by Alex Wells
She had to do something or half of them would fry. It was fire, Hob felt the echo of it in her blood, and she tried something she’d never had the gumption to do before. She stood, held out her hands to the fire, and shouted with all her will, “Come to me!”
The inferno obeyed, swirling into a roaring wave that spun around her, boiled her blood and turned the air in her lungs into nothing but more fire. She screamed, the ends of her hair singed, but then she bit down and pulled all that flame through blood and flesh into her bones. The pain was worse than anything but the day the phoenix had spat fire into her skull, and her own wings of flame exploded from her back as she drank the fire in and tamed it. She left a smoldering shadow on the rock.
She was a goddamn idiot, she thought with the one neuron she had above all the nerves aflame. Every day of her life since Nick had taken her from the desert, she’d treated her fire like a parlor trick, for lighting cigarettes and dazzling dumbass kids. It wasn’t a trick. It was in her. It was her. She was fire.
And still the three train cars kept tumbling, end over end, to slam into the canyon walls. Charred and twisted, they were barely recognizable when they came to rest, one of them propped on end against the north wall.
She could barely hear over the surge of her own heartbeat, but Hob could just make out the chatter, the men yelling at each other. “Shut up, all of you,” she said, voice hoarse. “Geri, get movin’. Don’t know how many survivors there’ll be, but we can’t be too safe. There’s a… there’s a nasty drop at the mouth of the canyon now, be ready to jump it. North wall, sound off.” She heaved a smoky sigh of relief when seven came back. They sounded shaken. “Smile, boys. Near same thing woulda happened with explosives, and this we didn’t have to steal.”
There was reassuring if nervous laughter as she bolted down off the ledge and extricated her motorcycle from its crevice. There was a dent in the battery stack and the paint job would never be the same, but it was otherwise OK.
“Movement sighted, Ravani,” Maheegan said.
She got the engine started, bursting around the ledge in time to see a man in green kick out a shattered door, crawl into freedom. His head burst in a flash of red, accompanied by the crack of a rifle shot.
“Neutralized,” Maheegan continued laconically into her ear.
She pulled up next to the Bone Collector, who stood where she’d left him, hands hanging loose at his sides as he breathed heavily. The hair on one side of his head was singed, his cheek blackened with ash. “It still lives,” he said.
Geri’s group streamed out of the canyon, jumping down off the newly created ledge like a waterfall of metal, the morning sun glinting orange off the barrels of shotguns and pistols. “Then get to it.” Hob revved her engine to a whine and started moving again, pulling the shotgun from the holster on the side of her bike. The fire beat at her blood, screamed to be released, but she didn’t want to release it yet, because it was one more weapon in her arsenal, a hell of a lot more powerful than any gun.
Three more doors burst out in one of the passenger cars. She made out the black line of a rifle barrel in one. The shooting started in earnest.
“Keep ’em pinned!” Hob shouted. “Cover, let’s get a couple people with grenades, go, get ’em in those doors as you go by. If you ain’t sure of your throw, don’t waste it!”
The motorcycles swirled around the wreckage; moving targets were harder to hit. Doors opened in the second car.
Someone went tumbling off a bike next to her. She dodged neatly around the fallen motorcycle and fired at the train car as she went close by. She didn’t know if she got a kill or not, but the rifle disappeared from the door, dropping out of sight.
“Got a runner,” Maheegan’s calm voice came over the channel. “Neutralized. They’re trying to get to the car to the east.”
“Then that’s where the Weatherman is.” She looped around, taking another shot at the train car. Her hand wobbled; she couldn’t stay steady with everything still burning.
Pain hit her head in a wave, her ears ringing. She almost lost control of the motorcycle, had to lean hard into a turn before she ran into one of the cars.
