Anthem's Fall (58 page)

“There was necessity to our creation.”

“There was desperation. Terrible desperation,” Gravitas gasped. “Our bloodlines were created to protect,
only
to protect. Our power was derived from a need for good. And yet all we have managed to do is obliterate.”

Vengelis waved a dismissive hand. “Had it not been for the Sejero, Anthem would have been swept into destruction. What good did the natural order of things do for us, then, when our entire world was covered in mushroom clouds and killing fields?”

“The blood of the Sejero vanquished the Zergos invasion, yes. But the same blood—the same power—then turned on the morality of our own civilization and vanquished it, too, with equal force. The day we were given the strength of gods, we abandoned everything that made us men. What chance does sovereignty and morality have when the whim of a few unmerited individuals can deny them from all? When we stepped out of the boundaries of the natural world, our race might as well have been destroyed. Everything we once stood for, what the people down there
still
strive for, was lost forever.”

Vengelis stared at Gravitas for a long moment. Nerol’s body was beaten beyond recognition, his armor torn to ribbons and cracked throughout, his eyelids swelled to great fruits, and his nose and jaw were distended and bleeding profusely. The building pressed down on him with an unimaginable force, and yet he held obstinately against it, trembling with exhaustion. An obvious truth that had been staring Vengelis in the face since he first set eyes on Gravitas Nerol suddenly dawned on him. Its sheer obviousness crashed over him like a dousing of icy water. He bowed his head in shame of his own lacking restraint and reason. Vengelis had heard all of these sentiments before, many times over.

“You trained under Master Tolland,” Vengelis centered his attention bleakly on the fleeing people and debris-covered pavement within the broad shadow of the building. “Didn’t you?”

“I . . . Yes.”

Vengelis slowly closed his eyes and shook his head in disgrace of his own imprudence. “So did I.”

Gravitas looked up, both startled and affronted. “You lie!”

“You really don’t believe me? After all you have seen of my fighting style and techniques? After this prolonged back and forth stalemate? Look at us both; we are equally beaten. Nerol, we are the same: students of the greatest teacher of our time.”

“Master Tolland wouldn’t . . . ”

“Tolland
sent
me here, Nerol!”

“He would never do that,” Gravitas’s voice became enraged, his tone betrayed. “Master Tolland would have died before he sent a slaughterer to this world.”

“Come with me, Nerol. Come
back
to Anthem and turn your values into realization. You seek to defend those weaker than you from death. Anthem lies on the brink of ruin! Cold and pitiless machines are ripping through our civilization.
Our
civilization, Nerol! Fight alongside me, and together we can defeat the Felixes. I
know
we can. The two grand sentinels of our world will return in a display of glory and splendor unparalleled since the fall of the old world and the rise of the Sejero!”

“Tolland . . . would never have wanted this. You’ve been here one day and you’ve already killed so many. Master Tolland would never have sent an Epsilon here.”

“Nerol!” Vengelis’s voice grew in feverish intensity. “He
did
. I didn’t know you were here; you have to understand me. When Tolland told me of Filgaia, it was in the midst of Sejeroreich’s fall. We were surrounded by madness. His words were drowned out in the carnage. I had to assume Tolland sent me here because of the humans. I had to push them! Each hour lost in this errand, scores of my people—our people—die. You must understand that?”

Vengelis tried to weigh Gravitas’s thoughts. At last he spoke into the dusty wind. “Come back with me, Gravitas Nerol. Come back to Anthem and save your people.”

Gravitas said nothing. The steel supports pushed and gnawed against his shoulders, and he sunk several feet.

“Return with me to avenge a dying race,” Vengelis pleaded. “Return to become the champion among equals that you are!”

Gravitas looked up, his face was severe and his eyes were bloodshot from his strain. His tone was harsh. “
No
.”

“You must come with me.”

Gravitas shook his head. “If I return, and we together destroy your machines, if all that you hope for comes true, it will only lead to the second rise of oppressive rule. How long will it be until the next Yabu race, the next human race, is bent to our descendants’ will? No. We were given our shot . . . we failed.”

The momentary rise in color suddenly drained from Vengelis’s face. His lips went white with fury. “I will only ask once more.”

