Page 131 of The Sovereign: Part One
“Maxim?”I said, barely hearing the blur of Constant’s underhanded comments in the background.A distant drone beneath the sudden weight in the air.
Everything seemed to be in slow motion, Fio greeting a small group of Tier One children, the Hiven cleaning crew moving to the next office, colleagues stopping in for the weekend to check a project like I just had.But something was off.The passing man’s posture was wrong—shoulders hunched, head down, gait uneven.His beard was full but patchy, an oversight no Sovereign would ever allow, and his eyes were too alert.He seemed to be scanning for the kind of danger that didn’t exist here.
“Something’s wrong,” he said, just loud enough.“I can’t…” His brow pulled tight as if he were deep in deciphering a difficult calculation.His gaze tracked the seams of the floor, the walls, the vents above, and then everyone around us.
In the next moment, the answer clicked into place, and his eyes widened.Without warning or hesitation, he scooped me into his arms, sprinting for the main entrance.“Hold on… hold on… hold on,” he repeated, his voice strained.His arms tightened around me as he pushed his body to full capacity, his cheek crushed against my forehead as if he were shielding me from monsters no one else could see.We blurred past the cleaning crew, the Hiven working the atrium, the children.I wasn’t sure if he was running from danger or toward safety—maybe both—as he burst from the main entrance, only to build momentum as we passed transports parked in the porte-cochère.
“Hold on to me!”he yelled, leaping as the building exploded behind us, a fireball chasing our shadows.He wrapped his body around me to absorb the impact as the shockwave pushed us further and we rolled to the ground.Once we stopped sliding, Maxim dragged me to a safer spot behind a pillar, covering me once again with his body.
The detonation ripped through the atrium with a roar that was less sound and moreevent—a pressure wave that cracked marble composite, shattered transpane, and turned elegance into ruin.The blast still echoed, but beneath it, I could hear the sharp edge of screams.I looked up for just a moment from the support column, feeling Maxim’s hand on my head as he pressed me toward the ground, folding around me as if he were living armor.Shrapnel sang past us, the curated grass convulsed.Then, dust filled the air.Heavy.Suffocating.The world was ash and silence.My ears screamed with static, and every breath scorched my lungs.
Maxim’s hands were already furiously searching my face, panicking as he examined my arms, my hips, abdomen, and legs, checking for blood, burns, bones out of place.“Are you hurt?”he asked, his voice faltering.He stood up and brought me with him, again using his hands to complete a second check over every inch of me, turning me away from him and then back again.
“Isara, are you hurt?Isara, look at me!Are you…?”
“I’m okay,” I croaked, my voice hoarse from the dust and debris.“You… Your jacket…”
His coat was scorched straight through.The back of it was blackened, the seams blistered open.Beneath it, angry red welts crisscrossed his skin.He’d been burned.Badly.
“You’re burned,” I whimpered.My fingers trembled as I touched his shoulder.I helped him peel it off, his once crisp, white shirt now scorched at the edges of the large holes created from the fire.
His hands framed my face, thumbs brushing the dust from my skin like it hurt him to see it there.He pressed his lips to my forehead—fierce, lingering—not in comfort, but in desperation.As if he held me still enough, breathed me in deeply enough, he could convince himself I was whole.“Don’t worry about me.I need you to focus.”He held me at bay.“I’m not sensing any injury, but I need you to run a quick self-check.Can you bear weight on your legs?Arms moving freely?Any pain in your head?”
“I’m okay,” I said, moving my arms to prove it.A cough rattled from my chest, but I froze as the unholy wail of alarms rose in staggered bursts, followed by the shrill approach of drone sirens.
Then came the screams.Even on a weekend, the Dominion housed dozens, sometimes hundreds of Sovereign, Hiven, and exponents.
My fingers threaded through my hair, coming away with grit and the fine weight of dust, tangled with fragments of something sharp— small, brittle—that snagged between my fingers.Debris, I told myself.Just debris.I didn’t look.I didn’t want to know.
“Maxim,” I whimpered.“The children in the atrium…”
He moved like he was about to go after them but stopped short, his eyes sweeping the devastation around us.We had somehow found ourselves at ground zero of a warzone.The pristine marble lobby was unrecognizable, swallowed in smoke and jagged ruin.Columns had cracked in half, their decorative veneers splintered as if it were brittle bone.Twisted beams jutted from the rubble like exposed ribs.Overhead, chunks of the ceiling had collapsed inward, leaving gaping holes where light streamed in, highlighting the carnage below.
Bodies were strewn across the ground, some still, others trying to rise with trembling limbs.Those who’d survived stumbled aimlessly, draped in a fine gray powder that erased color, status, and the illusion just moments before that we would always be safe.Blood mixed with ash streaked down the faces of Sovereign.A woman sobbed behind a fractured bench.Another man limped barefoot over shattered transpane, unaware it was slicing through his skin.
“I see them,” he said, voice tight as he homed in on what was left of the building.“There’s nothing we can do,” he choked out.
The air carried a strange silence only disaster knows—too full of sound, yet hollow.My own breathing sounded foreign in my ears.Then came the approaching sound of enforcement.
Regs marched in through the front breach, helmets low, expressions cold as they moved forward in their blackened armor.Behind them, drones dipped lower, their search beams casting harsh cones of green light across broken bodies.They scanned with surgical precision, tagging the living, prioritizing triage, and identifying the dead with impersonal efficiency.
A child’s scream cut through the noise.Somewhere to the left, a woman yelled for help.A man in a suit—too calm as he walked amidst the wreckage—repeated a name over and over like a prayer he didn’t believe in anymore.
Maxim stood still beside me, holding me to his side with both arms.His jaw worked, eyes tracking every movement, every moan, every collapsed figure in the debris.He wasn’t searching for additional threats.He was calculating the damage.I could see the rage in his eyes.He blamed himself for not stopping it.For not sensing it sooner.For not protecting everyone lying broken and bleeding under the rubble.
“How did you know?”I asked, my voice nearly unrecognizable.
“Inference,” he said, his eyes following a drone as it hovered above.“Everything I’ve gathered via conversations with Lev and Joss, the archives.We’ve been on the cusp of war.The man we saw, he was The Ruhat.He may have been Qadim himself.”
“Qadim,” I tested the name on lips.“The man who leads them?”
His expression threatened to crumble, his voice sharpened by disbelief.“He passed by those children knowing they had seconds left to live.He looked them in the eyes, Isara.And still… he let them burn.”Maxim’s gaze swept the splintered architecture of the Dominion’s atrium, now broken open like a carcass.The screams, the blood, the smoke—it lived behind his eyes now.
“I’ve scanned the horrors of what humans have done to each other over the centuries.Wars.Genocide.Torture.”He spoke his next words with revulsion, “But this… this issavagery.A calculated choice to murder innocence in the name of ideology.No cause, no movement, is worth this kind of carnage.”
He exhaled like the realization cracked something deep within him.He looked down on me, and for the first time since he opened his eyes in the Eidolon chamber, Maxim seemed haunted.
I reached out to him, touching the angry parts of his skin.“I know… I know.Right now, we have to focus on what we can control.We can’t go to The Crèche for repair.We’ll have to… Lev.Lev can do it.”
