"It's all right," Ponch said. "I know her scent. I got it fresh yesterday; it hasn't changed that much. And the trail is fresh. I can track her."
Changed, Kit thought, confused. How could it change?
"Come on!" Ponch said. "The longer we stand here, the farther away she goes." "Let's go," Kit said. "There's not much time."
The leash was still around Ponch's neck. Kit picked it up and wound it around his wrist. The two of them stepped into the darkness and were gone.
Grand Central was in shadow as Nita came out of the gate by track twenty-four, and as she put her foot down, she heard a splash. There was so little light in the space around her that Nita spent some power to produce a small wizard's candle, a glimmer of light that rode above her shoulder as she looked around.
The tracks were ail under water, and water lapped at the piers that held up the platforms—a bizarre sight. Even the platforms were an inch deep or so in water, like black glass, the surface of it rippling gently, silent and intimidating. Beside her, Pralaya slipped into the water, ducking under it, and coming up again down by the place where the platforms tapered in, down where the tracks ducked more deeply under Forty-sixth Street. "This would be a wonderful swimmery," she heard him say from down in the darkness, "but I think perhaps it shouldn't be this way?"
"You got that in one," Nita said. Already she was trying to sense around her for this micro-universe's kernel, and she couldn't feel anything. What's the matter? I should be able to at least get a hint. It's my mother, after all! But it felt wrong somehow; she couldn't hear that faint buzz or whine that she'd learned to associate with a kernel, the sound of life doing its business. "Can you feel anything?" she said.
Pralaya surfaced in front of her, twisting and rolling in the dark water. "I'm not sure," he said. "There's... a darkness..."
Friday Morning
Nita was all too aware of this darkness. Listening, watching, she could feel it all around her. It bent in; it pressed against her; and worst of all was the sense that at any moment Pralaya's innocent, merry personality could be twisted out of shape by the Lone Power suddenly looking out of his eyes at her, offering her the bargain she could not refuse.
It's here, she thought, feeling that heavy, dark presence leaning in all around her. It's waiting for me to make a mistake. And maybe she already had.
"Come on," she said to Pralaya, "let's get out into the open."
Together they made their way toward what would have been the Main Concourse in her own world. "What does this look like to you?" Nita said to Pralaya as they made their way through the wet.
"In my world? This is the Meeting of the Waters," Pralaya said. "The place where the rivers come together before they run to the Sea."
Nita thought of the Sea and immediately was sad, seeing in her mind's eye Jones Inlet, and the Sun over the water, leaning westward in the afternoon, and the long, broad golden sunset light over the Great South Bay, where she had screwed things up so seriously with Kit. But now they came out under what should have been the ceiling of the Main Concourse...
Nita stood there and took in a long breath of shock, and let out another long one of sorrow. The whole place was under water, five feet deep, and the beautiful cream-colored stone walls of the terminal, to the four compass points, were striped with green-brown tide-marks of high water from other times, and still flooded deep in an unhealthy dark water that lapped and sucked at the walls. The whole place smelled of damp and cold and weed and chilly pain, and Nita shuddered as she splashed out of the platform arcade into the center of the terminal. She looked up at what should have been a warm, summery, Mediterranean-sky ceiling, and instead saw nothing but watery stars and autumn constellations, all fish and dolphins and sea serpents—not to mention poor Andromeda shackled to the rock, waiting to be eaten by the monster from the waves. It was not a view that filled Nita with confidence.
"Is it always so dark here?" Pralaya said.
Nita thought of fire gaping out of the depths of this space, not so long ago; yet now that scenario seemed positively preferable, for it had put only her own life at stake, not her mom's. "Not usually," she said, and led Pralaya up out of the Main Concourse, up the ramp to what normally would have been the street.
It was no improvement. The sky was clouded, dark and heavy; this was a city in shadow and under threat, with the waters rising all around. Some of the skyscrapers around them were in good-enough shape, but many of them were crumbling. Too many, Nita thought, knowing that she was seeing what her own mind could most effectively make of her mother's physical condition. Things were already going wrong here, and her doubt rose up and choked her.
"We have to go where it's worst, don't we?" Nita said.
Friday Morning
Pralaya nodded. "It would be the only way."
They stood there in the thunder-colored water, in the flooded street, and gazed up and down it. All of Forty-second Street was a river, and no traffic light, or any other light, burned on it anywhere; buildings cliffed out above the street, dark and forbidding, their lower stories wet and scummed with mold, their upper windows dulled with the residue of recent storms. Overhead, the roiling gray sky was like an unhealed wound, uncomfortable, unwell, unresolved. Nita closed her eyes and swallowed. Somewhere here was the kernel, the software of her mother's soul. She held still and listened, listened.
"Do you have time for this?" said the voice behind her, a little provocative. "Yup," Nita said, fierce. "Don't joggle my elbow, Pralaya, or I'll chew one of your legs off."
There was a pause. In a hurt voice Pralaya said, "I wouldn't have thought I'd have deserved that from you, Nita."
"Yeah, well," Nita said. "Sorry, cousin." Assuming you're really my cousin at the moment, and not That One.
The trouble was, there was no telling— Never mind that. Nita held still and listened with all of her. It's my mother, for heaven's sake! I should be able to hear her. But it was hard, suddenly.
And who's making it hard? Or is it just tough to sense your own mother when you're on business, as opposed to when you're at home? She becomes like water, like air, like anything else you get used to and take for granted.
Beside her, in the water, Pralaya paddled along as they worked their way down Forty-second Street. "Sorry," Nita said again. She would have said, I didn't mean that, except at the time she bad meant it, cruel as it was, and a wizard did not lie in the Speech—that was fatal. More fatal than what I'm about to do?
Nita stood at the spot where Forty-second normally crossed the Vanderbilt Avenue underpass, saw the drowned canal that the under-running road had become, and wished that Kit were here. It seemed to her that if only he were here, everything would be all right.
Yet she had constructed the circumstances in which he couldn't be here. She stood there in the muddy, westward-flowing water...
... and something bit her in the leg.
Nita yelped and jumped. "What was that!" she said.
Pralaya had already clambered up onto a pillar of the west side of Grand Central, sticking up out of the water. "We're not alone here," he said. "What would these be? They have teeth—"
"Cancer viruses," Nita said. "I wouldn't let them get too friendly with your extremities, if I were you."
Peering down into the muddy water, Nita could see them: little dark blocky hexagonal shapes with fierce straight little tails or stingers, cruising around. The water was teeming with them, large and small, like the little dark minnows in one of the local freshwater creeks. So many! Nita thought. How am I going to persuade all these things to do anything? The Lone Power was right. It was right.
She considered using the spell that would let her
Friday Morning
walk on water... but that took more energy than she now felt like using. I'm going to need everything I can possibly save for later, Nita thought. Better use the low-power one I tailored earlier. "I have a spell against these," she said to Pralaya. The spell would at least protect the two of them from the stings, but it couldn't stop the viruses from doing what they pleased with her mother.