Page 41 of Prima
“Watch out!” he shouts.
She sees only a thin line cutting through water at nearly the speed of a bullet. Then she senses it—so much ill will, it careens into her like a ship crashing against a promontory.
She closes her eyes. A red blur appears in the darkness behind her eyelids.
“Get down!” she cries to Prince Nineteen.
He doesn’t emanate enough ill will to show up in her mental imaging—she could shoot through him if he’s not out of the way.
The red blur switches directions, now coming directly toward the raft. She hears her lover hitting the raft and fires.
Just as the body servant swerves.
Now it’s moving too fast again. She fires as soon as the red blur pauses and becomes a dot. A man screams.
“I think you hit him!”
But the dot becomes a blur again, as crazy-fast as ever—she hasn’t hit the man in the legs or anywhere fatal.
The man zigs and zags; she shoots anytime he comes to a stop.
The boy swears. “Eleven’s climbing back into the cockpit—he’ll use the plane’s gun on us. I have to engage the autocannon.”
She opens her eyes only long enough to put her back against his. Once the brothers open fire, at least she’ll no longer worry about the body servant approaching from the fore. “To the left of the crank there is a lever. Use it to raise up the shield.”
The body servant stops for a fraction of a second longer—he too must be calculating how not to get caught in the crossfire. She pulls the trigger. He screams, but the sound is drowned by barrages from the autocannon and the plane’s gun.
The body servant runs again, slower this time. The red dot behind her eyelids fades somewhat. Is he too injured to project as much ill will?
Armor-piercing shells screech through the air. The raft wobbles with the autocannon’s powerful recoil. The muscles on the boy’s back, pressed into hers, coil and flex as he cranks the next round into the autocannon’s barrel.
The red dot disappears. She dares not open her eyes right away in case it’s trickery on the body servant’s part. But what if he’s dead?Thatwould make the red dot go away, wouldn’t it?
She opens her eyes but can see no one on the ring of the atoll around the lagoon. The atoll has no vegetation and its highest point is barely fifteen centimeters above sea level—there is no place to hide.
Except—
Sirens go off in her head. She scans the lagoon on the side of the raft closest to where the body servant was. Nothing. Shit. She whips her head around just as he surfaces on the other side of the raft, a nerve gun in hand.
He is not aiming at her, but at Prince Nineteen, the one they’ve come to kill in the first place.
She throws herself in front of the boy she loves and opens fire at the same time.
Blood blooms from the body servant’s forehead, a grotesque flower. He sinks into the lagoon. She falls to the raft.
Did he hit her? She feels normal. She feels fine. She?—
So much pain hits her at once; she twitches and spasms. Then twice as much pain. Twice as much pain again. Her skin burns. Her inside burns. She opens her mouth but she can’t make any sounds.
Her eyes dissolve. Her spine is on fire. A red-hot scalpel scrapes the inside of her head.
Something thumps against the raft. It’s her, convulsing uncontrollably.
The next second she’s in water, completely submerged. But that does nothing for the pain. She thrashes. Knives have been wedged under her nails. She?—
Someone catches her and holds her tight. It will not help. Nothing will help.
But her full-throttled agony stutters and hiccups. One moment she’s in the very depths of hell, the next she’s in pain that would have had her rolling on the floor, moaning, but not losing her mind. And this practically normal pain feels like the first drops of rain after a hundred-year drought.
