Page 60 of Salt Kiss
So it’s not like I haven’t seen him today.
I’m giving our corner of the hall another scan—easily catching the uniformed silhouettes of the extra guards we hired, stationary forms against a backdrop of dancing hedonism—when the air itself splits.
A snap, loud and unmistakable. The calling card of lead tearing through time and space.
A gunshot.
It’s funny how little changes after a war, how instinctive it still is to move, to run, to shield someone with my body. The room is screaming, now a crush of bodies, and I have Mark, my hand fisted in the shoulder of his tuxedo jacket to haul him to safety, and my thoughts are clearer than ever, my mind alert, processing the shouted bits of information coming in through my earpiece.
Can’t find the shooter—
Nat, evacuate the playrooms—
Goran, stay at the cameras; Roz will take Isaac and Emily and clear the bar and roof—
And then a noise I’ve never heard before, a shrill alarm ringing through the earpiece. Mark goes stiff as I’m trying to move him to the doors, and I settle for covering as much of his body with my own as I can.
“Sir, we need to leave!” I shout over the tumult.
“That’s the alarm for the basement,” Mark says tightly.
“Mr. Trevena, we have a problem,” comes Goran’s voice over the earpiece. “I can see two men in the basement trying to get into the server room.”
Mark’s fingers go to his ear. “I need someone there, Goran,” he says, but I already know it’s hopeless—every single staff member we have is trying to evacuate a thousand people from the hall, playrooms, bar, and every other corner of the club.
“Sir, I can’t spare anyone until the guests are safe,” Goran says.
Mark closes his eyes a moment. People are rushing behind us, bumping and elbowing, and my back prickles with awareness that the shooter is still in here. “The guests come first,” he agrees. But then he opens his eyes and looks at me.
“No,” I say instinctively.
“You need to,” he says. “You’re the only one we can spare. Everyone else is keeping my guests safe.”
“I’m keepingyousafe.”
“I’ll be fine,” he says impatiently. “This is a feint to distract from what they really want, which is getting into the server room. And if they do get in there, it’s possible many,manypeople will die with the information they find, and that blood will be onour hands.”
I don’t like that any more than he does, but also I can’t leave him here, unprotected; the very thought fills my mind with a bright, awful static, and for a second, I see McKenzie’s vacant eyes, Sims’s pulpy neck.
“Sir,” I try again, but Mark is past impatience now. He shakes off my hold on his tuxedo jacket with strength that surprises me, his eyes flashing.
“Do as I say.” His words crack through the air like more bullets. “Or I will go and fucking do it myself.”
He means it. I see in his carved, tense features that he means it.
With a bitten-off growl of frustration and a feeling of wrongness so strong that I cantasteit, I go, wheeling around and shoving through the crowd to the elevator banks closest to the backstage area. This is a horrible fucking idea, and I’m going to tell Mark exactly that when I get back, and if something happens to him while I’m down there, then it serves him fucking right—
“I can hear your thoughts from back here,” Mark says through my earpiece. “Knock it off.”
“I’m supposed to be protecting you. Myjobis protecting you.”
“There’s enough security here tonight to declare Lyonesse a sovereign nation. And I’m also a combat veteran, Tristan, so I promise I have better instincts than standing still while someone’s shooting at me.”
I don’t answer, at least not out loud, instead venting my irritation in an unending litany of silent swear words and curses, finally breaking free of the crowd and climbing up the stage as I pull my firearm from my holster. I didn’t draw it earlier because I wasn’t going to return fire in a room full of people, but in the basement, there won’t be guests to worry about. I won’t have any compunctions about leveling the playing field.
The elevator takes its sweet time coming up, and then even longer to shut its doors and get moving again. The whole time I listen to the chaos happening elsewhere in the club, the evacuations, the head counts. They still can’t find the shooter.
I did all my combat in body armor and MCEPs, but you’d think that I’d only ever fought naked like an ancient Celt for how fucking stifling my suit jacket feels right now. I quickly strip the jacket off and drape it over my arm like I’m a gentleman about to walk into a nice restaurant.
