Free Way Down Dark by J.P. Smythe

turn, and they look back at me, their expressions almost comically confused.
    “Let her go,” I say.
    And they do. All of a sudden, I’m much more interesting to them. One of them—the one who isn’t holding a weapon—swings at me, and his fist connects with my chin. It’s a sloppy punch, totally untrained, no real weight behind it, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt. My head snaps up, and I can feel my chin reddening, bruising, almost immediately. He tries again, and this time I duck. I step back to get some distance between us. Behind them, the girl whimpers.
    “Run,” I say to her, but she stays still. The other Low has a mace of some sort, a thick wrought-iron stick with what looks like shards of glass fastened to its head, and she rushes forward, swinging it wildly. I’m smaller than her, and faster as well, and I hop backward, avoiding her. She swings again, and this time the side of the bar hits my leg. It hurts a stupidamount, but I can’t think about that. You get caught in the pain and it’s all over. I manage to stumble forward and slash out, and I catch her belly, cutting through the vest she’s wearing and puncturing her skin in a thin, sharp line. She gasps and staggers backward. It’s an opportunity. I back up more, leading them out onto the gangway, away from the girl’s berth. They follow slowly, wheezing their intentions at me with threatening breaths, their eyes fixed on mine.
    Two of them. I can take two of them.
    The one without a weapon runs at me, and I meet him, ducking down at the last second to try to use his momentum to trip him, knock him over. Agatha taught me to defend myself when I was younger, just as she once taught my mother, and this was her first tip: someone bigger comes at you, you use their own weight against them. I push him up and over me and he thuds to the floor, right on the edge of the stairwell gap that leads to section V. Damn. Any closer and he’d have been over and down into the Pit, and this fight would have been one on one. My leg stings, and my chin aches. The one with the weapon swings it. The mace clips my hand hard enough to make me lose my grip. I drop my knife, which bounces on the floor and then over the edge and into the darkness below.
    Damn, damn, damn.
    Don’t die, my mother’s voice repeats inside my head. I turn and leap across the stairwell gap, and I don’t miss a step. It only buys me a second. I keep running, but they’re right behind me. My feet clang on the metal flooring and theirs follow, their footsteps like echoes of mine, and I can see theirshadows flickering as they pass dimmed nighttime lights, first ahead of me and then falling behind as we run past the individual lights. Four berths away from mine, and then three, two, and then I’m throwing aside my curtains, and I’m here. Bess and her son sit up on my bunk, rubbing their eyes.
    “I’m sorry,” I say to them, “but you’ll have to hide. Under the bunk.” They move, but too slowly. “Now!” I shout, and that kicks them into action. They’re scared of me, I think. They’ve probably never seen me like this. I’m not sure that I’ve ever actually been like this. I can hear the Lows outside, stopped, talking about what to do. They know about me, and they know who I am. They know the reputation that my mother had, the power. I have to channel that. They have to be afraid of me.
    They have to believe that I am willing to kill them.
    “Riadne’s daughter?” one of them says. I don’t answer. I scramble around on the floor, trying to find a jagged edge, and when one catches on my fingertips, I press my palm to it and I push down, breaking the skin, and I drag my hand across to make a proper cut, nothing that will hurt too much in the morning but enough to draw blood. I flex my hand over and over, making it flow, and I smear it onto my face. This is all for show. My mother used to do this, I think. War paint, she called it. I want them to see how like her I am.