There was no time for thought. Within a split second, David was running up the narrow street toward Malcolm’s falling body. Malcolm was falling at least fifty yards ahead of David; there was no way David could reach him in time. But this thought never occurred to David. Every cell within him was alive with the urgent need to help his child—every cell within him was driven, from a preconscious, biological impulse, by his ethos of love.
Malcolm struck the ground heavily, with a thud that sent a wave of horror up from David’s gut into his throat.
But Malcolm did not remain still. For perhaps two or three seconds, he lay coiled on his side on the street, as David felt the muscles of his legs burn in his effort to reach his perhaps lifeless son. And then, very slowly, Malcolm rolled over onto his back.
Sampson was flying so close to the ground when Malcolm slipped from his back that the fall had not killed him on impact. Instead, his bruised skin and muscles, and his broken ribs, were already beginning to heal and reconstitute.
David was now within a few yards of his son. Relief flooded his body as he saw Malcolm’s chest expand mightily with a huge intake of air. It had only been a few seconds since impact, but his collapsed lungs were already knitted up and re-inflated.
As quickly as David felt this relief, it vanished. He heard a cry rise up from just beyond Malcolm’s prostrate form. He had been so focused on Malcolm that he had not seen that Commander Syné, using the brute strength of his own hands, had forced the huge Sampson to a landing just shy of Malcolm. Sampson was exhausted from the wounds he had sustained in combat with Syné’s Dactyl and from the wild, careering flight he had taken with both Malcolm and Syné on his back. He staggered now and drove his sharp snout at Syné, but he was powerless. One of his legs bent unnaturally beneath him, and he collapsed, his wings splaying out alongside his heaving, black-scaled body.
Syné ignored Sampson, as if he were nothing more than a nuisance that Syné had had to endure to get to Malcolm.
He strode toward Malcolm and drew a small biotoggler pistol out of a holster strapped across his chest. With his other hand, he pulled the red helmet off his head, the better to watch Malcolm’s demise.
Malcolm was steadily healing, but not fast enough. He could not move his arms or even sit up off the ground. He could only watch, wide-eyed, as Syné approached.
Syné cocked the pistol, and standing over Malcolm, leveled it at his exposed throat.
David did not even realize what his hands were doing. He was still clutching the dead Warped Immortal’s spear that Nev had handed him, and he was only a few yards away from Syné. He drew back his arm with all his might and hurled the spear.
Syné never saw it coming.
Its razor-sharp tip pierced through his right eye, drove cleanly through the socket, and emerged through the back of his skull, sluiced in fresh blood and brain matter.
Syné was instantly dead. His knees gave way underneath him, and he collapsed to the street, mere feet away from Malcolm.
There was a deafening silence.
David ran to his son. He scooped an arm under Malcolm’s limp shoulders and raised him up. The two of them huddled on the ground wordlessly for a moment, David cradling Malcolm.
Suddenly, Malcolm laughed.
“Dad!” he exclaimed. His battered torso had healed enough now that the waves of laughter shaking his belly and sides were not painful. “I didn’t know you had it in you!”
There was a small sound behind them, and David and Malcolm turned to see Nev standing just shy of them, her expression quizzical.
There was no mistaking it: She had heard Malcolm call David “Dad.”
But there was no time for any of them to pause and consider what this meant. A mighty roar of shouts, the popping of firing biotogglers, and a cacophony of explosions had risen up from the direction of the Renaissance Center.
Malcolm sprang to his feet. He was fully healed. His body was as primed and ready to fight as if the fall had never happened. Sampson had not fared so well. He was still slumped on the street, cooing softly. He raised his head and lifted his snout gingerly, as if giving Malcolm permission to proceed without him.
Malcolm’s chest lurched at the sight of his incapacitated familiar. But his body was vibrating with the call of his ethos. They were so close now to taking the city of Detroit. He could not hesitate now.
Suddenly, Sampson shrieked. The cry was high-pitched and tremendously loud, like the wailing of a fleet of ambulances. Sampson craned his neck in Malcolm’s direction and pierced him with a glare from his uninjured eye.
