By the Light of the Moon

Although what she had done, even in this imperfect fold, had to be judged a fantastic achievement by any standard, and though the busy horde of nanomachines and nanocomputers in her brain had within less than a day cursed her with amazing powers, Jillian Jackson could not fly. She materialized close enough to the third gunman to see his expression of absolute, unalloyed, goggle-eyed astonishment, and she seemed to hang in the air for a second, but then she dropped like a 110-pound stone.

***

The terrorist disguised in the Budweiser T-shirt most likely had a fine hard head, considering that imperviousness to new ideas and to truth was a prerequisite for those who wished to dedicate their lives to senseless brutality. The rifle butt, however, proved to be harder.

Especially for a man with the sensitive soul of an artist, Dylan took a disturbing amount of pleasure in the sound of club meeting skull, and he might have taken a second whack at the guy if he hadn't heard Jilly say, 'Here, there.' The note of extreme anxiety in her voice alarmed him.

Just as he looked at her, she folded into an asterisk of pencil-thin lines, which themselves at once folded into a dot the size of a period, and vanished. Dylan's racing heart beat once, beat twice – call it a second, maybe less – before Jilly reappeared in midair, high above the wedding guests.

For two of Dylan's explosive heartbeats, she hung out there in defiance of gravity, as though supported by the upsurge of pipe-organ music, and then a few wedding guests screamed in shock at the sight of her suspended above them. After a missed heartbeat followed by a hard knock that indicated a resumption of his circulation, he saw Jilly plummet into a rising chorus of screams.

She vanished during the fall.

44

Tough audiences had sometimes greeted her material with silence, and on rare occasion they had even booed her, but never before had an audience screamed at her. Jilly might have screamed back at them as she plunged into their midst, but she was too busy pinching-tweaking-folding out of the yawning maw of Death and back up to the top of the east scaffold, which had been her intended destination when she had left Dylan clubbing the second gunman.

Ruby and sapphire beams of stained-glass light, carved-marble columns, ranks of wooden pews, upturned faces wrenched in horror – all folded away from her. Judging by the percentage of blue-and-white brightness in the kaleidoscopic pattern that rapidly folded toward her, however, the new place appeared too well lighted to be the work platform atop the east scaffold.

She arrived, of course, standing high on the roof of the church, having dramatically overshot her target this time instead of coming up ten feet short of it. Azure-blue sky, white puffy clouds, golden sunshine.

Black slate.

The black slate roof had a fearsomely steep pitch.

Peering down the slope toward the street, she suffered an attack of vertigo. When she looked up at the bell tower looming three stories above the roof, her vertigo only grew worse.

She would have folded off the church roof instantly upon arrival – except that she clutched, lost her nerve, afraid of making a still bigger mistake. Maybe this time she would unfold with half her body inside one of the marble columns down in the nave, and half her body out of it, limbs flapping in death throes, most of her internal organs mingled with stone.

In fact, now that she had thought of such a gruesome turn of events, it would almost certainly come to pass. She wouldn't be able to banish the mental image of herself half wedded to stone, and when she folded herethere, there would prove to be the heart of a column, leaving her more completely involved with the church than ever she had been when she'd sung in the choir.

She might have stood on the roof for a couple minutes, until she calmed herself and regained her confidence; but she didn't have that option. Three seconds, four maximum, after her arrival, she began to slide.

Maybe the slate had been black when first installed, but maybe it had been mostly gray or green, or pink, for all she knew. Right now, here in the heart of a rainless summer, these shingles appeared smooth and black because a fine powder of soot had settled upon them from the oily air of smoggy days.

This soot proved to be as fine as powdered graphite. Powdered graphite is an excellent lubricant. So was this.

Fortunately Jilly started near the peak of the roof; therefore, she didn't at once slide all the way off and drop to whatever expanse of bone-breaking concrete, or impaling iron fence, or pack of savage pit bulls, might be waiting for her below. She glided about ten feet, regained traction too abruptly, almost pitched forward, but stayed upright.

Then she slid again. Skiing down black slate. Big jump coming up. Building momentum for an Olympic- qualifying distance.

Jilly wore athletic shoes, and she was pretty athletic herself, but she couldn't arrest her slide. Although she waved her arms like a lumberjack in a log-rolling contest, she teetered on the brink of losing her balance, teetered, and then one foot flew out from under her. As she started to go down, realizing that she was going to smack slate with her tailbone, she wished she had a fat butt instead of a skinny little ass, but all the years of doughnut denial had at last caught up to her, and here came the void.

Like hell. She refused to die a Negative Jackson death. She had the willpower to make her destiny, rather than be a victim of fate.

The round and round of all that is, beautiful in its eleven-dimensional simplicity, folded to her command, and she left the roof, the soot, left the slide to death unfinished.

***

Falling toward the floor of the church, Jilly vanished, and with her disappearance, the screams of the wedding guests spiked, causing the organist to abandon the keyboard. The many screams broke off as one in a collective gasp of astonishment.

Gazing down on the spectacle, Shepherd said, 'Wow.'

Dylan snapped his attention toward the work platform on the east scaffold, where the gunman with the rifle stood. Perhaps too stunned to act on his original intentions, the killer hadn't yet opened fire. His hesitation wouldn't last long; in mere seconds, his hatred would prove powerful enough to purge the wonder of having witnessed an apparent miracle.

'Buddy, here to there.'

'Wow.'

'Take us over there, buddy. To the bad man.'

'Thinking.'

'Don't think, buddy. Just go. Here to there.'

Down on the floor of the church, the majority of the wedding guests, who hadn't been looking up during Jilly's midair appearance and subsequent plunging disappearance, turned in bewilderment to those who had seen it all. A woman started to cry, and the piping voice of a child – no doubt a certain pigtailed girl – said, 'I told you so, I told you so!'

'Buddy-'

'Thinking.'

'For God's sake-'

'Wow.'

Inevitably, one of the wedding guests – a woman in a pink suit and a pink feathered hat – spotted the third killer, who stood at the edge of the work platform atop the east-wall scaffold, leaning out, looking down,