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THREE

Tate catches him on the roof.

Karl signs to the pilot and the engine whines as the rotor winds up. Released, Bink presses close to the backs of his calves.

Tate gets in his face, "Since when are you a dilettante?"

Refusing to be intimidated, Karl keeps his eyes on the skyline. Miraculously, a rift opens in the haze, and the sun glints off platforms, setting alloy aglow with a dull sheen. "May you consume offal and expire."

The rotors raise a gust. Bink whines, trembles, fear sent strong through Karl's legs.

"Clever. Okay, I don't scare you. Glad to hear it. How about self-interest? They won't give you a dime on the dollar for that place, you know that."

Karl's had enough, doesn't want to hear about it—probably set the whole thing up anyway. He turns, faces him a meter from a sheer drop to the water. "I ought to toss you off, you know that?"

"Maybe you should. I deserve it, giving a damn whether or not you and Bink end up in a trailer park behind the LP yard in Eureka. Oh, I'm sure you'll like it. I hear there's a space available down by the mud flats just across the bay from the pulp mill. What if it does smell like you've got a wet paper bag over your head? You'll have your goddam self-righteousness, and that's what counts, isn't it?"

"They won't get me out."

Tate shakes his gray head, hair whipping in the draft from the blades. "Karl...." He says it the way he always has, admonishing a wayward child, "They're fanatics. Okay, you're that good, you may take down a few, but they won't stop until they get what they want. They're fighting for all God's little creatures. You, you're the new version of the devil, remember. You eat our furry animal friends, you cut down the pretty trees."

"Then I'll go to them, hurt them where they live."

Again, Tate shakes his head, hair awry, "You think there aren't more where they came from, aren't more waiting in the wings for their chance to curry favor with the Greens? All you'll do is give them an excuse to crack down harder on other poor slobs like you. It's farmers, it's ranchers, loggers who are the endangered species." Tate signals the pilot to cut power and the whining drones slowly down.

Karl looks at him, sees a frightened old man, shrunken, not the Tate he remembers. An old man, impossible to hate, to be pitied. "Why call me back, why on this one? You know there's no way you can win against one of the cartels, and if there were, not against this one, not against Genie." He remembers the people he worked with, people he thought of as still alive until this morning. "It's not like you to throw good men and women down the tubes."

Tate turns his back to stand at the brink, staring down at the water. "Okay, truth time: The agency's being choked off. Maybe you haven't heard, but things are tight. Greens are cutting everything but welfare and EPA. On top of that the GAO notices we're budgeted to provide justice with toilet paper, liquid soap and pads, all of which duplicates services provided by a janitorial sub-contractor. I'm fighting tooth and nail for funding to keep afloat."

The agency's always scraped by on a shoestring, on favors from other agencies, borrowed weapons, equipment, but this is something else. "I didn't know."

"I'm losing, Karl. I thought maybe we could help each other." Tate turns. "So I was wrong."

"Wait, I want to get this straight. I go in cold, try to get close enough to protect this subhuman freak, convince her to come back with me, and if somehow I get her and myself out alive, Auri will see what she can do. That it? that the deal?"

Tate looks pained, "You're hard-headed, Karl, always have been. But you've never had a closed mind. You've changed."

It hurts, Tate's disapproval, his disappointment. It hurts more to know he's let himself be manipulated. Karl gathers Tate's shirt in a fist, "After this, I'm through—with you and this penny pinching agency."

Feet skimming concrete half a meter from the edge, Tate watches him, eyes laughing.

"I wouldn't be surprised if you set the whole thing up with EPA." Throbbing with fury, Karl shakes him, "Did you?"

Tate opens his mouth.

"Never mind, I don't want to know." Karl sets him down, signals the pilot, who raises his arms, weary of the game. Again the engine revs.

They stare into each other's eyes, wind rocking them at the edge, rotor blast whipping their hair, neither speaking—a test of wills.

Karl lets him go, shouts to be heard over the rotor wash. "I'm going to do this, and you tell that formaldehyde doll down in your office if she can't do what she says she can, I'll be back to ask her, and you, why not."

Karl opens the door of the helicopter and Bink scuttles to leap in. Karl follows, slams the door, taps the pilot and they rise off the roof. As they climb, Karl watches the old man dwindle on the shrinking roof heli pad below. The last of his strength leaving him, Karl leans back, cues his headset.

"Tonight on Uninet, bad day for Genesistems stockholders."

Ice-blue Pompadour is troubled, risks a frown as he drones on in a sonorous baritone. Wondering how he had survived so long on the net with a voice that annoying, Karl jacks it up to hear over the rotors.

"Aging super model Auri Zerai emerged victorious in the first phase of her decade-long court battle with DNA multinational, Genesistems. In a ruling today, the supreme court granted first generation Sisters human rights as of their 30th birthdays."

Karl sits up, nerves tingling as the words penetrate the haze of fatigue.

"What this means is that in mere days, they will have no further obligation to the genetic giant. For a corporation that earns a large portion of its revenues from organ procurement, this ruling is a body blow."

Somehow Karl can't see the genetic giant being very pleased about it, no.

"Wall Street reacted to the news with a massive sell off of technology stocks across the board. By the closing bell, Genie had fallen nearly ten points, a record one day decline.

"How lucky for me I don't hold any," Karl says into the white noise of the wash.

"A second suit brought by Zerai seeking both punitive and compensatory damages is due to be heard by the court next month. In light of today's ruling, many legal scholars see more trouble ahead for the developer of Biocom."

Now that, Karl thinks, cutting off the broadcast, may well be the truth.

They swerve leeward and the skyline opens up, spreads out before him.

The warren, in all its fecundity.

In all its degenerate splendor.

Los Angeles.

 

* * *

 

Sisters Tower, three a.m.

Things are slow. Usually are about now. A week on graveyard is enough to show Karl how the land lies. Deep in the embrace of a leather armchair in the lobby he sits amid most of an acre of peacock green carpet, a lake becalmed. Dinner crowd already in safe and sound. All-nighters trickling in. Romy due any time.

By now he's given up trying to classify men who fork over a fortune for a few hours' attention from a goddess. All types. Men he'd pass on the street without a second glance. Why do they do it? Who can know? The face that launched a thousand ships and all that—beauty to die for. If men will run onto a spear or into a food processor of hacking swords for a woman, what's a year's salary? Spin the wheel, roll the bones, take your shot at nucleotide ordained love. Why not? Makes as much sense as anything else.

Karl folds a stick of Juicy Fruit into his mouth. Villar saunters by, two underlings trailing, Walther submachineguns slung under the arms of crisp blue tunics. Insolent bastard gives him the evil eye. Karl smiles back, nods. Screw the little spic.

Most of them have long since lost interest in him—this crazy LO who won't keep his ass in his office—but not Villar. Karl has no idea what his problem is. Maybe it's Karl's face or the smell of him. If dogs can tell friend from foe by sniffing under a tail, surely men can do as much.

Wiry little Mex with buzzed head, phrenologist's banquet, black eyes always watching. Looks at him and smiles. Like he knows that soon Karl will be wired to a length of pipe, hollowed out, doing the statue dance knee deep in muck five klicks down. Does Villar dislike all LO's this much or is it just him? He won't lay a hand on him to find out. Karl pictures the first nine down there in the dark, the quiet, and a chill crawls over his scalp. He'll watch his back. And Villar.

Long quiet mornings he walks the quay, Bink at his heels, round and round, klick a pass, walks to keep his legs from going to sleep, to pass the time, to keep from going out of his head. He should corner her, talk to her, but for some reason he doesn't. When she's out of the nunnery, he shadows her, feeling more like a cheap gum shoe than anything else.

He's seen her flash that high-voltage charm. Seen her switch it off just as fast. He's seen her watching him watch her, and he's sure she'd like it if he went away. If only he could. He's seen her way of showing interest while keeping her distance, and from what he can tell, it's all a con. She's no more interested in these corn-fed hicks than he is. But he can see why they eat it up. >From his vantage across a crowded eatery her eyes tug at him like she's got fishing line wound through his guts. From up close it must be a killer. He'll keep his distance, thank you very much.

He's tried calling. Won't call back, won't come to the sat. No surprise. What can he expect? She doesn't know him, and he can't tell her anything until he gets her alone.

Bored out of his mind, Karl studies a dog-eared paperback of mathematical puzzles. Tonight he batters his head against a century old conundrum about a crooked Chinaman, a sailor, and a length of hemp rope. So far no dice. He'll put it to Sam.

Been there forever, twenty years at least, Sam's maybe sixty. Took to Bink right away. Calls him Mr. Binks. Karl trusts him at once, not enough to reveal himself, but as far as it goes. Sam can usually help him out of a jam with these things. It's been more than a week and he's not even a quarter way through the book. Tells himself when he's through, he'll go home, whether or not he talks to her.

At the rate he's going, it'll take a month. He has two days. After that she won't have to worry about being raped. In two days she turns thirty. In two days they all do. Same hatch, brood, clutch—God knows what the right term would be. Karl doesn't know. Doesn't want to. Things designed in labs, made to look human, raised in tanks like trout, immaculate whores for rent by the hour. Gives him the creeps thinking about it.

From his chair in the corner, he broods, eyes open but unseeing. Two days and she'll be retired. Nice word, retired. Nice way to describe being zipped, stripped, and sent to the bottom. Not a good way to lose your cherry. Even for animated mannequins it seems cruel. Watching their faces as they pass, he wonders. Smart as they are, they must know. Is it possible they don't care?

Shaking off the trance, he hoists himself to his feet. Definitely not a graveyard shift kind of guy. "Hey, Sam, got one for you."

Sam looks up, grimacing as if he's got a gutful of gas. It means nothing. He always looks like that. Varicose veins in his legs bother him. Keeps his feet propped on a little stool under the counter to keep the blood from pooling in his legs. Wears penny loafers look like they're fifty-years-old. Maybe they are.

"Wha' you want? Trying to do some paperwork, here, for chrissake."

Face showing more wrinkles than a hound with an abscessed molar, Sam won't let on, but he's glad to be bothered, gets as bored as Karl does.

Sam sticks a finger in an ear, grubs around in a dense bush of grey hair. To keep things opened up, Karl figures. Drives Karl nuts. He had his way, he'd yank out the undergrowth with a pair of pliers. He's thought about it a lot the last week, taking Sam in a head lock and yanking it all out. Like weeding cheat grass. Might hurt a little, but it would get the job done. Do him a favor. No more finger-hoeing for Sam.

Karl leans on the cool glass of the counter. "Okay, there's this sailor who needs a length of rope."

Sam holds up his hand, the one that isn't halfway up his ear canal to his brain. "What'd he need it for?"

"I don't know what he needed it for. It's a puzzle, Sam, a puzzle, not a goddam short story. They don't say why."

A short guy in a chartreuse tux brings in a Sister and Karl waits while Sam checks them in. The guy's obviously down, the way most of them are when their time's up. From the look on this guy's face, Karl guesses maybe he'll be paying for this for a long time. The Sister, one of Tatia's, he'd guess by the cinnamon tone of her skin and rope of midnight hair, saunters to the elevator. The guy slinks out, a whipped marmot. Karl watches him go. Wonderful thing, hope.

