Текст книги "The Dark Tower"

Автор книги: Stephen Edwin King

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Текущая страница: 23 (всего у книги 52 страниц)

“Fire!” Tammy shouted. “Fire!”

Fire? But that’s impossible, Pimli thought. For if that’s the smoke detector I’m hearing in my house and also the smoke detector I’m hearing from one of the dorms, then surely—

“It must be a false alarm,” he told Finli. “Those smoke detectors do that when their batteries are—”

Before he could finish this hopeful assessment, a side window of Warden’s House exploded outward. The glass was followed by an exhalation of orange flame.

“Gods!” Jakli cried in his buzzing voice. “It is fire!”

Pimli stared with his mouth open. And suddenly yet another smoke-and-fire alarm went off, this one in a series of loud, hiccuping whoops. Good God, sweet Jesus, that was one of the Damli House alarms! Surely nothing could be wrong at—

Finli o’ Tego grabbed his arm. “Boss,” he said, calmly enough. “We’ve got real trouble.”

Before Pimli could reply, the horn went off, signaling the change of shifts. And suddenly he realized how vulnerable they would be for the next seven minutes or so. Vulnerable to all sorts of things.

He refused to admit the word attack into his consciousness. At least not yet.

Eight

Dinky Earnshaw had been sitting in the overstuffed easy chair for what seemed like forever, waiting impatiently for the party to begin. Usually being in The Study cheered him up—hell, cheered everybody up, it was the “good-mind” effect—but today he only felt the wires of tension inside him winding tighter and tighter, pulling his guts into a ball. He was aware of taheen and can-toi looking down from the balconies every now and again, riding the good-mind wave, but didn’t have to worry about being progged by the likes of them; from that, at least, he was safe.

Was that a smoke alarm? From Feveral, perhaps?

Maybe. But maybe not, too. No one else was looking around.

Wait, he told himself. Ted told you this would be the hard part, didn’t he? And at least Sheemie’s out of the way. Sheemie’s safe in his room, and Corbett Hall’s safe from fire. So calm down. Relax.

That was the bray of a smoke alarm. Dinky was sure of it. Well… almost sure.

A book of crossword puzzles was open in his lap. For the last fifty minutes he’d been filling one of the grids with nonsense-letters, ignoring the definitions completely. Now, across the top, he printed this in large dark block letters: GO SOUTH WITH YOUR HANDS UP, YOU WON’T BE HU

That was when one of the upstairs fire alarms, probably the one in the west wing, went off with a loud, warbling bray. Several of the Breakers, jerked rudely from a deep daze of concentration, cried out in surprised alarm. Dinky also cried out, but in relief. Relief and something more. Joy? Yeah, very likely it was joy. Because when the fire alarm began to bray, he’d felt the powerful hum of good-mind snap. The eerie combined force of the Breakers had winked out like an overloaded electrical circuit. For the moment, at least, the assault on the Beam had stopped.

Meanwhile, he had a job to do. No more waiting. He stood up, letting the crossword magazine tumble to the Turkish rug, and threw his mind at the Breakers in the room. It wasn’t hard; he’d been practicing almost daily for this moment, with Ted’s help. And if it worked? If the Breakers picked it up, rebroadcasting it and amping what Dinky could only suggest to the level of a command? Why then it would rise. It would become the dominant chord in a new good-mind gestalt.

At least that was the hope.

(IT’S A FIRE FOLKS THERE’S A FIRE IN THE BUILDING)

As if to underscore this, there was a soft bang-and-tinkle as something imploded and the first puff of smoke seeped from the ventilator panels. Breakers looked around with wide, dazed eyes, some getting to their feet.

And Dinky sent:

(DON’T WORRY DON’T PANIC ALL IS WELL WALK UP THE)

He sent a perfect, practiced image of the north stairway, then added Breakers. Breakers walking up the north stairway. Breakers walking through the kitchen. Crackle of fire, smell of smoke, but both coming from the guards’ sleeping area in the west wing. And would anyone question the truth of this mental broadcast? Would anyone wonder who was beaming it out, or why? Not now. Now they were only scared. Now they were wanting someone to tell them what to do, and Dinky Earnshaw was that someone.

