Superior

Chapter 51

This chapter is kind of gorily described in parts. It's not too bad, though. Just a warning.

Chapter Fifty-One

Delaney

For one long, terrible moment, we did nothing but stare. Even the two guards were transfixed, standing rooted in place with their mouths agape. The man was looking down at his hands as if shocked at what they had done. His partner, Ana, was shaking. And then there was Trai, on his hands and knees at the edge of the platform, the only one to see his sister's death. As the moments fluttered by, an expression of pain overtook his features, swelling into a look of pure anguish that stabbed at my heart, even from thirty feet away.

Seeing him like that, so crushed and vulnerable, made anger flare up inside me. Anger at Leary, at Miracle, at whatever force had possessed Abby to chase after that train...but most of all, anger at the guard who had sent her to certain death.

Before I knew it, I was moving.

The gun, the Merit Z100 that had fallen from Mason's pocket, lay on the ground only a few feet from me. I reached forward and swiped it up. Its dark metal body felt cold in my hands.

AP stands for armor piercing, Leary had said. That means that if one of these bullets so much as grazes across your arm, your skin will be ripped to shreds.

When he had first explained that to us, I had been stricken with terror at the damage those powerful pellets could inflict. But now, staring down the guard that had killed my friend, I prayed to every god in the universe that Leary's warning had been serious.

With trembling fingers that I couldn't seem to still, I lifted the gun, holding it with both hands the way I'd seen it done in action movies. I was lying flat on my stomach, making it difficult to keep steady, but I bit back the ache in my arms and raised the weapon just a little bit higher.

The guard, entranced by his own disbelief, did not notice me inch forward on my stomach, my finger poised on the trigger. He didn't see me angle the gun so that the barrel was level with the side of his head. His position didn't change once as I flicked off the safety, seeing the word "Merit" embossed in the black metal.

I took a deep breath.

Briefly, in the half-second space before my pointer finger squeezed the clasp, I wondered what I was doing with a gun in my hand, about to send a bullet into the head of a stranger. Only an hour before, I had been quaking in fear of the same weapon that had now become my lifeline. Was this really my job to do? I knew myself; I wasn't a violent person.

So why was there a gun in my hand?

I was a heartbeat away from setting the pistol down when I caught sight of Trai, his face crumpled, jumping onto the tracks, with his sister's name tearing out of his throat in a strangled cry. And that decided for me.

Without taking a breath, stopping to think, or giving myself time to doubt my choice, I pulled the trigger.

I fired eight times, emptying the gun of its bullets. Each shot brought me a sense of sick gratification. I felt a smile form on my lips as the weapon jumped in my hands, emitting a series of deafening cracks. A piercing scream reached my ears, stinging and tearing, but I couldn't see the culprit through the haze of smoke that had materialized before me.

When I pulled the trigger for a ninth time and was met with nothing but a faint clicking, I couldn't help a swath of disappointment from falling over me. I wanted to hold on to the satisfaction I felt when the razor sharp bullets sped from their chamber and out into open air. I wanted to feel the burn of smoke in my eyes. I wanted to pull the trigger again and again, emptying every last armor piercing shell into the body of the man that had put that look on Trai's face. I wanted—