Anthem's Fall (57 page)

In her momentary distraction, Kristen’s ankle caught the curb and she fell forward, crashing onto the sidewalk and skinning her palms. Heavy feet kicked out and stomped on her arms and legs as the multitude sprinted past. A familiar hand reached down to Kristen and she desperately grasped hold of it as she raised her other arm to shield her face against an incoming boot. Madison pulled Kristen upright with all her strength just as a heavyset man collided into both of them. Kristen and Madison were sent heaving to the side. Kristen’s back came to a sliding stop on the hood of a car. All she could do was simply stare in resignation at the impending doom. It was too late, and happening too fast; she was about to die. The building was collapsing directly onto her.

Her thoughts blurred into an obscure mosaic of emotions as her world untethered itself from all the things she had once believed. She was scared and fearful for everyone around her, so soon to depart the things they loved. But mostly Kristen felt alone. She wanted to bury her face against someone and give up, to entirely surrender, if only to find some small sanctuary as she died. A heartrending longing to be with Ryan in some faraway place surfaced deep within her. Kristen hoped in that moment he had somehow managed to escape.

The looming skyscraper encompassed her entire vision. One by one, the bottom floors began to flatten and disintegrate with cataclysmic booms. Kristen’s body bounced off of the hood of the car from the tremors. A tsunami of cement dust erupted from the base of the building, and then a massive cracking rupture splintered down the center of the entire superstructure. For a fraction of a second Kristen watched the main section of the skyscraper lose its reinforcement and fall inward as if imploding. Then a wave of gray-black dust and ash detonated downward like a pyroclastic volcano eruption. The cloud of destruction thundered and discharged down upon her. Kristen screamed in terror and sucked in one last breath while covering her face from the thick noxious flow as it inundated her world. She shut her eyes tight and held her breath as the powerful rush of poisonous dust blew past her skin and buffeted her hair.

The dense wave of death consumed her. Kristen rolled and writhed as specks of cement pelted and stung her body. In her blind torment she felt her body slip off the hood and land hard on the pavement. Her vision became a shifting black kaleidoscope from the lack of oxygen, and her chest heaved and burned for air. She held her breath with all her might. The thick dust accumulated on her firmly shut eyelashes and eyebrows like snow. At last, Kristen could stand it no more, and her body forced her to take a gulp of the toxic air. She opened her mouth and, by no will of her own, sucked in a deep inhalation. The breath sent biting particles to the depths of her lungs. It felt as though she had been pepper sprayed. She hacked and coughed and violently gagged in an attempt to expel the awful toxins. Nestled in her position between two cars, Kristen felt as though she were trapped in a trench being bombarded with mustard gas.

She braced herself.

But almost at once she felt the dust cloud dissipating rather than thickening. Her coughing was lessening in severity, and the burning in her throat was calming. The dust was not drowning her. She did not hear what she expected—the impact of the plummeting skyscraper parts against the ground. Kristen flopped onto her back on the ash-covered pavement and shook the accumulation from her face, her eyelids still locked tight. Rubbing her eyes and wiping off the cement dust and plaster before opening them blearily, she stared in wonder all around her. A pall of dust blotted out everything. She looked upward into a swirling blizzard of dark gray snow. A blanket of the sawdust-like material covered her sneakers to her head, along with every other surface of the street. But it was not the layer of ashy dust, or Madison recovering beside her that caught Kristen’s attention.

They were still in the shadow of the skyscraper.

Through the diminishing storm of dust, Kristen could clearly see that the top of the tower had collapsed inward fifteen or twenty floors. The tiered apex of the building was nowhere to be seen. The bottom portion of the skyscraper was gone, disintegrated into nothing. Kristen realized it had been relocated to everywhere around her, pulverized to ruin. Yet despite the structural damage, the vast majority of the building stood prominently intact. Kristen gaped in confusion at the gigantic standing facade. It held true with no foundation and no supports, as though it were floating in space.

“Kristen,” Madison’s voice was hoarse.

Kristen breathlessly turned to her. Madison was also covered in the dust. Around the two of them, hundreds of other powder-covered people also stared up at the building.