Malcolm understood Sampson without question. The Dactyl was commanding his master to go.
Malcolm put out a hand and gave Sampson one gentle slap on the flank. Then, without a moment’s further sentimentality, he spun and took off down the street, ordering David and Nev to follow with a terse, “Come!” called over his shoulder.
By the time they reached the Renaissance Center, the air was thick with dust and smoke, and the halls of the central tower were packed with bodies in close combat. The battle was mostly being fought with bioweapons, so there was virtually no detritus of dead or injured. But Flint warriors were forced to resort to old-fashioned explosives to break down inorganic barriers of concrete and brick, which was adding to the confusion and sense of tumult.
Malcolm had turned into a single-minded force. He drove his way through the fray using his knife, slashing at any human obstruction that did not wear the Flint army uniform.
The Detroit defense was in total disarray. The element of surprise had worked without question in Flint’s favor. Hardly any of the Detroit fighters were even in uniform, and their resistance was uncoordinated and sloppy. They were forced to be entirely reactive. The Flint army managed quickly to push a ragtag group of two dozen defenders back against the doors of the Detroit City Hall on the first floor of the central tower.
Malcolm sprang to the head of the onslaught of Flint fighters, dropping into an offensive crouch.
“Step aside,” he commanded the Warped Immortal blocking the City Hall entrance.
The Warped Immortal was slight and fine-boned, clutching a biotoggler to his chest, but too distracted and frightened to take aim. He was flanked by several others who looked almost as unprepared to fight.
“I—I don’t have orders to let you pass,” he stammered. His eyes were wide and staring. Malcolm was backed by dozens of Flint Immortals and Bereft, who crowded the tower’s lobby.
“You have no orders whatsoever,” Malcolm countered sneeringly. “Your defense is in disarray. Step aside,” he repeated menacingly.
“Do as he says,” another Warped Immortal advised the first. She was taller, holding a quarterstaff at the ready across her chest. Her expression was tight and her jaw clenched. “We have no authority to negotiate with this enemy force. Allow them to meet Chancellor Kinnion.”
The first Warped Immortal looked as if he might burst into tears. He was perhaps not even a trained fighter. Appearing to be completely out of his element, he might just as well have been a schoolteacher or a veterinarian.
“Do as he says!” the female Warped Immortal barked suddenly, whirling on him. Her fear and tension had spiked so that she was now directing all of it at her ally, rather than at Malcolm.
That was all it took. The small band of Warped Immortals shrank back from the doors like a retreating tide, and Malcolm and the Flint army lunged forward through the heat-activated doors, which yielded to them almost invitingly.
Detroit City Hall was eerily like Flint City Hall. Although it was located on the first floor of a skyscraper, it was designed as a vast, open circle, flanked by rows of tiered seats for the Warped Immortal Councilors. The ceiling was high and domed, as in Flint.
Warped Immortal Councilors had rushed to the hall in confusion and chaos. Most did not wear the sashes that signaled their rank and position. Some were as disheveled as if they had run directly from their beds.
As Malcolm rushed forward,
a throaty voice stopped him at the center of the room. It was the Warped Immortal Chancellor Kinnion. He stood on a dais, wearing a long, red robe that skimmed the ground.
“Twisted Immortal,” Chancellor Kinnion boomed. He was broad-shouldered but compact, his black eyes almond shaped and heavy-lidded. “You have vandalized our city and murdered its citizens. We yield to you now only under duress, with no other choice. What are your demands?”
His voice shook with fury, and he watched Malcolm with unvarnished contempt.
Malcolm’s eyes narrowed, equally contemptuous.
“Twisted Immortal? What kind of epithet is that, Warped Immortal?” He spat back pointedly. But he did not give Chancellor Kinnion time to respond. With a wave of his gloved hand, he indicated for a unit of Flint Immortals in tight formation behind him to come forward and seize Chancellor Kinnion.
Commander Kashay was the first to reach the Detroit Chancellor. With a swift jab of her knee to the back of his thigh, she brought him to his knees and clapped a pair of handcuffs made of glowing light waves, like the ones David had worn only a few days before, around his wrists.
