Why?”
Then Tiadba was back in the hall. She had retrieved a bag—their books. Turning her back to the warden, cringing, she allowed herself to be grasped and lifted. They both stared straight into the roiling dark that filled the opposite end of the corridor—
The roar, the wailing—
The net holding back the blackness had dissolved. The blackness advanced, offering at the crest of its dark wave three, four, five breeds—Jebrassy could not count them all—bobbing and twisting in ways nothing could twist, terrified, turning inside out and then skin side outward again, while still horribly alive, arms and legs moving with impossible speed—heads spinning like tops. The heads began to grow, the blurred eyes to expand, as if they would explode—
Tiadba added her screams to theirs.
And Jebrassy knew. He had seen this before, smaller, more concentrated. They were on the leading edge of an intrusion—like the one that had sucked away his mer and per. With a jerk, the warden retreated down the corridor, bumping and scraping the walls. Behind them the hallway squeezed itself into a wall and golden wardens gathered around the stair core to throw nets everywhere—
Their own warden spun them, pulled them inboard to avoid banging them against whatever chamber or new branch of hall they had entered, smooth and silvery—a hall or pipe he had never seen before. A lift! Like the one in the Diurns.
Jebrassy tried to reach for Tiadba but could not quite brush her with his fingers. She was alive, he could see that—she clutched the bag of books tightly to her chest—but she squeezed her eyes shut and bowed her head as if in submission.
The journey along the shining pipe took almost no time, the air rushing by so quickly that despite the shield of the warden’s body, Jebrassy’s clothes were nearly torn from him. He felt his exposed skin grow warm—and then they flew from an opening in a far wall. The warden spread its wings and they rose in a gliding curve over the third isle. Jebrassy managed to open his eyes long enough to see how high they were—and was instantly sick.
He could not see Tiadba now—except for a foot thrust out from under the second wing—but with his stomach empty, a kind of fated calm came over him.
The first and second isles had been carved open, exposing dozens of levels. He looked with odd dispassion over broken and scalloped walls, whirlpools of retreating darkness—falling breeds. The air smelled rotten and burned at once. Half the ceil was gone, exposing something he had never seen before—the city abovehis sky, bits and pieces of unknown architecture, spirals and silvery arcs, walls and walkways, moving in an intricate dance of remediation, trying to reassemble and re-create safe havens for other citizens—
Citizens above the Tiers, also suffering—perhaps dying—
The warden lifted them over a cloud of dissolving darkness, but not without exposing them to a stench so great Jebrassy wanted to be sick again, but could not—
He heard Tiadba weeping. The warden’s wings and arms rearranged for swifter flight, allowing them to look into each other’s eyes across the short distance, and in her expression there was something outside Jebrassy’s understanding, outside his range of sympathy—
Tears streamed from her cheeks and blew off behind. But behind the tears, she was laughing—weeping and laughing at once with terror and with glee.
And then they were struck—something ugly and resentful reached out and pierced the warden, turning it black and crusted—then just touchedJebrassy—and his body filled with a violation unlike anything he had ever known before, and pain—pain so deep he could not give it voice.
TEN ZEROS
CHAPTER 44
Puget Sound
The storm began at sea as a tight, dark streak of cloud, like the smear of a giant brush loaded with gray mud. In the early morning hours, it spread quickly over the Olympic Peninsula, sucking in all the dark clouds, tightening and directing its spiral of winds, accumulating and controlling the charges behind the jagged lightning—then flowed across Puget Sound, where it formed the shadowy suggestion of an impossible giant—a female giant.
The shadow blew inland, then south, and swung back. It could not seem to find what it wanted, and so it lashed its wings against the city. Most frightening was not the continuous deluge of rain, but the lightning, which struck in clusters, in a rainbow of colors, and with a pummel of explosive reports, like the pounding of huge fists on a cathedral organ.
Heads turned and eyes averted, the citizens watched in mounting fear as the flashes grew more intense and more frequent. Not content with leaping from sky to ground, the lightning began to arc sideways, lancing between skyscrapers, blowing out windows, and crawling along the exterior lines of beams and girders, wrapping the towers in a lace of frustrated electricity—only to erupt again near ground level, stabbing through the tight-packed buildings like sabers through cheese. Sirens howled. Fire trucks and police vehicles added to the keening cacophony as far north as Lake Union. The storm compacted and gathered purpose. From above, it now formed a fat arrow paralleling the I-90 bridge, broad fletches over Lake Washington, powerful head probing: dumping, flooding, flashing.
It had found what it was looking for.
It followed an old white van.
CHAPTER 45
Wallingford
Uh-oh.
Something unlikely this way comes.
It took Daniel less than a minute to decide that the storm might be a hunter—but it was not after him. It raged south of his neighborhood, south of downtown.
As the rain began, then the lightning, he turned away from the morning drivers and their cars, working their way west along Forty-fifth to the freeway. He was done with street corners and begging. This morning, he was no longer just one of a thousand gray men and women standing on the littered curbs of a thousand on-ramps. That life was over. A new one had begun.
Above all, he was a survivor.
He looked south to follow the storm’s progress. Not even the flash of lightning and horizontal twists of clouds could break his new sense of physical joy.
For two hours now he had been enjoying freedom from the snake in his gut. What was left of Fred was no longer capable of putting up much resistance. This body was young, relatively healthy—though not in the best of shape.
Back in the house, Mary was still asleep—and Charles Granger lay dead on the couch, covered with a blanket, pitiful and spent. At least that was not his fault, Daniel thought. The broken-down pile of meat had simply given up.
Healthy again, Daniel had a fierce, unreasonable pride in his strength, his abilities. As well, he had no doubt now that there were others like him in the city—and they were about to be collected. To himself, he cheerfully sang, “ Dirus irae.”
He did not want to be caught in the open when the storm found what it was looking for. Even a few miles away the side effects would be unpleasant.
And he needed to retrieve his boxes, hidden behind the fireplace in the abandoned house.
CHAPTER 46
West Seattle
The van shuddered as it left the West Seattle Bridge. Squat and low in the driver’s seat, pale with tension, Glaucous swerved around a car stalled in the left lane—corrected the van as it rose on one set of wheels, jerked it back on a straighter course, then took the time to wipe sweat from his eyes with scarred knuckles.
In the back, tied up in a heavy canvas sack, Jack Rohmer had worked his arm through the drawstring and waved his fist as he rolled back and forth over the cold metal floor. Glaucous had stopped his trills and whistles of birdsong. Now he was selling things, long ago. “Costards, pippins, starberries, currants!” he called, in the full glory and joy of the old times. Penelope discharged a sharp grunt as lightning blasted a passing utility pole. A transformer sparked and tumbled over their windshield, bounced along behind them.