Up and Coming: Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

Revolver

Originally published by No Way Home: A Speculative Fiction Anthology

Cara Stone is a broken woman: penniless, homeless, and hopeless. When the given the chance to appear on television, she jumps at the chance to win a minimum of $5,000 for her family.

The state-run, crowdfunded series, Revolver, has been established by the nation’s moneyed elite to combat the increasing plight of class warfare.

There’s never been a Revolver contestant quite like her before. The corporate states of America are hungry for blood, and Cara promises to deliver.

The price tag on my head was $5,000. Easy money.

I followed the bald man down a long corridor lined with closed doors and framed black-and-white studio portraits of the station’s newscasters. I turned away from their glossy-print gazes, focusing on the producer’s back. He wore a long-sleeved blue button-down and black khakis that had sharp creases on either side of his legs. Sweat beaded his forehead from the brief moment he’d spent outside to allow me access to the building. The overhead lighting made his shoulder-holstered gun gleam.

He deliberately kept a few paces ahead of me, and I caught the downdraft of his cologne. He smelled nice. I didn’t. Too much time in the heat, dressed in too many layers, wearing most of the few clothes I had to my name all at once. I didn’t want them to get stolen and find myself fucked over by the winter.

Not that I was going to live that long.

“We’re through here, Ms. Stone,” the producer said. I forgot his name. Stevens or Stephenson. Whatever.

He held the door open for me and tilted his head back, nose up, holding his breath as I walked past. I imagined he worked with a lot of the desperate filth, and wondered how he hadn’t gotten used to it yet. Fuck him. Let him enjoy his false sense of security. Truth was, he was living on the edge between prosperity and desolation, a good two weeks’ notice away from losing everything. Eventually it would happen, and he’d be blindsided by it, same as everyone else.

“Should I leave you my coat?” I asked.

His lips curled in a funny, sour sort of twist and he primly shook his head. “You can hang it over there,” he said, pointing to an overly elaborate coat hanger.

I shook myself free of the carpenter’s coat, and then peeled off two oversized sweaters, down to a dirty, sweat-stained and once-white tank top. I thought about taking off my boots to fuck with him, smirking at the idea of smacking him across the face with a toe-jam-soiled sock. Smug prick.

Stevens—if that was his name—stood at an end table, next to a fancy bar stool with a thick leather seat. A large wooden box the color of dark walnut was opened on the table. The revolver sat enshrined in plush velvet and he motioned me toward it with an artificial air of ceremony.

“This is a Remington New Model Army Revolver, first produced in 1858,” he said with a reverential tone. “Fully loaded, six shots, with .44 caliber rounds.”

I nodded, admiring the gleaming gun metal and polished wooden grip. I sidled up close to Stevens to deliberately invade his personal space. His distaste was apparent, but I’ll give him credit for not moving away. Instead, he breathed shallowly through his mouth, lips slightly parted.

“It’s a nice gun,” I said. “Why six bullets, though? I’ll only need one.”

He shrugged. “Dramatic effect. We’ll have you open the cylinder, show it to the cameras. Let the audience know this is for real.” He licked his lips, staring at the firearm as if it were an old lover. “Did you want to hold her?”

Her, I noticed. Not It. Christ.

“Sure.”

He passed it to me with the gentleness he might use to handle a newborn. I’d never held a gun before and the weight was surprising. Even though it was only a few pounds, it seemed heavier. My fingers curled around the handle, and my index finger closed on the trigger. I’d never held a gun before, but this felt surprisingly natural, and a little too easy. I pointed it, away from Stevens, of course, and tracked the room through the sight at the end of the barrel.

I can do this, I swore to myself.

After a minute of mustering confidence and expelling doubts, I resettled the gun in its box and took a deep breath.

The Remington came from the Open Carry Association for Armed Americans, a “proud sponsor” of the Revolver webcast. OCA3 had a lot of politicians in their pockets—enough to pass mandatory open carry laws for all citizens in virtually all of the red states. Stevens was the third man I’d seen in the broadcast house that carried, and I knew there were plenty more I hadn’t seen, behind all those closed doors and in the studio set.

As a media employee of a far-right-leaning broadcast, Stevens was considered to be in a high-risk profession; along with police, firefighters, airline pilots, military servicemen and -women, educators, mail delivery, cable and internet service providers, doctors, construction workers, jewelers, librarians…The list seemed endless. OCA3, and their bought-and-paid-for shills across the nation, insisted that “a right ignored is a right lost forever”, and that it was the duty of all ‘real Americans’ to exercise their Second Amendment right and bear arms at all times.

“Don’t put the gun to your temple,” Stevens said. “You’ll want to put it here, behind your ear.” He pointed to a spot behind his ear lobe, where his skull met his neck. “Give that trigger a nice, long, steady pull and that’ll do ya.”

“Why there?”

“We want to avoid any accidents.” He licked his lips, as if he were salivating at the promise of a gun going off. A fucking Pavlov’s dog of the open carry movement. “Don’t want the bullet to glance off the bone of your skull. Had this guy one time, the bullet circled his skull, blew off his scalp but didn’t kill him.”

He stared at the box, plainly lusting. “Or you can stick it in your mouth, put the barrel up against your upper palate.”

I made the mistake of shifting my gaze downward and noticed the growing bulge tenting the front of his khakis.

“It’s been cleaned already, and it’s a reliable gun,” he said. “You’re all ready to go.”

He licked his lips again, and then, for the first time, really looked at me.

“There’s a bathroom through there,” he said, pointing at a door behind him. “You can get cleaned up, and we’ll have make-up get you ready for your big debut. Fresh set of clothes in there for you, too.”

I nodded numbly, unable to remember the last time I’d had a decent shower. He stood stock still, as if he were waiting for me to undress in front of him. After way too long, he rolled his eyes and let out an exasperated sigh, put out by my modesty. I waited until I couldn’t hear his footsteps anymore, then went into the bathroom and closed the door behind me. There was no lock.

Hot water cascaded down my body for a good, long while, and I held my fingers under the powerful spray to wash away the grime that had collected under each fingernail. Shampoo wrung all the excess oil away from my long hair, and I rediscovered the joyous feeling of fingernails against my scalp as I worked up a lather. A women’s razor had even been left for me, and I went about shaving my legs and armpits, if for no other reason than a brief return to a mostly forgotten routine.

I held the razor tightly at first, controlling my impulse to cut deeper. The razors were embedded in a safety cap, allowing for a surface-level, injury-free shave. Not like the single-edged razor blade that left the shallow pink lines on my left wrist, and then years of therapy and medications in its wake. “My cry for help,” according to the shrinks.

Finished, I stood in the steam-filled bathroom, wrapped in a terry cloth towel that I could happily live forever in. I wondered how gauche it would be to die in it.

A black clothes bag hung from the inside of the door. I cracked the door open to let the steam out, then dressed. The white blouse and blue capris were both ironed—all sharp creases and crisp fabric. They fit well enough, but felt a bit loose, either because I wasn’t used to dressing so lightly or because weight loss from too many missed meals had left me little more than a skeletal frame covered in taught skin. I left the socks in the bottom of the bag and stepped back into the main room. Or was it a dressing room? Green room? Guest suite? Did it matter?

Walking barefoot against the plush throw rug, I balled my toes into fists. I’d picked up this trick from some old holovid that pre-dated even my dad. It was oddly relaxing, and I paced for a few minutes, telling myself again this wasn’t a serious mistake.

I can do this.

Along the back wall was a long counter of freshly polished oak. The tang of Lemon Pledge was barely discernible beneath the thick stink of bleach. Glass shelves filled with bottles of amber and clear liquids caught my eye. A square tumbler waited on a coaster, inviting me. Something to steel my nerves wouldn’t hurt.

I reached for the top shelf and pulled down a bottle of bourbon. Knocked back two fingers, neat. It took a minute for the burn to blossom behind my breastbone and deep in my belly, but the warmth spread pleasantly. The booze was much better than the stuff I’d been drinking for most of my meals of late, and I poured off another two fingers. Fuck it; I made it three.

The walls were all white, and if I caught the right angle I could make out the dark tinge of stains, barely visible. The bleach had done a good job, but the cumulative effect of so many Revolver crowdfundings had left its indelible mark.

On the opposite side, at the front of the room, were three liquid holodisplays. Two were running stock photos—a polar bear standing on an ice float, hummingbirds, Earth from space, massive steel-bodied trucks with customized chimneys spewing columns of black smoke into blue sky.

The middle screen was running what passed for the news these days. Talking heads argued back and forth over whether or not the nation’s previous black president had been personally responsible for bringing Middle Eastern fundamentalist terrorists into the country across the Mexican border. One speculated that the ex-president had bought the cell leader a first class ticket with his own creds, but so what? It was still all taxpayer money, anyway.

A viral outbreak was sweeping through Plano, Texas, and had left more than a hundred people dead. Apparently, also the former president’s fault. They never blamed the current president for the tumultuous mudslide the country had been lost under, and had, for the better part of a decade now, been arguing which of his former liberal rivals, whether in office or not, had done the most grievous harm.

When the newsfeed switched cameras, to show the men in full and sitting across from one another, I saw that they were both armed. Naturally.

In a segment they called ‘Secular Murder Spree’, they ran the names of women who had received abortions that week, and vented their frustrations over the continued existence of underground women’s health clinics. This in spite of the personhood amendments that stripped women of most of their civil rights. It took the broadcasters a surprisingly long time—nearly a full minute—to get around to comparing the clinics to Nazi extermination camps. In a ticker at the bottom of the screen, the names and addresses of each woman scrolled in an endless loop. I couldn’t figure out a way to shut off the display, but the rant was a convenient reminder that I was doing the right thing.

I’d known what a shit-fest this faux news network was going in. Last week had been sweeps week, and to bolster ratings while also celebrating the anniversary of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act all of the state-run media reveled in bigoted debauchery. Revolver brought in a revolving door of LGBTQIA contestants who had no other options. Each had been given a choice—life in prison, chemical castration, or a chance to win their family some money and, maybe, give their deaths a smidge of meaning.

The zealots in office told us often enough, and loudly enough, that this was a Christian America. They just never bothered to clarify if we were New or Old Testament. And eventually their claim was repeated enough to win the perception of truth. Now, everything was a Holy War.

I covered my ears to block out the noises of such earnest hatred, but whoever was monitoring me was a spiteful little fucker, and the volume on the display rose and rose.

This world was way too fucked up to keep on living in. Especially with people like that—the so-called reporters, the so-called politicians, all of them just radical fundamentalists beneath it all—given so much power and influence.

Without knocking, Stevens opened the main door and popped his head in from the hallway. “Eyes are up here, bub,” I said, after his leer failed to drift much further north than my chest. “And quit drooling.”

He came into the room, but spoke back into the hallway. “Come on in.”

“Sure, that’s fine,” I said, like I’d been given a choice about who I socialized with before the main event. Stevens kept on ignoring me, but the woman that followed at least said ‘hello’, and seemed to recognize me as a fellow human being, if not a compatriot.

“I’m Tracy,” she said. “Why don’t you have a seat?”

“Here?” I said, pointing at the barstool.

She nodded—way too perky for me. “That’s fine, yeah.”

I straddled the leather seat, feeling the weight of Stevens’s gaze all the while. Starting with a manicure, Tracy decorated me and got me all dolled up for my first, and last, time on TV.

“I don’t think I could do this if I were in your shoes,” she confided.

She kept her voice low, throwing Stevens a sideways glance every now and then. I caught him staring at the both of us more than once, licking his chops. He kept his arms folded across his chest, one hand lingering near the grip of his holstered pistol.

“That’s because you haven’t hit rock bottom yet,” I said, rotating the tumbler between my fingers.

While Tracy worked, I tuned into the newscast. Always a mistake. A supermodel had been shot to death in LA after staging a ‘Get Out The Vote’ campaign. Two female anchors—both blonde, full figured, and virtually indistinguishable from one another, as if they’d been plucked fresh from a cloning tank—had joined the men and were taking turns mocking the model’s life and her murder.

“She was a supermodel,” one woman said, “so, obviously, she didn’t have much in the brains department.”

“She didn’t get it,” the other said. “We’re at war with the Middle East, and she’s speaking out against gun rights and demanding gun safety for people here in the States. She’s part of this campaign to turn the country into a communist state. She got what she deserved.”

“Ladies,” the first woman said, speaking to all of us now, her voice deepening into condescension, “you shouldn’t vote if you can’t control your emotions. If you can’t vote properly, if you can’t vote conservatively, stay home. Play with your apps and your phone and stay home. Make some cookies, find a date.” She threw the collection of paper she’d been holding at the table, clearly disgusted. “Do literally anything else.”

“That’s right,” the other woman said, nodding vigorously and glaring at the camera. “Our soldiers aren’t over there dying so you can go out to the polls and be completely clueless. Get a clue. Stay at home.”

“Let her life be a lesson. She should have kept her mouth shut and her clothes off. Learn something from that, ladies.”

A dull throb was building behind my eyes, and I pinched the bridge of my nose trying to drive it away. “How can you stand working for these people?” I asked.

Tracy shrugged. “It pays the bills,” she said. Stevens coughed to attract her attention, and she shut her mouth.

Instead, she said, “Close your eyes.”

