Jokertown Shuffle

IV

Two weeks later, and I have tried to get her out. I knew it wouldn't do any good to talk to Blaise, so I didn't. But I knew Blaise's thoughts. I knew that he had a grudging respect for Prime, even possessed a fear of the man who could create a jumper and couldn't be jumped himself, and so I tried that way.

I had to. It was bad enough that I had to hear Tachyon's mindvoice. But now… now she is in all my dreams too. I have them every night. She waits for me in my sleep, patiently.

It hurts. It makes me want to take Blaise and throttle the bastard.

I did try. Really. I talked to Prime-Latham.

Latham folded his hands on the new pair of Dockers he was wearing. Zelda made muscle-magazine poses behind him. He waited, filling his mind with old contracts and legal briefs, so that I had a difficult time knowing what he was really thinking. "I'm a busy man, Governor, and I really can't stay here very long," he said. "What is it you want?"

"I want your assistance," I told him. "Blaise has done something stupid and dangerous. I assume you know what I'm talking about, or do I have to draw you a picture of a certain red-haired alien who has had an involuntary sexchange operation?" I grinned down at him. "I used to be able to draw pretty well. I could have drawn a picture."

Latham only blinked. The dense contract language in his mind parted just long enough for him to speak-he really was very good at hiding his thoughts. "What Blaise does is his own business, not mine," he said.

He gave me a smile that belonged on a codfish. The events of the last month had taken their toll on Latham, but he still had the cold act down well, if a little cracked around the edges.

"Kidnapping Tachyon was dumb," I continued. "Even if Blaise hadn't brought his grandfather here, I would've said that. I supposed Blaise gets the stupidity naturally. Tachyon's certainly done some idiotic things himself-backing out on Hartmann comes to mind-but overall, we jokers owe Tachyon a hell of a lot. I don't want him hurt."

Zelda just snorted. "Why," Latham asked, "should I do anything at all?"

"Because," I said, a little bewildered that he could even ask, "a man like Tachyon doesn't deserve what Blaise is doing to him." That seemed clear enough to me.

Latham just pursed his lips and nodded. He sniffed, delicately. "Sympathy," he said at last, "is more foolish than revenge as a motive for doing something." He waited. "In my opinion."

I gave him all the rest then. "Look, you don't have to do it out of common decency if that offends you. Do it because Blaise has made the situation for the jokers a hundred times worse. You've heard the news reports. Bush has told Congress he'll consider a revival of the exotic laws if they'll put the legislation on his desk. The courts are playing hardball with any joker accused of any crime. Two states have already passed bills for mandatory sterilization of wild card carriers. The editorials in the papers are full of hatred and venom. Jokertown is a police state, and Koch's making noises about `no more tolerance of scofflaws and squatters who take over public property'-he always did have a way with words. The jumpers have the entire city paranoid and armed. Kelly isn't going to be able to masquerade as Tachyon for long. Taking someone with his high visibility will force the authorities to look at my Rox."

Zelda pursed her lips in sarcastic sympathy. Latham just sat there, hands steepled under his chin.

"I know you, Prime," I continued. "You hide your thoughts well enough when you're sitting here in front of me, but not always. I know everything you know. All I have to do is whisper the right things to the Egrets, or maybe just tell the authorities what a certain prominent city attorney is up to…" I left the sentence unfinished.

Zelda had gone alert and tense. The legal script in Latham's mind shredded like tissue paper. In Latham's mind, everything was cold. So cold. "Let me give you some advice, Governor," he said as softly as ever. "Never bluff with blackmail. It is always a very weak hand. "

"It's not a bluff. I'll do it. I will."

Latham almost smiled as guards came to attention all around us. He glanced at them slowly, calmly, then looked back at me. His hands didn't move. Not a muscle twitched in his face, and his mind stayed blank.

That frightened me more than anything he could have said.

I couldn't follow through. He was right. Kafka was right too-bluffing really is a dangerous game.

So I'm sorry, sorry because the Rox needs the jumpers. We need Prime and Blaise and all the rest.

Latham knew it. I knew it.

But I promise you. I will find another way.

Madman across the Water by Victor Milan

The boys from DEA paid a visit to the New Dawn Wellness Center just after morning rush when a few last late-running yuppies-if that isn't a contradiction in termswere polishing off their bulghur-wheat doughnuts and the center's famous low-cal, low-cholesterol, vegetarian "fried eggs," with tofu whites and whipped-squash yolks. Enough onlookers to be duly impressed, but not enough to get underfoot or in line for serious hurt. In the last winter of the 1980s, America's drug warriors could do no wrong in the eyes of the press, the public, or the law, but the powers that be felt that if the shithammer came down-as every member of the strike team devoutly hoped-it wouldn't do to have too many punctured civilians bleeding on camera.

Especially at the scene of what, if it came off, would be the media bust of the decade: the DEA versus a renegade ace.

While agents in civilian garb secured the customers and the single brush-cut, stocky, grumpy female clerk, a threeman element of the Covert Lab Enforcement Team dashed through the restaurant in their black Darth Vader togs, CAR-15s with fat suppressors shrouding the barrels clutched in their black-gauntleted hands. One of them paused to bang his Kevlar-helmeted head against the jamb of the door to the back before dashing upstairs.

"We're waiting on you, Lynn," his buddy Dooley said as he came highstepping up to the second floor. Dooley's mask muffled his words, but Lynn knew he was grinning, with the ESP that came from being pals since eighth grade. Lynn grinned back and bobbed his head.

He and Dooley pressed backs to either side of the door while Matteoli slipped the rubberized tip of a big orange wrecking bar between the frame and the door and popped it open. The other two wheeled inside, Lynn low and left, Dooley high and right.

"DEA! Covert Lab Enforcement Team! Freeze, motherfuckers!"

It was a fairyland, a fucking fairyland. It wasn't very big, but neither of them had ever seen anything like it outside a government facility or university. This was their eleventh lab bust, and they'd never even seen half the equipment in here. The only things out of place were the two men standing in the middle of all that gleaming technology. The CLET strike force had been briefed to expect the kind of scum that would hang around an overage hippie. Not a middle-aged black guy and a leaner younger Hispanic dude in jackets and ties.

The Hispanic was in motion already, reaching inside his jacket in a motion that could mean only one thing: Dooley tracked him with his muzzle.

"Hold it right-"

The big vent-ribbed Colt Python roared as it came on-line, chopping Dooley off in the middle of his sentence. The bulky armor encasing his body would definitely have stopped even the high-speed. 357 slug, the face plate might have turned it. But the jacketed hollowpoint nipped neatly between the lip of his helmet and the top of his mask, punched through his right eye and right out the back of his skull.

"Dooley!" Lynn screamed, and held back the trigger. Like everybody else in CLET, he'd had the three-round burst regulator on his assault rifle disabled the moment he'd been issued the thing. He let the whole magazine go on full rock'n'roll, felt the ripple of high-velocity slugs in passing as Matteoli did the same from the doorway.

The Hispanic dropped the Python and did a little jitterbug dance as the white front of his shirt came all over red. The black guy dove out of sight.

Lynn spun and dropped with his back to a lab table that would never stop a bullet but would at least hide him from sight. He dropped the spent magazine, fumbled another from a belt pouch, and rammed it home.

"Matty, pop a stun grenade on the puke!" he yelled. "Backup!" Matteoli screamed back. "We gotta call for backup!"

Fuck that, Lynn thought. His eyes stung with tears. Payback's a mother. He jacked the charging handle and rose. To see a black arm waving from the midst of all that mechanism, brandishing a black leather holder with an alltoo-distinctive gold shield inset.

"Narcotics Enforcement. We're NYPD, you dumb sons of bitches!"

TWO DIE IN SHOOT-OUT AT ACE DRUG LAB, the headline said, or screamed. The subhead read, Drug Czar Calls Illicit Lab "Most Sophisticated Ever"; Nationwide Manhunt Declared.

Dr. Pretorius sighed and looked over the half-moons of his old-fashioned reading glasses. "So a couple of your cowboys came off the handle and shot it out with New York's finest. What does this have to do with my client?"

The youngest of the three came out of his leathercovered chair with an incoherent scream of rage. Pretorius raised an eyebrow.

"Lynn," the eldest said, not loud but with a certain attack-dog-trainer snap. "Maybe you'd better wait outside." The young man with the shock of black hair falling into wild eyes turned and pounded the heel of one fist against a wall, making display cases with exotic insects inside dance. The he ran out of the attorney's office.

"Whatever was that about?" Pretorius asked.

"Agent Saxon was involved in the incident you so insensitively spoke of," said the third man. He was in his early fifties and in all ways average except for the expensive cut of his lawyerly three-piece and the bland smoothness of his face. A man for George Bush's America. "His partner was killed." He settled back, apparently looking for expressions of regret or sympathy.

"My question still stands," Pretorius said.

The third man's face hardened momentarily. "Under New York law, Dr. Meadows can be held responsible for violent deaths associated with his crimes."

"We're talking capital here," the attack-dog trainer added.

Pretorius began to laugh. The two of them stared at him as if he'd sprouted great big white wings like Peregrine's. "That is the farthest-fetched interpretation of the law I've heard in a long time," he said, taking off his glasses and wiping his eyes. "Is there no limit to the arrogant disregard you people have for concepts like `rights' and `due process' -not to mention common sense?"

Kinder-and-Gentler smiled. "Given that seventy percent of the American public believes any measures at all are justified in combating the drug menace," he said, "no."

The trainer pulled a sheaf of papers from an inside pocket of his sport coat. "We have something for you, too, Pretorius." He slammed a packet of official-looking papers on the desk and smiled up at Pretorius with satisfaction glinting in his steely gray eyes. Pretorius gave it a 6.5.

"As you're no doubt aware," Kinder-and-Gentler said, as smooth as his face, "under the Racketeering-Influenced and Corrupt Organizations and Continuing Crime Acts, all property belonging to drug dealers is liable to confiscation. As you're also aware, I'm sure, recent interpretations of the law permit us to seize the property of attorneys who represent such scum. We can't permit the enormous sums commanded by drug dealers to deflect justice, now, can we, Doctor?" And he smiled too.

My, we're a happy group today, Pretorius thought. He reached for the telephone, pressed a button. When a voice answered, he said simply, "Go."

His guests stiffened. The Attack Dog Trainer was leaning so far forward, he was in danger of toppling over and splitting Pretorius's desk with the blade of his face. "What are you trying to pull?" he barked.

It was Pretorius's turn to try his hand at smiling, and he gave it his all. "Your latest little perversion of due process does not precisely take me by surprise, gentlemen. I was just speaking to an associate of mine waiting at the federal courthouse. If you'll be patient a few moments, a court order voiding your seizure should shortly arrive by messenger."

They stared at him with eyes like boiled eggs. He reached into a drawer of his desk. The Trainer stiffened, and his hard right hand started inside his suit coat.

Kinder-and-Gentler put a hand on his arm. "He's not going for a gun, Pat. Act your age."

"At the very outset of the Meadows custody case,"

Pretorius said, "I foresaw you gentlemen and your modern Star Chamber tactics might become involved. And I personally have no need for money."

"You can't weasel out of this by waiving your fee, bunky," the Trainer said.

"Nor did L" He trumped the trainer's sheaf with his own embossed legal envelope. "I charged Dr. Meadows my full hourly rate-payable, under the terms of this contract, directly to the March of Dimes for research into mental retardation. And if you wish to try to confiscate their assets, gentlemen, I wish you luck."

"We're the future, pal!"

An open-hand slap cracked across the yellow stripe dyed down the center of his close-cropped skull. Trash-clogged foreshore and sagging graffiti-crusted buildings swam in stench thick as heat haze, or maybe from the blow. The tall man hunched his shoulders and raised his arms defensively across his face.

He'd ridden to the Rox in a giant jellyfish in search of shelter. It didn't surprise him much to find there was no shelter there, either. It did made him kind of sad.

He wasn't sure how many joker boys were on him. He'd never had much head for detail on a macro scale. It didn't really matter. Make Love Not War were the words he'd always lived by.

In his proper person, anyway. Which was all he had to help him now.

An attacker slammed the scarred pale Hormel ham he carried instead of a hand into the midriff of the tall man's faint paint-dappled Pendleton shirt. He whoofed and doubled and staggered back, and the empirical part of him noted that there had to be at least two assailants since another was, sure enough, down on all fours behind him to take him behind the calves and send him sprawling. That trick had been a constant companion in childhood and early adolescence. Made him nostalgic, almost.

Coughing and sobbing for breath, he tried to remember what the survivors of the Czechago Convention had told him: Curl up, get small, try not to give them a crack at your joints or skull.

Mayor Daley's disorder preservers had had nightsticks. These boys had body parts a la wild card. Like the calcareous hoof somebody was slamming rhythmically into the small of his back, aiming to pulp his kidneys.

