Everything became reversed.  A green-purple glow hung in the air over the city, shimmering in the sky like the sail of a ship.  The broken remains of the Biodome flashed and bent the light in total chaos.  People sat mesmerized on the roofs of buildings, gazing up at it, afraid to look down at the chaos in the streets below.  The automated flight-paths of the skimmers were distorted and deranged.  Drones and cars on autopilot crashed into buildings, sending flaming wreckage into the crowds below.  Lights were out all over the city.  There was looting and screaming as a howling wind blew cold across the bay and swept them all into a kind of timeless fury.  People were shaking violently and falling down in the street, plunging deep into trance states they would never remember for the rest of their lives.  Others were pushed out of their bodies, their astral doubles flung into the air to look down at themselves far below.  Many of the most devout Coconstructives simply went insane.  Convinced that the Hero was about to return, they took to the streets with weapons and fury.  The war had begun.  The military sent drones to the outer city to gas the civilians, but they were overtaxed programmed for surveillance, not warfare – so easy to shoot down that it became a game to bait them, waiting to the last minute to blow them out of the sky with small arms.

It was the soldiers who presented the real problem.  And Novosh’s elite Black Guard were the worst of the lot.  Many of the rank and file abandoned their posts, not wanting to shoot their own friends and family, but Novosh’s minions, when they were not utter cowards, went to the utter extreme and plunged through the screaming crowds with abandon, spreading carnage wherever they went as Novosh sat in his lair, watching the spectacle on a bank of 128 monitors and brooding over his next step.

And through it all, all of those who remained conscious were fascinated by the eerie presence they could all feel but not explain.  A  power that seemed to come from within and without at the same time, a kind of invisible glow, or curved air that centered in their minds but which removed all sense of boundaries against the outer world.

Cassie found herself wandering, her clothes ragged and torn, through the city streets just outside the Citadel.  She was weeping, convinced that all was lost when suddenly she saw or somehow sensed with her mind’s eye a presence standing before her.

“Cassie!,” came the familiar voice.  “You should have told me, Cassie.”

Something moved ahead of her and she raised her sunken eyes to see 3Pac standing before her, just as he had appeared the last time she’d seen him alive, except that he had changed his clothes.  He was now wearing a cloak of blue velvet.

Cassie glared and lunged at him, trying to kill him, “You son of a bitch, we all thought you were dead!  I was worried to death about you.”  She struck him on the chest several times, which he allowed because he was so much bigger than her.

“I thought … I thought I could do it differently.” he said.