The hoverboard was farther back in the room, but the entrance to the building is covered with rubble.
I stand there, swearing.
Essa puts a hand on my shoulder. “Have you tried Poise?”
“Poise is my sister’s job.” I stare at the broken structure, mapping my way up from floor to floor. “I prefer punching things.”
“You remind of my little brother.” Essa smiles softly. “He said he’d never get feels. But he could never control himself either.”
“Wait here.” I take a few steps up the rubble pile, testing.
It feels solid beneath my feet.
“Be careful,” Essa says. “There won’t be a free med drone anytime soon.”
“Don’t worry. I’ve already had my fall this week.”
The first two floors are easy—the collapsed front of the building is piled into a ragged slope of debris. It’s like climbing a junk heap.
But to reach the third level, I have to jump from the pile and grab the edge of sheared-off floor. The building’s guts are spilling out—a frayed edge of optical fibers tries to tangle my arms as I haul myself up. At least the smart-plastic pipes have sealed themselves off, so there’s no running water in my face.
The structures here in Paz are solid, compared to the shanties of Shreve. My father sweeps away whole neighborhoods at a whim. But this city was built to withstand disaster.
On the third floor, I find myself standing in what’s left of an apartment. Paintings on the three remaining walls, an overturned easel. Clothes spill from a closet ripped in half by the collapse. A whole life, left in pieces.
My father did this—here, and across this city.
Rusty war, boundless and brutal.
“¿Alguien aquí?” I call. “Anyone need help?”
No answer. Either they weren’t home or …
I turn and look through the missing wall, out over the city.
Chaos and destruction stretch out forever, the setting sun turning it all blood red. The sight almost swallows me.
“Keep going!” Essa shouts from the ground. “The sun’s going down!”
The next floor is about four meters up—too far to jump. I can’t see any fire stairs.
Just the elevator.
I make my way over, wary of the listing floor. The shaft is clear of debris. There’s even a hoverpod waiting on this level, its charge light solid green.
I step on.
“English, please. Fifth floor.”
“This elevator is damaged and on battery power. Emergency use only.”
“Um, this is an emergency.”
“Are you in need of medical care?”
“No, but I need some stuff from upstairs. I’m in the middle of a rescue!”
“A rescue? Do you have the warden password?”
I groan. If only I could talk to the city AI.
But it said something to me right before the last quake. Right before it died. Maybe it knew what was about to happen …
“Iron Mountain,” I repeat.
“That is not the correct password.”
I let out a groan. “Look, I’m a foreign aid worker—sort of. Just ask the city interface who I am!”
“The city AI is offline.”
“That’s how bad the emergency is!”
Another moment’s pause.
“That is unprecedented.” The hint of a sigh. “Travel is at your own risk.”
“Whatever—take me to five!”
“Doors closing.”
The doors shriek and grind, but don’t fully meet. When the pod jerks into motion, the floors slide past in front of me. More ruined homes, one with the apartment above fallen in on it. The next with a gaping hole.
The whole pod shudders as it climbs, sides scraping the damaged shaft. When it finally reaches Rafi’s, it screeches to a halt a meter short.
The doors wrench themselves open.
“Fifth floor.”
“Um, we aren’t quite there. Can you go a little higher?”
“No. The city magnetics are unstable.”
“Right.” I’m staring at the feet of Rafi’s pair of beds. The floor is only a meter above my waist, an easy climb, and the gap is big enough to squeeze through. But the pod is trembling beneath my feet. “You’re not going to fall when I’m halfway, are you? And, like, cut me in two?”
The pod doesn’t answer right away.
That seems bad.
“I should be able to hold this position,” it says at last.
“That’s not very confidence-making!”
“Returning to the ground level is the safest option.”
“Ugh, no.” I take a few sharp breaths. People shooting at me is easy, but it turns out the thought of crawling through a giant guillotine makes my heart beat sideways.
My eyes fall to the feels on my wrist. Maybe there’s one for courage.
There’s the face of a lion, more cuddly than fierce. But what else could it mean?
I touch it for a moment. My nerves settle a little, but not like Calm. Something bright and sharp is surging in me …
The pod speaks again.
“The sooner you exit, the less chance that I will—”
“Just be quiet!” I hurl myself at the doors, scrambling through the gap and onto Rafi’s floor. I keep crawling even after my feet are clear, until I’m halfway across the bedroom from the elevator’s open maw.
I lie there for a long moment, grinning.
“Would you like me to wait?” the pod asks.
I glance up. The hoverboard stands in the corner by the front door, with a green charge light and new crash bracelets.
“No, thanks,” I say. “I’m flying down.”
When I land next to Essa, she’s huddled in the shadow of Rafi’s broken building, wrapped in her own arms.
She’s weeping. Great sobs rack her body, and a rattling sound comes from her chest, like her soul has shaken loose.
I stare for a moment, confused.
“Did something happen?”
She shakes her head, drawing a shuddering breath.
