Well, I won’t give it up without a fight.
I’ve been too slow to grab my own knife when Brenna is upon me. Except she flashes past. I whirl just in time to see her tackle a man to the ground. I get it now—but there’s no time to feel guilty for thinking she’d betrayed me. She needs my help subduing the man on the ground.
Except she doesn’t. By the time I’ve tossed my pack aside, Brenna already has him in a chokehold and has pushed his head to the side with a bone-wrenching crunch. She releases him and he slides to the ground, his head bent at an impossible angle. I swallow my horror and compose myself. I recognize him, despite his mangled appearance. Pete. Tank won’t be far away.
“We should go,” I say. “Now.”
“Why was he trying to kill you?” Brenna asks, unmoving.
“I don’t know—habit? He and Tank have had it in for me since I got here.” I frantically scan the auto yard. Tank could be hiding anywhere. I don’t have time to explain everything to her, and even if I did, it wouldn’t help her any. She still has to live in Fort Black. The more she knows, the less safe she’ll be there. “I didn’t think they’d follow me outside the walls.”
They’re guards, not Scrappers. How did they make it out here without the Floraes finding them? They must’ve followed us close enough to be protected by the emitter. I’d have seen them, though. Had they just gotten lucky, riding in the wake of the emitter?
I look down at Pete. “Tank must be here, too. He’s . . .”
“Right here, cupcake.”
I turn to find Tank standing ten feet away, a rifle leveled at me. His nose is swollen, his face purple. He looks like a monster, not a man.
“If you fire that gun,” I tell him, “the Floraes will find you and they’ll kill you.”
Tank harrumphs. “We’ve been trailing you since you left Fort Black and you two haven’t shut up once. I don’t see what all the fuss is about with the Floraes. If it’s this easy to avoid them, I could be a Scrapper. It ain’t that hard.”
It’s pointless to reason with him, so I try to pull my gun, but Tank doesn’t hesitate to pull the trigger. I’m on my back before I hear the crack of the gun echo through the air, pain exploding from my chest where the bullet hits my synth-suit, the wind knocked from my lungs.
I hear Brenna cry out, “No!” as Tank laughs.
“Drop it, girlie,” he says to Brenna. Her knife falls to the ground next to where I’d been standing. She takes a step back, but Tank yells for her to stop. “We ain’t in Fort Black anymore, and this ain’t the Arena. I could kill you now and no one would ever know.”
I can tell he’s getting closer by the sound of his footsteps on the loose gravel of the parking lot. “You killed my buddy Pete, and I’m all tore up about it, so I need some cheering up. I was also looking forward to what I was going to do to cupcake there. I know you’d rather fight men than be with one, but we’ll see how much fight you have left after I’m through with ya.”
The pain in my chest is subsiding. My lungs scream for oxygen, but I make myself draw in a silent breath instead of gulping in air. I wish my gun were still in my hand. I turn my head slightly, but I don’t see it on the ground. It must have flown off, out of sight, when I fell. But as soon as Tank’s familiar foul smell hits my nose, I jump up, onto him, going for his rifle.
“What the . . . !” he screams. He’s shocked that I can move, that I’m not bleeding to death on the ground, so I do manage to get a hand on the gun, but he just covers both my hand and the rifle’s action with his enormous mitt and clamps me tight to him with his other arm.
“You ain’t dead?” he says, grunting. “Oh, cupcake, you’re gonna wish—”
A pair of arms wrapped around Tank’s neck cuts off his words, along with his oxygen. He needs at least one arm to fight Brenna off, but he’s not giving up the rifle. He heaves me aside with his other arm and starts clubbing away wildly over his shoulder with it. He throws me too hard, though: Both the rifle and I are torn out of his grip. I hit the dirt on my back again, this time accompanied by a horrible crack.
I sit up and see that Tank has stopped struggling, and Brenna has stepped away from him. Both are looking with shock at Tank’s left shoulder and the spreading bright-red bloom on his dirty white shirt. He places his hand over his heart and looks up at me, confused. I stare at the rifle, still in my hand. The gun either fired accidentally when I dropped it, or I pulled the trigger without even realizing it. Tank stumbles to the side, almost falling. He gives me one last look of pure hatred before loping into the distance, leaving a trail of blood behind him.