Total pages in book: 82
Estimated words: 78507 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 393(@200wpm)___ 314(@250wpm)___ 262(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 78507 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 393(@200wpm)___ 314(@250wpm)___ 262(@300wpm)
“There’s a spare bike in Bay 13,” he says.
That’s it. No lecture about carelessness, or needing to be careful. No big long guilt-inducing spiel about how I’m not grateful for the opportunities I’ve been given, like the academy tutors always gave.
I go out to Bay 13, where the loaders are stacking the panniers with deliveries, and I interface with the arm unit that has a glowing map of Eclipse on it, with the optimal route lined in yellow, and dots where the deliveries go.
I get on the bike, gun it, and start my day. First delivery comes in three minutes under target. I check the arm band, and see that I’ve been awarded three extra credits on my account. Not only do I get the thrill of recklessness, I get rewarded for it too. I grin broadly, and head out again. I’m being very careful to keep my thoughts on work, and to not at all think about Rafe, or Kirin, or Einar, all of whom will be angry at me for this. Maybe not Kirin. He’s not as serious as the other two. I think he actually gets it.
“Here you go,” I say as I hand off another package. “Have a D2G day!”
“Fuck you, bitch.”
People in Eclipse are known for being rude, but I’ve never encountered anybody who seemed pissed off that their package was on time. I look up from my arm band, confused.
It takes me a second to realize that this isn’t actually a standard delivery. I’ve driven into yet another trap. Not one set by my mates, but one set by a street gang interested in taking my cargo.
There are six people standing around me, all young males, all armed with cobbled together weapons of various kinds. Someone has welded a sword to a handgun. I can’t imagine how that functions. Badly, I suspect.
“Get off the bike,” their leader says.
“I can’t. I’ve already lost one bike, and the paperwork for using two is likely to…”
I don’t get to finish the sentence before I am roughly hauled from the bike by three men. They throw me on the ground and one of them kicks me in the side, the same place I crashed the other day. A shock of pain rushes through me, very quickly followed by rage. Not hot rage, the kind that makes you do insane things, but cold rage, the kind that makes you do insane things in a very calculated manner.
“Strip her. Let’s see what else we get to unwrap.”
I let them take my outer clothes off, because I don’t want them getting damaged when I turn feral. So these filthy strangers peel the Delivery 2 Go leathers away, slide my boots from my feet, and yank my helmet off.
“She’s cute! I didn’t know they got cute delivery… arrgghhh!”
The scream is due to the fact that as soon as my D2G livery is no longer in danger, I snapped into my wolf form and began destroying them. Limbs snap between my jaws. Blood flows into my mouth. One by one, I tear them apart without mercy, and with great enjoyment. My animal self has no compunction about killing. It’s not like when I hit a man with my sword and a bit of him fell off and I panicked. Wolves don’t feel guilt.
Later, I might feel bad, but for now, all I feel is right.
Six men on one woman is an unfair fight, but six men against a wolf are mere appetizers.
When the threats are dealt with, and the concrete runs red with the blood of those who dared accost a delivery rider, I slide back into my human form.
Their blood feels disgusting on my feet. Sticky, warm, and all too biological. I try to avoid looking at what’s left of their faces, but the human eye is always drawn to expressions, and right now I see six very dead expressions.
A woman starts screaming.
This time it’s not me. I think she’s the girlfriend of one of the men who used to be intact and alive, and is now neither one of those things. The sounds she makes are wild, incoherent, and terrified.
I let her scream as I pull on my uniform. I have more deliveries to make.
CHAPTER 19
Einar
“Where is she?” I ask Rafe the question. He promised he wasn’t going to take his eye off her for even a moment, but somehow she has managed to give him the slip. I’m not surprised. Running is what she does. She’s very good at it. She’s clearly read the chapter on evasion in my book a hundred times or more. At this point, she may as well write her own.
“She went to work,” he says. “I’m sorry. She talked me into it. I realized that we don’t actually have any right to treat her like a prisoner. If she wants to be a delivery driver, there’s no reason to stop her.”