Freefall

Freefall


The air split around me, cold and furious, tearing at my face and ears until there was no sense of up or down—only motion, only the rush of gravity dragging me through a throat of sky. The tower shrank above, its ribs and platforms sliding backward in a smear of rust and shadow. My arms pinwheeled once before instinct forced them tight to my sides.

For a moment, the world was weightless, like the pause before waking. Then my stomach dropped again, harder, faster, as though the city itself had opened its hand and let me go.

Tessa was a blur below, her limbs rigid in the dive. Somewhere behind, I knew Leigh was falling too, and Vale—Vale, if he’d jumped—was closing the gap. But there was no way to know. The roar of the wind drowned everything, made us ghosts in freefall, each one alone.

And through it all, the shriek of the fuel cell cut from the tower above—high, electric, mounting toward something final.

The blast hit before the ground did.

Light tore outward first, swallowing the haze in a single blinding flare. The sound came a fraction later, a cracking thunder that shook the air itself. Heat chased it, a wall that caught me mid-fall and flung me forward, as though the explosion wanted to carry us with it into the ruin.

I tumbled, head over feet, the skyline spinning, flashes of fire trailing from the tower as it sheared apart. Beams bent, platforms folded, cables snapped like tendons. The mech, still clinging to the frame, was consumed in the fireball, its visor flaring white before vanishing in the bloom.

Shards of metal scythed past, whistling like thrown knives. One beam clipped my shoulder, spinning me sideways. Pain ripped across the joint but I barely felt it through the rush.

We weren’t falling toward streets anymore. The blast had shoved us out, further across the ruins, toward what had once been the riverbed—a cracked sprawl of stone and collapsed piers, far enough from the densest rubble that maybe, just maybe, survival wasn’t impossible.

Tessa’s chute snapped open below with a violent crack. The fabric bloomed black against the flare, jerking her body upright. My pulse spiked.

Leigh’s followed—then Vale’s, further back, his silhouette wrenched upward by the force of the chute.

My fingers scrambled for the release on my own pack. The wind made every motion clumsy, tearing at my arms, dragging me sideways. The cord slipped once, twice. My throat closed. Then it caught, and the world snapped.

The chute flared open above me, yanking me so hard my teeth clacked. The rush of fall slowed into a glide, violent but controlled, the blast fading to a roar behind us.

I sucked air like I hadn’t in hours. Below, the riverbed stretched into jagged slabs of stone and steel. No water, not anymore. Just ruin, cracked wide under the years of collapse.

The tower was gone. Only the stump of its base remained, engulfed in fire and rising smoke.

I drifted closer to Tessa, our chutes angling in the same pull of wind. Her face was pale, streaked with soot, but her eyes were alive, locked on me with a ferocity that rooted me to this moment more than the chute did. She raised one hand in the air—a small gesture, but enough to say we’d made it this far.

Leigh’s chute drifted behind, angled wrong. She was fighting the cords, her path dragging her toward a jagged pile of concrete spikes where the riverbed wall had collapsed inward.

“Tessa!” I screamed, but the wind tore the sound away.

Vale saw it too. He was further back, higher, but angling in her direction. His arms pulled hard at the cords, steering into the draft.

I couldn’t help. Not from here. The chute dragged me in a shallow arc, carrying me down toward the flatter expanse of stone. My boots slammed hard, knees buckling, momentum ripping me forward into a roll that tore skin from palms and cheek.

I lay there, gasping against the grit, until my chest remembered how to pull air again.

Tessa landed nearby, collapsing her chute with rough jerks, then stumbling toward me. Her hands grabbed under my arms, hauling me upright.

“You good?” she panted.

My laugh came out strangled. “Define good.”

Her eyes flicked skyward. Vale was still descending, his chute jerking violently as he fought the draft toward Leigh. She was seconds from hitting the spikes.

“Come on,” Tessa muttered. She yanked her chute cords into a bundle and ran, pulling me with her across the cracked stone.

