Bad Monkeys

The Good Jane and the Bad Jane

WHEN LOVE FINALLY LET ME GO, I went down to the street and stood there taking deep breaths until I was sure, absolutely sure, that I was really outside, on the actual Vegas Strip, and not in some ant-farm extension of the Mudgett Suite. What ultimately convinced me wasn’t the air quality so much as the sheer number of tourists bumping past me on the sidewalk: even the organization, I figured, couldn’t afford to hire that many extras.

It was late afternoon. Which afternoon was harder to say, but that didn’t matter: I had a job to do. Panopticon had confirmed that John Doyle was in his suite at the Venetian. It was time to pay him a visit. I joined the flow of pedestrians headed north, past the Casino Royale to the fake Doge’s Palace.

The tourist crowd inside the Venetian was salted with Clowns, white-faced Italian mimes and harlequins. None of them made eye contact with me, but I knew they were watching—when I started to follow the hall of shops towards the Grand Canal, a passing mime caught me by the elbow, spun me around, and pushed me back in the direction of the escalator bank. I rode down to the lower level and found the hotel lobby, where a red-headed bellhop, his long hair combed in a Bozo flip, was waiting to slip me a keycard.

It wasn’t until I’d boarded the elevator that I really let myself think about who I was going to meet. I took out my NC gun and checked, twice, that the dial was on the narcolepsy setting. “Do not pick up any other weapons,” I reminded myself.

The elevator arrived on the penthouse floor. I located Doyle’s suite and used the keycard to open the door, stepping through into an entry hall that was larger than most hotel rooms. The walls and ceiling were mirrored and the floor was polished marble, so whichever way I looked I saw infinite Janes holding infinite NC guns that they didn’t dare fire.

I followed the hall to its end, to an enormous sitting room with still more reflective surfaces: another mirror wall; a line of floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the Strip; assorted glass-and marble-topped tables and cabinets. Here, though, my gaze was drawn to the body on the floor, the blood fanning out from it in all directions already beginning to dry to a dull finish.

John Doyle’s throat had been slit, and his face, palms, and chest all bore slashing cuts. His legs were curled under him, like he’d been on his knees and flopped over backwards. The thought that he’d died begging for mercy didn’t exactly break my heart, but this was obviously a problem as far as interrogating him was concerned.

As I dug in my pocket for my comm unit, I sensed movement in the room. I looked up and saw what seemed like an optical illusion reflected in the mirror wall: there I was, standing over Doyle’s corpse, while above and slightly behind me a second Jane extended upside-down from the ceiling. I turned and raised my head; sure enough, there was the bad Jane, standing on the ceiling with her hair and jacket dangling up, like gravity was reversed just for her. “Hello again,” she said, and while I was still trying to make sense of this, she reached down, grabbed my head with both hands, and gave it a sharp twist.

I woke up paralyzed in a chair, facing the mirror wall. Doyle’s body was at my feet, and my NC gun was on a table to my right, within easy reach, if only I could reach. The bad Jane was behind me, standing on the floor now like a normal person, only not normal: as I watched her in the mirror, she kept shimmering, disappearing, and reappearing, just as she had in the diner parking lot.

“How’s the neck?” she said, solidifying long enough to lay a cool hand against my jugular. “I hope I didn’t overdo it. Phil would be pissed if I did any permanent damage.”

I couldn’t reach, but I could talk: “What the fuck are you?”

“What, you don’t recognize your evil twin? Or do you mean this?” She winked, and winked out. Her voice came from thin air: “It’s the drugs, Jane.”

“You drugged me?”

“Not you, genius. Me.” She was back, crouched behind me with her chin propped on my shoulder. “Altered-state theory, Jane. Remember?”

I remembered.

Altered-state theory, that was a Berkeley thing. She must have gone there too. Small world.

What is altered-state theory?

This stupid acidhead idea about the relationship between consciousness and reality. There was this crazy guy, right, leftover flower child, who used to hang out on campus. He had great dope, and he was willing to share, but it was like the Salvation Army, where before you get the free soup you have to listen to a sermon. So this guy would go on about this theory he had, that any time you altered your perception of reality, there was a corresponding alteration in the way reality perceived you, or something like that…

Getting stoned changes the laws of physics?

In a nutshell. Which, you don’t have to tell me, is the kind of insane logic that makes people jump off of buildings thinking they can fly. But this guy, he’d spent a lot of time refining his hypotheses, and if you pointed out that gravity doesn’t seem to care how you look at it, he’d say that it wasn’t a one-to-one correspondence, consciousness was obviously more flexible than truth, and so you’d need a big change in perception to produce even a small change in reality. In other words, ordinary drugs weren’t strong enough, usually, to let you do magic. But he claimed to have heard rumors about this other, much more potent class of drugs, called X-drugs. With X-drugs, he said, you really could fly, bend time and space, or even go back and undo history.

So the bad Jane—

— was telling me the Troop had access to X-drugs. Which I would have laughed off, if she hadn’t been so busy demonstrating her powers.

Did it occur to you that it really was you who’d been drugged, and that this “demonstration of powers” was simply a trick?

Of course it occurred to me, but the thing is, I didn’t feel drugged, I felt sober. Trust me, I know the difference.

I’m sure you do. But by your own account, at this point you were recovering from an overdose.

A simulated overdose. I wasn’t—

Simulated, but still…And you’d just been knocked unconscious a second time.

I know all that, but it doesn’t change the fact that I wasn’t the one who was tripping, she was.

Of course, I still tried to deny it: “You’re full of shit! X-drugs don’t exist!”

She laughed, faded out, and phased back in again. “Do you really want to waste time pretending you don’t believe me?” she said. “Or can we get down to business before J.D. here starts to stink?”