I felt the soft press of a brush against my eyelids, and then a few sweeps across each cheek. She did my lipstick, then had me blot with a Kleenex. Finally, she did a light bit of curling with my hair. Something simple, but it finished off the appearance she was going for.

“What do you think?”

For the first time in a long while, I felt—maybe even looked—beautiful.

“Gonna be a shame to splatter half my head against the wall and ruin all your good work.”

My words took the shine off her perkiness, her beaming smile cracking then eroding in stages; first crestfallen and then downright plummeting off her face entirely until her lips turned into a thin, barely-there crease. I couldn’t muster up enough of a shit to care. The bravado was false, and my suicide was still enough hours away to not feel entirely real. I watched her smile wither and die with a small bit of satisfaction as she packed up her gear without another word.

Stevens was on top of me, clipping a wireless lavaliere mic into place.

“You need to undo a few more buttons.”

“Excuse me?”

He held both hands out, his empty palms cupping the air in front of my breasts. “Show more skin. C’mon, this is your last night on Earth. Let’s see those tits.”

“Get the fuck out of here,” I said.

“It’ll bring in more money. You want to raise enough creds for your family, right? So?” He shrugged. “Show your tits. You’ll make a killing.”

My face burned and I told him again, “Get the fuck out of here,” my words edgy and clipped. I fought back the desire to throw my drink in his face, not wanting to waste it.

He huffed, his cheeks ballooning as his face turned red. He twisted away from me and stomped back to the door, talking all the while: “Hey, it’s your life. At least what’s left of it. You don’t want my advice? Fine. Don’t take it. Fuck you too. I’ve only been doing this for five years, you hear me? I know what I’m talking about. And before this? I worked on This Evening, Tonight. You want to get all stuck up over me trying to help? Fuck you, lady. Enjoy your fifteen minutes of fame. Fucking psycho bitch.”

The door slammed behind him, shaking in its frame. The holodisplays shimmered in the wave of his frustrations.

I shot back the bourbon and poured another. Free booze was a luxury I hadn’t enjoyed in ages.

I nursed my way through round number three, letting the liquor cut through the fog inside my head. I felt downright swimmingly all of a sudden, and the world was clear enough to me that I wasn’t sure if I needed to laugh at it or cry because of it.

My fingernails were too neat, too shiny. I’d given up weeks of accumulated filth for that French mani, trying to shut out a memory that came to me, unbidden—my fingers scoring the earth as I tried to kick myself away from the weight pressing down on me. My heart raced and my hand started shaking. I had to set the glass back on the bar. My tough-girl routine could only carry me so far, but I’d almost died this morning. And how fucking ironic would that have been? To check out before I could do it on my own with cash in hand?

I thought of the stranger’s oppressive weight bearing down on me, my fingers scrabbling, nails carving shallow scars into the dirt, its blackness pressing into the nail beds and crowding the corners of my vision. His breath had been hot and putrid, heaving forcefully into my face, his stink invading my nose and mouth. He’d held a makeshift knife—a long shard of glass with one end wrapped in electrical tape—to my throat and had finished before he’d even unbuckled his pants. The thrill of it, the physical power he had over me, had been enough for him, and it had been more than enough to leave me shaken and violated.

I’d been through worse, so I wasn’t sure why I suddenly felt so shaken-up by this particular attack. Maybe it was Stevens, and his oafish, ripe sense of entitlement; the way his eyes had lingered and the way he’d held his hands before my breasts, not touching me, but making his thoughts plain enough.

The bourbon made me feel less like a piece of meat, and forced my hand to be still.

As I glanced around the room again, the truth of it finally sank in. A truth I had known in a largely academic way, without examining it too deeply; like knowing that the sky was blue. The reasons why weren’t important. It was a fact of life. But suddenly it carried new weight and settled into my brainpan, taking root in my mind with a new clarity.

I was alone.

Not too many people get a glimpse of how their own funeral will be, but I knew. All I had to do was take a look around this room and I could see the end so clearly. It was only me. No friends, no family. Not even motherfucking Stevens.

Me and a gun. Somehow, I always knew it would end this way.

There were no windows in the room, but I could hear the rioting outside through the walls. Angry shouts, hostile screams—the sounds of discontent, of pain and resistance. I didn’t need to see it to know what was happening. I’d seen enough on the way in, as the Revolver security team picked me up from the displacement camp and delivered me here. This evening’s riot had been birthing then, but was in full swing now.

Three floors up and on the opposite end of the street, I could still hear the loud engine and clacking of treads against asphalt as police combat carriers, mobile assault units and tanks rolled into place. The gunfire was sporadic, but I knew it would grow as the evening progressed. It always did.

A week ago, I’d been on the outer edges of a riot that had engulfed the entire city square. I’d been scavenging for food and wound up with a mouthful of tear gas. That was before the police began firing their automatic rifles into the crowds. I’d been lucky to escape.

As the bourbon settled, my mind drifted. I couldn’t help but think of good old Ravencroft. When I was sixteen and Dad demanded to know what had happened to my wrist and why it was wrapped in gauze I had lied—told him I cut myself on a bush…best I could think of at the time. Stupid, I know. He demanded to see, and when I tried to weasel out of it, he grabbed my arm and tore the bandage away. Then he found the razor after digging through the garbage can in my bedroom. After that, we were off to the ER and a week-long stay in the psych wing where they pumped me full of drugs that made me want to kill myself even more, and then medication that numbed my brain and turned me into a zombie during the very few hours I was awake.

It had felt as if my mind was disconnected from my body, and that I was living in a frail shell where everything was slow and sluggish. I had existed for a time on two planes, both myself and not myself, a familiar stranger in my own skin. Another batch of pills made my heart race and the world sped up into a nauseating, dizzy spin. Eventually, they sorted it out, but not before a lifetime of cardiac irregularities had set in.

Like this guest suite at the news station, my room in Ravencroft had been windowless too. Except there I had a roommate who spent most of the time muttering to herself and drooling across her hospital gown. I’d sit in the rec room with drugged-up horrors who stared blankly into space. There was a window there, at least, providing a wonderful view of the lower adjacent wing’s roof.

“The attempt was serious,” I had argued in my earliest group therapy session. I had been exquisitely pissed off to have my aborted suicide brushed aside as a ‘cry for help’. I didn’t need help. I needed to not be such a fucking coward. I needed to not have a fucking last minute epiphany about all the things I’d miss if I were gone.

“Then why not do a better job?” the doc had asked. “Why try to hide the razor in plain sight? Why not have a better excuse for your injuries?”

No planning, no follow-through. A cry for help. I sat there crying, hating myself for living and having to sit through this shit. Officious prick.

When I started drinking and collecting DUIs, my probation officer asked me what alcohol was supposed to solve. She didn’t get it either. None of them did. None of them understood the one, single, basic fucking fact of it all. Alcohol wasn’t going to solve anything—it didn’t have to. It simply needed to help me feel like a goddamn human being. It needed to make the world bearable.

But that was the one thing the world could never be again—bearable. Things only got worse. The bottom fell out of the whole place completely after the last market crash; a total downward spiral, and those of us with too little had even less. Displacement camps were set up for those who had their homes seized by the banks, or the police, who became increasingly aggressive in their stop-and-seize practices, even in the total absence of a crime, in an effort to prop up their local governments and demand additional funding.

I poured off two more fingers of bourbon as the gunfire went from erratic to almost continuous. I’d have to find a new bottle soon, and I wasn’t even trying to get hammered. I needed to be clear-headed enough to pull the trigger.

Rioting had become such a common practice, a backdrop of daily life, that it hardly even made the news anymore, unless there was a significant body count. The mention of rape hauled me back to the broadcast.

“Reports coming out of a college in Madison, Wisconsin where a young woman is claiming to have been raped by the football team. We’ve obtained some photos from the party she was attending, and look at that,” the journalist said.

He was young, his hair a black Brillo pad. The photo, blown up to focus on the girl in question, occupied the right side of the display.

“You can see her holding a red cup, probably filled with booze, and wearing a midriff T-shirt and a miniskirt. I mean, what did she expect going there, to some frat-house sorority mixer like that?”

“Beyond that,” the other reporter said, gesticulating with both hands, “it’s a football team, right? These guys need to blow off steam before the big game. Right? She shouldn’t have been dressing so provocatively.”

“You know how it is,” Brillo Pad said, “These women want sex so badly, and if they’re not satisfied they call rape. That’s how they are. It’s ridiculous.”

“Next time, ladies, be sure to cover up. Dress sensibly, this kind of stuff won’t happen to you.”

Right, I thought, dress in layers, wear your entire wardrobe. That’ll stop ‘em.

I hunted again for a way to shut this bullshit off, but it was impossible to escape the state-sponsored news.

“This is a Christian country,” Brillo pad continued. “And if you’re a good Christian, this kind of stuff doesn’t happen.”

“That’s right,” his co-host chimed in. “She needs Jesus. That’s the only man she needs to let inside her, not an entire football team.”

“She’s a whore, that’s the bottom line. And we know what happens to women like her.”

“Yeah, they end up standing on the street corner, expecting taxpayers to pay for their abortions.”

I threw the crystal tumbler at the display. The broadcast rippled slightly as the glass passed through and shattered against the wall. Still they prattled on, their poison inescapable. “Fuck you!” I screamed, my heart racing. I wanted to turn this off, to shut them out, to be rid of them. Alone in this room, and I still couldn’t even get rid of these two men and their twisted ideals. Why couldn’t I be alone? Why?

The newsman brought on a rotating gallery of talking head politicos, all of them men. The Wisconsin state rep reminded viewers that rape was God’s gift to women.

“If this cheerleader,” the rep said, “gets pregnant, then, you know, that’s a gift. This gift of human life. God knows all of it, from beginning to end. He has a plan for each of us, and, look, you know that life begins at conception. A beautiful new life could come from this ugliness, and that’s just a gift from God. It’s a wonderful thing, really.”

I twisted to the wooden box and opened it. The long barrel of the revolver shone beneath the lights. I could do this. I could do this right now and blot out all their voices.

But no, I couldn’t. Not yet.

I inhaled deeply and shut my eyes against the tears, forcing myself to listen to the gunshots and maimed screaming from outside, focusing on the distant noise instead of the sadistic, filthy machismo pouring from the display. I wished their voices weren’t so loud. A little while longer, I told myself. I can do this.

The building shook, the concussive throb of explosions outside dulled by distance and the thickness of the studio. The talking heads appeared oblivious to the troubles rising outside their windows. They were either used to ignoring it, or had their heads so far up each other’s asses that the plight of the people made no difference to either of them.

I ignored the tiny voice in my head warning me to stop and rifled back two more fingers of bourbon, finishing the bottle while the room spun and vibrated. I held on to the bar’s edge as I looped around back to the shelves of liquors.

There were no mirrors in the room, and I studied my distorted reflection in the line-up of booze, my face curling around the curved edges of thick glass, bright in the overhead recessed lighting. I was wobbly, but cognizant enough to chide myself for being a stupid drunk. I counted the bottles and found twenty-eight more reasons to die, not including the gin.

Christ, I was pathetic.

Stevens popped his head in the door, again troubling neither of us with so much as a knock. “Five minutes,” he said.

“Sure,” I said, the word thick and palsied as it slurred on my tongue. “S’great.”

I saw his eyes land on the empty bottle behind me, the weight of silent judgment in them as I took down a bottle of Balvenie. He said nothing, but he didn’t need to.

“Oh, fuck yourself,” I said, nearly falling over. He was a fucking hypocrite.

I grabbed the empty and threw it toward him, but missed by a mile as it glanced off the cabinet door in front of me and dropped to the ground. I nearly fell over. Could barely stand. Couldn’t even aim straight. Two more things to add to the list of things ‘Cara Stone sucks ass’ at. Already a long, long list of failures, with decades of recriminations behind each single fucking one of them.

When I finally felt solid enough to stand, I saw Stevens was gone. Good. Fuck him. I didn’t need him. Who the fuck was he anyway? Asshole.

I took small steps back to the plush bar stool, nudging the empty bottle gingerly with my toe to push it out of the way. Why didn’t the stool have a back, at least? I was going to fall over. I propped myself up on top it, using the Balvenie on the end table as support to keep myself upright. Why was everything so spinny and tilt-a-whirl? My eyes were heavy.

“Stay with Sean and I,” Brillo Pad said, “as we return with a new episode of Revolver. First up, though, a word from our sponsors.”

The two men were replaced with another man, this one dressed in combat fatigues and carrying an assault rifle in one hand, and a large wooden cross in the other. A number of other men stood behind him, each armed with a variety of guns, rocket launchers, bazookas, and knives. I wasn’t focused enough to listen to the rambling Sovereign Citizen recruitment speech, and the world dimmed as I tuned the speaker out.

“Miss? Hello?”

I opened my eyes to Brillo Pad’s smirking gaze. I’d hate to wake up to his condescending bullshit on a regular basis. Shit. Did I pass out? A hand squeezed roughly at my left breast, pinching the nipple through the blouse. I shoved the hand away and shot daggers at Stevens. Fucking pervert.

“Hello, hello, hello?”

“Oh. Hey,” I said, lamely. My tongue felt fuzzy. I wanted to sleep. I made a show of smiling, feeling absolutely none of it.

“Two minutes in, and you’re already a drunk skunk. That’s gotta be a new record, hey, Sean?”

