The light went away, but Nuala's hands were still invisible, as she worked the forces hidden within the captured tower. Travis knew she was hitting back at Rudra, reading his mind, searching for and finding the counter-agent, the necessary checkmate. Her eyes opened a second, looked into his. She whispered, "Watch the screen, Travis. The screen...."
He could see now what she was doing. The west wall of the tower that appeared through the nacre light was a giant visiscreen. In it the tower of Rudra in his city of Kovokod stood like a blackened giant above the ruins of the leveled city. Stone buildings were tossed and flattened. Smoke eddied upward in huge billows from charred and stark stumps of buildings. A woman fled with clothes ablaze along the upended stones of what had been a broad street. From the black and sullen sky red and fiery balls rolled and thundered, broke and splashed, devouring, on the city. The balls toppled walls, exploding; ate up wooden buildings with flaming tongues, caught and engulfed human beings, burning.
Sickened, Travis turned away—
It caught him, then. Bent and flung him back. Staring, he saw Nuala half out of the crystal block, rigid and writhing, twisted and distorted by some queer force. Her red mouth drew back in agony, screams gurgling in her throat.
And bent and twisted in her likeness, straining until their molecules whined, were the dynamos and cones and globes.
"Magnetic ... flux ... by Grock! Grock!" she screamed. "I can't hang on. It's got me. Grock ... good Grock...."
Travis dove to yank her free—and ran into it. He felt it in his fingers, first. It was a maddening wrench that bent them as if they had been boneless. He leaped sideways and the thing caught him in the middle. On hands and knees he crawled away, crawled toward the only spot that offered safety.
He slid into the nacre coldness, dropped onto the stone floor of the captured tower. Sobbing, he lay there, listening to Nuala scream.
This is the end of it. There is no way out—
No way out. Only death from torture. Or—maybe not death. Just torture for Nuala. He remembered the pink and menacing girdle that secured the crypt from the arklings. The unseen voices, recorded somehow by the first humanoid race, had told of tortures—Nuala, stop screaming! God, I can't stand it!