"Hey, nat! You ain't gettin' any younger. And maybe (kick) you ain't getting (kick) any older either!"

The others laughed their jackal laughs, and as painspikes jolted up his spine and down into his scrotum, the tall man wondered if he was actually going to survive. And he thought the thing he'd always sworn he never would: If my friends were here, you'd never dare treat me like this!

Laughter. "Hey, old dude, you got no friends! Or didn't you figure that out yet?"

There. It was out. He'd even spoken it aloud without meaning to. Shame as much as anger and pain and fear made his eyes run suddenly hot with tears as the impact of their limbs and their laughter redoubled.

And then a voice, cutting like a busted-off car antenna. "What the fuck is going on here?"

The blowstorm stopped. He rolled over and sat up, curiosity overcoming caution.

A woman-a girl-stood facing the joker quartet. Her hair was short, moussed into a nondescript-colored spike palisade to guard her scalp. Silver bangles and skull-and bones swung from one ear. "I said `What the fuck?' Don't try to hide from me, Foureyes," she added to the smallest, who had maneuvered himself behind his companions.

"Hey, hey," the joker said defensively, blinking his namesakes furiously. "Just trashin' this old nat, you know? Passin' the time."

"Whofuck you tellus wha'do?" the biggest one said, the one with the premium ham for a hand and a face that was all fissures and flanges, like a leaf-eating bat. Saliva shot from his face like Silly String when he spoke. "Juzda dumb cunt."

"Cool it, Tyrone," Foureyes said urgently. "She's a jumper." A slim black kid, normal-looking except for the hoof with which he'd tried to do street surgery on the tall man's kidneys, put a sneer on his chiseled handsome face. "She big time. She his squeeze." He added a head flip on his.

A quick steel veronica: balisong, a butterfly knife, unfolding its wings very pretty, like in the movies, and then just the tip stuck up the black kid's right nostril. "That's K.C. Strange to you, Footloose. And I don t need anybody's help to fuck up a bunch of detached assholes like you, capisc'? And don't be trying to circle around behind me anymore, Zero, or your friend here's gonna start looking lots more like Tyrone. In fact-"

Stung, or thinking he'd seen an opening, the gigantic Tyrone had begun to roll forward. K.C. smiled.

Footloose stepped back, looked Tyrone dead in the eyes, and laughed shrilly. Then his face changed, and he tried to take a step forward. The hoof didn't want to move. He pitched facefirst into sand caked with something dark, sticky, and sweetly fetid.

Tyrone stopped dead. He raised his hands to his face. The clubbed hand blundered heedlessly into his eye.

He screamed.

Zero was dancing around the perimeter. "What? Foureyes, what's going on?"

"Oh, fuck, oh, Tyrone, you useless fuck!" Foureyes moaned. Footloose raised his head to stare at him. Foureyes began to kick him. "She multiple jumped the stupid bastards, swapped their fucking minds."

K.C. smiled and made her knife disappear. "You're not as dumb as I thought you were. "

"Shit! Shit, we gotta get outta here," Zero gobbled. He grabbed Footloose his body, anyway-under the arm and dragged him upright as he began to roar incoherently. Foureyes caught hold of the weeping Tyrone-Footloose and hustled him away along the stinking beach.

"Come back tomorrow and ask nice, I may sort your little minds out again," she called after them. Then she shook her head. "Damn. The way we fight each other, all the Combine has to do is wait. We'll do the job on ourselves, and they won't have to worry about how to crash the wall." She looked down at the tall man. He slumped there, rubbing the ache in his face while the filthy waves of Upper New York Bay shot needles of sunlight in through his eyes and up to the roof of his skull. A twitch of breeze sent crinkled Ding Dong wrappers and styrofoam cup shards skittering like small animals to the shelter of his thin haunch. "So who are you?" she demanded.

"M-mark," he said. His lips felt big as basketballs. He saw no reason to lie to her. "Mark Meadows."

But she was looking away across the water, at the Circle Line ferry beyond the cordon of Harbor Police boats that surrounded the Rox, chugging toward the foreskin tip of Manhattan.

"Wha-" he gagged, spat sand that tasted like stuff you flossed from between your teeth, "what's the Combine?" She tossed her pointy little chin after the ferryboat. "Them. The straights, the nats, the outside world. The government. Everybody but us wretched refuse huddled here on the Rox, brother."

Oh. That was nothing new… a light dawned.

"Hey, man, I remember now. Randall McMurphyl He's the one with the Combine. Like, Nurse Ratched and them." She laughed. "You're the first person I've met on this damned island who knew that." She walked away whistling.

Some social worker had given her the small pink-plush elephant, back at another of the dim cold places with echoing halls. Now it lay on her metal-frame bed, slashed open, its cotton entrails strewn everywhere.

Tears filled her eyes. She didn't understand. Didn't understand the jeering taunts of the other girls, the makebelieve caring of the doctor people, the rough unconcern of the people who actually took care of her, to the extent anybody did. She had grown up with love and warmth and a constant glow of happy safety. Now, in only a few months' time, she'd learned to treasure being ignored. She began to gather up the fragments of the stuffed toy.

She didn't understand what she was doing here. The other girls said they were here for doing bad things, but she had never done anything bad. Her daddy always said she was a good girl. The doctor people said she was special. When she asked if that was why she was inside, they told her no, it was because her daddy was a bad man.

She sniffled. Her daddy wasn't a bad man. He was Daddy.

She threw herself down on the bed. Her roommate wasn't in. She liked this roommate. She didn't pick on her, didn't pay any attention to her at all.

The tears were overwhelming her now. Most of all, she missed her daddy, tall and strong and always there for her. He wasn't a bad man. And she knew that he wouldn't let her stay here forever. Someday he'd come for her. No matter what.

And a voice inside her head told her, You're what the other girls say you are. Just a stupid. You're going to be here forever and ever.

Alone.

She gathered the sad empty head of the elephant to her cheek. Its black-disc pupils rolled up in its plastic-button eyes. She hugged it to her and drifted into sleep, weeping for the death of her friend.

Head thrown back to let the dawn wind ruffle his red brush cut with bloatblack-stinking fingers, Blaise walked through the Rox's gray huddle. He was just in via the Charon Express from a night run with the jumpers. Just a casual cruise to see how some of their investment properties over in Manhattan were doing, and he was on top of the world.

You always lectured me about the proper uses of power, grandpere, he thought, and his smile turned edged and ugly. And I must hand it to you, you have indeed taught me to use it.

It came to him then that it might be time to go down below the medical building for a new lesson in the use of power. He was still fairly fresh, with a sixteen-year-old's endurance, and these little jaunts into town tended to leave him unsatisfied and maybe a trifle bored. His jumpers were too simple, too American. It wasn't that he didn't enjoy the same things they did. Only not as long.

And he wanted more. Putting the expensively cultured body of a millionaire's daughter through its paces while its owner looked on had its rewards. But mostly it served to draw his appetite thin and tight like the skin on a starving man's ribs. He could taste real power. That was what their victims commanded, why they were chosen.

He was tired of tasting it at one remove. It was like eating soup through a straw.

He came around a corner. To his right the river licked the beach like a wound. A knot of assorted seedballs was drifting though the wet cold sand toward the food tables, gray shapes half distinct in the false light. He paid them no mind. They were the basic flotsam that that fat fool Bloat got such a charge of clasping to his bosom, or whatever you called it: jokers, monstrous to the Takisian sensibilities Blaise had picked up as much despite his grandfather as because of him, nat trash not a lot more tasteful. The sort of scum he would've gotten a kick out of finding asleep in some alley, soaking down with gas, and lighting off if he'd been born a mere groundling.

Then Blaise saw him.

In cognition's ground-zero flash he went from a gangly shape stilting head and shoulders over the trash stream to a terror that yammered in Blaise's skull and pounded on the temples like a mad thing trying to get out. With a martial artist's backward leap, Blaise put the cold block of a building between him and the awful apparition. Burning Sky, could he have seen me?

"Blaise?"

Like a soft knife, the voice cut through the hammering in his temples. He looked up and saw K. C. Strange framed by his knees, realized he'd sunk into a sort of fetal crouch with his back to the chill cement wall.

"Blaise, what's the matter? You look like you're about to throw up."

He felt a stab of fury, a yellow ice pick through the purple throbbing fog in his brain. How dare she intrude? How dare she question? But the anger flickered and vanished like sparks from an oil-drum fire.

From the other jumpers he got fear and deference and awe-even from Molly Bolt, who hated his guts. From K.C. he got concern. He had never had people really care about him for his own sake before-he didn't count his grandfather or the one-eyed bitch. Tach's only interest was to keep him from becoming what he was truly meant to be, and Cody was only playing with him. In that last few years he had come to realize, to acknowledge, that for his beloved "Uncle George" he had never been more than a means to an end, and he'd been a kind of revolutionary mascot to the terrorist cells who raised him before that, before his accursed grandfather stumbled across him. K.C. of all the people he'd known gave a fuck for him._

Maybe that was why he kept her around in spite of her mouth. She was cute. But with his shoulders and attitude and sculpted looks, most of all with his power, he could have cute any time, any way.

He let out a long sobbing breath. "It's him. He's come for my grandfather."

"Who?"

"Him. He's cut his hair, he dresses differently, but it is him. I can smell him. I can feel his mind. He is here to rescue Tachyon."

"Don't be ridiculous."

He shot her a hot-eyed look, which she ignored. "Nobody knows about Tachyon except us-and Bloat, because he knows everything that goes down on the Rox. But Bloat's got a bigger hard-on for the straights than we do. He'd never spill."

"It doesn't matter," said Blaise. "He is an ace. He has his ways."

"Now go back to the beginning and tell me just who this he is."

"Mark Meadows," he said in a voice that rang with adolescent Sturm and Drang. "Captain Trips."

"Mark Meadows?" She laughed. "You're working up a sweat for nothing, lover boy. Why, I met him yesterday. He's just a harmless old-who did you say he was?"

"Captain Trips. The ace who has the friends. Jumpin' Jack Flash, Starshine, Moonchild-I am not sure how many more. He was one of Grandfather's best friends." He looked up at her with a face drawn like a Greco martyr's. "I must stop him. He will destroy us."

K.C. laughed. Blaise's face froze. She ruled his hair. Her fingers did a better job than the wind. As she teased and tickled his scalp, he relaxed slightly, knew again why he tolerated her.

He also knew that one day he would pay her back for each and every impertinence, with interest. But he was learning to defer gratification, sometimes. Grandpere would be so proud.

"Relax. He's just a harmless old geezer."

"He's an ace, I tell you-"

She laughed again. "He may have been a big ace, babe. He's nothing now, capisc'? When I tripped over him, he was in the process of getting his skinny butt kicked by Tyrone and Foureyes and company. Righteous dweebs. They were about to stomp his brains out through his big beaky nose until a little tiny teenage girl with a toy knife turned up to the rescue." She squatted beside him and played with the braided tail that hung down the back of Blaise's bombardier's jacket. "Some ace, huh?"

He shook his head clear with a flip of irritation. "He is undercover. He has to hide his powers. You never lived underground. You would not know"

"No, hey, I just lived out on the streets since I was twelve years old, I wouldn't know anything about that, and anyway I'm just a girl."

"That's right."

She reared back, ready to spit at him like a cobra. At the last instant before she said something he would have to destroy her for, he showed his teeth in a feral gin. She blinked, grinned back, hung her hands around his neck, and shook her head. "You son of a bitch."

This is our game, he thought, smiling complacently. I push her to see how far she pushes back. She pushes back to see how far I'll go.

And the stakes are her life. Wouldn't that surprise her? He remembered Mark, then, and lost his taste for games. He pushed her arms off his neck, only half roughly, and started to stand. "Enough of this, cheri."

"Ooh, I love it when you talk dirty"

He shook his head sharply, like a ferret with a mouse. She took the hint. "Your Mark Meadows has played a foolish game and lost. It's time to take from him the price="

"Andrieux."

He looked up. Mustelina and Andiron stood there. Mustelina cradled an AKM assault rifle in her furry paws-not one of the semiautomatics the liberals were so spastic about, but a real assault rifle, full auto as issued to a Baltic conscript with the Warsaw Pact in Poland, who had sold it for a lid. Andiron wasn't armed. He just tapped his blunt greenishblack forearms together gently with a ringing like weights dropped cn a carpeted gym floor.

Blaise snapped upright, heels together, and performed a mock bow, half Takisian, half French. "To what do I owe the honor?"

Monsters, he thought, and his skin crawled. "Governor wants to see you," Mustelina said.

Blaise smiled his beautiful smile at the ferretlike joker. "Ah, but I regret, urgent business requires me-" Andiron's handless arms pealed like a bell. "Now," he said.

