Robert Crane - Family

I tried to think of the things we’d been through; we’d met when he said some unkind things to me in the cafeteria at the Directorate and followed it up by leaving a nasty note under my door. We hadn’t really fought since then, but he’d annoyed me more than once. “You are…” I tried to think of the nice things he’d done for me, and there had been a few. “…an amazing person.” I couldn’t quite keep the irritation out of my voice, though, and whether it came from the past, the fact that he’d convinced me to leave Andromeda’s body behind, or just my aggravation and stress from the fact that I was fairly certain we were going to die in the next few minutes, I couldn’t really be sure.

“Your words say ‘amazing’, but your tone says ‘asshole’.” He didn’t put a lot of spice into his riposte; the first black-clad figure had appeared only a dozen yards away and was easing toward us one slow step at a time. They had us dead to rights, an easy kill. Scott started to stand, and his hands were in the air.

“That does seem to be the subtext, doesn’t it?” I mirrored his movement, putting my hands in the air, standing up. I left Zack at my feet, and Reed was lying on the ground next to where Scott stood.

They approached unspeaking, their guns trained on us. I spun around slowly, taking in all 360 degrees. We were well and truly surrounded, they had us covered from multiple approaches, and there was no escape in any direction. “You win, guys,” Scott said. “So what is it? Prisoners or dead?”

The leader didn’t respond, but his goggles were on his forehead and I could see his eyes. I didn’t love the look of them. I could hear the faint hum of something, and I suspected it was an earpiece tuned a little too loud. My senses became heightened, the smell of the men around me pungent in my nose – Scott, Reed and Zack were each wearing some sort of cologne, gunpowder was heavy in the air, and the men in black had it on them along with something else, something more potent – gun oils, and blood.

It wasn’t actually blood, but there was something in my head that was screaming, in the back, about blood. It was in their eyes, their posture, the way they moved. A faint voice was trying desperately to get out of a place I had locked him for a very long time.

Death, little doll, they mean you death…

They will kill you. I heard the voice of Aleksandr Gavrikov within. They will snuff you out the way they were always trained, like the dogs of war they are…

As amazing as it sounds, I saw Scott stiffen; he was looking at me and had noticed the change in my posture. “What?” he asked, sotto voce.

“The voices in my head say that they’re going to kill us.”

I saw the leader raise his submachine gun as if to answer me, and I could see his finger tightening on the trigger.

Adrenaline raced through my veins, and the sound of the chopper blades overhead was deafening. I smelled the blood, even heavier now, and I realized it was on me, on my coat, and my shirt – Andromeda’s blood. I wanted to hurt them, even as I watched their fingers tighten on their triggers; they were going so quick, there was no way I could stop them in time. And then I heard something else.

“GERONIMO!”

I was already moving before it registered that I recognized the voice. I heard and felt a rush of wind behind me and realized that two of the gunmen at my back had just been snugged to the ground by nets of light, something familiar to me from having experienced it in training. I leapt as I saw Scott shoot a jet of pressurized water out of his hands in two directions at once, sending two more of our enemies flying.

I heard the impact of a landing behind me, the sound of some dumbass – one Clyde Clary, in point of fact – shaking the earth with the weight of his bulk. I had a suspicion that ol’ Clyde had transformed himself into either movable rock or metal before he hit the ground. He’d probably landed on one or two of those guys that had been pointing guns at us, judging by the wet splattering sound I heard as I flew through the air toward the leader of the squad.

I saw his eyes widen, but his gun began to adjust aim immediately and was already firing when I was just a foot away from him. I caught two rounds, but my momentum carried me through as I felt sharp pressure in my arm and shoulder from the impact of the bullets and in my head as I rammed it into his nose, breaking it.

I landed on my feet, woozy, but maintaining my balance. The man in black was not so lucky; I heard his head hit the ground and his body bounced at least twice before coming to rest about ten feet from me. The searing pain in my arm caught up to me and I sunk to my knees. It felt like someone was stabbing into my left bicep and shoulder, then twisting around in radial circles for kicks. I sank back, letting the pain overwhelm me.

Scott appeared at my side, the trees swaying above him, framing his head like some sort of bizarre nature picture. A blue-white sky provided the backdrop. “Damn, Sienna,” he said, and his fingers came up with blood on the tips from where he touched my arm. “Not good.”

“Took that bastard out, though,” I said, trying not to make the kind of noise that would suggest I was hurt in any way. I blew my breath out through my lips and felt the tension in my guts as I bottled up the urge to scream. “Some of us don’t have a ranged attack to deliver us from harm.”

“Oh, yeah, harm,” he said, sarcasm oozing out. “I was certainly never in any of that—”

“You two are bickering like kids.” I heard a familiar voice as someone else stepped into Scott’s lovely arboreal picture. Glen Parks, my instructor, appeared to Scott’s left, his shaggy gray hair and beard such a contrast to his dark eyes. There was red in the beard around his mouth and he caught me looking. “Not mine,” he said. “Got your sniper.” We’d all been his pupils in training, Scott, Kat and I – but I always had this suspicion, based on the way he talked to me, that I was his favorite. Probably because I could fight better than either of them. Or it might just have been that our personalities meshed well – he had an edge about him, and I walked around like I was covered in barbed wire, daring anyone to get close to me.

“How’s it look?” Scott asked, and his voice betrayed the tension.

“She’s been shot,” Parks said, as if to add, you idiot . “Twice. How do you think it looks?”

“Like a gunshot wound?” He paused. “Like two gunshot wounds?”

Parks didn’t answer. I felt his fingers poke at one of my wounds and I let out the slightest moan without realizing I was the one making the sound. I saw other faces behind them – one of them was Clyde Clary’s, his round face and blondish hair looking particularly long. I hadn’t seen him for a few days, I realized, and I hadn’t missed him. At all. “Clary,” I said, acknowledging him with a little bit of a hiss in my voice.

“What’s up, girl?” he asked, looking over the shoulders of Scott and Parks. “You wearing a tank top? Where’s your gloves?” He looked at me blankly for a minute, nodding, his lips turning into a smile that I suspected was knowing – by which I mean it was knowing nothing. “Oh, I get it – you was throwing some hurt on people, giving ‘em the ol’ soul suck.”

“Could you make that sound any dirtier?” Scott said, glaring at him over his shoulder.

“Sure,” Clary said. “She was—”

“Shut up,” Parks said, as another face appeared next to Clary’s, this one looking at me from upside down. I almost didn’t recognize it, because the long blond hair that had been there when I last saw her was gone, replaced with scorched skin that hadn’t healed yet. One of her eyes was blank, sightless, but the other was still there and cold blue.