“Sabra,” Jack gasped, pinned to the wall, eyes wide. “What—”

  All it would take to crush his lying throat was the smallest clench of her fist. Her body hummed with adrenaline, and notes of prophecy thread a song behind her eyes. She should have known it was him. She should have fucking known.

  She tossed Jack aside with enough force that he left a crack in the far wall and tumbled to the floor in a heap. He groaned, and tried to get up, but she was upon him, kicking his rifle to the far side of the room and grasping him by the throat again. She slammed him against the wall, and his hands grabbed at her armored wrist. Christ and Allah, he just didn’t know when to quit, did he?

  “Sabra,” Jack rasped. “I can explain—”

  “Oh, can you?” Sabra glanced to Kortanaer’s body, and the blood splattered across the far wall, the fragments of bone on his keyboard. Her HUD helpfully noted: injuries incompatible with human life.

  “Explain what, exactly? Why you’re here? Why you keep killing people? I needed him alive!” She drew him back, and slammed him against the wall again. Jack’s hands dropped to his side.

  “Pulling this shit in the middle of Geneva?! What is wrong with you?! After I saved your life?!”

  But it was more than that, and they both knew it. Jack Harper was the man who had shot her father. She could never forget it, nor forgive it. But as her father would have wanted, she had made peace with it. He had lived, after all, and Jack had done what he could to atone, had expressed remorse, had even appeared genuine. But that was all it was—appearances. She’d been lying to herself, and the results were obvious: two people, in black armor, with no known allegiances...

  But blowing up a fucking train station?!

  “Sabra,” he managed to get out. “Listen to me.”

  “Then, start talking.”

  “We have to— There’s no time—”

  “Oh, do not fuck with me, Jack.”

  He gritted his teeth. “Security will be here any second.”

  “Yeah? Then where’s Sam?”

  “She’s not—”

  Then, a third voice.

  “Put him down.”

  Firm and commanding, with the mechanical buzz of a helmet filter. It wasn’t anyone Sabra recognized, and it certainly wasn’t Sam. Sabra kept Jack pinned to the wall with one hand, and looked over her shoulder to regard the newcomer.

  Or newcomers. The two of them stood in the bedroom doorway in matching sets of black power armor—no iconography, no identifying marks. The Palatine suits she’d seen on Julian’s drone footage. Their visors, black and opaque, revealed nothing.

  “Friends of yours?” Sabra asked Jack.

  His eyes flitted to them, then back to her.

  “No,” he muttered.

  “Then I might owe you an apology.”

  “Kortanaer’s down,” said the other member of the pair. Another man, and younger than the first. Alpha and Beta seemed fitting enough as identifiers.

  “I can see that,” replied Alpha. “The both of you, identify yourselves.”

  Jack, glancing at her, shook his head. Sabra didn’t need his advice, but it was good to know they were on the same page. She lowered Jack to the floor.

  “I don’t have to tell you shit,” she replied.

  Beta chuckled. “Wow. Combative, isn’t she?”

  Alpha ignored him. “I highly suggest you reconsider that statement.”

  “Alright, reconsidering,” Sabra said, and took a step towards the pair. “Yeah, I still don’t have to tell you shit.”

  They weren’t cops, that much Sabra knew, not that it would’ve made her any more compliant. The blank black suits made it clear they weren’t members of the Helvetican Guard. She couldn’t think of any empowered group that went black on black. But the armor meant they had money, connections. Hadn’t Julian said something about an American PMC?

  Sabra rolled her shoulders out. “How do you want to play this, guys?”

  “You can start by telling us what happened here,” Alpha said. “We had business with Mister Kortanaer.”

  “Then you might want to find a medium.”

  Beta made a sound that might’ve been laughter. Alpha stepped into the bedroom, raising his voice: “Under section 218 of the Swiss Criminal Procedure Code, as it appears that the two of you have committed a felony, my associate and I now have the right to arrest you and deliver you to police custody.”

  “Yeah? And I’ve got the right to deliver my boot to your ass,” Sabra replied, and cracked her knuckles, shifting her footing. “But we can dance, sure. Take your best shot, guys, because you’ll only get the one.”

  Alpha stood between her and the way out. The only other exit was via the three-story drop to the garden below. She understood their confidence—it was two-on-one, Jack was outside his weight class without a suit of his own—but they didn’t know her record, or her capabilities.

