Magic Time

Chapter Seventeen

WEST VIRGINIA

Thunder and darkness. Lightning that hurt the eyes.

And even so, it was nothing to the darkness Fred saw, as through a window. Nothing to the light that seared forth out of that dark, like a searchlight, into his mind.

WISHART The cold-water drag of the current redoubled, like the current of Cherry Creek, the wildness that would separate them. Desperate, desperate and scared, Fred clung tighter to his brother’s arm, to the dock. The dock? But it was as if he saw them all standing on the dock, Sanrio and Wu and Pollack, only it wasn’t three people or five people or ten people or all those people who’d been in the project when Hell had broken loose there in a roiling, glowing flood, streaming out of the Maze in a shattered firefall of exploding glass.

It was One.

WISHART And the tolling of the voice was like the sounding of a huge bell. Only it was his own voice. His own face on the thing on the dock.

I can’t leave Bob. He’ll die.

But even as he said it, he drew the power from it, from that One; the power to keep Bob alive. Every light on those useless machines was black and dead, hunks of expensive metal closing in the downstairs bedroom, looming around the bed; and every light, every flash of electrochemical brightness in Bob’s imprisoning flesh was dark also. The only light was what Fred poured into it, out of his self, his strength and the borrowed brilliance of the One.

COME TO US

I can’t leave Bob.

They didn’t hear. They never did.

COME

Twisting, dragging, clutching. . And he fought them. I can’t. He’ll die. I can’t.

Hell. Agony. Tearing him apart. Drawing him down into something that was worse than dying, worse than living- the loss of self into that all-devouring malice and power. The loss of who he was. Eaten alive.

Then slowly the vision faded, and Fred was in the downstairs bedroom still, clinging to Bob, who sobbed like a child in his arms.

Don’t leave me.

I won’t.

Stillness, and the peace of momentarily being out of pain. But because he was part of the One, because his thoughts were entangled in the shining awfulness that was growing in South Dakota, Fred knew it wasn’t over. It was gathering strength, calling to itself everything that would serve it, and he knew it too well to believe that it would give up on him. It had Sanrio’s cold single-mindedness; it had Wu’s dogged patience, which had taken her through fifteen years in a reeducation camp; it had Pollack’s skill in finding alternate solutions to problems.

It wanted to be whole. And to be whole, it would eat him. Make him be it, whether he wanted to or not.

I have to fight. I won’t leave Bob; I won’t become part of that thing, that One, that Source. .

In his heart he could almost hear Sanrio’s voice-or was it his own? — whisper, But you are part of us, Fred. You ARE us.

Bob would be taken away, never to be seen again. And he would be taken. The terror was suffocating.

I have to fight. Somewhere, somehow, I have to get the strength to fight.

NEW YORK

Tina dreamed, and the dream was a swarm.

She couldn’t see them, but she could feel them, all blue- somehow she knew they were blue-scurrying like bugs’ legs, tiny bugs all over her, and inside her too, frenetic, insistent. They whispered reassurance, a cicada hum, soothing words she could almost but not quite discern, lulling her, wafting.

Even so, she tried to fight, but she was so weary, so leaden. Time to wake up, she urged herself. Time to wake up now.

But she lacked the will, felt sapped by the cocooning presence. Rest, it sang to her, unspeaking, rest and grow strong.

As Cal and Colleen approached through the dawn shadows of the street, Doc stepped from the doorway and drew them aside. “How is she?” Cal asked.

“Sleeping. Her fever’s down a bit. Not out of the woods yet, but. .” He trailed off. Cal sensed his reticence to draw conclusions, to offer false hope. Still, it was hopeful. Doc stretched the stiffness out of his back and yawned hugely.

“You should get some rest,” Cal offered. “We can spell you a bit.”

“Thank you, Calvin, but not just yet.” Cal could make out the stubble on Doc’s chin, the dark patches under his eyes. Morning at last, and relief swelled in him. No telling what the day might bring, but it had been an interminable night.

“What the hell’s that?” Colleen said.

Cal turned to her. She was staring up at the sky, toward the west, and he saw now that strange, dark clouds were roiling in from over the Hudson, blanketing the sky, moving with alarming speed. They weren’t like any stormclouds he had ever seen. Blue lightning played over them, slashing, ferocious as crazy bullwhips. Then the discharges began to hammer down on the city.

