DN - Kill Men Spell

Graywytch’s revenge spreads out beneath me. A highway snaps past—a pillar of smoke, a sheet of flame, then I’m over it. There’s a dozen-car pileup frozen in time—and I’m already beyond it. The blooming cloud of an airliner’s final resting place rises from somewhere near the horizon. I pass over a small town and see people in the streets. Almost every intersection has a collision.

At my top speed, I can cover the distance from Cynosure to New Port in a little over twenty minutes. I never thought that would feel slow. Another pulse of the spell sweeps over me, and I grit my teeth and put myself on an upward trajectory before it becomes too much. Once again the spell makes me lose my grip, but I’m on a ballistic trajectory now and keep going up. I peak and begin the long, uncontrolled descent into a forest. At the last instant, I’m able to catch myself and get back in the air before I go smashing through the trees.

A small cabin in the woods is on fire as I pass. A woman is pulling a limp man out of the burning building. That’s all I have time to see before I’m thousands of feet beyond her.

She did it. She really did it. Graywytch told me this was coming, and I didn’t realize what she meant. When she had me strapped down to that table in the dungeon below Cynosure, she said women can only be pushed so far before they push back. And of course, her definitions of man, woman, and push are all so fucked up it could have meant anything. It could have meant anything, but it meant this:

The flat-out murder of half the human population.

All the signs were there, and I missed it. Her neglect of her superhero duties. Her strained alliance with Garrison. The shoddy magic she performed for him—almost as if her real concern was somewhere else, on a different project. Now that it’s happening, I can see how they all fit together: if her definition of what makes a man and what makes a woman isn’t respected anymore, she’ll simply remove men from the discussion. “Men” like me. Like anyone with a Y chromosome, I bet. More than three-and-a-half billion people, all dead, and then a mad scramble to figure out how to keep the species going.

The moment we realized that, Calamity didn’t even have to tell me to go before I was blasting off to head north as fast as I could. With the tilt-engine out of commission and Kinetiq still in serious condition, I’m flying solo for this one. My body hurts. Every part of it. My gorge rises and I don’t have time to stop, so I vomit in midair, just point my head down and spew on whatever happens to be beneath me. I’m so tired I’m shaking in the air. My arm is one loud screaming pain that tugs at my mind incessantly.

- Sovereign, Chapter 31