A man in blue stood on the side of the east car at a crazy angle, black hair whipping in the wind: the Weatherman. His gaze swept over her, and she fought to keep herself in a straight line as he kept looking, going past, searching…
“Target acquired,” Maheegan said. A flash of white heat popped in the air half a meter from the Weatherman’s head. And in the same deadpan tone, Maheegan continued: “Oh fuck me.” The Weatherman started to turn, looking up toward the canyon wall.
The Bone Collector’s voice rang out, loud and pure and raised in song over the chatter of gunfire. Dust whipped around him in a halo. The Weatherman jerked back toward him, took one staggering step forward, and dropped onto the broken salt hardpan.
Pressure built up in Hob’s skull, made her eyes blur. Her mouth tasted like electricity as she dropped the shotgun back into its holster and drew her revolver. “You can try one more shot now that our friend’s got the Weatherman’s attention, Maheegan.” Her voice sounded strange to her own ears. “If it don’t work, just let it alone. We got plenty of greenbellies to kill.”
“Cover fire coming, east side of car one,” Raff’s light voice said. The chatter of the machine gun rolled in loud as thunder, short bursts. A security man screamed as another ducked back inside that car.
Hob caught sight of Lobo ahead of her; there was no mistaking his huge shoulders, or the mass of the trike under him. As he spun by one of the cars, a man in green jumped out of the doorway and slammed into him, taking him to the ground. The trike rolled to an idling stop seven meters distant. The two tumbled along the hardpan, and then metal flashed in Lobo’s hand.
Dambala pulled up along one of the cars, firing his shotgun in rapid bursts, stuffing new cartridges into the barrel as fast as he could. Davey ducked around him, slowing enough to fling a grenade into one of the doors. Then he gunned it and slid away. Dambala gave the train car one more shot before he went skidding out. There was a burst of fire and then smoke billowed from the doorway.
“Gimme more of that!” Hob shouted.
A scream: another Wolf down.
And then a shout over the radio, “Bone Collector’s been hit!”
Chapter Forty-Three
Shige had been put in the car with the Weatherman for travel, since Mr Green liked him. Very much, it seemed. Thankfully, it was more than just the two of them; there were several guards, and the same supervisor that had accompanied them to Primero and Shimera.
They were all drinking coffee and eating a light breakfast, just fruit and pastries – or rather, all of them but Mr Green – when there was a rumble, and–
–he lay against the wall, and everything hurt. Blood ran into his eye from a cut across his forehead. He tugged a handkerchief from his pocket and tried to press it against the cut, but his arm didn’t seem to want to work right, his hand wavering before him.
Mr Green pulled himself from the shattered remains of their breakfast table. He looked completely unharmed and cheerful as ever, swiping splinters away from his lapels. “They’re here! They’re here. No more hide and seek,” he husked.
Shige tried to ask him what he meant, but all that came from his mouth was a distressed little moan. Mr Green reached down and touched him on the head, then smiled. Something twisted in Shige’s guts, and it hurt, but then the pain receded in a wash of relief.
“There. Now your intestines are back inside and you won’t die.” Mr Green walked away, pulling the door at the far end of the car open.
The sound of gunfire came into the wrecked car, strangely tinny. And then the sound of singing, which made absolutely no sense at all.
Someone else groaned, and wreckage crunched as it shifted. The supervisor, nearly as unharmed as Mr Green somehow, pulled himself out from under a pile of twisted chairs. He took a few steps, then went back, searching until he came up with
his automatic rifle. He gave Shige a disgusted look, the expression skewed by a swollen cheek and broken nose. “All hands on deck, if you can stand to get them dirty.” Then he, too, went to the doorway, where he stood and began to shoot. A moment later, he shouted, “Ha, got you, goddamn freak!”
Shige glanced around the car; there had been a few cameras, installed to track the Weatherman, now all smashed beyond recognition. No one else in the car was alive. Shige staggered to his feet. His insides twisted strangely again, not quite to the point of pain. He’d worry about that later. He paused next to the corpse of one of the guards, liberating a pistol from the man’s holster, and walked quietly up behind the supervisor. Around the man, he caught a glance of the scene outside – chaos on one side, and before them on the hardpan the odd, pale man he’d seen at Primero. Only now, blood stuck his coat to his side, stained the hands he held outstretched toward the Weatherman. Motorcycles buzzing about, and was that – yes, the so-called Ravani.
