THIRTY-TWO

The matron healer watched the wall of monitors, her sausage fingers curled with tension. In her prime, Olga Varnov had been a knockout blonde of stunning proportions. Now her hair was gray as ash and her body stood a balloon-sculpture parody of its former self. Not that she cared. Her need for beauty had perished at age twenty, when a bad reversal rendered her infertile, unsuitable for marriage. She’d grown content in her role as the clan’s beloved nurse and nanny. There wasn’t a Gotham under forty who hadn’t had their diapers changed or their wounds undone by Mother Olga.

She followed Amanda’s progress from screen to screen as the lovely young woman brushed the wall of the lobby, clutching her crucifix necklace in fright. On another monitor, three hazy figures crept down the stairwell, all lumiflaged against the backdrop like chameleons. Olga knew Ben Herrick could sear poor Amanda to a crisp while Colin Chisholm could cut her to shreds with flying knives of tempis. They advanced slowly on their prey, approaching a range close enough to guarantee an instant kill.

Olga clutched her giant bosom and turned away. “I can’t watch. This is slaughter.”

“You don’t have to look,” said Ivy. “Just be ready if things go bad.”

Ilavarasi Sunder was an Indian beauty of thirty-three, as tall and slender as the woman Olga pitied. She sported the same black bodysuit she wore at the Terra Vista siege, only now the nylon was stretched by a ten-week baby bump. Ivy only had to think of her child to erase all doubt about her mission. She only had to recall the gruesome death of Krista Bloom to shed her empathy for these Pelletier pets.

She stood behind her diminutive niece, who feverishly worked the camera console. As always, Gemma dressed well beyond her ten years of age, sporting the blouzer/skirt combo of a power executive. It was an improvement over the sleek-a-boo tinytops she usually wore.

“See anything yet?” Ivy asked her.

“No.”

“I don’t mean the cameras.”

“I know what you meant. If Azral and Esis were coming, I’d be screaming right now.”

Ivy sighed with guarded optimism. It seemed these breachers were on their own. Of course she’d thought the same thing in Terra Vista, just before her best friend was brutally butchered by Esis. Oh Krista. I left you to die. I failed you so horribly. Please forgive me.

Their command center was located four blocks north of the ambush site, in a tenth-floor office that was currently closed for renovation. Three of the walls were raw wooden beams. The fourth stood bare in plaster.

Ivy only needed one solid surface for her portals. She was ready to extract wounded teammates at a moment’s notice. There would be no more casualties, she swore. Not on her side.

—

Hannah sped like a missile through the sofa clusters, launching her frantic gaze in every direction. After two dashing circuits around the lobby, a hot cry of relief escaped her throat. There were no corpses to be found here. Zack and Mia must have fled through a different exit.

Beyond the slow-motion dribble of the tiered stone fountain, she caught her sister’s laggard form. Amanda kept to the walls beneath the overhang, out of view of any high snipers. Hannah couldn’t see any movement on the upper levels.

Her heart lurched when she heard soft footsteps behind her. She spun around and raised her pistol.

Bruce Byer jumped back and threw his hands up. Unlike everything else in the sluggish blue haze, the man who’d impersonated Peter Pendergen moved quickly and carried a faint red tint to his countenance. He squawked fearful words that were too rushed for Hannah to understand. She realized, with mad consternation, that he was shifted at an even higher speed than hers.

She concentrated until his crimson hue vanished and she matched his velocity.

“—not my idea!” he yelled. “I was against this from the start!”

Hannah kept the gun fixed on him. The man had set them up to die like clay ducks in a shooting gallery. Now she’d caught him sneaking up on her. She didn’t think it was to apologize.

“Give me one reason why I shouldn’t shoot you in your stupid lying face!”

“None of this was my choice! The elders forced me into it! Rebel’s got them all—”

“Rebel?! He’s here?”

“Yeah. This was his trap. My only job was to take the call and meet you guys here. I wasn’t supposed to fight you. I’m not a fighter at all.”

Hannah could see that. Any hint of masculinity he’d displayed as Peter Pendergen was now utterly gone. She squinted at him skeptically. “What are you then? An actor?”

“Yes, actually. A very accomplished one. I’ve been on Broadway.”

She knew there were a hundred better questions she could be asking right now, but her mouth got ahead of her. “In what?”

“God. Lots of things. Angeline, Dog Days, One Summer in Paris. I was with the touring company of Babes in Toyland.”

Hannah’s eyes lit up. “I know that one.”

“Babes in Toyland?”

“Yeah. I did it in college.”

“You’re an actress?”

“Uh-huh. I played Jane.”

“I was Alan.”

The two speedsters blinked at each other in addled stupor.

“Why are you people trying to kill us?”

Bruce chucked his hands. “Honestly, I don’t even know. A few months ago, all our prophets started madding out, screaming gloom and doom. Then some of our young ones started disappearing and everyone panicked. Rebel’s the only one who seemed to have a plan. He says killing you breachers will make everything right again.”

“That’s crazy! Why does he think that?”

“Who can say with these augurs? They’re all nutballs. Of course they think the same thing about us swifters. It’s strange to meet a new one after all this time. Do you ever hallucinate when you go real fast?”

A wary voice in Hannah’s head cut her off before she could answer. He’s still playing you. He’s stalling for time.

She turned around to check on her sister and now caught the outlines of three shrouded men. They crouched fifty feet behind her, moving in with the blended stealth of crocodiles.

“AMANDA!”

A shadow grew at Hannah’s feet. Once again, she spun around to see Bruce raise his fingers in anxious surrender. He’d halved the distance between them while her back was turned. Now Hannah could see the tip of a wooden nightstick protruding from his sleeve. At this speed, he could crack her skull like an eggshell.

