The air force was convinced that Mark Bryan was dead, incinerated in the shallow cave system that they had torched with napalm. However, they hadn’t brought out a body, and with a man such as him, the only way to be certain was to actually identify the remains.

She threw back her head and screamed her throat even more raw, then threw on Wolfmother’s “Woman” and ditched the goddamn “Caro Nome.” She threw on T. S. Eliot reading “The Waste Land”: “April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land…”

Man comes and tills the soil and lies beneath. After many a summer dies the swan—a black one in this case, for this was a black-swan day, when the impossible had turned out to be the truth.

Okay, she’d cut more orders, the hell with it, she’d burn down the whole screwed-up region, all the pretty trees and the pretty towns, she’d lay it all waste.

Where to go next? She looked at her monitors.

A major forest fire was already in progress from the last attack, and she watched a big DC-10 tanker glide slowly over the billowing columns of smoke and drop pink fire retardant. In contrast to the flooded, storm-choked Northeast, northern California was a tinderbox.

The lights flickered and for an instant she was alone in silence, her music gone.

“No!”

Her personal generator kicked in, she heard it whining. Then the music started up again. She tossed the Doors and threw on Laurie Anderson’s “O Superman.”

Superman, that’s what he was, the real thing, a work of living art, and she had loved him hard and he had wanted it, he had delighted in her.

Superman wasn’t complicated. He flew, he ditched bad guys. Mark was complicated. Probably didn’t fly, but who the hell knew? Ditched bad guys—and then damn well ditched his own guys.

“Bastard! Bastard! Bastard!” She sobbed into her hands. She asked the storm and the music, “Do you feel it when you burn?”

Of course you do, that was the whole point of the Inquisition, wasn’t it? The stink of burning heretics was supposed to smell sweet to the Lord.

Napalm is sweet, they say. She wouldn’t know, though, would she? She only delivered it, she never smelled the stuff, not Miss Clean up here in her tower of power.

A particularly nasty gust of wind was followed by a distant shattering of glass, then a chorus of screams. Somewhere, a secretarial pool had been penetrated by the storm—and a moment later, she could feel its wetness and smell dank, outside air as it filled the building.

What in hell was happening?

She whirled around and was appalled to see a surging wall of blackness pressing against her window. Was the building in some tornado or what?