Peril in the Skies

“The rifle!” Nora shouted up to the balcony, her voice echoing off the curving roof of the hangar. Outside, the sound of rumbling motors grew louder; perhaps mere moments remained before the entire building would be overrun with heavily armed cops.

Rafe scrambled to his feet, still gaping at the television. “The what?” he shouted, his eyes not leaving the screen.

“The silver rifle, in my bag!” Nora shouted, making her way around the seamless-looking silver fuselage of the unveiled Whirlwind, looking for some way, any way, inside. “I need it, quick!”

Rafe dug through the satchel bag lying on one of the cabinets until he came up with a strange, metallic rifle, unlike anything he’d seen outside of bad science fiction.

“Hurry!” Nora hollered, finding herself at the aft of the plane. No use. There was no way in the damned thing -- but it was her plane, supposedly, somehow, so there had to be. She rested a hand on the cool metal skin of the fuselage and tried to think.

Something hummed beneath her palm, and with a hydraulic hiss, a hatch unsealed and lowered, granting entrance to the plane.

“Here,” Rafe said from over her shoulder, slightly out of breath. He had the stone knives tucked hastily in his belt, and he handed the rifle over to a startled Nora.

“Let’s hope this thing’s still got... uh... whatever it’s got in it,” Nora muttered. She hefted the rifle and took aim at the rear door to the hangar. With a few quick shots, Nora covered the door in quick-hardening goo, then aimed upward to do likewise to the high windows around the periphery of the hangar’s ceiling.

“That’s...” Rafe began, wrinkling his nose. “I can’t decide whether that’s fantastic or disgusting.”

“Little of both,” Nora sighed as the trigger began to click. “Empty, I guess. Or maybe it needs to recharge. Look, I think I can get us out of here, but I’m gonna need some time to figure this-- this--”

“Er... fantastical space plane?” Rafe ventured, getting his first good look at the Whirlwind. “It looks a bit Thunderbirds, really.”

“Right, whatever,” Nora nodded. “Look, that goo, whatever it is, ain’t gonna hold off the cops forever.”

“About the cops -- on the telly, I saw--” Rafe began, but Nora cut him off with a quick wave of her hand.

“Listen, dammit!” she snapped. “I need you to buy me some time while I get the plane up and running. Keep the cops busy.”

“Excuse me?” Rafe said, taking a quick step back. “Whoa, hang on, what makes you think I’d last two seconds against those people? I’ve seen your police movies! They’re like a bunch of steroid-addled pit bulls in body armor!”

“Well, for one thing,” Nora said matter-of-factly, “I just saw you jump straight over that railing, ten feet down, like you were stepping off a curb.”

Rafe looked back quickly, then at Nora, then back up at the balcony. Come to think of it, he didn’t remember taking the stairs.

“Oh,” Rafe said. “Well, okay then.”

“Good luck. I’ll let you know when to open the doors,” Nora said, nodding at the large hangar doors toward which the plane faced. “Just... uh... don’t die or anything, all right?” She paused for an awkward moment, clapped Rafe on the shoulder, and then ducked into the Whirlwind.

“Right,” Rafe said to no one in particular. “Very comforting, that.” He took a deep breath, then another, hearing the sound of a battering ram being applied to the nearby hangar door with considerable enthusiasm. Rafe drew the stone knives from his belt and tested their heft in his hands, letting his arms hang loose and limber by his sides. They felt somehow good -- like familiar extensions of himself. Like he’d been born to hold them.

Rafe took one last deep breath as the hammering at the door grew more fervent, then exhaled. He shut his eyes. Opened them. Smiled.

“Either I’ve just gone insane,” he said quietly to himself, “or this might possibly be fun.”

As the hatch sealed up behind her, Nora found herself in a darkened cargo compartment, jump seats lining the walls, that led to the cockpit at the front of the plane. There was just one seat up front, swiveled around to face her, and reluctantly, gingerly, she sat down.

She yelped in surprise as the seat rotated around to face the front windscreen. Lights sprang on all across the instrument panels as a variety of screens, dials and readouts blinked to life. A control stick rose forward, placing itself exactly in her outstretched hands.

“Hey, sweet thing,” the Whirlwind said in a deep, musical voice. “Long time, no see.”

“Excuse me?” Nora blurted, looking around.

“Did I stutter?” the plane replied. “Girl, you look a bit different. Do something with your hair?”

“Uh... it’s a long story,” Nora said. “I’m talking to the plane, aren’t I?”

“No,” the voice replied with dry sarcasm. “You’re talkin’ to a magical genie livin’ in the engine compartment. What do you think?”

“Okay, okay,” Nora said, stifling a nervous laugh. “Just... uh... had to make sure.” Her eyes swept over the dizzying array of instruments -- and for some reason, they seemed as familiar and comforting as the dashboard on her car. There was the altimeter, the artificial horizon, the throttle controls. Wherever her eyes fell, there exactly was the very gauge or screen she’d been looking for. She shifted in her seat slightly, and even there noticed the familiarity. It was like the whole plane was molded to her preferences.

“Fuel,” Nora said. “How’s our fuel?”

“Baby, we are gassed up and ready to go,” the plane purred. “I’d ask if you want to file a flight plan, but damn if I can’t get a read on the FAA wireless network.”

“Uh... that’s fine,” Nora said. “Just for the record -- who am I?”

“Don’t you make me run no medical scan on you,” the plane scolded. “Unless you’re trying to test me? You’re Nora Swift, CEO of Gale Aeronautics, and pilot of this superfine Cyclone Mark III-class customized piece of utterly badass machinery. If I do say so myself. Now can we quit the twenty questions and get to the preflight checkup already?”

There was a sudden, violent jolt, and the sound of chunks of something large and heavy bouncing off the rear fuselage.

“Ow!” the plane winced. “Damn, girl, are you throwin’ a party or something? I’m readin’ all kinds of heat and motion out there. You want it up on the cameras?”

“Uh... sure,” Nora said, and the video screen in front of her blinked to life, showing live feeds from angles all around the plane. The back wall of the hangar was simply gone, a jagged hole blown in it by some sort of explosive, and men in black SWAT gear with automatic rifles were pouring in through the smoke that roiled across the gap.

As Nora watched, someone seemed to leap down from the roof of the plane, ricochet off one SWAT trooper, and smash open another’s helmet with a blow from the stone knife held in his hands.

“Damn,” Nora said. “Look at the white boy go.”

It was odd, Rafe thought (as he ducked under a burst of machine-gun fire from a black-suited SWAT trooper, and neatly sliced the gun in two with one of his blades) how naturally this all came to him. Well, yes, there had been the krav maga (punch that one in the stomach, let his weight fall on your shoulders, give a heave, and there! You’ve topped that other one who was about to set off the tear gas grenade) and the Le Parkour training, and the bit of muay thai, and of course the tae kwon do. There were always better things to do than study in Rafe’s life, and learning to hit people -- or better yet, avoid having them hit you -- was most definitely one of them.

But it occurred to him (sprinting halfway up the staircase, balanced on the railing, and then turning a somersault to drag two pursuing SWAT cops backwards down the stairs into a heap of helmets, padding, and confusion) that he’d always felt slightly awkward in those pursuits, always conscious of his own motions, always running checks in his head (so, apparently, those whizzing sounds going by his ears were bullets -- fascinating!) to make sure he was going through each precise motion correctly.

This? This was as natural as breathing. Although sometimes, when he’d connect with a particularly satisfying blow, behind his eyes Rafe would see a split-second flash of the young man from his dream, and that tidy smile of his.

Rafe blinked, and looked about. The concrete floor was strewn with groaning, semiconscious SWAT troopers; through the gap in the wall, he could see the remaining forces falling back. He seemed to have run out of oppnents.

Or not. There was a familiar dark shape striding toward the hangar from the sunlight outside -- a very tall, very determined-looking dark shape. He seemed to be sorting out a crick in his vertebrae, cocking his head rhythmically to one side, and even at this distance, Rafe could hear the joints popping.

Maximillian stepped calmly through the hole the SWAT troops had created, gave one arm a little shake, as if he were still trying to get the bones back into place, and fixed his strange gray gaze directly on Rafe. The tall man’s eyes narrowed.

Then Nora, in the cockpit, flicked the Whirlwind’s ignition switch. Powerful turbines on each of the wings began to spin, first at a slow whine, then faster and faster. A gale force wind filled the tiny hangar, stray papers and bits of rubble blowing everywhere, and the full brunt of the thrust sent Maximillian skidding bodily backward to slam against the far wall.

Rafe didn’t need an invitation. Stowing his knives and snatching up a helmet from an unconscious guard, he dashed across the hangar, took three quick steps straight up the front wall (that was a good trick, wasn’t it?) and grabbed hold of the dangling chain that opened the hangar doors. Braced against the wall amid the howling tumult of the turbines, the helmet resting on his knees, Rafe pulled the chain hand over hand, and the doors, slowly, began to open.

“Come on, come on,” Nora breathed in the cockpit, watching the doors inch upward. She strapped herself into the seat with sweat-slicked hands and checked the rear cameras. Her stomach knotted itself all over again.

Maximillian, under the full blast of the turbines’ backwash, had stood up. And he was walking, one hard-fought step at a time, slowly toward the back of the Whirlwind.

With a last heave, Rafe got the doors all the way up, and felt the chain lock in place. He pushed backward off the wall, turning a somersault in midar, and landed with a thump in the nose of the plane. Nora, startled, waved.

“Now, just who is that crazy-ass white boy sitting on my nosecone?” the Whirlwind demanded, with vague indignance.

“Let him in!” Nora barked. “You got any kind of roof doors or something?”

“Baby,” the plane reassured her, “you know I got everything you need.” Seamless doors in the roof of the plane retracted smoothly, filling the calm air of the cockpit with the roar and buffett of the turbine winds outside.

Rafe scrambled up the front of the plane and paused at the edge of the roof doors, hefting the helmet, testing its weight. He looked along the length of the plane to the tail, where the dark form of Maximillian staggered forward, the whole of his coat rippling in the wind from the turbines. The tall man stretched out one hand, fingertips mere centimeters from the back of the plane.

Rafe cupped both hands to his mouth. “Oi!” he shouted. “You there!”

Maximillian’s head snapped up, and Rafe hurled the helmet with all his might.

Accelerated by the turbines’ jetstream, the helmet smacked into Maximillian’s face so hard that it split in two. The tall man tumbled backward to the cement floor, clutching his face, and Rafe dropped inside the cockpit, landing in a crouch.

“Get yourself a jump seat,” Nora shouted back to him as the doors slid shut above. “You like flying?”

“It depends,” Rafe said, breathing heavily, flushed with adrenalin. “Is there beverage service on this flight?”

“Don’t think so,” Nora replied. She eased the throttle forward, and the plane taxied through the hangar doors and began to bump across the weedy, open field behind the structure. Far ahead of them, the blue-green waters of Lake Michigan filled the horizon.

“Ah,” Rafe said, hastily strapping himself into a seat folded-down from the wall. “Failing that, do you perhaps know how to fly this plane? Any plane?”

“I flew the UFO,” Nora told him.

“Yes, and we all know how well that ended,” Rafe sighed.

“Baby,” the plane said, “I got some bad news for you. Field’s too short. No way we can take off.”

“No,” Nora insisted. “My dad said he used this field all the time.”

“Well, it may be good enough for your dad’s single-engine piece-a-crap kit plane,” the Whirlwind huffed, “but I happen to be one finely tuned piece of precision avionics, and I’m tellin’ you, the field’s too short.”

“Um, excuse me,” Rafe chimed in. “Is that the plane talking?”

“Yes!” Nora and the Whirlwind shouted simultaneously. Rafe nodded quickly, relieved that this was not, at least, the next progression in his apparent nervous breakdown.

Something outside struck the fuselage with great force, sending a reverberating ping through the entire cabin. Then another, and another, until it sounded like a sudden hailstorm had erupted.

“Dammit!” the plane thundered. “Those melonfarmers are shootin’ at me!”

“Melonfarmers?” Nora asked. Rafe snickered.

“Hey, you were the one installed Profanity Limiter 2.3 on me,” the Whirlwind sulked. “Ow! The hell kinda ammo are they usin’?”

Ruby checked the video screens. Police cars and SWAT vans had flanked the plane as it slowly bumped forward along the grass; behind them, officers fired pistols, shotguns, and machine guns in a steady barrage at the skin of the plane.

“Are you hurt?” Nora asked the plane. “I mean, is there damage?”

“Naw,” the Whirlwind said. “You know I got that Morrowlite cladding. But it’s gonna be hell on my finish.”

“Shame you didn’t build a helicopter,” Rafe sighed, and Nora’s eyes snapped wide.

“VTOL!” she shouted to the plane. “You got any kind of vertical takeoff capability?”

“For damn sure!” the plane replied, and from either wing, Nora heard hydraulics humming, and a change in the sound of the whining turbines.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Nora asked, seeing stats for the plane’s vertical thrust slide into view on the video screen.

“You didn’t ask,” the Whirlwind replied. “Hang on to your butts, people. Here comes the fun part.”

The roar of the turbines intensified, clouds of dirt and debris beginning to roil around the plane, and with a sudden lurch, it shot upward off the ground, momentarily leaving Rafe and Nora’s stomachs behind. The ground below shrank with dizzying speed, and then with another, gentler, buoyant sensation, the plane leveled off.

“Altitude, 2,000 feet, and damn if it ain’t a lovely day,” the plane said. “So, baby, where you want to go?”

“Nowhere, for just a second,” Nora said, her eyes squeezed tight, willing the wave of nausea from the plane’s sudden ascent to recede. “Then 919 North Michigan.”

“Headin’ over to Morrow’s? What gives?” the Whirlwind said. “Is my calendar off, ‘cause it sure as hell don’t seem like Saturday.”

“Give me my calendar for the week,” Nora said as the plane’s wings rotated back to the horizontal, and the Whirlwind began to coast in a slow looping arc away from the expanse of the lake and back toward the Chicago skyline. A list of dates and places flashed up on the video screen before her.

“Board meeting,” Rafe read over her shoulder, having unstrapped himself from the jump seat. “Lunch with the Commerce Secretary! You do get around.”

“Look at this,” Nora said, tapping one particular date on the screen. “Saturday. ‘SSD meeting, 919 North Michigan.’ What do you suppose that’s about?”

“Society for Sleep Deprivation?” Rafe guessed. “Sloppy Seconds -- no, can’t think of a good ‘D’ word for that one.”

“You wanna know something, jungle boy?” Nora sighed, swiveling the chair around to face him. “You’re really not as funny as you think you are.”

“And yet I keep trying,” Rafe grinned back. “You do realize you’re flying a plane right now, yes?”

“The plane’s helping,” Nora said uneasily, to a wordless affirming mmm-hmm from the Whirlwind. Rafe looked unconvinced.

“Where’s the altimeter?” he said. “Go on, quick.”

Nora swiveled around and pointed, without hestiation. The she stopped, blinking. “That was an easy one,” she wavered. Rafe put a hand on the back of her chair and leaned forward, gazing across the bank of the controls.

“Afterburner,” he said. Nora pointed. “Air brakes. Stabilizers. Auxiliary electrics,” Rafe rattled off, and she found her fingers landing effortlessly on each dial.

“Eyes shut, now,” Rafe said. “Secondary fuel shunt. Distress beacon. Hydraulics levels.” And without even thinking, Nora let her hands move blindly, instinctively to spots across the console. She opened her eyes and let out a breath.

“And you,” she said, “with the kung fu and the climbing up walls. How much of that was training?”
“More than you’d think,” Rafe said, narrowly avoiding banging his head on a bank of switches as he stood up. “Less than I’d like.”

A snowball of doubt coalesced in the pit of Nora’s stomach, and she ran her hands slowly back through her hair. “How much of this do you think is me,” she said. “Who I am, who I’ve always been? And how much of this is... whatever we’re becoming?”

Rafe opened his mouth to answer the question, and fell over.

The blast had come from nowhere, making the whole plane shudder, jolting Nora hard against the straps of her harness. “What the hell was that?” she and the plane shouted simultaneously, as Rafe scrambled his way to the nearest jump seat.

“Hell if I know!” the plane shouted, an edge of panic in its synthesized voice. “I got nothin’ on radar.”

Nora swallowed hard and wrapped her hands around the stick. “Give me external video,” she said. The skies around them were clear -- nothing on any pane of the video footage that scrolled across the video screen. But another jolt rocked the plane, and alarms began to whoop.

“Whatever that was, it was closer!” the plane said.

“You mean those weren’t hits?” Nora said, her eyes widening.

“Indirect only,” the Whirlwind replied. “I’m readin’ incredible localized bursts of heat and concussion.”

Nora took another look at the video screen, and then looked closer. There was some error in the video feed -- glitches in the pixels. A cloud of slight distoritions in the video algorithm, like bad compression, off the Whirlwind’s right wing.

“Give me manual,” she said, feeling the stick loosen in her grip, the plane’s systems shift themselves over to her. “Rafe, you strapped in?”

“Couldn’t be more so,” Rafe said quickly from the back. “Not that I’d mind if I were.”

Nora rolled the stick hard to the left and kicked up the throttle, sending the plane into a hard bank. The turbines roared, and the plane shook again from another near-miss.

A black helicopter unlike any Nora had ever seen, all sharp edges and angles, wheeled into view through the Whirlwind’s cockpit glass. A single silver needle was painted on its side, on the aft fuselage. The side of the copter was open to the air, and a tall, black-coated man in a harness dangled out the side, something long and silver glinting in his hand. Nora recognized the calm, almost mechanical body language. Maximillian.

Even from this distance, she could swear she saw him smile.

“Oh, hell,” Nora said quietly. “Hang on!” She shot the throttle forward and plunged the stick down, and the plane dove, skimming under the landing skids of the black copter as a brilliant flash of blue light erupted from Maximillian’s side of the copter.

“How do they keep finding us?” Rafe shouted as the plane levelled off low above the surface of the lake, a cresting V of frothing water rising in its wave. A sudden memory flashed in Nora’s brain, and she reached in her pocket for the small rectangle of paper she’d put there the morning before. Mrs. Stitch’s card.

“Son of a--!” Nora shouted. “I’ve been leading them right to us! We’ve gotta ditch this thing. Rafe?”

“I’m comfortable where I am, thanks!” Rafe called nervously, and Nora risked a look back to fix him with the sort of Death Stare Rafe had seen a thousand times on the faces of girlfriends and, most often, his own mother. With sinking hopes, he unstrapped himself and darted forward to snatch the card from her hand. “I’m not going to want the details of whatever you’re planning, am I?”

“You’ll get the particulars,” Nora said. “Get to the back of the plane.”

“I don’t like this already!” Rafe said, weaving his way handhold-by-overhead-handhold toward the back of the plane. Hydraulics hummed under his feet, and a seam of white light appeared and steadily yawned wider before him, admitting a fierce blast of cold air and fine misty spray. “Correction,” Rafe muttered, so low that even he couldn’t hear it over the engines’ roar. “I loathe this.”

Then the black helicopter dropped into view through the open hatch, making Rafe cling to the overhead handhold for even dearer life. His grip didn’t loosen any when a second, identical copter appeared behind it, in equally hot pursuit.

“I despise this plan,” Rafe said. “I would kick this plan in the teeth!” He balled the black business card in one fist and flung it forward; the jetstream roaring around the plane sucked it up and away and gone. The tall one from the hangar, the one against whose face Rafe had smashed a perfectly good reinforced SWAT helmet at considerable taxpayer expense, leaned out of the side of the lead copter and took careful aim with his needle thing.

“Climb!” Rafe shouted! “Climb climb climb!”

The plane shot upward, yanking Rafe off his feet to dangle from the handhold over a great deal of nothing and the lake far below. He saw blue light erupt from the lead copter and boil a semisphere of lakewater into a sudden puff of steam.

“Doors!” Rafe shouted. “For the love of God, close the doors!”

The hydraulics groaned and hummed, and the plane began to seal shut beneath him. Rafe clung to the handhold with all his might, the fat hand of gravity squeezing him back, feeling his fingers slowly slip. Then the doors sealed, shutting out the last out the harsh outside light, and the plane leveled off slightly. Rafe lunged forward, swinging himself up the cabin, and finally latched himself back into a jump seat, panting with exertion.

“I’m not speaking to you!” he called out to the back of Nora’s head, and concentrated very hard on keeping down his breakfast.

Nora, at present, had bigger problems. Steel, stone, and glass problems, twenty stories high, and fast approaching: the Chicago skyline.

“They’re still on us!” she shouted to the plane as another nearby burst from outside rattled the fuselage. “We got any kind of weapons?”

“Yeah, ‘cause the FAA just loves you carrying that stuff around civilian population centers,” the plane shot back. “They made you take off the guns after that thing in Milwaukee, remember?”

“Uh... sure,” Nora lied. “Fine. What’ve we got for defense?”

“Active camouflage,” the Whirlwind said. “Turn that on, ain’t nobody gonna find you. Still charging, though. The solar cells are at 70 percent right now.”

“How much time until they’re full?” Nora asked, watching the skyscrapers loom ever closer. There was the Tribune Tower, and the Wrigley Building...

“Two minutes, thirty-three seconds and counting, unless it turns cloudy.”

“What do I do till then?” Nora said, watching two cloudy hazes of glitchy pixels swing into view on the video feed from the rear cameras.

“Stay in the air!” the plane suggested. Then the plane shot through the narrow channel of the Chicago River, and into the city proper.

A burst of brilliant blue light flared off to the left of the cockpit, buffetting the whole plane, and Nora yelped in alarm. Hands slick with sweat on the stick, she rolled the plane hard to the left, rocketing over the El tracks down State Street. On the screens, a single roiling mass of bad pixels tailed her doggedly.

“I’ve lost one!” she shouted. “Where’d he go?”

“Beats the hell out of me!” the Whirlwind shouted. “Collision! Collision!”

Nora yanked back on the stick, G-forces slamming her back into the seat, as the Whirlwind narrowly missed one of the federal courthouses. The world went black around the edges of her eyes, and she fought to keep her view from graying out until the plane leveled off.

“Enough of this,” Nora said, wheeling the plane around. One of the two black copters swung around into view. “The fuselage is reinforced, right? Morrow-something cladding?”

“Morrowlite. Tougher than a defensive lineman and twice as light,” the plane affirmed.

“Could it take a direct impact with a helicopter?” Nora asked.

“Oh, no,” the plane. “Oh, hell no. Even if it weren’t in my programming, I’d be telling you no way, no how.”

“Could it take a direct hit?” The copter was looming closer outside Nora’s cockpit.

“Maybe,” the plane said. “The odds ain’t good.”

“I’m going to pretend I can’t hear anything you’re saying!” Rafe called from the back. “Unless you enjoy uncontrollable, vaguely girlish screaming.”

“OK,” Nora said, gritting her teeth as the black copter ahead of her swung away and began to flee. “One more question. Do you think they know this thing can’t ram them?”

“Probably not,” the Whirlwind said, with greater confidence.

“Good,” Nora said, and punched the throttle all the way forward.

The Whirlwind screamed ahead, coming at the copter from slightly above, forcing it to dive. It wheeled through the maze of skyscrapers, desperately fleeing, as Nora doggedly pursued it.

“Come on,” Nora snarled under her breath to the other craft, with a frustration truly known only to office workers with terrible and lengthy commutes. “Come and get it, you jackasses.”

Again and again the copter tried to rise; again and again Nora brough the belly of the Whirlwind down inches above its whirling blades, forcing it to lose altitude or ram the other plane.

“Any sign of the other copter?” Nora asked, as the two vessels raced up Michigan Avenue, the South Loop blurring past to their left.

“Like I can even spot that thing to tell you,” the Whirlwind griped.

“Okay, fine,” Nora said. “Is there any spot around us where you see nothing? I mean, absolutely nothing?”

“Checking...” the plane said. “On top of us! Dammit, they’re right on top of us!”

Above, coming out of the sun, the second copter steadily dropped lower, the silvery length of the Whirlwind a fat and easy target as it skimmed above the honking, baffled choke of daily traffic. Maximillian leaned out the side of the copter, one hand holding his hat on, the other aiming his Needle at the fleeing craft. A smile played at the corners of his mouth.

“Active camo status!” Nora called out in the cockpit.

“Fully charged in three... two... one...” the plane said.

“Hit it!” Nora shouted, jamming back on the throttle and hitting the air brakes. The entire plane lurched, and a crackling him raced along the skin of the plane all around them...

A burst of energy lanced down from the upper copter, passed directly through where the Whirlwind should have been, and enveloped the second copter. There was a brilliant, searing blue-white flash, and then the rear half of the copter was simply gone, rotors and tail neatly sliced into invisibility.

The lower copter wheeled wildly, bounced off the face of a building, smashed into an empty intersection and burst into flames. Something unseen formed a fleeting hole in the plume of fire and smoke, and then it was gone.

In the copter above, Maximillian clenched one gloved fist tightly around his Needle, and narrowed his eyes in wordless rage.

The cabin had gone eerily quiet, and the world outside seemed a strange silvery-green through Nora’s windscreen as she slowly guided the plane higher. It was coasting now, at its lowest speed, the posh shops of North Michigan Avenue falling away beneath it. Nora slumped back in her chair, legs shaking, and let out a breath she felt like she’d been holding for hours.

“You,” she said, patting the overhead console fondly, “are one hell of a plane.”

“I’m just fine,” Rafe said from the back. “Not praying for death or anything. Thanks for asking.”

“You’re welcome,” Nora sighed. “Whirlwind, gimme VTOL mode, and get us as close as you can to the top floor of 919 North Mich.”

“Will do, baby,” the plane said. The Whirlwind, invisible to the eyes and ears of the world outside, drifted through the air and made a gentle, skidding turn. Its rear hatch unsealed, extending a ramp onto the top-floor balcony of the skyscraper, now dwarfed by the nearby John Hancock Building and its 95 dizzying stories.

“All right,” Nora told the plane. “Seal up, stay in camo, and wait for us here. You got any way I can contact you when I need you?”

“You know how to whistle, don’t you?” the Whirlwind said.

“Best plane ever,” Nora grinned, and unstrapped herself. Rafe was sitting very still and very pale in his jump seat, and she paused in front of him.

“You coming, jungle boy?” she said.

“To solid ground?” Rafe replied. “Oh, absolutely.” He unstrapped and followed Nora through the cabin and down the ramp, blinking in the sunlight. Behind them, there was only a yawning black hole into the plane in the midst of empty sky -- no sound, no glimmer of the plane, not even the slightest gust from the turbines. Then the hatch sealed, the black hole in the sky shrinking, and the air was empty once more.

Rafe and Nora stood on a broad balcony ringed with metal railings, overlooking the sunlit streets of Chicago. Above them, the still-proud beacon of 919 North Michigan rose into the blue, and ahead of them, glass doors led into still and dusty darkness.

Rafe tried the doors -- unlocked. “That’s welcome,” he said. “Guess they didn’t expect anyone coming in this way.” He opened the door wide and beckoned for Nora to enter. She shook her head sternly.

“Guy with the big-ass knives goes first,” she insisted, and Rafe rolled his eyes.

“How come you’re giving the orders now?” Rafe sighed.

“’Cause I’m the one with the plane,” Nora shot back. “After you.”

Rafe drew the stone knives from his belt and entered the shadowy gloom of the penthouse, Nora following. The door swung shut behind them, and they were enveloped in dust and silence.

The room was entirely empty. No furniture, no trash, nothing. Just a layer of dust on the floor, thick enough to raise small puffs as they walked, and a large, circular metal door on the opposite side of the main chamber.

“Look,” Nora said, her voice low. “Some more rooms over there. You think we should--?” Rafe held up a hand, the black blade of the stone knife he held catching the light. From beyond the metal door, they heard the creak of elevator cables, and the opening of rattling doors. And faint voices.

They were alone and exposed, trapped in an empty room at the top of a skyscraper. Rafe looked at the door, and then back at Nora. His mouth moved soundlessly, forming words: What do we do now?

Operators From Beyond

The secret panel swung shut, closing on the drawn and frightened face of Dr. Xiang, and Trip and Sully were alone in the tiny shaft, enveloped in complete darkness. Behind the door, Trip could fainly hear the sounds of metal groaning, as the men in dark coats attempted to batter down the Doctor’s steel door.

The dark reminded Sully too much of the cabinet of her childhood. She clenched her hands hard around the metal rungs protruding from the concrete wall and swallowed a wave of sudden panic trying to scrabble up her esophagus. Then, feeling her way down to the next rung, she began to descend the ladder.

Trip followed, and they reached the bottom not far below. There was a rustling of fabric in the darkness, and then a light snapped on. It was a surprisingly bright keychain LED, and Trip shone it around the dim space, Sully wincing as the beam lashed across her eyes, and finally found the catch to the secret door the Doctor had mentioned.

Above them, they heard a crash, and a single, high scream. Trip fumbled with the catch on the cold concrete panel, and it swung open, bringing winter with it.

Trip and Sully emerged from the secret ladder to find themselves in a darkened meat locker, frost-dusted slabs of pork and beef dangling from hooks, casting strange and sinister shadows in the light of Trip’s LED. Sully hastily shut the door behind them, and they both unconsciously pulled their jackets tighter around them -- Sully’s black leather, Trip’s olive drab army coat -- amid the unnatural chill of the room.

“Wait, don’t people get locked into these things all the time?” Sully asked in tiny puffs of steaming breath. Trip smiled and shook his head, moving gingerly through the frozen meat to the opposite side of the room.

“Only in bad sitcoms,” he said, and found the latch, and opened the freezer door.

It led to a somewhat warmer stock room, cardboard boxes piled in high, narrow shelves, and Sully went first through the double doors that led to the store proper.

The offices of Dr. Xiang occupied the second floor of her family’s building on Wentworth Avenue; a Chinese grocery store filled the ground floor, there to disguise the true nature of Dr. Xiang’s livelihood from tourists and snooping neighbors. At present, the store was closed and dark, the only light admitted through the broad windows at the front of the store. Squinting over the aisles of brightly colored packaging covered in Chinese characters, Trip could see that it was a busy morning outside; some kind of street fair had drawn hundreds of people, filling the streets as they browsed at various booths set up along Wentworth.

They had just passed from the dried mushrooms into the bottles of wine when Trip and Sully froze. A pair of shadows loomed at the front doors of the shop, and like a gunshot, Trip heard the bolts locking the front doors shoot open. The door swung wide, admitting a brief burst of mingled conversation and syrupy Chinese pop music, and two of the men in black coats glided inside the shop.

Sully grabbed Trip by the collar of his jacket and yanked him down into a crouch. They glanced at one another, and in that moment, Trip found himself pausing the consider the absurdity of this situation -- running for his life with no idea why, his only companion a total stranger.

The soles of the two dark-coated men’s shoes squeaked softly on the tile floor. They were passing down the next aisle over from Trip and Sully, still between them and the front door.

The floor above exploded with a drumroll of footsteps, and the sounds of falling furniture. Fighting. The two intruders paused, as did Trip and Sully, to stare at the ceiling, where the tumult on the second floor shook gentle falls of white dust from the acoustic tiles. The noise stopped, with terrible abruptness, and there was a single, final, thud. Sully heard a self-satisfied snort of amuseument from one of the intruders, and her stomach turned.

Then Trip’s mouth was just brushing her hear, and he was whispering. “Don’t move,” he said. “Don’t run. Just trust me. And whatever you do, don’t touch me.” He unslung his backpack from his shoulders and set it down next to her.

Before Sully could stop him, Trip had stood up and smashed a whole row of wine bottles off the shelves. They shattered on the floor, spilling wine in a wide pool that crossed the aisle, and Sully’s heart caught in her throat as the figures of the two men in black coats appeared at the end of the aisle. Trip raised his arms in surrender as they began to walk toward him.

“You’ve got me,” Trip said, as the men -- one broad and stocky, the other with a scar running down his left cheek -- sized him up with strange, identically gray eyes. “There’s no point in running. We surrender.”

Sully, used to looking for these things, saw Trip’s right thumb and forefinger move almost imperceptibly against the cuff of his jacket. The two men in black coats stepped into the puddle of wine.

Trip made a quick motion with his upraised hands, and both men shot out to grab him around the forearms. There was a sharp cracking sound, a sudden flare of sparks and smoke around the two men’s feet in the puddle of wine, and both men dropped, convulsing, their shoes smoking.

“It’s the jacket,” Trip said, reaching out a hand to Sully, who ignored it and stood up, straightening out her jacket. Trip grabbed up his pack instead. “Just an experiment -- kind of a personal security thing. Once you arm it, it hits anyone who tries to grab you with a blast of a few thousand volts.”

“Yeah, I read about that,” Sully nodded, grudgingly impressed. She paused to give one of the men a kick in the ribs as they stepped over the intruder’s prone, twitching bodies. “The Israelis invented it, right?”

“The Israelis invented it, but I improved it,” Trip said, looking slightly hurt. “Built this one myself. It recharges based on the wearer’s own motion.”

“Trip Morrow, Trip Morrow,” Sully said, turning the name over in her brain. “I know I’ve heard that name bef-- wait. Do you... build special-effects rigs? Animatronics, that sort of thing?”

“Sometimes,” Trip shrugged, pausing to examine one of the men’s sleeves. He drew out a silver needle like the one Sully had seem Eyepatch use, and held it triumphantly up to Sully. “Right where you said it was. Yeah, I build lots of stuff, why?”

Sully quickly moved his hand and the needle away from her face. “Careful with that thing, champ. I saw it make an instant pothole. Did you -- uh, did you build anything for Double Deuce Industries?”

“Can’t talk about it,” Trip smiled. “I’m still under NDA.”

“Yeah,” I know, Sully sighed, crouched by the front windows, scanning the crowd. No sign of guys in black coats. “I wrote the NDA. You do good work.”

“That was you?” Trip said. “I wish I’d had another month. I could have gotten more of the fine muscles around the eyes working.”

“You did great,” Sully told him. “Only way it could have been more realistic is if it demanded a bag apiece of sensemilla and M&Ms a day.”

“Oh,” Trip said, cocking his head, looking vaguely shocked. “He looks so healthy.”

“Illusion,” Sully smirked. Behind them, she heard one of the men in black coats groan, softly, and the full danger of their situation flooded back to her. “Come on,” she said, grabbing Trip by the wrist and yanking him out the front doors into the sun-flooded street.

The crowd buffered and battered them immediately, busy shoppers and gawkers nearly dragging Sully and Trip apart. Sully kept scanning the crowds for black hats and coats. Nothing so far.

“This is your city,” she said to Trip, as they managed to work themselves into the flow of circulating pedestrians. “Where can we hide?”

“I haven’t been down here much, but if we can get outside this fair, we can probably grab a cab. I have a workshop in Pilsen--”

“If they found us here, they can find us where you live,” Sully said. “Other options? I’d suggest a hotel, but I don’t have that kind of cash, and if they were monitoring my phone, I’m betting they’ve got some kind of trace on my cards, too.”

“I had one other idea,” Trip said. “Something in the magazine -- it said my grandpa had a --”

A high keen cut through the air, and from behind them, the air glared flashbulb-bright. Trip and Sully whirled, alone among throngs of oblivious passersby, and stared at the building they’d just left.

It had suddenly become a McDonald’s. A very bright, very modern McDonalds. One that had clearly been occupying that space for quite some time.

“What the hell?” Sully blurted. “Did you see--?”

“Yeah,” Trip said, his face pale. “But why didn’t anyone else? Look. Nobody turned. Nobody’s staring.” All around them, shoppers laughed and joked and talked on cell phones. No one seemed to care that a fast-food franchise had suddenly materialized in a burst of radiance.

Sully dragged them both out of the flow of pedestrian traffic, to the far side of the street, and the two stood on tiptoes and craned to see through the front windows. “Oh God,” Sully said, spotting it first. “The guy with the mop.”

It was Hu, in a restaurant uniform, pushing a mop sullenly across the restaurant’s floor with the thousand-yard stare of minimum wage. Behind him, at the front counter, Trip thought he saw Anna Mei Xiang in a headset, staring ahead in boredom, taking a customer’s order.

Sully and Trip looked at one another, horrorstruck. And then Trip’s eyes went wide, and Sully followed his gaze to the roof of the building.

A tall man in a gray suit and a dark coat stood at the edge of the facade. He tipped his hat down to them, and as the brim of his hat lifted, Sully could see the eypatch on his face.

“Oh, no,” she said softly. “No, no, no. I hit him with a freaking car.”

“No time,” Trip said urgently, and when she looked down, she saw more men and women in long black coats, their silver eyes locked on the two of them, making their way calmly and casually through the crowds.

They ran, Sully following Trip as they barrelled through the weaving forests of people choking the streets. They slammed into pedestrians, sending people sprawling, raising angry shouts behind them. Trip tossed back an occasional “excuse me,” or “sorry;” Sully, hardened by years of freeway driving, had no time for such pleasantries.

Behind them, the black-coated men and women strolled on with no particular urgency, as if they were savoring the thinning yellow sunlight and the crisp autumn air. The crowds, without making any particular effort to do so, seemed to consistently part before them and close behind them, and with their progress so unimpeded, the black-coated legions steadily closed the gap between themselves and their quarry.

Sully and Trip ran up Wentworth and across Archer, the crowds thinning as they emerged from the street fair. Most of the crowds had been drawn away from Chinatown Square Mall, and the Square itself was nearly empty as they dashed under the Knowledge Gate; just a couple of men seated on a far bench, tossing crumbs to pigeons. Lungs burning, they crossed the square, headed for an alleyway on the far side between two shops. Sully risked a look over her shoulder, and saw two of the men in black coats crossing Archer. Then they flickered, like a film skipping frames, and suddenly a whorl of pigeons erupted from the square as the same two men appeared in the center of the square, mere steps behind them.

“No fair,” Sully gasped, stumbling forward into the alley -- only to run smack into Trip. The two fell into a heap on the ground and lay there, gasping for breath. A line of men in black coats filled the mouth of the alley ahead of them, and the two pursuing them were now joined, as if out of nowhere, by two more. Trip and Sully were boxed in. Trapped.

They lifted their heads to the sound of the slow clapping of gloved hands. Eyepatch emerged through the line of men and women closing off the mouth of the alley ahead of them, applauding sardonically.

“Oh, you’ve had us on quite the merry chase,” he said, smiling without mirth. “Young miss, I’ll have you know you left some terrible scratches on my fender.”

“It’s not my fault,” Sully spat, regaining her breath in gulps, “if you didn’t lie down the first time.”

“Lie down,” Eyepatch nodded. “That’s exactly what you both should have done from the beginning. Look what all this running around’s gotten you. A few extra hours, tops? Can’t be worth it at all.”

“It’s gotten us this,” Trip said, getting to one knee, and pulled out the needle he’d taken. He thrust it out at Eyepatch and squeezed his eyes shut, concentrating with all his might.

Then he opened one eye, and looked at Sully. “Is it doing anything?” Trip said, and Nora, looking more mortified than anything else, slowly shook her head.

“Well, well, sport,” Eyepatch chuckled. “Just full of surprises, aren’t you? Too bad for you that each Needle’s keyed to its owner. Can’t have them falling into the wrong hands, can we?”

He reached into his sleeve and pulled his own Needle out. “You want a demonstration? Here.”

At the far end of the alley, behind Trip and Sully, someone cleared his throat.

“If you’ll excuse me,” said a tall, immaculately dressed man in a wool overcoat and a pinstriped suit, striding through the crowd of baffled men in black coats, “I’m going to have to ask you not to do that.” His hair was slicked back, thin and sickly along his oddly skewed scalp, and the round, gold-rimmed spectacles he wore seemed to curiously distort his pale blue eyes.

He was followed by a shorter, much stranger man. This one sported a tweed overcoat, a day or so’s worth of stubble, black pants from an entirely different suit, and a lime green t-shirt reading MONTCLAIRE FAMILY REUNION 1996. He wore a red sneaker, untied, on his left foot, and a waterproof hunter’s boot on his right. Tufts of brown hair stuck out at intervals beneath the fur-lined cap he wore, earflaps down, and neither of his eyes seemed to point in the same direction of the other.

“And by that,” the shorter man said, “he means that thing where the air goes in and out of your breathbags.”

“Lungs,” the taller man corrected quietly, as if mindly embarrassed.

“I like my word better,” the short man sulked. Eyepatch rolled his eyes and debonairly waved his Needle at them.

“You’re not here,” Eyepatch said. But to his visible surprise, the two men remained exactly where they were.

“An intriguing philosophical dilemma,” the taller man nodded, smiling. His teeth seemed somehow too even, too perfect. “Where, exactly, is ‘here,’ in a metaphysical sense? Are any of us truly in any single place at a given time?”

Eyepatch nodded to the men and women at the far end of the alley, annoyed. “Take care of them.”

“I must confess,” the taller man said, “to some hope that you might issue a command of that nature.”

“Yeah,” added the shorter man. “I’m hungry.”

They both smiled -- wider, and wider still, Trip and Sully watching in disbelief as their skin seemed to contort beyond the limits of human anatomy. And then purple-pink light climbed out of their distended mouths, painful to behold, uncurling in smoking, crackling tendrils. It hurt to look at, seeming to cut right through Trip’s brain and transfix him, and in his head, he heard the singing of many distant voices...

One of the two tendrils from each man’s mouth lashed hungrily around each of the four black-coated men and women at the far end of the alley, and in a startling instant, dragged them screaming back toward the two men’s mouths. There were horrible cries, and the crack and slurp of folding bone and tissue, and the four black-coated guards were devoured entirely.

Sully tore her eyes away from the strange, painful light and looked back at Eyepatch. In the reflected purplish radiance, she saw real fear written across his face, just before he and the remaining men frantically lifted their Needles and stutter-stepped themselves away into nothingness.

The tendrils curled back into the two men’s mouths, and the singing stopped, and suddenly Trip and Sully were alone in the alley with just the taller and shorter men. The taller one withdrew a pink lace handkerchief from one jacket pocket and dabbed daintily at the corners of his mouth; the shorter one let out a thunderous belch and whacked himself on the chest.

“I’m terribly sorry you had to see that,” the taller man said to a baffled, terrified Trip and Sully.

“Yeah,” the shorter one said. “Especially with those eyes of yours. So limiting. Tasty, though.”

Trip muffed his first few tries at speech, intended syllables coming through as blurted puffs of air. He managed “Who are you?” on his third attempt.

“I am Operator Vore,” the taller man said, bowing crisply, “and my associate is Operator Grin. We have been sent by-- ah-- a certain interested party to ensure your safety in this most crucial of times. The body we represent has a vested interest in your survival and success.”

“Success?” Sully said, getting shakily to her feet. “Success in what?”

“What is the statement of the moment?” Operator Vore pondered, cocking his head as if trying to recall. “Ah, yes. If you have to ask, you’ll never know.”

Operator Grin did exactly that. “We’re gonna eat you,” he said, in a slow singsong.

That was enough for Trip. He grabbed Sully by the arm, and they ran, fast as their feet could carry them, out of the alley and away from the two men.

Operator Vore sighed, pushing his spectacles up his pinched nose. “I can’t take you anywhere.”

Operator Grin let out another belch. “What? It’s true.”

Sully and Trip stopped running five blocks later, when Trip collapsed against a side of a building, waving breathlessly for Sully to hold up.

“Oh, Jesus,” Sully said, simultaneously cursing herself for not quitting smoking, and desperately wanting a cigarette. She leaned forward, resting her hands on the torn knees of her stockings. “Oh, Christ. What the hell were those things?”

“Worse question,” Trip gasped. “Why did they want to help us?”

“I don’t--” Sully said, breath shuddering in and out of her lungs. “Oh, God, I don’t want to think about that. I just want this all to be over, dammit. My schedule for the past two days is just completely shot.”

“I dunno,” Trip said. “I didn’t have anything to do this weekend.”

They looked at each other for a moment, and then Sully sputtered and burst out laughing.

“Oh, God,” she said between laughs. “I can’t tell if this is genuine laughter-- or, you know-- hysteria. Hoo.”

“Probably a little of both,” Trip said. “We need to -- phew -- we need to get back downtown.”

“What’s downtown?” Sully asked, and Trip dug the cigar box out of his bag and carefully opened the magazine curled up inside, leafing through the yellowed, autumnal pages until he’d found the right spot. “I saw this on the plane, when I gave it a quick flip-through,” Trip said, and began to read: “Tom Morrow kept his headquarters on the top floor of 919 North Michigan Avenue...”

“That’s a real building?” Sully asked, scanning the street for any sign of a passing cab.

“Um... yeah,” Trip said, slightly disbelieving. “Yeah, built in the late ‘20s. Used to be one of the biggest in town. I never heard of anything being on the top floor except, you know, offices, but I figured--”

“You figured,” Sully said, her black hair slicing above her shoulders as she turned to face him, “that if we just saw a Chinese grocery become a McDonald’s, stranger things have happened.”

“Exactly,” Trip nodded. Behind him, a yellow cab turned the corner and began to rumble toward them. Sully put thumb and forefinger in her mouth and let out an earsplitting whistle as it rolled past. But the cab had its OFF DUTY light on, and it simply kept driving.

“Bastard!” Sully shouted after it, kicking at the pavement in frustration -- then stopped when she saw the cab’s taillights flare red. It screeched to a halt, lurched as the driver threw the cab into reverse, and roared backward toward them. Sully glanced over and saw Trip holding up his right hand, displaying the silver-and-amber signet ring he wore.

“Playing a hunch,” Trip shrugged at her, as the cab screeched to a halt right next to them. “Dr. Xiang said something about the ring...”

The window rolled down, and an expansive woman with graying dreadlocked hair and a West Indian accent glowered out at them.

“You flash a ring like dat, boy, it better be genuine. You lemme see,” she commanded.

