Текст книги "City at the end of time"
Автор книги: Грег Бир
сообщить о нарушении
Текущая страница: 17 (всего у книги 33 страниц)
“The experiment has been tried. It’s always failed,” Ghentun said, unsure what the City Prince knew, what the Great Eidolons had told one another across half an eternity of subterfuge.
“Yet that is precisely what you seek—confirmation of something in the remote past. The final destruction, am I right?”
“You are never wrong,” Ghentun said.
The Astyanax froze the simulacrum and then dissolved it. The primordial mass dropped into a glistening lump on the platform. “Idle play,” he said. “Have you spoken recently to the Librarian?”
“I made a visit to the Broken Tower seventy-five years ago,” Ghentun said. “A meeting was scheduled to discuss the Tiers, but I have not yet been summoned.” He knew better than to try to hide obvious truths.
“You reported a change in the Tiers to the angelins in the Broken Tower, Keeper. I assumed someonewould let me know eventually. The Librarian and I, after all, have long co-ventured in this study.”
“It is not my place to carry messages between Great Eidolons.” Ghentun knew he was being provoked. He expected little more from an Eidolon—compared to the City Prince, he was less than a pede crossing a dusty road.
“I’ve heard the Librarian is still working on his radical solution to our difficulties,” the Astyanax said.
“Many rumors descend from the Broken Tower,” Ghentun said. “I’m not informed enough to know what to believe.”
The Astyanax surveyed him. Little could be hidden—a Great Eidolon could map a Mender in seconds.
“Menders and Shapers have been engaged for half a million years at least with the current variety of ancient breeds.”
“Nothing our Shaper does would surprise me. She so rarely does what I ask.”
The Astyanax showed a glim of humor. The backscatter made Ghentun’s cloak fluoresce. “Sometimes I feel this city will never be controlled. I would almost welcome a chance to see how the Typhon could manage it.”
Despite himself, Ghentun shivered.
The Astyanax observed with approval. “You are obviously in no mood to betray the Kalpa, Keeper. Nor would you betray your Librarian. No secrets here, Mender—only your ignorance of the past, of what actually happened between the Librarian and the City Princes. Still, I would like a discreet and open copy of your report on the Tiers—the report you will deliver to the Librarian when he summons you.”
“Of course,” Ghentun said.
The Astyanax made no sign of dismissal. Something changed in the air of the chamber. The angelins shivered and blurred, on high alert—and with a jerk of surprise, Ghentun realized he was now facing the City Prince’s primary self, directly controlling this epitome—which looked as if it were barely up to the task. The glow stung Ghentun’s eyes. But the tone-color of the epitome’s words, directly from the core of the City Prince, became less provocative, almost casual.
The angelins now gave Ghentun full focus, a kind of astonished warning that this intimacy was unprecedented. Theirs had become a meeting of presumed equals, and the angelins found this almost unbearable.
“I remember him most vividly as the Deva, Polybiblios,” the City Prince said. “A tiny thing when he first came here, compared to what he is now. He has brought so much trouble, along with the grace of survival.
“I’ve supported—tried to control—supported again, the Librarian, tried to understand his plans, the way he thinks—all of him. I’ve failed. There is inequality even among the Great Eidolons, and I have become the inferior—no doubt about that. But the Librarian would long ago have destroyed what we have left of time, if not for the efforts of the City Princes. The Kalpa has survived an extra few hundreds of millions of years—much of a sameness, to be sure, an elderly repose after reckless youth and endless maturity.”
A simple visual appeared between them—three pieces of a twisted puzzle. They came together, making a deeply patterned ball smaller than Ghentun’s clenched hand.
“I’m giving you a memory, Keeper. A message to convey, if you will. It will rise again when the time is right—when there is no time. Until then, it will sink deep, out of sight.”
Ghentun felt his attention flick left, then right. The puzzle…swooping bands interlaced around a cross, the whole spinning and whirling at the center of…nothing…
The nothing drew him, and for an indefinite moment fixed his thoughts. Ghentun listened to the Astyanax’s voice, rich and compelling. Even as the story was told, and slipped down and away from consciousness, Ghentun asked, trembling at his boldness, “Why did you send her away?”
