Page 3 of Xerxes Ascendant
Henri yanked back on his hand, making him stumble. “Don’t you order me around.”
“Then fucking move!”
He hooked his elbows under the other man’s armpits and tried to lift him that way, but his weight made it impossible. Akira staggered.
“They have guns,” he hissed, “and that door isn’t going to stop them.”
On cue, it rattled in its frame as one or more of the men hammered against it from the other side.
“Open up!”
“Just break it down”, he heard another suggest, and that got Henri scrambling to his feet.
“Are they from the Carrion?” he asked, white-faced. “The XGF? Seventh Hell?”
He continued to list Xerxian gangs, muttering about various inmates he’d presumably met in the prison and how he treated them as he’d been instructed. Whether that was favourably or not, Akira didn’t give a shit. He was too busy figuring a way out of the tiny apartment.
It was only slightly larger than Kyle’s old place had been – although the way the ceiling drooped with water damage made it significantly less appealing – but its one redeeming feature was the tiny balcony beyond the sleeping space. He ripped the heavy curtain aside and yanked on the sliding door, disappointed but not surprised when it didn’t budge. People didn’t leave doors unlocked on Xerxes.
“Where’s the passcard to open this?” he demanded, only Henri was turning in useless circles on the spot, his hands in his hair and his mouth still forming words Akira didn’t care to listen to.
Shielding his face with his other arm, he jabbed his elbow forcefully into the glass pane. Level D was hardly the type of neighbourhood one would find expensive safety glass and it predictably shattered upon contact, raining tiny, glittering shards.
Evening air rushed in, a degree or two cooler than inside the building, along with the familiar hum of the city. Lights flickered from all directions: the emergency and hatch indicator lighting on the level’s ceiling, warmer glows from individual windows in other apartment blocks, and the harsh neon buzz of various businesses advertising their services. A pink pair of scissors programmed to flash the blades open and closed promoted a 24/7 hairdresser, while the neighbouring convenience store dazzled with its green capital lettering. Lower Xerxes could easily give someone a headache with its exuberance alone.
Something hard slammed against the front door of the studio apartment. A foot or a shoulder perhaps: something solid enough to crack the wood and make the lock squeal. Another blow like that and they’d be through.
Akira swiftly kicked out the remainder of the glass so Henri could fit his large frame through without being sliced to ribbons, and then gestured with urgency at the other man. “Come on!”
Henri paled. “You want me to...but I’m not dressed,” he said weakly, waving a floppy hand down at his nudity.
He could have changed that in the seconds he’d spent rambling, but he hadn’t, and now it was too late. The door warped further under another blow, and Akira spied a flash of dark hair through the gap before the shiny muzzle of a gun was stuffed through it. Henri ducked.
Akira didn’t. The angle was all wrong: it wouldn’t hit either of them, and was intended only to frighten and keep the pair away from the door while Mackenroth’s three thugs broke through.
Akira had done worse things than run for his life while wearing nothing, and considering his client’s lack of clothes wouldn’t stop him getting plugged full of bullet holes, it really shouldn’t stop him from jumping over the edge of a first-floor balcony.
But the man was still backing away against the far wall, drawing the discarded bed covers around his hips as if the armed assassins at his door were nothing more than neighbours he had to apologise to for the noise.
“Then hide!” Akira hissed under his breath at him, stepping through the doorframe that had held the fragments of glass now crunching under his shoes. “It’s me they’re after. Hide and keep quiet!”
Whether that would have worked – whether they’d have pursued Akira outside without bothering to search the apartment for his reason for being there in the first place – he’d never know. Because in the greatest act of idiocy Akira had ever seen, and that included those pulled by Kyle because this was idioticandlacking any redeeming noble self-sacrifice, Henri blinked in the stunned realisation he wasn’t the target and then immediately ran towards the door the men had just broken through.
“Epsilon is in here!” he hollered, as if they didn’t already know that. “Let me out, you can have him-”
His head exploded in a flurry of crimson noise.
Akira spared him the briefest of mourning periods. Henri John Lyons, aged forty-six, never married. Had booked a total of a hundred and seventeen appointments with Akira over the years with credits he couldn’t possibly have earned as a prisonguard...at least not in legitimate wages. Lacking both integrity and a head.
But he hadn’t deserved to die, not for merely being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The first thug stepped into the apartment and the barrel of his gun determinedly swung Akira’s way. Yet he was already moving, slipping over the balcony fencing and dropping down to the street a couple of metres below. Akira landed on his toes, sank to a crouch from the force of it, and made sure he was lost to the shadows by the time the three men swarmed the tiny balcony with their angry cursing.
“Where the fuck did he go?”
“This is your fault!”
“What? How?”
