Page 179 of The Wild Charge

Bullets ricocheted off the concrete; one zipped past his ear; a sharp bee sting pain along the outside of his arm meant he’d been hit.

But four of the guards heading their way collapsed, their legs chewed to shreds, and toppled down the stairs toward them with a clatter of dropped guns and riot shields. They were alive, shouting and flailing, but in Tenny’s experience, once you crippled a man, he stopped trying to fight you.

A shield slid to a halt in front of him, and he snatched it up, and charged up the stairs toward the rest, trampling men as he went.

Bullets hit the shield and cracks spiderwebbed across its thick plastic. 9mm rounds – not strong enough to punch through, but given enough shots and enough time, the plastic would weaken to a critical degree. So Tenny moved fast. He was running by the time he hit the landing. He dropped his rifle to dangle from its strap, drew a twelve-inch tactical knife, and then it was close quarters, and it didn’t matter how many of them there were: he had a shield, and he had his life of training and toughening.

He stabbed a man through the soft skin inside his jaw bone, and whirled, blocking another shot with the shield, and reaching around it to stab another in the side of the throat.

A baton cracked against his knee. He gritted his teeth against the pain –again– because it was nothing he hadn’t endured before. He ducked low, stabbed a thigh; hamstringed another man. Came up with a vicious swing of the shield, its edge cracking off someone’s face with the wet sound of a nose breaking.

Spun, struck, ducked, dodged, struck, struck, struck.

He kicked a man in the back and sent him tumbling down the stairs. The crack of a single gunshot meant Fox or one of the others had capped him.

Tenny kept moving. His body worked with the speed and efficiency of an Italian sportscar; he was athlete and assassin both. His breaths measured and deep, his muscles flowing from one strike to the next, instinct driving every duck and every punch of the shield. He stabbed necks, and thighs, and the narrow strips of bellies between flak vests and belt buckles.

Again, and again, andagain.

Until the floor was slick with blood.

A gunshot sounded right by his ear; a sharp crack, and then sound fritzed out, replaced by a high, tinny ring. Tenny slashed at a bare patch of wrist, and the attached hand spasmed, the gun falling soundlessly. All he could hear was his own breathing, and that awful ringing, throbbing inside his head. He slashed out toward a goggle-covered face–

And his foot slipped. Slid without purchase in a puddle of blood, and he overshot his target; stumbled forward until their chests collided.

He brought the shield up in his left hand, as the man tried to grapple the knife out of his hands. Cracked the hard plastic off the side of his helmet once, twice, three times. The man staggered, heavy and clumsy, weight falling against Tenny. He twisted his wrist and the knife met soft flesh, forgiving, tender; the blade went in, and in–

And something hard cracked across the back of his neck.

He stumbled, skidded in the blood. Then he was shoved. He lurched sideways, his chest hit the rail, and, ears still ringing, he went over.

He dropped the shield, and caught one of the metal balustrades. Gripped it tight. His body kept falling, though; swung down in a wide arc, like a clock pendulum, and he felt thepop, the give, the tooth-jarring pain of his shoulder dislocating beneath the force of his torquing body as his grip yanked him upright.

Nerveless, his hand opened. He was thirty-two floors up, and the gap between the climbing stairwells yawned beneath him, dark and bottomless. He was going to –

He jerked, and shuddered, pain arcing like lightning through his out-of-socket shoulder, and he glanced up to see that Fox had a two-handed grip on his sleeve.

All three of them were there, their goggles pushed up onto their helmets, no sign of any guards behind them. Devin leaned over the rail, joined Fox in holding onto him, and together they hauled him roughly back up and over the rail.

Tenny got his feet under him as he crested it, and landed upright, breathing hard through his mouth. A quick scan proved that all the guards were down, the floor a Pollock painting of blood.

He slipped his dirty knife back into the sheath at his hip, and reached to probe at his bad shoulder. The pads of his fingers felt like the stab of needles through his jacket.

“I heard your shoulder go,” Fox said, as his flat, assessing gaze skipped over him, searching for damage. “Anything else?”

Tenny shook his head. “Put it back in.”

Abe stepped up, gripped his wrist, and his shoulder, and with a fast wrench, reset it. The pain blazed, so sharp it left his stomach cramping. But he could flex his elbow and wiggle his fingers after that.

Fox was in his face, suddenly, centimeters away. Beneath the battle-ready calm of his expression, his gazeburned. “Look at me.”

“I’m looking.”

Fox rapped lightly on the side of his helmet. “You still in there?”

Tenny tensed his arm, and the pain was so fresh, and so acute where the nerves had been wrenched and bruised, that it threatened, for one awful moment, to burn through his necessary haze of detachment. For one second of weakness, it was too easy to feel his own pain, and wonder how much worse it was for Reese right now.

Reese. That dopey blank look on his face, and his hesitant, barely-there smiles, and the way his hands gripped him sure and steady, no hesitation, no doubt –

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