Free Web NovelChapter 265: 265 | The Tactical Kiss
I hit the west stairwell door at full sprint and threw myself through it without slowing down. The door slammed against the interior wall hard enough to crack the safety glass in the viewport window, and I used the momentum to carry me up the first three steps before my boots found purchase on the concrete.
Behind me, Camille’s footsteps echoed through the hallway. She was following. Good. Every step she took toward this stairwell was a step away from room 2C and the hostage that Percy was currently extracting through a peeled window seal.
"Percy. Now."
"Going."
I climbed another four steps and stopped on the landing between the second and third floors. The stairwell was narrow, maybe six feet wide, with institutional green walls and overhead fluorescent tubes that hummed at a frequency designed to give everyone headaches. Perfect terrain for what I had in mind.
Camille appeared in the stairwell doorway below me. Orange light blazed at both palms as she tracked my position, and I watched her weight shift as she committed to the pursuit. Her compression top was still pulled low across her chest from our earlier exchange, the deep V of exposed skin catching my attention for approximately half a second before my survival instincts reasserted themselves.
"End of the line," she said. "This stairwell has one exit above you and one below me. You’re not getting past me, and you’re not reaching the third floor before I put enough rivets in your back to qualify as modern art."
"That’s an interesting theory."
"It’s not a theory. It’s geometry."
She raised both hands and fired.
Three rivets came up the stairwell in a spread pattern designed to cover my entire body. The narrow walls meant I couldn’t dodge left or right, and the steep angle meant I couldn’t drop flat without sliding back down the stairs directly into her range. Standard geometry said I was trapped.
Standard geometry didn’t account for what happened when I grabbed the overhead fluorescent tube with a construct and yanked it out of its housing.
The tube shattered on impact with the stairs between us, spraying glass fragments and phosphorescent powder in a cloud that filled the stairwell like flash-bang residue. Her rivets punched through the cloud and embedded in the wall behind my head, but she’d lost visual contact for approximately two seconds.
Two seconds was enough.
I launched myself down the stairs instead of up, diving through the dissipating cloud with my arms extended and four constructs trailing behind me like the world’s most aggressive moving violation. Camille’s eyes widened as I emerged from the powder cloud three feet from her position, close enough to see the individual lashes framing her brown eyes and the way her pupils contracted in surprise.
She tried to bring her palms up. I caught her right wrist with a construct before the motion completed, wrenched it sideways, and used my momentum to carry us both through the stairwell door and back into the second-floor hallway.
We hit the hallway floor in a tangle of limbs and constructs. My back took the impact and the air left my lungs in a rush that made stars explode across my peripheral vision, but I kept the construct locked on her wrist and extended two more to pin her other arm and her left ankle.
Camille thrashed against the grip with genuine strength. Her combat training hadn’t been theoretical. She knew exactly how to twist her body to generate maximum torque against a restraint, and my constructs registered the pressure as burning feedback that lanced through my temples.
"Let go!"
"No."
I rolled us over, putting her back against the floor and my weight across her hips. The position was deeply inappropriate for a combat training exercise and I was going to hear about it from approximately everyone who was watching through the observation deck monitors, but it was also the only way to pin her center of gravity while keeping my constructs locked on her limbs.
Her chest heaved against mine with every breath. The shifted fabric of her top had given up any pretense of coverage, and I could feel the heat of her skin through the thin compression material. Her brown eyes blazed with fury from six inches away, and her lips were parted in an expression that communicated murder in the most attractive way possible.
"This is cheating."
"This is winning."
"You’re sitting on me!"
"You shot me!"
She tried to headbutt me again. I tilted left and her forehead caught my shoulder instead of my nose, which hurt considerably less than the alternative but still sent a spike of pain through my collarbone. My grip on her right wrist slipped by half an inch, and she used the slack to twist her palm toward my face.
Orange light flickered at her fingertips.
I kissed her.
It wasn’t romantic. It wasn’t tender. It was a tactical decision made in approximately point three seconds when I realized that a rivet fired from three inches away would go through my skull regardless of how fast I could dodge, and the only way to disrupt her concentration was to do something so unexpected that her brain had to stop and process it before her Aspect could respond.
Her lips were soft and tasted like the protein bar she’d eaten for breakfast. The cardamom spice from her lip balm mixed with the cordite smell of her spent rivets, and for one frozen moment we were just two people in the most awkward position imaginable while twenty classmates watched through surveillance cameras.
Then she bit my lip hard enough to draw blood.
I jerked back with a yelp that was deeply undignified, and Camille used the moment to twist her whole body in a move that would have impressed a professional wrestler. Her hips bucked upward and threw me sideways, breaking my construct grip on her left ankle and giving her enough leverage to roll.
We ended up with her on top, straddling my waist with her knees pinning my arms to the floor. Her two-tone hair hung down around her face like a curtain, and her chest rose and fell with exertion that made the shifted fabric of her top do very distracting things. Blood from my lip dripped down my chin.
"Did you just kiss me?"
"You were going to shoot me in the face."
"So you kissed me?"
"It worked, didn’t it?"
She stared down at me with an expression I couldn’t read. The orange glow at her palms had faded to a faint shimmer, and her brown eyes held something that wasn’t quite anger and wasn’t quite anything else I could identify.
"You’re insane."
"I’m effective."
"Those aren’t mutually exclusive."
Her weight shifted on my hips and I became acutely aware of exactly how much of her body was pressing against exactly how much of mine. The position was intimate in a way that combat positions weren’t supposed to be, and my body was responding to that intimacy in ways I really wished it would stop.
I still had one construct free.
