She lay with her face pressed against the cold harsh gravel, feeling the grit of it against her cheek, the hot tears as they leaked between her lashes, and that awful chill wind that wouldn’t stop tugging at her clothes. Very slowly Nita opened her eyes, blinked, and gradually realized that the problem with the place where she lay was not her blurred vision. It was just very dim there. She leaned on her skinned hands, pushed herself up, and looked to see where she was.
Dark-gray gravel was all around. Farther off, something smooth and dark, with navy-blue bumps. The helipad. Farther still, the railing, and beyond it the sky, dark. That was odd—it had been morning. The sound of a moan made Nita turn her head. Kit was close by, lying on his side with his hands over his face. Sitting on his shoulder, looking faint as a spark about to go out, was Fred.
Nita sat up straighter, even though it made her head spin. She had fallen a long way, she didn’t want to remember how far . . . “Kit,” she whispered. “You okay? Fred?”
Kit turned over, pushed himself up on his hands to a sitting position, and groaned again. Fred clung to him. “I don’t think I busted anything,” Kit said—slow and uncertain. “I hurt all over. Fred, what about you?”
(The Sun is gone,) Fred said, sounding absolutely horrified.
Kit looked out across the helipad into the darkness and rubbed his eyes—“Me and my bright ideas. What have I got us into?”
“As much my bright idea as yours,” Nita said. “If it weren’t for me, we wouldn’t have been out by that worldgate in the first place. Anyway, Kit, where else could we have gone? Those perytons—”
Kit shuddered. “Don’t even talk about them. I’d sooner be here than let them get me.” He got to his knees, then stood up, swaying for a moment. “Oooh. C’mon, let’s see where the worldgate went.”
He headed off across the gravel. Nita got up on her knees too, then caught sight of a bit of glitter lying a few feet away and grabbed at it happily. Her pen, none the worse for wear. She clipped it securely to the pocket of her shirt and went after Kit and Fred.
Kit was heading for the south-facing railing. “I guess since you only called for a retrieval, the gate dumped us back on top of the . . . ”
His voice trailed off suddenly as he reached the railing. Nita came up beside him and saw why.
The city was changed. A shiver ran all through Nita, like the odd feeling that comes with an attack of deja vu—but this was true memory, not the illusion of it. She recognized the place from her first spell with Kit—the lowering, sullen-feeling gloom, the shadowed island held prisoner between its dark, icy rivers. Frowning buildings hunched themselves against the oppressive, slaty sky. Traffic moved, but very little of it, and it did so in the dark. Few headlights or taillights showed anywhere. The usual bright stream of cars and trucks and buses was here only dimly seen motion and a faint sound of snarling engines. And the sky! It wasn’t clouded over; it wasn’t night. It was empty. Just a featureless grayness, hanging too low, like a ceiling. Simply by looking at it Nita knew that Fred was right. There was no Sun behind it, and there were no stars—only this wall of gloom, shutting them in, imprisoning them with the presence Nita remembered from the spell, that she could feel faintly even now. It wasn’t aware of her, but—
She pushed back away from the rail, remembering the rowan’s words. (The Other. The Witherer, the Kindler of Wildfires—)
“Kit,” she said, whispering, this time doing it to keep from perhaps being overheard by that. “I think we better get out of here.”
He backed away from the rail too, a step at a time. “Well,” he said, very slowly, “now we know what your pen was doing in New York City . . . ”
“’The sooner it’s out of here, the happier I’ll be. Kit—where did the world-gate go!”
He shook his head, came back to stand beside her. “Wherever it went, it’s out there now.”
Nita let out an unhappy breath. “Why should it be? Everything else is changed.” She looked back at the helipad. The stairwell was still there, but the door had been ripped away and lay buckled on the gravel. The helipad had no design painted on it for a helicopter to center on when landing.
The glass of the small building by the pad was smashed in some places and all around; the building was full of rubble and trash, a ruin. “Where are we?” Nita said.
“The place we saw in the spell. Manhattan—”
“But different.” Nita chewed her lip nervously. “Is this an alternate world maybe? The next universe over? The worldgate was just set for a retrieval but we jumped through; maybe we messed up its workings. Carl said this one was easy to mess up.”
“I wonder how much trouble you get in for busting a worldgate,” Kit muttered.
