But BTC headquarters did not come apart. The forty-story black slab kept rising out of the ground, getting broader and more massive as the ground around it erupted—tearing up sidewalks and asphalt as floors and floors of dark nanorod curtain wall rose from the earth.

The entire region rumbled.

Cotton said to himself, “We’re recording this, right?”

 • • •

Miles away people stepped out of their homes and onto their balconies and driveways to stare in horror and shock as a towering monolith rose from the Detroit skyline in the predawn. They swayed from the tremors as they raised smartphones and started filming the dark spike that was still growing above them. Taller than any building they’d ever seen, it kept rising—a hundred stories, a hundred and twenty, and still it rose, surrounded by a crown of debris that glittered as the dawn sun caught the shards of glass. Winds thousands of feet in the air blew the smoke and debris away from the dark tower like storm clouds on a mountain peak, and yet still the massive tower rose.

People throughout the city stopped and stared, dumbfounded. Disbelieving their eyes.

 • • •

Alexa clawed her way across heavy debris, sending it rotating as she pushed off it, striving toward the positron pistol that twirled in the wind, bouncing it off walls.

Morrison was close behind her, his face bloody, but his eyes filled with rage. “You freak! You might be faster and stronger, but no one is tougher than me . . .”

Suddenly a chair collided with Alexa from behind, sending her sailing past the floating pistol. She stretched for it but instead saw Morrison’s approaching scowl as she fell away. His hand wrapped around the pistol while she accelerated her forward momentum, curling her body forward and pushing off the nearest wall with her feet.

Just moments later a loud crack delivered a massive blast to the floor that sent her hurtling across the debris-filled air, along with sofas, tables, and now shattering curio cabinets. Her foot caught the edge of a sofa and she started tumbling end over end, impacting other objects in flight. She covered her head with her hands.

She lost all frame of reference as she rotated out of control, loud cracks and explosions following her across the room. A sharp pain pierced her leg, and she curled up in a ball until she hit something hard—very hard. By the time she could think straight again, Morrison was headed in from above her, leading with the pistol. The walls of the room were afire with an odd, gelatinous flame, like she’d seen in space experiments. Fire with no “up” to burn in.

Morrison lowered the smoking pistol with dismay and cast it away. “You didn’t leave me much ammo.”

She waited for him and whirled into a roundhouse kick that sent him rolling through flaming debris.

The walls groaned and creaked around them.

 • • •

Grady pulled his way hand over hand toward Hedrick, keeping as much solid wreckage between them as possible. Hedrick struggled with some sort of hatchway and occasionally fired his weapon at Grady to keep him away.

But there was now too much debris in the room, and whatever type of beam weapon Hedrick was using, the energy kept hitting intervening wreckage and scattering as scalding vapor.

Grady was moving closer—now within twenty feet of Hedrick, ducking behind floating exhibit displays. He peered around one and could see that Hedrick was struggling to disengage a vehicle without wheels from its exhibit mount. Grady was close enough to see the glowing holographic words before it: “GMV—Gravity Mirror Vehicle.”

He had to admit, it looked like a Porsche for the twenty-second century.

Grady ducked back behind the display and shouted, “Hedrick! I’m not letting you leave here!”

In the roar of wind Hedrick didn’t seem to know where Grady’s voice was coming from, so he fired several times—but each time intervening debris was vaporized. “I’ll kill you if you try to follow me! You and Cotton will pay for this!”

Suddenly a soul-wrenching BOOM shook the building, and the walls beyond Hedrick cracked and disintegrated—sucking toward some powerful vortex. Hedrick dropped his gun to grab onto the GMV with both hands—even as he and the entire vehicle were sucked away.

Grady was pulled in moments later. As he looked ahead, he could see a massive hole had been torn into the side of the BTC building as the massive bulk of the brittle building flexed and turned on itself.

The view through the forty-foot-wide hole made him gasp. They were at least fifteen thousand feet in the air. The grid of city and suburbs and distant lakes spread out below them with the dawn sun breaking over the horizon.

And then he saw Hedrick climb into the GMV, the hatch closing over him, just as the vehicle got sucked out, furniture, carpeting, and partition walls swirling around it. Grady hurtled through the opening and felt incredible vertigo as a blast of cold wind hit him. He rolled end over end  in some sort of eddy as a massive black wall rolled past him like the flank of a massive ship. There was a constant dull roar like that of an avalanche.

And then he suddenly felt himself falling again. He looked back to see the BTC tower still rising. He fell in the opposite direction just a few hundred meters away. A glance down and he could see the jagged end of the thousand-foot-long tower where it had been torn out from either the remainder of the complex or from its foundations.

Grady noticed something even more jaw-dropping—a huge hole hundreds of meters wide and unfathomably deep had been torn in the center of Detroit’s downtown, and the Detroit River was rushing in to fill the void. A Niagara-size wall of white water was pouring in below.

Grady snapped out of it as he continued to descend. He figured he was at only seven or eight thousand feet already. A glance up showed the jagged burning end of the BTC tower receding into the sky.

Alexa.

There was no way to get to her now, and he realized she had a gravis of her own integrated with her tactical suit. And she knew how to use it more than anyone. He turned his angle of descent again and saw his only course of action was to find Hedrick. To find Hedrick was to find the location of Hibernity.

Scanning below, Grady noticed a large piece of debris heading purposefully to the south. It was a sleek form like the GMV, but it still seemed to have something attached to it. The exhibit mount.

It was headed south, but it was also falling. Losing altitude.

Grady nodded to himself and directed his angle of descent toward it.

 • • •

The interior walls within the BTC tower were oscillating with the gushing wind that poured through cracks and fissures in the diamond-aggregate nanorod shell. It seemed like everything was flexing around Alexa as she pulled her way along, trying to find an exit.

But Morrison kept on her tail. Since she couldn’t easily find a surface that wasn’t floating, it was hard to outrun him. There was nothing to run on.

The roar of wind and groaning and shrieking of massive sheets of metamaterials bending against forces for which they hadn’t been designed was terrifying. It sounded as though mountains were colliding in the sky.

She had to find her way to an opening. There had to be one. All of this wind meant there was a hole somewhere. A glance at the heads-up display in her helmet visor told her she was already at twenty-two thousand feet and rising. As the atmosphere thinned, they’d rise even faster. Before long even she would have trouble breathing.

“I’m not letting you leave here, Alexa!” Morrison was panting.

He suddenly grabbed her feet, and she rolled, kicking him off. She looked back at him as she clamored through the crack in a shattered interior wall. “I have to hand it to you, Morrison. You don’t quit.”