Automatic gunfire ripped and roared through the bone-speakers’ cavernous chamber. Caseless rounds ricocheted from naked steel and thudded into the massive armoured dome in the centre of the room. Stray bullets went wide, pinging off the floor of living metal, caught in the tangle of walkways and staircases, filling the air with flying lead. Booted footfalls rang out from above as the squad of Covenanters spread wide. The girl — Misane — screamed like a wounded goat, eyes wide with fresh terror, crammed into the junction where a bank of computer consoles met the floor.

  Elpida was pinned down.

  “—there, there! She’s gone behind the cogitator bank—”

  “—Bassa, go left, go left—”

  “You go left, I’ve already got an angle!”

  “Fuck you, I can’t see her!”

  “—bitch was armed, keep frosty, go slow—”

  “Screw slow!”

  “Wasn’t there another one?! I saw another person! I think there’s another person down there with—”

  “Fire that fucking weapon, Pranav! Don’t just stand there! Pull the trigger”

  “Who’s got the launcher? Did we lose the launcher?”

  “Tersi had it! Tersi, get up here, splat that fucker—”

  “I can’t see her!”

  “Go left!”

  The Covenanters were all shouting over each other. No leader, no clear orders, no chain of command. If Elpida had met this undisciplined rabble on level ground, she might have stood a chance. She could have shattered their morale by inflicting one or two quick, decisive, brutal casualties. But the Covenanters had entered the chamber high up, with perfect angles to suppress anything down on the lower floors, and very good sightlines on all the available cover. Their lack of cohesion and competent command was little impediment when they held the high ground, and Elpida had no way to dislodge them. In a few moments the Covenanter militia would flank her position. She would be wide open.

  Elpida shoved her heavy pistol back into her ballistic vest; she needed weight of fire, not miniature shaped charges. She drew the lightweight machine pistol, yanked the suppressor off the end of the barrel under her opposite armpit, then looped the weapon back into the makeshift harness around her left shoulder and forearm. The motion left her open to Misane, still pinned beneath her, but the girl was too shocked and confused to take the opportunity.

  Elpida stuck the machine pistol over the top of her cover, aiming up and to the right — to the Covenanters’ left. She pumped the trigger for three short bursts.

  The machine pistol shivered and twitched — brrrrt-brrrrt-brrrt — spitting a cloud of low-velocity reaction-mass shavings to chew at the underside of the walkways.

  Two Covenanters shouted. One swore. Somebody hit the deck with a clatter of gear, but no scream of pain.

  “—bitch fucking winged me—”

  “You’re fine, you’re fine, get up—”

  “Push on, left! I’ve got her pinned! Come on, before she shifts it! Left, go left!”

  The gunfire intensified, pouring down on Elpida’s narrow wedge of cover. The steel plates of the computer housing shuddered and shook with the impacts. She’d bought herself several seconds, nothing more.

  Elpida had two choices. One — use Misane as a human shield. She could shout that she had one of the Covenanters’ own down here, a child, unarmed, alive. Then she could drag Misane to her feet and put the pistol to the girl’s head. Could she back all the way across the room without Misane trying to escape, or one of the Covenanters deciding to be a hero? Doubtful. Even if Elpida had been willing to bluff that hard, the plan was a non-starter. The Covenanters had opened fire with Misane standing right there in the first place; Elpida had no guarantee they wouldn’t shoot through the girl just to kill a pilot. Some of them probably saw it as a necessary sacrifice.

  Which left only option two. Elpida had no time to weigh the implications.

  “Lykke!” she shouted. “Cover me!”

  Elpida had been certain that the Necromancer was standing out in the open, several feet away, giggling and gaping, ignoring the bullets — but suddenly Lykke’s voice was right next to Elpida’s ear.

  “Oh, zombie,” she purred — a soft, slippery, sibilant whisper, somehow clearer than the storm of gunfire, the pounding of Elpida’s own heart, and the birdlike screaming of Misane pinned beneath her. “I thought you’d never ask!”

  A vortex of bladed bone and bleeding meat erupted upward in Elpida’s peripheral vision, crashing into the underside of a walkway, seeping through the tiny holes in the mesh like blood-frothed mist.

  The Covenanters started to scream.

  “The fuck?! Where’d that come from?! Where’d that come—”

  “Artturi, Artturi, down! Down! Get back from it, get—”

  “City’s end, what is that?!”

