"You awake?" he asked. "For good now?"

"Water," she croaked, and the former coast guard man passed her a canteen. It was smeared with blood, and she could taste the coppery scum of it as she put her lips to the plastic bottle. The water was warm and tasted brackish, but she gulped it down gratefully.

"S'okay," said the Rhino. "The pirates have moved on. They didn't come in here. Guess this season's fashions are just so 2003, eh?"

He held up a pair of gold leather sandals and grinned.

Jules stared at him.

"I've been unconscious for most of the day, and that's the best line you could come up with?" she asked.

His grin grew wider as he saw she was going to be okay.

"Can you move? Or carry your weapon? Because believe me, I can handle two of these puppies on the leash, don't you worry," he said as he hoisted up both P90s. Julianne sucked in a deep breath, rocked back, and then rolled up onto one knee before standing, exhaling, and taking another deep breath to control her dizziness. The Rhino was quickly at her side with a strong arm for support.

"The fighting's moved downtown and west a ways," he told her. "Lucky thing for us, too. Thought we were gonna get ourselves squashed between both sides for a few hours there."

Jules allowed him to lead her though the wreckage of the store, which was so badly trashed that she couldn't tell what damage was new and what had been done by neglect and the elements over the years since the Disappearance. Here and there she was able to pick out a pile of clothes and accessories that were rigid and black with the congealed leftovers of whoever had been wearing them when the Wave struck. But mostly the store was just a shambles of collapsed shelving, broken glass, ruined stock, and…

"Oh…"

She closed her eyes and swallowed when she saw a disembodied arm poking out from under a blackened display cabinet.

"Damn, sorry, Jules. I thought I'd policed up all the remains."

He moved to pick it up, but Jules squeezed his elbow and shook her head.

"Doesn't matter. Come on. We should get moving. I want to get to Union Square before sunup."

The Rhino helped her out onto the street, which looked like a scene from wartime France, illuminated by the shells of burning buildings. Explosions had picked up car bodies and tossed them willy-nilly, smashing them into shop fronts, tearing the chassis into jagged knots of metal. Tires burned. Shop fittings burned. The long, ruined canyon of Mercer Street, once one of her favorite parts of this city, was illuminated by the oily orange glow of a hundred separate fires. Light rain, more of a sooty drizzle, drifted down, coating the rubble in a thick patina of ash and toxic chemicals.

They picked their way along the cobblestoned street, threading through entanglements of fallen scaffolding and brickwork. A huge steel garbage can blocked the path down near a boutique she vaguely recalled visiting during the three weeks she'd spent here in 2000, shortly after the millennium celebration. The can had been blown high into the air and come crashing down to lie with one end propped up against the first floor of the boutique. It had buckled in the center and now effectively closed off access to upper Mercer.

"Let's cut through," said the Rhino, gesturing at the boutique with one of the P90s. "We should get out of the main thoroughfares, anyway. There'll be a lane or something out the back of these buildings. We can get up the block using that."

Jules muttered her agreement, preferring to concentrate on not tripping and further injuring her arm. They climbed over the windowsill of the nearest shop front, a gutted homewares store, and navigated their way to the rear of the building, first by the light of the fires and then by means of a torch the Rhino clipped onto one of the machine guns. A jet screamed overhead while they searched for a rear exit, chased by the thump-thump-thump of a big antiaircraft cannon. She'd heard of the pirates mounting such things onto pickups but had wondered at the truth of such rumors. Surely the city's road network was too locked up with the rusted remains of all the vehicles that had crashed after losing their drivers.

"Here we go," said her companion as the thin beam of torchlight picked out a heavy metal security door. "Stand back, Miss Jules."

She did as she was told while he pressed down the locking bar and tentatively pushed open the door. No gunfire greeted the movement, and the Rhino slid through.

"Clear," he announced a few seconds later, and she followed him through, emerging into the cold, gritty rain that pattered down into the space between those buildings fronting Mercer and the ass-end of their counterparts on the next block over. She tried to remember which street ran parallel on that side but came up blank. The back alley, as always, was much less disordered than the main streets. There were a few vehicles parked here and there, but they had been parked back in '03 while their drivers ran deliveries to the businesses on either side. The smugglers had learned very quickly, right back at Duane Street, in fact, that such hidden, disused passages were safest when one was trying to traverse the contested island.

She recalled this as they sloshed through three inches of rancid, stagnant groundwater collected in the artificial valley between the two terraced rows of buildings on Mercer and whatever streets. Rats the size of small dogs swam away from the thin shaft of torchlight, trailing V-shaped wakes.

Didn't there used to be alligators in the New York sewers?

"Rhino," she said lightly. "Do you recall whether the Wave disappeared crocodiles and suchlike?"

He halted in front of her and turned around, keeping the torch pointed down to avoid dazzling her.

"Crocodiles? You mean gators?"

"Yes," she said, trying to sound casual.

"No idea, Miss Julianne. What is it they reckon now? It took humans and most of the higher primates. Chimps and apes and so on. And killed about half of anything that had a spinal cord. But not so as you could predict what was gonna get zapped beyond people and apes."

"Don't worry about it," she said, feeling rather foolish.

The Rhino sketched a devilish grin.

"Do gators have spinal cords? Or do they just like to eat them? Hmm. Do you know, Miss Jules?"

"Shut the fuck up and keep moving," she scolded, waving him forward.

The Rhino sniggered and turned back to resume sloshing through the filthy watercourse. The grumble of bomb bursts and far-off cannon fire rolled around the empty chasms of the city, but hidden away in their own deep concrete valley and with a cold rain pressing down, the fighting sounded muted and far away. Jules kicked away a rat that ran across her boots, sending it into a rack of old dresses still waiting to be delivered. They were covered in plastic bags; she wondered idly if any might still be wearable but scoffed at the thought. They'd be moldy and chewed to rags by moths and grubs after so long. After squeezing through a narrow space where the corners of two buildings almost met, they followed the passageway up to the rear of a two-story shop dwarfed by a much larger buildings on either side. The door was jammed open by a large cardboard box that was halfway to total disintegration. The Rhino tried to pull it out of the way, but it came apart in his hands and spilled its contents with a harsh clatter of metal and crashing glass.

"Shit," the Rhino said. He kicked a path through the refuse. As Jules stepped forward, she realized she'd stood on the remains of whoever had been carrying the box and felt an absurd reflex need to apologize. Hurrying to keep up with the bobbing torchlight, she tried to make out what sort of store it might have been, but the best she could come up with was "eclectic." Clothes. Knickknacks. Hideously expensive objets d'art. There were examples of all those in the small, neat space.