“What business? What does Phil want from me?”

“We’ll come to that. But first, check out the painting.”

A portrait of a Renaissance nobleman hung on the wall behind me. The bad Jane angled my head like a camera, aiming it at the portrait’s reflection in the mirror, and zoomed in my perspective until I could make out individual brush strokes. Closer still and I began to see, very faint around the portrait’s eyes, the outline of a pair of lenses.

“Panopticon.”

“Yes,” the bad Jane whispered. “They’re watching. They think they’re seeing. They know we can jam their signal, but what they don’t know—Shh! Don’t tell! — is that we can also substitute a false signal. Would you like to know what we’re feeding them now?”

My point of view zoomed out again, until I could see the whole mirror wall. It flickered, and suddenly in the reflection John Doyle was alive again, down on his knees in front of me. I had my NC gun leveled at his chest and was forcing him to keep still as I took swipes at him with a knife.

“Ouch!” the bad Jane said, as my reflection made a particularly nasty cut across Doyle’s scalp. “You know, I don’t know what Love’s orders to you were, Jane, but I’m pretty sure he didn’t tell you to do this…”

Unable to take the pain anymore, Doyle tried to pull away. Instead of shooting him, my reflection bent forward and slashed his throat. As blood geysered from the wound, I felt real wetness splash me in the chair.

“Oops!” said the bad Jane. “You really want to stand behind the person when you do that…” She clucked her tongue as the vision in the mirror faded. “So what do you suppose Dixon is thinking right now?” As if in answer, the elevator dinged off in the distance. “Uh-oh. This can’t be good…” I heard the suite’s outer door burst open. Footsteps echoed in the hall of mirrors. “All right, Jane, you’re on. Think fast.”

She slapped the back of my neck, and I could feel my arms and legs again. I dove for my gun, but by the time I got turned around in the chair she’d disappeared, and I found myself drawing down on a pair of harlequins. They were armed with horns: rifle-length, brass-belled instruments with rubber squeeze-bulbs.

“Put down the weapon, Jane,” the lead harlequin said. Then he clapped a hand to his head and dropped dead of an aneurysm.

“I didn’t do that!” I shouted at the remaining harlequin. Weirdly enough, he believed me. Instead of blasting me with his horn, he pivoted towards the mirror wall.

Then he was dead, too.

The bad Jane’s gun hand extended from a ring of ripples in the mirror glass. “There are more of them on the way,” I heard her say, as the hand withdrew. “You’d better get out of here.”

I tried to find my comm unit, but she’d taken it. “If you can hear me,” I told the nobleman’s portrait, “I didn’t do this!” The nobleman stared back skeptically.

I left the suite and ran to the elevator. When the doors opened on the lobby a minute later, the corpse of Bozo the bellhop fell into the car. I stepped over the body and saw two more harlequins coming for me. I ran the other way.

A flight of stairs brought me up beside the Grand Canal. A gondola floated by, the tourists inside it all staring. Although I’d tucked my NC gun back in my jacket, my hands and face were still covered with John Doyle’s blood spatter. “It’s just ketchup!” I called to them. Hurrying along, I rounded a bend in the canal and came face-to-face with a mime, who immediately drew a hatchet from his belt.

“Wait!” I said. “I surrender!”

The hatchet clipped a lock of my hair as it flew past my head.

“I surrender, God damn it!”

The air behind the mime shimmered. The bad Jane reached around with her knife, and the front of the mime’s white blouse turned red.

“You see?” the bad Jane said, as the mime crumpled. “Not a drop on me!”

Wink. Gone again.

And I ran on, past more staring tourists, through a door marked NO ADMITTANCE, down another hall and some more stairs, coming out finally on an underground loading dock.

A sports car idled at the dock’s edge. “Get in,” the bad Jane said.

I felt the weight of my NC gun pressing against my ribs. My hand twitched.

“Try it and I’ll leave you here,” she said. “You don’t want that.”

Behind me, a door banged open.

“Last chance…”

I got in the car. An ax blade kissed the back bumper as we pulled away.

“Better buckle up,” the bad Jane advised, steering us up a ramp and out onto the Strip. As I clicked my safety belt into place, I heard a squeal of tires and looked back; a subcompact stuffed with Scary Clowns was coming up fast behind us.

The bad Jane saw them too. “All right,” she said. “Let’s play.” She shifted into a higher gear and began zigzagging through the traffic. The subcompact, nimbler than it looked, kept right on our tail. Hatchets started thunking off the sports car’s trunk.

My hand was twitching again. I asked myself: if I could get my gun out from under my seatbelt, and if I managed to shoot the bad Jane before she shot me or stabbed me in the neck, and if I brought the car to a stop without crashing it, would the Clowns let me live long enough to explain what had really happened?

“I wouldn’t put money on it,” the bad Jane said. The rear windshield exploded, and a hatchet buried itself in the back of her headrest. I screamed; she laughed.

Up ahead, two identical trailer trucks rode side-by-side with an open lane between them. The trucks’ back panels were unmarked, but as we got closer, I saw that their mud flaps were decorated with mandrill faces.

“Pattycake, pattycake,” the bad Jane said, and flashed her high beams. The trucks began drifting towards each other. The bad Jane floored the accelerator and zipped through the narrowing gap; when the Clown car tried to follow, the trucks swerved aside, causing their trailers to swing together like clapping hands. The subcompact was caught and crushed.

That took care of the pursuit, but not the threat of looming death: the sports car was doing like a hundred and ten, and the light at the approaching intersection had just turned yellow. “What do you think?” the bad Jane asked me. “Can we make it?” Laughing hysterically, she took her hands off the steering wheel. The light turned red. I covered my eyes.

