Alex looked into her father’s face, bent over her. Or was he bending over her mother, lying in a coma on the bed? He was much younger although he still had the familiar sad dark circles under his eyes. He had the beginnings of what would be age jowls on his cheeks and chin. He was crying and the tears flowed from his deep hazel eyes down to the sheets and blankets and onto her mother’s face.

She was haggard, thin, and spent. The parchment flesh clung to her facial bones like a mask. Her skin was yellowed, a sickly color like urine or vomit.

Her father leaned over her – or was it her mother? – and kissed her on the forehead.

Thunder and raindrops woke her from her dream. She lay on what had once been an elegant leather couch, now pocked with holes through which stuffing struggled to escape. Her folded camouflage jacket served as a pillow beneath her head. A black fleece coat, a bit large for her frame and smelling of mildew, covered her shirt. Underneath, a padded bandage ran over both her shoulders and crossed around her back.

She looked around cautiously. She was in a darkened office, somewhat the worse for wear. Two of the walls were floor-to-ceiling glass interrupted by steel support frames. Electrical fixtures hung loose from the ceiling as if reaching for the torn carpet. Heavy drops of rain collided with the windows and left behind muddy prints that merged into tear-like rivulets flowing down toward the street far below. In spite of the dirt and smudge marks, she could see the ruined city beneath her, a panorama of what had once been the financial capital of the world. The skyscrapers and buildings were dark grey with shaggy outlines indicating wear and neglect.

What is this place?

Lightning brightened her surroundings. The windows shook from a crack of thunder. The illumination revealed a man sitting behind an executive desk at the other end of the room. The shadows concealed his face. Another figure sat on an office chair near the entrance. It was Webb. He sat bent over, holding an ice pack against the back of his neck. Neither man was watching her.

She sat up despite the aches throughout her chest and back and limbs. Her boots smacked the floor with a thump.

Webb looked up and set the ice pack aside. “General.”

The man behind the desk turned toward Alex. “Ah, you’re awake.” His voice was soothing and relaxed but older and with an inflexion of sadness. He stood and walked with a pronounced limping gait around the desk. His right arm hung useless at his side. An unmistakable thud sounded each time he put weight on his right foot. The gloom shrouded his features, but as he approached, she realized he wore a simple metal mask with cutouts for the nose, mouth, and eyes. His dark clothing made him almost invisible against the dark walls and furniture of the room. He wore a trench coat over his uniform. A heavy scarf covered his neck and lower face. Below his pants leg, she saw a brace attached to his right boot.

“Where am I?” Her throat was dry. The effort of talking made her cough.

“This is my office.”

“Who are you?”

The voice was again smooth and pleasant. “Martin.”

“General Martin?”

He seemed embarrassed, but said, “Yes, General Martin. I believe you have already met Colonel Webb.”

“Colonel?” she said.

Webb looked up, obviously annoyed.

Martin nodded. “He looks young, but it’s not the age, it’s the mileage.”

“Excuse me?” she said. Martin seemed to be speaking in a code.

Is he teasing me?

“I’m sorry. Private joke.”

“Why the mask?”

Martin remained silent for a long moment. “Birthmark.”

Lightning again brightened the office. Martin’s eyes watched her through the holes in the mask. They were steel blue. Had she seen her own reflection in the smooth metal mask?

“Why did you attack us?”

“We didn’t.”

Alex tried to maintain eye contact with Martin, but found herself intimidated by his gaze. “You blew up the bridge while we were crossing.” It was an accusation, but her voice sounded hesitant and unsure.

“My forces had nothing to do with the destruction of the George Washington Bridge.”

His voice was firm and sincere, but the mask put her off. Why is he wearing that thing?

“Then who attacked us?”

“I don’t know. I suspect… but it’s only a guess.” He shrugged. “I’d rather not say.”

I’d rather not say? It’s like a riddle. Like twenty questions.

An awkward silence save for the rain against the windows. Then another flash and the answer roar of thunder. She took a deep breath and tried to steady her thoughts. Something was missing here. Something not quite right. But what?

