Tammy brings his hands up to his eyes and forces the lids open. “Hnugh…”
Avi clicks her teeth, “that was a lot faster of a reaction time than I was expecting. Hmm… If we tried it a few more times I sure I could manage to shoot him before he brings up his shield, but that’d be hard to replicate for the real thing. I think-“
Tammy intends to put a finger over her lips, but his body is so sluggish and numb that he accidentally smacks her in the nose with his palm, and presses his finger against her eyebrow. Not that she’s bothered by it. “I… hold on, the clock.”
Avi brings her tail around, wraps it around the clock, then moves it in front of Tammy’s face.
He squints for a moment. “1:01. Okay, go on.”
“I think that, since my senses are dulled in a prophecy dream but I almost got the kill, I’ll be able to do it for sure once we go in for real.”
“But,” Tammy’s words are getting a little strained, “if we can’t do it in the prophecy dream, it’s worthless since we won’t be able to test our escape method.”
“True. In that case, I don’t think we can use this method of just popping out and shooting it in the face. What if I moved to a different box?”
“Its eyes are on the top of its head, and it can see all around. It’ll be able to see you from any angle. Plus, with so many people hostile to the gurant in front of it, it’s probably on edge and cautious, ready to respond to any hostile movement. What if I ran out to provide that hostile movement, then you-“
“No. You’d basically get ripped apart in a firing squad.”
“Alright, but what-“
“No.”
Tammy rolls his eyes. “Fine. We need something that you can do by yourself… What was in those crates we were hiding behind?”
“Artillery shells, I think it said?”
“An enclosed space like that, what if we blew them up? Thousands of rounds of ammunition, underground, it could produce quite the fireball. Plus, nobody would have any way of knowing it was the work of assassins. The authorities would probably think they were improperly handled; an accident. At least until they sift through the rubble and find our wanted posters.”
Avi smiles, “oh-ho-ho? Tammy? You’re fine with incinerating an entire room of unrelated people just to kill one gurant?”
He rests his head on the pillow, looking at the ceiling. “They’re working with the gurant. I won’t be bothered by the deaths of collaborators.”
“Haha!” Avi supportively slaps his chest while kicking her legs back and forth. “Even though that militia is being armed to fight the gurant? If we just let the deal go through, more gurant might end up dying in the long run.”
Tammy shakes his head, “it never works out like that. They’ll only end up fighting the regional governor’s human army. If they killed any gurant in the fighting, it would just be the soldier gurant that haven’t earned a name yet. At least two named gurant, like officers, would need to be killed to make it a net positive. Besides, there’s the principle of it. This toadman is arming them just as a ploy to rise through the ranks in the ensuing chaos. I’d rather just kill it.”
“And if the explosion breaks through the floor and engulfs the black market?”
“…If it’s that powerful, then it might incinerate us too. We’d have to think of a new strategy.”
“Fair enough, so let’s check!”
Tammy’s eyes flash white.
****
“-as a matter of expedience.”
Behind the crates, Tammy and Avi look at each other, then nod. He rubs his hand over the wooden planks that form the crate.
Tammy’s brow narrows, then he taps Avi’s shoulder. “[Can your acid ignite ammunition?]”
She thinks for a second, then inserts her needle in the wood to spray a pouch’s worth of acid into the box, which soon starts sizzling. Smoke billows out from the small gaps between the planks, but there’s no explosion.
The gurant looks over, “smoke?” He quickly realizes that that probably means there’s fire, which will ignite the ammunition. He leaps from his throne and bolts to the door on the other side of the room, breaking through the brittle steel with ease. The gurant’s advisers, guards, and clients are confused at how such a large toadman could run so fast, and curiously look to the smoking crate.
Avi purses her lips and looks at Tammy, who’s frowning at the lack of ignition. But then her eyes light up and she pulls the revolver from her back, pressing the barrel against the crate. It’s loaded with incendiary bullets, perfect for killing a gurant. She waits for Tammy’s approval. He shrugs, and holds his ears.
