Suicide Kings

7

Wednesday,

December 2

President’s Hotel

Dar es Salaam, Tanzania

Jerusha woke in her room at the President’s Hotel at what the room clock insisted was 5:30 a.m., but to her body felt more like the middle of the night. She could hear Wally snoring in the adjoining room like a venting steam locomotive. She lay there for several minutes trying to will herself back to sleep, but her mind was racing with all that she needed to do, with worry about the plane flight with Finch, with even more worry about how they’d cross Lake Tanganyika and what might be waiting for them in the PPA.

Judging by Wally’s snoring, he was worrying about nothing at all. She envied him that.

Jerusha threw aside the covers. Twenty minutes later, she was showered and dressed and striding out the lobby doors onto the embassy campus. The American Embassy compound was a dreary fortress: a series of rectilinear concrete buildings set behind a high security wall. To Jerusha it looked more like a prison than anything else. The ambassador had told them at dinner that this was the third embassy site they’d had in Dar es Salaam, that the campus sat on the site of what had been called the Old Drive-In Cinema, and droned on how the land gave them so much more room to expand at need.

The desk clerk had told her where the baobab tree was on the grounds; she headed in that direction. Rain had soaked the grounds overnight, and the grass was steaming as the day’s heat rose, but for the moment, the air was cool enough that the humidity wasn’t a bother.

She found the baobab easily. Up close, the tree was even more impressive than the one she’d glimpsed on the street, and even stranger. The trunk was massive-it would have taken a dozen people holding outstretched arms to encircle it. The trunk was furrowed and dented, branching above into nearly leafless main branches that diverged quickly into a tangled maze of branches and twigs. Birds were nesting in the hollows of the tree: several burst up into the air as she stroked the trunk. She saw a lizard sliding quickly around the trunk away from her, and dark squirrels chattered angrily at her from above.

There were pods hanging down from some of the branches, and a few on the ground at Jerusha’s feet. She picked one up: a gourd roughly the size and shape of a football, the outside covering leathery and hard. It was heavy in her hands.

“Monkey fruit,” someone said, and Jerusha turned to see a man in the uniform of the embassy staff stepping out of an electric golf cart a few yards away, the back stuffed not with clubs but with spades and rakes and trimmers. “That’s what some people call it.” His voice was heavily accented with Kiswahili or one of the other local languages, a lilt that Jerusha found charming. “Baobab fruit is very nourishing. The animals love to eat it: monkeys, baboons, elephants, even antelopes. They break open the gourds to eat the fruit and the seeds are discarded or end up in their droppings, and so new baobabs come up.”

“The seeds are in here?” Jerusha hefted the gourd.

The man nodded. His skin was the color of thick cocoa, but the black hair was liberally salted with grey. “You’re the one grows plants?” he asked.

It was Jerusha’s turn to nod. “My name’s Jerusha Carter,” she said. “Sometimes they call me Gardener.”

“I’m Ibada. I keep the grounds for the embassy. Toss that here.” He held out his hand, and Jerusha underhanded the gourd to him. He slid a long knife from a sheath in his belt and pressed the heavy blade into the gourd, splitting it open. Jerusha could see pulpy fruit inside, laced with large seeds. “The baobab is the Tree of Life in Swahili,” he said as he cut the fruit open. “That one there, it’s an old, old one. It’s been growing since before the birth of your Christ.”

Jerusha looked at the tree again, trying to imagine all that history that had passed since it first sprouted. It was impossible. “They look so… strange.”

“One tale says that the gods gave each of the animals a seed to plant. Poor baobab was the last, and it was given to the stupid jackal, who planted the seed upside down so that the roots came out on top.” He laughed, and Jerusha had to laugh with him. He was pulling seeds from the pulp, gathering them into one large palm. “Tree of life, remember? You’ll find the leaves used as a vegetable. Kuka, they’re called-my mother used to make kuka soup. Here, look…”

He handed one of the halves of the gourd to Jerusha and poked a finger into the pulp. “You know cream of tartar? That originally came from this fruit. Down in the market, you can buy dried pulp covered with sugar; it’s called bungha. Or you can mix it with milk or porridge. Very versatile.” He took the gourd from her again, took her hands, and poured a dozen of the seeds into her cupped palms. “Those-grind them down and you can use them to thicken soup, or roast them, or grind them to get oil. But I think you will use them for growing, eh?” He smiled at her.

“Thank you, Ibada,” she said. The seeds were cool and wet, and she could feel the great trees inside them, waiting to spring forth. “Later,” she whispered to them. She opened a pouch of her seed belt and let them fall inside. The pouch felt heavy and comforting.

“This is why you came to the tree, no?” he asked. “You could feel the call of the Great Mother in her?”