“Inside! Get inside!” Doc thrust them toward the door. A yellow-gray pall swept over them; the clouds were directly overhead. Now they heard the thunder, a wind-whipped howl that battered their skin, shuddered the pavement under their feet. And piercing the roar that filled the world, another sound, high and terrible.

Tina was screaming.

The thunder smashed into Tina like a blow. She bolted up in bed, eyes snapping open. But what she saw was not the room about her, no, no, it was, it was-

Blurred streaks like blood smeared on a mirror. Men, women, booted, hooded, gloved in marshmallow white, running, shouting. Machines spinning, pinwheeling sparks, a thrumming rising to a whine and then a wail. This is not right; this is not how it’s supposed to be. A rectangular door lined with lights. A gateway. And something emerging, slashing into existence, all colors and none, a whirlpool blaze of pure, savage power. The men and the women tumbling over each other, pitching headlong to get away, but the whirlpool surges up, seizes them and spins them back into itself. Faces shrieking as they melt together, a chaos of eyes and mouths, not dead but alive, not many but one, and screaming, screaming. And Tina was screaming, too, because this was not a dream, this was real, oh, God, it was real-

Hands gripped her, arms wrapped around her; someone was shaking her as she screamed and screamed. Cal held Tina as the shrieks tore from her throat, her eyes shut tight.

“Sh, sh, it’s okay,” he soothed, but she didn’t know him, couldn’t stop. “You’re safe. You’re safe, kiddo. You’re safe.” Keeping his own panic in check, he felt when the grip of her terror broke, when she clutched him, shaking, her face buried in his chest. Finally she quieted, eased into sobs.

“I saw.” She couldn’t get the words out, gulping for breath. “Cal-Oh, God, Cal. .” She turned her face up to him, and Cal’s blood went to ice. For even in the weak light from the doorway and the guttering lamp, he could see that his sister’s eyes, including the whites, were now a brilliant, incandescent blue, pupils mere vertical slits.

Uncomprehending, afraid, he held her as she gasped out, face damp with tears, “I saw. . I saw.”

Sam dreamed that the evening had been a dream. He awoke to a bellowing nightmare.

The roaring shook the rafters, and Sam came on the run, rubbing sleep from his eyes, disoriented and afraid. By the time he reached the guest room, all the ghastly, bloody events burst full upon his memory, the pitiless invader in his midst, the cold reality of it all.

Stern was sitting up in bed, blinking himself to wakefulness, breathing hard, covers thrown about. He’d even kicked out one of the oak bedposts, sheared it clean off.

Sam masked his horror, forced calm into his voice. “Goodness, Ely, what’s all the ruckus?”

Stern turned his eyes like molten sunlight on Sam, and his expression was beatific. “I saw a vision,” he said.

“In the west. . it was in the west.” Tina was all cried out now, finally drowsy.

“What, honey? What did you see?” He brought the blanket up under her chin. Her eyes were nearly closed, heavy with exhaustion, but Cal could still see their vivid aqua, like windows onto an ocean floor.

“I. . we. . I. .” Her eyes dipped closed as she whispered, “Wish. . Wish. .”

“What is it, honey? What do you wish?” Cal’s eyes burned, a cobweb ache in his chest.

“One to the south. Wish. . Wishart. .” And then she was asleep.

Cal stroked her hair, soft as down. It too had grown paler, blanched like her skin. He ran his fingers along her cheek, found the skin warm but not searing as before. He straightened, swiped his hand angrily across his eyes, wiping away tears.

“You don’t have to tell me,” Cal said to Doc. “There’s no shot for that.”

Colleen stepped to the open doorway. “Sky’s clear. The storm’s gone.”

“If it was a storm,” Cal said. “I don’t know what anything is anymore.”

“I’d say that’s a good philosophy to live by at present,” Doc said softly, watching Tina.

Cal drew closer to him. “What is this? What’s happening to her? You saw her eyes.”

“We’re in unfamiliar terrain, Calvin. Who can say what the rules are?” He studied the sleeping girl, quizzical. “To the west and to the south. .”

