I bow my head, and my hand’s trembling, gripping the mic so tightly I can’t seem to make my fingers unwind. Below me the silence echoes. But if just one person’s finger slips on a trigger, a single gunshot will end all hope of peace.
I flick the switches that will end the transmission across the planet and the galaxy, but I leave the loudspeaker in place, lifting the transmitter one more time. “I’m going to come down now. It’s time to talk.”
And finally, I let the mic go. There are stairs leading down inside the tower, and my legs are shaking as I descend, my footsteps the only sound. Jubilee’s at the bottom of these stairs. Badly injured, certainly. Perhaps dead by now. My mind is numb, my heartbeat leaden. My fingers fumble with the lock from the inside until I can open the door and step out into the open.
“Mr. Cormac.” The voice rings out from the swamp, and I know it—Commander Towers herself. I crane my neck until I see her, approaching the fence, which was torn to pieces in the battle. Some of the Fianna are melting out of the swamp as well, revealing their battle plan, clearly intending to flank the military in the darkness. It might even have worked.
Though they hang back in the shadows of the buildings, crouching low and keeping out of sight, I can see a hundred of the Fianna at least, the whites of their eyes showing against the mud camouflaging their faces. Plenty of guns still trained on me. “Stop,” I call. “We need to tend to our wounded, and talk.”
Our wounded. I can see Jubilee just a few meters away, slumped unmoving in the mud. Every muscle in my body wants to run to her, to throw myself down at her side. Suicide, she’d called it, the plan to run across the battle to reach the tower. She got me my chance to stop this war; I can’t risk shattering this fragile balance and let that sacrifice be for nothing.
“Please,” I whisper, and though it carries toward the soldiers in the silence, my eyes are on Jubilee.
“Flynn.” My heart surges up into my throat. It’s Sean. One side of his face is bloody where a laser clipped his ear, and my heart shrinks to see him looking so warlike. Our eyes lock, and despite the distance, I know what’s in his gaze. Blood and betrayal, Fergal’s ghost and Sean’s cutting grief standing between us. “What did that mean? That we turned to the murder of innocents?”
There’s no forgiveness in his tone, but the fact that he’s talking to me at all—the fact that he listened—makes my heart race. It’s the smallest glimmer of hope, like electricity running through me. But before I can respond, a flicker of horror runs through Sean’s features and he takes a step back, turning to find McBride some distance behind him. Sean’s eyes drop to the Gleidel in McBride’s hand, and as their eyes meet, something cracks in my heart.
“You’ve been lied to, all of you.” I harden my voice, make myself stand straighter, moving forward past Jubilee. It’s torture not looking back at her, and I force myself to keep my gaze up, to finish this. I can still see the desperation on her face, the pain, as she stared up at me. Go. “You’ve been manipulated into breaking the ceasefire by a madman.”
McBride’s shaking, the gun at his side trembling with suppressed rage. “No one is going to take the word of a traitor like you.” He’s beyond reason now—I can see it in his jerky movements, hear it in his voice.
“Nobody needs to believe me. They can see it themselves. Hand over your gun, McBride. We’ll check the readout and see how many shots it fired that night.” Because I know, and he knows, that if he refuses to let us see the data on his Gleidel, he’s announcing his own guilt.
A ripple of confusion runs through the crowd, and I cling to that—it means some of them do doubt him. Some of them want to believe me.
McBride’s eyes bore into mine, all the hatred and disgust he’s been trying to hide for years burning openly now. “Avon will rise from the ashes of this war, and you were always too weak to be the spark, Cormac. Doyle and the others couldn’t fight, but they could still serve our cause. They were kindling for the flames, and that was an honor.” His lips creep into a stiff rictus of a smile. “You can still serve, too.”
In slow motion I see his arm start to lift, and a vision of the next thirty seconds plays out in my mind. I see him drop me to the ground, I see the gunfire start up on each side once again. I see bodies crumple.
Then Sean’s beside him, grabbing at his arm, forcing the Gleidel down again with a grunt of effort. He knocks McBride off balance, but only for a moment; McBride is bigger, stronger, more experienced. He wrenches the Gleidel free of Sean’s grip, twisting an arm around his neck and pulling him in close to act as a shield, gun at his temple.
“Someday,” McBride hisses, “you’ll understand why I—”
The shriek of a laser rips the air, and my heart stops; the whole world stops. But it’s McBride, not Sean, who drops to his knees. He’s dead before he hits the ground, a neat, round hole smoking in the center of his forehead.
Sean falls, dragged down by the arm around his neck, but he rolls free, coughing, to come up on all fours.
Hundreds of guns lift, and the world holds its breath. Then I realize where the shot came from. I turn to see Jubilee on her knees, holding her gun in her left hand, her right arm hanging uselessly. I run back to her, my world narrowing to this one moment, everything else falling away as I drop to the mud at her side. She’s alive. Bloodied, trembling, leaning into me as I wrap an arm around her, but alive.