She let the grenade launcher come out because she needed it out.

The gang leader’s grip on the stock was reinforced by the servos in his armor, and trying to pry a weapon from a servo-assisted arm in a pure contest of strength was not something she cared to test.

She had something else in mind. She got both hands on the barrel, the metal hot from firing inside the hub, the drum magazine heavy at the receiver, and she did not pull it toward her.

She pushed. Up and right. Forcing the aim, pointing it at the load-bearing column at the base of the hub’s eastern wall, the one that had been carrying the stress of the fight.

The servos drove back against her. He was large, and the armor made him larger, and the resistance was real.

She put her weight into the turn. His arm moved two degrees. Four. Six.

Enough.

She found the trigger guard with her right hand and pressed his finger into it.

The launcher fired. The round crossed the hub’s interior at close range and hit the column at its base. The column cracked along the horizontal, and the wall section above it lost its support.

The roof had one second to understand what was happening before understanding stopped mattering.

Everything came down. Roofing panels, conduit runs, a walkway section, all of it fell into the maintenance yard in pieces.

It spread across a radius that covered the fuel cylinder housing on the far side, the open ground between, and the doorway where the fight had been.

The gang leader pulled back on the stock, wrenching the launcher toward his chest. His arm made the motion with mechanical certainty.

She let go of the barrel.

She did not need it anymore.

Clippy was in her right hand.

She stepped into his left side, inside the range, inside the distance where his weapon became a liability, the spot she had been working toward since the fight started.

She pressed Clippy’s muzzle directly into the armpit gap against skin.

She fired.

The round entered the shoulder muscle and he made a sound the armored jaw did not fully contain, a guttural compression of breath and pain forced out through the teeth.

He twisted toward the hit. The instinct was wrong, and she moved with it, keeping the muzzle seated in the gap as he turned.

She fired again. Again. Again. Again.

Multiple rounds into the tissue from zero distance, and the muscle had nothing left to give the servo.

The servo kept pulling anyway, the hardware compensating for load the body was no longer supplying, and what that created was an arm holding through machine alone while the flesh inside it stopped cooperating entirely.

"You gonk-" he started.

She found the elbow gap and pressed the muzzle in.

Two more rounds. The elbow bent, and the sound it made was wet and deep.

The sentence he had been building ended without reaching its conclusion. His voice broke into something that was not language.

She holstered Clippy and got both hands on the arm, one above the elbow, one below it.

She turned, using the ruined elbow against the direction the servo was holding it. The mechanism resisted. The tissue could not.

The arm separated at the elbow.

Blood came down across her hands and forearm at once, hot and immediate, the kind of volume that arrives when something under pressure has been opened to open air.

It ran down the arm she was holding and fell from her fingers onto the yard surface in a pool spreading outward from where she stood.

She let the arm fall.

He screamed.

The kind pain forces out when it is large enough that the chrome jaw cannot organize a response before the sound gets out.

He dropped to one knee. The remaining arm, his right, still holding the launcher, came up.

His one biological eye was wet at the corner, and his expression was the expression of someone who had not decided to stop.

Nyx looked at him for exactly one second.

Then she looked across the yard.

The debris from the roof section was still in the air on the right side. Large pieces, heavy, falling at a steady pace.

She observed their positions and moved through the gaps between them, because at the speed she had right now, the pieces falling were not moving.

They were placed. Fixed. Obstacles with positions she could simply not occupy.

Her eyes.

It had come in when she looked across the pipe run and saw the blade at his throat.

It had not come with heat the way fire did, or with the chemical surge of the blue, or with the bestial pull of the crimson.

It had come emotionless, from somewhere under all of those.

What it did to her perception was make everything in the yard very clear and very small and very solvable, except Proxy.

He was not small. He was the one thing in the yard it did not reduce.

Her iris had gone pitch dark. The pupil had gone silver.

She was aware of the debris path, the position of the fuel cylinder housing and the distance remaining between her and the man who was standing next to a woman who had held a blade at his throat.

She cleared the debris field. She cleared the pipe run.

She stopped near them.

The speed ended. The world resumed its pace around her.

Proxy was standing. The assassin was two meters in front of him, with the katana drawn back from where it had been.

Proxy’s handgun was up.

There was a fresh impact mark in the ground to her left. A round had struck there and kicked grit up in a short spread.

His shot had grazed the edge of her ribcage, a line of red across the outer left side.

The round caught skin rather than center mass, not deep, not the wound it had been meant to be.

His throat was intact.

The debt did not cancel. The blade had been there. The debt remained regardless of what the throat currently looked like.

Proxy looked at her eyes.

He moved left without speaking. Out of the line.

Nyx moved in an instant. One second she was there, and in the other she drove her right knee into the assassin’s face.

The knee connected at the bridge of the nose and the orbit below the left augmented eye.

The nose cartilage cracked cleanly under the impact, a wet and definitive sound, and the blood came immediately.

From both nostrils. Down across the chin. Dropping from her jaw onto the yard surface.

The force of the strike lifted the assassin. Her feet left the ground.

She traveled two meters backward through the air and came down on her back against the yard.

The impact traveled through her shoulders and the base of her skull, and the augmented eyes still tracked even from the ground because optical systems do not notice shock the way the body below them does.

The assassin was on her back, and she was already rising.

She was fast.

Nyx had Clippy up and fired three rounds at the path she was taking.

Three rounds that went where she had been and where she was going and where a person at normal speed would have been when they arrived.

All three rounds struck the yard surface in three separate impact marks.

The assassin was not at any of those positions when the rounds reached them.

She crossed twenty meters.

Nyx followed.

The speed activated again, and the yard compressed into a sequence of fixed positions.

The assassin reached the eastern wall and turned.

The wrist engaged with a precise mechanical click, and the blade deployed from the forearm housing in one locked motion.

She turned to face Nyx.

Both of them at speed. The world around them at another.

Nyx had Clippy in her right hand and the knife in her left.

The debt was unpaid, the specific kind that does not negotiate and does not resolve until it is paid.

And it is never the debtor who decides when that is.

Behind the fuel cylinder housing, Jinx had not moved.

She was watching the situation unfold with fear in her eyes.

The assassin’s augmented eyes tracked through blood-covered lenses.

The automated iris adjustments worked without reference to the damaged face below them.

And whatever the tactical overlay was telling her about what stood across the yard with pitch-dark eyes and silver pupils, she had not moved away from it.

They moved at the same time.