Reaper roared. He was looking at Jack as he did so, but he held nothing back. Shop fronts erupted, paving slabs cracked and shattered, cars immobile for two years slid along the road on flat tyres, and the three motorcycles and riders came apart as the wave of destruction hit them, flesh and metal, blood and plastic merging in a cloud that splashed down along the street and across the front of an old pizza restaurant.
As quickly as it had begun, Reaper's storm ceased. The street held its breath as Superiors emerged from where they had all been hiding. A woman stepped from a rooftop and floated down to the ground, flames playing around her fingertips and at her throat. Her hair seemed to be ablaze, and she looked at Jack with fire in her eyes. Puppeteer stepped from a shop doorway farther along the street, Scryer close behind him. And there were several other, all possessed of a silent, aloof confidence as they claimed the street and the scene of destruction as their own.
Puppeteer held up both hands, and along the street at least eight Choppers were held aloft six feet above the ground. They struggled, but to no avail. One of them shouted as she fought against the hold, struggling to bring her gun to bear, and Jack realised with a sick feeling who was in her sights.
“Jenna, duck!” he shouted. But Sparky had seen at the same time. He shoved his girlfriend aside and fell on her, smothering her with his body and limbs, and Jack thought, No, Sparky!
But when the woman's finger squeezed the trigger, it was her own head that the bullet smashed apart. Puppeteer grunted in satisfaction and flicked his hand at the air, sending the woman's corpse crashing against a coffee shop's window and sliding to the pavement. The look of surprise was still etched on her blood-spattered face.
“Don't kill any more!” Jack shouted. “Get them down, take their weapons, but don't kill any more!” He looked over to where Breezer and the other Irregulars were huddled down on the pavement and he couldn't help thinking that this was all going wrong. Brutality was a tool of the Choppers and a weapon of the Superiors, but Breezer and the others did their best to exclude it from their lives.
“Bring them down,” Reaper said. His voice was so powerful and held such command that the street itself seemed to be listening.
One of the men with Breezer stood and moved forward. He lowered his head so that he was looking at his feet, and Jack watched, intrigued. Then he said, “Drop your weapons,” and there was a clatter of metal on concrete and tarmac as the Choppers all obeyed immediately.
“Nice,” Scryer said from where she stood beside Puppeteer. “What do you call yourself?”
“Guy Morris, same as I always have,” the man said.
Puppeteer dropped the men and women to the ground. They landed with grunts and cries, quickly stood, and drew together into two groups.
Sparky and Jenna were standing again now, Jenna shaking slightly, Sparky with his arm around her shoulder.
“I've been shot before,” she said softly when Jack looked at her.
“I remember,” he said.
“It hurt.”
“Yeah.” Jack looked across at the crumpled Chopper, a pool of blood spreading around her head. “Her fault.”
“Precisely,” Reaper said. “What these bastards never learn is that we are better than them, and we will win.”
Jack's heart thumped, blood pulsing in his ears. He knew that this could turn bad very quickly.
“We won't have long,” Sparky said.
“Then let's not waste any more time,” Reaper said. He walked closer to one group of Choppers, and two who had discarded their helmets looked at him with unashamed terror.
“No more murdering,” Jack said. “We can use them.”
“And use them we will,” Reaper said. “So. Which one do we interrogate first?”
Each time she blinked, Nomad saw the girl's face. Young, pretty, yet aged with tensions and experiences that were etched into her eyes like memories on view. Her purple hair might have been a bruise. The explosion and the girl were one and the same.