Now.

  Alice wrenched her wrists apart. The rope snapped with a dry, fibrous crack, the sound of something that had been holding on by habit rather than strength, and her hands were free.

  She didn't think. Thinking was a luxury that belonged to people who had more than one option, and Alice had exactly one. She surged upward, drove her shoulder into Miller's midsection, and wrapped her left arm around his neck before his brain had finished processing the fact that the girl in the corner was no longer sitting down.

  Her right hand found the exposed skin of his wrist, the gun hand she needed to pin. She pressed her palm flat against it and pushed.

  The heat came faster than it ever had in any lesson.

  Miller's skin blistered on contact. The flesh beneath her fingers went from warm to searing in the space between one heartbeat and the next, and the sound he made was not a scream. It was something worse. A raw, guttural shriek tore from the animal part of the brain that existed before language, before thought, before anything but nerve endings and the absolute imperative to make the burning stop.

  "Don't move!" Alice hauled backward, trying to drag him between herself and the room, trying to make two hundred pounds of thrashing man into a wall she could hide behind. Her voice came out high and cracked and nothing like the imperious tone she'd used ten minutes ago. "Nobody move!"

  Miller was not cooperating.

  He was not a target. He was not a hostage. He was a panicked animal with a brand searing into his wrist, and his body was doing what panicked animals did. He was thrashing, bucking, and throwing himself in every direction at once to escape the source of the pain. An elbow caught Alice in the ribs. The impact drove the air from her lungs in a single, involuntary gasp, and her grip on his neck broke.

  He spun. She staggered. The pistol in his belt caught on the buckle as he twisted, tore free, and clattered to the stone floor between them.

  The gun skittered across the flagstones, spinning once, and stopped two feet from Alice's hand.

  She dove for it.

  Her fingers brushed the grip. It was cold metal, oil-slick, the checkered pattern biting into her palm—

  "Hold it."

  The voice was calm.

  The sound of the hammer cocking was the loudest thing in the room. It was louder than Miller's sobbing, louder than the rain, and louder than the blood drumming in Alice's ears. It was a small, precise mechanical sound, and it meant that the distance between Alice and the rest of her life was the width of a trigger pull.

  She froze.

  The Leader was standing five feet away. His arm was extended, the borrowed revolver aimed at the centre of her forehead with the steady, unhurried precision of a man who had done this before and did not find it difficult. The barrel was a dark circle, a period at the end of a sentence. Behind him, the other men had their weapons raised. Two shotguns and a revolver were all pointed at the corner where Florence was pressing herself against the wall.

  Alice's hand hovered over the pistol. Two inches. She could close two inches in a fraction of a second.

  She would be dead in less than that.

  "Well." The Leader tilted his head. His gaze had dropped to Alice's right hand, where the skin was still faintly luminous, the air above it rippling with residual heat. The cherry-red glow was fading, but slowly, and in the dim room it cast enough light to throw small, trembling shadows against the wall. "A mage."

  He said it the way a man might say a forgery or a complication, with interest rather than alarm. The gun did not waver.

  "A budding pyromancer. That puts a whole new price tag on your head, Duchess."

  He gestured with the barrel. A small, tight motion. Wall.

  "Back. Slowly."

  Alice's lungs were burning. Her ribs ached where Miller's elbow had connected, and her right hand was throbbing with the particular, hollow pain that came after pushing heat beyond what her reserves could sustain. She swallowed. The bile sat at the back of her throat, thick and sour, the taste of a plan that had failed.

  She shuffled backward. One step. Two. Her shoulders found the cold stone beside Florence, and the wall took her weight. She stood there with her hands visible and her options exhausted, and the understanding settled into her chest like a stone that she was going to die in this room.

  Miller was on the floor, curled around his wrist, the branded skin weeping fluid. His voice had degraded from screaming to a sustained, keening moan punctuated by bursts of language that were mostly profanity and partly prayer.

  "Kill her," he managed, through teeth clenched so tight the words came out in shards. "Boss. Kill her. Look at my hand. Look what she did. She's a witch. She's too dangerous to—"

  "Calm down, Miller."

