Angelfire

TWENTY-ONE

GOLDIE

Twain’s words fall off my tongue into a vacuum. I don’t hear myself say them, because there are wild animals in my head. They’ve been there since just after I went around the corner. It is as if a door has opened, letting in something that makes me doubt my already questionable sanity. In a New York minute, I’d get down on my knees and beg Cal to high tail it back across the Jackson Street Bridge, collect our horses, and get the hell out of town.

An absurd thought. I don’t allow it access to my tongue. I pretend I’m utterly fascinated by the flow of people in the next cross street. Under the weird, hazy, demigloom of the Bubble, they float like varicolored motes back and forth across the intersection.

“You nuts, boy?”

I look up, wondering if I’ve inadvertently leaked mental chaos onto the sidewalk, to find Enid in my face. I realize I’ve walked about a quarter of the way down the block without any awareness of having moved. My quaking threatens to go public. If this is the beginning of a manic episode, the timing is cosmically bad.

Nuts? “That’s the rumor,” I mumble.

Enid plants one hand firmly in the middle of my chest.

“What’re you thinking? You don’t even know where in hell you’re going.”

An interesting choice of words. An unwanted chuckle bubbles out of me. I swallow it. “Sorry… um, just curious, I guess.”

Colleen is at my shoulder, peering into my face. “Oh, jeez, Cal, look at his eyes-he’s only half here.” She grasps the sleeve of my jacket, digging in her little cat claws. “We’re not natives in Oz, Dorothy. Try not to wander off, okay?”

“No need to be snide,” I tell her. “I get the picture.”

Cal turns to Howard, who’s standing a little away from us, trying to hide in the shadow of a mailbox. “Fill us in, Howard. What can we expect here?”

Howard snuffles a little and looks down the hill. “Dunno,” he mumbles. “Haven’t been in for a long time.” “Welcome to terra incognita,” I murmur.

Cal fires a glance at me, then swings back to Howard. “What do you know?” Even I can tell his patience is fraying. “Angelfire’s welcome here.”

Cal looks down toward the busy intersection. “We just go?”

Howard’s face puckers as if the question perplexes him. “Sure.”

Cal nods and turns to Magritte. “Before we go anywhere, I have to know what you sensed back there just now, Maggie. You said it was like the Storm. Is it … How, like the Storm? How much like the Storm?”

Maggie and I trade glances. She has gotten hold of herself, of her fear. She shames me and buoys me up in that look. She knows I know.

“It has the same … texture,” I answer for her. “It… uh … sounds like the Source, as if it’s, I don’t know, speaking the same language.”

They all stare at me, and Cal sweeps a hand through the luminous web that binds me to Magritte. “You were half a block away from her.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Describe it.”

“Confusing. Anomalous. I don’t have words… It’s like a … a stew of energies, sounds, voices, textures. A kaleidoscope. Dark. Sentient. Aware.”

Cal’s eyes are narrow cat slits. “One voice, or many?” Maggie quivers. “One voice,” she says, and I shake my head, unwilling to let the half-truth slip by.

“In front of many,” I add.

“ ‘My name is Legion.’ ” Doc had probably not meant to be heard. He blinks as if our sudden regard is blinding, and shrugs. “The Gospels. Christ casts a demon out of a young boy and asks its name. That is the answer it gives: ‘My name is Legion.’ ”

“Well, I’m freaked out,” says Colleen, hugging her crossbow to her breast. Her tone is light, sarcastic, but she means it. If only it were demons.

“Like Fred?” Cal asks me. “Was it like Fred Wishart? One of the Many? A shard? A piece of the Source? Or was it more?”

Fred Wishart was working on Uncle Sam’s little science project when it derailed. We had met him, after a fashion, in Boone’s Gap. Or at least we had met what was left of him before the Source finally tied up all its loose ends. Fred was just that, a loose end, an appendage to the Source. And he had drawn his considerable powers from it.

A piece of the Source. “I don’t know. I can’t tell.” “Don’t know? Or don’t want to know?”

I’m stopped by the look on Cal’s face. I realize what he’s asking and it stuns me.

