Ash and Quill(63)

And the wall was unbroken.

Thomas wasn't there.



"Where are they?"

Jess turned on Khalila.

"They aren't with you?" she demanded in turn. "Thomas and Glain never arrived! Dario went to fetch them, I thought-" She pulled in a sudden, agonized breath. "Does Beck have them?"

"No," Jess said. "He'd have shoved them in our faces if he did." Thomas, you fool, what are you doing? "Glain and Dario went to get the books?"

"Yes! They're here!" She pointed to a stack of bags and packs near the door. Familiar ones. They'd carried them from Alexandria to London to here. "Glain went to get something else, and Dario went after her. I never saw Thomas!"

But Thomas, Jess thought, had seen the others and decided they needed help. Without Thomas, without that device to melt a hole in this wall . . .

"I've got to go find them," he said, and ignored the protests that burst out of Morgan, Santi, Wolfe. Khalila said nothing, and he kept his gaze on her. "If the building goes, stay near the wall. Ballista bombs don't drop straight down; you should be safe there."

She nodded, though they both knew that if the Library had declared no quarter in the battle, the volume of Greek fire that would shortly be descending on this city would leave nothing alive. Nothing safe.

"Which way did they go?" he asked her, and she pointed back to city hall.

"Jess!" Wolfe shouted, but he wasn't listening.

He was running.

Jess felt the waves of the explosion shudder through his body, and he nearly lost his footing; he watched one of the buildings in the street across from the fields shatter apart, wood and metal spinning in strangely beautiful arcs into the air, glittering end over end . . . and then the Greek fire contained inside the projectile caught fire. It was an awful, beautiful fountain of raw green liquid that breathed and spread, falling on other buildings, coating the street.

Everything, burning.

He ran faster, heart pounding as he heard more high, keening screams overhead. More bombs coming, from every direction now. This is suicide! But he didn't know what else to do. He couldn't leave them. Better to die honest.

He'd just reached the strip of mud and grass where the mob had been when two bombs hit city hall. One shattered right through the tower, like a rock through an eggshell. 

The other descended on the broad, white landing where Beck had threatened the prisoners. Right in front of him. He had just enough time to see Willinger Beck, with his badly broken leg, roll over and put his hands over his head in a futile attempt at protection, and thought, I'm sorry, and then the bomb went off.

He didn't realize he was falling. It was like a black stutter in the world, and with no transition at all he was lying on his back. A strange, hissing whine buzzed his ears, and he batted at it like a wasp, but it was in his ears, inside his head, and as he rolled slowly onto his side he remembered the ballista, the explosion. The thin, screaming sound of death approaching from the sky.

Then he saw the fire.

It lived, breathed, roared like a beast, greenish at the edges, raw, bleeding red at the center as it melted the stone steps. The building itself was burning, the tower collapsing in on itself. He saw Benjamin Franklin's golden statue tumbling down in an arc, melting into golden streamers as it fell.

The grass around him exploded in poison green patches, spreading, crisping the soil beneath into brittle glass. A tree near the corner became a burning matchstick weeping lacy, lazy curls of flame.

The air swirled with ashes and bitter smoke so thick he could bite it, chew it, swallow it whole. The acrid taste made him retch uncontrollably. He wiped thick, colorless spit away from his lips and levered himself up on shaking legs. The burning tree began to hiss and screech like a human strapped to a pyre; it was only the sap boiling and cracking through the bark with thick pops, but it sounded so alive.

He could hear more bombs exploding, and the high, thin shrieking now wasn't the bombs falling; it was people with no way out, nowhere to run. Am I burning? It occurred to him only then, in a blind panic, that he might be, that if he looked down, he might see his skin crisping and curling off of muscle, and fear nearly sent him reeling until he got ahold of himself. I'm not. I'm not burning.

A window at the far corner of the building suddenly exploded outward in a white shower of glass, and a large tufted chair crashed to the ground.

Glain was the first through in a leap and a roll. Dario clambered out and made the jump, awkwardly.

Thomas came last. He was holding a thick, crude weapon clutched in one hand, and he had a large, bulky sack over one shoulder. He jumped and landed to his ankles in the thick mud, and doubled over coughing. All three of them were stained with smoke, retching out thin drools of phlegm.