Page 118 of Dragon 7

Hiro

The red emergency lights turned the cargo bay into the inside of a fresh wound. Blood-colored light washed over corrugated metal walls. Cargo straps swayed from the ceiling like hanging veins. Long rows of steel crates stretched toward the cockpit, bolted to the floor as if even they feared being thrown into the sky.

Holding the kusarigama in his hand, Akiro stood at the center of it all. His remaining guards fanned around him in a tightening ring. They were the last wall of flesh between us, and they didn’t have guns in their hands.

And behind them. . .pressed into the shadows at the rear, our father crouched low. A gun trembled in each hand.

The Fox. . .for the first time in my life. . .looked like prey.

Tonight, we’ll finally kill you.

The plane climbed.

The floor tilted under my boots.

Wind screamed through the torn-open hatch behind us and dragged at my clothes, and on both sides of the cabin the engine housings rattled in their mounts. Those thin walls vibrated with every rotation of the props.

That stopped me cold.

Now I understood why Akiro’s remaining guards no longer had their guns out.

With these heights, air pressure, and impact of any gun, the walls would be paper. One bad angle, one round through the wrong panel, and we punctured a fuel line or shredded an engine, and then all of us rode this thing into the trees together.

Reo must have instantly come to the same thought.

"Watch your bullets!" Reo yelled over the wind. "We hit an engine, we all die up here!"

Kenji's masked head turned a fraction toward me. He understood at once. He flipped his silver guns in his grip. His thumb found the switch to shut them off, and then he holstered them. "We need this plane in the air until we land it.”

Aki nodded. "Blades.”

“Hands,” Yuki added.

“No bullet spray." I put my gun up.

Reo answered without looking back. "Understood."

The twins answered together. "Understood."

Then Akiro’s guards came for us.

The twins met them first, moving as one animal, the way they always did, two bodies running a single mind.

One went high.

One went low.

The matching kitsune masks gleamed wet red in the emergency light. The lead guard raised the blade in his hand and one twin slid under it and opened the man's thigh while the other twin rose behind him and drove a blade up beneath his jaw.

The guard folded.

The twins were already past him.

Kenji tore off his mask and dropped it on the ground.

Reo came in from the right and attacked two others. His blades did clean, economical work. He opened a throat. He took a wrist. The dim light worked for us and against them.

One panicked and took out a gun anyway. The muzzle flashes blinded. They were white bursts, yet the twins and Reo lived in the space between those flashes.