Written in Fire (The Brilliance Trilogy Book 3) (30 page)

Cooper’s vision was hazy, black gauze creeping in from the edges. His brain was trapped in a vise, like the worst hangover of all time, every beat of his heart ringing crystalline agony. His mouth was full of copper, and one of his teeth had broken, the exposed nerve shrieking. The sounds of battle had faded away, replaced by the thin thunder of breathing. He threw an awkward punch as Soren knelt to straddle him, but there was no power in it, and the man brushed it aside as he dropped down, knees pinning shoulders. The victory maneuver of a childhood brawl, and normally something Cooper could have countered easily, but his body was weak, he couldn’t get any leverage. Every move he made, his enemy had time to read and counter.

Soren was lean, his kneecaps bony as he drove them into Cooper’s shoulders. Half his face was coated in blood, a trickle that oozed down his neck and soaked his shirt. His cheekbone was visible in the worst of the gashes, the meat of muscle laid bare. Reflected flames danced in his eyes and glinted off the edge of the knife, making it seem alive. Cooper tried to buck, but Soren could feel the play of muscles, had all the time in the world to redistribute his weight.

“You started,” Soren said, “with her eye.”

The knife slid down, the move slow, theatrical, giving Cooper time to see it coming, to anticipate the burning tear as it cut his flesh open, to imagine it plucking his eye from his skull. He wondered morbidly whether he would be able to see it happen through that eye. The drone was away, the militia was winning, Natalie would die in the battle, his children would be yanked from bunkers and murdered as the city burned around them and the world fell to darkness, and there was nothing Cooper could do about any of it. Soren had beaten him again, just as easily as before, but it would not be quick this time. Cooper could see the relish in the man’s face, the madness whirling within him, the pleasure he would find in dispensing agony as civilization cracked and collapsed.

The knife drifted downward. The tip caressed his cheek. Penetrated. Scraped against the bone of his eye socket. The pain was sharpened by terror. He knew what would happen next, could imagine the blade digging, the agony, the permanence.

A blast of blue radiance flared like a lightning strike.

For a moment Cooper thought it was his eye going, but no, Soren saw it too, he was staring at the sky, his features carved in electric blue and darkness, a word forming—

That light is the same as when the other drone blew, liquid hydrogen burning explosively.

And Soren is staring, but it’s not surprise or distraction that really has him.

It’s despair.

Shannon took out the drone. She gave her life to do it.

And gave you an opportunity.

Are you going to waste her sacrifice?

—“No,” he and Soren said at the same time, but where the other man was lost in his own time, staring upward in the slow revelation of his defeat, Cooper forced all thoughts of Shannon from his mind, knew what she would want him to do, that she hadn’t thrown her life away, she had given it, and it was up to him to honor that, and Cooper put everything into a fast buck of his hips, throwing his arms up to lock Soren’s wrist as he kept the momentum going, the two of them rolling, Soren’s back hitting the ground as Cooper rolled atop him and twisted his arm, the man fighting back now, but inertia and strength were on Cooper’s side and he used them, bending Soren’s wrist back and driving the knife through the soft underside of his chin, the flesh stretching and then parting as Cooper slammed the heel of his hand into the pommel, driving the blade through the tongue and the palate and into his brain. Soren spasmed once, twice, and then Cooper got a firm grip and twisted the handle with everything he had and it was over.

He collapsed atop the monster’s chest. Limbs weak and trembling. A shriek ripped from his lungs, a sound that wasn’t a word. Was barely human. An animal howl of rage and pain and dominance.

Then he pushed himself to his feet, wobbling.

At the end of the airfield, blue flames danced like demons as pieces of metal and plastic rained from the sky.

He took a breath, made his feet move, a fall that became a step that became an awkward loping jog. Everything hurt. Blackness throbbed at his vision even as the fire grew brighter, hotter. He reached the UAV first, a twisted sculpture of flame, a licking inferno that forced him aside, but it wasn’t the drone he was interested in. He kept moving, passing pieces of her plane, a teardrop wing bent awkwardly, the tail intact and upright, a rubber wheel belching smoke. The fuselage had snapped, the forward portion ahead and inverted. He ran to it, grabbed the handle, jerked his hands back from the heat, then took a breath and reached again, flesh scorching as he ripped the door open.