  “Hold up,” Beta said. “I’ve got something here. I’ve just finished running the serial number of her Palatine. It matches a suit that went missing from the Asclepion production facility about six months ago. Huh, it’s rejecting the lockdown code. Looks like she nuked the firmware.”

  Yeah, because she learned from her mistakes.

  Sabra leaped to attack, and Alpha intercepted her charge. She’d seen how the fight would open, twisted his attempted grab into a grapple, didn’t manage to shift him, and had the momentary realization of, oh, right, I’ve never faced someone in their own set of power armor before.

  Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

  They stood and traded. He had good, viper-quick combinations, but it didn’t matter when she’d seen them coming, when she heeded the half-remembered song behind her eyes, and deflected the ones that might actually get through. Really, the fight was pointless. Blueshift may’ve criticized her for not seeing far enough ahead, but a few seconds was all she needed.

  Her left hand found an opening, grabbed Alpha by the helmet and slammed him into the bookshelf to her right. He bounced back, into her haymaker, and she grabbed him, introduced his helmet to her knee, and then kicked him back, leaving a dent in his chest plate. Beta had vanished, and she looked for him or Jack, and then the world went sideways as her second opponent came through the wall—just like she would have done.

  His knee crashed into the soft armor of her abdomen, and she beat him around the helmet, followed with an uppercut that knocked him on his ass, just in time for Alpha to shoulder-charge her through another set of rooms. He caught her with a quick one-two-three, and a knee, and she put him through a bathroom sink. Beta, leaping over him, was already throwing punches. Sabra grinned.

  Now, it was a proper fight.

  Her adrenaline spiked, her blood calling for action, to unleash the lioness. But the problem was that she wasn’t sure how. She knew she’d drawn upon it, dove deep into the currents, to face down Monkey, and she’d almost drowned. Perhaps she could not bend the arc of history, not yet, not without a repeat of the previous evening...

  But she could sure as hell tilt it.

  The fight went through another wall, and back into Kortanaer’s bedroom. The moments of insight were slipping away from her, the currents leading into more places where she had to take a hit. A flying kick from Beta, a haymaker from Alpha that caused her HUD to flicker. Christ and Allah, did they have to be so coordinated? And just as she thought that, Alpha straight kicked her through the window.

  The jets in the back of her armor fired just before she hit the ground, turning the impact from something debilitating to merely jarring. Sabra climbed to her feet as her two opponents landed before her, and started circling her like a pair of wolves, snowflakes drifting down. Her breathing was harsh and hard inside her helmet. They were starting to press her, and she couldn’t draw her trump card—so, she’d settle on something else, the other advantage she had yet to press.

  Both sides were pulling their punches. They, because they wanted to know who she was and what she knew. And her, because she’d rather not kill them. Someone would break first, and it sure as hell wasn’t going to be her.

  Better you than me.

  The wolves came at her together. Sabra boosted her strength, stepped into Beta’s charge, swept his legs, and hurled him with all of her might—he crashed into a marble plinth, a bust tumbling to the ground and shattering. Alpha was already upon her, throwing combinations that put her on the defensive. She deflected one, heeding the currents, and unleashed all of her strength into a haymaker cross into the center of his visor.

  It might as well have been a gunshot—it sent him reeling, bowed over and stumbling. Fragments of his visor tumbled free, bouncing off the polished stones beneath him. Then, Alpha pulled himself up, and turned to face her. What was left of his visor flickered—she’d punched maybe half of it away, and he’d caught much of the shrapnel in his face. He didn’t seem bothered. Maybe he’d had worse: his left eye was a prosthetic.

  “I’m done screwing around,” Sabra said. “Pack your shit up and go, or I’ll fucking kill you.”

  Alpha frowned, baring his teeth. “Two, I’ve lost comms,” he said, but he didn’t take his eyes of her. “Repeat your last.”

  “Not opposed to taking the offer,” Beta called. “She’s giving us a run for our money, and I’d rather not get my clock cleaned. You good?”

  “She’s empowered—her reflexes are off the chart.”

  “And she’s wearing a stolen Palatine? Well, fantastic.”

  “It’s fine. Backup’s inbound. T-minus two mike. All we have to do is keep her pinned for a little longer. I’m going blindsight.”

