The Sidhe Foundation members ducked behind Athelstane's car as a small ball of fire with a curling tail of flame, ejected from the impact of the miniature sun against the building, roared toward them. They felt its heat pass overhead and watched the bright thing's passage. The crowd beside the barricade shrieked, ducked, pushed to get clear; flames trailing the fireball dropped among them, igniting clothes, and some of the victims yelled and slapped themselves or rolled on the street to put the fires out. The little fireball itself slammed into a skyscraper a block past the barricades, bursting across its face, raining fire down on the street below.
Almost in unison, the Sidhe Foundation members stood to look back at the Danaan Heights Building—all but Harris, who had eyes only for the sky.
The front of the Danaan Heights Building was gone, burned away to a height of eight stories, to a depth none of them could discern. Flames raged throughout the gaping hole and along the street below, greedily eating into building fronts, trees, and parked automobiles.
"God, she's on fire," Harris said.
Hundreds of feet above the ruined building, flame also licked atop the Outrigger.
The Danaan Heights Building made a cracking, rumbling noise like a god of the earth clearing its throat. Then, slowly, barely perceptibly, it began to lean forward.
The Outrigger's bottom-heavy design righted it. Gaby was slapped helplessly against the doorframe, felt a blow to the side of her head, and for long moments was helpless with dizziness. But her hands and feet automatically sought out the controls.
When she could again see, she leaned out the window and banked to look below.
Whatever fiery thing had grazed her had also eaten away the front of the Danaan Heights Building and set it and nearby buildings ablaze. Frantic, she scanned the street until she spotted police cars at barricades; it didn't look as though any of them had been destroyed by the impact or its aftermath. Good—it meant Harris was okay. It had to mean that.
Then a glow attracted her. She looked up to where the Outrigger's gasbag blazed.
Cold panic gripped her. In seconds, the fire would eat its way through the rubberized cloth and hit the gas—
Helium, not hydrogen. It wouldn't explode.
No, she wouldn't die by fire. All the gas would escape and she'd drop a thousand feet or more to a death on the streets below. She was already losing altitude.
How many individual gas cells did the Outrigger hold? Two, she thought; but if one went, the vehicle wouldn't fly. It would just plummet more slowly.
Gaby forced the panic back, held it at bay. She had to get down, fast. Not too fast. She pulled a lever to open the nozzle on the bottled helium to slow the vehicle's descent, then opened the engines wide and guided the Outrigger down.
She felt the vehicle's rate of descent increase. Her stomach lurched—in spite of the extra helium being pumped into the system, her descent was too fast. At least one of the gas-bags had to have given way. The Outrigger would not survive its fall to the street.
"Baby, pull up," Harris said. "Up, up—oh, God." As the burning Outrigger banked west and began its last descent, he took off after it on foot, charging across the street littered with flaming debris.
None of the others saw. Instead, they watched the Danaan Heights Building's lean become more pronounced. It teetered out toward the street; then, with a great trembling roar of noise, it sheared at the top of the crater made by the destructive sun. Upper stories leaned further as they dropped toward the street, and sheared again higher up, as the building frame, designed to hold up under the pull of gravity in its proper orientation but not in any other, gave way.
The great mass of the building poured into the street, an enormous man-made avalanche of stone and twisted metal. What had been upper floors smashed into the park beyond, obliterating benches and fountains and statues, burying them under tons of rubble. Fragments the size of cars and trucks rebounded, sliding and bouncing along the streets toward the barricades, followed by a thick cloud of dust and smoke.
"This is going to be bad," Zeb said, and ducked behind Athelstane's car to join the others. He found himself between Doc, who was sheltering Ixyail, and Noriko. Instinct prompted him to cover the woman of Wo, sheltering her.
Bricks rained down around them. Something struck Zeb on the shoulder like a blow from a baseball bat. Then darkness rolled across them.
The street climbed toward Gaby.
There were no parachutes on the Outrigger. She remembered Doc saying something about weight limitations, damn him.
