“Kicked out both sides as he went past them,” J.B. grunted, clapping his hands approvingly. “Hit them smack on and smashed their knee joints apart.”
“Jesus!” Owsley breathed. “That ain’t…” He let the sentence trail away into the sudden stillness.
Jak had done a final double somersault, landing agilely on both feet, perfectly balanced, hands still at his sides. His chest was barely moving.
“Finished?” he called, not even a little out of breath.
“You finished them both, kid,” came a voice from the crowd.
Wolfe swallowed hard, clearing his throat. “Help them up and take them away,” he ordered.
“Two to us,” the Armorer said, taking off his fedora to wipe his forehead. “Sure you want to keep this going, Brother Wolfe? Can you afford to lose good men?”
“Who goes next?” Ryan asked. “How about me or J.B. taking our turn?”
For once the leader of Hopeville seemed to be quite lost for words.
“How about me takin’ on the redhead slut? Yeah, me, Sister Sprite.”
It was the giantess, her voice as deep as a thundering torrent through an abyss.
She pushed to the front of the crowd, standing with her hands on her broad hips, staring aggressively at Krysty, her face contorted with a violent hatred. She wore a cropped, short-sleeved white blouse of bleached leather over torn and faded ancient denim cutoffs, leaving a gap that revealed her belly button, sticking out like a chameleon’s eye.
Her hair was hacked short, teased into sharp spikes. The wide leather belt carried a knife nearly as long and broad as Ryan’s panga.
At a guess he put her at just over six-three and way above the 250-pound mark. And there didn’t look to be an ounce of fat on her body.
“Well now, Sister Sprite,” Wolfe began doubtfully, “I don’t know if—”
“Fuck you and the wag you ride on, Brother Wolfe! I don’t see anyone here, woman or weakling, who’s going to stand agin me on this.”
Ryan glanced at Krysty out of the corner of his good eye, looking for some reaction. But she was totally still and impassive, arms folded across her chest, eyes half-closed against the bright sunlight.
“Sister Sprite challenges the outlander woman, Sister Krysty Wroth, to a testing, as under the laws and gospels proscribed by the Children of the Rock.”
“What weapon?” Krysty asked quietly.
Behind Ryan, somewhere deep within the mighty pine forest, a flock of crows rose squawking into the sunlit air, circling around, their black shadows etched on the cerulean blue of the sky. He half turned, wondering what might have startled the birds, watching them as they weaved around one another before, at a soundless signal, they flew off southward.
He was distracted by the crows from what was happening right at his side.
“What weapon you like? Blaster or blade? Best would be to get my fingers round that scrawny neck and choke the fucking life from it. Watch your tongue swell, purple, and your green cat’s eyes pop out their sockets like the knobs on a mission-hall harmonium.”
“Not hand-to-hand, lover,” Ryan whispered to Krysty. “She looks to be—”
She turned and laid a hand on his arm, as gentle as the brushing of a butterfly’s wing. “What has to be, has to be, lover,” she said so quietly that nobody else heard her. “You see this?”
“Yes. I see this, lover. Like I’ve known this moment for all of my life. Seen this woman. These trees. These people. Yeah, I know them all.”
Ryan felt the chill of layered ice, gripping around his heart, seeming to paralyze him. There was a grim note of doom in Krysty’s voice that he’d never heard before in all the time that they’d ridden together.
“No,” he said, so hushed that he couldn’t even hear himself speaking.
“You ready for this, Sister?” The aggressive, grating voice was like a ragged fingernail in the eye socket.
“Guess so.”
Maybe if they all acted together they could grab some weapons from the watching sec men, taking advantage of their fascination with what was going down in front of them, open fire into the heart of the crowd and hope to be able to make a run for it amid the panic and bloody confusion.