Julia Defiant by Catherine Egan

Author:Catherine Egan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2017-06-13T04:00:00+00:00

She stands in the doorway, cool as anything, with a carbine the length of her forearm pointed at the dowager in one hand and a short sword in the other. The dowager is pointing her little pistol at Pia, her chest rising and falling fast.

“Get up,” says Pia to me.

“I can’t,” I say. “They’ve got me all tied up.”

She jumps, kicking herself off the wall so that she ends up behind Si Tan, the muzzle of her carbine pressed against his jaw while the empress dowager’s shot explodes against the wall. She shoves him closer to me with the gun, and then she cuts the ribbons around me with her short sword and tosses them aside. Si Tan watches me, expressionless, from the corner of his eye. My limbs feel heavy and slow, but I can move again. I get up off the bed unsteadily, trying not to look at Cinzai’s head, her body bleeding blackly all over the floor, her tattooed fingers still twitching like they are trying to write something.

“Go get her gun,” Pia orders me. To the dowager, she adds in Yongwen something to the effect that if she gives it over nicely, Si Tan might come back to her in one piece. Once I’ve got the gun, Pia tucks it into her belt and unloops a sort of harness on her back.

“Climb in here,” she tells me. It is an awkward thing to attempt with my limbs still feeling so rubbery, but I manage it. The empress dowager watches us, her eyes little points of rage, her chins quivering.

“Casimir is bold,” says Si Tan, very coldly, but Pia makes no reply. She yanks a strap on either side of her and the harness tightens around me, fastening me to her back so that I am like an overgrown child piggybacking on her psychotic mama. She shoves Si Tan’s face with the carbine and instructs him to go down the hall ahead of us.

The bell is still clanging, and I hear what sounds like a great many footsteps approaching at a run, but Pia seems unconcerned. At the end of the hall, she takes a small cylinder from her belt and releases a blast at the ceiling, leaving a smoking hole above us. Then she swings her elbow, striking Si Tan in the face. He goes down like a log. Pia clambers up the wall with me on her back. I’m terrified I will throw off her balance, but as far as I can tell, my weight does not even slow her down. Broken wood and tile scrape against my back as she hauls us both through the hole in the roof. I bury my face in her shoulder to protect my head.

When I look up, she is running along the rooftop gable, and then she leaps a terrifying distance to the slanted edge of another roof. I am certain we will fall, but her footing never fails her, and she goes running up the side of that roof and over it.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.