Kane leaped through the open mat-trans door at his blood-drenched double, swinging his right fist at the jaw of his surprised opponent. “You don’t really want me to answer that, do you?” he responded to Grant’s question from a second before.
Wrong-footed, the tired, bloody clone of Kane fell to the tiled floor with a wet slap like so much meat, the energy leaving him instantly. He lay there, unable to move as the figure he had been based on surveyed the Cerberus ops room. Kane saw the familiar forms of Cloud Singer and—was that Baptiste?—as well as the skull-faced assassin who led them both in a charge at Lakesh.
Behind Kane, still at the open doorway of the mat-trans, Grant jumped forward, his left arm coming up to block Broken Ghost’s attack as she swung a high kick at Lakesh’s head.
“Not if it’s going to depress me,” Grant growled at Kane as he pushed Broken Ghost’s leg back, forcing her to lose her balance and topple to the floor.
Furious, Cloud Singer’s eyes fixed on Kane and his partners and she let loose a low growl. “Deal with these animals,” she ordered the double of Brigid Baptiste, who remained in her thrall, “while I finish the leader.” Broken Ghost had taught her to tamp down her anger well, but she wanted to hurt Kane so much in that second that it took all her determination not to launch herself at him. Lakesh had to come first.
Beside her, the Brigid duplicate was already moving, arms cutting through the air as she clambered over a desk and pounced at the Kane in the faded denim jacket who had just stepped out of the mat-trans. Kane looked up, distracted by the semidarkness of the room, and grabbed for Brigid as she dropped onto him. Together, the pair fell backward, crashing into the busy desk of one of the Cerberus ops staff.
“What kind of foul trick are you?” Brigid spit as Kane wrestled with her atop the desk.
“Could ask the same question, Baptiste,” Kane responded as he drove a punch into her breastbone, knocking her off him.
The Brigid Baptiste creature wasn’t even fazed. She regained her balance in a split second and lunged at Kane before he could get up from the desk. She pinned him down with the weight of her body, a knee on his chest and her hands reaching around his throat. “I don’t know what you are,” she told him, “but it won’t matter for much longer.”
Kane felt her grip tighten around his neck, cutting off his air supply as he tried to take his next breath.
Meanwhile, just a few paces away, the true Brigid had emerged from the mat-trans wearing a suede jacket, a scarred leather satchel over her shoulder. She turned to Lakesh, her brow furrowed in confusion. “Lakesh, what on earth is going on here?”
“Mat-trans glitch,” Lakesh explained briefly.
As Brigid looked at him, eyes wide in surprise, Lakesh saw the dark form of Cloud Singer rushing at them both through the shadows.
“Brigid, watch your back!” Lakesh cried as the fierce, tattooed warrior started to attack.
In a flurry of movement, Cloud Singer vaulted over a desk, knocking the computer equipment from it in her haste. A moment later she was on Brigid’s back, the razor-sharp boomerang in her hand, sweeping the shining blade down toward Brigid’s face.
Brigid stumbled as she adjusted to Cloud Singer’s weight, turned her head as the sharp edge of steel raced toward her. She felt the swish of air, and a handful of red-gold curls fell to the floor as the boomerang cut through her hair.
As the tattooed girl tried a second time, Brigid let her body go lax, dropping to the floor like so much dead weight. She landed hard on her back, with the struggling Cloud Singer taking the brunt of the impact.
Cloud Singer shrieked unintelligibly as the pain drove through her coccyx.
Driving herself off the fallen warrior, Brigid arched backward and angled a solid right cross at Cloud Singer’s cheek.
A little way across the room, Grant was standing opposite Broken Ghost, sizing her up as she stalked left and right like a prowling jungle cat, head down, watching him. With the night-vision implants, the assassin who moved like a ghost could see Grant far better than he could her, and she was taking her time to settle on her best strategy. Still six paces from her, Grant appeared to swing a punch at the woman—too far away to hit her—and Broken Ghost saw the blaster appear in his hand.
As Grant pulled the trigger on the Sin Eater, Broken Ghost went into motion, running forward over Domi’s prone body, into Grant’s firing arc and bounding into the air. Grant tracked her, his finger holding down the Sin Eater’s trigger, as she leaped before him. His bullets were just behind the skull-faced assassin, ripping through the air where she had been just a fraction of a second earlier.
At the apex of her jump, Broken Ghost’s bare foot kicked out, the curled toes ramming into Grant’s right eye like a fist. Grant’s head snapped backward with the blow, and he fell toward the floor, his bullets spraying wildly about the room.
Grant hit the floor with the side of his head, knocking himself so hard that he saw stars for several seconds. His pressure on the trigger eased and the Sin Eater stopped firing. When his vision recovered, he found himself looking up at the pale-skinned assassin as she stood over him, the cord of the bull roarer coiled in her fists, poised to execute the killing blow.
LYING ON HIS BACK on the desk as the false Brigid strangled him, Kane felt the pressure increase on his throat, saw his vision blur. And his blurred vision was good, for it meant that he didn’t have to see what it was he did next.
