Todos los capítulos de Before the End, I Sold My $3.8 Billion Stake to My Enemy: Capítulo 21 - Capítulo 26

"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

"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

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