Total pages in book: 121
Estimated words: 112287 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 561(@200wpm)___ 449(@250wpm)___ 374(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 112287 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 561(@200wpm)___ 449(@250wpm)___ 374(@300wpm)
Ice forming in her cells. “The children.”
“Safe underground.” Raphael shoved a hand through his hair. “But Tasha told us they’re trapped until the water recedes, which it’s showing no signs of doing.”
“What—” She never got to finish her question because the sky exploded.
A literal blast of sound above the Tower that spread outward in a burst of stark white that cleared the sky of blue in a surge that soon obliterated the horizon.
“It’s everywhere now!” Raphael called out to her over the ringing in her ears. “Dmitri’s just had a call from Tzadiq, asking if we’re seeing the same.”
Tzadiq, Elena remembered, was Titus’s second.
She glanced down on that thought to see Dmitri on the balcony outside his Tower suite, phone to his ear. And it struck her. “We need to evacuate the Tower!” Because the scales were still crawling up over the Legion building . . . though they’d stopped at the base of the Tower. “Oh no! I think the Sleeper’s under the Legion building!” She began to turn, more instinct than conscious thought.
“No, Elena!” Raphael put himself in front of her, a wall of immovable power. “If it falls, we can rebuild it.” The waves crashed into her mind as his eyes became her world. The Legion would not want you to put yourself at risk.
Gritting her teeth, Elena forced herself to stop as emotion lodged in her throat and twisted in her gut.
Her heart would break when that building fell.
I know, Elena-mine, Raphael said as a siren sounded. It was loud enough to reach across Manhattan, and those within a block of the Tower in any direction knew that was their warning to get the hell away from the Tower.
Angels erupted from the Tower, going not skyward but sideways to land on buildings far from the Tower. All strong enough to do so held a non-flyer. Meanwhile, on the ground, cars began to turn, while pedestrians just dropped what they were doing and ran.
Dmitri had put that siren in place during the rebuild after the war. It could pulse out multiple patterns of sound. This one was the simplest—and everyone in the city knew what it meant, and that it was serious. No hesitation, no questions, run! That was the order drummed into the entire populace.
Tower inhabitants had different instructions.
Snapping out of her heartbreak, Elena blew her archangel a kiss, then fell—to land on the balcony outside the technological control center. Her assigned task during an evacuation was to clear the techs. Raphael, meanwhile, would be on the roof by now, on standby to fly out anyone who was stuck.
She found Vivek alone inside. He was shutting down systems at rapid speed, while shunting everything to a remote mirror of the center they had in another skyscraper in the city that most people thought was just an apartment building favored by angels. The secondary control station had been Vivek’s idea, and after the war and all else the city had survived, it was smart thinking.
“I’m going, I’m going!” he yelled when she ran in. “There, done!” In his wheelchair today, he wheeled himself out while she ran ahead and input an emergency code into a panel beside the elevator.
It came up smoothly. This was part of the plan, too, that code the only one that would work during an emergency override. Non-flyers in the upper floors would’ve been flown out by now. Those on lower floors would be racing down the emergency stairs; anyone left behind or who couldn’t get out was to go to a balcony or make a call for rescue.
Even Vivek had agreed to angelic assistance if the elevators were deemed a risk.
“Go, Ellie! Get out!” he called the second his wheels cleared the entry to the elevator.
She ran as the elevator doors were closing, fighting her instinctive urge to search for others who might need help. Dmitri had been blunt about how that would be the worst possible thing to do.
“If it works as designed,” he’d said, that hard, dark-eyed face set in “don’t fuck this up” lines, “and everyone does their job, no one will be left behind. That’s why we have multiple contingencies built in. Anyone who goes back in breaks the system.”
Tech floor clear! she reported to Raphael as her feet slammed onto the balcony. I’m out! She rode the winds away from the Tower at high speed.
Raphael’s mind hit all of them a minute later: Stage 1 complete.
“Wow,” she said to Aodhan, who’d just landed beside her on her assigned building, the intense white light of the sky dancing off him in a brilliance that was painful if looked at directly; he was a violent glow even in her peripheral vision. “I never expected it to go that smoothly. Guess Bluebell was right—Dmitri is the Dark Overlord of Planning.”
“Yes, Dmitri is the best of us at operations.”