The floor crunched and rang under me as I ran, loud as a siren. I could hear Frances behind me; then suddenly I couldn’t. She’d slipped and fallen to her knees. I skidded to a halt, darted back, grabbed her arm, and pulled her up and forward. She got her feet under her in time to keep from being dragged.

Two shots, I thought as the door loomed ahead of me. One for each of us. I should hear them any minute now. He’s had his fun. Then we were through the door, and the air was warm and humid and smelled like food and alcohol fumes and sweat and cooking smoke and not at all like the rooms at the top of Ego. The trike was still there.

“This is crazy,” Frances said, fumbling the latches open. “As soon as we roll away, he’s lost us, he can’t… Oh, God.” She scrubbed fiercely at her face with both hands. It printed her cheeks with little smears of blood. She must have stopped her fall with her palms, back in the Hall of Broken Glass. “Of course — Tom doesn’t give a damn if he loses us. We can’t hurt him; why should he care if we get away? He must be laughing himself into a seizure right now.”

She helped me into the back and scrambled into the driver’s seat. Whatever she thought Tom was doing right now, she hadn’t slowed down. As for me, the mindless strength that had gotten me out of Ego shut off the moment the weather shell closed over my head. Waves of trembling passed over me, and to stop thinking of Cassidy I had to stop thinking at all.

Spirits, he hadn’t even gotten a good exit line. No lines at all; no more trusting, uncomplicated, ill-considered actions; no more startling moments when the fine mind shone through a break in the alcoholic clouds. The fine mind was on a wall in Ego -

Stop thinking.

And Dana, who was still alive, still there, who might come to envy Cassidy because nobody could stay on the good side of a madman forever. And when she found herself deep in the nightmare, who had the means to drag her safe out of it? What friend did she have -

Stop.

The trike was rolling; buildings passed overhead. Frances’s shoulders were raised, as if she were ducking something. We shot through an intersection, and I saw headlights catch fire, swing in behind us.

“Dios te salve, Maria,” Frances spat. “Tell me that’s coincidence.”

She turned, and turned, and did a savage cut-and-cut-again through the remains of a hotel’s covered driveway. We sailed, nearly airborne, into the street and around the corner. A few streets later we had headlights behind us.

By the third time, we’d been forced south all the way to the Exhibition Hall. Frances slipped us out of reach by darting down a highway exit ramp — the toll collector saw us coming and fled the booth — then lurching off it and straight up through the tall grass of the embankment to the street above. I couldn’t hear her words over the engine, but the tone held a rising edge of fury and panic.