“And why would I help you?” she asks at the door with a turn. On the holo, Harmony is crawling free from the crippled shuttle. Her men drag her along to a gravity lift.
“Because I helped you. So did Volga. And someone once told me revenge is patient.”
She stares at me and tilts her head.
“We can get her after. There’s girls down there. Girls that risked their lives because they couldn’t take it anymore. Are you just going to let them die like Ulysses?”
She stiffens. Her eyes glare at me, then she looks at her bleeding wounds. “I will need proper armor.”
I call out into the hall. “Vanna, it’s Lyria. You can come out now.”
A maintenance closet door opens behind Victra, making her jump. Mops spill out onto the floor as Freckles stumbles out. Picking herself up, she looks sheepishly at the Gold and pulls the breastplate forward. “Ma’am. I brought you some armor.” She pulls out the razors. “And these.”
Victra almost smiles.
* * *
—
Victra, Freckles, and I look over the bridge down into the Common. Victra made us hide for ten minutes, though she refused to say why. Down below, the Red Hand has managed to gain order. While they haven’t found all the girls, they’ve found some. Dozens are gathered in the center of the township and under guard as most of the men pour toward the main tunnel to fight Volga’s fellow slaves. Then I see why Victra delayed. Unable to escape from the top, Harmony’s going out the bottom. She moves across the Common floor directing her men at the girls, and taking a group of more than forty down into the tunnels to link up with her larger force.
“She means to hunt me now,” Victra says. “Fair enough.” Victra hands me and Freckles the grenades she scavenged from the men she killed. “Bring these to me at the bottom.”
And then she jumps off.
I thought Figment and Volga were top of the food chain until I see Victra descend into the township. While Freckles and I clamber down ladders, Victra vaults from level to level, sometimes two down, sometimes one up, killing men as she goes. She lands amongst three Red Hand men on a bridge and throws them off. She jumps a level up and destroys a portable gun turret before it’s brought online. Bullets eat into the stone around her as she jumps down two levels, dragging her razor through a dozen men as they descend a single ladder to the second level. She kills the rest that gather at the base, and then, almost for fun, takes the rifles of the dead and begins popping in and out of cover, two quick shots, duck, move, two quick shots, duck, move. Soon all the men guarding the girls in the center of the township are on their backs or crawling away with holes in them.
We slide off the last ladder and rush up to Victra as she crouches behind cover, scanning for threats. Five rail slugs are flattened against the ill-fitted armor. I can see through a hole in her right biceps.
“Took you long enough,” she says, taking the grenades.
Her left ear hangs on by a strip of flesh. I motion to it.
“Stop being distracted.” She tears it off and puts it under her breastplate, wheeling as a gun goes off. Little Lion, who’d been caught by the Hand men, now has one of their pistols and fires it at a man limping away until he goes down. It becomes less funny when she runs up to him and fires at his thrashing body until her magazine is empty. She looks up, spattered with blood, not a single emotion on her face. Victra looks to me. “One of yours?”
“More or less.”
She grunts. “Be right back.”
“I’ll come—”
“No.” She kicks my thigh so hard it goes numb, and then silently bolts toward the tunnels, killing two men who come from the main force engaged with the slaves. Then she disappears. A cramp grips my leg. I stumble up and hobble after her as Freckles pulls the girls away to find a place to hide. I follow Victra’s wake of dead men until the tunnel widens and I come out to maybe two hundred Red Hand men firing down the tunnel at Volga and her men. The sound is enormous. Victra is crouched behind
where they’ve gathered their wounded. She finishes throwing something and turns to sprint up the tunnel. She catches sight of me and motions me back.
Thoom. Thoom. Thoothoom.
The grenades begin going off behind the Red Hand soldiers, tearing holes in their ranks until the whole tunnel is filled with dust. The explosions echo away, replaced by a growing roar down the throat of the tunnel. The slaves rush up into the dust.
I fall down behind a boulder with Victra, laughing as the Red Hand disintegrates in front of my eyes. “Don’t just sit there, you idiot,” Victra says from a knee, and picks off a Hand man as he runs half blind out of the dust. “Shoot something.”
I join her on a knee, steady my arms on the boulder, and take aim. I fire until I see a woman pushing her way through the dust, shoving the bodies of her own men into the path of the freed slaves.
Harmony is trying to escape. I point her out, but Victra is already on the hunt.
I’VE LOST SIGHT OF VICTRA in the tunnel. When her men’s fortune finally turned, Harmony left them to die and made her escape through a side tunnel. Victra and I gave pursuit, but Victra’s long legs outraced mine, and left me behind. The gloom of the tunnel is nearly complete, but I can see my breath blooming in front of my face as I walk the steep path of a clawDrill.
I stop suddenly, hearing a whisper, and go very still. Long shadows ripple on the ceiling of the tunnel, not twenty paces overhead. So that’s why she chose this tunnel. I take a step, and the shadows stop. Watching me.