The beast stopped. It looked at them with a gleam in its eyes that suggested it knew exactly what was happening. Who they were, what they were doing. Like it could understand them and the countdown.

“Six!”

“Time your shots, you want to be empty the moment Marcial is!” Diaz called out.

“Five!”

Valentin and Cox were still silent, still the odd ones out, expressions cold. They paid more attention to one another than they paid to the rest of the room. Exchanging looks.

Where were they from?

“Four!”

His scrutiny of the pair must have been obvious, because Early commented. One of the rookies, fresh-faced, but serious. He’d seen the kid toted around by Bash, a captain in training. “Weird, aren’t they?”

“Three!”

Gilpatrick looked at Valentin and Cox. “Weird how?”

“Even before, Cox’s nametag—”

“Two!”

“It was faded. Read ‘C-p-x’,” Early said, voice quiet. “Ink or marker—”

“One!”

“—painted over the ‘p’.”

“That’s the kind of thing you mention sooner,” Gilpatrick said.

Marcial opened fire, and as much as the room was vast, with fourteen or fifteen sections, the noise was deafening. They had none of the usual PRT or Patrol ear protection. No hats, nothing that muffled. And the walls did reverberate with the sound, making it echo.

And chunks began to fall off the thing. Bullets shattered it like it was made of ceramic, holes drilled in, cracks spreading, and sections falling off.

Except the sections that fell off weren’t anywhere near the part of the body they could see. Ten feet away, eight feet away. Bullets chewed into parts of it they couldn’t see while leaving the part they could see untouched.

“—Typo!” Early said, the first part of his sentence drowned out by the gunfire.

No, I don’t trust that it was a typo they covered up. That’s two bits of weird in short succession. Coincidences in this world get you killed.

Three bits of weird. Cox wasn’t flinching at the gunfire. She didn’t even seem bothered. She was supposed to be a rookie and she seemed less spooked than even Marcial.

He couldn’t dwell on it too much. Marcial was shouting over the din of the gun.

His time to shoot.

The gun fired with a force that jolted up his arms to his chest, made his head move, teeth shifting against one another. He focused, aimed, and pulled back on the trigger.

He’d timed it right. He ran out just about at the same time Marcial did.

Too much time at the range, getting an instinct about that sort of thing, while training his officers.

The silence and the ringing in his ears that came in the wake of the gunshots was their starter pistol, in an upside-down, fucked up kind of way.

The others were shouting, but with the hearing damage he’d sustained from the collective gunfire, they sounded far away.

He stepped beyond the safety of his section of the room, joined Rain. Colt was running over to stick by Rain. Love Lost was near Marcial.