Marked Cards

"You know who, all light. An old friend. We first met - when was it, '76? When I was just a kid, and I was working for you. And the next thing you know, I strung some guy up from a lamppost and ran him through with a needle." He gave a cold laugh. "I didn't know I had that kind of anger in me. I thought I was a good guy, you know? Just trying to help people. I didn't know that kind of rage existed. Did you?"

Hartmann edged away from him, eyes wary. Keeping the desk between them. "What are you talking about?"

"I figure I met Puppetman again later that day, when I joined the rioters. And later, when I strung up a couple or muggers on the Deuce. And then when I busted up the Los Bozos clubhouse. And - "

"What do you want?" Hartmann said. "If it's help, I can arrange it. I've got friends who can hide you."

"What do I want?" Shad repeated. The rage boiled in him, exploded in a shriek. "I want the man who wrecked my life! I want Puppetman!"

Alarm and confusion warred in Hartmann's face. "Calm down, okay? I'll get you what you want. But you have to tell me who to call. What's Puppetman's name?"

Shad laughed as he came around the desk. "You don't know?"

Hartmann looked blank. "No. I don't."

"Perhaps you can call up - oh, I don't know - George Gordon Battle? Was he the one who paid you off?"

Shock drained Hartmann's face of color. Shad grabbed him by the throat. Hartmann reacted quickly - for a nat, anyway - by trying to kick him in the knee, and by driving his linked hands up as a wedge between Shad's forearms, breaking the stranglehold. But Shad was faster than a nat, and stronger, and he avoided the kick and doubled Hartmann over with a mid-knuckle punch to the solar plexus. He grabbed Hartmann again, slammed him down in his chair. Hartmann tried to smash him in the head with his prothesis, but Shad rapped him in the face with a fist, hearing the nasal cartilage crunch, and then stunned him with an open-hand slap to the side of the head.

Hartmann put up a suiprisingly good fight, all things considered. Maybe he remembered his old Army training.

Shad tied him to the chair with extension cords. Hartmann coughed on the blood running from his broken nose, spat, looked up with incredulous eyes. "Wait!" he said, "I'm not who you think I am."

"Yeah, Gregg baby," Shad said. He wadded a piece of paper and stuffed it in Hartmann's mouth. "I know that."

He took out the knife and showed it to the bound man.

"This is going to be unnecessarily brutal," he said. "But hey, it's only what you taught me." He smiled. "And if you've got any fancy mental powers, better use 'em now."

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

Shad found he hardly had to think at all. He'd had it done to him once, he knew how it went. It was a thing he'd already thought about, already visualized so completely during his years in stir that no mental effort was required - no thought, no feeling, nothing that stirred or repelled. Nothing but business.

Hartmann babbled a lot when Shad took the gag out to ask questions. He talked about will and the flames of cigarette lighters. He kept trying to pretend he was someone else, presumably someone this wasn't happening to.

Shad could have told him that didn't work. He'd tried all his life to be someone else, and it wasn't something a person could do.

Eventually Hartmann told him things. He wasn't very coherent by that point, but it was a place to start

None of this was going to make Shad any happier. It wasn't going to release or bury his demons. It was just something that had to be got out of the way so that, in some future moment, he could become more himself. Free from Puppetman. Free from the ice that prison had injected into his veins.

Free to be, in some distant future time, horrified by everything he was doing.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

In Hartmann's blood Shad wrote Race Traitor and George Battle Lives! and Sharks Revenge on the wall. Then he changed his blood-spattered clothes and called the police. He told them that he lived across the street from that nice Senator Hartmann and that he'd seen several men in masks break into the apartment. Then he called every television station in the city and told them the same thing.

When he went back to the apartment in Jokertown, he went to the shower and stayed under the hot spray for a long time. He ate the heat as it rained on him, and the water fell to the porcelain floor cold as ice.

The Color of His Skin

Part 5

Gregg had a vague memory of his soul being wrenched away from his body, and then of running screaming through the night, followed by a period of darkness. He wondered how long he'd been out.

Gregg wasn't quite sure what he felt like. That told him that he was still in shock, because he knew damned well that he should be screaming.

He'd been jumped.

He seemed to have come to rest in a midtown alley in a nest of discarded rags. They smelled of ... well, a dozen varieties of piss, a trio of motor oils, a trace of lingering perspiration from six or seven people, ancient semen and vaginal secretions from a few encounters, at least thirty old food stains, and a hundred things that he'd never smelled before - it seemed his new body had a wonderful sense of smell; hardly an asset at the moment.

He squinted toward the light at the end of the alley, realizing that anything more than a few yards away looked blurry, and the street beyond the alley's mouth was just a wash of color. He might have a great nose, but the eyes sucked. Wonderful. He was going to need glasses.

Gregg lifted his right arm: the stubby caterpillar limb that came into his myopic view sent his mind reeling again. He shut his eyes, shivering like a frightened baby. He tried the experiment once more - and once more what he saw wasn't even vaguely human. There were three short fingers at the end; he could wiggle them.

Taking a deep breath strongly spiced with the varied aromas around him, Gregg bent his head to look at his body. He looked like a four foot long weinerwurst dipped in fluorescent yellow paint. Six legs/arms. Spiky tufts of hair protruding from the cylindrical rolls in the skin. He couldn't wait to see what his face looked like.

"Fucking shit, I'm a joker!" he squealed, and heard a voice that sounded like Alvin the Chipmunk.

Gregg waited for the mocking, taunting voice inside. He knew what it would say: Whassa matter, Greggie? You finally got what you've always deserved, that's all.... But the voice didn't come. Inside his head was only silence.

It seemed a very small compensation.

He crawled out of the rag pile. He had to find someone. He had to get help and find a way to get his body back.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

He couldn't hail a cab - they wouldn't stop for a fire hydrant with legs. Besides, he couldn't even see them until they were nearly on him.

He walked to the nearest bus stop. The nats who were there when he scuttled up gave him sour looks of disgust and moved on, refusing to stand near him - which was fine by Gregg, as he found that they all reeked. Three buses went by in an incredible wash of fumes before Gregg decided that none of them was going to stop.

He went around the corner, waited until a group of nats had assembled and the next bus had stopped, then scurried quickly toward the open door. The driver looked down at him as he humped his way up the stairs, and the glare was plain even with Gregg's poor vision.

"Get off my bus, Mac."

With Puppetman, it wouldn't have been a problem. Even with the weaker new "Gift," he might have been able to blunt the antagonism. But this body had no such powers. He couldn't feel the man's emotions at all - all he could do was smell the stench of his body. He suspected that the driver was on the second or third day in pair of underwear. "Look, buddy," Gregg answered, "this is an emergency. I'm Gregg Hartmann. I've been jumped."

"Yeah. And I'm Elvis, and my wife's Amelia Earhart. Get the fuck outa here."

Gregg narrowed his eyes and drew up on his hind legs. He suspected that the gesture hardly looked intimidating. "This is public transportation. I have as much right to use it as anyone."

"Yeah? I don't see no fare, and I don't see no tokens, and I don't see no pockets where you could hide 'em, either. Now, you gonna back outa here or am I gonna have to toss you out, worm?"

Gregg glanced at the faces of the passengers. Most were pointedly ignoring the confrontation, staring fixedly through the windows. Those that were watching wore matching scowls.

"Fuck you," Gregg said "Fuck you all." Even to his ears he sounded like a two-year old. Laughter followed him down the steps.

Okay, he thought. I'm midtown in nat country. Who'd help me here?

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

"Erin, I have to see Peregrine."

The nat receptionist peered over the edge of her desk as if she'd just discovered a hairball on her rug. Gregg could distinctly smell her shampoo, her deodorant, her perfume, the dry cleaning fluid on her dress, the coffee in the mug on her desk, the bagel she'd eaten that morning, and the toothpaste she'd used afterward. "I'm sorry, but that's not possible," Erin told him.

"Look, Erin, I know this is damn near impossible to believe, but I'm Gregg Hartmann. You and I just talked last week, remember? You were trying to set up an interview with Pan Rudo. I was jumped into this damn body, and I need help, and I need to talk to Peri !" The last word was a soprano squeal. Erin's face had gone stiff and red, but at least she picked up the phone. "Thank you, Erin," Gregg said.

Half a minute later, the office doors swung open and the lobby guard - another nat - was giving Gregg the hard stare. "This the one?" he asked Erin. She nodded. "Come on, bub. Let's go."

"I'm not leaving until I see Peri."

The guard almost smiled. He smelled of aftershave and last night's beer. And gun oil. "You can come quietly or you can make it tough for yourself, short stuff," he told Gregg. "I don't care either way."

"Erin - " Gregg began.

"I don't find your sick little joke funny at all," the receptionist said. "Especially not from a joker."

"Hey, I was jumped!"

"I had a lot of respect for Gregg Hartmann - he was a good man. Now please leave."

Gregg looked from Erin to the guard. They had the same look the bus driver had. He dropped to all sixes, sighing, and padded through the door the guard held open. "But I was jumped. I really was," he told the guard as the man escorted Gregg to the rear entrance of the studio. "I am Gregg Hartmann."

The guard opened the door for Gregg, let him out and shook a finger at Gregg like a parent scolding a child. "Listen, buster, I see all kinds here. I don't normally mind. But you're sick. Anyone who would make a joke like this after Hartmann was murdered like that..." The guard stopped. He let the door swing shut and walked away.

"Wait!" Gregg shouted through the glass, his voice piping. "What do you mean, murdered?!"

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

He found out some twenty blocks later, near Jokertown.

A half dozen television sets tossed blue light from an appliance store window. The evening news was on. Standing with his front legs up against the glass, squinting, Gregg watched the body bag being brought out of his apartment building. There was tape of the interior - blood was splattered everywhere, and slogans had been written on the wall in blood. The camera focused on one: SHARKS REVENGE, it declared, written in shaky, smeared block letters. The reporter on the scene was talking about "... one of the most brutal, vicious, and sadistic murders the city has seen. Back to you, Peter."

Behind Peter Jennings, one of Gregg's old publicity photos smiled blandly back at him. "Ex-Senator Hartmann had created an uproar with his press conference only yesterday, in which he denounced the conspiracy he himself had publicized on Peregrine's Perch, the so-called "Card Sharks' group ..."

A short clip of the press conference was shown. In a quick sound bite, Gregg watched "himself" state haltingly that the Card Sharks "... never existed, except in the minds of a small number of deluded people."

The report cut back to Jennings. "Reports that several masked persons were seen going into the Senator's apartment have not been verified. Given that Mr. Hartmann refuted his own part in the Card Shark speculation, it would seem counter-productive for a true Sharks organization to assassinate him. There is speculation that jokers angry with Hartmann's reversal of stance may instead be responsible, but we stress that, right now, nothing is certain beyond the fact that our country has lost one of its more colorful and controversial political figures."

Gregg felt sick. He reeled away from the display, nearly falling off the curb. His body heaved, a rippling spasm. Something sour and huge choked him; Gregg coughed and spat. A hard spheroid of brown, crusty stuff rolled off the curb and into the gutter.

He had no idea what it was.

He had no idea who he was.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

"Oddity!"

Gregg had caught a glimpse of the figure in the Jokertown alleyway, a darker shadow against the night. Gregg hurried across the street toward Oddity, who had stopped. Gregg could smell the three distinct odors under the ankle-length cloak, but the eyes behind the mesh of the fencing mask were lost in his fuzzy sight. "I have to see Father Squid and Hannah," he said. "They jumped me. I don't know who was in my body when it was killed, but it wasn't me. I'm Gregg. Gregg Hartmann!"

"I know who you are. I also know that the jumpers are dead, Battle," Oddity said. John's voice - that was hardly comforting; John had been Puppetman's favorite, but he was the least pleasant of the trio. "Bloat's dead. Hartmann's dead. Too many damn people are dead. Keep bothering me, and you might be, too. I don't know what kind of shit you're trying to pull with this, but it isn't going to work."

"Please!" Gregg lifted up on his hind legs like a begging dog, clutching at Oddity's cloak with his clumsy fingers. "I can prove who I am if you'll give me a chance. I have to see Hannah!"

"Get off me!" Oddity kicked Gregg away. The joker's powerful muscles tossed Gregg halfway across the alley. He hit the ground hard. He felt the unbidden reflexes kick in once more - a roar in his head as adrenaline flooded the body, as the world seemed to go into slow motion around him. Suddenly he was tearing around at full throttle like the Roadrunner with Wile E. Coyote right behind him: across the street and back, darting between the jokers on the sidewalks, back into the alley at top speed, up the side walls, leaping a dozen feet in the air, caroming off garbage cans and fire escapes. "Jesus, the little sucker can sure move," he heard Oddity say, and then Gregg was streaking off again, back out into the Jokertown streets.

When the buzz wore off and Gregg was able to control the body once more, he was six blocks away. When he finally got back to the alley, Oddity was gone.

Gregg was hungry, too. Considering the cranked-up metabolism this body possessed in stress situations, Gregg wasn't surprised. In fact, something in the alley smelled ... good. Gregg sniffed, unbelieving. Yes, the garbage can there by the wall - not the noisome contents, but the can itself. His joker body was salivating, and an odd pressure was building up somewhere in his gut. Gregg opened his mouth as if to belch - he was surprised when a liquid glob the size of a softball jetted out. The odd stuff clung to the side of the garbage can like transparent jelly.

And the aluminum can melted around it like candlewax. The resulting metallic pabulum smelled delicious, and the ache of hunger surged. Gregg glanced around to make sure no one was watching, and dipped his head to lap the steaming goo tentatively.

Hiram Worchester had never made a better meal.

Great, he thought. I eat my own vomit. And I like it.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

His apartment was a lost cause; Gregg didn't even consider going there. He tried his office and couldn't get into the building. The doors were locked and probably would have been too heavy for him to budge even if they'd been open. He couldn't reach the public telephones to call anyone, not that it mattered since he didn't have a quarter and no one would have recognized his voice anyway. The constant police patrols around J-Town were looking at him strangely.

"Hey, Battle!" one of the cops called once, leaning out of the car. The face under the NYPD visor looked like crumpled parchment paper. "What the hell you doing in J-Town?" Gregg didn't answer, and the cop finally shrugged and gunned the cruiser on past.

Hannah and Father Squid had gone into hiding again in the wake of "his" murder - a priest he didn't recognize answered the door and would tell Gregg only that Father Squid had gone to a "conference" until the weekend. He couldn't find Oddity again or Jube or anyone else who might be of help.

He wanted to shout to whatever god would listen that he was very, very sorry for everything he'd ever done and while this was wonderfully appropriate penance he'd learned his lesson and could he please, please be just a normal person again. He'd never misuse the Gift again. Never ever. No one seemed to be listening. Gregg decided that he had no choice. After all, Hannah, Father Squid, Peregrine - none of them could really help him. He'd been jumped out of his body. His own body was dead, but there was a way to get a new one. He needed a jumper. The Sharks had a jumper. So Gregg needed to go to the Sharks.

Feeding Frenzy

2

Shad's wiretap of Herzenhagen's phone got him precisely nowhere, so he got on the motorbike he'd bought that morning and followed Herzenhagen's Jaguar to his club. He returned to his apartment long enough to pick up another wiretap kit and his phone company uniform. Then he stole a phone company van he found double-parked, drove it to Herzenhagen's club, and tapped the phone. He abandoned the van, changed and went up the building across the street.

Most of what he heard was junk. He had to keep switching from one line to another in order to monitor all the calls. But finally he heard the one he was waiting for.

"Philip von Herzenhagen, please."

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

"The Quarantine Bill is stuck in conference committee," Senator Flynn said. "President Barnett could resolve the whole thing with a few phone calls, but he's not making them."

Herzenhagen adjusted the receiver to his ear. "What's giving him cold feet?"

Flynn was Gregg Hartmann's successor as chairman of SCARE, the Senate Committee for Ace Resources and Endeavors. It had taken the Sharks years to get him in place. "He's getting information from somewhere else. My guess is that it's the Vice President's office."

"Zappa."

"Yeah, Zappa." The Oklahoma accent dripped with scorn.

Inchoate anger flailed in Herzenhagen's head. He'd made General Frank Zappa, Jr. Recommended him for the job of destroying the Rox, introduced him to the old political hands who promoted his memoirs and built him into a candidate.

Damn it. Zappa's father had died of the wild card. Zappa had fought with the Joker Brigade in Vietnam - he had to have known what a menace they were. And he'd made his reputation fighting jokers on the Rox.

Who'd have thought he'd turn soft now?

"Zappa's got his own connections. He spends a lot of time with Barnett. Barnett always wanted to be in the military - he ran off to join the Marines at sixteen, remember - and Barnett really looks up to Zappa. So they get together a couple times a week, and sometimes Zappa brings along his stepfather, the Marine, and they all smoke cigars and tell war stories and Barnett just laps it up. And what Zappa is saying is that the Quarantine Bill isn't necessary, that if what we really want is to find a cure for the wild card and help the jokers, all we need to do is use the clinics and systems already in place, and just fund them better."

"Damn it."

The hell of it was, Zappa was perfectly right. The existing system was more efficient than quarantining all the wild cards in "Hospital Centers" on Federal reserves in the western US.

The only reason - the real reason - for moving the wild cards into the camps was so that, at the right time, they could be dealt with all at once.

Faneuil had demonstrated how, back in Africa, then again in Central America.

"I think I should come to Washington," Herzenhagen said. "We need to meet in person."

"Who with?"

"The General and Rudo are in Europe. I should see Peggy, so that she can liaise with Rudo. Is Hughes still in town?"

"Yeah. He's doing some discreet lobbying for us while he's supposed to be concerned over the transportation bill."

"Where will you be staying?"

"The Statler. As usual. Tell Peggy I'll be in tomorrow."

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

Shad stood outside Mr. Gravemold's Jokertown apartment and hesitated. The scent wafting from under the apartment door was tomato sauce and cheese.

Already? Shad thought.

He looked over his shoulder, made certain no one was looking, then covered himself in darkness and used his key.

A brown-haired white man in his thirties was in the kitchen eating store-bought lasagna from its white microwave tray. Two frozen pizzas, visible through the glass door of the oven, were beginning to bubble. A half-eaten gallon of ice cream, the spoon still stuck in it, sat on the counter.

The man looked up and saw Shad's cloud of darkness.

"Oh, hi," he said casually. "Thanks for leaving all the food."

Shad had put Croyd in the Gravemold apartment on the assumption that it wouldn't tell Croyd any more than he didn't know already.

"I knew you'd be hungry when you woke up," Shad said. "You are who I think you are, right?"

"I'm Croyd Crenson, if that's what you mean. Join me in some pizza?"

"It's a little early for me." No point in reminding Croyd that he hardly ate anyway.

"Yeah? What time is it? And what day and month while you're at it?"

Shad told him. Croyd seemed impressed. "I usually sleep longer. But it varies, you know." Croyd's eyes narrowed again as he tried to peer at Shad. "Uh, is there a reason you're clouded up like that?"

"Do you recall the last moments of our previous meeting?"

"Oh." Croyd seemed a bit shamefaced. "Well, yes, I do. But I wasn't quite myself at the time."

"The point is, am I still redefined as enemy?"

"No. I'm in my right mind now, and I don't hold that business on the docks against you." He seemed amused. "So you're Gravemold, huh? How do you stand the smell?"

"Various methods. Usually I snort a whole bunch of cocaine."

"Yeah?" He screwed up his face. "I used to use that stuff, but I gave it up. You sure it's safe?"

"You're a speed freak, and you're giving me advice about drugs?"

Croyd shrugged. "Each to his own, I guess. Which reminds me - about this Gravemold business. If you're around me when I've been speeding - well, I get paranoid and irrational, and you should probably avoid me if I'm crazed. I don't hold a grudge, but when I'm speeding I see things differently." He shook his head. "Boy, that last joker body was a wrench. No feelings, no real thoughts even, just priorities and calculations. It must be what Mr. Spock feels like all the time."

"Figured out what your power is this time around?"

"Well, I don't fly or levitate, I don't make things move with the power of my mind, I don't walk up walls, I can't cook the frozen pizzas with my heat vision, and I can't read minds or control people with my thoughts."

"How do you know about that last one?"

Croyd smiled thinly. "I just tried."

"How about strength?"

"I don't know. I didn't want to wreck your nice furniture."

Shad let his darkness drain away. "The question is," he asked "have you retained your prime directive from your last body?" Croyd looked quizzical. "Rudo," Shad said.

"Oh, that kraut-eating bastard. Absolutely. I should have killed him forty years ago." Croyd took a few bites of lasagna. "How about your little nemesis? Gregg Hartmann?"

