In the darkness, the beasts screamed first.
Then the people.
The dome over Skyfall City turned white, and its defensive lines swung away from the Wildlands and towards the streets. The city's exits closed, shelter doors locked, and lifts stopped between floors.
Every system built to save lives now held people in place.
Kane had not gained complete control over the free beasts. Those that had already broken their collars went on resisting. But the Crown could hear them, crush them with pain and cut them off from one another.
The swarm scattered too.
Through Styx, I felt hundreds of connections break. The captains were still alive, but white noise drowned out their signals. The broods could not tell where their queen was.
Kane released the basilisk's coils.
I fell onto the roof.
"You can go now," he said. "Climb down and look for your friends. See how much freedom helps them inside locked shelters."
He made no further attempt to stop me. He needed the city to see my defeat.
I pushed myself onto my knees.
Styx flew out of the mounting. The red glow on her body had almost died. Thousands of voices drawn from the debt seals sounded inside the bond.
"Too many," she said.
Before, I would have ordered her to shut out the pain.
Now I placed my palm on the roof.
"Give me some of it."
"It will break you."
"Then it won't break both of us at once."
Styx settled on my hand.
The voluntary bond opened in both directions.
The city entered me.
I heard a beast hurling itself against a locked cage in the infirmary. A child trapped in a stalled lift. Leon struggling to keep the dragon conscious. Lily feeling her way towards a transmitter. Cole hauling open a drainage door by hand.
And Kane.
He stood beside me, but inside the Crown his voice was everywhere.
"Freeze."
Thousands of collars repeated the command.
I could not shout him down. Any command of my own would make me their second master.
So I did not order them to move.
I sent a single question.
"Do you want to get up?"
The Void Dragon answered first.
Then the hound in the square.
Then the old pack beast from the dyehouse.
Individual voices did not break the Crown. But the white network shuddered when something Kane had never allowed for appeared inside it.
Not resistance to a command.
A decision of their own.
Open in the reader