“My God, it is.” Hermann Wagner held his breath. It seemed that it took them forever to plunge past the burning windows. How afraid they must be that they would miss the tiny net. What would they do if they saw that they were falling off course? To Wagner’s immense relief, the poor couple did not miss the net. They landed dead center. But instead of bouncing back up in the air, they smashed through it to the ground.

“Bull’s-eye,” said Christian Semmler.

“The net collapsed,” cried Wagner. “It didn’t hold.” He stared at the wreckage, but, of course, no one moved from it. How could they? A moment later a section of the building’s wall gave way and thundered down, burying their remains under tumbled bricks.

The first team of fire horses clattered alongside the auto.

“Drive!”

Wagner’s chauffeur almost stalled the motor in his haste to get away.

“Where now, General Major?” asked Wagner, staring back over his shoulder at the burning building, and grateful that the wooden fence blocked his view of where Bell and his wife had died. “To the freight yard?”

“Take me to a doctor. While he sutures this, charter a special to New York. We are done in Los Angeles. For now.”

Christian Semmler sounded remarkably pleased, Wagner thought, for a man who had seen his entire enterprise go up in smoke. And he displayed a God-like indifference to his grievous wounds. God-like, or machine-like—it was as if he didn’t feel pain.

Semmler noticed him staring. “Of course it hurts,” he said, spitting blood so he could speak. “You should pray you never feel anything like it.”

“WE’RE RUNNING OUT OF ROPE. Hang on! I’ll see what I can do.”

Isaac Bell let go of the last inches of a seventy-foot-long string of Cooper-Hewitt light cables and stage fly ropes he had knotted together, and dropped ten feet to the roof of the Imperial Moving Picture Palace marquee that sheltered the sidewalk in front of the building. He landed on stinging soles and looked up. Flames were gushing from windows they had descended past moments ago.

“Let go. I’ve got you.”

Marion slid down to the end of the rope, shredding the little that remained of her gloves, and opened her hands. Bell caught her in his arms, swooped her to a gentle landing, and held her tightly for a grateful moment.

The clatter of hoofs and the throb of steam pumps heralded the arrival of the fire department. “Firemen!” Bell called down to them. “Did you boys happen to bring a ladder?”

“ISTILL CAN’T SLEEP,” MARION whispered, “I keep seeing that sandbag burst on the ground. That could have been us.”

Bell held her close. “But it wasn’t us. Don’t worry, we’re fine.”