Unity by Elly Bangs (free e reader txt) 📕

sixteen years old. She was in some kind of shock. Her legs and torso struggled against our grip, but her arms were too racked by spasms to offer much resistance.

“What the hell happened?” Naoto asked.

“She must have followed us from the terminal,” Standard said. He ejected the power cells from her pistols one by one and set them on the cot without ever taking his eyes off our captive. “I’ve secured all the doors to this car as a precaution.”

Naoto knelt to pat her down. He looked up at me to ask, “Is she one of them? One of your Keepers?”

I was still too shocked to form words—but the more I looked at her, the more I knew it was the last thing in the world she could be. I’d forgotten to tell Standard one crucial detail: the Keepers would never allow a woman to handle a weapon. She had none of a Medusa’s markings, either.

Yet there she was: living proof that someone wanted us dead—and if not the Clan or the Keepers, then who?

“Tell us who hired you,” Standard said. His voice was eerily calm. “Names, objectives, parameters.”

The assassin only glared up at us and gritted her teeth against whatever pain had disabled her arms. I couldn’t see how she’d been injured; she had no visible wounds or waver burns.

“What if she was just trying to rob us?” Naoto said. “This could be random.”

Standard shook his head. “Someone hired her.”

“How do you know?”

He never took his eyes off her to tell us, “I recognize her type. An underworld teenager who romanticizes mercenary labor but has limited to no experience of it.”

Our captive glared viciously up at him.

“How do you know that?” I asked.

“She has aim-assists in both arms,” he sighed. “And the aim of someone who’s never fired at a living human target before.”

Our captive broke her silence to shout, “You don’t know shit about me.”

Naoto carefully pulled up her sleeve to inspect her hand and forearm. A network of geometrically branched lines was drawn in blood blisters and dark traces beneath the skin. All those hair-thin electrodes, designed to automatically fine-tune her muscle response for machine-like shooting accuracy, had violently shorted out at once.

“Fuck,” the captive hissed, squeezing her eyes shut against the sight of her own wounds. “My arms. The fuck did you do to my arms?”

It was only then that I noticed the pain creasing Standard’s own face. He stepped back against the wall, wincing and gritting his teeth to stretch his arms back to carefully remove his coat. One by one, he unfastened the interlocking pieces of his thin, matte-black armor.

“Are you hurt?” I asked.

“It’s nothing.” He cautiously inspected a dark circle on his chest, just above the bottom of his ribcage. It took me too long to recognize what I was seeing: blood and blackened skin showing faintly through the material of his undershirt.

I gaped. “You’re shot?”

“I said it’s nothing.” He peeled the fabric away from the blister. “It was a low-energy shot. The plates absorbed most of it.”

When he pulled the shirt off, his naked torso held me in sick awe. His skin bore dozens of marks from other waver burns like this one: circles and ovals of various sizes; some old and fully scarred, others still healing in uneven shades of pink. These were complemented by a constellation of other old injuries: thick and ragged lacerations indenting the muscle of his left shoulder; at least two clusters of healed-over shrapnel wounds; blotchy, discolored patches rising above his hip, etched by some chemical or bio-agent or nanoweapon. I tried and failed to look away as he attended to this newest addition, callously picking away the crisp dermis before applying a self-adhesive patch. Naoto and I shared a glance that asked, more clearly than words:

Who in the hell was this man I’d hired to guard me? Just who was Standard? I’d stumbled into that smoke bar praying for a cheap but marginally competent hired gun who wouldn’t instantly betray me to the Medusas, and instead I’d unknowingly come away with a hardened veteran of multiple wars, a genius of violence. I hadn’t decided yet whether that was better or worse.

I still couldn’t stop staring at the dull gleam of the bent-up wire necklace.

He restored the shirt, the armor, and the coat, and that was that. When I looked back, I caught a twinge of despair in the eyes of our would-be assassin: not for her failure or her capture or her injuries, I realized, so much as her perverse envy for the record of violence etched into Standard’s cruel body.

“I’ll ask you again,” Standard told our captive. “Who hired you? What were your objectives? How many others are there?”

“Others?” I echoed.

The young woman’s strained voice barely rose above the thrum of the magnetic fields under our feet. “You know I’m not telling you shit. A merc doesn’t give away her employers or her comrades.”

Standard was unfazed. He picked through the pile of her belongings until he found her shard. With a few keystrokes he interfaced it with his own, then made a call. “Are you with me, Kat?”

A scrambled voice creaked out of his shard to answer, “To the bitter end.”

“Our party has its first guest. Find out who invited her.”

“On it.”

Standard hung up. “My associate is tracing her recent activity in nodespace. Some information about her employer or her objectives might still be cached in her shard.”

“How long will that take?” Naoto said.

Standard shook his head.

Our attacker was only looking at me now.

For five years I’d lived in fear of what the Keepers would do to me if they ever caught me, but at least that fear was known and familiar. This was somehow worse: standing here with my would-be killer, knowing nearly nothing about who had sent her or why—and every second we did nothing, the train carried us inexorably closer to Crossroads Station.

“If she’s working with a group, they must know we’re on this train,” I said. “They could be setting