Chancellor Kinnion kept his chin high. He met Malcolm’s gaze with a steady, defiant stare.
“You are a coward and a criminal,” Kinnion said calmly. A flicker of rage passed across Malcolm’s brow, but he kept his gaze steady.
“We surrender for the time being,” Kinnion continued. “But this is not over, Twisted Immortal.”
Malcolm matched Kinnion’s steely coolness. He leaned forward until his warm, brown face was mere inches from Kinnion’s chiseled cheekbones.
“It’s over, Kinnion,” he said. “You and your hateful tribe are finished.”
alcolm sat in the sawdust, near Sampson’s hulking form. The pterodactyl was beginning to recover from his wounds, although his right eye, which Syné had gouged, was gone. Its raw socket was packed with a poultice soaked in a stem cell medium, which would facilitate its rapid healing. The cuts in his leathery wings and the places on his body where his scales had torn away had been similarly treated by the official veterinarian of the Immortal Council, who had traveled to Detroit with the Flint forces. Sampson would eventually make a full recovery, but since neither he nor any Dactyls were Immortal like their masters, he would have to be patient and endure.
By now, Malcolm had spent so much time immersed in the ways of the twenty-sixth century that the twenty-first seemed like a vaguely defined dream. He could barely remember what it had felt like not to be Immortal. The cuts and scrapes of his childhood, and the one broken arm he had suffered during an ice hockey mishap when he was eleven, were bygone memories. Every bad flu or cold he’d ever come down with now seemed like barely a hiccup in his imagination. Malcolm hated to see his familiar suffering, but he couldn’t actually remember what suffering was like. A piece of him bristled with frustration that Sampson couldn’t heal as quickly as he did.
Malcolm rested a hand gingerly on the side of Sampson’s neck, careful to choose a spot that was unmarred by the battle with Syné and his Dactyl. Very lightly, very gently, he stroked the beast’s smooth scales.
He murmured gently to Sampson, trying to reassure him that his aches and sores would soon pass. And Sampson seemed perfectly content to accept this reality. He was not new to battle; he was not new to suffering. His good, left eye blinked lazily, and he dipped and nuzzled his head toward Malcolm.
“Soon enough,” Malcolm said out loud, well aware that his Dactyl could not literally understand him, but comforted nevertheless by the act of speaking to him, “you’ll have a new eye, and you’ll see better than before.” Indeed, the Immortal Council veterinarian could generate a new eye for Sampson from Dactyl stem cells. They had only to wait until the socket was healed and ready to accept the transplant.
Sampson cooed.
Malcolm’s mind began to wander. Tomorrow, the trial of the Warped Immortals would begin. Chancellor Kinnion and his closest cohort of Warped Immortal advisors stood charged with two counts of high treason against the Flint Immortal Council. First, they had waged an illegal war against their own government. As far as Malcolm, as victor of the Flint-Detroit Conflict, was concerned, Detroit had never been legitimately its own jurisdiction in the first place, which meant that its Warped Immortal residents stood in violation of the Flint Immortal Constitution, both in attempting to govern themselves and in rebelling against the real government at Flint City Hall.
The second count of treason, however, was the one that placed Chancellor Kinnion and his entourage in the greatest peril. They were accused of fraudulent immortality. It was clear to Malcolm and the senior members of the Flint Immortal Council that Kinnion and the Warped Immortals were not true Immortals, because they followed dark and indefensible ethea. The purpose of the trial was to expose these false claims of immortality for what they were and force Kinnion and his followers to renege on their ethea, thereby renouncing their immortality—and their lives.
The trial would begin the following morning, led by a special prosecutor Malcolm had appointed from among the members of the Flint Immortal Council, Councilor Tsikovna. She was a relentless cross-examiner, and Malcolm was certain the trial would end quickly, resulting in the discrediting and shame of the Detroit leadership. Thereafter, Malcolm would unite Flint and Detroit into a single, consolidated city, capital of the entire Ethosian world.
