Maksim Maksimov.

Smoke rises from his rifle’s barrel, and he looks just as confused as I must look. I don’t think he intends to be here, which just makes it more annoying. It’s pure misfortune that Alice and I have run into one of the few men capable of beating me right now.

I tuck in again, avoiding a round of rifle shots. Damn, that’s some quick sighting. He’s fast, but my cursed body still has juice left. I cock my rifle while sliding my back along the wall, keeping the woman out of sight behind me.

Maksimov speaks up. “Selfish, entitled war machines.”

He’s moving closer, his rifle still firing five bullets at a time. I’m insanely lucky that Maksim is not as adept with guns as he is with swords, for he could’ve just calculated the angle needed for the bullets to ricochet from the wall and hit me in the face.

He says again, louder, “We want to live too. Why can’t you just follow orders for once?”

Maksim gets closer and closer, but he makes a crucial mistake: he gives me a second to react between his rounds.

Time to strike back.

Just as I’m about to fire, a terrible feeling suddenly envelopes me. Fatigue. My body suddenly turns drowsy like a puppet with a torn cord. What’s going on? I shouldn’t feel fatigued this soon. It must be because I used up some power while fighting him yesterday.

I can’t return fire. I can’t run away. I can’t do anything.

I have pushed both of us into death’s corner.

“Hey,” I whisper to the girl next to me. “You . . . people . . .” I avoid the word woman so Maksim doesn’t know that I’m next to the alleged spy, if he hasn’t found out already. “You people usually bring mirrors with you, right?”

I can’t calculate the exact angles for a rebound shot while my body feels this shitty, but I can at least see the angle with a mirror.

The confusion on her face turns into genuine annoyance. “What? Who told you that?”

“Out of all the things in the book, isn’t that the most plausible?”

Goosebumps pop up on my body as a metallic clank resounds right near us. A grenade! I jump at the girl, press on her and pin her on the ground.

The explosion never comes.

Instead, gray smoke rises everywhere, obscuring my view. Maksim has just thrown a smoke bomb. Why a smoke bomb? Was he that afraid of my enhanced senses that he had to give up his advantage for this? Did he think he could disable my abilities with a layer of harmless fog? I don’t care. I just know that I have a chance now!

I stand up and spring out from the wall. A thick grey veil has enveloped the entire corridor, but I can still sense his presence from a relatively close distance. Maksim’s figure looms over the smoke. There’s his head!

I pull my trigger. Right then, a bullet scrapes past my cheek. We fired at the same time.

When I hear the sound of flesh ripped apart by bullets, I know I’ve hit and he’s missed.

However, he still manages to pull the trigger again. I roll to the floor; by some miracle, all of his shots hit the wall behind me.

I was so sure I shot him in the head. Is he a freaking zombie? Unless . . .

I aim the gun at the shadow’s head, the one that’s supposed to be Maksim’s.

That turns out to be a corpse he’s holding in front of him. I fell for the distraction.

Blood spouts from the meat shield, splattering onto Maksim’s face. He wipes it off, dropping the body in the process.

I realize that the only reason Maksim missed his last rounds was because the blood smeared all over his eyes.

The gray fog has still not subsided, but I can’t wait any longer. I know I’m running out of bullets. I only have one more chance to pull the trigger again, firing another round. I do that.

This time, I hear bullets ripping into skin, a horrid scream, and a man dropping to the floor.

Bingo.

Only then does the smoke start to clear out. I see the man, Maksim, writhing, lying in front of me, one hand covering his eye, the other hand still trying to aim at me. Blood drips through his fingers, which cover his eyes. I might have blinded that eye of his. He’s not dead though.

Next to him, there are a couple of black boxes scattered everywhere. I’ve never seen those boxes before.

The pistol I just looted is still in its pouch. I can’t finish him off. We only have one option left.

“Run, woman! Get up and run!” I dash back and pull the girl to her feet. Maksim lets out a horrid growl, one of a mortally wounded beast. He fires his staccato shots. But we are faster.

I ask as we get farther away from danger, “Are you wounded?”

“I . . . uh . . .” One of her hands clutches her cheek, which is furiously reddened for unknown reasons, while the other hand pulls the jacket over her chest. “No. But Alexei . . . did you see those boxes?”

“Yes. What about them?”

“I brought them here. I need them back.”

Wait. Does this mean those boxes are in the same batch as the prosthetic arm and the ring? There’s a high chance they contain top-notch weaponry. If I can get my hands on them, I can surely—

From the corridor perpendicular to this one, Maksim growls again. Right then, my ears catch the resounding noises of footsteps, hustling like a herd of rhinos running wild.

Fuck. They’re coming for us.

“We can’t retrieve them. We’ll be dead meat.”

“I am told that those boxes are of particular attributes. They are most important.”

“You’re told? So you don’t know?”

She doesn’t reply.

“Important or not, we have to stay alive first. Leave it,” I say, pulling her along, then turning away.

“It is important. Can we retrieve it?”

“What part of staying alive don’t you get?”

“So you can kill, but cannot pick up a box.”

What the hell is that supposed to mean? I don’t have time to read her mind. I pick her up again and start running like a person who has been physically disabled from birth and gets to run for the first time.

“Where are we going? Did you not say that we cannot return to the main corridor?” she asks.

“Yes. But I know of a way out . . . I think. I’m not entirely sure, but we have to make a blind bet on it.”

If I’m not mistaken, there is one more route that can help us get out of here safely and to the mountain road. It sounds like a perfect plan, but I don’t want to take that into account because it’s all just in my head. It’s too flawless to be true. I have only had the chance to go to the place twice and observe everything for a few minutes, and if I persist in following that plan, it is like leaving my life to the chance of a lucky coin flip. But now, it’s the best odds I have.

“Where is it?” she asks. “Where is the way out?”

I take a deep breath. “The path is underneath Commander Artem Dzyuba’s office.”