The answer remained in his immediate memory though all else faded:
“I doubt you can understand the humility of an Eidolon, Mender. But in all my extensions I have tried to exercise humility. I saw a grave danger to the Kalpa. Had all the parts of the Babel been brought together, they would have triggered the end of the Kalpa—and everything else. Their completion and unity would have beguiled the last great forces of our cosmos into starting over: Brahma, the moving stillness within, who will awaken; Mnemosyne, the reconciler, who walked among us for a time, but who must return to her true nature; and Shiva, who will dance in joyous destruction. Do you understand what a Babel is, Keeper?”
The Astyanax touched his cloak, and Ghentun saw homunculi—servants of the Babel—climbing spiral staircases from balcony to balcony, arrayed along a wall that stretched up, down, to left and right—seemingly forever. The balconies provided access to bookshelves bearing prodigious numbers of ancient bound volumes. Farther along, other staircases rose to impossible heights and descended to limitless depths.
One by one the homunculi pulled volumes from the shelves, examined them, frowned, and replaced them. And moved on, book after book, shelf after shelf, level after level. A reverse swing of his point of view revealed, across a narrow gulf, another unbounded wall supporting an equal number of books, on an equal number of shelves. The two apparently infinite walls of shelves seemed to meet and vanish in a vertical curve. Ghentun grudgingly admitted the curve was a nice touch, signifying a distortion of space—and an eternity of search.
Strings of symbolic data beyond counting—certainly for a Mender. And probably even for the Librarian himself. Every history, every tale, every sequence, every theory right and wrong, lost in vast mazes of churning, indecipherable text…
“Nothing will be beyond the scope of the Babel, combined and completed. All is there—all possibilities, all nonsense, all pride, all defeat. Truly it will be the greatest thing ever created. And the most dangerous.”
A question seemed to flame into Ghentun’s mind, even though—perhaps because—it was unanswerable:
And which would be more important to a universe—the random nonsense, or the things we think we can read and comprehend?
“I know nothing of this,” he said, eyes lidded, yet he was terrified to his very center. The Babel would be so much larger than any universe…
“No need. Recognize only that you haven’t finished your work,” the City Prince told him. “And finish it you will. Within a very few wakes, the Chaos will break through all our defenses. I acknowledge defeat. There is no choice, no reason to delay. I have transferred the city keys to the angelins in the Broken Tower, and my authority goes with them.
“I am aware that you have long hoped to follow your ancient breeds outside the border of the real. Go now, Mender. There are no longer city rules to stop you. Do what you must to get your breeds to Nataraja—if it still exists. What matter of a few wakes and sleeps? The Librarian’s plans will proceed.
“We will not meet again—in this creation.”
The Astyanax turned gray as old stone and his presence passed to another location. The extraordinary meeting was over.
An angelin escorted the silent Ghentun back to the platform and a waiting photon disc. He had been charting the intrusions long enough now to understand much of what the Astyanax had said or implied. The reality generators were weakening to such an extent that they could no longer protect any of the bions.
Ghentun knew he had to act. He had to put a humane end to this experiment—make one last attempt to fulfill the task he had been given, ages before; whatever the Eidolons wished, and however they debated the nature of the end of time.
The Keeper was only vaguely aware that he might be the last weapon in the City Prince’s arsenal.
CHAPTER 42
The Tiers
For the sake of Grayne, the Shaper joined Ghentun and did what she almost never did—she left the crèche.
They came invisibly upon the old breed in her niche and stood over her while she slept. The Shaper was obviously pleased that Grayne was still capable of dreaming, despite all interference. These breeds were strong with dream. She knelt and applied broad, smooth fingers to Grayne’s forehead, then said, “Tell us who will be best for this last march, and who will be best for a journey to the Broken Tower.”
Grayne did not need to speak to answer.
The Shaper released her, and Ghentun stepped forward. “Her chosen pair seem smart. She’s always been a good judge.”
“A breeding pair?”
“They haven’t discovered that yet.”
“Would it be wise to separate a breeding pair?” Ghentun asked rhetorically. The Shaper did not bother to acknowledge there was a question. It was not her place to render such opinions, and never would be, thank the city. She merely shaped—she did not ponder overmuch.
“They’ve searched the deserted Tiers for their books, as always,” the Shaper said. “She steered them toward those shelves that tend to repeat the tales of Sangmer and Ishanaxade. Separated lovers…”
“Can you tell what she’s dreaming?” Ghentun asked.
“Oh, I’ve known that for an age,” the Shaper said. “All the trainers share the same dream, since the first batch. She’s dreaming she’s part of a group of ancient females—in the Brightness, apparently. Details obscure, of course, but they seem to seek out talented youngsters, just as she and her sisters have done.”
