Mat opened the driver’s side door to his car and sat down to catch his breath. He took out his cell phone and called the local DAA office. Unsurprisingly, it rang unanswered until he hung up. He stared at his phone in frustration for a moment, then flinched as, in his peripheral vision, the Emissary’s bulk briefly came into view above the buildings. It was still blocks away, but this glimpse reminded Mat that whatever he was going to do, he needed to do it quickly.
The problem was that he had no idea what to do from here. He had come to help and been soundly rejected. All he had to pass on was an ultimatum: leave Seed’s minions unchecked for two weeks, absorb the loss of an American city, and then they would be allowed to sue for peace. He knew precisely how well that would be received.
As he sat there considering his options, his cell phone rang, a call from his office. He answered.
“Director Roche.”
“Director! Thank God.” It was Alan, one of the agents who worked for him at the Washington office. “We’ve been trying to reach you. Where are you?”
“Miami. Things haven’t gone well so far.”
“You’re still there? You need to get out.”
“Yeah, I know about the evacuation.” Mat came to a decision. Although he would have been able to make a more persuasive argument in person and with time to prepare, the Emissary’s demand was time-sensitive enough that it needed to be delivered now. “Listen, I need to talk to Administrator Akerman. Connect me to him, please.”
“No, you need to leave!”
“No?” repeated Mat in disbelief. “Then I’ll call him myself.”
“Don’t hang up! You need to leave! They’re—I can’t, I can’t say. But you need to get out now.”
“That’s not an option. My tires are flat.”
“Drive on them anyway! Get to safety now, Director.” Alan spoke urgently, panic lacing the edge of his voice.
Mat started the car even as he tried to talk his subordinate down. “I’ve spoken to the Emissary. It’s willing to negotiate. This is bad, but it’s not unfixable.”
“Yes, it is,” insisted Alan. “Director, Administrator Akerman spoke to the president earlier. The president. And that’s why you need to leave. Now.”
Mat put the phone on speaker and set it on the passenger’s seat as he attempted to wrestle the car through a three-point turn. It swerved erratically, responding to the steering wheel more as a suggestion than a command. After managing to get the car pointed in the correct direction, Mat drove once more over the spiked rope and back the way he had come.
“I’m working on leaving,” Mat said. “Your message has been delivered. Now, I have one I need to deliver, too. Put me through to Akerman.”
Mat heard a sigh, and then the phone rang loudly as Alan initiated the transfer. Mat frowned. Whatever Alan was hinting at, hopefully he’d still be in time to stop it. That was, of course, assuming that he could get Akerman to agree to the Emissary’s demand, which was far from a given.
“DAA, Administrator Akerman’s office,” came a female voice.
“Claire? This is Director Roche. I need to speak to Akerman, please. This is urgent.” The car swerved and lurched like a poorly-broken horse, but Mat kept his speed low and managed to keep control as he steered carefully along the empty streets. Bits of rubber tore free from his tires and tumbled haphazardly along the street in his wake.
“Connecting you. Just a minute.”
A moment passed, and then a man’s voice: “Mat? Good to hear from you, son.”
“Linus! Listen, I’d rather not do this over the phone, but I spoke to the Emissary.”
“No time for that. Are you still in Miami?”
“Yes, but—”
“Get out of there. Are you north or south of the Emissary?”
“North—”
“Good. Keep going, fast as you can. Don’t stop for anything.”
“Sir, I don’t know what you’re planning, but it’s not necessary! The Emissary’s willing to negotiate!” More or less, Mat added mentally, but he could fill in those details later.
Akerman laughed, a humorless bark. “Bit late for that, son. He’s not going to be doing much negotiating in an hour or so.”
Dread started to form in Mat, a solid mass in the pit of his stomach. “What are you planning to do? The only way you could have something here in an hour is if—”
Akerman cut him off. “Loose lips sink ships, and all that. Just keep moving.”
“But he’s willing to negotiate!” Mat said desperately.
“The US government does not negotiate with terrorists,” Akerman told him. “And don’t tell me this isn’t terrorism. What else could it possibly be?”
Retribution, thought Mat, but before he could say anything his car was struck on the passenger’s side by another vehicle. Mat went careening into a spin as his airbags deployed, totally obscuring his vision. The seatbelt bit deeply into his shoulder, holding him firmly in place. His phone, without any such support, flew across the car to smash against the door panel.
The smell of fireworks stung Mat’s nose as he punched his way free of the airbag, unbuckled his seatbelt and stumbled out into the street. In the middle of the intersection sat another car, its left front corner smashed to pieces. Fluids were running rapidly into the street, making an iridescent puddle. It was clear that both cars were totaled.
A man stood beside the car, hitting the hood with his fist and repeating, “No, no, no, no!”
Mat took him by the shoulder. “Come on. We need to go.”
He turned the man north, but the man swatted his hand away. “No! I have to go. I have to get my wife.”