Trip held out his hand and the woman leaned over and grasped it in one broad, calloused hand. Her nails were about an inch long, Sully noted, bright pink, and aggressively fake.

The cabbie pursed her lips and let out a low whistle of amazement. “By de Great Dispatcher! How you get dis ring, boy?”

“Uh... my grandfather left it to me, miss,” Trip said, feeling slightly awkward with his hand still in the driver’s grip.

“Family inheritance... I tink dat’s acceptable under de bylaws. And dis is a time of urgent need, yes? You not just tryin’ to get to some concert or sometin’?”

“I can’t even explain how urgent,” Trip said, and the driver looked into his drawn and weary face and nodded in understanding.

“You get in, and your pretty friend too. I’m gonna forget what it was you call me, miss wit de fresh mouth.”

“Uh... thanks,” Sully said awkwardly, as she and Trip clambered inside the back of the cab. “Sorry.” It smelled of pineapple air freshener, and the seats were patched with broad strips of silver duct tape.

“Where to?” the driver said as the cab lurched away from the curb.

“919 North Michigan,” Trip said. He shot Sully a look: I can’t believe this worked.

“Haven’t heard of nobody getting an Order fare in ‘least twenty year,” the driver said. “Oh, wait, wait,” she laughed, and reached out a hand to hit some unseen switch on the bottom of the meter. The digital fare readout vanished, each of the numbers somehow replaced by a stylized circular emblem that looked to Sully like some sort of wheel.

“We’re, uh, we’re happy to pay you, Miss,” Trip said, and the cab driver whirled to transfix him with a blazing stare of indignation.

“You do nothing of the kind!” she said in a huff. She unclipped a walkie-talkie phone from the dash and thumbed the talk button.

“Dispatch,” she said, all business, “Agent 492, requestin’ an OSF override.”

“Granted,” a voice crackled back over the radio in a heavy Chicago accent. “Swift travels, Agent 492.”

“Safe roads,” she responded, then turned around to her befuddled passengers and smiled widely.

“You travelin’ wit de Order of St. Fiacre now,” she said. “De ride’s on me.”

The Woman Who Cheated Death

The cruelest thing about the tumor, Valencia Stitch often thought during the long, hazy last days of her life, was that it had taken her sight, but not her memory. She would lie in her hospice bed, feeling the sheets rustle against her dry, paperlike skin, hearing nurses’ shoes squeaking past in the halls outside and the wind in the trees outside. And as she stared up at the ceiling with blank, useless eyes, she’d see the faces of all the men she’d worked with -- all the ones she’d sent to die.

As with most everything else, Valencia thought of the tumor through the framework of her former job. It had infiltrated her brain, making its way undetected past her body’s security services. It had settled in, acted the part, and then reached out to other, healthy, normal cells, and turned them. Brought them over to its side. And then they went out and did the same, feeding the tumor’s power, extending its reach.

It was how Valencia had, in the better years of her rapidly dwindling life, brought down countries. As countries went, she supposed, so could she.

The second cruelest thing about the tumor -- and Valencia was not a woman given to excesses of self-pity -- was that it would deny her the culmination of her life’s work. Her friends from London Circus still came by now and then, sweeping the room for bugs as they habitually did, and then sitting down to talk some shop with the dead woman. And so she knew that the Iron Curtain was rusting through; that a great sea change was beginning to swell beneath an entire continent, that all the work and all the years and all the blood would pay off, and consign those miserable Soviet bastards to history’s dustbin.

But not yet. A few months, at most. By which time the greedy little goblin in Valencia Stitch’s skull, and her lymphatic system now, and who knows where else the doctors hadn’t the heart to tell her, would have had its final way with her.

The kindest thing about the tumor, the guilty secret she nursed deep in her heart, was that it might take her back to her dear Roger. She saw his face now and then, too, floating up out of the perpetual dark to which she’d grown accustomed. For the first time in ages, it felt like, the thought of him was more comfort than pain.

She woke on the last afternoon of her life from a hazy, blurred morphine dream of playing solitaire alone at her desk back in the circus, with each card bearing a dead man’s face. She’d just matched up Michaelson, who’d died badly somewhere in a Stasi secret prison, with Godfrey, who was poisoned in Malta, when the dream dissolved and faded into sightlessness and the smell of crisp starched sheets and spring air.

At the chair by her bedside, someone shifted and cleared his throat.

“Do I know you, sir?” Valencia asked in a voice like rustling papers. She knew the answer already, and posed the question with all the formality she could muster.

“I’m afraid we haven’t had the pleasure,” the voice said. American, possibly with a trace of the Midwest about it. “But I’ve read a lot about you.”

If her mouth had ever been moist anymore, it might have gone dry.

“Have they sent you to kill me, then?” she asked. “Afraid I’ll dose myself halfway to Heaven on the morphine, and spill a few secrets?” Her guest chuckled softly.

“No, no,” he said. “I’m outside that little game entirely. I understand you were quite the organizer, though.”

“I had my moments,” Valencia replied, her lips pursing in some ghastly approximation of a smile. There were some things she was glad not to see, and her own reflection was one of them. “Kept my boys in line. Kept things neat and tidy and running smoothly.”

“I can appreciate those talents,” the guest said. “Actually, I was wondering if you’d like to come and work for me.”

“Please don’t say such things,” Valencia told him. “It rather hurts me when I laugh. Besides, unless you propose to pay me by the hour, I doubt you’d get the better of that offer.”

“Who’s joking?” the guest said softly. “Fifteen years now, you’ve been a queen in the biggest chess game in history. Kept track of pieces all across the board, in multiple countries and multiple languages. Moved your knights and bishops. Your rooks. Your pawns. You weren’t afraid to sacrifice a piece when you had to.”

No, Valencia thought. Not afraid.

“And you can offer me, what?” Valencia asked him. “Something grander still? I’m afraid I must decline. There’s a skeletal gentleman who’s already come round for the preliminaries, and he has a rather exclusive prior claim to my services.”

The guest laughed again. “Death? Death’s nothing. Not compared to what I’ve done, or what we’ll face, or what we have yet to do. Are you afraid of dying, Mrs. Stitch?”

“No,” Valencia said, as convincingly as she could. But her guest laughed again, knowingly.

“You’re lying,” he said. “Young woman like you, not even close to 40 yet. And beautiful. I saw the pictures -- before the chemo, I mean. Tell me again, truthfully. Tell me you’re not afraid of sliding into that long dark just yet.”

Valencia said nothing, sliding her dry alien tongue around a mouth that hardly felt hers anymore.

“Because I can assure you,” the guest said, “if you’re not afraid of what’s beyond the borders of this life, you should be.”
“Get out, damn you,” Valencia said. “Who are you, to taunt a sick woman with false promises and mockery? Are you suitably amused, you horrid little man? I’ve had hallucinations more personable.”

She heard the visitor stand up, heard his chair scrape on the linoleum tile. A hand, unusually soft and very cold, fell not unkindly upon her brow.

“My promises aren’t false,” the visitor said. “I need your skills, Mrs. Stitch. We have great work to do. Many difficult choices to make, and many lives depending on them. Take the job, and I’ll cure you. Right now. Right here.”

“I...” Valencia faltered. “I should like to speak to my doctor.”

“Now or never,” the guest said, softly, with the edge of a threat in his voice. “Tell me you’re not afraid. Tell me you want to die, and I’ll walk right out the door.”

“I don’t,” she said quickly, even before she knew it was true. “I don’t, I don’t, I don’t.”

“I didn’t think so,” the visitor said, and she heard the smile in his voice. She heard the rustling of his jacket. “Now, this is just a prototype, but I assure you, it’s been thoroughly tested.” She felt a point of cool metal rest against her brow, and against her will, her lower lip quivered, just once, with a spasm of sudden fear.

“It’s inoperable,” she said to the visitor. “The doctors have said, over and over. Quite impossible.”

“Impossible?” he laughed softly. “Impossible’s just an excuse. All I need is a little time.”

She felt the tip of the metal slowly grow warm, and then hot. A singing just beyond the range of hearing filled her skull.

“Let there be light,” she heard the visitor say distantly. The darkness rushed away from her, like a curtain lifted.

And Valencia Stitch died, and lived, all in the same moment.

Reap the Whirlwind!

It was hot where he was, the air thick and steaming and alive, and all around him, he could hear and feel and sense the motion of a thousand living things, circulating. There was no light save silvery slivers of moon shifting through the trees like falling feathers, but Rafe treaded confindently through the vast and ancient trees, bare feet moving across whispering carpets of fallen leaves.

His eyes caught a gleam of orange firelight far ahead in the depths of jungle night, and he walked toward it, brushing dangling vines aside as he passed and clambering over tree roots as gnarled and knotted as an old prizefighter’s hands. There was a clearing, he saw, and in the clearing a ring of torches planted in the earth, and in the center of the clearing a table neatly draped in white linen, set with a china tea service. A young man about Rafe’s age sat at one of two chairs on opposite sides of the table, in evening finery, strange lines and whorls of color encrusted in paint upon his face. The man looked up at Rafe and grinned with neat white teeth.

“You’re just in time for tea,” he said.

Rafe sat. “Have you any scones?” he asked. “I’m famished.”

“I’d imagine you are,” the young man said, sliding a dish across the table to Rafe. “Proper currant scones, with jam besides.”

“Just like mum used to make,” Rafe smiled. The tableware was made of black stone, and he picked up a short, blunt knife and sliced open a scone, relishing the steam that rose from within it.

“Just like great-grandmum used to make,” the young man corrected him. “In your case, that is.”

“Do I know you?” Rafe asked, before taking a bite. It was an absurdly good scone. The young man grinned again. “Yes. And no. We’ve never met.”

It occurred to Rafe that he was dreaming; for one thing, no scone could possibly be this delicious. They were usually much drier, and the currants had hard bits in them that got stuck in your teeth. So it comforted him somewhat to remind himself of that when he reached for the jam and saw it softly pulsating, in a steady, even beat, in a glass jar shaped like a human heart.

“It’s in the blood, you see,” the young man said. “Eat up. You’ll need it.”

Rafe saw no harm in a bit of somnolent cannibalism, and slathered the red jam, steaming and vaguely sticky onto his scone. It smelled like American pennies. He bit into it.

“It doesn’t taste like anything,” Rafe said, puzzled. The young man laughed.

“It’s already in you,” he said. “Always has been. It’s one and the same between us.” Rafe suddenly felt something on the skin of his face, and put up a finger to trace lines of dried paint that ran across his forehead and down his nose and cheeks. As dreams went, this was a lot more exciting than his usual variety, which usually involved something on the order of shopping for socks on the set of Countdown.

Something moved in the shadows, and then a panther poured itself into the firelight of the clearing. There was a monkey on its back, and a great plumed bird of paradise. The monkey scrambled off and climbed up onto the table, greedily nibbling at a scone; the bird alighted on the lid of the teapot and cocked its head at Rafe; and the panther seated itself to Rafe’s left and the young man’s right, its tail curling back and forth, and watched Rafe with narrow, patient, iridescent eyes.

“I didn’t know we were having guests,” Rafe said. “Who did the seating chart?”

“We’re still waiting for the last arrival,” the young man said. “Before he gets here, look under your teacup.” Rafe turned over his teacup and saw a gold medallion on a chain curled underneath.

“St. Christopher,” Rafe said, examining it in the firelight. “My grandfather had one of -- ohhh.” He looked up at the young man, who looked terribly amused. “You’re him, aren’t you.”

“I wish you were a bit less of a rascal, I must say,” the young man said, smiling indulgently. “But then, I suppose, you’d hardly be a Windham.”

Rafe was about to issue an indignant rejoinder when the trees behind him creaked and shifted, and something vast displaced the air and entered the clearing. Rafe felt each of its footsteps shudder themselves up through his chair from the ground. Whatever it was, it stopped just behind Rafe, and lowered its immense head, and blew blasts of hot, stinking breath on the back of his neck. The animals, and the young man at the opposite end of the table, all looked past Rafe at whatever it was in friendly greeting, but somehow, Rafe felt it was entirely in his best interest not to look round.

He’s a bit skinny, said a voice that could rival any desperately overcompensating young man’s car stereo for sheer bass. Rafe could feel it in his spine and sternum. I could down him in a bite. Two at the most.

“You old piker,” the young man laughed at whatever was over Rafe’s shoulder. Then he looked at Rafe, and in the firelight, his eyes seemed to glow like the panther’s. “It’s time,” he said.

“Time for what?” Rafe asked, quietly beginning to hope that the reply included the words “wake up.”

“Time to pay fealty, Your Lordship,” the young man said.

Rafe woke up, and promptly fell out of bed.

The floor was cold and hard and not terribly clean, but nonetheless, Rafe was content to lie there for a moment and get his bearings, breathing in the short, agitated gasps common among racehorses and the freshly, violently awakened. He heard footsteps thumping closer, and then they stopped, and a woman’s voice said “Oh.”

With a great, wide-eyed heave, Rafe flopped himself into his back and lifted his head. There was a young, frizzy-haired black woman standing over him with a baseball bat, looking relieved, which made this only the fourth most colorful situation to which Rafe had awakened in his life.

“Where am I? Who are you?” Rafe looked down. “Where are my -- oh, there they are. Sorry! Sorry. I’m accustomed to lacking pants in these scenarios.”

The young woman’s face screwed itself up into something halfway between disbelief and disgust. “You’re welcome,” she said.

“What am I welcome for?” Rafe asked, giving his head a brief, cobweb-clearing shake and propping himself up on his elbows. It was a small, cozy little room, walls done in the absolute worst of 1970s wood paneling, and there were dust-covered bookshelves all about, bearing cobwebbed model airplanes and a lot of very stern-looking volumes with military-sounding titles. Also, he realized, he hadn’t fallen out of bed -- he’d fallen out of couch, and a very lumpy and well-traveled one at that.

“For carrying your heavy ass down three flights of stairs over my shoulders, for starters,” the young woman said, reaching up to rub the back of her neck in the manner of someone needing a proper introduction to ibuprofen. Rafe recognized the red t-shirt she wore, and the blue jeans, and things clicked into place.

“Ah,” he said. “You’re Dora -- Nora! Nora. Yes. The young woman who destroyed my flat with a UFO.” Some small part of Rafe’s brain realized that he’d had far too few opportunities in life to utter that sort of sentence, which was not necessarily a bad thing.

“Hey, your flat destroyed my UFO, too,” Nora said. “’Sides, it looked like you’d had a head start on wrecking the place.” She held out a hand, grudgingly. “Up. Come on. I’ve got coffee.”

“Coffee?” Rafe said. “I should very much like to marry you.” Nora raised the baseball bat warningly. “I didn’t mean right away,” he clarified. She just rolled her eyes and left the room through the single doorway. Rafe breathed out and smoothed out his shirtfront -- his clothes looked and felt decidedly slept-in, and he wondered how long he’d been out. He no longer felt like dying was a particularly lovely option, so it must have been a while. He followed Nora through the door.

It led to a little balcony with a makeshift kitchen -- sink, coffeemaker, electric burner, cabinets, mini-fridge -- that overlooked a much larger space. It was some kind of garage -- no, hangar, if the large sheet-draped object sitting ghostly in the middle of the bare concrete floor below was any indication. The whole room smelled of dust and petrol, and Rafe could see drums of fuel and a workbench with tools and dray parts against the far wall. A large set of roll-up doors, now shut, made up one wall of the room below, and a metal staircase led down from the balcony.

There was a rickety, much-abused wooden table in the open space on the balcony, next to the paint-peeling steel railing, and Nora was setting it with bowls, spoons, and mugs from one of the cabinets. Rafe saw a sleeping bag spread on the floor against the cabinets at the far wall -- well, that was nice of her, giving him the couch -- and on the counter above it, a small black-and-white TV playing the local news at low volume through a faint snowstorm of static.

The coffeemaker had percolated, and Nora poured the coffee dark and steaming into two mugs, handing Rafe one that read 30th Annual Chicagoland Aviation Conference. “No sugar, sorry,” she said, “but there’s milk if you want it.”

“Black’s good with me,” Rafe said, and then added, “the coffee, I mean. I like my coffee black.” Nora looked at him wearily, and his brain finally had the good sense to shut up. She opened another set of cabinets and took out two brightly colored boxes.

“Cheerios or Lucky Charms?” she asked, and Rafe took the red box.

“Always been partial to leprechauns, really,” he told her, and she smiled in spite of herself. Rafe was generally in favor of making young women smile, especially if they had baseball bats, except of course if it was the thought of hitting you with said bats that was making them smile in the first place. They sat down at opposite sides of the table, the telly playing over Nora’s shoulder, and ate in silence, sharing a small plastic bottle of milk from the mini-fridge.

“So,” Rafe said after swallowing a spoonful of wheat bits and purple horseshoe marshmallows. “This is a very nice, um, hangar. Yours?”

“My family estate,” Nora said, looking around without a great deal of fondness. “Used to belong to my dad, and his mom, and her dad before that. I haven’t been out here since Dad moved to Florida.” She nodded down at the shrouded thing on the floor below. “He keeps saying he’s gonna come up here one spring and get that old beast off the ground, but somehow, his golf game always takes priority.”

“Could be worse,” Rafe said, taking another gulp of now-lukewarm coffee. “Could be polo.”

“You’re kidding, right?” Nora said as she dropped her spoon into her emptied bowl. Rafe shook his head emphatically.

“Oh, God, he’s mad for it,” Rafe sighed. “Even the horses think he’s a bit off.”

They sat there, drinking coffee, in silence for a little while. Rafe studied the scratches in the wood of the table.

“This is nice,” Nora sighed at length. “Just talking, like two normal people. I can almost pretend that crazy people in black coats didn’t try to kill me in some silver science fiction airplane yesterday.”

“You had the people in black coats, too?” Rafe said, perking up.

“Yeah,” Nora told him, running her hands back through her springy mass of hair. “Yours say anything to you?”

“No,” Rafe said. “They just... they killed somebody, for no reason, in a very cruel way. And then you, well, squashed them.”

“Never flown before,” Nora said, her mouth tightening into a bitter, remorseful line. “Never killed anyone before, either. I had my eyes shut the whole time.”

“Did you mean to actually crash into my flat?” Rafe asked her. Nora shook her head.

“I was trying to land on the roof or something. Thing’s got a hell of a literal definition for ‘take me to such and such an address.’”

“Wait, wait, one second,” Rafe said, getting up for a refill of coffee. “How did you know my address? Come to think of it, how do you know me?”

“I don’t,” Nora replied. “At least, I’m not sure. I think -- okay, let’s try this. I’m gonna tell you some stuff about yourself, and you tell me if any of it’s true, or if it just sounds crazy.”

“That’s going to be a decidedly relative judgment after the last -- has it been a day?” Rafe asked her. “Did I sleep that long?” Nora nodded.

“Okay,” she said. “Your name’s Reginald Windham, but you go by Rafe.”

“Correct so far,” he nodded, then winced, because he’d burned his tongue on the new coffee.

Nora knotted her fingers together and shut her eyes, reciting from memory. “You’re in line to be the nineteenth Lord Havoc, after your father. You live in New York City, in some crazy English mansion your grandpop had bricked all the way over from England, on like four square blocks of prime real estate turned into your own private park. You’re big in industry -- the number two man at the family multinational. Your granddad was some major-league adventure guy, national hero type, who was born on some crazy-ass island off the coast of--”

Rafe nearly spit coffee. He’d been holding in the laugh too long, and it sort of leaked out, along with the coffee, around the corners of his mouth in a fine mist. Then he started coughing, and when he could breathe property, he indulged himself in a chortle or two.

“I’m sorry,” he said when he was able to. “I’m sorry. That’s just so terribly, terribly wrong. Windham Hall is still in dear old England; my Dad’s a high muckety-muck with the home office, and wants me nowhere near any line of work with which the family name’s connected. And he’d rather dress like a chicken and go running up and down the high street than see me inherit his precious family title, which, well, I can’t blame him, and it’d almost be worth it for the chicken suit.”

Rafe sat down at the table again and looked at Nora, grinning bemusedly. “And my grandfather, far as I know, was born at the hospital in London. I mean, he was a bit of the safari type -- had adventure in his blood, I suppose, always tramping off to strange corners of the globe in the name of science. He died when my dad was just a boy -- drowned somewhere up the Amazon on another of his expeditions. We didn’t speak of him much in the household, and my gran never quite forgave him either. So I have to ask, because you’re the second person in the past day -- sorry, two days -- to tell me a lot of extremely wrong things about my life -- where are you getting this?”

Nora reached down under the table and hoisted up a satchel bag, from which she removed a what looked like half a notebook computer. It was pebble-sleek, all glossy screen, and when Nora tapped it with a finger, the screen sprang to sudden blue life.

“I popped it out of the, uh, the UFO,” Nora said. “Two days running now, and the thing doesn’t need a battery charge. It says I fill it up with alcohol in a little slot on the back.”

“And the UFO came from...?” Rafe asked, staring half-hypnotized at the weird glow from the screen.

“The big silver space plane that crashed down in Lake Michigan yesterday morning,” Nora said. She told Rafe about her job, and Murray, and Mrs. Stitch and Maximillian and the strange plane, and in turn, he told her about the painted warrior who’d turned up in his living room.

“That reminds me,” Nora said, and fished his stone knives out of the satchel bag, passing them gingerly across the table to Rafe. “Damn things nearly cut a hole in my bag. They looked important, though. I didn’t have room for the box.”

“Quite all right,” Rafe said, resting a hand on them. For a moment, he had a flash of his very odd dream -- a dream that seemed to be hanging back whole and patient in his subconscious, where most others would’ve had the courtesy to dissolve into fragments by this point. “You were going to show me something?”

“Hey,” Nora said to the glowing screen. “Biographical data. Rafe Windham.”

“One moment,” the computer said in a cheerful, tinny voice. Text spilled gracefully onto the screen, along with a photograph, and Nora handed the screen to Rafe.

He was looking at himself -- a bit better-fed, perhaps, with fewer signs of wear and tear, and possessed of some undefinable vitality -- in an impossibly good suit. It was a candid shot, taken at some society function; he was toasting with a glass of champagne, and there was a young woman whose arm encircled his at the elbow. Rafe recognized her instantly, and with a pang of guilt and longing.

Windham Industries COO Rafe Windham, with fiancee Julia Smythe, at the 2005 New Atlantis New Year’s Eve Ball, the caption read. And there, in crisp text, was the entire unreal history of his life that Nora had laid out for him.

“Now try mine,” Nora said, when he’d finished reading and his face had gone at least a shade paler. “Nora Swift.” The computer seemed to hear her and obliged, and new text fell onto the screen like a hail of cherry blossoms.

“Um,” said Rafe, reading in bafflement. “Apparently I just had breakfast with an accomplished pilot, designer of vast, ocean-spanning airliners, and third-generation CEO of the nation’s largest aerospace contractor.”

“Not even close,” Nora said. “I’m CEO of nothing -- heck, my cat doesn’t even listen to me. I investigate plane crashes for the government, which is my pride-preserving way of saying that I read a lot of reports filed by people who actually do investigate plane crashes, and sometimes I get to look at pictures of dead people. And if you think that’s freaky, look at this.”

She put the in-flight magazine and the newspaper down on the table with a thump, and after Rafe had gaped sufficiently, she unfolded the paper to a two-page spread inside, paying lavish tribute to some old man Rafe had never heard of, but was clearly expected to. Nora thumped a finger on one of the photos, which showed a younger version of the man in question, a tall chap in a cowboy hat, a young boy with glasses cradling a floppy-eared mutt, and a smiling black woman -- who, come to think of it, looked a bit like Nora.

“Tom Morrow, the late Lassiter Odes and Ruby Gale, and the unfortunate Jef Franklin, as seen before their 1931 expedition to Tibet to explore the temple of Tal Xan Sherat,” Rafe read slowly. “That woman--”

“My grandma Ruby,” Nora said. “Except she wasn’t a pilot, not by then. She did a little flying when she was in school, but she quit when she married Grandpa Thad. I mean, she talked about -- what is it?”

Rafe turned the paper around wordlessly, and pointed at another photo, which showed this Tom Morrow person shaking hands and grinning with the young man who’d sat across from Rafe in his dream. “That’s my grandfather,” Rafe said. “At least, I think. Can’t be too many Harker Windhams in the world, right?”

Nora scanned the text in the article. “Says here Tom Morrow had a headquarters downtown -- 919 North Michigan.”

“The one with the big light on top?” Rafe asked absentmindedly, and Nora nodded.

“Look, whoever the folks with the needles are, they’re after the both of us,” she said. “There’s some kind of connection, and I think this Morrow guy’s the key. We go to 919 North Mich, maybe we’ll find that headquarters of his and get some answers.”

“Um, not to raise a ridiculous question,” Rafe interjected, as Nora glanced over at the sheet-draped form in the middle of the hangar floor and furrowed her brow in curious thought, “but what if there’s nothing there? I mean, this paper talks about--” he flpped back to the front pages of the A section -- “the Caliphate of Greater Islam where I’m fairly certain a whole load of scrapping, oil-greedy countries are, and last I checked, no one’d redone the maps.”

“Yeah, but there was sure as hell a whole flying wing floating in the middle of Lake Michigan yesterday morning,” Nora said, still peering distractedly at the thing under the tarps below. “And I haven’t seen anything about it in the papers, on the news, nothing.” She set her dishes hastily in the small sink and then thumped down the stairs to the hangar floor.

“Don’t mind me,” Rafe said. “I’ll just, uh, sit up here.”

“Okay,” Nora said. “I won’t. Just something weird about this I can’t put my finger on.”

“New tarps?” Rafe offered. Below, Nora shook her head, hair flopping about.

“I think...” Nora began. “I think it’s the wrong shape.”

The sad thing, Rafe thought, as he turned back to read more fake news about a Caliphate that didn’t exist, is that Nora’s statement was beginning to sound downright normal. He was poring over an infographic about the success of CO2 reduction protocols in restoring the ozone layer when a snatch of conversation from the running telly brought his head snapping up.

There was a pretty blonde newsreader -- well, she looked blonde, but it was hard to tell with the black-and-white and the static -- and some kind of graphic plastered up over her shoulder, with CONDO CRASH in garish letters.

“Breaking developments now in yesterday’s shocking crash of a small aircraft into a Wrigleyville condominium,” the newsreader was saying. “We told you yesterday that Homeland Security had declared it a terrorist act, and now we’ve got word that the FBI is about to launch a raid on a South Side airfield. We’re going live to Brett Hardwick at the scene. Brett?”

The picture changed, and there was a sensible-looking man in a proper overcoat with a microphone to his mouth and his other hand to his ear, standing in front of a bustling hive of activity. There were men in SWAT gear running about behind him, and other men in dark windbreakers with FBI on the back.

“Thanks, Amy,” Brett said on the telly. “The FBI has asked us to stay back, but it appears that they’re about to raid a disused aviation hangar that sits on this rare patch of open field off the South Side lakeshore, near the Bronzeville neighborhood. No word yet on whether there are suspects inside, or who they might be. We’re hearing that the FBI believes yesterday’s crash, which killed at least one unidentified man, was a deliberate act of terrorism, possibly carried out by a cell operating here in Chicago...”

Rafe slowly got up and walked toward the set, hunching down to squint through the static at the background of the picture. There were people standing next to one of the FBI men... familiar people...

Down on the hangar floor, Nora slowly lifted one corner of the tarps covering her dad’s old wreck of a repair job, the old Curtiss P-38 he’d sworn to get restored and flying again one of these days. The Curtiss had a bad paint job he’d never gotten around to fixing, black and peeling and spotted with rust underneath. But the metal revealed as she lifted up the tarp was bright silver, polished so finely that Nora could nearly see her reflection in it.

She began gathering tarps in great handfuls, fast as she could.

Up on the balcony, Rafe squinted harder. Then one of the people behind the reporter, the people in long black coats and wide black hats, lifted his head, and Rafe scrambled backward from the TV and landed on his bum.

On the hangar floor, Nora flung off the last tarp in a cloud of dust and gaped. It was a vision, all curving lines and fins and wings. She’d pored over the schematics for every plane in the air in the United States, and never seen anything like it. Not even on the covers of the endless back issues of Popular Mechanics Murray kept in his cube.

Painted in looping letters on the side of the nose: THE WHIRLWIND. And underneath it, in block print: “NORA’S BABY.”

Staring out of the TV at Rafe, in a whirl of phosphor dots, was a woman of indiscriminate age in a black coat and hat. And next to her, the very tall man Rafe had seen barging into his flat the day before. The man who’d broken the painted warrior’s neck as if he’d been cracking a whip. The one Nora’s UFO, he’d thought, had smashed to a fine red stain on the carpet.

“And it looks like --” the reporter said. “Yes, they’re giving the go signal, and we’re being asked to move back. The raid has begun.”

There was a roar of heavy engines outside, growing louder, and shouts, and the thudding of boots across asphalt.

“Oh my God,” said Nora, and Rafe, all but simultaneously.

In the Lair of Dr. Xiang

Trip Morrow tumbled through a long period of choking, turbulent unconsciousness. Tiny bits of his brain broke loose and scrambled about until the inside of his skull became a nest of snakes, all slithering over one another in constant, chaotic, feverish motion. And underneath it all, strange shapes at the edges of his consciousness, their movements vast and slow and seismic, and a curious and fearful uluation of harmonies not issued from any human throat.

Trip woke, and stared into the face of a dragon.

It stared down at him from the walls with huge, googly paper-mache eyes, and a grimace as comical as it was fearsome, tufts of fur-scales bristling in brilliant greens and yellows around its head, and for a moment, Trip thought he was still dreaming.

Then reality sorted itself out, the tumblers in the lock of his brain clicking into place, and Trip recognized it as a fake dragon head, the kind used in Chinese New Year’s ceremonies. He was shirtless, lying under a thin sheet on something soft and comfortable, his torso and the back of his neck clammy with slowly drying sweat.

His mouth was cotton-dry, his throat parched and prickly, his muscles sore. There was a dull, fading ache at the side of his neck, where -- yes, he remembered now. Thje stone giant. Muriel and her needle. Running, the world inverting itself, the headlights. And now, a dragon’s head.

He felt whole, and alive, and incredibly hungry.

It took him a solid minute to muster the energy to sit up and turn his head. The room was high-ceilinged, the windows tall and criscrossed with the fine metal mesh of industrial glass, and barred from the outside. The walls and floors were concrete underneath, unpainted, but hung with elaborate Chinese scrolls and paintinings. Trip put a bare foot down to the floor, braced for cold, and found instead thick, soft rugs. Red paper lamps dangled from the pipes along the ceiling at intervals, and the air smelled of incense and oranges.

He’d been lying on a deep red overstuffed couch; he saw a wooden chair nearby, as if someone had been keeping watch. His button-up shirt and t-shirt were draped over the back, and his shoes and socks rested underneath, neatly stacked.

He turned his head a bit more, slowly, and saw a heavy metal door ajar at the far side of the room -- and next to it, another window, and a lush, overstuffed armchair, and curled up asleep in the chair, a young woman with dark hair and fishnet stockings. Her boots splayed on the floor next to the chair, and she was hugged in a silk blanket, her exposed toes -- the nails painted black and red, alternating -- twitching softly. Her hair had fallen in dark, sharp slants across the pale skin of her face. Her breathing came in even, regular gusts. Trip felt a sudden, inexplicable need to put a shirt on.

His arms and shoulders ached as he shrugged the t-shirt over his head, but it felt good to move. He examined the skin of his arms and found tiny, dark-red dots at even intervals; there were more on his stomach and chest, when he checked, and his mind immediately suggested, accupuncture. He stood slowly, on shaky but reliable legs, and slowly shuffled his way across the room in his bare feet. The woman in the chair shifted as he passed, muttering cottony mush-syllables, and he froze for a moment, suddenly afraid he’d wake her. But she settled back into sleep, and he squeezed himself carefully through the steel door and into the next room.

It was some kind of kitchen, a cold kettle still on the stove and dregs of loose leaf tea in the sink. The refrigerator hummed softly, and at the far side of the room, seated around a table, Trip saw two more sleeping men. They were Asian, about his age, heads both shaved bald, wearing some kind of black silk robes. They slept deeply with their heads down on the table, and as Trip studied their faces, he saw nasty-looking bruises, yellowing around the edges of the purple, and a multitude of neatly dressed cuts and scratches beginning to heal. A pizza box from Giordano’s yawned open on the table between them, and to Trip’s considerable disappointment, it contained nothing but dark grease-spots and a forlorn plastic tripod, lying on its side.

He moved past them, bare feet on the cold linoleum tile of the kitchen, past one steel door that seemed to lead outside, and slipped through another open doorway to what looked like an office. There were more windows here, admitting early-morning sunlight, and elaborately carved and laquered cabinets lining the walls, bristling with tiny, regular drawers, like a library card catalog. A desk sat beneath the window, with a high-backed chair behind it. A calligraphy brush and a pot of ink sat next to an unfurled scroll of white paper, elaborately painted characters unreeling themselves neatly down its surface. Trip’s written Chinese was shaky at best -- he’d only gotten through the basic textbook -- but he recognized some of the characters. Herbs. Some kind of recipe, perhaps.

And there, to one side of the desk, his grandfather’s cigar box. With a pang of urgency, he reached for it, and lifted the lid, but to his unaccountable relief, its contents were all in place.

The strange gyroscope. The two tuning forks. The glass vile of glittering black dust. The battered moleskine notebook, filled as far as Trip had been able to tell with his grandfather’s characteristically dull and minutely detailed notes on various acoustic and mechanical experiments from his early Bell Labs days. And, strangest of all, the yellowed, crumbling magazine printed on cheap, grainy paper.


Trip hadn’t had a chance to crack it yet; he’d been too struck by the cover, which showed a man smashing feet-first through a window, into some mad scientist’s laboratory where a beautiful, negligee-clad blond had been shackled to a heavy wooden table. The man on the cover had his grandfather’s face, lean and youthful, but with a single white streak in his hair his grandfather had never possessed.

TOM MORROW ADVENTURES, the masthead blared in bold and stylish type. THIS MONTH: THE DUPLICATE DANGER OF DR. DIABOLICUS, BY DENNISON LAND.

Trip shook his head slowly, wondering if it had been some kind of joke -- a gag gift worked up by his grandfather’s buddies at the lab. He put the magazine back carefully and shut the lid of the box. It was the only thing left specifically to him in his grandfather’s will -- the lawyer had been instructed to personally put it in Trip’s hands -- and it represented a puzzle even Trip’s active, searching brain had yet to piece together.

He caught a face out of the corner of his eye and turned quickly -- a bit too quickly, the motion making him briefly dizzy -- only to see a shrine against the opposite wall, next to the door through which he’d entered. It was dominated by a photograph of an earnest, serene-looking old Chinese man with a long white beard, smiling at the camera as if he knew a particularly amusing secret. Before the picture, a low altar bore smoking sticks of incense and a plate neatly stacked with fat, firm oranges. A single painted scroll hung next to the picture, and Trip instinctively, quietly sounded out the characters, first in Chinese and then in English.

“The Most Honored and Wise Doctor Xiang Chen-Hee,” Trip said.

“Not bad for a gwailo,” came a sleepy voice from the opposite side of the room. Trip turned to see a Chinese woman in her early thirties shuffling into the room from a door he hadn’t previously noticed, wearing a purple camisole and long flannel pajama pants with a bacon-and-eggs pattern on them. Her hands worked deftly behind her head, braiding a long lash of black hair into a neat ponytail.

“I’m sorry,” Trip said -- apology was his default reaction most of the time -- “I didn’t mean to intrude. I just woke up, and, uh... where am I?”

“In the land of the living, for one thing,” the woman smirked, and padded over in slippered feet to join him by the altar. She yawned hugely. “You’re in Chinatown, couple blocks from the Red Line stop, if you’re in any great hurry. Been out for about a day straight. I’m surprised you’re even awake this soon. I didn’t think a skinny guy like you would make it, but you’re a fighter.”

“Make what?” Trip said, rubbing the side of his neck absentmindedly.

“The Black Lotus,” the woman said, her face growing serious. “Deadliest poison this side of Australia. Hell, I can’t believe you even made it here.”

“How’d I get here?” Trip asked, his stomach suddenly tight with disbelief and alarm. “And -- wait, poison? Who’d want to poison me?”

“You tell me,” the woman smirked, drawing a fresh stick of incense from a holder near the altar and lighting it in the flame of a nearby candle. “One of the Order guys -- I’m gonna assume you’re a bit slow, so that’s the Order of St. Fiacre -- picked you up. Must’ve seen that ring of yours. And when he saw the Black Lotus on your neck, he knew to get you here.”

Trip opened his mouth to ask another question, but the woman saw it and sighed heavily. “It’s gonna be Cliff Notes all the way with you, isn’t it? ‘Here’ is the offices of Dr. Xiang, Foe of Poisons and Mender of Ills.”

“And the doctor is...?” Trip asked slowly, looking at the picture over the shrine.

“Oh, so sorry,” the woman said, bowing low. “Honorable Dr. Xiang is off getting crispy fried duck from takeout place.” Quick as a flash, she shot out a hand and slapped Trip hard enough to sting against the side of his head. Her eyes narrowed in annoyance. “I’m Dr. Xiang, dumbass.”

“Ow!” Trip said, baffled, rubbing his skull. “Sorry.”

“Dr. Anna Mei Xiang, and yes, I have a “real” degree too, thank you very much,” the woman said. “And you, Thomas Roosevelt Morrow the third, of 103 W. 18th St., Pilsen, eyes brown, hair brown, drivers license photo surprisingly non-crappy, are one amazingly lucky bastard. I was up half the night with you bleeding out the poison and administering the antidote.” She gestured at the photo. “My grandpa there had only told me about the Black Lotus. Never saw it myself, before you. Somebody wanted you way the hell dead.”

“There was a woman--” Trip began, but Dr. Xiang cut him off, breezing past him toward the kitchen.

“Talk later,” she said. “Food first. And so much tea.”

Trip sat at the table with the two black-suited guys -- Hu and Gary, rubbing sleep out of their eyes and yawning, looking at him with a distance that suggested less unfriendliness than some private trouble of their own. Dr. Xiang fired up the rice cooker, then rummaged and rattled through the fridge, coming up with a dozen eggs and a handful of vegetables. In a few minutes, she was frying eggs and veggies on the stove as steam rose from the rice cooker, and a kettle whistled on the back burner. The noise brought the woman in fishnets into the kitchen, bleary-eyed and pushing her hair back from her face. She sat down at the kitchen table without saying anything to anyone, stealing occasional sad looks at Hu and Gary, and accepted a mug of tea from Dr. Xiang in silence.

“That’s new,” the fishnet girl said at last as they ate, nodding at Trip.

“What’s new?” he asked, his mouth full of eggs and rice, suddenly self-conscious.

“Your hair,” she said. “You didn’t have that yesterday.”

Trip stood up abruptly, searching his pockets. “Mirror,” he said absentmindedly. “Anyone have a mirror?” The fishnet girl reached into a pocket of her jacket and handed him a compact. He flipped it open and looked.

The first thing he saw was the side of his neck, and a deep purplish-red scar where Muriel’s needle had stuck him. It unfolded radially, like a flower. The Black Lotus. Then he moved the mirror up, and probed at his hair with slender fingers. There was a streak of white now running from the crown of his head down to the strands along his forehead, just over his right eye. Just like the Tom Morrow on the magazine cover.

“That’s not new,” he said, baffled, handing the mirror back to the fishnet girl. “I think that’s old. Very old” She just looked at him strangely, shrugged, and kept on eating.

“Could be the poison,” Dr. Xiang chimed in, reaching over Gary’s plate to help herself to more rice. “Sure put your system through enough stress. You want to tell us who exactly thinks you’re worth offing?”

Feeling the food settle comfortably, almost gratefully, in his stomach, Trip told them, starting with the subway accident, and ending with what he could remember of Muriel’s last, strange words. When he mentioned the needle, he saw the fishnet girl visibly stiffen across the table. Her eyes met Hu’s, then Gary’s, and she hunched her shoulders and stared into her teacup.

“Your turn,” Trip said at last, picking up his fork again and pointing to the fishnet girl with it. “What do you know about needles?”

She spoke, slowly at first, then more expressively, about Eyepatch and the men in the black car. She spoke around the subject of Pang, and her silences said plenty. Hu and Gary and Dr. Xiang filled in the gaps in her story -- how before he died a few years back, the Doc’s grandfather had written out a scroll for her, to be opened on a given date and time. The scroll contained instructions for contacting the Three Brothers of the Dragon -- at a phone number they hadn’t even had when it was written -- and described the girl, Sully, right down to where she’d be on the night they grabbed her.

“What did Pang mean,” Sully asked, leaning forward on her elbows, “when he called me the Gaunt Heir?”

“Is there a Michael Gant in your family?” Dr. Xiang asked her. “Three, maybe four generations back?”

“My great-grandfather,” Sully said. “He was a stage magician. I think he spent some time in Asia when he was young -- that’s what my grandfather said.”

“My grandpa,” Dr. Xiang said, “once showed me a scar on his shoulder. He said it was a bullet wound, decades old. Said a man named Michael Gant had saved his life.”

“There’s somebody like that in our history, too,” Hu piped up. “Our master back in Oakland used to tell us about the time his master emigrated here, back in the ‘30s. Said he owed his life to a guy named Gaunt.”

“His English wasn’t so good,” Gary added. “Maybe he got it wrong.”

“Wait,” Trip said, standing up from the table. “Wait, wait, that name sounds familiar.” He ducked into Dr. Xiang’s study for a moment, and returned with the cigar box, which he set carefully down on the kitchen table. He took out the magazine, and carefully flipped it over to the back cover, which listed the stories inside:

TOM MORROW ADVENTURES, ISSUE 33, OCTOBER 1931

THE DUPLICATE DANGER OF DR. DIABOLICUS ....... p. 1
Tom, Nosh, and Shida battle deadly doppelgangers in a haunted castle!

DISPATCHES FROM THE WORLD YET TO COME ....... p. 121
An artificial moon to orbit the Earth?

MORROWMEN OF AMERICA BULLETIN .....p. 124
October is Thriftiness Month -- build your own Tom Morrow Savings Vault!

NEXT MONTH: MALVOLIO SINN’S RADIO REVENGE!
Tom Morrow teams with Mister Gaunt to thwart the Caesar of Crime!

“Muriel said something about my grandfather,” Trip said, as their eyes all moved in unison over the back-cover text. “I didn’t understand -- Grandpa spent his life in a lab, pretty much. I mean, he invented telephone switching equipment. New kinds of synthetic rubber and copper wiring. Stuff nobody would care about.”

“Then what’s he doing playing Indiana Jones on the cover of a dime novel?” Sully shot back, and Trip could only shrug. He glanced down into the box again, his eyes falling across the notebook--

He had to look twice, to make sure he was seeing it. He picked up the diary, stared at it hard, brushed his fingers over the leather cover. Then he hastily began to undo the elastic straps that bound the book shut.

“What?” Sully said. “I’m pretty sure that’s a notebook, chief.”

“Yeah,” Trip replied. “My grandfather’s. Except the last time I looked at it, it didn’t have this.” He pointed to the cover, where a creased, yellowed, well-worn stamp from Borneo was stuck in one corner.

“Maybe you missed it?” Hu asked, but Trip was shuffling quickly through the pages. “1942 -- okay, this is the same, just notes from the lab. But...” Trip paged back to the very first entry, flipped through a couple pages, then back to the beginning, then forward again.

“The second entry’s ordinary stuff. Equations, diagrams for some kind of switchboard,” Trip said. “But when I looked in it on the flight back to Chicago, the first entry was about a picnic he had with my grandma in Nantucket.”

“And now?” Sully asked, leaning forward, craning her neck to see. Trip handed her the diary, and she began to read. “January 1, 1931. New Year’s in the Lookout. We’re fresh back from New York, where --” She stopped, blinked a few times, and started again. “Where the Sovereign of the Sewers had stolen the Christmas Tree from Rockefeller Center. Lasso and I tracked him to the Great Undercity Basin...”

She looked up at Trip, baffled. “So your grandpa wrote fiction?” Trip shook his head.

“I saw his bookshelves. My grandpa didn’t even read fiction. And besides, that entry -- and that stamp -- weren’t there two nights ago.”

From outside, the metal stairs clanged. Once. Again. Footsteps, heading upward. Everyone froze.

Dr. Xiang looked slowly at Hu and Gary. “You guys didn’t order a pizza?” They shook their heads. “That cabbie guy, Jimmy, when’d he say he’d be back?”

Gary checked his watch, his voice dropping to a whisper. “I think he’s still on shift.”

There was a square of frosted glass in the steel door that lead to the outside, and as all five watched, their mouths suddenly dry, it filled with shadows. Shadows wearing dark coats, and broad-brimmed hats. Someone tried the latch, rattling it first softly, then harder.

Then the door boomed with a solid blow.

Dr. Xiang looked first at Sully, then at Trip. For the first time, he saw real fear in her eyes, and when she spoke, it was a thin, harsh whisper of controlled terror.

“You need to leave,” she said. “You need to leave right now.”

Escape From the Terrible Three

Sully Wells had spent maybe an hour there in the stifling dark, first shrieking and pounding the lid, rattling herself up and down in hopes that someone would hear her. Then a long period of sobbing quietly, her whole body shaking. And then, worst of all, the quiet acceptance, when her tears ran out and she became acutely aware of the dimensons of her body, and seriously believed that no one would find her, and wondered whether there really was a Heaven.

