“Bellona?” is all the Sovereign can say before he presses the button. Mustang’s steel vest unbuckles and falls to the ground. Mine follows suit. She dives for a dead Praetorian’s pulseRifle. Unshackled, I rise, jerking my arms free and pulling the knife hidden inside the metal vest. I lunge toward the Sovereign. Faster than she can blink, I jam the blade through her black jacket into the softness of her lower belly. She gasps. Eyes huge. Inches from mine. I smell the coffee on her breath. Feel the flutter of her eyelashes as I stab her six more times in the gut and on the last, rip the metal up toward her sternum. Hot blood pours over my knuckles and chest as she spills open.
“Octavia!” Aja’s charging me. Makes it halfway before Mustang, firing from her knees, shoots her in the armored side with the pulseRifle. The blast lifts Aja off her feet, slapping her across the room into the wooden conference table beside Sevro and Antonia’s bodies, nearly crushing Lysander. Seeing their Sovereign stumbling backward, gut ripped open, the Truth Knight and the Joy Knight both wheel on Cassius, pulling their razors from their hips, their shields thrumming to life. Unarmored, wearing only his blood-spattered prison greens, Cassius flashes forward, skewering the surprised Truth Knight through his eye socket up through the roof of his skull.
The Jackal pulls my razor from his hip and slashes at me. I sidestep, coming at him. He swings again, screaming in rage, but I catch his arm and head butt him in the face before sweeping his legs and tackling him to the floor. I take my razor and stake his left arm to the floor so that he has no free hand. He screams. His spit spattering my face. Thrashing at me with his legs. I drop a knee into his forehead and leave him stunned and pinned to the floor.
“Darrow!” Cassius calls to me as he duels the Joy Knight. “Behind!”
Behind me, Aja’s rising from the shattered remains of the table. Eyes wide with rage. I run from her to help Cassius and Mustang, knowing she’d kill me in seconds with my right hand gone. Blood darkens Cassius’s green jumpsuit. His left leg has been slashed badly by the better-armored Joy Knight, who is using his weight and the pulsing aegis shield on his left arm to overwhelm Cassius. Mustang grabs two razors from the dead Praetorian and tosses one to me. I catch it on the run with my left hand. Toggle the hilt. Razor leaps to killing length. Cassius takes another slash to the leg and stumbles over a body, going down, blocking the second strike with the pulseFist, ruining the weapon. The Joy Knight’s back is to me. He feels me coming, but it’s too late. Silently, I jump through the air and swing a huge looping strike down at him from behind, left arm slowing as it meets the throbbing resistance of the pulseShield centimeters from the armor, then jerking as it cleaves into his sky-blue plate and through muscle and bone. Carrying from left shoulder to the right pelvis, parting his body at a diagonal. His body drips to the ground.
Silence in the room as the bodies hit the floor.
Mustang rushes to my side. She sweeps her golden mess of hair back, a fevered grin splitting her face. I help Cassius up from the ground.
“How was my acting?” he asks, wincing.
“Not quite as good as your swordwork,” I say, looking at the bodies around him. He grins, more alive in battle than anywhere else. I feel a pang, knowing this is always how it should have been. Missing the days where we rode together in the highlands pretending we were lords of the earth. I grin back at him, wounded, bleeding, but almost whole for the first time I can remember.
“Will you two save the flirting for later,” Mustang says.
Side by side with her, we turn together to face the deadliest human being in the Solar System. She’s crouched over a terribly wounded Octavia, who has crawled to the edge of the holodeck and pants on her back, holding her stomach together with both hands. Octavia is pale and shivering. Tears stream down Aja’s face and Lysander’s, who has rushed into the pit to help his grandmother.
“Aja!” the Jackal screams from the floor. “Kill them! Open the door or kill them!” He’s lost his mind. Thrashing about, trying to reach the whip toggle on the razor with his stump. It’s three and a half feet above him and he just can’t quite reach. “Open it!” he says through gnashing teeth.
But to open the door she must reach it. And to reach it, she must go through me and my friends then present her back to us while she enters the code. She’s trapped in here till we’re dead or she is.
“Aja, give us the Sovereign. Her justice is due,” I say, knowing what Aja’s reply to that will be, but minding the holodeck is still active. Still broadcasting as Gold blood wets the floor. Aja does not turn to look at us. Not yet. Her huge hands caress Octavia’s face. She cradles the older woman like a mother holding her own child. “Stay alive,” she tells her. “I will get you out of here. I promise. Just stay alive, Octavia.”
