Tamping down her concern, she turned her mind to her upcoming appointment, her second interview for a Head Nursing Director role.
Despite her experience, a tight knot of nerves twisted in her stomach.
‘Ms. Munene? I’m Sonia,’ a young woman said, hurrying in her direction.
She wore a crisp charcoal suit, and her silver ID badge identified her as anAssistant to the Senior Executive Team. ‘The board is ready for you. We’re heading up to the forty-fifth floor.’
‘Sante, Sonia,’ Sheba replied, falling into step. ‘Is the panel always this punctual?’
‘Only when they’re impressed by a candidate’s first round,’ Sonia chirped, offering a professional smile as she motioned at the elevator bank. ‘They were particularly interested in your off-world mercy hospital experience.’
Sheba followed the friendly, chatty young woman towards the opening doors of the lift.
With no warning, a thunderclap, one so loud and booming, sounded. It pierced eardrums, causing her and everyone around her to stagger in agony.
Jolting in astonishment, Sheba clapped her hands to her ears, her auricles ringing. ‘Thefokk?’
She managed to raise her eyes to the view outside the floor-to-ceiling windows just in time to see the sky turn black.
What she saw next made her stomach churn as a massive, indigo energy storm slammed into the city dome.
A collective gasp rippled through the lobby, followed by frantic whispers and screams.
A shock wave went over the building, and seconds later, there was loud crackling and the shattering of plexiglass as the lobby’s facade fractured under the atmospheric pressure.
The overhead lights flickered once, buzzed with a dying electrical whine, and then blacked out.
The elevator doors lost power, slamming together and apart in a violent, mechanical stutter.
Sensing danger, Sheba lunged forward and grabbed Sonia by the shoulder.
She twisted the smaller woman out of the path of the snapping metal barrier just as they jammed shut with a shower of sparks.
‘With me!’ she shouted to the dazed assistant.
Taking Sonia’s hand, Sheba surged toward the street exit, her sensible heels crunching over broken glass.
Yells and screams followed them as people poured out of the building.
A second, enormous, tectonic crack sounded.
Above, the city-wide canopy screeched under the heft of the massive surge of spectral tsunamic force.
A fracture raced across the sky like a glitch in the matrix, and then an immense section of the dome imploded.
Sheba’s newSsignakhtsensors went into overdrive, and time slowed to a crawl.
She tracked huge, shimmering slabs, each one the size of a transit bus, free-falling toward the streets below.
Her reflexes kicked in before her brain could process the trajectory.
She dove behind a thick titanium support pillar, shielding Sonia with her own body, just as the lobby evaporated in a roar of pulverized concrete and shrieking metal.
Shards buried themselves in the ground inches from her feet, in tumultuous, crackling thuds.
As she choked from the swirling dust, she peered up at the sky as another massive piece of the dome aimed straight for what was left of the edifice.
‘Fokk, nada,’ she whispered.
