Yasmine folded under the weight of her attacker, stunned by the sudden assault. The only thing that saved her was Jemma running at the man at full speed, striking with her shoulder and throwing him off. Yasmine struggled to push herself to her knees.
Bodie threw sand at his main attacker, seeing the legs of the other two as they pushed by. Without thought, he threw himself at them, tangling and tripping them. It was a frantic melee. Again, a knife’s flashing blade flicked past him. The men rose.
A sudden eddy of sand swirled from the desert floor between them, a perfectly random phenomena, but nonetheless off-putting. Bodie managed to snag his knife out of its holster, once again reminded that he was no trained soldier. A soldier—a Pang—would have had his gun to hand.
Jemma was thrown to the side, striking her shoulder against the half-uncovered ruin. Ignoring the pain, she used the space to grab her knife and hold it in front of her, warding the Hood off. When he darted in, she slashed, chopping through his sleeve.
The Hood snatched back his hand and attacked again, slicing at Jemma’s throat. All she could do was fall back and hope to avoid the swipe.
Yasmine lunged in from the Hood’s blind side, plunging her own knife through his ribs and twisting it. The man hissed in pain, fell to the sand and groaned. Yasmine scooped up his knife so that she now carried two.
Cassidy was no stranger to kill-or-be-killed, hand-to-hand fighting. Nor dirty fighting. When her attacker lunged, she kicked him full in the groin, then dropped, rolled right into his legs and sent him flying. By the time he landed she had his balls in one hand and his throat in the other, and nothing was going to stop her squeezing.
The man pounded back hard at first, his cowl slipping away from his face to reveal bulging eyes and gritted teeth. Cassidy held on through the pain, ignoring severe punches to her chest, ribs and kidneys. In the cage, in a different life, she’d been taught to take the pain, use it to her advantage. She did that now; every harsh blow the man threw resulted in her tightening her savage grip.
Moments later, he was out cold. Cassidy took his own knife and plunged it into his chest, snarling into his face. Blood dripped from her lips and she was sure at least one rib was broken, but adrenalin was the best painkiller.
Yasmine helped her up, Jemma at her side. Lucie was standing behind them, looking shellshocked, but rummaging in her pack for her gun. Cassidy wished she had time to do the same but Bodie was in a crazy tangle with the three remining Hoods.
Knives flashed.
Bodie grunted.
Cassidy and Yasmine dived at the tangle, hoping to make sense of it. Behind them, Lucie struggled to reach her gun at the bottom of the pack, getting it tangled in bags and rope and other kit. She wasn’t a fighter. Didn’t even think she could fire a gun point blank, and didn’t trust herself not to hit one of her own team.
But there was something she could do.
*
Lucie grabbed the rope, some pitons, a head-torch, a chisel and a hammer, dropped the bag, and ran. She sprinted past the struggling group, giving a random kick to one of the Hoods’ knees as she went. A token gesture maybe, but it helped.
Floundering in sand, she slowed for a moment, then came up against the brick wall of the well. To the right, she saw the rough excavation, its wall picked out by starlight, and used its crumbled, pitted façade to climb an easy eight feet. The rope was across her back, the gear stuck in her jeans’ waistband.
She paused as a certain fear took hold, the fear of death and broken bones. But the struggle below snapped her out of it, enabling her to climb another seven feet and haul herself atop the wall that had once formed the top of the building. Here, she could reach across to the top of the well.
Lucie hammered two pitons into the side of the well, looped the rope through the rings and made a harness to wrap around her body. She took out the flashlight, fitted it to her head and then wondered how the hell she was going to extract the ore and carry it out.
The chisel, hammer and... well, you have pockets.
It was all she could do. Who knew if any level of contamination would be enough to ruin the ore sample? Lucie didn’t think it would. The ancient depths to which they’d been forced to go to collect the ore were replete with a millennium of pollution and particles. She hardly thought some pocket fluff would upset the crucible.
Yanking on the rope, she climbed across to the rim of the well and stood with her boots against the inner wall. Inch by inch she lowered herself down, pausing after a minute to shine her flashlight below. The beam picked up nothing but inky blackness, but then she was only twenty feet down.
Lucie’s mind couldn’t help but count the feet as she descended, the hot humidity of the night fading the lower she went to be replaced by a seeping, enfolding chill.
*
Bodie crawled away from the man pinning his legs. Sensing the thrust of a knife, he twisted away and saw a blade plunge into the sand where the back of his right thigh had been. He unleashed a kick to the Hood’s face, snapping his head back. Yasmine and Cassidy were struggling with the other two.
“This will not do!” a man cried out, the man he’d just kicked in the face. “Kill them!”
Bodie spun, ready for
