“No! No! Please!”
Esis threw a baffled gaze at the highest railing, beneath the artificial sky. Through the metal bars, she saw Hannah and Amanda hobble out of the elevator. She’d sent them to the twelfth floor, not the fifth. Her dark eyes narrowed in suspicion. No. Not him. The fool wouldn’t dare.
“Please!” Mercy shrieked. “I’ll do whatever you want!”
Esis turned back to her captive. She had no intention of killing Mercy Lee. The child came from an optimal gene line, and her future intersected heavily with Zack Trillinger’s. The two funny artists were practically born to entwine.
“You seem sincere, child. Perhaps I will spare you. But know that if you raise your claws against my little ones again, there will be no mercy, Mercy. Do you understand?”
Through her upside-down perspective, Mercy saw a large figure creep up the stairwell. She looked away for fear of alerting Esis. “Yes! I won’t! I promise!”
Rebel aimed his revolver through two metal posts. He reeled with doubt as he watched his speculative gunshot pierce the back of Esis’s skull. That can’t be right. It can’t be that easy.
Indeed, the moment he pulled the trigger, a small white portal appeared ten feet in front of him and swallowed the bullet whole.
Esis dropped Mercy and moved toward Rebel in a windy blur. He barely had a chance to react before she tackled him down the stairs. He crashed to the floor, his gun sliding thirty feet across the marble.
The mother Pelletier straddled his stomach, pinning him to the floor in a tempic web.
“Imbecilic ape. Did you think you were the only augur here? You see nothing compared to me. You’re a blind and stubborn fool and we are out of patience with you.”
Five stories above, Amanda took a wincing perch on a cushioned bench by the railing. She’d sent Hannah to the restroom to soak her scalded hand. Now she had a lone view of the conflict below, clear enough to recognize the man beneath Esis.
Rebel bucked and thrashed in her web. “I’ll kill you, bitch.”
“Your foresight fails you again, Richard. Shall I tell you the future? That crude piece of lead you fired at me will return one day when you least desire it. It’ll travel through the skull of your pretty wife. Or perhaps the tiny eye of your child.”
He bucked madly. “NO!”
“You’ve inconvenienced us greatly, Richard. Did you think we would tolerate it? You should have listened to Pendergen. You accomplish nothing by killing these children of ours.”
“The breaches—”
“The damage to this world is already done. It cannot be undone, any more than your hand can be unrifted. Cease your foolish crusade and perhaps we’ll let you and your family live to see its natural end.”
“I swear to God I’ll—”
“Kill me. Yes.” Esis sighed. “A stubborn fool to the last. So be it. Soon you’ll know—”
She threw her head back and gasped in cold shock. Even the most powerful augur couldn’t foresee every circumstance. When Esis dropped Mercy Lee to the carpet, she never anticipated for a moment that the terrified girl would rediscover her nerve. And her solis.
With a feral scream, Mercy drowned both Esis and Rebel in an invisible field of energy, dissolving the tempic web between them and flipping the cruel advantage. Esis was a 130-pound woman with slender arms and a delicate beauty. Rebel was not.
Amanda gaped, thunderstruck, as Rebel’s first punch drew blood from Esis’s nose and sent her flying onto her back. He leapt on top of her, pummeling her with fists both flesh and synthetic.
“You threaten my wife? You threaten my child?”
Four blocks away, the screens of the command center flickered back to life. Gemma did a double take at the action on the center monitor. This was not the future she’d seen. Not at all.
“Oh my God. He’s alive.”
Ivy raised her teary face from her hands. “What?”
“He’s alive! Rebel! He . . . Holy shit, he’s beating her!”
Olga looked up from her table. She’d just finished tying a tourniquet around Bruce’s leg and was now lowering his body temperature in preparation for reversal. Her ice pack dropped to the floor when she saw the two slaughtered kinsmen in the elevator bank. Dear Lord. No.
Ivy kept her rapt attention on the middle screen. “Oh God. Richard. Get the gun. Kill her.”
“Kill her!” Gemma screamed.
Kill her, Amanda cried in her broken thoughts. Kill each other.
Rebel continued his furious assault, reducing Esis to a raw and battered wreck. The woman had been raised in a more civilized era, where only the poorest suffered the indignity of pain. Even a surgeon like her could live her whole life without seeing a drop of blood.
Now as this ancestor ape thrashed her with his brutal fists, a shrill cry escaped her bloody lips.