They were delayed by the dead.
The road was full of them. The Gravedigger had cleared the vehicles and the soldiers, but the road itself was a ruin, and the vans that had survived the ambush were scattered across the asphalt like dropped toys. By the time Kin and Nia found a vehicle that still had four wheels and an engine that turned over, the sky was beginning to grey. By the time they reached the stadium, the speech was already over.
The stadium was a massive concrete bowl on the eastern edge of the city. The parking lots were empty. The outer gates were closed. The lights were still on inside, throwing a pale white glow up into the sky.
Kin stopped the car a block away and looked at the screen in his vision.
The System gave him the feed from the drone.
[Warlord Amadou Diallo: Status alive. Exiting the stadium. Moving toward the eastern VIP exit.]
[Speech status: Concluded. Crowd size: approximately 500. The remaining seats were left empty.]
[Crowd status: Mobilized.]
Kin looked at the screen.
Inside the stadium, five hundred men were standing in the lower tiers. They were not sitting anymore. They were standing with their heads thrown back, and they were singing. The drone picked up the audio. It was a low,deep sound that made the hair on Kin's arms stand up.
Inside the stadium, five hundred men were beating their machetes against the concrete. The sound was like a heartbeat. A war song was rolling through the stands, words about blood and soil and killing the minorities and killing the imperialists and killing the rebels.
"They are already gone," Nia said. She was standing beside the car, looking at the stadium. "The speech did its job. They are going to leave here and they are going to do exactly what he told them to do."
Kin looked at the eastern VIP exit.
The warlord was walking out of it. He had four guards with him. He was smiling.
Kin walked across the street and the guards saw him coming, and two of them reached for their weapons. Kin did not stop. The katana materialized in his hand. The first guard went down with the flat of the blade across his temple, and the second took a shoulder to the chest and went into the side of the SUV, The third fired missed and Kin punched onto the side of his jaw incapacitating him, the fourth dropped his gun and took off. Kin reached the warlord, who had stopped smiling and had opened his mouth to say something and grabbed him by the collar.
The warlord looked at him eyes were wide, he was trying to speak. Before he could utter a word, Kin took his head off in one clean stroke as if he wasn't the all powerful warlord. The most powerful man in the country and region killed like a chicken before his bodyguards.
He dropped the body and held the head, and he did not look at it. He looked at Nia.
"The speech is over," Kin said. "They are chanting."
"Then we stop the crowd," Nia said. "We lock the gates. We contain them. We can use the medical crew. We can gas them. We can knock them out. We can put them in a deep sleep, we can—"
"Brainwash them?" Odile's voice came through the earpiece, sharp and cold. "You want to induce mass psychosis, Nia? You want to fry the brains of five hundred men with a serum we have not tested?"
"Then we can detain them."
"And what do we do with them while we detain them? They are already infected. The speech is in their heads. If we let them out, they kill the minorities. If we hold them, they rot in a cell, and the country falls apart anyway because we have no government ."
"Then what is your brilliant plan?" Nia demanded.
Odile was silent for a moment. When she spoke, her voice was hard.
"There is only one option," Odile said. "We kill all five hundred."
Kin froze.
"No," he said.
"It is math, Kin. The speech has poisoned them. Even if we kill Diallo, they will carry out his orders. They will go into the neighborhoods and they will do the killing for him. They are armed ,angry and ready."
"Then we stop them. We arrest them. We—"
"There is no time to arrest five hundred men. There is no prison that will hold them. There is no court that will try them." Odile's voice cracked, just a little, and then it hardened again. "Look at them. Most of them are men. Men are easy to replace. They are not the ones who carry the next generation. Their aggression is high right now. If we let them out, they will kill the 1700 with machetes and they will enjoy doing it."
"They are still people," Kin said.
"They are weapons," Odile said. "They are weapons that have been pointed at a village, and the safety is off, and we are the only ones standing between them and the trigger."
Kin looked at the stadium. The chanting was louder. He could hear the machetes beating on the concrete. The sound was rhythmic and endless.
"You are talking about mass murder."
"I am talking about survival."
"Odile—"
"Do it," Odile said.
And then the air changed.
Kin felt it before he saw it. The temperature around him dropped. Nia stopped speaking. The guards on the ground stopped groaning. The world went very quiet, and Kin turned his head and looked at the top of the stadium.
The Gravedigger was standing on the rim.
He had appeared on the highest wall, looking down into the bowl, and he was not moving. He just stood there.
"Gravedigger," Kin whispered. "Stop."
The Gravedigger did not look at him.
"Gravedigger, I am ordering you to stop."
"Order denied," Odile said in his ear. "I gave the order. He is here for the cleanup. He is here to end it."
Kin tried to move.
He tried to take a step toward the stadium, and his legs did not answer. He tried to reach for the katana, and his arms did not answer. He looked down at his body and his body was not his. The System had taken it.
[System Override: Active. Muscles locked. Motor functions suspended.]
"System!" Kin shouted. "Let me go!"
[I cannot. The order was given by your handler. The math dictates it. If the crowd is released, 1,700 will die. If the crowd is stopped by force, 200 soldiers will die and the 500 will die anyway. If the crowd is stopped now, 500 die, and the 1,700 live.]
[I am sorry, Kin.]
Nia was frozen beside him. Her legs had locked too. She was standing perfectly still, her eyes wide, looking at the stadium.
"Kin," she whispered. "Kin, do something."
Kin could not do anything.
He watched the Gravedigger from the top of the stadium.
The Gravedigger looked down into the bowl where the five hundred men were chanting. He looked at them for a long moment. And then he opened his mouth.
"Blinding light," he said.
The voice carried over the chanting. The men in the stands stopped singing. They looked up.
And then the Gravedigger exhaled.
It was thick, white smoke. It came out of him like a cloud, like a fog, and it rolled down the walls of the stadium, and it swallowed the chanting, and for a second, the whole stadium was white.
Then the fire came.
It was not an explosion. There was no sound. It was a flame that ate the air. A flash of heat so intense that the asphalt on the road in front of Kin turned soft and then turned to glass. A blinding white heat that hit the stands and did not stop. The men in the stands did not scream. They did not have time to scream. They were vaporized. Their clothes, their weapons, their seats, the concrete around them. Everything burned. The entire stadium turned into a glassy crater, and the flames rolled up into the sky and dissipated into the morning air.
And then it was quiet.
The Gravedigger stood on the rim. He looked down at the glass. He looked at Kin. Then he was gone.
Kin was still frozen. His eyes were burning from the light. The stadium was a glass bowl full of nothing.
"The military is headed to that spot," Odile said. Her voice was shaking. She had given the order, but she was shaking. "They are tracking the heat signature. They are sending everything they have. We need to leave now."
The System released Kin's legs.
He fell to his knees. Nia fell beside him. Neither of them could stand. Kin looked at the stadium and the glass and the morning light reflecting off the crater, and he could not speak.
The medical crew came in two vans. They picked them up and carried them to the vans and put them inside. The doors closed. The vans sped off toward the private hospital. Kin lay on the floor of the van and looked at the ceiling and did not say a word.
The 1,700 lived.
The 500 were glass.
He did not know if he was a savior or a butcher.
But the System was quiet, and the road was long, and he had never felt so cold.