by K. Gorman
The moment clinched together when each of their netlinks buzzed in their pockets and the Nemina’s monotone AI voice filtered into the air.
“Terminal lockdown initiated, code TK-0045668, station master Eznan Arcillio. Please re-enter authorization to override.”
The ramp hissed behind her. She didn’t need to look back to know that it was closing.
Lockdowns were perhaps her least favorite security system. She hadn’t thought the lot, which looked more like a parkade than an actual landing pad, would have the proper measures to keep them grounded, but it looked as though some part of the warehouse and the ground below it was outfitted. Either an old system the gang—yes, she was going to call them that now—had been delighted in re-claiming, or they had gone through the trouble to find a place like this specifically for her.
Because they were definitely after her. Ever since the ramp had closed, the leader—Eznan Arcillio, she assumed—had not taken his eyes off of her. And neither had most of his entourage. Their stares burned into her from all angles.
A small silence filled the clearing as everyone processed what was happening. Slowly, the light within her stopped its rise. She looked up, skimming the bulbs inside the warehouse—their light didn’t tug at her senses quite like it had threatened to a few seconds ago—before returning her focus to the group.
“I take it you didn’t call us out for the guns,” Marc said.
He hadn’t moved from his position next to Arcillio, likely a tactical decision. She’d seen him in close-combat with Shadows and been impressed—which she felt was admirable in itself considering she had Nomiki for a sister. He was not up to her sister’s level, but if it came to a fight between himself and Arcillio, her money would be on Marc.
“It’s a business transaction.” Arcillio didn’t look away from her as he answered Marc, the humor from half a minute ago having faded from his face, replaced by the kind of cold, desperate need that so many people looked to her with nowadays. “You give me her, I give you the money, you leave.”
“That’s not happening,” Marc said.
“You don’t have a choice.”
More movement caught her attention to the side. Two men had appeared from behind a small outbuilding with older-style blasters in their hands. On the left, Nomiki had turned her gaze to the pinnacle of the roof, where a sniper had moved into place.
Her sister gave a low whistle. “Wow, Marc, you need to up your security. You just got fucked.”
“Thanks,” he said, his tone dry and unamused. “I hadn’t noticed.”
“You guys got this, or do I get a bonus for joining your security detail?”
Marc snorted. “Doesn’t this fall under your jurisdiction, anyway? Since they’re after her?”
Arcillio scowled, finally turning his attention from Karin to Nomiki. “Who are you?”
“I’m her sister.” Nomiki dropped her gaze from the sniper on the rooftop and swung it over to meet Karin’s, the movement that would have been casual had there not been several guns pointing around at various people.
She didn’t look worried, which made Karin’s heart rate pick up and her stomach give a light, tingly dance.
Gods and fucking saints, this is going to get messy.
Arcillio, ignorant of the sudden change between the rest of them—Cookie and Soo-jin had also tensed, their eyes riveted to Nomiki—made a surprised sound.
“Oh, really?” His eyebrows shot up. “Have you got any special powers?”
“Oh, yes.” Nomiki broke her eye contact with Karin to reach up into a light overarm stretch—but not before she caught the dangerous, happy twinkle in her sister’s gaze. With the dark lipstick she wore, there was no hiding her smile, either. “Sis, be a dear and get the lights for me?”
Karin was ready, and so was her light. The lights had never stopped calling to her; she’d just been ignoring them—and her power had connected to every single one of them. All she had to do was call back.
For one long, awkward moment, nothing happened. She drew in a ragged, shaking breath, only half-aware of the stares boring into her, her mind filling with the heavy, pounding blur of energy.
Her power bunched together under her skin, twisting.
Then, in an instant, all went dark.
A second later, someone screamed.
Chapter 6
Karin staggered forward with a gasp, blinking to clear the spots. By the sudden flood of energy inside her, and the dizzy, heady sensation that made the world sway around her, she estimated she’d grabbed a full block’s worth of illumination—everything from the warehouse to the street was black, including both the running and interior lights on the Nemina. Hells, she’d probably gotten the dashboard controls and the sani-closet tubes, too. Instincts went for familiarity first.
