Shadow Unit 15 by Emma Bull, Elizabeth Bear

skips a beat in relief when the larger turns sideways against the hellish glow of the emergency exit sign. She'd know Brady's Robert Redford profile anywhere.
    She reaches out to find Brady's phone—she doesn't need a network this close—and pings it.
    He raises it without looking away from Saito, and she knows what he reads. I'm in your six.
    "Stop," he says, and Saito stops. Brady steps back, creating a triangle and putting Saito in between them now. Hafidha walks forward, leaving her gun low. As she comes up, Brady's eyes widen and Saito smirks.
    So much blood all over her.
    "So," Saito drawls—he learned his delivery and most of his dialogue from every crappy horror movie you've ever seen, "kitty found a plaything? I told you monsters don't get better, Danny-boy."
    Brady doesn't shift his focus off Saito, but she knows he's seen her. And all that blood. "Motherfucker, Hafidha. What did you do? "
    It stings. Even though she knows she deserves it— Fuck you, Bug: it's you that deserves it, not me .
    "Hakes is out. He got Kat and Sam."
    "Danny," Saito says. "Are you going to believe that?"
    "What happened to Rufus?" she asks, ignoring Saito and his rattlesnake tongue. Ignoring the fact that Brady's eyes shift, for just a second.
    Brady says, "Don't know. Total fear response. I couldn't move him and keep control of Jason, here."
    "You have something to do with that, Saito?" Hafidha asks. "New manifestation? Practicing up?"
    He shrugs. His shackles rattle. "Would you believe me if I said no?"
    "I'm taking him back to his cell," Brady says. "Or I was—"
    Something tickles in Hafidha. Sharp pain. Panicky. A splitting murder behind her eyes. She doubles over, nearly jerks her hands up to her face. Remembers Leon's Glock at the last second, keeps her hand down, gives herself a cookie for decent trigger discipline. Massad Ayoob and Solomon Todd would be proud.
    Fear now, so much fear. Blossoming. She feels like a car in neutral with the accelerator pressed. Roaring, and going nowhere.
    She wants to run. Curl up. Throw herself into a corner and die. Hide under a bed, a desk. Anything.
    Shoot it. Shoot everything. There's a gun in her hand. There's a threat right in front of her. A threat that is moving. She hears the clink of his chains. His silky, silky voice.
    The monster comes toward her. Shut it up, shut it up, shut it—
    Vaguely, she hears grunts. Struggling. Heavy footsteps. Brady makes a noise of pain.
    Blindly, groping, the fingers of her right hand find her left wrist. She hooks them through the elastic, pulls, snaps. Zap.
    Revision 1.21a.
    And it is gone. The pain. the fear. Everything. Everything is slick and harmless and ironically interesting and so, so distant and cool. She looks up, a wary animal, and finds herself staring right into Jason Saito's eyes.
    His wide, incredulous eyes. His nose inches inches from hers. He'd been leaning in, she realized. Captivated by the aroma of her fear.
    Behind him, she glimpses Brady on the floor, heaving one knee under himself. Doubled over as he rises.
    "Shit," Saito says. "You're just like me."
    She pistol-whips him with the barrel of Leon's gun.
    He staggers back, clutching his broken cheekbone—even a gamma notices another gamma's blow. And she would have been on top of him, swinging again, but Brady beats her to it. Barrels into Saito, scoops him up, lifting the smaller man on tiptoe and swinging him around. Hand to hand with a gamma. Hafidha sees Saito bent over, his neck locked under Brady's arm.
    "Danny," Saito says, "you wouldn't hold it against me, would you?"
    She doesn't follow the next move, exactly. But Brady goes down hard—a backward shoulder roll over Saito's head. And Hafidha Gates thinks that if she lives to be a thousand—world's oldest metabolic freak—she'll never get over the sound of Saito's skull hitting the floor, and the crunch of bone that comes with it.
    Brady heaves himself up and shakes Saito by the head like a dog murdering a stuffed giraffe.