She was the last one down the rope, except for Gentry, and he just said he wasn’t coming, didn’t care, he’d stay. The rope was fat and dirty gray and had knots tied in it to hang on to, like a swing she remembered from a long time ago. Slick and Molly had lowered the gray box first, down to a platform where the metal stairs weren’t wrecked. Then Molly went down it like a squirrel, seeming barely to hang on at all, and tied it tight to a railing. Slick went down slowly, because he had Cherry over his shoulder and she was still too relaxed to make it down herself. Mona still felt bad about that and wondered if that was why they’d decided to leave her there. It was Molly who’d decided, though, standing there by that window, watching people pop out of the long black helicopter and spread out across the snow. »Look at that,« Molly’d said. »They know. Just come to pick up the pieces. Sense/Net. My ass is out of here.« Cherry slurred that they were leaving too, she and Slick. And Slick shrugged, then grinned and put his arm around her. »What about me?« Molly looked at her. Or seemed to. Couldn’t really tell, with the glasses. White tooth showed against her lower lip, for just a second, then she said, »You stay, my advice. Let them sort it out. You haven’t really done anything. None of it was your idea. Think they’ll probably do right by you, or try to. Yeah, you stay.« It didn’t make any sense to Mona, but now she felt so dead, so crash-sick, she couldn’t argue. And then they were just gone, down the rope and gone, and it was just like that, how people left and you didn’t ever see them anymore. She looked back into the room and saw Gentry pacing back and forth in front of his books, running the tip of his finger along them like he was looking for a special one. He’d thrown a blanket over the stretcher. So she just left, and she wouldn’t know if Gentry ever found his book or not, but that was how it was, so she climbed down the rope herself, which wasn’t as easy as Molly and Slick had made it look, particularly if you felt like Mona did, because Mona felt close to blacking out and her arms and legs didn’t seem to be working real good anyway, she had to sort of concentrate on making them move, and her nose and throat were swelling inside, so she didn’t notice the black guy until she was all the way down. He was standing down there looking at the big spider thing, which wasn’t moving at all. Looked up when the heel of her shoe grated across the steel platform. And something so sad about his face, when he saw her, but then it was gone and he was climbing the metal stairs, slow and easy, and as he got closer she began to wonder if he really was black. Not just the color, which he definitely was, but there was something about the shape of his bald skull, the angles of his face, not quite like anybody she’d seen before. He was tall, real tall. Wore a long black coat, leather so thin it moved like silk. »Hello, missy,« he said, when he stood in front of her, reached out to raise her chin so she was looking straight into gold-flecked agate eyes like nobody in the world ever had. Long fingers so light against her chin. »Missy,« he said, »how old are you?« »Sixteen . . .« »You need a haircut,« he said, and there was something so serious about how he said it. »Angie’s up there,« she said, pointing, when she found her voice again. »She’s –« »Hush.« She heard metal noises far away in the big old building, and then a motor starting up. The hover, she thought, the one Molly’d driven here. The black man raised his eyebrows, except he didn’t have any eyebrows. »Friends?« He lowered his hand. She nodded. »Good enough,« he said, and took her hand to help her down the stairs. At the bottom, still holding her hand, he led her around the wreck of the catwalk thing. Somebody was dead there, camo material and one of those big-voice things like cops have. »Swift,« the black man called, out across that whole tall hollow space, between the black grids of windows without any glass, black lines against a white sky, winter morning, »get your ass over here. I found her.« »But I’m not her. . . .« And over there where the big doors stood open, against the sky and snow and rust, she saw this suit come walking, with his coat open and his tie flapping in the wind, and Molly’s hover swung past him, out those same doors, and he wasn’t even looking, because he was looking at Mona. »I’m not Angie,« she said, and wondered if she ought to tell him what she’d seen, Angie and the young guy together on that little screen, just before it faded. »I know,« the black man said, »but it grows on you.« Rapture . Rapture ‘s coming .