Chapter Three: Ninety-Three Lives and One Drop of Metal

The explosion tore three floors of curtain wall from Cloudrest Tower. Glass, steel, and burning battery fragments burst into the night. The upper building visibly tipped outward. Crowds screamed and retreated as structural alarms merged into one continuous note. Then twenty-four nearly invisible silver lines snapped taut. One end of each cable had entered the undamaged core. The other ends formed a web across the facade. Their ingredients were only carbon fiber and steel, but their molecularly graded structure divided the impact into tens of thousands of tiny vibrations and distributed it through intact beams. The tower stopped at an angle of 2.3 degrees. Silence held the plaza for a heartbeat. Then came a deafening cheer.