He sensed movement to his right.
Finney materialized from the shadows.
He was holding a gun.
A gun?
A Glock. And he was holding it all wrong.
Which didn’t matter so much because he was pointing it at Sebastian.
Where the hell had Finney gotten a goddamn gun?
“Boss?”
“Thank you, Sebastian.”
Finney fired it four times into Sebastian.
FINNEY
The force of the bullets blew Sebastian off his feet and out of the pool of light they were standing in. He toppled over some stacked building materials and disappeared.
The gun shook in Finney’s hand.
It wasn’t too late. He could still salvage this. Set things right, make things the way they were supposed to be. The universe lusted for order. It craved balance. Every action needed a reaction. Why couldn’t these people see that? Why couldn’t he make them understand?
The gun shook.
He had to move quickly. Not much time. Someone would be here soon to investigate the noise.
The big man first. Then he’d finish off whatever was left of Sebastian.
Then Wu.
He’d save Wu and her sister for last.
He approached the large man, who was the same one Sebastian had pointed out to him today in the park. A neurosurgeon. Campbell, or something? How on earth had he found them? No matter. He’d take care of him. He’d take care of all of them.
The big neurosurgeon was on the floor, curled into a ball, clutching his right knee, moaning.
He looked up as Finney approached.
Finney raised the gun toward the man’s upturned face, which was streaked with tears.
RITA
Finney was about to shoot Spencer.
He was about to shoot Spencer.
Without thought, Rita hurled herself at Finney. She didn’t care about the blood dripping from her abdomen, and from the crook of her elbow where she’d pulled out the IV from her arm; or that she was drawing breath in painful gasps through her raw and swollen throat; or that she was shirtless.
Twenty years of anger management vaporized in an instant by the gun aimed at Spencer’s head.
Finney, intent on Spencer, didn’t see her coming. She crashed into him from the side, shoving his arm holding the gun away from her as he fired. The bullet went wide, striking the metallic casing of Morpheus, displacing a rubber hose—
(The one connected to the oxygen tanks)
—attached to its side. The bullet’s impact produced a flintlike spark, a jangle of broken metal, and a hiss of escaping gas.
A flame appeared from where the bullet had displaced the hose: an orange tongue that licked the wooden pallet on which Rita had been lying. The pallet’s edge began to smoke, then burn, the flames rapidly spreading across its surface.
Toward a stack of red gas canisters stacked on the floor next to the pallet.
As she struggled with Finney, a detached part of Rita’s brain processed this—the bullet spark, the flame, the spreading fire, the red tanks of gas—and thought, Oh, shit. That can’t be good.
Finney yelled and stumbled sideways. Not knowing what else to do, Rita kept a vise hold on his arm and bit the back of his hand holding the gun.
Finney screamed a second time.
SEBASTIAN
An indisputable fact: Finney had shot him.
Another indisputable fact: He, Sebastian, was a fucking idiot.
Idiot!
How could he have been so fucking stupid?
Finney had to have planned this from the very beginning. It made perfect sense. So fucking obvious now. He should have seen it from a mile away. Hell, part of him even admired the Machiavellian bastard for it.
Once the authorities discovered Wu’s body hooked up to the auto-surgeon, they’d be investigating this clusterfuck for years, trying to figure out how she’d ended up on the wrong end of a scalpel. With Sebastian also dead at the scene, Finney could arrange for any story he wanted to tie Sebastian to Wu and plant additional evidence. He could have made Sebastian and Wu look like secret business partners whose relationship had soured, or lovers engaged in kinky sex. It didn’t matter.
Finney would also have to bring Cameron into it now, of course. But three bodies instead of two would simply generate more orgiastic Internet speculation once the story broke. Totally plausible.
But that was all water under the bridge. Sebastian had more pressing concerns: like, the physics of bulletproof vests, and like, how-the-fuck-was-he-going-to-get-out-of-this-thing-alive?
Okay.
So he’d been an idiot. He’d dropped his guard for a moment. But he wasn’t a complete moron. He’d slipped on body armor before tonight’s activities, concealed underneath his windbreaker: an ultrathin state-of-the-art vest he’d obtained from a friend of his at DARPA, so slim and flexible as to be undetectable without close inspection. Perfect for not arousing Finney’s suspicion. He couldn’t say that he’d suspected Finney would shoot him, exactly—he’d just sensed the potential for a shitstorm, and prepared accordingly.