“I think so, Brian. But, you know, women don’t have the fortitude for this kind of fundraising. Men are able to muscle through it pretty well, but the ladies get too emotional to stay clearheaded. I’m not surprised by her inability to stay sober.”

“Can you hear us OK, Miss Stone?”

“You two are assholes, you know that?”

“Wow, language,” Brillo Pad Brian said. “You wouldn’t talk to Jesus that way, now would you?”

“I’m sure it’s that time of month,” Sean added, giving a sage nod and a smirk to the camera. A real yuckster.

Stevens was standing beside me, and the weight of his unforgiving stare bored into me. How many times had I seen that disappointed expression on others?

I stared at the scars on my wrist as I set the empty tumbler aside, trying to screw up some courage for this. I wanted to get it over with, go right to the ‘bang bang, goodnight’ part of the show. I felt so small under their stares and wanted to curl up and bring an end to it all. I hated myself for being so pathetic, but was somewhat relieved that I could still at least have enough control to finish myself off. There would be peace at the end of all this, finally.

“OK, so,” Sean said, “let’s talk money. Something I know women can never get enough of. You’re here to raise five thousand dollars for your family, is that right?”

“That’s right,” I said, keeping my answers short.

“You’ve come to the right place, then. Revolver is all about helping the unfortunate. Our corporate sponsors, the Kay brothers, Johnnie and Donnie Kay, have matched your fundraising goal as they always do. Your five thousand is guaranteed. What we’re going to do tonight is see how much more money we can earn your family, and help get a few more folks out of the breadlines tonight. The Kay brothers recognize how much of an enemy poverty is to society, what a blight it is on this country, and they’re working to eliminate it one person at a time. Tonight, Miss Cara Stone, their war against poverty begins with you!”

I could hear canned applause through the piped-in speakers surrounding me. The clamor made my head thrum painfully. The noise of slapping hands gave way to the muffled roars of explosions, and I smelled a too-close chemical stench. I dimly wondered if the factory town on the city’s outskirts was burning, and how close those flames might come to us.

“What’s happening outside?” I asked.

My question seemed to have taken Brillo Pad off guard, and he flashed an arrogant smirk at the camera. “Nothing you need to worry about. You’re surrounded by an awful lot of strong menfolk, and our building’s security team is top notch. We’ll keep you safe.”

I opened my mouth to respond, then noticed the small green light on the lavaliere wink out. I spoke anyway, asking, again, “What’s happening out there, though? Shouldn’t you be reporting on this?”

“You’re off-air, Miss Stone,” Stevens said, as if I were brain dead. Shit, maybe I was. And even if I were, he still had no right to look at me like that, as if he was so goddamn patronly and concerned for me—the kind of concern that was wrapped in a haughty sense of superiority.

“What’s going on out there?” I waved an arm toward the far wall. “And you keep your fucking hands off me, you hear me?”

He shrugged, clearly bored. “The usual riots. Soup kitchen ran out; too many mouths and not enough food. Entitled fucks decided to start something, and now we gotta put them down. Nothing you need to worry about.” He patted the pistol under his arm to emphasize the point. “They’ll calm down once the show gets into the swing of things,” he said.

I thought of the massive jumbotron in the city’s center square, and the metal bleachers lining the courtyard around it. My mug would be blasted large over the park grounds, while people gathered to watch and warm their hands around their bowl of hot food.

“People like you,” he pointed at me, then flapped his hand in the general direction of the building’s north end, toward the park, “nothing you all love more than free handouts and cheap entertainment.”

Something to the left of me gurgled and gave off a steamy belch. The scent of coffee perfumed the air, and I noticed the maker in its final stages of brewing.

Stevens grabbed the bottle of Balvenie and poured two cups of coffee, black. He set one on the table for me, and then left the room without another word. The door closed on a trail of hot steam.

The pretty pictures blanketing the other two holodisplay feeds dissolved into a stream of ranting vitriol. The Revolver social media stream. I read the comments with a glazed detachment, as if I were studying a train wreck.

Icons sat beside the vulgar text of supposed men hiding behind usernames that were rife with sexual innuendo, swear words, or obscure movie references. Most of the users’ icons were cartoon images or video game stills; a rare few were actually vain or brave enough to slap their face beside words they should not have been proud of.

One user hid behind the façade of a cartoon mouse and wrote:

Rape the bitch to death! #Revolver

Another:

Ugly bitch. She look like a homeless skank.

#Revolver best thing to ever happen to her.

And:

Fat ass #Revolver deserve to die tonight.

Get her fat ass outta breadline.

Leave the crumbs for somebody else!

Not to leave out this gem:

She gonna suck dat #Revolver wishin it was ma dick.

#DieStupidBitches #KillAllDaBitches

The coffee was too hot and too bitter to enjoy. It went well with the stream of ugly consciousness scrolling across the display. Very briefly, I thought about spiking the coffee, but knew that I needed to be alert. The demons were running rampant, inside and outside my skull, and no matter how badly I wanted to stay drunk, I knew that I needed to sober up. Last thing I needed was Stevens’s big, ugly hand tweaking my nipples again.

A dulled whoompf! rattled the bottles over the bar. Plaster dust fluttered down through the beam of recessed lighting. The holodisplays and lights flickered briefly before regaining full strength. I was missing a hell of a show, apparently. Had to be better than this state-run filth.

I opened up the walnut box that held the revolver and hefted the gun’s weight again. I couldn’t deny the sense of power it imbued me with, even as I doubted my ability to follow through. My final moments would be coming up soon and I wanted to be clear-headed.

I can do this.

But, could I really? The artefacts on my wrist said otherwise. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. All I needed to do was put the gun to my head and pull the trigger. Not that difficult. Barely any thought required at all. Then, I would be good and truly free. I could escape. That was all I really wanted, and how I went about achieving that didn’t matter. I was in control, and I could do this. The news hosts, the hashtaggers, the rape-loving politicians, Stevens, all of them—they didn’t matter. They could try to degrade me and strip me of my worth and individuality. I didn’t care about them. I was in charge of my fate, and this was my choice.

I cradled the gun in my lap, holding tightly to its grip, steeling my nerves with the weapon’s utter indifference. Then the left-most holodisplay snapped and flung a new face into place, and it felt like a rivet gun was firing into my belly and twisting my intestines in a vice.

“Dad?” I said, noticing the tiny green light splashed against the white fabric above my breast as I looked down. Live and on-air now.

Through the watery haze of the standing puddle that formed against my eyes, I saw an extra fifty dollars had accumulated on the tally display. Five thousand and fifty dollars, my life’s worth.

“You don’t have to do this, sweetie,” he said, imploring me. His bottom lip quivered, making the loose skin beneath his chin shake. I had the same eyes as him, and I saw the same watery gaze reflected in his, both of us holding back tears at the sudden reunion.

I’d expected this. Known it was coming, that it was part of the Revolver gimmick. Still, it took the wind right out of my sails and shook me to my core. I’d tried to prepare myself emotionally, tried to lock away all the feels, but my stomach still quivered with butterflies and my heart raced. My throat burned as I choked back the sobs. I hadn’t seen my father in ten years, and now this.

He was here to watch his little girl blow her brains out on state TV. How could I not cry? How could I not hate myself?

“Mr. Stone,” Brillo Pad said, “thank you for being here tonight for your daughter. Is there anything you want to say to her?”

“It’s not your fault, Cara. You don’t have to do this. I don’t need the money. Please, come home.”

“I—,” I began, my voice hitching. My mouth flapped open and closed of its own accord, and my throat swelled enough to make sounds difficult. I think I squeaked. Don’t fucking cry, you shit. Don’t. “I can’t,” I said.

The truth of it all was plain and simple—it was my fault.

After my ‘cry for help’, after the antidepressants made me feel so good that I decided I didn’t need them anymore and went off my meds, I went straight into a downward spiral. An underage DUI bust, and pissing dirty with THC, was more than enough for the state police to seize my parents’ home and all their belongings, even though the charges of Contributing to the Delinquency of a Minor filed against them didn’t stick. They were tossed out on the street and it was me who left them there.

There were harsh words, to be sure, but Dad didn’t disown me. He didn’t need to. I’d invented enough arguments in my head and went through all the potential back-and-forths, and they all ended the same. I knew that reality wouldn’t be any different than the lousy movies I dreamed up in my head. So I left.

He and Mom spent months searching for me. I stayed hidden, though, and I lied to the shelters and to the bums I decided to cohabit with. He touched me, I said. A year later, I learned through the hobo network that he’d left a message for me at one of the shelters.

Mom was dead. Massive heart attack.

That sealed the deal. I was poison. I didn’t even know where they’d been living, or where she was buried. I was too busy staying drunk and avoiding the police for the warrants I knew were out there from skipping out on my probation officer. At that point, the fewer people I was involved with the better. Fuck everyone, you know?

“I can’t come home, Dad,” I repeated, stronger now. I sat up straighter, still holding the gun in my lap, index finger curled around the trigger.

“There’s a better way, sweetheart. It’s not too late. Let me help you, please. I can get you help, and we can turn all of this around.”

But in my head, his voice said what I knew to be the truth: You killed your mother. You’re beyond hope. You might be cleaned up right now, but we both know you’re nothing more than pure filth. You don’t deserve my help. Kill yourself. Get it over with.

“Mr. Stone, did you know that your daughter has active warrants for her arrest? She has multiple misdemeanors: counts of drunk and disorderly, operating while intoxicated, resisting arrest. And, of course, soliciting. Mr. Stone, your daughter is a whore. How does that make you feel?”

Dad’s face went red as the blood rushed to his ears. I knew he was seething. “What? What kind of question is that? She’s my daughter! How do you think that makes me feel?”

A burning lump crawled up my throat and I stumbled off the stool before rushing headlong into the bathroom, a hand clapped tightly around my mouth. I couldn’t stop it, couldn’t contain it. Vomit sprayed between my fingers, and I was running and gagging as my stomach emptied itself of everything. Booze, coffee and bile burned against my tongue. My foot hit the puddle and skidded against the sick-slick tile and I went down hard. My back crashed into the bathroom floor, the back of my head bouncing hard off the tiles. Muscles seized up instantly, a tight shock of pain all along the length of my spine and in my hips. I twisted, half-screaming, half-gagging, to finish throwing up. Hot, sticky liquid dripped down my neck from the side of my face. I could hear myself repeated through the room’s speakers—an unpleasant, discordant echo.

I lay there for too long, in my nasty waste and humiliation, reeking of bourbon and spent coffee, utterly dazed. I could hear Brillo Pad and his ammosexual co-host laughing at me. Their words were lost amongst the whirling ringing in my ears and flashes of silver that lingered in my vision with every blink. I couldn’t make out what they were saying, but their mocking tone was unmistakable.

Slowly, I got to my knees, using the bathroom sink to haul myself to my feet, my back screaming all the way. The pain kept me from standing up straight. My whole body was shaking, and a thick caul of mucus covered my chin, darkening the neckline of my stained blouse. I washed in the sink, ignoring the condescension of the Revolver crew and the concerned pleading in my father’s voice.

If I needed another reason to kill myself, I guess I had it.

My eyes lit upon the social media stream. More men laughing at me.

Sick whore, one said.

That was funny, another said. Now suck off that gun.

Lost amongst it all was a lone voice of reason. A single person that wrote:

#Revolver is disgusting and irresonpsible.

Don’t let these people win! Turn it off!

It didn’t take long for the message to get buried in the noise, or for other users to attack that one voice of dissent and threaten them with arson and rape and death.

“Honey, please,” Dad said, openly crying now. Begging me. I saw #Revolver #FAG out of the corner of my eye and my ears burned. Another trait I shared with him. “There’s other ways. We can fix this. I promise you, we can fix this. We can start over. We can change things. Don’t do this.”

“I’m sorry, Dad. I didn’t do enough for you. I wanted to help.”

“There’s better ways for you to help than this. C’mon, sweetie. Cara. Please. I’m begging you, sweetie, please. Not like this. You have to listen to me. I—”

“Turn it off,” I said, turning toward Brillo Pad.

He nodded and Dad disappeared in a dark wink.

“Your dad obviously loves you very much,” Sean said. “You can walk away from the money, the money you earned for your father, and leave with nothing. Or you can continue to participate.”

“We’re up to sixty-five hundred,” Brillo Pad said, a shine in his eyes. He licked his lips, slowly, as if anticipating the blood spill. My life nothing more than a cheap game to him.

“What’s your choice?” Sean asked.

I can do this.

My lips were dry and my back ached scornfully. I brushed aside Dad’s televised lip service and said, “Let’s go for seven thousand.”

Both hosts smiled, revealing toothy fangs, their leering eyes brimming with hatred. I was in the devil’s sandbox, digging my hole deeper. That was my choice.

Bitch. Slut. Whore. Hussy. I’d heard it all before. Been called all of it and worse. Still, I was surprised at the amount of repetition in the media feed, and the frequency with which these words arose, as if cultivated from some collective, self-loathing hive mind of insecurity. There wasn’t even an attempt to muster something approaching creativity in the insults. The whole display was pathetic vitriol.

Brillo Pad and his boy-toy eventually got around to my medical history. The Kay brothers owned seventy percent of the nation’s healthcare providers, and obtaining a complete record of my past was an easy feat for them. The social feed filled with hashtag poison.

