by S. L. Dunn
The sheer mayhem was a sight Kristen never could have conjured up in her most vivid dream, for no imagination could fully capture the breadth of this terror. Her legs went weak, her stomach raw. In this hysterical screeching sea of humankind before her, there was no foothold, no niche upon which the enforcement of civil obedience could cling. Words such as order, law, restraint, and authority were all merely indulgences that perhaps had held a place in the city earlier that morning. But such reassurances held no sway over a million-strong mob.
“Dear god,” Madison muttered from behind her.
Kristen turned back into the ballroom to see that people from the audience were gathering the courage to move from the rear of the room and look out the windows. They, too, were staring with awe at the collapse of civilization occurring below. At the other end of the windows, shouts began to rise from their ranks as people were demanded to part with their blazer or fall coat so as to add another link to the makeshift rope. Kristen turned shamefully away from a scuffle between two PhDs over a heavy twill sports coat, and saw Madison was looking across the Lutvak ballroom to a navy banner that had been draped across the far wall.
The banner read: ICST The Future of Man.
“These people are the future of man?” Madison asked scornfully, indicating the two grown men who were now wrestling across the carpet. “Give me a break. Why do they even want to make a rope? Look outside, there’s nowhere to go! We’re trapped.”
“Yeah.” Kristen unwillingly brought her attention back to the miserable sight of Professor Vatruvia up on the stage floor.
“You . . . knew him?” Madison asked.
Kristen nodded slowly.
“I’m sorry.”
“He was my boss.” Kristen cleared her throat in a detached manner. “Somewhat ironic that Vengelis killed him before they had a chance to speak. He murdered the very man he was aiming to exploit.”
“Yeah.”
Kristen turned to Madison. “Why were you with Vengelis?”
Madison let out a long fatigued exhale and shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t even know. These men attacked me at my work. One had a knife. And then Vengelis came out of nowhere to help . . . he must have been in the crowd. For the life of me I can’t imagine what he was doing there.”
“Strange,” Kristen said.
“He told me New York wasn’t safe, and he said all the insane things he later proved without explanation to everyone in here. I thought it was a joke at first, some weird reality TV prank or something. Then he hit the truck. He wanted me to show him where the Marriott Marquis was, so I brought—”
Krrrrghhh!
An immense clapping noise suddenly emanated from outside their building in the far distance. Everything—even the ruckus of the avenue outside—immediately fell quiet. The boom had been loud enough to silence the entire city. Kristen was unconsciously locked in stunned eye contact with Madison, both of their mouths agape. They stared straight through each other’s gaze, both straining to listen to the dead silence that now pressed down upon them.
Krrrrrrrgggghhhhhh!
K-K-K-K-Krrrrrrrghhhhh!
The sounds were eerily reminiscent of a violently intense thunderstorm, though somehow different and unearthly. The cracks were sharper, louder, and more pronounced than a roll of thunder, with a less drawn-out rumble. They were unmistakably the sounds of tremendous impacts, though not of pushing clouds in the lofty ceiling of the atmosphere. The crashes were so loud that it sounded as if the very tectonic plates of the planet were splintering apart, except the noise came from the sky to the south.
Then, as quickly as the strange overhead crashes had begun, they ceased. A long hush ensued, filled only with nervous glances and apprehensive breaths. Then the masses awakened. The crashes, or explosions, or whatever they had been, were the last traumatic nudge necessary for the multitude filling Times Square to reach its final tipping point. An earthquake began to shake the very floor of the ballroom as the avenue outside erupted into a unified and earsplitting wail of stampeding dread. If the masses had been a downtrodden sea of humanity minutes previous, now it was a violent maelstrom of thrashing limbs and screaming faces. The roar of men and women coming in through the open windows was equally as alien to Kristen’s ears as the crashes in the sky; the communal roar was a calamitous requiem for the fallen order of their world.
KRRRRGGGHHHH!
