Anthem's Fall

by S. L. Dunn

  “Listen!” Kristen shouted and grabbed Madison by the shoulder. “We’re not safe!”

  Madison looked at Kristen as if she had uttered the most apparent exclamation imaginable. “No kiddin—”

  “I mean, we, as a world, are not safe!” Kristen screamed at the top of her lungs directly into Madison’s ear. “Whoever, and whatever the hell they are, they’ve already proven they don’t give a damn about us. Do you know what happens when two societies clash and one is inferior?”

  “I—” Madison could barely hear her.

  “The lesser society gets wiped out!” Kristen screamed. “Whether it happens in a day or a hundred years—they get wiped out! We won’t be able to survive against them! We won’t endure, in my heart I know we won’t!”

  “I’ve noticed!” Madison yelled.

  “We—as a race, as an entire way of life—are doomed if we can’t figure out a way to stand our ground!”

  “Yes, I realize this!”

  “Listen!” Kristen stepped closer to Madison, the gathering audience by the windows pressing against them on all sides. “I—I have an idea!”

  Kristen turned back and strained to look at the bloodied giant. People were pouring past the huge body, not daring to go near it. She then turned to Madison and shouted into her ear, “We have to get down there!”

  “What?”

  Kristen sprinted across the ballroom, moving from table to table madly pushing laptops out of the way and throwing papers and exhibits off of the assembled display tables as she frantically searched for something. Any box she found she upturned violently, spilling the contents across the floor.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Madison demanded as she followed her.

  “Looking for something!”

  “Why?”

  “Because,” Kristen called as she ransacked a bovine lymphocyte display table. “What’s the need to understand a technology if you can copy it? We may only have one shot at this!”

  “What do you mean? What are you talking about?” Madison shouted, trailing Kristen in confusion.

  At last Kristen opened a small cardboard box and glared triumphantly at what she had been looking for. She reached into the box and pulled out an empty glass slide. It was a simple tissue slide, two thin pieces of glass that were clear against her fingers. Kristen carefully placed it back in the case as Madison called out more questions. She jogged to the Vatruvian cell table and picked up her backpack, placing the box with the glass slide inside and throwing the bag over her shoulder. She tightened the straps around her shoulders and turned to Madison with a rising look of passion.

  “I’m going to get a sample of their blood.”

  “What?”

  With the fear that the Marriott Marquis would collapse any moment, the researchers were now simply jumping out of the windows of the Lutvak ballroom and onto the heads of the crowd below.

  “I may not be able to understand Sejero genetics, or even the most fundamental aspects of their strength. But if I can get their DNA, if I can get a sample of their genetic code, I can try to replicate their power.”

  “Replicate their power with what?”

  Kristen’s face hardened, and she cast Madison a sobering look. “The Vatruvian cell.”

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Vengelis

  Vengelis watched Gravitas rub his fingers over the enormous dark red marks left by Darien’s arm on his neck. Tiny capillaries had ruptured under Nerol’s skin and left deep purple blotches. Together the two of them lingered over the clustered rooftops and spires in a momentary respite from their struggle.

  “You killed him for trying to help you?” Gravitas called to Vengelis over the roar of the streets.

  A gust of wind touched Vengelis’s face and he could feel its presence thicken the blood running down his cheek. The thumping of his pulse was sending surges of pain past his forehead to the back of his skull and down his back. It took all of his willpower not to visibly wince from the sharp pain. He was encouraged by Gravitas’s battered state, but he was in no better condition.

  “Darien had no place interfering in a fight beyond his abilities,” Vengelis said.

  “So you killed him?”

  “I’m a man of principle, Nerol, even if you choose to believe I’m simply a tyrant. I have the courage to act on my convictions; a trait in which you and I are evidently alike, I suppose.”

  “The only thing you and I have in common is that neither of us belong here, and very soon one of us won’t be.”

  Vengelis smirked despite the pain coursing through him.

  “Your troops are gone. You are alone. Once again I offer you the choice to leave,” Gravitas said. “Go back to Anthem and forget this place exists. It’s a win-win: this planet can return to life as normal, and you can return to your throne.”

