“You look as City as they come,” she said.
He pocketed the pass card and was pocketing Talbot’s iPhone when an idea occurred to him. “Doris, have you really used one of these devices?”
“I said so, didn’t I?”
“To make moving pictures?”
“Yes.”
“I’m going up to the observation deck to find out what’s happening. Will you come with me?”
“Those elevators don’t open to us anymore.”
“They’ll open for me. It’ll only take a few minutes. Will you come?”
She seemed flattered and curious in equal parts. “Yeah, all right,” she said.
The observation deck of Tower Two, like the rest of Tower Two, had been designed to impress guests who had never seen a building taller than three stories. Jesse had been up here occasionally during his tenure at the City, and for him, as for most guests, the effect was an amalgam of fascination and dread. The floor was not divided by interior walls, and the outer walls were made of thick transparent glass. It was like standing on an open platform suspended from a cloud.
Not everyone enjoyed the experience. Every week a few visitors, by no means exclusively women, fainted at the sight. Others begged to be taken back to solid ground. And even Doris’s pleasure was not unalloyed, it seemed to Jesse. Or maybe it was the risk of a stray artillery round that made her uneasy.
He went to the north side of the deck, where he could see the wall and the army arrayed beyond it. From this angle it was clear what the City’s strategy had been. The army was separated from the wall by a broad swath of empty prairie, a sort of no-man’s-land, marking out the effective range of a twenty-first-century rifle. The City’s soldiers were posted atop the wall itself, which was more than broad enough to accommodate them, and they were all armed with automatic weapons. Any infantryman who ventured into the no-go zone would be rewarded with a bullet. And City rifles were accurate at distances that made even the finest Winchester seem like a farmer’s musket.
The gate itself was a smaller steel barrier set into the wall, and the soldiers had trained their artillery on that target, perhaps hoping to eventually blow it open and enable a massed charge. Or maybe they were simply restraining themselves in hope of a negotiated surrender: They could have shelled the towers at any time, as a few stray shots had demonstrated.
The steel gate was sturdy, but it wasn’t as massive as the wall itself, and there was enough accumulated rubble at the base of it to suggest a breach was possible. As Jesse watched, another artillery round burst against it. The City’s defenders responded with rounds of automatic-rifle fire.
“Kemp wants to buy time to finish the evacuation,” Jesse said. “The Mirror is a bottleneck. It’s hard to say how long this will last. You can record moving pictures with this phone?”
“For the last time, yes! But I don’t mean to stand close enough to the window to do so. I’ll go back down, if you don’t mind. I feel like a flea on a flagpole.”
“All right, but will you show me how to do it?”
She spent a few grudging minutes adjusting Talbot’s device until it needed only the touch of a finger to begin capturing images. Jesse thanked her. She said, “You’re bleeding again.”
He was, but it wasn’t a problem he could address just now.
“And you’re pale as a ghost.”
“I can take care of myself from here on out. Thank you for your help. You’re a good girl at heart, Doris.”
He thought the words would please her, but she frowned. “Do you mean that?”
“Of course I do.”
“Then say it like I was one of them.”
“What?”
“You know what I mean.”
“Woman,” he corrected himself. “You’re a good woman.”
She smiled. “And you’re a gentleman.”
“I left you something,” he said, “back in your cubicle.”
He used Dekker’s pass card to open the elevator for her. She stepped inside and gave him a longing look. Those big eyes of hers were what had drawn him to her in the first place, against his own better judgment. She said, “We were a good pair, weren’t we? While we lasted?”
No, not especially. “Sure, we were.”
She smiled and kissed his cheek. “Keep safe.”
Keeping safe was not an option. But he nodded as the doors closed.
In truth, he would have liked to get off his feet. There was something lulling about this bright, vacant aerie. It provoked an urge to sleep, despite the thunder of guns. The tiled floor began to look like a bed to him. But he dared not give in to that temptation. It was the siren song of his faltering body. He pictured Phoebe in his mind’s eye. Phoebe and Elizabeth. He would sleep when they were safe.
Now the federal cannons began to fire en masse, a concentrated volley that probably represented some frustrated commander’s failing patience, all focused on the main gate. Swaying at the edge of the observation deck, Jesse took off the Oakleys Doris had given him and dropped them at his feet. He raised the iPhone to eye level, peered at its screen and at the diminishing row of bars that predicted its useful life, touched the icon that caused it to record moving pictures. The device captured images of rising smoke and City soldiers firing fierce volleys, the steel gate trembling under the artillery barrage. At least two shells arced over the wall and struck Tower Two as the battle went on, impacts that shook the floor under Jesse’s feet.
He was still recording all this when a vast shape hove up at the periphery of his vision, close enough to rattle the window. It was the City helicopter—the one that used to give rides to tourists—but there were no tourists in it now. As it canted toward the besieging army Jesse saw an open door and figures with rifles at the ready.
It was as if a monstrous but formerly pacific creature had been provoked to deadly violence. The airship crossed the City’s boundary and bore down directly on the federal lines. What happened next seemed dreamlike, framed in the luminous display of the iPhone: federal marksmen firing futile volleys at the airship—the airship tilting to give its own gunners a field of fire—then rounds pouring down from above in a sudden, furious rain. Here was Thermopylae, Jesse thought madly. Here was Bull Run.
Blue uniforms blossomed with blood.
He went on recording until the phone’s screen dimmed to darkness. In a matter of minutes the besieging army was reduced from ordered ranks to terrified chaos, its flags trampled in a panicked retreat. And now the victorious City men began to abandon their positions atop the wall, hurrying down interior stairways and across the open courtyard toward Tower Two as the attacking airship circled back to its landing pad.
Which could only mean that the evacuation was nearly complete.
Which meant Jesse had to hurry.
He used Dekker’s card to call an elevator, hoping the artillery impacts hadn’t damaged the machinery. Hours seemed to pass before the door slid open. He stumbled inside, leaving boot prints in the blood that had puddled at his feet.
Down in the sublevels, in the tunnel that connected the towers, he joined the crowd of men who had just left the wall. He recognized none of them, and none of them recognized him. They were all from the future, new arrivals recruited to act as a rear guard for the evacuation. A few of them saw the blood he was trying to conceal and urged him to hurry to the Mirror or to go to the clinic in Tower One while there were still medics available. It was this last advice he chose to accept. His body had grown mysteriously heavy, but he refused all offers of help. Better not to involve strangers. He found the designated elevator and used Dekker’s card to summon it.