Blaise's eyes became slits. "I could make you dance a waltz into the river and drown."

"Sure you could," Mustelina agreed easily, "but you won't."

Blaise stood a moment longer, his lips stretching across his teeth so tightly he feared they'd tear. "Someday," he hissed.

Mustelina levered the AK from full auto to safe with two loud clacks. "Someday," she agreed.

Blaise turned to K. C., gripped her by the arms. "Go find Meadows. Get to know him. Find out what he wants." She nodded and slipped away.

He turned to the two Bloat guards, straightened, pulled back his shoulders, and adjusted the fit of his leather jacket. "Well? We burn the daylight."

Mark settled down with his rump propped on a mostly horizontal slab of asphalt, part of a stack of paving chunks piled at the tip of the southern arm of the blocky U that was Ellis Island, next to the mouth of the tiny little harbor. It was a crisp, clear morning. His breath smoked like a dragon's as he tried to get comfortable with his plastic plate of lukewarm beans perched on his knees.

"Hey there."

He started at the voice, looked up furtively, prepared to run. He still wasn't sure he was entitled to eat. The fooddistribution system on the Rox was pretty rough and ready:

Some plundered steam tables out on the sand, where a pair of truly horrible-looking puswad jokers in stained paper hats ladled out crud to queues of shabby, surly residents. Another joker, as big and as ugly as any two of the bunch who'd hassled him yesterday, stood watch with a pair of lean mean kids, not jokers-which meant they probably were jumpersarmed with bats. They scrutinized him when he took his place in line behind somebody with a head like a burn-victim mushroom growing out of a black leather jacket, but didn't challenge. He guessed the drill was if you looked too familiar, they figured you were trying to jump seconds and thumped you accordingly.

For a moment he feared they'd belatedly decided he didn't look familiar enough, but the shadow between him and the sun rising over Manhattan was small. Also familiar.

"Mind if I sit down?" K. C. Strange asked. "No, no. Uh, like, go ahead."

She hunkered down next to him. He tried hard not to notice the contours of her black Spandex pants. This wasn't the time or the place or the person. He was an outsider. Just an old nat.

He proffered his plate. She waved him off. "You like the water?" she asked.

"I never thought the smell of the Hudson would be a relief."

He regretted it immediately. She seemed to be a big Rox booster. But she laughed.

"Well, it isn't your white-bread world here, that's for sure." She glanced down at him. "Sleep okay?"

"Done worse." Right after the trial he'd spent a few weeks on the street, just wandering, sleeping in alleys or the occasional midnight mission, while Pretorius did all he could, which unfortunately wasn't much. That had been in summer. The makeshift dorms of the Rox smelled so bad, the stench was like a weight, and the debris rustled constantly with small unseen things, but they kept the winter wind off. He didn't care that some of the bodies pressed against his were human only by ancestry; they were warm.

"Thought I'd check on you. After all, it isn't everybody out here I can talk about One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest with."

"Not even your, uh, your boyfriend?"

Why did you ask that, you nitwit? the little guy who sat in the peanut gallery of his mind asked. It used to be Flash and the Traveler who sat back there and gave him a hard time. Now it was just a little gray guy, anonymous as everybody else in New York. Mark didn't have a ready answer anyway.

She looked at him from the sides of her eyes. They were gray eyes, pale, almost silver. "He doesn't read much. What brings you to the Rox?"

"Had a little… run-in with the law."

It was funny. Here he'd been a member of the counterculture most of his adult life, even when the original countercultural heavies were all joining brokerage firms or flogging diet plans and self-help seminars on paid-programming TV shows. And now that he was at last genuinely, authentically underground, it embarrassed the hell out of him. Also, he understood in an inchoate sort of way that it wasn't exactly survival-positive to trot out his personal problems in front of strangers. It's 1990, and, as Gilbert Shelton used to say, government spies are everywhere.

She laughed. "Come on. It had to be more than that." He stuck out his lower lip, mulish, and she laughed louder.

"Give me a break. We don't have informers here, even if President George is coming to town to encourage us all to turn in our neighbors. Take a look over there."

She pointed with her chin. A shape was just breaking water out in the miniature harbor, streaming water thousandcolored like an oil slick: a translucent glabrosity, a Portuguese man-o'-war the size of Godzilla's piles. "That's Charon. Making a late run; he usually doesn't like to surface by daylight. He's how you got here, right?"

"Uh, yeah."

He didn't know it-he-was called Charon. All he knew was what the joker who looked like a clump of seaweed in an Orioles cap and Coors Light jacket and oozed into the record store to warn him the DEA were on their way had told him: If he thought he might need the sanctuary of the Rox, he ought to blow what roll he carried on a bag of groceries at some late-night bodega, go down to the river, fire up a flashlight, and think real hard about how bad he wanted to go there. It smacked to Mark of clicking his tiny heels together and chanting "There's No Place Like Home," three times, but the drug-war dogs were on his track, and if they took him, he'd never get Sprout free, and so he did what he was told.

And the damnedest thing of all, it worked.

"He's how most people get here. Now look real close. What do you see inside him?"

Mark squinted into the spindrift sun. From this perspective, Charon looked like a grotesque exaggerated glass Oliver Hardy-shaped Christmas-tree ornament; you could just see a hint of face, up near the top. With the late-dawn light shining through his body, you could see-

"Nothing."

"Good answer. But think about this. Charon never makes dry runs."

He felt the greasy congealed beans he'd choked down start becoming buoyant. "But-"

"Yeah. And when you come to the wall-Bloat's Wall that surrounds this place-you start to feel Big Fear. And then you better want to get here real bad. Because if you don't, you stick-and Charon never stops, either. So the wall holds you in place, and he just sort of oozes out from around you and leaves you on the bottom. Osmosis, like."

Mark bit his lip and put his plate down on the damp sand. But he took care not to spill it; his appetite might come back in a bit. He'd learned to be practical that way these last few months.

K.C. shaded her face with her hand and looked at him. She was quite pretty, once you got past the crown-of-thorns hair.

"So what're you really doing on the Rox? You're not just on the run for knocking over a 7-11."

"It's my little girl. My daughter. I need to get her back."

"She's on the Rox? Joker or jumper, let me tell you, dude, if she's here, you don't really want to see her. Capisc'?" "No. It isn't that. She's in a juvenile detention center. I don't know which one. I need to find her and get her out." Something passed behind her ice-fleck eyes. Then her face hardened. "A middle-class wimp who's spun out on the ice past thirty-something, run a jailbreak? Give me a break. You wouldn't know the first thing about it."

"Hey, I can do it!" he exclaimed, outraged. "I can do something, anyway," he mumbled, coming all over uncertain. "Yeah. Like what?" Her smile taunted him.

"Uhh-" His ears got hot. Aware he'd said too much, he turned quickly away.

"So tell me," she whispered, right by his ear, "where are your friends, Cap'n Trips?"

When he spun around, she was gone.

"Now, Blaise," the creature called Bloat said, and tittered. "I heard you. thinking bad thoughts about one of our guests here on the Rox. That won't do. It won't do at all, at all."

Blaise let his nose and upper lip contort in disgust at the stench that washed off the shimmering translucent maggot mass as palpably as the evil black crud that cascaded endlessly down its sides. It wouldn't do any good to hide his reaction, even though K. C. said it made him look like a fruit bat. Bloat could read his mind.

Blaise hated that. He let the nausea shine back like a beacon, filled his head with images of throwing up, great yellow geysers.

Hovering in attendance, the big cockroach Kafka made a set of sounds like knuckles popping. Kafka was kind of grand vizier to Bloat and was always trying to make sure his boss got the treatment merited by his position as governor of the Rox, and not that earned by his appearance. Kafka didn't much like the jumpers. He liked Blaise least of all.

"I suppose you're going to try to tell us what to think now," Blaise said, very brassy. "Authority has gone to your head, wherever the hell you keep it."

"No," Bloat said, and he forgot to titter. "I wish I could tell you what to think. Better yet, I'd like to tell you not to think. But you can't help thinking, any more than I can help… hearing you."

He faltered a little, because Blaise had conjured up a vivid memory of going down on K. C. Strange. Her pubic hair was sparse, dark blonde and very fine. Her flesh was pink, and when he moved his tongue, she moved with it.

"Then why did you send your pet monsters to drag me here?" Blaise asked.

"Ahh. Mark Meadows. The man who once was Cap'n Trips. You plan to harm him."

"What of it?"

"He is a victim of the straight world's hatred and fear. I choose to offer him refuge. If he still has his ace powers, he will be an invaluable ally when the nats try to crush us. If he does not… his body is still warm. He can still attract bullets that might otherwise find homes in joker flesh. I forbid you to touch him."

Blaise laughed. "What gives you the right, fat thing?"

"He's the governor of the Rox," Kafka hissed, his voice like a snake in dry leaves.

Blaise started to give back static, but Bloat had pulled it from his mind already. "Give me a break. We've had this discussion before. You need the Rox, which means you need me. And if you think you're going to change that, Latham might have a few different ideas."

Latham. That cold fish. He felt a memory of pain deep in his belly and shuddered. He was not ready to square accounts with Latham. Which meant settling Bloat had to be deferred-and worse, the monster knew it.

"Very well, Governor." He performed a mock bow. Bloat just giggled. "I bow to your authority… on the Rox. If Mark Meadows takes action against me here, I claim the right of self-defense."

"Please, Blaise, don't make this difficult. You have that right. But Meadows isn't going to move against you. He doesn't know what you've done with his friend, your grandfather. I read his mind, remember?"

He's an ace, remember?

"He thinks you're his friend, Blaise."

"Be that as it may, I have other scores to settle with him. Should he leave the Rox, he leaves your domain, and then he is mine."

"The mainland is a dangerous place," Kafka rasped. Blaise frowned at him. He wasn't naive enough to take the cockroach's agreement at face value. "Even you could have an accident there, Blaise."

To his own surprise, Blaise's reaction was amusement, not anger. "If anyone was going to lay hurt on me, I'd read it. And I'd hurt them worse." He was bluffing, of course. It was always good to keep the monsters off balance. And even if Bloat had the perseverance to endure the image of K. C.'s lean thighs wrapped around Blaise's head, he would be able to read only that Blaise was bluffing. Not to what extent.

"Your power is great, Blaise," Kafka said, "but what's its range? There's a thing called a Barrett Light Fifty. A sniper's rifle. It fires the same round as a fifty-caliber machine gun. It has a range of over a mile. Does your power reach that far, Blaise?" He moved his chitinous limbs in the gesture that served him as a shrug. "I'm afraid somebody might take it in mind to pick you right off the Rox with a shot from the mainland. Meadows has lots of friends among the jokers, Blaise."

Tight-lipped, Blaise glared at him. Anger seethed, but there was still Latham. "Don't threaten me," he said sullenly. "He's not threatening you, Blaise," Bloat said earnestly. "I don't tolerate threats. He's concerned for you. You're one of my people too."

Like hell I am. "You look to use him, don't you? You think he'd be a big help when the nats come for you." Bloat said nothing. Nameless sounds rumbled from the depths of him.

"All right. But what if something happens to Meadows that I don't have anything to do with?" God, he hated truckling to these beasts. "He's a fugitive. He's wanted by the authorities."

"You're being clever, Blaise," Bloat said. He almost sounded sharp. "I hate it when you're clever. But if Meadows falls afoul of circumstances beyond your control, there's no way we can hold you to account."

"Then we are understood. Mark Meadows is safe from me." Blaise bowed again, much lower than before. "Gentlemen, I wish you good day." -

A furry joker and a nat with his hair shaved in sidewalls and a coiled dragon tattooed on either side of his skull were going at it ankle-deep in the sludgy water. Somebody cranked up the Butthole Surfers on a box by way of sound track. Mark ducked his head reflexively between his shoulders and just walked on with his hands deep in the pockets of his Goodwill windbreaker. Other residents of the Rox, living less in the shadow of the Summer of Love, thronged like so many seabirds on a rock and watched with interest.

He hadn't brooded as much about K. C.'s being in on his secret as he thought he would. He was too full of the need to do something for Sprout to give much room to other emotions. What he could do he had no idea. Having been all on fire to get here to the Rox, having gotten here alive only because he wanted to so badly, he now was all on fire to get off again. But he had nowhere else to go.

A change in the crowd noise made him stop and look up. A squad of nat-looking youths were moving in on the fight, led by a tall kid in black T-shirt, tight jeans, and a leather jacket. His hair was a startling rich red, blood red, and cut in a brush. He looked somehow familiar.

The spear carriers stopped and cracked their knuckles a respectful three yards away. The redhead walked, not quickly but purposefully, between the combatants. A braided tail hung down the back of his jacket.

