The lights of Chicago were still out and the night was growing even darker. The storm had driven most people from the streets, and now headlights appeared only intermittently. The National Guard had set up around Cook County Hospital, bringing in generators and laboring to keep them running while providing a shelter of some sort and a presence of authority on some of the streets—but they were as badly hampered by the lack of reliable telephone and radio communications as anyone else, and rain and darkness had cast them into the same morass of confusion as the rest of the city.

The net result of it was that some streets were bright with the headlights of military trucks and patrolled by National Guardsmen, and some of them were as black and empty as a crooked politician's heart. One section of State Street was sunken in blackness, and I pulled the Beetle up onto the sidewalk in front of a darkened Radio Shack.

"Stay, Mouse," I told the dog, and got out of the car. I walked to the glass door and considered it and the bars on it. Then I leaned my staff against it, drew in my will, and muttered, " Forzare."

There was no flash of light with the release of energy—I'd kept the spell tidy enough to avoid that. Instead it all went into kinetic force, snapping the plate glass as cleanly as if I'd used a cutter, and bending the center bars out into a neat bow shape, large enough to slip through.

"Holy crap," Butters said, his voice a hushed shout. "You're breaking in?"

"No one's minding the store," I said. I nudged a few pieces of door that hadn't fallen out of the frame, then carefully slid into the building. "Come on."

"Now you're entering," Butters informed me. "You're breaking. And entering. We're going to jail."

I stuck my head out between the bars and said, "It's in a good cause, Butters. We're the secret champions of the city. Justice and truth are on our side."

He looked at the front of the store uncertainly. "They are?"

"They are if you hurry up before someone in a uniform spots us," I said. "Move it."

I went back into the store, lifting up my amulet and willing it to light. I stared around me at all the technological things, only a very few of which I could readily identify. I turned in a circle, looking for one particular gadget, but I had no idea where in the store it would be.

Butters came in and looked around. The blue light of my pentacle gleamed on his glasses. Then he nodded decisively at a section of counter and walked over to it.

"Is this it?" I asked him.

"Something wrong with your eyes?" he asked me.

I grimaced at him. "I don't get in here a lot, Butters. Remember?"

"Oh. Oh, yeah, right. The Murphyonic technology thing."

"Murphyonic?"