The fireball rose in eerie silence, billowing over the eastern skyline, a monstrous upraised fist of boiling scarlet and orange. Incandescent fragments which must have been the size of entire houses rained out of it like falling petals. Then the noise reached us, a crashing peal of thunder that rattled the teeth in my jaw. The ground trembled underfoot. Loose bricks and roof tiles clattered down from the ruins around us.

The firelight cast Ninth Watch in a baleful red glow. Long shadows danced across the stunned faces of the dissidents, across the horrified, open-mouthed expressions of Jandra and Helina and Cherdane.

Modvehl watched the fireball bloom with a smile of detached interest. His face was a crimson mask, his eyes sunken into black shadow.

I turned to him in appalled disbelief. “What was that? An atomic? Did you set off a fucking atomic?”

“Nothing so crude,” he replied. “It’s a form of metastable explosive. Enormously complex, high-density chemistry – centuries beyond anything the kingdom can manufacture. Not radioactive in the slightest, but it packs hundreds of times more energy than conventional explosives. I ensured some of it got mixed in with the rest of the impounded contraband.”

I thought of the cases we’d confiscated from the children in Saldein Heights. Orczin had made sure they were picked up by the Inspectorate, in accordance with the contraband-tech protocol. Playing right into Modvehl’s hands, yet again.

“There were thousands of people there,” Lokh protested hoarsely. “For fuck’s sake, Queen Haara Square is right in the middle of the city! There’s tenement blocks all around it!”

Modvehl glanced at him, unmoved. “The blast was concentrated in the Inspectorate headquarters, focused upwards from its underlevels. There will undoubtedly be some collateral damage, which is regrettable. But this was an unavoidable necessity. The Interior Ministry can no longer use the square as a staging area.”

The fireball spread and darkened, raining droplets of fire over the heart of Indeleon. I wondered if the Ministry strike force had even had time to realise what was happening. A whole regiment, blasted into oblivion. And who knows how many others with them.

Helina was crying. Her silent tears shimmered in the light of the dissipating fireball.

“Our people were under Queen Haara Square. In the black cells,” she said wretchedly. “Modvehl, you killed them all.”

“I did,” Modvehl replied. He gave her a solemn little smile. “Instantly and painlessly. They would have been tortured to death by the Inspectorate. This was the kindest fate they could have hoped for.”

Helina gave a broken little sob. Even Amaya and Cavire were silent, staring dazedly at the distant flames. Gradually, the burning light died away, leaving a mountainous column of smoke to loom over Indeleon.

The gunfire in the surrounding streets, which had been briefly stilled by the blast, resumed with fresh intensity. The rotors of a circling gunship thundered a few blocks away, drowned out intermittently by the heavy bark of its autocannons.

Modvehl gestured us onward like a music-hall maestro. “Let’s keep on to the hypocentre. The remaining Ministry forces will be attempting to regroup. And I have so much more to show you all.”

His lackeys snapped themselves out of their shocked stupor and began to hustle us along the devastated street. We were led through a row of hollowed-out houses, skirting around a yawning black sinkhole in the floor of a destroyed living room. I saw human bones strewn in an overgrown corner, jumbled ribcages and skulls colonised by green moss. A family, perhaps, huddled together in their house when the atomic went off. Left unburied for twenty long years, as Indeleon rebuilt itself around them, and weeds sprouted in their blind eye sockets.

The ruins ahead were full of shadowed crannies and hiding spots, too many angles for the dissidents to cover at once. A bolder man might have tried to make a run for it. I could have thrown myself into the cover of the shadows, pulled the little revolver out of my boot, and lined up a shot on Modvehl’s smug bastard face.

Except I knew, if I did that, Jandra would die for it. I could throw my own life away easily enough. I couldn’t bring myself to gamble with hers.

The sprawling, shifting, district-wide battle went on behind us, lighting up the smoke-shrouded evening sky with muzzle flashes and scattered explosions. Gunships strafed the rubble with bright volleys of tracer fire. There was no way to tell exactly what was going on. But Amaya and Cavire periodically tapped their earlobes, receiving messages on those hidden communicators of theirs, and I could tell from their darkening expressions that the Orphaned were losing. Blowing up Queen Haara Square hadn’t changed the simple arithmetic of this war. The Interior Ministry could absorb the loss of a thousand men; Modvehl’s people could not.

