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  He's describing a cage and calling it an opportunity.

  "So basically," she said, "you want me to go with you and build things for you." A beat. "Forever."

  Harren tilted his head, genuinely curious. "That word keeps coming up. Forever." He looked at her. "It's interesting that it bothers people so much. Farmers work forever. Soldiers work forever. Nobody calls that slavery."

  "Farmers choose it."

  "Do they." He seemed to find that worth considering. "I suppose that depends on how you define the word choose." He looked at Napoleon for a moment, then back at her. "Think of it as helping this planet, if that makes it easier."

  It doesn't.

  Torin's voice came from beside her, tight and low. "Where is our group?"

  Harren turned to look at him. "Alive," he said.

  "Where?"

  "Somewhere comfortable. For now." A small pause. "I'll be honest with you, I was impressed by them. The composure those children showed was remarkable. Adults rarely manage half as well." He looked at Torin. "The problem is that they know things I can't allow moving freely through this zone. About her. Knowledge doesn't become harmless because the person carrying it is twelve years old."

  All of them. The weight of it landed slowly. Locked up. Because they were near me.

  She felt Torin move before she saw it. Her hand shot out and grabbed his arm.

  "Don't."

  "They're going to lock them up," he said.

  "I know." She held his arm. "And you getting killed right now doesn't help them. You saw what he did to Carin's men. Stand still."

  His arm was shaking. He held.

  Harren watched them both. "You know," he said, almost to himself, "I always find this moment interesting. The part where someone has to decide whether to act or wait." He looked at Torin. "He made the right choice, by the way." He looked back at her. "As did you."

  She let go of Torin's arm.

  Harren turned back to her. "I'm going to be direct with you," he said. "Not because I think anything else would work, but because I think you'd find it insulting." He looked at her steadily. "You can fight me. People have. And I've adapted every single time, and it always ends in the same place, just with considerably more damage along the way." A pause that sat comfortably in the clearing. "Or we skip that part." He tilted his head. "What kind of person do you want to be from this moment forward. That's genuinely all I'm asking."

  She looked at him.

  Say yes. Buy time. It's the obvious move.

  She could see the logic clearly.

  She also hadn't slept. Her hands still ached from twelve hours of work. And this man with his folded hands and his pleasant voice had just told her those kids were spending the rest of their lives in a cell.

  I know what I'm supposed to say.

  I can't.

  "I had an accident," she said. "There are gaps. Things I can't reach."

  And everything you told me yesterday filled in more of those gaps than anything has since I got here.

  Not that you're getting credit for that.

  "But there is one thing I do remember," she said. "Religion as a control mechanism. Classic." A beat, dry and flat. "Worked for thousands of years too, I'll give you that." She looked at him. "Maybe you force me. I don't see a way out right now. But every day you keep me I'm going to be working on something to send your church to hell."

  The clearing held its silence.

  Harren looked at her.

  "Ah," he said quietly. Just that.

  He stood, and she had half a second to understand that something was about to happen, and then the world cracked sideways and she was on the ground.

  The slap hit her so hard she didn't register falling.

  One moment she was standing. The next the dirt was against her cheek and her ears were ringing and she couldn't remember the part in between. Her whole skull was still vibrating from the impact. She could taste blood and her vision was white at the edges and narrowing fast.

  Stay awake. Stay…

  The trees above her tilted and kept tilting.

  Operator. Tera's voice, far away, like someone shouting from the other side of a wall. Operator. Stay with me.

  She tried to answer and nothing came out. She tried to get her hands under her and they found the dirt but her arms had nothing in them and she went back down, face against the ground, the ringing in her ears getting louder.

  Up. Get up.

  She couldn't get up.

  Her vision kept going white and coming back, white and coming back, and Tera kept calling her name from somewhere very far away and the trees above her wouldn't stop moving.

  The sphere. The watch. Where are they.

  She turned her head and immediately regretted it. The world lurched sideways. She held still and waited for it to settle and tried again, slower, scanning the ground around her.

  Nothing. Just dirt and leaves and the clearing blurring in and out of focus.

  Find them. You need to find them.

  She found Napoleon.

  Napoleon had launched the moment she hit the ground. Three soldiers were working around him, cutting off angles, and she could see the problem even through the spinning. He was faster than any one of them. But there were three, and every time he turned to block one the next was already moving, and he was having to work harder each exchange to cover the gaps.

  He's still up.

  She tried to get her hands under her again.

  Stay up.

  Torin lunged at Harren from behind.

  One second. Harren didn't turn around. His hand moved backward, caught Torin's wrist, and the knife was gone. Torin stood there staring at his empty hand.

  Then Harren drove the knife into his shoulder.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

  Torin made a sound, short and bitten off, and went down hard, one hand grabbing at the wound, blood already running through his fingers. He didn't get back up.

