She fell and feet trampled over her, and she focused on channeling that well, in twisting the line, in sucking up the fuel and pouring it into her legs. A woman fell over her and landed on her back, driving the wind out of her lungs, but that didn't matter any more.
She didn't need air. She poured anger into her arms and shoved upwards, tossing the woman off and getting her feet under her. It took a second only to reorient herself, not in the pell-mell chaos of stampeding people, but in the flash and spray of signals. The ones with the guns were different, resolving like hot blemishes on her skin.
She charged.
Bodies peeled away before her, split by the arrowhead of will she poured three feet ahead, letting her stamp into the gap.
"Halt right there!" one of the soldiers shouted, seeing her coming through the mulch of bodies, and leveled his weapon at her. Not for the first time she stared down the whorled barrel at a bullet.
And stopped it.
Now the well was pumping smoothly into her, filling her with strength, and it wasn't hard to mold that force into something familiar. With the right kind of control and a simple twist she turned the shape of her rage into an icy, stifling wall, just like she'd felt the very first time she saw a demon in the depths of Mongolia, and flung it at the soldiers ahead.
They froze. Their eyes showed fear but they didn't move. Their trigger fingers strained but didn't pull.
Anna sped up. Shouts and gunfire rang from behind, but there was no stopping now. She pumped the cold out like a shield, even as she cleared the last few feet and pushed past the two frozen soldiers, into the elevator.
Wild excitement flooded her. This was real and she was doing it now. She hit the call button and the doors chimed closed. Every eye in the frozen hall stared back at her, every eye terrified.
As they should be.
The doors closed and the carriage rose.
In the pocket vestibule, hung halfway between the Habitat below and the real world above, she poured more anger into her weary limbs and took to the ladder. Last night this had burnt her out, and it would so again, but she could tell she was getting better at it; sucking the anger out of others and using it as fuel as she passed.
With every rung up she felt the sense of what was coming from above more clearly, and drained it faster.
Then she was there, and there were two more soldiers at the top, skulking in the hot, stinking hangar, but the drain had already left them vacant, watching her with their weapons hanging slack.
Anna ran on.
Bodies still lay in the hangar's shadowy, wet heat, nestled in with little mounds of trash; plastic bottles, meal trays, rumpled towels and bedding. The smell of old sweat and urine filled the air, mixing with the stench of putrefying death.
She strode through the ranks of the sick, scanning the shadows and the opening beyond for more soldiers, but there weren't any yet.
"Anna," came a call from behind, and she saw Peters loping after her, limping but otherwise unharmed. "Where are we going to?"
"Montcliffe," she answered, and emerged from beneath the hood of the hangar, out onto the melting airport blacktop. The sun was high in a cloudless cobalt sky, beating heat down. Bodies still lay scattered on the runway; the dead in clusters as if gathering for warmth. Clouds of flies roamed and buzzed. Off to the right, past the curve of the terminal building, lay a large harvested heap.
Anna ran on and listened to the nearby signals, while Peters struggled to catch up. There were people in one of the nearby hangars equipping themselves with weaponry. There were people slowly dying in the makeshift above ground hospitals, suffering the failure of the line. There were others standing around a table, studying a map. The level of detail she was getting now was more than ever before, as if in its absence the hydrogen line had somehow opened up to her.
She looked for Inchcombe and found her in a baking cell; one of the prison huts they'd used for Lucas and the others, resurrected in the sun. She'd been beaten. Anna tasted blood in her mouth, and wondered that she was lucky not to already have been over-ridden. Montcliffe must be exercising an abundance of caution, with the earlier soldiers sent just to scout out where she was hiding.
"Anna?" said Peters. "Where?"
They were drawing stares again. Two men and one woman were standing guard by the entrance to the weaponry hangar, and they leveled their rifles toward her. Yes, there. She sent a probe ahead and felt Montcliffe in the thick of them. Angry. Working hurriedly. This was it.
It added up.
"We're in the middle of a coup," Anna said. "Montcliffe's coming for us now."
"How did you-"
Anna honed in before the first of the soldiers could fire, twisting off a chunk of ice and shaping it into a bullet, that flew out and dropped him where he stood.
The two remaining guards watched him go down with a second's disbelief, then tried to fire as well, but Anna dropped them with two more shots, pop pop, to the floor. The power was really humming in her now. She wasn't even thinking, just doing, surfing the surge intuitively just as she'd learned to race catamaran on the ocean. There were tides and flows and she rode them better than anyone.
"How did you do that?" Peters called out.
Anna shifted her flows and began to sprint.
There were seventeen signals in the dark of the hangar ahead. She ran under the lip of the wide entrance and circled round a stack of large crates, to emerge into the midst of them as they prepared for combat; putting on black tactical gear similar to the uniforms worn by the ones in Istanbul city center. A range of strange helmets sat on a table beside them, some matte black and others like ancient diving bells similar to what Salle Coram had worn.
Montcliffe stood in the middle, a powerful man dictating his most trusted troops, amongst whom were the five who'd pulled the skin off Jake; she recognized them not by their faces but by the stink of their signals in the absence of the line. In their hands were rifles, grenades in long rolls, even a flamethrower, ready to come kill her and her people.
