Daniel Suarez - Influx

But there was now too much debris in the room, and whatever type of beam weapon Hedrick was using, the energy kept hitting intervening wreckage and scattering as scalding vapor.

Grady was moving closer—now within twenty feet of Hedrick, ducking behind floating exhibit displays. He peered around one and could see that Hedrick was struggling to disengage a vehicle without wheels from its exhibit mount. Grady was close enough to see the glowing holographic words before it: “GMV—Gravity Mirror Vehicle.”

He had to admit, it looked like a Porsche for the twenty-second century.

Grady ducked back behind the display and shouted, “Hedrick! I’m not letting you leave here!”

In the roar of wind Hedrick didn’t seem to know where Grady’s voice was coming from, so he fired several times—but each time intervening debris was vaporized. “I’ll kill you if you try to follow me! You and Cotton will pay for this!”

Suddenly a soul-wrenching BOOM shook the building, and the walls beyond Hedrick cracked and disintegrated—sucking toward some powerful vortex. Hedrick dropped his gun to grab onto the GMV with both hands—even as he and the entire vehicle were sucked away.

Grady was pulled in moments later. As he looked ahead, he could see a massive hole had been torn into the side of the BTC building as the massive bulk of the brittle building flexed and turned on itself.

The view through the forty-foot-wide hole made him gasp. They were at least fifteen thousand feet in the air. The grid of city and suburbs and distant lakes spread out below them with the dawn sun breaking over the horizon.

And then he saw Hedrick climb into the GMV, the hatch closing over him, just as the vehicle got sucked out, furniture, carpeting, and partition walls swirling around it. Grady hurtled through the opening and felt incredible vertigo as a blast of cold wind hit him. He rolled end over end in some sort of eddy as a massive black wall rolled past him like the flank of a massive ship. There was a constant dull roar like that of an avalanche.

And then he suddenly felt himself falling again. He looked back to see the BTC tower still rising. He fell in the opposite direction just a few hundred meters away. A glance down and he could see the jagged end of the thousand-foot-long tower where it had been torn out from either the remainder of the complex or from its foundations.

Grady noticed something even more jaw-dropping—a huge hole hundreds of meters wide and unfathomably deep had been torn in the center of Detroit’s downtown, and the Detroit River was rushing in to fill the void. A Niagara-size wall of white water was pouring in below.

Grady snapped out of it as he continued to descend. He figured he was at only seven or eight thousand feet already. A glance up showed the jagged burning end of the BTC tower receding into the sky.

Alexa.

There was no way to get to her now, and he realized she had a gravis of her own integrated with her tactical suit. And she knew how to use it more than anyone. He turned his angle of descent again and saw his only course of action was to find Hedrick. To find Hedrick was to find the location of Hibernity.

Scanning below, Grady noticed a large piece of debris heading purposefully to the south. It was a sleek form like the GMV, but it still seemed to have something attached to it. The exhibit mount.

It was headed south, but it was also falling. Losing altitude.

Grady nodded to himself and directed his angle of descent toward it.

The interior walls within the BTC tower were oscillating with the gushing wind that poured through cracks and fissures in the diamond-aggregate nanorod shell. It seemed like everything was flexing around Alexa as she pulled her way along, trying to find an exit.

But Morrison kept on her tail. Since she couldn’t easily find a surface that wasn’t floating, it was hard to outrun him. There was nothing to run on.

The roar of wind and groaning and shrieking of massive sheets of metamaterials bending against forces for which they hadn’t been designed was terrifying. It sounded as though mountains were colliding in the sky.

She had to find her way to an opening. There had to be one. All of this wind meant there was a hole somewhere. A glance at the heads-up display in her helmet visor told her she was already at twenty-two thousand feet and rising. As the atmosphere thinned, they’d rise even faster. Before long even she would have trouble breathing.

“I’m not letting you leave here, Alexa!” Morrison was panting.

He suddenly grabbed her feet, and she rolled, kicking him off. She looked back at him as she clamored through the crack in a shattered interior wall. “I have to hand it to you, Morrison. You don’t quit.”

“Damn right I don’t!” He pulled himself hand over hand. “That’s why I excelled… in the service.” He was panting like a dog now. “It’s knowing one’s… limitations… and then ignoring them.” Halfway to her he grabbed a shard of glass—or diamond more likely—that was floating between them. He tried to bring her within reach, sweeping the shard before him as best he could.

She ducked under his swing and rained a series of sharp blows to his face. A couple of his teeth floated free along with blood and spit.

But still he pulled himself toward her in free fall against shifting and moving walls.

“Morrison, is your brain even connected to your body?”

He braced his feet against a wall and launched himself at her. She pushed off another wall and shrank back from a wicked swing that nearly slit her throat.

“The BTC is finished! We need to get out of here.” She could see he was panting for breath. “I can bring you out of here. Just surrender.”

Morrison shook his head. “We’re not… leaving. If it’s the… last thing I do… I’ll prove… I’m better.” He rolled the diamond shard in his hand expertly.

“You’re insane.”

“Maybe that… makes me better.”

He launched himself at her again, and she pulled herself along a bent and twisted stairwell. Suddenly a sucking wind started to rush past her, and she could see daylight.

There was a two-meter opening in the wall ahead, down a twisted and shuttering corridor filled with free-falling debris.

She glanced back to see Morrison climbing hand over hand to the top of the stairwell, diamond shard between his teeth. Blood all over his face, missing teeth reflected in the surface of the knife. He grabbed the shard and shot a furtive glance at the tear in the side of the building.

“That’s it? You afraid… to face… me?”

She shook her head. “No interest. That’s something you probably never realized, Morrison. Homo sapiens never killed off Neanderthal; they just outlived them.”

“The technology… it’s going with me… and this tower… into oblivion.”

“Looks that way.”

Morrison was panting, finding it harder and harder to exert himself at this altitude.

“It’s over, Morrison. Give up, and I’ll take you down to the ground.”

Morrison sucked for air. “Fuck you. How the… hell… can you breathe?”

“I have a third more lung capacity than you, and each of my breaths metabolizes twenty percent more oxygen.”

“Goddamned freak.”

She studied him as he clung to the twisted stairwell handrail. His weathered face and scar-ridden body. His uniform shredded around him. “Why didn’t you ever get cell repair therapy, Morrison? Why did you let yourself grow old?”

He was growing visibly more sleepy now. “There’s such a thing… as aging gracefully.”

Alexa laughed in spite of herself. Her visor display told her they were at twenty-eight thousand feet now.