He steps closer, penetrating my defenses for the second time today. Perimeter alarms go off all over the place. “You said it yourself-it costs a lot to let the Source in. I wouldn’t blame you for blocking it out by any means you could.”

“No, but I’d blame myself.” I wipe sweaty palms on my jeans. “Okay, let’s do this.” I close my eyes and arm myself to sample the strange, chaos vibe. To listen to the whispers in the air. But when I let my guard down, there’s nothing to listen to. There is a wall. And whatever we sensed has gone behind it. The Source has never closed itself off to me. I am the builder of the barricades; it possesses none.

And yet… “It’s like it’s hiding from me. If this is the Source, Cal, it’s playing games.”

Colleen turns to Cal and says, “If the Source is here, will we be ready for it?”

“We have to be,” he tells her. “Enid, what do you need to do to jam Magritte from human sight? The way you did when Colleen first saw you.” Mentally, he has already moved on. I try to follow him.

“I gotta sing out loud.”

“Out loud?”

“Don’t look at me, man. I don’t make the rules, I just play by ’em. I can jam the Storm by just thinking music. I can’t jam people’s eyes unless they can hear me.”

“Okay. If we get into real trouble, you may just have to make Maggie disappear.”

Enid’s dark face goes to ash. “Whatever it takes.”

I snag Magritte’s tether and we head down toward the intersection of Jackson and Wells and our first close encounter with local life-forms. Howard hobbles along in front while the rest of us try damned hard not to look like a troop of tourist commandos. It’s difficult to appear nonchalant and harmless with a machete dangling at your hip.

Not a single soul glances our way as we approach the intersection. It’s as if they can’t see us. The weirdness of this makes me turn back the way we’ve come.

Anyone who’s watched a lot of horror flicks (or lived them) knows better than to do this, but I am forgetful of these mundane details.

I catch Cal’s arm and turn him around so he’s facing our back trail. “Have you wondered why there are so many people down here on Wells and none up on Franklin?”

“That’s … interesting,” Cal says, because behind us Jackson Street disappears into an opaque cloud of lumpy red. Well, less like a cloud and more like dense cotton candy. My fear that we’ve entered a trap escalates, but Cal is not panicking. “Not real comforting,” he adds.

“Maggie,” I say, “look up our back trail.”

She glances at me, then pivots gracefully in the air. After a moment she shrugs. “What?”

“Cal and I see a thick, red cloud. What do you see?”

“Same as before-just kinda hazy. Want me to check?” She tugs at her tether and I release it reluctantly. She’s gone in a heartbeat, surprising me all over again with how swiftly she can move, how like a hummingbird or a dragonfly.

She disappears into the sticky-looking red stuff. Were we connected only by human sight, I’d be seriously freaked, but I know where she is and that she’s all right. As to the wall of cotton candy, after a moment’s concentration I see street, sidewalk, and asphalt arroyo-as Maggie sees it. Most comfortingly, I see the intersection of Jackson and Franklin. And I see Maggie.

She is back at my side in a flash of aqua light, shaking her head and telling me what I already know. “Like I said- same as before.”

I reconnect us.

Cal affords the cotton candy wall one last, dubious look before we join the others at the corner. Intent on the street scene, they seem not to have noticed the illusory barrier. Cal sees fit not to mention it.

We turn the corner onto Wells. In one step the city goes from deserted to bustling, but I remind myself that my standards are slightly skewed. Populated by bicycles, rickshaws, pedal-cabs, the occasional horse-or dog-drawn conveyance, by any pre-Change standard it’s still deserted. In and out among the larger vehicles weave people on skateboards, roller skates, scooters. It is muted traffic: no engine whine, no horn blare. Only the sound of bicycle gears, wheels against tarmac, shoe soles on asphalt, voices.

People, all looking pretty normal (to me, at any rate), move along the wide sidewalk. Many carry bags and satchels of various kinds-paper, plastic, cloth. I even see bags from major department stores-Macy’s, Saks Fifth Avenue, Neiman Marcus. Some folks wheel shopping carts full of stuff.

Huh. Maybe in Chicago the bag ladies have taken over.

Someone in a particular hurry shoves past me, pinballing me into Enid. I experience a moment of claustrophobia. It’s been months since I’ve been part of a street scene. I’d almost forgotten what it was like.