“Yes.” Jerusha brushed a hand over the thick trunk. A heat seemed to answer her, welling up from the ground below. “I think I could.”

“Hey, Jerusha!” The call was a loud bellow. Both of them looked back toward the buildings of the embassy. Wally was striding toward them, waving.

Ibada nodded, grinning again. “I feel that call too, sometimes. You and the metal man, you’re not here just to see the animals or take pretty pictures of Kilimanjaro?”

“No.”

“Then you might need the baobab,” he said. “Use the seeds well, Gardener.”

“I will.”

Ibada lowered his head, almost as if he were bowing to her. He began walking back to the electric cart. Wally passed him with a suspicious glance. “He bothering you?”

“No. And I can take care of myself.”

Wally had the grace to look abashed. “Sorry,” he said. The cart whined as Ibada left with a wave. “They said the car would be ready in an hour to take us to that Finch feller. I knocked on your door to tell you, but you didn’t answer. The feller at the desk said you were out here, so…” His voice trailed off into silence. He was looking up at the baobab behind Jerusha. “Cripes, that’s one big tree,” he said. There was a distinct note of awe in his voice. Somehow that made Jerusha feel better.

“Yes, it is,” Jerusha told him. “C’mon, we should get ready.”

Kawi Airport

Dar es Salaam, Tanzania

Finch had said it would take at least a couple of hours to get them properly provisioned; they wanted to leave for Lake Tanganyika in the early afternoon. He took them to a… well, it wasn’t really a store. Not that Wally could tell. It seemed more like a depot, or small warehouse, not far from the hangar where Finch kept his plane.

A stuffy, mildewy smell wafted out of the mud-brick building when Finch unlocked the door. Wally and Jerusha followed him inside. There was no electricity; the only illumination was the mustard-colored light leaking through grimy windows, except in places where the windowpanes were broken. Rows of shelves and piles of crates filled the space. Many shelves were empty, but those that weren’t amounted to lots of gear. Camping gear, by the look of it.

“Wow!” said Wally. “This is all yours?”

“Finders keepers,” said Finch. “Been flying in and outta the bush for thirty years. People get lost, people leave things behind, people get one glimpse of the jungle and go screamin’ back to their hotel. I find it, take it here, and then sell it to lucky blokes like you.”

Jerusha said, “This stuff isn’t stolen, is it?”

“Bite your tongue!” Air whooshed through the pilot’s flared nostrils. “I’m an honest businessman.”

Wally edged in front of Jerusha again, just in case. “Hey, she’s just asking, is all.”

“Just so we’re clear, mate. I don’t steal, but I don’t run a charity here, either.”

“Huh?”

Finch rolled those tiny little eyes again. “You’re gonna pay for what you take, right?”

“Oh, sure, you betcha.”

“Thing is,” said Finch, “I’m sure the Committee is good for it, but I can’t wait around six months for a check to arrive from the United States. Not many banks around here that would honor it anyway, right?” He chortled, slapped Wally on the back. Most people flinched after doing that, but not Finch; it looked like he had pretty thick skin. The clang echoed through the warehouse.

“Right, I guess. So, um, what does that mean?”

“It means I run an honest cash-only business.”

Wally looked at Jerusha. She shrugged. What else could they do?

The outfitting trip turned out to be an expedition in its own right. Though she’d offended him with her question, Jerusha won a bit of grudging respect from Finch once they got down to business. She had done her homework, and had compiled a list on the way over from New York. Wally knew they were doing this on the spur of the moment, but he had no idea just how unprepared they’d been.

He’d been camping up in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area. Preparing for a trip like that was nothing compared to this.

It was one heck of a list: Packs. Safari vests (with extra pockets). Biological water filtration bottles. Chlorine tablets. Painkillers; antibiotics; antidiarrhea medicine; rehydration salts. Pocketknives; machetes, for hacking through brush; compasses; toilet paper; rope. Flashlights; electric lanterns; a handheld GPS unit. Lots of batteries. Sleeping bags. Tents.

For Jerusha they also bought insect repellent, mosquito netting, and antimalarial tablets. Wally hadn’t been bitten by a bug since his card turned. Jerusha got a wide-brimmed hat, too. Sunburn wasn’t much of a danger for Wally, but he bought a pith helmet for the fun of it. He’d always wanted a pith helmet, ever since watching Tarzan the Ape Man (the original, not the remake). It would keep the sweat and rain out of his eyes.

Finch made a big deal about footwear. It had to be comfortable, he said, but it also had to let your feet breathe. Wally decided to go barefoot. It would be more comfortable than anything else, and besides, Finch didn’t have any secondhand boots or hiking sandals that wouldn’t get shredded by Wally’s iron feet. As long as he was extra careful about rust, going barefoot wouldn’t be a problem.