Asleep, Tina’s face was serene, and in her marble whiteness Cal had the dreadful sense that he was looking at her corpse. I can’t save them. I can’t save the people I love. Mom had died; he had been helpless to avert that. Now Tina was being swept inexorably away.

Despair rose in him. But at the same time another sensation surged up, strangely familiar. Fight, it insisted, fight even though you don’t know what you’re fighting.

“Can she be moved?” he asked Doc. “Back home to Eighty-first, then out of town? Away from here?”

The Russian was quiet for a time, his eyes returning to Tina. “Her fever’s gone, but who knows if it will return? And what is happening to her is continuing to happen.” He shrugged. “On the other hand, if power doesn’t return-if the world doesn’t return to the way it was-this city’s a hungry beast, Calvin. A day, two days… it will begin to devour itself.”

Cal nodded, his mind racing. Where would they go? Back to the prairies, the plains? Was this same nightmare happening there?

He didn’t know. He was just going on a feeling.

But in the past twenty-four hours, it had served him to trust his feelings.

Colleen’s eyes met his. You really want to do this?

He nodded. “Don’t think I’m not open to suggestions.”

She smiled. “I’ve got some stuff I think you can use.”

Her flat was just down the street from his, the next block over. He’d passed it a thousand times, but he’d never known she was there.

Once Cal had gotten Tina safely settled in his apartment, Doc watching over her, he and Colleen had walked the few dozen yards to Colleen’s place. Her brownstone was much like his own, a relic of the previous century: weathered brick and mortar, decades of paint layers, railings of curlicued black iron. Once through the heavy oak door with its leaded stained glass, Colleen led Cal up the narrow wood staircase past silent apartments to the fourth-floor landing. Musty sunshine filtered through a dingy skylight. The thick odor of cooking cabbage filled the stairwell, and Cal wondered how they were managing it.

At her door, Colleen slid her key into the lock, slipped back the bolt. She eased the door open and stepped through soundlessly, alert. Cal followed her in. The living room was airless, dark and still.

“Hello? Rory?” Colleen called out. There was no response. “Guess he’s out.” She tried to make it sound neutral, but Cal heard the relief in her voice.

She threw the drapes open, and light flooded in, twinkling dust in the air. Cal blinked against the sudden brightness, turned from the window and nearly jumped: rows of hunting knives in holders covered the walls, flanked by spears, fiberglass and wood bows, quivers of steel-tipped arrows. Colleen had vanished into the bedroom.

“Your guy’s a real macho jerk, huh?” Cal called after her.

Colleen returned, carrying an empty cardboard box. “Most of those are mine,” she said, nodding at the arsenal.

“Oh.” And it made perfect sense, of course it did-and that there were no guns. Cal remembered the weekend warriors in Hurley, with their hats like Elmer Fudd, their assault rifles with the extra clips. But Colleen, with her sense of honor, would demand a more level playing field, pitting will and muscle, fang and claw, against that of her adversary.

And he felt sure that whatever she killed, she ate.

“It also happens to be the stuff I thought you could use.” She shoved the carton against his chest. “You ask nice, maybe I’ll show you a trick or two.”

“You know, once upon a time, I was Midwest regional junior fencing champ, three years running.”

“Someone throws Errol Flynn at you, you’ll do great.” She began removing gleaming blades from the wall, selecting a bow, piling them into the box. “We’re not talking some effete rich boy’s sport here, slick. Where you’re going, you might not always be able to find dinner wrapped in paper and served in a sack. Might just have to run it down and wrestle it.” She handed over quiver and arrows, replacement barbs, then moved to the far end of the room, started rummaging in drawers.

“Got a tent I can spare, and some thermals. That one’s Rory’s,” she added, as Cal fished out an elaborate blade of the double-deluxe super-duper Special Forces variety, complete with brass knuckles on the hilt and hacksaw on the back. “He’s a sucker for the really big ones. Goes through sporting goods stores like Sherman going through Georgia, but then they just collect dust.”

Cal set the box on a weight bench. His eye fell on a photograph atop an end table. It showed Colleen in Gore-Tex and microfleece, victorious atop a snowy peak. “You climb, too.”

