Departure(72)

She must have known something I don’t. She gave her life to stop Nicholas, to keep him away from the device. She took away the one thing he would stop at nothing to possess: her life.

“Stop!” I yell, sitting up.

Grayson turns back to me, but Oliver keeps his arm around his son, corralling him, whispering to him.

“He came here for her, didn’t he?”

Oliver turns, an amused smile on his face.

“Grayson, get the tablet! Stop the countdown!”

The floor booms below us. All the glass figurines and trinkets rattle and shake, falling, shattering. It’s a sickening sound, accompanied by a shower of sharp pieces, debris and dust from the ceiling mixing with it, burying me behind the counter.

I feel Mike’s arms around me, pulling me up, around the counter. We stumble over a sharp blanket of broken glass, toward the door and stairway, where Oliver is practically dragging Grayson.

“Help us, Grayson!” I yell.

Oliver turns, fires a shot that catches me in the shoulder, blowing me back into the store. I slide over the bed of glass. The shards cut into my back, a million agonizing slices, jabbing deep, cutting me to shreds.

Mike stands and fires, but Oliver catches him with a shot to the head. He’s dead before he lands at my feet.

Grayson grabs his father’s arm, forcing the rifle out of it. Our eyes meet, and I see the pain in his, the sadness, the struggle. His moment of hesitation allows his father to trap his arms at his sides. Oliver leans in, speaking, but Grayson frees his right hand and jerks the tablet out of his father’s sleeve, tossing it clanging on the marble floor. It settles halfway between us, and Grayson lunges for it, but his father restrains him, pulling him back with far too much force.

I watch in horror as they both crash through the glass rail. A second later, I hear the sickening sound of the fountain’s granite breaking, more pieces of the Titan statue crumbling away. There’s a splash in the water, and their blood spirals into the pool.

The tablet’s screen is cracked, but still lit, displaying the countdown.

I try to sit up. Every movement pushes the glass deeper into my skin. I crawl, the shards grinding into my knees and elbows through my tattered suit.

Footsteps. Boots on the marble. Titans and colonists descending the winding helix of the grand stairway.

My hand reaches the tablet.

“Stop!”

I minimize the countdown.

“Stop, or I’ll shoot.”

I work my fingers, pulling up the access program for the array of explosives. There’s no pass code, just a fingerprint verification, keyed to only two people in the world: Oliver Norton Shaw and Nicholas Stone.

A shot hits the floor three feet from me. I wince, close my eyes, and press my thumb to the screen.





40





When the countdown on the tablet stops, I toss it away and roll onto my side, the only part of the suit that isn’t coated in jagged glass. Blood oozes from a thousand places on my body. At any moment I expect my guts to spill out on the white marble floor like the contents of a pi?ata that’s finally popped.

Maybe that’s what they’re waiting for—the easy way out.

I stare up into the barrels of the rifles pointed at me, into the hatred on the faces of the Titans holding them. They circle me, glancing at each other, no doubt silently debating: shoot all at once, so no one knows who fired the killing shot, or conduct a more orderly execution? Or wait—after all, I’ll die soon either way. That’s what’s next. No words I can say will change it.

I wear the face of the Titan Civil War. When they look down at me, they see Nicholas Stone, the man who destroyed this world and set the Titans against each other. They see the villain who betrayed humanity time and again, slaughtered his fellow Titans at Heathrow, and planned and executed this final assault.

As I wait for the end, I can’t help contemplating what Nicholas became, how all his extraordinary achievements changed him, made him arrogant, how his guilt at his mistakes ate away at his moral compass, drove him inward, to a selfish and ruthless place where he longed only to taste happiness again. I guess I felt some of that desperation, the fear that I would never feel whole and happy again, before Flight 305 took off. He was me. He is me. I’m capable of everything he did. I guess we’re all capable of evil, under the right circumstances.

Movement. The Titans around me shift, form up, getting ready.

A sound track of death and destruction plays behind them. Blood-reddened water gurgles in the battered fountain below, the statue of Nicholas and Oliver that broke the fall of so many Titans, crushing them, each body chipping away more of the stone. Behind me, shards of glass fall to the store’s floor like wind chimes blowing on a lazy day. I focus on the sound of each little piece falling, wondering if it’s a piece of my face or that of another Titan. I imagine them settling on the floor, indistinguishable in the sea of shattered glass.

Footsteps, loud on the grand helix stairway. The Titans part.

Sabrina.

“Hello, Nick.”

I’ve never been so glad to hear her voice—or my own name. Just Nick. I’ll never use the name Nicholas.

She bends down toward me, a syringe in her hand.

“Wait.”

“Your injuries are urgent,” Sabrina says in that mechanical tone, the sweetest sound I can imagine right now. “We must—”