I fired until the pistol whined empty.
The lead man stepped close and stomped the pistol out of my hand. “There,” he said. “No more mistakes.”
He grabbed my coat and yanked me into the wrecked sunlight. The road had become a ring of men and dust. The riders’ horses stamped and snorted. The nearest boulder flashed with mica like a million small eyes.
“Let’s make sure you don’t run.”
He shoved me into a rutted ditch. Someone caught my arms from behind. My shins hit stone; sparks shot up my bones. He crouched in front of me, all smell of tobacco and sweat, the grin now a strip of teeth.
“You gonna be smart about this?”
I spat blood at his boots. It felt like the only thing that was mine.
He sighed, almost disappointed. “Didn’t think so.”
He reached for my throat, fingers going for the courier tag cable to rip it free. I thrashed. The man behind me folded me in like a trap, forearm across my windpipe. Sound narrowed toa mosquito whine. Somewhere, a wagon horse screamed and screamed.
Then the air changed.
The hair along my nape prickled. It was like a cold wind moved through the ditch without touching the grass.
The lead man’s grin stuttered. He looked past my shoulder. The men around the ring turned their heads and went very still.
“Who the—” the one behind me started, and his voice cut off with a wet hiccup.
The weight on my throat vanished. I fell forward into the ditch water, coughed, and crawled on my palms. Boots slid in gravel behind me.
A shape moved—wrong in the way a mountain moves when you try to see it while you’re falling.
Tall. Broad across the shoulders. A dark coat that wasn’t cloth at all but some kind of matte armor that drank the light.
The lead man went for his gun.
The shape didn’t shout. It didn’t warn.
He stepped in, caught the man’s wrist, and the gun went off into the sky. His other hand struck the rider’s face once—precise, almost gentle.
The rider folded like a cut rope.
“Two!” someone yelled. “On the flank!”
I saw it through a frame of grass: the stranger—no, the thing—turning. Something like a blade flashed from his forearm. He moved too fast to be human; the world seemed a step behind him, trying to catch up.
Two men rushed with clubs. He slid between them, took one by the throat, and clipped the second at the base of the skull.
No wasted motion. No joy in it.
Only economy.
“Monster,” someone breathed, and my mouth remembered that word even as my eyes fought it.
I got my knees under me and reached for my knife.
A boot kicked it away.
Another man dropped into the ditch after me, grabbing my hair—then screamed and shot backward as the stranger hit him mid-lunge, a black blur and a crack of knuckles.
The ditch water ran pink around my hands.