The Shaper touched Grayne again and murmured, “Pity to lose her, after so many challenges. A favorite.”
Grayne twitched. Her face betrayed a secret anxiety, not in the least connected with their presence. Ghentun closed his eyes. “Then I know her,” he said.
The Shaper could not suppress allcuriosity. He looked back at Ghentun. “How? Are you dreaming as well, Keeper?”
“Retrieve the trainer’s books.”
The Shaper paused, looking down on the old breed. Then she reached for the trunk, opened the finger-lock latch, and removed all the books—five of them. They stacked easily in the Shaper’s many arms. “Let’s not wake her,” the Shaper said. “Such a loss would be exquisitely painful to her. Not that I’m sentimental.”
They backed out of the sama’s niche. A Bleak Warden entered, slow and silent. It settled to spread its folds over Grayne, and with a slight stir, before she could open her eyes, she was no more. A mercy, considering what was soon to come.
“Bring me the male,” Ghentun said.
“And the female?”
“She will march. Pick others—friends, if they have any. Complete the sama’s travel group however you can, and speed their training.”
CHAPTER 43
The sound began low and heavy—a bass hum that vibrated the walls of Tiadba’s niche. Jebrassy opened his eyes and twitched an arm, knocking one of the precious books off the sleeping pad. The last thing he remembered before falling asleep was Tiadba’s soft, steady breath—sweet and soothing. But the bed next to him was empty.
He sat upright, listening, and thought that the thumping might come from Tiadba moving around. Where was she?
But the sound was much too loud. It felt as if the Tiers themselves were shivering apart. He pulled on his curtus and stumbled over the scattered bedclothes to the door, which had opened halfway and seemed to have stuck. Somehow, that frightened him more than the sound, which grew even louder.
The shaking made it difficult to stay on his feet.
Over the deep rumble came another sound, no less frightening but higher-pitched—wailing and shrieking, like creatures in horrible pain.
He squeezed through the opening and fell to his knees in the corridor. His hand nearly touched a deep, greasy blackness spreading along the floor of the hall like a hole cut into the substance of the Tiers—and growing. His eyes tried to focus on what had fallen into the hole—a fleeting impression of blurs that might have been two or more breeds, trying to swim against the blackness—and then something grabbed his shoulder and whirled him around.
A huge warden nearly filled the hallway, its wings folded, strong, hard arms extended, one clutching Jebrassy, the other throwing a net, a thick cross-weave of glowing fibers that sucked itself in over the blackness and seemed, for the moment, to hold it back.
The warden pulled him away. “You are going,” it said, in a voice both passionless and irrefutable. Jebrassy was lifted from the floor and dangled like a doll. He swung his head just in time to see Tiadba squeeze past the warden’s gray carapace into the half-open door of the niche. The shriek and the roar grew, and to it Jebrassy now added his own shouts of pain—and a question: “
Why?”
Then Tiadba was back in the hall. She had retrieved a bag—their books. Turning her back to the warden, cringing, she allowed herself to be grasped and lifted. They both stared straight into the roiling dark that filled the opposite end of the corridor—
The roar, the wailing—
The net holding back the blackness had dissolved. The blackness advanced, offering at the crest of its dark wave three, four, five breeds—Jebrassy could not count them all—bobbing and twisting in ways nothing could twist, terrified, turning inside out and then skin side outward again, while still horribly alive, arms and legs moving with impossible speed—heads spinning like tops. The heads began to grow, the blurred eyes to expand, as if they would explode—
Tiadba added her screams to theirs.
And Jebrassy knew. He had seen this before, smaller, more concentrated. They were on the leading edge of an intrusion—like the one that had sucked away his mer and per. With a jerk, the warden retreated down the corridor, bumping and scraping the walls. Behind them the hallway squeezed itself into a wall and golden wardens gathered around the stair core to throw nets everywhere—
Their own warden spun them, pulled them inboard to avoid banging them against whatever chamber or new branch of hall they had entered, smooth and silvery—a hall or pipe he had never seen before. A lift! Like the one in the Diurns.
Jebrassy tried to reach for Tiadba but could not quite brush her with his fingers. She was alive, he could see that—she clutched the bag of books tightly to her chest—but she squeezed her eyes shut and bowed her head as if in submission.
The journey along the shining pipe took almost no time, the air rushing by so quickly that despite the shield of the warden’s body, Jebrassy’s clothes were nearly torn from him. He felt his exposed skin grow warm—and then they flew from an opening in a far wall. The warden spread its wings and they rose in a gliding curve over the third isle. Jebrassy managed to open his eyes long enough to see how high they were—and was instantly sick.
