“Who?” I stared at the figure in the middle of the road as I waited for an answer. They wore a knee-length coat over tactical fatigues and boots, all in dull black. The only thing that wasn’t was their pale mask. Its vague features reminded me of a display mannequin’s, and its eyeports were blank black holes.. It seemed to be faintly smirking at us.

“The Winnower. Don’t know much about her, ‘cept she don’t tend to leave survivors.” He shook himself, some of that familiar stubbornness pushing away his shock. “She uses some kinda…string, I guess.”

Maybe that was the half-visible thing I saw blurring and swirling around her right hand. My visor cameras couldn’t focus on it. No point asking him to clarify. I’d find out what he meant soon enough.

“Ximi and Bodine are down, and Willy- um, Willy’s dead.” The Zamok clearly broadcasted the hitch in my voice, and Walker’s eyes widened a fraction. “Back this thing up, Walker. Get out of the way.”

“You can’t fight her, Sharkie, not if what I hear’s-“

“She’s not just gonna let us go, is she?” I snapped. “I’m not just gonna let her go, either.” I reached back to grab Agatha off the floor of the van while the Winnower kept still. I could almost sense a raised eyebrow behind her sneering mask.

Walker looked at me, tried to say something but cut himself off at first. “Just try to hold her off. I’ll get Monta to reposition. Maybe we can…” He threw the van into reverse instead of finishing and peeled away as soon as I vaulted over the hood.

The moment my titanium cleats bit the pavement I started firing, braced against the .50’s prodigious recoil. The Winnower finally moved, leaping aside fast and twitchy as an insect. Had to be enough chrome in her to buy a Vitroix apartment. I went cyclic, brass clanging off my feet as I followed her darting shape with the reticle. Nothing did any damage. Most of the slugs that got close sparked off off that blurry thing surrounding her hand, which lashed out as needed to intercept them. The few that weren’t struck her coat without penetrating or slowing her down, zirconium sparks washing off her without leaving more than a scorchmark. Make that a whole Vitroix building.

The gun had grown lighter in my hands when she stopped so suddenly she cracked the asphalt. The thing in her hand lashed out again- this time right at my head. I had a bare instant to get a better look. It was as thin and hard to make out as a spider’s thread, but it wasn’t quite transparent or blurry. Rather it reminded me of an eye floater, something floating on top of or under the the world rather than part of it. I had about a split second to gape at it before there was a tremendous impact and I blacked out.

I came to just in time to slam into a concrete wall and almost get knocked out again, cursing in pain even within the armor. Bits of shattered stone clattered onto my helmet. If the sabot rifle was like getting hit by a truck, this was getting creamed by one of the ore trains they had in the quarries. How in the fuck…My head was twisted at a painful angle and it wouldn’t move when I tried to rectify the situation. Making myself breathe deeply, I squelched a spike of claustrophobic panic- trapped, stuck, trapped let me MOVE- and thought deliberately about the helmet-release command. Even more warnings flashed and beeped on my HUD but nothing else happened. Stay calm. Pushing through rubble, I reached inside my collar to find the manual release and wrenched it open.

The helmet clunked free of its bent fixtures and I tore it off, panting. My Thayer eye briefly rebooted, and everything looked unnaturally bright and sharp- I’d gotten used to seeing through the visor cams. The smells of exhaust, gunpowder, and pulverized concrete filled my nose as I staggered to my feet. A brief glance around revealed that I’d been cratered eight inches or so into the side of a high-rise. My helmet was hors de combat- there was a deep, splintered furrow down one side like someone had stuck it in a metal shear. Would have been my head if I wasn’t wearing it. The Winnower was briskly walking down the street, not even looking at me. It was a good thing Walker’d gotten the hell out- Oh. Shit.

The van was only a little ways down the street, engine steaming and the front fender buckled by one of the cops’ glue projectiles. Just as I got up the Winnower lazily flicked her arm like an orchestra conductor. Blurry lines swirled out, and with an awful crunch of metal the van launched straight up as if uppercut. It turned over languid as a flapjack and crashed to the road upside-down, a great hourglass divot cinched into its sides.

“Walker!” The yell was involuntary. I couldn’t see him, and if he was still alive I doubted he could even see me. Luckily I’d kept hold of Agatha on my flight. I yanked the .50 cal up and jammed on the trigger, awkwardly bending my neck to use the sight on the gun. My teeth gritted of their own accord- outside of my helmet the thing was fucking deafening. The Winnower spun and jinked away immediately, the bullets seemingly sparking in midair.

Without the helmet I could see her thread or whatever it was a lot better. It was like a flowing crease in the world, a crimp that slightly refracted the light around it. It spun and whipped too fast to track, suddenly flickering at me. I stumbled back, but I wasn’t the target. There was an incredible jolt through my arms as Agatha was yanked out of my grip. She slammed into the pavement yards away as if hurled there by a giant. Parts and sheared rivets bounced everywhere, and the barrel was crushed almost into a spiral. I made a disgusted noise. I was getting really sick of my guns getting broken, but more immediate was the fact that I was all out of firepower to harry the Winnower with.