“Save your breath. I won’t willingly let go of this building. Upon my shoulders rests the faith of an entire spectrum of existence. I will not forsake it to misery and despair. As a martyr I can provide for them a cohesion that may hold their society in tact. So go on; kill me. Then return to Anthem and die yourself. In time the horrors we have seen will be forgotten.”

“And there will be no changing your mind on this?”

“None,” Gravitas said.

A moment of silence fell between them, each with expressions pained and miserable.

“Very well,” Vengelis said. He knew what he had to do, it was clear to him now. “I thought Master Tolland sent me here for human scientists, but now I see I was wrong. He did not send me here for the humans at all. He sent me here to retrieve
you
, to recruit your help. Master Tolland knew that together we could defeat the Felixes.”

“He . . . never . . . ” Gravitas gasped.

“If you will not come back to help me save my people, so be it.” Vengelis leaned in close to Gravitas, their faces a foot apart. “But I will not aid you in helping yours either. Make no mistake, Nerol, the Felixes will be created; the people down there fear us too much, and their dread will push them to create terrible things—things that will shock this world like nothing you can possibly imagine. You will be forced to embrace what I have seen, to feel the horrors I have felt, and only then will you understand my actions today. When you look into their blue gaze you will realize your mistake.”

“I . . . ” Gravitas sunk several feet, the building hitched, and he screamed out, his strength failing.

Vengelis watched sadly as Gravitas Nerol’s strained body began to steadily sink against the weight of the skyscraper. He wondered, watching the tears of hopeless exhaustion fall down Gravitas’s cheeks, if perhaps the strength of the Sejero had at last waned against the ages. With a terrible moan, Gravitas Nerol’s strength failed. He slipped backward and was swallowed by the nest of mangled steel. At once the building collapsed inward from its own unsupported weight. The entire superstructure plummeted past Vengelis in a deluge of carnage. Vengelis floated numbly in the sudden dousing of sunlight, staring vacantly into the empty space where the skyscraper had just stood. His mind was void of thought as a tremendous cloud of dust and ash bellowed and swelled upward in the skyscraper’s stead.

As though it were a perfunctory task, Vengelis numbly departed the calamity of the fallen skyscraper and flew unhurriedly down the length of the avenue to retrieve Darien. Below him, the streets of Midtown were now mostly desolate of evacuees. Long shadows of the tall buildings were lengthening in the flagging afternoon sunlight, and the power outage across the city accentuated the abandoned gloom.

The giant Royal Guard was dead amid a demolished Times Square. Vengelis took hold of Darien by his rigid ankle and carried him into the sky, the giant’s huge arms dangling free and reaching down to the streets. Vengelis hauled the enormous body up to the rooftop where Hoff lay, and cast the loyal soldier he himself had killed alongside his departed Lord General.

A muffled beep sounded from the
Harbinger I
remote, indicating that the ship was near, but Vengelis ignored it as he gazed regretfully across the city to the endless lands to the west. The adrenaline had abated its pacifying hold on his broken body, and he could not believe the hurt that now coursed through him. He limped in agony to the ledge of the roof and gingerly lay down on his back far above the evidence of his inflicted pain and misery far below. His body was encompassed with pain, but as he turned his head and looked past the nearby spires and into the broad horizon, he felt only anguish.

For the first time in as long as he could remember, Vengelis allowed his eyelids to shut, and he simply stopped caring. Allowing the defeat to drench over him, he listened to his own labored breaths and stared to the serene clouds in the far distance.

It had always been Gravitas Nerol.

The purpose of Master Tolland’s intent had not been hidden from him either; he had known from the beginning that someone had traveled to Filgaia on the
Traverser I
. But how could Vengelis have known it was a warrior equal to himself? How could he have known there
was
an equal to himself? He hated the Nerols: one, the bringer of ruin, and the other, a self-proclaimed saint, each equal in their ignorance. He resented Master Tolland and his cryptic orders. He despised Kristen Jordan and her negligent courage.

