I didn’t bother finishing my statement. I just took off in a flat charge toward the nearest window and called Wolfe to the front of my mind as I leapt through it. No surprise, it hurt a lot. Glass doesn’t shatter in full windows like it does in cars or in movies. That’s called safety glass and it turns into little pebbles that don’t tend to do much harm.
This glass shattered into razor sharp slivers, and I felt my clothes and skin suffer dozens of cuts of varying depths as I broke through.
I ignored every single one of them for about two seconds while I felt Wolfe go to work, then I pulled Gavrikov to front of my mind as well and switched off the Earth’s gravity.
I shot into the sky like I had a rocket motor latched to my feet, wind rushing into my face. I threw a hand forward like I was Superman … err … Superwoman? Whatever. I threw a hand forward as I flew and saw lines of blood running off my newly knitted flesh.
“What the f—” I heard Harper in my ear. “Did she just jump out the window?”
“She did,” I said, enjoying the feel of the wind in my face. I surged east, the sky above and the ground blurring past below. “I’m about two minutes out from the site.” I followed the freeway east and saw the white line of 494’s loop ahead just a few miles. I didn’t know exactly how fast I was going, but it had to be in the hundreds of miles per hour. The rush of the wind was probably not helping Harper hear me, I figured.
“Are you in a wind tunnel?” Harper’s voice came back. She sounded cautious. “There’s no way your ETA is two minutes.”
“Status report, MARS SIX,” I said.
That seemed to snap Harper out of her state of confusion. “Right,” she said with crisp professionalism. “The town car is burning, but we have three friendlies on the ground and moving. Tangos are engaging with them, I’m picking up a lot of heat discharge from one of them, like they have a flamethrower or something, I’ve never seen anything like it—”
“Understood,” I said.
“I am designating you MARS SIX-ACTUAL,” Harper said calmly. More calmly than I would have been if I’d been in her situation.
“Neat,” I said. “Consider me designated the Goddess of War.”
There was a moment’s pause, and I figured Harper’s brain was crunching away on the other end of the line, trying to come up with an explanation for everything she was experiencing right now. I knew she’d given up when I heard her reply. “Copy that, MARS SIX-ACTUAL.”
I streaked through the air, passing the interstate and coming down lower as I got closer to St. Louis Park. I tried to match my geography with the overhead imagery I’d seen from the drone and locked on to Minnesota Highway 7. I skirted toward it and slowed slightly, looking for the turn. My eyes found it a mile ahead and I traced it back to the grid-like latticework of roads. A lone warehouse stood with vacant lots for several blocks on one side, and I knew I’d found it. Even before I saw the flaming car just down the street.
“MARS SIX-ACTUAL …” Harper’s voice came into my earpiece. “Is that you flying …?”
“Like a bird, like a plane,” I said. “Janus, if you can hear me …” I paused. “Brace yourself.”
It was a total furball on the ground, someone scrambling around, someone else—one of my people, I assumed—firing a gun, and someone else throwing fireballs into the air like they were Aleksandr Gavrikov, Jr. Except this one was female. It very much looked like a battle, like a frigging war on a city street, completely with flames and black smoke churning skyward. I couldn’t pick out which of the people in front of me were enemies with full certainty, but I caught a glimpse of a guy hanging back from the others, closer to the warehouse than the fight, and I realized he was surveying the scene. And not one of mine.
“Incoming,” I muttered and arced sharply downward. I put my feet out and dropped, letting my speed carry me along with the power of gravity. The wind blurred my eyes, and I saw the ground rush up at me in a way that might have scared me yesterday.
I landed feet first on the top of the Century agent’s head and slammed him into the ground like I was a sledgehammer and he was a watermelon. His skull exploded when it hit, a cascade of red spraying in a ten-foot cone across the cracked and ragged pavement. It was icky on my nice boots.
And it made a noise, too. Like a SPLAT.
Four heads wheeled to look at me, and the gunfire stopped for a moment as the little battlefield caught its collective breath.
I looked at each of them in turns over the next few seconds, caught the stunned looks on their faces as I stood there, one of their people already dead at—or, actually, under—my feet.