  “Back up, back up!”

  Lykke cackled, shrieking with joy. “Stand still, little puppets, so I can pluck your flowers raw!”

  Gunfire went wide, chewing into the meat of the walls with wet slapping sounds, bouncing off the ancient yellowed bone.

  Elpida’s position was no longer under fire.

  Misane was still screaming, hands clutching her own face, eyes wide white pools in blood-stained skin. Elpida hit her across the cheek with the machine pistol — just a tap, not hard enough to leave a bruise, only to shock her out of the screaming. Elpida didn’t have any other options; even if she’d not been working with her right forearm missing, she could not have gotten the girl up and on her feet and dragged her clear. Besides, there was no point.

  “Stay here and stay down!” Elpida screamed in Misane’s face. “When it’s over, shout that you’re one of them, shout for them not to shoot!”

  She couldn’t spare a moment to see if Misane understood.

  Elpida scrambled off the girl, bolted out of cover, and sprinted across the floor of the chamber, back the way she’d come. She had to gain height, as quick as she could. Lykke was an excellent distraction, but if one of those Covenanters realised their prey was getting away, Elpida might draw opportunistic fire.

  She hit the nearest set of stairs at a dead run, then vaulted them five at a time, her long legs carrying her to the top in a few bounds. Her shoulder blades itched as she scrambled along the walkway, but she didn’t look back — a pointless temptation at this moment in a firefight. Automatic gunfire spat and screeched on the other side of the chamber, splitting Lykke’s cackling laughter with staccato interruption.

  “—get it off me, get it off me! Get it off—”

  “Down, down, I can’t get an angle!”

  “What the fuck is this?! What is the fuck is that!? Where’s the launcher!? Give me that—”

  “Little piggies, little piggies!” Lykke crooned — voice cracking and hoarse. “I’m going to eat the crispy skin off your slow cooked corpses! Now come here and let me flay you! Come! Here!”

  Elpida hit the end of the walkway and vaulted up another set of stairs, almost level with the Covenanters now. The blast door she’d entered through wasn’t far, one more level upward. When she got there she could drop prone and crawl, well out of sight—

  Bullets suddenly rained down onto the metal around Elpida, rebounding and ricocheting from the naked steel. Somebody held down a trigger, filling the air with full-auto fire, mag-dumping at her back.

  “She’s getting away! The pilot, she’s getting away!”

  Elpida ducked and dived, through the railing on the side of the stairs. She landed hard, winded for a moment, behind a row of baroque machines wired into the living flesh of the city, a tangle of sweeping steel curves and massive cables. Bullets chewed into polymer housing and bounced off reinforced metals. A delicate crystal disk two arm-spans across shattered overhead, scattering broken fragments down onto Elpida’s hair. Gunfire broke a complex articulated arm, sending the mechanism crashing to the floor. Flecks of Telokopolan bone exploded from bullet impacts several feet up.

  Elpida quickly checked herself for wounds, but she’d gotten lucky. Her back felt bruised, up by the left shoulder; the ballistic vest must have stopped a low-powered round.

  She was pinned down again.

  Elpida stuck her machine pistol through a gap in her cover and pulled the trigger three times — brrrt-brrrt-brrrrrrrrt. Incoming fire lessened for a moment. She scrambled six feet to her right and peered around a corner of machine housing.

  The dozen Covenanters were regrouping; Lykke couldn’t even touch them.

  The Necromancer seemed to be experiencing the same simulated impotence she had suffered against the lone Covenanter, back in the memory of the cadre’s quarters. She could menace them with hooked claws of serrated bone and loom over them as a crashing wave of roiling meat; she could dance between them like burning red sunlight made of viscera and gleaming teeth; she could draw their fire and frustrate their aim and ruin what little semblance of unit cohesion they had. But she couldn’t touch them. It was as if her body was surrounded by a magnetic repellent, always allowing the Covenanter gunmen to scramble out of the way at the last second. Bullets passed harmlessly through her warped body, bouncing off the walkways and walls behind; the Covenanters screamed and panicked, their sorry excuse for a formation badly disrupted. But the lack of actual contact had left several of them free to ignore their comrades and advance toward Elpida.

  And Elpida was still a level short of the blast doors.

  “Lykke!” she shouted. “Lykke, keep them off me! Lykke!”

