Limitless Evolution As a Snake

The pump-house was close enough for me to reach before a patrol, which gave me an excellent excuse to leave the argument about waiting for one unfinished. I sent Bridget the location, told her to bring Hollis and took the dry drainage cut alone.

My underside still hurt where the purge had caught it. The fin jets made the journey faster without making the injury less real, and I had enough sense left to land behind the pump-house rather than advertise myself through its front window.

[System: You’ve got burns, bruises and the health plan of a shopping trolley on a motorway, mate. Look inside before you charge in and make the ambulance driver earn his smoko.]

I checked the bloody entrance, and you can stop rehearsing my funeral speech while I find hers. Heat showed beneath the open service hatch, where an adult woman sat tied to a pipe with a rag pushed between her teeth and the supervisor standing over her.

He was speaking into his own phone, telling somebody the witness had arrived but the transport had been interrupted. The woman struggled when he mentioned her daughter, and he kicked the pipe beside her face to make her stop moving.

I went through the broken side vent in partial mist, becoming solid behind a stacked pump casing. The air inside tasted of old grease and warm wiring, and the only useful exit near the woman was blocked by the supervisor’s legs.

He ended the call and pulled wire from his pocket, testing its length between his hands. He glanced at the woman instead of the broken pump, and I stopped waiting for him to make his plan any clearer.

I struck his gun hand before he could turn, trapping the wrist against the pipe with my coils. His shot went into the pump housing, and the woman threw herself sideways as sparks spat across the floor beside her.

Galaxy Brain caught his knife moving and laid out my options instantly. Pulling clear would free his gun hand beside Jessa, so I kept the wrist pinned and twisted, taking a shallow cut beneath my scales instead of gambling with her head.

I could have called for him to surrender. Instead, I tightened around his throat and drove a solid cutting edge beneath his jaw, holding him until his hand stopped trying to push the knife deeper into me.

The violence ended quickly, leaving me with an aching underside and a body I had chosen to make. Old Mate didn’t award a kill counter, a shiny badge or any of the comforting nonsense that might have turned the man into a number instead.

He wasn’t going to let her leave. The thought came easily enough, but the next one stayed with me longer: I had enjoyed being the person who decided he would never try again.

[System: She gets to go home, mate, and you still get to own what you did. Don’t ask me to put a party hat on it so it feels tidier.]

I cut the woman’s ties and moved the dropped knife away from her feet. Her name was Jessa, and she asked about her daughter before she asked about the dead man, which gave me something useful to answer without making myself sound better.

”There’s no girl here, but the shelter can check on her while we get you back,” I told her. I kept my voice gentle because she had already had quite enough of men making their feelings the loudest thing in the room.

She gripped the side of the pump casing until her knees steadied. When I offered a coil to help her across the broken floor, she accepted without looking towards the body, and I decided not to mistake that for approval of anything beyond getting outside.

Bridget and Hollis arrived as we reached the rear steps. I told them the supervisor had attacked me and the witness was safe, which was true as far as it went and stopped exactly where I wanted the questions to begin.

Hollis saw the blood on my scales and sent Bridget to fetch the medical pack from the car. She asked whether the man was alive, and I said he wasn’t, keeping my eyes on Jessa while the sergeant went inside to see for herself.

Bridget treated the shallow knife wound without making a speech about what sort of person I should be. ”Did you go in planning to kill him?” she asked. ”I went in to get Jessa out,” I replied, and hated how quickly I’d found an answer that avoided hers.

She noticed the gap and didn’t fill it for me. Her hand stayed against my uninjured scales while we waited for the shelter to confirm Jessa’s daughter was safe, and I was grateful in a way I couldn’t turn into a joke without spoiling it.

The freight tag still gave us a dock and a buyer. I passed a photograph to Rook through the phone inside my body, then sent Pike the cooling-unit details he had requested, carefully avoiding the part where being useful was easier than being honest.

The reply that arrived next wasn’t about the harbour. Lyra wanted to know whether I had eaten anything that wasn’t a reward from strangers, and Cherry added that my side of the sofa had become a storage area for things I kept promising to come home for.

I read the messages twice before answering. For once, the next thing I needed to fix was something I had done without a gun being involved. ”Tell me what you both want for dinner, love, because I’m coming back and I’d like one evening where nobody has to borrow me from a crime scene,” I said on the call, and Lyra went quiet long enough to hurt.

Then she told me Cherry had been pretending she wasn’t counting the days, and asked exactly when I intended to stop making the people who loved me wait until everybody else’s emergency was finished.