She must have fallen asleep at some point, because the next thing in her memory was the lid opening wide to reveal her grandfather’s face, haggard and frantic and relieved all at once. He had picked her up under her armpits and lifted her bodily out of the trick cabinet and hugged her tightly, the both of them crying, and made her promise never, ever to play up in the attic again. And then, because he knew her better than that, he showed her the trick of it -- the hidden latch that opened one of the sides of the cabinet and let the people inside slip out. She’d absorbed it all with wide eyes still red from crying, and said nothing.

That night, lying atop her covers in bed, with all the lights on and her favorite stuffed hippo hugged close to her, seven-year-old Sully decided that she never, ever wanted to feel that scared, that trapped, again. She had to know the secrets her grandpa knew -- the trick to it all. She had to know how it worked.

She started back in the same attic, amid posters of her grandpa in a tuxedo, pulling rabbits out of hats during his days as The Great Gant, Master of Illusions. She pulled out the dusty books of magic he’d gotten from his father, Indigo the Magnificent, and spent all the afternoons of all her summers reading closely, studying the diagrams, practicing with her own hands and her grandmother’s borrowed jewelry mirror. She didn’t concern herself with patter or showmanship; she didn’t want to be up on stage doing these tricks, which her grandfather assured her was not nearly as glamorous and exciting as the posters made it look. She just wanted -- needed -- to know the mechanics. If only so that, the next time she dreamed she was back in the box, as she did now and then, in the close, velvet, suffocating dark, she’d know where to look for the latch.

The skills and the interest stuck with her, into high school, where picking locks proved great for sneaking out of or into the house at odd hours, and sleight of hand made an ideal method for cadging the occasional pack of cigarettes down at the Quik-Stop. And into college, where she picked up more than one guy by surreptitously lifting his wallet while she had him busily looking down her shirt. It’s how she’d known OMG was good -- better than she was -- when she saw him doing card tricks in Santa Monica. And it’s how she was able to make sure that the new tricks she and the magic consultants had worked up cut through his perpetually foggy brain -- by sitting him down with several large cups of coffee and running through the tricks with him, hour after hour, until he could do all the palms and reverses with a skill and fluidity she secretly envied.

So when the sheer, surreal panic of being hauled off her feet by unseen men, bound, blindfolded, and tossed roughly into someplace noisy and dark had passed, Sully was able to take a deep breath, call upon months of West Hollywood yoga classes to calm her heart rate, and take inventory.

The floor was cold and metal, rumbling and bumping. Car, she thought. No, the engine sound was too growly, and the space she was in too spacious-sounding. Truck. Van. She tried to move, tasting the fibers of silk in the gag stuffed in her mouth, and found her hands bound behind her back with what felt like one of those treacherous plastic zipties, and another set around her ankles.

Voices. Two, from somewhere not far away; one low, the other slightly higher. Sully couldn’t make out what they were saying, or even the language. Too much noise. Then someone nearer, much nearer, cleared his throat, and Sully knew she wasn’t alone. There was a third man in the back of the... van, she guessed... with her.

Okay. First things first: Get her hands free. When she wriggled her hands, she felt them press against cold metal. Which meant she was lying with her back to a wall, which in turn meant that odds were her captor couldn’t see her.

She gave her wrists a shake, and her silver cigarette lighter slid neatly into her palm. She waited for the van to hit a bump, and flicked the lighter on, hoping the sound had been covered. Hoping it wasn’t so dark in the back of the van that the flame would cast a light. She began to twitch her ankles back and forth, in a regular rhythm, hoping it would draw the eyes of anyone watching her away from what her hands where doing.

Sully pulled her wrists as far apart as they would go, creating a precariously small gap where the plastic band around her wrists did not touch bare skin, at the cost of cruelly cutting off circulation in her hands. She’d have to work quickly. Carefully, she turned the flame of the lighter against the plastic, and hoped it’d melt before she’d burned her hands.

It did, but only just, and Sully pulled the melted, stretchy plastic apart wincing at the scorched skin on her wrists. She lay there, the lighter flicked shut, and waiting for the stinging to subside. She heard whoever was with her in the back of the van cough and shift -- soft sounds, like silk -- and felt the van lurch to a halt at a stoplight, idle for a moment, and then turn a corner.

Sully began to make gagging sounds in the back of her throat. She let herself convulse, let the sounds welling up from inside her get louder and more distressed. She heard the man move to her, heard his clothing rustle as he crouched down, felt hands against her face clumsily but not cruelly working to untie the gag.

Sully waited until she could feel the faint exhalation of breath on her face. That told her where his head was. She shot one hand out to grab the back of his neck, and using that as a gauge, made a lucky guess as to the location of his testicles with the other hand. Then she brought her head up hard against his. It hurt like hell, for the both of them, but Sully was the only one ready, and before he could so much as whimper, she clonged his head against the metal wall of the van.

She waited. The van drove on. She heard continued conversation from the front seat, and soft, regular breathing somewhere close by. Lucky on two counts. Sully reached up at last and stripped the blindfold off her eyes.

It was, indeed, the back of a van. Outside it was just getting light; Sully couldn’t recognize the neighborhood, but then, she couldn’t recognize anything shorter than a skyscraper in this town. (It was why God had invented cabs.) There was a young Asian man lying next to her, his head shaved and stubbly, dressed in black robes like some kung fu movie reject. There was a goose egg rising on one of his temples, but nothing bleeding, and he seemed to be breathing all right.

Sully used the lighter to get the ziptie off her feet -- wincing as the lighter scorched the leather on her brand-new vintage boots, picturing the look of withering disdain on the face of the shopowner who’d sold them to her that such treatment would surely invite -- and took a moment to plan her next step.

Slowly, staying low to the floor of the van, she crawled around the man in the black pajamas toward the rear doors. She kept an ear cocked for the conversation in the front of the van, but it didn’t change -- now they seemed to be having some sort of good-natured argument.

The van stopped at another light. Sully reached up and turned the latch. The rear doors swung wide, predawn light spilling into the shadowy confines of the van, and Sully tumbled out.

The change in light and the sound of the doors made the two men in the front of the van take notice. There was a burst of Mandarin syllables, flung with the sort of throwing-star vehemence that marked them as curses, and both the front doors of the van opened to disgorge two fit, muscular young men with shaven heads and loose black tunics and pants.

“Dammit!” spat Hu Lao, the stout, broad-shouldered one, slamming a palm against one of the open rear doors of the van. “I thought you were keeping an eye on her, Pang!

Pang Qi exhaled nervously, clapping both hands to his elongated head. “I was watching the road, Hu! You kinda have to do that when you’re driving! Crap, crap, crap! Gary, where’d she go?”

“Huh?” said Gary Cheng, wincing as he rubbed his aching head. “Ow. Damn, do I look like I know where she went? Unconscious here.”

Hu and Pang helped a groaning Gary out of the back of the van, Pang carefully sizing up the lump on Gary’s head. The truck idling behind the three men’s van honked angrily as the light turned green.

“Just go around!” Hu fumed to the driver, who responded with a hand gesture that would not, in any culture, have a friendly interpretation as he sped around the van and through the intersection. “Some goddamn kung fu masters we are. Can’t even bag a skinny little white girl.”

“Skinny little white girl who hits like a freakin’ Marine,” sulked Gary, his pudgy cheeks puffing sullenly. “Even my nana doesn’t hit that hard.”

Pang took another deep breath and surveyed the empty street behind the van. There was nothing -- no alleys where she could have hidden, no other cars with which she could have hitched a ride. She couldn’t have vanished into thin air. So that meant--

There was a sudden lurch of grinding gears, the roar of the van’s motor, and it sped off through the intersection, rear doors flapping open, as the three black-robed men whirled in disbelief.
Hu looked skyward and let loose a stream of paint-peeling syllables. Gary winced anew, this time thinking about the deposit they’d put down to rent the van. Pang just blinked, and nodded.
“She’s good,” he said grudgingly.

In the driver’s seat of the van, Sully risked reaching over to slam the passenger’s side door shut. Her forearms and knees were grimy and gritty from crawling beneath the vehicle, making her way quietly to the driver’s side door while her captors argued at the back, but she was alive, and in one piece, and apparently the new owner of a late-model black Ford van.

She’d run two red lights -- fine, let the cops pick her up, please -- before she thought to check her jacket pocket. Her phone was still there, thank God, reassuring and cool and pebble smooth. She flipped it open one-handed, with experience born of many a day on the freeway, and thumbed the one-touch button for her assistant Ida. She didn’t even wait for a hello, just the click of a line picking up.

“Ida!” she barked. “Sully. I just got kidnapped by three jackasses in ninja suits and a piece of crap van. I’m -- hell, I don’t know, someplace with buildings, and I think I see the Sears Tower off to the left. Just call the cops and get them to wherever I am. And pick up some bagels, and coffee, because I’m gonna be freakin’ starving whenever I get back from wherever this is.”

There was a soft, musical chuckle on the other end of the line -- very un-Ida-like -- and then the gentle tones of a woman’s voice, proper and English -- also not Ida-like, Ida being a native of Cerritos whose way with a DayPlanner was matched only by her colorful approach to grammar.

“Sit tight, dear,” said the weird Mary Poppins voice. “We’ll be by to collect you directly.”

“Hello?” Sully asked, suddenly bewildered. She stared at the phone’s caller ID, knowing she’d dialed Ida; the display read NUMBER UNKNOWN. “Who is this?” But the line had already gone dead.

Three sets of thumps landed on the roof, heavy and person-sized, and suddenly Sully had more immediate problems. She stomped on the gas and took the next corner hard, feeling herself lurch against the seatbelt she’d reflexively buckled on. Things slid around on the roof, and she thought she heard cursing, but her rear-view mirrors revealed no black pajama-clad people tumbling along the pavement in her wake. Couldn’t have everything, Sully supposed.

The passenger door unlatched. Before she could stop him, one of them -- the tall skinny one with the vaguely egg-shaped head and the serious eyes -- had swung himself down inside the van, slamming the door shut behind him. Sully heard footfalls in the rear of the van and the slam of the back doors shutting. She reached over for the parking brake, and the ninja guy’s hand reached out and grabbed hers. She tried to lift it, twist it like she’d learned in the self-defense classes, but his arm seemed to glide out of her grip like water, and reform just as solidly with his hand around her wrist.

“We’re not going to hurt you,” the ninja guy said. “I suppose we should have led with that.” Sully jerked her arm, but he held it fast. “Easy! I said we’re not going to hurt you?”

“Yeah, the kidnapping totally convinced me of your good intentions,” Sully growled. He wasn’t wearing his seat belt; if she stomped on the brake...

There was a quiet click next to her, and when she looked again, he’d buckled himself in. Not bad, she had to admit.

“I’m Pang Qi,” the ninja guy said gently, evenly. “That’s Hu Lao in the back, and Gary, who I believe you’ve met.”

“Ow,” chimed in Gary through the partition.

“Yeah, that’s nice,” Sully said. “I don’t care. You put a gag on me and threw me in the back of a van, and I’m not gonna stop until you’ve got about five cops each shoving their nightsticks so far up your--”

“We were sent to protect you,” Pang said firmly. “Your life is in danger, and it’s very important that we keep you safe.”

“Oh, and I so belive that, on account of being bound and gagged and thrown in the back of your crappy-ass van,” Sully said, rolling her eyes. Dammit, there had to be a police station somewhere around here. “Just keep talking. I’m taking mental notes for when my lawyer gets here.”

“Yes, absolutely,” Pang replied, with an edge of sarcasm in his voice. “It’s clear that we should have sat you down over a cup of tea and explained it all to you. You know, given your evidently trusting nature.”

Sully had to think about that. She wasn’t naturally inclined to believe anything anyone told her, ever -- having had far too much experience with the simple, depressing fakery behind the most elaborate of promises -- and especially disinclined in the case of weird Chinese guys who walked around dressed like Hugh Hefner’s palace guard.

“Sullivan Wells,” Pang continued, “we are the Three Brothers of the Dragon, the seventeenth generation in a line of sworn protectors dating back to ancient China. And you are the Gaunt Heir, the lineal descendent of the man who saved our master’s master’s life many decades ago. And we have been sent to you now, in your hour of unknown need, to save your life.”

“Go on,” Sully sighed. “Offer me the red pill now.” She had to admit, there was something about Pang’s no-bullshit manner that she kind of liked. He wasn’t trying to seem less crazy -- especially with all that Gaunt Heir business, whatever that meant. He wasn’t trying to suck up to her, and he knew her full name -- something she didn’t exactly advertise. “Save my life from what, exactly?”

She saw the wide, low-slung black car two seconds too late, and only a split second before it barrelled out of the intersection from their left and smashed into the van.

Metal shrieked and rent. Glass shattered. The world spun sickeningly, over and over, and came to a stop upside down. Sully slumped dazed against the seatbelt, hair hanging over her face, and waited for her brain to stop rattling. She heard footsteps outside, spots swimming before her vision; shoes crunching across broken glass. Something tore her door off its hinges, and powerful hands reached in, undid the seatbelt, and hauled her out.

She blinked, trying to clear her vision, feeling a powerful hand clamped around the collar of her jacket. And then she was lifted abruptly up, the jacket pinching under her arms, her feet danging off the ground.

“Hey!” she, shouted, then broke into a coughing fit. Her eyes finally cleared, and she found herself looking down an outstretched arm at a very tall, very slender man with close-cropped silver hair, a hawkish nose, a thin old-fashioned mustache, and one silver-gray eye staring clinically at her. A black eye patch covered the other eye, and a black coat draped his lanky frame down to his ankles. Underneath, Sully saw, he wore a gray tweed suit, with something small and glinting tucked in the lapel.

There were two more men, black hats and coats like his, climbing out of some gigantic ‘50s beast of a black car behind him. It was the same car that had smashed into them, yet some part of Sully’s brain registered that there was no damage to it, not the hood, not the front grille, not even a busted headlight.

“Hmm,” Eyepatch said, pursing his lips thoughtfully. “Yes, it’s definitely you. Pleasure to meet you, Miss Wells.”

“Who--?” Sully managed to blurt, her head still swimming.

“Shhh,” Eyepatch said, raising one long slim finger to his lips. “Don’t trouble yourself. It’ll all be over in a moment.”

With his free hand, Eyepatch reached into his coat and drew out a long, thick silver needle.

There was a sudden whooshing sound, and something round and silver zipped through the air and smashed into Eyepatch’s head. He grunted and dropped Sully, who landed hard on her butt and scrambled back, feeling one of her stockings rip on the pavement. The hubcap that had struck Eyepatch in the face fell to the pavement and began to wobble in a gentle, receding orbit.

Sully looked over and saw Pang, Hu, and Gary next to the demolished van, bloodied but sturdy-looking, poised in the sort of fighting crouches she’d only seen in bad kung fu movies.

“We’re here, Miss Wells,” Pang said, his eyes never leaving Eyepatch or the two other men in dark coats, “to save your life from them.”

“Oh,” Sully said. At this point, that was okay by her.

One corner of Eyepatch’s mouth quirked. Then he smirked. Let out a snort, that became a jag of derisive, hyena-like laughter that quickly spread to his two comrades as well. He fished a crisply folded handkerchief out of one of his suit pockets and dabbed dapperly at the tears forming at either corner of his eyes, and took several deep breaths to calm his laughter into chuckling.

“Oh, son,” he wheezed sarcastically to Pang, “you’ve gotten a bit big for your britches there. The Three Brothers of the Dragon are legendary. Fearsome. You boys are just playing dress-up, there.”

Pang shifted the position of one foot, the sole of his light sandal scraping across asphalt. He tilted one outstreched hand, and twisted it into a fist.

Eyepatch shook his head sadly, his smile going cold. He glanced down at Sully, still crab-walking her way across the pavement. “We’ll be with you in, oh, ninety seconds, Miss Wells. Tops. Don’t you go anywhere.”

Then he flicked the tip of the needle in his hand at the Brothers, and it bubbled with blue energy, and with a sizzling scorch, the chunk of asphalt on which the three had been standing bubbled, burst, and vaporized into a neat crater. Sully yelped with surprise, and immediately hated herself for doing so. But the Brothers had scattered, leaping, and the end result was just one more pothole.

In midair, Pang flung out a hand, and three small blades seemed to materialize in Eyepatch’s forearm. He didn’t drop the needle, though -- just looked at the knives embedded in his flesh, and the dark red stains soaking into the sleeve of his overcoat, and tsked softly.

“Now son,” he sighed to Pang. “There’s no call to go ruining my coat like that.”

Hu and Gary were locked in combat with the other two men, the four of them a dizzying blur of flying punches and spinning kicks and fluttering black silk. Pang and Eyepatch, meanwhile, circled each other slowly, reminding Sully of gunfighters in a Sergio Leone movie.

Eyepatch moved to twitch his wrist and work the needle again, but in a blur, Pang had stepped inside its range and driven the heel of his palm up against Eyepatch’s chin, snapping the tall man’s head back. Pang followed up with a blow to Eyepatch’s stomach, then dropped low under a swing from his opponent to sweep Eyepatch’s legs out from under him. Eyepatch dropped to his back, rolling with the blow, and came up on his feet. A thin line of blood dribbled from one corner of his mouth, and he paused to dab at it ruefully with the handkerchief.

“Two minutes,” Eyepatch revised. “Two and a half, perhaps. And I’m going to enjoy every second.” He made a show of slipping the needle back into his sleeve. “Let’s see what else you’ve got, son.”

Pang’s foot shot out, stomping on the edge of the fallen hubcap he’d first thrown at eyepatch. It popped up into the air, and he spun, kicking it whistling toward Eyepatch’s neck. Eyepatch neatly snatched it one-handed from the air.

“I’ve got no depth perception,” he scolded. “Doesn’t mean I’m blind.” And almost faster than Sully could track, he hurled it back.

The hubcab struck Pang just below the left shoulder. Sully heard bone crack, and Pang winced, glancing for a moment at his arm. In that split-second moment of distraction, Eyepatch charged, and Pang barely had time to throw up a block before Eyepatch slammed a fist down into the apex of his neck and shoulder. Pang cried out and dropped to his knees, but blocked the knee Eyepatch launched at his face, and drove a fist up under Eyepatch’s rib cage, driving the tall man back.

With teeth gritted, Pang reached over and snapped his dangling left arm back into place, then bound it hastily with the sash from his belt. As Eyepatch regained his wind, Pang stood up, wincing, testing his injured arm, and took up a defensive stance.

One of the men in black coats sailed through the air behind them, slamming headfirst into a curbside mailbox with a thunderous clang. He staggered to his feet, shook himself like a dog, and charged back toward a waiting Gary, who was bleeding from his nose and a cut on his cheek.

Eyepatch leapt, one finely shod foot flashing out in a kick aimed at Pang’s neck. Pang sidestepped, grabbed Eyepatch’s ankle, and swung him toward the asphalt. Eyepatch rolled, catching Pang on the chin with his free foot, and got to his feet, plucking the blades one by one from his forearm. He stuck them between each of the fingers in his right hand and made a fist, then smiled thinly at Pang.

“I suppose you’ll be wanting these back,” he said. He swung, wide, roundhouse blows, the blades clenched in his fist whistling centimeters away from Pang’s desperate dodges. At last, Pang managed to grab Eyepatch’s wrist and twist it with a horrible snapping sound; the hand went limp, and the blades fell jingling to the ground, but Eyepatch didn’t so much as whimper. He just smashed Pang in the chest with the flat of his uninjured palm, then calmly set to twisting his wrist back into place.

“Ow,” Eyepatch said, flatly, disinterestedly. “My, you’ve done me a piece of harm.”

Sully took this opportunity to launch herself at his midriff.

She envisioned him going down like a sack of bricks, like in the movies. She certainly threw herself with enough force to catch anyone off balance. Unfortunately, he stumbled a few steps, but stayed very much on his feet. Sully found herself hugging him awkwardly around the waist, looking up along his shirtfront to see him smirking down at her in a way that made her feel like even more of an idiot.

“Wait your turn, Miss,” he said. With one hand, he peeled Sully off him like a piece of lint, and flung her through the air. She landed hard on the hood of Eyepatch’s black land-boat of a car, feeling the shock through her entire body, and took a few seconds trying to remember how to breathe.

Pang, clutching his chest and wheezing, steadied himself against the upside-down wreck of the Brothers’ van as Eyepatch calmly walked over to him.

“Son,” Eyepatch said, dusting a stray pebble off Pang’s shoulder, “you put up a good fight and all. I just can’t be prepared for the consequences if you aren’t smart enough to stay down.”

Pang hit him in the face, then again, and followed up with a kick to Eyepatch’s midriff.

The big man sighed, and casually broke Pang’s right arm with a single hard jerk.

Pang cried out through gritted teeth and staggered backward. Eyepatch let go of Pang’s arm and grabbed him by the throat, lifting the smaller man off the ground. Pang’s feet kicked helplessly off the ground as Eyepatch’s fist smashed again and again into his unguarded midsection. Pang spit blood, gasping for air as Eyepatch’s hand closed off his windpipe.

“Last chance, son,” Eyepatch sighed. “You’re getting blood on my suit there. Say you’ll stay down this time.”

Pang hissed the words out one fierce, defiant gasp at a time. “I won’t. Let you. Hurt her.”

“You say that like you’ve got a choice in the matter,” Eyepatch replied, and began to squeeze.

Behind him, a powerful motor roared to life. Eyepatch turned to see Sully behind the wheel of his own big black car, giving him the finger with one hand as she shifted into drive with the other.

Eyepatch dropped his free hand to his waist pocket, and found his car keys missing. His lone eye grew wide. Then the huge black battleship of a car lurched forward, devouring twenty feet of pavement in a split second, and smashed him like a paper doll against the side of the Brothers’ wrecked van.

Eyepatch choked out unintelligible words, bent backward at the waist over the hood of his own car. He let Pang drop to the hood and roll wheezing off the side of the car. Eyepatch stretched a hand back toward the windshield toward Sully, clawing at her. Hu, Gary, and their opponents had all stopped dead at the sound of the impact, the four of them gaping through fresh bruises and blood dripping into their eyes.

Sully narrowed her eyes, threw the car into reverse, and backed off a few feet. Eyepatch turned, gasping, his spine contorted. Somehow, he was still on his feet. He shook one dangling arm awkwardly, the needle up his sleeve slowly sliding down into his hand. That made up Sully’s mind right quick.

She gunned the engine, seeing the RPM needle on the dash flutter up toward the red, threw the car into drive, and plowed into Eyepatch again, crushing him against the van. This time, what was left of him had the good sense not to move.

She hit reverse again and peeled back, rolling the wheel, the car cutting a wide, dangerous arc through the street that sent Hu, Gary, and the other two men in black scattering. The latter two ran to what was left of Eyepatch, kneeling by the twisting, twitching form, and Sully locked eyes with one of them through the windshield as he looked up at her. His eyes were gray -- the same gray, the exact same gray -- but the hatred behind them was jet black.

The doors around her opened, then slammed shut. Hu had taken shotgun next to her, and Gary cradled Pang in his lap in the back.

“Go, go, go, dammit!” Hu shouted, and Sully managed to break eye contact with the man in black, throw the car into drive again, and peel out through the intersection. She saw the two men in black coats begin to give chase in the rear view mirror, shrinking away, and stop at last to stare after the car as it rounded a corner.

Sully gripped the wheel blindly, not caring where she drove. She wanted a cigarette more than she’d ever wanted anything in her life. All she could hear was Pang in the back seat, his breaths turning high and wet and keening. Hu was rummaging around in the glove box.

“Got it,” Hu said, and there was a flurry of sparks from the glove box, and then he was holding a squat black box, trailing wires. “Scratch one homing device.” Sully looked from him to Gary and Pang in the back; they all looked beat to hell, bruises on their face red and purple. One of Gary’s eyes had gone red, bleeding under the surface.

“How’s he doing?” Sully asked around the sudden lump that rose unbidden in her throat, jerking her head toward Pang. He was staring up at the roof of the car, blindly, blood bubbling at the corners of his mouth. Gary just shook his head.

“Hospital,” Sully said to Hu. “You’re from here, dammit. Where’s the closest hospital?”

“No hospital,” Hu said grimly. “We’ve gotta go see the Doc. Next right, then take the second left.”

Sully floored it, and the car surged forward hungrily, greedily, through the empty streets washed in early morning light.

They were heading south, out of the city proper, she guessed. Condos under development flashed past, neat townhouses and crumbling tenements all on the same blocks, and up the hill to her left she thought she glimpsed some kind of big museum building. She noticed a change in the signage -- pictograms accompanying English on the local restaurants and grocery stores and dry cleaners. Chinatown.

“Up here, up here,” Hu said, pointing through the windshield to a wide alley behind a blocky, nondescript industrial building. Chain-link gates swung wide, invitingly. Sully all but took the turn on two wheels, and screeched to a halt across two parking spaces in the small lot at the back of the building, next to the closed-down loading dock and the stairs leading up to the second level.

Sully didn’t even kill the engine, just bolted out her door and threw open the rear driver’s side door. She found Gary sitting there quietly, tears welling in his swollen, bruised eyes, and Pang motionlessly staring out the open door, through her, at eternity.

Her knees wobbled, and she put a hand out against the car to steady herself. Dammit. She didn’t know these people. She didn’t cry, as a rule, ever. Not since she was seven. Not since the trick cabinet in her grandfather’s attic. Now she looked into the face of a stranger who’d died trying to help her, and the monstrous, immense unfairness of it all hit her like a blow to the stomach.

The morning air was still and cold, the shadows wintry blue, the sunlight a pale, sloping orange against the walls. The car idled, spinning clouds of exhaust like candyfloss from its tailpipe. And no one said anything.

The roar of a motor, down the block, grew louder. Coming their way. Sully’s stomach clenched up again, her hands closing into fists. A blur of yellow screeched into the alley, the chain-link gates chiming and jingling as it batted them out of the way, and swerved to a halt, tires squealing, in the middle of the lot right in front of them. It was a taxicab, yellow and black, dented and scoured by years of potholes and harsh winters A wiry young man with tousled black hair, his skin a burnished chocolate brown, all but launched himself from the drivers seat and stared at Sully, Hu, and Gary with wide, desperate eyes.

In the back seat of the cab, a shadow stirred.

“You’ve got to help me,” the driver pleaded in round, rolling curlique syllables. “He’s dying -- the Black Lotus, I think. Please, please tell me -- is this where I find Dr. Xiang?”

To the Death!

“I’m afraid there’s been some terrible misunderstanding,” Rafe Windham said, “and what exactly did you mean by ‘to the death’?” Then the painted warrior’s wide, flat obsidian blade swung down and neatly cleaved his skull in two.

Well, no. More accurately, it cleaved a small bookshelf about halfway in two, Rafe having had the presence of mind to throw himself sideways toward the entertainment center as the warrior leapt over his coffee table to swing. But the head-cleaving intent was certainly there, and for a brief moment on the carpet, Rafe found himself curiously nostalgic for the days when all of his problems were entirely explicable ones.

“I think we can safely rule out this being a joke,” Rafe said, scrambling to his feet as the warrior yanked his knife out of the ruined bookshelf -- Rafe suddenly felt a great deal better about having rented the place furnished -- and advanced once again upon him, twin blades glinting in the morning sunlight through the glass doors to the balcony. “Do I owe someone money?” he tried. “Well, obviously, yes, but someone creative?

The warrior smiled, showing teeth. “This is about your destiny,” he said in his perfectly honed English accent. “Start fighting back. I’ve come too far for this to be over quickly.”

He lunged again, one blade whipping through the air to bury itself deep in the side of the television. Rafe ducked, only to have the warrior’s leathery foot catch him in the ribs. He stumbled back into the sole remaining bookcase, the shelves slamming painfully into his back, and felt the beginnings of a good head of instinctive rage build up. He reached back to the shelf, grabbed the first thing his hand reached, and threw it at the warrior.

The paperback copy of The Thorn Birds bounced harmlessly off the warrior’s unflinching face and flopped to the floor. The warrior looked down at it on the carpet, a bit sadly. “I hope that’s not yours,” he sighed.

At which point Rafe hit him full in the face with Watley’s Field Guide to the Birds of England, unabridged revised second edition. It was a coffee-table book in the sense that it could double as furniture, and it felled the warrior like a bolt from the blue.

“Much better,” Rafe heard the intruder say from beneath the book, in somewhat flattened syllables, just before Rafe brought the entire bookshelf down on him.

There was a slight settling of paper, and a slowly rising cloud of dust -- Rafe not being the most attentive of housekeepers -- and Rafe sagged against the sofa, legs shaking, and waited for the adrenalin surge to die down.

The bookshelf stirred.

“No,” Rafe said, looking around for something heavy he could put on top of it. “Oh, no, come on--!” And then the bookshelf all but leapt from the ground, propelled by a shove of the warrior’s sturdy legs, and the intruder snaked back of to his feet with a breakdancer’s grace, spun the knives impressively in his hands, and smiled.

“This is more like it!” the warrior exulted, and raised his knives high.

Rafe Windham, in his relatively brief life, had enjoyed considerable experience with a variety of men bearing sharp objects (blunt ones, too) and wishing him harm. It began to dawn upon him that he was, perhaps, now facing an expert in the art. Then the knives fell, and the sofa pillow Rafe had instinctively grabbed to shield himself fell into three pieces and a cloud of polystyrene fluff.

Rafe dropped the remains of the pillow, grabbed each of the warrior’s wrists with this own to force them away and apart, and drove a knee as hard as he could into the intruder’s solar plexus. He’d been aiming for the crotch, but this was hardly the time for precision. As the warrior doubled over in pain, Rafe grabbed him by the shoulders and drive his head entirely into the wall.

The warrior sagged for a moment, and Rafe reached down to grab one of the black stone knives -- only to find the thick, solid butt of it driven into his stomach. He lurched backward just in time to avoid a swipe from the blade’s business end, and felt the anger in him tighten and redouble.

The warrior pulled his head from the wall, his face now ghostly white with plaster dust, and spat out a piece of sheetrock.

“I’d have thought the walls a bit sturdier, in a place like this,” he said.

“Americans,” Rafe managed to gasp, struggling to catch his breath. “You know how it is.” Then he ran for the kitchen.

It was just off the living room, with a wide hole cut in one wall to see through from either side. Rafe wasted no time going around this partition; he just leapt, as he had at the parking garage, and slid himself through feet-first, landing hard on the linoleum. He managed to cross his arms in front of his face just in time to take the blow as momentum smacked him forward into the cabinets. He stood up, drew the biggest carving knife he could find, and turned just in time to completely shatter the blade against that of one of the warrior’s stone knives.

“Mm,” the warrior noted. “I see what you mean about the craftsmanship.” He swung with the opposite blade, Rafe ducked, and the stone knife sank itself into one of Rafe’s kitchen cabinets -- taking some of the crockery within with it, by the sound of it. Had Rafe ever used the kitchen for anything more than reheating Chinese food, this might have been a more grievous loss.

The warrior let go of the trapped knife, but before Rafe could grab it, the intruder backhanded him viciously across the face. Rafe tasted blood, and then there was a knee in his ribs, and another fist slamming into the side of his neck.

With a grunt of primal fury, Rafe wrapped both arms around the microwave oven, yanked it from the wall, and smashed it full into the intruder’s face.

When the intruder staggered back, Rafe hurled the microwave at his chest, and the painted warrior fell hard against the lower cabinets, bare feet squeaking on the linoleum, struggling under the weight of the appliance.

Rafe reached down, running on pure furious instinct, and opened the dishwasher -- and when the warrior blindly brought his remaining knife up to slash wildly at Rafe, he shut the door again. Hard. Several times.

At last the warrior, howling, dropped the knife. Rafe heard it clatter against the silverware holder. As the warrior scrambled backward on his elbows, shoving the microwave off him, Rafe opened the dishwasher one final time to snatch up the knife the warrior had relinquished. It felt good and heavy and powerful in his hand, and he turned to grasp the handle of the other one, still jutting from the cabinets. With a tug, it came free. Rafe stood for a moment, testing the weight of the blades in his hands. The warrior was up on his feet now, blood streaming from a broken nose, weaving a bit.

Rafe took a step toward him. And another.

The warrior reached up to strike, and the krav maga class Rafe had taken way back in college -- to impress that one young lady with what had been, in retrospect, a disturbingly fervent interest in the Israeli military -- paid off, as Rafe slapped the blow away effortlessly. The warrior dropped, spinning, to whirl a kick at Rafe’s ribs. It connected, but the pain just fed into the anger growing in Rafe. He didn’t mind people trying to hurt him. It was all too commonplace, generally understandable, and frequently justified. But he absolutely hated it when they succeeded.

“I’ve had a very bad morning,” Rafe growled, smashing the handle of one blade hard into the warrior’s face. The intruder staggered, barely staying on his feet, lurching back toward the living room. “I’ve been cheated. I’ve been chased. I’ve been beaten up. I nearly fell off a train.”

The warrior threw a punch, pathetically, and Rafe hit him again. He fell backwards over one arm of the sofa and rolled onto the glass coffee table, knocking the wooden case from which he’d produced the knives to the floor. The table bore the impact with a thrum of vibrating glass.

“I just wanted to sleep,” Rafe said, low, furious. “I’ve filled my quotient of people trying to kill me for the day. And you’ve done a lot of things to me that hurt quite a bit.” He brought one foot up and smashed it hard against the intruder’s chest, and he heard the table crack with the force of the blow.

Rafe flipped one of the knives in his hand -- it came so easily -- and prepared to bring it down into the intruder’s heart.

And stopped.

He saw the man’s face, the red of his blood against the white of the plaster dust, and the wide, calm accepting eyes. He saw resignation, and disappointment. He’d seen it many times before, in the faces of girlfriends, and professors, and especially his parents. Too many times, honestly.

The cloud of anger that bubbled up from his brainstem, from the deep prehistoric part of him, rolled back and disippated. The knives felt suddenly heavy and wrong and alien in his hands, and once again he realized his legs were shaking. He let the knives drop to the carpet, on either side, and held out a hand.

“Are we done?” Rafe sighed.

The warrior smiled through bloodied teeth. “Indeed we are,” he said, “Your Lordship.” He took Rafe’s hand.

“None of that,” Rafe said, grimacing, as he hauled the man up off the broken table. Everything hurt, even more than it had when he’d walked through the door, as if such a thing were possible. And yet somehow, Rafe felt better than he had in ages. “My father’s the lord, officially, and at the rate I’m going, he’ll sell the deed to Windham Hall to some American software tycoon before he ever lets me have it.”

“I wasn’t talking about Windham Hall,” the warrior said, gingerly touching one thumb to his bloodied lip.

Rafe let himself sink against the sofa. “Look, what’s this about? Did my father send you?”

“The calendar sent me,” the warrior said, collecting the box from the carpet and setting it on the table. He set the knives back inside it, one at a time, but kept the box lid open. “The Long Calendar of the Children of Silence. Carved from a block of solid stone by hands too distant to remember. It knew the date of my birth, and it knew what I would be asked to do. It said that I would travel to this far place, on this day, in the shadow of a great unraveling. I would find the heir of Harker Windham, and test him in ritual combat. And if he were worthy -- if he could be civilized and savage, a foot in both worlds -- I would have the honor of passing on to him his birthright.”

The warrior handed Rafe the open box. Rafe took it and laughed, closing the lid -- and then stopped, because laughing hurt too much. “What sort of truly excellent drugs are you on?” Rafe said. “And where can I get some?”

The warrior just smiled and shook his head. “You’ll need the blades, the calendar says. Something about how they’ve been blessed -- that, or the atomic structure of the stone has been altered. The translations are inconsistent.”

“This calendar,” Rafe said, lifting the lid again to peer at the stone knives. “What else does it say?”

“It says today I die,” the warrior said, looking out Rafe’s window to the skyline of the city off to the south, gleaming in the first full rays of morning sun. “You’ve a lovely view here. Sorry about the mess.”

“I wasn’t expecting to get the deposit back anyway,” Rafe said. “It really said you were going to die?”

The warrior just nodded, his bone necklace jangling. “But it’s been wrong before. Once or twice. Errors of translation, like I said.”

“Well, that’s a relief,” Rafe said, his limbs feeling very heavy. He stifled a yawn. “Look, now that you’ve destroyed my apartment and beaten me bloody, what’s your name?”

The warrior opened his mouth, and Rafe’s door flew inward off its hinges, banged off one wall of the entryway, and skidded across the carpet to bump against the far wall.

The painted warrior whirled, and before Rafe even knew what his body was doing, he was up off the couch with both of the stone blades ready in his hands. A tall man in a black coat and hat strode into the room, two similarly dressed men behind him. The tall man’s face seemed curiously red and blistered, as if sunburnt, and his gray eyes swept over the room, locked on Rafe, and bored through him.

“So,” the warrior said. “The calendar was right.”

He leapt through the air toward the tall man, and suddenly seemed to stop short in midair. The tall man had him by the throat, and before Rafe could move, the tall man had shaken him like a rag doll, once, with vicious quickness. Rafe heard the painted warrior’s neck snap, and when the tall man tossed him to the carpet, his body simply flopped, still and unbreathing.

Rafe raised the knives with weary, shaking arms. He had no idea what exactly he would do to this tall, strange, inexplicably disturbing man, but took comfort in the notion that he was, at least, a very sizable target.

The tall man and his associates moved toward him, drawing long silver rods -- no, needles, pointed and wicked at the ends -- from their sleeves. Rafe seemed to hear a distant, droning hum behind him as they approached.

The hum grew louder, and louder still. The men stopped. The tallest one seemed to be looking over Rafe’s shoulder, out the window, with a mixture of frustration, admiration, and sheer disbelief.

Rafe turned to look, and something huge and silver blew through the glass with a blast of wind, the force of its passing and the unearthly roar of the turbine at its rear hurling Rafe sideways through the air onto the couch, and smacked into the three black-coated men like they were bowling pins. It screeched and skidded across the floor, chewing up carpet, and leaving a slick of something far redder and wetter than Rafe ever wished to consider in its wake. It smashed into the entry to the front hall, sending cracks up the walls, and completely obliterating any even mildly theoretical hope that Rafe might indeed ever recover his security deposit.

The turbine ran for a few more seconds, whirling papers and stray objects wildly about the room, and then died out with a whine. A single chunk of glass from the splintered remains of the back windows dropped to the concrete of the balcony and shattered. Rafe struggled to his feet, knives at the ready, and wondered what fresh hell this was, exactly. Polish gangsters were beginning to sound downright wholesome.

The rear hatch of the thing, turbine and all, unsealed with a hiss. A young woman climbed out, her thick black hair a frizzy mess, wearing a red t-shirt, jeans, and trainers, and carrying a satchel bag slung over one shoulder.

“Damn,” she said, surveying the mess. “Need more work on the landings. Are you him? Are you Windham?”

Rafe just nodded, slowly.

“I’m, uh... hi. I’m Nora,” the young woman said, suddenly seeming bashful. “Sorry about your window. I think I’m kind of here to save your life.”

Rafe’s brain considered this improbable chain of events, and decided the only sensible thing to do was shut down. So he nodded, and smiled quite charmingly, and fell straight back into the couch, and the welcoming arms of unconsciousness.

A Stitch in Time

Author's note: With this chapter, I've beaten NaNoWriMo's 50,000 word goal. Now I've just got to finish the darn thing...

“There are more people coming,” Nora Swift said, backing slowly away, as the tall, black-coated woman advanced on her, holding the long silver needle casually in one hand.

“Oh no, my dear,” Mrs. Stitch laughed, shaking her head cheerily. Her grey eyes seemed to stare through Nora. “There’s no one else coming. They’re having a lovely quiet morning at the office.” The one she’d called Maximillian had bent his tall frame over to pluck the silver needles from the back of Murray’s neck. He glanced up at Nora, coolly, lizardlike, with the same strange gray eyes.

“Copters,” Nora said, feeling the plastic walls of the corridor bump up against her back. “There are news copters -- gotta be.”

“Whatever would they be here for?” Mrs. Stich said gently, almost scoldingly.

That’s when Nora’s body finally caught up with her mind, and she hit the woman in the face, hard as she could with her flashlight. Mrs. Stich sagged against one wall, and Nora turned and ran.

For a moment, she thought she could escape out the hatch, maybe jump in the black boat tied to the railing -- but as she reached the doorway, she saw another black boat rapidly approaching, still and silent men in black coats and hats standing at its helm. She heard the thud of heavy footsteps behind her, and kept running.

Into the passenger cabin now, and when she risked a look back, there was Maximillian, the top of his hat nearly brushing the ceiling, his wide shoulders filling the aisle, pursuing her with long, swift, deliberate strides. Nora began to slap the release buttons on all the overhead bins, dragging carryon bags out to tumble into the aisle and block the route behind her.

Maximillian stepped over the first pile gently, had some difficulty with the second, and calmly began to cut through the row of seats to the next aisle over.

Nora ran, stumbling as the plane rocked gently on the water, back into the flight attendants’ kitchen. She flattened herself against the wall behind the privacy curtain and stared at the strange, bulbous microwave oven, the cabinets, the pot of coffee still percolating in a niche against the wall. She tried to think.

A thick arm in a black sleeve reached through the curtain from the opposite side of the kitchen and grabbed her hair. She hollered and dug her nails into Maximiliian’s exposed wrist as he pushed calmly through the curtain to hold her fast, but he didn’t so much as flinch.

She reached out, grabbed the full pot of coffee, and smashed it full against his face.

He didn’t howl, didn’t cry out, but he staggered back, steam rising from his face, and Nora’s hair slipped from his grasp. Her own hand was scalded where the coffee had splashed, but she scarcely had time to think of that. She half-ran, half fell out the opposite side of the kitchen and saw the two men from the second book gliding down the aisle in her direction.

She passed the stairwell, momentarily wondering if she should climb it -- until she remembered there was nowhere for her to hide in the wide, empty ballroom. Nowhere that she wouldn’t be found. Nora wondered when, exactly, she would wake up. Hopefully soon.

Nora ran into the semidarkness of the corridor ahead, the one she hadn’t explored earlier. She saw the panel marked EMERGENCY on the wall, the silver latch gleaming dully in the dim half-light from the emergency lamps in sconces along the ceiling. “It’s an emergency for damn sure,” she said under her breath, and yanked the panel open.

It was some kind of rifle, silver and sleek as the plane itself, mounted on prongs inside the wall cannister, bearing no identifying marks besides a stylized M embossed onto the stock. She saw a trigger, saw a narrow end, and guessed which side she was supposed to point toward the bad people, and that was good enough for her.

As she removed it from the wall, feeling the rifle cool and resolutely solid in her hands, she saw the clear, pictographic instructions written on the wall behind it. IN EVENT OF SKY PIRATE INCURSION, they were labeled, and the pictograms included tiny figures rapelling from a blimp into the upper surface of a drawing of the plane itself.

At the opposite end of the hallway, someone cleared his throat.

Nora turned and saw Maximillian filling the doorway, the two newly arrived men in black coats just visible behind him. He was slowly wiping the traces of coffee from the bright red skin of his face with a gray handkerchief.

“You stay the hell back,” Nora said, her teeth chattering with adrenalin, hefting the rifle in his direction. Maximillian clucked his tongue disapprovingly and wagged a single finger back and forth at her.

Nora squeezed the trigger.

The rifle kicked, and wet pellets burst from its muzzle, ballooning and spinning as they zipped through the air. They hit with splattering bursts against Maximillian and the men behind him as the three surged forward, expanding into a web of strands that criscrossed the corridor. As Nora watched in amazement, the goo hardened, trapping her pursuers.

“That’s about the most disgusting damn thing I ever saw,” she said to herself, looking down at the rifle with renewed curiosity.

Maximillian stared at her with calm, certain eyes, held fast by the immobilizing resin, and slowly used two fingers to withdraw a long silver needle from the sleeve of one trapped, upraised arm. He touched the tip of the needle to the nearest strand of resin, and to Nora’s horror, the bonds holding him fast began to slowly crumble away into dust.

“Oh, come on!” she shouted, and turned to dash deeper into the corridor. It was narrowing, and as she rounded a corner, she saw the dead end ahead, and felt her heart sink. There were round alcoves along one wall, each secured with a latch, and branded with the same EMERGENCY lettering. Nora briefly glanced at the rifle in her hands, sighed, and figured why the hell not.

The latch hissed open, and a circular door lifted up and out into the hallway. Beyond was a tiny cockpit of sorts, a single-seater with basic controls. Nora heard pursuing footsteps and ducked inside, sealing the hatch shut behind her. She caught just a glimpse of black trouser cuffs and shiny black shoes before the hatch closed, and she hastily turned the wheel on its inner surface to seal it tightly.

“Okay,” she breathed, seating herself and reflexively fastening the straps that dangled from the chair around her chest. “Come on...” A glass bubble wrapped around the front of the tiny cockpit, but all she could see beyond were the seams and rivets of steel plating. Looking down at the cockpit, she saw a blank flatscreen display, a twin-handled control stick, what seemed like a throttle, and -- aha -- a big red button, right within easy reach.

She smacked the red button full with her palm.

Nothing happened. From the hatch behind her, she heard steady hammering on the metal. The men in black wanted in. And then Mrs. Stich’s voice, melodic and crisp, filled the cockpit from a speakers somewhere in the tiny chamber’s roof.

“Very clever, dear,” she said, “but I’m afraid we’ve got the entire craft locked down. There’s no escape for you.” Another wave lurched the ship, and Nora’s stomach with it, and she suddenly felt very trapped and very alone.

“You can stay inside if you like,” Mrs. Stitch’s voice continued, “but Maximillian is a very patient and resourceful boy, and I assure you, he’ll be through the door soon enough. I assure you, dear, that we have no wish to hurt you. Kill you, yes, but I promise it’s thoroughly painless. Like drifting into the soundest, deepest Sunday-morning sleep. We’re not monsters.”

