The crack of a gunshot mixed with the tinny echo of metal on metal impact shook Lan’s composure, and she stepped back, raising her hand to her face and examining her fingers. Blood. The man must have taken aim and fired in the space of half a heartbeat, shooting across fifty feet of hallway at the barest sliver of flesh in the darkness of night. Any slower closing the door, and the bullet would not have been deflected off its edge before it moved on to hit her, and she would now bear a wound far more grievous than a gash across her cheek. It was a shot no man could have ever made, even with all the luck in the world on his side, and then some.
Errol Archer. What’s more, he wasn’t trying to disarm her. He was aiming to kill. Grent must’ve not got the memo – he didn’t care about taking her alive.
Lan panicked, turning and running up the stairs, registering the murmurs of the crowd and the now ever so slightly wavering edge to Grent’s voice, as presumably the muffled sound of the gunshot had reached the reception room. Archer must have been one of the two in the storage room all along, which meant he would have been aware of her as well. Lan felt a flush of childlike embarrassment and anger – he must have been waiting to see what she would do all along, only stepping in when she got too close to Grent. The fact that that was the only covert route into the factory was exactly why Archer was placed there. Lan cursed herself, reaching the top of the stairs and looking down them, ignoring the few guards placed around the raised platform that now noticed her. She knew Archer had to run along the hallway, reload his pistol, and open the door. This should give her enough time to commit the crime, she reasoned, although the escape route would have to change. She stepped towards the railing, about to leap up and over onto the stage below, right before the door downstairs burst open.
Time slowed down as Lan whirled round, a part of her seeing the shapes of men moving towards her out of the corner of her eye, but most of her attention on the figure of Archer at the bottom of the stairs. He was looking intently ahead, pistol in hand, about to reload. Lan’s heart sunk as she realised that the time it would take him to reload would be essentially negligible; she suspected that particular skill had not been birthed of Faith, but rather came from years of experience. First checking the status of the door that Lan had not noticed, which presumably lead through to the main reception room, he would surely turn and see her in moments. The flames of her weapon would not reach him from this distance, and the light from the fire would trigger his reflexes anyway. She would be dead in under a second. No time to change weapon, no way she could take a single step without being shot down. Very quickly the plan had changed from pulling off a crime, to somehow managing to get out alive. Surrounded on all sides, Lan chose the only option left to her, and hurled the contraption down the stairs towards Archer as some pitiful form of distraction, for seconds that would likely not even matter given the steely grip that had just closed around her other arm.
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Before the compact flamethrower was even a quarter of the way through its flight, Archer’s head snapped to the side, his eyes wide with primal instinct. His hands seemed to blur, and he raised his pistol and fired in one smooth motion just as it cleared the halfway mark.
It felt like a star had been born for the slightest moment, the flash so powerful that the throbbing afterimage of Archer’s horrified expression remained clear in Lan’s vision as she opened her eyes, dazed and suddenly on the floor of the mezzanine. The guards around her groaned, equally stunned but thankfully with nowhere near as much adrenaline coursing through their bodies. Lan knew she was in a bad way as well though, limbs shaky as she moved to her hands and knees to survey the damage.
The whole room had darkened enormously, though Lan could make out the shrapnel of the flamethrower’s silvery carcass strewn about the stairwell amidst panelling and other debris. Had the explosion taken out the building’s electrics? Lan could only guess. No sign of Archer, although on closer inspection it seemed as though the whole section of the floor had caved in, and down, on the area around the bottom of the stairs. He had reacted automatically, inhuman reflexes working against him as he shot at the movement before registering what it was – a tank full of explosion. The fact that there was no sign of movement and that Lan’s brains were still firmly situated in her skull gave her reason to suspect, with a rather large amount of relief, that Archer had been crushed by the falling pieces of building, and now lay dead or dying underneath the wreckage of his own making.