“What? No, that’s Team America.”
“Huh?”
“For shit’s sake, Twyla, what eon were you born in? What, Julian? Oh. Yeah, the Ball and clock board are tied. But that still won’t be enough firepower to fry a vamp’s circuits. And it’s still the wrong colors.”
I pushed knuckles into my skull. “I should know this. I’m the light and color expert.” Nixie’s handle on chartreuse and carmine hammered that home.
Nikos, maybe feeling my frustration, started pacing. His eyes were red and his fingers were awfully long and pointy.
Something niggled at me but it wouldn’t quite settle. Kind of like my big Spartan lover. “I should know this,” I repeated.
I panned through years of art school memories, but there was so much. Photographic theory. Mixing oils, different than mixing watercolors. Arc welding. Even some CAD. Centuries of knowledge, condensed into an impossible four years. Now I tried to pack that into four minutes.
No, three. The clock turned eleven fifty-seven while I was thinking.
Nikos stopped pacing abruptly. “I’m going down.”
“Into the streets? You hate crowds.”
“It’ll be a bloodbath. Somebody has to help. They’re mostly fledglings down there, and I’m old. I can take them out.”
“And what happens if you’re as overcome by Jones’s light show as the rest? How much more damage could a millennia-old vampire do?”
Without a word, he kicked into pacing again, although his pacing screamed curses.
Eleven fifty-seven and twenty seconds. “Nixie. Is there a way to see what your computer guru is seeing?”
“Hey. He’s not a guru for nothing. Julian?” She spoke with her hubby for a moment, then came back on the line. “Okay, take a look at your display.”
I pulled the phone from my ear. Nikos came to watch over my shoulder.
Sure enough, the normal display had been replaced by a picture of the Ball, all flashing colors, descending on its pole. Colors played, indigo to orange to white. Red and yellow weren’t even predominant. I cudgeled my brain, trying to figure out what that meant. Or even trying to guess a way to structure my thoughts to figure out what it meant. I clapped the phone to my ear again. “Can I see that with the countdown added in? Cut it down to the last fifteen seconds.”
“You can see the whole damned building, and hear it, too. Julian!”
Moments later we saw the same play of lights, view expanded now. Whatever Jones and Steale Programové had done, it coordinated the entire building. Color swirled, intensifying with the percussion that hit the final ten seconds.
“What’s wrong?” Nikos’s breath was warm on my ear.
“The colors intensify on the beat. But they don’t change. Don’t flash. On television the Ball flashes the last seconds of the countdown in bright, white light. But this one swirls a cacophony of colors.”
“Isn’t it just artistic design? Maybe there is no purpose.”
“All art has purpose. Sometimes only to shock or please the viewer, but the artist made it for a reason. And in this case, we even know the purpose-stimulate vampire vision. But how, without the red or yellow? Damn it, Nikos, I’m missing something.” I gasped. “It’s missing-”
The music stopped. Loudspeakers blared. “Two minutes.” A roar erupted from the city’s miles-long carpet of people.
“Damn it, I had it! Before that stupid announcer broke my concentration-”
“Calm down, Twyla.” Nikos stroked my hair. “You had it, you’ll get it again. Something missing.”
“Missing, yes. Missing.” I snapped my fingers. “Color. The way it combines. Red and blue, red and green-no wonder I didn’t see it before.”
“What are you talking about?”
“What if the Ball isn’t the focus? What if Jones programmed the colors, not to trigger the vampires, but to trigger the other buildings?”
“What? Why would he do that?”
“Colors combine. Imagine the Ball-and the whole damned glowstick of the One Times Square building-throwing its light on these skyscraper-sized neon billboards around us. Beaming colors in just the right order so that everything that’s not red or yellow is changed to red or yellow. Now the whole ocean that’s Times Square is pulsing pus and blood. Combined with the noise, the blood scent of the crowd, the excitement-”
Nikos nodded impatiently. “Vampires would go wild, especially the youngsters. But how? Yellow and blue combine to make green. Yellow and red make orange. Nothing combines to make red or yellow. They are primary colors.”
I sometimes forget that not everyone went beyond kindergarten art. “In paints, yes. Paints are subtractive. But light mixes differently. Light is additive. RGB.”
“Twyla, make sense.”
“Red Green Blue. Red is a primary, but it’s a color we want. Blue can be flashed with red light to make magenta, a violently bright pink.”
“And green? Green plus blue is aqua, and green plus red is just ugly brown.”
“Not in light. Green plus red equals yellow.”
His breath sucked in. “What? That’s impossible.”
“No, it’s physics. Every single light in the Square can be morphed into a variation of red or yellow.”
Nikos blinked once as his brain processed what I was telling him. “The whole Square is a vampire time bomb. And we’re standing on the detonator?”
“Exactly. In the last minute, as the Ball descends, the Square will be awash in yellow and red. Vampires will go berserk. Did you hear that, Nixie?”
“Yep. Mr. Goo’s on it. But it’s going to take him a minute to reprogram.”
That was when the Ball started to drop.
Chapter Six
The bright bustle of color oozed around us, morphed in the streets below. Red began to predominate, and a spoiled-egg-yolk yellow. The beat of the final seconds hit my ears like a battery of drums. I stared out, horrified. “We don’t have a minute!”
“Julian, Twyla’s got a panic on, and that can’t be good…uh-oh. Take a look at the idiotbox.”
They were seeing what I was seeing. The cement and glass ocean of Times Square was bathed in light that was red as fresh blood. The color would be real soon enough.
“Damn, Julian, look at the crowd. That guy, there. Look at his face. His eyes.”
“Nixie, I’m on the roof. What are you seeing?”
“This,” Nikos said from behind me.
Nape crawling, I turned.
Fangs split his lips like gleaming daggers. His skin was hard as a shell and his eyes were deadly rubies.
“Are…are you okay?” I squeaked.
“No. But I will control it.” His fingers clenched like he was concentrating really, really hard. His claws poked holes in his skin but his fangs receded somewhat.
I wasn’t afraid, not of Nikos. He would never hurt me. He would manage whatever was happening to him.
But I was shaken. “Nixie. We could really use your guru to come through about now.”
“He’s hamster-wheeling it, but it’s not that easy. He has to figure out which colors are combining with which buildings and signs, all over satellite bandwidth-”
“No he doesn’t. Just scramble it!” Below me, the roar of a million excited people sharpened with the edge of panic. “All he has to do is bump the colors coming from the Ball. Make them random.”
“Oh. Yeah. Julian-you heard?”
The lights intensified. Red and yellow became screaming vermillion and lemon. They brightened so much I had to squint, my eyes aching. Vermillion and lemon became salmon and canary…and then pink and buff…and then white.