  "She'll burn us all! You can't keep her! You can't—"

  "I said calm down." The Leader's voice hadn't changed register. He was still looking at Alice with the same tilted, appraising expression, running calculations behind eyes that were colder than the room. "He has a point, you know," he said, addressing Alice directly, conversationally, as though they were discussing a change in travel plans. "I considered alternatives. Breaking your fingers. Your legs. But pyromancers are tricky. The literature is quite clear on that point. You don't need hands to start a fire, and after that little performance, none of my boys are going to volunteer to get within arm's reach."

  He sighed. It was a genuine exhalation of a man who had been presented with a logistical problem and found the cleanest solution distasteful but necessary.

  "Too much variance," he said. "I'd rather not gamble. And to answer your earlier question regarding the freshness of the merchandise," he shrugged his gun-arm shoulder in a small, apologetic motion. "It seems our Clients are not as particular as I implied."

  The meaning of the words arrived a half-second before the fear.

  Alice felt the blood leave her face. It was a physical sensation, a draining and a withdrawal, as though her circulatory system had decided to abandon the extremities and retreat to the core. The Leader's expression had settled into something that was not anger or cruelty, but simply the face of a man who had finished his arithmetic and arrived at a number.

  "Please." Florence's voice came from beside her, small, cracked, and barely a voice at all. She stepped forward half a step, her bound hands trembling in front of her. "Sir. You don't have to do this. We can—"

  The Leader looked at her. It was a brief look, dismissive, the glance of a man swatting a thought away.

  "A man's got to do what he's got to do, sweetheart."

  He pulled the trigger.

  The muzzle flash turned the room white.

  Alice flinched. Her eyes closed. Every muscle in her body contracted simultaneously, bracing for the impact that would end the bracing. In the fraction of a second between the flash and the expected darkness, she thought of nothing. Not her family, not her name, not the fire she had spent ten years failing to light. The mind, at the end, was emptier than she had expected.

  The darkness didn't come.

  Instead came a sound. Sharp, metallic, impossibly wrong. It was the ping of a hammer striking an anvil, bright and percussive, a sound that did not belong in the same room as a gunshot. Immediately after came a second sound. It was wet, thick, the tearing of something that should not have been torn.

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  Alice opened her eyes.

  Florence was standing in front of her.

  She had moved. Alice didn't know whether it was before the shot, during it, or in the impossible sliver of time between the trigger pull and the impact. But Florence was there, directly between Alice and the barrel. Her body was squared, her shoulders set, her posture carrying the unconscious geometry of someone who had placed themselves in a doorway and intended to fill it.

  There was a tear in the shoulder of Florence's dress. It was a small, smoking hole with the fabric singed at the edges, and through it Alice could see skin that was not skin. The surface was grey and dull. It was metallic. It had the flat, dense sheen of gunmetal, and as Alice watched, it rippled. A slow, liquid shimmer moved across the exposed patch like a shudder before fading, the grey receding, and the flesh returning to its normal colour as though nothing had happened.

  To the right of the table, Jenkins was dying.

  He had dropped his revolver. His hands were at his throat, his fingers sunk into the flesh on either side of his windpipe, trying to hold closed something that would not close. The blood came up between his fingers in dark, arterial pulses. It was not bright red but deep, almost black in the dim light, the colour of blood that had been carrying oxygen a moment ago and would never carry it again. His eyes were wide. His mouth was open. He made a sound that was not a word, and then his knees folded, and he went forward into the dirt, and the sound stopped.

  Florence was staring at the blood.

  Her head had tilted in a small, involuntary motion, taking the angle of someone listening to a sound no one else could hear. Her lips were parted. Her eyes had fixed on the dark pool spreading beneath Jenkins's body with an intensity that did not look like horror. It looked like attention.

  The room was silent. The Leader's revolver was still extended. A thin curl of smoke drifted from the barrel. His composure, which had survived the explosion on the road and the death of Cole and the knife work on the merchant couple without so much as a crack, was gone. His mouth was open. His eyes were moving between Florence and the dead man on the floor, trying to connect the two, trying to build the chain of causality that linked a bullet fired at one girl to a hole in another man's throat, and finding no links that fit.

