And then the wave of electricity courses through me and knocks any sensation and confidence from me in an instant. Li’s body explodes off me as if loaded with springs in each of his ligaments. In the split second that he decides to electrify his own self, the bat no longer is effective at dissipating his own electric current. I find myself experiencing the sensation of a thousand tasers driving into my skin simultaneously.
The convulsions are instantaneous. I start screaming in agony, the pain overriding all of my attempts to stand up and swing at Li once again. I feel the bat leave my hands as someone picks it up from my body that is in the middle of a seizure that only from observing it will give its onlookers some form of trauma.
My heart races in my chest as my breaths become shorter and more frantic. My entire body is collapsing from the inside out while the exterior of my skin feels like it has been set ablaze by the electric current.
There is no way I am getting out of this and somehow defeating Li. The tiny pebbles that fall from the sheets of rock on the walls now turn to small boulders that fall with increasing intensity. In minutes, my body will be covered.
Jake and Ai better do something. Jake and Ai better make sure Li doesn’t get that cube. I cough as the agony decreases a bit, yet the shock from the interaction still has my body frozen and unresponsive to any of my commands to get up and get moving.
I can’t let my father die in vain.
I hear Li say something in the monotone voice of his translator, but the current of electricity has left a weird feeling of static and odd buzzing in my ears. Even if I can get up now, part of me doesn’t want to. I know Li will shock me again. My job is done. I did everything I could do. I don’t have the cube anymore.
I can’t do anything to save China. I can’t do anything to save myself.
Right as I close my eyes, getting ready to enter a state of Zen where I can imagine the sea of rocks and dirt about to flood over me as nothing more than droplets of rain, I feel two hands on my shoulders. They forcefully pick me up, and with a lack of resistance in my muscles, I have no choice but to capitulate to their force.
“Hold on!” I hear someone scream in my ears, a voice I discern to be that of Ai. I wrap my arms around her body, my hands fitting right in the space between the arch of her back and butt. On my hands I feel the pressure of an object pressing against her back, and in a quick instant I finally recognize what it is.
She has a jetpack on her back.
We are headed up to the surface. We are headed away from Li. We might make it out of this alive.
But the hundreds of millions of Chinese in peril during the aftershocks won’t.
The earthquake is here.
Chapter 15
I know I’m dramatic at times, but my anxiety is so intense that I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy. I am currently holding on to Ai’s waist for dear life as we rocket straight up through the pitch-black hole. Hundreds of pieces of rock and dirt pass by me as we continue our desperate ascent to the surface.
The entire elevator shaft leading to the nuclear test site thousands of feet into the Earth is caving in. Every second we stay in this shaft without getting out is one second nearer to us all being buried in thousands of pounds of stone and rubble for eternity.
With the darkness omnipresent, it is hard to discern whether we are only a few hundred feet from the surface, or if we still have thousands of feet left to break through to the highest room in the oil rig that has blocked any light from extending into the dark shaft. All it will take is one large chunk of rock smashing into our heads to knock us unconscious and make any altitude we gain with the help of the jetpack useless. Or better yet, the rock could cause me to lose my grip on Ai, causing me to plummet to the layer of rocks coating the glass floor thousands of feet beneath us. The last light I would see would be that of the exhaust coming from the jetpacks and the last person who would see me is the body of Li that will likely dance on my dead body until the earth has piled on top of it.
I’m not worried about me surviving, though.
I’m worried about the Chimera Cube.
I initially hoped Ai had it in her hands, but it becomes apparent after I feel her hands wrap around my back that she doesn’t have it.
Jake still has the Chimera Cube. Yet Jake is still down at the bottom of the shaft, his body unable to be distinguished from the darkness. If he can’t get out with it alive, then I might as well be dead too.
I don’t want to live in a world where the power of that cube is absent from my hands and present in the hands of someone like Li. I don’t want to live in a world where the legacy of Isaac Savery and the legacy of my own father will be weaponized into a series of decisions that could destroy humanity.