Her shoe scraped against the concrete, and she nearly went down. Other sounds arose around her—people running, shouting, one lone blaster bolt whose flash and light vanished halfway to its target thanks to the aftereffects of her power grab. She felt its energy spike into her chest a second later.
She wouldn’t hear Nomiki. Only her aftermath.
Aware of the two men from earlier closing in behind her, she shot forward and launched into a low sprint.
This wasn’t her first rodeo with Nomiki. In fact, the past few weeks had seen her sister remind her of all the things she’d drilled into her when they’d been younger, which largely consisted mostly of her running away and hiding while Nomiki worked her particular talent.
So, while the scene erupted into chaos around her and she heard the distinct grunts and thuds and yells of a fight, she threw her arms up in front of her face, ducked low, and ran as hard as she could through the dark to where she remembered there being some outbuildings to the side, slowing only when she’d cleared the general area of the group and approached a large metal bin.
As a side-effect of her strengthening power, she’d regained another ability she’d previously forgotten about. There may be little light coming down on the compound—actually, she thought she’d taken out two blocks rather than one—but she could force her eyes to adjust faster than was normal. While she’d never be like Nomiki, who could see in the most pitch-black of places, it was enough to pick up the silhouette of the outbuilding against the dim light pollution of the sky and catch the slight gleam on the bin’s metal lip.
Behind her, the fight had escalated. As she wedged herself down next to the corner of the building, for now hidden by the bulk of the bin, she thought she detected more groans and grunts of pain than people pounding on each other—how anyone could see well enough to hit someone else in the dark was beyond her—but then a grind and crash of metal caught her attention to the far right.
Machinery whirred, and there came a sound of two hard stomps—feet?—and the whine of something powering up. The image of the power suit she’d seen earlier flashed through her mind, and she cursed, gritting her teeth as she crept back. A red glow began to radiate from the warehouse, visible in the gap between the bin and the outbuilding. It illuminated the hard, dark silhouette of the power suit as it charged up its weapon, swinging it around toward the fight.
But, even as her power started to seep the light away from its arm, a second silhouette ran up to its front. Sparks flared, catching Nomiki’s snarling face in a brief underglow, then darkened. A shriek of bending and scraping metal broke through the night air, followed by a raw, pained scream. It cut off a second later.
Gravel crunched by her. She glanced back to see one of the men from earlier wandering close, probably drawn to the building like she had been, and she gave a measure of the distance between them and the likelihood that he could see her—the building was a light color, and she was wearing a dark jacket, so it wasn’t impossible—but he turned a different way. She spotted Cookie and Soo-jin out of the fight, crouched under the Nemina’s nose. A few seconds’ search located Marc close the door of the warehouse. Most everyone else was down, splayed around the ground
clutching various injuries. The yells from earlier had turned into quick, pained breaths and low groans.
Near the center of the lot, Arcillio moved in a slow, blind circle, his hand clutching a communicator to his mouth as he barked commands. “Alice? Qing? What the hell is happening? Where—”
A surprised yelp from the roof made him look up. Something scraped hard against the metal roof, making a distinct rumble, then stopped.
“Qing?” he asked.
After a few seconds’ silence, Nomiki’s voice carried through the dark. “Okay, sis. You can turn the lights back on.”
Karin waited a beat, casting her gaze around the lot. Then, with a slow, conscientious exhale, she relaxed and let the area’s lighting flow back through her. It took a few seconds, and some of the brilliance floated around her like espers first, as if given a lazy sentience, but the lights around the warehouse shivered back into existence. The ones on the surrounding streets turned back on a beat later, like she’d flicked a switch.
She blew out another breath, then glanced around. Few were left standing in the lot, and they had a stunned, half-scared look to them. Following their gazes, she found Nomiki at the apex of the rooftop, the gang’s sniper held in front of her. As they watched, Nomiki gave her a push.
