Two more divots appeared in the window as sniper bullets slammed into it. Then the chopper banked away and took off low and fast above the factory buildings, heading out over the bay. It was soon lost to sight.

Gragg looked back down at the body in the street. Two small photographs wafted away from Merritt's dead fingers in the wind.

Ross pulled Philips up onto the quay on the far side of the ship channel. They both crawled to level ground, and after panting for a few moments, Ross looked up.

They were on the edge of a pipe storage yard. He eased Philips up so her back rested against a smooth concrete pylon. She looked dazed.

He turned to face the ruins of Building Twenty-Nine burning beneath a thunderhead of roiling black smoke across the water. A dozen more columns of smoke rose elsewhere in the distance. He could hear sirens wailing all over the city. It was a war zone.

Fireboats approached from the bay.

He knelt down next to Philips and brushed her wet hair away from her face. "Help is coming, Nat." He felt her trembling. "Are you okay?"

Her lips quivered slightly but she nodded. Her face contorted as she tried to contain tears. "How many do you think we lost?"

He took a deep breath. "Possibly everyone."

She put a hand to her mouth and started crying.

"It's not your fault, Natalie." He put a hand on her arm reassuringly.

"I was in charge!"

"No. You weren't. We just thought you were."

She stopped and turned her blindfolded eyes toward him.

"They were never going to let us stop the Daemon, Natalie."

"You're talking crazy! The government created the Task Force. We were betrayed by private industry."

"Private industry is your government. I thought you knew that."

"How can you say that to me?"

"Because it's true. Sobol knew it. The Daemon isn't attacking us, Nat. This is a struggle between two artificial organisms. The Daemon is just a new species of corporation."

They sat for a moment listening to the distant sirens.

"The old social order is dissolving, Nat. It happens every few centuries." He looked out across the burning city, then turned back to her. "I won't let Loki be our future."

She was trembling, whether from being wet or scared he couldn't tell.

He brushed his hand along her cheek and eased toward her blindfolded face. His face was only an inch away from hers. She could sense him there.

"I want you to know, every day my first and last thought is of you."

He removed his hand from her cheek. She blindly glanced around, listening, feeling forward with her hands. "Jon." A pause filled with the sound of sirens and approaching tug engines. She no longer felt his presence. "Jon!"

The only reply was an echoing, amplified voice from the water. "Are you injured?" A fireboat's engines throbbed in reverse.

Philips wept on the jetty as the roar of powerful engines drowned out the world.

He floated in the darkness of his mind for what seemed decades. Thoughts came to him only as raw concepts-black despair, vertiginous fear. As he began to coalesce from the emptiness, he slowly pieced together scraps of his personality, regaining some measure of self. His mind no longer floated on a sea of nothingness. It was enmeshed in a carnal vessel again. That vessel was named Peter Sebeck.

He wasn't sure at what point he noticed someone talking-perhaps they had been there all along-but they kept up a persistent chatter while his mind came into focus in the darkness. At first Sebeck couldn't distinguish individual words, but as he concentrated they became more distinct.

"…Christ figure is a recurring motif in many cultures; death and rebirth; symbolic turning of the seasons, all that crap. Wyle E. Coyote was a fucking Christ figure, man, and Acme Company was Rome, baby." A pause. "You can find it in Hindu legend, Sumerian mythology. Shit, you find it in modern folklore, like Rip van Winkle.

"Although Rip van Winkle didn't die. He slept.But that's the damned point: death as sleep. Sleep as death. Isn't our life a cycle of death and rebirth? Sleep and awakening? The promise of eternal life is a threat unless you get to start over. The mythmakers knew that. They weren't dummies, man."

The clattering of metal tools.

"They were the ones who invented rhyme and meter-the programming language for human memory in preliterary civilizations. It was a cultural checksum — a mnemonic device. You couldn't fuck with the code or the rhymes didn't work; and if the rhymes didn't work, people noticed. And so the knowledge of a people was passed down intact. It was a shamanic code. If you fucked with the code, then society lost its collective mind. Smell me?"

A pause.

"Hey, I think our boy's coming around."

Sebeck opened his eyes and slowly focused on a pasty-faced twenty-something kid sporting a tangled mane of black hair. A few days' beard shadowed the kid's neck and climbed higher than usual up his cheeks. This was a hairy guy.

Sebeck blinked at the overhead lights. He coughed and tried to sit up. A rock-hard surface greeted his elbows when he tried to push up. He immediately abandoned the attempt as his head began to swim.

The hairy kid leaned in close. "Hey, bro, sit back for a few. You're still trying to metabolize the meds."

Sebeck noticed the kid was wearing a lab coat. He tried to remember where he was. His brain was mashed potatoes.

Sebeck's voice croaked. "Where is this?"

"Phoenix Mortuary Services. I call it PMS."

Sebeck tried again to sit up, and he pushed aside the kid's hands when he tried to help. «Who-» He stopped short; his throat was sore as hell. He put a hand to his larynx. No exterior damage.

Sebeck leaned to one side and looked around. His eyes tried to focus to a greater distance. He was in a long room with several medical examination tables. Oak cabinetry lined the walls. A strong chemical odor assaulted his nose. He'd smelled this before. Formaldehyde.

Sebeck snapped alert; the body of an old man lay naked on a nearby metal table. The old man was definitely dead because his body had the pallor and flattened appearance that comes when blood pressure and breath leave the human frame.

"Where am I?"

"Like I said, my man: funeral home. That's where they send dead people. It's the law. And you, my friend, are legally dead. Got the paperwork to prove it."

Sebeck looked around for a few moments more, then brought his gaze back to the kid. "Who are you?"

The kid wiped his hand on his lab coat, then extended it. "Laney Price. Body prep. I take out the pacemakers and shit like that. That stuff'll blow up if it goes in the furnace."

Sebeck ignored Price's hand and tried to shake his head clear. He glanced down, then swung his legs over the edge of the table and sat up.

Price rushed to hold him steady, but Sebeck pushed him back. He glanced down at his own body. He was wearing casual slacks and a pullover shirt. Next to him on the table lay his crumpled prison khakis. He picked them up, balling them up in his fists. That's right.He remembered now. He had just been executed for murdering federal officers. He was the most hated man in America.

He dropped the khakis and sat motionless, staring at his own hands. A wave of emotion overcame him, and he started to breathe in fits.