The end is immediate and absolute. The Lockheed hits the Games Building high up, still fast and carrying fuel. Then the whole structure erupts, and fire rains across blocks of the city. No courtroom, no confession, no negotiated ending. Just impact.
The plane roars low over Harding and turns the city into panic. People run into doorways, windows shatter, street trash spins in the blast, and even cops freeze under the engine thunder. Free-Vee signals glitch across town while everyone tries to understand what they are seeing.
This chapter is tiny, but it says everything. The jet cuts through the night like ice, and Co-Op City appears below, broken and familiar. Richards is not circling or escaping. He is lined up and coming straight at the Games Building.
Richards reaches the controls and sees the target ahead, huge and dark in moonlight. He makes shaky adjustments, overcorrects, fights the pedals, and tries to manage altitude with failing vision. One eye is nearly gone, and even basic control feels like balancing on a wire.
Ground control starts shouting over the radio, warning the plane is too low and asking for acknowledgment. Richards whispers back contempt, then crawls toward the cockpit controls through repeated waves of pain. Even crawling becomes a technical problem when part of his wound snags on a corpse.
With the door open, the cabin becomes a wind tunnel. Richards fights his way forward while his intestines trail out and his wound burns like fire. He is alone now with dead bodies, screaming air, and Otto flying on automatic toward Harding.
Richards, barely standing, forces Amelia to put on the parachute and move with him toward the emergency door. He tries commands, then threats, then violence when she freezes. It is not noble, but it gets her moving while the plane continues to fall.
Amelia sees the blood and breaks down while McCone charges in for one final gunfight. They fire almost at once. Richards is hit badly in the belly and below the collarbone. McCone takes catastrophic damage too, keeps moving for a few seconds, then finally drops.
The hit on Donahue works, but Richards’s wound tears open again. He grabs Donahue’s gun, notices the tiny mesh transmitter in his nostril, and confirms how deeply managed this whole situation has been. Then he shoots Friedman, Holloway, and Duninger in rapid sequence.
In the galley, Richards pours coffee, notices the fancy supplies, and quietly falls apart. He thinks about Sheila wanting a Silex coffee maker and starts crying without sound. It is one of the saddest pauses in the book because nothing explodes, nothing chases him, and grief finally catches up.
Richards steps into the cockpit and sees “Otto,” the autopilot, handling the plane with no hands on the main controls. Holloway and Duninger explain how automatic routing works and joke about it, but the jokes are thin. Everyone is tired, and everyone knows the flight is near its end.
This chapter is only a few lines, but it lands like a punch. Richards tells Killian, “I’ve decided to accept.” Killian responds with calm satisfaction. On paper, it looks like the story just ended in surrender.
An hour passes and Richards sits in a dark mental space, drifting through old faces and recent violence. He considers Killian’s offer in a frighteningly practical way. With no family left and no moral order to cling to, the idea of becoming the hunter starts to look possible.
Richards goes numb as Killian keeps talking. His mind runs through memory snapshots of Sheila and Cathy, old scenes from school days, marriage, work, and fatherhood. It reads like a broken photo album flipping too fast to hold onto any single moment.
Richards is fading physically, but Killian pushes ahead and finally reveals the real offer. Not amnesty, not a staged death, but a promotion. They want Richards to replace McCone as Chief Hunter. The logic is simple and sick: the best runner knows how runners hide.
After McCone is pushed back, Killian and Richards return to the core question. Is the bomb threat real or not? Killian sounds confident and says they know Richards is bluffing. To prove control, he orders Donahue to take Amelia’s purse from Richards’s pocket.
Chapter 85 is short, but it matters. McCone wants to shoot Richards immediately and calls it safety. Killian shuts him down in cold terms and reminds him who signs his paycheck. McCone then spirals into open rage while Donahue keeps the gun trained and takes command of the cabin.
Killian appears on the screen and starts with praise, then goes straight to business. He offers Richards a deal: land at Harding, stage a fake execution, and join the team. He also says the bomb threat is a bluff and claims they could have destroyed the plane anytime.
Half an hour later, the cockpit relays a message from Games Federation. They want Richards to turn on the Free-Vee for a direct high-intensity broadcast. He almost does it right away, then freezes for a second because the screen pulls him back to home memories he cannot handle.
Over Newark, Richards asks the question everyone already knows the answer to. Yes, they have a lock on the plane. He then asks about heading south and learns it stays over dense urban spread for a long time. Instead of following that line, he orders a turn due west.
This chapter shifts into a near hallucination as Richards imagines the tracking network following his plane. Trucks move through the night, missile silos open, radar dishes swing, and technicians trade clipped updates while the target blip moves south. The whole country feels wired into one giant kill system.
The drone of the jet starts wearing Richards down, and he drifts in and out of a dangerous haze. He knows it, McCone knows it, and Amelia knows it. To keep himself alert, he punches his own wound, reopens it, and keeps going while Holloway calls out locations.
As they cross into Vermont, Richards asks for both physical and political maps. Donahue brings them back and gets uneasy when Richards locks onto him with questions. Then Richards starts steering the flight path like a field commander, first south, then a hard turn west.
Richards studies the seat setup, then passes handwritten notes to Amelia because he assumes they are being bugged. He tells her to stage a panic scene so McCone will reveal himself. She admits she lied earlier because he seemed pitiful and made her feel guilty. Then they burn the note and start the act.
Richards wakes up in the air and looks out at the night like he is seeing the world for the first time. The sky is almost black, the ground is mostly dark, and he has to think fast while pretending he is not thinking too fast. He asks the crew how low they can fly and starts giving directions.
The chapter opens with two troopers watching Richards’s stolen jet climb into the dark. The image is simple and sharp. Blinking lights, loud engines, and two men who cannot do anything now except stare. Their target is gone, and the whole manhunt suddenly feels unstable.
Book: The Rise and Fall of a Dragon King | Author: Lynn Abbey | Series: Chronicles of Athas, Book 5
If Chapter 8 was a war chapter, Chapter 9 is the emotional core of this book. Abbey slows everything down and lets Hamanu sit with his own pain. It’s devastating.