Glimmering

He shivered. Snow brushed his forehead. When he wiped it away, it left a greenish sheen to his fingers. He thought of what Nellie had told him of GFI’s plans to distribute the fusarium bacteria, and a wave of nausea went through him. Cold wind played at his face, redolent of balsam; he could also smell a trace of acrid smoke, raw sewage, the standing-water scent of the city. If he stared beyond the scrim of stars and pared moon, he could see the structural grid of the dome; beyond that, something else lodged within the real sky like a bullet in a wound. A glistening golden shape, outlined with red lights that spelled out GFI then melted into the image of a gryphon holding a globe in its claws. Not far from it another, and another. He counted seven of them, an unmoving school of skyborne leviathans. A field of black spread between them like a stain—the sky platform, part of the payload to be towed into the upper atmosphere tonight.

…Because I was the one who provided them with fifty-seven sheets of collodion cotton soaked with nitroglycerin, all of which have been incorporated into the Fougas’ outer structure…

In the distance he heard an orchestra tuning up, the echoing snarl of feedback, and a voice booming from a loudspeaker. A liveried woman approached him, carrying a tray of champagne flutes. Jack took a glass from her gloved hand. As she left, two security people passed in a haze of electrified chatter, glancing at him. Jack sipped his champagne. Within minutes he felt light-headed. He hadn’t eaten in two days. He still didn’t feel hungry; the opposite, in fact, strung-out but intently focused. He wondered what would happen if he approached security and told them about the bomb.

He finished the champagne. The waitress reappeared. He set his empty glass on her tray and took another full one, watched as more and more people filled GFI’s winter palace.

Someone sure had a lot of friends. And probably they wouldn’t like it if some emaciated, scruffy-looking, no doubt virulent guy, who didn’t even have the decency to wear a mask, started raving about bombs. He thought of Jule, of Nellie Candry slumped elsewhere within the Pyramid. He would be detained again, maybe permanently, an unknown man connected with two suspicious deaths.

“Happy New Year!” A creamy-skinned young girl, no makeup, no mask, tossed a handful of glitter at him. “Happy New Year!”

She turned giggling back to her friends. He watched them go, and thought of flames raining from the sky, burning fuselage, ten thousand panicked people dying in a crush of fire and twisted girders. The world unredeemed by solex shields, all of humanity doomed because Jack Finnegan hadn’t acted on a tip about a terrorist bomb threat. Weighed that against the image of himself being questioned, insisting on the veracity of a dead woman’s ravings about terrorists and psychotropic drugs, while the party of the century went on till dawn without him, and he was finally released to stumble home to his brother’s accusing eyes. He thought of Leonard here, somewhere in his stained leather motley: the Lord of Misrule. He thought of kissing Larry Muso, of making love to him and holding him afterward, the two of them laughing—bombs! what bombs? He thought of Nellie Candry, of the web of connectedness she’d shown him; how easily it could be torn but how that was how the light got through, sometimes.

I should leave, he thought. I could escape now, I could get away from here, somehow get back to Lazyland…

But that would mean never seeing Larry Muso again. That would mean never knowing how it might have all turned out. And he wasn’t quite ready to forgo the chance to see what might have been.

And suddenly, with a clarity that took his breath away, he realized that Leonard had won, after all. They had all won, Julie and Leonard and everyone who had ever urged Jackie Finnegan to go for a dangerous drive, cross against the light, leap off the Brooklyn Bridge, fall in love with strangers.

Because Jack saw it was the jump that mattered: not the presumed safety of the cliff edge, nor the certainty of annihilation at the bottom. It was Chance that mattered, the dizzying recognition that somebody or something was, in fact, playing dice with the world, and had been all along.

Phantom sparks glimmered in the air, green and gold and violet. He glanced again at the dome, half-expecting to see the real and broken sky there, mirroring his own dislocation. He heard a soft roaring, a sound he had heard before—in the wind, in the sea, in the pulse of blood through his ears.

It was, he realized, the sound of things falling apart.