Sam bares bad teeth in a foxy grin, "Hemingway didn't say why."

Karl ignores him. He's always coming up with stuff like that. "Anyway, there's only one rope dealer in port, a Chinaman. The sailor knows the guy's crooked, but he needs the rope."

Sam leans over the desk, frowns, "Yeah?"

Karl has him, now. He's a sucker for these things as much as Karl is. "So he goes in and he says he wants twenty yards of hemp rope. Well, the Chinaman says he's got a hundred-foot spool for two cents a foot. Sailor looks it over, says it isn't worth more than a penny, but he'll take twenty feet. Now, he knows this guy uses a rule that measures an eleven inch foot, so after he cuts him his twenty feet, he pretends to change his mind. Now he says he'll take the eighty feet instead."

Sam rubs his eyebrows with his thumbs. "Why in hell he do that?"

"Because he wants to beat this crook at his own game. When he measured out his twenty feet, it was short, because the guy's a cheat, see? So the eighty feet is really more, get it?"

"Yeah, yeah, sure, go on, go on, go on."

Karl sighs. It happens this way every time. This place is driving him nuts, he has to get home. "Okay, so the Chinaman's not happy about it, but what can he say? If he says anything it would be admitting he's a crook, right? So he figures up what the guy owes."

Sam takes the pencil from behind his ear, blows off a few loose hairs while Karl waits. He's this far already, but it doesn't do to interrupt Sam. Just confuses him. One lane mind.

"Eighty feet at two cents a foot...." Sam scribbles on his pad. "Comes to dollar sixty."

"Sailor pays him with a five-dollar gold piece. Now the shopkeeper doesn't have change, so he goes next door and changes it. He gives the sailor his change, and off he goes."

Sam holds up his hands, "So? what's the big deal, I tole you, dollar sixty."

Karl smiles. This is where his mind starts to carousel. "Fake gold piece."

Sam slaps a hand on thick glass. "Oh, fiddlededee, they're both crooks!"

"So, counting the extra inches, how much did the sailor take him for?"

Sam deflates, "Ah, you did it to me again!" He groans, waves him off to his seat at the far wall."Don't know why I let you tell me these damn things. Go on, get away from me, let me think, let me think, for chrissake, I'll get back to you."

He'll let Sam chew it over for a while. He might come up with something he can use. Usually does.

Karl turns and forgets to breathe.

An arm's length away stands Romy looking him straight in the eyes.

And mercy, what eyes they are.

 

* * *

 

The Army of God rises at dawn.

Drew rolls from bed to set bare feet on cold hardwood. The large room is furnished with antiques, any piece of which, sold, would see his cell fed for a year. Pacing, hands pressed hard together just under a weak chin, he claps hands, small, soft claps, a ritual for prayer.

Guilt gnaws his gut.

Today's the day.

He hates his mother's house. He puts up with her, so pigheaded, so absolutely blind to his vision of God. It's that or cut her out of his life. Her wealth he tries to ignore. Usually he fails. Naked body taut, he gazes up through a skylight at the brightening dawn sky and smiles.

Today's the day—the day he will prove he is not a part of this, that he is as devoted to God as any of the others. That's why they gave him this one, so he can prove it, and he will.

He runs a hand over a flat belly, groans, sick. Ate too much last night. Always does here. Eats as if he could eat himself senseless, eat himself to death, eat his way out of guilt, out of hating them both. He can't.

Away it's one meal a day—vegetable curry, rice, half stale sprouted wheat bread. Whatever he can get at the health food store down by the park. Sea-hag with frizzled gray mane works there, saves stale bread and soya snacks, all the outdated stuff. Keeps it under the counter for him. Most days it's all he brings home. Just enough to fill his belly, to quiet the pangs, no more. Always the edge, gnawing insides kept at ebb. The way most live, the way God would want him to—knowing the want of the world.

Here at his mother's it's two-inch-thick New Yorks and asparagus. Food for the rich. God help him, after a month scraping mold off tofu he hasn't the strength to refuse.

Again he pats his stomach, reassuring himself it's still flat, shivering with revulsion at his own gluttony, worst of the seven, and not his only one. Over the toilet he gags, ridding himself of last night's meal. Done, he peers down at it curiously. Has he lost the ability to digest so much flesh at once? Today he'll fast, drink only water, purify himself. Today he will not sin. Today is the day he will penetrate the evil tower, a sword thrust into the bowels of Satan, spreading cleansing fire within.

Thinking of this, he drops to do push ups, the thought of so many dying, some innocent, so many hooks in his guts. Sisters are not to blame for what they are. Women may hate them for their beauty, for the power they have over men, but he can't. Them he doesn't want to kill.

He thinks of the million he's been allotted for his mission, his private mission, and collapses onto the cool wood, heat rising to his face. He will save her if he can. If not, she will die. In war, good die alongside bad. In war one uses whatever weapon comes to hand, and right now that means the case under the bed.

Overcome with a rush of gratitude at being selected for the task, unworthy as he is, he falls to the hard planking, lips moving against cool oak. Praying, he rocks up and down on knees, eyes squeezed shut.

He hates this world, a world strangled in the seductive grasp of The Evil One. Once he laughed at the concept of a devil, smiled at the quaintly naive idea of the personification of evil. Now he sees. The liberal humanists are deceived. There is evil in the world. Evil solid as quartz. Not evil of happenstance. Not evil of the under-privileged, the abused, the downtrodden.

Living, breathing, pulsating evil. Evil that wants, waits, hungers. Evil as entity. Evil as wind moving the world. Evil that owns the world and most of those in it.

Rising to pull on slacks, he comes face to face with himself in the mirror and looks into his own dark eyes. Why does he come back here, this house in its gated neighborhood? He has no answer. Though he loves his mother, he's not sure she's the reason. Maybe he wants to be tempted, to succumb, to revel in what he ordinarily denies himself. Maybe she's the excuse.

Drew dresses silently in the flesh-colored light of dawn. Carefully he lifts a leather valise from under the bed, opens it, needing to see its treasure one last time. Inside, held in place with duct tape and blocks of foam, are twelve slender gray loaves of waxed paper-wrapped C-4. Heinrich showed him how to press a pencil into the blocks to make impressions for the detonators, how to place it in a corner near glass to get the most effect in a closed room, even how to set the timer for fifteen seconds. Enough time to get away—if he wants to. He doesn't.

A dozen loaves—a gift from God.

Drew closes the bag, pads silently downstairs, letting himself out. He dares not wake her lest she see something in his eyes. Better to leave pure, soul empty as his heart, burned clean as the nexus of evil will be.

Out into sunlight, down an empty street writhing up and over hills he walks, shades the color of blood shielding his face from UV. It is wise to be careful, he thinks, smiling to himself as he descends the steep hill. Skin cancer is a hazard, they say.

He knows that afterwards he will be on the news. He will be portrayed a religious fanatic, all because he is willing to die.

Drew stops, sets down the case, bends to examine a wild lupine growing by the edge of the sidewalk. Through the polarized filter of his glasses the indigo floret glows magenta. A bumble bee lurches onto it as he watches, causing it to drop, unsheathing scimitar of pistil. When the bee again takes to the air, this recedes with the slow control of hydraulics with its prize of pollen. He smiles to see the bee forced on its way, robbed of a fraction of its hoard—genetic treasure filched by an insensate herb, animal never the wiser. Foolish is man, so quick to claim superiority. The blessings of the creator are indeed manifold.

Rising, he smiles. Anyone willing to forego the next meal, the next sexual congress for God, is branded mad. Melancholy contentment washing over him, warm and solid, he heads for his bus stop. His heart is pure, his aim righteous. Though the evil he opposes is great, he does not fear.

Soon, very soon, he will see the face of God.

 

* * *

 

More people die at three in the morning than at any other time.

So Karl's heard.

Well, when Romy's eyes take him in their embrace, he dies.

The ache starts in the pit of his stomach, snakes up his spine, spikes its way through his brain—disgust, desire, fear, loathing—for himself, for her. Numb, he gives up trying to think.

Holos can lie—usually do. Airbrush, cosmetics, gene therapy, digital imaging—what truth can survive them? People, they lie more than they don't—if he knows anything it's that. The net—forget it. UR is truth and lie rolled up in one marble-caked dung ball.

So now here he stands, knee-deep in cement, brain turned to masa, no more able to turn his eyes away than he can leap to cling to the ceiling by his nails. Sure as beetle pinned to entomology case, he is nailed by those eyes.

Holding his gaze, movements fluid as water, Romy passes her hand through the sensor, her glance passing over him, hot as a blast of sun on a coast shrouded by perpetual cloud. Karl sees it, now—everything he's ever heard about them is true.

The last week he's read all the brochures, heard the Net ads, seen the vids, and though he doesn't quite believe it, about her they told the truth. Clothing soaked, hair hanging, no face paint, there she stands, just what she is—the most magnificent female he's had under his eyes.

Tall, slender, but no mannequin. Freckles, she has them, if you can imagine freckled perfection. Not another blond. Hair rubbed ash. Cedar left out in sea air. A luminous shine to it, same as what he's seen on porcupines in his apple orchard late of frosty autumn nights.

Stunned, feeling like he did when he fell off the swing in kindergarten, winded, sick, he swallows his gum and sticks his pencil behind his ear. After a week getting nowhere, he can't wait any longer. This is it—he'll get her to talk to him or die trying.

He opens his mouth and the sun disappears behind cloud as she shifts her gaze. Passing him by like he's gas, she goes to his chair, sits, takes up his book of puzzles.

Now the weasel-faced guy brought her in sets his satchel under the counter and settles up with Sam. Odd kind of guy, intense. Moves like a bird. Business done, he follows with the satchel, a man with a mission. He draws Romy to her feet, whispers in her ear. Edging off toward the elevators up to her tower, she smiles, eager to get away.

Tetuán street kid in last year's suit, he won't give up, won't take no, won't cut her loose. "Come with me, now, while you can, come to God," he catches her elbow in a bony hand, eyes the gray of night cloud.

So misplaced is the sermon, Karl feels the keen urge to laugh. Face straight by en effort of will, he takes in the show.

"You know I can't, Drew," she says. "I've got to go."

Karl's mouth goes dry. Her voice is wind in tall fescue, that soft. There, too is polished granite—hard, and as slow to heat.

He releases her, drops the bag, speaks, voice rising, "Therefore as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, so death spread to all men because all men sinned." Speech done, he waits.

This guy's waiting for something. He's scared. In his face is struggle. With a glance over his shoulder, he bolts, brushing Karl's hand with the back of his own as he passes. Fleeting contact, but enough.

For Karl time stops. He loses a breath in a grunting exhalation, doubling over, a vision exploding through his mind. Hell vivid as Brueghel: a blast. The stench of burning flesh, singed hair, death. Recovering, he turns to see him bolt out the big door.

Karl has touched schizophrenics, paranoiacs, autistics—lucid in their warp, bathed in the scalding ice of delusion. This isn't like that. This is concrete against incisor, nothing nebulous about it. Real, immediate, close, very close. He remembers the satchel, turns back to see it, and understands. Wondering how long he has, he finds Romy waiting by the elevator.