This meant that the planet was poised on the brink of an era of peace and stability unprecedented in its history. And Malcolm was uniquely positioned to shepherd in this new chapter of human—of Immortal—history. He would have unrivaled power, but he felt confident, too, that he would wield it with grace and benevolence, and that when the time came, he would transfer his power to a democratically-elected successor, thereby securing the stability of the world for generations to come.
Why, then, did Malcolm feel so discontented?
Why was he plagued by anxiety?
The same sense of creeping uncertainty that had dogged him before the offensive against Detroit, which he had been certain would disappear in the heat of righteous battle, lingered.
Malcolm sighed, leaning his forehead gently against Sampson’s steadily rising and falling flank. He had thought that winning the battle would dispel his uncertainty. It hadn’t.
But surely the trial would. Kinnion would be proven a traitor and forever vanquished. And Malcolm would be vindicated in his mission against Detroit.
A panel of seven Immortal high judges sat behind a bench at the head of Flint City Hall. Chief Justice Ianjuana rose from his chair at the center of the bench, his black robe falling in stately folds from his shoulders.
“All rise!” an Immortal bailiff called from the corner.
There was a ripple of motion as everybody in the densely packed City Hall stood, including every member of the Immortal Council in their tiered seats on either side of the hall and every Immortal and Bereft citizen in the overflowing spectators’ gallery.
The accused—Chancellor Kinnion and eleven of his highest-ranking advisors—were arrayed at a table on the left side of the hall, flanked by attorneys appointed by the Flint Immortal Council. On the right side of the hall, Councilor Tsikovna sat alone at the prosecutor’s table. Her smooth, pale face was completely unlined, though her thin lips met in a severe frown. She looked as if she could not be more than twenty years old, but in fact, she had been a ranking member of the Flint Immortal Council for seventy-nine years.
“Warped Immortals,” Chief Justice Ianjuana called out, his throaty voice booming throughout the hall, “you stand accused of two counts of high treason. You will be given the opportunity to provide evidence and testimony in your defense. How do you plead?”
The head defense attorney, Councilor Russo, a short, stocky Immortal with close-cropped black hair and an olive complexion, replied simply, “Not guilty.”
Chief Justice Ianjuana raised a skeptical eyebrow but did not comment. “Councilor Tsikovna,” he said instead, “you may present
your opening arguments.”
Councilor Tsikovna rose and made her way to the center of the hall, directly before the judges’ bench. She wore her hair pulled straight back off her forehead in a tight bun, giving her a formidable, severe air.
“Esteemed justices of the Flint High Court,” she began, “we are confronted today with the greatest threat to the traditions and values of Ethos that we have ever before seen. Chancellor Kinnion and his cohort are fraudulent Immortals who follow ethea bent toward destruction and cynicism.”
A murmur passed through the hall as both Immortals and Bereft turned to each other in shock and repulsion.
“Because they are driven by pride, lust, avarice, anger, sloth, envy, and gluttony, they are not true Immortals. On behalf of the Flint Immortal Council, I hereby demand that they renounce their evil ways, witnessed by all gathered here today.”
“Objection,” Councilor Russo called from the defense table, rising from his seat. “Councilor Tsikovna must be aware that if the Warped Immortals renounce their ethea, they will become Fallen and will perish within twenty-four hours. She is de facto demanding the death penalty for their crimes, which is illegal in the city-state of Flint.”
Again, a ripple of emotion passed through the hall as the spectators and councilors looked at each other in surprise.
“Overruled,” Chief Justice Ianjuana returned. “This objection was struck down in pre-trial hearings, Councilor Russo, and you are wasting the court’s time in raising it again. The court is within its limits of power in handing down the sentence that the Warped Immortals must renounce their ethea. The consequences of said renunciation are not the court’s concern—the Warped Immortals bear sole responsibility. Should they die as a consequence of breaking their ethea, the Flint Immortal Council cannot be held responsible.”
A smattering of applause broke out sporadically among the Flint Immortal Councilors, but Chief Justice Ianjuana quickly raised his gavel and called the court back to order.
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