“Hey, you ain’t got money or looks, you gotta do something.” She tossed a bundle of tent barely larger than a paving stone down by the box.

Cal thought to correct her on the looks part but, feeling sure it would be rebuffed, said nothing. A man was standing beside her in the photo, a lopsided grin on his face, his arm around her. Rory, in all probability. A little roughneck with a knife at his belt (on a climb?) and a tattoo on his ungloved hand.

“Matter of fact,” she said, turning toward a big wardrobe, “if I can find that gear, that’s something else you can probably-” A figure burst from the closet as she opened the door, blundered into her, clawing and shoving. “Jesus…!”

But the figure bulled past them, frantic, as Cal sprang to Colleen’s side. It lunged to the front door on bare feet. As it struggled with the bolt Cal saw that it wasn’t human, at least not entirely so. It was five feet or less, wearing a brown bomber jacket and “I Love NY” T-shirt and jeans too big and bunched up; its skin was light gray, almost blue, its bald head huge, with tufted, pointed ears. There was a broad muscularity to it, in spite of its twitchy fear.

Colleen was staring opened-mouthed. “Rory. .?”

Now Cal too saw that, incredibly, the creature before them was Rory, unmistakably the guy in the photograph, but shrunken and altered to this thing before them.

Rory froze in the open doorway. He stared at them through milky white, bulbous eyes with vertical slits for pupils. “I–I-I don’t want to live here no more!” With that, he ran thudding down the steps.

Cal dashed after him, but the little brute was devilishly fast. By the time Cal hit the pavement, Colleen close behind him, Rory was halfway across the street. But he was slowing now, reeling, shielding his eyes with his hands. He’s blind, Cal thought. The daylight’s blinding him.

Rory tripped over a discarded bottle and fell flat. Screeching hideously, he flailed his arms, legs kicking futilely. His fingers brushed a manhole cover. Desperately, he clawed at the edge, pried up the disc and lifted it with one hand. He scrunched into the open hole and vanished, the cover dropping back with a thump.

Colleen was beside Cal now. “That was my old man. I mean, I mean, he was never any beauty prize but he didn’t look like-like-”

“His eyes,” Cal said, and the anguish in his voice stopped her. “They were like my sister’s.”

Afternoon sun slanted through the gauzy curtains and lay across Stern’s broad shoulders and massive head as he squatted in the living room, too big now for the sofa, a blanket wrapped around him. He held the china cup delicately in his taloned hands as Sam poured, then took a sip and sighed. “I’m not human till I’ve had my coffee.”

Sam thought, That’s supposed to be amusing. And he sensed Ely had always been powerful enough to have underlings assure him that he was.

Even squatting, Stern was now taller than Sam. Sam could see that Stern’s face was becoming more of a muzzle, teeth longer and sharper, brow more severe. His skin was continuing to alter, thicker now, its ordered trenches and rises gleaming like brown-black carapace.

Sam replaced the kettle in the fireplace. While Stern had slumbered-twelve hours, dead to the world-Sam had searched feverishly for the notepad that Stern had confiscated, but he had not been able to find it anywhere in the house.

No one messes with the big guy, but the big guy messes with them.

Stern had relished the murder he had committed, that much was crystal clear. To be released from the bottle, to have no limits, no limits at all.

And it was just the beginning.

While Stern slept, Sam had gathered up all the other pads, armfuls of them, some of the browned pages older than many of his neighbors, and burnt them in the fireplace. He had crouched before the flames, heat singeing his eyes, as the paper blackened and curled and fell to ash. Watching silently as the journal of his life was consumed, Sam had felt his own life was burning, being devoured to nothing.

But it had to be done; Ely mustn’t read any more of it.

All the uncounted, solitary days and nights Sam had read and reread every scribble, reliving the old trespasses, weighted down with the familiar sense of impotent rage.

Impotent. He’d had no idea. .

Glancing back, he saw Stern contemplating one of the dolls near him, a 1910 Jumeau, her hair an eruption of blond curls, her dress a fantasia of lace. Stern ran his rough hand along her pale, perfect cheek. “All innocence when they’re young,” he murmured.

“I have some muffins I could get us,” Sam offered.

