Page 88 of The Devouring Time

Helen scowls at the door. “Damn it—she’s not in. We’ll have to find a telephone directory and look up her address.”

“We don’t have time.” Mary starts back down the hall. “You said the machine is in the astronomy tower, right?”

“Yes.”

“I know the way.” She glances back at Helen. “Remember the Esoteric Astronomy class I took? You said it wasn’t practical enough to bother with.”

“It didn’t help you predict this, did it?” Helen shoots back.

We scurry after Mary, back through the reception area and onto the tower stairs. We’re all out of breath by the time Mary reaches the room beneath the observatory and throws open the door.

She freezes instantly, and I do the same by pure instinct. A familiar voice says, “Well, well, it looks as though Mr. Hart was right. Come on in. One at a time, hands where I can see them.”

59

Mary smiles as she puts up her hands and steps through the door. I cautiously follow.

The machine is gone. Six men crowd the room, all of them with guns drawn. Frank Myers, fake butler and actual bootlegger, stands in front of them. “Hello again, Mr. Caine.” He raises his voice. “The rest of you get in here, or I’ll shoot the broad.”

“Oh no, whatever shall I do?” Mary’s still grinning like a shark, unafraid. I remember her threat to blow up Adrian’s gun by setting a spark to the powder with magic. No doubt that’s her plan, though I don’t think the flying shrapnel will be particularly healthy for us at such close range.

Helen, Adrian, and Dorset obey Myers’s order. “Where have you taken Dr. Dane’s machine?” Helen demands.

“The machine and the doctor are in good hands, don’t you worry about that.” Myers looks at us thoughtfully, as if trying to come to a decision. “Mr. Hart said to nab Caine if he was dumb enough to show up here. The rest of you, though…well, he left that up to my discretion.”

I can all too easily imagine what Zebulon Hart has in store for me. Or rather, what the Swarm does. The one who’d been in my body would return to it, like a man coming home to a familiar abode. I’d be back in its stolen Tschchch form, and this time, there would be no escape.

“I won’t be taken again,” I snarl, and slick his gun with ice.

He yelps—then the rest of the hoodlums rush us. Adrian grapples with one and flips them over his shoulder, then strikes the gun from the hand of a second.

Mary opens her mouth, and new horror flashes through me. She means to explode the guns, no matter how close they are to us. Before I can do anything to stop her, a look of confusion passes over her face. “The guns aren’t fucking loaded!”

Myers scoops his dropped weapon off the ground and in a single, fluid motion throws it at her head.

The heavy steel smacks hard into her skull. Blood pours down the side of her face, and she staggers. Helen yells Mary’s name and tries to pull something from her purse, but it’s torn from her by grasping hands.

“Do you think we don’t know what sorcerers can do?” Myers gives the bleeding Mary a cruel smile. “Though I admit, the frost caught me by surprise.”

There are too many of them. I try to fend off the ones coming for me, but am quickly shoved to the ground and pinned. Others draw knives shaped like clock hands, like the one that killed James. Adrian freezes, as do Helen and Dorset. Mary is already on the floor with me, too dazed to struggle as her hands are tied behind her back and a gag shoved in her mouth.

“I should slit all of your throats,” Myers says conversationally. “Except Caine’s, anyway. But I don’t like to leave things too messy, and a room full of blood might raise questions.”

Questions from whom? We’ll all be replaced or dead, and if Myers is lucky he’ll be a prisoner of the Swarm for the rest of his natural life.

But of course, he doesn’t know that. Neither did the Tschchch whose writings implied it collaborated with the Swarm, only to realize too late that it had been sold a pack of lies.

“They’re going to destroy humanity,” I tell him, my cheek rubbing against the floor. “You’ve been⁠—”

He kicks me almost casually in the head. “Shut up, or I’ll gag you, too.”

The blow isn’t enough to injure me, but it hurts. I fall silent while his people search us, removing Adrian and Dorset’s guns, Helen’s purse, and an array of small knives and a tiny pistol hidden on Mary’s person. Mary and I are hauled back to our feet and all of us marched down the stairs.

No one sees as we’re hustled outside and toward a waiting truck. If only it were a weekday, when the campus would be filled with students and faculty.

The truck has Ice Delivery Service painted on the side, though I suspect it’s used to transport a lot of illegal booze and zero blocks of ice. I find myself sitting with my back against the wall, Adrian to one side of me and Helen on the other. Myers himself climbs in along with most of his underlings, all of them with their knives out. A few seconds later, the engine starts and the truck pulls away.

The clock-hand knife in Myers’s grip draws my gaze like a magnet. “You—the Timekeepers—you killed James.”