Somewhere downtown in the Eastern Cardinal, normal city life continued.
People moved about in their flying cars along the designated aerial lanes, the traffic management system keeping everything flowing in that organized way it had been rebuilt to manage after Kruel's attack. Street vendors had their stalls open on the ground level, the smell of food mixing with the particular urban smell of a city that was still in the process of deciding what it was going to be after something catastrophic had happened to it. Kids walked in groups between the rebuilt sections and the sections still wrapped in construction scaffolding. Task force officers moved in pairs along the main thoroughfares, their uniforms distinct from the old security forces, a newer presence that had become part of the street's normal texture over the past months.
Then a laboratory window on the fourteenth floor of the Crestway Research Building exploded outward.
