“I fear I am unable to answer, sir.” Rad winced as the voice that didn’t belong to Kane came from somewhere inside the suit. “I believe I shielded him from the worst, but there was some violence to our collision with the building.”
“You took the top right off it,” said Jennifer. “It’s a scene out there, that’s for sure.”
“What happened?” asked Rad.
“We were Shanghaied, my dear detective,” said Carson from the floor.
Jennifer shook her head. “What?”
Carson opened his eye and fixed it on Jennifer. Rad watched the camera lens in the other socket rotate, focusing.
“Bushwhacked. Ambushed. Hijacked! We had a stowaway…” Carson collapsed into a fit of coughing.
Rad frowned. Carson needed help. He looked over his shoulder at Grieves and the agents, but Grieves was already on his feet, turning to his men.
“Get this man out and to the ambulances by the police cordon. Move.”
The agents moved in, and Rad gently pulled Byron to one side.
Jennifer looked at Rad, and Rad thought he could see her blink deep within the eyeholes of the golden mask. She turned to Byron. “A stowaway made you crash?”
Byron inclined his head.
Rad looked around. “He must be buried under this lot somewhere.” The stowaway’s chances didn’t look good.
“It was the robot commander, the one who called himself the King of 125th Street,” said Byron.
Jennifer jumped like she’d been given an electric shock. She whirled on Rad, the tails of her long coat flying.
“James,” she said, breathlessly. “James is here. He came through.”
Rad grabbed hold of Jennifer’s arm. “I don’t like to say it but I’m not sure he would have made it. Look at this. It’s a miracle that the Captain and Byron got out like they did.”
“Rad!”
The call came from outside the wreck. Rad and Jennifer looked at each other and raced to the exit, Byron close behind.
Mr Grieves was kneeling beside some torn debris that matched the metalwork of the crashed airship, his three agents carefully making their way towards the police cordon with Captain Carson carried between them.
Rad dropped to his knee, Jennifer by his side.
“What is it?” she asked.
Rad peered at the ground, then looked at her, his expression set. “Looks like… blood?”
“No,” she said as she trailed her gloved fingers in the substance. “Machine oil. Lubricant. From a robot.”
“There is more here,” said Byron. The trio moved, and Rad quickly caught sight of the oily spatter that formed a trail through the rubble, towards the husk of the Chrysler Building.
Rad and Grieves exchanged a look.
“He’s gone inside,” said Rad.
“If you’re going to say we need to follow the trail, I’m not sure the building meets city regulations right at the moment,” said Grieves. Rad stared at the man for a moment, then turned around.
But Jennifer had already left, walking at pace towards the shattered entrance.
“Yeah,” said Rad. “Good luck with that. Come on.”
Rad turned and jogged after Jennifer. After a moment, he heard Grieves follow.
FORTY-NINE
The gun kicked in Nimrod’s hand, the sound loud, reverberating off the thick plate glass behind him. He blinked the smoke away and his nostrils were filled with the smell of fireworks and dirt.
Evelyn McHale smiled, and Nimrod took a breath and fired again, and again, five more shots. Then he sighed, his arm dropping to his side. He stepped forward, until he was within touching distance of the Director’s rippling blue aura. Through her he could see the marks on the New York mural where the bullets had struck.
“Well?” he said, his eyes dark and narrow. “What do you want from me? You have what you want. You have the Fissure. Your organization has control of the city.” He waved at the cityscape below and behind them. “I must have a purpose. You said that everything does, that free will is an illusion and that you can see into the future, down our predetermined paths. So what is to become of me, hmm?”
The Director tilted her head, and when she spoke it was with infinite patience. Nimrod had to control the rage burning inside him. He could already feel the heat in his cheeks, the tremble in his jaw as his anger grew. And all the while, she was calm, quiet. A ghost out of time.
“Is that a question you really want the answer to, Captain?”
Nimrod raised his head and stared at the Director down his nose.
“Do you want to know the future?” she asked “Do you die in bed, peacefully? Does cancer claim you, eating you from the inside out? Do you choke on a fishbone at a restaurant in Maine? Do you take a vacation to New Zealand and die in a car wreck? Does someone shoot you in Times Square, accidentally, perhaps the police chasing a dangerous felon as you are caught in the crossfire? Or do you die here now, with me, in my Cloud Club?”
Nimrod raised an eyebrow. “It hardly seems to matter, does it? You already know. You already know the outcome of this very conversation. How awful it must be for you, reading lines from a script as you do.”
“I can tell you what happens. Don’t you want to know?”
Nimrod laughed. “If that is supposed to be a threat, then it fails completely. It does not matter if I know. What will be, will be, and it appears I have little choice in the matter. If I am to meet my end here, then there is nothing I can do about it, because it is already written in the stars.”
The Director smiled. Nimrod viewed her warily, rolling his fingers along the grip of his seven-shot revolver.
There was one bullet left.
“I need you, Captain Nimrod.”
“Is that so?”
Nimrod raised the gun to his temple and pulled back the hammer. Perhaps he could cheat fate, disturb the universal harmony. Perhaps everything the Ghost of Gotham was saying was a lie, another of her games to pass the torment of eternity. He could understand that.
Nimrod pulled the trigger, and he heard the gun go off even as the floor dropped away from him. Surrounded by blue light, when he blinked he was somewhere else.
The Director of Atoms for Peace was still floating in front of him, but they had left the Cloud Club. They were standing on a circular platform with a grilled metal deck. Below them stretched the great factory floor buried deep underneath Manhattan, where a thousand silver robots stood in their ranks, active but awaiting orders. The glow from the floor was a brilliant red and orange and the light moved as the fusors inside each robot torso churned. The platform on which he was standing was directly above the main fusor reactor, the great torus suspended in the center of the factory. Mounted above the reactor’s control panel, hanging underneath the platform above, was a large mechanical digital display, nothing but an empty black rectangle.
Nimrod was lifted into the air slowly, a foot at a time until he hung there, floating higher even than Evelyn. She pointed to him, gesturing with her hands, and he felt his arms being pulled outwards until he hung like a crucified man. The empty gun was still in his right hand.
“You cannot cheat fate,” she said. “You do not die in the Cloud Club.”
“I can see that, Madam,” said Nimrod. The tingle of the Director’s power surrounded him like a warm bath, but it was getting hotter, and more intense, quickly. He gritted his teeth against the burning pain.
“Now you know what it is like, being dragged through the universes against your will. Pain — infinite, eternal.”
Nimrod said nothing, focusing instead on dragging air through his clenched teeth.
The Director lowered herself to the platform, and began to walk around its edge, trailing ghostly fingers on the railing and leaving a trail of sparkling blue dust in their wake. She surveyed the robot army below her.
“Elektro?”