Everything I had learned at the LDA. The grid. The Prophecy. Our sacred duty to safeguard our perfect planet. It had all turned out to be true. There was some force willing and able to bring our entire planet down after all. This was the first strike.
A Munis vehicle had double-parked outside the club and its driver was rushing to attend the victims. I climbed up the side of the truck to get a better view of the city.
It was as I’d feared.
Everywhere I looked on the horizon I could make out the sight of yet another destroyed landmark. The North Arena. My former school. They were all burning.
I turned around. There was no smoke, but the Spires of Elkin, the largest structures on Lorien and home to almost a third of the city’s population, were gone too, leaving a soul-shattering void in the skyline. With no obstruction, I stared up at the column of violet light pulsing malevolently on the horizon.
That was no “Herald.”
In a burst of understanding, I saw it all clearly. If only I hadn’t been so convinced that everyone at the LDA was a self-important fool, I would’ve seen it so much sooner. It was obvious now: the column of light was responsible for the grid’s burnout. Whoever had just attacked us must have known about the weaknesses in the grid, and sent that light down to screw with our only mechanical form of defense. It had been draining our defenses this whole time.
I clutched my head, my heart thumping in my chest. The attackers had sent missiles through the holes in the grid, targeting high-density structures like the Chimæra and the spires. I had just replaced the wiring in this sector days ago, but the security patches were interdependent and I knew there were outages all over the city. We’d been unprotected.
It was as clear a night as I’d seen in a while. There were no clouds at all. Just smoke, flame, and the brilliant blue light of the Quartermoon.
I couldn’t take any more. I jumped down from the Munis vehicle and raced to the Egg, which I found still parked exactly where I’d left it. Amazingly, it was all in one piece.
I had to get back to the academy—or whatever was left of it. I had to explain my theory to whoever would listen. Surely the council and the academy faculty had been apprised of the attacks on the city, and Daxin would be awake, wondering where his ID Band was.
As I opened the door to the Egg, I heard a voice.
“Sandor.”
I turned around. Devektra and Mirkl stood in the shadows. I had never seen Devektra look so lost before, not even during her little panic attack before the show. All the anger and betrayal I’d felt toward her just minutes ago disappeared as soon as we collapsed into each other’s arms.
After just a moment she pushed me away and shook her head sadly.
“I just came to say good-bye. I know we won’t see each other again. Whatever this thing is, Sandor, it’s bad. It’s the thing they warned us about. I’m going to find some of my Garde friends and we’re going to do whatever we can to stop it.”
Mirkl had been standing there the whole time but he was staring straight ahead with a dead look in his eyes. Whatever fight he’d had in him looked like it was long gone now.
“Let me come with you,” I said. “I can help.”
Devektra shook her head. “No. We have to do it on our own.” She looked at the band on my wrist. “There are people who need you more than I do right now.”
She was right, but I wasn’t ready. Not yet. Tears were streaming down my face. I tried to fight them back. There was no time for crying.
“Why did you leave me in there?” I knew the answer. It didn’t matter. I had to ask anyway.
Devektra put a finger to my lips, as if to say listen carefully.
“I left because I was scared, Sandor,” she said. At least, I think she said it. “We were never perfect. There’s no such thing as perfect. But it’s not too late for us. We can still be good.”
CHAPTER 11
I programmed the Egg to return me to the LDA on autopilot. In the driver’s seat, I folded my arms across my chest and stared straight ahead. I didn’t want to see the devastation as I passed my charred school, or any of the other now ruined landmarks of my home city.
But even with this cultivated tunnel vision, I couldn’t help noticing the smoke coming from the Elder Gardens.
Hundreds must be dead, I thought.
I closed my eyes. I didn’t want to think about it. I just wanted to get back to the LDA, to do something.
I opened my eyes as the Egg passed through Alwon. Chimæra still frolicked by the light of the campfire, and the Kabarakians clustered together in merriment. They were unaware of the destruction to their west. It wouldn’t be long before they found out.
The first thing I had to do was make sure academy officials and councilmembers were even aware of the attack on the city. I was pretty sure they were, but even so, it was still possible I had firsthand information that would be important somehow. I would confess to having snuck out and brief them on my experience of the attack. I’d share my theory that the column was some kind of attack intended to disarm the grid in advance of the wave of missile attacks that had decimated our city.
Once that was accomplished, I would locate Daxin, apologize for taking his ID band, and return it to him.
Then there was Rapp. I had to make sure he was okay.
I smelled it before I saw it. A coppery, dusty tang in the air, somehow strong enough to reach me even through the Egg’s high-grade air filters.
The first thing I actually saw was an absence: the LDA building, the hangar, and the council chamber behind it were all usually bathed in security lights. But as the Egg approached the academy’s coordinates, I saw nothing but blackness.
The academy had been hit.
