FRANCIS AND MALIK were near the station, just a block away, lurking in the doorway, waiting for the appointed time. Each was nursing a Starbucks cup and trying to look inconspicuous—not easy on a street with no more than two pedestrians per block. The city was not dead; there were still businesses open, and even the occasional yellow cab.
“I was here—in Manhattan, I mean—when I was ten,” Malik said. “My mom had a business thing here. I can’t get over how empty it all seems. This whole area should be jammed with people all rushing one direction or the other. Heading to their car or their train, heading home.”
“If I lived here, I’d sure get out,” Francis said. Immediately she wished she’d kept quiet. She hadn’t meant to engage Malik in conversation. Malik intimidated her. In the Over There she had seen the true, unmorphed Malik, and it had evoked horror and pity in equal measure. But still more intimidating to Francis was the fact that Malik was supersmart. Or at least that’s how he seemed to her, not that she’d ever had experience dealing with supersmart people. And, too, all the others in the group seemed smart to her: smart and brave and good, none of those being character traits she’d really witnessed in her life before joining the Rockborn Gang.
Francis had nothing in common with Malik. He came from Chicago North Shore money, she came from a biker gang’s desert compound. He was educated, a college freshman, and she . . . well, she’d attended school through most of fifth grade, but for several years since then her mother had insisted she was homeschooling Francis. Of course that was total crap. She hadn’t been taught math or social studies or English. What she’d learned with the gang was that the threat of violence, including rape, was a constant, and that her mother offered only weak protection. Francis was pretty sure that was not on any official school curriculum.
“Do you miss your mother?” Malik asked suddenly, and Francis started guiltily, as if Malik had read her mind. But of course it was a normal enough question for an older guy to ask a kid.
Francis shook her head. “Not really. I mean, I’m sorry she died. I’m not sorry the rest of them died, but she was my mom, even though she wasn’t very good at it.”
Malik nodded. “I miss my family. I miss my room. I miss my guitar collection. I miss going to classes.” He took a sip from his cup, then another. “I miss privacy most of all.”
“They’re in your head? Those Watcher things?”
“Always. Always, always, always.” He said it with a sigh and a grim smile. “I am never alone. I would give a lot to get them out of my head.”
Francis sensed that Malik wasn’t talking to her, so much as just talking to pass the time. And as much as she was intimidated by him, she had deeper worries.
“What do you think happens to people if they get left in the Over There?” Francis asked.
Malik met her gaze. “I don’t know. But I do know that when I let go of your hand I was scared. Badly scared. As far as I know, you are the only way in and out of that n-dimensional space.”
“So maybe they’d just be stuck there forever?”
“Possibly,” Malik admitted.
“That’s pretty harsh.”
“It’s hard to stop evil without doing evil yourself.” His face registered wry disgust, disgust with himself. “Are you religious?”
She frowned, searching her memory. She’d never been to church, let alone Sunday school. And the only references to the divine she’d ever heard were blasphemous curses. “I don’t think so.”
“Me neither. It’s almost a pity, because people who believe in God, they have someone to ask forgiveness from. If I do something . . . something evil . . . who do I go to to absolve me?”
“Yourself, I guess.”
“Yeah. I wonder when this is all over, if it’s ever all over, I will forgive myself.” Then he seemed to shake off the gloomy mood, and in a harder, more decisive voice, said, “Today, however, Francis, our friends are counting on us. Shade and Armo and Dekka and Cruz may die unless we do our part.”
“Just . . .”
“What?”
“Just don’t let me be like those people the bug man hurt. Don’t let me be like that.”
Malik stood silent, looking at her until she reluctantly turned to look him in the eye. “Francis,” Malik said in a serious tone, “you need to explain what you mean.”
“I mean don’t let me live like that. Promise me if that happens you’ll, you know . . .”
“You’re asking me to kill you?” He said it softly, not as an accusation. “Jesus, Francis.”
“Promise me or I quit,” she said with sudden vehemence. “I’m not a coward, but . . .”
“Of course you’re not a coward,” Malik said. “You’re brave as hell.” He was silent then, but she could practically see the wheels turning in his head. At last he said, “All right, I promise.”
