Inside Straight

S. L. Farrell Incidental Music for Heroes

The world roared around Joker Plague: a barrage from the stage amplifiers; the black boxes of monitors taking the roar and hurling it back; the massive cliff-wall ramparts of the sound system thundering to either side of the stage; the crowd screaming; slap-back from the rear walls of the auditorium a second assault; the insistent rhythm of the song a hammer pounding at them.

To stage left, Bottom thumb-slapped his Fender Precision, his ass’s head nodding aggressively in time to the music. Michael felt rather than heard Bottom’s bass, a solid minor pattern caught in lockstep with the subsonic pounding of Michael’s bass drum, the lowest of the tympanic rings set on his body. Shivers, his appearance that of a demon snatched directly from the fires of hell, stalked stage right before a wall of Marshalls, his blood-red guitar screaming like a tortured soul in hands of the same color.

Next to Shivers was S’Live, floating behind the ranks of his keyboards like a garish hot air balloon painted with a face, multitudinous tongues flickering from a too-wide mouth to punch at the keys. And, in the gel-colored clouds of dry ice fog drifting at the front of the stage, there was something: the ghost of a thin body caught in the floodlight-colored wisps and gone again, a wireless Shure SM58 microphone floating in the air before it, though no hand seemed to hold up the black cylinder. There was a voice, though—The Voice: a powerful baritone that alternately growled and purred and shrieked the lyrics to “Self-Fulfilling Fool.”

Michael—“DB” to his band mates and most of his friends, “Drummer Boy” to much of the world—heard mostly The Voice. He wore earpiece monitors to dampen the 120+ decibel hurricane, with only The Voice’s vocals coming through his monitor feed. He could hear his drumming quite well, resonating through his body, and no earplugs could entirely shut out the unearthly cacophony of the stage equipment.

Michael loomed at center stage, pinned in spotlights, his six arms flailing as he beat on his wide, tattooed, and too-long torso with his signature graphite drumsticks, the multiple throats on his thick muscular neck gaping and flexing as they funneled and shaped the furious rhythm. He wore a set of small wireless mics on a metal collar around his upper shoulders. While the gift of his wild card talent gave him more than enough natural amplification to be heard throughout the auditorium, the volume would have been uncomfortable for everyone on stage and in the first rows: it was easier to let the sound system do the work. He prowled the stage as he drummed, the actinic blue of the spots following him as he danced with The Voice in his cold fog, grinned at Bottom’s driving, intricate bass line, screamed his approval of Shiver’s searing licks, or swayed alongside S’Live’s saliva-drenched tongue-lashing of his keyboards.

For the moment, he thought only of being here. It was what Michael loved about being on stage: for those magical few hours he could leave the rest of the world behind. For that time, there was only the music.

La Cavea, the outdoor venue at Rome’s Auditorium Parco della Musica, could accommodate 7,000 spectators. There were that many and more packed into the seething mass of humanity in front of him, a dark, fitfully lit sea of heads bobbing in time to the song, fists pumping their approval back to the stage, their energy fueling Joker Plague’s performance in an endless feedback loop. The pit in front of the stage was a tight crush; out in the auditorium, everyone was out of their seats and standing. Against the night sky, the beetlelike shell of the Parco della Musica loomed, caught in blue and red spotlights beyond the tall ranks of the upper balcony.

It reminded Michael uncomfortably of an Egyptian scarab.

The song—their third and last encore—ended in a flourish of riffs and cymbal crashes from Michael, a final power chord from Shiver, and an explosion of pure white light from a bank of floodlights behind the stage. The audience roared, a deluge of adulation that swelled and broke over them. “Fuckin’ yeah!” The Voice screamed at the audience through the Italian night. “Thank you! Grazie! Buona notte!” They shouted back, a wordless, thousand-throated monster’s voice. Michael underhanded his half-dozen sticks into the audience as the stage lights went dark and house lights came up at the rear of the auditorium. The audience seemed to be split nearly evenly between jokers and nats, judging from the faces Michael glimpsed, but it was the jokers who were nearest the stage, the nats mostly lurking to the rear.

Roadies swarmed the stage, hooded flashlights guiding the band off to the tunnel behind the stage. “Fantastic show, DB! Great job! Esposizione eccellente!” they said, as he passed them, leading the way. He nodded, but he could already feel the stage adrenaline rushing away, and with it any sense of pleasure. The malaise and subdued anger he’d felt since leaving American Hero wrapped more tightly around him with every step he made toward the dressing room, the energy and pleasure of the performance fading.

“Fuckin’ A, that was tight,” Shivers said as the door closed behind them. He tossed his ancient, scarred Stratocaster into its case, grinning—with his red-and-black-scaled face, it looked more like a leer. “Better than the Paris show. Shit, DB, those new kicks in ‘Stop Me Again’ were killer. Just killer. S’Live, you and me gotta catch those next time.”

“Yeah,” Bottom added. He’d popped one of the champagne bottles and upturned it into his horselike snout. More of the bubbling liquid seemed to escape the sides of his mouth than went down his throat, soaking his already-sopping T-shirt. “Let’s listen to the board tape. If I punch those bass drum hits with you, it’ll be monster. Wish we’d recorded it that way in the studio. DB, man, you listening?”

He wasn’t. Michael dropped onto the couch, multiple arms sprawled out, his eyes closed. The remnants of the show still rang in his ears. The cushions at the far end sagged a few moments later under an unseen weight and Michael felt the springs move in response.

“’Sup, big guy? You ain’t yourself,” The Voice said from the air: low, sonorous, a cello bowed by a master. “You were playing angry out there—sounded nice and aggressive, but it ain’t the usual fun-lovin‘ you. ’S matter, man?”

Michael shook his head. The searing adrenaline high he’d felt during the concert was gone, as if someone had pulled a handle and flushed it away. “Nuthin’,” he said. “And fuckin’ everything. When we’re playing, it’s cool. But after …”

“Bad shit goin’ down in Egypt.” Michael glanced over to where The Voice’s head would have been and could almost see the raised eyebrows. “Hey, I ain’t fuckin’ stupid, man. I seen what you kick up on your laptop: CNN and Yahoo News instead of porn. Shit, how boring is that?”

Michael shrugged with all six arms. “Hey, I’ve been—”

The door opened and their manager came into the room: Grady Cohen, a nat the label had hired as part of their contract. “Kiss-Ass Cohen,” DB had dubbed him early on. He wondered if Grady knew why the band usually called him “KA.” Michael thought that if Grady was ever infected with the wild card, he’d turn into an empty suit. Behind him, in the theater’s backstage corridor, Michael could see the groupies waiting to be let in.

There were always women waiting, nat or joker, whatever he wanted. Only …

Grady was grinning and applauding as he strode into the room. “Hey, KA!” The Voice said loudly. “You look happy—you snag a blow job on the way back?”

Grady ignored The Voice. “Great show, boys. That’s all I need to say. The promoters are contentedly counting the ticket sales, and the label tells me that Incidental Music for Heroes shows up as number-one on Billboard next week. Numero Uno. It doesn’t get any better than that. So congratulations all around, eh? Don’t need to say more.” He clapped his hands again. He looked at each of them as if he were counting bills in his wallet. “All right, here’s the schedule. Wake-up call is at noon, and the limo will be at the hotel to get us to the airport two hours later. It’s Berlin tomorrow night, then London, then right on to New York—the label’s added Cleveland, Dallas, and Denver to the American tour. Boys, Joker Plague is hot. Hot. Enjoy the ride.” He grinned again. “And speaking of rides …”

He went to the door and opened it. “Come on in,” he said to those waiting outside. He gestured sweepingly toward the band. “Entrato. È tempo di celebrare …”

She had the face of a cat and her skin was blanketed with silken fur mottled like an orange tabby, but the body was very much a young woman’s. The name she’d given Michael was Petit Chaton—little kitten—and she was French, not Italian, having followed the band from Paris. She was beautiful, even in sleep. Michael could swear she was purring as she slept curled under the covers. He slid his several arms from under her, stroking her face gently with his top hand: yes, she was purring; he could feel the vibration in his fingers. He slipped out of bed and, naked, padded into the other room of the suite. The clock said five A.M. local time, but Michael’s internal clock was blurred by travel and he wasn’t sleepy at all. He picked up the remote and turned on the television set, tapping the mute button, since he knew about a half-dozen words of Italian. The channel was still set to the news where he’d left it, and Egypt evidently remained the big story, as it had been for a few days now. He watched the images flickering by: jokers with heads that he vaguely recognized as those of Egyptian gods; jerky, confusing footage of a battle; bodies strewn across a sand-rippled landscape; and …

Curveball.…Kate.

Michael sat up abruptly, entirely awake now. The camera panned away and he cursed doubly, since fucking Captain Cruller was standing next to her, looking like he hadn’t slept in a week, the scarab that had possessed him sitting under the skin of his forehead like the world’s largest pimple. Fortune was talking to someone off-camera. Michael fumbled for the mute button, but he couldn’t hear Fortune over the Italian translation. The camera panned back again, showing Kate, Ana, Lohengrin, Holy Roller, Fat Chick, Hardhat, Toolbelt, Simoon, and Bugsy all clustered around Fortune, with desert in the background and what looked like a dam structure in the middle distance. Michael watched only Kate. She was solemn, her face dirty with a streak that might be dried blood along one cheek. She looked like she would collapse the moment the camera was turned off, as if it were only force of will keeping her upright. They all looked the same way. And Kate was standing right alongside Fortune. He saw her fingers link with his as the camera panned back.

Light shifted in the room as the program went to a split screen, with a commentator speaking on the left while on the right was promo footage of King Cobalt from American Hero. “… King Cobalt morto. …” the commentator intoned, and the last word jumped out at him. Morto. He could figure that one out. Michael suddenly knew why King Cobalt’s picture was on the screen.

He felt as if someone had punched him in the stomach.

The scene switched abruptly to a reporter interviewing a crocodile-headed ace who looked like he’d just stepped from a mural in a pharaoh’s tomb, standing outside one of the restored temples.

Another shift, and a new reporter was placing a microphone in front of the fierce scowl of the Righteous Djinn, the former strong right arm of the Nur and now the primary weapon in the new Caliph’s arsenal. He glared into the camera as it focused on him, and Michael found himself scowling back.

“Fuck,” he said aloud.

“If you would like.” The answer came in French-accented English. Chaton was leaning sleepily against the doorway to the bedroom, illuminated by the shifting light of the television. Her belly was cloaked in soft orange, her tail curled lazily around a knee, the end of it flicking restlessly. “But you left our bed.”

“Can’t sleep,” Michael told her.

A shrug and a smile. “Bon. Then—”

“Not right now. Go back to sleep. I’ll be in later.”

Her gaze drifted over to the television. “The problems in Egypt? That is bothering you? You know them, oui? From American Hero ?”

He didn’t answer. With his middle left hand, he tapped at one of the tympanic membranes on his chest—a low, steady dhoomp-dhoomp-dhoomp that reverberated through the room and his body. The sound was somehow comforting. Chaton finally shrugged and padded back into the bedroom. A few minutes later he heard her purr-snore again.

“Michael, you’re a great guy,” Kate had said with her soft, quiet voice, not long after they’d met. “But I don’t think I’m ready for this.” He started to protest, but she cut him off with a smile. “Maybe when this whole thing is over. When we’re not so distracted.”