(NORTH STAIRWAY WALK UP THE NORTH STAIRWAY WALK OUT ONTO THE BACK LAWN)

And it worked. They began to walk that way. Like sheep following a ram or horses following a stallion. Some were picking up the two basic ideas

(NO PANIC NO PANIC)

(NORTH STAIRWAY NORTH STAIRWAY)

and rebroadcasting them. And, even better, Dinky heard it from above, too. From the can-toi and the taheen who had been observing from the balconies.

No one ran and no one panicked, but the exodus up the north stairs had begun.

Nine

Susannah sat astride the SCT in the window of the shed where she’d been concealed, not worrying about being seen now. Smoke detectors—at least three of them—were yowling. A fire alarm was whooping even more loudly; that one was from Damli House, she was quite sure. As if in answer, a series of loud electronic goose-honks began from the Pleasantville end of the compound. This was joined by a multitude of clanging bells.

With all that happening to their south, it was no wonder that the woman north of the Devar-Toi saw only the backs of the three guards in the ivy-covered watchtowers. Three didn’t seem like many, but it was five per cent of the total. A start.

Susannah looked down the barrel of her gun at the one in her sights and prayed. God grant me true aim… true aim…

Soon.

It would be soon.

Ten

Finli grabbed the Master’s arm. Pimli shook him off and started toward his house again, staring unbelievingly at the smoke that was now pouring out of all the windows on the left side.

“Boss!” Finli shouted, renewing his grip. “Boss, never mind that! It’s the Breakers we have to worry about! The Breakers!”

It didn’t get through, but the shocking warble of the Damli House fire alarm did. Pimli turned back in that direction, and for a moment he met Jakli’s beady little bird’s eyes. He saw nothing in them but panic, which had the perverse but welcome effect of steadying Pimli himself. Sirens and buzzers everywhere. One of them was a regular pulsing honk he’d never heard before. Coming from the direction of Pleasantville?

“Come on, boss!” Finli o’ Tego almost pleaded. “We have to make sure the Breakers are okay—”

“Smoke!” Jakli cried, fluttering his dark (and utterly useless) wings. “Smoke from Damli House, smoke from Feveral, too!”

Pimli ignored him. He pulled the Peacemaker from the docker’s clutch, wondering briefly what premonition had caused him to put it on. He had no idea, but he was glad for the weight of the gun in his hand. Behind him, Tassa was yelling—Tammy was, too—but Pimli ignored the pair of them. His heart was beating furiously, but he was calm again. Finli was right. The Breakers were the important thing right now. Making sure they didn’t lose a third of their trained psychics in some sort of electrical fire or half-assed act of sabotage. He nodded at his Security Chief and they began to run toward Damli House with Jakli squawking and flapping along behind them like a refugee from a Warner Bros. cartoon. Somewhere up there, Gaskie was hollering. And then Pimli o’ New Jersey heard a sound that chilled him to the bone, a rapid chow-chow-chow sound. Gunfire! If some clown was shooting at his Breakers, that clown’s head would finish the day on a high pole, by the gods. That the guards rather than the Breakers might be under attack had at that point still not crossed his mind, nor that of the slightly wilier Finli, either. Too much was happening too fast.

Eleven

At the south end of the Devar compound, the syncopated honking sound was almost loud enough to split eardrums. “Christ!” Eddie said, and couldn’t hear himself.

In the south watchtowers, the guards were turned away from them, looking north. Eddie couldn’t see any smoke yet. Perhaps the guards could from their higher vantage-points.

Roland grabbed Jake’s shoulder, then pointed at the SOO LINE boxcar. Jake nodded and scrambled beneath it with Oy at his heels. Roland held both hands out to Eddie—Stay where you are!—and then followed. On the other side of the boxcar the boy and the gunslinger stood up, side by side. They would have been clearly visible to the sentries, had the attention of those worthies not been distracted by the smoke detectors and fire alarms inside the compound.