The loudest bang yet reverberated from a point directly over their heads. It was as though the center of the storm had shifted to sit above them. A descending torrent of fire and brimstone would have been an appropriate counterpart to the thunderous crashing, yet only clear afternoon sunlight spilled onto the floors through the tall windows. Kristen, along with everyone in the ballroom, visibly flinched and stooped in shock with her arms raised above her head. For a moment she thought she was dead—that the hotel had collapsed down on them. This louder series of cracks sounded from just above them and shook the walls of the ballroom. The chandeliers rattled and swayed against their brackets.
“What is happening?” Madison shouted.
Kristen shook her head, her hands raised to cover her ears. “Don’t know!”
“Do you think it’s Vengelis?”
Kristen’s eyes lingered uncertainly on the ceiling tiles as the booms rattled over and over again from somewhere far above the Lutvak ballroom. She could not bring herself to envision what could possibly be generating the decibels shaking the world around her, though she knew it had to be related to Vengelis.
Madison winced. “It must be him!”
Kristen felt paralyzed. She had seen it on Vengelis’s face—something had concerned him. Whatever it was had forced him to leave, and Kristen did not like the idea of what that might entail. Something that concerned Vengelis Epsilon would surely prove to be a concern to her as well.
An upsurge of fierce bangs sounded from the clear skies outside the windows. Instantly the clamor became deafening, and the floor shook violently beneath their feet. Kristen was forced to her knees, and Madison grabbed hold of the windowsill, barely able to stay standing. Her chin tucked to her chest and her hands pressing against her ears, Kristen’s painful scream went unheard even to herself.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Gravitas
It was the mingled sounds of fever pitched shouts rising from the barge below him that snapped Gravitas out of his incapacitated condition. His mind came to attention, and his body steadied itself from freefall just before he crashed straight through the barge’s rusty deck. The entire bay spun round and round in his vision. The dreary water and the bright blue sky were barely distinguishable from one another. His eyes seemed unable to focus on anything. At once, the spires of Manhattan, the wharfs of Brooklyn, and the shores of New Jersey swirled and revolved.
In his daze he squinted at three blurry Statues of Liberty standing side by side across the bay, all three raising a green copper torch into the Atlantic sky.
Gravitas could feel warm blood running down his head from above his right temple. He moved his jaw back and forth and blinked the stars out of his vision as he cursed his recklessness. The fight had just begun, and he was already concussed. He trained his gaze on the unsteady horizon and tried to focus on ridding the growing daze in his consciousness. Wind touched a clammy sweat on his cheeks and brow, and he forcefully quelled the rising queasiness in his gut and turned to search for Vengelis Epsilon. As he raised his head, Gravitas could feel the stream of blood change its course and run behind his ear and into his armor.
The dark form of Vengelis was thankfully easy to identify contrasting against the clear sky overhead. He was visibly moving back and forth unsteadily. Gravitas latched onto one hope: that even if Vengelis was stronger than he—which had yet to be determined—Gravitas would prove tougher than the Epsilon. Without a second thought, Gravitas erupted upward at Vengelis with a swerving wobbly charge.
As Gravitas accelerated toward Vengelis, he could hear the Emperor of Anthem scream in unint
elligible infuriation. Instead of repeating the same careless stroke once more, this time Vengelis Epsilon held his skyward position and readied himself for impact. Gravitas flexed his midsection and forced his dizzied body into a ferocious swinging kick at Vengelis’s side.
But Vengelis was too quick.
The Epsilon turned his body to the side, flexing each of his arms together. Gravitas’s uncoiled shin connected powerfully, not with tender ribcage, but with Vengelis’s iron biceps. Just as the deafening ring of the impact boomed across the immensely populated shores of the bay, Vengelis pulled up his forearms and grasped Gravitas’s leg like a vice.
“Got you!” Vengelis said, his face furious, and launched himself forward while holding Gravitas’s leg in his arms. Gravitas flung his free limbs outward and teetered to maintain his balance as he was pushed backward, reeling across the sky in Vengelis’s grasp. Salty moisture from the bay touched his face as he frantically considered his next move. Gravitas steadied his upper body as best he could to deliver a swift punch to Vengelis’s exposed face. But the moment he did so, he was shocked to feel Vengelis skillfully figure four his legs around his own trapped hamstring and attempt to put Gravitas in a heel hook that would tear every tendon in his knee within seconds.