"Taken care of."

"Already? You sure work fast. What was it he did to you, anyway?"

Shad told him. By the end of the story Croyd had finished the lasagna and gotten halfway through the first pizza. Croyd shook his head.

"Boy," he said. "I coulda sworn Hartmann was a nice guy. Not that I ever knew him particularly well." He turned melancholy. "Not, for that matter, that I ever really get to know anyone particularly well."

"Hartmann was working with the Sharks. I found that much out. My guess is that he was threatening to expose them just so they'd pay him off somehow. Or maybe it was something more complicated than that, some elaborate game the Sharks were playing."

Croyd's eyes turned cold. "The Sharks."

"Rudo's a Shark. Hartmann was working with them, even if he wasn't a Shark himself. It's all part of a package. And you know what I'm thinking about the package?"

"You're thinking it's time to bury it."

"Six feet under."

Croyd smiled. "Might as well start with Rudo. You know where he is?"

"I called his office at the UN. He's inspecting sanitary conditions in - I think it was Kirghizia. But he works right here in New York, so he'll be back sooner or later."

"There are other Sharks," Croyd said. He took a thoughtful bite of pizza.

"You know how the Sharks work, right?"

"Know how they work? Shit, man, I was inside their heads! Raney and Shannon - what a cold couple of bastards. They were gonna kill us with some bug, just like that Faneuil did in Guatemala ..."

"The point is, nobody knows who they are. There's no visible connection between the Sharks and their victims. There's no apparent motive for what they do. And they set up others to take the fall. There's no way any of this could go through the courts - everything's too deniable."

"My guess," Croyd said with a mouth full of pizza, "is that you're not planning on taking it through the courts."

"You know we can't."

"You're going to do it to them."

"Their own medicine. Their own style. Yes."

"You'd like my help."

"Help, yes. If you're willing. But I'd also like your advice."

Croyd blinked. "Sure."

"I mean moral advice."

Croyd began coughing on his pizza. Shad pounded him on the back. "I'm not exactly Fulton J. Sheen, you know," Croyd said finally.

"Listen. We're going to be hurting people. Messing them up bad."

"I thought that was the point. I thought that's what you were good at."

"I am good at it." Shad reached for words, found some that would do. "But that man was Puppetman's doing - he's responsible for a lot of it. And ... this is kind of funny - I really don't know who I am anymore. I refuse to be Puppetman's creation. But what does that leave?"

Croyd was thoughtful. "I can see this being something you wouldn't want to go to Dear Abby about."

"Well, yeah."

"I'll give you what advice I can. But - like I said ..."

How pathetic was it, Shad wondered that he was asking moral comfort and suasion from a onetime professional criminal who had slept away nine-tenths of his life since 1946, and who spent most of his waking hours out of his mind on crank?

"That's okay," Shad said. "Whatever you can do."

"Where do we start?" Croyd asked.

"Hartmann gave me a list - it's pretty much the same one he gave on television. I was going to leave it here for you, for when you woke up ..." Shad's voice trailed away as he looked up to see a man staring back at him, a black man with a cold, intent expression and scars that creased the uniformity of his short prison hair, a man straining on the very edge of violence. With humming nerves Shad recognized the man.

Himself. Suddenly Croyd looked just like the escaped homicidal maniac Neil Carton Langford, aka Black Shadow.

"Croyd," Shad said, "I think I found out what your power is."

"Yeah? What?"

"Take a look at yourself in the bathroom mirror."

Croyd munched pizza as he ambled to the bathroom and stared into the mirror. A brown-haired white man stared back.

"So?" he said.

Shad flailed for an explanation. "To me you look like someone else. You look like me."

"Say again?"

"It's got to be a kind of projection telepathy. You make people think you look like someone else, but your appearance really doesn't change."

"Huh." He scowled at the mirror, drew his brows together, and puffed out his cheeks. Then he looked at Shad. "Who do I look like now?"

"Still me."

"I was trying to do Richard Nixon. No joy, huh?"

"No."

Croyd ambled back into the kitchen for pizza. "I'll work with it a bit and see what happens. Meantime, you tell me about the Sharks."

"Well, for starters, it looks like there's gonna be a convention of them in a few days in Washington."

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

Herzenhagen propped himself up in bed and watched as Peggy Durand pulled her tight jeans up over her hips, her butt wriggling back and forth as she tugged them on. Watching Peggy dress was becoming his second-favorite afternoon activity.

She saw him watching - she always saw him watching - and gave him a flirtatious glance over her shoulder. "Are you horny again?"

"Flatterer."

She sat next to him, patted his round, ruddy tummy. "And they say old men can't cut the mustard anymore."

"They just need the right inspiration."

"Just think what you'll be able to do when you finally get a young body. You're going to wear me out."

He laughed. "Goodbye, Peggy." Herzenhagen gave her a serious look. "Take care, now."

"No one will follow me to Latchkey. No problem."

"And how are our jumper friends?"

Peggy looked amused. "Mam'zell's restless. Life on a little Maryland farm isn't really to her taste. The others - " She shrugged. "They're happy with their toys."

"Let's remember to keep them happy."

They're the things that make us as gods.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

Peggy Durand used multiple evasion procedures on her way to the Maryland farm. But she hadn't checked her car for bugs; and Shad and Croyd were able to follow the two transmitters in her car, and arrived at the farm called Latchkey without having to keep her vehicle in sight.

You didn't want to be in sight of the target, Shad knew. Not if there were jumpers involved.

Croyd and Shad had emptied their various hiding places and come south with a smoky-windowed van filled with enough weapons to outfit a SEAL team, and sufficient surveillance gear to supply a Central American intelligence agency. There was even room for Shad's motorbike in the back.

Shad drove slowly past the farm once, then found an elm tree by the road and went up with a pair of binoculars. He scanned Latchkey slowly, saw the electronic gate, the two guards ambling around the buildings, and a young girl in a leather jacket kicking around the back half-section like she was bored and looking for something to do.

"Ahem." Croyd's voice.

Shad looked down and saw him standing at the foot of the tree. He looked like the waiter who'd brought them their room service breakfast at the Statler that morning, a tall, thin Somali in a white uniform.

"I can't climb like you can," the waiter said in Croyd's voice.

"Right."

Shad dropped down the tree, picked up Croyd, and with a certain amount of effort carried him to a convenient limb. By the time he arrived, Croyd looked like the little old lady who'd served them the crabcakes they'd eaten for lunch the day before.

Croyd was still honing his power. As Shad had guessed, he used a form of projection telepathy to convince other people that he looked like someone else. But he couldn't look like just anyone - he had to be around a person for a while in order to "absorb" his looks. He couldn't look like Richard Nixon unless he'd spent at least a few minutes hanging around the real thing.

Mirrors would give him away. So would his voice - he never sounded like anyone but Croyd. This was going to demand a certain amount of caution in using his power.

Shad handed Croyd his binoculars.

"So far as I can tell, the security isn't much," he said. "But there are probably alarms out there, and I'd have to get a closer look at them tonight. After we get back from the meet at Hughes' place."

He thought about the last time he'd met with jumpers, and old bullet wounds - ribs and leg - began to ache. He realized he was having a hard time breathing, that his heart was racing. He remembered lying in his own blood as he leaned against a brick wall in Jokertown, remembered the warmth of Chalktalk's breath as she kissed him.

No, he thought. It wasn't going to be like that.

This time it was going without a hitch.

Croyd yawned vastly. Shad looked at him in surprise. "You just yawned."

"I must have."

"You're not getting sleepy, are you?"

Croyd lowered the binoculars and looked surprised. "Maybe I am. And since I didn't sleep very long, either, maybe I'm doing everything faster this time around."

Shad just looked at him. Without a hitch, he thought, right.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

Herzenhagen waited for Senator Flynn and watched Howard Hughes do bench presses. The old man grunted as he did his reps. Fourteen, fifteen ...

The heavy iron free weights clanged as Hughes dropped them onto the weight bench supports. He sat up, mopped his little goatee with a towel, and then moved toward the curling machine.

There was a buzz from the wall speakerphone. "Senator Flynn is here, sir. I'm sending him up."

Hughes looked at Herzenhagen. "Open the door, will you, Philip?"

The machine clanked as Hughes began to do arm curls. Herzenhagen rose and opened the door for Flynn. While he waited for the senator to leave the elevator he turned to gaze out the clear glass wall of Hughes' penthouse. The Washington Monument, some miles distant, thrust out of a murky haze of ozone and auto exhaust.

Hughes was a fanatic about his health. He was so terrified of the wild card virus that he filtered the air in every one of his residences so as to weed out any random spores. He worked out daily in a gym that he dragged with him from place to place on his own aircraft. His diet was supervised by a full-time employee - a gorgeous redhead - who, Hughes maintained, also fucked like a weasel.

At least it was better than in the old days. Herzenhagen remembered the insomniac Hughes who kept a dozen starlets stashed in apartments throughout Los Angeles, and who ate trash, hot dogs and corned beef hash right out of the can, as his driver shuttled him, all night long, from one girl to the next.... The current lifestyle seemed a lot healthier.

And it worked. Hughes was in amazing shape for someone his age. Perhaps he could star in a TV show about it, Herzenhagen thought, Eightysomething.

Flynn entered. He wore a western suit and a string tie and bore the dark skin and high cheekbones of his Shawnee ancestors. Herzenhagen shook his hand.

Hughes grinned with effort. "Would you like a drink, Henry?"

Flynn looked around the room. "Carrot juice?"

"We can find you the hard stuff if we look."

"I don't really have time. I've got a meeting with field investigators at three."

Prosecuting wild cards, of course, for violations of the registration and public health acts.

"To business, then," Herzenhagen said. He started to light a cigarette, saw Hughes' look, then sighed and put it away. "A triple jump, I think, with one of the holdouts on the conference committee."

"Congressman Phipps," Flynn said. "He's been waffling for weeks on this - won't say yes, won't say no."

"I'll head to Latchkey to tell Gyro to get ready. Henry, if you can get hold of Phipps' schedule ...? Let's see if we can get Phipps in the body of some fat old tourist lady from Philadelphia."

And if that didn't nudge Barnett, Herzenhagen thought, he would unleash a barrage of jumping incidents throughout Washington society, not forgetting to include his little friends in the press. Stick Ted Koppel in the body of a foreign tourist named Indira, and see how long the press was willing to editorialize about civil liberties.

And if that didn't work, Herzenhagen had a little plan of his own.

The Lord, he thought, moves in mysterious ways his wonders to perform.

Hughes dropped the weights and mopped his face. "You're ruthless, you know that?" His tone was admiring. He turned to the senator.

"Now, what about the logistical support you were saying you need?"

Herzenhagen stood. "This really isn't any of my business. I should head out to Latchkey and let Gyro know about his assignment."

And maybe, he thought hopefully, squeeze in an hour or two with Peggy.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

Shad had heard every word. To anyone with a parabolic mike, the glass wall of Hughes' penthouse formed an exemplary diaphragm to amplify the sound of anything inside.

As soon as Shad heard the door close behind Herzenhagen he left the roof of the building opposite, moved quickly down the outside of the building, crossed the alley between them, waved to Croyd in the van, then went up Hughes' building. He ate enough photons to keep himself from having a human silhouette, and it looked as if no one was paying attention anyway. People simply didn't look for people to walk up the side of a building as if it were a sidewalk.

Strains of Scrapple from the Apple floated through his mind, an odd little instrumental accompaniment to his thoughts.

Shad vaulted over the railing of the balcony and tested the glass door. It was open - who expected an enemy from this direction?

Eyes turned toward him as the door slid open. He sucked every photon from the room and went for Hughes first. Shad knocked the old man down, drew a Smith & Wesson, and emptied it, six shots, into the chest of Senator Henry Flynn.

Hey man, some inner voice said, you just killed a US Senator! Is this some kind of great or what?

His old wounds ached as he saw Flynn fall. Then pain crackled up his leg as Hughes sank teeth into his calf. He grabbed Hughes's ear and yanked - he didn't want to bruise the man - and Hughes let go. Shad slipped a forearm around his throat and put a sleeper hold on him. Hughes struggled - he was strong for an old guy, and a nat - but he was elderly and hadn't even so much as Hartmann's combat training, and he passed out quickly.

There was a sound outside. Shad dragged Hughes to the door and locked it from the inside. "Howie?" The voice of the bewildered dietician. "Is there something wrong? Shall I call security?"

Shad smeared Hughes' fingerprints all over the Smith & Wesson, tossed the gun next to Flynn's corpse, then hoisted Hughes into a fireman's carry, and started walking down the building with him.

"Howie!" he heard. "You're scaring me!"

Croyd had the rear door of the van open. He looked like the little old crabcake lady. Shad tossed the old man inside, slammed the doors, walked to the driver's door. As he drove away he heard the rip of duct tape being torn off the roll, heard one of Hughes' awakening moans being snuffed out by tape placed across his mouth.

Shad made some random turns, found a pay phone at a corner. "Got the list?" he asked.

More tape ripped. Croyd dug the phone list out of his jacket pocket, spilling gel caps in the process, then made a series of phone calls alerting the media and police to the fact that there had been a shooting in Howard Hughes' apartment.

Shad always liked to use the cops as his allies when he could. It was harder to cover up stuff when the police were actually wandering around taking pictures.

Croyd got back in the van and Shad took off. Hughes was puffing and blowing and trying to fight his arms out of the duct tape. "You know," Croyd said, "I thought you were going to be asking my moral advice from time to time."

His voice sounded pretty strange coming out of an elderly waitress.

Shad shook his head. "They were planning on jumping a congressman so that they could pass a law to put us all in camps."

"Oh. Okay. But I was going to advise you to snuff the bastards anyway."

Shad looked over his shoulder, saw Croyd's little-old-lady eyes gleaming bright. "We're not out of control, are we?" he asked.

Croyd picked one of the gel caps off the floor of the van and popped it in his mouth. "No," he said. "Why do you ask?"

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

"Would you like a date with Katherine Hepburn?" Hughes asked. "I can get you one. Mr. Connections, that's me."

They'd slapped him around some with a towel, trying to get answers out of him, and Shad had drained a bit of body heat; but Hughes, simply in being kidnapped, seemed to have regressed into some strange, alternate personality. His mind floated around the Forties without ever quite landing anywhere.

"General MacArthur Johnson," Shad said, giving it another try. "Who's he?" He was on Hartmann's list, but Shad had done some checking and found out there was no MacArthur Johnson in the US Army, Marines, or Air Force, or on the retired list, either.

Maybe the fucker was Canadian.

"How about Jane Russell?" Hughes grinned. "Some hooters, huh?"

Shad considered again the possibility of the Hartmann solution, fun with a kitchen knife, but found his heart wasn't really in the idea anyway. He didn't have quite the same grudge against Hughes that he'd had against Gregg Hartmann.

Besides, he was afraid Croyd would enjoy it too much.

"The hell with this," Shad said, and picked up his Skorpion. "Let's do it."

"You betchum, Red Ryder." Croyd's face twitched as he taped Hughes' mouth shut and left the van. The cool night Maryland countryside opened up around them. They began walking down the lane toward the lights of Latchkey, a quarter-mile away.

Croyd rotated the yoke on his High-Standard semiautomatic shotgun so that he could fire it from the crook of his arm, just by pointing. His current appearance was that of a three-piece suit executive standing next to him at the McDonald's counter that afternoon, an image that contrasted somewhat with the weapon.

"I suppose Red Ryder was before your time," he said. He was having a hard time not talking, Shad noticed.

"I suppose he was."

"Who'd you listen to when you were growing up?

"Watch, not listen to. Scooby-Doo, I guess."

Shad traced the phone line from the house, went up a power pole, cut the line. "Never heard of Scooby-Doo, the bastard," Croyd snarled from below. "I'm getting disconnected from my culture, you know that?"

That's not all you're getting disconnected from, Shad thought.

"It's like mathematics. I always wished I learned algebra."

"Quiet for a second, okay?"

Shad covered himself in darkness, glided forward, checked out the detectors on Latchkey's fence. Infrared, he saw. Piece of cake. He swallowed enough photons to conceal body heat and waved Croyd forward over the fence.

There would probably be motion detectors on the farm itself, he thought, but by that point it would be too late for the defenders. He put a dark cloud just in front of himself and Croyd as they walked to the farm, to conceal them from anyone with a night vision scope.

"You learned algebra?" Croyd asked.

"I almost got my doctorate in physics."

"No shit!" Croyd was impressed. "I never knew that, homeboy! Why didn't you finish?"

"I sorta got into the vigilante business."

"Yeah. The bastards. They always screw you out of everything."

Shad wasn't too clear on the antecedents of this remark, but he let it pass. "There's a lot of suffering out there," he said, "and most of the time you really can't help. The situation is just too complicated. But sometimes you know exactly what the problem is, and exactly who's causing it; and sometimes that person is invulnerable. I mean, who's going to go up against Howard Hughes?"

Croyd giggled. "We are, homeboy."

"Well, yeah, but that's my point. Who the hell else? The Sharks are part of the government. They're part of industry. They're part of show biz. They bought Gregg Hartmann, for chrissake!"

Croyd looked at him. "Do you always have to talk yourself into it this way?"

Shad took a breath. "Sometimes. When I realize I'm going to kill a bunch of people I've never met, and that some of them are kids."

"Well, do whatcha gotta do to get yourself up for it. But they're jumpers, you know, and even when I was on the Rox they gave me the creeps."

"You were on the Rox?"

"Yeah, but I fell asleep, and the next thing I knew I was waking up on the Jersey shore, and the Rox wasn't there anymore."

"Huh."

"Just remember who put us in the slams, bro." Shad looked at Croyd and his nerves started to wail - Croyd had shifted his appearance to look just like Shad again. Croyd gave a twitchy grin. "This way we don't get confused and shoot each other by accident. Right?"

Shad tried to calm his shrieking nerves. "Fine, man. Whatever."

"Jesus. What's that smell?"

"Something died, I expect." The odor seemed to be coming from one of the farm's small outbuildings. Shad scanned it, found no sources of body heat. His heart sank. "They've probably killed someone and stuck him in there," Shad said.

"We'll check later, if there's time."

Shad looked at Croyd's automatic shotgun. "Sing out if you want to shoot that thing," he said. "And I'll hit the deck."

Shad stepped closer to the farmhouse, and suddenly lights switched on.

"Showtime," he said.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

Try to remember who put us in the slams. That thought helped a lot.

Shad felt oddly disconnected from the whole business as he walked through the back door and killed two people in the kitchen with his silenced Czech sub-machinegun - one of the guards and an Asian kid presumably a jumper. He realized he'd fallen back in prison mode again, not feeling anything. He kept a cloud of darkness in front of him and around him and no one could see where the danger was coming from. He advanced into the house and shot another guard, a man who fired a few blind rounds into the walls before he fell. And then there was a huge booming crash that set his nerves shuddering, and a stunning blast of odor that felt like the shock wave from the first blast. Shad flung himself on the floor. There was another crash, then another, then the sound of a body falling. Waves of a hideous stench flew through the air like echoes of each shot

Shad whipped around, saw Croyd standing with his shotgun smoking. A man was sprawled in the doorway from the kitchen, a big man in a black fighting uniform with a one-eyed black hood over his head. The man began to move again.

"No!" Shad shouted just as Croyd fired for a fourth time. The man shuddered and lay still.

"Shit!" Croyd said. "He just kept coming!"

Shad jumped to his feet. "That's Crypt Kicker," he said "He's a friend of Battle. If we'd taken him, he might have told us where Battle is." He must have been living in the small house outside, where his smell wouldn't offend people.

"Too late now." Disgust at the odor twitched across Croyd's face. "Too late for some weeks, smells like."

There was a hissing sound from the body. The acid that ran in Crypt Kicker's veins was melting a patch on the linoleum.

This had taken too long already.

"Let's get moving," Shad said "You guard the stairs. I'll go up and out."

He threw open a window and went up the outside of the building. The top floor was dark. Once he found who he was looking for, it was over in seconds.

No one else was in the house, though there were two bedrooms - one filled with the foul odor of French tobacco - that there were no bodies to match with.

Croyd opened file cabinets in search of documents while Shad went out onto the grounds. He found an empty space in the garage where a car had been parked, Crypt Kicker's cozily furnished little outbuilding, complete with Hank Williams poster and a well-thumbed Bible, and nothing else.

"Lots of documents," Croyd said as he returned.

"We missed two of our targets," Shad said. "Peggy Durand and that girl in the leather jacket."

"Stick around and wait for them to come back?" Croyd offered.

