The queen reached them and swung the rocket launcher down before Brick could react. It slammed into his jaw, knocked him flat. Stars burst behind his eyes. All thoughts flew from his mind.
They resettled, one by one, like birds back to a wire.
Get up.
He did, scrambling away from the enraged queen, and dragged himself up against the rusted hull of a shipping crate. He was cornered, but on his feet.
The bandit queen loomed over him, an inverted pyramid of muscle and barely concealed cleavage, her short skirt and low cut top more appropriate for clubbing on the dance floor than clubbing with the butt of a rocket launcher, but that didn't stop her from raising the weapon again.
He lurched aside, avoiding the blunt steel by inches.
"What's going on?" Lilith asked over the ECHO.
"I gotta go. I'll call you back," he said, and ducked another swing.
He wondered where Rocko was, but then he saw him, fleeing across the tarmac. Brick's stomach knotted, but he had no time to wonder about why Rocko would abandon him. Shoot her. Do something. He twitched his wrist to summon a new Baby Maker. It spun into existence with a soft shirring sound, but before it was fully formed, the queen struck again.
The launcher caught on Brick's half constructed SMG and smacked it out of his hand. It skittered across the asphalt, leaving small pools of acid in its wake, then self destructed. The queen looked over at the explosion with wide, piggy eyes.
While she was distracted, Brick struck with an uppercut. She stumbled back, giving him just enough space to squeeze by. He sprinted across the tarmac and flashed a request for another Baby Maker.
The queen recovered quickly. He could hear her coming after him, not with the thunder of footfalls, but with a strange, hissing clatter. Roller blades, Brick finally realized, and barked a convulsive laugh.
He tripped on something in the dark and lurched forward. The gun jumped out of his grip, and he didn't get his elbows out in front in time. His face smacked on the ground. His nose folded sideways with a crack.
The queen plowed into him, fast, and was sent flying over his prone body.
Brick groaned and pushed himself to his knees. His nose was broken. His head throbbed, his whole face had been scraped raw. The queen lay on the asphalt a few feet away, face down, limbs splayed. Brick realized, with an absurd cringe of embarrassment, that he could see up her skirt. He caught a glimpse of her pink panties with almost hallucinatory clarity. He looked away, but saw her stir out of the corner of his eye.
Noise like a swarm of bees thrummed through his head. He clutched his temples, eyes screwed shut.
"Brick!" someone yelled over the cacophony.
Brick squinted up. A buzzard hovered almost directly over top of him, silhouetted against the searchlights, landing gears like the talons of a predatory bird. Brick gaped.
"Come on!" Rocko said, leaning half out of the cockpit, hand outstretched.
Brick grabbed him with one hand and the landing gear with the other, and hauled himself up. Rocko grunted with the effort. "Fuck, babe," he wheezed as Brick squeezed into the seat beside him. "You scared me. I thought you spaced out again."
Gone, slipped across the curve, Brick thought. A nonsense phrase, something rattled loose in his knocked skull.
Rocko worked the buzzard's controls while Brick continued to reel, clutching the seat, eyes closed tight, as the buzzard climbed. They crossed the beam of a searchlight, briefly turning the backs of his eyelids red.
"Thanks," he muttered.
The responding voice was not Rocko's, but Lilith's. "I know you said you have to go, but I really need to talk to you."
"Fine. What is it?" Something spanged off the underbelly of the buzzard, loud enough to hear over the engine. Gunshots. Brick peered out of the cockpit to see the queen firing on them with a revolver. He ducked back in just as a bullet whizzed past. "Persistent bitch."
"Excuse me?" Lilith gasped.
"Not you."
"Uh-huh. I just wanted to...forget it." The connection crackled out.
Rocko turned a hard right, nearly pitching the craft over in a roll, and Brick grabbed the seat to keep from sliding out.
"Whaddaya doing? She's got a little peashooter down there. She can't-" Brick said, but before he could finish the thought, there came a loud grinding. Metal tearing, followed by a belch of smoke. The buzzard jerked.
"Damn," Rocko sighed.
Brick swallowed. "What was that?"
"She shot out one of the engines."
"With a handgun? What kinda thing is this, if you can take it out with one good shot? I thought you helped build these."
"They weren't finished!" Rocko huffed, struggling with the controls. The throttle juddered in his grip.
The buzzard tipped past the point of equilibrium, rolled, and plummeted out of the sky. Brick cast a quick glance to his shield. Full power. He hoped it would be enough. All he could do was grab Rocko, fold him in the protective crook of his arm, and spring clear of the craft.
They hit the ground and rolled a few feet. The buzzard smashed into the ground nearby, obliterating the remainder of their shields with a shuddery wave of heat and shrapnel. Brick looked down at the other man. His black eyes were wide, reflecting the dancing flames.
"You okay?" Brick asked.
"I warned you," Rocko said.
"Huh?"
"I told you, I'm not a good engineer."
Brick kissed him, laughing. They didn't stay like that for long. The queen was still out there. The pair struggled up, arms locked and braced against each other, grinning and patting debris off their clothes. Rocko spotted the queen first and pointed.
"Ding-dong, the witch is dead," he said.
She'd been crushed by the buzzard. Only her calves and roller blades poked out from under the flaming wreck, one wheel still spinning lazily.
