LITMIR.BIZ

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his eyes on the fallen Weist and dove to the ground beside him, checking his pulse almost before he stopped moving. He couldn’t feel much of anything, but a wave of blood bubbling up from the wound in the man’s chest told Marcus the heart was still beating. He clamped down with his hands, applying as much pressure as he could, and cried out suddenly as someone yanked him backward.

      “I’m trying to save him!”

      “He’s gone,” said a soldier behind him. “You need to get to cover!”

      Marcus shrugged him off and scrambled back to the body. Woolf was shouting again, pointing through the meadow to the hospital complex, but Marcus ignored them and pressed down again. He hands were red and slick, his arms coated with warm arterial spray, and he shouted for assistance. “Somebody give me shirt or a jacket! He’s bleeding front and back and I can’t stop it all with just my hands!”

      “Don’t be stupid,” said the soldier behind him. “You’ve got to get to cover.” But when Marcus turned to look at him, he saw Senator Delarosa, still in handcuffs. She was crouched between them.

      “Save her first!” said Marcus.

      “He’s over there!” cried Woolf, pointing again to the buildings behind the hospital. “The shooter’s in there, somebody circle around!”

      Blood pumped thickly through Marcus’s fingers, staining his hands and covering the prisoner’s chest; blood from the exit wound flowed steadily from the man’s back, spreading out in a puddle and soaking Marcus’s knees and pants. There was too much blood—too much for Weist to ever survive—but Marcus kept the pressure on. The prisoner wasn’t breathing, and Marcus called again for help. “I’m losing him!”

      “Let him go!” shouted the soldier, loud and more angry. The world seemed drenched in blood and adrenaline, and Marcus struggled to stay in control. When hands finally jutted forward to help with the bleeding, he was surprised to see that they were not the soldier’s, but Delarosa’s.

      “Somebody get over there!” Woolf was shouting. “There’s an assassin somewhere in those ruins!”

      “It’s too dangerous,” said another soldier, crouching low in the brush. “We can’t just charge in there while a sniper has us pinned down.”

      “He’s not pinning you down, he’s aiming for the prisoners.”

      “It’s too dangerous,” the soldier insisted.

      “Then call for backup,” said Woolf. “Surround him. Do something besides stand there!”

      Marcus couldn’t even feel a heartbeat anymore. The blood in the victim’s chest was stagnant, and the body was inert. He kept the pressure on, knowing that it was useless but too stunned to think of anything else.

      “Why do you even care?” asked the soldier. Marcus looked up and saw the man talking to Senator Woolf. “Five minutes ago you were calling for an execution, and now that he’s dead you’re trying to capture his killer?”

      Woolf whirled around, shoving his face mere inches from the soldier’s. “What’s your name, Private?”

      The soldier quailed. “Cantona, sir. Lucas.”

      “Private Cantona, what did you swear to protect?”

      “But he’s—”

      “What did you swear to protect!”

      “The people, sir.” Cantona swallowed. “And the law.”

      “In that case, Private, you’d better think good and hard the next time you tell me to abandon them both.”

      Delarosa looked at Marcus, her hands and arms covered in her fellow prisoner’s blood. “This is how it ends, you know.”

      They were the first words Marcus had heard her speak in months, and they shocked him back to consciousness. He realized he was still flexing his arms against Weist’s lifeless chest. He pulled back, staring and panting. “How what ends?”

      “Everything.”

      

think it was the Grid,” said Xochi.

      Haru snorted. “You think the DG killed the man who used to represent them in the Senate.”

      “It’s the only explanation,” said Xochi. They were sitting in the living room, nibbling on the last remnants of dinner: grilled cod and fresh-steamed broccoli from Nandita’s garden. Marcus paused on that thought, noting that he still thought of it as Nandita’s garden even though she’d been missing for months—she hadn’t even been the one to plant this crop, Xochi had done it. Xochi and Isolde were the only ones left in the house, and yet in his mind it was still “Nandita’s garden.”

      Of course, in his mind this was still “Kira’s house,” and she’d been gone for two months. If anything, Marcus spent more time here now than before she’d left, always hoping she’d turn up at the door one day. She never did.

      “Think about it,” Xochi went on. “The Grid’s found nothing, right? Two days of searching and they haven’t found a single piece of evidence to lead them to the sniper: not a bullet casing, not a footprint, not even a scuff mark on the floor. I’m no fan of the Grid, but they’re not inept. They’d find something if they were looking, therefore they’re not looking. They’re covering it up.”

      “Or the sniper’s just extremely competent,” said Haru. “Is that a possibility, or do we have to jump straight to the conspiracy theory?”

      “Well, of course he’s competent,” said Xochi. “He’s Gridtrained.”

      “This sounds like a circular argument,” said Isolde.

      “Weist was part of the Grid,” said Haru. “He was their own representative on the council. If you think a soldier would kill another soldier, you don’t know much about soldiers. They’re ferociously vindictive when one of their own gets attacked. They wouldn’t be covering this up, they’d be lynching the guy.”

      “That’s exactly what I mean,” said Xochi. “Whatever else Weist did, he killed a soldier in cold blood—maybe not personally, but he gave the order. He arranged the murder of a soldier under his own command. The Grid would never just let that slide, you said it yourself: They’d hunt him down and lynch him. The new Grid senator, Woolf or whatever, Isolde said he was practically screaming for the death penalty, but then they didn’t get it, so they went to plan B.”

      “Or more likely,” said Haru, “this is exactly what the Grid says it is: an attempt on Woolf or Tovar or someone like that. One of the senators still in power. There’s no reason to kill a convicted prisoner.”

      “So the sniper just missed?” asked Xochi. “This amazingly competent super-sniper, who can evade a full Grid investigation, was aiming for one of the senators, but he’s just a really crappy shot? Come on: He’s either a pro or he’s not, Haru.”

      Marcus tried to stay out of these arguments—“these” meaning “any argument with Haru”—and this was exactly why. He’d seen firsthand the way the soldiers had reacted to the attack, and he still had no idea if it was a conspiracy or not. The soldier had tried to pull Marcus off Weist, but did he do it because he was trying to save Marcus, or because he was trying to keep Marcus from saving Weist? Senator Woolf seemed practically offended by the attack, as if killing the prisoner had been a personal insult against him, but was that genuine or was he just playing up the ruse? Haru and Xochi were passionate, but they were too quick to jump to extremes, and Marcus knew from experience that they’d argue back and forth for hours, maybe for days. He left them to it, and turned instead to Madison and Isolde, both cooing quietly over Madison’s

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