Peter.
He lurched backward. A dam was bursting in his mind. Images, faces, days, names—they poured forth in a torrent, almost painful. The scene around him—the field and the river and the flat light of the sky—began to disperse. It was washing away. Behind it lay a wholly different reality, of objects and people and events and ordered time. I am Peter Jaxon, he thought, and then he said it:
“I am Peter Jaxon.”
—
Peter stumbled backward; the sword fell from his hand.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Fanning barked. “I said, kill her.”
Peter’s head swiveled; his eyes narrowed on Fanning’s face. It was happening, thought Amy. He was remembering. The muscles of his legs compressed.
He sprang.
He rammed Fanning headlong. Surprise was on his side: Fanning went sailing. He crashed back down and rolled end over end, coming to rest against a concrete pylon. He rose onto all fours but his movements were sluggish. He gave his head a horsey shake and spat on the ground.
“Well, this is unexpected.”
Then Amy was being lifted; Peter had gathered her into his arms. Together they raced down Forty-third Street on soaring strides. Where was he taking her? Then she understood: the partially constructed office tower. She tipped her face skyward, but the dust was too thick to see if the building’s upper floors rose above the cloud deck. Peter halted at the base of the elevator shaft. He swung her onto his back, scrambled ten feet up the shaft’s outer structure, guided Amy back around his waist, lowered her through the bars to the elevator’s roof, and followed her down. His purpose in all this was unknown to her. He hoisted her onto his back again, using his elbows to compress her legs around his waist to tell her to hold on to him as tightly as possible. All of this had transpired in just a matter of seconds. The elevator’s cables, three of them, were set into a steel plate affixed to a crossbar on the elevator’s roof. Peter gathered the cables into his fists and set his feet wide. Amy, her arms hooked around his shoulders and her legs squeezing his waist like a vise, felt a gathering pressure in his body. Peter began to groan through his teeth. Only then did she grasp his intentions. She closed her eyes.
The plate tore free; Amy and Peter launched skyward, Peter gripping the cables, Amy riding his back like the shell of a turtle. Five stories, ten, fifteen. The elevator’s counterweight plunged past. What would happen when they reached the top? Would they shoot through the roof into space?
Suddenly the whole cage shuddered; the counterweight had reached the bottom. The tension on the cable was instantly gone. Hurled upward, Amy found herself looking down at the base of the shaft. She was alone in the air, unattached to anything. Her body slowed as she approached the apogee of her ascent and for a second seemed to hover. I am going to fall, she thought. How far away the ground was. She would hit it going a hundred miles an hour, maybe more. I am falling.
A jolt: Peter, still gripping the cable, had seized her by the wrist. He pumped his legs, shifting his center of gravity to swing Amy in progressively wider arcs. Amy saw his target, an opening in the wall of the shaft not far below them.
He flung her away.
She landed on the floor and rolled to a halt. They were still inside the dust cloud. The adrenaline of their ascent had sharpened her thoughts. Everything was coming into a fine, almost granular focus. She scrambled to the edge and looked down into a dizzying maw of space.
Fanning was climbing up the side of the building.
The air concussed with a titanic roar. The building on the opposite side of Forty-third Street began to melt straight down into itself like a man felled at the knees. The floor under Amy began to shake. The vibration deepened; sounds of buckling metal rippled through the structure as the floor tipped abruptly toward the street. Loose materials—rusted tools, sawhorses, moisture-swollen pieces of drywall, a bucket of nails—slid past her and sailed into the abyss. She was on her stomach, pressing herself to the floor. The angle was increasing. She was slipping, her hands and feet could gain no traction, gravity was taking hold…
“Peter, help!”
The sweet pressure of his hand on her arm halted her slide; he was lying on his stomach, the crowns of their heads just touching. The floor gave another downward lurch, yet he held on, his toes digging into the concrete. With gathering force, he drew her back from the edge.
“Ah,” said Fanning. His face had appeared above the lip of the floor. “There you are.”
—
Michael heard a faint metallic ringing from the hallway—the sound of hangers jostling on racks. A short silence ensued; the trail of his blood, crisscrossing the various hallways and doubling back, had momentarily perplexed them. The delay was excruciating. If only he would just pass out. If anything, he felt more alert than ever.