The T.D.S. was jerking back and forth, trying to throw her off. One of its lasers shot near her but not at her.

She found whatever she was looking for, and even with her skin peeling to reveal fried integument, she smiled. She concentrated even harder, and a single crack of lightning traced down from a cloud overhead, hitting right where Patricia had guided it, deep inside the Total Destruction Solution.

The machine keeled sideways, just as Patricia slid off it and landed on her back on a serrated piece of concrete, with a splintering sound. The machine landed across the street, legs all in a pile.

Laurence ran toward Patricia, arms sawing and legs wobbling. Sucking in air and venting pitiful bleats, totally unsteady in his core but eyes focused on the prone body with her spine diverted by a chunky spur of sidewalk. Please be okay, please be okay, I will give anything I own large or small. He chanted this in his head, as he vaulted over gray and black and red shapes in his path. He had been so bitter toward her just hours ago, but now he felt in his hobbling kneecaps and his jerky pelvis that his life story was the story of Patricia and him, after all, for better or worse, and if she ended his life might go on, but his story would be over.

He tripped and fell and kept running without even getting up first. He was wheezing and gasping and hurdling over shapes, over holes in the world, only looking at Patricia.

He reached her. She was breathing, not well, but breathing. Raspy staggered grunts. Face barely facelike, burnt half-off. He crouched over her and tried to tell her it was going to be okay somehow, but then there was a gun pointed at her head.

The gun was in a manicured hand he recognized. The hand connected to a wiry wrist, disappearing inside a pea-green sweater, which had a trembling veiny neck and Isobel’s bumpy shaved head sticking out of the top.

“Milton’s gone,” Isobel said. “Milton’s gone. Tell me why I shouldn’t blow her head off.”

“Please,” Laurence said. “Please don’t.”

“Tell me,” she said. “Tell me why I shouldn’t shoot her right now. I want to know.”

He wasn’t going to be able to get the gun out of her hand before she could pull the trigger.