Commanding his blaster back into its hidden holster, Kane kneeled next to Domi and reached for the shifting stones. Hands just a couple of inches away from her body, he stopped himself, staring nervously at the semi-living things. Like a swarm of tiny-shelled insects, the hard backs of the stones had massed against Domi’s arm, creating solid bands there that wrapped over her skin like bangles.
“Kane?” Domi squealed. “They’re pushing into me. I can feel them.”
Kane had had a similar stone embedded in him just a few months earlier, and he could still recall the pain it had caused. Like leeches, Kane knew that the insidious things needed to be wrenched from the body before they gained any greater hold.
“Okay,” Kane said, “let me work.”
* * *
ON THE STAGE BEHIND KANE, the robed figure was pushing himself up, careful not to put pressure on his wounded leg. As soon as he was standing, the slingshot began to revolve again in his hand, cutting through the air with an audible whoosh as he targeted the man who had shot him.
Still standing over the spilled stones like a barricade, Edwards saw the hooded figure rise, saw the slingshot picking up speed in his grip. Edwards assessed the situation in an instant and concluded that taking a potshot at the man was too dangerous in this crowd. So he ran, knocking aside several of the congregation as he rushed for the stage and leaped. Before the robed man could launch the stone projectile, Edwards threw himself at him.
“No way, buddy,” Edwards growled as he slammed full force into Kane’s would-be attacker. “Fight’s over for you.”
The hooded man dropped to the stage with a crash under the weight of Edwards’s attack, crying in agony as his wounded leg was wrenched painfully to the side.
Edwards turned to the crowd that was warily approaching the spilled stones he had been guarding. “Nobody touch anything,” he warned, “for your own safety.”
The Stone Widow weaved through the crowd, hurrying toward the main exit of the hangar with the last of the robed guards stumbling after her, recovering from Edwards’s attack. “What happened?” she asked. “The stones...”
“We’ll come back for them,” the robed man said. “Let’s just get out of here.”
They both looked up as Grant stepped from the shadows to block the door. “You ain’t going nowhere,” he warned.
Beside the Stone Widow, the robed figure turned on Grant, throwing a handful of stones in the ex-Magistrate’s face. Grant lifted his arm to protect himself, batting the stones aside as they slapped uselessly against the Kevlar of his coat sleeve.
Before the robed figure could follow through, Grant had his Sin Eater pressed against the man’s forehead, whip fast. “You try that again, you’ll be doing it without a head on those shoulders,” Grant warned ominously.
Seeing the futility of arguing, the robed man slowly raised his hands in surrender.
* * *
OVER THE NEXT FIFTEEN minutes, Kane used a knife to pluck the stones from Domi’s arm while she lay there, biting her lip. “Evil things,” she hissed, and Kane was inclined to agree.
Removed, the stones moved only for a few moments before lying still on the floor. It seemed that contact with flesh triggered them, and separated from the warmth of Domi’s body they ceased functioning, returning to their dormant state.
Once he was done, Kane produced a little medical kit from a pouch in his belt. The kit included several antiseptic wipes, and he used these to clean the grazed sections of Domi’s arm where the stones had tried to bond.
“Does this mean Ullikummis isn’t dead?” Domi asked.
“He’s dead, all right,” Kane assured her as he wiped at one of the grazes. “Saw it with my own eyes. Just a few last bits of his crap to clean up.”
Domi watched the unmoving stones for a few seconds. “They tried to—” she began and Kane nodded.
“I know.”
While Kane nursed Domi’s wounds, Edwards guided the confused congregation to the doors, assuring them they had been duped and that this was just another old-time scam, the kind of thing their grandfathers were either pulling or falling for in the Deathlands.
“Go home and find a better life for yourselves,” Edwards told them. “’Cause you won’t find it here in a bunch of empty promises.”
Whether the congregation took his warning to heart, no one could say, but the sight of a man with a bullet-bitten ear brandishing a blaster and ordering them from the hangar was enough to dissuade them from asking too many questions. Once they had left, Edwards carefully retrieved the spilled contents of the other box of stones, piling them together with his booted feet, careful not to let them touch his skin. They seemed dormant now, dead things, but he had felt them call to him earlier, deep in his skull where Ullikummis had touched him.
While his companions were clearing up the mess, Grant brought the Stone Widow to the rear of the stage along with one of her robed assistants. The other sec men had been disarmed by Edwards, and both were still unconscious. Edwards proceeded to tie them up with strips of their own robes while Grant interrogated the two who remained awake.
“Where did these stones come from?” Grant asked, fixing the Stone Widow and her guardian with a no-nonsense stare.
“What’s it to you?” the robed figure challenged.
Beneath his hood, he looked tired and drawn, a man of twenty-five with the skin of a man of sixty or seventy. It was as if something was eating him up from inside. Grant had seen this before when he was a Magistrate, drug users hopped up on jolt or some other stimulant, burning through their own bodies in just a few years. In the case of the robed man, Grant suspected he knew what it was. His robe indicated that he had been one of Ullikummis’s elite guards, the people whom Cerberus had dubbed “firewalkers.” Each firewalker had a sentient stone embedded within his or her skull that could simulate the physical properties of Ullikummis, turning flesh to stone during bouts of incredible concentration. The stones had been linked to Ullikummis himself, and with him destroyed they were withering and dying, eating away at their hosts like parasites.
“Come here,” Grant said, grabbing the man by the scruff of the neck and marching him over to a window of the hangar.
Edwards remained with the Stone Widow, sitting on the edge of the stage and holding his blaster ready in case she tried anything. She looked defeated, biting her lip in futility.
“See this?” Grant said, shoving the robed man facefirst toward the window. “Your face, you see that?”
The man looked at his reflection in the glass. “What of it, man?” he replied contemptuously.
“You’ve got a stone inside you, right?” Grant said. “Just like the ones that attacked the white girl over there.”
“Mitra?” the man said. “She shouldn’t have been—”
“Never mind what she should and shouldn’t have been doing,” Grant cut in. “How old are you?”
“What? Twenty-three. What’s it matter to you?”
“You’re even younger than I’d guessed,” Grant said sorrowfully. “Take another look at your face.”
The twenty-three-year-old man looked at his reflection in the dropping-spattered glass of the window.
“You’re looking old,” Grant told him. “No escaping it.”
The robed man look irritated, but he seemed unsure of where to direct his anger. “Is there a point to all this?”
“You have a stone inside you,” Grant told him. “Just like the ones that tried to attach themselves to Mitra there. They’ve burned out, my friend. They’re past their due