"No. Leave enough of the documents to show something incriminating, then go get Hughes. We can find Durand again just by following Baron von Whatsisname."

Shad guarded the gate when Croyd went back for Hughes. The night was so quiet that he could hear Hughes offering Croyd a date with Rita Hayworth as Croyd marched him back across the field.

I'm not feeling anything, he told himself. But still a part of him cringed as he heard the shot, and Hughes' voice ceased.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

Herzenhagen's heart hammered in answer to the banging on the door of his suite. He gasped for breath, reached for the drawer with the pistol in it, took the weapon in his hand.

He looked at the clock. Not quite four in the morning.

He chambered a round in his Hi-Power, put on his dressing gown and stepped to the door. He looked through the peephole, saw Peggy standing anxiously in his fish-eye view. He put the pistol in his pocket and opened the door. Peggy stormed in.

"We've just come from Latchkey," Peggy said. "Something's happening. The place is swarming with cops and press."

"Have you heard about Flynn and Hughes?"

"No. What?"

Herzenhagen took a firmer grip on his pistol.

"Let's talk," he said.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

News filtered through from people Herzenhagen knew, and he tried to put it all together in his mind. The jumpers - dead. How does someone with a gun kill a jumper at short range without being jumped? Let alone jumpers that had four of the General's best men guarding them? It didn't make sense.

Gerard could have died with them, if Peggy hadn't decided to take pity on her and drive her to DC for an evening's pub-crawl.

Gerard, whom Peggy had stashed at a Baltimore hotel before coming here.

Only one jumper left. He was going to have to use her very carefully.

A terrible thought entered his mind. What if the jumpers weren't in their bodies when they'd died? What if they were elsewhere now and ... working for someone else?

Dawn leaked past drawn blinds. The coffee and pastries he'd ordered from room service had been consumed.

"Let me think here," he said. "All the jokers from Governor's Island escaped, and all of our people dead. Hartmann dead just when he was becoming useful. Flynn dead just when the Quarantine Bill is stuck in committee. Hughes missing, and being blamed for Flynn's death. The jumpers dead."

"Someone's got it in for us," Peggy said.

"But look at the style," Herzenhagen said. "No witnesses. No suspects except for those intended to be suspects. No apparent connection between the crimes. No apparent motive ..."

"They're good," Peggy said.

"It's us," Herzenhagen said. "It's our style. That's how we operate."

Peggy stared at him. "What are you saying?"

"This may not be a battle. This may be a coup."

Peggy considered this. "Who?" she said.

"Brandon. The General. Casaday. Who knows? But we've both had narrow escapes today."

"And all the ID connected with this body," Peggy said, "was left at Latchkey. Which makes this body a suspect."

Time for the backup plan, Herzenhagen thought. He couldn't know who was doing this, but things had grown too dangerous, and he still had his deus ex jumper. Time for a new lease on life.

"I've got to get the Quarantine Bill out of committee," he said.

Peggy seemed dubious. "How? Flynn's dead."

"We've got one jumper left. And one President. Sounds like a fair trade to me."

Disbelief entered Peggy's eyes. "Who have we got that ballsy? And who could pull off an impersonation of Barnett?"

Herzenhagen smiled. "Ever want to make it in the White House?"

Peggy looked shocked. Then she smiled.

"Wno knows?" she said. "They say power is an aphrodisiac."

"Just long enough to sign the Quarantine Bill. And then Barnett and Zappa can have an accident, one with enough freaks and jumpers to turn the public against wild cards for all time."

And then there was a crashing at the door, and Herzenhagen and Peggy turned to stare down the bores of police shotguns.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

Just long enough to sign the Quarantine Bill. The words sent cold fingers up Shad's spine.

"Ever want to make it in the White House?" Croyd mocked. "These old Sharks sure talk about fucking a lot."

Shad laughed, but a train of thought had been set in motion. Herzenhagen and Faneuil and Durand, Hughes with his redhead ... older men, most of them, with younger women. Shad wondered if there was some pervasive potency metaphor at work here in Sharkland, if the whole organization was based on a bunch of fading, hollow old men trying to recapture the power and splendor of youth, reviving a time where they were in charge, unchallenged by the wild card.

They watched as DC cops drove Herzenhagen and Durand away. Media lights burned bright on the two stolid faces.

"Do you think we stopped it?" Shad said.

"Stopped what? The Sharks?" Croyd laughed.

"No. Jumping the President."

Croyd laughed again. "Who cares? If Leo Barnett ends up in some French bitch's head, that's copacetic with me. What's that cracker ever done for me except stick me on Governor's Island and wave bye-bye?" He laughed again.

Shad shook his head. "I don't want that Nazi cocksucker in the President's head, not for one second."

"Easy enough to put a stop to it, then." Croyd's brilliant eyes glittered.

"Yeah. We'll see."

We'll see how long those two stay in jail, he thought.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

Early next morning, Crypt Kicker's body strolled out of the little Maryland medical examiner's office where it had been stashed pending an autopsy. People who saw him go were understandably disinclined to stop him leaving. Shad wished he'd known the man regenerated so quickly; he'd have taken the body and been waiting when the Kicker woke up.

Herzenhagen was released next morning, after questioning. No charges were filed, at least so far. Peggy Durand, whose body seemed to have been named Dolores Chacon, didn't quite have Herzenhagen's clout, and remained a guest in the DC women's facility.

It only cost Shad a few minor bribes to see her privately - Shad loved legal institutions in the East, where everyone was corrupt. Though he was dressed as a lawyer, in a blue blazer and tie, still the smell of a jail, the antiseptic mingled with foul body odor, sent a cold charge up his spine. And when the steel door of the interrogation room slammed behind him. Shad had to clench his hands in his pockets to keep them from trembling.

Make this short, he thought.

Peggy Durand seemed a lot less nervous than he was. She managed to make a shapeless prison jumpsuit seem elegant, and she'd gotten makeup from somewhere. A wisp of smoke rolled up from a cigarette in her hand.

And then her eyes leaped as she saw Howard Hughes.

"Hi, there," Hughes said.

Durand stared. Hughes gave her the thumbs-up pilot's sign and stayed by the steel door with a grin plastered to his face.

"What's going on?" Durand demanded.

"Housecleaning, Peggy," Shad said firmly. "A tad overdue, actually. Would you like some cigarettes?" He offered a pack of Marlboros.

"I smoke Dunhills." She flashed the cigarette in her hand.

"Keep them. You can use them for money in here."

Durand looked thoughtful for a moment, then took the pack of cigarettes and put them in her jumpsuit pocket.

Shad pushed Mr. Diamond's spectacles back up his nose, opened the briefcase, took out a tape player. "I assume you're a pragmatic woman, Miss Durand."

Durand's pupils dilated at the name. "You've got me confused with someone else," she said "My name is Chacon."

"Goddam Gravemold." Hughes muttered to himself. "Motherfucker!"

Durand's eyes flicked to Hughes, then back to Shad. "Who are you exactly?"

"I'm an employee of an agency that is known to you."

She seemed amused. "An American agency?"

Shad feigned annoyance. "Of course. It is an organization that has been tasked with the ... Card Sharks matter."

"The what?"

"The Sharks," Shad began, "have been useful to friendly interests over the years. Because of their usefulness, they were granted a certain degree of ... unofficial latitude in regard to their, ah, viral obsession. A recent reevaluation of their status indicates that they have now become a liability, and even worse, an embarrassment. It has therefore been decided to bring the Sharks operation to an appropriate termination. As you are no doubt aware, certain Shark assets deemed too intransigent to be of further use have already been annulled. Whereas those who might continue to be of further use may be retained in another capacity."

Durand sat expressionlessly in her metal chair - lips clenched, eyes contracted to pinpricks. Thinking furiously. She jerked her head toward Howard Hughes.

"And Howard? Isn't he supposed to be dead?"

"Mr. Hughes has long-established links to the intelligence community," Shad said. "Those links will continue to be of service to this country."

"Fuck yes," Hughes mumbled. "But who'd have thought the smelly bastard would have screwed me on the docks?"

Durand drew on her cigarette, leaned forward "And what precisely do you want from me?"

"You are, I believe, a practical woman. Your history demonstrates your resourcefulness and adaptability. I suggest that you acquire an attorney of your own - not the one the Sharks have found you - and turn yourself in to the federal witness protection program. You would know best which of the available prosecutors' offices would be immune from Shark penetration."

Durand peered at him. "Witness protection? You anticipate prosecutions? Public prosecutions?"

Shad smiled thinly. "That would be for the prosecutors to decide, wouldn't it? But the decision has been made that something has to go on the public record. Too many incidents have been without explanation for too long."

"Why don't you simply arrest me?"

Shad permitted his smile to broaden. "My agency does not have powers of arrest within the borders of the United States."

"Ah. Of course. You can't arrest, you can only ..."

"Terminate."

Durand stubbed out her cigarette, bit her lip nervously. "I'm not in every loop. I'm just - " She flashed a seductive smile. "I'm just a friend of some very powerful men. I only know what they tell me. They use me."

Shad looked contemptuous at the merest bit of heat from Durand's frame.

"You can rehearse your excuses later. It's not my job to believe one thing or another - that's for the prosecutor to decide."

"Goddam cracker president!" Hughes said.

Durand licked her lips. Maybe she was used to Howard Hughes being flaky. "I'll think about it," she said, "very seriously." And then she gave a sad little toss of her head. "Poor Etienne," she said. "Poor Philip."

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

In honor of the occasion, Herzenhagen wore a mourning band and the little red ribbon of the Legion of Honor, the decoration de Gaulle had awarded him back in '44. He could have worn all his medals, here at the veterans' cemetery, but most of them were too showy.

He didn't want to be vulgar, not here at his own inauguration.

Senator Flynn was being buried in a little dell surrounded by green hills and long rows of modest white tombstones, veterans anonymous in their ranks as during their service years. Around one side of the grave site were round green hills; currently crowned by Secret Service in black uniforms: the other side sloped down to a lovely autumn view of the Potomac Valley, with Washington and its white marble monuments glowing in the westering sun. An inspiring vista, truly. And absolutely perfect, because anyone on the sloping hills had a perfect view of Leo Barnett.

Barnett, an old preacher who couldn't resist a grave side service and a chance to give a homily to the cameras.

Well done, thou good and faithful servant. Barnett's words echoing Herzenhagen's thought.

For two days he'd been staying in a safe house with Gerard and a half-dozen of Johnson's strong-arm goons. The press had been camped outside, but that wasn't what made the stay a nightmare. Gerard had jumped him repeatedly over the last few days, jumping him until the normal spastic reaction faded, until he could function in a strange body from the first instant.

So President Barnett might trip on a tombstone and fall down. Big deal. He'd get right up again, and go right to work on getting the Quarantine Bill passed.

And then all he needed to do was confirm a finding from the National Security Council, then sign an executive order, and every wild card in the country would be on his way to a nice new tent city on a federal reservation in some picturesque state like, say, Utah.

And President Barnett would be trapped in Herzenhagen's body, which would be hustled away to his limo by Herzenhagen's security, then loaded with stonefish toxin, the stuff the CIA stored by the gallon for any interfering defector, agent, or reporter, which would result in cardiac arrest and which wouldn't show up in an autopsy.

And all the media lice that had been following him around, and the surly cops who'd ordered him not to leave town - well, they'd be left with another body and no answers. And then strings could be pulled to get Peggy out of jail.

Out of reflex he glanced up at the Secret Service. Herzenhagen's own security, unarmed and inconspicuous, hovered at a discreet distance, until the moment of the jump when they'd arrange for the President's heart attack.

Gerard - she'd been driven here in a separate car to avoid the press - drifted toward him. Herzenhagen didn't entirely like the way she moved - she moved jerkily, twitching, and there was a smirk on her face.

Oh well. He'd worked with less promising material in his time.

And in any case the whole thing was about to pay off. His life's work, reassembling into a perfect picture. The bits of history shattered by the wild card, nurturing it and caring for it and finally seeing it on its way like a good child - all about to be completed. As the President called for a moment of silence, Herzenhagen bowed his head and found himself thinking of the others, Einstein, Hughes, Hearst, Battle, and Flynn himself, the ones who had dedicated themselves to this triumph and who would not share in its consummation.

The President finished. Herzenhagen raised his head, found himself staring into the taunting eyes of Gerard. Annoyance flickered through him. He held her eyes, assumed his benevolent face, and nodded toward Barnett.

Gerard did nothing. Just smiled.

Barnett was moving down the line. He took the flag from the soldiers, handed it to the widow. Herzenhagen gave a more emphatic jerk of his head.

No response. Gerard stood on tiptoe, peered at the President. Herzenhagen moved closer, checked his six o'clock again, saw only a stout middle-aged woman in a K-Mart dress, a worried-looking black man with a beard and a blue blazer, a couple of small children separated from their parents. No one he had to concern himself with. The President was moving down the reception line, would soon disappear into the crowd. Herzenhagen leaned toward the jumper.

"Vite!" he urged. "Allez-y!"

Gerard gave him a scornful look. "Speak English." A disrespectful mumble.

Anxiety clutched at Herzenhagen's heart. "Jump him! Now!"

The President reached the end of the line. Gerard cupped her ear. "Whassat?"

"What game is this?" Herzenhagen demanded. "Do it! Jump him!"

He had spoken too loudly: the K-Mart lady was frowning at him through her bifocals. Gerard pointed at his red Legion of Honor ribbon.

"Your laundry tag is showing, Phil."

The President was disappearing. Herzenhagen lunged after Gerard, grabbed her lapel.

"Jump him!" Trying to keep his voice level.

And suddenly she wasn't Gerard at all, but a mocking Howard Hughes, grinning through his little goatee. "Wanna date with Rita Hayworth?" Hughes said.

Herzenhagen realized who'd been behind it all. "Howard!" he screamed, and raised a fist, not really knowing what he was going to do with it....

Something cannoned into him from behind. He stumbled and fell flat on a Navy man's grave, saw black hands close on his like steel bands, heard a voice screaming in his ear, "He's gat a gun!" Screaming over and over. He tasted autumn leaves in his mouth. He tried to struggle, but was pinned. From somewhere came the scent of gunpowder and gun oil. Felt something underneath him, a solid iron lump, and more hands closed around him, white hands this time, and as he was lifted from the earth he saw something under him, a pistol, not his pistol but another; and he stared at it in shock and looked around him for Hughes and the black man, but he couldn't see either one, and rude hands were patting him down, demanding his name. His own security, unarmed and unable to intervene under the eyes of the Secret Service, had long since faded.

The President, down below, had already been husded into his limo and was gone.

"Hughes," Herzenhagen said. A Secret Service man looked at him.

"Is that your name, sir?"

Herzenhagen straightened and realized he was in deep trouble. "I want my lawyer," he said.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

Shad's nerves howled at him to stomp on the gas and get the hell away from Arlington, but the bridge across the Potomac was jammed. Instead he moved the rented limo into the queue, and waited.

"Did you see the way I fucked with his mind?" Croyd barked. He had his little-crabcake-lady appearance again. "Man, the look on his face when I turned into Hughes!"

"I wish you hadn't done that," Shad said. "If people were paying attention, they might figure wild cards were involved."

"Fuck that! You think I give a damn?" He snarled at the stalled traffic ahead, leaned over Shad, hit the horn button. He looked like Marjorie Main on a rampage. "Move, you assholes!" he roared. Shad winced at the volume.

"Let's try not to attract attention to ourselves, okay?"

"Who gives a damn, Gravemold? Isn't that your name, asshole?" Croyd hit the horn button a few more times for emphasis, then jerked back into his own seat. Shad recalled how Croyd had attacked in the car on the night of the Governor's Island escape. The vibes were turning unpleasantly familiar.

"Oh, yeah," Shad said. He reached into a pocket and pulled out a pill bottle. "I found these on the floor of the car. They would seem to be yours."

"Thanks." Croyd popped the top on the bottle and swallowed a mouthful of gel caps. "Wish I had Scotch for a chaser. Nothing like a Scotch after you've killed a bunch of people."

The last few days, Shad thought, didn't make him want to do anything other than kill his own thoughts.

Shad had followed every detail of Herzenhagen's plot through listening devices and phone taps. He and Croyd had ample opportunity to evolve their plan.

Gerard and her driver would be found dead, in the cemetery, in their limo, one rented by Herzenhagen. It had been an easy enough hit, Shad filling the car with darkness so that the jumper couldn't use her power. Forensics would determine that the gun was the same one that had been found under Herzenhagen when he was arrested. And Shad made sure, when he grappled with the old man on the ground, that he'd smeared the gun oil and gunpowder residue from his own hands onto those of the Shark, providing clear forensic evidence that it was Herzenhagen who had despatched the jumper and her driver.

"We get Rudo now, right?" Croyd said.

"As soon as he gets back to this country. In the meantime, maybe we can get some other names out of the Latchkey documents."

Unfortunately, the documents would require careful work. There was a lot of raw material; but all the money moved only in numbered accounts and the people were referred to only by code names. It was enough to keep a team of investigators busy for weeks.

Casaday. The General. Brandon. Names Herzenhagen had brought up on the tapes. If Shad could attach them to code names on the documents, maybe he'd have something.

And he really wanted to spend some time off the street anyway. Keep to himself, lose his prison self, find someone else to be.

Croyd's voice rapped out like shotgun pellets landing on a roof. "Hell with that, Gravemold. Hell with that. We fly to Kirghizia and scrag the bastard. Nothing easier." Croyd put a paternal hand on Shad's shoulder. "Stick with Croyd and his moral guidance, kid. I'll steer ya right." He laughed. "I called you Gravemold, didn't I? For some reason I can't get that name out of my mind."

Sit back, Shad thought, and let nature take its course.

Not everyone in the government was a Shark, and likewise the media. Shad hoped that enough furor had been created to generate any number of investigations. With luck Peggy Durand would turn state's witness. And if the investigations seemed to be dying down, Shad could start mailing the tapes he'd made, Herzenhagen and Durand and Hughes and the others. Or copies of the documents they'd taken from Latchkey.

Maybe Shad wouldn't have to do anything more except help Croyd take out Rudo. He owed Croyd that at least - and he owed Rudo, too, as far as that went.

"Kirghizia," Croyd said. "Lovely name." He opened his mouth as if to yawn, then shut it abruptly. "And you think we should look at documents when Rudo's on the loose?"

"Okay," Shad said. "Kirghizia it is."

"Documents. A lot you know about documents." Croyd gave a grin. "I know something you don't know." He reached for the pill bottie again, popped the lid, swallowed another couple gel tabs. "Off-the-street crap," he muttered. "This shit's gotta be cut with something. The only speed you get on the street nowadays is smuggled up from Mexico or crystal meth people make in garbage cans. Not like when the pharmaceutical companies - "

"What is it, Croyd?" Shad asked.

Croyd smiled expansively, stretched, stopped another yawn. "I remember the good old days of speed. You could get anything - Black Beauties, desoxyn in all those pretty colors ..."

"What is it you know," Shad spelled out, "about the documents that I don't know?"

Croyd chuckled. "Oh. Your old buddy Hartmann."

"What about him? Did you find something that said what he was up to?"

"See, there was this log of the jumps they were doing, and I kind of paged through it. Started with putting Mistral back into her body just after the Rox, and then going on to ..."

He yawned.

"Going on to what?" Shad said. An ominous warning was sounding in his nerves.

"Going on to Hartmann. They jumped him." Croyd laughed lazily. "You got the wrong guy. It was your buddy Battle you killed."

"You bastard!" Shad pounded the steering wheel while Croyd laughed on. The horn went off again. Shad clamped his hands on the wheel and spoke through clenched teeth. "You didn't tell me?"

"I didn't want you running back up to New York when we were having such fun here in DC."

"So what happened to Hartmann? They killed him, right?"

"No. They jumped him into this puny little joker body, looked like a chrome yellow cartoon character, and he escaped." Croyd yawned and closed his eyes. "The Sharks are supposed to shoot him on sight. There's a description in the book." He tapped his jacket. "Got it right here. I'll show it to you," he yawned again, "once we get to Kirghizia."

"I don't think we're going to Kirghizia, Croyd."

"Oh yeah?" Croyd licked his lips and pillowed his head against the headrest. "Why's that?"

"Because of the drugs you've been taking."

"Heh. I'm a pro, man. Don't wony. My liver is safe."

"It isn't your liver I'm talking about. It's the fact that I emptied the crystal meth out of those capsules of yours and filled them with Dalmane."

Croyd dragged his eyes open. "That's a tranquilizer!"

"Yep."

"You ..." he yawned again, "bastard!"

