The voice continued, louder and more urgent now. ‘Every day they welcome more of these scum—these bringers of death and disease and decadence and drugs—so they may go on eating us alive from within! And they will continue to do so, until there is no place left for us, no food, and the very air will be sucked from our lungs to fill those of the scum!’

The crowd was screaming so loudly the voice could barely be heard. Vail raised his hands. Immediately, there was silence, so severe you could have heard a fly buzzing at the other end of the Arena.

‘And that is not all! Not content with just inviting in disease spreaders and death merchants, they also let in the Domechildren! Domechildren! They let in the very people who drove us here, who are responsible for everything that ails us, who even today seek to destroy us! Even now they walk among us, countless scores of them, including, from what I have hear, one whose crime, whose betrayal was too much even for the Domechildren—a man who befriended the machines!’

Somehow, that sentence cut through everything else, searing its way into Albert’s brain. He stirred as if from a trance. Vail was talking about him, it was his own blood he stood here baying for! The voice still clung to him, stroking him with desperate fingers, but the spell had been broken, the golden glow falling as dust from him. He felt twinges of horror streaking through him as, for the first time, he heard the words themselves, just the words, and felt fear deepen as he realized what they said.

‘They let in this man, this machine-friend, this betrayer of mankind! What will they do next? Let in the machines themselves? No, we will not let it happen! Never! Not while there is breath in our bodies and blood in our veins!’

Albert looked around and saw the bloodlust in the eyes around him, and he felt his chest constrict. He needed to get out of here, now! If these people, this raging mob realized that it was him, that he was the ‘machine-friend’ Vail was talking about, then …

He tried to turn but the crowd was too thick, he couldn’t get out, not without attracting undue attention. If they saw him trying to leave, they might guess he wasn’t one of them. Maybe he could just bide his time and slip out when it was over. It wasn’t like anyone was paying any attention to him right now—they were all fixated on the stage, held in thrall by their manic preacher.