James Knapp - Element Zero

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.

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.