She pulls the trigger-
****
“AH!” Tammy rises, his brain on fire.
“AAH!” Avi curls up, holding her stomach. “Wh-whoa…” Her body convulses from the disorientation of technically being dead for a moment, yet experiencing no pain due to how instant it was. “I guess my gun c-can explode them.”
“Nhhgh…” Tammy clenches his teeth and moans in agony. Avi rubs his well-developed chest and waits silently for the pain to pass. She has a painkiller serum in her body, but his pain is related to his psychic powers. It’s not something that can be fixed with painkillers. “A-alarm clock, please…”
She leans over him to grab it, then waits for him to open his eyes.
“1:09. This… might be the last one, I think.”
“Yeah!” The tip of her tail rattles. “All we need is to open the door, fall back a little, then I’ll shoot the crate at range, right?”
He nods. “If… hngh, if we don’t die instantly like before, then yeah, that’s all it’ll be. Let’s dive in and see if it works. If it does, we’ll try to escape. Then we’ll do one more dive where we fix any issues with escaping.”
“With the chaos of such an explosion, that should be the easy part.”
“Unless if the warehouse falls down on top of us.”
“Pfft, what are the odds of that happening?”
“Fate doesn’t like being tempted, Avi.”
Avi grows a wide smile, “I bet we’re gonna blow up the room,” Tammy sluggishly tries to cover her mouth, but she keeps moving her head out of the way, and he can’t keep up. “Everyone in the room will die, and we’ll be out of there in no more than two minutes. Real quick, nobody in the black market will even realize anything happened. And THEN we’re gonna come back here and celebrate with a night full of passionate-“
Tammy’s eyes glow white, and they pass out. Her heavy head smashes against Tammy’s face, giving him a bloody nose.
The two are unconscious but aren’t yet sleeping. Tammy’s power basically loosens the connection between their souls and their bodies, which causes their bodies to fall into a psychically induced coma. When the consciousness has fully left their brains, that’s when he can bring their souls into a prophecy dream, and that delay is what causes the passage of time. When they’re pulled out of the dream, their souls automatically reenter their bodies, which causes a sudden resurgence of consciousness.
****
In the pure darkness of the hallway just in front of the tajasteel door, Tammy puts his hands on his face. “Aagh, what the hell’s wrong with my nose?” He twitches his face muscles in discomfort, but not outright pain.
Avi leans in closer and sniffs, he can feel the cool air of her breath against his skin. “You were bleeding.”
“Bleeding? Did we get into a fight? Are you hurt? What happened?”
She pats herself down, “no injuries,” rubs her hands, “knuckles fine,” swipes her tail which results in a rattle, “no serum depletion besides what we used to get here.” She pats her stomach, “huh, weird. I have a fair amount of your blood ingested.”
“Are you sure it’s mine?”
“Haha, of course I am! I’d recognize this excellency anywhere.”
Tammy rolls up his sleeves, “is there anything written on my arms?”
“Hmm, yes,” she nods.”
“…So read it.”
“Says… oh, when we fell asleep that last time, my face landed against yours and I gave you a bloody nose.”
“Ah, gr-“
“And you wrote some pretty crude words describing how I licked all the blood off.”
“Ah, great. Whatever, open the door.”
She reaches forward, grabs the knob, and slowly turns it. When she opens the door, light floods into the hallway, and they can see the stack of crates blocking their line of sight to the gurant and all his minions.
“-train any group of half-brained monkeys to form a coherent militia. You’re here as a matter of expedience.”
Tammy thinks, “I would have grabbed something to keep the door open,” and when he checks his pockets, he finds just that. With a chunk of wood in hand, he taps Avi’s thigh and bends down to wedge it in the small gap between door and floor. With it stuck open, they back up all the way to the hallway’s curve.
From there, Avi pulls out her revolver and aims it at the distant crate. At this distance, she can’t rapid fire though the doorway.
