By the light of the moon

last instant, as pinch turned to tweak, she thought
of The Fly , and she didn't want to be responsible for
Dylan's nose being displaced forever in Shepherd's left armpit.
    She almost made it from platform to platform.
    She arrived no more than eight or ten feet short of her
goal.
    One instant she stood beside Shep atop the west scaffold, and
halfway through that same instant, she unfolded in midair,
twenty-two feet above the floor of the church.
    Although what she had done, even in this imperfect fold, had to
be judged a fantastic achievement by any standard, and though the
busy horde of nanomachines and nanocomputers in her brain had
within less than a day cursed her with amazing powers, Jillian
Jackson could not fly. She materialized close enough to the third
gunman to see his expression of absolute, unalloyed, goggle-eyed
astonishment, and she seemed to hang in the air for a second, but
then she dropped like a 110-pound stone.
    * * *
    The terrorist disguised in the Budweiser T-shirt most likely had
a fine hard head, considering that imperviousness to new ideas and
to truth was a prerequisite for those who wished to dedicate their
lives to senseless brutality. The rifle butt, however, proved to be
harder.
    Especially for a man with the sensitive soul of an artist, Dylan
took a disturbing amount of pleasure in the sound of club meeting
skull, and he might have taken a second whack at the guy if he
hadn't heard Jilly say, 'Here, there.' The note of extreme anxiety
in her voice alarmed him.
    Just as he looked at her, she folded into an asterisk of
pencil-thin lines, which themselves at once folded into a dot the
size of a period, and vanished. Dylan's racing heart beat once,
beat twice – call it a second, maybe less – before
Jilly reappeared in midair, high above the wedding guests.
    For two of Dylan's explosive heartbeats, she hung out there in
defiance of gravity, as though supported by the upsurge of
pipe-organ music, and then a few wedding guests screamed in shock
at the sight of her suspended above them. After a missed heartbeat
followed by a hard knock that indicated a resumption of his
circulation, he saw Jilly plummet into a rising chorus of
screams.
    She vanished during the fall.

44
    Tough audiences had sometimes greeted her material
with silence, and on rare occasion they had even booed her, but
never before had an audience screamed at her. Jilly might
have screamed back at them as she plunged into their midst, but she
was too busy pinching-tweaking-folding out of the yawning maw of
Death and back up to the top of the east scaffold, which had been
her intended destination when she had left Dylan clubbing the
second gunman.
    Ruby and sapphire beams of stained-glass light, carved-marble
columns, ranks of wooden pews, upturned faces wrenched in horror
– all folded away from her. Judging by the percentage of
blue-and-white brightness in the kaleidoscopic pattern that rapidly
folded toward her, however, the new place appeared too well lighted
to be the work platform atop the east scaffold.
    She arrived, of course, standing high on the roof of the church,
having dramatically overshot her target this time instead of coming
up ten feet short of it. Azure-blue sky, white puffy clouds, golden
sunshine.
    Black slate.
    The black slate roof had a fearsomely steep pitch.
    Peering down the slope toward the street, she suffered an attack
of vertigo. When she looked up at the bell tower looming three
stories above the roof, her vertigo only grew worse.
    She would have folded off the church roof instantly upon arrival
– except that she clutched, lost her nerve, afraid of making
a still bigger mistake. Maybe this time she would unfold with half
her body inside one of the marble columns down in the nave, and
half her body out of it, limbs flapping in death throes, most of
her internal organs mingled with stone.
    In fact, now that she had thought of such a gruesome turn of
events, it would almost certainly come to pass. She wouldn't be
able to banish the mental image of herself half wedded to stone,
and when she folded herethere, there would prove to be the
heart of a column, leaving her more completely involved with the
church than ever she had been when she'd sung in the choir.
    She might have stood on the roof for a couple minutes, until she
calmed herself and regained her confidence; but she didn't have
that option. Three seconds, four maximum, after her arrival, she
began to slide.
    Maybe the slate had been black