Turns out, when you live in a box, there aren’t a lot of options for hiding or decent cover. I could have tried to curl up inside my wardrobe and hope they somehow failed to check there, but … that probably wouldn’t work.

  Still, when Mela gave me her instructions, I looked at her like she’d just stabbed me somewhere vital.

  “Repeat that for me, please?”

  “I want you to turn over your wardrobe and drag it to this side of the room so we have some cover. Then we need to block the door with your bed,” she repeated slowly.

  I didn’t care that she was looking at me as if seriously doubting my intelligence. I was too busy screeching bloody murder inside my head.

  My wardrobe. My bed. Some of the only things of any worth that I owned.

  That stupid, stupid bed in particular. It was so nice. So fluffy. Lying on it felt like I imagined it would feel like to lie on a cloud… if clouds weren’t collections of the foulest gas that dumped acid on our heads on the few occasions we had any precipitation.

  She wants me to do what with my lovely bed?!

  Then I looked again at the rabid ganger. She was doing her level best not to pass out or puke blood while a bunch of thugs tried to break down my door and kill us both. That made me reconsider my priorities a little.

  Not without snarking, though. Never without snarking.

  I started pushing on the wardrobe, ignoring the screaming threats from the hallway.

  “You do realize,” I grunted, “that this is, like, the entirety of what I own? Like, literally all of it? I fucking love that bed.”

  “Awww, who’s a lost little puppy? You are! Poor little thing. Dontcha worry, we’ll find ya a nice girl to love instead. Or boy. Both? I ain’t judging!”

  “Well I am!” I hissed, then wondered why I was still keeping my voice down. Shrugging, I gave the wardrobe one final push and sent it tipping over onto its side. It landed on the floor of my apartment with a loud clang, the cheap metal ringing like a bell.

  The voices in the hallway fell silent for a moment. Suddenly, I had an idea.

  With the best shit-eating grin I could manage under the circumstances, I started to scream.

  “Please! You have to help me!” I shrieked, pitching my voice to make me sound way younger than I was. “Whoever’s out there, please help! She’s insane! She’s got a knife!”

  Mela glared at me, and I had to bite back some unstable-sounding giggles.

  “What? Maybe they won’t shoot me immediately,” I whispered as sweetly as I could, though my mood immediately soured when she stumbled over to the wardrobe and I realized my bed was on the docket next.

  “Yer one insane kid, aintcha? What did I do to get stuck with you, of all people?”

  “Joined a gang. Saved a kid from getting mugged. Got ambushed by a rival gang,” I counted off.

  Pushing against the frame of my bed, I tipped it over and positioned it to block the door. Not as useful as it would have been had my doors opened inwards instead of withdrawing into the wall, but… beggars, choosers, and all that. A few extra seconds were a few extra seconds.

  Next came the unpleasant task of checking exactly what I had on hand to violently protest the gangers’ invasion of my privacy. Which… wasn’t much.

  I knelt by my backpack and examined my options. My good old Cadmus E-20 had at least five rounds left, though the exact count was lost to me in the haze of fear and adrenaline.

  Meanwhile, when last I checked Jason’s shooter, I’d been confronted by the startling realization that it had only one shot left.

  One. Shot. Left.

  The asshole had brought a massive-caliber gun and a disproportionally small number of bullets to an ambush.

  Not for the first time, I put extra heat into cussing out the idiot in the confines of my mind. We all could have died so easily on that day, and it was mostly his fault. Worse, now his dumb ass was reaching out from beyond the grave to screw me yet again.

  “You look like you’re gonna shit yourself, kid. Everything all right?” Mela’s voice snapped me out of it.

  I hurried over to her, holding out both guns. She raised a brow at me.

  “I’m wondering if they’d be open to vacating my premises if I just threaten with the guns, without having to do the whole shooty-shoot thing.” I flushed at the smirk she gave me. “Ammo is expensive, okay! I don’t have much of it. More like I have six shots between both guns and then we’re dead.”

  “That old Cadmus ain’t gonna do much anyway. How many rounds you got in that other shooter?”

  “One. The previous owner was kind of an idiot I had a violent disagreement with.”

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  “How violent?”

  “Doesn’t matter. He’s no longer around to protest my treatment of his gun.”

  “Ah.” She nodded sagely, or what she probably thought that was supposed to look like. “I approve. One shot ain’t gonna be good for much, though.”

  “Yes, I know that! Any better ideas, or should I just… what? Lie down here and wait to die?”

  “Urgh, I can’t believe I’m gonna die alongside a brat,” she griped, but she did slip her hands behind her back and draw out two guns.

  Both were steel monstrosities about on par with Jason’s shooter, just a lot less glammed out. They were pink. The cutesy kitten symbol was a tad much. Still, they looked way more lethal than my pea shooter of a Cadmus.

  “You need something like this. Here, I’ll give ya one of my babies. I swear, though, if you somehow damage her…”

  She shoved one of the pink shooters into my hands. I was stuck between awe and disgust as I fumbled with it, letting my own guns clatter to the ground.

  The gangers must have finally rallied by that point, because something heavy slammed into my door with incredible strength.

  “How many bullets?” I asked in a hurry, checking the shooter over. It was large, much like Jason’s, but the magazine was bulkier and longer, making it tricky to get a proper grip. Not for the first time, I was annoyed by how much smaller I was compared to others my age.

