The man cursed when he missed. Said nothing when he hit his target.
“Shouldn’t you be in the militia?” the sniper asked him while reloading, back against the wall. No one had shot back yet. Later, Finch would wonder if the sniper had been shooting at shadows. “You’re old enough.”
He had no answer. No one had ever told him he was old enough before.
Then his father appeared in the doorway, pistol in his hand. The bright green eyes. The neatly trimmed beard and mustache. The broad shoulders. The callused palms.
The sniper turned, began to raise his rifle.
His father shook his head. A grim, single-minded look. Finch had never seen that look on his father’s face before. It wasn’t the expression of an engineer. It came from somewhere more primal.
The young sniper saw it, too. Lowered the rifle. Stood up. Walked stiff-legged past Finch’s father and out into the hall. Like a dog trying to make itself bigger.
Finch saw his father turn and aim at the back of the sniper’s head. Saw him struggle with the decision. Then lower the gun and lock the door.
For a moment, Finch didn’t want to come out from under the chair. Didn’t know this person who looked like his father.
6
Finch headed back to the station. Wyte’s death lodged like a heavy stone in his throat. Constricting his breath. Making him reckless.
A mob came at him out of nowhere, around a corner. Broke around him like a summer storm. A torrent of shouting. Of sweat and dirt and fear. The armbands of a long-dead neighborhood militia reborn. Some dared to show the rebels’ blue band on their arms. Sensing that their time had come. Had it? Finch didn’t know. So many camp uniforms he began to wonder if the gray caps had released them just to create chaos. To somehow obscure what was going to happen. Focused on some objective other than him. Or they didn’t like the look of him. Numb. Staring straight ahead. Gun in its holster, sword in his right hand.
Ambergris come alive again, but into tribes, not a city. Finch wondered what old scores would be settled first.
* * *
Less than a quarter mile from the station, a shuddering thud and crack rumbled through the world. A series of them, from everywhere. Some near, some distant. Followed by silence. The sounds jolted Finch out of a walking trance. The shock reverberated in his bones.
Had the towers unleashed their weapon again? Couldn’t confirm that. Couldn’t see the towers from there. Hidden by the dirty green marble of old luxury hotels taken over by lichen and flanked by tall trees with yellowing leaves. People leaned out of windows on the fourth, the fifth floors, holding flags and shouting. Pointing to the northeast, the northwest.
In the street, a tiny old woman in a faded flower dress. A grubby boy gnawing on a shriveled apple stood beside her. Three Partials staring at the sky. All waiting for the next blow.
But there was no green light. No second series of explosions.
Instead, a curling trail of black smoke began to rise into that perfect blue sky. Finch recognized it. Had seen it before when a rebel bomb left a signal to the rest of the city. Heard shouts and screams rising like the smoke. Muffled. Distant. Disguised.
Had an odd premonition. An awful tightness in his stomach.
Finch began to run toward the smoke. Past wounded storefronts. Past the abandoned wooden box and scissors of a sidewalk barber. Past a huge red drug mushroom whose shade snuffed out the sky, the gentle sighing of its gills both ominous and calming.
He crossed onto Albumuth Boulevard, and approached the station.
The remains of it.
Transformed into a couple of side walls. Smoldering blocks of stone. The kindle of shattered, crackling wood. A blackened hole near the back, expelling blacker smoke. A smell like kerosene. A smell like meat cooking.
A roiling mass of particles. Discharging light until a steady humming glow suffused the city in a kind of dawn. There came in reply from the city a hundredfold bestial roar.
Finch rushed to the edge of that broken space. Stopped short. Saw the scattered remains of bodies. A pant leg. A foot. A torso tattooed with dirt and blood. A pile of something he could not identify. Realized some of it came from the people Heretic had killed and left in the holding cell.
The tubes of the memory holes, torn and bleeding, glistened as they thrashed, whipping the ground back and forth. Others lay still and dusty in the rubble.
A couple of men Finch didn’t know staggered through the mess. Looking for survivors even though they were both bleeding. Both marked by fire. Searching like they might find something alive.
Finch took a step forward. Then another. Walked through the rubble, still holding his sword. Became aware of a dull, booming roar from deep inside the smoldering black hole in the back. Through the swirling whoosh of the rising smoke.
Became aware, too, of someone laughing from the wreckage of the wall to his left. The bricks still went up maybe twelve feet high, ending in a broken snarl. Sheltering the table with the typewriter, which stood as if indestructible. Beside it, slumped against the wall: Blakely, hurt in ways beyond a doctor’s care. But still alive.
Worse than war. Worse than stab wounds.
There would be no putting Blakely back together.
“The typewriter,” what was left of Blakely gasped, between laughs. “The typewriter. It’s still there. It’s still there.”
Finch knelt down beside him. The closer he got, the less he was forced to see what had happened to Blakely. Not a scratch on the man’s face. But Blakely’s eyes knew. Finch could see death in them.
“What happened, Blakely?”
“Albin,” Blakely said. “Albin happened.” Laughed again. “Blew it all to hell. Came by to talk, he said. Had explosives strapped to him. Stood by the curtain, said something I didn’t catch. Stepped inside. Blew himself apart. Threw me all the way across the room. Albin. Can you believe it? Can you believe it? Can you believe it? Can you believe it? Can you believe it? Can you believe it? Can you—?”
Finch returned his gun to its holster. Blakely’s face matched his body now. No kinder mercy. The world getting smaller and smaller, even as it expanded.
Stood up shakily, feeling the shock in his legs. Waved to the men searching the rubble. “Get the hell out of here.”
They saw his gun and his sword, woke as if from a trance. Picked their way through the rubble, the interrupted flesh. Disappeared as if never there.
More curls of black smoke now. Rising all around. Other stations hit. Felt a conflicting sense of loss and freedom. People were dying who’d just tried to feed themselves. Just wanted to stay alive.
The Lady in Blue: “We don’t use suicide bombers anymore.” But they did.
Partials would be on their way to the station. Gray caps. Struggling to dig out of the rubble of their underground headquarters. Maybe the sound Finch heard was just a subterranean fire or maybe it was some fanaarcensitii beast clawing its way to the surface. Finch knew his imagination couldn’t compete.
Was it coincidence he hadn’t been there when it happened?
Left the station to whatever demon was fighting its way out from under the bricks and stone.
* * *
The madman danced on the steps near his favorite statue like nothing had ever gone wrong in his life. Even while the black smoke continued to rise over the city. In the hotel lobby, people had gathered as if seeking shelter from a thunderstorm. They stood there, strangers to him, and parted before him and his sword. He barely saw them.