I know death well enough to hear it gather its breath.
I activate my external speakers. “Kavax, Mustang, stop. It’s me. It’s—”
“Stop moving, you piece of shit!” Victra snarls. Cassius smiles pleasantly and he lunges forward. Ragnar makes a weird twisting movement to my left, and one of the two razors he carries flies through the air and skewers the Death Knight through his forehead. The Silvers gape at the famous Olympic Knight teetering to the ground.
“KAVAX AU TELEMANUS,” Kavax roars and rushes forward with Daxo. Mustang breaks sideways. Moira charges, lifting her pulseFist.
“Waste ’em,” Sevro says with a snarl.
The room erupts. Air torn to shreds by superheated particles as the Howlers open fire at point-blank range into the crowded room. Marble turns to dust. Chairs melt into gnarled chunks of metal and kick across the floor. Meat and bone explode, filling the air with red mist, as Silvers and Coppers are caught in the crossfire. Sevro misses Cassius, who dives behind a pillar. Kavax is shot a dozen times, but he doesn’t falter even as his shields overheat. He’s going to smash into Sevro and Victra with his razor when Ragnar charges from the side and hits the smaller man so hard with his shoulder that Kavax is lifted clean off his feet. Daxo attacks Ragnar from behind, and three giants tumble to the side of the room, crushing two scrabbling Coppers half their size as they go. The Coppers scream on the ground, legs shattered.
Behind Kavax, Mustang takes two shots to the chest, but her pulseShield holds. She stumbles, fires back at us, hitting Pebble in her thigh. Pebble’s lifted backward and flipped into the wall, leg shattered from the blast. She screams and clutches at it. Clown and Victra cover her, firing back at Mustang, dragging Pebble behind a pillar. Screwface and four other Howlers who guarded the door and kept Matteo outside now fire into the room from the hallway.
I stumble sideways, lost in the chaos, as the marble where I stood shatters. Silvers scramble under the table. Others kick away from their chairs, racing for the imagined safety of the columns on the fringes of the room. Hypersonic pulsefire rips between them, over their heads, through them. Buckling the columns. Quicksilver runs behind two Coppers, using them as human shields when shrapnel rips into them, and they all tumble down in a mess of limbs and blood.
Moira, the Fury, rushes Sevro to impale my friend from behind with her razor as he tries to move past Ragnar, who’s fighting both Telemanuses, to get at Cassius. I fire my pulseFist point-blank into her side just before she reaches him. Her armor’s pulseShield absorbs the first few rounds, rippling blue in a cocoon around her. She stumbles sideways, and if I did not continue to fire, she’d have nothing but a bruise in the morning. But my middle finger is heavy on the trigger of the weapon. She’s an engineer of oppression, and one of the best minds of Gold. And she tried to kill Sevro. Bad play.
I fire till her shield buckles inward, till she falls to a knee, till she twitches and screams as the molecules of her skin and organs superheat. Boiling blood comes out her eyes and nose. Armor and flesh fuse together, and I feel the rage ride wild inside me, numbing me to fear, to sense, to compassion. This is the Reaper who laid Cassius low. Who slew Karnus. Who Gold cannot kill.
Moira’s pulseFist fires wildly as the tendons of her fingers contract in the heat. Shooting into the ceiling on full automatic. Twitching sideways, whipping a stream of death across the room. Two Silvers running for cover explode. The glass of the viewport at the far end of the room, which looks out onto the space city, cracks perilously. Howlers scramble for cover till the pulseFist glows molten on Moira’s left hand and the barrel overheats to melt inward with a corrupt fizzle. With that last gasp of rage, the wisest of the Sovereign’s three Furies lies in a charred husk.
My only wish is that it could have been Aja.
I turn back to the room, feeling the cool hand of wrath guiding me, hungering for more blood. Bu
t all those that are left are my friends. Or once were. I shudder with hollowness as the rage leaves me as fast as it came. Replaced by panic as I watch my friends try to kill one another. The ordered lines have broken down into a hi-tech brawl. Feet sliding on glass. Shoulder blades slamming into walls. PulseFist battles between pillars. Hands and knees scrambling against the floor as pulseFists wail and blades clamor and hack.
And it’s only now, only with this terrifying clarity, that I realize that there is only one common thread that binds them. It’s not an idea. Not my wife’s dream. Not trust or alliances or Color.