“I think we’re in enough trouble right now. We have to find the thing.”
(See if you can find me the Sun and the stars and the rest of the Universe while you’re at it,) Fred said. He sounded truly miserable, much worse than when he had swallowed the pen. (I don’t know how long I can bear this silence.)
Kit stood silent for a moment, staring out at that grim cold cityscape. “There is a spell we can use to find it that doesn’t need anything but words,” he said. “Good thing. We don’t have much in the way of supplies. We’ll need your help, though, Fred. Your claudication was connected to the worldgate’s when we went through. You can be used to trace it.”
(Anything to get us out of this place,) Fred said.
“Well,” Nita said, “let’s find a place to get set up.”
The faint rattling noise of helicopter rotors interrupted her. She looked westward along the long axis of the roof, toward the dark half-hidden blot that was Central Park, or another version of it.
A small flying shape came wheeling around the corner of a skyscraper a few blocks away and cruised steadily toward the roof where they stood, the sharp chatter of its blades ricocheting more and more loudly off the blank dark faces of neighboring skyscrapers. “We better get under cover,” Kit said. Nita started for the stairwell, and Kit headed after her, but a bit more slowly. He kept throwing glances over his shoulder at the approaching chopper, both worried by it and interested in it. Nita looked over her shoulder too, to tell him to hurry—and then realized how close the chopper was, how fast it was coming. A standard two-seat helicopter, wiry skeleton, glass bubble protecting the seats, oval doors on each side. But the bubble’s glass was filmed over except for the doors, which glittered oddly. They had a faceted look. No pilot could see out that, Nita thought, confused. And the skids, the landing skids are wrong somehow. The helicopter came sweeping over their heads, low, too low.
“KIT!” Nita yelled. She spun around and tackled him, knocking him flat, as the skids made a lightning jab at the place where he had been a moment before, and hit the gravel with a screech of metal. The helicopter soared on past them, refolding its skids, not yet able to slow down from the speed of its first attack. The thunderous rattling of its rotors mixed with another sound, a high frustrated shriek like that of a predator that has missed its kill—and almost immediately they heard something else too, an even squealing, ratchety and metallic, produced by several sources and seeming to come from inside the ruined glass shelter.
Kit and Nita clutched at each other, getting a better look at the helicopter from behind as it swung around for another pass. The “skids” were doubled-back limbs of metal like those of a praying mantis, cruelly clawed. Under what should have been the helicopter’s “bubble,” sharp dark mandibles worked hungrily—and as the chopper heeled over and came about, those faceted eyes looked at Kit and Nita with the cold, businesslike glare reserved for helpless prey.
“We’re dead,” Nita whispered.
“Not yet.” Kit gasped, staggering up again. “The stairwell—” Together he and Nita ran for the stairs as the chopper-creature arrowed across the rooftop at them. Nita was almost blind with terror; she knew now what had torn the door off the stairwell and doubted there was any way to keep that thing from getting them. They fell into the stairwell together. The chopper roared past again, not losing so much time in its turn this time, coming about to hover like a deadly dragonfly while positioning itself for another jab with those steel claws. Kit fell farther down the stairs than Nita did, hit his head against a wall and lay moaning. Nita slid and scrabbled to a stop, then turned to see that huge, horrible face glaring into the stairwell, sighting on her for the jab. It was unreal. None of it could possibly be real; it was all a dream; and with the inane desperation of a dreamer in nightmare, Nita felt for the only thing at hand, the rowan rod, and slashed at the looming face with it.
She was completely unprepared for the result. A whip of silver fire the color of the Moon at full cracked across the bubble-face from the rod, which glowed in her hand. Screaming in pain and rage, the chopper-creature backed up and away, but only a little. The razor-combed claws shot down at her. She slashed at them too, and when the moonfire curled around them, the creature screamed again and pulled them back.
“Kit!” she yelled, not daring to turn her back on those raging, ravenous eyes. “Kit! The antenna!”
She heard him fumbling around in his pack as the hungry helicopter took another jab at her, and she whipped it again with fire. Quite suddenly something fired past her ear—a bright, narrow line of blazing red light the color of metal in the forge. The molten light struck the helicopter in the underbelly, pattering in bright hot drops, and the answering scream was much more terrible this time.
“It’s a machine,” Nita said, gasping. “Your department.”
