The mercs are scattered out around the pump house, holding their ground. They’re waiting for Ratta’s people to either break and try to negotiate, or to get flushed out by the heat at their backs. I can’t see Alpha in the press, and that’s probably for the best, because the kid has her gloves off now, and a look in her eye like she might be a killer, after all. Her sister would just make her doubt. Make her slow.
We dart in, augments singing through our veins, vibrating against our skulls, and the mercs drop into burning and rotting heaps. The kid’s quick for being unpracticed in the field, her training sinking its claws in tight as she works protocols I recognize. Sweep the perimeter. Flit in and out. Don’t get surrounded.
But I’m older, meaner, and by the time she’s dropped five, I’ve dropped ten, and then it’s just mopping up.
Thing is, we ain’t invincible. Gouges and bruises and a few bullet punctures, too, decorate our bodies. Kid’s got a nasty gash running from the side of her jaw up to her temple, and it’s bleeding like only a head wound can. But the augments do more than deal death. They hum away, sealing us up, slowing the flow and pumping us full of stimulants and painkillers until we feel so damn unstoppable we think we can kill the world.
When the ground’s nothing but rot and char, there’s still no sign of Alpha. I scan the area, searching, and it hits me. The way we started off, I was dropping two bodies to Omega’s one. But she’d leaned into her training, blossomed in blood, and now that it’s over there’s more rot than ash on the ground.
“You see Alpha?” I ask.
Kid shakes her head, eyes huge with something that might be excitement, might be elation. This was what she’d been made for. Operatives like us, we don’t really come alive until we’re in the field.
Training scenarios are all fine and dandy, but it’s real blood on your hands that kicks the reward systems hardwired into us into overdrive. I grin at her, because I remember what that first time is like, and even though the bandana is over my mouth, her senses are cranked up enough that she catches the crinkling at the corners of my eyes, interprets it correctly, and grins back.
I wave the kid back so she doesn’t get her head blown off and stalk up to the doors of the pump house. They’ve been watching from the windows, hailing down gunfire when it suited them, so they know the kid’s not Alpha, but still. She saved their asses. They don’t get to pump lead into her just because they’re feeling jumpy.
My wrist braces clang against the metal door as I pound on it with my forearm. The half-rusted steel is hot enough to feel through my padding.
“Ratta, problem’s handled. Get the fuck out of there before you boil to death in your own sweat.”
The door swings open and Right-Boulder is on the other side, leaning hard against the door, sweat pouring down his body to mingle with the blood spilling out his thigh, making a pink slurry that stains his clothes the lurid colors of spring. He wipes his wrist across his forehead, and when he speaks, his voice is little more than a strained whisper.
“Ratta’s hurt. Bad.”
It shouldn’t bother me, but it does. The faces of the people hiding in the pump house aren’t pirate faces, not mostly. They’re settlers, after a fashion, and they’re scared. Real scared. Because they’ve come out here to live a way the coasts don’t like, and now their crops are burning and their leader’s bleeding.
“Show me.”
He yanks the door open wide and leads me into the sweltering dark. Ratta’s people shuffle out, reluctant to leave their leader, but unable to bear the steadily mounting temperature any longer. I can’t blame ’em. Every breath I take sears my throat, tickles my augments, tempting them to flare back to life.
Ratta’s pushed herself up between some crates so she’s sitting, staring dead at me as Right-Boulder shoves aside a plastic tarp. Her back is against a wide pipe, possibly the coolest place in the building, but it’s not doing her much good. Cold can’t put the blood back in your veins.
Someone had attempted to bandage her guts, but her hands are wrapped over those blood-soaked rags, the fabric so saturated I can’t tell what it used to be. She stares at me, hard, sweat making her countenance radiant, and I think for a second she’s already dead, she just died with her eyes open. It’d be kinder.
But then she pulls her lips back. Breathes. Sneers at me with all those pointy teeth.
