into thermite powder, then he was sucked down into the Timekey, which stood on its point, spinning like a top.
A bolt of lightning shot from its tip, scorching the ceiling, then it too disappeared.
“Okay,” said Chevie, grabbing Riley’s shoulder and hustling him toward the steps, “I know where this is going.”
Without an aperture at the twenty-first-century end of the wormhole, the time tunnel craved energy to sustain the matter conversion. The first things to go were the barrel batteries, which were grabbed with lightning fingers, squeezed dry, then tossed aside like dead husks. Then the lightning burrowed deep into the earth itself, siphoning geothermal energy until the soil cracked and split.
Chevie pushed Riley upstairs and toward the front door, hearing the earth itself open behind her with thunderous booms and sharp snaps. She could feel Bill Riley’s Timekey buzz sympathetically against her chest.
“Run,” she called, wholly unnecessarily. “The house is going to collapse.”
Riley did not need any urging. He raced toward the door, thinking that this was the second time he had fled this house in fear of his life.
The house collapsed around them as they ran, sinking into the basement’s maw, as the structure itself fed the wormhole with kinetic energy. Glass shattered and stone was crushed like sand. Chevie kicked Riley hard in the rump to shunt him past a falling chandelier.
Garrick had bolted the door behind him, but this didn’t delay them, as most of the front wall had collapsed. The fleeing pair dived through a hole in the wall onto the pavement and scrambled quickly from the maelstrom of destruction behind them.
Streams of people flowed from the doors of adjacent houses, and screaming and howling rose up in the square as the wormhole gulped and swallowed the entire building, excising it from its neighbors with surgical precision. When at last the dust settled and the cacophony faded, the house had been removed, like a rotten tooth from a gum, leaving the others untouched save for a score of broken windows and a spiderweb of superficial cracks.
Riley and Chevie leaned on the park railing, as caked in dust as any victims of Vesuvius, but intact and uninjured.
Riley spat a ball of brick dust to the ground. “Did you know that the entire house would be consumed?”
Chevie touched the tender spot on her chest where Garrick’s bullet had struck the body armor she had stripped from a fallen member of the hazmat team. “I knew there was a chance, but it was worth taking.”
There was chaos on Bedford Square as bobbies’ whistle blasts filled the air and the bells of an approaching fire engine clanged across from the West End. Some people had fainted dead away, and young lads clambered over the rubble heap, calling for survivors.
“We should run,” said Riley. “The police will question everyone in a posh gaff such as this.”
Chevie tore off her bulletproof vest and took several breaths. “Yeah, okay, Riley. I make the strategy decisions, remember? Anyway, we should get out of here before the local police blame us for something.”
Riley tucked the magician’s cloak under his arm. “A good strategy. Lead on, Agent Savano.”
The pair trudged to the corner of Bedford Square, against the flow of the crowd straining to see the collapsed foundations of what the London News would call the “House of Hell.”
Riley and Chevie left a trail of dust behind them. They did not speak for a while, both engrossed in thoughts of the future. Eventually they realized that they had linked arms as they walked.
“We are like a couple off to the opera,” said Riley.
Chevie laughed and a puff of dust escaped her throat. “Yeah, a zombie couple.” Her laugh petered out. “You could have died back there, fighting Garrick. That was not part of the plan.”
“I thought of him, leaning over my dear ma,” said Riley, “with his knife ready to do its business, and I couldn’t help myself.”
Hooves clattered alongside as a hansom cab slowed, the driver sniffing a fare, despite of their appearance.
“We’re content on foot,” Riley called, without glancing upward. “Move on down the avenue.”
“Perhaps I am content to ride beside my mates,” said a familiar voice.
It was Bob Winkle, who had somehow kept a grip on the stolen carriage.
Winkle stood on the driver’s seat, peering down toward the corner of Bedford Square. “You pair had a right knees-up on that gaff,” he commented. “A cove might expect a life of high adventure partnering with such a duo. Like Holmes and Watson, ye are,