Chapter 26 #7
I'd deal with him later. The abaya slid into the kitchen, darting past the doorway; I burst forward, chasing her.
The moment I ducked in the kitchen – our kitchen – she fired off another shot, but it sprayed wide again, her hands unsteady.
I threw my own gun aside – I didn't need it; I was the weapon – and leapt at her, grabbing her wrist and slamming it hard against the wall, so hard I could feel something give, fragile.
It was glorious, almost, to be on this side.
She made a startled sound, hand spasming as the pistol clattered to the ground.
The abaya jabbed at my stomach with her other hand, but she was slow, washed out to a sickly green.
I hauled back with one hand and punched her square in her face, feeling the crunch of bone beneath my knuckles.
I didn't blink and miss it this time. This time, I was there; this time, I had acquired a taste for the ugliness of violence.
"Virra, wait –" she began, but I couldn't hear her, not in that moment. All I could hear was the high-pitched scream inside my skull, the hammering of my pulse, and the void calling to me. A snarl somewhere deep in my chest, rumbling louder and louder; the clarion call of violence justly done.
This time, when I drew back, I didn't go for her face: I went for her throat.
Control. My fingers latched hard around the column of her neck and I tightened like Andiri had done to me.
I could feel her kelthil shivering in her throat as her lips darkened to a dangerous green, her eyes wide and black.
She thrashed against me, hands pummelling my torso, all pretense at making nice gone – but it was a losing battle.
The air was killing her. I'd get there first.
It wasn't anything like the dramas. I didn't have anything pithy to say.
I didn't have anything to say at all, and I wasn't even screaming this time.
Instead, I just stared into her eyes as I – monstrous, violent, a nothingness given physical form, a hunger finally feasting – crushed her throat until she sagged against the wall.
When I stepped away, she fell down, lifeless.
I realized, at that point, that she'd had a dagger and had stabbed me just above the hip. I looked down at the hilt, distantly surprised in a hollow way, before reaching down with my murderous hands. My fingers weren't even trembling when they grasped the blade and pulled it out.
I heard the sound I made then, at least, a thready gasp of pain and surprise and maybe, maybe horror.
I let the blade clatter to the floor and instead grabbed my arc lance, glittering in the lights above, lustrous despite the darkness of the thing I'd become, and returned to the hall.
I wanted the radiant force of my lance for what would come next.
The ketaari was still down. I half-fell to a crouch by his side, nestling the muzzle of my lance up underneath his chin and then, with the smell of burning skin and blood in the air, I blasted a clean hole through the top of his skull.
Sounds began to filter back in, drip by drip. The air system, hissing. My pulse. The sound of the rebreather as I breathed, even, slow. A voice calling out, somewhere in the hold.
I stood. I could drop the brin too. But –
Behind me, I heard a soft groan, a heavy footstep.
Some part of me woke up, as if rousing from a dream or a waking nightmare. I shuddered violently, my body quaking. I sucked in a hard gasp through the rebreather.
When I turned to look back at the stairs, Araxis was standing at the base, pale and bleeding, his stare unfocused. "Sashen," he said, sounding grim. "You're –" He moved forward, unsteadily, reaching for me.
Words escaped me. They were so far beyond me that they might as well have been pricks of light in the vast darkness of space.
Instead, I moved to meet him, touching my hand to the blood leaking from one ear, a slow rivulet winding its way down the column of his pale neck.
I hissed as he pressed his own hand to my side, just above my hip.
Distantly, I heard the scuff of boots on metal from the stairwell to the cargo hold.
Araxis shoved me aside, pushing me hard toward one of the bulkheads in the hallway which provided a sliver of cover.
But the face that peered up from the stairwell wasn't the brin: it was an abaya with a rippling halo of quills behind them and a rebreather firmly strapped over their mouth.
"Hm. I wondered if you might have dealt with the others," Nizanin said through the buzz of the mask.
"We've handled your unwelcome guest down below.
If you would be kind enough to adjust the atmospheric controls, we will all be more comfortable.
We might not have noticed, except our Ankalas worked in a refinery and is well acquainted with this particular bouquet. A clever piece of work, sinnenthi."
Araxis stared at Nizanin as they reached the stop of the stairs, as they took in the splatter of viscera all across the metal floor; the blood that was soaking through the fabric of my jumpsuit; the glistening silver down Araxis's neck.
"I thought we might be coming to your aid," observed Nizanin mildly. "It appears you had the situation well in hand. Tell me, have you any tea on this ship?"