Cheyenne was groaning beyond them, writhing in pain at whatever he’d done to her arm. Smoke filled the air. Rangan coughed, his eyes burning.

“You won’t shoot,” the man replied.

“You know I will,” the blond woman said.

“Fine,” the man above Rangan said. There was a click, and then the man crouched down, placed a bundle at Rangan’s feet, and rose again.

“Now the transmitter,” the woman said.

The man shrugged. He reached his hand into a pocket, and very slowly pulled it out, a flat black rectangle he held in two fingers. He gestured with it at the woman. “You see what happened here? You see how they fought? You see how they were about to just walk away?”

“I see how many people you killed. People who agreed with you. Give it to me.”

People who agreed with you, Rangan thought. Who the fuck were these people?

The man who’d almost killed him tossed the transmitter at the woman’s feet. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “What’s done is done.”

“You, on the ground,” the woman said. “Get your friend and get out of here.”

Oh fuck yes, Rangan thought.

Rangan half-carried Cheyenne through a world gone haywire, looking for Angel and Tempest. There were flames everywhere. Signs were burning. Stages were burning. Trees were burning. Buildings were burning. The tear gas and the acrid smoke from the fires were filling his lungs. Tears and snot were running from his inflamed face. Sirens were wailing. Molotovs were still hurling through the air. The sound of clashes between police and rioters came from all directions, the sounds of truncheons being brought down onto bone, of rubber bullets slamming into bodies, of the rage-filled screams of tens of thousands of humans gone mad, ripping at the better armed and trained police forces trying to quell their eruption. Above it all, Cheyenne’s pain was overwhelming across their Nexus link, her right arm and shoulder sending out waves and waves of agony. They passed people lying prone on the ground, and Rangan just hoped they weren’t dead.

Then the hate flipped off, like a switch. He almost missed a step, even buffered as he was by his NANCie, then caught himself and Cheyenne. She’d turned it off. Whoever that woman was.

Cheyenne groaned in pain. More smoke rose into the sky. More screams came from somewhere off to his left, mixed with the dull crack of breaking bones. A crash and whoosh came as another Molotov struck home somewhere else. Rangan coughed again, and harder, as the burning penetrated deeper into his lungs.

That woman had turned off the hate machine.

But it was too little, too late.

54
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Thursday 2040.12.06

It was Rangan? Kade sent. You’re sure of it.