The Man in the Bubble

David Annandale

“This is what a headache looks like.”

Commissioner Qiana Taylor glared at the wreckage as her chauffeur maneuvered the black Rolls Royce through the devastation in the Chelsea warehouse district of Manhattan. Most of the block of West 19th Street between 10th and 11th Avenues was a disaster area. Building facades had been stripped away, gone as if taken by a wind sent by Hell itself. Floors had collapsed, spilling shattered timber and brickwork into the street. Cars lay crushed beneath rubble. Others, overturned and on their sides, rested like scattered leaves. A ruptured hydrant gushed water onto the pavement. Sunset bathed the ruins in red.

“A gas explosion story should stick, don’t you think, commissioner?” Archibald Hudson asked. He rode in the back with Taylor, while her other field aide, Valeria Antonova, sat beside the chauffeur. The clean-shaven Hudson had the creases of his suit sharp enough to draw blood. Antonova was tall, athletic, and coldly pale. The two agents worked as a synchronized unit, and they had sharply honed instincts for anticipating Taylor’s orders before she gave them.

“If I didn’t know better, I’d believe a gas explosion,” Antonova put in.

“The story had better stick,” Taylor said, still studying the blast zone. “The alternatives are too messy.”

A bomb narrative would be almost as bad as the truth, whatever that turned out to be. Gas or bomb, either carried the price of the outraged public and the screaming headlines, but that much was a given anyway. No event this big could be swept out of sight in an instant. Investigations would happen, and fingers would point. A scapegoat would have to be found. The difference was a bomb story would linger in the public’s mind. It would generate fear and unrest. It would refuse to go away. A gas explosion, on the other hand, could be replaced by the scandal of the day in fairly short order. The Foundation could ensure that it receded from the front pages, sinking into the procedural, political, administrative and bureaucratic quicksand that came, as surely as inertia, sooner or later to all matters of public urgency.

“There’s a problem, though,” said Taylor. “Can’t you see it?”

Antonova did first. “Damn,” she said. “No fires.”

19th Street should have been choked with smoke. Nothing burned, nothing guttered. The blast had been as antiseptic as it had been destructive. Try as she might, Taylor could not spot so much as a single scorched brick.

“Huh,” Hudson said uneasily. “If not a gas explosion, then what do we use?”

“We go with the gas,” Taylor said. “Until it doesn’t work. It’s the simplest explanation, and the one most people will think of first when they hear there’s been an explosion. If we’re lucky, the absence of fire will be ignored.” The mind had a way of dismissing inconsistencies if they were too big and got in the way of what seemed normal. “We may have to see to it that there’s a second explosion. One that has no unusual features.”

Hudson nodded. “We’ll watch for some promising gas mains.”

The Rolls pulled up near the collapsed warehouse that marked the center of the blast. The police had cordoned off the area, and the firetrucks were in attendance, looking a bit forlorn in the absence of conflagration. Taylor put on her wide-brimmed hat and got out of the car. Flanked by her aides, she marched up to the barricade.

A police officer held up a hand as they approached. He looked a little unsure of himself, to be confronted by three people in identical black suits. Perhaps he sensed his authority was about to be put in its place. He wasn’t going to let it go down without a fight, though.

“Sorry,” he said. “No admittance.”

“Stand aside, officer.” Taylor flashed her badge, just long enough for it to register, not long enough for the officer to read it. “This scene is under my jurisdiction.”

The officer’s florid cheeks flushed a deeper red. It seemed he was not a man used to the fact, or even the concept, of being given orders by a Black woman. “Now just a minute…” he began.

“You will stand aside,” Taylor said, her voice a whip that could crack stone. “Immediately.”

The officer’s partner stepped away smartly, wincing as if stung. The other man held his ground, anchoring himself with fury and humiliation. “The area isn’t safe.” He addressed Antonova, and then Hudson. “The investigation isn’t complete.”

The aides said nothing. Their faces, expressionless, turned as one to defer to Taylor.

“The area is not safe,” Taylor agreed. “The investigation is ongoing. It is being conducted by my people. You and the Fire Department must wait for my OK to venture into the blast site. Is that clear enough?”

Cheeks shading into a deep violet, the officer slunk away.

Taylor marched past the barricade and through the rubble to the pit. About fifteen feet wide, it plunged diagonally into the ground, the slope steep but not too steep to be walked. One end of a rope had been tied around one of the warehouse posts that still stood, sheared in half. The rope’s length disappeared into the darkness.

