Looking back.
And I’ll never forget that smile on his lips.
Sly.
Triumphant.
Sinister.
He’s the sacred cow, and I’m the sacrificial lamb. The motherfucker lured me out here for this and this alone. It’s a hit.
So I won’t stop him from developing and unleashing SP-73 to its full devilish potential.
So I won’t stand in the way of his delusions of grandeur.
So I won’t survive this, but no one can blame him when they call it an ambush and talk about how bravely I sacrificed myself so the CEO could get away.
I know this fucking scenario because I’ve set it up before.
Because I’m a tactician, because I can see every branch of possibility, probability, and deliberate action converging.
Right on this hell-point when four men in ski masks and black tactical gear drag me deeper into the dark cold.
One of them clamps his hand over my mouth to stop me from crying out, alerting the authorities or anyone in the buildings around us.
Later, no doubt, they’ll say it was thugs. Or assassins hired by competitors well-versed in the bloody art of corporate espionage.
But I recognize those brutal builds and the flat blankness of the eyes looking at me past the ski masks.
Then I can’t see anything but red as the first fist crashes into me.
It’s hardly a fair fight, but I give them one.
I strike back with everything, fists and legs and teeth.
But there’s four of them and one of me, and even though I’m good, I’m not an engineered supersoldier trained to be able to kill ten men single-handedly. I never stand a chance unarmed and dizzy with surprise against four fucking Nighthawks.
There’s pain now.
Explosions of ripping, white-hot pain as they lash out at me with hammer fists, hard knee jabs, steel-toed boots, catching me in my face, my ribs, my gut.
Another minute of this and I’ll be a pile of mush.
Closed casket funeral for sure.
But it’s nothing compared to the sudden slicing explosion of agony as a tactical knife rips across my knee, and suddenly the icy wet concrete scent of the street is eclipsed by my own blood, red and smoking in the cold air, filling my nostrils with its bitter, coppery scent.
I go down hard.
The last thing I see is a flash of silver coming toward my face.
Pain bursts in my skull as a blade drives into my eye.
I can’t begin to describe the searing heat, the torment, the fire that races over me. The scream that bottles in my throat, forced back by the hand still clamped over my lips.
But I don’t feel it for long.
I’m shutting down.
Goodbye, good night.
It’s all going black, the pain fading away into a terrible fog of shock.
I can’t breathe. I can’t think. I can’t even remember who I am.
But I remember her.
Fuchsia.
My last thought is wondering what she’ll do now.
And how much I hate myself for leaving Fuchsia to raise our baby—and guard her against Galentron.
Alone.
* * *
I’m not dead.
Somehow I’m not dead, and believe me…
I’m just as surprised about that fact as you are.
I know before I even open my eyes—excuse me, eye—that I’m in a hospital.
Not even a Galentron one, either.
Because I can hear people talking—warm, soft. Gentle emotion between two people who care about each other.
You’d never find that in a Galentron facility, no matter how hard you looked.
Listening closer, it’s a girl talking to her father. About chemotherapy, I think, about how she’s a candidate for donating bone marrow and he’s going to be okay.
I’m still fuzzy, not quite sure on everything, coming up out of the darkness and into a sort of muted pain in my skull. It feels like I’m being held together by a dull wall of drugs, but that’s the first thing that hits me when I come to.
I’m in a hospital, and my roommate is a man with bone cancer, and his daughter is crying with happiness and clutching his hand to her chest while he smiles up at her with new hope in his eyes, because there’s something she can do to save him.
Waking up with heartache is, I guess, better than not waking up at all.
But I guess my movement sets the heart monitors off.
They start beeping as I try shifting in the bed to get a better idea of my surroundings. I have to get the fuck out of here.
There’s a second of panic. Then a weird epiphany occurs to me.
Galentron can’t know I’m alive, or I wouldn’t be in a civilian hospital in…wherever I am.
It’s hard for me to focus.
Everything feels off-kilter, and that’s when I realize it’s because I’m only seeing out of one eye. The other is completely dark, not even red light filters through my eyelids, though I can feel gauze thickly padding the flesh over my socket and wrapped around my throbbing head.
The woman sitting next to the other bed in the room, along with the older man in the bed, glance over at me, their faces lit with elation. It’s like they know me and actually care that I’m conscious.