Re: [Capital: Hannah, Con, & a bad guy]
Hannah stepped back again, but she didn't run away. She wanted to run away, but she didn't run away. She put enough distance between herself and the boy to ensure she had time to run, but she didn't actually do it. The little girl clung, and the old man squeezed his eyes shut. Hannah thought that squeezing his eyes shut was useless, but she understood why he did it. She'd thought about that a lot, about what she would do if she knew she was going to die. Maybe it was a strange thought for a person like her, but she often forgot what it meant to be a person like her.
There were crashing sounds, and Hannah had a better understanding of what the man with the blue eye had done than the boy did. "He broke the streetlights," she told him. She didn't call it out too loudly, but it maybe carried, even if it wasn't very helpful information. "He's only partly human," she added. It wasn't a very smart addition, but she figured it was obvious a little with the blue eye.
The boy moved almost as soon as Hannah was done talking, and Hannah reacted really quickly. It was thoughtless reaction, and it made her head tic a little to the side. She ran forward instead of back, right after the boy, and she grabbed the little girl's arm from beneath the boy's raised arm. The little girl, shocked like she was, let herself be pulled, and Hannah started running toward the alley.
All around them, people were screaming. The gun went off, but the bullet didn't hit the old man. It went off between the gunslinger's chest and the boy's chest, and Hannah did hesitate a tiny bit in her step when she heard the discharge. She looked over her shoulder in time to see someone helping the old man, who'd been thrown wide and hit his head on the sidewalk, and she held onto the girl with a tight grip, not wanting to lose her. But the little girl screamed, and Hannah let her go instinctively (she didn't have control of the unfurling of her fingers in that moment).
The gunslinger's eye was turning in its socket, and he was reaching his still-intact hand (the gun was destroyed and blood was dripping from the muzzle) and raising it to shove fingers into Con's eye.
Hannah teetered and, ultimately, she ran.
Which, of course the gunslinger noticed, and he tried to step around Con and pursue, the movement combined with another swirl of mechanized blue and with another twitch of his head. His programming was clear; bring in the girl. If he'd managed to puncture the boy's eye, he merely withdrew his fingers. If he hadn't managed, he simply shoved at him with unnatural strength and pursued.