The locked-up immobility dissolved. Faster than anything I’d seen since combat on Sanction IV. Something in me was expecting it, and I still missed the exact moves. She seemed to flicker like something from a badly edited virtuality, sideways and gone. I closed on the little group, combat rage funnelling my synthetic vision down to targets. Peripherally, I saw her reach back and fasten on the officiator’s wrist. I heard the crack as the elbow went. He shrilled and flapped. She levered hard and he went down.

A weapon flashed out. Thunder and greasy lightning in the gloom at the bar rail. Blood and brains exploded across the room. Superheated globs of the stuff splattered my face and burned.

Mistake.

She’d killed the one on the floor, let the others alone for time you could measure. The nearest priest got in close, lashed out with power knuckles and down she went, twisting, onto the ruined corpse of the officiator. The others closed in, steel-capped boots stomping down out of robes the colour of dried blood. Someone back at the tables started cheering.

I reached in, yanked back a beard and sliced the throat beneath it, back to the spine. Shoved the body aside. Slashed low through a robe and felt the blade bury itself in flesh. Twist and withdraw. Blood sluiced warm over my hand. The Tebbit knife sprayed droplets as it came clear. I reached again, dreamlike. Root and grab, brace and stab, kick aside. The others were turning, but they weren’t fighters. I laid open a cheek down to the bone, parted an outflung palm from middle finger to wrist, drove them back off the woman on the floor, grinning, all the time grinning like a reef demon.

Sarah.

A robe-straining belly offered itself. I stepped in and the Tebbit knife leapt upward, unzipping. I went eye to eye with the man I was gutting. A lined, bearded visage glared back. I could smell his breath. Our faces were centimetres apart for what seemed like minutes before the realisation of what I had done detonated behind his eyes. I jerked a nod, felt the twitch of a smile in one clamped corner of my mouth. He staggered away from me, screaming, insides tumbling out.