The Keeper fired all four barrels at Annah. Simultaneously. The resulting blast was a pandemonium of light and sound, a blare of pure chaos that lasted only a fraction of a second; but in my mind's eye, it seemed to break into distinct pieces that each lasted forever.
I imagined the bullets reaching her first: an eruption of lead traveling faster than sound. Since she'd been diving forward, facing the shooter, the slugs would hit her in the head, the shoulders, and chest.
The hypersonics would arrive next. It was the same kind of attack Opal had talked about — the pistol she'd been carrying in the tobacco field. It hadn't affected the Lucifer, but I prayed it would work on Annah: frazzling her nervous system, hammering her into merciful unconsciousness so she couldn't feel the horrors to come.
Then fire. A flammable gas, something that blazed bright orange, pouring in a burning jet. Igniting her clothes, her hair, her beautiful skin.
Finally, the acid, its spray traveling slower than bullets, sound, and fire. Acid splashing onto the flames. I couldn't tell whether the acid would burn off harmlessly, or if the heat would make it work that much faster: disintegrating what was left of Annah's corpse.
Annah's corpse.
Then it was all over. The Keeper toppled forward across the furniture barricade, smoke pouring off his body. The gun clattered from his hands. Impervia leapt to the floor as if there was something she could do for Annah, but I remained frozen where I was.
The Caryatid slumped beside me. Her face was damp; not tears, but perspiration. "Ugh," she said. "Let's not do that again."
I stared at her, shocked at her lack of feeling for Annah. Before I could speak, something fluttered down in the room: Impervia had just kicked Annah's cloak and a few more pieces of clothing halfway across the floor. "Get down here, Phil!" Impervia snapped. "We need your first aid kit."
We?
I leaned over the edge of the hole. Lying tight against the wall was Annah, stripped to her underwear and blood drenching her left arm, but still very much alive.
She looked at me and smiled. "Keepers might be good with electrical things, but they sure are lousy shots."
I held her in my arms as Impervia bandaged Annah's only wound: a bullet had passed in and out of her left biceps muscle, missing the bone and all major blood vessels. As she'd said, the Keeper had been a lousy shot — not too surprising for a man who'd lost one eye and was dazed from being battered unconscious. All but one of the bullets had gone wild, and the hypersonic stun-wave was off target too.
Annah would still have been cremated by the flamethrower if not for quick work by the Caryatid — our mistress of fire had redirected the blaze back at the shooter before Annah was hit. (Good-bye, poor misguided Keeper.) That left only the acid, also badly aimed; Annah's thick winter outfit protected her from the caustic splash, and she'd managed to peel off her clothes before the corrosive fluids ate through to her flesh. (Smoke still rose from the discarded bundle of cloth. Her long parka was pocked through with holes, as if chewed by huge moths. The black cloak that let her vanish in the dark had vanished itself — totally consumed by the ravaging chemicals.)
But Annah was safe. Shot, yes, and trying not to wince as Impervia wrapped bright white bandages around her dark arm; but when I considered the alternative…
I held her tightly and lowered my face against the top of her head. I didn't cry; I just breathed in the warm fragrance of her hair.
"Phil… Phil!" The Caryatid was shaking my shoulder. "We have to get going right now."
"Can't we let Annah rest—"
"No," the Caryatid interrupted. "I heard voices up the elevator shaft. They're whispering, but the shaft carries echoes a long way."
"Probably the Ring of Knives," Impervia said. "No doubt, Mother Tzekich has been running around Niagara Falls, asking at every hotel if they've seen Sebastian and her daughter. She must have found someone who saw the two heading this way."
Either that, I thought, or Tzekich noticed the Falls had stopped flowing and came to investigate. She'd have seen Pelinor's body in the roadway, immediately in front of the power plant. After that, it was just a matter of following our tracks.
Annah put her hand on my cheek. She was bandaged now — looking painfully vulnerable in nothing but underwear, and probably weak from blood loss — but her smile was genuine. "We have to go before they get here. I'm strong enough. Really."
I helped her to her feet. As I did, Impervia slipped off her own winter coat and draped it around Annah's shoulders. "No," I said, "I'll give her my coat."
"She's already got mine," Impervia said. "I don't need it — this place is heated. Anyway, a coat will only slow me down if the time comes for… punishing the wicked."
Impervia smacked her right fist into her left palm. I stifled a laugh. In the past twenty-four hours, Impervia had been kicked by fishermen, gut-punched by Hump, kicked by Zunctweed, tossed around by Sebastian… and still she was looking for a fight.
Annah whispered softly in my ear, "That's what happens to some people when they take a vow of celibacy."
When I stifled the laugh this time, I nearly hurt myself.
I kept my arm around Annah as we moved forward; I don't know if she really needed my support, but she didn't push me away.
As we passed the fallen Keepers, Annah suddenly stopped. I thought she just needed to rest — but she bent down and pried an Element gun from its dead owner's grip.
"You want one too?" she asked.
Thinking of Pelinor and Myoko, I nodded. This was not just a quest; this was war.
22: HALF A LEAGUE, HALF A LEAGUE, HALF A LEAGUE ONWARD
A single door led forward. It had once been equipped with a fancy electronic lock connected to a keypad. Half the keypad was missing now, along with a chunk of the door frame. Sebastian hadn't wasted time on delicacy.
Beyond lay a short corridor with a door in each side wall and another at the far end. All three doors had been blown off their hinges.
The side doorways opened into locker rooms where the plant's OldTech personnel had changed from street clothes into whatever work-suits they wore on the job. The lockers had been knocked helter-skelter, some tossed against the walls, others cracked open like eggs. I wondered if Sebastian had smashed around the lockers just to show he could… or because he'd begun to like pointless mayhem.
Our friend Caryatid had also developed a liking for displays of mystical force. Before this business started, I'd never seen her juggle flames any larger than a big candle — but now she'd built a blaze the size of a cow's head, floating in front of us at chest height and pouring out heat like a furnace. No one dared step within five paces of it… no one except the Caryatid, whose face glistened with heat-sweat. She barely seemed to notice; she and her flameball just plowed ahead toward the next smashed-in doorway.
The entrance to the main machine room.
The place was as big as the academy's main building: a single chamber more than four stories high and a hundred meters square, its ceiling supported by dozens of pillars. The walls and floors were painted kelp-green; they tinted the space like a sea-grotto, ripe and weedy. In OldTech times, the place must have been brightly lit — bank upon bank of fluorescent fixtures hung from the roof, with multiple light-tubes in each fixture. But the days were long gone when such tubes could be mass-produced. Three-quarters of the fixtures had no light at all, and the remainder each only held a single long bulb. The result was an oceanic dimness, a full-fathom-five gloom filled with shadows.