The missile hit the barrier immediately behind Orc. His body took most of the blast.

  It blew him apart. TV cameras caught the moment when a thousand little stones went flying like shrapnel. The rock was blown from his back and much of his chest, from his shoulders and most of his head. It was as if he was a mud-crusted shoe knocked against the wall. The mud gravel was knocked away in patches.

  His internal organs were crushed. His eyes bled. For a terrible moment a body, the body of a young man, with pink flesh rising from still-stony legs, tried to push itself up off the ground. Surely just a physical instinct, surely not a conscious effort, because he could not be alive.

  Charles Merriman, long known as Orc, tried to rise, and instead fell dead.

  Orc’s massive body had shielded Gaia from the worst of it.

  She lived, still, but the shrapnel and the fire had stripped the skin from much of her body, a terrible mimicry of Orc’s own destruction.

  She was a creature of blood, red from head to foot.

  But she lived still.

  Sinder ran from the terrible scene. She tripped over bodies, got up, and ran some more.

  She glanced back once and saw Orc hit.

  She could hardly breathe for the beating of her heart and the sobbing that tore at her.

  Her feet pounded earth, tripped, stood, ran, glanced back again and saw Gaia coming.

  A beam of light shot past Sinder and she screamed. A girl to her right made a soft gasp and fell. The hole in her neck was smoking.

Light, Chapter 30