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coincidences to ignore so I
came to find you. I figured an old school cop might have a useful
hunch or two.”
    Rees shook his head.
    “ I wish I did,” he said.
“None of this makes a damn bit of sense to me.”
    She smiled again.
    “ Oh, I think you know a
thing or two that’s far more useful, Detective. I wouldn’t have
spent the last week looking for you if I didn’t.”
    Rees gaped at her, trying to process what
he’d heard.
    “ You heard that right,”
Reilly said. “It’s been a week since you walked into the Sircotin
Technologies building. I had a feeling you’d gone back there, but
it wasn’t I tracked down Squibel and went through her search
records that I knew for sure. Didn’t make it any easier to find
you, though. I turned the whole damn city upside down and never
found a trace until you burst into the precinct three days ago
raving in some weird language nobody could decipher.”
    Rees sat still, probing his mind for any
memories beyond losing consciousness on the eighty-eighth floor of
the Sircotin building. He did his best not to think about what had
sent him racing through those halls.
    “ I… I don’t remember
anything,” he said.
    “ No, Detective,” Reilly
said, “you mean you can’t remember; your mind won’t let you. Whatever you
saw in there must have had quite an effect. I need to know what it
was.”
    “ Why don’t you just go see
for yourself?”
    “ I can’t,” she said. “The
Sircotin building collapsed the same night you disappeared; it just
imploded like it had been scheduled for demolition. Killed plenty
of innocent people. You’re the only living soul who saw what was
going on inside that place. I might have asked your buddy Vandum,
but I expect you know what happened to him?”
    Rees nodded as a door clicked open behind
him.
    “ Doctor,” Reilly said,
“are we ready to begin?”
    “ Yes, of course,” the
doctor said as he walked around the chair to adjust something on
the terminal beside Rees.
    “ Good, plug him in and
let’s get started.”
    Rees couldn’t see the doctor’s face, but he
could see the three-inch spike in his hand clearly enough. It was
connected to a fiberoptic cable that fed into the terminal. He
became aware once again of the pain on the back of his head as the
doctor brought the point of the spike closer to him.
    “ Don’t be afraid,
Detective,” Reilly said. “We’ve installed a cranial datajack into
your skull so the good doctor here can interface directly with your
brain and tear down those troublesome memory blocks. It shouldn’t
cause any permanent–”
    ***
    Rees couldn’t have been unconscious for more
than a few seconds. He knew that because he was still alive,
because he hadn’t been ripped apart by whatever energy had washed
over him and prevented his escape. But then the silence caused him
to doubt, and he wondered if that was all death would be, nothing
but a black void, silent for all eternity.
    Then a soft light swelled up in the distance
and Rees realized that he was no longer where logic said he should
have been. The rising sun was a queer color, a blend of orange and
purple tinged with a bit of brown, and it cast dim light over an
equally strange landscape. It looked like nothing so much as a vast
plain of wax that had once held a far different, perhaps even
majestic, form, but now found its features heaped and lumped into
sickly, misshapen columns and piles.
    As the light grew brighter, he saw bizarre,
winged shapes circling in the sky overhead. Confused, Rees
staggered toward the sun, but within a few steps he found himself
on the precipice of a towering cliff that overlooked something…
horrible.
    He could find no words to describe it, none
that could convey the hideous nature and instincts of the swelling
mass of flesh, fangs, and eyes.
    A few hundred of its countless eyes turned
on him and Rees screamed.
    The sound of his cry echoed painfully
throughout the eighty-eighth floor and he staggered when he