São Paulo's sky is green. It's not the green of the forests. It's an electric, sickly light that burns my retinas every time I try to open my eyes. The smell of ozone cuts through the air alongside the stench of burned flesh and the sour tang of molten steel running down the buildings like hot wax. I breathe in short gasps. Every breath is a fight to keep soot from clogging my lungs. Santos has stopped helping me. Now he's just an eighty-kilo dead weight I have to drag. I hold tight to the straps of his tactical vest. My feet slip on the shattered asphalt of Sé Square as I try to reach the overturned articulated bus twenty meters ahead. The twisted metal looks like the only solid shelter before the next blast hits. I hear the dry thud of Santos's boots catching in the holes in the concrete. I feel his blood running hot and thick along the side of my hand, staining my fingers all the way to my wrist. My hand is shaking, but I don't let go. —Get up, Santos!—My voice comes out ragged, my throat raw. —Stay with me, man! Just a little farther! He grips my wrist. His skin slides against mine, slick with sweat. We're almost at the bus when the air snaps around us. An electric chill climbs up the back of my neck—the warning that the atmospheric pressure is about to collapse. The plasma shot doesn't sound like gunpowder. It's a dry thump, a vacuum that sucks all the oxygen away at once. I feel a violent jerk in my left arm. My shoulder pops out of place. Santos's weight disappears for a millisecond, then comes back doubled, slamming me face-first into the rubble. When I turn over, there's no face left. Just thick black smoke pouring from what remains of his head. His body still takes three mechanical steps, nerves frying in spasms, before collapsing onto the asphalt like a sack of stones. I hit the ground face-first in the dust. The taste of iron floods my mouth. All around me, São Paulo is being chewed alive. I see a woman running with her hair on fire. She opens her mouth to scream, but the vacuum steals the sound. A bolt hits her, and all that's left is a pink mist—a spray of human particles splattering the window of an electronics store. My throat burns. I swallow bile. I run. —PIETRO! Rodrigues's shout cuts through the ringing in my ears. He's crouched behind an overturned Military Police caveirão. The vehicle's wheels are still spinning uselessly, a sight that squeezes my chest. His face is covered in soot. Twenty meters of open ground separate us, and from here it looks like a working meat grinder. I spit out a piece of tooth that broke in the fall, feel the bitterness of bile rise, and run. I dive behind the caveirão's cold metal and come face-to-face with Miguel. My cousin. The guy who used to split his lunch with me at the construction site. He's crouched behind a wall made of rubble and remains fused into concrete by the plasma. There's nothing left in his face of a twenty-one-year-old kid. It's a hard mask, made of stone. Rodrigues grabs the strap of my backpack and throws a heavy bundle against my chest. —Thirty kilos of Russian hardware, Pietro. Brutish technology, patched together with copper wires and electrical tape. If you hit the ventilation, that Whale goes down—he points to the alien transport pulsing gray and violet above the Municipal Theater. I look at Miguel, then at the weight in my arms. —Why us, Rodrigues?—I ask, my voice faltering. —We're inexperienced. We've never made a run like this under direct fire. Rodrigues stares at me, eyes fixed, with no time for comfort. —Because you can run, Pietro. You two are the fastest scouts I have left. And it's going to work. These Russian bombs don't fail. It's now or never! I tighten the straps. I think of my brothers and the other cousins who stayed in Minas, waiting for news over the radio that never comes. I can't die here. —Miguel, on three! He doesn't even blink. He just adjusts the rifle sling, braces the barrel against the mass of flesh and concrete, and waits. —Go, Pietro. The Whale is coming down—he murmurs. The ship's sound is a low frequency that makes my teeth vibrate and my stomach churn. —One... two... three! RUN! RUN! FASTER, PIETRO, RUN! My boots, held together with wire that's now cutting into my toes, pound against the hot asphalt. The thirty-kilo weight on my back wants to bury me in the ground. The air reeks of ozone and decomposition. Plasma streaks across the sky. Zzap. A white flash explodes behind my eyes, and the heat singes the hair on my arm. The smell of burning is coming from me. —NOW!—Miguel roars, firing short bursts to draw the guards' attention. He's offering himself as a target so I can gain ten meters. I see one of the Grays emerge from a hatch. The movement is fluid, wrong, fast as a snake. Miguel lands a shot in the thing's throat, and black liquid sprays across the wall of the Caixa building. Five meters. The Whale's thermal hatch opens. The heat pouring out is like opening an industrial oven in your face. —You're done for!—I yell, feeling my vocal cords snap. I pull the pin and throw the Russian charge straight into that light. I throw myself beneath a burned-out car, feeling the hood's metal fry the palms of my hands. The crack comes first. The vacuum sucks the sound out of downtown. Then comes the white that wipes out everything.
