Victoria catapulted from her chair. "Everyone evacuate the building now!" She snatched her bird's cage and ran to the door.

"Your Majesty?" said Captain Gandara.

"Now! There's a bomb in the building. Get moving."

Everyone startled, but Victoria did not stick around to see who followed. If they didn't obey her order, then too bad for them. She was out the door and headed toward the stairs. Two floors down. The military shuttle would be right there.

The very second Quentin said those words, she knew exactly what his plan was. She'd been an idiot for not seeing it earlier. Fuser assemblers. They can produce any element under the sun. Metals. Rare elements...

Fissile materials.

That was half the reason she had confiscated those machines in the first place.

She reached the stairwell and leapt from landing to landing. In her mind, she checked where Quentin was. He was on the fifty-eight floor with the second machine, already prying open the doors.

What had he made? An alloy of Thorium? Uranium? Maybe even plutonium for all she knew. No doubt Quentin's flair told him exactly which one—or what alloy of materials—to use. Whatever fissile material he had was no doubt subcritical when distributed across three separate floors, but when they all came together at the bottom of that elevator shaft...

The notches along the poles and the conversations about gliders had just been a feint to distract her, and it had worked. Goddamn that man.

She ascended to the eighth floor and charged into the hall. The guards at the security checkpoint had already been evacuated. Good. If someone were here, they'd slow her down. She visualized upstairs as she ran. The marines were racing through her personal floor toward the service lobby. Quentin and Sibyl tossed another set of bars down the shaft. At the bottom, the fissile bars were starting to glow.

It was a race to see who reached that last assembler first. She hoped it was the marines, because she would still be in the tower when that moment came.

Quentin burst into the lobby on the sixtieth floor.

"They're here." Sibyl said. "They're coming."

"Just do the last one, damnit." Quentin flipped the latch for the elevator and pulled the door open. Sibyl grabbed the bundled rods. These ones had the reflexors wrapped about them. As she moved toward the elevator, marines charged in.

They fired. Sibyl screamed and collapsed. The bundle rolled toward Quentin. In a mad hope, he let go of the door and dove for the rods. As the door slid closed, he tossed them. A dart struck his side, and he went down.

The bundle glided horizontally through the closing door. The reflexors caught the door and its frame as it passed, causing it to launch through like a squeezed grape. It struck the far side of the shaft, twirled, descended like a snowflake, and then caught on a steel beam.

It lingered. The reflexors kept it from sliding off immediately, but eventually it did. From there it continued its lazy decent.

The marines saw none of this as they lugged Sibyl and Quentin toward the stairs.

Victoria saw the transport shuttle ahead. A soldier stood at attention outside the door.

"Get this moving," she yelled as she ran towards them. "We need to evacuate now."

The soldier hopped into action, yanking open the passenger door and running around to the pilot side.

Victoria climbed in and set her bird's cage on the seat. Others were coming, though they were far behind. No one understood the urgency. They couldn't see the bundle of rods slowly drifting down the shaft toward the eighth floor—the very floor she was on.

She slammed the hatch closed. The other evacuees could take other ships if they had time, but they didn't.

Victoria looked in the cockpit with her mind. The pilot was powering up the system. Was this security's idea of "standing by"?

"Move faster," she ordered.

"Yes, ma'am." The system booted up. He switched into manual and put his hands on the controls. On the comm he spoke. "This is the transport in tower bay four alpha. I have the queen on board. We require immediate clearance to evacuate."

At least the pilot did not wait to hear back. They were lifting. The craft was turning. The bundle of rods drifted closer. The ones already at the bottom glowed hot. They were scattered like a pile of matches.

There was no way Quentin could have known how they'd fall. Meaning he had no idea what the explosion's payload would ultimately be. It might destroy this floor. It might destroy the city. There were too many variables, the largest being how desperate Quentin was.

Her shuttle moved forward. The wide open exit neared. The bundled rods began glowing like the rods beneath them.

Then, whether because of heat or radiation, the reflexors around the bundle failed. It plummeted the remaining few feet.

For a fraction of a second, all the rods merely brightened, as though their approach toward super-critical might take time.

They exploded before the new rods hit the ground.