Dealer's Choice

Friday night

September 21, 1990

The bodysnatcher waited by the Jersey Gate with the cowards and weak sisters. A fog was rolling in off the bay. The light from the setting sun brushed a hundred-odd silent, frightened faces as the small clot of jokers and jumpers waited.

A few stragglers were still crossing the causeway, lugging whatever they could lug. Most had bedrolls or blankets. A few were carrying their pathetic little sacks with all their worldly possessions. No one had any weapons. Bloat’s joker guards had relieved them of guns and knives. They could leave if they wanted to, but the guns stayed behind to defend the Rox.

Pulse’s body was all the weapon the bodysnatcher needed. No one dared to say a word to him.

He looked at the crowd around him. A bare hundred jokers had shown up, out of the thousands on the Rox. Old women, the sick and feeble, a few mothers with small children. Nobody who’d be missed.

The jumpers were clustered together under the watchful eyes of Bloat’s demon guards. The bodysnatcher counted them twice, and came up with twenty-one. Twenty-two counting him. The world’s only middle-aged jumper.

He was taking a risk. Someone might recognize the Pulse body. But the bodysnatcher had made it hard for them.

He’d shaved his head, plastered tattoo transfers over his face. A death’s head moth spread its wings around his eyes. He was wearing a filthy pair of denims and a leather vest. Under the vest he was bare-chested. There was a safety pin through his right cheek, and another in his left tit. His nipple leaked blood like a mother leaking milk. That was all right. The pain kept him sharp. He didn’t think anyone would want to look at him too long.

Finally the huge gate swung open. Jokers on the walls stared down with contempt as they raised the portcullis. Outside, the bodysnatcher glimpsed men in uniform, trucks, a yellow school bus.

For a long moment, no one moved.

Then Juggler took a step forward. He was carrying a beat-up old suitcase in one hand, and the amnesty leaflet in the other. He looked back over his shoulder. “Let’s go,” he said.

The parade of cowards shuffled slowly out through the castle gate. Up on the ramparts, one of the guards unzipped and began to piss down on them as they passed, moving the stream back and forth as jokers and jumpers tried to scramble out of the way.

The bodysnatcher waited until almost the end, when the guard had run out of piss. Then he mixed in with a sorry bunch of jokers. Outside the gate a grizzled sergeant was directing traffic. “Jumpers left, jokers right,” he droned, over and over.

The trucks were parked to the right, military troop carriers, a double row of them. Uniformed soldiers were helping the jokers up inside. Father Squid was there too, tending to his flock. There were way too many trucks. The Combine had grossly overestimated the coward count. Off to the left, the jumpers were boarding a battered yellow school bus. The bodysnatcher studied the setup for a beat, then decided to go right, with the jokers.

He hadn’t taken more than three steps when two soldiers fell in beside him. One put a hand on his arm. “Excuse me, sir,” he said. “I think you want to go that way.” He pointed.

The bodysnatcher imagined all the ways he could kill him. “Where are you taking us?” he asked.

“Routine debriefing,” the soldier said.

The bodysnatcher went to join the other bozos on the bus.

The Outcast had orders for Modular Man. The Outcast was supposed to be Bloat in another form.

Which was certainly on a par with all the surrealism Modular Man had seen so far.

“We need to get some messages out,” the Outcast said. He held an amethyst-headed staff with the same casual, elegant sense of power with which a king held his scepter. “There are teams of jumpers and jokers we have waiting in the city and in Jersey. The only secure method of communications is by messenger.”

“The orders are important,” Kafka said. “We want you to carry them for us.” His mouth parts worked. “The governor has decided we need to take political action.”

“Political action?”

The Outcast gave an apologetic giggle that completely undermined his nonchalant air of authority. “Hey,” he said, “we’re gonna blow things up. Okay?”

“You’re certain?” Herne asked. “I mean, this is something you really want me to do, Governor?” His voice was eager, as were his thoughts — this was Herne the Huntsman speaking, not the daylight personality of Hardesty. The inner transformation had already begun.

“Yes,” the Outcast replied. He looked at the jokers gathered in the courtyard in front of the Crystal Castle. Bloat’s white body, snared in a web of spotlights, could be seen sleeping there, guarded as always by a few dozen jokers and a squadron of fish-knights. In the gathering darkness, the lights of the skyscrapers shone beyond the ebony stones of the Wall out in the bay. The Outcast raised his staff as if in benediction, the glittering rays from the amethyst touching the faces: Mustelina, Andiron, One-Eye, Squirt, Bumbilino, a handful more — all of their minds set and firm.

Angry.

Anxious.

“You want to know about Hartmann?” the Outcast said, and he let his power bleed into the words so that they sparked in the minds of the listeners. “You want to hear what I’ve heard in his mind? Let me tell you. Hartmann’s an ace, or he once was. A powerful ace and an evil one. He could make you dance to the strings of the power in his mind, and he used that power. He used it to get his kicks, to take pleasure from the pain of the jokers he controlled. He used us, his own little pet slaves. He used us to kill and maim and torment, and he let us be blamed for the things he made us do. Oh, Hartmann deserves this. Believe me.”

Herne pulled a handkerchief from his pocket. An ornate “H” was stitched on the cloth. He tossed it on the ground.

“Now,” the Outcast said to Herne.

This was a power the Outcast had never felt before. Most aces seemed to have powers that affected only their own bodies, made them stronger or faster or able to project energy in some way. Like Bloat himself. Hardesty/Herne affected the very shape of reality around him. As it had with so many others, the wild card had taken something from Hardesty’s mind and given it form. In the dark of night, Hardesty could become a figure from Celtic mythology: Herne, the leader of the Wild Hunt.

Herne took the battered silver horn that hung around his huge chest and inhaled deeply. He lifted the horn to his lips and winded the instrument. The note that emerged was pure and crystalline in the night air; as the sound lingered, storm clouds began to gather far above. A wind rose from the east, and the horn shimmered in the joker’s hand, the patina changing from tarnished silver to rich, polished gold, the dings and dents filling in until the surface gleamed and threw back the lights of the Crystal Castle. The Outcast’s skin prickled, the hair on his forearms lifting as if with static electricity. The long call continued to sound, impossibly loud and vast, like a celestial horn calling the end of the world.

But the world didn’t end. Instead, the heavens answered with a barrage of lightnings. As the mournful sound faded, it was replaced by thunder and wind and the wild howling of dogs. A mist rose around the courtyard, incandescent with its own light. The Outcast shivered, but Herne laughed, deep and resonant.

They came, the Hunt.

The mist coiled and folded; from the tendrils issued the shape of the Gabriel Hounds, fierce and glowing-eyed. Herne reached down and plucked the handkerchief from the ground. He threw the cloth toward the pack, and they pounced on it, sniffing and tearing, howling all the while. A lightning flash momentarily blinded the Outcast — when he could see again, Herne was leaping astride an enormous black stallion, and a herd of like beasts paced alongside.

Andiron clashed his steely fists like a gong against his chest and clambered onto the nearest steed, the other jokers alighting a few moments later. “Away!” Herne shouted. The hounds leapt and growled in response, the stallion reared underneath him. The others in the courtyard shouted with the Huntsman, and the Outcast heard his own voice join with them.

A great power here, one that tugs at you like an addiction.

The mindvoices raged like the storm, a cyclone of rage and fury and blood lust, all linked to the madness of Herne. The jokers, the jumpers — they howled like Herne’s beasts; they shouted and raised fists.

“Ride!” exclaimed Herne.

“Ride!” echoed the Rox, and dug their heels into the sides of their horses.

“Ride for Hartmann!” Herne exclaimed. His stallion screamed, the hounds bayed; like an onrushing stormfront, the Wild Hunt tore from the gates of the Crystal Castle, leaving the sleeping Bloat and the Outcast behind.

“Wait!” the Outcast cried, knowing he was snared in the web of fury that Herne spun but finding himself helpless to resist it. He wanted to be with them, he had to be with them.

“I’m coming too. Wait!”

The Outcast spoke a word of power and became lightning himself, streaking above the Hunt as they pounded from the shore of the Rox onto the frothing water of the bay, the mounts and hounds riding over the waves as if they were nothing more than rolling, transient hills. The Outcast followed, his breath fast, the wind of his passage ruffling his hair and making him squint. In a few minutes they came to the stone edifice of the Wall itself. Herne looked up, and the Outcast grinned back. He sent his power down to the Wall and opened the great gates facing Manhattan, letting the immense doors of oak and steel swing out to loose the Hunt. He flung himself forward to keep pace, crying as Herne sounded the horn again.

And he found that he could go no farther. The air became a solid fist and pushed back at him. He could not pass his own boundary. His world would not let him go.

“No!” the Outcast wailed, almost weeping. “Please!”

But the lust was already fading, his mind emerging from the spell of the Hunt as it moved farther and farther away from him. He could feel the strings that bound him eternally to the great form of Bloat. Those bonds were far, far stronger.

He could not ride with the Hunt. He was a prisoner in the Rox, confined to his own land.

The Outcast materialized on the top of the nearest tower. He pounded his fists on the stones there — they seemed substantial enough, cutting his flesh so that he bled and cried out. There, his hands gripping the cold blocks of granite, he watched the green fire and the blue lightnings of the Hunt recede over the bay, the turbulent cloud of death riding toward the city.

He found that he was crying, and there were too many reasons for the sorrow for him to sort out why.

Once, almost in another lifetime, it seemed, Wyungare had visited Outback-Disneyland. The experience, business aside, had been horrifying. It all came back. The stately voyage to the Rox rapidly evolved into Mr. Goanna’s Wild Flume Ride.

First, there was the environment. The skies, what he could see of them through the swirls of fog, were ablaze with lights, most of them moving at speed. No missiles, heavy shells, or other bombardment, at least. But glowing streaks of exhaust that might be reconnaissance craft. There was a lot of air traffic behind him over Manhattan. Many helicopter landings. A couple of times he saw what looked like human figures moving through the air rapidly, without benefit of craft.

Then all hell burst loose as a sudden thunderstorm seemed to brew over the approaching island. Wyungare blinked and averted his face as lightning forked and linked sky and earth. It looked like a radiant vision tree impressed on his retinas. The thunder rolled past a fractional second later, the concussion shoving the air before it like the blow of a nulla nulla.

