Mack led his tired, frightened forces down the causeway. It looked like retreat. It felt like retreat. The stone causeway was still growing ahead of them, rising from the sea.
An earthquake rattled them so badly it knocked them all to their knees. Mack could see the tall buildings of the city sway just ever so slightly. He saw the bridge sway even more.
Behind them the roar of gunfire and the furious cries of the Pale Queen’s troops faded slowly. Mack felt terrible guilt at that. Had he just left innocent people to die?
Three heavy military helicopters swooped overhead and circled to land just behind where the SWAT team was still firing the speargun. The Coast Guard cutter was also firing steadily until a bolt of fire hit its deck gun.
The bridge loomed huge now, almost overhead. Mack saw people lining the railing, pointing, aiming cameras at the incredible battle, at the causeway, and down at his little band of Magnifica.
They had reached the just-emerging tip of the stone causeway. Any farther and they’d be walking in water. But now the causeway was doing something strange. Okay, its very existence was strange, but up until now it had just been a sort of stone roadway. Now the tip, the end of it, was piling higher and higher. The earth groaned as the stone grew.
“It’s making a ramp up to the bridge!” Rodrigo said, pointing.
“It’s not for us,” Mack said. “We need to get up there now, ahead of that mob back there.”
“Vargran?” Valin suggested, frowning.
“If we do, we’re powerless again,” Sylvie said. “It is the dilemma of our power: to use it is to lose it. To fail to use it is to die.”
Mack usually appreciated Sylvie’s philosophical musings, but in this case it was just a bit depressing.
“Look!” Jarrah cried. “It’s Xiao!”
Mack squinted and looked close, thinking, I wonder if that’s her? And then realized it was pretty unlikely to be some other turquoise dragon.
She came slithering beneath the bridge and landed beside them.
“Where did you get to?” Charlie asked her.
“Visiting friends and relatives,” Xiao said. Had it been Jarrah, Mack would have thought it was a sarcastic answer. But Xiao wasn’t really the sarcastic sort. Occasionally, but not often.
“We need to get off this causeway and onto the bridge,” Mack said. “Can you help us?”
She could, but only three at a time. The last two were Mack and Stefan.
Stefan was gazing back toward the battle. The cops and marines were falling back, getting closer every second. The murdering horde was just beyond them.
Mack had the definite feeling that there might be fewer cops and marines still standing than there had been to start with.
The Coast Guard cutter was burning and veered away. A helicopter lay crumpled and sinking beneath the waves.
“You know what I said about you being under my wing?” Stefan said, not taking his eyes from the terrible conflict.
“Of course,” Mack said.
Stefan looked at Mack, and to Mack’s amazement there were tears in his former bully’s cold blue eyes. “I don’t think I can protect you from what’s coming.”
Mack didn’t know what to say. Just then Xiao reappeared, and the two boys climbed swiftly onto her back, Stefan behind Mack.
As they rose into the air, Mack heard Stefan whisper, “But I’ll make them pay.”
It was a wild ride up to the bridge. The bridge is an object that is both delicate and massive. Past one end lay the brown hills of Marin County; on the other end, the green trees and hills of the Presidio park, and beyond it the city of San Francisco.
To one side of the bridge there was the bay with its sailboats and ferries and hulking great cargo ships. To the other side there was the Pacific Ocean, though something new now dominated that familiar view.
As they rose through the air on Xiao’s back, Mack saw the full length of the causeway. The creatures looked small from up here. Small but not harmless. They bristled with weapons both natural and manufactured. Mack saw a creature he’d never seen before, nor imagined in his darkest nightmare: he saw the source of the firebolts that lanced out at helicopters and ships. It was a deep-red, six-legged, twisting, curling, wormlike thing with a head as smooth as a snake’s but for two hornlike protrusions, one on either side. One was red and dripped liquid fire. The other was blue. As the creature moved, it casually crushed Tong Elves and Skirrit. It even dared to push aside the giant Gudridan. And unless Mack was very much mistaken, it occasionally shot out its forked tongue and sucked in a Lepercon.
It was hard to feel sorry for the Lepercons. Mack had had a run-in with them before and didn’t like them one bit.
Jets now flew higher, out of the monsters’ range, and fired missiles that were no longer wasted on the impenetrable barrier but were aimed at the hole Mack and his friends had made. Two missiles arrived without more than a second’s notice and flew right into that opening.
The explosion was incredible and everyone cheered, including the people who lined the rail on the bridge.
“You people need to get off this bridge!” Mack yelled, realizing that they were in great danger. In fact, he told them: “You’re in great danger!”
“Hey, it’s that kid from YouTube!” someone shouted, and pretty soon camera phones were swinging back and forth between Mack and the advancing army of the Pale Queen. Very few people ran away, which was certainly what Mack felt like doing.
Police had not even stopped traffic onto the bridge yet. Of course they were busy, but this, Mack knew, was a disaster in the making.