"Big deal." Sam excavates with a forefinger. "What was all that about?"

Time crawling, Karl forces himself to move. Deaf, nearly blind, tunnel vision clamping down, he passes the bag to run up behind her in air gone to molasses, taking her about the waist without slowing, lifting her against his hip as he goes, hearing his pulse swishing in his ears, he counts.

One....

He's got to put some distance between them and the eye of the coming millisecond storm. Karl runs, but she fights, wrenches, a writhing snake in his arms. Too strong!

Two....

The carpet sucks at his shoes like muck. Up ahead he sees what he's looking for—what they need—a place to go to ground—a meter wide pillar. He won't make it in time, can't move that fast with her jerking in his arms.

Three....

She kicks, struggles, stronger than he can believe. He takes it, her hitting, prying, squirming. He wants to tell her, but there's no time. Behind them security follows, boots pounding carpet, gaining. It won't be long, they'll have them.

Four....

Hands against his chest, Romy pushes herself away, eyes branding the skin of his neck, a mewling whine rising from her throat, the loathing she feels for him coming through over the length of her, whipping him, stinging, salt in a cut.

Five....

The corner looms, but too far, too far. He sprints, her thoughts screaming in his mind. He's like all men, only worse. She wants away from him, his hands off her, his smell out of her nose. Of course she would feel that. He's not surprised. Sadness clingy as kelp wraps itself around him. If he had time he could drop her, try to explain, but there is no time. He can only run, run with her on his hip no more than a mass to be shifted, like clothing, like the gun under his arm.

Six....

If he had time to think he wouldn't be here at all. He'd be a thousand klicks north where he belongs. Instead of the 10th agent to be parted-out, the tenth to take the half-klick slow-mo plunge to the bottom. Right now, his brain has shrunk to contain only one thought—to get around the wall and out of the way of the expanding gas cloud. But she's too heavy, he's too off balance. He won't make it.

"God...."

He says it out loud though he never prays, never begs.

"God!"

Eyes on the pillar. Her hands catch at a chair as they pass, jerking him off balance. He's got no time for this—no time!

Seven....

Anger scalding his throat, he raises his knee to break her hold. Another ten meters around the corner, he flings her onto a chaise. Teeth bared, she spins to face him as he throws himself atop her. Villar thunders toward them across the lobby, leading two others, an incipient avalanche of brawn, as Romy claws to get free.

Eight....

Karl wraps her head in his arm, using the thick ostrich hide of his jacket to shelter their faces. No time to talk, to explain as her teeth find his earlobe, shocking pain flooding his eyes, he wrenches free, "Lie still. Can't you just lie still!"

Nine....

No, she thinks, no, fighting it—what Karl can't read, something she fears, dreads—a spark from down deep: No, this one can't be the one!

He wants to know, to ask her, what it is he can't be. At the same time he wonders if maybe he's wrong, if maybe there are undershirts and boxers in the case. Has he lost his instincts?

Holding her under him, Karl sneaks a quick look back as Villar swoops, victory on his lizard face. Then, hair on his head prickling, feeling it coming like a sneeze, Karl buries his face in ostrich hide.

The air swats them like a hand, knocking the breath out of his lungs, sound louder than sound, battering eardrums, brain, sinuses. Shards of steel rip air heavy with glass, cement, insulation. Girders groan, wrung awry under load.

Then quiet.

Numb, what is surely blood draining from his nose down teeth, salty in his mouth, to drip off his chin, Karl opens his eyes to find he's blind.

 

* * *

 

At eighty, still at work shaping mankind in his image, Francis Crick looks up, blue eyes sharp under a white bush of brows to postulate the existence of an area of the brain as the seat of free will. Sure there is no God, he works eagerly to free man from the faith that there is more to us than what can be coded in the helix.

For an adoring public he pinpoints the anterior cingulate sulcus as the seat of what unenlightened men have for ages believed was a soul. Prometheus Crick will lead them to the tunnel mouth where blares the flame of reason. Laboring tirelessly as Auden's Honeyman, Crick bequeaths us the knowledge to grant government its fondest fantasy—control over the common mind. No longer are stripped electric wires, truncheons, dental drills the shapers of dissident thought.

To posterity Crick delivers subtlety of means.

 

 

* * *

 

Darkness absolute.

Air thick, hard to breathe, a colloid of gypsum dust, Karl cocks an ear, working his jaw, sure he's deaf. Hearing sobbing, he lets out a held breath, relief flooding him. A scream long, dying, then only the patter of raining detritus. And under it all, the slosh of the sea among the pilings. Romy still under him, he is suddenly afraid of falling.

Pushing himself off, sliding onto one knee, shin slamming something sharp, pain brings him back, a cold slap. Using touch alone, he takes her head in his hands, runs a palm over dome of skull feeling her whole. In her hair he feels no blood.

Fighting vertigo and a fear of blindness, he finds a lightstick in his pocket, snaps it to life, shakes it to distribute catalyst. With heartstopping relief, he watches it glow blue-white. Frantic to see if she lives, he holds it to her face and is relieved to see she glares at him with wary eyes.

"You okay?"

She nods, and he remembers what he needs do. With his left hand he takes her wrist, pressing it as if taking her pulse. Eyes on her wrist to distract—the old con—with his right hand he presses an adhesive chip the size of a sesame seed to the nape of her neck. Guilt gnaws at him as soon as it's done. Can't be helped—business first.

"You've got a pulse, anyway." He stands, wishing he were taller, younger, hating himself for wishing it. Backing away, needing her eyes off him, he nearly trips over Villar. >From the deck he looks up, eyes mad with shock. Seeing blood trickling from his ear, Karl drops to check for concussion.

Villar slaps his hand away. Karl should know better than to try to help a wounded dog—get bit that way. Karl goes to find Sam, lightstick overhead, calling into dark, dust. He steps over the other two guards, shoes slipping in something dark and slick. Hunkering, lightstick between his teeth, he lays a finger along each of their necks. Already bled out. His hand comes away glistening black in the glow.

Materializing from the gloom at his feet, the blond who came in behind Romy lies on her side, alloy crescent sprouting magically from sternum glistening with arterial blood.

"Ow," she says, "oh, ow, ow, ow." She works with blood-slicked hands to free it, over and again, strength fled.

On knees beside her, Romy, draws her hands away from the jagged sprout of steel, pins them to her, "No, Kara, leave it, baby, leave it." Smoothing hair from her face, Romy leaves dark smears of blood from hands wet with it.

As Karl watches, a med tech, all business, bustles out of the elevator, red and yellow light sticks clipped to his tunic. He hunkers down at her head, passes a strobe over her hand, consults the glowing data running across his vision, "Got her," he says, moving on.

Wondering at his efficiency, Karl steps in front of him, "What are you going to do?"

"Do?" His voice oozes contempt. "I said I've got her." A man unused to being questioned, he starts past.

Karl catches him, big man, by slick synthetic jumper, swings him around. "Give her something."

Frowning, he slaps his hand away like he's swatting a bug, leaving Karl's wrist smarting. "Liver's ruptured. What do you want? You can see the blood, it's the wet stuff."

Karl blocks him again, too numb to fear the blows he knows will come, the man's hands he can feel on him now. "Make her stop hurting."

He jerks away roughly, irritated. "And who the hell are you?"

Somehow Karl's gun fills his hand. He raises its pig snout, says, voice low, "I'm maybe the last man you'll ever see, that's who."

Suddenly reasonable, the big man shrugs meaty shoulders, mouth smiling, eyes dead calm on Karl's face. "What's your hurry? She'll be dead in a minute."

Karl's getting lightheaded. Security catches him with his gun out he's gone, off the plat and on a fast boat to China, ten mandatory for possession, twice that if he uses it. He's no cop, has no credentials, nothing. He's on his own. Too late to back down, now. "Do it, do it now, right now."

The big man kneels by Romy, looks up, sure Karl's lost his mind. "That's a billion in organs there. I could lose my job, the opiate will taint them."

Knowing it's the wrong thing to do, but not thinking of anything better, Karl grabs his hair and presses the blunt muzzle of the .44 into the valley beneath his ear, shoves his head down, hoping the cold steel against his skin will move him, "Do it anyway."

Wrenching free, he injects her through the skin of her neck, looks up, face nasty. "Happy now, big man?" He slams the injector into the case, stands, looks closely at his breast ID. "I'll make sure Mr. S knows who gets credit for this." He disappears into the jungle of hanging fiber optics and insulation.

Feeling he's being watched, Karl turns to find Villar has seen the whole thing. Karl wonders why he didn't stop him from throwing away so much of Genesistems money. Suddenly tired, Karl watches as Romy strokes the quieting girl. Is it the drug or just that she's running out of blood? At last she quiets. He feels a weight against his leg and looks down to see Bink, flocked in dust, trembling against him. With a pang of guilt he realizes he'd forgotten him.

Putting the revolver away, he strokes the dog, looks up to find Romy watching him through tearing eyes. Face hard, what she looks is curious. In this light he can't read her eyes. The look could mean anything. It doesn't seem so important to talk to her now.

Reaching down, he lays a finger under the delicate curve of the dying girl's jaw to feel for a pulse. Finding none, he gets to his feet, stumbles through white haze to help Villar and the others dig out survivors. One Sister is still breathing when they pull her head-first from the fallen tangle covering her. As she comes free, Karl reaches to take her ankles and grabs air. A stone drops in his stomach. Her legs end just below the knee. Villar cradles her head on his thighs, holding her as she screams, as she reaches out with delicate hands to yank at his ears, his collar, his mustache, biting down onto the brown skin of his wrist with perfect teeth. Villar lets her bite, eyes on Karl's, a different look in them now, hate gone. And something else there. What, an appeal? Karl doesn't know, can't believe he's seeing Villar do this.

Same tech bustles over. Rage rises in Karl as he sees the SOB isn't going to give her anything. He shuts his bag. Karl reaches out, taps a beefy shoulder. This time a look is all it takes. He reaches for his injector.With it poised at her neck, he looks to Villar.

Villar nods, short, barely noticeable, and the tech presses the stud, forcing the drug through her skin. Glaring, he goes away. Soon after, a slow smile softens her face. She looks up at them, eyes wide as a child's. "Where's Romy?"

At once, almost as if she's been summoned, Romy is there on bare knees beside her.

"What is it, Lia, what?" Romy says, ear to her mouth.

"I..." she says, eyes growing vacant. "I want you here." It's as if she listens to her own breathing, puzzled by the sound. Then her eyes return to her sister's. "Romy, oh, Romy I'm afraid."

Romy wipes dust-caked blood from her face, "It's all right to be afraid. I'm here, I'm here, now, Lia."

Humbled by the intimacy of death, Karl looks away.

Her mouth opens for a breath she never draws. Slowly, imperceptibly, her hold on Villar eases, hands sliding down his filthy tunic to rest like broken birds among the debris.

Dust coating his throat, Karl backs away, picking his way through fallen framing, hanging wires, dangling insulation. Barking his knee on an I-beam bent bowed, he reaches down to quell screaming pain. He's seen all he can stand, needs to get out of the dark, the bitter dust, the smell of blood.

