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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.”