  A dismal and rumbling laugh emerged from the bottom of Vengelis’s chest and spilled out of him. “You think those crude fools Hoff and Darien had any effect on my chances of survival—or yours? Don’t insult our power, Gravitas Nerol, you’re a son of Royalty.”

  “I take no pride in my power, and neither should you.”

  “Spare me,” Vengelis said. “It was the power of our blood that allowed for our race’s survival. If it weren’t for the Sejero strength you seem to be so ashamed of, our ancestors—along with all of Anthem’s natural life—would have been used as mere fertilizer for the Zergos, our entire history and existence blown to oblivion in a day. Instead we—we —rose up and defended our world. I would think you would exercise your Sejero gifts with a greater degree of respect. I mean for god’s sake you’ve spent the last four years pretending to be one of them. How can you live with yourself? You slander and turn your back on all your ancestors fought and died for.”

  “My ancestors!” Gravitas shouted and pounded a finger to his own chest. “Fought for the cause of those weaker than themselves. They protected a fragile world from a gross enemy that was otherworldly and ruthless. Today I believe I follow in their footsteps.”

  Vengelis’s mouth fell open. “How dare you compare me to the Zergos, Nerol. You go too far. How dare you! You are nobody, a pathetic nobody hiding from his gifts and his responsibilities. Nothing but a stale, conventional fool filled with the opinions and platitudes of weak men,” Vengelis said, his face turning red. “Men too weak to act. I am emperor, Nerol. And I need to act now, not for my own whimsical interests, but for the good of my people. I alone can do this, or my—our—existence will fall.”

  “The people here have an expression that might interest you, emperor: ‘With pride comes the fall.’ ”

  Vengelis looked down at the riots below. “A lot of good that logic is doing them today, these noble savages of yours.”

  Gravitas made to say something else, but Vengelis had heard enough. He darted forward and drove a fist into Gravitas’s quickly raised forearms, then swiftly raised a knee to block an irate counter kick from Gravitas. Once more the very atmosphere began to tremble as their strikes detonated over the rooftops of the city. Here and there a blow would slip past one of their nearly perfect defenses and cause brutal damage.

  Vengelis had never experienced anything like it. His heart rate had never been so high, even in the most vicious of his spars and duels. The feeling was foreign to him. He was no longer breathing, but instead was sucking in gasping inhalations: his quick breaths matching the racing pace of his heart. In the brutal swapping of blows, Vengelis reached and exceeded his threshold of exhaustion. They each became blind with rage and ferocity.

  Vengelis tried desperately to keep his mind lucid and not give in to his frustration. A slip up against an opponent like Gravitas Nerol would end the fight. Though no intelligible words crossed Vengelis’s tenacious mind, his conscious was going ballistic with frustration and bewilderment. It was true that Nerol was Royal blooded and not some half-bred giant. But even in his early teens Vengelis had brutally demolished many Royal fighters who had been overconfident enough to chal
lenge him. He had easily cast all of them aside as amateurs, vastly inferior to his overwhelming strength, speed, and resolve.

  How was Gravitas Nerol so strong?

  Then, as Vengelis began to come around to the mortal danger he was truly in, it was Gravitas that made the first blunder. Surely as exhausted as Vengelis, Gravitas missed his target—the tendons in Vengelis’s right knee—with a powerful kick. His leg swinging at nothing but air, Gravitas staggered forward in space, losing his balance and tumbling forward for a single breath.

  Vengelis did not hesitate. The moment Gravitas’s body slipped unintentionally forward, Vengelis raised a left fist, sending it barreling into Gravitas’s chin. Gravitas’s head rocked back from the blow, and as it came forward again, stunned and discombobulated, Vengelis’s right fist came up and caught Gravitas on the cheek. He could feel bone break against his knuckles. Vengelis then grabbed Gravitas by the arms and launched his hips into him as he spun around with all his might. Roaring with exhaustion, Vengelis released Gravitas and sent him spinning through the air.

