Chapter 21

Selena stood on the other side and did not run.Her mist had eaten away half the glass, and cold wind poured into the airlock and lifted the ruin of her gown. She looked at the shaft, then slowly turned to me."I can help you.""Help me with what?""Managing people." She forced a smile. "You can fight and you can hoard, but you do not know how to make several hundred people obey. At the company, public relations, the board, the press, all of it was me. I know who is greedy, who is weak, who can be used."She undid the last of the buttons still on the gown."I can belong to you too. Just let me live."Tara swore over the comm.What I thought of instead was myself in the last life.Outside that shelter door I had also done everything I could to prove I was worth something. I said I understood finance, I understood supply chains, I knew the storeroom codes. I even knelt in the mud and offered to hand over everything my father left me.They closed the door anyway.The first thing I took ba

Chapter 22

"No." Lia had two fingers on my pulse. "When you lose control you pull non-living objects in, but you still go into shock yourself. We stay right here."They did not treat me as a god because I had the vault, and they did not treat me as a monster because I lost control.They simply used the rules we had written together to drag me back out of my own ability.Ten minutes later my heart rate was down to a hundred and thirty.I wrote the new limits on the log board.One. Absorbing a core carrying strong hostility leaves emotional residue.Two. For twenty-four hours after an upgrade, the vault may open and close at random.Three. The lightning stops at a heart rate above one hundred and sixty, and anyone has the right to cut the power.Tara read it and added a line underneath."Four. The Warden follows the rules too."I signed it.The alarm went off right then.Not an internal alarm. A convoy signal picked up by the passive radar on the summit.Emma brought a screen back up and enlarged t

Chapter 23

Emma glanced at the feed and her breathing went ragged."That is Evan."A young man in his twenties was kneeling on the ground with a wound in his left shoulder. The gunman behind him had already raised his weapon."Nine minutes," the Welder said.I closed my eyes and pushed my senses out ahead of me.The hundred-foot field only covered my immediate surroundings and could not reach the lot. But during the scouting pass, the drone had already dusted every vehicle with metal powder carrying a vault mark. The marks would not let me take a whole truck at range, but they let me confirm exactly where each vehicle was and how it was built."Vehicles first," I said.Emma looked at the hostages. "They will start shooting.""Which is why we do not kill anyone first."I crawled along the drainage ditch to the edge of the lot. At ninety-five feet from the first truck, the wheels, the driveshaft, the gun mount and the fuel lines all came up in my head at once.I raised two fingers.The four lug bol

Chapter 24

"Shut the door, or I'll—"I made the spring inside his gun vanish.In the second he was stunned, Evan turned and threw himself back, driving a shoulder into the man's chest. The boy came free and slid along the ground through the doorway.One sixty.The edges of my vision started going dark. I could keep discharging. Three seconds would have electrified every puddle in that lot and burned the rest of them where they stood.The enemy and the creatures were standing together. There would never be a better opening.But our rules were written plainly.I let go of it myself.The arc died, and the cardiac alarm in my ear stopped climbing."Emma, break my conductive path."She drove an insulated axe into the cable trough and the last of the current was cut."You actually stopped?" She could not believe it."One sixty. I have to stop."Evan and the last survivor rolled through the fire door. Emma hit the local mechanical switch, and the door finally sealed, shutting the creatures and the bulk

Chapter 25

The canned food, the medicine and the machines I stockpiled before the disaster only kept people from dying.Those technicians could turn supplies into production, and turn Northridge from a warehouse into a real town.In the first month after we got back, we built a second defensive line along the ridge.The wind was strong that day, and Tara had twelve new guards lying below the snow line. She did not shoot for them. She only nudged the youngest one's boot with her foot."Muzzle down two fingers. You are shooting a mutant dog, not a cloud."The kid was shaking with nerves. "It is coming right at us!""Wait until it crosses the red line."The dog came over the rock pile and onto the prepared ground. The kid squeezed the trigger, broke a foreleg with the first round and put the second through an eye socket. The animal went down outside the line without setting off the mines behind it.Only then did Tara nod."Remember this. The ammunition belongs to everyone. The fear is yours. Do not

Chapter 26

Everyone's wristband carried contribution points. Patrol, repair, planting, teaching and caring for the wounded all earned credit. Children, the seriously ill and anyone who could no longer work drew a basic ration and did not have to prove they deserved to live.Of course, the rules did not suddenly make people better.Some stole medicine, some inflated their hours, and some tried to bribe the storeroom manager.The first time we caught an internal theft, more than twenty people gathered outside the storeroom demanding that the thief be thrown out of Northridge.The thief was a seventeen-year-old girl. Her mother had pulmonary fibrosis, the official ration was not enough, and she had altered Lia's dispensing records.Lia put the original records, the camera footage and the pharmacy inventory up on the wall."She did steal the medicine," Lia said. "But the ration model is also wrong. We underestimated overnight dosing for radiation lung damage."Someone shouted, "So she gets off?""She