  Harren crouched down in front of her. His voice was exactly the same as it had been all morning. Not elevated. Not satisfied. Just the same pleasant, unhurried voice.

  "I was waiting for you to open your eyes," he said. "I needed you to see what happens when someone doesn't cooperate with the church." He paused. "Watch."

  He stood. His sword came out.

  She tried to get up. Her arms buckled. She was still on the ground when Harren moved, there and then not there, and then Napoleon made a sound she'd never heard from him before. High and short and then cut off completely.

  Then nothing.

  Harren crouched in front of her again, the same expression he'd had all morning.

  She looked past him.

  Napoleon was on the ground. Harren had cut him diagonally, just below the middle of his body, and the two halves lay separate in the dirt with a gap between them. The legs on the lower half were still moving, small and involuntary, slowing down. Sparks jumped from both cut edges. His eyes were flickering, the glow coming and going, each pulse weaker than the last and the silence between them getting longer.

  She couldn't look away. She couldn't speak. She couldn't move. She just lay there in the dirt watching his eyes go on and off and on and off.

  She stopped breathing.

  His eyes were still flickering. On. Off. On. The lower half twitching in the dirt, slowing down. Sparks dying out one by one.

  She'd felt fear every day since she woke up in this zone. She knew exactly what it felt like.

  This was not that.

  Something settled into her chest. Cold. Heavy. Clear. It had nothing to do with surviving or finding a way out.

  She looked at Harren.

  "You son of a bitch," she said. "I'm going to kill you."

  Harren moved. His knee came down on her throat.

  She grabbed at his leg. Both hands, no leverage, nothing to push against. The weight was cutting off everything and her vision was already going dark at the edges and her hands were losing strength and Napoleon's eyes were still flickering in the dirt beside her, on and off, on and off, and she couldn't breathe and she couldn't think and her grip was going and she knew it.

  Stay conscious.

  She kept grabbing at his leg with both hands. Frantic. Desperate.

  Harren didn't move. He watched her with the same expression he'd had all morning.

  Just a little longer.

  Her left wrist turned. One small motion against her palm. The specific curl.

  The click was so quiet it was almost nothing.

  The explosion was not.

  The force shot up through her wrist and into her arm like something had tried to rip it off at the shoulder. She cried out. Her whole arm went numb from the impact.

  It took his leg above the knee and threw him backward and the sound hit every tree in the clearing at once and she felt it in her chest and her teeth and the ground under her spine. She gasped, air flooding back in hard and raw.

  Half a second of silence.

  His severed foot landed in the dirt beside her head.

  Son of a bitch, my arm.

  Hadn't expected that much force. Battery components do something to the impact. Good thing I reinforced the barrel or it would've shattered. Three rounds left.

  Harren hit the ground screaming, both hands clawing at the stump of his leg, fingers digging into the cauterized edge. The sound coming out of him had nothing in common with the voice he'd used all morning.

  She was already moving.

  Find it.

  She ran, eyes sweeping the dirt. The sphere had rolled when he hit her. It had to be close. She covered the ground in a wide arc, scanning fast, her arm still numb from the wrist up where the brace had fired.

  There. Against a root.

  She grabbed it and spun around.

  The four soldiers were all staring at Harren. At their powerful leader on the ground, screaming, one hand pressing into the burned stump of his leg. She watched their heads start to turn toward her. Weight shifting. The frozen second of disbelief breaking.

  Three seconds. Maybe less.

  Her eyes swept the clearing fast. Trees left. Tree line right. Torin on the ground, hand pressed to his shoulder. And Napoleon, in two pieces near the center, sparks still jumping from the cut edge, legs moving in slow patterns that kept getting slower.

  Her eyes stayed on Napoleon for one second too long.

  One click. She dropped the sphere. It hit the ground and the smoke exploded outward, gray and thick, swallowing everything around her in seconds. She dropped low and ran, counting steps from the map in her head.

  Fifteen seconds.

  Her hands swept the ground, moving fast through dirt and leaves. Her fingers found a sphere and she shoved it into her pocket without stopping, kept moving, found another, another, one more. Four total.

  The watch. Where's the watch.

  Her fingers kept moving, sweeping wider. Leaves. Roots. Dirt. Nothing.

  Come on. Come on.

  There. The smooth flat surface of the Lumen Watch under her palm. She closed her hand around it.

  A hand closed around the back of her neck. The grip was so hard her fingers opened on their own and the watch hit the dirt and then she was airborne.

  She hit the ground shoulder-first and the impact knocked every bit of air out of her body in one single moment, like something had collapsed inside her chest. She rolled and rolled and stopped face-down in the dirt and just lay there. No air. Nothing. Her mouth was open and nothing was coming in.

