Vin’s hands were steady, but beads of sweat ran down his forehead and over his closed eyelids. He blotted out the energy of every other living thing around him and narrowed his Perception until it seemed he was stretching his senses down a very long tunnel. Don’t fuck this up.
In his headset, the Horn’s voice spoke to everyone. “We move on Vin’s signal.”
“Something’s changed,” Vin whispered. At this point, one of the jade auras was so weak he was quite sure it was near death. Another wasn’t much better, flickering and blinking in and out like a bad light bulb. The four others, however, which had already been vibrating with unusual stress, now flared with extreme agitation and hostility. People were moving around, slipping in and out of Vin’s narrow field of fire. The Fist drew a bead on the strongest, most energetic jade aura he could Perceive. As his finger curled over the trigger, he sensed his target’s energy turn murderously dark.
“Go, now!” Vin hissed into the radio. He exhaled, held his breath, and fired.
_______
When the phone rang, the barukan were startled. They looked at each other as if questioning who among them was expecting a call. “Who the fuck—” The man with the jade nose ring stomped into another room and answered the phone. The others waited. They left Shae slumped and gasping in the living room chair where they’d been interrogating her. When the phone clicked off and the man came back, the blood had gone out of his face. “That was Choyulo,” he said numbly. “He said the Matyos have turned on us. He said we have to let these Green Bones go and get out of here.”
Stunned silence. Then the short leader exploded. “Does he think this is some sort of fucking video game? That we can hit ‘erase’ and start over? Choyulo said the Matyos would have our back if we got heat from Janloon, and now he’s saying they’re going to fuck us over? After we lost four guys? What the fuck?”
The barukan broke into heated argument punctuated with shouted Shotarian and profanities. Shae struggled feebly to understand what was going on.
“If the Matyos have sold us out to No Peak, we’re worse than dead.” The young man with the neck tattoo swallowed noisily. “We better do what Choyulo says.”
“Fuck Choyulo,” the leader shouted, eyes bulging from his head. “And fuck the Matyos! I’m sick of being second to those Oortokon pussies. None of them could’ve pulled this off. Once they know about the information we’ve got, they’d be out of their fucking minds not to back us up. Otherwise, we go straight to Ayt Mada and the Mountain.”
“What if Ayt’s in on it too? What if she turns us over to the Kauls?” the man with the nose ring murmured, his eyes starting to dart back and forth fearfully.
“She wouldn’t do that, she hates the Kauls.” The lead barukan crossed over to the closed window and pushed down on the slats of the aluminum blinds, creating a tiny crack through which he peered out onto the empty, moonlit street with narrowed eyes. Satisfied that all the guards were still in place, he turned back to his men with a fearsome glare. “We’re all in this together, so none of you can turn chickenshit now, you hear? Go pack up the money and jade, kill the guy in the tub if he’s not already dead. We’re going to get out of the city first. Then we’ll bargain with the Matyos.”
“What about her?” asked the young man with the tattoo, looking at Shae.
The leader stared down at her. Shae saw the heartless calculation made in a few seconds. He couldn’t expect mercy even if he let her go. She was more a liability than an asset now and would slow them down. “We didn’t get everything we wanted from this bitch, but we got enough,” he decided, and drew a knife to slit her throat.
Shae’s body seemed to move with a will of its own. In a final instinctive bid for survival, it flung itself forward like a suffocating fish flopping on the deck of a boat toward the water and the tiny chance of living. Shae crashed to the floor, knowing that her final spurt of defiance was useless, simply a trapped animal response. She twisted onto her side, staring up with mute hatred. The man with the knife snorted in amusement at her struggles and took a step toward her—then jerked and stumbled, as if he’d been punched in the back. The knife tumbled from his fingers to the carpet. Shae followed the movement of his empty hand as he raised it in confusion to his chest, and then she saw the two exit wounds that had punched through his body, a pair of darkening flowers in the front of his black T-shirt.