Locates Siberian

I shifted some of my clones. They were still several blocks away, but they were coming in from every direction.

How would I find the master?

All of my clones were now on high alert. There were less people in the area surviving than I would have thought, at least now. The area Medhall was in hadn’t been zoned for residential use; most of the buildings nearby were either businesses on one side, or industrial buildings on the other. There were squatters, of course, but the smell of blood and the moaning that I heard suggested that many of them had been killed or injured during the initial explosion of glass throughout the entire city.

The Master would be someone who wasn’t injured. It was likely that he wouldn’t be among a group of other people either; what was the point of being a Master if you could be stabbed in the back by the people you were around?

There were roughly fifteen hundred people still alive in a six block radius of Medhall. Most of them had been squatting inside of businesses. Of those people, at least two thirds were injured, at least from the sound of them and from the moaning.

***

I was inside and I extended a tentacle to slip the cover under a desk. I couldn’t replace it; hopefully the fact that the vent was only large enough for a rat would keep anyone from paying too much attention.

I needed to whittle that five hundred people down. Of the five hundred, there seemed to be only fifty singletons. Unless I was willing to murder fifty people to kill the Siberian, which I might do, although I suspected that my more emotional self would regret it later, I needed to narrow my criteria.

It was rare to be a Master and a Brute at the same time. If I was as squishy as an ordinary person, I’d want to be ready to move at a moment’s notice. In a vehicle?

That was the defining factor, the one that made all the difference.

The Siberian could make whatever she touched invulnerable. Presumably that would help her protect her Master. The people who had hidden in vehicles were mostly dead now; safety glass shattering normally wouldn’t have been that much of a problem but Shatterbird’s power overwhelmed the protections designed to keep people from being hit by shattered glass.

Of the five vehicles with people in them, four had people that were dying, bleeding out. Only one still had its windows intact, and from what I could see, the van sat low on it’s axles, as though it was unusually heavy. I’d seen that often enough in the vehicles used by the PRT agents assigned to bodyguard me.

The van was armored.

***

Down