“You asshole!”

“It’s not what you think. I was just—”

“Fuck you!”

She aimed the gun at his thigh and pulled the trigger. His leg erupted in a bloody torrent.

Olga gasped as she watched Bruce’s plight on the monitor. Gemma yelled into her headset.

“Don’t all go for the swifter! Someone get the tempic!”

Her warning went ignored. The moment they heard the gunshot, the three Gothams swung their palms at Hannah and launched their attacks in reflex.

A pair of twelve-inch tempic shards shot from the hands of Colin Chisholm, a stocky young blond with a pocked and piggish face. Even in Hannah’s shifted state, the projectiles flew at her like fastball pitches. She dove out of their way, her shoulder colliding painfully with the edge of the fountain as she dropped to the tile. Her pistol fell in the water.

Ben Herrick, the gangly beanpole of the trio, fired an invisible blast of heat from his charred right palm, a blurry cone of air that cooked everything in its path. Tables smoldered. Upholstery bubbled. Ceramic lamps burst apart. Hannah ducked behind the concrete fountain. She shrieked as hot steam hissed above her, scalding the hand that remained clasped on the fountain’s lip.

There was no escaping the third assault. Nick McNoel was a portly redhead of seventeen, a skilled lumic who’d been bending light since he was a toddler. The cloaking colors vanished from the trio’s skin and garments as he channeled his thoughts. Suddenly Hannah became engulfed in a dome of searing white radiance. The light blinded her through the membrane of her eyelids.

Gemma’s high voice howled in their earpieces. “Goddamn it! The tempic!”

Amanda clenched her teeth and thrust her hand at the attackers. A spray of white force erupted from her palm, quickly splitting into three long arms that shoved each man back against the steps. She felt something snap in Nick McNoel’s back.

The tempis vanished. Amanda rushed to her sister’s side. “Hannah! You okay?”

“No! My hand hurts and I can’t see anything! I can’t see!”

Amanda studied her red, blistered fingers. They looked like second-degree burns.

“You’ll be okay. Just hold on to me. We have to go.”

“I shot someone,” Hannah uttered, in a stammering daze. “I aimed for the leg. Is he . . . is he alive?”

Bruce lay unconscious on the nearby tile. From the way blood spurted from his thigh, Amanda was sure the bullet hit an artery. Her inner nurse and Christian clamored for her to make a tourniquet. She dismissed them both as lunatics.

“He’ll be fine. Come on.”

A half mile away, Olga grabbed Ivy’s arm. “He’s bleeding to death! You have to extract him!”

Ivy kept her hot gaze on the sisters. “What are you waiting for, Mercy? Hit them! Now!”

Amanda caught new movement above her. By the time she looked to the second floor and saw the slender young Asian at the railing, it was already too late.

Mercurial Lee was the daughter of augurs. Her birth name itself was a prophecy, a forecast of her future temperament. Though she’d spent much of her life trying to disprove the prediction, there was no denying it. The twenty-three-year-old artist was a turbulent woman, as quick to humor as she was to huff. She heckled the elders at public assemblies and littered the walls with subversive graffiti. She arrived at a wedding wearing nothing but handcuffs, a protest against the clan’s forced unions. Her parents would have done just as well to name her Rebel.

Five weeks ago, her teenage brother Sage became the latest young Gotham to mysteriously vanish, a shock that put an end to her incendiary antics. At long last, Mercy stood aligned with her people. Her unique temporic talent, one she’d long considered useless, had single-handedly turned the tide in the battle against the Golds. To Rebel, she was more than a cherished ally. She was the key to destroying the Pelletiers.

With a heavy thought and an unblinking stare, Mercy enveloped the sisters in a field of concentrated solis, the equivalent output of a thousand home generators. The bombardment scrambled the sisters’ access to temporis, turning them back to the normal people they once were.

Hannah furrowed her brow at the faint new tickle under her skin. “Something happened. I feel weird.”

The moment Amanda wiggled her indelibly pink fingers, she recalled the four humming towers the Deps had used to suppress her tempis. Now the great white beast wasn’t just sleeping inside her. It felt all but dead.

She looked to the steps, where Colin Chisholm and Ben Herrick rose to their feet. Then she peered up at Mercy again. The two women traded a look of grim understanding.

“Hannah, take my hand. We have to run.”

“Why? What’s happening? I still can’t—”

“Run!”

She pulled Hannah away. The two angry Gothams watched them stumble helplessly across the lobby. They raised their palms for a second attack.

Gemma turned from the monitors and shined Olga an ugly grin.

“Now it’s slaughter.”

—

Rebel followed the blood drops through the elegant reception area, a razzle-dazzle array of neon sculptures and lustrous white furniture. The ground-floor office belonged to Nicomedia Magazines, publisher of such upscale monthlies as Push, Preen, American Woman, and Taste. On the dimmer end of the spectrum, they put out Wonders, a biweekly pupu platter of weird news items that always managed to include one crackpot Gotham sighting. Seventeen days after the incident, the tabloid continued to swoon over the great tempic arm that dangled a man from a hotel balcony in Evansville, Indiana. Rebel wanted to kill the Silvers just for that headache.

Beyond the white glass wall lay a sprawling grid of office cubes. The blood trail ended at the edge of the first cluster. The targets had wisely plugged the leak before moving on.

Rebel checked his watch. Six minutes until Deps stormed the building. There was no time to search every cubicle. No reason. He pitched his gravelly voice across the room.

“Zack Trillinger. I know you’re in here. You know my voice. You know I’m not leaving till you and the girl are dead.”

