Outrageous Fortune-Errant Freight Book One

Chapter 38

While a breeze from the open door chilled the back of his neck, John torqued Mary's knife hand away, meaning to keep the blade as far from any mortal bits as possible.

Along his right arm a line of red welled, dripping onto the deck.

"A bit extreme, don't you think?" he asked her, indicating the stolen knife.

"I take my work seriously," she replied with a little pout. "Honestly, John, it's not personal."

"Ah, well, I'm pleased to hear that," he said with a smile that had her eyes gleaming. He tossed the axe, still in his left hand, aside. The second it clunked onto the deck, Mary's demeanor changed, every muscle shifting from rough-and-ready fighter to the demoiselle he'd first met in the Nike airfield.

She was, he thought, very good at her work.

Then he stepped back and delivered a left cross that knocked her senseless. He stood back and watched her slump to the deck. "That might have been a little personal."

I beg to differ.

A deep, lyrical voice shivered through the bay—no, through John's mind—sending a chill down his spine and freezing his limbs in place.

This is quite... quite...personal, Galileo's unvoiced judgment rang through John's skull.

"Turn around, John, if you'd be so kind, " the sensitive added, speaking aloud.

John turned, slowly, as if moving through honey.

What he saw first was Colin, out cold on the deck, and, to Colin's left, Eitan, on his knees, his head bowed low, and the staff hanging loose from the rope on his right wrist.

He saw Rory, still shackled, but John didn't think it was the chains holding him frozen, not the way his grief-stricken eyes stared, fixed on some unseen point.

At last John faced Galileo where he stood, a bruise marring his jaw where John had struck him and, standing next to him, her small, capable hand draped unresisting in his, stood Jinna.

The young woman's expression was neither fearful nor angry, but a terrible blank.

It looked to John as if no one was living inside.

"What's wrong with them?" he asked. "What have you done?"

"I've done nothing. 'Tis you, John, who've done this. If you hadn't resisted, they'd be fine and proper, but you did, so now they're each living their personal nightmares. Over, and over, and over, again."

"That's not possible."

Isn't it?

And suddenly Galileo was at John's side.

John hadn't even seen him move, but he was there, and then he was picking up the axe and then turning for the door and John's body would...not...move, no matter how he much he urged it.

And now Galileo was raising the axe and bringing it down, and the line holding Jagati parted, and John's world tumbled a thousand feet down...

* * *

Seeing the line's fibers fraying under Ysabel's knife as smoothly as the patching tape had, earlier, Jagati was again forced to appreciate how smogging sharp the other woman kept her blade.

She also, luckily, was already on the return arc, and while her line continued to deteriorate, she swung up behind Ysabel so, in the same moment the line gave away, she was latching on to her opponent's back.

As the line whipped away above, Jagati felt the return of her own weight. It was a sensation she generally associated with the end of the jump, when her boots struck ground to join whatever ongoing battle she and her team had dropped into.