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the air went foul and full and stiff

darkness everywhere, all but where something blue sizzled, some awful coal-pot set atop a monster’s skull and

an irregular chopping noise infecting it all, a s

luggish wooden heart beating, getting

closercloserclosercloser

— but then it was four weeks later, and Morrow was already clawing his way back up, alone but for Chess Pargeter’s broken body clutched one-armed to him — reaching out in the dark by blindest drive alone and catching hold of somebody else’s hand, tiny and cold, its brass-hard nails curved and sharp as a harpy’s — screaming out loud as he was dragged inexorably upwards, out into the light.

Where a hearty Scots voice greeted him, burred and blessedly familiar: “Damnable good to see you again, Agent — even under these sad circumstances.”

Cries, screams, shrieks and Spanish oaths formed a howling, incomprehensible music around them, as mobs of panicked men, women and children rushed everywhere. Dust clouded the sky in a choking, shadowy veil. Amid broken brick, splintered wood and fractured stone, Pinkerton knelt over the disgusting ruin of what had once been Asher Rook’s lieutenant. Songbird, who’d plucked him from the hole, had taken up position on Pinkerton’s left hand, and was shielding her albino complexion with an incongruously dainty parasol of red-lacquered paper. And here came Asbury, toddling along in the rear, examining some sort of trail snaking — crack-like — up through the dirt.

Morrow glanced back at Chess, and immediately wished he hadn’t: the man lay there flayed and gutted, only recognizable because his jaunty earring was held on by a few threads still, tenaciously attached to that slack flap which had once been his earlobe.

“Well, he’s good and dead,” Pinkerton remarked, while Asbury looked disappointed.

But Songbird, whose pale eyes saw more than either of them, simply shook her head. “Perhaps . . . not.”

She put her hand almost in Chess’s grievous central wound, hovering right above his open rib-cage, only to have it close with a sticky Venus Flytrap snap, trying for the fingers themselves. Startled, she tried to yank back, but seemed unable to move — was caught, squirming, that same meat-to-fluid slide of hex-on-hex drawing hard at her, the way a five-year drunk inhales his night’s first jolt.

And all the while mould grew over Chess, flourishing with each wave of her stolen juice — a cocoon of green, a husk that turned gold, then brown. Then peeled away, in its turn to reveal a fresh new Chess, naked, re-skinned once again. Perfect as ever.

Perhaps more so, even . . . seeing how they all of them — even Pinkerton, even Songbird — gave out a collective hungry gasp at the sight of him, like it’d reached down into their privates and twisted.

“Aw, shit,” was all Morrow found he had left to say, on the subject, before slumping backwards into similar unconsciousness.

The sunlight had angled and deepened only to afternoon, but Morrow felt he could sleep for days. “And everything after that . . . you know.” He massaged at his forehead, fighting not to yawn.

Pinkerton stroked his beard. “You deserve a medal, Agent Morrow,” he said gravely. “And were there any way to cast you one this minute, I’d do so.” One side of his mouth lifted. “Though I’d dearly love to see the faces of the men, when we tell them how ’twas earned.”

Morrow stared at the table-top. “Thank you, sir,” he replied, in a mutter so low he could only hope Pinkerton would put its distinct lack of enthusiasm down to a state of impolite but understandable exhaustion. After all, he hadn’t found out until waking — in one of a convoy of stagecoaches thundering back to the Pinks’ unofficial headquarters in Tampico port — that the pile of rubble they’d dug him from had actually been a too-damn-large part of Mexico City itself. The quake he’d kicked off down in that dreadful world below had wreaked sympathetic damage on a monumentally destructive scale.

This sort of thing starts wars , Morrow thought. If anyone ever reckons just what exactly happened. . . .

Once out of the debriefing, however, the air smelled suddenly clearer. He’d forgotten just how bad the incense-and-gunpowder stink produced by Songbird’s opening ritual, when she’d stripped Rook’s mojo-bag geas from him, must have clung. Still, a bath might be in order, before he bedded down.

Upstairs, he came on Hosteen conferring with a Mexican sawbones in front of Chess’s chamber door — authority writ large in every limb of him, like he’d negotiated on the Agency’s behalf his entire life. “Pinkerton says he needs Mister Pargeter fit to travel, Doc.”

“Señor, he may not live out the night. That man is down in Mictlan again, I think. By tomorrow, he’ll either be better or dead.”

Hosteen clicked his tongue impatiently, and turned away — past Morrow, who he seemed intent on ignoring outright. But Morrow wasn’t having any.

“Good to see you made it here all right, Kees,” he said.

“Uh huh,” Hosteen flung back, over his shoulder. “Too bad Chess didn’t.”

Morrow shut the door of his room, leaned back against it and let himself hang there, boneless. Felt how every part of him ached with roughly the same intensity, an all-over throb.

Sleep, he thought. Sleep. Until —

He heard it rise, slowly, softly — that shuttery click-clack again, wooden-soft, hollow as a rotted log. Blue sparks appearing at the very edges of his vision, sizzling.

Aw, hell no, damn it. Just — NO.

Morrow half-ran to the wash-basin, splashed his face and shook his head, as though he could throw the last three-days-that-were-thirty off just by willing it. Kept his eyes shut throughout, black shading to red, ’til the sound receded and there was nothing but his own pulse to hammer at the world’s edges, his own breath to hiss in his ears like the sea.