Lacey Osborne, the first of the Foundation’s agents to have been on the scene, detached herself from a cluster of resentful firefighters she had been talking to and walked over to Taylor.

“Commissioner,” she said. “Thank you for coming. I felt sure you would want to see this.”

“By ‘this’, I take it you mean what’s at the bottom of that shaft.’

Osborne nodded.

“How much longer do you think we can keep the Fire Department at bay?” Taylor asked.

“They’re growing restless,” said Osborne. “I’m going to run out of convincing excuses soon.”

Taylor thought the strategy through. She needed enough time for herself and her team to see what they needed to see, but without stretching things out so long that the fact of another investigating agency taking priority over Police and Fire became a story in itself. A combination of authorities had kept reporters away from West 19th altogether, but that wouldn’t last much longer.

No perfect solutions. There never were. As ever, time to get the job done with what she had.

“Wait here,” she said to Osborne and the aides. She strode over to the firefighters, flashed her badge again, and said, “One hour. Then, if it’s safe, you can go down.”

A man goggled at her. “If it’s safe, we can go down?”

“Correct. Thank you for your cooperation.” She turned on her heel and left them to their stunned objections.

Taylor took hold of the rope with one hand, a proffered flashlight with the other, and started down the slope behind her agent. Hudson and Antonova brought up the rear, each with their own torches.

Taylor played her beam around the walls of the shaft as they went descended. They were smooth as glass. Foundations, sewers and bedrock had all been cut away by a perfectly uniform, irresistible force. Taylor pictured it shooting up through the earth, compressed energy, and then exploding out in the sudden freedom of the air.

“What could have done this?” Antonova wondered.

“Whatever it was,” said Taylor, “we’re lucky it wasn’t any stronger.” She had a vision of the entire district vaporized, or all of Manhattan. What had happened here? And why? What was to blame?

No, not what, but who. In Taylor’s experience, there was always a who to blame for a disaster like this.

Somebody had played with something they should have left alone.

She had no evidence to back up her gut feeling yet. Just years of hard experience.

The shaft continued straight down, heading west, for what Taylor judged to be at least half a mile. She had to hold tight to the rope to stay upright. They had to be a thousand feet or more beneath the surface when the shaft ended, opening up into a cavern hundreds of yards wide and high. Three other Foundation agents were here. They had set up a portable Kohler generator to power some lamps. They helped, but much of the scene still receded into an ancient, brooding gloom.

Taylor looked up at the structure that took up most of the space of the chamber. “We’re going to need that second explosion,” she said. There was no way she was going to allow any firefighter or police officer down here to see this.

She was standing at the base of a temple. Constructed from huge slabs of green-tinged black stone, its lower half rose in the shape of an octagonal pyramid. The top half formed a smooth dome, and its dark opening gave it the look of a skull emerging from the pyramid. A serpentine path wound up the near face of the temple to the gaping maw of the skull.

Taylor had seen a lot in her time with the Foundation. She had seen structures on this scale before, carved by inhuman hands. Seen enough of them that she had mastered the ability to conceal her emotions, to lock the fear away and get the job done. But the awe and the terror were always there, her blood always chilled by the vision of something tearing through the fragile, illusory veil of normality. Taylor was glad of this. It meant she was human. It meant she never forgot the danger.

“It doesn’t look damaged,” said Hudson.

“No, it doesn’t,” Osborne agreed.

They both did well in keeping their tones matter-of-fact, their terror on a tight leash. Taylor could barely detect the tremor in their voices. They knew their duty, and would follow it.

“It seems to be the origin of the blast, though,” Osborne went on. “As if a focused beam of energy shot up from it.”

It lashed out, Taylor thought. “Have you been up to the entrance yet?” she asked the other agents.

“We were just about ready to,” said one. “We’ve checked all around the base, and it seems safe enough.” He shrugged.

“Yes,” said Taylor. “As safe as anything like this can be, you mean.”

The man nodded.

“Let’s go,” Taylor said, and she started up.

She went carefully. The footing was slick. The stone oozed, like suppurating flesh, the substance grey, thick as petroleum jelly, and slippery. As the path wound up, Taylor felt as if she were making her way not towards the heart of some mystery, but towards its fangs. It would not do to go any further than was absolutely necessary.

