What Fire Cannot Burn

I'm alive for a reason.

Actually, a couple of reasons depending on what kind of survival you're talking about.

I don't mean that with the cheap, feel-good populist existentialism daytime TV talk show hosts love to hand out: You're alive because even though you eat too much fast food and can't point to your own state capital on a map, we're all really unique and individual and specia-blah, blah, blah. I mean: in the world we live, with what I do, there's a reason I've remained among the living. A reason I've survived.

Regarding my physical endurance, science is my guardian angel. Science by way of an O'Dwyer VLe. An all-electronic handgun that can fire a four-shot burst in just 1/500 of a second. Ordnance that is designed, specifically, to deal with the problem.

Funny. Kinda. It's that easy to turn the struggle for persistence into catchphrases. "The problem." "After San Francisco." "Freak hunting."

Too bad it's not as easy to solve the problem as it is to label it.

Nothing's ever easy.

Not in this world.

This world is hard, it's bleak, it's unsure, it is filled with risk. It's fat with weak sisters who look for obvious morals, comfortable politics, and clutch themselves hoping that hope alone will deliver them soft resolutions to hard situations.

Sorry.

And the world's got people like. me. People who do, rather than subsist because of the deeds of others.

And people who do what I do; we're good as dead.

Accepting that, accepting my mortality: It's the other reason I survive.

Venice, California.

Venice, California, was beachfront land bought up by Abott Kinney and Francis Ryan at the end of the 1800s.

Venice, California, was an oceanfront attraction the two men built acre by acre, canal by canal, that matrixed the vistas of Rome with an American boardwalk.

Venice, California, was. long time ago, a tourist attraction. A place to ride amusement rides on a pier, go to an aquarium.

Then the pier burned down. Then oil got discovered percolating under the ground. Then the city of LA did a land grab, snatched Venice for its own just like LA did with everything it wanted. Water from up north. The movie business from out East. Venice was like that. Worth stealing. A sweet piece of real estate.

Things change.

Turned out there wasn't all that much oil in Venice, California.

So the city of LA lost interest in Venice, California, let her fall just about to pieces same as an ex-mistress tossed aside 'cause it'd grown tiresome. And when it didn't fall apart completely on its own, the city tore down more than five hundred historic buildings.

Five hundred.

LA didn't care.

Progress doesn't own any sympathy. Why should the city?

Venice, California, became kind of a shithole for bangers and dealers. Wannabes when they gave up and quit wanting to be anything but what they were which wasn't much. It was a haven for illegals coming up from Mexico who couldn't get to anywhere better than Venice, California.

But, real slow, Venice turned itself around. Some.

Just because it was cheap didn't mean decent people couldn't end up there. Decent, people need affordable housing as much as bangers. More than bangers. Bangers aren't usually long-term customers.

With reasonable renting rates, a laconic beach vibe, into Venice flooded artists both visual and unique as well as crappy.

And Venice gladly took in the oddball, mainstream hating artistes because like a lonely boy who was otherwise without affection, Venice was really happy for anybody who came to be with her.

Venice, California, was like that; mostly about the little guy or the bohemian, the actor or the failed male beefcake who ends up pumping iron down at the beach, spending his considerable free time getting bigger for trigger's sake. Venice said to them: Forget about Brentwood or West Hollywood or Sherman Oaks or any of the parts of the city where people aspire to reside. Come here, live here. We'll take you as you are. Happy that you came, we will offer you little stress.

Things change.

Mostly, what, changes, property values go up.

At some point the little guy, the little guy in Venice- the artist: and the bohemian-has gotta get with the fact he's sitting on prime, oceanfront real estate. The little guy's gotta get with the program. The program: get outta the way.

The program: That's when the developers move in. The malls and complexes go up. The little guy is invited to move to Van Nuys or East LA or anywhere that wasn't here where we've gotta put up a mini-mall with a sixteen-screen movie multiplex.

Most, most little guys-small boutique shop owners, mom-and-pop businesspeople-they took the hint, sold out, went their way.

No fighting things.

Progress's got no sympathy.

But in Venice, California, against the odds, there was still the occasional coffee shop that wasn't a Starbucks, the bookstore that wasn't a B&N or a subsidiary thereof. Every now and then there was someplace other than a Gap, Inc., LLC, trying to make a stand, trying to offer people some other kind of joint where they could buy retail. And there was even a bank on the corner of Rose and Main that wasn't part of some massive, interstate fiduciary corporation. The tellers worked through lunch and the loan officers-David and Carol and Rick-looked at more than your TRW before deciding if you were an acceptable risk. ATM fees were under two bucks. Diane Woodward had been doing her banking there since her divorce-she'd left her stay-at-home-dad husband for a partner at her firm-had forced her to make some new financial arrangements. Regularly, Mike Anderson strollered over with his two-and-a-half-year-old daughter before stopping by the newsstand to pick up a copy of Chocolate Beauties. And there was old Mr. Roth, the sweet, septuagenarian widower whom life never seemed to get the best of though life never shared with him the best of anything. The bank was, in a dry of far too many millions of people, where you could go for a minute, do your business, get a smile in return that wasn't based on the size of your deposit. Wasn't charged against your account.

It was also the kind of place, like a lot of banks in Los Angeles, where a couple of guys- White. Gaunt. Sweaty with nerves, sweaty on the tail end of a hard meth jag that was crashing- walked in, stood for a second, stood for a second as their waning high gave them fake courage, then yanked nine-mils from beneath their jackets.

The usual bank robbery confluence of events followed.

Sweaty Guys: "Get down! Everybody get the fuck on the floor!"

Nobody moved.

"Get the fuck on the fucking floor now!"

No movement. Minds were processing what was happening-men, men with guns. Crazy-looking men waving their gafs around-while bodies waited for further instructions.

Except for the security guard. The security guard knew what was going on. The security guard was also getting paid minimum. The security guard went down like the class whore on prom night, hugged the floor. He never even bothered going for the gun he hadn't used in the year and a half since he'd capped his two-week private security training course.

"Get fucking down!"

Shots fired in the air.

Screaming. Crying. The mental/physical debate was over. People, finally, got down.

Time wasted. Time wasted by the Sweaty Guys getting the shouldabeen relatively manageable situation managed.

Old days, you couldn't take that kind of time to get a job handled. Old days, too much time wasted, all of a sudden you'd have the Adjudicator punching his way into the bank through a wall. The Sweaty Guys' guns? Useless. Bullets were like spitballs to the Adjudicator's kind. Then the Adjudicator would've been all over your sweaty ass.

That was the difference between then and now. Now there was time to scream at people just trying to do their banking to get the F down. Fire off a few shots if they didn't get the F down.

These days, when all you had to worry about were outgunned LAPD cops, seemed like there was all the time in the world for bad things to happen.

Unless you're jagged on crank. You're hopped on tina. Then time's got a way of being trippy. unnervy. No matter how fast things happen, they don't happen fast enough.

For Mike Anderson, with his baby in the stroller, it took a swipe of a pistol to the head to hurry up his downward progress. Wasn't really much of a blow. Mike Anderson more or less went with the swing, went to the ground on his own and covered his daughter knowing, beneath his body, she'd be safe.

David, Carol, Rick: still screaming, but learning well from the pistol-whipping demonstration the rewards of noncooperation. They pressed themselves on the tile behind and below their desks. Would have pressed themselves through the floor if they could have. The tellers went down behind the counter.

In the whole of the bank only three were standing. The Sweaty Guys. Mr. Roth.

Mr. Roth was old, didn't move so quick. Mr. Roth's eyes were probably bad and his hearing most likely shot. There was a real chance Mr. Roth didn't know, didn't really understand, what was happening. For him it must've been like trying to figure out what's going on when you're watching the world from under five feet of Jell-O. The «fucks» screamed, the pistol whips given: It was all lost on him.

"Wha… what's-"

"Get down!"

"I, I don't-"

"Get the fuck down!"

It could be read in the Sweaty Guys' dilated eyes. Loss of control was on the horizon. Mike Henderson saw it.

From where he was on the floor Mike Henderson, sensing the badness to come, had a variation on a single thought: I gotta do something. No matter his daughter was there, no matter doing something wasn't… wasn't right, wasn't safe, he could real easy see the sum of the equation before him: Old man doesn't move fast enough, jagged thugs don't react rationally. Bullets fly. Old guy dies.

"Get down on the fuck-"

"I don't… I can't-"

From the rest in the bank a modified Greek chorus chanting in frightened wails: "Please, Mr. Roth! Get down, Mr. Roth!"

One of the Sweaty Guys worked the slide on. his gun.

Should've done that before he hit the bank. Anyway, a round was chambered. He was, finally, ready for business.

"Goddamn it, fucker! Get the fuck-"

Consequences didn't matter.

It was coming to that.

Consequences didn't matter for Mike Henderson. A life mattered. Not his own. Mike Henderson had to-

"Told you to get the fuck down!"

A gun yelled twice. Deafeningly loud in the tight space.

The screams, the screams from David and Carol and Rick, from Diane and especially from the security guard, spiked and died. The bank was filled with a bed of sobbing.

All looked.

Even Mr. Roth, still standing, looked and saw the two sizable holes in his chest.

A couple more screams from someone at the sight, the sight of Mr. Roth with those holes.

The two guys, the Sweaty Guys, they weren't high anymore. Not so much so. Shooting someone can do that to you. Sober you up. Shooting someone in California where they execute people for such things will slap the fuzziness straight out of you.

Mr. Roth looked up, looked from his wounds to the formerly Sweaty Guys.

And then the wounds in Mr. Roth's chest, which were not wounds, but truly holes- tunnels opened to allow the passing of a couple of slugs-self-sealed.

And then Mr. Roth gave a smile. A smile that stretched, stretched itself across his face. The corners of his lips seeming to… not seeming to. They did. The corners of his lips touched the base of his ears. Teeth filled his mouth, swelled to fill his mouth. Twisted. They went jagged. Looked more like ivory claws then dentition.

For a second Mr. Roth's smile… it quivered. It quivered. For a second it was like Mr. Roth's smile couldn't contain its glee, its perverted anticipation.

And then Mr. Roth's smile, his jaw, had at the two used-to-be/now-again Sweaty Guys who'd tried to rob a bank and had only gotten as far as shooting at a seemingly old man. Mr. Roth's smile bit at them, tore at them, ripped, ripped and ripped them. Did not slow for the shrieking, the screaming, the spraying blood and flying flesh. And meat.

And Mr. Roth's smile accomplished all this mayhem while Mr. Roth's body remained a good thirty feet clear of the slaughter.

Somewhere along the way darkness got a bad rap, got itself associated with fear and malevolence. Bad things only happen in the dark.

Perception, not truth.

The dark was safe and warm. People calmed and closed their eyes and slept in the dark. The dark was as solacing as a womb. It was coming out of darkness into the light of the day when you could see just how fucked-up the world was.

The APC doors opened. Harsh white sunlight hacked its way into the vehicle's bay.

Soledad held up a hand against it, against the light. But there was little blocking of the sun to be done.

Every time.

Every time she spilled out of an APC on a call Soledad felt like she was dropping out of a Huey into a hot LZ deep in Charlie territory or exiting a

Bradley for some foot patrol in Fallujah, dodging random IEDs.

It was an assumptive feeling. She'd never done either of those: urban pacification or hit an LZ. Hadn't even been in the military.

But Soledad was pretty sure the feeling of dread, of imminent unavoidable death that came with taking either of those locales was the same as rolling out of her APC. The same, 'cept for the fact that across the street, in Soledad's war zone, was a Quiznos where she'd once had an exceptionally adequate lunch. On the far comer was a computer store where she'd had her PowerBook worked on three times because the first two times the twenty-something the joint passed off as a tech expert had not one idea in hell what he was doing. In Soledad's war the battleground was here. Not a desert city, not a rice paddy halfway around the world. Here; her city. And the enemy didn't, wear a uniform or in any particular way identify itself as a combatant or insurgent. The enemy looked like Soledad, or the kid working at the copy shop, or the mother of two out running with her jogging stroller.

The enemy looked normal.

The enemy, however normal-looking, was anything but.

LAPD squads surrounded the bank at Main and Rose. Uniformed cops used the squads for cover. A growing crowd across the street from the police action stood out in the open. Overhead news birds from Channels 4,7 and 9. Circling low. Making communications difficult. Ensuring the viewing public would get "live team coverage" if anybody got killed.

The shit was, most definitely, about to get rolling.

The uniformed Officer in Charge waved Soledad over. Her element was right on her heels. Her element, Pacific MTac, she'd inherited in a command, shuffle when its most recent sergeant was KIAed. It'd only been his third call on point. Third time's the charm.

Pacific MTac: Eddi Aoki and Jim Whitaker on HKs, Jesus Alcala, a probee, working a Benelli. Alcala was a baby MTac, but he'd proven himself on four previous calls. Without fear, with smarts and deadly aim on the Benelli. A3! that and the fact Manhattan Beach had one less freak walking around courtesy of a one-ounce slug was proof enough of Alcala's skills.

Eddi was a known quantity. Her, Soledad; they'd survived going head-to-head-no pun- with a telepath. Eddi'd come back from a nearly shattered knee to get a slot on an element. She was a cop Soledad had no problem giving her back to. Whitaker.

Whitaker had been transferred off Central MTac just prior to Central MTac being shredded by that telepath. Previously a little mousy, a little nervous, in the eight months since his almost near-death experience, Whitaker had gone at the job with a vengeance and without hesitation. BAMF twice in that amount of time. Knowing that you dodged a bullet by avoiding a telepath is a life-changing experience. Especially when it's just luck that kept you from standing in the spot where others died.

Soledad landed at the QIC, squatted, asked;

"What's the deal?"

"Two-eleven in progress. Turns out one of the civvies in the bank is a freak. Tore the shit out of the perps."

"Got an ID on the freak?"

"Won't do you much good. It's a shape-shifter."

Eddi, a noise of disgust, then: "Fucking shape-shifters."

Alcala: "One freak better than another?" "Some are worse than the rest."

"Mouths shut, ears open." Soledad was all business.

The business at hand: getting intel, staying alive. To the OIC: "What do you know?"

"The guy's name was Sidney Roth. Ran him with DMV. Age listed was sixty-eight, widower. No priors. Was a quiet guy."

"The bad ones usually are. It's inside?"

The OIC gave Soledad. a nod to the affirmative. "The civvies are accounted for. Perps are dead. Black-and-whites responding to the silent alarm had the perimeter locked down before anyone got out."

"Description of the freak."

"Told you, it's a-"

"Just give me height and weight."

"Five-eleven, around one-seventy. That's from the civilians." The OSC's meaning: Civvies don't generally make for great witnesses. "So it could go a little either way."

Across the street: Commotion. Loud voices.

Uniformed cops, on edge, overanxious, turned, took aim with their sidearms. Would've sent bullets into the lookie-lous if they'd had just, a touch more jitter to them.

The lookie-lous: Their ranks had swelled by a handful of protesters. Voices raised, placards waving. Homemade signs. The sum total of their message: Fuck the Police. Let Freaks Be.

Alcala, re: the protesters: "You believe that shit? We're manning the line, and they're acting like we're the damn problem?"

"Forget 'em." Soledad was plain with her order.

Whitaker was snide with his suggestion: "How about we take a couple of them along, see if they're still freak lovers when some mutie's trying to rip their-"

"How about we concentrate on the job?" Soledad didn't have the time, didn't have the patience for her element venting. "It's the Westside. What do you expect but the liberals are going to turn out? Lucky Susan Sarandon's not here."

"I like Susan Sarandon."

Soledad looked to Eddi.

Eddi's smirk: Yeah. Really.

Still, Soledad was pretty sure Eddi was just messing with her. Much as Soledad respected the girl, there was no getting on with Eddi.

To the OIC: "Got a floor plan?"

"Bank manager drew one up." Hipping open his duty log, showing a poor sketch to Soledad: "Not much to it. About twenty-five hundred square feet total. Desk, chairs on the north side just past the door. Tellers' windows, manager's office back here…»

"Vault open?"

"Vault was open."

Soledad, facetious with herself: That'd be fun. Trying to corner a freak that could shift its shape just about any way it pleased within the restricted confines of the vault. It'd be like taking a swan dive into a steel coffin. She hoped, Soledad hoped it wouldn't come to that. She hoped they could nail the thing in the relative open. About all she didn't hope for was that the freak was already gone.

Other cops, the uniformed cops who'd be staying on the outside hidden behind their cruisers, guns pointed at the bank; probably they were hoping the thing had split. Hoping that they could make it through the day without having to deal with a mutie. But that's why they were, would never be anything but beat cops. Uniforms. Good men all. But when it came time to really step up they'd rather step behind their cars. By the time Soledad, her element… by the time any cop goes MTac they'd long since given up wishful notions of avoidance and turned their fancy to the hope that one day freaks would be relegated to a portion of a museum right next to T. Rex and they as MTacs would get the chance to play a significant part in the extinction event.

From her belt Soledad slipped a yellow-marked bullet clip. Slid it into the back of her modified O'Dwyer. Her gun. The gun. The OIC watched her actions with the same mythic reverence for Prometheus grabbing fire.

Soledad to her element: "Listen up!" Her voice punched straight from the gut. The tone: This is it. The meaning: Pay attention and live. Maybe. "The space is tight. Be aware, and don't get yourself between the target and a gun. We go two-by. I'll give the Civil, but this one's already got a body count. You got the shot, take the shot."

No inducement for questions. Far as Soledad cared, at this stage of things there had better not be any.

One thing more: "The safe word is 'cardigan.' Got it? Cardigan."

The safe word was the first word that popped into Soledad's head. The randomness didn't diminish its importance. Not when the freak you were going after could real easy mimic, among other things, an MTac; reshape itself as the cop who was supposed to have your back. It was good to have a way, a word, to separate the real from the imposter. This call: cardigan.

Soledad called for a mike check, heard her element count off in her earpiece.

Then they were moving, moving for the bank. As always, this situation, this call, different than the last call. Different freak with different abilities. And even freaks with similar abilities came wrapped in different psyches. Like snowflakes, no two alike. Like real deadly snowflakes. But every call, in some ways, was the same. MTacs vs. some kind of thing. The MTacs with their guns, the thing with heat vision. The MTacs with one-ounce slugs, the thing bulletproof. Four MTacs, the thing stronger than a hundred men.

The MTacs. A thing that could, with as little as a thought, steal their lives.

And for any MTac, no matter how many calls they'd been on, how many freaks they'd previously chalked… no matter how many times they're BAMF. Every now and again a little self-prepping is required.

Soledad, to herself, but loud in her head: I'm not dying today.

The sound track, the sound that came with action for the MTacs creeping into the bank, was the sound of each other's breath-short, sharp- coming through their earpieces.

The sight: Chairs overturned. Deposit slips spilled on the cream tile floor along with phones, brochures to inform customers in four-color gloss about direct deposit and certificates of deposit and free checking that actually hit you harder with jacked-up service fees.

Some cash.

Some cash just lying among bloody, shredded bodies. Body parts. What was left of the two sweaty guys. The place was empty of people.

Probably, it still held a freak

So now it was about looking. Looking for movement where there shouldn't be any. A sign of life where there should only be inanimation. The freak could've melded with the wall. Easy. Obvious. How about that shitty hotel-quality painting hung on one side of the space? Could a shape-shifter duplicate something that bad?

The spray of deposit slips on the floor?

Clever.

One of the dead sweaty guys: Was that really a freak in hiding?

Very clever.

A kiosk? A chair? The ashtray stand…?

This; this is why, like Eddi'd said, shape-shifters were worse than other freaks. They're tricky. They play dirty.

Yeah but so could Soledad…

Soledad, to her element: "I'm giving the Civil."