  Breathe.

  She couldn't breathe. Her chest just sat there, locked, not moving, while the dirt pressed against her face and the smoke drifted past her and her body refused to cooperate with anything she was telling it to do.

  Breathe. Right now. Breathe.

  The first breath came in wrong and she choked on it. The second was better. She got her palms flat against the dirt, then one knee, then the other, and stayed there on all fours with her hair in her face until her chest started working again.

  The watch was gone from her grip. Somewhere in the roll.

  I had it.

  The tank stepped out of the smoke. Broad, heavy, pointing at her. His voice was low and tight. "Our lord offered you grace today, a place and a purpose." He looked at her on the ground with something close to pity. "And you chose this."

  From inside the smoke, a voice. "Wound's cauterized. I'm getting him out." A pause. Then Harren, strained, barely recognizable. "Don't kill her. Alive."

  The tank started running toward her. Beside him the fighter-class soldier broke into a run at the same moment and got three steps.

  Something dropped from above.

  It landed on the fighter's throat and opened it in one clean motion, corner to corner.

  Both hands went to his neck. The blood came fast, running between his fingers, and he went to his knees making a sound that wasn't words. His mouth kept opening. His eyes found her once, then the dirt, and he stopped moving.

  The small metal shape dropped beside him and went still.

  The upper half of Napoleon. Eyes fully dark.

  "Napoleon."

  The word tore out of her chest. Her throat closed around it.

  He didn't move.

  The tank had stopped. He was staring at the soldier on the ground, not moving, not breathing. "Colm." A beat. "Colm, who did…?”

  Now.

  She was already moving.

  Two clicks. She threw it hard through the air.

  It exploded mid-air in front of his face. Dozens of small needles with purple tips burst outward at high speed, too fast to see.

  She'd lost count of how many she'd made through the night. The magnet and ejector at the center meant she didn't have to place them one by one, their tips bonded to the core on their own. Battery-tipped. In theory, small explosions on contact.

  Let's find out.

  The needles buried into his face all at once. Some hit armor and stopped. The ones that didn't have armor to stop them kept going, sinking into skin and cheek and jaw and around his eyes, and he had just enough time to understand something was wrong before they started going off.

  One. Then another. Then three at once. Small hard detonations under the skin, each one tearing outward, and his hands flew to his face and the screaming started, raw and high, and he stumbled and fell and kept screaming on the ground, fingers pressing into what was left, bone showing white through the mess where skin had been.

  Then he went still.

  Good.

  She was already pulling another sphere.

  Three clicks.

  Across the clearing Harren's face had changed. He screamed at the soldier carrying him to drop him and run.

  The soldier dropped him. Harren hit the ground on his hands and started moving, faster than she expected, but running on hands wasn't nearly as fast as running on legs and he was already off balance when the sphere landed beside him.

  Let's see if this kills you.

  The sphere had three modes. First click, smoke, that was the default, she hadn't changed it. Second click, the needles. Third click, something she'd never tested. At the center of the sphere she'd forged a section of battery more concentrated and more unstable than anything else, compressed tight, designed to explode. How big the explosion would be, she was about to find out.

  She turned away and covered her head.

  The explosion hit harder than anything she'd calculated. The force picked her up off her feet and threw her backward and she hit the dirt and rolled and stopped with her ears ringing and the taste of smoke and blood in her mouth and fire everywhere behind her.

  That was bigger than I planned.

  She pushed herself up.

  Torin was on the ground, right arm useless at his side, using only his left to try to push himself up. Not making a sound about it. Just trying.

  Two of Harren's soldiers lay in the grass, not moving, the flames still working at what the blast had left behind.

  And Harren. Against a tree at the far edge of the clearing, one arm bent at an odd angle, blood on his mouth, the stump of his leg black and cauterized, struggling to push his back upright against the bark.

  Still breathing.

  She got to her feet. Her legs held.

  "Get up." Her voice came out hard. "Right now. Path is clear."

  She looked at him. "Go find Reth. Take your group and go."

  "I'm sorry." He got to his feet. "That they told him who you were. They shouldn't have...“

  "I don't care. Go. You can't help me here."

  He held her eyes for one second. Then he was running, disappearing into the trees away from the fire.

  She stood in the middle of the clearing.

  Fire spreading on three sides and smoke rising through the canopy. Two bodies in the grass that weren't moving. Two spheres left in her pocket.

  And Harren against the tree, watching her cross the clearing.

  He wanted to make me a slave. And he cut Napoleon.

  She started walking toward him.

  At the edge of her vision the HUD waited, quiet and patient.

  [LEVEL 5 EVOLUTION AVAILABLE]

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