The Atlas Six (The Atlas, #1)(34)

“Good, and we’ll check the access points—”

That was about as much Nico had the patience to discuss when it came to logistics. By then his arm had gone a little numb, probably because his mind was leaping ahead to the prospect of fending off intruders.

He had been very, very good at the physicist tournament. Voted MVP four years running, in fact, and as good as Libby may or may not have been (fine—she was, but still), she had never once beaten him. Nico had a taste for adrenaline, and besides, he had to see someone about a bullet wound. In his not-so- humble opinion, he was rather richly owed.

“Come on,” Nico called to Reina, leaping atop the gallery’s bannister and beckoning her after him into the hail of gunfire below, shielding himself with a hand outstretched. “Meet you down there.”

“Varona,” Libby sighed, “you do realize there are stairs—”

He wasn’t listening. Shots were fired, surprise surprise, but he was ready for them now. He slipped one as easily as he might have ducked a punch, catching the uniform that suggested he’d been right; this was some sort of military task force. Fun! Exciting. All of them against him; how terribly unfortunate they hadn’t thought to bring a party twice as large. He curled the floor in slightly, funneling them all into an invisible drain. Better that way, to see how many. He counted six and smiled to himself, returning the floors to how they’d been. The gunmen stumbled, then shot towards him.

It was Reina, to Nico’s surprise, who took aim first, sending a bolt of something very crude but very fast into the chest of an oncoming gunman. It knocked the wind out of the gunman, sending the butt of his rifle flying into the face of his comrade. By the sound of his swearing, Nico guessed American, maybe CIA. That, he thought with a shiver of anticipation, would be very exciting indeed. He had never been important enough to merit assassination before.

More shots were fired, which certainly wouldn’t do; one bullet wound was plenty. After waiting a moment to take the impact through a temporary shield of his making, Nico took hold of the nearest gunman and aimed him in a circle, prompting the others to launch themselves behind the aristocratic furniture for cover. A little tug of gravity out from under them sent them floating in slow motion, the rifles drifting from their hands. Nico summoned their weapons and disassembled them with a single, explosive blow, sending the components flying like shrapnel as the ordinary forces in the room returned.

There, he thought. Now let’s really have a fight.

Reina seemed to be managing well enough with hand-to-hand combat; Nico caught a glimpse of her from the corner of his eye. She moved like a bull, attack after attack, and the force of her blows remained unfinished but heavy, unmistakable. He was a bit more finessed, more agile. The first gunman, now armed with a small utility knife, came for him with a blind overhand right hook, which Nico happily ducked, sending the gunman stumbling with a loud slur of profanity.

That, Nico thought, was certainly British English. CIA and MI6, perhaps?

How flattering.

Reina handled two of the gunmen, landing a hard but accessible shot to immobilize one thigh while Nico narrowed the remaining four men to three, twisting the gunman’s knife around for a blow to the kidney. He brought three to two with some tricky shots to the head, dazzling with a few careless jabs before shooting upwards with an uppercut, snapping the gunman’s neck back. All it took was a little precision to guide his non-dominant, uninjured hand.

It made sense, really, that whoever was trying to break into the Society would not have sent an entire company of medeians. Surely they knew what sort of security measures they were trying to breach, and a pack of special operatives could conceivably do just as much damage without sacrificing a drop of valuable magical blood. Yes, they would have to be accompanied by a medeian to break the security wards, but nobody Nico was facing now was dangerous unless he allowed them to be. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he wasn’t particularly in the mood to be killed.

The two remaining gunmen weren’t stupid. They attacked side by side, making Nico the point of an isosceles triangle; a basic tenet of two-on-one combat, and therefore easy enough to predict. As was Nico’s decision to force them into an Orion’s belt, sprinting towards one while firing a blast of force at the other. For Nico, magic was merely an augmentation of his natural aptitude; he was sure-footed, well-balanced, compact and quick without any help from his powers, which would need to be preserved as much as possible. He could waste it, ending the fight sooner and requiring more time to recover, but he knew better than to do something short-sighted. These men may not have been magical, but someone here was, and they would surely prove it soon enough. Nico intended to be ready when they did.

He used only enough to give his blows the equivalency of electrocution, sending one gunman (now fully disarmed with the help of a summoning charm and the burying of the gunman’s own knife into the muscle of his quadricep) stumbling backwards, temporarily immobilized, while the other shot forward, missing Nico by an inch.

Nico, regaining control of the gunman’s knife, slipped just in time to avoid a shot aimed for his wounded shoulder—which, he supposed, was a bit of a giveaway as a pressure point, seeing as it was currently covered in blood. Luckily, his reflexive counter led his opponent directly to the spot of difficulty he’d hoped for, and his next slip, calculated to intercept the gunman barreling forward from behind him, caused the second gunman to make contact with the first.