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Gaia advanced on him, but the crowd, the huddled, terrified mass, had used the distraction to break and run.
Gaia felt the fear creeping back in.
And then the missile exploded against the barrier.
Lana stumbled down from Clifftop. It felt like forever since she’d been away from that foul room, that now-terrible place.
She could see in the distance fire eating at the edge of Perdido Beach. She tasted the smoke.
“Not much point quitting if the air’s going to be one big cigarette,” she muttered.
Her battle was over. She felt it inside. The gaiaphage had ceased to struggle against her. She had fought and won her own little war.
Suddenly Patrick came bounding up beside her.
“So, Sanjit sent you to look after me, huh?” She reached down and patted his head. “You and me, boy. You and me.”
There came a loud explosion, a flat but powerful sound, just off to her right.
There would be people hurt by that kind of a thing.
For the last time, the Healer headed toward the sound of suffering.
The missile hit the barrier immediately behind Orc. His body took most of the blast.
It blew him apart. TV cameras caught the moment when a thousand little stones went flying like shrapnel. The rock was blown from his back and much of his chest, from his shoulders and most of his head. It was as if he was a mud-crusted shoe knocked against the wall. The mud gravel was knocked away in patches.
His internal organs were crushed. His eyes bled. For a terrible moment a body, the body of a young man, with pink flesh rising from still-stony legs, tried to push itself up off the ground. Surely just a physical instinct, surely not a conscious effort, because he could not be alive.
Charles Merriman, long known as Orc, tried to rise, and instead fell dead.
Orc’s massive body had shielded Gaia from the worst of it.
She lived, still, but the shrapnel and the fire had stripped the skin from much of her body, a terrible mimicry of Orc’s own destruction.
She was a creature of blood, red from head to foot.
But she lived still.
Sinder ran from the terrible scene. She tripped over bodies, got up, and ran some more.
She glanced back once and saw Orc hit.
She could hardly breathe for the beating of her heart and the sobbing that tore at her.
Her feet pounded earth, tripped, stood, ran, glanced back again and saw Gaia coming.
A beam of light shot past Sinder and she screamed. A girl to her right made a soft gasp and fell. The hole in her neck was smoking.
Feet on concrete now, the road, running. Clifftop! To the left, but uphill, and Gaia was coming, and another deadly beam of light, so close Sinder felt the heat of it on her cheek and cries and shouts and the sound of people gasping for breath, gagging in the smoke.
And suddenly, Caine rising up behind a wrecked car. He was holding something long and white.
The panicked crowd parted around him. Sinder ran on, glanced back, saw Gaia still running and firing, and Caine grim and steady.
“Damn,” Caine breathed. “That is one tough monster Diana and I made.”
The rest of the missiles were off to the side of the road in their crates. He kind of didn’t think he’d get a chance to reload.
