Chapter 9 - The Flesh and the Wire
The lead mercenary leveled his rifle at Leo. "Target acquired. Taking the shot."
Before he could pull the trigger, Leo moved. He swept his arm through the air, and the blue light radiating from his tattoo exploded outward in a directed electromagnetic pulse. The mercenaries' night-vision goggles short-circuited violently, blinding them instantly with bursts of internal sparks.
Leo closed the distance in a heartbeat. He slammed his palm into the first guard’s chest plate, discharging a kinetic burst that threw the two-hundred-pound man into the brick wall with bone-shattering force. He swept the leg of the second guard, caught the dropped assault rifle in mid-air, and smashed the stock into the third mercenary’s helmet, shattering the ballistic visor.
In less than five seconds, the entire squad was neutralized.
Sarah watched from the ground, her vision blurring from loss of blood. "Leo... what are you?"
Leo walked back to her, dropping the shattered rifle to the pavement. He knelt beside her, his expression softening for the very first time. "My mother didn't just save me from Vance’s lab, Sarah. She built me to destroy it. The drive wasn't in the computer. It’s inside me."
He pressed his hand against her bleeding side. A gentle warmth spread from his palm into her wound, cauterizing the torn flesh with localized thermal heat. Sarah gasped, the searing pain vanishing into a dull ache as the bleeding stopped.
"You can heal?" she whispered.
"I can control molecular energy," Leo said, helping her to her feet. "But it has a cost. Every time I use it, my biological cells break down. I don't have much time left."
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Sarah gripped his shoulders tightly. "Then we make it count. Where are we going?"
Leo looked up at the monolithic, pitch-black spire of the Sterling Dynamics building towering over the ruined city. "To the top."