They saw Anna and their faces paled. Their weapons spun around like a circular firing squad.
Anna waved a hand and cold shot out of her like a bomb, freezing them in place. Only Montcliffe went untouched, his jaw dropping as the strings of all his people were cut. There wasn't anything any of them could do. They hadn't grown up in the arms of the ocean, faced off with demons as a teen, lived through the explosion of a leper that broke the line. They just weren't prepared.
"You can't do that," he said, as Anna stepped up to him, the slightest note of a whine entering his voice, as if he'd just caught her cheating at Monopoly. "How can you-"
"It's done," Anna said, passing by the table of helmets. "Get used to it. Put your gun down."
He looked down at the gun in his hand. He'd forgotten it was there. His face flicked from shock to an ugly snarl, and he raised the gun smoothly as he spoke.
"I should have killed you the moment we had you."
Anna froze his hand with a thought.
"Yes," she said, "you should have," then covered the last few yards and knocked him out with a solid punch in the real world, a right cross across his jaw. He dropped.
For a moment Anna stood at the head of his frozen people, looking out at their wild, terrified eyes. Yes, it wasn't fair. Yes this wasn't what they expected, but she was going to show them a hell of a lot more mercy than they ever would have shown her.
"Stop fighting me," she said. "I'm not fighting you. Open your eyes."
At that moment Peters came running in, panting round the boxes. He stopped at the edge of the ring, like the final statue in the full-size diorama, and stared with disbelief at them, at Anna, at Montcliffe on the floor.
"Anna, how did you-"
"Can you please tie these people up?" Anna said, not willing to waste another moment.
"But how did you… I've never…"
"Please, Peters," Anna said, already starting back through the hangar toward him. "I can't hold the
m like this forever. I'll explain everything soon. But please, do this for me now."
He looked at her, into her eyes and past the new demon-like aura she exuded, and she tried to show him the real Anna inside, who she'd always been, just altered, and he nodded.
"Good. Yes. Of course."
"Thank you," she said, rested a hand on his shoulder as she passed by, then continued swiftly out.
The air was dead silent outside. Anyone watching had tucked themselves away. Good. It was time to sort this place out.
She ran toward one of the hospital tents. The signal was clear and bright there, shining in the absence of the line like a lighthouse.
It was stuffy and smelled of gangrene inside the tent. Doctors and nurses called to each other in quiet, harried tones, their white aprons marred with blood and soot still. How long had they been working like this, saving lives? In the corner a man worked at a sputtering air conditioning unit. People on beds watched her dimly pass by. Blood streaked the canvas ceiling.
Anna advanced through their ranks, drawing no attention, toward a doctor in the middle who was intent upon an incision in a patient's abdomen, extracting a fragment of what looked like rubber. It was a young woman. Across her chest Anna picked out the unmistakable marks of tire treads.
Amo.
She waited while the operation continued. The doctor was skillful, precise, though she had to be exhausted. Her concentration did not break until the last shreds of rubber were extracted, the wound cleaned and sealed.
Then she turned to Anna, as if she'd known she'd been there all along, waiting.
"You," she said.
"Me," Anna answered.
It was the woman who'd saved Anna and her people the night before. She was young, perhaps twenty-four, with the same pale skin as the rest of the bunker people, bloodshot eyes, but a gritty resolve in the set of her mouth.
A moment passed.
"I heard something about a coup," the woman said. "Was that you?"
Anna smiled. "It is now, I suppose. Montcliffe was coming for me, trying to undo your work, and I couldn't have that."
The woman frowned. She was not impressed, nor afraid. Anna liked that.
"Dead? Injured?"
"Just unconscious."
The woman grunted. "It's not my business." Then she started to turn, but Anna caught her arm.
"It is your business. I need you."
The woman looked at the hand and frowned. "I have work here. Too much work."
Anna shook her head. "You're not helping anyone like this, in a tent in the baking sun without air conditioning, understaffed, under-resourced, getting by on probably no hours of sleep. That's bullshit and you know it. Inchcombe's out of her depth and your people won't listen to me, not after what I've done. They need someone strong and fair, and as far as I can see that's you."
The woman glared. To her credit, she didn't dissemble or deny anything Anna had said. If anything her signal shone brighter. "You don't even know me."
"I know what I've seen," Anna said firmly, "and that's enough. Look around you. We need to do this together or we're all going to die, and I think you might grasp that. Inchcombe couldn't see past her own nose. Montcliffe can't see anything except revenge. Did you know they're carting the corpses only a few hundred yards away? They're not thinking clearly, not beyond the next emergency, while I'm talking about surviving the line, and the bunkers and the lepers, and the years that come after that. Stop fighting me and start helping, and help your own people."
The woman's eyes hardened.
"What do you mean, the bunkers? We are the bunkers. We're all part of the SEAL."
Anna snorted. "That's what I'm talking about. I said it to Inchcombe and she didn't listen, but maybe you will. You're not in the SEAL anymore! Think about what you did to us when we were offering a treaty, just because we were outside their shields. You're outside their shields now too, which makes you just as infected as us. It doesn't matter that this is a gap in the line; in a few months enough of it'll creep in and you'll flip to zombies, just making more of the enemy. You really think they won't strike here first, with another nuclear bomb?"