Wyungare thought he heard howling, as though from rather larger predatory throats than he cared to encounter in the middle of the Upper Bay. Madhi? he wondered. Perhaps extremely large dingos. Lightning blazed again.

Further speculation was lost as the alligator dipped his snout like a diving plane and water sheeted across Wyungare’s fourteen-foot reptilian vessel. The black cat leapt backward and the Aborigine found himself with nearly two stone of soaked cat wound around his chest.

Does this reptile fear thunder and lightning? he wondered. It couldn’t be.

It wasn’t.

Jack’s massive jaws opened and closed like a medieval portcullis. The webbed, slightly glowing tail of some unknown fish flopped frantically outside of the teeth. The alligator gulped and the tail disappeared within.

Ah, thought Wyungare. Supper. Jack was a mighty engine that needed fuel. Feeding could not easily be denied.

The alligator jigged through the bay waves with remarkable agility considering his size. Jaws opened. Jaws closed. Some of the prey screamed.

The Aborigine tried to hook his strong toes around the curve of the reptile’s body. He leaned forward, keeping his center of gravity as low as he could, attempting not to be thrown loose into the frigid water. Crushed between Wyungare’s and Jack’s rough hide, the black cat wailed.

Then Jack’s particular feeding frenzy ceased. His teeth clicked together decisively a few more times as he turned his snout back toward the Rox.

Wyungare tried to let communication sink from his fingertips into the armor protecting Jack’s head. You’re doing fine, he wanted to say. Now let us make land. It will aid your digestion. And mine, he thought.

The feeling of approaching Bloat’s psychic barrier crossed a spectrum of apprehension. It’s like — Wyungare thought a bit fuzzily — it’s like approaching a glass wall at speed in a Land Rover. He thought of insects squashed on windscreens. He felt an unaccustomed dread, and then a sudden terror, the abrupt image of shattering glass smashing around him. He felt as though he were breathing in a cloud of microscopic shards. They stung like ice, like invisible razors, like venomous, stinging mites. Wundas. Evil spirits.

The Wall was closer than it had looked. Suddenly it loomed directly in front, the waves slapping against the peculiarly textured gray stone blocks. The Aborigine’s head cleared.

Wyungare touched the alligator and suggested that he follow the curve of the Wall in the direction the Aborigine believed a gate to be.

Indeed, the Aborigine, gator, and cat arrived at the gate after the voyage of only another hundred yards. Jack docked as smoothly as the Staten Island Ferry pulling into its slip. The side of the alligator bumped up against what appeared to be oaken beams, but sounded more like heavy steel ringing like a gong.

Wyungare gingerly rapped his fist against the door. It did feel like metal. And it rang like metal. His head throbbed. He pounded harder.

With a rusty creak, the gate swung inward.

Wyungare said to the darkness, “Thank you, I was afraid I was going to have to bloody my knuckles.”

Light grew within the gateway. The entrance was lined with truly grotesque Boschian creatures. Beside them, the intermixed jokers looked like matinee idols.

“You a nat or what?” said one of the jokers.

“What,” said Wyungare. He motioned. “This is an alligator. That’s a cat.”

“I know the nursery rhyme,” said the joker. “So where’s the owl?”

Wyungare stopped, bewildered for a moment.

“Don’t worry, you’ll catch on,” said the roller-skating penguin, suddenly weaving its way through the crowd of guards. “So. You have business with his Bloatitude? Or just another version of the Circle Line cruise way off course.”

“That is correct,” said Wyungare. “The first hypothesis. I have important business with the one called Bloat.”

"Well, he’s pretty busy,” said the penguin. “The war and all. Could you perhaps come back tomorrow?”

Wyungare felt like he was in Lewis Carroll Land. “Tomorrow, no. It is essential I see your… governor now.”

The penguin spun on the tip of one skate. “It helps me concentrate,” he said once he’d stopped. “All right, then. It’s off to the castle with you.”

Wyungare stepped into the gateway.

“Them too,” said the penguin, dipping its beak toward the cat and the alligator.

The guards, joker and simulacra alike, drew back when Jack hauled his long, armored body out of the bay and into the opening in the Wall.

Suddenly the cat sprung from Jack’s back and grabbed the penguin in his paws. Bird and beast rolled over and over as the guards glanced at one another.

Wyungare shook his head. “They are just playing,” he said reassuringly.

The penguin sat up, laughing uproariously. The cat purred and rubbed against the penguin’s feathered haunches.

“Perhaps we should go,” said Wyungare. “We’re off to see the wizard.”

“I don’t know how I do it,” Danny told him. “I mean, I do know, but there’s no good way to put it into words.”

She was perched on Detroit Steel’s right shoulder, legs crossed, Giants cap pulled low, looking down on Tom in his shell. They were alone with the empty armor. The soldiers had turned on the floodlights, and the outfield grass was a deep, rich green.

Zappa and von Herzenhagen had been taken off by helicopter, to supervise the surrender at the Jersey Gate. Pulse still hadn’t shown. The other aces had gone inside to get some rest. No one was saying when they’d be sent into action. There way no way Tom could get his shell down the narrow tunnel under the grandstands, so he’d been left behind to guard center field. The ponytail Danny had stayed to keep him company. "There’s six of you, right?” Torn said.

“There’s one of me,” Danny corrected him, “in a bunch of different bodies.”

“So,” Tom said, “so one of you is in New York, and three are in Minneapolis, and one’s in Chicago, and.…I mean, you’re in six different places at once. Doing six different things at the same time. Seeing different things. Feeling different things. I mean, how do you make sense of it?”

Danny pushed back her Giants cap, shrugged. “You ever eat and watch TV at the same time?” she asked. “Well, how do you do that? I mean, you’re doing two things at once, right? Doesn’t it get confusing?”

Tom thought about that for a moment. “I see what you’re getting at,” he said. “Have you always had six bodies?”

“Remind me never to introduce you to my mother. Giving birth to one baby was distasteful enough to hear her tell it. She’d be mortified at the suggestion that she popped a litter.” She grinned. “There was only one of me at first. I hardly remember what that was like. I drew my wild card when I was three. They thought I was going to die. I got very sick, and very big. You should see the pictures. I looked like Bloat’s little sister. Then I started to split. Mom was set to have kittens. The family wasn’t ready for a Siamese twin. When I turned into two perfect little girls, the relief almost killed her.”

“Only two?” Tom said.

“At first,” Danny said. “Would you believe it, they made both of us go to school. What’s the use of being two people if both of them are stuck in Miss Rooney’s class reciting the multiplication tables? My parents even named the other me. Michelle. I never paid any attention. I knew both of us were Danielle, even if nobody else did.”

“And your other, ah, sisters? When did they —?”

“When I hit puberty, I hated myself. I wanted to be taller. With beautiful long dark hair. No freckles. And boobs. I was thirteen and neither of me had any boobs at all.”

She had boobs now, Tom reflected silently as he watched her on her screens. They were right there under her shirt, giving a hint of curve to the bulletproof vest. "Next thing I knew,” Danny said, “one of me was getting big again. The splits take about a month. Fortunately, there was another me to go to school, so I didn’t miss anything.”

“Did you get, ah… everything you wanted?” Tom asked delicately. He couldn’t quite bring himself to say “boobs.” All of a sudden he felt strangely shy.

Danny grinned. “Oh, yeah. No freckles at all. Or were you thinking of something else?”

Inside the shell, Tom found himself blushing.

“You should have seen me in a bikini,” Danny said. “After that, it was easy. My dad tried to pretend we were triplets, but I’d started to see the possibilities. One of me kept on with school, one took up dance fulltime, and one helped out down at Dad’s store. After a while, I decided the world was too big for three of me to handle, and I split again. For a few years there, I gave myself a new body every year for my birthday. I stopped when I hit my lucky number.”

“Six,” Tom said thoughtfully. “Do all of your bodies split off the original?”

Danny polished Detroit Steel’s tailfin idly with her sleeve. “Nah,” she said. “Any of me can make a new me.”

“Which one of you is the original?”

“That would be telling,” Danny said coyly. “Besides, I’m not sure I remember. It was a long time ago.”

“How old are you anyway?”

“Free, white, and twenty-one,” she replied cheerfully.

“You don’t look more than nineteen.”

“Tell me about it. I still get carded everywhere I go.” She made a disgusted face.

Tom remembered when he’d been twenty-one, half a lifetime ago. Even then, he didn’t have a fraction of Danny’s energy or optimism. All of a sudden, he felt old, tired, and depressed.

“So there you have it, Mr. Turtle Sir,” she was saying, “the story of my life.” She flashed a crooked grin. “Your turn.”

That took Tom aback for a moment. Then he laughed. “Nice try,” he said, “but no way.”

“No fair,” Danny protested. “I showed you mine.” Tom was glad she couldn’t see him. He was blushing again. Forty-six years old, and all of a sudden he felt like he was in high school again. “I prefer to remain an enigma,” he said. “Don’t you read Aces? Mystery is the Turtle’s middle name.”

“And what are the Turtle’s first and last names?”

Tom laughed again. But Danny made a short, sharp gesture with her hand, cutting him off. Her head was cocked to one side, listening. “What’s wrong?” he asked her.

“Do you hear that?” she asked.

Tom couldn’t hear a thing. He turned a dial, boosting the volume on his exterior mikes, filling the shell with the familiar sounds of the Brooklyn night: a distant roar of traffic, a horn blaring, the rumble of a tank.

Then he heard it.

Far off and small, yet somehow it cut through the street noise to bring a chill to the blood. A baying, as of..

“Dogs.” Tom said. “A lot of dogs.”

“Hounds,” Danny said. Suddenly she was all business. She jumped down off Detroit Steel, landing with catlike grace on the balls of her feet and snatching up her M16. “I grew up in the north woods. I know the sound of a hunting pack.”

High, high overhead, a lightning bolt crashed across a clear sky. The thunderclap came an instant later.

It was warm and close in the steel confines of his shell. But Tom Tudbury shivered.

