A bridge between the earth and sky. Hanging twisting and quivering from the clouds above, its pointed foot dancing delicately just out of sight on the other side of the building, was a howling cone of wind. Oya danced before my eyes, and I understood, looking at her, why change, in the cards, was called Death.

Josh and LeRoy were at work, supplementing the light with a pair of battery lamps. I couldn’t see Frances. I moved, slowly, toward the office door, the one I’d come in through.

Wet hands closed around my face and lifted it, and Theo said, “Where is he?”

It was Theo. That was why I’d needed to keep going: to find Theo. His thick brown hair was streaked with rain and curling on his face and neck, his glasses were spattered with droplets, and he smelled strongly of burning cable insulation. I sighed and shut my eyes.

Theo shook me, very hard, and said, “Sparrow, where is he?”

His voice was raw.

I opened my eyes again. Theo’s face was laced through with horror, an expression so different from any I’d seen him wear that it almost made a stranger of him. I turned to find the cause of it, back the way I had come.

It was there. It must have been the same thing that had hardened Josh’s features and words, and made LeRoy’s hands shake. I had known it was there, and with unnatural camera angles and restricted depth of field kept myself from having to see it all.

The room was washed in the pale golden light that Theo had turned on, cast by the Gilded West: Death, the patron of change, the destroyer of the established order, looked in the window. What had been terrible in the dark was unbearable now. There had been change enough in that room to wake me up screaming for the rest of my life.

Theo shook me again, and I dragged my eyes away from Dana, from Mick, from the huddle of people who were trying to keep Frances from following the same route. “Sparrow!” Theo said. “Where’s my dad?”

“I don’t know. He wasn’t here when… ”

LeRoy’s booster shot kicked in at last, and I could think again. It was a bad time for it. You know my business, she had said. I did. The Hoodoo Engineers had called her, Mr. Lyle and China Black and all the people who knew it was time and past time for change had called her, to break the stagnant hold of Ego on the City. The hold of A. A. Albrecht. She, in turn, had called me.

Not Legba the gatekeeper, male and female, to whom I was supposed to belong; it was Oya Iansa who’d come in with the light from the Gilded West, the goddess who brought revolution and the falling of towers. Oh, of course I was hers, not Legba’s. Out of all the things in that bunker, she’d preserved and awakened the one with the technical knowledge she wanted. I wasn’t a practical joke; I was the whirlwind.