59. Kyle

CHAPTER 59

Kyle

T he deafening blast was punctuated by half of the training room's ceiling simply disappearing , dropping onto the one they'd called Frog and swallowing him whole. There shouldn't have been time to catalogue the expression on the man's face as he was crushed by the falling debris, yet his look of startled disbelief would stay with Kyle for the rest of his life, haunting fretful nightmares that hung thick with powerlessness and destruction.

"What the fuuuuuck was that?" Bear screeched, echoing Kyle's own panic. "Is this shit'ole coming down on us?"

As if in answer, more of the ceiling shuddered, sagged, and then collapsed. Items from the floor above – a bedside table, a chair – could briefly be seen through the gap before it was blocked by rubble that must have come from even higher up. Pieces of jagged concrete worked their way down through the roof-high mound, kicking up further clouds of dust.

Akira, closest to the detritus, coughed and buried his face into his shoulder.

Rumbles continued to echo through Xerxes with the grim threat of further structural collapse, and then a faint ringing sounded in Kyle's ears. It wasn't a noise in itself but rather the absence of one…the absence of the constant hum of the city's engines that must have persisted his entire life and he'd never even realised it was there until it stopped.

Stopped?

The engines. Had stopped.

Xerxes dropped from the sky.

Kyle's stomach lurched with the unmistakeable sensation of falling, his fingers desperately scraping the air for a handhold that didn't exist. He couldn't scream; their rapid descent pulled the breath from his lungs and the thoughts from his head, all of it giving way to the horror of what was happening. Twenty million people were plummeting to their death, and there was nothing any of them could do to stop it.

They were helpless.

Kyle had wondered before what Xerxes looked like to the planet below, back when its descent had been gradual. Now it would resemble a meteor hurtling towards the Earth, its shields doing their best to endure the friction but undoubtedly leaving a heat trail that cut through the sky like a knife.

And there was no one else left to wish on this shooting star.

Then, as if they'd reached the end of an invisible string, the city seemed to catch itself. Gravity abruptly restored along with that faint thrum of the engines, and the room jerked violently, tilting first one way and then the other before coming to uncertain rest.

Kyle grunted, feeling the pressure on his spine as he was pulled upward by his restraints instead of down, but he was lucky in how tightly he'd been held in place during the fall. The other men had been tossed carelessly around the room and were now trying to clamber back to their feet with pained groans.

Kyle's attention – as always – snapped to Akira. The man was lying motionless on the ground where the handcuffs still shackled him to the floor, his eyes closed, and he was coated in a thick layer of building dust that made his dark hair look white. Large lumps of rubble were dotted around his bleeding body.

Stars. Was he even breathing?

"Fuck this," Bear swore and he was off, charging towards the door and flinging it open. Beyond it, the foyer was in similar disarray to the training room, with bricks and concrete scattered over the floor.

"Stop," Kyle yelled, but it came out only as a feeble croak that made him cough. His throat was raw. "You have to help us!"

Bear didn't look back, nor Mouse. Master Theta, on their heels, did, but only briefly and then he was gone too, the three of them scurrying through the door and disappearing from sight.

"Please," Kyle begged the final of Mackenroth's thugs, the one for who he'd never even heard a nickname. "You can't just leave us here."

The man hesitated. His nose had once been broken and set badly, Kyle noted with an odd kind of detachment as they stared at each other with something that transcended the man's role in Kyle's kidnapping and Akira's brutal beating. A shared realisation that if he didn't do anything to help them, they would likely die. And that whatever else he might be or might have done to survive the harsh realities of Xerxes, once the line to murder was crossed, it couldn't be undone.

The man flinched, cursed, and then moved: not away, as Kyle had feared, but towards him, reaching up to unfasten the leather cuff locked tight around his right wrist.

"Hurry," he said urgently, as though it were Kyle's trembling fingers fumbling at the buckle and not his own. "This place could come down any minute. We should be able to carry him out together if we-"

The city lurched again and dropped another few heart-stopping feet before recovering. It only made the man stumble, but his wan face turned even more pale.

"I'm sorry," he whispered to Kyle, backing away. His fingers slipped from the clasp that separated Kyle from his and Akira's freedom. "I'm so, so sorry."