"I'm not going anywhere with you." My voice comes out steadier than I feel, and I'm grateful for that small mercy. I've had enough of being weak, of being the pawn everyone else moves around the board. "Tell Demeter she can rot in her sterile gardens."
His smile doesn't reach his eyes. "I wasn't asking."
He moves fast. Faster than someone his size should be able to move, and I realize with a cold wash of terror that he's enhanced. Cybernetic augments or genetic modification or both, the kind of edge that money can buy when you have as much of it as my mother does.
A stun-baton appears in his hand, crackling with blue-white energy that throws harsh shadows across his face. He swings it in a practiced arc meant to incapacitate, to drop me twitching and helpless at his feet so he can haul me back to the life I escaped.
Instinct takes over. My hand plunges into my jacket pocket, fingers closing around the small pouch of seeds I always carry. Sunflower, mostly. Some vine varietals. Things that grow fast and strong when I pour my power into them.
I throw them on the ground between us andpush.
The seeds explode into life with a violence that would terrify me if I had time to think about it. Vines erupt from between the grating, thick as cables, thorned and hungry and utterly wrong for any natural growth pattern. They whip toward him likestriking serpents, one of them wrapping around his wrist with enough force that bones creak.
He howls. Drops the stun-baton. It clatters across the floor, still sparking, throwing erratic light across the corridor.
I grab one of the vines bare-handed, shape it with touch and will into something more, something sharper. The thorns lengthen, harden, becoming more weapon than plant. A whip made of living wood and my own desperate fury.
"I said no."
I crack it at him. He dodges, fast and fluid, but not fast enough. The vine-whip catches him across the shoulder, tears through his jacket, draws blood that looks black in the stuttering light. His face twists with pain and rage and something else. Respect, maybe. Or surprise that the soft little flower-girl has teeth after all.
He reaches behind his back. When his hand comes forward again, it's holding a gun.
Not a stun weapon. Not something meant to incapacitate and retrieve. A real gun, compact and lethal and pointed directly at my chest with the kind of steady aim that says he knows how to use it.
My vines falter. The whip goes slack in my hands.
"Your mother would prefer you alive." His voice is cold, professional, the voice of a man just doing a job. "But dead still has value. The genetic samples alone would be worth the trip."
He thumbs off the safety. The click echoes like a death knell in the narrow space.
I'm going to die here. In this forgotten corridor, surrounded by scattered strawberries and the desperate growth I called into being. Haid will find my body and blame himself, and the people on this station will lose their Spring Queen, and my mother will harvest whatever pieces of me still have value and move on to the next weapon in her arsenal.
The thought fills me with rage so pure it burns away the fear.
I won't. Iwon'tlet it end like this, won't let her win, won't let all the people counting on me starve because some corporate spy put a bullet in me on her orders.
My power surges. Wild. Uncontrolled. The vines around us thicken, multiply, begin crawling up the walls with a speed that defies physics. Flowers bloom and die in seconds, their pollen filling the air with a golden haze. The metal floor buckles under the pressure of roots that have no business being strong enough to move steel.
The spy's eyes widen. His gun hand wavers slightly, tracking my movement as I stumble backward, trying to put distance between us even as my own power threatens to tear the corridor apart.
He steadies himself with the practiced ease of someone who's done this before, too many times to count. Takes a breath. Holds it. Adjusts his stance with minute precision, centering his weight, squaring his shoulders. The gun stops wavering. His aim becomes absolute, the barrel aligned perfectly with my chest, with my heart, with the exact spot that will end everything I am in a single instant.
His finger begins its slow, inexorable journey against the trigger. The pressure builds, the mechanism responding, the fraction of a second that separates me from oblivion shrinking with each passing heartbeat.
The shadows pooled behind him, formless, meaningless, just the natural darkness of the poorly-lit corridor, suddenlymove.
Not drift. Not shift with some trick of the light or play of perspective.
Move.
Not like something stepping into frame. Like the shadows themselves gain substance, weight, intention. They flow likeliquid darkness, condensing into a shape that towers over the spy, broad and lethal and utterly silent.
The spy must sense something. He starts to turn, to bring his gun around to face the new threat.
He's far, far too slow.
Haid steps out of the darkness as though he was born from it, as though those shadows are his native element and the light is just a courtesy he extends to lesser beings. His eyes glow with void energy, pure black sclera shot through with veins of purple that pulse in time with his heartbeat. His face is a death mask, beautiful and terrible and completely inhuman in its rage.