But before he goes, he's got to find Sam. Not far in front of where his counter should have been, he stumbles on what looks in the dim glow of his tube like an area of immaculate dark carpeting. Wondering how this could be, he hesitates before stepping out. Hunkering to investigate, he is shaken to find a gap in the floor open twenty meters down to the sea.

No desk.

No Sam.

A loafer he finds, penny still secure in its slot. Looks like the old man's. He stoops to pick it up. It's heavy, full of something. Looking inside he understands. Sam's foot's still in it. Swallowing carefully, Karl sets it on concrete scorched clean, backing slowly away. Desperate for air, he shoulders his way out past tourists gawking outside.

Somehow he makes it to the rail where he clings to cold alloy hard with both hands, mind dead numb. Letting his eyes fall to the sea below, he watches swells sweep under him, breaking blue green as they plow past barnacled pylons.

God, he misses the sea.

Not this sea. This isn't the same Pacific that booms into the dead end cove where his pasture falls away to rocks a hundred feet below. This sea is foul. Like the plat, like L.A., like everything here.

He had her there in front of him and he said nothing. Nothing. Under that gaze he choked, and he won't get a second chance. When Swindlehurst hears about the three bills he cost the company, he'll be gone. Not that it matters. If he blows this, he might as well be down there in the dark as anywhere else. He doesn't want to live without the land. He won't.

Behind him the grid clanks, shifts under his feet. Karl notices Bink doesn't growl and wonders why. He turns, hand going to the Smith, but lets it fall, turning back. Gray water smooth as slate spreads to a coastline caught in transient equilibrium between night and day. L.A. with its halo of sodium light, hills beyond shrouded in hydrocarbon haze as the first glaze of dawn floods the east.

"Forgot your puzzle book," Villar says from the rail.

Karl takes it.

"Hungry?" Villar says, as if it's nothing out of the ordinary for him to be talking to him without a sneer edging his voice.

Karl says he is, which is the truth. A week of living off dried apples and deer jerky he brought with him and he's ready for something else. "Any place a guy can get a steak out here?"

Villar's eyes are different, the mocking gone. A man who might or might not be a friend. Villar squats, holds out a hand to Bink. Still he doesn't growl, even lets Villar pat him on the hock. Amazing.

Exhausted, hungry, Karl sags against the rail. Bink's judgment is good; he trusts it. He could always reach out and take his hand, but he doesn't. Doesn't want to, not yet. Might find out something he'd rather not know. Right now he's happy just to have someone to talk to.

"That depends," Villar says to the dog, "on what you mean by a steak."

Karl remembers the chip he planted in Romy's hair, cues up his headset geo-locator and finds her in the tower right where she should be. Romy's chip in its memory, it'll let him know if she goes anywhere. "What's to describe?"

"When somebody says they want steak out here, what they get is a slice out of a fifty-ton tissue culture lolling about in a quarter million gallon nutrient tank. Same, only without the bones and gristle. So they say. I say bull."

Karl's raised cattle, looked them in their big black eyes when he shot them in the X between eyes and horns. Good life on tall pasture, low-limbed Sitka to shelter from driven rain, clean, cool spring water, a quick death you don't know is coming. Give him one of his steer's lives. There are worse ways to go, worse ways to live.

"Okay," he says to Villar, "Porterhouse this thick out of a steer left tracks on range. Hung at forty degrees till good and moldy, grilled on red hot iron three minutes to a side, couple eggs over easy, rye toast with caraway dripping butter, real Java, fresh squeezed OJ."

Villar looks as if he may smile, but doesn't—just his eyes. "You don't ask for much, do you? Been to The Derby, I see. Let's hop on over for breakfast, what do you say?"

Karl looks Villar's uniform over, then down at his own.

"Don't worry about it, they won't. You up for it?"

"Give me a minute to drop Bink."

Villar leads the way down wide stairs to the dock where tourists mill about the casino entrance. Big businessman leads a Sister by the arm, vacant smile on her painted face.

"There's a new one," Villar says, shaking his head in derision, "Second generation—no better than the whores upstairs."

Villar leads him past the tunnel down to hover service.

"Where we going?"

"Taxi." He looks back, contemptuous, "The flying douche bags are for the touristas." He raises a hand and a speedboat standing off the quay tears up to come to easy equilibrium along the tires lining the waterline. "Let them eat the blob in the tank."

They step down, and engine roaring, the small boat pulls away.

So hungry he can barely stand, Karl grabs hold of the rail as the taxi whips them across to the mainland. Blinking, he checks the menu to see what else of interest his search of the archives has unearthed. He finds 32 items waiting. He cues one.

"The following is a Uninet public service announcement."

Party. Cannabis smoke marbles the air. Dresses glitter. Earrings shimmy. Music jangles, jars. Tossing their tresses for effect, eyes painted to look as if they've been beaten, young women pose at looking unposed. Young men with perfect skin, eyes on other young men, barely tolerate them.

Karl remembers this one. Twenty years old and still vital as if chipped this morning. And here he is. Vic somebody, an ordinary man. Not handsome, not tall, not anything—an Everyman. Obviously meant to be the center of his sympathies, he catches a blonde's eye and Karl gets a shock. He knew he'd seen her before, but hadn't known when. It's Auri, a jaded seventeen.

Under the wind, Karl speaks out loud. "In the net role that catapulted her into the limelight."

Her whole body swells erect, silicone augmented ornaments rising beneath sheer satin. The belle of the ball, she's interested, very interested.

Karl freezes her in a tight close up, lips parted in invitation. It's her all right. Boat lurching under him, he remembers.The saturation campaign back in 2010. It may have been crude. It may have been crass, flagrant, glaring, but it did the job. As a result, more than nine of ten norteamericanos were implanted by 2014.

Quick, painless, easy—and for one year, free—implants were more a national passion than sugar cube polio inoculation ever was. Like the drive to stamp out smallpox, it left the beneficiaries with a small scar, this time just above the hairline at the nape of the neck. He cues it.

Laying a long forefinger to her temple, Auri signals him onto com, running a pink tongue over full painted lips, promising what sensuous dissipation we are left to imagine. That's the way it starts. Now with a blink of an eye they can exchange codes, STD test results, holos, whatever, storing them for later. All without touching, without speaking. No fear of humiliation, rejection, disease, complication. Either can end it with the firing of a synapse. Easy. Clean. Risk free. All around them it goes on.

Our hero, eager face awed by his good fortune, reaches back in an unconscious movement to seat the pick ups more firmly against the nape of his neck, a gesture habitual among headset wearers.

In that instant Auri's face wilts with disgust. Her voice comes over his set, sultry, but not right. Something's wrong. What, he wonders?

But we know.

"Sorry, I'm looking for a man who's hard-wired," she says, voice dripping vitriol, accent on hard, subtle as ball-peen on kneecap.

Crushed, he slogs away off-vid and into the twilight of obscurity.

The actor, whoever he was, was rumored to have died soon after, mind addled by UR kiddie-porn, drowned in a hot tub under a flowering yucca somewhere in the Hollywood hills. Typecast untouchable by his first, his last, his only role.

Forever and always, etched on the public memory, what there is of it, a loser.

 

* * *

 

Still numbed by the blast, Romy showers, curls up with Lena on an expansive bed in Dr. Vici's suite.

No sooner is she asleep than it comes.

The dream.

Always the same.

Little girl, hair Romy's tint of platinum, features hers.

Her daughter, she knows it.

One, no older. Teetering, she runs, looks back, falls, looks up, lip trembling, straight at Romy. Wanting, needing to be picked up, held, loved—needing all the things a mother can do, can give—all the things Romy never can.

Mutely, she witnesses the need in those eyes, same jade as her own, desperately wanting to explain she's not the one she needs, that she is not—and can never be—anyone's mother.

At that moment she wakes, as always, marooned by a tide of despair, of loss, of longing.

For whom?

For the little girl she will never birth, never take in her arms, never speak comforting nonsense to? Or for herself, emptiness solid and cold as basalt within her?

Jade eyes still vivid in her mind, Romy turns, clutches the bedclothes to her throat, casting herself back onto the surf of sleep.

To forget.

 

* * *

 

The taxi dumps them along the boardwalk where Cherry Beach used to be.

Lost, Karl scans row upon file of houseboats, junks, hundreds of floating shacks bobbing on calm waters behind breakwater rip rap, boulders hanging with every form of plastic flotsam captured by the tide.

Villar passes a hand over the ruby eye and the hack grumbles in Punjabe, roaring away, setting the dock arock.

Sun rising above the hills, they walk north past a motley line of floating houses, shops, some Karl can't tell what they sell, junk all he sees. Broken, torn, soiled, castoffs fished from torpid surf. Things he wouldn't let in his barn. Kids line the walk, eyes vacant, slack faces growing animated at the sound of their approach only to lapse back into their daze seeing their uniforms.

"These kids, they live here?"

Villar nods. "Runaways mostly, netpunks, some from money, homes where both parents have pupated."

Karl frowns at the word, doubting his ears. Carefully, he steps around an impossibly thin boy, knees wider than thighs, naked but for a filthy pair of briefs. "Pupated, as in pupa?"

The boy raises an open hand, skin raw, oozing rashy, scabbed, patches pink where he's picked them away.

"Keep your distance," Villar says, giving the kid room as he passes. "Watch yourself."

Fascinated, Karl stops, "What's with him?"

"Deep in UR and not to be disturbed. Don't eat, don't wash." Villar shrugs. "Ringworm, scabies, leprosy—all making a big comeback down here. L.A....." He grunts, something like a laugh. "...new Calcutta."

Karl sidesteps the boy, who sits oblivious, hands open in a habitual panhandler's benediction. "Why here?"

Villar stops, turns, waits for him to catch up, "The boardwalks? Private property, no cops, they can dodge the owners by ducking under the floats. Sleep under them, too." He stomps the decking. "Down here."

It's too bizarre. How can this city, this world have changed so much so fast? Karl gets down, lowers his eyes to a slit in the thick plastic, cupping his hands to shield them from sunlight. In the dim he makes out several pairs of eyes, children's eyes. Wary, they watch him with a feral glint. Karl sees it coming, pulls away as the hand rises, wire jutting between the fingers of a dirty fist.

The point misses his eye by a centimeter. Stunned, he rises, dabs at his temporal bone. His hand comes away bloody.

Villar stomps the wire down, sprays OC between the slats. From underneath comes a howl, a splash. "Cuidado, hombre, this isn't Disneyland. Better clean that good, too, probably smeared with crap, fester if you don't." Reading Karl's face, he shrugs, explaining, "It's the same all over L.A., anywhere kids live on the street. They try to help them, but first they got to catch them. Last thing any of these kids wants is to be taken in and cut off UR—they like it right where they are."

Karl doesn't believe it. Again Villar guesses his thought. "They're not here, not down there in that filth, they're somewhere out there," he says raising an arm to the sky. "This isn't their world, that is," he says, touching finger to temple. "Ultimate Reality—they call it that for a reason, you know. They say it's better than this, more intense. If they didn't have to come back at all they wouldn't."

"Wait, wait," Karl says, "you said something about pupating. That's a bug thing, isn't it?"

Villar smiles, frowning, lines creasing his shining brow. "You just fall off the truck from Jalisco or what?"