Shige calmly assessed the situation, weighing what would be best for him, for the mission in general. He was under deep cover, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t intervene, as long as he did it safely. He had assets worth protecting at this point.
He raised the pistol level with the supervisor’s head and pulled the trigger.
* * *
“Stay on the greenbellies, goddammit! We ain’t supposed to let that happen.” Hob gritted her teeth as she braked hard, planted one foot on the hardpan to spin, and shot back toward the Bone Collector. He still stood, but blood spotted his duster, running freely down his back from just under his shoulder.
Even as she watched, he jerked again, more blood bursting from his side. He took a half step back, then pushed forward, like he was wrestling against something invisible and towering. His mouth opened like a scream, his eyes fixed on the Weatherman.
Two meters away, she hit a wall that wasn’t there. She dropped the bike, sent it sliding across the hardpan ahead of her as she tumbled, hands clutching her head through the helmet. She couldn’t breathe, and tore her helmet off. She staggered up toward the Bone Collector and saw a third gunshot hit him, this one in the leg. He fell to one knee, blood spraying over the hardpan.
But the sound of it. Without her helmet, she could hear the Bone Collector. Not a scream, but song, pure song, with words she’d never heard before, like the one he’d sung when they were going to get Mag. The Weatherman tore through that music, weaving discord with the notes, twisting them, trying to take control. The air writhed, dust clouds tearing into fantastic shapes, light warping and bending. The hardpan beneath the Bone Collector’s knee cracked.
Hob caught sight of dark green in the tilted doorway of the car, and brought up her revolver, striding forward. If she concentrated, if she aimed, she could shut out everything else, the sound and feeling pounding at her head, the fire threatening to burst out of her blood and eat her whole.
The man in the doorway dropped forward, limp and dead before she could shoot. She thought she caught a flash of blue suit, quickly gone. She took a quick glance at the Bone Collector, at all the blood pooling around him, then aimed at the Weatherman and fired. A burst of white light bloomed by his shoulder, the bullet vaporizing.
The Weatherman’s head started to turn toward her, that pressure digging into her brain again, but the Bone Collector shouted, twisting his hands, pulling the man back around like a puppet.
She fired again, the bullet bursting past his hip.
Even as he raised hands to claw at his own face, the Weatherman laughed.
laughs as the blood sprays and sprays and sprays, laughs you did this, you did this
He had no right to that pain, that personal horror. No one did. She’d paid for it a thousand times already. A scream of pure rage tore from her throat, the fire surging in her blood. That fire, the fire she’d eaten, the fire she’d never taught herself to use right. Well, it wasn’t too late now. She fumbled to focus all that heat in like a magnifying glass, down to a single point. She looked down the barrel of that revolver, Nick’s revolver, at the laughing face of the Weatherman, and all that fire flowed up through her arm. The metal of the pistol went red with heat, the bone butt singeing. Fighting with every ounce of strength she had to keep the pistol from melting – heat into the bullet, out of the barrel fuck she should have practiced more, why didn’t she just practice more, she could do this, she would do this, she was Hob Fucking Ravani – she pulled the trigger one more time.
Instead of a bullet, the gun spat every bit of the fire from the explosion and her own blood compressed into one white-hot mote.
That mote screamed as it tore the air between them, and punched into the Weatherman’s chest, where she’d tried to ruin him with a normal bullet before. For a moment his lips moved, and she almost heard him – so pretty – before she let that captive explosion go. Flames roared up, shot from his eyes and fingertips, turning him black and crisp and then to fine ash in an instant. Then there was only song for one perfect moment, the air going still and the gunfire retreating and she heard it, she almost heard it, the voice of the phoenix.
