Free The Seek by Ros Baxter Page B

her. Kyn knew the vibro would mask the lethal intent she laced the words with, but she couldn’t risk removing it. Voice was an identifier, that’s why they masked it as well as faces in this place.
    All three men laughed as one. But the rat was closest to her, and his laugh was the creakiest and dirtiest of all, as if the interruption was just adding to his enjoyment of the moment. The dark man finished laughing first and spoke. ‘She does wanna play!’ He clapped his hands.
    The rat, still standing slightly behind Kyn, made to grab her arms, but she stepped neatly away from him. ‘I don’t want to hurt you,’ she said. Actually, it wasn’t true. She wanted to tear them apart. She wanted to hurt them, and break them, and then truss them up on the bloody frame that Kyn was hanging from.
    But she knew that to do so would be to reveal herself. Her fight was her signature, and these three men would definitely know that no other woman on this station could give them the fight that she would if they crossed her.
    She went on. ‘But I will. Your only choice right now is to untie her, move to the wall’ — She gestured to the left hand side of the room — ‘and get the fuck out of my way while I take her out of here.’
    The big one, the ex-Avenger, smiled as he flicked open a prod and unleashed its blue flame, holding it up like a prize. ‘Come on then, darlin’,’ he said, licking his lips like he had as he’d watched Mirren dancing, back at the club.
    Fuck. Kyn was out of options.
    Before the big man registered her movement, she streaked forward, kicked the prod out of his grasp and drove the flat of her hand against the bridge of his nose, hard. He stumbled backwards and Kyn felt the other two bodies coming for her. She spun into a high kick that took the rat down and destabilised the dark one. The big one lunged towards her and she picked up the prod from where it had clattered beside her feet and charged him, driving it into his right eye and enjoying the frisson she felt as she smelled burning hair and tissue. He screamed and fell back behind the frame. As Kyn clocked that he was down and staying down, she caught Mirren’s eye. The girl’s face had lightened, and her eyes were actively following the action. She looked younger, suddenly — scared but hopeful at the same time. And, Kyn was sure, excited by the fight. Kyn noticed her fingers twitching in their binds.
    Kyn took it all in for only a second before she swept around low, snaking the prod against the legs of both the remaining two men. They squealed as the thing burned their flesh, putting them momentarily off guard. Then Kyn sprang up, and landed gracefully on the shoulders of the rat, driving him to the floor with her weight and twisting his neck brutally once he was down, millimetres from finishing him. His fingers twitched in the neck lock. She wanted to. She very badly wanted to snap this pointless neck. She willed herself not to. It would only make cleaning this mess up afterwards that much harder. Instead she compressed a point near his temple, very hard, and felt him grow slack in her arms.
    Meanwhile, the dark man’s hands descended on her neck, clawing at her and ripping her mask from her face. His moves were so amateur she was sure this one was never an Avenger. She twisted one finger away from her skin, and used it to propel the man up and the down onto his knees before she broke it cleanly with an audible snap.
    Then she stood, robbed of the usual rush of battle because of their smallness and dirtiness. As the two men with the worst injuries howled, and the other slept, she addressed them very calmly. ‘I’m taking her. Try to stop me and I’ll kill you all.’
    ‘You.’ The ex-Avenger spat the word at her, and his tattooed face and ruined eye lent him the aspect of some mythical creature. The part of Kyn that would always be an eleven-year-old girl, watching the end of the world, quailed. But the Avenger in her didn’t. The