•—•—•
If there’s one thing I’d learned in the Academy, it’s that there is no such thing as unnecessary overkill. I twisted the broken sword, pulled it out, and stabbed again.
The hand that stopped me this time was flesh and blood and as large as my head. With a flick of his wrist, Carnage threw me backwards all the way across the ridge.
I landed hard in a pile of dead or dying soldiers, and felt something in my spine give way. My legs splayed uselessly to the side and blood fountained from where I’d removed the metal shard, but my eyes still worked.
I saw Fallout on one knee, both hands still extended upward.
I saw shadows stab down from Tempest’s own thunderclouds like the negative images of lightning strikes. I saw her obliterate some with lightning of her own, saw her build a wall of wind and rain against the others.
And I saw the shadows slide right through that defensive wall to strike her.
I saw Tempest die.
And two hundred feet below her, I saw Carnage turn and start to come my way.
Fuck this fucking shit.
•—•—•
I couldn’t feel my legs. I could barely move my arms, and darkness was starting to creep into the edges of my vision, but what I remember more than all of that was the emptiness of my power spreading from my core. I felt it reach my heart, felt my heart skip one beat, then a second. Felt it reach my mouth, making my tongue go numb. I felt it reach my eyes, felt them flutter shut.
Some people say there’s a great tunnel of light when you die, and an uncontrollable urge to travel toward it. Some people say you see your own life flashing before you, every decision made, every mistake, every blessing.
I opened my eyes and saw ocean.
It wasn’t the Pacific, not really. There wasn’t any water and there wasn’t any sky. There was just darkness, like an ocean’s waves, tiny pinpricks of light reflecting off the surface. Except even that was wrong, because it wasn’t darkness; it was emptiness, and it wasn’t light, it was something else, something that pooled in increasingly shallow puddles in the dead bodies about me, something that barely glimmered in the imperceptible forms of ghosts across the battlefield.
For the first time, I saw with my own eyes that balance of life and death of which Sally had spoken.
Even in this strange perspective, Carnage was a giant; a bonfire of energy twenty feet tall. I watched him come as the last bits of life trickled out of me, as my emptiness spilled over into the earth and the corpses around me. He stood there and said nothing, content to watch me bleed out on my own.
I’ve said it once, and I’ll say it again,
Fuck going out like that.
I pulled on that dark-watered ocean around me, the dead and the almost-dead, even the pockets of buried decay in the desert beneath me. I pulled that death back into me, kept pulling until metaphysical seams started to tear, as my core struggled to contain the emptiness I’d taken.
Then my right hand, my good hand, reached up of its own accord. Fingertips brushed the exposed skin of the Black Hat’s thick ankle.
I let all that emptiness go. Out of me and into him.
Fuck you, asshole.
They weren’t the greatest last words ever spoken—or thought, since I lacked the breath to speak them—but they were mine.
Sometimes you just have to take what you can get.
CHAPTER 75
That’s how it was supposed to go anyway. Orphan Crow, Academy dropout, and would-be murderer giving his life to take the big bad down with him.
Problem is, it didn’t quite work like that.
Oh, I killed the fucker; make no mistake about that. All the death that had pooled in a hundred soldiers and I don’t know how many Capes flooded through me into Carnage like a tidal wave he couldn’t see. Asshole never knew what hit him.
What I didn’t expect was that the emptiness I’d forced into him didn’t consume his energy so much as displace it. As black waters filled his nine-foot-tall, unstoppable frame, drowning every molecule of his existence, all the energy that had previously occupied that space was pushed out along the path of least resistance.
Into me.
For a brief, horrifying moment, I thought that was going to kill me, wild energy running roughshod through my broken body, but what my shell couldn’t hold spilled right back out of it. I pulled my hand away from Carnage’s ankle and the excess energy splashed into the bloody earth beneath me, soaking into the soil until it was lost from sight.
When it was over, I took a breath and it didn’t hurt. Stretched my legs out and watched them move. Every part of me felt vibrant and energetic, whole and unharmed, and the emptiness at my center was silent and still for the first time in months, curled in about itself like a seed waiting for spring to sprout once more.
I rose to my feet, and watched Carnage’s body crumble into dust. Looked from that swiftly decaying body to the wide eyes of the half-dozen Capes who had just arrived, their bright costumes scorched and pitted by what looked like magma.
“You’re too fucking late,” I told them. “We already lost.”
“Look again,” said the lead Cape, a pale-skinned woman in the Society’s colors.
I turned and stared.
A single man floated in the sky, the sun a halo around him as the last vestiges of Tempest’s storm dissipated.
Dominion had arrived.
•—•—•
Thirty minutes after that, it was over. The Black Hats who didn’t scatter or surrender died where they stood, most of them swatted like insects by the Free States’ only Full-Five. Twenty minutes later, a rescue operation was in full swing. Fliers from the Society and Red Flight brought in paramedics from the 184th Regiment as well as both Academy Healers and the recruiter