“A real threat,” Kit said, crawling up the stairs beside her. “How do you kill a helicopter?” But he braced one arm on the step just above his face, laid the antenna over it, and fired again. The chopper-creature screeched again and away.
Kit scrambled up to his feet, pressed himself flat against what remained of the crumbling doorway, pointed the antenna again. Red fire lanced out followed by Nita’s white as she dove back out into the stinging wind and thunder of rotors and slashed at the horror that hung and grabbed from midair. Gravel flew and stung, the wind lashed her face with her hair, the air was full of that car-tearing metallic scream, but she kept slashing. White fire snapped and curled—and then from around the other side of the chopper-creature there came a sharp crack! as a bolt of Kit’s hot light fired upward. The scream that followed made all the preceding ones sound faint. Nita wished she could drop the wand and cover her ears, but she didn’t dare—and anyway she was too puzzled by the creature’s reaction. That shot hadn’t hit anywhere on its body that she could see. Still screaming, it began to spin helplessly in a circle like a toy pinwheel. Kit had shattered the helicopter’s tail rotor. It might still be airborne, but it couldn’t fly straight, or steer. Nita danced back from another jab of those legs, whipped the eyes again with the silver fire of the rowan wand as they spun past her. From the other side there was another crack! and a shattering sound, and the bubble-head spinning past her again showed one faceted eye now opaque, spiderwebbed with cracks. The helicopter lurched and rose, trying to gain altitude and get away.
Across the roof Kit looked up, laid the antenna across his forearm again, took careful aim, fired. This time the molten line of light struck through the blurring main rotors. With a high, anguished, ringing snap, one rotor flew off and went pinwheeling away almost too fast to see. The helicopter gave one last wild screech, bobbled up, then sideways, as if staggering through the air. “Get down!” Kit screamed at Nita, throwing himself on the ground. She did the same, covering her head with her arms and frantically gasping the syllables of the defense-shield spell.
The explosion shook everything and sent gravel flying to bounce off the hardened air around her like hail off a car roof, ragged blade shards snapped and rang and shot in all directions. Only when the roaring and the wash of heat that followed it died down to quiet and flickering light did Nita dare to raise her head. The helicopter-creature was a broken-backed wreck with oily flame licking through it. The eye that Kit had shattered stared blindly up at the dark sky from the edge of the helipad; the tail assembly, twisted and bent, lay half under the creature’s body. The only sounds left were the wind and that shrill keening from the little glass building, now much muted. She rid herself of the shielding spell and got slowly to her feet. “Fred?” whispered.
A pale spark floated shakily through the air to perch on her (Here,) he said, sounding as tremulous as Nita felt (Are you well?)
She nodded, walked toward the wreck. Kit stood on the other side of it, his fist clenched on the antenna. He was shaking visibly. The sight of his terror made Nita’s worse as she came to stand by him. “Kit,” she said, fighting the urge to cry and losing—tears spilled out anyway. “This is not a nice place,” she said.
He gulped, leaking tears himself. “No,” he said, trying to keep his voice steady, “it sure isn’t,” He looked over at the glass-walled building.
“Yeah,” Nita said, scrubbing at her face. “We better have a look.”
Slowly and carefully they approached the building, came to one collapsed wall, peered in. Nita held her wand high, so they could see by its glow. Inside, hidden amid the trash and broken glass, was what seemed to be a rude nest built of scraps of metal and wire. In the nest were three baby helicopters, none more than two feet long. They stared fiercely at Kit and Nita from tiny faceted eyes like their parent’s, and threatened with little jabbing forelegs, whirring with rotors too small to lift them yet. Sharing the nest with the fledglings was the partially stripped skeleton of a dog.
Kit and Nita turned away together. “I think maybe we should go downstairs a little ways before we do that finding spell,” Kit said, his voice still shaking. “If there’s another of those things—”
“Yeah.” They headed down the stairwell, to the door that in their own world had opened onto the elevator corridor. The two of them sat down, and Nita laid the rowan wand in her lap so there would be light—the ceiling lights in the stairwell were out, and the place felt like the bottom of a hole.
“Fred,” Kit said, “how’re you holding up?”
Fred hung between them, his light flickering. (A little better than before. The silence is still very terrible. But at least you two are here.)
