I ran toward Noor to push her away from him. As I reached her, the man squeezed off two shots. The sound was incredible, less a bang than a sonic blast. The first shot I heard caromed off the wall. The second shattered the tank next to him. One moment it was whole and the next it was falling to pieces, crabs and water and broken glass spilling everywhere, and then the many tanks stacked atop it toppled sideways and forward across the hall. The topmost one exploded as it hit the column of tanks on the opposite wall; the others shattered on top of Bowers. They must’ve held a hundred gallons apiece and weighed a collective ton, because in the space of three seconds he was both crushed and half drowned. Meanwhile, a chain reaction of impacts sent nearly all the tanks in the hallway crashing to the floor in a tremendous explosion of noise and glass, freeing their crustacean prisoners in a tidal wave of fetid water that rushed along the hall and knocked us both off our feet.
We coughed and choked; the water was disgusting. I looked at Bowers and winced. His face was shredded to strips and glowing with green light. His body was alive with scuttling crabs, but he was very dead otherwise. I turned away quickly and picked through the wreckage toward Noor, who had gotten washed down the hall.
“Are you okay?” I asked, helping her up and checking her for cuts.
She looked herself over in the dim light. “My limbs are still attached. You?”
“Same,” I said. “We’d better go. The other guys will be coming.”
“Yeah, they probably heard that in New Jersey.”
We linked arms to steady each other and moved as fast as we could toward the mouth of the hall, where a neon sign in the shape of a crab buzzed and flickered.
We’d hardly made it ten feet when we heard heavy footsteps pounding in our direction.
We froze where we stood. Two people, maybe more, were coming for us at a dead run. They had heard us, all right.
“Let’s go!” Noor said, and started pulling me forward.
“No—” I stopped. Planted my feet. “They’re too close.” They’d be here any second, and the hallway ahead was too long and cluttered with broken tanks; we’d never make it in time. “We’ve got to hide again.”
“We have to fight,” she said, gathering what light there was into her hands, but there wasn’t much left.
That had been my first instinct, too—but I knew it was wrong.
“If we fight, they start shooting, and I can’t let you get shot. I’ll give myself up and tell them you ran somewhere else—”
She was shaking her head vehemently. “No way in hell.” Even in the dark I could see her eyes flashing. She let the tiny ball of light she’d raked up dissipate and retrieved two long shards of glass from the floor. “We fight together or not at all.”
I let out a frustrated sigh. “Then we fight.” We crouched down, shards of glass held out like knives. The footsteps were loud, and so close we could hear the approaching runners’ heavy breaths.
And then they were here.
A figure appeared at the end of the hall, silhouetted against neon. Someone stocky, broad-shouldered . . . and familiar, though I couldn’t immediately place them.
“Mr. Jacob?” a voice I recognized said. “Is that you?”
A shimmer of light fell across her face. Her strong, square jaw, her kind eyes. I thought, for a moment, that I must be dreaming.
“Bronwyn?” I said—almost shouted.
“It is you!” she cried, her face breaking into a wide grin. She ran toward me, bounding around drifts of broken glass, and I dropped the shard of glass just before Bronwyn wrapped me in a big, breath-stealing hug. “Is that Miss Noor?” she said over my shoulder.
“Hi,” Noor said, sounding a bit stunned.
“Then you succeeded!” Bronwyn said. “I’m so happy!”
“What are you doing here?” I managed to squeak.
“We might ask the same of you!” said another familiar voice—and as Bronwyn let me go I saw Hugh coming toward us. “Blimey, what happened in here?”
First Bronwyn, now Hugh. My head was spinning.
Bronwyn set me down. “Never mind that. He’s all right, Hugh! And here’s Miss Noor.”
“Hi,” Noor said again. Then, quickly, “So there’s, like, four guys with guns coming for us right now—”
“I coshed two on the head,” said Bronwyn, holding up a pair of fingers.
“I chased off another with my bees,” said Hugh.
“More will be coming,” I said.
Bronwyn picked up a heavy-looking metal bar from the floor. “Then let’s not dally, shall we?”
* * *
◆ ◆ ◆
The subterranean seafood market was a baffling maze, but we navigated its wriggling nooks and crannies as best we could, each twosome struggling to remember just how we’d gotten down here and which of the Chinese-language signs around us meant exit. The place was both cramped and sprawling, packed tight with crates and tables, divided by hanging tarps, nests of dangerous-looking electric wires and bare bulbs that swung overhead. It had been crowded a short time ago, but Leo’s guys had pretty well cleared it out.
“Try and keep up!” Bronwyn called over her shoulder.
We slid after her under a table squirming with live octopi, then chased her down an aisle of fish laid out in boxes of steaming dry ice. Turning left at a junction with another aisle, we saw two of Leo’s men—one was splayed on the ground, and the other was crouching next to him, attempting to revive him with little slaps on the face. Bronwyn didn’t slow her pace at all, and the man looked up in surprise just as she delivered a running kick to his head and sent him sprawling onto the ground beside the other one.
“Very sorry!” she called behind her, and in reply there came a pair of shouts from far across the market—two more of Leo’s guys had spotted us and were now charging in our direction. We took a sharp turn and ran up a narrow stairway, then slammed through a door and burst out into daylight, briefly blinded after having spent so long in the gloom. Suddenly, we were on a busy sidewalk at rush hour in the present day. Cars and pedestrians and street vendors were everywhere, zipping around us in a dizzying whirl.
There’s an art to fleeing casually. It’s not easy, running from something that might kill you while not attracting stares. Seeming to be engaged in something no more dramatic than an afternoon jog, especially when two of you are soaked head to toe, two of you are dressed in nineteenth-century clothes, and all of you keep shooting nervous glances down every alley and back over your shoulders. Apparently, we hadn’t got the hang of it, because we were getting even more stares than two costumed and two wet teenagers should have warranted, especially in New York, where strange people populated most sidewalks.