They had another three minutes to wait—their cue was two minutes before everyone else—and passed the time in silence, Francis savoring the fact that Malik thought she was brave. She’d received very few compliments in her life, none in recent years unless you counted leers and vulgar suggestions from the bikers.
At last Malik said, “Thirty seconds.”
Francis could not speak past a lump in her throat but held out her hand. Malik took it.
“Now,” he said.
The world of right angles and straight lines, the world of up, down, left, right, forward, and back disappeared to be replaced by a lunatic vision of concrete and pipes under the street and gas lines spewing vapor like clouds of red gnats.
And then, all at once, they were in a brightly lit public restroom. The floor was dark terrazzo, the walls white tile. They were between two rows of stainless-steel sinks crowned by round mirrors. Francis saw a thin, frightened-looking girl in the mirrors, and as she looked at her reflection she imagined her skin turning red and black, pustules, seething masses of creepy-crawlies . . . imagined the unspeakable pain. The despair. Imagined her own voice screaming, begging for death . . .
Fear took over then, like a sudden fever. Her mouth was dry. She needed to go to the bathroom. She needed to vomit.
With a thought she could be gone. She could be back out on the street, and from there, who knew how far she could go? A long, long way from here. Mountains, maybe. The Rockies she’d seen from the back of a motorcycle with her arms holding on to the fat waist of her mother’s then-lover.
It was very clean up there in the high passes. Air so fresh and pure, freezing-cold water running in streams, ready to drink. How great were her powers? Could she actually blink out into the Over There and pop up by the side of some road in Wyoming? So very much of her wanted to try. Just an experiment—she would transport herself there and . . .
And be alone. No family. No friends. Nowhere to go. But also, no Vector. No possibility of being trapped in a living hell of pain.
Suddenly Francis realized they were not alone. There was a young man just emerging from a toilet stall.
“What the holy hell?” the man yelped.
“Sorry, didn’t mean to . . .” Malik started to apologize. Then he and Francis both took a long second look, feeling they’d seen the face somewhere before.
The young man, a handsome boy, began to back toward the exit, but at the same time he was changing. Thick armor like a lobster’s shell rippled over a body growing swiftly larger. One arm flattened, like it had been run over by a road leveler, and then stretched and extended. The other hand was forming a heavy pincer.
“Knightmare!” Malik gasped.
“You can’t hurt Knightmare!” said Justin DeVeere. “I know your pain blasts don’t work against Rockborn.”
Francis had worried that when something terrible happened she would hesitate or even run away, had in fact been thinking seriously about it just seconds before. And in the old days she might have done either, hesitate or flee. But Francis had survived Las Vegas, she’d come face-to-face with the Charmer, she’d witnessed the horror at the Triunfo, and she was no longer the little mouse she had once been, at least in her own mind.
“Save me, Knightmare! Malik’s hurting me!” Francis cried. She rushed at Knightmare and before the startled and confused Justin DeVeere could react, she had grabbed his hand.
Ten seconds later Francis popped back into 3-D reality.
She and Malik were now alone.
“I guess that works,” she said.
“I guess it does.”
Cruz was lurking under the Park Avenue overpass, just opposite one of the entrances to Grand Central, in the form of a homeless woman she’d seen. Nothing was less visible in a city than the homeless, who most people just sort of edited out of what they saw. Cruz had given careful thought to just how she would enter Grand Central. Through the door, obviously, but as whom? Looking like what sort of person? Her repertoire of guises was heavily weighted toward female pop stars, with a few policemen and even a passable version of Tom Peaks as Dragon.
But would being morphed protect her against Vector’s insect air force? Malik couldn’t cause pain to people in morph, but these new laws of physics were either very complex or just random, and either way, Cruz was not at all certain that she would be safe.
If she sashayed in as Beyoncé or Adele, Vector would know immediately that she was Rockborn. She needed a morph that would make Vector hesitate before attacking, and it occurred to her that she might just have an idea. She’d met the person in question, but her visual memory lacked detail, so she pulled out her phone and Googled images. Front. Close-up of face. From the side. And yes, in a crowd shot, there was the view from behind.