Come home, it sang. Come home, come home, come ho–
The song stopped abruptly as, behind her, the Bone Collector fell in a heap. Hob ran the short distance between them, hissing as she drew the heat back out of her revolver and into her skin before the damn thing melted. She dropped to her knees next to him.
“I think… I might have made a mistake,” he whispered, voice barely audible. His lips were bright with blood. “He was stronger than I expected.”
“Yeah, well, he’s still dead now.”
He looked at the dark smear of oily ash that now decorated the hardpan and the side of the train car. “Oh. So he is.”
There was an explosion, a wash of heat. She glanced behind her quickly; smoke poured from the other train car. A man crawled from the door, started to run, and then dropped, flesh shredding under a burst from one of the machine guns.
The Bone Collector choked. She looked back down at his face, gave his shoulder a little shake. “You better not be plannin’ to die on me.”
“I’d rather not. I’ve… grown rather fond of this.” He closed his eyes, swallowed hard. “Can you get me to the sands? I need to… I need to heal. Here would not be a good place.”
Hob nodded. “If you can hang on, I can get you there.” She stumbled to her feet and ran to where her helmet lay, then shoved it back on. “Tell me we’re winnin’.” Next she sprinted to her motorcycle, levering the heavy machine back up with hands that felt like they’d had the strength charred out of them.
“Just pickin’ off stragglers comin’ out of the two guard cars now,” Geri said. “What about the Weatherman?”
“Dead.” She scrabbled at the side panel over the engine, opening it up to make sure she hadn’t cracked the batteries when she dumped the bike. She didn’t much feel like exploding, having made it this far. “Careful about the third car. Dunno if anyone’s still alive in it. But… if you see a man in company blue. Get a name before you shoot – if it’s a guy named Rollins, he’s… he might be on our side.” Batteries whole, she started the engine back up; the hum felt unsteady, but it would get the job done.
“Ain’t you gonna check it out?”
“Bone Collector’s been hit. Needs me to take him out to the sands.”
Geri hesitated, then said, “Gotcha.”
“I’ll be back fast as I can.” She got herself over to the still form of the Bone Collector with a little squirt from the engine, then picked him up. He wasn’t nearly heavy enough for someone who could be stone. “Can’t put you on the back, can I?”
He cracked one eye open. “I… don’t think so.”
Awkwardly, she bundled him onto the bike’s seat, laying him over the battery stack, and then slid on behind him. “Good thing for you I got such long damn arms and legs,” she muttered. She lifted him back to lean against her and tied him in place with a scrap of rope. Then she burned out
of there as fast as she could, cutting straight east, where the closest dunes would be.
* * *
Shige had retreated to the car rather than risk being hit by a stray bullet, though he tracked the battle as best he could with sound. The sudden silence from Mr Green, coupled with an explosion that blasted ash over the far end of the train car, told him that he’d been right to stay well back. A couple of explosions later, the gunfire went to almost nothing. Which likely meant that “his” side had lost.
He allowed himself a slight smile, because he could, without lying, say that he hadn’t seen what had happened. Though he did hope he’d be able to convince the Ravani to tell him later how she’d done it.
The thin amount of light coming into the car wavered, and he looked toward the door, seeing the shape of a bulky man cut out in it. A bulky man with a gun. Shige carefully raised his hands over his head to show he wasn’t armed.
“You Rollins?” the man called.
“Yes, that would be me.” He gave the man a polite smile as he stepped closer, noting that he did not lower his gun. “And you are?”
“Geri.” The man squinted. “Somethin’ about how you sound…”
“My older brother is one of your fellows.” He was more than willing to play that card in the hopes it would keep him in one piece. “I believe you call him Coyote?”
The man seemed less than impressed. “Coyote’s dead. In Harmony.”
Shige sighed. “He said he had it handled. Apparently he didn’t.”
“Hell of a thing, to leave your brother to die.” Geri crouched down in front of him.
