Chapter 107: Battle Rattle
*/Nikki’s First Person POV/*
The letter sat folded in Kara’s hands.
Three yellow pages off a four-Credit notepad, creased twice down the middle, and she held them in her lap with both thumbs pressed over the fold, and she hadn’t opened them once since I put them there, because she’d already heard every word inside them from my own mouth.
So she sat in the armchair and watched me, and said nothing.
Neither of us had touched the argument again. And it had ended with three pages moving from my hands into hers, and that was as close to her blessing as this night was ever going to come.
I hadn’t looked at her since the letter left my hands. But her eyes stayed on me the whole time, and I could feel them crossing my back with every buckle, and I knew that meeting them even once would cost me the exit.
So I kept my eyes on the gear.
The plate rig went on first, arms through, and the weight came down onto my shoulders.
-Chk-!-Chk-!
Side straps cinched. The Glock 20 seated into the chest mount with a press-check, the karambit riding behind on the belt, the hatchet clipped at my waist, the Shorty 40 sliding home into the shoulder holster while Kara’s eyes followed every single click.
The respirator went around my neck, and I checked both seals twice with my thumbs.
I caught myself doing it and let it happen, because the last time this thing mattered, a Revenant took it off my face without me ever feeling the strap move, and some lessons get written into the hands instead of the head.
Then the rifle. I lifted the M110A2 off the bed and brought the sling over my head, and Nia’s carving passed under my thumb when it settled, and I stood there holding her handwriting and understood I was carrying it into a war for her.
"System... one Accelerated Healing Stim."
-Ding!
{
Accelerated Healing Stim ×1
Effect: Regeneration +90%
Cost: -100,000 Credits.
Advisory: Sleep remains unpurchasable.
}
"Noted..."
The auto-injector landed in my palm, fat and black, and I put it against my thigh through the jeans and pressed.
-Hss-!
Fire went into the muscle, and then the fire turned to heat and started crawling, down into the shredded calf first, then up through the chewed hand until it itched under the gauze like ants trapped beneath the wrap, then into the nose, the cheek, the two loose teeth, every wound I owned lighting up at once as the stim found them and got to work.
[A hundred grand... and not one Credit of it can fix stupid.]
I rolled my shoulders under the rig, then closed my eyes and reached inward for the level, and it came back at around eighty percent, give or take.
Eighty percent, against tens of thousands on a shoreline and one thing sleeping in the shallows that can shrug off just about everything money could buy.
Eighty would have to be enough.
Tikki crossed the bed without a sound, climbed my arm, and stepped down into the shoulder pocket, and he turned once and settled in facing forward with his chin up, clocked in for the shift.
"Mea."
"Yeah... us two again."
I picked the helmet up off the bed and stood there with it in both hands, and I spoke to the chin strap because the chin strap didn’t have eyes.
"If I’m not back by evening..." I said, "...you get everyone up, you pack, and you head west. You don’t wait for dark, and you don’t wait for me. The Ascender will be down on the road, fueled, loaded, keys in it... The letter covers everything else."
Kara’s thumbs pressed harder on the fold.
"I’ll catch up..." I said.
And after all long while, Kara nodded once, small and slow, and stayed exactly where she was, while the silence in that room got heavy enough that I could hear the stim working under my own skin.
I seated the helmet and clicked the strap home under my chin.
And with that, my face stopped being the face Kara knew.
[Time to go...]
I pushed the Awareness out.
Thirty meters bloomed through the spot between my eyebrows and took the whole penthouse in one breath: the taped panes, the dark kitchen, two shapes upstairs folded together in one bed, breathing slow. It brushed past Nia in the medical ward, flat and even, before finally resting on the old man on the sofa
He sat upright with his hands on his knees, and his head was not aimed at his daughter’s glass, and it was not aimed at the floor between his feet.
It was aimed straight at my bedroom door.
Square at it. Level at it. A man sitting alone at four in the morning, spine straight and face pointed at a closed door, and I stood on the other side of that door in full battle rattle and felt my stomach drop through the floor of me.
[He knows... How? How the hell does he know?]
There was no reading a face through Awareness, but I didn’t need the face.
I knew he was waiting for me.
I stood there for three full seconds while every version of the next ten minutes ran through my head, and not one of them ended with me reaching the balcony unheard, because the route to the glass ran straight past that sofa and the man on it.
"Mea..." Tikki said, very quietly, against my ear.
"I know," I said, before taking one long breath, holding it at the top until my chest pressed the plate, before letting it go.
[Then again... don’t remember the last time things went according to plan...]
Then I opened the door and stepped out, being unable to even look Kara in the eyes till the very end.
And before my second boot had even crossed the frame, his voice came across the living room, quiet and level and awake for far longer than I’d guessed.
"...We need to talk."