“The city that wouldn’t die,” I murmur.

“That’s my Chicago,” says Enid.

“This place is awfully well-kept for a postapocalyptic urban zone,” observes Colleen.

She’s right. Among the relatively untwisted wreckage of civilization, the pedal-cabs travel surprisingly garbage-free streets to deliver surprisingly well-dressed passengers to shops that seem to be open for business. A number of them have patched windows, but no glass litters the sidewalks as it does outside the Bubble. The whole place is squeaky clean by postapocalypse standards.

“No one’s armed, either,” Colleen notes. “At least not as far as I can see.”

We’ve been visible since we stepped from the mists of Jackson Street, and no two people react to the sight of us in the same way. Some lower their heads, avert their eyes, shy out of our path. Others stare us down, boldly and speculatively, and make no move to give us a wider berth. I find I can predict who will react in a particular way by what they wear and how they move. Not so different from the world we left behind.

Polarities. There are those who scurry or shuffle as if apologizing to the sidewalk. Their clothing suggests they have shopped in thrift stores or Dumpsters. These are the package-carriers, the cart-pushers. Street people. I know them. I am them. In this city, too, they are the shy ones. Seeming to exist in a parallel universe, they see not and are not seen.

Then there are those who appear stunningly mundane, average, untouched. There is nothing shy about them. They own the pavement; they command it. The others weave around them, follow behind them, beg their pardon.

“I don’t mean to be an alarmist, but people are definitely checking out Magritte.” Colleen has forsaken her usual position at rear guard to slip between Cal and me as we make our way down the block. “A guy in a turban just slunk by whispering prayers and shielding his face, and I’ve seen at least three people cross themselves or clutch at something around their necks when they see her.”

We stop in the middle of the block and watch ourselves being watched. Colleen is right. People are checking out Magritte. Staring at Magritte, and finding her noteworthy. I glance around, claustrophobic again. In the semidarkness of a doorway a man in a suit-looking both at home and out of place at once-is studying us intently. Studying her.

Panic rises in my throat.

Cal looks down at our grunter Sacajawea and asks, “Is there something you want to tell us, Howard?”

The little guy blinks up at Cal through his mirrored shades. “Like what?”

“Like, do these people consider Magritte a deity, or a demon, or what?”

“Let’s just get the hell out of here,” I whisper, tensing to run.

Colleen catches my arm in a steel grip. “Chill, Goldman.”

Before I can “chill,” whistles cut the air behind us, letting out bleat after persistent bleat. I have images of policemen on black and white skateboards in pursuit of us gatecrashers. Everyone else draws back from the center of the sidewalk at the first tweet, but we flock dead center like a bunch of domestic turkeys awaiting the hatchet.

Belatedly, we scatter, too. I grab Magritte and thrust her into the shelter of a wide archway before we are run down by three roller-bladers in Day-Glo spandex, knee pads, and helmets. Each wears a collection of fanny packs and a backpack, carries a baseball bat, and clutches a metal police whistle between his teeth. In a skirl of sound and a swirl of wind they are gone, flying ahead of us down the block. Our fellow travelers move back onto the sidewalk and continue their sojourns.

I take a deep breath and loosen my hold on Magritte, if only a little.

She peeks over my shoulder at the retreating couriers. “You okay?” The curve of her mouth suggests she is fighting the urge to laugh at me.

Before I can answer, another voice intrudes: “Is that your deva?”

“Day-vuh,” he says, and I wonder which one of us he’s mistaken for a Hindu deity. I turn, shielding Magritte with my body. It’s the Suit.

“Excuse me?”

He nods through me at Maggie. “The deva, she yours?” “Yeah, I’m his,” says Magritte. “Fuck off.” Her voice is harder, colder, more acidic than I’ve ever heard it.

The suit seems amused. “You taking her in?”

Taking her in. I’m Clueless Joe, here. “No.”

“Really? That’s quite a mouth she’s got. Could be a real annoyance after a while. Interested in selling?”

Okay. Something less than a deity, then. “Fuck off,” I say, and haul Magritte back out onto the sidewalk where the others have already collected.

“Let’s get the hell off this street,” I tell them. “Now.”