Forty feet away, Zack and Mia crouched beneath a copywriter’s desk, both sheet-white and drenched in sweat. As they’d escaped the lobby, ninety seconds ago, Rebel’s bullet struck the wall and cut Zack’s neck with a flying shard of marble. Mia pressed a folded T-shirt to his laceration. The fragment had missed his jugular by an inch.

Now that she knew who was in the room with them, Mia fought her panic. If Rebel’s new gun was anything like his old one, he could probably kill them through six of these flimsy partitions. Worse, Zack had seen him shoot two ceiling cameras and a friend without even looking. He didn’t need a line of sight on his targets.

The hulking Gotham prowled the edge of the office, brushing his revolver against the cubicle barriers. With each tap of the barrel, he scanned the speculative future to see the end result of a gunshot. This little bullet kills a desk lamp. This little bullet cracks glass. This little bullet goes “wee wee wee,” all the way into no one.

“You won’t believe me, Trillinger, but I got good reasons for doing this. You people were never meant to come here. If you knew the damage you were causing just by living and breathing, you’d kill yourselves. I’m prepared to do it nicely. I got a bag of sedatives here with me. Just say the word and I’ll send you both home with a smile instead of a bullet hole.”

Zack fought a pitch-black laugh as his stomach seared with stress. Rebel looked down at his prosthetic hand, a clunky thing of chrome, rubber, and circuitry. He saw the folly of his offer.

“Guess you don’t believe that either,” he said. “I don’t blame you. Last time we tangled, you got me good. Stuck me with this million-dollar meat hook. Can’t say I’m happy about it, but I’m not angry anymore. If anything, you’re the one who owes me pain.”

He raised his revolver in readiness. “I killed your brother.”

All the blood rushed to Zack’s face as Rebel turned a corner. The gun barrel continued to make loud friction sounds against the cloth-board walls.

“Josh Trillinger. Tall guy. Curly hair. Little scar on his not-so-little nose. He was one of Azral’s New York group, tucked away in some fancy building in White Plains. We hit them last month in the middle of the night. Two of the Golds got away from us. Six didn’t. Your brother was one of the ones who didn’t.”

Mia squeezed Zack’s trembling hand. Hot tears spilled down both their faces.

“I took no pleasure in it,” Rebel insisted. “He seemed like a good guy. When his friends started dying, he came right at me. Faced me like a man. Now here you are, hiding under a desk with the other little girl. I fig your brother would be ashamed to see you right now. He’s probably been ashamed of you your whole life.”

Rebel could hear the faint sounds of shuffling as Mia struggled to keep Zack still. Though his skin burned red with rage, he only reached for the notepad above him. He plucked a pen from the floor and scribbled hastily.

He’s coming this way. I’ll hold him off. The second I move, you RUN and don’t look back.

Mia shook her head. The girl was only half Zack’s age, but she was no stranger to losing brothers. Now she was convinced that she had four more loved ones to mourn. In her dismal thoughts, David and Amanda and Theo and Hannah were all dying or dead. All she had left was the man in front of her. Her entire world was small enough to fit under a desk.

She seized the pad and pen, then scrawled what she could only assume was her final note.

I love you and I’m not leaving you. Don’t you dare think I would.

Zack closed his eyes and pressed his forehead to Mia’s. From the moment he realized he could end people with a thought, a dark new tunnel opened up inside him. He’d barricaded the entry with warning signs and cattle skulls and enough moral rhetoric to fill a synagogue. Even now he’d rather follow his brother into the afterlife than join Rebel in the dark fraternity of self-excusing murderers.

Ultimately it was the thought of Mia that shattered his obstructions and turned every red light green. He planted a soft kiss on her forehead, then steeled himself to take a path he knew was one-way only. Whether he succeeded or failed, there was no coming back from this.

Suddenly Rebel caught a fresh new glimpse of the minute to come. In his mind’s eye, he saw Zack spring out of an office cube, launching his temporis in a thirty-foot arc that would easily rift the Gotham a second time.

Unfortunately for Zack, there was a reason Rebel kept making noise, alerting his targets to his position. Now that he’d flushed out the Zack of next minute, Rebel knew exactly where the current one was hiding.

He ducked behind the corner and aimed his revolver through three cubicle walls. The future had a better story to tell now. This little bullet cracks the heart of an enemy. This little bullet hits home.

—

Hand in hand, the sisters fled across the marble, toward the emergency exit in the north elevator bank. In Amanda’s frantic thoughts, she reckoned they (maybe maybe please) had a chance if they reached the stairwell. They might even get their defenses back if they escaped the cruel Asian woman with the heavy eyeliner and the Kryptonite stare.

Twelve yards into their dash, a flying white sphere demolished the flower pot near Amanda. Colin Chisholm had ditched the knives in favor of firing tempic cannonballs. His cracked ribs screamed with blunt force trauma. He was determined to pay Amanda back in kind.

At twenty yards, the air around the sisters abruptly doubled in temperature. Ben Herrick might have roasted his targets alive if he hadn’t been hobbled by a fresh concussion. All he could summon now was a dry sauna blast, one strong enough to send Hannah stumbling to the floor.

Amanda rained sweat as she struggled to lift her. “Come on, Hannah! Please!”

A loud crack rang out from the balcony. A bullet pierced the coffee table behind them. Amanda threw a savage yell at the distant railing.

“LEAVE US ALONE!”

Mercy pulled the bolt lever of her rifle, her face streaked with mascara tears. It was only just this morning that her parents finally told her they were proud of her. Proud of her for doing this.

The gunshot scared Hannah back to her feet. The sisters ran again.

Once they reached the elevator bank, a tempic cannonball slammed Amanda’s left ankle. Her fingers flew from Hannah’s grip and she crashed onto her back.

“Amanda! What happened? Where are you?”

