Vanhi walked through the exit into the cold air. The wind hit her instantly and set her hair flapping back. The moment she cleared the door, someone grabbed her from behind. She saw broad arms close around her, draped in black.
Without thinking, she drug her heel back and down, and when the arms loosened slightly, she dropped to the ground and scrambled forward into a run.
The light was dimming fast as the sun went down behind the horizon, the dark blue sky veering into purple. The sodium lamps flicked on around the campus as she ran, no clear destination in mind, just trying to put distance between herself and the attacker.
Stay calm, she told herself. You’ll be fine.
He’s the one who better watch out.
She cut an angle, arcing around the side of the building so she’d be out of sight. She chanced a look behind her and saw a man in a white mask and a black hood coming at her. She didn’t have her Aziteks on, so the figure was undeniably real.
She turned and ran.
She rounded the corner of the school, down the long strip that led toward the construction site and the portables. That was her best chance to lose him.
She realized her phone was a tracking device on her body. So were the Aziteks in her bag. She had a feeling that with her infinite Blaxx they would do her no good anyway. She had no Goldz left, there was no tool to buy, no app to run. In the Game, she was bankrupt. She tossed her phone one way and her glasses the other a few feet later. Then she went a third way, a narrow strip between two brown portables on risers. She turned sideways, pressed through the crawlway, and saw someone coming from the other direction, another man also in white mask and black cloak. She ducked back into the gap between the portables and crawled under the risers of one, coming out into the maze of temporary buildings, then dipping under some sawhorses that closed off a hard-hat area. She heard footsteps behind her, or maybe it was just the wind picking up, rolling loose gravel or rattling temporary signs on hinges. She found what she was looking for in a pile of scraps at the worksite—a nice hard pipe, a foot and change long, sawed off smooth on the end so the material shone silver while the outside was a nice tarnished rust. It felt weighty in her hand, and she practiced a swing. She kept moving because it was fairly clear now that she heard footsteps approaching, and one of the men came around the corner; he was ageless and faceless because he wore a porcelain mask. His hair stuck out in chunks over the top. He came closer.
Can I really do this? She abhorred violence.
Vanhi stepped back, keeping her eyes on him, sensing that the wall of a portable building was getting closer behind her. She wouldn’t be trapped. She wouldn’t feel afraid. Without warning she reversed direction and stepped forward. He had a knife in his hand and lurched toward her, not expecting the gap to close so quickly as she doubled back on him, then flawlessly she swung the pipe with both hands, winding up before he could notice and springing back a half turn to bring the pipe against his head. It made a cracking thunk noise—part head, part mask—and he went down in a crumpled heap. Vanhi turned and ran through another passageway between the temporary buildings, cutting left, then right, hearing footsteps on the gravel behind her again, crunching as they went. She came to a barricade and ducked under it, the only direction left to her, but within a moment she was cornered against a wall dirt wrapping her in a U, the product of a long-gone excavator heaping dirt from a hole on the other side, which she couldn’t see, for a project abandoned or at least frozen, a building that never made it out of the ground. So she spun back around, but he was there, another figure, this one upright and alive, knife pointed toward her in his hand clad in black leather.
“Rats get stuffed and fucked,” he said.
Vanhi wasn’t going down like that.
She started up the pile of dirt and got a good ways up, high enough to see the yawning hole below, but the dirt gave way under her feet and she tumbled back down the way she’d come, losing the pipe. He was on her, but she was fierce and kicked the side of his knee, bringing him down momentarily, long enough for her to get her fingers on the pipe. He grabbed and pulled at her legs, but she gripped the pipe and turned her torso, swinging. She landed a hard blow on his shoulder and he dropped her leg. Vanhi was up, ignoring the fear radiating all through her, holding the pipe like a batter. He slashed with the knife, and she hopped back and the blade swished by but missed her. She swung the pipe at the right moment but missed him, too.
“Go to hell,” she spat at him. “Hide behind your mask, coward.”
She swung the pipe the other way, but to her surprise she missed, and equally surprising was the way the blade went in before she even realized it, before she felt anything at all like pain. It just went in, like, surprise! She looked down at the improbable sight of the handle sticking out from her belly, and she thought, a little dreamily, But I’m young! The figure had let go of the knife, looking up from her belly to her face as if he was surprised, too. That’s what Vanhi took with her, as she faded away. The strangely maternal observation that he didn’t mean it.