*
Raiff counted three of them, their positions imprinted on his brain. He’d recognized them as androids immediately, even before he caught that burned odor wafting in the air.
He extracted his stick while hurdling airborne out of the SUV embedded in the front wall. Firearms were fine but not very effective against the androids’ steel, maybe titanium, shells. He snapped the stick outward, feeling its connection with his own DNA register like a switch being flipped, elongating the elements, their molecular composition altered by its whip-like form. His whip could cut through anything, and without the randomness of bullets or blasts. Perfect weapon for the kind of in-close maneuvers he’d most likely have to perform.
He spotted Dancer, and the girl the Watchers had informed him about, at the edge of his vision, but she was not yet his concern. Protecting him was Raiff’s concern. So many years of waiting and preparing, finally coming to this, his purpose fulfilled.
Even now, though, even as the whip whistled through the air, that purpose seemed empty against the bigger picture that Dancer’s world would never be the same, any more than Raiff’s task would ever be. They had found the boy twice already, not even a day apart, and they would find him again.
Something was coming.
He felt it with a dread certainty in the pit of his soul, the last eighteen years rendered meaningless in the face of such a concentrated attack.
Two of the androids swung toward him in perfect unison, as if possessing the same mind. The third went for Dancer.
So Raiff went for the third.
Lashing his whip outward so it sizzled through the air, a crack resounding when it impacted the overlayer of skin-like material wrapped around the neck of android number three. Raiff pulled and twisted and the head popped off in a shower of smoke and sparks that intensified the burned odor to the point it hurt his nostrils when he sniffed it.
“Run!” he yelled to Dancer, their eyes meeting ever so briefly for the first time ever. “Run!”
Raiff watched Dancer drag the girl with him out of sight through a door leading out the back, distracted long enough for the android on the right to lurch for him, laser knife in hand. The size of a common kitchen knife but far more deadly.
He saw the first blade as a flashbulb-bright light coming straight for his face. Raiff twisted, feeling the thing graze his shoulder, taking flesh and fabric with it. He smelled his own blood now, the wound as searing hot as the sparks that flew from the first android’s head when he’d lopped it off.
The remaining two androids sensed his vulnerability, came in for the kill together and tossed laser blades from twin angles to catch him in the cross fire. Raiff dropped to the ground and rolled, his whip in motion. Low first toward the one on the right, slicing off both its legs at the ankles. Then he snapped the whip with a violent jerk of his wrist, sending it on an upward trajectory from floor level directly between the final android’s legs.
Wires, electrodes, and capacitors popped, frizzled, and flamed as the whip made a neat slice upward all the way through the android’s metallic skull. Leaving both halves of him sputtering on either foot, somehow managing to retain their balance while the matching eyes on the perfectly symmetrical husks popped out in a final flame burst.
Raiff reeled his whip in, starting to push himself back to his feet, when a boot clamped down on his hand, the disembodied foot of the android he’d upended. The rest of the thing hopped along on ankles spewing smoke and wire, the burned smell noxious enough to turn Raiff’s stomach.
He felt the severed boot trying to crush his hand, the pain starting to shoot up his arm, when he swept it off into the air by whipsawing his own foot across his body. Launched airborne, the booted foot struck the android it had belonged to in the face, toppling the thing over as it continued hopping after Dancer. Raiff got one leg up in front of him, balanced on his other knee, and lashed his whip out from there. The blow struck the thing’s face, left it a mass of severed, spaghetti-like wiring with the eyes still attached by clear strands.
It was done. Dancer was safe, at least for now.
Then Raiff heard the scream coming from the back of the store.
63
TRASH
EVEN AS HE DARTED toward the screams and hurdled over the counter, Raiff was aware of the store manager and single other customer cowering for dear life: witnesses to the scene of unprecedented risk and exposure on the part of the enemy he’d been sent here to fight.