Cruz checked the time. She was to enter the station five minutes before H-Hour as they were calling it. Two minutes to morph and another two minutes to figure out how to act the part. Then . . . walk.
Her job was to move in at two minutes before H-Hour, distract Markovic while the others attacked. Distract for as long as she could. And then?
And then Bug Man finds you inside your illusion and you scream and scream and never stop . . .
Cruz bent over suddenly, hands on her knees, feeling as if she’d had the wind knocked out of her. She felt sick with fear. Dying was bad, but she had faced death. What Vector threatened was so much worse. Unendurable.
Walk in. Just walk right in. Into what they all knew was a trap. Just walk in and . . . distract. Keep Vector busy. Wait for the attack. And then?
And then run, Cruz, run.
Run and hide. Get out of the way of the fight that would be won or lost by the others. At least that was some small comfort: she only had to be brave until the fight started. After that she could contribute very little.
So there is an upside to this stupid power of mine.
The time ticked by, each second seeming to last an infinity. Then, she took a deep breath and walked with purposeful stride despite legs that wanted to wobble and collapse, toward the entrance.
The entrance was, strangely, beneath the overpass. She reached the bank of doors, pulled a door open, and stepped inside.
“Hey, you, stop right there!”
Cruz froze.
The challenge came from a pimply teen armed with a baseball bat. He had a partner, a small, angry-looking older woman who seemed to be doing mime, waving her hands either in a parody of martial arts movies or in the delusional belief that she had powers.
“I’m here to speak to Markovic,” Cruz said, doing her best to sound like the mayor.
“His name is Vector,” the boy said smugly. “And unless you got powers or at least some muscle, he ain’t talking to nobody.”
“Yeah? Well, you listen to me, you little toady, I am the mayor of this city. I want to speak face-to-face with Vector, and if you send me away he will be mightily pissed at you.”
To Cruz’s amazement, her improvisation worked. The boy took a step back and muttered, “Okay, but it’s on you, lady. If you end up covered in sores screaming for your mommy, don’t blame me.”
Cruz fought down a wave of nausea and was rescued from collapse by the appearance of the Watchers in her head.
I won’t give you the satisfaction!
The boy led the way, baseball bat on his shoulder at a jaunty angle, down a marble ramp beneath too-bright lights in the ceiling. A sort of bridge supporting offices crossed the ramp, and Cruz looked up to see engraved signs indicating the waiting area and pointing an arrow ahead to tracks eleven and twelve.
Walk like a boss, Cruz reminded herself. You’re the mayor.
At the bottom of the ramp a broad arch opened on the right, marked as the way to the Dining Concourse, and the pull of that safe-sounding space nearly drew her in. There was a Chase Bank, all blue and shiny on her left, but with a plate-glass window starred and needing only another tap to collapse in shards. They passed an information kiosk with posters of shows that would never happen, and discounts on tickets to places she didn’t recognize.
Ahead was openness, a sense of a vast space, and then she saw three gigantic windows, each perhaps a hundred feet tall. The setting sun turned many of the panes red or gold, an arrestingly lovely sight, and Cruz wished she could savor it. Cruz had seen the windows—indeed every part of the terminal—in the photos and maps they’d all studied in preparation, but they seemed so much bigger in person, bigger and somehow both beautiful and overawing.
She marched boldly out into the main concourse. To her right was a long row of unoccupied, beaux arts marble ticket windows topped by a long black tote board now filled with cancellations. The entire concourse was framed by massive square pillars, each seeming as tall as a ten-story building. The pillars rose to support a gorgeous arched ceiling painted blue-green and decorated with a schematic of the galaxy. At the far end, beneath the glorious windows, was a balcony grand enough to host a papal visit. It was the most magnificent building Cruz had ever seen.
There were maybe a hundred people scattered over the acres of marble floor, some with weapons ranging from crowbars to guns. All, presumably, in service to Vector.
And then she saw the information booth, a round, ornate gilt kiosk in the middle of the floor. It was topped by a four-sided analog clock, and it was there that Cruz’s gaze stopped. For up there, roped to the clock, was a man . . . a woman . . . it was impossible to say. The person tied to the clock was covered in boils and open sores. Their flesh was like some fever dream of Satan, red lesions and putrefying green-and-purple-and-black flesh. A warning. A demonstration for the benefit of Vector’s enemies but also, perhaps, his friends.
