I jumped as the armored truck slammed through another pothole, nearly launching Pengyi into my lap. The guy sitting on the bench opposite snickered, then turned toward the cab.

“Careful up there, Boukari! You drivin’ with the lights off or what?”

He was, of course. “Aw, shut it, Bodine! You’dve put us through a wall miles ago!”

Bodine shrugged at us. “Eh, he’s probably right.” He was Marie’s combat medic, small but tough and full of grinning energy. He sat with us in the back of her armored truck, along with the rest of her team. They were about what I’d expected, a group of wiry men and women who gave off an air of quiet competence. Their easy camaraderie made me worry I was going to throw things out of whack- not that I was the only interloper.

“So you’re goin’ out, huh? How long for?” Ximena asked the question, a big, tanned woman with a hard face but an easy smile.

I glanced at Pengyi, unsure what to say, but he answered for me. “Ahh…this our second date.”

“Seriously?” Marie shouted from the passenger seat. “Damn, Sharkie, he’s a keeper!” Some of the team laughed, and Ximena just smiled and shook her head.

“Wait, wait, really? This is a date for you guys?” That was Plehve. Her and Rossi had showed up at the office when we were about to leave and insisted on coming. I’d warned them it was probably going to be a mess, but they wouldn’t hear it. Said they had to make up for their mistakes.

“I mean, kind of?” I answered. “We were supposed to be going out for real tomorrow, but instead we gotta do this.”

“Oh, wow!” Plehve exclaimed. “Where do I find a guy like that?” There were more good-natured snickers from the rogue’s gallery.

I glanced at Pengyi, who gave me a smile. “I dunno. Look under rocks, in bushes, that kind of thing.”

Whatever she’d been about to say was cut off by Korobov, Marie’s second-in-command. “We’re five minutes, out, people,” he said. “Check your shit and get ready.”

There was no pseudo-military chorus of ‘yes, sirs’ but everybody obeyed immediately, filling the truck with clicks of metal and polymer. Marie’s team brought implements of close-quarters death: armor-piercing machine pistols, shotguns loaded with flechettes and tungsten buckshot, heavy-caliber kalashes chopped down short and nasty. One guy even had an MG6 belt-fed like the one Tanje tried to sell me, though his had a shortened barrel. I myself checked the charge on the saw and the load on my Ultima 7 revolver. Beside me, Pengyi thumbed shells into his antique shotgun. I could see the projectiles through their clear hulls: steel slugs rather than buckshot, segmented to expand in flesh.

“Nasty stuff, huh?” I muttered, glancing at them.

“Hmm? Oh, yes. Not want to stand front of one of these.” He finished loading the shotgun, checked that his pistol and machete and knife were in place, and sat back with a sigh. His breathing was steady, his face relaxed, and it made me curious.

“Have you done this before?” I asked him. “Fought other people, I mean.”

“Yes.” The answer was quick. “Before I…leave my clan, do this several times.” He didn’t look at me as he spoke. “My people as nasty to themselves as yours.”

“Oh. Alright, good.” Immediately I winced. “I mean, not good that it happened, but-“

“I understand.” He met my eyes and smiled again. “Not worry about me, Sharkie. I know what I doing.”

I hesitated a moment, then nodded. Very soon the truck rumbled to a halt and the whole crew tramped out. We’d stopped on a typical Valiant street, only a couple blocks from the Killers’ hideout. Blown-out storefronts and dilapidated tenements lined the pulverized sidewalks. At least half the lifelights were dim or out completely, leaving us in navy-blue darkness. The only person I saw was a passed-out bum cradling a jug of toxic rotgut. Everyone else had the sense to keep out of our business. A cool, misty rain was falling. A mild one, considering it barely tingled on my exposed skin. Anything worse would have seen an acid warning go out anyway.

“Alright, ladies ’n’ gents, here’s the plan.” Everyone but a couple of sentries gathered around Marie. Most of them hald put on coarse-knit balaclavas, only their eyes and mouths visible. I declined the spare one someone offered me, though I did accept the ear protection and size-XXL aramid vest they’d manage to scrounge up. I wanted these fuckers to know who was paying them back, and I wasn’t the least conspicuous person anyway.

