I wait for the inevitable boom, the ensuing smoke and flames, but it doesn't come.

Green light emanates from the concrete in rings, like ripples on the surface of water. The soldiers fall back, white scales and black helmets reflecting each beam. I shove the Commander and rip the syringe from my neck, then arch beneath the light. Each one passes over my hips, chest...I lose a curl to the glare, it tumbles over my lashes in tiny black pieces, then scatters the asphalt beneath my shoulder.

Wave after wave bursts through the smoke. I flatten to the ground, ears ringing, and close my eyes until the green glow behind my lids fades. No one lays a hand on me, no shouts penetrate the noise in my ears, there's only light, then ash, then silence.

Smeared with the ichor of both man and machine, my lightning spear rolls to touch my fingertips. I snatch it up and flip to my feet, send the electricity to the tip, and reach for a Cockroach--but no one is there. I grasp grimy swathes of ash and burning debris, then cover my mouth in an attempt to keep my lungs clear.

"Huh," I say around the back of my fist. "How about that."

The Commander lies beneath my feet in pieces, his torso pulled apart, ripped in two. Metal and organic insides spill from a ribcage still connected by warped iron bones.

His men are loyal, they don't run back to their hovering starships. They follow their Commander's lead, each one a pile of dismembered limbs, some reaching for the alleyways as charred remains.

"I guess there's more than one way to kill an insect," I say. "More ways than I expected. You can have this back, Commander." I crouch beside his visor and ready the black syringe. He doesn't protest when I slam the needle through his throat and empty the dose. "Maybe if Titan is fast enough, you'll wake up in time to find out what it does."

The thunderstorm in the distance becomes impossible to ignore. I leave him to soak up the poison inside his puddle of oil and blood, distracted by the city and its noise. Colossus whines and groans. Rain cracks against the sidewalks some miles back in thick violent droplets, and underneath it rumbles a creature of sorts, the sound not unlike a Vitiate, a common desert Beast. Wonderful, another monster to fight on top of all this, in a rainstorm of course. But the smoke reveals a dark blue sky. The same sunbeams shift through the fog without a cloud in sight. Thunder rages in the distance and comes closer with every loud heartbeat in my ears. The skyscrapers reveal themselves one at a time, shattered windows hanging from thick metal beams, with dust and dirt slapping the sidewalks like the oncoming rain--that is the rain.

My imagination dissipates the storm. A much less-comforting reality settles in; that my grenade not only killed the soldiers, it cleaved the city in half.

I run.

The gaps in the smoke guide my way. Within each break, another building falters. Spires crane their necks until they snap and render skyscrapers headless. The empty homes of my people prepare to bury me, forever trapped beneath a splintering forest of metal and concrete. Among the metal trees, all the Cockroaches reignite. I dash over busted cars and quiet starships as the Legion returns one by one, mechanical bodies resewn, only to be lost again within the rubble. What few survive their resurrections flee to their ships until I run the streets of Colossus alone. Maybe, for the first time, that's not a good thing.

The city catches up to me, then pulls ahead. A great skyscraper blocks my path. I throw myself to its face and run along the bursting metal beams as it falls. My reflection sprints through cracked shards of glass beside me, shards that burst, sting my face, and cut my clothes. I clear the siding and catch myself on the split ground, then dash for a clearing in the distance. A moment too late, the skyscraper would've killed me, I wince as it collides with the others and showers the streets with industrial snow.

Somehow I find my radio despite my race against Colossus. I pull the glass tablet from my armor and summon green lights that display my soundwaves. I yell some numbers into it, breathless, then leap around a hunk of metal in the sidewalk.

"Saint," I say. A moment passes, filled with the devastation of the city, as the radio struggles to distinguish my voice from it. The soundwaves flatline. "Saint!"

"King, is that you?" the radio says. I swallow a lungful of smoke.

"Yes." I blow into the receiver.

"Are you on a run?"

"More or less. Do you have units in Colossus?" I spit onto the glass screen.

"No, but you do."

My face overheats from exertion and passing flames. "What? Who?"

"Thief."

Of course. "Tell her to get out of here. Send me a transport, I'm giving you my location." I mash a button on the screen a bit too hard, another crack added to the ones already there.

"You can tell her yourself," she says, static interrupting. "Good luck."

The green sound waves flicker and disappear, leaving the glass blank. I cast it on the rocks where it breaks, fragments joining the windows, and crunching beneath my boots. "Infuriating," I tell the city.

I run as if I do this every day. The earth separates under my feet but I jump along the canyons as if they were already there. The buildings pummel the sidewalks but I predict every new metal beam, dodge every slab of concrete before the structures collapse. Soon the monoliths meet their end far behind me. Sanctuary awaits at the city's heart.

A park, dead and covered in sand, separates the skyscrapers and offers me rest. I sprint to the opening, the shriveled cacti and dry oasis a welcome sight. The city falls around the clearing as if it were a sacred place, each building afraid to scatter across it, so they lie down instead at its edges.

