Other crafts in dock are joining the fight, thinking themselves under attack, guards and freight shotgunners opening fire on the Peacekeepers who come roaring from the fire-licked darkness of the town. Bullets tear past as I draw level with the General and we throw ourselves behind the metal walkway. Her chest heaves violently, her eyes bulging and too bright.
‘Lieutenant Okmulgee,’ she barks, stuffing a new charge pack into the blaster. ‘There are enemy snipers at six o’clock, we must draw their fire to protect the medical corps.’
‘General?’ I shake her, but she is not present, she’s on some distant battlefield during the war, and as I watch, she scrabbles at her waist. ‘Where is my ammunition? Lieutenant, send a runner to the supply line, we will mine the area for their retreat.’
Charges and bullets thud into the walkway. ‘General, we have to go!’
Her face is slicked with sweat. ‘We never run,’ she says, and leaps up, firing the blaster again.
She catches the Marshal’s buzzard on its nose, and snarls triumphantly as it flips in the air, careering into the metal barriers behind us.
No more time. I grab her arm and drag her with me as she screams about insubordination. With a desperate surge of relief, I see that the others have reached the doors of the Charis, that Pegeen is slumped safely inside the hold.
‘Silas,’ I yell, climbing aboard. ‘Get us out of here!’
Blood soaks his shirtfront from a gash to his head, and he looks dazed, but he nods, staggering towards the flight deck.
A charge pings off the ship’s hull, and something shatters.
‘Limiter scum!’ the General calls.
‘Shit!’ Falco ducks as a rain of charges slices through the night. ‘Low, they’ve got us fixed!’
I look down in alarm. A generator is running at the edge of the dock and beneath the dirt I see it: the fine, mesh pattern of a gravity mat, fizzing at the edges, locking the Charis in place.
Deep within the ship I hear the rumble of the engines starting up, coughing and spluttering. The General fires the blaster again and the ship shakes, the metal of the walkway beyond buckling from the force of the explosion.
Through the blinding flare, they crash into my consciousness, unspooling the paths around me. Thousands of versions, but through it all the same terrifying images; the desert, my friends lying dead, the thing with my face reaching out…
My eyes clear. Falco is yelling, the General smacking the dead blaster. I see the Marshal stumble through the smoke towards us, his pistols raised.
I leap from the ship, back to the ground.
Shouts follow, but I ignore them as I kick at the dock’s control panel. The ship strains against the pull of the mat, and soon it will overheat, the Peacekeepers will rush upon us and it will be too late.
Wrenching open the metal casing, I find the power lever. A shape looms from the smoke, not six feet away; Marshal Joliffe, his face lit with violence, a pistol pointed at my heart.
Too late.
I pull the lever, sending the Charis leaping into the air at the same moment that he fires.
* * *
The wind carries me in its jaws. I feel its breath rush past me, a continuous exhalation.
I remain motionless. The jaws are like a cat’s; gentle while I don’t move, while I don’t remind it of my quick heart and thin skin, so easily broken. But it is already broken, and pain comes on in fast, red circles. Who has done this to me?
The memories are washed with darkness, merging into one another, but I remember faces; smoke-stained, fibreglass teeth, bloodied armour. Boots, metal-toed and thick with dust that drove into my body, that drove bile and blood from my stomach into the sand. Fists, thickened by the long exposure under the sun without water, that collided with my face and head until I stopped resisting and sent my thoughts to them, wanting them to take my body away, to make me like them, vast and hungry and untouchable.
But they did not. They set me on this path that was paved with violence, and feasted silently on their choice. Is this penance for Tamane finally visited upon me? If so, I can’t fight it. Perhaps I have been wrong to fight death, all this time. Wrong to keep the tally when this is the only price I can pay.
I open my eyes. One of them obeys.
There is sand below me, sand and a shadow like a bird. I try to raise a hand to touch it, but agony redoubles through my limbs and oblivion takes me again. Too soon I return, and with me, realisation.
I’m in a net, folded like a calf and swaying in the air. A net made from tightly woven cables, too tough to think of breaking. The desert rushes by some distance below.
Blood coats my front, dried stiff on Silas’s jacket. When I move there’s pain, and the fabric grows wet again. I inch my fingers across my chest.
The Marshal may have missed my heart, but the bullet wound in my shoulder is deep and ragged. An old metal slug, dirty and vicious, not clean, not quick and searing like charges. The wound dribbles blood. Without care, it will kill me.
I roll my head away from it, though my neck screams like rusted metal. I try to open my lips. They are swollen too, crusted with blood that flakes into my mouth. How long has it been since I rose from Silas’s bed, since we ran from Angel Share?
Inch by inch, I check my clothes. They’ve ransacked the pockets, pulled out anything that could be of use or aid. The only thing I find, deep in the lining, is a small, worn bone dice. I close my hand around it, and let my eyelids fall.
The ground wakes me, the hard thump and