Tammy presses his palms against his ears and stands behind Avi. He’s leaning to the side to watch the results.
Avi squeezes the trigger, and the revolver kicks back. The fireball illuminates the hallway, and the gunshot bashes against their ears. The wooden panel of the crate explode in a small fireball, charred black chunks splintering out in a small cloud of ash, yet the artillery doesn’t detonate. There are gaps between each shelf inside the box, and she just happened to miss. She quickly adjusts her aim and pulls the trigger again. Her barrel lights the hallway, Tammy flinches, and another chunk is blown from the crate, but no detonation.
Avi bites her bottom lip, her tail wriggling in frustration. The gurant has no doubt started to run, so this is her last shot. She fires once more, and finally the end of the hall erupts in a blinding light!
A shockwave of pressure, sound, and heat rips through the hallway, kicking up a firm layer of dust in a visible wave. The wave impacts the couple hard. Avi grimaces as the shockwave hits her heavy, 500-pound body and slides her along the concrete floor. Tammy is blown clean off his feet, slamming against the wall hard, then slides to his butt. There’s a series of secondary explosions as the rest of the ammunition blows like popcorn. If the gurant was inside, he is now dead. He wasn’t wearing power armor so it is completely impossible for him to survive such an explosion. If he managed to escape, it doesn’t matter because Avi now knows where to shoot, so she’ll explode the artillery on her first attempt.
“Tammy?!” Avi screams as she drops her revolver away and jumps to him, falling to her knees and grabbing his shoulders. “Are you okay? Well, obviously not, dumb question.”
“I’m, ungh…”
Avi pats his body down, and Tammy inhales hard when she touches the left side of his torso. “You’ve got two broken ribs.” She brings her tail around and injects his torso with a bone-mending serum. It acts like a cast around the broken section, and will let him move almost normally while the bone heals. “Wanna pull us out?”
He shakes his head, clenches his jaw, and forces himself to stand with only a little help. “I’ll stand further back during the real thing.” He looks towards the shattered concrete doorway. Crackling flames bathe the entrance and reflect off every surface of the hallway. There were a few hundred napalm rounds in the arsenal. “Do you know where to shoot next time? I want the toadman caught completely by surprise.”
“Y-yeah. I know where to aim.”
He takes a deep breath, but his expanding lungs press against his ribs and cause him to wince. “Let’s see how hard it’ll be to escape.” With his head held high and his back straight, he leads Avi through the tunnel, using the reflecting light of the fires as his guide. On the way, Tammy takes out their wanted poster from his pocket and leaves it in the hallway for the authorities to find later. When they reach the staircase, there is no light to greet them. “What’s up there?”
“Uhh… Looks like wood.” Climbing up the stairs, Avi taps her knuckles against a collapsed piece of wall. “Ah, the warehouse collapsed.”
Tammy frowns, “you know, there’s a non-zero chance that that wouldn’t have happened if you hadn’t tempted fate.”
“S-sorry! I’ll get to moving it, right away.” Flexing her arms and back muscles, she presses against the rubble, shifting thousands of pounds of debris out of the way. When she can’t move anything more, she punches the rubble to break it into more manageable chunks. She passes those pieces back to Tammy, who promptly tosses them down the stairs behind them. The black market was built from a four-story tall warehouse, so there’s a lot of broken wood.
“Piece of shit construction,” Tammy groans. “Regardless of how big the explosion was, the entire thing shouldn’t have collapsed like this.”
There are faint gaps in the debris where light peeks through. Avi grabs a board and squeezes it until it snaps. “Hey, since the whole thing collapsed… how many people do you think I just killed?”
“Best not to think about. You killed a gurant, and that’s all that matters.”
“Well… I do want to think about it, though.” She kicks through what used to be the back of a couch and moves the pieces aside. “Gotta be at least a thousand, right? Some are probably alive, just trapped under the rubble, so let’s say 500. That’s a lot! Gotta be a new record for a single bullet, haha.”