Every time she did something, though, I learned. This thread of hers…despite floating around weightless as spidersilk, when she whipped it around it struck like it weighed tons. It had smashed the roof clean off Walker’s van and tossed me and the van around easy as empty beer cans. I couldn’t tell how she controlled it, though. It had to be some heavy-duty processing to catch bullets with a kingsdamn string. The big question, though- why was I alive? Then I realized why she was still going for the van. She wasn’t here to kill me. She probably wasn’t here for any of us. She’d been contracted, I’d bet, to make sure whatever was in the case got to the Cromwells and damn anyone in the way.

Had to slow her down, get her to stop ignoring me. At least the cops had backed off- they’d decided this was above their pay grade, or at least someone had decided for them. Anyone in the buildings nearby was smart enough to stay hunkered down too. My hand clanged down to my hip, but found nothing there- Idiot. Of course my revolver was already gone. Past my hand on the ground, though…I took one of the first pages out of history’s book and decided to throw a rock. Well, a big hunk of concrete on the end of some twisted rebar, but same difference. The Zamok was slow but it had a hell of a follow-through, so I was able to launch the thing hard enough to take someone’s head off. The Winnower spun to face me just before the projectile burst into dust and iron shards a few yards from her. I had to wonder if she controlled the string manually or if it protected her through some automated control. It seemed to keep everything off her no matter what.

She paused a moment, appraising me from behind that sneering mask. She raised her right hand as I braced to dodge- and wagged a finger at me. Naughty, naughty. A spike of white-hot anger drove through me. Kill my friend and fucking mock me- I squashed it. I had to stay calm and think clear, or I was dead. Unfortunately, as far as I could tell I might be dead anyway. She was too far away for me to do a thing to her, but I had to try. Doing my best to focus, I drove the Zamok into its floaty run. She twirled her hand, and I got ready to get smashed again.

Blinding actinic sparks flashed in a jagged cone around the Winnower, searing spots into my retina like a welding arc. She shielded her face with an arm, whirling to look up at the high-rises down the street. Dust crackled up from the pavement, and an instant later an earsplitting boom almost made me stumble. Fidi found a new spot, I thought. He would have potted her in one if the Winnower’s weapon hadn’t intercepted the railgun slug. Even so, he’d done some damage. White-hot fragments of the projectile had punched through her long coat and left deep scars on her mask. I got a glimpse of her thread roiling in the air around her before she leapt away in a blur. Another railslug cratered into the asphalt right where she’d been. I kept running towards the van, figuring she’d have to get there eventually.

I was right. She took a series of wild, evasive leaps, trails of sparkling smoke crackling in her wake. My Thayer eye stuttered, its normally perfect sight going staticky around those trails. She must have had ECM chaff projectors implanted, the clever bitch. I wondered how much trouble Fidi’s scope would have dealing with it. Still, after a few seconds of that she clanged to a hard stop just between me and the wrecked vehicle. I pulled up short just in time for a bloody-faced Walker to shove halfway out of a broken window and empty his pistol at her back like he was at a competition. The string whirled like a dust-devil to knock his bullets out of the air, but by the way the Winnower twitched she’d been surprised. Maybe we were tougher prey than she’d expected. Maybe that frustration was why she made an imperious flick of her wrist and sent what was left of the van tumbling into the nearest building. It landed in a barely-recognizable heap, more deep grooves crimped into it. Even as terror for my friends sliced through me, that nasty, callous, vicious part of my mind had noticed some things.

When the thread defended her it did so without her input. That made sense. “Move in front of ballistic projectiles” was a pretty basic task. Not simple to actually implement, but this was spacetech I was dealing with. It might as well be magic. When she wanted it to do something manually, though, she had to give it a cue: moving her hand or fingers. It wasn’t much, but it already made me feel like I had more of a handle on the situation. A plan began to congeal in my mind.

As much as it tore me up to leave it, I couldn’t check on the van right now. I was dead if I got distracted from the Winnower, and might be even if I didn’t. She turned away from the smoking wreck and watched me for a few seconds, pacing slowly across the street. Her movements were eerie, either inhumanly smooth or insect-fast. There was no playfulness in her manner now. Her thread coiled low around her ankles, faintly rumbling as it crushed spirograph patterns into the asphalt. Glittering sparkles of chaff hung in the air between us, drifting upwards on the draft. I watched her like a man who’s bet his last dollar watches the last lap of the race, waiting for her fingers to twitch. Come on…fucking make a move…I was about to lunge at her and damn the distance when her hand moved- her left hand. It twitched up to point right at me, something unfolding from her forearm. Even through the chaff, my eye tagged the implanted gun just in time.

I got an armored bracer in front of my face just as she opened up, the caseless rounds fired at such a high rate they made a single continuous blurt of noise. The impacts shoved my arm back into my forehead. Fragments stung my face and clinked queasily off my bionic eye. Snarling more to make myself feel brave than anything else, I ran headlong into her fire, each step feeling like it took forever. I cocked my arm just enough to peer over it with the Thayer, figuring that between its armored lens and my armored skull it was the best I could do. I needed the cybernetic for another reason, too. The chaff was dissipating upward now, and as I closed in I focused on her right hand.

