A bullion van lurched through the ruins, its heavy frame navigating a hellscape of collapsed buildings and black smoke that stained the sky. Bryce gripped the wheel, his knuckles white.
He passed the crumbled remains of his personal lab, a knot of regret tightening in his chest.
I shouldn't have kept Diego there. We underestimated those fools.
After Driving for a while, he got close to The White House.
His tension spiked as he turned onto the street that led to the White House. Once a corridor of tight security, it was now a desolate strip. Litter skittered across the road, pushed by a hollow wind.
The White House itself stood unnervingly intact, a pristine monument amid the devastation. But it was not undefended. It was surrounded by a small army—soldiers in plain sight, others hidden in ambush positions. They were waiting for him.
Devastating gunfire and mini-bombs rained down on the van. The tires shredded instantly, bringing the heavy vehicle to a grinding halt directly in front of the building.
The visible soldiers held their positions. Those in ambush sprang out, forming two vertical lines to the east and west.
How does Yakkov know my every move? Bryce scoffed, the thought a fleeting spark of fury. It doesn't matter. He'll die today.
His form shifted to polished steel, then beyond, becoming a semi-translucent haze as nanites bent light around him. He didn't vanish; he diffracted, his outline scattering like dust in the wind.
The van's door blew open.
A bomb sailed inside, followed by a deafening explosion that turned the vehicle into a charred, mangled wreck, scattering debris across the lawn.
A soldier on the west lane felt a shift in the air beside her. She turned to see a bomb—her bomb—strapped to her own vest, now floating in mid-air. It hurled across the divide and exploded amidst the east lane soldiers, burning them to crisps.
The west lane soldiers responded instantly, firing indiscriminately around their comrade. Bullets riddled her body, piercing her armor. She fell. They kept firing.
Another soldier felt the same phantom movement. All the explosives on his vest vanished.
Six bombs and two combat knives hung in the air.
The bombs shot forward, landing at the White House entrance. The blast incinerated everyone in the vicinity and blew the reinforced doors to splinters. Simultaneously, the knives became a whirlwind of silver, dancing through the air and slicing the throats of every soldier on the west lane.
From inside the blasted doorway, a little girl emerged. Blood dripped from her neck as she walked toward the smoldering frame.
"Karolyn!" A raw, metallic scream tore from the west lane. A being of shifting metal was re-forming, its hands drenched in blood, three powerful tentacles sprouting from its back. The tentacles touched the ground, propelling the metallic figure in a desperate leap toward the door.
---
"Karolyn!"
The same scream ripped from Bryce's throat in the present, shattering the memory. In Silicon Canyon, he leaped high into the sky, soaring over a horrified Elara and the cadets sprawled on the ground.
Elara had arrived twenty minutes earlier to find chaos. She had joined the circle of cadets, calling Bryce's name, trying to anchor him in the present.
"I should have listened to Yakkov," he had muttered, his eyes closed.
After five minutes of futile pleading, she made the mistake of touching his shoulder.
He sparked.
His hand shot out, tearing the left side of her blouse and flinging the fabric east. He didn't stop. He shredded seven pieces of her top, flinging five fragments forward. The remaining two fluttered to the ground as his fingers elongated into ten-inch blades.
He danced through the air, a dervish of grief and violence. His bladed finger sliced a hairline cut across Elara's throat. She tried to kick him; he blocked with a shin-shattering kick of his own and grabbed what was left of her top.
The fabric ripped completely away.
Bryce stumbled, used the twist of momentum, and drove a blow into Elara's chest. The impact lifted her off her feet, hurling her backward through the air. He resumed his gliding dance, his elongated fingers precisely slicing the throats of the surrounding cadets.
From the grotesque angles of the fallen cadets, a dozen different live feeds continued to stream. The public net was being fed a fractured, horrifying video of the pooling blood, and Bryce's metallic form—all recorded from the dead's-eye view of their still-active B-Wax units.
"Karolyn!" Bryce shouted again, leaping into the air.
He was no longer just remembering the past. He was reliving it, mimicking every move from his memory, trapped in a ghostly reenactment of his saddest memories.