But it would never be over. The cameras would always be there for both of them, no matter where they were or what they did. And Fortune…goddamn John Fortune had somehow managed to say the right things that she wanted to hear. Kate saw Michael as the lightweight, the entertainer, the womanizer.

He’d slept with a dozen of the contestants and staff of American Hero after his stupid affair with Pop Tart, after it was apparent that Kate was never going to forgive him for the slip. It was stupid and he knew it, but if she thought of him as the slut rock star, then he’d play the role to the hilt. The tactic earned him the response it deserved. After he’d been “drafted” by the Diamonds, after Fat Chick had been voted off the show, after the show had revealed that he was sleeping with Tiffani, he’d tried again to patch things up with Kate and she had stared at him as if he were a stranger. When he’d persisted, things were suddenly flying at him very hard and very fast, and he was too busy ducking and shielding himself to make any reply at all. The other Hearts took judicious cover.

“You’re an ass, Michael!” Kate shouted in the midst of the barrage. “Go bang your drums!” A vase exploded on the wall nearest him, scattering water and petals and china shrapnel and leaving a hole he could have put his head through. “Go bang your groupies, too!” A pencil caught him on the ass, punching through his jeans and embedding itself point-first in his buttocks. He gave up trying to cover himself and retreated entirely. He heard glass hit the wall beside the door and shatter. “Stay away from me!” he heard her say as he fled.

Fortune was serious; he had a vision that included more than CDs and concerts and screaming fans, even if that vision was driven by the goddamned bug inside him. Fortune was also dangerous. Michael felt that instinctively; but Kate…Kate didn’t see him that way, just as he felt she couldn’t see beyond the persona of Drummer Boy.

Hell, sometimes he couldn’t do that either.

He’d been sent to the Discard Pile after the Blacks had lost their challenge, and that’s when his growing fury and discontent couldn’t be contained any longer. He lasted a single day there, listening to the stupid prattling, the ego games, the posturing all of them did for the cameras. It was stupid, all of it—fake drama and fake heroism. That same evening, he packed his clothes and headed for the door, only to find his way blocked by King Cobalt and Hardhat. Other discards watched the confrontation: Ana, standing in the middle of the huge living room with hands on hips, shook her head as if she’d been expecting something like this; Toad Man lurked in the archway to the kitchen like a wart-ridden VW Beetle; Brave Hawk, his arms folded on his chest, gazed down stoically from the balcony above them; two five-foot-tall Matryoshkas huddled against the wall. And the cameras. Always the cameras.

“Where the hell you going, DB?” King Cobalt said.

“I’m outta here,” Michael told them. “Fuck this shit. I got music to play with people I actually like. I’m done with this crap.”

King Cobalt shook his masked head, the silver lightning bolts sewn there glistening. “Uh-uh. That ain’t how it works, and you know it.” Hardhat gestured, and a crosshatch of glowing steel beams barred the door of the mansion.

“You think that shit’s gonna stop me from leaving?” Michael told him. He flexed his six arms, looking at all of them. “It’s gonna fucking take most of you to do that, and it’s gonna be real. No stuntmen, no dummies, no breakaway furniture, no pulled punches. Real.” He wanted them to try, in that moment. He wanted to lose himself in blind rage. All it would have taken was a word or a movement. Hardhat glared. King Cobalt’s eyes glittered behind the blue mask, but then King Cobalt stepped to one side. He waved at Hardhat; the barrier at the door vanished.

“Michael,” Ana said as he stalked past them to the door and wrenched it open. “All you’re proving is that you’re still an ass. Kate—”

He hadn’t allowed her to finish the sentence. “Fuck Kate. Fuck you. Fuck John Fortune and Peregrine and this whole goddamn show.” He doubted that they would play those exit lines on the weekly wrap-up, and the slamming of the door behind him was entirely unsatisfactory. He took some small pleasure in ripping the locked steel gates of the driveway from their hinges and tossing them aside. He gave a sextuplet of fingers to the cameraman filming his exit.

As he walked down the street looking for a taxi and drumming irritated riffs on himself, his anger slowly cooled. He wondered what Kate would think when she heard, and how he could ever apologize, how he could ever apologize to any of them.

He would never be able to apologize to King Cobalt. Not now.

The news program had turned to another story now—floodwaters and boats rescuing stranded people in some local city—and he picked up the remote and channel-surfed, looking for Kate or Fortune or anything to do with the escalating crisis in Egypt. Nothing. He tapped on his chest with his free hands as he pressed the channel button with his lower left hand. Drumbeats surrounded him, fast and hard. He focused the sound through the open throats on his thick neck, tightening the muscles there and shaping the sound—he could feel it in his own body, though someone standing five feet to his side would have heard very little. But a person standing right in front of him, where he was staring …

The television set vibrated in its wooden cabinet.

Tighter yet. Tighter …

A jagged crack ran quickly across the screen, from lower left to upper right. The television hissed, sparked, and went dead. Michael tossed the remote across the room.

He rose from the couch and went into the bedroom. Without waking Chaton, he dressed quickly and packed a small duffel bag with underwear, jeans, T-shirts, and a bundle of his signature graphite drumsticks. He left the room and took the elevator down to the lobby. The night staff looked up with surprise at his appearance. “Scusilo. There’s a young lady in my room,” he told the woman at the desk as he placed a hundred-euro note conspicuously on the counter. “Make sure someone sends breakfast up to her around eleven-thirty. I need a cab, also, and I’d prefer that no one knows that I’ve gone out.” He tapped the note for emphasis. “Oh, and there’s a slight problem with the TV—just put it on my bill.”

The woman blinked. “Surely, Mr. Vogali,” she said, her English accented with the Roman lilt. “The concierge will help you with a cab.”

A half-hour later, he was at the airport.

The call on his cell phone came about 8:30—hours earlier than he’d been hoping it would come. It seemed that a hundred euros wasn’t as much of a tip as he’d thought, or maybe Grady just tipped better. At least it was Cohen and not one of the guys in the group; that would have been much harder. “Hey, KA,” Michael said as he flipped open the phone. “I figured you’d be calling eventually.”

“DB, where the hell are you and what the fuck are you doing?”

“I’m just taking a walk, Grady. Enjoying the scenery. Y’know, the Coliseum, the Parthenon …”

“The Parthenon’s in Athens.”

“It’s been a long walk.”

He heard an exasperated huff. “The desk clerk from the hotel called me. I’ve talked to the concierge and I’ve been to your room, DB. I’ve talked to the girl, I’ve seen what’s missing, and I’d appreciate it if you’d treat me like an adult. Now, where are you?”

“At the airport,” Michael told him. The private prop-jet was idling on the runway a hundred yards from him. He could feel the prop wash whipping his pants legs and whistling past the throats on his neck. From the open door of the plane, a hand gestured toward him.

“Please tell me you’re going to Berlin,” Cohen said.

“I’m going the other way, actually.”

“You can’t do that, DB. You can’t cancel this concert at the last minute. Forget that it violates your contract, it’s not fair to the rest of Joker Plague. It’s not fair to your fans.” A pause. “It’s not fair to me.”

“This is more important right now. To me.”

Cohen’s exasperation rasped the phone’s speaker. “What? What’s more important? You think you’re fucking Bono, off to save the goddamn world?”

“Wow, KA. Didn’t mean to touch a nerve.”

“Fuck!” The blast of fury made Michael lift the phone away from his ear. “DB, you blow off this tour and Joker Plague is finished. The label won’t touch you again. Your career—and everyone else’s—gets flushed down the toilet.”

“Bullshit,” Michael spat back. “Let’s cut the crap. You’re just worried about your own ass, KA. The label still has a best-selling CD, and they’re not going to flush that. It’s all about the money, Grady, and we both know it. You’ll be getting plenty of publicity to sell CDs and concert tickets by the time I get back. I promise you that.”

“When? When are you coming back?” Another pause, and a long sigh. “Look, maybe I can do something with Berlin, even London if I have to. But when are you getting back here? By New York? Tell me it will be by New York.”

“Talk to you later, KA.”

“DB! Goddamn it—”

Michael closed the cover. With his middle hand, he sidearmed the phone at the concrete wall of the terminal. It shattered. He strode quickly toward the open door of the plane and hauled himself inside. The pilot was checking off instruments. He glanced back at Michael as he strapped into the nearest seat.

“Let’s get the hell out of here before I change my mind,” he told the pilot.

The long road from the Aswan airport was drifted with sand, and the air above the asphalt wavered and rippled. The wind through the open windows of the taxi only seemed to stir the heat. “It has not rained here in six years,” the driver said, glancing over his shoulder to where Michael was crammed uncomfortably into the rear seat. His eyes widened slightly, and Michael figured he must look like a large spider stuffed into a too-small box. “When our people weep, we save the tears.”

The car seemed ready to shed side panels like a snake’s discarded skin with every pothole and bump. The vehicle shuddered from badly out-of-alignment tires, every inch of the interior was coated with a fine layer of sand, and the driver—“Ahmed,” he said. “It is like ‘Bob’ in your language. A common name, but I am a man of uncommon talent”—used his horn at every possible opportunity, or simply as punctuation. Ahmed spoke English well enough, but he also spoke it constantly. “The Living Gods, they say ’Ah, we will take us back to the old ways, the right ways, the way it should be for us.’ Egypt, she is ancient and that’s why she likes them, but these Ikhlas al-Din and the Caliph …” He shook his head and swerved violently around a slower car, horn blaring, as Michael’s head banged first against the roof, then the side.

“Ta’ala musso!” Ahmed shouted from the window. Michael assumed it was a curse. Ahmed wrestled the car back into its lane and continued his monologue. Michael wished that Ahmed would look more at the road and less at him. “You are what they call a ‘joker,’ yes? Myself, I have many friends who are jokers and a few even in my family, so I am not offended to look at you. Here, so many with the virus take on the shapes of the old gods—it is the very land that does this. Their forms are in the sand and the stones and the air. The waters of the Nile flow with it. You, in your United States, you take on whatever shape you wish, like you with your many arms to make much noise, but here—here the old gods use the virus to allow their shapes to return to their ancient home. These Ikhlas al-Din, they believe that Allah has cursed the deformed ones for their sins, but even though I am Muslim I am not so certain. I wonder if the Old Ones aren’t truly attempting to return. When you go see the temples and the places of the gods here, you’ll wonder, too. Go to Philae, or even to Sehel; I will take you.”

Michael grunted, his head slamming against the roof of the car with every bump, his legs folded up against his chest, his several hands clutching at any hold he could find. The heat made him sweat, which made the sand stick to his bare skin, and he could taste the gritty stuff in his mouth. They drove rapidly east, through a village where people watched the taxi from open doorways or behind shuttered windows. The market they passed was closed and deserted; Michael suspected that most of the inhabitants had already fled the area. The driver turned onto a four-lane highway, and Michael saw ahead the curve of the massive dam that held Lake Nasser. “Sadd el Aali,” Ahmed said, pointing through the sandblasted windshield. “The High Dam. And there, that is our memorial, celebrating the cooperation of Egypt and the Soviet Union which allowed us to build such a wonderful dam.”

The memorial was monumentally ugly to Michael’s eyes: five huge pillars like the petals of a concrete flower holding up a concrete ring at the summit. There were tents erected in the open space around the memorial. As they approached, guards with automatic weapons waved the taxi to the side of the road. AH of the guards appeared to be jokers. Ahmed honked at the men and appeared prepared to run them down, but Michael reached over the seat with a muscular top hand and pulled the wheel hard to the right. “This is my stop,” he said, and Ahmed shrugged and braked. Michael opened one of the rear doors and managed to unfold himself from the car without quite falling down. He rummaged in a pocket and tossed several bills onto the passenger seat of the taxi. “Salam alekum,” he said.

