Hey, looks okay by me, says Buddy merrily. Seriously.
Some of the voices have faces now. An ancient holy man on a wind-flayed ridge in the Andes. A woman in the Bronx cradling a chicken. A young man tossing knucklebones in Riyadh. Many others.
Come on, friends, says Buddy. Time’s awastin’. Let’s do it.
And they vote. The decision is quick and anticlimactic.
Wyungare is suddenly aware of his aloneness.
Except for one remaining voice.
Rock on, says Buddy. You will, my friend.
And then he’s gone too.
What remains of Wyungare is still thinking about something else. The boy shucking his burdens … is it Bloat… or Jack? Or both?
Billy Ray reached down into the mess on the floor that had been Wyungare. He straightened a moment later, holding a rough-cut opal on a charred leather thong. He handed it to the one called Cameo as if it were a holy relic. Cameo stretched out her hand to take the offering. When she looked up again, her eyes were not her own.
“Hello, Teddy,” Cameo said. “It’s time to choose.” The sudden silence in her head was the silence of Wyungare.
“You really are him?” Teddy asked slowly. “You really are?”
“Yeah, she is,” Carnifex said. “So let’s get moving.”
“Choose,” Cameo/Wyungare repeated, frowning in the same way that the Aborigine had frowned. “You still want to be the Outcast, a nat? Then you will be.”
"Wait.” Teddy licked his blood-flecked lips, groaning under the weight of the torch and the agony of his wounds. The light in the room seemed to be flickering blood-red. Shadows were gathering, like vultures crouching around him.
“…Wait…” he said again, wondering if he could wait or if the deepening darkness would take him.
Teddy glanced around the room, looking at the carnage.
Most of them are here because of you. So many people dead, and they were fighting for you as well as themselves. Wyungare, the penguin, all of them who were killed by soldiers and the shelling. For you
“I’m a fucking lousy hero,” he told Cameo/Wyungare. The stench of corruption was overpowering. “I don’t want to be the Outcast, don’t want to be a nat. That ain’t me.”
Briefly, Wyungare smiled. “Good,” he said.
Cameo/Wyungare began bass chanting. Battle started forward to interrupt, but Carnifex held the man back. At first Teddy felt nothing, but the pain from the open wounds on Bloat’s body slowly began to recede and the trembling stopped. He could feel the power swelling deep within the body once more, but the energy was different this time — more diffuse, softer, and yet more powerful than what he had been given before. There was no longer just the connection to Bloat and the dreamtime, but an entire network of bright links, interlacing and flowing, all coming together inside himself. He could hear indistinct voices and a monotone, rhythmic drumming beat that made his blood pulse in time.
He let his consciousness sink into the chant, into the red pulsing, into the flaring, lacy threads.
Teddy looked outward. He had no eyes, no head; he saw in some way he didn’t yet understand. It was as if he stood high above the Rox itself and could look out over the entire New York Bay panorama. Through the last haze of the dying fog, he could see something, something far up the Hudson.
The chanting stopped. Now.…said a voice. Open yourself to us…
He tried. He imagined the Wall falling, collapsing, crumbling into nothingness. He sensed himself falling and he let himself go freely.
D
O
W
N
and then…
He rode five feet above the flood, his shell a green chariot in the moonlight.
Beneath him, the water was a living thing, a black torrent lashed with white, hundreds of feet high, roaring. Even through three layers of plate steel, he could hear its anger.
He had let the water build until it threatened to overflow the Palisades themselves. Then he wrapped his teke around it, pushed his wall up the banks of the river, and forced it even higher. Behind his dam, looming over him like a building about to fall, the river had fought like a living thing, like a monster in chains, like a terrible great beast hungry to be free.
He had let it build until he was trembling from the effort, until he was almost blind from the pain, until he could feel the blood trickling from his nose. He had held it until the last possible moment. Then he had risen, high over the river, high over the Palisades, high over the sword that he had forged.
He looked down at what he had done, and set it free.
Now he rode with it. Faster than he had ever flown before, his head throbbing as he channeled the waters, walling off the shores with his teke, scouring out the riverbed, keeping the torrent on course, aiming the hammer.
The Palisades vanished behind him. The fog sent out its tendrils. The black waters swept them aside. The lights of Manhattan shimmered up ahead. And beyond them, under the rolling mist, square in the mouth of the Hudson: The Rox.
He pushed ahead of the flood, and turned on his mikes. The roar of the waters filled the world, a thunder out of hell. There was no other sound. There could be no other sound.
And the sound was doom.
A north wind had sprung up and torn Bloat’s fog away from Manhattan. The island was remarkably still. Modular Man floated over its brightness, torn between a wish to savor his freedom and a desire to mourn that which was lost. His innocence, not least of all.
Something rolled down the flank of the island.
Foreboding chilled the android’s mind. He arched upward to get a better look, saw boiling white water thundering down the bed of the Hudson, its anger miraculously contained within invisible walls that prevented it from spilling into the city.
The water sounded like a world coming to an end.
And now that he had risen above the tall buildings of the island, Modular Man saw the fleeting radar image of the Turtle leading the angry waters down.
It was the end of the Rox. Nothing was going to survive that impact.
Hovering in air, the android thought for a long moment. He was a shooter. The business of the Rox filled him with little but disgust The island was full of criminals and killers, all shootees, and had nothing to do with him.
Criminals and killers and shootees like Patchwork.
He dropped to the top of one tall building and placed the tarpaulin carefully on the roof.
And then he was off.
The android’s top speed was over 500 miles per hour, and the Turtle was slow, tied to the speed of the tumbling river he was bringing to the Rox. Modular Man made it to the island well ahead of him.
The north wind had torn Bloat’s fog away. The island was a ruin, all torn walls and fire. There was hardly anyone moving. He flew through the ruins of the golden dome into the governor’s throne room. Bloat lay, bleeding and half-crushed, under Liberty’s fallen torch. A young woman sat cross-legged on the floor beside a corpse burned beyond recognition. She was chanting.
The rest of them were staring through the walls of shattered crystal, wondering at the sound of the water that was bearing down on them. There were too many to carry. Plans raced through the android’s macro-atomic mind.
He flew across the room to Bloat. The governor’s eyes were closed. He looked asleep, or dead. The huge weight of the torch had cut deep into his flesh.
The android placed himself beneath it, poured power into his generators, and pulled. Saint Elmo’s fire glowed off the broken glass surfaces of the beacon. Slowly, it began to move.
The oncoming wave sounded like a thousand Niagaras.