“There’s no time!” called Mat, but the man was already running away to the west, limping slightly as he went. Mat thought about chasing after him, but instead began running himself, heeding Akerman’s advice and heading north. He wondered if the man had another car at home. If he did, and his home wasn’t far, he might yet make it. Mat consoled himself with that idea, until he remembered the person he’d left hiding in the tailor’s shop. His mind then flashed to Dana, to the mingled look of fear and hope he’d seen on her face just seconds before she was ripped apart by the crystal detonation. That in turn brought up the image of Marc, his face swelling and distending horribly as he became a living bomb.
These thoughts haunted Mat as he ran, lending speed to his steps. He ran without any idea of where he was going or when he would get there, mindlessly following the directive to head north. He could hear horns from the backed-up freeway, getting closer as he approached the site of the jam. The street he was on remained quiet, though, free of both people and Nevermen.
It was unnerving to be so alone. Mat had a horrible idea that if he looked back, he would see a horde of Nevermen running behind him, silently focused and steadily gaining ground. He knew it was ridiculous, but he still didn’t look back.
He ran until, without warning, the buildings ahead of him lit up like the sun, blinding him with their reflected glare. He stumbled, shielding his eyes, and then a wave of hot air washed over him just as the ground shook. An earth-shattering rumble pulsed through him, knocking him to the ground and reverberating in his bones. Mat looked back, blinking through the afterimages of the buildings, to see a large section of Miami on fire and a mushroom-shaped cloud rising into the sky.
“They couldn’t have,” he said in disbelief. “They couldn’t have!”
He reached for his phone, then realized he’d left it in the car. Cursing, Mat picked himself up off of the ground and began to run again, this time veering east toward where he’d heard the car horns. They’d stopped now, awed into silence by the blast, but Mat was sure that the traffic was still there. He wasn’t even sure what he needed from them at this point, except perhaps to know that other people had also survived the nuclear blast.
Behind him, Miami burned. The attack had been devastatingly effective, like chemotherapy destroying surrounding healthy cells in order to weaken the ca
ncer hiding within. Where the Emissary had been—where most of downtown Miami had been—was only a radioactive crater.
Mat could practically hear the Administrator’s voice in his head. “Desperate times call for desperate measures, son.” He just couldn’t believe that it had actually come to this.
The buzz from the crowd of reporters, already diminished from its standard volume, dropped away entirely as the president walked onto the stage. His usual energy was absent, and he moved in a somber, measured gait like a pallbearer at a funeral. He stopped behind the lectern and looked out into the crowd for a long moment before speaking. The cameras broadcast this across the world, the image of a man who had been given a terrible task and who had executed it dutifully.
“People of America,” he began at last. His voice was quiet but firm, striking exactly the right note for the occasion. “Today, America has suffered a terrible tragedy. A terrorist attack on one of our cities has led to an unimaginable result. Many of you have seen the images broadcast from Miami earlier today. The augmented individual known as Seed, long allowed to keep to himself in the Everglades, rose up and attacked the city. The death toll is not known, but it is at least in the hundreds. Hundreds of your fellow citizens were murdered by this terrorist, with a stated goal of claiming the entire city as his own.
“Through the brave actions of our police, firefighters and National Guard, the majority of the city was evacuated. Without these heroic men and women, this attack would have been far worse. They jeopardized their own safety in order to ensure the safe passage of a city’s worth of men, women and children. My thanks, and the thanks of the nation, go out to them.
“Seed is classified as an Augment 5 Alchemist, subclass Midas. He possesses the ability to alter his environment to suit him, and he changes both living creatures and nonliving objects around him. Miami was becoming irreversibly tainted by his touch. And so I gave an order no American president has ever before had to consider. By my command, we have detonated a nuclear bomb on American soil.”
Although this was already well-known, nevertheless a murmur ran through the room. It was different hearing it directly from the president. There was no chance that there had somehow been a misunderstanding, a miscommunication. This made it all real beyond any shadow of a doubt.
The president waited for the vocal ripple to subside, then continued. “This was no easy decision. History will judge me for it, and we can only wait and see whether it judges me kindly. You, the American people, have entrusted me with your protection, and today that was no easy job. But painful though this action was, it was successful. Seed was eliminated in the blast. The threat has ended.
“We will rebuild. Although the fallout cannot be prevented, the attack was delivered in a way intended to minimize it. There will be environmental repercussions. There will be social pressures as we attempt to house half a million displaced people. I ask you for your patience and your kindness in this time. Remember that these are Americans just like you. Many of them have lost everything. Make them welcome. Share your cities. Treat them as you would want to be treated if you were in their place.
“We are already working on a recovery plan to clean and contain the radioactive material. We will restore this. We will rebuild. And we will come out stronger than ever before.
“We are America.”
The president paused, aware that despite the power of his speech, he was starting to lose his audience. The room was becoming distracted, small pockets of reporters turning to each other and discussing something in whispers. It spread rapidly, the whispers rising to a babble. Finally, one reporter waved his phone in the air and called out, “Mr. President, you should see this.”