"Word, man."

Croyd was asleep. Shad dragged the documents out of Croyd's jacket, read furiously as the traffic inched its way toward Washington. Then he began to laugh.

Gregg Hartmann was stuck in the body of a three-foot-tall joker with bad eyesight and the voice of a ruptured countertenor. Puppetman's powers had to have died with Hartmann's original body. Every Shark in the world had orders to kill Hartmann on sight. And since Shad had just killed the last jumper on the planet, Hartmann was going to stay in the joker body for the rest of his life.

If you could call it living.

Shad tossed the documents on Croyd's lap and laughed. The Sharks had done Shad's job for him, had engineered a vengeance on Hartmann that was better than anything Shad could ever have done.

And if Hartmann the joker ever surfaced, maybe Shad could contrive a few additional disappointments for him. Just to remind him of who he was, and what he'd done, and what he'd deserved.

Yeah, he thought. Just like he'd said all along.

Let nature take its course.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

Black Trump.

The word repeated itself in Herzenhagen's mind. Something to concentrate on as he sat on his bunk and watched the shadows of the bars form patterns on his cell wall.

Black Trump.

Herzenhagen wasn't talking, even to his own lawyer, would let the man fight the accusations without his help. Because sooner or later the Shark mission would be fulfilled, and then it didn't matter what happened to Herzenhagen.

Black Trump.

Only a matter of time.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

Between the idea

And the reality

Between the motion

And the Act

Falls the Shadow.

- T. S. Eliot, The Hollow Men

The Color of His Skin

Part 6

Gregg waited a week. That wasn't really his intention: it was his body's fault.

He had to molt.

Only a few hours after he'd decided to call Rudo, he had a sudden, instinctive urge to find a private, dark place. Not long after he'd pulled aside a loose grating and slithered down into the New York sewer system, pieces of skin had begun the long, slow process of peeling away. Molting felt like having the worst sunburn in the world. Every moment of it was agony: scraping against the rough stone walls to help the skin loosen, the raw new layers burning for hours until they hardened, more layers sloughing off in long streamers.

Afterward, he didn't look or feel any different except that his vision was a little better and he was ravenously hungry.

He ate a manhole cover for breakfast.

It wasn't fair, Gregg decided. It wasn't fair at all.

It took a while to dig up the necessary humility to beg for change, but it got easier each time he tried. When he had a few quarters clutched in his front legs, Gregg went looking for a phone he could reach. It took half an hour or more to find one of the old-fashioned booths with a seat he could use as a perch. He dropped a quarter in and held the receiver up to the clown nose that served as one of his ears. That left the other end dangling several inches from his mouth. He dialed Pan Rudo's private extension at WHO. Pan had a habit of working late - he hoped tonight wouldn't be an exception.

When he heard the receiver click and Rudo's cautious "Hello?", Gregg moved the phone to his mouth.

"Don't say anything," he said. "This is Gregg Hartmann. That's right. By now your goons must have told you that I got away after you jumped me out of my body." Gregg heard a faint tinny squawking and quickly moved the phone back to his ear.

"... are you talking about? How did you get this number? You - "

Back to his mouth. "No need to get so shrill, Pan. That's not like you. You gave me the number back in January at the van Renssaeler New Years party - on the embossed private card you use for your personal contacts. I am Hartmann. When you came over to my office the last time, you were wearing your double-breasted Italian suit - the blue one - and a floral tie. I told you I was sending you an invoice for the work I did on the Senate WHO funding - $35,900, it was. Your secretary's name is Dianne, mine is Jo Ann."

More squawking. Back to the ear.

"... do you want?"

"I want a body. A nice normal one. And you'll get it for me. I still have the evidence, Pan, and now I have more. See you soon."

Gregg hung up on Rudo's protest.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

Rudo's limousine pulled up in front of the UN plaza while the sun was still hidden behind the Manhattan skyscrapers. The driver got out and opened the door for Rudo while a tall, muscular black man got out of the other side: Rudo's security chief, General MacArthur Johnson. Gregg moved from where he'd been pretending to look at the landscaping by the street and hurried toward them on his six legs. Johnson spotted him before he was halfway there. Johnson's right hand disappeared beneath his jacket, and Gregg called out loudly in his cartoon character voice: "Pan! Sorry I'm late for our appointment, but it's hell getting a cab when you look like this."

Rudo swiveled around awkwardly, nearly stumbling. "And you're usually so graceful," Gregg tsked softly. "Sorry I startled you, but I'm not exactly responsible for my appearance, remember?"

Ruao's pinched features contracted even more. "Just come with me and shut up," he said.

They entered the UN building. Rudo spoke with the guards and signed Gregg in for a visitor's pass before taking the elevators to the WHO floor. They didn't talk. Rudo left Johnson outside his office with his secretary, Dianne. He shut the door and turned to face Gregg. Rudo seemed uneasy and out of sorts. He sat in the chair behind his desk like a kid in his parent's office, uselessly straightening the calendar pad and toying with the Mont Blanc fountain pen on the leather-encased blotter. His eyes kept darting about nervously. He didn't seem comfortable at all, like a person in unfamiliar surroundings.

It hit Gregg suddenly. He's not Rudo. He's someone else. Rudo's been jumped, too. The implications staggered Gregg. The Sharks had a tame jumper - which meant that Rudo, Faneuil, Durand, Battle, Herzenhagen, all of them, could be safely ensconced in shiny new bodies. Safe.

"Oh my God," Gregg said.

"Not quite," said a voice. "But I did come for vengeance. A nice look, don't you think?"

Rudo was staring in fascinated horror at something behind Gregg. Gregg pivoted on his hindmost legs to see a shape coalesce out of air. Humanoid, it never seemed to quite reach solidity. Gregg could see the striped wallpaper of the office through it. "I'm Croyd, Pan," the ghostly apparition said in a cheery voice. "Just so you know."

"Croyd?" the false Pan managed to sputter.

"Yep. Amazing what a little nap will do for you, ain't it? Pan, I should have killed you long ago."

Gregg was never quite sure what happened then.

Croyd was whistling softly as he seemed to shape something in his hands, as if he were using the air in the room like clay. The outlines of the shape were suddenly visible: a long, tapering spear. "Crude, but effective," Croyd said.

And Croyd's arm flashed. The weapon flew unerringly toward Pan, who was rising from his seat. The spear tore through the man's chest as if Rudo were no more substantial than paper, and then seemed to explode. Gregg saw the man's back rip open. A gout of blood spattered the wall behind Rudo as if someone had thrown a bucket of red paint mixed with raw hamburger.

"Very effective, in fact," Croyd observed.

"But I'm not ..." Rudo screamed, but the scream quickly became a gurgle as blood frothed over his lips. "I'm not - " he said again, and keeled over on top of the desk, his mouth still open in the protest. The Mont Blanc went clattering to the floor.

"You're right. You're not anymore," the ghost of Croyd said, and chuckled. He waved to Gregg almost cheerily and disappeared in a roll of soft thunder.

It had taken perhaps fifteen seconds. The door burst open and Johnson rushed in, gun in hand. He looked at the carnage, at Rudo's body.

At Gregg. "You son of a bitch," Johnson said.

"No!" Gregg screeched. "I didn't do it!"

He moved at the same time, and Johnson's first shot grazed one of his legs. That was all that was needed. Gregg felt the sudden blinding panic, and Johnson dropped into slow motion. Gregg's joker body streaked for the door, turned left, and nearly left skid marks on the walls and ceiling as he half-ran, half bounced up and over Johnson. He landed on Rudo's body, legs pumping and skidding momentarily in the blood, then he was moving again. Johnson was trying to track Gregg for another shot, but he was hopelessly behind.

Out the damn DOOR! Gregg willed the body, and nearly ran down Dianne as he scurried from the room. The outer door was open now, with people running toward the commotion, but he couldn't make himself move in the right direction. He was all around Dianne's area: over the desk, tangling his multiple feet in the computer wires and taking the equipment over with him. The monitor shattered as he sped up and around the walls as if they were a racecourse specifically designed for him. Another shot tore great chunks of plaster from the wall in front of him and Gregg did an involuntary and impossible 90° turn as onlookers screamed and hit the floor. The DOOR! He felt like he was starting to get some control of this flight reflex, but it still took two circuits of the room before he managed to make the left turn out into the hallway. He heard Johnson shouting behind him and alarms going off.

He headed for the stairs.

And hit the door like a rushing bull. The door was harder than his head. He bounced. Johnson was pounding down the hall toward him, still bellowing and waving the gun. Office workers were scattering in his wake - under desks, behind chairs and filing cabinets. Gregg jumped for the handle and slipped off. Panicked now, he thought desperately of the garbage can he'd had for supper, remembered the saliva flowing and the pressure building and building -

He spewed onto the door panel, then could no longer hold his body still. He took off like a crazed gazelle toward Johnson, bouncing madly out of control from wall to wall and past the man as Johnson fired once more, missing. Johnson whirled around; the people who'd thought the trouble safely past them ducked for cover again.

Gregg reached the end of the hall, trying to gain control of this wild body and managing to spin around and came back the other way again, scurrying past Johnson one more time. This time when he hit the stair door it gave like hot caramel, and Gregg was spiralling down the stairwell with all six legs pumping.

At the bottom, he slammed into the crash bar with a grunt. The door gave enough for him to slide out, and now he was skittering across the slick marble floor like an out-of-control kiddie car. He slalomed into a crowd, one woman falling on top of him. The impact re-galvanized him and he heard himself screech while the world around him slowed down even more. The front door guards were pointing at him - the DOOR, damn it, the DOOR! - and Gregg tried to control his furious retreat. He hit the lobby fountain, spraying water as he slid in and out like a neon otter. He skidded halfway back to the elevators before he could get turned around again. The guards were scattering, trying to catch him, but they moved as if their feet were stuck in tar. Unfortunately, Gregg moved like a Formula One Lotus with no one behind the wheel.

Johnson had reached the lobby. Gregg smelled him, smelled the sharp terror of the gunpowder even though he couldn't see him. He managed to get himself moving toward the entrance: as Johnson shouted behind him, as the guards leaped belatedly for him, as a delegate entering the building gaped with wide-eyed confusion at a streaking yellow apparition slithering through his legs and out the door.

There was only one place Gregg could go now.

Jokertown. With the rest of the freaks.

A Breath of Life

by Sage Walker

Finally, standing on the cracked, stained sidewalk, after the appointments were set up with the defense attorney, after she'd figured out precisely how her best friend had framed her, Zoe Harris let herself whimper, once. No one noticed. This was Jokertown.

Zoe wanted to go home. Home to momma, and safety, and emotional shelters that would let her forget that she had been an up-and-coming CEO this morning, and had become a suspect in an embezzlement case by afternoon.

She was aware that her clothes were too good for Jokertown, that her Armani blazer, simple red silk, targeted her as a mark, but she hadn't been able to face getting to her townhouse in Chelsea and then back into Jokertown tonight.

Out of the acrid smog, kids appeared from an alley, five of them, taking up positions around her. Joker kids; the oldest couldn't have been more than sixteen. Their faces (but one of them didn't have a face, the kid had a head that looked like a soggy balloon, contours shifting as she moved) were greasepainted, divided down the center into black and white halves. They backed away from her on tiptoe, circling like stray cats. Hands in the pockets of their jackets, half black and half white vinyl, zippered on the diagonal.

"Bad. She's bad." The boy's square teeth were yellow against the dead white of the greasepaint. "She wants to stay bad, this richass bitch, she turns around and goes right back home."

Zoe started to walk through them, toward home, toward the smallest of them, thinking. Don't stop. Don't stop and they'll back off. They're kids. She could smell rotting garbage and trash fires. The street was a morass of discarded paper, broken glass, gray rubbish that even her New York eyes couldn't ignore.

"Nat! Nat! Go 'way. Go 'way. Not your part of town. You keep us here, but you don't come 'round our space. It's all we got, and we ain't sharin'."

She lowered her head and tried to keep walking. The street wasn't empty; jokers of all varieties went about their business and studiously ignored her.

Then there was no kid in front of her. There was a tearing sound, as of ripping silk; she thought she felt cooler air strike the sweaty place between her shoulders.

She spun around in time to see a flash of needle-sharp claws on the hand of the kid behind her. He tucked his hands in his pockets and smiled, gray-pink gums and translucent teeth like a baleen whale's beneath sad, sad eyes.

In a mincing falsetto, someone said, "Such shoddy workmanship these days. These rags just hardly hold together."

Three in front of her now, dancing backward, just out of arm's reach. She slipped her left hand behind her, fast, and felt the back of her blazer. It wasn't torn.

"Don't be this way!" Zoe said, very low. She kept on walking. Forward, another corner and then down half a block, she'd get home.

"Don't be what, bitch? Don't be jokers? Don't be hungry?"

The kid with the claws let them flash again, inches from her eyes. She knew that if she started to run, she'd go down, hurt, and they would vanish.

Black as night and as shiny as patent leather, an unlikely champion moved up through the crowd and took up a position beside her. She had never been so glad to see him. Jube wore his porkpie hat and he carried his papers, as if he'd stepped out of the past, unchanged.

"Chill out, Needles. She belongs here," Jube said.

She could see the stoop, with its wrought iron lace that she used to push her fingers through. Half a block and she'd be home.

"Looks like a nat," Needles said.

"She belongs here. Needles, Jellyhead, Jimmy, Jimmy, and Jan, allow me to present Ms. Zoe Harris."

The black and white retinue ducked their heads. Their hands stayed in their pockets.

"Ace, huh?"

Jube didn't say anything. Jube didn't know, did he? Zoe thought no one knew....

"Okay, we'll mark her," Needles said.

Zoe wondered if he planned to "mark" her with his claws. She hoped not. He pulled a camcorder out of his jacket and focused its lens at her. She almost put on a smile for the camera.

"Safe conduct," the falsetto voice said. "Make it worth our time, bad lady. Our memories, they short, you know?"

Zoe felt someone touch her. The child called Jellyhead had grabbed a corner of her blazer. She rubbed it back and forth between her fingers, like some babies do with the satin bindings of their crib blankets. "Soft," the girl whispered. "So soft."

"Jellyhead! Mind your manners, please."

Zoe reached into her bra and pulled out her mugger's twenty. "It's all right, Jube. Here." She waved the twenty. "Needles? Jellyhead? Wait outside my mom's place. Then get me outa here safe. One of these every time I come around. Watch for me. You're my escorts, right?"

They hadn't stopped walking. The twenty disappeared, flicked out of her hand and into the pockets of the smallest one. One of the Jimmies, she guessed. Needles danced away and the kids widened their circle, but now it was defense.

"They are hungry. There's your mother, Zoe."

Anne waited on the stoop. Her eyes scanned the street, the silent, monstrous, wary array of jokers on their evening business. Zoe looked around at them, free to do so in the space people kept around Jube. No nat faces, and no masks. Zoe waved at Anne. Mrs. Pojorski, blue as a robin's egg, shouldered her way past Anne without a word.

"What's happened here, Jube?" Zoe asked. "Is Mrs. Pojorski mad at momma? They've been friends for years."

"You haven't been home in a while. The mandatory blood tests have flushed out the latents and the jokers who can pass as nats. And most of them have lost their jobs. Your mom hasn't. Some jokers hate her for that."

"Dad's still working," Zoe said.

Jube didn't say anything.

He handed her up the stairs to her mom's hug, the familiar soft warmth of Anne's six pairs of breasts under her loose caftan.

"Tell your kids how long you'll be. They'll come back. Evening, Anne."

"Jube! Come on up! Have some tea with us."

"Can't stay, lovely lady. Sorry." Jube turned to the black and white escort, who had ranged themselves at the bottom of the steps.

"Two hours," Zoe said.

"Got that?" Jube asked.

"Got it," Needles said. The kids vanished. Zoe couldn't see jube anymore either; he'd fitted himself into some invisible space in the twilight.

The dingy stairs still creaked. The yellow fog put out by bare light bulbs still twisted the shadows into monstrous shapes. Home again, same as it ever was.

Bjorn sat in his disreputable leather recliner, his feet wrapped in hot towels and a heating pad, his thick legs covered in postman's blue twill. He still had his job, then. Jube had made her wonder.

"Hi, handsome," Zoe said. She kissed him, the bristle of his five o'clock shadow rough on her lips. Something was wrong, some pain had layered itself over his usual physical aches, had marked his face with deeper lines and reddened his eyes.

"Hi, skinny."

Zoe perched on the arm of the recliner.

Bjorn sat up and unwrapped his feet. Red-brown fur covered them, down to the vestigial claws on his splayed, short toes. He pulled on his ancient and disreputable slippers and leaned back again.

"Got news for us, do you?"

He knew it couldn't be just a duty visit. He knew her.

"Bad news. Very bad news."

He sighed and shifted his weight. "Seems to be the only kind there is these days."

And they waited, both of them, while she said "Uh," a couple of times, while she tried to figure out the best way to begin. "I've been called to a grand jury hearing. About some theft that's been going on in the company."

"They want you to be a witness or something?" Anne asked.

"Worse than that. I'm likely to be indicted for embezzlement."

"You?" Anne said.

"Or you. The stolen funds are in an account with your name on it, momma."

"Oh, my," Anne said. She sank back into her corner of the couch and waited. Not panicked though. Anne worked for a lawyer. Legalese wasn't likely to scare her.

"How much?" Bjorn asked.

"Half a million." And then the words came tumbling out, the neat, small transactions that Nosy had put together, the faked invoices for things that wouldn't have been noticed, now that the company had gotten bigger.

The mandatory wild card testing had started this. We can't have people like that working here, Nosy had said. Nonsense, Zoe had told him. Nosy, the disease is not contagious. But, he'd said. But nothing, Zoe had replied. This is a company that hires chemists. Jewish chemists, Japanese chemists, any old damned chemist who can do the work. And that includes wild card victims, Nosy. She'd put her foot down, he'd looked abashed, she'd thought the matter settled.

"An order showed up for a tanker full of acetone for the plant in Jerusalem. Paid in full. We haven't built the plant in Jerusalem yet. Accounting spotted it and called for an audit. I got a subpoena today. And a lawyer. Mendlen."

"He's good. But you should have called me," Anne said. "No, you couldn't, I had a clinic appointment. I wasn't in this afternoon."

"The funds were diverted to a signature account. We'll get a handwriting expert on it, momma, and you'll be cleared of all this."

Mendlen hoped.

"So what do I do now?" Zoe had asked.

"Act as if nothing has changed," Mendlen told her.

Right.

Bjorn was staring at the mute TV set, and he was trying not to look worried.

"I like Mendlen," Zoe said. "I'm going to see him again tomorrow. Dad? What else is going on here? Jube seems to think you've lost your job."

"No. No, I still get to carry mail around. As long as I can walk, I guess." He reached his arm around her and patted her hip. "The job's fine."

"So what's wrong? Something is!"

"Zoe, it's nothing you need to worry about."

"Don't make me crazy. Tell me, daddy."

He sighed and shifted in the chair. "My pension's gone."

"That can't be! You're a federal employee, for God's sake. The government hasn't lost its pension funds!"

"I'm a wild carder. What they said, is that - oh, just a minute here." He rummaged along the edges of the chair cushion. "Here's the brochure. I got it today."

He held it at arm's length and began to read.

"See? It looks like real good stuff. Wild card victims get cared for in special 'Biological Research Units,' they say. No Medicare or Medicaid, not for us. We get 'special treatment,' and 'individual financial assistance.' Got that, honey? 'If medical problems arise from these tragic infections.'"

"Barnett," Zoe said.

"Yeah." Bjorn sounded resigned. Zoe took the brochure from Bjorn's hand and scanned through it. It was as opaque to read as an insurance policy, but a sickening concept came through. Sick jokers would be spirited away, isolated.

"They can't do this!"

"Well, they did. It's enough to make me believe the Card Sharks are real." Bjorn patted Zoe's hip as if she were the one who was hurt, not him. "Barnett's in the White House, and Hartmann's dead."

"I never trusted Gregg Hartmann," Anne said, sotto voce.

"I did. Let me finish, Anne."

From her nest of pillows on the couch, Anne winked at Zoe.

"We've got another election before I'm due to retire," Bjorn said. "I think the law can't stay on the books, Zoe. the ACLU and the JADL will get it revoked."

"Sure."

"So, daughter. This mess you're in. It's a business mess, it's a money mess, but you've got your health and your strength. You can't let it get to you, Zoe. I'd hate to think some nasty little nat could stress you so much that your card would turn. Don't let that happen, Zoe."