Shannon hung upside down, still belted to the seat, her torso packed hard in a white substance like Styrofoam but already melting, the impact foam dissolving to run thick and soapy to the tarmac, and something inside him gave the same way, a wash of warmth.

She opened her eyes. Met his. “Oww.”

“You fucking nutcase,” he said, laughing and gasping. “I thought you were dead.”

“No,” she groaned. “Not quite.”

His burned fingers were clumsy, but he managed to undo her seat belt, her weight sliding into his arms, the two of them collapsing amidst the bubbling remains of the safety foam. She lay in his arms, both of them panting, lit in blue. Finally, he said, “A parachute was too much trouble?”

“Old-world thinking, Cooper.” She smiled, and he bent down to kiss her, never mind the agony from his ribs, the shock from his splintered tooth.

There was another explosion, the UAV jumping and then crashing down again. They startled apart. Shannon said, “Soren?”

“Done.”

“Good. That’s good.” She shifted, then winced. “I think my leg is broken.”

“That’ll teach you.” He smiled, stood up, bringing her body with him, one arm draped around his shoulder, her body soft and warm against his.

“We won,” she said.

“Almost. One more thing to do.”

“What’s that?”

“What you’ve been bugging me about since we met.” He tried a wobbling step, found it okay, took another. He kissed the side of her hair, her hair smelling of smoke and sweat. “Tell the truth.”

CHAPTER 44

In the flare of light from his rifle, the man kneeling in the street looked different from the others. For one thing he was older, fifty or even a very fit sixty. But there was more to it. It seemed to Natalie that he had a serenity about him. He had fired just a single shot, not a screaming burst, and where the others were lit by ferocity or pain, he had a killer’s calm. As if this scene of horror was his home.

It scared her. And so when she lined up her sights on the place he had knelt, she didn’t hold back. She held down the trigger and unloaded the rest of the magazine at him. The bullets ricocheted off the concrete, sparked off his rifle, and though she couldn’t say for sure, she thought she saw his body fall.

She dropped to the floor, removed the magazine from her rifle, and reached for a new one. The bag was empty. She grimaced, said, “Jolene?”

As she looked over, she saw Jolene on the floor, arms outstretched and a strangely placid expression on her face. Staying low, Natalie hurried over. No point in checking for a pulse. There was a neat hole in her forehead.

Something tore in her then. She hadn’t known the woman long, had really only had the one conversation, but they had fought side by side, and that had connected them in a way she’d never understood before. Like her, Jolene wasn’t here for ideology, or Tesla, or even her own survival. She’d fought for a child. Natalie took a trembling breath. Laid a hand on Jolene’s eyes and closed them. Then she grabbed her dead friend’s spare ammunition and moved to the next window.

The moment she popped her head up, there was a fusillade of fire from the street below, flashes from a dozen spots. She dropped, fought the shake in her hands. The street had been filled with attackers, men sprinting across with impunity. For the first time in a long time, Natalie let herself look around.

When the attack started, there had been eight of them spread out across the floor. Eight men and women, including Jolene and Kurt and the pudgy girl with the dog. Jolene was down, Kurt was nowhere to be seen, and the dog was whimpering and pawing at the girl’s body. Best Natalie could tell, she was the only one left.

Their line had failed. The Sons had broken past the building. It was over.

You don’t know that.
They’d been hit hard here, but maybe the rest of the city hadn’t taken as much fire. She had to believe that, because otherwise it meant the militia was streaming in everywhere, and how long could it be before they reached the city center and the bunker where her children hid?

She didn’t dare even crouch, instead crawled across the floor, pushing aside broken glass and spent shell casings. Her file cabinet was shredded, the metal punched with scores of holes through which paper scraps bled. The d-pad was already active; she’d left it up so that she could glance at the map as she reloaded, although she had been too focused to actually do it very often.

The city glowed in swirling colors like fire. It wasn’t just their position that had broken. The Sons had gotten in through a dozen spots, and pitched battles raged all over the city. Epstein’s towers still held, but the colors showed the militia drawing closer from every direction.

They’d failed. Somehow everything hadn’t been enough.

Natalie stared. Tried to think what to do. She was low on ammunition and wildly outnumbered. The situation had flip-flopped, and now she was on the outside, and the killers were between her and her children. There was no way she could get through town.

