36.
Sienna
When the SUV exploded outside, the shockwave hit me like a punch to the chest. I felt the hard compression quivering through my internal organs. Warm liquid oozed out of my ears, something thumped me in the forehead, and then I smelled metallic tang of blood as I keeled over, blood dribbling into my eyes.
Something burned just below my hairline, like someone had taken a knife and hacked into my skull with a chisel. I moaned low but couldn’t hear it, trapped in my own head, the world dark and fuzzy around me.
“That’s … probably not good,” Zack said quietly, sounding like a real person speaking in my ear instead of a faint voice inside my head.
“I’m guessing skull fracture,” Roberto Bastian said in his clipped tones. “Blood in the eyes, lack of clarity of thought.”
“She’s never had much of a brain,” Eve Kappler deadpanned.
“This is not good,” Aleksandr Gavrikov said.
“Brain injuries tend not to be,” Bjorn said in his thick Nordic accent.
Sienna, Wolfe said, and his voice faded as he continued to speak, I am healing you, but you’ve taken some sort of shrapnel to the brain. I blinked, listening to this low, gravelly voice speak. It’s going to take a minute to get your mind right again after this.
“More like … mind … less … am … I right?” I said, not really sure what I was saying.
Yes, said Eve Kappler, you are mindless sometimes.
“Thanx,” I said, putting an x on the end as I slurred my speech. An x just belonged on the end of that word, I felt. Like xylophone should have been spelled with a damned z. I tried to lift my head and failed, thumping it on the bank’s tile floor. I blinked my eyes again. They were shaded with warm, dark liquid, and grainy dust had settled in it. I could feel it getting stuck in my eyelashes as I tried to clear my vision.
I ran a hand over my face clumsily and brushed away a strip of my vision. It still hurt to have my eyes open, though. I dragged my sticky fingers down my cheekbones like I was painting my skin for war or a football game or something. I blinked over and over, trying to get that awful feeling out of my eyes so I could see, so I could see what was going on, but it wasn’t really working. All I could see was a haze over me, and faint hints of a scarred ceiling somewhere above.
I jerked as feeling returned to my toes. I hadn’t even realized I couldn’t feel them until the sensation came back and it felt like I stubbed my right big toe before that pain faded with Wolfe’s healing ability. I tried to lift my head again and succeeded, the warm blood dripping out of my ear like I’d gotten water stuck in it.
I turned over onto my belly in hopes it would let the liquid run out of my eyes, but it didn’t help as much as I hoped it would. I ran my bare forearm over them, and that made it a little better. I could see again, though I was still blinking heavily against the grit and blood, and there was a smear of red all down my wrist now.
“I’m giving at the … office today,” I muttered to myself, swiping at my eyes again with my other wrist. They were tearing up now, and my head was just throbbing like someone had clenched a vein inside. Every beat of my heart was like a drum beat, and someone was going kind of wild with the bass line.
“Olympic One,” came a voice from out of the periphery of my vision, “this is Torch. Extract in ten seconds.”
What the hell did that mean? I wondered, and then my hearing fully returned.
Something slammed into metal outside, and I looked up, trying to see through the front window of the bank, searching for some sign of where the noise was originating. I blinked in the harsh daylight. Cops were sprinting in all directions, hustling out from behind the cop cars still parked out on the street. The SUV that had blown up was still smoking, and I wondered how they’d passed the bomb inspection dog on that one.
“Five seconds to extract. Respond please, Olympic One.”
I realized at last that the talking was coming from a radio that one of the downed robbers was wearing. It was attached to his tactical vest like a SWAT or Special Forces operator, except the earpiece had fallen out of his ear during the fight with Jamie, so I was catching the broadcasts with my meta hearing. A vein in my temple throbbed as I realized that this was the escape plan, that these guys had intended to get caught in the bank all along. This wasn’t an accident. It wasn’t a bug in their plan.
It was a feature.
I staggered to my feet and stumbled toward the front door. Be careful, Sienna, Wolfe warned me, you are still not well.
“I’ll be fine, just keep the healing going,” I mumbled as a piece of metal the size of three of my fingers popped out of my forehead and clanked against the ground, covered in blood. I staggered out through the front door, onto the sidewalk, the sounds of metal crashing getting louder. I looked to the east, figuring maybe I’d get a hint of what was coming—like a school bus, or another SUV, anything, really, but what I saw.
It was a garbage truck.
And it was on the sidewalk.
Barreling toward me.
If I’d been at the peak of my capacity, I might have been able to do something about it, like punch the engine out through the grill, or hurl a fireball, or transform into a dragon and bite it in half.
As it was, I sat there, slow-witted as though I’d just woken up, locking eyes with the driver, whose face was hidden behind a ski mask except for his eyes, which widened at the sight of me. A moment later I heard the sound of him accelerating before the grill smashed right into me and sent me flying through the air, my limbs not even responding to commands.