“Wa alekum es salam,” Ahmed replied, glancing at the bills—that he didn’t bother to haggle told Michael he’d drastically overpaid. “Though I doubt that you will find much peace here,” Ahmed said solemnly. “Here, my number if you need me again.” Michael took the crumpled business card as the guards approached, their weapons trained on his bare chest. He put down his duffel bag and raised his many hands.

“Hey, Drummer Boy!” one of them said in Arabic-accented English. He lifted an iPod from the breast pocket of his fatigues, and Michael saw the white cord of headphones running up to a hairless head that looked more like a skull, the buds stuffed into earless holes. “Joker Plague—love your music. I have all your CDs.”

They slung their weapons over their shoulders and Michael lowered his hands. Ten minutes later, he knew the joker fan’s name was Masud, the other guard had taken their picture together, and Michael picked up his duffel bag again. “I’m looking for Lohengrin or John Fortune,” he said.

“I’ll take you to them,” Masud said. He inclined his head toward the monument. “This way. Would you mind giving me an autograph, too?”

There was a rusting and decrepit motorcycle parked outside the tent. Fortune was inside, standing alongside a table with maps spread out and held down by rocks against the furnace-like wind off the desert. The armpits of his white shirt were stained a pale yellow and his normal café au lait skin was tanned darkly; his blond, curly hair was bleached by the sun, so that the contrast between skin and hair was stark. Lohengrin—looking more like a pudgy, badly sunburned college student than a warrior without the white armor—stood next to him, along with Jonathan Hive. Three of the Living Gods were gazing at the maps as well; the one called Sobek, who bore the head of a crocodile, the hippopotamus god Taweret, and a dark-haired teenaged girl Michael remembered from her brief stint on American Hero: Aliyah Malik, also known as Simoon.

He’d never been to bed with her. Not that he probably wouldn’t have tried, if she’d stayed in the game long enough.

Fortune touched a finger to the jewel of Sekhmet embedded in his forehead, as if trying to massage it. The lump was far too prominent for Michael’s comfort. “What’s left of the Egyptian army has pulled back north of Aswan, but all the reports we’re hearing say that Ikhlas al-Din and the army of the caliphate are advancing southward along the road from Daraw and Kôm Ombo—the Djinn’s with them, and so is the Caliph. Some are coming by rail, some in vehicles. They have C-130 transport planes, too. That means that taking out the airport is a priority, to keep them on the east side of the river and away from Sehel Island and Syrene. They’re moving quickly. It’ll be the same tactical situation we had with the Egyptians: they’re on the east side, and will be looking to cross the Nile at the British dam, or maybe here at the High Dam where the road is wider. We don’t know where they’ll make their initial attack, or how.… ”

Fortune lifted up his head as Michael stepped under the shadow of the open-sided tent. He grimaced and his voice changed slightly. “Well, the Little Drummer Boy shows up,” he said. “What are you doing here? Your tour cancelled already?”

Michael held back the anger that surged through him at the hated nickname. “I figured you could use more help.”

Fortune snorted. “You know what? This isn’t a goddamn television show and I’m not your Captain Cruller anymore. We don’t need a guest star appearance, especially from someone who’s only here for publicity. You just want to see your face on CNN so you can sell a few more CDs. This is serious. People are dying here.” His face twisted, and for a moment Michael wondered who was talking, Fortune or Sekhmet. “We just buried King Cobalt. The Caliph intends to wipe out all the rest of us, along with the Living Gods and all their followers. This is war, and it’s real. I—we—don’t need dilettantes strolling in at the last minute.”

A wasp shrilled by Michael’s ear. He ignored it. “That’s what I figured you’d say. But you ain’t the only one here. What would Kate say? Or you, Lohengrin? Bugsy? You know what I got to offer.”

Lohengrin neither smiled nor frowned. Sweat beaded on his forehead, but evaporated before it could slide down his pale, doughy features. “He’s strong enough, ja? We shouldn’t turn down allies, John. We need every ace.”

“I’m a joker, not an ace,” Michael told him.

Lohengrin shrugged. Bugsy only stared. Sobek and Taweret were conferring sibilantly with Ali in Arabic, and she said something quietly to Fortune. Michael waited.

Finally Fortune looked down at the map again. “Fine. I don’t give a damn one way or the other. Just stay the hell away from me.”

“Not a problem,” Michael said. He waited a beat. “Where’s Kate?” he asked.

That brought Fortune’s head up again. “You’ll leave her alone.”

“I’ll let her tell me that.” Michael glanced at the map. “When you figure out where I can help you, let me know.” He turned to leave the tent. “No, you ain’t Captain Cruller no more,” he muttered. “You’re fucking Beetle Boy.”

He didn’t particularly care if Fortune or his companions heard him. He was tapping at his chest as he left, and the sound of drums echoed from the low hills around Lake Nasser.

“Ana! Earth Witch! Hey, I heard you saved the day with the dam.”

The woman, wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat, glanced over her shoulder at him. Her eyes widened as she recognized him, then narrowed tightly. “I thought I was ‘Earth Bitch’ to you.”

“Ouch.” Michael spread his lower hands. The lines of his tattoos crawled over his abdomen and biceps with the movement. “Hey, I was just pissed off when I said that, Ana. I really didn’t mean it to stick.”

“It did.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Yeah. I’ll bet you are.” Ana took a breath, looking away from him to the nearest tent and back. “Kate doesn’t need you here. Your being around is only going to stir things up again, and that’s dangerous for Kate. You’ve hurt her badly enough. Distract her here and you could kill her.”

“C’mon, Ana, lighten up.”

Her dark eyes glittered under the hat. She glanced again at the tent. “I’m not joking.” Michael could see a deep sadness in her eyes, a grief that had never been there before. “You care about Kate? Then stay away from her. She won’t say that to you because she’s too polite for her own good, but I will.”

“She’s in there, isn’t she? Why don’t I just ask her what she thinks?”

“I can’t stop you. You always get what you want, don’t you?”

“Not always,” Michael told her. “Not with—” He stopped.

The tent flap flipped open and Kate stepped out. She looked tired and worried, the skin pouched and brown under her eyes. If she was startled to see him, she didn’t show it. He wondered if she’d been listening and for how long. “Michael,” she said, and a faint smile brushed her lips. She tossed a marble up and down in her right hand. Ana sniffed loudly and Kate glanced at her. “Take a walk with me, Michael?”

“Sure.” He extended his middle left hand to Kate. Her head moved from side to side faintly and he let the hand drop back down.

“We need to get you a hat,” she said. “And something over your torso and arms. You’re going to burn up here.”

She said little else, and Michael was content to walk alongside her. She led him across the road to an observation tower on the northern face of the dam. The guard there, a joker whose face was silver and reflective, nodded to Kate and opened the door. Beyond was a set of metal stairs. When they reached the first platform, she stopped and pointed north—downstream. The water on that side lay a few hundred feet below them, a winding lake held back by another dam several miles north. “That’s the Low Dam, Aswan Dam, built by the British,” Kate said, seeing where he was looking. “Four miles away, maybe a little more. The island just this side of it, the smaller one over to the right, is Philae; some of the Living Gods are there right now, but mostly they’re on Sehel Island, just on the other side of the dam. The Gods and their followers restored the ruins of the temples and rebuilt the town over the last several years. Philae’s really gorgeous, truly breathtaking. You should go see it if you get the chance, before …” She didn’t finish the phrase. Her voice was strained, dispassionate, and too quick. Michael thought she was talking mostly so he couldn’t.

“The main city of Aswan’s maybe another four or five miles past the Low Dam on the east bank,” she continued. “Syrene’s on the western bank, directly across from Sehel—again, just a bit north of the dam. Right now there’s a quarter million or so of the followers of the Living Gods living there, most of them refugees from downriver—from Alexandria, Cairo, Karnak, and Luxor. They can’t go any farther. There’s nowhere else in Egypt where they could survive except along the Nile. So they’ll stand here, with their Living Gods.”

Kate touched his arm, pointing behind them. Michael turned, feeling the lingering touch of her fingers on his skin. South of the dam, a gigantic lake pooled behind the curved ramparts of the dam out to the horizon, its water crowding the top of the structure. “Yeah, Lake Nasser,” he said. “I know. I looked at the maps.”

Kate smiled. “You knew all this?”

“Pretty much. Figured it might be useful.”

A nod. “If it weren’t for Ana, we would have already lost Syrene and Sehel Island, and I don’t know how many people. We won the battle but almost lost Aswan Dam in the process. That wouldn’t be as catastrophic as if this dam were to rupture—that would send a wall of water rushing all the way down to the Mediterranean—but it would have been bad enough. Controlling the dams is the key to controlling Egypt.” She took a breath. “Some of the Living Gods are afraid that Abdul-Alim might just try and take out the High Dam if things get desperate. He’s a fanatic, Michael. He means to destroy the Living Gods and all their followers.”

Michael stared downriver. On Philae, the sun glinted on gilded columns. Feluccas dotted the waters of the Nile, moving from island to island, shore to shore. He tried to imagine it all gone in a roaring fury of white water.

“Why’d you come, Michael?”

He knew she’d ask. He’d formulated a hundred replies to the question on the way, but they’d all evaporated in the heat and sunlight and her presence. He licked dry lips. “I wanted … the way things happened back on American Hero … I don’t know, Kate. I really don’t. It’s all fucking mixed up in my head. I wasn’t happy where I was. Even playing with the band wasn’t helping. I felt like if I came here—if I showed up …” He tapped at his chest; a mournful, low dhoom answered. “Y’know, back in L.A., we talked about doing something genuine, something that wasn’t faked and artificial. I’ve been on stage most of my life; I worked my ass off to get where I am. But I know I could do more. The fame, the money—I have all of that I need. I can either play with it all, or I can use it. The visibility, the publicity, the money—they can be tools, just like what the wild card gave me. Sometimes they’re better.” He flicked his fingers over his chest; a rapid drumbeat answered as the throats along his neck pulsed—a quartet of paradiddles, followed by the splash of a cymbal. “I’ve always been able to get what I want if I work at it hard enough.” He found her gaze, held it. “Every time but once. I really hate fucking up. With you, I fucked up worse than I ever have, and I’m not even sure why. I know I’ve regretted it every day since.”

“Sometimes you can’t have what you want just ’cause you want it.” She hefted the marble; her arm arced back and forward almost too fast to see. He heard the hiss of the glass ball through the air. A moment later, far out in Lake Nasser, a fountain of white water erupted. “I like you, Michael. I do. You can be charming and funny and empathetic, and when you drop the rock star act there’s actually a great person underneath.”

“But?”

“I can’t trust you. You’ve proven that.”

He spread all six hands wide. “How can I show you you’re wrong, Kate?”

“You can’t. And …” She stopped.

“And you’re with him. Fortune.”

One shoulder lifted. “I’m not here because of John. I’m here to stop the genocide. You should understand the difference.”

“You can trust him, with that thing in his brain? That’s not even Fortune talking half the time. What if he’s just a marionette dancing on Sekhmet’s strings? Remember how he was when we first met him? Just Berman’s toady, Momma Peregrine’s little fetch-it boy. We all thought that he was a joke. Even you, I bet.”