"Been away for a while," Karl says, feeling the need to explain. "Out of circulation."

Villar's mouth turns down, he nods. "Pupating's the next step, cocooning themselves in a jell pod. Not like these kids—they've still got to pick their scabs, eat, excrete—they keep getting jerked back. The ones that can afford it, call themselves digerati after illuminati—now that's a joke—the enlightened ones. They go into pods to lose the meat. Once they do, they spread their wings and fly away."

They pass a junk with what might be a cat or a big rat turning on a spit over a hubcap of coals set up on three bricks to keep it from melting its way through the deck. A boy, dreadlocks matted with filth, senses their approach, rises to a crouch, raises a pipe.

"Now see," Villar says, "this kid's not here, but his belly brings him back every once in a while. Not good. To them it's like death to come back. One of them, fifteen-year-old whore I know, told me it's like dreaming you're abed among rose petals, and waking to find yourself chin deep in sewage. No, they don't like us much. If we'd all go away, that'd suit them just fine."

Karl struggles to take it all in, can't.

"This isn't real to them, we're not either. Unpleasant things to be dealt with—that's all we are. They're in to stay. This isn't their world anymore. I heard a rack of pods down in Van Nuys went down, and when they cracked the seals to get them out, they were flopping around like fish on the bottom of a boat."

Karl looks up from the coal brazier with its skin-tailed delicacy slowly turning. "Why?"

Villar smiles, mouth hard, the effect more like a jackal's snarl. "Shock of losing it, maybe, quien sabe?" He points, "Look at him, afraid we'll steal his rat, but he won't come up unless he has to. He's just listening, still out there." Villar picks up an empty drink box floating on the water, "Watch this." He tosses it at the boy where it bounces off a bare leg.

Leaping unsteadily to his feet, screaming a stream of vile epithet, the boy swings his pipe back and again. Seeing their uniforms, he scoops up the box, sends it back at them, and, with a final imprecation, sits, sinking back into reverie.

"I know," Villar says, "cruel, right? I felt that way, too, but you can't take it seriously, can't think of them as real—they sure don't."

Smelling a familiar stench, Karl leans over to see a body. Bloated, grinning, it stares up at him. Whoever it is has been there long enough to come up on his own. Before he can speak Villar drags him away by an arm. "Come on," he says, genuine friendliness coming through, muted by ostrich hide. "It's best not to look too close, nobody else does. Let's go, the Derby's not far. I'm starving."

From there the floating wrecks are gradually displaced by pleasantly maintained shops, flowerboxes and potted trees lining the wide floating walk, foot traffic becoming more and more plentiful as they pass under bowers of bougainvillea the color of dyed tissue.

"Better neighborhood," Villar says, pointing at a curving brown dome ahead. "There she lies."

The Derby, as far as Karl can tell an exact copy of the restaurant back a century ago in L.A., rocks on languid waves. He hasn't seen one since he left, and that one's underwater, now. The roof a hat twenty meters wide, is an eye catcher floating out there among the boathouses. Coming up on it, Karl has to smile. From the hills it must look like somebody's tossed his hat out on the water. He's glad to know somebody still has a sense of humor.

Inside it's coffee brown and white. Hundreds of old autographed black and whites of movie stars look down from the walls. Villar moves to sit, but Karl holds him back.

"What?" Villar says, following Karl's eyes. "What is it?"

It has to be here—it always is.

Karl scans the walls to find the one photo he always has to find. Mitchum, standing alone, trench coat caught by the wind on some bay-side cobbled back street. What bay Karl has no idea. He likes that picture, doesn't sit out of sight of it. At home he has one by his bed. He sees it last thing at night, first thing in the morning. Superstitious? sure. Ridiculous? probably.

What it means to him he's never talked about, never even thought about. It's from an old ad, that much he knows. Something from the last of the century. Doesn't matter. What does is that Mitchum speaks to him. Strong and clear, he says everything he's always known is true.

With his eyes he says it. The way his collar's turned up to the wind says it. The way he stands, looking old, tired, worn, the way Karl feels most of the time. Head held straight, Mitchum says it: Do right, and screw who doesn't like it.

Karl believes that, lives it, doesn't give a damn what anybody thinks about it. Over the long counter, chrome and white, Karl spots him, slides onto a stool.

Warily Villar follows. "You like this seat? You sure, now? I don't want to rush you."

Too tired to notice the teasing, Karl's mouth waters as he opens the menu. "Sit down."

"Mind telling what it is you were looking for? I've always wondered what dogs get out of turning around three times before they lie down. You may give me a clue."

Karl motions to the picture, surrounded by dozens of others.

"Ah, a picture you like, huh? Now let me guess.... Could be Grable, she's got a great set all right, but I don't think so." He appraises Karl, glances back at the wall. "Could be Hepburn. All that tall, bony charm.... Might even be Douglas. No, no, wait, wait, I've got it." A slow smile grows on his mouth. "It's Mitchum, isn't it. Oh, yeah, that's the one. That's the one you'd like. That Kipling If... attitude, he sends across, right? Yeah, that's the one you'd go for. I right?"

Surprised, Karl nods.

"Uh, huh," Villar says, gloating.

Disturbed he's that easy to read, Karl changes the subject, "Come here a lot?"

Villar shrugs. "What do you think? At two-fifty a plate, it costs too much, but me, I'd rather eat one meal a day of the real stuff, than three of the pap they serve out there."

Karl looks around, swiveling on his stool, looking over the dozen diners, eating, talking, playing chess, reading. Something's wrong, different from the restaurants on the plat. "What's missing?"

"Noticed, huh?" Villar grimaces. "Damped—no signals in, no signals out. Legal, barely, since it's a floater. Offshore you can get away with a lot you can't in the city." He turns to look back at the dozen or so diners at the tables behind them. "Shot hell out of business—aren't many willing to pull out of the net long enough to eat."

Karl sees it now. Most places he's been the last week it's like walking in on a seance. Everybody seeing and hearing something he can't without taking the feed. Every once in a while, they'll laugh, wince, sigh, depending on which center's getting tweaked. They murmur, they mutter, eyes on air. A creepy feeling, being on the outside—he doesn't like it. Anything that keeps the hive society away suits Karl just fine.

"One time I saw a couple," Villar says, "implants, try to make it long enough to eat without net feed." He comes as close to laughing as Karl's ever seen him, teeth flashing ivory against pollo en mole skin. "They looked like they were crawling with fleas." He blows air between his teeth, "Out the door before they ever got their order."

Karl looks at Villar, "Why aren't you planted?"

"Nobody gets in here," he says, thumb tapping temple. "Let the lambs join the flock, not this Mexican." Villar's eyes blaze over him like Baja sun. "The Sister you pulled out of the way," he says, towing fork and spoon around on his napkin with a single finger, "know her?"

Karl says he doesn't. Strictly speaking true.

Shaking a bowed head over a thick heavy mug of coffee the girl sets before him, Villar grunts like he's considering it. Hands, small, strong, nimble as lizards, wrap themselves around his cup. "Pretty popular lately with some of the new guys, always asking about her."

Instantly, Karl's on his guard. Just what and who is this guy, and what does he know?

"I've seen a lot of LO's coast through here in ten years, I've never seen one that would have done what you did. I don't know what you are—"

Karl inhales to string him the line and Villar waves him silent. "I got Sam to give me a peek at your record," he laughs, examines bloodstains on his hands. "Poor Sam, cured his varicose veins, anyway, huh?" Again he shakes his head. "I don't know what the hell you are, but you're not some drunk also-ran from Timbuktu."

Villar looks at him like he's waiting for him to tell him what he is.

Karl sizes up the tough little Mex perched on the stool next to him. He's never much liked Mexicans. Never trusted them. Maybe he can trust Villar. He doesn't, though, not yet.

"No dice, huh? Don't like Mezcans?"

Karl looks at him, sees he's serious, "Not much."

"Ever had breakfast with one?"

Oddly, Karl isn't made uncomfortable by the question. "Not when I had a choice."

"Well, we're making progress, then, aren't we? Maybe racial harmony is within our grasp after all, huh?" Villar taps with nervous fingers on the counter. "I didn't think much of you either."

Thinking of the reception he got a week ago, Karl smiles, "No kidding."

Villar grimaces, tugs at the neck of his vest to work it down from where it's ridden up, something he does all the time without realizing it, Karl notices. He raises his cup to drink, "You know you're dead."

Karl tastes his coffee, mug feeling good in his hand after the ersatz crap he's swilled out of foam for a week. Bitter, hot, the way he brews it at home. "I didn't plant it."

Villar looks tired in torn tunic, blood and a slash of black grime over one eye. "Didn't say you did. They don't care about the bomb. By the time they get done they'll make money on it. It's the organs. Those two sisters, the ones you convinced the tech to shoot with painkiller—that little bit of chivalry cost Genie three bills. Mr. S doesn't like losing money. The way I see it, they'll recoup what they can from yours."

Karl nods, suddenly doubting the wisdom of being here, "Who's going to collect, you?"

"Me, no, not me, I clean up messes, I don't make them. Swindlehurst's got other guys you better watch out for, though. Good, too, from what I hear. Very good at making trouble disappear. Last few months I've seen a few guys get a little too pushy, a little too interested. All of a sudden they just pack up and go, no notice, no nothing, just gone." He drinks, making love to the heavy mug hidden in his hands. I'd hate to see that happen to you, that's all."

He seems to mean it. "I'm touched."

"Yeah, yeah," Villar says, glancing over his shoulder. "How about what happened in L.A. the other day, huh?"

Karl says nothing, waits to hear what he has to say.

"Some security guys babysitting that old nag that's suing Genie, Ori, Ari, something like that, you must have heard about it."

"Nope."

"Whacked, five or six of them, maid too."

Karl listens, watching his face in vain for any clue to his thoughts. "Got her, huh?"

"Got away. Think about that. Team goes in by air slick as snot, hits half a dozen guys armed to the teeth, and she gets away?" Villar watches, eyes probing, "Never happen."

Karl sips his coffee, wishes he could crawl right down into it and soak his aching ribs, knees, head.

"So what do you think?"

Tiring, Karl looks at him, cup in his hands as the waitress fills it brimming. "What do I think? I think there's nothing like real Java. Over a hundred different compounds give coffee its flavor, you know that?"

"Nonono." Villar snorts. "About the old broad, how'd she do it, how'd she get away?"

Karl pretends to consider it, "Maybe they snatched her."

"Na," Villar says to his coffee, "got away, it was all over the net."

It's obvious Villar has an answer. Karl decides to hear it. "I give up, how?"

Villar watches him, eyes sharp, "She had help, that's how."

Karl looks up, meets eyes hard as opals. Hands still shaking from the concussion, the nearness of death and his own escape, he feels nothing so much as numb. Numb and tired. He breathes deep, waiting for what comes next. Why the hell did he agree to come? He doesn't need this jousting when he's trying to enjoy the first decent meal he's had in a week. "I don't know, man, if you say so."

Villar nods, looks as if he accepts his ignorance. "So why the hell'd you do that today? Most guys wouldn't cross the quay to spit on a sister if she were on fire."

