34
The director’s office had seemed a lot bigger to Rose before he’d started shooting lightning bolts at her. Although the lightning bolts weren’t as bad as they could have been.
Not to say they weren’t bad. Not to say they didn’t singe and burn. Not to say they didn’t hurt like hell.
Just to say: They should’ve killed her, but they didn’t.
For one, she was quick. They barely grazed her — her calf, her shoulder, her boot — as she tumbled around trying to get herself closer to the director. Closer, that was where he had seemed most vulnerable.
And for two, she was protected. Of course she was protected. Emma and Henry, they wouldn’t have sent her on a suicide mission. Or, sure, maybe they would have sent her on a suicide mission, but they wouldn’t have done so without offering her some amount of protection.
They were assholes, but the kind of assholes who wanted to win this thing.
So. Runes, spells, counterspells. A little extra help in case her innate superstrength and superspeed and all the training they’d given her wasn’t quite enough. Not that she believed in it. The magicks, that is. Not that she didn’t believe in it, either. If there were women with superpowers and Oracles who could predict the future and a woman in a place called the Regional Office with a mechanical arm that looked like just any other arm, why couldn’t there be magicks and spells and runes? Just that they sprung this voodoo on her right before she left and for all she knew, someone back at base could have lit a Virgen de Guadalupe candle for her, too. Not to mention that the way she imagined it, when they cast these spells over her it would have felt like a shimmery dome, except, really, it was like nothing had happened. She had expected it to be like that game kids play where they crack an imaginary egg over your head and it feels real, like egg yolk is really dribbling down your face, but she didn’t get even that. Just, “So when are they going to cast these protective countermeasures?” and, “They already did. You’re good to go.”
Still. They weren’t doing nothing.
Not to mention this polyester-blend bullshit they called her assault uniform. Sure, it didn’t fit her right — too tight on the calves, because not everyone had the calves and ankles of a fucking gazelle like Windsor did, and too loose in her chest, because, well, she was seventeen (eighteen in two weeks) for Christ’s sake, and not the most developed seventeen-year-old — and it didn’t breathe at all, like, as soon as she put it on, she was cooking inside it, sweat dripping down her back and into her fucking panties, but as a flame and lightning and bullet and, who knows, a dragon-breath deterrent, it had its strong points.
But it didn’t much matter — outside of keeping her alive — because she didn’t know how long all this shit would stand up to the guy with the glove that had once been a hand, and the director wasn’t letting her get close. He let loose with a barrage of lightning bolts and a whooshing of gale-force winds, and she wondered if all this glove could do was X-Men Storm-style shenanigans, or if there were more deadly uses that the director just wasn’t smart enough or skilled enough to have figured out yet.
She also wondered what the hell happened if you cut that shit off his hand.
Like, would he be consumed by the blue flame of the glove’s power latching on to the closest warm body as that power was released from the glove itself?
Or would he just be in a lot of fucking pain because she’d cut off his hand?
Was it even attached to him or was he just kind of wearing it?
Either way, it was bound to be a better situation than one in which he still had the glove and his hand.
Normally, the thought of cutting off his hand wouldn’t have crossed her mind. Not like she was carrying a couple of ancient Japanese swords with her. They were all expected to wade into this fray weaponless — well, they were the weapons, right? — that was what all that training had been about. Well. Training had also been about the use of all the various weapons one could use — rifles, pistols, silencers, brass knuckles, swords, knives, garroting wires. The usual. But still, their whole philosophy being: Train the person to be a weapon and they won’t need to carry extra weapons with them, with a secondary philosophy in: Don’t be above using whatever potential weapon might be at hand if you want. And she’d seen it — when the bookshelf began rocking — she’d noticed an ornamental kind of sword on a stand on the very top shelf. It looked like some Ren Faire knockoff, but any thinnish piece of metal with enough of a blade coupled with the power of her mighty fucking punch should do the trick.
Let’s be honest: If she couldn’t cut a sword — even the cheapest of swords — clean through a guy’s wrist, she should just turn in her Trained Assassin Badge and Assassin Gear and open up a quilting shoppe.
Tired of this tumbling-around bullshit and with the beginnings of an idea for a plan in mind, she charged right at him, hoping to get close enough to him to a) get by him and to the sword, and then b) cut off his fucking hand.
He lit into her with some fierce blue crackling power shit. She spun into and then out of it and stumbled straight into him, tripping on half a desk drawer on her way. She grabbed for him as she fell forward, snagged the cuff of the glove — the wrist of the former hand? — and then, falling, falling, she yanked it clean off.
35
Rose crept for a hundred or so feet toward the camp where they were holding the girls, then paused long enough to pick up a medium-sized branch and throw it in a high arc over the heads of the guards and over the large tent, waiting for it to crash into something on the other side, grab the guards’ attention just long enough so that she could skitter across the flat, bright expanse separating her from the guards and the tent.
She had three of them off their feet and flat on their backs — the Spindletop move — before the fourth knew she was even there. He lunged, she slipped through his lunge — that one was Thread the Needle — caught him in his solar plexus with her knee as she passed by him, an afterthought really, then, pivoting, threw her weight, in the form of her elbow, onto his back, heard the cough, the whoof escape his mouth, but heard, too, the charge coming from her blind side, shifted her weight right, spun low — the Revolving Door (Crouching) — and swept the fifth guard off his feet, heard the action of a semiautomatic, from behind her again (next time, she would make sure there weren’t so many different angles to attack her from), and without thinking performed a zigzagging series of back handsprings, aerials, and flips, suddenly so fast, so much faster than she thought she could be, that when she stopped and realized she was standing just inches away from the guard with the gun, she swooned a little from the head rush, but not so much she couldn’t grab the rifle by its butt and shove it hard into the guy’s nose and then take it from him.
She spun around with the rifle ready to fire some too-close-for-comfort warning shots at the others, but they were gone.
Well.
Two of them were gone, the other three were on the ground, breathing but knocked out. The last one, the one with the now-broken nose and no longer the rifle in his hands, stood up behind her, his right hand cupping the blood coming out of his nose, his left hand raised as if he were giving up, but she couldn’t trust him, Rose decided, so she brained him again with the butt of the rifle.
All in all, she figured it’d taken her five minutes.
She looked around the campsite. Looked at the four men knocked out and on the ground at her feet. She looked at the rifle in her hands.
Then she fainted.