Awake

Chapter Forty-Five - The Elite Guard

They reached a crossroads several hundred metres from the anti-chamber of the office. Natalia held up her hand for them to halt. They waited. In the back of her mind, Kaede was counting.

Five...four...three...two...one...

Three figures, small and unarmed, came sprinting down the corridor, flying through the elite guard and vanishing out of sight. Behind them, an explosion rocked the world. Kaede fought not to choke as the ash and dust swirled up into her face, stinging her eyes and blinding her. It tasted foul and burning in her mouth.

"Forward!" Natalia ordered. "Go!"

Kaede broke into a run, long strides, keeping pace with the people around her. They rounded the corner, burst into the anti-chamber, and flew through the chaos of the clearing smoke and stinging air. Dust was raining down, sparks and shards of metal, bits of rubble. The walls were black. The air was hazy. From behind the remains of the door, Kaede heard panicked shouting.

She didn't hesitate. In one stride, she bounded over the wreckage of the melted door and the pitiful barricade of furniture beyond, landing on the charred floor of Field-Marshal Bone's office. Without a second thought, she opened fire. Someone screamed, and the fight began in earnest.

Kaede rolled behind a desk and sat crouched, firing out into the room. It was impossible to see from the leftovers of the explosion. She could make out the shadowy shapes of figures but knowing whether they were friends or enemies was a game of chance. She fired with caution, and accuracy.

  The air was thick with bullets, pelting from all sides, pummelling her with the proximity of their passage. The smoke was clearing now, clearing and revealing the chaos of the room left behind. Bodies danced and spun, ducking and dodging and weaving. Some sheltered behind splintered furniture. Others took their chances in the open, advancing and advancing only to be cut down as though some puppet-master had severed their strings.

Kaede sprang out from her hiding place and sprinted across the room, firing into a man's back. He went down, alive but paralysed as her bullet severed his spinal cord. His scream was inaudible over the drumming of bullets, the roaring in her ears, the ringing airlessness of the room.

  She nearly tripped over a body but there wasn't time to see whose it was. She took a woman down, trapping her in with a hail of gunfire, ripping holes in her arms and shoulders until she was helpless. A bullet whistled past Kaede's neck, streaking blood down her throat, just scratching her skin. She whirled, answering it with shots of her own.

It was a brief and bloody madness. There was no time to think. There was no time to make judgements. Dim light, smoky air, breathlessness, exhaustion, a fear that went beyond panic and straight through into brutality. Kaede was master of it all, the merest inch from death.

She lost her weapons in the melee, blown straight from her fingers, forcing her to retreat to a place of safety. From behind the shattered remains of a cabinet, she tried to judge whether she could risk a foray out into the battleground to seize a gun from the hands of a corpse, but even as she thought this, Natalia's order came.

"Hold! Soldiers, hold fire!"

In a few stumbling seconds, a semblance of calm returned to the scene that, only moments before, would not have looked out of place in hell. Kaede took a deep breath, letting her lungs expand for the first time since this began, hitting the sides of her head to clear the ringing from her ears.

"Hold," Natalia repeated, quietly.

The smoke was clearing at last and Kaede could take in the room in all its glory. There were three bodies, two of them her own soldiers. Everyone else was alive but scarcely anyone had escaped injury. The room had an unreal atmosphere to it, as though none of this could really be happening, as if it were some poorly-made fake.

"Field-Marshal." Natalia saluted. "Sir."

Field-Marshal Bone, weapon-less and nursing a wounded calf, looked up at her with a disinterested expression. Natalia held her gaze for a moment and it seemed like they were talking with their eyes.

  Kaede's eyes lighted on something behind Natalia. Her muscles worked before her brain. She flung herself out of her hiding place, launching herself across the room, just as the man rising up behind Natalia brought his knife across to slit her throat.

  Natalia twisted aside at the last second and the blade bit deep into her upper arm. The young commander let out a little gasp of pain as the man wrenched the knife out and she spun, reaching for her belt, ready to deflect his second attempt. But he never got a chance to try.

  Kaede launched herself between the two, grabbing the man's wrists, pushing him away. He slashed out at her, flipping her off her feet, and for a moment the two of them were entangled, rolling, arms locked, faces close together, scrabbling to reach the knife that had flown out of his fingers.

"No!" Natalia yelled. "Don't fire!"

Kaede gritted her teeth and pressed the man down, pinning him beneath her. She leant across him to grab the knife but he reached up and took her ear in his teeth, ripping at it, tearing the flesh, swinging over and crushing her beneath him.

His fumbling hands found the knife and he brought it round to kill her but Kaede's hands were that, grabbing at him, tearing the skin of his knuckles, pressing her thumbs between his bones until, with a shout, he let the knife go. With a grunt of satisfaction, Kaede caught it and thrust up between his ribs. One heartbeat, two, and he was dead.

She climbed to her feet, glaring at Natalia.

"A little help," she gasped out, "might have been nice."

Natalia swallowed hard. "We couldn't shoot. We would have killed you. Kaede..."

"What?" Kaede asked. "Commander, are you alright?"

But all at once, Kaede became aware of throbbing pain in her hand and the heat of blood spilling down her wrist and dripping onto the floor. She looked down and the pain intensified to a fire. The little and ring fingers on her left hand had been sliced clean away, leaving scarcely a stump behind.

"He must have caught me," she murmured, amazed, "while I was trying to take the knife from him..."

Her severed fingers lay on the tiles like bloody quotation marks. Suddenly, the world felt far away, distant and numbing. Kaede stared down at her hand, waved her fingers vaguely through the newly-created space and laughed.

  Natalia was saying something but Kaede couldn't hear her. The world tilted sideways slightly and somehow, suddenly, her face was lying against the tiles.

"I'm alright," she mumbled. "I'm alright."

Faces swam in and out of focus. It seemed far too much effort to remain looking at them. Kaede closed her eyes and disappeared.