I rushed over to them, untied their rope, and checked them all over.

Iggy landed, then Fang.

“Where’s —?” I began, then saw Fang’s face. I glanced at Iggy; he had the same tragic expression. Akila had been too heavy for them. They hadn’t been able to hold on to her.

My heart squeezed painfully. What would we tell Total? Right now he was flopped on his side, panting, but any second he would realize the love of his life was missing. . . . Oh, God.

“Gozen.”

My head whipped up and I looked where Fang was pointing. High, high above us, Gozen and, amazingly, the Uber-Director were flailing wildly by, close to the edge of the eye. Suddenly my fury overwhelmed me — at Akila’s death, at Angel’s broken arm, at their trying to sell us, and at every other bad thing that anyone had ever done to us, which, believe me, was a pretty long list. In seconds I was streaking upward as fast as I could.

Chapter 70

70

GOZEN WAS WRAPPED around the Uber-Director, which was the only reason the UD hadn’t come apart by now. But even as I shot toward them, I could see that Gozen’s weight was working against him; they were both being dragged roughly around the eye wall of the storm.

I saw the UD shout, “Don’t let go!” though I couldn’t hear him. But Gozen’s enormous fingers were slipping, and his body and face bore signs of violent contact with a lot of debris.

Gozen’s eyes met mine as I got close, blue lasers into brown. “Help me,” he rumbled.

“I don’t think so,” I said, kicking at his arm. That was all it took — me kicking his arm in retaliation for his breaking Angel’s — and his hold on the UD collapsed and Gozen spun away, falling heavily downward, his face assuming the only expression he was capable of: horror.

I held on to the UD’s wheelchair. Fluid was leaking from his boxes; his human eyes in his human face were terrified.

“I control more than you could ever realize,” he gasped. “I can make you rich beyond your wildest dreams. I can protect you for the rest of your life. Just save me now.”

If he’d been a real person, I would have hesitated. I’m not a killer. I mean, not on purpose, anyway. But he was a machine, someone’s consciousness hooked up to a bio-mechanical body.

Plus, he was a complete and total jerk.

“You need to not be in this world,” I told him, and let go.

I didn’t watch, but I’m sure the boxes snapped grotesquely apart in the next instants, and that he whirled around in the storm in pieces for a while. I never saw any part of him again.