I, Cassandra

46 | RYAN MADDOX

Back in the city, I bolt out of the slaughterhouse into a world of utter darkness lit only by sporadic pools of emergency lighting. Above, the dome glows with a macabre red-orange hue, reflecting the destruction tearing its way over the world towards us twenty kilometres high. The alarms have stopped, all of Alpha VII's power rerouted to G-II's systems thanks to de Pommier. In the wake of the alarms' silence, chaos has unfolded. Gunshots ring out. Pandemonium reigns, punctuated by screams of terror, wails of despair, weeping and cries to the gods of men to save them. I ignore it all, my entire focus on what I must still do, and where I need to be. Sixteen minutes left.

The lab is deserted. On the third floor, locked in a small vault, I find the safe exactly where it should be, its precious cargo inside tucked tight into another container seething with nanobots to sustain it. It's dormant, the code to awaken it long since hacked and buried inside me. I heft the small box and thank the quantum powers that be for this one good thing that has come out of this hell. Something for Blue after all she has lost. Just one thing.

The safe tucked in the crook of my arm, I push my way out of the lab into the corridor. de Pommier's avatar is there, waiting for me.

'I knew you would come back for it,' it says, soft, de Pommier's French accent hits me, tragic in these final moments, I realise, pointlessly, there will never be another French accent again. She continues, conversational, a faint smile on her lips as if we have all the time in the world for a little chat: 'My little gift for the one who could save humanity from itself.'

I say nothing, I keep walking. I have no time for this. For her. She left Blue tied up and drugged with the intention to take me out and leave Blue alone on another planet. Fuck her.

'Maddox,' she says. 'Wait. Please. Take this.'

Her avatar holds its hand out, curled into a fist. It unfolds its fingers and in its palm, a tiny unit beats with a little life of its own. 'I am pleased you never learned about this in all your searches. My deepest secret of all.'

Time claws its way past me. Fifteen minutes. I reach out to take it, whatever it is. She drops it in my upturned palm.

'It's the key to a vault,' she says, sensing my urgency, 'buried under Alpha VI. The history of man, or at least what I could salvage from what was left during the relocation. I had hoped for it to be used by those returning from Mars in the future. Well,' she smiles, soft, and shrugs, valiant in the face of the totality of her failure, 'maybe, one day, it will come in handy again.'

I secure the thing into my breast pocket and leave. There's nothing more to say.

'Goodbye Capitaine,' de Pommier says, soft, from behind me, a relic of an already dead world. Her avatar collapses, a heavy, dense thud. I keep moving and don't look back. I don't even care. There's only Blue, now.

And the next thousand years to kill.

Seven minutes left. I am almost at the slaughterhouse, the safe tucked tight under my arm. The entire city glows with a dull orange tint, the colour of hell. Of hopelessness. Of finality. There are no shadows. The whole sky is burning now, the heat already unbearable. The oppressive silence of the doomed city weighs down on me, claustrophobic. I feel like I'm the last thing left aware and alive on Earth. A gunshot splits the air and corrects my error. I reach the slaughterhouse elevator, its doors slide open and welcome me into its sanctuary.

Five minutes. It's going to be tight. I bolt to the main elevator and plunge the final two kilometres to the safety of G-II.

The doors open. One minute and twenty-four seconds to spare. I'm already running, determined to be there with her when it happens when the world as we know it ends. To watch over her. And wait.

Halfway down the corridor, a resonance surrounds me, goes right through me, the agony of a planet in its death throes. A heartbeat later, a ripple of seismic activity slides along the length of the corridor, a harbinger of more to come. Another tremor follows, hard in its wake. The lights die. Absolute darkness surrounds me.

I keep running, blind. Echolocation kicks in, an enhancement I never even knew I had. Ultra-high pitch frequencies reveal a world in low res. It's enough. At the blast doors, I punch the emergency switch to close them. A faint click answers me, then nothing.

Fourteen seconds. Fuck it. Blue is all who matters now. I reach her with six seconds to spare. The safe still in my grip, I kneel and scan her pod for power. Her readout blinks at me, innocent of the hell unfolding around it. Relief slams into me. Whatever shut down G-II's power didn't hit the pods.

Two seconds. It comes then, the roar of the earth's mantle tearing itself apart. The floor heaves with the force of a detonation, slams me into a wall. The safe skitters away into the darkness. Damage reports flood my sensors. I'm injured, can feel myself repairing. I need to get back to Blue. I need to get the safe. I stagger back to my feet, I don't feel pain, but I know I should—if I had bones, most of them would be broken.

Another roar of stone against stone shoots through the cavern and I am thrown again, this time against a pod unmoored from its place. I claw my way through the mêlée, but everything is moving, a heaving sea, a storm of pods rising and falling. I search for Blue's pod, lost in the chaos. Another pod loses its footing, slides across the floor at me. I lunge out of its way straight into another incoming pod. A glitch of blue in my vision, then nothing. Darkness. Silence.