A rain of glass shards from the obliterated wall tinkled around me while I flopped over, gasping for breath. My eyes hit the scorch mark on the wall behind where I’d just stood. Figueiredo draped his lab coat over the shards on the ledge of the former glass wall and then vaulted over. Next thing I knew, his blurry-edged body was above me, and then he lifted his gun to blast out the door that led to the hallway.

Shouting, somewhere. Conking my head on the floor had fucked with any sense of time. Locusts with glass-shard wings swarmed me as I tried to crawl over to the hallway away from Figueiredo, slicing up my forearms on the way. Dizzy shadows burst into the room, only for him to launch them against the walls. He must’ve been ’roided up or wearing some sort of superhero exoskeleton with the way he brushed off Yusuf and the security guards like biting flies.

I knew Figueiredo wasn’t going to kill me because he needed me. Right? That didn’t stop him from reaching down, hauling me up by the collar of Rui’s polka dot shirt, and slamming his fist into my face.

Fireworks. Shards of glass dazzled my eyes. It felt like the front part of my skull caved in under his fist.

“You didn’t have to do that,” came Kaori’s bored voice.

He ignored her, dragging me as I thrashed against his inhuman grip and snarled out animal noises. With a sigh, she climbed over the wall and her booted feet crunched over the shattered glass. In the hallway, something knocked into us from behind and I careened onto the floor again, rag-doll limp, with Figueiredo toppling over me. His gun clunked on the carpeted floor.

The blood in my eyes smeared my view of Yusuf, Hassan, and the two security guards from before. Yusuf snapped forward, grabbed Figueiredo, and shoved him at one of the walls of the narrow hallway.

In my mild, I-probably-have-a-concussion delirium, I remember thinking, my boyfriend kicking ass for me is surprisingly hot.

Another guard flicked his hand to extend a collapsible baton and used it to pin Kaori to a wall. The thing must’ve been electrified with the way she jolted and clenched her teeth. Yusuf slammed Figueiredo into the wall again, hard enough that his head knocked back against it. The other guard lanced Figueiredo in the side with an electrified baton.

Through the kaleidoscope of brain-spins and blood in my eyes, I barely kept track of anything. Screaming over alarms. Kaori yelled at Yusuf to ask him why you’re here. A squad of five security guards with their batons rounded a corner and joined the drunken bar brawl in the hallway. Yusuf helped pin Figueiredo against the wall but was also somehow at my side and lugging me up by my armpits.

“Let’s go,” he snapped.