Soledad yelled into the bank: "This is the police. You are in violation of an Executive Order from the president of the United States. You are ordered to surrender yourself immediately or face potentially lethal force!" The Civil-short for "Civil Rights"-was the freak version of getting Mirandized; a little speech mandated by the Supreme Court after a constitutional challenge of police powers by the ACLU for a metanormal rights group. "Freak fuckers" to the majority of Americans. The 5–4 decision required cops to recite the Civil when executing a warrant on anyone with "unique, metanormal and/or supernormal abilities not found among the common populace of the human race." The freak fuckers had complained that the cops weren't giving freaks a fair shot at surrendering. They'd complained that the cops with their guns that fired nothing more than bullets weren't giving freaks-flamethrowing, self-electrifying, supersizing freaks-an opportunity to give themselves up. So now Soledad had to scream the incredibly, legalistically stupid phrase "or face potentially lethal force" at the top of her lungs, doing the double duty of both embarrassing herself and warning the freaks: "Here we come!"

From outside the bank, from across the street, Soledad could hear the group of freak fuckers chanting for freak rights.

In the bank nothing. Relative quiet. Just the breathing of the cops in each other's earpiece.

Most times, with ornery freaks and muties, the lead officer delivering the Civil didn't get past "This is the po-" before fire or frozen air or animated metal came rushing for them, rushing to kill them.

Fine with most MTacs. They didn't care about freaks' so-called rights. They only wanted something to shoot at.

Alcala, checking the space: "Oughta just blow all this joint up."

No one responded to the statement.

"Oughta just-"

Soledad: "Heard you."

"Blow it up. Freak's in here, freak's dead."

"Good plan," Eddi miked back. "Every time somebody reports a freak, call in an air strike. Nuke the block."

"Just saying-"

"Not getting jitters, are you?"

She wasn't looking, but Soledad would take the bet Eddi was wearing that grin of hers. "Aoki, Alcala, shut up."

Whitaker kept out of things, kept quiet. Kept his eyes on the space all around. Not scared. Not even anxious, having settled in his head that today, probably, was the day he was going to die. If not this call, then the next. Or the next. Sooner or later he was going down. Wasn't fatalism. It was, to Whitaker, being realistic. In anticipation of the moment itself, the prayer repeated in his head: Jesus, all I want before I go, let me chalk one more stinking freak.

Soledad's voice in all their earpieces: "Moving forward."

She crab-walked for the center of the space. Out into the open. Trying to use cover was without point. Cover could be the freak. Get too close to the kiosk, it could reach out and choke you. The garbage can could jump up and real quick beat you to death.

Whitaker kept near to Soledad. Aoki, Alcala covered. All of them, guns reedy, fingers brushing triggers. The four black eyes of their weapons sweeping the space, looking without compassion. Looking for something to kill.

The. doors of the bank were closed. If the AC was on, Soledad couldn't feel it. The air was full with the stink of the dead Sweaty Guys already going stale. To wrap things quickly would be a pleasure to the senses.

Soledad: "Rising up."

The element held their ground, did a slow sweep with their weapons. Black eyes searching.

Soledad stood from her crouch, had a look around. Nothing.

Not nothing. Too many things. Too many ordinary-seeming accessories of life that could be a homicidal, blood-crazy shape-shifter.

To her element: "C'mon up."

Aoki, Alcala and Whitaker stood.

Fingers brushing triggers, black eyes searching…

Soledad, inching forward, inching…

Something wasn't right. Something had to not be right. That something would be the freak: A section of wall misaligned. A chair where one shouldn't be.

Something had to not be…

Inching forward, inching…

Black eyes…

Sweat on her forehead, dripping across her brow. Why the hell would somebody shut down the AC?

The floor got tacky. Sweaty Guy blood under foot.

Something had to…

"Eddi…»

"Yeah, Soledad?"

'Tell me what you know about shape-shifters." Soledad didn't need a primer on transmogrifying freaks. What she needed: a voice in her head to help her focus, to walk her through facts, hip her to what she wasn't seeing.

"They have an evolved genetic ability to dissimulate. Every aspect of them malleable. They're able to alter shape, size…»

The carpet? The mutual fund display? Something…

"Not mass. Mass has to be maintained."

The loan area behind Eddi. The desks? The chairs?

"Altering mass would require a discharge of energy. Basically, the thing would explode." The desk? The chairs? Four desks. Three chairs. There were three loan officers. It wasn't right.

"Eddi." "Yeah?"

"Move!"

She did. With speed, Eddi dropped low, twisted clear from Soledad's line of fire.

Soledad gave one tug to her O'Dwyer's trigger. Four slugs. All dead on target. All ripping, shrieking for the desk without a chair.

The desk moved. Its middle section dropped, torqued, pulled itself from the bullets' path.

And the party got started.

Alcala went to work with the Benelli, a hell's roar ahead of each one-ounce slug auto fired. Devastating most times. This time… The freak sucked itself in, stretched itself out. Took the form of something like a serpent. The slugs missed their intended target. One hit another desk, turned it into a vapor of wood chips, pulped paper. Another punched a fist-sized defect into a wall.

The freak, still shape of a serpent, sprouted tendrils. Lashed one for Soledad. She took it square to the face. Felt, tasted blood in her mouth from teeth driven through the flesh of her cheek.

Soledad went backward, went down, kept up the grip on her gun.

I'm not dying today.

Springing up, looking, assessing…

The situation: The freak had another tendril noosed around Alcala's neck, had his feet off the ground. His face already going from red to blue.

Eddi's HK went hot, but she maintained control. Fired in bursts. Regulated her ammo. In a gunfight with a freak what you did not want, you did not want to have to take a time-out to reload. Staying alive was hard enough. Running out of bullets? That kind of miscalculation got you killed.

The freak snapped its tendril, the one gripping Alcala. Alcala took air. Sailed for Eddi. Eddi had enough quick to her to hold her fire, keep from putting slugs in Alcala. Not enough quick to keep from taking Alcala full to her chest. One hundred ninety-six pounds of man. Fifteen miles an hour. Felt like catching a Hyundai.

Eddi's chestplate kept her ribs from busting. Eddi's chestplate shattered Alcala's wrist on impact. Both their weapons were lost as their bodies played a limp game of twister across the floor.

Soledad up, moving. Moving for the action. Two jerks on her trigger. Eight of her special slugs added to Whitaker's rhythmic bursts. A spray of blood signaled a hit on the freak. Whitaker's rounds, not Soledad's. Soledad's, and the thing would be down.

The thing.

The thing contracted, expanded. Went from looking like, from being a serpent, to… Scales into fur. Tendrils into claws.

Serpent into tiger.

A white tiger.

Soledad, to herself: Jesus H. Christ. It's a goddamn freak show.

And the tiger leaped, leaped for Whitaker. Whitaker fired, nicked the freak as it reached the apex of its arc.

Then it was on him.

Then it was tearing at his throat.

Sick joke.

Then Whitaker was screaming. Trying to. "What he was doing, really, as he was failing, was gurgling. Blood was free-flowing. What wasn't pooling in his throat was just spraying. Whitaker kept up the fight, swung at the thing. Bare-handed, tried to beat it back. Whitaker was fighting for his life.

Whitaker was losing.

Eddi was sailing.

Like a Hollywood, A-list action chick, Eddi was sailing for the mutie. One hand out and groping at it, the other hand clutching her knife. The knife. The one her late father, a casualty of May Day, had legacied to her.

in all of MTac a single, nonreg weapon got the same dispensation and respect as Soledad's O'Dwyer. At the moment, Eddi was driving the weapon hilt-deep into a freak.

And blood fountained, turned the fur of the white tiger pinkish red.

And the freak went crazy with itself. It bucked. It kicked. It juked. It threw Eddi, finally, clear.

And good, Soledad thought. Good for that. Eddi was out of the line of fire. It was just her and the freak.

Soledad squeezed her trigger.

The O'Dwyer let slip its bullets. The bullets, four, nearly in unison found their way into the freak. Lethal on their own, Soledad's bullets carried a little something more. Hollowed, each with a flywheel. Air ramjetted against the wheel, which drove a microturbine that self-generated an electrical charge. Eleven hundred feet per second, the flywheel making 850 revs per one hundred feet. It made for a hell of a charge. On impact with the freak's body, inside the freak's body, the charge discharged. The freak got 675,000 kV of fresh-brewed juice. Per slug. That kind of electricity does a horrid thing to a malleable mass.

The freak snapped, contorted grotesquely against itself, voltage punching at it, ripping at it from the inside out. Its struggle made it seem as though, against its own will, it was trying to move in three or four or five directions at once. Limbs-ones that were properly formed and others, little mutated things that sprang from the tiger-form wherever they pleased-both reached for help and curled in pain. The whole of it twitched spastically and gave the impression of one of Satan's brood that, hellish as it was, fought the twin mortal afflictions of Parkinson's and epilepsy. From a tiger, from the nightmare tiger it'd become, the thing took on the form of a dog. A partial dog, partial humanoid. Then it, the humanoid portion of the thing, kind of started looking like John Madden if John Madden were melting. If his face were on the side of his head, if his mouth were pried open but incapable of delivering the scream it attempted to yelp.

Then it was a deformed John Madden with what looked like a goat making an escape from his thigh.

Jerking. Twitching. Slowing.

Then it was just a freak on the floor bleeding out.

Whitaker was bleeding out.

Aoki was curled, clutching herself.

Alcala was sitting, his right hand folded back in an incorrect manner.

Into her mic, Soledad: "Pacific to Metro! Eleven ninety-nine; officers down! We need EMS at this location forthwith!"

And then she was over to Whitaker, putting pressure to his neck, lips to his ears. Talking to him hut. not telling him false promises-it's going to be all right. Don't worry, boy, you're gonna pull through. What Soledad was doing, Soledad was handing out orders.

"Hang on, Whitaker, You hear me? I do not lose operators! You bang the fuck on!"

And in herself she heard herself say, no longer as a command but as a sigh of relief: I will not die today.

And outside the bank, across the street, as the door opened, as EMS, as uniformed cops spilled in and got a look at the torn-up MTacs, Soledad heard voices chant: "Metanormals are people too!"

If the general public wanted to have a scare, they'd consider what happens immediately following a rough or south MTac call. A rough call is when one or more operators end up in serious condition. A call gone south's when one or more end up terminal.

Most MTac calls were rough calls.

And when a call goes south, when operators land on a bus to the closest ER, the nearest morgue, for a minute until a replacement MTac (or MTacs) can be slotted into an element-whether elements are shuffled or a cop is added to G Platoon, the LAPD unit that covers Metanormal tactical responses-the city, the people of the city are just that much more vulnerable. If freaks, if muties were a little more on the ball, if they really wanted to stir up some trouble, they could come at the MTacs in waves. We could take on a couple of them at once. I know we could. A few of them. Maybe. But sooner or later… There are about forty suspected muties in LA County. That's the best guess from DMI, the Division of Metanormal Intelligence, the spooks who keep a surreptitious eye on freaks.

Forty of them.

If the freaks really wanted to have at it, how long would it take for them to wear us down, wipe us out? My fear… well, honest, I've got a lot of them. But one that's becoming vivid to me is the one where I come off a call, I'm in a hospital healing up, or there tending to an operator who's gotten it bad, when we get a general alert: A flamethrower in Tarzana. A terraformer ripping up Carson. A UCM is flattening Century City. And when that happens, when that call comes in, I'll know, we'll know: It's not a coincidence of incident. It's the opening salvo. It's the beginning of the end. The race war we've been waiting for.

And when that happens…

When that happens…

I'll load up my gun.

I'll go to work.

Have to.

I'm alive for a reason.

Santa Monica-UCLA Medical Center. Soledad's mouth had been stitched. Alcala's wrist was getting set. Eddi'd been bruised up, but that was it. No broken bones, cracked ribs. She was good. Soledad would've been clear of the hospital, clear of Santa Monica-its own city, a liberal city that brushed up against LA; that they had a different take on the "metanormal problem" was obvious from the cold looks Hypocritically oathed doctors openly sent her-except for Whitaker.

Whitaker was in very rough shape. Mauled about the neck. Massive blood loss. A stroke while under the knife. It was a mild one, but there's never, Soledad imagined, any good thing about having a stroke.

Best to be hoped for, out of surgery, Whitaker would get listed as critical. From there, the slow crawl from critical to serious was going to take a while. If it happened at all. And from, there…

Eddi and Soledad sat in a waiting area just off emergency surgery flipping mental coins. The opposite sides: Whitaker was gonna make it/Whitaker was gonna expire. And even if things landed right, even if he did live, what kind of living would he really have to look forward to? Months of physical therapy to get his jaw and facial muscles working enough to chew Jell-O. Vicious scars a reminder of the incident every time he so much as looked in a mirror to shave. And mentally?

Forget about going through a near-death experience. Just a near-death experience. What Whitaker might… what he will, Soledad modified herself, what he will survive was something that would walk with him beyond a couple of sleepless nights and a handful of sessions with a PTSD counselor.

Jesus.

Soledad thought as she did after every call that went south: All this to take out one of them. Just one. Jesus.

She let her head fail back, rest against the wall behind her.

All this for one of them. How many were in the SoCal area? How many were there really? Those forty: a guesstimate from DMI. There could be, could be twice that. Three times..

Jesus H…

"It's been good."

Soledad lolled her head on the wall, looked to

Eddi.

Eddi, one more time: "It's been good operating with you again."

"Got a guy down, he's probably not going to be getting up soon if at all. It's been real good."

"If you hadn't been the senior lead, things could've been worse. And more than that, I just mean, you know, personally. Personally, it's been good having you-"

Jumping in, cutting Eddi off: "If the brass got off its asses and approved the O'Dwyer departmentwide… Wait four more months just to evaluate my field test? That's a bunch of-"

"You're a piece of work, you know that?" Eddi smiled, but the laugh she gave was unkind. "All I'm trying to do, I'm trying to give you a compliment. I'm not trying to make a moment out of things. You don't want a moment, you want to avoid anything that comes close to you and me having a conversation? Cool. Fuck you." And she was very serious about that. "Now we don't have to have a moment."

The wall across from the pair got a steady look, got Eddi's full stare.

The wall was blank. Cinderblock jazzed up on a budget by a dull shade of green.

But Eddi gave it all her attention.

Soledad kept up a stare at Eddi…

Kept it up…

She rubbed her tongue over the stitches inside her mouth. Brittle. Prickly. Their alien nature begging to be scrutinized. Rejecting touch with a very standard form of pain, common to a hurt she'd had at one point or another in her arm, her chest, her back just below her scapula. Very, very common to her throat. The scars she wore there the first of so many forget-me-nots freaks would leave with her. This one, the mouth wound, it'd be what? A week or more of careful masticating before it healed? Even at that she'd probably end up biting the swollen meat a couple of times. At least that. Keep it from healing right. One of the hazards of a rough call. A minor one. The polar opposite of, say, being dead.

Being Whitaker.

Soledad to Eddi: '"Let me see your shoulder." "Fuck that."

"You've got a foul mouth, young lady." "Fuck-"

"Want me to make it an order?"

"You're gonna order me to show you my shoulder?" Eddi gave a "yeah, right" smirk and bob of the head.

Soledad was without humor. "You want a write-up for insubordination, I will write you up." "Like that's going to-"

"It'd sit you down for a while. And I know, for

you,

missing out on so much as one watch, one call, would tick you off royally."

Eddi's look shifted from the wall, the dull green wall, to Soledad. The two of them got into a quiet knife fight with their eyes.

They would've grappled forever.

Except Eddi, eventually, not quite backing down, but chewing her lips same as if she were grinding bits of lead-the job done with both grit and disgust-zipped down the front of her Nomex jumpsuit, started to reveal her right shoulder.

"The other one," Soledad instructed.

Oh, the disdain Eddi seeped. The petulant callousness of a young girl being called to task by her mom. Still, she shifted her suit, revealed the opposite shoulder. Flesh. Just flesh. No tattoo.

Eddi: "Okay?"

"Yeah. Okay."

"Got over it a long time ago." Eddi adjusted her suit, zipped, went back to looking at the wall with all the unwavering discipline of a Shaolin monk.

Soledad stared at it with her.

There was the occasional page for a doctor, a specialist. Hushed voices refracted by the acoustics of the space carried down the corridor. Mostly, there was quiet.

But elsewhere…

Elsewhere there were babies being born, spleens being removed. An organ or two being transplanted. Maybe. Being Santa Monica, there were mostly breasts being implanted, lipo being suctioned, tummies getting tucked. Probably at least one somebody dying.

But it all went on in a respectful quiet. Good news, bad news. Life. Death. Here it was held in the same clinical, objective manner. Perhaps we can save you, perhaps we cannot. Here is your child, but she needs a new liver.

Soledad struggled with: "I'm… It's good we got to work together again. You've become a solid operator, and I'm, I'm… that your first call got to be under my watch…»

And the difficulty Soledad had in communicating that little actually gave Eddi humor. It brought 'round that smirk of hers, that smart-assed variety of grin usually owned by frat boys playing pranks and kept women playing men. And Eddi when things tumbled her way. Very often things tumbled Eddi's way.

With as much shit-giving pleasure as anyone who's survived a fellow cop, another fellow cop getting maimed by a freak: "Damn, Soledad. Don't kill yourself."

H e used to crack wise. Was always quick with a comeback. His word was the last word. His talent, his fetish was the ability to add with rapidity the final line to a conversation, if need be, or if he just had the desire, with an unblunted mocking of the person to whom he was speaking. Call it snaps, call it the dozens. Call it a sense of humor sharp as a brand-new knife. He could've been a put-down artist. He could've. In younger days.

Younger in spirit, not age.

Via didn't crack wise much anymore. When he used his barbs, his jests were focused mostly inward. Self-deprecating. Sometimes self-destroying. What wit he had was leaden. His humor, his high humor, was ripped away along with his ego, his cockiness and his right leg by an animated engine block brought to life by a telekinetic freak.

Months.

After the incident-really, it. was an ordeal- months followed of lying in the hospital recovering. Getting well enough physically, mentally, to just get out of bed.

Going half a day without pain was a miracle.

Going to the bathroom in something besides a bedpan became a minor victory.

Then there was the physical therapy. The physical therapist with his two good legs and easy platitudes who didn't have one idea in hell what it was like-how much it hurt-learning to stand. Learning to walk with crutches. Learning to walk with a fake leg and a cane. Learning to walk with just a fake leg.

Not so hard, the just walking.

it was walking without the gimp, the gimp that advertised to the world there was something wrong with him. Something different about him. Vin could do without the stares, without the pity. Pity from others. For himself, for himself he had plenty of pity. And his melancholy made him jaded. Stole his humor. Made him quiet.

Soledad didn't mind. She… liked? Preferred the Vin Vin was becoming, having been a perpetual target of the cocky Vin. The macho

Vin. This Vin-unobtrusive and removed-suited her nature; isolated and detached.

It was New Leg Day. That's what Vin called it in a rare display of levity. Heavy as the levity was. It was the day he was set to get his permanent replacement leg. His phrase. Again, humor. Squarely jested from the thirteenth step of the gallows.

Soledad came around for the celebration. That made it a party of two.

Vin's permanent replacement leg was an Otto Bock Health Care C–Leg® with its patented microprocessor-controlled knee-shin system featuring onboard sensor technology, which reads the individual's every move by measuring forces at the ankle and angle of the knee fifty times a second. The C–Leg's microprocessor then uses this information to guide the knee's hydraulic stance resistance as well as swing phase to ensure that the user's gait is as natural and efficient as possible. The efficiency of the CLeg's swing-phase dynamics-all this Soledad got from the Otto Bock Web site-even at varying walking speeds and uneven terrain, provides a more secure, natural and efficient gait. Using unique algorithms developed from studying how thousands of people walk, combined with input: from multiple built-in sensors, the microprocessor determines the phase of gait. Then automatic adjustments are made to the knee's function to provide stability. The result is increased stability, ease of swing and greater efficiency with every step! The exclamation Otto Bock's own. There's even a knee-disarticulation version available.

