Bonds of Brass (The Bloodright Trilogy #1) - Emily Skrutskie Page 0,59

sink to the bottom, let any threat you pose evaporate.

Go limp.

I let my arms sprawl out as I close my eyes, heaving a defeated sigh. I feel the pause—one Cutter crawling to his feet, the other bringing his foot back down from the kick he was aiming.

And then I feel the hilt of the blaster underneath the tram seat. Out of their sight, but not out of my reach.

One second to get it in my hand. One second to crack my eyes open. Two quick pumps of my trigger finger as I snap the weapon out and aim it, first to the right, then to the left.

The Cutters collapse. I push to my feet, gritting my teeth against the throbbing in my head. With a few nudges of my toe, I check to make sure they’re properly stunned, then stuff the gun in my waistband. The tram sways into a wide turn, and I glance to the fore.

Gal and the Cutter woman dance around each other. She’s flagging fast, drained by dozens of tiny slices that arc across her body. Her flesh flashes white and red beneath the black suit in the places where Gal opened it.

He remains untouched, keeping her at the end of the umbrella as he weaves from side to side. His hooded eyes are dark and vicious, and another wave of nausea hits me as I realize he seems to be enjoying this. Gal doesn’t fight like the sloppy cadet I thought I knew. He’s not scrapping for his survival, scrabbling for that upper hand like I was two seconds ago. He fights like an imperial, dismantling her piece by piece, and even though I’m on his side, I feel the impulse to step between them for the Cutter woman’s sake.

I look at Gal emp-Umber and see something that I don’t recognize. And it scares the shit out of me.

“Thirty seconds to our stop,” Wen hollers.

I glance out the tram’s open windows. We’re a hundred feet up, well above the buildings, and the wiretram shows no signs of slowing. I don’t want to know what she means. I stagger toward the fore.

Wen skips back from the controls, waving the driver back in. He hauls himself out of the corner he backed into and dives for his post. A moment later, the brakes howl overhead as the tram burns off its speed.

The Cutter woman staggers back, collapsing against a row of plastic seats. Gal brings the umbrella down gently, resting the bladed point against the softness of her neck. A slight sneer lifts the edge of his lips, cruelty that I’ve never thought him capable of flashing in his eyes. She shakes her head, holding up her hands without another word. She’s done.

“Fifteen seconds,” Wen says. She snatches the umbrella out of Gal’s hands, and a look of confusion flickers over his face like he’s surfacing from a trance. He blinks once, taking in the bleeding Cutter woman, then glances up at me, lips parting as if to make room for an explanation, a curse, a plea for forgiveness.

Wen’s the only one of us not frozen. She flips the umbrella handle-up as she pulls a release on the tram’s wall and forces the gate over the door open. “Ettian, get over here.”

My eyes flick to my pack, wedged halfway under one of the seats in the scuffle.

“Leave it,” she snaps.

But that’s not happening. The velvet bag—my only memento of my family—is in my pack, and goddammit, I’ve let go of enough in the past two days. I dive for my gear, wrestling it onto my shoulder, and turn to find Wen reaching out the door with the umbrella’s hooked handle. Gal has one hand clenched around the umbrella’s stem, the other locked around Wen’s waist. She’s beckoning frantically for me.

I throw myself at them, my arms outstretched. Catching. Clinging.

My momentum topples us out of the tram, and for a terrible second, we fall.

CHAPTER 13

WHEN THE UMBRELLA’S hook catches on a line, we’re all reduced to the same instinct. The three of us hold on with everything we have. Grips