Wizard

44 Thunder and Blazes

It was in the middle of her fourth magazine that the feeling began to trouble her. At first she could not put her finger on it. She shook her head, aimed, and fired another round. She swallowed dryly. It was quite possible the "gesture" was still going on; she could not know. Even if she hit the thing, her bullets were small and probably harmless. Nevertheless, she fired another shot and was about to shoot again when the feeling returned, stronger than before.

Something was telling her to run. That this should strike her as an unusual feeling to have in her present situation might have amused her at another time, but it did not now. She fired twice more, and the slide locked open on the empty chamber. She released the empty clip and let it fall beside her, where it clattered noisily. She swallowed again. The feeling came back, stronger than ever. Unaccountably tears came to her eyes and ran down her cheeks. Damn it, she was waiting to die, and it was taking longer than she had thought.

But she knew what she was feeling now, and the tiny hairs stood up on her arms and the back of her neck. For whatever reason, she was sure Gaby was telling her to move.

It was some trick of Gaea's. She moved a few uncertain steps, and it felt good. But she stopped moving, and the feeling started again.

Why was she determined to die? It had not been in her plan when she started, except in the sense that she had been prepared to die if it had to be. There were certain things she had to do. She had done them, and it had been her intention to flee afterward. Was this the trick? Was Gaea putting Gaby's voice in her mind to confuse her until vengeance could arrive?

But suddenly she trusted it. She began to walk toward the cathedrals.

The air seemed to split as a bolt of lightning crashed into the spot where she had been standing. She ran, and Gaea's wrath poured from the world all around her. The red line above glowed more brightly than ever.

Jump!

She obeyed, cutting sharply to her left, and another bolt crashed where she had been.

It was possible to build up a frightening speed in the negligible gravity of the hub, but it came slowly. Feet on the ground could not provide enough traction to accelerate quickly. She had to begin with short, choppy steps, gradually lengthening them until her feet touched the ground many meters apart. And the speed, once attained, stayed with her. She streaked along, touching the ground infrequently, as the lightning crashed.

The biggest difficulty was changing direction. When she decided she must veer to the right, it was hard to put the urge into action, but she managed and could not tell this time if it had done any good. No bolt hit where she had been.

The ground was shaking. Some of the cathedrals, hit by repeated bolts and now attacked from beneath, were coming apart. Stone gargoyles crashed around her as she overtook some of the people who had fled. Spires tottered in slow motion, fragmented, and monstrous blocks of stone started to float inexorably down. Though they might weigh only a few kilograms, their mass would crush anything they encountered.

Too late to turn, she found herself heading straight for the replica Notre Dame. She lifted both feet from the ground, continuing to skim along the surface until she had sunk half a meter; then she pushed off with both feet and soared into the air. She cleared the peaked roof, came slowly down, and bounced up again. Below her, the remnants of the Mad Tea Party milled like a disturbed anthill. She could see the sloping edge of the Rhea Spoke mouth just ahead. She would not touch the ground again; her momentum would carry her over nothingness. A few people had reached the edge and stood gazing down at a leap they could never make.

Cirocco reached into her wrap and took out a small bottle of compressed air. Twisting to face the red line, she held one end of the cylinder to her stomach and turned the valve on the other end. It hissed, and a steady pressure threatened to turn her around, but she kept it in balance. Soon she could see she was building up speed.

When the bottle was empty, she threw it as hard as she could, then removed the two remaining clips for the automatic and threw them, following it with everything in her pockets. She was about to throw the gun itself but hesitated. Robin deserved to have it back, if that were possible. Instead, she slipped out of the red blanket, balled it up as tightly as she could, and threw that. Every ounce of reaction mass counted in her haste to get moving.

Damn! She should have fired the remaining bullets instead of throwing them away. She might have been able to save her serape. But she could not think of everything, and besides, when she turned around, she saw it did not matter as much as it might have. The entire cylindrical interior of the Rhea Spoke crackled with a million electrical snakes. She had hoped to get quickly out of range, but now she must run this gauntlet.

Below her she spied the slowly circling shapes of her angel escort, waiting where she had instructed them. As she watched, one of them was struck, and seemed to explode in a shower of feathers. She looked away for a moment, sickened. When she brought her eyes back, she saw the remaining five had not scattered as she had feared they would. At first glance it might have appeared they were fleeing, for all she could see of them was their feet and their frantically flapping wings, but she quickly realized they had spotted a problem before she had, with their incomparably better ballistic senses. A few seconds later she streaked past them and had occasion to feel relief that she had not fired the remaining bullets. Her velocity was already high enough to put her in jeopardy of outdistancing them.

She turned and fell with her back to the ground. There was no point in looking for lightning flashes as she could do nothing to avoid them. She spread her arms to kill some of her speed, and the angels chased her falling body through the flickering tunnel.