By the light of the moon

but now she ran toward him.
    Even with her heart lodged in her throat and pounding as loud as
a circus drum, with fear twisting like a snake through the entire
length of her entrails, she possessed sufficient presence of mind
to wonder if she had found a fine new courage in herself or instead
had lost her sanity. Maybe a little of both.
    She sensed also that her compulsion to go after the gunman might
be related to the fact that the nanogadgets busily at work in her
brain were making profound changes in her, changes more fundamental
and even more important than the granting of supernatural powers.
This was not a good thought.
    The twenty feet between her and the would-be bride killer were
as long as a marathon. The plywood seemed to move under her,
foiling her advance, as if it were a treadmill. Nonetheless, she
preferred to sprint rather than to trust once more in her as yet
unpolished talent for folding.
    The hard boom-boom-boom of running feet on the platform
and the vibrations shuddering through the scaffolding distracted
the gunman from the wedding guests. As he turned his head toward
Jilly, she slammed into him, rocking him sideways, grabbing the
rifle.
    On impact, she tried to wrench the gun away from the killer. His
hands remained locked to it, but she held tight, as well, even when
she lost her footing and fell off the scaffold.
    Her grip on the weapon spared her from another plunge. The
garlic-reeking gunman's tether prevented him from being dragged
immediately off the platform with her.
    Dangling in space, looking up into the bigot's eyes – such
black pools of festering hatred – Jilly found in herself an
intensity of anger that she had never known before. Anger became a
rage stoked by the thought of all the sons of Cain crawling the
hills and cities of this world, all like this man, motivated by
innumerable social causes and visions of Utopia, but also by
personal fevers, forever craving violence, thirsting for blood and
mad with dreams of power.
    With Jilly's entire weight suspended from the rifle, the killer
didn't have the strength to shake the weapon out of her hands. He
began instead to twist it left and right, back and forth, thereby
torquing her body and putting stress on her wrists. As the torsion
built, twist by twist, the laws of physics required rotation, which
would tear her hands off the gun as her body obeyed the law.
    The pain in her tortured wrist joints and tendons rapidly became
intolerable, worse than the still tender spot in her hand where the
splinter had punctured her. If she let go, she could fold to safety
during her fall, but then she would be leaving him with the rifle.
And before she could return, he'd pump hundreds of rounds into the
crowd, which was so transfixed by the contest above it that no one
had yet thought to flee the church.
    Her rage flared into fury , fueled by a fierce sense of
injustice and by pity for the innocent who were always the targets
of men like this, for the mothers and babies blown to pieces by
suicide bombers, for the ordinary citizens who often found
themselves between street-gang thugs and their rivals in drive-by
shootings, for the merchants murdered for the few dollars in their
tills – for one young bride and a loving groom and a flower
girl who might be shredded by hollow-point bullets on what should
have been a day of joy.
    Empowered by her fury, Jilly attempted to counter the killer's
torquing motion by swinging her legs forward, back, forward, like
an acrobat hanging from a trapeze bar. The more successfully she
swung to and fro, the more difficult he found it to keep twisting
the rifle from side to side.
    Her wrists ached, throbbed, burned ; but his arms must
have felt as though they would pull out of his shoulder sockets.
The longer she held on, the greater the chance that he would let go
of the weapon first. Then he would be not a potential killer
anymore, but merely a madman on a high scaffold with spare
magazines of ammunition that he couldn't use.
    'Jillian?' Someone down on the floor of the church called
her name in astonishment. 'Jillian?' She was reasonably
certain that it was Father Francorelli, the priest who had heard
her confessions and given her the sacrament for most of her life,
but she didn't turn her head to look.
    Sweat was her biggest problem. The killer's perspiration dripped
off his face, onto Jilly, which disgusted her, but she remained
more concerned about her own sweat. Her hands were slick. By the
second, her grip