When the car jerked sharply to the right I was sure we’d been hit. The seatbelt cut into my waist and chest; the shift in g-forces combined with a sudden loss of friction was the cue that we’d left the ground and were tumbling through space. I braced myself for a final impact that never came.

Slowly the car leveled out. There was a light jolt as the tires reestablished contact with the road, and our speed began to drop back into a saner range. The blare of horns had already faded, leaving only the purr of the motor and the steady rush of air through the broken back window.

When I pried my hands from my face, we were out in the desert under a starry sky. The lights of Vegas and the last rays of sunset were just a glow on the horizon behind us. The bad Jane wore the satisfied smile of someone who’s just had amazing sex.

“Evil,” she said, in answer to my stare, “is just so much cooler than even you know.”

The road we were on led to a ramshackle house that stood alone in the middle of the wasteland. The bad Jane parked the car and got out. By the time I staggered from the passenger side, she was at the front door with her back to me, which would have been a perfect opportunity if my NC gun hadn’t disappeared. “Sorry,” she said, without bothering to turn around. “I’m a little too tapped out to play hide-and-seek right now, but if you give me a chance to recharge, I’ll be happy to go again.”

The house was just a shell; beyond the front door, metal steps led down into an underground complex. The first room we came to was a cross between a bomb shelter and a den: the walls were reinforced concrete, but there was a gas fireplace and a fully stocked bar.

“I’ve got sandwiches in the refrigerator if you’re hungry,” the bad Jane said. “And mineral water and juice to drink—I’d offer you something stronger, but I’m guessing your head’s in a weird enough space as it is.” When I didn’t answer, she shrugged and said, “Suit yourself. I definitely need a little something…”

While she rummaged in the fridge, I went over to the shelves that flanked the fireplace, drawn by a familiar row of yellow book spines: Nancy Drew mysteries. Tucked into a gap in the line of books was an autographed photo of Pamela Sue Martin.

“There you are,” the bad Jane said, holding up a glass vial filled with clear liquid. She fitted it into an auto-injector and shot the full dose into her arm. “Ah-h-h…” Her outline got fuzzy, then snapped back into sharp focus. “That’s better.” She ejected the empty vial into a trash bin. “You wouldn’t believe how expensive this stuff is…And before you get any ideas, you should know that it’s DNA-specific. If you’re not me, all it’ll do is give you a really bad trip, the kind you don’t come back from.”

“So when are you going to tell me why I’m here?” I said. “What does Phil want from me?”

“What does Phil want?” She rolled her eyes. “This isn’t about Phil, Jane. It’s about you, playing for the wrong team.”

“You want me to join the Troop.”

“No, that’s backwards. You want to join us. And we’re going to grant your wish.”

“My wish? My wish is to get my brother back, and for you to go to—”

“Are you auditioning, Jane?” She grinned. “Trying to show me what a great bullshit artist you are? Trust me, I know you’ve got that down cold. And hey, it’s a useful skill, we can definitely put it to work for the Troop, but right here and now? I need you to start coming clean with yourself.” She pointed to a door at the end of the bar. “In there.”

“In there what?”

“The thing you’ve been denying for the past twenty-three years. Your true nature. Go on in and check it out.”

I looked at the door. I didn’t move.

“Go on,” she said, and the door opened on its own, and then I was moving—not walking, you understand, just moving. I passed through into this darkened space, and the door slammed shut behind me, so it was like total blackout, and that was bad, not for the dark itself but because I knew it wouldn’t last. She gave me a few seconds to think about what was coming, and then she said, “Now look,” and the lights came on, and there he was, staring at me from every angle. John Doyle.

His wanted poster, you mean. The one from the post-office lobby.

Yeah. Officer Friendly may have kept one copy, but the Troop had a million of them. Every inch of wall space in this room was plastered with them. The ceiling, too, and I didn’t even need to look down—I could feel the paper crackling under my feet.

“He really was a creepy guy, wasn’t he?” said the bad Jane. “Some child molesters, you know, they’re actually very sweet when they want to be, but J.D. wasn’t one of those. He was more the come-with-me-now-kid-or-else type.”

“Did Phil…He told you what I did?”

“At the post office? Yeah, that’s still kind of a sore spot with him, but he told me. Showed me the tape, too.”

“The—”

“The surveillance tape. Probably you guessed this already, but the organization doesn’t have a monopoly on Eyes Only technology. We’ve got our own version. Have had for years.”

“The wanted poster…?” I said. She nodded. “And that’s…how you find victims?”

“Recruits,” she said. “Yeah, that’s one of the ways. You think about it, it’s not a bad profiling strategy: show someone the face of evil, see how they respond. Your brother’s reaction was classic. That look of vulnerability on his face, like he was just begging someone to come in and start rewiring his brain—I can see why the powers that be snapped him up. What I don’t understand is why they didn’t recruit you at the same time.”

“Me?”

“Jane…” Suddenly she was right behind me, with her hands on my shoulders. “Don’t be coy, now. You know what I’m talking about.”

“No.”

“You were standing behind Phil, just like this, whispering in his ear, saying…Let’s see, what were your exact words again? Oh yeah: ‘That’s the guy, Phil, the one who kidnaps little kids for the gypsies. I told him all about you: where you live, where you play, where you sleep…’”

I shut my eyes.

“‘…and when he comes for you, Phil, you’d better not scream or try to run away. That’ll just make him mad, and then he’ll hurt you. And don’t go crying to Mom about this, either. She can’t protect you. He’ll hurt her too, maybe even kill her, and he’ll still take you away afterwards.’”

