and the truth of the words. “I think I came to apol—”
Midsentence John lunged forward and grabbed her shoulders, and with all the force he could muster, he pulled Quin to the ground behind the rubbish bins lined up in the alley. With a vicious twang, a knife planted itself in the wall and stood quivering with the force of its impact—exactly where Quin had been standing a moment before.
Three teenaged boys stood at the alley’s entrance, more knives in their hands, ready to throw.
“Oh God, not now,” breathed Quin. And then, almost like a prayer, she whispered, “Shinobu, where are you?”
Quin rolled out from beneath John and was back on her feet in a moment, crouched behind the bins, her whipsword in one hand, a knife in the other. She ripped off her smock, which was getting in the way.
“I don’t have anything you want!” she called at the boys—the Middle Dread’s boys. Trained by him, kept by him for…what? To chase after his athame, after he was dead?
Of course, Quin realized. They don’t know he’s dead. All this time, they’ve been talking about him as though he’s still alive.
“Liar!” said the smallest one, Nott. He and the other two were moving down the long, narrow alley.
“You’ve seen them before?” John asked, huddled beside her.
Quin nodded. “You too?”
“Yes. They run if you challenge them.”
“They don’t run from me without a huge fight first,” Quin told him grimly. “I don’t have anything you want!” she called again.
It was true enough. Shinobu had taken the focal and the athame of the Dreads, which also meant she had no easy way to escape the boys. Where had Shinobu gone? Her body still ached painfully from the last fight. Facing a new one without him was an unpleasant idea.
Mentally she made a quick inventory: she had her whipsword and a few knives. She had been walking around armed since their last fight with the boys, in case they showed up suddenly again. But she hadn’t expected them to find her on the Bridge, not really. And she wished, for once, that she’d chosen to wear a gun, though they were hard to come by in Hong Kong and against the Bridge’s rules.
“Then let us search you!” one of the older boys called back. This was a dark-skinned one. She’d fought him on the estate.
“Your master is dead!” she called out to them. “If you had let me get a word in before you attacked us yesterday, I could have told you. You have no one to retrieve the athame for.”
“Shut your mouth!” the dark one snapped.
“You’re a liar!” yelled Nott.
“Who’s their master?” John whispered.
“The Middle Dread,” Quin whispered back.
The third boy stepped out from behind the others. He was in his late teens, with dark, dark skin, and he’d been their worst opponent on the estate. He was wearing a focal on his head…
And he had a disruptor strapped across his chest.
“Lying girl!” he spat.
Quin realized she’d been hearing the disruptor’s high whine for some time, but the sound had been obscured by the noises of the Bridge. Before she could react, he fired the weapon.
“Oh God,” she and John said in unison, dropping to the ground. The disruptor sparks hit the metal bins and ricocheted off in a hissing, flashing mess.
“I don’t have what you want!” she yelled. “Your master is gone. I watched him die!”
“Stop saying that!” yelled the boy in the focal.
He fired the disruptor again.
She and John pressed themselves low against the bins as a new swarm of sparks collided. A handful bounced through a gap, soared past Quin’s face, and smashed into the metal stairs behind her.
She could smell the boys. Death hung about them like an invisible cloak.
“Come out and show us what you have or haven’t got!” the oldest one ordered, and he fired the disruptor again.
“How is he firing it so fast?” she asked. Unlike the disruptor she’d trained with on the estate, this weapon took almost no time to recharge.
“He sounds like he wants to disrupt you,” John whispered, “like he’s dying to do it whether you come out or not.”
“Shinobu and I injured them pretty badly. They’d probably rather not fight.” Indeed all three boys looked wounded, with dirty, blood-caked bandages in various locations. “And they think I have an athame. They don’t want to give me a chance to use it.”
“And they really don’t like what you said about their master,” John said.
He was right. The boys were arguing as they got