I blow past the plexiglass-hidden desk worker and nearly throw the door off the hinges in an attempt to leave as fast as possible. Nobody makes any comments on it, even though Call complains every step of the way. He doesn't understand why I'm annoyed. Hell, I barely understand why I'm annoyed.

But he wasn't damn subtle. They're planning something for Saturday. Something I'm going to get roped into no matter what I do.

"Saturday. Spill," I demand. "If it'll interfere with my efforts, you're not going forward with it."

Call grunts. "It's not that important. Just something we've been planning for a while, but didn't have the confidence to actually try. Now that the timeline's getting pushed up… well, we can't afford to be cowards about this."

"About what?"

He makes another noise of discomfort. Doesn't take a genius to know that he doesn't want to tell me. I reach up to fiddle with my earrings, but the helmet stops my hand dead in its tracks. It annoys me more than it should.

"If he won't tell us, then we have no choice but to pull out," Pearl says grimly. "We can't risk the Preservation getting wind of our plans before we can finalize them. And when I say 'pull out', I don't just mean go back to the resort."

Yeah, I know. Pulling out here means cutting ties with Call altogether. I don't want to do it, since his intent really is a noble one, but I can't risk everything. So many more lives are at stake. Shit, Earth itself could be at stake. I… no… no. Don't jump to conclusions. Just talk to the guy first, set things straight, and actually tell him the consequences of screwing up here. He doesn't know everything that we do.

Because I haven't told him everything.

I raise my fingers to the helmet and gently trail them over my face. "Call, we have to talk when we get back. There are things that have come up since the last time we talked that make this way more complicated."

He grunts. "I assumed as much. We're both stressed about this… but I don't really know why you are."

I exhale a low chuckle. "Yeah, and that's the problem. I can't just get pissed at you for blowing things when you don't know what you're about to blow. Promise me you won't put out the call for whatever you want to go down Saturday."

"What?" he asks in disbelief. "Why? We're working towards the same thing here; I can help you. We can help you. Not everyone in the Preservation wants the same things the higher ups do."

A loud noise screams by overhead. It's nowhere near enough to shake the ground, and when I look up, there's actually a mech soaring up to the platform far above. Some of the people around us look up as well, but not all of them. Tiny droplets of a shimmering liquid rain down onto the grass, fizzling and smoking for fractions of a second before they disappear into a sheen in the air.

"Exhaust?" I mutter to myself. "I didn't think magic had any exhaust."

Pearl nods in confirmation. "Our magic doesn't. A junky reconstruction of our stuff would, though. Which that mech definitely is. But… even still…"

She looks around at the literal rain of droplets, lingering long after the mech has flown by. There's no need for her to finish her sentence; the only reason there'd be this much fluid is if something was horribly wrong. Or if there was another purpose to it entirely.

I hold out a hand to catch a few drops. They sizzle against Call's armor and disperse harmlessly enough. "Call, what is this?"

"Bad. Shelby, get back here now," he says through what sounds like clenched teeth. "The last time a mech was damaged like this… well… the psychics erased it from most of the civilians' memories. Even us Speakers had selective removal, so I can't remember the entire thing."

I gawk at the implications and start to run. "You willingly subjected yourself to a magical lobotomy?!"

"Well, when you put it that way, it sounds horrible," Call mutters.

"Yeah, because it is. Details, now–even if they're fake ones the Preservation put in your head when they told you they were just removing things."

Call hisses through his teeth. "Shit, I hadn't even thought… damn, is that when they… shit."

A soft beeping sounds through the link. Call says a few things that I won't repeat in the strangest calm voice I've heard from him, and then the beeping completely fills my ears. He's connecting me to whatever's making the noise.

The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

"This is a level one emergence warning for the–outer west–section of the city," a robotic voice calmly states. "The apocalypse has breached a hangar and is expected to spread to all vehicles within. All available speakers are to immediately gather to contain this breach before it can spread to the city proper. The location has been marked on your maps. This message will now repeat."

"Shit, damn it, ass, shit ass!" Call grumbles with increasing frustration. "New plan–go to the hangar and work with the other speakers to stop this shit. And don't you fucking dare say 'this is what the Preservation deserves'!"

I narrow my eyes and turn towards where I'd arrived in the city. "Do you really think I'd let innocent people die for no reason at all?"

"Would you?!" Call demands.