“Shut up, Michael.” Her cheeks flushed. “Look, I’m—I’m glad you’re here. I’m sure we can use your strength.”

He flexed his arms reflexively. “My strength. But that’s all.”

She caught her lower lip in her teeth, as if trying to stop herself from saying more. “We should get back,” she said finally. “We’ll need to find you a place to sleep. Maybe you could share a tent with Rusty.”

“Toolbelt? The iron bigot? No fucking way.”

“He’s not that. We wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for him.”

“If you say so.”

“No. Here. Hold it like this.” Michael demonstrated the proper way to hold a drumstick to the child, a dark-skinned, dog-headed boy. He was thinking that Ahmed the cabdriver had been right: animal-headed jokers were common as sand among the followers of the Living Gods. He gave the drumstick back to the kid and a loud percussive crack followed as the boy slammed the stick onto Michael’s chest.

Michael lay on the ground outside his tent, his top arms under his head, the others set close to his body as a crowd of joker children gathered around him, laughing and jabbering excitedly as they played him as if he were a drum set. Parents and other adults watched, smiling from the periphery. Masud, his soldier fan, stood nearby, clapping and smiling. A joker with eyes set on long stalks and press credentials draped around his neck pulled a heavy, professional video camera to his shoulder and put his eyestalk to the viewfinder. A red light pulsed next to the lens.

The racket was incredible, and Michael’s neck throats yawned open as he let the sound boom out. There was a definite beat—the two kids kneeling by the lowest of the tympanic rings on his abdomen poured forth a subsonic phoom that was more felt than heard, a steady rhythm that struck the onlookers like invisible, soft fists. The children playing the higher-pitched, smaller rings above unleashed a cascade of varied tones as Michael shaped the noise with the matrix of vocal cords layered in his thick neck.

The noise radiated out, forte.

Rustbelt came out from the tent, yawning with a groan like ancient hinges. One of the kids rushed to him and began tapping at his leg with a drumstick. “Hey, you’re not a half-bad cowbell,” Michael said to him, half-shouting.

Rustbelt glanced at the knot of kids flailing at Michael’s body. “Cripes,” he said. “What are you doing, fella?”

“Getting to know the locals. Kids are kids, no matter where you are.”

Rustbelt glanced at the joker with the videocam. “Yeah.”

Some of the aces and the Living Gods had come to investigate the racket as well. Through the crowd, Michael could see Lohengrin and Fortune standing several yards away, looking at the scene as Fortune shook his head and whispered something to Lohengrin. Slightly behind them, he glimpsed Kate and Ana. He lifted a middle hand to wave to Kate. She nodded. Michael glanced over at Rustbelt, who was also looking in Kate’s direction. “‘I like kids’ can’t be a bad message.”

Rustbelt grunted. It sounded like a dump truck farting. “Not so long as it’s true.” Eyebrows lifted above the rust spots on his face. He stepped away carefully from the child banging on his leg and walked toward the other aces. Kate glanced back once, but through the arms and the blur of drumsticks, Michael couldn’t see if she was smiling or not.

He awoke to predawn explosions—a stutter of blasts muffled by distance and reverberations, sounding almost like a distant thunderstorm. He blinked, wondering if he’d dreamt the sound, but as he dressed quickly and splashed water over his face, Rustbelt came clanking into their tent, his massive steam shovel jaw half-open. “What the fuck’s the racket?” Michael asked him.

“The Living God fellas are blowing up the airport so the Caliph can’t land his soldiers in airplanes,” Rustbelt replied.

Michael blinked, rubbing at sleep-rimed eyes with his top hands. “They could have waited until daylight.”

“They could have.” Michael wasn’t sure what that meant. Rustbelt hooked a thumb toward the entrance of the tent. “Come on. Lohengrin said to get everybody up.”

Fifteen minutes later, most of the aces were gathered in the command tent, Michael wearing a long, loose white shirt with holes torn in it for his multiple arms and a blue scarf turbaned around his shaved head. The scene reminded Michael of the tryout sessions for American Hero, with so many of the former contestants standing there: Curveball, Earth Witch, Rustbelt, Bugsy, Holy Roller, Fat Chick, Simoon, Hardhat…

Most of them ignored him after a glance his way.

Fortune looked worried, but he looked up when Kate entered, nodding to her. Michael saw her give him a tightlipped smile in return—so it was Fortune and not Sekhmet running the body at the moment. “Here’s what we know,” he said. “The army of the caliphate is still advancing along the Nile. Right now they’re within thirty miles of Aswan, just leaving Kôm Ombo. They have Chinese WZ-10 attack helicopters providing cover and ground troops in APCs in the vanguard. The Djinn is back with Abdul, but we can’t assume he’ll stay there.”

“What about the fucking Egyptians?” Hardhat asked. “Is one ass-kicking enough for them, or do they want a fucking encore?”

“The Egyptians are staying out of it,” Jonathan Hive spat. A cloud of small green wasps detached from his cheeks and flittered around his head. One of them landed on Michael’s neck, and he felt a stabbing between two of his throat openings.

“Ow! Goddamn it,” he said, slapping at the thing. He looked at his hand and saw green goo on his palm. Crouching, he wiped his hand ostentatiously in the sand.

“Enough!” John Fortune’s voice cut through the rising hubbub under the canvas. Michael wondered who was really talking. “The Egyptian army no longer matters. The Caliph is our problem now. Him, and the Djinn. If any of you are having doubts …” He glanced at Michael. “… too bad. It’s too late to leave now.”

Lohengrin stepped up alongside Fortune. “Where they will attack first, we don’t yet know,” he said, his accent more pronounced than usual: “vair zay vill…”

“Jonathan is watching them with his wasps. The Low Dam is most likely, ja, but some of us must remain here at the High Dam, if they come this way instead.”

Fortune nodded. “Sobek will be on Sehel and will handle things there; Hardhat, you’ll be with him. Taweret will cover Syrene and the river. Jonathan, DB, you’ll stay here at the High Dam with a full platoon of jokers—DB, you’ll prepare roadblocks every few hundred yards. Take anything you can find that’ll serve. The Living Gods and their people are doing the same right now on the Low Dam. All the rest of you, be ready to be in one of the trucks in an hour—on the west end of the dam, by the monument.” He turned.

“Hey!“ Michael shouted. “I didn’t come here to babysit a dam!”

Fortune scowled. “I told you what we need you to do. Are you telling us that you won’t do it?”

Michael could feel them all watching him. He could especially feel Kate’s gaze, and he wondered what she’d said to him. “I’m saying that I could be more help elsewhere. You want to keep an eye on me, fine. Then keep me with you.”

“I want you here,” Fortune said flatly. “We can’t afford mavericks, Drummer Boy.” He drew out the name, and Michael tried in vain to stop the scowl that twisted his face. “Everyone needs to cooperate. Everyone needs to do the job they’re asked to do, or we fail.” He stared at Michael.

At the side of his vision, Michael could see Kate standing next to Ana, both of them watching. I can’t trust you. You’ve proven that. He let out his breath through his nose. “Fine,” he said, his teeth pressed together.

Fortune nodded, and it was impossible to miss the look of smug satisfaction on his face. “Let’s go over things, then. There’s not much time. Lohengrin, if you’d give us what’s known about the Righteous Djinn.…”

War was simultaneously nerve-wracking and boring.

After Fortune and most of the aces left, Michael and the jokers spent several hours driving cars, trucks, and buses onto the four-lane road atop the High Dam, starting from the east side and working their way west. Once a vehicle was in position, Michael would turn it on its side. Michael wrapped metal bars around them while the jokers piled on truck tires and chunks of broken concrete and bricks.

Around noon, he and the others went back to the tents near the monument to rest and eat. Hive was there, in one of the gun emplacements built into the dam. Four guards armed with Russian Kalashnikov submachine guns were with Hive, all of them jokers of the Living Gods, all of them grim as they stared out over the dam’s spillway toward the north. Michael thought Hive was sitting on a ledge near the antiaircraft gun mounted there, but only the top third of Hive’s body was there. Below the chest, there was nothing at all.

The guards had set up a radio on a rickety card table, with the orange cord of an extension cord trailing off toward the tents around the monument. The voices were spattered with static and interference. In the distance, Michael could hear the faint rattle of gunfire, and once or twice the sound of explosions. In the air, there were a few dark specks hovering far downriver: helicopter gunships, perhaps.

“It’s started,” Hive said. “Doesn’t appear to be any end run from the town toward us yet, though. Thank god, ’cuz we ain’t got enough firepower here to stop four hillbillies in a pickup truck.”

“I’m wasted here, Hive. The action’s up north at Aswan. Goddamn Beetle Boy—”

“Did you ever consider why John put you here?” Hive interrupted before Michael could launch into a tirade. “Oh, that’s right, thinking isn’t your strong suit. Look, we already lost King Cobalt—and he was strong and fast and tough and always wanted to be in the middle of the fight, just like you. And, just like you, he couldn’t do anything about bullets. John was doing you a favor.”

“Yeah?” Michael snarled. “He’s just fucking looking out for me, huh? Seems to me that Kate can’t stop a bullet either, or Ana. Or Holy Roller, for that matter. Funny, I don’t see them here. Do you?”

Hive just shook his head. Wasps came and went from where his body met the ledge. “What are you seeing?” Michael asked him. “Tell me.”

Hive sniffed. “Well, the Caliph’s holed up in this damned mansion in Aswan, and I could tell you exactly what he’s got planned if I could speak Arabic. He’s got Bahir with him—and I’ll tell you, that fucker’s fast: he cut my wasp in half with that scimitar. Poor Abdul was badly stung, though—”

“The fighting, Bugsy.”

Hive sniffed again. He closed his eyes momentarily, as if resting. Wasps fluttered away from his sleeves, his hands gone. “There’s fighting on the east side of Sehel Island—the Caliph’s people are pumping mortar rounds onto the island from the east bank of the river, and they’re trying to cross over the channel to the island in boats. Sobek, Taweret, and Hardhat are doing what they can.”

“And Kate?”

Hive’s eyes opened. “She’s with John, trying to hold the dam. They’ve pushed back one assault already, most of it, anyway. The Djinn hasn’t shown up yet, though—so far it’s just been the regular troops.”

“I should be there.”

“You should be building roadblocks. And sitting here chatting with me isn’t helping anyone at all, is it?” Hive smiled. “Just a suggestion.”

“Fuck you, Bugsy.” Michael drained his bottle of water. He stalked away, and for another half-hour assuaged unfocused anger by flinging cars into place. The jokers working with him whispered to each other in fast Arabic, pointing at him. The racket from the fighting northward continued to crackle over the water, growing louder and more intrusive by the minute. Michael kept looking that way, wondering at every plume of smoke. When a particularly loud explosion thundered in the north, he plunged his lower hand into the pocket of his jeans and found the piece of crumpled cardboard there. “Hey, any of you got a cell phone?” he asked his companions.

Ahmed chattered nonstop as they careened down the western Nile road behind a troop carrier laden with jokers. “I have no fear for myself, you understand, but my wife and my children, they would be lost if I were gone.…”

They were stopped as they approached the western terminus of the Low Dam. “I’m trying to get to the front,” Michael had shouted to the nervous, armed jokers at the checkpoint, followers of the Living Gods. “Fortune’s orders. Sobek has called for me. Sobek … ? Sekhmet… ?” Eventually, through Ahmed’s Arabic and the guards’ pidgin English, he’d made himself understood. Ahmed’s taxi had been commandeered, however. A jackal-headed joker with an automatic weapon sat in the passenger seat, with three more sitting on the trunk and two on the hood. Yet another duo held onto the open rear doors, standing on the car’s frame. All the jokers were dressed in ragged uniform pants and shirts that didn’t match; most had animal heads or other body parts. They looked more like escapees from a zoo than soldiers, and they looked suspiciously untrained. Ahmed cursed and honked his horn endlessly.

