The Dead Mountain

  The Consultant’s Tower loomed over the center of Sector 4 like a massive, black tombstone.

  Without the amber glow of the mood-lighting or the violet pulse of the Monolith on the roof, the skyscraper looked dead. The grand glass doors of the lobby, which Thomas had forced open hours earlier, were still wedged apart.

  Elias sat in the back of the battery-powered cargo cart, staring up at the sheer vertical drop of the building. His ribs throbbed in a relentless, sickening rhythm. He had taken exactly two steps out of the cart before his knees completely buckled. His body had categorically refused to climb.

  "I can't make the stairs," Elias admitted, the frustration burning hot in his chest. He looked at the rusted wrench resting in his lap. For the first time, he felt completely useless. "I can't walk it, let alone carry a tank down."

  "You are not required for manual labor," Thomas rumbled.

  The cybernetic giant stepped up to the back of the cart. He had left his heavy gauntlets behind at the triage center to free up his hands. His exposed hydraulic arms, thick with braided steel cables and synthetic muscle, twitched in anticipation.

  "I need your eyes, Elias," Marcus said, adjusting the straps of a heavy canvas utility harness he had scavenged from a Peacekeeper supply locker. "I know tactical breaching, but I don't know industrial plumbing. You’re the one who analyzed the thermal core. If I pull the wrong valve on a pressurized coolant tank, we all turn into ice sculptures."

  Elias looked at the former Peacekeeper, then up at the giant Warden. He had spent the entire book fighting these men. Now, they were his only hands and feet.

  "Okay," Elias breathed, nodding slowly. "We go together."

  Thomas didn't ask for permission. He reached into the cart, sliding his massive, reinforced arms under Elias. With a sharp whine of hydraulic servos, Thomas lifted Elias as easily as a man lifting a child. He settled Elias onto his broad, metallic back, securing him with a length of heavy nylon strapping.

  "Hold on," Thomas instructed, his voice vibrating through the metal plates of his chest.

  "Don't slip," Elias grunted, wrapping his arms loosely around the giant's thick neck, careful not to squeeze his own taped ribs.

  Mara stood by the cart, holding a heavy iron pry bar. She looked up at the trio. "We'll hold the lobby," she promised, her eyes darting nervously toward the street. "If the mobs from the Commercial District migrate this way looking for shelter, we’ll barricade the doors. Just... don't blow yourselves up."

  "That's the plan," Marcus said, racking the slide on a scavenged kinetic pistol and holstering it. "Let's climb."

  The Heavy Ascent

  The central maintenance stairwell was exactly as Elias had left it: pitch black, suffocating, and echoing with the ghosts of the morning's trauma.

  But the ascent felt entirely different.

  Marcus took the lead, using a heavy, battery-powered tactical flashlight to cut through the gloom. The beam bounced off the cinderblock walls, illuminating the bloody handprints Elias had left during his descent.

  Behind Marcus, Thomas climbed. Clank. Whir. Clank. Whir.

  The sound of the Warden’s leg servos was deafening in the enclosed space. Thomas weighed nearly four hundred pounds with his cybernetics, and he was carrying Elias on his back. Every time his heavy steel boot hit a metal grate, the entire staircase shuddered.

  Elias rested his chin on Thomas’s shoulder, trying to ignore the sickening sway of the climb. "How are the legs holding up, Thomas?" Elias asked around Floor 20.

  "Operating within acceptable thermal limits," Thomas replied mechanically. Then, he paused. The human inside the machine corrected himself. "I am tired, Elias. The synthetic muscles do not ache, but my spine does. It feels... heavy."

  "We're almost halfway," Elias lied, checking his digital watch. "Just keep a steady rhythm. Don't rush."

  Floor 30. Floor 40.

  The air grew thinner, the smell of old copper replaced by the sharp, bitter scent of ozone and scorched metal drifting down from the roof.

  This novel is published on a different platform. Support the original author by finding the official source.

  The Stranger flickered into existence, floating effortlessly beside them in the dark stairwell. The entity didn't need a flashlight; his body cast a pale, white, static glow against the concrete. "ELEVATED HEART RATES DETECTED IN ALL BIOLOGICAL SUBJECTS. ADVISE CAUTION. THE TANKS YOU SEEK WEIGH APPROXIMATELY SIX HUNDRED POUNDS EACH WHEN FULL."

  Marcus, wiping sweat from his brow, glanced at the flickering ghost. He couldn't hear the Stranger, but he could see Elias tracking something in the dark. "You talking to the anomaly?" Marcus asked between heavy breaths.

  "He's running the math," Elias said, his voice tight with pain. "He says the tanks are heavy."

  "Tell him I didn't need a ghost to figure that out," Marcus muttered, pushing open the heavy steel fire door to Floor 50.

  The Freezer

  They stepped out onto the roof.

  The brutalist landscape of the Peak was silent. The storm had passed entirely, leaving behind a cold, biting wind that whipped across the flat expanse of black concrete. In the center, the ruined Monolith sat like a hollowed-out volcano, its titanium casing peeled back like the petals of a dead, metallic flower.

  "Mother of God," Marcus whispered, shining his flashlight over the sheer scale of the destruction. "You did this with a wrench?"

  "I did it with water," Elias corrected, tapping Thomas’s shoulder to signal him to lower him down. "Physics did the rest."