Gravitas recognized the subtle beginning steps of the submission move as though it were a sixth sense. He had defended the specific maneuver Vengelis was attempting every day for half of his childhood, though the fact that this Epsilon knew how to execute such an intricate submission was deeply unsettling. It was not the kind of move taught by the Imperial First Class.
The figure four had been one of Master Tolland’s favorite moves.
Knowing the only functioning counter quite well, Gravitas twisted his body in a tactical position, keeping his knee at a protected angle as he stretched and grabbed Vengelis’s exposed ankle. Gravitas rolled his own upper body around, swinging Vengelis by his now vulnerable foot.
Yet Vengelis, too, seemed to know counters, and Gravitas was even more surprised as the Epsilon expertly rolled his entire body in a sleek motion and freed his foot from the grasp.
The limbs of the two Sejero sons untangled, and Gravitas and Vengelis spun free in the gusty air. They faced each other in astonishment, each regarding the other in equal bewilderment and breathlessness.
“A heel hook counter,” Vengelis called. “Impressive.”
Gravitas stretched his knee out gingerly and shook his head in disapproval of his own carelessness. The fight had been a moment from ending, and his leg snapping in two. This would be no uncouth Imperial First Class fistfight. Vengelis Epsilon knew how to handle himself.
“I’m impressed, too. You almost got me with that leg lock. Almost. Ready to give up and leave yet?”
Vengelis smirked.
“Just leave,” Gravitas yelled, exasperated. “No one will know you retreated.”
Vengelis shook his head. “Can’t.”
This time it was Vengelis’s turn to charge. He accelerated and launched his fist into a punch, which crashed into Gravitas’s quickly raised arms. Without hesitation, Vengelis wound up and swung out again in an attempt to breach through Gravitas’s defenses. At once, the individual blows transitioned into an indiscernible flurry of stinging strikes against Gravitas’s raised arms and midsection; Vengelis cycled between face and stomach hits, forcing Gravitas to flex his abdomen as hard as he could and fall back into total defense. Each sustained impact of fist on forearm or elbow against gut sent a disproportionate boom echoing and rumbling across the chaotic waters of the bay and through the city to the north. It was as if the very world around them was in total submission to their power, incapable of shielding itself even against the mere sound of their struggle.
After barely sustaining Vengelis’s initial explosion of strikes, Gravitas lowered his guard and began returning blows. And so the two Royal sons engaged in a turbulent back and forth exchange while involuntarily moving northward back toward Manhattan. They pushed and pulled at each other violently, each trying to get the upper hand of momentum as they moved miles across the open water. With a roar and a sudden surge of strength, Vengelis pulled a few feet away from Gravitas and savagely swung out at him, catching him directly in the face.
Gravitas felt the knuckles snap against his exposed nose.
Seeing a first genuine window of opportunity, Vengelis lurched forward in an attempt to bombard Gravitas with an overwhelming barrage of strikes. But once more Vengelis underestimated him. His right fist missed terribly as it flew past the space Gravitas’s cheek had inhabited a moment previous, and Gravitas buried a blind knee directly into his stomach. The air audibly deflated from Vengelis’s lungs like a popping balloon, and he staggered back. Gravitas took no delay in his follow up. He sunk three brutal fists into Vengelis’s unprotected face before Vengelis rolled his body to the side and slipped out of the way.
They turned to face each other once more, and Vengelis gaped blankly at Gravitas as blood surfaced and spouted from the swelling wounds on his cheek and nose. Deep crimson droplets of pure Sejero blood dripped from his face and were carried away in the sea breeze; each drop a preternatural jewel of immeasurable power and magnificence eternally lost. Vengelis watched the blood fall off his own face, and Gravitas knew his mind; surely the Epsilon viewed the drawing of his own blood as an unspeakable crime. Gravitas floated poised and ready as Vengelis turned from his own falling blood to meet his gaze.
