The men fired as they tried to duck for cover. Neither hit the other, but the screaming civilians behind them were not as lucky. I saw a woman with an old MAGA hat fall, dragging her young son down with her. No way to tell if the kid had been shot. On the other side, a Black man with gray hair and a preacher’s Roman collar spun away, hands clamped to a bleeding stomach.

Other people fell, though many were diving for cover.

On the dais, police and security personnel were pushing the governors down into crouches and shoving them in stumbling runs toward the exits.

But then the exit doors banged open, and that’s when I knew that I’d been right about it all. Four big men emerged from the exits, a mix of races, all of them armed and moving as precise military units. These were the Fixers, dressed in civilian clothes. No fancy body armor, no cybernetic fighting machines. Hopefully no goddamn explosives. But from their speed and the bellows of fury they howled into the air, I knew they were being driven by R-33. And they were both relentless and filled with rage as they plowed into the security teams.

I saw so many people go down in the first barrage—cops, uniformed security, aides, tech staff, and some of the governors. No way to tell how many were hit or how badly. All around me, people were fighting. Rioting. And again, no clear way of determining who was a militiaman or radical tricked into coming here, who was a Fixer seeded into the audience, and who was just a civilian whose simmering political anger had boiled over. It was a true melee, a free-for-all.

I saw all of this while moving.

I pulled the Snellig and, as I ran through the thrashing crowd, shot anyone who’d been holding a placard, anyone holding a gun, anyone clearly going after a civilian. I wanted to get to the dais and take out the Fixers, but there was a churning sea of people between me and them.

A fat man with a huge beer belly and massive forearms got in my way and threw a head-smasher of a punch at me. I ducked it, rammed my shoulder into that belly, and used him as a combination shield and battering ram as I slammed into the Black man who’d accidentally shot the woman. I rose up, headbutting the fat guy. I stamped hard on his foot, splintering the bones, and leaned past him to shoot the white guy who’d nailed the preacher. Then I shot the Black guy. All three went down, and I quickly knelt by the preacher, but he was dead, his eyes staring up with profound surprise at the heavens. As I turned toward the woman with the kid, I saw someone else kneeling to help. Good.