Chapter 32: explosion
The hotel room was a tomb of heavy silence, broken only by the muffled, frantic sounds of the city beyond the sealed windows. Kyleson stood by the door, his packed bag slung over one shoulder, watching the scene before him with a mixture of awe and unease.
The guard—David, he'd learned—was bound to a heavy wooden chair with thick ropes that bit into his wrists and ankles. His face was a ruin of terror. Sweat plastered his hair to his forehead, and his eyes, wide and white-rimmed, darted between the two figures in black who held his life in their hands. He had been a professional once, a man trained to handle threats. Now he was just raw, quivering meat waiting for a verdict.
The Architect stood before him, a study in absolute stillness. His packed bag sat at his feet, but his focus was entirely on the bound man. The mask hid any expression, but those piercing blue eyes above it were doing an inventory, cataloging every flicker of fear, every desperate calculation behind David's gaze.
"What is your name?" The Architect's voice was calm, almost gentle. A teacher asking a student a simple question.
David swallowed, his throat working against the pressure of his fear. "D-David."
"David," the Architect repeated, tasting the name. "A good, solid name. Biblical. Do you have any Intel inputs regarding the next defense protocols in the town, David? Any information about police movements, tactical positions, contingency plans they might activate?"
David shook his head violently, the ropes creaking with the movement. "I don't know anything. I'm just security. They don't tell us that stuff. Please, I have a family. A daughter. She's five."
The Architect's head tilted slightly, a gesture that might have been sympathy on a normal face. "I am asking you for the last time, David. Do you have Intel inputs?"
Again, the desperate shake of the head. "I don't know! I swear to God, I don't know anything!"
A long pause. The Architect's eyes seemed to dim slightly, not with anger, but with a profound, almost philosophical disappointment. "Well," he said softly, "your kind of useless."
He reached into his bag and withdrew an object that made David's blood run cold. A bundle of explosives, wires, and a digital timer—compact, military-grade, utterly lethal. He set the timer with a series of precise clicks. Ten minutes. The red numbers began their silent, irreversible countdown.
The Architect placed the bomb on the bed, within clear view of the bound guard, then turned and walked to the door. He paused at the threshold, looking back. "Ten minutes," he said, the words hanging in the air like a death sentence. "I would recommend prayer, if you're the type. Though I find it statistically ineffective."
He pulled the door shut behind him. The click of the lock was a period at the end of David's world.
In the hallway, Kyleson was already moving, his own bag heavy with the remaining payload. The Architect joined him, and together they began their grim work. They moved with the synchronized efficiency of professionals who had done this before, though Kyleson's hands trembled slightly as he planted his first device.
Door by door. Room by room. They worked their way down the corridor, planting bombs on every surface—doors, walls, the elevator doors, the stairwell landings. Each device was identical: a compact block of explosive, a timer glowing with the same red numbers. Ten minutes. The countdown was universal, synchronized, absolute.
Six minutes had already elapsed by the time they placed the last device in the stairwell. Four minutes remaining. The building was now a honeycomb of impending annihilation, and the bees were leaving the hive.
They descended the stairs at a controlled jog, not a panicked run. Panic was for victims. They were architects of the event, not participants in it. The lobby was a ghost of its former elegance—shattered glass, overturned furniture, the dark stains of violence on the marble floor. They stepped over the debris and pushed through the emergency exit into the grey, smoke-choked air of Pioneer Square.
The street was a nightmare of chaos and confusion. Emergency personnel were still arriving, their lights painting the smoke in surreal, swirling colors. People ran in every direction, coughing, crying, clutching each other. No one noticed two figures in dark clothing slipping away from the hotel. No one was looking at them. Everyone was looking at the burning, screaming city.
The Architect led them to a specific building, a derelict structure a hundred meters to the right of the hotel. It had been marked on his mental map for days—a perfect observation post. Abandoned, crumbling, with a clear line of sight to their masterpiece. They climbed the creaking stairs to the rooftop, their footsteps echoing in the hollow space.
The rooftop was a landscape of rust and neglect—old HVAC units, broken furniture, a forest of discarded antennas. They moved to the edge, positioning themselves behind a low parapet. The hotel loomed before them, its elegant facade now just a canvas awaiting its final layer of paint.
"How much time?" Kyleson asked, his voice a hoarse whisper.
The Architect checked his watch. "Thirty seconds."
