“Down!” I shoved Ariel behind the van’s bumper and covered her with my chest. A ricochet will take whatever it can find; I preferred it find me. I counted two, then moved again because stillness is a kind of target.
The last link opened with a hard, ugly pop and Sunshine caught the blonde under the arms. A hand from inside the van snapped into Sunshine’s hoodie and hauled. She twisted, drovean elbow into the man’s mouth, blood bright against powder, he still dragged.
Her eyes found mine. She shook her head once, a clean little no that meant later and maybe and I love you in the language of not-now. “Run!” she shouted, voice bigger than her body.
I grabbed the prep table by its far edge and heaved it sideways into the kitchen mouth. It didn’t make a barricade; it made mess, legs tangling with chair legs, edge biting tile, the sort of chaos that steals a stance and eats a shot. “Mudroom!” I pointed.
The hall to it was narrow and short. Hooks on the left with coats that would never go home, a rubber mat curling at the corner like a tongue, a cheap latch on the door that had lost every argument it ever had. I jammed the extinguisher’s black horn under the plate and pried. Metal bent, screws squealed, the latch popped like it remembered this exact kind of pain from another life.
Cold air slapped. Rain and diesel and mud came in like a chorus.
We boiled out onto the stoop. The yard ended at a fence dropping into a skinny alley; the bottom rail had a water-cut dip. I kicked the rail up, bent a gap big enough for fear and bone. “Through!”
Juno dove first, a prayer riding shotgun with a curse. The hoarse man slid on his belly and came through with a grunt and a new coat of mud. Ariel ducked and wriggled after them, hair stuck to her cheek, mouth set like a line drawn with a knife.
I went last. A round sizzled through a fence slat near my ear and made the wood sing; powder and an overturned table still stole the watcher’s clean shot, but he’d find it if I loitered. I slid through the gap and dropped into the alley.
We ran left. Scrub trees took us like we belonged and then let us go again. A shallow creek bed waited where the alley gaveup and the ground fell away. Rain turned the world into static. Gravel spit behind us. A van engine coughed and found itself. Men discovered their radios were only as powerful as the truth inside them. The watcher didn’t yell. He saved breath for the part where breathing mattered.
We slid down the creek bank on our heels and dropped behind a fallen trunk that smelled like wet iron. I counted by faces: Ariel. Juno. The man. Three. Not Sunshine. Not the girl with the sun.
Ariel grabbed my wrist. “We go back.”
“Yeah.” It came out like a plan and a promise. “We get these two to ground. Then we circle. We don’t leave Sunshine or the sun-tattooed girl.”
Juno wiped powder and rain off her mouth with a muddy wrist and nodded once, a blade sliding home. The man swallowed mud and fear and managed, “Okay,” like he had to pay for the word and meant to.
We moved east along the creek, low and quiet, the storm chewing our tracks behind us. Trees didn’t care about our names. That indifference felt like mercy for the first time all night.
We were alive.
That was going to be a problem, for them.