  But the Necromancer wasn’t listening. Lykke had grown visibly frustrated; the vortex of meat and bone was shrinking and collapsing into itself, folding back to reveal Lykke’s slender limbs and stained white dress, her blossoming bruises and a little pout on her lips. She stamped her feet and clenched her fists as bullets ripped through her, pale flesh reforming and reknitting over and over.

  “This isn’t fair!” she screamed at the Covenanters, red in the face. “You’re supposed to die! You aren’t even real! You’re simulations and you’re humiliating me in front of the one zombie who matters! I hate you I hate you I hate youuuuuu!”

  Lykke’s tantrum did not impress.

  The handful of advancing Covenanters opened fire again, popping out of cover and darting forward along the walkways and gantries.

  Elpida ducked back behind cover and sprayed with her machine pistol twice more, left then right. Covenanters grunted and shouted and hit the deck, finding their own cover — but then they opened up again, forcing Elpida to keep her head down as bullets pounded the steel at her back.

  “Keep her there, keep her covered! I’m almost on the right!”

  “What about the fucking thing back there?!”

  “Silico trick! Bullshit! Not even doing anything! She brought it here, take her out and it’ll leave!”

  “Get up on that gantry! Mazuo, Maz! Get up there, you dozy bastard! You’ll have an angle on—”

  Elpida pointed her pistol and unloaded on a ladder which led to a gantry on her right. She heard somebody crash to the floor, swearing and shouting. But bullets were still landing all around her, whizzing over her head, keeping her pinned. She had perhaps ten or fifteen seconds until the Covenanter militia had her flanked.

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  She eyed the top of the open blast door, one level up. If she vaulted the barriers at the edge of this level of walkways, she might just make it up there. She would take a few bullets in the process, likely in her back and legs. The ballistic vest would protect her vitals. She had no choice.

  She gave the Covenanters a last chance.

  Elpida shouted: “None of this is real! We’re in a simulation! Cease fire, cease fire now!”

  No reply but bullets.

  She braced herself to leap from cover and haul herself up to the blast door. She stuck her pistol over the top of the machine housing one more time, pumping the trigger to make the Covenanters duck — brrrt-brrrrrt. She leapt upright as she fired, twisting side-on to minimize her profile; she glanced back once, to fix in her mind the position and number of the nearest Covenanters — two on her left, three on her right, faces hidden behind greensuit hoods, bodies barely protected in scraps of armour, all of them jerking from cover, levelling rifles to open fire.

  Elpida was going to take more than one or two bullets getting out of this chamber. She started to turn, to twist, to bunch her muscles for the leap, to brace herself for the slam of bullets against the back of her ballistic vest—

  A shimmer of misplaced light dropped from the high ceiling; it landed behind the Covenanter trio on her right.

  The impact buckled the walkway with a deafening screech of tortured metal. The gantry bowed but did not break. The three gunmen were thrown off their feet.

  All gunfire ceased. All eyes turned to the glinting of refracted light, the negative space which had bent steel beneath massive weight. Even Lykke paused her little tantrum. Elpida froze.

  An occluded shape unfurled — ten thousand facets of translucent ruby, catching and warping the blood-red inner light of Telokopolis. Twelve feet of shimmer and glisten, bristling and rippling with unseen power, wrapped in refracted glimmer.

  Optical camouflage.

  “It’s here!” one of the Covenanters screamed.

  The screaming spread. Weapons swung round, muzzles spat fire. Bullets pattered like hailstones on invisible armour.

  The three Covenanters who had been knocked prone died first. The one nearest the Silico seemed to burst as if detonated from within — clothes and flesh and bone and organs torn apart in an instant, hurled outward in a sphere of gore; flecks of blood landed on Elpida’s face. The second gunman hauled himself halfway to his feet, greensuit hood lost, eyes bulging, teeth clenched tight — then he was swept up and smashed down against the walkway, skull shattered, brains forced through the mesh. The third man was scrambling backward on his arse and elbows, trying to get distance. He raised his weapon and jerked his finger on the trigger — then the front half of the rifle was gone, cut away in a flash of ruby-red mirror. A split-second later the gun was bisected again, along with the man’s hands and forearms. Metal and meat clattered to the floor and slopped into his lap. He had a moment to stare at the spurting stumps of his limbs — then his head left his body, neatly decapitated.

