Act One, Scene Seventeen
The man who was not named Lodestone walked up to the gate invisibly, his feet never quite touching the grimy sidewalk. He liked his hood but Luminosa’s costume worked better; he was faster, swifter, deadlier. It was an imposing gate, topped with barbed wire, two walls and a kill-zone between them with towers behind it studded with machine guns and anti-tank rifles. The Fifth district had nothing like this; no, this belonged to the Eighth that mocked all laws, the Eighth that thought the rest of Novapest a nest of criminals, beneath its notice, hardly worth considering.
A city shouldn’t look like that. A city should have one law. Justice for the rich and justice for the poor.
He launched himself over the gate and landed in a world out of American television. Neat whitewashed two-story-and-an-attic houses, white picket fences anyone could climb over in front of them to guard their neat little green yards. Toys for the Tyrant’s engineers, paid for by the Count of the Eighth out of men’s blood. A mask over the real face of the city.
The hooded man walked through the nighttime streets. There was a man watering his lawn with a hose, as if it was a perfectly ordinary thing to do. As if a lawn was a perfectly normal thing to have. Above him loomed Steelstorm Industries, a factory stretching across half the width of a district, here to serve the Mass-Production Tinker in building his arms.
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There were no plans available for the Count’s factory, not for the man who wasn’t Lodestone. What there were were reports for where the men who were supposed to pick up weapons for shipments to the other counts should go, because those men sometimes talked.
There were six drones guarding the shipment, one heavy, and two armed guards, all visible through a window into the garage. It had bulletproof glass panes, solid steel walls, and the drones had the full threefold blaster - laser, stunner, force. A wave of his hand and they were crushed. The two guards whirled, drawing guns; razor-thin discs of steel that had been part of the drones sliced across the room and took both of their heads off.
Another shove to get through the wall and he could see the mass-production tinker’s work, neatly packed for shipping. The crates were metal, and he lifted them effortlessly. Threefold blasters, miniature railguns, kinetic deflector shields, energy absorbers - the laws of physics tied into a pretzel to make the weapons every hero and every villain needed.
He was expecting Luminosa to appear behind him as he accelerated into the sky with his prizes, which was why he reacted so fast when the laser impacted against his costume. The Knight of the Eighth (the man from Saint-Andrews spun to see) wore a black and silver jumpsuit with goggles low across his eyes. His hands were encased in glowing power gauntlets. Steel.
“Next will be lethal,” the knight said, dodging as his enemy flicked a gear at him not quite fast enough to break the sound barrier.
“No,” said the man who wasn’t Lodestone, crunching the gauntlets inwards, and as a Knight of the Eighth fell he flew on.