2026-08-01 14:08:33
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318 Gratitude
Sophia Baker came up Calloway Street with a man's spine hanging from her right hand. It was what remained of Marek Voss.She dropped it on the tarmac and walked on without looking down.Charles Wheeler walked beside her. Blood covered the man from his hair to his boots, all of it splatters from other people.Behind the pair, the rebel army lay in pieces across the road. Entrails steamed in the cold air. One man dragged himself toward the shopfronts on two stumps, screaming for his mother."Who are they?" a man wailed from the middle of the crowd. "What are they?"Kate Harper knew both faces, and the knowledge put ice in her stomach.Sophia Baker sat at the top of Springfield's extermination list. The Puppetmaster had taken the woman apart four years ago and built her back out of something that was not bone, and Kate had read all two hundred pages of her file.Charles Wheeler was worse. Kate had heard him fight Roadkill on a construction platform eighty stories above Springfield.What
317 Raven Wings
The rocket left the tube with a noise like a door being torn off a house.Kate Harper had three seconds, and she was afraid in a way she had not been in two years.Eleven women stood shoulder to shoulder in its path. She knew the explosive capability of that warhead. All eleven of them would die in the blast.She could save them. The Raven could.Kate's nanofiber supersuit was folded inside the watch on her left wrist.But two helicopters were working the district, and every satellite over Sparta City had been watching this coup since nine o'clock.The whole world would learn Raven's true identity.Was there another way? There was not.She pressed the button.The watch opened along a seam nobody had ever seen. Black alloy ran up her arm and over the gown she had worn to the Emporium auction, and it closed over her face last.Kate Harper was gone. The Raven stood in the middle of Calloway Street, and a smooth steel mask hid her face.Four hundred people saw it happen, and for one secon
316 The Escape
Kate Harper walked at the head of four hundred and eleven Springfield citizens, eleven blocks from the airfield, through a city that had stopped having a government at nine o'clock that evening.The power was out across the whole eastern district. The only light on Vellum Avenue came off the capital building, still burning six streets north, and rifle fire opened up somewhere new every few minutes.Nobody knew whose fire it was. That was the worst part of a coup. There was no way to tell a soldier from a looter until he was pointing something at you.Twelve Springfield elite guards walked the edges of the column, seven feet each. They had come to the Emporium auction dressed as guests. Now they carried rifles taken off dead men."Keep them tight, ma'am," the captain said. "Loose columns lose people.""Then walk slower at the front," Kate replied.Four rebels stepped out of a shopfront at the second crossing with their rifles up. The guards put them down without breaking stride.Two sh
315 Thirty Minutes
The terrace was cold.Kate came out through the glass doors with two guards ahead of her and two behind, and stopped at the rail, and for a moment she did not understand what she was looking at.Sparta City ran downhill from the Emporium all the way to the harbour. She had flown in over it that afternoon. It had been white and orange in the sun, ten miles of low buildings and shipping cranes and one glass tower at the centre where the government sat.The glass tower was on fire.There were three columns of smoke west of it. She counted them and then a fourth started and she stopped counting. Something heavy went off near the port and she felt it come up through the stone under her feet, two full seconds after she saw the light.Sirens, everywhere, and under the sirens a sound she had heard exactly twice before. A city crowd, a very large one, all making noise at once.Behind her, through the glass, the auction floor had turned into three hundred wealthy people trying to leave a buildi
314 Madam Harper
Halloran had her by the arm.He had taken hold of her when the crowd first closed, and through all of it he had not let go. Kate could feel his thumb pressing into the muscle above her elbow.It was not a grip meant to hurt her. It was a grip meant to show the room that he could put his hand on her and nothing would happen.She could have broken it in under a second. She had been taught four ways to do it and two of them would have put him on his knees.She did not do any of them, because she was in a foreign city, in a dress, holding a hundred million dollars of Victor's property, and the moment she dropped a billionaire in front of three hundred witnesses she stopped being a buyer and became an incident.So she stood there and let him hold her, and she hated it."Nobody's going anywhere," Halloran was saying, "until this woman tells us exactly who she stole that card from.""Sparta City police," Castellane's son said. "Somebody call them now.""They'll take an hour to get here.""Th
313 The Black Card
Halloran got his voice back."Is this a joke?"He said it loud, and the room grabbed it like a rope thrown in water. Somebody laughed. Then somebody else. Within five seconds the whole floor had decided what it was looking at, and the tension went out of it all at once."She's playing with us," Castellane's son said, delighted. "She has no intention of paying anything.""A hundred million." Halloran spread his hands to the room. "A hundred million, from a girl who hasn't bid on a bottle of water all night."The laughter thickened.Kate stood in the aisle and let it happen."You think this is a game?" Halloran came closer. The friendliness was gone now, scraped off entirely. "That's a binding bid, sweetheart. Registered. Witnessed by three hundred people.""Sir," the auctioneer tried."No, let's do this properly." Halloran didn't look away from her. "Tell her what happens to people who bid money they don't have."The auctioneer swallowed."If the bid cannot be paid tonight, the Emporiu
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