“Give me a second.” She presses a thumb against her wrist, and gradually her expression turns calm and self-possessed again.
But her dusty face is still streaked with tears.
I drop to one knee, not knowing what to do. Courage doesn’t help with this.
“Did your feels run out?”
She shakes her head. “I messed up. I thought a jolt of Grief would clear my mind … but it made everything worse.”
I don’t know what to say. How feels work is beyond me.
“Nothing’s ever felt like this before.” Her voice is even, but there’s a horror deep in her eyes. “The Calm is there, like always. But I can feel something past it, trying to get in. And when that first drop of Grief hit, it all came roaring through, crushing me.”
“Ah,” I say.
All my life, there was a storm in my head. I knew something was wrong—pretending to be my sister, hardly seeing my own father, my trainers hurting me. But somehow I got used to it.
Until my father attacked Victoria, and the storm crashed through.
“Your city’s falling apart around you, Essa. Maybe you should take a—”
“After we save that kid.” She makes two fists. “He’s the same age my little brother was.”
Yes. Saving someone sounds perfect. “Then we’ll help him. Come on.”
She mounts the board behind me, her hands firm on my waist.
“It’s getting dark,” I say. “Want the crash bracelets?”
“I’m good. Used to ride freestyle, junior division.”
I glance back at her with new respect. My trainers used to let me watch the freestyle finals. Pretty-surged girls and boys with neon outfits, doing wild tricks in full crash suits. I wanted to be like them—famous for my boarding.
Until my trainers reminded me that my name would always be a secret.
“Hang on, then,” I say, leaning forw
ard and turning on the lifting fans.
We shoot back toward the boy, whipping through the turns. Essa shifts her balance gracefully, guiding me across the broken rooftops with taps on my shoulders.
The dust is sharp and choking. The rain of debris swats at us, churned by the fans and the speed of our passage.
But I ride fearlessly.
In the red sky to our right, the wind has stretched the clouds above the fallen towers into huge anvils. Firefighting drones flit beneath them, lofted on sprays of foam. I can smell burned plastic, hot metal …
And something worse.
I turn away to squint into the biting, acrid wind, wondering if Srin is okay.
Suddenly my Courage runs thin in my veins. What if Srin was wrong, and Rafi is still here in Paz? What if she’s hurt?
No. Stay brave. She left days ago.
But those people in the market last night—the man I stole the coat from—how many of them have been erased from the world?
In a few minutes, the broken building takes form in the dust ahead of us. The boy is still clinging to that shard of metal, like it’s the mast of a sinking ship.
We angle in beside him, and Essa steps off onto the shorn top of the structure.
She takes him in her arms.
I stand there twitching, ready to fly him down. But Essa and the boy are wrapped around each other. He’s sobbing like she was a few minutes ago, an echo of her grief.
I can only watch.
This isn’t my city.
Finally she pulls away from the boy and pushes him toward me.
“Take him down first.”
He steps onto the board, wary for a moment, then throws his arms around my waist with all his strength. I spare a glance at Essa, suddenly worried about leaving her up here alone. But she waves me on.
As I ease us out over the street, the boy hides his eyes from the drop.
“It’s okay,” I say. “We can’t fall.”
“But the buildings fell. I saw them.”
I want to explain that we aren’t using the city magnetics—our lifting fans won’t be affected by any aftershocks.
But that’s not what he means.
He knows now that anything can break.
We land next to a cluster of Pazx capturing water from the broken main. Someone’s dragged a portable hole in the wall out onto the street. They’re feeding it salvage for raw materials, and it’s spitting out bandages, water bottles, and flashlights. But it won’t work for long with no city grid to draw power from, and fabricators must be rare here in Paz, where they prefer things handmade.
Calm and efficient as always, the Pazx take the boy from me.
They’re perfect citizens in an emergency, but I wonder how long they can go on like this. What happens if they all hit themselves with Grief when the sun goes down? In their joyous lives, none of them has ever experienced anything like this before.
I wheel the board around and fly back up to Essa. She’s clinging to the metal shard, staring at the city center.
“They’re all gone,” she says quietly. “How?”
I put a hand on her shoulder, just to steady myself. Courage burns fast in a disaster, it seems.
I could tell her that this was an attack, not a natural event. The people of Paz need to know the truth, and soon. They have to get ready. This was only the first step of my father’s plan. The next could be anything.
But if I warn just one person, it’s nothing but a rumor.
I have to tell the whole world.
“Essa, I have a friend in a hotel nearby. She’s got a lot of communication gear. We can call for help from outside.”
“But wouldn’t the city already …” Essa begins, then looks at me. “It’s gone, isn’t it?”
“Dead,” I say, and tell her name of Srin’s hotel.
She hesitates before getting on the board, staring down at the street. At the boy we rescued.
“You think he’ll be okay?”
“They’re pretty organized down there. He’s safe now.”
“That’s not what I mean.” She kneels, touches the structure below us. “A kid his age wouldn’t be out alone. Whoever was with him …”
We’re standing on a dark tangle of metal and wires, a whole building compressed in on itself, like junk after a recycler’s got hold of it.
