Annihilation: Love Conquers All Read Online Free Page B

away from him; her name was Leila, and she was looking at his picture in their school yearbook. “Now that’s something new,” he thought. “Maybe this gift hasn’t been completely opened yet.” He had to admit he always enjoyed opening gifts. This was one he would just have to hide. Then he fell asleep.
     

Chapter 2
    T ag was seventeen years old and he liked riding the city floaters to school. Most human transportation used floaters. The floater was aptly named because it actually floated on a cushion of air. Since the invention of the small-sized power cell, vehicles used the power cells to power turbines that spun and lifted the vehicles on propellers. Just like ancient helicopters, the vehicles could lift amazing weight. The city floater Tag was currently riding looked like one of the ancient busses that were used in mass transit, but instead of using streets to travel, the floater just rose and entered a traffic lane hundreds of feet off the ground and flew from stop to stop. The ten-mile trip to school gave him the chance to look out over the city and see some of the millions of people and the homes they lived in. Some of the homes were beautiful to gaze on, and Central City had many examples of them. Central City was the largest city on the North American continent, covering an area that included part of what used to be northern Oklahoma all the way to what used to be South Dakota. The ancient cities on the east and west coasts, New York, Los Angeles, Boston, San Francisco, Washington D.C., and Atlanta, had been destroyed during the third world war with the Chinese and were radioactive for more than three hundred years, making it unsafe to live anywhere near the old sites until two hundred years ago. Now that the radioactivity had dissipated they were growing, but only the central part of the continent, now known as Central City, was safe to live in after that war. It had been damaged during the other wars but managed to survive. Over time it had become the planet’s center of government and had the largest population of any city.
     
    From a distance, the central spires in the middle of the city with the rising sun reflecting off their crystal windows looked like giant diamond triangles growing out of the Earth. Tag was fascinated by the various shapes and colors, and he never tired of studying how the view was constantly changing. His gift gave him an inborn sense of shapes and how they fit together, or, in some cases, didn’t. The huge number of floaters flying over the city at different levels looked like long, moving dotted lines that surrounded the buildings like ants moving around their colony. The city soared thousands of feet into the sky and extended as far as the eye could see. He found that gazing at the city touched him in the deepest part of his soul with an emotion that felt almost religious. The clear blue sky and white clouds gave a beautiful background for the city, and today was spectacular.
     
    The tops of the tallest buildings were covered with low white clouds. Of course, the tallest buildings were 4,500 feet tall, and the clouds didn’t have to be low to cover them. It amazed Tag that some of these buildings extended more than three thousand feet underground. He found it interesting that the height difference from their tops to their lowest levels allowed most of these older buildings to use geothermic energy for their power due to the temperature difference between their tops and bottoms. Of course the Coronado solar panels could have powered these buildings by themselves. Eighty-four years earlier, Joe Coronado had invented a solar panel the size of a floor mat that would generate ten times the electricity of an old solar panel that covered one square mile. That really wasn’t the best thing about his invention, though. Its storage capacity was enormous. One hour of sunshine would power that five-thousand-foot-tall building for a day. This invention allowed humans to have clean,