I need that cube. It is more important than my life. It is more important than everything. It is our only chance at making sure that the tens of millions bound to die in this disaster don’t turn to billions.
I scream, my words muffled by Ai’s chest which my head is buried in. The sensation of her breasts against my face is something that I have dreamt of experiencing many times before this instant and is something my thirteen-year-old self would have dreamed about for years to come, but now the interaction gives me no pleasure. The only thing I feel is terror.
Terror from the fact that everything is out of my control.
I don’t have the Chimera Cube.
And there’s not a thing I can do to save it.
The chunks of rock turn to large boulders that pound against my head, threatening to knock me unconscious. It takes all the strength I have to continue holding on to Ai, yet the fact that my muscles still feel fried from the shocks of electricity certainly don’t help my cause. Top that off with the fact that our bullet-proof suits that work to dull the impact of the rocks also make it so that we have virtually no friction when grasping onto each other and we have a truly lethal combination.
In moments past, this combination would be something that I could easily overcome. And I don’t say this arrogantly, but when you have the weight of the world on your shoulders and feel it all crashing down, your body knows you have no choice but to stay strong. But now I don’t feel that anymore. Now I know that if I die, my life isn’t factored into some sort of logical equation where sacrificing myself will lead to millions being saved in the future.
Without the Chimera Cube, I am nothing. Or at least it feels that way. And my will to live, my will to keep persisting under the weight of thousands of pounds of rock doesn’t feel strong enough.
Ai doesn’t say anything in response to my inaudible screams. There is no reason for her to anyways. She keeps her arms wrapped tightly around me, both our bodies intertwined in the weirdest yet most intimate hug as the jetpack continues to propel us upward. I don’t need any light to know we are getting closer to the surface. The source of the very rumbling shaking the entire shaft and causing it to cave in on itself is growing closer.
Then we finally make it to the surface.
I hope to be welcomed by warm rays of sunlight and teams of Syndicate operatives helping us into a helicopter to cart us away to safety. It takes me a moment to realize that no one is coming. We have no way out of this. There are currently hundreds if not thousands of military vehicles headed to our exact location as we bump up against the ceiling of the same dark room that we entered the building through.
No longer do we have the Chimera Cube to conjure up a magical object that can kill everyone in sight and shield us from death. It’s just me, Ai, our bullet-proof suits and our jetpack that can easily be converted into a bomb if the fuel tank explodes.
To put it lightly, we are fucked.
“Let’s get outside.” She keeps her arms wrapped around me as our heads collide into the metal roof of the oil rig. The collision jars Ai, the top of her head connecting with the metal first as our motion shifts from dozens of miles per hour in an upward direction to being stuck in midair with a thick sheet of metal blocking us.
Her v
oice is airy, the tension in her body dissipating for a brief moment as she battles the urge to pass out. I battle the same urge, and with the ebony encasing my vision, it only intensifies the power of that wave of sensation. The glass windows that let in light from the outside when we first entered are now tinted black. The only visible light protrudes from the hole the impossible knife cut in the roof and the trail of flames pumping out the end of the jetpack.
Otherwise, nothing but darkness infests the air. I make the mistake of briefly looking down. The hole seems to have a gravity of its own. A cold breeze tugs me downward, tantalizing me to let go of Ai, give my arm muscles a rest, and finally give in to the beast that is this unrelenting world.
The darkness has a distinct character to it, an invisible force that works to shake the sides of the piping and force chunks of rock en masse down the shaft to collect on the bottom. Somewhere deep down in the shaft I can see a faint light that vaguely looks like the exhaust of a jetpack, but I am forced to look away before I can find out if I’m delusional or not.
Jake has a long way to go if he has a shot at living.
But we have a chance at seeing the sunlight again before the Chinese military strips our lives away from us. Ai takes that chance without me having to do a thing.
