Heat flashes across my hand. The smell is horrific, burned hair, skin, synthetic jacket material, and ozone. He reels backward, clutching his face. The left side is burned raw and blackened in streaks, one ear scorched, cheek split open where the energy grazed instead of struck clean.
For one second, I think it is over.
Then he pulls a pistol from inside his jacket with his good hand.
I fire.
He fires.
The world detonates in white pain.
The shot hits my shoulder and punches me backward. Not clean through. It burns through muscle high on the right side, hot and wet and impossible. My grip fails. The plasma pistol drops. I stagger into the bedroom window.
Glass cracks behind me.
Ron stands in the doorway, half his face ruined, breathing like an animal. His remaining eye burns with a hatred so complete it looks almost peaceful.
“You,” he rasps, “took everything.”
Blood runs warm down my arm. My fingers go numb.
“No,” I whisper. “You threw it away.”
He raises the gun again.
I throw the nearest thing I can reach.
A potted plant.
It hits him in the head.
The shot goes wide, blasting through the ceiling.
I lunge for the pistol on the floor, but my wounded shoulder fails. My body tips sideways. My hip hits the window frame.
The cracked glass gives way.
For one terrible breath, I hang between inside and outside.
Halo opens beneath me in rain-wet neon and black pavement.
I hear Ron shout.
I hear someone downstairs scream my name.
I think, stupidly, that Kauss fixed this window latch but not the glass.
Then I fall.
The world becomes cold air, broken light, and the impossible sensation of the apartment leaving me.
I hit the bakery sign first.
Pain rips across my side as the metal bracket catches me, slows me, fails.
Then the street comes up hard.
The impact knocks every sound out of existence.