“I was just messing with his head!” I said. “I was teasing him! I didn’t know—”

“Teasing him?” She touched the side of my face and I flinched. “I think you’re teasing me, Jane. I mean, I saw the tape. Phil was practically pissing himself from fear, and you: you were into it. Teasing! You were being evil. You liked it. You were good at it. Good enough to make a casual observer think that maybe you’d had some practice…”

“Fuck you! I wasn’t—it was just that one day.”

“Yeah, right. That’s a hell of a coincidence, Jane. The one time you give in to a sadistic impulse, put on a performance that couldn’t have been better if you’d been trying out for the Troop, and we just happened to be there to record it…You know what I think? You had ten years with Phil before we took him, and I bet if we picked any day out of those ten years and put J.D.’s poster in a room with the two of you, we’d have caught something just as telling. Jane being evil? Hah. How about Jane being Jane?” She touched my face again, and whispered: “Bad monkey.”

This time instead of pulling away I turned on her, but my fists punched empty air. I heard the sound of her laugh off to my left and lunged for it, still swinging.

“Open your eyes, Jane,” she said. “I know you don’t want to see, but you’re never going to catch me blind.”

I opened my eyes. She was right in front of me, and this time I actually managed to get my hands around her throat before she melted away.

“Stop doing that!” I complained, as she rematerialized, just out of reach.

“All right,” she said. “You want a fair shot, I’ll give you one. Here, I’ll even give you a handicap…” She brought out the knife she’d used to kill John Doyle, and tossed it to me. “Now come on,” she said, showing me her empty hands. “No tricks this time, I promise.”

“OK,” I said. “Just one other thing…” And I lunged at her, leading with the point of the knife blade. She sidestepped, caught my wrist, and threw me face-first into the nearest wall.

“So where did it all go wrong?” she asked, pinning me effortlessly. “After such a promising start…Were you actually sorry when Doyle took Phil away? Or was it that business with Whitmer? I mean, no offense, that was pretty impressive for a fourteen-year-old, but still. You think taking out a serial killer makes you some kind of saint?”

She released me and stepped back, and I whirled around, slashing with the knife.

“Or was it the organization?” she said, dancing clear of the blade. “Talking to Catering on the phone, I can see how that might have an effect on a young girl, even a bad seed. Weird though, how they waited so long before actually recruiting you…Why do you suppose that is?”

I cut at her again, and this time she ducked beneath my arm, hooked a boot behind one of my ankles, and jerked my feet out from under me.

“Was that just a bureaucratic oversight, you think? Or did they maybe have a reason for not rushing to take you on?”

“I had a life,” I gasped. “They hoped…They wanted me to do something with it.”

“Oh, that line.” She laughed. “So why didn’t you do anything with it?”

When I’d landed on my ass, I’d dropped the knife. I tried to pick it up, but she got there first and toed it out of my reach.

“They did recruit me,” I said. “Maybe it took twenty years, but—”

“Yeah, and how’s that been working out? Word from our spies is, not great. Your mission failure rate is kind of an embarrassment. And why is that?”

I made another try for the knife. She kicked me in the face.

“What’s the problem, Jane? Are you just a titanic fuckup? Or could it be that your heart’s not really in it?”

As she hauled back to kick me again I sprang up and locked my hands around her throat. I felt her try to pull away and thought: Got you now, you bitch! But then her own arms came up, breaking my grip, and she spun me around and slammed me into the wall again, eye-to-eye with John Doyle.

“Yeah,” she said. “I really think that’s it, your heart’s just not in it. And I think you’ll feel a whole lot better once you admit it…Say it, Jane.”

“Fuck you!”

“Say it…” She pressed up against me, belly to back, like a full-body hug from behind, and then—the intimacy of it was hideous—our clothes, our skin, just dissolved, and we started to merge…

“Say it,” she commanded, her voice inside and outside now.

(I’m evil.)

“What’s that? I didn’t catch that, Jane. Say it again. Say it loud.”

“I’m—” I said, and then fought it, pushing back until the pressure in my skull was just too great to resist: “I’m evil!”

“Now we’re getting somewhere.”

She pulled back, withdrew, and I collapsed to the floor.

“First time’s always the hardest…” She squatted beside me, hands balanced casually on her knees. “So listen up, Jane, I’m going to tell you what your options are. Option one, you can deny what you just admitted. Go back to Vegas, try and square things with Love—or just run like hell, which amounts to the same thing, except he’ll be even less likely to believe you when he catches you. Option two, you can think it over some more. No one knows about this room but me—not even Phil—so you’ll be safe here, long as you like. But the lights stay on.

“And then there’s option three. You can stop hiding from yourself. Embrace what you really are, what you’ve always been. Join the Troop, and start making the kind of difference in the world you were meant to make. Now”—she leaned forward, lowered her voice—“I know what option you’re going to pick, because I know which one you want to pick. But I also understand you don’t want it to look too easy, don’t want to seem like you’re caving just because I kicked your ass. So we’re going to pretend you’re going for option two. You stay in here, ‘think it over’ as long as you need to, to save face—only not too long, OK, because we’ve got stuff to do. I’ll be waiting for you outside when you’re ready…”

When I dragged myself back into the den twenty minutes later, a black case was sitting on the bar. It was smaller than the case the Troop had given to Arlo Dexter, but the style was identical.

“You know one of the great things about evil?” the bad Jane said. “You can’t fake it. I mean, think about it, there isn’t a good deed you can name that an evil person couldn’t do, and still be evil afterwards. But it doesn’t work the other way around. You pass our shibboleth test, and there’s no question that you’re one of us.”

I popped the latches on the case, lifted the lid. “You expect me to use this?”

