Nobody moved.
Selah's hand was still on Kin's, pressing it down against the gearshift, and Kin's other hand hovered an inch from the katana's hilt without touching it. The engine idled. Outside, the boots kept marching, and the streetlight threw long shadows across the hood of the SUV—shadows of men with rifles, standing in a loose arc, waiting for an order.
Kin's vision flickered blue.
[Threat Assessment]
[Hostiles outside vehicle: 34.]
[Weapons identified: 19 × AK-pattern rifles. 6 × submachine guns. 4 × RPG-7 launchers. 2 × DShK heavy machine guns mounted on armoured trucks. 3 × fragmentation grenades, visible on tactical vests.]
[Estimated survival if engagement initiated: 0.4%.]
[Estimated escape probability, current position: 0.9%.]
Kin stared at the number.
Less than one percent.
That's it?
[That is it.]
Then what the hell am I supposed to do? He could feel his jaw tightening, his pulse picking up. You can count every rifle and every grenade and So every truck. You can tell me exactly how dead I am to the decimal point. why can't you tell me how to get out?
The System did not answer.
System. Answer me.
Nothing.
Kin bit down on the inside of his cheek, hard enough to taste copper, and turned his head toward Selah.
"What now?"
She didn't look at him. She kept her eyes forward, fixed on the road, her voice low and level.
"I don't have a plan," she said. "This isn't my part of the job. I find targets. I don't extract them."
"Then whose part is it?"
"Baros." She tilted her head slightly toward the back seat. "He plans this kind of thing. He's done it a hundred times. He would have contingencies stacked on contingencies before we ever left the safe house."
Kin twisted around. "Baros."
The back seat was empty.
Baros was gone. The door on the far side was closed, but the seat was still warm, and there was a faint smear of grease on the handle—the same grease from the pickup truck on the airstrip.
"When did he—"
"Don't ask," Selah said. "He's doing his part. That's all we need to know."
The earpiece crackled.
For half a second, there was nothing but static. Then the static shifted—became something else, something with weight and motion, like a curtain of wind being dragged through the channel—and Kin felt a rush of air pass along the outside of the SUV. The vehicle rocked gently on its suspension. Loose grit skittered across the roof.
Both of them turned their heads toward the sound.
"Wind," Selah said.
"That wasn't wind."
"It was wind."
"Selah—"
"It was wind." Her eyes flicked to his, sharp and warning. "Whatever you think you saw, it was wind. Keep your face still."
Kin looked past her, out the windshield.
The general was walking past them.
He was older than Kin had expected—fifties, grey at the temples, with the compact, unhurried build of a man who had spent his entire adult life in uniform. He wore no medals, no insignia beyond a single small pin on his collar, and he carried no weapon. He didn't need one. He walked down the line of stopped vehicles with his hands clasped behind his back, glancing into each window as he passed, and every soldier he walked by straightened as if pulled upright by a string.
He reached the SUV.
He stopped.
Kin's hand was still an inch from the katana. Selah's grip on his wrist tightened until it hurt.
The general leaned down and looked through the glass. He couldn't see them—the tint was too dark, the interior too dim—but he looked anyway, tilting his head slightly, the way a man looks at a locked door he fully intends to open.
Then he raised one knuckle and knocked on the window.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
Nobody moved.
Nobody opened the door.
The general waited. Three seconds. Five. His expression did not change. He straightened up, turned his head toward the nearest armoured truck, and lifted two fingers in a short, unhurried gesture.
Fire.
The window exploded into a spiderweb of white fractures.
Kin flinched—Selah's hand slammed his shoulder down, forcing him below the line of the glass—and then the entire vehicle began to shudder and roar as the rounds hammered into the doors and the pillars and the roof. Glass snowed across the dashboard. The interior filled with the smell of out scorched metal and gunpowder. Kin could feel the impacts through the seat, through the floor, through his ribs.
But the glass did not break.
The windows held. The doors held. The reinforced plating under the trim absorbed round after round without giving a millimetre.
Armoured, Kin thought, and for the first time since the ambush began, he allowed himself one breath of relief.
Military grade.
Then the roar stopped.
And in the silence that followed, Kin heard something worse than gunfire: the heavy, metallic clack of an RPG being loaded.
He lifted his head just enough to see over the dashboard.
One of the soldiers on the armoured truck had climbed onto the roof. He had the launcher on his shoulder, the tube aimed down at a shallow angle, and the man behind him was already shouting a warning to the rest of the line.
Every single soldier outside took three long steps backward.
They knew exactly what was coming.
"RPG," Selah said, flat, and the word was barely of her mouth before the radio in Kin's ear came alive.
"Kin." The Strongman's voice, low and steady, the way a man talks when he has already decided something. "Look behind you. Between the two minivans on the left. There's a gap."
Kin twisted in his seat. Through the shattered rear window, past the smoke and the shadows, he could just make out the shape of it—two minivans parked slightly out of alignment, with a narrow channel of open asphalt between their bumpers. It wasn't much. It was barely wide enough for a single vehicle. But it was open.
"I see it."
"It's a fraction of a second wide. Once they start moving, it's gone." The Strongman paused. "So here's how we do it. You reverse first. I'm on your tail. I'll get onto the trunk while you're rolling. When we hit the gap, you brake hard—I'll push the minivan out of the way with my shoulder. Then we both drive. Hard. Divided but not too divided. Close enough to come back for each other."
Selah was already looking at him. "We have to take the RPG first."
"I know."