I start down Wells again at warp speed, Magritte moving in harmony. When I finally slow down a bit, Cal catches up to me and pushes me into a defunct bus stop kiosk. The rest of the crew crowds in around us. Howard dives under the bench.

“What happened back there?” Cal asks.

I want to pace, but there’s no room in the cramped quarters. I settle for shifting from one foot to the other and tapping out a rhythmic tattoo on the handle of my machete. “A suit just tried to buy Magritte off me.”

“Oh, jeez,” Colleen mutters, eyes on my face. “He’s losing it.”

Maggie leaps to my defense. “No he’s not. This guy asked if Goldie was taking me in, whatever the hell that meant. Then he tried to buy me.”

Colleen grimaces, glances at Doc, then almost meets my eyes. “Sorry, Goldie,” she mumbles, and slips to one end of the kiosk to watch the traffic flow by.

“Taking her in,” Cal repeats. “Maybe he was just asking if you meant to keep her, take care of her.”

“No, no. That wasn’t it. We’d already established that she was my flare.”

“It pissed me off,” says Magritte. “What, do I have a damned For Rent sign on my forehead?”

Cal glances up and down the street. “Okay, well, that gives us a little insight into the place. Apparently, some people are commodities here.”

“Some things never change,” says Magritte.

I ask, “Enid, do you think feedback would be a problem in here?”

He shoots me a startled glance. “Nobody’s threatened Maggie. That guy’s probably just doing business as usual. Maybe he’s a pimp.”

Maggie shakes her head. “I know pimps. He seemed more like a stockbroker.”

I glance back up the street. “Yeah, well, the stockbroker is following us. Can we blow this bus stop?”

“Let’s,” Cal says, and prods Howie out from under the bench.

Our pace isn’t brisk enough to keep the suit from overtaking us and putting himself in our path. “You didn’t wait to hear my offer,” he tells me, smiling. “I can be very generous.”

“Really? Well, I can be very violent. Please take no for an answer.” I lay a hand on my machete.

He seems not to take me seriously. “I can get all kinds of swag,” he says. “Jewelry, twenty-four karat gold, precious stones. Fresh water? I can get you fresh, clean water. And fruit.”

“She’s not for sale,” says Colleen, stepping out from behind me to face the suit. Her crossbow is aimed at his heart. “What part of this very basic concept don’t you get, mister?”

Her, he takes seriously. He stiffens, eyes the weapon, and steps back a pace, but he doesn’t give up. “She’s useless to you. Your friend here said he wasn’t planning to redeem her, so I thought perhaps…”

Colleen trades glances with me. “What do you mean, redeem her?”

An icy jolt of fear ripples through the connection between Maggie and me. I can’t tell whose it is, but I think of her uncle Nathan and sermons on salvation.

“You’re obviously not local,” says the suit. “Devas are worth a great deal around here, but you have to know the ropes, which you clearly don’t. I can act as middleman, pay you for her up front, handle the details of the redemption process myself.”

“Jesus,” says Colleen. “It’s like she’s a beer bottle or something.” Her hands flex on the crossbow as if they are just dying to take this joker out.

His eyes don’t miss this, but he persists. “If you don’t turn her in willingly, he’ll only take her away from you. You might as well derive some profit from it.”

“He?” asks Cal. “He who?”

“The Boss.” He pauses to glance at us askew. “You really are new here. Where are you from?”

“I’m from Chicago,” says Enid. “Before any of this happened. They’re from-”

“Yes, well, this Chicago is subject to the rule of law. That’s what holds it together. Specifically and especially, the law of supply and demand. I work the supply side. And trust me, there is a definite demand for her kind.”

“Why?” asks Cal. “Why her kind?”

The suit looks at Magritte, who moves farther behind me. “She’s a rare commodity, for one thing.”

“Look,” says Enid, before I can ask about the other thing. “I don’t give a shit about your laws or your demand. We’re not selling.”

He sidesteps the suit and moves off down the block. Cal gives the guy a last look and follows, pushing Howard a little ahead of him. The rest of us fall in behind.

When I glance back, the suit is gone. I feel no relief. My eyes brush Colleen’s as I face front again. We share an unlikely moment of accord.