Denial was a wonderful mechanism. Bjorn and Anne must have known that their daughter was no latent. Her deceptions could not truly have fooled them, back when she was small and not so clever. She'd known, even as a tiny child that they desperately wanted her to have escaped the wild card.

"There's pot roast and cranberries, Zoe," Anne said. "I can heat some for you, if you'd like."

Bjorn's dietary preferences ran to meat and fruit.

"Thanks, momma. But I had a sandwich at work." That was a fib. She just couldn't eat, not now. My family has always operated on a structure of polite lies, Zoe realized. Momma is facing a charge as an embezzler's accomplice, and she wants me to eat my dinner like a good girl.

Zoe got up from the arm of her dad's chair and went to sit on the couch by her mom. Muted by the thick insulated draperies Anne kept over the windows, a siren wailed, rap music blared, and the popcorn sound of automatic gunfire peppered the night, but it was far away.

As if tonight were an ordinary night, they watched while the TV ran its retinue of nightly news. The Great and Powerful Turtle was going to appear on Peri's Perch; tune in tomorrow.

"I've got to go home, momma," Zoe said. "No, don't get up." She paused with her hand on the doorknob. "What clinic appointment, ma?"

"Breast lumps. I'm waiting for some biopsy reports. I'll know tomorrow."

"Holy shit."

"Language, language, baby." Anne got up from the couch.

"I'll go to the clinic with you."

"You have an appointment with your attorney." Anne stretched on tiptoe and kissed Zoe's cheek. "You'd better keep it."

"Yes, momma."

"Your room's still here. There's always a place for you here, if you don't want to be alone."

"Thanks, sweetie."

Zoe kissed her and left.

She went down the stairs at speed. Her life felt unreal, the day's events impossible. Cancer. Poverty. Disgrace. She had to make these things not happen, and she didn't know how. Scenarios of a grim future kept popping into her mind; Anne dead, Bjorn locked in some walled enclave. She saw herself in gray cotton in a prison workroom, stitching useless things on old sewing machines. No.

Taking the first step outside always made her catch her breath, even though her fears of the stoop didn't seem quite real, even to her. Once, she'd seen an alligator under there. No fantasy, she'd seen it. A big one, too.

This time, she saw triangles of white that flitted away from the stoop when she came down, her "escorts" waiting for her. Jube was there, too, marked out of the gloom by the white rectangle of the newspapers he still carried.

"Hiya, people," Zoe said. "Hey, Tube."

Her escort fell in beside her, Jube at her left. There was something odd about the way he walked, as if his hip joints didn't connect in a standard fashion.

"Want a paper, Zoe?"

"No. Distract me. Tell me the news, Jube. I belong to a post-literate generation."

"Things aren't going well at home?"

Not exactly. "No."

The streets were nearly deserted, unusual for a citizenry who usually felt more comfortable in the dark.

"Where is everybody?" Zoe asked.

Three of the Escorts had placed themselves in a triangle ahead of Jube and Zoe. They rotated the point position, traded off by using some sort of hand-jive that Zoe couldn't follow, while the remaining two ducked in and out of shadows and alleyways, waited, and changed positions with the two kids who brought up the rear.

"Hiding, if they have a place to hide, Zoe. And some have moved away. Gone to Nam, or to Guatemala. Can't be that many with that much money, though. Makes you wonder."

Nam, Guatemala. And Jerusalem, where medical care was excellent and jokers were ghettoed, but relatively safe. Safer than Anne would be in Barnett's medical camps. How? Buy a ticket, that was easy. Convince Anne to go. Not so easy.

"I need to get my folks out of here," Zoe said. "How do I do it, Jube?"

Jube didn't speak for a while. She'd never known him to be reticent. The Escorts turned at the next corner.

"Where are we going, Jube?"

"Going to get you some news, Zoe. And maybe some help." His hand was firm on her upper arm, guiding her forward.

In the cluttered alley, a single forty watt bulb hung over a rickety stoop. Needles knocked on a thick steel door, and a man in a hooded black cape opened it and ushered them inside with an exaggerated bow. Inside the cavernous, echoing space, the Turtle's battered shells hung motionless over a murmuring crowd of jokers.

Jellyhead slipped her hand into Zoe's. The hooded figure turned and Zoe saw his mask, a yellowed skull. He spoke to someone. No. Not a mask. Echoes richocheted from odd corners, sounds she couldn't recognize. She smelled burning Sterno.

"Who is that?" Zoe bent her head and whispered to the child beside her.

"Mr. Dutton," Jellyhead said.

Charles Dutton, the reclusive owner of the Famous Bowery Wild Card Dime Museum, a place as macabre as she had imagined. Even unlighted and motionless, the displays compelled the eye: Tachyon, with curls the color of cherry cough syrup; Jetboy, whose bloody wounds looked dusty and drab. Bloat, miniaturized, a blob with a boy's tortured face perched atop it, filled one corner.

"Jube, why did you bring me here?" Zoe asked.

Jube wasn't there. It was Needles who stood beside her. The boy put his finger to his lips and looked away from her, toward the bolted front entrance.

Blue Sterno flames flared out of what looked like a sturdy marble birdbath. A figure appeared from the shadows, scooped up some of the flames, and swallowed them. "It's time to begin," the fire swallower said.

"Can't see you, Hotair!" someone called out.

"Oh, sorry." The man hoisted himself up and sat cross-legged in the burning fountain. It didn't seem to bother him.

"Can we start with the report from Hester Street?" Hotair asked.

"Two beatings," someone said. "We didn't get there in time to film the attack."

"No way to identify the assailants?" Hotair asked.

"Description only. Shaveheads."

"Bowery?"

"We filmed a verbal assault," Needles said. "Shaveheads again. But we missed a knifing, damn it."

"They cut my dad. Someone did," Jellyhead called out. "He's dead." Her voice didn't even quaver. A joker woman moved close to her, and Jellyhead let herself be hugged, briefly, before she twisted away from the proffered comfort.

"Sorry, Jellyhead," Hotair said. "Any idea who did it?"

Jellyhead looked at the floor and said nothing.

"We'll move another team over to Bowery," Hotair said. "Johnson, can your team cover it?"

Johnson had pointed ears the size of dinner plates. "We'll have to leave our territory uncovered. But yeah, we can do it. We haven't had more than a couple muggings since yesterday."

"Ms. Harris?" The voice behind Zoe was well-modulated and low. "Jube said you might be of assistance to us, and asked me to speak to you."

Zoe heard the swish of a velvet robe.

"You're Dutton."

"Yes."

"But - " But I'm here to get help, not give it. A glint of reflected blue flame danced in the deep sockets of Dutton's eyes and then vanished.

"The patrols are trying to record episodes of violence against jokers, with the hope of forcing prosecutions. But it's difficult to stay funded. Camcorders cost."

"But - "

"Come with me. We can talk in my office."

Zoe followed him.

Dutton's office was loaded with computers, faxes, and modems. He ushered Zoe to a chair and settled himself behind his desk with a practiced flourish of his cape.

"I'm not a source of funds for joker streetfighters," Zoe said.

"Are you not? I am disappointed." Dutton's accent was Ivy League; his hands, folded on the desk, were normal and impeccably manicured. "Then what is your interest here?"

"My parents are jokers. They are not young. My mother is ill. I want to get her to Jerusalem."

"That is simple, Ms. Harris. One buys a ticket."

"She will need more than that. A place to live, introductions. Medical referrals. And some information I'm not likely to get from the Jerusalem officials, like how to buy protection for her. People get killed there, far too often."

"You seem to think I have access to such information."

"You seem to be providing a place where joker activists gather."

"Yes." Dutton steepled his fingers.

"I'll pay." How? The defense costs to keep me out of jail are going to take everything I have.

"Payment is not requested, Ms. Harris. I will make certain inquiries for you. I assume I can leave messages with Needles?"

Not at my company, please. Not at home, Anne will balk.

"With Needles. Yes."

"Give my regards to your father, Zoe." Dutton knew Bjorn? That wasn't surprising; rumor had it that the reclusive Dutton loved gossip. He got up and opened the door for her. The museum was emptying rapidly. Needles and one of the Jimmies fell into step beside Zoe and led her toward the back door. A fetid wind from the river enriched Jokertown's pervasive stench.

"Get me to the train, kids," Zoe said.

"Going uptown, right?" one of the Jimmies asked.

"Right"

At the station, one of the Jimmies ducked down the stairs. Zoe heard a whistle, and the tiny one - Jan, that was, a little girl who Zoe now realized was twelve or less, flashed her fingers at Needles, then stuck her hands back in her pocket.

"No trouble down there," Needles said. "You can go back home, Zoe. Where it's safe."

"Where do you ...?"

"Sleep? When it gets cold, we used to buy a bottle of wine for Jellyhead's dad. He'd get drunk and we'd sleep on his floor. But he's dead."

"There's nothing ..."

"You can do."

Needles patted her hand, smiled, and turned away.

She walked down into the city's concrete guts. Wanting to be able to tell him, to tell someone, even to tell Dutton, it's not my problem. I got out. I can't take in every joker orphan in one block of this stinking place, much less help them all. Don't ask me, Dutton. I have to take care of my own, first. I have to take care of me.

Dank subterranean wind, rushing up the tunnel, chilled her hands. She stuffed them in the pockets of her silk blazer and climbed on the near-empty train.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

Zoe dressed in an Anna Sui for work, floaty and fragile, a perfect dress for injured innocence. She went into her office and found Nosy sitting in her chair. Act as if nothing has changed, Mendlen had told her. Fine. Nosy couldn't see her clenched fists, or the marks her nails were leaving in her palms. "I'm going over to the Flatbush plant," Zoe said. Then she turned on her heel and left.

She spent the day arranging to put the Chelsea place on the market. Mendlen said that would be okay, if she handled the transaction discreetly. She didn't tell him she planned to use the money to send her mother to Jerusalem. Zoe packed some clothes in Chelsea and went back to Jokertown.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

"It's cancer. In three of the breasts." Three of the breasts, Zoe's mom said, not three of my breasts. "I'll get to get rid of them, after all these years."

"When is the surgery?" Zoe asked.

"As soon as they can schedule the OR, Zoe. The Jokertown clinic is always so busy. Two or three days, Dr. Finn said. They're going to take six off then, and later another six. Too much trauma for one surgery, they said. Then I'll be on chemotherapy."

"I'll start dinner," Zoe said.

"Nonsense. I don't feel any different than I ever did." Anne got up from the kitchen table and began to bustle, but Bjorn padded around and set out knives and forks and plates, not typical behavior for him at all, while Zoe chopped the vegetables Anne pulled out of the fridge. "How did your meeting with your lawyer go?" Anne asked.

"The grand jury hearing is scheduled in three weeks," Zoe said. "Nothing to worry about until then." Except you need to have your surgery in Jerusalem, momma, not in Jokertown. If the "Biological Research Units" start accepting "patients," you might be forced to go there, and that cannot happen. Zoe reached for an onion and sliced it. "Damned onion juice," she said, and Bjorn and Anne pretended to ignore her tears.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

At four in the morning, she gave up on sleep. She tiptoed into the hall and stood at her parent's doorway, as if she were a three-year-old with a nightmare. She wasn't three years old anymore. She was thirty-four, and she couldn't climb in bed with them and say she was scared. They slept. Bjorn snored, with vigor and industry. Anne shifted and rolled over, but she sighed and didn't wake. Cancer. Biological Research Units. Rumors of a conspiracy determined to cleanse the world of the wild card. She remembered Hartmann's utter conviction, his intent, pleading gaze. She remembered old textbook photos, Jewish prisoners after the war, the ones still alive, who looked into the cameras with terrifying, terrible eyes.

Never again.

Not here. Not to those kids who live in the street, not to my family.

It's time to change things. It's time to do something, even if it's wrong.

Zoe tiptoed back to her room. She changed into jeans and scuffed high-tops and a nylon windbreaker. She pulled on a knit cap, stuffed her tawny curls underneath it, and went out into Jokertown, into the dark and the noise.

"Lookin' chill, Zoe lady. Think you fool us?"

Needles carried his camcorder in the front of his jacket as if it were an infant.

"Had to try, didn't I?" Zoe asked. "I thought you guys watched everything around here. Where were you when I came in this afternoon, Escorts?"

Jellyhead danced a quick end-zone dance and slipped her hand into Zoe's. "Sleepin'," Needles said. "Bad night last night. Can't take you home, though. You already there."

"I had to get loose for a while. Where's Jube?"

"Where's our twenty?" one of the Jimmies asked.

"Oh. I almost forgot." She handed it to him. He looked like a gangly nat adolescent, pretty much. His eyebrows were downy. So were his ears, she saw as he moved in to spirit away the twenty; faint peachfuzz feathers, still colorless, were just growing in. He was going to look very like an owl.

"No Jube. Can't touch that dude, for a time. Maybe you stay home. Best place. Best place in Jokertown tonight, you got a door to lock."

This Jimmy had stripes on his skin. Pale, but they looked like some sort of tropical fish. An angelfish.

"Oh." She'd been counting on Jube, his rotund stability. She wanted a buffer to guard her from the wall of deceit and decency at home. "I really wanted to talk to him."

"Talk to us." Jellyhead had nuzzled up close to Zoe's side.

"Ah, shut it, Jellyhead. We got the bucks, and I'm hungry." That was the tiniest one, Jan.

They hadn't stopped moving. They danced their circle around her, and she saw they had herded her down a street where a neon sign jittered and blinked out the word Diner.

"So am I," Zoe said. It was another fib.

The countertop was orange formica, the stools were covered in cracked yellow vinyl, the general effect was gloomy, and the man behind the counter looked like Humphrey Bogart.

"The usual?" he asked.

"Sack full," Needles said. "Extra catsup?"

"Don't got any." Moby's eyes were on Zoe.

"She's ours," Needles said. "She's ours."

"Looks like a fucking social worker," the man said, but he turned to his grill and laid out burgers.

"We don't sit down?" Zoe asked.

"Can't watch from in here," Needles said. "We got to cover our territory, you know?"

Zoe nodded. Needles and Jellyhead were beside her. The other three had vanished again. And Needles didn't have the camcorder; he must have passed it to one of the others on his way in. Damn, these kids were quick.

Needles took the grease-stained bag and the man gave back some change. And then the kids were herding her down the street again, twisting and zigzagging, until they turned into an alley. Concrete blocks stacked in triangles supported a lean-to of steel roofing. The interior space was a dark maze of nests of wadded clothing and smelled of old grease and sad child. The huddle was four feet high. Zoe crawled in beside the Escorts, sat down, and pulled up her knees to give Jellyhead, who shoved at her gently, room to get out again.

Jan sat down next to Zoe. Needles portioned out the burgers and fries. "No," Zoe said when he tried to hand her one. "No, I can't."

Jan gulped down half a burger at a bite.

"Hey, bitch. Too good for our food, are you? No way we shoulda brought you here. Maybe you best get out, now." Needles sliced at the air in front of her nose. "Go on! Get clear, fancy lady! We move this place, when we need to. You won't find it again, hear?"

"Needles! Don't, please. Not you, too."

This was too much. Even this pathetic refuge was closing to her. Zoe rested her forehead on her knees, utterly defeated.

"Got troubles, lady?" Jan asked.

"Not like yours," Zoe whispered.

"Whatsa matter?" Needles asked. "You lose your rich-bitch job or something?"

"Yeah." She snapped at him, too angry to hide the pain in her voice. She had no reason to hide pain from such as these. "An old buddy of mine decided he hated my wild card ass. And he's framed me with embezzlement."

"Whoa!" Needles said. "You like a fugitive or something?" His claws flashed in the air, moving around his face as if to guard it.

"The cops don't have a warrant, if that's what you mean."

"She hurting, Needles. You let her talk." Jan patted her knee. Jan looked like a normal, though thin, little sparrow of a girl, except for her eyes. Her irises rearranged themselves, constantly, like miniature kaleidoscopes.

"The job is nothing. My mom's got cancer. She's so good! Good people shouldn't get cancer."

The kids didn't say anything. Good people shouldn't get the wild card, either. "There's nothing I can do. There's nothing I can do about any of this shit! My God this world is going crazy."

Not to mention that she was pouring out her troubles to joker kids who lived in an alley. "And I don't want to cry on my parents' shoulders and let them know I'm scared. My folks think I'm strong, and rich. They think I got out of Jokertown forever. But I didn't. I'm here. God damn it, I'm here!"

Needles bit through a french fry with his baleen teeth. "You got that note, Jan?" he asked.

"Got it." The child pulled a sheet of shiny fax out of her pocket.

"Dutton said give you this." Needles settled back with the rest of his french fries.

"It's dark in here," Zoe said.

"Oh." Jan reached for the sheet of fax and looked down at it. Her eyes sent out beams. Her eyes were bioluminescent flashlights; the light they produced had a chartreuse tint like that of a firefly.

The information you seek is available. Please contact me.

Charles Dutton.

Zoe folded the note and stuck it into the kangaroo pocket on her windbreaker.

See the man. See him. Get Anne out of here, and Bjorn too, if it were possible, and tell Mendlen you're going to do it. If he says Anne's leaving will break a law or several? Find out how to do it discreetly, then.

"You thinking," Needles said.

"I'm thinking." She felt the kids' sympathy, their support. Thinking about how to find the cracks in the walls of the world, how to step through them into safety. Thinking about how to be good in a time of evil.

"We like you," Jellyhead said.

"Thank you," Zoe said. What about these kids? She wouldn't be able to walk away and forget them, their survival, their odd sense of charity. They had offered bread and salt, in their own way.

Okay. Question. What could a female ex-CEO facing embezzlement charges do to change the opinions of a terrified, well-meaning population that was bent on quarantining a fearsome disease? A disease that killed nine out of ten and changed the tenth into an inhuman monster? She couldn't think of much, at the moment.

Angelfish Jimmy had replaced Needles near the door hole. "Up, Jan. We gotta go talk to Hotair. Time to make morning report."

"I should see Dutton. Will he be awake?" Zoe asked.

"Yeah," Angelfish Jimmy said.

Zoe crawled out of the lean-to and followed the Escorts toward the Dime Museum.

"Ms. Harris." Dutton did not seem suiprised to see her. "I'm glad you're here."

He led her to his office, away from the crowd of tired-looking jokers. He offered coffee. Hot and fresh.

"Kona," Zoe said.

"Why, yes."

"You have information for me, or so the kids say."

Dutton tapped at a manila folder on his desk. "I have names for you. In Jerusalem. A flat that is ready for occupancy, if a deposit can be made in the next twenty-four hours. Several names of oncologists in Israel, but none in the city itself. However, the distances to the clinics are not large, and your mother should have no difficulty obtaining care."

"Oncology. How did you know Anne would need an oncologist?"

"Please, Ms. Harris." Dutton's protest was a mix of amusement and offended pride.

"Sorry," Zoe said.

"The Jerusalem information came from an organization you may not find - palatable. They are called the Twisted Fists."

"Terrorists."

"Dependable terrorists. Their organization has shown signs of maturity of late. It would be advisable, of course, for you to purchase round-trip tickets for your parents, ones that would indicate a relatively short stay in the Mideast. In light of your current - difficulties."

"You know about those, too?"

Dutton pushed the folder, gently, toward Zoe's side of the desk. "I grew up in Rhode Island. I went to Princeton. I was a successful stockbroker once, Zoe Harris. In spite of this face, this fate, I am 'successful' again. There is life after one's card is on the table. There is life. More coffee?"

Zoe shook her head, no.

"Please. Hotair is not going to be finished for a while. I enjoy your company, I must admit. It is not often that I have the honor of being of assistance to beautiful young women."

Zoe smiled and pushed her cup across the desk. "Thank you. And yes, another cup, please." She picked up the folder and held it tight to her chest.

"I am known to be a gossip, Zoe. But I am also a good listener, and my gossip is tempered with discretion."

She believed him. Stories of his charities, of his generosity, were part of the Jokertown mythos.

"I want to ask you something," Zoe said.

"Yes?"

"Do the Card Sharks exist?"

Dutton leaned back in his chair. "Conspiracy theories are usually the product of the imaginations of the prosecuted. There are many internal consistencies in the stories I have heard. Too many. I fear that they exist. I cannot prove it."

He spoke with great sorrow. Zoe sipped her coffee. Tell him. Tell him what you've never told anyone before.

"There is so much hatred. I fear that my mother will be locked away. My dad's pension has been commandeered. These things are real, whether or not the Card Sharks are real. I've got to do something, Mr. Dutton, even if it's wrong." She caught her breath. "I have - I have a wild card power. It's not a great power, it's just this little thing I can do, and I trained myself years ago never to use it. There are other things, things like money and political clout that might help the wild carders now, but I don't have those things, not any more. I've lost a lot of what I thought was me, since my partner framed me for embezzlement. But that doesn't mean I want to come out of the deck."

