Chapter 30 - The Edge of the Void
Time fractured once more.
Arthur stood planted on the asphalt, his arms raised high, the iron crowbar cocked back to crush the small carbon-fiber chair barreling straight at him. The madness in his hollow eyes was total—the final act of a destroyed man determined to drag his enemy into the grave.
Mia didn't close her eyes. She didn't scream.
At twenty-five miles per hour, ten feet before impact, she reached down to the emergency handbrake lever Marcus had welded to her frame—not to stop, but to lock her left drive wheel while throwing her entire upper body into a violent centrifugal drift.
The chair whipped sideways. The heavy rear carbon wheel slammed with bone-cracking force straight into Arthur’s shins.
A sickening *crack* echoed over the roar of the crowd.
Arthur let out an agonizing howl as his legs collapsed beneath him. He crashed down hard onto the asphalt, the iron crowbar flying harmlessly from his grip and clattering across the track.
The impact sent Mia’s chair into a violent, sideways skid. The rubber screamed against the pavement, blue smoke curling from the tires as she fought with every ounce of strength in her arms to keep the three-wheeled frame from flipping over.
*Snap!*
The right axle sheared under the immense lateral stress.
Her chair bounced on two wheels, wobbling precariously on the razor's edge of a catastrophic rollover. The finish line banner was forty feet away.
With her right wheel dragging uselessly, sparks showering the asphalt like fireworks, Mia threw her weight forward, using her bare hands against the left push-rim, clawing forward inch by agonizing inch.
Behind her, Arthur, dragging his broken legs across the street, his eyes wild with demonic fury, reached into his jacket.
He didn't pull out a gun.
He pulled out a heavy industrial detonator wired to a blinking red transceiver taped to his chest.
"If I rot, we all burn!" Arthur shrieked, his bloodied thumb hovering directly over the red toggle switch.
At that exact instant, high above in the skybox, Montgomery’s private helicopter engine roared to life on the adjacent rooftop pad.
On the giant jumbotron screen, the live television feed suddenly cut from the race. Frank Callahan’s face appeared on every screen across the stadium, the state capitol, and national television, the classified documents and wire transfer receipts of Apex Steel flashing across the screen in stark, damning black and white.
Arthur’s thumb dropped toward the toggle.
Mia was ten feet from the line.
The crosshairs of a sniper’s rifle from the Capitol roof centered on Arthur's chest—
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A single, muffled gunshot cracked through the autumn air, just as Mia’s front tire crossed the painted white threshold of the finish line—
And the world erupted into fire and darkness.
