Kyla almost wondered if Fernandadidknow what was coming.
Squeezing the child tighter to her chest, Fernanda nodded to the column of silver light. “We must hurry. He is almost there.”
ETHAN
As the roads collapsed beneath him, as the moans from the column of light grew louder and faster andLOUDER, all Ethan could focus on was the heat—raw energy thrumming in the air. Sweat soaked his hair, slicked his palms. He didn’t know where he was going, but the city seemed to be guiding him. Every road curved inward, always toward the mountain’s wailing heart. A turn, another turn, and he’d be there.
“Let go, Mister Cross,” Jack Allen’s voice murmured in his ear. Ethan could feel him nearby, the man’s presence crawling through his bones. “Submit to the primal current. Submit to me.”
Ethan pushed forward, rounding yet another bend, rushing past windows glimpsing other times, other worlds: snowy landscapes, empty houses, a desert with two moons in its sky, a trench in the earth funneling blood into a gaping pit, a pale sun the color of ice.
And in so many windows, there was nothing. No life. No reality. Just a black void where reality itself had been burned away.
It sleeps.
It wakes.
“I will destroy all that divides and distinguishes.” Jack Allen’s teeth—that awful grinding. “I will create a world unlike any Te’lo’hi can dream.”
Ethan rounded a final bend and found himself on a wide silver thoroughfare. There was a deafening boom of stone to his right: another great spire falling from the sky.
This wide road, at least, seemed more durable than the crumbling streets. Better yet, on the road’s other side, Kyla and Sarah Powers and Fernanda all came sprinting around a bend of their own. Fernanda held a small girl to her chest. It looked like Adeline, Penelope’s spectral sister.
She wasn’t a specter any longer. This girl was solid. Real.
But where was Penelope?
Kyla gave Ethan a curt nod and pointed to the end of the wideroad. It ended ten yards away at a tall stone archway, past which was a round courtyard that encircled the column of silver light. The light moaned and shuddered. The air warped and shimmered around it, like heat off a hot Texas road.
Jack Allen stood up ahead, beneath the stone archway, smiling at them all. He held a long knife in his hand. Its blade dripped with blood. When the man opened his mouth to speak, Ethan heard Jack Allen’s voice coming from just behind his own shoulder.
“Mister Cross. Miss Hewitt. A shame you couldn’t make it here any sooner. You might have had a chance.”
Jack Allen moved his arm so fast, Ethan almost didn’t realize it was in motion. With a grunt of recognition, Kyla grabbed Ethan by the wrist and pulled him to one side. Jack Allen’s knife whizzed past Ethan, missing his chest by an inch, and left a ribbon of blood dribbling through the air.
Something small and white went flying back in the opposite direction. With a wicked overhand snap, Sarah Powers had heaved her grooved stone egg, the one Ethan handed the woman earlier in her room. The egg struck Jack Allen dead between the eyes. Even from this distance, Ethan could hear thecrackas the egg broke through the bone.
Jack Allen fell backward. His hands twitched. Sarah might have killed him.
“Jesus,” Kyla said.
“Softball scholarship,” Sarah said simply.
“Look out!” shouted Adeline, still in Fernanda’s arms.
Following the girl’s finger, they turned back and saw men descending the road behind them, heading their way at a steady, unbothered pace. There were six men, all of them dressed in identical gabardine suits, all clutching identical bloody knives. Ethan had thought he was finished being surprised by this place, but clearly he’d been mistaken.
He stood a moment, staring in shock, at six smiling Jack Allens sprinting his way.
“You didn’t think it would be that easy, did you?” Jack Allen whispered in his ear.
Kyla had apparently been able to hold on to her handgun on herway through the window, but it did little good. She fired three shots, knocking one of the Jack Allens down, only to stare as two more identical men clambered out a pair of nearby windows. All around them, Ethan heard that steadyknock
Knock
Knock.
“This way!”