The widow cried with pain as she sat up to check the damage. The skin of her ankle was red and distended. Her foot pointed in a horrible new direction. Broken. It’s broken. It’s—

“Over. It’s broken. Hannah, you have to go.”

“No . . .”

“You have to go,” she cried. The temperature around them continued to rise. They could barely draw a breath. “The stairs are right behind you. Please!”

Through the murky brown spots in her vision, Hannah could see two approaching figures. It was already too late.

You were wrong, she thought to Ioni. You got it all wrong.

The actress sat at her sister’s side, their faces wet with perspiration.

“I’m sorry,” Hannah said. “For every awful thing I ever said and did to you. I’m so sorry.”

Amanda closed her eyes, squeezing her golden cross with one hand and her sister’s wrist with the other.

“Nothing to forgive,” she creaked. “You were never that bad.”

The two Gothams reached the elevator bank. Hannah shot them a hot wet glare.

“Assholes. You don’t even know why you’re killing us.”

“We know,” said Ben Herrick, with a shaky look that betrayed his confidence.

“You know nothing,” Amanda hissed. “Just do it already.”

The young men raised their palms for a final strike, and then arched their backs in screaming pain. With a sickening bone crunch, a curved white spike burst from the chests of both men, like elephant tusks. The tempis lifted the bodies three feet into the air and then hurled them to the ground like rag dolls.

Standing tall and fierce behind her two crumpled victims, Esis Pelletier shined a crooked grin.

“Hello, Givens.”

—

The high alarm scream of Gemma Sunder filled every earpiece, making Nick McNoel wince and Mercy Lee drop her rifle. Rebel flinched in surprise as he fired his revolver. The bullet cut through two cubicles, shattering the computer screen above Zack and Mia.

He shouted a curse, then pressed his collar mic. “Gemma, what—”

“Get out! Get out! Everyone get out!”

“What do you see?”

“Esis! She’s in the lobby! Ivy, get out of there!”

Rebel turned white at the mention of his wife. He made a furious dash for the exit.

Gemma was alone in the command center, her fearful gaze leaping between the monitors and the shimmering portal on the wall. Soon Ivy and Olga returned through the white liquid surface, lugging the ailing Bruce Byer between them.

Gemma frantically motioned them in. “Close it! Close it! Hurry!”

Ivy dropped Bruce’s legs and waved the portal shut. “Jesus, Gemma! Are you sure it’s—”

“Yes, I’m sure! She’s right there! She—”

Suddenly every screen went dark. The static hum of their headsets fell quiet. Ivy tried to hail Rebel three times, then covered her mouth.

“Oh no. No! I have to go back!”

Gemma’s head jerked back as if she just woke up from a nap. Like Mia, the girl shared a rapport with her future selves. But Gemma’s weren’t content to pass her notes. They possessed her body like demons.

Now four minutes older in mind and spirit, she closed her eyes and wept.

“You can’t go back,” she said. “You can’t help any of them.”

—

Freddy Ballad floated down the maintenance hall on a disc of radiant white aeris. Though the young blond Gotham stood among the elite minority of tempics who could slip the bonds of gravity, he never got the hang of wing flight. He settled for simple acts of levitation, a handy trick now that he needed stealth. In this narrow concrete passage, his feet would clop like Clydesdales.

Once the clamor in his earpiece died down, he steered his disc around a corner and whispered into his mic. “Rebel? Ivy? What’s happening? Are we aborting?”

No response. Even Gemma, that shrieking little bat, had gone quiet. His eyes darted back and forth in busy debate. He didn’t want to play the coward here. The Ballads had a history of weakness, both genetic and moral. Freddy had a rare chance to elevate his family’s status.

He pressed on with his task, continuing to test every door with long white arms before cautiously peeking inside. He didn’t know why he was so scared. His targets were a half-dead augur and a boy who could throw fake fire. What chance did they have against his tempis?

The last door on the right opened to an empty locker room. Freddy moved on, then backed up for a puzzled second glance. Something wasn’t right. The angle of the lockers changed oddly when he moved his head, as if he were looking at a forced-perspective painting.

Sharp white spikes grew from his arms. He hopped off his disc and stepped through the door.

Suddenly the illusive screen vanished and two figures turned visible. Freddy barely had a chance to register Theo in the background before his stunned gaze fixed on David and his government-issue pistol. It pointed right at Freddy’s face.

A hot stream of urine trickled down the tempic’s leg. “Wait—”

The gunshot rattled every surface in the room. Theo watched in wide alarm as the stranger fell backward in a bloody heap.

“God. Jesus. You killed him.”

“I saved us,” David replied. “Come on.”

After a quick scan of the hallway, he escorted Theo to the drab and tiny office of the building security manager. David stashed him behind the metal desk and crouched at his side. Theo saw new flecks of blood on the boy’s face. They mingled with the thin wet stripes that dribbled from his forehead gash.

“Stay here while I look for the others,” he told Theo. “Keep hidden. You’ll be all right.”

“I won’t.”

“Why do you say that? What do you see?”

Theo blinked confusedly. He was responding to something David said thirty seconds from now.

“I . . . never mind. Just be careful. I think Melissa might be coming. I think she’s bringing a whole lot of people.”

David cursed under his breath. That damn woman was the last thing they needed now.

“All right. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

He glanced down at the gun in his hand as if he just remembered it was there. He looked to Theo with pale discomfort.

“I would, uh . . . I’d consider it a kindness if you didn’t tell the others what I did. I’d rather they hear it from me.”

Theo nodded shakily as time looped again. “I won’t.”

Once David left the room, Theo’s hold on the present slipped away like a thousand balloons. He huddled in the corner, his mind scattering across futures near and—

“No.”

—very near. He felt a wave of panic so powerful that his whole body fell to quivers. Something was coming for him. Something terrible.

