Page 80 of Backpacking through Bedlam

Well, we’d deal with that later. For the moment, I hopped down, turning to Ryan, and asked, “Mind if I boost you up?”

He made a frankly adorable chirping noise and stood up on his hind legs. I scooped him off the ground, resisting the urge to pet my ally. It wasn’t easy, and from the look on his semi-canine little face, he knew it.

“Yeah, yeah, you’re cute as hell,” I grumbled, boosting myself back onto the sink one-handed. It creaked slightly, protesting the additional weight of forty pounds of tanuki, and I hoisted him hastily through the opening into the vent before bending to retrieve the grate.

“Sorry,” I said, and slid it back into place, ramming the screws as far into the holes as they would go without actually being screwed in barely three seconds before the bathroom door burst open and the woman I’d seen before rushed back in, two men on her heels.

She didn’t look surprised to see me standing on the sink with my hands on the grate. “Figured you’d be looking for a coward’s way out,” she said. “Your kind always do. You going to come quietly?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. So she thought I was taking it off, not putting it back on? Good. “This thing was rattling, I was trying to help the bookstore by getting it flush to the wall.” I hopped down from the sink, landing with my knees bent to absorb the impact, keeping my eyes on her face the whole time. She watched me unblinking, as steady as a predator that knew it had finally locked in on its prey.

Protective coloration it was, then. Wouldn’t be my first time. I straightened up, schooling my expression into one of complete innocence, and asked, “Didn’t you hear it when you were in here before?”

“Where’d your friend go?”

“Huh?”

She nodded toward the bundle of clothing on the ground. I kept my expression steady, even as I was swearing inwardly. In my defense, I’d expected at least another ninety seconds to get the clothes out of sight before she came crashing through the door. Expectations can get you killed.

“That guy? I don’t know,” I said. “I went to pee, and he was gone when I came out of the stall. I was washing my hands when I heard the grate rattling.”

“So he took off all his clothes and left the bathroom.”

“Looks like it.”

“We didn’t see anyone leave the bathroom,” said one of the men. “We’d have seen it if anyone had.”

So why didn’t Istas see you coming in? I shrugged. “I don’t know what to tell you. I was on the toilet when he disappeared. Did you drop something when you were in here before?”

“Cut the crap,” snapped Margaret. “I know it was you on television.”

Oh. Well, that was a fun side effect of Sarah’s mental whammy. Apparently, Margaret not being able to recognize Verity meant she thought I was Verity. Since I looked older than Verity for the first time her life, she probably wouldn’t be too flattered by that, which was why there was no point in telling her. Instead, I could just modify my original plan a little, and let things roll as they would.

I stood up straighter, dropping the look of innocent bewilderment, and folded my arms across my chest. “So what are you going to do about it?”

One of the two men cracked his knuckles. The other drew a knife. Neither one of them looked like they had my best interests at heart, which was almost a good thing: I would have been disappointed in them if they’d suddenly decided to play nicely.

Then Margaret held up one hand in a clear stop gesture, and both men stopped moving. Interesting. From the way they were watching her, at least one of them didn’t have a lot of respect for her, but they were doing what she told them to do.

“No,” she said. “These damned traitors have knocked me down twice. They’re not going to do it again. She’s mine.”

I love it when an opponent’s pride lets them decide that one-on-one is the only way to handle things. It makes it so much easier on me. I shifted my stance, moving more of my weight onto my front leg, preparing to kick. I like kicking. I have strong legs, and unlike my punches, I don’t telegraph what I’m going to do broadly enough to give people extra time to dodge. It’s fun.

She surged forward, hands already raised to swing, and I responded by shifting the rest of my weight front, bringing up my rear foot and swinging it around in a vicious kick to her midsection. I hit solidly enough that I expected her to go staggering backward, and was only a little surprised when she grabbed me by the ankle instead, keeping my foot pinned against her side while she swung at me with her free hand.

It’s even more fun when the people hit back. And when they give me free leverage, everything becomes a party. I pushed off the floor with my remaining foot, using the movement to bring my other leg up at the same time and locking them around her waist. It was a maneuver guaranteed to send me crashing to the floor, which it did only half a second later. I took the impact on my upper back, managing to keep my head from hitting until I was finished with my fall, having taken Margaret down with me. I tightened my legs, trying to roll her over.

Margaret responded by shrieking and punching me in the throat. That’s always been one of my favorite tricks—the punching, not the screaming—and I would have been grudgingly impressed if I hadn’t been trying to deal with the sudden struggle to breathe that followed her hit. I grabbed her head and rolled to the side, worrying less about flipping her onto her back than about slamming her head into the floor. She made a deep, bestial noise when I first slammed her head down. I took some satisfaction in this.

The two men who’d come in with her were watching us roll around on the floor, one looking disgusted, the other almost delighted, like seeing two women doing amateur wrestling in a bathroom was the best thing he could possibly have imagined.

Margaret was slightly larger than I was, which meant that once her head stopped spinning, she was able to roll me back onto the floor and get an arm across my throat, pushing down until I saw little black spots. That was an incapacitating move, not a killing one. I could feel at least three knives through her clothes, and she hadn’t gone for any of them.

They wanted a captive. Well, I’ve been taken captive before, usually by worse than the Covenant, and I’d been planning on getting caught after I hoisted Ryan into the vent. I closed my eyes and went limp, making it seem like I’d passed out.

She kept pressing down for long enough that my masquerade almost became reality before she took the pressure off and pulled away, leaving me coughing but supposedly still unconscious on the floor.

“Get the propofol,” she said, voice brisk. “I want her to stay out until we’re ready to deal with her.”