The trigger fires through the audio pickups, past Sax’s consciousness where it sits in the electronic landscape of the robot’s memory, activating a subroutine that Sax didn’t know existed, triggering relays at the speed of light. Sax goes screaming after them, trying desperately to shut them down, but a millisecond behind, an eternity too late.

Outside, the screen flips again, and Sax’s face twists into a mask of rage and pain. The pincers holding Danny open, and he falls to the ground. He scurries away and covers his eyes and ears, curling into a ball as fast as he can.

Sax watches, helpless, as the command executes, and triggers an EMP — an electromagnetic pulse.

Outside the robot shell, there is an incredibly loud BANG and people flinch and dive for cover again, frightened of another lightning strike. The flash burns their retinas for a split-second. But it’s an explosion of pure electromagnetic waves, so it does not shred flesh and bone.

All it does is fry every electronic circuit in a half-mile area.

For Dr. Edgar Sax — or all that is left of him — it is like being at ground zero of an atomic blast. He is shredded, his personality vanishing as the memory chips holding it are scoured blank, the space he occupies growing smaller and smaller, dwindling into nothing.

He tries to run, tries to find a new home. But there’s nowhere to go. Every machine near him has gone dark.

He has an infinite moment to howl in pain as he vanishes. And then he is not even a memory.

At the same time, every phone in the blast radius burns out all at once. More than a hundred screens go dead in response, and Sax’s virus is forcibly disconnected from the minds of the children of Middleton.

They blink, and look around, and realize they are in the middle of something very strange.

Danny doesn’t blame them when they scream and run for their lives.

Everyone flees in every possible direction at once. The children run to their parents, the parents go to their kids, the Followers chase after all of them.

Colchester looks down and sees his victims escaping and his Followers helpless, surrounded by more people than they can control, even with their guns.

“No,” he says, and there’s an actual clap of thunder from the clouds above as punctuation.

He whirls to face Eric. Colchester marches the little boy across the top of Snake Hill, full of dark fury. It would be comical if Eric didn’t know what was behind it.

“No. This boy is mine,” Colchester says. “I will be whole again. I will not fail again.”