“Croyd, wake up, would you?” The Outcast shook the form on the bed. The bedsprings rattled, but Croyd continued to snore. From the doorway, the two guards that Kafka had set to watch the Sleeper stared silently.

“Bet if he got those adenoids fixed, he wouldn’t snore like that.” The Outcast turned to see the penguin, doing tight little figure eights on the ledge of the high tower window. The guards grinned; the penguin waved back at them.

The Outcast sighed and straightened up. He exhaled loudly. “He’s gotta wake up,” he said. “We need him.” He gestured at Croyd. “Look at that body. Those orifices have to do something.”

“Well, I have other visitors for you, Your Largeness. They came to help.”

“More aces?” the Outcast said, suddenly eager. “Who?”

“An alligator, a cat, and an aborigine.”

"Oh, them. I heard. Thought there was supposed to be an owl along with that.”

“So they didn’t quite get it right. Are you perfect?” The Penguin attempted a triple axel, failed, and did a pratfall to the floor. It grinned up at the Outcast. “So you coming or not?”

“I’ll be there in a moment.” The Outcast looked down again at Croyd and sighed once more.

The penguin clucked at him. “You might try an alarm clock. Hey, okay, I’m going, I’m going.”

Tom’s fingers tightened on the armrests of his chair. He pushed with his mind. The shell rose slowly off the ground.

There was another flash of lightning. He heard rolling thunder. Then the baying came again, louder this time, closer. There was something terrifying about the sound. The way it lingered on the wind and chilled the soul. It was a dark, primal sound. It turned his bowels to water.

Tom turned up his speakers to drown out the distant hounds. “GET TO HQ,” he told Danny. “WARN HARTMANN AND THE OTHERS.” She didn’t move. She stood there listening, cradling her M-16. “NOW!” Tom thundered. “WE DON’T HAVE MUCH TIME.”

Danny turned her head slightly, looked up at him. The wind was rising. Her baseball cap went sailing off her head. “I’ve told them already,” she said. “They’re on their way up.,’

Her sisters, Tom remembered. Before he could reflect on it, the others came boiling out of the tunnel beneath the grandstands. Cyclone and Mistral in their fighting suits. Snotman in army fatigues, Mike Tsakos in his skivvies, Radha O’Reilly in a sari, a bunch of Dannys and a larger bunch of uniforms. Hartmann stopped by the dugout. He looked scared. Somewhere off to the west, thunder rumbled, and they heard the stutter of machinegun fire.

The Turtle crossed the infield, his shadow rippling across the model Rox, the rising winds buffeting his shell. “WE’RE UNDER ATTACK,” he told them. He wasn’t sure how he knew, but he did.

A grizzled, red-faced old man in a lieutenant colonel’s uniform was the first to gather his wits. “Cyclone, Mistral, do something about this wind,” he ordered in a southern accent so thick you could cut it with a knife. “Tsakos, get your skinny butt in those iron long johns and go reinforce the main gate.” Tsakos went running off toward center field. “We need to find out what’s happening out there. Turtle, you-”

“Dear God,” Hartmann interrupted, his voice shrill with sudden fear. He looked around wildly. “They’re after me.”

A lightning bolt crackled toward the west, underlining his words. The call of a hunting horn shuddered through the night, faint but distinctive.

“We don’t know who they’re after,” Vidkunssen began.

“Can’t you hear it?” Hartmann screeched. “Dear God.” He sounded close to hysteria.

The thunder was louder, the lightning flashing all around. But under it, you could hear the eerie baying of hounds, coming closer and closer.

“Corporal Shepherd,” the lieutenant colonel drawled in his grits-and-bourbon tones, “the senator’s a little upset. Escort him back to headquarters and get him a warm glass of milk.” He looked around at the aces. “You, Booger —”

“My name is Reflector,” Snotman insisted.

“You let anything happen to the senator, boy, and your name is Shit, you got that?” the old man snarled.

Corporal Danny put a gentle hand on Hartmann’s arm. “Come with me, Senator. We’ll keep you safe.”

He wrenched away from her violently. “No,” he said. “They’ll find me. They’ll get me.”

The cracker colonel spat. “Shit, boy, get a hold of yourself. It’s just someone out walking his dawgs.”

Hartmann backed away from them. His head twisted back and forth, like a rabbit about to bolt. “Run,” he shouted over the wind, over the sounds of automatic weapons fire from the street outside. “We have to run. We have to get away from them…”

A lightning bolt flashed down and touched one of the light towers. For a moment a brilliant shower of sparks lit the night. Then the field went dark. The hounds were very close now. Outside the walls, someone screamed.

Even the grizzled old colonel looked shaken by that scream. He spit, and made a decision. “You up there,” he shouted at Tom. “The senator’s a little nervous. Maybe you should get him someplace safe. Can you do that?”

“NO PROBLEM.” Tom thought of a hand. Invisible fingers closed gently around Hartmann, lifted. Tom deposited him on top of the shell. Hartmann was hyperventilating, his eyes wide. “HOLD ON, SENATOR,” Tom told him. “THIS COULD BE A BUMPY RIDE.”

“I just don’t have time for this,” said Bloat. “I don’t. I really don’t.” He rolled his head distractedly.

Wyungare gazed up at the immensity that was the overgrown boy. The joker called Kafka set one chitinous appendage on the Aborigine’s shoulder. Wyungare shook it off.

“Sorry,” said Kafka. “That’s it for the audience. I’m afraid there’s a war on.”

Wyungare ignored him. “You have to listen to me,” he said to Bloat. “What I described to you about the destruction wrought to the dreamtime is, if anything, understated.”

“Later,” said Bloat. “I can’t worry about it now.”

“There are millions, many millions of human beings around this world whose lives are being destroyed by you, however inadvertently.”

’No!” said Bloat. “There are hundreds on this island whose lives will be destroyed if we don’t figure a solution. They count more to me than your millions. Sorry.”

Bloat’s advisers murmured, mumbled, nodded appreciatively.

“I can appreciate that,” said Wyungare. “Your loyalty to your friends here, your colleagues, is admirable. But is it possible that both our purposes can be served? Perhaps if we simply reason this out."

Bloat said. “How many penguins can skate on the head of a pin?”

The penguin performed a series of tight infinity signs, each one precise and equal to the one before it.

Bloat nodded. “We will talk, but another time.” He pointedly directed his look toward Kafka.

Agitated, the joker looked from Wyungare to Bloat. He took a step forward. The sound of his body was like the sound of a barrel of steel flatware rolling downhill. “So where do you want I should take him?”

“A cell, I think,” said Bloat. “For tonight, anyhow. Tomorrow, we’ll talk. I promise,” he said to the Aborigine.

“I think it will be too late.”

“Can’t be helped,” said Bloat. “The feds didn’t consult me before setting up their offensive.”

“What about the gator?” said Kafka.

Bloat rolled his eyes. “Put him in the moat. He can earn his keep as one of the guards.”

“How we gonna get him there?” said the joker practically.

Bloat thought for a moment. “I’ll have one of the guards waiting out front on his fish mount. If that doesn’t work as bait, I don’t know what will.”

“What about the cat?” said Kafka.

“What cat?” said Bloat.

Kafka glanced around the huge chamber confusedly. “He was right over — shit, I don’t know where he went.”

The Aborigine smiled. No one but he had seen the black cat depart.

“I’m ready to go to my room,” Wyungare said. He held out his wrists as though expecting iron shackles.

“Just go,” said Kafka disgustedly. “I’ll tell you which way to turn and when to stop. If that doesn’t meet with your approval, well, then I’ll just fill you with nine millimeter.” He hefted his rifle suggestively.

“It’s not too late to discuss this,” said Wyungare over his shoulder.

"Yes, it is.” Impatient, Bloat clearly turned his attention to other things. Kafka gave a shove to his prisoner and Wyungare moved toward the door.

Wyungare sensed the presence of the black cat as Kafka and he moved up a spiral climb of stone steps. Good.

The cat would know the Aborigine was confined. And thus, so would the alligator. And that seemed, to Wyungare, to be important.

Out in the streets of Brooklyn, nature had gone mad.

The street lamps were shaking in the grip of gale-force winds. Thunder was booming all around. Down below were screams, shouts, howls, a tank rumbling around a corner, the chatter of machine guns and the whine of rifles. Soldiers were scrambling everywhere like frantic cockroaches. The hounds were among them, dozens of them, more than he could count, huge pale wolfhounds with glowing eyes.

A spear of lightning flashed down, throwing everything in sharp relief for a split second, etching the scene forever in Tom’s memory. The images seemed frozen on his screens. Blood swirling into a gutter. A white hound as big as a pony, tearing out the throat of a downed soldier. Another bounding after a jeep, dissolving into mist as a stream of tracers ripped it open.

The light faded; darkness closed in. It took his eyes a moment to adjust. The thunder slammed into the shell with an almost physical force. For a moment it broke his concentration. Twenty-three tons of steel and armor plate dipped, then plummeted down like a dropped saucer. Hartmann yelled something incoherent into his mikes. Tom jerked the shell to a sudden stop, tasted blood in his mouth where he’d bitten his tongue. Too close, only ten feet off the ground, he had to get higher. He saw motion from one corner of his eyes, glanced back…

The hound smashed up against the glass, snarling. “Jesus!” Tom said. If the TV lens had been a window, the thing would have come right through. The shell slid sideways. Tom heard claws scrabbling for purchase against his armor as they began to fall again. Hartmann shrieked. Tom was breathing hard. The sound was deafening; thunder, gunfire, howling. On top of the shell, Hartmann was on his knees, fighting for his life. The hound had his right hand in its jaws. Its eyes glowed a baleful green. Other hounds were closing in.

Tom reached up with his telekinesis. He reached deep inside the hound, wrapped a telekinetic hand around its heart.

He thought of claws, and squeezed.

The beast’s massive head snapped back, and it howled in sudden agony, shuddered… and then it was gone, melting away into green mist, dissolving on the wind. Tom pushed up, hard and fast. The hounds leapt after him, missed the rising shell by inches.