As the noise of gunfire grew louder across the river, Michael heard the thrup-thrup-thrup of copter blades, followed by a low, sinister whoomp and an explosion of dirt and sand. A troop carrier two vehicles ahead of them lifted its front end high into the air and dropped back again on its side. Ahmed’s brakes squealed in protest and locked; the jokers clinging to his car went tumbling, as trucks lurched to one side or the other to avoid hitting anyone.

The air rained blood-spattered sand and truck parts. What had to be someone’s hand slapped dully against the windshield, a watch strapped to the wrist and the tattered dun camouflage remnants of a uniform around it. Ahmed stared, momentarily speechless. He made a warding motion toward the severed forearm on the hood. The chopper screamed overhead, heading north toward Syrene. A raging tornado of sand erupted from the ground ahead of it and bent its dark funnel—Simoon. The chopper turned sharply to avoid her vortex, but the rotors were caught in the swirling winds, flinging the craft down like an abandoned toy. They saw the flash as it exploded on the ground, then a second later came the shrieking howl of the crash.

Smoke poured from the wreckage ahead of them. Through the haze, Michael could see figures moving over the sand, rushing toward the dam. “No further! I go back now!” Ahmed’s mouth was opened wide, but Michael could barely hear him through the roaring in his ears.

“No further,” Michael agreed. Crawling from the rear compartment, he ripped bills from his wallet and tossed them to Ahmed. “Thanks, man. That was definitely over and above,” he said. “Go find your wife and kids and get the hell outa here. Salam alekum.”

“Peace to you” sounded like a stupid thing to say, in context, but it was the only Arabic salutation he knew. Ahmed nodded furiously. He put the taxi into reverse, gears grinding, and fishtailed backward until the car was pointing south. The arm slid from the hood, smearing a line of blood over the rust-flecked paint. Ahmed, with a blare of his horn, spat sand from under the wheels, scattering running soldiers of the Living Gods as he fled.

Michael faced south. You wanted to come here. You wanted to come because Kate was here. The smoke made him cough and cover his mouth and nose with a hand. The sand was bitterly hot through the soles of his sneakers. He could barely see through the haze of dust and smoke. Armed jokers were running past him. He joined them, jogging past the fuming wreckage and trying not to look at the carnage inside the twisted steel.

A battle between armies, he discovered quickly, was no clean, discrete thing, but a whirl of individual scenes which made little sense.

… Michael ran through the smoke toward the dam and the sounds of struggle, slipping near the smoldering hulk of a bus, on its side at the western end of the dam. There was the loud tink of a bullet striking metal not two inches from his head, and his shaved scalp was peppered with hot flecks of steel. He threw himself facedown onto the sand as a line of metallic craters dimpled the sheet metal where he’d just been. He felt warm blood running down one of his arms, and he realized he’d opened a long, deep slice in his middle left arm on a sharp corner of the wrecked vehicle. The pain hit him then, and he rolled on his side, clutching at the wound.

He stopped. Someone was staring at him from alongside the bus, no more than four inches away from his face: Masud, the Joker Plague fan. His eyes were wide in his hairless skull and his mouth was open in a soundless scream, his temple a gory red crater. Gray brain matter and blood were sliding thickly down the bus just above him. Masud’s earbuds had fallen from his earholes, the white cord trailing back to the pocket of his uniform, and Michael could hear Joker Plague’s music playing shrill and thin. Michael’s stomach lurched, unbidden, and he vomited loudly and explosively. His stomach still knotted, he ran again …

… he was on the dam itself, still running and trying to find any familiar faces in the chaos. Through the smoke, he saw Rustbelt as he came around another cluster of overturned vehicles barricading the roadway. Three soldiers in the uniform of the caliphate were firing at the ace from point-blank range, and Michael could hear a metallic ting-wheep, as bullets bounced from Rustbelt’s body and ricocheted away. Rustbelt, shouting, reached out to touch the nearest weapon. The barrel crumpled to red dust. Rusty was bleeding as badly as Michael. His right shoulder displayed a sickening red crater; he might be immune to bullets, but something had punched through his natural armor. Michael saw the soldiers backpedaling as they continued to fire at Rusty, retreating and clustering together. The weaponless man reached for a canvas belt bandoliered around his shoulder and fumbled with a grenade there.

Michael crouched; the roadway was broken, and he snatched up a two-foot hunk of concrete curbing with his lower hands, and flipped it to his upper set of arms. Grunting, he heaved it overhead with all his considerable strength toward the soldiers. They went down hard as Michael dove for the ground, trying vainly to cover his head with all six arms. The gunfire stopped. When he glanced up, Rusty was looking down at him, nodding his riveted head and clutching at his wounded shoulder. “Thanks, fella. That would’ve been a bad deal.” Michael sat up: The grenade had rolled away from the crushed soldier’s hand, the pin still attached. He could see it on the pavement, not two feet away …

… people were running westward past Michael and Rustbelt, all of them jokers, some of them with weapons clutched in their hands, many of them bloodied and injured. “What’s going on?” Michael shouted, catching one on them in his hands, but the man replied in fast, frightened Arabic, pushing at Michael’s arms to get away. “Djinn,” was the only word Michael caught. Rustbelt shrugged and pointed northward over the edge of the dam. There, maybe a mile down the river, Michael could see a large island. Bright girders glowed as a bridge between the island and the town of Syrene on the west bank, with the black dots of hundreds of people hurrying across the improvised span. Then smoke obscured the scene again. “Hardhat. Good fella.” Rustbelt grunted and started walking eastward, and Michael followed behind him.

… it seemed like he’d been running along this road forever, dodging around the roadblocks and ducking behind any cover he could find whenever he heard gunfire. He’d lost Rusty during one of those moments. Craters erupted in the edge of the roadway as an automatic weapon fired, and Michael flung himself behind a stack of burning tires. “You never hear the one that hits you,” he muttered to himself. He thought he’d heard that somewhere. He was close to the middle of the dam, the arrow-straight roadway stretching out in front of him. A hundred yards ahead of him there was another roadblock, this one piled high with the burning, motionless hulk of a caliphate tank perched atop the rubble, stretching entirely across the two-lane road. To the north, there was an eighty-foot sheer drop to the Nile; to the south there was water, only a few feet below the stone retaining wall.

And on this side of the improvised roadblock: Kate.

She wore a hodgepodge uniform: The helmet of a WWII German soldier, a bulky Kevlar vest over her T-shirt, camouflage pants tucked into heavy boots. Several joker soldiers were gathered around her. Ana, similarly attired, was with them, as was Rusty, Lohengrin clad in his shining ghost steel, and Holy Roller. Ahead of them all, prowling from side to side of the road, was Sekhmet, glowing brightly even in the sunlight. The huge lioness’s fur was spattered with blood, her claws were snagged with tatters of cloth and raw meat, and smoke coiled from her mouth as she roared defiance.

Michael wondered what Sekhmet was growling at. He wondered at the shuddering of the roadway under his feet. The answer to both came immediately. The Righteous Djinn loomed up behind the barricade—a scowling giant who looked to be three stories tall, a nightmare with black tendrils of smoke curling about him. Fear struck Michael at the sight, a mindless, unreasoning fear that stole the air from his lungs and clamped hands around his throat, a fear that sent his bowels grumbling and bile burning in his stomach, a fear that made his muscles quiver. He shouted with alarm, the cry lost because it was echoed by them all. All but a few of the joker soldiers dropped their weapons and fled past Michael as he gaped up at the Djinn.

“All is lost,” Michael heard Lohengrin proclaim, his sword down. “We cannot stand against this.…”

Holy Roller shrieked. “It’s Satan himself!” he shrilled. “The devil walks the earth!” And he was gone, rolling westward and heedlessly bowling over fleeing soldiers in his rush. All of the rest of them except Fortune had backed up several paces. They looked ready to follow Holy Roller. Michael had to fight the compulsion to put his back to this horror.

“Fear is his greatest weapon,” Lohengrin had told them yesterday. “He radiates terror, and his enemies often flee from him without fighting.” Michael believed that now.

The Djinn glared down at them. His monstrous hands came down and plucked the tank from the barrier. He lifted it high, and Michael and the others scattered like roaches. There was no place to go—but the Djinn flung the tank effortlessly sideways over the side of the dam. They heard it hit the ground far below, as the Djinn flicked his massive hands as if brushing away crumbs, sweeping aside the rest of the barricade. Behind the Djinn, Michael could see troops in the uniform of the caliphate. One of the soldiers held a banner of red on which a crescent moon enclosed an eight-pointed star made of scimitar blades, both symbols yellow against the blood-hued backdrop: the Djinn’s personal banner. They were advancing at a walk, the Righteous Djinn behind them, the roadway shuddering under his step, the army behind him.

The lioness of Sekhmet stood her ground, her tail lashing furiously, her glow almost blinding.

Michael remembered Lohengrin’s other warning: You can’t get near him. If he touches you, he will steal your power entirely away.

Looming above ranks of his elite guard, the Djinn extended his huge hand, palm-up, toward Sekhmet, his fingers curling back toward him in unmistakable invitation. The elite guard pressed to either side of the roadway, leaving an open path to the Djinn. Michael could hear the sounds of the army of the caliphate advancing relentlessly behind the Djinn and his guards—part shouts, part the chatter of tank treads and the growl of diesel engines, part stones tumbling and timbers cracking, part the varied barks of weaponry. All of it the sound of death.

“Kate!”

She glanced over to him. Her eyes widened slightly. He wondered what she was thinking, what he must look like—one arm hanging and bloody, his clothing torn and filthy with gore. He could not read her face. She looked quickly back to Sekhmet. “John!” she called loudly. “Don’t!”

The lioness roared, and searing flames erupted from her mouth. Some of the caliph’s soldiers, their uniforms afire, fled as the lioness bounded toward the Djinn, claws extended. She looked like a kitten attacking an adult. Sekhmet’s fire seemed not to affect the Djinn at all, her claws left red scratches on the hand the Djinn lifted to send Sekhmet tumbling back. The Djinn reached for the stunned lioness, but Sekhmet’s attack had broken the stasis of fear that held them. Kate was flinging rocks, making the Djinn bring his hand back as though it had been bee-stung. Lohengrin lifted his sword. “Yield!“ he shouted. “Yield, Righteous Djinn, and you may yet live!”

And Ana … she had dropped to the ground. On her hands and knees, her head down, she looked as if she were praying. A rumbling shivered Michael’s feet from the roadway beneath him.

Laughing, the Djinn made his gesture of invitation once more, as Sekhmet shook her head and stood once more. The lioness snarled, smoke curling around her snout. Her claws tore furrows in the concrete of the road, and Michael knew that Sekhmet would renew her attack in a moment. The rumbling under Michael’s feet grew, and the roadway lifted up and fell under him like a concrete wave. “Cripes,” Rusty grunted, nearly stumbling. Michael could see the ripple growing higher, as it knocked Kate and Lohengrin from their feet entirely, as it raced toward the Djinn.

