“One minute, elevation at four hundred feet.”

“It will virtually knock L.A. back into the Dark Ages.” Archer stared at the large screen. “You’re about to see history be made again, but the kind of history that can never be rewritten.”

“You can’t do this,” I said.

Kat was shaking her head. “You can’t. There’re people there who need electricity—there are innocent people, and their whole way of life is about to be ended. You can’t—”

“It’s obviously too late,” Nancy snapped, dark eyes firing. “This is our only option to stop them. For there even to be a tomorrow where mankind is safe.”

I opened my mouth, but the broken radio transmission fired up, counting down from twenty seconds, and there wasn’t any way to stop this. It was happening, right in front of us.

Moving closer to Kat, I continued to rivet my eyes on the screen, on the cars traveling the freeway, trying to exit the city. There could be Luxen in those cars, good ones and bad ones. There could be humans with heart conditions. There were also hospitals somewhere on that screen, people whose next breath would never come.

And then it happened.

Kat smacked her hand over her mouth as a flash of blinding light caused the image on the screen to wobble for a moment or two, and then the picture settled. Everything looked as it had seconds before, except none of the cars moved on the freeway. Nothing moved, actually, and . . .

The entire city had gone dark.

13

{ Katy }

Oh my God, I felt like I needed to sit down or I was going to fall over.

I couldn’t tear my gaze from the screen. Nothing was happening. Of course not. Millions of people in L.A. were currently stunned. And out of them, how many would never get back up again? Hundreds? Thousands? I couldn’t believe what I’d just witnessed.

A voice crackled over the radio, declaring a successful drop of the EMP bombs. No one in the room cheered. I was glad they hadn’t, because I was sure either Daemon or I would’ve ended up with onyx being sprayed in our face.

“We’ll be initiating a scan for any electrical pulses,” the man who had been counting down earlier announced. “Two minutes and I should have the data.”

General Eaton nodded. “Thank you.”

“Luxen and their many spinoffs emanate an electrical response,” Nancy explained, but I already knew that. That was why the PEP and EMP weapons were so dangerous.

They fried us on a massive level.

Daemon wrapped an arm around my shoulders, dragging me against his side. When I placed my hand on his chest, I could feel his body hum. He was angry, like me. The fury swirling inside me caused a rush of static to pop across my skin. There was so much frustration, because I knew our options were limited, but this . . . ?

The magnitude of what had just happened went beyond the loss of life. Today, whatever the date, would go down in infamy as the day the City of Angels just stopped. Nothing would work there the same again. All of the electrical grids, the networks, and the complex infrastructure that was so beyond my realm of understanding were all gone.

“There’s no recovering from that, is there?” I asked, and my voice sounded hoarse.

Archer’s jaw was set. “It would take decades, if not longer, to rebuild to what it was.”

I closed my eyes, floored by the ramifications of this.

“There is no activity,” the man announced. “Not even a blip.”

Daemon stiffened beside me, and I pressed my hand against his chest. There had to be a lot of innocent people who had perished.

And this was only the beginning. I knew it. They would do this to more cities, all around the world, and more innocent people would die and the world would become . . . holy crap, life as we knew it would become a freaking dystopian novel like I’d thought before, but for real.

Pulling away, I turned and faced General Eaton. “You can’t keep doing this.”

His deep gray eyes met mine, and I knew he had to be thinking, Who in the hell is this chick to think she can even say anything? and maybe I didn’t have a right. Hell, in the grand scheme of things I was a nobody, just a freak of nature, but I couldn’t stand here and not say something as they literally destroyed the world one city at a time.

“You’re obliterating millions of people’s way of life, and that’s not even taking into consideration the people who were killed when those bombs were dropped,” I said, voice shaking. “You can’t keep doing this.”

“This wasn’t a decision that came lightly. Trust me when I say there were and will be many hours where sleep will be lost,” he replied. “But there is no other way.”

Daemon folded his arms across his chest. “What you’re doing is basically committing genocide.”

No one responded, because what could they say to that? It was genocide, because those bombs were going to wipe most of the Luxen off the planet.

Archer scrubbed a hand along his jaw. “The thing is, guys, what other option do they have? You know as well as I do that if the invading Luxen aren’t stopped, and if the Origins who are working with them aren’t rounded up, it will take just weeks before they have complete control of the whole planet.”

“Maybe not even that long,” Nancy commented as she dropped into an empty chair. Her expression was as impassive as ever, but I wondered if she feared that wherever the Origins were holed up was near one of the cities where bombs would be dropped. “If the Origins are in on this—”