Finch made an even bigger deal about the satellite phone. “Don’t lose this bloody phone,” he said, shaking it in their faces. “This is your lifeline to the outside world. Your cell phones will be worthless in the jungle.” He gave them a long lecture explaining how to use the phone. Wally tried to follow as best he could, but he secretly hoped Jerusha was getting it.

They unrolled one sleeping bag after another, trying to find a pair that hadn’t been afflicted with mildew. Finch asked Wally, “Committee does this to you a lot, does it?”

“Does what?”

“Sends you off to the arse end of the world without any provisions.” Finch’s ears twitched. “Seems like a bloody awful group to work for, if you ask me.”

“Uh, no. I mean, it happens sometimes. But not all the time.”

Jerusha chimed in. “Our trip to the lake is an emergency. There wasn’t time to get properly outfitted back in the States. We had to get here as quickly as we could.”

“Ah, right. Right. So you said, so you said.” Finch didn’t sound entirely convinced.

After two hours, they had almost everything they needed. Jerusha haggled with Finch, so in the end it cost them just under half of the cash they’d pooled.

Then it was time to leave. They bundled up their gear and followed Finch outside. Wally offered to carry Jerusha’s pack for her, but she didn’t seem to like that.

Finch disappeared into the hangar. Wally lingered outside with Jerusha. “I don’t think he believes us,” he said. “What should we do?”

Jerusha frowned. She looked tired. “What can we do? Stick to our story until he gets us to the lake.”

“Oy, tin man!” Finch pointed at Wally. “Get over here. Help me push her out.”

Wally set his pack down next to Jerusha. Little eddies of red earth swirled around him as he clanged over to the hangar. The dust clung to the sweat on his legs; it looked like the worst case of rust he’d ever had.

Wally had never flown in such a small airplane, even back in Egypt. He’d flown in helicopters, but those were UN things, and still larger than this plane. He cupped his hands to a window glass and peered inside. It looked like it could seat maybe four or five, or fewer with gear.

“Grab her like this,” said Finch, “gently.” He leaned on the diagonal strut that braced the wing to the fuselage. Looking at Wally’s hands, he added, “And don’t scratch her.”

Together they eased the plane outside. Finch made a musky smell when he exerted himself. Wally could have moved the plane himself, but it looked kinda fragile.

Actually… once they got it outside, in the sunlight, it looked really fragile. Long cracks spiderwebbed a couple of the windows; the fuselage had silvery gouges where the white paint had been scraped away; the wings had pits and dings and one thing that looked like a homemade patch. And the huge landing gear appeared to be more patch than tire.

“Hey, Mr. Finch? Is this safe?”

Finch’s nostrils flared again. “Tourists,” he muttered.

Jackson Square

New Orleans, Louisiana

CNN was broadcasting it live. So was every other major news outlet. Juliet told Michelle it was being streamed live on the Internet.

Michelle had been bubbling for almost twelve hours now. She was still as huge as she had been, but she could tell she was getting lighter.

The bubbles were pouring from her hands. As many bubbles as she could release. She kept them dense enough that they didn’t just pop, but light enough to float away. Just making a bunch of soap bubbles wouldn’t do, and every other variation she had thought of had risks. She’d tried to make the bubbles somewhat pop-able; it was impossible to have the kind of control over them that she wanted. Even now, even hours since she’d begun bubbling, the power was still clawing through her. It was exhausting trying to keep it in check.

On the TV there was a long shot of the temple with the stream of bubbles rising from it. Then there were overhead shots, but these were on a loop since they’d shut down the Louis B. Armstrong Airport and closed New Orleans to all air traffic. Now they were cutting away to viewer video.

In every frame they showed, pretty, iridescent bubbles floated and bobbed like a child’s playthings. They went up, up, up and then floated here and there, carried by the prevailing winds, until they slowly started to fall back to earth.

It was raining bubbles in New Orleans.

The TV showed a long shot of a young man in front of the Super Dome, preening for the camera. “Yeah, I know she saved the city, but damn, couldn’t she have done this bubble thing somewhere else?”

The camera cut to another shot. A harried-looking woman held a toddler on her hip.

“I’ve got babies to think about. You don’t know what’s in those things. Oh, they look pretty enough, but have you tried to keep a baby away from one of them? They put everything in their mouths. I saw American Hero. She can make those things blow up.”

Michelle yelled at the TV. “ These aren’t blowing up! They’re not supposed to!”

“See, that’s part of your damn problem, Bubbles.” Joey turned down the TV sound. “You worry about what fuckers think about you. Me? I don’t care.”

“Did you tell Juliet about us?” Michelle blurted. Stupid, stupid, stupid, she thought.

Joey gave her an annoyed look. “Fuck no. Christ on a crutch, why would I do somethin’ like that?”

