Captain America gave Will a disbelieving look. “On a train?”
“Wait,” Anne said. “You’re the one who set that bomb?”
“Uh . . .”
“How could you do that?” Anne demanded. “You could have killed everyone in the flat!”
“It wasn’t aimed at the room you were in,” Captain America said, but he sounded defensive.
“Not aimed—! You dropped the roof on my head! If Alex hadn’t gotten me out of the way it would have crushed me!”
“Wait,” the Chinese kid said uneasily. “You were in the living room.”
“I moved!” Anne was nearly shouting, which was quite something from her. “Don’t any of you realise what you’re doing? You can’t just play around with this! People are going to die!”
“That’s the idea,” Will said curtly. “Get out of the way and you won’t be one of them.”
“How can you still think you’re the good guys when you do things like this?” Anne demanded. “You’re going to—”
Will had put away his handgun and shortsword. Now he held his hand out to Captain America, who reached into what looked like thin air. I felt the flicker of space magic as Captain America pulled two full-sized submachine guns out of a portal so faint as to be almost invisible, handing one to Will and keeping the other for himself. Dimensional storage, I thought. So that’s where they keep getting those weapons from.
Will cocked the gun and levelled it at Anne. “I’m not asking,” he said in a flat voice. “Verus murdered my sister and I’m going to kill him for it. Get in the way and I’ll do the same to you.”
Anne hesitated, her eyes flicking between the guns, and I knew what she was thinking. Life magic is powerful, but it has two weaknesses: it’s touch range only, and it doesn’t have any defences against direct physical attack. Anne is very good at healing, but both she and her patient have to be alive for her to do any healing, and bullets do damage much faster than she can heal it. The last time she’d run up against men with guns it hadn’t gone well for her. “Let me ask you something,” I said to Will. “Say you actually manage to pull this off. What then?”
Will had moved up to the wall of force and now he kicked at it, keeping his gun trained on me. “Not your problem, is it?”
“Is that the only thing you care about?” I said. “Killing me?”
Will shook his head. “You don’t get it, do you? This isn’t about you. This is about every adept who’s ever been fucked over by a mage who wanted something. You’re not the only mage we’re going after. You’re just one more name on the list.”
“And this is how you’re planning to work your way down it? Killing everyone one by one?”
Will shrugged. “It’s all you mages listen to, right? Anyway, it works.”
“No, it doesn’t! Using violence to solve all your problems just means you end up with bigger problems that’ll multiply faster than you can deal with them. Let me put this in terms you’ll understand. You will run out of bullets”—I pointed down at the spent ammo at Will’s feet—“and out of people”—I pointed at Captain America and the Chinese kid—“before you run out of problems.”
Will didn’t even look at me. “I figured you’d say something like that.”
“Rachel’s the next one on your list, isn’t she?”
Captain America glanced at Will. Will stepped back from the wall without answering. “You’ll lose,” I said.
“We beat you,” Will said.
I pointed at the Chinese kid. “You. Your name’s Lee, right?”
The Chinese kid—Lee—drew back a little. He’d been standing well back and looked like he’d been trying to avoid attention. “Uh . . .”
“You found me for Will, right?” I said. “So I guess he’ll be using you to keep looking for me, and then for Rachel too. Well, Rachel is stronger than me. Much stronger, and that’s not counting the guy she hangs out with. If you’re having this much trouble with me, how the hell do you think you can beat her?”
Lee looked around. Captain America gave him a nod. “We’ll be stronger by then,” Lee said. “We’ll have had more practice.”
I threw up my hands. “Jesus Christ, you think you’re playing a computer game! Killing someone does not make you level up! All it gets you is nightmares for the rest of your life and the never-ending hatred of everybody who ever cared about the person you murdered!”
My voice had risen to a shout, and both Lee and Captain America stood staring at me; without looking I knew Anne had turned to do the same. I stood balancing on the train, the wheels rumbling beneath my feet. The futures of Lee and Captain America flickered, shifting. Will’s didn’t, and his eyes stayed steady. “They said you were good at talking your way out of things,” he said. “Not going to work this time.”
I felt Lee and Captain America’s futures waver and then fall into line to match Will’s. I wanted to swear, wanted to keep shouting, but my precognition was starting to sound a warning and I knew we were out of time. “Anne,” I said. “Go. Get down.”
Anne turned and ran, crossing the gap from the fourth to the third carriage with a running jump. I gave Will’s group a last glance and followed, putting a little extra speed into the leap to make sure I cleared it. Up ahead I could see a dark wall with streetlights running along the top of it, and the tracks ran into a black circle. We’d had a long run in the open but London’s a built-up place, and every railway line in the city goes underground sooner or later. In this case sooner or later meant now. As soon as I’d made it onto the third car I dropped and craned my neck back to look.
Will, Lee, and Captain America were staring at us through the forcewall, watching the tunnel entrance draw nearer. I wasn’t close enough to see their expressions but I saw the jolt go through Captain America as he figured it out, and as the tunnel mouth swept over us he yelled a warning and turned to run. Lee followed; Will stayed a little too long and had only just started to sprint away as the fourth carriage passed into the tunnel, and through the shrinking window of the tunnel mouth I had one last glimpse of their backs before the forcewall hit the top of the tunnel and physics took over.
I didn’t get much of a view of what happened next. It was all very fast and my attention was focused on hanging on. Looking back on it with the benefit of hindsight and having read the accident reports, what I think happened was this.
The forcewall hit the brickwork at the top of the tunnel and, just as it had with the bullets, the forcewall tried to transfer the momentum of the impact down into the freight car. The forcewalls I use are powerful by one-shot standards but there’s a certain maximum amount of momentum they can transfer. This doesn’t matter in normal situations because there’s no way a normal human can break the wall’s limits. The momentum in the sixty-thousand-pound freight car fell well outside the wall’s limits. The wall resisted for a fraction of a second, then vanished as the energy stored in the discs ran out.
But in that fraction of a second the wall transferred enough momentum to put a major dent in the freight car’s velocity, and all of a sudden the fourth car was moving at a different speed from the rest of the train. The freight car wasn’t harmed, at least not directly—the discs spread the momentum through a large enough volume that the car got away with only minor buckling. The coupling between the third and fourth cars didn’t do so well. It had been designed to withstand gradual stress, not instant stress, and it snapped, separating the first three cars and the engine from the rest of the train and sending a massive jolt through the metal.
The coupling between the fourth and fifth cars had a different problem: instead of being stretched, it was suddenly and violently compressed. The buffers absorbed some of the impact but the rest was transferred into the cars. Something had to give, and the back wheels of the fourth carriage went off the track, followed by the front wheels of the fifth carriage as the two freight cars jack-knifed into the side and mouth of the tunnel.