It’s a miracle that he survived. No one else did.
“I don’t know” is all I can say.
Essa stands, her fingers on her wrist again. “Sorry. We should keep moving, but that kid …”
“Reminds you of your brother.”
She nods. “I miss him.”
And suddenly I want to tell Essa all about Rafi. How I’ve always tried to protect my older sister. How she was protecting me from my father all along. How she’s run away from me—to become me—and there’s nothing I can do to help her anymore.
But that’s a lot to tell a stranger on a day like this.
So I ask, “How long since your little brother died?”
Essa places a hand on her feels. She’s hitting Calm again.
“Fifty-seven minutes,” she says.
“Wait,” I say. “It happened today?”
She looks down at the street, toward the spot where I rescued her.
“Elio was with me when the quakes started. We ran to take shelter in the entrance of a building. We were safe.” Essa’s voice breaks a little, and her fingers go to her wrist again, steadying herself with a chord of feels. “But he’d dropped his backpack in the street. When the second quake ended, he pulled away and ran to get it. I didn’t go after him—just yelled for him to come back. Then the big one hit.”
She falls silent.
“He was right there, under all that …” I shake my head. “You didn’t say anything. We didn’t look for him!”
“He was dead. I saw the stones come down.” A tremor crosses her face. “There were other people who needed our help.”
Essa’s eyes open, and she looks off into the darkening haze.
“Your friend’s hotel is that way,” she says calmly. “Come on.”
Srin’s hotel is still standing, squat and powerful in the darkness. Its shattered windows gape like missing teeth.
Her room was on the seventh floor, I recall. Counting up from ground level, we fly a slow circuit around the building, peering in through broken glass.
My mind is still spinning with what Essa told me. She left her own brother behind, buried under a pile of stone. Without a word to me, or a moment for herself. Like a forgotten toy.
Maybe it was logical, putting her grief aside to help other people. But there are times when logic makes no sense.
The streets below us are full of Pazx calmly working together, digging through rubble and treating wounds. How many of them have lost loved ones today? How many are holding back a storm in their heads?
What happens when all those nightmares break through?
Light flickers through a missing window—a row of flatscreens. I ease our hoverboard through the empty frame, and we step off onto a plush carpet. A cleaning drone drifts along the floor, vacuuming up beads of shattered safety glass.
Srin’s standing in a bathrobe, her hair wet.
“Don’t you knock?”
I stare at her. “The whole city’s falling down—and you took a shower?”
“Before the water pressure gives out,” she says. “I was dusty.”
“Sure, okay.” I guess some people don’t need feels to stay calm. “Srin, this is Essa.”
“Hey.” Srin turns back to me. “Did you know the city AI’s down? No local feeds at all. Creepy-making, right?”
“That was my father’s plan,” I say.
Both of them look at me.
“His plan?” Srin asks. “Are you saying your dad caused an earthquake?”
“It all makes sense now. The weapon I told you about—he said it was like a force of nature.” I cross the room toward her satellite dish, the stack of backup ba
tteries. “We have to tell the other cities!”
“Um, no,” Srin says.
“Why not? Isn’t the point of all this to make my father look bad?”
“Of course,” she says. “But good propaganda has to make sense. Nobody can cause an earthquake. Not one that big!”
“The Rusties figured out how. I’m telling you the truth.”
“The truth doesn’t matter, if nobody believes it.” Srin gestures at the walls of flickering screens. “I’ve spent the whole war building a reputation, a global audience. I’m not going to blow it all on one logic-missing theory.”
“It’s not a theory. He told me, face-to-face.”
“Unless you have AI-verified video of that, it won’t matter,” Srin says. “And we’ll look scruples-missing if we try to leverage a tragedy!”
“Frey,” Essa says gently. “You might want to try some Insight—the little face with glasses. It really clears your head.”
She’s looking at me funny, like I’m some intense, wild-eyed foreigner who thinks her own father controls earthquakes.
Which is exactly what I am.
The weight of their doubt falls on me like defeat, and I sit heavily on Srin’s couch. If my friends don’t believe me, the rest of the world never will.
“There’s no way to stop him,” I say.
“Relax. Help’s on the way already.” Srin peers at one of her screens. “Fabricators, med drones, construction teams. This quake might have saved Paz—your dad can’t march in when it’s full of aid workers from other cities!”
Right. With their own citizens in danger, the world would crush him.
So why did he visit this disaster on Paz?
I force myself to stand back up and walk to the gaping window. The sun is gone now, turning those broken buildings into silhouettes against the red sky. This new, shattered city looks like the Rusty ruins outside Victoria. All the angles are skewed, the skyline a row of jagged teeth.
Like something that can never be fixed.
“She’s not coming to save us,” I murmur.
“Who isn’t?” Srin asks.
“It’s a rebel saying, about Tally Youngblood disappearing. It means we have to take care of things ourselves.”
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