Barrier Protocol. Now.
She could feel Alistair hesitate.
Mitzi, there is no time to complete the download. It takes more than thirty seconds…
Alistair, I don’t have time for this right now. Trust me. Start the download.
There was another brief hesitation, perhaps Alistair consulting the analytical pool, then confirmation.
Alright, Mitzi. Your call. Download commencing.
She didn’t wait for the download to start. Mitsuru had already begun to return to her body, moving along the red string, so fast it felt like freefall. She crashed into her body with a sickening sensation, and then the protocol hit her, and she felt like screaming, raw logic structures descending on her mind, displacing, enlightening. It was a migraine headache, a cluster of migraines localized in her forebrain. A wave of unutterable brilliance passed through her, illuminating, making her vision warp and blur.
She didn’t have time for that. Mitsuru dropped her guns and dug a short knife from her belt sheath. She heard the Weir howl and knew that they had started to move, even without confirmation from the acoustic analysis of the half-forgotten firearms protocol. She slashed one palm with the knife, deeper than she’d meant to, and then the other, and then dropped it. There was no pain, only blood spilling out of the wound, propelled by her frantically beating heart.
Mitsuru slumped to her knees beside boy, and then planted both of her hands palms down into the already bloody mud on either side of his head. The pain of the rapidly downloading protocol was intense, but it flared even brighter when she forced it to activate, ripping away her vision and replacing it with a field of ruby-tinted darkness. Her palms ached, and she could barely feel her fingers, as they sank into the viscous mud. There was fantastic pressure in her sinuses, a tingling sensation throughout her body, and then her eyes rolled back in her head.
The energy bled out of her, through the wounds in her palms, and her hands burned where they touched the mud. Every nerve sang as Mitsuru forced power through her hands, through the blood-born nanochains, through the mud and then up, into a dome she visualized, a thin red transparency that surrounded her and the boy, perfectly round and perhaps a meter across. Her head was filled only with the migraine now, as the incomplete protocol sputtered and whined. The power she forced into the protocol struggled to find an outlet, attempting to discharge to relieve the unbelievable pressure. Submerged in the cold mud, her hands burned. She held the structure of the protocol in her mind, aligning and maintaining the energies by force of will.
The first Weir to hit the barrier crumpled, going down in a tangle of teeth and paws, bones cracking against the translucent field. Mitsuru screamed as it hit, screamed as power flared through the incomplete protocol, but she was unaware of it. The whole of her consciousness was focused on channeling power into the damaged structure of the protocol. Whatever the source, the mysterious power seemed inexhaustible, and she made herself into a conduit for it, a preferential pathway for the available energy.
One half-human paw on the back of its damaged head, the silver Weir rose to his feet and paused, staring at Mitsuru in the mud a few yards away, her body wracked with effort and pain, sprawled across the boy, and the translucent red shield over them.
“Little one,” it said, walking toward them, his voice a repulsive parody of human speech. “Little one, you cannot hold that barrier for long. It is tearing you apart, I can see it.”
If it expected a response, it didn’t get one. It studied the shivers that racked Mitsuru’s body. Her nose poured blood unheeded, her face pale and her eyes screwed shut.
“It will fail, girl, it will fail without me even touching it. And when it does,” it said, lolling its long black tongue over its tangled teeth, “we will hurt you. First we’re going to tear that boy apart. Then you…”
It leaned down closer then, almost touching the barrier, its breath foul and hot on the back of Mitsuru’s neck.
“We’ll take our time with you. You’ll wish you were dead long before we let you die. There isn’t anything you can do about it. Think about that, behind your dissolving barrier.”
The thing’s tongue extended out several inches, black and viscous, caressing the barrier obscenely, leaving a trail of mucus and spittle behind.
Mitsuru’s fingers dug into the mud. Her nosebleed had become a stream now, the blood flowing steadily onto the boy, onto the ground around him. The shield flickered, not due to lack of power, but rather because the incomplete protocol had begun to disintegrate.
“Enough.”
Mitsuru felt, rather than saw, the arc of blue-white flame that struck the silver Weir, igniting his fur and hurling him, bones cracking, back toward the scrub and brush. The shield around them flickered and then dissolved as Mitsuru allowed the protocol to dissipate, and then rolled herself off the boy and onto her back. Lying on the mud, she forced her eyes open and saw the Operator standing over her through the veil of the migraine.
She didn’t recognize him. He was middle-aged, Caucasian, with a serious, plain face and dark hair. He wore an overcoat, damp and heavy for the season, and an expensive-looking brown suit beneath. In his right hand, he held something that looked very much like a metal umbrella handle, a blue-white stream of flame running out of the elongated end, dripping to the ground and pooling there, beside his immaculately polished shoes.
The barrier protocol diminished to fragments and half-remembered images, but Mitsuru’s headache remained blinding and her nose continued to gush. She managed to force herself up to her knees, though it took both hands and a concerted effort. She put two fingers against the wrist of the fallen boy, too tired even to summon a probe.
“Relax, Operator Aoki,” the man said crisply, his expression unreadable. “I will finish this. Do you have the strength to contact Central for retrieval? They’ve prepped an extraction for you.”
Mitsuru stared at her wounded hand, wondering. She realized that somehow she did, and managed a nod.
“Then go,” the man said curtly, raising the bar over his head, the liquid fire trailing behind him in a continuous wave; like a long whip, or more accurately, like the line of a fly-fisherman, extending out yards behind him in elaborate coils, a sinuous and lazy exaggeration of his movements.
Mitsuru reached through the Ether as the line struck the first of the Weir, snapping forward with a terrifying, unavoidable momentum. Wherever it touched, the line scorched, reducing the wolves to ash and smoking meat, sending up gouts of steam from the hissing mud. He drew the line back over his head in a high, slow arc, and then brought it whipping back in a wide sweep, parallel with the ground, and whatever it touched, burned.
Already, the park was devastated, and filled with howling, terrified Weir. It was the single most flagrant display of the Salamander Protocol that Mitsuru had ever witnessed, and even through the pain of the broken protocol, she felt a profound envy.
Then she hit the white of Central, and a moment later, both she and the boy were gone, into concerned voices, soft light and hospital sounds.
Four
“What, then? Are you suggesting that we should kill him?”
Gaul tried to be patient. Vladimir was badly arthritic, and during the colder months he was inclined to be cantankerous. He wasn’t trying to be difficult, Gaul reminded himself, he didn’t have the patience for complicated answers right now.
Gaul pushed his wire-frame glasses up with one finger, sighed, and tried again to explain the scenario to the two other conscious men in the room.
“I’m not saying we should kill him, Vlad, I’m saying that is one of the solutions that some of the cartels will come to. Others, the majority probably, will want to recruit him, but I’m certain that all would rather see him dead than see him join another.”