30.
Sienna
I was screwed over by Edinburgh again, and I didn’t really have a lot of options available to me that I liked.
The mob behind me broke into a run as soon as I saw them, so, naturally, I broke into a run too, pounding down the street at meta speed, cries of angry and disgruntled people starting to bellow out from behind me. Waverly Station was right ahead, and there was no point in politely pretending I wasn’t a meta when a randomly assembled street gang of people dressed in…
Whoa.
While my lead pursuer might have been dressed in quite the, ah…aesthetically displeasing ensemble, what with the shredded jeans and all, his fellow members of the Kill Sienna Gang were not following his fashion example. I saw men in suits, women dressed for the office, two people looking like they were homeless, someone who might well have been on their way to a punk rock concert…
I was about to be killed by horde of Edinburghers who probably wouldn’t have associated with each other under normal circumstances. Yay for bringing people together. I was a unifier.
Waverly’s triangular roof stuck up straight ahead, and I tried to decide whether it’d be better to leap the wall and try to hide in the crowd or dodge this lot and circle around to the main entrance. Hopefully they hadn’t hacked my stolen phone (a very Jamal thing to do, but hopefully not a very Rose one) because if so, the damned game was up on my current destination and also my final one.
My boots thudded against the sidewalk and I shoved past an old lady wearing a head scarf. She let out a cry of shock as I jetted past, almost knocking her over just by momentum. I looked back to see her astounded face…
And also my tattered jeans pursuer running a hell of a lot faster than a normal human would, leaving the rest of the angry mob behind.
Okay, well, that gave me something to work with. I might be able to outrun most of them if I could just get rid of this guy.
I decided, screw it, and vaulted the wall, finding myself landing in the Waverly Station carpark. That seemed like a fine option for a game of hide and seek, which was what I was planning to play with Mr. Blonde. I knew the next train to York was leaving in twenty or thirty minutes, but that was a long time to try and dodge him.
I cursed when I landed, because not only did it hurt, but this wasn’t actually a car park at all. I must have misread the sign, because instead I found myself in a passenger drop-off zone. I could even see a damned train, though it was just behind a fence.
Shiiiiiiit. This did not help at all, really.
Deciding there was not a lot of point in being coy, I broke for the train and sprinted. With a short, controlled leap, I made it over the fence into Waverly proper, and found myself not on a platform. I was on the damned tracks, and there was a train in front of me, pulling slowly into the station, driver gawking at me open-mouthed.
Getting run over slowly might have been a metaphor for my life of late, but it wasn’t really going to work for me, so I sucked it up, ignored the pain in my ankle, and leapt again, skittering over the roof of the train, staying below the arched glass that made up the ceiling to the station, and slid off onto the platform on the other side.
I almost landed on a guy who looked at me with visible alarm. “Where’d you come from?” he asked in thick Scottish.
“My mom said heaven, but everyone else says hell,” I quipped, and started to walk away like my little leap over a train was nothing. “Actually, my mom probably agreed with everyone else, now that I think about it.” I turned and started to run down the platform. This was not the train I was looking for. This one was heading for Inverness.
A grunt behind me caused me to turn from my run. The blonde man had landed, and he’d done so on that poor, unsuspected Scot who’d asked me where I’d come from. Mr. Blonde was up in a hot second, grimacing in pain from landing his ass on the pedestrian’s head or something, I imagined.
For my part, I suspected the getting was about as good as it was going to get, provided I wanted to finish this incident quickly and not start another. I leapt over the next train and Mr. Blonde followed, about ten yards back from me. As I slid over the roof of the carriage, I knew what I was looking for–
An empty aisle or space between trains where I could pull out my old ass-kicking skills and put old Blondey down hard so I could catch a train. Maybe I’d even change up my look by borrowing his shirt. My hoodie was probably well-identified by this point, after all, so it wasn’t going to function as an effective disguise for much longer.
I came sliding off the train and down onto the tracks below. I landed with all the grace of a sack of potatoes, but Mr. Blonde didn’t do much better. I wondered if there was a third rail here, brimming with electricity and ready to bring this fight to a shocking close. I resolved not to touch any of the rails, though that would be a hard resolution to enforce if I got into a scuffle. I’d been shocked to death before though, and had no wish to reprise that particular exit from the mortal coil.
Blondey landed a little more solidly than I did, letting out another grunt as he pulled himself to standing. He was staring at me with a look of such intensity that I couldn’t help but comment on it.
