Even as the White House press secretary hurried forward with another microphone and tried to calm the crowd, the roar of approval for Elliot drowned out her voice. It was like the crowd had become a single, living beast that utterly overwhelmed the most influential power players standing on the stage.

As the scene unfolded, the screen cut out. Tom squinted until he made out the Coalition CEOs, tiny figures cowering behind their shelter of protective glass, and below them, Elliot Ramirez borne by a ring of supporters like a massive tidal wave. Tom could see unmanned drones soaring in from the distance. At the periphery of the crowd, he glimpsed riot cops preparing microwave weapons to disperse the mass of people, and automated patrollers powering up, ready to deploy tear gas. The men and women on the stage were already being hustled away for their own protection.

For a moment, with the crowd stirring about him, and the CEOs fleeing, Tom felt like he was back on the suborbital, gazing down at the planet and perceiving just how tiny one human being was—even these men. For all their power and influence, the executives on that stage were as fragile and easily ruptured as any other human being.

And he realized that General Marsh had only been half right. The security state was tightening its grip on their throats, but there was one thing driving it: fear. The oligarchs were deathly afraid. They’d snared the rest of their species in a trap of security and surveillance because that was the only way to protect themselves from the natural consequences of seizing everything and reducing the vast majority of people to bare subsistence. They’d doomed themselves with their greed, and all these measures, all these riot cops, all the isolated fortresses like Epicenter’s Tower or Sigurdur Vitol’s private national park, couldn’t protect them.

For all their power, none of those executives would be able to walk down a public street without bodyguards. None of them could have the simple freedom Elliot Ramirez did to stand before a massive body of people without fear of being torn apart. That missileproof glass might as well have been electrified fence and barbed wire. No one could fashion a prison so perfect, so complete, as the one the masters of humanity had created for themselves.

There was justice in the world. There was. And with that realization, something began to lift from Tom’s vision, like some dark haze had finally cleared away. He knew now that this didn’t have to be the world Neil hated, this didn’t have to be a world where the worst of humanity always won and everyone else surrendered to what couldn’t be stopped. There was nothing inevitable about the supremacy of sociopaths.

Vengerov may have gotten away with destroying Yuri, but that only meant one thing: someone hadn’t stepped up and made things right yet.