Another hand yanked his back! Now somebody—oh, no, not the old magician!—dropped on top of him.
Not that Dane had any choice but to throw himself into it, but he did have some advantages. He outweighed Stone and, as luck had it, was the guy on top. The crane cab was a tight place with little room for wrestling or hauling back for a punch, and all Dane really had to do was keep Clarence or whatever his name was crunched into that chair and away from the controls. Sure, it was going to hurt—Clarence nailed him in the side of the head, knocking off his headset—well, that hurt more than he expected.
Mandy, trapped in the pod andflying outside with the doves, could see the stage and the flaming volcano passing a hundred feet below. Some of the doves were spooking at the heat and flames—she couldn’t blame them, it was more than enough to spook her—but they followed their buddies and kept flying straight and level, fifty feet beneath the pod and a hundred over the heads of the crowd.
To those on the ground, 4,864 pairs of wings flying in tight formation put out a sound as awesome as the sight, a rushing clamor like a stadium-size crowd applauding in a heavy rainstorm. People’s mouths hung open, kids clung to their parents, cameras blinked, clicked, and flashed, and voices across the entire crowd clashed in a corporate, involuntary drone of wonder and astonishment.
Atop the hotel, the hang glider crew had been waiting for Mandy to arrive and get harnessed up, but now they stood like ornamental statues on the edge of the hotel roof, the only ones granted a view of the birds from above.
“Emile …” the leader radioed.
“Uh, roger, stand by,” Emile came back. “We have traffic in the area.”
Clarence kept swinging and Dane kept trying to grab his arms to keep him from swinging, which worked only half the time. He dug his knee into Clarence’s groin and got some mileage out of that, though it was purely accidental.
Mandy grabbed two tabs, one on each shoulder of her leather costume, and yanked downward. In less than a second she went from medieval warrior princess to glimmering angel.
Next—there was no way to think or plan it, she just had to bring all her minds and selves and doves together and agree on the timing, speed, and placement, that one precise point in time that was … now!
She squeezed her eyes shut, plugged her ears, braced herself, hit a button with her toe …
Everyone heard the noise, like a short string of firecrackers all popping at once. A puff of smoke and fire from the pod caught their eyes. The petal doors had blown open. They cheered, shrieked, as …
Mandy dropped out of the pod into blinding sunlight, spreading her arms and legs like a sky diver as the rush of air unfurled streamers and a long train from her costume. The doves were like a cloud deck below her. They filled her vision and disoriented her a moment—she felt as if shewere rushing backward and they were standing still. She was floating.
The crowd saw an angel with a glimmering, silken comet’s tail free-falling.
An apparatus like a trapeze trailed just behind and below the doves, suspended from the grid by wires so fine they had to be assumed more than seen, and slowed by flags of silk to keep it trailing, in the clear. Before anyone had time to complete the thought: Uh-uh, never, no way …
As Dane took another blow to his body that sent his radio flying but managed to land a punch of his own, bloodying Clarence’s nose …
As the hourglass trickled down to its last grains of sand …
As Moss and DuFresne were just realizing they’d missed their chance to cover up the retrace …
Mandy brought one more object into her realm of control, that trapeze behind and below her. The birds kept moving, she kept dropping, it appeared she would fall right into the last several rows of birds …
She stretched her arms out front. Feather-light, composite clamps—Dane’s brainchild, Emile’s craftsmanship—shot out of her sleeves like open claws.
Her hair was curled now, fluttering above her head. She had this style when she and Dane did the Carson show in 1989—she was thirty-eight.
The last row of doves slipped under her and she fell past, body flattening out, arms extended. She could see the maw of the volcano, larger now, a circle filled with flames. Heat struck her face.
The trapeze rigging was racing past, the lines marked with fluorescent stripes for her reference, counting down, counting down, getting closer.
She tucked her chin to see the trapeze. Here it came …
Oh, Lord, if I’m to live …
A microsecond early. She lowered her arms six inches—
The trapeze slammed into the clamps, her hands fell free, she dropped below the trapeze, the trapeze yanked the harness lines out of the slots in her sleeves until they terminated at the torso harness sewn into her costume and went taut. The jerk was mushy but enough to pull her arms and legs down into a crawling position, enough to make the birds sink a little from the added weight, but the birds recovered, she straightened into a graceful flying pose, and …
She was flying under their wings, trailing a long train and streamers of silk.
A fluttering to her right caught her eye. She grinned. Bonkers and Lily, wings beating, were flying their own formation with her. She looked to her left. Carson and Maybelle.
Well, where Momma Dove went, they went. That’s just the way they were.
Dane didn’t see the ultimate payoff of his design, but he heard the roar of the crowd, and it was not the sound of horror at something gone tragically wrong; it was the frenzied, jumping-up-and-down jubilation at something that had gone incredibly right.
Well, Clarence could drop the pod now.
The other guy—Lemuel. Dane only saw a peripheral corner of him when a lightning bolt hit him in the back of the neck. The next thing he knew, he was on the asphalt beside the crane. He couldn’t move, but he could look up.
An angel was flying by, suspended under a cloud of doves.
Maybe I’m dead,he thought. Maybe I’m in heaven.
Emile was just about to order the drop …
Mr. Stone had his orders. He lunged for the button.
The pod dropped, the open petal doors causing it to invert like a shuttlecock on the way down. Only half the audience saw it fall, but all heard the explosion when it hit and saw the fireball. Wow!
Emile went back to watching Mandy and her doves make a climbing turn, circling around to make one more pass by the bleachers and over the crowd.
In the background of Mandy’s mind it was her fortieth birthday. She opened Dane’s gift to her: the most beautiful diamond wedding ring she ever saw. Dane said, “It’s about time you had a really nice one.” That was 1991.
In 1992 she was in his arms, weeping at the news he’d brought: her father, Arthur, had passed away suddenly, a failed aortic valve.
The rest of her mind was on her doves— Easy now, right turn, that’s it, stay together, let’s give ’em a show—and where in God’s universe she was going to find and join up with the Machine. That timeline, that certain fold in space, was like an elusive word on the tip of her tongue, something she knew she knew but couldn’t remember. What happened that day? She was afraid, she was drugged, she ended up in Dane’s pasture, then his living room … how? What did I do?
In 1995 her periods became sporadic, her life became pointless, applause irritated her, and Dane couldn’t do anything right—and right now she was having a hot flash.
Moss and DuFresne had a debacle in front of them and deadly power in high places pressing in from behind.
“As I was trying to tell you,” said Moss, “if we kill her short of the retrace we’d have to rework the numbers manually. It would take years.”
DuFresne shot back, “But if she finds the Machine’s timeline with that much mass …”