Nora gave a small whimper of frustration and fear. This was insane! Any other morning she’d be filling out paperwork, listening to the horrible, syrupy drive-time hits from Myra’s radio in the next cube over. “Our time, amusingly enough, is short,” Mrs. Stich continued over the intercom, “and I’d rather hoped to be on to Windham by now. So do be a help and open the latch, would you? Maximillian gets so cross when he doesn’t get his way.”

Nora remembered the pursuing man’s creepy gray eyes, his slow patience, and made up her mind.

“Oh, hell no!” she shouted, smacking the button again. “Wake up, dammit! Get me out of here!”

Lights switched on. The flatscreen blinked to life, displaying a soothing blue field and a menu of helpful options Nora had no time to process, much less read.

“Gale family voice override confirmed,” a calm, tinny synthesized voice chimed. “Welcome, Nora Swift. Please state your preference.”

Nora had no time to understand any of this. She only heard the thumping on the door behind her grow louder, each blow now accompanied by the groan of bending metal.

“Go!” Nora shouted. “Launch! Evacuate! Whatever!”

“Command processed,” the computer voice soothed. “Please prepare for launch.”

“Such a clever girl,” Mrs. Stitch sighed over the intercom. “I should have expected no less. We’ll be seeing one another soon, I assure--” Her voice died in a hiss of static, and the entire compartment lurched. Nora felt her stomach curdle, sweat breaking out on the back of her neck. Adrenalin raced through her limbs.

“Oh, fffff---” she began. Then the steel ahead of her knifed away to the pale blue of a morning sky, and something roared underneath her, and the hand of God smashed her back into the seat, cheeks flattening themselves against her teeth, as the capsule shot straight up into the sky.

The punishing acceleration lasted a good ten teeth-rattling seconds, and then there was a sudden, terrifying feeling of weightlessness as the jets cut out. The cockpit bubble slowly rotated, the skyline of the city rising into view, and for a second Nora thought she would plunge straight back into the dark waters of the lake. But there was a hum of hydraulics on either side of her, the clack-clack-clacking of wings unfolding in segments, and a low, vibrating howl as some sort of turbine kicked in, and with another nauseous burst of acceleration, the pod shot forward under its own power.

Nora clenched the stick with sweating hands, breathing in sharp, ragged gasps, and allowed herself a moment of absolute terror. Her hands unconsciously pulled the stick left, and the craft dipped and swooned sharply. Nora yelped and swung the stick back level, and this time, she felt a certain ease, a satisfaction, in how crisply it responded.

“I’m flying,” she said softly. And then a grin of relief and amazement spread across her face. “I’m flying.”

“Current altitude 1,247 feet,” the computer voice offered helpfully. Nora checked the screen and saw colorful gauges for fuel, GPS coordinates for her position, and a steadily dimishing “distance to empty” counter. It currently topped 200 miles.

As the pod drifted onward toward the skyline, Nora’s breathing eased, and she tried to think. She had no idea what was happening to her, what she was even doing in this craft. But she remembered Murray with the needles in his neck as Maximillian -- what? Rewrote his dreams? His memories? And she remembered how the police boats had simply been gone, what Mrs. Stitch had said about the news copters.

She had a terrible feeling that she couldn’t go home, and with a pang, she wondered if she could even call her mother. Did they have her phone tapped? Could they do that?

And then, at last, she remembered the other name Mrs. Stitch had mentioned.

“Hey, you!” she said to the craft. “Computer! Whatever.” It worked on Star Trek, she figured.

“What is your request?” the computer said melodically.

“Do you have any kind of, I dunno, historical information?” Nora asked, feeling strangely stupid. She was used to yelling at computers, but she never expected them to respond.

“The Gale Aeronautics X-9 escape craft has a variety of educational and entertainment options to ease travel,” the computer said.

“What can you tell me about Windham?” Nora said, then thought of something else. “Windham and Gale.”

“Processing,” the computer said. “While I’m thinking, would you like any other information?”

“Yeah,” Nora said, seeing the skyscrapers loom ahead, and once again feeling sweat slick her palms. “I think I’m gonna need to know how to land.”

Far behind her, on the lake, the great gleaming aircraft slowly began to sink, the dark water rising around it, until it was completely swallowed up. For a while, it was a shimmering silver shadow beneath the suface, and then a vague shape, and then, nothing at all.

Two black boats trailed white Vs of wake away from where the great, impossible aircraft had been, headed inexorably back to shore.

Encounter in the Depths

Trip Morrow was looking at the silver-and-amber signet ring he’d just put on his finger -- not even the strangest of the objects he’d found in the cigar box resting at the bottom of his backpack -- and thinking about his grandfather’s face, how it had seemed so soft and diminished and unreal lying there in the coffin, when the train crashed.

It was suddenly dark, without even a flicker, and he was lying full on the grimy rubber of the subway car’s floor, and his entire left side felt like the beginnings of a bruise. He felt a tang of iron in the back of his nose and had to check hastily to make sure it wasn’t actually bleeding. It wasn’t, and after a quick intinerary there in the dark, nothing else was bleeding, or broken for that matter. He heard a shriek elsewhere in the car.

The emergency lights kicked in after a few seconds, with a dull whine, spilling flat reddish light throughout the car. Trip, getting to his feet with one of the silver railing poles, counted three other people in the car.

One of them, a young man in a hooded sweatshirt and jeans, stood up. “It’s OK,” he said, shakily. “Everybody stay calm. I’m a cop. Just be calm.”

(By “I’m a cop,” Officer Brian Callas meant that he had finished the academy six months ago, in the middle of his class, and had since logged many dangerous hours prowling the mean streets of Wrigleyville, writing up college boys for public intoxication. He had once unsuccessfully pursued a very athletic purse snatcher, and had never so much as carried a gun, much less fired one outside the range.)

A young woman, dressed in a puffy black coat, spangly top, tight black pants, and shoes with nothing resembling any sort of proper structural support, sniffled and wiped at the mascara now running down her cheeks. An old woman in the sort of clothes she’d probably wear to church, her dark skin faded and mellowed to cafe au lait with age, made her way unsteadily across the car to offer the young woman a handkerchief.

Trip took a few deep breaths, feeling his heart rattle his ribcage, and began to think.

“We’ll be outta here in no time,” I’m A Cop said, reaching up to pull the emergency knob that would trigger the manual release on the doors on the side of the car, just like the colorful emergency diagrams had told him to do on a thousand prior train rides. He pulled the knob again. And again.

“Okay,” he said, “everyone just be cool. You on the floor, you okay?”

Trip nodded. “I’m good. Listen, I think that--”

“Can you try that door there?” the cop said, pointing to the door at the end of the car, labeled with EMERGENCY EXIT ONLY signs that the transients and panhandlers who periodically weaved through the cars each day made a point to ignore. “I’m gonna try the one up front.”

“Sure, but I think the crash might have--”

“Great,” the cop said, and hustled up the aisle, pausing to check on the young and old women sitting together by the window. “You two all right?”

The young woman blew her nose into the old woman’s handkerchief; the old woman nodded calmly, like someone who’d seen much worse, and patted the young woman reassuringly on the shoulder. “It’ll be all right, honey,” she said; Trip only half-heard it as he jiggled the handle of the rear door, and found it stuck, and wondered whether she’d said to to the girl or the cop.

In the weird glare of the emergency lights, Trip caught his reflection in the glass, all slabs of light and pools of shadow, and started for a minute, his mind overlaying his own face with that of his grandfather. The family had always said they were practically clones; same gangly build, same straight, floppy hair; same angular, earnest features. Trip had always liked the notion that he was going about the world wearing a face passed down from a loved one, and he thought again of the still wax puppet in the coffin to whom he had supposedly been related. From the opposite end of the car, he heard a handle jiggle, then rattle, and then a curse as the cop kicked at the door.

“All right,” the cop said, heading back down the aisle, “let’s just be cool. I’m sure somebody’s coming for us. Anybody got a cell phone?”

“I tried,” the girl said from behind raccoon eyes. She held up a silver wisp of a phone. “There’s no signal down here.”

The cop let out a long breath through pursed lips, hands bunching on the close-cropped hair on the back of his head. “All right, let’s just think. We could smash out the windows. Does anyone have, like, a heavy object?”

Trip had an idea, and began rummaging in his backpack. The cigar box rattled invitingly as he poked around inside, but it could wait. He came up with a swiss army knife, and carefully folded out the screwdriver attachment.

“Hey!” the cop said, as Trip began loosening the screws at the top of the silver pole that ran vertically from the roof to the floor of the car, in the middle of the space left empty for the unfortunate riders who couldn’t squeeze into a seat. “Hey! That’s public property! What are you doing?”

“It’s OK,” Trip said as he finished one screw and moved on to the other. “I think I have a way to get us out. Give me a hand with this?”

The cop made his way uneasily over, and Trip handed him the loose screw. “I think whatever we hit slightly warped the frame of the car,” Trip said. “That’s probably why the doors were stuck.” Having finished with the top of the pole, he dropped to his knees and began unscrewing the bottom. “We can get the side ones open, I think. Just need a little leverage. There. Now pull hard, with me, on three.”

Trip counted to three, and they both yanked hard on the steel pole, and managed to pop it from its housings.

“So what are you?” the cop said. “Like, that guy on TV who makes bombs out of candy bars?”

“Nah,” Trip said. “I just build stuff. I’m Trip.”

“Brian,” the cop said. “Hi.”

“I’m Jenna,” the girl in the back said, appropos of nothing, and Trip smiled and waved at her absentmindedly. She was, some part of his brain noticed, the sort of ridiculously cute girl who never even talked to him outside of potentially life-threatening situations. Of which this was approximately his first, so perhaps, he thought, he should endanger himself more often.

“Muriel,” said the old woman. “Y’all need a hand with that?”

“I think we’re good, ma’am,” Trip said, then turned to Brian and hefted the steel pole. “OK, help me get this wedged in the door.”

It took them a few tries, but together, they managed to get the tip of the pole into the narrow, rubber-flapped gap of the door.

“This totally reminds me of something,” Brian the cop said, suppressing a snicker. Trip shook his head, hair flopping from side to said, and looked at him quizzically. “Never mind,” Brian said. “So what do we do now?”

“Muriel, ma’am?” Trip called to the middle of the car. “We could use your help now. Can you pull the release knob?”

The old lady made her way slowly up the aisle, trailed by Jenna, the young woman walking unsteadily on the tall, skinny heels of her shoes. Muriel reached up into the recess at the top of the doorway, on tiptoes in her flat, squarish shoes, and pulled the knob down.

“Okay,” Trip said. “Brian, Jenna, give me a hand with this. We’re gonna try to lever the door open.”

It took them a few minutes of diligent tugging, until their faces were red and their muscles ached, but at last the doors shrieked and groaned and slid open wide enough to permit passage to the cool, clammy subway tunnel outside.

“Woo!” Jenna cheered, and Brian whooped in triumph. Trip wiped sweat from his brow and grinned.

“Give me a place to stand,” he said to himself, “and I will move the world.”

“Archimedes?” Muriel said, smiling gently.

“Ten points to Muriel,” Trip nodded. “Are you a teacher?”

The old woman shrugged. “I read a lot.”

“Okay, everyone out,” Brian boomed. “Come on, let’s go. Stick to the walls, and watch the third rail.” He wasn’t entirely sure which one was the third rail, but he figured avoiding them all would be a safe policy.

Trip quickly shouldered his backpack -- in an emergency, he supposed, the suitcase he’d had with him could wait for rescue -- and squeezed through the gap in the doors onto the narrow concrete walkway, then helped Muriel and Jenna through. Brian followed, still gripping the slightly crimped steel pole. “Just in case,” he told Trip, who just nodded.

They inched their way along the platform quietly, scuffing shoes echoing in the closeness of the tunnel, lit by the eerie emergency light from within the cars. The train had been nearly empty, this early in the morning, and no one stirred within the cars they passed.

Trip heard the girl, Jenna, behind him, her breathing becoming increasingly ragged. She put out a hand and clutched at the sleeve of Trip’s jacket, and he stopped and turned back to her as Brian and Muriel continued on ahead.

“You all right?” he said, as she continued to gasp, her eyes wide.

“It’s the tunnel,” she said. “I don’t -- I feel like I can’t breathe, it’s so small.”

“Here,” Trip said, slipping a bottle of water from a side pocket of his backpack. He cracked off the cap and gave it to her. “Just shut your eyes and drink it slowly, little sips. We’ll be fine.”

She did just that, taking small sips from the lip of the bottle, smudging it with her lipstick. In the light from the train, Trip could see the glitter on her cheeks. “Where are you from?” he said, conversationally.

“Lincoln Park,” she said, her breathing slowly quieting. “I’m, uh, I’m house-sitting for my sister while I look for a job.”

“Just graduated?” Trip asked, as she handed the water back to him. He screwed back on the cap and stuck it in the pocket on his back.

“Yeah, a few months ago,” she said, then laughed in embarrassment. “I know, who graduates in August? I had a few credits to make up. English major.”

“Want to be a writer?”

“Yeah, totally. Write for a magazine or something. All my friends say I do awesome horoscopes. When were you born?”

“November. The fifth. I’m a Scorpio, right?”

She smiled at him there, in the dim of the tunnel. “Ooh, good sign. Scorpios are all intense and passionate.”

“And also me, apparently,” Trip said, smiling, and got a giggle out of her.

“Hey, hey!” Brian’s voice echoed down the tunnel. “Come on! You’ve gotta see this!”

Trip and Jenna shuffled their way to the front of the train, where Brian and Muriel gazed silently at the front of the train. It had accordioned inward with the force of the impact, but the hulking, carved stone block into which it had smashed showed no cracks or other visible damage.

“Is the driver OK?” Trip asked.

“I dunno,” Brian said. “I think I saw somebody moving in there, but seriously, they’re gonna need the jaws of life to get him out.”

“Hey,” Jenna piped up, “did the crash bust that hole in the wall?”

As the four of them squinted in the gloom, they began to make out the outlines of a rough-edged hole in the concrete wall on the opposite side of the tunnel, next to the strange stone block. It seemed to slope down into an engulfing darkness.

“I don’t think so,” Trip said. “There’s no debris or anything big enough to--”

The tunnel came alive with the sound of stone grinding on stone. Jenna shrieked and grabbed reflexively at Trip’s arm.

“Where did that come from?” Brian said, hefting the steel pole, his head swiveling from side to side, eyes wide.

“From that,” Muriel said quietly, and pointed to the stone block. It was moving.

Now better adjusted to the darkness, Trip could see the strange geometric carvings that covered every surface of the stone block -- not the harsh angles of the Aztecs, but something a lot like it. The grinding sound continued, and the block seemed to get taller. It unfolded arms and straightened legs, and Trip realized it was a statue in the rough shape of a man, about nine feet fall. Solid stone, and yet -- its head swiveled slowly towards the four of them as they unconsciously flattened themselves against the wall of the tunnel.

Red eyes glowed like coals in its head, casting a strange radiance across its carved stone features and the black, open hole of its mouth.

“Irik ku ta Kroatoan?” it rumbled from somewhere deep within, like a quarry shifting in its sleep. “Ku va tirim Kroatoan.”

“What the hell--?” Brian said, and raised the steel pole. “Hey!” he shouted to the thing, waving the pole from side to side. “Get away from us!”

“Brian--” Trip began. The thing tilted its head slightly, and its eyes glowed even brighter, and then the pole glowed white-hot and burst into vapor. Brian howled, the sleeve of his jacket aflame, the flesh on his palm still sizzling from the burn, and toppled sideways onto the concrete.

Jenna shrieked and turned to run, stumbling on her heels and falling onto the plaform. It saved her life; the thing’s eyes glowed again, and a red line of molten concrete streaked across the tunnel wall at the former level of the girl’s head.

“Irik ku ta Kroatoan?” the stone statue said again, shifting its gaze now to look at Trip. He risked a glance to his left; Muriel was crouched next to Brian, using her tweed jacket to beat out the flames on his arm as he grimaced and writhed. Slowly, keeping his eyes on the statue, Trip extended a hand to Jenna as she lay, whimpering softly, on the platform.

“Just... stay... still,” he told her. “Don’t move.”

Keeping his hands low by his sides, he slowly stepped forward onto the tracks. The thing stood near the center of the tracks, about a foot from the white-capped, raised third rail, and its glowing red eyes tracked Trip as he slowly circled it, drawing its attention away from the people huddled by the wall.

“What are you?” Trip said softly, as amazed as he was knee-knockingly terrified. “You look like stone, but--”

Veins of red light slowly emerged and began to pulse softly along the body of the statue, illuminating its squarish, bulky dimensions.

“Whoa,” Trip said softly, stealing one hand inch by inch back toward the side pocket of his pack. Toward the bottle of water. “Definitely not stone.” He glanced over at the side of the tracks, at the recess against the tunnel wall beneath the lip of the raised platform.

“Okay,” Trip said, “so you recognize tones of voice, and aggressive behavior. And you’re not attacking me, right? Because I’m not doing anything. I’m just talking.”

“Irik ku ta Kroatoan?” the thing said, cocking its head slightly.

“You’re... you’re some kind of sentinel, maybe,” Trip said. “Like a security guard or something.” He slowly, slowly, unscrewed the cap on the water bottle. “But for what? What are you guarding? There’s nothing down here.”

“Irik ku--” the thing began again and Trip hurled the open water bottle underhanded toward its square stone bulk, and dove sideways and down toward the recess by the tracks. He landed hard, the breath rattling its way out of him, and a lot of things happened at once. The wood on the tracks where he’d just been standing burst into blue-white flame, and the metal tracks nearby glowed yellow-orange and began to sag and melt. The water splashed full against the stone guard, and against the third rail, and electricity surged and sizzled in blinding sparks up the sodden body of the creature. It screamed geologically, and the red veins of light on its body burst into flame.

The stone creature’s arms waved wildly, trailing afterimages of white fire, and flames boiled up out of its eyes. Then, suddenly as the fire had begun, it died out. The stone sentinel, now completely dark, toppled smoking to the tracks with a heavy crunch.

“I’m sorry,” Trip said to its hissing remains, and meant it.

***

Dawn was breaking, and on the street outside the subway station, activity was winding down. The ambulance had long since taken Brian to the hospital, and the transit guys were still down in the tunnel, sawing at the cars, freeing the remaining passengers and seeing to the injured. (Trip had asked the guy who looked like he was in charge to get his suitcase out as the transit team headed down into the station and the guy had just given him a look.) A few cabs and cars passed, and one guy on a bicycle, gawking, but the streets were still mostly empty at this hour.

The police detective had folded up his notebook from taking Trip’s statement, sighed, and shook his head. “Still too damn early for this sort of thing,” he’d said, and gone to the Starbucks across the street for coffee. That left Trip with Jenna and Muriel, the latter of whom had managed to find a Sun-Times in a vending machine and was reading the comics, chuckling softly to herself.

“You all right?” Trip asked Jenna, and she smiled up at him from her seat on the curb.

“Oh my God,” she said. “That was so amazing. I thought we were going to die. What was that thing?”
Trip shrugged and sat down next to her. Her hair was a mess, plastered in thick strands against her forehead. Trip liked it. He liked just about everything about her, except maybe her shoes. “I don’t know,” he said. “It looked Aztec or something, maybe, but I haven’t heard of anything--”

Jenna’s pocket began to sing I’m Walking on Sunshine, tinnily, and she reached in and pulled out her phone. “Oh my God!” she said to the voice on the other end. “Oh, sweetie, it’s so good to hear your voice. You’re never going to believe this. I totally almost died.” And just like that, Trip knew his brief and shining window of visibility had passed, and he was once more, and forever, beneath the her notice.

“Walk me to the next block over?” Muriel said to Trip, folding up her newspaper with a knowing grin. “I know I’m not a blonde in one of them short litttle skirts, but...”

“Uh... sure, ma’am,” Trip said. “My pleasure.” They began to walk, Trip taking small steps to keep pace with the old woman. “You sure you’re going to be all right?”

“The police let me call my friend Mary Jean. She’s gonna be by to pick me up in a few minutes,” Muriel replied. They rounded the corner and passed a bakery, its windows darkened like all the other shops on the street. The city waited in the dawn light, a breath away from coming alive.

“You’re a remarkable young man,” Muriel said, smiling up at him.

“You’re not so bad yourself, ma’am,” Trip replied, rubbing his bruised left arm. “You did a good job with Brian’s arm.”

“Used to be a nurse, back in the war,” Muriel said proudly. “Never forgot the training, I guess.” Trip noticed, for the first time, the small silver glimmer on the lapel of her tweed coat.

“Is that -- what, a pin?” Trip asked, and Muriel nodded.

“A needle,” she said, taking hold of it by the eye and drawing it out of her lapel. “Kind of a badge of honor, really. So’s I don’t forget.”

And then she stabbed him in the side of the neck with it.

“Ow!” Trip shouted, stumbling back, hand clapped to the sudden stinging on his neck. He felt a bead of blood form wet against his palm. “Why did you do that?”

“Had to be sure it was you,” Muriel said, casually wiping traces of Trip’s blood from the tip of the pin with a white linen handkerchief. “Thomas Morrow the third, grandson of the one and only, the great man himself.”

“Great man?” Trip sputtered. His legs felt wrong, rubbery, and a hot prickling was beginning to crawl up the base of his neck. “He did forty years behind a desk at Bell Labs!”

“Is that what he did?” Muriel asked, bemusedly. Trip’s world was beginning to spin slowly, and he realized he very much wanted to close his eyes. “I’m so sorry, sweetie. You seem like a nice boy and all, and if it was up to me, I’d let you live. But Stitch says you might try to get things all unfixed again, like the bad old days, and we’ve got a big enough mess to deal with as is.”

“What--” Tom said, his lips beginning to turn to disobedient mush. “What did you do to me?”

“You just lie down, Trip Morrow,” Muriel said. “Lie down and go to sleep, and I promise it won’t hurt you none. You won’t even feel it.”

Trip stumbled away from her, ran on blind rubbery legs. The world was canting wildly, and he fell over, tumbling, and lay in the middle of the street. And the last thing he saw before his vision went black was the blurry shape of a taxicab, hurtling toward him, horn blaring, and sure to run him over.

The Vanishing Skyscraper

It was 20 stories tall, solid steel frame clad in concrete, and the man in the glass box had promised to make it vanish.

That’s why the people had turned out in throngs, even at nearly 4 a.m. on this bone-cold November morning, when the fine, barely palpable wetness of the air seeped through the thickest coats into your marrow. They lined the opposite side of the river that cut through the city, jostling and hugging themselves and stamping feet against the cold, and followed the spotlights that cut through the predawn sky and illuminated the Riverside Tower. They were waiting for it to disappear.

Forty years ago, the Riverside Tower was hailed as the latest wave in truly mod living. Now it was a weirdly angled, moderately beloved eyesore, its cheaply built interiors at least a decade past their prime. The new property owners hungered to tear it down and build newer, shinier, even more exclusive condos in its place.

They’d already cleaned out the area around it, fencing it off and parking the bulldozers and steam shovels. But a phone call from Los Angeles, a few hundred thousand dollars, and the promise of truly outstanding promotional opportunities stayed their hands, at least for a week. Because OMG wanted to use it for his latest trick.

The news crews waited at the back of the crowd, cameramen shivering and drinking coffee, on-air talent savoring the opportunity to be imperfect and human -- at least aside from their hairstyles -- before the red eye of the camera opened on them once again. The Channel 9 guy, a third-stringer fresh from Akron, tried to chat up a young woman waiting disinterestedly at the back of the crowd in fishnet stockings, and got shot down so epically that he might as well have actually been on fire. The news crews waited because there was no news. Just the Riverside Tower, still very much visible, and the live feed coming from the Jumbotrons set up on either side of the crowd, showing the bald man in the box.

OMG must have been a magician, the joke went, because he’d come out of nowhere. Young guy, good looks, spooky intense eyes, and that signature indigo scarf that was starting to get writeups in the fashion magazines. He didn’t give interviews, he didn’t do publicity; he just did magic. On the street, in train stations, in hotel lobbies. He made hats and gloves vanish and reappear all the way across the room, without moving. He made decks of cards sprout like flowers from purses and briefcases he’d never touched. He nodded intently at fortune cookies, and the messages inside became personalized for their owners.

And like magic, he was on magazine covers, TV specials, the sides of buses. He was the calm center of a publicity hurricane, coordinating whole storm systems of publicists and flacks to do his talking to the media for him. He just hung back and preserved the mystery, and people loved it.

OMG had 100,243 MySpace friends and climbing.

Riverside Towers was his latest feat. Last week, just before he’d entered the building and sealed himself in the six-foot-by-six-foot glass box in what had once been its penthouse -- all on video, all broadcast 24/7 on the Internet and the Jumbotron screens for even the sweatiest, least-otherwise-occupied basement-dwelling nerds to squint at and scrutinize, in silent hopes that they’d be the ones to spot the trick -- he’d promised to make it disappear after a week of intense fasting and meditation. Well, the press release had said that. He’d just mumbled something quietly, smiled, nodded, and had the workmen seal him in and drill the airholes.

For days now, he’d been up there in the lonely concrete tower, in the exact same spot in one corner of the glass cube, like a modern art project. Not moving, not eating, not visibly sleeping, not relieving himself, even. They hadn’t even put in a bucket. His head would move every now and then, and his hands and feet would shift in random and barely perceptible ways, and even the Internerds, through the grainy wash of streaming video, could see the steady rise and fall of his shoulders that showed he was breathing.

People had tried to break into the building, of course. To prove it was all a trick, to tap on the glass box, or just to wave to the cameras and feel million invisible eyes on them, warm like sunlight. But fame had given OMG resources, and between the phalanx of off-duty members of Chicago’s Finest -- well-fed and better paid -- and his small army of private security men, each with biceps the size of small bowling balls, no one hopped the fence and crossed the no-man’s-land of dirt to the concrete tower beyond.

So the people waited, some jeering, some snickering, but all secretly hoping to see something amazing. To see the building crack off its foundation and fly brick by brick into the air; to see it shimmer and vanish; to see an indisputably solid and tangible thing enter the realm of the unreal.

A woman in the crowd saw it first -- a junior consultant and A&A, out late and growing sober after a long night’s drinking with clients, drawn to the lights and crowd when she should have been home in bed -- pointing to the video screens.

OMG’s head had lifted. Within the glass box, he slowly nodded. And smiled.

The camera guy from Channel 9 was the lucky one; he happened to have his camera on, getting B-roll footage of the crowd and the building, and he got it all. The explosions began at the foundation of the Riverside Towers and moved up, smoke and concrete bits and roiling clouds of dust billowing outward level by level. The video screens cut out, flaring white static that lit up the faces of the crowd. The building swayed drunkenly and fell in on itself like a bad souffle, and dust billowed out across the river like some searching tendril.

No one was looking east, to the lake. No one saw a brief flash in midair, a strobing flicker like lightning, a reflection off something immense and silver. Everyone was watching the building die.

The cops on guard around the perimeter of the fence, who had no idea this would happen at all, much less at this particular moment, were all huddled in the cars to which they’d hastily scrambled, peering out through the haze of dust. They would later realize exactly why they’d signed those complicated waivers indemnifying themselves against shock, emotional distress, or injury.

On the far side of the river, the crowd screamed, or whooped, or cheered, or something in the middle of the three. They weren’t sure whether or not they’d just seen a man die, but they knew for sure that they’d just seen something huge explode, implode, and collapse, and it plucked some base chord in them that wanted to cheer and ask for more.

The spotlights swept down to the pile of rubble where the building had been, as the cloud of dust and debris finally began to clear. There was a figure standing atop the mass of concrete. People in the crowd squinted, stared through binoculars, tried to cup their hands around their eyes as if it might help them see better. The Internerds, in a thousand dorm rooms and basements and one-bedroom apartments, cursed the inadequacy of their connection speeds.

The dust cleared. OMG, now all but gray with plaster dust, his indigo scarf swung rakishly around his neck and draping down the front of his once-black turtleneck, stood atop the huge, jagged, broken concrete slabs that should have crushed and consumed him. He waved.

The crowd roared. Even the cops cheered. The members of the media among the onlookers began piecing together leads in their mind, dipping into internalized thesauri for words like “stupendous” and “remarkable.” The TV reporters let their minds go blank, and prepared to start speaking.

At the back of the crowd, the woman in fishnets, her lank, dark hair bobbed with razor precision around her angular face, passed a silver dollar coin one-handed back and forth along her knuckles, like her grandfather had taught her, and his grandfather had taught him. She worked for OMG, if only in the sense that when they’d met, he’d been a talented but ambitionless sleight-of-hand man working the Santa Monica pier, and she’d been coming out of grad school with a master’s in media management and absolutely zero luck in the Great Resume Lottery, and she’d needed some project to latch onto if she didn’t want to end up working at the Barnes and Noble like half her classmates.

She’d coordinated the early appearances, got him local TV gigs, put him on the magic circuit. She’d arranged for OMG to just happen to bump into that producer on the street, and get his cell phone -- dead battery and all -- to call the person he’d been thinking of calling without leaving his hip pocket. Abracadabra, they had a national TV deal.

That was the thing about magic. Nobody wanted to know how it was done, really; they came away feeling cheap afterward, and a little guilty. People wanted the illusion, the mystery. No one needed to know that the mysterious OMG was Oscar Myron Gimble, burnout son of wealthy rug importers from Palm Beach. No one wanted to know that he gave no interviews because he rarely had anything worthwhile to say, besides noticing that wow, the sky was so incredibly blue today, or hey, were you going to finish those fries? No one wanted to know that his small army of dedicated and secretly envious accountants had informally calculated that about ten percent of his gross income went to high-quality weed specially imported from Stockholm. The woman in fishnets knew it all, and often quietly wished she didn’t.

She’d been planning this trick for months. Getting the property owners on board was cake; hiring the demolitions experts to prewire the site for demolition, under the guise of a final site inspection, a week before the first press release even dropped was almost as easy. The fake OMG in the box, breathing and twitching animatronically in ways that had to skirt the edges of the Uncanny Valley without falling in, had been a little bit trickier, but she’d called around a year ahead of time and found some mechanical braniac who did rigs for the local haunted houses. She’d had an effects studio in Hollywood digitally scan OMG’s face under the guise of mocap for his upcoming next-gen console game, Feel The Illusion, and sent the data to the braniac . Her assistant said he was a nice guy on the phone, about which she could care less. Three months later she’d opened up a crate to see another OMG sitting inside, breathing quietly on battery power, and most definitely not asking if anyone had any candy bars he could borrow. She liked this one better than the real thing.

After that, it was just a matter of coordinating the split-second signal glitch, mere moments after the workmen had sealed up the box and left the room, from the real OMG in the box to the dummy on a sound stage in a warehouse back in L.A. that exactly replicated the inside of the penthouse, down to the laser-measured inch. The dummy, hooked up to a power source coming up from under the floor, sat there breathing realistically for a solid week, while light sensors wired around the penthouse in Chicago sent data back to the lighting system in the soundstage, replicating the lighting down to the passing shadows of clouds.

Keeping OMG holed up and out of sight had been the toughest part, more in the “keeping him holed up and out of sight” part than the actual logistics. He’d been in a construction trailer on the edge of the condemned property the whole time, a very well-stocked trailer full of his favorite video games and truly amazing leaf and plenty of snacks. And his girlfriend, a very sweet and earnest aspiring model with a great whistling vortex of nothing between her ears, to make sure he didn’t go outside or call for a pizza or anything too terribly stupid. To make sure he was sober and awake and not in the middle of an online deathmatch when the building went, so he could dash off through the dust cloud and climb to the top of the rubble and be there to wave to the crowd.

It cost a pretty penny, sure. But the endorsement deals were already rolling in, and Hollywood would want him for sure after this, and the woman in the fishnets got 10% of everything OMG made, which worked out to a whole hell of a lot of not working at Barnes and Noble. She talked to all the reporters, made all the crucial calls, wrote all the press releases, and no one knew or cared who she was. Exactly as she wanted it.

She also wanted a cigarette, and about a day’s worth of sleep, and a longer skirt, and a heavier coat that went down to her ankles and kept her legs from feeling like ice. But the trick had worked, and the crowd was still buzzing, still cheering, four solid minutes after the building went down, and the thing she’d never admit to anyone was how much she loved to stand at the edge of crowds just like this one and soak that feeling in.

Sully Wells rolled the coin across her knuckles again, smooth and reflexive, and thought about misdirection, and sleight of hand.

Which was kind of inadvertently apt, really, since she and the dozens of other assembled people were staring so intently at the demolished building and the semi-phony magician standing atop it, in the spotlight’s glare, that the men swathed in black silk were able to grab Sully, gag her, and drag her kicking into the back of their van without anyone else even noticing.

The Law of the Jungle

“So tell me,” Rafe said through slightly smushed lips as the two muscular goons pinned his skull down against the alcohol-stained wood of the bar. “How exactly did you lose those fingers?”

Leopold “Eight Fingers” Kruczyk finished lighting his cigarette with his silver Zippo and chuckled softly. The flickering flame of the lighter danced in twin reflections in his glasses, as square and opaque as television screens, and cast eerie shadows on the scarred-over nubs where his right ring and pinky fingers had once been.

“An Irishman,” he said in clouds of smoke, sounded out around the cigarette clenched wolfishly in his teeth. His consonants were heavy and curved, like frost-covered plowshares. “Shot them off back in ‘73 -- it is before your time, I understand. Now he is a very dead Irishman.”

The bar had been closed for hours, but upstairs, Rafe could still hear the lively noise and music of the little casino where he had, until recently, been playing a lovely game of Texas Hold ‘Em. His face had been pushed down facing away from the front windows, but from the light beginning to filter in, it must be close to dawn. Understandably, Rafe was in no position to check his watch at the moment.

One of the gorillas shifted his grip on the collar of Rafe’s black pinstripe sportcoat, and he felt thick, calloused knuckles scrape across the back of his linen shirt and the knots of his upper spine. His arms dangled over the end of the bar, and beneath it, out of his captors’ sight, his long, agile fingers probed for any advantage they could find.

Kruczyk plucked the cigarette from his lips and exhaled a long, luxuriant plume of smoke. He scarcely looked the part of a gangster; he wore a cheap polo shirt from some no-name department store and a rumpled gray windbreaker. Rafe had expected Armani, at the very least.

“I understand we have a problem,” Kruczyk said to Rafe. “You play poker upstairs, yes? With my boys. You lose a great deal of money. Now you say you cannot pay.”

“Will not,” Rafe clarified, smiling as best he could under the circumstances. “I can pay just fine. I said I will not.”

Kruczyk gave another one of his short, rattling chuckles, sounding like something loose in a running dishwasher. “I can tell by your accent you are not from here. Perhaps in England, they play poker different. Here in Chicago, I assure you, if you lose, you pay.”

“Had I lost,” Rafe replied, “I’d pay, and pay gladly. Unfortunately, I was cheated.” He grimaced as one of the goons -- he doubted he’d be able to tell them apart even if he could see them clearly; they were an indistinguishable two-man wall of bad suits and questionable choices in jewelry and facial hair -- dug a fat cigar-sized thumb under one of the bones in his shoulder. “By the -- hnnf -- gentleman now attempting to dislocate my shoulder, if I’m not mistaken,” Rafe added, helpfully.

“Forgive Zbigniew,” Kruczyk said. “He is a sensitive man. He takes these things personally.”

“Well, then he should learn to remove the ace from his left sleeve a little less obviously,” Rafe replied.

Kruczyk set down the lighter with a deliberate clunk on the wooden bar and took off his glasses. His eyes were bloodshot from too many late nights, saddled with purplish bags; they made a poor contrast with the frizzy wisps of silver hair still clinging to his scalp. He rubbed the calloused thumb and forefinger of his mutilated hand in slow intersecting lines across his eyelids to the bridge of his nose.

“OK,” he said at last. “I understand. You feel you were cheated. You don’t want to pay. Fair enough.” He rummaged around in a pocket of his jacket, as if for car keys or a stick of gum.

“That’s very reasonable of you,” Rafe said, noting that the pressure against his neck and shoulders hadn’t abated any. Under the bar, his fingers found what they were looking for, and closed fast.

Kruczyk removed something from his pocket, something vaguely oblong and pearlescent and gleaming. A handle. His wrist flicked, and a silver blade snicked out from it.

“We take your fingers instead,” Kruczyk sighed.

“I’m very sorry to hear that,” Rafe said, and brought his arms up, smashing the liquor bottles he’d grabbed beneath the bar directly into the faces of the two men holding him down.

Their grip loosened for only a second, as the shattered glass cut their skin and the alcohol stung their eyes and soaked their shirtfronts, but it was enough. Rafe snatched up Kruczyk’s lighter from the bartop and ducked out of the goons’ grasp, whirling to face the three men, his back now to the front door of the bar.

“I suppose now, you’re going to shoot me,” Rafe said calmly. Indeed, the two alcohol-sodden men brushing broken glass off their faces seemed to have just such an idea in mind.

“Many, many times,” Kruczyk nodded, and smiled unpleasantly with a mouth dotted in gold.

“I figured as much,” Rafe said, flicked the lighter, and tossed it at the nearest of the goons.

The alcohol caught fire immediately, and his shirt and jacket with it. The other one -- they really were a wall of dumb, weren’t they? -- flailed at the fire with his fat ham fists and only managed to ignite himself as well. Rafe turned and ran.

The stupid amateur mistake in a situation like this would be to try the door. It was always locked, always, and jiggling the latch like an idiot only gave the invariably angry people behind you a chance to sort themselves out, catch you up, and proceed with the previously planned vicious beating. Instead, Rafe leaped to a chair, up on a table, and curled himself into a tight ball as he flung himself at the front window.

There was a crash, and a sudden jarring thud rattling through all of Rafe’s bones, and then he was on the sidewalk on a chilly morning, dawn rising over the distant Chicago skyline, breath steaming in the air. In the split-second he had to spare, he took stock of himself. Watch? Yes. Wallet? Yes, with money in, even. Shoes? Yes. Overcoat. Still in the club upstairs, hate to lose it, but it’s not worth a couple of fingers.

Provided he wasn’t killed in the next few minutes, Rafe’s Illegal Gambling In Shady Dens of Iniquity adventure seemed to be shaping up as quite the success.

Rafe scrambled to his feet and ran, followed by the sound of Polish curses that sounded like a burlap sack full of engine parts and rotted cabbage being bashed against a concrete wall. Halfway down the block, he risked a look back. Tweedledee and Tweedledum, as he’d decided he’d call them one day in his memoirs, were hauling themselves out through the broken window. Their faces were a lightly blistered red, and much of the fronts of them was still faintly smoking, including their eyebrows and the tips of their mustaches. And, he noticed, they had guns, with silencers on. That part was less than optimal.

Rafe took a quick cut right into an alley. Fire escapes. God bless the lovely Americans -- always plenty of fire escapes. One set on either side of the alley, spidering their way up the weathered brickwork. He scrambled up onto a dumpster, losing a shoe in the process, and leapt for the lowest of the metal platforms. He’d just gotten a foothold on it when there was a little little sound like a cartoon rabbit passing wind, and something incredibly fast whistled past his ear. It took him a second to remember that this was what being shot at sounded like, and indeed, there were the Tweedles, squeezed into the mouth of the alley, guns raised just like in the gangster movies.

Right. No time to go up just the one, so why not the both?

Rafe pushed off and leapt to the fire escape on the opposite side of the alley, then again, and again, bounding his way back and forth, higher and higher, toward the waiting rooftops. One last leap -- sparks bloomed on the metal railing near his hand, hot particles stinging and singing his skin, and a bullet puffed into the brickwork beside him -- and he was up on the roof, in a world of moisture-pluming chimneys and TV aerials and gravel.

He heard the groan of the fire escapes from the gap in the rooftops behind him. The Tweedles, it seemed, were giving chase. Fine, good, he needed the workout. It had been ages since he’d done this properly.

Rafe ran toward the multistory parking garage looming in the distance, vaulting from roof to roof. Running felt good. When he ran, he forgot all about his troubles. Not the two men at his heels bent on ventilating him, of course -- that was a touch too immediate. But the whole messy impending implosion of his trust fund, certainly. The fact that he was still, technically, until the expulsion was finalized, a university exchange student with a whole lot fo failing credits and two -- no, wait, three papers due on which he had not written, had never intended to write, and would indeed never write a word. The endless disappointment of his father and mother, expressed with steadily escalating vitriol in a series of emails, letters, and strident, quickly deleted voice mail messages. And, of course, the whole business about Julia never wanting to see him again, which was entirely understandable, but also the only one of his troubles that Rafe genuinely regretted.

He risked a look back, in mid-leap from a karate studio to an Indian restaurant, and saw the Tweedles still puffing along after him. Persistent fellows, certainly. The parking structure was just ahead, and -- oh, dear -- there was quite a bit more of a gap than he’d expected. He recalled the words of Marcelique, the Le Parkour instructor with whom he’d spent six months training in Paris when he was supposed to be, oh, taking all those far less interesting classes at the Sorbonne.

“When the gap is big,” Marcelique had said one chilly spring morning, gazing philosophically up the hill at the spires of Sacre Coeur, “you just jump a lot more emphatically.”

Not a lot of help, really, that Marcelique.

Rafe ran out of roof and jumped, very emphatically.

His legs squeezed up to his chest, and he threw up his hands, catching hold of the thick concrete partition and swinging himself through it. He ended up wedged painfully between two bloody great SUVs, and had to do a lot of undignified scrabbling to get his feet back on the ground, but hey, nothing broken. From the rooftop he’d just left, the Tweedle’s guns made their helium noises again, and the windshields of the SUVs starred and exploded. That meant it was time to keep running.

For a moment, Rafe thought he was home free. But sound carried well in the echoing concrete of the parking structure, and far below he distinctly hear the sound of a very powerful motor roaring into the garage, and the snap of a yellow caution arm being broken off its hinge by people very much in a hurry. Rafe leaned over the thick metal wire partitions strung between the levels of the garage, looking three levels down, to see a Chevrolet sedan barreling up the ramp. He caught a quick glimpse of a thick hand, missing two fingers, leaning out one open window.

There was another loud bang off to his left, and for a moment, he thought it was more shooting. But not, it was just two men, two very large, very armed, very Polish men, bursting from the door to the garage’s stairwell like frustrated linebackers, and hurtling in Rafe’s direction.

Lacking better options, Rafe squeezed himself into the gap between the levels, wedging his feet, knees, and elbows against the opposite slanting levels of concrete, and climbed for his life. The wires twanged and hummed as he used them to pull himself up, leaping for the next level as he reached the top of each. Concrete dust fell in his eyes, powdering the sleeves of his sportcoat, and his arms burned from the exertion.

He heard a distant, faint sound over the shouts below him and the steadily rising roar of the approaching motor. A rocking, soothing clacking sound. Oh, he couldn’t be that lucky.

Yes. There were El tracks on the far side of the garage, just outside the walls. Two more levels and he might -- might -- be high enough to make it. The train’s horn sounded, getting closer. Rafe climbed.

He squeezed himself out of the gap between levels, two floors higher, as the Chevrolet sedan roared around the turn at the far end of the garage. It showed no signs of slowing down; if anything, the driver had been told to accelerate. Outside, the ratcheting of train wheels grew louder, nearly deafening. Rafe sprinted out from one pair of parked cars, across the empty aisle -- the Chevrolet passed so close, he could feel it fluttered the hem of his jacket -- squeezed between a Camry and an Accord, leapt up in a crouch to pause for a moment on the ledge--

He jumped, arms and legs flailing long-jumper style, and smacked painfully down on the roof of a passing Brown Line train. He slid -- ouch ouch ouch -- across the bumpy, corrugated top of the train, limbs waving wildly for purchase, and managed to stop himself just before the point at which he would have fallen off the other side to his death below. Good place to stop, really.

Exhausted, lungs burning, chest heaving, he raised himself up on adrenalin-shaking arms and saw tiny, angry Polish men shouting inaudible, angry Polish things from the rapidly receding parking garage. He rolled over at his back, grinning at the pinkish-blue dawning sky. It felt damned good to be alive.

Reginald “Rafe” Windham greeted the day with an impromptu yawp of primal triumph. Law of the jungle, and all that.

One very well-timed descent from the train roof, a few dirty looks from transit police and bleary-eyed commuters, and a station change at Belmont later, Rafe was dragging himself up the steps to the condo he’d rented in Wrigleyville. Well, rented insofar as the landlord expected rent to be paid, and boy, wouldn’t he be surprised this month. Long after Rafe was back in England, thank goodness, being yelled at, for a change, in proper English accents by people mostly related to him.

He was tired. Everything hurt, and his earlier euphoria was giving way, as it always did, to the reminder that he hadn’t slept for a good twenty-four hours now, and he’d probably pulled at least half the muscles in his body, and his legs were reaching the point where they were just going to stop working until they got some rest. He took a few tries getting the key into the lock, but at last, the door opened, and he stumbled into the foyer of the condo, stripping off his coat. He looked at himself in the mirror; tousled dark hair, stubbly chin, dark circles developing under his eyes. Still, all in all, a handsome devil, if he did say so himself.

“Oh, good,” said a voice from the living room, where the windows opened up onto a terrace overlooking Wrigley Field. “You’re back.” It was a crisp voice, a very English voice, and Rafe felt instinctively nervous. And then he actually saw the speaker.

He was brown as mahogany, his eyes very white, wearing a leather loincloth and bindings around his wrists and ankles. A necklace made of animal bones dangled and jangled around his neck, and lines of bright, chalky-looking dried paint crisscrossed his chest. His head had been completely shaved, the scalp as deep brown as the rest of him, and he had the muscles of a well-trained athlete. He was sitting on Rafe’s good white leather sofa, reading a copy of The Economist, with a large, unfamiliar. wooden box on the glass coffee table in front of him.

