Page 12 of Gunslinger Girl

The footsteps stopped. “Hey!” said a muffled voice. “Someone’s still alive!”

There was no time. Pity shifted her other arm, bracing for agony, but it responded without complaint. She pawed blindly at the ground around her.

“C’mon, over here!” More footsteps.

They were coming.

Her fingers brushed steel. Pity grabbed the pistol, slipping her finger into the trigger and cocking the hammer as the debris pinning her began to shift.

One chance.

Light flooded in, scorching her vision. She angled the barrel up as the canvas was lifted and tossed to the side.

She fired.

“Holy shit!” A blurry figure tumbled backward.

The shot had gone wide. As her vision broke apart and came back together, Pity raised the gun again, but a lightning sear of pain shot through her wrist. The gun flew from her grip as it was wrenched to one side. Another silhouette appeared, quickly lost as a gray fog of unconsciousness enveloped her again.

“She’s waking up.”

Her ears still rang. Everything still hurt. And this time Pity couldn’t move at all. Not a finger or a toe. Her eyes cast around helplessly. She was in a room but could see nothing except a metal ceiling above her and a blank wall to her right. A clipped yelp escaped from between her frozen lips.

“Hey, shhhh.” A face appeared in her field of vision: a young man around her age, dressed in filthy clothes. He was milk pale, a feature amplified by his spiked hair dyed oil-slick black. Except for the tips, which were cyan. At least a dozen silver rings and studs pierced his eyebrows, lips, and ears.

Another scrounger?

“Don’t try to move,” he said. “We didn’t know if you had internal injuries, so we gave you a paralytic to be safe.”

A paralytic? Pity took a sharp breath. Where would a scrounger have gotten paralytics?

“You were lucky. A mild concussion, a lot of bruises and scrapes, but you’re alive.”

“Move, Max.” He was replaced by an umber-skinned woman at least a decade his senior. She had a square face and dimpled cheeks, with dark eyes that would have been beautiful had they carried any hint of softness. “I’m going to un-paralyze you now. You are going to behave yourself. If you don’t, I’m going to shoot you in the knee. Blink twice if you understand.”

Pity blinked twice. She felt the prick of a med injector in her neck.

“Try to sit up,” said Max.

“Slowly,” warned the woman.

Pity lifted herself onto one elbow, muscles waking slowly. Her other arm ached like the devil, but she could move it without much effort. She lay on a narrow cot. There was another like it nearby, along with a small seating area built into the wall and a tiny kitchen. The rest of the space was occupied by storage containers of all sizes. There were no windows. A wave of pain radiated through her body. She closed her eyes and leaned over the side of the bed, afraid she would be sick. It was then that she noticed the vibration—a distinct, subtle turbulence.

This wasn’t a room… it was a vehicle.

And it was moving.

“Finn!” Her eyes flew open. “Where’s Finn?”

The woman stepped away, crossing her arms as she leaned against a counter littered with bandages and a portable medical scanner. A row of metal cabinets with coded locks ran above her head. “Was Finn one of those bodies back there? Because they’re right where we left them.”

“Geez, Olivia!” Max perched on the edge of the bed beside her. What she had taken for filth on his clothing were actually streaks and splatters of paint, in all colors. “We saw the smoke. What happened?”

“Finn and I… we…” Pity grasped for the words. “Scroungers attacked our camp. They… they killed…” The room wavered as her lungs emptied. She fell back onto the bed. No. The word beat in her head, worse than the pain. No, no, no. “They killed her and… and you just left her there?”

Max’s brow furled. “There was nothing we could—”

“Did you bury her? Did you do anything?”