The Darkness Before the Dawn - By Ryan Hughes Page 0,48
as well. He stood beside them in the street, cocking his bulbous-eyed head this way and that, while Kayan and Jedra blinked to regain their vision in the sudden light.
Link up, Jedra sent. He took Kayan’s hand in his own, remembering that physical contact had strengthened the link before.
The rush was like a wind blowing through them, spreading well-being through every cell of their bodies. They felt their minds merging again, felt themselves become a new being. With Kitarak so close by, they tried not to imagine themselves with any kind of physical body, lest their psionic wings or claws do him inadvertent damage before they could get clear. Instead, they concentrated on the city before them, bringing every stone and every shadow into sharp focus. This time, now that they had seen it with their own eyes, they saw it as it was now, rather than in its former glory.
It was still impressive. The tallest remaining tower, nearly six stories high, stood only four or five buildings away, halfway down the next block on the same street on which they stood. Jedra and Kayan turned toward it, stretching out with their power, letting it flow through them, upward and outward. They raised their hands to help direct it, palms out, arms slightly bent. They could almost feel the stone walls against their hands. A little more concentration, and they could feel the stone. They felt every crack, every joint, every rectangular window for the entire six stories on the side that faced them.
Then they pushed.
The building groaned. The massive wall resisted. Jedra and Kayan pushed harder, and slowly, inexorably, the wall tipped away from them. It didn’t go over in one big slab; instead it buckled in the middle, and the top half, suddenly relieved of its support, broke into its constituent blocks and rained down like a sudden hailstorm.
The ground shook, and thunder rolled down the street. The lower half of the collapsing wall smashed through interior partitions as if they weren’t even there, gutting the building, then twisting to the right as it toppled inward and knocking out the back wall as well. The whole building shuddered, and more stones fell. Then the third wall, the far one, crumbled away from the others and crashed down on the building behind it.
The fourth wall stood for a moment, a massive, six-story monolith with the ragged ends of floors sticking out from the side, then it tipped inward and did what the others failed to do: fell in one piece all the way to the ground.
Dust billowed up, obscuring the entire far end of the street. Jedra and Kayan struggled to keep their balance when the quake hit, and the renewed body awareness brought them out of their link.
They hadn’t been merged long enough for the letdown to be as severe as before. They were able to stand and watch the dust cloud rise above the other buildings while they waited for the noise to die down enough to allow speech. It didn’t die right away, though, and finally they realized why: The shaking had weakened the next building closer to them, and it was going down, too. This one was only three stories high—it was the one in which Jedra had found the crystals—but it fell with nearly as much impact as the first.
Kitarak didn’t know they had only caused the first collapse directly; He turned toward them and shouted, “Stop it!”
“We can’t!” Jedra shouted back. Helplessly, they watched the debris from the second building knock out the wall holding up the next one, which collapsed into the next, sending a wave of destruction up the street toward the three watchers.
Run! Kayan mindsent as she whirled around and did just that, dodging boulders and leaping through the rubble while the ground shook and more stones fell from the buildings all around them.
Kitarak was already in motion, but rather than sprinting down the street after her he ducked into the building they had just been inside. Jedra and Kayan’s packs flew out the doorway, then Kitarak reappeared, dragging his own pack behind him.
Jedra grabbed both his and Kayan’s packs and ran off after her. A section of cornice fell off the front of the building beside them and shattered, sending fragments everywhere. He felt a sting in the side of his right leg, but he kept running.
Kitarak passed him within twenty feet, leaping high on his powerful back legs even with his pack weighing him down. He ran all