She imagined Nick in this position and knew what he would think.
Fight until they kill you
. She loaded a fresh magazine, readied herself to face that fire again.

As she was about to stand, the battle map disappeared from her screen. There was a flash of an image, and not only from her d-pad, she saw, but from Jolene’s. Others across the floor lit up too, casting bright lights against the ceiling. A ten-foot wall screen mounted on the opposite building glowed to life. And on all of them, the same image. A surreal, impossible picture.

Her ex-husband.

CHAPTER 45

When he’d thought of the idea earlier, Cooper had imagined a tri-d studio—lights, makeup, and more importantly, a professional. A newscaster, maybe, or Jakob Epstein. Someone who talked into cameras for a living.

“Time is a factor,” Erik said over their video link. “And credibility.”

“Exactly. That’s why it should be someone who knows what they’re doing—”

“They will not listen to us.”

“What makes you think they’ll listen to me?”

“Statistically also unlikely. Odds of success are—”

“Okay,” Shannon cut in. “That’s enough confidence-boosting, Erik. Is the link ready?”

“Yes. We’ve activated dormant Trojan horse software. Estimated efficiency puts the message on 96.4 percent of screens in America.”

“Jesus Christ,” Cooper said.

Shannon lowered the d-pad. “Give us a second.”

They were still at the airfield, in the drone hangar. The lights were on, and Cooper felt strangely exposed under them, their sodium glare blasting out against the darkness of the city outskirts. The steady
pop-pop-pop
of gunfire continued in the distance, although it seemed quieter than before, which he was having a hard time imagining was a good thing. Shannon sat on a stool with her broken leg extended. His gift could read her pain in the sheen of neck sweat and the too-wide pupils. She said, “You okay?”

“I know this was my idea.” He rubbed at his eyes. “But all of a sudden I don’t know what to say.”

“Just open your mouth and let the truth come out. I believe in you.” She quirked her crooked smile at him. “So don’t blow it, okay?”

Before he could respond, she pointed the d-pad camera at him, said, “Now, Erik.”

“Activating.”

Cooper swallowed his retort. Stared at the lens. Tried to imagine his face suddenly appearing on every d-pad, every phone, every tri-d in the country. Quickly decided that was a bad idea. Panic seized his belly. What was he supposed to say that could change the world?

Don’t talk to the world.

Talk to Todd and Kate.

“My name is Nick Cooper,” he said. “I am . . . I was a soldier, then an agent at the Department of Analysis and Response, an advisor to President Clay, and an ambassador to New Canaan. I’m an abnorm, I’m a patriot, and above all, I’m a father fighting for his children.”

He took a breath, let it out. The air rushing past his broken tooth sparked electric. “Tesla is under attack by an illegal militia. The sound you hear is gunfire. Right now people on both sides are dying. Normals and gifted, men and women.

“Thirty years ago the world changed. We didn’t ask for it. We didn’t expect it. Since 1980 we’ve been trying to deal with it. We’re doing a lousy job. And lately, both sides seem to think that war is the only way to make things right.

“But the words
right
and
war
don’t belong together. War may sometimes be necessary, but it’s never ethical. There is no such thing as a moral war.” He thought of his children, huddled in a bunker. Of jets falling from the sky and a missile destroying the White House. Of Soren, trapped in a virtual hell Cooper had imagined. “It makes monsters of us all.

“Worst of all, war is never contained. It has no rules, no boundaries. We tell ourselves that we are fighting for our children. But it’s our children who suffer the most.”

Todd sat on the bunk with Kate and stared at the screen. The bunker was bright and had been noisy, thousands of kids all talking at the same time. But now all of them were quiet as they stared at the screens in their hands or those mounted on the wall.

He could barely breathe. Dad. Dad was alive. He looked terrible, his lips swollen and face dirty and a gash beneath his eye and blood between his teeth, but he was
alive.

“A smart woman once told me,” his father continued, “that there wouldn’t be a war if people didn’t keep going on television and saying there was. That the problem wasn’t in our differences. It was in our lies.

“I have to believe that. I have to believe that by telling the truth, we can stop this. Not the politicians’ truth, or the terrorists’, not the part of the truth that we find convenient. The whole truth, even the stuff that stings.