“Senator,” Tom said. Hartmann had collapsed atop the shell, sobbing, cradling his mangled fingers. “I’m sorry,” Tom said, not even knowing if Hartmann could hear a word. “I didn’t know they could jump so high, I…”

Another lightning bolt blew apart a street lamp ten feet below him. He had to get the fuck out of here. The shell would draw the storm better than a lightning rod. All it would take was one hit to fry his electronics… not to mention the senator.

Torn pushed and the shell rose straight up, a steel balloon. The thunder battered at him. He turned off his exterior mikes. The sudden silence was a blessed relief. He was pushing higher, higher. He never heard the horn wind, but when he scanned his cameras again, the Hunt was coming down the street.

There were a dozen riders on huge horses with glowing green eyes. They flowed down the center of Bedford Avenue like water. Behind came a ragtag mob of animals, some with two feet and some with four. Feral dogs, poodles, and cocker spaniels with glowing eyes, street punks and winos and cops, for chrissakes, a whole phalanx of bikers on chopped Harleys. His sound was off, but Tom could see how their mouths twisted as they screamed, and he knew they were screaming for blood. There was nothing human left in any of those faces. Ahead of the mob, ahead of the armed jokers on the horses, he came. The Huntsman… It was the joker he’d seen on the Rox, the stagman with the antlers, but now he seemed transformed. He was naked, his shaggy red mane moving in the storm winds, his eyes glowing green. A golden dragon horn hung across his chest. Green fire played along his antlers and flickered around the great spear he held.

“Holy fuck,” Tom said aloud.

Somehow the Huntsman seemed to hear him. He pulled up suddenly, the great black stallion rearing as if it were about to prance into the sky. The hounds seemed to go wild, leaping, snapping. Then the street in front of the Huntsman exploded.

Horses, hounds, and riders went tumbling through the air. A burst water main fountained upward. Somehow the Huntsman kept his mount, leaping nimbly over the torn pavement, then moving toward the ballpark at a full gallop, more hellhounds coming hard at his heels.

In front of Ebbets, the tank had settled into position. Tom let out a cheer. A thin tendril of smoke trailed from the turret gun.

The Huntsman threw his spear without breaking stride.

It sliced through the air like a cold green thunderbolt, dead on, right up the barrel of the turret gun.

The gunner must have fired at the same instant, that was all Tom could think. The tank exploded. A huge gout of orange flame and green witch-light flowered in the street.

When the fire faded so Tom could see again, the Huntsman had his spear in hand once more. He gestured with it, pointing upward.

Pointing at the shell.

“You’re late,” Battle said flatly at the entrance to the graveyard of Our Lady of Perpetual Misery. Crypt Kicker stood slackly behind him, slumped against the moss-covered rock wall that cordoned off the tiny cemetery from the rest of the church lawn.

“You know how hard it is to find a shovel in New York?” Ray asked, dropping it at Battle’s feet. “I had to go all over the damn city looking for one. Who the hell ever digs in the ground in New York City?”

Battle gestured to Puckett who bent over slowly and laboriously to pick up the implement. The dead guy may be as strong as shit, Ray thought, but that’s also about how coordinated he was. The battle computer that was Ray’s mind filed that tidbit away for future reference.

“This way,” Battle said, leading the way into the graveyard. “And quickly. I’ve got to be someplace very soon.”

It was quiet inside, and peaceful except for distant thunder to the south. Ray looked up at the sky. It was clear above them, but there seemed to be a hell of a storm brewing in Brooklyn. Ray hoped that it’d stay there. The last thing he wanted was a rainstorm when he was screwing around in a graveyard at night.

Many of the cemetery’s headstones were small and plain. Only jokers were buried in the confines of Our Lady of Perpetual Misery, and most jokers couldn’t afford elaborate graves. The stones were also crammed closely together. A lot of jokers had been planted within the cemetery’s walls.

Battle stopped. He’d found the grave he’d been looking for. The tombstone was a simple one, with a grinning death’s-head chiseled into its top with the name “Brian Boyd” engraved below it. Boyd had been dead for two years.

“This who we’re looking for?” Ray asked doubtfully as he leaned against another tombstone that read simply “Chrysalis.”

Battle nodded. He gestured at Puckett and the ace began to dig. He was strong and he could move dirt fast. Ray, knowing the man had been dead once, considered asking him what it was like to lie in the ground. But then he decided it would be better not to know. Besides, he had a more pertinent question for Battle.

“What do you expect to get from this guy, anyway?” Ray asked.

Battle looked at him. “Boyd was known as Blockhead when alive —” Battle began, but his jaw slung open wordlessly as a ton of bricks landed on Ray’s back. Ray had time to think only, Christ, now what? then all conscious thought tied as he flowed into action.

He grabbed one of the arms that encircled his chest and pulled at it, but whoever had grabbed him was stronger, and that meant he was a strong fucker. Ace category. But Ray could also tell from the distribution of weight on his shoulders, back, and legs that whoever was holding him from behind was relatively human-shaped, unlike the flying squirrel man he’d fought that very morning. Human shape meant human weaknesses.

Ray fell forward, bringing his attacker with him, using him to break his fall. Whoever had him still wouldn’t let go, but Ray twisted like an eel, turned, and butted hard enough with the top of his head to bring tears to his eyes.

His head connected with the bottom of his attacker’s chin. Whoever had him pulled back at the sudden pain and Ray wriggled free.

Ray hit the guy three times before he realized who it was.

“Christ,” he said, and stood up.

Quasiman, Father Squid’s handy joker, lay on the ground, bleeding from his lips and nose. No wonder, Ray thought, he hadn’t heard anyone sneaking up on him. Quasiman was a teleport. He’d probably swooped down on Ray from his favorite position atop the church’s roof like a hawk on a pigeon, stepping off into space and materializing right before landing on Ray’s back.

“What are you doing?” Ray asked the joker-ace.

Quasiman straightened up slowly. He was big and ugly, hunchbacked and half-witted as well. But in the strength department he was up there with heavyweights like Modular Man and the Golden Weenie.

“Guarding the cemetery,” Quasiman said, “from grave-robbers.”

“Well, shit,” Ray said, “we’re not grave-robbers. We’re federal agents.”

He turned to Battle and Puckett. Battle was watching with a guarded expression. Ray found it as difficult as ever to read what was going on in his devious brain. Puckett was also looking on, frozen in mid-motion with a shovelful of dirt. The events of the last few seconds had totally overwhelmed what passed for his mental processes and he was still trying to figure out how to react. He came to a decision and resumed shoveling.

“We have a court order to exhume this body,” Ray explained. He turned to Battle. “Don’t we?”

“Indeed we do,” Battle said. He reached into his jacket pocket, extracted a folded sheaf of papers, waved them at Quasiman, and then put them away again.

Quasiman nodded slowly. “Why do you want the body?”

“It’s not the body,” Battle explained impatiently. “It’s — ah!”

There came the scrape of shovel on wood, and everyone gathered around the grave as Puckett scraped dirt off the top of the casket. He tossed his shovel on the back-dirt pile, then horsed the coffin out of its hole using brute strength. He tipped it over the lip of the hole and pushed it onto the ground. He clambered stiffly out of the grave, somehow looking very much in his element.

“Open it,” Battle commanded.

Puckett didn’t need a crowbar. He hooked one hand under the coffin’s lid and pulled. There was a squeal of protest as nails were yanked from holes they’d been in for two years. Ray screwed up his nose, expecting a hideous odor, but it wasn’t too bad.

There wasn’t much left of Brian Boyd, a.k.a. Blockhead. He hadn’t been a big guy to begin with and his remains had shrunken down to the size of a withered child.

Battle peered closely at the body, bouncing up and down on the balls of his feet like he did whenever he was excited. “There,’ he said, bending down and pointing. “The ring.”

Puckett bent stiffly and reached into the casket. There was a brittle cracking sound and he offered Battle the corpse’s desiccated left ring finger, ring still attached.

Battle shook his head. “I don’t want the goddamn finger. Just the ring.”

Puckett stripped the gold wedding ring off the finger and tossed the digit back into the coffin. He gave Battle the ring. Battle took it and put it into his coat pocket, smiling, happy as a goddamn clam.

Ray looked at Quasiman and suppressed a shrug. He still didn’t get it. But Battle was the boss.

The boss checked his watch. “Ah, good,” he said. “I still have time to make my appointment. Ray, I have one last thing for you to do tonight.”

He swept out of the graveyard, Puckett following him. Ray paused and looked at Quasiman, but found nothing to say. He followed Battle and Puckett from the graveyard. He looked back when they’d reached the gate and saw that Quasiman had retrieved the shovel Puckett had discarded. He was standing by the open coffin and empty grave, a bewildered expression on his sad, ugly face.

It took Modular Man hours to deliver the messages to all the joker combat groups hidden in various parts of the New York area. Most of them had been hiding in small apartments for days and — when he could read the jokers’ expressions at all — they seemed happy at last to have a chance to get out of their claustrophobic surroundings and attack something.

All the groups seemed to have television sets, and CNN’s bluish glow illuminated their crowded apartments full of sleeping pallets and weaponry. The rooms were crowded with the mingled scents of Cosmoline and unwashed bodies.

“They’re just discussing you,” said one adolescent. He was part of the last group to be visited, thin to the point of anorexia and pale enough to remind the android — with a private shudder — of the albino Croyd. He dressed all in gothic black and wore shades even at night. He seemed to be this group’s jumper.

Modular Man glanced up at the set and felt something flutter through his macro-atomic heart. The screen was full of a close-up of a blond woman named Cyndi. The television identified her as soap opera actress.

“I know Modular Man,” she said. “I know he’s not doing this from choice.”

“You tell um, bitch,” laughed one gray-skinned joker. He brandished his k-bar suggestively.

“Maybe he’s been jumped,” Cyndi said.

The interviewer’s response was reasonable. “How do you jump a machine?” he asked.

“Are you kidding? How do you jump a human?”

Modular Man had to admire her.

“He’s got to do what his creator tells him,” Cyndi continued. “He has to have been ordered to do this. Or maybe somebody’s messed with his programming. But if he’s fighting the government, I know it’s not from choice.”

The adolescent grinned up at Modular Man. His teeth were bad. “That true?” he asked.

“More or less.”

“Life sucks, huh?”