There’s a deep pain in Tammy’s gut, far worse than his broken ribs. When they do this assassination for real, Tammy will have his psychic powers. He won’t be able to stop himself from counting the number of souls that fade directly because of his actions. When doing so, he’ll experience all their fears, all their shock. He’ll experience the panic of those trapped under rubble. He’ll feel the desperation of the prostitutes who had to sell themselves to survive—only to die anyway. He’ll know the stolen hope of everyone who came to barter their last possessions to raise enough funds to bribe an official. How many people were in the process of spending their life savings to keep off the conscription registry? How many eager parents were excited to buy their way onto the family registry so they could raise their child without the state stealing them? How many were in the market section and came to buy nearly-expired food for their starving children? As a result, how many children will go hungry with their parent’s dead?
Avi clears a path through the rubble without sparing a thought for any of these issues, but Tammy knows well what he’ll experience in a few hours.
Tammy sneers, “I’ll count the number of innocent lives snuffed out later, if it really interests you.”
“Thanks!”
Avi lifts a flat section of metal wall for her husband. Before he leaves, he takes off his tunic and ties it around Avi’s waist. She coils her tail beneath it, and then they leave the pile of rubble together.
The morning air is hot and bright as the fire spreads. A crowd assembled around the pile of wood and sheet metal that used to be the warehouse. Some are standing by and watching it burn while others are trying to dig people out of the rubble. The shockwave spread far and shattered the glass of every car and building for at least a quarter of a mile. Some unlucky citizens who were standing outside got hit hard by the explosion and broke bones.
A man runs up to the couple, “are you okay? I saw you crawl out of that mess!”
Tammy coughs, “we’re fine. She’s tough.”
The man nods and runs off somewhere else.
“Yep, I’m tough,” she pats her bicep, then turns around and walks backwards, admiring her work. “That was all me!”
“Don’t say that too loudly.”
“Teehee, sorry.”
The back of the warehouse, above the basement where the gurant’s arms deal occurred, is a crater full of concrete and wood, a blazing inferno. The explosion destroyed the ceiling and broke four stories worth of warehouse instantly. Some pieces were sent flying far into the surrounding area, but most of it collapsed back in on itself, creating plenty of kindling for the napalm to ignite.
The empire doesn’t spend much in the way of first responders. No firemen will arrive, the collapsed warehouse will continue to burn until it runs out of fuel. No ambulance will come to save the injured unless they’re rich enough to pay.
Avi smiles and sways back and forth as she walks next to her husband. But when she looks, there’s a faint hint of distress on his face. “Still in pain? You can probably pull us out now, it doesn’t look like anyone will trouble us.”
“I’m fine.”
“Hmm…” Avi circles around her husband as he walks. “No, that’s not it… Aaah. You’re upset about all the non-gurant deaths.” She puts her hands on her hips and shakes her head, “fine, fine. It’ll mess with my stats, but I can go over and pull some bodies out, if it’ll make you feel better.”
Tammy sighs, deflated. “Your stats? Really? Those are human-“ he shakes his head. “Forget it, it doesn’t matter.”
Avi frowns, then grabs his hand and pulls him around to face her. She holds both of his hands together, while his glossy and empty eyes are locked on the ground. She’s only two inches taller than him, but with how much he’s slouching, she’s towering above him. “Hey, come on… It does matter. It matters to you. I don’t,” she pauses for a moment, “I don’t really need to kill a whole lot of people. It doesn’t matter to me, honest! We should focus on the gurant, right? Everyone in that arms deal is gonna die, that’s pretty set in stone, but what if we… how about we set a fire in the warehouse? Right? A big fire and everyone will start evacuating. When the explosion comes, most people will already be out, right?”
“…Yeah. That makes sense.”
“Exactly! So one more dive to make sure.”
Tammy pauses for a moment, then his eyes flash a slightly-more-hopeful white.