“I don’t know. Maybe you wanted to unburden yourself. Feel less guilty.”

“I don’t feel guilty about nothin’ I do.”

“Then why didn’t you tell her?”

“You know why,” Joey replied. “She sat here for a year waiting for you to wake up. She kept your parents away long as she fucking could, considerin’ she don’t have no rights. And she did it expecting nothin’.” Joey shook her head. “You and me, we’re alike. We’re used to having to look out for ourselves. Juliet, she don’t know how to do that. She loves you and that means putting everything else aside to take care of you.”

“I suppose you know more about my girlfriend than I do,” Michelle snapped.

“Yeah, I do.” Joey slouched down in her chair. Juliet had gone out for coffee and beignets and it was the first time Michelle and Joey had been alone.

“Oh, my God. You’re sleeping with her!”

“Jesus, you are one crazy bitch. No, but it ain’t because I didn’t want to. You just don’t know a thing about Ink, do you? Fuck me all to hell.” Joey jumped up from her chair and grabbed her gimme cap. “I’m gonna go see if she needs some help with those doughnuts.”

Michelle fumed. She wanted to run after Joey. To tell her she was wrong. That she did so understand Juliet. But she was still too big. And then there were those damn bubbles. They went on and on and on…

Jokertown

Manhattan, New York

The famous bowery wild Card Dime Museum was a short ride on the subway. Ellen spent the time looking out the windows at the speed-blurred concrete and the darkness. She had a slight smile on her face, and a sense of peace that was almost postcoital, though Bugsy knew for a fact it wasn’t.

He knew what it was. “How’s Nick?” he asked.

Ellen took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “The hat itself is a little the worse for wear. It’s strange having him back again. I still can’t quite…”

Ellen’s voice got thick for a moment. She hadn’t expected to get Nick back. He’d died before she’d met him, and with the physical locus she used to channel him gone, she’d thought he was gone again. She’d been in the middle of mourning him.

Now he was back, and she had spent most of the last day communing with him-bringing him up-to-date, sharing confidences, no doubt telling funny stories about Bugsy and Aliyah and that one time when the FedEx guy opened the apartment door when they were in flagrante in the kitchen.

There was something basically unnerving about hearing the same mouth you kissed when you were making time with your girl laughing about you in a man’s voice.

The subway reached their station, and Bugsy and Cameo ascended into the light.

Jokertown made up a section of Manhattan small enough to walk across in half a morning. It was also a different world. In the pale sun of early morning, two jokers jogged slowly down the street, one half mastodon half insect, the other with the body of a beautiful woman and the head of an oversized horse fly. But they were talking about Tara Reid’s latest fashion blunder, so maybe it wasn’t such a different world after all.

On one of the city buses that stopped to let out its cargo of freaks and misfits, a teenage girl was weeping. The cell phone pressed to her ear let out squeaks and buzzes, making words in no known language. An old man still drunk from the previous night urinated in an alley, his penis talking in a high, gargling voice of its own about imagined sexual conquests. A bat the size of a rottweiler with the face of a twelve-year-old Chinese girl flapped desperately, trying to catch up with a distant school bus. The coffee shops filled with the morning press of men, women, and who-the-hell-knew all grabbing a cup of joe and a corn muffin on their way to work while a neon-blue man in the back booth sucked down eight breakfasts, the plates stacking up beside him higher than his head.

Bugsy and Cameo crossed in front of a slow-moving delivery truck and went into the museum. The place smelled like old french fries and mildew, but it looked like the best secondhand shop ever. Display cases were filled with oddments and curios. A waxwork Peregrine stood in the corner in the same pose and outfit as the copy of Aces framed behind her. The joker at the counter could have been a man or a woman. The long face was something between a melted candle and road rash. Thick, ropey arms spilled out of a Yankees jersey. “Cameo!” it said.

“Jason,” Ellen said, smiling. “It’s been a while. How’s Annie?”

“The same,” the joker said, spreading his splayed, tumor-budding hands in a gesture that meant Women. Whatcha gonna do? “What can we do you for today?”

“My friend here is doing some research. People’s Park riot.”

“The what?”

“Apparently there was a riot in People’s Park in 1969,” Bugsy said.

“Could have been,” the joker agreed. “I was two, so chances are I wouldn’t remember.”

“Thomas Marion Douglas was there,” Ellen said.

“The Lizard King? Oh, fuck yeah. We’ve got crates of stuff on him.” The joker squinted, scratched himself, and nodded. “None of that’s on display anymore. The whole sixties rock thing we don’t put up unless there’s a revival or something going on. But… yeah. I think we’ve maybe got something back in the newsreels, too.”

“Anything you’ve got would be great,” Ellen said.