“Later,” Stern said, not looking at him, and Sam realized that Ely was holding the fugitive notepad in his other hand, beginning to flip through it.

He must have had it with him, Sam thought, perhaps in the pockets of the old robe he had outgrown in the night, which lay burst and discarded like a ruptured cocoon on the bedroom floor. “I feel like stretching my legs,” Stern yawned, “making a new friend or two.”

Sam forced himself to look directly at Stern, said almost inaudibly, “I think you’ve made your point.”

“Point?” Stern’s molten eyes glided over to him. “There’s no point here.” He stretched, and the muscles in his back made a sound like creaking leather. “And anyway, last time I checked this was your writing, babe.”

He’s right, he’s absolutely right, oh sweet God. . How many names were in that pad? Dozens, hundreds maybe. Sam felt light-headed, and in his imaginings the slick wetness that covered his body was not sweat but blood.

Stern was still watching him with keen interest. “You got anything else you’d care to say?” There was a deliberate menace in his tone that made Sam’s guts twist.

“Me?” Sam ducked his head, looked away.

Stern chuckled, then dropped his gaze to the pad. He skimmed several pages, then stopped, incredulity dawning on his face. He looked up at Sam, and his lips curled in a smile of sheer, delicious joy.

“This one,” Stern said, “will be a pleasure.”

OUTSIDE D.C.

Shango and Czernas reached the first plane before they even left Arlington County, just a few miles beyond Scott Key bridge. It was a JAL nonstop to Tokyo, a jumbo jet whose pilot had tried to put it down on a high school football field, Washington Parkway being jammed with cars heading into the city. The fat silvery monster had, not surprisingly, rammed into the auditorium and plowed through into the rank of summer-empty classrooms beyond. Charred patches on walls and grass showed where fuel from the ruptured tanks had sprayed, but there was surprisingly little evidence of fire.

“He said she’d be on a United flight,” said Shango, as Czernas skidded to a halt among the dead cars on the parkway and swung his bike up onto the median, to cross to the driveway into the school.

People were milling around the walls. Shango could hear moaning, the low steady clamor of those exhausted by pain that would not cease. No meds, he thought.

There was no sign of the National Guard or any kind of transport, though he could see bodies lined up under the shelter of the back of the bleachers. Movement there in the shadows, big birds-ravens or crows-and probably rats. At a guess they’d put the wounded in the gym.

The still hot air brought them the smell of smoke and shit.

A small white woman in green sweatpants and a white tank-top was striding toward them, waving her arms. “Let’s go,” said Shango, making a move to turn his bike, but Czernas didn’t follow. The aide’s face was twisted with shock and pity. Shango added, “There’s nothing we can do here.”

Still Czernas waited for the woman, who had broken into a run.

Having mentally reviewed McKay’s other friends, Shango guessed why the President had picked Czernas for the job. Press Secretary Ron Guthrie had to top out at two-eighty, and Nina Diaz, though slim and fit, would have been viewed as booty by the roving gangs of looters Shango and Czernas had encountered in the pillaged streets on their way to the bridge. But Steve Czernas, with his youth and fitness, had the idealism that in McKay had been chipped and filed by Nam and politics and years of responsibility.

Maybe in his youth McKay would have turned aside from a mission to help people in need. Or would at least have waited to see what the woman had to say.

In war, reflected Shango, that kind of behavior would probably get you and your men very dead, very fast.

The woman in the green sweats stumbled up to them, panting. “Thank God,” she gasped, and caught Czernas’ arm, as if fearing he’d flee. “You’ve got to get help. Find the National Guard, wherever the hell they are. They sent out two guys-two guys! — last night and said they’d get water and food and some meds, and since then there’s been nothing.”

She didn’t look bruised or smoke blackened, though her face was grimy with dust and sweat. Shango guessed she was from one of the houses in the upscale development down the road. She had the slim body and cut muscle of a woman who worked out hard and often, but her face was lined, her hair white: she was sixty-five at least. She took a breath, and when she spoke again, her voice was shaky but forcibly calm.

“We’ve got a hundred and thirty-five people in the gym, trauma, shock-there’s a girl there who broke nearly every bone in her body when the plane hit. My neighbors and I have been trying to help, but there’s no water, no electricity. Does anybody know what’s happening? What’s being done?”