She takes one hand off my back and uses it to push across the roof to the opening in it. The second we are finally directly underneath the hole, she wraps her arm around me again and the jetpack shoots us into the sky above the oil rig. In the relatively short time that we spent in that oil rig and underneath the earth, the smoke and debris have not dissipated much.
The heavy cloud of black smoke and particulates still hangs in the air, blocking out most sunlight and instantly irritating my lungs. There isn’t a swarm of soldiers waiting for us on the roof, firing machine guns at us like I expected. And there isn’t a swarm of helicopters surrounding the oil rig, all preparing to shoot missiles at us.
Instead, everything is eerily silent. The reverberations within the oil rig are impossible to hear or feel out here, and in the aftermath of the collapsed oil rig, there is nothing more than the sound of waves crashing against what is left of the rig to accompany my heavy breaths.
All the soldiers in the area must be dead from the collapse or have fled due to the impending explosion that they thought would cause a massive tsunami. Looks like the electromagnetic pulse was actually effective after all. Except it does nothing to help us live beyond this moment, and it did nothing to save any of the millions of lives in peril.
“What are we doing?” I scream at Ai, who is still holding on to me as we continue rocketing through the sky. Within seconds we are dozens of feet above the oil rig, the density of the smoke in the air increasing with our height as the worst of the smoke and dust migrates upward in the air where it will eventually diffuse completely.
“We have nowhere to go but up,” Ai says, her voice ringing in my ear. That may be the most ironic thing anyone has ever said to me in my life. Yet she is right. We have one shot at living, and that is getting out of the airspace and out of sight from any of the naval ships on the ground or helicopters in the air. We can use the cloud of debris that extends thousands of feet in the air as a protective shield of sorts, and once flying through the cloud, we may be able to shift direction and see if we can land on an island somewhere out in the middle of the East China Sea.
Never mind, who am I kidding? That idea is crazy.
We won’t survive for a day out here on an island. I won’t be able to make it an hour knowing that the Chimera Cube is in the hands of Li and will only be used to ensure that the infrastructure of China in the process of being leveled will remain destroyed.
I can’t witness what is about to happen.
I can’t live in a world that is falling apart, knowing that I was the one who failed to save it.
“Stop going up, what the hell are you doing?” I squeeze Ai even tighter, my nails digging into her back as a large spaceship-looking aircraft comes into view. As we continue to soar through the sky thousands of feet above the ocean, the white exterior to the aircraft grows closer. The rays of sunlight that manage to penetrate through the upper layer of smoke reflect off the aircraft, causing it to have a heavenly glow.
“That’s not the Chinese military,” Ai says, her tone about as confident as I would be if reciting Newton’s Third Law to a stranger. “They always have that bright red color and the same yellow symbol that everything in the imperial army has inscribed on it.”
Ai sounds right. In fact, I hope she is right, but part of me wants to let go and let my body fall back down onto the oil rig. Part of me won’t trust the world no matter how obvious something may seem. I’d rather die by my own volition than have Li rip my life away from me.
My depressing thought is at first nothing more than an empty desire. But as we close in on the aircraft, the idea becomes more of a reality. I struggle to hold on to Ai. The air resistance pushing down our bodies is growing so intense that it hurts as Ai presses a button on the back of the jetpack that causes us to fly even faster through the sky.
I look down, trying to see if Jake’s body is somewhere down in the depths of the black smoke, but even if he did miraculously make it out of the rig in time, it’s impossible to see anything with all of the smoke. It’s almost impossible to breathe. My eyes are watering from the particulates and dust seeping through the pores in the suit and my lungs burn as I hold in a violent cough from erupting out of me. I know the second that I cough, I may very well lose control of the tension in my muscles keeping me tied to Ai.
“I don’t know how to stop this thing.” Ai panics. She has one arm around me as the other one fumbles around on the control pad on her jetpack, trying to guess from touch which one will bring the engine to a stop. If we continue rocketing upward, we will blow right past the aircraft and enter the upper layers of Earth’s atmosphere until we eventually come crashing back down.