“‘Expect.’ When you say it like that, it makes it sound like there’s room for doubt. I have faith in you, Jane.”

“Who do you want me to kill?”

“Just some people. Nobody important. It’s part of an op you’ll be doing for us. For Phil, actually. He’s throwing a party next week, and he wants a Clown for the entertainment.”

“You mean Love? You want me to kill Robert Love?”

“No, I’m going to kill him. You’re just going to bring him in so Phil can talk to him first. And this”—she patted the case—“this is going to help you get him.”

I shook my head. “Even if I was willing to do that—”

“God, Jane, don’t start backsliding. You want to go another round in the poster room?”

“Even if I was willing to do it, there’s no way I could get back into the Mudgett Suite now.”

“Oh, you could probably get back into it. It’s getting out that’s hard. But that’s OK, you’re not going after him in the Suite, you’re going to hit him at the tables…He gambles,” she explained. “Baccarat, if you can believe it. I mean, of all the boring games…But that’s his thing, and tonight’s his usual night out. Of course he may have changed his plans after your little defection today, but I doubt it. We’ll know for sure in about an hour.”

“I want to talk to Phil.”

“You will. After you grab Love, I’m going to take you straight to him.”

“No, I want to talk to him now.”

“Sorry.”

“I need to talk to him, OK?”

“I get that you’re anxious,” she said. “If it helps any, you should know that Phil is going out on a limb, bringing you in like this. I mean, corrupting organization members is part of his job, but there are special rules where family is involved. If the über-bosses knew he was going after his big sister personally, they’d be pissed.”

“Why? The Troop has a problem with nepotism?”

“It’s more a question of objectivity. Those old sibling bonds, you know, they can screw up your emotions. So this is technically a breach of protocol. But Phil figures if we bring in Love, the über-bosses will owe him some slack—he’s already gotten big points for taking out True and Wise. And with this”—she patted the case again—“there shouldn’t be any questions about your loyalties, either…So just be patient, Jane. Once you’re officially on board, there’ll be plenty of time for you and Phil to reconnect.”

“Once I’m on board,” I said. “And what’s my job going to be? Phil’s assistant? His number two?”

“More like his number three.” She grinned. “Now come on, let’s get you cleaned up. You’ve still got J.D.’s blood all over you.”

Two hours later I was back in the sports car’s passenger seat, wearing a fresh set of clothes. Coming up on the west side of the Strip was the black pyramid of the Luxor, its glass tip shooting a beam of light half a mile into the sky.

My evil twin was giving me some last-minute instructions. “Put these on,” she said, handing me an amazingly ugly pair of cat’s-eye glasses. “There’s a built-in comm unit, and it also transmits video, so I’ll be able to keep tabs on you.” Noticing my expression, she added: “I know it’s a fashion felony, but that’s part of the point. It’ll help disguise you if you bump into any Clowns on the way to Love’s table.”

“What about Eyes Only?” I said. “Doesn’t Panopticon have face-recognition software that can pick me out, even disguised?”

“Yeah, and that software is so reliable…Don’t worry, we’ve got it covered. The lenses are specially treated so you can see Eyes Only sensors. Go ahead, try it.”

I put on the glasses and looked out. Above us, a billboard showed a line of half-naked showgirls, and my attention was drawn instantly to the girl with the biggest boobs. Her eyes were glowing.

“Of course,” the bad Jane continued, “spotting them is only half the battle. This car’s shielded against Eyes Only surveillance, but outside, you’ll need this.” She passed me an expensive-looking wristwatch. “State-of-the-art jamming device. It’ll shut down every Eye within line of sight.”

I read the brand name on the watch face: “Mandrill.”

“Yeah.” She shrugged apologetically. “I don’t want to be untrusting, but I figure there’s still an outside chance that you and Love are running some kind of elaborate counterscheme here. So along with the jammer, there’s a destruct mechanism that lets me vaporize you by remote control if I get a bad vibe.” Her right arm came up, and I was staring into the muzzle of my own NC gun. “Put it on.”

I slipped the watchband around my wrist. The clasp emitted a faint beep as I snapped it closed, and I didn’t need to be told that trying to undo it without permission would be fatal.

“Good girl,” the bad Jane said. She put my NC gun on safety and dropped it in my lap. “Here we go…”

Two bright-eyed statues of the Egyptian god Horus guarded the entrance to the Luxor casino. As I stepped from the car, the light in their pupils dimmed and went out. The next test was waiting just inside the casino doors: a pair of real security guards. When one of them looked straight at me I thought I was busted, but the guy just yawned and turned away.

“You see?” the bad Jane said, a voice in my ear. “It’s like you’re invisible…Walk straight ahead, now. The high-stakes room is at the center of the casino floor.”

I passed between rows of blackjack tables, a wave of darkness preceding me as my Troop watch turned every king, queen, and one-eyed jack blind. Next came bank after bank of slot machines. Here the effect was more subtle: even with their Eyes Only devices jammed, the slots had lights to spare.

The entrance to the high-stakes room was a sliding door of frosted glass. The door was triggered by a motion sensor, but my watch seemed to have jammed it, too.

“Problem,” I said.

“Don’t worry. I’m patched into the electrical system. Before I open the door I need you to pay attention. Love’s dressed in a tuxedo. He’s sitting at a table with two women; they’re his bodyguards. There’s also a dealer at the table, a pit boss off to the right, and a couple other dealers cooling their heels at the back of the room. Any of them might be bodyguards, too.”

“So I need to shoot six people in, what, three seconds?”

“Two seconds if you can manage it. And don’t hit Love—even if he were light enough to carry, you aren’t that invisible. Can you handle this?”