Karl takes another sip, hot coffee burning all the way down, clearing the taste of dust, the stench of the floating corpse from his palate. This is what Villar really wants to know, why he offered to take him here. "Maybe not, but they pay a hell of a lot of scratch to be with them for a few hours."

Villar shrugs, "They're buying fantasy. They pay to bang one of the girls on the quay, too, that doesn't mean they'd take a chance the way you did. All I could think was you wanted to impress Romy, and that didn't fit. I've seen you around them, you don't even look up from that damned book of yours when they go by."

Karl's not letting him get away with that. "You were there, why'd you let me? Seems to me you're an accomplice. Odds the tech will think so, too."

Their waitress takes their order and goes away.

Villar watches him, knowing more than he says, no more willing to trust than Karl. "I never argue with a man with a gun that big. I told you...."

"Yeah, I know, you clean up messes."

"Genie doesn't hire cowboys." He smiles, waves a finger, "Nice try, but you still didn't answer my question—why?"

Hard question. One Karl's not sure he could answer if he wanted to, which he doesn't. To impress Romy? He smiles at the thought he would ever be foolish enough to try. He sips coffee wishing he had one of the little boxes from his cubicle to squeeze into it. "Where I come from, a man doesn't let an animal suffer."

"Ah...." Villar's eyes spark. "So they're animals?"

"Aren't they?" Karl drops his head, seeing again the look in Romy's eyes after he got off her, feeling again the clarity, the sensitivity of her mind. He realizes he doesn't know anymore. "Whatever they are, they don't deserve that."

Villar shrugs, rubs a brown hand over a close-cropped head, watches him speculatively. A Negress in a white and brown apron slides their steaks in front of them, then the tablet with the bill. Karl reaches for it, but Villar beats him to it.

"Got it, and thanks."

Karl lets orange juice run down his throat, so cold there's frost around the rim of the heavy glass. Villar's not smiling. "For what?"

"For keeping your eyes open."

Karl doesn't trust him, it's all coming too fast, too easy. If he weren't so damned tired of being alone he wouldn't be here. The steak's good, first real food he's had since he's been here. He thinks over the seconds before the explosion. "Why'd you chase me down?"

Villar nearly laughs this time. "You looked like you had a good reason to run, so I ran, too." He shrugs. "Something I picked up in Way Tay, saved this brown ass more than once."

Karl chews the steak, tender, salted, charred from the grill, wishing Villar would shut up and let him eat.

"Can I ask you something?"

As if anything he could say would shut him up. "Go ahead."

"You believe in redemption?"

Karl turns to see if he can be serious.

"I'm serious, you believe in it? Can it happen? Can it work? Can a man—an imperfect one, a flawed one—redeem himself, make up for all the...lousy stuff, all the mistakes?"

This is not what Karl expected to hear. As far as he can tell, he's perfectly serious. Karl saws through steak, chews, swallows. Can this guy be a holy roller? He's never met anybody looked less like one.

Redemption? What does he know about it? About as little as anybody can. Anybody starts talking God he runs the other way. Like anything else, he reckons—them that talks ain't doing. "You need to ask somebody who knows more about it."

Villar's eyes shine dangerously. "Well, I'm asking you."

It's been a long time since he's thought about anything like this. It makes him uncomfortable thinking about it now. Redemption—he's not even sure he knows what it means. "I'm for it."

"That mean you believe in it?"

Karl wants more than anything else to be left alone to eat his steak, but if he can't do that, then he's willing to walk out and leave it behind him. What he's not willing to do is endure a Jesus spiel. "Look, why ask me?"

"Why not? We're two of a feather, you and I." Villar looks at him over a pointed finger as if it is the sight of a gun. "I've thought about it, I thought maybe you had too. You telling me you haven't?"

What if he has? How the hell can Villar know about it? "That's what I'm telling you. Need answers, ask somebody who's got some to give."

Villar grimaces. "Sure," he says, slides off his stool, heads for the toilet. "Back in a minute."

Watching him go, Karl squirts Heinz on his hash browns. That is one strange SOB.

He takes out the puzzle book, dusting it against his trousers. Still can't get past the bogus gold piece. He's all right up to that point then it all slips away. Sawing off another chunk of beef, he opens the book, finds a note in the margin: Don't worry about the gold piece.

And he sees it. The Chinaman getting change is chaff, doesn't change a thing. He remembers, now, how he turned his back on her for a few seconds. The book open on the cushion.

It had to be her. She saw his scribblings and guessed where he was blocked. So she's smarter than he is, too. Why doesn't that surprise him?

He doesn't want to think about it anymore, just wants to eat. This isn't turning out at all like he thought it would. He glances up at the mirror behind the counter where he can see the front door, just checking, good view, though he would have preferred a booth—always more comfortable with his back to the wall. He wonders how long the news will take to get to Swindlehurst, guesses he's had it since before he left the plat.

He won't end up on the bottom of the shelf, a hollowed out bodega bag. Thing's get that bad he'll take his chances on the cape. Not much of a chance maybe, but better than dying here. If he can't choose anything else, he can choose where he dies.

He's about to look back down to his plate when a big guy in a bulky coat comes through the door wearing what look like sunglasses. Karl minces eggs with his fork, mind running four ways at once. Alarms go off in his head like a series of electric shocks, but he keeps still, keeps steady, doesn't attract attention. He's overcompensating, he's sure of it, it's been barely an hour. Too fast, nobody's that efficient. But there he stands, filling the doorway.

Karl takes a bite of egg, chews, swallows, watching the stocky man scan the room. Sunglasses he leaves on. Isn't it lucky Villar's at the phone, he thinks, isn't it lucky? Dark, the glasses are glossy black. Not a style he's seen before, but then he's been out of touch a long time. He remembers a net piece he caught on the latest in night vision.

Karl takes another bite, going through the motions in his head, doing the mental practice, taking the Smith in his hand, swiveling, thumbing back the hammer, extending his arm, watching the front sight, firing—at the head, it would have to be the head, no way would the the slugs cut through the heavy vest that mountain could be hiding under there.

He spears a chunk of charbroiled New York, lifts the fork to his mouth, no longer hungry. Chews, not tasting, thinking he might as well be eating a drink box as he glances back up into the mirror. The big man staring straight at his back smiles, horse-teeth shining.

Every hair on Karl's body prickles. His back crawls. The man at the door draws back his coat revealing something long and black. Karl drops his fork, clanking on thick crockery, tumbling off onto the counter, taking a heart shaped droplet of ketchup with it. Red and thick. He feels the butt of the heavy revolver in his hand, still out of sight under his jacket and starts to swivel on his stool just as a waitress comes out of the kitchen carrying a tray of plates heaped high with onion rings.

She moves away, enfilade, and dammit, he can't see what he's got under the coat.

The lights blink out.

 

* * *

 

Karl rolls over the counter, hits tile on his knees, pain shocking in the dark.

Feeling blindly along the back of the counter, putting some distance between where he is and where he was, expecting to hear the drone of a carbine at 900 rounds per minute.

He doesn't.

The lights wink back, the cook cursing power outages. Karl peeks around the edge of the counter to see the big man adjusting the dial on an oxygen concentrator, clear hose snaking up inside his clothes and up a big nose. He follows a hostess to a booth.

At once, Karl makes the connection. Back in '23 a leaking valve sent EDB rolling in from San Pedro, a deadly mist carried in with the fog. Those who survived were on concentrators as long as they lived. The power outage just another inconvenience as the grid compensates as L.A. microwaves breakfast. He's read about them, why hadn't he remembered? Feeling a nudge from behind, Karl looks up to see his waitress glaring down at him.

"You looking for the little boy's room, honey, it's through the kitchen."

Slipping the .44 under his coat, he stands, ignoring an old couple staring after him as he goes. He's not back at the counter long when Villar slides onto his stool and notices the waitress cleaning away the orange juice Karl spilled when he leapt the counter. "What happened to my juice?"

Giving Karl a baleful look, the big negress says, "Clumsy me, I'll get you another one." She goes to fetch it.

Karl, feeling like a jerk, forces himself to eat.

"Tell you what," Villar says as the taxi shuttles them back to the plat, "get some sleep, a shower, and tomorrow morning on break we'll hop on over for lunch."

Karl isn't sure he heard right. "Tomorrow? You mean they'll have the tower up and running in twelve hours?"

Villar laughs as if he's out of practice, "You think they'll let a little thing like this shut them down? Uh, uh, they'll work out of the mezzanine."

Karl agrees.

Back in his cubicle, he showers, slips into the narrow bunk. Bink whines, licking a cut on the pad of a front paw. "Sorry old buddy, no running around tomorrow. I'll bring you a side of sausage, huh?" he says, smoothing his muzzle with a finger.

Seeing the glowing neon blue 42 in the periphery of his vision, a reminder of the news items waiting on satcom, he cues it. If he can't sleep, he might as well learn something. At the rate they're accumulating, he'll have to wade through at least half if he ever wants to get through them this century.

Instantly, the cubicle comes alive with movement, with sound. Under glaring lights masked police in black lead a dozen men and women, eyes resigned, to a waiting van. Cut to newsbabe with perfect turned-under newsbabe hair.

"Uninet news as it happens...."

Karl wonders if it's something they learn to do at newsbabe academy or if they're just selected on the basis of their hair's willingness to curl under in just the right way.

"Fundamentalist Christian terrorists blamed for the failed attempt on the life of aging supermodel Auri Zerai, in which a half dozen people, including a long-time personal assistant, were killed, are led into waiting police vans by L.A. SWAT early this morning."

Mouth hanging, Karl listens, not believing what he hears. The guys he met worship one fundamental religion: the almighty buck. No way was that anything other than a professional whack. How is it that whenever he has any personal knowledge of the news, the babes get it wrong?

"Raids on an underground church headquarters yielded weapons ballistic analysis has determined were the same as those used in the attack last week."

Neat trick. Karl suspects they never even bothered to fake results. After all, who would question? Not journalists.

" More than a dozen suspected terrorists were taken into custody in the pre-dawn raid, LAPD Anti-terrorist Division spokesperson said this morning. Thirteen terrorists, among them five children, died as a result of gunfire exchanged between the entry team and the terrorists. No SWAT team members were injured."

How lucky for them. Disgusted, he sighs, cuts it off. Reaching up to switch off the light, he sees the holo of Romy with the others scattered over the floor, reaches to pick it up. Propped on an elbow, he looks at it for what must be the hundredth time in the last week, and for the first time sees it's not perfection, that in fact it doesn't even begin to show what it is about her that pulls at his insides. No more than a holo of a rose blossom can capture the cool velvet brush of petal upon lip, the scent, the prick of a thorn.

Switching out the light, he lies long awake. Insane are the thoughts that sweep through his mind despite his effort to quiet it. She is scum on the cesspool of the world, the culmination of the trickster's art, everything he despises, the worst of it all. He knows she is. And yet....

If she is all that, then why is what comes through from her mind clean as an apple newly picked and sliced with a jackknife? Never before has he doubted what he sees, never.

He does now.

For the first time in his life he won't trust his gut. He can't. If he does he'll have to admit he wants her.

And damn it....

That he won't do.

 

* * *

 

Snip.

Tiny clippers taking away, and by subtracting, adding, Romy shapes the gnarled tree before her.

