I look down at the rifle in my hands. “To…help?”
Taylor frowns. “To help what?”
“Take down the Lightbringer?” I suggest slowly. Her eyes grow wide and incredulous. “Okay, you know what? I’m hearing it. I sound insane. Well, I’m here. What do I do?”
My captor anxiously looks to the disoriented Lightbringer, then to me. She sighs, slaps her pistol into my hand and exchanges it for my rifle. “Run as fast as you can across the street, and take cover in that alleyway. On three.”
“Your big plan is to run? Good, now we both sound insane.”
“One.”
Slowly, she crawls around me to the sidewalk side of the car.
“Two.”
She crouches to the ground, back leg extended, fingertips scraping the ground.
“Three.”
We both take off. The Lightbringer follows my route with sprays of hot laser fire, concrete and debris exploding up into the air at my heels. Once I’m safely behind cover, I peek out to watch Taylor as she vaults the hood of a nearby car, running over its roof and using it as leverage to leap at the Lightbringer head-on. Clutching its metal frame, she climbs up the front as it recklessly sprays gunfire. Finally, she smashes the rifle into its glowing red eye and empties her bullets into the mainframe inside its head.
A high-pitched shriek emits from the microphone mouth inside its metal skull. It falls to its knees, shaking the buildings to their foundations. Its gun hits the ground with an ear-splitting smash, like a grand piano crashing from the sky. Taylor stands on its shoulders, its multicolored wires tight in her hands like reins. The Lightbringer collapses onto its chest with enough force to move the ground, heaving an almost lifelike final breath as its electrical currents short-circuit and fail.
Taylor walks off the metal creature, panting and sweating but looking like a total badass. She picks up her duffel bag and bends down to grip the fallen gun. It’s twice or three times her size, but she manages to haul it screeching down the road. I can’t take my eyes off the metal corpse. Smoldering remains billow smoke into the air, smearing the sky, blotting out the stars like the closing of a body bag.
“Won’t Theia be tipped off to your excursion if you bring this back?” I ask, eyeing the frightening bundle of wires and circuitry boards.
“Who says we’re gonna let her see it?” Javier grins and rubs his hands together as he inspects the weapon. “I have access to the dev lab. Once we figure out how to make more of these, Theia won’t care how. She’ll wet her pants for laser guns.”
I grimace at the mental image. Javier uses a handkerchief to wipe off soot from the shiny tech, bringing my attention to the embossed metal tag with my ancestral name on it.
“I think the innards have tracers.” The soldiers stare at me a bit suspiciously, as if I’ve intentionally withheld this information. I gesture at the tag. “Papa tagged the individual parts in case of theft at the warehouses.”
Taylor pauses. “Are you sure?”
“Not one hundred percent about the tracers, but I believe that’s why they’re tagged. Papa checked every six months in the database to make sure none of them went missing.”
“Okay. Not worth the risk,” Taylor says. “We have to leave it.”
“Damn, I hate to see this baby go to waste.” He frowns mournfully at it. “How long do we have before they know it’s down?”
“They already know,” I tell him. “It’s more of a question of how quickly they’ll get Force here.”
“Or another Lightbringer,” Alisa says.
Taylor nods in agreement. “Less than five minutes.”
“I only need two.” Javier tears into the rifle. “Thanks, Lucy. That tip might’ve saved our asses.”
Taylor glances at me, and she looks almost proud. But it’s gone as quickly as it appeared, and once Javier is finished, she corrals everyone and the equipment into the van. We settle back into our seats, and Taylor dumps the duffel bag onto the floor.
Javier cracks his neck. “Well, that went to shit.”
“This was never going to be easy.” Taylor removes her earpiece and tosses it to Javier, followed by the hummingbird cam. Javier gobbles up the discarded tech, returning it to a black case. “But the hard part is over.”
“The hard part being the fact that you annihilated a Lightbringer?” I ask.
“The hard part is the robbery.” I arch an eyebrow at Taylor. “It is. The human element is always the most unpredictable.”