Nifty. Really. To Soledad, haying majored in emerging technology, it was all really nifty.

The days of prosthetics merely mimicking human ability were fading. Getting fucked-up and coming back at or below your birth abilities was yesterday's news. Science had found a way to improve on the Lord's work. The leg the Otto Bock was replacing had been a millimeter longer than Vin's remaining leg. The Otto Bock was the exact length of Yin's real leg. Science didn't make mistakes. Take that, God.

Vin jogged around his apartment a couple of times, displayed his leg for Soledad.

That ended his New Leg Day celebration.

After that, as was common, as was comfortable for Soledad and Vin, they sat together saying nothing. Physically close, they maintained distance. Incredible how much they dug that about each other: the ability to be in each other's sphere without taking up space.

After a while more, Soledad downloaded Vin on the previous day's call. The freak in the hank.

Never mind her facial bruises, Vin hadn't trespassed Soledad's privacy. Had asked no questions. He'd waited until she was ready to tell her tale.

And she told it.

She told Vin about leading the element against a thing that could alter its shape at will. She played back details of the freak getting taken down, finally, by a combo of Soledad's high-tech piece and Eddi's old-fashioned sharpened metal. It was a story that would've been-just a couple decades prior-fantastic. Before the likes of Nightshift and the Headman and the Miko.

Nubian Princess.

Much as Soledad despised all of them with their stupid names and ridiculous costumes, the thought of the Nubian Princess sometimes still gave her a thrill-chill.

Vin took it, the details of the call, as a matter of course, showing an emotional spike only when Soledad detailed the metanormal rights protesters.

"They've got an opinion… " Tight little shakes of Vin's head. "I don't care how stupid it is, okay, they've got their opinion. But…" Vin reduced his thoughts to a phrase: "Freak fuckers." Added: "Israel Fernandez; glad he died."

"Oh, no. Didn't die. The black copters from the special ops assassinated him." Sarcasm buttered with bitterness. "He probably killed himself just so we'd get the blame."

Then, talking about Eddi, Vin said: "She's good. She's a good operator."

Soledad said yeah to that, complimented Vin for having seen Eddi's abilities early on.

Vin was the one who wanted Eddi to join his and Soledad's element as a probee to keep her hot head from getting taken off by a freak.

Ironic.

Vin thought it was ironic: He'd brought Eddi onto the element to help watch over her. Eddi ended up walking away from their bad, bad call relatively unhurt. And he had…

Vin looked to his bionics.

He thought of his days on MTac. Two-legged days. Days without painkillers.

Days that were only months ago.

Like she was dialed into his thoughts, Soledad: "What are you going to do?"

"Order a pizza. Watch The Simpsons."

"With yourself: What, are you going to do? It's been eight months."

"Thanks. 'Cause a lot of times it's hard for me to keep track of how long it's been since I had my leg-"

"You're off rehab. You've got your new leg. So what are you going to do?"

"The only thing I've ever been is a cop, and that's done with."

"You could work Admin. You could work DMI."

"I was just thinking how much I want to hang around a bunch of other busted MTacs talking about how good things useta be when we had all our limbs instead of just a couple of them."

"So instead you're going to sit here, get fat off pizza and watch TV. If you were any more pathetic, you'd be a cliche."

Vin said nothing. Vin, fractured Vin, let Soledad have the last word.

And then, again, there was quiet between them.

And sometime after that Soledad said: "I was scared yesterday."

"Going against a homicidal shape-shifter, how are you not going to be scared? All the macho bullshit aside, I never knew an operator who didn't get tight on a call. You're crazy if you don't. You can plan on getting killed otherwise."

"I'm not talking that kind of scared. Scared that makes you sharp. I was scared to death. Vin, I was scared to where I felt Death. I felt it right there with me, crawling all over me same as a million ugly maggots."

"And you were wrong about it. Wrong about it for you, for the element." Thinking of Whitaker, thinking of him still lying up in a hospital between the here and the hereafter: "Maybe you were." Vin worked himself to where he was as sincere as he could be. Open as he knew how to be. "If you really felt Death, if that's what you really felt, fear, there's no shame in stepping aside. Bo was as tough an operator as there was. When it was time for him to get out of the bag and behind a desk…" Recalling a moment he and Soledad'd shared; their senior lead, Bo, telling them he was quitting MTac: "Nobody's done it with more whatever. Dignity."

Bo was still around MTac. Around in a big way. He was 10-David. Unit commander. He was the guy in charge of day-to-day operations. That meant a lot of pencil pushing. Politicking. A lot of filling out requisitions and forms. Begging one way or another for the couple of extra bucks in the budget that meant the difference between good equipment and the best equipment for G Platoon. And difference between good equipment and the best equipment? Sometimes the difference was living and dying. Soledad wasn't sure how other operators felt about Bo's choices. But how she felt, how she felt when she saw him knee-deep in paperwork: She felt he was lucky. Not just lucky to be alive. Lucky to have the smarts to know when to get out off the streets.

Maybe not just lucky. Bo, different from most MTacs, had a wife. Kids. Probably, Soledad conjectured, having something to live for keeps you from doing shit that's) get ya killed.

Probably.

She didn't know. Not for sure.

From Soledad, a tick of her head, dismissing all that. Getting back to what was what: "The way I felt wasn't just about the call. I felt… it was like an O'Hara novel. I felt like things were inevitable."

"Well, you're pressing thirty. Thirty, and you're not married. Yeah, you're thinking about

dying."

And Soledad laughed. A little. And this was why, despite their distant natures, she chose to spend time with Vin. Vin knew her. Could slice the bullshit. Could move her. Could touch her from feet away. Always could.

She wanted to kiss him.

Just a peck.

Maybe a little more.

Wouldn't let herself. And she wouldn't tell Vin that when she thought of death, she thought of him. Thought of losing him or being lost to him. Whichever. Thing was, Vin gave Soledad something to live for. And the thing about that..

"You think too much, Soledad." No idea what was going on in Soledad's head, but Vin was precise with his insight. "You think, then you let your thinking get to you. Yeah, you're gonna die someday. Somehow. You stay on MTac, it's gonna involve a mutie. But you're getting a cloud over you,… what's got you feeling like that? Like that.

What had Soledad feeling like that: Last time Soledad felt like she had something to life for, someone to live for, turned out to be a freak.

Hell if that was going to happen again, freak or normal human. Hell if it would.

Love = weakness all around.

Well, this was stupid.

Well, Eddi thought, this was just about insane.

She'd made it this far and she couldn't…

She'd made it this far, this far being from her duplex where she'd showered and primped and gussied up. Dressed in some hip couture that lacked the right amount of fabric in all the right places. She'd gotten in her ride, rode to Sunset in WeHo, overpaid for parking that wasn't all that close to where she wanted to be. Walked. Actually walked in the city of Los Angeles. And was standing across the street from what, according to her Googling, was real much "the joint."

The ridiculous part: She'd been cooling across the street from "the joint" going on four minutes. Four. Long. Minutes.

Couldn't make herself cross the street, go in.

It'll probably be too loud. She's not gonna know anybody. They probably aren't spinning the kind of music she's into.

Probably. Probably to all that.

But she had to get cleaned up, go out, spend dough to stand on a street corner to debate the act of going out in the first place?

Ridiculous.

And what really blew: This was supposed to be a… an "I made it through another call alive" celebration. Little more than eight months on MTac. She'd seen a grip of operators wounded, killed on the job. She'd almost done as much to one of her own on her first call. Somehow she'd survived.

Luck. Skill. Whichever. She figured she owed herself a little something for making it another day.

But standing outside a club alone? Ridiculous.

Eddi had actually thought about calling Soledad. Inviting her along. How weak would that've been? First off, Soledad was probably out doing whatever Soledad does when she's on her downtime. Dating a bunch of guys or kickboxing or bullfighting. God knows a woman like Soledad; her social calendar was phat. God knows. Eddi didn't. Much as Eddi… appreciated

Soledad, Eddi didn't know all that much about Soledad.

What she did know: Oh, the laughs she'd get from Soledad for asking Soledad to hang out.

So she went solo. And there she was… stupid.

Eddi made the cross. Overpaid, again. This time for cover. Entered the club.

Mostly, Eddi wasn't a drinker. Her parents weren't drinkers. At least in the time she had parents, she never much saw her father taking a drink outside of special occasions. Eddi grew up thinking that was the only time you were supposed to have a drink: marking an event that was memorable. In the time she was fatherless Eddi's mother drank. A little. Also to mark an occasion. An anniversary, a birthday, Christmas. Maybe not mark it. Dull the pain of it. So for Eddi, here was a moment to combine both habits of her parents. She drained some, of her apple martini, which she knew wasn't strictly a martini but dug its candy goodness. She took in a little more, celebrated inside herself. Here's to eight months, six calls, two kills and no one to-

What was she gonna say? No one to share it with? She was in a club sick with people, the male percentage more than eager to share something with her. But she'd been sitting around, thinking about her past, her parents, what constitutes a proper martini. Eddi hadn't even been savvy to the three guys who were giving her the eye. One guy was clearly older than her but not old. Looked like he had means but didn't flaunt it. The other guy was gorgeous, and that was gorgeous measured against the average man in a city where the average man in a club at night made or hoped to make his living acting, modeling or otherwise engaged in a profession where a superior collection of features was an absolute requirement. The third guy didn't come off as being moneyed, was not nearly as gorgeous as the gorgeous guy, but was cute in the way he nervously, shyly stole glances at Eddi. He was a little country. In a good way.

In the way…

Yar was country.

Yar got killed courtesy of a piece of animated metal freak-jabbed through his chest. Eddie finished her drink. Marked the occasion. Dulled the pain.

Went home.

People think about it. Average people. Real people. Normal people. They think about, surely every now and again, what It'd be like to be super. Average, real, normal people-as much as they hate superpeople, hate them for what they did to San Francisco, hate them for all the average, real and normal people who were killed when a couple of warring superhumans turned half the city to slag-they still think: What would it be like to have abilities beyond imagination?

After San Francisco-as people refer to the history of man since the tragedy-the response to the thought, at least openly, was disgust and revulsion and strong statements of contempt. Why would I want to be like them? Who the hell would want to be like them?

But the false plating on the statements was fairly obvious. Like racists who spent their time at the beach working their tans. Normal people couldn't help but think what it'd be like to be a god.

The real, true answer to the thought depended on who was doing the pondering. The real, true answer was sometimes banal: If I could make myself invisible, I could hide out in the women's locker at 24 Hour Fitness and ogle all the naked chicks I wanted!

The real, true response was sometimes, probably, noble: If I had superpowers, I could've kept that little girl from being hit by the truck, saved the space shuttle crew, put an end to the war in…

But those are the thoughts of normal humans. People who have to shield their eyes from the sun as they look skyward from the bottom of an unclimbable mountain.

Truth is, reality is, looking down from the mountain, the view's not all that better.

Yeah, you can turn yourself into a human torch, but when you do, you ignite, incinerate, everything within a ten-foot radius.

Superstrength is real nice. Except you have to work, actually concentrate on opening a door without ripping it from its hinges. Picking up an egg is an Olympic event. Your fear, your sweaty nightmare: someone saying, "Here, you want to hold the baby?"

If you're invulnerable-bones like titanium, skin like steel-sure, you could walk from a plane crash scratchless.

Physically.

But an invulnerable's still got pain receptors. It could survive a plane crash, but it would feel the associated trauma. The impact, the metal of the fuselage slamming into, twisting against its body. The shock of the explosion, the burn of the resulting fireball.

What would it feel? A shitload of pain.

For an invulnerable, at some point, a sustained influx of pain could overwhelm it, fry its CNS. Do to it what the physical force of getting plowed by a bus or hit by lightning couldn't. Kill it.

Anson Hal! was feeling a lot of hurt.

Anson had jumped from an eight-story building, had been slammed against a brick wall, had a motorcycle thrown at him… And the running. All the running hurt like hell. His lungs burned from overuse, lactic acid nuked his legs. Brimstone in the body. Hurting like hell wasn't just an expression. Fact was. no matter he could take a hit from a semi truck, what Anson could not do was run any more.

Yet he kept on.

Adrenaline.

Adrenaline propelled Anson forward. Adrenaline brewed by panic. Anson could die.

That he could die: It was a concept that hadn't so much as entered Anson's mind in the twenty-seven years since, when he was thirteen, a couple of rottweilers mauled him. Tried to. Ended up shattering their canines without so much as breaking his flesh. The thought of dying had no traction with Anson since Anson realized he was… different.

Special, Ms parents told him. They told him he was special. Then they told him to never say anything to anyone about being special because even in the Age of Heroes regular people had fear of superpeople. Special people. People who were different.

Then San Francisco.

Then "after San Francisco."

Then everyone who was special… different…just kept their mouths shut. Heads down. Acted normal.

Anson knew the score, played the game. But Anson also knew what he was and death wasn't a consideration for him. Never before.

Now death was a demon on Anson's back, chasing him down. The demon drove him on.

Run.

Run to where? Didn't matter.

Just away. Run away from it. It.

Except It kept pursuing, and It could not be lost. It had followed Anson when Anson tried to lose It in that apartment complex, then jumped from the building to the street, crashed through the boarded window of an abandoned self-storage. It had been the one to hurl the motorcycle at Anson, pick Anson off the ground by his throat and slam him-repeatedly-into a brick wall.

Anson had broken away, run away, as he'd been running for the last eighteen minutes. Since It-middle of the night, at a lonely stoplight as Anson's car stalled- had run up on Anson, ripped the door from the frame and Anson from his seat. Introduced Anson to the asphalt of Chavez Avenue.

In Los Angeles, a city that traffics in random violence, this thing-It-had come specifically for Anson.

And It brought pain.

Fingers which crackled with electricity, electric fire which could not be deterred by indestructible skin and bones. Forget the drop from the building, the thrown motorcycle and wall. Brought pain? It was pain.

So keep running.

Keep running.

Keep…

To where?

Anson had run, had been chased into East LA. Was like getting chased into Beirut. Abandoned cars, houses shrouded behind metal bars and locked doors and chained gates. Citizens living as Inmates. Scared into submission, driven to seclusion by bangers and crackheads and LAPD Rampart cops who were most times little better than bangers and crackheads. Sometimes they were the same thing.

Farewell, age of heroes.

Who was going to help? Who among the timid, the thuggish, the strung out would help Anson?

None of them.

Keep running. Keep…

Climb!

Up, over a chain-link fence and then… Keep running.

Never mind the hurt, the bum. Keep running.

Jesus.

Diane.

He thought of, Anson thought of… Jesus.

Light.

Anson saw the light. Too late. Anson turned, but the light was on him. The light and the wail of an air horn. They were from the Gold Line, the light rail that cut from Pasadena to Downtown. Anson was standing dead in its path.

The train's horn shrieked.

That was what, a warning? Useless. The train was rolling too fast to stop. Anson was too tired to move. Too beat to care.

This was going to hurt.

And then came the impact: the grille, the steel of the engine slamming into Anson, picking Anson up and launching Anson's body.

And then there was a moment, the pain so intense if. didn't exist. It was off the agony scale. Anson's mind could not quantify it. The sensation did not register. Not immediately. Later Anson's head would find a way to process the hit, and the hit would hurt.

Later.

Now…

There was a moment when Anson was sailing in the air. Sailing.

Flying.

And in the moment Anson thought, he thought: If there was a superhuman ability to possess, this, the ability to traverse without effort and with dispatch from one point to another, was the one to own. Anson thought: If he could truly fly on his own and unaided by a speeding train, he would not be here. He would be passing easily to Diane. He would go to her and take her in his arms, and together they'd sail away… God, Styx. When was the last time he'd… They'd sail to somewhere that people who were different and those who loved them weren't hated and hunted like rabid dogs. Wherever that mythical land was.

And then Anson's brain finished its processing. His receptors kicked in and he hurt like the devil. But even the devil didn't know hurt as detailed as when Anson took to the ground landing at sixty-plus mph. Skipping a couple of times, skipping along, whipping and twisting along. Clothes shorn on coarse earth. The repeated, repeated, repeated slap of flesh on road until there was a sound. The sound of an animal begging to be put down.

A few seconds or so. A few seconds. Then Anson realized the sound was his own putrid screaming. One more lesson In a night of learning. Being invulnerable ain't shit against hurting.

What Anson didn't hear was the sound of the train braking. It kept hard-rolling, the engineer not wanting to have to go through due process and the form filing for hitting whatever it was he'd hit. If he kept on for Union Station, pretended like nothing had happened, well… maybe he'd just hit a bum. That was the same as nothing happening.

LA. Even through the hurt of getting hit, Anson thought: Goddamn LA.

And Anson straggled up to his feet. Gingerly. Then he reminded himself, had to actually remind himself he was indestructible. He was not hurt. Not truly hurt. No need to be ginger. It was time, again, to run.

Run to…

Where would he run that It hadn't already demonstrated It would follow?

Run to the police? If they saved Anson from It, who'd save Anson from the police?

Home?

Diane? Run to her? Bring It to her?

No.

Run to where?

Tungsten. Anson thought of Tungsten. Anson used to want to be: Tungsten, same as just about every metanormal- before San Francisco- dreamed of taking their gift and being something more than normal. Doing something beyond regular. Acting like a hero.

Tungsten had been KIA by King of Pain. King of Pain had previously, in one of those used-to-be-common battles between the supergood and the superevil, put the otherwise indestructible Tungsten in a coma for five months.

Didn't matter.

To Tungsten it didn't matter. When it came time to square off with King of Pain again, he stood his ground. Knowing King of Pain had the ability to take his life, Tungsten didn't run.

Heroes don't run.

No more running.

No equivocation in what Anson told himself, ordered himself to do: no more running. No matter the outcome might, be same as with Tungsten, Anson would stand. Anson would fight It.

I will be, Anson said in his head, something more than human.

A trick of the moonlight. Clouds cleared the sky. Up the street darkness seemed to part.

Coincidental. It was coming.

I feel no pain, Anson told himself. I cannot die. I am more than human.

The caller ID on her integrated cordless phone/digital answering machine that had every advanced feature except the one that allowed Soledad to walk more than five feet from the base unit while talking on the phone said it was Soledad's parents calling.

She didn't pick up. Wasn't Sunday. Wasn't the day Soledad had designated in her mind and by habit as being the day to talk with her folks. Sit on the phone while they talked at her.

She let the phone ring itself out, was through the door by the time the answering machine picked up and her mom started asking of Soledad's empty joint: "Are you there? Sweetie, it's Mom. Are you home?"

Melrose to Robertson. Down to Third, over into BH. That was the route Soledad was going to run. A five-mile loop. Same one, with slight variation, she ran the four days out of seven she did road work. Not too many places m LA offered decent scenery and a fair lack of traffic. The city was built for driving. Health nuts be damned. Soledad had found a course, and she stuck to it. Some Hybrid on her iPod to speed the miles along. The sun was, as always, up there. The heat from the endless pavement, the smog; they'd mix for a physically taxing workout. A good workout.

Some sweat and ache to wear away that nagging, fucking… Death. Death was nagging Soledad. Shouldn't be. She'd gotten over, thought she'd gotten over, Death a long time ago. The day of San Francisco: Soledad, her family, were supposed to be in the city when a battle between the superhero Pharos and the supervillain Bludlust turned half the town and most of its citizens to slag and ash. But Soledad, her family, weren't there. They are alive. Alive, Soledad figured, on borrowed time. So what was Death..

