Cates 05 - The Final Evolution Read Online Free PDF Page A

they tossed you high into the air and then let you drop. For some reason they always thought being able to do these two things gave them the advantage in a fucking gunfight.
    I tried to scan the crowd quickly to find the Angel before he spotted me; Tele-Ks had to see you, or at least have a good mental picture of where you were in relation to them. Just as I picked him out, though, the world jerked under me and an invisible hand tried to toss me up into the air. My shoulder popped painfully out of its socket as I jerked upward, but I grimaced and kept my arm clamped around the rope. Ever since Hong Kong, my shoulder slipped out of its socket like it wanted to be free, and I’d gotten good at ignoring the grinding pain and just popping it back in at my earliest opportunity. I fluttered there like a piece of trash caught in the wind, and I tried to swing my gun around to throw a few ill-advised shots at him before he started pelting me with buckets or rocks or people. The fucking Telekinetics were all the same. All the power in the cosmos and the best they could do is throw shit at you.
    Morales’s two guards had unslung their rifles and crouched down, but didn’t know what they were looking for. As I swung around trying to orient on the Angel, they both flew into the air, screeching, their careers ending more or less as expected. I spotted Remy, crawling toward me, staying low.
    “Stop!” I shouted, the invisible hand slapping me into a spin. “Stay still!”
    “Avery Cates!” the Angel shouted as a large rock shot past my head. “You have been judged! The world is broken! Men are vanished! The human race is barren, and we are sent to make final judgments!”
    His voice was rough and throaty, a rasp. As I jerked this way and that, clinging desperately to the thrumming rope, I saw a crowd gathering behind him, eager for some entertainment in a place like Potosí. I didn’t blame them. If I wasn’t the unlucky bastard constantly being batted around by these freaks, I would have been pretty amused, too.
    My arm burned with the effort of keeping the bulky rope pinned under my armpit, and my shoulder ached, the pain blasting into a sharp jab with every jerk. I watched Remy crawling for another moment and then raised my arm and swung it around until I was more or less aiming in the general vicinity of the Angel, who stood there in his dark, mud-stained suit without flinching. The crowd behind him let out a rolling, chaotic roar and split into two, moving rapidly to either side of him. Fun was fun, but nobo wanted an errant bullet in the face. I couldn’t get a bead on him as he tugged violently at me, trying to dislodge me from my anchor.
    Below me, Remy had crawled, unnoticed, almost directly underneath. Lying on his belly, he carefully took a bead on the Angel and squeezed the trigger, but the revolver was so fucking huge it bucked in his hand as usual and all he did was tear up a spray of mud at the Angel’s feet. An instant later Remy shot up into the air, getting caught in the fluttering fabric of Morales’s tent. I swallowed and pushed Remy out of my mind, didn’t think about being responsible for him sailing up into the air and the last moments of his life being high-velocity ones. I concentrated on the Angel on the ground, his round face and full cheeks and big, dark eyes. I brought the Roon around with a grimace and spent some seconds trying to hold a steady bead on him.
    This is why , Dolores Salgado, who had once been an undersecretary, one of the most powerful people in the world, whispered in my head. She’d been dead a long time, and I was tired of carrying her around and ignoring her. This is why we collected all the Actives and trained them. Because of this .
    He noticed what I was doing before I could get a shot off, and with a tick of his head a rusting metal barrel hosting a garbage fire sprang from the ground and sailed toward me, spitting flaming chunks of grease and sparks, smacking into my