Leigh’s scream cut through the air, sharp and short.

Vale reached her at the last second, smashing his own chute against hers to shove her trajectory just wide of the spike pile. They both slammed down in the debris, rolling hard. Dust plumed upward.

Tessa and I skidded to a stop, too far to do anything but watch.

The silence after was terrible. The roar of the blast had faded, leaving only the hiss of settling fire and the groan of shifting rubble.

Then movement—Vale crawling out from the dust, half-dragging Leigh with him. Her leg bent wrong, twisted at the knee, but she was alive. Her face was twisted with pain, but she clutched his shoulder and shoved herself upright anyway.

Relief hit me so hard it made me sway.

The four of us staggered together at last, our shapes small in the cavern of the dead riverbed, smoke rising all around.

Behind, the tower’s skeleton was gone, replaced by a wound of fire that licked at the horizon. The mech had burned in it. The Institute’s signal had burned in it. And part of me had burned in it too.

Vale’s face was pale under the soot, his jaw set. “We move. They’ll know it failed.”

Tessa rounded on him. “It didn’t fail. The mast is down, the mech’s destroyed. We bought time.”

“Not enough.” His voice was flat. “They’ll send more. That blast wasn’t an ending. It was a flare.”

Leigh leaned on him, breath sharp with every step. “Then where?”

Vale didn’t answer immediately. His gaze swept the far edge of the riverbed, where the ruins thinned into a skeletal line of broken highways and bridges. Beyond them, the haze thickened again, darker this time, as though something was waiting just behind it.

“The harbor,” he said finally. “We make for the harbor. If anything’s still running, it’ll be there.”

The word stuck in me like a splinter. Harbor. Escape, maybe. Or just another trap. But we had no choice.

We walked.

The stones shifted underfoot, some still hot from the blast. Our shadows stretched long in the red haze, four figures against a landscape that no longer remembered what it had been.

Every few minutes, Vale glanced back, as though expecting the mech to claw itself free of fire and rubble. It never did, but his eyes never softened either.

The silence between us was a wound of its own. I thought of Marley then—not just her absence, but her laugh, her voice, her way of filling space so it never felt this empty. I thought of what she would have said if she were here. Probably something sharp, reckless, designed to slice through the quiet and make us feel human again.

But she wasn’t.

And all I could hear was the wind dragging smoke across the ruins.

By the time the highway carcass loomed ahead, Leigh’s steps were faltering. Her face was clammy, her hands trembling where they gripped Vale’s shoulder.

“We need to stop,” I said.

“We don’t stop,” Vale replied.

“She can’t keep moving like this.”

“We don’t stop,” he repeated, steel in the words.

Tessa slowed then, planting herself in front of him. “She’s not a machine. You drive her further, you lose her. We find cover, five minutes.”

Vale’s jaw worked. His gaze flicked once toward the haze at the horizon, then back to us. Finally, he nodded. “Five minutes. No more.”

We ducked into the hollow under the highway’s collapsed belly, where concrete slabs leaned together to form a rough shelter. It smelled of mildew and old oil, but it was cover.

Leigh collapsed against the wall, her breaths ragged. I crouched beside her, brushing grit from her face.

She tried to smile. “Better landing than the tower.”

My throat tightened. “Don’t joke.”

“Why not? Somebody has to.”

I pressed her hand, not trusting my voice.

Vale paced near the entrance, eyes on the haze. Tessa sat with her back to the wall, staring up at the cracks in the concrete as though the sky might answer her.

The silence pressed again. But this time, it felt heavier—less like absence, more like waiting.

Because somewhere beyond the haze, something was moving.

We all felt it.

The ground gave the faintest shiver, too regular to be wind, too steady to be collapse.

Another machine. Not the mech—we’d killed that one. Something else.

Leigh’s hand tightened on mine. “Tell me that’s thunder.”

No one did.

The shiver came again, closer.

Vale’s face was hard as stone. “We move now.”

And this time, no one argued.