Through the closed door, she could hear murmurs of sound, the jokers doing what they could to protect each other.

"I'll send momma to Jerusalem. I'll talk to your Twisted Fist people, because I might need them someday. I'll get my latents out of the country, the ones who work for my company. There are thirteen of them, Mr. Dutton. But maybe you knew that."

Dutton said nothing.

"That will take every cent I have, but that's okay. I'll get momma out, and Bjorn. I'll start there. Then I'll deal with this embezzlement mess. I haven't done anything wrong. Things are bound to work out for me. The court system is designed to protect the innocent, isn't it? This thing with the company is just an awful nightmare mistake, that's all it is."

Dutton sighed. "More coffee, Zoe?"

"Yes. No. Yes, half a cup. It's not like I can use my ace when I want to. I don't know how to use it! And I don't want to. It's ugly, it's strange. Mr. Dutton, I hate what I am underneath this, but this is me, too." She held her hands palms up, her fingers stained, as always, with residues of the chemicals she still worked with, CEO or no, for she was good at finding the mixes, it was as if she shoved the molecules into place - and she moved her hands to indicate her flat belly, her long thighs, like a model on a runway pointing out design details. "But I've got to learn to use my ace. I've got to stop hiding from it. But I don't want to. I want to keep on hiding in the nat world. But I can't. I'd hate myself, every morning, if I did. Who can help me?"

"Turtle," Dutton said.

"Turtle? That man's a bag of neuroses! I mean, there's defense mechanisms, but his are made of armor plate!" And needless to say, she wasn't neurotic, or defensive, at all. No way.

"He's in town for a week." Dutton rummaged in a drawer, extracted a business card, and handed it to her.

Thomas Tudbury. A California address. There was a Manhattan number scrawled on it in ballpoint.

A knock sounded on Dutton's thick door.

"Zoe? Zoelady? You ready to go?"

"Yes," Zoe said. "Thank you, Mr. Dutton. I think."

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

Zoe tried to slip in quietly, but they were already awake. Anne, in her chenille bathrobe, sat in the kitchen drinking coffee. Bjorn, always warm in his fur, wore seersucker jogging pants. He paced back and forth, blowing on a cup of chamomile tea.

"Wups. You heard me leave, didn't you?" Zoe asked.

"No," Anne said. "But we worried, a little, when we found you were gone. I have to admit I'm - concerned - about this cancer thing, Zoe. That's why I woke up, I guess."

"Mother. The clinic. You can't go there." Zoe put Dutton's folder on the kitchen table. She shrugged out of her windbreaker and sat down. "Momma, you've got to go to Jerusalem instead."

"It's that bad is it?" Anne asked.

"I fear for you."

"Bad times have come and gone," Bjorn said.

"This is different. Maybe the Sharks are real, maybe they aren't. But until this craziness is over, I want you safe."

Bjorn sat down. He looked mean and big. It was just his fur standing on end, but it did make him look scary.

"You're right, daughter. I'm afraid that this time you are right. We'll go."

"Good. I want you to call a travel agency and book tickets to Jerusalem for you and Anne. And get me the price of tickets from New York to Saigon. I'm going to be buying quite a few."

"Quite a few?" Anne asked.

"I can't leave yet, not with this grand jury nonsense. But the latents who work for me - pardon me, that's who worked for me - they can get out. I've got to talk to them. Damn. What time is it?"

"Don't swear, darling. It's six."

"I can get to Maria's place before she goes to work. I need to talk to people face to face. Can I shower first, daddy?"

"Don't stay in all day, is all I ask. I've got to walk my route, you know."

"You're not going to the clinic with momma?" Zoe asked.

"Last time I was in the clinic, I ended up getting married," Bjorn said. "Anne says for me not to come."

True. He had come to the labor room and waited through Zoe's birth. "Must be mine," he'd said to the delivery room nurses. "Look at that red hair." Father Squid had married them while the nurse on duty had stitched up Anne's episiotomy. The doc had been attending a transformation crisis and hadn't made it into the room until later. It had been, Anne said, a typical night at the Jokertown clinic.

Zoe got her shower and came back to the kitchen. Bjorn, his bifocals perched far down his nose, turned over the last page of the morning Times and looked up at her. "Daughter? I don't want you to use your money for these tickets."

"I can't desert these people! I know that most of them don't have the cash to get out! I can't just watch them get slaughtered! Daddy - "

He stared at her with his "I won't take this nonsense from you, young lady" expression. "You need your money for your lawyers. Your mother and I have been talking. I have a savings account that isn't part of the pension. It just might cover the costs on this rescue of yours."

"It will leave you with no safety margin."

"I'm old. Your mother isn't so young. These workers of yours are young, and some of them have children. Let's get them out of here."

"You've always said not to run away from problems," Zoe said.

"Running away can be the only good choice, sometimes. This looks like one of those times."

"I can't let you do this," Zoe said.

"Since when, young lady, have you begun to decide what your parents can and cannot do?"

"Since never. Thank you, daddy." Zoe bent down and hugged him, hard. She hid her face against his chest, afraid that he would see her thoughts, and what she was thinking was - Daddy's contribution gives me a little more slack. Needles, Jellyhead, Jimmy, Jimmy and Jan, you're getting out, too.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

He just wasn't what she'd expected. Maybe she wasn't what he'd expected; the short little man took a step backward, his hand still firmly on the hotel room's doorknob, and looked her up and down. This was the Great and Powerful Turtle? This graying, paunchy, blue-collar nerd? She knew he'd written Shell Games, the Turtle's story, himself, even if it had been published with an "as told to" name. She'd caught a glimpse of him on Arsenio once, but the cameras hadn't given her the leprechaun look of him. He wore chinos that were baggy in the butt, and a rust-colored shirt, some sort of brocade. But he looked like he'd be happier in a coverall, one with "Turtle" embroidered in red over the left pocket.

"Mr. Tudbury?"

"You're Zoe, right?"

"Yes."

"Come on in. Charles Dutton just called. Good thing he did, too. I was ready to call this off. Dutton made me change my mind." He waved her toward a table by the window, stacked with the remnants of a room service breakfast - for two. No bed, the room held a couch and end tables, and a desk with a laptop and modem.

"Want some coffee?" he asked. "Lemme get a clean cup, there's one on the dresser."

"Uh, I didn't mean to intrude ..."

"You're not intruding." He ducked into the bedroom of the suite and came back with the promised cup. "Danny's in the shower." He poured coffee for her, indicated the sugarbowl and the cream pitcher, and sat down with a definitive thump, as if he planned to stay in his chair all day.

"I got another hate call this morning. The hotel usually screens the calls pretty well, but this was a real nut case. Gave the right names, you know, and then it turns out to be some fanatic who insists that the shell's forcefield, whatever that might be, made his roses die. He'll probably sue. They all do."

Turtle projected a sense of restless energy. He wasn't doing real well with eye contact. "It could have been worse," he said, as if he were talking to himself. "It could have been someone who lost someone on the Rox. To save people I loved, I killed people I loved. That's a bitch. That's such a bitch." He stared out at the bricks outside the window until Zoe thought he'd forgotten she was there. The shower kept running, and CNN's electronic ta-da-da-dat! came from the bedroom. "My old friend Charles says you want to be a hero. Do you?"

"No!"

"That's good. Only fools want to be heroes." When he smiled, he was a different person. "What do you want, then?"

"Mr. Dutton thinks you can help me learn to use my ace."

"Ace, huh. What makes you think you're an ace?"

"I've got a power. I can't use it when I want to. I tried so hard to pass as a nat that I guess it just got ... repressed or something."

"I'm not a shrink," Turtle said.

"No. You're an ace. How could I trust a shrink with this?"

"Good question. What's wrong with being a nat?" Turtle asked.

"Nothing!"

He was looking away again, and she feared she had lost him; he looked as if he were thinking about showing her to the door. "I've lost my company. My VP has framed me with an embezzlement charge. My father lost his pension because he's a joker. The feds are about to put jokers in fucking concentration camps! And maybe this shit about the Card Sharks is fake, or maybe it's real, but if it's real, it must be stopped. About the only asset I have left is a little wild card power that I can only use when I'm scared to death, and it's not any help because I don't know how to use it!"

His guarded look was replaced by one of wry amusement. "Embezzlement, huh? I've only been stuck with insurance fraud myself. So far."

"But I didn't embezzle anything."

"You don't look the type."

"I'm not the type."

"You look like a total yuppie. I'm not comfortable around yuppies."

"I'm sorry."

"You're sorry. You've got money problems, is all I've heard so far. Money problems! Let me tell you about money problems. I've got the IRS on my ass, the City of New York wants me to fix the Brooklyn Bridge, the feds want the Statue of Liberty put back, on my tab, and that's only the money part! That doesn't even begin to get close to what I did to those jokers on the Rox!"

"My mother's got cancer, and I think the feds are going to lock her up in a Biological Research center! It's not just money, Mr. Tudbury."

He'd hunched his shoulders up as if he were trying to pull his head down beneath his collar.

"The tabloids said you didn't do anything but stir up some water. They say the kids went to never-never land. Some sort of alternate reality business. Jumpers, jokers, and all," Zoe said.

"You want me to believe the tabloids?"

"It would beat believing that you're a mass murderer."

"Yeah. It would. Some of the bodies were real, though. Kids in uniform, serving their country, or trying to. Jokers floating in with the tides, and the ambulance crews afraid to pick up the bodies, couldn't be convinced the wild card wasn't like AIDS. Sometimes I ..."

He looked dazed, as if the world had slapped him, hard. Zoe pushed her chair back, leaned across the breakfast dishes, and reached for him. She held his face in her hands and kissed him, gently, half-convinced that she'd gone mad, and totally aware that a buttered muffin was squashed against the pocket of her Versace blouse.

The shower had stopped running. The woman who had been in it stood in the bedroom doorway. She was drying her red, red hair with a towel, and she wore another draped like a sarong.

"Oh, sorry to interrupt. Tuds, you have more old friends than a politician."

Zoe disengaged from what was turning out to be a lingering and very satisfactory kiss, brushed crumbs away from her blazer, stood up straight, and offered her hand to the naked woman.

"Zoe Harris," she said. "You must be ..."

"Danny Shepherd."

From his chair, Turtle yelped out in a voice that had suddenly gone about an octave higher, "She's not an old friend. I just met her!"

If Central Casting had a prototype for a perfect starlet's body, Danny Shepherd fit it. Periwinkle eyes, long legs, high firm breasts, a dancer's muscles, triple-cream skin, Danny had it all. And she had one of the most honest and infectious cheerleader's grins Zoe had ever seen.

"New friend, then."

"She's got a repressed ace. She wants some help, Danny."

"So help her. Jeez, Turtle, do what you can, okay? The way things are going, we're going to need all the ace powers there are. Right?"

"Thanks," Zoe said. "Thank you, Danny."

"He's shy, you know." Danny turned and bent to kiss Turtle's cheek. "Tuds, I forgot my razor. Can I borrow yours?"

"Sure."

Danny wandered back toward the bath. Turtle loved her. That showed in his eyes. She hurt him, sometimes. That showed, too. He braced his forearms on the table and motioned Zoe back toward her chair.

"She's beautiful," Zoe said.

"Yes. Yes, she is. Now about this power of yours."

"I ... animate things. I guess that's what you'd call it."

"What you do. Is it like teke?"

"It's not teke. I can't float a coffeecup in the air. But I could grow legs on it, and it would jump, or I could give it a big floppy ear where its handle is, and it could fly."

"Show me."

"Oh, no!"

"Why not?"

"I'm shy. Maybe that's part of it." So why had she kissed him? Well, because he'd needed it. So there.

"I'm shy myself. Show me."

"I can't do it while you're watching me."

"Fine. I'll go in the other room." He got up and left her there.

Can't work, won't work, nothing was ever this simple. Just do it? Zoe stared at the coffeecup, picked it up, breathed against it, tried to imagine the amorphous latticework of the fired clay flowing into new shapes, the metallic ions becoming gears and levers. Nothing. She heard Turtle say something, and Danny giggling. Zoe held the cup and tried again. Can't do it. Can't.

"Well?" Turtle reappeared at the doorway.

"I have to be scared. I have to be convinced I'm in danger. Sorry, Turtle. You're just not scary enough."

"That's what they all say," he said, very low. He looked disappointed, and wary, as if he still didn't believe she wasn't here on some sort of scam or the other.

"I hurt a mugger once. I think. He had a knife, or I thought he did. I grabbed my special twenty, you know, the one I carry in my bra, and made it turn into a little airplane. Like a paper airplane, but metal, with razor edges, and it went for his eyes. He ran."

"Weren't people watching you then?"

"On the street? No one looks. I'm trying to remember when I've used the power. Sometimes when I can't find my keys, I just open the locks anyway, if no one's watching. I try to forget when I do things like that."

"I'm not sure you can save the world if that's all you can do," Turtle said.

Danny came in and sat down on the couch. She had put on jeans and a bomber jacket, both in a deep butternut color. On her, the simple clothes were a designer's wet dream.

"If I didn't have to wait until I was scared, if I could plan things out in advance, I could think about how to use them better. I could set a watch to watch someone, or put a listener in someone's pocket"

"Electronic bugs have been around for a long time," Turtle said.

"I could make weapons out of things, vases, silverware, coffeepots. Design them to resume their original shapes once they'd been used."

"That has possibilities," Danny said.

"Yeah," the Turtle said.

"Small things," Zoe said. "I have to be able to pick them up. I can't do it with anything that's alive. The energies aren't right, they move around so much, anyway."

"Nothing alive. Nothing big. How big, Zoe?"

"The biggest thing so far was a ..." She had just met these people. She couldn't tell them all her secrets. But if she didn't, she was running from possible help. And she liked them, both of them. "... a bedspread. It almost strangled a guy I was in bed with." There wasn't any way this was going to sound right "No, no, he wasn't trying to rape me or anything. He just scared me."

"Your first time?" Danny asked.

"Yes. I just didn't realize ..."

"How big they could get," Danny said. She began to laugh. Turtle didn't.

"Oh, the poor bastard," Danny said. "Did he recover? Enough to - "

"No. Not that night anyway."

"But later?"

"Oh, yes." Zoe smiled, remembering his embarrassment, her confusion, the mutual reassurances which had blotted out, she hoped, his memories of the bedspread levitating above them, then twisting in the air to form a noose that snaked its way around the poor guy's neck. The relationship hadn't lasted long, though. A few weeks.

"But when you do the keyhole bit, you aren't scared then."

"No."

"How do you feel afterwards?" Danny asked.

"Uh ... fatigued."

"For how long?"

"It depends. It depends on how much energy goes into the animation, I guess."

"Sleepy?" Danny asked.

"Yes." Zoe had never thought about it, but yes, sleepy.

"Uh, huh. Zoe, what's your schedule today?" Danny asked.

Time to go. They think I'm a total nut case, and Danny wants me out of here. "I'm due at the attorney's office." These were sweet people, but they couldn't help. Zoe had to meet with Mendlen again, and she dreaded the encounter, the questions, the mutual evaluations. "Soon. I really should be going."

"Let's do lunch," Danny said. "Tuds, you have an interview. Sell that book, honey."

"Where this time?" Turtle asked.

"It's a radio thing. Here's the address. I'll be back around midafternoon. Come on, Zoe."

"The attorney - "

"Can wait."

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

The waiter led them through a maze of tables and past stainless steel dim sum carts to a red leather booth where Danny sat, except Danny was beside Zoe and the Danny scarfing up phoenix-eye dumplings was a little more angular. Her absolutely perfect auburn hair was cut in a side-parted, chin-length wedge, the sort of cut that Zoe's waves would never let her wear.

"I can't blame you for feeling a little jittery," Danny said. "Lawyers can wreck your day. But you've got a couple of hours before you have to meet this shyster of yours. You'll feel stronger after a good lunch. Trust me."

And then, "Hi, Danny," Turtle's Danny said, and Zoe found herself seated between them, while the cart arrived and Turtle's Danny picked out an assortment of neat small fattening things.

Identical twins? Of course. But the thinner Danny stabbed a smoking hot pot-sticker and said, "Zoe, you made a hell of a first impression. The expression on Turtle's face when I came in from the shower!"

"Don't worry, Zoe," Turtle's Danny said. Their voices were identical. The effect was like listening to a stereo set for too much separation. "It's good for him to find that attractive women think he's kissable. He'll get used to it, someday."

"But you?" Zoe pointed to the thinner Danny.

"Oh, yes. I was there. I don't listen in all the time, but we're me."

"We are Legion," Turtle's Danny said.

"Uh, like clones?" Zoe asked.

"Better," they both said.

"I'm the Danny who lives with Rick," thinner Danny said.

"Rick?"

"Beautiful, black, Rick," Turtle's Danny said.

"How many of you are there?" Zoe asked.

"Only three," starlet Danny said. "Nobody wants to hide out and eat enough to bud another one right now."

"Turtle got a little freaked when we did that last time," Rick's Danny said. "Zoe, you didn't tell me everything about this talent of yours. A little more detail, please. Just eat your pot-sticker, there, and tell me how you get a lock to unlock. Like Turtle said, you won't get far if you have to be scared to death to do your thing. And you want to fix this in a hurry, it sounds like."

All right, fine. She was sitting in a Manhattan dim sum place with two women who were the same person, and the situation felt a little trippy, like the pot she'd tried only once, and then she'd gotten loose and floaty and not at all scared, so she'd had the napkins on the coffee table fold themselves into origami cranes and fly around the room. Fortunately, the three people around her had said nothing more than "Oh, wow," and passed off the experience as a contact hallucination. She'd never tried it again, and she didn't ever drink.

She felt drunk now. The world had gone tilt in a Chinese restaurant where reality duplicated itself and two selves could exist in one booth, but this was New York, after all, and no one seemed to notice. "It's not a verbal process," Zoe said. "But I'll try." She felt like a drab shadow between these two. Their porcelain skins made her olive coloring look darker, and to her eyes, muddy. "I think - I can't be sure, but it sort of feels like nano-engineering would feel, if anybody could really do that. I have to be close to things. Like this chopstick, say. It's not ivory, of course, it's plastic, so there's a way that the hydrogen links can bond and unbond fairly easily. It could have legs there, see, and little arms, and this chrysanthemum painted on the blunt end could be a mouth."

"Well?" starlet Danny asked. "Go ahead."

"Well, not here. But I would pick it up and hold it."

"That's all you need to do?"

"No. I would ... breathe on it. What my breathing does is sort of instruct the molecular bonds. I think. When I was little, I sort of thought it was like giving CPR, or something. I guess."

But they were laughing, both of them.

"You blow on things to bring them to life?" starlet Danny asked.

"Wnat's funny?" Zoe asked.

Starlet Danny grinned her cheerleader's grin again. "Zoe? I have to ask you something. How's your sex life?"

"What?"

"No, seriously."

"It's ... okay, I guess. No. It's not okay at all. I'm always afraid I'm going to get too involved and that whoever I'm with is going to find out about me. That I'll slip up and animate something. So I'm a little guarded."

"You fake it," Wall Street said.

"Well, yes." Faked sexual satisfaction, and then dealt with the frustration later, courtesy of a vibrator and a size C battery. And if she hadn't felt safe with these two, hadn't trusted them, she could never have admitted any of this.

"Zoe. Zoe, I think you've just told us what could replace getting scared to death, if you can handle it. No harm intended, now. This may be hard to accept," starlet Danny said.

"Think about it for a minute," Rick's Danny said. "What other activity, other than animating things or going to the john, would you rather have a little privacy for? What else makes you tired, a little sleepy, after? But relaxed maybe? A little less tense?"

"Oh." The chopstick in Zoe's hand was warm, plastic, potentially malleable. She squeezed it harder. "Oh, that's ridiculous."

"Is it?"

"Oh, for gravy's sake."

"She's thinking about it," starlet Danny said.

"That's the equation? Animating things, for me, is a sexual activity?" Analytically, and she began to analyze, right then and there, it was possible. Profound changes in physiology, in neurochemistry, were part of sexual arousal and certainly occurred in orgasm. The whole chain of interactions, sex, violence, arousal, were so closely related in the architecture of the brain.

The chopstick broke with a snap. It wasn't animated in any way, it was just a plastic chopstick. She dropped the pieces on the table. But she knew, she knew to the level of her very cells, that what she'd keyed through terror, yes, could be keyed through desire. "I'll be damned." The Dannys were smiling at her. Their smiles were accepting, tolerant, and warm. "I think you're right.

