His eyes flickered.
“I’ve come to try to make you see reason,” he said. “I promise you that a worst-case scenario has been studied, and a response prepared. Whatever it is—”
Something boomed from across the city, loud like a crack of thunder. I turned, and saw a fading flash in the distance.
“What was that?” Nix asked.
Another bright flash came, and then another followed a beat later by two more loud booms.
Transformers, I thought. Blown power transformers. The test… Vamp’s power cut. It’s started….
I looked around, trying to spot the Zun-Zhe district, when the first flicker of light drew my eye. I watched as a whole block went out, then another. The rest rolled fast after that, the blackness spreading out until the brilliant lights of Hangfei had a single dark patch off in the distance.
Even with all that had happened, I felt a smile creep onto my face. It had worked. Vamp had somehow wormed his way into the system, and his cascading failure idea worked. He’d shut off the power to hundreds of thousands. Not for long, and in an area where there wouldn’t be any haan, but he’d done it.
For me.
“Sam,” Nix called, “what have you done?”
“It’s just that one spot,” I told him. “It’s just a test to see if—”
Another boom sounded, and then more lights flickered somewhere else, somewhere outside of Zun-Zhe. The Gong district, maybe? Another dark patch appeared in the sea of lights, a city block gone black. Some of the lights dimmed, then several more blocks went out.
“What was that?” I asked under my breath. “Was that supposed to happen?”
Vamp, I called. Vamp, are you there?
The 3i connection dropped. Then, like a tidal wave, the darkness began to spread out from the two blacked-out sections.
Even as more booms rolled through the city, a strange sound began to swell. A low hum rose in pitch, then became an angry electric buzz. It broke into overlapping tones, a shrieking, dissonant chord that drowned out everything else.
The darkness moved across Hangfei, winding between lit sections in patterns that looked random. I could still make out the distant movement of cars, pinprick headlights streaming through the dark as it picked up speed, and began to rush toward Ginzho.
“Something’s wrong,” I whispered. “This isn’t supposed to happen like this. We have to get off the building. Now.”
The electric screech continued as one by one the surrounding blocks went dark, cascading all the way to Ginzho until the buildings around the tower winked out one by one. Streams of traffic slowed as they suddenly lost connection to the airway guides.
I turned back toward Nix as a wave of dizziness came over me and sent me staggering to one side.
“Sam, get on the rigging….” I heard Nix shout, but his voice seemed far away and his voice box was cutting in and out.
The last of Ginzho’s lights blinked out. I had never seen the city dark like that before in my life, and the sight of it scared me.
Dizziness turned to nausea that made me double over, hugging Alexei close. I struggled to see as bile crept up in my throat. The lights were still on in some parts of the city, but far away. In Ginzho, only the tower and the buildings surrounding it still had power.
“Sam,” I heard Nix shout, “get on the—”
His voice cut out, overlapped by a low, raspy whisper. The sound was deep, resonating in my head along with a series of clicks like the creeping legs of an insect.
Haan speech. I remembered the sound from Shiliuyuán Station, when Sillith had crept closer to me in the darkness of the tunnel. The sound came from Nix. I could hear Nix’s true voice.
The blackout… the field is failing….
The lights directly ahead flickered, and the tower, having held out as long as it could, went dark. As soon as it did, my body began to feel lighter. My feet began to come up off the ground underneath me. I felt Alexei’s body begin to peel away from the wall and start a slow slide away from me.
The graviton plating. With the power gone, the field had scattered. We were going to fall.
I pushed myself back up onto my feet as true gravity took over and the whole world flipped. I spotted the washer rigging ahead to my left, a direction quickly dropping away to become one story below. I lurched forward and grabbed Alexei’s arm, hauling him up as he began to stir.
As the last of the power drained from the plates, I hooked one arm around Alexei’s waist and ran for it, stumbling as the floor underneath me dropped away and turned back into the wall that it was. As I pushed off with one foot and the sole peeled free, the cigarillo came loose from my mouth and began tumbling down the building face end over end.
I lunged, feet peddling in the air as the last of the graviton emissions faded. Alexei panicked and began to flail as we fell down toward the street eighty stories below. I managed to keep my arm around him as the momentum of my leap sent us sailing down onto the washer rigging, and I struck the metal railing that surrounded the platform. My stomach hit the bar, forcing the air out of me as my head pitched down toward the deck and I went ass over end to crash down on my back next to Alexei. A bucket of cleanser and squeegees toppled over and went sailing down toward the street below.
I rolled over, pain pulsing through my ribs as I crawled across the platform to Alexei. Off to the side, something big and dark whooshed past, one limb cracking against the rig’s railing before it sailed by.
“Nix!”
I looked over the railing in time to see a dark shadow in front of a honeycomb flash of light, like a sunspot, before Nix plunged into the gate he’d created and was gone. I blinked, and the light disappeared.
“Alexei,” I hissed in his ear, still seeing the afterimage of the gate as I shook him. His eyes swam, and blood trickled from his nose. “Alexei, are you okay?”
“I’m okay,” he moaned, waving me away.
The electric racket stopped, its echo rumbling off into the night sky. Through the railing I could see the dark city blocks sprawled out in front of me far below. The grid hadn’t failed, and the haan ship still had power, but big sections of the city had been completely knocked off the grid. I looked out over the dark section, and saw one island of light off in the distance in the middle of it.
My GPS was off but I didn’t need it to know where that was. I could see the big central tower, and the electric lanterns from the protesters at the outskirts. The light came from Xinzhongzi. The tower, where the gonzos had set up shop, still blazed with bright electric light.
I looked and saw that the 3i connection had come back up. I used eyebot to take a snapshot, and sent it to Vamp, along with a message.
Vamp, what happened?
I don’t know.
What do you mean you don’t know; I thought this was supposed to be just a test?
It was. This shouldn’t have happened. Our calculations couldn’t have been this far off.
It spread all the way to Ginzho. You have to shut it off.
We’re trying. It’s cascading out of control.
Xinzhongzi still has power.
Xinzhongzi? They shouldn’t.
Check the picture I just sent you.
I stood, leaning against the rail for a better shot, when something moved down below. Something big. I saw it more in the way that it covered the lights of the traffic streams below than I saw it directly, a long, undulating shadow that cruised over the streets below about twenty stories down. I squinted, straining to see in the dark but before I could make out anything more it snaked around the corner of Ginzho tower and disappeared out of view.