Chapter 7: Fuel

"That's our fuel," I said.

Pennington looked up from his clipboard.

"That's the city's fuel," he said. "The city has decided where it goes."

"The city's a voice in your head."

"The voice made me Rank Three an hour ago for bringing it."

He turned his wrist so I could read the band.

"I'd call that a decision."

His six fighters stood on the dock with their bands glowing.

Behind me, people were crowding into the back hall to see what the trucks were.

Gloria walked past me to the steel door between the dock and the basement stairs.

She put her palm on it.

"Shut," she said.

The bolt went in with a sound.

Pennington sighed.

"The tank's half of it," he said. "The drums in your basement are the other half. I need both."

"You're not getting the basement."

He walked to the steel door and drew his right hand down it once, from top to bottom.

The blade of light along his hand went through it like it was cardboard.

The door fell open in two pieces.

Gloria put her hand on the doorframe and said, "Shut," again.

Nothing happened.

There was nothing left to shut.

"What I cut stays cut," Pennington said. "I've tested it."

The crowd in the back hall had gone quiet.

There were sixty or seventy of them now, people I'd walked up Eastern Avenue a few hours ago.

"That fuel runs the ventilators," I said. "Forty people are on machines in this building."

"I know what fuel runs."

"Then you know they'll die without it."

"I know they're going to die anyway."

He said it gently.

"Shannon, I can keep three hundred healthy people warm in the Green with that fuel."

"Or I can keep forty dying people alive for a week. That's not a hard call."

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