At the top of the path, she said, “We aren’t the first to come here.” She aimed her light on three bodies lying at the temple’s threshold. A cold wind blew from the darkness within. It wrapped around Taylor’s exposed flesh with an insinuating whisper.

While the others held their beams on the corpses, Hudson and Osborne examined the dead. The force from the temple had killed them as it had cut through rock and concrete, shearing away half a head, a torso, arms at the elbows.

“Mid-twenties, at a guess,” said Hudson. “Dressed for hiking, but nothing expensive.”

“We need to know how they came to be here,” Taylor said.

“Dumb luck?” Antonova ventured, sounding unconvinced.

“They went exploring in the sewers and stumbled upon this?” said Taylor. “A temple no one has seen before?”

“And that the Foundation has never heard of,” Osborne added.

“Not necessarily,” said Taylor. “We might have some hint of it, but one that we will only recognize with subsequent research.” The Foundation’s archives were extensive, and growing larger all the time. They were too huge for any one person to know fully, but this temple, in this location, would be something Taylor would have heard of, if there had been anything definite in the records. No, the temple would be a new entry in the vast catalogue of darkness.

Hudson was going through the backpacks that lay near the bodies. He unfolded a sheet of paper. “There’s a map,” he said, holding it up to the light.

Taylor looked at the diagram, drawn in pen, by someone with some drafting skills. “They were sent,” she said grimly.

“Couldn’t the map have been done by one of them?” Antonova asked.

“That’s stationery,” said Taylor. “Look at the address.” Incredible, she thought. The map had been drawn with no concern for secrecy. Its creator had to be stupid, arrogant, or both.

“This is near the Flatiron,” said Antonova, examining the letterhead. “Oh. The Davenport Tower.”

“Ryan Davenport,” said Taylor. It took some effort to hold back a growl of anger and frustration. Davenport had been hovering at the edge of the Foundation’s attention for years. Always a person of interest, never quite interesting enough to be a concern. An acquisitive but indiscriminate collector of all things occult. He bought a lot, but hadn’t seemed to do so with any real knowledge or agenda.

We were wrong, Taylor thought. She wondered if his wealth and political connections had played more of a role than she had thought in making him seem not worth doing anything about. If so, she was going to correct that past mistake.

Hudson dug up a battered notebook from deeper in the knapsack. He flipped through the pages, then stopped dead. He stood up from his crouch and brought the book over to show Taylor what he had found.

The drawing was a crude attempt at capturing the essence of the relic’s shape. Someone had tried to draw a triangle, then extend into a third dimension to form a complex knot. The effort looked like a nonsensical scribble, unless one had seen a more detailed, assured representation of the object. Taylor had. “The Coronal Prism”, she said. One of the infernal Coterie’s accursed Keys.

“Maybe they didn’t find it,” said Osborne. “Maybe they triggered a ward and it’s still here.”

“I would like that maybe to be true,” said Taylor. “But I count four knapsacks and only three bodies.”

“Could the fourth be inside?” Osborne asked.

“Possibly. But I think it’s unlikely.” She pointed at the bodies. “Look how they fell. They were on their way out of the temple, not in. I believe the blast was a response to the removal of the Prism. We have to assume it’s gone, and we’re almost out of time.” She turned to Antonova. “Did you see anything we can use for another explosion?”

Antonova nodded. “About a hundred feet in from the shaft entrance. I saw the side of some piping, exposed but intact. Should do the trick.”

“Good.” Taylor started back down the side of the temple. “I want this sealed away until we have the time to examine it properly. Blow up the tunnel, then the police and fire departments can do whatever they like on the surface.”

“And Davenport?” Hudson asked.

“Leave him to me.”

The draft from the temple became more insistent, more probing. Searching for something that had been taken.

•••

The Foundation had private facilities behind a nondescript door in the basement of the New York Public Library. The amenities were basic, just a couple of offices, empty except for furniture unless an operative needed to do some research there. Then, the Foundation had access to the entire holdings of the library, many uncatalogued as far as the public was concerned. Specific Foundation files would also be delivered to the offices as required.

Taylor required the complete dossier on Ryan Davenport. She spent the morning after the blast learning all she could about her foe. She had to look at him that way. He had, she was sure, the Coronal Prism. Possession made him the enemy, regardless of his intentions.

If Taylor could find any clues to what those intentions actually were, that would serve her well.