  Alice did not waste the miracle.

  She did not understand it, and she did not need to. Understanding was for later. For now, there was a pistol on the floor and a man whose eyes were not on her. The distance between those two facts was the distance between dying in this room and not dying in this room, and Alice had always been good at arithmetic.

  She threw herself forward. Her knees hit the stone. Her hands found the grip of Miller's pistol, the one that had skittered free during the struggle and was still warm from his belt. She rolled onto her back, bringing the weapon up with both hands, the sights finding the Leader's centre mass through the curtain of her own hair.

  He was still staring at Florence.

  Alice fired.

  She aimed for his head. Her hands were shaking from adrenaline, exhaustion, and the fine motor control of a girl who had never fired a pistol under suboptimal conditions. The shot went low and left. The bullet punched through the meat of his right shoulder, the gun arm, and the revolver spun from his fingers as the impact threw him backward.

  He hit the wall. He slid down it, his left hand clamping over the wound, his teeth bared, and the sound he made was more anger than pain.

  "Kill them! Fire, you idiots! Fire!"

  The man at the table was standing over Jenkins's body. He was frozen, not with fear but with the particular paralysis of a man whose training had not covered this contingency. By the time his hands remembered the shotgun, Alice had already adjusted her aim. The second shot took him in the chest. He folded backward over the table, his weight dragging a scatter of ammunition and cleaning rags off the surface as he went down.

  The third man, Florence's carrier whose name Alice had never learned, had the other shotgun. He was not frozen. He was not thinking. He simply raised the barrel, pointed it at the girls, and fired.

  The blast filled the room.

  It was buckshot at close range, a spreading cone of lead pellets designed to turn flesh into something unrecognisable. The sound alone was a physical force, a concussive wall that compressed the air and set Alice's ears ringing.

  Florence didn't duck. Alice would wonder about this later, in the small hours of the morning, turning it over and over in her mind like a coin she couldn't identify. Florence didn't duck, she didn't freeze, and she didn't scream. Her body moved forward, not back, with a jerking, mechanical speed that didn't look like Florence. She didn't move like Florence, as though something beneath the skin had seized the controls and overridden the girl at the wheel.

  She stepped in front of Alice.

  The pellets hit her.

  They flattened.

  Florence's skin rippled with that same dull, gunmetal grey, spreading across her chest and arms in a wave that arrived a fraction of a second before the impact and receded a fraction after. The buckshot struck the surface and deformed, each pellet compressing into a jagged disc, the kinetic energy absorbed and dispersed with a sound like hail on a tin roof. Lead fragments pattered to the floor around her feet, misshapen, spent, and harmless.

  Florence looked down at herself. She looked at her chest, which was intact. She looked at the flattened pellets on the floor. She looked at her hands, which were trembling, the grey fading from her skin in slow, retreating tides.

  Alice was already on her knees. The pistol came up. The third shot cracked through the room, and the shotgunner folded, clutching his stomach, and went down.

  The room was quiet for one full second.

  "Got you."

  The arm came around Alice's throat from behind.

  Miller. She had forgotten Miller. He had crawled across the floor, dragging his branded arm behind him while she'd been firing. Now his good arm was locked around her neck, the crook of his elbow compressing her windpipe with a force that turned the world immediately, urgently dark at the edges.

  Her gun slipped from between her fingers. Her hands went to his forearm. She summoned the heat. She used everything she had left, every scrap of mana in her guttering reserves, and her palms blazed against his skin. She smelled it before she felt him react. It was the sweet, nauseating char of burning flesh, the fat rendering beneath the surface.

  Miller screamed. But he didn't let go.

  He was beyond pain. He was beyond reason. He was two hundred pounds of adrenaline and hatred wrapped around her throat, and the burning was just another sensation in a body that had already catalogued so much damage it had stopped filing complaints.

