What?
Please!
Says she’s the chief’s daughter, Sarge?
What?
It’s true! I’m Chris Walk—
Fuck. I don’t know. Okay. Fine. Let ’em through.
Let them through! Make way and let them through!
And suddenly the wall parts, armored bodies shuffling aside, and she’s there, Jane is there standing in front of him, and he starts to cry, tears rolling down his face from behind the spex. More than anything he wants to reach out, hold her to him, feel her—
Take your friend through to the Bearpit. There’s first aid there. Should be, at least.
Thank you, thank you.
He watches them limp past him, and through the blur of tears follows them, stumbling into the bodies of partygoers intersecting his reality. Follows them through the dark, out into the light.
In the Bearpit he watches her, standing back and useless, as she lowers her friend onto the ground. Around them all is chaos, injured and stunned-looking police, civilians. Exhausted-looking paramedics. Blood pooling in the gaps between paving slabs, concrete stained crimson.
I’m going to see if I can find someone to help.
The girl, Jane’s friend—Walker faintly recognizes her: Gemma?—disappears off into the crowd, leaving Jane alone, crouching next to the boy. She holds his hand.
It’s going to be okay.
My fucking arm—
Yeah. I think you broke it.
It’s killing me.
He crouches next to her, unable to take his eyes off her. Tears still flow.
Hey, you’re going to be fine. I promise.
Everything is so fucked-up—
It’s fine. It’s all fine. We got out and we’re safe. We’re going to get someone to check you out and then we’ll get you back up to Clifton.
Time to go home?
Time to go home.
She smiles, and his heart flips. So much kindness. Who is this kid? Is that her boyfriend?
Something rips the sky above them apart, something screeching as it rips through the air, and then a boom that dulls eardrums.
He glances up—up through the geodesic dome, now (then) whole and complete—just in time to see the top corner of one of the nearby brutalist office towers dissolve into dust, a point cloud of masonry pixels.
What the fuck was that?
Running, screaming. Shouting.
Incoming!
Walker wonders who could have been responsible for shattering a building, the dread realization falling across him that it was probably friendly fire, or another rogue round from the malfunctioning drone.
Everyone is moving around him, but he’s transfixed again, unable to take his eyes off her.
We need to go.
No, just stay here! Don’t move!
But—
We’re safe here, don’t move! Just hold my hand.
Walker looks up again, through the geodesic lattice of the dome. It seems alien to him, like this. He got so used to seeing it shattered for the last decade. Through the recording it looks like an ode to a forgotten, lost future—smeared with bird shit and graffiti, glass panels missing here and there, CCTV cameras retrofitted to its frame. For some reason his mind fills with Buckminster Fuller, that book he read about him, the way he was heralded by designers and architects as a neglected hero, the one that would have built us a utopia if he’d been given half a chance.
And how someone had told him that was all bullshit, and people thought of him so well only because his plans never got built. If they had been, he would have made the same mistakes as Le Corbusier and Goldfinger and all the others—the mistake of believing the myth that architects can build futures full of people as simply as they make their little models, sketch their little plans.
He knows what comes next.
The air ripped open by screeching, the thunderclap, the ceiling above them exploding into a billion shards of glass and steel.
But he doesn’t see it, because he’s staring into her face when the rain hits.
Anika releases her grip on the gun, slips her hand back out of her bag.
She watches her target sprawl on the floor of the Bearpit, hammering concrete with fists, sobbing as the crowds heading into the Croft flow around him. Most of them barely see him, avoiding him on autopilot. They’ve had ten years of public nervous breakdowns, of people screaming at floors and architecture, of trying to fistfight the confusion and the chaos and the loss.
Most of them have probably done it themselves, she thinks.
PTSD on a civilization-wide scale.
She takes a deep breath, pulls her hood up tight. Adjusts the bag full of spex on her back, and heads into the crowd like a fish swimming upstream, not looking back, just heading for Cabot Circus and her ride back home.
EPILOGUE
Lajune climbs down from the jeep and steps over dead bodies in the parking lot, follows waypoints dropped by Kareem, pulsating pale blue arrows hanging in the air, pointing to the shattered glass of the low building’s entrance. Five members of the assault squad are waiting there, their outlines made amorphous by what hangs from their bodies; armor, assault rifles, grenades. It’s too much to fucking carry, she finds herself thinking. Need to sort this shit out.
Two of the squad are sitting on the floor, in the debris, and their leader orders them up as he sees her approach.
“On your feet, soldiers.”
“Nah, it’s okay, Kareem. You’re good. Stay put. Sitrep?”
“Site secured, sir. Residents have been taken aside and are being processed for rehousing in NYC. Just waiting for the trucks.”
Lajune glances around the parking lot, at bodies with missing arms, legs. Heads.
“Looks like you met some resistance.”
Kareem smiles. “Nothing we couldn’t handle.”
“Any casualties on our side?”
“Nothing major. DeShaun and Williams received minor limb injuries. We got them patched up and waiting for evac.”
“ETA?”
“Last I heard from Hoboken we’re six hours out till the trucks arrive.”
“Jesus. They’ll be fine till then?”
“They’ll be fine, sir.”
Lajune nods through the shattered glass doors. “So what’s the story here?”
Kareem takes a deep breath. “The usual, from what we can make out. Some prepper cult. Probably been holed up here damn near three years now. Came down when the crash happened, ’cause it still had power. Stayed here to shelter from the storms. They weren’t, ah, in particularly good shape mentally, if you catch my drift.”
“The place has power still?”
“Seems that way. Lots of solar on the roof, lots of backup batteries.”
“You got them?”
“Yes, sir. Second squad got them out a couple of hours ago. Again, just waiting on the trucks.”
“And this is a colo, right?”
“Right. Medium-sized. Modular, container-based design.”
“Commander?” It’s one of the girls sitting on the floor. Young. In her teens. Queens accent. Pretty, tired face almost drowned by the battle gear she’s wearing. “Can I ask a question?”
“Go ahead, soldier.”
“Why there so many damn colos around here? In Jersey, I mean?”
Lajune stamps one combat-boot-wrapped foot on the asphalt. “We sitting on one of the biggest data pipes in the world, buried right beneath our feet. Stretches all the way from here to Manhattan, and then out across the country. Real fast line. Back before the crash this was the best place you could put a data center if you didn’t want it to be in the city. All those Wall Street motherfuckers, after nine-eleven, they moved their shit out here, hidden away in the middle of nowhere. And those big-data motherfuckers, too. They got backups here of all their stuff. All that cloud bullshit. When the crash happened, a lot of these centers automatically shut themselves off to avoid getting infected. Looked like they’d been wiped but the data is still intact. That’s why you’re out here, soldier. To make sure they can’t be started up again. To make sure everything gets wiped. You get me?”