I scowl. “Down in the lobby. What happened to that woman?”
Wen reaches around behind herself and pulls a blaster out of her waistband. She keeps her wrist limp, the weapon pointed at the floor. Her umbrella sports a few fresh red patches.
“Gods of all systems,” I mutter, letting her go and taking a step back. She keeps the umbrella pointed at me. “What about Jusun?”
She gives me a blank look.
“The owner? The guy—”
“Oh, he locked himself in his office. But the Cutter got a call off to her fellows before I took care of her, and they’re probably tracing her location. We’ve got a minute, maybe more.”
“Does anyone feel like telling me what’s going on?” Gal asks, his voice dangerously low. I turn to find him backed into the corner, his eyes fixed on the gun in Wen’s hand. My heart drops. In all of this chaos, I nearly forgot what we’re doing here. What’s at stake. How stupid it is to let someone like Wen anywhere near him.
“Who’s he?” Wen asks.
“You don’t want to know,” I say, and Gal smirks despite himself. The sight of it grounds me from my panic. I have two and a half years of academy training under my belt. I have a minute to work with. I can get us out of here. “Wen,” I bark, and she snaps to attention. “Put the gun away. Gal?” He straightens, relaxing slightly as Wen slips the blaster back into her waistband. “Get that deflector armor on. I wish there were time to explain, but we need to get moving.”
Gal crouches by the packs, pulling out the armor I wore during our escape. I dig into our gear and find my grappling gun. Wen creeps closer, hovering over my shoulder as I check the device’s charge. “Where the rut’d you get gear like this?” she asks, clutching her umbrella tighter.
“Unimportant. More important—you know the city. You know where we go to lose them, right?”
Wen bares her teeth, and something tells me I’m going to like this place even less than her last hidey-hole. But it’s all the confirmation I need.
Gal finishes strapping on the armor and pauses, glancing between us. “Which one of you smells like garbage?”
I shrug. Wen says, “Both.”
Gal sighs.
I cross to the window, glancing down into the street below. Our room is around the corner from the main entrance, so if there are Cutters on their way, we’re none the wiser. Foot traffic’s light—we’re in the midafternoon lull between when most people take their lunches and when they start heading home for the day. Still, people will see us. We have to make this fast.
“Wen, you any good at climbing ropes?” I ask, popping the window’s latches and hauling it open.
“Up or down?”
“Down.”
“Not a problem.”
“Great.” I kick out the screen, lean into the open air, and fire a grappling line into the wall adjacent. Two quick yanks to check that it’s rooted. One nod to Gal, who hands me my pack without a word. I lean out the window, loop the line around my foot, and set the gun to unspool.
Voices sound outside our door. “Go,” Gal whispers, slinging his own bag onto his back. Wen turns to face the noise in the hall, bringing her umbrella up like a knight’s vibrosword. I grab the line with my free hand, shift my weight onto my foot, and drop, wincing as the woven fibers strip skin from my palm. I hit the street, kick free from the line, and immediately press back against the building, switching my grip from the grappling line to the blaster tucked against my back. Five seconds later, Gal hits the pavement. His hand finds my shoulder, and I let him brace against me as he slips his foot out of his loop.
The line shudders and sways, and I glance up to find Wen leaning awkwardly out of the window, the hook of her umbrella’s handle clenched in her teeth as she tries to replicate the way we used a loop around one foot to slow our descent. People in the street stare up at her, and I hiss. “Wen? You sure you’ve got this?”
Gal grabs the line to steady it, but it doesn’t do much for her. She slips out the window and thuds gracelessly against the building’s side as she swings. The blaster topples out of her waistband, and both Gal and I duck to dodge it. “I’m fine,” she calls, the words muffled by the umbrella in her mouth.
I really have to stop falling for everything she tells me. “Try to twist it around your leg,” I offer, and Gal swings the rope to help.
But before Wen can get the line positioned, her attention snaps up to the window. I don’t catch the words she says, but I can taste the venom behind them. Wen plummets down the line, her fall barely controlled. Gal and I dive out of her way. She hits the street so hard that she crumples. A nearby woman shrieks, and I glance up to find people clad in black sticking their heads out of our abandoned window. Gal’s grip on my shoulder tightens.
Wen staggers to her feet with the help of her umbrella, looking winded. Her palms are crossed with furious red lines. “Gotta run,” she mutters, blowing a stray strand of hair out of her eyes.
Her gaze flicks to the gun she dropped, but I shake her by the shoulder, bringing her attention back to me. “Which way?”
She squints, the circuits of her brain firing in rapid blinks of her eyes. “Wiretram. Next block over.” Before we can get anything else out of her, Wen bolts down the sidewalk without a backward glance. Gal and I launch after her, both of us looking up in time to catch the shadows overhead disappearing back into the room.
“You’ve certainly had a busy day,” Gal says as we chase Wen’s slight form.
“If we get out of this, I’ll tell you all about it,” I reply, wishing we hadn’t stuffed so many extra tools into the packs we’re carrying. Why the rut did I think we’d need every size of wrench on the Ruttin’ Hell?
Wen pauses at a corner up ahead, waiting for us to catch up. “Right down this way,” she says, pressing against a wall and pointing to a squat-looking station where the wires that cross the city skyline dip and converge. A tram is approaching, trundling along at a good clip. “One minute until they dock. Two until they launch. We get on board, and we should be in the clear. You got fare?”
I nod, my gaze sweeping the open ground between here and there. I don’t like it. It’s too exposed. We’ll be spotted the second we break across it. And then there’s the matter of the tram—I’ve never used public transit, and I’m fairly certain Gal hasn’t either. In post-reconstruction Trost, I’d heard its reputation for being slow and unwieldy, and I don’t see why a Corinthian borderworld would be any different. How the hell are we supposed to escape the mob with a bunch of commuters on a known route?
I glance back, expecting to see black suits sprinting toward us, but we’re only getting weird looks from passersby. Gal presses into my shoulder, the deflector armor humming to life against my arm.