Element Zero (21 page)

IMMINENT ORBITAL STRIKE

The pilot and copilot looked at each other, and the pilot shouted into the radio. Before I could pull up the details, Alice cut back in.

Wachalowski, get out of the area now.

I just got an alert about an orbital strike. Is it an ICBM?

No. The DoD just detected a massive energy buildup in Heinlein’s orbital-defense satellite, The Eye. It’s going to fire in the next minute.

Fire at what? What kind of buildup?

They’re not sure what the target is, but this charge is off the charts. A spy satellite observing it saw it go into targeting mode two minutes ago. It looks like it’s focusing every lens it’s got on a common target that is outside of Heinlein’s security perimeter.

I brought up the specs for the satellite. It had more than one hundred lenses for striking multiple targets such as missiles, aircraft, or ground forces. Any one of them could generate a beam capable of incinerating a large vehicle or even a tank at only half capacity.

Can they stop it?
I asked.

Not in time. A communication from Fawkes warned that if The Eye is destroyed, he’ll launch another—

The connection skipped, then cut out. A second later, the radio chatter on the helicopter cut out as well.

Something flashed and lit up the sky. A hole appeared in the clouds and a light shone there like a second sun. The hole blew out, until the clouds were gone and a huge, blinding beam of energy arced down toward the ground below.

The helicopter banked hard as I threw my hand in front of my eyes. Everything went white, and a loud thunder crack pounded in my ears. Spots danced in front of me as the white-hot light burned over the skyline and struck the Central Media Communications Tower in the distance.

The pilot screamed to the copilot, but I couldn’t hear anything over the racket outside. I stared in shock as a ball of fire engulfed the base of the tower and began to expand.

Clouds of glass blew out and rained down toward the street as the flames began to boil from the windows. The air rippled, and in seconds the base of the tower turned an angry, molten red.

The pilot was screaming to hold on. A blast of hot air rushed in as the beam writhed and arced through the night sky, setting the surrounding building tops ablaze. The helicopter began to shake violently, then fell into a slow spin.

Concrete and glass split under the waves of heat and tumbled down toward the streets below. Over everything else, I heard a low, earsplitting moan echo through the sky as the huge structure started to twist on its failing foundation.

The city reeled through the window as the helicopter’s spin got worse. As the remains of the CMC Tower whipped past the windshield, the arc of light flashed and went out, leaving a dark line to float in front of my eyes. The tower was lit up like white phosphorus, while a cloud of black smoke and fire blew out from around it in every direction.

The peak dropped down toward the other buildings it towered above, and then the mighty structure began to implode. As we spun around again, I saw it crumble, and begin a slow collapse down into the debris.

“We’re going down! I’m going to try to land her!” the pilot yelled. My stomach rolled as the deck jumped again, but he managed to stop the spin and stabilize us. The street below tilted at a steep angle as we whipped, dangerously close, past a mirrored building face.

“Hang on!”

The buildings tapered off up ahead where a large, flat area was carved out. It was the Stillwell Corps base. Security alerts began flashing as we passed into their airspace. The pilot was barking into the radio, requesting an emergency landing even as we began to drop.

“Negative! Negative!” a voice came back.

“We don’t have a choice! We’re coming in!”

A helipad was lit up on one of the buildings up ahead. At street level, I caught several bright flashes of gunfire as we banked around and began our descent.

“The security perimeter has been breached!” the voice on the radio said. “Repeat, our security perimeter has been breached!”

As we came back around toward the helipad, I saw more muzzle flashes from below, and when the helicopter’s floodlight washed over the street, I saw why: hundreds of bodies surged toward a chain-link fence whose gate had been forced open. Blood sprayed through the air as soldiers on the other side opened fire on them, but there were too many. Already they were breaking their way into the buildings on either side of the street.

The pilot veered off at the last second, struggling to keep control of the helicopter as we passed over the heads of the clawing mob. The copilot pointed out the windshield at another rooftop, farther into the base, past the fence.

