I was halfway across the room, leaning against a bookshelf to catch my breath, when she called out from behind me. “We’re not done, boy.”
I turned to face her. She was on her feet again and hugging herself with one arm, no doubt applying pressure to keep her ribcage from moving very much with each breath. She held her other hand up in front of her in a ready stance.
“You’ve lost. If you keep this up, you’ll die from those injuries.”
“Victory and defeat are the temporary forces of circumstance.” She choked and coughed, spitting a mouthful of blood onto the floor before continuing. “The way of avoiding shame is different. It lies in death.”
A moment later she rushed at me, launching one attack after another with a desperate ferocity. The strikes were wild and loose, less precise and controlled than before. Big, arcing slashes and deliberate kicks driven more by rage than technique. To her credit, she was still absurdly fast, but having faced her at her best, I could see the difference. Where I could do nothing but defend before, I now found openings to counter.
She slashed in an upward swing at my throat that I weaved back to avoid. She countered by bending at the elbow, stepping forward, and hammering down to stab. That might have worked if she were faster—there was no way to shift my balance in time—but her attack seemed so slow that her surprise when I caught her wrist was odd to me. I pushed her arm to my left, stepped back, then pulled it down to the right and twisted.
Katerina had the presence of mind to know what I was doing, and instead of fighting it, she went with the movement. She was already kicking off into a standing frontflip by the time I twisted her wrist. She had a tortured expression when she landed, but the movement had saved her from a broken arm.
Still, the pain had distracted her, and that split second of delay was more than enough. I pulled her wrist up over her head. Our difference in height meant she was essentially hanging by the wrist, her toes barely scraping the floor, too close to kick at me and too injured to knee me. I balled my fist and punched her in the side. She cried out, her face twisting in agony. I pulled back and hit her again. She turned her body to face me, for all the good it would do. I punched again, closer to her armpit, then again in the kidney, each blow eliciting another shriek.
She managed to fight through the pain and reached out with her bloody hand to claw at my face. I brought my elbow down to block, keeping a tight grip on her wrist, and realized too late what she was doing. Lowering my arm had allowed her to get her footing back. She kicked off the floor and drove both heels into my face.
The blow drove me back and I stumbled into a bookshelf. It toppled and I went with it, the glass shattering as it hit the floor. The pressure in my sinuses told me my nose was bleeding long before the blood trailing down my shirt did. I inhaled through my mouth and blew my nose clear as I stood. The room was spinning, but I could see that Katerina had vanished.
I knew it wasn’t in her to walk away. Wherever she was, she was doing something to tip the fight in her favor. That was enough to give me the strength to get across the room to the kitchen. The men I’d taken down were still where I’d left them. I turned the storyteller over and opened his coat. The straps of a holster were visible around his left shoulder, so I turned him onto the other side to get at his weapon. That was when I noticed he wasn’t breathing.
I took his sidearm with a mixture of regret and indifference. I ejected the magazine to find it topped off with all twenty-one rounds and press checked the chamber to discover a round ready to be fired. The storyteller had been the cautious, overprepared type. Now he was dead without having fired a single round when it mattered. More proof that fate had a sense of humor.
I loaded the magazine into the gun and started to back away from the body. No sooner had I taken my first steps than the corpse was shredded by a single blast of gunfire. I scrambled behind the kitchen island as another shot tore through the countertop. My expensive coat hung in tatters above my head.
From the damage inflicted by those gunshots, it was obviously a shotgun of some kind, but the pause between shots meant it was probably pump-action. That was rare luck; an automatic would have meant my death.
“Come out, Tycho,” Katerina called out. Her voice was strained and broke as she said my name. “You’re pinned, and you know that.”
The door was down a narrow hall and beyond a foyer. The entire path was a killbox, and even past that there was only the elevator to get off of the level. Any attempt to run would mean getting shot in the back, but staying where I was meant getting gunned down at point-blank range. She was right; I was pinned.
“Come out so we...can get this...over with.” She was raspy. “I’ll shoot you in the head and blow your goddamn brain out all over this nice pinewood.”
Her calm demeanor had fallen away. The lectures, the esoteric references to philosophers, and quotes from ancient texts were gone. Beneath her cultured veneer was the same narcissistic sadist as Solovyov and Marcenn. That was why they were drawn to each other. They reveled in their own sense of superiority and only found value in the artificial constructs that made them different.
I couldn’t hear footsteps, but she had to be moving. I needed to keep her talking. “I’d ask you to do the same,” I said, “but we both know that won’t happen. The fox that can never be caught, chased by the dog that never fails.”
“The Teumessian fox? That’s more...than I’d expected from you, Tycho.”
I slowly pulled my tattered coat down from the countertop. “Yeah, I get that a lot. People think Arbiters are dumb machines.”
“And they’re right. You’re not...an Arbiter. You never really were.”
“Yet you keep underestimating me,” I said. She was somewhere to my left, maybe five meters away. I balled the coat with one hand.
Katerina coughed. “Because you’re an idealist. You can’t see...what’s in front of you.”
I took a breath and steadied my footing. “Yeah, you could be right.” I threw the coat to my right and dove left, bringing my gun up even before I could see her. Katerina fired at the first sign of movement, her shot tearing through the remnants of my expensive, tailored coat. She didn’t have the chance to even register her mistake.
I fired six rounds before I hit the floor. Three hit Katerina in the head. Her blonde hair twisted into spirals tracing the bullets’ path as they exited her skull in the Callistan gravity. She fell to her knees and her head slumped forward, before finally toppling softly to the white tile.
I stood and fired nine more rounds into her back; not out of spite, but because I had to be sure she was dead. I approached her body in a wide, curving path to keep myself behind her as much as possible. Once close enough, I kicked away her shotgun and rolled her over with my foot.
Her right eye was missing and her nose had collapsed into her skull, but her mouth was still turned up in the same faintly amused smile. The exposed bone of her cheek peeked out from beneath lacerated skin and torn muscle, shining slick beneath the dim accent lighting. Her left eye stared up at me accusingly.
I reached into her pocket and took back my dataspike. I felt behind her ears with my fingers but couldn’t find hers. I checked her collar and ran my fingers through her hair, but it seemed like she simply didn’t have one. It made a certain kind of sense; the old spy had made sure whatever secrets she carried went with her to the grave.