Work Text:
The woman's body was riddled with scar tissue. Dermal regeneration treatments had caused most of them to fade to invisibility, or nearly so, but between his enhanced eyes, medical training and tissue scanner there was simply no hiding the signs of old damage.
Of course, the far more pertinent damage right now was not the old. "They clipped your lung. The MedGel is keeping you stable, for now." The man's voice was calm, clinical. In the face of Nika Muratova's rattling breaths, Raymond Malik's calm was as if wounds such as these were mundane to him. Perhaps they were, Nika mused.
Malik continued, "I will need to operate, the projectile is still inside. The damage will just worsen, even assuming they cannot track the bullet". She could see the unspoken threat in his eyes. He would leave her behind if she became a liability. She had barely made it out of HQ and not entirely unscathed. But a problem remained. "I am not trusting your augment or your reflexes. It will not do either one of us any good if you knock my head off mid surgery. I can jury-rig my Neural Disruptor to jam the signals going through your spine."
Nika grimaced, unable to hide her displeasure even as Malik held her stare. Was that anticipation in his eyes or was her paranoia getting to her? If she let him apply the Disruptor she'd be unable to move, numb. Defenceless. Right now, even injured as she was, Nika was fully confident that she could disable or outright kill the sniper. In the close quarters of their temporary safehouse he held a distinct disadvantage. She knew. He knew. Shalem11, the notorious assassin. The patient killer. He'd wait months for the right opening to close a contract. He'd been with Invisible for eight years, Central had revealed to her. And even Central still didn't know the man's true intentions for joining their company, their crusade against the Mega-Corporations that had held him in such high esteem.
Why had he even been this close to HQ, on the day of the attack? Had he known? Was this the first step to Shalem11 taking the shot? But if so, why help her to this apartment? Her augment was misfiring, the MedGel was failing to stem the tide. Nika was running out of time and with every arduous breath she knew she ad to make a call. Take down a potential traitor even as it sealed her own fate, drowning on dry land because even she had not been good enough in the face of so many Enforcers? Or take a leap of faith, the bodyguard trusting the hired murderer?
One laborious breath, two, three. Any moment now the killer would reveal his true nature. Nika's body tightened like a coil, ready to spring into action, adrenaline flooding through her system.
Then, she slowly reached her hand up, gathering up her hair at the back of the neck and moving it out of Malik's way. Nika offered one final glare to the man's patient, flat stare and closed her eyes.
Rustling of cloth, a body within striking distance moving, the sensation of cold metal prongs on her neck and then... nothing. Numbness and a crushing inability to move. It felt like death.
"Thank you" Raymond murmured and got to work.
Within the hour, Nika Muratova and Raymond Malik had departed from the safehouse.