run, and threw her haz-suited body into a diving handspring, jackknifing feet-first off the ground with a fluid agility that would have made even Camilla Hect erupt in a wild “Okay.” Protesilaus had braced his stance for an attack and had not expected his enemy to move past him; by the time he shifted and started to turn, the Sleeper was on her feet again, and yet another gun was in her hand. She pivoted lightly and shot him in the small of the back.
A pop. A wet spatter emerged from his abdomen. Protesilaus dropped. Next to Harrow, Ortus moaned in terror. The Sleeper turned back toward them, handgun raised, trying to draw a bead, a wisp of smoke trickling from the muzzle. When she found no head or limb sticking out to put a bullet in, she stepped back, pointed the gun at Protesilaus’s prone form, and—without looking—fired two more shots. The body jerked, then was still. Dulcie screamed.
There was silence, except for Dulcinea’s panicked, wheezing breaths, punctuated by a ripping cough. Protesilaus’s body lay heavy and unmoving on the cold metal of the facility floor, somehow still more animated in this death than he had been as the empty puppet of the seventh saint.
“Listen to your leader,” said the Sleeper. “Don’t engage. I’m not here for you, but don’t think you can’t die again. Just give me the girl, and the rest of you are free to go back to whatever hell you came from.”
Abigail said, from somewhere in cover, “You must be joking.”
The orange-suited figure raised the gun and fired it into the ceiling. Ortus cringed at the noise; Harrow dug her fingers into his arm, though what comfort that could provide she did not know.
“Harrowhark,” called out the Sleeper.
The Sleeper said it slowly, as though she had never said it before—Har-row-hark, as though the syllables were strange. That was not the most arresting thing about the monster calling her name. It was the untrammelled contempt with which it was said, as though her name itself were a curse.
The Sleeper said, “You can’t hurt me here. If you give yourself up to me, the ghosts can leave. If not, I end all of you. This is the only bargain. I’m giving you to the count of ten, then the offer expires. Ten.”
Harrowhark said, “Who are you?”
“Doesn’t matter to you. Nine.”
“I don’t negotiate with strangers.”
“Doesn’t matter to me. Eight.”
Septimus broke cover. She stayed low, darting from the doorway where she had hidden herself toward the shelter of a bank of instruments, her shadow huge and jumping in the light of the flickering candles. She was only in the open for a second, but the Sleeper pointed the little black gun as casually as Harrow might point a finger, and fired. Her orange-wrapped arm flexed with the recoil. Dulcie cried out and fell, her leg knocked out from beneath her. Harrow closed her eyes briefly; then she began scrabbling through Ortus’s panniers, winnowing for the best pieces, her fingertips slick with sweat as Ortus breathed through his teeth.
“Seven,” said the Sleeper. “Six. Five—”
“My cue, I think,” said Magnus Quinn.
Harrow had lost track of him entirely when the shooting started, and had assumed he was with Abigail, who seemed from her voice to be somewhere near Dulcinea. Now he emerged from the doorway immediately to the right of the one through which the Sleeper had entered. He flung himself at the Sleeper from behind, before she could turn to meet him, and grabbed her in his arms, locking them tight round her midriff, so her elbows were pinned against her sides.
From the other side of the room, Marta Dyas burst out of her own doorway, bent at the waist. The Sleeper managed to wrench her arm far enough to fire from the hip, but the shot pinged into the metal wall with a bright, hot snap. Dyas fell into a sideways roll—a much less beautiful movement than the Sleeper’s impossible handspring, but one that bore the spare efficiency of long practice—and came up holding the big gun with the wooden stock that the Sleeper had tossed away. She braced it against her shoulder, looking like a drawing of some ancient soldier on a far-off battlefield, her Cohort whites gleaming pale blue in that sea of unearthly candles, and fired.
Dyas flinched back with the recoil, and a hole split open in the Sleeper’s orange suit, high in the middle of the chest. But no mist of blood sprayed forth; the Sleeper