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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.

Flash: Here is a man in a puffy black ski jacket with a pistol in each hand, his mouth contorted in a howl as he pulls both triggers at the same time.

Flash: Here is the kind-faced older man in the neighboring building, tongue caught boyishly between his lips as he fires into a crowd.

Flash: Here is a teenager with a buzz cut hauling his bleeding body across broken ground as he shoots blindly.

Flash: Here is your hand on the barrel of a rifle, pale with cold and carved with the lines of your history.

Flash: Here is gentle Jolene screaming obscenities, lips curled back, hair swinging like snakes.

Earlier, when Natalie had tried to imagine the assault, she had mentally screened old movies, columns of men goose-stepping like Nazis down the center of the street. She had wondered if she would be able to frame the sights up on a living target and pull the trigger, send a hunk of metal screaming through space to tear the flesh of another.

That turned out not to be the problem. Any reluctance had vanished when they started shooting floodlights—when, like the beast that had lived in her childhood closet, they drew their strength from darkness. She had gone through five magazines of ammunition already, and although she couldn’t say for sure how many people she had hit—how many she had killed—she knew the number was far from zero.

No, the problem was that the militia didn’t goose-step down the middle of the street. Instead they sprinted, zigzagging. They hid behind every scrap of cover. They stormed the barricade and leapt from the top and hit the ground at a roll and came up running. They dashed along the paths that ran between the buildings. There were so many of them, an endless stream, and all desperate to live, and even as she lined up and fired and lined up and fired, even as she knew that her rounds found targets, there was always another, and another. It was like trying to poke holes in the ocean, only this ocean was clothed in black and howling and shooting back.

The slide of the rifle locked open. Natalie dropped to her knees, spun so her shoulders were against the filing cabinet. She spared a moment to look at her d-pad, where the battlefield map glowed faintly. Drones circling above tracked heat signatures, motion, and gunfire to build an interactive picture of war as a living organism. It looked like a ring of fire squeezing inward. The colors shifted and flowed as she watched, vortices of furious red spinning against blue as the New Sons broke the city defenses.