“That interpretation has occurred to me.” Images of Cyndi floated through his memory.

“And now you’re stuck on the Rox.” The kid laughed. “Man, I’m glad I’m not on that island being a target for napalm an’ cruise missiles an’ shit.”

“Your sympathy is noted.”

The kid laughed again, then jumped as lightning struck nearby and a blast of thunder rattled the windows. “Shit,” he said again.

Modular Man left to return to the Rox.

A strange, dark storm was hovering over Brooklyn, more or less where Zappa had his headquarters at Ebbets Field.

Modular Man didn’t want to know.

The Aborigine realized he was not the only prisoner in the drab cell block as Kafka led him down the narrow passage. At the very end of the hall was a young woman. She slumped against the barred door of her cell. Wyungare caught a glimpse of dark spiked hair and stained leather. He could smell her hysteria, a pungent odor that ate corrosively at his nostrils.

Two doors farther, the joker jammed a key into a lock and twisted. Then he tugged at the door. Wyungare helped him wrestle it open. Kafka stared at him sideways.

“Thanks,” he said.

“You’re weird, guy.” He shut the door after the Aborigine and locked it. “Sleep tight, people,” he said to the two prisoners.

Wyungare looked around at his new — temporary, he hoped — home. It looked like a medieval monk’s cell, or something out of a dungeon, which figured, considering what he could deduce about Bloat’s maturity level and range of interests. He put his palm against the wall. Hard, cold stone blocks. Unyielding.

The cell had no furniture. The only amenities were a hummock of loose straw in one corner, a galvanized steel bucket in the corner opposite. Wyungare shook his head. Obviously Bloat wasn’t expecting many guests.

But the environment didn’t matter. It was time to work.

He would make the formal acquaintance of his fellow prisoner later. Then he stopped. He heard the woman weeping softly and his heart went out to her. It didn’t take supernormal powers to pick up her feelings. The dark terrified her. So did the loss of power that came with imprisonment. Wyungare took a deep breath and let his soul range out.

The black cat yowled low in his throat just a short distance away. He had followed Wyungare and Kafka first up, then down to the cell block. Wyungare pushed just a little, made a suggestion.

The cat purred and ambled up to the barred door of the woman’s cell. He flowed between the bars almost as fluidly as quicksilver.

There was silence for a few seconds. Then, “Kitty?” said the woman. Wyungare felt the sense of arms wrapping tightly around the cat, hot tears spotting his warm fur. Wyungare offered thanks to the mirragen’s spirit.

Then he sat cross-legged on the stone, conscious of the fissures of the irregular surface imprinting in his flesh. He took a deep breath, another, began deliberately to control his respiration. Wyungare let the rhythm of his breathing fall into synch with the cycles of his body. One breath, four beats of his heart, then six beats. He slapped the stone with the heels of his hands. If he had no drum, he could make one.

And he descended into the lower world.

Wyungare found himself in something that looked like swampland. Good, that was what he had hoped for.

In the distance, he heard the mournful cries of a harmonica. He walked toward the sounds.

He had to circle the huge complex trunks of cypress. Most of the sun was shut out by the foliage canopy. The water now lay on either side of him, brackish and green with moss.

Finally, as the music grew louder — it was a French ballad, he finally decided — Wyungare rounded a clump of scrub oak and found a young boy, perhaps eight or ten, sitting on a fallen log and playing his juice harp.

The boy stopped when he saw Wyungare.

“You can keep on if you like,” said the Aborigine.

“I don’t mean to bother you, sir,” said the boy shyly. His hair and eyes both were the black of starless nights.

“It’s no bother,” said Wyungare. “Hello, Jack.”

“Do I know you, sir?”

Wyungare nodded. “We’ll take a walk, young man. We need to talk. I have a favor to ask of you.”

Jack looked at him curiously, but got up from the log.

By the time he neared the Brooklyn Bridge, Tom knew what he had to do. Hartmann was curled up on top of the shell, his bloody hand pressed to his chest, moaning. “Hospital… my hand…”

“I can’t,” Tom said. “They’d be on you in no time. The Hunt’s only five blocks behind me. I’ve been doubling back, dodging through alleys and over rooftops, trying to lose them, but they’ve got the scent, I can’t shake them.”

Thunder pealed behind them. The storm went before the Huntsman, it seemed.

“… hurts… “ Hartmann whispered.

“I’m sorry. Hang on a little longer.”

There was no reply. Tom glanced up at his overhead screen. The senator’s eyes had closed. He started to slide down the curve of the shell. Tom caught him with his teke, shoved him back up top. Hartmann whimpered in pain.

The great stone arches of Brooklyn Bridge loomed ahead of him. Tom slowed, hovered, looked around. There wasn’t much to work with, except…

“This is going to make me real fucking popular with the natives,” Tom muttered. But he didn’t see that he had a whole lot of choice. He summoned all his concentration.

A half-dozen cars parked along the bridge approach floated into the air, yanked upward by his teke. One slipped from his mind’s grasp. The windshield shattered as it hit the ground. “Fuck,” Tom said. The sound of the Huntsman’s horn came echoing through the night, and he heard the baying of hounds. There was no time.

He thought of a net.

He held it high in the air, above the street lamps, and began scooping parked cars into it, fast as he could. Three, five, ten, twelve, he grabbed them with his teke, shoveled them up into the net, where they slammed together. Twenty, twenty-five, thirty…

A dozen hounds came howling around a corner, a block away.

Tom fled, dragging his net behind the shell. Metal screeched, glass broke, and sparks shot off concrete as the jumble of cars bounced along in his wake.

The Hunt came howling after him.

He pushed harder. The shell picked up speed. He started gaining on his pursuers. The baying grew more frantic.

At the approach to the bridge, the Turtle stopped, hovered, and began to slam the shattered cars into place.

By the time the hounds reached him, the wall was there: a solid barrier of twisted metal, not as high as the one in his junkyard, but high enough to shut off the roadway.

A yellow cab, coming on too fast and braking too late, fishtailed and sideswiped the barrier. “GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE,” Tom roared down at him. The cabbie must have seen the hellhounds in his rearview mirror. He smoked his tires backing up, then lit out of there. One of the hounds bounded right over the taxi, staving in the hood as it bounced off.

Tom flew back over his barrier, onto the bridge.

More traffic was coming from Manhattan. “TURN AROUND,” the Turtle told them. “YOU DON’T WANT TO BE HERE.” A big limo saw the wall, slowed, stopped. “MOVE IT,” Tom thundered down. A taxi swerved around in a sudden U-turn. The limo began to back up. It got rear-ended by a Mercedes. “OUT OF HERE!”

If the drivers had any doubts, the sight of the first hound coming over the cars made up their minds.

The wall of wrecks barely slowed them. They were climbing it in the blink of an eye, leaping down the far side, baying up at the shell. The Mercedes reversed, backed, fled. The limo followed. Other traffic was turning back halfway over the span.

More hounds were bounding onto the bridge now. Behind came the Hunt. The Huntsman sounded his horn again, and took the barrier in full gallop. The great black stallion leapt clean over it, with a good five feet to spare. The other riders followed.

“OKAY, YOU CAN JUMP,” Tom said. “BIG FUCKING DEAL.”

He pushed higher, taunting them, way up in the air out of their reach, watching his cameras until the mob came into view.

Tom zoomed in on the faces. Cops, streetwalkers, bums, bikers, old women who’d taken their poodles out for a walk and gotten caught up in the blood lust as the hunt went by. People, that’s all. They had no part in this.

He thought of a portcullis. Made it a gate. Wide, solid, heavy, strong as iron. He pictured it in his mind’s eye. Then he brought it down. The metal barrier jumped with the impact. Cars crunched. A biker tried to ride his Harley over the wrecked cars, hit the invisible wall, and went flying. The mob found they could go no farther. They groped at nothingness, hit it, clawed at it.

“NO WAY PAST,” he told them. Nobody listened. This bunch wasn’t going to give up and go home. Lightning fingered the cables of the bridge like a demon harpist. Close, too close. Thunder swept over the shell. Beyond the wall, the mob was howling louder than the hellhounds.

He had to keep the wall in place, Tom thought wildly. He moved the shell out over the span. “The wall,” he muttered to himself, a frantic mantra. “The wall, wall.” The microphone caught his plea, sent it booming out into the storm. He held the wall firmly in his mind even as he left it behind.

The Hunt came howling after him.

He’d never moved the shell so fast before. He was forty feet above them, skipping along like a twenty-ton Frisbee. The massive stone arches of the bridge loomed overhead. Far below, the East River churned and foamed. The storm was whipping the river into a frenzy. Whitecaps danced a madman’s frenzy, waves crested and broke against the huge stone pylons. Lightning played among the drooping cables and lashed at the waters. The world had gone mad.

“The Wall,” Tom prayed. He clung desperately to the image.

The Huntsman had outdistanced the hounds and the other riders. For a moment it almost seemed as if the great bridge was shaking beneath him. His eyes were fixed on the Turtle’s shell, burning like two green stars. He blew his great horn, and now the bridge did shake. The hellhounds and the other riders followed, hot for blood.

“COME ON, YOU MOTHERFUCKERS,” the Turtle roared down at them. “COME TO POPPA.”

The Huntsman drew up beneath him, lifted his spear, threw.

There was a flash of green light that burned the eyes, and Tom felt his shell shudder, heard the scream of tortured metal. He blinked. Four feet of spear was sticking out of the floor, not a foot in front of his face. Smoke was still rising from the carpet where it had punched through. He could smell fused metal. The spear was golden, ornate, crackling with green fire. Without thinking, Tom reached for it, but it faded and dissolved before his fingers could touch it.

Wind whistled through the hole in the floor. Solid battleship plate, Tom thought numbly. He was too stunned to be afraid. The wall was forgotten. He only prayed the mob wasn’t on the bridge yet.

He thought of a hammer.

Bigger than that.

Bigger than that.

The biggest fucking hammer in the world.

He pictured it, half as wide as the East River, hanging in the air above the bridge. The hammer trembled. It was heavy. It was too fucking heavy for him to support it. He made it heavier still. Down below, the Huntsman raised another spear.

Tom let the hammer fall.