  Thomas knelt, carefully unbuckling the nylon straps. Elias slid to the concrete, his legs shaking violently before they finally held his weight. He leaned on his rebar cane, gasping at the sudden rush of cold air into his lungs.

  "Where are the backups?" Thomas asked, his servos hissing as he stood back up to his full, towering height.

  Elias pointed toward the rear of the Monolith, where a heavy steel containment cage was bolted to the roof. "There. The secondary coolant array."

  They approached the cage. Inside, bolted to heavy shock-absorbing mounts, were four massive, cylindrical tanks. They were painted hazard-yellow, though the paint was entirely obscured by a thick, creeping layer of white frost.

  The ambient temperature around the cage was drastically lower. Elias could see his breath fogging in the air.

  "Liquid Nitrogen. LN2," Elias said, his teeth beginning to chatter. "Stored at negative three hundred and twenty degrees Fahrenheit. The blast severed the feed lines to the main engine, so the fail-safes locked the pressure valves. They’re full."

  Marcus stepped up to the cage, shining his light on the thick, braided steel hoses connecting the tanks to the ruined Monolith. The pressure gauges on the sides of the tanks were pinned in the red zone.

  "This isn't a simple disconnect," Marcus warned, his Peacekeeper training taking over. "The lines are pressurized. If I just take a wrench to that coupling, the pressure will blow the valve clean off. The liquid will flash-boil into gas the second it hits the atmosphere."

  "THE PEACEKEEPER IS CORRECT," the Stranger noted, floating closer to the frosted metal. "A SUDDEN DECOMPRESSION AT THIS PROXIMITY WILL RESULT IN INSTANTANEOUS SEVERE FROSTBITE. TISSUE NECROSIS IN 1.4 SECONDS. ASPHYXIATION IN 8 SECONDS."

  "We have to bleed the line first," Elias said, stepping closer, fighting the instinct to back away from the terrifying cold. He pointed with his cane to a small, secondary purge valve located beneath the main coupling. "Marcus. See the manual override? It’s a twist-lock."

  Marcus nodded, pulling a pair of heavy tactical gloves from his harness. "I see it. I'll bleed the pressure. Thomas, I need you to hold the main feed line steady. If it whips when the pressure drops, it’ll shatter."

  Thomas stepped forward. He didn't have gloves. His cybernetic hands were composed of exposed steel, synthetic rubber, and hydraulic fluid. "My tactile sensors will register the extreme cold as critical damage," Thomas stated flatly. "It will hurt."

  "I know," Elias said softly. "Can you do it?"

  Thomas looked at Elias, then at the frosted pipe. He remembered the sobbing mother in the plaza. He remembered the empty silos. "Yes," the giant rumbled.

  Thomas clamped his massive hands around the thick, braided steel hose. Instantly, the white frost leaped from the pipe onto his metal fingers, spreading rapidly up his forearms. A low, grinding alarm began to sound from the diagnostic speaker in his chest. WARNING. THERMAL DAMAGE DETECTED. WARNING.

  "Do it, Marcus," Thomas grunted, his jaw locking tight, his organic face paling as the freezing temperature bypassed his armor and hit his nerve endings.

  Marcus grabbed the purge valve. "Bleeding the line... now!"

  Marcus wrenched the valve open.

  HIIISSSSSSSS.

  A deafening, shrieking jet of pure white vapor blasted out of the purge valve, shooting twenty feet into the air. The temperature on the roof plummeted instantly. Ice crystals formed in the air, falling like sudden snow.

  The braided steel hose bucked violently like a dying snake, trying to rip itself free.

  Thomas roared, locking his hydraulic servos. The synthetic muscles in his arms strained, whining under the immense torque. The frost was climbing past his elbows now, locking the joints, turning the hydraulic fluid sluggish and thick.

  "Hold it!" Marcus yelled over the shriek of the escaping gas, his hands moving in a blur as he unscrewed the main coupling. "Almost there!"

  "Ahhh!" Thomas bellowed, his boots sliding backward on the icy concrete.

  CLACK.

  The main coupling detached. Marcus slammed the purge valve shut.

  The shrieking stopped. The white vapor slowly dissipated in the wind, leaving behind a profound, terrifying silence.

  Thomas dropped the severed hose. He fell to his knees, clutching his frozen arms to his chest. The steel was coated in a thick layer of rime ice. The diagnostic alarm in his chest was blaring a continuous, high-pitched wail.

  "Thomas!" Elias shouted, limping forward as fast as his ribs would allow.

  "I have it," Marcus said, grabbing Thomas’s arms and physically forcing them straight, breaking the ice that had locked the joints. "Keep moving them, big guy. Keep the fluid pumping. You did good. You did real good."

  Thomas gasped, his chest heaving. Slowly, the alarm faded as the internal heaters in his cybernetics kicked in, melting the frost.

  Elias looked past them, at the disconnected, hazard-yellow cylinder sitting in the cage. It was free.

  "One tank down," Elias breathed, a cloud of vapor pluming from his lips. He looked at the heavy canvas harness Marcus had brought. "Now... we just have to figure out how to carry a six-hundred-pound bomb down fifty flights of stairs without dropping it."

  The physics of a heist.

  The Danger: They got it disconnected. But gravity is waiting in the stairwell.

  Next Chapter: The Descent (Again). We are bringing the cold to the streets. The smokescreen is almost ready to deploy.