Ren-the-Cinder’s shriek sliced through the tense silence of the Grand Meridian Bridge like a rusted razor through velvet.
On the iron pylon thirty feet above the roadway, the coward was hanging by his fingertips from a rusted girder, his grey cloak flapping wildly in the river wind, his face purple as he pointed toward the brick heavy-duty water tower three hundred paces to the north.
“SNIPER! ON THE WATER TOWER! GET DOWN!”
Ren Prime moved on pure, unthinking reflex. He didn’t look at the sky. He didn’t look at the tower. He threw his left arm across Mira’s shoulders. He drove her down behind the heavy ash-wood table. Just then, an unnatural, ear-splitting hiss ripped across the open water.
It wasn’t the sharp crack of black powder, nor the twang of a steel crossbow cord. It was the high-hum shriek of sky shifted weight—a sound like an empty pocket collapsing inside a bell jar.
Above the roadway, Ren-the-Cinder was having a complete body meltdown.
His Hazard Sense—the peak ability he had mastered over a lifetime of fleeing burning cities—was not a polite mental warning. It was a violent, screaming migraine that felt like a rusty needle being driven through his right eye into his cerebellum. Two seconds before the trigger was pulled, the Coward had felt the micro-fluctuations in sky thickness around the water tower. The sudden drop in air pressure, the faint scent of ozone and chilled liquid silver. The clear causal empty pocket of an un-burning weapon being…
