My eyes slowed everything down, the way they always did on the plain when something lethal was about to happen and my body understood it before my mind caught up.
The robots. The guards shifting their weight. The handshake still locked at the center of the room.
Then Mrs. Rivers blinked toward Bagins. A final, deliberate signal. The last peaceful thing that would happen in that room.
I saw it all in perfect, crystalline detail from the sofa: her eyelid rising again after the blink, the movement completing.
And her head burst.
Blood exploded across the floor and up the sofa she had been sitting on moments earlier. It splattered across the cushions, the arms, and the photographs of her own naked body lining the wall behind her in a gruesome red arc.
What have you done?
My mouth fell open. My hands planted hard into the cushions as I pushed myself up.
