Rico screamed, “Down, down, down!” Something slammed into me from behind and sent me lunging toward the apparition in the corner.

Then the sky fell.

I had something heavy on my back, and my face was pressed uncomfortably against the floor. Or something like the floor. I was coughing.

The thing on my back shifted and coughed, too.

“Rico?” I asked between spasms.

“Yeah. I don’t suppose you managed to hang onto the flashlight?”

“Here.”

“Here where?”

At that, I had the sense to thumb the button, and a cone of dust-filled light appeared at the corner of my vision.

“Ah. My hero.” Her hand closed over mine and took the light. “Do you hurt anywhere?”

“Besides everywhere?”

“Yeah. Here, roll over. Easy, now.”

The flashlight illuminated a heap of architectural carnage. “What happened?” I said, and started coughing again.

“An embarrassing trap, that’s what,” Rico said sourly. “I want Linn to look the place over, but I’ll bet the trigger for everything was the light from the damn flashlight.”

“Trigger?”

She stood up, cautiously. “Careful—a lot of the third floor has already fallen on us, and I’d just as soon the rest didn’t. Yeah, you’ve just seen a demonstration of the Rube Goldberg school of spellcasting. light on the paper triggers the illusion that pops up out of the trash pile. While that keeps us in the middle of the room, it also sets off whatever cracked the ceiling beams. And boom. If I hadn’t decided on the lesser of two evils and gotten us up against the outside wall we’d be hamburger.”

She was right. There were three lengths of foot-square wooden beam collapsed into the center of the room, along with antique gas piping, an upstairs radiator, old wiring, shattered studs, and an incalculable amount of plaster and lath.

“What I want to know about,” Rico continued, “was the technology outage.”

“Huh?” I said wisely.

Even in the half-illumination of the flashlight, I could make out her look of martyred patience. “Did you think the batteries had died?”

I remembered the flashlight going out. I said nothing.

“My pistol wouldn’t fire, either. Not that it would have helped. If we’re after someone who can turn the laws of physics off at will, we’re in deep, deep shit.”

“You’ll have to learn to fence,” I said. It was her turn not to respond.

I followed the light as it moved through the fog of plaster dust. The strange landscape of empty rooms was stranger still. The front room was three-walled now, no division between it and the one we’d brought down on us. The air was opaque with dust. In the hall, another piece of ceiling had fallen, and a bearing wall, and the rotten roof. The sky hung heavy and starless above us.