The elite guard had responded to the attack on their leader also. Their weapons opened up—Lohengrin rolled in front of Kate; Rusty moved to shield Michael. Tiny puffs of dust erupted all around; concrete chips flew. Sekhmet leaped toward the prone Ana. Most of the bullets struck the lioness as she roared and spat flame, but Ana gave a cry, rolling over and clutching her side below the short Kevlar vest.

Michael could see blood.

The low grumbling beneath them ceased. Ana’s wave stopped sluggishly, but there was enough of a slope under the Djinn’s feet that he fell backward. The impact of his body on the dam sent reverberations through the entire structure and sent clouds of dust skyward. The mound of Ana’s earth wave collapsed noisily, leaving a deep and jagged fissure separating the groups. Water rushed in to fill it, pouring over the north side of the dam. The Djinn’s guards continued to fire wildly over the gap as they moved back quickly from the breach, as the Djinn picked himself up.

“Ana!” Kate ran to her friend. Rusty and Michael ran to her also.

“I got her,” Michael told Kate, who was crying and trying to lift the young woman. “I can carry her.” He took Ana in his lower set of arms; she fought him, crying out in pain with her eyes closed, her flailing arms striking the tympanic rings on his chest, so that wild drumbeats sounded. He tried not to look at the wound that gaped just above her right hip or the blood that poured from it. He cradled Ana and ran, crouching low. Terror gave him speed. Sekhmet roared, the guns of the Living Gods’ people chattered. Several green wasps went zipping past Michael’s head. “We’ll stand at the western end,” Lohengrin shouted. “Simoon and Bubbles will meet us there.”

They retreated, Lohengrin, Rustbelt, and Sekhmet at the rear.

The Djinn’s mocking laughter pursued them.

Michael panted, carrying Ana, who had gone terribly still in his arms. To the north, Hardhat’s girdered bridge still gleamed, wreathed in greasy smoke and filled with refugees fleeing Sehel. On the island’s eastern shore, a fleet of landing boats clustered while helicopters hovered like carrion birds overhead. The tornado of Simoon was racing south from Syrene on the western shore of the Nile, in their direction. A flotilla of bubbles was hurrying west to east across the river toward a squadron of WZ-10 attack helicopters, all with the black, green, and white insignia of the caliphate on them.

“Curveball!” Lohengrin shouted, gesturing with his sword. One of the WZ-10s emerged from the dust and smoke behind them, its black snout bristling. Its nose dipped and Michael waited for the guns to open up, or for a missile to gout fire and race toward them. But Kate had turned at Lohengrin’s shout, and, with that softball pitcher’s windup, she threw.

The stone shattered the windshield and buried itself in the pitot’s face. The chopper wailed like a wounded beast, its nose tilting straight up so that it seemed to be standing on its rear rotors, which sliced at the ground and shattered. Bits of rotor flew; Michael heard one of the followers of the Living Gods grunt and fall, his body nearly severed through. The chopper fell backward, the main rotors thrashing at the roadway. They all ran for cover. Michael heard the shrill scream of tortured metal and felt the heat of the explosion as the fuel tank went. The world was bright yellow and red, then black—the concussion sent him to his knees as he cradled Ana in all six arms.

A larger explosion came as he tried to rise; the ordnance on the craft exploding. Michael was flung down entirely, and he rolled to avoid going down on top of Ana. A series of smaller detonations followed.

He struggled up again, clinging to Ana with two arms and using the others to lever himself up. Bits of unidentifiable things were smoldering all around him. He couldn’t hear anything; the explosions still roared in his ears. Sekhmet was rising from where she had been flung. Kate was shouting something to Rusty and Lohengrin, both still on their feet. She was pointing. There was pure fright in her eyes.

A crater, twenty feet across and far deeper than that, was gouged in the dam where the chopper had been, ripping entirely through the two-lane road. The wound seemed to be widening as they watched, white foam lashing at the tumbled, broken lip. Lohengrin waved his sword, his mouth open below the helm though Michael could hear no words. Lohengrin and Kate started running; gesturing at Michael. Sekhmet spat flame, but then she, too, turned. The followers of the Living Gods, those who could, ran with them.

The dam shuddered like a living thing.

They were within sight of the western end when the dam failed.

“Scheisse,” Lohengrin breathed. Michael heard the curse. He stopped and looked back, pressing Ana to his chest with four arms.

In the center of the long, straight span, the dam bulged, broken now in two places. Water boiled, spewing wildly from twin rents in the wall. As Michael watched, the bulge sagged entirely. The confined waters of the Nile burst free, tearing away concrete and earth, ripping away the tanks and trucks and soldiers of the caliphate caught on the roadway, and hurling it all northward in a tsunami of white water. The entire middle third of the dam was gone, and still the water poured through, tearing away more of the dam every second, an endless deluge. People were screaming on both sides of the river; feluccas and other river craft were tossed and tumbled under; houses crushed and ripped from their foundations on the islands and along either bank. The Nile, which after millennia of annual floods had been tamed since the first decade of the 1900s, flooded once more. A century’s worth of pent-up fury rushed downriver as the lake behind the dam emptied—toward Hardhat’s bridge, unstoppable.

The freed Nile reached Sehel Island and bore it under.

There was no sound, not from that distance. Michael saw Hardhat’s bright girders lift, black specks of people falling from them. The girders swayed and twirled, lifting higher and higher above the flood, as if Hardhat were trying to use them to rise above the water, to find something to hold onto and survive this watery assault.

They watched silent, helpless.

The girders vanished. They were present one moment, towering above the foaming torrent, a flickering hope. And in the next, they were gone, as if they had never been there at all.

Michael watched as Kate wiped Ana’s face with a damp cloth while a nurse injected a syringe of morphine into her arm, before moving down to the next cot in the crowded field hospital. The chill night air under the canvas roof was laden with the plaintive cries of the wounded. Michael doubted there was enough morphine in all of Egypt for this.

“… and you saved literally thousands of lives today. We held them to the east side of the river, and most of the people got off Sehel before the dam went, thanks to Hardhat. We’ve certainly hurt the Caliph’s army.”

“The Djinn?” Ana husked. Her voice was barely a whisper.

Kate lifted a shoulder. “Alive.”

Ana tried to sit up, but fell back even before Kate could stop her. “Don’t,” Kate said.

“Listen to Curveball, Ana,” Michael commented. “You’ve lost enough blood for one day.”

Kate looked over her shoulder. Michael smiled at her. Kate bore a long cut down her right cheek, taped closed, and a smaller one over her left eye, and there were bruises on her arms. The corners of her mouth might have moved slightly in response. “Hey,” she said. “They patch you up okay?”

Michael rubbed his middle left arm, wrapped in white gauze from shoulder to elbow. “A couple dozen stitches. The doc said I’ll have a nice scar. How you holding up, Ana?”

“Fine,” Ana mumbled drowsily. “Thanks, Michael. You got me out of there.”

“Hell, I figured grabbing you was the best excuse to get the fuck away from that dam.” He tried another smile; neither woman returned it. “I just… I thought I’d see how you were. Any news about Hardhat, Kate?”

She shook her head. “Nothing. Even if he survived, he could have been swept miles downstream. …” Her voice trailed off.

“He’s strong enough. You never know,” Michael said, and knew neither one of them believed it. He wondered if they’d ever know how many hundreds or thousands had died, on Sehel, in the lower sections of Syrene, or at Aswan and on downstream, as the flood rampaged north. “Ana, you just take care of yourself for now …” he began, and noticed that she was asleep. “Kate, you want to grab some food? I’m told they got the mess tent going. Ain’t much there, but—”

Kate shook her head. “I’m going to stay here for awhile.”

“If you’d like some company …”

“No,” she said sharply, then tried to soften the words. “I’d really rather be alone right now,” she told him.

“Yeah.” He tapped at his chest; drumbeats answered. “Sure.”

They gathered at the top of the High Dam, all the aces and several of the followers of the Living Gods—at least all of them who could be there. A few were missing: Kate was still with Ana, and Holy Roller was also in the infirmary—after his panicked flight from the Djinn, plowing over and through everything in his path, his body looked as if someone had scoured him with a divine file.

As Michael glanced around, he could see few aces who were unscathed. Lohengrin appeared none the worse for the battle, untouched through his armor; Aliyah was tired but uninjured, and of course Hive looked just fine, though he was currently missing everything below his hips, his torso propped on the ledge next to Fortune. But the rest… The least wounded, like Michael, bore scabbed and stitched wounds from the battle. Fortune’s body was visibly bruised and battered. Rustbelt’s arm was wrapped and in a sling; Bubbles looked decidedly anorexic, her pupils nearly lost in the caverns of her eye sockets. The two Living Gods present appeared little better. Sobek was missing teeth, and the great bulk of Taweret’s hippopotamus body was mummy-wrapped in red-stained bandages. They had been among the last to escape Sehel.

Feluccas patrolled the waters between the Low and High Dams, and on the western side of the Nile the banks were dotted with campfires from the refugees who had fled from Syrene and Aswan. Lines of them clogged the roads leading south. Michael had been told that there were at least five thousand camped on the road between the High Dam and the airport, mostly the elderly, the infirm, and the very young. In the middle distance, the island of Philae was ablaze with lights: some natural; some, Michael suspected, wild card driven. Farther out, past the remnants of the Aswan Dam, there were few lights burning where once villages had lined the banks of the Nile. The old Nile channel had been scoured clean of life.

“… we must prepare for tomorrow,” Fortune was saying. “The Low Dam is gone and we’ve taken out most of their air power—they now have to cross the Nile here at the High Dam.”

Sobek grunted his agreement. “The Caliph will send his army south again as soon as it’s light, pursuing those our resistance saved.”

“Maybe, but those bastards took huge losses yesterday,” Hive interjected. “If I were them, I wouldn’t be quite so anxious.”

Sobek’s crocodilian snout wrinkled, as if he were scowling. “They took losses, yes, but that will only anger them. They will come, and they will be crying for revenge.” Next to him, Taweret shifted her immense weight almost daintily. Sobek translated. “Taweret says we could retreat to Abu Simbel—we might still reach there.”

“They’ll just follow us out into the desert and kill us there, where we have no cover at all,” Fortune answered, and other voices murmured agreement. “At least here we know the ground, and we have the advantage of the river.”

“Then send a team to Aswan. Kill the Caliph,” Sobek told him. “It’s his army.”

“Yeah, there’s a great idea,” Hive grumbled. “Wasn’t killing the Caliph what started this shit in the first place?”

Taweret and Sobek both started to answer angrily, but Fortune’s voice rose over theirs. To Michael’s ears, it didn’t sound like Fortune at all. “Enough of this. There’s no other way for them to go, and we will make our stand here.” Fortune paused. No one spoke. “Good. Now—here’s the crux: we need to deal with the Righteous Djinn. He’s the real head of the beast, not Caliph Abdul—if the Djinn is removed, the loss would demoralize the army. They’d break. I’m certain of it.”

“And just how do you propose to do that?” Michael asked. Heads turned toward him. “Maybe some oracle told you about a fatal weakness? Maybe a poison arrow in the heel?”

Fortune scowled at Michael’s interruption. “We could start by making sure that people obey the orders they’re given,” Fortune answered. “We were lucky yesterday that the Djinn didn’t decide to cross here at the High Dam, because there wasn’t anyone to stop him if he had.”