The dossier didn’t point in any specific direction. Davenport collected occult objects, and did so very publicly. Sellers of every persuasion knew they had a ready market in him, whether their goods were genuine or not. Until now, the information about Davenport implied an enthusiastic dilettante, one with too much money and no discernment at all. His indiscriminate purchasing, often of certainly fake items at inflated prices, had been why he had not registered as a threat. He did not appear to know what he was doing.

Except he did, Taylor now saw. Knowledge about the Coronal Prism and its potential location did not fall into the lap of an amateur. The Foundation had been searching for that Key, and coming up against one dead end after another. The problem, Taylor now saw, was the same as it had so often been. Errors of interpretation around relevant clues, misplaced focus on irrelevant ones… It all came down to being able to see the right thing at the right time and knowing what to do about it. Davenport had succeeded in all three ways, and beaten the Foundation to the prize.

Did he know what he had? At some level, he must. But fully? she wondered. If Davenport really knew what he had, then would he risk owning it?

Maybe he didn’t know. If not, that might give her some leverage. She wanted to secure the Prism with a minimum of conflict. How difficult things would become was up to Davenport.

In the early afternoon, the Rolls deposited her outside the Davenport Tower. She passed under the gothic arch over the main entrance, and into a lobby where more neo-gothic decor reigned. Gargoyles looked down from the vaulted ceiling to the gold-inlaid marble floor. The iron grille in front of the elevator looked more medieval than functional, and the operator’s livery was worthy of a palace. Taylor noted the zodiac symbols embroidered in silver on the man’s vest. Davenport’s obsessions extended to every aspect of his little empire, then. The man believed in his right of absolute control. Not an encouraging sign, but also not unexpected.

Davenport’s private offices were on the 20th floor. Taylor crossed the expanse of a huge reception area. The ceilings here were as high as in the downstairs lobby. The receptionist’s desk, big as an ocean liner, blocked the way to high bronze doors. A lot of effort had gone into making the space one that would impress and intimidate.

The effort was wasted on Taylor. She saw the handiwork of a man who believed in himself too much or not enough. Both, she thought. The two flaws so often came together.

The receptionist, a young woman with a glare icier than her blonde hair, looked up at Taylor when she reached the desk. “May I help you?” the woman said, with the clear certainty that she would not.

“Commissioner Qiana Taylor to see Ryan Davenport.” When the receptionist began to run a manicured finger down a column of the open book in front of her, Taylor said, “No, I do not have an appointment. What I have is the authority to see Mr Davenport. Now.”

The receptionist’s eyes twitched with a slight flutter of unease, but she maintained her pose of merciless decorum. “I’m sorry. Mr Davenport is unavailable.”

Taylor lowered her head, so the shadow of her hat’s brim fell over her face. “He would be well advised to make himself available.”

Another twitch of an eyelid. “He is not available because he is not here.”

“Then I’ll wait.”

This time, the receptionist’s lower lip trembled. The thought of spending an indefinite period in Taylor’s company clearly troubled her almost as much as Davenport’s anger. “He really isn’t here,” the woman pleaded.

Taylor thought through her next step. She had no intention of waiting. That would be playing into Davenport’s hands, handing the power in this situation over to him, assuming he was in his office. Always the chance the receptionist was telling the truth.

Taylor could just walk past the receptionist and through the doors. But no, too public a display for the Foundation, and the exposure at the scene of the blast had already been excessive.

“Tell Mr Davenport he should expect to hear from me very soon,” she said. “And tell him that nine tenths of the law are meaningless in his case.”

•••

Gabled, turreted, gaudy as a cardinal and ostentatiously brooding, Davenport’s mansion dominated the 58th Street block of 5th Avenue. Its chimneys bracketed the full moon when Taylor looked up at the night sky. The moonglow fell on a skylight, turning the glass into a baleful eye. Another glow, from what had to be many large candles, wavered on the other side of the skylight.

Very forbidding. Very esoteric. Taylor imagined Davenport would be pleased by the first impression his home made.

She stood on the sidewalk before the porch with Hudson and Antonova. “Everything ready?” she asked Antonova.

“Yes, commissioner.”

“Good. I’ll speak with him alone first. If he has any sense, he’ll make this easy, and that will be better for everyone.”

One way or another, she would be leaving with the Coronal Prism in her custody. She couldn’t let any more time go by. Even the few hours since her visit to his tower were a risk. The air felt taut, apprehensive. Beyond the glow of the streetlights, the shadows grew thick, dense with hidden muscle.

