The wind hit her almost as hard as the fear.
Before, she’d been moving: over the Pier, through the Court of Honor, up and down Cold Storage and its towers—she hadn’t had a chance to be afraid. Now she was dangling, rushing helplessly toward the roof, with no recourse but bending her fingers about the belt and praying that it or the rope wouldn’t break, that the wind wouldn’t rip her free, that Wiley wouldn’t ...
The furthest of the other guards lost his grip.
Neva opened her mouth to swear, but another guard’s coat tore apart.
The epithet died in her throat as a third guard’s rope snapped where flames had weakened it.
One, two, three: the trio of men splattered on the roof in rapid succession. A fourth guard had enough luck to make it down his hose, but he pitched forward upon landing and smashed his head open.
“Brace yourself!” called Wiley from behind her—still alive, thank God.
Neva inhaled and half-loosened, half-stiffened her shins, once more imagining her bones to be as elastic as a spiderweb. Her legs slammed against the roof, but they held, and she ran with the impact to make room for Wiley. He touched down a second after her, landing in a roll and coming up smoothly.
They’d made it.
Three men remained on the tower, however. And as the unoccupied guards on the main roof ran to Wiley and Neva’s side, another gout of flame whooshed from the first landing’s windows, catching the last ropes and hoses afire.
The three men on the tower began exchanging long, heartfelt embraces.
“Where are the damn ladders?” roared Wiley. “Throw them another rope!”
But the trio had already made up their minds, and after chanting something in unison—the Columbian Guard’s motto?—they slapped each other’s backs, saluted the guards on the main roof, and jumped.
“No,” Neva breathed.
Yet five, six, seven they came, in another horrible, crunching parody of raindrops.
The next several moments were filled with nothing but scattered whimpers from the crowd below and sputtering crackles from the flames above.
“Gentlemen,” Wiley finally said. “The building is lost. Gather the dead and get to safety.”
As if to emphasize his words, the west tower buckled between the first and second landings, showering debris over the roof. The tower’s inversion caused a brief disturbance in the surrounding smoke, creating an opening large enough to glimpse the crippled structure’s last occupant: the porter.
Somehow, he was still atop the third landing, his clothes burned to shreds and his hair a wreath of red. He no longer seemed panicked, though. With absurd calm, he removed what remained of his beard—as if it were a prop—and dropped it into the inferno. The height was too great for his features to be anything more than indistinct; there was no telling what his sooty expression actually conveyed.
But something gleamed on his bare chest above the crimson splash of the gunshot wound. Something purple. Something that might have been two large, adjoined sickle shapes. And the set his shoulders had taken looked ... familiar.
“No!” shouted Neva as the realization crystallized too late. “Augie! WAIT!”
Unhearing, her brother crossed himself, leaned forward, and stepped.
Chapter Eight
AUGIE FELL IN A SLOW tumble, completing his first rotation as the west tower gave way completely. Its upper half chased him to the main roof, smashing over him a second after his spine snapped across a cruelly curved piece of rubble.
“AUGIE!” screamed Neva.
She staggered toward the immense pile of blackened steel, plaster, and wood, but Wiley yanked her back. “The roof is going!” he shouted.
Neva bent free anyway, but the lower half of the tower crashed down on the other end of its base, and with a creaking shudder, the Cold Storage Building began caving in.
“Augie!” she screamed again as the debris that had buried him disappeared into a yawning, smoking hole.
Four arms grabbed her, two on either side. She struggled initially but went limp as the guards—Wiley and another of his brethren—raced her to one of the ladders that had finally appeared on the side of the building.
“Augie,” she whispered while the other guard helped Wiley get her on his back.
“Neva, I need you to hold on. Can you do that? I need you to use some of your squirrel strength to hold on.”
Sluggishly, she wrapped her arms around his chest, just below his neck.
“Good girl. Now, don’t let go. Not until we reach the ground.”
She might have nodded—it was hard to tell; her body seemed to have stopped responding to her thoughts. Everything was so ... muffled. She knew men were yelling above her and that more bits of Cold Storage were collapsing, but she could barely hear any of it. And she could tell Wiley was laboring to bear her weight as he descended the ladder. Except that was odd, because she felt like she was floating.
When they reached the ground—had the climb down really been so fast?—he shook his head at an approaching ambulance crew and shouted something at the crowd, presumably telling them to back up. Another guard kept making a shoving motion with his hand. “This is no longer a God-damned spectacle!” she thought she heard him say.
Then Wiley eased her onto her feet, brushed a bit of ash from her face, and asked her if ... she could walk? Talk?
It didn’t matter.
Augie was dead.
As Wiley told someone he was “taking her to see the Commandant,” Neva kept seeing her brother step from the third landing. Kept watching him spin slowly through the air, turning graceful circles as he grew larger, and larger, and ... died.
He kept dying. Neva kept seeing him die.
He hit the rubble, his spine snapped, the falling tower buried him. He hit the rubble, his spine snapped, the falling tower buried him. He hit the rubble, his spine snapped, the falling tower buried him ...
Her hand twitched—Wiley had taken hold of it.
“This
