Free Immortal Twilight by James Axler

voice by sound alone. His finger stroked the trigger, sending a triple burst across the gloomy room, kicking up flash-sparks as they struck the walls and floor. But his target was gone, hurrying across the room with the swoop of a long dress.
    It was getting messy, Kane knew. There was too much risk now, and damaging the tech wasn’t an option. He had to finish this—fast.
    Kane ran, leaping over the outcropping of the nearest dreamer’s crib, his blaster stretched out before him, searching for a target in the darkness.
    Crack!
    Something struck Kane from the left, slamming against his side with the force of a charging bull. Despite himself, he felt his legs give and suddenly he was crashing to the floor. Kane struck the floor with a crunch, his jaws clacking shut as his lower jaw smacked against stone.
    He had written off the woman too easily. She was scared, but she’d managed to stop shaking long enough to wing him.
    For a moment he saw the room spin, the dull, bluish light making it seem like the ocean, as if he had been dumped at sea. Kane’s mind reeled, trying to cling to consciousness. His eyelids wouldn’t stay open.
    “Look, do you see?” The woman’s voice was close, tremulous with adrenaline. “His blaster. He’s a magistrate.”
    Something struck Kane hard in the side of his ribs; it felt like the toe of a shoe and it was directed with savage expertise.
    “That’s not a mag.” This time it was a man’s voice. “They don’t come to this part of Hope.”
    The woman spoke again. “But he’s using a Sin Eater. I recognize it.” She sounded young.
    “Well,” the man replied, “we’ll find out soon enough. Go see to Deren, Alana, while I figure out what we’re going to do with our visitor here.”
    Kane felt the foot again as it kicked him in the side, in the exact same spot as before. Then something heavy crashed against his skull and after that he didn’t know what.

Chapter 5
    Accelerator pressed to the Turbo’s floor, Brigid Baptiste held the wheel locked as far as it could turn even as the first of the Deathbird’s laser beams sliced through the street in a bloodred streak. Light and nippy though the car was, the Turbo had a heavy engine. Brigid was counting on that—once it began to roll, it would keep going.
    Another crimson beam of energy cut the air before her, blasting just six inches in front of the windshield and casting the whole interior of the car in a bloody red glow. She clung on for dear life as the vehicle slammed against the crash barrier and flipped, leaving the road entirely as it twirled through the air. Amid the shrieks of lasers and the rat-a-tat of the conventional guns, the barrier strike seemed soundless.
    Then she was upside down with the car still flipping, its heavy engine drawing it slowly along its x-axis even as it flipped again 420 degrees along its lengthwise y-axis.
    She couldn’t picture the map to the city because there was no map, Brigid recalled now. There was no map, no history. An hour ago she had entered a dingy little shack in the back street squats of Hope and paid a man to pump her with glist and send her on a journey into the traum wirklichkeit . If she worked at it, thought about it, she could still taste the glist on her breath, smell the room with its months-of-sweat stink, like a locker room.
    Her false reality played on all around her, feeling no different to any other experience she had ever had. The Turbo 190 flipped again as it left the road entirely. Another blast from the chopper sawed clean through the hood with a scream. The view through the windshield spun with such speed that Brigid could hardly make sense of it, tossed as she was against the restraint of the seat belt. The shipyard building was ahead of her, rushing toward her as she sailed through the air, a great glass knife thrusting up from the street below.
    Hovering over the roadway, the Deathbird turned on the spot, bringing its guns around to keep firing at Brigid’s