T’hom? she said silently. Any news?
There was a pause. Tom had been spending most of his time in “link” with the wizards who were holding the gates shut—an ehhif version of the conjoint linkage that Urruah had insisted they would need. As a result, when you called him, the answer you got was likely to have anywhere from five to fifty other sets of thoughts, of other internal voices, wound around it as he directed the ehhif-wizards to apply their pressure to one area of the multiple gate matrix or another. It made private conversation impossible and required you to shout nearly at the top of your mind to get his attention.
Sorry, I missed that.
How are you doing? Rhiow said.
The pressure from the other side’s been steadily increasing … but not by nearly as much, minute to minute, as it was earlier. We may be winning.
All right. Call if we’re needed.
You’ve done a lot today already, Rhi.
Maybe. But don’t hesitate.
She felt his tired breath as if it were her own as Tom went back to coordinating the other wizards. Rhiow breathed out, too, glanced over at Arhu: he was tucked down by Urruah, staring at the ehhif walking in the Concourse. Deep-voiced, the clock began to speak eight o’clock; neither Arhu or Urruah moved. Rhiow turned and saw that Saash had moved over toward the escalators, where she was simply sitting still now, looking down into the Concourse as well, but not washing: this by itself was unusual enough that Rhiow got up quietly, so as not to bother either Urruah or Arhu, and went to where Saash sat.
Saash didn’t say anything as Rhiow came over. Rhiow sat, and the two of them just spent a while looking at the comings and goings of ehhif who had no idea of what was going on down the train platforms.
’Tired?” Rhiow said after a while.
“Well, it wears on you…” Saash said, flicking an ear back toward the tracks. “They’re working so hard down mere… I feel guilty, not helping.”
Rhiow twitched her tail in agreement. “We’ve got specialist work to do, though,” she said. “We wear ourselves out on what they’re up to… we won’t be any good at what we have to do.”
“I suppose.” They watched as a mother with several small noisy children in tow made her way across the nearly empty concourse. The children were all pulling shiny helium-filled balloons along behind them, tugging on the strings and laughing at the way the balloons bobbed up and down. They paused by the Italian deli, where their mother leaned across the counter and apparently started chatting with the deli guy about the construction of a sandwich.
“It’s not that, though,” Rhiow said after a moment, “is it? We’ve known each other long enough now … you know my moods, I know yours. What’s on your mind?”
Saash watched the mother with her children vanish into the Graybar passage. “It’s just… this job…”
Rhiow waited.
“Well, you know,” Saash said, turning her golden eyes on Rhiow at last, “I’m a lot of lives along.”
Rhiow looked at her with some surprise and misgiving. “No, I didn’t know.” She paused, and then when Saash kept silent, “Well, you brought it up, so: how many?”
“Almost all of them,” Saash said.
Rhiow stared at her, astounded. “Eighth?” she whispered. “Ninth?”
“Ninth.”
Rhiow was struck silent for some moments. “Oh, gods,” she said finally, “why didn’t you tell me this earlier?”
“We’ve never really had to do anything that dangerous, until the last couple of times. Besides, would it have made a difference? To what we have to do, I mean?”
“Well, no, but… yes, of course it would!”
“Oh, sure, Rhi. Come on. Would you really have done anything differently the past few days? Just for my sake? You know you couldn’t have. We have our job to do; that’s why we’re still wizards—why we didn’t give up the power as soon as we realized it cost something.” Saash looked down at the concourse again: more ehhif were filtering in. “Rhi, we’ve just got to cope with it. If even Arhu is doing that, who am I to turn aside from this just because I’m on my last life?”
“But—” Rhiow started to say something, then shut herself up.
“I had to tell you, though,” Saash said. “It seemed to me—when we finally get down there again, if something happens to me there, or later, and I fall over all of a sudden and it’s plain that that’s the end of everything for me—I didn’t want you to think it was somehow your fault.”
Rhiow was quiet for a few breaths. “Saash,” she said, briefly leaning close to rub her cheek against her friend’s, “it’s just like you to think of me first, of the others in the team. But look, you.” She pulled back a little, stared Saash in the eye. “Haven’t you forgotten something? We’re going down in conjunct. If you don’t come back up with us, none of us will come back up.”
“Don’t think that hasn’t occurred to me.”
“So don’t consider not coming back, that’s all. I won’t hear of it.”
“Yes, Queen Iau,” Saash said, dryly, “whatever you say, Queen Iau. I’ll tell Aaurh and Hrau’f the Silent that you said so.”
“You do that,” Rhiow said, and tucked herself down with a sigh—
Something screamed nearby. Rhiow leapt to her feet, and so did Saash; both of them looked around wildly. Arhu was running to them: Urruah was staggering to his feet, shaking his head as if he had been struck a blow.
“What was that?” Saash hissed.
“I don’t—” Rhiow started to say. But then she did, for the screaming was not in the air: it was in her mind. Ehhif voices, shocked, in pain; and in the back of her mind, that sense of pressure, suddenly gone. Something blown out. Something running in through the blown place: something dark—
“Come on!” she said, and headed for the stairs.
The others followed. Rhiow nearly fell once or twice as she ran; the images of what wizards were seeing, down at the track level, kept overlaying themselves on her own vision of the terminaclass="underline" The gate hyperextending, its curvature bending inward toward the wizards watching at the platform, but also seeming bizarrely to curve away; the hyper-string structure warping out of shape, twisting into a configuration Rhiow had never seen before, unnatural, damaged-looking … and in the darkness, roaring shapes that poured seemingly more from around the gate rather than through it.
They’re all going, came Tom’s thought, all the gates— look out!
Rhiow and Saash hit the bottom of the stairs first and were about to run leftward toward the gates to the tracks— but a screaming, roaring wave of green and blue and pale cream-colored shapes came plunging through the gates first, spilling out into the main concourse. Ehhif screamed and ran in all directions—out into the Graybar and Hyatt passages, out onto Forty-second Street, up the stairs to the Vanderbilt Avenue exit—as the saurians charged across the marble floor, and their shrieks of rage and hunger echoed under the high blue sky. The chilly scent of dinosaur flesh was suddenly everywhere. The cold things, Rosie had said. They went by. I heard them roaring…
Panic was spreading in the terminal; ehhif were struck still with shock and disbelief, staring at the impossible invasion from their distant past. Rhiow caught sight of one saurian racing across the concourse toward the Italian deli, and toward the mother, half-turned in the act of accepting her sandwich from the guy behind the counter; and toward the children, frozen, mouths open, staring, their bright balloons forgotten at the sight of the sharp claws stretched out toward them—