But that didn’t matter because the shooter was changing magazines, and he was not especially adept at it. The muzzle of his rifle-a Bushmaster, Jonathan now saw-was pointed harmlessly to the sky as he fumbled the effort to flip his quick-load mag. The shooter would never be more vulnerable.

Jonathan gauged the distance at forty yards, too far for a reliable shot to the head, so he took aim at the center of mass-the shooter’s chest-and he squeezed off two rounds.

Colleen had never seen anything so beautiful. It was just as Brother Michael had told her it would be. It was better than any drug. This was power in its rawest form, and as her bullets raked the Users and sent them to Hell, she found herself laughing.

As far as she could tell, every burst of bullets had hit exactly where she’d wanted it to. Puffs of glass and puffs of blood. Her senses took all of it in and it nearly overwhelmed her. Blaring horns and crumpling metal mixed with the pounding thump of her weapon, echoed half a mile away by the hammering of Stephen’s gunshots. The tableau of destruction-the tableau of success-was unlike anything she’d dared to imagine.

The first magazine emptied itself in no time at all, it seemed. She leaned into each burst as she pulled the trigger, bracing herself against the recoil, and each trigger pull drummed the rifle’s stock into the soft tissue of her shoulder. After the tenth pull, the receiver locked open, but Colleen was too into it to notice. When the shots didn’t come, she nearly fell on her nose.

She’d practiced the first reload dozens of times. Brother Michael had stressed that that would be the moment when soldiers would be most exposed. She’d taped two magazines end-to-end so that when the time came, she’d have only to thumb the mag release, flip the array in her hand, and then reinsert it into the slot. On the range, back at the Farm, she’d learned to do this with her eyes closed. She believed that she might even be able to do it in her sleep. But out here, in the heat of the battle, her hands shook, and she had difficulty finding the slot after she’d made the flip.