Someone had taken a cushion and duct-taped it over the victim’s mouth so that their pleas and cries for mercy were muffled to groans. They writhed, the poor person, writhed and struggled and with each muffled cry reminded everyone of Vector’s power. It was medieval, like some baron or king sticking severed heads on poles to remind anyone passing by who had the power. And who did not.
Then Cruz had a crawling sensation go up her spine. She turned and nearly cried out in shock. There was a matching balcony beneath identical windows just behind her. She had been looking in the wrong direction.
Markovic, Vector, had stationed himself on the balcony level at the top of a wide set of stairs that Cruz thought she recognized from the movie The Untouchables, so that even as she was trying to quell the panic within and trying to ignore the insistent Watchers, she also was picturing the baby carriage from the movie bouncing in slo-mo down the steps.
Vector hovered in the air far above Cruz, a swirl like all the wasps and flies and locusts in creation, swarming, twisting, separating, and coming back together.
He’ll put me next to that poor person on the information booth. And I will scream, scream forever.
She did not have to try too hard to conceal her fear; the mayor would also have been afraid. There was no way to approach what amounted to a malicious, sentient bee swarm, a swarm with terrifying power to inflict unspeakable pain and despair, and not be afraid.
Holy Mary, mother of God . . .
As she walked with measured steps to the base of the stairs, she was watched. Every eye in the place followed her. In addition to the merely human, she saw three people in morphs, one with fantastically wide, completely impractical bat wings.
He probably thinks he’s Batman now.
But she also saw two morphed Rockborn who looked more dangerous. One might have been Armo’s evil cousin: a shaggy, seven-foot-tall monster with the teeth of a saber-toothed tiger. But it was the other one that worried Cruz more: a person small enough to be a child but whose entire body was covered in iridescent gray scales, so that she looked like a fish that had grown legs and arms. The scary thing was not the scales, but the way the creature hovered in midair as if gravity simply did not apply.
Cruz reached the bottom stair, and Vector said, “You can stop right there, your honor.”
“Markovic?” Cruz asked, looking up at him and trying for defiant body language.
“You don’t recognize me? I’m hurt. We’ve met three times that I can recall.”
“I’m not here to talk about old times, Markovic.” Cruz reminded herself to act tough, like a New York City mayor would. “I’m here to see what it will take to get you to stop.”
“No pleasantries, straight into negotiation.” Markovic mocked her. “So, what are you offering?”
“I’m not offering, I’m demanding.” Her voice was thready, occluded, the words hard to get out. But all the better, it would explain perhaps why she didn’t sound quite like the mayor.
Markovic had learned a new and unsettling trick. His component parts swirled together and formed into a rough oval shape. Then holes in the mass appeared where eyes on a face might be. And a slit of a mouth formed below.
“I’m still working on getting my ‘lips’ to move like I’m talking,” Markovic said.
“Impressive,” Cruz sneered. Impressive seemed like a mayoral kind of word. Markovic was a massive head floating in the air. He might almost have been a swirl of coins, copper and silver and gold, glittering in the dimming light from the great windows behind him. It was overwhelming, and something about the scene nearly triggered Cruz to cross herself. She was in the Cathedral of Vector, and Vector was playing his part to perfection.
“So, spit it out, your honor. Get the demands and the threats on the table so I can tell you to go pound sand.”
“I want you out of my city, Markovic. And I want you to undo the horrors you’ve caused.”
“No.” He appeared to be trying to shake his “head” but the result temporarily obscured his “eyes.” “Anything else?”
Cruz had a can of high-power insecticide stuck in the back of her trousers, invisible while she was in morph. She calculated the time it would take her to rush that stairwell, pull out her can, and spray.
Spray what? Maybe 5 percent of the bugs? No, that would be suicide to no purpose. The thing before her would not be terrified by a can of Raid. Anyway, she reminded herself, her job was distraction and delay.
Well, if it was about delay . . .
Like a boss, she reminded herself. Like a boss.
Cruz put her hands on her hips and took a wide stance. “I am prepared to negotiate.”