Left on Robertson…

When Soledad was already dead? Should already be dead? That kind of thinking had kept company with Soledad, given comfort to Soledad as she jobbed her way through the LAPD academy, worked a beat, SPU and MTac without so much as getting sweaty palms. Not once.

Until…

Right on Third.

And a thought came to Soledad, came like a frank observation that, being objective, was separate from her own thinking.

The thought: Know what you're scared of?

What?

You've been hanging around Vin. You're attracted to Vin. But you're scared you don't really care for Vin.

Endorphins pumping in Soledad. Runner's high coming on.

A high coming on.

Stupid, Soledad told herself. Losing herself in natural bliss, she told herself the thought was stupid. Why would it matter if she-

You don't care for Yin. Used to hate Vin. So you're scared Vin's just a bounce-back thing. You're scared 'cause if he is, then who you really love, who you're still in love with, what's really giving you unease-

No! It wasn't qualms or questions or misgivings on the ways of her heart. It was Death. Soledad felt Death creeping close and, yeah, it scared her because she didn't… she wasn't afraid of losing her life. She didn't want to lose the life she could have with Vin. Vin. Vin she loved, she told herself. And told herself. She could deal with Death and falling for a guy she used to hate. What she couldn't deal with- A horn.

Soledad looked as she ran out onto Ivy. Looked too late. As she saw the massive front end of the Ford Expedition bearing on her, she thought: I hate SUVs.

There was laughter all around. Rare thing. Odd thing.

Laughter from Eddi and Alcala. And from Soledad. Soledad laughing out loud, continuously. That was the bit that was rare and odd, and made more so by the fact that there were three MTacs cracking up and they were doing it in a hospital. Mostly, MTacs in hospitals meant cooling for some specialist to arrive from an ER, blood-covered, telling the rest-or the remainder-of an element, eyes lowered and with a mournful shake of the head, "Nothing we could do." Mostly, MTacs in hospitals meant waiting for spouses or family or lovers or life partners to come around, get the official word, then break down in sobs while the rest-the remainder-of an element wondered how long it'd be before their spouse or family, lover or life partner would be heaped on a dirty tile floor sobbing for them.

Mostly, that's the way it was with MTacs in hospitals.

But right then?

Eddi, Alcala and Soledad right then couldn't bust up enough. The situation was funny in a relieved kind of way. Everybody was relieved Soledad was still alive. Her left leg, specifically her knee, was fucked-up to a monumental degree by the hit it took from the Expedition. Beyond that, some scrapes and bruises she collected skimming over the asphalt on Ivy, the situation was funny. To a degree. After squaring off against flamethrowers, shape-shifters, even a telepath, Soledad had almost gotten taken out by a representative hunk of one of the worst automotive treads ever to get spat out of Detroit.

To the MTacs. it was hi-F'n-larious.

"Jesus, Soledad." Alcala joking. "Making all of us look damn near pathetic. An MTac getting put down by a station wagon."

"Wasn't a station wagon. You know it wasn't a-"

"Actually heard a traffic cop making cracks about MTacs. A traffic cop, Soledad." "Hey, I had the right-of-way."

Eddi: "Yeah, you always have the right-of-way."

"I'm serious. Had the right-of-way, and this ass…»

"Shoulda hit him with one of your bullets." "Guy barely brakes. Hate stupid SUV-driving sons of-"

"I've got an SUV," Eddi said, wearing that slick smile of hers.

"Figures. And he was on the phone too."

"You shoulda hit him with one of your bullets." Alcala saying it again. "What do you got for asses on cell phones driving their-"

"Lead. Nothing special. Just lead."

"Getting slow, Soledad." Eddi flicked through some food on a tray next to Soledad's bed with her index finger. Nothing worth trying. "You twenty-nine now? Might be time for your gold watch."

"Hell with that. I was making a move."

"Moving from human to hood ornament."

"Like to see you get out of the way of a speeding truck, kid."

'That's the thing: Us kids wouldn't let ourselves get boxed in first off."

Eddi and Alcala laughed, dapped.

What the hell, Soledad thought, was Alcala laughing at? She was older than him, but he was junior rank to her.

She was going to say something about that, but Vin walked in the room. Walked pretty decent for a guy with one real leg. That Otto Bock worked good. Vin walked in carrying some flowers.

Things quieted some, the laughing fell off.

Vin asked what was funny, what was the joking he heard before coming into the room.

Eddi and Alcala mumbled about busting Soledad's chops.

Then there was quiet. The uncomfortable kind.

Vin asked Alcala and Eddi how things were.

They said things were good.

The quad talked on about sports; what the hell was going on with the Lakers. The weather, the other night's episode of some sitcom.

Some more quiet.

Eddi announced she had some things to do. Alcala, too, said he had some things that needed taking care of. Both said their good-byes to Soledad, Vin.

"Good seeing you again, Vin."

"Take 'er easy, Vin."

Then it was just Vin and Soledad.

Soledad gave Vin an update on her knee. Tom ligaments. There'd he further surgery. There'd be physical therapy, a limp that would, hopefully, diminish over time. Time when Soledad couldn't work MTac. No matter how she'd gotten busted, she was a busted cop. Being busted was to be automatically inactive. Yeah, there was other cop work she could do: file files, write up reports. Any temp could do that. Doing that, the Admin work of law enforcement, was not being a cop. And the feeling that came with doing that-no matter she'd previously tried to convince Vin otherwise-was one of supreme uselessness. A car with no tires. A fork with no teeth. A Hollywood actress over the age of forty. It was a feeling as discomforting as any Soledad knew. Her job was her life, her purpose. It was her obligation. So no job…

No life?

No purpose?

And then Soledad got honest. "Scared me, Vin. Scared the hell out of me."

"Screwed up your knee some."

"Thought I was going to die."

"If a freak can't kill you…" Vin maintained a stare at the room door.

"That's what scared me. I've gotten it in my head I'd go out in a general alert, gun in each hand taking on a rush of muties. Put down as many of them as I can before I go."

"John Wayne."

"Angela Bassett. But then you see mortality rushing at you in the grille of a Ford… what the fuck, Vin? I was going to die, and I was going to die for nothing. From after birth to a stain on the asphalt, and what did I amount to in the between time?"

Still looking at the door: "This an ego thing? You figure your obit wasn't going to run enough column inches?"

"It could fill the paper, but right then I wondered, what would it amount to? That's what I was thinking: I was going to die without ever amounting to anything."

"Your gun, the telepath you took out…»

"I shot its wife."

"Another freak."

"I shot its wife. If I hadn't, would Yar still be alive? Would you still have your leg?"

"Wife or no, you want to talk about what the telepath would've done if you hadn't stopped it? Think about that."

"What I'm thinking, I'm starting to think… it's a war that breeds war." "Jesus, Soledad-"

"It's the kind of shit that never stops. So my gun, how many of them I take out… doesn't matter. They'll keep coming at us, we'll keep going at them. So what I do, what we do, what does it amount to? Might as well pack the fighting up, move it to the Middle East."

"You almost got killed. I get that. But you don't-"

"It's not a near-death experience. It's more like a-" It was more like what? "More like a near-useless death experience. I'm just feeling a little useless right now."

"Tell me about it, Soledad. Tell me all about it and act like it's new to me." Through Soledad's self-assessment, her talk of her feelings and concerns, Vin maintained his stare at the room door.

When Soledad finished her venting, Vin said at the door: "I'm a bad memory to them."

Soledad knew who and what Vin was talking about. Alcala, Eddi. Their distance, their coolness when talking with Vin. From the second he stepped in the room the shift in their mood was obvious. Soledad'd hoped Vin would take it in stride. He didn't. This was not good for her. Bad enough she had her own concerns. Now she'd have to put some emotional work into dealing with Vin's as well.

Soledad said: "You're not a bad memory. Alcala wasn't even on the element when we went at the telepath. You're not a bad memory for him."

"Then I'm a poster child for what happens when things go south. Couldn't even look at me. Barely could. Eddi could barely look at me, and Alcala-"

"That's their own guilt; that it was you, not them. They're staring at you, they're staring at mortality. They look at you, and they've got to deal with their own shit, so they-"

"They were laughing with you. They can laugh with you, but with me…" Vin realized he was still holding the flowers he'd brought Soledad. He formally presented them to her.

"They're pretty. Thanks."

"Got them downstairs. Was on my way up, figured I shouldn't come empty-handed."

"Or you spent all day picking out ones you thought I'd love," she coached. "You don't have to be honest. Sometimes it's okay to lie a little." Soledad, touched, genuinely: "Thank you."

Again, Vin looked to the door. "How's Eddi?" "Good."

"She good or just getting by?" "She's good."

"I worry about her. She likes to talk tough, but she's more girl than man."

"I'm telling you she's good."

"She had a thing for Yar, you know. Watching him get killed like that-"

"You want to make her?"

"Do I what?"

Soledad was kidding on the square. A little jealous, never mind her jokes. "I can slip her a note, see if she's got a date for prom."

"Or you could talk to her, make sure she's good like you think. She worships you."

"She doesn't worship me." Adjusting herself, Soledad tried to turn down the volume on the throb in her leg. Meds had kept it subordinate for a while. Soledad had quit those. Wasn't some hard-ass ploy. Opposite of that. The painkillers were gooooood. Made Soledad feel as sweeeeeet as she had since… in years. She could see how people got hooked on the stuff. She could see herself getting hooked on the stuff.

So she quit 'em.

Soledad, finishing the thought: "She doesn't worship me. Not anymore, if she ever did." "She get a tattoo?"

"No."

"You sure?" "Checked."

"Checked everywhere?" Soledad stared at Vin.

Vin: "She's not dumb. She knows you hate hero worship. She's not going to get a tattoo on her shoulder,"

Soledad, still back at the head of Vin's statement: "Check everywhere like where?"

"Her ass, maybe. Maybe… you know how some girls like to get one right near the crotch."

Slow roasting. Soledad did some slow roasting. "No. I don't know. Why don't you hip me to how some girls like to get one near their-

"Soledad-"

"Okay, just so we're clear on things: You really want to bang her?"

"Do you talk like a guy because you think guys think it's sexy, or-"

"Yes, and do you-"

"I think Eddi's a very attractive person." Soledad opened her mouth to spew fire.

"But I think she's nothing compared to you."

No fire. No fury. Not a word. She didn't say a thing. Soledad's mouth maintained its slightly open position.

"So what are you going to do with yourself?" Vin asked. "I know you taking downtime isn't going to happen."

"I don't know." Soledad was talking to the wall opposite Vin. Forgetting for a second that her black skin didn't blush, humility made Soledad look away from him. "Was thinking of seeing if I could get assigned, to DMI. Next best thing to being an active MTac, right?"

Vin shrugged.

"Figure it'll be good too, you know; doing Intel. Find out what they know about freaks, how they track them, how many there really are out there. Now's the chance."

"Why don't you get assigned to HIT? You can keep your research going there."

"HIT is bullshit." Looking back to Vin, blush turned to heat. "Bunch of geeks who couldn't get jobs at Metal-storm or DARPA, sitting around with their bullshit theoretical science. 'Gee, maybe if we perfect a particle beam or a rail gun, we can take out muties.' Meanwhile, I'm in my garage making shit that works. Just because my knee's messed up doesn't mean I'm gonna go waste my time."

"But that's just your first reaction. It's not like you put a lot of thought into it."

Referring to Vin's causticity: "So what's the deal? Takes me getting just about run over to get you back to your old self?"

Rubbing at where his prosthetic and stump met: "The days of being my old self are good and gone."

And whatever trace Soledad had seen of the used-to-be Vin, cocky Vin, get-that-last-word-in Vin evaporated. Returned in brief, gone quick. By Soledad, bitterly missed.

She said to Vin: "You could come over with me. Real easy, you could get detailed to DMI."

"To do what?"

"To work Intel. To get intelligence on freaks." "Yeah, but for me; why?"

"Because you should be doing something. Because it's been eight months, and you should

be-"

"You want to get married?"

Soledad managed: "… Married…?"

"Do you want to marry me?"

In this second go-round, Soledad couldn't even muddle out the one-word response she'd given the first time Vin asked.

"You don't want to marry me. You don't want to… You talk about what'd help me heal-"

"It's not that I don't want to… " No conviction there. Soledad quit talking, didn't even try working past what Vin knew, what she knew was the truth.

"If you're not going to marry me, and believe me, the question was more for shock value than meant as invitation, but if you're not going to really be part of my life, then don't try to orient my life."

Soledad wanted to say something counter to that, but short of "Yeah, I'll marry you," what counter was there?

Vin told Soledad he'd be back later to see her. He'd be back to quietly kill time with her as she'd done with him when the situation was exactly flipped. Exactly, except Vin's leg'd been chewed off, not busted by an SUV.

A kiss to Soledad's forehead. A squeeze of her hand.

The sounds of the hospital bled in through the open door, then died off as Vin left the room.

Figuring there couldn't possibly be anything on TV worth watching, Soledad passed time looking at the flowers Vin had bought downstairs, brought upstairs.

Her thought: Painkillers'd be real good right now.

What's the difference, the joke goes, between an MTac cop and a DMI cop?

You can see how fucked-up the DMI cop is.

That's the kind of interdepartmental ribbing that beat cops, SPU and SWAT cops think's funny.

It's not funny.

But like most jokes that trade on. stereotypes, it's true. Kinda.

We're fucked-up, MTac cops; inside we are. Any MTac who's honest would tell you that.

Normal people-in the physical sense-who want to earn their pay busting superpeople…

You can say to yourself: Somebody's got to do it. Somebody's got to protect all of us from all of them. Yeah. You can say that. But most people, most cops included, would respond: Somebody, but not me.

There's something in us, people like me, that makes us respond: Okay, I'll do it. There's something in us that is, honestly, off. Not quite right. For some it's too much macho in their DNA. For some it's fatalism. Me, I feel guilty for my survival, and that guilt's informed or misinformed every other thing in my life. The choices I make. The ones that I do not.

Vin, for example. Why can't I just tell Vin I like him? Why can't I accept that I like him? When he asked me to marry him, why couldn't I just say…

Because I feel guilty. Because I won't let myself he happy. Because I can't commit.

For starters.

Yeah. MTac cops: fucked-up on the inside. On the flip side…

DMI cops, cops who work the Division of Metanormal Investigations, you can see how they're fucked up. Mostly, they're ex-MTac cops who'd survived going up against a mutie, but just barely. Routinely, DMI cops had burned flesh, scarred flesh, were absent limbs or eyes or extremities. They limped. Sometimes they wheeled themselves. But they wanted to stay in the game. Fight the fight to the bitter, bitter end.

There was no way they could work an element, serve a warrant on a freak. But they could work with the brain boys who kept tabs on the freak community, gathered information to use against the freaks: identify freaks who thought they were passing; living as normal when there was nothing normal! about them. Track the comings and goings of such freaks. Who they socialized with. What their abilities were. Most important: What were their weaknesses?

It's a hard little game trying to figure which muties to leave be, keep under active surveillance in hopes they "d lead you to something good-good being a boss mutie- and which muties are too dangerous to let walk around like they were free, white and twenty-one. The wrong pick, bad information getting passed up the line concerning which freaks were at worst a nuisance and which were a clear and present danger… that could be somebody's life.

Not a mistake that happened often.

Most of the men and women in DMI were there because of somebody else's bad Intel or incorrect choice. Being a victim of stupidity makes you want to keep anybody else from suffering through the same.

DMI didn't suffer stupidity. They didn't tolerate slacking. They were arrogant about their work. They were more important-more self-important based on who was doing the talking-than MTacs. All MTacs did was shoot. DMI gave the MTacs an edge when it came time to pull their triggers.

Whatever.

You could go back and forth forever over who's the spearhead of the fight against muties. All I know, I'm not ready to give the fight up.

For a while, at least, I'll be working DMI.

Utilitarian, but as a style choice rather than a necessity of budget. Soledad hit the DMI headquarters in West LA and was, in return, hit with a mix of awe and resentment.

The awe: This is Soledad O'Roark. This is Bullet; the girl with the gun who'd been an operator on an element that'd taken out a telepath. Taken it out, mostly thanks to the gun. Hers. The one she'd made. She'd been BAMF a record number of occasions in a record short span of time. This was one of the best cops ever to wear a shield.

The resentment: "Who's this girl, this shimmer come 'round because her leg's bad- temporarily bad-and who'll go away soon as it's good again? Who's this MTac grant who thinks she's got the smarts, the skills to work DMI?

Some of the resentment wasn't so territorial. Some of it was just garden-variety bigotry. A woman cop? A Mack woman?

The mix of awe and resentment fluctuated from person to person. And while Soledad could do without the awe, she was surprised, from even those who admired her, to a person they all carried some resentment toward her.

"Don't worry about it." Abernathy passed a hand in the air, shooed away Soledad's concerns. Abernathy- his first name, rarely used in-house, was Benjamin- was, or would be for the time being, Soledad's CO. Her lieutenant, her "lieu." He was physically, Soledad thought, an unremarkable man. That wasn't, a slight. There was just nothing about the guy-his size, the cut of his hair, the way his features were arranged on his face; nothing biological or self-generated-that would make you give him, if you passed him on the street, a second thought. Except, except if you heard his voice. His voice was opposite his slight stature. It was deep and rich and booming. The voice of a beefy soul brother, not a negligible white guy. Should be singing some R&B. Should've, at least, been doing voice-overs for movie trailers.

"It's not personal," Abernathy said regarding Soledad and the cold shoulder she'd been getting hit with tag team-style from the minute she set foot in DMIville. Abernathy said: "Can't take it personal. DMI cops, their life is about being suspicious."

Soledad: "Even when there's nothing to be suspicious about?"

A shrug. "You spend your days doing surveillance on the corner pharmacist or a soccer mom who's actually a freak that can take out a city block without producing a sweat, suspicion's a hard habit to shake."

"I can deal with a little negativity. Compared to actually having to be the one to take down that pharmacist or soccer mom, it's nothing." Soledad wasn't so much displaying machismo as she was giving support to the whole of G Platoon.

Abernathy said: "There are bad habits all around. MTacs included. Again, nothing personal."

Cold. Distant. Unable, unwilling to allow people into their lives because their lives were, generally, short-lived. MTacs had bad habits to spare.

"I don't," Soledad said, "take it personally. Mostly." And mostly, Soledad didn't. She didn't take personally the ice, the propriety glances. Except for the cops that hit her with their straight-up old-school bigotry. Soledad personally wanted to kick that bunch in the teeth. Otherwise, long time ago, Soledad'd decided she wasn't in the give-a-fuck business.

Abernathy: "Would you mind?"

Just that said. Soledad knew what Abernathy was talking about. She pulled her O'Dwyer, removed the clip from the back. No need to eject a shell from the chamber. Didn't have a chamber. Handed it butt-first to Abernathy.

He looked the piece over, asked a couple of questions about it, and Soledad went into what'd become a standard speech on her sidearm. How Metalstorm had agreed to let her modify it, how the governor had okayed her field-testing it. Soledad skipped over the history of the field test: the disciplinary action against her and the trumped-up IA investigation that'd preceded it, her almost getting hung out to dry for getting a cop killed-a cop she admired, respected. A cop whose death she had nothing to do with, whose passing had changed her life. Whose tattoo, an exact duplicate of, Soledad wore on her left shoulder. Five simple words: we don't need

another hero.

All of that Soledad gave the go by to. She didn't need to bring it up. Abernathy knew about it. At least knew a version of it. There wasn't a cop on the force who hadn't heard the rumors filtered through the blue wall that's supposed to shield fellow cops from acrimony from the outside. Truth: All it does is make a cell where accused cops can get gang-raped from the inside by intimation and allegation.

So let others speculate and wonder. All that mattered, same as her encounters with a fire freak and a speed freak and any of the other freaks she'd gone against, Soledad'd survived that departmental attempt on her life as well.

