The ten-ton heavy concrete pylon plummeted toward the escape hall like a falling skyscraper.
It had snapped away from the ceiling thirty feet above. He carried tangled iron rods and twenty tons of trailing rubble in its wake. Directly beneath its dropping flight path was a bottleneck in the narrow escape tunnel, where twenty-five wounded cadets and four stretchers carrying comatose burn victims were bottlenecked, unable to scramble forward in time.
There was no time for Titus to reposition. There was no room for Pip to dive through the underground ceiling.
Arthur Vance unclipped the brass collar of the glass chest metal tube, thrusting both gloved hands into the treated stone water.
He lifted Echo out into the freezing, smoke-filled air.
The little axolotl was barely forty-five inches in length, his semi-clear pink skin glistening under the emergency work lights, his four tiny frilled feet splayed out in Arthur’s palms. His delicate outer gills undulated like silk ribbons, entirely calm by the screaming cadets, the showering dust, or the world-ending roar of the falling mountain above.
Echo tilted his flat, rounded head upward, his small, lidless black eyes blinking once at the ten-ton falling concrete monolith.
Through the Soul-Sync link, Arthur felt a sudden, deep shift in the creature’s internal space-folding topology. Echo’s body was not merely an amphibian organism. His cellular inside contained a dormant, tightly packed sub-spatial rift inherited from the ancient Kunpeng Giant beast—an endless, non-Euclidean pocket dimension capable of folding physical matter into spatial star-core.