From the look on the face of the butler who answered Taylor’s knock, the receptionist had passed on her message. The man looked like he might have been a boxer in a previous life, and his memories of that life were still fresh.

“Mr Davenport is not receiving,” the butler said. He had learned formality and enunciation, but they were a thin veneer over the accent of the streets.

“You’ll find that he is,” said Taylor.

Hudson and Antonova stepped around her. They each took hold of the butler’s arms. His eyes widened, the confidence born of his old skills draining away in the power of their grip.

“Wait for my signal,” Taylor said.

She entered the house and made straight for the wide staircase leading up from the main hall. She didn’t have to guess where Davenport might be. As soon as she had seen that skylight, and the flickering of candles beneath the moonglow, she had known where she would find him. Nowhere else would be suitable for him to gloat over his prize.

Taylor hurried to the top floor, and down a long corridor. She had always been a quick study when it came to a building’s geography. There had been times when that skill had saved her life, and that had been in structures whose architecture defied the human sense of geometry. Locating Davenport’s special retreat based on a quick scan of the exterior was child’s play.

Taylor opened the middle door of the corridor and stepped into a tasteless millionaire’s conception of an alchemist’s study. Symbols from a hundred different belief systems covered the black walls. The juxtaposition of the symbols made nonsense of them all. The arrangements were an open invitation to disaster.

He didn’t know what he was doing after all.

Shelves groaned with ancient books and display cases. Taylor saw shrunken heads, saints’ bones, ebony crucifixes, Elder signs of gold and iron, jewels forged from sculpted blood. Davenport had surrounded himself with a treasure trove of the precious and the deadly.

The man himself sat perched on his desk, turning the Coronal Prism over and over in his hands. The relic was as the doodle in the notebook had tried to suggest – a prism stretched out and then twisted into an unfathomably complex knot. Its texture made Taylor think of worms. Colors chased each other over its surface. Only a few of them had names.

Davenport had a high forehead, black, wavy hair, pockmarked cheeks and wide, self-satisfied lips. When he saw Taylor, he froze for a moment, then recovered his composure. “I think you’re in the wrong house,” he said. He spoke calmly, as befitted someone who had spent his life having people jump at his commands. He had inherited his father’s railway line and wealth. He had expanded both, which would have been hard not to do given the ever-growing hunger of the nation’s industry. He had thus acquired an unearned reputation as a genius. His cultivated image of eccentricity, though, was more than deserved.

“I’m where I need to be,” Taylor said. “Let’s not pretend you don’t know who I am. Give me the Prism and I’ll be on my way.”

“Why would I do that?”

“Because you don’t have a choice. And because it’s in your interest to do so.”

Davenport shook his head. “You’re right. I received your message, and I know who you are.”

I doubt that, Taylor thought. He knew a name, and that was all.

“The thing is,” Davenport continued, “I don’t think you know who I am. You wouldn’t dream of coming here, if you did.”

“I know exactly who and what you are.”

“Then you should go before I decide to make your life more miserable than I already will.”

“You have a lot of money,” said Taylor. “That means you also have a lot of political connections. You own a lot of powerful people in this city. I know who they are. That means things could be a bit stickier after I’ve dealt with you than I would find convenient. But that’s all, and I can deal with inconvenience. As a courtesy, I’m giving you the chance to turn the Coronal Prism over, and I’m offering you the promise of protection.”

“Protection?” Davenport sounded genuinely surprised.

He can’t be that stupid. “Are you telling me that you can’t feel it?” Just in the few minutes Taylor had been in the house, the tension in the air had grown. Something approached, drawing very close.

“If you think I need protection,” Davenport said, “then you really are misled. I have all the protection I need.”

Did he mean political protection? Or did he believe his nonsense agglomeration of symbols would save him from the consequences of his actions?

“You have no idea how wrong you are,” said Taylor. She shifted tack. There were things she needed to know to get a sense of how much damage Davenport had caused, and that she would have to clean up. “Will you tell me how you found the Prism? We’ve never been able to get a good lead on it.”

The appeal to his vanity worked. Davenport gave her a smug grin. “I cast my net very wide. I know a lot of what I collect is worthless. But that’s the point. If people know you’ll buy anything at all and pay well, they have an incentive to find and sell things to you. I got some books from an estate sale in Arkham. Manuscripts by a visionary poet. Except that her family thought she was delusional. They kept her locked away in the house, and buried her writings in the attic for a few generations. She knew about the Prism. It spoke to her in dreams.” He looked down at the Key in his hands as if it were a materialized dream.