“We might have been able to pry some information out of that guy,” Cal says.

“Yeah, maybe,” counters Colleen, “but could you stand being in the same breathing space with him for that long?”

Adams is less heavily traveled; we zig right onto it and a block later zag left onto LaSalle. We hurry; our eyes miss nothing. I find myself thinking about “the Boss.” My mind combines the historical with the virtual and conjures an image of a computer-generated guy in pinstripes and fedora with a tommy gun. Stupid, huh? I mean, tommy guns don’t even function anymore, except maybe as door stops, and these days all reality is virtual.

I scan the skyline. An impossible task; the buildings go up into a red Forever. But once or twice I think I see something large and shadowy gliding from pillar to post many, many stories above us. I decide I’d prefer it not to be real and sanguinely chalk it up to a mixed state (the bipolar equivalent of a rinse/spin cycle). It does not occur to me to wonder, at that moment, who or what is doing the mixing. I say nothing. I find I’m less afraid of actual mania than I am of having Colleen accuse me of being manic before the world.

“Oh, man, smell that?” asks Enid as we turn onto Randolph.

Food. Cooking. I salivate, remembering that I haven’t eaten since early morning. Ahead of us, people sit in a sidewalk bistro, dining. Chefs in white uniforms grill meat and veggies on barbecues under a green and white striped awning. For a moment I imagine that we really are in Oz.

“I wonder what they use for money besides gold and water?” Cal asks.

We pass by the bistro reluctantly, wistfully, hungrily, and continue east. I notice something. While the bistro’s tables are peopled by the well-groomed and the bold-eyed, there are small knots of bashful bag-carriers clustered around the green wrought-iron perimeter as if waiting.

A little farther up the street curiosity gets the better of me when I spot a pair of the grab-bag people huddled near the doorway of a fragrant place labeled ROSE’S TEAROOM. He is white and twenty-something; she is Asian, a little older, worn and faded. Her skin is more sallow than golden, and there are bluish smudges beneath her dark eyes. The two stand, listless, speechless, shoulder-to-shoulder, looking at nothing, packages piled about their feet.

I plant myself right in front of them. “Excuse me,” I say, when they pay me no notice whatsoever. “We’re from out of town and we were, um, wondering if there might be a place nearby we could spend the night.”

The woman blinks as if a patch of empty air has just spoken, while the guy says, “Huh?” His eyes lift only momentarily to my face, then glance away to my shoe tops.

I smile. “We just got here and, well, uh, all this,” I gesture up and down the street, “is kind of a surprise.”

The two exchange glances. Hers has an element of desperation in it that is only too familiar. I saw it all the time in Manhattan: in the underground, in the streets, in the high rises.

The guy lowers his voice. “Out of town? You came from outside?” For the first time his eyes actually make it to my face. Then they dodge to a spot over my shoulder and he says, “Shit!” and leaps backward, slamming against the stone railing of the tearoom’s porch. The woman, following his gaze, gasps and clutches his arm, her eyes going wide.

It’s Maggie, of course, hovering brightly behind me.

“Look, man,” says the guy. “You just move on, okay? Just… just leave us alone.”

The woman tugs at him. “Sammy, no, they’re from outside. They got in; maybe they know a way out.”

Sammy shakes his head, eyes trying to hold mine. “They’re not really from outside, Lily.” It is a statement of fact, he’s that sure.

Doc and Cal have moved to flank me. Doc says, “I assure

you, my friend Goldie is telling you the truth.” Though he

speaks to Sammy, it’s Lily’s face he’s focused on.

“We’ve come from New York,” says Cal. “It’s taken

months to get here, but we got into Chicago just today.” “Yeah?” Sammy says. “And how’d you manage that?” “Uh, walked over the Jackson Street Bridge,” I say.

Sammy’s smile is completely mirthless. “Through the firewall?”

“The what?” Cal asks.

“When we came through,” says Doc, puzzled, “there was only a red haze. Lily, that’s your name, yes?”

She nods.

“Lily, I am a doctor. Forgive me for the observation, but you do not seem well. Are you often tired? Dehydrated?”

Now she looks at Doc as if he’s just offered to raise her from the dead.

