Chapter 30 - 29 — The Former Number One I
**POV: Hadrian Nolan**
**Forty Years Earlier — 2061**
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The city had eleven hours left in it, and everybody in the evacuation column knew it except the children.
We had the main road, and that was all we had. Human infantry were working the column itself, moving people forward in blocks of forty, while the rest of us held the intersections that fed into it.
Four Players covering six junctions.
I had the northern two, which meant I spent most of that hour running between them, and every time I came back to one the barricade had moved another ten metres in the wrong direction.
The column went on for a kilometre and a half. Transports, requisitioned buses, private vehicles with families packed four deep across the back seats, and between all of it, people on foot carrying whatever they had decided at four in the morning was worth carrying.
Behind them the eastern districts were burning in a line you could have drawn with a ruler.
That was not artillery. Artillery makes craters and moves on.
What was working through those districts went into a building and took the building with it, and then went into the next one, and it had been doing that since Tuesday.
"Two more blocks," a sergeant was shouting down the line. "Two more blocks and you’re clear of the city. Do not stop. Do not put anything down."
Then the sky above the column tore, and a man came down into the middle of it.
Not beside it.
Into it.
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He landed in the road between a bus and a flatbed transport with maybe two hundred people packed around them, and the impact went out from his boots in a ring.
Both vehicles left the ground.
The bus went over onto its side and slid twenty metres with people still inside it. The flatbed came apart down its middle, and everything that had been on it went into the air, and I do not mean cargo.
The ring caught the crowd on both sides.
I want to be careful about how I describe the next part, because I have heard men tell this kind of thing as though it were weather.
It was not weather. There was a woman four metres from where his boots came down, and after the ring went out there was no woman there.
There was no clean way to tell afterwards which part of the road she had been standing on.
The two people beside her went into the frontage of a shop and did not come out of it.
Nearer the edge of it, people were only broken. That is the word for it.
Limbs at angles limbs do not go to. Ribs gone in on one side. A man sitting upright in the road holding an arm that was no longer attached to him at the shoulder.
The sound the crowd made afterwards was not screaming yet. It was the noise a large number of people make when they all inhale at once.
The screaming started about a second later.
Soldiers opened up on him from three directions. I watched thirty or forty rounds go into him and come off, and he turned his head to look at them the way you look at rain starting.
A mother was on her knees in the road with somebody in her arms who was not going to sit up again, and she was shaking him, and she would not stop shaking him.
The Player stepped over her.
He was not interested in her. He was walking toward the next transport in the line, which had its doors open and eighty people still climbing into it.
I was ninety metres away, and I was already running when I threw it.
> **[Aegis]**
I have never liked describing what my Ability does, because everybody who hears the word shield imagines a man hiding behind something.
Aegis is force in flat planes, as thin or as thick as I can hold, and it does not care what is on the other side of it.
What it does not do is appear wherever I would like it to be.
Every plane starts at my hands and travels out from there, the way a thrown thing travels, and the further away I want it the longer it takes to arrive and the thinner it is when it gets there.
Against something in front of my face it is instant, and at forty metres there is a delay too small to name.
At ninety I can feel the whole length of it leave me. By two hundred it stops being an inconvenience and becomes the difference between a wall and an apology.
That is the entire Ability. Everybody remembers the shields. Almost nobody remembers that I have spent my life running toward things in order to be close enough for the shields to matter.
The wall reached the transport about a quarter of a second before he did.
He hit it at full output, and the whole construct went white across its face and cracked from the centre out to both edges, and I felt it in my teeth from sixty metres out and still closing.
It held.
He drew back to hit it again, and by then I had covered another thirty.
And this is the part I want understood, because forty years of retelling has turned it into something noble.
I did not stand behind my own wall.
I went through it.
I let the plane come apart on my side, put a compact layer around my right forearm and shoulder, and crossed the last thirty metres while the fragments were still in the air.
He got one attack off. It took most of my forearm layer and part of the road.
Then I was inside his reach.
I put a plane behind his back, another against his chest, and closed them.
He was a strong man and he was fast, and for about a second and a half he pushed back against both of them with everything he had.
Then he stopped pushing.
I did not knock him unconscious. He had walked into a column of civilians four minutes earlier and taken about sixty of them off the road, and there was no version of that afternoon where I left him breathing behind our line.
I let the planes go and he came down in the road, and I was already turning, because the noise above me had changed.
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The second one was on a rooftop, and he had not come down at all.
Ranged Ability, something that came off his hands in a compressed line and arrived faster than anybody could react to it. He put the first one into the front of an apartment building for no reason I could see.
Then I understood that there was a reason.
He was not aiming at the soldiers. He was not aiming at me.
He was firing into the column.
Every shot he took went into the thickest part of the crowd, and the crowd could not scatter, because a crowd of that size in a street of that width does not scatter. It compresses.
I got a broad plane up over the road.
Sixty metres of it, edge to edge, angled so his shots would skate rather than punch. It cost me more to hold than anything I had done that week, and I could feel it flexing every time something hit it.
Under it, four hundred people kept moving.
Outside it, they did not.
He worked out inside three shots that he could not get through the plane, so he stopped trying, and he put the next one into the frontage of the building at the eastern edge of my cover.
Six storeys of masonry came down into the street.
I was holding the shield with both hands and I could not move it, because the moment I moved it he would put four shots into the middle of the column.
There were people underneath that frontage. I know there were, because I could hear them.
I stood there and held a barrier over four hundred people and listened to somebody trapped under that rubble calling out, ten metres past the edge of what I could cover.
That is what an SSS Ability is worth in a war.
I could save everyone under my hands, and nobody outside them, and the man on the roof understood that better than I did.
So I stopped defending.