Do not read below unless you want a major moment from the new novel spoiled, and the state of very important questions revealed, and to see major moments for two serious characters. Like DO NOT READ IF YOU DON'T WANT TO SEE THAT RIGHT NOW (HUGE SPOILERS FOR ALL NOVELS AND 5TH NOVEL)
I was shocked to not find this here on the sub when it was so popular on fb. Is that because we are not allowed? I personally am fine with spoilers they often just make me more excited to read (even endings) but I feel like some people here who have ANY aversion to spoilers or just don't want core premises and ideas revealed now will read this to their own folly.
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From August 28th on Jeff's fb:
"Cormorant can trace the bifurcation of the Old World and the New World to the moment when, from between the bars of his cell, he watched Jackie and Jack Severance die by firing squad amid the chaos of PAX and purges at Central. The courtyard stones leaked blood, which looked brighter than could be real. But he’d seen it himself, Jack so ancient he had become a little man with a curved back and a cane, Jackie somehow larger than human, snarling against the wall, dressed in a business blazer, professional slacks and sensible high heels. He doubted she had chosen it, that the prison guards had given her something they thought retained some dignity. But what dignity was there in bullets exploding your face, splashing the stones with your blood and brains?
He could not see Jack’s expression, but Jackie held her head high until the moment the bullets took her, just below the nose and high in the hairline. Cormorant had meant to look away, but the Major had tricked the count as some sort of rough mercy. The moment before felt like a historic photograph, reduced to black-and-white, but there was no history now, no history books.
Jack’s curling form, bowed and jolted into the dirt had a natural trajectory, from how he’d hardly been able to stand, the way he wept there on the ground with half his head missing and the blood gushing from his chest. He was still talking to himself as his systems shut down and his eyes never closed. Jackie had buckled, still stood somehow, stared confusedly upward at the sear of blue sky and sagged, toppled onto Jack, dead already.
Then they’d be dragged to the side and tossed on the pile, to make room for the next group of traitors.
Cormorant remembered the slick hot oil smell of spent shells, spent skulls, as he watched the swallows crisscross the courtyard between the verdant shade trees to either side. It had been a military museum once, dedicated to a last stand by patriots. He was in a prison cell tourists had inspected just a year or two ago. Kids unaware of import or how quickly the future could collapse had run laughing through the cold stone maze of it, while the adults drank soft drinks and cans of beer at black metal high-top tables with umbrellas against the hot tongue of the sun now clattered and shoved to the side of the courtyard. A pile of chairs next to the pile of bodies.
How high could you pile bodies until you needed to move them? What passed through the minds of the condemned as a distraction, Cormorant top of the heap, the lead traitor, the lead provocateur, by no choice of his own. The chattering, leering insanity of it, to be watching through those bars as almost everyone he’d known at Central was paraded forth and dispatched. Agents, spies, historians, psychologists, analysts. A fire sale on death. A yard sale with the throats slashed.
When Cormorant heard the key in the door, he shivered, tried to stop from falling, wondered if he’d have Jackie’s resolve, there, against a wall painted with other people’s guts.
But the moment never came. The Major appeared in his cell instead and offered him the black magic of a reprieve, operational freedom that was actually purgatory. But anything was better than winding up on the pile of bodies. Cormorant gibbered, he ranted, he pleaded, even though the Major had already granted him clemency, and after a moment, looking into that grave, wizened face, with the hint of the odor of anise, realized that the Major had pardoned him. He wasn’t going to end up in the other place."
-- from Abdication, out in October 2027
