Ash and Quill(64)

Jess heard the whistling of incoming missiles-more of them now. The keening of angry ghosts, made even more chilling by the thick clouds of smoke already spreading across the sky. Philadelphia-a defiant, crumbling wreck of a town-was burning, and burning as it never had before.

Jess stumbled to his friends and shouted, "Run!" He wanted to ask what had been so damned important that they'd risked everything, even the chance of life, but he had no breath to spare and neither did they. The air around them had grown hot, and every breath came painful and thick with smoke. He could taste the Greek fire now, as more and more containers shattered and the stuff spread into a fine, hazy mist. Flashover is coming. When Greek fire reached a dense enough fog in the air, it would ignite, and then there'd be nothing to breathe at all.

They ran through the rotten, dead fields. The plants were still too wet to burn, but mist rose off the mud like phantoms as the heat increased. Thomas had the advantage of extra-long legs; Dario and Glain struggled to keep up with the two of them. Jess ran like his life depended on every step, because it did.


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He slowed as they approached the barn, and turned to look back. It was like looking back on hell. Philadelphia was a seething lake of flame, and still the ballistae keened, still the bombs exploded. The park where he'd kissed Morgan burned, every tree a candle. No building remained standing. None would.

"Jess!" Thomas shouted, and tackled him into the mud, just as a ballista bomb shattered through the roof of the barn in front of them. We're dead. We're all bloody dead, Jess thought, because the explosion would catch them, catch those crouching near the wall . . .

But nothing happened. Thomas rolled off, and Jess ran to the door of the barn. The glass container of Greek fire had fallen on a pile of hay, and it hadn't broken . . . but the fuse still burned, and when it ignited the contents . . .

Jess didn't think. He moved. He hardly felt the shock of the burn on his fingers when he grabbed the fuse and pulled, because it didn't matter; all that mattered was that this bomb could not explode.

He dropped the hissing fuse to the ground and crushed it into ash with his boot, then allowed himself to stagger back outside, lean against the wall, and scream. It came out raw with terror, fury, horror . . . a sound as agonized as all those sounds in the town, all those voices crying out.

He couldn't do anything.

"Jess," Thomas said, and Jess looked up at him. The German's face was smudged and filthy, but tears made clear tracks through the soot. "Come. Come now."

They followed Glain and Dario to the other side of the barn, where the rest of their friends crouched with Askuwheteau's fragile group of survivors near the wall. Wolfe shot to his feet when he saw them, and the anguish and relief on his face made Jess want to weep himself. This was too much, too much for anyone.

Thomas said, "Everyone, get away from the wall now," and they did, though they still crouched low, looking up at the swirling black clouds, the bombs shrieking through the air somewhere above, an unseen terror.

Thomas had found the time to put the Ray of Apollo together from the components. It was bulky, crude, the ugliest thing Jess had ever seen Thomas craft; the long barrel flared out into a wide curve toward the end of it. We didn't test it, Jess thought with a horrible sense of fatality. We didn't test it, and now there's no time.

But Thomas was right. Heron had built this device back in the dim mists of antiquity. He'd made something that wouldn't be seen again until Archimedes, with his giant array of mirrors built to burn ships at sea. As Thomas had said, Heron's tools had been little better than what they'd had in Beck's workshop. 

Thomas pressed the button, and a thick red light erupted from the barrel of the thing, spreading out but staying somehow solid in the air. The mirror, Jess thought, and remembered all those painful hours of grinding and polishing. It's working. The light hit the metal of the wall, and the wall began to hiss and glow and melt off in liquid layers. Concentrated light, burning its way through the surface of a wall softened by Morgan's efforts.

It was why she was so weak. She'd created this chance at life.

It took a long, torturous minute to burn completely through, and when Thomas switched off the gun, there was a hole in the wall just large enough to crawl through. The edges glowed sullenly, but they were already cooling.

Thomas groaned, dropped the weapon, and staggered backward-and Jess realized, in the next instant, that his friend's palms were burned bright red. "I didn't have time to put in shielding," Thomas said when Jess came toward him. "I didn't think- No, no, I'm fine. Go, Jess, get them out! We don't have long!"