Page 46

Acker shakes his maned head. “We got lucky coming that way. They’ll be waiting for us.”

Match shrugs. “Current too strong for ‘um.” He nods at me and Kez.

I start to protest. I can do anything the rats can do, and Kez is a strong swimmer.

But I’m carrying thirty kilos of gear over my shoulders, a lot of which is metal.

Kez is carrying nearly as much. Swimming, particularly against a current, is probably out of the question, unless we ditch my gear, which is really out of the question.

Acker looks at me, takes stock of my knife. Nods. “We may have to fight our way through.”

“Least we came packing,” Kez mutters behind me.

Acker doesn’t react to her little joke. Just continues to look at me. I give him a hard stare back. He ain’t still pissed about me steppin’ on his toes, is he?

Acker turns away, flicking open the ties that hold his scythe to his back.

I glance at Kez, who shrugs.

Puzzled, I follow the rats. We descend a set of stairs into darkness.

Acker and Match pace surely and steadily ahead of me, so I figure they can see in the dark like I can. Kez can’t, though. I reach back for her, take one of her hands and guide it to the bag on my back. That way she doesn’t get lost, and my hands stay free.

Darkness sharpens my modified senses, and I catch the whiff of the sewer in the still, stale air.

Down two more flights of stairs, the second one gridded metal that clangs under my boots and ends in a splash when I step off the last riser.

Water up over my ankles. Cold and none too clean by the smell.

In descending, we’ve passed from smooth ceramsteel corridors into something older, and less man-made.

The watery tunnel we’re in now looks like a natural cavern that’s been laser cored.

Lighter patches in the walls are sprayed permacrete, probably filling irregularities in the rock.

Close to the waterline, a few, faint red sensors blink, bloody fingers that flicker across the flow.

Monitoring the water level, maybe, or the methane.

The sensors help me gauge the distance as the tunnel stretches ahead of us. At least a quarter klick.

We start forward, Match still in the lead.

The tunnel’s wide enough for all of us to walk abreast, but we keep to single file, down the middle of the tunnel.

I step where the rats step. The floor is smooth, slightly slippery.

Not ideal footing. The tunnel twists ahead of us, probably following the natural line of the fault or cavern that predated the sewer.

The water rises as we walk, a wave of cold creeping up my shins.

We move quietly. There’s no sound in the tunnel but the distant tumble and drip of water. I’m careful not to break that near silence as I reach back, draw Kez up beside me, and whisper in her ear. “You ever been down here before?”

She shakes her head.

“Know anything about what lives down here?”

She turns her head so she can speak right into my ear. “Cannibals,” she whispers. “One rule in the sewers. Kill them. Before they eat you.”

Good rule. I brush my lips across Kez’s temple so she knows I appreciate her intel and the warning. We move a step apart, but she stays at my side, her hand on my bag, as we follow the rat-men further and further into the depths.

They move at a fair clip, despite the water, which creeps up to my knees.

We turn, and turn again. I know we’re moving generally south, under the long sprawl of the city’s suburbs, parallel to the beach.

Other than that, I’m disoriented. Are we close to Doc Gray’s chop-shop?

The Night Market? I’ve got no idea, and not knowing exactly where I am knots the muscles of my neck and shoulders.

The tunnels themselves are uniform: laser-cored, grey rock.

They fork and branch at random intervals.

No landmarks. Match leads us on unerringly, but if he’s following any map but the one in his head, I can’t see it.

I don’t think I could find my way out, and being so dependent on anyone, even someone I like as much as I like Acker, makes my neck as taut as a bowstring.

It’s the tension singing through me, cranking my senses into overdrive, that alerts me to the new sound first. Not the slosh of water stirred by four sets of legs. Not our breathing, echoing off the rock walls. This is a hiss.

Water on scales.

I put my arm out so Kez knows to stop. Turn my head until I locate the source of the sound.

Behind me. I spin and catch the first dark shape as it rises out of the water.

I get a glimpse of long snout. Gleaming eyes and teeth.

Something incredibly muscular whips my left leg out from under me, but not before I slash my kukri across a scaly throat.

I go down in a spray of water and hot copper. The heavy bag strapped to my back drags me under and I remember to clamp my mouth shut before I submerge.

As the water closes over my head, it lights up like a solar flare. The water’s murky and I don’t want to know what the things floating in it are, but the wide, dark red current is unmistakable. I took one of the scaly bastards down.

I roll until I get my feet under me and pike up out of the water.

A meter ahead of me, Kez is facing off against three gator-men.

She’s got a glowing monofilament in each hand.

She spins the left one in in a tight circle, using it as a shield against the claws of the gator-man trying for her throat.