Abernathy handed back the gun.

"I don't believe you'll be needing that much here."

"Never know."

Nodding to her assertion: "No, you don't. But the use of deadly force is the last thing events should come to. Here we watch, we wait, we note. We fight with our heads, not our fists. The grunt mentality stays with MTac." Abernathy wasn't accusatory. He was even. And that voice of his, he sounded like he was reading copy for a public service announcement.

"Don't have a grunt mentality," Soledad said. "With MTac or otherwise."

"That business with IA-"

"Was never carried through. An OIS that was investigated as required."

He was probing. Soledad knew Abernathy was testing her same as any lieu would an operator being rotated in who had a… a situation in their package. They'd want to know, not so much the details of the event, but could the cop coming off the situation handle himself? Herself. Or are they burned and bitter, full up with anger they're just waiting to spew at a moment that's inappropriate? Inappropriate, in a cop's world, is a moment that gets someone killed.

"I guess the concern is," Abernathy said, "you have a history of independent action."

"Independent thought and independent action are two different things." Soledad was composed, quite controlled. Soledad said: "I've been point on any number of MTac elements, and on all of them my record speaks for itself. I know how to work as part of a ream. But I also believe in thinking beyond the box. That's got its own rewards, and it's got its own risks. But when it comes down to us versus the muties… yeah, you play things smart, but it's no good for cops to go at things overly cautious. That's just as dangerous as being a hothead."

"If you do say so yourself."

"I do. But would you want a cop jobbing for you who's not willing to take a stand?"

Nothing from Abernathy.

A moment more.

Abernathy said: "I don't mean disrespect when I talk about the grunt mentality. It's not an attempt to put down G Platoon. It's just, I don't know, call it departmental hubris. We all work together, yes. Nice, as company lines go. But as far as DMI is concerned, it's just a line. Three-quarters of the operators here are here because the grunt way of thinking got them shattered. Now they're ready to use their heads.

"This is not G Platoon. This is not MTac. I have no doubt once your leg heals you have no intention of continuing on with DMI."

No protest from Soledad.

"But you are here now. If you want to be effective here, now, then forget about G Platoon. They're not your family. We're your family. It's this family that has your back."

No flinching around with her gaze. Soledad gave Abernathy a stare hung on a taut tether eye-to-eye. "While I'm here, I'm here, sir. But I'm always going to be MTac."

What Soledad got for her forthrightness was sat down at a desk in an office empty of light that was natural and colors that weren't primary. What she got was a hard drive full of e-files that had to be cross-referenced with paper files that were prime for an incinerator. Most of the files were left over from surveillances that were shut down, a warrant having been served on a suspect. The suspect, the freak, probably dead by way of an MTac element. Occasionally, a freak was brought in alive and ended up housed at the SPA. The euphemistic way of saying they were incarcerated at the California state Special Protective Area located in the heart of the Mojave.

But freaks going to the SPA was very occasional. Mostly, when it came time for freaks to get arrested, freaks didn't do things the easy way.

The files, the cross-referencing, it was busywork.

For all the talk of brainwork, of how special DMI was, how DMI was the secret weapon in the war on freaks,

Soledad had been handed paper to shuffle. Duty buggery. Glorified secretarial fare, and that shit was what Soledad hated more than any single thing. Worse than being useless, it was the imitation of usefulness. For most cops their living nightmare was to get caught gun empty in the middle of a firefight. For Soledad…

So what was this? Was this a test too? Was this Abernathy having a look-see at how much banality Soledad could take? A gauge of how committed she was, despite her assertion of always being an MTac, to the job at hand?

That was a good thought to Soledad: that she was getting fucked with. That she was worth fucking with. That she rated some kind of initiation made Soledad feel special. Unique. Not, at least, like a cop too thick to be trusted with brainwork.

Soledad looked up from her papers. Outside the door was a guy she guessed to be in his early forties. Sandy-blond hair. Hazel eyes. One hand. He had one hand. His left. A prosthetic hook was the terminal device on the right. He was in the corridor lined up in the doorway staring at Soledad.

Soledad said: "Yeah?" And she said it to mean: Yeah, what do you want? Yeah, what do you need? Yeah, there's a black woman on leave from MTac working in your joint. What about it?

The guy's stare didn't beg any of that, but whenever presented with the air of confrontation, Soledad usually took things to the extreme.

The guy walked on, no words for Soledad.

Should've, Soledad thought should've put in for HIT. Too late now. Not because she couldn't still get the transfer. Ego wouldn't let her leave. Leave and have others think she'd been chased off by the stares, the cold shoulders. The busywork DMI passed off as intellectual endeavors.

Soledad had the tenacity to survive all that was presented to her.

Soledad put all of her formidable tenacity into finishing her e-files.

The message on Soledad's integrated cordless phone/digital answering machine was from Soledad's mom. Same hi-how-are-you-just-checking-in message Soledad had been getting, had been dodging, for six weeks. A month and a half. Little more than that. Soledad didn't feel like, could not take, talking with her parents. Loved her parents, her parents were great. Just couldn't handle at the moment the stress of their regard. The near-daily worry they heaped on her about her life, her work… Soledad could very much do without a repeat of five years previous when she'd been clipped by a car while out running. Her mom on the first flight out from Milwaukee, around all day every day for eight days solid to help Soledad recuperate when there was little or no recuperating to be done.

Her own fault.

Soledad knew the current state or her relationship with her parents-strained, distant, vague-was her doing. And it was as obvious as it was natural that the more Soledad pushed her parents off, the more clingy they became.

They clung to their daughter.

They held on tight to the little girl who inexplicably cried every time someone sang Happy Birthday and defiantly painted all her white Barbies black, shaved the heads of all her black Barbies 'cause "they look more kick-ass that way." Too young to even have a word like «kick-ass» in her lexicon. Soledad's parents hugged in absentia the young woman who- when others her age worshipped pop stars and teen heartthrobs-was in awe of the Nubian Princess, the greatest of the superpeople. Her opinion. And Soledad's parents quietly, daily, prayed for Soledad, the woman who shut down on the first day of May years prior when half the city of San Francisco and her citizens were removed from the planet along with Soledad's faith.

They loved her, Soledad's parents were there for her, and all Soledad had to do was reach out to them. Offer herself up as the daughter her parents wanted her to be.

Easy. Sure.

If you could resurrect a city, 600,000-plus people. If you could basically hop in a machine that bent time and could carry you back to a moment before the demigods who should have guided aspirations instead sparked fears, then maybe Soledad could trade her solitude for effusiveness.

Wasn't gonna happen.

So, for another week, Soledad would put the dodge on her folks. Give them a callback when she was pretty sure they wouldn't be home.

From her integrated cordless phone/digital answering machine Soledad erased the message from her mother.

Couldn't see it. Think about it.

You hold a magnifying glass over an ant on a hot day,

you can't see the sharpened sunlight that fries it.

So…

If a person has the ungodly-extra-godly- ability to refract the light collected by their retinas into focused shafts of intense heat, you cannot see the hot: death coming at you.

You can in movies.

In movies, people with heat vision are always lighting up the area around them with their death-beam eyes. But that's movies.

Movie audiences have to have their fleshy minds entertained for them. The excitement's got to be obvious.

In real life, feeling your flesh start to heat up when a fire-eyes freak looks your way: That's all the excitement you need.

But you always got extra excitement thrown in gratis.

In a parking garage in the Bridge, in the middle of a firefight with a fire-eyes, Eddi and her element got melting glass and warping metal and bursting tires and instant heat damage to everything that was in the general direction of where the fire-eyes looked.

Good thing: In a parking garage, there was ample steel for the element to put between itself and the fire-eyes' killer stare.

"Where is the iamb for the burnt offering?" the freak screamed.

Bad thing: All that cover made it hard for the element to get off a clean shot. They swapped fire for fire, but they couldn't drop the thing.

"Reload." came the call from Tipden.

A hail of .45 Colt auto covering fire was Eddi's response. It was her present for being upped to the element's point in Soledad's absence. The most ferocious handgun in existence. One of 'em. Didn't hardly feel enough in Eddi's hand. And to think her max dream had been to thread every freak she crossed with her pop's knife.

That she'd managed sharp-force trauma on any freak ever… Luck? A miracle? Stupidity.

Glass melting.

Metal renting.

Tires popping.

She wasn't going bitch, but Eddi couldn't put enough cover between herself and this freak.

"His word is in my heart like a fire, a fire shut up in my bones. I am weary of holding it in; indeed," the freak yelled, "I cannot."

"Reload," Eddi yelled.

Tipden and Allen picked up their rate of fire. Eddi crouched, popped the Colt's clip. Fed it another. She missed hefting an HK.

She sure as shit missed Soledad's O'Dwyer,

And she was up. She was firing. Three guns against a tire-eyes. Odds weren't hardly good. Three against one,

and the MTacs were getting pushed back.

"He makes winds his messengers, flames of fire his servants!"

That was… Even as she jerked her the Colt's trigger, signaled Tipden and Alien to drop back, Eddi was working to remember. Sundays. Church with her mother, her father. "Winds his messengers." "Flames of fire his servants." Psalms.

And if Eddi could dial her rage, up it went. She wasn't the most Christian person. Not even close. Never much cared for church on Sundays. But her parents, her father, tried to put. some God in her. Freak's acting like God had taken her

dad.

And now this one was spouting the Word? Unacceptable.

Bur. just about unstoppable. Eddi could feel the heat of the thing pressing closer.

Cutting closer. "Reload!" she yelled.

The freak just kept spouting pseudo-Bible, No reloading for him. No ammo out. No stovepiping, stoppages, jamming.

Just heat billowing. Steel bending. An Escalade sagged, bowed down before it.

The freak: "After me will come one who is more powerful than I, whose sandals I am not fit to carry."

Bad call. Eddi was starting to think she'd planned wrong.

"He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit…»

Planning wrong was gonna get her killed. Not so bad. She could take it. What made her feel like shit: Tipden and Allen were gonna get dead too.

She saw the concrete of a vertical support char. She saw Allen make a move as hot light punched its way through the side of a German car.

How, Eddi wondered, would Soledad have played it?

"And he will baptize you with fire! Revelation is coming! The truth will-"

The standing theory with freaks, the one few normals were ever hoping was proved otherwise, was that the vast majority of muties only owned one significant fetish. They had one superpower. And it would be a very bad day for the normal human race when freaks started developing a second ability.

For a split second the fire-eyes looked like it had suddenly acquired the ability to rent open its chest and spit its innards outward. Would've been a useless superpower had it been a superpower. In fact it was a one-ounce slug fired from Alcala's Benelli punching its way through the freak's front carrying a good-sized mass of the freak's back and spine and lungs and whatever else it could grab up before heading out its chest.

And then it was like the freak was rushing to scoop up what it'd ejected from itself. Making a quick move to avoid a spill like some guy who'd accidentally dumped his martini at a cocktail party. Really, he was just falling over. Crashing into the garage floor. Splashing into a puddle of his own insides.

The fire in his eyes was out.

The freak was dead.

And then there was this moment, this blessed moment that occurs only rarely and only when a call goes good.

When the freak gets dropped, there isn't an operator down and what's left of the element's screaming into a radio for a bus. After the guns quit talking in their particular vernacular there is just quiet. Calm, halcyon quiet that is a harsh counterpoint to the raging hell that existed in the same space an instant earlier.

It made Eddi think or realize that it was just that much or just that little between chaos and calm. An instant.

And then the quiet was gone.

Tipden was calling in an all-clear to Command.

Alcala, easing for the freak-the Benelli giving the body a stare-down-called for Eddi: "Dropped it."

"… Yeah… " Eddi's racing heart and spinning mind were a couple of gears that wouldn't sync.

"Dropped it, Eddi." Breathing hard. Words pitched between excitement and fear. Alcala sounded like a bull rider who'd just made his seven seconds. "Didn't even see me coming."

"Took your damn time."

"Only had one shot, wanted to make it count."

"Good call," Alien to Eddi. "Letting Alcala circle around like that."

Eddi to herself: It wasn't a good call. It was a gamble that turned out good. Most points would never hold a gun back against a freak. But she figured if three could keep it distracted, one could get the drop.

"Hell of a good one," Alien said, "for first time on point."

Alcala added: "Bullet wouldn't've called it any better."

She could see it. Beyond the dry prose of the perfunctory reporting in the Daily News, in the theater of her mind Soledad could see Eddi leading Pacific MTac-the element Eddi'd been elevated to point of upon Soledad's leg getting jacked-against a freak that could generate and discharge heat from its eyes. And they had taken it out sans casualty to the operators on the element, according to the Daily News. Usually, the News, the Times, local TV, didn't much bother reporting the details of warrants served on freaks, since warrants being served on freaks, no matter some flew and others spat fire, had grown over the years to be reasonably commonplace. Like gang shootings. Like politicians and their whores. Like Hollywood leading men getting outed. In this day and age what else was new?

What was new: a twenty-two-year-old cop, female on top of that, taking out a freak that could shoot heat beams with not much more than a knife.

That knife. That knife of Eddi's…

There was absolutely nothing in the article about the MTacs' procedure, about how they took out the freak. It was in her head Soledad saw Eddi putting it down, solo, with her blade. And Soledad could hear, again in her head, she could hear Eddi chiding: How about that, Soledad? Chalked a freak and didn't even need your fancy little gun.

That knife of hers…

Undoubtedly, it'd been multiple clips emptied by all of the element into the freak that'd dropped it. But Soledad, her feelings of uselessness that had festered in her leg and were now infecting her imagination, couldn't help but score the victory to that knife.

And Soledad'd been worried about Eddi worshipping her? Why should Eddi? Probably, Eddi made a better MTac than Soledad.

What was that Soledad was feeling now? Obsolescence doing an insect's crawl on her

flesh?

Eyes.

It was eyes rolling over her, sensed so strongly they came to her as an actual feeling.

Beyond the doorway, in the corridor, the one-handed, one-hooked cop-that particular cop with one hand, one hook-was standing where he had a couple of weeks or so prior. Staring as he'd done previously.

And, same as before, Soledad: "Yeah?"

"O'Roark, right?"

"Yeah."

"People talk about you."

Soledad gave a shrug indicating how much- how little-she cared about other people's talk. "People are saying-"

"Whatever." Soledad had no interest in the conversation and aborted it before it was fully formed.

The one-handed, — hooked cop kept up his stare, kept it going. And Soledad returned one. She maintained her intensity, not mocking him or imitating the guy. She was actively staring him down.

Then the cop came into Soledad's space. "Tucker Raddatz." He held out his left hand, offering an awkward shake.

Soledad joined his left hand with her right hand, didn't bother with her name. Obviously, it was known to him.

Raddatz said: "Welcome to DMI."

Where a thank-you would've been fine Soledad said, too honest for her own good: "You've got to come around, stare at me twice, two weeks apart, just to offer a hello?"

"Wanted to be sure."

"Of?"

"That you'd still be working here in two weeks' time."

Another shrug from Soledad. "Here's where I want to be."

"Which is why you waited until you got your knee messed up before making the move from G Platoon to DMI. A temp transfer at that."

"If I'd known the cops here liked to stand outside office doors like peeping pervs, I would have been here years ago."

Not so much as a smile from Raddatz. "Some gave a lot to be here." Signifying. He was obviously talking about his lost hand. Maybe some other wounds unseen. Those of other DMI cops. "Hard to take the sort-of-injured coming around for a temporary visit."

"I don't know if I'm supposed to feel a certain way because you're disabled."

"I'm not disabled. One hand, and I can still do more than-"

"I don't know how I'm supposed to feel that you're a gimp; if I'm supposed to feel guilty, or sympathetic, or what. Mostly, I don't feel anything. Not for you guys. You got the way you are because you were messing with freaks. Mess with freaks, sooner or later you get messed up. So I don't feel anything because, same as the rest of us, you knew the risk and you took it. And I don't feel anything because, well, how would you take the sympathy of a stranger anyway? Not well at all."

"How would you know?"

"Because I wouldn't take it well. I wouldn't want it."

Their mutual stare remained in a locked loop. Stayed that way.

Raddatz said: "Want to get coffee?" Soledad said: "Sure."

Soledad felt better about Raddatz after he'd directed her to a Norms. Norms were diners. Oldschool. Trapped in a Googie era. Value-priced. Highlights of the menu: a patty melt and a fajita salad and a California Reuben sandwich and a chicken-fried steak that Soledad had never had- she had never had anything of the kind anywhere-but promised herself to try before her death. She didn't care about seeing the Eiffel Tower. She didn't care about going skydiving one time before she bit it. She just wanted to try the chicken-fried steak. Only, not today.

Norms's coffee, porcelain-cup-served, varied only by the cream and sugar the drinker dumped in it.

Raddatz, deftly, used a combo of hand and hook to rip open his sugar, his little packets of cream. How many years of practice did it take to get good at mixing coffee like a two-handed person?

Soledad had tea. Regular Lipton. Lot of milk. Lot of sugar.

Panama had nothing.

Raddatz had brought a tagalong with them. Another cop. Chuck Panama. About Raddatz's age. Not a bad-looking guy. Only, he knew he wasn't a bad-looking guy and it had probably gotten him a lot of play in his younger days. So now he slung around his "ain't I fine" attitude same as some high-trading currency that ought to automatically buy him something.

Bought him nothing from Soledad except instant contempt.

And he was nondisfigured. He had no visible defect. No limp. No scars that could be seen. For a DMI cop that was remarkable to the point of being unique. Soledad's neck alone owned a souvenir-a palm-shaped scar of burned flesh- of her very first call. Panama's flawlessness was a curiosity to Soledad.

For a minute the three talked, mostly Raddatz and Soledad doing the talking. Panama seemed slightly above engagement. The talk was about nothing. The way smog was making a comeback in the city, the way the Clippers weren't and probably never would. They spent time on insignificance, but their talk wasn't about the conversation. Their talk, seeing who stood their ground, who held their convictions over matters of little consequence, served the function of a couple of sparring partners going around and around the squared circle waiting for the other to demonstrate if things were going to be gentle or if there was some pugilism to be done. In the process Raddatz gave a little primer on himself. Married, a couple of kids. Boys. Was with West

LA MTac four years ago. Twenty-first call, eighth on point-and he remembered the exact number it was-a freak got the best of them. Got three of the operators, got his hand.

Three cops dead, one gimped.

And here was the kicker. As the cops were fighting for their lives-more rightly, as they were losing their lives in a slaughter-one of the cops squeezed off a round that: went stray and did a through-and-through to some guy a coupla blocks away. The guy died.

The LA Times ran an op-ed piece. Heavy-handed. Anticop, Anti-MTac. MTacs were offing innocent people in their cross fire. Israel Fernandez led a protest rally. Not even a hundred people showed up. But that was a start.

Three cops dead. And the Times, the liberals were saying the cops were out of control?

Raddatz did his hand/hook thing, put cream and sugar in some fresh coffee.

He took a sip, took in some of the brew. He let out nothing but bitterness.

Raddatz said: "That damn Fernandez."

Panama nodded to that.

Soledad got where that came from. Here Raddatz was with one hand, and other people with two good ones wanted to wrap them around the freaks and give them a big, sloppy, "oh, you poor victims" hug. And of them, of that bunch of freak fuckers, the worst had been "Damn Fernandez," Raddatz said again.

Soledad said something to the effect that it had been how many,… how few, really. How few years since San Francisco? Already people were starting to forget.

"That's the thing," Raddatz said. "You try to make people remember, they say you're wallowing in tragedy. You do nothing, they just let it slip out of their minds."

"Month after May Day, everybody's like: Yeah, we want the Feds to do something; yeah, we want DNA testing." By the string, Soledad bobbed her tea bag in an empty cup. Something for her hand to do. "A couple of years go by, people were already bitching the Executive Order's not constitutional. DNA testing's an invasion of privacy."