Maybe if she projected her mind into the Grid, she wouldn't really die when her body did . . .
Then she saw the building ahead to starboard. It was a thirty-story skyscraper, and atop it, as with most tall buildings on Neckerdam, was a large cylinder-shaped construction made of cedar. She banked, the Outrigger responding sluggishly to the controls, and headed straight toward it.
No, she was losing altitude too fast to aim right for it. She had to aim to overshoot it and hope that her estimates were right, that her loss of lift would drop her right onto it. But if she was wrong, if the vehicle held enough lift too long, she'd sail right over it and then plummet more than three hundred feet into the street. She wailed, a noise of fear and anger, and aimed over the cedar cylinder.
A blow like a negligent kick from a giant-sized place kicker rocked Athelstane's car. It hammered the car door into Zeb's head and threw him onto the street with the others; he groaned and touched his temple, which throbbed under his fingers.
Doc was up, barely visible through the thick cloud of smoke and dust that now blanketed the area. Over the shriek of the crowds and roar of settling masonry, he shouted, "Bring the fire trucks up! Athelstane, get this car out of the way!"
"Can't, sir! There's a girder through the engine!"
"Well, put it in no-gear."
Zeb saw Doc move around to the back of the car and begin pushing. Zeb stood, dizzy, and joined him, if only to prove to himself that he was still functional. Joined by Alastair, they shoved the crippled automobile aside as fire engines, parked and silent for the last few minutes, started up their sirens.
Then the associates turned to the hours they knew lay before them of treating the injured, searching for the missing, looking for information.
Gaby woke up as the men in hospital white loaded her into the ambulance. Harris, his skin and clothes dark from dust and smoke, stood above her, worry in his eyes, and clambered into the ambulance with her. When she reached for him, he embraced her with tender care. "Shh, baby, you're all right. Don't talk."
"Can't shut me up that way . . ." She couldn't seem to talk above a whisper and it annoyed her. Experimentally, she moved her arms and legs, which told her they were bruised and battered and exceedingly unhappy with such experimentation. She was also damp, head to toe.
The rear doors slammed. A moment later, the ambulance lurched into motion.
"How long—?"
"You've been out for a couple of hours, I think. I found you an hour ago. It took a while to get the ambulance. You aimed for that water tank, didn't you?"
"Uh-huh." Try as she wanted to stay awake, Gaby felt herself growing sleepy.
"That's my smart, smart lady."
" . . . Outrigger?"
"It's a wreck."
"Good. Won't have to fly it again." The recollection of what had set the Outrigger afire jolted her. "The building?"
"It's gone, baby. But we got everybody out. Now we're going to figure out who did it and decide just how badly to hurt them."
"Good." Her sense of propriety soothed, Gaby let herself be lulled into sleep.
Well into the wee hours of the night, freshly bathed and bandaged, Zeb lay down on the bed in the room they'd given him in the Monarch Building and stared out the window beside him.
Below was a sea of lights, a broader rainbow of hues than the lights of Manhattan and viewed through less hazy air, but still reassuringly familiar. Beside the window, a radiator hissed and sighed, another familiar sight and sound.
But sleep eluded him.
The universe had become twice as big for him. Now, with heart and soul as well as intellect, he believed in the fair world, in the wonders Gaby and Harris had hinted at.
But why hadn't he realized that with twice the wonder, twice the humanity, there would be twice the pettiness, twice the evil?
There were no atomic bombs here. Atomic fission was still just a theory; Harris had mentioned that to him. But any place where someone could drop a giant fireball on a skyscraper with pinpoint accuracy had to have its own slate of technological horrors.
And then there was the racist dogma that rivaled the worst armpit regions of the grim world. Of home.
For Zeb, it had always boiled down to expectation. It was to look in someone's eye and see an expectation of laziness, of criminality, of sheer inferiority, and to feel lower, to be reduced, because of it. That was the heart of the experience.
In the last two days, he'd had that look from more people than he could count, from more people than any time in years.
