Nobody decided. That was the strange part, afterward, when the people who lived through it tried to say how it had happened. There was no order and no shouted word, no signal passed down any chain of command. A man cut in half at the foot of a ledge, a second man in the path of the blade, and the island, which had spent the whole day divided into heroes and soldiers and prisoners and terrorists, rearranged itself in the space of a heartbeat into two sides. The figure, and everyone else.
Heroes shifted their grips. Officers behind the cracked armored hulls found their rifles had already come up. The masked riflemen on the slope, who had been taught to hate the Association, turned their barrels away from the Association's line without being told to. Even the collared people in white, huddled in the lee of the rubble, pressed back against the stone as if the figure were a wall of heat. The body knew. Whatever this was, it was on no one's side, and it was not going to stop.
Jack saw the sword coming and did what Jack did. He laughed.
The figure crossed the last of the distance in a single stride and the blade came off its shoulders in a diagonal that would have taken him from collarbone to hip. Bone erupted from Jack in answer—spikes as long as a man's arm punching out of his chest, shoulders, and back in every direction at once, a hedgehog's defense scaled up to the size of a wall. The edge met it. The scream of shards chewing into bone filled the plaza, and white splinters sprayed.
Forty yards back across the plaza, in the cockpit of the Beast Machine, the pilot gave up on the word "don't" and fired.
The twin autocannons under the chin opened together with a sound like canvas tearing, and a line of tracers stitched across the ledge, across Jack, across the figure. Bone chips flew. Jack, startled to find himself a target, cackled harder. The figure was no longer where the first round landed.
It did not leap. It slid, a skid of frost across the paving that put it a body's width out of the stream. The blade came round in front of it in a blur, and the bullets that should have struck came apart. Each round met the edge and each one split, copper and lead falling away in halves with a continuous, tearing shriek. Where the sword couldn't reach, the shards did. They came off the flat of the blade like sparks off a grinding wheel, a loose swarm of glass that hung around its shoulders and tilted every incoming round a few degrees aside, so that the autocannons' stitching wandered across the plaza and chewed the paving, the wrecked marquees, the stone of the ledge, and everything on the far side of the figure except the figure.
It was walking toward the machine as it did this. It had turned its back on Jack.
Jack came in fast.
He came off the ledge at a run with a blade of bone already tearing out along his right forearm, a long white wedge of it, and drove it at the center of the armored back where the frost-veins joined between the shoulder plates.
The figure drove the sword into the ground.
It didn't look back. The blade sank into the paving to the guard, standing upright and still screaming, and the figure turned on its heel and the gauntlet closed over Jack's face.
The whole face. The claws wrapped his skull. It lifted him off the ground by it with one hand, the bone blade scraping uselessly down its ribs, and Jack's boots kicked, and for the first time that day the grin faltered. The other fist went into his stomach.
It was less a punch than a statement. The bone plate armoring his torso shattered outward in a ring, ivory shrapnel spraying across the paving, and Jack folded around the fist like paper around a thrown stone. The figure brought him down head-first onto the ground. Once. The crack went across the plaza. It dragged him by the face through forty feet of rubble, and then, with one arm and no apparent effort, it threw him.
He hit the pile with enough force that the slope shivered. A slab the size of a car slid down from the impact, and a white shape that had been a man disappeared into the dark of the stone.
All through it the autocannons had kept hammering, and all through it the shards had kept turning the rounds aside, a halo that moved with the figure like a second set of hands. Now the shoulder racks on the machine's back opened.
"Missile," the pilot said, to nobody. He had stopped being able to hear himself. "Missiles away."
Two rockets left the Beast Machine in a pair of white-orange trails, and the figure tore the sword out of the paving and met them.
The first came in under the blade's reach, so it reached with the other hand instead. The gauntlet closed around the rocket's body at a speed no hand should manage. The motor shrieked, and the figure's boots plowed two furrows ten feet long, and then a quarter turn of the wrist and a twist of the shoulder pointed the thing back down the line it had come from, and the figure let go. The second rocket went past its flank. The sword flicked and slapped it sideways by its fins, and it plowed into the slope where the masked riflemen were, and the slope became a fireball.
