There was something horribly unnatural about the sight of that arm sticking out of the open doors. Not because I wasn’t used to the sight of bodies, or because it was eldritch nonsense like so much other recent stuff in my life, but because it was not supposed to be possible.

  Not in the HQ. Not inside the Cattery.

  Even during the Zerx war, Kittens had stood firm and protected that doorway. To see it just… abandoned like that? It sent a shiver of utter dread down my spine.

  “Oh fuck no,” Mike snarled, eyes alight with fury. “Kid, stay here for now. We’re going to —”

  “No.”

  “What do you mean, no?”

  “I mean, no. I’m part of the gang too, Mike. I love this place. I’m not going to just sit here and let someone tear it apart. If I can do anything, anything at all to protect it, I will.”

  I delivered the little speech with enough conviction, or just pure spite, for Mike to shut up and shoot me a startled look. To be honest, even I was surprised by how much I meant it. My mind had felt so very fragile on our way there. All the death had affected me, plain and simple.

  Now that I needed to protect my own home away from home, though?

  All I cared about was fucking up the day of whoever had dared charge inside the building.

  “Can I stay here instead?” Lurch asked jokingly.

  Okay, so maybe it wasn’t entirely a joke. The man looked terrified. Still, he was gripping that gun real tight and seemed more than determined enough.

  Mike and I locked eyes again. We might have stood out there arguing longer, but then the building decided to literally shake.

  “Fuck! Okay, kid, whatever. Just don’t die or Mela’s gonna kill us all,” Mike snapped, already turning away.

  “Wait!” I called, making him stumble and almost faceplant. He shot me an irritated look, but I didn’t pay attention. I was busy fumbling with my discreetly shaped deck. Extracting the connection cords, I quickly stuck them into my neural link. “There, I’m ready now. Well? Go!”

  That snapped him out of whatever question he wanted to ask, and we finally closed the distance between us and the doors.

  The inside of the Cattery was… unpleasant.

  There were a few gang members who just preferred to do guard duty. They got stuck with the front doors more often than most. I hadn’t known them all by name, but after my daily visits to the HQ, I liked to think we were on friendly terms.

  Those same guards were now strewn all over the place in pieces. Literally. That arm we’d seen had nothing attached to it. Various other limbs formed a serious tripping hazard as we crossed the foyer.

  It looked like someone had actually torn these people apart, shedding blood, body parts, and all sorts of viscera. Oddly, that didn’t make me want to hide or throw up. If anything, it only made me more determined to find whoever was responsible and make them pay.

  We pressed on, through the little entrance area and into the actual lobby. That was when we discovered the cause of the building’s shaking.

  A gleaming knight at least two and a half meters tall was clashing again and again against Garren. The intruder was made up of silver metal plates that were completely sealed shut, showing no hint of humanity anywhere. Its right hand held a massive sword with glowing, vibrating edges that left heat mirages in its wake. Its face was a blank mask, featureless except for a pair of cybernetic green eyes.

  An android. A fucking clanker. Right there in our lobby.

  The death machine moved with unnatural precision, lashing out so quickly that its blade kept blurring into a vague trail of sparks.

  Much more impressively, Garren was matching it in speed.

  The two were so fast that they were causing actual air displacement, whipping up winds that buffeted anyone trying to intervene. And people were trying. Even though it made me want to scream at them for their stupidity, they were lighting up the clanker. At least they managed to miss Garren, but it still didn’t do anyone any good. Bullets simply bounced off the clanker’s plating and left not a trace behind.

  So, that made it all the more impressive that the clanker was actually marked by several obvious dents. Scratches also marred the clanker’s armor plates, some of which were nearly deep enough to pierce through completely.

  Even as I watched, Garren screamed out in fury. His own form threatened to blur as arms that had been almost fully stripped of synth skin lashed out.

  That’s when I saw the gleaming claws.

  Garren’s cybernetics were a solid pitch-black in color, tipped by silver claws that absorbed and reflected the light in unnatural ways.

  If I needed any further proof that the claws were special, I could just look at their effectiveness. The clanker was actually forced to dodge. Whenever it didn’t, Garren’s claws sheared new grooves through its defenses.

  The thing seemed enraged by this. Its assault redoubled in ferocity as its left arm came up, gripping an oversized shooter.

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  The stupid thing angled the gun so that even when Garren dodged, shots still sprayed into the crowded bodies of Kittens behind him. People screamed as the massive caliber went to town on squishy human bodies. I cursed when I noticed the bullets definitely didn’t stop at just one victim. Their penetrating power was insane.

  I looked around wildly, searching for something to duck behind. We needed to get to cover, even if I didn’t know how much good it would do us, so —

  My breath hitched in my throat as my questing eyes landed on Mela.

  The woman was laid out prone against a wall, at the furthest spot away from the fight between Garren and the clanker. It didn’t look like she’d been laid there gently. There was a small splatter and blood trail on the wall, as if she’d been thrown against it with enough force to crack her skull.

  I was running before I could even process the risks of doing it.

  Sure, I was headed away from the fight, but even just crossing the clear space might draw the mechanical menace’s attention. I didn’t care. Didn’t care that I could get shot, and sure as hell didn’t care about almost slipping on the blood and all the human and machine bits that littered the lobby.

