Shannon dodged to the right, swung around the corner of a building, running on the balls of her feet. As he followed, a bullet splintered the concrete cornice above him, a rain of dust falling, and then they were blitzing through a narrow alley, fire escapes and loading doors, the sour smell of trash. At the end, she slowed, peered around the corner. He moved alongside her, their arms touching. “Blocked,” she yelled in his ear, the words barely audible over the constant fusillade. “A row of cars.”
“On fire?”
“No.”
He nodded. “Targets?”
“Can’t tell. Probably.”
“Can you shift past?”
“If they’re looking at something else.”
Roger that. He took a deep breath, then swung around the corner, rifle up. A minor street with buildings close on either side. Fifteen steps away a double line of cars were parked perpendicular to the street, their tires slashed. There was motion on the other side, and he fired two quick bursts without bothering to aim, then sprinted to the barricade, keeping low and dropping behind the engine block of an electric coupe. Shots pinged and sparked off the hood. Without sitting up, he laid the barrel of the rifle on the hood of the car and fired full auto until the magazine emptied. He slapped in a new one and glanced back to the alley, but Shannon was no longer there; she’d moved across the street, into a pocket of black beneath a broken streetlight. She held up three fingers, then pointed. Cooper took a flashbang from his pocket, made sure she saw it, then pulled the firing pin, counted Mississippis, and tossed it over the cars in a blind underhand arc.
He’d been looking at Shannon as he did it, and even facing away, the blast of light left afterimages of her floating on his retina. Cooper blinked, rolled, then leapt up onto the trunk of the car, the weapon at his shoulder. He saw a man behind a toppled trash can clawing at his eyes and put quick bursts into him, then ran along the trunk, jumped to the next car, and slid on his butt to land on the other side, weapon up. A second Son lay on his belly in the middle of the street forty yards away. Cooper aimed ahead of him, fired a strafing burst, the recoil of the weapon driving it upward, the bullets marching through the man.
Cooper couldn’t see any other targets—
She said three.
Could the third have faded back into the darkness?
Not if he was blinded by the flash . . .
Oops.
—and realized his mistake. He whirled, spotted the third shooter ten feet away and behind him. He’d been up against the cars, nearly opposite Cooper, and hadn’t been hit with the flash. A scrawny guy with bad teeth and a submachine gun coming to bear. Cooper told his muscles to spin, his arms to aim, but the other guy had the drop on him—
Until Shannon appeared on the cars above, shotgun braced against her slender shoulder. Fire burst from the barrel, the light framing her snarling face. The man’s head collapsed like smashed fruit.
If he hadn’t already, he would have fallen in love with her right then.
Shannon leapt off the car, landing like a cat, and pointed. Cooper set off in the direction she’d indicated, dropping the magazine from his rifle as he went and slamming in a new one. Better to waste a few rounds than run dry in a firefight.
Muzzle flashes lit the darkness ahead, dozens of them. A car window shattered, pavement chipped with the whine of a bullet. He took shelter behind the corner of a ruined building and covered her approach, firing full auto at the place where he’d seen the muzzle flashes. The three they’d faced had been scouts for a larger group, men revealed to him in brief strobe flashes that he chased with his weapon. He heard a man scream, and then she was past him. He followed, pausing only long enough to toss the second flashbang. Gratifying as it might be to stay and kill these men, there wasn’t time.
They were on the outskirts of town. Most of the buildings here had been bulldozed or burned, and smoke still rose from the embers. They darted across the ruined landscape in a dancing zigzag, his gift intuiting her moves, her sliding and shifting unpredictable to everyone else, and for a moment he forgot the stakes, forgot the desperation of time, forgot that the world balanced on the head of a pin, and just relished the way they moved together, like one of those kung fu films where everyone was on wires and every move choreographed, the two of them covering each other without words, sharing a simple certainty that, succeed or fail, they would do it together.
A moment later they were on the edge of the combat zone, gunfire still constant but mostly behind them, when Cooper’s foot caught on a body splayed out in a pool of blood. He hit the ground, the impact banging up his knee. So much for kung fu.
“You okay?”
He nodded. As he pushed himself up to a crouch, he noticed the man’s throat had been slit wide.
Not two blocks later they found three more bodies, clustered in a circle. Two had knife wounds, the third was missing part of his face. Shannon grimaced as she pulled out the d-pad.
“Turns out we hardly need the tracker to find Soren. We could just follow the corpses.” Cooper laced his hands on his head, sucked in breath. Then he looked at Shannon’s face, saw her expression. “What is it?”
She glanced up from the screen, the pale light of the d-pad hollowing her eyes like a corpse. “I know where he’s going.”
The canisters were awkward, and each weighed about fifty pounds. Soren spent ten of his seconds considering taking just one of them; he’d move faster, and knowing how John’s mind worked, if success had required two tanks, there would have been four here. His friend had never aimed for good odds—he sought certain victory. That was how he could win even in death.
In the end, the dolly made up his mind. It was heavy-gauged and wide-wheeled, but designed for two tanks. Loading just one would leave it off-balance. It took him less than a minute to strap them in and be on his way.
His body felt strong and limber, and even pushing the dolly he could keep up a swift pace. Captivity had afforded him ample time to exercise, and here at the city’s edge, the streets were smooth and the buildings undisturbed. The battle raged on, but he hadn’t seen any militia since the three he left in the alley. It made sense. They weren’t here to hold territory, weren’t interested in establishing a base camp.
They had come to burn.
Soren didn’t care. Let them. Let them raze and rape and ruin. Let blood flow in the gutters. He’d never felt any particular loyalty to brilliants in general. The boys who had tormented him at the academy had been brilliants; Epstein and Nick Cooper and Rickard the torturer had been brilliants.
All that mattered now was that he finish what his friend had started. Not for the cause, but for John. Then find Samantha, the real one, and keep her safe while the world fell to ruin.
As he rounded the corner, he saw his goal ahead of him. A broad space hundreds of yards across, bounded by a chain-link fence. Red and white lights marked the edges, and a windsock hung limp. The gates were unguarded, but on the runway, a pilot had pushed a carbon-fiber glider out and was hurriedly attaching the cable that would fling it into the sky. The Tesla airfield.
Let this barbarian militia have their little massacre.
He would burn the whole world.
CHAPTER 40
Life had been reduced to extremes.
There was silence; and there was the thunder of gunfire. Cold, clean air; and the reek of smoke and gasoline. December chill; and the sudden sharp burn of an ejected casing pinging off Natalie’s skin. Strangest of all was the darkness broken only by flares of brilliant light. Each muzzle flash revealed a living photograph, lovingly composed and yet vanishing almost too quickly to absorb, like a piece of conceptual art.