But all the pain feels trivial compared to what I just witnessed.
“Twenty-five thousand pounds of bombs,” I spit out, my lungs almost shriveling up before I can get the words out. I have no clue how much explosive damage that number of bombs will deal. But as I continue to fly upward, the nanobots forming the bombs below me, I feel a surge of excitement course through me as I picture each one of the Li clones falling to the earth.
Within a few seconds the bombs are made, their insides packed with gunpowder, shrapnel, and lots of lighter fluid that will all create a firework show of death once they hit the ground.
Only a few short moments later, that’s exactly what happens. I am unable to see the destruction due to the fact that I am now thousands of feet above the city, the smoke becoming less concentrated as the peaks of the mountains on Hong Kong Island poke through the blackness.
But I can hear the moment when the chanting of the Li clones stops, and a deafening bang takes its place.
The sound of the explosion is somewhat muffled by the time it hits me, but nothing is more beautiful than the silence that follows.
I scream at the top of my lungs as I shift the direction of my flight path to exit the wall of smoke that has absorbed most of the sky. It feels almost as good to save people as it does to kill a bunch of the clones of President Li Wang.
The high of revenge fades almost immediately, though, and the sick, heavy feeling of the smoke and radiation settles into my lungs.
The Chimera Cube is really good at helping people. But it is even better at killing people.
There are a million more of those Li clones left, but those people will never get their lives back. I failed to save this city, and I’m not sure I can save this country either.
And that thought alone makes me want to ride this jetpack away into outer space, where no one will ever find me.
Chapter 20
I think I’m losing it.
Oh, who am I kidding? I lost it a long time ago, now I’m afraid I’ll never be able to find myself again. I’m trapped in the trauma, my brain still feeling like it is buried dozens of feet underneath the rubble. I was running through the woods for five hours straight, using the Chimera Cube to chop down trees at will and scale up the steep cliffs of the mountain range.
But eventually the exhaustion hit me.
The flight on my jetpack to an island outside of the ring of smoke already was draining enough. With the struggle of combatting the smoke inhalation and the overwhelming rush of adrenaline at flying hundreds of miles per hour through the air, it took everything I had not to give up midair and let the exhaustion overcome me.
Upon landing in the middle of a forest on the island, just in time before the fuel on the jetpack ran out, I had a second breath of life infused into me. With the core of the destruction miles away and the thickness of the smoke not blocking out all sunlight, my mind effectively dissociated itself from the horrors of before. I was able to breathe in the relatively fresh air that smells of salt and wet dirt and channel all the anger inside me at the one man who caused this mess.
I channel my anger in ways that may seem psychotic to some and terrifying to others.
I command the Chimera Cube to create a large crater in the ground about the size of a typical home. Inside the crater I pile in weapons, including hundreds of knives, thousands of machine guns, an array of swords, and even some laser guns for good measure. I continue to command the cube to produce weapons until the hole is full of deadly machine guns and semi-automatic rifles poking out of the earth.
To see the arsenal makes me feel warm inside; it makes me feel a bit safer. But the moment I hear the faint buzzing of what sounds like a military drone hovering in the air above me, the paranoia hits a new level. A crater full of weapons in the middle of the woods on the side of a mountain isn’t enough. I need to make millions of weapons. I need to make millions of robots that will all fight for me.
So that’s exactly what I do.
I start with a thousand defense robots, the same ones that Chimera used all over its compounds in the States. Although I have internal beef with the big, bulky metal structures due to the fact they almost killed me, when they are on my side, nothing is better. Then I command the cube to make one thousand drones, all of them armed with advanced detection software and turrets on their bottoms.
In a matter of minutes, the once calm, uninhabited forest on the edge of a small island in the Hong Kong archipelago is turned into a madhouse. Thousands of drones hover through the trees, whizzing back and forth, the faint buzzing of their engines all combining into one cacophonous sound that causes every living animal in the forest to stir with anxiety.
The security robots stomp around, all of them not in attack mode, but the moment that one of the drones mistakes them for an enemy, I know we will have a war between the drones twenty feet in the air and the thousand robots roaming the earth below.
I finally realize how pointless this all is.
I can make a million robots, a billion rounds of ammo, and a thousand nukes, and it can’t change what just happened. Nothing I do can save all the people that just died. Even if I defeat Li, hundreds of millions of people will still be lost.
And that’s when I lose it.
All the emotion that I couldn’t let out during the few short hours I dug through that rubble, trying to save as many lives as fast as possible, hits me in one numbing wave. I shake uncontrollably as my heart pulsates in my chest faster than it did when I was in the middle of the force field battling the giant Lis.
“Chocolate bar,” I say to the Chimera Cube as I am lying down underneath the shade of a tree. I have my hazmat suit on to protect against the radiation, but at this point I couldn’t care less how the lethal rays cause my cells to mutate.