The Egg whirred to a halt in the darkness. JOURNEY COMPLETE, read the dashboard monitor. Dazed, I stepped out into the eerie blackness of the night.
As my eyes adjusted, I began to make out tiny shards of light on the ground.
It was all gone. Razed. The entire structure had been pummeled into the ground by a weapon the likes of which I had never even imagined. The entire campus had been crushed and melted simultaneously. The green-tinged shards of light I was looking at were the smoldering edges of this black, toxic pancake on Lorien’s surface.
Hundreds more, I thought, stumbling back and forth over the black crust, looking for some unruined piece of the campus and finding none. My professors. The tech students. The Mentor Cêpan trainees and the resident Mentor Cêpans. All those Garde children.
Orkun. Daxin.
Rapp.
I fell to my knees on the crust. It was warm, ash black, but surprisingly soft. This time, I allowed myself to cry.
How could I let this happen? I thought.
The fumes rising from the crust—probably chemicals from the bomb mixed with whatever debris the academy’s destruction had unleashed—burned my throat and my eyes. I didn’t budge.
Let them kill me, I thought.
I had no plan, no home to return to.
I could go to my parents. Deloon, a minor city on the other end of the planet, was probably safe. But for how long? And even if it remained untouched, the thought of programming the Egg to take me there, of spending the rest of my life with my parents in their two-bedroom chalet in bourgeois seclusion made me ill. The only things I had ever cared about were gone. The worst part was that I’d never even really known I’d cared.
With my head pressed against my knees, still fuzzy and throbbing from the rising vapors, my ears suddenly pricked. I heard something approaching. A vehicle.
The attackers, I thought. The ground invasion has begun.
I had no weapons, no means of defense. The attackers, whoever they were, were probably coming to make sure they’d left no survivors at their target. When they found me, they would kill me.
This had been my home—not just the school, but the whole planet. I had been too busy wanting it to be something it wasn’t that I had never realized all the ways in which it was mine.
Maybe there was nothing I could do. I was just one Cêpan with a busted leg, with no Legacies and not even a weapon. I stood up anyway, turned around to face whoever it was head-on and prepared to fight.
The footsteps approaching me were heavy and purposeful, and as they got louder, the melody from Devektra’s final song came back to me. I began to hum. But before I could see my enemy, I had collapsed.
CHAPTER 12
I felt myself lifted from the ground, and carried to a vehicle. I was thrown inside and landed with a thump on my back. I heard the sound of the door buzzing shut, and felt the transport lurch as it speedily resumed its course on autopilot, throwing me hard against the back.
The lights came on and the world around me began to blur back into focus. I tried to make out the shape of my captor.
Brandon stared back at me.
“You?” I said, shocked not to see some hideous alien face. Stunned to see Brandon alive.
Brandon fell to his knees.
“No,” he said. “It’s not possible.” He looked as bereft and lost as I felt. Then he lunged at me, yanking my wrist forward. He inspected the ID band in disbelief, then grabbed my shoulders and started shaking me so hard I thought I might throw up.
“How did you get this?! How did you get this?!”
I tried to answer but he wouldn’t let me. He just kept shaking me. When I couldn’t take it anymore, I finally tipped over and retched all over the corrugated steel of the vehicle’s floor.
Brandon crawled back, away from my heaving. But by the time it had stopped, he was looking at me apologetically. “Sorry.”
“It’s not your fault,” I said. “I don’t think it was you anyway. The fumes from the explosion made me sick. Made me pass out, I guess.”
I moved to the other side of the still-moving vehicle, sat down, and explained how I’d come to be here. I told him how I’d stolen Daxin’s ID band to get into the Chimæra, and how I’d raced back to campus only to find the place a tarry smear on the ground.
Finished, I looked up at Brandon sheepishly. He was quiet for a minute, his expression impossible to read.
Finally, he spoke. “I never would have come back to the LDA if I’d known it was just you. It was a pointless risk.”
Ouch.
“I came for Daxin. I just wasted hours, exposed in the city, trying to locate Daxin, and all I find is you?”
I felt my insides twist with shame.
“He might’ve gotten out. If he’d had his ID band, he might’ve lived,” said Brandon, his anger rising. “When the first Mogadorian missile hit the grid, a warning was sent to us, the academy’s nine Mentor Cêpans. We were to immediately evacuate whatever structure we were in, to make our way to our assigned Garde using their locator bands, retrieve them and bring them back to the secret base. Eight of us succeeded, but Daxin must’ve slept right through the attack.”
The evacuation plan Daxin had cryptically alluded to. I’d assumed it was just Lorien defense paranoia, but he’d known this was coming.
“I’m sorry,” I croaked. The words sounded so pitiful, so puny, in light of the havoc and death I had created. All so I could go to a concert and mess around with Devektra. Now my city lay in ruins, and Daxin was dead. He would never complete the mission he’d spent his whole life preparing for.