Suddenly the entire front of the Pleasantville Hardware Company descended into a slot in the ground. A robot fire engine, all bright red paint and gleaming chrome, came bolting out of the hitherto concealed garage. A line of red lights pulsed down the center of its elongated body, and an amplified voice bellowed, “STAND CLEAR! THIS IS FIRE-RESPONSE TEAM BRAVO! STAND CLEAR! MAKE WAY FOR FIRE-RESPONSE TEAM BRAVO!”

There must be no gunfire from this part of the Devar, not yet. The south end of the compound must seem safe to the increasingly frightened inmates of Algul Siento: don’t worry, folks, here’s your port in today’s unexpected shitstorm.

The gunslinger dipped a ‘Riza from Jake’s dwindling supply and nodded for the boy to take another. Roland pointed to the guard in the righthand tower, then once more at Jake. The boy nodded, cocked his arm across his chest, and waited for Roland to give him the go.

Twelve

Once you hear the horn that signals the change of shifts, Roland had told Susannah, take it to them. Do as much damage as you can, but don’t let them see they’re only facing a single person, for your father’s sake!

As if he needed to tell her that.

She could have taken the three watchtower guards while the horn was still blaring, but something made her wait. A few seconds later, she was glad she had. The rear door of the Queen Anne burst open so violently it tore off its upper hinge. Breakers piled out, clawing at those ahead of them in their panic (these are the would-be destroyers of the universe, she thought, these sheep), and among them she saw half a dozen of the freakboys with animal heads and at least four of those creepy humanoids with the masks on.

Susannah took the guard in the west tower first, and had shifted her aim to the pair in the east tower before the first casualty in the Battle of Algul Siento had fallen over the railing and tumbled to the ground with his brains dribbling out of his hair and down his cheeks. The Coyote machine-pistol, switched to the middle setting, fired in low-pitched bursts of three: Chow! Chow! Chow!

The taheen and the low man in the east tower spun widdershins to each other, like figures in a dance. The taheen crumpled on the catwalk that skirted the top of the watchtower; the low man was driven into the rail, flipped over it with his bootheels in the sky, then plummeted head-first to the ground. She heard the crack his neck made when it broke.

A couple of the milling Breakers spotted this unfortunate fellow’s descent and screamed.

“Put up your hands!” That was Dinky, she recognized his voice. “Put up your hands if you’re a Breaker!”

No one questioned the idea; in these circumstances, anyone who sounded like he knew what was going on was in unquestioned charge. Some of the Breakers—but not all, not yet—put their hands up. It made no difference to Susannah. She didn’t need raised hands to tell the difference between the sheep and the goats. A kind of haunted clarity had fallen over her vision.

She flicked the fire-control switch from BURST to SINGLE SHOT and began to pick off the guards who’d come up from The Study with the Breakers. Taheen… can-toi, get him… a hume but don’t shoot her, she’s a Breaker even though she doesn’t have her hands up… don’t ask me how I know but I do…

Susannah squeezed the Coyote’s trigger and the head of the hume next to the woman in the bright red slacks exploded in a mist of blood and bone. The Breakers screamed like children, staring around with their eyes bulging and their hands up. And now Susannah heard Dinky again, only this time not his physical voice. It was his mental voice she heard, and it was much louder:

(GO SOUTH WITH YOUR HANDS UP, YOU WON’T BE HURT)

Which was her cue to break cover and start moving. She’d gotten eight of the Crimson King’s bad boys, counting the three in the towers—not that it was much of an accomplishment, given their panic—and she saw no more, at least for the time being.

Susannah twisted the hand-throttle and scooted the SCT toward one of the other abandoned sheds. The gadget’s pickup was so lively that she almost tumbled off the bicycle-style seat. Trying not to laugh (and laughing anyway), she shouted at the top of her lungs, in her best Detta Walker vulture-screech:

“Git outta here, muthafuckahs! Git south! Hands up so we know you fum the bad boys! Everyone doan have their hands up goan get a bullet in the haid! Y’all trus’ me on it!”