The bar is about a foot long and a few inches wide, and the moment that I sink its sugary goodness into my teeth, life feels great. That moment fades right after the sugary sensation melts in my mouth and I realize that nothing can take me away from the fact that I am in the middle of a forest off the coast of China alone, and with no option but to wait here for Li to kill me, try and take down the Chinese government myself, or wait for the Syndicate.
As messed up as this sounds, waiting for the secret organization of wealthy people that have been indirectly or directly responsible for killing almost everyone I love seems like my best option.
After about five minutes of waiting, I regret my decision. The shaking doesn’t get any better. Even as I pile food and water down my throat, the anxiety doesn’t ease up one bit. The visions of the bodies being thrown in the force field and the hundreds of people dying in a second from ginormous robot creatures shooting at them all hits me in a flash. The traumatic memories freshest in my mind are only a gateway to all the darkness that lies beneath. All the shit in my life that I try to compartmentalize so that I can function comes to surface in one terrible wave.
The massacre in the coliseum during the Charity Tournament for the victims of the Beijing bombing. The sight of Ai’s family all dead in caskets covered in feces. The stab wounds carved into Riva’s body, her glass eyes looking more like marbles than of a real human. And then of course there’s the moment when I decided to do the very same thing to the man that killed her in the first place.
And as much as I want to hate that moment, part of me will always long for the high of being able to see my enemy on the ground and cause then the same pain they caused me. In the end, it doesn’t make me feel any better about myself.
The high quickly dissipates and I feel like shit afterwards.
I feel like shit all these hours later.
I feel exhausted.
I feel like I’m falling apart.
And finally, that may be exactly what is happening.
I can’t keep living like this. I can’t keep barely surviving every day, witnessing one horror after the other. It has already corrupted my being beyond measure. It will already haunt my nightmares and daydream
s for the rest of my life.
I have nothing left to give.
Yet this fight is just the beginning.
This was only the first battle of the war.
We lost.
Wait, there was no “we” in that one. I lost.
I failed to defeat a bunch of robots even with a technology that allows me to manipulate subatomic particles and create virtually anything at will.
I lie back on the warm dirt beneath me and sigh. Taking a deep breath allows me to divorce myself from the thoughts spinning in my head for a brief moment and take in the beauty of my surroundings. The evening sun pierces through the tree canopy, the green, thin needles glowing with a heavenly aura in the light of the golden hour. When I stare up at the branches of the tall pines that line the hilly landscape of the island, I can’t help but feel that life may be better for the trees.
Yes, they don’t have it easy. Humans often cut them down without warning, and being outside in the middle of a storm sucks. But they don’t have to deal with an oppressive dictator hell-bent on getting revenge for their people. They don’t have to deal with manipulative trees trying to kill their offspring and steal their seeds.
They just exist.
And something is beautiful about that.
The thousands of robots and drones that have infested the landscape ruin my peaceful moment soon after it starts. A robot crashes into a hibiscus bush dozens of pinkish white flower petals falling to the ground as the robot storms through it like it’s nothing more than a small inconvenience in its path. All of them are programmed when there is no visible conflict to scour the area for data to pump into their machine learning algorithms in order to better be able to defend and attack in specific landscapes. There’s no way I can get these robots off this island.
I don’t even want to think about the day someone discovers this island infested with robots and drones and finds themselves dead for trespassing on their land. It’s way easier to think about the sensation of the small hairs of grass scratching my back that is devoid of both my bullet-proof shit and hazmat suit.
Fresh air feels nice even if it’s full of trace amounts of toxins and radiation.
The soft breeze blowing on shore from the sea and the warm, humid feel to the air all bring my nerves to a standstill. No longer am I hyperventilating with the visions of hell hijacking my consciousness. I finally have the strength to repress it all again, and I can’t help but think that maintaining this level of strength for the rest of my life will be challenging at best.
It’s challenging enough right now, and with the Chimera Cube safely strapped around my shoulders and resting on my stomach, I close my eyes and seek to drift into a deep sleep. Suddenly nothing else matters besides that, and my one desire is feeling the sensation of the darkness dragging my eyelids closed. No sleep for almost thirty-six hours is getting to me. The idea of somehow fighting Li in this condition is an impossible one—in fact, it hurts my mind to think about.
Yet, as I lie on the earth, waiting for the warm blanket of sleep to overcome my exhausted mind and body, the adrenaline is still flowing through me. It causes my heart to thump powerfully in my chest and keeps my senses alert even when I want them to shut down.
When I close my eyes, the only thing I see is Li.
The new version of himself that he unveiled today, his true self.
I see his young vibrant skin, his small yet pointy ears, his large, gray, bushy beard and the same chilling smile that will likely follow me to sleep every night for the rest of my life. In him I see all of the Uyghur people. I see the millions of lives killed at the center of his eyes, his people all wiped out in a matter of years because the government deemed it necessary and decided to brainwash the Chinese people.
For the first time I finally see him for who he is.
He’s a warrior. A fighter. Someone who wants to carry out the legacy of his own people in one of the cruelest ways possible, yet one that makes sense.