The joker held up a disjointed finger. One minute. He disappeared into the shadowy back of the museum. Bugsy walked around slowly, taking in the hundreds of small items and pictures. A poster for Golden Boy, the movie where the ace had gotten his name back before he got tangled up with McCarthy. Weird to think it was the same guy Bugsy had seen in Hollywood two years before. He looked just the same. Still pictures from the Rox War. A cheesy pot-metal action figure of The Great and Powerful Turtle, the grooves in the top making it look like a hand grenade cut along its length.

“I love this place,” Ellen said.

A dress Water Lily had worn. A copy of an arrest warrant for Fortunato. A metallic green feather off one of Dr. Tachyon’s hats. A solid two dozen pictures along one wall, each of them different, and all of them Croyd Crenson. “It’s a trip,” Bugsy said.

The joker stepped out of the shadows and motioned them in. The dim back office was stuffed to the ceiling with cardboard boxes and piles of paper. A ten-inch color monitor perched on the desk. It showed an image of a newscaster in the pale, washed-out colors that Bugsy associated with 1970s television.

“That’s the footage I was thinking about,” the joker said. “I’ve got a wash towel from his last concert in the box there. We got it off eBay a couple years ago, so it might be bullshit, but it’s the only thing I’m sure he’d have worn after the People’s Park thing.”

“You’re great, Jason,” Ellen said.

“I try,” the joker said with a sloping, awkward grin.

Bugsy squatted down, found the remote, and started the video playing. There he was. Thomas Marion Douglas. He was shouting at a crowd, exhorting them. A line of National Guardsmen stood shoulder to shoulder, facing him. This was before the advent of the mirrored face guard, so Bugsy could make out the nervous expressions on the soldiers.

Something loud happened. The reporter ducked, and the camera spun. A Volkswagen Bug was in flames. The camera pulled back to an armored personnel carrier, Thomas Marion Douglas on the upper deck, twisting the barrel as if it were nothing. The Browning came off the APC, and Douglas held it up over his head, bending it almost double.

“Watch this part,” the joker said. “This is great.”

The Lizard King bent down and hauled someone in a uniform out of the carrier. The poor nat kicked his legs in the air, and the Lizard King went down.

“Wait!” Bugsy said, poking at the buttons on the remote. “What happened?”

The joker lifted the remote from his hands and the images streamed backward. Frame by frame, they went through it. The burning car. The broken APC. The captain plucked out like the good bits of an oyster. And then the blurred arc of something moving fast. Thomas Marion Douglas’s head flew forward and to the right, and he went down like he was boneless.

The man who stood where the Lizard King had been wore work overalls and a hard hat. A long iron wrench was in his hand. The guy was huge, but seemed to be shrinking. “Go home!” the previous generation’s Hardhat called. “Go home now. Is over. You must not fight no more.”

It looked like the big guy was weeping. Someone shouted something Bugsy couldn’t make out, and the previous Hardhat went from maudlin to enraged in under a second.

“That’s not good,” Jason the joker said. But just as the guy with the big wrench was about to start in on the crowd, he went down too, tripped by Thomas Marion Douglas. The Lizard King got up as Hardhat regained his feet. The picture was jumping back and forth now, the cameraman torn between a great story and the threat of becoming collateral damage. Bugsy leaned forward. The Lizard King, blood running down his forehead and into his eyes, took a solid swing straight to the ribs and went down again. Hardhat stood over him, ready to crush the man’s skull. The wrench rose, and then something-a chain, maybe-wrapped around it and spun Hardhat to face a new enemy.

Tom Weathers. Bugsy stopped the frame.

He looked familiar, but not quite the same. Slender, with blond hair down to his shoulders, wearing only a pair of blue jeans and a saucer-sized peace medallion on a chain, but this was absolutely unquestionably the Radical. The man who had threatened New Orleans, who had killed enemy and ally alike for almost two decades.

But Bugsy couldn’t help thinking that the Tom Weathers on the screen looked… not younger, precisely. Softer. Kinder. Less ravingly homicidal.

He started the tape again. Hardhat, the Radical, and the Lizard King carried on their battle until it ended with Hardhat on the ground, reduced to merely human size and weeping, the Radical and the Lizard King in a victory embrace that was almost sexual.

“That’s all we’ve got,” Jason said.

“Okay,” Cameo said. “Ready to meet the Lizard King?”

Bugsy nodded. Cameo took the old grey terry-cloth hand towel from Jason the joker’s outstretched hand, settled it around her neck like a prize-fighter, and closed her eyes. Bugsy could see the change almost at once. She slouched into her chair, the angle of her shoulders changing, her head slipping back on her neck like a petulant schoolboy. He knew that Thomas Marion Douglas would be the one to open her eyes.

Apparently Ellen spent the two or three silent minutes prepping the Lizard King, because he didn’t seem surprised.