“We’ll find you the Sun, Fred,” Nita said, wishing she was as sure as she was trying to sound. “Kit, which spell was it you were going to use?”
Kit had his manual out. “At the bottom of three eighteen. It’s a double, we read together.”
Nita got out her own book, paged through it. “McKillip’s Stricture? That’s for keeping grass short!”
“No, no!” Kit leaned over to look at Nita’s manual. “Huh. How about that, our pages are different. Look under ‘Eisodics and Diascheses.’ The fourth one after the general introduction. Davidson’s Minor Enthalpy.”
Nita ruffled through some more pages. Evidently her book had more information than Kit’s on the spells relating to growing things. Her suspicion about what their specialties were grew stronger. “Got it.” She glanced through the spell. “Fred, you don’t have to do anything actually. But this is one of those spells that’ll leave us blind to what’s happening around here. Watch for us?”
(Absolutely!)
“Okay,” Kit said. “Ready? One—two—three—”
They spoke together, slowly and carefully, matching cadence as they described the worldgate, and their own needs, in the Speech.
The shadowy stairwell grew darker still, though this darkness seemed less hostile than what hung overhead; and in the deepening dimness, the walls around them slowly melted away. It seemed to Nita that she and Kit and the small bright point between them hung at a great height, unsupported, over a city built of ghosts and dreams. The buildings that had looked real and solid from the roof now seemed transparent skeletons, rearing up into the gloom of this place. Stone and steel and concrete were shadows—and gazing through them, down the length of the island, Nita saw again the two points of light that she and Kit had seen in the first spell.
The closer one, perhaps ten blocks north in the east Fifties, still pulsed with its irregular, distressing light. Compelled by the spell’s working, Nita looked closely at it, though that was the last thing she wanted to do—that bit of angry brightness seemed to be looking back at her. But she had no choice. She examined the light, and into her mind, poured there by the spell, came a description of the light’s nature in the Speech. She would have backed away, as she had from the perytons, except that again there was nowhere to go. A catalogue, of sorts, that light was—a listing, a set of descriptions. But all wrong, all twisted, angry as the light looked, hungry as the helicopter-creature had been, hating as the surrounding darkness was, full of the horrors that everything in existence could become. The Book which is not Named—
Nita struggled, though unable to move or cry out; her mind beat at the spell like a bird in a cage, and finally the spell released her. But only to look in the other direction, downtown toward the Wall Street end of the island. There in the illogical-looking tangle of streets built before the regular gridwork of Manhattan was laid down, buried amid the ghosts of buildings, another light throbbed, regular, powerful, unafraid. It flared, it dazzled with white-silver fire, and Nita thought of the moonlight radiance of the rowan wand.
In a way, the spell said, this second light was the source of the wand’s power, even though here and now the source was bound and limited. This time the syllables of the Speech were no crushing weight of horror. They were a song, one Nita wished would never stop. Courage, merriment, an invitation to everything in existence to be what it was, be the best it could be, grow, live—description, affirmation, encouragement, all embodied in one place, one source, buried in the shadows. The Book of Night with Moon.
A feeling of urgency came over Nita, and the spell told her that without the protection of the bright Book, she and Kit and Fred would never survive the hungry malevolence of this place long enough to find the worldgate and escape. Nor, for that matter, would they he able to find the worldgate at all; it was being held against them by powers adept in wizardries more potent than anything the two of them could manage. It would be folly to try match wizardries with the Lone Power on its own ground, this outworld long given over to its rule. Their best chance was to find the bright Book and free it of the constraint that held its power helpless. Then there might be a chance.
The spell shut itself off, finished. Walls and physical darkness curdled around them again. Kit and Nita looked at each other, uncertain.
“We’ve been had,” Kit said.
Nita shook her head, not following him.
“Remember Tom saying it was odd that our first spell turned up Fred and the news that the bright Book was missing? And what Picchu said then?”
“There are no accidents,” Nita murmured.
“Uh huh. How likely do you think it is that all this is an accident? Something wanted us here, I bet.” Kit scowled. “They might have asked us! It’s not fair!”
Nita held still for a moment, considering this. “Well, maybe they did ask us.”
“Huh? Not me, I—”
“The Oath.”
Kit got quiet quickly. “Well,” he admitted after a while, “it did have all kinds of warnings in front of it. And I went ahead and read it anyway.”
