“This way,” the gangster said and led the way down the halls, at last coming to the set of stairs they had been captured at earlier. He started to head up them, but Avery made him wait while he went forward himself. He opened the door and stepped out into the night. Fresh air teased his nose, but also the scent of smoke. Sirens wailed in the distance. Weird, mutated trees erupted from the rooftop around him, and strange animals scuttled away. One of the three moons hung above, fat and full.
“It’s safe,” he called back, and the others emerged after him.
“Now can I go?” Virine said.
Avery hesitated.
“Don’t,” Layanna said. “He’ll have his creatures on us as soon as you’re no longer pointing a gun at him.”
Avery knew she was right. “You’re staying with us,” he told the gangster.
Virine seethed quietly.
Coleel was surveying the rooftop. “Where’s the fire escape? I don’t see one.”
Virine grunted. “You think I’d allow someone to sneak onto my roof? I had it removed long ago.”
Coleel punched him in the face. Virine sagged to the side but didn’t fall.
“Been wanting to do that for a long time,” Coleel told Avery and Layanna.
Virine wiped his chin. “I hope that made you feel better. It won’t help any of us off this roof. Why did we go up during a fire? Idiots!”
Layanna turned to Avery. “You seemed to have some plan earlier.”
He nodded. “The trees. We cut one down and use it as a bridge to cross to the roof of another building, and so on. Doing that we could get clear of the Maze and outside the area the Octs are looking for us in.”
“Great plan, genius,” Virine said, “only I don’t see that any of you has an axe. Face it. We’re fucked.”
Avery indicated the weapons he and Layanna carried. “We don’t need axes. We have bullets. But we’d better hurry.”
“The flames are rising,” Coleel agreed.
“It’s not just that,” Layanna said, and her expression had darkened.
“What do you mean?”
“Aren’t you curious how the fires started?” said Avery, who had realized it, too. “On both sides? Someone set them.”
“The priests of the Restoration,” Layanna said. “It had to be. They either wanted to smoke us out …”
“… or empty the building so that they could come in looking for us.”
In the silence that followed, all four looked to the empty doorway. Then, very slowly, as if afraid to go too fast, Coleel closed the door and shot its lock, perhaps jamming it. The report echoed loudly in Avery’s ears. When Coleel spun about, he looked grim.
“Then let’s get to it, then, shall we?”
They moved to the edge of the roof. Below, a single fire truck was trying to make its way through the press of people pouring from the building. Flames licked up the walls, the smoke making Avery cough. He could feel the heat of the fire, which had reached a second-story window twenty feet below; the flames danced up toward him trailing sparks. Trees burned along the face of the structure, and animals scampered upward.
“That one truck’s not going to be able to do any good,” Coleel said.
While they had been distracted, Virine’s glabren had tightened their fingers around the triggers of their guns and taken renewed aim at Avery and Coleel.
“Don’t!” Avery snapped at Virine. He dumped his load of weapons and aimed his pistol at Virine’s head.
Coleel, evidently realizing that his laxness had almost gotten them killed, resumed training his rifle at Virine. He aimed at the gangster’s crotch.
“The priests must be combing the club by now,” Layanna said. “They won’t be long.”
Her point was taken. Working together, Avery, Coleel and the three glabren shot their rifles at the base of a nearby tree—covered in brilliant green-purple fish scales, with glistening egg sacs hanging off its subtly moving limbs instead of fruit—until the tree toppled, then carted it over to the edge of the roof facing an alley, where the gap to the next roof was narrowest, and, very carefully, maneuvered it so that it reached the roof on the other side. Even Layanna helped. Grunting and straining, Avery was glad for the presence of the glabren. Once the tree was firmly laid across, the company ventured out onto it, one at a time. Coleel crossed first while Avery kept his weapon trained on Virine, then two glabren, then Layanna, then Virine, Avery and, lastly, the final glabren, who had been facing the door leading onto the rooftop, gun trained in expectation of the priests’ arrival.
The priests didn’t show up, but the company hauled the tree across just in case; it wouldn’t do to leave the priests a bridge, would it? Also, they would need it again soon enough. They moved to the far edge of the new roof, again choosing the side facing an alley, and, again, tensely, made their way to the new building, this one only two stories tall, so that they had to travel at an incline on the way across; fortunately the tree was long enough to make up for the difference. Getting to the next roof, another three story structure, proved harder going, and Avery was sweating and his arms trembling by the time he hauled himself over the lip.
The others were tired, too, and they took a break on the new roof while more sirens wailed in the distance, joining the first fire truck, and flames crackled from the club. Virine watched the fires morosely.
“You lot,” he said with contempt. “You cost me one of my favorite spots. I’ve got other audience rooms, but they don’t all have whorehouses on the next level down.”
“Bullshit,” said Coleel. “Your whorehouse travels with you.” He flicked his gaze to the female glabren, who was lithe and attractive and wearing very little. No expression passed across her face.
“Did your glabren all get away?” Layanna asked, and Avery was surprised at the care he heard in her voice.
“More or less,” Virine said. “I lost contact with a couple of them. I expect a ceiling collapsed.”
More deaths on our heads, Avery thought and turned to catch Layanna glancing away; maybe she was thinking the same thing. For some reason, he hoped so.
They moved on, and Avery realized just how exhausted he was as they made their way along the roofs. He hadn’t slept in what seemed like ages, and he hadn’t eaten since breakfast at the temple of Sisters of Jucina. His mouth was parched and his lips cracked. Layanna, by contrast, seemed to be doing very well indeed; as they went, she helped herself to the fruits or equivalent dangling from the infected trees and vegetation. Coleel and Virine regarded her with disgust, even fear, but she ate on, oblivious, and soon enough Avery could see that her cheeks had more color in them and her eyes more life. She was healing from the damage inflicted by the dart. Soon she would be able to bring her other-self over—at least, he hoped so.
Coleel’s tattoos glowed so brightly that it would have made them easy to spot, so he was forced to lather himself with mud and filth gathered from the rooftops. Soon he was as cloaked in darkness as the rest of them.
