[The Past The Present The Future]
“Miss DeLune, right?”
I only have enough time to turn on my heels.
The round punches through the meat of my shoulder and inertia throws me back. My legs scramble in the mud, but momentum has already swept them out from underneath and for a beautiful, singular second, I am at the apex of my fall. Here, just a little longer – please – I float, and the stars up above shine for me and their constellations tell their stories just for me.
The concrete drives the air from my lungs and as the back of my head crashes down a fraction later, I am blessed with exactly what I asked for. Every higher-order thought dissipates on the rain, flashing to steam against bright red skin. Something animalistic rattles the cage of my scrambled skull, screaming to breathe, screeching for my diaphragm to shake itself free of its spasm. Save us. It does not know why, but my heart is spurred to work harder and so thrashes and rages inside my chest, tugging on every artery and vein connecting it to everywhere else.
Bitter iron fills my mouth, spills over my lips. I cough it up and it splashes frothy, cherry red in flecks all across the asphalt and earth.
He stands over me and I retch, gagging as the autonomic reflex to suck air in fights against the agonising, pain-driven, consuming need to scream out. Neither wins so I choke and gasp and in-between stolen breaths I sob.
A coil of smoke tries to curl clear of the muzzle but the downpour cools it to ambient almost instantaneously. The stink of cordite mixes with blood, finding another way to invade my senses. He does not even look satisfied – like doing this was at least worth it. Instead he hovers, reaches down, and snatches up my purse. He never breaks eye contact even as he rifles through it, helping himself to jewelry and cash. Then he drops it, pulls the hammer back with his thumb and curls a finger inside the trigger guard.
Something hot and wet spreads between my back and the concrete in a thick pool, warming my skin in the cold night air. My lips work silently – I cannot spare the air to make words. His finger squeezes down fractionally, the trigger cocks backwards.
He stops. Hesitates. I have seen that expression before. Curiosity. Morbid, insincere; vile. He watches me squirm, some part of my nervous system falling back on firing any impulse in an attempt to do what will not come naturally. The ruined mess of my shoulder, all shattered bone, ruined ligaments and pulverised muscle pulses. Each contortion forces up a fresh red geyser that spills down the purple slopes of skin.
Hormones burn their way through my insides, desperately trying to stem shock and prime my body for a fight it has already lost. All they serve to do is extend out this agony. Tears spill from between my blinking eyes, struggling to focus on the blurry face still looking down.
He steps forward and puts his boot down on my prosthetic. The input forces an output, and the plastic fingers rail against the weight. Servo motors whine and then scream, hopelessly outmatched as he presses down. The composite cracks, the underpinning metal frame bending under the load. The feeling is indescribable. Not pain – there are no nerves left to carry such a feeling – but an overwhelming synaptic pressure that builds and pushes on my senses. A crescendo of electrical impulses that hurt as effectively as anything biological until, suddenly, he releases it …
… Only to stamp down with every newton of vindictive force he can muster in such a short distance of travel. The prosthetic shatters and I scream with everything left in my bruised chest. It is beyond anything I have ever felt before, since they took it from me the first time. My stump lashes out, and the last shattered fragments spin away from the endoskeleton to leave it swinging feebly in the rain. He kicks it clear of his sightline, breaking the flailing pieces off and with a steel toe cap on the same boot, taps hard against the porcelain of my mask.
Then, he pushes the safety catch on with a forefinger and lowers the pistol out of sight of my spinning world.
“Not yet …” He murmurs, and a wet grin slips across his face.
And that is when Cassieopia puts a round through his back with the small-calibre, silver-plated pistol held between her shaking hands.
She is crying too.
