“At your age, you should not be renting furniture.”
“My age?”
“It’s not like you’re just starting out in your career,” Lucy said. “You’re at the pinnacle of success but you’re still renting furniture. That’s depressing.”
Startled, he glanced at her. “Depressing?”
“Never mind. It’s none of my business.”
“No, it’s not.”
He stopped talking, because the SUV was slowing down. He glanced at the display screens built into the dash. All of the readouts showed that the engine was shutting down. The headlights went out.
“What’s going on?” Lucy asked.
“I don’t know, but for now we’re going to assume the worst: someone has sabotaged the vehicle.”
“Weird place for an ambush. We’re in the middle of the Strip. There are thousands of people on the street. Security everywhere.”
“Get ready to bail when I give the word.”
“Okay.”
“I never thought I’d say this, but have you got your little pistol?”
Lucy opened her pack and took out the small mag-rez. “Oh, yeah.” She unclipped her seat belt, grabbed Otis, and prepared to open her door. “I assume we’re going to head for the closest casino? There will be tons of security inside.”
“Right. The Amber Palace.”
Gabriel got the mag-rez out of his shoulder rig. The SUV came to a full stop. He put on the parking brake. He was about to order Lucy to jump when he realized that the cars around him were also stopping. Headlights went out by the dozens. Traffic came to a complete halt.
“I’m not so sure this is personal,” Lucy said. “Everyone is getting out of their cars. Look, the casinos are starting to go dark, too.”
The big glowing signs that marked the entrances to the casinos began blinking. One by one they went out. The lights inside the casinos became faint. People poured out into the street.
A moment later the human-engineered lighting of the Strip disappeared entirely, leaving the streets and darkened buildings in the long shadows and acid-green radiance of the nearby quartz Wall.
“Looks like a power failure,” Gabriel said, “not an ambush.” He opened the console and took out the flashlight. Nothing happened when he rezzed the switch. “Check the charge in your gun.”
“It’s dead,” Lucy reported. She tucked it into her pack.
“It’s not just the local grid that has failed. The amber in our weapons and the flashlight aren’t connected to the city’s power station. Something has killed all of the amber-based energy in this part of town.”
“I’ve never heard of anything that could do that,” Lucy said.
“Neither have I. But this is Illusion Town. Some very powerful forces were unleashed here a long time ago, forces that were strong enough to rip holes in the Wall and topple the towers in the Dead City.”
“And now we’ve started opening up the Ghost City down below,” Lucy said. “Maybe we’ve disturbed those forces.”
“If so, I’m going to be very glad I didn’t invest in a lot of new furniture.”
“Is that another example of Guild boss humor?”
“Sorry.”
Screams echoed in the night.
Lucy stiffened.
Gabriel listened for a few seconds. “Relax. It’s just the people trapped on the roller coaster.”
Lucy shuddered. “They’ve got a right to scream. I’d be screaming, too. Looks like it’s going to be a long walk home, but at least we’re on the ground and can actually walk home.”
“True. I’ll secure the vehicle.”
“How? Everything in the car is amber-powered. We’re lucky the doors are mechanical.”
“Standard safety feature. Don’t worry, there are other ways to protect a vehicle like this.”
He slipped the mag-rez back into the shoulder holster, opened the door, and went around to the rear of the SUV. Lucy jumped down to the pavement, Otis tucked under one arm. She watched curiously.
“What are you going to do?” she asked.
“Leave a note on the car requesting people not to steal it when the power comes on,” he said.
“A nice little note requesting people not to steal it? You really think that will work?”
“It usually does.”
He rezzed his dissonance talent. Because the Dead City Wall was so close, there was plenty of energy available. A small ball of green ghost light burned in the night and quickly coalesced into a miniature fireball about six inches in diameter. He positioned it above the license plate.