The center span of the Brooklyn Bridge exploded.

Stone, steel, and pavement blew apart like paper. The cables snapped with a screech straight out of hell. A huge fragment of roadway came spinning up past the shell. Tom barely had an instant to savor his glimpse of hounds, horses, and hunters all tumbling toward the river.

Then the shock wave hit, and swept him away.

Once Modular Man returned he reported to Bloat, who he found awake, with a few members of his staff and a bodyguard of fish-knights. Travnicek was nowhere to be seen. Modular Man made his report, then looked up at the vast figure. “May I speak with you, Governor?”

“Is it important?”

“To me.”

“Very well.”

“You know,” the android began, “if you’ve been in my creator’s head, that I’m here involuntarily. Seeing as that’s so, I’d like the same opportunity to surrender as was given your other followers.”

Bloat looked startled, then confused. “That’s Dr. Travnicek’s decision,” he said. “Not mine.”

Travnicek. So Bloat knew Travnicek’s name, presumably having plucked it from his mind. The android wondered if Travnicek would even care.

“As I understand it,” Modular Man continued, “your society on the Rox is based on ideals. Presumably your ideals don’t condone slavery.” The next piece had to be run several times through the android’s macro-atomic mind so that he could phrase it properly without disobeying his creator’s orders. He found himself having to phrase it as a theoretical problem.

“If someone brought a slave onto the Rox,” he said, “you could make it a condition of that person’s presence that the slave be freed.”

Even that was misleading: there was no way, short of ripping out circuits, that Bloat could “free” Modular Man from Travnicek. But Bloat could refrain from assigning him to any dangerous tasks.

“This is ridiculous!” Kafka said. “You’re a machine! The governor might as well free a Mixmaster!”

The android turned to him and tried to put quotes in his voice. “’The governor might as well free a roach.’ I am a sentient being, as are you. Either we are equal under Rox law, or we are not.”

“We are a society of ideals,” Bloat said. His high-pitched voice did not point to justice. “We’re fighting for our freedom, for our new country. All we ask is to be left alone.”

“I will leave you alone, if I can.”

“We hope you will join us of your own free will.”

“I am programmed to fight the enemies of society, barring my creator’s intervention. You would seem to be society’s enemy.”

“The enemy of what society? Have you noticed there’s more than one? How do you know George Bush ain’t the enemy of society?”

“I’m very careful in assigning those labels, if it’s left up to me.”

“That’s big of you, Mister Judge Your Honor Sir. We want nothing from the outside, let alone your labels.”

“You want nothing except the money you’ve stolen. The bodies you’ve stolen. The drugs and arms you’ve brought in illegally. The criminals to whom you give shelter, and the kidnap victims you permit them to bring here. And of course you want me to fight for your right to do that.”

Bloat’s voice was getting more insistent. “We’ve only taken what we’re owed. The outside doesn’t care about jokers! We do! That’s why we came here! We are a principled people.”

“If you wished to act with principle, you could have come out here with your group of idealistic jokers and occupied the place and issued your proclamations —”

“And starved to death.” Kafka’s voice was scornful. “That’s what happened to us — no one gave a damn. We needed those others to make it work.”

“As I understand it, idealists often suffer for their beliefs. It would seem to be part of the job description. And f you had starved here, you might have attracted favorable attention to your cause, sympathy, perhaps aid. But you didn’t want to suffer that way, so you let in the jumpers and the murderers and the drug dealers and the kidnappers and the arms merchants and the fugitives from the law.”

“The signers of the Declaration of Independence were criminals in the eyes of the British government,” Bloat said. “I don’t see any difference.”

“With respect, Governor, I see a number of differences between Thomas Jefferson and Governor Bloat. Not the least being that Jefferson and his allies were fighting to keep a land they already possessed, and hold it free from tyranny, while the other is trying to steal a land owned by others, with money he’s filched from strangers who have nothing to do with him, and in doing so is imposing tyranny on a rather wide variety of people, including myself, and I presume Pulse, and all those other people whose bodies the jumpers have stolen and hold in bondage.”

“Jefferson had slaves.”

“He didn’t create that system; he inherited it, and he had the decency to be embarrassed about it. What is more to the point, he didn’t demand that they fight for slavery.”

“Yeah?” There was a sneer on Bloat’s face. “Since you admire Jefferson so much, I tell ya what — I’ll follow his example. Jefferson didn’t free his slaves till after his death, right? I’ll give you the same consideration. Once I’m dead, you can leave.”If that’s the way you want it. The cold thought rolled through the android’s circuitry. He knew better than to say it.

He had used the wrong approach, he knew. He had expected to argue with an idealist, a figure knowledgeable on political and revolutionary theory. He hadn’t quite realized that Bloat was a barely educated adolescent whose political thought derived more from MTV than the Federalist Papers.

He was the pawn of a willful, desperate, and ignorant teenager.

If that’s the way you want it. That was always an option.

“Go away!” Kafka made shooing gestures with his hands. “We’ve got important things to consider! Go help your creator!”

“I am not aware that my creator needs any help.”

“He’s with the Wild Hunt! Go help him kill Hartmann and make yourself useful!”

Calculations snarled through the android’s circuits, ran into brick-wall hardwired imperatives. “That storm?” he said. “You let him go?”

“Hey, it wasn’t my idea.” Bloat laughed. “The guy jumped down from his tower, knocked Roly-poly right off his horse, hopped on, and rode off. He must have been susceptible to Herne’s message.”

Modular Man’s programming lifted him into the air and fired him out of the room like a gunshot. He had an image of Kafka and Bloat gaping in surprise and then the night and fog enveloped him.

He shot straight up to get out of the radar clutter and the fog, then took visual bearings. The dark storm was prowling over the eastern approaches to the Brooklyn Bridge, and Modular Man fired himself straight for it, streamlining his guns back over his shoulders to decrease air resistance.

He didn’t know what to hope for.

The storm seemed to lose intensity even as he raced for it — the lightning ceased to crackle, and the thunder died away. There was the brief radar image of a small flying object — the Turtle? — racing off to the north.

And then Modular Man was above the broken bridge, absorbing the shattered image of the shattered span, watching as emergency vehicles poured up the bridge approaches.

What if his creator was dead but never found? he wondered. He’d have to obey the dead man’s orders forever, defending the Rox till there was nothing left.

In cold panic he spiraled toward the water. A few figures splashed forlornly in a boiling tide that carried them toward Sandy Hook. The android floated down over the cold, choppy water, saw hands raised toward him in pleading. Stag horns jabbed high above the water, and the android sped toward them.

“Where is my creator!” he shrieked.

“Ah dinnut ken!” This did not seem to be Received Standard English. Herne gulped water, spat it out. “Find the hoern!”

Both Herne’s horns seemed to be all right. Modular Man ignored the frantic cry and began a swift spiral in search of Travnicek.

He found him close to the Brooklyn shore, swimming strongly across the tide toward land. Modular Man dropped into the water beside him, lifted him with arms across the chest, and brought him to the end of Brooklyn Pier 5.

Travnicek stood on the end of the pier, water pouring off his torn clothing. “Magnificent!” he shouted. There was a gloating tone in Travnicek’s voice; he didn’t seem injured. “I never knew how glorious it was to kill!”

“Sir? Are you hurt?”

“Pah!” He gave a contemptuous wave. “The horse broke my fall.” He tilted his head back and gave a howl. “Magnificent! I snapped that woman’s neck! I felt the shock run through her brain! I felt her terror. I tore at her neck with a piece of broken glass and licked her blood before she died.”

The android was appalled. His mind was refusing to process any of this. “I should return you to the Rox.”

“Lemme tell you something,” Travnicek said. He sounded exalted. “I learned an important lesson when the Krauts machine-gunned my family back at Lidice, okay? As I was lying under a bloody pile composed of my second cousins, I realized something. There are two kinds of people in this world — the shooters and the shootees.”

He gave a laugh. “The shooters are the ones with authority, and they have authority because they control the guns. The shooters kill other people, or they get other shooters to do it for them. And the rest — they’re bullet fodder. Bloat’s a shooter — you don’t see him out on the front lines risking his ass, do you? Even as the Outcast? Zelda’s a shooter — she’s got a whole other body to do the killing for her. And” He pointed at himself with his cilia. “I’m a shooter too. I got the best gun in the world — that’s you, toaster.”

Travnicek leaned closer to the android. His sensory necklace pulsed with emotion. “Are you a shooter or a shootee, toaster? A winner or loser? That’s what you gotta decide.” He pointed commandingly back out at the East River. “Find Herne and bring him here. I’ll want to ride with him again.”

“Yes, sir.”

There were fewer swimmers now, and the huge rack of horns made Herne easy to spot. The big joker was racing frantically toward the lights of the Brooklyn Bridge, but the tide was carrying him away faster than he could swim.

The android grabbed him by his shaggy mane and began to pull him toward shore.

“No!” Herne was almost sobbing. “Find thee the hoern! The hoern!”

“Your horns seem to be intact.”

“The hoern, the hoern! Aa lost me goelden hoern! Aa kinnut sommon th’ Hoont!”

Modular Man lifted the ace from the river, hauled him to where Travnicek waited by the pier. “Where is it?” he asked.

“Oonder thon bridge!” Herne pointed desperately.

Somehow Modular Man knew that, even with a featureless face, Travnicek was leering at him.

“Fetch, doggie!” Travnicek said.

The android arrowed toward the bridge, calculating distances, flow rates, wind velocity. The storm cloud overhead had completely dispersed, and only a few people were still swimming. Modular Man dove into the water and propelled himself toward the bottom.

Radar was useless under the water and the water was completely black. Even infrared vision revealed only crumpled ruin, huge chunks of bridge span lying in opaque clouds of bottom mud.

Finding the horn took him almost twenty minutes, working methodically, by feel alone. He was lucky he didn’t need to breathe.

When he rose from the water with the battered old hunting horn, the water was empty of survivors. So far as he knew, only Herne and Travnicek, of those who had fallen, had survived the end of the Wild Hunt.

