2023-12-01 19:09:24
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320 Two Choices
Calloway Street stank of burning rubber and blood, and the airfield fence stood two hundred yards away under its floodlights.Nobody on that road was going to reach it.Morgana walked towards the crowd, and a crushing, invisible pressure rolled out ahead of her.The first people it touched folded over and vomited onto the tarmac.Kate lay on her back where the impact had thrown her. It came down on her chest and pinned her there. Her supersuit gave a thin electronic whine and went dead around her.The last charge was gone, and the Raven's powers along with it. She was lying inside a useless superhero suit on a Sparta street."Please!" Kate forced the word out through her teeth. "Ma'am, please! These people are innocent. They saw nothing. They don't understand any of what happened here tonight. Let them go!"Morgana stopped walking.The bone mask turned towards the woman on the ground."You are polite, but your people have all seen something the world was not meant to see yet," Morgana
319 Insects
Calloway Street was four blocks of burning trucks and people flat on the tarmac when the woman straightened up out of the crater.She wore a long coat the colour of wet coal. The mask across her face was carved bone, white and polished, and it covered her from hairline to chin."You are wrecking my town," she said. Her voice came out of the mask filtered and flattened, like a radio caught between two stations.Sophia Baker turned around, still dragging half a Springfield guard off her barbs. Charles Wheeler lowered his fist.Kate stayed on one knee, her blood running warm into her boot from the hole in her hip. Dread sat in her chest like a swallowed stone.Who was this woman? Where did she land from?"Morgana," Sophia said, and the name travelled through the Springfield citizens in a wave of whispers. "You are the one who took this city on Thursday. The coup was yours.""It was.""Then we have no quarrel."Sophia's barbs retracted smoothly into her forearms with a sound like rope dra
318 Gratitude
Sophia Baker came up Calloway Street with a man's spine hanging from her right hand. It was what remained of Marek Voss.She dropped it on the tarmac and walked on without looking down.Charles Wheeler walked beside her. Blood covered the man from his hair to his boots, all of it splatters from other people.Behind the pair, the rebel army lay in pieces across the road. Entrails steamed in the cold air. One man dragged himself toward the shopfronts on two stumps, screaming for his mother."Who are they?" a man wailed from the middle of the crowd. "What are they?"Kate Harper knew both faces, and the knowledge put ice in her stomach.Sophia Baker sat at the top of Springfield's extermination list. The Puppetmaster had taken the woman apart four years ago and built her back out of something that was not bone, and Kate had read all two hundred pages of her file.Charles Wheeler was worse. Kate had heard him fight Roadkill on a construction platform eighty stories above Springfield.What
317 Raven Wings
The rocket left the tube with a noise like a door being torn off a house.Kate Harper had three seconds, and she was afraid in a way she had not been in two years.Eleven women stood shoulder to shoulder in its path. She knew the explosive capability of that warhead. All eleven of them would die in the blast.She could save them. The Raven could.Kate's nanofiber supersuit was folded inside the watch on her left wrist.But two helicopters were working the district, and every satellite over Sparta City had been watching this coup since nine o'clock.The whole world would learn Raven's true identity.Was there another way? There was not.She pressed the button.The watch opened along a seam nobody had ever seen. Black alloy ran up her arm and over the gown she had worn to the Emporium auction, and it closed over her face last.Kate Harper was gone. The Raven stood in the middle of Calloway Street, and a smooth steel mask hid her face.Four hundred people saw it happen, and for one secon
316 The Escape
Kate Harper walked at the head of four hundred and eleven Springfield citizens, eleven blocks from the airfield, through a city that had stopped having a government at nine o'clock that evening.The power was out across the whole eastern district. The only light on Vellum Avenue came off the capital building, still burning six streets north, and rifle fire opened up somewhere new every few minutes.Nobody knew whose fire it was. That was the worst part of a coup. There was no way to tell a soldier from a looter until he was pointing something at you.Twelve Springfield elite guards walked the edges of the column, seven feet each. They had come to the Emporium auction dressed as guests. Now they carried rifles taken off dead men."Keep them tight, ma'am," the captain said. "Loose columns lose people.""Then walk slower at the front," Kate replied.Four rebels stepped out of a shopfront at the second crossing with their rifles up. The guards put them down without breaking stride.Two sh
315 Thirty Minutes
The terrace was cold.Kate came out through the glass doors with two guards ahead of her and two behind, and stopped at the rail, and for a moment she did not understand what she was looking at.Sparta City ran downhill from the Emporium all the way to the harbour. She had flown in over it that afternoon. It had been white and orange in the sun, ten miles of low buildings and shipping cranes and one glass tower at the centre where the government sat.The glass tower was on fire.There were three columns of smoke west of it. She counted them and then a fourth started and she stopped counting. Something heavy went off near the port and she felt it come up through the stone under her feet, two full seconds after she saw the light.Sirens, everywhere, and under the sirens a sound she had heard exactly twice before. A city crowd, a very large one, all making noise at once.Behind her, through the glass, the auction floor had turned into three hundred wealthy people trying to leave a buildi
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