Words changed hands. The joker squalled and aimed a roundhouse punch at the interloper. He blocked with a forearm, doubled the joker with a fist in the gut, dropped him with a hammerhand to head, right in the surf.

The tattooed nat lunged at his back. The newcomer half turned, drove a thrust kick into his solar plexus. Dragon Boy staggered back. His antagonist stepped in and kicked, stepped in and kicked, driving him back deeper into the filthy slog of the water. Finally he spun a balletic backkick into one dragon tattoo, his tail scything behind his head, and walked ashore, leaving his opponent bobbing gently.

"You asked about my boyfriend," a voice behind him said. "There he is."

He turned as the jumpers ran to fish out the tattooed kid. She was perched on the prongs of a rusted-out front-end loader, squatting with elbows on trim thighs. "You may have noticed things don't run so smoothly around here," she said. "They don't seem to run at all."

She jutted the chin. "He's trying to put a stop to that. Start getting things a little organized."

"Looks like it's weighted kinda heavily in favor of head busting."

"A lot of these wags don't capisc' much else. " She shrugged. "He's kind of like an ace, too, he's got very advanced mental powers. He does things this way a lot, though. To show he's real. That's the kind of leadership the Rox needs."

"'Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.'"

She dropped light to the sand. "I don't need tired old hippie shit."

He grinned at her. For some reason he was enjoying this. "I'm a tired old hippie."

"Yeah. Gone prematurely orange, like Ron Reagan, except more electric. And it's more maybe pineapple, on the sides, anyway. What made you do that to your hair? You look like a total dick."

They were walking now, along a line of makeshift structures jumbled together of fiberboard and plastic. A couple of kids-whether nat or joker it was impossible to tell under the grime-cooked what Mark hoped wasn't really a cat on a metal rod over an oil-drum fire.

"It was for the custody trial over who got Sprout-that's my daughter-my ex-old lady or me. She's gone real Park Avenue, and my lawyer told me to cut my hair or I'd get blown out of the water in court. So I did."

"So what happened?"

"I got blown out of the water."

She spat. "Combine justice. Where'd you get the twotone head?"

"I figured nobody in the world would connect Cap'n Trips the federal fugitive, with his long flowing locks and his goatee, with some trashed-out punker." He stopped and looked down at her. It was a long way; at six-four, he was a good foot taller. "But you did," he said. "How'd you recognize me?"

"I-I read the papers sometimes. And you told me your name, for Christ's sake. You still have a lot to learn about security"

"Oh," he said, crestfallen. "But, I thought -I mean, you said I was among friends…"

"Yeah, which is why you were getting your skinny ass kicked 'in when I found you."

Suddenly the knife was in her hand, its sharp little point poking under his chin, tipping his head back. "There aren't any friends, any where. Capisc'?"

He nodded, gingerly. The knife hilt parted and snapped around, devouring the blade.

"Learn that and you've gone a long way toward surviving on the streets," she said, walking on. He followed a beat late, still shaken by the crazy intensity he'd seen in those silver eyes. "Tell you the truth, I didn't make the name at first. It was only when you got that about the Combine. I suddenly thought, who else but an old flower child would know about Ken Kesey? Then it clicked."

"How'd you know, then? You're no flower child. You're hardly any older than Sprout."

"She's thirteen, and I'm a lot older than that. Centuries, maybe. Don't look surprised; I've been checking you out." She laughed, a sound brittle and edgy as old copper. "Tyrone and his butthole buddies would be shitting live rats if they knew who they'd been messing with-you got some powerful references among our heavier jokers. They still remember what you did for Doughboy, like you're some kind of martyred hero or something."

He looked away, embarrassed. He'd heard a few things along those lines, never taken them too seriously. Still, there was the joker who'd warned him to blow the record store…

"On the other hand, we have a few prominent citizens right here on the Rox who might be even happier to have their hooks in you than your friendly local DEA. Might be some of them remember the Cloisters-and don't go all pale and shaky and start having a coronary on me. You've still got your secrets. I don't make a habit of running my head. As I may have told you, snitches ain't welcome on the Rox."

"Does your… friend know?"

"Hey, Blaise is my main man, honey. You're just some bum I picked up on a beach. More'n that, he's the main man for the Rox, in a way poor Bloat can never be. If I think he needs information, he's got it. Okay?"

It wasn't, but he didn't see what he could do about it. He had his head cocked, as if listening for an echo. Something she had said… Sometimes it seemed as if he were walking along a slope with depression hanging over him like snowdrift cliffs, and every once in a while it'd land on him in an avalanche, muddle his thinking more than years of constant marijuana buzz ever had.

Whatever bond there'd been between them seemed broken now. He looked at her. "What did you say your boyfriend's name was?"

"Blaise. Blaise Andrieux. He's-"

Mark's head snapped around. The red-haired boy was walking along the beach toward them, and Mark wondered why he hadn't recognized him at once.

He jumped to his feet and lurched into an ankle-deep run. "Blaise! Blaise, how are you doing, man?"

Blaise walked with tight-butted dancer's grace through the clinging reeking sand. A satisfied smile was fitted tightly to his face, even if it was taking some effort to keep from shaking his right hand in the air. He'd caught the kid with the dragon tat wrong with a backfist knuckle to the cheekbone and it stung something fierce. But he couldn't show pain. It wouldn't do to have his bannermen getting the idea he was human.

He'd bulked up amazingly in the months since he first ran away from his grandfather. His body was just a volcano of boiling growth hormones, and the hot adolescent anger that ran in his veins like live steam had kept him keen on the martial-arts exercises and weight training his grandfather had insisted he maintain. He was already larger than almost anybody of Takisian stock had ever been-anyone who grew so far beyond the classic somatotype would be destroyed as a monster-and his Takisian-derived muscles were denser and more efficient than a human's, his neurons firing and recovering quicker.

All of which was to say that while he'd grown a bit bored with the effortless control his mind power gave him, he had discovered the existential pleasures of kicking ass.

He told K.C. it was to set an example for the others, of course. To show that he wasn't just some effete egghead ace, just a wimp, like-well, like his grandfather. That was because K.C. wasn't tough, even if she was smart and, when the mood hit her, as happily savage as any of the jumpers. She liked to rationalize Blaise's violence by imagining that he was crafting a New Order of some sort out of the Rox rabble. Since she amused him, it amused him to play along.

Meanwhile, he was enjoying the animal pleasures, the morning light almost warm on his face, the breeze blowing stiff enough from seaward that he could smell the ocean over bloathlack and New Jersey, the tingling muscle memory of flesh-on-flesh impact, his bannermen murmuring respectfully behind him. "Did you see the way he straightened those fuckers out?"

He heard someone calling his name. He looked up. The sensual mood turned to dust and blew away. The hated stilt figure of Mark Meadows was running like a horrible scarecrow with an orange do, right along the beach, right at him, waving his arms and calling his name.

Blaise was stupefied. He must be some kind of monster. How can he be so bold?

"Blaise! Blaise, man." Meadows stopped a few feet away, looked him up and down. "It's good to see you. How long has it been? A year?"

"I, uh. I think so, Mark."

Merde! He makes me feel thirteen again.

"You're lookin' good, man. Growin' up and fillip' out. "

I should have fucked your daughter in the ass the way Latham fucked me. She was a beautiful little vegetable. She could have been a marvelous toy, and I could break her and throw her away if I wished…

"Thanks," he said. His lips tasted like paper.

Mark's watery gaze flicked past Blaise at the bannermen, then back to the boy. "So what, uh, what brings you to the Rox, man? Pigs come down on you too?"

"Yes. Yes, Mark, I guess they did."

Meadows nodded sagely. "Nail that stands out must be hammered down, huh? These're tough times to be different, man."

Yes, they are. And I'll show you just how tough… "So, have you seen your grandpa recently, man? I, I really need to talk to him about something."

Blaise felt himself smile. It wasn't feigned. "Real recently."

"He's doing very well. What do you need to talk to him about?"

"It's kind of personal, man. I'm sorry."

Blaise gave a petulant little flip of his shoulders.

"Hey, I'd tell you if I could, you know that. But you're young, and I just hate to involve you, y'know?" He glanced around. "Well, I guess I'll catch you around. Good seeing you again, man." Meadows turned and walked away.

Incredible, he thought at the narrow retreating back. Such arrogance. Tell me now he doesn't wish me harm, dear Governor.

But he's still safe from me. Oh yes, so very safe.

K.C. was still hunkered on the sand where he'd left her. Her arms were around her knees, and her eyes were hooded. "Tell me one thing," she said, "and tell me straight. Is that true what you said, that the reason you came to the Rox, the reason you blew off your store, your being an ace, your whole comfortable little fantasyland life, was all for this daughter of yours?"

"Yes."

She stood. "You're a real case, buster. See you around."

He didn't see her the next day. He didn't expect to, and was disappointed anyway. In the chilly, fetid, humid dorm that night he reflected that he always seemed to be attracted to women who didn't see him the next day.

Ha. Attracted to her. There's a thought. For a moment, the voice n his head sounded like the familiar banter of JJ Flash, Esquire. But sharp-edged as he was, Flash was never quite that gratuitously nasty. And Mark's friends had dwindled away to nothingness within weeks after the trial. Actually, they'd drowned in booze for a few weeks, like the rest of his mind, and when he got a grip on himself they were gone. He wondered if he'd ever get them back.

Maybe he didn't deserve to. He had deserted them, after all-flushed them down the john on his lawyer's advice, to avoid a holding rap that would scuttle his chances of hanging onto his daughter. He had kept five vials, one for each persona. Three had been broken, one had sufficed to save the life of a child-at the cost of his secret, his life aboveground, and Sprout. The final one had gotten him out of Family Court just as the DEA was closing in on him. He had abandoned his friends. Maybe he had murdered them. And it hadn't done one damned bit of good. He wouldn't come back if he was one of them.

He went to sleep.

She caught up with him the next day, just after noon. They went for a walk again, and just talked. About books, about the fucked-up world they lived in, about the things Mark had been through, as an ace or beyond. Never about her, though; the times he asked she went quiet and spiky, and he quit after a while. She was a bright, bitter, and all-tooknowing kid, cynical and vulnerable by random turns.

She was also beautiful. He tried not to think about that. He settled into the routine of life on the Rox. Or nonroutine. Aside from the steam tables, which came to life sometime in the morning and sometime toward sunset, the only rhythms the Rox knew were the sun and the tides and what people felt like cranking through their ghetto blasters. Mark was going mad. Somewhere his daughter was trapped in a nightmare she couldn't possibly comprehend. He had to help her. But not even Pretorius-sticking his neck way out-had been able to turn up clue one to her whereabouts.

"I can't tell him."

The night wind unreeled flame and light from the tiki torches like a kid jerking at a roll of toilet paper. Pairs of jumpers sparred with one another on the landfill margin behind the Admin Building in the uncertain light.

Blaise paused in mopping his forehead with a towel. He always insisted on clean fresh towels being brought over from the mainland for his showers and workouts. He got them.

"What do you mean, you can't tell him?" His voice took on a dangerous edge.

"It means so much to him. I feel like I'm… like I'm using him."

Anger hit him. Trembling anger. She saw it in his face and stepped back.

You bitch. You bitch! Are you beginning to feel loyal to him?

"You haven't used people before? You haven't used people up? Think, K. C. Think hard. You're a jumper, remember? Jumpers use people. Especially burned-out old nat pukes."

"He's not a nat, he's an ace"She stiffened as if expecting to receive a blow. "Besides… besides, I'm through with that. You know that. We need to build something out here, something strong that the Combine can't just sweep away like a kid knocking down a bunch of blocks."

"You're starting to sound like Bloat."

"I thought I was sounding like you. You with your talk of a New Order. Is that all that it is, just talk?"

I should kill her now. But the thought fell like a dead leaf through his consciousness, without heat, without weight. He already knew he was through with her. But instead of destroying her here and now, he would use her. Use her up in the destruction of Captain fucking Trips.

I'm learning patience, Grandpere. You'll be so proud of me when I tell you.

"No. And that that's why you're going to tell him. We need his help. We, we need his ace power when the Combine comes to call. Besides, you'll be giving him what he wants most in the world, won't you?"

She looked at him a moment, eyes glinting like coins in the firelight. She stood tiptoe to kiss his cheek. "Yeah," she breathed huskily in his ear, and kissed him on the adolescent down of his cheek. "Sometimes, Blaise, you're almost human." She turned and ran away.

I'll pay you for that one too, he thought.

"She's in the Reeves Diagnostic and Development Institute, in Brooklyn. Borough Park area. It's a Kings County joint; there's some kind of deal down between the city, the state, and the counties to share custody, so they can keep her circulating."

