I could feel every one of them.
The beasts in the hospitals, the captains at the central ring, the little dragon beside Leon. The people bearing debt seals. The freed creatures in the academy courtyard. Even those who had gone to the river and wanted nothing to do with us.
There was no longer any distance between thought and action.
I restored power to the medical wing, opened the medicine stores and raised the protective dome over the northern wall. Then I shut off the pipe flooding the dyers' quarter again and diverted the water into the Li family's empty reservoirs.
What would have taken free people hours, the Crown accomplished in a second.
Skyfall City drew breath.
In the medical wing, the fox began to breathe again. Mira stepped back from the table before she could administer the second stimulant. Street lamps came on, and people stopped falling on dark stairways. The northern dome sealed the breach where the first nocturnal beasts were already entering.
The System displayed a projection.
If centralised control was maintained, the hunger in the city would end within two days. Transport would be restored within a week. Attacks from the Wildlands would fall by almost half. The debt contracts could be annulled with a single decision, Kane handed over for trial, and the archive opened to every victim.
I could do everything we had fought for.
Faster than the Council.
Without any more casualties.
Kane stood opposite me. Most of his armour had passed to me, and his face was human again.
"Do you understand now?" he asked.
I did.
Not his cruelty. The temptation.
In the eastern district, they opened the gates for the beasts leaving the city. Among them, I sensed a predator with a damaged white mark. The probability of an attack on the crowd was high.
I closed the gates.
The people in front of them shouted. Several beasts struck the doors. The predator did lunge at the nearest person, but my command stopped its muscles.
No one was hurt.
The panel marked the decision as optimal.
Lily was trying to reach me.
Her voice came with hundreds of others: open the gates, keep them closed, get the children out, leave the beasts alone, force them to lie down, lift the suppression. The noise kept me from seeing the whole picture.
I muted Lily's channel.
Then I shut off the rest.
The silence made the city clear.
I allocated the water, assigned guards to the stores and returned the transport platforms to safe routes. Several people resisted because they wanted to stay with the wounded. I forced them to move away: the risk of the building collapsing was too high.
They survived.
After the first act of coercion, the next came more easily.
Styx crawled from my collar to my neck and stung me.
Pain cut through the Crown's calm. With it came an image of a closed palm.
"I need to finish," I said.
Styx showed me Kane's last command, stopped by a white line. The line went no further.
I had finished.
Everything I had just done had come after I stopped Kane's command.
Kane sat down beside the ruined throne.
"The first hour is always the most persuasive," he said. "Then people get used to waking up alive."
I opened Lily's channel.
"You shut us out," she said. "Not the Crown. Us."
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