He felt an incredible surge of relief, happiness, as if he’d woken from a terrible nightmare to the realization everything was fine and good after all. How much he wanted to stay with his parents and just watch the floats passing by on the street before them.
But then the ash man slid by, riding a diesel-powered fire-breathing dragon, seeking him out amid the crowd viewing the parade and pointing a translucent finger Alex’s way.
Was this his doing, his way of trapping Alex? Or was it truly a quantum anomaly a million times more powerful than the destruction of Laboratory Z?
The answers didn’t matter, because Alex didn’t belong here. As safe and secure as he felt on that city street with his parents, his world was still a millisecond behind him, where this scene had never really happened. And if he stayed here, if he stayed, then Sam could be lost forever in some celestial ether, trapped literally between worlds, as represented by the spiral stairwell spinning so fast that the world ceased to exist beyond it.
Sam! Alex called in his mind. Sam!
She wasn’t there at all, then very far away but drawing closer, until she was back in his arms and he was hugging her tight.
*
The cyborgs were still converging on the elevator, just seeming to take note of Raiff’s and Donati’s presence, when something that looked like an electrical storm burst upward through the floor. The machines froze in place, locked up solid, as if frozen by a frigid blast of ice.
“Raiff!” the Guardian heard, recognizing Dancer’s voice from the area of a nearby stairwell.
Then he watched the boy lead Samantha through what looked like a tunnel carved out of the increasing shower of sparks and flames. It rocketed up and through the ceiling, churning its displaced energy toward the sky. A vast, swirling whirlpool that Raiff imagined, like a vortex, would suck everything within its reach into its field.
“Don’t look at it!” Alex cried out, clutching Sam so close to him they seemed extensions of the same person. “Follow me!”
Raiff did, dragging Donati along with him by one hand and retracting his whip in the other, weaving his way through the seized-up forms of the androids, the light gone from their eyes, starting to stink of burned metal and rubber. For a long moment he couldn’t breathe and thought he was holding his breath, until he realized there was no air to breathe, no air at all. Nothing but a vacuum they seemed to soar through, Raiff having no sense of his feet touching the floor as he moved all the way to the main entrance to the prison.
The door had already collapsed before them, the walls cracking in lines widening enough to let the blackness of the night pour through. They rushed through what had been the prison yard, surging downhill without ever looking back, Raiff nonetheless struck by the sensation that the vacuum was on their tail, trying to suck them into the vortex.
They tumbled down the slight hill as a group, fearing the world beneath them had been pulled out like a rug, until all their gazes fixed on the crumbling remnants of Alcatraz prison as it vanished in a blinding burst of white light.
105
MELTDOWN
IT FELT FOR A moment that the very night had been sucked away, trapping them in a kind of vacuum where they felt weak and weightless. Their clothes alternately billowing and then sticking to their skin, the color seeming to blanch from their faces, only to return in the next instant as the world kept jumping from color to black and white and back again.
Alex was squeezing Sam’s hand so tight it actually hurt. She thought her lungs should have been burning from lack of oxygen, but it didn’t seem like she needed to breathe, felt as if she were floating over the ground instead of standing on it.
Back beyond them, up the slight hill half a football-field length away, what was left of the prison building didn’t explode or burn so much as melt. Its shape receded in the blinding light, and when the light finally began to dim the entire structure was gone, just a sprawling expanse of scorched ground left in its place, minus any char or smoke.
Sam felt buffeted by a thick wind and just like that the air was back along with the sky, which, she realized, had seemed to vanish as well, stolen from the world in those brief moments along with everything else. She looked down, expecting to see her clothes melted or torn free, but found them still in place, soiled but not shredded and smelling of something that reminded her of the scent that lifted off a campfire to cling to fabric like glue. And the air felt … well, funny. Kind of staticky, a vague hum that reminded her of a swarm of insects buzzing about coming from inside her head.
She turned and saw Dr. Donati picking himself off the ground, too busy checking his watch to realize blood was running down his face from where he must have struck his head when he fell.
“It … stopped,” he said dazedly.
Sam rotated her gaze about, the San Francisco skyline having gone utterly dark as well. Then it sprang back to life, the entire world returning.