The bottle jumped an inch into the air and shattered. Glass shards sparkled jewel-like in the moonlight and rained down on the concrete with a sound like sand thrown against a window.
"Beer?"
Michael shook his head. "Water," he answered. "Couldn't find any beer." He glanced over his shoulder. Kate was standing at the entrance to the memorial.
"Great talent you got there," she said. "I thought only sopranos could do that."
"I'm pretending it's the Djinn's head. Or maybe Fortune's. I haven't decided which yet."
She didn't laugh.
"How's Ana?" he asked finally, when the silence threatened to swallow them both. "She gonna make it?"
"She's stable, they tell me. But they need to get her to a real hospital soon."
He nodded. He didn't say how unlikely he thought that possibility to be.
"I talked to John," she said.
Michael gave a bark of a laugh. "Did Beetle Boy give you my 'assignment'? What am I doing tomorrow? Kitchen help? Bandage detail? Maybe I should sweep the sidewalks so no one dirties their sandals while running away from the Djinn?"
Kate let out her breath through her nose. She was wearing jeans and a long-sleeved denim shirt with a large leather pouch around one shoulder, bulging with what Michael suspected were smooth, polished stones from around the riverbank, perfect for throwing. "You know what? John's right about you, Michael," she told him. "You refuse to listen to anything he has to say because you don't like him, and that's stupid. It really is. We can't win here without taking out the Djinn, and we can't take out the Djinn without everyone's cooperation. Sobek, John, Lohengrin, and Bugsy are making those plans now; maybe you should be with them, helping."
"The way you'll be with Beetle Boy when he goes after the Djinn?"
Kate grimaced at the name, but only shrugged. "If that's what he thinks is best," she said, "yes, that's where I'll be."
"Then that's where I want to be, too."
"Why?" she asked. "You think I can't take care of myself, Michael? You think I need your protection?"
He walked over to where she stood. She watched his approach with near-defiance in the tilt of her head and the narrowing of her eyes. He towered over her as she looked up at him. "I want to be there because you're there. No other reason. I'd think that would be obvious by now."
"Michael"
"No," he said. His arms, moving, sent bars of shadows flowing over her body. "Listen to me. I can't change what I did back in L.A., Kate. I was an asshole, I'll admit it. It was a fucking game and I treated it that way. But there was something genuine between us, and I really craved the feeling I had when I was with you. You felt it too, at least at first; but that feeling's never left me. Maybe what I did, being with Pop Tart and the others, killed it for you. I don't know. But I can pray that something's still there."
When she didn't answer, he allowed himself to hope. He hurried into the silence. "I can't change what I've done, but I can change. I can. I have."
She stopped him with a lifted hand that seemed to shake slightly against the moon-shimmer of Lake Nasser. "Michael, I really don't know how I feel about any of this." She stopped, shook her head again. "I can't think about it now. I won't. The truth is that it's not important. Not here, not now. Maybe afterward, if . . ." She wouldn't finish that sentence. "I've already told you: I'm not here for John, not at the core. And if you're here for me, then you're here for the wrong reasons. So why are you here, Michael? Tell me."
Her eyes scanned his face, the question held in them waiting for his words like a knife. "Maybe afterward . . ." He clung to the words, playing them over and over in his mind.
He opened his mouth. He tapped his chest nervously, sending the sound of a low drum into the night. His arms flexed and broken glass ground under the soles of his sneakers, but the words wouldn't come.
"I thought so," Kate said. "I'm sorry for you, Michael. I truly am."
Fortune didn't put him in the reserves. Michael wondered if that was Kate's doing, or simply because there were no reserves. But he wasn't with Kate, Fortune, and Lohengrin. He was teamed with Bubbles and Rustbelt.
Hive's wasps had warned them that the Djinn was leading Ikhlas al-Din and the army up the eastern bank of the Nile from Aswan, though the Caliph himself remained cocooned in the mansion he'd commandeered in the city of Aswan. "If they manage to cross the High Dam, if we can't stop them here today, we've lost everything," Fortune told the gathered aces in the predawn dark. "All that matters is this moment."
By the first hour after dawn, they had moved north on the eastern bank, the High Dam towering two hundred feet over them as they marched away. Michael, Rustbelt, and Bubbles accompanied a battalion of the Living Gods headed by Aliyah, positioned on the Aswan Road nearest the dam's eastern terminus, holding the newly drained slopes between the Aswan Road and the Nile. Fortune, Kate, and Lohengrin joined with Sobek, Tawaret, and the rest of their joker followersfarther north on the road and blocking it entirely. Hive ran communications from the High Dam, his wasps already placed.
All of themaces and jokersrested behind sandy earthworks erected hastily the night before, as the shadows shortened and the day's heat began to rise. Michael's bald head was encased in an Egyptian army helmet painted a sandy orange, and he wore a Kevlar vest, far too small, that was bound to his torso with elastic bandages. Rustbelt, his right arm still bandaged but out of the sling, was pounding on Bubbles with his left hand, as she glanced at Michael, her face rounding with new weight. "You, too," she said. "Hit me."
He punched her in the arm. She sneered at him. "That all you got, Little Drummer Boy? Now I see why Kate dumped you. You're weak, pathetic, and useless." This time, when he hit her with an anger that surprised him, she staggered backward but grinned fiercely. "More," she told him. "Don't hold back. We don't have much time."
She was right.
It started with machine gun fire to Michael's righta rough cough answered by a sibilant, fast stutter. Somewhere close, a voice screamed in Arabic. A invisible giant's boot thumped against the artificial dune sheltering them; a moment later sand dusted the sky in a thundering spout of orange and black. Michael could hear the sinister, grinding clank of tank treads; the ugly snout of one drifted over the crest, the tricolor flag of the caliphate painted on the side. Michael could see a soldier standing up in the turret. The man shouted down into the tank's interior, reaching for the machine gun mount as the turret swiveled toward them. But a bubble the size of a beach ball had formed between Bubble's outstretched palms, and it floated away from her toward the tank. The metallic shriek when it struck the vehicle was tremendous. Caterpillar tracks broke like rubber bands; the lopsided frisbee of the turret went spinning away, and the chassis split open raggedly, as if a divine can opener had ripped through it. There were body parts mixed in with the twisted steel.
Aliyah stood. The dark-haired young woman lifted her arms and a hot wind roared around her, sand lifting and swirling like a cloak encircling her, a tornado coiling, lifting and rising, the wind a shriek and howclass="underline" Simoon, the terrifying wind of the desert. The sand devil widened and thickened further, so that Michael had to shield his face from the blowing sand. The orange-red tornado, howling, went twirling northward toward the enemy. The Living Gods shouted and began running up the sandy slope in pursuit.
"Okay, fellas," Rustbelt said. "Here we go." They ran, Michael staying behind Rusty and Bubbles for the protection they could provide. By the time they reached the summit of the dune, Michael could hear the occasional bullet pinging from Rustbelt's riveted skin, and Bubbles had gained back all the weight she'd lost.
From the top of the dune, Michael could glimpse the panorama of the sandy battlefield, the scene before spread out like a movie set.