"Even to the point of talking about talking about it?" asked Petra. She answered herself. "Yes, I guess it could. But saying all this for reasons we don't understand, and saying, 'Saying all this for reasons we don't understand....'" She shuddered. "It's not supposed to be that way. It gives me the creeps." There was another sound, and they froze. It was the low sound of some structure tumbling, but they couldn't see anything. Another fifty feet, when the road had risen ten feet off the ground and the first tower was beside them, they heard a cracking noise again. The road swayed beneath them. "Uh-oh," Arkor said. Then the road fell. They cried out, they scrambled; suddenly there was cracked concrete around them, and they had fallen. Above them was a jagged width of blue sky between the remaining edges of the road. "My foot's caught," Petra cried out. Arkor was beside her, tugging on the concrete slab that held her. "Hold on a second," Jon said. He grabbed a free metal strut that still vibrated in the rubble, and jammed it between the slab and the beam it lay on. Using the wreck of an I-beam for a fulcrum, he pried it up. "There, slip your foot out." Petra rolled away. "Is the bone broken?" he asked. "I got a friend of mine out of a mine accident that way, once." He let the slab fall again. (And for a moment he stopped, thinking, I knew what to do. I wasn't clumsy, I knew....) Petra rubbed her ankle. "No," she said. "I just got my ankle wedged in that crevice, and the concrete fell on top." She stood up, now, picking up the notebook. "Ow," she said. "That hurts." Arkor held her arm. "Can you walk?" "With difficulty," Petra said, taking another step and clamping her teeth. "Alter says to stand on your other foot and shake your injured one around to get the circulation back," Arkor told her. Petra gritted teeth, and stepped again. "A little better," she said. "I'm scared. This really hurts. This may be a body that looks like mine, but it hurts, and it hurts like mine." Suddenly she looked off into the city. "Oh hell," she said. "He's in there. Let's go." They went forward again, this time under the road. The sidewalks, deserted and graying, slipped past. They passed a shopping section; teeth of broken glass gaped in the frames of store windows. Above, two roads veered and crossed, making a black, extended swastika on a patch of white clouds. Then a sudden rumbling. Silence. They stopped. Now a crash, thunderous and protracted. An odor of dust reached them. "He's there," Arkor said. "Yes," said Jon. "I can...." Then the City exploded. There was one instant of very real agony for Jon as the pavement beneath his feet shot up at him, and he reached his mind out as a shard of concrete knocked in his face (all the time crying, _No, no, I've just become Jon Koshar, I'm not supposed to_ ... as a lost Prince had cried out half a year and half a universe away) and at the same time, _There...._