“I hope you don’t mind,” the visitor said, holding up the magazine. “Haven’t had a chance to catch up with this one, and there’s a smashing op-ed piece on Anglo-Sino relations. Really cracking stuff.”

“Not to be rude,” Rafe said -- he was too tired for anything but courtesy -- “but what the devil are you doing in my house?”

“Ah,” the painted warrior noted, animal bones rattling as he nodded slightly. “You know, I wasn’t sure I had the address right, in which case, apologies are due. You’re Reginald Windham, alias Rafe, correct?”

“Correct,” Rafe said slowly, wondering where the men with television cameras were.

“Son of Harrison Simon Windham, grandson of Harker Windham, of Windham Hall, Devonshire?” Rafe nodded, wary. He very much wanted to sit down.

The painted warrior smiled neatly, cheerily, and began to briskly open the box before him. “Well, that seems entirely in order, so I suppose we can begin,” he said. He withdrew two immense, gleaming black stone blades, stood up from the couch, and dropped into a fighting crouch.

“Whenever you’re ready,” he told Rafe. “To the death.”

Arrival From an Unseen World

It was four in the morning on a cold, clammy November Tuesday when the flying wing sizzled out of the misty, moisture-speckled sky two hundred feet above Lake Michigan.

First there was nothing, then a faint dance of sparkling lines spreading sideways across the air. And then the sleek, gleaming silver wedge of the vast plane, nearly a third of a mile from wingtip to wingtip, knitted itself crackling out of nothingness and emerged full and whole into the chilly predawn air.

Its six powerful turbine engines whined, settling down to sleep. The flat belly of the craft drifted lower, skimming the waves, then hitting with a juddering clap of water and steel. It skipped like a stone across the choppy waters, spinning out of control, smashing a buoy against the massive edge of one wing, and settled with a great splashing surge of water.

As the flying wing began to sink, lights blinked all along its periphery, glowing through the murky water. Bubbles erupted all around the outline of the craft, and it slowly rose again out of the waves, tossed and floated on a ring of inflated gasbags. In accordance with proper emergency procedures, exit hatches on either side of its fore compartments, and all along both wings, unfolded into the water with the choreographed grace of chorus girls, and waited open and expectant.

No one disembarked. Indeed, there was no longer anyone at all aboard.

So the flying wing sat on the surface of the lake, forlorn and lightly jostling, its silver skin dimly reflecting the glowing lights of the Chicago skyline, and waited to be discovered.

Secrets of the Phantom Jetliner

Nora Swift got boatsick.

Nora Swift got carsick, too. Airsick. Bus-sick. Train sick. Anything short of a bicycle, if it moved under its own power, it made Nora Swift feel a queasy burning on the inside of her skull.

So as the small motorboat lurched and sputtered its way across the lake, eastern sky just lighting with the first glimmers of dawn, Nora Swift was too busy wishing she’d brought her Dramamine to appreciate the wonders of first light, or the pinkish glow it cast upon the receding line of proud skyscrapers, or even the silvery swell of the strange craft rapidly approaching over the prow of the boat.

On a normal day, she would have done something with her hair. Now it frizzed uncontrollably in tight black curlicues around her head, and made her hope that she wouldn’t show up in the background on somebody’s TV camera, lest her cell phone start buzzing with her mother’s urgent concerns that she wasn’t taking good care of herself.

On a normal day, she would have worn a pantsuit, a skirt maybe, something nice for work. A shirt with buttons, at least. Pants not made with denim, and definitely not bearing any sort of pizza stains.

Then again, on a normal day, the alarm would have woken her at 6, to whatever was playing on XRT, and she would have gotten dressed and grabbed a cup of coffee and gone in to the office and sat at her desk for a few hours, filling out paperwork. Or, if she was really lucky, looking at photographs of dead people and tiny bits of things that used to be jet planes.

But today, she’d been yanked from the black, buoyant depths of sleep by the shrill clamor of her cell phone, whooping and buzzing itself along the surface of her nightstand. And once Murray, on the other end, had managed to promise her that he wasn’t joking, and once her brain had managed to process what he was saying, she’d lurched out of bed and gone to see the U.F.O. that had splashed down in Lake Michigan.

She was NTSB, one of the low-level staffers in the accident investigation division. This generally meant that she wrote reports, or rewrote other people’s reports, or if she was very lucky, spent hours poring over photographs that only intensified her pure, primal terror of ever setting foot in anything with wings and engines.

This would be the first crash she’d actually seen.

“How are you holding up?” her boss shouted over the roar of the motor. He sat opposite from her in the back of the boat as the cop up from steered them out. Murray Doyle was a nice enough guy, if too damn cheerful too damn early in the morning. He looked the same as he had at her job interview a few years back -- same bald pate, same owlish glasses, same never-ironed button-down shirts.

She still remembered the way he’d leaned across the table at her, smiled, and said, “What the hell are you doing here? Really?”

And she’d sighed, shrugged her shoulders, rejection letters from the maintenance shops of all the major airlines out of O’Hare and Midway blurring past in her memory, and said, “I guess I picked a really bad time to want to fix planes.”

“Hey, Nora!” Murray shouted at her again, snapping his fingers in front of her face. “You’re not going to throw up on me, are you?”

“Depends,” Nora said, staring determinedly at the horizon and thinking calm, cool, stable thoughts. “You mean literally or figuratively?”

“You should be excited!” Murray hollered back. “First crash for you. Crew musta bailed out ‘cause we’re not getting reports of any floaters, or pieces thereof, so hooray for a day without dead people. Tail number matches a United 747 that’s currently on the ground, in one piece, in Pittsburgh. And the damn thing looks like something outta Star Wars.”

“And this is supposed to make me feel less anxious?” Nora said, but she couldn’t keep a smile from quirking at the corners of her mouth.

At last the boat slowed, Nora stomach turning a few loops in gratitude, and coasted to a stop amid the cordon of police boats surrounding the downed craft. It was huge, bigger than a 747 easily, all streamlined and bulletlike. Ruby squinted in the pinkish half-light and read the markings painted on the side.

“Murray,” she said, tugging at his upper arm as he traded pleasantries with the cop at the boat’s wheel. “Murray, look at this.”

PAN-AMERICAN AIRLINES was painted across the length of the fuselage in three-foot letters. Murray drank it all in with his owlish eyes and slowly ran a hand back across his scalp, making Shar-Pei furrows in the shiny skin. “Damn,” he said. “Hell of a way to make a comeback.”

The boat pulled alongside a larger police vessel, where cops in yellow rain slickers stood on deck drinking from Starbucks cups. Murray flashed his badge to the one who trudged over to take a look at them, and the cop nodded in recognition.

“Anyone been on board yet?” Murray asked. The waves slopped against the hulls of the boats with round, friendly sounds.

The cop shook his head no. “We been waiting for you NTSB guys,” he said, in a voice that Nora pegged as South Side Polish, probably somewhere under the Midway flight path. “Procedures. She’s all yours.”

Murray went first, clambering over the wave-slick prow of the boat and leaping, in his Rockport loafers, onto the open silver hatch near the front of the massive jetliner. Nora followed, unsteady, clutching a flashlight, a satchel bag slung around one shoulder. She was grateful for Murray’s offered hand as she made the last step onto the stairway leading up into the plane.

They found themselves in a narrow, carpeted corridor, pleasantly marbled plastic walls on either side, still smelling of pristine, processed, pressurized air. Murray nodded toward the front of the craft. “I’m gonna check out the cockpit. You get the lay of the land, see if there’s anyone still on board, okay?”

Nora nodded and switched on the flash, playing the beam up and down the walls. “Watch out for E.T.!” Murray called as he headed off into the grayish gloom.

“Not funny!” she shouted back, but he’d already rounded a corner. She took a deep breath, feeling the whole plane gently undulate beneath her feet, and started walking forward.

The corridor opened up into a passenger section as wide as a small auditorium, and half as long as a good-sized football field. Nora counted six rows of three seats apiece spanning the width of the cabin horizontally, and at least forty rows stretching back. Dawn light filtered in in shafts through the windows. Oxygen masks dangled from the overhead compartments -- strange, artful flowers of plastic, some new design Ruby had never seen -- but the seats were all empty.

But the seatbelts, nearly every one, were fastened.

The plane lurched on a sudden wave, and Nora stumbled sideways, hand falling against an overhead luggage compartment to steady herself. She reached up and hit the latch -- then jumped backward with a yelp as the door vanished up into the plane itself, leaving only a nub of a switch peeking out to close it again. Nora had read the technical manuals for damn near every commercial plane in the air, and there was nothing like this in any of them.

It was, she thought idly, the way she’d always thought they ought to work.

There was luggage in the compartments, neat little carry-on bags; but elegant somehow. Trimmed in leather or alligator skin, monogrammed in swooping initials, handles made of wood and mother-of-pearl instead of cheap plastic. She hit the switch again, and the door reappeared and slid shut -- slowly this time, as if out of regard for any fingers that might be in the way.

Nora spotted an in-flight magazine tucked into one of the seatbacks, and bent down to fish it out. The masthead read PAN AM EXPEDITION in bold, stylish letters, and the cover made Nora do a double-take. It showed grinning tourists strolling the beaches of a lush, tropical island in the shadows of vast blimps, row upon row of them, moored into the sand.

NEW ATLANTIS BY ZEPPELIN: 7 DAYS IN PARADISE, the teaser copy read. Nora had to squint to see the dateline, and had to squint again to make sure she’d seen it right. She was about to flip through it some more, when her eyes landed on something else -- a newspaper, left on the window seat, folded in fourths to some inside page.

She stuffed the magazine hastily in her satchel bag, next to the pocket pack of tissues and her cell phone, and bent over to snag the paper. It was folded to the crossword section, and Nora smiled, seeing that someone had been filling it in in pencil. She unfolded it right-way-round again, and looked at the headlines.

It was the New York Times, today’s date. Same flowing script in the masthead, same gray stolidity in its headlines. But the headlines themselves...

The lead photo showed two deeply tanned men in turbans shaking hands in some elaborate garden, rows of roses stretching back behind them like a hall of mirrors. CALIPHATE, INDIA SIGN PEACE PACT, the headline exulted. Leaders Herald “New Age” of Peace, Stability.

And below that, a somber, reverent portrait of a weathered old man in a dress shirt and suspenders, smiling and winking at the camera with still-youthful eyes, and an inset black-and-white photo of a much younger man -- same nose, same chin, Nora saw -- punching some hulking, tattooed man in the jaw.

TOM MORROW: AN EXTRAORDINARY LIFE REMEMBERED, the headline intoned.

Nora took the paper with her as she walked down the aisle toward the back of the plane, occasionally putting out a hand to steady herself on one of the headrests. She saw flat-panel screens in the back of each, blank and gray and glossy in the dimness of the cabin.

She passed the kitchen alcove -- no stewardesses, though Nora found a lovely jeweled hairpin lying on a folded-down jump seat -- and found herself in another corridor. Red exit lights led past some kind of panel on the wall, marked EMERGENCY -- but Nora was too tempted by the spiral staircase leading up to a second level of the plane not to climb up.

Her head emerged above the stairs to a vast, empty, silent space, dimly lit by sunlight from the portholes dotting its periphery. It took a few seconds for Nora’s eyes to adjust to the dimness, and when they did, she let out a low, disbelieving whistle.

It was a ballroom. Nora’s wet sneakers squeaked on wooden parquet floor, still littered with old confetti. There was a bar behind her, toward the aft of the plane; dining tables and buffet tables empty and waiting along either wall, and a stage framed in swoops and curls of aluminum before her.

She stowed the newspaper in her bag and crossed the floor to get a closer look at the stage. Instruments -- electric guitars, amps, drumps, a small electric organ -- were strapped into special holders next to the sort of pedestals Nora had seen in old movies, the kind you always saw with bandleaders in nightclubs. A card had fallen from a stand at one side of the stage, and Nora walked over and picked it off.

APPEARING ON THIS FLIGHT BY EXCLUSIVE ENGAGEMENT, it said: JAMES MORRISON AND HIS DOORS OF PERCEPTION. The accompanying photo showed middle-aged men, leaning toward elderly. The lead singer -- there was something about his craggy face, some familair intensity in his eyes. She’d seen it a thousand times, on every album cover in her college roommate’s CD rack -- and the poster hanging on her roommate’s side of the room.

“Oh, hell no,” Nora said quietly. Suddenly the whole place felt strange, wrong somehow -- like she’d stepped into some carnival funhouse and couldn’t get out. She needed to find Murray.

She nearly stumbled going down the staircase, head whirling, sneakers thumping against the carpeted steps. The plane lurched again as she ran down the aisle of the passenger compartment, and she lurched with it, but righted herself and kept running.

There it was -- familiar daylight, the hatch to the outside world. Nora stuck her head out, eyes shut, and breathed in clean, cold lake air. For a moment, she felt much better. Then she opened her eyes.

The police boats were gone. She could just see them churning up wake, far in the distance, headed for shore. In their place, a sleek black boat with two powerful engines bobbed against the steps leading down from the hatch, tied with a silvery metal cable to the railing.

“Murray!” she shouted, clinging to the edge of the door as the world began to slowly spin under her feet. She pounded off in the direction he’d gone, tripping against the yielding plastic walls, and rounded a corner to find herself standing before the open cockpit door.

It was huge, tall enough to stand it without stooping, with a wide curving windshield allowing a nearly 180-degree view. A dizzying array of switches -- Nora’s mind immediately picked out a few familiar-looking ones, trying to comfort her -- raked themselves along the instrument panels before each of the three pilot’s seats. And there were people in the cockpit.

Murray was one of them, down on his knees, staring straight ahead. His eyes were strangely glazed, and he breathed with a rhythm Nora had heard many times, first from little sisters and later from boyfriends. He breathed like he was asleep. Like he was dreaming.

Small silver needles stuck out of the back of his skull.

A woman, prim and stern in a long, sweeping black overcoat stood in front of him, her head cocked sideways to calmly regard Nora. She held a round, wide-brimmed, old-fashioned had calmly under one arm, and wore a gray tweed suit, matching below-the-knees skirt, black stockings and sensible, heavy black shoes beneath the coat. Her hair was strikingly silver, pulled back in a tight bun secured with a thick metal needle, one that echoed the single sewing needle pinned like an emblem to the lapel of her gray suit jacket. Her face was unlined but somehow bore the wisdom of age, and her eyes were the same unsettling gray as her suit.

Another man in a black coat, gray suit, and black fedora stood on the opposite side of Murray, eyes fixed on a fat calculator-like device he held in the palm of his hand. It occasionally blipped softly, soothingly.

Nora’s mouth twitched, lips trying for syllables and finding none. The woman met Nora’s eyes and smiled indulgently, like a schoolteacher.

“Shhhhh,” she said gently.

“What--” Nora managed. “What the hell--?”

“Language, please,” the woman chided. “We’re not hurting him. Don’t worry. But this is a very delicate procedure, and Maximillian here needs to concentrate.”

She leaned her body toward Nora, stretching a long graceful arm out, and handed Nora something small and rectancular. “My card,” the woman said. It was black, embossed in silver. Mrs. Valencia Stitch, it read on one side, and on the back, it bore the image of a sewing needle like the one in the woman’s coat.

“And may I say it’s quite a pleasure to meet one of the Gale heirs,” Mrs. Stich said calmly. Nora didn’t know how to respond, or even what that meant.

“What are you doing to him?” she said at last, swallowing hard, not daring to move.

“Just tidying things up a bit,” Mrs. Stitch said calmly, crisply, fluttering one hand. Her nails were impeccable, manicured and lacquered in glossy red. “Sorting out his memories, trimming out a few bits, and sewing together the ragged ends good as new.”

“His memories?” Nora said, feeling her stomach curl in on itself. “How -- why are you doing that?”

Mrs. Stitch smiled again, warm and sympathetic. Murray’s head slumped gently, and his eyes closed. Maximilian looked up -- beneath the brim of his hat, his face was sharp-featured, youthful, and his eyes were the same strange gray -- and nodded at Mrs. Stitch.

“It’s quite simple, my dear,” Mrs. Stitch said, drawing the thick needle from the bun at the back of her head as a violinist would run her bow across the strings. Nora took an involuntary step back, and Mrs. Stich smiled even wider.

“We’re ensuring that no one will miss you,” she said.

1932, 11. The World Unmade

“The Eaters of Kroatoan,” Jef said quietly. “They’re coming back, Tom.”

“They’re a myth, Jef,” Tom replied, subtly flexing the muscles in his shoulder, probing for weaknesses in the grip of the metal man who dangled him high above the ground. No good; the steel fingers clamped immovably around him. “Superstition from ancient tribes. Probably a metaphor for some--”

“I saw them,” Jef said, as calmly as if he’d been talking about the weather. “I saw them in my room.”

“You actually did it,” Tom said, wonder commingling with horror in his voice. From the corner of his eye he saw Gaunt slowly stirring in the other metal man’s grasp. “You broke through the fabric of spacetime. You bettered Satel’s design.”

“I thought he should be here,” Jef said, turning back to gaze down at the Well, where his armada of mechanical men seemed to be nearing completion of their work on the giant steel ring encircling the pit. “He deserved to see that his ideas worked. Everyone’s always picking on him, aren’t they? I read it in Scientific American -- they’re calling him a fraud. I thought I was doing something nice for him, Tom, I really did.”

“And when he ran for the Well...” Tom began, pieces clicking together in his head.

“I... I couldn’t see anyone else fall in,” Jef said. “I just couldn’t, Tom. And I can fix him, I promise I can. I read a book on it, and I’ve got some ideas for reconnecting the tendons...”

“And what about his assistants?” Tom asked, steel rising in his voice. For a second he was back in the Lookout, breathing through the gasmask, surrounded by death; with iron willpower, he forced the image from his mind. “What about Lasso, Jef? And Shida, and Nosh, and Danny?”

“I did them a favor!” Jef screamed in his high child’s voice, whirling back to face Tom. Behind his glasses his eyes were red and gummy with tears. “You don’t know what’s coming, Tom. You didn’t see it. And that’s why you can’t understand what I have to do.”

“Jef, we heard about your folks,” Ruby said, her voice soothing and genuinely sympathetic. “I’m so sorry, kiddo. But even if you’re right, if Tom’s right -- if these things came from some other dimension -- it could have just been an accident. Maybe they don’t know what we are. Maybe they didn’t know they could hurt us.”

“They know what we are,” Jef said, his quivering voice echoing and redoubling across the vast chamber. “They ate Scout, Ruby. He was nothing to them -- less than dust. And I had to watch them suck the marrow out of his bones. And then Ma came in...”

Jef sniffled loudly, smeared grubby fingers hard against his eyes to wipe away the tears. “I hear them in my dreams every night, laughing from their-- from the clusters of eyes...” He put a hand gingerly to the fresh network of dark red, scabbed-over scars crisscrossing the whole of his shaven scalp. “I think I figured out enough of their language to make the right signs -- I can’t... I can’t keep them out of my brain, but I can keep them from knowing what I’m doing. But I still hear them.”

“Lad,” Hark said, his loud, clear voice ringing out through the chamber, “I’ve fought many a monster in my time. Human or otherwise. Whatever these creatures are, there’s a way to beat them. We can help you find it.”

“The Eaters of Kroatoan!” Jef shouted again, suddenly manic. “The greatest civilization ever to rise on the North American continent, masters of principles we still can’t even fathom. Devoured with hardly a trace. And now they’re hungry again, the ones that ate Kroatoan. It was a snack to them. Now I think they want the whole meal.”

Tom cast an appraising glance at Gaunt, his eyes asking a silent question of the dark man. Beneath his wrappings, the eyes of the vengeful magician -- no stranger himself to madness -- flickered in grim, somber affirmation. The boy’s insane.

“I knew it was you, Jef,” Tom said. “The blast patterns on the walls of Satel’s lab, and in Sinn’s vault. I recognized them as the work of your Electroplasmic Ray. And the dust -- the same strange magnetic dust from here at the Well,” he added, nodding down at the fine, gritty black dust scattered across the stone of the chamber floor. “You needed Sinn’s money, didn’t you?”

“No one will miss him,” Jef replied. “He was a bad man, Tom. You told me so yourself. And I needed to pay the Twelve Celestial Signs, and Wicked West. I knew you’d be coming to stop me. And boy, you should have heard Miss West laugh when I finally got her on the radiophone. I guess boys are okay by her, long as they don’t grow up.”

“She killed my daddy, Jef,” Ruby said, disbelief and sadness in her voice. “And you gave her Sinn’s blood money, stolen from honest hardworking people like your folks. How could you do that?”

“I know you want to find her,” Jef said. “I brought her right to you. I did you a favor, Ruby. Did you get her this time?”

“Next time,” Ruby said, shaking her head, a distance in her eyes.

Jef laughed, like Ruby’d just told the funniest joke. He laughed until he bent double, hands on his knees, sides shaking.

“Oh, Ruby,” he said when he’d finally calmed. “There’s no next time. The Eaters are coming, and it’s all gonna be fire and blood. Whole nations turned inside out to pick at their bones. I hear them singing hunger-songs across the gap between worlds, Ruby. They know where we are now. I told them -- that’s why they let me live. They say I can be the last one alive.” His face fell, puckered in terror and renewed tears. “I’m scared. I’m so scared. I say my prayers and all I hear is them.”

“Jef,” Tom said quietly, firmly. “Jef, what’s impossible? Come on, say it.”

Jef’s fingers tightened around the baseball, grimy nails picking reflexively at the stitching. For a moment he couldn’t meet Tom’s gaze, mind seemingly preoccupied with equations or strange horrors or the looping corridors of the madness into which he’d retreated.

“Jef,” Tom repeated. “Come on. What’s impossible?”

“Impossible’s just an excuse,” Jef muttered. “And you’re right, Tom. You’re always right, and you’re never scared, and I’m so sorry about your friends. I didn’t want them to get eaten, and it didn’t hurt them any, I promise, I’d never do that to them.”

“Why don’t you let us down, Jef?” Tom coaxed. “You can help up fix up the plane, and we’ll all fly out of here, and we can talk the whole way back. You don’t have to be scared. We’ll find a way to lick these guys -- give them indigestion, big time.”

Jef brightened, smiling, eager to show off. “Oh, but I did, Tom! I figured it out all on my own!” He pointed to the needle and the iron ring surrounding the Well. “It had to be here, ‘cause the magnetic fields are just right -- all the funny ores in these rocks and stuff. I was thinking about it for Villefort -- I still feel just awful about him, Tom, and I know you said I shouldn’t, but I still do -- how I could fix things up so he never jumped. Now I just have to do it a bit bigger.”

“How much bigger?” Hark asked, uneasily.

“I worked it all out,” Jef said, digging scraps of paper out of his pockets, letting them flutter to the dirt around him as he searched for the right one. “I did the calculations -- well, they’re here somewhere. I have to smooth things out a bit, in time, I mean. I have to make some changes.”

“Jef,” Tom warned, “it can’t possibly work.” This was a lie, and Tom felt guilty saying it, even though he desperately wished it was the truth. “Say you do create a standing wave in spacetime -- that’s what you’re trying to do here, right?”

“Right, right!” Jef said, smiling. “Don’t want another hole. Especially not one this big.”

“And you’re going to hit that wave with concentrated energy pulses from the needle, aren’t you?” Tom said, his brain working furiously. He’d grasped the rough ideas of the project before, but now all the terrible pieces were coming together. “And these pulses, they’re going to move backwards in time?”

“Yes, backwards!” Jef told him, delighted, practically dancing in place with nervous excitement. “Because, when you think of it, they can’t go forward, because the future doesn’t exist yet. I’m gonna jangle up the atoms all the way back -- maybe thousands of years, I think. Just a little, maybe an atom here or there, so it’s not like we’ll all turn out with fish heads or something, but enough. It’s not exact, of course, but you know, that’s science.”

“You wish to change history?” Gaunt rumbled, out of nowhere. He hung completely still in the mechanical man’s grip, evincing none of the struggles of his comrades.

“Exactly! Keep myself or anyone from letting the Eaters in!” Jef exulted. “I’ve got it all figured out, Tom! It doesn’t matter what I did, all your friends -- it’ll never have happened. Everything’ll be better, Tom! Your parents -- maybe they never took you on that trip! Maybe in the better world they’re still alive to be proud of you.”

He pointed in turn to each of Tom’s companions. “Hark, think of it! Maybe your folks don’t get swept away on that island, and you get to grow up all fancy in England! Ruby, maybe in the better world your dad’s waiting for you, ‘cause there never was a Wicked West! And you, Mister Gaunt, I’ve seen the way you look at Miss Violet! Maybe whatever it was hurt you so bad never happened!”

“And maybe you were never born, Jef,” Tom said, quietly and steadily. “Who knows what you’ll do someday. You’ve got greatness in you, more than me, more than any of us. Ever since I met you, Jef, I’ve been counting on you. I’m like the Indian scouts, Jef -- I can find the signposts to the World Yet to Be, map out all the trails. But Jef, someone’s got to build it after. And that’s you.”

Jef looked up at Tom with wide, sad eyes. He shook his head slowly, back and forth. “I don’t want to be me anymore, Tom,” he said. “I want to be someone else, with a Ma and Pa still breathing. It hurts too much to be me now.”

Below them, the steel circle sprang to life, humming and crackling with electricity. The robots around its periphery retreated to stand like silent sentinels and watch as the air above the Well began to ripple and glow, blue-green sparks dancing across its surface.

“So it’s too late?” Tom shouted over the roar of the machinery below. Jef just nodded, not looking up at him, picking at the baseball.

“So be it,” Gaunt said, and did something curious and crackling with the bones of his imprisoned arm. He dropped out of his coat, tuxedo jacket and trousers fluttering as he fell to the ground, and rolled as he hit solid stone. When he came up, there were pistols in his hands, trained up at the mechanical man as it bent down and raised its hand. The energies of Jef’s Electroplasmic Ray began to flower, eye-searingly bright, in its outstretched palm.

Gaunt put two bullets square through its electric eye. The metal man wavered, emitting a mechanical screech of protesting circuits, and released Ruby. Gaunt was there to catch her, and together they whirled out of the way just in time as the robot toppled with a thunderous crash and began to slide heavy and clanking down the long stone staircase.

Tom turned at the sudden sound of shattering glass, and saw that Hark had swung himself up and around to plunge one of his stone knives into this steel captor’s electric eye. He wriggled free as its grip slackened, and as the mechanical man tottered backward and plunged off the edge of the stone outcropping, Hark leaped with powerful muscles across to the metal giant holding Tom. He landed on its shoulders, stabbed stone knives into either side of its head, showering Tom with sparks and bits of glass. Tom felt himself falling and landed hard, rolling. Coming up dazed. From somewhere far above, he heard Hark shout, “Move it, old chap!” Metal screeched and groaned above him, and Tom scrambled to safety as the last of their steel captors crashed lifeless to the ground behind him, Hark astride its shoulders with his blades raised in primal triumph.

“Now that’s satisfying sport,” the Lord of the Lost World grinned.

A shout from Ruby drew Tom’s eyes to the edge of the outcropping. The dark form of Mister Gaunt was advancing upon Jef, who sat peacefully in the black magnetic dust, looking up at the silver pistols gleaming in Gaunt’s gloved hands.

“Gaunt, no!” Tom shouted, breaking into a run, Hark at his side. Ruby was already at Gaunt’s elbow, trying to tug him away, but Gaunt stalked onward, inexorable.

“You have taken life,” Gaunt hissed at Jef. “You have consorted with the wicked. Forgive me, child, but Hell awaits.”

“Would you?” Jef looked up at him, pleading. “Oh, would you please? I think I’m already there.”

Gaunt took a step back, and his gun hands visibly trembled. As Tom reached his side, he saw something frightening and unfamiliar in Gaunt’s eyes. Pity.

“Come on, Gaunt,” Tom pleaded. “There’s no time. If we’re going to stop this, I need you with us, now.”

Gaunt just made a noise in the back of his throat and turned away. “What must we do?”

“You and Hark keep the robots off us,” Tom shouted over the growing roar of the strange energies lashing across the surface of the Well. “Ruby, you’re with me! Go!” As one, they scrambled over the fallen bodies of the metal men, and dashed down the stairs toward the edge of the Well.

Jefferson Edison Franklin, age 12, sat weeping at the edge of precipice, the lights of unearthly energies dancing reflected in his glasses, and waited for the world to end.

The mechanical men began advancing, as one force, before they’d even reached the bottom of the stairs. They lifted their hands, palms out, and the sizzling beams of Jef’s Electroplasmic Ray burst forth.

Gaunt and Hark forked off to either side, Gaunt clutching his pistols, Hark running low to the ground with his knives, as a blast boiled the stone floor between them. Tom and Ruby ducked as another beam scorched just over their heads, cutting a glowing molten scar into the rock face beyond.

Gaunt opened fire with his pistols, ducking and whirling as the deadly beams lanced all around him. He began to laugh.

Hark leapt, swung from one of the robots’ stiff metal limbs, and vaulted up into the air, knives poised to plunge into the thing’s head.

Through the chaos, Tom and Ruby ran, ducking through the lumbering legs of the mechanical men, toward the base of the steel parabola that held the needle suspended over the heart of the Well. There was a ladder built into the side of it, and without a word, Tom all but flung Ruby up onto it, and clambered after her.

The air rang with the screeching bursts of energy from the mechanical men’s ray beams, and the searing, shimmering harmonies of the rippling bright vortex of the Well, as Tom and Ruby climbed ever higher. Here and there, they could pick out bits of Gaunt’s mad, exultant laughter, or Hark’s cries of savage triumph, from the battle below.

The ladder arched up to a dizzying height, until Tom and Ruby stood perilously atop it, the wild rippling surface of the Well below, and the cylindrical top of the needle-like device just before them. With Ruby’s help, Tom ripped free an access panel from the surface of the needle; they watched it spiral into the roaring energies below, and boil to nothingness in a split-second flash.

“We’ve got to shut it down!” Tom shouted, barely audible above the surrounding din. Below, a robot stumbled backward, falling into the surface of the Well, erupting into steam and fire.

He reached in to tear out wires, any wires, whichever first came to hand. And then a whine just within the range of hearing rose to ear-splitting intensity, and the entire mechanism thrummed, and blue-white electricity began to surge and congregate at the tip of the needle, inches above the surface of the Well.

The entire mechanism groaned and shuddered under unimaginable stresses, and Tom felt himself thrown off balance. He tumbled into space, momentarily consumed by the sickening sensation of a world with no solid ground. A hand reached out and grasped his own.

Ruby, lying full on her stomach, held Tom dangling by one hand far above the Well.

“I’m slipping, Tom!” Ruby screamed, desperation etched in her face. She stretched out another hand. “Grab on! Please, Tom!”

Tom reached up, his finger tips cruelly brushing hers. Just another few centimeters could save him from certain death.

And then a bolt of energy lanced from the tip of the needle down into the surface of the Well, and it was simply too late.

In the split-second before the world turned into white, dissolving light, Tom Morrow realized he had the solution that would save them all.

Unfortunately, it was the solution to entirely the wrong problem.

1932, 10. The Parkersville Prodigy Sees Through Space-Time

May 12, 1920: Jefferson Edison Franklin, 6 lbs., 7 oz., is born to James and Edna Franklin of Parkersville, Iowa. Edna teaches history at Parkersville State College; James grows corn on 47 acres off Rural Route 25. Edna, long an admirer of our nation’s great inventors, wins a postnatal coin toss to determine the child’s name, thus sparing her son from a lifetime as Ezra Sutter Franklin. James, believing that Jefferson Edison Franklin is a hell of a lot of syllables to drag around, provides the convenient acronym “Jef.”

1921: At one year old, young Jef can say “Mama,” “Papa,” “corn,” and curiously enough, “syllabus.”

1922: At two years old, Jef’s parents catch him staring intently at an open copy of the almanac. They think this is adorable, until Jef begins to read it aloud -- and points out a spelling error in the second column of page 392.

1923: Jef’s mother takes him to the college library for the first time in his life. Eight hours later, she has to threaten him with a spanking to get him to leave. He cries all the way home until his mother promises to take him back the next week.

August, 1925: Jef enters kindergarten.

October, 1925: Jef begins teaching kindergarten. Miss Widowbrook, the actual certified and salaried teacher, understandably has some issues with this. Especially when Jef attempts to teach his fellow students their times tables up to the twelves.

April, 1926: Jef’s parents pull him out of school after Darien Morganveld makes Jef eat schoolyard dirt for the third day in a row. His mother helps clean the commingled mud, snot, and tears from Jef’s cheeks; later, by his workbench in the barn, his father tries to gently explain that some folks, some very lucky folks, are born smarter than the rest of us -- and there’s always going to be some dumb fool who takes it personal. Jef listens to this with wide, thoughtful eyes.

May, 1926: Jef builds himself a bicycle out of spare parts lying around his workshop. Two scraped knees, a bruised elbow, and a nosebleed later, he has learned to ride it.

June, 1926: Sherriff Tate finds Jef bicycling down Rural Route 25 at eight at night on a Saturday, a bundle of metal rods and fastenings strapped to his back, headed for the Morganveld place. With a big storm on the way, already whipping up winds, the sherriff takes Jef back to his worried parents. Not until his mother finds a magazine in Jef’s room, open to an article about lightning rods, does Jef confess that he planned to give Darien Morganveld a bit of a scare, by way of multiple lightning strikes to the rain gutter outside his bedroom window. Jef’s father has to sit him down again, this time to discuss responsibility in general, and its application to the smarty-britches of the world in particular.

March, 1927: Jef’s mother, who has taken over his education since his withdrawal from school, rapidly finds herself approaching the limits of her own education. Jef is reading a book a day, everything from literature to scientific texts, and spends hours in his room each afternoon, sketching diagrams for labor-saving devices and other curious apparatuses.

July, 1927: At the annual Parkersville County 4-H Fair, Jef wins first prize in the agricultural products competition for a self-designed still to convert leftover feed and cornhusks into a crude but serviceable fuel for tractors. Second prize goes to Maisy Lewis of neighboring Graingers Corners, who has raised a 512-pound pig named Edgar.

August, 1927: Jef’s mother catches him on the roof of the barn, about to test a prototype device for human-powered flight, and thus averts a highly premature end to his inventing career.

October, 1927: Devastating rains sweep Parkersville, turning Abel’s Creek from a peaceful gully into a raging torrent of brown water. When Johnson Smith’s truck hits a slick patch on Iron Bridge and goes into the water, trapping him in the midst of the rising torrent, Jef rigs up a counterweight system, persuades his father and the assembled rescuers to lower him down over the rushing river, and gets Johnson Smith fitted with a rescue harness. Jef’s ingenious series of pullies bear the weight, and Jef and Mr. Smith are lifted to safety just as his truck is swept away by the flood. (It is found a week later, upside-down in a pigsty in Graingers Corners.)

Jef gets his picture in the Parkersville Patriot, but more importantly, Mr. Smith stops by two weeks later to give Jef the prize pup of his dog Sadie’s litter. Jef names the puppy Scout, and once his mother has enlightened Jef on the ethical ramifications of using one’s pet as a test subject, particularly for experimental forms of transportation, the two become fast friends and inseparable companions.

November, 1927: With his parents’ blessing, Jef takes a job running errands at the Parkersville Depot in town. Within his first week, he has fixed the busted telegraph machine and begun observations on a way to improve the efficiency of the station’s track-switching.

February, 1928: The defining incident of Jef’s young life begins when an ice storm fells the telegraph poles across the railroad tracks down at the Depot. The resulting delay temporarily strands Dr. Ulysses Underton, professor of mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, en route to Chicago to display his Electrical Hovercraft to a consortium of investors. Jef, fascinated by “Dr. U” and the air of scientific progress that surrounds him, quickly strikes up a friendship.

This proves fortunate for both parties when Red Morgan and his gang, fresh from a string of bank robberies across the Midwest, decide to hole up in Parkersville. When the police catch up, and Red and his gang steal the Electrical Hovercraft, Jef stows away aboard and manages to sabotage the machine -- and blind Red Morgan with a well-timed squirt from an oil can -- to ensure the gang’s capture.

Dr. U is impressed by the boy’s hunger for knowledge, quick wits, and general resourcefulness, and a meeting with Jef’s parents convinces him that Jef has reached the upper limit of his ability to learn in Parkersville. Returning from Chicago following a successful sale of the Electrical Hovercraft design, Dr. U stops once more in Parkersville and invites the boy to come out to Cambridge for the summer. With his parents’ blessing, Jef readily agrees, on the condition that Scout can come, too.

March - May, 1928: Quite possibly the longest, slowest, most agonizingly boring months of Jefferson Edison Franklin’s young life.

June 1928: Jef and Scout arrive by train in Boston, met by Dr. U and his kindly housekeeper, Mrs. Mulligan. Jef is just in time for the annual National Scientific Symposium, being held this year at MIT, and spends a solid week drinking in the displays of fantastic new inventions and charming his way into high-level theoretical discussions with the foremost minds of modern science. Dr. Arlos Satel, a controversial but undeniably brilliant invitee at the conference, is the first to dub Jef “the Parkersville Prodigy,” a name that subsequently sticks with him, much to Jef’s secret delight. Satel and Jef begin a fruitful correspondence on matters of science and engineering that will last for years to come.

When strange acts of sabotage begin to befall the exposition, and scientists begin to vanish mysteriously, it is Jef who pieces together the clues that lead to Fritz Lermann, the deceptively jovial German biologist, who, under the guise of the Phantom Terror, is actually a member of the notorious League of Iniquity. Jef manages to surreptitiously spray an infrared dye on the Terror’s hands during a scuffle in the exhibition hall, later allowing him to catch Lermann quite literally red-handed.

July 1929: His summer visits with Dr. U now an established tradition, Jef and Scout accompany Dr. U to New York to unveil their jointly invented Electroplasmic Ray, a focused beam of energy designed to enable safer, faster construction and excavation without the use of dangerous, unstable explosives. Unfortunately, Malvolio Sinn, the Caesar of Crime, views the ray as an ideal addition to his vast and deadly arsenal, and abducts Dr. U and the ray itself. Sinn holds the city for ransom, threatening to topple the Statue of Liberty with the ray unless paid one million dollars.

Thus is Jef introduced to Sinn’s arch-enemy, Harker Windham, Lord Havoc of the Lost World, and a visiting Tom Morrow, as they team up to foil Sinn’s diabolical plot. Using Tom’s patented Undersea Exploration Suits, they breach Sinn’s submarine fortress at the depths of New York Harbor and mount a rescue attempt. Sinn escapes in the ensuing thrilling conflict, but Dr. U is saved, and Jef and Tom manage to thwart Sinn’s modifications to the ray and disable it, thus saving Lady Liberty and earning the thanks of a grateful nation.

Tom becomes Jef’s new friend and unabashed inspiration, and the two begin trading letters and postcards, swapping ideas for new and fantastical gadgets.

May 1930: On a birthday visit with his parents to Chicago, at Tom’s invitation, Jef is witness to Tom’s mysterious disappearance during the Field Museum’s Treasures of Egypt exhibition. The newspapers breathlessly speculate that the curse of the pharaohs has claimed another victim, particularly in the wake of Tom’s recent prevention of the Horror of the Tenth Plague, but Jef has other ideas. With the grudging aid of the mysterious Mister Gaunt and his assistant Violet Sullivan, Jef helps rescue Tom from the clutches of the Cult of Tempeth-Ta, and foil the ritual meant to bring their dread master Kalhemtep back from the Land of the Dead.

December 1930: Jef earns his fiftieth patent, for an improved bicycle chain, and receives congratulatory telegrams from Dr. U, Tom Morrow, and the President himself.

February 1931: Jef begins preliminary sketches and prototype construction for a self-calculating mechanical man. His father sighs and begins calling contractors to reinforce the barn. Again.

August 1931: Jef accompanies Tom, Lassiter Odes, Dr. U, and his colleague Prof. Vincent Villefort, with the aid of ace pilot Ruby Gale, on an expedition to the distant Himalayas, to the hidden temple known as the Sanctum of Sleeping Gods. Tom and Dr. U are fascinated by the reputedly unique magnetic properties of the surrounding rock; Lassiter wishes to study the Sanctum’s presence on a major fault line; and Villefort claims to be interested in the archaeological significance of the ancient culture that constructed the tomb.

After a harrowing brush with the slavering Yeti Guard, Villefort abandons Jef, Tom, Lasso, and Dr. U to the Sanctum’s ancient deathtraps, retreating with Ruby as his captive to the inner chambers, to the Well of Aeons Lost. There, he plans to enact an ancient blood ritual, copied from forbidden scrolls, to reawaken the beings supposedly slumbering far beneath the Earth -- with the aid of several bundles of Tom’s patented Ultramite high explosives!

Scavenging spare components from the equipment brought along in Ruby’s plane, the Cyclone, Tom and Jef build a crude but powerful mechanical man from Jef’s designs. With the aid of its brute strength and armored skin, they manage to thwart the Sanctum’s ancient traps and reach the Well in time to save Ruby from a grisly fate. As Lasso and Dr. U disarm the explosives, and Tom rescues Ruby her perilous perch far above the bottomless depths of the Well, Jef uses his mechanical man to drive Villefort to the edge of the pit.

He does not, however, anticipate that Villefort will, when cornered, jump to his death. Tom and Ruby do their best to console Jef. They are only partly successful.

Back home in Parkersville, Jef spends a week in his room, barely eating, scribbling on every spare sheet of paper. At last, his mother is able to coax him out with freshly baked cookies, and his father gets Jef to help him fix the busted axle on the truck, and life returns to normal.

But Jef never entirely forgets. And he does not abandon the ideas he began in that week of furious activity...

June, 1932: While working with Dr. U’s niece, 13-year-old Eunice, to solve the Conundrum of Champion’s Cove, Jef makes some preliminary observations that, had they been allowed to proceed, would have led to Jefferson Edison Franklin’s highly important discovery of girls.

Aug. 2, 1932: Back home in Parkersville after his summer’s adventures, and inspired by concepts Dr. Satel has mentioned in his latest letter, Jef decides to tackle a mildly ambitious summer project: Harnessing the powerful forces of electromagnetism to influence the fabric of space itself. Jef still sees Villefort in his dreams, his twisted smile as he steps backward into the pit and lets it swallow him, and would give anything for another chance to prevent that moment.

Aug. 7, 1932: After days of furious construction, Jef runs wires from the electrical pole up through his bedroom window -- having assured his mother, at least five times, that he’s entirely familiar with the necessary safety precautions -- and switches on his first small prototype.

The entirety of Parkersville County promptly goes dark. Jef, in the sudden blackness of his bedroom, hearing his father bellow from downstairs, realizes that he has perhaps not properly considered the infrastructure needs of this particular project.

Aug. 8, 1932: It takes five phone calls to the mayor, and the sherriff, and the local power co-op, to persuade all the necessary individuals that yes, Jef is very, very sorry about the blackout, and no, this will not happen again.

Aug. 10 - 24, 1932: Trucks, fleets of trucks, begin pulling up the dusty drive to the Franklin family farm. It appears Jef is spending some of his plentiful reward money from the Statue of Liberty incident, along with his most recent Morrow Grant, to construct generators. Many, many generators. In the barn. Jef’s father sighs once more, and asks his wife whether they have any milk of magnesia.

Aug. 25, 1932, 10:21 a.m.: The barn is roaring like a million angry hornet’s nests. The livestock, displaced, wander nervously about in the barnyard. Tom’s father is out in the fields, checking the crops. His mother is downstairs, re-reading Homer as she rolls out a pie crust.

Upstairs, Jef tests and retests the connections to the two-foot metal ring he has erected in the cleared-out space in the center of his room. This is only a prototype, only a test of the first step, but it’ll do for now. Crossing his fingers, he flips the switch once more.

Power surges from the battery of biofuel-powered generators in the barn, up the six-inch-in-diameter insulated cable, and into Jef’s device. Electricity crackles in blue veins around the circumference of the ring, and then converges in the center. Jef’s hair stands on end.

In the center of the ring, the air begins to ripple. And then it tears open with a brittle crackle. Strange light streams through the seared, coruscating edges of reality itself. Scout runs in nervous circles in one corner of the room. Jef, fascinated, hair prickling of its own accord, pushes his glasses up his nose, approaches the glowing rift, gets down on one knee, and becomes the first person in modern history to look into another dimension.

Something looks back at him.

10:23 a.m.: Edna Franklin feels the strange electrical prickling on the back of her neck, and sees sparks dancing on the edge of the paring knife as she cores apples. From upstairs, she hears a faint, terrified yelp from Scout, the frantic scrabbling of dog claws on floorboards, and then-- then--

It’s a horrible sound, a wet sound, the kind Edna, in the back of her mind, associates with years of seeing her father butcher livestock. Something drips through the ceiling from Jef’s room directly above, falling in a red drop on her knife blade, sizzling in the residual electrical charge. Blood.

Calling for her son, Edna Franklin runs upstairs.

11:32 a.m.: James Franklin comes in from the fields for lunch, hot, tired, and hungry. The generators still rumble away in the barn, and the livestock still wanders around, nervous and confused. James calls into the still, cool dimness of the house from the front parlor, hanging his hat on the rack by the door. He gets no answer.

In the kitchen, he sees the unmade pie on the counter, and the knife lying in the middle of the floor where Edna dropped it. He looks up to the ceiling, and sees a slowly spreading stain of red. Machinery still hums and crackles upstairs.

He calls for his wife, and his son, and gets no answer.

James Franklin goes to his office, unlocks the gun safe, and loads his shotgun. He says a quick prayer beneath his breath. And then he climbs the stairs.

1:26 p.m.: The last of the generators runs out of fuel. The power dies. The house is still and quiet.