The ceiling of the Municipal Theater looks ready to cave in. I'm staring at the designs in the plaster while fine dust falls straight into my eyes. I try to move my left arm. A searing spark climbs through my shoulder and travels along every nerve. I'm lying on an improvised stretcher—red velvet torn from an elegant armchair, reinforced with construction rods. The theater's musty smell battles the odor of cheap antiseptic and smoke. My hearing is nothing but a tunnel of wind. —Miguel?—My voice comes out as a dry whisper. It feels like I've swallowed shards of glass. No one answers. The silence terrifies me. I look around with effort. The main hall has become a morgue full of living people. Men and women are piled between marble columns covered with tactical maps and radio frequencies. Where there should have been opera, there's now only the sound of manual resuscitators and the slow dripping of IVs. I raise my torso, fighting the dizziness that makes the world spin. I see Rodrigues near the staircase. He's holding a field radio, gesturing to a man seated in front of a map. Fernando. The Front Coordinator doesn't look at the wounded. His eyes are fixed on the red dots marking the Grays' advance. He always acts as if he's under pressure. Rodrigues speaks quietly, but the words reach me. —...total loss in sector seven. Santos confirmed. The transport went down in Anhangabaú, but the cost was high. Pietro's here on the stretcher. Miguel... Miguel hasn't been located. His radio went dead before the explosion. A chill grips my stomach that has nothing to do with the lack of heating. It's absolute emptiness. —Find the kid—Fernando's voice is dry, devoid of feeling. —If he wasn't vaporized, he's in the wreckage. I need his technical report on opening the Whale. We don't have time to mourn, Rodrigues. My bare feet touch the cold marble. I have to find Miguel. He's all I have left here. I walk between rows of seats torn from the floor and turned into beds of pain. The smell inside is heavy—accumulated sweat mixed with the metallic odor of blood beginning to spoil. I see a woman trying to staunch a tear in a young man's abdomen with a piece of velvet curtain. The fabric is porous, a trap for bacteria. He'll die of infection before he dies of the wound. I think of my mother. I look away. There's no point thinking about that now. I pass a broken mirror at the side of the stage. The face appearing in the fragment isn't mine. I keep walking. I stop in front of the marble table where the map is spread open. Fernando doesn't take his eyes off the tactical markings. —I'm going after him—I say. My voice comes out firmer than I expected, cutting through the sound of the radio. Fernando slowly raises his head. He has the look of someone who has nothing left to lose. I've spent six months with him and still don't know whether that makes him brave or dangerous. To him, we're just tools. —You can barely stand, Pietro. Going out now would waste ammunition and effort—he says without a trace of emotion. —Miguel is the only one who saw the internal power chamber of that Whale before the charge went off—I answer, playing the only card he accepts: usefulness. —If he's alive, he has the technical detail you need to bring down the flotilla that's coming. If he's dead, I'll bring back his rifle and medical kit. We can't afford to lose equipment. Rodrigues looks at me from the side for a second. Then he puts a hand on Fernando's shoulder. —Let the kid go, Commander—he says, his voice hoarse. —He knows Anhangabaú better than any scout we have left. Fernando lets out a heavy sigh, the sound of someone calculating the risk of losing another man. —Go. If you don't come back in two hours, I'll mark you confirmed KIA. I won't send a search team, and there won't be a rescue. You're on your own.
The heavy bronze doors of the Theater open, and the air outside hits me like a punch to the chest. The neon-green light of that ionized sky floods my vision and burns my pupils. I breathe in São Paulo's icy air, saturated with soot and the sulfur stink of the combat zone. I squeeze my eyes shut to block out that artificial color. In the darkness behind my eyelids, the green changes. It's no longer the glow of plasma. It's the deep green of the forests of Minas Gerais under the October sun. I can feel the caravan bus swaying rhythmically. It was October. My mother's birthday was coming up, and Miguel... Miguel was glowing. He'd just turned twenty-one on the road. I remember the smell of warm pão de queijo we bought at a stop near Fernão Dias. Miguel, with that red hair that seemed like the only real splash of color in the world, laughed as he tried to balance an improvised cake on his lap while the bus was moving. We were headed to the Temple in São Paulo. It was a trip of faith, of family. We planned to call home as soon as we reached the capital. —Imagine your mom's face when we show up with the pictures, Pietro—he said, with that six feet of pure optimism. The bus stopped. But it wasn't a scheduled stop. The driver screamed. The radio began to hiss with a sound that wasn't music. And then came the first flash. We watched green bolts slash across São Paulo's horizon. Since that day, the silence of the phone is the only thing I get from Minas. My parents, my brothers, everything that was mine. I opened my eyes. The asphalt of Sé Square lay dead beneath my feet. Miguel wasn't the boy from the bus anymore. And I have only two hours.