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....
Petra got a chance to see the face of the building beside them rip off a foot before the air blast tore the notebook from her hands, and at the same time she welled her thoughts from behind the bone confines of her skull. There....
And Arkor's thoughts (he never saw the explosion because he blinked just then) tore out through his eyelids as fragmented steel tore into them. There....
It was cold, it was black. For a moment they saw with a spectrum that reached from the star-wide waves of novas to the micro-micron skittering of neutrinos. And it was black, and completely cold. A rarefied breeze of ionized hydrogen (approximately two particles per cubic rod) floated over half a light year. Once, a herd of pale photons dashed through them from a deflected glare on some dying sun a trillion eons past. Other than that, there was silence, save for the hum of one lone galaxy, eternities away. They hovered, frozen, staring into nothing, above, below, behind, contemplating what they had seen.
Then, the green of beetles' wings, and they flailed into the blood of sensation from the blackness, whirled into red flame the color of polished carbuncle, smoothly through the nerves and into the brain; then, before the blue smoke, burning blue through the lightning seared axion of their corporate organisms, they were snared within the heat and electric imminency of a web of silver fire.