All around him, the sounds of destruction penetrated the darkness of his sight, scaring him. Huge things crashed nearby; it was a wonder he hadn’t been crushed yet by a falling object. He wanted to shrink to the ground and curl into a ball until it was all over. But he couldn’t. He had to run. He had to get away.

He kept stumbling forward, searching for something, someone, anything.

~

When Sofia saw the big metal doors, she knew she’d arrived. Without pausing, she threw a Rager forward, then readied her Shurric. The Rager pulled the metal and plastic from the floor and ceiling as it rolled along, growing bigger and bigger. It crashed into the doors, bending them with a metallic squeal, but not breaking them open. Sofia fired repeatedly with the Shurric, its invisible thumps of sonic energy enough to finish the job. The doors parted to let her through.

She scrambled into a chamber as big as a football stadium, chaos reigning as things crashed and burned all around her. Most of the people had already fled, but she heard the skin-crawling screams of a woman in the distance.

“Tick!” Sofia shouted, getting no answer.

She ran forward, scanning her eyes left and right. Tick—where are you?

“Tick!” she yelled when she spotted him, sprinting toward her friend.

He looked terrible, sweaty and cut up, wandering around like a drunk man, feeling at the air with shaking hands, staring with blank eyes. His mouth opened and closed, but no sound came out. Every step he took sent a ripple surging through the floor away from him, like a stone dropped in water. Chunks of the ceiling fell and were whipped away just before crushing his body, as if a host of guardian angels hovered above him, protecting him.

“Tick!” she yelled again, but he didn’t respond. He looked so awful, so . . . crazy, she could hardly believe it was the same boy she knew.

Sofia kept running, looking above to dodge falling objects, winding her way back and forth toward Tick. A few remaining workers pushed past her in the opposite direction, fleeing. A thick man with a spotty beard crashed into her, knocking her to the ground. Sofia screamed something rude in Italian as she scrambled to get back up.

She caught a flash out of the corner of her eye, looking up just in time to see a spinning rod of metal right before
it slammed into her shoulder. She fell again, and a boxy contraption plummeted from the sky, landed on its corner, then fell over to pin her legs to the floor. She pushed at the smashed box with both hands, but couldn’t move it off her feet.