  “Ten. These beauts are custom! You can typically only find them with five, maybe seven to a magazine. Had to pay premium to get them touched up. The paint even glows in the dark!”

  I had to level another disbelieving look at her. I was trying to cut back on those, but really, she got them out of me like we were at a sale.

  “You have guns that glow in the dark?”

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  “Oh, I don’t know, just that everyone and their half-blind mother is going to know exactly where to shoot if they want to kill you!”

  “Why do ya have to sound like my boss right then, huh? Cantcha just appreciate art?”

  “Because your ‘art’ is going to get us —”

  I was cut off by a loud metallic whine as my door began to fail. Risking a nervous glance in that direction, I could just about make out the edge of the metallic barrier peeling back, letting in the light of the hallway above my bedframe.

  I once more silently wept for the large, glorious bed. Only inside my head, of course, because I couldn’t afford to have tears blur my vision.

  “Again! We’re gonna have that bitch soon!”

  Another bang shook both the door and the bed.

  At that point, neither of us felt like talking much. I was too distracted by my deafening heartbeat to have any energy left for banter. The grim look in Mela’s eyes suggested she wasn’t much better off.

  Another bang, and even more light began to invade my apartment from the outside.

  I began cursing my building’s cheapskate manager. Once, the doors had all been made of solid reinforced steel alloy, strong enough to hold back a small army for a little while. That was stripped away decades before I came along. The only proof those doors ever existed was the way their replacements didn’t quite fit the locking grooves right. The new doors were a bit thinner, a bit shorter, and a lot more flimsy.

  Oh, it was still some kind of metal, but I was seeing firsthand that it couldn’t resist any forceful attempts to gain entry.

  Not that I needed prior proof. I’d come across a few gutted apartments in the building. At each one, the battered doors lay on the ground like corpses, the only silent witnesses of what had happened. The actual corpses were long dragged off by that point, either for processing or for sale. Or, if the apartment’s inhabitants were still alive…

  Didn’t make much of a difference, really. They’d still been dragged off for processing or for sale. They’d just be more miserable while going through the experience.

  “Listen, kid. I know this is a lot. Still, when they get in here, I want you to shoot. This is you or them. Don’t hesitate.”

  Mela’s voice sounded serious and focused for the first time since I’d met her. Surprised, I looked at her. The ganger was gazing at me with such regret that I just stared back, blinking stupidly.

  Then she scowled and punched my shoulder, which effectively broke me out of the daze.

  “Yeah, yes, I get it. Shoot first, questions never. Another day in the slums,” I joked. But from the way she was looking at me, I could tell she didn’t believe I was ready to do what was necessary. Probably thought I froze up at the warning, rather than due to the shock of her suddenly getting her shit together.

  She might have tried to say something else, but it was then that my poor door finally gave up the ghost. It rattled out of its setting with a loud metallic clang. The gangers on the other side must have thought it had more in it, because they stumbled through with loud curses, overcommitting to the strike. Only my bed kept them from pouring through into the apartment.

  They immediately opened fire.

  I wanted to scream as shots were buried into my mattress, but at least they weren’t ricocheting wildly about the space the way I’d seen them do once or twice when I was way too close to a gang shootout than I cared to be.

  “Get the fucking bitch! Get the kid that’s with her too. We’ll have some fun with both before we cut her throat!”

  “Get ready, kid,” Mela whispered.

  Both of us gripped our guns a little tighter.

  For a group that had managed to batter my door down, the gangers took altogether too long to shove the bed over. As soon as their view was clear, they opened fire again.

  Shots thunked into the metal of my wardrobe, and my fingers shook with adrenaline. Then Mela lunged to the right, and her own gun began to fire in retaliation. There was a horrible wet gasp and a scream from the doorway.

  I chose that moment to pop out on the opposite side. The moment stretched, my fear and excitement giving me more situational awareness than I might have expected.

  The gangers had busted down the door and the bed, but most were still stuck in the doorframe. Only one was starting to climb over the bed itself. One ganger had his hand clasped around his neck, which featured a brand new hole in it. Another two were turning their guns on Mela, who was firing on the climber and had clipped his leg.

  I was just about to pull the trigger myself when my view… glitched.

  The gangers’ faces turned into shadowy things with unnaturally wide grins, all leaking some foul substance. Time itself jerked a few seconds forward. Shots were fired, the climbing ganger died, and then the one right behind him put a bullet in Mela’s forehead while his friend fumbled with his shooter.

  Then reality snapped into place again.

  I hurriedly pointed my own gun away from the climber and in the direction of the murderer behind him. I pulled the trigger as quickly as I could, as many times as I could. The first shot missed its mark. But the second blew the man’s fingers off, and the third found its way to his chest.

  His clumsy friend managed to fire back at Mela, but at that point, she’d already put down the climber. She turned her gun on the clumsy ganger, now the last man standing.

  The pink monstrosity roared one last time, and the ganger died with a startled look on his face.

  My vision was swimming. If I wasn’t already lying on my side after throwing myself out of cover to shoot, I would have collapsed.

  Then fingers found my shoulder, shaking me lightly.

  “Kid? You’re okay, kid. Just breathe.”

  I took a deep breath, finding to my surprise that I’d been going without oxygen for a hot minute. As my starving lungs filled with a coppery scent, I managed to start pulling myself off the floor, only to freeze when my eyes landed on Mela’s left shoulder.

  A heavily bleeding shoulder.