He steeled himself against those expectations. To let their opinions matter to you, he told himself, is to take a step toward becoming what they expect you to be.
But try as he might to keep those feelings at a distance, the constant barrage of dark and suspicious looks he'd been experiencing wore on him, tired him. Tired him, and yet kept him from sleep.
And then there was Noriko.
Her comments about his—what should he call it? His blackout, his episode, his rage—at the Fairwings plant still nagged at him. Thinking and thinking about it, he couldn't be certain that he wouldn't have fired on Alastair if the doctor's autogun had been pointed at him.
There were no friends in the ring, only enemies to beat and referees to ignore. He wasn't certain he knew how to concentrate on fighting and yet be aware enough of his allies to protect them. That was disturbing.
And Noriko's sudden change of subject that afternoon had prevented him from telling her why he understood her exile. His family in Atlanta had expected him to grow up in their image. Yet he'd forced himself to learn to speak English with the midwestern, TV-blanded dialect that no one in the U.S. prejudged as too rural, too ethnic, too stupid—it helped keep business opportunities within his grasp, but his family said he was putting on airs, that he thought he was too good for them. Choosing to stay in New York to train and manage fighters as boss of his own business had been the final blow; his last visit home, years ago, after his father's death, had been a time of tension and unspoken recriminations. He wouldn't return until his own kin could let him be who he was.
It was not the same, he knew, as Noriko's situation. He was not in exile from his native country, not considered a traitor in the city of his birth. But he felt for her loneliness, her vulnerability. He was certain that her mask of emotionlessness, even the fighting skills the Sidhe Foundation held in such evident regard, could not really shield her; they could only keep people at bay.
He swore. He did not need to be getting interested in a woman from a world he hadn't even believed in a few days before. It was stupid. Soon enough, he'd go home and that would be it.
But not before the ones who'd launched that giant ball of fire were brought down. By effort and sheer chance, no one had died today when the building fell. Yet the weapon that had caused the destruction of Danaan Heights had to be taken from the men who'd used it. He was committed now, couldn't back away from a task when Harris, whom he'd always thought of as a man light on determination or resolve, remained so effortlessly a part of the mission.
Zeb turned his attention to the featureless ceiling and waited for sleep to come.
And waited.
At dawn the next morning, they were a cheerless group in the Foundation's main room.
Noriko looked almost as though the previous day's events had never happened; dressed in a red silk pantsuit, she could have stepped from the pages of a fashion magazine, had a bruise on her cheek not spoiled the illusion.
Doc and Ish had apparently had their bath, and perhaps a little sleep; they looked clean and rested.
Alastair had benefited from neither. He wore the smoke-saturated garments of the previous day and a night's worth of stubble. Dark rings under his eyes proclaimed that he'd been up all night—helping with the wounded, he explained. He smelled like something that dogs would like to roll in and the others insisted he sit at a separate table. He nursed a cup of xioc; the bitter chocolate drink was all that kept him awake.
Zeb had finally managed to get a couple of hours' sleep, but the mirror had shown him bags under his eyes that were a clear indication he needed more.
Harris was last to arrive. He emerged from the elevator hall in yesterday's dirty pants, a starched white shirt probably loaned him by the hospital, and a haggard expression. "She's going to be fine," he said before the others had time to do anything but look the question. "Bruised breastbone from hitting the controls. Lots of other bruises. No concussion, no burns. She's mostly been asleep since we got her to the hospital. Now she's in that sleep." He poured himself a cup of xioc. He joined Alastair, sniffed, thought the better of it and moved to the others' table. Alastair grinned.
Zeb asked, "What's that sleep?"
"It has to do with her Gift. Basically, it recharges her batteries. If she can get enough sleep, she can bounce back really fast from exertion or injury that would wipe me out." He sipped at the bitter brew and winced. "God, I hate mornings. So, what did you find out while I was off gallivanting?"
Doc stirred. "The Danaan Heights Building was destroyed by a powerful devisement of unknown type and origin."