Head canted, eyes intent, she circles silently.

Snip.

One of her favorites, a Shara-miki maple, seven-eighths dead, windswept, leaning precariously, as if yearning for earth it will never touch. The bonsai stretches, weeping for the earth from its elegant prison, a cobalt ceramic tray of such exquisite simplicity it hovers near invisibility.

Head tilted, appraising the creature before her for a long minute, she clears her mind to see it. Not what she wants it to be, not how it will be—what it is.

Not easy.

Not easy at all.

She imagines what it must feel, this primitive soul. Roots trimmed, life force kept flickering by constant attention. Bound, stunted, cramped. Kept apart from the soil it craves, from the earth. What would she feel?

What she does feel is a yearning, a need to be more than she ever will. Squeezing sea green eyes shut, not to hear, not to think, she moves along the line of trees arrayed before her on a rooftop ledge overlooking the sea. Mist sweeps over her, leaving droplets of moisture clinging in tangled platinum hair, on faultless skin, on her trees.

Why spend so many hours alone with these maudlin ancients?

Down the line she moves, caressing, bending a wire-trained limb of the Ne Agari beech, roots straining fingers. Pinching back a terminal bud on a Sharikan elm. Peeling a shred of bark from the trunk with her nails. Dread building in her, she runs a perfect hand along the coiled trunk of the little cypress, a Bankan, trunk a serpent.

Her favorite, she's losing it. Salt spray, chemicals in the air are bleaching the last of its scaly leaves sickly yellow. Life in this, the oldest of her treasures, sputters. She bends, mane tenting it. Brushing her lips over scaly leaves, she breathes a plea, woman to shrunken ancient three times her age. It must heal, live, grow. It must not leave her alone on this steel island.

Sulking, pensive, the small mindless thing will not yield. It sends back only a mulish determination to die. Standing erect, she backs away, unwilling to cry.

With her tray of tools, wound seal, micro-nutrients, she moves on to a grove of beech, small mound carpeted with moss. If only she could disappear into that grove, lie on that velvet carpet in the sun. The spiny leaves of a Tako Zukuri cork oak prick her palm as she runs her hands over branches stretched wide in need.

These poor stunted beings she tends were made to serve a purpose, fill a need. As was she. No more human than they, she tends them. She raises her face to a sky hanging heavy with fowl-smelling mist and, voice an intense whisper, cries out. "I do have a soul.... I do."

In spite of everything she believes it. Whatever she is, however she was made, whatever anyone says—she knows it. A soul is not dependent on ordered bases, on a coded helix. A soul no one can take away, no matter the law. In defiance of all she knows, all she sees, she believes. Believes she is more than a sequence of bases, that there is a ghost in the machine, that there is God, that God hears. So many limbs out, so very far from the trunk she's willing to go for it to be so.

Nonsense, her sisters say: "You can't seriously believe in a god that would let them create us."

Most, having seen stranger fetishes, only laugh. Some say it's her need for a father talking, that it will pass.

But for her, it never does. Romy believes in good, in happy endings, in humanity. In a few days she'll be thirty. They will come, for her, for all of them, and what few remain of first generation Sisters will be gone.

One last time before she goes out she passes among the century old trees on the bench. She will miss these stubborn old men. Will they notice her passing?

Alone in the mist she laughs out loud at the thought. Her passing after thirty years will be noticed by not a single living thing. It will be the same dawn, the same wind, the same sea. When she is taken, all who would miss her will go with her.

The lucky ones are taken first, she decides. They are remembered by those left behind.

Troubling thoughts worm their way into her mind. The man who carried her out of the way of the blast. Why had he done it? Again she feels the gut wrenching attraction—irresistible as it is unwelcome. Again she smells him—so familiar yet so alien. Never before has a man affected her this way. Never. Can the ads be true after all?

Of all the men she has known in fifteen years as an escort, none has ever behaved that way. As if impressing her had been the last thing on his mind. Nervous, uncomfortable, almost as if he couldn't stand touching her, couldn't wait to get off her, away from her. His awkwardness is puzzling, the freshness of it intriguing. And how had he known about the bomb?

Even more troubling is her reaction to being grabbed. Her struggles had been bogus, for show, the nip on the ear cheap theatrics that shamed her now. She's never let herself be manhandled before. Why hadn't she freed herself?

The clippers she hangs on a nail out of salt mist, hesitating at the door for one last look before starting down.

The old ones will be cared for when she is gone.

That's what matters.

That's all that matters.

 

* * *

 

At midnight Karl finds Sisters Tower open for business.

New guy at the counter. Karl consults the record, finds Romy's out for a two-hour gig. Due back at two. Time crawls as he waits to see her. Every time the door opens, he has to look. He doesn't know what he expects to have changed after last night, but he does know he's a fool to expect anything at all. He knows what she thinks of him.

Right on time, she saunters in with the grace of a cheetah. Leaving the poor fool at the counter, she heads for the lift, Karl tracking her every step of the way. She knows he's watching, feels his eyes on her, he can tell, yet stubbornly refuses to look his way. At last, as the lift doors whisper closed, she turns, sending him a single furtive glance.

Disgusted, he heads out on the quay, spends an hour knuckles white on the cold rail fighting an urge to hop the next taxi off. He drags her bony ass out of the way of a bomb and what does it get him—a bitchy glance from the elevator.

A week here and he's still no closer to talking to her than he was when he first stepped on the plat. He feels again the conflict raging within her before the blast. What is it she fears so much, dreads so much? What is it he can't be?

At four, Villar finds him, suggests another meal at the Derby.

When Karl hesitates, he smiles, "Come on, LO, if a couple keys of C-4 can't stop the Sisterhood, I guess we can grab a decent steak without everything coming crashing down can't we?"

Karl has to agree.

Before they go, Karl tells the new clerk to call him if Romy goes anywhere. He promises he will, and though Karl doesn't feel right about leaving, even if for only an hour, he follows Villar down to the taxi.

 

* * *

 

The Derby's nearly deserted at this hour. They sit at the counter, and the same woman takes their order, fills their mugs with steaming coffee. The cook, a fat black, brow beaded with sweat, hums as he slaps New Yorks on a red hot grill.

"You say you don't know her," Villar says, looking clever. "Yet I saw you just ask that kid to call you if she leaves. Maybe I'm thick but I don't get it."

Karl chews, stalling, wondering what he can say to that. The guy's like a pit bull. Once he grabs on he won't let go. "Just trying to do my job."

Villar purses his lips as if he's trying not to smile, "You don't know her, I know, I believe you. Want to?"

Karl does his best to keep his face impassive. What the hell is this? "Can't afford it."

"No, no, on her own time. I know Romy, we have a mutual friend. She would, after what you did, I'm sure she would."

"She'd meet me," Karl says, unable to keep the confusion out of his voice, stunned at the direction they've taken.

Villar nods, "What's so hard to believe about that?"

That he's not anybody's idea of handsome for starters? That she seems to hate him running a close second?

Karl doesn't believe it, not for a minute. "You're having me on?"

Villar seems serious. "You want it, you got it."

Does he want it? Does he want a chance to talk to her, to convince her to come with him back to L.A.? Does he want off this metal island and home?

Karl shrugs, "Why not?"

Seeming pleased, as much as he ever does, Villar says, "I'll ask her," and reaches back to press the set to the back of his shaved skull. Irritated, he slides off the stool, "Forgot, I'll have to use the booth. Be right back."

Karl watches him go, warming tented hands over steaming mug. It's beginning to look like Villar may turn out to be not quite the pain in the rear he seemed at first.

Back on his stool what seems an instant later, Villar attacks his food, "Funny," he says, mouth full of egg, "doesn't answer."

Red coal of doubt searing the pit of his stomach, Karl reaches up to his ear and finds that the alarm has gone off, only he hasn't heard because he's had the gain turned down. He calls up the overlay and sees what he's afraid he might.

Damning himself and his fate, Karl shoves away from the counter and pushing bad knees to their limit, sprints out into the darkness.

Romy is not in the tower.

 

 

* * *

 

São Miguel in early fall.

Five years ago. Karl's first vacation in a year and Tate calls him back a week early. The Azores. Stone houses cling to cliffs. Streets snake up, around, through hills. Alleyways cramped enough to deny two burros passage. Lemon trees, limbs pendulous with fruit. Cactus. Hotel perched high above a smoked glass sea. Bougainvillea bower framing arched doorways. Fresh-caught shark grilled over oak. As far away from L.A. as he can get. Long languid days and nights under a lazy ceiling fan with a lovely girl with caramel skin, the hands, the mouth of an angel, the soul of an imp.

Kid comes knocking with the wire. When Karl sees who it's from he's torqued. Aunt sick again. Job only he can do. Sure it is. Behind him, the girl calls him back to bed.

God, he doesn't want to leave.

At the sea he smiles, drops his head onto the iron rail. Tate is Tate. The job is the job. Girl already out of his mind, he crumples the paper into a tight wad in his fist, tosses it off the balcony and watches it tumble all the way to the sea. Ten minutes later he's dressed and on his way.

At LAX a pool car waits—ugly, gray, smelling of smoke. Duffel in the trunk—vest, gun, spare strips of .44. On the front seat a file folder. Cruising down out of the parking garage, radials complaining, he opens the file in his lap while slipping conical AP rounds into the Smith. Governor's daughter, seven years old, didn't make it home from her bus stop. Gone twenty-four, no....

He glances at his watch, does some subtraction.

Thirty-six hours. Not good.

Steering with his knee, he turns the page. Holo of her posed with the family. Kat's her name. Nice looking kid, nice eyes—smart, sensitive. Not smiling. Threading the concrete loop down to the street, rubber screaming, he smiles, thinking about how much guts it must have taken her to deadpan a publicity shot. Must be tough. This kid he likes. Now someone's got her. Someone who shouldn't.

Karl hops onto the Long Beach, and straight out to the Governor's home to see the friend who saw her last. The governor's wife, Adriana Velasquez, good looking woman, used to be a crooner, lets him in without a word, face held together by power of will. Suit with spooky eyes sticking close behind her, she leads him past a room filled with idling FBI, tension puckering like yesterday's egg white. The looks he gets are cold enough to condense the moisture in the air. Not that this surprises him.

Catching sight of him, an agent he's crossed paths with before, big guy named Peters, steps in front of him. "What the hell you doing here?"

Ahead, the govornor's wife, waits.

Karl doesn't like this guy, never has. "My job."

"You want to help, why don't you just stay the hell out of the goddam way?"

"That's a good idea, now if you'll get out of mine, I'll do just that."

Peters moves close, wetting his lips, "Why don't we just step out in the garage for a minute, huh? I've got something I'd like to show you."

Karl feels heat rise up his neck to his face as fear takes him in its talons. There's no doubt this guy can kick his ass around the block. Karl knows it. He knows it. Considering his options, Karl hears the click of the woman's heels on marble.

"We're waiting, Mr. Latte."

To the agent, Karl says, "Maybe another time, huh?"

Not happy, he backs off, "Yeah, another time."

In a large room the girl and her mother wait. Still not introducing herself, the governor's wife raises a stiff arm, motioning him in. At first he resents the chill. Then he thinks of the hell she's been through the last day and a half. No sleep, mind flashing horrific negatives—her baby hurting, alone, and he understands, forgives. Stepping close to her, he says, "I'll find her."