Mine: Hashtag Go Fuck Yourself.

“What do you have to be depressed about?” Brillo Pad asked, apparently in all sincerity. But it was a loaded question. I’d been down this road too many times, too.

My probation officer: “You’re sixteen. You skip school, no job, you drink all day. What do you have to be depressed about? You want to be depressed, get a job.”

Dad: “Why did you do this to yourself? Are people at school making fun of you? What’s wrong? Talk to us. Tell us why you’re so moody lately.”

Ravencroft therapist and post-Ravencroft shrink, Dr. Tilbury: “How do you feel?”

It was all chemical shit, and I went through rounds of cocktail drugs to find something to even out the dopamine receptors and uptake my way to normalcy. Depressed was just what I was. I didn’t need a particular reason, and anything could set me off, and oftentimes did. Why the fuck did I stop taking the pills?

Because you’re an idiot, something dark and slithery told me, an all-too-familiar voice perched on my shoulder.

Nobody understood. Everyone thought they were miserable, that they had shitty lives, that their minor inconveniences were epic disasters. My raise wasn’t big enough. I stood in line for over two hours for a loaf of two-day-old bread. Well boo-fucking-hoo. Cry me a river.

My brain chemistry is fucked up, and that’s the bottom line. There’s no cure, only prescribed placations for the demons inside me. If I took the drugs, I was weak. If I tried to solve matters on my own, say with a Remington New Model Army 1858 revolver for instance, I was weak. And if I let nature run its course, my disease was illegitimate and unearned. I was another homeless fruitcake, my depression somehow less than real.

But, people have their own problems. Nowadays especially. That’s a hard hump to get over.

I shrugged and said, “Life sucks. That’s all.”

I saw the glare in Brillo Pad’s eyes. The one that said my answer was a cop out. Maybe it was.

“How many sexual partners have you had?”

“Excuse me?” I asked, struck off-guard. I took a second to recompose. “How is that at all relevant?”

“Well, I’m reading over your medical chart,” he wiggled a microtablet at the camera, “and it says you’ve had two abortions. That seems like an awful lot. And both before you were twenty.”

“I was raped,” I said, my tone hollow. I had to shut myself down inside. It was the one way I could go on. “I was…I don’t need to justify myself to you.”

“But you are promiscuous, aren’t you?”

“Hey, I know you and your pals think rape is great and rape babies are God’s gift to women, but—”

“But,” Sean interrupted me, “you’re a murderer! You’re a sinner! You’re a maniac and a serial killer and a whore.” His was a toothy strike, and he craved his pound of flesh with theatrical zeal.

“Whatever.” Defending myself was useless. I made a point of not glancing at the social feed. I needed a cigarette.

“So after you’ve killed two innocent babies, you think you can simply take other people’s hard-earned money and kill yourself? Take the easy way out?”

I laughed. “You think this is easy?”

“Isn’t it?”

“Honestly?” I said. “Listening to your hypocritical bullshit and not pulling the trigger on this here gun is one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.”

“Why do this? You know you’re going to Hell, right?” Brillo Pad jumped in, probably worried that Sean was hogging too much of his camera time.

“I guess we’ll see.” Not that I believed in Hell, or Heaven for that matter.

That little diatribe brought in another hundred bucks. I yawned.

“I hope we’re not boring you,” Brillo Pad said, smug as ever.

“I want to know about the riot outside,” I said.

“There is no riot outside,” Sean said.

“What’s with the gunshots, the explosions? I can smell shit burning. Why don’t you report on that? This city is falling apart.”

“Those are a bunch of hoodlums getting what they deserve. What do you think you deserve, Ms. Stone?”

“You’re deflecting,” I said, sipping coffee, trying to be cool.

“You learn that word during your time in Ravencroft?”

I shrugged. “I heard tanks earlier. There’s real life happening right outside this studio, and you’re willfully oblivious.”

“There’s nothing happening outside.” Brillo Pad was turning red and inching toward the edge of his seat, ready to fly off. If I were in the studio with him, he probably would have throttled me.

“Except people getting what they deserve, right?”

Another hundred bucks came in. “Maybe people actually want to hear the truth for once,” I said. “Seems there’s some real money in the news.”

“That isn’t your money,” Sean said. “You didn’t earn that.”

A huge concussive blast hit too close, shaking the building. The lights dimmed and, this time, took too long to self-correct. The Revolver hosts did a fair job of keeping their cool, still holding on to the pretense that nothing was happening.

“An explosion just rocked the building, Sean,” I said, putting on my best reporter’s hat and mimicking some old-school journalists I’d seen on TV before the Kay brothers bought up the entire nation, one politician, one lawsuit, one television studio, and one piece of legislation at a time. “We are at the epicenter of something very serious, and very dangerous.”

The green light winked out. The mic was dead. Brillo Pad cut to commercial, but I still had the camera studio feed on the left-most display while the adverts played out on the center console. I watched the hosts talk animatedly—yell, in fact—at one another, at their producers, at everyone in the room with them. There was no audio, but their wide mouths and violently red faces told me everything I needed to know.

I couldn’t help but laugh. For once, I actually felt OK. Somehow, an inner reserve of strength had helped prop me up in a way all the bottles of booze in the world never could.

The door blew open as another explosion erupted outside, even closer. The walls shook, but I didn’t know if it was from the blast or from Stevens’s furious stampede into the room. He took long, quick strides toward me and backhanded me across the face. The inside of my cheek cut open against my teeth and filled my mouth with a coppery tang. The blow toppled me off the stool and sent me to the ground. Hot coffee scalded the underside of my forearm and the back of my hand. Somehow, I still held onto the gun; even more miraculously, it didn’t go off.

He flung the stool aside, sent it crashing into the wall, and delivered a swift kick to my stomach.

“You stupid whore,” he screamed, kicking me again. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”

I raised my head, tried to sit up, but he grabbed my face in one large hand. His fingers pushed my cheeks into my teeth, making my lips pucker in pain. He smashed my head into the floor, screaming in my face, an incoherent rage.

“You trying to ruin the whole fucking show?” he yelled.

Saliva peppered my eyes and forehead. His fingers loosened and I took in a massive, painful breath. My ribs burned with the inhalation. He punched me square in the face and I felt my nose depress inward with a sickening crunch, snot flooding the back of my throat in a bloody glob.

I tried to blink, but saw nothing except swirling stars.

“I’m going to teach you a good goddamn lesson,” he said, one fat hand going to his belt and unbuckling the leather. I tried to scoot backward as he unbuttoned his pants and pulled the tail of his shirt away from his waist.

“You ain’t ever gonna forget this lesson,” he said. “I can promise you that much, you mouthy little shit.”

“Get away from me!” I dug my heels into the carpet and pushed myself away. My shoulders banged into the wall, and his hands were groping at my pants, fumbling with the button.

I raised the revolver and pulled the trigger. Time slowed and I watched the immaculate details of horror, as the flash of superheated gases puffed against his hair and bubbled the scalp to bursting. A gout of red exploded from the opposite side of his skull, messy chunks of grey and white mixed in with the blood, making a noisy, wet splash against the carpet.

His eyes went soft as he collapsed against me. I spent too long trying to get out from under him. I spent a long time sitting against the wall, my breath ragged, pointing a relic of a revolver at him, waiting for him to move. He never did.

My heart was racing, and I couldn’t quite believe what I’d just done. I wanted to cry, wanted to run, but I was stuck here in the ‘off’ position, exhausted, reeling and unable to catch up with reality.

I can do this, I thought. And then I wondered what this was supposed to be.

What did you say earlier, Daddy? That we could fix this? We could change things? Maybe we can.

I had five bullets left.

Another explosion, this one right outside. Close. Very, very close. The noisy, heavy treads of tanks rolling into the city square.

Blood seeped from Stevens’s skull, a standing pool too thick for the carpet to absorb.

Five bullets and a promise. We can change things. Maybe.

For the first time in a long time, I felt good. For the first time in forever, I smiled a real smile. Not like I had anything else to lose, anyway, right?

The riots, the explosions, the gunshots—it kept people on edge, nervous. I heard the shuffling of bodies behind closed doors, but nobody came out as I strode down the hallway and into the broadcast studio. Or maybe, since it was a Saturday night, the building was short staffed, operating on a skeleton crew. What kind of accountant wants to die a hero while pulling some weekend overtime?

I strode into the studio and marched past empty cubicles. Brillo Pad Brian and Sean were sitting right where they had been for the last few hours. An array of cameras surrounded them, but only one was operated by an actual human being; the rest were automated or controlled remotely from the control booth.

The cameraman turned, saw my gun, and reached for his own weapon. I shot him in the chest before he could pull on me.

Then I walked towards the hosts.

Brian and Sean both panicked. Brillo Pad went for his gun, his hand shaking with nervous energy, and before the barrel cleared the shoulder holster the gun went off, punching a hole in the green screen behind him. The unexpected shot rattled Sean further, but he was at least able to get his gun out.

I shot him first, blowing away half his face.

Brillo Pad raised his hands in surrender, forgetting about his weapon.

“Any more guys with guns around?” I asked.

“Please, don’t kill me.”

“I don’t know, man. I’m an irrational, shitty little bitch. Who knows what I might do.”

“Those were just words. You need to get a thicker skin, that’s all. This is a man’s world. It’s not anything personal.”

“Seemed pretty fucking personal to me.” I squared the front sight of the revolver with the centre of his forehead, and decided to get a little bit closer. I kept walking until the barrel was pressed to his skin and his eyes went cross looking at the metal shaft.

“You’re not a man,” I told him. “You’re a weak, insecure child playing at being a man. And not even a real man, at that. You’re trying to live up to some outdated, old-world Hollywood ideal of a man, playing dress-up with all your fancy little guns, like you never grew out of playing cops and robbers. You’re not a man, and you don’t know shit about what it means to be a man. You’re a coward who’s afraid of the whole damn world, and nothing more.

“You think this,” I pressed the gun hard against his skull, “gives you power. Until somebody with some actual balls steps up, and then your true colors run, and you beg and you grovel. You had all kinds of shit to say about me, about how weak I was, about how awful I was. Where’s your fucking righteous indignation now? Where’s that smug superiority, that grandiose sense of entitlement you broadcast to the nation? Huh? Where is it?”

“You don’t understand,” he said. “That’s what they pay me for. This is a show. It’s entertainment. That’s all it is. You need to understand.”

“I understand entirely.” I pulled the trigger and watched, dully, as he slumped in his chair, the back half of his head obliterated.

Two shots left.

I looked toward the control room, at the still cluster of open-mouthed people stationed behind the long stretch of clear glass. The center camera, now unmanned, went auto, drifting smoothly toward me of its own accord. I watched a woman barking orders, snapping her fingers at people, giving directions to her crew.

Over ten thousand dollars were on the board. The figure kept climbing by the thousands as the seconds ticked by.

Another explosion rocked the studio, and heavy footfalls stampeded through the anteroom. Shouting and gunshot were plainly audible, and too, too close.

“This isn’t a man’s world,” I said, to the camera, feeling the need to speak.

“This is our world. Forget the Kay brothers. Forget their bought-and-paid-for politicians, and their Bible-thumping propaganda, and this Revolver shit. Forget them, and move past them. They want you to hate, they want you to fear. Because they hate, because they are afraid. They want us divided, and they want all of us to be as insecure and insignificant and as fucking petty as they are.

“Outside, this riot they’ve been ignoring. It happens every day. And you know what? It isn’t a riot. It’s not. It’s a war. And it’s at your doorstep right now. This is supposed to be our country, our home. This is our world, our lives. We can fix this. We can change all of this. We can make it better.”

Boots hit the floor, getting closer and closer. Revolver security, or state police, or sisters-in-arms, I didn’t know. I didn’t much care.

I’d come here to die, and I still had two bullets left.

The tally board ran over twenty-six thousand, America eager to revel in its bloodlust and throw money at it? Or something else? It was more money than I’d ever seen in my life, more than I’d ever earn picking bottles out of the trash for their return. More money than my father had seen in ages. Blood money, earned in death.

You’ve had your fill.

“This is Revolver, signing off.”

I shot at the center camera. The electronics exploded and glass clinked to the floor.

Smoke drifted inside, thick, grey and noxious with a chemical stink. Gunfire behind that, and the dull thud of far-off explosions. The moans of a dying city.

I listened to the rattle of armed bodies working their way through the outer work area, maneuvering through the maze of cubicles as they neared the studio.

I hoped that my father was right, and that things could still be fixed—some of it at least.

I made my choice. I did the only thing I could do. I sat. I listened. I waited. Come what may, I waited, the gun in my lap, finger at the trigger.

One bullet left.

Preservation

Originally published by The Cyborg Chronicles

Summary

Kari Akagi is ex-British Special Forces, augmented by her government to be the prime soldier. In the wake of a devastating attack that cost her her legs, she has a new mission—protecting South Africa’s endangered species as a ranger for the Kruger National Park game reserve.

Kari Akagi sat in the crook of a massive baobab tree, a rifle in her lap, roughly twenty meters above the low-lying plains of the Kruger National Park.

From her perch she could see the Olifants River, which divided the southern and northern regions of Kruger. The north was elephant country, and she watched as a herd bathed in the shallow depths and grazed along its banks.

There was a simple joy in watching the massive creatures live their lives, in seeing the young ones play.