The pilot had half a second. He used it. The six legs hit the paving all at once and the machine leapt sideways in a movement nothing that size had any right to make, and the redirected rocket passed through the space it had stood in and detonated against the plaza behind it, throwing the machine forward on its stumbling legs.
The figure was already moving. It went after the machine in a long flat line of frost, and then up, the sword over its head, in a leap that would put the blade through the canopy and the hull and everything between.
Sol saw it.
He was in the middle of ducking a silver blade that had grown fast again, Orange's cold-slowed forearms loosening in the heat of the fight, and he watched the figure rise. Inside that machine was a pilot who had watched a corridor full of the dead on his visor and fired anyway, and who was still, whatever else, a man. Sol had spent his life refusing to decide which person to save first, and it did not occur to him to start now.
He dropped under Orange's strike and left her standing, and he went.
He went low, and flat out, a few feet above the paving, and what he spent on it was the last of the day's reserve. The air in front of him compressed to a wall. The shockwave behind him took the last unbroken glass on the plaza, and the sound reached the ground a full second after he had passed, a crack like the sky being struck.
The figure was at the top of its leap, sword raised, the canopy under its shadow, when Sol hit it from the side.
It went across the plaza like a thrown door, trailing frost, and Sol was already turning after it.
It turned over twice in the air. On the second revolution its feet found the ground, and the sword, which it had somehow still held, went into the paving point-first and dragged, and the figure slid forty feet behind it on its heels, carving a trench through the stone, until it stopped in a spray of rock.
Sol came in from an angle from above, a falling star, and let go the flash.
It was the full burst, the white release he had held back from Orange all night, and it bleached the plaza and threw every shadow on the island across the ground at once. He went down behind it with his fist cocked, aiming for the place where the frost-veins met at the base of the neck.
The figure did not look up. It had left the sword standing in the trench and it did not need it. The gauntlet snapped up and closed around Sol's descending fist, and it used all of his own momentum, swung him in a full circle by the arm, and put him into the paving before he could draw breath. The stone broke around him.
A fist came down into his abdomen.
The ground cratered. The sound was a bell struck from the inside. The figure drew its arm back for another, and the voice came out of the helm.
It was quiet. That was the thing everyone who heard it remembered. It was not a roar and it was not a threat. It was level and unhurried and it carried to every corner of the island, and it was spoken the way a man asks someone to step out of a doorway.
"Do not get in my way."
Across the plaza, something roared.
The Lord's report came from the shattered upper floor of the Administration Building, a door slammed in a cathedral, and the cross of white fire lit the whole of the plaza for the length of a blink. The round took the raised fist at the wrist. Where it landed a clean-edged bite of ice was simply gone, smoking at its rim, and the force of it turned the arm aside, so that the punch that had been falling toward Sol's skull went into the paving a hand's breadth from his ear.
The figure's head turned toward the building.
It was a moment. It was only a moment. Sol did not think about what it would cost him. He did the one thing he had been saving for the end of the world, and he let it rip.
Not the burst this time. The Flare. Everything the day had put into him and everything the night had not yet taken came out through his skin in a detonation of white-gold heat that turned the edges of the crater to glass and the inside of the dome to steam. Anyone who could still see looked away and still saw it through their eyelids. The figure left the ground. It went away across the plaza end over end, a blur of blue against a wall of light.
When the light settled, Sol was standing in the middle of it, and he was burning. His shoulders, the line of his arms, his hair, his eyes, all gold fire, the way the sun looks over a desert at noon. For the first time since the sun went down, he looked like the thing the city had put on posters.
He looked for where the shot had come from.
A man was coming out through the hole where he had gone in, glass in his hair, blood running from his nose that he had not appeared to notice, The Lord in his right hand with the barrel still smoking. He stepped over the lip of the wrecked floor and kept walking.
'King,' Sol thought.
That was when part of the dome moved.