"How about we just let freaks back into the country? All of you in Europe, c'mon home." Raddatz's sarcasm was high. "How about we give them their spandex back? Let them fly around, get in fights… start knocking over buildings again. Shit, if we're just going to act like San Francisco never happened…»

Panama gave a laugh.

She knew he was just going off, agreed with Raddatz's core philosophy, but still Soledad shook her head to all that. "They think that way, the bleeding hearts; they just want to roll back the clock in their heads to the day before yesterday ended." Soledad got the psychology of the liberal fringe. At least, she was able to articulate the thought process she ascribed to them. "They want to believe, they want to make themselves believe… some of them, maybe they actually think they're doing right. But I think most of them just want to make themselves believe San Francisco could never happen again."

"How the hell could they-"

"They just want to feel safe. Ignorance and bliss, right?"

Panama: "Bullshit."

"Yeah, it's bullshit. Absolutely it is. So people like us, not only do we never forget what happened, we've got the added chore of having to remember for the bleeding hearts."

"That why you went MTac?"

"There another reason to try and arrest things that can make you burst into flames with a look in your direction?"

"Some operators are just action junkies." Panama was accusatory in tone. Slightly, bur. just enough. "They get off thinking they're BAMF."

"And those operators mostly never get past SWAT." Soledad was adamant about the point, having worked with enough jarheads, youth wasted on PlayStation and thinking cop work, was nothing but. a video game, to last a lifetime. A lifetime that was likely to get. fractionalized when the jarhead found out too late that when you're going after a freak you don't get do-overs. "They can play badass all day, all night. Doesn't make them anything of the kind. Every other cop job. the odds are you're going to live, retire, get fat off your pension. MTac, every day you survive you've beat the odds. You know that. And you know, a job where being dead is the norm, you've got to be down for the cause."

"You'd stay with it, then; stay with MTac?"

Panama was probing. Soledad didn't care for it.

To Panama: "You ever work MTac?" Panama nodded.

"So what's your story? You don't look like you ever got it bad from a freak." "Maybe I'm too good for that."

"If you were so good, you'd still be MTac, so maybe you suck and got bounced to DMI."

"Lift your shirt," Raddatz said. "Show her your torso."

"The girl's eating."

"I stopped being a girl when I started kicking little boys like you in the teeth." "She's not eating."

"I don't mean right this second she is," Panama said. "But she might want to eat again someday. Why spoil her appetite for life?"

"First call I went on an operator got a hole hand-burned in her chest by a fire freak. So unless you've got something else to show me

Panama lifted his shirt. What he showed Soledad was some whole, other, hideous thing. It was…

Just… some other, hideous thing,

Soledad had to make herself, make herself stare at the damage just so not to come off like a bitch.

Panama lowered his shirt.

"Would you give your back," Raddatz rejoined the conversation, "to an MTac who wasn't in things for the long haul?"

Shirt down, and Soledad was still staring at Panama's torso. Soledad shifted her look to Raddatz. "No."

"So you can see why we're curious."

"We?" The word stuck out to Soledad. So did the fact that, with Raddatz, it probably wasn't a casual slip of the tongue. He was tossing bait. She wanted to know; "When did I become a departmental concern?"

Pulling a laminated menu from a holder at the edge of the table: "You hungry, O'Roark? Can't ever go wrong with a five-dollar steak."

"I'm good."

"Think about things."

"And you're not talking about the steak."

A bit of a smile from Raddatz. He wasn't laughing, but he appreciated her, appreciated Soledad. Soledad had that effect on people. Usually, right before they tried to terminate her in some fashion, they gave her their regard. "I'm talking about what you're going to do with yourself. Think about that."

He put down the menu. With one hand-and for him there was no other way-Raddatz pulled his wallet, picked out some money, tossed it on the table.

At some point early on, almost all kids have a moment where they want to grow up to be policemen. They want to be honorable. They want to aid the community, and in return be looked on with gratitude for serving the public good. Then kids actually grow up, wise up, go for jobs that pay six figures. At least that. And where you don't have to dodge bullets in the process.

Most kids do that.

Not all.

Not Tom Hayes. At a young age Tom got caught in the wanna-be-a-cop frame of mind. Or rut, however you want to look at it. Got in it. Never got out. He'd been indoctrinated by the ads. Not just the slickly produced, near-Hollywood-quality ads the Los Angeles Police Department ran every recruiting season. He got caught up in the actual Hollywood-quality ads. Ever)' movie, every TV show that portrayed the

LAPD as the toughest roughneck shield-wearing MPs on the planet, drawing their guns weekly, wrapping up every crime, no matter how major, in some length of time between forty-four minutes and two hours.

Creative license, sure. But it had to be. Torn figured, an approximation of real life. And for Tom, for having grown up in a trailer park in Palmdale, a cop's pay was the icing that shined like all the gold in Fort Knox laid out end-to-end in the noon sun.

So Tom took the entrance exam, aced it, went to the academy, became a cop.

Then the boredom set in. Even in LA, even in a city of eight-plus million, there was mostly not a lot for a cop to do. Not a lot that was exciting. You could make traffic stops for minor infractions day-night-day. You could settle disputes between/among bums, alkys and vagrants of every known race, creed, color, ethnic and religious background and sexual orientation until you felt like you were working security at a skid row UN meeting. Occasionally, you could get into a beef with some scofflaw punks of the rich, white variety whose snobbery begged for reduction from the polished, forged aluminum of a Monadnock baton. And very, very rarely there'd be some actual trouble-the real-world version of movie/TV show trouble-that maybe just might require the removal of your gun from its holster. The chances of pulling the trigger? What were the chances of getting elected pope?

And even if trouble ever happened that it was so severe it necessitated the pulling of your piece, even in LA that was a once-, maybe twice-in-a-career kind of thing.

If you were a beat cop.

In LA real trouble got dealt with by SPU or SWAT.

Real, real trouble, and MTac got the call. Everything else, every mundane thing was for cops like Tom Hayes. Could've been worse.

Tom could've been a cop years back in the Age of Heroes.

Age of heroes used to be capitalized. Not anymore.

Back then, in the age, there was next to nothing for a cop to do. Drug dealers, gangbangers, carjackers got dealt with by the likes of Nightshift, Street Justice, Urban Legend. Guys-and women-with just enough supernormal abilities to be able to kick the ever-lovin' shit out of your typical punk-with-gun.

Bigger trouble-punks with automatic weapons, terrorists with bombs, superevildoers with particle weapons- got handled by the likes of Elan, GammaMan, Nubian Princess.

Cops worked crowd control, directed traffic around the inevitable damage done when supertypes mixed it up.

Then San Francisco. May Day. Then the age of heroes got written in lowercase. Then beat cops like Tom Hayes got elevated from doing absolutely nothing to doing barely anything.

So when Officer Hayes got the call from dispatch to "see the man" down at the LA River, it gave him no spike. Another bumfight. A couple of white kids, rolling on E, in need of an attitude adjustment.

When he got to the river-a river by name, in actuality a concrete ditch used as an aqueduct to flow the water the city stole from the northern part of the state-and talked to "the man" who'd put in a call to the Hollywood station re: a body he'd found, Officer Hayes didn't make much of it. Bodies, like abandoned cars, got found constantly.

But if he'd had so much as a sliver of an idea that, staring at the body, he was witness to a portion of a play that featured God and man, Officer Hayes would've made more of the moment. Probably, he would have bent over and puked in the face of it. More intrigue than his internal organs could handle.

But he was aware of nothing but a dead body.

He waited for a hearse from LACFSC to come and take it away.

Then Officer Tom Hayes went and got himself some lunch, writing up a moving violation along the way.

There was one message on Soledad's integrated cordless phone/digital answering machine. Her mother, Soledad figured. About the only other person who called at home-besides telemarketers who had no regard for the Do Not Call Registry-was Vin, and Vin hardly ever called Soledad.

Soledad played the message.

The voice she heard had all the distinctiveness of a Swedish automobile. So free of spirit and character it could not be recognized. So bland she had to listen- Soledad actually had to work at hearing-to absorb what the speaker was saying, the voice not self-compelling. Couldn't manage it the first pass. Halfway through, Soledad started the message over. A request for a private meeting, a sit-down to talk about… What was to be discussed was vague, as ill defined as the voice that spoke. At the end of the message: "Oh, yes. I'm sorry. I should have said: This is Tashjian calling."

Soledad had once been nearly dead and buried. Metaphor, of course. Actually, considering her job, not "of course." But in terms of living a life that made her feel alive, the business with IA had just about killed her. Could have landed her in jail too. And the guy who dug her grave-dug it deep, dug it well and was ready to toss the first shovelful of dirt on her not-even-cold body- was Tashjian.

Sapless, swashy, milk-and-water. Tashjian. His voice on her answering machine was reminder to Soledad of what little there was of distinction to the guy. Except for being quite the creep. And being undeniable. He was a fellow who got his way, got what he pleased.

What he wanted was to have a talk with Soledad. And never mind their history-or because of their history, because she ended up free and clear of him-Soledad was glad to take the meeting. To look the bogeyman dead in the eyes.

"I'm not scared of you."

Soledad, Tashjian, were at Pan-Pacific Park, strolling around under the LA sun that was- thanks to a population that refused to stabilize let alone diminish-again losing the fight against the smog that only a few years prior it had begun to get a handle on.

Tashjian responding to Soledad: "I would doubt there's very much you are afraid of. Certainly not me."

"You better believe I'm not."

"And I do."

"You tried to take me out. Didn't work. If you think I'm going to run and hide when you come knocking-"

"You have no fear of me. I take you at your word. But the more you talk… exactly who are you trying to convince, Officer O'Roark?"

At that point, to say nothing more was equal admission Tashjian was right. To let his comment go was backing (Sown, and backing down never felt correct to Soledad. As middle ground: "Just so you understand where I'm coming from. It's not so much that I'm interested in what you've got to say as I am in letting you know I've got no problem with you saying it to my face."

"Understood."

It was odd being out of doors with Tashjian. He was, seemed as though he were, a creature of the shadows. More comfortable in dark than light where his designs could be more easily seen and therefore exposed. A requirement of prestidigitation is that actions be masked. Sleight of hand was Tashjian's expertise. The conceptual dark of others' ignorance was his stage. But here Tashjian was strolling around, walking in the sun just the same as anyone. No longer an object of apprehension, just, more of what he really was. Incredibly normal. Maybe daylight changed Soledad's perception. Maybe it was the change of circumstances; the crushing stone of disciplinary action no longer hanging by a threadbare twine over Soledad's head. Either way, Tashjian didn't seem quite the creep.

"At any rate," he said, "my ultimate objective wasn't to remove you from the department."

"You put a gold medal effort into things for a guy who wasn't trying."

"I told you at the time, I might have been there to help you. You didn't believe me. My intention, my intention was not to bring a good cop to false justice for no reason. It was about getting to the truth. That's what detectives do, be they Homicide, Robbery or Internal Affairs.'''

"I don't have a problem with you getting to the truth. What I've got a problem with is that I told you the truth and you wouldn't take it."

"What kind of detective would I be if I accepted things at face value? It's in the looking you learn to appreciate what you see." As if to demonstrate, Tashjian took a glance around the park. A little spot of green and trees lined by the low-rise apartments, the orthodox business of the Fairfax District.

Tashjian said: "It's in these moments, the casual ones, that I see the reason we do what we

do."

"We? You worked MTac?"

"No. I haven't. I was speaking of police work in general. This"-an arm arched before him-"is why we do what we do."

Soledad looked around, looked at what Tashjian was seeing, A bum, his whole world packed in the Sav-On shopping cart he pushed around the city. A couple of Asian guys, parish skin, shirts off, potbellies revealed, lying out sunbathing. Two softball-playing, Harley-riding, phys-ed-teaching dykes fornicating without care for, concern of, anyone who might be watching.

A cross section of the carnival Los Angeles. Small but representative.

In response to what she saw, to what Tashjian had said: "This? It's a freak show."

A. tic of Tashjian's head. "You and I both know what a freak show is: things disguised as normal but far from. Things that fly, things that change shape or size. Things that, can execute feats which you and I could perform only in our minds and with our best imagining.

"So the oddity around us now, within the city, these very people in the park: They are not so odd, Officer O'Roark. They exist, they are human. They perform simple acts of Irving. They search for love, companionship and meaning in life beyond the cycle of eat, work, sleep. It is these acts that make them human, that drives humanity. And though, per individual, we may not understand or wholly agree with the desires of others, the obligation that you and I and those who are like-minded have undertaken is to ensure normal people have the opportunity to fulfill their legal desires. Our obligation is not just, not merely to protect normal people but also to secure the acts of living to which they are guaranteed. Without that sense of guarantee, would we as people continue as a race or succumb to an emotional extinction? It is hope that gives us a future. So, in aggregate, our job is not to enforce the law. It is nothing less spectacular than to protect the future of humanity. We provide no other service except to ensure a certain peace of mind; that to the best of our abilities we will prevent acts of living from being interrupted. If they are threatened, we will protect. If the life itself is lost, then we will pursue the guilty.

For this social compact to work, you, I, people like us, must follow the letter of the law regardless of our feelings, our personal prejudices or favors. It is the law, as written and interpreted without bias, that must be our guide. Those you may have quarrel with out of uniform, you will offer your protection to under the color of authority.

"If this critical aspect breaks down, I believe- and I say this believing the statement is free of hyperbole-we will find ourselves on a path to anarchy. Worse. To our own destruction.

"We are on such a path, Officer O'Roark. I believe we are. But there is still an opportunity to correct ourselves. So I come to you to ask for your help."

There was nothing but confusion and questions for Soledad. "Help you how? With what? What… what anarchy?"

"You know, of course, of Israel Fernandez."

Soledad's nod "yes'' became a head shake of disgust. A quiet editorial of what she thought of the man.

"His is a death which remains in question," Tashjian said.

"For the freak fuckers. If that's the anarchy you're talking about, as far as I care-"

"You don't. You don't care. For you, yes, that's the natural reaction. But the anarchy I'm talking about is more than a death, or the conspiracy theories that surround it. There have been, over the past fifteen months, several deaths involving people associated with the metanormal community. Some were certainly more questionable than Israel Fernandez's. Some, five of them quite frankly, were murder."

"They were sleeping with the enemy." Not knowing the specifics, not caring for them, Soledad was unmoved, analytical. "Somebody wanted to, wanted to set them straight and went overboard. That's for R/HD. It's not my concern."

Then Tashjian added to the equation: "The five I believe were murdered were metanormals."

And that gave Soledad pause.

"What are you considering?" Tashjian asked. "How people with extraordinary abilities could be killed by anything short of an MTac assault? Or are you pondering the fact that most metanormals now live incognito and in fear of the law, police. If Fernandez was in fact murdered, he was an obvious and easy target. But how did the killer know his metanormal victims were in fact metanormals? The logical conclusion, the unpleasant one: The murders were carried out by those already collecting intelligence on metanormals. Those with an understanding of their weaknesses and how to exploit them, and with a severe desire to destroy them."

"Like a cop."

Tashjian nodded. Added: "Such as an officer within DMI."

"Does it… somebody's doing our job for us-" "It is not 'our job,' Officer O'Roark. Executioners under the guise of the law is what the liberal media, the bleeding hearts wish us to be. But we aren't. If there was a… There is a

child killer living down the block. You know this, you have evidence. You wait for him at night. And when he emerges from his house, as he passes, you press a gun to the base of his skull, and you-"

"That's not what I'd-"

"For the price of a bullet you save society the cost of a trial, the family the incalculable agony of reliving a nightmare."

Soledad said nothing. Tashjian'd made his point.

"As rational," Tashjian said, "as it might seem, there is no rationale for vigilantism. Merely empty justifications. There is also no account in murdering metanormals or their supporters. Their supporters have a right to free speech, and metanormals have the right to due process, the opportunity to turn themselves in, receive reparations. They are incarcerated in the Special Protection Area, yes. At times deported. But they are not executed. They only face harm when they attempt to do harm, or when their identities are disclosed, a warrant is issued and they refuse to surrender peaceably.

"How many MTacs would still be alive, do you imagine, if they were allowed to fire first instead of waiting to be threatened or until they had delivered so-called Civils to a suspect?"

Rhetorical question. But Soledad gave a quiet accounting of dozens and dozens. And how many times had Soledad wanted to shoot first and not even bother handing a freak the opportunity to surrender? But she had not. Never once. Despite her feelings, that wasn't the way things were done. At least, it wasn't how she did things.

The case Tashjian was building was, as to be expected, undeniable.

What Soledad wanted to know: "So freaks, freak fuckers are being killed. Let the cops deal with it. Why do you and me have to take a walk in the park?"

"The murders themselves, quiet, spread out over time among a relatively disenfranchised community, have gotten little attention from the department. At least as of yet.

But what's nearly certain, sooner or later some Intrepid individual at the Times or Channel 4 will piece things together: Metanormals and their supporters are being targeted, being killed by police officers. We are, Soledad, in a very precarious position. Less than a decade and a half since San Francisco, and people-"

"People forget," Soledad finished the thought.

"Worse than that. They have forgiven and are on the verge of shifting blame. The protectors become persecutors: We're too harsh on metanormals. We're too inconvenient in the public's lives. I've heard the word 'gestapo' used with the LAPD, with MTac programs. Hyperbole, but after a time extremism begins to stick. So metanormals, metanormal rights activists being targeted, murdered… which side, do you suppose, will gain advantage from this situation? Who will gain sympathy?"

"I get that. What I don't get: Why me? IA's got a department full of people."

"And you've been at DMI how long now? Already you've seen it's more like a fiefdom than a division. They don't even sit in Parker Center. To try and investigate by ordinary means is pointless. To try to infiltrate one of my officers would be useless. Everyone at DMI would see a plant coming as easily as if they were supervisioned muties. You're in a good position, inside DMI by circumstances beyond suspicion, and your credentials are beyond question. You've distinguished yourself in duty, and that you've been investigated by my department-"

"Tormented."

"Is well known. By rights you should hate Internal Affairs. Why would you ever work with us? You are perfect for what the situation demands."

"Like I was a born rat."

"We can play a game of semantics all day and all night. If you fear being a rat, don't think of yourself as one. Don't disregard the opportunity to exonerate innocent officers."

"And I could tell them that? After this is done, how do you think they'd take it that I spied on them?"

Tashjian made a show of looking confused. His version of sarcasm. "Why would you tell them?" he asked. "They have absolutely no need to know."

"I'm talking about-"

"Honesty. Fidelity. And I appreciate that. What I'm talking about, simply, is maintaining the structure of society as we know it for the foreseeable future. If the door of change opens slightly, it might as well be kicked down. I think so. You are needed to keep the door shut."

More than eight months since IA had gone after her. The bad taste Tashjian, the department, left with her was still strong in

Soledad's mouth. "Won't do it. I'm not going to sell out other cops."

"If they're murderers, if they are killing people-"

"Freaks aren't people. They don't have rights."

"Neither do dogs, but you can't shoot one in the street. The transgression is the same. So is the threat to you and me and everything that we believe in."

"That's kinda much, don't you think?"

"Maybe. But is that the chance you want to take? Hate me. O'Roark. From where you stand. I deserve your hatred. But don't hate me so much you would condemn us all to returning to a time when freaks ruled and humans clung to relevancy. Understand, that is where we are now: a point of advancement or reversion.

"I don't know what destiny has assigned us. Whether it's to change the course of history as we know it, or just bust a few dirty cops. Honestly, even thinking like that… well, I stand on very ordinary legs. What I do know, for whatever reason, whatever the outcome, we have been delivered to this moment to do something or to do nothing. My question to you, Officer O'Roark: Which will it be?"