Aug. 29, 1932: Following up on reports of errant livestock from the Franklin farm wandering onto neighboring properties, skinny and starved, grazing on everything in sight, Sherriff Tate pulls his truck into the Franklins’ drive. He pokes his head into the barn, sees the rows of dead generators, and shakes his head in wonder.

He knocks at the door of the farmhouse. There is no answer. He calls up to Jef’s room. Still nothing. He tries the door and finds it open. He wanders through the still and musty rooms of the house, smelling something awful and intense, followed by the buzzing of flies.

Sherriff Tate goes out to his truck, gets his pistol, and makes good and sure it’s loaded. He goes back into the house and climbs the stairs. The door to James and Edna’s room at the top of the landing is ajar, the room neat as a pin. The bed remains made, unslept-in.

Jef’s door is shut. Sherriff Tate listens at the door for a long time, hearing nothing but the buzzing and his own breathing, letting his nose acclimate to the awful stench seeping through the door. At last, he takes a shallow breath, fastening a handkerchief over his nose and mouth, and opens the door.

The county coroner, never the most religious of men, will have his faith further shaken by the end of the week, when he finally manages to identify the remains of James and Edna Franklin. It will take another week for the local vet to determine that, yes, the other thing found in the room was indeed Scout. Countless photographs will be taken of the strange, reeking drawings and diagrams painted on the stripped-bare walls of Jef’s room, in a smudgy, quavering hand, by twelve-year-old fingers. The photographs will be forwarded to Washington, and eventually arrive on Tom Morrow’s work table, in the midst of his suddenly empty and quiet Lookout.

Save a burnt-black spot on the floor, there is no trace of the device Jef was building.

And save for clumps of crudely shorn sandy blonde hair, found sticking to the sodden, stained floorboards, there is no sign of Jef.

1932, 9. The Mastermind Revealed

“Are you even remotely sure this will work?” Hark asked.

Tom stood at the edge of the white room, taking slow, deep breaths. His hands shook loosely at his sides, like a gunfighter preparing to draw.

“Nope,” Tom said, keeping his gaze intently on the grid lines spanning the floor of the deadly chamber. “So stand back. If it works, I’ll wait for you to follow me.”

Hark, Ruby, and Gaunt withdrew from the doorway, flattening themselves against the doors to either side.

“Don’t do anything stupid, Tom,” Ruby said, by way of wishing him luck.

“How would I ever have any fun?” Tom said, and took one big step onto the white square just inside the doorway.

And then, as the panels around him began to revolve, revealing their deadly workings, Tom took a quick leap to the left, into the momentary gap created by the revolving square of floor, and plunged into the darkness below.

A brace of pneumatically powered spikes hissed inward from either side, neatly skewering the space where Tom had stood. From the square just beyond, an automatic Gatling gun spat blazing rounds through the doorway and into the gloom of the chamber of stone machinery. After a few seconds, the firing stops, the machinery sank back, and the squares revolved once more to leave the floor bare.

Gaunt, Hark, and Ruby slowly peered around the empty doorway, at the blank white square where Tom had stood.

“Ten bucks says he lived,” Ruby said at last.

“Too easy,” Gaunt replied.

Tom had let himself go limp as he fell through the floor, the Morrow Personal Immobilizer and its ammo tank hugged against his chest, and tucked into a roll when his feet hit solid stone far beneath. His momentum had carried him an uncertain distance across the ground, and in the dark, he lay on his back and took a dizzy moment to catch his breath and make sure he’d broken or sprained nothing. Wherever he was, it was warm and humid, heat rising from the floor. Tom guessed geothermal vents. The air was close, but clean, and Tom smelled oil and ozone.

Having left his Chemoluminous Rod above with Ruby, he carefully fished a spare from inside his jacket, twisted its central portion with a snap to commingle the luminous chemicals within, and shook it to activate them.

In the rising green glow of the rod, Tom saw a gleaming nest of blades take shape from the darkness directly above him.

His heart leapt for a moment, until he realized he was staring up at one of the inert death-machines mounted to the underside of the panels above. His guess had been correct.

Nearby machinery stirred, jerking to life with mechanical swiftness. Shafts of light cut through the darkness about seven feet from Tom, around where he’d landed, as the floor panels flipped over once more. Tom saw Hark, Ruby in his arms, drop through the opening and land effortlessly in a crouch.

“Move!” Tom called. “The machines’ll come back down on top of you!”

Hark unceremoniously shoved Ruby to the side, into one of the narrow but navigable gaps between the upside-down forest of lethal machinery. He just managed to roll to safety himself as the panel directly above him flipped back over again, spikes plunging downward to dangle in their ready position.

Silence descended upon the crowded chamber once again. Tom scooted out beneath the machine above him and got up on one knee, holding up the rod to cast a faint light across Hark and Ruby a few feet away.

“Everyone all right?” he called.

“Bit of a rough landing there, your Lordship,” Ruby said, sitting up and brushing herself off.

“Terribly sorry,” Hark shrugged. “Couldn’t be helped.”

“You were right, Tom,” Ruby said. “If there are machines under the floor...”

“... there’s got to be a way to maintain them,” Tom finished. “Proper maintenance is the key to any truly effective deathtrap, I’ve come to think. Is Gaunt still above?”

“No,” a familiar voice echoed, and Gaunt stepped into the circle of slight cast by Tom’s rod.

“I didn’t see you fall,” Tom said, impressed.

“Precisely,” Gaunt replied. “Where to from here?”

“Well,” Tom said, as Hark and Ruby made their way cautiously through the machines to join him, “the opposite door was thatway, and if there’s a maintenance door into this room, it’s probably coming from the Well at the other side.” He slung the Immobilizer’s harness around his shoulders and checked the device to make sure it remained in working order. “Care to have a look?”

Slowly, gingerly, the four companions crossed the chamber in small steps. All around them, saws and knives and weapons of modern war hung like sleeping bats. Sweat began to trickle down Tom’s forehead in the heat; through his boots, through the floor, he could feel once more the thrum of vast machines rumbling from the chamber beyond.

“Tom,” Ruby said slowly, “engineer to engineer -- why isn’t this space booby-trapped like the room above?”

“Well,” Tom replied, “it’d be pretty silly for anyone to want to kill off their own henchmen in the course of routine maintenance --”

“Phineas Shaade,” Hark and Gaunt said dryly, almost simultaneously.

“And look how much trouble he had finding good help,” Tom continued. “Of course, I guess he could set it up so that the security system only worked if you entered the room through some means other than the door, but you’d have to be one heck of a thinker for the possibly to even occur to you that--”

All around them, the workings of death sprang to sudden life, automated chambers loading with fresh rounds, blades retracting with crisp, cutting sounds in readiness to strike.

“Oh, right,” Tom said softly, in the instant before all Hell broke loose. “Should have given him more credit.”

All four hurled themselves to the floor as a nightmare of mechanized slaughter erupted above them. Tom felt the hot blast of a flamethrower scorch the air inches above his back, searing the Morrow Personal Immobilizer’s storage tank; he’d just managed to hit the release straps before a knife blade scissored down, punctured the tank with a hiss, and lifted it off his back and into the killing field above.

“Crawl!” Tom shouted over the din. Inch by inch, clinging to the floor for their very lives, the companions made their way through a sizzling, slicing gauntlet of murder. Hot shell casings and bits of molten metal rained down above them as the machines worked their deadly arts on one another.

As Tom at last reached the flat, featureless stone wall on the far side of the chamber, the sounds of the killing machinery had begun to sputter and die. Powerful blades bit into machine gun nests, which spat punishing barrages into flamethrowers, which melted the blades in turn with roiling blasts of blazing kerosene. As the others reached him, the last of the machines finally fell silent.

“Well,” Tom breathed at last, “that wasn’t--”

“Don’t say it!” Ruby shouted, but it was too late. From the darkness there came a twang of snapping metal, and a whistling, and an errant, half-metal blade streaked out of the gloom and embedded itself two inches into the stone just above Tom’s head.

“Right,” Tom said at last. “I stand corrected.”

“Fond as I am,” Hark chimed in, “of crawling through dark, enclosed spaces filled with things that wish to reduce me to bits and viscera, might I suggest we find that door you spoke of?”

“Here,” Gaunt said, suddenly standing a few feet away against the wall, grunting as he turned a steel wheel to unlock a metal hatch. It swung open on well-oiled hinges, and a breath of cool air drifted through. “Let’s not wait around, shall we?”

They emerged into a tall, narrow passageway of stone, and Gaunt wasted no time resealing the steel door behind them. Small fires guttered in the mouths of carved rock faces along the walls.

“Look familiar?” Ruby said. “These are the ceremonial chambers under the Well. Villefort had me locked up down here while he was planning his little ritual.”

“How did you get out, anyway?” Tom asked as the group carefully advanced among the cool, moisture-dripping walls. “I still can’t figure it out.”

“Give me a place to stand...” Ruby quoted. “That’s your only clue.”

“Leverage, huh?” Tom mused. “One of these days...”

“Engineers,” Hark sighed to himself. At his side, Gaunt coughed meaningfully. “Present company excluded,” Hark added quickly, and Gaunt nodded. Hark sniffed the air, cocked his head, shifted his weight.

“What is it?” Ruby asked, turning back.

“Someone’s nearby,” Hark said. “Been here a few days, I’d imagine. I smell -- well, it’s nothing pleasant. A prisoner.”

Tom met Hark’s gaze. “Satel?” he said, and the Lord of the Lost World nodded. “Alive, thank heaven. Though in what state, I couldn’t say.”

“Let’s find out,” Tom said. “Lead the way.”

Hark, his sensitive, jungle-trained nose flaring almost imperceptibly, following invisible trails of commingled scents, led them through the twisting maze of passages, stopping at last at a thick stone door, featureless save for a circular jade lock with an octagonal keyhole, and a small slit just big enough to see through.

“Dr. Satel,” Tom called softly through the door. “Arlos, it’s Tom Morrow. We’ve come to save you.”

Chains clanked somewhere inside, and Tom heard a slow, painful shuffling of feet against stone. A face within loomed into the light cast by Tom’s Chemoluminous Rod, and for a moment, Tom started back. It was a visage so haggard, so frightened and strained, that at first he didn’t recognize it.

“Yes, it’s me,” Dr. Arlos Satel said softly, sadly. “Hello, Tom. You have perhaps brought my favorite tea-cakes from Nagel’s?”

“Sorry, Doctor,” Tom said, pressing a hand against the cold, unyielding stone of the cell door. “No room for them this trip. Sit tight and we’ll get you out.”

“No time,” Satel said, urgency rising in his voice. “Tom, you must listen. He’s gone mad, Tom, absolutely mad. He’s no longer anyone you knew. He’ll kill you in a heartbeat -- I saw him kill Reinhard, Sullivan -- all my assistants. Just because there wasn’t room for them on the plane.”

“I’ve got to believe I can reach him,” Tom said, his jaw set with determination. “Look, give me a few minutes -- I cracked one of these jade clockwork locks the last time I was here, and--”

“Will you listen for once?” Satel cried. “There’s no time! Even now he prepares the machine. I swear to you, Tom, I never imagined it could be put to such purpose. What he proposes to do -- it’s beyond the bounds of reason.”

“Which is why we need you out of there and helping us,” Tom said, but the ragged doctor only shook his head, tangles of unwashed hair falling into his eyes.

“I’d only slow you down in my... condition,” Satel said softly. “It would be no good for one of you to carry me.”

“What do you mean?” Tom asked, heart slowly sinking.

“When he told me of his designs...” Satel began, and then stopped, swallowing hard. “The second time I broke free and tried to throw myself into the Well, he... he had my hamstrings cut.”

Even Gaunt was left silent and shocked. Tom heard a cracking sound, and looked down to see his own fist clenching so tightly that his knuckles popped.

“We’ll come back for you,” Tom vowed, and behind him, his companions nodded grimly.

“If any of us are left to come back to -- or for,” Satel replied, and laughed without mirth. “Go, Tom. End of the corridor, two lefts, a right, and straight ahead to the second left. Stop him. Godspeed to you.”

The doctor’s hand, fingernails filthy and ragged, crawled spiderlike through the gap in the door, and Tom closed his own hand over it for a moment. Then he joined his friends in a dead run down the corridor, following the dcotor’s directions.

They led to a stone ladder, narrow rungs ascending some twelve feet up to a round metal grating. Strange, rippling blue light filtered down through the grating. In silence, Tom led the climb up the ladder, the dust of ancient empires grinding softly beneath his fingers and boots.

He had nearly reached the top, Hark, Gaunt, and Ruby behind him, when he froze in place, holding up a hand for silence. Something loud and metal clanged closer, up above the grate. Tom held his breath, flattening himself against the ladder, as the clanging noise grew louder. A shadow fell across the grate, and the clanging stopped. Tom waited for endless seconds.

At length, the clanging resumed, growing more steadily more distant. Tom exhaled, reliefed.

Something from above tore the grating off with a sudden shriek of metal. Before Tom could move, unbreakable steel fingers had plunged into the tunnel and seized around his shoulder. He was yanked roughly upward, stomach lurching, his shoulder scraping against the stone edges of the tunnel, and found himself dangling ten feet off the ground, eye to electric eye with time cold, impassive face of a hulking robot.

“GREETINGS-TOM-MORROW,” it clicked in staticky, prerecorded syllables. Tom looked around and saw two more metal men surrounding the shaft up from the dungeons, their right hands outstretched toward it, strange nimbuses of electrical fire coruscating from their palms.

“PLEASE-COME-UP-AND-SURRENDER-OR-WE-WILL-FIRE,” the robot recited. Slowly, grudgingly, Hark and Ruby hauled themselves up from the tunnel and were promptly whisked off their feet to hang painfully in the metal men’s grips.

The robots waited a few more seconds, looking down at the grating.

“ALL-OF-YOU,” the lead robot said at last. “MISTER-GAUNT-WE-WILL-KILL-YOUR-FRIENDS. PLEASE-SURRENDER.”

With a hiss of pure, spine-tingling hatred, Gaunt emerged from the tunnel. The robot holding Ruby reached down with its spare hand, snatched Gaunt up, and then proceeded to shake him. Sharp and glittering and dangerous things fell from his coat and clattered on the stone floor.

“I don’t know how those got there,” Gaunt rasped.

“RESPONSE-IRRELEVANT,” the robot holding him said. As one, the three robots executed a crisp turn and stomped off across the vast, echoing chamber hewn from the heart of a mountain, to the jutting stone promontory that overlooked the beckoning pit, a quarter-mile in circumference, at its center. The Well of Aeons Lost, the people who’d built this place had called it; the pit where the ancient and terrible gods who scarred the furthest murky reaches of their tribal memory had supposedly gone, tiring of their rule over the world of men, to sleep away the centuries.

Around the periphery of the pit, a dangling Tom saw other robots hard at work, making the final adjustments to a vast metal ring, bristling with wires and tubes, that completely encircled the Well. Above it, rising on a gleaming steel parabola to point straight down at the black, depthless heart of the pit, a twenty-foot needle of sleek, fluted metal descended to a point. Tom checked the construction against his memory of the plans Satel had sent him, all those long days before, in the pneumatic tube at the Lookout, and knew that what he saw boded nothing good.

The robots trundled Tom and his friends up the long, rough stone steps to the height of the outcropping, where a single small figure stood, overlooking the busy activity below. He tossed something lightly up from one hand, then caught it, again and again. A baseball.

The figure turned. He wore a dusty white shirt, streaked with something dark and brownish-red, and well-worn denim overalls, and red tennis shoes, the laces untied. Above the wide round spectacles that magnified his thoughtful blue eyes, his head was shaved down to a fine nub of sandy blonde stubble, and his scalp was livid with dark red scars, freshly carved in strange lines and patterns that covered the entire top and sides of his skull.

He was no more than twelve years old.

“Hello, Tom,” he said softly, and tossed up the baseball, and caught it again.

“Hello, Jef,” Tom replied. “I see you’ve been busy.”

1932, 8. The Man Who Lived 200 Lives

The passenger liner RMS Vespertine, two days out from Liverpool, slid beneath the waves of the North Atlantic just past midnight in the winter of 1915. The first torpedo from the German U-boat had pierced its starboard hull below the waterline; the second slammed into the boiler room, igniting the reserves of coal, and tearing open the aft half of the vessel in a plume of fire that glowed for miles distant. There was no time to drop the lifeboats, no time to even begin evacuations. The Vespertine sank in minutes.

The sea churned and sucked at the debris all through the long, dark hours of the freezing night, and into the hazy, fog-swathed dawn, before the rescue boats arrived. They cut slowly through the icy waters, powerful lights sweeping what little wreckage remained, crew members’ voices shouting across the surface of the deep.

They pulled men and women from the water, a dozen at most, found clinging to spars of wood -- one on a table from the ship’s dining room, still clutching a butter knife in one hand. But they were all stiff and sightless, faces kissed with frost, and the rescuers draped them in sheets and said quiet prayers for their immortal souls.

The last boat was about to turn back when the port-side spotter shouted a warning. With hooks on poles, sweating beneath thick wool sweaters and scratchy peacoats, the crew hauled the young boy dripping and shivering onto the deck. He stared at them with eerie green eyes, a shock of newly earned silver jutting through the auburn of his hair, and clutched the life preserver that had kept him afloat so tightly that not even three strong men could pry it from his grip.

The boy said nothing; not on the rescue boat’s return journey to the hospital ship, not to the doctor who checked his pulse and scanned his fingers and toes for frostbite, not to the nurses who swaddled him in blankets and fed him soup in spoonfuls, not in the hours he sat curled up on a cot in the empty infirmary, still clinging to the life preserver.

At last, the ship’s chaplain was sent in, a sweet-natured and patient man, and through gentle tones and persuasion, he was able to retrieve the white ring from the boy’s grip, and set it beside the cot.

“What’s your name, son?” he asked, sitting on the cot opposite from the boy. The child said nothing, green eyes calm and staring. “Have you a mother and father? Were they on the ship with you, or do they await you at home?”

“How many?” the boy said in a small voice. The chaplain paused, and begged his pardon. “How many were aboard?” the boy continued.

“I don’t know,” said the chaplain, kindly. And though he asked more questions, the boy said nothing further.

The chaplain went to the chief surgeon, who checked with the first mate, who sent a dispatch by wireless to shore, and hours later received a reply.

The chaplain returned to the infirmary to find the boy still there, still silent, still staring, and sat down once again on the opposite cot. He unfolded a piece of paper given to him by the first mate, and read the number scratched out in someone else’s handwriting.

“Two hundred and one,” the chaplain said, “counting the crew and all the passengers. I suppose that makes you the one, eh?”

“Two hundred and one,” the boy repeated, and his face grew so resolute, so impossibly old in its conviction, that the chaplain was privately startled, and would carry the image with him to his grave.

“I guess I’ll have to live for all of them,” young Thomas Roosevelt Morrow said.

He was nine years old, a native of Boston, Massachusetts. His father ran a bookshop; his mother kept the accounts. After saving since before Tom was born, they had sailed to England, in defiance of the ongoing war, to visit distant relatives. They died beneath the waves, with one hundred and ninety-eight other souls. Tom had crept out of bed when he should have been asleep, and snuck up on deck to see the stars bright and clear in the blue velvet sky. And so he had lived.

A distant aunt in Hutchison, Kansas took Tom in. He traveled westward, trailed by a shipment of books from his parents’ shop. Once they arrived, he had them unloaded entirely in his new room, dusty tomes in wobbling stacks stretching nearly to the ceiling.

“What are you going to do with them all?” his aunt pleaded. She was a good-hearted, sensible woman, and her taste in literature ran toward the farm report, the almanac, and the Good Book.

Tom fixed her with those strange green eyes of his, brushed the hair back from his face, and said, “I’m going to read them.”

Within a year, he had, and half the Hutchinson library besides. Even at that young age, he seemed to possess a remarkable recall, able to quote verbatim nearly everything he’d read. Once, when asked by a doubting Sunday school teacher to name the first full verse on page 273 of the Bible, Tom asked, “Which edition?”

No one likes a know-it-all, but that didn’t stop Tom from trying. He became known as a loyal, good-hearted lad -- a bit lost in his own head, perhaps, but always willing to stop and help a neighbor. And like the president from whom he’d gotten his middle name, Tom Morrow did not so much live his life as attack it with fervor.

He pored over books of anatomy, studying the intricacies of human musculature, and devised a series of dynamic exercises designed to rapidly and effectively promote strength, stamina, and vigor. When applied to his own skinny frame, they quickly transformed him into the all-around champion footracer, tree-climber, big-heavy-rock-lifter, and just-about-anything-elser of Hutchison and several surrounding towns.

By age 12, he was reading all of his textbooks by the end of the first week of school, and spending the rest of the year at the back of the class, sketching designs for a more efficient engine for his aunt’s old truck, or a human-powered flying machine, or simply rendering from memory the entire skeleton of the antelope, and offhandedly lobbing invariably correct answers back to the head of the class whenever prompted.

He got his first patent -- and his second, third, and fourth -- by the age of 14. (He would have gotten seven before he turned 15, but patent clerks are slow and methodical types.)

When the church caught fire from a lightning strike in the midst of a hot, dry, dusty summer, it was 16-year-old Tom who ran into the blaze to drag out Parson Weaver, and return the breath to his smoke-filled lungs using a series of techniques he’d been thinking on in his spare time.

By the time he was 18, he had fourteen patents -- for everything from a newer, more sensitive lens for telescopes to a novel means of transforming wheat hulls into long-lasting paper -- a report card full of straight As, a commendation for the governor, and a desperate need to get out of Hutchison, Kansas before he began to suffocate. Any university in the nation would have fought for him tooth and nail, had he bothered to apply. But Tom had tired of book learning, and wished to see the world. So he joined the U.S. Army.

This proved a mistake, as much for the Army as for Tom. He made a fine recruit -- strong, fast, a quick thinker and a crack shot -- but a terrible soldier. For one thing, there was his objection to killing.

“What did you say, cadet?” his drill instructor at Fort Long shouted, crimson-faced, individual veins pulsing soothingly beneath the skin of his forehead.

“Sir, I said I don’t see the point of it, sir!” Tom replied, as his entire platoon ran through their bayonet thrusts all around him. Each man watched Tom the corner of his eye, so as not to miss the inevitable, spectacular explosion of profanity, and possibly viscera, that Drill Sergeant McClary would no doubt unleash.

“Don’t?” Each of the Sergeant’s words would have spiked a distant seismometer. “See? The point?” The men of the platoon grunted, shoving their bayonets into imaginary enemies and twisting, and wondered if any of the blood from poor Cadet Morrow would get on their uniforms. The sergeant abruptly relaxed, his wide face breaking into a smile, much in the manner of a spider sitting casually in the center of his web. “Well, Cadet, just why is that? Speak freely, son.”

“Well, sir,” Tom began earnestly, betraying no awareness of his imminent mortal danger, “I don’t see why we need to, you know, stab the enemy to take him down. In the vitals, I mean. Multiple times.”

“I suppose you’d care to show me a better way to do it, wouldn’t you, Cadet?” the drill sergeant asked, his voice pure honey. Honey with cyanide in it.

“Sir, are you sure that’s all right, sir?” Tom asked, genuine concern on his face.

“I insist, Cadet.” The Sergeant smiled, imagining the wayward Cadet Morrow in the back room of the canteen, buried under a pile of self-generated potato peelings.

“Well, for one thing, sir, there’s this,” Tom said, and chopped the Sergeant on the side of the neck, right where he’d once seen a particularly important-looking nerve cluster in a Chinese book of medicine. Sergeant McClary turned briefly purple, and dropped in a heap. At the sight of this, the entire platoon paused in mid-lunge, sparing a troop of nonexistent foes from their forty-seventh consecutive impalement.

“And that’s just the beginning,” Tom said cheerily. “I mean, for one thing, you could simply use the butt of the rifle on the solar plexus, or perhaps -- sir? Sir?”

Sergeant McClary, once released from the hospital with nothing wounded save his pride, kept a wide berth around Cadet Morrow for the remainder of basic training.

The final straw in Tom’s brief, ill-starred military career came the following summer, in the sweltering humidity of the South Carolina pine woods, where he was serving as quartermaster for the 112th Infantry during their annual exercises. Tom had developed something of a reputation, understandably, and the top kick left him at B Company’s makeshift base camp to guard the supplies during the long day’s pretend fighting. Tom was only too happy to be at the front, but has he stood in the dripping heat of the supply tent, surrounded by crates of flares and radiophones and spools of wire, he resolved to make the best of it.

As darkness fell, the company doubled-timed back into camp, sweaty, grimy, and deeply annoyed. A Company had outfoxed them at every turn, and as soon as the men had broken out their canteens, the top kick called them to the heart of the camp to plan the next day’s strategy.They were joined by Tom, who seemed curiously smudged and sweat-stained himself; the men who didn’t much like him, which was most of them, began to joke about how hard it must have been, sitting on all those supplies.

With the tip of his bayonet, the top kick was scratching out vectors of attack in the dirt, when a curious series of static bursts issued from somewhere in the vicinity of the supply tent.

“What the hell is all that racket?” the top kick growled. Private Tom Morrow stepped forward through the circle of weary soldiers.

“If I may, sir,” Tom said, “that’s the alert from the acoustic sensor array I set up while the company was engaged, sir.”

“The what of what?”

“I just borrowed a few parts from some of the radios, sir, and slung ‘em around the bases of the trees around the camp perimeter. And that sound, sir, means a squad from A Company is headed in from the south, I’m guessing for a covert attack.”

From the woods to the south, there erupted multiple roars and a sudden burst of brilliant, lingering light, and the shouting of confused men.

“That,” Tom continued, “would be the tripwire flares I set up to blind and disorient them, and remove their element of surprise.”

The cracking of branches, and more shouting -- these cries each ending in an abrupt sort of muffling -- echoed through the trees.

“And that, sir, would be them falling into the pit I dug, and covered over with pine needles. Don’t worry, it’s not too deep, and I made sure the walls sloped enough. They should be just about ready to surrender at this point, I think.”

The top kick, for once in his long and impressive history of public outbursts of paint-peeling profanity, had nothing to say.

The Army knew they had something in Private Morrow. They just didn’t know what, but in the classic fashion of military men the world over, they certainly didn’t want anyone else to have it, either. So Uncle Sam stuck Tom deep into the heart of its bureaucracy, reviewing budgets in a tiny basement office at the War Department in Washington, D.C., until such time as they figured out what, exactly to do with him.

The career rear-echelon man who processed Tom’s transfer order had no way of knowing it, but he was saving the entire city of Washington, and perhaps democracy itself, when he thumped down the APPROVED stamp on Tom’s paperwork.

In the spring of 1924, as the chill of winter gave way to the first green hints of spring, the White House burned to the ground, again. This time, it was not the work of spiteful British soldiers, but that of the Walking War-Engines of Professor Wolfgang Heinrich Gotterdammerung. The rogue German scientist had transformed his grudge against the Allied Powers for his nation’s humiliating defeat in the Great War into twenty-foot tall mechanized monstrosities, fully electrical, with battleship-thick hides, feet that could crush an automobile as if it were paper, and three automatic Gatling guns at the end of each protruding arm. They stomped ponderously down Pennsylvania Avenue from the smoking ruins of the White House, bullets from the marshalled forces of the city’s defenders pinging harmlessly off their armored skin, headed inexorably for the gleaming white dome of the Capitol. They left a trail of smashed-in police wagons and army trucks, and a series of wet, red, vaguely soldier-shaped smears, in their wake.

Tom Morrow first caught sight of them through binoculars from the roof of the War Department, where he had the habit of taking his lunch breaks. In the glinting, mechanized perfection of their march of doom, he saw all that enthralled him, and all that he despised to the depths of his soul, in one streamlined shape.

And while the nation’s capital plunged into chaos, it was Tom who “borrowed” a police radio and used it to triangulate the curious radio signal that animated the metal monsters. It was Tom who jerry-rigged an antenna with a generator and a flagpole to broadcast a signal that counteracted the control frequency of the War-Engines, grinding them to a halt mere feet from the Capitol steps. It was Tom who led a ragtag squad of battered policemen and soldiers in a raid on the small freighter at anchor on the waterfront, catching Professor Gotterdammerung before he could make his escape. And it was Tom captured forever in the light of a shutterbug’s flash-powder, punching the burly, tattooed, pistol-weilding fiend of Teutonic science in the jaw. Magnification of the photo would later reveal a single tooth flying from the Professor’s mouth at the force of the blow.

(In the years that followed, Tom would strike up an unlikely correspondence with the incarcerated Professor, trading opinions on the latest developments in physics, and won no friends in Washington by describing him in a newspaper interview as “a decent enough fellow, provided you get to know him.”)

As the cleanup crews patched up the four-foot-long footprints all down Pennsylvania Avenue, and Arlington Cemetary enfolded her newest honored occupants in the shade of its flowering trees, Tom Morrow was summoned before a special Senate committee, to decide once and for all just what the hell was to be done with him.

“I see here plans for aeroplanes, and life preservers,” said the honorable and fat Senator Finster of Ohio, tongue habitually pressed toadlike against one wet corner of his mouth, “and something... I don’t know what the hell this is. I suppose you can build all this, son?”

“Yes sir,” Tom affirmed, seated behind an oak table in the stuffy chamber, dressed in his full Army uniform.

“What about bombs, son?” said Senator Finster, who had never seen combat with anything more formidable than a rare steak. “Could you build bombs? Better cannons? More powerful rifles.”

“I could, sir,” Tom said, slowly. “But I will not.”

“I beg your pardon, son?” the Senator scowled, looking halfway indignant, and halfway indigestive.

“I said I wouldn’t build any of those things, sir. Not for my country, sir, with all respect, and not for myself, and not for anyone else.”

“Are you not a patriot, boy?” Senator Finster growled. Tom stared back with his clear green eyes and slowly rose to his feet.

“I love my country, Senator,” Tom said. “I love what she stands for. And I maintain that anyone who thinks that taking life is the answer to any problem, of whatever scale, is thinking too small. You ask me for weapons to wage war, Senator? No, sir. I deal in ways to end war.”

In 1926, the budget and the paperwork finally approved, the U.S. Army designated newly promoted Captain Tom Morrow as the head of its Special Science Division, tasked with exploring and cataloging scientific threats to national security, and devising means to foil them. It was a division of one, at least at first, but Tom didn’t care. At last, he could see the world.

He was already famous as the breathless newspapers’ Hero of Washington, a repute he neither liked nor disliked, but indeed barely seemed to notice or acknowledge. As he traveled the globe, his fame only grew. He dismantled opium-smuggling rings in the Far East, uncovered secret alchemical weapons of the Renaissance deep in the prehistoric caverns of France, and battled Malvolio Sinn, the Caesar of Crime, side by side with Lord Havoc in the girders of the under-construction Empire State Building. In 1928, dime novel publisher Street & Smith of New York City contracted with Tom to publish accounts of his adventures -- highly educational, he was assured, and only lightly fictionalized, to ensure their commercial appeal. Tom shrugged, and signed the paperwork; he used some of the ever-accumulating funds that resulted to buy whatever the government refused to approve, and diverted the rest into a charity for orphans of war.

Over time, Tom Morrow’s travels won him steadfast companions. Albie “Nosh” Mirman, the pudgy, perpetually hungry word-puzzle champion and amateur codebreaker from Brooklyn, who cracked an supposedly unbeatable cypher to help Tom smash the League of Disrepute. Danny Ishido, the brash Californian engineer, whose aid proved invaluable in Tom’s defeat of the Metal Ghost of San Francisco. Lassiter Odes, Lasso to his friends, a straight-shooting cowboy geologist who joined forces with Tom to face down the Thunder Lizards of the Badlands. And Rashida Al-Mahmoud, the feisty, fiery-eyed mathematician from the University of Cairo, who worked with Tom to solve the ancient equation at the heart of Pharoah Ramhatep’s tomb in the Valley of Kings, and spare her native land from the Horror of the Eleventh Plague.

And as he traveled here and there, Tom would stop at houses, apartments, family farms, all drawn from a list he’d made years before and kept folded in his breast pocket at all times. He’d quietly introduce himself, and sit for a while in the parlor, or on the porch, or out on the fire escape, talking with the occupants. And in every case, he’d leave with some small item, a hairbrush or a ring or a battered old book, freely given to him from the reaches of some forgotten drawer or locked-up steamer trunk. And he’d cross another name off the list.

In 1929, Tom and the team of remarkable talents who found themselves assembled around him moved into the top floor of the majestic Art Deco tower at 919 North Michigan Avenue in the heart of Chicago. Sealed by an unbreakable lock to which only Tom and his friends knew the solution, the Lookout, as Nosh wasted no time in dubbing it, was stocked with the latest instruments of science and detection. Though each member kept separate quarters on the floors below, the Lookout was their true home -- a buzzing hive of intellect and discovery, and a stronghold in the Special Science Divison’s ceaseless battle for freedom, justice, and the light of knowledge.

The evening they moved in, Tom invited his team out onto the balcony overlooking the Magnificent Mile as dusk settled across the city. Electric lights had begun to illuminate the skyline; only the distant spire of the Wormwater Building remained black and still amid the glowing metropolis. Tom poured five glasses of sparkling cider -- he reminded anyone who’d listen of the deleterious effects of alcohol upon the cells of the human brain, and besides, champagne went straight to his head -- and proposed a toast.

“Let the light that shines above us,” Tom said, pointing to the glowing, omindirectional beacon at the top of the building’s crowning spire, “be our own inspiration.” His colleagues and friends good-naturedly rolled their eyes, only too accustomed to this sort of speechifying, and the sincerity behind every word. “Let us bring light to all the dark corners of the world, shine hope where there is despair, and for God’s sake, let’s not let Danny blow up the lab again.”

They laughed, and clinked glasses, and Rashida shouted, “What’s impossible?” To which they all replied, in one of Tom’s favorite maxims, “Impossible’s just an excuse!”

They didn’t know it then, but doom awaited them, a slow-motion bullet fired from the pistol of fate. And only Tom would escape.

It arrived one morning in the early summer of 1932, in a cannister that popped from a pneumatic tube whisked through the citywide subterranean communications network, up the towering stories of 919 North Michigan, and into the heart of the lookout. Big Tex, Lasso’s scruffly little mutt of a dog, retrieved it from the bin and trotted over to Tom, who was reading the latest issue of The American Journal of Physics upside-down during the winding-down of his morning exercises.

“You ought to try this sometime, Nosh,” Tom joked, red-faced, counting off one last handstand push-up before somersaulting to his feet. He bent down and scrached Big Tex behind the ears, retrieving the only slightly drool-soaked cylinder from the dog’s jaws.

“I’m good, thanks,” Nosh said through a mouthful of bialy, delivered hot that morning from his favorite Pilsen bakery. He had the Tribune in front of him, folded to the crossword puzzle on the work table, next to the coffee grinder and the Crystal Skull of Macchu Picchu. “Nine-letter word for ‘puzzle or problem?’” Nosh asked.

“Conundrum,” Rashida said, breezing past in spirited argument with Lasso regarding the merits of the controversial continental drift theory. “It’s absurd, Lasso. The continents are fixed to the crust of the earth.”

“There’s some very curious magnetic readin’s say otherwise, Miss ‘Shida,” Lasso drawled in his usual calm, easy manner.

There was a sudden whoomp and a crash from the workshop. Danny stuck his head out, face blackened with soot. “I’m okay!” he called. “Little more oxygen in the mix next time.”

“Business as usual,” Tom sighed, and unrolled the message inside the pneumatic cylinder.

The Lookout was always a busy, lively place, but whenever Tom stood stock-still, as he did now, his friends and colleagues knew to take notice.

“Professor Satel,” Tom said at last, balling the paper in one tightly clenched fist. “I think he’s in trouble. Where are we on the current projects?”

“The Looking-Glass is almost there,” Danny chimed in, wiping soot from his face with a stray dishtowel. “Just gotta make sure the gyro’s properly calibrated with the ley lines.”

“Still no luck with Sinn’s code,” Rashida added, snatching an apple from the fruit bowl in the work table.

“We think it might be some kind of circular algorithm,” Nosh said, and then said it again without his mouth full.

“Sinn,” Rashida snorted in her proper, rounded British-accented syllables. “Leave it to the greatest criminal mastermind of North America to leave his dying scrawl in ciphertext. Couldn’t make it easy for us, could he?”

“I got a theory ‘bout that dust we found in his Vault of Iniquity,” Lasso chimed in, draping his lanky frame wrong-way-round on a high-backed stool. “Still workin’ on it, but it’s got some mighty curious magnetic readin’s.”

“No luck tracking down Sinn’s missing loot, either,” Nosh said. “You’d think a bricked-up subway station full of gold and jewels would be easier to trace.”

“Great,” Tom said, letting the information run idly into his brain, his thoughts consumed with the message he clenched in his fist. “Sorry, this business with Satel’s got me worried.”

“Need some help?” Nosh asked, wiping his mouth. “I’m sure we can spare the morning.”

“It’s probably nothing,” Tom said, grabbing his jacket from a coathook as he headed for the door. “You know Satel -- he’s got a way of jumping at shadows.”

“That much high voltage would make anyone jumpy,” Rashida smirked. “See you for lunch, then?”

“If I don’t get distracted,” Tom said, unlatching the Lookout’s unbreakable door and stepping through into the anteroom.

“So, dinner, then!” Danny called as the door sealed shut behind Tom.

In the elevator down, Tom uncrumpled the message in his fist and smoothed out the paper, reading once again the hasty scrawl of the Doctor’s message, and the schematics enclosed with it. He strode through the lobby still engrossed in the contents, instinctively weaving around passersby, and emerged from the revolving doors to the bustling sidewalk and the bright morning sun. He stepped to the curb, placed two fingers to his lips, and let out an ear-splitting whistle, then held up the silver-and-amber signet ring on his finger to the nearest passing cab.

One swift taxi ride, one very exciting cab ride, and one hasty autograph of Tom Morrow and the Circus of Calamity later, Tom arrived at the Carbon and Carbide Building, whose glossy black exterior rivaled the Wormwater’s in striking distinctiveness among the city skyline, and found police cars circling the sidewalk around its entrance. A pang of alarm shot down Tom’s spine, and he dashed across the street, dodging traffic, and flashed his Special Science Division badge to the policeman standing guard. The cops parted like the Red Sea -- Tom didn’t need the badge, really, not in his adopted city or half a dozen others -- and Tom anxiously waited while the elevator whisked him up to the top floor.

Dr. Arlos Satel was one of the most brilliant and misunderstood scientific minds in the country, and a longtime correspondent of Tom’s. His eclectic, radical ideas about the applications of electrical power had repeatedly run up against the hard-headed interests of commerce, and only Tom’s discreet financial assistance allowed the Hungarian genius to further the work he hoped would transform the world into an endless glimmering web of invisible electricity and free, clean power.

Tom had gotten the vague outlines of Satel’s latest work from the Doctor, a more theoretical pursuit than his usual endeavors, but only today had he seen the full plans. The potential in them, and the urgency with which Satel’s note had conveyed his fears that some unknown force seemed hungry to obtain his work by any means, only redoubled Tom’s growing dread.

The elevator disgorged Tom into a sea of plainclothes detectives, and a wrecked, charred, and empty lab. There was no sign of Satel, or indeed of any of the bizarre and crackling machinery that usually cluttered the space; the light shone clear and stark through the windows, and the room’s white silence was disorienting and uneasy. A strange smell of ozone still hung in the air, and the walls and floors were blistered in curious circular scorch marks. In the center of the emptied room, surrounded by tattered bits of blueprints and tiny fragments of broken machinery, Tom saw a discolored place on the floor, where something heavy had sat for many months. It was shaped like a ring, roughly nine feet in diameter, and the inner edges were fringed with black wisps and eddies, where powerful currents had scorched the floor.

The police kept their distance from Tom, and he spoke to none of them, his eyes roving the room with the intensity of searchlights. He touched one of the scorch marks on the wall, carefully tracing the radial blast pattern with one finger, and frowned, troubled. Then he crouched almost level with the floor, fished a small glass file out of his jacket, and carefully swept up a small pile of the black dust littering the floor in spots.

He was about to rise from the floor when he heard it -- the steady whistling of an open pnuematic tube. He followed the sound to the far side of the lab, where the master pneumatic chute sank down into the walls of the building. The rubber flap that covered the mouth of the tube hung open, fluttering gently in the force of the constant suction. Tom checked the dial next to the tube that determined the destination of any cylinder sent. It was set to MORROW. Tom’s blood froze in his veins.

“Was this open?” Tom barked to no one in particular, his voice piercing the stillness of the room, commanding attention from the wandering cops. “Was this tube open when you arrived?”

A rookie detective, not much younger than Tom and clearly only a few months into plainclothes work, hesitantly stepped forward. “Uh... I believe so, Mr. Morrow. What’s wrong.”

Tom was already sprinting back toward the elevator. “I’m going to need one of your cars!” he shouted.

The police wagon was waiting, engine running, driver’s door open, when Tom burst from the front doors onto the sidewalk. He leapt inside, barely pausing to shut the door, and gunned the motor, racing back up Michigan Avenue. As the police wagon weaved through traffic, Tom pulled his Morrow Personal Radiophone from inside his jacket, flipped out the retractable antenna with a flick of his wrist, and switched the ‘phone on to the private frequency of the Special Science Division.

“Nosh!” he shouted into the receiver, swerving briefly up onto the sidewalk as he traded paint with a meandering produce truck. “Lasso! Shida! Danny! Can anyone hear me?”

Silence. Static. Tom’s foot shot the gas pedal all the way to the floor.

He left the car running, doors wide open, halfway up on the curb in front of 919 North Michigan, and nearly knocked two bankers and a chairman of the board flat in his dead sprint for the elevators.

All the long and lonely way up the tower, Tom’s lips moved silently, praying, hoping against hope that his terrible theory was wrong. He reached the anteroom to the Lookout, fumbling with the keys whose top-secret workings opened the unbreakable door, and paused only to grab a gas mask from the hidden compartment set into the wall by the door.

The door swung open to the scrabbling of Big Tex’s nails on the floor, and the dog’s soft, agitated whining. Tom’s breath hissed harshly in his ears inside the mask. The dog ran in panicked circles in the center of the room, surrounded by the still, prone bodies of Tom’s friends.

Tom, moving as if underwater, his legs as thick and unresponsive as in his nightmares, knelt and checked each body. Nosh had collapsed face-first onto the work table, the still-unsolved crossword puzzle next to him. Its edges fluttered in the breeze blowing in through the balcony doors, where Rashida lay, fingers splayed up on the edge of door she had barely managed to open before death took her. Danny and Lasso, the later still clutching a bandanna over his nose and mouth, sprawled grotesquely on the floor near the open pneumatic tube; shards of glass and part of a shattered vial, roughly the size and shape of a message cylinder, lay glittering near the open mouth of the pneumatic tube.

His friends’ eyes were all wide and staring, bloodshot. No pulses beat in their necks. There was no contortion, no evidence of final agonies. Death had swept across them gently, like a mother’s kiss on a sleeping child’s brow.

Tom half-consciously stripped the gas mask from his face and sat down in a sudden heap in the middle of the floor. Some part of his brain was still working; poison gas, it told him, sent in glass vials through the tube network from Satel’s lab, probably just after he’d left the Lookout. Possibly with some charge set to detonate upon detecting the normalized air pressure. The gas had risen, and eventually dissipated out into the air through the crack Rashida had opened onto the balcony. Big Tex, low to the floor, had survived while his masters died around him. The dog curled against Tom and licked his hand, whimpering.

Some part of Tom’s brain was working, yes. But in the rest, he was nine years old again, cold and wet and shivering, watching the flaming ruins of the Vespertine drag all that he loved into the pitiless deep.

Big Tex licked tears from Tom’s cheeks.

He allowed himself the luxury of grief for a minute, two, three. Then he stood up slowly, stepped over the bodies of his friends, and headed to the lab.

The Looking Glass sat nearly finished in one corner, its thick rectangular frame strung with coils of wire. Tom ignored it, sitting down roughly at the workbench. He grabbed a microscope and picked up one of Lasso’s slides of the black dust found next to Malvolio Sinn’s charred, mangled body the week before, in the plundered emptiness of his Vault of Iniquity. Then he prepared a slide of the dust from the vial in his jacket, from Satel’s lab, and compared the two beneath the scope. The particles were identical.

He checked them with the spectrograph, confirming the same mineral composition. From the sliding drawers of archived materials on the far wall of the lab, he produced one final slide, and checked it, too, against the two other samples. It was another match.

Tom sat in silence in the lab for a long while, trying to wrap his mighty brain around the almost unimaginable theory it was forming.

He moved to the telephone on the wall and asked the operator to call a number in Parkersville, Iowa; then, when no connection could be made, he placed another call to the Parkersville County sherriff’s office, asked a few simple questions, and listened grimly to the answers.

Tom clicked the receiver to get back to the building switchboard, and placed four more calls that afternoon. One to an airfield down in the heart of Bronzeville. One to a Miss Violet Sullivan on Lakeshore Drive, with regard to a mutual acquaintance. One long distance to New York City, where Chalmsworth the butler informed him in rolling tones that the master was taking his exercise on the grounds, and would return his call.

And lastly, one to the police.

Tom hung up the receiver and moved wordlessly into the main room. He went to each of his friends, closing the lids of their sightless eyes. He filled Big Tex’s water dish in the sink and set it down for the dog. Then he sat at the work table as the distant sounds of sirens approached up Michigan Avenue, surrounded by his dead friends, and began to plan the means by which he would avenge them.