Kyleson stared at the building. In those windows, behind those doors, were hundreds of people. Hotel staff. Guests. First responders who had arrived too soon. The bound guard, David, with his five-year-old daughter. All of them living out their final, oblivious moments. He felt something twist in his gut—not quite guilt, not quite triumph. Something in between. Something that felt like the Architect's definition of "fun."
Twenty seconds.
The Architect stepped forward, positioning himself at the very edge of the rooftop. He turned his back to the hotel, facing Kyleson. His arms began to rise, slowly, deliberately, until they were fully extended to either side. His body formed a perfect T against the grey, smoke-stained sky. A crucifixion pose. A gesture of supreme, absolute ownership.
Ten seconds.
Kyleson watched, mesmerized. The Architect's silhouette was dark against the swirling chaos behind him—the fires, the smoke, the sirens. He looked like a god surveying his creation, or a demon reveling in his destruction. The line between the two had long since blurred.
Five seconds.
The Architect's arms were fully extended now, his head tilted back slightly, as if basking in a sun that wasn't shining. The pose was one of utter, ecstatic reception. He was opening himself to the moment, becoming one with the annihilation he had engineered.
Three seconds.
Kyleson held his breath.
Two.
One.
Zero.
The world ended.
The explosion wasn't a sound; it was a physical force that punched through the air and rattled Kyleson's bones despite the distance. The hotel's facade simply ceased to exist, replaced by a blooming, hellish flower of fire and debris. Glass became shrapnel, steel became ribbons, concrete became dust. The shockwave rolled over them, hot and savage, carrying the screams of the dying that were swallowed by the roar.
The building seemed to hold its shape for a single, impossible second, a photographic negative of its former self outlined in fire. Then it began to collapse, folding in on itself in slow, grinding waves of destruction. Floor pancaked onto floor, walls crumbled, and the elegant spire that had crowned the hotel toppled into the inferno.
Twenty kilograms of explosives. A surgical strike of absolute devastation. Half the building was simply gone, vaporized in the initial blast. The rest was a burning, crumbling wreck. Fires raged through the ruins, casting dancing shadows on the surrounding buildings. Smoke billowed skyward in a thick, black column that would be visible for miles.
The official count would come later: 1,078 dead. Hotel guests, staff, first responders, civilians in the surrounding area caught in the blast radius. Men, women, children. A random sampling of humanity, reduced to statistics in a single, brutal moment.
But not the two men on the rooftop. They stood untouched, spectators in the front row of the apocalypse.
The Architect slowly lowered his arms, the pose dissolving into a more relaxed stance. He watched the fire with the appreciative eye of an artist examining a finished canvas. "Beautiful," he murmured, the word lost in the continuing roar of destruction.
Kyleson couldn't speak. He could only stare at the inferno, at the lives he had helped extinguish. The twist in his gut had tightened into a knot of something he couldn't name. He thought of David, bound to that chair, watching the red numbers count down. Had he screamed? Had he prayed? Had he thought of his daughter in those final seconds? The questions had no answers. They just floated in the smoke, joining the ashes of the dead.
---
Beneath them, in the chaos of Pioneer Square, the Old Man had witnessed everything.
He had been making his slow, deliberate way towards the hotel when the world erupted. The blast had knocked him off his feet, sending him sprawling onto the wet cobblestones. For a long moment, he lay there, the air driven from his lungs, his old body protesting the abuse. Around him, the screams of the newly wounded and the dying filled the air.
He pushed himself up slowly, his joints aching, his herringbone coat now ruined with grime and God knew what else. His clear, pale blue eyes—the eyes that had seen so much in seventy-two years—fixed on the burning wreckage of the hotel. The building he had been walking towards of now a funeral pyre.
He stood there for a long moment, breathing through his mouth to avoid the acrid smoke. His mind, a finely calibrated instrument of observation and deduction, was already working. The sniper had been in that hotel. The shooter in the lobby had been in that hotel. And now the hotel was gone, destroyed from within. Not an attack from outside. An internal demolition. A cleansing.
The perpetrators would have escaped before the blast. They would have a vantage point. Somewhere close, somewhere with a clear view. They would want to watch their work.
His eyes began to scan the surrounding buildings. To the left, a row of shops and cafes, most with shattered windows, people spilling out in panic. To the right, the abandoned structure, dark and silent against the smoke-filled sky.
He felt it before he saw it. A presence. A weight of observation from above.
