Except.
“You heard what she said? What Anna said?”
“Anna Volovodov is seriously mistaken about what is happening here,” Cortez said. “It was a mistake letting her into the project in the first place. I knew I should have asked for Muhammed al Mubi instead.”
“Did you hear what she said?”
“What are you talking about, child?”
“She said if we attack the Ring, it’ll take action against the people on the other side. Against everyone.”
“She can’t know that,” Cortez said. “It’s just the sort of thing the enemy would say to trick us.”
“It wasn’t her,” Clarissa said. “Holden told her.”
“The same James Holden who started a war by ‘telling’ people things?”
Clarissa nodded. He’d started at least one war. He’d destroyed Protogen, and by doing so set up the dominoes that would eventually topple Mao-Kwik and her father. He’d done all of that.
But.
“He didn’t lie. All those other things he did. He never lied once.”
Cortez opened his mouth to reply, his face already in a sneer. Before he could, the gunfire boomed again. She could feel Cortez flinch from it. The air was filling with the smell of spent gunpowder, and the air recyclers were moving into high-particulate mode. She could hear the difference in the fans. Probably no one else on the bridge would have any idea what that meant. It would just be a slightly higher whirring to them. If it was anything.
Cortez ran his fingers through his hair.
“Stay out the way,” he said. “When it’s over, when he’s done this, I can speak with Ashford. Explain that you didn’t mean to undermine him. It was a mistake. He’ll forgive you.”
Clarissa bowed her head. Her mind was a mass of confusion, and the hunger and gunfire weren’t doing anything to help. Jim Holden was out there in the corridor. The man she’d come so far to disgrace and destroy, and now she didn’t want him dead. Her father was back on Earth and she was about to save him and everyone else or possibly destroy them all. She’d killed Ren, and there was nothing she could ever do that would make that right. Not even die for him.
She had been so certain. She’d given so much of herself. She’d given everything, and in the end all she’d felt was empty. And soiled. The money and the time and all of the people she could have been if she hadn’t been worshiping at the altar of her family name had already been sacrificed. Now she had offered her life, except that after speaking to Anna, she wasn’t sure that wouldn’t be an empty sacrifice too.
Her confusion and despair were like a buzzing in her ears and the voice that rose out of it was peculiarly her own: contempt and rage and the one certainty she could hold to.
“Who is Ashford to forgive me for anything?” she said.
Cortez blinked at her, as if seeing her for the first time.
“For that matter,” she said, “who the hell are you?”
She turned and kicked gently for the doorframe, leaving Cortez behind. Ashford and his men were all armed, all waiting for the next round of gunfire. Ashford, stretched out behind his control panel, pistol before him, slammed his palm against the controls.
“Ruiz!” he shouted. His voice was hoarse. How many hours had they been waiting for this apocalypse to come? She could hear the strain in him. “Are we ready to fire? Tell me we’re ready to fire!”
The woman’s voice came, shrill with fear.
“Ready, sir. The grid is back online. The diagnostics are all green. It should work. Please don’t kill me. Please.”
This was it, then. And with an almost physical click, she knew how to fix it, if there was time.
She put her tongue to the roof of her mouth and pressed, swirling in two gentle counterclockwise circles. The extra glands in her body leapt into life as if they’d been waiting for her, and the world went white for a moment. She thought that she might have cried out in the first rush, but when she was back to herself—to better than herself—no one had reacted to her. They were all pointing their guns at the corridor. All drawn to the threat of James Holden the way she had been herself. All except Ashford. He was letting go of his weapon, leaving the pistol to hang in the air while he keyed in the firing instructions. That was how long she had. It wasn’t enough. Even high as a kite on battle drugs, she couldn’t do what needed to be done before Ashford fired the laser.
So he became step one.
She pulled both feet up to the doorframe and pushed out into the open air of the bridge. The air seemed viscous and thick, like water without the buoyancy. A woman ducked out of cover, firing toward Ashford, and Ashford’s people returned fire, muzzles blooming flame that faded away to smoke and then bloomed again. She couldn’t see the bullets, but the paths they made through the air persisted for a fraction of a second. Tunnels of nothing in nothing. She tucked her knees into her chest. She had almost reached Ashford. His finger was moving down, ready to touch the control screen, ready, perhaps, to fire the comm laser. She kicked out as hard as she could.
The sensation of her muscles straining, ligaments and tendons pushed past their maximum working specifications, was a bright pain, but not entirely without joy. Her timing was only a little off. She didn’t hit Ashford in the center of his body, but his shoulder and head. She felt the impact through her whole body, felt her jaw clicking shut from the blow. He slid back through the air away from the control panel, his eyes growing wider. Two of the guards began to swing toward her, but she bent her body against the base of the crash couch and then unfolded, moving away. The guns flashed, one then another, then two together, like watching lightning in a thunderstorm. Bullets flew, and she spun through the air, pulling her arms tight against her to make her spin faster. Rifling herself.
One of the women in the corridor leaned in, spraying gunfire through the room. A bullet caught one of the guards, and Clarissa watched as she moved toward the farthest wall. It was like seeing frames from an old movie. The woman in the corridor, the muzzle of her weapon alive with fire, then Clarissa turned. The guard, unmoved, but blood already splashing out from his neck, the little wave radiating through his skin out from the impact like the ripple of a stone dropped in a pond, then she turned. The guard falling back, blood blooming out of him like a rose blossom. The same would happen to her, she knew. The drugs flowing through her blood, lighting her brain like a seizure, couldn’t change the abilities of her flesh. She couldn’t dodge a bullet if one found her. So instead she hoped that none would and did what needed to be done.