His right fist swept around, jabbing Brigid below the rib cage, pounding hard into her kidneys. He tensed his wrist tendons as he punched, calling the Sin Eater to hand, his finger immediately squeezing at the trigger.
Kane felt the recoil against his hand as the Sin Eater unleashed a volley of bullets, point-blank range, into the fake Brigid’s guts. He shook as her body leaped in place, bouncing back and forth as the slugs drilled through her, her gripping hands jarring against his neck as she tried to cling to him, cling to life.
It took just three seconds. Then her grip loosened and she fell from Kane, collapsing over the side of the desk in a lifeless heap, her bright red mane of hair flopping over to hide her face.
Kane lay still a moment, sucking at the glorious air as the pressure on his throat eased. “Baptiste is never going to let me live that down,” he muttered as the Sin Eater returned to its holster at his wrist.
SPRAWLED ON THE FLOOR as the battle continued above her, Domi snapped back to consciousness just as Broken Ghost leaped over her, bullets from Grant’s Sin Eater cutting through the air all around. There was something sharp digging into Domi’s belly where Cloud Singer and the fake Brigid had tossed her on the floor like so much worthless trash. She reached beneath her to find out what it was. A glass shard from one of the damaged computer monitors was digging into her, its sharp edge pressing against her belly. As Broken Ghost snap-kicked Grant in the eye, knocking the larger man off his feet, Domi plucked the shard free.
Broken Ghost landed beside Domi, readying herself to execute Grant with the taut cord of the bull roarer as he struggled on the floor. As the assassin stepped forward, Domi lashed out with the glass shard, swinging it like a knife. With a spurt of blood, the glass cut through the tendons at the back of Broken Ghost’s bare ankles, and the assassin cried in agony as she found herself toppling forward, no longer able to stand.
She crashed against the floor tiles and rolled into the mat-trans unit, unleashing a shrill cry as blood pumped from her ruined ankles. Domi was crawling across the floor then, the shank of glass glinting in her hand as it caught the lights of the monitors.
As she raised the shard above her head, preparing to plunge it into the assassin’s breast, Domi felt a hand grasp her wrist, halting her attack. When she turned, she saw Grant there, a firm, no-nonsense look on his face.
“No, Domi” was all Grant said, but it was enough.
Domi’s grip on the glass loosened and it dropped from her hand, clattering to the floor.
Across the room, Brigid Baptiste was using the flex from one of Skylar’s broken computer units to bind Cloud Singer’s hands. The young warrior was unconscious now, from equal parts exhaustion and the effort of a solid right cross from the feistiest archivist that Lakesh had ever seen.
“Put her in there,” he directed, pointing to the jump chamber, “then close the door. We’ll secure the redoubt, then decide what to do with them.”
“We all okay?” Kane asked as he looked around the shadow-filled room.
“I believe that we are,” Lakesh announced after swiftly eyeballing the room himself and counting heads.
Kane stepped toward the Cerberus leader, with Grant and Domi a few paces behind, making their way through the debris-strewed room.
Lakesh cleared his throat, relief evident on his features. “I believe that I owe you—all of you—my deepest thanks,” he said.
Exhausted, her shoulders drooping, Domi pulled the rebreather from her face and passed it to Lakesh. “Save them until we’re out of here. This place isn’t safe.”
Lakesh took the mask gratefully as Domi went to the equipment locker to find more gas masks for her companions.
Kane looked at his surroundings, almost as though he was seeing them for the first time, and then he extended his hand toward Lakesh, gripping the older man’s hand tightly. “I think we all owe you some thanks of our own,” he said. “For a moment there it was starting to look like we’d never get out of Cobaltville.”
Lakesh had no idea what the man was referring to, but he nodded regardless, just relieved to still be alive.
As Domi passed around gas masks, Lakesh updated the others on everything that they had missed while they had been trapped in the digital limbo. As he spoke, Grant noticed a woman’s leg sticking out from behind one of the desks, where it had been almost hidden by the shadows. He stepped over the fallen body of the false Kane and made his way over to the shapely ankle, crouching beside its owner.
“Shizuka?” he asked in a gentle voice.
Face spattered with trash and blood, sporting a fat lip and a darkening bruise on her forehead, Shizuka looked at him, eyes flickering as she struggled to regain consciousness. “Grant-san?” she asked timidly. “Is that really you?”
Grant shrugged. “Who else would it be?” he asked as he reached one arm gently behind her head and, rolling her toward him, lifted her from the ground.
Grant stood, holding the featherlight form of his lover in his arms. He looked at the dried blood on her face, the food and garbage stains that spotted the silk of her familiar dressing gown. “What happened to you?” he asked.
“I got trashed,” Shizuka said and she began to giggle as Grant’s expression turned from concern to bewilderment.
They filed out of the ops center to convene on the plateau outside the redoubt where the rest of the Cerberus personnel waited.
When the anteroom was empty, the emitter array beneath the mat-trans unit began to whine, and mist began to swirl as the gateway powered up.