If I were in his position, I may just do the same thing.
If I were in his position, I may want to kill everyone in the world who let his own fall apart.
Hell, that’s exactly what I want to do. I want to get revenge on everyone who has ever hurt me and ensure the legacy of my father and of Isaac Savery will live on for generations.
And suddenly something finally makes sense to me.
The computer servers aren’t in Beijing. Li would never put the thing most precious to him in the capital of the country of the people that destroyed his people.
The servers are in the same places he showed me when he tortured me to try and get me to give up the Chimera Cube. The servers are in the heart of his homeland, likely in the capital of the Xinjiang province. He wants us to think they’re in Beijing. He wants the rén and everyone else to believe that to take down his regime, they have to destroy Beijing.
But it’s all a cover-up.
His home is in the Xinjiang province. And to kill his empire for once and all I have to burn his home down. I have to destroy every last thing in that province until there is nothing left of it, just like he did to the homes of hundreds of millions.
With that one thought, I will never be able to sleep again until I know Li is dead.
With that one thought, I have a sliver of hope, that maybe coming to Hong Kong was worth it. Maybe all these millions of people won’t die in vain.
Maybe I can use this cube to do something that only it could accomplish: destroying President Li for good.
Chapter 21
“What did you do?” Jake grabs my arm and helps me up into the open door of the aircraft.
“I was hanging out,” I say, refusing to make eye contact with him. Whenever I am ashamed of myself, I always let my eyes drift to the floor so that no one has to see my true expression of disappointment.
He doesn’t have to tell me that I failed.
I know I messed up. I managed to save a total of zero people. But that’s not the point.
Our mission is to take down the Party and destroy Li Wang. That will save hundreds of millions of the remaining people left in China and will prevent him from starting a world war. Winning this fight against Li is all that matters.
“Dude, there are like a thousand robots casually roaming around this island.” Jake narrows his eyes at me as the door closes behind me, leaving the smoke-filled air behind.
The intensity of the smoke in the sky and lack of civilization on the island meant that for a brief moment I was out of the prying eyes of Li.
That still didn’t stop me from worrying about an army of ginormous Lis invading the island, and despite my attempts to sleep, my brain remained impossible to shut down. The evening sun in the sky soon turned into a flash of oranges and reds and then it faded, giving way to the darkness. Eventually darkness gave way to light again and a large shadow was cast from the morning sun shining against the opposite side of the tree-covered mountaintop behind me.
The entire time I lay on the ground, motionless, my body in a weird limbo where I am both too tired to move and get up but too tired to sleep, my consciousness only able to handle a few minutes of rest before the anxiety forces me back awake. Well, in all honesty, I could have managed to stand up and walk around, but the terror has a way of weighing down my chest, the pressure having a poignant reminder with the weight of the Chimera Cube resting on me.
I knew that getting up would be useless. I’d only increase the chances of a Chinese drone hovering in the sky finding me and decrease the amount of energy I have to kill Li. I had to wait for the Syndicate. And they arrived right at the twenty-four-hour mark, just as promised.
They had no problem finding me. They have tiny trackers embedded into me for the rest of my existence.
That one thought is frightening enough, but it’s the smile on Drew’s face when I step into the plane that scares me even more.
“That was actually a great guess.” I grin at Jake, who is both too surprised and confused by the situation
to even react. I am pretty confused myself, but I know enough about dealing with the Syndicate that asking why Drew is smiling and why there is nothing in the interior of the aircraft but blank, dark black walls and a few seats bolted into the floor is pointless. They will only tell me what they want me to know. “There are exactly one thousand robots on the island.”
The moment I turn forward to see who else is in the aircraft, I feel Ai’s arms wrap around me. She runs up to me out of nowhere and embraces me. It feels good to be in her arms, and even better to know that she and Jake made it out of these last twenty-four hours alive.
I have no idea what the Syndicate did to them, but the thought of them being alone with these evil people without the Chimera Cube is about the scariest thing in the world.
“I thought you were gonna be dead when we found you. I’m so happy you made it.” Ai sounds more relieved than she does excited, and when she sighs, I can feel the tension in her body leaving along with the air in her nostrils.
“See this?” I look at Jake, who is staring at me, a spaced- out look in his eyes. “This is the hello I deserved.”
“Sorry. It was just a little odd to see you in the middle of a colony of robots. I didn’t even think that was real for a second.” Jake smiles, but it looks forced. The color is drained from his face, and from the way he has a hand on his stomach, it looks like he is about to throw up. That doesn’t stop him from stepping forward and wrapping his arms around me and Ai to form a group hug.
After about a second he looks uncomfortable.
“Why do you always hug in situations like this when it’s so hard to even say hello without just losing it?” Jake asks. His energy is different than before. Something about him seems more distant, even disconnected from the world around him.
“Because for a brief moment it makes me feel normal again.” As I say the words, they both nod and I sigh. I might never hug another human again, so I might as well enjoy this one while it lasts.
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