In through the door of the next shed, scraping a balloon tire of the SCT on the jamb, but not quite hard enough to tip it over. Praise God, for she never would have had enough strength to right it on her own. In here, one of the “lazers” was set on a snap-down tripod. She pushed the toggle-switch marked ON and was wondering if she needed to do something else with the INTERVAL switch when the weapon’s muzzle emitted a blinding stream of reddish-purple light that arrowed into the compound above the triple run of fence and made a hole in the top story of Damli House. To Susannah it looked as big as a hole made by a point-blank artillery shell.

This is good, she thought. I gotta get the other ones going.

But she wondered if there would be time. Already other Breakers were picking up on Dinky’s suggestion, rebroadcasting it and boosting it in the process:

(GO SOUTH! HANDS UP! WON’T BE HURT!)

She flicked the Coyote’s fire-switch to FULL AUTO and raked it across the upper level of the nearest dorm to emphasize the point. Bullets whined and ricocheted. Glass broke. Breakers screamed and began to stampede around the side of Damli House with their hands up. Susannah saw Ted come around the same side. He was hard to miss, because he was going against the current. He and Dinky embraced briefly, then raised their hands and joined the southward flow of Breakers, who would soon lose their status as VIPs and become just one more bunch of refugees struggling to survive in a dark and poisoned land.

She’d gotten eight, but it wasn’t enough. The hunger was upon her, that dry hunger. Her eyes saw everything. They pulsed and ached in her head, and they saw everything. She hoped that other taheen, low men, or hume guards would come around the side of Damli House.

She wanted more.

Thirteen

Sheemie Ruiz lived in Corbett Hall, which happened to be the dormitory Susannah, all unknowing, had raked with at least a hundred bullets. Had he been on his bed, he almost certainly would have been killed. Instead he was on his knees, at the foot of it, praying for the safety of his friends. He didn’t even look up when the window blew in but simply redoubled his supplications. He could hear Dinky’s thoughts

(GO SOUTH)

pounding in his head, then heard other thought-streams join it,

(WITH YOUR HANDS UP)

making a river. And then Ted’s voice was there, not just joining the others but amping them up, turning what had been a river

(YOU WON’T BE HURT)

into an ocean. Without realizing it, Sheemie changed his prayer. Our Father and P’teck my pals became go south with your hands up, you won’t be hurt. He didn’t even stop this when the propane tanks behind the Damli House cafeteria blew up with a shattering roar.

Fourteen

Gangli Tristum (that’s Doctor Gangli to you, say thankya) was in many ways the most feared man in Damli House. He was a can-toi who had—perversely—taken a taheen name instead of a human one, and he ran the infirmary on the third floor of the west wing with an iron fist. And on roller skates.

Things on the ward were fairly relaxed when Gangli was in his office doing paperwork, or off on his rounds (which usually meant visiting Breakers with the sniffles in their dorms), but when he came out, the whole place—nurses and orderlies as well as patients—fell respectfully (and nervously) silent. A newcomer might laugh the first time he saw the squat, dark-complected, heavily jowled man-thing gliding slowly down the center aisle between the beds, arms folded over the stethoscope which lay on his chest, the tails of his white coat wafting out behind him (one Breaker had once commented, “He looks like John Irving after a bad facelift”). Such a one who was caught laughing would never laugh again, however. Dr. Gangli had a sharp tongue, indeed, and no one made fun of his roller skates with impunity.

Now, instead of gliding on them, he went flying up and down the aisles, the steel wheels (for his skating gear far predated rollerblades) rumbling on the hardwood. “All the papers!” he shouted. “Do you hear me?… If I lose one file in this fucking mess, one gods-damned file, I’ll have someone’s eyes with my afternoon tea!”