“Colonel, could you step outside?” Martin said.

“Sir?”

“I’d like to speak with Alexandra in private.” His voice seemed to caress her name.

“Sir, she can—”

Martin turned to Webb, who sighed before rising from his chair. He left the ice pack on the floor but held his left hand against the back of his neck. He gave Alex a cold glare and then left, shutting the door behind him.

No more Mister Nice-Guy. And how did he knock me out just by touching my forehead?

Martin slowly and laboriously ambled back to his desk. He opened a drawer and withdrew a firearm, her handgun. He held it out to her with his good left hand. “Were you aware that your father and I knew each other, Alexandra?”

She watched as he retraced his steps to her. Did Webb reload the gun? Is it still unloaded?

“Alexandra?” Martin asked. “Did you hear me?”

“Yes,” she said quickly, then, “No, I didn’t.”

Martin regarded her and then looked at the handgun. He dropped the weapon to his side. “I only wondered if you were aware your father and I knew each other.”

“No, I wasn’t.”

“This Colt belonged to him, didn’t it?” Martin said.

“Yes.”

Martin sat down behind the desk. “I recognized it. Part of his collection.”

She began to relax but kept her eye on the handgun. “He had my name engraved on it before he gave it to me.”

Martin examined the weapon’s slide and nodded.

“How did you know my father?”

“We were friends at the Academy and kept in touch after graduation. Your father was on the fast track. They were grooming him for the Joint Chiefs. But then…” Behind the metal mask, Martin’s face was expressionless but his voice softened almost to a hoarse whisper. He turned toward the window. “We had a disagreement.”

She recognized the soft, hoarse tone. Her father had the same inflection when he talked about her mother.

As Martin stared at the floor, Alex wondered, Were he and Dad really that close?

The Directorate regarded Martin and the New England Alliance as the greatest obstacles to reclaiming the East Coast. She recalled the widespread gossip of crimes and atrocities committed by NEA forces under Martin’s command. Now the monster sat before her, reminiscing about a past friendship.

“I was there at your baptism.” Two droplets on the chin of his mask fell to his trench coat lapel. “It was a Presbyterian Church in Washington, over the Potomac from the Pentagon. Beautiful church. High arched ceiling, stained glass…”

He’s there now. He’s there at my baptism… but why?

Martin focused on her again. “You may not believe some of the things I’m going to tell you,” he said slowly. His voice was still husky but firmer. “But I just want you to hear me out. Then you can decide yourself.”

She nodded. Time for the NEA party line.

“August 7th, 2016. Does that mean anything to you?”

She squinted, surprised by his question. “The outbreaks.”

“Yes.” Martin continued watching her and she once again noticed his eyes through the holes in his mask: steel blue, almost exactly like her own. “In June, two months before the… outbreak, I was in charge of a facility in Antarctica. Lansing Research Station. The international treaties prohibited military activity in the area, so we were… ostensibly studying weather and atmospheric changes. But the station was military from the start. Air Force mostly.”

He shifted in his chair and then stood, pushing his hands against his thighs. Between movements, he grunted. “I’m sorry. No longer a spring chicken, you know. More like a winter rooster.”

She almost smiled but kept up her guard.

“We were studying an anomaly that had been detected by one of our reconnaissance satellites in low earth orbit. This particular bird could have sniffed out the radiation on those old radium clock faces. At first, the signal was intermittent, so much so that the analysts thought it was an error. But later, it became continuous and stronger. And it wasn’t really radiation as we know it. We could hear it on low-frequency radio as well.”

Martin limped toward the windows. His voice, still gentle, came out clear even as he stood at the glass looking out. “Of course, we wanted to know what it was. Your father had security clearances to the highest level. Special access programs and indoctrinations that I couldn’t have even dreamed about. His business kept him in DC, so he put me in charge of the project. I thought of it as a big favor at the time; I’d been pushing papers in Colorado Springs. But…”

Martin let out a long breath before continuing, “We built Lansing directly over the Anomaly. Again, the station was officially there to conduct research into the upper atmosphere, but in actuality, we were tunneling down to the thing. It took six months, but what we found was a solid black sphere that could suspend itself off the ground. It was giving off a broad band of frequencies and a weak radioactive signal. The signals seemed to be a code, but we couldn’t decipher it. It didn’t match any known language.

