Stalking the short distance to them, I demanded, “Why?” My question leaked bitterness so mighty, I tasted it on the back of my tongue.
Arlo stopped near the driver’s seat. Slowly, oh-so-slowly, he turned his head a fraction. “Because I want to crush your compound.” He drew a knife from one of his two chest sheaths. “You’re like flies, contaminating the minds of our people and steering them toward damnation. We had to lure you out—trap you.”
I followed his vanishing shape into the bus, ignoring how blood suctioned my boots to the asphalt. “That’s not what I asked.” Climbing the two steps, I crushed the glinting fragments of glass into dust. “Why areyoudoing this?”
Disregarding me, he backed a disarmed Tarri toward the back of the bus. Frantic, she searched the gray plastic seats bolted to the floor for anything to use as a weapon.
“Arlo,” I called out, imbuing the two syllables with as much contempt a person physically could. From now on, the four letters making up his name would always carry a sour aftertaste.
“I don’t answer to you,” he threw over his shoulder.
Right as Tarri glanced at me for help, he kicked her right in the sternum.
Her back slammed into a vertical pole anchored between the ceiling and the floor. Collapsing, she gasped for air.
But then her reflexes kicked in, and she rose onto her elbows?—
And stopped.
“Pathetic,” Arlo sneered. “Just another case proving women don’t belong among fighters.”
With a vacant look, Tarri stared at her feet, her pink sneakers drenched in blotches of maroon. “My legs.”
Her whisper pierced my chest like an arrow.
Arlo had broken her spine.
I flipped one of my knives, gripping it by the blade. A breath, and together with the next, the sharp edges flew toward mytarget—Arlo’s back covered by a dark green shirt, the tears in the uniform revealing the injuries he’d sustained.
He ducked?—
His foot caught on Tarri’s, and he crashed onto her shins. But she didn’t even wince. Just flopped onto her side, unable to move, to scooch away, to fight. To reach for the weapon clattering onto the bus’s floor.
“For this, youwillanswer to me,” I promised Arlo.
Tarri was my friend. Someone I valued so dearly, her life sat on a shelf higher than mine.
A second blade slipped from my hold. The handle twirled in the closed space?—
Arlo dodged, using a storm cloud-colored seat as a shield, but my knife reached its destination. Sunk into flesh.
Except it wasn’t Arlo’s.
The rubber handle poked out of Tarri’s calf, a dark stain unfurling in her navy sweatpants. But instead of crying out, she simply stared at the weapon. “It…doesn’t hurt.”
Arlo sneered, “But this will,” and jumped into the aisle, an arm’s-reach away from Tarri.
I patted the sheaths on my upper thighs and my chest, cursing their emptiness. But eventually, my fist coiled around a handle secured to my bicep…right as Arlo’s knife vanished in Tarri’s neck to the hilt.
Her eyes bugged out. Fingers uncurled from the traitor’s wrist. A line of blood rushed down to the hollow of her throat as she gasped for air.
With a grunt, Arlo jerked the weapon out. Crimson spurted out of the wound so deep the blade had undoubtedly damaged everything vital.
Convulsions rocked her upper body, a fountain of scarlet flooding the ash-hued floor, drenching into her clothes, seeping into the strap of my shirt I’d wrapped around her arm.
My hands shook as my world narrowed to the tremors gradually deserting my friend. Someone I’d considered my family. Someone I’d spent countless nights eating ice cream with. Someone who’d taught me how to work the tables at Vice. Someone who’d been aware of my past. Someone who’d once convinced me to try fries with caramel syrup drizzled on top. Someone who’d laughed so hard at my disgust she’d choked on her orange juice and the sweet liquid had gushed from her nose.
Her chest flattened in tandem with mine as she stilled, her mouth parted, her lips crimson, drops of red marring her pasty complexion, her eyes as glassy as puddles of rain in the mornings.
