"Run!" Flash shouted. "I'll handle him."

Without a backward glance, Durg put the car in gear and floored it.

Flash tried to dart away. An invisible hand seemed to be holding him fast, pinning his arms to his side. He couldn't move. "Don't make me get rough with you," he said.

Turtle chewed his underlip. "Have you gone nuts?" he asked his microphone.

"Just a little stir-crazy," came back through the audio pickups mounted in the hull. "Look, it's great schmoozing with you, Turtle, but the boys in blue are going to get sorted out down there and start shooting at me in a minute, and I've got things to see and people to do."

"You're a federal fugitive, for God's sake. Why are you-" He stopped. "I get it. It's Sprout."

"You definitely win the Bonus Round. It's Sprout. Now let me go."

"Jesus, Flash, this is jailbreak. I can't let you get away with this."

"So you're lining up with the pigs? Battle lines are being drawn and all that sixties stuff is that the side of the barricades you're comfortable with?"

A shot popped off from below. Turtle winced. Flame darted from Flash's hand. An especially bold SWAT man yelped and dropped his M16 as if it were red-hot, largely because it was.

"You people down there stop that," Turtle said. "I have the situation under control."

"My ass you do."

"It's your ass that's gonna get extra holes shot in it if they don't think I can handle you. Come on, Flash, don't you see this isn't the way?"

"We're fresh out of other ways."

"Flash, I feel for you and Mark, and especially Sprout. But we can't do things this way anymore. And not now, for God's sake! George Bush is in town. The whole country thinks aces are arm-in-arm with the devil. What's a scene like this going to do to wild cards everywhere?"

"Not a fucking thing, you complacent tin-plated son of a bitch! If they're going to let the lynch mobs loose, they'll find an excuse sooner or later. They'll make one up if they have to. Let me go."

"No," Turtle said primly. "The welfare of everybody touched by the wild card's at stake here. I'm taking you in." "A little girl's life is at stake, you bastard. And Mark Meadows isn't going to rot in federal slam!"

Flash set his jaw and forced flame out through every pore of his body. The unseen grip did not slacken. "So I can't singe your telekinetic fingers, eh?"

"THEY'RE ONLY IMAGINARY, YOU KNOW." "Yeah? Well what can they do to me, then?"

"THIS." Inexorably, the hand began to crush the air out of him.

He looked around. The cop car was already out of sight. Durg had instructions what to do if Mark was captured, in whatever persona. The mission was a success if only Sprout got away. And K.C.

Damn, that's a fine one. And Mark really loves her. But there's nothing I can do for her.

His vision began to swim. Blackness gathered around the edges. He knew Turtle didn't want to kill him, just black him out. But he had a higher metabolic rate than a nat, used air more quickly. Old Ironsides might hold on just a little too long, and then it was going to be JJ Flash, Turnip. And he knew that wouldn't do Meadows much good either.

Besides, he was Jumpin' Jack Flash. No pansy who wouldn't go out in public without his fat ass wrapped in armor plate was going to take him. He began to rotate his left hand, slowly so that Turtle wouldn't notice. The Turtle hadn't bothered to immobilize him totally, and Flash was fairly sure he could. Slowly, slowly-there. Palm outward.

"It's not-that-easy," he gritted. Fire shot from his palm and splashed against the underside of the Turtle's shell.

The hand squeezed tighter. Flash gasped in pain, blackness flickered across his brain, the fire jet sputtered. "Go-ahead-and-squash me. But you're gonna-be Great-and Powerful-Turtle-soup."

The flame got brighter. The roar was like a blast furnace in full throat. Flash felt his chest being crushed, felt ribs give and squeak as they reached the breaking point.

He screamed. And put all the force of his pain and fury into the fire.

A tentacle of smoke ran up Turtle's nose. He froze. His control panel lit up like a crash scene on the Triboro Bridge, and the display from his forward vid pickup popped and died from the heat.

"Shit!" Turtle yelled. "Shit!"

A klaxon began its cat-in-a-stamping-mill yammer as the fire-suppression system-the same as the M-1 Abrams used, surplus production from FY 1988-flushed the interior with halon gas. He freaked.

The teke hand crushing the life from Jumpin' Jack Flash, Esquire, became sudden nothing.

Bullets hit the hull like hail as the policemen on the ground cut loose. It was too late.

The shell plummeted toward the peaked roofs of the neighborhood. Fear hit the Turtle like a cattle prod in the nuts. For a rare moment in his life, it was a focusing fear, a fear that overrode the reflex panic induced by heat-noiselight-smoke: fear of collision with the planet.

Like a man about to be hanged, Turtle found his mind wonderfully concentrated. The shell wobbled, sideslipped, knocked over a chimney with a sliding clatter of yellow brick, and rolled out to a flat hover just below rooftop level.

By that time, even the afterimage of Flash's blazing departure had faded from the watchers eyes.

For a moment, Blaise just lay there. He felt like a man drowning in rapids who had abruptly fetched up on the bank. He had been spinning, spinning in a roaring sunless void. Reaching out for something he could barely remember, reaching and feeling and desperately trying to force himself toward that familiar shard he sensed in a place without time and space and things.

Home. He was back in his body, his splendid body. Burning Sky, that was close! he thought.

Any other jumper would have been lost when he was bounced out of Mark Meadows's body during the phase-shift to JJ Flash. Would have spun forever, or until his consciousness had unraveled and diffused and gone, become one with ever-black. Only the supreme power of Blaise's mind had saved him. It was a test he alone could meet, and he had met it.

Exaltation filled him like a gush of semen: I have triumphed. I am Blaise!

Then he remembered what he had come for, and it turned to bile in his mouth. Meadows, his idiot blond brat, Durg, K.C., had escaped. He had failed. Blaise.

He rolled onto his belly and began to pound his fist against the floor.

Round sunset, this stretch of New Jersey was just like Disneyland, if your tastes ran to industrial. Car corpses strewed fields to either side of the road, inorganic fertilizer spread perhaps to foster the growth of the squat tanks and pipe tangles that hovered in the shimmering petrochemical haze of the horizon. The sun swelled like a huge red festering boil as it fell into the pooled gray-brown crud. It made World War III look like not such a bad idea.

K. C. Strange lay on her back on a dirty old blanket next to the station wagon they'd stashed a few blocks from Reeves and collected when they ditched the cop car and a grumpy, groggy Lieutenant Norwalk. Her breath was coming quick and shallow now, and pink froth bubbled her lips at each exhalation.

Sprout Meadows bent over her, trailing tears and long blond hair in the jumper's upturned face. "Don't die, pretty lady. Please." Her father stroked her hair with the hand that wasn't cradling K. C.'s head in his lap.