****
Tammy can’t open his eyes anymore. All his senses are on fire. The cars driving by outside pierce his eardrums like a needle. His wife sleeping atop him is crushing his ribcage. The blanket against his skin feels like razor wire. Every thought causes pain to shoot out from his brain in pulses, but the worst pain is from his nose.
Avi opens her eyes slowly. “Haaaaa-lright,” she yawns. “No need to look at the alarm-oh!” The scent of Tammy’s blood hits her. The nosebleed has stopped, but it’s caked on his lips, chin, neck, soaked into his clothes, and there’s a bit of blood on her face too. Without a second thought, she starts licking.
To Tammy, her tongue feels like sandpaper that’s slowly tearing off his skin.
By the time she’s finished, the pain has subsided enough that Tammy can reach over and grab the alarm clock. “1:24.” There’s dried blood in his nostrils, so he’s breathing from his mouth. “Last dive… I’ll bring us to just after you beat up… the first guards…”
His eyes flash white.
****
Avi finds herself standing over the four unconscious occupants of the room. She looks at the door and sees a small amount of hardened red foam bubbling out of the keyhole. Tammy is in the corner of the room, hard at work using a screwdriver to empty the gunpowder out of his bullets.
Avi comes over and stands behind him, hands on her knees as her tail swishes back and forth. “How long should we wait for the fire to spread before I shoot the artillery?”
“I’ll have my psychic powers in the real run of this, so I’ll be able to tell you if the gurant is about to flee. It’s like a bunker down there though, it shouldn’t know there’s an inferno above its head unless someone tells it. So we’ll wait as long as we can.” Tammy glances over his shoulder at the unconscious bodies. “When I start the fire, kick a hole in the wall and throw the bodies out. That’ll give them their best chance at living.”
Avi frowns, “what if it turns out they’re working for the gurant?”
“They’re still people, Avi.” His voice is so calm and patient, it sends a shudder up her spine. “Maybe working for the gurant was the only way they could survive. I won’t begrudge them for that.”
“You seem really selective with who you begrudge, but very well. Love you, Tammy!” She affectionately wraps her tail around his waist as he finishes piling kindling and gunpowder.
When the pile is spread around the corner, he takes a match that he planned to grab, then sets it alight. The gunpowder sizzles, smokes, and sparks, then the fire quickly spreads to the kindling beneath. From there, it soon spreads to the old, dry wood of the warehouse.
“That’s spreading faster than I figured. Kick out the wall and throw them out!” He yells as thick black smoke billows up to the ceiling.
Avi runs to the metal wall and throws herself against it, falling to the ground outside and leaving a large hole behind her. There are hundreds of unrelated civilians standing out there, watching the commotion. “F-fire!” She yells. They’re stunned for a moment, then quickly see the flames behind her. It’s mostly a panic after that. People running in every direction, grabbing their goods if they had any to barter, screaming fire this way and that.
Tammy grabs two of the guards by their legs and pulls them to the hole. Avi throws them out before quickly grabbing the other two. Hopefully a good Samaritan comes by to move them further from the warehouse, but that’s up to fate. Avi charges into the bookcase and plows straight through the books and wood, losing her balance and tumbling down the hard, concrete steps. She’s tough though and doesn’t get more than a few cuts.
“Smooth,” Tammy says as he runs down after her, pulling an undamaged flashlight from his pocket.
“I-I’ll do it better in the real run.”
She picks herself up and runs at Tammy’s side down the curved hallway. There’s a distant crackling behind them, and the hallway is slightly warmer than usual. Beyond that, there’s no indication that anything is wrong.
They reach the door, and she carefully opens it.
The gurant’s voice fills the hallway along with the light. “-contingent on you following my orders. I don’t want a prolonged quagmire against the regional governor, I’m funding you to launch a sudden, climactic assault.”
The insurrectionist leader frowns, “very well, my lord,” he says with an overly polite tone. “Whatever you say. Your guns, your rules.” It’s clear he doesn’t intend to do what the gurant says.
