Then it gets bad. We round a corner that reveals a long, long corridor. We screech to a stop and stare down to the distant corner. Charlie could make it, but I’ll never be able to hobble down there before the guys are on us. We both know it. Charlie stares at me, her eyes watering. Then her hand flashes like a mongoose into the holster on my leg, comes out with the dart gun, and in one continuous motion she leans around the corner and fires a dart into the neck of the lead guy. He goes down fast, but two more are coming at us, guns out.

“Dart!” Charlie yells.

I peel one out but drop it. There is no time to load. Charlie picks it up, hurls it like a quarterback, and gets another neck shot and it’s thirrrp, boom, down. But the third guy is still coming, and there is no more time.

Passionately I wish that we had a real gun.

As Charlie yanks off her belt, I barely process the guy breaking around the corner, her arm swinging, the polished blur of a metal buckle lashing the guy’s hand. The gun skitters to the tiles and, somehow, the belt is now looped around his wrist. Charlie slips a punch, wraps it around his wrist a second time, cinching it, and then by some incomprehensible contortion of physics the guy is in the air, pinwheeling for what seems like a very long time until he hits the floor in a crunchy tangle of limbs. Charlie puts a chokehold on him, and it is not gentle. It is not a nudge into sleep, like the choke she used on me, and in a few excruciating seconds he is out.

Part of me is relieved to be alive. Another resents that I now owe Charlie one.

I pick up the gun and swing out the cylinder.

“Two bullets left,” I yell over the alarm.

Charlie extends her hand and for a second I almost hand it to her. But then I shake my head no; she can’t hurt me with a dart but I don’t trust her with a firearm. She can probably take it from me and do anything to me that she likes, true, but I’m not going to make it easy on her.