He was sitting with his butt planted in damp frigid sand, squinting at the occasional stab of a patrol-boat spotlight. It was cold as hell tonight, but you had to be flat desperate to retreat into one of the crumbling turn-of-the-century buildings crammed together on Ellis. She hunkered behind him, seemingly inured to cold in her thin jacket and thinner pants. "'Diagnostic and Development'?" he said.

"Yeah. Combine sure talks purty, don't it? Pig Latin for `kid jail,' pal. It's in a pretty decent neighborhood, never run too far down, starting to maybe catch a case of the yuppies. Not too bad. As hellholes go."

He turned and looked at her, disbelief struggling with the will to believe on the battlefield of his face. "How could you find out, when the best lawyer in Jokertown drew a blank?"

"Best lawyer in Jokertown is by definition not a juvenile delinquent, darlin'. Capisc'? `You wanna find a missing kid, ask an outlaw,' or words to that effect."

He jumped up, walked toward the water, walked back, sidestepping a drunk or drugged joker face down in the sand. He began to pace in front of K. C. "I have to make plans. I have to do this right. Think now, Mark. Think." He plumped down in the depression he'd made before, feeling heavy and overwhelmed.

"Maybe you should get some sleep first." She bent over and kissed him lightly on the forehead, then melted into black.

Mark stood on the sidewalk in front of the Blythe van Rensselaer Clinic with tears standing like small hot crowds on his face. Tachyon wasn't in, the surly and unfamiliar face behind the desk of the strangely deserted reception room had told him. And when the doctor was in, he wasn't receiving visitors. Any visitors.

Cody was dead. The news lay in Mark's stomach like a gallon of ice. That lady had meant so much to Tach, had done so much to bring him back from the terrible events of the Atlanta Convention.

Sprout had always loved her. And now she was gone, apparent victim of Tachyon's enemies.

Tach had crawled back into the bottle. As he had when honor had forced him to destroy the mind of Blythe van Rensselaer. It would not be easy for him to escape a second time.

And that was tough.

Mark rubbed spidery hands over his face as if scrubbing his cheeks clean with the tears. As he closed his eyes, he saw his daughter's hand reaching out for him again, while he asCosmic Traveler sank through the floor of the courthouse and the bailiffs closed in.

I'm sorry, Doc. She needs me worse than you do. No matter what's happening to you.

I'm sorry.

He raised his head. A patrol car prowled by. The flat black face of the cop on the passenger side seemed to track him through the chicken-wire mesh that covered the windows of all the cars from the jokertown precinct as it slid sharklike through the sightseers huddled in schools against the strangeness of the scene.

Time for my boot heels to be wandering, his nascent street-sense told him.

He stuck his hands in the pocket of his army jacket and walked away. But not too fast.

The Demon Princes had shot out the streetlights again. The man walking home from swing shift down the Jokertown side street paid no mind. It would take more than cracks in the sidewalk to disrupt the primo ballerino grace with which he walked, as it would take more than the chill of a New York January evening to require him to add the threadbare windbreaker thrown over one shoulder to the black Cinderella T-shirt. Besides, he saw in the dark like a leopard.

His chest and shoulders were those of a much taller man, swollen with muscle. His head was small and narrow, the features almost elfin. His eyes were slanted, the color of lilacs. He diverged far enough from the human somatotype to be considered a joker. Yet he carried no trace of the wild-card virus.

He wasn't a nat, either. He wasn't human at all.

"Hey, man." The voice came from the dark alley, a few feet away to his right: a sick-crow caw. The lilac eyes never wavered. He had no time for importunate groundlings. And if it was more than a panhandler

…

Seventeen months ago, a nat youth had attempted to mug him at gunpoint on a street much like this one. The youth was unduly confident in the superstitious terror in which the denizens of this vast, reeking, unaesthetic jumble of a city held their primitive firearms, or perhaps his confidence was chemically enhanced. He had been so little challenge that the man with lilac eyes had been merciful. There was a chance the boy had received medical attention in time to keep from bleeding to death after having his arm torn off at the shoulder.

"burg," the voice said, quieter now. "Durg at-Morakh. It's you, isn't it, man?"

He froze, turned slowly. The tall gaunt figure that shuffled toward him from blackness into mere darkness did not much resemble the owner of that voice as he remembered him. Still, the pale eyes of a being shaped by gene engineering and training to be the consummate bodyguard were not to be deceived by a few alterations in silhouette.

"Dr. Meadows." Durg performed a brief bow, accompanied by a hand gesture.

The taller man stood there in a posture of helplessness. Durg waited, legs braced, head up. He would maintain that pose all night or all week: awaiting orders.

"Uh, how's life, man?"

"My job as a stevedore provides adequate exercise. The pay affords me such comfort as this overly warm and insufficiently civilized world can provide." Thin lips smiled. "Should I require more funds, my coworkers are ever eager to wager on contests of strength and dexterity. Some of your people are dismally slow learners, lord. I would hope your own fortunes have changed for the better."

"No. Not really. Except-except I've found my little girl."

"I rejoice that the Little Mistress has been discovered. Does your government still hold her captive?"

"Yeah." Mark bit his lip and shuffled his feet. "I-I have to get her back. God only knows what she's going through."

"You mean, then, to employ force?"

Mark's gaze rummaged among the fissures in the pavement. He nodded. "You know I'm not comfortable with this kind of thing. But I'm desperate, man. I'm really strung out. I need to know, will you help me?"

"Does the sun yet shine on Avendrath Crag?"

"Beg pardon?"

"A Morakh saying, lord. So long as the sun of Takis shines, so long as the great rock of Avendrath shall stand-so long shall the loyalty of a Morakh run true."

"It'll mean breaking the law"

The elfin head tipped back, rang laughter like the pealing of a big silver bell. "I care as much for the laws of your kind as you care what legislation dogs might pass. Had you listened to me, you would have defied the law long since and fought to keep your daughter by force or stealth."

"I wasn't ready, man. I-I still believed in justice."

"Your world entertains many quaint superstitions. What now, my lord?"

"Now I'm gonna get Sprout back," Mark said. "Whatever it takes."

Bloat said he hated pity. His visitor pitied him, and he found it oddly pleasurable. What the man didn't feel was repugnance. That made all the difference.

"Dr. Meadows," he said, "welcome."

Mustelina and Andiron took their cue and left. Meadows stood blinking up at Bloat's bloatblack-slimy sides. "Thanks, uh, Governor. Like, to what do I owe the honor?"

You're dying to know what's become of your friend, Bloat thought, and couldn't help but giggle. The poor man. Should I tell you where he is?

"I understand you have a project in mind."

The tall man swallowed. Bloat heard him turn up the deception card and toss it away without hesitation, as if he were unused to its use. How rare that was.

"It's my daughter, Governor." He glanced at Kafka. "I have to get her back." With or without your permission. He didn't speak the words, but of course Bloat heard them.

"You don't need my permission," Bloat said, and tittered at the way Mark jumped to hear his own thoughts quoted. "But you have it. My blessings, even. More than that, Doctor. I want to offer my help."

"What-what do you mean, man?"

"You want to see if you can bring your friends back. Don't look so surprised, Doctor; you've got to know I can read your mind. I know what you need. You need certain drugs and a safe place to work. I can offer those things."

"What do you want from me?"

Bloat clucked. "My, my. The Last Hippie has gotten cynical."

"It's just the way the world works, man."

"Exactly. Dr. Meadows, you've felt the anger of the straight world-the anger and the fear. We've offered you shelter from it."

"Yeah, thanks, man, like I really appreciate-"

"Wait. That's understood. I want to make sure you understand that this can't last. The nats-the straights-won't let us defy them forever. They have to reassert their power. To destroy us for being different and daring to hold our heads up and not be ashamed."

Meadows nodded. "You think the Combine will move in on you. Makes sense."

"The Combine? Oh, you've been talking to K.C. Strange. Yes. We're inevitably going to be attacked, and we will fight. What I ask in exchange for my help is that you fight beside us when the time comes."

He read Meadows's hesitation and, stifled his own feelings of disappointed anger and I thought you would be different. "I know it's a big step. Asking you to cut yourself off completely from the nat world. But it's really a fait accompli, isn't it, Doctor? The straight world's rejected you. It's hunting you like a vicious animal. Do you really have anything left to lose?"

"No," Meadows said quietly. "Like, I guess not." He raised his head. "I'm with you, man."

Bloat giggled happily. "Marvelous! And now I have something-"

"Just one thing. When I get Sprout back, I have to find out what's happened to Tachyon. If he's in trouble, my friends and I will have to get him out. Then I'll, like, be happy to help you."

Uh-oh, Bloat thought. He switched in mid-sentence. "-something to ask you. What do you think of Hieronymous Bosch?"

Meadows's eyes lit. " I love him, man. He's my favorite. Him and M.C. Escher. And, uh, Peter Max."

When Mark had left, Kafka said, "You should have told him to go to Blaise for help hunting Tachyon. It would have been amusing."

Bloat's jellyfish sides heaved. The black ran glistening down. "I need them both," he said. "I need all the help I can get."

"You toyed with the notion of telling him, though, didn't you? About Tachyon."

"Blaise is-he's like a force of nature. I don't dare challenge him. He'll destroy us all. It's all I can do to get him to keep a lid on his taste for atrocity, and that's only here on my island."

Kafka produced clicking sounds with his chitinous joints. "Someday, Kafka. Someday we'll face down the nats and win. Then maybe Mark Meadows will hear a few things that'll raise his eyebrows. And then maybe Jumpin' Jack Flash will burn pretty Blaise fucking Andrieux down to a cinder. Someday."

"We're all secure here," K.C. Strange said. "Bloat's people are keeping the gawkers away."

Mark swallowed, nodded convulsively. He didn't look up from his work. "Ready in a minute, man. Don't rush me." The metal table was rickety, its washers rattling at every random gust that bulled its way into the fiberboard shack. The light from the alcohol lamp was thin and thready as a dying woman's pulse. Conditions were not ideal. But Mark in his way was an artist, who knew how to work around the limitations of his surroundings and his media. And this was a familiar task, even after so many months he didn't care to count. In the doing of it, he was even able to take a certain shelter: from thought, from demands the world and he laid upon him that he realized he in all likelihood could not fulfill. K. C. sat down and drew her knees under her chin. Her eyes glowed like coins in the lamplight as she watched Mark measure powder into glittering mounds of color.

Something passed behind Mark's eyes. His hand faltered, but none of the precious powder fell from the scoop. Even Bloat had only been able to obtain a fraction of the substances Mark needed. Enough to summon two of his friends for perhaps an hour apiece. Not necessarily the two he would have chosen.

He let his hand rest on the cold thin-gauge tabletop, suddenly uncertain. "I think there's something wrong with Tach," he said.

K. C. shifted her weight with a mouse rustle.

"This isn't like him. He'd never give up the clinic. He's stronger than he was back in the Forties. The clinic made him strong. It gave him something to live for."

"Fucking give it up!" Her voice rang like brass knucks on a steel surgical table. "He's ditched you. He's ditched the jokers and you and every fucking body. Sometimes people just turn their back and walk away from you, capisc'?"

He lowered his head and shut his eyes in pain. Instantly she was by his side, hand on arm. "I'm sorry, babe," she said. "I've gotten some pretty rough licks from life. Made me pretty cynical, okay? I don't have to lay it off on you."

"No," Mark said. "No, it's okay. I still cant believe he's abandoned me. I think something's happened to him."

Her nails dug into his arm. "What are you going to do about it?"

"Nothing." The word fell to the tabletop with scarcely more sound than a drop of sweat. "Not now. I hope he's okay."

"I'll do anything I can to help him-later. But Sprout that's stronger than friendship. I'm sorry."

She ran her hand up to his shoulder. He started to shy away, then relaxed with an audible sigh.

"You got nothin' to apologize for, babe," she said, low in her throat.

He emptied the contents of the scoop into a tiny vial, then stoppered it quickly, as if expecting the orange powder to escape. "Let's go."

K.C. followed him out onto the reeking beach. Mark stood with his feet spread wide in the sand, twisted the plastic cap off and tossed the orange powder down his throat. He sighed explosively, lowered his arm.

Then he burst into flame.

K. C. screamed and threw herself forward. Furnace heat threw her back. She smelled her eyebrows scorching. Reeling back, she saw that Mark was not fighting the flame. He had staggered several steps away from her, but now he seemed to be letting the fire have its way with him. "God, oh God, Mark, what have you done?" He was charring down to a mummy right before her eyes. She had read that happened when you burned. She never thought it could happen so fast. God, he's already down to my size! The mummy spread its arms.

K.C. screamed. The flames began to die, seeming to be sucked into the burning man. Astonished, she saw a flash of unburned skin, and then a small man in an orange jogging suit was standing there, grinning, while a final few flames chased each other through his shock of red hair.

