Written in Fire

CHAPTER 39

Soren didn’t wait for the man to finish dying. He just wiped the blade on his sleeve and kept walking.

It hadn’t taken long to read John’s plan, even as the signal flares rose into the sky and the militia attacked. One of the few benefits to his curse, he could easily digest ten pages a minute. And while John had included all the technical detail necessary, he’d understood how fluid the situation would be and hadn’t tried to micromanage.

According to the date stamps, the files had been prepared several days ago. That was the way his friend worked, the way he saw—had seen—the world. A multilayered series of branching paths, options to options and contingencies to contingencies. This one had clearly been a last resort; John would never have opted for it if he’d had a choice. No doubt he had intended something far simpler and far more elegant.

But he had been betrayed before he could put it into motion.

Had John suspected Soren would fail him? It seemed unlikely. He had a protocol in place to free me in case of his death. Why do that if he believed I would cause it? No, far likelier, John had known that he was a prisoner, and had intended to rescue him later, after his plan was complete. He had believed Soren could hold out. Trusted him to.

Behind him, the man whose throat he’d opened with the knife made a liquid gurgling sound, fingers twitching. Soren continued walking. Not far now.

After rising from the bench, he had hitched up the guard uniform he had taken from a locker in the prison control room, unbuckled the belt, and threaded the knife’s sheath through it. Then he’d pocketed the d-pad and left the rest of the detritus—rifle, pack, girl—on the bench.

Two blocks away he waved down a pickup loaded with ammunition, put his knife through the driver’s eye, pulled her body to the street, and drove toward the edge of town. There was gunfire from all directions. In his prison of white, he hadn’t even known that an army was descending on Tesla. Soren drove as far as the streets would allow, then abandoned the car and started walking. The low, slow thunder of gunshots rolled around him. Defenders leaned out windows, each trigger pull a flashbulb that made them glow.

The burning barricades had slowed him down, but not very much. In the end, he’d simply gone through a building. A man had stared at him, called him a fool. When he broke a window on the outside and started to climb through, the man had tried to stop him. Briefly.

Then he was out, beyond the line of defense, in the night.

The attacking army seemed more reapers than soldiers. A hundred or more were moving from darkness to darkness ahead of him. They howled and screamed as they loosed bursts of automatic fire at the buildings. Rather than waste time, he spun away, took a lateral route. Wended his way past a smoldering structure, heat still washing over it. The man he had just killed had been standing at the corner; staying out of his sight had been easy, and then the knife had finished the job.

Though the line of battle was behind him, he was still in town, amidst a loose sprawl of low buildings, many of them burned out. It made sense; the most defensible buildings would be the taller ones. At one point they might have marked the edge of Tesla, but towns continued to grow. Soren stepped lightly through shadows and smoke. In an alley, three men stood talking. Their eyes fell on him. One of them cocked his head, nudged another. They turned, rifles moving in slow motion.

He cut the brachial artery of the first, buried his knife in the ribs of the next. It caught and he left it there, spinning back to point the dead man’s gun and pull the trigger. Guns were clumsy and loud, and the recoil was graceless, but the bullet worked. The three men fell at the same time. Soren gripped the knife and planted his foot against the man’s head for leverage as he yanked the blade free.

A hundred yards farther, he found the restaurant. A diner, clean enough but not fancy, the kind of place no one made an effort to visit. He broke the front window with the pommel of the knife, chipped the glass from the frame, and climbed into the dark interior.

The air smelled of bacon and burnt coffee. He found a flashlight in the cabinet by the register and took it with him to the basement supply room. The walls were lined with shelves and stocked with canned goods. A safe as tall as he was sat in the back corner, a curved metal dolly resting against it. Soren opened the d-pad, found the combination, spun the safe dials, and tugged the heavy door open.

Inside stood the culmination of his friend’s dream. Two aluminum tanks, each four feet high and fitted with a simple valve.

I won’t fail you again, John.

Shannon led the way at a low dash, and Cooper followed, trying to step where she stepped, move as she moved. Her ability to shift wasn’t operating at full potential—she had to be able to see people to know where they would be looking—but he trusted her instincts for stealth. Shots rang out around them, from the windows above, from darkness beyond the barricade. Bullets screamed into brick and glass and flesh. Someone wailed in pain, though in the chaos he couldn’t tell from which direction, or even if it was a man or a woman. The heat of the burning barricade seemed to blister his face as they ran toward it. He held the rifle low, his finger outside the trigger guard, and had a flash of basic training, the endless drills, mud and sore muscles. A lifetime ago, before he’d met Natalie, before Todd and Kate, before the DAR, before the world had driven so intently toward its own destruction.

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.