Yeah, like I’d have been able to stop that guy, Michael wanted to retort. He wanted to rage and fume at Fortune, at his combined arrogance and hubris. Who the fuck elected you God? Michael swallowed the bile, and it burned all the way down. Fortune glared at him, but now there was a smirk hiding in the corners his mouth.

Lohengrin spoke before Michael had decided what to say. “If the Djinn touches you, you are lost. He will slay you and drink your powers. We all know that. But he can’t touch me. My ghost steel will protect me. The Djinn should be mine.”

Simoon gave a bitter laugh. “The Djinn is killing my people, Klaus. If he tries to grab me, I’ll rip the flesh and muscle right from his hands. Believe me, I can take him.”

“Look, none of you know what powers the Djinn has stolen from those he’s killed, what he can do, or what his vulnerabilities might be.” That was Fortune again.

Michael had heard enough. He turned and walked away as the debate went on.

He set the bottle down on the wall around the memorial. High above him, concrete petals held a ring encircling the half moon. Stepping back from the bottle into the center of the memorial, he pulled out the sticks he’d crammed into his back pocket and started to drum. The cadence was fast and rapid, the beat from his six hands so quick that it was difficult to hear the individual strokes at all. He ignored the painful objections from his wounded arm; instead, he focused the sound with his throat openings, shaping it until the bottle started to shiver. He tightened his throat, moving the sound up just a quarter step.

The bottle jumped an inch into the air and shattered. Glass shards sparkled jewel-like in the moonlight and rained down on the concrete with a sound like sand thrown against a window.

“Beer?”

Michael shook his head. “Water,” he answered. “Couldn’t find any beer.” He glanced over his shoulder. Kate was standing at the entrance to the memorial.

“Great talent you got there,” she said. “I thought only sopranos could do that.”

“I’m pretending it’s the Djinn’s head. Or maybe Fortune’s. I haven’t decided which yet.”

She didn’t laugh.

“How’s Ana?” he asked finally, when the silence threatened to swallow them both. “She gonna make it?”

“She’s stable, they tell me. But they need to get her to a real hospital soon.”

He nodded. He didn’t say how unlikely he thought that possibility to be.

“I talked to John,” she said.

Michael gave a bark of a laugh. “Did Beetle Boy give you my ‘assignment’? What am I doing tomorrow? Kitchen help? Bandage detail? Maybe I should sweep the sidewalks so no one dirties their sandals while running away from the Djinn?”

Kate let out her breath through her nose. She was wearing jeans and a tong-sleeved denim shirt with a large leather pouch around one shoulder, bulging with what Michael suspected were smooth, polished stones from around the riverbank, perfect for throwing. “You know what? John’s right about you, Michael,” she told him. “You refuse to listen to anything he has to say because you don’t like him, and that’s stupid. It really is. We can’t win here without taking out the Djinn, and we can’t take out the Djinn without everyone’s cooperation. Sobek, John, Lohengrin, and Bugsy are making those plans now; maybe you should be with them, helping.”

“The way you’ll be with Beetle Boy when he goes after the Djinn?”

Kate grimaced at the name, but only shrugged. “If that’s what he thinks is best,” she said, “yes, that’s where I’ll be.”

“Then that’s where I want to be, too.”

“Why?” she asked. “You think I can’t take care of myself, Michael? You think I need your protection?”

He walked over to where she stood. She watched his approach with near-defiance in the tilt of her head and the narrowing of her eyes. He towered over her as she looked up at him. “I want to be there because you’re there. No other reason. I’d think that would be obvious by now.”

“Michael—”

“No,” he said. His arms, moving, sent bars of shadows flowing over her body. “Listen to me. I can’t change what I did back in L.A., Kate. I was an asshole, I’ll admit it. It was a fucking game and I treated it that way. But there was something genuine between us, and I really craved the feeling I had when I was with you. You felt it too, at least at first; but that feeling’s never left me. Maybe what I did, being with Pop Tart and the others, killed it for you. I don’t know. But I can pray that something’s still there.”

When she didn’t answer, he allowed himself to hope. He hurried into the silence. “I can’t change what I’ve done, but I can change. I can. I have.”

She stopped him with a lifted hand that seemed to shake slightly against the moon-shimmer of Lake Nasser. “Michael, I really don’t know how I feel about any of this.” She stopped, shook her head again. “I can’t think about it now. I won’t. The truth is that it’s not important. Not here, not now. Maybe afterward, if …” She wouldn’t finish that sentence. “I’ve already told you: I’m not here for John, not at the core. And if you’re here for me, then you’re here for the wrong reasons. So why are you here, Michael? Tell me.”

Her eyes scanned his face, the question held in them waiting for his words like a knife. “Maybe afterward…“ He clung to the words, playing them over and over in his mind.

He opened his mouth. He tapped his chest nervously, sending the sound of a low drum into the night. His arms flexed and broken glass ground under the soles of his sneakers, but the words wouldn’t come.

“I thought so,” Kate said. “I’m sorry for you, Michael. I truly am.”

Fortune didn’t put him in the reserves. Michael wondered if that was Kate’s doing, or simply because there were no reserves. But he wasn’t with Kate, Fortune, and Lohengrin. He was teamed with Bubbles and Rustbelt.

Hive’s wasps had warned them that the Djinn was leading Ikhlas al-Din and the army up the eastern bank of the Nile from Aswan, though the Caliph himself remained cocooned in the mansion he’d commandeered in the city of Aswan. “If they manage to cross the High Dam, if we can’t stop them here today, we’ve lost everything,” Fortune told the gathered aces in the predawn dark. “All that matters is this moment.”

By the first hour after dawn, they had moved north on the eastern bank, the High Dam towering two hundred feet over them as they marched away. Michael, Rustbelt, and Bubbles accompanied a battalion of the Living Gods headed by Aliyah, positioned on the Aswan Road nearest the dam’s eastern terminus, holding the newly drained slopes between the Aswan Road and the Nile. Fortune, Kate, and Lohengrin joined with Sobek, Taweret, and the rest of their joker followers—farther north on the road and blocking it entirely. Hive ran communications from the High Dam, his wasps already placed.

All of them—aces and jokers—rested behind sandy earthworks erected hastily the night before, as the shadows shortened and the day’s heat began to rise. Michael’s bald head was encased in an Egyptian army helmet painted a sandy orange, and he wore a Kevlar vest, far too small, that was bound to his torso with elastic bandages. Rustbelt, his right arm still bandaged but out of the sling, was pounding on Bubbles with his left hand, as she glanced at Michael, her face rounding with new weight. “You, too,” she said. “Hit me.”

He punched her in the arm. She sneered at him. “That all you got, Little Drummer Boy? Now I see why Kate dumped you. You’re weak, pathetic, and useless.” This time, when he hit her with an anger that surprised him, she staggered backward but grinned fiercely. “More,” she told him. “Don’t hold back. We don’t have much time.”

She was right.

It started with machine gun fire to Michael’s right—a rough cough answered by a sibilant, fast stutter. Somewhere close, a voice screamed in Arabic. An invisible giant’s boot thumped against the artificial dune sheltering them; a moment later sand dusted the sky in a thundering spout of orange and black. Michael could hear the sinister, grinding clank of tank treads; the ugly snout of one drifted over the crest, the tricolor flag of the caliphate painted on the side. Michael could see a soldier standing up in the turret. The man shouted down into the tank’s interior, reaching for the machine gun mount as the turret swiveled toward them. But a bubble the size of a beach ball had formed between Bubble’s outstretched palms, and it floated away from her toward the tank. The metallic shriek when it struck the vehicle was tremendous. Caterpillar tracks broke like rubber bands; the lopsided frisbee of the turret went spinning away, and the chassis split open raggedly, as if a divine can opener had ripped through it. There were body parts mixed in with the twisted steel.

Aliyah stood. The dark-haired young woman lifted her arms and a hot wind roared around her, sand lifting and swirling like a cloak encircling her, a tornado coiling, lifting and rising, the wind a shriek and howl: Simoon, the terrifying wind of the desert. The sand devil widened and thickened further, so that Michael had to shield his face from the blowing sand. The orange-red tornado, howling, went twirling northward toward the enemy. The Living Gods shouted and began running up the sandy slope in pursuit.

“Okay, fellas,” Rustbelt said. “Here we go.” They ran, Michael staying behind Rusty and Bubbles for the protection they could provide. By the time they reached the summit of the dune, Michael could hear the occasional bullet pinging from Rustbelt’s riveted skin, and Bubbles had gained back all the weight she’d lost.

From the top of the dune, Michael could glimpse the panorama of the sandy battlefield, the scene before them spread out like a movie set.

… Figures spilled down a low rise just to the north, black against the sand. The horde seemed uncountable despite their losses from yesterday, and Michael despaired. Banners fluttered among them—most with the black, green, and white flag of the caliphate, though he also glimpsed the eight-pointed Islamic star of Ikhlas al-Din. The Caliph’s forces had evidently given up on air support—the sky was empty. The followers of the Living Gods rushed toward them, with some of the Living Gods themselves among them. The insistent chatter of small arms fire and the sinister ka-thump of mortars and RPGs rattled the air as they began their descent.

… Across the Aswan Road and ahead, clouds of green wasps swarmed. Lohengrin’s armor gleamed white and cold as he charged toward the enemy, and just behind the German ace, Sekhmet had taken Fortune once more. The great lioness roared and flame spouted from her mouth as she leapt into the fray, claws tearing at the ranks of the caliphate. Kate, farther back, flung rocks that struck the Caliph’s soldiers like missiles.

… and there wasn’t time to see more, as Rustbelt and Bubbles, with Michael close behind, were suddenly in the midst of fighting themselves. Rustbelt’s massive arms swung like pistons, as those nearest him retreated with curses in Arabic. Michael swung around Rustbelt’s left; a soldier fired at him, the burst hitting the center of his vest. The tremendous impact drove Michael to the ground. The soldier stood over him, and he was too dazed to react. He saw the muzzle pointed at his face …

… but a bubble the size of a orange wafted past above him, and the soldier went tumbling back in a spray of blood. Michael stared at the body for moment before pushing himself up, bruised and sore but intact, the vest hanging from a few shreds of bandages. “Thanks, Bubbles!” he shouted, but he couldn’t see her anywhere. The followers of the Living Gods were flowing past him, charging into the fray, and it was suddenly hand-to-hand combat. A bayonet-tipped rifle emerged from the crush, stabbing at him. It was all he saw, but Michael managed to grab the muzzle. He pulled with all his strength. A man came flying from the press around him, and Michael flung the man screaming back into his own people. There were weapons on the sand, and Michael picked up four of them with his lowest hands …

… “DB!” he heard Rustbelt call, and saw the ace swarmed with soldiers, like a praying mantis beset with fire ants. Michael ran toward him, firing his quartet of AK-47s without bothering to aim, feeling the furious kick of the automatic weapons as they bucked in his hands. Bullets sparked against Rustbelt’s body, and whined as they caromed away, but bodies were falling from him as well. Rustbelt rose with a groan and a cry and shook off the rest.

He pounded the last few of the soldiers heavily into the sand, leaving red craters. Michael looked away, trying to gain his bearings again.

