Zachary Rawlins - The Academy

Auditors did not take unnecessary chances. They eliminated the risks that they could, and then minimized the impact of the risks they deemed unavoidable. And, in this particular scenario, Mitsuru needed to be certain that she could finish the target before he struck, or he might well finish her, or worse, escape. That meant doing it close, close and ugly. The barrier had been designed to absorb the high-energy, low-mass impact of a bullet, so it would be useless against a physical assault.

The knife she clutched was as long as her forearm and broad, with a tapered point and a razor edge. The hasp was wrapped in worn leather, and it fit her hand like it belonged there. She’d been picky, rejecting a number of other knives before settling on this one, the product of a small smithy in rural Arkansas that had produced only a handful of knives before shutting down sometime in the Seventies. It wasn’t much to look at, having lost its sheen decades ago, but the weight and balance were perfect, and Mitsuru had fallen in love with it the first time she’d picked it up.

Mitsuru dispensed with caution, charging across the crowded street, relying on the concealment protocol to hide her from the target. Analytics guessed that she could close to within three meters before the target became aware of her. They were a little off. At five meters, the man started and turned in her direction, pulling a gun from inside his coat pocket.

At four meters, Mitsuru took a wrong step, and her ankle turned.

His pistol was a large, high-caliber chrome plated affair, probably loaded with hollow-point rounds, designed to inflict massive tissue damage. The barrier protocol Gaul had sheathed her in was tough, but it was not up to the task of blocking a bullet that large and fast at such close range. When he spun to face her and pointed it, the barrel of the silver pistol seemed enormous.

Mitsuru almost tumbled into the gutter in front of him, next to his discarded Thai food. For a moment it seemed certain that she would, the pain in her ankle sharp and dismaying, her balance badly skewed and her leg giving way beneath her. For Mitsuru, time slowed, almost froze, while her Etheric implants worked, querying the network’s servers, then processing the downloaded probability matrix, feeding her numbers, likelihoods, odds. She would be too slow, now, even if she didn’t fall. Her calculations were grim and infallible.

The gun discharged, and she could see the bloom of hot gases as they escaped the pistol, fire and vapor. The slug seemed huge as it wound its way through the air toward her, and she adjusted her stance slightly, still in midair, to avoid it hitting her in the chest. She couldn’t dodge a bullet, no one that she knew of could, but she could try and control where it hit her.

The bullet passed cleanly through the bicep of her right arm, a burning line drawn through the muscle. For a brief, brilliant moment, Mitsuru hung in the air, ruined arm trailing behind her, captivated by the twined agony and euphoria that flooded her body. She caught her breath, a rush of pain and pleasure running up her spine, as her arm blossomed into a crimson flower, the shockwave destroying the tissue all around the wound.

Mitsuru almost laughed then. The fool had saved her by using metal-jacketed rounds. They were perfect for tearing through barrier protocols, but tended to pass right through tissue.

The blood from Mitsuru’s arm swelled and warped in a mass, but it did not go flying with the chunks of skin and bone — Mitsuru reached for it, leaning against the Black Door in her mind, and with a sound like violin strings snapping, a few more of the luminous threads that bound the blood-soaked wood gave way. The door slid open with a strange, moaning sound, and the trail that it left behind was wet and thick. For a moment, her arm was held in flux, partially disintegrated, caught between inertia and Mitsuru’s will, and then finally bowing to the superior force.

Moving against prevailing motion, her blood flowed backwards, coating her arm with a slick layer of fluid. It wrapped around her arm like a cocoon, warm and gelatinous; Mitsuru could feel it crawl across her skin, hardening, becoming an exoskeleton. Her body twisted under the pressure of the outside forces, fighting momentum. As she passed by the target in a barely controlled dive, she twisted and lashed out with her knife hand, her damaged arm guided by the stiffened strands of blood like puppet strings. Her heart sang as the blade passed his guard, cutting smoothly through the target’s gun arm, severing it just below the elbow.

Mitsuru forced more power through her body, then, wincing at pain comingled with a base ecstasy, as she forced herself to land on her feet. Her right shoulder complained for a moment, then gave way to momentum, dislocating at a troubling angle. Her right arm hung useless at her side as she found her balance again. She tumbled into the man, her left arm and her legs wrapping around him, dragging him down to the ground with her, pulling his chin up and away from his throat.

And then, reflected in the glass of the shop windows, there was the look. The thing she lived for. His eyes went wide for a moment, with shock, when he realized that he had failed to kill Mitsuru, to defend himself. That he would die. That there was nothing he could do, by force or by pleading, to change the outcome. Mitsuru could see it in his eyes — surprise, fear, outrage, and buried somewhere beneath, a profound regret.

She wondered, in the second before she dragged the knife across his throat, which the regret was for — a lover, a child? It didn’t matter.

The knife was truly a marvelous blade. His throat offered no resistance, a single thread of blood trailing behind the tip, his jugular exploding in a warm spray, drenching Mitsuru’s face and chest in cloying stickiness.

She shook the blood from the blade with a flick of her wrist, and then turned to look behind her. The Isolation Protocol was still active. In the last few seconds, she realized belatedly, she had lost her link to Alistair. Worse, she seemed to have company.

There were at least half a dozen of them, wrapped in concealment protocols so powerful that she had not noticed them until they were within a block of her. They were nothing but grey blurs to her visually, but their Etheric signatures were massive. Her implant crunched numbers, and informed her helpfully that they were very probably hostiles, and that she could do little to defend herself from them.

Blood was pouring from her arm, mangled at the bicep and separated at the shoulder, hanging useless. She’d had reserves of power, but her Black Protocol had cost her more than she had anticipated.

Laughing, Mitsuru assumed the most fundamental of the one-handed fighting stances that Michael had taught her, the tip of the knife pointed toward the rapidly advancing figures, her back foot planted sideways, prepared not to give an inch before dying. Her uplink churned out numbers, scenarios, strategies, but she rejected them all.

There was no way for her to survive. But as she prepared her final protocol, Mitsuru promised herself that they would not, either. After the carnal exultation of the wound and the killing, she felt a strange calm. She reached toward the Black Door in her mind, still warped and complaining from her earlier endeavors. She threw herself at the threads that held the door closed, drawing up power from within, a tidal force, up from her blood, up from inside her. She felt the familiar pinpricks of pain and pleasure as her mind tried to disintegrate under the pressure.

Abort!

The command was delivered so powerfully that she could only obey in shock, her vision blurred and her head filled with cotton. For a moment, she thought the world had gone off kilter, the ground beneath her feet collapsing from the force of the broken protocol.