You have no cause for fear, a cold voice in his thoughts assured him. In moments, you’ll experience a great and wonderful change. Nothing will be the same again.

“No . . .”

Now a thousand busy screens in his head all united to display the smiling image of a white-haired man.

You are ready, Azral told him. Come to me.

—

Hannah’s thoughts screamed with discord as she helped Amanda into the elevator. She didn’t need her eyesight to identify their brutal savior. The woman spoke with the same alien accent as Azral, and carried a mincing mischief in her voice that no sane person could muster at a time like this.

Esis propped the door from the lobby and pressed the button for the twelfth floor. She dressed like she was headed for Aspen in her sleek gray ski jacket and black thermal leggings. Her winter boots left glistening blood prints on the carpet. She hadn’t bothered to walk around her victims.

“Stay high and out of sight,” she told the sisters. “This is no longer your battle.”

Hannah hadn’t encountered Esis since she was five years old, and was grateful she could barely see her now. Ioni’s harsh warning about the Pelletiers still rang heavily in her thoughts. They destroy worlds, Hannah. They destroyed yours twice.

“Is . . . Azral here too?” she asked Esis.

“My wealth addresses another concern. He entrusts his mother to end this mayhem.”

“W-what about the others?” Hannah asked. “What are you going to do?”

“To which others do you refer, child? Your enemies or your kin?”

“I mean my friends. Will they be okay?”

Esis threw Amanda a canny smirk, as if they were in on a chummy secret joke.

“Your friends, as you call them, are alive and in much better condition than the friend you currently hold. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have matters to discuss with the unfriendly others.”

Unlike Hannah, Amanda had a full view of Esis’s first “discussion,” one that left two young Gothams disemboweled on the floor. Now as agony and heat exhaustion pushed her to the edge of collapse, the widow scrambled to process this shark-eyed horror in front of her, a woman who slaughtered her enemies and employees without distinction.

“What do you want with us?” she asked Esis, in a parched rasp.

“A little gratitude, to start. I did save your life, and not for the first time.”

“What do you want with us?”

Esis slitted her eyes in a peevish squint before releasing the door.

“I want you to grow, my stubborn flower. I want you to live. If you wish the same, you’ll heed my advice.”

Her expression turned frigid. “And my warning.”

The elevator closed on her pointed last words, which struck Amanda like arrows. She envisioned a large tempic spike bursting through Zack’s chest, throwing him to the floor in a bloody heap.

Hannah held Amanda close as she continued to keep the weight off her broken ankle.

“It’ll be okay,” she insisted. “The others are all right. You heard her.”

The words did little to comfort Amanda. She stared ahead in a morbid daze, too distracted to notice the fifth-floor button lighting up on its own.

“What did she mean by ‘kin’?” Hannah asked her.

Amanda fixed her dark green stare on the doors.

“Nothing. She’s insane.”

—

The Gothams knew of Esis Pelletier. A week after Rebel’s ill-fated mission in Terra Vista, the clan’s best ghosters had traveled to Sterling Quint’s lobby and watched her slaughter four kinsmen in retrospect. Her tempic savagery was described in harrowing detail at the next elder council, enough to give nightmares to half the tribe.

Mercy Lee had missed that meeting. She’d been off sharing opiates and oral favors with a long-haired delinquent from Nyack.

Now she was all caught up on the matter of Esis.

Mercy hid behind a planter, struggling to hold back her screams as she listened to Nick McNoel’s gurgling last breaths. Esis had found the broken boy on the stairwell and wasted no time finishing him with a tempic sword through the neck. Three of Mercy’s teammates were dead now. Her comm-link was dead. Her solic charge was still drained from her attack on the Givens. I’m next. I’m dead. Oh God.

She parted the hydrangeas with trembling fingers, peeking down at the lobby through leaves and iron rods. No one was there. Maybe . . . maybe she . . . maybe she just . . .

A cold hand grabbed her ankle from behind. Mercy shrieked as she dangled upside down from a long white arm. The lip of her T-shirt tumbled down to her chin. Esis curiously studied her small breasts and flat olive stomach. A flowery vine tattoo spiraled around Mercy’s navel.

“Look at you. As lovely and filthy as an outdoor cat. Tell me, cat, why do you stain yourself with so many inks and oils?”

Thick black tears dribbled down Mercy’s temples. “Please! Please don’t kill me!”

“You slaughter my Golds and threaten my Silvers, and now you ask for mercy, Mercy?”

“Please! I’m sorry! I never wanted to hurt anyone! I just got scared! My brother—”

“Your brother lives,” Esis informed her. “He resides in our care, as healthy and pampered as an indoor cat. Does this news quell your bloodlust? Or must I find a stronger remedy?”

“No! No! Please!”

Esis threw a baffled gaze at the highest railing, beneath the artificial sky. Through the metal bars, she saw Hannah and Amanda hobble out of the elevator. She’d sent them to the twelfth floor, not the fifth. Her dark eyes narrowed in suspicion. No. Not him. The fool wouldn’t dare.

“Please!” Mercy shrieked. “I’ll do whatever you want!”

Esis turned back to her captive. She had no intention of killing Mercy Lee. The child came from an optimal gene line, and her future intersected heavily with Zack Trillinger’s. The two funny artists were practically born to entwine.

“You seem sincere, child. Perhaps I will spare you. But know that if you raise your claws against my little ones again, there will be no mercy, Mercy. Do you understand?”

Through her upside-down perspective, Mercy saw a large figure creep up the stairwell. She looked away for fear of alerting Esis. “Yes! I won’t! I promise!”

Rebel aimed his revolver through two metal posts. He reeled with doubt as he watched his speculative gunshot pierce the back of Esis’s skull. That can’t be right. It can’t be that easy.