"So you're the kind of babe Mark's hanging with these days," he said. "Bit less Park Avenue than the last one, but I'm not sure that's not an improvement."

Her first attempt at speech failed. She swallowed and tried again. "Who are you?"

He laughed. "Jumpin' Jack Flash, at your service, dear." He spread his hands and a tiny fireball arced from palm to palm. "It's a gas-gas-gas."

"Then it's true. He really was Cap'n Trips."

The fragment of fire sizzled and died on the upturned palm. Its echo still glimmered in his eyes as he raised them to hers and said, "He still is Cap'n Trips, doll."

He twisted left and right, the locked his hands, held them up over his head and back, stretching.

"Let's do it," he said. An orange glow sprang up in the air around him, without apparent source.

K.C. looked around nervously. "Jesus, do you have to do that? We don't need to advertise the fact that Cap'n Trips is back to the immediate world."

"Yeah, you're right. When you're right, you're right. I don't need the FIX. It's just been so damn long, and I'm used to going in style

… oh, well."

He flexed his knees and leapt into the sky.

Half an hour later, Flash touched down again, flipping a finger at the white foam wake of a harbor patrol boat churning outside the wall a few hundred yards away.

"Officious fucks. Don't even let me have a final flourish. 'Scuse me just a moment, hon. My exits aren't quite as stagy as my entrances." He stepped around the end of the shack.

K.C. stood, brushed wet sand off the taut seat of her black leather pants. "I've seen some scaly shit," she said, "I've done some. But this could take some getting used to."

She heard a strange whump like gasoline lighting off, and then a moan. She ran to find Mark Meadows lying in the fetal position in a depression in the sand, buck naked and turning blue.

She helped him sit up. Inside the shack was an army blanket. She brought it, wrapped it around Mark's shoulders. "Come on," she said. "Let's get inside out of the cold."

K.C. threaded one of Mark's arms around her shoulders, urged him to his feet. He lurched into the shack like a radio mast that had come to life and decided to take a hike. Inside she sat him on a second blanket thrown over a pad of old newspapers.

Mark turned his face toward the wall. His shoulders shook. "You're crying!" She touched his shoulder. He shrugged her off. "Why? What's the matter?"

"I can't do it," he sobbed.

"What? What are you talking about? You're an ace again. You changed. You got to fly. How long has it been, babe?"

"Too-too long. I don't know" He sat up shaking his head. Tears streamed down his wasted cheeks, glinting like melted butter in the yellow lamplight. "I don't think I can handle it."

"What do you mean? You ought to be high as a kite right now. You've won."

"No. You don't understand. They won. I'm not innocent anymore, man. I've lost the purity. Lost the dream."

"It's the drugs. You're just crashing." She put her arm around him. "You'll be okay in a while."

"No!" He tore away, lunged to his feet. "You don't understand. I'm no good any more."

"You'd do anything, right? For her?" He nodded.

"Mark. Listen to me. That's love. That's loyalty. I've seen aces, dude. I know plenty of people who can do weird stuff. Shit, I can chase people out of their own heads and party hearty inside, bust up all the furniture if I want to. But to have that much loyalty to a person, to love her that much-" It was her turn to move away. "Nobody's ever felt that way about me. Nobody."

He slumped to the floor. "Yeah. I let you down too. I let everybody down. And now Sprout shit, man, I can't even help her."

"What?"

"I can't do it any more. It just isn't right. I wanted to be more than an ace. I wanted to be a hero. But that's all just illusion." He hung his head. "At least for me it is."

"What the fuck?" She grabbed him under the arms, hauled him to his feet with a strength she didn't know she had. "Listen to me, you son of a bitch. You don't think you got what it takes to be a hero? Then be a fucking villain."

"The world thinks you're fucked up. The world thinks you're evil. The world thinks it's a good idea to stick your little girl in kid jail where the other girls can use her for a punching bag. Where sooner or later some counselor is going to get the idea how very pretty her blonde little head would look bobbing up and down on his needle dick. Decide that's just the therapy she needs."

"Don't say that!"

"Don't tell me you don't know! It's the only thing that kept you going all these months. What brought you out of the gutter and onto the Rox. It's real, Jack. I can tell you it is. Okay? We are not talking hearsay. This doesn't just happen in Linda Blair movies. I know. I fucking know."

She had backed him into the wall. He slid slowly down. "But what am I gonna do?"

"Welcome to the jungle, babe. You're on the Rox now."

"You're an outlaw. The first thing you do is accept that. The second is, kick some ass."

He stared at his hands. "Yeah. I guess so."

Her leather jacket slumped down beside him. He jumped, looked up at her.

She was skinning her Jane's Addiction T-shirt off over her head. Her breasts were small and conical. The nipples stood up into points.

" I lied," she said, undoing her fly. "There is something else you're going to do first."

He was instantly hard. To his horror, his erection tented up the front of the blanket he had wrapped around him poncho-style. He tried to edge away.

"But, uh, Blaise-" he stammered. "But Bloat-"

"But nothing." She covered his mouth with hers.

There were eight million stories in the naked city. Most of them were about assholes. The Great and Powerful Turtle looked over the monitor screens around the control console of his shell and thought pissed-off thoughts about how there was never anything good on television.

He canted his shell and slid down for a look at the crowds by Madison Square. "Imagine," he said aloud. "I'm up here looking out for that asshole, George Bush."

The president was in town to confer with the new mayor. A number of the more prominent public aces had volunteered to help ensure there were no incidents, with the grudging acquiescence of police and city officials. It wasn't that they liked Bush. The very idea that anyone might think he did pissed Turtle off no end. But this jumper thing was getting way the hell out of hand. It was more than mere media hype.

Given the country's current mood, anything that happened to Bush was liable to be blamed on aces and the Medellin cartel, a connection George had done so much to establish in the public mind. And if an ace, even a jumper, had anything to do with actually harming the president…

It would be easy to call the consequences unthinkable. But they were all too thinkable. They'd make McCarthy look like the Phil Donahue Show. So the Turtle was up here farting around to watch over a man who'd just as soon see him in a concentration camp. Great. Just fucking great.

A disturbance below. A stout black woman, hat askew, sat on the sidewalk. A skinny youth elbowed his way through the tourist throngs clutching her handbag by a strap.

"Don't these assholes ever give it a break?" Turtle asked the air. He punched up the megaphone. "Okay, dickweed, this is the Great and Powerful Turtle. Hold it right there or I'll spoil your whole damn day."

The purse snatcher looked left and right, but not up. "What a weenie," Turtle said, and winced as he felt his amplified words reverberate through his armor plate. Forgot to dump the mike. Great.

He reached down with his teke hand and grabbed the kid by the ankle, swooping him into the air. While the crowd gawked and pointed- "git a picture o' that, Martha, or the folks'll never believe us back in Peoria"-he carried the kid, the top of his head ten feet off the pavement, back to where the stout black woman was picking herself up. He shook the kid up and down until he let go of the handbag. "Oh, thank you, Mr. Turtle," the woman called. "God bless you."

"Yeah, lady, anytime." He stuffed the kid in a dumpster and flew off.

"George fucking Bush," he said. "Jesus." Fortunately he'd turned the microphone off.

"This is never gonna work," Mark Meadows said, feeling his head again. The Grecian Formula he'd doused his head with to cover the punk racing stripes had reacted funny with some of the dye, and now it felt as if he'd been moussing with old paint.

Up front in the driver's seat, Durg impassively kept his eyes on the road and his hands upon the wheel, just like the old song. His head looked odd sprouting from his collar and broad, suit-coated shoulders, like some narrow vegetable.

Frowning, K.C. scrunched herself farther down next to Mark. "Quit fussing, will you? Jesus."

Mark plucked at his tan corduroy sport coat and improbably wide maroon tie, and ran his fingers under the harness of his shoulder holster. There was nothing in the shoulder holster; Mark had a terror of guns, and like a good modern liberal knew for a fact that if he carried one, it would instantly take possession of his mind and cause him to rush into a subway and start shooting black teenagers. But K.C. insisted he at least wear the holster so he'd have the appropriate bulge under his left arm.

"I'm never gonna pass for a cop. I look like a total geek."

"You don't know much about cops, do you? We should have got you a bad hairpiece too. And maybe strapped a pillow to your stomach so you'd look like you'd put in your time on a Dunkin Donuts stool. Besides" she turned and stretched quickly to kiss his cheek-"you are kind of a geek, babe. Lucky for you I got kinky tastes."

He shuddered. " I don't know what I think I'm doing. I got no right to involve you and Durg in this."

K.C. fell back against the seat, bounced briefly. "You don't have a gun, sugar, so you couldn't hold one to my head."

" I live to serve," Durg said.

Mark's loosely strung-together collection of features twitched in irritation. "That's just a cliche, man. Your life is your own."

"Perhaps it is a cliche among your kind. To the Morakh, it is biological fact. For me, a master is like food-I can go without, but only for a short period of time. Then I must weaken and die."

"Things work different on our world, man."

"My genes are not of this world. They make me what I am."

"You must hate what they've done to you," K.C. said. "The people who created you."

He glanced over the butte of his shoulder. The look in the lilac eyes was amusement. It hit her like a blow. "What they have done to me, lady, is give me life. And strength, and agility, and skill. They have given me perfection. Among your kind I am an ace. Among Takisians I am an object of awe, even terror. Are these things not glorious? All they ask of me in return is that I do what I am uniquely equipped to do. I see no disparity."

"A man who knows what he wants." K. C. leaned forward and breathed in Mark's ear. "I think I love him."

She nipped Mark's earlobe. He blushed furiously. She giggled.

Durg cleared his throat. "We approach our objective."

"All right." K. C. subsided in her seat. "I'm back to being a bad little prisoner girl now. Kind of like a skinny, mean Michelle Pfeiffer."

Her short neutral-colored hair had been washed and combed out wet into bangs. She wore a scuffed leather jacket over tight black pants and a white T-shirt with three defiant transverse slashes across the belly. No spikes; when they committed you to the juvie justice system, they relieved you of props like that. She did look like a skinny, mean Michelle Pfeiffer.

"So, how'd you get this gig, anyway, Durg? What's a Takisian doing hanging out with a skinny Earthling biochemist kind of guy?"

"I came to this planet with Prince Zabb of House Ilkazam, cousin and blood-foe of the being you know as Dr. Tachyon. Dr. Meadows, more loyal a friend than Tachyon deserves, fought to aid him. In one of his avatars he bested me in single combat, thereby winning my loyalty. I have found him a good master, if somewhat prone to forget his servant."

"Sounds kinky," K.C. said.

They topped a hill, rolled down a block of shabbygenteel stone buildings with plenty of wrought iron at ground level. On the right, Reeves showed the street a blank high wall looped with strands of razor tape, a gate of wrought-iron spikes.

"Why are you slowing so soon, man?" Mark asked as Durg braked.

Durg nodded his narrow head. "That sedan at the head of the next block. It has two occupants in the front, more perhaps in back. I am disquieted."

"The windshield's so dark," K.C. said, "how can you see anything?"

"He can see, man," Mark said. "Should I drive on?"

"You're being paranoid, Durg," K.C. said.

They were almost at the gate, which stood open. On the far wall a small bronze plaque proclaimed RICHARD REEVES JUVENILE DIAGNOSTIC AND DEVELOPMENTAL CENTER through patina and soot. On the near wall a sign said DO NOT PICK UP HITCHHIKERS IN THIS AREA.

Beyond those walls was Sprout.

From what Tach had told him of Takisa pang of guilt here, over possibly leaving his friend in a tight place-a tendency to err on the side of caution would be a highly desirable trait in a Morakh. K.C.'s right, he told himself. "No. We go in."

Durg turned his head a fraction to the right, flicked Mark with his lilac eyes. Mark swallowed. Years of association with the alien told him that was the closest a Morakh could come to open mutiny. He set his jaw and tried to look determined.

Reeves occupied an outsize lot with a paved courtyard. Durg cranked the wheel to bring the car around in front of the cement steps behind a station wagon with heavy wire mesh in the rear windows-

And abruptly slammed the stick into reverse, Mark's chin bouncing off the front seat back as the LeBaron accelerated backward.

Not even Morakh hearing and Morakh reflexes were quite quick enough. The long sedan with the tinted windshield was already blocking the gate, trapping them.

"Daigla bal'nagh!" Durg braked to a bucking stop and reached inside his dark suit coat. He did have a gun in his shoulder holster, a Colt 10-mm auto that would shoot through an engine block and knock down a man in body armor.

K. C. dug nails into his arm like talons. "No! Look." Men in flak jackets, dark blue baseball caps, and identical aviator sunglasses were pouring out of the building and around the brick sides, pointing shotguns and M16s at the car.

"Holy shit," Mark gulped. His hand dived into the inside pocket of his sport coat.

