Chapter 40 - 39 — Nine Against One V (Bonus)
I did not overpower him. I wanted that stated plainly, because it is the part every version gets wrong.
The only reason I was still standing in front of Elias Varga with my arm coming apart was that six other people were occupying every single other part of him.
I released what I had been carrying since the sky came down.
Everything from eleven layers of shield and several thousand tonnes of a city, held inside a man for over two minutes, went out through one broken arm into his chest.
His wrist went first.
Then the ribs Mateo had already started.
Then his defence stopped existing, and the other six hit him at the same moment, and I put the last of it through him and drove him down into the road.
The intersection came apart around us.
Gravitas went out like a light.
I fell into the crater after him with my right arm hanging off me in a shape arms do not make.
---
He was alive.
His chest had gone in on one side and one arm lay underneath him at an angle and there was blood filling his mouth faster than he could clear it.
And the small stones around his body were still lifting an inch off the ground, and dropping, and lifting again, as something in him kept reaching for an Ability it could no longer hold.
Every one of us tensed at that.
Six wrecked people standing around a crater, watching pebbles rise and fall, and not one of us was willing to call it finished.
I got a plane against him. It shook badly and I held it anyway.
"You could have had a world," he said. It came out wet. "You. Not me. They would have followed you."
"I know."
That stopped him. I watched it stop him.
"They will fear you now," he said. "All of you. After this. They will look at what I did to a city and they will look at you and they will not be able to tell the difference, and they will write laws about it."
"Yes."
"You are not going to argue."
"No." I had to stop and get some air in. "They should be afraid. They watched a man rearrange a district because he disagreed with the people in it.
If they come out of this and put a leash on us, they will be right to."
He looked at me properly for the first time since I had arrived in that street.
"You would accept it."
"I would prefer it."
Something went across his face that I did not expect, and I have thought about it since, and I believe it was the only moment in the entire afternoon where I actually reached him.
He had spent four years explaining that the strong will never accept restraint, and the man who had just put him in a hole was telling him he would take the leash himself.
Then he came back to the only ground he had left.
"He was already there, you know."
I did not say anything.
"Before me. Before the war. You did not lose him to me, Nolan, you lost him in a room in your own house, and then you put him outside and locked the door and told yourself you had cut something out."
Blood came over his lip. "You have spent eight months deciding I am the reason. I am not the reason. I am only where he went."
I could not look at him.
That is the whole of what I did.
I looked at the wall of the crater instead, and my broken hand closed on nothing until the bone moved and I let it open again, and the silence went on longer than any answer I had given him all afternoon.
He watched me do it.
He died with that on his face.
---
Elias Varga was dead, and there were seven of us.
Mateo went down the moment Elise’s reinforcement failed, and he did not get up, and both legs simply lay where they were put.
Marta got to the edge of the crater and sat, and then finally looked down at her own leg properly for the first time, and made a noise.
Lucia stood with her left hand held out in front of her, looking at two fingers that had gone black.
Then she turned her head and looked at the other crater instead, the empty one, and did not look away from it for a long time.
Kenji closed his damaged eye. Then he opened it, and closed it, and opened it again, and I watched him work out that it did not make any difference.
Ingrid sat down because she had been standing on blood loss for six minutes and her body finished the argument for her.
Elise dropped beside Mateo with nothing left at all and did not even check him. She simply put a hand on his shoulder and stayed there.
Nobody cheered.
I have read accounts of that afternoon that describe cheering.
I stayed on my knees beside the body because my legs were not going to do anything else for a while.
I looked at the six of them, and then at the place where Samir had come down, and then at the crater where Marek had been.
Elias Varga was dead.
The war was going to end now. Everybody in that intersection understood it, and not one of us said it out loud, because saying it would have meant putting a price beside it.
---
**Present Day**
**POV: Christopher Nolan**
---
I had been reading the same paragraph for eleven minutes.
It was the preliminary Floor Five assessment, the one my secretary’s source inside the Bureau had promised for weeks, and it had finally arrived at two o’clock in a sealed envelope, and I had got as far as the second page and stopped.
My son had been on the news at midday.
Four masked Players, a reserve bank two streets from the Bureau plaza, and an eighteen-year-old with fire on both hands standing between them and four hundred people who had spent the morning holding signs about him.
He had not called. He would not, because he has decided somewhere in the last month that calling would be asking for something.
So I read the same paragraph eleven times and waited for the phone that was not going to ring.
The head butler knocked twice and came in without waiting for the second answer, which he has done perhaps four times in twenty years.
"Sir."
"I have seen the broadcast."
"It is not the broadcast, sir."
I put the report down.
He is sixty-one. He carried me to bed as a child when my father was away, and he taught me which fork to use.
In twenty years I have never once seen him choose his words in front of me.
He chose them now. I watched him do it, and my hands went flat on the desk before he had said anything at all.
"The Bureau has confirmed it. The young master intervened in the street outside the plaza. He put all four of them on the ground. Two civilians are injured and neither is critical, and there are no fatalities among the crowd."
"And Jace."
"Unhurt, sir."
"Then say the rest of it."
"He has been detained."
The clock on the far wall is a hundred and ten years old. My grandfather bought it. It has a tick you stop hearing after about a week of living in a house.
I could hear it.
"Detained by whom."
"Regional police, sir. Offensive Ability use in a civilian zone during an active operation."
He kept his eyes level, which cost him something.
"They disarmed him in the street. They took the gauntlets off his hands in front of the crowd and put him in an armoured vehicle."
I did not stand up.
I want that recorded, because it took everything I have.
I sat in a chair in my own study with both palms flat on a desk, and I looked at a hundred and ten year old clock.
And I thought about a plaza full of people who had spent their morning demanding that Players be removed from their streets, and about nine rifles.
Something went along the underside of my right hand.
I closed it. That usually works.
It went along the left instead, from the wrist to the second knuckle, blue-white and thin, and this time I did not put it away.
The desk lamp browned out and came back.
Then every light on that floor of the house went, all at once, and the clock stopped, and in the dark I could hear the head butler breathing very carefully four metres away and not moving at all.
The air had gone metallic. I could taste it against my teeth.
Somewhere below us a fuse panel let go with a sound like a dropped plate, and the emergency lighting came up along the skirting, and by that thin orange light I looked at my own hands on the desk.
There was lightning standing off both of them. Not crawling. Standing, in threads, four or five centimetres clear of the skin, the way it does when I am about to walk into something.
I have not lost hold of it since I was twenty-two years old.
The butler had still not moved.
"Sir," he said quietly. "The car is already at the door."