The throes of destiny had cast him as the herald of genocide. In his misery and desperation he had lashed out and extended the bloodshed to a blameless people. A large part of him knew he should chase down Kristen Jordan and Madison and tear the sample of Sejero genetics from their grasp. But there was no practical way of finding them without drawing out the slaughter, and he could not bear any more blood on his hands. Vengelis decided to pass the compass of fate, to place it in the hands of another lost navigator. A mighty gift had unintentionally been given to the people far below. How they used this offering would be up to them—he only hoped Kristen Jordan would prove more cautious than his own people.

Vengelis could not bring himself to grasp the true enemy, cold and callous: the Felix. In the midst of his hardships, the true enemy had been shrouded. As he looked across the cityscape, he was filled with a great sadness.

Everything he once had was lost.

His expression hopeless and distraught, Vengelis pulled the Blood Ring off the swelling knuckles of his finger. He looked at the brilliant ring for a long heartbreaking moment, its lustrous scarlet hue against the ruin of the streets below. What valorous achievements Sejero strength had ever achieved in legend and myth had long been overshadowed by the brutality of this ring’s history.

Vengelis reached out over the ledge of the building and turned his palm, letting the Blood Ring slip from his hand.

S
ide by side, Kristen and Madison ran steadily up along the length of the chilly shadow cast by the teetering skyscraper. Plaster and dust spilled off their hair and clothes and billowed behind them as they jogged past shattered storefronts and overturned cars. They were two faces in the indiscriminate mob, though the mass was noticeably diminishing as they crossed the intersections westward and put distance between themselves and the high-rises of Midtown. Out of danger from the collapsing skyscraper, they each still ran as fast as their dust-filled lungs would allow.

A loud rumbling thundered from behind them, and at the same moment the shadow of the skyscraper abruptly vanished. The grand building fell, its lashing supports crashing and hurdling into the heart of Manhattan. Rising from where the skyscraper had stood, a dark pillar of dust ascended high over the city. The cloud of wreckage that sprawled into the sky and surrounding streets, the one of which Kristen and Madison had been so nearly a part, seemed to touch the very ceiling of the clouds. Kristen turned and watched the churning plume in wordless awe. They were now well out of range of the devastation, but she took a few stunned steps backward on the trembling street. The back of her thighs touched the side of a police car, and she leaned back against it and watched the dreamlike cloud of destruction unfurl across the otherwise glittering autumn cityscape.

“Those poor people,” Madison said.

Kristen’s eyes reflected the ruin, and she quietly said, “Unforgivable.”

The sentiment of the people pressing around them was not that of total relief, but certainly that of momentary appreciation for their narrow escape from a grisly death. They were leaving Midtown behind, and their growing distance from the towering skyscrapers placated the fear of an imminent death. Together, Kristen and Madison turned their backs to the towers of the city with a sense of final resolve, and continued at a steady trot toward the Hudson River.

“Someone shouldered that entire building. We both saw it.” Madison spoke over the moving crowd as they fell in step. “If it wasn’t Vengelis, who was it?”

“I don’t know, but I don’t like it.”

“You don’t like that someone saved your life?”

“That’s not what I meant,” Kristen said. “It’s just that, well, I thought I had a grasp on the situation in all of this insanity. Now it looks like things are more complicated, which begs the question: what was Vengelis hiding? And that makes me scared.”

Kristen reached a hand back and rested it against her backpack, where she felt the boxy form of the slide case through the nylon fabric. The case felt secure, undamaged. Somehow she had made it out of the disaster with the Sejero blood in her possession. They jogged wordlessly along the street, breathing the clean air deep down. Kristen’s chest still felt fiery, the channels of her lungs razor sharp and inflamed. There were cuts and scrapes all over her body from the barrage of falling debris that had engulfed her, and her right ankle was tender from being twisted.

The crowd before them parted as the westward street met with the Hudson River, and they saw the full extent of the grand exodus off Manhattan Island. Kristen had never seen so many people in her life, and could not even venture a guess of their numbers. Countless men and women in military uniform were ushering the endless masses toward the river’s edge. Sprawled out for miles and miles along the glistening cement strands, the grayish choppy water of the Hudson was swarming with ships. Though most of the boats were flying Navy and Coast Guard colors, there were also countless private yachts and heavy commercial vessels carrying anyone and everyone across the comparatively narrow body of water. Many of the boats were weighed down to the very brim with refugees throwing buckets of bilge from the sides, hulls lingering inches above the water.