Filled the air. Filled his mind. Whatever holy mystery informed Teesa’s weird influence on the kids around them, it was evidently no stronger than their more prosaic sense of self-preservation. The spell shattered the moment the mercenary-woman opened fire. Sparks boiling. The world shaking to every shot. Myq struggled to his feet amidst it all, shoved and shunted, snotting blood down his chin and chest, eyes watering, and tried to work out what the hell was going on. The one-handed woman was shooting at the sky. Blood seething from her ruined wrist and across the floor. He remembered, guiltily, thinking her strikingly attractive in the crazy instants before he was knocked out: coffee brown, fastidiously hairless, features finely-printed but dead. Dead in all respects except the minor matter of being Alive. Like a robot, he’d thought. Not now. Now she was ashen, gloss-browed, eyes heavy and limbs limp. Blood loss, he figured. And weirdly, as if whatever numbing drug she’d taken (what else could it be?) had flushed clear through her open wound, now she was transformed.