The pilot switched off the radio, cutting off the screaming voice on the other end as he began to take us down.

7

OUROBUROS

Zoe Ott—Alto Do Mundo Penthouse

The silence that came after the lights went out was worse than all the chaos that went on before it. I stood in the dark with the others for what felt like a long time before the overheads flickered back on, but even once they did, the screens on the wall stayed dark. The feeds were all dead.

“What happened?” I asked. Ai was staring into space, not moving or saying anything. At first she looked like she had a seizure or something, but when I focused on her, I saw her mind was still working; she was just in some kind of trance. None of the others at the table moved either.

The armed guards were all alert but weren’t sure what to do. One of them called on his radio to see about the power, while the noise outside rumbled off into the distance. No one approached the table or Ai.

“What happened?” I asked again.

“It was the CMC Tower,” Penny said. Her face was lit by the glow from her computer tablet. “Fawkes just destroyed it.”

“What?”

She turned the tablet toward me, and on it I could see a video feed from somewhere in the city across town. Someone was filming from the window of a building that would have looked out at the spot where the Central Media Communications Tower would have been, if it had been there.

“Oh . . . ” It was all that came out. I stared at the image as thick black smoke billowed up from flames that had spread through the surrounding blocks. The CMC Tower was gone. It just . . . wasn’t there anymore. I couldn’t get my brain around it.

“That’s why we lost all the feeds,” Penny said, her voice flat. “It was all going through a hub at the CMC Tower.”

“Mr. Raphael—”

“He’s dead, Zoe.”

I just stared. I liked Mr. Raphael. He was always nice to me, and whenever we’d met face-to-face, he’d always brought me a little gift of some kind. The last thing he’d gotten me had been my little diamond solitaire. I put my hand to my throat without thinking, but I wasn’t wearing it.

“He blew up the CMC?” I asked. My voice seemed to be acting independently from my brain, which was still trying to take in the size of the wreckage I was seeing on the screen. The fire blazed as waves of smoke and dust several stories high boiled down the surrounding streets, swallowing up the cars and streetlamps as they went. Pieces of debris were still falling down through the air, raining down into the expanding cloud below. The CMC Tower had been almost as big as Alto Do Mundo, and now it was just gone.

“Zoe, snap out of it,” I heard Penny say.

I felt her hands grab my elbows as I looked around. No one else in the room was moving.

“What’s wrong with them?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Penny said. The guards had left the room to secure the floor and try to get back communications with the others. Except for the distant rumble, it was completely quiet. It was almost like Penny and I were alone together.

Penny started to get up, but I stopped her by grabbing her sleeve. She looked back at me, confused.

“Wait,” I said.

“I need to check on Ai—”

“Wait. I . . . ”

“What?”

“Something happened,” I told her. “I saw something. Something important.”

“What did you see?”

“The Green Room,” I said. “I saw inside the void again. I think . . . Noelle tried to contact me there.”

Penny’s face changed when I said her name. I felt a distant spike of emotion that she stifled just as quickly, a red flare that arced up out of the aura surrounding her.

“Did she say anything to you?” she asked. I nodded.

“I think we’ve been wrong this whole time.”

“Wrong about what?”

I glanced past her at Ai. Her consciousness had taken the form of a dense, white sphere. The connections had all been withdrawn. She was experiencing an intense vision, and wasn’t watching either of us. Still, I leaned close to Penny and whispered in her ear.

“Penny, I think I’m Element Zero,” I whispered. She tried to pull away, but I held on to her sleeve.

“Fawkes is Element Zero,” she whispered back. “Fawkes drops the nukes. You stop him.”

“She’s been trying to tell me something. . . . I think we’re wrong.”

“We’re not.”

