Dust Freaks & Demigods (Dome City Investigations Book 1) by Milo James Fowler

Author:Milo James Fowler [Fowler, Milo James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Future City Press
Published: 2024-02-06T00:00:00+00:00

13

"You cannot stop him," Dr. Solomon Wong tells me.

He stands in front of the speedlift door in the hangar of Futuro Tower, right where he tried to kill me. Right where I killed him.

This is how I always see him, bloody and back from the dead, with the melee of his frantic clones frozen in time around us, their projectile weapons firing up at W1nk and Bl1nk, who let loose their own barrage, sparking, flashing, paused in midair. This is the split-second before he shoots me with that laser welder, concealed for the moment in the pocket of his lab coat.

"He has help," Wong says, "a kind you cannot begin to fathom."

"Leave me alone," I moan, wishing he would disappear so I can go back to sleep, deep and dark, embracing me like a long-lost lover.

But no, that's not in the cards for Sera Chen. She can't so much as nod off without seeing this old megalomaniac again and hearing him go on and on about some sort of nascent impending doom. This is what I've been trying to avoid by taking those stimulants.

They've obviously lost their potency.

"He spent months in that correctional center planning every step. Now the plan is in motion. His followers have been activated." Wong's brow furrows, and he shakes his head at me. "You should have joined me. We could have outlived these trying times, left it all in the past. Unremembered history."

"You wanted to cryo-freeze us…"

"You could have slept through the turmoil that is to come. Now you will live through it. Everything I wanted to save you from." He starts to dissolve like a disabled hologram. "You will not escape any part of it."

"What?"

"The end of your world."

The second he vanishes completely, the violence around me is unpaused, lurching into action. Loud and frenetic, projectile rounds exploding at close proximity as my drones force the clones into hiding.

We're across the Mediterranean from Dome 10 on the shore of North Africa, what might have been Morocco or Algeria in ancient times. This was where Wong planned to live out the centuries in cryo-sleep while his clones figured out a way to terraform the desolate Earth. Last I heard, they're still at it, supervised by the clone of Persephone Hawthorne herself—who has a much better grip on reality than the woman whose image she bears—but sans their almighty creator.

Guilt causes me to see Wong's ghost like this. Usually, I'm able to snap wide awake to avoid hearing him talk. But this time, I was too sound asleep to escape his speechmaking. And now I'm too groggy to comprehend what the hell he was rambling on about.

Unless he meant Trezon, of course. In which case, my guilty subconscious mind manifested itself as the man I killed...in order to warn me. Which makes about as much sense as seeing his blood-drenched ghost every time I catch a split-second of sleep.

My eyelids flutter open to find myself still lying on the floor of the speedlift. W1nk and Bl1nk are hovering in the hallway outside, right where I left them.

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