Those who could move moved toward those who couldn't, the healers calling out for the worst cases, directing themselves by the signatures of mana that were faintest, the ones that needed reaching first.
Soldiers who had changed sides somewhere in the last hour, not always knowing exactly when the change had happened, knowing only that it had, began the process of figuring out what came next and where they stood.
Orion's remaining followers, those who had been held together by his certainty and by the enormous force that had always seemed to sit behind him, ready to be called on, felt the absence of it at the same time. That power was gone. The certainty went with it.
They set down what they were holding.
The hall was quiet.
In the silence, something that had been pressing against the city from underground, through the soil, through the stone, through the roots of the ruined network the mutants had been building for months, released its pressure.
One degree was enough for now.
