Page 2 of Eight of Swords, Part Two

Blaire looks over her shoulder.

The others doubled back. They’re behind her.

They knew what she’d do.

And they counted on it.

Four ahead, two behind, she’s trapped.

She freezes, her mind racing through possible outcomes.

None are good.

‘Ne me laisse pas mourir enchaînée,’ she whispers to the rain. Blaire knows they want to take her alive. It would be a catastrophic failure on her part to let them.

‘Be careful,’ the leader says, his accent a bastardised mess of British Isles and diluted American. They all speak the same over time.

They become the same.

Guns trained on her chest, they move in.

Blaire closes her eyes.

And the rain tells tales.

So she waits.

Calm.

Quiet.

Invisible.

Then gunfire erupts. There comes a loud and violent breaking that she suspects is bone giving way to brute strength, and several other gunshots followed by a distinctive whipcrack she’d know anywhere.

The Moroz Front, and the man who leads them.

‘Bee?’ he intones, gently tipping her chin up with wet fingertips.

When she opens her eyes, the Resets are gone.

Two are dead.

The others fled.

Resets will cut and run to preserve rank fidelity and numbers every single time. The concept of no man left behind does not exist for them. They are ruthless pragmatists without honour or moral code.

A Hydra does not weep for fallen heads, after all.

Blaire glances around. ‘Thank you, darling. That was rather close.’

Vasily Sorrenko is holding an umbrella. He doesn’t like to get wet.

‘Rather close?’ he echoes, scoffing indulgently before instructing his people to take the two dead back to command base for tests. He, unlike Blaire, has never given up on trying to design an override for the Resonyx compound delivered through the black cuffs. ‘Was it him?’

She shakes her head. ‘We should go.’

‘Not on foot,’ he warns. Vasily strongly dislikes Blaire’s tendency to walk absolutely everywhere when he has spent so long designing systems of transportation that render them almost invisible, even to direct pursuers.