  Gravitas’s body careened straight into the side of a skyscraper as Vengelis instantaneously dropped his hands to his knees and wheezed over and over again, his lungs barely able to supply his brain with enough oxygen to maintain consciousness. Below him the people roared as bits of maimed skyscraper fell from the sky. A wide cloud of gray-white dust rose into the blue skies from the opposite side of the building, where Gravitas exited the structure.

  Vengelis thought he was going to pass out from the exertion.

  Gravitas’s cheekbone had broken. The fight was over—it had to be over. No one could continue fighting with a broken cheekbone. Again and again Vengelis’s mind repeated this encouraging thought as he gasped for breath. Vengelis held his hands out and stared at them as he panted and heaved. The rough skin around his knuckles and the joints of his fingers were agonizingly scraped and split. Drops of blood fell from the gashes on his face and landed on his forearms. He noticed how closely the shade of the Blood Ring matched that of his actual blood.

  As the peaking adrenaline abated, Vengelis shifted the focus of his gaze beyond his hands and into the chaos of the city below. Now was not the time to give in to the limitations of exhaustion. He lethargically pushed himself forward and circled around the glass skyscraper through which he had propelled Gravitas. There was a broad chunk missing from the side of the building near its top, where Gravitas’s body had obviously made its exit. The wind had diffused the kicked up dust, and the gaping hole provided an architectural cutout of the building. A few exposed stories were visible, and the lofty wind blew through the office levels. Nestled between each floor and ceiling, exposed steel supports, sparking wires, and heating ducts hung loose. Gravitas’s body had connected with one of the giant vertical steel support beams of the tower, and Vengelis saw it was bent precariously. The immense skyscraper looked as though it might collapse any second.

  A flicker of concern grew at the thought of what Kristen Jordan and Madison might do if they saw the skyscraper fall, but he drew his attention away from it nevertheless. He had to establish Gravitas’s condition before he worried himself with anything else. Wincing from his injuries, Vengelis turned from the gouged skyscraper to survey the skyline and then down into the crowded streets as he searched for Nerol. Surely Gravitas had retreated, or was hiding.

  Not readily seeing his adversary, Vengelis anxiously oriented himself in the city. The apex of the Marriott Marquis was below him, which was a solace. The sounds rising from the city were increasing in pitch, and Vengelis vaguely realized he was easily within plain sight of the teeming masses on the streets below. With an exasperated curse at his situation, Vengelis spit in an unsuccessful attempt to rid his mouth of blood. Slowly and shakily, he descended past the bright windows of the Marriott Marquis to get back to Kristen Jordan. He leveled off outside the second-floor windows—where he was met by the blood curdling screams of the mob just below—to see a line of connected articles of clothing hanging out of the ballroom. The rope of shirts and jackets was shifting in the wind, its end touching the pavement of the sidewalk.

  His heart rose into this throat. If Kristen Jordan escaped . . .

  Vengelis’s face twisted with a sudden wrath and he shot in through a window. His eyes darted to the stage, then to the strewn-about chairs and desks. The doors were still barred shut by his doing, but the ballroom was nearly deserted. His mouth hung open, he turned from the rear wall to the front stage.

  Kristen and Madison were gone.

  Vengelis turned to the half dozen people huddling by a corner window. They were scrambling to get away from him, some even crawling to hide under a display table.

  “Where did the two women go?” Vengelis shouted.

  One man who was caught unaware turned to him, his face suddenly drenched in dismay. The front of the man’s pants immediately became wet with urine. If Vengelis’s presence had terrified the ballroom earlier, his now bloodied and beaten face was the finishing brushstroke required to paint him as the archfiend himself.

  “P-Please, I don’t—”

  Vengelis lurched forward unsteadily and gripped the man’s face with his palm, ramming him backward and burying his head and shoulders into the drywall. “WHERE ARE THEY?” Vengelis screamed, but when he released his hand the man’s body fell to the floor unconscious.

