She was thinking about the sound.
Not the gunshot itself. Something in her implants had flagged the gunshot half a second before her conscious mind finished catching up, which was exactly why Proxy was still breathing right now.
No, what stayed with her was the sound the bullet had made slicing through the air where he had been standing. That precise displacement. That very particular wrongness.
Someone had aimed a rifle at him. Someone on this island had looked at him through a scope, decided he qualified as a target, chambered a round, slowed their breathing, and chosen him.
And that realization sat in Nyx's chest like a coal that had been there for years, burning patiently, waiting for a moment exactly like this.
The corridor didn't really exist for her. Her legs handled that part.
Her mind stayed with the fire.
No one gets to do that.
The thought wasn't complicated, which was probably why it felt so correct. Water finds a drain without thinking about physics.
Everything in her did the same thing with Proxy. It flowed back to him. Keeping him alive. Removing anything that threatened that.
The simple logic of a universe that required Proxy's continued existence.
This man, Dust, this wasteland scrap with long-range ambitions, had made a decision this morning.
She was the consequence attached to that decision.
She felt very calm about it.
A shot punched through the window to her left and chewed a chunk out of the opposite wall. She glanced at it.
Blind fire. He was working off sound now.
She adjusted her position and kept moving, and the contempt she felt was flat, almost sarcastic. The kind you reserve for something that has already lost and simply hasn't realized it yet.
She hit the stairwell at speed, taking it wrong on purpose.
Her movement implants devoured the turns, pushing off landing walls and translating momentum into impulsion the stairs hadn't been designed to accommodate.
One floor.
Two.
She burst through the third-floor door still running, and her mind returned, inevitably, to him.
Proxy behind the bar.
Alive.
Unhurt.
The image replayed itself with annoying persistence.
His voice over comms had been certain when he gave the coordinates, completely free of panic. Of course it was. Proxy didn't panic.
That was one of the things.
One of a very long list of things that she-
Dust came around the corner.
He had already drawn his sidearm, and he was competent with it. That she noticed immediately, the way relevant information always did.
He had chosen to move toward her instead of retreating, which at this range was reasonable enough.
She noted he had done this before and assigned it the importance it deserved.
Which wasn't very much.
She fired first. He snapped into the doorframe, and the corridor transformed into a problem they were both solving from opposite ends.
Plaster shattered above her head.
She put a burst six inches from his shoulder and heard the subtle shift as he adjusted.
Back and forth.
Somewhere in the back of her mind she acknowledged that she respected this, in the same abstract way you respect a locked door before you break it.
She found herself thinking about Proxy's face again, about the moment she'd looked back at him from the pool complex doorway.
The expression he'd been wearing.
The one he used when thinking something in his head.
She liked that expression.
Being the variable he had to think over and over again appealed to her. It meant he was paying attention.
It meant she was real to him in a way that required more than just a thought.
She wanted that.
She wanted to be the thing he kept having to reconsider.
More urgently, she wanted to get back to him.
Dust moved toward the balcony.
She let him.
The balcony was a room with three open walls and one planter.
He was already dead. The only missing step was paperwork.
She took the doorframe.
Four meters.
The light out here was grey and wet, a sky that couldn't seem to commit to anything.
Dust crouched behind the planter, his good hand still on the sidearm.
Blood was already leaking from somewhere along his side from one of the corridor exchanges.
She hadn't even realized she landed that shot. That told her something about the state she was in.
Good.
She needed this state.
Someone had aimed at Proxy. Someone had considered that acceptable.
The least she could do was be thorough.
He moved for the rail.
She allowed him most of the distance before putting a burst into his forearm.
She wanted the gun hand specifically.
She got it.
The sidearm spun off the balcony along its own trajectory while his arm snapped back against his chest with the unmistakable collapse of muscle that stops cooperating.
The sound he made was short and swallowed.
High pain tolerance, she noted automatically.
Useful for the next sixty seconds.
Completely irrelevant after that.
You aimed at him, she thought, watching Dust try to reposition with one arm pressed against his ribs, his face busy negotiating with whatever messages his body was sending.
You looked at him through a scope.
You placed your finger on the trigger and you chose him.
She let him attempt to stand.
Watched the process carefully.
Legs organizing themselves.
Intention traveling through his body like a signal.
When he reached roughly halfway upright, she placed a single round into his left thigh.
He hit the tile hard enough that she felt the impact through her boots.
He didn't try again.
She walked around the planter.
He was on his back now.
One hand clutched his forearm.
The other lay flat against the tile beside him.
He stared up through the gap in the roof at the open sky.
Blood spread across the tile with that unhurried patience it gets when there's plenty of it and no deadline.
He looked at her.
At the blood in her hair, which belonged to someone else from earlier this morning, a different problem she had already resolved.
At the SMG.
At her eyes, still burning cold amber.
"Who-" he began.
"You shot at him. My Proxy. You really shot at him," she said.
It wasn't an explanation. She had nothing to explain.
He had shot at Proxy.
That was the entire ledger.
Debit and credit.
Balance owed.
Transaction pending.
Whatever question he had been about to ask, that was the answer.
His expression changed slightly, as if he realized his mistake.
Then he let his head fall back against the tile and returned his attention to the sky.
The SMG came up.
She was already thinking about getting back downstairs.