“I have risen, man,” Tom Douglas said in a slow, theatrical drawl. “That is not dead which can eternal lie, and in strange eons, even death may die.”

“Yeah, okay. So my name’s Jonathan,” Bugsy said. “I was wondering if you could tell me a little bit about the Radical. From the People’s Park riot?”

Tom Douglas shook his head as if he expected his hair to be longer and leaned even farther back and lower in his chair. Arrogance and contempt came off him in waves. “He’s still fighting the good fight, is he? Cool for him, man. He was righteous.”

“How well did you know him?” Bugsy asked.

The Lizard King shook his head. The movement was languorous, as if designed to stall just for the joy of stalling. “Just that one night, man. Just that one bright, shining moment. We showed the Man that we would not be intimidated. The people would not be pushed down. We stood the National Guard and their aces on their asses, man. And afterward, it was love, sweet love until the dawn.”

Bugsy blinked, mentally recalculating. “So you and the Radical were… ah… lovers?”

“That make you uptight, man?” the Lizard King asked with a smile.

“Well, not in a queers-are-yucky way. I just never really thought of Tom Weathers as a sexual object.”

“Everyone was with everyone, man. No jealousy, no possessiveness, no hang-ups. We were free and wild and full of love, man. But no, Radical and me were the power and the light. People were drawn to us. There was too much of us not to share around. Radical, he spent most of his night with a chick called Saffron… no, no. Sunflower. That was it. Seemed really into her.”

“And after that night,” Bugsy said. “Did he keep hanging out with her in particular?”

“There was no after that night, man. There was that one authentic moment, and then nothing. Dude came when he was needed and vanished with the dawn.”

“You never saw him again?”

“Before or since.”

“Great,” Bugsy said.

Thomas Marion Douglas leaned forward, shaping Ellen’s face into a smoky glower that Bugsy recognized from the covers of classic rock albums. “The thing was, we weren’t afraid of death, man. We embraced it. We became free, and everything around us was transformed by our power. After us, nothing was the same. Nothing.”

“Two words,” Bugsy said.

The Lizard King lifted his chin, accepting the implicit dare.

“Britney Spears,” Bugsy said, and then while the Thomas Marion Douglas looked confused, he lifted the towel from Ellen’s neck and returned her to herself.

“Well,” she said. “That could have been more useful.”

“We’ve got Sunflower to work with, at least.”

“Couldn’t have been more than eight or nine million girls called that in sixty-nine,” Ellen said.

“It’s something,” he said. Then, looking at the limp towel in his hand, “So that guy was the edgy, dangerous sex symbol of a generation, huh?”

“Apparently so,” Ellen said.

“Guess you had to be there.”

Kawi Airfield

Tanzania

The plane had creaked as Wally stepped aboard, the suspension visibly sagging. Jerusha eyed the rust-spotted and patched fuselage with suspicion. “How old is this plane?” she asked Finch.

He grinned. “Ah, this crate’s as old as me, and just as mean,” he said. “She’s a Cessna 206, made in 1964-a good year, all around. We’re both perfectly serviceable, lady, if you catch my drift.” He winked one tiny eye at her, and his glance drifted down the length of her body.

“Can it carry Wally?”

“Your metal man, you mean? Sure. How much can the bloke weigh?”

She said nothing, but climbed into the plane and took one of the four seats in the cabin, in front of a pile of boxes and crates lashed in with webbing and straps. Finch climbed into the pilot’s seat, and the propeller on the plane’s nose spun into invisibility as the engine coughed, sputtered, and roared. They clattered down the dirt runway, bouncing as Jerusha held tightly to the seat arms. As the plane finally lifted into the air and began to climb, Jerusha could see the sapphire water of the Zanzibar Strait, and off the horizon, the distance-blued green hump of the island itself. Below, the port city spread out, revealing all of its complexity and life.

“Where’s Mount Kilimanjaro?” Wally asked, shouting against the roar of the plane’s engine as they lifted from the airstrip, wings dipping left as Finch set them on a westerly course. “That’s in Tanzania too, right?”

Finch snorted. He pointed out the right window of the aircraft. “Kilimanjaro’s that way about six hundred kilometers: north, not west.”

“Nuts,” Wally said. He looked disappointed.

“Maybe on the way back we can make a detour,” Jerusha told him. “With Lucien.”

Wally brightened a little. “That’d be swell,” he said. “I hope we can.”

“So do I,” she told him, but the churning of her stomach belied her confidence.

As they slid westward under the high sun, the shadow of the plane below moved initially across well-greened land, but as they moved farther from the coast, the landscape below became more arid, tan earth dotted with the green of occasional stands of trees and brush, interrupted at intervals by the winding paths of streams. An hour or so into the flight, the ground began to rise and crinkle underneath them, steep green-clad mountains and deep valleys sliding underneath their wings. “Mongoro Region,” Finch called out, pointing down. “Beautiful, if you like mountains.”