She did what I thought she’d do. The gunfire ceased, the weapon snapping back into her arm like a butterfly knife. As it did the Winnower moved, barely bending her knees before launching sideways to flank. At the same moment the fingers on her right hand curled in a ’come-hither,’ picked out in exquisite fidelity by my Thayer eye. The thread itself was miragelike, barely visible, but if my guess was right it would come from…here. I moved the arm I already had up just a bit outward. I had a split-second to see the Winnower’s thread settle around it instead of my neck. I grabbed it in my fist-

There was a crunch. An immense, impossible pressure. A jerk of force so overwhelming I felt the Zamok’s shoulder joint crack. The world blurred and grayed, G-force pulling the blood out of my brain before I stopped with a world-rending impact. My vision flashed white and I went unconscious for such a brief instant I felt it happen. The pain was what kept me aware. Oh, Kings. I’d been shot before, stabbed and beaten and burned. I would have taken it all again ten times over rather than feel what I was feeling now for another second. I would have given the other eye. The only reason I wasn’t screaming is my jaw was clenched too hard to exhale. Though I was relieved I could still move my neck, looking down at my arm took a distinct effort of will. Seeing it made it real, made it hurt worse.

From the elbow down it was a mosaic of crushed armor plate, blood welling up through the cracks. A deep, spiral groove wrapped around it several times, marking where the string had crushed through like the composite was papier-mache. And if the armor was papier-mache, my arm itself may as well have been air. I could feel her thread sliding around in there, cutting flesh away, agony shivering through me like black spiny lightning as it sunk down to the bone. My fingers were- oh, ’Stride. ’Stride’s bones… They were worse. I couldn’t really tell which was which by eye anymore, and they felt like they were sunk in a crucible of molten glass. Even with all that, even with tears of pain leaking down my face, I felt myself smiling. Not a smile anyone would be happy to see, not even me, but a smile nonetheless. I was right. My bones were stronger.

“What.” The Winnowers voice was smooth, but its tone was flat and harsh. “No. That can’t happen.” Her boots crunched on broken glass as she stalked toward me. “Come on now, you-“

I didn’t hear the rest because pain whited out my mind. Car-crusher pressure clamped down on my arm, in my arm, and dragged me to the ground. I felt my bones creak and a wave of icy cold shot up and down my limbs, but they didn’t yield. I wanted to scream but instead I tasted blood- must have bit down and caught my tongue. After a second or a century it let up and I gasped out a shuddering breath. I wished I could just lie down and die, but some kernel of sheer stubborn orneriness kept me at least half-ass aware.

“This isn’t right. Not at all…” She sounded apprehensive now, almost nervous. Good. She kept getting closer, too. If it worked on Lyu, it might work on her…The thought needled through the haze of pain and I tensed in readiness. The Zamok still responded, though I noticed a blinking red and purple light inside the collar. It took a moment to remember what that meant. Low fuel. How’d that happen? Willy and I both had been supplied for four hours at least, and it hadn’t been one. Whatever. I’d just have to do this fast.

She was close enough. I lurched off the ground as hard as I could, ignoring the shattering pain on my left. The Winnower, of course, dodged away from my good arm when I lashed out- but she wasn’t what I was going for. Instead I reached across, grabbed the string where it trailed from my ruined fist, and gave it- and the Winnower herself- a hard yank toward me.

I let go just before the crushing pressure returned. It was too late for her, though. She’d been tripped up and tumbled right into me. As my legs turned to water and I fell to my knees I clamped my good arm around her back, dragging her down with me. She was immobile and the string was tangled. It was now or never. Come on, Fidi…

There was a CRACK louder than anything I’d ever heard, and the Winnower’s right shoulder exploded in a magnesium-bright flash of sparks. Slipstream tore past my face as she cried out, sounding more surprised than anything. And the string- for a brief instant it pulsed with a weight that made the other times seem like a love tap in comparison. There was no thought, only torment and the sound of a tooth cracking as my jaws ground together. Then, thankfully, blessedly, the thread went dead limp.

Not quite done. The thought spiraled through the woozy fog filling my head. I felt cold again. Maybe it was blood loss, but it was coming most of all from my mangled arm. I shoved the Winnower to the ground, the Zamok’s movement even more sluggish now. If it wasn’t dead it was damn close. It took all my focus to wrap my good hand around her throat and start to squeeze. Her neck was armored, though, and the chill was pushing all through me now. Her remaining arm flailed at me but I didn’t feel the hits. I felt numb, weak, barely able to hold myself up. Uneven footsteps approached but I was long past worrying about anything besides my fingers around the Winnower’s neck. I put all my will into my right hand, clenching, squeezing, crushing. Cold blackness edged in from the corners of my vision. Come on. Die. Let. Me. Rest…