Chapter 14 Kojo
KOJO
Zaki comes out of the dark above and ahead of the formation, dropping clean from somewhere she had been holding position and landing in front of the blocked freeway with an impact that compresses the snow outward from the point of contact in a ring.
She slides three feet on the sleet-slicked freeway surface, bare feet finding grip, and rises to her full height with her ridge fully extended, the spikes longer than mine.
She stands between me and fourteen armed men and does not look back at me.
“You cackling loud-mouthed bitch,” the leader says. His composure holds, but I hear the recalculation underneath it. “After we’re done extracting your bone marrow, I’m going to put your head on my trophy wall personally. I’ve been looking forward to that one.”
Zaki lets a sound move through her chest. Not her cackle. She drops into her defensive stance, and she looks over her shoulder at me.
Her silver-ringed eyes find mine. She speaks in our language, fast and clean: spread left. I take the right flank. Strip the helmets, drive the center together. Do not engage the helicopters. Let them come to us.
That is exactly what I told you, my Bouda says, vindicated. The same method. She thought it through the same way. Strip first, frequency second, hands for the rest. Your sister’s mind and mine work alike, Alemayehu.
I move left without answering him.
“Too bad I couldn’t mount your Matriarch’s head,” the leader calls out. “I blew it off myself. I want you to know that.”
The growl that tears out of me is not managed, and my ridge spikes so hard I feel the individual bones in my back separate and lock. The rage narrows everything to the distance between me and that man and the very specific way I intend to close it.
Zaki raises one hand. She does not turn around.
“Calm yourself, Alemayehu.” The Command frequency threads through the words even at half strength, and my body responds before my mind can argue, the growl cutting off, my ridge stilling.
“They are baiting us. Understand the game before you play it.” She lets that land.
“I know why they are working this hard to keep us alive. They want what they have always wanted, what they burned our village trying to take. They believe there is something in our blood, our marrow, that they can extract and weaponize.” She shifts her weight forward, her center of gravity dropping.
“What they do not understand is that two Bouda is not the same as one. We lost before because we were not ready for what they came with. We are ready now.” Her ridge hums, the sound vibrating the concrete beneath my bare feet. “Go.”
The first man raises his rifle and I am already through his reach.
My ridge drives upward into the underside of his helmet, the spikes catching the chin strap and tearing the device up and off in one motion that takes him off his feet.
He hits the pavement and I am past him, catching the next man by the collar of his tactical vest and driving the top of my head into his visor.
The visor cracks down the center and I hook my claws into the fracture line and rip it open, strip the helmet off with a twist that spins him sideways into the man behind him, and my cackle hits both of them at close range before they can find their footing.
They drop simultaneously, rigid as timber.
On the right flank, Zaki hits the formation and the humans do not survive the introduction.
She takes the first two men simultaneously, one hand seizing a rifle by the barrel and driving it backward into the shooter’s face, her other palm driving into the second man’s visor hard enough to buckle the outer shell.
She hooks her claws under the chin strap of the first, strips the device off mid-motion while her ridge punches through the second man’s tactical vest, the spikes finding the gap between the ballistic plates across his ribs, and she tears sideways.
He folds. She pulls his protection free before he reaches the ground and lets her cackle loose at point-blank range the instant both men are exposed, and they drop where they stand, every muscle locking at once.
Zaki is already moving before they hit the concrete.
The third man draws a blade. She catches his wrist mid-swing, twists until the joint pops clean, and wrenches his helmet off with her free hand.
He drops the blade. She drives her knee into his sternum and steps over him, catching the fourth man’s rifle by the stock, breaking it over her knee, using the barrel half as a lever to pop his chin strap and send his helmet spinning. Her cackle catches both at once. Down.
Two more open fire simultaneously. Blue pulses cut across the freeway and she drops beneath the first and rolls beneath the second, comes up on the hood of the nearest SUV and uses the height to launch herself into the cluster of three men trying to form up behind the vehicle.