It started as a John Doe. A body, no ID, clothes partially burned away, found at the bottom of the LA River. Not that the LA River was particularly deep. More like the LA stream. The stiff was stiff, probably dead forty-eight hours by the rigor, the lividity, but lack of decomposition. A bum, probably. Dead from too much booze, too little shelter. The body got transported to the LA County Forensic Science Center. Fancy name for city morgue. Given the same deference as the inanimate slab which it had ended up, the body would get processed, paperworked, stored, then prepped for an eventual dump in a potter's field.

Routine.

In LA, in a city that manufactured 158.9 bodies a day, this John Doe was just more of the same.

Would've been.

Except for the mandatory autopsy that the assistant medical examiner finally got around to performing six days after the body arrived. Except that when the AME put a scalpel to the John Doe to open his flesh, the flesh would not open. Not with the scalpel. Not with a bone cutter. Not with a hacksaw. Not with a Black & Decker power drill the AME pulled out of the trunk of his Dodge Stratus.

Who the John Doe was, was still unknown. What he was, was becoming real clear. What he was, was a freak. An invulnerable. Dead, probably, a lot longer than forty-eight hours prior to its discovery. Impossible to know. A hundred years from now his body might, slightly, begin to decay. Somewhat. Nobody knew for sure. As there had only been a very few exanimate invulnerables as case studies, the rate of their decomposition was still being surveyed.

So who the freak was, how long it had been dead were questions. But neither was the question. The question, the one that got the examiners at LACFSC nervous as they called DMI. reported what they had: What is it that killed an invulnerable freak?

“He's a freak."

Soledad and Donate!! stood just inside the doorway of the house. Nice house. Really nice. Palos Verdes nice. Big. Ocean view. The house was nice to the point the guy who owned the house probably referred to his "inside the doorway" as a foyer or anteroom or something else classy-sounding.

The guy who owned it: Fong. An Asian guy with an English accent. Either born in Hong Kong or educated at Oxford. However it was, the end result, he'd ended up in the south bay area of LA with enough dough to live well. Real well. The only stress in Fong's life, apparently, was Ms neighbor.

"He's a freak," Fong said again.

Soledad and Donatell gave very little outward reaction. Donatell-Mike Donatell-might've reacted the hell out things. His face, hard to tell. Donatell, when he was MTac, had ended up on a bad call against a fire freak. Donatell had been severely burned. Donatell's skull looked like it had molten flesh poured over it. Ears and nose made out of melted, discolored wax. He was a sight. Not a pleasant one.

Donatell: "When you say he's a freak…"

"When I say he is a freak, I mean that he is a freak. I'm not sure what, else there is to say."

"What kind of a freak?"

Hesitation from Fong.

"What are his abilities?"

"Well, they are subtle. But they involve his vision. I believe he has, has the ability to see through solid objects."

"X-ray vision," Soledad prompted.

"I believe. And he is superstrong."

"Thing is, freaks only have one metanormal ability. So which is it?"

Hesitation from Fong.

Soledad, again: "Which is it?" Soledad had been "graciously invited" along on the interview by Donatell. Strictly, she wasn't sure she should be asking questions. But, response by response, she was getting a sense of things. Her sense, her time was being wasted.

"X-ray vision. I believe."

"And you know this because…?"

"Because I've seen him use it."

"You've seen him use X-ray vision? How were you able to see someone use X-ray vision?"

"Why would I lie? What reason do I have to lie about that… that freak being a freak?"

"Did I say you were lying?"

"Mr. Fong," Donatell stepping back into things, "before we deal with the situation, we need to be absolutely sure of what we're dealing with."

"And I have told you." Fong did not, could not look at Donatell. Donatell's aspect too severe to handle.

"Yes, you have." Donatell's mouth was nearly fused shut. His 'words were permanently slurred, and every sentence uttered ended with a slurping sound. Donatell sucking in air and sucking back saliva. A couple of scenes from The Elephant Man jumped into Soledad's head. "'But we have to be sure of what we're dealing with. Every detail has to be considered. Can you give us a description of the individual?"

"He's Mexican."

And Soledad got it. No matter the guy was doing well enough to afford a place in Palos Verdes-which meant he was doing better than ninety-five percent of the working stiffs in

America-Fong figured Ms property value was going to take a hit having a Mexican living next door. So what do you do? You call him a freak, call DMI, have them send him off to a new place to live. Like the SPA.

Standing right where she was, Soledad settled back within herself. Let Donatell do the work, conduct the interview. She was done with getting her time wasted.

The queer thing about it all, one guy was accusing another of having the ability to see through solid objects. Soledad thought he was lying, but in the world she lived in he didn't sound insane.

The waiter took the order of the Chicken Saag, the Lamb Tikka Masai a. Onion Kulcha. The waiter, taking the order, stared at Donatell. Barely looked away enough to write on the pad he carried. He stared at Donatell like he was clocking one of those Night of the Living Dead zombies trying to figure what was the best way to kill the beast. And on top of all that the waiter was obvious with the speed he took down the order, got away from the table as if he had to rush off to puke. Donatell didn't seem put out. Then again, as before, it was hard to tell what was going on behind that permanent mask Donatell wore.

Soledad, eating some katchumber: "What do we do?"

"About the call? Write it up, turn it in. Surveil the guy."

"Even though the complainant was lying?"

"You know he was lying?"

Soledad gave a laugh. "C'mon."

Donatell, again: "Do you know he was lying?"

"Back in the day the complaint would've been: He's a dealer. A banger. Whatever. Whatever to try to get the cops to do some redlining on the city's dime."

"Do you-"

"I know it's a waste of time when DMI ought to be looking for real freaks."

"Good of you to educate me," big slurp, "on how DMI works."

No matter the damage, the scarring, the flesh around Donatell's lips retained his right and real pigmentation. Darker than his burned skin. He was sort of a reverse minstrel. So badly burned. A few more seconds, a few more, Soledad wondered, and would he have been killed rather than left to live as he is? Does he ever, she wondered, look in the mirror and wish the couple of seconds had broiled him into oblivion?

"Do they bother you?" Soledad asked. "Ones like the waiter. The ones who just stare."

"Two kinds of people. The ones who stare, the ones who don't. The people who stare… hell, I would stare at me. The ones who won't look are the ones I hate. How are they not going to look? I know how my shit is. But they won't even acknowledge me, like, like if they don't look, I don't exist and who the hell am I screwing up their beautiful world with my hideousness? Anyway, you get over it. I scare kids and I can't get laid by anyone but whores I've got to overpay. You learn to deal."

He sucked in some katchumber.

"I used to be," Soledad said, "the same way with my neck. Self-conscious like that."

Donatell laughed, blew slightly masticated food out of his mouth. "That's like a hangnail, O'Roark. That little bit of scarring you've got's like a hangnail."

"Yeah, well, I used to be beautiful. For all I know, what you've got's an improvement."

A little light in Donatell's eyes. If he preferred those who stare over those who don't, he really dug those who could give a good ribbing no different than if all he'd gotten was a bad trim at Supercuts.

Getting back to what's what: "Maybe it's bullshit, O'Roark, but we still do things by the book because that's how the book says to do them. I know you've got issues with that."

"Issues with…?"

"You don't always do things how they're supposed to be done." "You know that?" "I know the talk."

"And I care for talk the way you care for the people who won't even stare."

"You gotta understand," taking up a napkin, whipping drool from his chin, "things are different at DMI. Yeah, I know you've heard the talk; cops here think they're superspies. Most of that, most of that is self-arad…»

"Self-aggrandizing."

"I was never good with big words. Shouldn't even try. We're busted cops and we want to feel good about ourselves. I was MTac. Most of us were. But I'm just talking from my POV for a sec. When I was MTac, I saw things different. Mostly, I saw how the book was written by guys who were safe behind a desk telling us how to take out the freak of the week. You get bad advice a couple of times and you-"

The waiter brought the food. Set it down. Asked if the pair needed anything. When he got their no-thank-yous, the waiter left the table. All of that, his eyes never left Donatell.

Donatell, going on: "Things go bad for you a couple of times, sure, you do what you've got to do to keep you, keep your element alive."

Probing: "Not here. You don't use any independent, thought?"

Donatell didn't, say anything to that.

So Soledad let it lie. Had some saag.

Donatell ate too. It was not the most attractive thing in the world.

After a minute, taking a break: "I think if we go off the page, if we do… different from just doing something on our own, it's more about leadership here," Donatell said.

Soledad kept chewing, gave a quizzical look.

"Not like going head-to-head with a mutie, collecting intel is straightforward. Pretty much It is. But once you've got the intel, what do you do with it?"

"Merits a warrant, you get a warrant. Give it to MTac."

Donatell went back to eating.

Soledad was struck by his lack of affirmation. Being roundabout: "When you talk about leadership…»

"I'm talking about Raddatz. He's got respect coming to him."

"Other cops don't?"

"There're some of us who respect him a lot more… even more, I should say. Even more than others. The reason you did things your own way back on MTac-and I'm not telling you, I'm saying ask yourself: Was it because you couldn't trust your leadership? If you had real reason not to, if you just felt like you couldn't, it was the leadership you couldn't follow. Not when it got down to it. But Raddatz…»

"Him you can follow. No trust Issues?"

"You're lucky enough to work with him close, you see why."

"How many work closely,'" a little something on that word, "with him?"

"Me, Tony Shen."

Soledad gave a shake of her head. Shen she didn't yet know.

"You'd remember him if you met him." "How's that?"

"He makes me look good. Chuck Panama." "Him I know."

"You're curious to him, to Raddatz."

"And is that how I ended up taking a call with you? Are you giving me a field audition?"

"You've got nothing to audition for. How you handle yourself only matters if you're going to be DMI. You really going to be DMI, O'Roark?"

Donatell cast a line, waited for an answer. Soledad ate.

When it was real clear to him he wasn't going to get a response, Donatell joined her in getting back to eating.

Throughout lunch Donatell sounded like a suction filter on a pool. Bugged the hell out of Soledad.

There was one new message on Soledad's integrated cordless phone/digital answering machine. From her mother. The message had barely started playing and already Soledad was reaching to erase it, thinking of what would be a good time to return the call. «Good» meaning a time when most likely her parents wouldn't be home.

Her hand stopped, hung in the air, held up there by her mother's message.

Soledad's mother wasn't calling from Milwaukee, wasn't in Milwaukee. Soledad's mom was calling from the Radisson Hotel at LAX. Soledad's mom was in the city.

Sunset Plaza was a strip of boutique shops and al fresco eateries that lined the north and south sides of Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood. Very LA. Very LA in the way folks outside LA think when they think LA: Beautiful people. Expensive cars parked along the curb. Really old guys with their hot young girlfriends who clearly weren't hanging out with their men because they actually had a thing for guys thrice their age. Minimum of thrice. Lot of flamers. The occasional actor who could still do box-office. All very ostentatious. High-end. And it was all just pretentious enough to give the tourists something to talk about when they went back home to talk about "those people" out West. All in all, Sunset Plaza was about as decent a place Soledad could think to take her mom for lunch. It was also, Soledad hoped, filled with enough "look at that over there" value to intrude on her and her mother's conversation. The crappily little conversation Soledad knew she'd be able to muster.

Things would start badly, Soledad figured, when her mother saw her on crutches. Bring on the worry. Then the "Why are you doing this, why don't you get a regular job" talk would start free-flowing. After.Soledad macheted through that tangle of nonsense, things would really get going southward with all the questions her mom would send at her fusillade-style about the love life Soledad didn't have, the friends she didn't own. Question after prying question about bullshit, bullshit, bullshit…

Driving up La Cienega for Sunset Plaza. Soledad gripping the wheel of her car. Choking it.

God, how she hated this-

Tenser, tenser with each block traveled.

– having a sit-down with family. Having to open up and share because somebody wanted access to her life even though that somebody had given birth to her. Not that Soledad wasn't… appreciative; was that an expressive enough word? Not that Soledad wasn't appreciative of that. Her existence. Thank you very much, Mom, now here's a card for Mother's Day and a bunch of flowers. But why did coming from her mom's gene pool entitle her mother to more than Soledad wanted to give? Jesus…

Her mother had to come to LA, had to come unannounced? Soledad said to herself-and it was hyperbole, sure, but there was a kernel of truth to her emotion- she'd rather go at the worst of the freaks-a telepath- than have lunch solo with her mother.

Sunset Plaza.

Soledad parked in the lot looking south over the city. Clear day. Warm weather. Decent view. LA wasn't all bad.

Soledad limped up the hill from the lot to Sunset, crutched it over to Le Petite. Her mother, Virginia-Gin-already there. Looking good. Soledad thought her mother always looked good. Wasn't just a daughter's assessment. Gin was handsome the way Maya Angelou was handsome. The way, the way early pre-glam-makeover Oprah was handsome. Strong black women whose greatest strength was primarily their intelligence.

The future as Soledad had predicted did not materialize. Her mother greeted her warmly. Said how good it was to see Soledad, made a comment on the quality of the day. She did point out an actor sitting three tables over who'd had a hit TV show six years prior and hadn't much worked since outside of commercials for some kind of snack chip that wasn't made out of potatoes.

Gin said nothing about Soledad's crutches other than to ask: "Hurt yourself?''

"Twisted it running," Soledad lied. What she figured to be the first of many she'd be spinning over lunch as she prepped herself for the continuing cover-up of her leg injury.

But Gin had nothing more to ask concerning her daughter's leg, was more inquisitive with the waiter regarding the specials.

Soledad absentmindedly ordered the Santa Fe salad. She'd had it once years ago. It was decent. She figured it couldn't've changed all that much, and if it had, probably not for the worse.

A thank-you to both ladies from the waiter. He went to place their order.

No assessment as point of entry into a wider conversation about Soledad's love life from Gin to Soledad re: the waiter's looks and what Soledad thought of them. If Soledad found him attractive. If she'd consider dating him. If she wouldn't, was it because she was already seeing someone?

Unusual. Highly unusual, the lack of question asking.

In the time between the food order was placed and its arrival, Gin took charge of the conversation, apologized for coming to the city without forewarning but it just seemed the two of them kept… missing each other.

Signifying. Saying without saying she was on to Soledad's long-running scam.

But Gin abandoned her grievances there. Barely started, she let them go no further. All that came from her were pleasantries. About her flight, about the city. To her daughter, and about life in general.

Lilac.

She thought she smelled it when she sat down. Now Soledad was sure. There was lilac in the air.

Soledad didn't know of any growing on Sunset, The smell had to be drifting down from up the Hollywood Hills. Near the intersection of Sunset and Holloway-six blocks away-in a car that was made in Korea a cover version of a song by Fleetwood Mac played on the radio. Somewhere on the Blvd. a woman cried, but they were tears of joy. For a brief moment a near portion of the entire world was received with exceptional clarity by Soledad.

It wasn't right. The situation was incorrect. A background as a cop wasn't needed for Soledad to know her mother suddenly showing up in LA by herself was messed up. As her mother talked, Soledad half listened, half tried to figure the most natural, the least abrasive way to ask what she needed to know. Except if Soledad was ever nonabrasive, she'd long ago forgotten how to be. Probably about the same time she'd forgotten how to be patient.

So Soledad blurted: "What are you doing here?"

"I came to see you," Gin said.

That didn't come right away. There was a pause ahead of it. Brief, but it was there. The hesitation her mother had taken, the thought she'd put into a simple answer: Gin was lying.

Having spoken enough of them, Soledad knew a lie when she heard one.

"For no reason? You just get on a plane, fly a couple thousand miles-"

"To see you, talk with you. Not over the phone and not in, in vagaries."

"You and Dad splitting up?"

A laugh from Gin. A bitter one.

"If you are, you can, I guess, stay with me if you want."

"I never should have let you be an only child. You needed more family than your father and I could give you."

Soledad didn't know what to say to that, didn't know where it came from.

The waiter stopped by with the Santa Fe salad, the sea bass Gin had ordered, asked the ladies if they needed anything further.

A couple of curt noes.

Soledad fumbled with her silverware. Gin cut her food with a knife, forked a piece and ate. Ate another bite. Then she set the fork at the edge of her plate.

She said: "I have cancer. Ovarian cancer."

The handle of the knife she held, dull as it was, hurt Soledad with the force which her fingers gripped it. Drove it into her palm. Her throat went dry. And her eyes as well. Someone else hearing that, hearing their mother was potentially terminal, most likely their eyes would go slick. Soledad's did the opposite.

Her voice, Soledad's voice was steady. "You should be in the hospital."

"I will be. I'm scheduled to go in Monday."

"You're going to wait until-"

"I wanted to see you. I wanted to tell you." Soledad started to say: You could have called. Except…

Her mother had called. She'd called and called, and Soledad had ducked and dodged.

Soledad felt a slow and steady drip of guilt water-torturing her. She knew she'd fed it for years.

Fucking cancer.

Gin: "I came to tell you… well, I came to say how much I loved you. How proud I was of you.

Was. Was?

"This is… you're, you're sick, and you come all the way out to tell me-"

"… but it sounded so odd, vapid to tell someone you loved them. Under the circumstances." Gin had to fight with that word some. Circumstances. "When you say it like you're making a final declaration. If they don't know it; if the person you're saying that to doesn't already know that you… and it sounded, and it sounded cliche. I'm dying, and therefore I have to… well, probably I'm dying, so I have to tell you that I… but I wanted to tell you."

"Stop it!" Soledad barked loud enough people four tables over looked in her direction. The has-been actor among them. "Stop talking in the past tense. It's like talking to a ghost."

Amazing even to herself; her mother had cancer, the bet was it was killing her, she'd picked flying to LA over going in for immediate surgery or treatment or whatever science was up to that was-in terms of fighting cancer- little better than a good leeching, and the only emotion Soledad could show was anger.

Unbelievable.

The waiter returned, asked the two ladies if everything was to their liking. Soledad's head shook.

The waiter thought one of the meals was lacking and started to go into a WeHo hissy fit.

Gin set the guy right, sent him off. She ate. She put an effort into eating, going to the trouble not hardly out of hunger as much as to give Soledad a minute to collect herself. Food was poor distraction. Gin didn't have an appetite, hadn't since her doctor had sat her down, looked her in the eye and told her with all the compassion of a guy who's told a hundred patients some HMOified version of the same spiel: You've got an illness which could very much end things for you, and it's pretty much beyond us.

Gin pushed her plate away. She looked to her daughter. "What I want to say, I wanted to say face-to-face. I'm going to be selfish, Soledad. I don't want you coming home."

"What?"

"I don't want you dealing with my sickness." In that sentence Gin put the emphasis on "my." "I don't want you watching me waste away."

"You're not going to die."

"You talk as if it were a matter of choice. If I choose to live, I will. That's hardly the way things are."

Except, in Soledad's world it was. In Soledad's world she had to believe it was.

Soledad: "Please quit the bullshit acceptance of the-"

"It's not… bull." Knocking on Death's door. Gin wouldn't sully herself with foul language. "I'm fifty-eight years old. My time is coming. Today. Tomorrow. It is. I can cry, or I can… I can get what I'm able to out of the time I have left. If that means taking a few days, flying to see my daughter… My fear, Soledad, my living fear was that something would happen to you while I was still alive. I didn't want that. I didn't want that as badly as possible. There is something so horribly out of sync about a parent burying their child. And I take comfort In knowing the manner I will end. It won't be by a bullet from a. a thug or some such. Or getting run down by some drunk. This way when it happens it will be just like, like slipping under water."

Soledad was realizing there was so much more to her mother than she knew. Was it some kind of law of nature you had to be close to losing something to appreciate it?

"How's Dad taking it?"