1932: 7. The Empty Room of Death

“Wicked men,” the voice of Mister Gaunt echoed from out of the cavernous darkness of the chill, ancient chamber, “I offer you this final chance to repent. The Devil waits, hungry, and I have many men yet to claim.”

Dragon nodded to his fallen Shaolin brothers, and as one, they snuffed out their torches and receded into the gloom, leaving Tom, Hark, and Ruby alone in the pool of green light from Tom’s Chemoluminous Rod.

“So be it,” Gaunt’s voice hissed. Silence blanketed everything. Tom, Hark, and Ruby waited, still as stones, holding their breaths.

Gunfire cracked, sudden and sharp, and in the blazing light from the muzzles of twin pistols, the companions saw Mister Gaunt leaping into midair from the tooth of a stone gear far above them, twisting his body to discharge his guns into the body of the Celestial Sign labeled Dog. Then all was dark and quiet again, save a wet gurgling from above. Blood dripped and spattered to the stone floor just within the boundaries of Tom’s light.

Dog came tumbling from the darkness to hit the stones with a wet snapping, and moved no more.

There was a whisper of silk to Tom’s left, and then a knife blade pricked into the soft flesh under his chin. “Surrender, demon,” shouted the Celestial Sign labeled Rat into the waiting dark, “or we butcher your friends!”

Something fell throught the air, brushing lightly against the back of Tom’s neck, and he spun out of the assassin’s grip to see Rat clutching at his throat, where a fine, almost invisible line was closing around his windpipe. In the green light, only the faintest shimmering reflections betrayed the slender noose of wire, strong as steel, that looped around Rat’s neck and rose up into the dark above. The wire jerked, and Rat with it, like a puppet; there was a cracking sound, like a knife through a head of lettuce. Rat went limp, tongue lolling, and was suddenly whisked dangling up into the gloom.

The air was suddenly alive with the clang of steel on steel, sparks striking somewhere above, and Tom, Ruby, and Hark scattered as Gaunt and the Celestial Sign labeled Rooster suddenly came tumbling from out of the black, locked in fierce combat. The two men landed in a crouch and squared off, the sharp, curving steel talons strapped to Rooster’s hands and feet gleaming dully in the light.

Rooster launched himself toward Gaunt feet first, foot talons flailing, and brought his hands together and down in a savage strike, like the bird for which he was named. Gaunt’s wrists flicked and knives appeared in his hands, crossed like an X to deflect the blow. The impact sent Gaunt stumbling back as Rooster whirled, foot blades spinning, driving Gaunt backward. Behind him, from the shadows, the one labeled Horse appeared, lunging to the ground, bracing himself on his hands, and swinging his legs around to deliver a powerful kick to Gaunt’s undefended back. Tom prepared to cry out, knowing that the blow from the assassin’s feet would drive Gaunt forward to be impaled on Rooster’s claws -- but it was already too late.

For Gaunt had simply seemed to vanish, leaving Horse’s powerful feet to pass through empty air -- and slide with a horrible meaty sound through each of Rooster’s outstretched talons. As Horse howled in pain, and Rooster struggled to free himself, Gaunt appeared again, pistols in hand, and with two blazing reports shot each man in the head.

There was a rush of moving air, and the Celestial Sign labeled Rabbit came bounding over Hark’s head, feet spinning in a wild flurry of kicks, to catch Gaunt across the face with a heavy ironclad boot and send him tumbling to the floor. Rabbit leapt again, heavy boots poised to crush Gaunt’s rib cage, but the Gaunt rolled aside. Rabbit’s feet landed heavy on the stone floor, sending cracks spiderwebbing outward from the point of impact with a sound like gunfire.

Gaunt struck out with the side of his hand, snapping Rabbit’s knee sideways. The assassin shrieked in pain as Gaunt’s feet swung around, sweeping Rabbit off his feet. In a neat motion, Gaunt lunged upright, snatching one of the ironclad boots off Rabbit’s left foot.

Almost casually, Gaunt dropped the heavy boot sole-first from the level of his shoulders directly onto Rabbit’s face. It stayed there, and Rabbit kicked once, and was still.

“More,” Gaunt called to the darkness. And someone dropped with a shrill cry onto his back, driving him facefirst against the stone floor.

Gaunt’s wrists flicked, his daggers appearing in his hands, to stab the attacker. But the one known as Monkey had already vaulted off his back, turning a neat handspring across the stone tiles, to land in a crouch Tom recognized as the monkey style of the Chinese martial arts, low to the ground, loping almost comically.

A low rumble of annoyance issued from Gaunt’s throat, and he got to one knee. And was promptly slammed, hard, from the side, to tumble skidding across the floor, knives falling glittering from his hands.

The one bearing the sign of Ox was a mountainous man with a broad, impassive face. He charged again, low to the ground, battering Gaunt with a volley of short, brutal strikes with his fists and elbows. Tom moved forward instinctively, only to find his nose gripped by two strong, skinny fingers. They steered his head in the direction of Monkey, who leered at him and shook his head, as if to say, Wait your turn.

Gaunt curled into a ball, then shot his legs out into Ox’s face, shattering the man’s nose. Ox reeled backwards, giving Gaunt enough time to stagger to his feet. Gaunt struck out with a sharp blow from his left fist, but Ox encircled his wrist with a single massive hand, holding it pinned, inches from the big man’s bloodied face.

Ox grinned, white teeth showing through the red streaming from his swollen nose. Gaunt's fingers moved.

Ox’s face became a sudden cloud of fire -- flash powder, Tom recognized. Ox screamed again, his skin burnt deep red, his eyebrows wisping smoke, and Gaunt tumbled backward, pulling the big man with him. Gaunt brought his feet up under Ox’s chest as his back hit the floor, and kept rolling, flipping the big man over toward the sprawled body of Rooster.

Ox landed on his back, tried to get up, and found himself somehow pinned. He looked down, with considerable surprise, to see one of Rooster’s talons jutting through his chest. His head lolled to the side and his eyes emptied, his face still etched with a look of bewildered astonishment.

Monkey charged forward, leaping and tumbling across the floor, snatching Gaunt’s knives up from the floor and slashing out with them. Gaunt grunted as the knives raked across his upstretched forearm, pistols appearing in his hands, but Monkey had already darted into the gloom.
Again and again Monkey struck from the shadows; again and again Gaunt’s own blades slashed through his sleeves and coat; again and again Gaunt fired the pistols at nothingness, at the empty space where his attacker had been. The smoking shells rang out as they spiralled from the chambers of Gaunt’s pistol onto the stone floor, until both pistols clicked, empty.

Monkey dropped from directly above Gaunt, landing hard on his shoulders, legs wrapped tightly around Gaunt’s neck, ready to snap it. Hark dashed forward, leaping, swinging his blade. A blow from Monkey slapped into his chest and sent him crashing back to the floor, gasping. Ruby drew her pistol, and Monkey hand flashed out, whipping one of Gaunt’s knives at her. Tom dived, knocking Ruby to the floor as the knife whistled inches above their heads. The pistol clattered from her hand and slid into the shadows.

Monkey tightened his grip on Gaunt’s neck, slowly choking him. “Stupid man!” he sneered in Mandarin. “You’re out of bullets!”

Gaunt let the pistols drop from his hands, and shook his wrists. Monkey found two smaller pistols pressed up against his rib cage.

“I’ve got more,” Gaunt replied, in equally flawless Mandarin, and pulled both triggers.

Monkey hadn’t even hit the floor before the others were upon Gaunt, one rippling in a wave of crimon silk through the air over Tom and Ruby’s prone bodies, striking from four directions with singular and deadly purpose. Pig struck low, driving his hands like twin tusks into Gaunt’s lower back. Sheep charged headfirst, driving his iron-hard skull into Gaunt’s stomach, punching the breath from his lungs in a sandpaper gasp. Snake struck from the left, digging two hooked fingers into a nerve cluster in Gaunt’s neck; Tom saw his whole left side stiffen, momentarily paralyzed. And leaping from a stone geartooth above, in the eerie green light, Tiger swung the three-pronged steel claw clenched in his right fist in a long sweeping arc that would terminate in the center of Gaunt’s skull.

Gaunt fell, the guns falling from his fingers. He fell the right, to be precise, and quickly, pulling a surprised Snake with him. Before Tiger could move, his claws found purchase deep in Snake’s face. From the floor, Gaunt drove a flat hand like a knife up under Tiger’s ribs while driving a knee up into Sheep’s jaw. Tom heard bone crack, and saw Sheep spit teeth.

Gaunt scrambled sideways, out through the gap between Tiger and Pig, who now found himself stumbling backward under Sheep’s sagging weight. In a crouch, he swept one leg into the backs of Tiger’s knees, and as the assassin toppled backward, clawed hands flailing over his head, Gaunt rose and grabbed him by the ankles.

“Catch a tiger by the tail,” Gaunt hissed, and heaved with all his might.

He swung Tiger’s entire body into the air like a club. Centrifugal force flung Tiger’s claws out over his head, and there they raked across the throats of Pig and Sheep, and left both men, gurgling, to die. Gaunt kept swinging until Tiger’s head collided with the nearest tooth of one of the great stone gears. Something cracked, perhaps the stone. Perhaps not.

Gaunt dropped Tiger’s limp body. His shoulders drooped, and he breathed even more raggedly than usual, right arm clutching his left, trying to squeeze sensation back into the reawakening muscles. Tom saw something move in the dark behind Gaunt, a glint of golden thread, and before he could shout a warning, Gaunt whirled--

And Dragon struck, fingers digging into Gaunt’s chest, squeezing, twisting cruelly deep into the muscle. Tom had only heard the technique described in whispers, by ancient masters who shuddered at the thought.

“Dim mak,” he said softly.

Dragon smiled, withdrew his hand, and folded the fingers one by one back into his palm until the knuckles cracked. Gaunt staggered forward, sagging against Dragon, his knees seeming to melt away from under him. Tom heard Gaunt draw several harsh, shuddering breaths.

And then Gaunt began to laugh.

Softly at first, then louder, until he threw back his head and all but howled with maniacal delight, his laughter echoing like a cloud of bats in every corner of the chamber.

Dragon drew back, stunned, eyes wide with horror. “This cannot be!” he spat. His hands shot out to once more administer the deadly strike, but this time, he froze. Gaunt held a sawed-off shotgun in one gloved hand, pressed full against the assassin’s stomach, angled up.

“You sought,” Gaunt said, through the tattered trailing-off of his laughter, “to stop my heart.” He leaned his face in close, and whispered into Dragon’s ear. “But I have none to stop.”

The report of the shotgun echoed through the chamber. Dragon flew backward off his feet and vanished into the dark.

And Tom, at last, found himself letting out a breath he’d been holding for the last five minutes.

He helped Hark to his feet, still wheezing a bit from Monkey’s strike, as Ruby borrowed the Chemoluminous Rod to rummage around in a corner and recover her pistol. Gaunt stood still, the shotgun having vanished back into the folds of his coat, and looked in turn at each of the dozen dead men lying around him.

“You’re alive,” Tom said to him. Gaunt nodded.

“Scar tissue has its uses,” he rasped. His finger nodded in midair, wavering from one dead Celestial Sign to the other. “Six thousand, two hundred and seventy-eight,” he said at last, with grim satisfaction.

“You cracked six thousand, old man?” Hark asked, his breath returning at last.

“Business is good,” Gaunt nodded. “Shall we go?”

“You didn’t have to kill them,” Tom told him softly. “You’re good enough. You could have showed them mercy.”

Behind his wrappings, Gaunt’s eyes slowly narrowed. “I did,” he replied, his voice barely more than a whisper. The two men stared each other down for several long seconds, until Ruby physically wedged herself between them, a hand on either man’s chest.

“Enough,” she snapped. “We don’t have time for this. Listen.”

Tom felt it now: A soft vibration thrumming through the stone floor, and the faint roar of distant, vast machinery.

“He’s starting it up,” Tom said. “Let’s find the next door.”

It was solid white marble, smooth and cold to the touch, and when Tom and Hark hauled it open, all four companions shielded their eyes from the sudden burst of harsh white light.

The room was wide, and vast, and completely empty. Aside from the thrum of the machines, louder now, there was nothing within but a grid of squares, roughly nine feet to a side, painted across the floor, and one final arched door on the far side.

“More redecorations,” Ruby sighed. “I don’t suppose we just get to walk across?”

“Let’s find out,” Tom said, digging in the pockets of his jacket. “I’ve got just the thing.”

He drew forth a small apple. The others looked at him strangely. Gaunt coughed.

“What?” Tom said. “I get hungry on adventures.” He lobbed the apple high into the air, and watched it thunk down on a square in the center of the room.

Oiled hinges slid. The four adjacent squares flipped over, and machinery unfolded on springs, surrounding the defenseless apple. A flamethrower roared; an automated pair of machine guns spat bullets into the floor; and from opposite sides, a set of scissored blades snicked through the air a dozen times in a single second.

Then, quietly and dutifully, the machinery retracted, the panels flipped back , and four innocuous white tiles surrounded a scorched, bullet-pocked tile and the charred remains of Tom’s apple.

“You must be joking,” Hark said.

“He’s really stepped his game up, I guess,” Tom said, letting out an amazed breath. “I wonder how he got those blades to fit--”

“Focus, Morrow,” Gaunt hissed. “How do we get across?”

Tom closed his eyes and popped a stick of gum into his mouth. He chewed softly, the fingers of his left hand unconsciously straying to the signet ring on his right, twisting the silver band with the round, polished nugget of amber band back and forth. His companions waited. A minute passed.

Tom’s eyes snapped open. He spat the gum neatly back into his wrapper and stuck it in his pocket for later.

“We don’t,” he said, and grinned.

1932: 6. The Laughing Corpse

The jutting ebony spire of the Wormwater Building never failed to inspire a shudder from all who viewed it. It seemed a distressing void in a Chicago skyline of proud white and gray stone. The whole of the building was clad in slabs of midnight granite that absorbed all daylight, but seemed to glow against the night sky. Its angles seemed all slightly wrong, as if the tower, climbing 39 stories to a strange tangle of black metal points that menaced the clouds, was the funhouse reflection of some straighter, more honest building somewhere unseen.

Its history did nothing to help its reputation. It was the last design of Abingdon Crumb, the legendarily eccentric and visionary rival to Adler and Sullivan and their fellow titans of Chicago architecture. It was said that, in the final stages of its design, he had confided to close associates that imps and fairies had clambered in his window nights to consult with him upon its structure. The day construction broke ground in 1928, he mistook his wife for a sinister agent of the Anti-Pope as she sat with him at the breakfast table, and attempted to murder her with a mercifully unloaded revolver. He spent the rest of his days in a sanitarium, wrapped in sturdy burlap restraints and the unspooling narrative of his own mad ramblings.

Five men died in the building’s construction, in falls from great heights and tumbling collpases of steel girders, and once by switchblade knife, in a dispute over a lunchtime hand of cards. One more vanished entirely. Legend had it that he’d fallen into the concrete foundations as they were being poured, and was forever entombed. Nonetheless, Elias Wormwater, tycoon of international trade, would not see his hard-won investment go to waste, and moved into the penthouse offices the week after construction was completed. The lower floors remained empty, though Wormwater remained convinced that tenants would come.

Three months later, in the deep, frozen clutches of a pitiless Chicago winter, Elias Wormwater received word that a typhoon off Toyko had sunk two-thirds of his fleet. The next day, he learned that the shipment of cotton on which he had relied to see him through had burned, by unknown means, along with the ships that carried it, in the docks of New Orleans.

All his accomplished in ash and ruin and rust, Wormater finished his cup of coffee, told his secretary he wished to take the air on his balcony, and promptly leapt over the railing to his death far below.

Hard times fell across the city like a shroud, and the Wormwater building remained vacant, the banner advertising for tenancy slowly growing tattered by winds and rain. And as the life of the city continued all around it, the Wormwater building stood still and silent, and if footfalls echoed in the disconcerting angles of its oddly canted hallways, there was no one to hear them.

No one save Violet Sullivan.

The social columns had long since tired of speculating on her absence from the balls and galas at which she had once held court. Those who had long abandoned the polite pretense of friendship with her clucked their tongues, when they spoke of her at all, and decided that she hadn’t been the same since the police had recovered her from sordid business with the Hatchetman of Moline. At 23, the pretty young heiress to the Sullivan Meats empire had retreated entirely from society. There were even ugly rumors that she was attempting to learn business.

Night after night, the limousine would drop Violet Sullivan off in the vacant, paper-blown streets of the South Loop, where the Wormwater Building loomed over the neat rows of printinghouses, and drive away into the gloom. She walked the streets without fear, head held high, and entered the Wormwater through an alley door, into its dark and cobwebbed basement. And there, passing boilers and generators and things scuttling in the gloom, she would make her way to the steel cage of the secret elevator, open its screeching metal door with the strange brass key she kept around her neck at all times, and enter the four-digit code that would ascend her to the penthouse.

Violet had always been a fearless young woman. Even the hardened officers of Chicago’s finest had been quietly impressed, when they’d led her, barefoot, disheveled, and blanket-wrapped from the Hatchetman’s lair, with her calmness and presence of mind. The play of light and shadows on the vacant floors of the Wormwater enchanted her as the elevator bore her upward each night. She imagined it some fairy-tale castle, suffering under sad and terrible magic, and herself as the knight come to brave its unknown depths.

The dark corners of the empty floors were harsh and jutting, but when at last the elevator reached the penthouse, the night became softer, more sinuous and velvet. The new tenant -- who, indeed, owned the building entire, though he preserved the tattered for-sale banner far below -- had kept much of the original furnishings, the soft art deco cornices aglow with shielded light. Each night Violet would pad in stocking feet, her shoes in hand -- for she loved the feel of the thick rugs laid down against the hardwood floor -- past walls draped in the glinting steel of exotic weapons, and the glimmers of golden threads in Oriental tapestries, past the workship full of things that must never be touched, and the room of eyeless false faces on featureless mannequin busts, to the chamber of her protector and friend.

He had saved her the year before from the cruel bite of the Hatchetman’s blade, striding from the basement shadows with eyes as blazing as the twin pistols in his hands. And when she had faced him without fear over the Hatchetman’s lifeless body, she had seen a curious respect illuminate those eyes, and something painful and more tender besides. The hand he reached out to grasp hers, to lead her up from the killer’s burning abbatoir to the safety of the cold night air, was softly gloved, the grip surprisingly gentle.

Now she served as his eyes and ears in the sunlit world, a messenger to bear him news of injustices great and small, to pore through the musty shadows of libraries and halls of records, and arm him with the knowledge he needed. His girl Friday, she laughingly thought of herself, and only friend -- and sometimes, in the secret depths of her heart, perhaps something more.

He would be asleep by the time she arrived, every night; indeed, she came, to the best of her knowledge, incognito, and left at the dawn’s first light, long before he woke. She would sit in the overstuffed chair by his bed and watch over him, as she liked to think he watched over her. And when he began to scream raggedly in his sleep, as he often did, she would lay a small, cool hand against the scar-puckered skin of his brow, and he would sink back into calm.

She came one night to find the bed empty, and for an instant her heart was clutched with cold fingers. She would often find him bruised or freshly bandaged, but never absent entirely. But from the hallway behind her, she heard him clear his throat, and turned to find him still in the long black coat and fine tuxedo he wore out on his nightly work. He stoked a fire in the fireplace, and pulled two chairs close, for outside the winter winds howled jealously, and the building shivered in its steel bones. Then he bade her sit with him, and long into the night, for the first time, Mister Gaunt told Violet Sullivan the tale of his two deaths.

Michael Gant was practicing his close-in work the night he died for the first time. He sat in the Model T parked in the shadows of the Sullivan Meats plant on the edges of the stockyards, where the muddy ground sloped down to the endless shores of Lake Michigan, and passed a silver dollar loping across the backs of his knuckles. He palmed it with a wave of one hand, made it vanish into the other, produced it from behind his ear. Then he did it again.

This was the same plant in which his father had cracked open his skull on the offal-slick killing floor, and made a widow of Michael’s mother, and left himself and his older brother Ryan as the men of the family. The days were long, the work hard, the factories stinking and loud and jostling, and the paychecks far too small. Lying in bed at night in the tiny attic room he shared with his brother, Michael read secondhand books of magic, and practiced with the coin till his fingers could do the tricks themselves, and dreamed of himself onstage in tuxedo and tails, making ten impossible things happen in an hour to thunderous applause.

Ryan, the elder, had perhaps more practical dreams. America was a thirsty nation in those parched days of Prohibition, and a young man with the right connections and enough ambition could well make his fortune in slaking that thirst. It was Ryan who persuaded Michael to quit his job at the railyard, to come down with him to the back room of Kelly’s Tavern each night, and to toil, well-paid but uneasy, in the employ of jolly, red-faced Rooney Mudd, the boss of Bridgeport.

Tonight, in the shadow of Sullivan Meats, was of a piece with many other nights, some sweltering, some bone-cold, in which Michael and Ryan would drive to some remote spot by the shore and swing a lantern high to welcome the boats making their quiet way with the wind down from Canada. They’d offload small shipments -- a few cases at a time-- and rumble back to Kelly’s, the Model T clinking and jangling with every bump in the road, and call it a night.

This involved a great deal of waiting, which was fine by Michael; it gave him time to practice. He had not cast aside his dreams of illusion, only hidden them away, under the loose board in his room where he kept his pay in tight bundles, saving for proper books and the illusions he’d seen in the magicians’ catalogs -- and perhaps, one day, a tuxedo.

He watched through the frost-speckled windshield as, at the edge of the shore below, his brother held the lantern high, and from the lake the answering lights winked back. And then suddenly, the world got very bright.

Headlights, in startling pairs, switched on, caging Ryan in their beams, and Michael watched in horror as three black cars rumbled in from the night to surround him. Off on the lake, the boat waited at a certain shamed and cowardly distance. Tall men in broad hats climbed out of the cars, the shadows of Tommy guns slung in the crooks of their elbows. Michael saw Ryan make a break for it, swinging a wild fist at the face of one of the oncoming men. He caught a rifle butt to the stomach for his courage, and another to the back of his neck, and went down on his knees in the mud.

Michael heard distant laughter, and in the glow of the headlights, a tall man stepped forward and hefted a fire axe.

As they had so many times with the coin, Michael Gant’s fingers acted of their own accord. Before he knew it, he was roaring down the slope in the Model T, wheel clenched in one hand, the snub-nosed revolver his brother kept under the seat in the other. Michael’s car smashed into one of the intruders’ wagons, and as the men turned in shock and surprise, he fired the gun twice through the windshield.

The glass cracked and starred and the two closest men went down in spurts of blood, tumbling onto their unprepared comrades. Michael rocketed out the driver’s door and dragged his brother stumbling up out of the mud, and when the tall man with the axe snapped out of his shock and came charging toward him, Michael fired blindly. The man howled and went down clutching his bleeding knee.

“We’re leaving,” Michael said, holding the gun trained on the remaining men, their arms raised high, their faces twisted with hate. His teeth chattered. “We’re leaving, and none of you is stopping us.”

“You go ahead and run,” said the tall man slowly, through jaws clenched in pain. The tall man looked up, and in the glow of the headlights, Michael saw the face of Niccolo Salvatore, the grand capo of Chicago, so feared that even among the Irish, his name was but whispered, and then only followed by a hurried prayer. “Run as far, and as fast, as you can, mick,” Salvatore said. “It don’t matter. I remember your face now. You just run, and keep running. I could use the exercise.”

In the cab of the Model T, Ryan silent and wide-eyed beside him, Michael threw the car into reverse, and roared fishtailing backwards up the slope. As he paused to swing the car around, he heard the distant chatter of machine gun fire. The passenger-side windows exploded, canvas tore, the side mirror simply disintegrated. Michael stomped the gas, and the car rattled off into the thickening winter night.

And only when they were two blocks away and counting did Michael look over to Ryan, and see him slumped in the seat, breathing raggedly, wet red wounds steaming from his chest in the cold air.

“Don’t you be dying just yet,” Michael prayed, rounding a corner on two wheels. Ryan gurgled something in response. “We’ll get you to Kelly’s, we’ll call Dr. Flanagan. You just keep breathing.”

Ryan said nothing.

“You hear me?” Michael cried, desperate, and turned to shake his brother. And the world again grew very bright, and somewhere a horn shreiked, and Michael turned back to see the broken windshield filled with roaring light--

The world shuddered and spun itself, and battered Michael Gant from every direction. And when he awoke a minute later, upside down in the crumpled wreckage of his car, his brother was dead beside him.

Michael pulled himself from the twisted wreck and ran on shaking, bruised legs, past the angry shouting of the truck driver who’d hit them, down the street, across the neighborhood, into the railyard. A train was roaring past, to who knows where, and he leapt for it and tumbled inside an empty boxcar. The gun he’d left in the wreck of the Model T, next to his brother. All he had left to his name was two dollar bills, three dimes, a nickel, nine pennies -- and the silver dollar coin.

Michael Gant died that night, for the first time, and then he traveled. He crossed the seas in the holds of rusting freighters, swabbling decks, hauling cargo, speaking to few, befriending fewer still. He went ashore in Shanghai, and the continent swallowed him whole. For five long years, he vanished from written history.

And here Mister Gaunt paused in his telling, the indigo wrappings around his head rustling softly as he leaned his head back against his chair. The wild screeched and rattled at the windows. Violet pulled the soft silk blanket he’d given her closer about her shoulders, and asked, “What did you do?

Mister Gaunt gazed into the fire, as if discerning shapes from the dancing flames. “I learned,” he said at last, in his soft, scraping voice.

In 1925, a bold young magician appeared on the Vienna stage, calling himself Indigo the Magificent. In his midnight blue turban and black tux and tails, he claimed to have mastered the ancient secrets of the Oriental mystics, and the audiences who flocked to see him were not disappointed. He fit himself into a hatbox, only to have it be opened and found empty, and to descend from the catwalks above to rapturous applause. He communed with the head in a great glass ball, plucking answers to his audience’s questions from the denizens of the Lands Beyond. He turned himself into a tiger, just long enough to perform a card trick with the aid of his lovely assistant, and then reappeared as himself, spitting yellow canary feathers and bits of the Ace of Spades from his mouth to the great delight of the assembled spectators. And he concluded every show, not with some spectacular feat, but in a simple wooden chair at the front of the stage, jacket off, gloveless, shirtsleeve rolled up to his elbows, making silver dollars appear in midair, and vanish, and appear in the pockets of his astounded viewers.

Nearly as enchanting as Indigo himself was his assistant, a dark-eyed beauty with long, silken hair and skin the color of coffee and milk. Her name was Zulheika -- Zully, he called her, to her laughing protestations -- and she was his closest friend, and bride. It was said among the finer circles of society, in Vienna and Paris and London and everywhere else he appeared, that she had been the daughter of the Sultan of Shandemar, and that Indigo had won her hand by making the brass tiger statues in the Sultan’s throne room come to life and prowl about the room.

Michael Gant, alias Indigo the Magnificent, would laugh about this sometimes in the dead of night, with Zully soft and warm beside him. It was patently untrue -- they had, in fact, been lion statues, and he’d made them dance. And he’d captured her heart long before her father ever knew to consent. She was kind and courageous, possessed of a preternatural grace, flawed only by the jagged, ugly scar that wound its way around her forearm. It was the only thing of which she would not speak to him -- she told him, once, that it was the cost of saving her father’s life, and that she considered it a bargain. And Michael loved her all the more for the mystery of it.

In early 1926, after a triumphant tour of Europe, they sailed for America, and in the dazzling footlights of Broadway, Indigo the Magnificent unveiled his most remarkable illusion yet: the Flaming Coffin. It was, as expected, a sensation, and bookings appeared for them throughout the nation. When he heard about the planned engagement at the Chicago Theater, Michael wavered, but only for a moment. After all, on stage he wore padding in his cheeks, false lines around his eyes, and enhanced the profile of his nose with putty, to better preserve his mystery and anonymity in private life. And it had been six years, six long and distant years. Surely he was safe.

He had his advance man make discreet inquiries as his company rattled westward by rail. There was a map waiting for him when he arrived at Union Station in Chicago, and he sent Zully ahead to the theater with a kiss, and hailed a cab. It was raining by the time he got to the cemetary, and cold besides, but he bundled up his overcoat and trudged through the grass until he found the headstones of his mother and brother. From each of his sleeves, he produced a red rose, and laid them on the graves, and departed.

But the groundskeeper saw him, and saw the graves he honored, and remembered the instructions he’d been given years before. He went to his shed and picked up the telephone.

Indigo the Magnificent played that night to a packed house, relishing the laughter and cheers of the city of his birth. And as the show drew to a close, he stepped out onto an empty stage in his shimmering blue turban and his jet-black, crisp tuxedo, and Zully by his side in a glimmering white gown.

“I know I may not look it,” he told the crowd confidentially, “but I have been a wicked man.”

At this, his turban twitched, and the audience chuckled. The chuckle grew to open laughter as he reached up, lifted the turban, and produced a fat white rabbit. “This little fellow is a poor judge of character, I assure you,” he said, and the audience laughed harder. He tucked the rabbit into his tuxedo jacket, and it seemed to vanish.

“As I was saying, I have been a wicked man,” Indigo continued. “And if I have been redeemed, it is only through the grace, and the graciousness, of an accompanying angel.” And at this he turned to Zully and bowed, and she smiled back at him, radiant.

His turban twitched again. Indigo sighed theatrically, and plucked it off his head, and inverted it. He stuck his entire arm inside, up to the elbow, and the audience gasped.

“I can tell this fellow will be nothing but trouble,” he said, “so I’d best get him out of the way, lest he stow away for my next trick, and be roasted alive.” He rummaged through the turban, pulling out a handful of doves, a long string of silks that he promptly stuffed back in --”I haven’t the time for that now,” he said, to more laughter -- a deck of carts that slipped from his hands and vanished in bursts of flame, and at last, the offending white rabbit. He handed the fat, twitching animal to Zully to the audience’s applause.

“To my lovely assistants,” he cried, as Zully carried the rabbit offstage, beaming. “Both of them.”

Behind him, his stagehands wheeled out a silk-draped platform. Something solid and upright, taller than a man, stood upon it, covered in a black muslin shroud.

“Disbelieve if you wish, but I have sinned in my time, and the Devil has never ceased in his efforts to claim me,” Indigo said, walking to the platform and gripping the black shroud in both white-gloved hands. “Tonight, he may yet have his chance.”

To a flourish from the orchestra in the pit below, Indigo yanked away the shroud to reveal a massive black coffin of polished mahogany, ringed with bars of steel. The lid was inlaid with the leering face of some Oriental demon, and three thick latches hung from the edge of the lid at intervals on the steel bands.

The stagehands stepped forward to assist, spinning the platform in a slow circle as Indigo opened the lid to reveal the white velvet lining inside. The audience saw all sides of the coffin, and even the keenest eyes could detect no trick, no seam. It was solid wood and sturdy iron.

At last, Indigo stood before the open coffin, and then, to the gasps of women and children in the crowd, stepped backward into it.

“The Devil is a greedy sort, and at some time or another, he comes to claim us all,” Indigo said. “But even the meanest of us may be redeemed. All it takes is a little faith. I have faith, ladies and gentlemen. Do you?”

With that, he swung the lid shut with a thunderous clap of wood. The orchestra struck up the overture to A Night on Bald Mountain, and the stagehands stepped forth with three thick iron locks, and bound him within.

The audience waited, breathlessly, for thirty endless seconds. The coffin began to rattle, wobbling from side to side. One of the locks began to budge, as if of its own accord. The spectators leaned forward in their seats--

In a blinding burst of torrential flame, the coffin caught fire! Diabolical laughter echoed throughout the hall, mingling with the startled screams of onlookers, as the coffin continued to rattle back and forth, more urgently, strange green and violet flames engulfing it. The stagehands rushed forth with buckets of water, hurling them on the blaze, but it only roared all the higher. The iron bands groaned. The locks, wreathed in fire, rattled. The wood began to splinter.

The coffin split open with a mighty crack, and collapsed into a pile of flaming shards of wood and twisted, curling strands of metal. There was no one inside.

A hush fell over the hall as the stagehands finally managed to smother the blaze with the black muslin shroud. No one moved. No one breathed.

From the back of the auditorium, a single person began to clap, loudly. Heads turned. A spotlight lanched down from above the proscenium.

Indigo the Magnificent, unburnt and none the worse for wear, sat far in the back, in the cheapest seat of the house, applauding.

“Nice try, Old Nick!” he shouted, rising to his feet. “Better luck next time.”

Pandemonium. The theater erupted in wild applause, and Indigo the Maginificent dashed down the center aisle amid showers of joyously flung programs and leaped up on stage. As Zully ran out from the wings to take his hand, he bowed deeply, then removed his turban. The white rabbit sat perched, blinking baffled in the spotlight, on his head, and the cheers redoubled. The three of them stood, magician, lady love, and furry, befuddled prop, and tossed silver dollars from thin air into the outstretched hands of the roaring crowd.

Michael and Zully were the last to leave the theater that night. They stayed hours after everyone else had packed up and gone home, chasing each other through the rows of empty seats, playing tag like children, drunk on applause and deeply in love.

And when, at last, they came backstage one last time to call a cab for their hotel, they were unprepared for the two men with guns who stood waiting for them, or the tall man with a cane who sat perched upon the prop coffin used -- before a clever bit of bait-and-switch-- for the opening part of the Flaming Coffin act.

“I’m sorry, gentlemen,” Michael said, moving himself slowly in front of Zully as the elation in him curdled to dread. “I don’t give autographs this late after the show.”

The tall man on the coffin stood slowly, and walked limping toward them, leaning on a cane. He lifted his head, and from the shadows under the brim of his hat, Michael recognized the weathered, vengeful face of Niccolo Salvatore.

“You didn’t run far enough,” the crime boss said, and snapped his fingers.

The two goons fired simultaneously, bullets lancing through each of Michael’s shoulders. He collapsed to his knees, biting his lip to blot out the pain surging through him. Zully screamed, and one of the men tore her off him and slugged her across the face with the butt of his gun.

“I hear you did a very nice trick,” Salvatore said, opening the lid of the coffin. The second goon dragged Michael bleeding across the wooden backstage floor toward the open lid. “I’ve always liked magic myself. Got a reputation for it. I’m good at making people disappear.” The goons chuckled. “Not so good with the reappearing part.”

“My wife,” Michael gasped. “Let her go. She’s not part of this.”

“You worry about yourself first,” Salvatore said, as if he were ordering a drink. The second goon muscled Michael into the coffin. “I wanna see you do that flaming coffin trick myself. Only this time, I’m gonna make it a little more challenging.”

The lid slammed shut, plunging Michael’s world into blackness. He heard sloshing, fluid slapping against the sides of the coffin, and the click of heavy locks. He pushed with weak, agonized arms against the lid, but it didn’t budge.

Salvatore spoke from somewhere outside, distant, muffled. “You tell the Devil I said hello, would you?” Michael heard, clear as a pin drop, the scratch and flare of a match lighting. And then his world was smoke and flame and screaming, some of it his wife’s, and some of it his own.

Michael Gant died for the second time that night, locked in a flaming coffin, in a burning theater, mere helpless feet from the near-unrecognizable body of his wife.

And the thing that emerged from the coffin, too many agonized minutes later, the thing who stumbled grieving and smoldering into the night, was no longer Michael Gant, or Indigo the Magnificent, or perhaps even a human being at all. All extraneous parts of his body and soul had been burnt away in the blaze.

All that remained was a ragged, raw core of terrible wrath.

Nine months later, in the library of his lakefront mansion, Niccolo Salvatore sat up in a smoking jacket, reading Dante in the original Italian late into the night. He had just reached the twenty-fifth canto when he heard something out on the garden. The cry of a night-bird, perhaps. Or a muffled scream.

Elsewhere in the mansion, lights snapped on. Doors opened. Wary men with guns, lean and confident survivors of many a shootout with the Irish, or the Poles, or the Germans, or the cops, made their way out into the night. Salvatore resumed his reading.

Gunshots snapped outside, one, two. Silence. Salvatore walked calmly to his writing desk, opened the side drawer, and pulled out the loaded .44.

There was a crash at the opposite end of the house. Scuffling. Gunfire. Salvatore gripped the pistol tighter and smiled. These were the times when he felt glad to be alive. And then the lights went out.

Salvatore waited until his eyes adjusted to the faint light bleeding in from the windows. He tried the phone; dead. More gunshots, closer now. Joey Wingnut -- Salvatore recognized the voice -- gave a single, agonized screech.

Salvatore cocked the gun and stepped out into the darkened hallway. In slippers, he tread softly across the marble floors, stepping over the bodies of dead friends. His rooms were wrecked, men tossed around like rag dolls, contorted and still in the midst of tables and bookshelves. In the kitchen, an avalanche of plates had spilled from one of the bullet-pocked cabinets. It rested neatly in an unbroken stack, next to Tommy Scarlutti’s head, which was twisted the wrong way around on his neck. The door to the garden swung wide open, and Salvatore peered out into the darkness. It breathed softly, inviting him. Waiting.

He ran all the way back to his study, to the hidden catch in the bookcase where he kept the shotgun. Whatever this was, it was bigger than a pistol. He crossed the moonlit room, flipped the catch, and saw to his horror that the compartment behind was empty.

Behind him, someone lit a match.

Salvatore turned and emptied his pistol until it clicked. He hit nothing but the padding of the back of his reading chair. A single snuffed match wisped smoke, smoldering, on the cover of his copy of the Inferno.

Another match struck, and Salvatore whirled to find himself face to face with a fearfully slender man, garbed in a black wool coat and a smoke-stinking tuxedo, his whole head bandaged in fabric from an iridescent indigo turban.

“Nice try, Old Nick,” the intruder hissed. “Better luck next time.” Bony, gloved hands shoved Salvatore hard, and he stumbled backward against his desk.

“Gant,” Salvatore said at last, fear closing his throat. He knew this fear; he’d last felt it at the age of three, when the men came in the night for his father, and he fought to choke it back down. “You’re a dead man.”

“Yes,” the figure said softly. “We have that in common.”

Salvatore lashed out with his right first, and the intruder caught it effortlessly, squeezing until the bones cracked and Salvatore cried out. The figure let go, and Salvatore stumbled back and sat on the edge of the desk, clutching his hand.

“Perhaps I’ll kill you now,” the intruder said softly, with the same polished rhythm of a magician on the stage. He moved his fingers with a flourish, and suddenly there were gleaming silver pistols in his hands. “But no. Too quick. Too merciful.” Another flourish, and the pistols were gone, replaced by curving daggers. “Disfigurement, perhaps. The clean kind--” another flourish, and the knives became tiny bottles, each labeled DANGER - HYDROCHLORIC ACID. “Or the messy kind.” Flourish. The bottles were gone, and the intruder’s hands were empty once more.

“The Devil take you,” Salvatore said. His fingers groped behind him on the desk, in the dark. They closed around a letter opener.

“He did,” the intruder said. “He chewed me well, and found me not to his liking, and he spat me out again. Not wishing to leave him hungry, I made him a promise. The souls of ten thousand wicked men, singly or in aggregate, delivered to him by my hands.”

Salvatore struck, fast as lightning, plunging the point of the letter opener toward the dark figure’s heart. But he struck only air, and then his wounded hand was twisted behind him, so painfully it blotted out all other sensation, and he was forced down against the wood of his desk. The voice that had once belonged to Michael Gant hissed into his ear, so close that Salvatore could feel its infernal heat.

“Ten thousand evil souls, Salvatore. You’ll be among them.” Distantly, Salvatore felt some sort of wrenching motion against the numbed flesh of his pinned hand. He smelled something burning. “But not tonight. Perhaps tomorrow. Perhaps next year. Or perhaps, simply, at the time and place of my choosing. Your life is mine, and you draw breath at my amusement. Remember that. And sleep well.”

There was a rustle of cloth, and the wrenching pain subsided, and Salvatore stood up to find himself alone in his darkened library, weeping like a child. And all around him, the echo of a dead man’s mocking, diabolical laughter.

That was where the telling of Mister Gaunt’s tale ended, as dawn glowed softly above the blue line of the lake outside. Violet Sullivan left for her own bed, and troubled dreams, not knowing the one final detail, the part he’d chosen not to tell her. The part that was told and retold every night, in some form or another, to fearful criminals throughout the Chicago underworld. A tale that kept on living, long after Salvatore had died of his own madness in a tiny padded cell.

Mister Gaunt had not told her that Salvatore had put his hands to his head, shaking, only to find one of them missing. The right arm now ended in a pulpy stump, still sizzling where the acid had cauterized it.

And as the nerve endings in his numbed, mutilated arm reawakened, and the agony surged through them to his brain, Salvatore turned to the empty compartment in the bookcase to see his own severed hand sitting inside.

Abracadabra.

1932: 5. The Twelve Celestial Signs

Harker Windham, Lord Havoc of the Lost World, left the ground. His legs coiled like springs, calloused soles of his bare feet scraping against ancient bark, and rebounded off the trunk of a nearby tree. Hark turned a somersault in the air to dodge the swiping tendrils of the Predator Vine, and landed at a run on the vine that held Tom Morrow perilously above the deadly plant’s gaping maw.

“Now, Gaunt!” he called, and on the far side of the plant, there was a sudden burst of air, and something caught fire.

The Predator Vine liked heat, hungered for heat, sensed it, even more than the motions of potential prey, through the network of sensitive roots and tendrils it unfurled beneath its host soil. Fire, Hark had learned in his last battle with the thing, was the ideal distraction.

He shifted balance deftly as the thick, scaly tendril on which he perched swung away from the Vine’s dripping jaws, whipping Tom away from the danger of slow, horrid digestion in its guts, and toward the only comparatively lesser danger of cracking his head open on the jungle floor below. Harker looked up at the dead creeper vines dangling from the tree limbs far above, did some quick instinctive calculations, and gripped his knives tight.

With a piercing cry, he brought the obsidian blade down through the hideous green meat of the vine on which he stood, severing it as if it had been made of water. The vine holding Tom went slack, and began to plunge toward the ground.

Hark leapt, caught a vine, swung one-handed through space, and caught Tom in the crook of one arm, grunting from the impact. The momentum of their swing carried them across the clearing, high into the branches of a tree on the opposite side, where Hark set Tom down with more expediency than grace.

“You all right, old sport?” Hark asked, as Tom caught his breath and snatched up the dangling Morrow Personal Immobilizer.

“I think there are twigs in my hair,” Tom said. “Otherwise, I’m okay. What can I do?”

“Air cover,” Hark said. “If you see anything on the plant that looks lovely, anything even slightly enticing -- shoot it.” He took a few steps back up one knotted limb of the tree, dashed forward, and swung out into the air toward Ruby.

She dangled by one ankle, contorting her body to hack at the tough skin of the tendrils that gripped her with a combat knife drawn from a holster in her boot. The wounds oozed sap that frothed and sizzled in the air; smoke was rising from the blade of Ruby’s knife, and in spots from her jacket where the sap had fallen.

Hark leapt free of the vine, slashing out with an obsidian blade in midair to sever the tendril holding Ruby. He caught her up with his other arm before she could even start to fall, reversed his grip on his blade arm, and slammed hard into the trunk of a tree, plunging the blade deep into the bark to arrest their fall.

“Hot damn,” said Ruby, as Hark hoised her one-handed onto a limb. “That looked like it hurt. Felt like it, too.”

“I’ll live,” Hark said through gritted teeth, hauling himself up on the branch beside her. “Still have your pistol?”

“Sure do,” Ruby said, drawing it from her jacket holster and cocking the hammer.

“Cover Gaunt,” Hark said.

“From what?”

Hark laughed bitterly. “From the offspring.” He dashed along the thick limb, feet thudding hollowly on the wood, and leaped to catch a vine.

On the jungle floor below, Gaunt stood his ground as the hungry, grasping tendrils of the Predator Vine turned and slithered their way across the undergrowth toward him. In each gloved hand, the man in the indigo wrappings held a burning branch, letting them wave slightly at his sides, like an orchestra conductor tuning up.

Buds bubbled and swelled on the Vine’s tendrils, poking through the thick green skin, erupting into flowers of violent orange and sunset pink. They were fat, inviting, arrestingly lovely. Gaunt watched, motionless, as they quivered slightly--

Fine gold dust -- narcotic, numbing pollen, to immobilize the hungry plant’s next meal-- hissed in sudden jets from the flowers. Gaunt thrust his torches at the dust, and the flames flared as the pollen clouds burned to ash. He plunged the flaming brands deep into the flowers, hearing the squeal and sizzle of stored water boiling to steam, and ducked just as the tendrils lashed out in blind wrath.

Above the mouth of the beast, leaping from tendril to tendril, clinging with only his toes, Hark swung his black stone knives wildly, hacking at one vine, then the next, letting the thing tangle itself in pursuit of him. Too late he saw purple flowers sprout on the vine behind him. Their petals slowly opened, disclosing bristling hearts of purple spines, spines that Hark had seen kill a man in mere seconds.

There were dangling vines above -- but too far. Below, the horrible wet maw waited. Hark braced himself to leap.

There was a spitting sound, and a glob of sticky resin whistled past his ear, slapping against the opening flower, hardening instantly, freezing the spines in place. Tom Morrow crouched against the trunk of his treetop perch, aimed the Immobilizer, and fired more globs of his patented Morrow Quik-Bond Formula tumbling through the air to splatter and harden against the deadly blooms.

“It works!” he shouted to Hark, as the Lord of the Lost World scaled the thrashing tendril toward the safety of the vines above.

“Might you ever test any of these gizmos in the laboratory?” Hark called back, rolling his eyes. ”Just for a change of pace?”

“Who has the time?” Tom replied, nailing two more sprouting spine-flowers with blasts from the immobilizer.

