A good or malevolent angel.

Low clouds rolled across the sky. The snow fell in a gentle curtain. The car turned onto the highway.

Clifford understood soon enough where they were headed.

He didn’t question it. He had seen enough to know Dex Graham meant him no harm. But when the car left the highway for the narrow road into the forest—a road Clifford knew too well—he could not contain a sigh of resignation.

“It’s all right, Cliffy,” his mother said, as a roof of pine boughs closed over the car. “It’ll be okay now.”

She didn’t know any better.

The trees had sheltered this road from much of the snow, but the road itself was deeply rutted. The military vehicles had a wider wheel-base than Dex’s car, which kept wandering in and out of the ruts. The old snow here had been beaten down to black ice. More than once, the wheels began to spin freely and the car slowed and Dex had to fight it forward, patiently, carefully.

Like Linneth, he tried to ignore the clock. Not as successfully. The time available had slipped below five minutes.

Clifford had guessed their destination. He said, “There’s a hill before you get to the lab where the road cuts through the escarpment. It might be slippery.”

Dex saw it ahead. Not a steep rise, but a long one. The angle was maybe thirty degrees. He eased his foot down on the accelerator, carefully, carefully. The car picked up speed. It wobbled alarmingly from side to side, but he kept the nose pointed forward.

The car was doing sixty through the snow when it reached the foot of the hill. He was counting on the momentum to carry them forward, and it took them a long way up before he began to lose traction. Linneth held her breath as Dex worked the gas pedal and the car slowed to a crawl.

Now the front wheels lurched sideways and the car slid back a foot or so. Dex stepped on the gas. Let the wheels spin: maybe they would grind down to a solid surface. Blue smoke roared from the exhaust pipe. The car jumped forward, hesitated, jumped another yard or two. The peak of the hill was tantalizingly close.

Dex made the mistake of glancing at the dash clock.

They were on overtime now, and the bomb was less than half a mile away. Clifford had been staring out the back window. From here, he could see the gantry above the trees.

Linneth’s hands were clenched into fists in her lap.

Another yard forward and another. The motor screeched as if it had been burned clean of oil—which was possible, by the look of the steely blue smoke in his rear-view mirror.

Almost there now. He pushed the gas pedal all the way down. This wasn’t strategy, it was panic—but the car surged over the summit of the hill in a series of spastic leaps, and suddenly it was the brake he was fighting.

The ruined Two Rivers Physical Research Laboratory lay ahead. This blister of strange light was more energetic than Dex had expected from Howard’s description of it. It was like liquid lightning—frightening to drive into. More accurately, to slide into. The car was gathering speed and he was on the verge of losing control.

“Everybody hold on,” he said.

Linneth whispered something about “time.” Ellen Stockton held her son against, her. Dex took his foot off the brake. If the wheels locked now the car would tumble. We’re a sled, Dex thought madly. This is free-fall.

A timeless moment passed. Then the sky was full of light, and the pine trees caught fire and burned in an instant.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Milos Fabrikant followed the Censeur, M. Bisonette, to a trench that had been carved into the cold, bare hillock in front of the bunker.

The snow had stopped. The clouds were high and thinning. The countdown proceeded with a relentless precision, and Fabrikant listened to the numbers unreel from the mouth of a metal-horn loudspeaker. When the count reached twenty seconds, Fabrikant and Bisonette and a half dozen other privileged observers crouched with their backs to the west wall of the revetment.

The light from the detonation was sudden and shockingly bright. Shadows flared to the east. A revision of nature, Fabrikant thought. Silent at first. It was his thoughts that were loud.

Bisonette stood up immediately, cupping his hands around his amber-colored goggles. Fabrikant’s joints were agonized by the cold; he was slower to stand.

The fireball glowed like sunset in the far undulations of the pine forest. Incredibly, the clouds above the blast had been torn open. A pillar of smoke boiled into the sundered heavens.

The sound came at last, a battering roar, like the outrage of the offended Protennoia.

Fabrikant touched the sleeve of the Censeur’s greatcoat. He felt Bisonette’s unconcealed tremor of delight. He is as full, Fabrikant thought, as I am empty.

“We should take cover again, Censeur,” he said.

Bisonette nodded and ducked into the trench.

The wind came next, as hot as the wind from Tartaros.

Evelyn Woodward was blinded at once. The new sun devoured her eyes. Briefly, the sensation was beyond pain.

Then Lake Merced turned to steam as the shock wave crossed the water, and suddenly the window was gone. And the house. And the town.

Clement Delafleur had tried to staunch his bullet wound with the silk lining of his torn pardessus, but he had lost a great deal of blood despite his best efforts. In the time it took Dexter Graham to drive to the Ojibway reserve, Delafleur managed to drag the insensate meat of his legs as far as the door marked FIRE EXIT. From there, his plans were vague. Perhaps to lift himself to salvation. But time was short.

He was panting and only dimly conscious when the high basement windows admitted a column of superheated steam, and the stone walls of City Hall were crushed and carried away above him.

Calvin Shepperd listened to the countdown on a portable scanner, up at the limits around 13 MHz. When the count approached zero, Shepperd stopped the lead car and flashed his blinkers. The signal went down the long line of the convoy: it meant, Take cover. That is, hunker down on the upholstery and turn your engine off. Which he did. His friend Ted Bartlett huddled next to him, and in the back a sharpshooter named Paige. Shepperd’s wife Sarah was seven cars back, riding with a woman named Ruth and five-year-old Damion, Sarah’s nephew. He hoped they were all right, but he hadn’t been able to check. No time to stop. It was slow driving on this old log-truck road, even with chains.

The flash was distant, but it penetrated the cathedral pines like slow lightning.

The sound came later, a basso thunder that barreled out of the troubled sky. And then a hot, whipping wind. The car was buffeted. “Christ Jesus!” Paige exclaimed. Then a series of hard but muffled thuds against the roof, the windshield, the hood. Some kind of bomb debris, Shepperd thought wildly, but it was only snow, huge mounds of snow shaken out of the crossed boughs of the trees. It slid against the window glass, already wet in this unnatural heat.

“Drive on,” Ted Bartlett said as soon as the roar abated. “This can’t be healthy.”

Shepperd started up his engine and heard others revving behind him. Hang on, Sarah, he thought, and put the car in gear.