A disappointed sound went up from the onlookers as the smoke of the missiles’ explosions cleared and showed the monsters still coming.
“Get off this bridge, you idiots!” Mack yelled. “Do you want to die?”
Now, finally, the people on the sidewalk—there’s a sidewalk running along both sides of the bridge, wide enough for four or five people to walk abreast40—headed either toward the city side or the Marin side. They could clearly see that the living stone of the causeway was rising up, curling toward the bridge itself. And it was plain to see that neither missiles nor cannon nor rifles nor Charlie’s speargun could stop the onslaught. The SWAT team and the few marines would be lucky to get out alive.
“Everyone, out!” Stefan yelled, and that had even more effect than Mack’s warning. “Off this bridge!”
“But we have to be here,” a voice said.
There were two people who looked like they might be twelve years old. One was a boy. He was black, tall, gangly, and wearing a T-shirt from the band Rancid over khaki shorts. On his feet: sandals.
It was impossible to miss the fact that he was dressed for some place warmer than San Francisco.
By the same token, it was impossible to avoid noting that the other kid was rather overdressed for the Northern California climate. She wore a hugely puffy down jacket with a hood lined in fur, thick gloves, a scarf, and insulated stretch pants. She had dark goggles pushed up onto her tumbling blond hair. And, strangest of all, she was standing on a snowboard.
The boy had spoken. The girl seemed inclined to just stare.
“Who are you?” Mack demanded.
The boy answered. “I am José. Five minutes ago I was waiting for a bus in Espírito Santo.”
“How did you get here?”
“You tell me,” José said. “I am watching a video of you, and you gave us words to say. And here I am.”
A slow smile formed on Mack’s lips. “You’re one of us?”
“I don’t know what I am.” José looked around. “Or where I am. Is this Brazil?”
“What? Why would you think . . . ? Never mind; it’s San Francisco.” He pointed down at the battle below. “That’s the Pale Queen’s army.”
“Those are, like, monsters or whatever,” the blond girl said. “This is not Banff.” She looked around some more. “This is, like, a bridge or whatever. Monica was just showing me this stupid video and—”
Just then two missiles went arcing overhead, broke the sound barrier loudly, and hit the leading edge of the monster army.
“You’re part of the Magnificent Twelve now,” Mack said. “That’s Jarrah, Xiao, Dietmar, Sylvie, Charlie, Rodrigo, and Valin, and I’m Mack. And that’s Stefan.”
“Uh, right, so I’m going to call my mom, okay? Right.” The girl pulled out her phone and started to dial. “Oh great, straight to voice mail. Mom? It’s Hillary and I am, like, in San Francisco and they are having some kind of war or whatever and—”
Hillary was interrupted a second time, this time when the ground began to shake. It was the most severe quake yet. The bridge swayed extravagantly. Mack fell onto his back and, looking up, saw the vertical cables like ropes being yanked and released. The main cable, the one that was as thick as a subway tunnel, vibrated and swung just a little, but that little felt like a lot down on the road itself.
The quake went on for a long and frightening while. Both of the new Magnifica were yelling and praying. The more experienced Magnifica knew they were unlikely to be killed by a quake and much more likely to eventually be clubbed, stabbed, beheaded, disemboweled, or eaten by one of the Pale Queen’s minions or the queen herself.
The instant the quake settled down, Mack jumped to his feet and said, “Xiao, Jarrah, Valin: you three are strongest in Vargran; teach the new kids.”
“No one is teaching me—” Hillary began, but Stefan moved in close.
“Huh,” he said, meaning, “No time for nonsense.” He took the phone from her hand and tossed it over the side of the bridge.
In extreme emergencies it’s sometimes useful to have a bully.
“So, we are ten,” Mack said to Dietmar and Sylvie.
“But not yet twelve. Will ten be enough?”
Dietmar shook his head. “I believe the enlightened puissance has a logarithmic rather than linear progression. Like the Richter scale.”
That got him a pair of blank stares. So he explained.
“Two Magnifica are twice as powerful as one. But three may be six times as powerful as two. And four may be twelve times as powerful as one. The final two, or one, may increase our power a thousand times. Do you see?”
But seeing was about to become a problem. As so often happened in the San Francisco Bay Area, a wall of fog was advancing swiftly from the sea. It was like a great, gray fist aimed right at the Golden Gate.
It swallowed the volcano first, so that all that could be seen was a dull red glow.
It advanced up the causeway, disappearing the evil minions.
It reached the battlefront, obscuring good and evil alike and dampening and distorting the sounds of the fight.
It could totally have been just your average San Francisco fog. It could have, except for the fact that riding the fog like some kind of nightmare surfers were creatures, gigantic creatures, who seemed to have been formed of the very fog.
So, it was not exactly your average fog.
Mack pointed at this new abomination. “I think we better hope two more Magnifica show up, and fast.”