Rain slashed over them, driven by a moaning wind. Behind them, the interior of the great building sank into a churning vortex of crushed obsidian that swirled and flowed like a liquid. Only the broad curves and steep slopes of its exterior were left standing. A flash of lightning revealed the shattered, crumbling cityscape all around them. Ahead of them stretched a long causeway, which led to a tower whose odd organic shape reminded Pennington of a bone.

They were three steps onto the bridge when another staccato burst of lightning betrayed the fact that the tower they were running toward was toppling sideways—and taking their bridge with it. Slipping to a precarious stop on the rain-slicked surface, Pennington caught Theriault. “Go back!”

She scrambled through a flailing turn, with him directly behind her. They tumbled off the bridge as it sheared away from the promenade and broke into hundreds of pieces swallowed by the storm. There was no cover, no room to retreat. Pennington flipped open the communicator Terrell had loaned him. “Quinn! Can you hear me? We’re trapped! Where are you?”

Through the spattering of static and the oscillating wail and whine of random signals, Pennington thought he might have heard Quinn’s voice. Dismayed to find his luck running true to form, he slapped the communicator shut and tucked it back in his pocket. Then Theriault’s arms were around him, squeezing tight.

In an electric slash of light across the blackened sky, he saw the reason for her sudden embrace. Another tower was pitching over and falling to its doom—directly toward them.

Time felt to Pennington as if it had slowed down. His mind was racing against the moment, and where he had expected to find nothing but panic and paralysis he found clarity.

The tower fractured as it fell and cut a path through the storm that deluged the city. The rain whipped at their bodies and faces; it kicked off of the buildings’ façades in a gray mist and ran down them in sheets, hugging the organic curvatures of the biomechanoid metropolis. Far below, frothing eddies of runoff merged and flowed toward low ground.

There was no time to think it through, only time enough for a simple assurance—“Trust me,” he said to Theriault—and a leap of faith. He wrapped her in a bear hug, lifted her off the ground, and made a running jump into a softly angled groove in the building’s exterior, on a slope partially shielded from the falling tower. He wasn’t surprised that Theriault screamed as they dropped off the promenade into free fall; he was surprised that he didn’t.

It felt as if they were dropping without resistance. He spread his feet against the slippery wet sides of the groove in the wall and applied all the pressure he could. They continued to fall faster by the second, but he felt his back settle squarely into the groove, which was several inches deep with water and getting deeper the longer they fell. It got steadily colder and stung him with icy needles of pain.

Fear and adrenaline made it impossible for Pennington to know how long they actually fell before they found themselves completely submerged in a rushing vertical torrent of water. Then he felt his momentum working against the familiar pull of gravity. Their heads broke the surface. They’d passed the trough of the slope and had begun speeding up its opposite side. At its top it twisted and threw them through a hard turn, then another in the opposite direction. Then it pitched downward again, on a steep but at least not vertical gradient. It’s like riding a luge underwater, Pennington thought.

He might have been tempted to laugh and enjoy the ride, but then he saw that the end of this slope spewed its water out into open air toward another building.

Theriault’s arms closed so tightly around his chest that he could barely breathe. “Tim…” she said, her voice trailing off.

“This may have been a bad idea,” he confessed a moment before they were launched out of the trench and through billowing curtains of rain at the side of another building a dozen meters away. With all the strength he had, he twisted and turned in mid-air, placing himself as much as possible between Theriault and the point of impact.

He closed his eyes and hoped that the water might have been cold enough to numb him even a little bit to the pain.

It hadn’t been, and it didn’t.

His back hit the wall. A few ribs on his right side cracked. Every ounce of air immediately exploded out of his lungs, which refused to reinflate. Stabbing pain flared across his lower right side as gravity once again took hold of him and Theriault. This wall had no groove to slip into, just a thin, steady cascade of rainwater across its slope, which Pennington was grateful to see shallowed quickly beneath them.

As they were funneled into another curve-bottomed trench, every twisting turn wrenched his back and pummeled his fractured ribs. Pained howls left his mouth filled with dirty water, which he spluttered out between curses. Then a final whip-turn sent them hurtling toward an intersection of several drainage channels, all of which flooded into a tunnel that plunged swiftly into underground darkness. “Bloody hell,” Pennington grumbled.

“It’s okay.” Theriault gasped. “Take a deep breath, and keep your head down!” She filled her lungs and pressed her face against his chest. He gulped as much of a breath as his protesting lungs would allow, closed his eyes, and rode the turgid current into the darkness.

It was surprisingly peaceful. Completely submerged, he was barely aware of being in motion. Alone with the beating of his heart, he focused on slowing its tempo. On letting go of fear and expectation. On the warmth of the body entangled with his. On the ambience of moving fluid…

Light and air, rushing and roaring as they dropped into free fall. He opened his eyes. Sixty-five meters below, in a stag-geringly huge cavern, a broad pool of azure water awaited them. Dozens of plumes of water cascaded from the roof and walls of the cavern into the pool.

Theriault pushed away from Pennington so that they could each control their own splashdown. They straightened and pointed their feet at the water. He watched her pinch her nose shut, and he did likewise. Then they plunged together into the water, and their frantic forward motion at last came to a halt.

Pennington savored the inertia for a few moments. Then he used his left arm and left leg to propel himself back to the surface. As he wiped the water from his eyes, he saw the familiar shape of the Rocinante making a slow vertical descent from a broad opening in the cavern’s ceiling. Rain poured in alongside it.

Within moments the tramp freighter was hovering above him and Theriault. The cargo doors on its underbelly opened, and a rescue harness at the end of a winch cable dropped in a rapid spiral. From inside the hold, Quinn smiled down at the pair in the water. “Hell of a time for a swim, newsboy.”

Pennington laughed with relief. “I’m so happy to see you, I can’t think of a comeback.”

“First time for everything,” Quinn said. He offered a small salute to Theriault. “Cervantes Quinn, miss. At your service.”

She swam over to Pennington, helped him into the harness, and took hold of it beside him. With a double tug on the safety line, she signaled Quinn to hoist them up. As the winch lifted them from the water, she favored Pennington with a quirky, irresistibly cute smile. “I guess sending a reporter to save me wasn’t such a bad idea after all,” she said.

He smiled back. “Can I quote you on that?” “Absolutely,” she said with a single, exaggerated nod and a crooked grin. “Consider my thank-you officially on the record.”

The Wanderer committed herself again and again, sharpening her fury into a cutting edge, a singularity of hatred, but it was not enough to halt the Apostate’s slow dismantling of the glory of the Shedai.