BOUNDARY(155)

In the very short time it took her to finish that assessment, the slabs had come more than halfway down. There was only one possible chance left, slim as it might be. She took a step forward, stopped, planted her legs, extended her arms at what she guessed was the best angle, and braced herself.



The ice arrived.





A moaning, grumbling noise echoed through the tunnel. A.J. spun to see the roof coming down, seeming to break in two directly above Madeline's head.



A ghostly blast of white-red dust filled the corridor. A.J. felt himself dragged backward by Helen, away from the collapse. The two of them tripped over something. They fell to the floor and lay there, expecting to see the roof come down on top of them also.



"Madeline! A.J.! Helen!" Joe's voice came faintly over the radio. "Are you all right? What's happening down there?"



Dust fogged the air so thickly that A.J. felt an impulse to cough or hold his breath, despite the fact that none of it could possibly get to him. His voice was strained when he answered.



"Cave-in, Joe. Me and Helen seem to be okay." The rumbling had faded away. The ceiling in this far area of the tunnel seemed solid enough. He looked at Helen, who blinked wide-eyed back at him. For a moment the two just held each other. He saw Rich picking himself up. He was apparently what they'd tripped over. "Rich is okay too."



"What about Madeline?"



It was starting to sink in. "Jesus . . . She was smack in the middle of the tunnel when it came down."



He heard a choking sound from Joe, a sound filled with so much pain that it caused his own eyes to sting. "I'm going to take a look, Joe. We really don't know anything yet."



Despite that attempt at reassurance, A.J. had no real hope that Madeline was still alive, as he groped his way toward where she'd been. Ice dust still drifted thick as smoke in a burning building in the corridor. He couldn't see anything, although he could sense Helen and Rich following him.



"I can't see anything at all yet. Place is filled with ice dust. Some rock dust too, looks like. Hold on . . ."



He could now make out vague dark shapes in the beam of his light. "Clearing up slowly. Probably all blocked, but I'll get as close as—"



He broke off sharply. Just stared, wide-eyed.



Helen and Rich came up beside him. "Holy . . ." Rich started to say, but trailed off, unable to finish.



Helen said nothing at all. Just shook her head, back and forth, like a metronome.



Finally, A.J. cleared his throat, very loudly. "I swear, I swear, I swear. I will never again made a wisecrack about Supergirl."



Madeline stood in the center of the corridor, her arms stretched up and out to either side at perhaps a sixty-degree angle. Her hands held up two huge slabs of ice which, in turn, prevented most of the ice above from erasing the entire corridor like a bubble from a wad of dough.



They heard a gasp from her. Now that the ice dust was clearing away, A.J. could see that Madeline's eyes looked as wide as his felt.



"W-what do you know . . ." she said shakily. "It worked. For now, anyway."



"What? What worked? How the hell are you holding up all that? Dammit, you're not that strong. Three-eighths gravity be damned. No human being who ever lived is that strong!"



By the end, he was almost screeching. A.J. realized he sounded half-hysterical; relief, terror, incomprehension all mingled in his high-pitched demand. Somewhere in the background, but not really grasping the words, he could hear Joe hollering words that combined relief and demands for a coherent report.



"No, I'm not." Madeline took a slow breath, settling her own nerves. "But I thought the suit might be."



The dazzling Fathom smile came. Even shining through her faceplate, it seemed to light up the whole tunnel. "I remembered what you did with Joe, after he broke his leg."



Enlightenment burst over A.J. "Mother of God. You made your whole suit go to rigid impact mode and lock that way. With mostly carbonan components . . . yeah, it could work. Genius. Pure effing genius."



He finally understood, now, why Hathaway had been so insistent that Madeline accompany them.



False modesty aside, A.J. knew he was extraordinarily intelligent. Something of a genius, in many ways. But his mind groped to imagine the combination of foresight, quick thinking, and instantaneous reaction that had enabled Madeline to do what she'd done.



A.J. knew he'd never have been able to do it himself, if he'd been in her position. He'd have been nothing more than a smear in the ice.



In the end, brains were only a part of it—and a small part at that. The universe that had shaped Madeline Fathom was just a completely different one than had shaped A.J. Baker.