It’s me.
And without me, this is what they will do. Without me, this is what Sevro has been doing. What an inevitable waste it seems. Death begets death begets death.
I have to stop it.
At the center of the room, Cassius stumbles after Victra through twisted chairs and shattered glass. Blood slicks the floor beneath them. Her damaged ghostCloak sparks on and off and she flashes between ghost and shadow like an undecided demon. Cassius cuts her again across the thigh and spins as Clown shoots at him, cutting Clown across the side of his head before bending back to dodge a shot from Pebble on the ground across the room. Victra rolls under the table to escape Cassius, slicing at his ankles. He jumps onto the table, firing his pulseFist into the onyx till it caves in the center, trapping her beneath. He’s inches from killing her when Sevro shoots him from behind, the blast absorbed by Cassius’s shield, but one that knocks him several meters to the side.
To the right, Ragnar, Daxo, and Kavax fight a duel of titans. Ragnar pins Kavax’s arm to the wall with his razor, leaves the weapon, ducks, fires his pulseFist into Daxo at point-blank range. Daxo’s shields absorb the blast, and his razor misses Rangar and takes out a chunk of the wall instead. Ragnar hits Daxo in his joints and is about to snap his neck when Kavax skewers him through the shoulder with a razor, screaming his family name. I rush to help my Stained friend, but as I do I feel someone to my left.
I turn just in time to see Mustang flying through the air at me, her helmet covering her face, her razor arching down to cut me in two. I bring my own razor up just in time. Blades slam together. Vibrations rattle down my arm. I’m slower than I remember, much of my muscle instinct lost to the darkness despite Mickey’s lab and my training bouts with Victra. Plus Mustang’s gotten faster.
I’m pressed back. I try to flow around Mustang, but she moves her razor like she’s been at war for the last year. I try to slip to the side, like Lorn taught me, but there’s no escape. She’s smart, using the rubble, the pillars, to corner me. I’m being hemmed in, corralled by the flashing metal. My defense doesn’t cave, but it erodes along the edges as I protect my core.
The blade parts an inch-deep gash through my left shoulder. Stings like a pitviper bite. I curse and she slices through more flesh. I’d shout at her to stop. Shout my name, something, if I had even half a second to breathe, but it’s all I can do to keep my arms moving. I bend back just in time as she cuts a shallow gash through the neck of my scarabSkin. Three quick cuts at the tendons of my right arm follow, just missing. Building a rhythm. My back’s touching the wall. Cut. Cut. Stab. Fire opening up my skin. I’m going to die here. I call for help over my com, but they’re still jammed by Sevro.
We’ve bitten off more than we can chew.
I scream in futility as Mustang’s blade scrapes through three of my ribs. She spins the blade in her hand. Swings backhanded to cut my head off. I manage to deflect the razor into the wall with mine, pinning it above my head so her helmet is near my mask. I head-butt her. But her helmet’s stronger than the composite duroplastic of my mask. She reels back her own head and slams it into mine, using my own tactic. A seam of pain splinters down my skull. I nearly black out. Vision rushing out, in. Still standing. Feel part of my mask crack off and slide off my face. Nose broken again. Seeing spots. The rest of the mask crumbles and I stare at the death-eyed horse helmet of Mustang as she prepares to end me.
Her razor arm draws back to deliver the killing stroke. And it stays there above her head. Trembling as she looks at my exposed face. Her helmet slithers away to reveal her own. Sweat-soaked hair clings to her forehead, darkening the golden luster. Beneath, her eyes are wild, and I wish I could say it’s love or joy I see in them, but it’s not. If anything, it’s fear, maybe horror that draws the blood from her face as she stumbles back, gesturing speechlessly with her off-hand.
“Darrow…?”
She looks over her shoulder to see the mayhem that still grips the room, our quiet moment a little bubble in the storm. Cassius flees, disappearing through a side door, leaving the corpse of the Death Knight and Moira behind. Our eyes meet before he disappears. Victra gives chase until Sevro reels her back in. The rest of the Howlers are turning toward Mustang. I take a step toward her, and stop when the tip of her razor pricks my collarbone.
“I saw you die.”
She backs away toward the main door, boots sliding over the marble, crunching on bits of glass from the walls. “Kavax, Daxo!” she calls, a vein in her neck bulging from strain. “Pull back!”