The woman sank to the ground beside the remains of the Chancellor. She was already spattered with gore, and her pale skirts floated on the widening pool of his blood. A crimson tideline crept up her dress.
She bent over the body. Embraced it. Kissed it.
Grotesquely tried to gather it up to cradle in her lap, but it was too far gone and the shattered chest cavity only yawned wider open as she pawed at it. She was red from head to toe now, wearing Chancellor Zelston’s blood like a second skin, drying on top of her own.
She tipped her head back to howl, and the whites of her eyes were shockingly vivid in her red-painted face.
Euterpe Parva, who’d slept for twenty-five years, Luke thought numbly. Who’d woken only yesterday.
Who’d been loved by this man, and had loved him.
Her howl grew louder, became a scream. No longer a sound, but a sensation. Not pain, but pressure, building from the inside out.
To his left, Jackson had fallen to his knees. To his right, Lord Jardine was doubled over and bellowing. Everywhere, Equals were hunched and trembling.
Luke collapsed to the ground. Crouched next to him, he saw Lord Rix. The man’s face was a mask of fury.
‘Stupid boy – what have you done?’
The Equal reached out, pincered his fingers. Luke’s brain became pure pain, as if those fingers had crushed his skull as easily as Silyen Jardine had shattered the padlock.
Stunned and weeping, half blind with agony, Luke rolled onto his back. Above him, Euterpe Parva raised a scarlet hand, fingers clawed.
The air around her seemed to twist and shudder.
And Luke felt the blood trickle hot from his ears and his nose as Kyneston’s East Wing exploded in a supernova of glass and light.
21
Abi
Her mouth was filled with dirt and dust. It was like being buried alive. Abi blinked, and that hurt too, grit scraping across her eyeballs until tears welled up to rinse it away. Even breathing hurt. Her nostrils, her mouth and her lungs felt as though they’d been scratched inside with a thousand tiny needles.
Could she move? Yes.
What had happened?
The world had exploded.
Luke had shot the Chancellor.
Memory flooded back, carrying a flotsam of horror. Abi groaned and closed her eyes, letting her head fall against the ground.
She hadn’t seen the moment he did it. They’d heard the gunshot, and Jenner had gone to see what was happening.
It was only when Euterpe Parva began to scream and people started falling that Abi had seen Luke. Her brother was standing bloodstained and bewildered above a gory mess that had plainly once been Chancellor Zelston. In his hand was a gun.
The detonation of the entire East Wing had seemed like a small thing after that.
Abi coughed and sat up. Where was her brother? She had to find him.
She scrambled unsteadily to her feet and looked around. What she saw was so awful that for a few moments, it displaced even Luke.
The news showed you wars in far-away places: the border between Mexico and the Confederate States, or those islands in the West Pacific that were bombarded alternately by Japanese Skill and Russian nukes. The triumphs of the Skillful regimes over their unSkilled opponents were shown in unflinching detail. But watching carnage onscreen was no preparation for finding yourself in the middle of it.
There were bodies strewn everywhere. And the East Wing of Kyneston was entirely gone.
Abi, and everyone else – hundreds of parliamentarians and slaves – were exposed beneath the night sky. A fine powder was raining down. Abi thought it must be ash and looked for the fire, which was when she saw that the entire side of the stone mansion had been sheared off.
Rubble and jagged lumps of masonry bigger than a man were scattered about like Libby’s building blocks. There didn’t seem to be enough to add up to half a house, so some of it must have been pulverized. That accounted for both the grit that Abi could taste in her mouth, and the drizzling dust.
She recoiled when she saw her clipboard a few metres away and, close by it, an arm reaching out from under an immense bronze door, now laid not quite flat on the ground. The hand was lightly dusted with powdered stone. It could almost have been a statue toppled from the roof, were it not for a trickle of bright red blood that ran down the sleeve. The poor marshal. Abi had stood barely a metre from him throughout the evening.
The rest of her family would be safe, she knew, with a surge of relief so strong it nearly knocked her off her feet. Mum was spending the evening in a makeshift first aid station in the housekeeper’s office. Dad was watching over the generator array set up some distance from the house. Daisy was back at the Row with banished Libby Jardine. Had any of them been here, they might well have been dead.
Then everyone in the world screamed all at once.