  From what I could tell, these were the remains of the other lieutenants and the Kittens’ few borgs. They’d been dismantled with the same cold efficiency as the guards at the front, so even the fact that Mela was still intact gave me hope.

  The world glitched around me abruptly. I was treated to a split-second scene of blood erupting and clouding my vision before the Clairvoyance cut out. I dropped like my fucking life depended on it, because it did.

  The bullet whizzed past where my head used to be, slamming into the wall with enough force to leave a sizable hole.

  Garren screamed in fury again, then showed me why the whole fucking building had been shaking. He did a weird dash forward into a kick with his right leg, somehow transferring all of his momentum and strength into the blow.

  The kick hammered into the clanker like the fist of an angry titan. The thing was actually lifted off its feet and launched into a wall. The whole building shook like we were in an earthquake, but Garren was moving again already.

  The only hint I got of how he’d managed that blow was the gleam of black metal near his feet, where his pants had been slashed open. More cybernetics. Except, I’d seen convincingly natural-looking skin on Garren’s lower body when we switched into workout clothes together before.

  Just how much of that man is concealed cybernetics?

  The question became all but irrelevant as I finally dropped to my knees and skidded to a stop by Mela, ignoring the flare of pain that caused.

  I wasn’t skilled at first aid. I wasn’t even moderately okay at it. I still dropped my deck next to her in a hurry and checked her over with trembling fingers, cataloguing her injuries. They were surprisingly few, but those few were bad.

  There was an extremely deep gash stretching from her hip down to her knee. It wasn’t bleeding, because the clanker’s fucking thermal vibro sword had cauterized the wound even while inflicting it, but it was still cause for concern. Then there was, of course, the cracked skin on the back of her head, and that was bleeding like all get out. She also had a few bad breaks that would make her legs and right arm pretty much useless.

  Still, I realized with startling clarity that if I could do something about the head wound, she would live. Her chest still rose and fell erratically as she sucked down wheezing breaths.

  Okay, so maybe there was something else going on with her lungs that I couldn’t see, but I clutched onto hope with all I had. I so very badly wanted to believe I could help her.

  In fact, I even knew how! Hopefully. Maybe. So long as she hadn’t suddenly decided to switch up some recent new habits.

  I rummaged through the right side pockets of her jacket, looking for those stupid, impractical inhalers that felt like a punch to your lungs. Sure enough, I found two MaxDocs. They were even the slightly fancier versions, the ones she’d started smuggling me when Torn declared we weren’t supposed to waste medical supplies.

  Even under our dire circumstances, I couldn’t hold back a fond grin as I dragged her into a slightly better position. I tilted her head back and very awkwardly gave her that first puff of MaxDoc goodness.

  I kind of wanted to scream at first as I saw some of the aerosol particles escape her mouth, and again when she started gagging, wasting even more of the medicine. Still, the stuff was so potent that I could actually see the head wound’s bleeding start to slow down.

  My eyes fell on the second inhaler. I only hesitated briefly before shoving that down her throat, too.

  She actually inhaled more of the medicine this time, which was both a relief and a worry. On the one hand, anything that made her get through this alive was a boon. On the other, there was a reason you really shouldn’t use too many MaxDocs too close together.

  That reason became apparent almost immediately when Mela gasped and started convulsing. Her eyes shot open and looked around wildly. Her limbs were a twitchy mess, particularly the broken and savaged ones. It was like she’d been wired directly into the city’s power supply.

  I was incredibly impressed when her eyes actually landed on me and widened in recognition.

  “K-Kid? Fuck. No. Please no. I-I s-shouldn’t h-have sent them for y-ya. Go. R-Run. Can’t stop them…”

  Them?

  My eyes widened in alarm. I glanced back at the fight just in time to see Garren turn aside the stupid overpowered sword with his bare hand. I wanted to goggle at the impossibility of the scene, but my eyes only lingered briefly on his pinched grimace before I started looking around in a panic for more intruders.

  If there was even a single extra clanker lurking around, we were fucked.

  When I couldn’t spot anything, I tapped into the cameras and drew on my deck for a little extra RAM so I could —

  My thoughts screeched to a halt. That same pressure I’d experienced once before slammed into me, and into my eyes in particular. I grunted and almost pitched forward onto Mela as the enemy runner fought to take my defenses apart.

  I couldn’t even muster the presence of mind to try and do something. It felt like a tightening vise was clamped down onto my eyeballs, squeezing ever harder, the pressure mounting until they began to heat up.

  Yes!

  I wanted to scream and pump my fist in the air as my lips twisted into a vindictive smirk. My eyes heated a little, but then my deck spun up as well, the eyes drawing on its resources automatically.

  I didn’t mind. I remembered what happened to that Zerx runner. Wasn't it right after attempting to hack my eyes that he tried to dig out his own brain?

  Whoever this new fucker was, I was more than happy to let the 'Shadow Runner Package preservation protocols' take him out on their own. Then if I could weaponize the shadows somehow, I could maybe even go after the clanker, and —

  Pain exploded behind my eyes. I whimpered as I clutched at my face. My vision glitched, for real this time instead of Clairvoyance activating, but I still caught hints of both blood and tar marring my fingers.