“What if we are? She said the blast doesn’t cause the event; it stops it. I think Noelle knew that. I think she knew Ai was wrong and that she’d have to be the one to kill all these people, to stop something worse from happening. She knew—”

“It was one vision,” Penny said, raising her voice. “That’s not enough to—”

“But it’s the only one that matters,” I said. “It came from the void after the event . . . isn’t that why Ai tracked us down? Maybe she is some ‘next step in evolution’ but even if it’s true she can’t see past that point—she doesn’t survive whatever happens, she knows that. We ran out of time, and even with everything she did, she wasn’t able to figure it out.”

“Zoe—”

“I’m telling you I saw something, something important. Noelle tried to reach me there. . . . I think she’s alive.”

“She’s not alive.”

“The database says she’s dead, but how can we really—”

“Because I killed her, Zoe.”

I felt the vibe again, like a spike. Her face didn’t change, but I felt it, and I remembered something she’d said to me a long time ago:

“
This can be a good gig
,” she’d said, and her voice had been serious.
“It can also be a bad one . . . ”

“I thought they had her killed,” I said.

“They did.”

“Ai made you do it?”

She shook her head. “Osterhagen,” she said. “Things were different then. Noelle was . . . ”

“Was what?”

“She was amazing,” she said. “She was better than I ever was. Ai sent her to go get me and bring me in. She took me under her wing. She took care of me and protected me.”

One of the screens flickered, but didn’t make it back on. Ai’s consciousness pulsed, but she stayed withdrawn.

“Like you did with me,” I said.

“Yeah.”

“Then why did you do it?”

“She had a bad vision one day,” she said, looking down. “Like the ones you’ve been having . . . the deformities and all that. She started talking dangerous talk.”

“Like what?”

“You’re right about one thing,” she said. “Noelle was afraid. She did think we had it all wrong. One day, she saw something she wouldn’t talk about, and she changed after that . . . she lost her appetite, stopped smiling. Something was really wrong, but she wouldn’t tell me what she’d seen.”

“She knew. She knew what she’d have to do.”

“Maybe,” Penny said. “She decided at the time that the only way out of this was for us, everyone like us, to be destroyed. Maybe that was the alternative . . . maybe it was one or the other. Either way, she believed it. She got this idea that we were wrong about everything. She sounded a lot like you, but she just . . . wouldn’t let it go.”

“How did Ai react?”

“How do you think she reacted? We’re the greatest human breakthrough the world’s ever known. Even if it was as simple as flipping a switch and getting rid of us, no one’s going to listen to that.”

“So what did she do?”

“Even back then, the model was crystal clear,” she said. “Whatever other factors might or might not be in play, Fawkes triggers the event. When she realized no one would listen to her, she pushed to take out Fawkes early, to kill him. He was just an engineer at Heinlein back then. He had no idea any of this was going to happen, but she didn’t want to wait. She wanted to cut the line there.”

“But why not? Why not do that?”

“Ai can see how all the pieces fit together in a way no one else can. She knew killing Fawkes was a mistake even if Noelle couldn’t see it. She knew he’d be more dangerous dead than alive, and she was right, but Noelle was off on her own by then, and she tried to kill him anyway. She jumped him on the street and stabbed him. He lived, but they all knew she’d done it. By that point they’d begun to think she was some kind of ‘rogue element’, and that she had the potential to cause the very outcome she’d seen ... the one where the people with our abilities are wiped out. Osterhagen wanted her dead. . . . ”

“What about Ai?” I asked.

“She didn’t,” she said. “But Osterhagen was so sure she was going to end up causing the holocaust that even when Ai refused to authorize it, he came to me.”

“And you—”

“I was different then, Zoe,” she said. “Osterhagen convinced me it was the only way to stop things. He promised me the number-two slot if I did the right thing.”

She shook her head.

“And here I am, like he promised.”

She got quiet. The longer she talked, the deeper I could see the pain inside her went. I couldn’t think of anything to say.

