Chapter 27 - 26 — The Price of Power II
> **[PSB Purchase Offer: C 540,000]**
>
> **[Equal Share Per Player: C 108,000]**
They talked about it properly, which surprised me a little.
Idris wanted the auction until the official said six weeks, and Nia said she would rather have the money now than a larger number later.
Bria asked whether the Bureau’s offer changed if they waited and were then turned down at auction, and the answer was that it did not.
Everyone agreed to sell.
Then Tomas put his hand up like we were still in a school hall.
"Can I keep some of the spines? Not to sell. I want arrows made out of them."
"You can retain material against your own share. Three spines?"
"Three."
"At the purchase rate rather than the appraisal rate, which is seven thousand two hundred each. That is twenty-one thousand six hundred deducted from your payment."
Tomas did the sum on his fingers, out loud, and then said he still wanted them.
> **[FINAL SETTLEMENT]**
>
> **[Jace Nolan: C 108,000]**
>
> **[Bria Caldwell: C 108,000]**
>
> **[Nia Okafor: C 108,000]**
>
> **[Idris Bennett: C 108,000]**
>
> **[Tomas Meyer: C 86,400 and three Manticore tail spines]**
We signed separately, at separate terminals, and the transfers went out while we were still in the room.
Nobody asked me what I was doing with mine. I did not ask them either.
Bria left first. Then Nia. Idris said something to me on the way out that was almost a conversation and then decided against finishing it, and Tomas went out carrying a sealed tube like a man holding a winning ticket.
C 160,800 in total, between the burrow and the Manticore.
I did not feel much about it, and I want to be honest about why.
I am a Nolan. There has never been a month in my life where money was a question, and if I had asked my father for that figure this morning he would have transferred it without looking up from whatever he was reading.
What was different was that nobody had given it to me. I went into two holes in the ground and came out with it, and the second one I did alone.
That is not the same thing as being rich. It is the first money I have ever had that did not come with the family name attached to it.
---
The protest had grown while I was inside.
There were more of them now, spilling past where the barricades ended, and the shouting had a rhythm to it that it had not had that morning. Two officers were arguing with a man who wanted to move a barrier.
I came down the steps and turned away from the plaza, and I was maybe forty metres along the street when the sirens started.
Three armoured police vehicles came past me fast enough to move the air, took the junction ahead in a line, and stopped hard outside the regional reserve bank two streets down.
They had already been called. Nobody drives like that on a report.
Officers came out of all three and went straight into a containment pattern around the entrances, pushing civilians back with their arms and their voices, and then the rifles came up.
I know what those rifles are. Everyone does.
Disruption rounds came out of the Second Gigantomachy, invented by governments who had learned the hard way that ordinary ammunition is a suggestion to somebody with an Ability.
They do not kill well. What they do is strike a mana construct and break the coherence of it, and against a Player they are the only thing in an ordinary officer’s hands worth carrying.
Then the front of the bank came out into the street.
The explosion went through the doors and took the façade with it, glass and masonry and a section of security shutter turning over in the air, and the shockwave hit the windows down the whole block.
Behind me, the protest went completely silent.
Four figures walked out through the smoke.
All of them masked. One carrying two black reserve bags with the seals still on them, and behind him four more bags riding along in the air at waist height without anybody touching them.
A currency delivery had come in that morning. I found that out later. What was in those six bags was somewhere around one and a half million Concord.
The third one had both hands out, and a curved barrier stood in the air in front of the group, pale and faintly rippling, covering all four of them.
The fourth had done the doors.
"Put the bags down!"
The barrier man did not put anything down.
The first volley went into his construct and I saw it land, white cracks opening across the surface where each round struck, spreading and fading and spreading again.
It held.
Then the fourth one lifted his foot and brought it down.
The road went.
A pressure wave ran out through the asphalt like something moving under a carpet, and it turned one of the police vehicles onto its side and took out every ground-floor window opposite.
Officers went down. Chunks of road came up between them and stood on end.
The four of them started moving toward the junction, where a vehicle was waiting with its doors already open.
I stayed where I was.
That was deliberate. There were police on scene, and this was a robbery in a civilian street, and I am not an officer and I am not a Bureau field agent. I am a nineteen-year-old with a licence and a permit.
An SSS Player walking into a police operation because he happens to be standing nearby is the exact thing every sign behind me was about.
Half that crowd would have watched me put out a fire and still gone home certain they had watched a Player decide he was the law.
So I did nothing, and I would have gone on doing nothing.
Then the barrier cracked.
The disruption rounds finally opened a seam through the front of it, and the man carrying the two bags looked at that seam and made a decision.
He broke off from the group and ran for the plaza, and the vibration user fell back with him.
Straight at the protest. Straight at four hundred people standing behind a barricade with nowhere to go, because he understood the same thing I did, which is that no officer on that street would fire into a crowd.
The front of the crowd tried to move and could not, because there were another three hundred behind them.
A woman near the barrier went down and did not get up fast enough.
The vibration user turned toward the crowd and raised his hand.
Not toward the police. Toward the people who could not move.
The officers had their rifles up and none of them fired, because there was a civilian line between the muzzle and the target, and every one of them knew what a disruption round does to a person.
I stepped off the pavement.
I did not run and I did not shout anything. I walked out into the middle of the road and stood in the gap between the four of them and the barricade, with the fallen woman somewhere behind my left shoulder.
The same barricade. The same signs, still up, some of them still legible from where I was standing.
**BAN THEM BEFORE THEY RULE US.**
Mana went into the channels of my gauntlets, and the pale lines ran from the wrists out to the knuckles the way they are built to.
Then I lit Aten.
Fire came up around both fists and stayed there, tight, exactly where I put it.
The four of them stopped.