Indeed, the moment he pulled the trigger, a small white portal appeared ten feet in front of him and swallowed the bullet whole.

Esis dropped Mercy and moved toward Rebel in a windy blur. He barely had a chance to react before she tackled him down the stairs. He crashed to the floor, his gun sliding thirty feet across the marble.

The mother Pelletier straddled his stomach, pinning him to the floor in a tempic web.

“Imbecilic ape. Did you think you were the only augur here? You see nothing compared to me. You’re a blind and stubborn fool and we are out of patience with you.”

Five stories above, Amanda took a wincing perch on a cushioned bench by the railing. She’d sent Hannah to the restroom to soak her scalded hand. Now she had a lone view of the conflict below, clear enough to recognize the man beneath Esis.

Rebel bucked and thrashed in her web. “I’ll kill you, bitch.”

“Your foresight fails you again, Richard. Shall I tell you the future? That crude piece of lead you fired at me will return one day when you least desire it. It’ll travel through the skull of your pretty wife. Or perhaps the tiny eye of your child.”

He bucked madly. “NO!”

“You’ve inconvenienced us greatly, Richard. Did you think we would tolerate it? You should have listened to Pendergen. You accomplish nothing by killing these children of ours.”

“The breaches—”

“The damage to this world is already done. It cannot be undone, any more than your hand can be unrifted. Cease your foolish crusade and perhaps we’ll let you and your family live to see its natural end.”

“I swear to God I’ll—”

“Kill me. Yes.” Esis sighed. “A stubborn fool to the last. So be it. Soon you’ll know—”

She threw her head back and gasped in cold shock. Even the most powerful augur couldn’t foresee every circumstance. When Esis dropped Mercy Lee to the carpet, she never anticipated for a moment that the terrified girl would rediscover her nerve. And her solis.

With a feral scream, Mercy drowned both Esis and Rebel in an invisible field of energy, dissolving the tempic web between them and flipping the cruel advantage. Esis was a 130-pound woman with slender arms and a delicate beauty. Rebel was not.

Amanda gaped, thunderstruck, as Rebel’s first punch drew blood from Esis’s nose and sent her flying onto her back. He leapt on top of her, pummeling her with fists both flesh and synthetic.

“You threaten my wife? You threaten my child?”

Four blocks away, the screens of the command center flickered back to life. Gemma did a double take at the action on the center monitor. This was not the future she’d seen. Not at all.

“Oh my God. He’s alive.”

Ivy raised her teary face from her hands. “What?”

“He’s alive! Rebel! He . . . Holy shit, he’s beating her!”

Olga looked up from her table. She’d just finished tying a tourniquet around Bruce’s leg and was now lowering his body temperature in preparation for reversal. Her ice pack dropped to the floor when she saw the two slaughtered kinsmen in the elevator bank. Dear Lord. No.

Ivy kept her rapt attention on the middle screen. “Oh God. Richard. Get the gun. Kill her.”

“Kill her!” Gemma screamed.

Kill her, Amanda cried in her broken thoughts. Kill each other.

Rebel continued his furious assault, reducing Esis to a raw and battered wreck. The woman had been raised in a more civilized era, where only the poorest suffered the indignity of pain. Even a surgeon like her could live her whole life without seeing a drop of blood.

Now as this ancestor ape thrashed her with his brutal fists, a shrill cry escaped her bloody lips.

“SEMERJEAN!”

A nine-foot portal opened on the second floor balcony. A speeding figure burst through the surface and knocked Mercy unconscious. It continued down the stairs in a blurry streak, yanking Rebel off Esis and slamming him against a wall. Two heavy-framed paintings crashed to the ground.

Now Amanda could see this new man clearly. He stood as large and bald as Rebel, with powerful arms and a broadly muscled back. His entire body was glossy white, like a marble statue of a naked Greek god. It took two squinting glances for Amanda to see that he was covered in tempis.

Ivy stared at the screen in slack horror. “Oh Jesus, Richard. Come on. Break free.”

Rebel may as well have been crucified for all the force that pinned him. When he tried to kick his aggressor, the man grew a second pair of arms from his hips. They held Rebel’s thighs to the wall.

Gemma shook her trembling head. “God. What is that? Is it even human?”

Only Rebel was in a position to glimpse the man behind the tempis. Through the small round eyeholes, he could see pale skin and sandy brown eyebrows. His fierce blue eyes brimmed with savage fury, like a panther in mid-roar.

Rebel hocked a spiteful gob at his attacker. “Fuck you, coward. A real man shows his face when he kills someone.”

Semerjean’s eyes laughed with a shrewd and vicious mockery that Rebel found even more frightening than his rage. Clearly this creature wasn’t just a thug on the family payroll. He was a Pelletier through and through.

Ivy cried out when the tempic man grew a third pair of arms from his rib cage. They struck at Rebel with relentless fury, cracking his jaw, breaking his teeth. Once Rebel’s face matched the bloody wretchedness of Esis, Semerjean melted away his extra limbs. He leaned in toward Rebel and hissed a gritty whisper.

“You’ll know when I’m killing you, boy. You’ll see my true face then.”

Rebel moaned in pain as Semerjean traced a finger along each cheek, rifting the skin just enough to scar him. He let his victim collapse to the floor, then gently scooped his wife into his arms.

Amanda watched in bleary-eyed anguish as Semerjean carried Esis through a new portal. The gateway shrank to a close behind them.

All was once again quiet in the lobby as the living fell as still as the dead. In the remote command room, three Gotham women stared numbly at the monitors. Gemma shuddered in her seat while she received new intel from the future.

“It’s safe to get Rebel and Mercy,” she told Ivy. “But you have to do it fast.”

