He didn’t. But the view was unsettling. The jets reached out, arcing as if to encircle the planet. The omega was a malignant force, a thing out of religious myth, an agency beyond understanding.

The al-Jahani maneuvered around the fringes of the cloud, trying to record as much of the event as it could. Collingdale went to his quarters, slept, got up, slept some more. The cloud closed and, as the city rotated into position, made contact directly above. Winds howled. Lightning ripped through the skies. Tornadoes formed.

It was just after sunset.

Collingdale could hardly bring himself to watch. Electrical discharges had been growing in the cloud, had become more intense as it drew nearer. The storm gathered force, but the towers stood, and the planet rotated, moving the city directly to ground zero and then past. And for a while he hoped it would get clear. But without warning a gigantic bolt tore though the cloud and hammered the city. The chess-piece structures seemed to melt and blacken and sink into the ice. Sprays of pebbles rattled against them, and something blasted into the base of one of the corner towers. The tower shuddered and began to lean precipitously. Other buildings collapsed or were blown away. Once, twice, they lost the picture as satellites were neutralized. Lightning ripped out of the night, scorched the diamond steeples and the crystal polygons. Hurricane-force winds hurled black dust across the snowscape. A few rocks fell from the sky, plowing into glass and crystal. It needed only a few minutes, and when it was over, a ground blizzard buried everything.

Collingdale was hardly a violent or even a confrontational man. He hadn’t been in a loud argument as far back as he could remember. But in those moments he would have killed. Rage spilled out of his soul, sheer fury driven to excess by his helplessness.

The cloud wrapped itself around the world, around Moonlight, and it found the other cities.