Sonia Rheinschild knows she will die. In truth, she’s amazed she has survived this long, what with so many other ADR operatives killed in “random” clapper attacks. But to lose the kids in her basement is too much to bear. Poor Jack, lying there beside her, had it easy compared to what the others will now have to endure.
Then, as the heat builds around her, as the air grows inky black with smoke, she hears the most wonderful sound she’s ever been blessed to hear. A sound that changes everything.
In that moment, her fears and regrets leave her. She smiles and begins to breathe deep, over and over again, resisting the urge to cough, willing her body to succumb to smoke inhalation so that she never has to feel the flames.
She will go to her husband now. She will join Janson in whatever place, or nonplace, all the living eventually go—and she will go there in peace . . .
. . . because the wonderful sound she heard from the basement below was the breaking of a window.
38 • Grace
Cold, confused, and covered with scratches, Grace crawls out of the prickly hedge. Her head spins, and she’s terrified because for the first few moments, she can’t fathom how she got there. Maybe she was hit by a car and thrown into the bushes. Maybe she was mugged.
When her memory begins to return, she resists it, because even before it oozes to the surface, she senses it’s going to be bad. And she’s right.
She saw Argent, but it wasn’t Argent, but it was. She screamed and passed out—perhaps from her shock, perhaps from something else. The sky is a bit darker now than when she lost consciousness. It’s still late twilight, though. How long was she out? Ten minutes? Twenty?
Her attention is drawn to orange light ebbing and flowing in random surges. Something around the corner is on fire.
Fighting the weakness in her knees, she holds on to a streetlamp for balance, then turns the corner to find Sonia’s shop on fire. Grace can feel the heat of the flames all the way across the street. She runs toward the burning building in a panic, but the shop’s plate glass window explodes before she can even reach the curb. She’s thrown back onto a manhole cover, its hard steel skinning her elbows.
People have come out into the street to watch—perhaps they want to help, but there’s nothing to be done. All they can do is stand there with phones to their ears. A dozen simultaneous calls to 911.
“Sonia!” she calls as she gets to her feet, then turns to the onlookers. “Has anyone seen Sonia?”
They answer with helpless expressions.
“You’re useless! All of ya!”
She tries to peer into the flames, but all she can see are antiques burning. Then out of the corner of her eye, she sees kids slipping out of the alley behind the shop. She hurries to the alley, to find it’s the AWOLs from Sonia’s basement, as she had hoped it would be.
“What happened? What happened?” she asks them.
“We don’t know! We don’t know!”
Farther down the alley, Beau pulls himself out of the broken basement window—he’s the last one out. As Grace scans the gathering of kids, she can’t find Connor, which means he hasn’t returned from whatever secret mission Sonia had sent him on. But Risa isn’t here either.
“Grace, you’re alive!” says Beau, pleased by the fact. “We’ve gotta get out of here before the fire trucks arrive.”
“Where’s Risa? Where’s Sonia?”
Beau shakes his head. “Dead,” he tells her. “Some maniac. We tried to stop him, but we couldn’t, and then he set the whole place on fire.”
“A guy with a messed-up face?”
“You know him?”
“No, but I know his face. Or part of it.”
Now the hollow wail of sirens comes to them over the treetops, distant but drawing closer—and as bad as this whole thing is, something occurs to Grace that makes it even worse.
“Where’s the printer?”
Beau looks at her as blankly as the fire watchers had. “What? Why the hell do you care about that stupid thing now?”
He doesn’t know! They never told anyone else how crucial it was, and so, without Risa or Connor there, there was no one to save it. Connor had said that the gears and mechanics and stuff were broken, but the important part—the printing part—was still okay. Maybe. But if it burns, there isn’t even “maybe” anymore.
Beau grabs her arm. “Come with us, Grace. I’ll find us a place to hide. We’ll be okay, I swear it.”
She gently pulls out of his grip. “You be smart with them, Beau. Run north, and maybe east, ’cause most people runnin’ away run south or west. Be smart, and keep them whole, you hear?”
Beau nods, and Grace turns and, without looking back, runs down the alley toward the back of the burning building.
The heat is so intense, Grace can’t even get near the back door. A few feet over, low to the ground, is that solitary window into the basement. Rather than spewing smoke, it’s drawing in air, breathing in oxygen to feed the flames above.
She gets down on her knees and peers in, but can’t see a thing—which means that there’s no fire down there!
Not yet, anyway. It may be too late to save Sonia and Risa, and for all she knows, Connor is dead too. She may be the only one left who knows of the printer’s existence.
Something heavy crashes in the shop. The flames crackle with nasty, vicious greed.
The window is so small, and she’s such a big-boned girl, she’s convinced there’s no way she can fit through the window—but she has to try. How terrible it would be if everything were to be lost because the window is too small and she’s too big. The odds are even money she’ll fit, and even money she’ll get to the printer before the floor above her collapses. That’s a 25 percent chance. Lousy odds, but they get worse the longer she hesitates.