And the one thing that might have turned it around, at least temporarily, was nowhere to be seen. There was no doubt in my mind – Modvehl had lost control of his venator. But that knowledge was little comfort to me now. It was only on his orders that we had been kept alive. If a mutiny flared up out here in the ruins, Cavire or Amaya would happily gun all the hostages down as loose ends.

We’d made it another few hundred yards when the first fighter jets from the Kavenan airbase arrived. A three-plane formation whipped overhead, making us all flinch and duck into the shadows. The jets screamed low over the blasted streets southwest of the cathedral, and bright blossoms of fire rose in their wake, bomb-blasts gouging new craters into the already devastated district.

“Fucking Almighty,” Cavire exclaimed. “That was the safehouse. They found it already!”

“It’s deep enough to survive a few bombs,” Amaya said, though her confidence sounded brittle and forced.

“The bastards won’t drop a few. They’ll drop hundreds,” the Esuloan retorted. “Artheym and Dalhan need to evacuate into the tunnels. They’ll get slaughtered if they stay.” He reached up for his earlobe.

“No!” Modvehl cut in sharply. “Artheym’s team must remain in place. They need to hold off the Ministry.”

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

“They need to buy you a little more time with their lives, you mean,” I told him.

Amaya raised her stolen Watch pistol in my direction, clicking off the safety with her thumb. “How many times do I need to tell you to shut the fuck up?” she snarled.

Exhausted, terrified, furious, I stared her down. “You’re being led to your deaths, and you know it. Shooting me won’t change that.”

“Amaya, lower that weapon,” Modvehl commanded. With obvious, grimacing reluctance, Amaya obeyed.

Modvehl zoned out again, communing with his invisible devils. His lips moved and his brow furrowed. All of us, dissidents and hostages alike, watched him in nervous anticipation.

I almost expected the venator to flash into view, joining the battle at last in a whirlwind of silver blades. Instead, I saw several bright points rise from the ruins maybe half a mile away, streaking into the sky on thin trails of white smoke. The missiles converged on one of the Air Corps jets as it curved back around for another bombing run. Flying so low and fast, the pilot had no time to evade them. The jet banked hard and spat out a fizzing cloud of flares, to no avail. The missiles zeroed in, and a new fireball lit up the night, tiny compared to the destruction of Queen Haara Square but fierce enough. Burning chunks of fuselage spiralled out of the sky.

The dissidents gave a ragged cheer, full of the savage enthusiasm of the truly desperate.

“The advance teams are in place now,” Modvehl said with satisfaction. “The king’s forces will no longer be able to operate with impunity. There will be no safety for them, in the sky or on the ground.”

I kept my mouth shut this time. The man was so far beyond delusional, it wasn’t even worth calling it out any more. There was nothing to do but be carried along by the tide.

We moved on, weaving from ruin to ruin along the darkened length of Blackwater Avenue. More missiles streaked into the sky behind us, this time chasing down a Ministry gunship like hounds bringing a ponderous quarry to bay. Fresh explosions illuminated the barren streets. The gunfire on the ground didn’t let up. The dissidents cursed us and shoved us with their gun muzzles whenever we showed any sign of slowing down.

And then we were in the zone of total destruction, that half-mile circle around the hypocentre where Indeleon ceased to exist.

The ruins surrounding the cathedral were a miserable sight, but at least they were still recognisable for what they had once been – orderly streets of houses and shops, places where people had lived. Out here, those traces of the old world gave way to absolute, numbing devastation. Here there was only rubble, a pitted and hummocked field of it, like a rolling grey desert. Weeds grew in thick clumps and clusters around hollows full of stagnant rainwater. This was a place of emptiness, home only to the ghosts.

As it had been ever since that spring day in 1388, when a mushroom cloud split the sky.

*

Nilen’s atomic exploded in the very heart of what was now Ninth Watch, where the Salvator defenders had dug themselves in. They waited until the King’s Army had them surrounded on every side, with several infantry divisions fully committed and more coming in across the western plain. By all accounts, the fighting had become a ferocious street-to-street melée, with men dying by the dozen over every pile of bombed-out wreckage. There were plenty of civilians stuck in the middle, unable to escape through the constant bombardment, most of them just cowering in basements and metro tunnels in the hope of weathering the storm. Poor bastards.

