Tuesday, July 3
11:33 A.M.
Ibis Cosmetics headquarters, Manhattan
164 DAYS TO THE END OF THE WORLD
Lyle checked his water filter carefully—that was the key. It was natural to assume that the ReBirth batches had been failing due to contamination, and even more natural to insist on filtering his own water. They hadn’t suspected a thing. He’d rigged a series of pool filters, aquarium filters, and other purifiers, and the water dripping out at the end was the cleanest he’d ever seen. Of course, the water didn’t matter; all he really needed was the filters.
Different water filters were made of different things, but one of his special requests—not his only request, but buried inconspicuously in the list—was a CrystalBlue pool filter. He knew the brand from his days in college chemistry, and he breathed a sigh of relief when the Ibis thugs had dropped a box of them on his desk. He’d been terrified the company didn’t even make them anymore. One of the CrystalBlues had been duly inserted into his filter contraption, but the others had all been disassembled, dissected, and collected in a pile of his last great hope: potassium permanganate. He was being watched by closed-circuit cameras, of course, but they didn’t know what he was doing. He’d even added some of the chemical to a batch of ReBirth, just for appearances, being careful to keep any glycerine out of that one.
Glycerine was a common enough ingredient in skin products, thanks to its texture, but potassium permanganate and glycerine together were so flammable they didn’t even need heat—they’d just burst into flames, all on their own, and water would only accelerate the reaction. With as much of the stuff as he’d managed to collect, he could start a fire they’d have to evacuate the whole building to put out.
At 11:34 a.m., on the third of July, he stacked all his books and papers and magazines on a single table. It was the day of the ReBirth product launch, and he knew he’d already missed the beginning; it was certainly too late to stop it. But this was as quickly as he’d been able to prepare everything: the potassium permanganate, the glycerine, and a box full of real, authentic, functional ReBirth. They’d stolen it from NewYew and given it to Lyle so he could study it in action. He had to get it out of here, and in just a few seconds—
Suddenly his door opened, and Ibis’s two massive enforcers rushed toward his pile of books and papers, and Lyle knew that they’d realized something was going on. He dumped the bulk of his potassium on the books, being careful not to get any on himself, and flung the last bit in the faces of the thugs, blinding them for a few precious seconds. His glycerine was stored in a glass jar, and he shattered it on the desk with a crash, heaving great gobs of it onto the books with his hands. The pile darkened, smoldered, and burst into flame, a bright chemical fire that raced across the rest of the pile, lapping it up hungrily. The thugs lunged for Lyle and he swung a wild fist; they dodged him easily, but small globs of glycerine flew from his fingers, pelting them in the face, and when the great blaze behind him triggered the fire-suppression sprinklers in the ceiling, the water splashed down on the enforcers and mingled with the glycerine and the potassium and their faces lit up like dry kindling, burning and blistering and crackling like mad demons. The men fell back, clawing at their faces, and Lyle stared in shock, losing two, three, four precious seconds before regaining his senses and grabbing the box of ReBirth. Tiny glass vials rattled inside as he ran out the open door, through the sprinkler-drenched halls, mingling with the chaos of men and women dashing back and forth through their cubicles, some trying vainly to cover their desks and papers and computers, others simply running for the exits with coats above their heads, impossibly trapped in a summer rainstorm right in the middle of their office building. The fire roared behind them, spreading eagerly through the laboratory and out into the hall, up through the ceiling, down through the floor, and here and there Lyle saw himself in the crowd—in a black suit, in a blue one, in a soaked white shirt sticking slickly to his own foreign chest. Nobody knew who anyone was, and as the fire crackled voraciously behind them and the two burning thugs ran wildly through the crowd nobody cared who he was. He swallowed hard, never stopping, and ran to the stairs and down.