Their timing was exquisite. One-hundred riders hit the Martyrs at the same time. They didn’t seem to have specific targets, or goals beyond causing mayhem. But they did this expertly, spiking armored vehicles and field guns with white phosphorus charges and scattering any clusters of Martyrs they could find.

The woman, Kishori, rode past him, her face skinned and weeping blood, as she lobbed a hand grenade toward a group of Martyrs hunkered behind the shattered remains of a public restroom. She pulled a macuahuitl, with an iron trunk and gleaming obsidian blades, free from her belt as her steed leapt over the burning wreckage of a jeep and bounded toward the survivors. Roland followed her, tearing a piece of rebar free from some rubble as he charged.

The restrooms were at one end of what had once been a giant playground in a public park. It had been derelict for more than a decade, but the corpses of swing sets and remnants of slides were still visible. Several hundred of the Martyrs had fallen back to this position trying to create some kind of defensive line. Panic and mass death had robbed them of a lot of cohesion, but they still managed to pour a lot of fire into Roland and Kishori as they charged.

A rocket-propelled grenade hit the chest of her quadrophract and burst, ripping off one of the machine’s legs and sending the chromed woman tumbling to the ground, gravel and rubble embedding itself into the red musculature of her bleeding face. Roland didn’t stop for her. He charged ahead, absorbed a few dozen rounds of small-arms fire and dodged a handful of rocket-propelled grenades.

He hit a group of twenty-three men, hunkered behind a long ­Stihl-glass barricade and several heavy, metal crates. These Martyrs had been trying to get a trio of anti-tank guns back into the fight. They gave up on that once Roland closed to about twenty feet. One of them, an older man with a spine, shouted words of encouragement and charged forward, firing, with a dozen of his men.

These soldiers weren’t wearing powered armor. They weren’t good enough to hit more than one in twenty shots. They wore old upcycled body armor. Only a few of them had bayonets. They presented no real threat. Twenty seconds and I can put every one of these fuckers down for the rest of the fight. No one needs to die. His hand twitched. The river of dopamine in his synapses shrank to a babbling brook. Roland felt a craving rise. Maybe just a few more.