It’s chaos. The bar is a wreck. Broken tables and chairs. Broken bodies. Orphaned weapons. Spent shell casings. Blood pools around collapsed bodies, mixing with alcohol from shattered glasses. Corva is taking on three mercs at once. It’s Boneless Joe and two of the remaining close-range mercs. They can’t touch her. It doesn’t matter if it’s a fist, a knife, or a bullet. They simply don’t connect. She’s not where they are. And she’s enjoying it.

She spins and ducks, jumps and dodges. All the while, she grabs broken chair legs, knives, pieces of glass, even a disembodied foot—anything she can improvise as a weapon. She uses them and discards them as easily as she picks them up. And she’s fast. Man, is she fast. Especially her arms. There’s something like an afterimage of each arm as it moves. Jack can’t so much see her arms as much as catch glimpses of where they were.

Thing is, she’s not really connecting with any of the three mercs herself. It’s difficult for Jack to tell if she’s wearing down or if she’s just toying with them. As fast as she is, she should be having more of an impact on them. That smile of hers is disorienting.

He shuffles to the side a bit. Need to see who else is around.

None of the other mercs seem to be in or near the fight and there’s no sign of Tretch. Of course, the hole doesn’t give Jack the best view of the room. His head drops. He’s going to have to prairie dog his head above the bar to get a better view. It’s not like the bar itself is offering much in the way of protection, but there’s definitely a certain advantage in the fact that no one knows he’s there. Well, no one except for maybe Boneless Joe.

Jack pauses. Maybe there’s another way.

He turns and looks over at Zeke. “Say, you don’t think you could—”

The monkey doesn’t even turn his head to acknowledge Jack. He doesn’t let the question finish, either. His tail covers Jack’s mouth as he just stares forward and delivers another slap to the back of Jack’s head.

Jack sighs and pulls Zeke’s tail from over his mouth. “Figured not.” Keeping an eye on the action through the hole in his bar, he rests Plan B’s barrel on his shoulder, then raises the metal cylinder to eye level. “But I ain’t pokin’ my head up there without bein’ armed.”

Jack reaches into the inner breast pocket of his vest and pulls out a small rectangular case. It’s got his last cigarette for the day. He rolled it in the morning so he wouldn’t have to think about it come closing time. Of course, the case also has additional rolling papers in it for those days when one smoke isn’t enough. He puts the case on the floor in front of him. At the same time, he hands the metal cylinder up to Zeke.

He takes Plan B off his shoulder and cracks open the break-action shotgun. With Plan B balanced on his knee, he pops open his smoke case and slips out one of the spare papers. He reaches up with his free hand. No words need to be said. Zeke gives the cylinder back to Jack. The top is already off. “Thanks, Zeke.”

Jack pours one of the beads into the center of his rolling paper. He hands the cylinder back to Zeke and starts wrapping the paper around the bead, forming it into a more evenly round shape. He jams the wrapped bead in one of Plan B’s twin barrels and checks to make sure it’s a snug fit. The last thing he needs is to have a bead slide out right when he needs it.

Quickly, he pulls another rolling paper and goes through the process of wrapping a second bead for the other barrel.

With the beads loaded, Jack snaps Plan B shut. This better friggin’ work. The last time they tried this, the results were, well, unimpressive.

He closes his smoke case and takes the cylinder back from Zeke. Stuffing them back in his vest, he takes another peek through the bullet hole. Now it’s two to one. The third merc that had been in the fight lies crumpled on the floor. A splattery mix of blood and hair decorates a fresh head-sized crater in the wall above the body. Now it’s just Corva against Boneless Joe and one other merc, a mean bitch with a face tattoo and a chembraid. Strike that, it’s two chembraids, each bound to one side of her body. Of course, as much as Jack likes chembraids, it’s the face tattoo that holds his attention the most. Half her face is painted to look like a skull. That must’ve hurt something awful.

There’s a popping sound from the rear of the room, out of view from Jack’s improvised peephole. One more still in the fight. Tretch?

The projectile shot at Corva is much larger than a bullet. It’s like a bola, but with a fine metal cable connecting the two weights. She catches the middle of the cable and the weights spin around her arm, clanking against her forearm bracer. They must be a lot heavier than they look, because her arm drops like a rock, dragging her down to one knee.

She struggles against the weight; her wrist is pinned to the ground. However, she can’t focus on that for long. Boneless Joe and Facepaint are already on top of her. Facepaint goes to work with kicks to Corva’s midsection. Boneless Joe starts dropping down his oversized arm like a hammer.

But the fight isn’t out of this girl yet. A mule kick sends Boneless Joe flying. He crashes through a table at the front of the room. Facepaint gets her legs swept out from under her. She lands hard on her back. Air rushes from her lungs and Jack can see Facepaint making that same fish face everyone makes when the wind gets knocked out of them.

Corva’s back on her feet. With great effort, she’s managed to use her free arm to help lift her weighted arm from the ground. The wire from the bola slides down her bracer and digs into her skin. The weights knock against each other as she steps over to Facepaint.

She doesn’t pause, doesn’t hesitate, doesn’t even take a breath. She just rolls her hand into a fist and lets that weighted arm drop right into the merc’s tattooed head. There’s a meaty crunching sound, like dropping a sack of rocks on a melon. Facepaint’s legs kick up in an uncontrolled, flailing last twitch.

Corva stands back up. She uses her knee to push away the crushed mess that used to be Facepaint’s head. Blood drips from her face and arms. And that smile. It’s still there, bigger even, like she’s constantly on the verge of laughing. She pauses a beat to look at the back of the room.

Jack tries to get a better angle of the back from his squat behind the bar, but it’s no good. He can’t see anything. Can’t tell if she’s staring someone else down or just looking. She turns her head and looks at the bar. At Jack.