Departure(70)
He slides the door open, and I take off, running full on across the room.
He turns just in time to see me charging for him. There’s horror on his face.
He opens his arms a second before I reach him, bear-hugging me as I bowl us both over the rail of the balcony.
Time stops.
The air grows colder as we fall, flying toward the jagged valley floor. The hotel tower is just left of the middle tower and the wide waterfall below, but we’ll miss it. We’ll hit the hard, rocky bottom.
He pushes back so he can see me. The shock is gone. There’s no horror on his face. A sad smile spreads across it. Then he hugs me tight. Behind my back, I feel him fidgeting with his hands, tapping his forearm, still bear-hugging me.
We move in the air. The pack on his back sputters, slowing us.
A spray of cold water assaults me, pelting my body. The waterfall. He almost loses his grip, but the pack sputters more, and he pulls me tight. His somber grin turns triumphant.
He’s slowing us down.
I reach back, fighting his hands—
39
They call it the Palm. I call it hell.
A seven-story mall with a wide-open space in the center, a round granite fountain on the ground floor. The statue in the center of the fountain features a smiling Oliver and Nicholas, their arms raised, hands intertwined on the day Titan City opened, the day they revealed their immortality. It lies in pieces where bodies have pummeled it, some falling from a single story up, others from the second, third, fourth, and fifth stories—each level we’ve taken. We’ve paid for every inch with lives, our blood spilled here, some deposited in the now-red water of the fountain.
Mike, Oliver, Grayson, and I reach the sixth floor and retreat into an abandoned shop. Glass trinkets—molds of the Gibraltar Dam, the faces of the first hundred Titans—line the glass shelves. It’s weird, seeing glass replicas of my face in all sizes staring back at me. I took a shot to the arm on the third floor, but I’ve tied my arm to my body, and I think I’m okay otherwise.
For the last hour, it’s been a deadly game of hide-and-seek. We make a move up the grand, helix-shaped stairway, take a floor, then recede into the shadows of the dark shops, hoping they’ll come after us. We harass them with fire until they do, or until we think they’ve retreated enough to take another level.
We’re a distraction force. An attempt to buy time.
At the turbines in the power plant, Nicholas saved us all with some quick thinking and a few well-placed charges. Three of us were lost to the turbines’ blades, but the bulk of our force made it through. All the lower levels of the power station were booby-trapped. We lost half our remaining number down in the cramped bowels of that place. We left bombs of our own, though, our backup plan. We’ll take this dam down if we have to—anything to destroy Yul’s quantum devices and prevent the other faction from resetting the bridge, sending Flight 305 back to 2014, dooming the world we came from to repeat the mistakes made here. Those are the stakes.
But Nicholas has a plan. If it succeeds, we won’t need the charges below.
At the base of the Palm, Nicholas laid out the last details of the mission. I thought they were brilliant. He took two Titans, his best, apparently, and split from us, making his way to the Titan apartments, where he believes the device will be hidden. They know this place like the back of their hand (pun sort of intended); the best we can do is buy him time. We’ve certainly been paying for it. We’re down to just the four of us, and no one is in good shape.
I hope Nicholas finds the device soon, and we can get out of this place. Leaving the way we came, via the power plant, we risk hitting more booby traps. The consensus is, we make it to the top, to the promenade on the Atlantic side, and then dive, using the packs to pull us through the ocean to safety. Once Nicholas has what we came for, we’re home free. Just have to hold out, distract them a little longer, wait for the signal from Nicholas.
The four of us shed our helmets on the lower levels after they stopped working. Our suits are fried, shot to pieces.
Oliver has a hand-held device, a backup link that shows Nicholas’s location. Oliver checks it every few minutes, letting us all follow along. Nicholas finished the search of the apartments a half hour ago; now he’s moving up the hotel tower, hopefully closing in on the device.
I slump behind a counter, let my back fall against it, and lay my rifle across my legs.
Grayson collapses next to me. “How you doing?”
“Peachy. You?”
“Been better.” He lets the hand he’s been holding against his stomach fall forward, revealing a deep gash. Blood fills his palm in the few seconds it lies open.
Crap.
Pings. Metal on marble, like a ball bouncing.
“Stun grenade!” Mike yells.
Oliver, Grayson, and I duck our heads and cover our ears. I squeeze my eyes shut, but the blast is still overwhelming, a wave that slams into me, pulverizing my hearing and sight.
I’m vaguely aware of Mike reaching up, plopping his rifle on the glass-topped counter, and pulling the trigger, his head held below, firing indiscriminately, hoping to repel any forces rushing in after the blast.
Twinkling sounds, faint, like someone playing a tiny piano at the bottom of a well. It’s the glass from the shelves and the tall window panels shattering, falling on the marble floor, a sea of shards from us to the open area and stairwell. My hearing normalizing, I can just make out shots raining down on us. Mike keeps firing, and I push up, ignoring the pain from my wounded arm. I lay my rifle next to his and fire wildly as well. We keep shooting until their fire subsides, no one connecting. These rifles seem to have an endless supply of electric charges—they don’t use projectiles as far as I can tell, and there’s no magazine.