“What’s the matter?” I asked, feeling a little tingle in my heart, in my legs, in my guts, but unwilling to show it to one of Rose’s flunkies. “They don’t make laxatives in Scotland?” I mimed his expression. “I mean, you look like you need to sit down and pop a squat, really take a load off, bro—”
He glared at me, then cast a look over his shoulder at the purple- and blue-painted train car behind him. I followed his gaze, because when you’re fighting a meta and you don’t know their power, it’s not wise to look away from their eyeline, cuz odds were—
Yep. The train wall flexed and bowed, metal squealing in a loud echo through the vast open spaces in Waverly Station. The side of the train started to swell like a pimple, growing larger and more distorted the longer he stared at it. Within a few seconds it looked like it was ready to explode. “Uh oh,” I said, and waited until the last second before—
It popped like a zit and shrapnel came shooting at me, little fragments of metal that filled the air like buckshot. I threw myself back up on the platform, but that wasn’t exactly cover. I was gonna hoof it to one of the nearby benches, but a quick look back over my shoulder made it obvious that Mr. Blonde had now taken control of these fragments of metal and was steering them like tiny bullets.
At me.
I dodged them as they shot by. Well, most of them. A few little shards caught me on the arm and shredded my hoodie sleeve like it was nothing. I sucked in a pained breath, realizing that no, the good times were indeed not going to roll right now. I was going to roll, though, and I did, going low and sliding under a bench before coming up on the other side, breathing a little heavily.
The bench slid away along the concrete with a screech as Mr. Blonde worked his power on it. It skittered away, revealing me lying flat on my chest. “Oh, man,” I muttered, popping back to my feet in an improvised flip that left a trail of blood on the concrete floor.
Blondey grinned and then brought the flotilla of makeshift bullets at me again, hard and fast, and this time I flung myself backward, just fell and caught myself in a bridge, hoping that he’d gotten them moving too fast to steer them into me.
He had, more or less. The “more or less” being two or three fragments that sliced across my exposed midriff and made me fall out of my bridge. I landed on my back, and propelled myself back to my feet with a quick shoulder roll.
“I want your blood,” Blondey said, grinning like a shark who smelled—well, blood in the water. He was advancing on me, and I’d been in enough fights to recognize a distraction when I saw one. He still had that angry swarm of shrapnel, after all, like his own personal squadron of bullet bees, and unfortunately they did not buzz.
“A lot of people have wanted that over the years,” I said, trying to get control of my breathing. The run, the jumps, this fight…none of it was proceeding as well as I might have hoped. I looked around the platform, hoping for something, anything I could use as a weapon. There were green-painted steel poles holding up the electronic screens to announce the trains, and a few advertisements on those big, back-lit screens. Everything in sight had metal in it, and thus would make a poor weapon against this guy. “You guys should consider just scheduling a blood drive and inviting me. I’d totally donate, since it’s for a good cause—”
I heard the shrapnel rather than saw it, since it was coming in hot at my six o’clock, and I threw myself forward. I had high hopes that he’d have to stop it before it completely perforated him—actually, I hoped he’d suck at controlling it and that would solve my problem for me by ripping him to shreds with his own petard—and thus lose track of me for critical seconds wherein I would—
Coming to my feet, I was ready to make my attack. Except I’d executed a forward roll, and hadn’t been able to plot out my approach exactly. I wasn’t going to come at him directly, because I didn’t want to step into the path of the shrapnel, so I’d gone sideways left, at a forty-five-degree angle, figuring I’d come back at him hard from just outside the shrapnel cloud—
Except he’d stopped the shrapnel cloud and spread it out above me, something I didn’t realize until I started to come to my feet and felt a mighty stinging right at the top of my head—
I’d jumped right into the metal shards, hanging perfectly immobile right above me like a minefield.
Blood sluiced down my face and I stopped my upward movement as soon as I felt the sharp pain. It was a little too late though, because I hit another shard with my shoulder, another with the side of my ear, and another sliced right down the back of my head.
I hit the ground hard, blinded by both my blood and the astounding level of pain that comes from a partial skull fracture. I’d heard the bone crack upon impact with the shard I hit most directly, and it had done some serious damage. I landed on my tailbone, adding another element of agony, which ran up my back like someone had pulled the pain fire alarm and it was ringing all up and down my body.
I didn’t even realize how badly I’d been hurt until a few seconds later, when Blondey was already on top of me, a dozen other people around him. The mob had caught up to us while I’d apparently been stunned out of my senses.
They surrounded me, swarming me, and Mr. Blonde and his grin were the most frightening part of it all. They closed in, and all I could see were shadows blotting out the sunlight coming in from the windows above as hands started to grab at me, angry, like the shrapnel, intent on tearing me apart.