Modular Man deposited Travnicek, a naked Dylan Hardesty, and a weed-snagged horn on the floor of the Crystal Castle. The Outcast was waiting there, below the dreaming Bloat, below the spectacle of Liberty’s torch. A bit of dirty East River water dribbled from the bell of the horn onto the tile floor.

The Outcast stared at the scene grimly. “So many gone… One-Eye, Bumbilino… God damn it!” His nostrils flared, the amethyst gleamed in purple fury. “How?”

Modular Man answered before Herne could speak. “Moose Man here did his best. Morning traffic’s going to be hell, that’s for sure.”

“Ye Tuhtle… destroyed the Hoont.” Dylan shuddered. The Outcast made a gesture with his hand; a large blanket appeared around the huge figure. In Dylan’s mind there was residual horror — remorse for what he’d done as Herne, fear from the memory of the bridge. The Manchesterian accent was thicker than usual. The coloring of dialect drifted into Dylan’s usual impeccable cultured British. “Ah dinnut see anything, but alla soodden sommting cum a’smashin’ inna oos and yonder bridge was toomblin’…” He pulled the blanket tightly around his shoulders. He paused and corrected his speech in his head. “Sometimes I hate myself, Governor. I really do.”

“I saw it,” Travnicek said. “A hammer of gravity and air. Excitement. Blood lust. It was.. pleasant.” There were odd images in the man’s head — he was seeing with some other sense than any the Outcast had ever experienced. It made for extremely confusing but very colorful images, like falling into a whirling Mandelbrot set.

“Hartmann?” the Outcast asked, and then plucked the thoughts from Dylan. “Still alive, yet my jokers are dead… Damn it!”

The Outcast pondered. Teddy was getting tired. Staying in the Outcast’s form for the last several hours had drained him. He could feel all the links; to Bloat’s body sleeping above him, to the demons, to all the physical changes he’d made here. They weighed on him, as if the Rox were a shell that he carried tortoise-like on his back. It would be very easy to fall into dreams right now. He could fall like a ghost through the caverns and gawk at the strange creatures there; he could maybe find Kelly and talk to her again, maybe even kiss one more time.

Ted shook his head, bringing himself back to the present. Travnicek had brought those strange eyeless tendrils around toward him. Yes … he was thinking, as if in sympathy. Dylan, with the mournful demeanor of an alcoholic regarding an empty bottle of Mad Dog, had picked up his horn from the floor.

One of the guards had gone to wake Kafka; Ted could hear his adviser rising, his thoughts still confused with the vestiges of dreams.

“The Hunt has failed,” the Outcast said slowly as Kafka scuttled in from his alcove. “I think we can still gain something from this. I really do. We forced an ace and the political leader of the military to run from their own headquarters. We caused panic and fear throughout New York for most of the night.” The Outcast was nodding, more because he could sense the uncertainty in the thoughts around him than because he believed what he was saying.

“Kafka — I want you to prepare a statement. Tell them that this was just a little of what they can expect if the Rox is attacked. Tell them that the Wild Hunt wasn’t destroyed, that it can return each and every night. Say that unless Hartmann and General Zappa and the others are reined in and any plans for attacking the Rox are shelved, we will continue to defend ourselves. We’re willing to talk, to negotiate, to do whatever we can to live peacefully here in our own country, but we won’t tolerate threats. We won’t be responsible for the destruction or the deaths that will occur if President Bush and the government of the United States persist in their current course of action.”

The Outcast waved a hand at Kafka. “Or something like that, anyway. You know how to word these things. Maybe they’ll reopen negotiations.”

“Governor, there isn’t going to be a political solution to this,” Kafka said. “I’m sorry, but, don’t see it happening.”

So tired. Well I do,” Ted said, more harshly than he wanted to, then softened his tone slightly. “I have to, Kafka. I don’t want any more people to die than already have.”

“Nobody dies if you surrender,” Modular Man pointed out quickly. “We just dial that number”

“Shut up, tin-face,” Travnicek snarled. Modular Man’s mouth clicked shut audibly.

“We have a chance,” Ted continued. “We made Hartmann and the Turtle run; we’ve beaten off the two previous attacks.”

“And they beat off the Hunt,” Dylan said. “From their perspective, they’re probably calling it a victory.”

“Then let’s get our own victory,” the Outcast said loudly. “We know where the ammo dumps are located, where they’ve placed the artillery batteries. Let’s take them out. We can use Modular Man, Pulse, some of the jokers who served in the Brigade and have experience. We can do it.”

If they hadn’t been so tired, he might have been able to rouse them. They just looked at him dully. Even their thoughts were dull. Only Kafka was moving, barking orders at the guards. Dylan clutched his horn to his breast and walked out of the hall like a wounded, dripping stag. Modular Man looked at Travnicek. “Do I have to, boss?”

“You heard the governor.” Travnicek chuckled. “Go hit some ammo dumps for your poor father, would you?”

As Modular Man took off, Ted felt the weariness over taking him. He willed the Outcast’s body to dissolve, expecting that he would find himself back in Bloat’s form again.

Wyungare regarded the other boy, the one who lay dozing beneath the tree. He showed little sign of who he eventually would grow into. But he was clearly dreaming.

The Aborigine watched with fascination as the dream generated within the dream. It was almost like watching a werewolf movie, one with decent transformation special effects. The boy’s figure blurred and lengthened and solidified. Now a man’s form stirred on the moss, a man dressed in a cowled medieval robe.

“Outcast,” said Wyungare. “Wake.”

The man opened his eyes, stared in confusion. His eyes narrowed and he struggled to his feet.

“You?” he said. “You’re in a cell.”

“Indeed,” said Wyungare. “And so are you.”

“I don’t understand.” Outcast yawned and stretched his arms.

“You will.”

“I don’t have time to understand,” said Outcast a little petulantly. “I’ve got so many things I have to do.”

“Don’t worry,” said Wyungare. “The time you’re spending here is a series of tiny bits of being that fit very comfortably into your normal time stream. Believe me, this is hardly taking any time at all.”

“Oh,” said Outcast uncertainly. “Okay.. I guess.”

“Let’s walk.” The Aborigine led the way. “Tell me about yourself.”

“There’s really not much to say,” said his companion.

But Wyungare made encouraging noises and what seemed half an eternity later, Outcast was still elaborating out all the things that comprised “really not much to say.”

“Let’s talk about your parents,” said Wyungare. Outcast looked back at him suspiciously, fearfully. “Let’s talk about loneliness.”

After a while, Outcast did.

Dead Nicholas was dead.

Ray had been to the club a couple of times before. They grilled a decent steak and a certain amount of excitement could be found in the gaming rooms in back. Usually Dead Nicholas was crowded. Tonight, though, the pale-skinned waitresses dressed in tattered shrouds that gave tantalizing glimpses of their smooth white flesh were mostly standing around the bar gossiping. There were few customers to serve. Dead Nicholas had always relied on the tourist trade. And now tourists were staying away from Jokertown in droves.

Ray got a table in the lounge. He leaned over its glass top to see who was interned in the coffin that formed its base. It was a woman, no more than a girl, a beautiful and lifelike Sleeping Beauty. The figures were supposed to be waxworks, made by the Bowery Dime Museum, but they looked damned real. Ray found himself staring intently, trying to see if it was breathing, as two waitresses raced to the table. The one with the white streak through the middle of her long black hair beat the ash-blonde. “What can I get you?” she asked.

“A babe named Cameo,” Ray said.

The waitress frowned. “She expecting you?”

Ray reached into his pocket and pulled out a twenty. He held it up, showing it to the waitress. “What do you care?”

“Right this way.”

Ray recognized Cameo right away from the photo in her dossier. She was young, maybe twenty, maybe less, with long wavy blond hair and big brown eyes. She was dressed in an outfit from an old Cagney gangster movie. She looked good in it. She also wore an antique cameo on a black ribbon choker around her long, graceful neck. Ray wondered what kind of lingerie she preferred. Something old and lacy and expensive, Ray thought. Something about this girl suggested money. Lots and lots of money.

“Cameo?” Ray said. “Or would you rather I call you Ellen?”

She looked at him and frowned. “How do you know my name?”

“Shouldn’t I? It’s in your dossier.” Ray sat down in the chair opposite her. There wasn’t much else in Cameo’s private back room. The table that they sat at was small and round, well suited for intimate conversation. Atop it were Cameo’s beaded clutch purse, a cordless phone, and a crystal-stemmed goblet that she toyed with as Ray sat opposite her.

“If you’ve read my dossier,” Cameo said, “you must be from Battle.”

“That’s right. My name is Ray.” He flashed his lopsided smile. “You can call me Billy.”

“Well, Mr. Ray, what exactly do you want?”

All business, no banter, Ray thought sourly. “I have something for you.”

For the first time eagerness showed on Cameo’s face. “Did you bring the jacket?”

“Which jacket is that?” Ray asked with a frown.

“The jacket that was my price for going on this expedition of Battle’s. The leather jacket that once belonged to the ace called Black Eagle.”

Ray frowned. “What, you collect clothes from dead aces? Weird hobby.”

Cameo frowned back. On her, it looked pretty. “I thought you read my dossier.”

Ray shrugged. “I did. It said you were a psychosomatic trance channeler.”

Cameo rolled her eyes. “A psychometric trance channeler, Mr. Ray.”

“Oh. Okay. What’s that?”

“I didn’t know that my discussion with Mr. Battle would lead to my secrets becoming common knowledge,” Cameo said frostily.

“Hey, you can trust me to keep my mouth shut. Besides, we’re both on the team. I’ll see you in action tomorrow. It won’t hurt to tell me what you can do tonight.”

Cameo nodded. “All right. I read psychic impressions from objects and then channel the psyche of the dead from the things they once owned.”

“Wow,” Ray said. “Sounds like fun.”

Cameo shrugged.

“Exactly how would that help us take Ellis Island?”

"Well… this is not something that’s widely known, but if the deceased is an ace —”

Ray snapped his fingers. “Then you can channel his powers!”

“If,” Cameo said, “the powers were mental in nature. I couldn’t channel, say, the Harlem Hammer’s strength, but I could channel Dr. Tachyon’s telepathy.”

“If,” Ray said, “Tachyon was dead and you had a pair of his socks or something.”

