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“Simple,” Luke had replied. “You throw it all at them at once. Everything you’ve got. You hit as hard as you can as fast as you can, and count on fear to do the rest. Same reason we nuked both Hiroshima and Nagasaki, using our entire atomic arsenal.” Luke had paused. “We’re going to take a hell of a beating.”

“Once you factor in wounded and fled, probably 20 percent. But those who remain will become an army, instead of a militia.”

“Of course, if we’re wrong, it will be over.”

“If we’re wrong, it’s over already.”

Time to test that logic. Atop the shipping container, Luke felt naked, every instinct screaming to find cover, but he thought of his burning boys, and stood at attention.

“WE ARE THE LEADERS OF THE NEW SONS OF LIBERTY,” Miller shouted. “YOU WANT TO END THIS RIGHT NOW? GO AHEAD AND RECOMMENCE FIRING.”

Then he lowered the bullhorn, tilted his head back, and spread his arms cruciform. There was blood on his cheek and dirt on his uniform, and against the smoke and rising fire he looked like some primitive war god.

Standing beside him, Luke did the same. He kept his eyes open, staring at the cold and swirling skies, where somewhere above them drones circled invisibly.

Flames crackled. Men groaned. Somewhere, a bird shrieked.

Then he heard the first voice.

“This ends now!”

And a second, and a third, and a thousandth, drowning out the screams and the fire and whatever might have held them back.

CHAPTER 15

The tingle started at the airfield, as Cooper negotiated with one of the pickup pilots who hung out in the lounge.

“Newton, huh?” The woman cocked her head, slid her hands in the pockets of her jacket. “You’re in luck. It’s a clear night, good thermals. I can get you there in two hours. Four hundred.”

“Two hundred.”

“Costs four hundred.”

“Three hundred in cash—if you get me there in an hour.”

“Cash?” She raised an eyebrow. “All right. But you better not puke in my wings.”

“I don’t get airsick.”

“You might, kind of flying I’m gonna have to do to make it in an hour.”

Two minutes later he was helping her push a glider onto the runway. Made of carbon-fiber about the thickness of a napkin, the thing didn’t weigh more than a couple hundred pounds. The pilot hitched it to a thick metal cable and was checking instruments and talking to ground control before he’d even gotten settled.

The cable jerked tight, then yanked a mile in thirty seconds, slingshotting them into the sky fast enough to leave his stomach behind.

It was his second trip in a glider, and he didn’t love it any more than the first, when Shannon had been at the stick. Cooper had no problem with planes, but not having an engine didn’t agree with him. It wasn’t exactly mitigated by the pilot, who took him at his word and rode hard, bouncing hundreds of feet up on thermals before tilting into velocity-building dives, the cracked landscape of the desert hurtling toward them. After one particularly gnarly cycle, he said, “What happens if you time that wrong?”

“Then we get to see how well the safety foam works,” she said. “Supposed to fill the cockpit in a tenth of a second, solidify with impact, then dissolve. Anyway, you were the one said you were in a hurry.”

“At least I’m not hungover this time.”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

The trip ended up taking a bit more than an hour, but he paid the full three hundred, then hopped in one of the electric cabs waiting at the Newton airfield. It started to snow on the ride, thin flurries that haloed the streetlights, and it was still going fifteen minutes later, when he climbed out in the midst of a row of two-story buildings, apartments over businesses. He walked past a bar and hustled up the steps two at a time. Cooper took a moment to smooth his hair and check his breath, then knocked on the door.

He waited, conscious of his heart, and a warmth that wasn’t entirely contained to his stomach.

The door swung open.

Shannon clearly hadn’t been expecting company. She wore what passed for pajamas—fitted black yoga pants and a thin cotton top that slipped low on one shoulder, revealing her collarbone. Her hair was loosely tucked behind her ears, and though he couldn’t see her right hand, the angle of her arm told him she held a pistol in it.

“Hi,” he said.

She stared at him. Quirked her lopsided grin. Moving with perfect economy, she set the gun on the entryway table, then reached forward, grabbed his shirt with two hands, and yanked him inside.

Her body was hot and tight against his, all dancer’s muscles and humming skin, and her smell enveloped him, woman and a whiff of shampoo. She took a handful of his hair and pressed his mouth to hers, her tongue flickering sweetly as he hoisted her up, legs wrapping his hips, his hands gripping her ass. He kicked the door closed as they staggered into a wall, and she laughed in her throat. “Miss me?”