“Shit shit shit,” Victoria swore, helpfully translated from whatever she was actually shouting. She went to stifle herself.

“They know we’re here. Just stay away from the door.”

“Are you-”

“No,” I answered before I knew what she was asking. I wasn’t okay. I wasn’t there. I wasn’t going to be fine. None of those.

“Hurt?”

I hissed as my support system pumped another dose of painkiller into me. “Victoria.”

“Yes?”

“That’s a dumb fucking question.”

“I’m surprised you’re awake. I didn’t know if-”

“I’m on more drugs than I want to know about right now,” I explained, “but I haven’t topped up pharmaceuticals recently so I don’t know how long I have with that.”

“From your jacket?”

“Support system but yes. Lots of uppers, lots of downers.”

“Okay-”

“Can you check the arm for me?” I tried to get any feeling back into my shoulder but the numbness wasn’t pinpoint enough to let me move my stump and not feel the pain.

“It’s gone.”

“Bleeding?”

“Black.”

“Okay that’s-” I was going to say better, and it was, but it wasn’t exactly the time to be spouting optimism. I was down a shooting hand and in a lean-to with a sniper trained on our position. Our one way out was Victoria somehow out shooting them.

We were going to die sweaty.

“Not bleeding means that-” I couldn’t find the words again. Hard to explain away a missing arm. “How’s the Nurse?”

“Gun on your back?”

“Yes.”

“Wasn’t hit-”

“Good,” I nodded. That said, had the Nurse been hit in the wrong spot we would have been blown to kingdom come, that was why you weren’t supposed to modify weapons too much. “Can you-”

“Can I what?”

“Shoot it?”

“I-”

The hesitation was enough for me to cut in. “I can’t with one hand, nothing to aim with.” It took a second for the sentence to hit me, one hand. Fuck I’d managed to stay bio for all these years just to- “Your Mako doesn’t have the range to try and tag a person up in the ceiling, so we need to get them down here or get a shot off with the Nurse.”

Victoria pressed herself tighter against the wall with the mention of the shooter, “How would we get them down here?”

“We can’t.”

“So. Nurse it is then,” she whispered to herself. It took Victoria a moment to unclasp the strap on my shoulder, she was shaking. Not good for a firefight. I tried my best to help her with my off hand but everything was on the edge of numbness right now. I’d been given too many sedatives, better than writhing on the ground.

“Kingston?”

“Yeah?”

“They know exactly where we are and they could have moved…” she turned the Nurse over in her hands looking for the safety, I pointed to it, just to the right of the cooling vents, “...He shoots me first.”

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I kept quiet for a little too long.

“Shit.”

“Victori- Vic,” I stopped her short of a breakdown, “this can be done. There are ways. We just need to get them to blink first.”

She nodded.

“If we can get him to shoot something that isn’t us, we can try and move when the gun is cycling- or you can take a shot at him.”

“What if I miss?”

“Don’t.”

She didn’t say anything in response to that, just took a deep breath and clutched the Nurse close to her chest. I found enough feeling in my fingers to get the Hammerhead off my side and into my free hand. If I told her I could follow her shot she would know there was still a chance if she missed.

I kept the Hammerhead behind my back.

“How do I make him flinch? Do I throw something or-” she glanced around the maintenance building but there wasn’t anything in here other than control panels and us.

“If they fall for that I’m pissed off that I got hit.”

“Kingston.”

“You’re not going to like my answer.”

“What?”

“They’re not going to shoot at something that isn’t us,” I explained, “so I just need to dodge a shot.” I nodded to the one window that the shed had, it had either never had glass or had it looted a long time ago. “I’ll poke out there. You take the shot once he shoots.”

“You’re not bait.”

“I can’t shoot the Nurse.”

“You’re already hurt.”

“What’s a little more?”

“I’m not going to-”

“This is what you hired me to do. If you didn’t want me getting shot at, we shouldn’t have signed the contract.”

“King-”

“Victoria.”

Steam erupted from a valve somewhere in the spider's web of catwalks below us.

“Are we counting?”

“Just wait for light,” I corrected. I should have stood up as soon as I said that but it took some time. Even as the medicine started to pinpoint where I needed to go numb it still took the edge off some of my movements.

I got myself standing and leant against the wall. If I stuck my hand out too fast then they wouldn’t shoot, half a second too long and I was missing both. More than half a second too long and-

No point thinking about that.

I took a deep breath and tried to find my new center of balance, slightly skewed to the left. “Ready kid?”

“As I’ll ever be.”

“Good enough.” It had to be.

Even after years of practice it took a second to convince your body to reach out to leave cover, I understood the strategy but my arm knew that this wasn’t safe. My fingers gripped tight around the handle of the Hammerhead as I swung my arm around the corner, out the window and aimed blind toward the ceiling where the shots had come from.

Every hair stood on end as I left the arm there for the second that I had to, hanging out over the edge of safety and-

Footsteps.

I snapped my arm back in just as the area outside the window erupted into light again. Behind me the Nurse hissed to life and then cracked a shot that I couldn’t see. The platform around the housing groaned as support beams turned into slag.

The footsteps.

The far door.

I used the momentum of ripping my hand back inside to snap the Hammerhead towards the door and the silhouette coming out of the fading bright outside. I should have been aiming right at them.

I lost the shot alongside my balance, my empty right side giving way.

“Kingston I-”

A flash of pearl and black as the woman slipped past me as I started to fall.

“Think I-”

The grinding crash of hardlight slamming into a shield, then it giving way.

The smell of burning skin.

Victoria’s scream.

I pushed my leg off the ground as I fell, trying to spin around just enough to wrest the Hammerhead in their direction, anything to-

The barrel pointed at Victoria first as she dropped to the ground. I hesitated.

The Ovishir batted the Hammerhead out of my hand and sent it careening across the room. I didn’t have the strength to hold onto it, and trying to knocked me to the floor with it.

Victoria’s finger twitched. I went to snap around into a roll but I was on the wrong side, there wasn’t an arm to swing around me.

Just as I found any movement, hardlight stabbed into the ground in front of me. “Don’t do anythin’ stupid. Bounty ain’t on you.”

A foot pressed down on my shoulder and then rolled me onto my back.

The cold black visor of a life support mask stared back at me. The Ovishir hesitated, if I’d been any less numb I would have been on top of her at that point.

If she was going to spare me then I just needed to play along until I could try and-

“Kingston?” she asked.

The visor flipped up and Dvall winced at me as Victoria bled on the floor.