Cameo pursed her lips. “Yes. Interesting example.”

Ray reached into his pocket and pulled out the ring they’d taken from the graveyard earlier that night. He put it on the table between them. “That explains this, then.”

“Whose is it?”

“It belonged to a guy named Brian Boyd, an ace also known as Blockhead. He’s dead now.”

Cameo reached out, not quite touching the ring.

“I guess Battle wanted you to have it so you could do your mumbo-jumbo and be ready first thing tomorrow.”

Cameo nodded abstractedly, still looking closely at the ring.

“I guess he has the jacket and he’ll give it to you tomorrow.”

Cameo looked up at him. For the first time there was uncertainty in her liquid eyes. “That when everything starts?” she asked. “Tomorrow morning.”

“Well,” Ray said, leaning close, “if you want we could have some real action tonight. Just the two of us.”

Cameo looked back at him steadily. “Tomorrow will be quite soon enough, Mr. Ray, thank you very much.”

“It’s another cunt,” the bodysnatcher said. “Someone’s cut it with a straight razor. You can see where it’s bleeding.”

The psychologist sighed and put down the Rorschach card. “We’ve looked at fourteen cards now. You’ve seen images of sexual mutilation in every one of them.”

The bodysnatcher tilted back his chair. “I’m a twisted motherfucker, what can I say? Too bad you gave me amnesty.”

“I don’t think there’s any point in continuing with this test,” the psychologist said.

“Don’t give up,” the bodysnatcher told him. “Come on, show me the rest of the inkblots. I promise, I won’t see anything but butterflies and puppy dogs.”

The psychologist opened a drawer and put the cards away. “Why don’t we just talk instead.”

The bodysnatcher yawned, like he could care less. Or maybe the meat was just tired. Pulse was an old fuck, after all. The bus had delivered them to a low cinderblock building behind an electrified fence somewhere in Jersey. Inside, the place was bigger than it looked, with at least four levels hidden under the surface. It had airlocks instead of regular doors, and closed-circuit TV cameras everywhere. The jumpers had been fingerprinted, photographed, run through a physical, then split up for a battery of tests that reminded the bodysnatcher of college entrance exams. After that he was given to this shrink.

“You look to be much older than the other jumpers,” the psychologist said.

“I’m young at heart. And this isn’t my original body.”

“I see,” the psychologist replied. He didn’t let any reaction show on his face. “Where is your real body?”

“Worms are eating it,” the bodysnatcher said. “It was a great body. I kept myself in shape. Not like you. When’s the last time you did a sit-up?”

The shrink ignored that. “What happened to your body?”

“An ace threw oven cleaner in my eyes,” the bodysnatcher told him. “Then some weights fell on me and broke my back. The ace left me there and killed the man I was supposed to be protecting.”

“I see.” He made a steeple of his fingers. “How did that make you feel about aces?”

“I want to kill every last one,” the bodysnatcher said.

The psychologist made a notation.

“I’d like to kill all the nats and jokers too,” the bodysnatcher added. The shrink wrote faster.

“They finally found me,” the bodysnatcher said. “They took me to some hospital. It was too late to save my eyes. Being crippled, that didn’t matter, but I needed my eyes. You can’t jump what you can’t see. All I could do was lay there and wait to die. You know what saved me? My cunt.”

The psychologist stopped writing and looked up. “Are you telling me you used to be a woman?” He licked his lip, like the idea got him excited.

“What do you think, Doctor?” the bodysnatcher said. “I’d been in that hospital maybe a week. One night I was lying in my own shit, waiting for someone to come clean me up. Finally an orderly shows up. He wiped me off, changed the sheets. Then he spread my legs and raped me.” The bodysnatcher gave a savage smile. “I jumped while he was in me. No one had ever done a blind jump before, but he was close enough for government work.”

“I see,” said the shrink. “So this body originally belonged to the orderly.”

“Fuck no,” the bodysnatcher said. “That jelly-belly? His feet always hurt, I couldn’t stand it. I used him for a few days. Then I filled a tub, opened his wrists with a razor blade, and phoned 911. I jumped the first paramedic through the door. The meat arrived DOA.”

The psychologist sat very still after he had finished, then gave a nod. “I see. Very well. I think we’re just about through here.” He stood up. “If you’ll come with me.”

The bodysnatcher followed him downstairs, where the shrink turned him over to a nasty-looking old fuck who said his name was George Battle. Battle looked over his file, then escorted him to a small bare room in the lowest subbasement. There was nothing in it but a large glass window opening on another small room. On the far side of the glass an old man in a flannel shirt sat at a table, working a crossword.

“One final test,” Battle told him. “We’d like to see if you can jump that gentleman over there.”

The bodysnatcher looked through the glass at the geezer. He was about eighty. Loose skin dangled under his chin, and there were liver spots on the back of his hands. He didn’t seem aware that he was being watched.

“Why should I?” the bodysnatcher asked.

“A good soldier never asks why. He follows orders,” Battle said. “But I’ll tell you, this one time. We want to get a better understanding of how your jumping power works.”

“Why don’t I just jump you instead?” the bodysnatcher asked.

Battle was as cool as Prime used to be, he had to give him that. “I certainly can’t stop you, but it won’t establish anything. This experiment is designed to ascertain whether jumpers can use their powers on a visible target even if a physical barrier interposes. Like that window.”

“Windows can’t stop jumpers. Take my word for it.”

“I’d rather you show me. If you can.” Battle gestured.

The bodysnatcher moved to the window, studied the geezer lost in his crossword. He drew a fingernail down across the glass. The geezer looked straight up at the window, blinked. Not a television hookup, then. It had to be one-way glass.

The bodysnatcher turned. “Fuck you,” he said.

“Save the vulgarity,” Battle said. “I’ve heard it all before. If you’ll follow me, you can rejoin your friends.”

Wyungare knew he was still in the cold, drafty, starkly austere cell. No question about that. But he simultaneously knew he remained in the dreamtime. No discrepancy, there. You can be both a particle and a wave. No contradictions.

“Let me show you something,” he said to the Outcast.

The man looked uncomfortable.

“Is something wrong?” Wyungare said.

“I have to get back.” His voice shook a little.

“You are back,” said Wyungare. “You don’t have the ground rules down yet. You’re still there as well as here. And here is taking virtually no time. It’s like Mr. H. G. Wells’ ‘The New Accelerator.’ The times are different, here and there.”

“I still don’t see,” Outcast muttered.

“Please trust me,” said Wyungare. “Now come on. I’ve something to show you.”

“More of this swamp?” said Outcast, more than the hint of a complaint in his voice.

“Not much more.” The pair came out from under what had seemed an endless canopy of overhanging tree branches, both broad-leafed and pine. They entered a clearing, a space where the scars of clearing were long since muted by time and the wear of human usage. The low frame house squatted at the edge of the water. A ragged curl of smoke drifted from a crooked, rusted vent pipe in the roof.

Wyungare whistled a few bars of “Blue Bayou.” Outcast didn’t seem to get it. The Aborigine stopped. “All right, we’re going visiting now. Just follow me and watch.” He glanced back at Outcast.

The man nodded. “Okay. But please make this quick. Back in … the real world… I’m sending people —” He hesitated.

“— out to die.” Wyungare finished the sentence for him. “I know. Don’t worry, you’ll send them all out in plenty of time for their respective appointments in Samarra.”

Outcast looked puzzled.

“Don’t worry,” said Wyungare. “I’ll explain someday. You need to read something more than game-playing novels.” He led the way around to the front of the house. The two men climbed rickety steps and crossed the sun-bleached plank porch. The door stood open.

They heard sounds of pain from within.

“After you,” said Wyungare. He motioned inward. Outcast went.

And stopped, dead in his tracks.

“Go ahead,” said Wyungare. Outcast resisted the urging. Wyungare gently pushed him forward anyway.

“Oh, no,” said Outcast. “Please, no. I don’t want to watch this.”

“I’m afraid you must,” said Wyungare. “Just a bit. Just enough to make an impression.”

They stood just outside the doorway into the small living room. "No,” said Outcast.

“I’m afraid so.” said Wyungare.

They saw a young boy tied facedown across a rough wooden table. His wrists were lashed with clothesline cord to the table legs at one end, his ankles secured to the wooden legs at the other side. His hair was very black. He rolled his head from side to side with pain. When he turned toward the pair in the doorway, they saw how dark his eyes were.

“That is Jack,” Wyungare said.

“Do I know him?” Outcast sounded puzzled.

“You’ve met.” The Aborigine chuckled. “You didn’t recognize him because his outer appearance has changed just a bit.”

On the table, the boy’s thighs were spread. A cloudy figure stood between the boy’s legs, pumping in a violent pounding rhythm.

“What’s that?” said Outcast, alarmed.

“Just what you think.” They heard the brutal sounds of flesh slapping flesh.

“But… who--”

“Someone you might have known well, at least in a slightly different context,” said Wyungare. “Recall your cousins. Think of their father.”

Outcast moaned. Then he rushed forward past Wyungare, striking out at the phantom figure pistoning between the imprisoned boy’s thighs.

Fingers through smoke.

It did no good. The rape continued.

“I commend your attempt,” said Wyungare quietly. “At least you tried to do something.” He took Outcast by the shoulders and steered him back toward the door. “Jack would thank you if he could.”

“Jack?” said Outcast. “That boy? Jack?”

“Indeed.

“But can’t —”

“— we help him?”

Outcast nodded frantically.

“Perhaps,” said Wyungare. “But there’s nothing we can do about the past. Jack found his own solution.”

"What?” said Outcast, voice as desperate as a man trying to pull his feet out of quicksand.

Wyungare said, “After a time, Jack killed him.”

Outcast gasped. “Killed his daddy?”

“Stepfather.”

Outcast looked shocked and sober. “And then?”

“Things just got worse,” said Wyungare.

Outcast shuddered. “How could they?”

“Take my word for it.”

“Tell me.”

“Prurient interest?” said Wyungare gently.

Outcast said slowly, voice shaking, “I have to know.”

“And why is that?” Outcast shook his head. “I can’t tell you. It’s… a family secret.”

“I think I already know,” said Wyungare.

Outcast began to cry.