Their life expectancy was too short for her liking, but the luckiest among them could live for fifty years or more. If the poachers didn’t get to them first.

Her morning had started with news of another rhino killing. The reserve had less than one hundred left, and there was a countdown hanging over the heads of the survivors. Each one dead drove the black market prices of their ever-scarcer horns higher and higher into the millions.

The news had woken her like a kick to the gut, and she’d wanted to rage at the rangers and volunteers who had fucked up and let this happen. Unfair, certainly, but her anger was palpable. Instead, she retreated and cut off her commNet, fuming.

She zoomed in on the Olifants, increasing the resolution of her blink-powered retinal upgrades and recorded the lackadaisical scene playing out below. This was a memory she wanted to keep.

Standing to stretch her torso, she set the rifle aside and raised her arms above her head, holding the pose for several deep breaths. Then she bent at the waist, stretching her spine, shoulders, and the muscles of her one remaining thigh, the flex deep enough that she was able to touch the two long blades that had replaced both feet.

Her legs had been lost to an IED years ago. Her left leg, from the hip down, was a mechanized limb replacement system. Both high-grade prosthetics were equipped with hundreds of ultra-fast quantum-load microprocessors, hydraulics, rotors, flexions, actuators, and sensors. A neuronal interface allowed her to control each limb as if it were the real thing, and the built-in multi-directional response coordinators allowed her to move with ease and grace in virtually any environment.

With her chin practically touching the tough Kevlar shell of the artificial knee joint, she could feel the absorbed heat boiling off the deep blue fabric.

Although she was warm and hadn’t eaten real food in several days, she had little concern for dehydration or starvation. The military had seen to her well-being both before and after her mandatory four tours in Afghanistan and Syria. Keeping her in-country in such harsh climates that ranged from desert tundra to colder mountain terrain had required significant modifications to her meat suit.

Akagi’s innards had been replaced with artificial organs to regulate her body’s water loss, and nasal cavity inserts and heat exchangers implanted atop her jugular veins and neck arteries inhibited water loss that occurred through exhalation and perspiration. There were even filter systems installed in her bladder and large intestine to capture, concentrate, and store any water lost through digestive waste. In her rucksack was a three-month supply of hard-shelled, egg-shaped candies. Each one contained a liquid center and provided her with her daily requirement of nutrients and calories.

While the military had designed her to be an optimized soldier, she had found a more satisfying niche working as a wildlife ranger. The truth of it was, she had merely traded one war for another, exchanging a cause for a cause. Her cause, nowadays, just happened to have four legs and tusks or horns.

Rising from the stretch, she again lifted both arms over her head and pulled her torso first to the left, then the right, stretching her oblique abdominals.

Her body felt looser, her mind more composed. Until the ping hit her commNet with an urgent alert and a geotag.

Another kill.

She felt her cheeks warm in anger, then quickly cool as her implants triggered a temperature regulation control and systolic dampener. The physical stressors were muted, but they didn’t do shit for her emotional state and only made her feel that much more pissed off.

“Has anyone heard from Gerhardt?” Command asked.

“Negative,” she said. “What was his last status?”

“He checked in for morning debriefing, but no updates since.”

“Roger that, Command.”

Another kill, and now a missing ranger. She swore softly to herself, unsettled.

Clambering down a ladder the park rangers had installed more than half a century ago, the dual-bladed system that comprised her feet hit the soft grass below. She broke out into a run, maintaining an easy pace to the latest kill site, roughly forty-five minutes away.

Akagi knelt before the butchered rhino, resting her hand against its still flank and closing her eyes for a moment of quiet respect.

The massive herbivore’s face had been brutally hacked apart, probably by an axe. The horns were missing, naturally. Dried blood stained the earth around the creature.

She cursed the lack of resources and the bribed politicians who abetted in this gruesome horror. The reserve covered more than eight thousand square miles of land, and it was impossible for the small squad to cover all of it efficiently. In a fit of twisted logic, the politicians argued that the reduced population of near-extinct animals meant there was little need for increased funding and the hiring of more rangers. The reservation’s budget was slashed and burned, leaving little more than twenty active field rangers to patrol twenty-two sections of the park.

Their duties had been eased slightly with the deployment of reconnaissance drones, but it hadn’t taken long for the poachers and the syndicates they worked for to grow aware of the extra surveillance. One by one, the five drones were shot out of the sky and the budget for replacements dried up.

Poaching was ludicrously profitable, and the wealthy higher-ups in the syndicates spent good money buying South African politicians and influence within the leadership of preservation agencies. Once upon a time, the reservation had implanted the rhinos and their horns with tracking chips to make life more difficult for the syndicates. As a result, the syndicates went on a spending spree to develop a smear campaign through third-party agencies about how the tracking chips made life more difficult for the animals, and how the reservation was mutilating rhino horns, destroying the vital essence of the rhinoceros. All it took were a few dozen parliamentary members in the syndicates’ pockets to undo all the good the rangers were attempting. Even the rangers and veterinarians on staff were lulled by the big money the syndicates offered. Akagi herself had arrested one of the drone operators, who was tracking the preserve’s animals for poachers, who were being supplied high-grade tranquilizers by one of the park’s veterinarians.

More than six thousand miles away from Syria and she still found herself on the losing side of another desperate warzone, surrounded by corruption, turncoats, and failed leadership. She couldn’t help but laugh to herself as the bitter resentment bubbled over.

Her partner, Okey Ekwensi, stood nearby with his canine companion, Dashi. The black-and-tan German shepherd panted lightly as he watched her movements.

Circling around the fallen rhino, she saw the mess of clumsy footprints from both animal and man. The rhino’s cloven hooves left a large, rounded mark that looked somewhat like a bubbly W. There were five distinct boot treads as well.

Blood spatter along the ground led to the brush, where the trap had been sprung. The blood line along the ground left a clear trail, and she spotted red in the grass. Her mind’s eye pictured, too clearly, the team of poachers surrounding the rhino and hacking at its flanks with their axes. Gore flew off the blades as they tore their weapons free from the animal’s hide, raising them for another strong swing.

The rhino had tried to run, but the men—they were almost always men—had gone for the legs, severing its Achilles tendons. The rhino then collapsed, immobilized in the trampled dirt, where its face was hacked apart and dismembered.

“This is number eight-six for the year,” she said.

“And it’s only March,” Okey said, nodding. He spoke softly, his black skin shiny from the layer of sweat covering him and plastering his fatigue shirt to his chest.

“They’re not going to last the year.”

Okey said nothing. The solemn look on his face said enough. He knew the score as well as she did. What else was left to say? They were standing there quietly in the middle of an extinction event.

“Let the dog loose," she said.

They followed Dashi into the tall grass fields as he tracked the poachers’ scent, Okey keeping close. Akagi surveyed the terrain, seeking out the trail, looking for footprints, scanning the horizon with a variety of ocular magnifications.

Odds were, the poachers were long gone. They spent the better part of an hour following the trail before it went cold. The bent grass and boot treads gave way to flattened earth and the deep impression of tire tracks.

Dashi grew agitated, his panting becoming heavier as he sniffed at the air, straining on the leash. The sudden movements caught Okey by surprise and he nearly lost his grip on the leather strap. He recovered quickly and the two were off and running in a westerly direction.

Akagi followed close on their tails but came to a swift stop, her bladed feet sliding through the dust and briefly losing traction as the stabilizers fought to maintain her vertical equilibrium. The stench was enough to gag her, and she pulled her checkered shemagh over her mouth.

She recognized the soiled green fatigues as that of a ranger, but it was impossible to tell who it was. The man had been gutted, his innards spilled across the ground. His face was a pulpy mess, hacked apart by the poachers. He’d likely stumbled upon them or heard the sound of their vehicle and went to warn them off. Sorry fucker had been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

As she drew closer, she realized she knew the man. Not because of any physical features, but rather because of the lack of them.

“They took his arm,” Okey said. “His leg too.”

“Gerhardt,” she said, refusing to look away from his splayed form.

Like Akagi, Gerhardt had been fitted with similar prosthetics following war injuries. He’d been caught on the wrong side of friendly fire when his troop had come under attack in Iran. They’d been forced to withdraw into a meat-packing facility and radioed for backup. Drones had been dispatched, and if the operators had bothered to discern the differences between hostiles and friendlies, the payload sure as hell didn’t. A rain of hellfire missiles pounded the surrounding area, eliminating the Iranian Army and laying waste to the surrounding commercial zone. Gerhardt had been too close to an exterior wall and it had cost him.

Always in the wrong place at the wrong time, she thought.

The poachers had had a good day, it seemed. Black market bionics had a nice resale value. Not as much as rhino horns or elephant ivory, both of which had become more valuable than gold and oil combined in certain Asian markets, but still, they fetched a hefty price tag.

Another rhino lost. Another ranger killed, their seventh of the year.

We’re all going extinct, she thought. We’re the last of a dying breed.

She scratched at the scars along the side of her neck, shooing away a mosquito.

“Call it in,” she said. “Get some trucks out here.”

She thought, not for the first time, that this was less of a preserve and more of a graveyard.

Whoever had hacked apart Gerhardt’s face hadn’t bothered to chip him. After the support staff arrived to load his remains into the bed of a truck and hauled him back to base, the reservation’s medical officer gave him a quick once-over and checked the man’s data ports.

As with most servicemen hailing from Europe or the fractured American territories, Gerhardt had received cerebral modifications. The Databiologic Receiver of Mnemonic Response, or DRMR, was a standard utility that basically turned ground soldiers into drone equivalents, allowing command centers to monitor, supervise, and record battle conditions directly through otherwise independent operators.

“Why wouldn’t they chip him?” Okey asked.

Akagi shrugged, absorbing the data packet that base had distributed through the commNet.

Gerhardt’s final memories had been gruesome, but she had seen worse. The data was crucial, though, and forensics would be poring over every detail in the days to come. Still, she couldn’t help but feel frustrated.

The poachers had been smart. They’d worn masks, goggles, gloves, long sleeve shirts, and pants. There were no visible markings other than their dark skin flashing in between the breaks of clothing.

“They wanted us to know,” she said eventually. “They were bragging to us. Showing us how smart they are.”

Gerhardt had been alive when they ripped his arm off, a sight that sent a shiver of revulsion deep through her core. His screams would haunt her dreams for a long while, she knew. The limb, like her own legs, was hardwired into the body’s nervous system, allowing for electrical transmission of movement commands, a fusion of metal and flesh and bone.

When those monsters tore Gerhardt apart, he had felt every fucking inch of himself getting ripped apart.

Not until after they’d ripped his belly open and crippled him did they finally take their axes to his face.

“We’ll set up camp here,” she said. She dropped her rucksack, glad to be free of its weight.

They had been walking for hours, patrolling their quadrant of the reservation on foot. The circuitous path would bring them back to base in three days if they kept a steady pace and ran into no trouble.

Okey put his thumb and forefinger between his lips and fired off a shrill, piercing whistle to call Dashi back. The dog had run ahead of them, picking up some kind of scent but making no fuss about it. Tracking spoor, probably.

She built her tent quickly, then set up Okey’s while he went about building a small fire. He needed to eat real food, unlike Akagi, who had little interest in canned goods and MREs.

Sitting on the ground, her legs stretched out before her, she decided to have one of the nutrient-rich candies. The vitals app on her retinal display showed a spike in burned calories, and her empty stomach was starting to whine.

She chewed slowly, scoping the horizon and keeping an eye out for approaching animals. She doubted any of the big cats would get close, but it was still worth keeping a good lookout for them.

Okey ate a can of beans, and each of them enjoyed the quiet. They were comfortable enough with one another to not need small talk and, not for the first time, she found herself intensely grateful for that.

Digging around in her backpack again, she found a small peanut butter cup and opened the recycled paper packaging. The corners of her jaw tingled in anticipation as she brought the treat to her lips and bit down, the spike in endorphins making her head spin. She didn’t need the snack, but savored it nonetheless. What was better than chocolate and peanut butter? Sex, maybe, she thought ruefully, digging a small depression into the soil with her heel.

Laughing felt wrong, but she couldn’t help herself. Eyes shut, she saw Gerhardt dying, and that only made her laughing feel more horrendous, spurring it into a near uproar. Tears ran down her face, but she couldn’t tell if they were from joy or sorrow anymore. Eventually the laughter slowed to a stop and Okey was staring at her like she was a mad woman possessed. And maybe she was.

“I’m turning in,” she told him, crawling into her tent and curling up beside her smart rifle.

The marketing gurus in the public sector had hailed DRMR for being an incredible breakthrough in memory retention. Never forget. Always remember. But remembering was a brutal, double-edged sword. Sometimes the brain forgot things to protect itself, but not hers, and as a result Akagi remembered far more than she wanted.

When she closed her eyes, all she could see were muscles and wires and nerves stretching and snapping, metal snagging on skin and ripping it apart, staining the earth dark. She clenched her eyes shut, willing the images to disappear, but they refused to leave. Instead, they merely changed.

She saw her legs lying in the sand, the stumps of her thighs bleeding profusely, rich black smoke swirling around her and carrying the screams of the wounded and dying. She tried to look away, but couldn’t. Those legs weren’t hers. They couldn’t be. She felt oddly detached from all of it, as if it were happening to somebody else, even as her blood pumped out of her, draining onto Syrian soil.