"Will knowing it help?" Rick's Danny asked.

"I don't know," Zoe said. "I don't think so."

"Blowjob, honey, come back up to the hotel tomorrow night. Turtle and I are free then. We'll work on this, okay?" starlet Danny asked.

"Okay," Zoe said. "Blowjob?" Blowjob. Some of the more flamboyant aces wore costumes. She tried to imagine one for a woman called Blowjob.

"Why is this woman laughing?" Rick's Danny asked.

"I'll tell you later," Zoe said. "Maybe." She bit into a sweet dumpling covered with sesame seeds, and listened to the sisters talk. Thinking, at least talking with Turtle and Danny would delay, for a while, the prospect of another restless night and its fantasies of courts, jail, disgrace. And that she wouldn't have to think so much about Anne, about losing her, about how sick she was going to be in Jerusalem, with surgery and chemotherapy. Anne would need her there. As soon as the court thing got finished, she'd follow momma and Bjorn. Off to a country that she still thought of as a place with sand and camels, full of people who wore flowing robes, where all the men had big, thick beards, and all the women were beautiful, with eyes like roe deer, and their bellies were like heaps of wheat.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

The kitchen at home was empty, the coffee cups washed and put away. Anne had gone back to work. Dr. Finn was displeased, she'd said, that Anne was delaying her surgery. Anne still seemed to think that things weren't all that bad, and she liked Finn a lot.

But she'd promised that she'd leave when the airline called. The flights were booked heavily for the next six months, El Al kept saying. The Israelis took political refugees, yes, but officially speaking, jokers weren't political refugees.

Zoe managed to talk to the first three latents on her list. She arranged lunches with them. Some of them didn't really want to talk to her. They hadn't known her that well; the rumor mill had told them she was in disgrace, even if she was still the official President of Subtle Scents. But Maria, this morning, had listened. "I'll do it. I'll leave. But Zoe, I'll pay you back," she kept saying. On her bottle-washer's salary, living in Jerusalem's inflated economy, Zoe didn't count on the money coming back real soon. But the thought was nice.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

Danny wasn't in the hotel room. A soap producer, Turtle said, a meeting. He seemed uneasy without Danny, so Zoe suggested they get dinner. French, he wanted, which surprised her, and he drank white Bordeaux with it. She might have thought beer. But she got him talking about the Shell Games movie, and Richard Dreyfuss was going to play Turtle. Turtle liked that a lot. By the time the profiteroles arrived, he was almost, but not quite, expansive.

"I'm glad we came," Turtle said. "I was afraid someone would recognize me, but they haven't, so far. I hate it when that happens. Either it's someone who is delighted that I 'cleaned out the Rox,' or it's someone who thinks I'm a mass murderer and they want to kill me. Those guys, I can understand. They're the sane ones. The ones who make my skin crawl are the idiots who think it's neat that I killed a bunch of miserable jokers. They probably have my picture on the wall right between Hitler and Pol Pot."

"You've had death threats?" Zoe asked.

"Death threats, love letters from women I don't know, and three hundred lawsuits by people who claim they were 'telekinetically assaulted' by the Turtle. Most of those claims are bizarre as hell. A lot of crossover with UFO abductees, and all the kinky sex fantasies that go with it. Tom Tudbury and his big smooth round sex object shell." He polished off the last profiterole. "Are you still sure you want to be a hero?"

"I never said I wanted to be a hero. I said I was afraid not to."

"Danny told me her theories. What you talked about at lunch."

Tom seemed wistfully shy. Charming, Zoe thought. "Danny's sex theory on animation? She may be right, Tom."

"Well, she would never have a problem like that. You met Rick's Danny?"

"Yes. I like her, too."

"It bothers me. Rick's a nice guy. But when Danny makes out with him, Danny, my Danny, gets to make out with him, too. I mean, not there, but in Venice in the apartment, sometimes, she'll get this look, and I know what they're doing."

The check had come, had been examined; Tom's card had paid for it. He opened the heavy brass-fitted door that led them back out into Manhattan's night-time streets. They navigated back toward the hotel, dodging a mink-clad woman wearing tennis shoes, a crowd of shavehead wannabes in baggy pants and hightops, and a large poodle walking a small man.

"You're jealous, Tom."

"I guess. But it's more weird than jealousy. Sometimes I think about what Rick's Danny is feeling when my Danny and I are making out. I think about the fact that I'm in bed with two women at once, and one of them isn't there. It feels pretty strange."

The elevator took them back toward the hotel suite. Starlet Danny wasn't there.

"About this power of yours. You've been practicing?"

"No." There was a bar in the room, and one of those little refrigerators stocked with booze and chips and candy, with a card to check off what you'd taken out.

"Tom? What do I do if I learn to use it? Is there an organization I could work with?"

"There's the government, I guess. SCARE and the Justice department."

"No."

"Good. I'm glad you said that."

"But something else? There has to be something else."

"I really don't know. I'm out of the hero business, myself." He looked troubled.

"Tom? I'm in the mood for some cognac."

"Fine with me." He settled into the cushions on the couch.

Zoe poured cognac into tumblers, good stiff doses, and brought one to him. She never drank. She planned to play with her glass and sniff the fumes.

"Danny says she figures you don't drink," Tom said. "She make it sound really sad. You don't drink, you don't make love unless you're on guard about it. That's sad Zoe."

"I'm not always on guard about it," she said. She sniffed at the cognac. It made her eyes water a little. She walked to the window, which had a view of a brick wall outside, and then back to the little bar. Pacing. She was tense, and didn't much care.

"What happens when you aren't? Do you animate, uh, modify, uh, do you - "

Poor man. No, I don't modify penises. "My talent doesn't work on anything living. The energies aren't right. I don't know how to explain it."

"But if you have an orgasm, things start jumping?"

"Well - yes."

"Should be interesting," Tom said.

Zoe wondered how it would be, to celebrate an orgasm with showers of confetti, with a round of applause from chiming crystal glasses on a bedside table, with chandeliers strobing themselves on and off. And someone else there to enjoy the show, not just her trusty vibrator.

The phone rang. Tom picked it up. He said yes a couple of times and hung up.

"Danny. She's going to stay with her sister."

"Oh. I wanted her to be here." She really did. Danny had this healthy, relaxed attitude about all sorts of things.

"Well. She won't be here. She'll be there. I hope Rick has a good time."

"Because you think they'll make out?"

"Because I know they will. Or Rick is a purblind fool who doesn't deserve a Danny in his life. Sit down, Zoe. You make me think I'm watching a tennis match."

She sat down.

"Now. You have to be scared to animate things. Or you have to be horny, Danny thinks. Or you have to be alone."

"That's right."

"No crazier than I am, when you come to think about it. Me, I have to have my shell to do really good teke. Little things, like this glass, I can lift without it, but that's about it."

Zoe put her glass down on the coffee table.

"Show me," she said.

"You're challenging your teacher."

"Yup."

"I'll try." Tom stared at the glass. He clenched his fists. Nothing happened. "This is harder than you might think," Tom said. He closed his eyes, opened them again. The room was very quiet. The glass lifted about an inch, the meniscus of cognac tilting as the glass swayed in the air. Then it thumped back down on the table. "Getting there," Tom said. "One more time." He tried again, and the glass sailed up, hovered in the air, and beelined for Zoe's face. It adjusted its angle as if waiting for her to sip. So she did.

"Oooh," she said. "Applause, applause. Clap, clap." She lifted the glass from the air, and sipped again. The cognac burned all the way down. It tasted of apples, late summer, and oak.

"Your turn," Tom said. He put his glass on the table. "Here. Maybe this will help." He reached up and clicked off the table lamp. The room was lighted only by a faint glow that came from the lamp in the bedroom. Tom got up and half-closed that door, too. "See? Nobody's watching."

"I'll try," Zoe said. She tried. Gossamer wings on the stem of the glass, that would be nice, and a program to flutter them to let the glass waft around the room. She really wanted this to work. She tried. "Nothing. Damn."

"My turn." Turtle lifted his glass for her. It seemed easier for him this time. "Drink up," he said.

"We're going to run out of cognac." Zoe spluttered on a too-large gulp.

"That's what room service is for," Turtle said.

It took them about a half-bottle to get from the couch into the bedroom.

"I guess," Turtle mentioned at one point, "that anything you can animate, I can move out of the way with my teke. Just keep it lightweight," he said.

"Sure." He didn't have a pelt, like Bjorn, but the curls on his chest were quite pleasant to stroke, all the same.

There wasn't any confetti to dance around the room. But, eventually, the glasses on the bedside table clapped their crystal hands against their bellies, and gave them a round of ringing applause.

"Damn," Tom said. One of the glasses leaped from the bedside table and hung in the air over their heads. "I think you did it, Zoe."

"Hell of a way to have to get things going," she said. "Tom, you may not always be there when I need you."

"You're right. It's going to be a problem, if this is what it takes to get your powers working."

"Maybe I jus' need a lil more practice," Zoe said.

"Good thought."

Good man, this Thomas Tudbury.

Sooner than anyone might have expected, the glasses again rang their chimes.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

Turtle was gone, back to California with his Danny. Zoe had seen him again, but he'd seemed defensive, a little frightened, and she didn't want to get in his space and upset it. He'd said something about getting back in harness. He'd said he had to contact some people.

He left Zoe with memories, fine rich memories, and a wistful hope. Someday, someday, someone for me. If only.

The days lurched forward toward the grand jury hearing. In her mind, she faced an inquisition, hooded figures cloaked in red who carried candles the size of walking sticks. They snuffed them out on the floor, and her breath died with the dying flames.

She became something she had never been, a drifter in Jokertown streets in the daytime, alone when the Escorts slept in the warm mornings. She heard tales of hunger and death and outrage. The tabloids kept up their barrage of joker hate stories. And in the Times, she read of the groundbreaking for the first of the Biological Research Centers.

Her bank balance sank daily. Some of her latents had asked for transfers to Jerusalem. Some wouldn't think of leaving. Zoe worked with Dutton and set the Escorts up as a student tour group, with Bjorn and Anne as adults-in-charge. The Escorts thought the idea sucked. She stuffed the tickets in their pockets anyway.

"You'll go when there's space for you on the damned plane. You'll check with my daddy every day to see if your flight is scheduled. You'll get the fuck out of here when he says go. These are round-trip tickets, kids. Think of it as cultural enrichment."

"Mess around with yuppies, and look what happens to us," Needles said. But in his streetwise eyes, there was something like hope.

Home base was her parents' flat, her childhood bedroom with its pink and white French Provincial canopy bed. Zoe rummaged through her closet, still crowded with mementoes of triumphs past, her prom dress, the first Calvin Klein she'd ever been able to afford, an Issey Miyake with its artful cutouts. She'd bought it the first year the company had gone public; still a lovely dress, but now hopelessly outdated. She had dressed for success, once. She had been a success, once.

She practiced. She thought about Turtle, and practiced. Alone in home's stuffy silence, trying to find a space in her mind where her power would work on demand. Yes, the dustcloth flew around the counters, her old Snoopy barked and chased the elusive rag, the little toy soldier raised his rifle. But now, she had him shoot bursts of laser light that left smoking holes in the playing cards she set up as targets.

Trying to convince herself that no one would notice, that no one would see her excitement when she animated something, that no one would recognize the sexual tension she felt while she worked. She had tried to animate things when the Escorts were around, trusting that they wouldn't pay much attention, or maybe even notice what had happened. She hadn't been able to do it.

And then she would pick up the phone, and try to convince another one of the latents to leave the country.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

You'll be fine at the hearing tomorrow. Say this. Don't say that. Remain calm. Respond only to what is asked. Don't volunteer information. Mendlen's instructions echoed in Zoe's head. Furtive, watching the streets, she wanted to get home and she didn't want the Escorts to see her, but Needles danced up beside her. He was up early. It was barely past lunch.

"Dude sent this for you," he said. What he slipped into her hand was an El Al ticket.

"Who?" Zoe asked.

"Short little nerd. Kept wigglin' his nose, like it stinks round here or something."

Nosy? What the fuck did this mean?

"You told him where I lived?"

"Not exactly," Needles said. "We was just cruising, you know. So this stupidass nat shows up and we, like, in-terror-gated him a little."

"Uh-huh," Zoe said. First class, priority ticket, that identified her as an executive of Subtle Scents, Jerusalem. Maybe Nosy figured she would run, and look like a fool. Keep the damned thing? Would its use set off an alarm at the FBI or something?

But she didn't have the money to buy another. Mendlen's secretary had taken a big cnunk today. Zoe Harris, CEO, was tapped out.

She stuffed the ticket in her purse. Bjorn waited on the stoop. Needles nodded at him and ducked away.

"Why are you home so early?" Zoe asked. He was out of uniform, freshly shaved; he wore a polo shirt under his sport coat.

"I thought you could use a little company," Bjorn said. "A little distraction."

"Possibly I could." Zoe tried to smile at him.

"Your mom's on her way to Jerusalem. She fussed, but there was an open seat and she took it."

Brave momma. "Good," Zoe said.

"Let's see if I can say this like she would." Bjorn cleared his throat.

"Say what?"

"Dahling. Let's go shopping!"

"Perfect!"

"God knows I've heard it often enough."

"And groaned every time."

Bjorn had a great groan. He groaned it now, a subdued roar that seemed to vibrate the wrought iron on the stoop.

"Daddy. We can't spend any money. Are you nuts?"

"You'll feel better tomorrow in a good little suit," Bjorn said.

"I won't feel better in a good little suit."

"An expensive little suit?"

"Daddy, you're impossible."

"You're my daughter. You deserve to look wonderful."

Autumn in New York was the best of the city's seasons. The leaves were turning. A light breeze lifted most of the smog. Fifth Avenue's windows showed the fall collections, the furs, the silhouettes. Fuller skirts, smaller shoulders. Shorter fitted jackets with definite curves in their lines. The keynote color was green, which Zoe in no way could wear, but the season's stones were topaz and amber, big faux chunks of them. Topaz brought out cat colors in Zoe's hazel eyes. Very good.

Mary, Queen of Scots, wore a red silk petticoat to her beheading. Zoe would stick with a business suit, black, perhaps, with a closely fitted jacket. A Hermes scarf at the neckline, white and some bronze tones? Perhaps.

Bjorn limped along beside her on his ever-sore feet. Zoe pretended not to notice.

But she noticed, as always, the movement in the street around her, the moiling mix of shoppers and the aimless. A black mannequin in the Saks window wore a Donna Karan dinner dress, bias cut and loaded with long looped chains of gold and topaz, reminiscent of the thirties. It was a gorgeous ensemble.

Reflected in the Saks window, something changed in the street's motion. In a flicker of vision, Zoe saw a movement like the turning of a school of fish. Shaveheads in padded, pale denim, interchangeable faces with dead stupid eyes and one of them moved too fast. His hands snatched at the collar of Bjorn's shirt, jerking it open. Another shavehead circled behind Bjorn and pulled his sport coat down, trapping Bjorn's arms. The afternoon sun brought out gold highlights in Bjorn's thick auburn fur.

"Joker!" someone yelled.

The pack was on him. One of them shoved Zoe aside. She stumbled and caught her balance against the smooth glass of the Saks window. Bjorn went down, hidden under pounding fists and flailing arms. Zoe grabbed the shoulders of the thug in front of her, but her fists striking his back had no effect at all.

Yelling help, please, somebody help, but her voice didn't carry over the chorus of obscenities.

"Joker!"

"Mutant!"

"Fucking monster! Abomination!"

She ripped her fingernails across the throat of the thug in front of her. He jerked his elbow back, a hard punch that caught her in the stomach. The back of her head struck the glass. It boomed with the impact, but didn't break. Over the heads of the shaveheads, she saw the cyclops eye of a camcorder, a Japanese tourist filming the show.

She heard her voice yelling out "Stop it, stop it, you're killing him!" but it was as if someone had turned the volume down too low. Bjorn roared and growled. He kicked out and one of his shoes went flying. His naked foot, blunted claws and fur, connected with a thug's leg and the man yipped in pain. The shaveheads circled their prey like a dog pack, except for one, who humped away on top of Bjorn in a horrid parody of screwing. Zoe saw the flash of a knife in the thug's fist.

She drove her shoulder against the plate glass, again, again. Break, damn it, I need shard, sharp, weapon, silicon brittle edge, damn it, break! Bjorn kicked out hard and a shavehead slammed into the window next to Zoe, ass-first through the window, his arms and legs spread like a starfish. Above the crashing noise of the breaking window, Zoe heard a siren wail. She spun around and hoisted herself up onto the display shelf. The flesh of her palms parted on broken glass. She tackled the black mannequin and went down flat across its torso, her mouth pressed to the molded, elegant lips. One breath. Another. The total program, that's all you get. It's now or never, baby.

Zoe rolled away as the mannequin spun into motion. The animation leaped through the window, the gold and topaz necklace suddenly a garrote in inhuman, strong hands, looping around the shavehead's neck and twisting, twisting. The mannequin yanked back, hard, and the thug's head made a funny little jerk, as if he'd just heard someone say something really interesting.

Limp, the dead man and the mannequin sprawled over Bjorn's motionless body.

The Japanese tourist leaned forward and adjusted the focus on his camcorder.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

In the ambulance, while terse EMT's said little and worked hard, pounding on Bjorn's chest, Zoe realized what the tourist had been doing. He wanted a closeup of Bjorn's face, of glassy eyes staring into nothing.

And if he took his little recording to the police? From embezzlement to murder in two short weeks. Turtle would be impressed.

Something in the attitudes of the paramedics told her Bjorn was dead. She watched while the gurney bumped across the concrete with its limp burden, and the doors of the ER hissed open.

"Daddy, what do I do now?" she whispered.

The door closed. She did not enter.

Stay and face charges. Act like a responsible citizen. Bjorn would want her to do that. Or would he?

Running away can be the only good choice, sometimes.

She had used her ace and killed a man. Yes, but the man who had killed her father would never kill again. It didn't feel right. It felt wrong. Being a killer felt wrong.

Stay. Let the process of law decide her guilt or innocence.

But what is innocence in a time of genocide? They killed my father in front of my eyes!

Never again.

The embezzlement mess could wait. The "stolen" funds were frozen, and Subtle Scents hadn't lost a dime. Let the lawyers sort it out.

Anne was in Jerusalem by now, the home of the Twisted Fists. They killed five for one, and managed to live with it. Perhaps they had some things to teach a fledgling, angry ace.

If the cabbie noticed her hands were bleeding, he didn't say anything. He took her to Kennedy.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

Night flight to Jerusalem. Hassidim and their sober, beautiful children, a collection of Hadassah women chattering like magpies. Zoe followed the line through the corridor into the plane, heading for the Promised Land. She looked for her seat number, thinking, they haven't stopped me yet. The FBI isn't here. The cops haven't delayed the departure. So far, so good.

The lighting was dim. She sat across the aisle from a fairly handsome man, somewhat thin, with black hair, dark eyes, and a nose that would have been lovely if it hadn't had a marked bend toward the left.

"Hello," the man said. He yawned, reached into his jacket pocket, and pulled out what looked to be at least two pounds of chocolate-covered espresso beans. "Want one? They're Kona."

"Thank you, no," Zoe said.

The man began to munch on a handful. "Barely had time to get these before we boarded. I woke up in a cab and found I was an escort for a tour group to Jerusalem. Odd. What about you, young lady? Care for a bean?" He offered the bag to the person in the seat next to Zoe, a small person who seemed absorbed in a book. Useful Phrases in Hebrew. The child read by the light cast by her own eyes.

"No thank you, Mr. Croyd."

Zoe looked across the aisle and saw black and white jackets in the gloom.

"Hi, Jan," Zoe said.

"Shalom." Jan wriggled in her seat and pressed against Zoe's side like a friendly puppy.

The Color of His Skin

Part 7

There should have been a voice - Puppetman, or that nagging Jiminy Cricket who had manifested after Puppetman had died. There should have been someone else in here.

There was only himself.

And he despised the company.

He had run himself unconscious. He remembered streaking into the city after the murder of Rudo, managing to get headed roughly north and east to where Jokertown offered some hope of refuge. Somewhere near midtown, he'd blacked out, though ne'd had the impression that the body continued running. At least it seemed that his new form seemed to have the knack of finding a safe haven while on automatic pilot. Gregg had no idea where he was other than that it was dark and very ... fragrant. He also had no idea when it was, but he had the feeling several days, at least, had passed. It seemed there was a price to his hyperactivity, paid in lost time.

