They weren’t Medusas. Somehow I knew that, and I wanted to be relieved, but something in my gut was screaming that this was wrong—that this was somehow even worse. That smile was like a half-remembered nightmare.
“No,” I heard Danae gasp. “Oh no. Not him.”
“What the fuck is this?” Jenna shouted out.
The man in the suit said, “Is she here?” His voice was perfectly placid. It made me shiver.
“I said who are you?”
He ignored the question. One of the Medusas at his side said, “It is not in my nature to kill, but I cannot allow you to take Sybil from me.”
“We can’t allow that,” the other four strangers agreed in a muttering, uneven unison.
“Who the fuck are you?”
The short man went back to the rover and reached inside. He calmly pulled out a 300-millimeter shoulder-mounted anti-tank wave cannon and opened fire on both sides of the transaction.
One of Kat’s bodyguards was struck directly in the first volley. To say simply that he exploded would do no justice what happened. In the space of a millisecond, his body blossomed from the inside out into a living shockwave—every molecule of water flashed to steam at once, every cell membrane and fiber of clothing frayed apart molecule by molecule, converted into flame, and propelled at high velocity in all directions at once. The force of his detonation cracked the windshield of the rover he was running to and shook the sand in all directions with a deep, resonant thud. Nothing remained of him above his knees.
The shooter never so much as paused to observe the horrific spectacle he’d unleashed. He continued raining electromagnetic fury on anything in sight, while the man in the suit laid down suppressing fire with a rifle and the others primed their pistols. I heard the crack of metal rapidly expanding on the wall of the bounty hunters’ truck and saw one of them fall dead or dying from the reflected heat alone. Doc caught a stray beam refracting through the cab windows and fell to the ground, screaming and clutching his scalded hands while his comrades worked to smother the small fires on his coat. Rays of fatal, invisible heat seemed to come from everywhere and everything. Metal deformed. Plastic splattered and hissed. Hairs crisped. Flesh blistered. Nowhere was safe.
“Six,” I counted the whistling shots under my breath. “Seven . . . eight.”
That was it. The gun’s mammoth fuel cells were exhausted and spewing chemical fumes. The bald man heaved a simple sigh and dropped the cannon, and then all five of the strangers leveled their weapons and advanced in an even line.
Everything devolved into total chaos. Kat and her remaining bodyguard, and the three bounty hunters not already dead or immobilized, all opened fire on each other and the strangers at once with mutual and adrenaline-soaked bloodlust. The strangers continued their impossibly calm advance. The man in the suit took a direct shot to the head and fell; his comrades glanced briefly back at the body and continued unflinchingly on. I lost sight of everyone. I could only listen to the rising cacophony of waver shrieks amid the varied sounds of human agony and death. Danae was somewhere behind me, straining against her shackles. I heard her shouting:
“No! Not you. It can’t be you!”
“I’ve come to save you,” said a calm voice. “Just relax. I’ll rescue you.”
“Luther, stop!”
I tried and failed to turn myself around to see her. “What’s happening? Danae? Danae!”
I heard her words devolve into cries. I heard rhythmic scraping in the sand. I arched my back despite the pain and tried to roll over to see her, to see anything at all, but I couldn’t.
Her sobbing became quieter and farther away, until finally two of the calm strangers dragged her back into my field of view: the boy, joined by one of the Medusas. The latter caught a shot in the back and fell dead, but the boy hefted her up into his arms and went on carrying her unsteadily back to the rover.
I squinted in disbelief. He had a waver burn on his side, next to his kidney: not an immediately lethal wound, but it should have been more than painful enough to debilitate. He barely seemed to notice the blood soaking through his clothes. He just lifted her into the passenger seat, shut the door, and took the wheel. The rover skidded away into the wastes.
The shooting had stopped. The only sounds were a low chorus of groans, and a single voice calling my name.
“I’m here,” I yelled. “I’m right here.”
Kat dropped her rifle when she found me. She turned me over and knelt to face me, and the panic in her eyes faded into relief. Joy. What I could not help but recognize, however strangely, as love. She laughed and sniffled and wiped her eyes.
“You’re shot,” I said.
She glanced at the circle of burnt cloth in the middle of her chest and said, “Plates caught it. Come on. Let’s blow this popsicle stand.”
Even though Danae’s memories of Naoto were fading in my mind, I couldn’t bring myself to leave his body behind. Over Kat’s protests, I made sure we wrapped him in a tarp and lifted him into the rover’s trunk.
“Anything else you want to take with you?” she demanded irritably—and when I said no, she gunned the motors and sent the scene of carnage rapidly receding into the desert behind us.
“We have to follow them,” I groaned through the pain. Every connective tissue in my body was still stiff from the rocket strike and the hours in shackles. I did my best to treat my own injuries while Kat drove—gasping as I wrenched a metal shard out of my forearm.
It only then dawned on me that my wave rifle was gone. For seven years, its cedar-paneled grip with the Major’s initials had never once been out of reach of my right hand. I’d walked with it, slept next to it, hung it