“Let’s find out,” I said. “Open the door.”

The door slid aside. I stepped forward, raised my gun, and pulled the trigger six times.

“Well,” said Robert Love, glancing over the half dozen unconscious bodies sprawled around him, “I see my warning didn’t take.”

“Shut up.” Without his clown outfit, he wasn’t nearly as frightening.

“Search him,” the bad Jane said.

I set the bomb case on the floor and gestured at Love with my NC gun. “Stand up and lean forward. Put your hands flat on the table.” Love did as he was told. I moved around behind him. Feeling under his jacket, I found a hand ax tucked into his cummerbund. I pulled it out and set it aside. I checked his pockets. “He’s clean,” I announced.

“Good. Now explain to him what the situation is.”

“There are some people waiting to meet you in the VIP parking garage,” I told Love. “So we’re going to walk out of here now. You’ll stay in front of me, go where I say, not make any sudden moves, not make trouble.”

“Interesting plan,” said Love. “But as I can only assume you’re taking me to be tortured and murdered, what’s my motivation, exactly, for not making trouble?”

I kept the gun on him as I transferred the case from the floor to the table. I showed him what was inside it. “You know what this is, right?”

“I recognize the brand name. I can’t say I’ve seen that particular model before.”

“It’s got a damper switch on the back,” I explained. “If the switch is on, the blast is limited to an area roughly the size of this room. But if the switch is off, everyone within two hundred yards gets turned to ashes.”

“I see. And in the latter case, will you be one of the dead?” He tilted his chin to indicate my glasses. “I’m guessing your controller won’t be happy if you fail to bring me out of here.”

“He’s got that part right,” the bad Jane said.

I leaned in close and pressed my gun to Love’s temple. “If I fail this mission,” I told him, “it means I’ve blown my only chance to see my brother again. And if that’s true, I don’t care what happens to me. Are we clear?”

“Yes,” said Love. Then he smiled. “So shall I keep my hands up while we’re walking, or will that be too conspicuous?”

“Don’t worry about being conspicuous.” I pulled back but kept the gun pointed at him. “Take your clothes off.”

“What?”

“Strip. Everything, even your socks and shoes.” I lifted the bomb out of the case, then pulled up the case’s lining to reveal a button-down shirt, khakis, and a pair of loafers. “These should fit you. The stuff you’re wearing now goes in a pile on the floor. Put your little ax in the pile, too.”

“…and as far as the organization knows, I died in the explosion.” He nodded. “Tricky. Very tricky.”

“Dixon will figure it out eventually. But by the time he does, it’ll be too late to do anything.”

“So you get to see your brother again, and stick it to Dixon on your way out. I can see now why you turned.”

“Less conversation, more action,” the bad Jane said. “We don’t have forever here.”

“Let’s go,” I said, waving the gun. Love changed his clothes. When we were ready, I set the timer on the bomb.

Neither one of us looked like a high-stakes gambler now, but my invisible status held, and nobody paid us any mind as we left the room. We crossed the casino floor without incident, the bad Jane directing us towards a private elevator whose doors opened as we approached. I pushed Love inside.

In the parking garage the bad Jane, maybe worried about a last-minute change of heart on my part, was standing back at a safe distance from the elevator. She’d called in backup: eight guys dressed as parking valets, all packing Troop-issue NC guns. The bad Jane’s own gun was still holstered, but she held the detonator for my wristwatch ready in her hand.

I’d taken off the glasses but my vision was crystal-clear. Even from fifty feet away, I could make out the little hairs on the back of the bad Jane’s thumb as it hovered over the detonator button. I could see, and count, the beads of sweat on the foreheads of her backup team, and the grains of dust on the van they’d brought to carry Love away in. I saw the eddies of hot air rising from the engine of the bad Jane’s sports car where it sat parked beside the van. And I saw the bad Jane’s jaw muscles tighten, as she realized her concerns about a double-cross were justified.

“Where is he?” she said.

“Where’s who?”

Her thumb tensed. “Don’t fuck with me, Jane. Where’s Love?”

“Oh, him…He got off between floors. He claimed it was a security issue, said he knows too much to let himself be captured. Personally, I think he’s just a wimp about being tortured by psychopaths.” I waited a beat, then added: “Oh yeah. He said to tell you the Scary Clowns have sealed off all the exits from this building. None of you are getting out of here alive.”

Her backup guys started exchanging glances, but the bad Jane herself was unmoved by the threat. “None of us?” she said. “Not even me?”

“Especially not you. I’m going to kill you myself, right after you tell me where Phil is.”

“Sure you are…Good-bye, Jane.”

As Love and I had walked through the casino, we’d passed by a Vegas version of an old-fashioned carnival wheel. Now I imagined that time was like that, a big wheel of fortune, and I reached out, mentally, and stopped it in its spin. Next I focused on my arm, telling myself that the bones in my wrist and hand were elastic. When I felt them start to stretch, I brought my arm up sharply. The Mandrill watch slid off with its clasp still fastened, and went flying across the garage like a guided missile, zeroing in on a cluster of four parking valets.

I let go of the wheel of time. The bad Jane’s thumb came down, and half of her backup detail disappeared in a yellow-orange flash.

“What the fuck?” the bad Jane said. Some instinct had enabled her to protect herself by redirecting the energy of the blast around her; her hair was mussed, but otherwise she was untouched. Her surviving minions weren’t as lucky: dazzled by the explosion, they were staggering in blind circles.

I held up the auto-injector I’d found in Love’s pocket when I’d searched him. “Love took a sample of my blood before he let me out of the Mudgett Suite,” I explained. “He wouldn’t say why, but when you told me that X-drugs were DNA-specific, I started to get an idea.”