"Hey!" he said into the darkness. There was no answer, inside or out, just a metallic echo of that piping, high voice. He shivered. He sniffed, and took in a cornucopia of odors: the sewers. He was ravenous, too.

He tried walking, splashing through the black effluvium. He found that he could tell when he was about to hit something - a head sense that seemed to emanate from the silly clown-nose ears. "You'd have made a great cave fish, Greggie," he told himself.

No answer.

He was one. Only one.

A few hundred yards and two turns later, he saw sunlight streaming through the holes of a sewer lid. The finger-size shafts of light seemed like the glow from a dozen searchlights after the darkness. There were rungs set in the walls; he dissolved and ate the lowest one, just to take the edge off the hunger, then clambered up, discovering in the process that the body's multitude of legs seemed to have small, clinging suckers on the bottom pads.

Okay. Climbing wasn't a problem.

Gregg pushed at the sewer lid with his hands. It didn't budge. Gregg sighed, thought of his hunger, and ralphed up an enormous glob that splattered on the underside of the metal. He let himself fall; a few moments later, the lid sagged like heated plastic and clattered down beside him. He took a few quick nibbles of the feast and headed up.

He was in an alley, and it was either just after dawn or very near evening. From the odd collection of shapes and forms he saw walking along the street, he was also in J-Town.

What do I do now? Where do I go?

Silence. Unnerving, insistent silence.

Gregg padded out to the street, but discovered quickly that he wasn't going to find the anonymity he expected. He'd thought that he'd just be one of many there, another mishappen body in the midden of Jokertown; he'd thought that even those who might recognize his form as Battle's would ignore him. But ...

Even with his myopic vision, Gregg could tell that he was attracting undue attention, even from those who looked stranger than he did. A four-armed woman just down the street jabbed a companion in his chitinous ribs and pointed in Gregg's direction. They were upwind; Gregg could smell an odd, sour scent to both of them that suddenly intensified. The couple quickly ducked into the nearest storefront. Puzzled, Gregg went to the window of the store, lifting the front end of his body up so that he could look in. He squinted. In soft focus through the smeared glass, he could see the four-armed woman at the public phone. Her companion was looking out; when he saw Gregg, he tapped the woman on the shoulder.

Gregg dropped down and hurried on, trying to convince himself that he was being paranoid. A block further down, an NYPD squad car passed him going the other way, obviously from Fort Freak since the patrolman driving had the face and hanging jowls of a bulldog. Gregg heard the car pull over behind him, smelled the exhaust and the sudden odor of stale cigarettes as the doors opened. He didn't look back, trying to convince himself that the cop wasn't stopping for him, but the jokers in front were suddenly moving aside, wide-eyed, and Gregg felt a prickling chill along his spine.

There was a scent of metal, of burnt gunpowder, of oil, of shoe leather, of tobacco.

"Battle!" a gruff voice like a talking St. Bernard growled. "You're under arrest. Stop right there."

Gregg thought about running, but he didn't know how to shift his body into hyperdrive without getting hit first. That didn't leave many good options, and Gregg suspected that if he was taken into Fort Freak he might end up being one of those suspects found accidentally dangling from the end of their belts in their cell.

At least he was still hungry. He turned around.

Bulldog-jowls had his gun out, standing just behind Gregg.

Gregg puked.

He had decent velocity and aim - in fact, he told himself, he was getting pretty damn good at this. The viscous globule splattered messily and noisily over Bulldog's gun hand. The officer recoiled involuntarily, staring in disbelief and disgust. The moment was enough. The short barrel of the official issue 9 mm. automatic drooped, the chamber sagged, and the vinyl grips were pressing against each other as the metal frame turned to tafly. The cop dropped the weapon as if it were molten, shaking his hand as what looked like cream of steel soup dripped from his unhurt fingers. Everyone watching was suddenly giving Gregg a wide, cautious berth.

Gregg didn't need a second invitation. He ran, nightmare-slow at first, but accelerating all the time. If Bulldog-jowls had had the inclination, he could have tackled Gregg before he moved five feet.

About three blocks down the street, the world finally shifted into slo-mo about him.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

It was days before he dared to come out from the sewers again. He let himself run until exhaustion slowed him more, even though this time he didn't black out. He returned to the alley and the open sewer hole, and let himself climb down in a half-stupor. Gregg didn't fight the weariness.

You're defeated. Done. As far as the authorities are concerned, you are George G. Battle, the murderer of Pan Rudo, and you can add assaulting a police officer and flight to avoid prosecution to the charges.

So he slept, so that he wouldn't have to think.

Part of him hoped that he'd never wake again.

The weather finally drove him out. His new body didn't seem to mind the cold as much as his old one, but the temperature suddenly dipped drastically. He woke up shivering, with icicles hanging from the gratings above him and everything around him frozen solid.

"This is no way to live, Gregg," he said aloud mostly to hear a voice, any voice. "You need a place to stay. You need money. You need to find Hannah and let her know what's going on."

It was snowing. The night air was luminous, and the sounds of the city were hushed and muffled. Gregg could smell the moisture and the cold like mint. He hesitated in the alley before going out onto the street.

Where to? Can't get to any of my funds - by now, my estate's been settled. If I'm seen, someone's liable to call the cops. The Oddity's apartment isn't far away, but if John's in charge he's liable to kill me before I get a chance to explain, especially after the last time. Finn might know where they are, but the clinic's not going to be safe. Who ...?

He knew.

His secretary, Jo Ann, lived on the edge of Jokertown near his old office. The brownstones crowded shoulder-to-shoulder might have looked impressive a century ago, when trees had lined the street and gaslights had shed their warm glow on the dark fronts. Now they simply looked shabby and tired. Gregg eased his body up the worn steps to the front door. He had to climb the wall to get to the doorbell. As soon as he heard it ringing, he dropped back to the stoop.

The inner door opened. A man looked out through the screen door, then down. The skin showing around the sweatshirt proclaiming THE ROX LIVES! was beaded like a Gila monster with swirling patterns of glossy orange, black, and red - actually rather striking, Gregg thought. The eyes, startlingly human, squinted as the man peered down at Gregg through the mesh. Gregg could smell supper in the warmth that cascaded from the house into the chill air: baked potatoes, carrots, chicken: none of it smelled as appetizing as the cheap aluminum screen door frame.

"What do you want?" The breath was freighted with beer.

"I need to talk with Jo Ann. You're Sam, right? Her husband?"

"Yeah." Sam was making no move to invite him inside. "Wait here ..." He turned and bellowed into the interior as he let the screen door close behind him. "Hey, Jo! Someone asking for you ..." Sam's voice trailed off as he went further back into the house. He heard Jo Ann answer, and the two of them talking for a moment. Then Jo Ann came to the door. She stared down at him through the screen.

"I know who you are," she said without preamble. She looked like she was ready to flee. Her hand stayed on the comforting thickness of the inside door.

"I know you think you do, but you're wrong," Gregg said quickly. "Please, I need to talk with you, Jo Ann."

"I aon't think so."

"You hid a tape recorder in the office after Hannah came, that first time. You always kept the extra key to the office in the front of the file drawer, in the folder marked 'Receipts.' You and Sam met on Black Queen Night; Father Squid introduced the two of you. You two got married the day after the Rox disappeared - you said that something good had to happen that day or you couldn't stand it."

"How do you know all that?" Jo Ann asked. Her voice was shaky and she kept looking over her shoulder to where Sam's bulk loomed under the ceiling light in the hallway. "What do you want, Battle?"

"I need to see Hannah and Father Squid. It's very important. And I know all about you because I'm not Battle. I'm Gregg Hartmann." He saw her fairy-tale witch's face twist then, and the rest of the words tumbled out in a rush, falling over themselves. "They had a jumper, Jo Ann. They jumped Battle or somebody into my body before the press conference. It wasn't me who said the Sharks didn't exist, and it wasn't me who was killed - "

"Fuck you," Jo Ann interrupted. "You tortured Gregg before you killed him, Battle. He could have told you anything. For that matter, you could be reading my mind - the wild card's given that gift to a dozen people I can think of. I'm not talking to you and I'm not telling you anything."

The door slammed shut on his explanation. Gregg stood there on his six legs, his mouth open under the clown nose. A few seconds later, Sam opened the door again. He had a baseball bat in his meaty hands. "Get the fuck out of here," he said. "I won't have you or anyone upsetting her. I won't turn any damn joker over to the law, no matter how much I despise them, and you probably did a good thing killing Rudo, but if I see you around here again, I will beat the shit out of your ugly goddamn body. You understand me?"

"I'm not Battle, damn it - " Gregg began.

Sam kicked open the screen door. The corner of it struck Gregg full in his cartoon-drawing face and sent instantaneous adrenaline surging through his body. He used the pain and the rush to catapult himself into a double-speed retreat.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

"Jube! Goddamn it, Jube ...!"

Gregg's voice sounded like a two-year old with an adenoid problem; the cursing sounded almost laughable. He had spent several nights lingering in the shadows of Jokertown, staying away from strangers and hoping to find someone he knew, someone he felt halfway safe approaching. There weren't too many on that list, but seeing the walrus-shape of Jube lumbering by on an otherwise-empty street was a relief. Jube knew everybody and everything. Jube could help him.

The joker had turned at the sound of Gregg's voice, his eyes trapped in the blue-black, rubbery skin peering at the darkness where Gregg huddled between two closed and boarded storefronts.

"If you're who I think you are," Jube said slowly, "I don't understand why you're still hanging around Jokertown."

"I'm not Battle."

Jube took a careful step away from him and stopped. He moved his papers from one arm to the other and pushed his porkpie hat back on his head. In the light of the streetlamp, bright orange passionflowers wrestled on the aching blue backdrop of his short-sleeved shirt. "I doubt there are two yellow caterpillars around here," Jube said. He was backing away again, his voice sounding falsely jovial. "Though I remember a joke along those lines: What'd the doctor say to the joker woman after she gave birth to triplets?"

"Jube, I'm not going to hurt you. I'm not Battle."

Jube looked like he was about to bolt, but he waited. "I'm actually Gregg Hartmann," Gregg continued. "I was jumped into this body. I need to get into contact with Hannah Davis and Father Squid. It's very important."

Jube blinked. He took another step away. "Please," Gregg said.

"I heard that was what you were telling people, a couple months ago, back before you killed Rudo," Jube said. "That's a pretty unbelievable tale, considering no one's been jumped in years, not since the Rox went down. Not that it matters. I was never much impressed by Gregg Hartmann. I wasn't surprised that he sold us out at the end."

"Damn it, he - I didn't!" The word came out as a screech and Jube jumped backward, a few papers scattering to the ground. "It wasn't me. I'd already been jumped."

Disbelief pulled at the thick skin of Jube's face. He was backing away again, and Gregg scuttled out from his hiding place before the joker decided to turn and run. "Jube, you have to believe me. What I have to tell them is urgent. I need - "

They both saw the squad car turn the corner and head down the street toward them at the same moment. Jube looked once at Gregg, then at the cruiser. His hand started to lift. "Jube, no," Gregg said, but the joker stepped out from the sidewalk, waving the cops down.

Gregg didn't wait to see any more. He fled.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

"Ellen?"

"Who are you? This is an unlisted number - who gave it to you?"

"Ellen, please, just listen for a minute. When the Hartmann estate was settled, you were the prime beneficiary. There was also a safety-deposit box at First Manhattan Trust - about $20,000 worth of bonds in there. The will specifically mentioned an old grandfather clock that Gregg had kept as part of the divorce settlement, which was to go back to you. You and Gregg bought the clock in Germany during the WHO tour, just before Berlin - Sarah Morgenstern was along, too, remember? She was the one who saw the clock first, sitting in the dusty rear corner of that old antique shop."

"How do you know all this? Who are you?"

"Ellen, I'm telling you all this so you'll believe me. I know what was in the will because I wrote it. I'm Gregg, Ellen. Gregg. I need your help. I know I don't have any right to ask you, but ... Ellen? Ellen? Hello ...?"

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

Furs was a long-time companion. The lion-maned joker had been on various of Gregg's staffs for years, had been campaign manager for New York when Gregg had run for president. Even though he'd drifted from politics to general media consultation in the years since, he still had worked with Gregg on various joker's rights committees and organizations, which was why Gregg had gone to him for help with the Peregrine show.

Furs knew him. Furs had connections.

For Jokertown, Furs lived upscale. The apartment building had a doorman, a burly joker with long, rubbery arms and a decidedly suspicious demeanor. Gregg decided not to risk the front door, not after his previous experiences. He waited until night, scaling the side wall of the building like a large yellow limpet, peering through windows until he found Fur's fourth-story apartment. He could see a television tossing light at the walls, but no one was watching and the sound was off. The window to the living room was unlocked; it opened when Gregg pulled it up. He scrambled over the sill and into the dark room with a thump, the curtains swirling. He looked around the room - Furs was here; a beer, the head still foaming, stood on the coffee table in front of the couch, and Gregg could smell his presence somewhere close by. Gregg moved into the room.

"Stop right there."

The voice came from the bedroom. Gregg turned to see Furs standing in the open doorway, sighting down the short barrel of a handgun gripped in both hands.

"Furs," Gregg said softly. "I'm not going to hurt you. I need to talk." As Gregg took a step toward Furs, the fingers tightened around the weapon.

"I know who you are. I also know what you can do to this." Furs waggled the gun. "Take another step, and I won't wait for you to get close enough. Now, back up into the corner over there. That's it - nice and slow."

As Gregg retreated, Furs moved into the room, going over to the phone. His gaze still fixed on Gregg; he reached down for the receiver. "Furs, please listen."

"You're a Shark, Battle - "

"I'm not - " Gregg started to interrupt, but his tiny, high voice had no hope of carrying against Furs's booming bass. "Shut up. You're a murderer. You helped destroy the Rox. I have nothing to say to you." Gregg couldn't see well enough to tell what he was dialing, but Furs only hit three numbers: 911, then. He was calling in the cops.

Gregg wasn't going to wait for that. "Furs," he said desperately, and then words simply failed him. There was nothing to say. Furs wasn't going to believe him any more than the others he'd tried.

Furs let go of the gun with one hand, to pick up the receiver. With the motion, Gregg leapt for the open window.

The sound of the gunshot was deafening. Something hot and powerful slashed across his rear body segment, the impact making Gregg's body tumble. There was no pain, only the sensation of heat and the horrible smell of gunpowder, and then the blinding surge as metahuman automatic reflexes kicked in. He heard himself screaming, and found himself tearing around the perimeter of the living room as a stunned Furs whirled hopelessly behind him.

Gregg saw the window on the second circuit. He turned in mid-air and half-fell, half-scrambled down the side of the building.

He ran through the streets of Jokertown like a demented banshee until he blacked out.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

He came back to consciousness, as he expected, back in the sewers. His body had healed, though there was a long scar in the yellow skin. It was warmer, at least. He wondered how much time had gone by, and then realized that he didn't care. In the sewers, it was easy to feel despair.

"I can't live this way," he told the dripping walls. "I won't live this way."

The walls declined to answer.

"I don't want to be a joker," he said into the dripping, odoriferous darkness. Only the varied, pungent smells of the city's waste returned to him. He almost wished that the voice would sound in his head scolding him and mocking him - at least it would be something.

But he sat in unyielding darkness and silence, and he knew there was no refuge for him - not with Hannah or anyone else. If he stayed in this body, he would spend the rest of his life running. The murder of Rudo would always be hanging over him: that was the lesson he'd painfully learned over the last weeks. He would spend the rest of his life in hiding, or he would find himself in the hands of the criminal justice system - for a murder he didn't commit, for the death of a man who wasn't Pan Rudo, but some stranger. In the maelstrom of his despair, Gregg could think of only one way to get out of the body in which he found himself trapped - a way he'd already tried unsuccessfully once before.

This time, though, he would use the one commodity that might purchase his freedom.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

"I need to talk to Brandon van Renssaeler."

"Who is this calling, please?"

"Tell him.... Hell, tell him it's Sirhan Sirhan."

"Sirhan - ? Who - ?"

"Just tell him. Please."

Gregg drummed several of his feet on the telephone stand next to the couch. He kept his eye on the door, ready to bolt for the open window if he heard anything. Luckily for Gregg, it seemed that a whole slew of people in upper floor apartments didn't expect burglars to climb sheer walls.

"This is Brandon van Renssaeler," the phone squawked tinnily on the table. Gregg leaned down toward it. "Who the hell is this?"

"Gregg Hartmann."

The retort came a breath too late. "Gregg Hartmann is dead, and you're a sick person, whoever you are."

"If you really believed that, you'd have already hung up, Brandon. Come on, my friend, we've known each other for years. You want details about you that only I could know? I can give them to you. But I'm sure your Shark friends have already given you my new description. After all, this was Battle's body first."

"Listen, I don't know who you are or what you're talking about, but I can't talk to you right now. If you'd like to come to the office ..."

"Not a chance, Brandon. Remember, I'm wanted for Pan's murder - but it wasn't Pan, was it? The real Pan has a nice shiny new body, just like Durand and Faneuil. Well, I want one too."

"I don't know what you're talking about. Pan Rudo is dead."

"Just shut up and listen. We've both been involved in politics, so we know about compromises. Your little group's on the run, but you've managed a few victories lately; in fact, things are swinging your way again, and the last thing you want is to lose the momentum. The nat public's tired of the violence, and they're willing to make the jokers scapegoats if that means an end to it - I saw in the paper where Barnett has a new anti-joker bill on his desk for signing. Right now the person who's the main thorn in your side is Hannah Davis. The publicity Hannah and her group are getting is the only thing keeping Congress from passing the full-blown Quarantine Regulations. You took me out, but Hannah hasn't eased off the pressure on you, and I know the woman well enough to know that she's not ever going to do that."

Gregg paused, taking a breath and hating himself. Brandon didn't interrupt. Gregg could hear the man's breath, waiting. "She wouldn't, but I would," Gregg said at last.

"What do you mean?"

"You're interested now, aren't you? Look at it from my perspective. The truth is that I was never involved in this because of any moral conviction or idealism. This never was my fight. Right now I'm stuck in a joker's body and, frankly, I don't like it. I want to be normal. How's this for a proposition? Let's play your game once again: you jump me into Hannah's body and Hannah into this one; let her take the rap for Rudo. Maybe she'll even get killed resisting arrest, right? As Hannah, I can finish the job you people started with my old body - confess that poor murdered Gregg Hartmann was right, that the evidence was manufactured and the whole Shark conspiracy was a fraud. Once that's over, you can jump me into a new body of my choice and we'll call it even."

Silence.

"Brandon? Jesus Christ, Brandon, have some compassion. We're friends, remember? I don't care any more about the Sharks or Hannah or any of it. I just don't want to be a goddamn freak." Gregg could hear his voice break with the word, almost a sob. He took a deep breath.

"This ... this isn't a decision I can make on my own."

"I didn't figure it was."

"How can I get in touch with you?"

"You can't." The feeling of hunger was washing over Gregg again. The metal table lamp smelled positively luscious. "Brandon - don't fuck this up. If I want, I can blow the Sharks entirely out of the water with everything I know. I've got absolutely nothing to lose. I'll turn myself in publicly and loudly, and eventually the truth will come out - all of it, Brandon, including stuff you'd rather no one knew. You don't want that - and I don't want to be a joker the rest of my life. Let's work together. I'll call you. Tomorrow at four."

"That's too soon. I ... I need at least two weeks. There's people I need to get in touch with, and they're ... hard to contact."

Gregg sighed. He had to find Hannah, somehow, in any case. That would take time. "Two weeks then," Gregg said. "You'll hear from me."

Gregg hung up before van Renssaeler could reply.

You're vile, Greggie. You're soiled beyond redemption.

Gregg waited for the voice, but the accusation never came. He told himself that he should be happy - he was free, free to do whatever he wanted or needed to do, free for the first time since he'd been infected with the virus. There was no Puppetman to foul him up with its demands, no Jiminy Cricket to nag at him from the other side. Gregg was on his own, he was whole. He could do whatever was needed and nothing, nothing inside him would disagree.

Gregg sat in the dark for an hour wondering why he felt so fucking miserable.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

There was only one problem: finding Hannah.

At one time, Gregg would have known exactly where to start. There had been one person who knew everything that happened in Jokertown, and who would sell that information for the right price: Chrysalis. But Chrysalis was long dead, and the person who had inherited her mantle - Charles Dutton - wasn't someone Gregg felt comfortable approaching. He had no leverage with Dutton.

So there had to be another way to approach it.

Luckily, the sewers went everywhere....