High over the eastern side, a slab of ice the size of a city block shuddered, and then it came apart. It went from ice back to water in the space of a heartbeat, and out of it, uncoiling, came the dragons, long serpentine shapes of black seawater with heads like battering rams, spiraling down out of the sky toward the plaza. Behind them, the gap froze over again, seamless, as if it had never been.
The figure was still in the air from the Flare.
One of the dragons swept in beneath it and its boots hit the long back. The dragon bent like a spring and swallowed the momentum, and the figure rode it down to the ground and stepped off. It landed in a crouch with its gauntlet flat to the paving and the frost crawling out from its palm, and held out its other hand.
In the trench, forty yards away, the great sword tore itself out of the ground and flew.
It caught it, and it did not look at Sol, and it did not look at the man with the gun. It looked past all of them, past the burning shape in the crater, past the ruined building, to the far edge of the dome on the eastern side of the island, where against the deepening indigo of the sunset—the first heavy violet shadows of dusk bleeding across the stone—a thin pale man stood at the rim with a ribbed casing in his tentacles, and a woman beside him had both hands pressed flat to the wall.
Silver ran down the ice there. It steamed, and bit in a finger's depth, and ran again. Orange had moved the moment the dome closed and she had not stopped since. She was trying to melt through.
The figure changed direction.
It turned from the crater and the building and the man in gold, and went for the rim in a line of frost drawn across the island, and Sol went after it in a streak of burning light.
Lucius broke into a run.
Behind them, everything on Sentinel Forge that could still stand came after it, because there was only one thing left in the world that anyone had agreed on. The NCC line opened up from behind its hulls. The Beast Machine staggered round and found its feet. Saboteur seeded the ground in front of the figure with mines, and Airbrush threw ink, and the Mandrake came howling up the slope with the scream already in his throat. War Hammer threw, and the hammer crossed the plaza on a bar of magnetic fire. Diving Bell hauled himself up from the rubble where he had landed, dented brass and thrusters, and launched. Even the masked riflemen who were left turned their guns on it.
The dragons came down on them like a fist.
One met the hammer's arc and the hammer rang off it and sank. A second took Diving Bell out of the air and wrapped him in itself. Saboteur's mines went off in a dragon's belly and made fountains. The ink bound a jaw for half a second and the sea came apart and put itself back together. The Mandrake's scream shook another into spray, and the spray reformed behind it. The machine's cannon blew a head off one, and it grew a new one.
A dragon dove on Sol's back. Lucius did not break stride. He lifted The Lord and put a round through its throat, and for a moment the head stopped being water and was only a hole, and then the sea closed over it and the thing went on past, and he kept running.
The figure did not slow. It went full speed at Orange.
Berry saw it come across the island with the whole of the dome's light bending around it, and he sent everything he had. The red limbs lashed down the length of the island in a storm, a dozen of them, two dozen, wet and glistening, each one thick as a tree. The figure went through them.
It sliced them like paper. The blade came round and every limb it met parted in a spray of dark red and fell away twitching, and where the blade didn't reach it weaved, under, and over, around a sweep that would have taken its head, a body that moved like frost across glass. It leaped. It cleared the last of the tentacles in a single bound, the sword over its head, aimed at the man at the rim.
Orange was still at the wall. The silver had cut a pit in the ice the size of a doorway, and she had both arms pushed into it, her teeth bared, intent on nothing else. She never saw it.
The wall around her began to whirl.
It went from ice to water in a ring around her, a wheel of black seawater that spun up her arms and her legs and took her off her feet. A blast of it hit her full in the chest, and she went backward across the rocks like a leaf in a drain, silver spraying from her arms in beads, and landed thirty yards inland in a tumbling heap. The pit in the wall sealed itself. It did it like a closing eye.
Berry stood alone at the rim.
The figure was in the air above him with the blade coming down, and he did what he had not done once all day. He opened his tentacles and let the heavy metallic core drop. He did not look at it. Every limb he had left rose, and every dark red eye of the island's last terrorist turned up at the thing falling out of the sky.
His attention was entirely on the figure now.
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To Be Continued