"I'm shocked." Harris looked around at impassive faces. "That's sarcasm, guys. How `unknown'?"
"Very unknown. The residual flavor of the energy didn't match any god or goddess I'm familiar with. The delivery mechanism is unknown. The launch site for the miniature sun is unknown; I didn't see any sort of aircraft at its point of origin, though it might not have been possible to see it behind the ball of fire."
Alastair mumbled something. He looked at them expectantly, as if waiting for an answer, then cleared his throat with another swallow of xioc and tried again. "The strings have been cut."
Harris asked, "What strings?"
Doc frowned. "You mean, on the rubber man?"
"Yes. That's almost the first thing I checked on when I got back. The rubber man is no longer connected to a human controller."
Doc looked as though he wanted to swear. "And now, a lead lost because of this event. That is something we did not need."
Harris straightened. "Jesus. What if that was the point?"
The others looked at him. Ixyail said, "Destroy a building just to have time to cut the ties between your rubber puppet and its puppeteer? That would be like swatting flies with an autogun."
"Yeah . . . if that's all they did." Harris moved to the nearest telephone-style talk-box and pulled a grimy, crumpled list of names, addresses and numbers from his pants pocket. "Give me a minute."
It didn't take Harris long to get the information he sought.
According to the city guard, yesterday, while most of Neckerdam's attention was glued to talk-box reports of the Danaan Heights situation, gunwright Rospo Platsmith, the man Noriko had spoken to about the making of four unusual gun barrels, was approached by a potential customer. The man, a gray-bearded light, opened a carrying case containing a shotgun, an old Gudson Model 1 in fair condition. He claimed that he needed the hardening devisements renewed on the weapon's metal. But as Platsmith reached for the weapon, the client took it by the grip and turned to shoot the shop's guard dog, firing both barrels. He then drew a revolver and shot Platsmith twice in the chest and once in the head. He then turned the gun on the other gunsmith and two customers in the shop, shooting each once in the head or the back as they fled. Both customers apparently died instantly; the second gunwright lingered long enough to give city guards the story before she, too, died.
Half a bell earlier, a few blocks up the street, gunwright Francisc deCallac and members of his staff had been murdered by a person or persons unknown. DeCallac's clerk and shop guard were found in a back room, lying upon the floor, shot in the back. DeCallac was found between the ground floor and up one on a back stairway, apparently shot in the back while fleeing.
No evidence was left behind to indicate why the two gunwright shops were attacked in this way. But Noriko confirmed that deCallac was the gunwright who had commissioned Platsmith to fabricate the four barrels.
Zeb listened to these accounts in a sort of haze. All those people murdered just to impede the Foundation's investigation—he knew they should be his chief concern, but the image of Rospo's dog as he'd last seen it, stretched out on the floor, body inert but eyes and ears attuned to every customer's movements, stayed fixed in his mind's eye. His throat felt tight.
"They're cleaning up after themselves," Doc said, his tone wondering, "and they may have knocked down Danaan Heights just to give themselves uninterrupted time in which to do so."
"No," Harris said. "There's already talk on the street that the great Doc Sidhe couldn't stop this bombing. I heard it in the hospital. They were cleaning up after themselves and messing with Doc's reputation. A double victory."
Ixyail wrapped her arms around herself as if against a chill in the air. "I hope this does not mean the building was a casual demonstration of what they can do."
"For now, we have to presume it is," Doc said. "And take steps based on that presumption. None of the associates is to move alone—go in pairs at least. No one is to go unarmed. Spend as little time as possible in predictable locations, like the Monarch Building and your own homes. Harris, we might all find your makeup kit handy—"
"Right."
"Who is protecting Gaby?"
"Two of Lt. Athelstane's men. And as soon as I can get back over there, me. She'll probably check out later this morning."
"Good." For a moment, Doc's tired, discouraged expression reflected the years Harris knew he carried. "Milords and miladies, we appear to be at war. Conduct yourselves accordingly."