"Well. He's well in my presence. I think he cries alone, wishes that he could do something. I haven't… There are some things you avoid talking about, but I know it must be horrible for him. When you marry, you take a vow to love, to protect. Then there comes a time when the vow is useless."

"It's not useless. He still loves you."

Gin appreciated her daughter's insistence. But she was in a place of frankness. "Not useless, then. Hollow. How much does it hurt to love someone, to say you'll always protect them… I know he'd give his life for me. But he can't. He can't, and that's a hurt beyond imagination. I've felt it about you. There have been so many times where I've felt-"

"Do people know? Have you told people?"

"No." A slight smile. Even at this juncture Soledad steamrolled her mother, kept the personal conversation from becoming too intimate. "I told… do you remember Mrs. Schoendorf? Her daughter was in your class."

Soledad remembered the girl, her mother. She indicated so to Gin.

"Right after," Gin continued. "I got out of the doctor's office, in a store I ran into her. Don't even know why I'd gone shopping except so that I could pretend everything was normal. Pretend the doctor hadn't told me what he told me. So there I was. Mrs. Schoendorf, she was talking, going on about… whatever. About nothing, really. I don't know. Maybe it was important. Maybe it was the most important tiring in the world to her. But once you know you have, you have this thing, you have this thing that's actively trying to end your life inside you… once you know your self is trying to kill you, that's the only thing that's important. And I said that to her. I said: I can't talk now, I have cancer.'"

"… How did she, what did she-"

"Well, I think I shocked her. I did. I know I did. You say something like that… but not so badly that… I saw her again. A day later. She shunned me. She actually shunned me."

"What do you mean?"

"She…" As if it were a cat lying on the table, as if it could feel and respond to her movements, Gin's hand, the tips of her fingers, moved up and down over the fork that rested near her discarded plate. "I don't know how else to describe what she did. She did not wish to encounter me, and did everything she could to keep from doing so. Because I was sick. Just because I was sick, she treated me like I was some kind of-"

"I want to come home. I want to go home with you." Soledad was forceful with that. Put the same energy into her words she would if she were kicking in a door, executing a warrant.

Her mother, not as forceful, was equally indisputable. "No."

"This isn't… we're not taking a vote."

"Soledad, I love you. There it is. The cliche I didn't want to… I love you, you're all the daughter I could have ever wanted."

A lie. It hurt Soledad that at such a moment her mother was so mindful of her feelings she felt compelled to engage in emotional subterfuge. That Soledad, despite, in spite of her faults-her baggage that she portered poorly. The distance at which she kept people-could be as a daughter anything close to all Gin could have hoped for was beyond Soledad's comprehension. Both her self-perception and her perception of her mother were that badly adjusted. When she looked in the mirror, all Soledad saw was a cop who did work. That she was a cop who was honest and true and selfless was as lost on her as it was precious to Gin.

And that it was lost on Soledad made her all the more beloved to her mother. Tears free-flowing from her. The cloth napkin not nearly enough to contain them. Giving effort to rejoin her own thoughts: "But since the day you left home you've been your own woman, I haven't agreed… I haven't even liked every choice you've made. But I've let you live your life the way you wanted to." She was pointed with that. "All I'm asking, if I'm done, let me end my life the way I see fit."

Soledad tried to think of a time-after Reese had a pit burned in her chest by that fire freak. After the tag team of a metal morpher and a telepath had cut through half her element. Even when a weather manipulator, for a minute, looked unstoppable to the point Soledad thought for sure she was staring death in the eye-she did not want to face a day of work.

Couldn't come up with one.

Her work gave her purpose. Even being benched from MTac. maybe especially because she was benched, her work gave Soledad a sense of purpose.

She wouldn't, could not consider not working, even though the stats said her work would eventually catch up to her. Kill her.

There were, yeah, times alone when Soledad found herself with the shakes. The night after going against that telepath she'd gone home and vomited. Spilled from her gut contents she didn't even know it had. That reaction was human. It was a reminder she hadn't actually "seen it all." Like Vin had said: the kind of nerves that keep you on your toes.

What Soledad was feeling now… competing needs: the need to come up with a reason to pry loose her grip on her Prelude's steering wheel, get out of the car, cross the parking lot and go into the DMI offices. Into work.

Vs.

Come up with an excuse not to do all that. Flip the ignition. Go home.

Her mother's dying of cancer. A reason. No excuse needed.

But telling people, telling Abernathy about her mother meant opening a door a little. Letting people view a sliver of herself.

Wasn't going to happen.

So there had to be something else; another reason to go in or drive off. Stay or leave. Do work or-

Metal tapped the glass right next to Soledad's head. Unexpected, but it didn't startle her. Not that she was startleproof. She was in another space where sound took its time traversing, and when it had, it was garbled among thirty-three other sensations coming to her on a lag. Even turning her head was a process where thought and action were filtered by delay.

At the window of her car: Raddatz rapping his wedding band against the glass. He said something. Through the door it was just a fog of wordless sounds.

Soledad dropped the window.

"You good, O'Roark?"

"Yes," she said. Quick, but without conviction. "Sitting in your car alone? You sure you're good?"

Soledad's eyes drifted over Raddatz. Over his body. She wondered: What did he look like naked? What kind of damage did his clothes hide? Massive scars? Burns?

Twisted flesh that would never be a well-tailored suit again? She wondered: Was it better to have your wounds on display-a missing arm, a leg gone-was it better to look damaged than to walk around normal on the outside only to, end of the day, have to strip down to the truth of yourself?

"O'Roark… " Raddatz tossed out her name trying to catch her focus.

"I'm not okay," Soledad said.

Raddatz squatted, came down to Soledad's level. "Got issues you want to talk about?"

Soledad took what seemed the appropriate amount of time she figured it should take to work through the pre-articulation of a difficult thought.

She said: "Talked to my physical therapist this morning. My knee's only going to get so much better."

"How much?"

"Not enough to go back to MTac."

"What are you going to do with yourself?"

"That's what I'm sitting here thinking about."

"What would you like to do with yourself?"

"I guess… what I've been doing with myself for the last month. Working DMI."

Coming up off his haunches: "Make it sound like we're a consolation prize, and not much of one."

She wasn't an expert on such things, but common sense told Soledad the best deceptions are the ones that aren't deceptions. The best deceptions are truths that hide lies.

"If you're asking me, yeah, it is a consolation prize.'" Soledad modified herself none. Didn't plane any edges. As such she sounded as though she spoke with honesty. "But a prize is a prize.

And a job where I can still help do something about muties is a whole hell of a lot better than working security at the Beverly Center. I'm still in the fight. If this is the way it's got to be, I'm good with that."

She put up the window on Raddatz. She went back to sitting alone. She was pretty sure the lie about her knee would stick. And just that quick she was working for Tashjian. That quick she had purpose again.

The thing is, the thing is how right she was." "Mothers have a way of being annoyingly correct."

Soledad was with Vin. In his place. Lying on his couch. Staring at his ceiling.

Vin was across the room, in a chair. Same chair he'd been sitting… planted. As much time as he spent there, «planted» was the better, was the more accurate word. Same chair he'd been planted in last time Soledad'd been over. If Vin hadn't opened the door for her. Soledad would've figured Vin and the chair were never apart.

"And the way she said it." Soledad giving color to the context of her conversation with her mother. " 'I don't want you to come home.' So to-the-point. So… harsh."

"The apple doesn't fall far from the-"

"Don't give me that shit."

Vin kind of mumbled something. Back when he had two legs, when he had two legs he didn't mumble. His comments, always sharp, were never gagged by self-pity.

And then he kind of eked out: "She wanted to make it stick."

"She could have just-"

"Just what? It" somebody told you to breathe, you'd suffocate yourself just to be your own man." Force to the thought, but not much to his tone. "She doesn't want you to watch her die."

"Don't say that!"

"That she's going to die or that she doesn't want you around?"

"Any of it. Take your pick."

Vin's head dropped back, sort of lolled around. "I didn't. Didn't say it. She, she did." That last bit was slurred slightly as it gimped its way off Vin's tongue. Something besides pity was washing out his words.

Soledad looked to Vin. He was slumped some in the chair. Was as if, even sitting, he needed all of the furniture to keep him propped up. A little sweat was on his brow, collecting on his upper lip. It was there never mind the AC being on.

Vin, like he was waking up from a snooze, realized he'd caught Soledad's eye. "So… so what are you going to do?"

"Stay on the job. Stay here. Mom made it real clear what she wants."

"Do you care? If someone told you to, to breathe-"

"You said that. You said that. Vin. You said it already." Soledad drifted where she lay. She drifted to the day prior, to her lunch with her mother. Before, like a little girl who'd messed her best dress, Soledad feared having to explain her damaged leg to her mom. But at lunch… "She didn't even ask about my leg. Barely she did."

"She's got cancer."

"Cancer'll kill you. It doesn't stop you from being a mother. Nothing does. She knew I didn't want to talk about my leg; she knew the boundaries I'd set."

"So she knew."

"All this time I'd been pushing her away. Didn't have to. She knew to keep some distance. But I kept pushing when I should've been-"

"Soledad, you've got a unique ability to make everything about you."

Vin's words didn't set Soledad right. Just made her more morose. "The death I was feeling… thought it was mine. It was hers."

Vin: "How Is your leg?"

"Good. Recovering good. Moving to a cane in a couple of weeks. I could put in for active duty." And on the subject of limbs: "Where's your leg?"

Vin flipped a finger, Indicated across the room. Through a doorway Soledad could see the prosthetic lying, surreal, on the floor. Some kind of exhibit on loan from MOCA.

She said: "Doesn't do much good parked there."

"Doesn't do much good at all unless I've got somewhere to go. I'm not going anywhere."

"If you had it on, maybe you would."

"And one day I'm going to put your little theory to a test."

That was that. So Soledad moved the conversation on by returning to the central subject. "I couldn't even cry. I sat there feeling like I should. Feeling it, knowing it. Was like I went through a checklist-heartache, guilt, denial-but I couldn't finish the emotion."

"You're shut down. That's what we…" Vin was mealy mouthed with that, feebled the word «we» as if ashamed at the attempt to equate himself with working cops. Doing an edit: "That's the way you get through things."

"This isn't cop shit. I've been shut down since May Day. Since San Francisco I've been about taking a stand against the freaks to the exclusion of every other thing around me. It's like I was so set on dying I took out a scorched-earth policy on the rest of my life."

Pathos with such pretty words.

Putting spin on it, Vin: "And good for it. Well, not good, but… good came, came out of it." He stumbled a little. "If you hadn't taken out that telepath-"

"Some other cop would have."

"Without that gun you put together? Doubt it. And even if… we only lost Yarborough. How many cops would've been lost if things were different?"

Despite what Vin was putting out, Soledad's lament stayed constant. "My own mother… Tell you something: You're looking at the end of things, you realize you weren't even decent with your own mother… Sometimes, Vin, sometimes I feel like-"

"Don't get sentimental. You'll regret it tomorrow."

"Sometimes, sometimes I feel like I'm fighting for normal humans and I traded my humanity in the deal."

"And you talk about me going soft. Act like you don't know what love is just 'cause some guy broke your heart."

It was as if, what it was like was Soledad had been gored from gut to chest. Some guy. Ian. He was unaware, but Vin wasn't just talking. For Soledad, he was seancing demons. And the twist in her Soledad felt… it wasn't that she had her heart broken. What was hurting her was the how of her heartbreak. It's one thing to fall in love and have love not work out. It's a very, very different thing to fall in love, have the love force you to question yourself to the core, only to find out who you love is the thing you hate most.

Soledad had fallen in love-she'd use the word in the quiet inside her, but she'd never speak it, regarding Ian, aloud-she'd fallen in love with a freak,

"How'd you know?" Soledad asked regarding Vin's knowledge of Ian.

"You make a big deal about a guy for months, then all of a sudden you don't so much as speak his name. Not since I got out of the hospital. Maybe you're being sensitive to me, knowing how I feel about you. But the next time you're sensitive to how I feel'll be the first time."

"Fuck you." Playful with that. Relieved, really. Vin didn't know the specifics of Ian, was just tossing out suppositions on some vagaries: of Soledad's heart. Coming back at Vin, deflecting, things from herself: "You want to be a detective, put your leg on and get back on the force."

Just a little smirk from Vin that said he didn't want to play anymore. From the way his shoulders slouched, his body hunched, he didn't want to do much else than sit where he was for another hour. A couple hours. Seven years. It was all the same for Vin.

But it was okay Vin didn't want to play. Soledad was ready to get serious about things as well.

She said: "Were you for real about what you asked before?"

"What I…»

"Do I want to get married? Do I want to marry you?"

"Yeah," Vin said. "Okay," Soledad said.

My motivations are screwed. I know that.

I don't know if I came out of the box screwed up, or if I got that way after San Francisco when getting sick kept me from taking a trip to the city. Kept me alive when 600,000 other people got killed.

That's a shitload o' guilt to be carting around.

So I quit living for me and started living for the give-back. Paying off a debt I didn't really owe to people I'd never met. And from day one, if that wasn't wrong, I knew what I was doing at least wasn't quite right.

Thing is, knowing you've got a dysfunction and doing something about your dysfunctionality sound the same, but are nothing alike. Maybe with years of therapy and religion, tons of medication you can break patterns.

I didn't go in for any of that.

So the pattern repeated.

With MTac.

With the tattoo I wore for Reese. And now, again, with Vin.

I didn't love him. I liked him, cared about him. The little bit I understood of love, I know I didn't feel that way for Vin.

What I felt….

Pathos.

I felt it for this cop, used to be so strong, who'd let himself devolve to the point of being a gimp. Not just physically. There were all kinds of people, fewer body parts than Vin, who amounted to so much more.

That sounds harsh, but sometimes the truth hits

like All

What was damaged on him, it was his spirit that was handicapped. The most obvious indicator was he 'd casualty, quietly become a lush, thinking his slowed movements and slurred speech went unnoticed. Same with the perpetual glisten of sweat that he now wore. Or worse, he knew the signs were obvious and didn't care.

I think, really, Vin's romantic about the idea of being cliche: the busted cop who melts to an alky.

Not romantic. Just pathetic.

s couldn't let Vin be pathetic.

No matter saving Vin is an unactionable task. Like the costumed freaks from years prior who I've come to hate so well, I felt I had to-had to — try some difficult heroics. So I tested Vin. Took his offer of marriage. Any other man, receiving a belated yes to a proposal right after talking about a woman's former love would say two things to her. The second is "you," the first, "fuck." Any man wouldn't let himself, so obviously, be relegated to sloppy seconds.

Any real man.

Any self-respecting man.

Any man who hadn't let himself devolve into a one-legged drunk.

But Vin, Vin had said okay. Vin passed the test. Or flunked it. Vin needed saving. So here's Soledad the anti-hero to the rescue.

God, do I need more religion.

Or medication.

Soledad was crutching through DMI, crutching to her office. Raddatz was on his way somewhere else.

Their paths crossing, Raddatz stopped. Said to Soledad: "Got anything pressing?"

"No."

Raddatz said: "Want to head over to LACFSC?" "Sure."

Humanity is self-modifying. It adjusts to constants of its environment. Death.

See a dead body once, be shocked. Revulsed.

See another body, a few more. You might be revulsed, but shock's no longer part of the deal.

A few more bodies, revulsion is a quaint notion that's remembered, if at all, with effort.

See a dozen bodies or more, no matter they've been shot, no matter they've been burned, regardless of the decay or level of stink, the viewing sensation is nothing more spectacular than seeing a late-model Ford creeping along in the slow lane on the 405.

But even the jaded could be, if not astounded, affected. There are, after all, a lot of ways to die. But Soledad didn't know, wasn't sure until she hit the Los Angeles County Coroner's Office at the Forensic Science. Center, that there was tiny way to kill an invulnerable metanormal.

Michael Han, the county ME, found it all fascinating as hell. Fascinating enough he didn't pawn the inquest off on some junior on his staff.

Raddatz…? Hard for Soledad to tell how he took things. Maybe he was shocked into submission by the confirmation of an invulnerable's mortality. Maybe he didn't care just as long as the freak was dead. But if there was a spike in him emotionally one way or the other, it was indistinct beyond normal curiosity. By choice or by accident he was tough to read as a player at the big table at the World Series of Poker.

Raddatz asked: "How did it happen; an invulnerable dead?"

"Dead by a means other than natural causes." Han tossed out the obvious.

Hard to say if an aptitude for working with the corpses was a product of nature or nurture. The Hans could've been a case study. Michael's father, Chise, had jobbed in the Coroner's Office. As an assistant ME, but never as the coroner. That left a way for the son to surpass the father. Assuming being better at dealing with the dead than your old man was an aspiration. For the

Hans, for a generation of Hans, apparently, yeah, it was.

"Other than natural causes," Raddatz acknowledged.

"If you were," Han continued, "to consider which superability would be the most desirable, I think many would say invulnerability. Skin that's impregnable. Bones that are little different from titanium."

Han gave an odd gaze to the thing on the examining table below him. It was the longing look of reverence. Han was all about death. With the John Doe, he'd almost met something that could kick Death's ass.

Almost.

Han, continuing: "It's about as close to immortality as can be achieved. You would never need fear a traffic accident, a plane crash, let alone slipping on a patch of ice. Only age. Only God's work itself. And even that may not come on a schedule normal humans are accustomed to."

"And this one, it didn't die of natural causes?" Soledad was circling the examining table, giving herself a guided tour of the freak, the examining light overhead raining down a harsh luminescence. There's your God light: the light people who've had near-death experiences claim they've floated toward. The light of the guy who looks at your body with a cold disinterest before he cuts it open 'cause that's what his paycheck tells him to do.

A shake of the head from Han. "Not that we can determine, Miss O'Roark."

Soledad stopped, looked up. Looked to Han. Miss O'Roark. Not Officer O'Roark. Not operator. Not Bullet. Miss O'Roark. When was the last time she'd heard that? Long enough ago that hearing it now sounded pleasant.

"What about poison?" Raddatz asked. "Poison'd take it out, yeah?"

Han answered: "We were able to empty the contents of its stomach, run a tox screening. It came back negative."

"Suicide?" Soledad asked.

"A possibility." Han leaned back against a wall. He looked up, looked at the ceiling as if he were giving the question a little thought. "If anyone would know how to kill such a thing, it would be… it would be the thing itself. But that adds why to the question how."

Raddatz: "You're a freak, you've got no prospects, the law says you're not human. You end things."

Soledad: "We should be so lucky the muties start taking themselves out." Soledad added harshness to a sentiment she already held, put the edge there for Raddatz to see how he'd take it.

Nothing. No effect she could read on him.

On the freak, on its side, on its bare flesh: defects. Soledad saw them as she circumvented the body. Little… little divots. Four on one side.

Soledad: "What are these?"

Han stepped around, took a look at what Soledad was talking about. "Actually, I was hoping you might know."

"How am I going to know what you don't?"

"If it was any other metanormal, I wouldn't expect you to. But as you can imagine, not a great many invulnerables make their way to my part of the world. And not too many officers have had as much experience with metanormals as you have."

Soledad gave a careful look to the defects. She said to Raddatz, guessing: "Scar tissue?"

Raddatz shrugged.

Soledad split her focus between the freak and Raddatz. Here they were checking out a dead invulnerable, and all Raddatz could do was shrug? Was he one of those cops who said little but took in all they saw? Was he a cop that had prior knowledge of what he was looking at and was therefore bored by questions he knew the answers to?

"It's a possibility. The meta gene," Han said, "becomes active in most metanormals around puberty. He might have been injured as a child."

Soledad asked: "Has the body been cleaned?"

"Before the autopsy. Before." Han corrected, "the attempted autopsy."

"Where the scar tissue is, was there any flaking?"

Han picked up a notepad, flipped through it.

"Yes."

"A lot, a little?" "Minimal amount."