Crack in the Kill Code (AmpCore #2)

60 - Ding, Ding, Ding: Tell Them What They Won

"You okay?"

"What do ... you think?" Arrow rasped. They opened their eyes and looked at his face. It was probably most frightened they'd ever seen him. When he met their gaze, he quickly gathered himself, his cocksure facade reasserting itself.

"You've had worse."

"Oh, you think so?" They broke off; grimaced. "Shit... don't make me laugh."

"Where's Piper?"

"I..." They tried to think back to what had happened, peering through the pain to try and grab a reliable memory. Their implants felt sore, biting into their bones, connections misfiring. They remembered the violent, snapping pain in their wrist, and the feeling of certain death, before Piper had offered herself up.

Did that happen? Arrow remembered flying through the air and... and not much else.

"I think he took her."

"He?"

"The leader," they croaked. "It was a trap. Piper. He wanted Piper. I just... just got in the way."

"Where did they take her?"

Arrow just shook their head.

"Did they say why?"

A shrug. "Looks like everyone... thinks Piper is all kinds of special," they rasped.

Toran's face was tight with frustration. Not enough information. Not a good report. But he kept a lid on it, forcing an uncomfortable smile onto his face and nodding.

"Let's get you out of here. I've got teams sweeping this tunnel in both directions. We'll find her."

Arrow wasn't about to argue. One of the accompanying soldiers wrapped a hasty field-splint into place around the injured arm, and shot a heavy dose of painkillers into the side of their neck. Some of the agony receded, enough that they could struggle upright with a few helping hands.

Their senses sharpened a little, enough to pick out the swarm of at least twenty corporate security troopers and a handful of loyalist AmpCore practitioners moving through the tunnel around them, scanning the wreckage, examining the dead codewraiths and cyborgs; checking the mutilated bodies of their comrades for any sign of life.

As they staggered along with Toran supporting them, Arrow felt something else in the darkness, a faint echo in the ravaged datastreams around them. It was a scattered sensation out in front of them, little pinpricks of light in the darkness.

Then memory surged back. The shatter; the fiery shards flying in all directions.

Piper's amplifier.

"Wait," Arrow murmured weakly, shrugging Toran's hand away.

"Arrow-,"

"Wait." They found more strength to repeat it. Deep breath. In out. Look. Feel. They felt the slivers of precious metal long before they saw them. The mangled, eviscerated remnants of Piper's amplifier. The pain was too much for Arrow to risk using their wand to gather them, so they slowly and carefully sank down onto their knees, their uninjured hand outstretched, just groping into the world for sensations.

"What are you doing?" Toran asked, his voice tight with anxiety. "You need to get to an AIP."

Arrow ignored him, feeling around until they found what they were looking for. It took a minute in their current state, but they managed to find the shards – the shattered pieces of Piper's amplifier. It was heart-wrenching to feel it, a thing of beauty like that, destroyed in such barbaric fashion.