The patients were already gone, of course; he’d had them out of their beds and down the stairs at the first bray of the smoke detector, at the first whiff of smoke. A number of orderlies—gutless wonders, and he knew who each of them was, oh yes, and a complete report would be made when the time came—had fled with the sickfolk, but five had stayed, including his personal assistant, Jack London. Gangli was proud of them, although one could not have told it from his hectoring voice as he skated up and down, up and down, in the thickening smoke.

“Get the papers, d’ye hear? You better, by all the gods that ever walked or crawled! You better!”

A red glare shot in through the window. Some sort of weapon, for it blew in the glass wall that separated his office from the ward and set his favorite easy-chair a-smolder.

Gangli ducked and skated under the laser beam, never slowing.

“Gan-a-damn!” cried one of the orderlies. He was a hume, extraordinarily ugly, his eyes bulging from his pale face. “What in the hell was th—”

“Never mind!” Gangli bawled. “Never mind what it was, you pissface clown! Get the papers! Get my motherfucking papers!”

From somewhere in front—the Mall?—came the hideous approaching clang-and-yowl of some rescue vehicle. “STAND CLEAR!” Gangli heard. “THIS IS FIRE-RESPONSE TEAM BRAVO!”

Gangli had never heard of such a thing as Fire-Response Team Bravo, but there was so much they didn’t know about this place. Why, he could barely use a third of the equipment in his own surgical suite! Never mind, the thing that mattered right now—

Before he could finish his thought, the gas-pods behind the kitchen blew up. There was a tremendous roar—seemingly from directly beneath them—and Gangli Tristum was thrown into the air, the metal wheels on his roller skates spinning. The others were thrown as well, and suddenly the smoky air was full of flying papers. Looking at them, knowing that the papers would burn and he would be lucky not to burn with them, a clear thought came to Dr. Gangli: the end had come early.

Fifteen

Roland heard the telepathic command

(GO SOUTH WITH YOUR HANDS UP, YOU WON’T BE HURT)

begin to beat in his mind. It was time. He nodded at Jake and the Orizas flew. Their eerie whistling wasn’t loud in the general cacophony, yet one of the guards must have heard something coming, because he was beginning to pivot when the plate’s sharpened edge took his head off and tumbled it backward into the compound, the eyelashes fluttering in bewildered surprise. The headless body took two steps and then collapsed with its arms over the rail, blood pouring from the neck in a gaudy stream. The other guard was already down.

Eddie rolled effortlessly beneath the SOO LINE boxcar and bounced to his feet on the compound side. Two more automated fire engines had come bolting out of the station hitherto hidden by the hardware store façade. They were wheelless, seeming to run on cushions of compressed air. Somewhere toward the north end of the campus (for so Eddie’s mind persisted in identifying the Devar-Toi), something exploded. Good. Lovely.

Roland and Jake took fresh plates from the dwindling supply and used them to cut through the three runs of fence. The high-voltage one parted with a bitter, sizzling crack and a brief blink of blue fire. Then they were in. Moving quickly and without speaking, they ran past the now-unguarded towers with Oy trailing closely at Jake’s heels. Here was an alley running between Henry Graham’s Drug Store & Soda Fountain and the Pleasantville Book Store.

At the head of the alley, they looked out and saw that Main Street was currently empty, although a tangy electric smell (a subway-station smell, Eddie thought) from the last two fire engines still hung in the air, making the overall stench even worse. In the distance, fire-sirens whooped and smoke detectors brayed. Here in Pleasantville, Eddie couldn’t help but think of the Main Street in Disneyland: no litter in the gutters, no rude graffiti on the walls, not even any dust on the plate-glass windows. This was where homesick Breakers came when they needed a little whiff of America, he supposed, but didn’t any of them want anything better, anything more realistic, than this plastic-fantastic still life? Maybe it looked more inviting with folks on the sidewalks and in the stores, but that was hard to believe. Hard for him to believe, at least. Maybe it was only a city boy’s chauvinism.