“We are different, and dealing with those differences isn’t easy. We’re all scared. We’re all hurting. And most of us just want to live our lives. We don’t want to take to the streets, we want to put in a day and then have a beer and play with our kids.”

Kate squirmed against him, and Todd looked down, saw her eyes were wide and wet. She said, “I told you he’d protect us.”

“Shh.” He wiped snot from her nose, put his arm around her, and tilted the d-pad so she could see better.

Dad said, “But this isn’t happening far away, to people we’ll never meet. It’s happening to our children. We know it’s wrong, and we’ve been letting ourselves ignore that.

“And there are people who are taking advantage. Extremists on both sides doing it for power. Some think they know better than you. Some are just scared. In the end, it doesn’t matter. The fanatics don’t care about you, and if you let them, they will push us into war for their own benefit.

“I’m talking about people like John Smith. And Secretary of Defense Owen Leahy.”

Standing at the men’s room sink, Leahy stiffened, his stomach filling with acid. He’d been using the toilet when the tri-d on the wall switched suddenly to video of Nick Cooper. He’d hurriedly wiped and flushed and now stood rooted.

“Both of these men,” Cooper continued, “would tell you that they are fighting for their country. They may even believe it. But what they really want is war. The only weapon we have against fanatics is the truth, so here it is.”

It’s impossible,
Leahy thought.
An abnorm trick. Cooper is dead. He was assassinated weeks ago.

“Several months ago, a team of researchers discovered the biological source of brilliance. Not only that, but they figured out how to replicate it.

“That’s been a goal for thirty years. It could change humanity’s future forever. It’s a triumph that belongs to all of us, that should have been screamed to the heavens.

“Instead, it was concealed. The scientists were chased by the government and terrorists alike. The work ended up in John Smith’s hands. The greatest discovery in human history, and he immediately weaponized it. He used it to develop a virus that would have cost hundreds of millions of lives if he’d been able to release it.

“That’s the truth. But there’s more. Today, as an army of killers swept toward his city, Erik Epstein tried to beg the president for mercy. He couldn’t get through.”

The image cut away from Cooper, replaced by a split screen. On one side sat Erik and Jakob Epstein. On the other, Leahy found himself staring at himself.
The call from earlier. No. Oh, no . . .

The video froze on him, an unflattering pause, a cold smile on his face.

Then Cooper was back. “That’s the truth too. These people use our lives as poker chips. They did it in the Monocle. In the bombing of the stock exchange. Right now, a mob is burning a city of innocents. And all for lies.

“Both normals and gifted are staring into the abyss. But there is still time, barely, to make a choice. We can find a way to move forward together.” He paused. “Or we can keep fighting. All of you watching can sit quietly while Tesla is destroyed, while thousands of brilliants are massacred with their families. But make no mistake, that won’t be a victory. Someone will survive, and they will strike back harder. Blood will lead to blood. In the end, we’ll annihilate each other.”

Cooper stopped talking, and the video held on his face for a moment, blue flames burning behind him, the faint firecracker pop of gunfire. Finally, he said, “We are better than this. We have to be.”

A moment later the video disappeared, and the screen returned to a newsfeed, the anchors confusedly blinking at one another.

Leahy stared. His hands shook. They looked so old. Part of him wanted to run, but where would he go? There was no window to crawl out of, no getaway car waiting to whisk him to safety.

You’ll have to bluff it through. You can do that. You’ve done it before.

He took a deep breath and stepped out of the bathroom.

Camp David’s largest conference room had been converted to serve as the Situation Room. Ranged around the table sat the chief advisors, the surviving cabinet, the commanders of the armed forces. Twenty pairs of eyes stared at him. On a dozen screens, the battle for Tesla raged.

President Ramirez rose from the head of the table. She pressed a button on the intercom. “Could we get some agents in here please?”

“Madam President, I can explain—”

The door to the conference room banged open and four men in dark suits rushed in, eyes sweeping for threats, their coats open and hands inside.

Ramirez said, “Detain Secretary Leahy for treason.”

The Secret Service agents glanced at one another, then drew their sidearms and moved toward him. Leahy said, “Madam President, this is foolish—”

“If he resists,” Ramirez said, “shoot him.”

Then she turned to the people around the table. “Get me Epstein.”