By this point, the couple has already wedged the door and moved back to the curve. This time, Tammy is on the ground, curled up with his ears covered, ready for the shockwave. Avi has her revolver trained on the crate. She can faintly hear the gurant’s booming voice as he discusses terms with his clients. So long as he’s talking, he’s in range of the explosion.
Before long, a man runs into the storehouse from the door on the far side, “f-fire! There’s a fire upstairs!”
The gurant considers the danger and all possible options in a fraction of a second. If the fire is part of an assassination plot, what could it mean for him, and his best options for surviving. But gurant are inherently selfish and sociopathic, it’s impossible for him to consider that the fire is to draw away civilians. He decides that the most logical course of action is that the fire is to draw him to the second warehouse for a trap, so he should cautiously head up the third hallway and meet the trap head on.
Avi can’t know that he plans to stay for longer, so rather than risking him escaping, she pulls the trigger and ignites the artillery. The warm shockwave throws her to the curved wall, and slides Tammy a few inches along the floor. A moment after the initial explosion, the end of the hallway is quickly buried in thousands of tons worth of concrete rubble and flames. Even if the initial blast didn’t kill him, being crushed by rubble would do the job.
“Definitely dead!” She yells.
Tammy groans, “that still hurt even when laying down…” He slowly pushes himself to his feet. “Let’s get out of here.”
Avi doesn’t need to grab hold and lead him through the hallway, but she does anyway. It’s easy going, until they reach the stairwell and see a wall of flame at the top.
“Err, that’s a problem,” Tammy says.
“Why? This is a concrete hallway. No flames in here, and smoke isn’t coming down. Let’s just wait for the fire to die out.”
“There’s fire on both ends and there weren’t any air vents. We’re going to suffocate.”
“Ah. Maybe we won’t?”
“That’s a big maybe.” Tammy presses his back against a wall and slides down until he’s sitting. Avi quickly joins him, their shoulders touching. “The plan to get people to evacuate might not be possible if we want to live.”
“And we do.”
“It probably won’t make a difference if we start the fire somewhere else, assuming we even could.”
The air is already getting thin.
Avi looks up at the flames. “There’re loads of tiny gaps between the wood. Maybe I could carry you and burst straight through?”
“I can feel the heat from here, we’d melt if we tried that.”
“Hm… I don’t have the materials needed to make a stasis serum, where our hearts and brains would stop. My paralysis serum would still require us to breathe.”
Tammy grabs his chin, “we’re definitely too far underground for your acid to chew it’s way to the surface.”
“How about if I made oxygenated blood? Or just concentrated oxygen, and injected it directly into our lungs?”
“Could you store a big enough supply for you to last a few hours?”
“Uh, I’d need enough for you too.”
“I could leave the warehouse through the hole you kicked in the wall. You’re the one who’s going to shoot, there’s really no need for me to be down here.”
Avi pouts and crosses her arms, “I don’t really want to be down here by myself for so long.”
Tammy rolls his eyes, “then can you store enough concentrated oxygen for us both to last several hours down here?”
“…Probably not.”
Tammy speaks through clenched teeth, “can you store enough for just yourself? If the options are you sitting in a hallway for a few hours, or directly killing some 500 people by avoiding the fire method, then sorry, but you’re staying down here.”
She stares at him for a second. “…What about an oxygen mask?”
“A what?”
“We smuggle in two oxygen masks with enough storage to outlast the fire, and then we sit down here together until we can leave!”
“Do you know where to find two oxygen masks?”
“I think I saw one in the market earlier.”
Tammy sighs, then coughs as it’s getting harder to breathe. “1. How do you suggest we pay for them? 2. You ‘think’ you saw one?”
“1.” Avi says forcefully, leaning in close. “We can just steal it. 2. Yeah! Sure.”
Tammy’s sharp, icy blue eyes stare at her for a moment, and Avi ruby eyes stare back. It’s hard for her to maintain eye contact under the pressure of his intense gaze, and she keeps glancing off to the sides.