She lands in the middle of them, her ridge fully spiked, and she does not pause to aim.
Her hands move faster than the men can track, claws hooking under chin straps, palms driving into visors, wrenching helmets free in bursts of separated hardware that scatter across the icy road surface.
Three helmets off in four seconds. She lets the sovereign frequency loose at a range so close I feel the harmonics from twenty meters away.
All three drop. Same instant, same way. They hit the pavement in unison, rigid where they fell.
I clear the remaining men on the left flank in under ten seconds.
Ridge through a visor, claws through a chin strap, cackle the instant the helmet comes free, move to the next before the last has finished falling.
Zaki taught me this drill when we were young, in the village, before any of us knew what we were training for.
She said one day the enemies will come with tools to silence our voices and we will have to use our hands first. The Matriarch listened and made it doctrine. Tonight it pays the debt.
Eleven men are down across the concrete surface, helmets scattered between them.
One helicopter banks and climbs, its searchlight swinging away.
The pilot has decided he is not built for this fight.
The second holds position and lowers slightly, the side door sliding open.
The man in the door braces against the frame with a weapon that fires, and the impact point is ten meters to my left, throwing ice and concrete in a spray that hits my shoulder and the side of my face.
My furnace takes the heat of the friction. My ridge takes the rest.
Zaki does not look up at the helicopter.
She runs toward the leader’s SUV at full stride, hits the hood without slowing, her feet finding the metal surface and launching off it in a single continuous arc, and she goes up.
Her body clears the distance between the hood and the helicopter’s landing skid with room to spare, both hands closing on the skid rail, and she swings her weight up onto the side of the aircraft.
The man in the open door turns his weapon on her. She takes it from his hands before the aim is set, strips it away, and uses her grip on it to haul him out of the door by his vest. He falls. She does not watch.
She drives her ridge into the tail rotor housing with everything behind it, the spikes punching through the casing, and she tears sideways with both fists braced on the housing edge.
The assembly shrieks, catches, sheds pieces of itself outward across the dark air, and the aircraft begins to yaw, spinning slowly on its axis.
She drops from the skid rail and lands on the road below in a crouch, bare feet finding the concrete.
The helicopter rotates twice, losing altitude in a slow sickening spiral, and comes down on the freeway forty meters ahead of the truck.
The main rotor fragments on impact, each blade carving a separate groove across the pavement, and the body of the aircraft rolls onto its side and the fuel feeds a fire that starts fast and burns orange against the falling snow.
From inside the truck, I hear her screaming.
The leader’s SUV is already moving.
I see the small lurch before he commits, the tell of a man who has decided that hitting me is preferable to staying still, and I step in front of the vehicle and put my hand up.
The engine roars, tires biting for grip, and the SUV comes at me with two tons of momentum behind it.
I take it on my palm and forearm and I do not move.
The front end presses against my hand and the tires smoke against the concrete, spinning, the engine climbing to a pitch I feel in my back teeth. The SUV does not go anywhere.
He reaches for a weapon inside the cab and points it at the windshield.
The driver door tears off its hinges.
She reaches through the gap and closes her hand around his throat and lifts him out of the seat, his feet leaving the floor of the vehicle, the weapon falling somewhere inside.
She steps back from the SUV and holds him at arm’s length, her silver-ringed eyes level and entirely without hurry.
She takes the weapon from his belt with her free hand, breaks it open, and drops the pieces on the road.
Then she puts him down.
He hits the pavement face-first and I step onto his back before he can move, my full weight settling onto his back, and the sound he makes is more air than voice. His fingers claw at the road surface and find nothing worth holding.
She crouches in front of him. She seizes his helmet and wrenches it free, the chin strap snapping under her grip, and sets it aside. She looks up at me.
“For our Matriarch,” she says. “For every Bouda they burned and sold and mounted on a wall.”
I step back.