She saw the ruined and blackened remains of Syrian children lying in rubble from drones she had interfaced with and piloted over civilian centers, dropping payload after payload after payload to pay the debts of war with the lives of too many innocents. Marketplaces, infrastructure, warehouses, homes, palaces, whatever the latest target-rich environment Command & Control deemed hostile. Emotionless and efficient, letting the machines do the dirty work until she and her squadron hit the ground hard for clean-up duty, killing whoever resisted or looked threatening.

How much of her life could be measured in blood—hers, or others—spilled by her own hands?

There were too many thoughts, too many memories that she wished she could blot out. Forget them, erase them, purge them. Instead, they haunted her and drained her, slowly bleeding out into a discomfited sleep.

The bellowing of a lion’s roar woke Akagi in the early morning hours.

The beast carried on for a solid minute, if not longer, but it was a noise she had grown to love. The sound was one of vibrant life, loud and proud, and for a brief time she forgot about her pain. It helped to refresh and reorient her. To remind her why she fought, and to remind her that there was a larger world outside of her own problems.

Shoving herself out of her sleeping bag, she stabbed her toes into the ground and planted her palms on the earth. Every morning she started with a routine of planks, pushups, crunches, and squats. Hitting the gym was impossible in the wilds of the reservation, so she relied on body-weight resistance training to keep her muscles active. By the time she was finished, her sweat stained the soil and her thick arms bulged nicely from the increased blood flow. Her short hair was wet from the exertion, and she used her fingers to spike it.

Another candy rehydrated her and replenished the spent calories.

After dressing, she broke down her rifle for cleaning, then reassembled it and went about breaking down the camp while Okey ate a strange looking white goop from a can. Synth protein, she knew, fiber rich, loaded with vitamins and minerals. Like her candies, but far less appetizing.

“Did you sleep well?” he asked.

“Yeah, why?”

Okey held her eyes for a moment, studying her, then shrugged. “Just checking. Long walk ahead of us today.”

He set the can down for Dashi, but the dog wasn’t quite that desperate for food.

“Did I wake you?” she asked.

“No,” Okey said, but the lie was plain.

Once, he had asked her if she knew she screamed in her sleep. She said she didn’t, and that had been the end of it. He’d never brought it up again, but often asked how she had slept the night before. Eventually it had become a bit of a game in which both lied to the other. If her nocturnal distress had made him any the worse for wear, he was at least good at hiding it.

Before setting out on the trail, both rangers checked in with Central Command. Six hours had elapsed between Gerhardt’s last check-in and the discovery of his body and the mauled rhinoceros. Although long stretches of radio silence were often the norm, in hindsight it felt inexcusable. Now all field rangers were checking in hourly, just to let Command know they were still alive out there.

“Let’s a get move on,” Okey said, whistling for Dashi to follow.

Akagi wished she knew how to whistle like that. She could whistle well enough with only her lips, but adding fingers to the mix was a clumsy affair that usually ended with nothing but wet digits.

With the dog following closely beside his master, they walked in silence. Akagi was once again glad for the lack of small talk and spent her time reviewing the daily stats. The info was nothing more than a depressing countdown toward extinction, the bold red header at the top a crystallizing reminder of their preservation mission.

It read simply: BLACK RHINO - EXTINCT.

Beneath that was a list of the remaining animals in Kruger National Park and the remaining figures, along with a plus or minus difference in historical trends. Scrolling down the list, she saw that the tiger population was down by one, which, statistically, was not all that surprising. For every tiger cub that was born, three adults were murdered by poachers.

In the white rhinos column there was a red −2 from yesterday’s known losses. There were more kills than births, and the two rangers were attempting to pick up the trail of a local herd.

White rhinos were gentle giants. Their unaggressive nature made them particularly vulnerable to poachers, and while they had learned to be wary of humans, it did them little good.

During her time at the park, Akagi had noticed that the animals were keen observers of the human condition. They knew which humans, like the rangers, were there to protect and guard them, and which ones were there to hurt them. On more than one occasion, leopards had strolled through her campsite, completely at ease and utterly nonthreatening. If not for the night vision apps on her optics, she never would have seen them. The leopards crisscrossed the rangers’ own tracks to a remarkable extent, very often routinely circling their camps. To a degree, she even felt like she was one of their pack. Her and the animals, they were simpatico.

“Here,” Okey said, pointing at spoor.

The three-toed ungulate impressions were barely visible, but Okey had a good eye. Despite how heavy the animals were, they were incredibly graceful and left only the faintest of marks in the hard-packed dirt. Akagi had to adjust the contrast in her optics to resolve the details more plainly. There were, in fact, multiple impressions. And as with nearly every rhino track they found, there was an uncomfortable number of boot impressions in the soil as well.

“Akagi to base,” she sent across the commNet. “We’re on the trail of a herd, northernmost quadrant.”

“Roger, Akagi. Backup is en route.”

“Copy, base.”

Akagi scanned the fields, cursing. Her eyes went right to left, softly focused, not straining to see any anomalies but to absorb them, looking everywhere.

The region they patrolled was prohibited to all but park rangers and staff, and less than a mile from the borders of Zimbabwe. That country, and Mozambique, were home to a number of the poaching syndicates that were responsible for decimating the park’s population. Extradition laws were utterly pathetic, though, and there was little in the way of legal avenues to combat them directly. This made the rangers a responsive police force far too often, rather than a proactive offensive measure.

Her forensic algo dissected the footprints, calculating depth and moisture differentials between the animal and human steps, and the heat of the rhino dung left on the trail. “Rhinos came through here about an hour ago, and the boot prints followed about a half hour later. We’re about forty minutes behind them."

Okey nodded, tight-lipped, his fists balling at his sides. Adrenaline spiked through Akagi as she set off to follow the spoor, following the broken mopane, hoping this was finally it. That this was the break they needed to end some of the brutality, to save at least one of these creatures. One of these rhinos. Her herd.

The rhino had probably realized they were being followed by people that meant them harm. They’d gotten shy, and probably more than a bit worried, and worked their way deeper into the maze of mopane trees and surrounding brush.

Overhead, the sky was overcast, a deep gray much like the hide of the animal the rangers were seeking. For two hours, Akagi and Okey walked through the brush, single file, looking for signs of the rhinos and their following poachers, looking for flattened grass, footprints, dung, any indication that they were on the right trails.

The poachers were far less cautious while treading upon the earth. They found plenty of boot prints, and even a few cigarettes. Seeing the spent butts gave Akagi an idea, and she took a deep breath, running the stink of nicotine and burnt additives through the scrubbers lining her nasal passageways, interfacing the data output with her visual overlays. A grid-like map dropped across her retinas, and each inhalation was processed to pick up on the scent of scorched chemicals, giving her a predicative analysis of where the poachers had stepped next.

She couldn’t help but grin at herself, thinking she’d just one-upped Dashi in the bloodhound category.

After an hour she lost the scent as the chain smoker called it quits. Another hour passed before she caught sight of several large gray rocks deep in the bush, nearly lost among the grass and trees. She let out a small hiss to get Okey’s attention, and pointed one finger toward them. He nodded, scratching Dashi beneath his collar.

Akagi took a knee, keeping her rifle ready, and ran the optic thermals. The rhinos were dead ahead, so where the hell were the poachers?

She scanned right to left, not focusing on any one thing in particular, waiting for the scene to reveal itself to her. The landscape was splayed before her in monochrome, with the hot-blooded rhinos standing before her in large, bright, cleanly defined white shapes.

A drop of rain splashed against her arm, quickly building into a torrential downpour. Still scanning, she crouch-walked through the brush, disturbing pockets of bugs, which swarmed around her head and buzzed irritatingly in her ears.

Okey followed behind her, also scanning the terrain, but without any sort of ocular modifications she doubted he could see very much. She opened a commNet channel and pushed a simple thought to his receiver. “Anything?”

“No,” was his brief reply.

The hairs rose on the back of her neck and she stopped, standing stock still. She kept her focus soft, slowly panning her head and waiting for the anomalies to make themselves visible. Over the years, she had learned to trust her instincts, and something was very, very wrong.

Poachers were here. They had to be.

She took in a slow, deep breath and let out a long, slow exhale.

There. It was one of them.

The poacher gave off no heat signal at all, but she caught sight of the killer’s negative impression as the downpour defined his shape. Sometimes the key wasn’t to look for what was there, but what wasn’t. Now she knew why finding these bastards was so difficult.

Son of a bitch. “They’ve got chameleonwear,” she said.

Naturally the poachers would be better equipped than the rangers, always one step ahead. The syndicates they worked for traded in an ever-limited commodity, and could thus afford better equipment and resources than the shrinking budget allocated to the parks could buy.

Not for the first time, she cursed the constraints of law enforcement that the rangers worked within. There was no shoot-first policy here, their rules of engagement defined only by self-defense.

She opened a new channel to base and said, “I’ve got eyes on target. Where’s that backup?”

“En route, Akagi. Twelve minutes.”

Shit. She wasn’t sure they had twelve minutes. Wasn’t sure how many more tangos were out here, hunting her as she hunted them. The only thing she knew for certain was that there was definitely more than one.

The dry, hungry earth was soaking up the rain and quickly turning it into shallow mud, obscuring boot treads and hoof prints alike. Her black t-shirt was sodden and plastered to her skin, the shemagh sopping wet and heavy across her neck.

She surveyed the ground again, crouch walking to the left to get behind the solitary target she’d identified. She held out her palm toward Okey, telling him to stay put with Dashi. If their prey didn’t know the rangers were present, she didn’t want to send the dog out as a warning.

Although her heart was racing and her nerves were jangling, she fought to keep her breathing under control.

Smooth and steady. Pace yourself.

Thunder exploded across the sky, wind rustling the sodden grass around her. The hair on her arms stood on end, goose pimples breaking out across her exposed skin. A brilliant flash of lightning momentarily blinded her and as she blinked to clear her vision there was an explosive burst of movement beside her as something heavy crashed into her.

She tumbled beneath the invisible weight, her cheek slicing open beneath something razor sharp.

Gunfire rang through the air and she heard Okey scream briefly in pain.

Dashi was off his leash, bolting straight ahead toward a figure that only he could sense.

Fingers grasped her throat tightly, cutting off her air, the press of warm metal cutting deeper into her cheek and sliding down her face. She screamed, got an arm up between her and her attacker, grabbed his wrist, and fought to get her face out from beneath the cutting press of his cloaked knife.

The earth shook as the rhinos bolted, running furiously away from the sudden commotion.

Holding her attacker off with one hand, she reached for the blade along her thigh with her free hand. Her face burned from the lack of oxygen and black speckles appeared in her vision. The blade cleared its scabbard and she drove it into the air, where she thought the man’s head would be, and was rewarded with a satisfying bony crunch, saw a splash of blood.

He toppled to the side, dead weight.

Okey was on a knee, firing his automatic rifle, but at what she had no idea.

Dashi was down, whining and panting heavily.

She found her smart rifle in the brush, grabbed ahold of its stock and pulled it toward her. The gun was loaded with smart, muscle-wire ammunition, and she hoped like hell that the rounds could outsmart the chameleonwear.

Taking a knee, she unfolded the rifle’s onboard view screen and scanned for the now-familiar man-shaped absences in the rain, firing when she thought she had a lock on a target.

Each bullet could update its position sixty times a second, allowing for precision tracking of each hostile while still in flight. She’d even seen data from a fired round that had made a 90-degree hairpin turn around a wall to effect a kill shot to an enemy skull from two miles away.

But not against the advanced cloaking shell of chameleonwear. FLIR systems were utterly useless. Still, she could hope to get lucky, or at the very least, give these fuckers something to think about.

“Status, Okey?”

“Still here.”

She risked a quick look back at him and saw a spreading crimson stain against the shoulder of his green shirt.

More thunder sang out above, a steady concussion, a rumbling roar that was growing louder. Closer?

Not thunder.

A helicopter flew over, a gunman strapped in and leaning out the open side, taking aim.

Not at the poachers, though. And not at her, nor Okey.

A pit opened in her stomach, bile crashing against her innards and up her throat.

Gunfire split open the air above, and she saw the tracer rounds cut through the sky.

Her rifle turned, finger on the trigger, aiming for the helicopter and—

Okey screamed. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw him fall backward, his rifle shooting rounds uselessly into the air in a violently dangerous arc.

Rain shifted across a man-shaped object to her right, and she fired, fired, fired. The bullets found their target, and the hidden body stuttered and jived as he died. She found another as dirt exploded in front of her, as bullets whipped past her, as a burning sear tore open her bicep, but she didn’t care. She kept firing, realizing that the poachers were flanking her, closing in on her, boxing her in.

She refused to put her back to them as she pushed deeper into the bush, putting distance between them.

“Okey,” she thought-pushed across the comm. “C’mon, buddy, you still with me?”

No answer.

“Damnit, Okey, snap to. I need you here, pal.”

She fired again, quickly looking back over her shoulder for cover. There was an anthill nearby, a massive construct twice as tall as her and three times as round. The wide base could provide her with shelter, and if needed she could even climb the sandy ridges and hide behind the thick pillar that jutted into the sky as the hill tapered upward.

She caught a hazy flash of movement in her peripheral and turned automatically, firing toward a murky, ill-defined target. Blood blasted into the air, and a faint glimmer of satisfaction bubbled through her.

