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Jinx drapes herself begging over Vi, puts the gun in her hand, and bargains.
“Make her go away, please. Send her on her way, and,” Jinx angles her knee into Vi’s stomach, presses into the crags she left her, hopes the scars sting. She watches the way Vi’s face drops when she deposits the weapon and watches every emotion fire in her eyes. Up close, personal, too personal. Her words are gummy in her throat, like chalk and desperation.
“—and you can have Powder back. Please.”
Less than half a moment before Vi lifts the muzzle and fires. The bullet cracks through the air and Caitlyn’s jaw before Jinx ever finishes her sentence, the back of her chair popping, burning, shredding into splintery remains.
Jinx doesn’t get to watch Caitlyn die.
She just dies.
Bits of the enforcer's uniform fly in the air, navy, white, gold trim confetti. Jinx's cupcake, a centerpiece on the mantle, sizzles. The concept of celebration comes to mind. Jinx feels her fingers go numb.
As the coppery, metallic scent of blood reaches her nose she realizes it’s all over them. Both of them. Her gun smokes in Vi’s palm, curling sweetly around them, before Vi lets it clatter to the concrete. Bits of metal fly off the mini-gun, and Jinx isn’t even mad—
Vi asks, "Like that?”
It's seconds. Maybe it's lifetimes. It doesn't matter; Jinx smothers her with her mouth. Between the two of them, it’s hard to tell whose lips are bruised. Whose cut, whose splinter, whose point, whose revelation. Whose party. Surely it's hers . Jinx tastes metal, Caitlyn’s blood, and wishes that the Kirammans could see it stain her teeth.
“Untie me," Vi whispers.
Jinx nods before she realizes she’s nodding. Electricity eats through her nerves. There’s a rave of voices in her head but they’re as silent as they are loud and it’s deafening, in its own, special way.
“You… actually did it,” is what comes out as she shakily unbinds Vi from the chair.
Vi stands and cracks her shoulders, cringing from a crick. She wipes sawdust and pieces of rope from her jacket. “She might have saved my life, but she’s still an enforcer, Powder. You’re worth more than that.”
An orchestra of ghosts swells in her breast. Behind her, Mylo screams.
"You're worth more than every person up there," Vi nods, and looks around like she's seeking her target. Jinx glances where the missile is hidden. It's a phantom on the floor, concealed in darkness, but she places herself between it and her sister anyway.
Her choices were weighed. Vi shattered the scale.
She doesn't need it anymore.
Jinx nearly jumps out of her skin from the sound of movement. A low creak, wood groaning, floods the factory. She realizes it's half as loud as she's imagining when her eyes land on Silco, as if she's learning of his existence for the first time.
"Unbelievable," he rasps, his tone punctuated with a few shallow coughs.
It sounds everything and nothing like disbelief.
She thinks it's the first time she's ever heard disgust in his voice. Jinx wonders what from. Then she remembers how he hid Vi from her, tried to steal her away, keep her from Jinx like a runny little dark thing, like she was his sister — and all of her anger narrows into one hot, sharp point.
"We're sisters," she spits, indignation heating up her chest like a balloon. Her own anger bites into her skin.
She's not his to take.
Vi's silhouette stalks towards him. Jinx feels a giddy sense of excitement at the thought of Vi hitting Silco, a fantasy she's imagined thousands of times by now, caving him in with her fists, and that would make her feel better, so much better—
Jinx watches Vi's arm come up, sees the definition of it, knows how strong that arm is. And then, too late, Jinx sees the glint of metal.
Her gun.
Vi has her gun—
Another bullet. Another shot rings through the factory.
His chair torques and spins once, twice, and the hole left in his chest and the wood smokes with a metallic ferocity. Jinx could never quite call the lethality of her toys, they just worked, and that mattered. Better to fire once than try a second—
Vi doesn't miss her third shot, right between his eyes. A good measure , some voice keens, lost in the back of Jinx's mind.
Silco tips over backwards, dead in the chair, his mouth gaping. All dead meat and fresh weight, or maybe the opposite.
Jinx sees galaxies and the birth of a star in his open skull. She looks at his skin, blown from bullet fragments as his blood leaks onto the concrete, and thinks of pushpins. Of needle marks. Jinx thinks of injections and feels the loss of her sister. She thinks of severing, of something sharp and dying, thinks of agony and isolation and loss.
She swims back to a moment in a dark room, blind. Trails of pink and magenta scald her vision. Jinx can taste her own pulse.
"I had to," Vi whispers, miles away. "I had to. He can't have you either."
Does she want her heart?
She'd cut it out.
It surges, suddenly, all at once. Disbelief. Anger. Joy. Arousal. Parties, explosions, knives, bullets, eating, clawing, bleeding, wanting need.
"Let's go home," she hears Vi say, feels her arms support her, around her, suffocating her —
Jinx throws herself wild and beating in the direction of Vi's mouth.
She calls her bluff in the way Vi meets her in the middle, gnashing their teeth together, all fifty pounds of extra force, extra height. It does nothing to quell her urgency, the newness of it. Through her shut eyes she can almost make out the shapes of corpses, but the only name she can think is Vi, Vi, Vi.
In the distance, Jinx can taste the explosions on the horizon.