“As you know by now, I have your friend,” she said.
“He’s not our friend,” Vamp spat.
“If you don’t cease the attack on the power grid, I will kill him.”
“Like I said, he’s no friend of ours.”
“Wait,” I told her, holding up one hand. “Wait… don’t hurt him.”
“Then stop the attack on the power grid.”
“I can’t.”
“You’ve seen what I can do. I will pick you all apart, piece by piece.”
Shuang turned pale. She looked to Vamp.
“What does she mean?”
“I truly do regret this,” Qian said, her voice quiet.
“What would Pei think of this?” I asked, taking a chance and dropping Qian’s—the real Qian’s—daughter’s name. Her eyes flicked toward me.
“How do you know that name?” she asked.
“You told me I reminded you of her.”
She let up her grip on Vamp a little. Her gaze turned distant.
“We had been at the mall,” she said. “This mall. We were shopping together. We’d separated, just for a minute. I was shopping for clothes, and she wanted to visit a music store. I let her go. She was eighteen, and it was a public place. I didn’t think anything of it, but when she didn’t return, I…”
Tears formed in her eyes, real tears, and one began to roll down her cheek as her pretty face contorted. She wiped the tear with her thumb, but another came right behind it.
“Do you know what you are?” I asked her. She nodded.
“I’m Qian Cho.”
Her tears stopped, and she swallowed hard. Her eyes grew determined again.
“I’m Qian Cho,” she said again.
She moved toward me, and Vamp lunged. He grabbed her wrist, and twisted her arm but it just seemed to roll in its socket. Her hand flickered, and when the flicker passed it was still in the same position as before, like the twist never happened.
“Vamp, no!”
Vamp let out a grunt of pain as he released her hand. I couldn’t see what had him but I could make out the impressions of something coiled around his arm from wrist to elbow, constricting hard enough to cause the skin to turn dark and veins to pop out. Before I could even draw the pistol, Vamp screamed.
Nix moved as I managed to free the pistol from my pocket. Something struck Qian, and then the pressure on Vamp’s arm let up. Her arm fell, bouncing off the booth’s chair and rolling under the table, but when I looked back, it had returned.
“What the hell?” Shuang shrieked. “What the—”
Qian went for me again as I raised the pistol and fired five times, as fast as I could pull the trigger.
Her head jerked back as the first bullet hit her in the cheek. Vamp pushed away farther into the booth while he pulled a butterfly knife from his jacket. Qian shielded her face and the rest of the bullets either struck her arm, or missed and punched through the ceiling above her.
She recovered and I scrambled out of the way just as she lashed out. Something hit the table where I’d been sitting a second before and pulverized the bottles and glasses there, snapping the end off of the table in a shower of splinters and broken glass.
I fired again, hitting her in the chest even as I felt something slither around my ankle. By now the whole club had started screaming and yelling, and I could hear people surging outside the booth in an attempt to get the hell out of there. The grip on my ankle tightened, dragging me toward Qian as I fired three more shots into her. The shot to her face didn’t show—the skin stayed as smooth as ever, and completely unharmed—but the shots to her chest were being rendered. Blood bloomed through the white fabric around the powder-burned holes.
Vamp whipped his blade around and stabbed her in the side so hard it might have killed her, had she been human. Instead she turned to him and grabbed him by the neck, hauling him toward her and shoving him down onto his knees. The LCD marquee near the ceiling blinked on, and displayed a security alert. Someone had just triggered the alarm, but by the time anyone got there it would be over for sure. I aimed for her head again and fired three more times. Her head snapped back, and a chunk of something flew away from it.
That seemed to do it. She hadn’t expected the gun, and decided she’d taken too much damage. She let go of me and Vamp, who fell back, gasping. She turned and crashed straight through the booth’s sliding door. With the noise screen broken, the screams on the other side jumped in volume.
I grabbed Vamp by the arm and helped him up.
“We’ve got to go, now,” I said. “Is there a back way?”
He nodded.
“Come on,” he said. “Follow me. Nix, help Shuang.”
We stepped through the wreckage of the door and I saw Qian pulling herself free from the smashed door across from ours where she’d barreled through. The club had flown into complete chaos as everyone tried to get out at once. As we struggled to fight our way through the current, Qian stood and turned toward us. The clubbers piled up behind her, building until one of them got impatient and shoved her. Without turning around, she threw back one shoulder and blood sprayed from the guy’s broken nose as he went down.
“Come on!” I said, pulling at Vamp’s shirt. I ducked as something whooshed over my head and crashed into the wall next to me. People swarmed in behind us, running for the exits and cutting Qian off from us. In the bar area, something crashed but I couldn’t see what had caused the commotion. It sounded like it had been close but outside people surged every which way, scrambling for the exits.
“This is a security lockdown,” a voice boomed over an amplifier. “Everyone return to your seats and await further instructions. Do not attempt to leave the premises.”
We followed a line of sweaty people through the blanketing fuzz of bass and the electronic crowing that wailed above it to the bar area, which sat on a raised platform. We clambered up the set of stairs, and I looked over the rail to a sea of silhouetted arms waving and pumping in the air while people shouted. Men in black ponchos and helmets herded the crowd back, keeping their rifles pointed toward the ceiling for the moment.
Qian tried to plow through the crowd toward us. As she passed a pair of security men, one of them stepped out to block her. She hit the officer hard enough to knock his helmet off and send him sprawling down onto the ground. The second one unclipped the graviton gun from his belt and took aim.
She had sprinted three paces toward us when the beam washed over her body, causing it to become ten times its original weight. She crashed down onto the floor, and struggled as the officer approached. “Come on,” Vamp said.
He led us past the bar, and shoved open a door there. Someone shouted behind us as we filed through, and before we’d even gotten halfway down the corridor, I saw the shadow of a security officer on the far wall and heard the crackle of a radio.
We scooted through a doorway just as the officer turned the corner, and we raced around the corner to a fire door.
Vamp slammed it open, and an alarm began to sound as we headed out into the plaza. People began pouring out behind us, shoving to be first out the door.
“Sam, Shuang, come on!”
Through the tangle of arms around me, I spotted Qian’s paisley shirt, then heard a scream. Blood splashed against the metal door as something hit it; then an arm severed at the elbow flopped down onto the pavement.
Several shots were fired inside the club, and the crowd surged again, piling up at the door. Someone pitched down onto the ground and the others just trampled over her. Qian spotted me, and started shoving her way toward us.
“Back!” an officer shouted. “Back! Everyone get back against the wall!”
Behind them, the last few people wrestled through the door and it slammed shut behind them.