A sigh seemed to issue from every corner of the room, from the building itself. Then the entire place shuddered. There was a loud, long wrenching sound and bits of ceiling tile rained down into the room.
“Shit, the whole place is coming apart,” said Colleen.
I rolled to my feet, drawing her up after me. “Let’s go!”
The Tower shook again, then settled into a rhythmic quaking. Ceiling tiles continued to fall, exploding dully against the floor.
We scrambled from the room, half dragging Goldie, who still clutched Magritte’s frail body to himself. The building no longer toyed with us. It was dying, groaning, pelting us with debris as it disintegrated around us. We escaped through its death throes to the escalator core and descended, sometimes conveyed by tides of other refugees.
Out in the street we put as much distance between us and the Tower as possible. We’d barely gotten across Dearborn when it seemed to sag, settling toward the parking garage at the rear. We took cover in doorways and under ledges, and while we watched, every window in the place blew out, showering debris everywhere. Then flares poured from the building into the sky, which even now was clearing, losing its ruddy gleam. There were dozens of them.
Primal’s ruby dome was evaporating.
For the space of several minutes the sky was amber-washed cerulean. A cold wind whipped the streets and flayed the clouds overhead. But then, in the west, a swift unnatural darkness gathered, blotting out the sunset. The sky went yellow-gray, the way it does before a tornado.
From where I hunkered inside the blasted foyer of the building across Dearborn from the Tower, I saw Enid move out of cover into the middle of the street, his knot of rescued flares hovering close behind him. They were enclosed with him within a shimmering nebula. The light was pure, blue-a weave of flare magic and music.
Enid raised his eyes to the twisted, static-filled clouds, to the fingers of lightning. He’d seen this before. We all had. He put his harmonica to his lips again and played, the sharp, sad wail of sound reaching up into the sky to grasp at the escaping flares, to do battle for them with the Source.
In the end fifteen more flares made it into the safety of Enid’s protective pocket of sound; the others were lost- sucked up into the whorl of unnatural wind. When it had taken them, the Storm raged above us, opening and closing its maw, roaring, spewing bright rage, while Enid led the rescued away toward the Near South Side. I had to pray they’d be safe there.
The Storm lingered for a time, reaching after the lost flares, then retreated into the sunset, taking its lightning and thunder with it.
The broken skeleton of the Chicago Media Building pointed up into a clear, dusky sky. Wind scraped walls and windows, whistling around corners. Normal sounds. Natural sounds.
I sagged back against the facade of the building, weakness flooding my limbs. Nearly at my feet, Goldie sat cross-legged on the sidewalk, Magritte’s body limp across his lap. Howard hunkered next to him, sucked into himself.
“I’m fine,” said Colleen in answer to a murmured question I only half heard.
“Let me look at you.” Doc’s voice was gentle, as always, but had an undercurrent of alarm.
I turned, fearing what I’d see. Doc had Colleen’s head between his hands; Colleen was trying to push them away.
“Ni smyesta!” said Doc sharply. “Don’t move.”
“Viktor, stop!”
“You’re bleeding-”
Colleen grimaced. “It’s not my blood. It’s his.” She glanced across the street to where the puppet master and his puppet lay in a mound of debris. “Look. See? Just little cuts. Nothing major. Stop fussing.” She imprisoned his hands with hers and looked up into his face. “Stop, Viktor. Parestanya.”
He kissed her. With a passion she obviously shared. And all I could think was, Now, why didn’t I see that coming?
I pushed myself away from the wall and walked across
Dearborn toward the ruined building. I tried to think as I walked. What to do next? We’d have to find some way to protect the flares. With Primal/Clay gone, we might be able to find other musicians like Enid who were now “released” from their contracts. Maybe they’d help us against the Source, too, or maybe they could help get the flares back to the Preserve.
Maybe, maybe, maybe.
I paused to look back across the street at Goldie, slumped over Margritte in the lengthening shadows with Howard still huddled beside him. That was a mistake. Just seeing them like that made me feel hollow inside. The way I’d felt as I watched Tina change. The way I’d felt in the days after she was gone.
I took a deep breath and moved to where the bodies lay, Primal’s and Clay’s, in a sea of fallen glass and tile. Primal’s remains weren’t so much a corpse as they were a heap of rubble.
Behind me, I heard the crunch of boots on debris.
“This was Primal?” Doc asked, stepping carefully over the littered ground. Colleen was at his side.
I nodded and knelt to pick up a clod of the detritus. “This was never flesh and blood,” he said. “This was-” “Clay,” said Colleen. “Primal was clay.” She glanced
over to where the onetime puppet master lay on the ground,
gray as burnt ash.
“A golem,” I murmured.
“A golem?” Colleen repeated. “What the hell’s that?” Doc answered. “An effigy. A lifeless figure made of earth and powered by wizardry.”
Colleen shivered and pulled the front of her shirt together. “He did like word games.”
“What did you do to him?” I asked her. “At the end, when you grabbed his leg. It paralyzed him. What was that?”
She reached into her pocket and held up the wedge of leather Papa Sky had given her. Mr. Mystery’s talisman.
“Before I realized what he was, he tried to …” She glanced sideways at Doc. “He made a grab at me and got a handful of this instead. Derailed him. I thought, hell, why not? Nothing to lose, right?” She shrugged, returned the thing to her pocket, then moved to kick at the wreckage.
A moment later she called out, “Hey, look at this.”
She picked her way out of the debris and laid something on the ground at my feet. It was a metal tool kit about the size of a shoe box.
“Where’d you find that?”
“There was a little cavity of some sort in the torso.” She nodded back toward the broken golem. “It split wide open when it hit the ground, but I figure it was right about here.” She gestured at her own midsection.
I knelt to inspect it. It wasn’t locked; in place of a lock, what looked like a piece of bone was shoved through the hasp, holding the box closed. I knocked the bone out with a chunk of rubble and opened the lid.
Inside, sitting in the half-empty metal tool tray, was a sheaf of papers, binder-clipped and held together with a fat rubber band. More specifically, it was a sheaf of contracts. Enid’s, other musicians whose names I didn’t recognize, one I did-Charlie Gwinn, who had chosen death over slavery. He and a Vanessa Gwinn had signed on with Primal as a duo.
I turned them over in my hands. “Huh. What do we do with these now?”
“Burn them.” The voice was Goldie’s. He was standing behind me in the wan light of the setting sun, looking wasted, pale, all the luster gone from his eyes. “So we can move on.”
He wandered off around the field of debris. I followed him with my eyes, wondering why tears wouldn’t come when I so felt like weeping.
“Cal, what do you make of this?”
Colleen had come around to hunker down next to me. She’d moved the tool tray to reveal a collection of pitifully mundane objects. There was a wallet, a badge, a small velvet bag, and an envelope.