“They’re all here,” the guard reported.
Early, Tinman thought with a grin. Early meant eager. Eager meant high bidding. He clapped his hands together and glanced up at Dingle. “I’ll inspect each girl before she’s made available.”
Dingle nodded. “Going to be a good night.”
“Very good,” Tinman shuffled to the left one more time, out of habit. He raised the flashlight to the girl’s face. One of the Americans. A blonde. Fit and slender, which was a hard sell in Asia, since they were accustomed to slender builds, but at least she wasn’t slender in the places that mattered, and her face... She was stunning.
She squinted at the light.
Her pupils constricted.
Brows furrowed.
Tinman’s distracted mind registered all this too late to stop the foot rising for his crotch. The woman’s boot found the soft flesh between his legs and crushed it upwards, while the rest of him crumpled down. He was in a full fetal position by the time he hit the steel floor.
Through clenched eyes, Tinman looked up to see the woman standing, her fists clenched, her eyes set on Dingle, who had drawn his beloved knife. It was usually more than enough to keep the women in line. But this one? Not only had she clearly not been drugged with the rest, but she had a fire in her eyes. She’s a cop, he thought. The American’s slutty ignorance had been a ruse. But there had been two of them. Where was the—
The sound of fighting at the far end of the crate answered his question. He tried to shout an order, but he hadn’t yet taken a breath.
Suddenly, the container tipped forward, then back, as a large wave passed beneath the ship. It didn’t feel big enough to worry about, but it was the kind of wave encountered on the high seas, not in port.
The descending crate knocked Dingle off balance. It was the opening the woman needed. She lunged forward, and with a speed and precision Tinman had never seen, she knocked the knife from Dingle’s hand. Before the blade struck the metal floor, she broke his wrist and punched his throat, dropping him hard.
A second wave struck. He could hear the dock’s moorings creaking under the strain.
Tinman took his first gasped breath. The woman looked down at him, sweat melting away makeup from her forehead, revealing a red scar...or was it something else? She paid him little attention and shouted to her partner. “All clear?”
“Affirmative,” the other woman replied, her accent Russian. “We are good.”
“Let’s wake ’em up,” the blonde said, pulling a cylinder from her pocket. She mashed down the top of it. White gas hissed out, quickly filling the container.
Tinman tried to hold his breath. He didn’t know what kind of gas the woman had deployed. But his need to breathe after being kicked overrode his caution, and he sucked in a lungful. His body felt instantly revived. Energized. Though the intense pain of his injury remained.
He heard the women around him wake from their stupors, their confusion melting away with a din of rising voices. The blonde was now a ghost in the mist, but he could hear her shouting commands in a variety of languages. More than a cop, he realized.
The ship beneath them shifted again, canting backwards at a sharp angle. For a moment, Tinman thought he was feeling another wave, but he quickly realized the ship was tilting in the wrong direction. And they weren’t dropping back down. It was as though some immense weight were pulling the aft down.
He wracked his mind to come up with a theory of what could cause the massive ship to tip back so quickly. Only one theory made sense. The realization helped him to his feet, but the shipping container was struck hard from above. The jolt swept his feet out from under him. He hit the floor again hard, leading with his face this time.
The woman’s shouting grew more fervent, and the sounds of running feet echoed all around him. Then her boots clanged on the floor. Despite the danger, she was leaving last. Well, not exactly last. For a moment, he hoped the sudden flood of women fleeing across the deck of his ship would buy him time, but then he remembered what motivated the monster.
Nemesis.
Poems called her the winged tilter of scales.
She’s here for me, he realized.
A shriek of metal turned his eyes upward. Huge claws hooked into the container’s ceiling and pulled. The top came off like the lid of a can of soup. The white gas the blonde had deployed was sucked up by the lifting ceiling. The breeze carried it away. The container was empty now, save for him and Dingle. The two guards lay at the end, dead or immobilized. The women, all thirty-three of them, were gone.
Tinman got back to his feet, stepped over Dingle, who sounded like he was gagging, maybe even dying, and ran for the shipping container’s end. Before he made it five steps, he noticed his shadow, long and framed by bright orange light from above.
He was right. She was here.
For justice.
For vengeance.