They were in a valley between low dunes. The wind devil of Simoon scoured the top of the dune ahead of them. He didn’t know where Bubbles or the rest of the followers of the Living Gods had gone. “Come on, fella,” Rustbelt said, “we’re done here.” He lumbered up the dune with Michael struggling after him. The sand dragged at his feet and filled his sneakers, clinging to his sweating body and chafing at the belt of his jeans. He was bleeding; the bandages wrapped around his wounded arm were soaked, and there was a long, ugly gash on his right side between his top and middle arm, the blood mixed with gritty sand. Michael hadn’t felt the bayonet that had left that mark, but now he felt the pain and the stitch in his side.

Rustbelt reached the top of the dune. He stopped, and Michael heard the ace grunt.

“Shit.” Michael saw the issue as he scrambled up next to Rustbelt. For the moment, they were alone in an oasis of relative calm. The main force of the army was focused on the road snaking through the landscape a quarter mile to their left, on the east bank, north of the dam. There, smoke rose from the twisted hulks of personnel carriers and tanks. The troops of the caliphate and the armed jokers of the Living Gods were engaged in a fierce firefight. In the midst of it, in the smear of the tracer rounds and the explosions from mortars, the aces of both sides had come together.

The banner of the Djinn waved, bloody and threatening. Around him, the armies swarmed, but the Djinn stood untouched, a tower in the midst of the plain, his hands lifted to the sky as if in praise. The followers of the Living Gods were running away from him in wild retreat, firing their weapons over their shoulders to no effect. Even from this distance, Michael could feel the tinge of fear radiating from the ace. Uncertainty burned in his stomach. This would be a quick and brutal assault. The Caliph intended to take the High Dam and end this, and the Djinn was going to make certain that the job was accomplished swiftly.

Michael didn’t see any way to stop it. The Djinn dwarfed everyone, and the fear he produced was spreading outward in a wide crescent in front of him. Taweret was among those fleeing, running over her own people in her panic. Michael watched the Djinn reach down and pluck a trio of jokers from the running troops behind Taweret. His fist squeezed, and he flung the broken bodies at the Living God and her priests, chortling in his bass voice.

“If we only had Ana,” Bubbles said, and Michael started to see her standing next to him. “We’d see how that bastard likes being buried under a hundred feet of sand.” Rustbelt grunted in answer.

But they didn’t have Ana. They didn’t have King Cobalt or Hardhat or Holy Roller. They didn’t have the hundreds of jokers who had died yesterday. Those who were still standing were exhausted and injured, and there would be no Peregrine to call “Cut!” when it was obvious they had lost.

The wind devil of Simoon raged to the Djinn’s left flank, her sands tossing tanks as if they were toys, her fierce winds ripping flesh from bone and leaving skeletons on the sand in her wake. The funnel cloud bent toward the Djinn and he opened his arms as if to welcome her, unmoving. “No!” Michael heard Lohengrin’s cry even from where he stood. “Simoon, don’t!“ But she ignored the warning. The tornado tossed aside the Djinn’s guards. Her funnel touched his outstretched hand and he roared as if in pain, snatching his hand back as blood rained on his troops. Simoon curled her winds toward him; they whipped the Djinn’s robes, they lashed his face and body and he retreated a step back. For a moment Michael felt hope. But he braced himself in the sand, reaching for her again, this time with both hands as if he were grasping something hidden in the twisting column of the tornado. The winds abruptly ceased to howl and sand fell like rain; the Djinn’s massive hands were flayed and bleeding, but in them was Aliyah, naked. They could see her mouth open in a scream. “Bubbles—” Michael said. “Can you … ?”

“I can’t,” she said. “Not while he’s holding her.” Michael could see Kate with a stone in her hand, evidently with the same doubt in her mind. Lohengrin called challenge and Sekhmet roared, but the Djinn’s huge fingers closed over Aliyah’s head and shoulders, around her hips. With a grimace, the Djinn twisted his hands as if he were snapping a dry twig.

“Oh God,” someone said, and Michael didn’t know if it was Bubbles or Rusty or himself.

The Djinn tossed the halves of Aliyah’s corpse to either side, trailing gore. He laughed. New skin slid over his wounded hands, as if painted on by an invisible brush. He pointed at the cluster of Sekhmet, Kate, Lohengrin, and Sobek. He took a stride toward them that covered yards.

Rusty started to lumber down the dune toward the others. Bubbles and Michael followed, stumbling through the sand. They were going to be too late, Michael knew. Already he could feel the fear clogging his throat and making each step more of an effort.

Lohengrin ran toward the Djinn, armor gleaming and sword shining; Sekhmet roared, flames jetting from the lioness’s mouth; Kate brought her arm back and flung stones at the giant ace; Sobek, crocodile mouth gaping, snarled as he advanced, his finger holding down the trigger of the AK-47 he held; a clot of wasps arrowed toward the Djinn.

“Hurry!” Rustbelt shouted over his shoulder as they ran. He stumbled, over-balanced and went rolling down the slope of the dune. Michael and Bubbles slid through the sand behind him.

The Djinn took another step and was within arm’s reach of Fortune’s group. Shadows played around him even in the brilliant sunlight, as if he were surrounded by unseen figures; he loomed over them like a god. Sekhmet was slapped down in midleap; Kate’s stones went careening away; Sobek was down, bleeding from a head wound; a puff of breath from the Djinn banished the wasps. The giant reached toward Lohengrin, ready to pluck him from the sand. “Deus Volt!“ they heard the German ace cry, and Lohengrin’s sword slashed at the hand that curled around him—two massive fingers fell like tree trunks to the sand. The Djinn roared, and the sound drowned out everything else. His other hand came down and struck Lohengrin open-handed. The ace went flying, slamming hard into a disabled tank.

The glow of ghost steel faded. Where there’d been a warrior drawn from myths and legends, a pudgy blond boy now sprawled, unconscious.

“Fuck.” Michael spat out the word along with a mouthful of sand. They’d reached the bottom of the dune. Bubbles was helping Rusty to his feet. “Hit me!” she shouted at him, at Michael. “Hit me now!”

Ahead, Kate and Sekhmet were the only two still standing. Kate reached into her bag of stones; Sekhmet roared defiance. The followers of the Living Gods were fleeing the confrontation, while the Djinn’s elite guard spread out around the giant once more. Between Michael and Kate, there was little but open sand. “Come on,” Michael said, as Rusty slammed a fisted hand into Bubbles’s stomach. “We gotta get there.”

They ran. As they did, Sekhmet roared once more, the sound louder even than the Djinn’s laughter. Fortune bounded in one leap toward the Djinn; Michael saw Kate shout at him—“No!”—and desperately begin to fling stones. The Djinn stood calmly. Shadows pulsed; his figure shimmered. Kate’s stones slid harmlessly through and past the Djinn.

And Fortune: the lioness of Sekhmet leapt toward the Djinn, and he rushed forward to embrace the Living God. He was too slow this time. Sekhmet twisted in midair, slipping past his maimed hand. She slashed at his bearded face with her claws, ripping a quartet of bloody lines down his cheeks. Strips of flesh curled back from the wounds. The flames from her mouth set his beard afire.

The Djinn pulled her from his face as more flesh tore. He held Sekhmet in one hand; his fingers tightening around her body. The lioness screamed, an awful shrill of torment. The flames gushing from her mouth went to smoke as he threw her hard to the ground.

The lioness fell, but it was Fortune, naked and unprotected, who lay crumpled on the sand. The Djinn crouched and picked him up again, a smile twisting under his dark beard, his cheek bloodied and torn. As he held him tendrils of smoky vapor began to curl from the scarab embedded in Fortune’s forehead toward the Djinn, wreathing around his body and sinking into his flesh. Fortune screamed in his hands, wordless and horrible. Kate, weeping, flung stones.

Michael, Rustbelt, and Bubbles were fifty yards away. It might as well have been as many miles. Rustbelt bellowed; the Djinn glanced in their direction. Michael felt as helpless as he had the night he’d seen Kate and Fortune on the television set in Rome. As helpless as he’d felt during the first challenge when none of them knew how to work together, as outmatched as he’d been when Golden Boy tossed him aside as if he were a child.

“If the Djinn touches you, you are lost. He will slay you and drink your powers.”

But if they didn’t have to touch him at all…

“I’m pretending it’s the Djinn’s head….”

Michael blinked, fighting the despair flowing from the Djinn. He tore away the remnants of the Kevlar from his chest. “Rusty, you gotta go after that fucker—make him pay attention to you somehow, just don’t let him touch you; Bubbles, can you keep him distracted, too, maybe put him off balance, the way you did Golden Boy?”

“And what are you gonna do?” Bubbles asked.

“Play,” Michael answered. Grimacing as aching muscles protested, he began to tap on his body with his open hands, playing on himself as if he were a set of living congas—softly at first, then louder and harder. The sound welled out from him, unfocused, echoing from the ruins of houses along the road and the ramparts of the High Dam. The Djinn turned, noticing him as his dark eyes narrowed. Michael tightened the throats of his neck, forcing the sound of the drumming into a narrow pattern, all of it aimed toward the Djinn. The Djinn grimaced as waves of percussion hammered at him. He seemed to stagger a step backward, but that was all. The wispy shadows continued to flow darkly from the screaming Fortune toward him …

… as Rustbelt charged blindly at him; as Kate redoubled her efforts; as Klaus shook his head groggily and rose, clad again in Lohengrin’s ghost steel. They were not going to be enough, Michael knew. The shadows faded and Fortune’s screams fell to whimpers as the Djinn laughed.

… a torrent of bubbles broke over the Djinn, crashing down on him, the impact sending his guards tumbling, as well as Rustbelt and Lohengrin. Michael struck his body harder than he ever had, as he forced his multiple throats to close even more tightly so that his own skull ached with the sound—he forced his vocal cords to contract yet further, as he imagined the bones of the Djinn’s skull vibrating and shaking, rattling in the fleshy envelope that held them and slamming the brain against its bone prison, again and again and again.

The Djinn screamed a shrill, high cry. He dropped Fortune’s body and clapped his hands over his ears; thick, bright blood poured from his nose and mouth. He sank to his knees. Shadows whirled chaotically around him, a hundred smoky figures of those he’d consumed. Michael continued to drum, to pound at the man with sonic fists. The Djinn wailed. His head shivered, a frantic quivering that rendered his features blurred and unfocused. Blood gushed from his mouth and into his dark beard. The violent motions of his head sent droplets splattering everywhere.

His eyes rolled back. The shadows around the Djinn fled. He collapsed, a stricken tower, crushing his guards beneath him.

The fear that had held them all evaporated in the same moment. The guards, those still standing, gaped at their stricken commander—now just a man laying on the sand, swaddled in yards of cloth that no longer fit his entirely normal stature. A breath later, they fled, pursued by the Living Gods’ followers, who had turned with a desperate hope rising in them.

Kate was staring at the fallen Djinn. Then her gaze moved to Michael, his hands now down at his side. In his mind, he saw the way she would smile, how the realization would dawn on her face, how she would run desperately and gratefully to him.

She did run. She sprinted to Fortune and sank down alongside him, cradling him in her arms as they gathered around her: Lohengrin, Bubbles, Rustbelt. Several of Hive’s wasps quivered on Lohengrin’s shoulder. “He’s really hurt,” Kate said, her voice breaking slightly. “Help me. Help me get him away from here.”

Lohengrin moved, kneeling to help her pick up the moaning, half-conscious Fortune. “No,” Michael called to the ace. His throat openings ached and the words grated. “I’ll get him for her.”

He lifted Fortune in his many arms. With Kate alongside him, stroking Fortune’s bloodied hair and crooning encouragement, he walked from the battlefield with the rest of the injured, his own great wound invisible.