God, let her be there, he pleaded to the unseen, uncaring deity that had taken their mother’s life and gifted them with an abhorrent, fugitive father, had cast him and his sister onto the foreign shores of Manhattan and then split them apart. I don’t care what she is, what inhuman, damaged thing. Just let her be alive, let me care for her and get her home….
He opened the door and stepped inside.
The girl sat in her chair by the bed, in the rocker (or cunning replica of it) that had been bought on the day of Cal’s birth, that his father had torn the runners off of in a fit of rage before Tina was born. A reading lamp sat on a shelf above her head, glowing like a halo, shining its radiance down on her glistening hair.
She held a book open in her lap, was glancing down reading it. Cal knew it from its scuffed leather binding; it was Great Expectations. He had read it aloud to her, in their life together, the life that had been theirs so long ago.
“Tina…” Cal said, and his voice cracked, had no volume to it.
She looked up, and two thoughts struck him at once, with the force of blows. Her hair was not silken and white, her eyes not an alien blue; both were dark, and she appeared utterly human.
And in those human, dark eyes as she regarded him calmly, quizzically, there was not the slightest hint of recognition.
She doesn’t know me.
He was staggered. He had not expected any of this, and he felt a flood of fresh grief, of raw anguish that cut him as if with the sword he carried in his hand.
“Tina, it’s Cal,” he prompted.
“I go by Christina now,” she responded abstractedly, but underneath there was no hint of familiarity.
Of course, Cal realized, a more adult name. He could see she looked older than when he’d last seen her; she was thirteen now. And they had been separated by what each had experienced since their parting, yet another gulf between them.
The others were behind him now.
“We have eight minutes,” Shango murmured.
Enough time, barely, to get back, if they left now.
“Take her,” Cal said.
But before they could move to do so, Goldie suddenly moaned, grasping his head with both hands, and fell to his knees.
Cal peered at him in alarm. With an effort of supreme will, Goldie forced his face up toward him. His eyes were slits, pain filling them wetly with tears. “The way back,” he gasped, whispering. “It’s closed….”
The floor abruptly shuddered with a pulse, a tremor that shook along its length like a bear awakening from slumber and stretching to rise. Outside, the air rumbled with a deep, sonorous roar.
“It knows you’re here,” Inigo said, and there was dread in his voice.
The far wall of Tina’s room melted and reached for them.
“Shango!” Cal cried. “The explosives!”
Shango dug in his bag and pulled out one of the homemade metal canisters he and Krystee Cott had constructed back in Atherton. He pulled the pin and hurled it at the shifting, amorphous shapes stretching out toward them.
Now we’ll see how good a cook you are, Cal thought, as he shielded Tina and drew her back away with the others.
There was a breathless moment of expectation, then a satisfying explosion of fire and smoke, blasting what had been the wall clean apart.
“Yeah!” Colleen shouted in triumph…then fell silent along with the rest of them as the smoke cleared and what was revealed filled them with horror.
Littering the scorched area of the blast, lying piled atop each other by the gaping hole in the wall, were what looked like frail, delicate children, bloody and mutilated, torn to pieces, their glow damping down to nothingness.
Flares, dead flares.
And though Inigo had not told them-had not until that moment even known-Cal and the rest of them grasped exactly what this hideous spectacle meant.
“It’s flares,” Cal whispered, thunderstruck. “All of it…”
With the exception of Tina, who somehow had been made human again, everything they had seen in this cruel parody of New York City, every building, every street, every tree and cloud and lamp fixture, was composed of flares. That was the substance that made up the matter of this place, that powered it and gave it solidity. The thousands, the millions of innocents abducted by the Source and turned to this brutal purpose.
Cal realized they couldn’t-mustn’t strike out at it.
They would be killing the very hostages they had come to save.
And in their moment of terrible uncertainty, of hesitancy, the room rose up against them, like ocean waves crashing up out of the floorboards, and separated them, one from another. Mama Diamond and Goldie, Shango and Colleen, Doc and Howie and Enid all cried out in surprise and alarm, frantic exclamations that were quickly stifled and fell to silence.
The room resumed its formal shape, with no sign of the mangled flares; they’d been absorbed into the greater, secret whole. Cal found himself alone with Inigo and Tina.
The others were gone.
“We have to get out of here!” Inigo tugged insistently at Cal’s sleeve, at the scaled dark dragon hide encasing him. “Now!”
Stumbling blindly, bereft, Cal dragged his sister out of the building and, led by the wild, abandoned boy, made his escape into the void.
THIRTY-EIGHT
As any profound philosopher and serious scholar of the natural laws of the universe has discovered at one time or another, there are occasions on which the most appropriate and jejune observation regarding one’s immediate situation is Fuck this!
Which was certainly the epiphany presented to Colleen Brooks in the moments immediately following the little fun-house shenanigans the doppelganger of Cal Griffin’s Upper West Side apartment pulled on her, when the floorboards bucked like Roy Roger’s horse on locoweed and she was hurled forcibly backward and suddenly found herself in surroundings utterly unlike New York or any place on the North American continent.
This wasn’t to say she didn’t recognize her surroundings, however. She knew exactly where she was-or rather, where they wanted her to think she was. The air was musky and thick with humidity, as hard to breathe as if she were trying to inhale syrup. Her skin was instantly sticky with sweat, her clothes beneath the dragon armor plastered to her skin, and yet she felt as cold within as if her insides were tombstone marble.
While it had been daytime only moments before, here it was night (as it was always night in her remembrances) and the garish, ugly street was clogged and raucous with subcompact Toyotas and Nissans belching exhaust; with huge and gaudily decorated trucks over from India blasting their horns as they inched precariously forward; with the brightly colored, three-wheeled taxis known to the locals and farangs alike as tuk-tuks zipping between the swaying, ill-balanced vehicles. The black asphalt of the street was shiny with recently departed rain, and in its reflections the boisterous cacophony of neon signs was rendered double in its seedy enticement, blinking and flashing with images of over-endowed, underdressed woman and smiling, dangerous men; Marlboro Men, to be exact, the American male being the ne plus ultra of invitation, of reckless power and release.
The smell on the air was the same, exactly the same as she remembered it, the fetid stink of sewage, and rotted fruit, and spices in hot cooking oil, of a city of five million left to decay and sink on its foundations slowly back into the marsh and swampland from which it had been dredged and excavated by men long dead, their dreams of glory dead with them.