Of Bone and Steel and Other Soft Materials Page 3

Lab was to Tynda, hunting just to survive until she’d discovered she could scavenge for wire and scrap to barter for what she needed in the city.

  She’d only ever killed one man. The man who’d tried to rape her on her first night in Tynda. She had his cycle now, thinking it, and his life, were fair payment for his crime.

  “It’s so dark,” Toma whispered through the crack as Ryska let the plywood shift back into place. “How will you see?”

  “I can’t,” Ryska said. “Shhh. I’ll be back for you.”

  Freed of having to keep track of the boy, Ryska slipped out of their sanctuary room, carefully mapping out in her memory where she’d left Toma. She crossed the next room, heading back to the hallway and only the shuffle of feet warned her as one of the men stepped through the door, the white blob of his electric torch blinking into her sensor range.

  Ryska dove straight at the dark red shape, slashing the torch with her pick-axe. These men might be bigger, stronger and more armed than she, but within the deep darkness of the interior buildings, Ryska had an advantage and she intended to use to its fullest.

  The torch crashed to the ground, the white flickering and then going out. This man reacted better than the last had, leaping back and bringing his rifle up. Ryska dropped down and rolled to the side as the Kalashnikov crackled loudly. For a moment her sensors were overwhelmed by the close, loud noise and too-fast-to-track bullets that shook the air as they passed. She wanted to curl her arms around her head and scream.

  The flash passed and the world resolved itself back into shades of blue. Ryska forced herself still, watching the red shape creep forward, his breath hissing in her ears. He smelled like sweat and motor oil and his breath carried the bitterness of tabac use on its puffing vibrations as they tickled her whiskers. He toed the area in front of him, searching for his torch, coming within a few feet of her.

  Ryska swung her pick-axe into where she thought his knee should be and was rewarded with a scream as he crumpled forward. A sharp blow to his head stopped the next scream and the scent of blood filled her nostrils. She gripped his coat and pulled his body out of the doorway, listening carefully for signs that another was on the way.

  Boots running down the hallway. Two sets. Govno. Two men. Ryska let her training take over and pushed away the fear. She’d killed one. Now she must kill two more. She could almost hear the Trainers’ voices in her head telling her that if she wanted dinner she’d have to find the bunny. Just a bunny. Just a little blood. Dinner will be good. You can find it. Use your sensors. Let your mind tell the muscles what to do.

  The man had dropped his rifle and it showed up in her sensors in a helpful green color. The programs in her control panel remembered her training, even if she fought to forget. Skull still ringing, she remembered to command to the sensors to identify and dampen their reaction to gunfire.

  Ryska plucked up the rifle and swung back to the door as the white of a torch appeared, trailing the red shapes of the men. Her finger found the trigger as the stock rested heavy against her shoulder. Gregr had always told her he found guns easy because he just thought of them as a game. Just a game. Just a bunny. If you aren’t the hunter, you’re the rabbit.

  The white shape of the torch flashed into the doorway and Ryska stepped out, opening fire. She heard the bullets hitting the drywall with quick thunks as she blindly sprayed across the area with the red shapes. Then the bullets found bodies and the sound changed, wet thwacks that a sighted ear might not discern. A man cursed loudly and she stepped further into the hallway, firing another burst in his direction. The white blob blinked out. Both red shapes were on the ground, one unmoving, the other groaning and shaking.

  Ryska moved cautiously forward. The yellow haze helpfully parted around the men, telling her that they were obstructions in her path and making them look like islands of blood in a sulfur sea. She gagged as the hot smell of ruptured intestines hit her. The man still groaning was gut-shot. She pulled the trigger and fired another burst into his body. It’s the merciful thing to do.

  Stillness. Ryska dropped the rifle, feeling from its weight that the clip was almost spent. She found her pick-axe, a lighter blue, contoured shape on the deep blue of the floor, and put it away in her belt.

  No sound of movement or life came from down the hallway. Toma had said six men took him. She’d seen only four within her sensor range out in the square.

