‘Fine,’ I replied. ‘Kara, it is a game. An obscene hunting game. We have to find this girl, whatever she is, before they do.’

‘Understood. Absolutely.’

Kara was about a third of a kilometre away to my right.

‘I’ve got a drone active in your vicinity,’ Carl told her over the link.

Kara acknowledged, and glanced around. That was when the two hunters, twins clad in silver-grey skin sleeves, pounced. One pinned her arms from behind, the other came at her with a chainfist. She rolled her body back, using the man pinning her as a back-brace, and bicycle-kicked the other in the face. He went over in the rubble, rolling.

But the man pinning Kara from behind rammed forwards and headbutted her in the back of the skull.

+Kara!+

Even at that distance, I felt her pain, and sensed that she had blacked out. They’d have her gutted before she could come round.

I knew I had no choice. I had to ware her. It wasn’t something she – or anyone else I knew – enjoyed, but it was necessary. Besides, we had trained for this. Kara Swole was a particularly receptive candidate.

The wraithbone pendant around her neck lit up with psychic energy. Kara’s body suddenly animated again, but it was me moving her. I had taken her physical form over, put it on like a suit of clothes.

Blank-eyed, Kara’s body twisted hard and broke the pinning hold. She tore clear, landed well, and swept out the legs of the hunter with the chainfist so he went over on his backside.

Then she turned, raising a forearm block against the other’s attack, following the block with two rapid jabs to his face and a side-stamp that caught and dislocated his right knee.

He howled in pain. Kara/I grabbed his flailing arms and swung him bodily around right into his partner, who was returning to the fight for the second time.

The partner’s forward-thrust chainfist, which had been sweeping at Kara/me met the ribs of his fellow hunter instead. The whirring bite-blades of the gauntlet weapon punched clean through the man’s side in a shocking welter of blood and torn tissue. He screamed as he died, his whole body quivering in time to the rending vibrations of the glove’s cycling blades.

His partner and accidental killer screamed too: in outrage and horror at what he had just done. He wrenched the glove out, but it was too late. His twin, a huge and awful excavation yawning in the side of his torso, stopped quivering, and dropped. A film of blood covered everything in a five-metre radius.

Berserk, the remaining hunter hurled himself at Kara/me. We leapt, boosted by a touch of telekinesis, and executed a perfect somersault over his head.

He swung around. But by then Kara/I had grabbed up her fallen riotgun. Her puppet hand racked the slide. A single, booming shot blew the hunter backwards eight metres.

We heard a sound behind us, and turned, bringing the pumpgun up. ‘Steady!’ Nayl warned.