Pearl shoots me a look of confusion. I can't help but agree with her; Call should trust me more than this. Either he's panicking bad–or there's some psychic interference with the message that's setting him even further on edge. More likely both, actually. I summon a coin inside of the armor and let it press flat against my palm as I listen to Call belt out a tirade of expletives and panicked mutterings that don't sound anything like the man I've been talking to up until this exact second.

"Call. I'm out of the loop here; fill me in on why this deserves this much panic."

A nearly deranged laugh rips out of his throat. "Why?! WHY?! Because the entire city could be destroyed from this shit! If the mechs get… if the mechs get apocalypsed before we can stop them… we'll lose… we'll lose… what?"

He stops dead in his tracks mid-sentence. "I can't remember what we'll lose."

"You can't remember."

"Yeah."

The confusion and sadness along with some serious undertones of pain in that one word says way too much. If the Preservation went so far as to erase portions of the speakers' memories from the last time this happened, then the possible damage this could do could be catastrophic. I trail my gaze skyward as distant eruptions of magic engulf the leaking mech, consuming it in a faraway explosion that sends car-sized chunks of metal raining down to the city below. Most of them don't get past a swarm of specks that must be class-wielders.

I count at least eight pieces that do. Eight chunks of death that plummet to the city below. One hits an office building and shears right through it, sending an arterial spray of dust into the air as all the windows shatter in unison. The sound it makes is like nothing I've ever heard; a distant shearing thud that seems to steal away everything for miles and miles around it.

Then, like a cruel punchline at the end of a particularly horrible joke, it detonates. Magic and force shear the building to pieces, turning the spray of dust into a veritable eruption that quickly coats everything in a thin layer of dust. I dumbly raise my hand to my face as a wave of force and noise rushes over me, shearing away blades of grass in an attempt to knock me off my feet.

There's a tiny bit of wet red mixed in with the grey. I think I can see… people in the soaring debris. Faces. Eyes glassed over in a final moment of confusion and fear. The screams finally start in earnest.

The second piece hits.

It all happens again. And again. And again. Battering the area under where the mech died with a grim reminder that magical tech is not to be taken lightly.

Pearl clenches her fists. "They used the Ao models. Why did they use the Ao models?!"

"Ao?" I whisper automatically, my brain still stunned from the raw destruction.

"Armada One. Mechs that were designed to fight until they… couldn't," Pearl says hesitantly. "So they wouldn't fall into the system's hands… we made sure they wouldn't exist after a defeat. But we didn't use those models to defend our home; we used way more stable builds with cores and reactors that could survive almost anything. I mean, they're designed to fly; why would we ever build something that'd explode like this if a bit got ripped off?"

I laugh at the absurdity of what I'm seeing. "So even your suicide mechs are built better than these?"

"Yes," Pearl says without hesitation. "Whatever they found to copy our tech… I was angry before, Shelby. Now I'm scared for everyone here. For every city, town, and individual the Preservation ever decides to fly a mech over. Please, if we're going to war with them, we have to take out every single one of their mechs before they can do anything with them."

If I know warmongering assholes… someone's looking at these explosions and emotionlessly thinking of their applications as massive bombs. And as far as I can tell, none of the pieces that fell were too critical for the mechs. One reactor tumbling through the sky attached to a dying robot, piloted by a nearly–or completely–brainwashed soldier?

An unbelievably cruel and powerful weapon. Perfect for the cruel and selfish leaders of the Preservation.

With great effort I tear my attention away from the tragedy that's unfolding just a few miles away and lock on to the hangars where it came from. I can't imagine that things went so downhill in so little time. A mech must've come back from a mission already partly apocalypse-ified and caused enough damage to the other mechs to put all of them at risk. Every synapse in my brain is screaming that something is horribly wrong here. That it's all too convenient that this is happening so close to when I got here.

Even if it is true, though, I can't just let the people in the city die. Everyone I want dead is sitting pretty on that floating paradise. They'll give some speeches when all this is over, offer their 'sincere' condolences, and keep on going like normal anyway since apparently something like this already happened.

"Don't worry, Call; I'll make sure there aren't any mechs left to cause any damage," I assure him. "Are the other hangars at risk of being infected, too?"

He gasps. "I don't know! Could they be?!"

My coin burns against my palm. This is the excuse I need. And just maybe… I can turn this into an internal problem instead of an external one. Because after all this destruction… how many of the speakers at the scene would be willing to run to the other hangars for some preemptive dismantling?

How many can I coerce into fighting for me in a war they don't even know exists?

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