He could not see Tiadba now—except for a foot thrust out from under the second wing—but with his stomach empty, a kind of fated calm came over him.
The first and second isles had been carved open, exposing dozens of levels. He looked with odd dispassion over broken and scalloped walls, whirlpools of retreating darkness—falling breeds. The air smelled rotten and burned at once. Half the ceil was gone, exposing something he had never seen before—the city abovehis sky, bits and pieces of unknown architecture, spirals and silvery arcs, walls and walkways, moving in an intricate dance of remediation, trying to reassemble and re-create safe havens for other citizens—
Citizens above the Tiers, also suffering—perhaps dying—
The warden lifted them over a cloud of dissolving darkness, but not without exposing them to a stench so great Jebrassy wanted to be sick again, but could not—
He heard Tiadba weeping. The warden’s wings and arms rearranged for swifter flight, allowing them to look into each other’s eyes across the short distance, and in her expression there was something outside Jebrassy’s understanding, outside his range of sympathy—
Tears streamed from her cheeks and blew off behind. But behind the tears, she was laughing—weeping and laughing at once with terror and with glee.
And then they were struck—something ugly and resentful reached out and pierced the warden, turning it black and crusted—then just touchedJebrassy—and his body filled with a violation unlike anything he had ever known before, and pain—pain so deep he could not give it voice.
TEN ZEROS
CHAPTER 44
Puget Sound
The storm began at sea as a tight, dark streak of cloud, like the smear of a giant brush loaded with gray mud. In the early morning hours, it spread quickly over the Olympic Peninsula, sucking in all the dark clouds, tightening and directing its spiral of winds, accumulating and controlling the charges behind the jagged lightning—then flowed across Puget Sound, where it formed the shadowy suggestion of an impossible giant—a female giant.
The shadow blew inland, then south, and swung back. It could not seem to find what it wanted, and so it lashed its wings against the city. Most frightening was not the continuous deluge of rain, but the lightning, which struck in clusters, in a rainbow of colors, and with a pummel of explosive reports, like the pounding of huge fists on a cathedral organ.
Heads turned and eyes averted, the citizens watched in mounting fear as the flashes grew more intense and more frequent. Not content with leaping from sky to ground, the lightning began to arc sideways, lancing between skyscrapers, blowing out windows, and crawling along the exterior lines of beams and girders, wrapping the towers in a lace of frustrated electricity—only to erupt again near ground level, stabbing through the tight-packed buildings like sabers through cheese. Sirens howled. Fire trucks and police vehicles added to the keening cacophony as far north as Lake Union. The storm compacted and gathered purpose. From above, it now formed a fat arrow paralleling the I-90 bridge, broad fletches over Lake Washington, powerful head probing: dumping, flooding, flashing.
It had found what it was looking for.
It followed an old white van.
CHAPTER 45
Wallingford
Uh-oh.
Something unlikely this way comes.
It took Daniel less than a minute to decide that the storm might be a hunter—but it was not after him. It raged south of his neighborhood, south of downtown.
As the rain began, then the lightning, he turned away from the morning drivers and their cars, working their way west along Forty-fifth to the freeway. He was done with street corners and begging. This morning, he was no longer just one of a thousand gray men and women standing on the littered curbs of a thousand on-ramps. That life was over. A new one had begun.
Above all, he was a survivor.
He looked south to follow the storm’s progress. Not even the flash of lightning and horizontal twists of clouds could break his new sense of physical joy.
For two hours now he had been enjoying freedom from the snake in his gut. What was left of Fred was no longer capable of putting up much resistance. This body was young, relatively healthy—though not in the best of shape.
Back in the house, Mary was still asleep—and Charles Granger lay dead on the couch, covered with a blanket, pitiful and spent. At least that was not his fault, Daniel thought. The broken-down pile of meat had simply given up.
Healthy again, Daniel had a fierce, unreasonable pride in his strength, his abilities. As well, he had no doubt now that there were others like him in the city—and they were about to be collected. To himself, he cheerfully sang, “ Dirus irae.”
He did not want to be caught in the open when the storm found what it was looking for. Even a few miles away the side effects would be unpleasant.
And he needed to retrieve his boxes, hidden behind the fireplace in the abandoned house.
