Total pages in book: 104
Estimated words: 104141 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 521(@200wpm)___ 417(@250wpm)___ 347(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 104141 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 521(@200wpm)___ 417(@250wpm)___ 347(@300wpm)
His body folded forward and his rifle hit the floor.
At high speed, Hiro dropped and slid along the tile like a man sliding into home during a World Series game.
“Hiro’s coming!” A Scale raised his gun and pointed at him.
I hurried forward, shot him in the forehead, and got the one next to him in the eye.
Hiro was already at the rolling bed. In the next second, he caught one of the legs.
The whole thing pivoted with him. The wheels jumped. The dead patient slid sideways across the mattress. His IV line tore free.
The man hit the floor.
Hiro flipped the bed onto its side toward the Scales. The metal frame slammed against the tile and the mattress folded against the rails and the whole thing became a wall of steel and foam between him and the corridor full of guns.
I was right behind him.
One of the Scales panicked. “What do we do? She said not to kill the Dragon!”
“But they’re going to kill us!”
Bullets started a half-second later.
They came in a wild scattered burst—not aimed kills, not even good cover fire. Warning rounds. Bullets meant to scare us. They ate the wall behind us. They sparked off the metal frame of the bed. They chipped tile in a long ragged line three feet over our heads.
When we got the bed a few feet closer to them, I rose up over the top of the bed and shot the closest one through his open mouth.
He had been yelling something. I never heard what. The round took the back of his skull out and he went down with the word still half-formed on his tongue.
A round took the top of my ear before I dropped back down.
Fuck!
A bright clean line of heat seared me. Then warmth ran down my jaw. I touched it with the back of my gun hand and my knuckles came away wet and red.
Hiro sneered at me. “Be fucking careful.”
“I was careful!”
“Half an inch lower and the round would have been in your brain!”
“Got it.” I exhaled once through my teeth and rose up again to shoot the next one through the eye.
Another burst of bullets came in.
“Cover me.” Hiro vaulted over the bed, flying in the air and slicing necks, one by fucking one. So fast that I feared I might shoot him as I got the others.
What the fuck?! And you told me to be careful?
Blood sprayed as men fell from his blade or my bullets.
Then, one of their rounds caught Hiro mid-vault.
No!
I saw it the way one saw lightning—after the fact, in a flash, before the thunder. A spray of red snapped across my brother’s left shoulder as he twisted between two men and stabbed one in the heart.
The fabric of Hiro’s shirt opened in a long shallow seam.
He landed on the other side of the newly dead men and kept moving as if the bullet had not happened, but I saw the wet shine of him and the torn cloth, and my chest seized for the half-second it took me to confirm that he was still on his feet.
I reached Hiro as he wiped the blade on the shirt of a man he had killed.
His chest was rising and falling fast. His hair was wet with someone else's blood. There was a smear of red along the side of his jaw that was not his and a long stripe of plaster dust across the shoulder of his shirt from a bullet that had missed him by less than the width of a hand.
He met my eyes.
I met his.
For one breath, neither of us spoke.
We’re good.
Dead bodies were spread out on the floor around us.
Hiro spat on the floor. “I counted twelve.”
“The other four must have run off.”
Sound erupted behind us.
We turned that way.
Reo and my men raced to us, and my Roar didn’t look happy at all. “Why didn’t you wait for us?”
I gestured to where he’d come from. “What was down there?”
“Just fire and people burning to death.” Reo cocked his gun. “Apparently, the action is here.”
“It is.” Hiro winked. “Glad you could keep up.”
Reo sneered at him and scowled at me. “The both of you get behind me.”
I blinked, but did as I was told.
Hiro snickered. “We were just trying to get a warm-up before the battle tomorrow.”
I checked my gun. “Fuck. Empty.”
One of my men handed me one of theirs.
I took the safety off. “Now let’s find Kiko.”
Chapter twenty-eight
Ruined
Kenji
We rounded the corner.
Reo took the lead. My Scales fanned around him in a tight diamond—two ahead with rifles sweeping the corridor in slow arcs, one at each shoulder watching the side doors, one at our rear watching the way we had come.
The formation moved as a single body.
Hiro and I remained safely within it.
Blood dripped from my ear.
The corridor curved. The smoke was thicker here. The east wing's fire had climbed somewhere into the walls, and the heat was starting to push along the ceiling in slow heavy waves.