“Why? Are those monsters coming back?”

“No.”

Gemma adjusted the camera displays to show a view of the street. A trio of ash-gray vans came to a halt in front of the building, with several more approaching.

The Deps had arrived in full force.

—

Howard Hairston parked his rental coupe at Bowling Green Park, a block away from the action. The freckly young redhead was the only member of Melissa’s team to follow her here. Everyone else had been called back to Los Angeles by the regional director, who sought to sever his office from this quagmire of a case. Until Integrity seized the reins, as everyone assumed they would, the six otherworldly fugitives were officially New York’s problem.

The moment Howard reached the siege site, he saw that New York was ready for them.

Seventeen government vehicles flanked the building—armored trucks, reviver vans, mobile thermal scanners. A trio of NYPD aerocruisers circled the roof like buzzards.

Howard scanned the crowd for Melissa, to no avail. He moved in on Rosie Herrera, a small and sturdy woman whose masculine features were only slightly countered by her salmon-pink ensemble. She paced the barricaded entry, commanding her men like Napoleon at Austerlitz.

“I want all exits covered before that tempis comes down. Every door. Every window. Every vent.”

“Excuse me . . .”

She held up a finger to Howard, then fumed at the young agent working the gate controls. “Why am I still looking at this barrier, Jules?”

“None of the overrides are working. Someone jammed it good.”

“Well, fix it already. We got thirty guys standing here with their twigs out.” She turned to Howard. “Who the hell are you?”

He raised his badge. She leaned in to study it. “Huh. Another one from Sunland. You must be Melissa’s boy.”

“Yes, ma’am. Has she arrived yet?”

“She’s here. She’s changing.”

“Changing?”

“You faced these perps before. How bad are they?”

“Bad.” Howard sighed. “One of them broke my teammate’s back. Another punched the gate off a Tug-a-Lug truck. They’ve got an Australian kid who’s an ice-cold gangster and a Filipino who probably already knows your middle name. If they slip out this time—”

“They won’t.”

“—it’ll be because of Maranan. That guy just knows things.”

Rosie snorted. “Unless he knows how to turn into sunbeams, he’s not getting out of there.”

The back doors of a truck swung open with a heavy thud. Eight imposing agents marched down the ramp. They wore the same padded black armor, with thick-soled boots and gray metal cables that ran between their gloves and their backpack shifters.

The lone female of the group broke away from the procession and approached Howard. He smiled at the dreadlock tips that dangled from the base of her mirrored black helmet.

Melissa raised her visor and flashed him a humble grin. “Hello, Howard.”

“Hi, boss. Damn. I guess I don’t need to ask if you’re ready.”

Melissa now had the power to move at twenty times her normal speed. Her armor carried four gas bombs, three flash grenades, two sonic screamers, and a stun chaser. She kept a snub-nosed pistol in her side pouch in case Zack rusted her primary weapon. Most crucial of all were the two reviver vans parked right outside the building. In lieu of winning over her quarry’s hearts and minds, she now had the freedom to shoot them everywhere else. This was Melissa’s final chance to capture the fugitives alive. She wouldn’t waste it on words.

She blew a hot breath, then looked to the barrier. “Let’s get this thing down, shall we?”

—

Hannah eyed her dreary reflection in the restroom mirror. Her vision was coming back in dribs and drabs, enough to let her see the magnitude of her sister’s injury. Amanda was in mortal agony and yet somehow she found the strength to fuss over Hannah’s trifling burn. You need to soak that hand, she’d told her. Put it in cool water, not cold.

After forty seconds, Hannah yanked her fingers from the sink in restless anguish. There had to be something she could do for Amanda. Maybe she could make her a splint out of something, or find some painkillers. For once it was time for the dizzy actress to take care of the nurse.

She returned to the hallway and scanned the many glass doors. Though her weirdness was still smothered under a lingering sheen of solis, she figured she could smash her way into any one of these offices if she found something heavy enough.

Her search was interrupted by the sudden presence of music, a faint and tinny riff of jazz lounge trumpets. Hannah looked around and saw that the door to a nearby office—some personal injury law firm—had been opened a crack. Stranger still, she could swear she recognized the song that blared from within.

Soon her suspicions were confirmed by the unmistakable voice of the divine Sarah Vaughan.

Whatever Lola wants, Lola gets.

And little man, little Lola wants you . . .

Make up your mind to have no regrets.

Recline yourself, resign yourself, you’re through.

Hannah reeled with fresh perplexity. This wasn’t some Altamerican retread of her old favorite showtune. This was a haunting echo from her old dead Earth.

She pushed the door open in a dark and dreamy daze. The law firm’s lobby was no larger than her old living room. Drab wood paneling covered every wall, while bubbly white chairs stood out like blisters on the red shag rug. There wasn’t another soul in sight.

Through the glass wall of a conference room, she spied a clunky homemade contraption at the edge of a long table. Two large speakers were bridged at the top by a thick square battery. Clipped, split wires curled wildly in all directions.

Resting in the center of the construct, like a beating heart, was a tiny pink device that triggered another sharp flash of recognition in Hannah.

She was looking at her own iPod, the one she’d carried in her handbag on the day the world ended. Last she knew, the thing was dead and gathering dust in Terra Vista. What the hell was it doing here?

Suddenly the ground beneath her vibrated. Eight-foot poles of tempis sprang up all around her in a perfect square formation. Panicked, she shook the bars, then looked down at the metal platform below. A large engraving by her foot reminded owners to check their local laws for restrictions on using this Ellerbee-brand live animal trap.

She covered her eyes. “Oh no. No no no no . . .”