The woman paled, but gritted her teeth. "You really think…"
"What's your name?" Anna asked.
"I- it's Helen. You're Anna."
"I'm Anna. I'm telling you this because I know the bunkers in ways you can't. I guarantee that they are not sending aid convoys to help you as we speak. Rather they are planning how to blast you off the map, to cut off the infected limb, just like they did with us. We need to delay that for as long as possible, then we need to round up and contain the lepers before they hit Brezno and kill three thousand more, and I can't help with that if I've got Inchcombe half-assing things or Montcliffe trying to kill me. And after we get that done, we'll need to spin up a mobile shield or find another way to cure your people so we can get out of here, and I need someone like you for all of that, Helen. I don't trust anyone else not to try and lock me up or shoot me down. You're the first person I've seen from below who's kept her humanity, so let's do this. Can I rely on you?"
Helen's pale, pretty features shifted. Her face set with a new resolve.
"Montcliffe's coup. You stopped them by doing that thing in the air, in our heads, just when you were collapsing? Did you take them out alone?"
Anna nodded.
Helen drew herself up, gaining another inch so she actually stood taller than Anna. "You have to stop doing it. Whatever it is. No more, just like you wouldn't fire a gun, because it's obviously a weapon. It stops here."
Anna nodded sharply and held out her hand. "Deal, as long as no one draws a gun on me."
Helen reached out. Her arm was slender and willowy but her grip was strong.
"Deal."
"Then come on," Anna said. "We need to pull this place into order."
Helen looked around at the ward, doubtless seeing a dozen patients who needed her immediate attention, putting the cap on her decision. She was leaving them now, and perhaps a few more of them would die because of it, but if they saved two thousand for the sacrifice? There were other doctors and nurses, and she could save more by getting them the help they needed.
She nodded.
Anna led her out. The real work began.
INTERLUDE 8
The raids blew a smoking hole in James While's control of the SEAL.
First thing on his jet, rising up out of the Alps and the attention trap of Olan Harrison's mutilated corpse, he savagely cut back his inner circle, throwing up fresh walls of security around every secret facility and classified information silo. There was still a giant enemy infrastructure out there, bent upon shredding the SEAL and leaving James While holding the tatters, and he had to respond.
His response only shredded the SEAL further, but there was no choice. Tens of thousands of staff, associated with only the slightest hint of possible collusion, were lopped off like rotten branches. Root and branch he scoured the organization, dissolving the sixteen current departments along with their Heads, raising only a handful of people he trusted most to positions of czar-like power.
There were twelve of them, each responsible for the Ark bunker in their global geographical slice; building it, staffing it, stocking it, hiding it from the world. The world was shifting and the SEAL's old priorities of environmental protection, famine-mitigation and war-reduction no longer mattered. What mattered was the Ark project. If he couldn't protect that, and build that, and stock it with enough people to restart civilization once the threat was past, then nothing would survive the apocalypse to come.
He drafted in army, navy and air force units from a hundred nations, under the guise of emergency preparedness operations he'd laid the groundwork for years earlier. He dispersed logistical delivery as broadly as possible, to keep the locations of the Arks as secret as possible. He doubled down on interrogations of all the suspected SEAL staff he still had in custody, but as the hours and days passed by, he expected less and less.
He barely slept; catching an hour or two at a time as his jet circled the Earth one, two, three times, refueled in mid-air. He paced round the empty cabin, bringing up screens and data, trying to narrow the focus for an investigation into what had happened, where his people had been taken, what was coming next. The loss of Rachel Heron was stinging, leaving him with only the lower echelons of seniority from the Logchain to draw information from, though he had one trump card left.
Joran Helkegarde.
They talked frequently, in brief bursts and updates at all hours of the day and night. Joran had transformed himself in the days since his Array erupted; diving deeper into the hydrogen line than ever before, bringing in experts on the T4 and genetic splicing, exposing for the first time the brittle points of contact between the T4 and the hydrogen line of research, all the while searching for a unified theory on what was happening, and how to stop it.
He had taken over the running of both the Istanbul and Bordeaux bunkers in large part, turning swathes of their limited real-estate over to outsourced labs and research bays, stocked with staff drawn from across the dissolved Arrays, the Logchain and the Apotheo Net. James While saw no choice but to trust him fully, sharing everything with him about Olan Harrison and Rachel Heron.
Joran asked for Rachel's 'samples'. His scientists and tech-experts went to Sakhalin with overwhelming military guard, where they raided the remnants of Rachel Heron's data, gathered the earliest expressed samples, the gray and the red ones, and brought them back to Istanbul, where Joran ordered up destructive testing.
In one update eight days in to While's two-week sojourn around the world, Joran announced he may have unlocked a means to shield the twelve Arks. On the video screen his eyes shone like fevered jewels, high on any number of illicit substances. His lab coat was rumpled and smeared with blood samples. At that pace he would be dead within a month, While recognized, but he took no action to slow him down. They might not even have a month.
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