“So did I.” Nita closed her eyes for a second, breathing out, and heard something in the back of her head, a thread of memory; Did I do right? Go find out . . . “Look,” she said, opening her eyes again, “maybe we’re not as bad off as we think. Tom did say that younger wizards have more power. We don’t have a lot of supplies, but we’re both pretty good with the Speech by now, and Fred is here to help. We’re armed—” She glanced down at the rowan wand, still lying moon-bright in her lap.
“For how long?” Kit said. He sighed too. “Then again, I guess it doesn’t matter much—if we’re going to find the bright Book, the only way to do it is to hurry. Somebody knows we’re here. That thing showed up awful fast—” He nodded at the roof.
“Yeah.” Nita got up, took a moment to stretch, then glanced down at Kit. He wasn’t moving. “What’s the matter?”
Kit stared at the antenna in his hands. “When I was talking to the Edsel,” he said, “it told me some things about the Powers that didn’t want intelligence to happen in machines. They knew that people would start talking to them, make friends with them. Everybody would be happier as a result.
“Those Powers—” He looked up. “If I understood that spell right, the one which owns this place is the chief of them all, the worst of them. The Destroyer, the engenderer of rust—”
“Kit!”
“I know, you shouldn’t name it—” He got up, held out a hand to Fred who hobbled over to Kit and came to rest on his palm. “But that’s who we’re up against. Or what. Fred, do you know what we’re talking about?”
Fred’s thought was frightened but steady. (The Starsnuffer,) he said. (The one who saw light come to be and could not make it in turn—and so rebelled against it, and declared a war of darkness. Though the rebellion didn’t work as well as it might have, for darkness only made the light seem brighter.)
Kit nodded. “That’s the one. If we do get the bright Book, that’s who’ll come after us.”
Fred shuddered, a flicker of light so like a spark about to go out in the wind that Kit hurriedly tucked the antenna under his arm and cupped his other hand around Fred protectively. (I’ve lost enough friends to that one,) Fred said, (Heard enough songs stilled. People gone nova before their time, or fallen through naked singularities into places where you burn forever but don’t learn anything from it.)
For a moment neither of them could follow Fred’s thought. Though he was using the Speech, as always, they couldn’t follow what other things he was describing, only that they were as terrible to him as a warped thing like the helicopter-creature was to them. (No matter,) he said at last. (You two are part of the answer to stopping that kind of thing. Otherwise my search for an Advisory nexus wouldn’t have brought me to you. Let’s do what we can.)
Kit nodded. “Whatever that is. I wish I knew where to begin.”
Nita leaned back against the wall. “Didn’t Tom say something about the two Books being tied together? So that you could use one to guide you to the other?”
“Yeah.”
“Well. We’re not too far from the dark one.” Nita swallowed. “If we could get hold of that—and use it to lead us to the bright one. That vision only gave a general idea of where the Book of Night with Moon was. Probably because of it being restrained, or guarded, or whatever—”
Kit looked at Nita as if she had taken leave of her senses. “Steal the dark Book? Sure! And then have—” He waved his hand at the northward wall, not wanting to say any name “—and Lord knows what else come chasing after us?”
“Why not?” Nita retorted. “It’s a better chance than going straight for the bright one, which we know is guarded somehow. We’d go fumbling around down there in the financial district and probably get caught right away. But why would they guard the dark Book? They’re the only ones who would want it! I bet you we could get at the dark one a lot more easily than the other.”
Kit chewed his lip briefly. “Well?” Nita said. “What do you think?”
“I think you’re probably nuts. But we can’t just sit here, and it wouldn’t hurt to go see what the situation is—Fred?”
(Lead,) Fred said, (I’ll follow.)
Kit gently tossed Fred back into the air and paused long enough to put his book away. He didn’t put the antenna away, though. The rowan wand glowed steadily, and brilliantly. “Can’t you damp that down a little?” Kit said. “If somebody sees us—”
“No, I can’t. I tried.” Nita cast about for ways to hide it, finally settled on sticking it in her back jeans pocket and settling her down vest over it. “Better?”
“Yeah.” Kit had turned his attention to the doorknob. He touched it, spoke softly to it in the Speech, turned it. Nothing happened. “Not listening?” he wondered out loud, and bent to touch the keyhole. “Now why—Ow!” He jumped back, almost knocking Nita over.