“Don’t listen,” Sammy says. “They’re lying. He’s no doctor. And they’re not from outside, there’s no way.”

“Way,” I protest. “Maybe it looks like fire to you, but it looks like cotton candy to me. It’s neither. It’s an illusion. You know-abracadabra, hocus-pocus, magic?”

Doc slides me a bemused look, then draws Lily a little aside.

“Yeah?” says Sammy. “Some illusion. I saw a guy get third-degree burns from your hocus-pocus, bud.”

I feel Cal’s sudden and intense interest like a hot flash. “What did you say? Third-degree…”

“Burns,” repeats Sammy. “You heard me.”

“But outside,” murmurs Lily, still listening. “If there’s really something left outside-”

“Lily, please,” says Doc, his voice gentle. “Do you have pain here?” His hands are equally gentle as he draws her head back around and probes the sides of her neck just below her jaw.

“There’s nothing outside,” says Sammy.

“Says who?”

He looks at me as if I’m speaking in tongues. “Everybody knows, man. It just is.”

It just is. Resignation? Hypnosis? Mass hysteria? “So what do you do here?” Cal asks.

Sammy glances sideways at Lily. “Mostly wait… and starve. While she’s in there. They really don’t give a shit if you go hungry all day while they screw around.”

“They?” Cal shakes his head.

“Them.” Sammy shakes his head. “Shit, you’re freebies, aren’t you?”

Sigh. And me without my handy Traveler’s Guide to PostApocalyptic Slang.

“What the hell are you doing?” The female voice is as chill and biting as Chicago’s normal winter weather.

We look up and gawk like a herd of startled deer. I hear Howard snuffle and assume he has found something to hide behind.

She stands four steps above us in the open door of Rose’s Tearoom, dressed impeccably in a charcoal-gray wool pantsuit, hair and makeup perfect, expression outraged. “Why are you harassing my people?”

Her people.

Cal smiles his most clean-cut, all-American litigator smile and says, “Just asking for information. We’re from… out of town.”

We watch her reaction with great interest: the widening of the eyes, the arching of the brows, the lifting of the head. Her eyes go immediately to Magritte, and the expression in them changes. Then the She-Suit checks each of us over carefully, picking at this and that, lingering on the armament, which most of us carry in plain sight.

She focuses on Doc, perhaps because he is unarmed, or perhaps because he stands so close to one of “her people.” “Are these your bodyguards, sir?” she asks him.

I swivel my head toward Doc and mouth, Say yes.

He does, without batting an eyelash.

Her whole manner mutates, going from challenge to chagrin in the turn of a phrase. “I apologize if I was rude, but armed as they are, they tend to intimidate. Then again, I suppose that’s why you have them.” She offers an uneasy smile.

At this point, Doc, God bless him, sees a window of opportunity for his particular passion. “I could not help but notice,” he says, “that this woman’s color is not good. She is dehydrated and her glands are swollen. If she is in your employ, I would recommend that you allow her several days of rest and that she see a doctor. I don’t know what the state of medicine is here, but surely something can be done for her.” The she-suit reddens and glances from Lily to Doc. “You … you want her to see a doctor?”

Doc smiles. “I am, myself, a physician. Unfortunately, I have nothing with me that might help.”

I don’t know which reaction makes me the queasiest, the She-Suit’s nostril-flaring, eye-rolling expression of silent fury or Lily’s abject fear.

“You want her to see a doctor,” she repeats.

Doc hesitates, puzzled. “It would be for the best, yes. And her diet-if she could have leafy vegetables it would be very good, although I realize they may be hard to obtain.”

Not according to the menu posted in the tearoom’s front window. Spinach salad is right at the top of the leafy green list. I don’t grok the price units. There are symbols in column B, but none of them are dollar signs.

Faces have appeared in the window to peer out at us, and an animated dialogue is taking place behind the glass. I catch Colleen’s eye and incline my head toward the window.

She looks, steps to Doc’s side and lays a hand on his arm, but he’s too involved in the task of saving Lily to notice. She gives the arm a gentle shake. “Viktor, we need to go.”

Doc nods and looks back to the she-suit. “My friend reminds me that we have an appointment. Please, if you are able, see that Lily gets to a doctor.”