It had started slowly at first. Buried under the rubble of toppled buildings, a pea-sized piece of cement shifted. Something oozed from beneath it, something miniscule and purple. It flowed smoothly over the ground, deforming itself to pass over and around obstacles, until it encountered another purple globule. Like two water drops meeting on a sheet of glass, they seamlessly merged into one.
Across the crater that had been Miami, this process repeated itself in hundreds of places. Thumbnail-sized drops combined with each other until they were the size of golf balls. The golf balls slurped together into gelatinous bowling balls. It was at this point that the news drones first caught sight of what was happening, and began to focus in. One remote-controlled drone buzzed low, following one of these rolling blobs, broadcasting the news of its discovery to the world.
The process accelerated, the larger pieces moving faster and covering more ground, slamming into each other to rise up into a single solid lump the size of a man, then the size of a car, then the size of a bus. The news drones fell back, not to avoid danger but simply to keep the entire shape in their view. They hovered as close as they could, though, eager to get the best shot. Ordinarily their operators would have been told to avoid risking such expensive equipment, but none of these drones were ever returning from the fallout zone in any case.
Even so, their operators believed them to be safely outside of the reach of the towering blob, now over ten feet tall and still reabsorbing more of its mass. And so it was a surprise when one long cilium whipped out and lassoed a drone, dragging it close. The camera view wheeled and spun, flashing past a wall of translucent, pulsing purple and panning past a quick shot of the other news drones before being dragged down the street at a surprising rate of speed.
The other drones followed like a pack of hungry dogs, their captured compatriot now just another part of the emerging story. They beamed out their images as the blob slid down the street, forced itself under a fallen wall and began to hurl debris out of the way. Its target was revealed in less than a minute of digging, as a bloody and battered arm waved feebly from the ground.
If the man thought he was being rescued, however, his relief was short-lived. No sooner had the blob freed him from the building pinning him down than it snatched him up, holding him aloft in its cilia like a triumphantly displayed trophy. He screamed, the quick movements clearly torture for his broken body, and the cameras captured his agony and terror. They caught what happened next, too, as the blob retracted its cilia and drew the screaming man deep into its mass.
Across the nation, people watched the live broadcast, horrified. The drones’ streams were going out unedited on every channel and across the internet. And while most showed only a distant view of an indistinct struggling figure, the blob took the drone it had captured and held it just outside of its body, its camera pointed directly at the terrified man’s face. The camera was shaky and the picture angled and badly framed, but it showed the crystals bursting through the man’s skin even as he struggled, suffocated and died.
Several minutes later, the blob split open and dropped the newly made Neverman onto the pavement. It struggled to stand on its broken legs, then sank back as the blob’s needle-thin hairs pierced its neck and wormed their way inside.
From its heap on the ground, the Neverman looked up at the wall of purple ooze towering above, and the drones hovering above that. It then swung its eyes down to stare the captured drone in the face.
“You,” it began, drooling blood and ichor. Its voice was understandable, but only barely. “Have shown me your might. And failed.
“You have tried to kill my Emissary. And failed.
“Now I will show you my might. I will not fail.
“I am Seed. This country is mine. This country will be me.
“I will have peace.”
The feed from the captured drone cut out at that point, as the Emissary tightened its grip and crushed it like a gnat. The Emissary then seized the Neverman lying at its feet and hurled it at the remaining drones, a living, snarling missile. It smashed into one, its grasping hands entangling in the drone’s rotors, and brought it crashing to the ground. Two more of the drones collided as their operators steered into each other trying to escape, leaving only one filming. It zoomed around, getting one final shot of the n
ow two-story-tall Emissary before a lightning-fast tendril whipped out and snapped the drone cleanly in two.
The reporters were shouting an endless din of questions, struggling to be heard over each other. The president stood like a rock in an angry sea, stolidly waiting as the waves washed over him. Finally they subsided enough for individual questions to be heard.
“Mr. President, what does this mean?”
“You saw the same footage I did. Our attack was not successful.”
“What will you do next?” This one from another corner of the room, the reporters still verbally jostling each other for place.
“My advisors are already convening. I will join them shortly. We will succeed.”
The questions came fast and furious. “What if you don’t?” “Is the Emissary radioactive now?” “What’s your next move?” “Are more evacuations needed?”
One question cut through the din. “What about Retroactivity?”
The president pointed to that reporter, a woman near the front. “We’re considering asking him, yes.”
“Asking him? It’s an open secret that half of the government is beholden to him anyway,” she replied. “Why not just put him in charge and have done with it?”
The president turned away to take other questions. The reporter’s question had been heard and broadcast, however, and many people repeated her words to themselves and nodded in agreement.
XV
“So as you can see, everything was proceeding perfectly.”
“Are you sure you’re all right, Director Roche?” asked Agent Garcia. She frowned at him critically, looking for any signs of damage.
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