“Look,” Madison said.

Kristen matched Madison’s gaze, and looked halfway up the length of the broad structure. There, clearly evident in the jumble of huge gnarled steel garters and rivets was a man. Impossibly bent iron supports bent and stacked atop his shoulders like a car wrapped around a tree. The man was holding the entire skyscraper—and all of their lives—on his shoulders. It was the most alien and impossible sight Kristen had ever imagined. Her chin trembled, and she began to cry at the overwhelming display of strength. Vengelis was right; Kristen had not witnessed their true power. There was no refuting it to the hushed and awed crowd of pale faces surrounding Kristen and staring upward; they were in the presence of a god.

With great effort, Kristen drew her welling gaze from the unreal vision.

“Madison!”

“Y-yes,” Madison was transfixed with the sight above them.

Kristen pulled at Madison’s shoulder. “We need to go,
now
!”

Madison nodded, drew her gaze away from the grand vision, and together they began running westward through the dust cloud and away from the balancing skyscraper.

V
engelis stared dazedly at the backside of Gravitas as he soared northward, his tattered Imperial First Class armor growing smaller in the distance and finally disappearing into the cloud of doom that was billowing from the falling skyscraper. Suddenly alone in the shadow of the afternoon, Vengelis slumped against the side of the broken window and watched an unhinged billboard sway back and forth across the avenue. He tried to compose his body and his mind but found himself unable. His broken ribs made even breathing a painstaking struggle, and when he tried to make a fist, he realized his forearm and most of his knuckles were broken.

Strange calamitous noises echoed across the city from the falling skyscraper, and a developing dark cloud expelled from the streets around its base. Gravitas was holding up the building, Vengelis had no doubt about it. It was an unspeakable insult. Gravitas had turned his back on him, as though he were no longer even a threat. Bitter hate brewed in Vengelis’s chest. It was Gravitas’s fault the skyscraper was in danger of collapsing at all. Inflicting damage to the buildings of New York had never been a part of his plan. Gravitas’s rashness was to blame for the failing skyscraper, and yet here he was acting as though he were the decent and respectable one between the two of them. Vengelis could not believe how much he hated the Nerols, father and son both.

“Who do you think you are?” Vengelis screamed unsteadily to no one, his voice hoarse. “Nerol! We’re not finished!”

The roar sent spasms of pain up his side, and Vengelis let out a constricted exhale with a grimace. He hacked and spit up bloody phlegm, unable to guess how many ribs must be cracked. His body was broken, but he was too overwhelmed with rage and exasperation to acknowledge it. Mumbling to himself, Vengelis reached into his armor and pulled out the
Harbinger I
remote. Things were spiraling out of control, and the situation had escalated more than he could have possibly imagined. Vengelis could not wrap his mind around why he and Gravitas Nerol were so evenly matched. On top of that, somewhere in the craven multitude far below, a scientist capable of manipulating Felix technology had Sejero genetics within her grasp. In their unfathomable hubris, the humans were going to bring about their own destruction.

And it was undeniably his fault.

Vengelis looked down to the glowing display of the remote and commanded the
Harbinger I
to lift off and head to his location. It was time to cut his losses. He stashed the remote back into his dinted armor and peered around the afternoon with shaky vision. The buildings that rose around him were in shambles. It looked as though gigantic bullets had riddled them, structural damage from his fight with Gravitas.

Hoff and Darien were dead. They, too, had joined the fallen ranks of the rest of the massacred Imperial First Class. So much death and destruction, all in the name of some mysterious cause that now seemed vain and futile. He was the last one left.

How had it come to this?

Vengelis lifted from his position against the side of the building and pushed out into the open air, rising unsteadily and flying northward up the avenue in the direction Gravitas had gone. A fine dust hung in the air, catching the rays of sunlight. Traveling listlessly above the oblong shadow of the leaning skyscraper, the dust added striking contrast to the daylight and the shadow.

Vengelis felt wayward and grieved at the cruel cards dealt to him by fate. To this world and their narrow scope, he was the villain, and he resented it deeply. He was another victim, like them, doing his best given the circumstances. Vengelis longed more than anything to be back on Anthem. Even the killing fields of Sejeroreich would suit him.

