Breed

Chapter Thirty-seven

 "What happened to Mayumi?" Linc asked, still trying to catch his breath. He'd run halfway across campus from the nearest parking lot.

"She's fine," Mikaela said. "But right now you've got something else you should be focusing on. Because I need you to tell me the truth."

"I've got a lot of lies in the fire," Linc said. "You'll have to be more specific."

"Mayumi. She's not just some Japanese exchange student, is she?"

His eyes got wide. "Fuck," he mumbled. "She was the one, last night? I heard about the incident, but I never... is she okay?"

"She's not seriously hurt," she said. "I'm not sure she can be seriously hurt. But okay? That's a different question entirely."

"Christ, the protest. She got hurt, didn't she?"

"Yes."

"And she lashed out. Violently."

"What is she?"

"Your phone," Linc said. She frowned. He took his out of his pocket, and then removed the battery, and set it on the table. "Your phone. There's no such thing as too much caution, here." She removed it from a pocket, then slid out the battery, too. "I don't know everything."

"Start with what you do know, then work out from there."

"I met her in Pakistan."

"Pakistan?"

"We weren't exactly supposed to be there. But there was a high value target we were stalking, pretty sure he was hiding out over the border. So we went in to find out. And that's when we stumbled into her. She took out a dozen terrorists in under thirty seconds with her bare hands; and I don't mean the usual, dumb as an inbred post underwear bomber, but guys with military backgrounds. But then she turned on us. We'd stumbled onto an operation that wasn't supposed to exist. And as a contingency, she tried to wipe us out. Actually, she succeeded.

"I can restart my day. It's about 24 hours back that I can go. She killed my entire squad. I was one of the first she downed. She killed our medic while he was trying to get my intestines back inside the wound. Then she started towards me and I knew that there wasn't any way in hell I was going to win the fight. Of course... it isn't that simple, either. I couldn't just flip a switch. I had to sit there and wait while she pulled out my intestines, then she looped them around my neck, then that around a doorknob."

"She lynched you by your own guts?"

"Yeah. But it was what I saw after that made me try to save her. She started crying. She stopped being the cold, emotionally dead killer who tore through some of the best soldiers we've ever trained, and went back to being a teenaged girl. Not that she is, mind you; she's probably my age. But her cells repair with such efficiency that she basically doesn't age.

"But she was a tough son of a bitch. It took me fourteen attempts to take her down- knowing in advance where it would go down and how."

"We all but had to drop a house on her last night to get her to stop Terminating. How'd you stop her?"

"What finally worked? A hell of a lot of body armor."

"That doesn't seem so bad."

"I wasn't done. I wore layers of body armor, then goaded her into attacking me. And while she did, my team peppered her with blasts from shotguns. I can't tell you how much buckshot I took; but I can say I don't get through airport metal detectors without incident."