Jerusha nodded. Staring down, she realized that it would have taken long days to cross Tanzania by car as she’d first planned, following the winding, rough roads carved into this wild land. The mountains eventually drifted off behind them, and they were flying over flat savannah plain. Finch pointed out herds of wildebeest, and buzzed low above elephants and giraffes. Wally was entranced, staring out the windows of the cabin and pointing.

In the late afternoon, Finch set the plane down near a small village. “Delivery,” he said, jerking a thumb back toward the crates. “We’ll be spending the night here…”

The village-a Masai boma, according to Finch-was a collection of mud-brick adobe huts. The children hung behind the adults at first, staring at Wally mostly. By the time they’d off-loaded the plane, the kids had overcome their shyness: they darted out to tap Wally’s metallic skin and dart away again, coming back to hit him harder and laugh at the sound. They plucked at Jerusha’s clothes too, but it was Wally who intrigued them, and Wally seemed to enjoy their attention. He’d make false lunges toward them, roaring when they ran away shrieking and enduring their pestering. He showed them Lucien’s picture, telling them (in English that they couldn’t understand) how he was going to visit Lucien, who was his friend. One of them kicked a soccer ball in Wally’s direction, and he booted it high and long, the children exclaiming and shouting as they ran after it.

Jerusha watched, laughing with them. She reached into her seed pack and found an orange seed; she let it drop, drawing on the life within so that in a few minutes an orange tree had bloomed, with ripe fruit hanging on the branches.

The village smelled of orange rinds that night.

Special Camp Mulele

Guit District, South Sudan

The Caliphate of Arabia

“Hey!” Tom shouted. “Hey! Knock that shit off!”

The two ignored him. One was the stocky kid Leucrotta, the other the Lagos guttersnipe with the Brit accent, Charles Abidemi, the one called the Wrecker, or sometimes ASBO, after some incomprehensible Limey bullshit.

Tom already knew who started it. Poor skinny Charlie wouldn’t start shit with anybody, although he might make your Austin Mini explode a one-kilogram chunk matter at a time once he got clear of you. But Leucrotta was your typical adolescent male: a dick with legs. Which, given that he was an ace, was a very dangerous dick indeed.

Tom hauled Leucrotta off by the collar of his outsized Simba Brigade camo blouse just as it quit being outsized anymore. As a giant hyena-form chest exploded all the buttons off the front and blew out the sleeves, Tom tossed the rampaging were-beast up just far enough to transfer his grip from a collar that had just turned into a ribbon to bristly scruff.

“What the hell is wrong with you little shits? Don’t you know there’s a revolution on?” Tom spoke French. After spending six or seven years in the Congo, he could speak it just about as well as he chose to. He found that slangy with a deliberately nasty americain accent usually had the best effect. It wasn’t like anybody was going to mouth off to him about his bad pronunciation. Not twice.

Of course, then he had to repeat it in his native tongue. Son of an Igbo soldier who immediately abandoned his Yoruba mum in a Lagos slum, Charlie had spent most of his short, miserable life in a housing estate in a not-so-trendy part of the London suburb of Brixton, getting his narrow ass kicked by Pakistani Muslim gangs, poor white gangs, Yardie gangs, and gangs of England-born blacks who despised immigrant Africans. He understood nothing but English. When the Limeys deported them Charlie’s single mother hauled him back to Lagos, which got promptly overrun by the Simba Brigades. She’d jumped at the chance to sell her troublesome son to Alicia Nshombo’s recruiters for a couple hundred bucks. But he wasn’t the fucking problem.

As if to prove the point Leucrotta snapped at Tom. Only his ace reflexes let Tom shove him out to arm’s length as drooling black jaws clacked shut. They’d have taken his face off as cleanly as any sad-sack Egyptian tanker’s, Uber -ace or no. “You little fuck,” he shouted. “Try that shit on me? You need to cool off, man.” And he flicked the four hundred pounds of spotted furious monster a casual two hundred yards through the air with a flip of his wrist. Trailing a howl of despair, Leucrotta landed in the middle of a swamp channel with a colossal brown splash.

About half the couple dozen kids hanging around by the tents broke out clapping. Tom gave them a sour smile and stomped off to confront the supposed authority figures who had made themselves oh-so-scarce during the dustup.

The special-unit camp, set well apart from the rest of the PPA army in the Bahr al-Ghazal and surrounded with coils of razor tape that glittered evilly in the white-hot sun, was as depressing a patch of perpetually soggy alkali clay, barbed-wire scrub, sorry-ass grass, and hyperactive mosquitoes as Tom had encountered in all his years spent knocking around the very least desirable real estate in the whole Third World. What the hell possessed me to take my day off in fucking Brazil, anyway? he asked himself furiously. Next time I’m going to goddamn Greenland.

