I got the necessity of it—they had to do something against the invading Luxen—but my sister was out there somewhere, hopefully nowhere near L.A. And there had to be innocent Luxen and hybrids there, even Origins, and they had no clue what was coming their way.
“Innocents will die in this, both human and Luxen,” the general said, as if he could read my mind. “But we have to sacrifice the few to save the many.”
I turned back to the screen as it flickered rapidly for a second before evening out. The image had zoomed in once more, enough that I could track movement on the ground.
“That’s not all it does,” Archer said quietly. “The EMP was designed for a different purpose.”
The general nodded. “Originally, it came to creation as a weapon of mass destruction that would limit the loss of human life. The EMP irreversibly damages any and all electronic devices and power sources.”
Holy shit.
That was all I was capable of thinking.
“That’s everything,” Kat whispered. “That’s absolutely everything in the city—phones, cars, hospitals, communications—everything.”
“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.