Gravitas’s stomach was tender from his sustained blows, and the lake of dizziness in his head was getting deeper. He knew now without a doubt that he had sustained a concussion, but he also knew that he stood alone between this man and a complete domination of everything he held close. There was a singular line in the sand—or in his case, the sky—standing between Vengelis Epsilon’s selfish rage and the fragile hopes of billions. He alone could champion that deserted line, and it had to hold. His expression hardened to steel despite his condition, and Gravitas shook the throbbing from his forearms.
They had somehow managed to move back over Manhattan, and both of them looked down, panting and heaving, toward the churning disorder of streets below. Gravitas prayed the government and the media had noticed his presence; that they realized the implications of the thundering occurring above the city and not within, that where Chicago fell in minutes, New York still endured. Yet in the streets he now saw, there was no such optimism, no silver lining, for the countless horrified souls he looked down on.
“Look what you’ve done!” Gravitas shouted. “In one day you’ve ruined thousands of years of social evolution. You’ve ruined an entire civilization on a whim.”
Vengelis heaved for breath and spat blood streaked spit into the wind. “Please. They’ll be fine. Our ancestors managed, didn’t they?”
“We’re gods to them. Gods.” Gravitas groaned in fatigue. “Do you understand? Can you grasp the magnitude of your actions, as a god? By our decency we could have generated a movement of goodness unparalleled in their history. We could have given them everything that was not given to us; hope in something greater! Where Anthem met only apocalypse at the hands of a higher species, we could have given them a bright light, we could have been the example for their future. It was within our power to protect them from the horrors our people had to endure. It was our responsibility to protect them. And instead look down at them now, look at what you’ve done to them. You’ve taken any belief they held in morality by the reigns and ran it straight into the ground!”
“I don’t give a damn about them! My responsibility is to my own people—to Anthem! Do you think I am so imperceptive that I don’t see your perspective? Don’t flatter yourself! You don’t need to explain it to me; they are words I already know. But your point of view is selfish. You hint at responsibility, but you know nothing of it. You’ve never led men. And you’ve never had anyone depend on you to be hard when it’s so much easier to be soft. Do you see this ring?” Vengelis held up his hand. His knuckles and forearms were pur
ple and beginning to swell from the blows he had already delivered and received. The Blood Ring glinted on his finger in the afternoon sunlight. “This ring means I don’t have the luxury of being philosophical! This means I alone can save my race—our race—from oblivion. So spare me your naive accusations. You are playing the roll of ill-conceived guardian to these simple people, and that’s fine. Win and you’ll be their hero; die and you’ll be their martyr. But you and I both know there is another existence, another point of view, a greater race—your race—that sees you as the traitor, and me as the hero. I’m here to find a way to save my people from ruin, and nothing, including some one-dimensional fool, will stand in my way.”
A silence fell between them, punctuated by sounds of the indiscriminate riots below.
“Your move, then,” Gravitas called. “Because I’m not going anywhere until you are either off this planet or dead. I won’t let one race be sacrificed for the good of another.”
“You know what your problem is?” Vengelis said, a broad stream of blood now rolling down his face. The wind whipped at their shoulders and the roar of the chaos erupting in between the buildings below nearly drowned out his voice. “You’re unwilling to acknowledge the simple truth that life is cold and merciless.”
“Whatever allows your diluted mind to justify a slaught—”
Gravitas suddenly choked and hitched as a gigantic arm, moist and sticky with cold sweat, wrapped around his neck and placed him in a textbook chokehold. His eyes widened in stunned and horrified panic, and he knew at once that it was Darien’s arm.
The giant Royal Guard had evidently found some inner courage and overcome the pain of his dislocated elbow. With wide and welling eyes, Gravitas realized that Darien must have risen from the pavement and snuck up behind him. Had Vengelis merely been keeping him distracted with their words? Had he been smugly watching as the giant snuck up on him?