The adult supervisors on duty stood aside in a clump: four surly overfed Congolese nurses from the National Health Service and a pair of Leopard Men commandos in their spotted cammies. All wore web belts with Tasers and Mace prominently displayed. The commandos wore holsters with 9mm SIG P226 handguns, too.

“What the fuck?” Tom said, spreading his hands palm up. “That asshole Leucrotta is throwing his weight around. You can’t be dumb enough not to know how that’s gonna fly: either he’s gonna waste somebody or somebody’s gonna waste him. Either way the People’s Paradise loses a valuable asset. You need to keep these kids in line. They’re freaked out and pissed off. They’re gonna tear each other apart without Siraj having to lift his little finger!”

“They are like animals anyway,” one of the nurses said. “Let them settle their pecking order themselves.”

“At least exercise some adult moral guidance,” he said in exasperation. “Try persuasion. Lead by example.”

“If the great leader will show us the way,” the shorter of the Leopard Men, Achille, said.

Tom walked two steps back into the sun. Then he swung back around and jabbed a finger at the handlers. “All right. I’ll do that. I’ll do that little thing. Hey, kids. Listen up.”

Back came Leucrotta from his bath, human, slouching, and squelching. Tom favored him with a hot blue glare.

“Got control of yourself now, Fido?”

The boy glared. “Uh-huh.”

“If you ever pull shit like that again with me I’ll take you up for a nice little visit to orbit. For about five minutes. Do you understand? Say yes.”

“Oui,” said Leucrotta sullenly.

Tom nodded. “Smart answer. Let’s hope that means you’re getting smart.” He turned to the others. They stared at him wide-eyed. He saw awe on some faces and dread on others, but no hint of hostility. That was a relief; some of them could threaten even him. I’m Hell’s scoutmaster, here, he thought. Fuck me. He drew a deep breath. “All right. Just what are we doing here in the middle of the nastiest swamp God never made? Can anybody tell me that?”

“We’re helping liberate the oppressed people of the South Sudan,” a boy said.

“Yeah,” Tom said, nodding. “That’s the official line, isn’t it? And hey, that’s true. That is what you’re doing. Don’t forget it. And what else?”

“We’re trying to keep from dying.” The speaker was a stick-thin girl in ridiculously baggy Simba BDUs. She was about thirteen, extremely dark-skinned and threatening to become pretty one day. Her hair was cut short to her head. Despite strict embargoes on “unnecessary” personal possessions she sported a pair of huge red plastic hoop earrings and matching glasses with big round lenses.

“You show some respect to your betters, little freak,” bellowed the stoutest of the Health Service matrons, a slab-faced woman with wire glasses named Monique.

Tom opened his mouth to invite Monique to butt the hell out. Before he could speak, inky Darkness began to dance around the skinny girl like black flames, then leaped suddenly toward the matron. Screeching, she turned and fled as her fellow matrons stampeded out of the way.

“Now, that wasn’t nice, was it, Candace?” Tom asked.

The Darkness shot her nonexistent hips and stuck out her underlip in a cute prepubescent pout. “We’re not here to be nice, non? And anyway, she oppresses us. Or are we not meant to share in the Liberation?”

Candace Sessou was a bright and sassy teenybopper girl from a middle-class neighborhood of the city of Kinkala, near the former Brazzaville part of Kongoville in the southwest of what had been the Republic of the Congo before Nshombo and Tom liberated it. He was constantly surprised she’d survived to make it out of the labs alive. She had a problem with authority.

So did Tom.

“You are,” he told the group. “The Revolution is for everybody. It’s about liberating everybody. The people of the world. The people of the South Sudan. You.”

The handlers shot him barbed looks, as if he were giving the children license to eat them all alive. None of them had the guts to say anything. They were bullies, all of them. But he couldn’t very well let the kid aces go all Lord of the Flies on them, either. Time to try getting their twisted little minds right.

“But the Revolution is all about discipline, too,” he told the children. “About putting aside your selfish little ego trips and squabbles. See, the way the Man keeps the people down is divide and conquer. So what you need to do is pull together. Do your parts for the Revolution, for all the other kids suffering oppression around the world, and most of all, for each other. Can you dig it?”

“Yeah!” They shot to their feet, throwing their little fists up in the air on skinny arms.

“That’s the spirit. That’s my brothers and sisters. The Man can’t stand against commitment like that. You kids will save the world!” He let them soak that up. Then he said, “Now listen up. We got a job to do. And this time you kids are gonna make all the adults in the world sit up and take notice.”