Rachel Caine: Devil's Due

Another muzzle flash, and something like a sledgehammer struck her in the chest. A hit, low and on the right. The afterimage showed her that the two men with Kavanaugh had their guns out. Kavanaugh, preternaturally quick, was already through the door.

She braced herself for the pain, cocked her elbows, and fired without letting herself think. The recoil slammed up through her arms, hard enough to make her cry out, but she didn't let it stop her. Two shots, directed to the positions where she'd seen the two men. She heard one hit the floor. The other staggered, then went down.

She struggled to her feet, sweating and light-headed. It was unnaturally silent, with not even the air vents working in the room.

She hit the glass doors with her shoulder, praying that the locks hadn't been reset, and saw Kavanaugh rounding the corner up ahead. He'd be getting help, and she was handicapped, gun held behind her back. With Jazz and Ben out of action, she didn't have a hope in hell…

And then Kavanaugh backed up, looking as if he'd seen a ghost.

And maybe he had.

Max Simms came into view. He was armed with what looked like one of Jazz's guns, and in that moment, Lucia wondered if they'd all been taken for a ride by the frail-old-man act, because the expression in his eyes…she'd never seen anything like it. Power. Terrible power.

"Endgame," Simms said. "Your move, Gil."

“You can't be here," Kavanaugh said. He backed up, collided with a padded cubicle wall decorated with crayon drawings and clipped-out Dilbert cartoons. "You can't be here. You're dead."

"Do I look dead?" Simms asked mildly.

"I saw you die."

"What, the vision you saw of your man coming up behind me and putting a bullet in my brain?" Simms smiled. "In some reality that happened. Not this one. You should learn to parse time lines better, Gil."

Kavanaugh glanced desperately around, but he was trapped. Lucia, to his right, had her gun on him; Simms had him from the front. A blank wall to his left. A cubicle wall at his back.

"An endgame," Simms continued, "is nothing but the last moves of a foregone conclusion. You were always going to lose, Gil. It was just a matter of sacrificing enough pawns to draw you out."

"Like her?" Kavanaugh's eyes cut to Lucia. "Two for one, is that it?"

"Oh, they're not my pawns," Sirnms replied. "We may very well be theirs. Didn't you understand that when you failed to keep McCarthy in prison by stealing Jazz's files on the case? Or by trying to have him killed inside? This had to happen. Inevitability at work, and neither you nor I have anything to do with it."

"You're insane," Kavanaugh said flatly.

"You've made a fortune out of the disasters of others," Simms said. "So have I. Maybe that does make us insane. It definitely makes us culpable."

"Then kill me."

Simms smiled. "Now that is inevitable."

Lucia, intent on holding aim in an achingly difficult position behind her back, heard the elevator doors rumble open, and shifted her attention that direction.

Uniformed guards. "Simms!" she yelled, and darted out of the line of fire. Kavanaugh was already moving. When she looked back, Simms was gone, Kavanaugh was heading for safety, and she was on her own. Again.

She dodged through the cube farm, hoping she wouldn't reach a dead end, and somehow found the stairs. She elbowed the handle down and tried to decide which direction would be best. Down was obvious, and that was why she hesitated.

"Lucia!" Jazz's voice echoed in the stairwell. "Get your ass up here!"

She breathed a sigh of relief, wished she could wipe her sweaty hair out of her face, and took the stairs up at a run.

Jazz and Ben met her on the seventh floor landing, and Jazz had the handcuff keys out. She spun Lucia around and worked the lock, and Lucia, panting, said, "What the hell happened?"

"Complicated," Jazz said briefly.

"Jazz got the handcuff key and Taser out of your purse, opened her cuffs and took out the guards," Ben said.

"Okay, not so complicated." The handcuffs clicked free. "Simms is here."

"Yes. I saw him."

"EMP go off?"

"Their servers are completely dark. If Manny has managed to take down the backups—"

"He will." Jazz looked vivid with the excitement of the chase, green eyes gleaming. "All of them. Cross Society servers, too."

"What?"

"I talked Borden into it," she said. "We tracked the system through Gabriel, Pike & Laskins, and found their server nodes. Manny's working on it. By the time this is over, both sides should be down for the count."

"Except for the psychics."

"Yeah, well. Beyond going on a killing spree—which I'm not in favor of for once—I don't see a way around that."

"Maybe it doesn't matter," Ben said. Lucia pulled out her gun and checked the clip. "Simms said that their psychics are specific in their predictions. Maybe they can still help people. It's when it gets to be a strategy that things go to hell."

"You know what? Not my problem." Jazz looked at each of them in turn. "You good to go?"

"Yes. Where?" Lucia asked.

"Roof. Kavanaugh's got a nifty black helicopter."

They took the stairs at a run.

Kavanaugh was already on board, and the rotors were turning, when they banged through the exit. Lucia's feet slid on gravel as she stopped. Kavanaugh was facing them, and his eyes widened. He said something into a headphone.

"Uh-oh," Jazz said. "That's not good."

Max Simms was in the helicopter, too. Handcuffed.

"Oh, dammit !” Lucia took aim, but the chopper was moving and the shot was risky; with Simms in the aircraft any shot she could make would be potentially lethal. She let her gun fall back to her side.

Simms was watching her with those wide, cold blue eyes. Smiling in that creepy, secretive way. Lucia felt McCarthy's hand on her shoulder, urging her back to the cover of the concrete wall. "Guards could be coming!" he yelled over the chop of the rotors. The helicopter was ten feet up, and rising. "This is done—we can't do anything. Let's go!"

There was a flutter of color on the gravel, something red, half buried under a handful of rocks. Lucia ran for it, grabbed it, and made it back to the safety of the wall as the helicopter gracefully spun in the air, preparing to head out. It exploded.

The concussion hit with a wave of pressure that triggered Lucia to involuntarily cover her head and close her eyes, and then the unbelievably loud roar of the explosion rolled over them.

She forced her eyes open and saw the blackened shell of the helicopter heading back to the roof at terminal velocity.

"Run!" she screamed, and pushed the other two ahead of her.

They made it to the back of the roof just as the wreck crashed in a fireball, sending blazing fragments spinning. Rotors broke loose and pinwheeled wildly. Lucia went flat, taking Ben and Jazz with her, while metal hissed overhead. Some of it embedded itself in the low wall at the edge of the roof, as if a nail bomb had gone off.

She felt heat on her back, then slaps. She was on fire. She rolled and stripped off the blue-and-white-checked shirt. Jazz was slowly getting to her feet, staring at the inferno that was melting the tar around it in into a hissing pool.

"Holy Christ," she said. "Two psychics, and they didn't see that coming?" She holstered her gun and held out a hand to Lucia, but Ben was ahead of her, a strong presence lifting her upright.

He had a long bloody cut on one cheek that would need stitches. Other than that, none of them was harmed.

Lucia tried to get her head together. "We need to retrieve the EMP and get the hell out," she said. "Now."

Jazz nodded. "And how do we do that without running into their guys coming up?"