Under A Winter Sun by Johan Dahlgren (ink ebook reader txt) 📕

Instead, she cracks her slender neck, something pops back into place, and she can move again. She leers at Meridian through the blood flowing from her nose. The blood bubbles between her ruined teeth as she breathes hard.

Soledad wiggles her fingers. “Surprise.”

It is. I was not expecting that, and neither was Meridian. She's an augmented immortal. Like me.

But that's impossible. The last of the Cherubim were killed on Persephone forty years ago. All but me.

The General doesn't burden himself with questions. The rudimentary lizard brain functionality left of his once great mind is focused on one thing, and one thing only. Keeping the General alive at any cost. Soledad is still a threat, and he won't stop until she is neutralised.

He punches her in the face, and she goes down again. She struggles to her feet. Stay down, Soledad, I want to scream. Stay down. No sound crosses my lips. Meridian sneers.

He hits her again, sending her off balance. Then he goes for her eye. Her beautiful eye. His fingers dig into her socket and tear it out. She howls and drops to her knees. Meridian moves in for the kill and there's nothing I can do to stop it. Soledad is going to die. He grabs her by the collar and pulls the monomolecular knife with his free hand. Even if she's an immortal, she can't live without her head, and the General knows that. He flips the blade open one-handed.

Now I will never learn who she was or what this was about.

Soledad glares up at Meridian with a mixture of rage and defiance in her remaining eye. The jelly from her torn eye squishes between Meridian's fingers as he raises the knife to take her head.

“Fuck you, Perez,” she says with blood flowing down her face and bubbling from her once attractive lips.

As last words go, not especially original, but far from the worst I've heard. She spits blood in Meridian's face, defiant to the last. Fuck, I liked her.

A short, controlled swarm of bullets explodes from Meridian's chest, tearing control of my body from him along with my internal organs. The aim is perfect, and the projectiles cut through my spinal cord right between the shoulder blades. I lose all motor functions in my lower body and I drop to the floor next to Soledad. Ice creeps into my veins as the blood leaks from the fist-sized exit wound in my chest. As I expire on the dusty concrete floor of this sorry warehouse, there's another voice in the shadows.

“Goodbye, Perez.”

“Major internal damage. Vital signs in the red. You're dying, Perez.”

“Don't worry about that.”

“Whatever.”

The newcomer steps into the light.

At first, I only see a halo of platinum-blonde hair. Then she leans in and her face comes into focus.

Except for the hair, she is the spitting image of Soledad.

“Die fast. We have a job for you.”

Something Big

If this is death, I'm sorely disappointed in the universe.

I've been here before, many times, in this darkness, and if this is all we get when we die, I'm not impressed. I hope ordinary humans get something more when they go because this is just sad. To make matters even worse, I'm not even getting the full run of my life passing in front of my eyes this time. It's only the last twenty-something minutes. Not my greatest hits.

What a shame.

There was a moment or two from my childhood I would have liked to revisit.

* * *

There's a flicker of light, like a school of fish reflected in a submarine's headlights, and I return to life. No sudden intake of breath, no tunnel of light. I simply wake up.

“Back online. Vitals stabilising.”

“Stop talking, Aeryn.”

“Whatever.”

“And he's back.”

A woman's voice. “How good of you to rejoin us, Perez.”

She speaks in the low, cultured tones of an aristocrat from Earth. Fuck.

There's still a hint of gunpowder on the air, so I can't have been out for too long.

I open my eyes, getting ready to close them again if the glare is too sharp. But the lights are turned down like someone knows how the eyes hurt when you come back. And then I remember. They're clones. Immortals.

Like me.

They must have been in that darkness themselves.

I blink and squint through the gloom. I'm still on the warehouse floor. There's still dried blood around me, but they left me in it so the nanites could reabsorb my precious fluids.

How kind of them.

It's also a message. They could have killed me when I was dead, but they didn't.

My cheek has stuck to the dusty concrete. Shit. Couldn't they at least have cleaned me up while I was out?

There's a powerful-looking black executive-style car standing close by with the engine humming. Two women lean against it.

“Please, can I kick his teeth in?” the one called Soledad asks with obvious longing as she fingers her still ruined face. She winces as she finds a sore spot on her full lower lip and spits blood on the concrete in front of my face. There are shards of teeth in there. Her eye is still a gory mess, but it's not bleeding anymore. She catches me staring and pulls out a pair of dark shades and puts them on. Sunglasses at night? Fucking poser. She looks like a feed-star.

I strain to focus on the two women through the headache splitting my skull.

They have the same sleek, powerful build, the same fair skin, they dress the same in those charcoal military combat suits, but they sport different hairdos. If they didn't, I don't think I'd be able to tell them apart.

Where Soledad has her black hair tied back in a ponytail, the other one is platinum-blonde and wears her hair in a stylish asymmetrical bob. Very haute couture.

Where Soledad is unarmed, the other one holds a compact automatic rifle. It looks like an Aitchenkai PDW. Packs a hell of a punch in a compact package. One of my favourites.

So, she was the one who shot me in the back. The bitch.

I finger