President Maya snapped out of her daze and scrambled to her feet, scanning the skyline in every direction.
"Wait—when did that building catch fire? How is it already that bad? It looks like a torch. And where's Spider-Man?"
A beat of silence, then she rubbed the back of her head sheepishly. "Oh, he was here a while ago. How did I not notice?"
"He must've come from the other direction. That's why I didn't hear him. And as for why I only just noticed a burning skyscraper two hundred meters away—that fire spread insanely fast. Obviously. Definitely not because I was too busy drowning in embarrassingly self-important chuunibyou thoughts. Absolutely not."
Having neatly absolved herself, President Maya tuned out the crowd noise below discussing the fire.
She'd been perched at the triangular intersection of Broadway, Seventh Avenue, and 46th Street. The burning building sat roughly 200 meters to her southwest, between Seventh and Eighth Avenues.
In the early 1990s, this triangle—where wealth and art met in a kind of glamorous madness—was at its most electric. The Midtown North blocks surrounding it still had plenty of adult venues tucked in between the glitter, but this immediate stretch was New York's showcase. And Maya recognized that building.
The Golden Crown Tower. Famous landmark. Major corporations kept offices there.
A fire in a building like this shouldn't spread this fast. It wasn't that the Golden Crown's fire suppression systems were so thorough that a fire could never happen there. it was that no fire should consume an entire upper section in less than half an hour. When Maya had first arrived, the building had been fine. Now flames had jumped from the twenties into the thirties. At this rate, the roof deck on the 40th floor would be inaccessible to rescue helicopters within minutes.
Buildings like this had fire refuge floors—entire levels constructed from specialized fireproof materials, with reinforced floors, ceilings, and stairwells. They were pressurized to force air outward and keep smoke and flames from penetrating.
Those floors should have slowed this down considerably. The Golden Crown seemed to have none—and even Maya, standing several hundred meters away, was choking on the smoke.
On the 3rd floor, Amanda clutched her head in a public restroom, sobbing.
The burning gases rising from the floors below had eaten through whatever energy she had left. The heat pressing in from all sides delivered its simple message: it was almost over.
The rescue helicopter had already gone down—its rotors clipped a rooftop antenna in the smoke-reduced visibility, and no second helicopter had come since. Amanda had no intention of ending up like her coworkers on the top floor—wailing helplessly in the smoke, waiting and praying for a rescue that was never coming back.
She'd retreated to her office, and now she prayed, clutching a small cross: "Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name. Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven... Loving God, thank You and praise You; You are the source of life and our final home. Lord, let the souls of those who perish in this fire find eternal peace, and joy, in Your kingdom..."
Not far away, a heavyset Black man—round-faced, round-bodied, a guy everyone called Mountain—was not prepared to give up.
He stood in a group near the edge, screaming at the faint silhouette of a helicopter through the smoke: "HELP! SOMEBODY HELP US! PLEASE!"
But the helicopter wasn't getting closer. It was drifting further away, until even its outline disappeared.
Mountain felt the last of his strength drain out of him.
"Those bastards—" He let himself crumple to the floor, voice cracking. "Those absolute bastards! They burned down the whole tower—they found them, Frank's two hundred gunmen hidden in the building, found them all and burned them alive—Frank, man, I'm sorry—" He broke down completely, sobbing and cursing at the same time. "I don't want to die—"
Nobody around him paid much attention. The others were doing the same—crying, screaming, cursing that cowardly bunch. Despair was spreading through the group like the smoke itself.
Down on the street, a young white firefighter in a soot-blackened uniform turned to his captain. "Cap—are we really giving up?"
The captain stood there covered head to toe in black soot, his fireproof boots split open at the toe. The old burn scar across the left side of his face twitched involuntarily.
"Sam," he said, voice breaking. "I'm sorry. We're out of options." He looked away. "Shawn and his crew—they didn't make it out of the last blast. I hate saying it, but after everything I've seen... there's nothing left we can do."
Sam regretted asking. His captain had led the charge all night, throwing himself at this thing with everything he had. The scene told the truth for both of them: beyond a certain point, no amount of effort changed the math. The only thing left to rely on was God.
The street outside was lined with news vans.
"Good evening, this is CBS. As you can see, the Golden Crown Tower is now burning from floors fifteen through thirty-six. This historic Midtown landmark, standing for thirty years—"
"This is Anna from ABC. The latest casualty update: one hundred thirty employees self-evacuated immediately after the incident began. Another twenty have been rescued via ladder and helicopter. However, according to Golden Crown Tower records, at least four hundred people remain trapped—"
"Good evening, this is Alice from Fox News. The scale of the blaze is visible even to viewers at home, and it appears the rescue operation has been suspended. We're going to speak with some of the survivors now to find out how this fire started—"
Fox's Alice had just extended her microphone toward a shell-shocked, soot-covered survivor in glasses when the man suddenly stopped staring at the smoke and looked straight up. His jaw dropped.
"God—is that—oh my GOD, is that SPIDER-MAN?!"