Hennessy stood in the parking lot as Ronan drove the car away from them both, expertly spinning it to the left to slam the still-open back door shut. The car instantly became hard to see, even though she could hear the pounding bass of music from within it. It was not enough to drown out the complex’s sound, which was still everywhere. Inside her. Inescapable. Unrelenting. It required no human hands to do its work; it was in there powering that sound all by itself, working away at Bryde without feeling or pause.

Humans were so good at pollution. The best.

Suddenly, a massive hole appeared in the dark glass lobby doors of the closest building. Ronan had driven right in. For just a moment, Burrito was visible in the reflection of the remaining glass, and then it winked out of view. Crashing sounded from within the building.

Minutes passed.

Although it was impossible to see what was happening, it was nonetheless obvious that something was happening, because the terrible sound had gotten a little quieter, replaced now by security alarms. Bryde had stopped screaming and instead was simply hunched, eyes closed in pain, hands still over ears.

Hennessy missed the moment of Burrito emerging from the first building, but she saw the moment it crashed into the second. That shivering glass, that brief reflection. Again, as Ronan did his work inside the building, the terrible sound went down another notch, replaced by yet more ordinary howling of alarms. She wondered if they were hooked up to anything. She wondered if she’d need to bedazzle any security forces with one of Bryde’s silver orbs. She examined her conscience to see if she would be willing to rummage in Bryde’s jacket to retrieve one of the orbs while he stood there. Hennessy ordinarily had no problem violating people’s personal space, but with Bryde, it felt wrong. This, she thought, was probably related to Bryde’s secrets.

By the time Ronan and Burrito crashed into the third building, Bryde had lowered his hands from his ears and simply stood, staring dead-eyed and haggard off into the distance.

Then the terrible sound was gone and so were the alarms, so Ronan must have destroyed those, too. There was only the sound of an unmanned business park several miles away from an ugly town. Distant trucks. Faraway heating and air-conditioning units. Tractors and birds.

This time the ley’s surge was so powerful that it nearly knocked Hennessy right off her feet.

It was less that she was physically struck and more like the ground beneath her feet suddenly seemed unimportant. She was a part of a huge, ancient thing that was slowly stretching, slowly coming back to life, and she suddenly thought she understood in a very real way why the Moderators were doing everything in their power to catch them.