  The Silico killing machine launched itself into the air before the man’s head hit the floor, flashing across the chamber, a storm of blood-dyed glass.

  It landed on the opposite walkway, next to the other two Covenanters who had been advancing on Elpida. They died before they could even turn their guns on it — pulled apart and torn up and emptied out. Steaming chunks of meat collapsed in a mess of blood and guts, slithering over the edge of the walkway in loops of voided intestine.

  Elpida drew the heavy pistol from inside her ballistic vest.

  The Silico turned — toward her, or the other way? Elpida couldn’t tell. She couldn’t draw a bead on the thing with the active optical camo; it was like trying to aim at a flail made of wine-soaked crystal. She would only get one shot — two if she was fast — and she had to hit the main housing, had to disrupt a critical process, or the thing would charge right on through the shaped explosive tips.

  It was looking at her.

  Elpida was certain, it was looking right at her.

  Thonk!

  The Covenanters had found their grenade launcher — or at least figured out how to fire it without blowing themselves up. A grenade round arced through the air toward the shimmering carmine ghost of the Silico, right on target. At least somebody over there knew how to range a launcher properly.

  The Silico twisted like a wind chime in a hurricane. The grenade round shot straight upward, sailing toward the ceiling, deflected by a limb. The round burst a moment later, pulsing the chamber with a concussive thump. Elpida dived back into cover; shrapnel pattered against steel.

  A fragmentation grenade. Elpida almost wanted to laugh. The Silico needn’t have flinched.

  The seven surviving Covenanters tried their best to put up a real fight; they were no longer distracted by Lykke, since the Necromancer was just standing there with her mouth open, green eyes gone wide as she tracked the Silico’s every motion. But the Covenanter militia lacked everything they needed to neutralise this target — training, courage, weapons, leadership. A Legion kill-team would have stood a decent chance, armoured in hardsuits and armed with real weapon systems, drilled to within an inch of their lives on how to respond, trusting in each other’s skills and morale. But the Covenanters bunched up instead of spreading out, taking refuge in proximity; Elpida screamed for them to scatter. Too late — the Silico sprinted into their midst, an invisible knife parting one of them down the middle. Two halves of a person fell to the floor, spilling guts and gore in a fountain of blood. The others screamed and scrambled clear. The cough and splutter of small arms did nothing against the Silico’s armour; their only real chance was to get distance and blanket it with rapid fire from the grenade launcher, if only to slow it down long enough for them to flee. But the Covenanter with the grenade launcher was reluctant to fire so close to her comrades; Elpida shouted for her to do it anyway, just point and pull the trigger, or they’re all dead. But the Silico caught the woman by her head and hoisted her into the air. She had enough time for a single scream and a twitch of her index finger.

  The fragmentation grenade in the chamber exploded point-blank. Knocked two other Covenanters off their feet. The Silico didn’t flinch.

  Nobody took command or gave orders; there were barely twenty seconds in which to do so. The Silico tore the remaining Covenanters to pieces, smashing them to pulp against the floors, pulling off a head, mincing flesh, ripping off limbs. A final survivor lasted a few more seconds by pure luck — slipping on blood and sprawling on his front. He tried to scramble toward the rear blast door.

  The Silico paused — then reached forward with a cluster of invisible limbs. It impaled the man through his ribcage and belly, pinning him to the floor.

  It waited while the man screamed and bled and died. Didn’t take long.

  Elpida still couldn’t draw a proper bead on the thing.

  “Drop the cloaking, drop the cloaking, drop the cloaking. Come on, come on, come on,” she whispered through clenched teeth. She needed a clear shot.

  The Silico tossed the final corpse aside. The body hit the wall, leaving a bloody splotch on the machine-meat of Telokopolis.

  A mass of fragmented glass and broken rubies and blood-slick surfaces turned to face Elpida.

  She emptied her lungs. Steadied the pistol. Now or never—

  “Well hello there, big boy,” Lykke purred. “Now where oh where did you come from? Crawled out of the circus, did we? Why don’t you do another round of tricks, just for little old me?”

  The Silico turned again — to look at the Necromancer?

  Lykke’s human visage was fully restored, a petite woman all bruised and bloodied and wearing a tiny white dress, golden hair awash with the blood-light of the city. Her emerald eyes sparkled with dark delight. Her lips curled into a crimson bow of cruel amusement.