Taking his time while approaching the leaning skyscraper, he pulled to a stop above its caved in roof. Below him was a peculiar sight: the bottom portion of the colossal building was gone, vaporized by the incalculable force of the upper building’s collapse. Yet the rest of the structure seemed to hang in the open air as though it were immune to the laws of physics and the longing hands of gravity. A wide radius around the base of the building had been decimated by the momentary collapse, and a few blocks in every direction were covered in powdery debris. Vengelis descended into the thick dome of dust rising from the failing building and surveyed up and down the length of mangled windows and exposed floors in search of Gravitas Nerol.

It did not take long to find him.

About halfway up the superstructure, conspicuously pressing his shoulders into the side of the building, was Gravitas. Vengelis found himself hating Gravitas more than anything as he watched his struggle against the collapse, more than even the Felixes. It was this fool’s father that had caused this mess, and now the son had the indulgence of taking the high road at his expense. Vengelis’s face showed no reaction as he slowly descended in front of Gravitas. He lingered in space before him and stared at Gravitas for a long mocking moment.

“Really?” Vengelis croaked.

Gravitas said nothing. He glared at Vengelis with a scathing aversion. His entire body was shaking with exertion and his face was trembling and deep red under the impossible load. Steel beams four feet in girth were stacked and bent around his neck and shoulders, their rigidity turned pliable in comparison to the Sejero shoulders upon which they wrapped.

“And this accomplishes what exactly?”

“You . . . said . . . you . . . have . . . principles. . . . ” Gravitas gasped feebly. “So do I.”

Vengelis blinked with contempt. Far below them, the two Royal sons engrossed thousands of ashen dust-covered faces. A cold gust of wind blew by them, and Vengelis could see the strain in Gravitas’s expression as he kept the building upright against the wind’s push on the entire side of the superstructure.

“And the principles represented here are what exactly?”

Gravitas shook his head a quarter of an inch from side to side. “One’s that require . . . no explanation.”

The building shifted loudly from far above, and the thick beams bent deeper around his shoulder blades. Gravitas sunk a few feet, failing under exhaustion and the incomprehensible load. Vengelis descended with him, and peered up the length of the shadowed windows, having to turn his neck upward to see the maimed spire looming far overhead.

“Let go. This is over,” Vengelis said. “Listen to reason.”

Gravitas buried his chin into his chest and heaved himself upward several inches. Vengelis saw him watching the crowd that had now begun to flee from the base of the building.

“Let go!” Vengelis shouted.

Gravitas did not budge, and Vengelis smoldered with fury.

“As we speak, a scientist within this city is unwittingly playing architect to this entire world’s destruction. That includes all these people. I know you think of them as innocent, but they aren’t . . . no one with intelligence ever is. They are brilliant and conniving, and will stop at nothing to secure dominion over their way of life. Just like we did. So know this as you hold that building on your back and spew your would-be logic at me: all you have done today is assure their self-destruction. After your strength wanes and you fail under the load of this building, I will destroy this city. I have to, in order to stop them from bringing about their own end. I will raze this city to save their world.”

Vengelis awaited a response, but nothing came.

“I can give them salvation from an extinction,” Vengelis said with a tone of finality. “It is all I can give them, and it is more than we received.”

“Annihilation.” Gravitas exhaled.

“What?”

“Annihilation is all you can give them. That is all Sejero strength has ever been able to give. For all of its grandeur, our blood knows only destruction.”

Vengelis looked past his feet to the intersections below. Insect-sized people were fleeing from the base of the tower, some limping with injuries, others laboriously dragging the wounded away from the teetering tower.

“What are you talking about?” Vengelis said.

“We were born out of atrocity. The Sejero were created during the Primus race’s darkest hour, and in the wake of their creation the Primus race has never advanced forward. We were born out of apocalypse, and that is all we have ever provided. We’ve mired our beliefs in truths that aren’t so, based our worldview on certainties that were never intended by the natural order.”