“The Burner saved us all.”
“Maybe not you,” I say, crossing my arms.
“If you’d joined us, it wouldn’t have come to this.”
“If I’d agreed to fight with you, you still would have been sleeping off your damn party when they hit you. It’d change nothing.”
“If you’d stayed the night here—”
“Never would have.”
She stares at me so long I expect to hear her breath rattle out its last, but then she nods, body shuddering from the pain of movement. The skin around her lips has gone grey, and there’s a tremor in her hands that speaks of shock.
“You got them? All of them?”
“All but the girl.”
She spits blood on the ground, and the young woman crouched beside her, hands bloodied from trying and failing to contain Ratta’s wound, tsks.
“Where’s your doctor?” I ask.
“Gally’s dead,” Ratta says. “First one they took out.”
The name Gally means nothing to me. I couldn’t even tell you how old they were, or what pronoun they claimed. Maybe I’d seem ’em, at some point. More than likely I’d sent them plenty of patients over the years, but if I’d stepped into this camp and someone asked me to find Gally, find their doctor, I couldn’t have done it. Wasn’t any of my business what Ratta did with her ill and injured. But the mercs wouldn’t be so lax. They’d get their targets set in stone long before they struck.
I find it a little funny that those mercs probably knew more about her camp’s details from their one night of reconnaissance than I’ve bothered to learn in all my years living off the badlands. Ratta catches the evidence of my smirk along the edges of my bandana and scowls.
“Is there anything you can do?” the woman crouched beside Ratta asks.
Asks me. I stare at her in bewilderment. I’m no doctor, no healer of any kind. My hands bring death, and death alone. I take my hits, that’s true, and I manage those wounds myself, for the most part.
My augments take care of most of the real work, though. The sealing up of delicate connections, the purifying of infection. I don’t know shit about first aid aside from how to staunch a wound until the real help gets there, and they’ve already tried that, and Ratta’s still bleeding.
But I know someone who can help.
Once, when I first came to the badlands, a pirate who would grow up to be one of the Beysian Boys put a bullet in my back. It got caught under my shoulder blade, and the augments couldn’t get it out. I spent nights screaming and sweating while my body burned too hot, throwing everything it had at the intrusion.
On the third day, Ma Rickets found her way to the Beast, yanked me out, slammed me face-first into the dust and plucked the bullet out, then stitched the whole mess up and told me to never tell a soul; we all had pasts out here we were running from.
“You get her the flour, don’t you?”
The woman and Right-Boulder, they look downright perplexed, but Ratta don’t. She blinks at me, slow as a snake on an ice floe, and a smile slices up the side of her face, followed by a low laugh that quickly causes her to seize up with pain, gasping.
“Yeah,” she rasps, blood dripping off her lip. “I get her the flour, Burner.”
Ratta’s light in my arms, her body so slick with sweat she’s slippery, but her skin is damn near frozen, legs and arms and fingers twitching and jerking as pain rolls through her. I’m amazed she’s still conscious, truth be told, but you don’t live long out here if you ain’t stubborn.
“I’m coming with you,” Right-Boulder says as the kid helps me load Ratta in the back of the Beast, on top of all my spare ammo and other equipment. The woman followed us out, too, but she stopped talking the second she saw the bodies on the ground. Ratta stopped trying to talk when we walked past the nopales field, and I can’t say if that was due to her injury, or despair.
“You’re welcome to follow,” I say, slamming the door closed on the hatch, “but I ain’t got no room for you.”
“The kid—”
“The kid goes.”
I stop myself just short of saying she’s cargo. Maybe she is. Maybe I’m still going to truss her up and hand her over to Pac-At, if the mood suits me. Devil knows I’ve had fucking enough of her and her sister. Either way, Ratta’s people aren’t getting their hands on her. They might do some fool thing, like try to use her to lure Alpha out. If anyone’s going to use the kid as bait, it’s going to be me.