Chapter 85 Sooner than expected

Chapter 85 Sooner than expected
The evacuation started at dawn.

Garron moved through Hulon's residential corridors like he'd been planning this for months, which I suspected he had, his people already positioned at every major transit junction before most of the district had woken up to what was happening. He spoke to people directly, standing in doorways and corridor intersections, his voice carrying without needing to be raised, that thick mustache and the particular stillness of him making people stop and listen before they'd decided to.

I watched him tell an old woman on the third floor of a residential block that she needed to take only what she could carry and that everything else could be replaced. She looked at him for a long moment, then nodded and went back inside to pack.

That was Garron. He made people believe the thing they were doing was already decided, already right, already the only thing that made sense.

Tasha worked the eastern corridors with Haruki beside her, his eye still covered under fresh bandaging, moving people toward the transit lines Kellan's ground crew had commandeered for the evacuation. Thousands of them already, families with children, workers still in their shift clothes, elderly residents being helped down stairwells by neighbors they'd never spoken to before that morning.

I worked the central hub, directing flow, keeping the lines moving, watching the clock in the corner of my eye-ring count down the hours Daniel had given us.

Thirty one hours remaining.

Then the Men of Moon vehicles arrived.

Three transports rolled into the central plaza from the northern access road, unmarked, moving slowly.

Matt stepped out of the first one.

He looked at me across the plaza, two hundred people moving between us in a steady stream, and neither of us said anything for a moment. Rusk climbed out behind him, then four more operatives I didn't recognize, taking positions along the plaza's edge without being told to.

Garron appeared on my shoulder.

"Friends of yours?" he said quietly.

"Not anymore," I said.

I walked toward Matt. He walked toward me. We met in the middle of the stream of evacuating people, stepping sideways out of their path, and for a second it felt absurd.

"You need to stop this," Matt said.

"Two hundred thousand people will die if they stay."

"You're moving people out of their homes based on a broadcast. Mr. Rothmere will talk to him before anything happens. You need to stay here."

"You’re full of shit!"

"Da Vinci—"

"You watched the Breathless Dome footage," I said. "You sat in the same briefings I sat in. You know exactly what Daniel is capable of and you know exactly what Men of Moon authorized." I looked at him steadily. "Are you telling me you think these people should really stay?"

Something moved across his face that he didn't want me to see.

"I'm telling you that you don't have the authority to move an entire Nation," he said.

"Neither does Daniel," Tasha said, coming up beside me, Haruki a step behind her.

Matt looked at her, then at Haruki.

"Sera gave us a direct order to halt this evacuation," he said.

"Then Sera is asking you to help Daniel kill two hundred thousand people," I said. "And you have to decide right now whether that's an order worth following."

"Don't do that," Matt said, his voice dropping. "Don't make it sound simple."

"It is simple, you dumb fuck!" I said, unable to control my mouth.

"It's not simple!" His voice came out harder than he meant it to, loud enough that a few of the evacuees nearby glanced over before looking away and keeping moving. He pulled it back down. "Nothing about this is simple, Da Vinci. You think I don't know what Daniel did? But I also see you being the killer of Sable and Lyra and every other person who's died because of the F.L.A that day!"

I waited.

"But Men of Moon is the only structure holding any of this together," he said. "Without it there's nothing between order and complete collapse. Garron's people can't run a colony! Grandisfield's been dead for months as far as anyone knew. And you..." He looked at me with something raw behind his eyes. "You ran, Da Vinci. You've always run. You ran on that surface ten years ago and you've been running ever since and now you want me to believe you've suddenly stopped?"

The plaza went quiet between us for a moment despite all the noise around us.

"I'm not running," I said.

"You're evacuating an entire district."

"That's different and you know it!"

Rusk shifted his weight on the far side of the plaza. I noticed it without looking directly at him.

"Last chance," Matt said. "Stop the evacuation. Come with us. Whatever comes next, at least we face it together the way we always have."

"That’s funny," I said laughing. "Face it together? We both know you want to torture me before feeding me to Sera."

He looked at me for a long time.

Then he shook his head, and took a step back toward his operatives.

The standoff held for twenty minutes.

Garron kept the evacuation moving around the edges of the plaza, rerouting people through side corridors to keep them away from the tension at the center, his voice steady and constant somewhere behind me.

Matt's people held their positions. Ours held ours. Nobody drew a weapon. 

Rusk stood at the edge of Matt's group and said nothing, watching the evacuees move past. Then his comm lit up.

He looked at it. Looked up. Looked at the stream of people moving past him, a mother pulling two children by their hands, an old man carrying a photograph under one arm.

He stepped away from Matt's group, moving to stand alone near the plaza wall, his arms at his sides.

Matt looked at him. "Rusk?"

"Give me a second something’s come up," Rusk said simply.

"What—"

"Shut up for a second."

The four other operatives exchanged glances, uncertainty moving through them like a current, their certainty about which way this was supposed to go suddenly less certain.

I opened my mouth to say something. Then the lights changed.

Not all at once. Section by section, the plaza's overhead panels shifted from their normal warm white to the pale blue that the emergency atmosphere systems used when oxygen concentration dropped below safe threshold.

The change was subtle enough that most people didn't notice it immediately. 

My eye-ring flashed an atmospheric alert.

Oxygen concentration in Hulon central district: 97%.

Dropping.

"He moved the timeline," Tasha said, her voice stripped of everything except the fact.

I looked at the countdown on my eye-ring. Twenty nine hours remaining. Daniel hadn't waited.

"Garron!" I shouted across the plaza.

He was already moving, already on his comm, already redirecting the evacuation flow toward the faster transit routes, his voice cutting through the growing noise.

"Move them faster," he called out. "All routes. Move them now!"

The plaza erupted.

Two hundred thousand people discovered simultaneously that the air they were breathing had already started thinning.

Matt stood in the middle of it, his operatives buffeted by the suddenly moving crowd, the controlled standoff dissolving into chaos around him, and for one second his eyes met mine across the surge of people between us.

I turned and ran toward the transit lines holding Tasha’s hands tight and not letting her go.

Behind us, the atmospheric alert on every screen in Hulon climbed from pale blue toward amber.

Oxygen concentration: 96%.

And it was still dropping.