Tempt the Stars

the section of roof I was kneeling on suddenly caved in.
    I had a split second to see Rosier’s evil face and a forest of shiny swords and the floor all rushing up at me—
    And then my arm was almost snatched out of its socket when someone caught me.
    I looked up to find Casanova staring at me, as if he couldn’t believe he’d managed that, either. Especially one-handed, because the damned bottle was still clutched in the other. And then he was screaming and yanking me up and screaming again, because his feet were slipping on the widening edge.
    And then Caleb jerked him back and Pritkin grabbed me. “Run!”
    Which, yeah. But the cascade of old tiles and half-rotten ceiling beams and moldy plaster that had been the roof made it seem like we were running in place even as we pelted for the edge. Because the precipice was coming along with us, nipping at our heels.
    And then consuming them, in a boiling mass of debris, just as Caleb grabbed me and swung me up, which seemed the wrong direction but I couldn’t scream with a throat full of plaster dust. And then we were going down again, fast, but I couldn’t figure out why until—
    “Shiiiiiiit!”
I screamed, finding dust no match for a zip-line ride down a sparking electric wire, dangling off the bit of rope Caleb had thrown over the top and speeding fast, fast, too damn fast toward a one-story building across the street.
    Which we reached just as a bunch of indigo guards burst out of the bar behind us, and took off like bats out of hell. Or servants of one very pissed off demon lord, anyway. And then I couldn’t see them anymore because we were running up some stairs, and then pelting across the second building’s flat roof and running to the edge and no, no,
no
—
    And then jumping across a too-wide cavern we almost didn’t make, Casanova’s feet slipping on the edge and his arms spiraling wildly, and me grabbing him and spinning around, and then Caleb grabbing me and all three of us doing a strange, death-defying dance on a two-inch ledge before Pritkin grabbed us and yanked us back.
    And then we were off again.
    “Where’s the council?” Caleb yelled as we pounded across the roof.
    “Less than a block,” Pritkin said, which should have been good news. Only he didn’t sound like it.
    It didn’t look like Caleb thought so, either. “What’s the problem?” he demanded.
    “That,” Pritkin said as we ran up to the other side of the roof.
    And yeah.
    This side had a fire escape going down, but it didn’t do us any good. Because the street below had suddenly decided it didn’t want to be a street anymore. And turned into a culvert.
    And then flip, a stone-walled garden. And hey presto, a sewage tunnel. It was shifting so fast, it was making me dizzy, and I wasn’t even down there. I couldn’t imagine trying to navigate a yard through the middle of a landscape that was constantly changing, much less a block.
    Only it didn’t look like someone wanted us to have even that tiny chance.
    Because the building suddenly shook all around us, like the aftershock from an earthquake had hit it. Only the earthquake was coming, not going. And tossing us up—
    And up and up and up some more, as the building sprang out of the ground, additional stories popping out of the earth like cars on a freight train heading straight into the sky.
    “Oh, shit,” Casanova said miserably. And then, “Fuck that!” as the bits of rope came out again.
    And this time, I was siding with Casanova.
    Because yeah, there
was
another electric line, attached to the side of the building. And yes, it
had
grown up along with the rest of this place. But the building was now a good fourteen stories up, making the line into an almost perpendicular plunge to a tiny pole way the hell down there.
    Which might not even be there in a minute, the way things were going.
    And then it wasn’t, as Pritkin waved a hand and the pole went scooting down the street-that-was-a-street again for the moment, weaving in and out of the crazy landscape like a skier on a hill, only to stop at the entrance of a large edifice at the very end.
    An edifice that looked like a municipal building, but probably wasn’t.
    “Oh
God,
” I said, with feeling.
    “Fuck
that
!” Casanova repeated, backing away.
    “It’s doable,” Caleb said staunchly.
    “In what universe?”
    “You have a better plan?” Pritkin asked, throwing his very thin and not-at-all sturdy-looking piece of rope over the line.
    “Yes!