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Elliot had been looking at Mr. Bhandari when something flashed across his vision, followed by a thunderous boom that shook the ground. He flinched as shrapnel blew past him. People cried out, some knocked off their feet.
Mr. Bhandari shouted louder than before. “What the hellscape dancers was that?”
Someone else was yelling a command to hold position: one of the armed enforcers. Elliot realized as the man raised his blaster that he was aiming at Hubcap.
“Don’t!” Elliot yelled. Hubcap was at the door of the aircar, boosting Owen in while the engines roared to life. The bolt of energy hit him square in the back.
Elliot stumbled into a run as the robot seized up and pitched forward against the side of the aircar. Owen and Larry exclaimed next to him while the closest armored locals looked visibly conflicted about who to aim their net launchers at.
A scream of panic was all the warning Elliot got before he was bodyslammed off his feet. Disoriented, he tried to roll away only to nearly get trampled by heavy boots. He made it to his hands and knees. Chaos was unfolding around him.
An armored man dove into a bush, wailing in fear. A woman climbed a tree. Another man dragged one of the first two out by his feet, shouting about unseemly weakness. And in the center of the clearing, Mr. Bhandari was a towering inferno of rage.
It was only when Ms. Acosta stamped the CEO with a SedEgg — using more force than was necessary — that Elliot belatedly realized what was going on.
We’re near the mating grounds, he thought as he struggled to stand. The invisible cloud creatures are everywhere. He pulled out his own SedEgg only to nearly drop it when an angry shove sent him sprawling.
This time he rolled back onto his feet, ready and waiting for his attacker, who turned out to be one of the two enforcers. Elliot’s heart rate hitched.
But someone else got the man from behind: a local who nodded at Elliot and darted away as the enforcer fell. Scuffles were breaking out everywhere. Elliot turned back toward the car and saw Hubcap getting up.
Of course. He’s built to withstand lightning strikes.
Elliot’s relief was eclipsed by a burst of maniacal laughter behind him. He whirled to see Ms. Acosta moving in a devastating display of empty-handed strikes at the workers around her, with the SedEgg forgotten in the grass.
“You bastards want to fight?” she asked with a brutal kick to a man’s knee. “You can’t even — uck.” An arm around her neck earned her attacker an elbow to the teeth, but he held on just long enough for someone else to tag her arm with a SedEgg. The pile of people fell. More were fighting behind them.
Stay calm, stay calm, Elliot chanted, taking deep breaths and telling himself that everything about the situation was still salvageable. With another glance to be sure Hubcap was okay — he was stepping away from the aircar and waving it into the sky — Elliot dashed back into the fray with his SedEgg at the ready, looking for the rest of the camera crew.
Vic had kept her cool. She had her own SedEgg and someone else’s as well, and she stood protecting a pile of camera equipment. Tarja was on the ground beside it. No sign of Graham or Dale.
Elliot dodged past a knot of wrestling workers, tagging an arm and two legs that might have belonged to different people. He kept moving. He heard Hubcap exclaim in exasperation and do the same. It was an encouraging sound.
Dale turned out to be hiding ostrich-style between two mossy boulders, and he went limp when Elliot stamped his backside. Elliot left him there for the moment. It seemed safer.
There we go. One down. He looked back up at the riot. Leaving only ... everyone.
The scene was pandemonium. People fought, hid, ran, and collapsed over each other. A couple workers had retained enough presence of mind to sedate the others through their armor, but they appeared to be fighting a losing battle. Even Hubcap was getting bogged down by a cluster of angry men.
Elliot felt a splash of true fear.
We’re all going to go down, he thought in wide-eyed shock. The frenzy is going to take everyone, and we’re all going to die out here! His heartbeat exploded in his ears, and the world turned into bright flashes of sight.
People fighting — two men with their hands around each other’s throats and their faces set in blind grimaces. A woman ramming a fist into another man’s gut. A graybeard with a camera who he should have recognized running into a tree, and the two human shapes up in the branches retreating from the impact.
Then the trees were moving past him, faster and faster with every flash, and bushes jumped up out of nowhere for him to trip over. Every time he fell, he rolled and clawed his way back up onto his feet; the world was a spinning reel of grass and dirt and bushes and sky, with trees blinking in and out of existence where they should not have been.
All he could hear was his pulse and a faint raspy sound that he distractedly realized was his own breathing. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered, not the branch that swept close to his head, not the colorful flapping animals that filled the air, not the way the ground beneath him turned uneven and made his vision even more jerky. The world tipped sideways and gave him a view of the grass. Somehow he got back up and kept moving.
The way his vision kept dipping to the left after every other step didn’t matter. All that mattered was running, getting away from the danger. He no longer remembered what it was. He only knew that he needed to run.
The sound of his pulse was getting quieter. The images that he saw of the trees and bushes and dirt were getting smaller, being eaten away at the edges by a speckled darkness that seemed oddly comforting. He kept pushing himself forward, unsure of how fast he was moving, but knowing that he had to keep going. He had to get away—
Then his vision jerked again, more than before, and he was looking at dirt. Something else was there, reflecting in front of his eyes while that speckled darkness chewed away at the image until nothing was left. It looked like a metal hand. Then it was gone.