  Nothing happened. Beta stood up, but did not advance. Well, his boss had made his choice. Sabra pumped her arms, closed the gap, threw out a quick one-two—and Alpha’s uppercut crashed straight into her helmet.

  Her head snapped back, and she went evasive. Deflected, parried. But his fists found gaps and slipped past. Sabra only realized she’d utterly lost momentum when she realized she was reduced to blocking, and not even that as Alpha’s next move was to throw her through a stone bench, and she tumbled, churning up the lawn. She hadn’t even landed one strike. Christ and Allah, she wasn’t sure she’d even thrown one.

  “What the fuck?”

  “Yeah,” Beta called. “It’s creepy as shit, huh?”

  Sabra rolled to her feet, ran to the broken bench, snatched up a chunk of masonry and hurled it at Alpha. He slipped past it like he’d seen it coming. What the hell was this? She stepped back, kept her distance. She had the range advantage from longer arms, sure, but it didn’t matter—at this point, she needed another pair just to hold him off and regain momentum.

  Alpha broke into a spring and leapt at her—his sweeping cross, bolstered by a burst from his jets, knocked her into a tree. He was on her in a second and each strike came with a burst from his suit’s jets to hit that much harder. It was a neat trick, one she’d have to figure out. If she got out of here.

  If he didn’t beat her to death.

  For every blow she managed to block or deflect, it was like two more got through. Her armor was beginning to fail—yellow lights burst to life on her HUD, some flipping red. It was bullshit. It was all bullshit. What was the point of this, of Blueshift’s lessons, of anything? What was the fucking point of her precognition if it didn’t obey her? She was not going to lose. Not like this. Not now.

  Not ever.

  Something changed, yet nothing did. Her awareness rippled out from her, and plunged inward. An awareness of her heart, the paralyzing moment between relaxation and contraction. The split between tick and tock, the gap between now and then, the line between life and death. The snowflakes fell around her, dancing in a pattern that was so obvious she was astounded she’d only gleaned it just now. The pattern was there in the snowflakes as it was there in the currents and in the stars, and in her opponent—as above, so below. She had been here before, straddling the apocalyptic terminator, and all she had to do was choose.

  Ah, Sabra thought, and remembered thinking.

  Here we go.

  She caught her opponent’s fist, forced him back, and threw out a kick so high that it would have popped what was left of his helmet into his jaw had he not seen it coming. Something reached her ears about a system going haywire. She didn’t know what that meant, but knew she would soon.

  Beta joined the brawl then, striking her from behind, driving her to one knee. It didn’t matter. She held her ground, fighting from disadvantage, and divided her strikes between the pair with the rhythm of a remembered melody. It was there in her blood, in her bones: victory everlasting, and a lioness never bowed to wolves.

  Her fists weren’t enough. She needed a weapon, and she found one. A metal stake of black iron. She tore it from the ground, lashed Beta with it, and then swept his legs on the back swing. As he fell, she turned and tossed the stake up, caught it and hurled it like a javelin at Alpha.

  It punched through his right shoulder. He staggered, reaching to pull it free, and Sabra pushed through, bowled him over, and buried the stake into the ground. He didn’t even cry out. Distantly, Sabra figured she should respect that.

  Then, it all fell away from her, and she was herself again. Sweating, trembling, aching. She steadied out her breathing, and waited for the last of the currents to recede.

  “So,” she said, “Who the fuck are you two?”

  Someone descended, thrusters cutting out, and landed heavily. Sabra turned to face her next opponent, and her momentum stalled out. The angled planes of her armor, the bare arms...

  “Christ and Allah,” Revenant said, striding toward them. “I think I’m about to pop a heat sink. All of you, stand down immediately. And that goes double for you, Defiant.”

  She entered their ruined section of garden and nothing about her changed—not her bearing, not her voice, not her face. Sabra opened her mouth to say something, but mortification bit down on her tongue for her. She didn’t know what was going on, but she knew she’d never won an argument against Revenant.

  Her opponent, still impaled, asked: “You know this monster?” Through his cracked and broken visor, his facial expression made it clear he was as incredulous as she was.

  Revenant glanced down at him. Her expression betrayed nothing as she drew the stake from his shoulder and tossed it aside.

  “She’s my girlfriend,” she said, and sighed—actually sighed. “So, monster or not, I’d really appreciate it if the three of you could stop beating the shit out of each other.”