A hoarse cry from Gaunt drew both men’s eyes to the jungle floor. The ground beneath his feet was slithering, shifting, slick green pods bubbling up through the soil. They unfolded like sodden umbrellas, revealing smaller versions of the central beast, each round hungry mouth larger than a man’s head. The Predator Vine was sprouting offspring.

“Hello, little ones,” Gaunt hissed, and thrust his torch into the closest one until the thing withered and smoked. Too fast, a tendril wormed its way through the snapping mass of hungry young to catch Gaunt around the ankle. It yanked, and he tumbled to the dirt, waving his remaining torch as the tentacles that held the budding offspring closed in.

Shots rang through the trees, and as Gaunt flailed with the torch, the heads of the offspring began to pop in bursts of sizzling, thick sap. Ruby snapped off six pistol shots from her treetop perch, flipped open the cylinder with a practiced motion of her wrist to let the spent cartridges drop, and began to reload. Gaunt kicked free of the writhing vines, extinguishing his remaining torch in one final snapping set of chlorophyll jaws, and ran for safer ground.

The offspring, Hark knew, were still connected to their fat, greedy mother. Kill it, and he’d kill them all. Easier said than done.

From his perch high in the tangle of vines that dangled above the plant-beast’s gorge, Hark’s keen eyes spied Gaunt on the ground, waving furiously, black coat swirling as he dodged the Predator Vine’s slashing tendrils. There was something small and shining in Gaunt’s upstretched hand.

Hark nodded, tucking one of his obsidian knives back into its harness on his belt. He hastily wrapped a creeper vine around one hand, shut his eyes, took a single deep breath, and let himself drop.

The maw of the Predator vine loomed below him, undulating hungrily. Dirt tore and roots shifted as it wrenched itself up out of the ground, reaching for its next hot meal. Gaunt flung the thing in his hand through the writhing nest of the Predator Vine’s tentacles, high in the air toward Hark’s falling body.

Hark caught the flare gun from the Cyclone’s survival kit just as the vine around his arm drew taught. For an endless second, he dangled suspended, twenty feet above slow digestive doom.

“You may find this a bit spicy,” Hark warned, and fired the flare whistling into the belly of the beast.

The vine recoiled, launching Hark up into the air ahead of a sizzling, blinding eruption of phosphorescent fire. The Predator Vine exploded, sizzling, flaming chunks spiraling up through the air to ignite the dry fibers of the creeper vines. Hark let go at the apex of his rebound, spinning wildly up into the air, then tumbling down through empty space.

A vine slapped at his face and he grabbed on desperately. In the tree high above, Tom braced his heels against the bark and gripped his end of the vine he’d torn loose from around the tree’s massive trunk. His muscles strained as the sudden force of Harker’s weight threatened to yank him off his feet.

The vine held. Hark swung in a pendulum arc, letting go to roll and tumble in a cloud of dead leaves across the jungle floor. Tom collapsed against a thick branch, letting his aching arms dangle to either side, and breathed a slow sigh of relief.

Gaunt was there to help Hark to his feet. As the lord of Windham Hall brushed himself clean of dead leaves and clinging twigs, the two men surveyed the smoldering, dying wreck of the Predator Vine.

“Did you know,” Hark said at last, “that after we fought the last one of these things, some absolute bastard had the gall to send me a bouquet of flowers?”

“That was me,” Gaunt replied, and made a rattling sound that might pass for a chuckle.

“I couldn’t even set foot in the greenhouse for a solid week,” Hark groused. “And I was raised in the bloody jungle.”

Ruby came sliding down the trunk of her tree, gripping a vine, bootheels scraping against the bark. Across the clearing, Tom was leaping cautiously from branch to lower branch, making his wobbly way down to join them. “That’s what I like about you boys,” Ruby said, tugging at the sleeves of her jacket to see the spots where the Predator Vine’s sap had scorched the leather. “One outing with you, and suddenly a milk run to Burma with a cabin full of goats sounds like a week at Pismo Beach.”

“So,” Tom said, flexing his arms and elbows to work out the lingering kinks, “that was fun. Anyone else see that door on the far end of the chamber?”

It bore the same archaic runes around the archway, but where the last door had been polished steel, this was heavy carved stone, blocks of strange and sneering faces.

“I remember this one,” Ruby said. “This was the room full of dead machines, right?”

“It was,” Tom said, grasping hold of one of the thick stone rings that dangled from the door. “Let’s see if it still is.”

The room was pitch dark, light from the greenhouse room spilling in a pool across wide squares of cool stone, then shriveling back to nothingness as the doors swung shut behind them. There was a wet shaking sound, and a quick snap, and green light bloomed in the darkness from the glowing plastic rod Tom held aloft in his hand.

They walked in silence and bobbing green-black shadows through the ancient, ruined workings of strange stone machines. Wheels and gears jutted from the walls, scaling upward into the black pool of the distant ceiling, and carved stone pistons, some half-crumbled with age, rose from neatly carved pits in the floor. It looked to Tom like the workings of some primitive calculating engine, scaled to skyscraper size or more -- but what equation it could possibly have been meant to uncode, even Tom’s mind could not begin to fathom.

They had walked for five minutes before anyone realized they were not alone. Harker stopped, holding up a hand, scenting the air. “There’s someone--” he began, and stopped, for in that instant he felt the cold edge of a blade pressed just against his throat.

“Greetings,” the darkness said softly, and torches flared, and twelve men in red silk robes appeared all around them. One held a loaded bow, arrow nocked against the taut string, bladed tip pointed directly at Ruby’s ear. Another stepped out of the shadows directly before Tom to rest the tip of a long slender dagger lightly against Tom’s sternum.

“Your arrival has been anticipated,” the man said. Tom’s eyes flicked to the Chinese character painted in gold on the front of his silk robes, and to the similar calligraphy on the eleven other men surrounding them.

“Dragon,” he said to the man before him, and then, nodding at the others, “Horse. Pig. Monkey. Rooster. You’re the Twelve Celestial Signs.”

Dragon made the merest of bows. “You are well-traveled indeed, Mr. Morrow.”

“The Twelve Celestial what?” Ruby asked, resisting the urge to scratch a sudden itch on the side of her chin.

“Fallen Shaolin monks,” Tom explained. “I heard about them last year in Shanghai. They were banished from their order for stealing forbidden secrets -- the hidden twelfth scroll of dim mak, the death touch. Yin Po Lee told me they were the deadliest men in the East.”

“And how is dear Yin Po Lee?” Dragon asked with polite indifference.

“Dead,” Tom replied calmly. “He had some trouble with a vat of molten gold.”

“Apt,” Dragon said, “for the Merciless Thief-King of the Coast. I have heard much about you, Mr. Morrow. Please believe me when I say I am truly aggrieved that I have been requested to kill you.” The tip of the knife dug a little deeper into Tom’s chest. “If you and your two companions would be kind enough to kneel, I am prepared to extend you the courtesy of doing so painlessly.”

A slow smile spread across Tom’s face. “Two companions?” he said, looking first at Hark, and then at Ruby, and then at the empty place between them.

Above them, in the darkness, there came low and ragged laughter, echoing. And for the first time, Tom saw the faces of the deadliest men in the East fill with mortal terror.

1932: 4. The Civilized Savage of Windham Hall

He was born at spearpoint in the morning after a storm, in the smashed-open wreck of a gondola, dangling from frayed ropes from a gashed-open gasbag that covered the canopy of ancient trees above. His father held his mother’s hand as she breathed through the contractions, squeezing a verse of the Lord’s Prayer in with every breath. The natives staring out at them behind thick crusts of paint and dyes and animal-bone war masks watched silently, and did not move for all the hours of her labor.

Simon Windham, the sixteenth Lord Havoc, used the proceeds from his landed estates to fund the feedings of his insatiable curiosity for the natural world. He had watched tigers prowl the shaded copses of India, and seen giraffes canter spindling across the African savannah against a gray-black canvas of coming storms. His wife Anna, at 23 four years his junior, was already a skilled draftswoman and accomplished linguist; she had presented no less than three monographs before the Royal Society, most recently on the tonal subtleties of the tribes out Outer Mongolia. Indeed, Simon and Anna had met at just such a meeting, and found their mutual love of learning kindled into something deeper indeed.

When Simon had charted the curious tides off the western coast of South America, and grown increasingly convinced that they suggest the presence of a body of land not yet marked on any map, he proposed a solo venture by lighter-than-air craft to make an aerial surveillance of the region. His wife, barely a month with child, would hear none of it unless he took her with him, and while Simon had the firmer voice, Anna, as ever, had the harder head.

They traveled by steamer across the Atlantic, around of the southernmost tip of the continent through the frigid waters that approached Antarctica, and up the coast to the western shore. There, to light applause from the fellow passengers, a champagne toast from all assembled, and a stirring rendition of “God Save the Queen” from the shipboard string quartet, Simon and a considerably round Anna filled the great balloon of the craft they had designed, and lifted from the aft decks on what was to be no more than seven days’ excursion.

The storm and Anna’s labor struck at nearly the same moment, on the second day of their voyage. As if in sympathy with the brave young mother-to-be’s endurance, the natural world raged and lashed, tossing the balloon about, as Simon and Anna clung to one another, praying for their survival, and more fervently, for that of their child to come.

And in the morning, as the sun steamed mist from the trees around them, they found themselves marrooned in the midst of a jungle of unknown dimensions, confronted by curious and stoic inhabitants. So it was that Harker Windham entered the world.

As soon as the mother could walk, Simon, Anna, and the child -- wrapped in a tattered fold of torn fabric from the ballon -- were prodded, not uncourteously, through long hours of mazelike jungle. They arrived at dusk, to their considerable shock, not to a crude assemblage of huts, but a vast city of stone and wood, spread out in the lush valley that sloped out before them. The inhabitants lined the wide stone streets as the skies grew darker, festooned in feathers and woven-reed garments and the skins of unknown beasts, peering at the newly arrived family with curious, alien faces. But Simon and Anna were all the more surprised -- for every house, every temple, even the ground along every stone-speckled avenue, glowed with a light too white and steady to come from any fire.

They were led to a vast central temple, strange-tongued gods leering in geometric anguish from the pillars that encircled it, and ushered to the chamber within. Simon’s breath caught in his throat as he spied the strange cylinder that rose from the heart of the temple through a gap in the roof, to the exposed night sky, and at the bright blue-and-red-painted man who looked up at them from what was unmistakably an eyepiece at the device’s base. It was a stone telescope.

The man at the telescope walked up to them carefully, taking in their tattered clothes and strange pale faces with a keen, detatched regard. Tiny Harker burbled and yawped, and Anna moved to hush him, but the strangely painted man reached out a hand, fingers banded in rings of hammered gold, to draw back the cloth from around the child’s face. Harker squeaked, stretched out an impossibly small hand, and wrapped his new fingers reflexively around one of the painted man’s outstretched fingers.

The painted man looked to Anna, and then to Simon, and smiled, some of his teeth gleaming crystal, and they saw in his eyes the mutual pride and love of a parent, and somehow knew they were safe.

He said something, all clicks and consonants. Anna remembered the sounds of it, and in six months, when she’d learned enough of their language, she knew what it meant. We thought we were the only ones left.

The painted man was Iqxtl, and his people were the Children of Silence. They had lived on the island for longer than anyone could remember, longer than any recorded history could trace. They had legends of another time, of a broad spreading continent rich in game, of an empire to make their own humble city seem crude and backward. It had left its remnants scattered and seeded through their culture, in the glowing crystal lights and the crisscrossing aqueducts, and the carved murals in the darkest depths of the temples, where tiny human figures contorted in angular terror before something so horrible it had been scraped clean from the face of the rock by later hands. A plague of emptiness.

Anna took to the language quickly, and taught it to Simon, and by the time young Harker took his first staggering steps across the floor of their stone chambers, they were as part of the community. The balloon was wrecked beyond repair, the ocean around wide and forbidding, the island ringed with jagged shoals of rock, like the teeth of some terrible beast. But the world into which Anna and Simon had fallen so enchanted them both that they grew to view their new lives less as a curse than a wondrous opportunity.

Iqxtl was a hearty, gentle man of middle years, and mere months after the deaths of his daughter, son-in-law, and granddaughter -- at the hands of something whose name even Anna could never entirely translate, leather-skin-claw-mouth, something of whom none of the Children of Silence would freely speak -- the miraculous appearance of these pale humans from the sky had soothed him. Simon discovered, to his considerable delight, that his new hosts were anything but backward savages; they had all the same concepts, gravity, magnetism, electricity, thinly cloaked under different names. Iqxtl shared Simon’s boundless curiosity, and the two men would talk long into the night in the upper rooms of the temple, Simon watching as Iqxtl ground fine crystal lenses for the telescope from chunks of quartz, scraped and shaped by a water-powered wheel of stone.

Harker Windham grew up with a foot in each of two civilizations, never questioning the strangeness of his life, nor indeed finding it strange to begin with. The mornings of his childhood were spent with his parents, his mother reading from the Bible or showing him sketches, assembled from her memory, of the wonders of distant England. From his father he learned the principles of science, the laws of the natural world, and the proper comportment of a true English gentleman. And from Iqxtl, in the afternoons and into the evenings, he learned the ways of adopted home. He planted wild corn in the rows of fields, and learned the routes of the irrigation channels. He gazed out at distant stars through the great stone looking-glass and learned them by two different names. And, with some trepidation from Anna, in his seventh year he began the training of the Children of Silence’s defensive arts, the graceful looping dance of death, the obsidian knives.

The rules that bound his life were few. The Ten Commandments, of course, and their rough equivalents among the natives, but beyond that, from the time he could speak, Harker knew only one other inviolable law: Never, ever cross the river.

It ran, wide and brown and turbulent, roughly across the center of the island. The banks were ten minutes’ walk from the city of stone, fringed with thick, heavy reeds and chunks of strange and porous rock. Far across the river, a dense stand of trees faded into shadow, and distantly beyond them rose a great rumbling volcanic peak, occasionally seen to belch sooty puffs of ash into the sky.

The other side of the river did not belong to the Children of Silence, it was said, and simply left at that. When his chores were done, before his mother or one of her friends called him back for supper, Harker would sit on the banks of the river at dusk and train his eyes on the distant shore, the dark silences among the trees. Sometimes, he thought, he could see glints of movement, stealthy and brief.

In his twelfth year, Iqxtl took him down to the depths of the temple, past the scoured-away carvings, and unlocked a foot-thick stone door with a crystal key.

“Don’t be afraid,” the old man smiled, and Harver followed him through a dripping humid maze of stone, lit at intervals by the crystal lights. They emerged, after more turns than Harker ever hoped to recall, in a vast and humming chamber somewhere deep beneath the city. In the center grew a crystal tree, fountaining in frozen spikes out from deep within the earth, glowing from within with an ethereal light. Its branches thinned and melted into the ceiling, becoming veins of pulsing light that spread through the whole of the stone metropolis.

“Do you know how it works?” Harker breathed, awestruck. Iqxtl shook his head, the bones and feathers of his chieftain’s headdress jingling in the vast, echoing deep.

“In all other things, I seek knowledge, understanding,” Iqxtl said. “In this one instance, I am content in ignorance, and wonder.”

By his twenty-first year, Harker Windham was the second-best hoopball player in the city league, the third fastest swimmer, and perhaps the best of his generation with the ways of the obsidian knife. (He was also, his mother noted with a certain wry pride, an arrogant pain in the arse, not unlike his father. Simon refused to deny this, and indeed took it as quite the compliment.) All that stood between himself and full adulthood in the eyes of the Children of Silence was the Waking Sleep, the vision ritual.

Iqxtl himself ground the paste of herbs and berries in his stone mortar, before wrapping it in a spreading green leaf and placing it in Harker’s waiting hands. His mother helped with the paint, supervising the application of the traditional designs on Harker’s chest and back, adding a few touches here and there as pleased her sense of color. She kissed her son’s bristly cheek and squeezed his hand, and told him to be careful. His father drew a medallion from beneath the wilting collar of his increasingly gray linen shirt and placed it around Harker’s neck. St. Christoper, patron saint of travelers, embossed on the gold in midstream with a pilgrim on his back. Safe passage.

He nodded to his parents, and to Iqxtl, and set out across the wide stone square of the city, the eyes of the Children of Silence upon him, and into the forest beyond.

Harker Windham walked all day and through the dusk, and when the last traces of light slipped out of the sky beyond the trees, he sat and lit a torch with shards of flint, and lapped the ritual paste off the green of the leaf, and waited with open eyes for the coming message of the night.

And far beyond his sight or hearing, on the distant bank of the river, shadows dressed for war slid rafts into the water, hacked-down trees tied together with bands of dried human skin, and stroked toward the glowing lights of the stone city with paddles made of bleached white femurs.

Sometime after moonrise, Harker opened his eyes and felt the slow respiration of the jungle all around him. A beetle crawled up his arm and across the back of his neck, and flitted away with a buzz. And from the shadows before him, yellow eyes dancing in the light of the fire, a panther emerged. It prowled back and forth, hipbones scissoring beneath black fur, and then it spoke to him.

Pledge me your service, and I will give you my cunning, Panther said.

Monkey appeared on a high branch, tail curling, wide eyes staring from beneath a fringe of fur.

Pledge me your service, and I will give you my speed, Monkey said.

Bird of the Air flapped down from nothingness, its wings a shifting tapestry of incandescent color, to land just outside Harker’s circle of firelight.

Pledge me your service, and I will give you my sight, Bird of the Air said.

And the trees bent, and the ground shook, and the air stank of thick breath and old prey, and a beast appeared from the heart of the night to tower over the rest. A lizard, tall as any of the stone buildings Harker had ever seen, with cruel glinting eyes, thick powerful haunches, and tiny grasping forearms. Leather-skin-claw-mouth. The Great Reptile. It spoke from a mouthful of knives in a voice like the volcano’s murmurs.

Pledge me your service, and I will give you my power, Great Reptile said.

“I so pledge,” Harker said, to Panther, and Monkey, and Bird of the Air, and Great Lizard, and bowed low until his forehead touched the earth. And Panther, and Monkey, and Bird of the Air, and Great Reptile bowed in return.

Well met, your lordship, Great Reptile said with his scavenger’s cave of a mouth.

And then it was morning, and Harker Windham started, covered in sweat, the torch burned down to ash and nothing. He spent a long minute passing his eyes across the empty cleaning, listening to the jungle. Then he rose on stiff and shaky legs and turned back for him, staggering, then walking, then jogging, then running, elated, through the mist-shrouded dawn, a man transformed.

He smelled the stink of the burnt city before he ever saw it, and his breath quickened, and his heart pounded, and the joy went out of his long and graceful strides. He burst from the edge of the jungle to see the field levels, corn stalks charred and crushed, the birds and the pigs and the capybaras butchered in their pens and left for offal. And beyond them, the city, black and ruined, parts still in flames.

He ran through streets scattered with bodies and attended by scavenger birds, necklace beads and bits of tile crunching beneath his steps, all the way to his parents’ rooms. His mother’s drawings lay scattered across the floor, the bedding torn, his father’s precious suriving instruments smashed -- and no sign of them.

The hoopball court was painted in blood, a woman’s head stuffed cruelly into one of the goals.

He found Iqxtl in the temple, at the base of the stone telescope, probing his own innards with stoic fascination as they spilled from the slit cut in his stomach.

“They broke the pact,” he said to Harker through bloodied teeth. “We always feared they would come.”

“Who?” Harker pleaded, eyes hot and stinging with tears.

“Across the river,” Iqxtl said slowly. “The Kingdom of Ragged Teeth. As a child I heard stories from one of our own... the last to cross the river, the only one ever known to escape alive. I heard them spooled from his madness in the hour before his death. He spoke of mines, of thousands kept in chains. Under the volcano, the Cavern of Ceaseless Day, where the light from the golden crystals severs men from their own minds...”

Iqxtl smiled, painfully, and looked down at the inside of himself. “We never think...” he began, as Harker squeezed his hand tightly and willed him, in vain, to somehow live, “that all we are is meat.”

And then he died, his eyes still open, the light in them snuffed to flatness, and Harker was alone.

Harker buried Iqxtr at the banks of the river, facing toward the far side. “So you will see my victory,” he swore. He washed off the paint of his vision quest, and dried his skin, and painted himself anew in the jagged green lines of war. He collected a pair of black stone knives from a fallen warrior with half a head, a man Harker only wished he recognized, and spent long hours at Iqxtl’s stone wheel, grinding them to sharpness until the slightest touch against their edges raised a line of blood on the skin of his thumb.

At dusk, he tucked the knives in his belt, and kissed the cold metal of the St. Christopher medal, and dove into the river.

In the deep waters at the river’s heart, large and hungry things stirred, and turned themselves toward his motion, and swished lazy trails toward him. There was a sudden splash, a thrashing just beneath the surface of the river. Air bubbles mushroomed and popped on the brown surface of the river.

Three minutes later, Harker Windham hauled himself dripping and unscathed onto the far bank of the river and set off into the trees. He did not look back. After a time, the large, scaly bodies rose by one to the surface of the river, unmoving, slit-open bellies facing the stars, and the current slowly bore them to the sea.

The Kingdom of Ragged Teeth slept fat and intoxicated in its nests of human bone, crude and reeking hovels slung with creeper vines and things less pleasant to imagine from the rock face of the volcano. Those of the new slaves not yet sent into the heart of the mountain, to the mines whose mouths cast a distant glow even now, in the heart of night, were kept in pens at the periphery of the camp, weeping, terrified, curled into themselves in the fear of what was to come. Harker Windham moved, a shadow among shadows, along the wooden pikes that made up the walls of the pen, and took off the sleeping guard’s head with one swift, remorseless movement of his blade.

He appeared in the opening gate of the slave pen with a blood-soaked finger to his lips, pleading silence, and sent the huddled women and children stumbling back toward the river, and freedom.

Up the jagged rock of the mountain he climbed, moving without noise from hut to hut among the Kingdom of Ragged Teeth, making quick wet noises with his knives in each, until his arms dripped red almost up to his shoulders. He spared none, and let himself feel no joy in it, and made himself stay human, stay rational, all the while.

And the Ragged-Toothed Emperor, Collector of Ears, awoke in his pile of furs to find the point of an obsidian blade at his throat.

“I will grant you one cut,” said Harker Windham, “just one, as a reminder of my sins. But I warn you now: That one cut will be the last blood you ever spill.” He handed the Emperor the royal Killing Spear, cruelly crafted crystal at its point, and stepped back from the bedding.

The Emperor laughed through filed, pointed teeth, for he did not understand the pale stranger, and believed him soon to die. And he sprang from his bed with the point of the spear leveled at Harker’s heart.

They fought for some minutes, all the way down the mountain, clinging to vines, scraping themselves on the unforgiving rock, dancing across roofs of bone. Again and again the crystal spear stabbed, but Harker wasn’t there. He moved with fluid grace, and saw the tiniest openings in the Emperor’s attacks, and struck back with the force of a clap of thunder.

At last, the Emperor’s spear found the slightest purchase, tracing a line of fire down Harker’s left cheek, and the young man staggered backward at the sudden sting of it.

“Thank you,” Harker said. And he dodged one final thrust of the Emperor’s spear and thrust his knives upward, and spilled his enemy’s steaming guts onto the soil below.

The whole of his body trembling as the adrenalin fled his blood, breathing in the short, ragged gasps of a race horse, Harker descended into the glowing mouth of the mine. The deeper he got, the more he saw them, glimmering in razored bursts through the walls of rock. Crystals, glowing soft and gold. Singing to him at the edges of his mind.

He began to whistle to himself: Rule, Brittania, Brittania rules the waves...

The caverns stretched an impossible distance, bright and hot as the most merciless summer’s day, endless fields of crystals. Ragged bundles of sticks that had once been people clawed blindly at the dirt, digging out the glowing mineral fragments, piling them in crude wooden carts for removal. He passed faces he had once known, their eyes now empty, moving like ghosts, breathing out the sickly golden light of the crystals. The singing in his mind grew louder, and Harker clenched his teeth, and switched to heavier weapons. Nearer my God to thee...

He found his parents ten minutes’ walk into the cave, matted in blood and dirt, digging slowly at a rich and glowing vein of crystal. He pulled them away, crying out, and held them tightly, but they stared back at him with faces with only the barest semblance of humanity. The song of the crystals had washed away their minds. His parents breathed, and moved, and were surely dead.

Harker ran all the way out of the mine, half-blind with tears, spitting rage. The mocking song the crystals followed him out, tempting him back to oblivion with every step, and only his anger kept him strong enough to refuse.

Some years later, the steamer Royal Highlands, carrying exotic spices and typewriter ribbons, found itself adrift somewhere several hundred miles distant from the Western coast of South America, its compasses demagnetized by the lashing lightning strikes of the previous night’s storm. While the captain paused to take readings by sextant, and the coal-shovelers rested in the Stygian heat of the boiler room, the first mate spotted land on the horizon, off to port.

The island was thick with woods, and promised fresh fruit and fresher water. And the spyglass showed some sort of motion on the beach. The captain nodded, and the first mate gathered four able men, armed them with rifles, and set out in a launch to the distant shore.

Navigating the rocky shoals was no picnic, but the men were seasoned sailors, handy with an oar, and the little boat made it safely to shore -- and to the most extraordinary sight the men would ever see. For there on the shore, tanned and painted natives had set up a cricket match, carved wickets and bats and all. Nothing could have amazed the first mate more, until the batsman saw them and jogged across the sand, smiling with neat white teeth, and enquired in perfect English as to the health of the Queen.

It was the year of our Lord nineteen hundred and twenty-seven. Had a certain Mr. Lindbergh’s safe landing in Paris not captured the world’s telegraph wires and front pages the day before the Royal Highlands put in at Liverpool, Harker Windham’s extraordinary return to his native land would have surely earned wider fame.

He was the seventeenth Lord Havoc, and at age 25, he took his place at the family seat of Windham Hall, where he sent for tailors, and newspapers. He immersed himself in learning those first few months, devouring a library’s worth of books and papers, soaking his brain in all the wonders his parents had not been around to pass on to him. There was little else to do; compared to the jungles into which he had been born, the land of his blood was flat and gray and decidedly dull.

In time, he mastered finance, and walked among the cities of civilized men, and quickly grew disgusted with them. Civilization, he found, had less to do with anything resembling honor, and more with the cut of one’s suitcoat. He would sit in boardrooms and clubs and expensive restaurants, and nod politely at the fat, smiling faces around him, and wonder why they bothered with the formality of walking on two legs at all.

He had headstones made for each of his parents, placed beneath a spreading oak tree on a hill his father had described to him many times, though for all he knew they still drew breath somewhere in the crystals’ terrible, sustaining golden light, beneath the mountain on the unnamed island. And on the afternoon before he quit England, he paused to see them there, taking an umbrella to ward off the rain.

“Here they would have called us savages,” he told them, “yet are no better themselves than any man. This I swear to you: Let me be better. Let me walk among savages, in any land, and be a truly civilized man.”

Six months later, in the summer of 1929, the steamers began to dock in New York Harbor, one after the other, carrying loads of brick and masonry. At the northern end of Manhattan, workers glad for the employment cleared four square blocks of ruined homes, recently gutted in a neighborhood fire, and fenced them all around in sturdy wrought iron. A flotilla of trucks rolled in, landscapers hauling huge and fantastical plants and pots of tall grasses, carpenters and bricklayers uncrating English stone, rebuilding Windham Hall brick by brick in the gateway city of the New World.

New York City was a wild place still, a place of life and wonders, and in the heart of those four blocks, something just as wild began to grow, taking seed in a tangle of fast-growing trees and spreading vines. And word began to spread, first through the neighborhood, and then the entire city: If you were desperate, afraid, in need of help, come to the gates of the forest house north of Central Park, and ring the bell, and speak your case into the polished brass tube. And if your need was sincere, and your cause was true, perhaps the gates would open to the long drive canopied with trees, and you would walk nervously in silence and shade to the front doors of the manor house, and the jungle man in the Saville Row suit would invite you in for tea.

1932: 3. The Sanctum of Sleeping Gods

“Loop-de-loop!” Ruby Gale called back from the cockpit, and suddenly Tom Morrow was free-falling through the cabin toward the pile of strapped-down crates before him.

A well-muscled arm reached out from the ceiling to grab him, straining against G-forces that would dislocate the shoulders of lesser men, as the plane made its dizzying climb, and in the brief moments when the ceiling became the floor, Tom was able to grab hold of the cargo netting and make eye contact with its current occupant.

“Thanks for the save, Hark.”

His Lordship, a.k.a. Hark, was tall and sharp-featured, hair tightly pulled back across his scalp, with a long scar running from the corner of his left eye halfway down his cheek. He wore a thick, fur-lined coat -- it was close to freezing in the cabin, and even Tom’s self-designed Ever-Warm Jacket, with its synthetic fibers of the future, was reaching its limits -- and dangled with disconcerting ease from the cargo netting, his arms and legs casually looped in its gaps. He smiled with neat white teeth.

“Now you see why I prefer the netting, Tom,” he said.

And then Tom was floating, weightless, as Ruby began her dive, his feet rising of their own accord to bump against the backs of the jump seats.

“This is such a fascinating phenomenon!” he told Hark over the roar of the engines. “I keep meaning to investigate it when I have a spare moment!” Hark merely rolled his eyes.

“So, sometime in the next century, perhaps,” he said.

“Air travel makes you cranky,” Tom sighed, dropping into a crouch on the floor of the cabin as the plane leveled out.

“I prefer good solid Earth beneath my feet,” Hark replied, swinging himself down effortlessly to land next to Tom.

Tom nodded toward the largest among the pile of crates. “Time to warm it up,” he said. “Ruby’s good, but there’s a lot of angry monkeys out there.”

“Apes,” Hark replied. “Monkeys have tails. Gorillas are apes. Maybe that’s why they’re so angry.”

“Barrel roll!” Ruby shouted from the cockpit -- Tom could now make out the chatter of machine gun fire from the Cyclone’s wing guns as well -- and Tom and Hark found themselves cartwheeling against the round walls of the cabin, end over end, until the plane righted itself.

“Hell of a way to get one’s morning exercise,” Hark said. “So, I presume the gizmo comes with instructions?”

“It’s not a gizmo!” Tom began. “It’s a--”

“It is now, and shall forever be, a gizmo, Tom,” Hark told him, grinning, as he popped open two heavy latches on the largest case. It was scuffed and battered from travel on a thousand continents, and stamped in bold letters: PROPERTY OF U.S. ARMY, SPECIAL SCIENCE DIVISION. “Save the future talk for those who care to hear it.”

“One of these days I’ll drag you out of prehistory,” Tom laughed, squeezing past the stack of crates on his way toward the rear gun turret. “The wonders I’ve seen from the World Yet to Be...”

“ Unless the World Yet to Be has trees,” Hark said, effortlessly hauling a sleek, wire-strung device the size of a large dog from the musty innards of the case, “I’m quite content in the World That Is Right Now.”

The sound outside the Cyclone changed -- closer, louder, different acoustics -- and for a few moments, the light was suddenly a stark and brilliant blue. Ice tunnel, thought Tom. They were getting close.

The man strapped into the rear gun turret was all angles and edges, scarecrowlike, bundled up in a thick black wool overcoat that smelled vaguely of soot. Tom heard him grunt with satisfaction just before every burst from the Brownings whose triggers he clutched.

“Gaunt!” Tom hollered over another ear-splitting firework rattle of automatic fire. Outside the bullet-starred glass of the rear turret, he watched the tracers arc away, shearing through the ever-scrambling ranks of the pursuing black fighters.

The man called Gaunt turned to look at Tom for the briefest of instants, narrowed blue eyes peering out from a slim opening in the strips of shimmering indigo cloth that wrapped the entirety of his head. “I’m busy, Morrow,” he rasped. He had an eerie trick to his voice -- somehow, it always sounded a mile off, and just behind your shoulder, all at once. One day, Tom was going to figure out how he did it.

“Gum?” Tom asked, holding up a fresh pack plucked from behind one strap of his olive drab suspenders. “It’s spearmint.”

“Very busy,” Gaunt said, and let off another burst. The tracers seemed to cleave one of the Winged Monkeys’ fighters neatly in half, unfolding it origamilike into gouts of flame and smoke. Gaunt cackled, and under his breath, he said something that sounded to Tom like “Thus always to the wicked.”

“Look, Gaunt, I know you’re having fun--” at this the dark man gave a derisive snort -- “but Hark’s warming up the-- the, uh, the gizmo--”

“The magnetic pulse projector?” Gaunt asked dryly.

“Yes, finally!” Tom said, bending at the knees as Ruby swung the Cyclone into a turn and the force of gravity politely asked him to kneel. “Anyway, I haven’t finished testing it, and even if we dangle it out the back hatch, you’re gonna be in the line of fire.”

“I am unafraid,” Gaunt said. Tom watched his gloved fingers squeeze the triggers, as if Gaunt were grasping a lover’s hands.

“I’m serious,” Tom said. “I don’t know what this-- nine o’clock, nine o’clock!”

“I see it,” Gaunt said, and let off another burst.

“I don’t know what this thing does to people up close, but I did the math, and, uh, if you ever wanted to have children--”

Gaunt turned and fixed Tom with an icy gaze, and beneath the wrappings, Tom saw one of his brows rise in slow, disbelieving annoyance.

“Okay, bad reason,” Tom admitted. “But Gaunt, I know what you carry around in your pockets, and like I said -- magnetic. I can’t speak for Hark, but I don’t want any of that stuff flying at me the first time we fire it up.”

Gaunt said nothing for several long moments, then sighed, a funerary sound, and unstrapped himself from the gunner’s seat. As he rose and turned, Tom caught a flash of white beneath Gaunt’s coat, a tuxedo shirt, like the momentary gleam of a shark’s teeth.

As they headed forward to join Hark, deftly adjusting wires and flipping switches on the magnetic pulse projector, Tom popped a fresh stick of gum in his mouth and offered the pack again to Gaunt, who hesitated, and then snatched a stick of his own almost more quickly than Tom could see. Gaunt fanned the fingers holding the gum, an old reflex, and it vanished. Nothing up my sleeve, thought Tom.

“Is she good to go, Hark?” Tom hollered as the engines momentarily roared.

“Insofar as I’ve plugged in everything that looked as if it wished to be so, yes!” Hark said.

Tom dashed back to the cockpit and stuck his head through the door. “How we doing, Ruby?”

“One engine out, but she’s holding together,” Ruby replied through gritted teeth. Cliff walls blurred past on either side, shafts of sunlight falling along the canyon floor ahead of them. “Only thing I hate about this job, Tom? Those damn monkeys. I can’t even go to the Zoo anymore -- I see ‘em and I just want to throw things.”

“Don’t tell Hark,” Tom laughed. “He might take it personally. Give me ten seconds, then pop the rear hatch. Keep her level if you can, until I can get off a shot.”

“How’m I gonna know when you have?”

“Oh, trust me, you’ll know.”

“You’re having too much fun, Tom!” Ruby groaned.

“What, aren’t you?” Tom asked, and ducked back into the cargo hold. The magnetic pulse projector was sleek and silver, a series of projecting cones emerging from a symmetrical nest of looping wire. Tom knelt before the control panel, above the thick cables running into a socket to the Cyclone’s backup power supply, and adjusted a few final dials. Then he gripped the activation lever with one hand and the body of the machine with the other.

“Hark, Gaunt, grab an elbow,” Tom said, “and hang on tight!”

The hydraulics groaned, the rear hatch opened in a blast of white light and frigid air, and gravity dragged Tom Morrow and his latest invention forward down the ramp, toward two thousand feet of nothing, and rock beneath.

At the last moment, he felt hands grab each of his outhrust elbows -- Hark’s thick fingers, Gaunt’s bony, gloved grip -- and hold him steady. His companions clung for their lives to straps on either side of the cabin, muscles shaking from the strain, but they did not let him fall.

Dangling above the swiftly passing snows of the Himalayas, bullets from the Winged Monkeys’ cannons pinging and sparking off the fuselage around him, Tom waited until the black, pursuing fighters bunched together, flitting through a narrow pass -- and switched on the machine.

The world turned momentarily blue-white, and a sound almost beyond hearing popped like a bubble from the center of Tom’s brain outward. In the cockpit, Ruby saw every dial on her panel go dead for one sickening second, then spring back to life.

For an instant, Tom thought he was falling, but then his vision cleared, and he saw the fighter darts weaving drunkenly, trailing plumes of sudden smoke, smashing into the walls and the ground and one another until none were left in the air.

He took a moment, as Gaunt and Hark hauled him back in, to feel sorry for the poor apes. Then again, at least they’d gotten to fly.

The hatch hissed shut, and Tom left Hark and Gaunt to secure the machine, and slung himself back into the co-pilot’s seat in the cockpit. Ruby risked a glance and sputtered out a poorly contained laugh.

“Your hair’s all standing up,” she said.

“It is?” Tom asked, and hastily flattened it back down. “That was... I think I have to destroy the plans for that one. Bad enough using it on the monkeys.”

But Ruby wasn’t listening. Tom saw the mouth of a cave ahead, half-buried in the snow, looming ever larger. “Here we go,” she said, and nosed the plane into a dizzying plunge.

They flew for a few heart-pounding seconds in absolute darkness, and then the rock passage spat them out into a bottomless cavern of radiant blue ice. Flashing by below, Tom could see broken fragments of the ice bridge, built by some ancient and unknown hand, that had once spanned the chasm. At intervals on either side, along the walls, great statues towered, tall as skyscrapers, kings and gods from tongues and faiths and cultures long lost to living men. They carried swords and shields and stranger weapons yet, and only some of them had what anyone would call a face.

“Tal Xan Sherat,” Tom whispered.

“The Sanctum of Sleeping Gods,” Ruby said, blue ice-filtered light making a ghost of her features. “Somehow, I thought I’d be less impressed this time around.”

And then, up ahead, the statues began to move.

Throwing off sparks of twinkling frost, steam shovel-sized arms groaned away from the cave walls, weilding flails and maces and swords of solid ice, and began to swing in the terrible slowness of a dream toward the hurtling shape of the Cyclone.

“This is new,” Tom said, unconsciously checking his harness.

“This is very, very new,” Ruby spat, and banked the plane hard left as an ice blade as wide as a house sheared the air mere feet above them.

Across a deadly mile of depthless ice, the frozen statues of long-dead myths attacked. Ruby dived vertically, the Cyclone spinning and twisting, to evade the moonlike mass of an oncoming mace from a statue with a wooly mammoth’s head.

“I see it!” Tom shouted, spying the smooth, gleaming stretch of flat ice up ahead, and the distant archways beyond. Then the whole plane twisted, shuddered, filled with the shriek of metal tearing, and Ruby wailed like a mother bereft as the controls fought to tear themselves out of her hands.

The G-forces pushed them back in their seats, but Tom fought back, swimming his arms through leaden air to lend his strength to Ruby’s, keep the stick level, keep the wounded plane coasting toward the welcoming ice ahead.

The Cyclone’s landing gear snapped off on impact. The plane bounced once, twice, underbelly screaming as it spun along the ice, then ground and shuddered itself to a halt in a foot-deep furrow of frost.

In the cockpit, lit by sporadic sparks from the dying instrument panel, Tom lifted his head and exhaled slowly. He saw Ruby reaching up to touch the metal ceiling of the cabin.

“Oh, baby,” she mourned. “Oh, I’m so sorry.”

“Chin up,” Tom offered. “Now we get to build you a better one.”

By the time they clambered outside, Hark had already climbed the fuselage, scaling it to the upraised tip of the tail fin, long fringes of his fur coat trailing against the frosted metal. He clung to the tail like a sailor in a crow’s nest, shifting his weight from side to side, alternating hands, fingers flexing.

Gaunt stood alone, unmoving, a black void in the blue light, staring up at the statues as they slowly shifted themselves back into slumber.

“He made improvements, I take it,” Gaunt said to Tom over his shoulder. Tom just nodded, somber.

Ruby made the walkaround alone, touching bits of the battered plane here and there, stopping for a full minute to brush her fingers agains the ragged edges of the sheared-off right wing. She didn’t say anything, and Tom and the others said nothing to her, busy collecting their personal gear from the jumble of boxes in the back of the plane. At last, Ruby appeared, framed on the ice at the bottom of the ramp of the rear hatch, her face set and stoic.

“We don’t have all day,” she said, and the men nodded as one.

Tom tossed her a fresh box of cartridges as he emerged from the belly of the Cyclone, and Ruby drew her revolver from inside her leather jacket to snap each round into the cylinder. Hark finished tucking his usual accompaniments into the harnesses inside each side of his coat, and Gaunt, as ever, merely rattled faintly and menacingly as he walked. Tom hefted the patented Morrow Personal Immobilizer, a bubous tube of fluted silver with a rifle grip, and slung its ammunition back onto his back.

“Let’s hope I don’t have to use this, huh?” he said to Ruby, hoping to coax a smile from her.

“Let’s hope you do,” she said, and stuck the revolver back in her jacket.

The archway loomed, thirty feet high, carved with ancient runes, and they passed beneath it in silence, into a long chamber with deep recesses in each of the walls. Ornate steel braziers swung from the ceiling far above on thick chains, throwing off eerie firelight.

“Something’s not right,” Ruby said. In the recesses, reddish-black frozen stains were stuck suspended to the ice. Tom knelt in one of them, listening to the dark air that whistled in from the thick steel grating far at the back of the recess, and hearing nothing. He picked up a scorched tuft of something brittle and white.

“What’s that scent?” Hark asked, wrinkling his sensitive nose in disgust. “It’s-- it’s almost like--”

“Burnt hair,” Gaunt said, to no one in particular, and a silence fell across the group.

“Like I thought,” Tom said, returning to his companions. “He’s killed all the Yeti Guard.”

They walked onward, across slicks of frozen, stinking blood, and furious claw marks gouged deep into the ice, and heavy cracks from the tread of large, inhuman feet.

“I don’t remember a door,” Tom asked Ruby, as they approached one, high as the chamber walls. The surface was polished steel, so slick you could see your reflection in it.

“There wasn’t a door,” Ruby said, and laid a hand against it. She turned back, wonder and concern on her face. “It’s warm,” she said.

And Tom noticed the steam wisping out from underneath. He grasped the thick steel rings on either door, and hauled.

Eden. The ice underfoot gave way to sudden grass, to trees, to small tufted hills. The sun shone dazzlingly down through a canopy of broad leaves on thick tangles of wild flowers and creeper vines. The air was thick and humid, steam seeping up through tiny fissures in the layers of dead vegetation on the ground.

“Geothermal greenhouse,” Tom said quietly. “I don’t know how he got all this in here.”

Hark laid a hand on the bark of a tree that stretched dizzyingly high overhead. “I know these trees,” he told Tom softly. “A taste of home, perhaps.”

Ahead, in the soft green shadows, something stirred. Tom and his companions froze, Hark crouching, fingers to the ground, listening.

“Animal?” Tom said. Gaunt’s gloved hands began to crawl toward some secret and doubtlessly deadly pocket.

“No,” Hark said. “I haven’t heard a single one. Not a bird, not even an insect.”

“Then what?”

The leaves on the ground stirred, once, again. Awakening.

“The thing that ate them,” Hark replied.

Tom looked over at Ruby and started. Green vines, thick as a child’s arm, were rising through the undergrowth to twine around her calf. He was about to shout to her, when he felt it, too -- the firm, meaty pressure of the vines, snaring his own ankle.

“Fiddlesticks,” Tom swore, and then the world went sideways, and he had leaves dragging against the back of his head, and the trees became inverted.

The vines rose triumphantly from their camouflage of dead leaves, dangling Tom and Ruby high above the ground as Hark and Gaunt watched horrorstruck from below, and at their source, something obscene and verdant unfolded itself from behind a curtain of fat, broad leaves, and opened a wet, sinkhole-sized maw, dripping with acid nectar and fine prickly spines.

“Vercigorax Carnivora,” Gaunt growled. “The Predator Vine.”

“I thought we killed the last known specimen back in New York, when we battled the Weed of Crime,” Hark said, unfastening the snaps all the way down his coat.

“Evidently not,” Gaunt replied. “Would you like assistance?”

“Absolutely,” Hark replied, shrugging off his coat. As it slipped to the ground, he plucked the two wide, flat blades of gleaming dark obsidian from their slings within. He could have been cast in bronze, his musculature as knotted and solid as some ageless tree from the primeval forest. Dried lines of brilliant red and yellow war paint dove and swooped across his chest to his sturdy leather loincloth. Hark flexed his toes against the dead leaves and twigs, and breathed in, and smiled with his neat white teeth.

And then, raising the black blades high, he charged forward with an ear-splitting roar to battle.

1932: 2. The Corsair Queen

For the rest of her life, Ruby Gale, age 4, would remember her first flight. She had to wrap both hands around the stick just to try to grasp it, and her father stuffed a pillow between her back and the seat so the harness would fit her snugly. She should have been afraid. She should have cried. Any sane and sensible parent would have thought her father mad for taking her up so young, much less in the front seat, much less in a rickety biplane with a two-can-a-day oil habit.

Ruby loved every moment. She would remember her father’s voice from the trainer’s seat behind her as a series of peaks amid the steady thrum of the propeller, and the way the wind made the tips of her hair dance around her head, and how the world turned upside down beneath her, all of Chicago suddenly pointing down from the sky, and then rightside up again.

She heard her aunt say once that the flu had “carried off” her mother when Ruby was still a baby. Until she was old enough to know otherwise, Ruby saw her mother -- the vague outline of her anyway, as she’d faded to a blurry, comforting presence in Ruby’s memory, a face smiling out from photographs -- snatched up by a thing made entirely of tiny flapping wings, and carried off into the distance of the night sky. Some nights, when her father thought her asleep, she would sit by the w