“I arrived at Lansing a month after the excavation team found the sphere. Your father came to check on our progress soon after. He brought a number of classified documents showing that the Soviets had unearthed something similar to this… thing during the Cold War. The object the Russians found was on an archipelago called Novaya Zemlya, the USSR’s main nuclear testing ground. Early in 1961, an avalanche caused by one of the detonations unearthed the sphere. The Soviets built a small research facility in the area. In late October, we received reports of a disaster. Thankfully, one of the old Corona satellites snapped a few pictures of the area before the Soviets dropped a fifty-megaton bomb on the facility. The explosion wiped out everything within a hundred miles.

“According to Khrushchev, the bomb was detonated to prove Russian superiority. However, those satellite images showed there had been something there. Something not mentioned in any of the official Soviet reports.”

Alex remembered reading about the Soviet Union’s nuclear tests. The long-since defunct USSR possessed the dubious honor of having built the most powerful nuclear weapon ever detonated. The device, which the Soviets had dubbed the Tsar Bomb, had produced a mushroom cloud sixty-miles high and forty-miles wide, visible over five hundred miles away. The Directorate’s digital encyclopedia entry of the event featured a picture of the explosion, but it had been difficult for her to comprehend the sheer scale of the blast.

“What does all of this have to do with you and my dad?” Alex said.

“Your father came to Lansing Station to oversee our progress. He went down the excavation shaft and saw the thing. And he saw something… something else. He left a few days later. Soon after that, the science team tried to remove a sample of the sphere. Then…” Again, his soft voice trailed off. He remained facing the window, his good left hand behind his back with the right hanging down like a rag doll’s useless appendage.

He looks all used up. Like someone condemned to die.

In an uncertain tone, she began, “So you’re saying this ‘Anomaly’ was responsible for—”

“For killing everyone on the planet!” Martin said with a sudden surge of emotion. The change in his voice was palpable. He turned back to her. “I was there! Your father was there! We could have done something!”

Done… what?

With a visible effort, Martin brought himself under control. “The reason this is important is because… I believe your father is planning an expedition to Antarctica. The only reason he would do that is to recover the sphere.”

“Recover it? Why? What would he want with it?”

“I… I don’t know for certain. I think he wants to use it for… for something.” He shook his head. “I’m not sure.”

Not sure again! she thought with frustration. Twenty questions!

“You said my dad saw something in the Anomaly. What was it?”

Martin turned away again and placed his hand on the glass. When he spoke, his voice was soft and modulated but still trembling with emotion. “Despite everything that’s happened, I respect your father. I have no desire to hurt you, Alexandra. Your father was a good man. I see a lot of his qualities in you.”

“My father is a good man,” she said, feeling her face flush. “He’s trying to rebuild this country and make it what it used to be. He wants people to be able to live in safety. What about that makes him anything other than a good man?”

“Live in safety,” Martin said in a bitter tone. “Do you know how many people the Directorate has killed since the crusade to rebuild this country began? It’s in the thousands, Alexandra. Maybe in the tens of thousands.”

“That’s a lie! We never kill anyone except in self-defense.”

“Self-defense.” He turned from the glass, still steadying himself with his hand. “And how many attacks have there been against Cheyenne Mountain or Peterson? How about anywhere in Colorado Springs?”

“Well… none. I don’t think anyone’s ever attacked the mountain.”

“And yet, your forces have killed over a thousand people in the past two years alone.”

“That… that isn’t possible. And even if it is, they were malcontents or rebels. People who spread chaos. No one attacks the Springs directly, but they hit our outposts and patrols all the time!”

Martin remained calm but with a new intensity in her speech. “The Directorate has main battle tanks and self-propelled artillery and attack helicopters. You have fighter jets and gunships. You even have a nuclear-armed bomber sitting at Peterson. Why do you think that simple, mostly-unarmed people would try to fight you?”