“What’s the matter?”
Kit was sucking on his finger, looking pained. “Bit me!” he said, removing the finger to examine it. It bled.
“I get the feeling,” Nita said slowly, “that there’s not much here that’s friendly.”
“Yeah.” Kit looked glumly at the doorknob, “I guess we’d better consider everything we see potentially dangerous.” He lifted the antenna, bent down by the lock again, and touched the keyhole delicately with the knob at the antenna’s end. A brief red spark spat from the antenna; the innards of the lock clicked. This time when Kit turned the knob, the door came open a crack.
With great caution he opened the door a bit more, peered out, then opened it all the way and motioned Nita to follow him. Together they stepped out into a hall much like the elevator corridor in their own world, but dark and silent. (The elevator?) Kit said inwardly, not wanting to break that ominous quiet.
(Do you trust it?)
(No. Know where the stairs are?)
(Down the way we came. Past the elevator.)
The door to the main stairway had to be coerced into opening by the same method as the door to the roof. When they were through it Kit spent another moment getting it to lock again, then stepped over to the banister and looked down at story after story of switchback stairs. (It could be worse,) Nita said. (We could be going up.)
(It will be worse,) Kit said. (If the worldgate stays at this level, we’re going to have to come back up . . . )
They headed down. It took a long time. The few times they dared to stop was when Kit and Nita heard odd muffled noises through the walls—vaguely threatening scrapes and groans and rumbles, the kind of sounds heard in nightmares. The stairs were as dark as the corridor had been, and it was hard to sit in the corner of a landing, rubbing aching legs, with only the light of Nita’s wand to argue with the blackness that towered above and yawned below, as those sounds got louder.
They quickly lost count of how many stories downward they’d gone. All the landings looked the same, and all the doors from them opened off into the same pitch-blackness—until finally Kit eased one open as he had eased open scores of others and abruptly stood very still. He put his hand out behind him, (Nita! The wand.)
She passed it to him. It dimmed in his hand from moonfire to foxfire, a faint silver glimmer that he held out the door as he looked around. (It’s all that shiny stone, like the other lobby, There should be a way down into the station, then—)
Nita’s hair stood up on end at the thought. (Kit, you saw what happened to helicopters. Do you really want to meet a train? Let’s go out on the street level, okay?)
He gulped and nodded. (Which way?)
(There’s a door out onto Forty-fifth Street. C’mon.)
She slipped out, and Kit followed with the wand. Its pale light reached just far enough ahead to gleam off the glass wall at the end of the corridor. Near it was the down escalator, frozen dead. They made their way softly down it, then across the slick floor and out the glass doors to the street.
It was nearly as dark outside as it had been inside; a night without a hint of Moon or stars. The air down there wasn’t as chill as it had been on the building’s roof, but it stank of dark city smells—exhaust, spilled gasoline, garbage, and soot. The gutter was clogged with trash. They stepped out to cross Forty-fifth—
“No,” Nita hissed, startled into speech, and dragged Kit back into the dark of the doorway. Pale yellow-brown light flickered down the street, got brighter. A second later, with a snarl of its engine, a big yellow Checker Cab hurled itself past them, staring in front of it with headlight-eyes burned down to yellow threads of filament—eyes that looked somehow as if they could see. But the cab seemed not to notice them. Its snarl diminished as it plunged down the street, leaving a whirl of dirty paper and dead leaves in its wake. Kit coughed as its exhaust hit them.
(That was alive,) he said when he got his breath back. (The same way the helicopter was.)
Nita made a miserable face. (Let’s get outta here,) she said.
Kit nodded. She led him off to their left, through the Helmsley-Spear Building, which should have been bright with gold-leafed statuary. Here it was gray with soot, and the carvings stared down with such looks of silent malice that Nita refused to glance up more than that once.
She hoped for some more encouraging sight as they came onto Forty-sixth Street and looked up Park Avenue. The hope was vain. The avenue stretched away and slightly upward for blocks as it did in their own world, vanishing in the murk. But the divider between the uptown and downtown lanes, usually green with shrubbery, had become one long tangle of barren thorn bushes. The old-fashioned red-and-green traffic lights burned low and dark as if short on power; and no matter how long one watched, they never changed from red. The shining glass-and-steel office buildings that had lined the avenue in their Manhattan were grimy shells here, the broad sidewalks before them cluttered with rubbish. Nothing moved anywhere, except far up Park, where another pair of yellow eyes waited at a corner.
