tiny points, which wasn’t the best thing in the world for anyone I hit. They were mostly last-resort weapons and I figured that this qualified.
In this case, I didn’t strike. I caught Raine’s left hand with my right, stopping the momentum of the swing, and then when his right hand came in I blocked with the point of the spike facing out of the bottom of my fist. I slammed my hand into his, moving my fist like a hammer, and the point of the spike hit right between his ring and middle fingers. Our combined force was concentrated on a spot the size of a BB.
Thanks to the gauntlet it didn’t pierce his skin; it probably would have been better for him if it had. There was a series of crunching noises and the sound of something tearing, and he dropped his hammer to stare at his ruined hand. The spike slid out as he started to make gulping, urking noises. The hand was wider across the palm now, split in half internally from the knuckles to the wrist.
I didn’t wait to press my advantage. Unfortunately, the pain seemed to have really pissed him off. He roared as I swung at him again, pushing me off of him and backward over a table. Chair backs pummeled me as I tumbled, one catching me on the side of the head and dazing me a bit. I fought to get to my feet as he plowed through the debris in my direction. I was sure that his eyes were actually glowing red, all traces of the friend I knew gone.
It didn’t appear that he was going to listen to reason. He wasn’t the only one who could get scary. I let the rage in the back of my head out of its cage and I watched the world dissolve. I didn’t like the rage but it was there and it was going to be useful in this instance. I had two small weapons to his large one and though I didn’t think mine were the killing kind, his ruined hand testified that I could do bad things with them.
The room turned into a dark whirl of grunts and screams, mostly mine, as the rage took over and I charged right back at Raine. Distant from the fury that governed my body, I felt a vague interest as I watched myself take him apart. He managed to land a few good hits, including one that felt like it took off part of my right ear, but there were a lot of chinks in his armor that were perfect for my spikes. Armor, by its very nature, is weaker at the joints. It has to allow for range of motion. My spikes were the perfect tools for my rage-fueled muscles to break through the minor protection there.
I did so with a fierce joy that felt like nothing else on the face of the earth. Sex. Love. Food. Drink. Nothing came close to the feeling of letting the rage out so that it could sort out a problem. It bothered me in my sane moments. When I was enraged, berserking, everything was clear and shining and easy. It was like falling asleep and waking up at the same time.
I tasted blood when I came back. That was pretty normal; I had lost count of the times I’d bitten my tongue during my berserker rages. My spikes were covered with blood and skin and hair, as were my fists all the way up to the elbows. Nothing was intact within ten feet of me, including part of the bar.
Raine certainly wasn’t. The spikes, not sharpened, weren’t designed to kill. They were designed to be force multipliers, to be used on pressure points. I had multiplied the shit out of them, driving them into his joints again and again until he not only couldn’t stand but also couldn’t move his arms. He stared at me, his eyes going glassy and then dull as he tried to suck in a breath through a ruined windpipe. I’d hit him there at least twice, crushing it.
I swore, feeling weak and dizzy as I usually did after the rage went back into its den. I felt even worse seeing him there on the floor; Raine had always been the one who had treated me like a person, at least up until the last twenty minutes. I watched him die, unable to help him even if I’d wanted to as he strangled.
It wasn’t long until I realized that a small crystalline sphere was hanging over my head. I looked around. “Fraser?”
He peeked the top of his head over the edge of the bar, just enough to see me. “Nope. No one named Fraser here. They call me Ferdinand.”
“Fraser, it’s safe. He’s dead.”
He didn’t move. “It’s possible, should there even be someone around here named Fraser, that he might be nervous about more than just the guy on the floor. Like the crazy man with the spikes. Possibly.”
“Just get out here.”
Fraser reluctantly came around the side of the bar, his eyes wary. I didn’t move toward him, just went to get my axe. I found a cloth in my pack and wiped down my spikes, gauntlets, and axe while I let the anger drain out of me. The rage was a useful tool but I regretted that I wouldn’t be able to ask Raine what had happened. Another, smaller part of me wished that it hadn’t happened at all, that Raine was still standing and laughing. I fought that part down. I tried to focus on what had happened and what was going to happen next, and the conclusions were not my favorite things ever. I slid the spikes back into my gauntlets until they clicked.