Finally. My heart strains against my sternum, my feet protest, my legs burn, and a pounding headache settles in my temples. Thirst burns the back of my throat. Corruption comes to tap the corners of my vision.

I slam to a stop, boots dragging a trench through the sand, arms flailing. My precious sanctuary doesn't give me the chance to recover.

Silver and ever-reaching, the Commander's starship meets me at the center, all cannons pointed at my head. Within them shines a light charge so bright my vision explodes in spots of blue and green--even if I could see I wouldn't find a path to escape. The Stingray spreads her wings and hovers, offering an ultimatum: run back to be buried, or surrender to Mars.

Invisible machines and turbines whine with the strain of a high-pitched charge, one I've heard only a few times before, a blast so catastrophic the Legion almost never uses it. Pointed black helmets stare down from the cabin, each one hiding a soldier far too eager to report my death back home and claim a victory that shouldn't belong to them.

With arms wide, I welcome the starship and her cannons. Thirty seconds, that's how long it takes to charge that blast. Thirty seconds to figure out how to run away.

"So, you've found me," I tell the soldiers inside as if they can hear. "I assume your orders have changed."

"In fact, they have."

The Commander's metal voice slithers from one ear to another, He strikes. The blow lands.

Shock, then stillness. Electricity sticks its needles in my limbs. I see the spear jammed through my core but feel no pain--adrenaline. Sweet and paralyzing, it steeps my veins in cold water until I freeze, chills raising bumps on my arms. My knees bury themselves inside the sand and I, unwillingly, surrender to the desert.

He sets his chin over my shoulder, mechanical pieces clicking in my ear as Titan pulls together parts of a missing face. His broken visor shows a silver skull, synthetic skin torn and burned away, with gears churning between the cracks. The pattern continues down the left side of his body, suit melded to his insides, scales lost within machine parts and remaining organs. "Worthless rat," he says. "You caused me a lot of trouble. I wonder what the Minister sees in you."

"D-didn't I p-poison y-you?" I struggle against the spear, my hands searching the sand for a rock, anything. With my weapons lost in the fallen city, I'm defenseless, not that it matters anymore.

"A valiant effort, but no, that serum wasn't made for me or you. It's for someone much worse."

My heartbeat falters. "N-number Seven."

He nods. "Surrender and I'll order my men to stand down." He wraps his arm around my neck, scales pressed against my windpipe. I gasp and spit on the holes in his skin, where metal bones peek through rotted sinew. Not even the Martians are safe from Old World decay.

"N-no." The word catches my bloated tongue until I choke.

"So be it." He motions to the Stingray and the starlight expands. I press my feet into the dirt and struggle against him, with the lightning coursing through my insides, my fight is useless. Blood drips and stains the sand from the edges of the onyx spear. Yellow sores spread from one arm to another; if I lose any more blood, I'm done for—and so is he.

Ten.

The charge expands between the cannons and converges at the Stingray's nose, a star held between two strings. I shut my eyes and press my back against his chest, shoving the spear deep into my spine. "What are you doing?" I say. "You'll die too."

Nine.

He presses on my throat to shut me up--it works. That deep cough returns, I spit more blood and ink onto his armor.

"Titan will upload me to a new body, I'll have to come back to do this all again. I envy you, you're the winner here."

"N-no...."

Eight.

"But consider this a much better fate than what awaits you on Mars," he says. "You'd be humiliated, strung up before the Gateway as a warning to the other Warlords. The Minister does love a show."

"I was right, you were lying." I shove my elbow into his nose and kick out his legs--but he catches me. He wraps me up in a hold so tight my limbs throb, broken ribs stabbing my lungs.

Seven.

"I assure you, I wasn't. With cooperation comes reward. But fight a higher power and you'll dig your own grave."

Six.

The ringing in my ears returns. That awful fever settles in once more, hot enough to challenge the center of the star. Drops of blood change their color on the sand, from red to black, ink replaces burgundy.

The light grows.

Five.

"You would have been the best of us, Eden," he says.

"My name is King."

He slams his knee into my spine. I collapse. Leather fingers find my hair and pull, I swallow a cry, forced to stare at the blaze.

Four.

"We offered recovery, freedom, redemption, the chance to watch your son grow up and yet, you rejected it. All for what? Power? Reputation?"

"For my people," I whisper. I'm growing tired.

"Spare me," he says. "You've already abandoned them."

Three.

He jerks my head back again and points. "See, look at that, isn't it lovely? A flash and then, it's over. This is a kindness."

Two.

I fight him no more. The grains soak up my blood, I stare at the puddle where the ground awaits, all too inviting. My body hangs around the spear, dangling, and I reach to touch the crimson sand.

"That's it," he says. "Rest, you've done enough."

One.

The cannons fire. Light swallows the blue desert sky....

WC: 1990