Hero (Gone 9)

We’re doing okay. We’re doing okay!

Another mutant was charging into the fight, the shaggy monster with the improbable saber-toothed-tiger teeth. It chose Armo as its target and ran straight at him, charging like a bull. Armo stepped nimbly aside but the tiger had anticipated that and twisted to grab Armo and spun him around. Armo’s feet got tangled, and he went down with the beast atop him. The creature’s teeth should never have been useful; it couldn’t possibly open its jaw wide enough . . . but Dekka saw that it had done just that, dislocating its jaw to bring its teeth into play.

Armo swung a frantic paw but missed and left the creature a perfectly exposed upper arm. The saber-toothed jaw widened and the teeth closed, two thick ivory tusks spearing Armo’s flesh.

“What the hell?” Armo let out a roar, but he was on his back again, with something as big as he was lying athwart him and Armo’s arm shish-kebabed.

They were too entwined for Dekka to take out the beast without hitting Armo. But now Francis was running flat out across the floor, arms pumping, sneakers squeaking, running straight at the beast. Running straight into danger.

Like a stab to the heart, Dekka knew where she’d seen something like that before: a wild, slender girl running heedlessly toward destruction.

Brianna.

All the while Vector burned. The bugs that made him up fell in a rain of shriveled bodies, bouncing like hailstones as they hit marble. And Vector did nothing. He did not threaten, he did not try to escape, he just hung there in the air as the flamethrowers burned on and on.

Shade’s flamethrower was the first to run dry. The ring of flame she’d run around Vector sputtered and died.

Francis reached the saber-tooth, tripped and plowed into it, and fell hard, elbows and knees slamming the edges of the stairs. The tiger creature spun around, leaving Armo gushing blood, and reached for Francis. Crawling, then flipping over and scooting back on her rear end, Francis tried to grab the claw that raked inches from her face, but couldn’t get a hold.

But the tiger had made a fatal mistake: in chasing Francis, it had exposed its rear.

Dekka aimed carefully for the creature’s rear end, farthest from both Francis and Armo. There was a feline howl and a noise like a meat grinder, and the creature’s back legs disintegrated. They looked like they’d been jammed into a blender. Flesh and fur, bone and sinew dissolved, fragmented into bloody bits, and now it was the saber-tooth who roared in agony as parts of it slopped down the steps.

The tiger creature crawled away, trying to dig its claws into waxed stone. Blood poured from the stumps of its legs, and it had not yet begun to de-morph, return to its human form.

It doesn’t know!

Francis jumped up, her face a furious mask, and avoiding the desperate, flailing claws of the beast, got behind it and grabbed a handful of fur. Seconds later, she was gone, and so was the beast.

Simone was still having all she could handle with the hovering girl. Neither of them was a boxer or martial artist, and a fistfight in midair was by its very nature a hard way to land a serious blow. They careened together into the black tote board, splintering it.

Oh, God, we’re winning!

Now, though, Dekka’s flamethrower was weakening; the jet that had been a straight line of fire became a downward arc.

“Poison!” Dekka cried, shut down the flame, and shrugged out of her harness.

Cruz and Malik, too, now both armed with insecticide, came at a run, bounding up the stairs trailing clouds of poison from spray cans. Their feet crunched on the dead bugs, lying two inches deep, like the aftermath of a hail storm.

We’re actually winning!

So why don’t I feel . . .

And then, Dekka knew why she didn’t feel victorious. Her folly, her blindness was suddenly horribly clear: Markovic wasn’t trying to get away.

Vector had a plan.

CHAPTER 30

. . . The Enemy

SHADE HAD SEEN the same thing as Dekka and had come to the same queasy conclusion. She skidded to a halt and tried to slow her speech enough to be understood.

“Vector’s not running!”

“I know,” Dekka snapped. “He’s not even fighting back!”

Shade spun, taking in the whole room. The downed humans. The fish girl who Simone now had backed against a pillar, thirty feet up. Armo bloody but on his feet again. Francis and Malik spraying aerosol cans like a pothead spraying Febreze before his parents come for a visit. Cruz hugging a pillar, no longer as the mayor but as herself again.