She looked from Shango’s face to Czernas’ and back again, and behind her thick bifocals Shango saw other things: desperation, terror, husband and children and grandchildren who hadn’t been heard from since yesterday morning. Her world in pieces around her. Compassion stabbed him like an assassin through the heart, and like an assassin he thrust it aside, crushed it.

It was a luxury they couldn’t afford.

Bilmer was somewhere out there, maybe lying injured in some makeshift dressing station somewhere, maybe trying to hike in from Dulles by herself.

“Please,” the woman was saying to Czernas. “Whatever you’re doing, please turn around and go back to town and find the National Guard or whoever’s in charge and tell them-ask them-to at least get us some water, a doctor. Doctor Vanderheide’s been on her feet for twenty-four hours, and she was hurt in the crash, too. . ”

“We can’t,” said Shango, seeing the struggle on Czernas’ face. Seeing that he could not say no.

The woman stared at him with eyes that blazed in sudden hate.

“If we run into the National Guard at Dulles, we’ll tell them to get out here, but we can’t turn back.”

“What are you, deaf?” The woman’s voice cracked with sudden passion, her hard-held calm dissolving. “Or stupid? You want to come down here for a second and see what a man looks like who’s still alive after having his legs and pelvis mashed to jelly?” Her voice rose to almost a scream. “You want to tell a ten-year-old girl whose back was roasted that she’s going to have to go on hurting for a while longer? You want to. .” She gasped, clutching at self-control, fingers digging harder into Czernas’ wrist as he tried to draw away. Tears were running down her face, tracking the grime.

“Please,” she said. “Please.”

There were tears also on Czernas’ face, mingling with the sweat in the hot morning sun.

Quietly, Shango said again, “We can’t.” And to Czernas, who seemed incapable of movement or speech, “Let’s go.”

The woman released her grip, stood for a moment looking at them both, her eyes the eyes of a damned soul who has been told that there isn’t any way out of Hell after all. Czernas unslung two of the water bottles he carried and pressed them into her hands. “I’m sorry,” he said.

The woman turned without a word and walked back down the drive toward the gym, slim and small and fearfully alone in the glaring sun. Shango swung his bike around and walked it back across the parkway, the heat from the asphalt baking his legs. After a long moment, Czernas followed.

NEW YORK

A melodic tinkling roused Cal from a profound sleep. Within the cocoon blackness of his still-closed eyes, he tried to remember if it was Sunday, if Mom would be cooking her banana-nut pancakes.

Then recent memory sliced the image in two, and he jolted awake. He pressed himself up, safety and certainty vanishing. The sound was coming from Tina’s room. He noted Colleen and Doc had turned toward the sound as well, Colleen’s hands poised over her half-made bedroll, a disheveled Doc blinking himself toward consciousness.

Cal rose. The others followed.

Tina was sitting up in bed, the Buffy poster on the wall behind her like some protective saint. In her lap, she held the music box that had been her mother’s, clinking out tinny strains of Swan Lake. Her back again arrow straight, the sheen of her fever gone, she continued to peer downward, appearing clear-headed but lost in thought.

Tina looked up, her eyes that startling, unearthly blue, her skin eggshell pale. A line of worry etched between her brows, she lifted the box toward Cal. “Remember how Mom used to keep her jewelry in this?”

Cal nodded. The depository for the few modest but much-prized pieces that Cal had never seen his mother actually wear, only display proudly to the daughter they would someday adorn.

Tina eyed Doc and Colleen timidly, not recognizing them. Cal said, “A couple of friends.”

He stepped close, put a hand to her forehead. Mercifully cool. She turned her head aside, as if unwilling or ashamed to be touched or seen.

Cal glanced over at Colleen and Doc. They nodded and withdrew. He turned back to his sister, saw that she was again contemplating the jewelry box.

“I wonder how it felt.”

Tina’s voice was so low that at first Cal thought she was talking to herself. Her eyes, however, met his and, with a small gesture of her head, directed his attention to the volume by her bed.

It was Nijinsky’s diary; on the cover, the dancer in makeup and costume for Afternoon of a Faun, suffused with passion. Half man, half something else.