“But your men have guns and training.”

“Your father is a strong proponent of… mutually assured destruction. For the NEA to attack the Directorate would be… ill-advised.”

“But your men did attack us. They killed two of the members of my team!”

“Only after you needlessly killed our reception party.”

She tried to think of a reply but nothing came. Martin was right, if the two men on the eastern ramp of the bridge had been a reception party then that meant Shepherd’s actions had made the Directorate the aggressors. And the bridge. What if the NEA really didn’t blow it up?

“Have you ever wondered how the Directorate sustains itself?” Martin turned to face her and began his slow uneven trek back to the couch. “Colorado Springs produces barely any of its own food. The Directorate exists for military activities. You don’t have peasants or slaves to raise your food.” He emphasized the words “peasants” and “slaves.”

“We collect food from the communities we protect,” Alex said. “Then we distribute to the places that need it most. Of course we take some food for ourselves. But in return we keep everyone safe.”

“Safe,” Martin mused as he paused in front of the couch. “Safe from whom or what, I wonder. Have you ever been out to any of the communities under the Directorate’s protection?”

She shook her head. “My dad has told me about them, though.”

“They’re more like concentration camps than communities. Do you know what the Directorate demands of a community once they’ve joined you?”

“No.”

Martin paced back and forth in front, his reinforced boot echoing an uneven beat in the massive room. “Seventy-five percent of agricultural production and a guarantee the community will provide any labor necessary for your projects. Do you know how much food and water the community will receive in return?”

“Enough to live on?”

“That’s one way of putting it,” Martin said with a mirthless laugh. “Depending on how useful the Directorate deems a community, they receive just enough supplies to prevent starvation. And sometimes less than that.”

“That isn’t true,” Alex said and clenched her hands. These were all baseless accusations. The Directorate was a force for good. The only force for good left in this ruined world. No one ever complained about the living conditions within the Directorate’s communities. Of course things were harsh sometimes, but it was the same even in Colorado Springs. Everyone knew that working for the Directorate meant a return to peace and prosperity for the world. If anything that Martin was saying were true, someone within the Directorate’s command structure would have spoken up. Her father often fixed problems with a single word. He would never allow people to starve.

“After hearing all I’ve told you, do you really believe your father is trying to help people?”

“Yes. There isn’t anything more important than what we’re doing. We’re making the country a better place. How can you not support what we’re doing? You must have known what it was like when all of these skyscrapers were lit up and millions of people lived here. How can you tell me we’re so horrible when we’re the only ones trying to reunite the country and make it great again?”

Martin paused in front of her. She glanced at the reinforced right shoe with its metal support. The leg above the shoe, from what she could see, was bony and wasted like its owner.

“Alexandra,” he said softly, “if you win, it isn’t going to be like it used to be. We’ll have a military dictatorship.”

She knew her face was hot and flushed. She found it hard to think straight. She wanted to back away from the conversation and take a deep breath to clear her thinking.

Still, she stared at the mechanical boot and its bony shank.

She shook her head. “You never told me what my dad saw in that sphere.”

Martin frowned. “No, I didn’t.”

“So, what did he see? And if you and my dad used to be friends, then why are you with the NEA instead of the Directorate? You said there was a disagreement. What was it about?”

“I—” Martin began but a flash lit his face and the entire room. More lightning. Except the subsequent rumble was like an earthquake, shaking the windows in their frames. Martin staggered from the force of the explosion and almost fell backward.

Instinctively, she rushed forward to steady him. If he fell, he would break the spindly leg wrapped in its iron cocoon. She braced him by pushing her arm under his right armpit and holding him upright with her body.

Through the trembling windows, she saw a torrent of fire gushing from a lopsided, blue-glassed tower five hundred meters away.

The door crashed open, and Webb rushed in. “Sir, Tower 49 is under attack!”

Martin leaned heavily into Alex. His entire right side acted as dead weight pushing against them both.

“What’s happening?” Alex asked. “What’s going on out there?”

Martin did not seem surprised or overly alarmed. “Well, I think your dad is… really pissed.”