  “Lykke!” Elpida shouted. “You can’t fight it! You can’t—”

  “Hush, zombie.” Lykke raised one white finger, but didn’t take her eyes off the cloaked Silico. “I have been stymied and humiliated enough. Enough! I am no fumbling virgin now, I am no cuckold to be forced aside. I am what I am, and I will not be ignored!”

  The Silico twisted part of its cloaked body, as if considering Lykke from a new angle.

  “This dance is mine,” Lykke said with a little giggle.

  The Necromancer exploded forward in a surging wave of liquid flesh; pale skin and satin dress and golden hair dissolved into a mass of teeth and claws, diamond-tipped tendrils, gnashing maws filled with acid, stingers dripping corrosive fluids, and a dozen more biological weapons Elpida had never witnessed before.

  She slammed into the glimmering translucence of the Silico like a wave breaking against a diamond boulder. Her weapons flashed and stabbed; teeth closed on invisible metal; stingers bounced off armour; hissing fluids sluiced to the floor.

  Lykke’s body suddenly blurred, flying apart as if thrown into the blades of a blender — but reforming just as quickly, Necromancer nanomachine control sucking her back into shape faster than the Silico could dismantle her.

  “Haaaaaaaahahahaha!” Lykke squealed with delight, a clotted voice howling from a dozen bloody mouths. “This one I can fight, zombie! I told you! This one I can fight! I—”

  The Silico hurled Lykke away from itself with a convulsive shove. A whirlwind of flesh flew through the air; a petite woman in a white dress landed in a tumble of flailing limbs.

  Lykke sprang back to her feet, panting, flushed, face ripped by a grin. Her eyes were wide and burning like green flames. She raised her hands and clapped slowly.

  “Bravo, bravo! But not enough, little puppy dog! Try again! Try and try and try again, but I’m going to shove your snout into your own guts!”

  The Silico dropped its optical camouflage.

  Like a sheet of bloodstained rainwater sliding down clean steel, the refracted light fell away.

  Twelve feet of Silico killing machine rippled and flexed beneath the crimson glow of Telokopolis. A sweeping upward curve of metal stood on six jagged legs, each limb with so many joints that they seemed to blur together into a twitching mass of rainbow-hued skin and shivering black muscle. The metal skin slid like oil on water beneath a hidden breeze, the subtle shimmer of an ancient rainstorm flowing across the surface of the Silico’s body; that skin was inches thick, and not true steel, but a semi-translucent material that Telokopolan science had never managed to comprehend, let alone replicate, both impossibly hard and strangely flexible at the same time, as if a different order of evolution had acted on iron and fire instead of meat and bone, to forge a new kind of tissue out in the green. Beneath that armoured hide, bundles of black muscle flowed back and forth, pulsing and throbbing along the limbs and inside the torso like blood-fattened leeches, their greasy coal-dark masses relocating and readjusting, seemingly independent of the Silico’s outward motion.

  Six arms curved forward from the torso, like fingers curled into claws from the flayed bones of a narrow hand — eight feet long, many-jointed, omni-directional, with tapered points hanging in the air in front of the main body. Blade limbs, for close combat, each one lined with eight cutting edges; the blades hurt Elpida’s eyes, so sharp they looked unreal, the edges maintained by constant nanomolecular repair. Two dozen more limbs were folded into recesses on the Silico’s torso, tipped with strange metal organs, hooked and barbed and wired and holed, intended for a dozen different purposes, combat and otherwise.

  The Silico’s body was haloed by three semi-visible rotating rings of shining metal. The rings seemed to pass in and out of view, as if not wholly material. Their passage blurred Elpida’s sight.

  The front of the Silico’s body — the front of the upward curve — housed the sensory equipment-organs. It had no head, just that long vertical strip of optics and sensors and apertures down the middle of the curved torso. A hundred winking lenses stared at Lykke with red and green and sickly purple — some mechanical, others slick and black with Silico biology.

  An imitation of a human face stood in the middle of the upward curve, wrought in Silico metal, white as chalk. The face was upside down, eyes closed in cherubic sleep. It looked like a child.

  Elpida had seen that kind of thing a million times before; the kind of detail which got edited out of records and logs, the kind of inexplicable imitation that the public never knew about.

  She ignored it, as best she could.

