Survive This Book · Book 7

Gatecrash

1

You are forty seconds from being the smartest dead man in Chicago, and you don’t know it yet, because you’re looking at your phone.

Eli Moreau. Twenty-five, three degrees, and a fellowship interview in eleven minutes on the fourteenth floor of a tower on Michigan Avenue. You’re crossing under the El at Lake and Wabash with one earbud in, rehearsing the version of yourself that gets the money. A Brown Line train grinds overhead and shakes rust flakes onto your sleeve.

The phone says INTERVIEW: RAFFERTY FOUNDATION, 9:00. Under the reminder sits a thread you scroll past every morning without opening. Darnell. Two years old.

you were right, man. hope it was worth it.

You thumb it out of sight.

The air above Michigan Avenue splits.

There’s no sound. That’s what your mind snags on first. A tear that size ought to end the world with a bang, and instead the whole Loop goes hushed, as if a theater had dimmed its lights. The wound opens three blocks east, taller than the Aon Center, edged in a color your eyes keep refusing to name. A winged shape comes through it, unhurried. Then everything else comes after, pouring down the faces of the buildings like water finding a drain.

Forty feet from you, a man in a good suit is lifted off the sidewalk by nothing you can see. He comes apart in the air like a wet paper bag. Somebody screams. Then everybody does.

The crowd breaks for the El stairs in one surge. Shoulders hit you. A latte bursts against your shoes.

Something flutters down out of the noise, stiff, ivory, edged in gold, and slaps flat against your chest right over your heart. It sticks there like a nametag. Small print crawls across its face, rearranging itself while you watch, as though it’s still deciding what to say about you.

The stairs are twenty feet away. The card is warm. Squat, heavy shapes are coming down Wabash at a lope, and the crowd is running straight toward the only way out it can see.

You have about four seconds.

To drop against the granite and read everything before you move, turn to 57 .

To run with the crowd for the El stairs and the trains, turn to 95 .

To press your thumb to the card and take what it offers, turn to 160 .

To dive under the stalled CTA bus at the curb and hide until it’s over, turn to 273 .