Karin’s heart surged in her chest as the woman tipped off the edge of the roof and fell ten meters to the ground.
In the heavy quiet of the lot, everyone heard the pained thump as she landed.
Karin stared.
Holy fucking hells. Did Nomiki just do that?
Shock hit her brain with a hot, muggy numbness even as her thoughts filled up with what had just happened, still processing, replaying the sound, the look on Nomiki’s face. She stared at the woman’s prone, unmoving form. The warehouse lamps cast a stark light across the buckling planes and twists of her jacket. A patch of pale skin burst out where her arm came free of her sleeve, stubbing at an awkward angle to the concrete with her hand bent at the wrist. It took Karin a few seconds’ looking to realize that her arm was supposed to bend that way; it looked so broken. She doubted the rest of her was so lucky.
She hadn’t screamed, and she didn’t move now. Either Nomiki had knocked her unconscious before, or the fall had done the trick.
Or she was dead.
Nausea swarmed up her back, and she blinked past a sudden blurring of tears.
Sol’s fucking child, ‘Miki.
Marc found her, then—she hadn’t even noticed him arrive. Without a word, he crouched beside her. Hands caught her shoulders, steadying her. The thumb of his right hand stroked the ridge of her collarbone.
She leaned back into him, hot tears slipping from her face.
Nomiki stepped up to the edge of the roof. The light from below flashed on the edge of her knife as she pointed it down at Arcillio.
“The way I see it, you’ve got two options,” Nomiki called down. “Either you let my sister and all of her friends go and pay them for their guns, or I finish what I started.” Her arm moved in a quick, violent motion, and the knife clattered to the ground at Arcillio’s feet, making him jump. “Your choice, dumbass.”
The line of Arcillio’s shoulders shook once, a quiet twitch. His head lifted from the knife at his feet to the former sniper who lay motionless on the ground several meters away. In the background, the power suit Nomiki had disabled lay in two pieces, its gun arm half a meter from its side and a hole punched through the plastic-glass window of the cockpit. After a few seconds, his gaze returned to the lone, small-ish woman who’d been responsible for the destruction. A dark, visible streak of blood coated Nomiki’s arm, but she either didn’t notice or didn’t care.
Hells, it probably wasn’t even hers.
Arcillio didn’t say anything, and with his back to her, Karin could only imagine his expression, but after a few more beats, he reached to the small of his back and retracted the knife he kept there, throwing it to the ground two meters away.
“And the other one,” Nomiki said.
He froze for a half-second, the surprise evident in the sudden tensing of his body, then reached back again. A second knife, shorter and thinner than the last, clattered to the ground.
“Good.” Nomiki smiled. “Let’s deal.”
*
Back on base, Karin retreated to her room. After the impromptu violence of the delivery, she needed the room’s quiet, familiar gray walls and subdued lighting—and she’d needed to be alone to process. No clubbing for her tonight. Or for the rest of them, she guessed, though there was definitely some activity going on outside her room.
She didn’t know, or care. Whatever Soo-jin and the rest did, she wouldn’t be going with them. She had too much to process.
Nomiki wasn’t normal. She’d known that since they were little. Even among the compound’s children, Nomiki had been an outlier. She processed information and handled emotion on a different level, a kind of programmed psychopathy that affected certain areas of her thought process. She could pretend otherwise—hells, she could live otherwise, and apart from anything combat-related, she did—but Nomiki was not normal.
A normal person wouldn’t have thrown the sniper off the roof. A normal person would have cared more—but Nomiki was not normal.
That had become abundantly clear when Karin had confronted her about the incident afterward.
“You didn’t have do that,” she’d said. “You didn’t have to throw her off. That was unnecessary and cruel.”
Nomiki had only fixed her with a stare. “Yes, it was. If I hadn’t, he might have tried something stupid. There were still blasters in play. He needed to know he’d lost.”
“I think he got that impression by the amount of stab wounds in his men. You didn’t have to throw the sniper off, too.”