I can’t die like that. A vision flashes through my mind as I imagine what the sensation of falling tens of thousands of feet to our death would be like. Out of every way to die, that may be the very worst one. Falling from the greatest apex my body will ever reach as the entire world falls along with it.
I can’t let this end like that.
“I’ll find it,” I scream, my voice unable to be heard with the wind if I don’t yell into her chest. “Hold on to me tight!”
I close my eyes, trying to stomach a nauseating sensation that boils deep inside me. The strap from the jetpack tied around Ai’s waist will keep the jetpack strapped to her body, but there is nothing keeping me in place but Ai’s arms, which are likely as tired and dehydrated as mine.
In about five seconds we will be above the aircraft and forced to either fall back down to be at the same altitude, or our hopes at surviving will be done for. I use every bit of those five seconds to find the familiar texture of the button I remember pressing with Jake when fleeing the Chinese military the first time (this is a common theme in our life) to first decelerate and then turn the engine off.
My memory serves me well, despite my inner thighs on the verge of herniating as I wrap my legs around Ai, desperately doing everything I can to hold on. I find the right button as we are a few dozen feet below the aircraft.
I try to redirect our bodies so that we can fly to the side of it, but as we change our trajectory, the aircraft hovers to move right above us. The bottom of the aircraft opens up, revealing a row of fluorescent lights that line the ceiling.
There’s no way to know if it is a Chinese military aircraft undercover, whether it is the United States government, or if it’s the Syndicate. All sound terrible. And without the Chimera Cube, they are all likely to kill us.
But we can’t do anything to avoid it.
As we decelerate, the aircraft begins to take up our entire vision. If I had found the button earlier, there is a chance we could have decelerated enough in time to switch directions and fly as fast as possible away fr
om the aircraft. But by the time we stop moving, we are already inside the aircraft, our two bodies fitting in the open hatch at the bottom that is likely used to deploy packages and weapons.
I finally let go of Ai as the engines of the jetpack come to a halt right before we smash into the row of lights on the ceiling of the aircraft. It doesn’t take long for gravity to win out, and as soon as I let go of Ai, I feel a dull pain. My fried nerves are barely able to register the sensation of the cold metal floor beneath me, the bottom of the aircraft closing up as quickly as it opened.
My mind is spinning, my vision is blurry, and despite the fact that I am safe compared to a few moments ago, I could not be more terrified.
I don’t have the strength to lift my head up and look at the people who surround me, but as I lay down on the floor next to Ai, the both of us out of breath and hyperventilating, I can’t help but think of Jake.
He is still out there.
He still has the cube.
I fight back tears as his warm laugh and infectious smile overcome my mind. I should be in his place. I should be the one who is dead.
But Li won instead.
Chapter 16
“Get this robot away from me.” I push its body to the side, the soft skin coating its exterior feeling strangely human. Although the humanoids that Li’s conscious controls are hyper-realistic, the human features that many robots display if one pays the right price are striking.
“You need water,” Justin says. He is standing next to the uncomfortable rubber cot that my body was dragged to. I am at one corner of the aircraft while Ai is at the other corner, both of us being attended to by a staff of robot nurses that even most centimillionaires could not afford.
“I’m fine!” I sit up. Within seconds of me lying on that floor I realized that this aircraft belonged to the Syndicate, which I am still unsure if it’s a good thing or not.
Only a minute has passed since the team of robots forcefully picked up my squirming body from the ground and placed me on this cold, rough cot. They have since ripped off my bullet-proof vest, jammed an IV into my arm, all while one is in the process of scanning my body for wounds and infections. I could have fought back harder and prevented them from stripping me down into the same sweaty, blood-stained clothes I have worn for over a day, but when they held up a new pair of clothes for me to wear, a plain gray hoodie with baggy sweatpants, I couldn’t resist. It feels good to be out of my old clothes and to let my skin breathe again, but that is about the only good news I have to report.
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