The Fall of the City of Steel

Rebels

That afternoon, after dinner, I took Jerry down to the stadium to practice. Seeing him having innocent fun once again, coupled with the relaxing nature of physical exercise, allowed any thoughts of mysterious pills and borderline-criminal misadventures to leave my mind once again.

The following day, I awoke unmindful of the previous day's events, just as I did every morning. Once, my father joked about this, telling me that I should not take up drinking as an adult, or I would wake up one drunken morning, having forgotten the events of the entire previous year. Whether or not this was accurate, I had no intention of ever finding out.

As Jerry and I flew towards the school building that morning, Jerry noticed a surprising number of police planes landed on the pad atop the skyscraper. Once we landed, we both made for the nearest plane with similar looks of childlike wonder. Upon reaching the nearest plane and stopping to admire it, I did not need to tell Jerry to keep his distance from the machines; he already respected them too much to touch them.

After we finished savoring our rare up-close view of the mechanical paragon, we split up and started for the elevators. The wait for the platform's arrival, the accretion of students as the wait wore on, and the muted mingling of the small crowd on the elevator during the ride down all proceeded as normal. At the bottom of the elevator, however, waited an unpleasant surprise.

Twenty feet down the hall after the elevator bay, a single policeman, clad in the usual leather flight gear uniform, funneled all incoming students through a thin checkpoint. Before allowing them to pass, he would ask something- I could not hear what- of the student. He was visibly armed, but his expression was unthreatening.

When it came my turn to pass this guard, he asked me a question that nearly caused my knees to cave in.

"Are you Damon Gottlieb, student?"

I froze, uncertain of what to do, inexplicably hesitating to answer truthfully.

In the split second during which I struggled, Emilia, up ahead, separated herself from the stream of students leaving the checkpoint and did something I never expected of her- she activated the fire alarm.

Were it possible for people to turn to stone, I would have done so as soon as the ear-splitting shrill of the fire alarm's acoustic bell tore through the building. Countless pairs of eyes darted around our surroundings, searching for a fire, before settling squarely on Emilia.

"There's a fire in the janitor's closet!" she fabricated, pointing somewhere random with fake urgency. Hurry!"

Instantly submerging in the ensuing morass of roiling, panicking people, Emilia resurfaced next to me, grabbed my arm and dragged me away from the elevator with surprising strength. Still thawing from my terrified stupor and stunned by the alarm's din, I followed with minimal resistance.

Somehow, the alarm brayed on for minutes, granting Emilia's distraction surprising longevity as she hauled me across the length of the building to the other elevator, calling for Tony as she did.

"What... what's going on?" I begged, regaining my balance and running with Emilia, keeping pace with her.

"They were after you," explained Emilia, turning to me.

I started, not at this news, but instead at the look on Emilia's face. It was a look of frantic exertion combined with a laser's focus- a look I had never seen on a girl before.

"Emilia?" came Tony's voice, shortly after he appeared in front of us from an adjoining hall. "Is that Damon?"

"It's me!" I intervened. "What's going on here? What did they want?"