"So..." Brick said, wrapping an arm around the younger man's middle. "What's your first decree as Queen?"
Rocko folded against him, practically purring with satisfaction. His fingers fluttered up to Brick's chest. "That's really up to you. You're the king." The word rolled off his tongue lovingly, and Brick kissed it from his lips. His hand came up to fold around Rocko's, and he paused. Something was wrong.
"What?" Rocko asked, feeling Brick stiffen. "What's the matter?"
"My necklace," Brick said. Not the one with the paws and key. That was there, but the one with the security chip was gone.
"Did you leave it in Sanctuary?" Rocko asked.
That had been two days ago. Brick touched the damn things a hundred times a day, restlessly probing those old wounds, and he would have noticed by now.
He remembered a snag when he'd leaped out of the buzzard, a quick tug around his neck. Had that been his necklace catching on something? Brick looked at the flaming wreckage of the buzzard. Rocko followed his gaze.
"No, no. Don't even think about it," he said, but Brick wasn't listening. He checked his shield readout again. It was back to full. If he could duck in quickly, find the chain, and get out... "Brick!" Rocko grabbed his arm.
Brick shrugged him off and plunged into the fire. Flames snapped over his shield, casting him in orange and electric white light. The buzzard's cockpit gaped open, sagging where the metal melted, and Brick's eyes darted over its frame, searching.
The keen of tortured, twisting metal rose over the roar of flames. A beam snapped—the neck of a crane—and crashed down behind Brick, cutting off his route back to Rocko. The flames reared up around the impact.
Brick could no longer see through the wall of heat. Smoke prodded its prickly fingers into his lungs, making him cough.
"Okay, I'll just say it. I'm sorry!" Lilith said, her voice bursting from the ECHO unit, clear and unexpected.
"I..." Brick started, but his lungs hitched and burned, and he hacked uncontrollably.
"I shouldn't have let you go like that. Roland is sorry too, he's just to stubborn to say." While Lilith was talking, Brick caught the glimmer of silver through the smoke. It was his necklace, dangling from the buzzard's shredded hull. He snatched it free. The hot metal burned his palm, but he closed his fist around it anyway, grimacing as it seared his flesh.
"Brick?"
"Lil," he wheezed. He stumbled blindly through the fire. Darkness closed around him.
"Are you in trouble?"
Brick answered with another coughing fit and fell to his knees. The flames blistered his skin. He couldn't think, couldn't move. His animal felt distant, at the bottom of some ocean. Brick was alone.
Then, suddenly, he wasn't. A figure stood over him: a gaunt, black form, silhouetted against a world of fire.
Mordy. The figure grabbed his hand, and he discovered that it wasn't Mordecai, after all. These fingers the short, slender fingers of a woman.
The world of fire vanished. Brick plunged into a void—across the curve—as empty and icy as space, but only for a moment. He burst back into existence, gasping. That first suck of fresh air was ragged, painful, but such a relief that it pushed tears to his eyes.
Now he stood on the open tarmac, looking at the fire which had just a moment ago engulfed him. Lilith was the one who'd saved him. Her eyes were sunken, and she looked weary, but she flashed him a grin. "Pretty good, huh?"
"Yeah," he agreed. Rocko had been pacing around the wreck, calling for Brick, but when Lilith spoke, he whirled around. Relief smoothed his pinched brow. He launched himself at Brick and flung his arms around him.
"I told you not to go," he scolded.
"I had to," Brick said. He opened his clenched hand and grimaced as seared flesh peeled away, stuck to the totem. It had been deformed slightly by his grip, lined by the creases in his palm, but it had survived. So had he. It didn't escape his notice that if Lilith hadn't rescued him, two people would have died with that same chip clutched in their fist.
"It's not worth dying over," Rocko said, as if reading Brick's mind.
"How could you say that? You knew her!"
"You think she would've wanted you to die for some stupid chip that didn't even mean anything to her?"
Brick growled. "She died for this stupid thing. You should have more respect, since we as good as killed her."
"Hyperion killed her. They knew what they were doing when they threw a couple of innocent kids in prison, but if you don't understand that-"
"Don't talk to me like I'm an idiot. Kindle wouldn't have been out of the block if we hadn't been fightin."
"And she wouldn't have been in jail at all if it weren't for Hyperion," Rocko said. While Brick's voice had been rising, threatening to become a shout, Rocko's remained calm. He spoke patiently, like an adult trying to explain something to a slow child. Lilith shuffled awkwardly and glanced away.
"Fuck you," Brick said. "Of course you wanna think it wasn't our fault. If you hadn't..." He trailed off.
"Just say it. I know what you think. I can see it every time you look at me," Rocko said.
Brick stared down at his feet mutely.
"If I hadn't done the thing with Cash," Rocko finished Brick's earlier sentence. "That's what you mean, right? You think that if I hadn't been such an appalling slut, Kindle would be alive. You're right." Rocko's voice was still low, but full of cracks.
Brick didn't reply. Tears blurred his vision and he worked the trinket over in his hand, twisting and gripping, pressing the edges into his injured palm. Lilith put a hand on his shoulder.
"Brick," she said.
When he looked up, only Lilith remained on the roof. Rocko had gone.