She wondered what dryback eyes would see, if drybacks ever ventured here after dark. Maybe, when Sudbury’s citizens looked to this place, they didn’t see the Entropy Patrol at all. Maybe they saw a haunted tower, dark and ominous, full of skeletons and sick crawling things. Buried in the guts of the twenty-first century, besieged by alien microbes and ghosts in the machinery, could people be blamed for rediscovering a belief in evil spirits?
Maybe they’re not even wrong, Clarke reflected.
Lubin pointed to the spectral lights on the parapet. A landing pad rose from that nimbus, a dozen smaller structures holding court around it—freight elevators, ventilation shacks, the housings of retracted lifter umbilicals.
Clarke looked back skeptically. “No.” Surely they couldn’t just land there. Surely there’d be defenses.
Lubin was almost grinning. “Let’s find out.”
“I’m not sure that’s—”
He hit the throttle. They leapt into empty, unprotected space.
Out of the canyon, they banked right. Clarke braced her hands against the dash. Earth and sky rotated around them; suddenly the ground was three hundred meters off her shoulder, an archeological ruin of razed foundations—and two black circles, meters across, staring up at her like the eye sockets of some giant cartoon skull. Not empty, though. Not even flat: they bulged subtly from the ground, like the exposed polar regions of great buried spheres.
“What’re those?” she asked.
No answer. Clarke glanced across the cockpit. Lubin was holding his binoculars one-handed between his knees, holding his pince-nez against their eyepieces. The apparatus stared down through the ventral canopy. Clarke shuddered inwardly: how to deal with the sense of one’s eyes floating half a meter outside the skull?
“I said—” she began again.
“Superheating artefact. Soil grains explode like popcorn.”
“What would do that? Land mine?”
He shook his head absently, his attention caught by something near the base of the building. “Particle beam. Orbital cannon.”
Her gut clenched. “If he’s got—Ken, what if he sees—”
Something flashed, sodium-bright, through the back of her skull. Clockwork stuttered briefly in her chest. The Sikorsky-Bell’s controls hiccoughed once, in impossible unison, and went dark.
“I think he has,” Lubin remarked as the engine died.
Wind whistled faintly through the fuselage. The rotor continued to whup-whup-whup overhead, its unpowered blades slapping the air through sheer inertia. There was no other sound but Lubin, cursing under his breath as they hung for an instant between earth and sky.
In the next they were falling.
Clarke’s stomach rose into her throat. Lubin’s feet slammed pedals. “Tell me when we pass sixty meters.”
They arced past dark facades. “Wha—”
“I’m blind.” Lubin’s teeth were bared in some twisted mix of fear and exultation; his hands gripped the joystick with relentless futility. “Tell me when—the tenth floor! Tell me when we pass the tenth floor!”
Part of her gibbered, senseless and panic-stricken. The rest struggled to obey, tried desperately to count the floors as they streaked past but they were too close, everything was a blur and they were going to crash they were going to crash right into the side of the tower but suddenly it was gone, swept past stage left, its edge passing almost close enough to touch. Now the structure’s north face coasted into view, the focus sharper with distance and—
Oh God what is that—
Some unaffordable, awestruck piece of her brain murmered it can’t be but it was, black and toothless and wide enough to swallow legions: a gaping mouth in the building’s side. She tried to ignore it as they fell past, forced herself to focus on the floors beneath, count from the ground up. They were diving straight past that impossible maw—they were diving into it—
“Le—”
“Now!” she yelled.
For a second that went on forever, Lubin did nothing at all.
The strangest sensations, in that elastic moment. The sound of the rotor, still impossibly awhirl through luck or magic or sheer stubborn denial, its machine-gun rhythm dopplered down like the slow, distant heartbeat of a receding astronaut. The sight of the ground racing up to spike them into oblivion. Sudden calm resignation, a recognition of the inevitable: we’re going to die. And a nod, sadly amused, to the irony that the mighty Ken Lubin, who always thought ten steps ahead, could have made such a stupid fucking mistake.
But then he yanked on the stick and the chopper reared back, losing its nerve at the last moment. Suddenly she weighed a hundred tonnes. They faced the sky; the world skidded around them, earth and glass and far-off cloud rolling past the windshield in a blurry jumble. For one astonishing moment they hovered. Then something kicked them hard from behind: from behind, the sound of cracking polymers and tearing metal. They lurched sideways and that magical rotor slashed the earth and stopped dead, defeated at last. Lenie Clarke stared up mad-eyed at a great monolith leaning crazily against the night sky, descending along with the darkness to devour her.
“Lenie.”
She opened her eyes. That impossible mouth still yawned overhead. She squeezed her eyes shut, held them closed for a second. Tried again.
Oh.
Not a mouth after all. A great charred hole, partway up the north façade, stretching across ten gutted floors or more.
Rio, she realized. They never repaired the damage.
The roof of the building was clearly visible, straight ahead through the forward windshield. The lights up there had gone out. The whole building seemed to lean to the left; the chopper’s nose was twisted up at a thirty-degree angle, like some mechanical mole that had breached from the earth and torqued on its axis.
Their ride was sockeye. The tail boom must have either crumpled at their backs or snapped off entirely.
Pain in her chest and arms. There was something wrong with the sky. It was—that was it, it was dark. They were in a clave, where static-field generators hummed endless electricity into the air. Sudbury’s sky should have been flickering. Before they’d fallen, it had been.
“Lenie.”
“Was that—was that a pulse?” she wondered.
“Can you move?”
She focused, and located the source of the pain: Lubin’s backpack, hard and lumpy, clutched tightly as life itself against her chest. It must have risen from the floor during the dive, she must have grabbed it in midair. She remembered none of it. The slit along its top puckered like a mouth in her embrace, affording glimpses of the stuff inside—an angular jumble of tools and ordnance pressing painfully into her flesh.
She willed her grip to relax. The pain subsided.
“I think I’m okay. Are you—”
He looked blindly back at her through sandblasted eyes.
An image from the fall came to her, unregistered until now: Lubin’s pince-nez, sailing gracefully towards the back of the cabin. Clarke unbuckled and twisted to look behind her. Sudden sharp pain splintered down her spine like cracking ice. She cried out.