Bear with me, my memory is hazy...

  It was a long way down. Fifty stories of empty air between him and a vaulted semidrical skylight. Tempered window gss glittered on the roof, the stairs, the street, refleg the red-blue lightbars like fae fire for the me.

  Up here, golden twilight bled across the sky from an hour dead sun. Down there, downtown gathered shadow ireets and alleys and on the eastern faces of the buildings. Somewhere a helicrowled. Newscast. They had already lost one police chopper. A smoking husk setting fire to a grass slope between the curved ramps of the mixmaster, its jet fuel burning on six nes.

  Snipers watched him. Swat moved into the lobby below, ant-like. National guard not far behind. Unknowable tier-one operators waiting in the wings after that. His death inescapable. But something else, something more pressing, had chased him up here.

  “You’ve made your own little world and you think you’re safe in it. There’s no pce they ’t get to anymore. That time is over. You either go dowending it isn’t, or you bring some piece of that old world with you into the new. God knows we’re going to .”

  But he had never felt safe. Never felt powerful. Never felt like he was untouchable. He didn’t o. He had had somethier. He had never felt alone.

  Until now.

  Behind him, the door flew off the hinges and bounced along the carpet. He was already falling when the gun fired, a CQBR M4. He could tell by the sound, but he would have known without hearing it, the same way he knew without looking who fired it.

  The round that made it under his back pte was the most painful wound of his existe twisted like a knife and stung like hate, burned like betrayal.

  uns joined in, but they missed or jammed. Useless. He was already dead, a falling corpse too forsaken to stop breathing.

  Air rushed over his ears, drowning out everything like the world was screaming. A spotlight fshed up and passed over him, blinding him for a brief moment, a sun-bright star turning everything else to darkness, reminding him of another world. Whey returned, he saw a jagged gap in the vaulted frame rising towards him and the body crumpled in the lobby below. Another fallen Angel.

  He pulled the chute and the harness squeezed the wound. The city around him burned and the sound of rushing blood drowned out the wind in his ears. Then the old familiar feeling of flight took his spirit with it, and the pain faded to nothing. He cut right at four hundred feet up, aiming at the bck mirror side of a swordbde shaped tower. A lucky spotlight caught him. Doomed him.

  He barely heard the gunfire, but the tracers glowed like meteors and cracked like a body on the pavement. They zipped past his head, tore through his opy, dug into his shoulder, and sliced paracord to nothing. The spotlight held him until he spun and dropped untrolbly. Defeated by light. Falling into darkness. What kind of Angel?

  Bck gss rushed by him as he struggled for trol and flew over a thin grey sliver of building so close he almost lost his legs to the Aits. As he came out from the side of the bck tower, another curre him spinning again, but not before he saw it.

  Alone on a triangle plot of grass, t pathways, and fountain ponds. Unnatural in an urban biome of gss and steel. Squat corkscrew tower of white stone, made in imitation and celebration of things a thousand years dead. He ughed. It seemed to pull him in, spiral roof ing up to meet him, to catch him, to save him. Anod damned spotlight swept him as he tried to position himself for some kind of nding. He found the fshlight button and trigger on his slung FN F2000 and fired half a mag between his feet. The disc of pstic set iop of the spiral shattered and wildflower colored stained gss burst beh it, flowing down his beam into the dark chapel. He fell through the ring without a scrape, as if guided.

  The sudden stop pulled the harness so tight on his wound that for a moment the world went bd he floated in a swarm of glowing rainbments while spirits waited out in the dark.

  He returo reality hanging forty feet up in the air, blood running down his leg, fshlights sweeping in through the doorway below, catg bits of css and shell gs on the floor. He got the harness uh sluggish movements while the beams below grew brighter and boots striking crete echoed in the ical hall.

  Just before he got the st strap off, a spotlight fshed above him, sending a solid n of white past his head aing the colored circles on fire. The rotary bdes roared over his heartbeat and a voied out of a loudspeaker, wordless, barking.

  The strap gave. He dropped and his legs pulled in automatically for a para fall. For a moment, he thought he would fall forever. The floor and walls were one pne of darkness beh a bzing white oval and a scattering of prismatic shapes.

  His knees came up with a jolt and his feet crashed through a chair. He rolled hard on the carpet and smmed into a cube-shaped stoar.

  A moment of stillness. Light pying on the walls. The helicopter morphed into a thuorm. They broke in with ons raised, screaming.

  “Hands! Lemme see your fug hands! Hands! Drop the rifle!”

  It’s on a sling, dipshit. But all that came out was a wheeze. They kept on screaming anyway. As if they didn’t want to shoot him. As if they didn’t know the guys on that first chopper.

  A voice came in, clear as polished silver, floating over the screaming like real speech over TV dialogue.

  “It won’t end with this.”

  That’s what you think. But again, just a wheeze. He grabbed the F2000 with one hand and they shot him thirty times. He watched glowing gunsmoke rise to the disk of light above and disappear.