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The average life expectancy for a Hell Diver was fifteen jumps. This was Xavier Rodriguez’s ninety-sixth, and he was about to do it with a hangover.
“We dive so humanity survives.” It was the Hell Diver motto, and his typical response—a reply that reassured the captain she could count on him.
Ash could not help reflecting on the original purpose for the tubes: to drop not people but bombs—the very bombs that had turned the surface into a wasteland, forcing humans to take to the sky in the very ships that had doomed them.
He tried his best to ignore the murmured pleas and resentful glares as he walked through the close, sultry air. None of them seemed to care that he had saved their lives countless times. They only saw a member of the privileged elite in front of them, not the parts that X had risked his life scavenging to keep the ship in the air.
Education was reserved for the children of engineers and farmers—people who would grow up to play a vital role in keeping the Hive in the air.
The explosion engulfed the entire ship, leaving no question that every soul on board had perished.
Two decks beneath her, under the guts of the ship, humanity’s last hope was about to dive into the abyss, and there was nothing she could do to help them.
In the end, it won’t have been a storm that finally brought down the Hive. It will have been a bullet. Ash was tired. Tired of fighting gravity, tired of fighting the lower-deckers, tired of fighting the cancer.
He didn’t know what the Sirens were or where they had come from, but one thing was clear: the bombs dropped by his ancestors hadn’t just destroyed the Old World—they had created a new one and populated it with monsters.
Snowflakes laced with nuclear fallout fluttered from the ceiling as he waited for the storm to pass.
