I pop the tooth.
Without changing her broken expression, Victra coils her legs under her. The acid releases into my mouth. She thrusts her manacles at me. When the acid goes cool, aligning itself to recognize my DNA, I dribble a line of it at the bridge between her cuffs. Then I spit the rest at the lock of the cell. It begins to smoke as it eats through the casing.
“It’s in their teeth,” Harmony murmurs after inspecting the dead girl. She wheels around. “It’s in their teeth!” Before the men can turn back to the cell, the lock makes a satisfying clonk.
I’ve never been to Mercury or its Hippodrome. But I’ve seen videos of old chariot races. When the horn sounds, there is a rippling of muscle, a stir of dust, and everything becomes…heightened.
Victra bursts from the cell.
Wounded, tired, spent from labor, she isn’t what she should be. But by killing her baby, these men get the Victra they made.
She kills the first man by breaking his back with a kick to his lower spine. The second, she kills so she can use him and his thick blast vest as a shield. His body erupts when his boys fire on them. And then Victra is amongst them, not blocking their attacks as they come one by one, but pouncing on them, breaking them as she pivots to break the next. Those she doesn’t kill are mown down by their friends. Bullets and pulseblasts ricochet around the prison. I lie flat and two pulseblasts almost take off my feet.
Harmony gets one look at this, aims down her rifle, and shoots one of her own soldiers in the back of the neck as Victra throws him through the air between them. He knocks Harmony down, and when she gets up, shaking her head from the collision, she sees Victra covered in gore, crushing men in her rampage forward.
Like a good cockroach, Harmony bolts.
Victra tries to give chase, but the Red Hands throw themselves like madmen in her path, eager to let Harmony escape even if it costs them their lives. Victra takes them up on that offer.
When she takes her foot from the shattered back of her last victim, the room is still but for moaning prisoners. Victra hunches, breathing heavily, bullet through her shoulder, gashes around her legs, something red pulsing from her right buttock.
Then she walks out of the room. I glance at the prisoners, who are just starting to look up from their bullet-riddled cells. They won’t be any use out there. They’re so thin. I run to catch up with Victra, calling her name in the hall. She’s already gone. Bloody footprints lead left. I follow them to the sound of wet thumps, and find Victra in the communications terminal I crept past earlier. Blood gathers around her bare feet as she absorbs the hologram feeds. One shows Volga and several dozen slaves firing up a tunnel at Red Hands. Several hundred more huddle behind them, ready to pick up a weapon if another drops. They’re outmatched by the Hand men pouring from the township down to meet them at the main tunnel.
“You did this?” she asks without turning.
“Yeah. But I think I need some help now.”
She looks over, then back at the screens. Harmony is running up a stairwell.
“She’s getting away,” I say.
“I am aware.” She squints at the holograms, then sits at the console to take its controls. “What you are not aware of is that you have signed everyone’s death warrant. They have an army camped around the perimeter of the mine’s aperture. We’ll never get out.”
“I called for backup,” I say.
“Metaphorically or physically?”
“Uh, physically.”
She turns. “Howlers?”
“Like I have their number. I did something called broad spectrum.”
Her body tenses. “Did you use my name?”
“I’m not an idiot.”
“So you said,” she says, turning back to her task.
Harmony runs from a stairwell into a large chamber with an open roof to the sky. Fifty men slide down the ladders dangling from the rim of the roof. Harmony shouts at a pilot and loads up into a shuttle. They’re airborne a moment later, rising slowly out of the mine. Victra’s fingers move over the keys and the camera shakes. The men who just slid down the ladders point upward. Then I see why. The sky is becoming smaller as the roof closes. It slams shut before Harmony’s shuttle can escape. The top wings of her shuttle snap in half as her ship collides with the closed ceiling and spins on sputtering engines to crash back down to the floor.
Victra stands up.
“Where are you going?” I ask, throwing an arm toward Volga’s holo.
“To pay a debt.”
“Volga needs your help. We all do!” I shout as she walks away. “She’s got dozens of men up there. If you die there, you can’t help anyone.”