Chaos emerged around me as my mother’s house of cards toppled.

Dozens of them surrounded her mansion. PNP and Metamatics blended, their wearables alive with activity, targeting reticles searching for the weak spots. I pulled my head back down just as a bullet shot through the cracks in the steel paneling right where my head had been.

The fragility of Mother’s operation set inside me. Everything she worked towards over the decades she had left our family was fragile compared to the weight of the PNP and Metamatics bearing down on it. Her whole operation would halt in a few minutes, and I would go along with it.

“You know how to use that thing? Eh?” Beside me, Hannah emerged from a doorway holding some type of machine gun. A helmet reserved for armored police sat on her neck. Her combat vest made her appear twice the size.

I stammered and paused before remembering I was carrying the gun Mother had given me. It was a rock in my hands, or maybe that was my frailty at seeing the agents barge through the gate, their land drones in tow.

She spat. “Useless kid.” She pushed me aside and looked out to the lawn. “Stay away from the windows!”

Hannah unleashed a barrage of fire, peppering two officers running up to the front steps. I crawled back just before more bullets sprayed into the room. Hannah swiveled her body from the window and crawled the rest of the way.

“You’re going just to stand there while they come for us?!” she yelled, firing through another window. “You’ve got a gun—use it!”

I shook my head, still stunned by the chaos emerging around me. I wanted to, and I thought it would come to me as easy as it was for Hannah to spray down and kill another person. But I had seen the PNP agent die in front of me, and who I guessed was Quin. They were both unnecessary casualties in this whole grand scheme.

I was better than my mother, wasn’t I?

“Whatever, kid,” said Hannah, firing again. “You’re dead.”

I know I am, I thought. So what was the point of doing all this if we were all destined for the beyond?

Worse, a thought crawled into me that I deserved this. Didn’t I? I let Janice die. I let everything slip out of my hands. Why should I have fought to save something I didn’t want to protect anyway? For revenge? For spite?

None of those agents outside deserved this.

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No. There was only one person who needed to be stopped.

“Where are you going?!” Hannah screamed. “Bah! You coward! Run, then! Just keep-”

The wall exploded, and I was flung back. Hannah’s body pinwheeled against the wall, and my ears rang, my head spinning and throbbing. I ran my fingers through my hair, and they came back with blood.

Across the hallway, Hannah stirred, groaned, and pushed herself up against the wall. Her face was covered in blood, but she bobbed her head to face me. She spat and muttered something I couldn’t discern.

A huge gap had opened between us from the mansion’s third floor to a view of the agents.

I rose and stumbled but righted myself as men worked their way up from downstairs. Ernesto was with them, pushing me aside, urging me to go downstairs away from the carnage.

I did so not to flee from it but to end it.

I went downstairs and ran through the hallway to Mother’s test chamber. She stood on a dais in the center of the room, holding her swivel chair throne. Her wearable buzzed with a dozen menus as the Black Fire pushers slept around her in their beds. Zip-ties snared their wrists and ankles.

A dozen men trained their guns on me before lowering them. I wouldn’t have a chance.

Mother closed her menus, and her frown was more stricken than I ever remembered. It deepened when she saw me. “Come to cower at your mother’s feet when things get tough?”

I closed my eyes and breathed. Could I still do this? Could I put an end to this operation? A rightful end, too—the end I knew needed to happen.

But no, she was surrounded. Her entire mansion may have been a house of cards, but this part was solid.

More shots erupted from outside, but my mother never flinched.

“Well,” Mother started, “it’s as good a time as any.”

She didn’t wait to see what had transpired. Instead, she removed her wearable and moved to a box-shaped device on a table at the side of the room. A slinky cord coiled up to what looked like a vintage phone attachment. She opened her mouth, ready to speak into it.

She paused, eyed me again, offered the device to me, and said, “Maybe it should be you. Your voice is soft, anyway.”

I didn’t know what she was getting at. The pistol was in my pocket, and I calculated the time it would take for me to remove it and gun down my mother.

She squinted, pulling the device back to her. “I know that look, Jayson, and you had your chance already.” She looked to the men around her, who raised their guns at me—her son. “You could have killed me a dozen times before, but you did not. You’re too obvious.” She shook her head. “But, I guess it’s smart being useless now. This way, you might end up in a more comfortable cell than mine.”

She raised the device to her mouth. “Hello?”

Her voice flooded through the compound and outside, emanating from speakers on the corners of buildings outside—the ones that had survived the rain of bullets.

Soon after, everything stopped—the guns, the whirring of the drones, the shouts of the PNP and Metamatics.

“Good,” she said, her words permeating like a god. “Now, if you’ll just listen and stop your bickering, I’m going to tell you how you can save these 200 hostages.”