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Mira’s body was nearing its breaking point.
Her hyper-dense muscle fibers strained to clear the pile of concrete and steel blocking the way forwards; her high-capacity lungs itched from holding her breath against the smoke of the napalm behind her.
She knew it was better to feel her insides burning than to experience the real burn of that red-hot gel adhering to her skin.
Genetically engineered though she was, Mira wasn’t able to shift two tons of rubble on her own. It took her being joined by two hands of silvery steel—equally capable yet plainly inhuman—to make it move. The circuits in Rumi’s arms flared with purple light and her joint-servos whined under the strain.
The mangled pile of collapsed ceiling slid a few centimeters only to catch on something a moment later and jolt to a stop.
“Guys, please, I can help!”
Mira and Rumi both spared a moment to glare at Zoey. She stood inside the spherical barrier of hard light that Rumi had erected; with no respirator and no bodily resistance, that energy matrix was the only thing keeping Zoey from asphyxiating in minutes or melting in seconds. The flames licking around Mira’s calves had finally broken through her body armor—the same that Zoey wore—and the burns were starting to ache even through her resistant skin.
“Absolutely not,” Mira spat. “You stay the fuck in there until we get this out of the way.” She paid the price for speaking when she inhaled toxic, incendiary air that singed her lips and burned her throat. So she silently heaved again, pushing sporadically at various angles. Nothing.
“Fu—fine. But you two need to sync up now! Chop chop!”
“Ugh,” Rumi growled, deep and bassy, “I’d chop right through this if I could! But somebody needs my E-MAT right now so—”
“Do you want an apology, babe?”
“I want my sword!” Rumi huffed, shook her head, and widened her stance. “We’re buying you a rebreather after this. No more—”
Zoey crossed her arms and stomped her foot, and was practiced enough in the art to manage a full-on pout even under such dire circumstances. “C’mon, you two need to harmonize! Find your rhythm!”
Mira shared a glance with Rumi. An unheard beat was flickering in the golden light of her black titanium eye. It shone along Rumi’s arms, too, the same tempo pulsing along the Acoustech™ wires etched into her shoulder, bicep, forearm, and fingers, then back—a perfect heartbeat.
Though she’d loathed it at first, Mira had long since accepted the fact that Rumi was easy to follow. Learned to love her for it, even.
“Okay,” Mira grunted through gritted teeth. She lost precious air with every word, but refused to inhale any more fumes; it was better to trust that her cellular oxygen reserves would keep her brain and heart functioning. “Rumi, count us in.”
Rumi closed her eyes and hummed. The tempo of her energy stabilized. She bobbed her head a few times, then chanted, “... two, three, four—”
Mira heaved in time with the whirring of Rumi’s motors. The stone didn’t budge, but she trusted the rhythm religiously: push, wait, push, wait, shifting only on the beat.
Blue and purple light strobed from Rumi’s joints. Slits in her steel biceps vented plasmatic vapor on every downbeat. Forgetting in her effort to keep her lips closed, Mira hissed in exertion, smoke and steam puffing from her taxed lungs.
There was a ballad of pain contained within every measure, but the blockage slowly rocked free and started rolling aside.
“Stop!” Zoey cried. “It’s good!”
Mira sagged, nearly collapsing before Rumi caught her beneath the shoulder and hauled her through the cleared doorway. Mira shrugged Rumi off once she was through.
Help Zoey, not me. I’m fine.
She allowed herself an ugly grimace once she was alone.
Everything hurt. She’d been lucky to avoid direct contact with the mercs’ napalm; her genegineered skin and inhibited pain had helped her weather the flames, but the indirect heat and toxic air had taken their toll. Nothing permanent, though, and she knew she’d recover with an hour of rest—and that she didn’t even have a minute to do so.
Unwilling to take even that short a break, she assessed the room. Dozens of shattered windows were cut into the stone against the far wall of the office space. To her left, the building—ceiling and floor included—was sliced in half by a glowing scar of melted stone.
