BUT IS IT SO EASY TO DESTROY IF IT’S THE MOST ASTONISHING THING YOU’VE EVER SEEN?
EVEN the hardiest urban explorer considered Belgium’s Clabecq Iron Foundry, closed since 1992, extremely dangerous. But every corner of the world had its bored teens, youths who either didn’t care, didn’t believe, or willfully ignored their own mortality—and the occasional campfires that licked the rusting structures often went unnoticed.
Quinten was about to toss another wood scrap on the fire when Brent grabbed his hand. “What?”
“Don’t make it too big. The guards will see.”
“You’re boss now?”
Most of the others were busy texting or bobbing their heads to the music playing through their earbuds. Amelie was paying attention, though. Quinten smiled at her, then nodded at the wavering darkness. “Where? What guards?”
Slightly older, Brent took the vague challenge in stride. “They can’t afford to hire many, but trust me, they’re out there. Why ruin a good thing? Keep the fire low.”
Quinten grimaced, but chucked the wood into the shadows.
Amelie, in shorts and midriff, moved closer. She sat cross-legged and rubbed her hands over the fire, pretending to be cold. “Don’t pout, Quinten. After all, Brent found the statues, didn’t he?”
“But we all worked to get them out of the crates.” He put his head in her lap, and looked up at the two bronze forms. Once the statues were unpacked, the little group of outcasts tried to get them to face each another, so the orbs each figure held would touch and form a sort of protective shrine. But they were too heavy.
“The Nazis made them, you know,” Brent said. “There were swastikas airbrushed onto those boards.”
Quinten was right below one of the spheres, so that whenever the firelight flickered the right way, he could make out the carved fingernails on the cupped hands. “They were too rotted to tell for sure.”
Still not happy with the fire’s glow, Brent took out another piece of wood. “They were swastikas.”
Quinten rolled his eyes. “Fine. Swastikas.”
Amelie looked up into the bronze faces. “How could something so beautiful come from something so ugly?”
Quinten smirked. “You came from your parents, didn’t you?”
She grabbed him by the cheeks and shook his face, the way his mother used to when he said something out of line. “Don’t be terrible.”
Worried he might ruin things with her, Quinten tried to enjoy the quiet, but Brent started talking again. “Definitely Nazis. Who do you think they’re supposed to be? Why are they holding those globes?”
“Gods, maybe? I don’t know.” Quinten shifted in Amelie’s lap. “If they’re Nazi, how did they get all the way here? Belgium was occupied, but…”
Amelie glared. “Stop talking. Stop thinking, both of you. Try to be in the moment. Shh.”
Brent eyed her. “Aren’t you even curious?”
She stroked Quinten’s hair. “No. If you listen quietly, you can hear the wind make the buildings creak.”
Quinten looked into her eyes until she closed them, then decided to do the same. All he heard was the crackling firewood. Bored, he was about to say something when he caught a heavier sound. It was close—too close to be the settling of the sheet-metal walls against their rusting steel supports. It didn’t sound like metal, anyway—more like stone rubbing stone.
But even that wasn’t quite right. It wasn’t stone, exactly.
And it was getting louder.
He opened his eyes—and kept opening them until they refused to grow any wider. The statue’s arms were lowering. It looked as if it had come to life, until the scar-like rifts forming along its shoulders revealed that it was simply collapsing—right on top of them.
Terrified, he rolled, pulling Amelie along with him. The others popped to their feet, scrambling to get away.
“Run!” Quinten screamed. His cry was nearly drowned out by the thud of the massive sphere and arms hitting the concrete. As it echoed and the dust settled, the panicked teens stopped to stare.
Brent, who’d been the last to run, took a few cautious steps back toward the stone figures.
When the three-meter sphere rolled over him, it made a sound completely unlike metal or stone.
This time it was Amelie who screamed and ran. Quinten kept staring. The sphere was part of a statue, not alive. It shouldn’t do that. It wasn’t possible. It hadn’t even started off slowly, the way a car accelerated. One moment it was still, the next moving.
As it kept rolling, a panting Amelie called from somewhere in the dark. “Quinten! Why aren’t you running?”
Her voice, usually so familiar, sounded strange and harsh, as if from a dream. Part of him wasn’t sure any of this was real. Maybe he was dreaming. It took the dead, hollow tones from the moving sphere to finally snap him into the moment:
“Ich komme um zu töten Kapitän Amerika.”
Quinten spun and pressed his feet into the concrete floor. He took off. The sphere kept a straight course: not turning, not speeding, and not slowing down. Even when it hit the wall, its direction didn’t change. The sheet metal buckled, fell, and flattened as the orb passed over it.
The sphere wasn’t chasing them at all. Poor Brent had simply been standing in the wrong spot.
* * *
LESS than an hour later, Quinten sat shivering under a blanket, surrounded by men and women in dark uniforms. They said they were police, but they didn’t look like any police he’d ever seen. He overheard one say that “Colonel Fury” had been informed, but the name meant nothing to him. They’d corralled Quinten and his friends and separated them, claiming it was to keep their stories from influencing one another.
All Quinten wanted to do was find out whether Amelie was okay. When they’d been nabbed, she had been so terrified she started hyperventilating. They said she was fine, that she was receiving medical attention, but they wouldn’t let him see her.
Instead, they peppered him with questions. They asked why the teens hadn’t reported finding the crates in the first place, as if that meant they were somehow in on their secrets.
“Because we’re stupid teenagers, why do you think?”
Prodding, they told him about the dead millionaire who’d hid the statues here after the war. They wondered whether the man was a Nazi sympathizer, or, as his public statements said, just a fan of the sculptor—as if Quinten might somehow know.
Of course, he didn’t!
He was so exhausted, he couldn’t even bring himself to care about the history of the statues, that one represented the Greek titan Atlas supporting the heavens, and the other the Roman goddess Tellus supporting the earth. They were to be part of a Volkshalle in the New Berlin the Nazis imagined, some huge domed building intended for the public worship of Hitler.
Brent would have cared about all of that. But Brent was dead.
When Quinten shook and began to sob, they gave him some water and told him he’d be released soon—after a few more questions.
Yes, he’d seen the news story about the battle in Paris. No, he hadn’t made any connection between that and the sphere until they made it for him.
“Was that exactly what it said? Ich komme um zu töten Kapitän Amerika? I come to kill Captain America?”
“Yes. I think. Yes. Please, I want to—”
“It didn’t ask where Captain America was? Why not?”
“How should I know? Maybe it already knows where he is!”