On this occasion, though, we’re doing weapons training. Adria’s idea. “If the dayfolk fail to honor the terms of our agreement,” she says, “or if my own subjects decide to try their luck with a freezeshot at your head … you’ll be glad you heeded my advice.”
On the one hand, weapons other than my standard-issue heatshot pistol—carried by any members of the Morpheus Market who would rather not lose a limb in a transaction gone wrong—are deeply unfamiliar. Chloe raised me to be clever, not strong. A concealed creature, skittering silently through the underbrush, ready to flee at the slightest sound. A prey animal, really.
But the freezeshot shotgun Adria presses into my gloved palm is a hunk of bulky, rumbling metal—a predator’s appendage, like a horn or claw designed only to charge in and gore. I’ve grown so accustomed to the surprising lightness of heatshot weapons, my knees nearly buckle under this war-making wreckage machine.
For all my awkwardness, though, staring down the weapon’s sights is the perfect excuse to avoid Adria’s molten violet eyes when I ask, quick enough that I almost hope it conceals the audacity, “So who’s Neo?”
There’s always the slim chance that it’s my overactive imagination, but I swear I hear Adria’s claws scrape against the blue-white skin of her hands as they curl into fists. “You listen to everything.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“Knowledge comes with a price, Kori. Say … a clean head shot.”
“I’ve been your captive for all of … ten, twelve sleep cycles?” Honestly, I hardly know anymore. “And already, you’re testing me with a request to commit regicide?”
At that, Adria extends a hand, her claws just barely brushing the side of my helmet, forcing me to readjust my line of sight toward the stone targets. “Don’t be coy if you’ve got cause to raise a weapon. If those were real soldiers—your people, my people, visitors from deep space, whatever—you’d be dead before you finished your one-liner.”
“Not my preferred way to go out.”
“Glad to hear it.”
I smirk despite myself. “Being clever, Adria?”
“I wouldn’t dare.”
Her tone is slick and cold, but if she meant any harm, Adria’s claws would’ve been buried in my skull a moment ago, ending me even before the radiation could. I swear the little shudder I feel in her body just behind me, watching me take aim, is a suppressed laugh.
I tighten my grip on the shotgun’s barrel, willing this strange automaton to become like my mask and gloves and armor, merely another artificial layer between me and the real world. A tool to help me navigate it. I draw in the deepest breath I can manage—resenting the jagged edge of it, telling myself it’s not from Adria’s proximity—and exhale ever so slowly as I focus on the closest stone mannequin’s head.
I pull the trigger.
I’ve rarely had to fire my heatshot pistol outside of mother-mandated training scenarios, but I’ve grown accustomed to what that feels like. A little electric skitter, almost like my weapon hand has fallen asleep, before a surprising shock of warmth up the whole limb to my shoulder, rapidly fading from the sensation of a burn to a light, pleasant prickling. The freezeshot shotgun is … not that.
The trigger clicks, the barrel rolls, and the gun announces its intentions with the loudest noise I’ve heard since the alarm inCharon.My helmet is designed to dampen close-range volume spikes that coulddamage my eardrums, but even so, the recoil makes my hearingring.Where the heatshot’s sensation is of my hands falling asleep, the freezeshot is like my limbs being frozen stiff and hacked off with a rusty blade, and then my new stumps being promptly filled with additional ice because why not?
If I scream, and I honestly can’t tell, it’s luckily drowned out by the shotgun’s bellow. All my focus was on steadying the gun, not steadying my legs, so I naturally careen backward like a second projectile, gun still braced against my throbbing ribs, and collide fully with Adria.
I would’ve thought those massive witchy wings do something for Adria’s balance, but I suppose she’s as surprised as I am that the recoil launched me so hard. In any event, we land in a tangled heap of arms and legs and now-crooked wings. I can feel my own mortified heartbeat pounding through me, but I swear I feel hers, too, through all my layers of armor, strong and fierce and unexplainably unsteady.
She must be furious with me.Ishould be furious withmyself.Given an opportunity to explore the Shadowlands, to personally gain knowledge of its queen and its history and its weaponry, I proceed to fall on my own ass like a low-charge mech?
But then I look up. And, despite myself, I smile.
“Look.” I extend an arm to point at the stone targets.
Cursing through her teeth, Adria takes the liberty of using said arm to haul herself upright again, wings sprawling wide like an exasperated shrug.
The farthest stone mannequin is missing one head. Behind it, the chunk of rock that was once its crowning appendage is frozen solid to the wall, nearly split down the middle exactly. Not the mannequin I was aiming for, but Adria doesn’t know that.
“I’d call that the entry fee to more Neo info, wouldn’t you?”
Adria shakes her head. “I’d call that a lucky shot. And if things go sideways, luck won’t be enough to protect you.”
“Don’t worry,” I fire back, “the last thing I’d want to do is leave that to you.”
“Don’t think I’m up to the task?”
Adria gives her wings a lazy stretch, like the boys at my home compound’s gym trying to one-up each other on bicep flexes. Except I usually roll my eyes at those boys’ boorish antics, but my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth at the ripples of muscle in Adria’s back, the shine of the spikes where her wings terminate, the superhuman heft and bulk of her contrasted with the predatory fluidity of motion.
