Deliverance (Book 1)

Job Six: Overwhelming Force

Nobody slept well that night. Maon tended to their facial cuts and scrapes as best she could, and they sorted themselves in other areas. Suzu had protected her face well, but a piece of glass had still sliced the skin below her right ear rather nastily, and she found a sizeable cut like a 'tear here' perforation on her stomach from leaning in through the busted window to get Neil's gun, and realised she'd been bleeding over herself and the front of her black jeans were soaked with her own blood. Neil's problems were better than they looked – aside of a few superficial scratches that had started scabbing over already, he had a cut on his forehead and another across his nose, but as with most head wounds they had bled profusely without really being that serious.

Once their wounds were dressed, they all went to sleep. Maon drifted off with a frown on her face, but Neil was restless and took longer to check out. Suzu, in the spare room, dragged the chair over to the window and sat there, wrapped in the futon from the bed, watching the occasional taillights of cars on the far-off main road. It wasn't only a car. It was her work too, a turbocharged CV, proof of what she was, what she could do. It had felt like an extension of her body when she drove it, and losing it was, it seemed to her now, every bit as shocking as losing a body part. This was probably a massive exaggeration, she knew, but still, it felt that way. After a while, though, weariness forced a dejected but easier retreat into bed.

She awoke in a sweat some time later, having been rolling endlessly in the Lancia while the man with the shattered head from the Takagamine counter-ambush sat next to her saying "just walk away..." over and over in a liquid gurgle.

She finished her glass of water, subsided back into sleep and dreamed of the Delta again, this time laid out piece by piece like an art installation, and of having to put the entire car back together from memory with her bare hands; she had a toolbox, but it was full of guns and cans of coffee. Also she was in an infinite white space, and there were penguins. The penguins helped, for some reason; she woke up laughing about them. It was a desperate laugh, but it was a move in the right direction.

Feeling a little more capable of dealing with things, she got up and headed in search of something to drink, to find Maon sitting at the kitchen table with her expensively thin computer, a spreadsheet of hideous complexity taking up the screen.

"Hey. How are you feeling?" she asked, a note of trepidation almost but not quite absent from her voice.

"Better. A bit. I dreamed about penguins, and it was so ridiculous I couldn't keep on feeling desolate. Don't worry, I won't destroy anything. I think that's more or less out of my system." In fact her arms were aching dully; the last thing she wanted was to pick up anything heavy.

"That's a relief. Need food? Drink?"

"Just water for me at this point."

Maon gestured at the glasses on the worktop. "Check the bottles in the fridge."

She did, pouring, draining and re-pouring a glass. "Where's Neil? Still asleep?"

"No, he's in the bathroom, playing with his face."

At the word 'bathroom', Suzu's bladder woke with a start and made its needs known in no uncertain terms.