Ewan did not offer a response. He looked to the floor and found that a bunch of odds and ends had fallen away from the pile before him. Some were everyday objects such as phones and watches, and others were half-kilogram weights made of different metals.

Ewan grabbed hold of the nearest weight, ignored the searing heat against his hand, and lobbed it as hard as he could towards Oliver Roth.

Roth did not look bothered. Not until the weight passed between the two stone pillars. He had not witnessed Ewan switching on the AME shield.

The weight detonated against the shield, causing violent red ripples and a fiery explosion that threw Roth from his feet. As the assassin fell against the wall, Ewan jumped upright, leaned around the pillars and shot him four times in the chest.

As satisfying as it would have been, Ewan did not hang around to watch Roth collapse to the hot ground. He leapt back through the empty window frame, took a running jump over the burning control panel, and tore off his gas mask as he landed in front of the open door. Wheezing, weakened, but alive, Ewan stumbled back into the Floor F corridor, slamming the door closed behind him just to be certain.

He shot his tired gaze down the corridor, and found himself to be safe. There were no clones waiting for him. Oliver Roth had acted alone, and lost.

There’s no way I should still be alive after all that.

It’s almost enough to make me believe in luck. Almost .

*

With surprisingly little guidance from Lorraine and Shannon, Kate had found the lower battlements of Floor L. The corridor looked different to anywhere else she had seen in New London.

Her corridor stretched in a straight line as far as her eyes could see: a mile or two, at the very least. Most Outer City corridors had turns at least once in a while, accounting for the different-shaped rooms they passed, but not this one. Kate was fairly sure she could fire a bullet each way down the corridor and hit both the eastern and western Citadel walls. Every hundred metres there lay a door on her left, unlabelled and cream-coloured. She picked one at random, took a deep breath, and swiped her latest stolen keycard.

There was no buzz. Snipers didn’t like to be distracted by sudden noises.

She opened the door, slowly and silently, and found what must have been the smallest type of room in the whole Citadel. There was enough space for a small man to lie down on its inbuilt mattress, but little more. At the front end, a square hole in the concrete wall pointed diagonally downward, through a widening tunnel to the cool air of the outside.