"Come out of the car with your hands up," Lieutenant Norwalk said through the megaphone. He stood tall at the head of the front steps, ignoring the SWAT team's frantic signals to seek cover. He knew these New Age wimps. Mark Meadows would never hurt him. Norwalk bet he didn't even carry a gun.

As he lowered the loudspeaker he cheated his face slightly to the right, so that the Action News team on the roof opposite would be sure to catch his best profile. He was a rangy man who really and truly thought he looked like actor Scot Glenn.

The LeBaron's windows were tinted, so that he couldn't see clearly inside. But he thought he saw movement, and a ripple of tension among the crouching SWAT men confirmed it.

The rear passenger's side door nearest Norwalk began to open. He put his head back and waited, conscious that even the way the late-morning bluster ruled the sandy hair brushed across his balding crown was reminiscent of Scot Glenn.

Out of the car stepped… George Bush.

"Hey, kid," the SWAT cop yelled from behind the trunk of a cruiser blocking the street above Reeves. "Get back. Get out of here."

The boy kept coming. A tall athletic-looking red-haired kid in a leather jacket, who obviously thought he was Major Bad News.

"Fuck," the policeman said under his breath. They could have the fucking news teams set up to cover the big event, but they couldn't detail enough people to keep civilians from wandering into the line of fire. Too much danger of alerting the quarry. Oh, yeah. He should have stayed in the army. He stood up, flipping on the safety of his Remington 870 riot gun. Then he stopped, leaned the shotgun against the car, and began taking off his uniform.

Blaise knelt beside a pair of officers behind the sedan parked across the gate into Reeves. The policeman's uniform was a couple of sizes too big, especially in the gut, but that wasn't too overt. With his riot helmet and dark glasses and his tail tucked down inside his flak jacket, nobody spared him a glance.

He was filled with wild hot energy, the energy of repletion, like taking a woman for the first time, or mind-controlling a man into cutting his own throat with a razor. The kind of energy that needed occasional venting so it wouldn't get the better of him. It was coming down payback time on Mark Meadows and K.C. fucking Strange. He knew how to savor these moments.

Thanks to New York regulations, when you dropped a dime on someone, you still actually dropped a dime. Bloat would suspect. At Blaise's first unguarded moment, Bloat would know. But he would never take action any length of time after the fact. Bloat needed the jumpers, needed their drugs, needed their numbers when the Man came to call.

More than that, Bloat was too cowardly to burn Blaise in cold blood. He was too sensitive. The ultimate eighties kind of guy.

Blaise giggled. A couple of cops briefly turned faces hidden by sunsplash on visors toward him, but their body language showed neither surprise nor concern. Giggling is more common on the firing line than jackboot-opera cop shows want you to believe.

Then the cops' body language changed to stone confusion.

"What is all this here? What is this? I approve of men on the front lines in the war against crime in our streets showing initiative, but don't you think this is taking things too far?"

No, Lieutenant Norwalk thought, bullshit-no way. This cannot be the president. But still-he looked like Bush, and he acted like Bush, and he had that prissy little mouth… and Christ knew he talked like George Bush.

The SWAT troopies were back on their heels, lifting weapons off-line in confusion. They couldn't quite believe it was Bush either, but if it was, their nifty Hard Corps vests with SWAT in big tape letters on the back were not going to keep their asses out of Leavenworth on a long-term lease if they pointed fucking guns at him. And it would be just like the weenie to pull a spot inspection of some chickensquat D-home on zero notice.

No, no, where's the Secret Service? Reality got hold of Norwalk's brain again, and he opened his mouth to give orders to grab the impostor. Then a small nasty-looking number in black leather stuck her Michelle Pfeiffer snub nose out the door behind the pseudopresident. Her pale eyes met his.

"Put down your guns, men," Lieutenant Norwalk rapped. "Can't you see it's the president? Dammit, move when I tell you!"

The SWAT men eyed him dubiously but obeyed, straightening up from behind the station wagon, rising out of the empty flower beds. Norwalk had a rep for liking to chew ass. If he said this was George Bush, that made it official.

The little cupcake in black sagged against the car with drool trailing from the corner of her mouth. Since she was a lot more fun to look at than the president, several of the team noticed her open her mouth as though about to scream. A plainclothes cop who looked like a compressed Jean-Claude van Damme slid around from the driver's side and caught her arm just above the elbow. No sound came out of her. George Bush strode up the steps. Lieutenant Norwalk held the door for him. The squat cop and his prisoner followed.

In the foyer George Bush looked left and right. No one in sight. He stooped slightly to honk the girl's left butt-cheek. "No one can say I don't take an active interest in today's young people," he croaked.

"If I was in my own body, I'd break your arm for you, you asshole," Lieutenant Norwalk said, stumbling slightly. The president gave the policeman a horrible stroke victim's leer. "It's nothing I haven't done before, my child."

"That was Mark. I don't even know who you are, you creepy blue thing, so just fucking watch it."

"I'm your salvation, you ungrateful little-"

"Shh," Durg said pointedly. He gave the captive a quick slap on the side of the head, enough to scramble whatever wits she had been able to gather. Or he, actually. Most people who were jumped were incapable of doing anything meaningful for a while, but he was taking no chances.

In the reception area a couple of uniforms stood, making sure the staff didn't go pressing their noses to the front door and giving away the show or getting in the way of any stray slugs. They gaped at the intruders.

"Mr. President," the black cop said.

"Just a moment," a heavyset black woman in a mauve dress with an outsize collar exclaimed. "That's not really the president."

Durg pushed K. C.'s body to the scuffed hardwood floor. His arm whipped out with the big black Colt in his fist. "But this is really a gun. Nobody move."

K. C. guided Norwalk's body past him. Keeping clear of his line of fire, he relieved the black cop of his sidearm, tossed it to Durg. He caught it one-handed, pointed it at the other cop as K. C. disarmed him.

"Oh, my," the man who looked like George Bush said. "I don't approve of firearms. People might use them to defy the law"

"Shut the fuck up," K.C. Norwalk said. To the administrator in the mauve dress she said, "Sprout Meadows. Where?"

"I won't tell you."

K.C. pointed the second officer's pistol at her. "If I kill you, maybe somebody else will be a little more sensible." "Lieutenant Norwalk," the white cop breathed.

"Blow me, Patrolman. Now, where's the girl?" She cocked the pistol. "One-"

"Rec room. Annex in the back, second floor."

Turtle blinked and stabbed a finger at the control of his police-band radio, overriding the automatic scanner. He punched it back three channels, to the broadcast that had belatedly caught his attention.

"-tell you it's the president of the United States!" a voice was insisting. "George Bush. The weenie himself. He's on some kind of cockamamy spot inspection-"

The Turtle frowned. Bush was supposed to be under massive guard, addressing a Turn-In-Your-Parents rally somewhere in Harlem. He looked at the digital readout, checked the freek against a dog-eared looseleaf notebook hung beside his console. Brooklyn.

The voices were still arguing about whether the president could possibly be at something called the Reeves Institute. He turned his shell east.

Sprout Meadows sat to one side looking at the pictures in a magazine with a yellow cover. She liked to look at that magazine because it always had nice animals in it. Sometimes it almost seemed she could tell what the words said. But never quite.

Fine Young Cannibals were on the television high on the wall. A couple of girls were arguing over whether to keep watching MTV or switch to Santa Barbara. It sounded as if they were going to start hitting each other at any moment. Sprout was getting good at telling things like that. Fortunately the other girls had gotten bored with picking on her; she was mostly left alone these days. That meant the counselors scolded her for not getting more involved in what the other girls did. She hated being scolded. But she hated getting picked on more.

She glanced up. The monitor lady was watching her intently, just as she'd thought. That always happened when other girls got ready to fight. Sprout thought it was because the monitor lady got in trouble if she reported that the other girls were fighting but got rewarded if she told on Sprout. But that probably just meant Sprout was stupid, like the other girls always told her.

The door opened. Two men walked in. One of the girls squealed in surprise. The monitor stepped forward, frowning. "I'm sorry, you're not supposed-my God, it's President Bush."

"Yes. Yes it is. How perceptive of you to notice." He smiled and nodded at her, then looked around the room. "Sprout? Is there a Sprout Meadows here?"

Cheeks burning, Sprout dropped her National Geographic and stood up. She couldn't say a word. Inside she quailed, knowing that he'd never see her because she couldn't make herself talk.

But he did. He smiled and dropped to one knee. "Come here, honey. I've come to take you to your daddy."

The movies notwithstanding, a human being is not physically capable of aiming two handguns at different targets with any degree of accuracy. A Morakh is. Somehow the two police officers sensed it.

They hadn't offered any backchat when he ordered them to drop their trousers around their ankles. Now he'd gotten them to cuff themselves together, back-to-back, and stand to one side, still covered by the Colt, while a nervous staffer pulled the phones out of the wall under the watchful eye of the service revolver. The people outside were still dithering. Everything seemed to be under control.

He knew it couldn't last.

"I can't believe this is going so smoothly," K.C. said as they approached the stairwell. Her voice sounded strange in her ears; everything sounded strange in her ears. She was getting antsy to get back in her own body. She'd never liked long-term jumps. They disoriented her, and her borrowed bodies never seemed to respond well to her commands.

"Are you really taking me to my daddy?" Sprout asked George Bush, who was holding her hand.

"Yes, I am. I'm not really the president, you see. I'm one of your daddy's friends. Cosmic Traveler, I'm called."

Her face lit up. "Oh, I know! The blue one. The one everybody says is a weenie."

Black, and menacing in his borrowed cop suit, Blaise stalked down the reform-school corridor, head buzzing with fury and the disinfectant smell that forced its way into his nostrils like probing fingers. He had set the perfect trap for Meadows: the pigs had the drop on him, and even if Meadows found the balls to act, no matter how powerful a "friend" the ancient hippie summoned, he or she couldn't make his companions bulletproof Meadows didn't have the spine to write them off and drive for his daughter on his own. Blaise knew that as he knew he could make a five-year-old skip rope into the path of a speeding semi.

Yet Meadows had found a way through the jaws of the perfect trap.

I was right to fear him! he yammered in his mind, as if Bloat could read him from here. He's too powerful! He must be destroyed!

Ahead of him Blaise saw that the corridor led into a waiting room of some sort. A familiar pair of legs encased in skintight black protruded from the left, lying up against a chest-high wood-sided planter.

He paused, unsnapped the safety strap on his holster. He'd left the riot gun propped inside the side door he'd let himself in through. To a European, a shotgun is a peasant's weapon.

He preferred the precision of a handgun, and was vain of the combat shooting skills his grandfather had drilled into him. He drew the pistol. It was one of the new Walther nine millimeters with an ultra-high-capacity magazine. Solid Euroworkmanship; he approved. He shifted to the right-hand wall of the corridor ard moved forward with the pistol held in both hands, ready.

The rest of K. C. came into view. She lay with her arms cuffed behind her. Her head hung listlessly on her neck. Blaise recognized a common jump reaction. K.C. wasn't home right now. His pulse raced with hunter's eagerness. Swiftly, sure, he glided forward into the foyer.

As expected, the monster was there, positioned to cover both the front door and the white-faced D-home staffers. The Morakh. The ultimate abomination-a variant Takisian.

Despite the hostility between Tachyon and Morakh, Durg had often been set to watch young Blaise. The boy had a nasty way with baby-sitters. But a Morakh mind cannot be controlled. Try as he might, Blaise had been unable to dent Durg's mindshield.

But that was then. Blaise had grown, and learned. He was unique, a new thing beneath the sun of Takis or Earth, and he knew no rules.

He reached for Durg's mind. It was like grabbing at a wall, massive as battleship steel, friction-free as glass. Yet for just a moment he actually had a grip. The narrow head snapped around, the lilac eyes found his and widened.

The tree-trunk arm swung around. Blaise narrowed his focus, pouring his entire being into a desperate attempt to stop it. It was like trying to keep a tank gun from traversing. The heavy Colt rose inexorably on-line.

For the rest of Blaise's life he would believe he saw the black 10-mm eye of the pistol flash yellow. Only Takisian reflexes saved him then. He felt the hot breath of the bullet's passage as he threw himself back into the corridor, and its miniature sonic boom stung his cheek like a slap.

He hit the right-hand wall with enough force to send the air out of him, went down on butt and shoulderblades. But his training held; he kept two-handed control of the SWAT man's wonder nine, kept the pistol trained generally on the corridor mouth the whole time.

When he stopped sliding, he firmed his aim in the middle of the door where he judged the center of the Morakh's mass would appear. He held there for a dozen highspeed heartbeats, ignoring the trembling in his arms.