“I’ll see what I can do.” She glances from Doc to Magritte and adds, “sir.” She watches as we move away up Randolph.

When I glance back, a man has joined her on the steps. Without a word to Sammy or Lily, they fade back into the tearoom.

Okay, that was disturbing. I find my legs are suddenly heavy and loath to move the farther we get from the tearoom and the two unfortunate people left waiting and starving there.

“Why was that woman so deferential to me?” Doc wonders as we drag our demoralized bones up the block.

“You were unarmed,” suggests Cal. “She took us for bodyguards and figured you must be the VIP we were protecting. Also, of the lot of us, you’re arguably the most presentable, except for Magritte.”

True enough. Doc, even in his fleece-lined, buffalo plaid jacket, still looked the part of a distinguished, if shaggy, professor.

“Her people,” murmurs Colleen. “God, that makes me sick.”

Cal chews his lip and worries his sword hilt. “Sammy seemed completely convinced there was no way out of here.”

Colleen puts a hand on his arm. “Yeah, what was all that about a firewall?”

Cal carefully describes the opaque red goo that ate Jackson Street and I repeat what Magritte said about it not being real.

Colleen echoes Sammy. “Not real? What’s not real that causes third-degree burns?”

“Oooh, is this a riddle?” I don’t mean to sound glib, but sometimes glib just pops out of my mouth.

Colleen ignores me and Cal looks uneasy. “Magritte,” he says, “when you went back up Jackson into the … the cloud, did you feel as if you might be in danger?”

“No. It was a mirage.”

“Maybe it’s only a mirage if you’re a flare,” says Colleen. “Maybe for normals like us, it’s a one-way street.”

Chilling words.

“Normals like us,” repeats Cal softly.

“Maybe that’s why we haven’t seen any twists in here besides Howard and Magritte,” I say. “They’ve all split… or been redeemed.”

“It goes further than that,” says Cal. “I don’t recall having seen anyone in here do anything that wasn’t a hundred percent pre-Change mundane.”

“Which means?” asks Colleen.

I hold my breath and my tongue. TMI. Too much information. My head is swimming in it-in pieces of meaningless flotsam.

“I don’t know what it means,” says Cal. “But we’re almost to Dearborn. Let’s focus. Let’s get this done, okay?”

I don’t know which one of us sees it first. Irrelevant, I suppose. I only know that when we turn the corner onto Dearborn and walk into the shadow of the Chicago Media Building, a great, black, oily wave of horror breaks over me. Time, light, reality, life, all stop and I am nailed to the sidewalk by the weight of sheer terror.

This is hell, I think. We have turned the corner into hell.

The Tower stands fifty stories tall, slick and gleaming, beneath a canopy of dark, inescapable radiance. We’ve all been here in our worst nightmares. We have visited this spot in a landscape we each imagined, prayed, hoped, was entirely internal.

I’m aware of Magritte clinging to me, warmth in a suddenly frozen world. Her sobs fill up my universe for a stunned instant, then other, alien voices come screaming through my head like a gale-force wind. They tear at me- at us. They are at once sweet and sad and hungry.

And familiar.

Magritte twists in my arms. “Make them stop! Oh, God, Goldie, make them stop!”

But I can’t. I’ve been ambushed-with no chance to regroup.

It’s Enid who makes them stop, rolling homemade, heartfelt melody off of his tongue, weaving a field of sound. The alien voices fall silent, but only for a moment, then they are back to batter at Enid’s shield.

I hide my eyes from the Tower, afraid that if I look at it, it will devour me from the inside out. I look anywhere else. At Magritte, burrowed tight to my side.

At Colleen, who herds us back into the shadowy canyon that is Randolph Street.

Doc’s face is a Siberian wasteland, and his eyes are windows into a variety of death I have never seen, for all my time on the street.

Cal, blank-faced and stoic, pulls us along the sidewalk, urging Enid to sing, to keep singing. And Enid sings, the tracks of tears gleaming wetly on his dark cheeks. I don’t think they’re for the Tower, or even for what it represents. They are for those he can’t see, but who will be touched by his music in ways he never intended.

It is some time before it sinks in that Howard Russo is gone.