She crossed the gap to Duarte in an instant, sliding past him and over the webbing on the left side, where the girl had damaged it enough to leave a hole. One arm around his throat, bracing her legs around his waist. The heat of his body was almost painful, but she fit herself into place. From here, she could use the strength of her whole body, pulling through her back and twisting at the core, against the little vertebral joints in Duarte’s neck. The girl screaming somewhere. Holden shouted something. Tanaka pulled, twisted. Duarte’s neck snapped like a gunshot. She felt it as much as heard it. In gravity, his head would have lolled to the side, the weight of his skull drawing it down. Here, it might almost not have happened.
The sentinels shuddered, and Holden shouted again. Something stung her arm like a wasp. A strand of the black filament dug into her skin. A half sphere of deep-red blood was spreading out where it had bitten; she swatted it away, and Holden shouted again. This time, she understood the words.
He’s not dead.
Between her still-braced legs, Duarte shifted. The noise in her brain ramped up to a scream. Instincts warred in her: push away and evade, or commit to the attack. She leaned into the attack.
Holden was on the float, turning slowly on all three axes, with the girl in his arms, her head curled into his neck to hide her eyes. His skin was mottled and bright and twisted with effort. The sentinels twitched, jumping toward her and then falling back. Tools with two masters, bouncing between conflicting commands. Her last battle, and she was locking shields with James fucking Holden.
Tanaka punched Duarte twice in the ribs. The second time, she felt the bones go. Another sting. Another thread, biting at her leg this time. She flicked it away. The girl had been trying to pull her daddy free from the web, and even her amateur thrashing had done some damage. Tanaka didn’t know what the relationship was between Duarte and the threads, but she could recognize a weak point. It wasn’t proper shuto-uchi, but she could improvise. She stayed braced with her legs and the arm around Duarte’s broken neck, and brought the knife-edge of her hand in where the threads met his body. With every hit, a few more ripped free. Drops of black fluid stippled the free air, and she didn’t know if they were coming from Duarte or the filament.
Duarte writhed against her, and his pain made her lock down harder. The inside of her thighs was burning like he’d poured acid on her, but the pain was only a message. She didn’t have to care. She kept chopping away at the threads. By the time his side was free, his arms had started flapping back at her, punching her face and the side of her head. The shriek in her mind was constant now.
When she went to shift her position so she could attack the connection on Duarte’s other side, the skin on her arm tore. Tiny extrusions were coming out of Duarte’s throat, thick and wet as slugs. They’d burrowed through her sleeve and penetrated the flesh of her arm. When she tried to pull her legs free, she couldn’t.
“Oh, fuck you,” she said. Strategy vanished, and she beat her fist into Duarte’s side, crushing bones with every strike. The thing that had been the leader of all humanity squealed in pain, and she took joy in the sound. Something pressed into her belly, squirming its way into her like a snake. She stiffened her fingers and pressed hard into the softness where Duarte’s rib cage ended. His flesh ripped under the pressure. “Not as much fun when it’s happening to you, is it, you fuck,” Tanaka said. “Don’t like it as much when it’s happening to you.”
Ink-black blood slickened her hand and stung the quick under her fingernails. Her fingertips pushed through a tough, resistant layer of muscle, and her hand was inside him. The snake thing in her gut whipped and writhed. The pain of it was transcendent. She pushed into him, fitting up to her wrist, pulling him in close against her. Something in his chest fluttered against her like a sparrow. She grabbed it, crushed it, and forced her way deeper.
Something happened, and everything went white. She lost herself, if just for a few seconds. When she came to, her mind was clear. It was her own for the first time since the Preiss came back from going dutchman. She coughed, and tasted blood.
The threads that were still sewn into the mess that was her body and his released, floating in the sweltering, furnace-hot air like smoke from hell. Tanaka’s breath was shallow, and when she tried to force herself to breathe deeply, she couldn’t. She pried her legs free of Duarte’s corpse, and scoops of missing flesh the size of golf balls filled with her blood. When she tried to push him away, the snake thing snapped off, still stuck in her gut.
Duarte floated, rotating slowly. His empty eyes swept past her. For almost four decades, she had been an officer of the Laconian Empire, and she’d been good at it. For longer than that, she’d been herself.
Off to her left, Holden and the girl were still. A cloud of sentinels around them had turned to statues. Holden’s eyes found hers. There was still enough humanity in him that she could see horror and disgust in his face. She wished she had a sidearm, so she could have put a round through both of them and watched them bleed out with her. She reached out her arm, index finger pointing forward, thumb raised, and sighted in on Holden’s face.
“Bang, motherfucker,” she said.
The last thing she felt was rage that he didn’t die.
Chapter Forty-Seven: Jim
Don’t look,” Jim said. “Don’t look, kid. I’ve got you. Don’t look.”
Teresa kept her head against him, her eyes down. Even with his numbed arms, he could feel her hyperventilating. Her father’s body, not just mutilated but also transformed, floated slowly away, a sheet of dark liquid clinging to it from surface tension. Tanaka, covered by more traditional blood, was on the drift too. The two bodies separated slowly.
He tried to imagine what it would have been like for him, seeing Mother Elise or Father Caesar or any of his parents die that way. He tried to picture Naomi or Alex where Duarte was. He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t imagine being sixteen years old and watching his father, the center of his life and reality, who had been taken from him and then teasingly almost returned, die that badly.
“It’s going to be okay,” he whispered to her as she sobbed and wailed. “It’s all right.”
Miller swept off his hat and wiped metaphorical sweat off his unreal brow. He looked exhausted.
“Is he gone?” Jim asked.
Miller nodded. “Yeah, we’re the only ones here now. Which is good. I was switching those goons off a hundred times a second, and he kept setting them back on ‘murder everything.’”
Teresa raised her balled fists to her eyes. Miller shook his head. “I always hate this part. The bodies and the blood are gross sometimes, but the ones who are left holding the bag? Especially kids. I hate that part.”
“What do I do?”
“Normally, I handed them a stuffed bear and called in the social worker. I don’t know. How do you tell someone that it’s just the way the game plays, and this time their number came up?”
Jim rested his chin on the top of her head. “It’s going to be all right.”
“Or lie to them,” Miller said. “That works too. But there is a question we need to answer. I’m not sure how we get her out of here safe.”
“We can clear a path, can’t we? If Duarte’s not reconfiguring the station, can’t we do it?”