Soft footsteps approached. A high and merry whistle kept rhythm with the song. Once her captor moved close enough to pause the iPod, Hannah opened her eyes and looked at him.

Evan Rander tossed her an impish grin through the bars of her cage. He tilted his head in mock concern.

“I’m sorry. Is this a bad time?”

—

Rebel lay flat on the marble, a grim and battered husk. The skin of his face had become as numb as a mask while the bones beneath throbbed with jagged pain. Through the sliver of his unsealed eye, he saw a narrow figure kneel at his side.

Ivy pressed his shoulders. “Don’t move, hon. Don’t try to talk. Your jaw’s fractured. You have four shattered teeth and that creature rifted some skin on your cheeks. But you’ll live.”

He could tell from her level of knowledge that Gemma had been to the future to get the doctor’s prognosis. The girl had probably already spent an evening at his bedside.

“Merzee,” he mumbled.

“Olga’s getting her now. She’s out cold, but she’ll make it. So will Bruce.”

Rebel couldn’t give a crap about Bruce Byer. He sensed from Ivy’s grim omission that all the others were dead. Ben. Colin. Nick. Freddy. We lost four. They lost none.

“Firdy . . .”

“Richard, don’t talk.”

“How?”

Ivy closed her eyes. “Gemma says he was shot in the face. She thinks the boy did it.”

A guttural groan escaped his lips. Ivy held his arm. “I know. I’m angry too. But right now I’m just so glad you’re okay. I can’t believe you survived that creature. I just can’t believe it.”

Rebel knew it wasn’t luck. The Pelletiers had chosen to spare him, either out of strategy or sadism. Now that he’d been rifted again, he knew he couldn’t be healed through reversal. The temporal discord in his body would kill him instantly, gruesomely. He’d have to recover the slow and painful way, as Semerjean no doubt intended.

While Olga carried Mercy over her shoulder, Ivy helped Rebel back to his feet. She slung his thick arm around her and walked him to her portal on the eastern wall.

Amanda followed their progress from her hidden perch. Just go already. Leave.

As Olga carried Mercy through the glimmering gateway, Rebel stopped and noticed his revolver. It had spun all the way through the eastern arch, resting halfway between the lobby and the entry for Nicomedia Magazines. One more second and he would have gotten Trillinger. One more second.

Ivy tugged him along. “Come on. We have to go.”

His fresh failures bubbled inside him like boiling water. All the evidence they were leaving behind. All the dead kinsmen. All the living Silvers.

Rebel broke away from Ivy and charged through the archway.

“Richard!”

He seized the gun and fired seven shots through the open door. The first round hit the leg of the reception desk. The next two shattered the white glass wall behind it. The remaining four traveled into the sea of cubicles where Zack and Mia hid. Rebel’s foresight was still hobbled by solis. He shot blindly and was now blind to the results.

By the time Ivy caught up to him, he fired empty clicks at the office. She grabbed his arm.

“Richard, stop! Stop! It’s over!”

“No!”

“If we’re lucky, the Deps will finish them. If not, we’ll have other chances. But we have to go!”

Amanda turned white at the distant sound of gunshots. She looked to the southern archway and saw David make a stealthy reentrance. He ducked behind a support column just as Rebel and Ivy returned to the lobby. Amanda’s fingers dug into her thighs.

Oh God, David, don’t. Just let them leave.

A half mile to the north, Gemma accessed the Nicomedia office cameras and shook her head at the image.

“Christ, Rebel. You lucky son of a bitch.”

Olga looked to Gemma. “What are you talking about?”

“He did it.” She chuckled in wonder at the screen. “He got one.”

—

Zack sprawled facedown on the carpet, his fingers pressed over his head. From the moment the glass wall exploded in front of him, his body went into system crash. He couldn’t move. He couldn’t think. He couldn’t feel anything but the thundering beat of his heart.

Two minutes after Rebel’s hasty exit, Zack and Mia worked their way back toward the front of the office, darting in and out of cubicles like skittish rabbits. Once they’d reached the first row, Zack made Mia wait behind him while he scanned the reception area. He’d only made it as far as the white glass partition when the shots rang out and the world seemed to end all over again.

Now the wall lay in shards all around him. For all he knew, his body was just as broken.

“Zack?”

The sound of Mia’s voice prompted him to move. He clambered to a wobbly kneel, then checked himself with trembling hands. He still couldn’t feel anything. He couldn’t get his mouth to work.

“I . . . I . . . God . . .”

After four more seconds of self-scrutiny, he rose to his feet and blurted a nervous laugh.

“I think . . . I think I’m all right. I’m okay. Jesus, Mia. I . . .”

He turned around and saw her now. Her skin had turned chalk-white. She pressed a weak and trembling hand to her chest. For a hopeful moment, Zack figured she was simply struggling to collect herself. Then he saw the thick blood seeping through her fingers. His delirious grin faded.

“Oh God. No. No . . .”

Mia removed her hand and stared down at the oozing hole in the center of her chest. She thought about the policeman’s bullet that had narrowly missed her face a month ago, the ridiculous luck that kept her in perfect health while her friends suffered wound after wound.

She finally understood how the universe worked now. Suddenly it all made sense.

“Zack . . .”

Her legs gave out from under her. She crumpled to the floor.

—

Four hundred and thirty feet away, in the tiny windowless office of the building security manager, Theo screamed in synch with Zack. His scattered thoughts came together in a unified roar, a thousand voices all wailing in grief, insisting that there were no futures left with Mia Farisi in them.

He clutched his hair, throwing his elbows left and right.

“No! No! No! No!”

It was at that cruelest of moments that a final gear snapped into place inside him. His eyes rolled back, his skin glowed white, and his consciousness took him to a strange new place.

At long last, Theo Maranan was formally introduced to his weirdness.