He fell, felt the sky rush around him, the static cloud enveloping him like a thick blanket. Dade closed his eyes and let himself be taken.
The Levels rushed past.
Then everything went black as he passed out.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Arden watched her datapad in horror. Her lungs burned—she couldn’t draw a full breath. She shook while tears streamed down her face, wondering whether somehow this was all a bad dream, whether she was really witnessing Dade’s last moments.
Normally she didn’t waste time on visicasts, never bothering to look at the news unless Lasair was involved somehow. But the chatter she heard as she’d made her way through Undercity had her finding a dark corner so she could figure out what the commotion was about: buildings burning, shooting in the streets, and the Upper Levels at war. What she hadn’t expected was the devastation that greeted her.
She enabled the volume to hear the commentators’ reaction to the coverage, wanting to know every possible bit of information she might have missed. Her mind was a blur. Perhaps if she could work out what had happened to start this mess, there would be a way to make it better, to rescue him.
Each vid-angle became more painful than the last.
She needed a moment to process, but the events didn’t slow. Thankfully, she was alone, because she couldn’t have concealed her emotions, the utter devastation she felt. How could she explain to anyone from Lasair why she was crying over a Solizen? She would never be able to answer with the truth.
Her eyes continued to track the situation playing itself out on live visicast. Every moment of the fight captured, displayed for the whole city to see. At first Dade had been in a phase-fight with the Ghost. That hadn’t bothered her. She didn’t know who was playing the part of the Ghost or for what purpose, and she really didn’t care as long as Dade was safe. Perhaps it was a plan of some sort. She trusted that Dade knew what he was doing. At the start, it had been entertaining to watch all the stunts they’d pulled off. She’d been impressed with Dade’s skill, and a little hot for him, truth be told.
It was no longer amusing.
When the govies had shown up and Dade had switched sides to fight alongside the Ghost, the tone of the commentary shifted. Now it was speculative, with Dade on the wrong side of the discussion. They were all but calling him a traitor.
“We’ve got positive confirmation that the first shooter is Dade Croix, son of Hernim Croix and heir of Croix Industries. We don’t know who the Ghost is at this time,” the woman said. The commentators’ images were at the bottom corner of the screen so that both visicasters could be seen while also covering the live feed.
“It appears they’re working together now. Weren’t they just shooting at each other?” the male visicaster asked.
“They were, Hal.” The woman’s mouth puckered as she watched the feed along with the rest of the city.
Hal leaned forward, practically salivating. “A bit of gossip landed the Croix heir in hot water just this morning.”
“What’s that?”
“A series of photos posted on a gossip site show the young Croix heir buying Shine in the slums on Level One. Sources said the pictures were taken three weeks ago. Along with this, it makes me wonder what Dade Croix has gotten himself involved in.”
The woman loudly inhaled through her scrunched lips. The surprise seemed insincere. It was a calculated move. They’d probably sat on this piece of news in order to release it at the right time. Perhaps they’d even known the govies had planned to confront Dade. The city loved to watch a Solizen fall.
Arden did too. She couldn’t deny it. This was different, though. This was Dade. It made her spitting angry that they dared to say such awful things about him, especially when he was fighting for his life.
Grudgingly she admitted that they had a point about questioning his allegiance. It was foolhardy for him to have publicly aligned himself with the Ghost. Maybe Dade hadn’t thought of the repercussions of the actions in the seconds he’d had. Perhaps he wanted to help a friend, which was completely in character with the man she loved. She smiled softly in spite of the ache in her chest and the tears on her face.
The visicaster continued to speculate. “Does Dade Croix have a drug habit? Perhaps the Ghost is not a humanitarian, but rather a drug dealer? Are we seeing the aftermath of a drug deal gone wrong? Perhaps Dade Croix is the connection the Ghost uses to break and enter the drug facilities.”
Bright sun, Dade would be held accountable for this even if he made it out alive. That kind of suspicion didn’t go away. It grew like a cancer. She wanted to punch both visicasters in the face. This was a very dangerous path for people to start speculating on, and they were heralding the charge.
“It seems a logical conclusion,” the woman agreed. “If that’s the case, the Croix heir has an almost unlimited drug supply.”
Arden didn’t want to hear any more, but she couldn’t force herself to silence the stream. Their comments made her sick, but it was important to know the totality of the consequences Dade would face. The fallout would be more troubling than the visicasters suggested. They were effectively painting a target on Dade. If the city believed that the Ghost was in the drug business and not just being a do-gooder, then he’d become a bigger target in her world than he already was. Lasair wanted him now, but that was because he affected them specifically. If it was perceived that he cut into the drug profits of the whole city, he’d be hunted by other gangs as well for encroaching on their territory.
There was also social perception to consider. It would open the doors to stricter laws, and then maybe a civil war. She could see the spin now: a rich Solizen keeping life-saving VitD from the people, while flooding the streets with Shine.
Maybe Niall was right. Perhaps civil war would happen with or without the Lasair prodding things along. There would be a fight eventually, and people would die either way. He might also be correct in his assumption that cutting off the beast at the head was the best way to move forward.
Dade and whoever was playing the Ghost made a run for it into the blown-out building. She knew that building had several exits. The govies couldn’t cover them all. It looked like they would have a chance of escape if they chose wisely. Unfortunately, they didn’t know some of the hidden passages that would take them to Level One nor the bolt-hole into Undercity. If she had been there, halfway across the city, she could have used the bolt-hole to rescue them.