No change in Nomiki’s expression, no regret or doubt—only an echo of a kind of resignation Karin recognized from other situations like this during their escape. Other people that Nomiki had hurt. Other actions she’d taken too far.
“Nomiki, we aren’t running anymore. We’re safe. I was safe. The situation was handled. You handled it. I—”
Nomiki had put a hand on her shoulder, stopping her. “Karin, you know I love you, but please don’t question my decisions. I did what was necessary. The woman broke both legs and several ribs, maybe a small back fracture—this isn’t Earth. Fallon hospitals can take care of that. And as much as I’d be willing to stay here and help you clear your own conscience for my perceived wrongdoing, I need to go talk to my superiors at the military and brief them with reports of what happened. They can judge if what I did was too extreme. And you can feel free to add to my reports or cite your concerns to them. As far as military morality goes, Fallon’s got a well-developed system.”
And that had been that. Nomiki’s grip on her shoulder had turned into a pat, and she’d walked off the ship. And now, Karin was in her room, hearing the bone-breaking thud of that woman landing play through her head over and over again while her sister stood on a Takao rooftop holding a knife.
Hells. She’s right. As far as military experience went, Karin had zero.
She blew out a breath and made to lean back, but a soft knock on the door interrupted the action. She blinked hard, gave herself a quick check-over, and cleared her throat. “Come in.”
There was a small sound of someone shifting outside, and two rapid, strangled clinks, then the panel flashed green, and the door hissed open on its track. Marc stepped inside, a box in one hand and several bottles in the other. The near-permanent frown on his face lifted with his head as he looked up, and a smile touched his lips. “I’ve got news.”
“And booze,” she said. “Definitely come in.”
The smile widened into a grin, but his gaze dropped again as he maneuvered inside. She scooted over on her bed to make room and patted the mattress beside her. “So, what’s up? I assume Nomiki briefed Brindon? She back yet?”
“No. Something else came up. She’s still in a meeting, but I t
hink they’re talking about something else now.”
“Oh—” She sat straighter. “The Alliance delegates.”
As Marc leaned down, a frown reappearing on his brow as he put the bottles and the box on the floor in front of the bed before turning to sit. “The what now?”
“They sent a ship over. Nomiki said they were finally willing to talk. Plus there’s weird energy readings coming from Nova Earth.”
“Hmm. Remind me to avoid that place. Don’t want to get irradiated or something.” He leaned forward as he sat—a habit probably attained over many times spent on a bottom bunk—and the bed sank down beside her, pulling her closer to him.
“Well, considering I’m working for Fallon, and I doubt they’ll be willing to let me go anytime soon…”
She flashed him a smile, faltering a little. Despite all her casual not-quite-leering, she always forgot how big of a person he was. He didn’t have a big presence, and rarely seemed to get in the way—even in the Nemina’s tight corridors. It was only when he sat down, either sprawling in the co-pilot chair next to her where he dwarfed the seat or as he was now, next to her, with her own small-ish stature to compare with, that she noticed.
He gave her a sympathetic look. “You know we’d back you if you wanted to leave, right?”
For a second, she’d forgotten what he was replying to, too caught up in her thoughts, but she backtracked. Fallon. Her current work duty. The infinitesimal likelihood that she’d be going anywhere near Nova Earth, which served as the Alliance’s head of state.
She twitched an eyebrow. “You think we could escape? I’m not sure even Nomiki’s badass enough to get us away from Fallon.”
He chuckled, the deep rumble of his laugh familiar and comfortable to her. “Now, now—I didn’t say we’d succeed, just that we’d back you.”
“Good to know.”
But it was a somewhat depressing topic, and he appeared to sense that. No one wanted to talk about their potential lack of freedom, least of all Karin. Fallon and its officers might talk big about her personal freedom and options to leave, but she was willing to bet that, if push came to shove, they’d pull the same enslaving shit that Alliance had, except they’d be much more efficient and polite about it. Besides—what else was she going to do? Leave and let the system suffer a slow collapse due to the Shadows? She was trapped by her own conscience just as much as by the Fallon Empire’s need for her.