“The Scary Clowns have X-drugs?”

“Yeah. And speaking as a connoisseur of controlled substances? I’m pretty sure their shit’s better than yours, Jane.”

“Let’s find out,” she said. “Let’s play.”

She dropped the detonator; I dropped the auto-injector; we both went for our guns. We both tried to stop time again, too, and in the slow-motion world that resulted, the shots we fired were actually visible. The bad Jane’s NC gun spat thick jagged bolts the color of arterial blood; my own gun sprayed wispy white lines of narcolepsy. None of the shots connected, and after dodging back and forth for a moment, we both rolled for cover.

Crouched behind the polished bulk of a silver Mercedes, I listened to the stumbling of the parking valets until I had a clear picture of where they all were. Then I thumbed the dial on my NC gun to MI and popped up firing. I’d killed three of them and was about to shoot the fourth when I heard the beep of a Mandrill bomb being activated, and the soft swoosh as the bad Jane lobbed it overhand in my direction. I put a hand on the roof of the Mercedes and flipped myself up into the air. My foot connected with the incoming bomb and kicked it back the way it had come, with a slight course correction; it smacked into the chest of the last valet and detonated.

The blast, much more powerful than the previous one, broke the windows on most of the cars in the garage; as I dropped back to the ground I had to cover my head against a shower of safety glass. By the time the rain stopped the bad Jane had gotten back in her sports car and was revving the engine for a getaway. As she reversed out of her parking slot, I jumped up again, using the hood of the Mercedes as a springboard to launch myself through the air. I landed on the roof of the sports car even as the bad Jane was shifting into forward gear; when she hit the gas, I reached down through the broken front window and gave the steering wheel a hard yank. I rolled clear as the car swerved into a concrete pylon.

The crash killed the sports car’s engine. The bad Jane fought free of the deflating air bag and crawled out over the crumpled hood. Back on my feet, I tried to draw a bead on her, but then another Mandrill bomb came skittering across the garage floor, its countdown timer reading 0:01.

I closed my eyes and teleported behind another concrete pylon. The bomb detonated, shattering more glass. An alarm began to wail—and beneath that, I heard the bad Jane’s footsteps receding, and the sound of a stairwell door.

The stairs led back up to the casino level. By the time I got there, the bad Jane was out of sight. As I stood searching for some sign of which way she’d gone, a security guard approached me. I recognized him as the same guard who’d eyeballed me when I’d first entered the building, and I hesitated, not sure whether he was a Troop member, a Scary Clown, or a civilian.

A second security guard tackled me from behind. He locked an arm over my windpipe and tried to shove me up against the wall, but he was no bad Jane: I melted out from under his chokehold, reappeared behind him, and gave him a double shot of narcolepsy to the back of the head. Then I turned to deal with the first guard, but he’d already been knocked senseless by a burst of sound from a brass-belled Clown horn.

“Hello again, Jane,” Robert Love said. “Enjoying the rush?”

“Yes, actually…But you could have told me in advance.”

“What, and spoil the surprise? That wouldn’t be very tricky.” He giggled, but then his grin turned to a grimace. “Ouch!”

“Love?”

I was worried he’d been shot, but he didn’t fall down. He stretched out his arm, opening and closing his fist. “Must’ve pulled a muscle climbing out of the elevator…No matter. Listen: I’ve got Clowns on X-drugs guarding all the primary exits, but that will only delay her. You need to hunt her down before she finds another way out.”

“Right…” I stared at the casino floor, focusing on the individual fibers that made up the carpet. Out of the thousands of random impressions left by passing gamblers, a fresh set of footprints appeared, as visible to me as tracks in grass. “Got her.”

I sprinted away at superhuman speed. The bad Jane’s trail led out under the pyramid atrium, where another pair of security guards tried to get in my way. I’d just finished taking them down when I heard a horn blast off in the distance. I ran towards it, and the bad Jane came darting right in front of me, her hair more than just mussed, now—she looked like she’d been through a tumble dryer. She saw me and tried to snap off a shot, but the barrel of her NC gun had cracked, rendering it as harmless as the toy it appeared to be. A look of real fear came into her eyes then, and she took off in a blur.

I stayed right on her heels. I could sense that she was almost out of power, in need of another dose, but between the Mandrill bomb explosions and the horn blast, any X-drug vials she was carrying would have shattered by now. All I had to do was keep pressing her until she was completely tapped out.

I chased her into a corner of the atrium, where she broke through another stairwell door. The stairs went up, the flights staggered to follow the incline of the pyramid. The geometry of it made me dizzy, so I forced myself not to look up the central well and just concentrated on running. By the time I passed the fifth landing, it was more like flying.

We flew up and up, all the way to the top—I nearly caught her at the three-quarter mark, but she put on a final burst of speed and pulled away again. Then I was at the top landing, in front of a door that radiated heat. The door was unmarked, but if you were going to make a sign for it, the symbol off the organization coin would have been a good choice.

I nudged the door open and stepped into the eye of the pyramid. It was like stepping into the sun: the Luxor’s searchlight was the size of a swimming pool, and though it pumped most of its energy into the sky, enough reflected back off the inside of the glass cap to turn the room into a bake oven.

My pupils shrank to pinpoints as I climbed onto the catwalk that encircled the searchlight. The air above the light was one big heat-shimmer, but I thought I glimpsed a human outline on the far side of the catwalk.

“You might as well show yourself,” I said. “I know you’re here, and you don’t have enough juice left to get past me.”

She solidified. “Careful with the gun.” She gestured at the glass walls. “If you miss…”

“I’m not going to shoot you. I need you awake so I can beat the truth out of you.”

