“If you’re counting on my modesty,” said Eli. “You should know, I have very little left.”

Eli pressed himself against her, head bowed in a strange, almost loving embrace as at last the steel collar around his throat rusted, fell away.

Eli smiled through the agony, his final chains gone.

The ground beneath them was wearing visibly now. Eli tightened his grip, his body screaming in protest. “I’ve killed fifty EOs,” he hissed,

“and you’re nowhere near the strongest.”

Marcella’s power wicked through the air. The bronze statue a dozen feet away began to rust, crumble. The pillars swayed, unsteady, and the whole building trembled, brittle, the marble beneath their feet wearing away, the same way Eli’s body did, layer by layer.

The marble thinned like melting ice beneath them, first translucent, then transparent.

“It appears,” said Marcella, “that we are evenly matched.”

“No,” said Eli as the floor splintered, cracked. “You can still die.”

Eli slammed his foot down into the fragile marble, and it shattered beneath them.

* * *

VICTOR was halfway to his feet, one hand clutching his wounded shoulder, when the floor gave way. He staggered backward, boots searching for solid ground as the force of the crash rippled through the building.

Only once he was beyond the wave of destruction did Victor see the full scope of what had happened.

It was like a blast turned inward, an implosion.

One second Eli and Marcella were tangled together, engulfed in light at the center of the atrium, and the next they were gone, plunging like meteors through the marble floor. The force of the collapse set off a chain reaction. The walls shook. The pillars toppled. The glass dome cracked and shattered.

The hole was vast, a drop of twenty, maybe thirty feet onto solid stone floor.

There was no sign of June, but Victor saw Stell nearby, unconscious, one foot pinned beneath a broken pillar.

The building stopped shaking. Victor stepped to the edge of the hole and looked down. Marcella lay stretched at the bottom of the chasm, her limbs draped over broken stone, her black hair loose and her head tilted at a wrong angle.

Rubble shifted, and Eli staggered to his feet beside her, naked and bloody, his broken bones knitting themselves back together as he rose.

He looked down at Marcella’s body, and crossed himself, and then he craned his head and looked up through the broken floor.

His eyes met Victor’s, and for a second neither man moved.

Run, thought Victor, and he could see the response in Eli’s coiled frame.

Chase me.

A rock came free near Eli’s bare foot, skittering down the pile of rubble, and both surged into motion.