“Max?” Nudge whispered, appalled.
Ari grabbed my arm and stepped halfway in front of me, to protect me. I smiled at him and shook my head slightly, and he stepped back with an angry frown.
“That guy wants to kill you, Max,” said Angel, sounding scared. “His whole life, he’s been trained to kill you.”
Of course. Because God forbid he should have any kind of normal existence, watching TV, eating Twinkies, and so on.
Like a school of washed-out-gray fish, the mutants all turned to stare at me. They parted, as if Moses were waving his staff over them, and then Omega did a high double somersault off the stage, landing perfectly on the gray grit with a barely heard crunch.
“Angel, if you can, this would be a good time to mess with his mind,” I murmured.
“On it,” she said, but she didn’t sound hopeful.
My heart had kicked into high gear, my fists were clenched, and adrenaline was whipping like white lightning through my veins.
From the end of the mutant corridor, Omega started coming at me, doing one handspring after another, leaping forward onto his hands, flipping over, then landing lightly, a human circle. He could move incredibly fast, and within seconds his booted feet landed crisply right in front of me.
Omega snapped upright, and for a second, those silvery eyes looked coldly into mine.
Before he knew what was happening, I had cocked my arm back and slammed my fist into his left eye as hard as I could.
I can move pretty fast too, when I want.
He staggered back but used the energy from my punch to fuel a spinning snap kick that would have caught me right in the neck if I weren’t a great fighter and the fastest bird kid around.
Instead, I was ready, and I grabbed the heel of his boot and whipped it to the left, yanking him off balance so that he landed hard on his back in the dirt. Hoo-yah.
In a split second he sprang up again. I blocked his hard elbow jab to my head, but his other hand knifed into my side, right over my kidney. The pain was immediate and stunning; it hurt so much that I wanted to sink to my knees and throw up.
But I hadn’t been raised that way.
It’s just pain, I told myself. Pain is merely a message, and you can ignore the message.
So I stayed on my feet, sucked in a breath, and smacked my open palm against his ear with all my force. His face crumpled, and his mouth opened in a brief, silent scream. I hoped I’d ruptured his eardrum. But all too quickly, his face straightened out and he lunged at me again, elbowing me in the ribs and then chopping the back of my neck with the edge of his hand.
Pain is merely a message. Right now I was holding all calls.
I managed to spin and kick him hard in the side, then followed with a snap kick right into his spine. If he’d been an ordinary human, it would have broken his back. But Omega just staggered, instantly righted himself, and came roaring back full force.
Usually I try not to kill people, ’cause I’m just a softie that way. Even Ari—I only killed him by accident. But I decided that since my ex-mom had said this was a fight to the death, in a way I kind of had permission to kill this weiner. And yes, I’m worried about the state of my soul and karma and blah blah blah, but right now I wanted to live, to come out of this battle alive. So I would deal with my karma later. And if I came back as a roach in the next life, well, at least I’d survive the nuclear holocaust.
I did a spinning kick where I literally looked like a propeller, both feet off the ground, scissoring at Omega with my powerful legs. One kick caught him hard in his back, and he lurched forward. As he tried to block the next one and grab my boot, I slammed right into the back of his perfect little head and knocked him to the ground.
In seconds I had sprung onto his back, grabbed one arm behind him, and yanked hard, up and to the left.
His arm popped out of its socket with a stomach-churning
thunk sound.
“Maybe you should change your name to Theta,” I hissed into his ear as he gasped, facedown in the dirt. “Or Epsilon.”
Okay, now, the shoulder dislocation, I have to tell you, stopped most people cold.
“My...name...is...Omega,” he ground out.
Then he jerked upward, throwing me off as his shoulder joint popped loudly back into place. He grimaced, then came after me again, murder in his bloodshot, silvery eyes.
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