The steady sound of metal crashing outside, like heavy footfalls, drew Mira to the far windows to investigate. She crept over, mindful to keep her head out of view from outside.
Behind her, Rumi strode into the room with Zoey in her arms. A few of her hair strands—flickering with energy from within—had already been rewired into her energy matrix’s interface port, and she’d recalibrated the field into a cocoon that still protected Zoey from the ovenlike conditions in their wake. The metal of Rumi’s legs glowed red-hot and was surely dangerous to touch… And an armor plate by her shin was melting under a fist-sized globule of manmade magma. If that had gotten on Mira or Zoey, they’d be incapacitated and screaming at best. The only indication that Rumi was aware of the molten adhesive stuck to her was how carefully she set Zoey down.
All three women flinched as the hallway they’d been in just seconds prior suddenly collapsed—the support beams had melted just a little too late to claim them in a concrete coffin.
Praying that the room they were in wouldn’t go down with it, Mira seized the opportunity to peek out at the street. Keeping her back pressed against the thick concrete wall, she peered over her shoulder.
She ducked back on instinct too quickly to truly register what she saw; a beat later, a blast of dust and stone sprayed over her head.
“Mira!” Zoey cried.
“I’m fine, just…” Another impact showered her hair with rubble. Then another. “Shit.”
Mira scuttled back from the window, keeping low and ducking beneath desks and around chairs to meet her partners against the building’s back wall.
"That was dumb," Rumi scolded. As if the look on her face wasn't bad enough, the light from her cybernetic eye really put the glow in glower. Whether in spite of or because of her disapproval, Rumi dropped her humming barrier shield just long enough for Mira to slip inside.
“I had to see what we were up against. Find a way out.”
Rumi scoffed, but Zoey took Mira’s arm and looked up at her with hopeful eyes. “And?”
“I… well…” Mira’s quick glance at dozens upon dozens of soldiers—and the even-more-terrifying D0-K43B1 mech towering nearly to their hideaway on the fourth floor—hadn’t provided many answers.
Zoey’s face fell at Mira’s expression. “Damn.”
“Yeah.”
The air started to shake.
Why’d it have to be a fucking D0-K43B1?
The stationery on the desks around them began to vibrate, then rattle, then bounce. The powerful bass from outside was almost too low for Mira to hear, but she felt its devastating sound building in her chest and grimaced.
Rumi mirrored her expression for a moment, then her eyelid twitched in focus. With nothing but a mental command through the fiber-optic strands of her hair, the spherical barrier transformed into a flat shield shaped like a round-petaled flower. The soundwaves woven into the light glowed brighter, and its hum strengthened.
Mira didn’t mention that its protection would be woefully insufficient. She couldn’t speak her doubts into existence, couldn’t let them be heard when she knew the power held in sound, especially not as Zoey wrapped her arms around theirs and clung tight.
The bass crested, rattling her bones, then—
—wwwwwhhhhhOOOOOOMMMMMMM
Yellow light tore through the room, a wall of heat from floor to ceiling some thirty feet away. It burned the hairs on the back of Mira’s neck as she averted her gaze, and the heat sizzled against her skin as it drew closer and closer, sweeping out an arc where Mira had been spotted a minute prior.
Rumi growled and deepened her stance to brace her shield.
Mira squeezed her eyes shut and gritted her teeth against the painful levels of light and sound.
Zoey tightened her grip. She almost hid her whimper.
When the glow faded and Mira blinked the afterimage off the inside of her eyelids, the window she had peeked from—and the wall it had been set in, and the five windows on each side of it, and the desks and the floor and the ceiling in a cone behind them, had been incinerated. Nothing remained except melted orange stone dripping down the edges of the carved-out ruin.
The other side of the room must have been given the same treatment; the slag there had hardly even begun to cool, and now the smell of ionized brick was sharply renewed. They truly had nowhere to run.
“Damn it…” Mira muttered.
