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40. Naifu – Not Quite Dead

She lay on her back. She could hear noises, but they didn't match what she knew was happening. She couldn't see. Her neck hurt, but not in the right way. The voices around her weren't saying the right things either.

"Don't think you're leaving early, Turk."

"Yeah, you got special invitations to this party."

"Is the girl dead?"

"Gotta be. Alejandro cut her up pretty bad."

"Check her."

"You check her."

"I told you to do it."

"Look, you check her pulse while I take care of this guy."

Someone touched her. She didn't respond. They got off on begging for mercy. If she stayed silent, maybe they wouldn't take her to the cellar too.

"I can't tell if she's breathing."

"So check her pulse, dingis."

Someone groaned. The voice was familiar in a different way. Her conscious mind surfaced for a moment: she wasn't in Old Corel, she was in Midgar, and the injuries she could feel weren't the ones she expected to feel. Her mind was so mixed up that it hurt to think, but her body didn't hurt the same way. She couldn't understand the signals being sent to her brain. It would be so much easier to go to sleep and not wake up again.

"Shit, he's coming round!"

"After you hit him that hard? The guy must have a skull of steel!"

She forced herself to pay attention.

"Hit him again. Quick, hit him again! Use the pipe this time. It doesn't matter if he dies. Alejandro said it doesn't matter."

"But Shinra will…"

"Just do it before this guy wakes up and kills us!"

Shinra. Alejandro. Her brain roiled but these things stuck. Rod. Legend. And her …

"Sureshot! Naifu! Adrienne!"

Three names for one person.

Me.

Her eyelids flickered. Shapes moved above her: two figures advancing on a prone form she recognised. Pieces of information welded together to form a coherent whole. The jigsaw didn't fit completely, but she melted off the corners and enough stuck for her to tell what was going on: Legend was going to die if someone didn't stop it from happening.

Me.

Her mind snapped into a curious kind of focus. She rose, not needing to push or grapple her way to her feet. A suit jacket nearly slipped off her until she caught it and pushed her arms through the sleeves, buttoning up the front like it was perfectly normal to be covering your own nakedness in a slum alley, under the Plate, at night. Muscles that should have been too badly damaged to work somehow flowed into their natural movements. Her body moved with a clarity that was nothing to do with nature and everything to do with her unnaturally singing veins. The place where the Phoenix Down had touched her fizzed as it interacted with the drug cocktail. Pain didn't matter anymore. She didn't know how she moved from one position to another. It should have hurt but it didn't. She should have been incapacitated, but chemicals and sheer resolve drove her to do the impossible. She had lost people before because she was too scared and hurt to keep them from dying. Not again. Never again. Even if it broke her, she would not let it happen again.

"Leave. Him. Alone."

The two figures turned. Both had tattoos across their cheekbones. More memories came to her: Carlito on the monorail platform, her knives, her suit, the Turks. She was a Turk. She wasn't a victim anymore.

Time to stop acting like one. The thought arrived in her head fully formed and strangely serene. She was angry but she didn't sound it, even to herself.

"I thought you said she was dead!"

"I thought she was! She looks like a fucking corpse, man!"

"Forget this guy – hit her!"

She focussed. They were kids. That didn't mean anything. She had been a kid when she was left for dead next to the bodies of her family. Being young didn't absolve you of things you did. If you were old enough to feel pain, you were old enough to know not to cause it in others.

"Bad idea," she said softly and moved.

She couldn't say how she did it. The whole experience felt like a dream. She was aware of mixed signals coming from her hands and feet. A few of her toes crunched, but nothing bad set fire to her nerve endings. Her ankles felt overstretched, but balanced just as smoothly as ever. Something sliced across her left hand during a palm-strike but she felt only satisfaction as she grabbed the knife and wrenched it away from the boy. Everything she should have felt simply dissolved like hot eater over ice. Afterwards she stood next to their crumpled bodies, her fingers dripping and something red running into her eyes.

"All that without my knives," she said. Her head tipped briefly to one side. "Hm." She turned and knelt beside Legend, gravel biting into her torn knees. "Legend. Hey, old man, wake up."

He stirred. His good eye opened blearily. "Sure … shot?"

"Close enough."

"How're you … y'shouldn't be able t'move …"

Her teeming bloodstream laughed at him. She just said, "We've got to save Rod."

"We … nuthin'. You gotta … nggh!" He sat up and gingerly felt his skull. "What the fuck hit me – a truck?"

She inclined her head at the bodies. "Took care of it."

He stared; first at them, then at her. He seemed to be having trouble accepting the information presented to him. "How? Crap on a raft, Sureshot, you were half dead! Now you'rerunning around beating the shit out of people? Your body ain't right yet. You can't put it through stuff like that so soon." His eye narrowed. "It's the Lucid, ain't it? It's got you all turned around, thinkin' you're superwoman when you're a heartbeat away from a toe-tag."

Whatever it was, it was making her feel great. She didn't even feel sorry for the little punks with their blank eyes and smashed up tattoos. Maybe this was the reason doctors always advised against mixing magic and drugs – the high was too addictive and empowering. She should be … should be …

Hurt. In pain. Humiliated. Tortured. Violated. Dead.

She sucked in a breath. A flood of memories came back to her, each attached to those tattoos. Alejandro's manic laughter echoed through her head. She clutched her skull. After a moment she realised the noise wasn't just in her mind, but echoing out of the hole in the building Legend had made. She rose with the grace of a gymnast, still wearing his jacket. Yes, she realised, it was his jacket, not hers; but it was damp with new blood she had put on it.

"When this is all over," she said softly, "I owe you the cost of a dry-cleaning bill."

"Naifu – no!" Legend's words trailed behind her as she took off for the slaughterhouse, back to the place she should have been running from, if her rational mind would only listen. "Wait! Come back!"

But she was lost to the intoxication of her impossible, invincible but finite high.