29: Crown
It was a surprise that after having seen it happen in films roughly a million times that the crown did actually bounce down the steps leading up to the helipad as the king slumped against the assassin who had buried a blade in his stomach.
“Huh,” Prim said, sounding quite surprised, “that was easier than I thought it would be.”
The statement hung in the air, heard only by a few crows who had been quite startled by the ruckus and were now settling down and the ears of the ten dead men strewn about the rooftop who had served as the king’s honor guard. The helicopter pilot, who had quite wisely decided not to attempt an attack on a woman who she’d already witnessed carve apart men with far more combat training than she had, could not hear anything over the sound of the engines beginning to spool up.
Prim looked back at the helicopter and waved, then gestured at the still-rolling crown as if to say can you believe this shit? The pilot continued to prepare for takeoff, figuring this was as good of a time as any to get the hell out of here before reinforcements showed up, assumed she was somehow culpable in this whole mess, and killed both her and Prim – or Prim decided to kill her, whichever came first. Unfortunately for the pilot’s escape plan, Prim shrugged the cooling royal corpse off of her shoulder and jumped into the helicopter. She indicated that the pilot should continue to take off, and found a headset.
“I have zero interest in killing you,” Prim’s voice crackled in the pilot’s ears, “because I don’t know how to fly these things. I do have alternate methods of egress, though, so if you try anything funny I will, absolutely, kill you. Okay?”
“Okay!”
“What’s your name?”
“Marie.”
“Good to meet you, Marie. I’m Prim. Did you know that now I know your name, I’m significantly more likely to let you live? It’s a psychological thing.”
“I did not know that,” Marie said, keeping her voice surprisingly even. “Is there anywhere in particular you need me to drop you, or…?”
“Let’s focus on surviving this,” Prim said, sliding the door shut as the first group of guards breached the door to the rooftop. “I don’t suppose you have a gun somewhere on this thing, do you?”
“Guards usually had them,” Marie replied, yanking the controls and sending them into the air as the first few shots spang-ed off the hull, “so no.”
Prim frowned. “Figured as much,” she muttered. “Well, fly quick! I think one of those guys has an RPG.”
He did, in fact, have an RPG. Marie did a surprisingly good job of bringing the helicopter down in the bay, but the impact still left both her and Prim barely conscious. Prim, for her part, had the presence of mind to get them out of the wreckage and, for reasons she couldn’t place, strapped a flotation device to Marie first before beginning to swim away.