Those eyes made Nita nervous. (This way,) she said. She hurried past a dirty granite facade full of still doors and silent windows. Kit followed close, and Fred with him, both looking worriedly at everything they passed.
Nita was doing her best to keep herself calm as they turned the corner onto Forty-seventh. It can’t all be as bad as the helicopter, she told herself. And nothing really bad has happened to us yet. It was just the shock of the—
She jumped back into the shadow of a building on hearing a clapping sound so loud she felt sure the helicopter’s mate was coming for them. Fred and Kit huddled terrified into that shadow too, and it took a few seconds for any of them to find the source of the sound. Not more than five or six feet from them, a pigeon had landed—a sooty-dark one, cooing and strutting and head-bobbing in a perfectly normal fashion. It walked away from them, muttering absently, intent on its own pursuits. Kit poked Nita from behind—not a warning: a teasing poke. (Getting jumpy, huh.)
(Yeah, well, you were the one who said—)
The lightning-stroke of motion not six feet away knocked the merriment right out of them. What had seemed a perfectly ordinary fire hydrant, dull yellow, with rust stains and peeling paint, suddenly cracked open and shot out a long, pale, ropy tongue like a toad’s. The pigeon never had a chance. Hit side-on, the bird made just one strangled gobbling noise before the tongue was gone again, too fast to follow, and the wide horizontal mouth it came from was closed again. All that remained to show that anything had happened was a slight bulge under the metallic-looking skin of the fire hydrant. The bulge heaved once and was still. Nita bit her lip. Behind her she could feel Kit start shaking again. (I feel sorry for the next dog that comes along,) he said. (I hope you don’t mind if I cross the street.) Kit headed out of the shadow.
(I think I’ll join you,) Nita said. She backed out of range of that tongue before she started across the street herself—
There was no time to move, to scream, even to think. Kit was halfway across the street, with his eye on that fire hydrant, his head turned away from the big yellow Checker Cab that was maybe six feet away and leaping straight at him.
A flash of brilliance struck Nita like a blow, and did the same for the cab so that it curved to its left and knocked Kit sideways and down. The cab roared on by, engine racing in frustration, evidently too angry to try for another pass. But something about it, maybe the savage sidelong look it threw Nita out of its burned-down eyes as it squealed around the corner of Forty-sixth and Madison—something made Nita suspect that it would not forget them. She ran out into the street and bent over Kit, not sure whether she should try to move him.
(All right,) Kit said, groaning softly as he worked at getting up. Nita slipped hands under his arms to help. (Fred did it.)
(Are you all right?) came the frantic thought, as Fred appeared in front of Kit’s face. (Did I hurt you, did I emit anything you can’t take? I took out all the ultraviolet. Oh, no! I forgot the cosmic rays again.)
Kit managed a smile, though not much of one, his face was skinned and bruised where one cheekbone had hit the pavement. (Don’t worry about it, Fred, that thing would have done a lot worse to me than a few cosmic rays if it’d hit me the way it wanted to.) He stood up, wincing. (It got my leg some, I think.)
Nita bent down to look at Kit’s left leg and sucked in her breath. His jeans were torn, and he had a straight horizontal gash six inches or so below the knee, which was bleeding freely. (Does it feel deep?)
(No. It just hurts a lot. I think it was the cab’s fender, there was a jagged piece sticking out of the chrome. Listen, Fred, thanks—)
(You’re sure I didn’t hurt you? You people are so fragile. A little gamma radiation will ruin your whole day, it seems.)
(I’m fine. But I’ve gotta do something about this leg. And then we’ve got to get moving again and get to the dark Book.)
Nita looked over at the fire hydrant, fear boiling in her. Casually, as if this was something it did many times a day, the hydrant cracked open and spat something out onto the sidewalk—a desiccated-looking little lump of bones and feathers. Then it got up and waddled heavily down to a spot about fifty feet farther down the block, and sat down again.
And I thought it couldn’t all be bad.
Together, as quickly as they could, two small, frightened-looking figures and a spark like a lost star hurried into the shadows and vanished there.