The building rumbled from another explosion, and Vinci and the guard both fell into a ready posture Marcus had come to recognize as communication: They were scanning the link for news of what had happened. Marcus heard distant pops of gunfire.

“The fighting’s getting close,” said Vinci. “Get back to your men, I need to talk to the building’s defensive force.”

They hurried back down the spartan hall. “We can help,” said Woolf. “I have ten trained soldiers in there—”

“Please,” said Vinci, “this is a Partial battle. You’d only get in the way.”

He led them back through the double doors to the waiting area and left them there, racing deeper into the complex. Trimble’s guard closed the doors behind them, locking the doors tightly. Only one of Woolf’s soldiers was in the waiting area, standing by the door of their sleeping quarters; when he saw them he waved them over, shouting urgently. “Hurry, Commander, you’ve got to see this.” Woolf and Marcus ran toward him and he led them inside; the other soldiers were clustered around the outer window like children, watching the city in awed silence.

“Get away from there,” said Woolf, “there’s a battle going on. . . .” His voice drifted off as the soldiers cleared a spot for him, and he saw what they’d been watching. Thousands of Partials, seemingly with no battle line, running and shooting and killing one another in the city below—in the streets, on the rooftops. Their window was fifteen stories up, well above the majority of the fighting, which gave them a terrifying sense of the scale of the battle: Literally as far as they could discern through the city, battle was raging.

More frightening than the size of the battle, though, was the nature of it. Even the smallest, wounded, most ill-equipped Partial soldier was performing feats that would make any human the unquestioned hero of the Grid. Marcus watched in shock as an infantryman ran lightly along the roof of the building beyond, firing his rifle one-handed as he did and picking off snipers on the next roof over. When he reached the edge he leapt to another building, clearing the thirty-foot gap and landing in a machine-gun nest that was firing in another direction. More impressive still were the people he was shooting at, who despite his unerring accuracy were able to step to the side with inhuman speed, dodging the bullets by millimeters and returning fire almost casually. The machine-gun nest where the runner had landed became a swirling cauldron of knives and bayonets, each wielded with a controlled fury that made Marcus pale at the sight of it, and each blow turned aside with almost contemptuous ease. It was a war of supermen, every one of them too accurate to miss, and too fast to be hit.