“We’re goin’ in two ways. Boukari, Ximena, your ten’re headin’ through the garage-bay door in front. Keaton, you brought your Minetex?” A lanky man nodded. “Good. Go head and blow the bitch down. Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em, huh?” Another, more eager nod. “Me, Rossi, an’ the rook’ll head in that way. Korobov, your five are goin’ in the side door. East side of the building, second floor, up a set of exterior stairs. Breach when you hear Keaton knockin’.”

“Got it, ma’am.”

Marie scoffed. “Aw, to hell with the ‘yessir, no sir’ shit. This ain’t Enforcement. Sharkie, I want you with Korobov. And I guess you’re stickin’ with her?” she asked Pengyi, who nodded. “Right. We punch ‘em in the face, you put the knife in their back. Nobody fuck up and we’ll be home in time for breakfast.” There were a few sardonic laughs, but I was too keyed up to participate.

I wouldn’t say I was scared, necessarily, just tight-wound. Most of my previous jobs I hadn’t had time to stress out before getting into the thick of it, but even this informal briefing made things seem more real. Pengyi being there complicated things too. I didn’t want him hurt, but I was glad he had my back, but then I was guilty for feeling glad- It doesn’t matter, I told myself, letting out a breath. I couldn’t predict the future. Within me too was that seed cultivated in young people by trainers and sergeants all across history: that kernel of irrationality that told me I wasn’t really in danger, that death was something that happened to other people.

We moved out at a jog, passing near-silently through the dark. Sling swivels and other sources of noise had been removed from our kit or muffled with tape. Pengyi and I stuck to the rear of the group, near Rossi and Plehve. I could fight on my own, but this small-unit stuff was new to me. Marie was in the lead, and she stopped us with a raised hand upon reaching the corner of a burnt-out distillery.

“I got two sentries and one guy takin’ a piss,” she murmured to Korobov. He took a quick peek and nodded to her before beckoning a guy called Almeida up. He cradled a weapon that reminded me of Fidi’s VSK rifle, just smaller. Without further instruction he took a knee, peered through the bulky scope, and let off three shots. They were so quiet I could only tell by the gun’s kick.

“‘Update: no sentries and no guys takin’ a piss. Almeida, stay put and watch the windows. Everyone else, you know where you’re going.” The man nodded, and Marie waved us forward. We came around the corner and I finally got a view of the Killers’ warehouse, or as good a view as I could manage through the thick darkness. It was pretty small for the name, two stories high with walls of rust-streaked sheet metal. The parking lot was full of junky-looking vics- including one poorly parked sedan with a blown-out back window.

Most of the team jogged quietly up to the big bay door in front. Keaton knelt down and began spreading lengths of plastic explosive across it, ignoring the headshot sentries spread across the ground beside him. Meanwhile Korobov led our smaller group up the stairs bolted to the near side of the building. I did my best to move carefully, but more than three hundred pounds on a rickety steel staircase do not a quiet ascent make. I got a few glances but nobody said anything. Pengyi flowed up the stairs like water, sticking just behind me.

I realized it made no sense to have me at the back. I’d make a good shock-and-awe distraction, something big and scary to draw the bad guys’ attention while my friends shot them in the face. With a few taps on shoulders, Pengyi and I inched awkwardly up to the landing around the second-floor door. Up there with us were Korobov and a man with an automatic shotgun whose name I couldn’t remember. I caught Korobov’s eye and pointed to myself- and Pengyi, when he caught my eye- then held up one finger. He looked briefly at the saw on my belt, then nodded his assent. I took the saw up in my left hand, my revolver in the right. The shotgunner lined up his weapon’s muzzle with the door lock, winked at me from behind his mask. Pengyi inched his way in front of me, nodding solemnly when I raised an eyebrow. Then we waited.

We stood in preternatural stillness, waiting for Keaton to finish his rigging. I found myself calming down, my breath slow and even as the rain slowly soaked through my borrowed vest. I thought I heard voices from inside, arguing or yelling. Pengyi’s ears flicked, droplets of moisture scattering from their tips. Korobov slowly flicked the safety on and off his kalash, click-click, click-click. The doorkicker murmured under his breath, some prayer or bit of doggerel.