She lashes out with the other like a whip, scoring bloody wheals on the upraised arms of the second gator-man and severing the tip of the third’s tail as he lashes it at her.

The water’s a disadvantage. I usually rely on speed in a fight, but the scaly fuckers will be faster than I am. I need to take them down from a distance.

I shuck off my equipment bag. It’ll sink to the bottom, where I can retrieve it later. I don’t want the weight slowing me down. I also don’t want a stray hit setting off the grenades while they’re still strapped to my back.

Sighting carefully, I lift one of the kukris over my head and hurl it. My kukris are not ideal for throwing. But they’re well-balanced and with such a long cutting edge, it would be hard for me not to hit something. Nothing fancy, no spin; I just put a lot of force behind my throw.

The knife sticks true, point in, above the long snout, between the gleaming eyes. The gator-man with the bleeding tail topples backwards into the water. He’s not getting up again.

Against only two opponents, I know Kez will change tactics. Anticipating her move, I draw my second kukri back for an underhand throw. Kez will aim for the neck. If the gator-man slithers aside, I want a body-shot to take him down.

Kez twirls the second monofilament over her head.

It’s the same move she uses for the infinity loop, but at the end of the second arc, she opens her hand.

The monofilament fans brightly through the air.

That twirl of light carves open the gator-man’s scaly, muscular shoulder as he twists to avoid it.

Painful, and it’s a good bet he won’t be able to use the arm, but it’s not a wound that will immediately kill him.

I finish the fucker off.

He turns straight into my throw. The kukri carves through the pale scales, into his soft, ribbed belly.

The force of the throw and the sharpness of the blade tear the gator-man open from navel to sternum.

Blood and grey ropes of intestine spill out of the wound and tumble into the murky water.

The stink of lizardy bowels claws up my nose and down my throat.

Next to me, Kez gags, and her shield falters. The gator-man she was holding off lunges for her throat. His swiping claws catch her upper arm, opening long gashes that fill with blood, black in the stark light of the remaining monofilament. Kez curses with the sudden pain.

I side-step, drawing the katanas over my shoulders as I move around Kez. She slides aside, still whirling the monofilament.

I spin to avoid her shield and for momentum as I complete the draw, swinging the katanas in wide arcs.

Their razor blades sing through the air, cleaving through skin, muscle and bone.

They snick to my sides in twin arterial sprays.

Glistening membranes slide across the gator-man’s eyes.

Once, twice. Then his body drops into the water; his head creates a second, smaller splash.

I scan the tunnel for any further gator-men. Listen hard. The only sounds are Kez’s harsh breathing, and the lap of water. I turn to my kitten as a new hiss fills the tunnel, but it’s only Kez spraying her wounds with newskin. I look around for Match and Acker.

They’re standing a few steps away. Match has his flamethrower pointed in my direction, but it’s not even lit. Acker’s scythe hangs loose in his paws.

I raise my blood-streaked blades. “You waitin’ for a fuckin’ invitation?”

“When the Whites named you Reaper-Man—” Acker shakes his head.

Beside me, Kez snorts. “Doesn’t really do him justice, does it? ”

Amateurs. I turn my back on the rat-men and check Kez’s arm.

She knows what she’s doing but newskin needs a good seal to work, so it never hurts to have a second set of eyes on it.

I also want to make sure there’s no sign of poison, since you never know what’s on a mutant lizard’s claws.

Some germ-killer wouldn’t hurt, either, given where those claws have been.

“Solid?” she asks when she finishes spraying.

“Solid. How’re you doin’?” I don’t ask if she’s okay, because I know she won’t be. My kitten’s not a killer. Even defending herself haunts her.

She nods. “Good to go.”

My tough kitten. I shake the katanas. Rinsing them in the sewer will only make them dirtier.

I’ll need to clean them later. I sheathe the swords, retrieve my kukris and the bags.

Do a quick check of the gear. The bags are waterproof so nothing inside’s been damaged by the dunking.

The bags themselves are a loss, but so’s everything we’re wearing. Sewer’s a smell that don’t come out.

While I’m checking the gear, Kez stows her last monofilament, winding it around her wrist bracer and doing whatever she does to kill its glow. The tunnel dims to shades of grey.

I take Kez’s hand and put it on my bag so she can follow me again, then I lead her the few steps to the rat-men. Match sets off before I reach them, but Acker waits and when I draw up to him, he grabs my shoulder.

“I would never be your enemy,” he says.

That ain’t the same thing as being my friend. “Me, neither.”

“As long as we understand each other.”

I nod, but I’m not sure we do.

He moves off after Match, wading swiftly despite the knee-deep water. He’s sheathed his scythe. Guess it doesn’t make much difference if he’s not going to fucking use it when the shit hits the turbo-fan. I keep a kukri out.