She kept low to the earth, hoping the tall brush and driving rain obscured her, the enemy chasing her with hails of ammunition.

Her sensors registered the impact of several rounds hammering the meaty Kevlar lining of one thigh, the damage negligible.

Tucking behind the anthill, she took another deep breath, working to calm herself. Her vitals were spiked clear across the board and she just wanted to run and keep on running. That was not an option, though, and she had to tamp down on that flight reflex or else she was dead.

For a moment, she wondered at their munitions load out. The poachers were equipped with chameleonwear, but not smart ammunition. It seemed like a half-assed approach to her, but she supposed you didn’t exactly need muscle-wire bullets to kill a rhino in the wide open expanse. Also, the poachers were nothing more than the low men on the totem pole.

To the syndicates they worked for, the poachers were a meagre expense and easily replaceable. Maybe the chameleonwear was a simple and easy way of protecting their investment, but they had little reason to go overboard. A gun and machete was all a poacher really needed to get their job done, and anything else was a waste of resources.

More ammo pounded away at the anthill, slowly shredding her cover. The ants fled their cells, pouring out of the structure, flooding across her, crawling over her skin. She compressed her lips into a tight line, swallowing the scream that boiled inside her. She twisted around her cover, firing blindly, the old pray-and-spray method of combat.

“Base, I need that backup! Okey is down. Hostiles are cloaked.”

“Roger, Akagi. Thirty more seconds.”

Fuck!

She fired until the clip ran dry, then ejected the magazine, reloaded, and fired again.

C’mon, you fuckers. C’mon!

A growing rumble neared, and then a Jeep plowed through the brush. Six rangers bailed out of the open cabin, taking shelter behind the vehicle and firing across the plain.

With the arrival of new friendlies catching the poachers by surprise, she was able to more easily identify the hostiles. She lined up a headshot and pressed the trigger, seeking out her next target before the first had even fallen.

She caught a rapid flurry of movement as the poachers disengaged and ran. She lost them in the brush as the park swallowed them.

Her bladed feet carried her to the Jeep quickly, and she ordered two of the men to come with her, guiding them in the direction the helicopter had flown and where the rhinos had fled.

Twenty minutes later, they found the animals.

A teenage male lumbered down the trail, his steps halting and wary, body sagging. Blood poured from its mouth and nostrils. The whole top half of his face was gone, his head cleaved apart, his eyes missing. The upper half of its flank was riddled with seeping bullet holes.

Akagi strode toward the rhino and did the only thing she could. She raised her rifle and ended his misery, tears streaming down her face. She swiped them away with the back of her hand and ordered the men back into the jeep, intent on finding the other three rhinos.

The adults were able to run about thirty miles per hour, but the poachers hadn’t given them the chance to make it very far. Of the three, Akagi and her team of rangers were only able to find one other, a female, off the trail and in the brush, dead and butchered.

She wondered if this female had been the mutilated male’s mate, and hoped that maybe the two were able to find a measure of peace after their lives had been so brutally ended.

Another dead ranger. Two more dead rhinos. Another day, and another increase in the kill counts.

She seethed the entire ride back, hands shaking in anger, her mechanized legs bouncing on the rounded curve of her feet to burn off the anxiety.

The rangers were heloed back to base camp at Skukuza, to a squat khaki-colored building with an array of old, outdated antennas encircling the structure. The flight took little more than an hour, but being forced to sit still for even that long did nothing to calm Akagi, nor did it ease her nerves.

The adrenaline come-down was exhausting, but still she needed to move. Strapped into a bucket seat made her feel like a prisoner in her own body, and she felt the overwhelming urge to run as far and as fast as her cybernetic limbs could carry her. She was both utterly drained and completely restless.

Before the helo had even settled on hard ground she was shoving her way out the door. A second helo containing a single captured poacher had arrived already, and she bounded toward the interrogation chamber.

Biographical data flooded her left retina, and she quickly surveyed the information. The poacher was a scrawny, stick-limbed teenager named Alamayehu Tamele. His hair was shorn close to his scalp, and thin tufts of patchy hair dotted his face in a poor imitation of a beard. With sallow cheeks and sunken eyes, he hardly looked like a killer now that he was stripped of his chameleonwear and his weaponry.

She steadied herself before entering the chamber and kept her voice calm and even as she said, “I want to know who you work for.”

Tamele smirked and shook his head.

“It’s clear you’re employed by a syndicate. Which one?”

He sat still, sucking on a hind tooth, pulling his thin cheeks ever deeper into his mouth. He crossed his arms over his chest, his legs splayed forward and feet crossed at the ankle.

Tamele knew the game too well. He’d been arrested before, once by the Kruger rangers, even. The history of charges that scrolled across her vision all carried the same denotation of (dismissed) beside each offense. Poaching (dismissed), animal abuse (dismissed), attempted murder (dismissed). Dozens of instances on record, which meant there were plenty of other times he hadn’t been caught. Whoever he worked for carried enough weight and influence to skirt the courts and buy off the prosecutors. He didn’t have to answer to anything because he knew he only had to ride it out and that in all likelihood, he’d be back on the streets within twenty-four hours.

She gripped the crown of his skull in her hand and twisted his head, getting a look behind his ear. Sure enough, he was ported, the upgrades probably supplied by his mysterious benefactor.

“What are you doing?” he shouted.

Akagi smirked. It was her turn to stonewall him. She fished loose a coil of wire and jammed the male connector into the small slot embedded in the hollow of his ear.

“I do not consent to this!”

“I don’t give a fuck.”

“This is illegal. I want my lawyer!”

From her pocket she took a DRMR pad and plugged it in to the opposite end of wire.

“You cannot do this,” he protested.

Akagi sat on the corner of the table and waited for him to meet her eyes. “You should know that I’m technically not a park ranger. I’m British SAS and am serving here strictly on a consultancy basis. I am not an arresting officer, I am not pressing charges against you for your assault on me, and I am certainly not questioning you or even formally conducting an interrogation. In fact, the registry worms I am embedding in the station’s security feeds will confirm that I was never even here. And if there is any blowback, I’ll just disappear. So, much like you, I don’t particularly give a fuck about the laws ‘round here.”

She scrolled through the pad, pretending to look for a particular app, giving him a moment to reconsider. Tamele stayed buttoned up while her finger hovered, but she caught sight of a slight tremor in the corner of his jaw.

“Now, let’s see how good your security is.”

She tapped on the icon, initializing a mnemonic assault cascade of amplifying intensity. His brow furrowed in pain as he slammed his palms against either side of his skull, his groans slowly progressing to screams. The cascade was designed to root out, attack, and destroy any security enhancements that protected his cerebral mesh from forced intrusion. The strong-arm hack triggered a number of mem mines, lighting up the pain receptors in his brain while severing the biomechanic weaves lacing his cerebrum. After ten minutes, his breathing had grown ragged, his body soaked in sweat, and his mind was entirely open to her.

His countermeasures were a joke, but she realized he had little need for sophistication. Or rather, his employers had little need for hardware-based security. The data he carried around in his mind was of little consequence with so much of South Africa’s judicial system bought and paid for. Tamele might one day wind up in prison, maybe even soon, but those above him lived far above the reach of the law, so cushioned in money were they. Judges and prosecutors were bought in blood, the country’s legal measures as dead as Okey.

A wave of neural drones infiltrated Tamele’s limbic system, harvesting local memory roots and capturing stored data, offloading digital copies of his memories to her pad. She spent forty minutes brute force hacking his personal history and downloading everything. By the time she finished, his eyes were screwed tightly shut and tears streamed down his face.

He’d have a migraine for days, but unlike her partner, and unlike Gerhardt and the rhinos killed in his wake, he’d live. She couldn’t help but think that was a shame.

As Akagi dived into Tamele’s mnemonic recordings, she refused to feel sorry for him. He had made his choices.

His family, though…her heart went out to them. Guerilla forces had raided the village Tamele called home and slaughtered people in the streets. His mother had been caught in the gunfire, sprinting to safety too slowly. Tamele had watched his mother brought down in a hail of automatic weapons fire, and Akagi felt the wave of anguish wash through her as the DRMR recording fed her brain the awful, replicated chemical and sensory reactions. She felt what Tamele had felt, saw what he had seen.

Hundreds of memories pierced her mind, and she watched as her (his) sister, Zyeredzi, grew thinner over the months that followed, her body emaciated from the lack of resources, the loss of income and security her mother had provided them. The siblings lived in a very small dwelling, with only a single bed to share. Akagi felt the frail, skeletal form in her arms as she (he) held her.

Tamele needed to work. He needed money. They needed food. His first kill had been difficult. Although there had been several hunters in his village, before the guerilla forces had attacked and captured or killed them, he had not been one of them. Guilt leaked through the DRMR feed as Tamele cut through the wire fences surrounding Kruger Park, invading the land with a trio of other men, a gun—surprisingly heavy—strapped across his chest. Thoughts of Zyeredzi and the loud groans her stomach made in the middle of the night. Hoping for meat, something, anything, to keep them alive for one more day.

Akagi skipped over the rest. She didn’t need to see the savagery of his kill. She’d seen enough of that over the years, the results of these butchers and their damnable choices.

Aggravated, she disconnected from the DRMR and set up an automated search protocol, scrubbing the mems with a forensic app. This would yield names she could research, locations, data, all without having to comb through the mems manually. Something she should have done in the first place.

Never should have played the damn things, she chided herself. She wanted so badly to keep on loathing Tamele, but found herself frustrated instead, angry at only herself.

She fell to the ground, letting her open palms hit the flat wooden floor, and began cycling through a routine of push-ups and crunches, letting the building sweat ease her troubled mind while she attended to keeping what was left of her flesh, blood, and muscle healthy.

Her face burned beneath the gauze padding, the skin itchy from the adhesive keeping her wounds closed.

After an hour, a notification popped up in the corner of her vision. The forensic work-up was finished. She sat on the floor, her slick back sticking to the messy bedsheets that hung off the mattress, and reviewed the results.

There were a number of names that she was able to research, cross reference, and eliminate. Most of them poachers. Good data, but not what she was looking for.

Tamele was too much the low man on the totem pole, but that did not make him invaluable. He had been involved, observant. He had heard things, seen people, come in contact with them, if only for the briefest of moments and perhaps without deliberation. But there was information to harvest and examine.

It took several hours to pore through the data and research the findings. In the end, it was time well spent.

Slowly, she stood and sat at the small table attached to the far wall. She broke down her rifle for cleaning. Once that was finished and reassembled, she methodically reloaded the magazines with smart ammo, sliding the bullets in one at a time.

She worked the sling over her head so that the rifle hung across her body.

Her room held no valuables, no personal belongings. She lived a Spartan existence at the park, most of her time spent outdoors and in the field. When she closed the door behind her, she knew she would not be returning to Skukuza.

Her mission was to protect the animals, to preserve all that remained. Tamele’s memories had made it clear that this was not a mission that could be done within the park, so far removed from the real culprits.

She realized that it was time for her to return to the world, to walk among mankind once more. Her war could not be fought from within the reservation, not if it were to be won.

She had a name. Karl Jubber. That name had given her a location. That location would be the new front in her war.

Akagi found her little-used car in the lot outside the base and drove. Kruger National Park was soon lost in the distance, and she disconnected herself from their data feeds for now.

A new kill count had begun.

Akagi spent much of the following week hidden in the woods separating a secluded Cape Town mansion from civilization. A chameleonwear suit kept her blended with the surroundings, while the smart rifle was disguised in a similar wrapping.

She had used her time collecting as much information on Karl Jubber as possible. When she caught sight of him for the first time, her dislike for the man was instantaneous.

Tall, broad-shouldered, close-cropped black hair. Always wearing board shorts and a designer t-shirt one size too small. The short sleeves pulled taut around his biceps, showing off the South African Special Forces tattoo of a Commando knife within a laurel wreath. He carried himself with an ostentatious sense of self-importance, surrounded by a bevy of personal guardians. Every night he made his way into the heart of Cape Town, secreted away in one of four rugged and heavily modified SUVs to take part in the city’s night life. He often returned home with a score of women to continue the after-hours party. His social media accounts were littered with his idiot mems and drunken selfies as he sat among his naked, drugged-out conquests, always with the same wry smirk.

The photos and mnemonic recordings were utterly distasteful, but they had given her insight about the Clifton mansion’s layout. The home was at least as large as Jubber’s ego, but far more sedate. The interior was Spartan and white, with plenty of windows. The view across Clifton 3rd Beach and the Atlantic Ocean beyond was to die for. Jubber’s heavily-guarded palace was a stone’s throw from the water, but given the heavy foot traffic along the shores and the wide-open expanse of beachfront, she had quickly ruled that out as a point of ingress. She felt much more comfortable in the thick profusion of trees and foliage that hid the villa from Victoria Road and its neighbors.

There were a handful of guards watching the gated access road, and another handful that acted as Jubber’s personal protection detail. Roving security toured the house, and she had followed their route from the thick greenery on either side of the home, watching as they stood guard on the oceanfront deck. Some of the men had dogs, which she refused to kill.

Much like the rangers, Jubber’s security relied on visible deterrence and a strong showing of force. Jubber never seemed uneasy or put out by the measure, and never appeared threatened. He had a strong show of force, and often spent much of his days on the deck overlooking the beach or sitting in the infinity pool, watching the tourists mill about below. More often than not, he looked like little more than a smug king soaking in his own opulence, his minor kingdom built on blood and murder.

