Baby was bolting for the smog layer like a falcon with her tail on fire. Tommy muttered a curse, leaned back in the contoured chair, closed his eyes. Tach felt the muscles in the human's arms bunch and jump as Tom gripped the arms of his chair and concentrated. And suddenly they were climbing, and at a greater speed than Tachyon had ever experienced with the turtle shell.

Their increased speed was not closing the gap with Baby. No matter how much Tom pushed, he was not going to match the speed of a spacecraft attaining escape velocity. But as Tach watched, she saw Baby shudder and jerk like a trout hitting the end of a fishing line.

"What have you done?"

"Grabbed her with my teke," grunted Tommy. His eyes were narrowed to slits, and sweat was starting to roll down his round cheeks.

Tach was amazed. "Can you hold her?"

"I have no fucking idea."

"So what are you trying to do?"

"I don't know yet! I just did itl Now I'm trying to work it out!"

Tach glanced again at one of the monitors. If Baby escaped, she was trapped-forever. Her mind spun in frenzied circles-this can't be happening… Tommy won't let this happen… if I close my eyes, it's yesterday, and this isn't happening.

"Shit," said Tommy, and his teeth rattled like dice on a marble floor.

Tachyon realized that she was shivering, great shuddering heaves that shook her tiny frame. "What?"

"I'm not flying the shell any longer. We're being pulled along. And I'm not slowing her at all." Tommy craned about, examining the shell as if he'd never seen it before. "First the heat goes, then the air. We gotta go back."

"No!"

"Tachyon, we've got no choice." His fingers bit deep into her shoulders.

"I'll reach her… wait… IT t-try again… I'll r-reach her." Cold and terror made her stutter.

The sky revealed on the monitors was turning an alarming shade of midnight blue, and the stars shone hard and bright through the wisps of remaining atmosphere.

Hugging herself against the cold, Tach bowed forward over the swell of her pregnancy, reached deep within herself. Touched and melded her child's feeble telepathy to her own.

Flung it out, clawing, scrabbling for the beautiful rough surface of her ship.

Baby, hear me! Stopl Stop, please, stop!

Memories flashed behind her eyelids a mocking, damning litany of mistakes and lost opportunities. Claude Bonnell hobbling away with Blaise in his arms. If Tachyon had delayed, allowed him to escape. Cody, wrenching him off the boy as Tach methodically tried to beat Blaise to death. If she had allowed him to kill the monster.

Tommy was gasping, desperate animal sounds in the icy confines of the shell. The lights on the fleeting spaceship danced wildly before Tachyon's eyes.

Noooooo! The mental shriek cut off as Tommy released his grip on the Takisian ship, and the shell tumbled end over sickening end.

Tach lost her grip on Tommy and was thrown violently from side to side in the shell as it fell toward earth. In the screens, the lights of the ship strobed in and out of view as the shell tumbled.

And as Tachyon watched, the amber and lilac lights of the ship stretched and erupted in liquid fire as Baby shifted into ghost drive.

And was gone.

The Temptation of Hieronymus Bloat

XI

The walls were still pocked with bullet holes. Most of the glass had yet to be repaired. I hadn't let them clean up the remnants of the Temptation; brightly painted bits of wood still littered the top of my pedestal. What I could see of the Rox from my vantage point looked like a battlefield.

It was a dream or it was real, one or the other. It didn't much matter, really; dream or reality, it was starting to look the same. I was sobbing. I wept for Kelly-Tachyon; I wept for Peanut; I wept for the jokers who had died defending this place; I wept for myself and what I'd become.

Far off over the bay, the city stared back at me. Sunlight glittered from the Manhattan towers. New York seemed to laugh at me.

"I hate you!" I screeched to the city. "I hate what you've done and what you've made me do."

A voice interrupted my tirade. "Hey, you just grew up, Fatboy. That's all."

I glanced down. The penguin stood at the top of the stairs in front of me. It scuffed at bits of the painting with its webbed feet.

"You're dead," I told it. "I saw you die."

It shrugged. "So what? Now I'm alive again. Birth, rebirth. You know-the never-ending cycle."

"Did I bring you back to life?" I asked. The question seemed important somehow.

"You tell me."

Such a strange thing, to see the creature standing there and not be able to hear its thoughts. "Okay, yes I did," I told it. I was certain of it in that instant, then in the next not so sure at all. "Maybe. Somehow," I hedged. I laughed, bitterly. "If I did, it's another useless talent I can't control, like everything else. If I were going to bring someone back, it'd be Peanut. I can't even do that in my dreams, can I? None of this is real."

The penguin looked smug and amused. "Hey, you have a thousand jokers living in your damn caves, so you'd better hope your dreams are 'real,' huh?" Then it squinted its eyes under the funnel and cocked its head. It looked at me very seriously. "God knows what the Rox could be… if you put your mind to it," it said.

That made me laugh. "I did put my mind to it. I made the Rox a charnel house."

"Right. Wallow in guilt. But consider this-wouldn't you do it again if you had to?"

I thought about it. I was still angry.

"I can read your thoughts," the penguin said to me. "Yes, you'd do it. You laughed, Bloat. You chuckled while the nats died. You enjoyed the feeling revenge gave you."

Yes, I remembered. In those moments, I'd felt strong. They deserved what they'd gotten, the nats. They all deserved it. I'd only given them justice.

The penguin cocked its head at me; the funnel hat tilted and almost fell off. "You still feel it, don't you," it said.

"Feel what?" I almost asked, but then I knew. I knew.

I could sense the same thundering underneath all the chatter and noise in my head, the same bass pounding I'd felt when I'd called forth Anthony's demons to kill. That powermy power-was still there, still fueled by all the bile and anger in the Rox. That vigor, that energy, was mine, as much mine as my horrible slug-mountain body.

"Yes," the penguin hissed contentedly, as if it were reading my thoughts again. "That's it. Go ahead. Do it!" So I did.

I looked at New York and the glittering, mocking expanse of skyscrapers again. "You hate us," I said to the city.

"Fine. Well, this is my dream. Inside the Wall, I can sculpt my world whatever way I want."

I touched the seething mass of energy with my mind and let it flow out, out across the Rox to my Wall. As the energy coursed along the periphery, I let it shape the boundary. An artist, I drew a new wall.

The penguin started to laugh. All around me, jokers were pointing out to the bay.

Far out in the water, under the false green and stormy sky of my dreams, the Wall was becoming solid. It flickered with dark lightnings and then slowly hardened. Where my thoughts flowed through and past, they left behind what was indeed a Wall, a massive thing of stone and brick a hundred feet high-an edifice that giants would have built. I played with it, using the power like a fine chisel. My whim gave the Wall great oaken gates banded with steel and barred with portcullises that a Titan couldn't have shaken loose. Towers sprouted along its length, barbicanned and tall.

Now I imagined a great arc of a bridge, and the power flashed outward visibly with the thought, painting a delicate structure as thin as a hair that spanned the wall. Unsupported, it touched the ground by the Administration Building and then again in the bay just outside the wall, pointing toward Battery Park. The bridge was wide enough for only two people to walk abreast. There were no handrails, and the span glittered as if it were made of glass.