Page 184 of Eight of Swords, Part Two

The warning comes too late.

A dense, localised explosion punches through the room, followed immediately by Dean’s scream. Kade turns towards the sound and finds him already on his knees, clutching an arm that ends in smoke, metal and too much red. What remains of the gun lies in pieces around him. Blood runs between his fingers and spatters steadily against the floor.

‘We need to move. There’s too many.’

Vasily’s whip, Lapsha, slices through the air again, expertly gripping and frying another Reset by the throat. He wields it like a second arm. ‘I agree.’

A dozen pour into the room at once. Only half fall when they’re shot. The others stagger beneath the impact and keep coming, climbing over the bodies dropped ahead of them without breaking stride. They move like a flood forced through a doorway, no hesitation, no attempt to find cover, no instinct towards preservation. Each of them is simply carrying the next wave deeper into the room.

No skill involved, just brute force. They can’t be bottlenecked.

‘Shit,’ Kade mutters, spinning around to launch an elbow into the mouth of the man coming up behind him, jaw breaking beneath the strike.

Another Reset reaches him before the body hits the ground.

Kade knocks the grabbing hand wide, steps inside the other man’s reach and rams the heel of his palm beneath his jaw, follows it with a knee hard enough to fold him, catches the gun slipping from his hand and fires twice into the man closing from the left.

An arm locks around Kade’s throat.

He drops his weight, drives his head into the face behind him and hooks one leg until the Reset pitches over his shoulder and lands flat on his back. Kade goes down with him, knee crushing into his chest, pulls out his own knife and buries it between the ribs, no chance for a second stab because someone grabs the back of his jacket. Kade spins with the momentum, knife arm swinging backwards… and stops just in time.

It’s Luca.

‘We’re moving!’ he tells Kade.

‘The entrance is blocked.’

‘Weirdo made a new one.’

There’s a very large hole in the wall that Luca’s team are guarding while Riley climbs through. Vasily and his people are killing the ones who already got through.

‘I’ll hold them off. You go,’ Kade tells Luca, but his friend hands him a better weapon and doesn’t budge.

‘Absolutely not.’

‘That’s an order!’

‘Fuck you, Motorkade,’ Luca intones, taking careful aim.

They need to keep the focus on this door so Riley can get away.

Kade knows that.

But fuck, he also knows this is a suicide mission.

If he gets killed, Riley will die.

And Luca is his friend.

‘Thirty seconds should be enough. Gimme a flashbang.’

They take cover after it’s tossed, both wheeling around to shoot whoever they can. Vasily yells something but Kade can’t hear it.

‘Well, shit, Lucozade,’ Kade says, tone light, hands nimble, mind locked in as he reloads the last of his bullets. ‘How many was that?’

‘At least eight,’ Luca crows, doing the same. ‘How many did—?’

A bullet bursts out through the right side of Luca’s face, exploding his cheek in a wet blossom of rose red that paints Kade’s own face to match.