  If she was lucky, the firefight with Toma’s unfortunate rescuers had taken out at least two of the six. Which meant one more man, somewhere. She licked her cold lips and shook the tension out of her hands, torn between grabbing Toma now and heading as quickly as possible for her cycle, and hunting down the other man. She didn’t want to kill anyone else if she didn’t have to, but she didn’t want an armed man at her back, waiting to ambush her.

  Ambush. The stairs. She sucked in her breath and crept forward, back down the hall toward where the metal steps were. That’s where she’d ambush. Cover the retreat of the men, prevent the boy from slipping away. Gregr and Misha would be so proud of her for thinking like her enemy, for remembering her training.

  For remembering them.

  It isn’t you I wanted to forget, it isn’t you I shove away. I just want silence. I want peace. There was no one there to see the words she mouthed, her fingers absently tapping out the code on her thigh.

  She hovered at the entrance to the steps, but they were too long for her to sense the full length. Nothing moved that her whiskers could pick up and the yellow haze pointed the way as unobstructed. No tripwires, no broken glass to make noise, nothing that looked like a quick trap set to catch a little boy and his mysterious helper.

  Ryska felt a warning twinge as her control panel notified her with a sharp vibration that it was going to need to shut down and collect energy for its battery soon. With all the running and fighting she’d been doing, it would charge pretty quickly, but her sensors would be down, only the touch ones up from her whiskers, no helpful overlay or color mapping to show her the world. She hadn’t run it down to nothing in a couple years, but Ryska figured on having ten minutes left, if she was lucky.

  She slipped down the stairs carefully, lifting and setting each foot down with minimal noise. Her footfalls sounded hellishly loud in her ears, but her rational mind knew that her hearing was far better than any sighted man’s.

  There. Red flickered in her sensor range through the pale blue opening into the bottom hallway. The man was lying in wait, hovering behind the protection of the wall. Slowly Ryska slid her satchel off her body with one hand as she pulled out her pick-axe.

  The rustling of her bag drew his attention and Ryska threw the sack of wire through the doorway before the man could flick on his torch and expose her. As she’d hoped, he turned the light on the bag, following the sound of movement. Time enough for her to leap forward off the last few steps and tackle him.

  He’d half-turned toward her, quicker than she expected and her body slammed into a raised rifle. The metal dug hard into her ribs, knocking the air out of her but her bodyweight and momentum was enough to bring them both crashing backward.

  Ryska tried to hit him with the small axe, but she was too tangled, too close. The man started a stream of curses as she rolled away from him and went for the white blob of the torch instead, kicking it in a spinning blur down the hallway until it spun away, out of her sensor range.

  “Sooka, little cow,” the man swore.

  Ryska lay still, not daring to move or even breathe as the man stood, rifle ready. Her ribs ached and she tasted blood where his shoulder had shoved her lip into her teeth, tearing it.

  Come toward me, she willed him. Nothing is here. Just darkness. Come for your light.

  The man fired a burst down the hallway, the bullets flicking by a meter above her head. Then he seemed to stop and listen. Ryska lay flat and breathed shallowly, her heart pounding like an angry fist, so loud that even this man must hear it.

  He took a step forward. Listened. Step. Listen. A
nother step. Ryska tensed, her pick-axe ready. She shoved away everything but this moment. She didn’t want to be the rabbit.

  The red shape stepped closer. In range. She swept up into sitting position, her legs striking out to tangle his forward foot as she swung the pick-axe through the haze of yellow and blue.

  The man screamed and brought the rifle down, cracking her hard in the head, but she swung again and shoved herself away, her ears ringing as the control panel pinged again and shut off. The world went dark but the man was in range of her whiskers, the thin, slippery graphene telling his position as he brokenly tried to crawl away and raise his rifle.

  Ryska threw herself onto the man, using her sore body to crush the rifle against his chest. Her whiskers brushed his face as she brought the handle of the pick-axe against the man’s throat. For a moment, she could almost see his features with the brush of the whiskers. His face felt strangely uneven, his beard prickly. She hadn’t touched a human face since the Lab.

  Almost with regret, Ryska brought her bodyweight down into the axe handle and crushed the man’s throat. Blood sprayed from his mouth, sticking to her cheeks and audibly spattering her goggles. He tried to throw her off and then something cracked in his throat and he stopped moving.

  Four dead. Ryska crawled to her feet, tucking