The monster did not follow up his advantage. Blaise fought panic like a swimmer in an undertow, forcing his mind to the surface. Durg would not pursue him, he realized. To do so would leave the door unguarded, and holding the surrounding police at bay would be Durg's main priority. Short of a direct threat to his master-or death-there was no force in the universe that could move a Morakh from his post.

The fear receded. Rage took its place. Blaise dropped his eyes to the limp body of K.C. Strange and smiled. With a gymnast's bound, he came to his feet. He flexed his knees slightly, locked his arms into the isosceles triangle of the Weaver stance, drew a deep breath.

The fat white dot of the foresight hovered like a moon over K. C. Strange's sternum. Blaise began to let the breath out. The trigger slack came in.

"Shit! There's shooting!" K. C. stopped halfway down the stairs.

"Well, it can't hurt me, at least," read George Bush's lips.

She tossed her pistol to Cosmic Traveler and fumbled a pair of handcuffs out of a pocket of Norwalk's coat. "Put these on my wrists."

"Whatever for?"

"Something's coming down. I've gotta get back to my body."

"But it's too soon! You have to get us out of here!"

"You're the ace. If I have to, I can jump somebody else. Jesus, come on."

"Oh, this is just too much. Trust Meadows to have such unreliable friends. How can you leave me and this innocent child in the lurch?"

"You, easy." She finished snapping the cuffs around Norwalk's knobby ginger-haired wrists. "Sayonara, sucker."

Blaise squeezed the trigger with one smooth pull, felt the sear break crisply.

K.C. raised her head. Her eyes met his above the sights. "No!" he screamed. The gun bucked and roared. The bullet hit K.C. two inches above the right nipple and slammed her back into the planter.

Durg at-Morakh fired three quick rounds into the corridor from which the shot had come. He was firing blind, suppressive fire; the angle was bad, and he couldn't see a target. It was impossible to cover the gaggle of prisoners, the front door, and the side corridors all at once. Even Morakh had their limitations.

Still, he could scarcely believe he had missed his first shot at the intruding policeman. There had been something behind his eyes, a flicker of touch, like nothing he had ever felt before. Perhaps that had thrown off his aim by a fraction of are.

It was no excuse. A Morakh knew no excuses, only success or death. If his lord demanded his life for K. C. Strange, it was his.

For now, he still had duty.

Cosmic Traveler and Sprout had just reached bottom when the shot hit K. C. The Traveler cringed as Durg blasted shots in return. His impulse was to go insubstantial and melt through the floor into the basement. It was the sensible thing to do. He could keep himself insubstantial only so long, and then bullets would be able to hurt him, cops would be able to lay heavy coarse hands on him. He couldn't tolerate that risk. But something-residual influence of the baseline Mark persona perhaps-made it impossible for him simply to vanish and leave Sprout to her fate.

Durg saw him, waved him back. "Go. I'll catch up with you."

Traveler rabbited up the stairs with Sprout in tow. Tears stung Blaise's eyes as he stumbled down the corridor. Oh, K.C., K.C., why did you have to choose that moment to jump back?

She was hurt too badly to muster the mental concentration needed to jump to safety in another body. She was lost to him, lost. Rage and grief rose up and threatened to overwhelm him.

Now I'll never get to torture you to death! Oh, Mark Meadows, you have much to answer for.

Durg ignored his captives' screaming. He was focused on the front entrance now. The police outside would have heard the shooting.

Bulky in his flak jacket, a SWAT man hit the outer door, popped it open, and rolled in, leveling a shotgun from the hip.

Durg had orders from his lord to avoid violence if possible, to avoid killing at all costs. Durg had mentally amended that to not killing anyone except to preserve the life of Mark or his daughter. He could always atone with his life later if Mark would not absolve him of guilt for disobedience; to preserve the life of one's lord was a higher imperative even than to obey. But Durg felt confident he need take no lives. None of these groundlings was a big enough threat.

Without seeming to hurry, he pivoted, bringing the Colt around. He fired as it came on-line.

The Kevlar jacket was guaranteed to stop anything up to a. 44 Magnum. The 10-mm was slightly less potent, equivalent to a. 4-I Magnum. As advertised, the vest did stop it. But the copper-jacketed bullet delivered a lot of energy right through the vest into the patrolman's solar plexus. He went down gasping like a grounded carp.

"Ohh," Cosmic Traveler moaned at the pistol crack that chased them up the stairs like Fate hounding a classical Greek hero. They popped out the top, and there at hand was salvation, the Traveler's ultimate refuge: a broom closet. He tried the door. Locked, of course.

"Shit," he said.

Sprout gasped. Heart in throat, he whirled, expecting to see fifteen hundred SWAT cops and federal agents thundering down on them like a herd of buffalo. Instead, the girl was staring straight at his face, and he realized he'd resumed his preferred form, a blue and hairless humanoid with a black cowl. "Wait here a moment, honey,'." he said, and stepped through the door.

Once inside, he thought, why open the door? It will only let them know I'm here. And they'd never hurt a mere child. I

The universe seemed to vibrate to a single plangent chord. A chasm opened beneath his feet. "No!" he screamed. "It's not possible! I'm supposed to get an hour! Oh, God, the fool will get me killllled!.. ."

He plummeted into black infinity.

"Something's going on here," SWAT lieutenant Dixon said to the pencil neck from plainclothes. "I'm assuming Lieutenant Norwalk has been taken hostage. I'm taking command here." He pumped his neck and shoulders a little, hearkening back to lineman days.

The honkie from Serious Crimes kind of fell on himself. "Okay."

A couple of officers had dragged Torres from the doorway, and he was unloading breakfast into what winter and half a hundred booted feet had left of a rosebush.

"All right, we're going in again, but this time we're gonna do it right. Connelly, take your men around to the left. Washington, you go right. Kelly, you get three and take the back. The rest of us are going right through the front door." There was no one in view down the corridor when Durg got there. He waved his Colt back at the terrified staffers. "I'm letting you go now. Out the front door."

The captives just stared at each other and trembled. He fired a round into the wall over their heads. It sounded like a howitzer going off.

"Now!"

They stampeded for the exit just as the cops were coming in.

For a moment, Mark Meadows stood in the dark with his hands braced against the door and his head hung between them. It had been a long time since he'd been the Traveler. He'd almost forgotten what this concentration of Lysol and ammonia smelled like.

Cosmic Traveler's final fading plaint still echoed in his skull.

I never promised you an hour, man. That's just the max. He was pleased to have thought of filling a vial with a sixth of a normal dose for just this kind of emergency, and by chance his timing had been perfect. Maybe he could do something right. By accident at least.

"Sprout," he breathed. He fumbled at the door, got it open, got his feet tangled, and fell on his knees in the front of his daughter.

Without a word, she lunged forward and wrapped her arms around his neck.

At the foot of the stairs he found Durg. The Morakh had his Colt jammed up in the notch formed by Lt. Norwalk's jaw and his ear, and was winding duct tape around the officer's head to hold it in place. Mark looked past him and yelped. "K. C.!" She was lying against the wall. The front of her T-shirt was scarlet. She was breathing with difficulty. Her eyes were half closed and looked at nothing.

He knelt beside her. "Baby," he said.

"Don't touch her," Durg said. "She's badly hurt." There was a band of duct tape diagonally across her chest, holding down a gauze compress, now dripping red. Durg believed in being prepared.

Mark touched her cheek. She moaned. Blood bubbled from her lips.

Durg finished taping the dazed policeman. "We must move. The groundlings in front will eventually compose themselves enough to act."

Mark looked a wordless appeal at him.

"I can bear her," the Morahk said. "You take the young mistress and go."

"Come on, honey." Mark grabbed Sprout's hand, and they raced back up the stairs.

At the top, Mark turned to his daughter. "Stand back," he said. He reached into the inside pocket of his cord jacket, brought out a tiny vial full of orange powder, raised it to his lips.

From the far end of the corridor, a voice screamed, "Meadows!"

From thirty feet away, he could see Meadows's mouth fall open. "Blaise?"

Blaise laughed.

What he was about to do was fantastically risky. He was beyond caring. Besides, he was young, and he was Blaise, and he was immortal.

He seized Meadows's eyes with his, coiled his soul like a panther, and sprang.

Sprout looked from the strangely familiar man dressed like a policeman to her daddy. Her father was wrapped in flames. The expression of calm happiness and love on her perfect features never flickered. Sprout took it for granted that everybody's daddy periodically caught fire and turned into somebody else.

Roiling red and black surrounded Blaise, suffused him. For a moment, he saw his own now-vacant body through a roaring curtain of flame. And then his soul exploded outward, went spinning into an endless treacherous dark where shadows went to die.

JJ Flash rocked on his feet. It was as if he were whirling around and around inside his own head, surrounded by a maelstrom of shrieking blackness.

The whirlpool effect subsided like water gurgling down a drain, carrying with it a dying shrill keening like nothing Flash had ever heard. "Wow," he said. Bloat must've gotten burned with some impure shit. JJ would like to hunt up his supplier someday and return the favor just a bit, teach him better business practices. Guys like that gave the free market a bad name.

He opened his eyes to see a SWAT cop collapsing like a marionette with its strings snipped at the far end of the hall. "What the fuck?"

"Hi, JJ," Sprout said shyly.

"Babe. What's happening?" He gave her a quick hug and hung his head over the stairwell.

"Durg. Go for it."

Durg kicked the back door. He put a bit too much IEnglish on it. The heavy meshed-glass-and-steel door popped right off its hinges and went spinning out into the small blacktopped yard to bounce off the eight-foot wall that separated the institute grounds from the street.

He stopped, slung K.C. over his shoulder as gently as he could. Then he thrust Norwalk out into the cloud-filtered light, holding the Colt with his left hand.

"Everybody get back," he commanded. "I'm holding the hammer back with my thumb. If I release it, the lieutenant dies."

He gave them a few beats to mull that over, then stepped outside. He could see four squaddies hunkered in pairs, covering the door from either side. He walked deliberately to the back wall. Then he looked up at the second-floor window of the annex.

JJ Flash kissed Sprout on the forehead. "Stick tight, honey. Back in half a tick."

He rolled his hand onto its back. Flame leapt forth, played against the window. Glass and steel wire shimmered, puffed away. Flash followed.

"You can't use tear gas," the therapist said. She was a redheaded woman with saddlebag thighs and thick horn-rim glasses. "That kind of brutality would devastate our developmental strategies-"

"Screw your strategies," Dixon said. "I'm talkin' lives here="

"Yo!" a voice said. "Down there. Pay attention."

The babble of voices in the courtyard stopped. Everybody looked at one another, then up.

There was a small red-haired man in an orange jogging suit hovering just above the peak of the roof. "You might want to stand back away from the LeBaron, there."

"Nail the bastard!" Dixon roared.

Guns came up. Flash let his hand loll out. A jet of fire flashed to the top of the car Mark and company had arrived in. Just enough to melt through the roof and start the vinyl inside burning nicely.

"The gas tank!" somebody screamed. "Get back!"

Cops and institute staffers scattered. Now that somebody'd had an idea, JJ Flash turned up the heat. The LeBaron exploded with a very satisfactory whoomp and a ball of yellow flame.

Explosion! A quarter mile ahead, Turtle saw a fireball blossom into the sky.

"Here we fucking go again." He tipped his shell into a shallow dive and accelerated.

The four cops in back turned to stare at the big black ball of smoke rising from the far side of the building. Leaving K.C. balanced on his broad shoulder, Durg rammed his right fist into the wall.

Brick gave. Powdered mortar drooled away. He punched the wall again. It bowed outward.

JJ Flash shot out the second-story window, holding Sprout in his arms.

Durg spun a back-kick into the wall. A man-size section exploded outward as though struck by a cannon shell. Nodding politely to the SWAT men, he backed through, dragging Norwalk with him.

Fire has a wonderful effect on people. The fear of burning is immediate and deeply ingrained. Flash enjoyed burning things but not people, so the psychological effect of his fireballs was very convenient.

The Brooklyn cops hadn't forgotten all about the back wall. They thought it unlikely the fugitives could make it out that way, so they'd just stuck a patrol car and a couple of uniforms there on general principles.

By a remarkable coincidence, both uniformed patrolmen remembered urgent appointments when JJ Flash burned through the roof of the car's backseat. Took off down the street in opposite directions.

"It smells icky in here," Sprout complained as she slid in back.

"Be better once the car gets moving," Flash said.

He helped Durg ease K. C. in beside her, then fired a blast back through the hole in the wall to keep the SWAT boys on the other side from getting too curious. Durg broke pistol and gun hand free of Norwalk's head, shoved the still-stunned detective lieutenant in the passenger seat, then ran around to slide in behind the wheel.

"I'll catch up with you later," Flash said. "Want to make sure our friends on the other side have their minds right -whoa!"

He was snatched straight up into the sky. A voice boomed down,