“It was quick,” she said. “I watched her bleed out. But I stuck around too long, and someone saw me. I could have wiped his memory, but I gave him the knife and made him believe he’d done it. He copped to the murder and went down for it.”

“You just made some random guy do life in prison?”

“He didn’t do life. He got killed in jail before his first year was up. He ended up at Heinlein.”

She smiled a bitter smile.

“The guy heard our last conversation before I wiped his memory. We didn’t know about Zhang’s Syndrome at the time . . . in Fawkes’s lab, his revivor remembers everything. With what he must have heard, Fawkes finds out who tried to kill him and why. He learns Ai’s identity. For all I know, that’s what sent him down the path he chose. How’s that for irony?”

I focused on her . . . not too hard, not enough to get her attention. Just enough to let her colors fade into view so I could see them. Under her calm exterior, her thoughts buzzed like bees in a hive. There was almost more going on in there than I could make sense of. I saw fear, like a cold, white cloth that rippled in the wind. . . . You’d never know it to look at her face, but she was afraid. I saw concern, confusion, and uncertainty, but underneath it all, shifting slowly like a gray mist, was guilt. When I concentrated on it, I could see how deep it ran.

“I’m not a good person, Zoe,” she said.

“That’s not true.”

“You don’t have any idea.”

“Yes, I do.” I looked deeper . . . there were a lot of things she carried around, but one thing in particular was tucked away. Something she’d barely admit even to herself.

What is that?
I couldn’t read her mind. I couldn’t know what caused it, just that it was there, but it was something I’d never known about her. She’d never let me look that far. I looked deeper and still didn’t find an end to it.

She put one arm around me and held me to her. I kind of tensed up at first, but she was gentler than she usually was. I rested my forehead on her bony chest, and she stroked my hair. It reminded me of how my father used to be, back when I was little. I let out a big sigh into her shirt.

“You’ll get through this,” she whispered.

She put her cheek against the top of my head and squeezed me a little tighter. It was the longest we’d ever touched. It was the longest I’d ever touched anyone in years and years.

“Do you remember when we first met?” she asked. She smoothed my hair with one hand.

I didn’t. I didn’t want to admit it, but it was lost along with so many other things over the years.

“It was in the subway,” she said. “Raphael sent me to make contact with you. I caught you near one of the sake stands. You looked like you really wanted one.”

I still didn’t remember, but it sounded like me. She laughed just a little.

“You thought you dreamed me.”

“I used to get confused about that.”

“I know. Back then, I approached you because they told me to,” she said. “I didn’t want to. I didn’t want anything to do with you, Zoe, but . . . ”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said. I pulled away so I could see her face, and for the first time ever, I saw she was crying. She didn’t make any noise. Her face didn’t even really change except her eyes. Tears just came out, and the colors swirled around her head like a tiny storm, with something dark just under the surface. I saw a glimpse of it just before the halo brightened and pushed me away.

There was something else; something she wanted to say. There was something she needed to say but it wouldn’t come out.

“I threw Karen out the first time she showed up at my door,” I said. “It doesn’t matter how it started.”

She said something then, that, unlike most things, I always remembered.

“When this is over,” she said, “I’m going to save you, Zoe. If we’re both still alive, I’m going to save you.”

“What—”

“He’s going to destroy us all,” a voice whispered in the dark. I thought it was in my head, but Penny perked up too. We both turned and saw that Ai had lifted her head. Her eyes were still closed and sweat ran down her face as her mouth hung partway open.

The others at the table snapped awake as her eyes opened. Her eyes wandered for a second before they found Penny and me.

“We need to evacuate,” she told her.

Penny nodded.

“But they have the outside completely surrounded,” I said.

“Have the soldiers secure the roof, whatever it takes,” Ai said. “We’ll take the chopper.”

“But the chopper will only hold—” Before I could finish, I felt a numbness seep through me. My head spun a little, and the words fizzled out.

“We’re too late,” Ai said calmly. “This city will be gone within the hour. We’re leaving. Now.”