She was already on her feet when Lucius reached the edge of the hall.
The casing had finished leaving her. It stood on its cradle in the middle of the floor, a ribbed cylinder taller than he was and thick as a barrel, the amber light crawling along its flank in a slow pulse. More metal than any body should have held. More than a body could have, and she had held it.
She wiped her mouth with the back of her wrist and looked up at him. Not startled, not afraid. The look of a person regarding a delay in her schedule.
Lucius dropped. Twelve feet of air. He slipped his arms through the sleeves of his coat, pulled it straight, and landed in a crouch that cracked the concrete under his boots. He rose and took a long look at the thing in the middle of the floor.
"I'm going to assume that's going to be a problem," he said. "So don't blame me if I get a little rough."
She didn't answer. She smoothed down her torn clothes with the dignity of someone leaving a meeting, and stepped around the casing until it stood between them.
He went the other way, quiet along the pump row, to come at her from behind.
---
He had covered half the distance when something hissed through the dark. He turned his head, and the bone spike passed close enough to shave the air before it punched into a pump housing behind him and stood there, humming.
"Ah, ah, ah." The voice came from the shadows, delighted. "You can't skip the show!"
Handsome Jack stepped out of the dark at a stroll, clapping slowly, plates of bone sliding back along his forearms as if taking a bow. "Ladies and gentlemen, the star of our second act! The man who seizes so beautifully on command!" Jack spread his arms to an audience of dead pumps. "I looked everywhere for you. I was starting to take it personally."
"You must be exhausting at parties," Lucius said.
"They never invite me twice!"
Behind the casing, the woman was already backing toward the black mouth of a service shaft. "Handle the rest," she said, the first words Lucius had heard from her, and swung herself over the lip. The shaft took her. The dark closed.
Lucius looked at Jack, then back at the casing. "Not here," he muttered.
"Not here what? The party's just starting!" Jack laughed and surged forward.
Jack crossed the gap faster than the plating should have allowed. His opening strike was a blade of bone extending directly from his palm, swinging flat at Lucius's face. Lucius ducked beneath the arc, slipped inside the reach, and threw a low sweeping kick meant to take Jack off his feet.
Jack saw it coming. The bone plates along his shins hardened into dense ivory, stopping Lucius's leg cold with a dull *thunk*.
"Nice try, swift-kick!" Jack grinned, twisting mid-stride to hurl a forward kick straight at Lucius's face, a cluster of bone spikes sprouting from his heel.
Lucius rolled backward across the concrete, clearing the immediate trajectory. Jack didn't miss a beat—he fired the heel spikes like projectiles mid-kick. Lucius kept rolling, the bone darts shattering against the stone floor around his shoulders.
By the time Lucius pushed up from the roll, Jack was already on top of him, closing the distance with a flying superman punch. "Catch!" Jack chirped.
Lucius caught the flying wrist, redirecting the momentum safely past his cheek, but Jack used the rotation to whip a sweeping roundhouse kick toward Lucius's upper body. Lucius raised his arm, catching the leg under his elbow. Instantly, sharp micro-spikes erupted from Jack's thigh, driving through fabric and piercing Lucius's skin.
Lucius didn't flinch. Ignoring the bite of the bone, he drove his left hand—the one wrapped in heavy medical bandages—straight into Jack's face with an open-palm strike.
Jack's head snapped sideways, his teeth clacking together. He skidded across the dust, chuckling through a split lip. "Oh, a palm strike! Very traditional! Did you learn that in—"
Lucius closed the distance before Jack could finish the sentence, driving a brutally heavy uppercut into Jack's abdomen. Jack hardened his abdominal armor half a second too late; the sheer kinetic force carried through the bone, rattling his internal organs.
Jack gagged, spat a droplet of blood, but his eyes were wide with unhinged excitement. "Oof! Okay, ten out of ten for power!"
Jack brought both arms inward, forming a pair of cross-blades that slashed out in a deadly X-pattern. Lucius ducked, weaved back out of the cutting zone, and spun smoothly on his heel, driving a spinning back kick directly into Jack's chest. The impact lifted Jack off his feet and sent him crashing into a row of iron pump housings.
Lucius didn't relent. He leaped into the air, bringing down an overhead fist with enough force to crater the concrete floor where Jack landed. Jack rolled clear a fraction of a second before the impact. Rising from the dust, he executed a quick, fluid handstand, springing back onto his feet while a violent wave of bone spikes erupted out of every inch of his body like a sea urchin.
"Pop goes the lethal weapon!" Jack cackled, firing the wave outward in all directions.
Lucius threw himself backward, slapping aside the incoming bone darts with his forearms. Reaching down, he tore a massive chunk of broken concrete out of the crater floor and used it as a shield, smashing through the remaining barrage as he pushed forward.