Fraser inspected the corpse. “Wow,” he said. “Millicent, be sure to get all this.”
“We don’t have time for that,” I said. I steeled myself and went to Raine’s body, looking for his weapons. There wasn’t much I could do with the armor but his supplies would be useful. I wasn’t under any illusions: even though I didn’t know why Raine had attacked me, it had happened just after he spoke to Ethan. For some reason, they wanted me, Virgil, and Fraser dead.
I started to go through Raine’s pouches. As I did, I said, “Go get Virgil. We have to get out before the others come after us.”
“What? Why would they come after us?”
As if on cue, Raine’s hand radio squawked. Ethan’s voice sounded tinny thanks to my distance from the speaker. “Raine. Report.”
I nodded. “That. Go get Virgil.” I slid Raine’s pistol into my pack, into a previously vacant pouch shaped just for such contents.
I picked up the radio and pushed the button on the side. “Raine,” I said, doing my best to sound like my ex-friend.
“Report.”
Fuck. I had hoped that Ethan would give more information but that wasn’t what he was calling for. He wanted Raine to report, not to have to repeat Raine’s assignment.
“We want the boy’s mother. Then you won’t hear from us again,” I said, my mind whirling. I wasn’t built for covert operations or information gathering; I was just a front-line fighter. I just knew that whatever had happened, I wouldn’t be traveling with Breakers Incorporated anymore. Since Virgil was with me and one of Raine’s apparent targets, I also knew that they wouldn’t want to take care of him. In my mind, that meant that I had to get Lynette back. I hoped that would be the end of it.
“Ward. Report on Raine’s condition.”
“Neither of us are a hundred percent, Ethan. He came out the worst of it. He won’t be rejoining you.”
“Understood.” There was no anger from Ethan, no threats or boasts. “We’ll send the woman out to join you. Wait by the gate.”
I looked up at Fraser, who was standing there with Virgil. I nodded to them and said, “We’re going to go get your mom now, buddy.”
Virgil didn’t reply. His eyes were locked on Raine, staring at the body of a man that he’d seen walking around just the day before. It occurred to me that Virgil might not have seen a dead body before, and then I realized immediately how silly that idea was; the boy had grown up on the streets of Seattle. He’d probably seen dozens, sometimes more than one a day.
He looked up at me with tired eyes. Life was nasty and short in a place like Seattle, even in the strongholds. It was worse on the streets. “Let’s go get mom,” he said.
I wasn’t proud of it, but I was a little relieved. There was no need to be glad that he was tough enough to not react to a dead man.
The three of us headed for the gates, Fraser unusually quiet. We stopped well back from the open gates, nodding to the guards as we stopped. They didn’t nod back. Their glares, in fact, were downright unfriendly. I tried not to let it bother me. There was a general unlimbering of weapons and shifting of stances, as if they were expecting an attack. They weren’t going to get it from me
.
The radio hissed some static. “You there, Ward?” said Ethan, sounding as mild as ever.
I lifted it and pushed the button. “I’m here. Send her out and we’ll go our way.”
“You got it.”
I wasn’t sure what the wailing noise was at first. It didn’t matter; it was cut off soon enough. Lynette slammed into the pavement perhaps ten feet from where we stood and the crunch of impact was what cut off her scream. She’d barely had time to begin as she fell from the top of the high wall.
I felt as if I’d been turned to ice. I heard Virgil take a whooping breath as if he was going to scream, but nothing came out. I looked up and saw Gunner standing on the edge of the wall, dusting his hands off as if he’d just finished a job well done. He laughed, the noise booming out over the street. Fraser took a step toward Lynette’s crumpled body and that was when the guards at the gates leveled their guns and began to fire on us.
I grabbed Virgil and turned, my body moving on instinct. The bullets slammed into my back but the armor held. I forced myself to keep my feet and managed a staggering run as the guards kept firing. It was made harder by Virgil’s sudden squirming and shrieking as he tried to get out of my arms to get to his fallen mother. I couldn’t see Fraser but I had other things to deal with at the time.
I don’t know how long we ran. By the