• ONE • The Earthquake on the Great Lawn
FRANCESCO HELIOS had never experienced an earthquake before. Nor had anyone who’d lived their life in New Shining Capital.
Yet his Mower, seventy tons of metal with a wrecking arm eight stories tall and steel tractor treads eight feet wide, quivered like a slender branch of a sapling when leaped upon by a fat squirrel.
Far more ominous, the looming mushroom Francesco knew he would need to dismantle six or seven months hence—the Washerman’s Monument, already grown to more than three hundred feet tall—shook like an obelisk made of uncooked bread dough. Not fully solidified, it could topple at any moment.
Its fall would crush hundreds of tourists who surrounded the Great Lawn, gathered to watch Francesco perform his duty.
They’d come to watch him work. He was responsible for them being here.
Their screams from the far side of the wooden fences reached him even over the throbbing groan of the Mower’s engine and the roar of breaking earth. He had to save them.
He’d been reversing from the spreading fissures, trying to keep the Mower from suffering damage. He couldn’t be concerned about that now. His powerful right hand desperately grabbed hold of the transmission lever and jerked it into its first forward gear, steering his colossal mechanism directly toward the even more colossal mushroom.
The Mower lurched up and over fissures, its front claw wheels pointing momentarily skyward and spinning over empty air before the machine’s center of gravity brought the front portion of the tracks crashing to earth again. The closer he drew to the Washerman’s Monument, the more afraid he became. Big as his Mower was, the trembling monument made it seem puny by comparison, a mere sandlot toy. If the obelisk insisted on toppling west, could he shift its fall by even a single degree? Or would his sacrificial tackle simply add him and his machine to the earthquake’s victims and not preserve even one life?
He crossed one more wide fissure and was then within grappling range of the monument. The fissure boxed him in; a good ten feet of his tracks still dangled over distended roots and open air, meaning he wouldn’t be able to deploy his stabilizers. In front of him, the obelisk blocked out much of the sky, a thick slash of milky whiteness across the cloudless blue.
He swung out the Mower’s wrecking arm so that it would traverse the widest arc possible before pressing against the monument’s western face. Simultaneously, he spooled out the wrecking ball’s cable to its full extent so that the ball would add its maximum momentum to the force of the push. He didn’t dare strike the monument with the ball directly—that could split the obelisk in half and send the top portion plummeting onto the trapped crowds. Instead, he’d have to give it a good, strong shove with the steel arm itself, praying that would be enough to change the direction of the monument’s fall without prematurely breaking it into pieces.
The Mower’s cabin and everything inside it began shaking again. The rumbling wail of an invisible freight train returned. Aftershock, Francesco thought. Grabbing the wrecking arm’s control lever with both fists, he muscled it all the way to the right. The ground danced beneath the Mower’s tracks. Thick gray cracks scurried across the obelisk’s midsection, close to the spot where the wrecking arm’s blow would land.
The laws of physics had taken over—nothing could be stopped now.
Realizing he might have only seconds to live, he prayed for the health of his pregnant wife, Aleedia, and for the futures of his daughters and sons. He braced himself for the colossal impact. Eshrae, his youngest son, might never receive Francesco’s final tendarm; the boy’s life, barely begun, teetering on the brink of puberty, would be stunted and twisted in ways Francesco could hardly imagine. That, possibly, was the most crushing thought of all.
The force of the collision threw him against his safety straps. It bludgeoned the breath from him. The sound of the crash was muffled by the rumbling of the still-accelerating aftershock. As though it were happening in slow motion, underwater, the wrecking ball orbited the obelisk like a great black moon, winding its taut cable around the cracking stone monument. Obelisk and Mower had wed, fusing their fates for whatever brief duration shuddering ground and gravity would allow.
The ground’s trembling surged. Francesco felt the Mower lurch backward as the earth disintegrated beneath the rearmost portions of its tracks. He heard what sounded like demolition charges exploding, then saw the monument’s southern face buckle, cracks darting like lightning bolts above and below where the cable had wound itself. Then he was falling, the sky tilting, his stomach heaving, his seat dropping away from him until the restraining straps, loath to let him escape, snapped him backward.
The sky is falling …
Locked in a mutual suicide pact, the backsliding Mower pulled the toppling monument down upon itself. The obelisk’s pointed tip aimed at the center of Francesco’s forehead. He threw his arms across his eyes. Before he blocked it from view, his slayer seemed to be falling in slow motion, giving him ample time to remember the strange steps of the past half hour that had led him here to his death …