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It didn’t look like Caleb thought so, either. “What’s the problem?” he demanded.
“That,” Pritkin said as we ran up to the other side of the roof.
And yeah.
This side had a fire escape going down, but it didn’t do us any good. Because the street below had suddenly decided it didn’t want to be a street anymore. And turned into a culvert.
And then flip, a stone-walled garden. And hey presto, a sewage tunnel. It was shifting so fast, it was making me dizzy, and I wasn’t even down there. I couldn’t imagine trying to navigate a yard through the middle of a landscape that was constantly changing, much less a block.
Only it didn’t look like someone wanted us to have even that tiny chance.
Because the building suddenly shook all around us, like the aftershock from an earthquake had hit it. Only the earthquake was coming, not going. And tossing us up—
And up and up and up some more, as the building sprang out of the ground, additional stories popping out of the earth like cars on a freight train heading straight into the sky.
“Oh, shit,” Casanova said miserably. And then, “Fuck that!” as the bits of rope came out again.
And this time, I was siding with Casanova.
Because yeah, there was another electric line, attached to the side of the building. And yes, it had grown up along with the rest of this place. But the building was now a good fourteen stories up, making the line into an almost perpendicular plunge to a tiny pole way the hell down there.
Which might not even be there in a minute, the way things were going.
And then it wasn’t, as Pritkin waved a hand and the pole went scooting down the street-that-was-a-street again for the moment, weaving in and out of the crazy landscape like a skier on a hill, only to stop at the entrance of a large edifice at the very end.
An edifice that looked like a municipal building, but probably wasn’t.
“Oh God,” I said, with feeling.
“Fuck that!” Casanova repeated, backing away.
“It’s doable,” Caleb said staunchly.
“In what universe?”
“You have a better plan?” Pritkin asked, th
rowing his very thin and not-at-all sturdy-looking piece of rope over the line.
“Yes! Anything that takes place on the ground!”
“Man up,” Caleb advised.
“I’m a vampire—”
“Yet you’re afraid of heights.”
“Yes!” Casanova said hysterically. “They’re one of the few things that can kill me! I hate fire and I hate heights!”
“How do you feel about stakes?”
“Very funny! Very goddamned—” He broke off when a familiar streak of red lightning tore across the roof and exploded against the lip of the building.
“What are they doing?” he screamed.
“Trying to get a payday,” Pritkin snarled. And I remembered what he’d said before, about having enemies, even at court. But damn it, Rosier was here—
Only he wasn’t, I realized. There was no slick gray suit among the blue robes leaping from the other roof to ours. He must be down on the street, keeping the card flip going. And that meant—