  "You're dead," he was saying, or something like it. The words were muffled, distorted by the roaring in Alice's ears. Her vision was narrowing. The room was a tunnel. The tunnel was closing. "YOU'RE DE—!"

  BANG.

  The arm went slack.

  Miller's weight fell away from her like a coat sliding off a hook. It happened suddenly and completely, the tension replaced by nothing. Alice pitched forward onto her hands and knees, coughing, sucking air in raw, desperate gulps that tasted of gunsmoke and burned skin.

  She looked up.

  Florence was standing over her.

  The pistol was in Florence's hands, the same one Alice had dropped when Miller seized her. Florence was holding it the way a person held something they had never held before and wished they were not holding now, both hands clamped around the grip, the barrel still smoking, her arms rigid and locked at the elbows. Her eyes were enormous. The pupils had contracted to black points in wide, brown irises that were seeing nothing in this room and everything they would see for the rest of her life.

  Behind Alice, Miller was on the floor. The entry wound was centred on his forehead, neat and precise, the kind of shot that marksmen trained for years to make under pressure and still missed. Florence had made it from six feet away while shaking so hard the gun was vibrating in her grip.

  Silence filled the cabin.

  It was not the comfortable silence of a room with nothing to say. It was the ringing, pressurised silence that followed violence. It felt heavy and fragile, a held breath waiting for the next thing to break it.

  "Two mages."

  The voice was wet and strained, coming from the far wall.

  Alice spun.

  The Leader was the last one alive. He was sitting where he'd fallen, his back against the stone, his right arm hanging useless from the shattered shoulder. Blood had soaked through his fingers and down the front of his greatcoat, darkening the wool in a spreading, asymmetric stain. He had retrieved his revolver with his left hand. It lay across his thigh, the barrel pointed at nothing, the grip loose.

  He was staring at Florence.

  "My luck," he said. The bloody grin that split his face was the grin of a man who had arrived at the punchline of a joke the universe had been telling at his expense. "Lead-proof skin and she doesn't even look like she knows how she's doing it. That's just—" He coughed. Blood flecked his lips. "That's comedy."

  His gaze shifted. It moved across the room, taking in the four bodies, the scattered brass, the buckshot on the floor, the brand on Miller's arm, and the smoking hole in Miller's forehead. The arithmetic was simple. He was bleeding out. The girl who could stop bullets was standing between him and the other girl, and the other girl had a gun.

  But the other girl, the pyromancer he called Duchess, was on her knees, coughing, her neck already darkening with the bruises Miller's arm had left. She was between Florence and the wall. If the bulletproof girl needed to move, she would need a fraction of a second.

  The Leader only needed less than that.

  "Goodbye, Duchess," he said, and raised the revolver toward Alice.

  His finger found the trigger.

  The wound came apart.

  There was no warning. There was no sound, no flash, and no visible mechanism. The bullet hole in his shoulder simply opened. The flesh separated, the clotted blood liquefied, and then erupted outward with a force that was not mechanical but vital, as though the blood itself had remembered it was under pressure and decided, all at once, to leave. The torrent hit the wall behind him. The revolver tumbled from fingers that had lost the instruction to grip.

  He slammed sideways. His skull cracked against stone. The room spun, dimmed, and through the grey that was swallowing his vision he saw her.

  Florence.

  She was standing with one hand extended toward him, the fingers spread, trembling. It wasn't just with fear. It was with effort. It was the kind of trembling that came from holding something immensely heavy at arm's length, something that wanted to pull free and could not be allowed to. Around her fingers, the air shimmered faintly, barely visible in the dying light of the room. It pulsed with a colour that was not orange and not white but a deep, crimson red, beating in a rhythm that the Leader recognised, in the last coherent moment of his life, as his own heartbeat.

  Blood magic too, he thought. The observation arrived with the clinical detachment of a man whose capacity for surprise had been exceeded several minutes ago. That would have made me rich.

  His head dropped back against the stone. The ceiling of the cabin was dark, smoke-stained, and crossed by beams that had been old when his grandfather was young. It was not a bad ceiling. He had seen worse.

  He looked at it for a long time.

  Then he stopped looking at anything.