MATTHEW WEEKES: The Horn was letting out this frequency, too low for us to hear but vibrating in the street—it drove a massive crack through the pavement right under Sloane and the Dark One, and I was adding to it with the Bough, but we could both tell it wasn’t going to be enough. The Dark One had set up some kind of protective barrier around him and Sloane, and she was screaming—
SLOANE ANDREWS: I’m not sure what he was doing to me. It felt like he was trying to rip me apart. It was all I could do just to hold on to the Needle. No chance of me actually thinking straight long enough to use it.
MATTHEW WEEKES: But then—from the bridge just west of the one we were on, the one that State Street runs across—
SLOANE ANDREWS: The Bataan-Corregidor Memorial Bridge.
MATTHEW WEEKES: Yeah, that one. Anyway, it was Albie. He had the Freikugeln in his fist and he was aiming them out the open window of a taxi. I think you guys gave the taxi driver the Medal of Honor. One of a handful of private citizens to get it. Anyway, then everything just . . . broke.
SENATOR GOO: I will refer everyone to Exhibit 24, A through R, for footage of this event from a . . . wide variety of angles, submitted by civilian bystanders in advance of this hearing. Essentially, the entirety of Trump Tower pulled free of its moorings, taking along with it the Wabash Avenue Bridge with the Dark One and Miss Andrews on top of it. For approximately 1.23 seconds, everything remained suspended in midair and then radiated outward from a central point inside the . . . floating building. The steel and glass projectiles caused forty-five casualties and upward of two hundred injuries as well as a significant amount of property damage.
ESTHER PARK: We’re . . . sorry?
SENATOR GOO: We’ll be expecting your reparation money any day now, Ms. Park.
[silence]
SENATOR GOO: That was a joke.
MATTHEW WEEKES: We all got knocked out at that point, so none of us remember—
SLOANE ANDREWS: I remember something. I remember—falling. Into water. The river. I sank all the way to the bottom with the concrete from the bridge. That was when I blacked out. I woke up on the lake shore. Still not sure how I got there, why I didn’t just drown. And the Dark One, he was . . . gone.
14
SLOANE WALKED a winding path through the tents that surrounded the Drain site. It had rained earlier, so the ground was soft beneath her boots. There were fewer people milling around than when she had come during the day, and those who were still out were gathered around portable grills and small fires with lanterns hanging above their heads or floodlights attached to the front of their tents. She heard a few bars of “The Times They Are A-Changin’ ” coming from one of the sites, and the words chased her, as if carried on the cold wind, all the way to the Dome.
Sloane stopped at the security barrier that separated the crowd of seekers—no matter what they were here for, they were all looking for something—from the Drain site. She was not far now from the cluster of tents she had stomped over to a few days ago to punch that guy in the face.
But it felt like a dream to her now. Albie was gone, which meant it didn’t matter what some Dark One acolyte called her or what he wanted. Albie was gone, and now there was only what needed to be done and the one willing to do it.
No one had recognized her, nor would anyone. She had changed into new clothes in the car. They were shapeless and black, disguising anything feminine about her figure. She was tall enough to be mistaken for a man. A hood was secured over her hair, and over her nose and mouth, she had on a neoprene mask she wore when running in the dead of winter. She was glad she hadn’t put on makeup that day—nothing to wipe off. ARIS would suspect her, she was sure, as soon as they realized what she had done. But the disguise would buy her some time.
Sloane took the broken pieces of Koschei’s Needle from the container in her back pocket. She had broken it herself. After Bert came after her and Albie, unnecessarily, and died because of it, and after being a captive of the