“I know,” Zoey whispered, “I know, Mir, but—”
“No, I meant, DAMN. IT!” Mira ducked around the edge of Rumi’s shield and crawled back to the remaining stretch of windows as quickly as she could manage on her elbows and knees.
Zoey and Rumi screamed her name at the same time.
When Mira reached the street-side wall, she braced her back against it and took out her rifle. “I’m not dying here!” she hissed, firing a glare at her lovers.
Without waiting for a response, Mira yanked back on a latch atop her gun. It slid cleanly through a channel in the steel, pulling apart the tri-split barrel into twisted prongs that coiled around each other like springs. Energy crackled between them.
Mira’s gaze dared her girls to fight back. “If we stay here, we’re fucked.” She cranked a dial at the base of the widened barrel, securing it before adding, “Royally fucked. With a parade and everything.”
Fingernails picking at her weapon's grooves with practiced speed, Mira flipped up a half dozen thin tines on each side. The quiet, stable resonance within its body started to warble.
Zoey started to step forward, but Rumi stopped her with a hand against her shoulder. “Mira, what are you—”
“Shh.”
The hum of Mira’s gun grew louder, collapsing into dissonance with its tuning forks out of alignment. She twisted them about, racing at a rhythm born of desperation, and soon found a new tone within the chaos. A couple more deft adjustments honed the sound until a far deeper harmony thrummed through the steel against her palms.
The metal began to warm.
Rumi appeared beside her—Mira had been in a trance, too distracted to see her approach. “Mira—”
“Shh!” Mira closed her eyes and listened to the stirring tool in her hand. She worked at it more, guiding its purr to a growl.
“Don’t shush her!” Zoey snapped, poking Mira’s shoulder. Mira bit back a retort. “Mir, we don’t want to die here either. Let us help.”
A few more button presses and the butt of her rifle extended into a cylindrical chamber with a sharp hiss. The balance of energy tilted as the harmonic plasma within filled the extra space, building a roiling momentum with a throaty rumble.
“If you can draw their fire…” Dials flew beneath Mira’s fingers. Letting the plasma accumulate in the exhaust vaporizers was dangerous, but she did it anyway. “... It’ll give me more time to aim.” Sparking energy started to spill from the rifle's vents—pure and violent plasma in the form of white-hot smoke. She flipped their seals shut a heartbeat before the flow went critical. “I can’t really afford to miss.”
A hand—cold steel, yet still a warm comfort—squeezed Mira’s shoulder. “We can do that,” Rumi assured her. She scrambled away, ducked beneath the window-line to avoid being made exactly one head shorter.
Before dashing off to join Rumi’s distraction, Zoey kissed Mira’s cheek and whispered, “Like you ever miss.”
Mira’s focus was sneakily stolen by her partners—not-so-subtly substituted with a smile and a fond gaze—until a painful zap pulled her gaze back down. A hairline crack in one of the resonance cells promised her an agonizing death if it fractured fully. She swore under her breath, recalibrated the balance, and swore once more—in relief—as the sparking pressure rebalanced within the cells. The faint off-key whistle it had emitted steadied into a low, powerful whine that crescendoed through every beat.
Another once-over told her there was nothing more to adjust.
That didn’t mean she was ready, though.
Her gaze lingered on her rifle, heartbeat synced with the rapid pace of the thrumming energy barely contained by gunmetal and a prayer. Between its three central magnetized prongs floated a growing sphere of blue-white plasma that popped and fluctuated at a steady rhythm—distilled energy dancing to her tune. Static crackled into Mira’s fingers and plucked at the cords of her muscles. She fought against each involuntary twitch towards the trigger.
She wasn’t ready. Not yet.
“Any second…”
She winced as a barrage of bright flashes and discordant cracks split the air a few meters to her left. Rumi’s energy shield ate the brunt of a barrage while the rest of the incoming shots bit into the sides of the window they peered from. Pistols wedged around Rumi’s barrier, Zoey returned fire, but her light bolts were ill-suited to the foes below. Their shrill blasts pinged and sizzled off armor and barriers rather than finding purchase.