  This Silico was a close-combat model — no true ranged weaponry, but plenty of options for CQC.

  In a combat frame, Elpida could have destroyed a thousand of these things with a secondary weapon system alone. Up close, on the ground, inside the city, she stood little chance.

  Neither did the Necromancer.

  “Lykke!” she screamed again. “You can’t fight it! It’s goading—”

  “Ugly puppy!” Lykke shrieked with girlish laughter, wrinkled her nose in disgust, and launched herself at the Silico again.

  Lykke slammed into her opponent as a tidal wave of flesh and bone, infinitely plastic, infinitely regenerative. The Silico exploded upon her in return, the six blade-limbs blurring into a tempest of knives, slicing Lykke to pieces every split-second. The Necromancer ignored the rending of her flesh, flowing over the Silico, shrieking and cackling and whooping.

  “Lykke, get off it!” Elpida shouted. “Get—”

  The semi-visible rotating rings which haloed the Silico’s form suddenly accelerated, filling the air with a deafening whine. Pieces of Lykke’s body flew in every direction, cut apart by invisible force — but Lykke giggled, so loud that she drowned out the screaming sound of the Silico’s close-in defence systems.

  “Tickle-tickle-tickle, puppy!” she howled. “My turn!”

  Lykke’s flowing flesh somehow gripped one of the Silico’s blade-limbs, immobilising the arm. Lykke pulled and yanked and ripped until the limb tore free, exploding from the socket in a welter of black blood and living muscle. Masses of leech-like flesh slopped from both ends of the wound — then seemed to suck back within the edges of the rupture, wriggling away from the open air.

  Elpida hesitated.

  Could Lykke actually do this?

  If the Necromancer could fight, then she needed Elpida’s help. And the girl from earlier — Misane — she was still crammed against a bank of computers down on the floor, still alive. If the Silico won and Elpida fled, the girl would die shortly after.

  Everything in Elpida’s experience told her that Lykke didn’t stand a chance. And she was a Necromancer; Elpida should have been glad to spend her against the Silico, just for a chance to get away. The girl down on the floor of the chamber was a Covenanter, and probably a simulation anyway. Howl was missing, Howl was all that mattered. Elpida knew she should turn and run.

  She broke from cover, heavy pistol in her left hand, and sprinted — toward the duel.

  If she could get close, she wouldn’t even need to aim, just unload the whole magazine into the Silico’s guts.

  Lykke was waving the Silico’s severed limb in the air, cackling and giggling and hooting. The Silico was unfolding extra arms, shooting Lykke’s protoplasmic flesh with close-range weaponry, unloading contact viruses, dousing her with electroshock fields, cutting her to pieces. And none of it worked. Perhaps the same would never have happened in reality, but maybe it would. But at least here, in the simulation, inside the network, Necromancer control was winning, and—

  The Silico’s whole body pulsed. The air around it blurred and thickened.

  Elpida skidded to a halt as the shock wave passed over her. She winced and hissed, her guts trying to punch upward through her throat. Her mouth suddenly tasted of blood. Her vision swarm, eyeballs throbbing. She locked her knees and forced herself to stay standing.

  Lykke — a mass of whirling flesh and bone — slopped to the floor like cold offal.

  The Silico picked up its severed limb and pressed the stump to the voided joint; black leeches reached out from either side of the wound and sucked the limb back into place with a wet slurp.

  “Lykke,” Elpida said. “Lykke? Lykke! Get up. Get up, now! Lykke!”

  Whatever was left of Lykke wasn’t moving anymore.

  The Silico turned toward Elpida. The upside down face in the front of its body was still asleep, eyes closed in childlike innocence.

  It took a step toward Elpida, then another, then another, all six legs carrying it forward.

  Elpida levelled the hand cannon.

  The Silico stopped.

  Elpida froze, finger on the trigger, with the Silico perhaps a dozen feet away. With all its attention on her, she knew it could read her muscles. It would see the moment she tried to fire before her finger could squeeze. It would leap aside, or into the air, before the bullet could land. Elpida presented almost no serious threat to the Silico now, not without a good distraction, not unless she could make the shot against Silico speed and precision — and then only if she got very lucky and hit something that mattered.

  But the Silico didn’t move.

  Elpida didn’t breathe.

  She held the gun.

  The Silico.

  Waited.

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