"An RPG-7 on armoured plating at this range won't penetrate. It'll throw us and it'll blind us and it'll hurt like hell, but it won't kill us."
"I know."
"So we take it."
"We take it."
[Incoming: RPG-7, estimated impact in 4 seconds. Armour integrity sufficient. Recommend: brace, hold position, do not exit vehicle.]
Kin looked at Selah.
She looked back at him, and for a moment, in the fractured light of the streetlamp through the cracked windshield, her face was not the face of a professional.
"Hold on to something," she said.
The rocket hit.
***
The world went white.
Not the blinding white of light—the choking white of fire and smoke and shrapnel, packed into a space smaller than a car, with nowhere to go and nothing to do but let it happen. The SUV rocked up onto two wheels and slammed back down. Every window not already cracked shattered completely. The air bags did not deploy—the impact was lateral, glancing, absorbed by the plating—but the concussion drove the breath out of Kin's lungs and rang a bell inside his skull that he could not silence.
He couldn't see. He couldn't hear. He could only feel Selah's hand on his shoulder, pressing him down, and the floor beneath his knees, and then her voice shouting something he couldn't make out.
Reverse. Reverse. Reverse.
He found the gearstick. He slammed it back.
The SUV lurched.
Through the smoke—grey, thick, rolling—he couldn't see a thing, but he could feel the vehicle moving, feel the wheels finding grip, feel the weight shift as the Strongman's SUV closed in behind him. Something heavy hit the trunk, and the whole car dipped, and then rose again.
"Now," the Strongman said. "Now now now—"
Kin braked.
The rear of the SUV slammed into something with a crunch of folding metal. Then something else slammed into it, from the other side—a massive, grunting impact, the sound of a body driving a two-ton minivan sideways—and the gap opened.
"GO."
Kin went.
He pulled the wheel hard and the SUV swung out of the smoke and into the open avenue, and behind him the Strongman's vehicle burst out of the burning cloud a half-second later, and they were running, both of them, side by side and then nose to tail, down the wide empty street under the orange streetlamps with the motorcade's lights already distant in the rear window.
Behind them, the minivans began to move.
"Strongman," Kin said. "Status."
There was a pause. Then: "Took a round in the bicep. Through and through. It's not arterial." Another pause. "It hurts."
"We need to get you to a medical bay."
"We need to get you to a medical bay. I've got a hundred and thirteen more lives in the bank. I've lost blood before."
Kin looked at the rear-view mirror. The minivans were coming. Fast. Four of them, headlights low and wide, spreading into a pursuit formation across all four lanes.
"Four behind us," he said.
"I count five," Selah said.
The radio crackled.
And then Nia's voice came through, small and quick and slightly breathless, like a girl who had just finished sprinting up a staircase.
"I see them," she said. "Go left at the next intersection and don't slow down. I'm going to run between them and raise dust. Just enough for you to get out of sight. But don't go far—I'm going to release a burst of pure speed energy because I want to be faster than bullets, and that might knock me out, and you need to be close enough to catch me afterward."
Silence.
Kin looked at Selah. Selah looked at Kin.
"Nia," Kin said. "That's a bad plan."
"It's the only plan."
"It's a—"
"It's the only plan. Left at the intersection. Don't slow down."
The radio cut out.
***
She ran.
Kin saw her only once—a small dark shape crossing the avenue in front of the minivans, so fast that his eyes couldn't quite track her, her heels kicking up a wall of grey street dust that swallowed the headlights and the grilles and the whole front rank of the pursuing vehicles. For a moment, the avenue behind them turned into a single rolling cloud of dust and grit, and the two SUVs slipped through the intersection and turned left, and the pursuit fell out of sight.
Then a shot rang out.
Not from the minivans. From the far side of the dust cloud, where a military SUV had just pushed through the smoke and locked its headlights onto the small figure sprinting along the edge of the road.
Kin saw her stumble. Saw her leg buckle underneath her. Saw the trail of blood she was leaving on the asphalt, bright and thin.
[Nia: status critical. Gunshot wound, left calf. Speed reduced to approximately 200 km/h. Kin's top speed in full System enhancement: approximately 400 km/h. Time to intercept at current distance: 11 seconds.]
The soldier came up through the sunroof of the military SUV. He planted his boots on the roof rack, braced himself, and raised an assault rifle to his shoulder.
Selah's rifle was already in her hands.
"I can take him," she said.
"No."
"Kin—"
"I said no." He kept his eyes on the road. "If you fire, they'll see the weapon. They'll know what we're carrying. Then they won't chase one car—they'll bring everything. Armour. Air. The whole country. We lose the mission and we lose her."
"Then what do we do?"
Kin's mind was moving very fast, and the System was feeding him numbers, and none of the numbers were good. The soldier's sight picture. The distance to the turnoff. The seconds until the next intersection. Nia's slowing legs.
He took a breath.
"I have a plan," he said. "But first, you have to take the wheel."
Selah stared at him.
"Take the wheel," he repeated. "Now."
She unbuckled. She slid across the centre console—fast, efficient, the way a professional moves—and as she passed him her hip brushed across his lap, firm and warm through the fabric, and she gasped, one short, sharp intake of air, and then she was in the driver's seat with both hands on the wheel and her eyes fixed rigidly forward.
She sat very still for a moment.
Then she looked at him—one quick sideways glance, unreadable, unasked—and whatever had flickered across her face folded itself away and her jaw set and the poker mask came back down over her features like a shutter.
"Let's do this," she said. "After you."
Kin put his hand on the door handle.
He opened it an inch.