The man grins threateningly and points the gun out to the water. He squeezes it and a load bang rips through the air around us. I duck and cover my ears, my eyes wide at the flash from the end of his weapon and the answering splash as the projectile hits the water. My ears ring with the sound as it echoes across the open water.
“Does it scare you now?” the man snarls.
Locke slowly puts his hands in the air. “Hey, man. We’re not trying to start trouble. But there’s someone dangerous coming this way.” He looks at the boats. “We can share the boat. We’re friendly. I’m Locke. This is Vesper.”
Svetlana doesn’t say anything. She just watches the interaction carefully.
The man doesn’t relax. If anything, he grows more tense. “And I’m Nate. So what? I don’t need to know your names to kill you.”
I wince. “You can have the boat,” I say, looking over my shoulder. In the distance, I can see a form appear from the broken caldera. We have maybe a few minutes at best. “Just take it.”
“I am,” he growls, keeping the weapon pointed at us as he backs towards the wooden platform. “Don’t move.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Locke grumbles, looking at me worriedly.
As Nate backs up to the platform, I get flashes of memory of his “highlights.” The first time I’d seen him, he was standing in line with his wife and sick baby. The second time I’d seen him, he’d been leaving his wife and child in this frozen nightmare, leaving her to grieve over their child, to freeze in a forever statue of a mother’s love. She’d been fighting to give her baby a better life, and when that baby couldn’t handle the Harrow Gate, she’d given into her grief and died there with her baby. This man left them there. He hadn’t looked back.
The next memory I have of him is watching him drag an NPC into a building, watching him assault her, watching her cry out lines that didn’t make sense for the situation, like she couldn’t deviate from the script even as she was being brutally raped.
This man doesn’t deserve to survive the Harrow.
“Humanity is brutal,” Cipher says.
“It doesn’t have to be,” I answer.
Nate looks at me with aggression. “Shut up, bitch.”
“Yes,” Cipher answers. “It does. If you are not brutal, someone else will be. It is up to you to decide which brutality survives.”
Nate hops into the larger boat and fiddles with the contraption on the back. His fingers dance over it, searching, until he finds a handle and he pulls. The contraption roars to life loudly and I realize it’s some sort of propulsion system. I watch as he slowly starts to ease away from the platform. He puts his weapon away to focus on steering only once he’s far enough away from the platform that we can’t leap onto it after him.
“Let’s go,” Locke growls, rushing onto the wooden platform and jumping into the much smaller boat. There’s going to be barely any room for the two of us. Our legs are going to have to overlap, but we situate ourselves in it and each pick up a paddle.
“I suggest you paddle fast,” Svetlana says. “The Leech is coming.”
I look over my shoulder as we push away from the platform and float into the water. We start to paddle when I get a good look at Stryker running closer. We don’t have long. We’d wasted precious minutes while Nate aimed his projectile stick at us.
“Faster!” I say. We’re still too close to the platform. He could leap and make it onto our boat. We have no idea of knowing how high his agility stat is, but considering how fast he’s running, it’s gotta be high. “Go! Go! Go!”
We paddle with all our might, pushing away from the shoreline, desperate to put distance between our boat and the Leech chasing us. I slam the paddle into the water and push it backwards, the icy water splashing on my gloves and immediately making my fingers start to chill. I don’t worry about it. If we don’t put enough distance between us, we’re as good as dead anyways.
Stryker slides onto the wooden platform and looks like he’s about to launch himself off it, but he pauses, his legs bent, his sharp teeth bared, and freezes. I’m holding my breath as we still violently paddle, my eyes on his. Slowly, achingly slow, he straightens and tucks his hands into his pockets. He doesn’t enter the sea, and there are no more boats. I don’t know how long it’ll take for more to respawn, but we likely have at least an hour. Everything seems to take an hour. We’re safe. For now.
As we paddle our way out into the Frostbit Sea, Stryker stands on that platform, grins . . .
. . . and blows me a fucking kiss.
CHAPTER31
VESPER
Ikeep paddling, my heart in my throat as I realize how close we just were to being drained by the Leech. Locke flicks Stryker the bird behind us and smiles, but I don’t dare instigate him. Stryker had said he had plans for me besides draining me. I don’t know what those plans are and I don’t want to think about the way he makes my lower stomach tighten every time I see him.
Some traitorous part of me likes the Leech, and that’s really fucking dangerous. Clearly, my ability to pick lovers is just as bad in the Harrow as it was in Dross.
“That guy really has a thing for you,” Locke says, shaking his head.
“Don’t know why,” I grumble, paddling, matching Locke’s speed. In front of us, I can see Nate in his own boat, cruising at a much brisker pace with his machine propeller. He doesn’t have to paddle like us, but the machine isn’t super powerful. He trucks through the water at a steady, slow speed, but it‘s noisy, echoing around us even as he starts to put distance between our two boats. He looks at us and tips up his weapon again, holding it aloft like a threat. Fucker.