BANG! There was a deafening explosion from below, followed by a fusillade of automatic fire before the sound even faded. Korobov’s man needed no instruction. He immediately triggered a breaching slug into the door then drove it open with a vicious kick. Pengyi zoomed through like, well, a cat with the zoomies, letting off shotgun blasts in rapid succession. I charged in on his heels, eyes flicking madly to catch my bearings. Catwalks and open space to my left. Decrepit office area to my right. A man directly in front of me, pistol still holstered, on his knees clutching at a huge wound in his chest. I lashed the saw through his neck without slowing down, hot blood misting onto my clothes.

By the bursts of fire coming from my left Marie’s team had the first floor in hand. Clear the offices it was. I just caught sight of Pengyi zipping through the farthest door, a newly headless corpse pirouetting to the ground in his wake. I went for the nearest one. Maybe we’d meet in the middle. How romantic.

Men were shouting at one another past the door. I caught just a snippet of their conversation:

“Bones, the Bones, it’s gotta be!”

“I fucking told Shank he shouldn’tve-“

Then my boot blew the cheap plyboard off its hinges and I lunged into the room saw-first. I whipped the blade across myself, ripping a dusty trail through the drywall before cutting both men in half at the waist. I felt the familiar jolt-buzz of the saw as it chewed through ribs and spines, smelled bitter bone and salty-copper blood, saw the shocked looks on faces that didn’t know they were dead yet. As they tumbled to the threadbare carpet I took a quick look around. I saw that this room had once been a tiny office, though there were now holes in the wall and a generous scattering of trash, bottles, and spent hush cans littering the place. My boots splashed as I stepped over the still-choking bodies. They were emptying fast enough to swamp the floor and send a red puddle flowing under the next door.

I kicked it open and found myself looking down a hallway at a woman who’d just entered from the other end. Her mouth made an ‘O’ of surprise, the machine pistol in her hand dangling momentarily forgotten. I shot her without hesitation, the Ultima punching back into my wrist as its deafening report filled the corridor. As it turned out, a weapon meant for shooting at powered armor and monsters the size of trucks worked just fine against an unaugmented human. The huge hollow-point put a hole big as my fist through her and she dropped dead right there.

The gunfire grew even more intense, easily audible through the thin walls. I picked up the pace and sprinted down the hall. The more we kept up the initial shock the easier this would be. Suddenly someone tackled me from a side door, knocking me into the opposite wall. I looked down just in time to see a Killer slam his knife into my aramid vest with all the strength his cheap bionic arm could manage. Probably meant to slit my throat, but being a foot too tall has its advantages, sometimes. He kept sticking to me, his next thrust aimed well enough I barely fended it off with my gun. He was too close to use the saw on without risking self-evisceration. I sent a knee snapping into his side and felt ribs crack, then did it again when he didn’t let go. And again. And again, snarling into his acne-scarred face. He was my age or younger, eyes were scared and leaking tears of pain, but he wouldn’t stop pushing on his knife, wouldn’t let go. Finally I dropped the saw and shoved him as hard as I could with my free hand. He smashed partway through the opposite wall just before I shot him in the face. He ought to have run away, surrendered, done anything but run up on me- and still he’d caught me off guard. Shouldn’t have been so hard, I thought as I picked up the saw. I need to practice more.

I gave the room he’d jumped me from a brief glance- it was a rather aromatic restroom. Caught in the shitter without your gun. Talk about poor timing. I resumed my charge, hearing desperate shouting from the room at the end of the hall.

“She’s dead, man! This is fucked! We gotta get out-“

“How, you dipshit? Through ‘em’s the only way. Might as well wait, see if they miss us-“

The speaker was cut off by the throaty boom of a shotgun, followed by two more. “That you, Morranne?” I called, straining my ears.

“Is me, Sharkie, yes,” he said loud as his whispery voice could manage. I pushed through the door to find him standing there reloading his smoking shotgun, none the worst for wear.

“You are alright?” he asked.

“Yeah. You run into any of them?”

“Three or four. They not paying much attention, are they?”

“No, we caught them off guard.” I broke open the Ultima and reloaded. “Speaking of, let’s go help Marie’s crew.”

