“WHAT THE HELL’S THAT?” he muttered.
He saw CorpTroopers in heavy power armor rappelling down to the plant’s roof. He saw the Preacher appear from inside the installation, pushing some kind of cylindrical glass case, too rimed in frost to see inside it. But even through the smoke and fog, Cricket’s optics were good enough to see two bloodstained figures being secured on the tethers, hauled skyward along with the capsule into the flex-wing. A pretty male with a mop of bloody blond hair. And beside him, dripping scarlet from the multiple holes in her chest…
“EVIE…”
The missile pods unfurled at Cricket’s back, the chaingun from his arm. But looking at the human soldiers above, he didn’t…he couldn’t fire. The Preacher leaned out over the roof, bloodstained and grinning. He spat a stream of sticky brown from between split lips, gave Cricket a salute, calling words he couldn’t hear.
“WHAT’S HE SAYING?”
Solomon’s eyes flashed, and he scribbled on his whiteboard in a panic.
Megopolis detected a launch from a rogue military installation near the Glass seven minutes ago. There’s a fully armed nuclear cruise missile inbound on this city.
“…WHAT?”
He’s also alluding that logika don’t have souls, so he can’t actually see you in heaven, but he likes your style and hopes—
Cricket ignored the rest of the note, turning to Abraham.
“WE NEED TO GET OUT OF HERE!”
The Daedalus carrier blasted its turbines, lifting the Preacher, Evie, Gabriel and their glass cargo up into the sky. Banking off through the rolling smoke, the air fleet tore away over the city, burning south as fast as their engines would take them. Cricket snatched up Abraham, roaring at the top of his voice.
“ALL OF YOU NEED TO RUN! THERE’S A MISSILE COMING!”
Panic flooded his systems as he stomped to the front gate, as the Brotherhood broke and scattered, the citizens streamed out of the waterlogged buildings. If what the Preacher said was true, there was nowhere to run—no way to escape the incoming firestorm. The blast would simply be too massive to escape. But still, the First Law was screaming in Cricket’s mind. His only concern, the hundreds still in New Bethlehem—innocents and sinners alike. His only imperative to try and save the unsavable.
He looked up into the cigarette sky, data scrolling down his optics as his scanners scoured the gray. Looking for a telltale heat signature, a flash of light, anything that might…
There.
He saw it. A tiny black spear, burning in out of the sky like a thunderbolt. Electric despair washed over him. Thinking about Evie. About Lemon. About everything he’d fought for, everything he’d learned, everything he’d lost, glad in the end that despite it all, at least he wasn’t alone.
He patted Solomon gently on his metal knee, cradled Abraham to his chest.
“I’M SORRY,” he said.
He felt a knocking on the side of his head. Turned to look at Solomon one last time. The spindly logika was pointing east, out across New Bethlehem’s smoking walls, the wrecked cars, the ash and ruin. There, glinting in the sunlight, Cricket saw a lumbering monster truck, painted Brotherhood red, speeding in across the desert.
He sharpened his optics, thinking he was glitching as a colorless…tear opened up in the ground in front of the truck. The vehicle plunged down into it, fell out of a similar rift that had opened up just in front of New Bethlehem’s walls.
The truck hit the deck, bouncing wildly, crashing through the wreckage out front of the gate with a scream of tortured metal. Brotherhood and Disciples and citizens all went scattering, the truck slewing sideways, overcorrecting and skidding into a row of parked autos. Windows shattering, steel tearing, engine smoking, it crashed to a halt right in the middle of the city square.
“…WHAT THE HELLS?”
Cricket saw two teenagers in military uniforms in the front seat. A dark-skinned boy, spattered in blood, a radioactivity symbol shaved into the side of his head. And a girl, dark hair, hooded eyes and lips smudged with black paint. The pair climbed up onto the truck’s roof, shaking and bloody and bedraggled.
“WHAT ARE YOU DOING?” he cried.
Cricket saw a shimmering rift open in the air high above their heads.
Cricket saw the missile, speeding in from the heavens.
And Cricket saw the boy
raise
his
h—
Lemon stood on the burning sand, eyes to the horizon.
The wind at her back blew her hair about her face, her freckles streaked with dust and tears. Tire tracks were torn into the earth at her feet, marking Grimm and Diesel’s frantic drive back to New Bethlehem. Her hands were crusted with dried blood. Her lips were still tingling.
It’d been ten minutes since the missile launched, tearing westward with its cargo of fire and screams. Six minutes since Grimm kissed her, lifting her off the ground and lighting a fire in her chest. Five minutes since he and Diesel disappeared over the horizon with nothing but a desperate plan, leaving her alone to watch the western skies and wish she were the kind of person who prayed.
Lemon stood and stared, counting each second in her head, one by one by one. She knew it was stupid to believe things might turn out okay. To imagine happy-ever-afters in a world like this. She knew it was the kind of thing a kid would do, and that—if she’d ever been—she surely wasn’t a kid anymore.
She knew it was silly to hope.
But in the end, it was all she had.
If they make it…
If he comes back…
And then, to the west, a new star bloomed in the sky.
It was brighter than the daylight. Brighter than anything she’d ever seen. A burst of atomic fire, like some awful desert flower opening its petals to the sun.
She put her hand up against it, trying to blot it out. As if by making it invisible, she might make it unreal. But a handful of seconds later, she felt the blast, heard it tearing across the desert at the speed of sound.
Dawn without a sunset.
Thunder without a storm.
She felt tears spill down her cheeks as the light bloomed brighter.
Impossible.
Unimaginable.
Mushroom-shaped.
Her legs wouldn’t hold her, she slid to her knees, down into the dust. She thought of the boy who’d called her love, who’d kissed her like he meant it, who’d run toward that fire without even flinching. She thought of the girl who’d gone with him, fighting for this world after everything she’d lost. She thought of the earth burned black, of the hatred and fear that had driven them all to this.