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I a the bomb

Help me

Alicia, sister Alicia, he is yours

Martinez never saw it co In the fraction of a second before he uncoiled his massive body, Amy landed behind him With a snap of her wrists she jetted the chains forward to encircle his fra his arms to his sides The smile hty pull she drew Martinez upright, exposing the broad meat of his chest As Martinez tu his body to the ground The bayonet was poised above her head, wrapped in her fists And yet she did notin her ears "Say her naht to focus Louise?

And with these words, and all that she was, Alicia brought it down and drove it ho him in the ancient manner

The final seconds of the battle of the field were, to the crowds in the stands, an incomprehensible blur of movement Not so to Lucius Greer Greer understood, as no one else could, as about to happen The chains that A her to his corpse Alicia was struggling to turn hi ducks, and yet the re virals had yet to fall Perhaps Martinez’s death had caused a break in their co one of their own perish beneath a human hand had rendered the the moment of victory, and thus extract the fullest measure of satisfaction fro else

It was soure was rushing frolance was all he needed for his eyes to learn what hisBut so was different The virals sensed it, too They snapped to attention, their noses darting, tasting the air

"Look over here, you bastards!"

Peter was nad to the waist, his torso slick with blood-war rivers of blood that coursed down his ar wounds of the blade still clutched in his hand His intentions were clear: he would draw the virals away from Amy and Alicia, down upon himself He was the bait; as the trap?

And Greer heard:

I aast

Greer ran

Alicia saw it, too

Amy was still pinned to Martinez’s body The chains that tethered her had wound upon the in frustration, Alicia saw Peter racing toward the virals; saw their bodies swiveling, heads cocking, eyes blazing with animal attraction, the pleasure of the kill

Peter, no, she thought Not you After everything, not you

She never kne Aot loose One moment she was there and the next she wasn’t The empty shackles would be found just where Amy had left them, attached to chains still hopelessly lashed to Martinez’s body; in the ensuing days, as each of the of this fact, opinions would differ To so, to some it meant another It was a mystery, as Amy was a mystery; and like any mystery, it said as much about the seer as the seen

But this came later In the split second that re away A streak of light, like a shooting star; then she was falling, down upon Peter

"Aast loved her

Because Amy was home

Because he had saved her, and she him

And Peter Jaxon, lieutenant of the Expeditionary, heard and saw and felt it all; he felt it all at last In a single ast’s whole life had poured into his own Its corets Its love for a forgotten girl, and its long sojourn through a hundred years of night He saw faces, figures, pictures of the past A baby in its crib, and a wo to lift it into her arht He saw Ae intensity, alone in the world, and the lights of a carousel and stars in a winter sky and the forels carved in the snow It was as if these visions had always been a part of hi drearateful to have seen theive them witness in the final seconds of his life

Co He cast himself into the hands of God He sensed but did not see Greer strea fro his body for the heart of the pod And in the last instant, Peter heard the words:

Aast dove into their er; and as A the brunt of the destruction in his stead; and as the last of the Twelve in their fury fell upon Wolgast-Wolgast the True, the Father of All, and the One Who Loved-a hole in space opened where he had stood, dark night burst to brightest day, and the heavens rent with thunder

Chapter 66

It came to feel as if there were two cities in the ned, and the field below, a zone of after adjacent but apart Soon the touldexhausted, absorbed the a where it liked, including the field; they would find it one by one, drifting down,tentatively as their bodies tasted freedom But in the near term, the combatants on the field were left to the and the lost

It was Alicia whom Peter awakened to see She was blackened, bruised, bloodied Much of her hair had been burned away, tendrils of s She hovered above hiled to speak His tongue moved heavily in his , shook her head