Eight armored speedsuits lit up with a crosshatch of bright red lines as their wielders jumped to maximum velocity. A temporal voice converter in each helmet allowed the team to communicate with their unshifted brethren, though Melissa had quietly disabled those devices nine minutes ago. The speeding elites were now isolated in their own headset network, Melissa’s to command by default rank protocol. Sorry, Rosie. It’s easier this way.
“Fan out,” she ordered them. “Search every corner. You see a fugitive, shoot them in the gut, even if they raise their hands in surrender. These people are never unarmed. And I assure you they have no intention of coming quietly.”
The men dispersed in streaking blurs. Melissa moved to the elevator bank and studied the two young corpses on the floor. They looked like they’d been gored by rhinos. No sword or lance could have killed them this brutally.
Tempis, she thought, with sinking dread. God help you if you did this, Amanda. God—
—
—help me.
Amanda lay chest-down on the carpet, her slender frame convulsing with shudders. Her wall-hugging hop down the hallway had been the single most agonizing experience of her life, until Evan’s chaser set every nerve ablaze. Now she was a prisoner of her own fractured body, a tiny creature in a cage of screaming flesh.
She had a moment to register Hannah through a sideways glance before Evan crouched to eclipse her view. He chuckled at her bug-eyed recognition, the long pink fingers that wriggled helplessly like earthworms.
“The tempis you’re trying to call is currently unavailable,” he teased. “Please try again later.”
“P-please . . .”
“Hey, don’t look at me. I didn’t cork your weirdhole. That was the cute Asian solic you met downstairs. Her name’s Mercy Lee, but you can call her the Future Mrs.—”
“Leave her alone!”
“—Trillinger.” He spun around to glare at Hannah. “Don’t step on my lines.”
“She never did anything to you!”
“BAAAP! Incorrect.” Evan squinted venomously at Amanda. “She’s done plenty.”
Though Amanda didn’t know it, she and Evan carried centuries of animosity between them, dating back to his first days on this world. Even when he’d tried to be a good little Silver, the sharp-faced bitch never trusted him for a moment, never liked the way he looked at her sister. He, in turn, hated the gooey hold she took on his one true friend. She ruined Zack every single time.
As a full-fledged adversary, Amanda was even worse. Just months ago in his recollection, on a cold and rainy night near the end of his fifty-fourth lifetime, the widow came looking for blood in the wake of Hannah’s murder. She took Evan by surprise on a Boston rooftop, swooping down from the sky on her mighty wings of aeris. Before he knew what was happening, Amanda’s cold tempic sword burst through his chest. One inch to the left and he would have died instantly.
Instead, Evan spent sixty-two of the longest seconds of his life on the wet concrete, sobbing and pissing and begging for mercy while Amanda looked down at the wretched creature she’d made of him. Though her disgusted pity allowed him enough time to concentrate on a rewind escape, the phantom pain followed him for weeks. The memory still tortured him at night.
Now he walked a slow preening circle around his nemesis, basking in their reversal of fortune. Amanda didn’t piss herself, as Evan had hoped, but she was just a few pokes away from full emotional collapse.
“You know, I learned a long time ago why Tits McGee over there is such a train wreck. I know why all your husbands grow to hate you. You just have that effect on people. You beat them down with your high-and-mighty know-it-all-ism until they just want to stab a hobo. Godmanda, Judgmanda, Reprimanda. Hell, even now if I asked you to beg for your life, you’d beg for Hannah’s instead. And it’s not because you love her. You don’t. You just have to be the noble one.”
“She is the noble one,” Hannah snarled. “Compared to you, she’s Jesus in drag.”
“What part of ‘don’t step on my lines—’”
“—do I not understand? I get all of it, you weasel-faced shit geyser, just like I know your threats are worthless. You’ll either kill us or you won’t. Nothing we say will change that. So why don’t you shut your mouth and—”
“‘—do what you came here to do,’” Evan said, in perfect synch. He shook his head at her, chortling. “One of these days, you’ll come up with new dialogue. As for your ‘tough girl’ bit . . .”
Evan pulled a snub-nosed .38 from his holster and aimed it at Amanda’s head. In a sharp instant, all the bravada left Hannah’s face. She lurched forward in her cage.
“Wait! Stop!”
He balked in mock bother. “But . . . I thought my threats were worthless.”
“Please! I’m sorry! I’m sorry! Don’t!”
Evan chuckled scornfully. “You always were a shitty actress.”