“F-fine!” Avi gives up. “I’ll sit in the stupid hole for an hour! But you better talk to me telepathically when I’m down here.”
“Deal.”
“A-and, AND! I want you to come into the shower with me later to wipe off the soot and ash.”
“Fi-“
“And I don’t want you to complain while we’re in there!”
“Alright already!” Tammy starts coughing, he can barely choke down enough air.
Avi sucks down a big gulp of oxygen. “…and I want you to wake me up tomorrow with a good morning kiss. On the lips.” With that, her oxygen supply is out, and she can’t breathe anymore. She can hold her breath for up to 15 minutes, but breathes out so she can die alongside her man.
The veins on Tammy’s forehead bulge. He forces himself to speak, his voice higher pitched than normal. “You get one or the other.”
“…” She thinks for a moment, but they both pass out from suffocation before she can reach a decision. A minute later, the brilliant white of Tammy’s eyes overpower the orange-red glow of the two fires.
****
Tammy’s bloodshot eyes open, and he stares at the blurry ceiling without blinking.
Avi’s eyes open, “okay, I definitely want the shower.” Focusing on that dilemma kept her soul from experiencing the disconnect of having died in the prophecy dream.
“Get. Off.” His voice is strained, and Avi does as she’s told. His movements are stiff, but he flips his blanket off and swings his legs off the edge of the bed. Every muscle in his body aches with a sharp, stabbing pain, but he grabs the alarm clock regardless. “1:37. Get dressed. Start making that oxygen serum.”
“Don’t you want to wait until you feel better?”
Tammy doesn’t respond. It feels like his joints are cracking under the pressure of his own weight, but he forces himself over to his bag and digs out his clothes. Even a simple shirt feels like ton, and the rough fabric might as well be crisscrossed with needles.
Avi pouts, then whips her tail around and injects Tammy in the lower back with her fast-acting paralytic serum. Getting stuck with a long needle in his current state nearly makes him pass out from the pain alone, and it’s a testament to his willpower that he doesn’t scream.
“What are yough dogignggnd…” His voice trails off as his body goes numb. Avi rushes over and scoops him up, throwing his limp body back onto the bed. The impact on the mattress makes him want to cry.
“We don’t have to leave right now. It doesn’t take that long to reach the warehouse, and we have time to spare. I won’t give you the antidote until you’re better.”
Tammy speaks telepathically. “[I’m fine, I promise.]”
Avi walks over and sits on his stomach. She weighs over 500 pounds and it would be painful regardless, but with how he is now, the pain is similar to being shot with a rifle or being eviscerated from the belly button out with foot-long claws. Both are things he’s experienced in prophecy dreams.
“Considering that you haven’t told me to get off, I assume you’re too busy screaming internally.” She stands, then walks to her bag to find her clothes. “Tell me when you regain consciousness, I need to drink a lot of water for that oxygen serum.”
They end up leaving with time to spare, and the plan works perfectly. Tammy stands in the crowd and telepathically keeps Avi company as she sits in the hot tunnel, regularly injecting her lungs with small doses of concentrated oxygen. The flames run out of fuel after two and a half hours, she leaves behind their wanted posters, and she’s finally free to leave the tunnel.
With just one bullet, Avi kills a gurant, incinerates the other 40 people in the room, destroys six months worth of smuggled artillery shells, and regrettably kills another 13 civilians who either couldn’t make it out of the warehouse in time or were standing too close to the explosion.
The authorities find their wanted posters and know who to blame. Of all the criminals and dissidents in the thousands of worlds of the Gurant Empire, Tammy and Avi have some of the largest bounties. The state quickly covers up their involvement by having four state agencies and 11 different terrorist groups take credit for the explosion. They secretly send agents to comb the city in search of the two, but they’re already gone, in search of another gurant to kill.
Tammy breaks his end of their deal. He complains the entire time he’s forced to help wash the soot and ash out of her hair.