The impatient whine of Mira’s gun was drowned out by the percussive cacophony of the skirmish, but the baritone resonance in its belly still thrummed through her arms.
She and her rifle were wholly in sync—two predators preparing to pounce.
Just a little more…
Mira’s weapon flared, straining against her grip, overeager for their prey. A tiny spark sputtered out of its jaws and landed on her arm, the superheated plasma melting through her armored sleeve to fry her nerve endings. It hurt like hellfire and she knew she’d need a dermagraft to hide the scar… but she held the bucking weapon firm.
You can do it, I know you can.
The rifle hissed its impatience.
The seals began to buckle.
Mira was fluent in a dozen languages. Conversational in two dozen more. But she knew the one her rifle spoke like she’d been born to it—and while the beast’s body language was ferocious, its unstable whine told a different story.
A whistling harmony warbled from her gun’s overfull cells, tonally rich but shaking with an erratic cadence. To slay their quarry it needed structure. It needed to grasp a rhythm from the aether.
Perhaps it was pure serendipity—perhaps a dozen do-or-die jobs had finally made them work as one. Whatever the reason, Mira didn’t have to say a word. One wide-eyed look to her left was all it took: Zoey thumbed her pistols’ selector switches and unleashed three melodious bursts that rang through the shattered hall. RA-ta-ta— RA-ta-ta— RA-ta-ta— The air quivered with each perfectly timed triplet, then on the fourth beat Rumi’s shield shattered with a cymbalic crash.
Mira’s gun swallowed the rhythm and bared its pulsing fangs.
It didn’t matter if Mira was ready. She had to be.
She made sure to step in time as she rose to one knee, shouldered the drooling rifle, and lined up the shot.
The beast in her arms mirrored the buzz of anticipation in Mira’s chest, practically keening in her ear, unmatched energy straining beneath the surface and tingling against Mira’s cheek as she pressed it to the stock.
Mira inhaled on the first beat.
On the second, set her sights.
She grasped the trigger with the third.
And then she set her gun alight.
The sound ringing in her ears was not a gunshot, not a crack of lightning, but a bestial roar that rattled her bones as the violent miracle of magnetohydroacoustics was made manifest once more.
The backblast from her overcharged cannon scorched her sleeves and set a lock of her hair on fire.
Mira didn’t even blink—all that mattered was seeing her prey fall.
The blast of plasma ripped free from its cage, bolted to its target, and struck the mech center-mass. It tore through the armor with a crackling, triumphant howl.
The blur of energy dug its claws deep into the machine’s chest, spraying white energy and oily mechblood through the air.
Then it exploded.
The mech was rent to shreds as its own reactor detonated. Bright threads of energy—the useless remnants of a failed containment—lashed deep grooves into the ground as a glowing shockwave ripped through the air.
Mira ducked away from the shrapnel soaring towards their windows; she could only imagine how the infantry outside fared. The building shook, rubble rained from the ceiling, and searing harmonic energy shone through the windows like a vengeful supernova.
When her vision returned, Mira risked a peek over the window ledge. The vast majority of the street was blackened in concentric rings. Scattered soldiers lay groaning in patches of unmelted ground—areas where fragmented barriers had mitigated the blast. They were the lucky ones; there was nothing left of their comrades.
Mira cursed to herself. She’d wanted to get all of them—and the survivors were already struggling to their feet and picking up their weapons. Her own rifle had a grinning split along its right side that puffed hot vapor like a hound panting for breath.
Zoey and Rumi didn’t miss a beat. They flipped out the window, dropped to the street, and turned the desperate firefight into a chaotic dance on their own terms.
Mira just groaned and slumped against the wall. She took a deep breath and inhaled the smells of success and smoke. Fresh smoke…Mira's hair was still smoldering. She slapped out the flame, then nursed her burned arms while she listened to the discordant symphony outside. A disbelieving guffaw burst from her chest before fading to a tired chuckle of relief.
Her girls could handle a dozen dazed mercs without her.
At least she’d stolen them a chance.