Concentrating hard, Kyle saw Isabel again, lying in the darkness, very far away. As he moved closer, he began shouting to her, his words echoing up and down some back service corridor of his own mind. "Isabel! Isabel, wake up! “

"split up!" Rath shouted, coughing. "We'll meet up again tonight, in the usual place. “

Unfortunately he had already lost track of Lonnie and Ava in all the tumult, and could only hope that they'd heard him. A bedlam of shouts, curses, and weapons fire now filled the gutted warehouse, as did the smoke from the canisters that had fallen at Rath's feet. Enclosed behind an impenetrable veil of caustic vapor, Rath found that he could still move, but it felt as though he were swimming through peanut butter. Unable to draw breath, or see much of anything through his burning eyes, he forced his body forward, away from the din.

All at once, a wave of dizziness seized him, and he dropped heavily to his knees. Then he noticed that some clear air lingered near the floor. Inhaling deeply, he crawled as quickly as he could toward one of the walls.

He could breathe now, but his eyes continued to water obscuring his vision. But now he saw light ahead of him. The fire escape has to be around here, he thought, rising in a corner to feel around for a railing he remembered having seen earlier. Focusing past the exhaustion caused by the earlier battle, Rath concentrated on neutralizing the effects of the smoke canisters. Moments later, he felt only marginally better. He was still tired, and he simply wasn't the healer the late Zan the Man had been.

But at least he could see a little more clearly now. Rath saw that he stood only a few yards away from a wide, cracked window, through which he could see the platform and railings of a rusty metal fire escape. Its ladder led downward toward the street.

Machine-gun fire perforated the floor near his feet. He bolted toward the fire escape, diving straight for the window. Shutting his eyes tightly and throwing his arms in front of his face, he let his careening body shatter the glass. His heavy leathers protected his forearms, but his cheeks and scalp felt moist from a thousand tiny cuts. He ignored the pain and hurried down the fire escape ladder, which quickly extended toward the pavement in response to his weight.

He paused, glancing groundward for the first time since he'd gotten clear of the building. A little less than one story below him, ten or fifteen riot cops, decked out in body armor and gas masks, were rushing into the building through one of the street-level loading docks, which the cops apparently had just knocked down with the front end of their armored vehicle. More riot cops seemed to be coming, both from the armored car and also from around the building's corner, while he watched.

One of the troopers suddenly looked up in Rath's direction, though Rath couldn't see the cop's eyes through his shiny black helmet visor. The policeman pointed at him with a nasty-looking black truncheon and barked an unintelligible command.

More cops paused momentarily, and each of them looked Rath's way. Several leveled their rifles in his direction. Caught between the hammer and the anvil, Rath thought, quickly moving his muscular body back up the ladder and onto the fire escape platform. Alien-possessed derelicts were one thing. Highly trained armored cops were something else entirely. Even ifLonnie andAva manage to dodge the freaks in there, he thought, they aren't gonna have an easy time getting past these guys.

As Rath headed back toward the shattered window, one of the riot cops down below bellowed an order to halt. Rath ignored the command, as well as the bullet that struck the masonry near his shoulder. He dived back into the building, wondering exactly how long he had left until the oil furnace that Lonnie had sabotaged finally exploded.

Moments later, the warehouse reverberated with a deafening roar as gouts of smoke and flame erupted everywhere all at once. Rath couldn't help thinking that he, Lonnie, and Ava probably had very little chance of getting out of this alive.

"Boom!" Lonnie said, grinning at Ava through the lingering pall of tear gas. The two of them were still lying on the floor, where they had thrown themselves after the cops had entered and started exchanging fire with the armed alien freaks.

"I hope that explosion took out the freakazoids' machinery," Ava said, coughing. "I was starting to think that boiler you sabotaged was gonna take all day to blow. “

Lonnie nodded as she rose unsteadily to her feet. Ava thought she looked as utterly exhausted as she herself felt. "You worry too much, O Queen of Antar," Lonnie said, pointing toward a heap of dusty clothing that only moments before had contained a hostile, alien-possessed derelict. "I just gave 'em their one-way ticket home. Without their machinery, they can't hang on to their host bodies. They just crumble away to dust like the Skins in their husks, or those vamps on Buffy. “

Ava looked at the mortal remains of what had been a human being, and suddenly felt ill. She realized the tear gas was only partly responsible. "Too bad we couldn't have found a better way. “

"Better them than us," Lonnie said, shrugging. "Now let's get out of here. “

Ava coughed like a four-pack-a-day smoker as Lonnie helped her to her feet.

"Great," Ava said as she recovered from her coughing fit. "Now all we have to do is slip past the cops and find Ra… “

"Freeze! Police!" Fatigued, Ava hadn't noticed the riot cop until it was far too late.

Should have stayed in freaking Roswell with Max, Ava thought, meekly raising her hands.

Sergeant Vince Orman had only been forced to draw his weapon in the line of duty on a few prior occasions. Today was the first time he'd been forced to take another human being's life. The unkempt young man who had leaped out at him from behind a storage locker had been young… little more than a boy, really. Despite his riot helmet and gas mask, Orman had seen the gun in his assailant's hand and had ordered him to drop it.

But the kid had simply kept on coming, a vacant, strung-out look on his face. Now, he lay dead on the warehouse floor as clouds of tear gas quickly engulfed the place. Feeling a bitter upwelfing of regret, Orman looked carefully at the teen's face. He thought of the kid who had tried to exit the building via the fire escape a few minutes earlier, only to be chased back inside by the squad. Though Orman had only caught a glimpse of that kid, he could tell that this wasn't him. Better keep an eye out for that one. I've seen him around on the street, and he looks like trouble.

Luckily the tear gas canisters seemed to be having a profound effect on the other perps. Like the dead teen, these people carried firearms of various calibers, and represented a fair cross-section of New York 's street dwellers. They were dropping like flies, even as Orman and the men and women of his SWAT team secured the building's perimeter and began methodically handcuffing the at least two dozen people who were now gasping for air on the warehouse floor.

Orman felt the building shudder as a sound like thunder rattled the floor beneath his boots. "What the hell was that?" he said, turning toward a female officer named Carmody "Sounds like somebody set off a bomb," Carmody said. "Down in the basement. “

"Go check it out," Orman said, suppressing a nightmare memory of Ground Zero, and all the friends and colleagues he'd lost there. "Let's hope we don't have more terrorists on our hands. “

"1 don't think it's terrorists, Sarge," Carmody said, pointing toward one of the cuffed thugs who lay on the floor near her feet. Though Orman couldn't see Carmody's face, he could hear an edge of incredulity in her voice.