“And you sent a group of young people to do the hard part for you.”

Davenport shrugged. “I paid them well. They were happy to do it. This was the kind of thing they lived for.”

“They died for your collection.”

“They knew there was risk. And not all of them.” He spoke with the calm, untroubled tone of a man pointing out an accounting error. The deaths of his employees meant nothing to him at all.

“Of course,” said Taylor. “The one who brought you the Prism.”

“Right.” Davenport frowned, irritated. “He was supposed to come by with some pictures of the temple today, after he developed them.”

There we go. Taylor had the information she wanted. “And he hasn’t responded to the telephone.”

“No.”

“Where does he live?” Taylor asked. Davenport gave her an address on the Lower East Side. She made a mental note of it. She would send some agents to investigate, but she knew they would be there far too late to do anything other than make a record of what had happened, and to make sure what remained would make sense to the police when they were finally drawn in.

“You realize he’s dead,” said Taylor. As she spoke, she noticed how tense her shoulders had become. The air crackled faintly when she breathed. The shifting colors of the Coronal Prism grew brighter. There wasn’t much time left.

Davenport gave no sign of being aware that the atmosphere in his house was changing. “Why would he be dead?” he asked.

“Because the force that guards the Prism is tracking its thieves. It found him first, and now it is coming for you. I felt it stir at the temple, in the wake of the destruction caused by your useful idiots. It’s almost here. Can’t you sense it?”

Davenport looked at her as if she were speaking Latin. “What are you talking about?”

She saw him clearly now. She fully understood what he was, a man so completely insulated by his spheres of privilege that the idea that he could be under threat, from anyone or anything, was incomprehensible.

She tried one more time. “The Coronal Prism is dangerous,” she said. “My organization has the means to keep it, and those who have come into contact with it, hidden from the hunter. Give me the Prism, and come with me, and we’ll see to it that you’re safe.”

“You must think I’m stupid.”

Taylor sighed. “As it happens, I do. So, you won’t do as I ask?”

“Of course I won’t.”

“Then I’ll leave you to the consequences of your decision.”

She turned on her heel and walked out of the study. She’d left things as long as she dared. A faint hum, like the beating of a thousand moth wings, vibrated through the mansion.

Taylor looked down to the hall, to where Osborne and three other agents waited. Unlike at the temple, this time they wore sidearms. They had come prepared to deal with human opposition. “Do it,” said Taylor.

The agents moved in, and they moved in fast. They felt the same urgency Taylor did, and they knew that the moment they seized the Coronal Prism, the hunter would be on their trail. They wore amulets that would provide them with some protection, and conceal the scent of their souls from the hunter long enough to get the Key to a Foundation vault.

Even so, it would not do to tarry.

Davenport started yelling when they entered the study. His threats of ruin and retribution followed Taylor as she made her way down the stairs.

The thrum and rustle of moth wings grew louder. At the point where the hall’s chandelier met the ceiling, the plaster twisted back and forth like a bedsheet.

Taylor paused, eyeing the distortion. The chandelier began to swing. She cursed herself for having granted Davenport so much time.

She waited for her team, and they came pounding down the stairs a few moments later. Osborne and another agent carried a case between them, lead, and marked with an Elder sign.

Taylor stepped aside to let them pass, then hurried after them. The thrum of the wings grew deeper, louder, and a snarling moan reverberated up from the foundations. As Taylor reached the main hall, a tremor shook the mansion, and the chandelier crashed to the floor behind her. The ceiling ripped open, and she tore her eyes away before she glimpsed worse than a vortex of teeth and wings.

Davenport screamed. There were terrible layers of disbelief in his terror. As if he did not believe this could not be happening. Not to him.

Shortly after Taylor reached the street, and retreated across the way with her team, the screams became mindless. Then the mansion trembled hard, and began to collapse in on itself. Her skin prickling from the close brush with the hunter, Taylor made herself watch the destruction to the end, and worked just as hard not to imagine what was going on inside. There were so many things that her line of work forced her to know. She took the mercy of ignorance where she could find it.

“Another gas main?” Antonova asked, her voice strained.

“Yes,” said Taylor. “And let’s get some fire burning in there as soon as possible.”

It helped to keep her mind on practical steps. That kept the thoughts of whirring darkness at bay.