“Mm.” I followed him back through the hall at a dead run, passing several corpses along the way. We made it out onto the catwalk just in time to see the firefight below intensify. I was momentarily shocked still by Marie’s crew. They moved not like gangsters but professional soldiers, taking cover behind the shipping containers and forklifts scattered across the warehouse floor. One or two would lay down suppressing fire at the opposing Killers while another advanced to a new position. Marie herself was in the thick of it, curled tight over a suppressed carbine and shouting orders between bursts. The Killers seemed confused and disjointed, nobody clearly in charge. They were paying for it, too, getting slowly herded toward the back wall by withering fire.

I snapped out of it when the door to a ground-level office burst open, a fresh group of Killers rushing out with SMGs and shotguns blazing. A shipping container kept the fire from Marie’s group off them, but me and some of the upstairs squad started shooting. A few dropped- I must have hit one guy in the head, because it just disappeared. Unfortunately, one of their number had the brainpower to lead his friends closer to the catwalk, until they were practically under it. Now we didn’t have an angle on them, and what’s more we started taking potshots from below as the Killers down there noticed us. We hit the floor and scooted back from the edge- but then Pengyi caught my eye.

“I take care of this,” he said, like he was about to go get something out of the fucking microwave. Before I could reply he leapt to his feet and vaulted the catwalk’s railing.

“What the fuck are you doing?!” I shouted, scrambling over there myself. I was terrified he’d get hurt, get killed because of me- but it wasn’t him I needed to worry about. He opened up with his shotgun while he fell, emptying the mag into the Killers below as fast as the gun would cycle. He landed lightly amidst a rain of spent shells, three gangsters falling dead around him, the remaining two staring like he’d appeared out of thin air. Even as he rose from his crouch he dropped the shotgun onto its sling, yanked the machete from his belt and sank it halfway into a Killer’s neck. Yanking it free, Pengyi pushed away the wandering muzzle of the last gangster- though the guy seemed to have frozen up anyway- and chopped the heavy blade down through his collarbone. The dude dropped his gun and collapsed, shrieking. The machete rose and fell one more time and he stopped. It took two seconds for him to kill fiver people. Maybe less.

By this time I was half over the rail myself, making a much more clumsy landing beside him and grabbing his shoulders in the cover of another conex box. “Are you okay, man? What the fuck was that?” Some of the ground crew were already pushing up into the gap he’d made, taking up new positions past us and keeping up the pressure.

“I fine, I am fine!” he protested, sounding almost amused. “Can let go of me. I need to reload.”

I did but I held his gaze a moment longer, trying to impress…I don’t know, something on him. “You don’t need to do crazy shit like that for me, seriously! I mean, we just met each other…” I noticed a spatter of blood just above his eyebrow and swiped it away with my thumb, leaving a streak in his camo paint.

Now he really did laugh, waving my hand away from his face. “Like mother pergato, Sharkie, like I say before!” He shook his head and reloaded his gun, hands moving with quick and practiced motions. “Now we get over this, right?”

Get this over with, he meant. He was right. We moved up alongside Marie’s soldiers, but there was hardly anything left to do- it seemed like Pengyi’s mad leap of faith had broken the Killer’s line completely. The last few left out in the warehouse were corralled into a corner, flashbanged, and shot down like animals with disciplined bursts of fire. Now there was only a small section of offices left to clear, and Pengyi and I found ourselves just behind Marie and Korobov. Those two cleared rooms like they’d done it a thousand times before, slicing the pie around corners and kicking in doors with the power of Korobov’s bionic legs. I didn’t even see the few Killers they found until they were corpses: wax-faced under the sickly flourescents, riddled with bullets from Marie’s carbine. Nothing for us to do except follow.

In a minute or so our train reached a door at the end of the hall. Korobov blew it open like it was made of styrofoam, revealing a short, tattooed man frantically ransacking the drawers of a water-stained desk and stuffing their contents into a backpack. His hand had barely moved toward the big pistol in his belt when Marie vaulted the desk and stuck her gun up under his chin.

“You in charge of this here outfit?” she asked, tone deceptively light. “Or maybe I oughta say ‘were you.’”

“Y-yeah!” he got out, voice choked. “Yeah, but-“

Marie slugged him right in the solar plexus with her free hand, which made him fold up and jam the gun even harder into his throat. “Let’s talk out front, huh? Too close in here. Now put ‘em up.”