the building.”
“Hold Zoe under guard,” she said. But when they approached, Penny tensed again.
“Penny, let them take her,” Ai said, but Penny shook her head.
“You heard them,” Ai said, calmer. “Fawkes’s army has breached the perimeter and is inside the building. They are coming for us. We need to leave now.”
“Can we shut down the elevators?” someone asked.
“Not from here,” a voice answered over the radio. “We’d need to get to the maintenance—” The voice was cut off.
“We’ve got movement in all wings,” one of the guards said, shaking his head as he looked at a computer tablet in his palm.
“How long?” Ai asked.
“At their current rate? Not long. Five minutes.”
“Take them both under guard,” Ai said. “Right now.”
“Next one that moves—” Penny started to say, but Ai turned on her and she stopped short. To concentrate on Penny, though, she took some of her focus off me. I saw the cords in Penny’s neck stand out as she tried to hold her ground.
“How dare you resist me?” Ai asked.
A shot rang out, and Penny jerked back. Blood spattered across the floor. One of the men lunged past her and grabbed me.
“Penny!”
I could sense the consciousness of each of the soldiers as they surrounded me. I could feel them trying to gang up on me and push their will on me. I even felt my body start to relax.
Before they could worm their way in any further, I pushed them all back. I locked on to each of their patterns and found the hot, white band that fed them.
I severed them all, and the lights went out. A gun clunked onto the floor, then another, as their bodies crumpled and fell where they stood.
“Zoe, stop!” Ai snapped from behind me as I ran to Penny.
“Penny!”
I knelt down next to her. She lay there, beads of red scattered on the tile around her, but her mind was strong. I sensed pain and worry but not panic. I didn’t sense that slow euphoria and disconnect people got when they slipped away. She wasn’t dying, at least not yet.
“Penny …Penny, are you okay?”
She lifted her head, then propped herself up on one elbow.
“Hold on. Don’t try to move.”
“I’m okay. Don’t turn your back on her.”
I turned as the colors in the hallway washed out and the lights turned bright. As another blast of freezing wind whipped through my hair, I saw the pattern appear around Ai’s large head, bright orange, and red, like molten pieces of a broken planet.
“You have to let Vaggot go,” I said. “You were wrong about everything.” Ai shook her head.
“I have seen more clearly than you are capable of.”
“The end is coming,” I told her. “This has to happen. Fawkes doesn’t destroy the city, and he was never going to. It’s something else, something you didn’t see—”
“Thousands of visions from thousands of people have been catalogued over the course of years and studied by the best minds—”
“None of them live—”
“Don’t you dare interrupt me!”
“None of you survive,” I said. “You can’t see what’s really going on because none of you live. You see these … snippets of what happens beforehand, but it’s useless because you can’t see past it to what really happens. This is the only way to stop it—”
“Who do you think you are?”
I felt her punch through my defenses and grab hold of me. A jolt went down my spine and my whole body started to wind down. She’d found that stem of white light at the base of my consciousness and was trying to pinch it off. My heart skipped a beat and fluttered in my chest as I started to sag.
“We have control of the satellite back,” Ai said. “Heinlein Industries will be reoccupied, and Fawkes will be destroyed very soon. His army on the street will be shut down and then collected and destroyed. Fawkes has lost, and we’ve won. All we need to do is survive until they retake control of Heinlein’s transmitter; then it will be over.”
“It won’t be over,” I gasped. “It’s already too late…. ”
My vision blurred as I pushed back, trying to force her out of my head.
“Penny, kill her,” she said.
Penny got back up onto her feet, and turned toward me. Distantly, I could feel the conflict in her mind; she was my friend, but she’d belonged to Ai for a long time. At some point over the years, Penny had learned to kill without thinking about it, either before or afterwards. I looked into her eyes but it took everything I had to keep Ai from killing me herself, and I couldn’t tell what she was thinking.
“Don’t,” I whispered to her. “Please.”
“I said, ‘kill her.’”
Slowly, Penny turned away from me and faced Ai. Red dots appeared on the tile near her feet as she straightened her back.
“Penny, you know you can trust me,” Ai told her. “She is wrong. She dies here in this building; you know that. You both die here.”
“Then so do you,” I said, and as the light got so bright that it stung my eyes, I pushed her away and out of my head.
11
SACRIFICE
Nico Wachalowski—Heinlein Industries
The four revivor signatures moved around the western face of the Pratsky Building, heading for the transmitter hub. The one in the lead was Fawkes. With his head start, it was going to be close.
I skirted past several more piles of clothing strewn on the floor. The toe of my boot hit a stray pistol and sent it spinning down the hall, where it struck an empty helmet. Somewhere else in the building, several shots went off.
The corridor opened into a large area with cubicles set up in the center. Offices ran the length of the wall to my right, and across the room, a huge window looked into a dark laboratory. The glass had been punched through with a long row of bullet holes, and through the web of fractures I could make out hulking machinery. According to the map, I could cut through there on my way to the dish.
The door was jammed. I kicked through the damaged glass and climbed over the edge, dropping to the floor. Back the way I’d come, I heard more gunfire.
A large tank along one wall had ruptured, and the air in the lab had a chemical smell. Fog had formed over the