Then the building lurched.
The floor dropped an inch, rose, and dropped again, as if something enormous below had taken hold of the foundations and shaken. Thunder rolled through the hall. The casing slid on its cradle with a long grinding scrape.
Lucius went for it. He could drag a casing clear of an edge if he got his hands under it, and nobody was going to dig the thing out of rubble if it wasn't in the rubble. Three strides. Two.
Jack intercepted him, lunging from the side with a sweeping blade. Lucius ducked the swipe, but the extra beat gave Jack the opening he needed.
"Property of the management!" Jack hollered, throwing himself onto the casing.
The floor gave out completely.
As they both entered freefall, bone poured out of Jack's body in a dense, blinding wave. White ribs of calcium wrapped around his limbs and coiled around the cylinder, sealing both Jack and the casing inside an impenetrable, root-like bone cocoon.
"Hold on tight, folks!" Jack's muffled voice echoed from inside the hardening shell.
Lucius was falling. Concrete blocks and metal beams tumbled through the air around him. Scrambling mid-air, Lucius kicked off a descending slab of floor, leaping toward the bone cocoon to grab it before it plunged into the abyss. He landed on a floating piece of masonry, poised to make one last jump—
A support beam as long as a bus detached from its mountings, swinging down through the dark in a massive arc. It slammed between Lucius and the cocoon, cutting off his path entirely and sweeping the white bone shell down into the depths.
Lucius abandoned the chase, pivoting entirely to survival. He sprang across falling debris, leaping from slab to slab as the dark swallowed the cocoon below. The roar of falling concrete filled the shaft.
He hit the far wall hard enough to taste copper. Pipes burst overhead in a spray of rust water. From far below came a sound he felt in his sternum before he heard it—a long, dry tearing, like something enormous unspooling.
He ran.
---
Sol saw the tentacles first.
He was crossing the plaza at a hundred feet, the broken marquees below him spinning slowly in the wind of his passing, the tower filling the sky ahead like a held breath. Smoke bled from its upper floors. The east entrance gaped. Everything about it said hurt, and nothing about it said yet.
Then the pavement in front of the building lifted. Not cracked. Lifted, like something under the stone had taken a breath. Dark red shapes broke the surface in a spray of paving and dirt, thick as support columns, wet and glistening, uncoiling along the base of the tower with an almost lazy speed. One wrapped the nearest column of the entrance colonnade and squeezed. The colonnade went to powder.
"No," Sol said, to nobody, and dove.
He was too far. The tentacles fed into the building's foundations like roots finding water, three, then six, then more than he could count, tearing through the lobby glass from inside, and the entire east face of the ground floor blew outward in a shower of shards.
For one impossible second, the tower stood on nothing.
Twenty-eight stories of stone and steel hung there as though the world had forgotten to pull. Sol saw the upper block settle, the windowless mass of it dropping a fraction, the way a man's knees give before the rest of him follows. Then it all came down.
Not toppling. Falling straight, floor upon floor, each one landing on the next with a crash that arrived late, a full beat after the sight, so that the harbor boats were already rocking before the sound reached them. Dust blew out of the base in a wall. Grey, enormous, rolling over the plaza and the marquees and the empty paving, swallowing the sky the tower used to hold.
The shockwave caught Sol at the edge of the cloud and threw him like a leaf. He tumbled through the dust, skidded across the paving on his shoulder, and ended on his hands and knees in the grey, coughing, ears ringing. Somewhere behind him the cargo helicopters had scattered, their crates swinging wildly on cables.
Down near the docks, an evacuation boat rocked heavily in the surge. Charlotte was steadying Hannah near the gangway, pushing her toward the deck while the medical team loaded supplies.
"I'm not getting on!" Hannah snapped, her arm bandaged and pulled tight against her ribs. She gripped the railing, looking back toward the billowing dust cloud. "We have to wait for King!"
"Hannah, we have to clear the harbor!" Charlotte urged, keeping a firm grip on her good shoulder.
Toby stepped up beside them, placing a steady hand on the boat's frame. "Go, Hannah. Get on board. I'll stay near the perimeter line and wait for him. You know he's not dying in there."
Hannah searched Toby's face for a long second before giving a reluctant nod and letting Charlotte guide her onto the vessel.
Across the perimeter, Teo stood motionless near the command tent. Beside him, Leah had stopped moving entirely, staring at the wall of grey dust.
"He's still in there," she said, very quietly.
Nobody told her she was wrong.
Where the tower had stood there was a hill of rubble and a roiling cloud, and a silence that slowly filled with sirens. Sol pushed himself upright, brushing dust from his eyes, and stared at the pile.
'Come on,' he thought. 'Come on, King.'
Nothing moved.
Then, from somewhere deep under the stone, something did.
---
TO BE CONTINUED