“Do we respect their bravery? Yes, we do. Can we let such actions go unpunished? No, we cannot.”

I look at the images of the men and women on the stage, some crying, some stoic, some shaking with fear.

They’re going to send them to the Block, I think. And then Galen gestures offstage, and eight Alt soldiers walk onstage carrying Deleters—sickle-shaped executioners’ weapons that reduce the condemned to microscopic particles. One of the cuffed prisoners begins to scream.

“Remember this, friends,” Galen says as the Deleters rise above the prisoners, “remember what happens to those who do not support a World Government who chose you to live through the end of the world.”

Galen nods, and the Deleters begin to swing.

I look away as the first prisoner is reduced to ash. I switch the SoCom off as the crowd begins to cheer, and I am left only with the ghost of that sound, resonating throughout the building.

I exhale, thinking that I might be about to throw up.

Happy is killing Alts, I think. Happy is killing Alts who dared to question genocide.

And I cannot understand it. I cannot understand how so many people can be talked into believing in something so cruel, something so ruthless and vicious.

“Apple-Moth, time?” I whisper, my voice shaking.

“The time is 11:02 a.m., friend.”

I feel my heart sink. Five minutes until Woods becomes a host, eighteen minutes for Malachai. I have to put the atrocities that are occurring just down the hallway to the back of my mind.

“Apple-Moth, do you know if there’s a medical center or laboratory in this building?”

“I don’t have access to the blueprints or plans to the Arc. Sorry, friend.”

“Shit!” I say, almost yelling but stopping myself just in time.

“But,” Apple-Moth says from the chest pocket of the T-shirt beneath my body armor, “the building is completely uniform on every level barring four anomalies: the hangar where the tank was parked; the big hall where that man was speaking; a single, large, circular room at the very top of the building, and two more rooms that don’t fit the symmetry on the penultimate floor.”

“It has to be one of those three,” I say, running to the center of the room until the spray from the waterfall begins to soak me. I look up into the abyss of stairs and corridors. “How many floors to the top, Apple-Moth?”

The drone zips out of its hiding place, the electronic mask disappearing from my face. Apple-Moth looks up too. “Sixty-six floors.”

I know that I can’t climb sixty-six floors in less than five minutes, but my eyes have already fallen upon the emergency drone-risers inside the break-glass-in-case-of-emergency cases against the far wall. Drone-risers are used to travel up and down tall buildings rapidly in an emergency to get people to safety. They removed them from the Verticals after kids stole them and hurt themselves.