Across from them were Pleasantville Shoes, Gay Paree Fashions, Hair Today, and the Gem Theater (COME IN IT’S KOOL INSIDE said the banner hanging from the bottom of the marquee). Roland raised a hand, motioning Eddie and Jake across to that side of the street. It was there, if all went as he hoped (it almost never did), that they would set their ambush. They crossed in a crouch, Oy still scurrying at Jake’s heel. So far everything seemed to be working like a charm, and that made the gunslinger nervous, indeed.

Sixteen

Any battle-seasoned general will tell you that, even in a small-scale engagement (as this one was), there always comes a point where coherence breaks down, and narrative flow, and any real sense of how things are going. These matters are re-created by historians later on. The need to re-create the myth of coherence may be one of the reasons why history exists in the first place.

Never mind. We have reached that point, the one where the Battle of Algul Siento took on a life of its own, and all I can do now is point here and there and hope you can bring your own order out of the general chaos.

Seventeen

Trampas, the eczema-plagued low man who inadvertently let Ted in on so much, rushed to the stream of Breakers who were fleeing from Damli House and grabbed one, a scrawny ex-carpenter with a receding hairline named Birdie McCann.

“Birdie, what is it?” Trampas shouted. He was currently wearing his thinking-cap, which meant he could not share in the telepathic pulse all around him. “What’s happening, do you kn—”

“Shooting!” Birdie yelled, pulling free. “Shooting! They’re out there!” He pointed vaguely behind him.

“Who? How m—”

“Watch out you idiots it’s not slowing down!” yelled Gaskie o’ Tego, from somewhere behind Trampas and McCann.

Trampas looked up and was horrified to see the lead fire engine come roaring and swaying along the center of the Mall, red lights flashing, two stainless-steel robot firemen now clinging to the back. Pimli, Finli, and Jakli leaped aside. So did Tassa the houseboy. But Tammy Kelly lay facedown on the grass in a spreading soup of blood. She had been flattened by Fire-Response Team Bravo, which had not actually scrambled to fight a fire in over eight hundred years. Her complaining days were over.

And—

“STAND CLEAR!” blared the fire engine. Behind it, two more engines swerved gaudily around either side of Warden’s House. Once again Tassa the houseboy barely leaped in time to save his skin. “THIS IS FIRE-RESPONSE TEAM BRAVO!” Some sort of metallic node rose from the center of the engine, split open, and produced a steel whirligig that began to spray high-pressure streams of water in eight different directions. “MAKE WAY FOR FIRE-RESPONSE TEAM BRAVO!”

And—

James Cagney—the taheen who was standing with Gaskie in the foyer of the Feveral Hall dormitory when the trouble started, remember him?—saw what was going to happen and began yelling at the guards who were staggering out of Damli’s west wing, red-eyed and coughing, some with their pants on fire, a few—oh, praise Gan and Bessa and all the gods—with weapons.

Cag screamed at them to get out of the way and could hardly hear himself in the cacophony. He saw Joey Rastosovich pull two of them aside and watched the Earnshaw kid bump aside another. A few of the coughing, weeping escapees saw the oncoming fire engine and scattered on their own. Then Fire-Response Team Bravo was plowing through the guards from the west wing, not slowing, roaring straight for Damli House, spraying water to every point of the compass.

And—

“Dear Christ, no,” Pimli Prentiss moaned. He clapped his hands over his eyes. Finli, on the other hand, was helpless to look away. He saw a low man—Ben Alexander, he was quite sure—chewed beneath the firetruck’s huge wheels. He saw another struck by the grille and mashed against the side of Damli House as the engine crashed, spraying boards and glass, then breaking through a bulkhead which had been partially concealed by a bed of sickly flowers. One wheel dropped down into the cellar stairwell and a robot voice began to boom, “ACCIDENT! NOTIFY THE STATION! ACCIDENT!”

No shit, Sherlock, Finli thought, looking at the blood on the grass with a kind of sick wonder. How many of his men and his valuable charges had the goddamned malfunctioning firetruck mowed down? Six? Eight? A motherfucking dozen?