He looked up at the derelict building. Its rooftop was a jumble of shadows and rust, but for a moment, just a moment, he thought he saw a silhouette against the grey. Two silhouettes, perhaps. Watching.
The Old Man made his choice. He turned right.
He walked towards the abandoned building, his pace steady, his figure a dark shape moving against the chaos. The smoke swirled around him, hiding his face, revealing only a silhouette—the outline of an old man in a fine coat, walking with the terrible purpose of a force of nature.
He was the hidden demon of Pioneer Square, and he was coming home.
---
Kansas – The Carter Homestead
The train ride had given Noah too much time to think. Too much time to replay the image of the knife rising and falling, the sound of it, the look in Collins's eyes when he realized he had bet on the wrong horse. Too much time to wonder if the man he saw in that blood-spattered mirror was still, in any recognizable way, himself.
He had told Luna it was a refresher trip. Time with his mother. Space to breathe. She had looked at him with those eyes that saw too much, but she hadn't argued. Maybe she needed the space too. Maybe she needed to look at him without seeing the ghost of what he'd done.
The airport in Wichita was a small, quiet affair compared to the chaos of Dallas or the haunted silence of Eldridge. Noah moved through it like a man in a dream, his bag light, his mind heavy. He was heading for the exit, towards the rental car counter, when he saw it.
A crowd, gathered around a small television mounted on a pillar. A journalist's face filled the screen, her expression grave, urgent. The chyron beneath her read: "CARTER CASE: NEW DEVELOPMENTS. PUBLIC RESPONDS."
He stopped, frozen in the flow of pedestrian traffic. The journalist was talking about them. About him and Luna. About the lawsuit, the allegations, the public frenzy. Photos of them flashed on the screen—his driver's license, Luna's candid shot from the Dallas gathering. They looked like wanted posters. They looked like criminals.
A man in the crowd turned, his eyes scanning the passing travelers. Noah's heart seized. He knew that look. It was the look Collins had worn before he pulled the knife. The look of a man who had seen a price tag on a face.
Noah turned and walked away. Not fast, not running. Just walking with purpose, the way the Architect had walked through the hotel lobby. He didn't look back. He couldn't afford to.
---
Eldridge Courthouse – The Trial
The courtroom was a cathedral of procedure and precedent, all polished wood and solemn faces. Justin stood at the defense table, his suit impeccable, his expression a mask of professional concern. He had studied for this. Prepared for this. The Architect had given him a role, and he would play it perfectly.
"Your Honor," Justin said, his voice carrying the appropriate mix of deference and quiet confidence, "the defendant, Mr. Noah Carter, is not present for today's proceedings. This is not an act of contempt, but a matter of necessity. As you can see from the document I am submitting, Mr. Carter has filed a formal notice of his absence, citing personal reasons and the need for respite following the traumatic events that have engulfed his family."
He held up the paper, a crisp sheet with Noah's signature at the bottom. "If the court wishes, we can proceed with the trial in his absence, based on the evidence and statements already provided. Alternatively, we can reschedule to a date when Mr. Carter can be present to face these proceedings directly. The defense is prepared to accommodate either path."
The judge, a woman with iron-grey hair and eyes that had seen every kind of human failure, extended her hand. "Hand over the notice."
Her assistant crossed the space and placed the document on the bench. The judge read it slowly, her expression revealing nothing. The courtroom held its breath. The gallery, packed with reporters and curious onlookers, watched with hungry eyes.
Finally, the judge looked up. "The defendant's request for absence is noted. The trial will proceed as scheduled, based on the evidence and testimony available. We will not delay justice because one party chooses not to attend." She fixed Justin with a steady gaze. "Present me the statements and the report sheet. We will conduct this trial by the book."
Justin inclined his head, a gesture of acceptance. Inside, a cold satisfaction bloomed. The game was proceeding exactly as designed.
---
Seattle – The Rooftop
High above the burning city, the Architect stood motionless, watching the Old Man's silhouette disappear into the abandoned building below. Kyleson was on the third floor, his sniper rifle trained on the streets, but his attention kept drifting back to the structure beneath them.
"Someone's going to the house just next to ours!" Kyleson whispered into the walkie-talkie. "I saw someone go in. A silhouette. They're heading this way."
The Architect's eyes, fixed on the rooftop access door, showed a flicker of something—not fear, but anticipation. "I know," he said softly. "Let them come."
Chapter 32 ends
To Be Continued…