Atomic death, you’d think it would be quick. A flash of light and you’re turned to cinders, shaking hands with the Almighty before you even know you’re dead. The reality is a whole lot nastier.

Hundreds of thousands died in the blast, vaporised or burned alive or crushed by falling debris. It was a big bomb, hundreds of kilotons, and what it didn’t smash to powder it set aflame. A firestorm swallowed the whole west side of the city, hurricane-force winds sucking people alive and screaming into the inferno. Entire neighbourhoods were scoured off the face of the planet. Thousands of people tried to jump in the Velmiris to escape the flames, only to be scalded to death as the river boiled in its banks. Then came the black rain of fallout, and many of those who survived were left wishing they hadn’t.

Altogether, between the blast and the radiation and the withering waves of disease that followed, something close to a million people died in Indeleon. The fallout took thousands more in the towns downwind. It was years before the farmland around the city recovered. I’d often heard rumours (and I hoped they were just rumours) about three-headed lambs and milk that gave you cancer.

Just hours after Indeleon, the Salv set off another atomic, in the similarly besieged city of Drax-Taalo two hundred miles to the north. Another quarter-million dead. Nilen doubtless had more bombings planned, but the King’s Army overran the Salv reactor complex at Ocharam soon after, capturing a dozen finished atomics in the process. Supposedly, there was talk among the generals of dropping those bombs on Salvator-held cities in revenge. The king, thank the Almighty, vetoed that idea.

The atomics were the last gasp of the Salvator war effort. A couple of months later, the Crown City was liberated, and Nilen’s own bodyguards finally got sick of his sermonising and fed him a faceful of pistol bullets. King Charos proclaimed the kingdom restored atop the still-smouldering rubble of the Dawn Palace. The greatest victory in history, a triumph for all of Aede. Small comfort for a hundred million dead people, my father included.

Indeleon was rebuilt, of course. It was too big and too important to be abandoned. All through the 1390s, mountains of money and labour were directed into the reconstruction projects, demolishing whole blast-damaged districts to make way for a brand new industrial quarter. The suburbs sprawled outwards and the tenement blocks rose like concrete weeds as workers flocked to the factories. It would never be a handsome city again, but it would be big, and noisy, and profitable. By the time I moved there in ’99, the population was a good two million, and growing fast.

But so much of Ninth Watch, that whole swathe around the hypocentre, remained in ruins. Drax-Taalo was rebuilt from the ground up, leaving hardly a trace of its destruction, while Indeleon still had a great unhealed wound slashed across its western half. Drax-Taalo got a beautiful memorial garden and a tasteful museum at its hypocentre; Indeleon got a crude concrete cenotaph and the Cathedral of the Blessed Martyrs. The ruins were a window back in time, a snapshot of the hell the whole world lived through twenty years ago. They loomed over us, no matter how hard we tried to pretend they weren’t there. They weighed on the city like a chain around a convict’s neck.

In other words, they had exactly the intended effect.

Indeleon had been one of the Salv strongholds before the war. Nilen used to hold torchlit rallies on those fine old boulevards, drawing crowds a hundred thousand strong, and ending in grand sermons in the cathedral. Several of his inner circle were Indeleon boys, born and bred, and they made sure to recruit locally. By the time of Nilen’s election in 1380, practically the whole city council was already made up of diehard Salvators. They hanged a good few loyalists from those fancy wrought-iron lampposts after the Apostasy, and shot a good few more. They dumped so many bodies in the Velmiris that the towns downstream complained about corpses washing up on their riverbanks. The city’s factories worked day and night all through the war, pumping out tanks and artillery shells for the Salv armies. When the tide turned and the King’s Army started to retake the heartlands, Indeleon was declared a fortress city, with orders to fight to the last man.

For eight years, this city bayed for King Charos’ blood. And the king had a long memory.

Officially, the ruins were “under survey for redevelopment”. There were still residual radiation hazards, the Municipality said, and ground subsidence, and a dozen other excuses that they repeated year after year. Nobody with any sense bought it. We all knew the real reason why the scars of the atomic had been left unhealed. Why the cathedral was still a crumbling, deconsecrated shell, in a kingdom that prided itself on its great houses of worship. It was a message, a warning, to the city and the world.

This is the price of treason.