From behind Damli House came that terrifying chow-chow-chow sound once again, the sound of automatic weapons fire.

A fat Breaker named Waverly jostled him. Finli snared him before Waverly could fly on by. “What happened? Who told you to go south?” For Finli, unlike Trampas, wasn’t wearing any sort of thinking-cap and the message

(GO SOUTH WITH YOUR HANDS UP, YOU WON’T BE HURT)

was slamming into his head so hard and loud it was nearly impossible to think of anything else.

Beside him, Pimli—struggling to gather his wits—seized on the beating thought and managed one of his own: That’s almost got to be Brautigan, grabbing an idea and amplifying it that way. Who else could?

And—

Gaskie grabbed first Cag and then Jakli and shouted at them to gather up all the armed guards and put them to work flanking the Breakers who were hurrying south on the Mall and the streets that flanked the Mall. They looked at him with blank, starey eyes—panic-eyes—and he could have screamed with balked fury. And here came the next two engines with their sirens whooping. The larger of the pair struck two of the Breakers, bearing them to the ground and running them over. One of these new casualties was Joey Rastosovich. When the engine had passed, beating at the grass with its compressed-air vents, Tanya fell on her knees beside her dying husband, raising her hands to the sky. She was screaming at the top of her lungs but Gaskie could barely hear her. Tears of frustration and fear prickled the corners of his eyes. Dirty dogs, he thought. Dirty ambushing dogs!

And—

North of the Algul compound, Susannah broke cover, moving in on the triple run of fence. This wasn’t in the plan, but the need to keep shooting, to keep knocking them down, was stronger than ever. She simply couldn’t help herself, and Roland would have understood. Besides, the billowing smoke from Damli House had momentarily obscured everything at this end of the compound. Red beams from the “lazers” stabbed into it—on and off, on and off, like some sort of neon sign—and Susannah reminded herself not to get in the way of them, not unless she wanted a hole two inches across all the way through her.

She used bullets from the Coyote to cut her end of the fence—outer run, middle run, inner run—and then vanished into the thickening smoke, reloading as she went.

And—

The Breaker named Waverly tried to pull free of Finli. Nar, nar, none of that, may it please ya, Finli thought. He yanked the man—who’d been a bookkeeper or some such thing in his pre-Algul life—closer to him, then slapped him twice across the face, hard enough to make his hand hurt. Waverly screamed in pain and surprise.

“Who the fuck is back there!” Finli roared. “WHO THE FUCK IS DOING THIS?” The follow-up fire engines had halted in front of Damli House and were pouring streams of water into the smoke. Finli didn’t know if it could help, but probably it couldn’t hurt. And at least the damned things hadn’t crashed into the building they were supposed to save, like the first one.

“Sir, I don’t know!” Waverly sobbed. Blood was streaming from one of his nostrils and the corner of his mouth. “I don’t know, but there has to be fifty, maybe a hundred of the devils! Dinky got us out! God bless Dinky Earnshaw!”

Gaskie o’ Tego, meanwhile, wrapped one good-sized hand around James Cagney’s neck and the other around Jakli’s. Gaskie had an idea son of a bitching crowhead Jakli had been on the verge of running, but there was no time to worry about that now. He needed them both.

And—

“Boss!” Finli shouted. “Boss, grab the Earnshaw kid! Something about this smells!”

And—

With Cag’s face pressing against one of his cheeks and Jakli’s against the other, the Wease (who thought as clearly as anyone that terrible morning) was finally able to make himself heard. Gaskie, meanwhile, repeated his command: divide up the armed guards and put them with the retreating Breakers. “Don’t try to stop them, but stay with them! And for Christ’s sake, keep em from getting electrocuted! Keep em off the fence if they go past Main Stree—”

Before he could finish this admonishment, a figure came plummeting out of the thickening smoke. It was Gangli, the compound doctor, his white coat on fire, his roller skates still on his feet.