Akagi was going to take all of that way from him, forever.

She was not worried by the score of security, and watching their movements and learning their routines only bolstered her confidence. The chameleonwear helped, as did the smart ammunition in her rifle. She followed them on foot, observed from the trees, and monitored their movements through a sourced hacker satellite rented through a dummy account she had set up ages ago during her time in Syria to buy information. She tracked the weather reports and bided her time, popping hydrating nutritional candies, waiting.

Mid-afternoon on the sixth day of surveillance, the rain came, and she smiled. She would have to move fast, and her cybernetic legs were a blessing in this regard.

Hidden in the branches of milkwood trees, she programmed the targeting schematics and took aim at the cluster of men guarding the access road. Her finger rested on the trigger as she waited for them to finish their twenty-minute check-in. The man she had designated as the supervisor, due to his bearing and weariness, looked slightly distracted as his gaze retreated slightly inward for the commNet report. His men became slightly more aware of their surroundings, taking up the slack of his neuronal distraction. Thirty seconds later, she softly pulled the trigger three times, the built-in sonic dampeners reducing the gunfire to a mere whisper, hidden by the noise of lashing rain, the muzzle fire a minor puff of smoke lost in the shaking leaves surrounding her. One bullet, one target. Three men dropped dead within microseconds of one another.

She moved quickly, deeper into the foliage, flanking the short side of the house, invisible. She knew that these men would have to look twice as hard to find her.

Her mechanized limbs carried her swiftly and quietly through the terrain, propelling her into the higher reaches of an oak tree. She crouched into a V-shaped crook of limbs, her back pressed into the trunk, her heart racing and mouth suddenly dry. She observed the guards through the scope of her rifle, the device interfacing with her own optical upgrades to present a wider field of view and sharper, closer focus on her targets while she uploaded the live targeting solutions to her ammunition.

A two-man team slid the door open and stepped onto the raised deck, grimacing as the warm rain pelted them. Their hands were empty, but each carried automatic pistols in quick-draw holsters. Neither would be fast enough, or aware enough, to draw on her.

Two more two-man details emerged on the upper level and ground floor platforms. Six men total, across three different levels of the villa, their movements nearly synchronized. It would not take them very long to cover the outdoor sections of their patrol, even as they moved in different directions.

The top floor details would be moving to the right side of the house and out of her view the soonest. She took them out first and sent an updated nav plan to the rifle, moving to the mid-tier targets moving toward the left, closest to her. Again, she fired, and the bullets flew true. One guard tumbled backward, splashing into the infinity pool while his partner crumpled to the deck.

At ground level, the two guards surveyed the open expanse of sand and water beyond the stone wall encircling the villa. They were clumsy, stupid. Worse, complacent. They thought this was a cigarette break, the flick of a lighter destroying their night vision. They died easy, their smokes left smoldering on the beach.

Akagi dropped to the earth, then darted to the wall, her bladed toes digging into the masonry as she scaled up and over, clinging to the shadows where the minute distortions of chameleonic activity in motion would be less obvious. She moved slowly, the timer on her retinal display counting down toward the next check-in. Only four minutes had elapsed.

Even though she was, for all intents and purposes, invisible, she still moved cautiously, covering the distance from lawn to patio pavers in a crouched walk, rifle forward and constantly scanning for threats. Taking cover against the flat stretch of wall beside the patio door, she looked toward the dead guards at the wall. The rain was thick enough that she could hardly see their still lumps at the far end of the property. All it would take was one of the roving guards to take notice of the dead men on either of the upper floors or on the driveway to end her covert intrusion.

She passed through the sliding door, taking a moment to close it behind her and give the guards one less reason to be cautious. Doors were never open, and she left it as she had found it.

The dining area was sterling and bright white, the long wooden table shiny and spotless. She was hyper-aware of her own noises and clamped down on her own sense of urgency, forcing herself to move slowly and cautiously, her eyes constantly scanning, always alert, always listening.

A toilet flushed nearby, and she heard a rush of water tumble through the wall she was pressed against. She followed the noise of pipes to a closed door and drew her blade, waiting for the door to open. When it did, she moved quickly, darting up, blade out, jamming the knife into the underside of the man’s jaw, the point of the blade gouging through his throat and severing the brain-spine connection. She grabbed his shirt front, pushing him back into the water closet and closed the door to hide him.

A snuffling noise came from around the corner, toward the kitchen, followed by the noisy crunch of a German Shepherd inhaling food. The chameleonwear not only hid her physical form, but helped to hide her scent as well, a feature she was eternally grateful for. Two more guards stood nearby, chatting aimlessly about rugby. Slowly, she withdrew a doggy treat from a pocket of her tactical vest and slid it across the floor to the dog. His ears perked and tail wagged as he sniffed at the treat, but the men took no notice, too engaged in their small talk. She willed the dog to eat and breathed a sigh of relief when his teeth crunched through the biscuit, devouring it, practically inhaling the crumbs off the floor before returning to his bowl. The sedative was quick-acting and soon enough the dog was out.

The men laughed at some joke they shared, then cursed the dog’s snoring. One kicked at the animal’s ribs, and killing them sent a particular satisfaction through her. The dog was still out, though, despite the man’s attempt to abuse him awake. She pulled both corpses behind the kitchen counter, leaving a streak of blood on the white floors.

Jubber’s selfies and mem recordings, satellite imagery, and her own reconnaissance had allowed her to build a map of the villa’s interior. She knew Jubber’s bedroom was on the topmost floor, a massive half-circle construct with floor-to-ceiling windows providing a one hundred and eighty degree view of 3rd Beach and the Atlantic, encircled with decking and inset pools and a long expanse of furniture. His night life was active enough that he spent much of the day asleep, so she wasn’t worried about him noticing the dead guards outside his room.

Still, she wasn’t one to dally, and she headed directly for the upper floor. She caught snatches of conversation on the second floor. Her timer clicked closer to the halfway mark, though it felt like she’d been inside much longer, as if time itself was dilating and expanding.

She paused at the landing to observe. The men were drawing near the stretch of glass separating the massive living room from the outdoors. She couldn’t risk them catching sight of their fallen companions. A dog padded along beside them, and she swore at herself for this. She hated to compromise, but there was no way she could get one of the tranquilized treats to the dog without putting herself in danger. Regardless, killing the dog would be a last resort.

The men were executed first. The Shepherd looked confused at first, his brow furrowing and ears rotoscoping for the noises of a threat. She thought, and hoped, that maybe she wouldn’t have to kill this one. A low growl burned through his throat as he padded toward her, and she slowly withdrew a treat and sent it across the floor toward him.

No luck.

The dog bolted toward her, but she was able to move aside quickly enough. He sniffed the air for her, still growling, growing angrier. He knew she was there, but couldn’t figure out where. She had to make a decision, and quickly. She chose to push aside all of her basic training on engaging animal hostiles, knowing it was not the practical way to deal with the dog, but knowing full well it was the only moral choice she could live with. She moved fast, wrapping her arm around its throat and covering his body with hers, forcing him to the ground. He was panicked and tried to buck her, but she outweighed him. His head fought to get free, but she had him trapped, pinned down between her legs, one hand clamped across his muzzle while the crook of her arm squeezed either side of his neck to cut off the blood flow to his brain. It took a while, but she was able to choke out the dog and leave him unconscious. Alive, but out of commission. Akagi couldn’t risk him coming to, though, and he could wake up and be on her tail again in less than a minute. From another vest pocket, she withdrew a syringe and a small medicine vial, injecting the dog with a low dose of tranquilizer.

She proceeded up the stairs once again, stopping outside the closed door that she knew led to Jubber’s bedroom. Switching her optics to thermal, she surveyed the room and the cluster of still bodies, committing positions to memory before shifting her vision back to standard with a series of rapid blink commands.

She eased the door open, still crouched low, and softly stepped inside.

Three women slept on the floor, human detritus left in the wake of last night’s conquest. Two more spooned in the king-sized bed beside Jubber. The white stylings of the room gave the murky gray of the stormy afternoon enough ambient light to see by, and she could make out the still forms cleanly enough, along with the scores of empty liquor bottles and the packets of designer drugs.

Jubber slept on the far side, facing the windows. Rain drummed a steady beat against the glass, white caps from the Atlantic storming the beachhead and dissolving into spray.

She took her time approaching him, keeping herself low, her breathing soft and steady. The smart rifle was strapped across her back, her invisible blade in hand.

Jubber’s eyes snapped open, grabbing her wrist and pushing her backward as he flung himself out of bed. His eyes were dulled with sleep, but wide with shock. She realized in an instant that he was moving purely on reflex. Whatever edge of warrior training he’d once had had not been dulled with the pathetic, self-absorbed opulence of his life as the head of a poaching syndicate.

His movements were precise and trim, economical. As he pushed up from the bed, his hand darted beneath his pillow, finding a pistol and bringing it to bear.

Akagi brought her arm up between them before he could press the large bore muzzle into her face, blocking him with a forearm just as he pulled the trigger. The explosion deafened her and she felt the warm trickle of blood from her ear canal pooling against the inside of the chameleonic fabric. Dazed by the concussive blast, Jubber had enough time to slam a knee into her belly, knocking the wind from her lungs.

She fell back, and he was on her, landing a flurry of blows to her face, hammering her with the butt of his pistol. A large, meaty hand pawed at her face, tearing at the chameleon mask. He laughed at her, grabbing a fistful of her hair in one hand while punching with the other. Through the force of the blows and the piston-like repetition of his attack, her numb mind mentally cataloged the fact that he’d gotten synth muscle upgrades at some point. Not a part of the public record, nothing she’d been able to find in all her research on him.

Blood and snot welled in her throat from a broken nose, and she felt a cheekbone fracture before the physical status app notified her of the incurred damage.

She fought through the pain to not panic, enough to realize she still held the knife in her hand. The world was slowly coming back to her, even as the assault continued.

Jubber was intent on beating her to death.

The women were screaming, but she could still hear his laughter. She noticed a buzz of activity as the girls scrambled to gather whatever clothes they could collect off the floor and hustle out of the room.

Her status app warned her that the moisture-collecting inserts in her nasal cavity were busted and that her jaw was fractured. Two teeth missing. Blood thick on her tongue. She waited, waited for just the right moment.

Waited for the blow to land, waited for his arm to retract in perfect motion, for his elbow to touch the sky just so…and then—

She jammed the knife blade up, into his armpit, into the cluster of nerves. He howled in pain, his arm sagging and paralyzed. She twisted the blade, drawing it loose, cutting open his bicep. Then she slashed hard, opening his neck. A bib of blood splashed down on her, and his free hand went to his neck, trying, too late, to staunch the blood loss. Crimson leaked between his fingers, the color draining from his face.

She kicked her way out from under him, pushing him aside. He scrambled on the floor, trying to put distance between them, trying to retreat. Like a wounded animal who had just realized there were other, stronger, better predators in the wild.

He had dropped the gun. She held it, watching him bleed as she swiped blood away from her face. She raised it and fired, finishing him.

Kari Akagi sat in the crook of a baobab tree, a rifle in her lap, roughly twenty meters above the low-lying plains of the Kruger National Park.

She was clad in chameleonwear, her presence in the park largely unnoticed by the animals and the rangers that had once been her colleagues. If either knew she was out there, it troubled them little. They knew she was there to help, a member of their pack or tribe, even if no longer in any official capacity.

She had returned to the park to heal, both physically and spiritually. She felt at peace, comforted by the gentle giants that grazed below.

There hadn’t been a rhino killing in more than twenty-four hours. A small victory, but nothing to get cocky about. They were still far, far away from any sort of recovery. The animals were drawing closer to extinction every single day. Akagi only hoped to help make those days last, to draw them out as long as possible.

A passing squadron of three rangers earlier in the day had been talking animatedly. Apparently there were reports of more dead poachers turning up. Three in the last two days. Nearly twenty in the last three weeks. She had smiled to herself, hidden away in her tree perch.

She zoomed in on the Olifants, watching two rhinos fording the river. A male and a female, both teenagers. Perhaps they were on a date. Some distance away, she found another female grazing, and a much smaller rhino running around and beneath her. The animal was young, little more than a baby, and full of energy. If his mother could survive, the baby could have a long life ahead of it. If Akagi could do her job well enough, and make her mission succeed.

She lost herself in the tranquility of the moment, riding high on a small measure of bliss. She knew that her days, too, were numbered. There were still plenty of poachers out there, and eventually they would lead her to another link in the long line of syndicates that she would contend with.

First, she had to heal. A bone-deep ache wrapped her skull, the skin still puffy and bruised. The swelling around her eyes had lessened considerably, but her cheeks had a painful, cottony feel, her nose tender and mushy beneath the surface. The nasal implants were an irreparable loss unless she opted to leave the country. But having them fixed or replaced would raise too many questions that she wasn’t prepared to lie in response to; not yet, anyway. Not while there was still work to be done.

She popped a hydrating candy, allowing herself to linger and enjoy the fruity tang. Her eyes returned to the mother and her baby, rolling in the dirt and sending up a cloud of dust. For the first time in a long while, she allowed herself a glimmer of a smile. And then, she prepared herself for the hunt.