“Oh.” Everything that hadn’t worked as he’d expected bubbled up inside him a demoralizing flood. “Oh, shit.” He really had fucked this up, hadn’t he?
“Yes,” Fatima Blaize agreed. “An excellent summary of recent events. Now where, exactly, is Jan?”
Bharat very much wished he knew.
07: Encore
Dressed like down-on-their-luck prospectors, Jan and Emiko slunk past the Truther warehouse on the far side of the street, hands in the pockets of worn jackets. Each shiftily surveyed their surroundings. The lone male guard standing by the warehouse looked them over and looked right past, as he’d look past any rabble strolling by in the middle of the night.
Emiko made a show of stopping, looking around, and tugging at her loose jacket. The guard’s gaze returned.
“What?” Jan demanded, loud enough for the man across the street to hear. “You got a lead?”
Emiko glanced surreptitiously at the Truther guard, who was now looking right back. “I dunno. Maybe ... over there?”
Jan looked as well, then shrugged. “Let’s go ask him.”
The scowl the guard offered as they crossed the street clearly said Don’t ask me anything, dipshit. Jan smiled nervously and pulled his hands from his pockets. He elbowed Emiko as if reminding her to do the same.
The guard stepped forward. “That’s close enough.” He held a bolt-action rifle with a strap around his neck, but he didn’t point it at them, yet. “This is private property. Back off.”
“Hey there, playboy!” Emiko raised both hands high, voice trembling. “Got anything we can use?”
The guard’s eyes darted between her and Jan. “Nothing here for you, junkies. Den around the way might have what you need.”
Jan didn’t move. He kept his hands raised.
“But they’re all out,” Emiko whined. She pulled again at a halfway zipped jacket Jan knew offered enticing flashes of bare flesh and a worn black bra. “I have to get blissed or I’m going to lose my fucking mind, you know?” She stepped and stumbled.
The man spotted cleavage. His eyes went to cleavage.
“You got bliss in there?” Emiko tugged her half-zipped jacket way open as she rose and scratched her neck. “Wouldn’t be guarding a warehouse without something to sell, right?”
“Listen, lady,” the guard said, as he found her face again. “I said we got nothing for you here.” He took one more step and brought his rifle up. “Now, move—”
That was all he managed before Jan, who’d drifted out of his line of sight as he focused on Emiko’s cleavage, tossed a paralytic knife into his neck. The man’s eyes shot wide as his mouth opened, but no sound emerged.
Emiko dashed forward, caught the man as he slumped, and eased him down on the pavement in front of her. As Emiko knelt at his side, on the side away from the warehouse’s single door, Jan dashed toward the door and pressed himself to the wall beside it, on the hinged side.
Emiko pulled the knife free of the dying man’s neck, tucked it behind her back, and wailed like a woman who’d just seen her partner shot. “Oh God!” she shouted, loud enough that someone might hear her a block away. “Somebody help us! Help us!”
The warehouse guard spasmed against the biocrete as Emiko held him down, like she was trying to staunch blood from a wound. Jan heard boots on the other side of the armored door, then heard the snick of a door slit opening. He didn’t breathe.
“Who’s there?” Emiko gazed hopelessly at the door slit from at least three meters away. “Are you his friends? He just collapsed! I think he OD’d!” A short, unarmed junkie was no threat to anyone from way out there.
Locks clanked, and then the armored door popped open. Two figures in dark body armor rushed out. Their raised rifles and worried gazes focused on their fallen comrade and the wailing woman kneeling over him. They didn’t even see Jan, who dropped a metal doorstop in the rapidly closing door.
Jan slipped up behind the woman in the back and scythed his knife across her throat. Even as she collapsed Jan was behind the second man, cutting his throat with no more sound than a whisper. That man dropped as well.
Emiko stood and stepped over Jan’s first victim, narrowed gaze focused on the warehouse and its surroundings. Jan moved beside her as the two of them advanced on the almost closed door, propped open by Jan’s doorstop. Jan pulled the door open as Emiko slipped inside, into darkness. Except she could see.
Normally, cutting people’s throats in cold blood would bother Jan, but these people were Truthers. They had tortured and murdered many innocent Advanced civilians, people who had committed no other crime than visiting Ceto and trying to co-exist. Even so, these cold-blooded murders still bothered Jan — a little — which assured him he hadn’t turned into a sociopath while imprisoned on Tantalus. Good to know.
“Clear,” a robotic voice said over their ear-comms.
That would be Emiko, silently mouthing words that the attachments on all their throats converted to speech inside their ears. Kinsley never went anywhere without the best gear.
Jan held the door until a huffing Pollen lumbered in from the end of the street, where she’d kept watch through the scope of her tank-killer rifle. Her bulk and armor barely fit through the frame. Jan had asked her to bring a smaller weapon, but to be fair, asking Pollen to bring a small rifle was like asking a champion hoverbike racer to use a bicycle.
Kinsley emerged from around the corner and breezed in after Pollen, looking as relaxed as if she hadn’t just stepped over three bloody bodies. She still wore her formfitting body armor,