CHAPTER 46
West Seattle
The van shuddered as it left the West Seattle Bridge. Squat and low in the driver’s seat, pale with tension, Glaucous swerved around a car stalled in the left lane—corrected the van as it rose on one set of wheels, jerked it back on a straighter course, then took the time to wipe sweat from his eyes with scarred knuckles.
In the back, tied up in a heavy canvas sack, Jack Rohmer had worked his arm through the drawstring and waved his fist as he rolled back and forth over the cold metal floor. Glaucous had stopped his trills and whistles of birdsong. Now he was selling things, long ago. “Costards, pippins, starberries, currants!” he called, in the full glory and joy of the old times. Penelope discharged a sharp grunt as lightning blasted a passing utility pole. A transformer sparked and tumbled over their windshield, bounced along behind them.
All the while, Glaucous was muttering words with no apparent sense or connection to their journey or their peril: “Shoestrings and jute! Oakum and fiber! Paper and rags, any old iron! Scallions! Onions!
Leeks! Bones and FAT!” (This as lightning struck again) and “Plasters and pastes! Plasters for all, plasters and poultice, what ails will draw!”
A stench filled Jack’s nose, rank and oppressive, not just the sweat and confinement of the bag, but a taint from his recent jaunt. He had jumped too far, crossed into a diseased knot of world-strands, dissolving, looping—stinking of something awful.
He knew that the van was being followed, that his reek was being tracked…
Glaucous seemed to share the same opinion. In between his pointless calls—he was now working his way through “Bluing! Blue stuffs! Indigo!”—he paused and leaned toward his partner, as if to speak in confidence, then, shaking his head, pulled back and wrenched his spine straight, his shoulders as square as they could be, incredulous he would even think of giving voice to such thoughts, whatever they might have been.
He could not afford doubts—not now.
Penelope had broken the armrest from the van’s door and held it out, squeezing the plastic and steel like a banana. Her eyes almost popped from their fat-draped orbits.
Speckles of weird light danced on their faces.
Glaucous clapped a hand over his mouth and nose and stared above his thumb, eyes wide.
“What isthat?” Penelope shrieked, her vocal register that of a frightened kindergartener.
“It is magnificence!” Glaucous shouted. “It is power and promise, a plight, a troth!” His words belied his expression; brows low, piggish eyes receding into his skull.
Jack now had his arm out of the sack up to the shoulder and was squirming to push his head through.
“What are you saying?” Penelope squealed.
“Something is hunting us! Too eager, waiting too long!”
“Hunting what? You promised we would be safe!”
“ Iwill be safe.” Glaucous gave her a guilty glance, then wheeled the van onto an off-ramp and said, with grim curiosity, sunken eyes on the rearview mirror, “I turn up this road—bolts like giant feet, stamping feet, they follow and turn withme! I have not seen this before, believe that, dear queen of buzz and hum—not before, not ever. We have not called for a delivery, yet I sense something other than a Gape. The Chalk Princess is anxious. More than we bargained for. A large bite, this youngster—more than we can chew!”
Jack was beyond fear. The cloying treacle and liquor of Glaucous’s talent had pinched to sour vinegar, stinging in his nostrils and brain, opening up choked glimpses of branching, looping world-lines—none of them good, all of them in fact awful.
What was happening had never happened before, not in Jack’s experience, nor in the experience of any ancestor who had ever contributed to the sum of the genes ratcheting in his flesh and blood—even as far back as the primordial slime.
CHAPTER 47
Wallingford
Daniel drew up Fred’s gray wool jacket and walked west, shoulders hunched, feeling the storm gather its power.
A sharp jerk of sense had reversed his arrogance and pleasure at his new body. The storm wasn’t after him—but it would work quite well as a distraction. He had been too preoccupied to pay close attention—stupid, stupid!
There was almost certainly another target nearby—another fate-shifter. Maybe more than one. But someone in the employ of the thing that hunted them could still set his sights on Daniel. He would be special. I no longer dream of the city. I don’t know why—I just don’t. A bad shepherd—isn’t that what they call me?
Lightning whited the facades on his right. Just blocks from the turn to his home, as he walked beside the big lamp shop, all the chandeliers, switched on for the morning trade, suddenly went dark. The air hissed.
Daniel had to drag his new body by main force toward the abandoned house. Fear was bringing Fred back, unpleasantly strong, and Fred most certainly did not want to go. Daniel could not jaunt again, even had he the strength, the concentration. The corrosion would be everywhere. Nothing but hideous, gray looped worlds bunched up between this dissolving segment of history and whatever lay at the end: tumbled lengths of fate, frayed out, soaked and sour-smoky with decay. Another voice—not his own, not Fred’s. Fred was already being pushed back like a slug under a stone. Why bother, Mr. Iremonk?