  Vengelis turned to the others, but it was obvious even in his rage that they did not know where Kristen and Madison went. A few had fallen to their knees and were begging. Others took their chances and simply turned and leapt out the open second-story window. Completely disregarding any semblance of civility, Vengelis turned and exploded out of the Marriott Marquis, his body crashing through the crown molding above the windows and taking a broad chunk of the ballroom ceiling with him. Dust from the crumbled wall of the hotel gathered and caked to his wounds as he moved into the open air of the street. He jerked his neck up and down the crowded avenue as he scanned the thousands of heads.

  Vengelis had told Kristen and Madison he would demolish the entire city if they ran away. Why would they run? Why would they test him like this? They were gambling with millions of lives. Their gall astounded him. Were they really going to force him to follow through with such a threat?

  In his heart Vengelis was not certain if he even had the remaining strength or will to do so. He glared down at the makeshift rope that billowed out of the Lutvak ballroom. All of the exits within the ballroom had been barred shut. Kristen and Madison had to have used the rope of jackets to get out. Therefore, their two heads were somewhere in the packed crowd below. Frustration began to overwhelm Vengelis as he frantically looked down on the faces of the endless people in the crowd and scanned for the two he would recognize.

  If what Kristen Jordan said proved true—that there may be no way to defeat the Felixes—what would he do? Vengelis forcefully pressed the idea from his mind as he realized there was no way he would be able to discern two individual women in the midst of the bedlam sprawled out beneath him.

  Taking no notice of the pointing fingers and skyward shouting faces, Vengelis rotated back and forth in space as he stared up and down the extensive vista of the avenue. He considered screaming for them to show themselves, but his voice would have no chance of carrying over the uproar below. He could not believe how many people had taken to the streets, surely hundreds of thousands—maybe a million. The jolt to the skyscraper seemed to have jarred the confidence of the people who had decided to remain safe in the raised sanctuaries of their buildings. Now the already clogged riot was growing exponentially by the moment as people poured out from the various towers.

  A deafening shudder of shrieking steel and a pinging of loosened bolts echoed down from far overhead. Vengelis turned upward to see the skyscraper Gravitas’s body had damaged visibly pitch and lean treacherously to the side. The terrible sight was met with a chorus of hoarse screams from the masses. Vengelis looked up to the disfigured upper portion of the skyscr
aper, then his gaze moved around the skies over the buildings. Where had Gravitas gone? Could he have knocked him out? It was possible, but Vengelis would have felt much more comfortable knowing Gravitas’s condition for certain. He began to move forward slowly, continuing to scan the mob in an attempt to find Kristen and Madison.

  A strangeness in the masses suddenly caught Vengelis’s eye some way down the avenue. Several hundred yards from him, there seemed to be an imaginary fence holding back a ring of people. In the center of the open pavement, positioned grotesquely, was what Vengelis immediately recognized as Darien’s dead body. As Vengelis drew nearer to his fallen Royal Guard, he saw the abandoned circle around the corpse was not entirely empty.

  There were two people leaning down to Darien. Vengelis began to fly faster, and as he neared, he recognized Kristen and Madison. Vengelis’s mangled face narrowed in confusion, and he accelerated forward unsteadily. Kristen Jordan was kneeling down to Darien. Coldness poured through Vengelis’s veins, and with a sudden pale terror in his face that matched the people below, he saw what she was doing. Kristen was collecting a sample of what she knew to be Sejero blood.

  Vengelis had not considered the horrendous possibility he now saw unfolding before him, and he exploded toward Kristen with all of his remaining might. He knew at once what she was attempting. All of the pieces were set, the knowledge and capabilities aligned.

  Kristen was going to create Felixes.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Kristen

  The riot beat against them as Kristen and Madison slipped down from the makeshift rope and clumsily crowd surfed to the sidewalk. They stayed close as they pushed through the crowd of Seventh Avenue. In the lead, Kristen drove past the currents of people and toward the mammoth body she knew lay to their south. They navigated the unruly sidewalk, littered with everything from broken benches to dented vendor kiosks and cracked cell phones. Here and there injured people lay curled on the pavement, crying out with their arms raised over their faces to fend off buffeting feet. Kristen held Madison’s forearm tightly as they pushed forward.