“The truth.” She smiled. “You sure you want the truth, Jane? Because the truth is, even if you get me to tell you where Phil’s hiding, you won’t save him. He belongs to the Troop now. You might catch him, but you won’t turn him. He’ll curse you for even trying.”

“Why don’t you let me worry about that?”

“I know you are worried about it. That’s why there’s a part of you that really would like to shoot me, to shut me up before I can talk. Go on, check it out.”

I glanced down at the gun in my hand.

The dial was turned to the MI setting.

“Yeah,” the bad Jane said. “If you kill me, Phil gets away, and then you can go on pretending there’s hope. But there is no more hope, Jane. You had your chance to protect Phil twenty-three years ago. Now he’s got power, and position, and a purpose—more than you ever had—and he’s never going to give that up willingly. He might have shared a little of it with you, but that chance is gone too. So all that’s left is death. You can hunt him down and execute him, like the bad monkey he is. Is that the truth you’re looking for, Jane? You want to be responsible for finishing Phil off?”

As she talked, she moved along the catwalk towards me. She started to get a little too close for comfort; I took a step back and my heel caught, throwing me off-balance. It was all the opening she needed. She came forward in a blur, chopping her hand against my wrist to make me drop the gun. Then her hands were around my neck.

“Don’t fight it,” she said. I tried to melt away, but she held on to me firmly, using the last of her power. “Don’t fight it, Jane…You know this is the best way.” She bent me backwards over the catwalk railing. I felt the heat of the light scorching me. “Just let go. Just let go. No more guilt for you, no more screwups, and Phil gets to go on…”

With the last of my strength, I reached up, placed a palm flat against her chest. I pushed, merged, my hand passing through her jacket, her skin, her breastbone. I grabbed her by the heart, and squeezed.

She gasped and let go of me. She tried to step away, but I lifted her off the ground.

“Now,” I said. “You’re going to tell me where my brother is…”

Her arms and legs started flailing like mad, but her slaps and kicks were nothing to me. I pivoted around, lifting her over the railing to dangle her above the searchlight. I concentrated; the light blazed up, not just like the sun now, until I could see all the way through her, all the way to her soul. Steam, then smoke, curled off of her.

“Tell me where he is,” I said. I gave her heart one more squeeze.

She threw her head back, screamed it out; the words echoed off the glass tent as the light continued to blaze.

“Thank you,” I said. “And good-bye, Jane.”

I opened my hand. Her body, limp now, slipped free. Descending, she flashed into fire, the light consuming her more thoroughly than a Mandrill bomb. Not even ashes were left.

Tapped out, dripping with sweat, I slumped against the catwalk railing.

A dark shape moved at the edge of my vision. There was a flash of pebble glasses.

“Well,” Dixon said. “That was rather medieval.”

“I didn’t like her,” I told him. “I don’t like you much, either. But that doesn’t matter now…I know where Phil is.”

“Yes, I heard. I hope she wasn’t lying.”

“She wasn’t. But we’re going to have to move fast. By now Phil will know that this operation has gone wrong. When the bad Jane doesn’t report in, he’ll run.”

“Not to worry.” Dixon flipped open his cell phone. “I have a Bad Monkeys strike team standing by.”

“I don’t want any help. Just get me to him, I’ll go in alone.”

“You aren’t going in at all. Even if I trusted you, you can barely stand.”

“Even if you trusted me? What…Wait. What do you mean, ‘strike team’?”

“What do you think I mean?”

“No. We’re supposed to bring Phil in alive. Love promised me he’d honor True’s deal.”

“Love is on his way to the hospital,” Dixon said. “He had a heart attack—a real one. That puts me in operational command.”

“It doesn’t change the deal! You can’t—”

“You know that bomb you left on the baccarat table? The technician we sent in to defuse it said that the ‘damper switch’ was just a dummy. If it had gone off, it would have killed everyone in the casino.”

“It wasn’t Phil who put me up to that. It was her.”

“It was his plan. This is the sort of thing your brother does for the Troop. This is what he is, now…And I am not going to go in soft and risk letting him escape, just to assuage your guilt about being a bad sister.”

“You prick,” I said. “You’re just doing this to spite me!”

“I’m doing it because it’s the right thing to do.” He raised the cell phone to his ear.

I scooped my NC gun off the catwalk.

“Don’t be a fool,” Dixon said.

“Don’t think I won’t…” The dial was still on the MI setting. I tried to switch it back to narcolepsy, but it must have been damaged in the fall. It wouldn’t budge.

A cold smirk formed on Dixon’s lips as he watched me struggle with the dial. “How very convenient,” he said. “To stop me, you’ll have to kill me…And as there are no witnesses, you’ll be free to blame the bad Jane…”

“Shut up!” I banged the dial against the catwalk railing. It still wouldn’t turn. “Put down that goddamned cell phone!”

“No.”

“I’m not going to let you kill my brother, Dixon.”

“And what about all the other people he’ll kill, if he gets away? I suppose you’ll blame their deaths on the bad Jane, too.”

“Dixon—”

“Go ahead,” he said, staring me down. “Pull the trigger. Prove me right.”

“No.”

“No?”

“No…” Relaxing my grip, I let the gun drop. It bounced off the catwalk and vanished into the light.

Behind the pebble glasses, I caught the tiniest flicker of relief. “That’s better,” Dixon said. “Now—”

Before he could finish his sentence, I dipped my hand in my pocket and came out holding the bad Jane’s knife.

“I’m not going to let you kill my brother,” I repeated. “But you’re wrong about the rest of it. I take full responsibility. For everything. For Phil.”

Then I flicked open the blade and stepped towards him.