Lightning flew down the street, sizzling, blinding, and struck a fire hydrant. The blast nearly knocked him off his feet and shattered all the glass in the lamp shop windows.
He stumbled on, whining like a kicked dog.
You have an appointment, long delayed.
People on the sidewalks were screaming, running.
He whirled around. An old woman in tight pedal-pushers held an inverted black umbrella in one hand and dragged a terrier along behind her, on its side, legs kicking. Each time the dog got to its feet, she jerked the leash so hard it fell over again. Big splats of rain—drops the size of baseballs, mixed with sharp chips of ice—hurled from the churning sky.
Just a few miles from the center of the storm.
The sweep of her robe, merely that. Nothing compared to the Gape. Remember, Daniel? Poor bastards, all of you. But especiallyyou.
Half a block behind him, Daniel saw a small man with oily, slick black hair. Daniel turned left. Across the street waited another—slender, dressed in old black clothes shiny with water and age—and a block east, a third, clutching a dripping, battered bowler hat in one white hand. All were smiling, enjoying the storm—ignoring the rain and the ice.
Where is the net’s fourth corner, Daniel?
Trying to run backward, he almost fell, so he swiveled, arms wind-milling, and lit out—gave it all he had. He wouldn’t look back.
Had to reach the house.
Had to.
CHAPTER 48
West Seattle
The storm had a dead, hollow voice. It had never known hunger, care, passion, or any growl of hormonal surge; its voice had never vented from flesh or form.
The storm was a thousand spins and drafts of wind and water, filled with restless veins of flash and charge, and all it knew—all it could possibly know—was that it had been set free, liberated from probability, and that it had a power no storm had ever before possessed. It could gather, it could kill– with malice.
One wet black swirl had almost caught up with the white van.
“My dear, it is our quarry, our cargo!” Glaucous shouted over the roar. He jerked his thumb toward the back. “He trails a spoor…”
“Of thread?” Penelope shrilled.
“Spoor, not spool! He exudes, he stinksof the bad places, not hell—though he must have come very close, dipped an ankle or a knee… Violet! Indigo! Blue! Red! Red bolts and orange! All for madam’s delight!”
Jack needed all his strength. He pressed his feet against the doors at the rear of the van, clutched the sack around him, rolled, grunted—
The light from the windshield darkened. Glaucous and Penelope screeched like terrified parrots. Jack peered out of the hole he had pushed through the cinch, between the silhouettes of the massive, cowering woman and the driver—through the van’s windshield. There, he saw something inexplicable. The vision refused to be cataloged or stored away, even in short-term memory. A seam, a gap, a failure.
A face. Extraordinary beauty—and rage.
Jack immediately forgot what he saw.
Glaucous looked to his terrified partner. In one bright flash he saw the intensity of Penelope’s fear and knew that she knew. A fatal mistake had been made. However long their relationship—whatever her strength and talent—she would have to be the one. Not for the first time, Glaucous would sacrifice a valued partner.
The storm could not wait. It struck with all its pent-up force, spending all its power, everything hidden within, at once.
A black wall of cloud plummeted.
The windshield shattered.
Darkness hammered.
The van flipped and skidded along its side, rolling Jack with a bone-bruising thump onto the ribbed panel. Through the sack, the skin of his back burned as friction heated the metal. Jack rolled and kicked and pushed his head and one arm through the cinch.
The van ricocheted off a jersey barrier and flipped again. Suspended in space, Jack drew up his knees, rounded into a ball—all he could do to avoid breaking an arm, a leg, his neck. From the front seats came twin explosions of breath as belts jerked tight. The van slammed down on its roof.
CHAPTER 49
Wallingford
As Daniel ran up the steps of the house, he observed the fourth corner of the net. A small piebald man stood on the porch of the bungalow. Rain fell in such volume, Daniel could barely make out the house, much less the figure waiting for him there—paleness within shadow, shrunken, like a hideous dwarf. Daniel was soaked. The tall grass in the yard lay flat, submissive. Pieces of ice bounced on the sidewalk and the roof, struck his head and shoulders. Blood trickled down his forehead, diluted by rain. Not a good performance for a man used to walking between raindrops. Lightning played to the south, where he supposed the real search was under way—where the main target was being harried. Assume nothing. Perhaps it isyou, after all.
