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He remembered the way the man had moved, the lethal grace and precision afforded by his time sense. Cooper had hoped that the militia might at least slow him down, but it had been an idle sort of hope. No normal would stand a chance against Soren. Cooper wasn’t sure he and Shannon did, either.

The gunfire was growing louder, not the steady crack-crack-crack of a firing range, but the clustered, hectic overlap of thousands of human beings trying to kill one another. He had a flash of memory from earlier this year, running down an abnorm hacker who had created a computer virus for John Smith. What had her name been? Velasquez? Vasquez. Alex Vasquez. Just before she put her hands in her pocket and hurled herself headfirst off a roof, she had told him that war was their future. That there was no stopping it, you just had to pick a side.

He’d been a DAR agent then, and filled with certainty. Certainty that humanity was too sane to get to this point. That cooler heads, heads like his, would prevent open conflict.

And now here we are. An army ready to slaughter the greatest concentration of brilliants in America—and an abnorm terrorist poised to wipe out everyone else.

Vasquez had been wrong. This wasn’t war. It wasn’t about picking a side. There was no winning a genocide—only measures of loss.

Shannon said, “Left.”

They turned the corner to find a wall of fire.

The barricade spanned the width of the street a block ahead. The base was pallets of bricks, but atop them lumber and furniture had been piled, gasoline poured, a match struck. Flames leapt twenty feet in the air. A couch burned blue-green, and tires guttered thick black smoke. Cooper could feel the heat through the windshield. Sourceless gunfire cracked back and forth beyond it. “Can you find a hole?”

Shannon shook her head. “Nothing we can get the truck through. Tesla was built to be barricaded.”

“The hard way, then.” He pulled the SUV to the curb and killed the engine. As he swung out of the seat, a wave of battle noise crashed into him, screams and gun blasts and the roar of fire. Cooper opened the back, took his rifle and spare magazines. Shannon crumpled her d-pad, then tucked handfuls of shotgun shells in her jacket pockets.

For a moment, they looked at each other. Her face was lit orange, infernos reflecting in her eyes. The heat washed in waves, like the whole world was burning. “Don’t hold back out there,” she said. “Don’t hesitate, and don’t play fair.”

“They’re here for my children.” Cooper shook his head. “Fair’s got nothing to do with it.”

“Good. Let’s go kill some assholes.”

He leaned forward, grabbed a handful of her hair, and pulled her close. Their lips mashed together, tongues dancing, her teeth nipping at him, a kiss as fierce and raw as any he’d known. After far too brief a moment, she broke it. Grinned at him.

Together they headed into hell.

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.