“I mean,” she continued, “to go not just a little crazy, like my variations teacher says we all are. But to lose yourself. . “

Her otherworldly gaze slid to the vanity mirror. In a voice flattened and opaque, she said, “Would you cover that up for me, please?”

Cal took a sharp breath but said nothing. He lifted a blanket and draped it over the glass. She nodded and eased back.

Cal sat down beside her, not touching her. “It’s not just you,” he said. “It’s everything. Whatever this is, lots of people have been affected. They’ll have to find a cure.”

At last, something connected, sparked life behind her eyes. “It won’t be like what I read about smallpox or-polio and stuff? Where they can save your life but. . ”

Her gaze returned to the music box. She whispered, “No one will want to look at me.”

“You’re lovely.” And she was, in all her pale strangeness. But from her reaction, Cal could see his words had been dismissed. Worse, regarded as a lie.

Finally, Cal said, “Look. There’s gonna be an awful lot of people working on figuring out what made this happen and making it un-happen. In the meantime, though, because. . well, for a lot of reasons, I thought it’d be best if we left the city for a while.”

Surprise flared, then resistance. “But what about my-!” She stopped, but he knew the unsaid rest of it. What about my lessons, my variations and barre work? The endless, obsessive attention to every nuance of the dance that might, just might secure the future she had so avidly pursued, that he himself had sacrificed so much for. To abandon that, jettison it? To leave the focus of her life like trash by a roadside?

Then her eyes dropped, and her shoulders sagged, and Cal’s heart felt a greater pain than he had known.

“Okay,” she said, and he saw her resignation, her hopelessness that it would ever be the same again, ever be what it was.

“Tina. .” Her focus remained on the blanket. “Tina.”

Sharper than he’d intended. Still, it won her attention, cracked through her glass shell to bring him a look, a presence that, for him, made her Tina. An instant in which he saw the exuberant four-year-old making up steps to a Beethoven sonata, the ardent nine-year-old helping him prep for the bar while wincing through her stretches, her every gesture now bearing the grace of a carefully choreographed move. The tapestry of their life together glowing in the spotlight of his sister’s unyielding passion.

“Listen.” His voice had again gentled. “Even if things don’t go back, even if they get worse-especially if they get worse-people are still gonna need more than food and shelter to get them through.” Cal reached out, touched her silken hair. “There’s such magic in you, in what you can do. You know that, don’t you? I watch you move, just across a room, and I find myself thinking, miracles are possible.”

I don’t know how to do this, he thought. And suddenly her arms were around his neck, very tight, and she whispered, “I love you, Cal. I love you.”

And in that moment at least, he knew that anything really was possible.

Doc and Colleen were waiting for him in the front room. “We’ll be leaving first light tomorrow,” Cal said.

Doc put a hand on Cal’s arm. “Calvin, maybe the penicillin helped, maybe not; there’s no way to know. But I’d rest a good deal more easy if I could send you off with some medicines.”

“You know what the hospitals are like.”

“There’s a man who owes me a favor,” Doc answered. “If he’s out of prison-” Cal started to protest, but Doc cut him off, heading for the front door. “Don’t worry, I’ll be quick.”

Colleen fell in alongside him. “We’ll be quick.” Now Doc was the one protesting. Colleen lifted her sweater to reveal twelve inches of Green River toothpick sheathed at her belt.

Doc raised his hands in surrender. “I never argue with a woman who has a machete.”

As she followed Doc through the doorway, Colleen paused, shot Cal a look. “Thanks for the adventure.”

He returned the look, with gratitude. But in the turmoil of his mind, all he saw were eyes entirely blue.

He had stood in the shadows of Patel’s looted market for some time now, gazing through the broken glass at the brownstone across the street, watching the woman, the dark man and the other as they appeared from time to time at a fourth-floor window. Now two of them emerged from the building into the hot slant of evening sun, headed off down the street, unaware.

That left just the one, alone in the apartment, as he had wanted it. Not that he couldn’t have taken all three quite easily; the sweet hum in his arms and legs and chest told him that. No, it was just that he wanted to give this one his full attention, and all the time in the world.

Slowly, making sure no one saw him, Stern crossed the street and headed toward the apartment.