Whole body trembling as if she's resisting mounting internal pressure, she nods quickly, biting her lip. Karl senses desperation in her strong enough to curdle milk. Desperation enough to try anything. Desperate enough to let a psychic, showing up in a Hawaiian print shirt and tennis shorts in the middle of January talk to a little girl in pigtails.

Karl sits cross-legged on the rug, handwoven Cashmere by the feel, and with the mother's eyes on him, meets the child's curious stare. She doesn't know about him, about what he's there for, which makes it tricky, but not hard. He's had a lot of practice.

"Who are you?"

"My name's Karl."

"I'm Louisa. Are you FBI, too?"

"No."

"Are you going to ask me more questions?" She says it as if she dreads it.

"No, but I'll tell you what. I see you draw, and I was wondering if you might make me a picture."

This gets her attention. "Of what?"

"Oh," he pretends to think, "How about a picture of a party, the one you'll have when Kat comes back."

Kat's mother loses the breath she's been holding, and covering her mouth, runs out, shoes tapping granite.

The girl looks up at him with big eyes, "Kat's mother's very worried. You're sure about the party? I don't draw very good people."

"I'm sure. Now let me see...." Under the worried eyes of her mother, he picks out a crayon in a revolting shade of green, offers it, scooting close. "This is my favorite color, would you use it for me in your picture?"

She nods, reaches for it, touches his hand, and the rush comes fast and strong as static shock.

On a sunny sidewalk he stands, warm, four-o'clock winter sun on his back. There himself, he can't explain why. He's got only a few seconds. Moving quickly as he can, he heads straight to the van, opens the passenger door, climbs in over the seat, clamps the man's throat in his hand, and for an instant, freezes as a flood of poison streams into him. Odd technique—double dipping. Unlikely as time travel, logically, it shouldn't be possible. Why it works he has no idea. He only knows it does.

Had all he can stand, Karl rips his hand away, breaking the connection. Too much. Too dark. Too ripe, too septic— a ruptured boil of thought.

Blinking to clear his head, he smiles, greets curious eyes the color of an Azore sky. "Thank you, Louisa."

He has what he needs—his name is Darrell.

"Were you there?" she says, brow wrinkled in a frown. "I think I remember you there."

He's not surprised, though Louisa's mother stifles a cry, eyes tearing. One thing talking about Psi, another seeing it. Karl knows the reaction, has felt it himself—the awe, the shattering impact knowing can have.

"No," he says, gently, levering himself up on stiff knees. "No, not me."

Disturbing image forgotten, she goes back to her drawing. "But you can't leave. I'm not done."

Karl sees Kat's mother watching from the hall. Behind her waits Peters and her shadow. "I'll come get it later, okay?"

He heads for the front door, Adriana following him with terrified eyes, "You know, don't you? You know."

"I'll get her," he says.

Peters blocks his way, "Slow down, hotshot, we're coming along."

Karl says to the woman, "Tell him to get out of my way."

The agent takes a step for him. Karl reaches under his jacket. "I know where she is. You going to shoot me you better do it, because otherwise I'm going out that door."

"Roberto!" Kat's mother screams. "Roberto!"

Into the hall comes a man Karl has seen many times on the net: the Roberto Velasquez, governor of New Mexicali. Though a head shorter than Adriana, he's wide as a fullback—an imposing man. "You Latte?"

"Yeah." Hand on the butt of the .44, he's already decided to do whatever he has to do to get out the door. He'll let Tate worry about what happens later.

Velasquez raises a squat finger in Peters' direction, and in a voice used to being obeyed, barks. "¡Ve te hombre!"

Peters opens his mouth to protest, but thinks better of it, goes without a word.

Velasquez turns on Karl, "Mr. Latte, we have half a hundred agents here, if you know something, don't you think it might be wiser...."

But Karl's already sprinting for the door. No time for arguments, no time for anything.

"Let him go," his wife says.

Karl floors the loaner, fishtailing down the driveway way too fast, smashing a fender, scraping the black face off a smiling footman, knowing what he'll find if he's too late.

An address in Bell, a house with a half basement, a basement, oh, sweet Jesus, a basement. On the Santa Ana he passes cars on the right at ninety, leaves a hubcap rolling and spinning on the off ramp as he goads the gutless Ford, bounding over a raised berm. Just a few blocks, now.

In the rearview mirror, flashing blue lights. With his palm he pounds the wheel, cursing, stands on the brakes. Heading back to the CHP car with hands plain in view, he hands him a card, "I'm on US government business, I'm in a hurry, com the number on the back of the card, I'll wait." He goes back to his car, leaving the patrolman standing by the side of the freeway. In the mirror, motor purring, car in drive, he watches as he speaks into the air, looking a bit bored. Fighting the temptation to drive away, Karl counts to ten.

He's on three when the officer's face changes, on five when he begins his sprint to the car, nine when he tells him breathlessly he's free to go. As Karl pushes back into the flow of traffic, he smiles. Magnus' idea, the number on the card leads directly to Magnus 24 hours a day. It never fails.

Running fast, concentration half a block ahead of smoking front tires, Karl pushes deeper into the bad side of L.A.. Around corners at 80, tires stuttering in gutter muck, used diapers. Children squat on the curb. Mothers, seated along a low wall, improbably young, wide Aztec faces staring at nothing, feet dangling flip-flops.

He cuts left down Orchard, using the straight stretch to wring the last klick of speed he can from the pool heap, laying on the horn. Almost there, his thoughts darken.

Why the basement? You can never find the light switch in basements. Cold, smelling of earth. No place for a girl with such knowing eyes.

Recognizing the house, he romps on the brake, pedal alive and jumping under his foot as the ABS keeps the car from going into a skid. Sway backed farmhouse. Lawn dead. Garbage scattered by dogs. Gate closed. Too bad.

The car he blows through chain link, up over lawn onto the sagging porch, splintering a four by four post as he skews to rest, setting the roof to sagging. Out and up the stairs he runs, gun in hand.

Barbie doll nailed through an eye to porch post, black string around her neck, torso slit open and what looks like a chicken heart stuffed inside. As he gawks the door cracks. He looks Darrell in the face. Karl hits it with his shoulder.

Mouth open in surprise, Darrell puts his weight behind the door. Karl blocks it with a foot, sticks in the barrel of the .44. Before he fires it swings wide.

Darrell whines, dirty hands held open, "don't shoot me, Bud!"

"Where is she?" Karl says, "Tell me, now, right now." Darrell backs and Karl stays with him down the hall, knowing he should kill him right now—not able to do it that way. Back down the cramped hall Darrell leads. Knowing he's losing it, letting the moment of surprise slip away, Karl says, "Stop, down on your knees."

Darrell's eyes flit to the left, then quickly back. "Sure, Bud, sure."

Scalp itching like he's got lice, Karl turns to see a guy the size of a linebacker come at him out of the living room, axe handle raised overhead. As it cuts the air, he ducks, the .44 bucking six times, too close to miss, fast as he can put them out, the blast awful in the close hall as pee wee winds up for another swing.

The big man, arms like hams, just like hams—Karl never knew what that meant before—eyes gone glassy, several entrance wounds in his neck and cheek, back of his head artwork streaming down the wall, goes down swinging, a dead man still on his feet. Karl raises an arm and the hickory catches him just below the elbow, snapping his ulna with the sound of a breaking breadstick. The fat man slams down on top of him, pinning Karl to the wall, paper slick with grime, dead man's face against his.

Reeling, dizzy from pain, shielding his ruined arm, wondering what in hell this guy ate—his last breath is sewer gas—Karl strains to get out from under him. Two hundred kilo if he's a gram, the contact with his skin is like turning over an animal on the side of the road and seeing maggots squirm for cover— worse than that. As much as he can he shuts himself off from it, but he can't do much—the man's mind reeks like a two-week-old corpse. Hand on his face, fingering an eye socket, Karl shoves with all he's got, and frees his gun arm.

Ears ringing, Karl looks up to see Darrell come for him, short handled trench shovel raised over his head for a hacking swing. He can see the side of the blade honed sharp, spattered with something dark. Knowing he's dead, Karl smiles, raises the empty gun, obvious to anyone with eyes the cylinder's empty.

Darrell blanches, turns, pounds down wooden stairs to the basement, door slamming behind him. Convinced of miracles, Karl, still not believing he's alive, sags against the dead man. Wrong, it's all going down wrong.

Nagging guilt uncoils in his gut, burning what it touches. He should have come in with a dozen agents, not like a goddam hotshot, alone.

Wrenching free, he sets the revolver on the batter's broad back, and with painful clumsiness, ejects the spent cases one-handed. Now he may lose them, lose his one chance to get her back. It was pride kept him from calling in the suits. Pride that ruined his arm. Pride that might still cost Kat's life. Jesus, what an ass he is.

Watching the door, praying he doesn't realize his mistake and come back, Karl digs a strip of cartridges out of his pocket and, with trembling fingers, reloads one handed. When he closes the cylinder, he feels better. Pushing with his legs, he shoves the body off him, getting to his feet. The cellar door's unlocked. It's dark and of course there's no switch. He feels anyway, finds it, flips it—nothing.

Halfway down he realizes he's going to die. Darrell's waiting down here. Waiting to split him open with the shovel. The reek of earth is strong. He reaches out with his gun hand and touches dry soil, packed hard. He blinks, willing his eyes to see. They stay blind. Left arm numb, useless. He clutches it to his chest, air like ice on jagged bone nosing out through torn skin. The revolver he brings in close to his ribs, hammer back, determined not to be the only one to die down here, not to let him get away.

The outside cellar door slams open, the glare blinding him. He hears her moan. She's alive—that much at least has gone right. With a bang the door slams shut, and overhead Karl hears him drag something across, barring him in. Cold fire reaches up his back. He won't be trapped down here. Backing up steep stairs, ducking under a low beam, Karl forgets and hits the door with his ruined arm.

He gasps as pain jolts through him like electricity. Down the hall he moves, climbing over the bloated man with no skull. He hears a car turn over. Pushing himself, every step jarring his arm, he bursts through the rotten screen door and outside as a white Fairlane in the carport catches, vomiting clouds of blue smoke.

Darrell's got an arm round her neck, straight razor in his dirty right hand, her frightened face hidden against his chest. Karl calls to her. "Kat!"

She turns and he sees red eyes, expression like a hunted animal, and Karl knows what she's suffered during two days with this thing—this soon to be dead thing.

Karl shuffles to where he can get a shot, .44 held out barely three paces from Darrell's nose. Tip of Karl's finger light on the trigger, car idling. It's a moment of cusp, of equilibrium, washed in choking exhaust.

"Hey, Darrell, let's stay cool, now, shall we?"

Darrell's eyes flit from the gun pointed at his head, back out the dusty, cat-printed windshield and back. No intelligence in those eyes, only a shifting caginess, the sly understanding of a dog circling to bite.

Looking past the front sight, Karl sees the eyes have changed. No longer vacant, they become shrewd, triumphant, calculating. Darrell looks up and down the street in front of the house and sees no cruisers, no strobing red lights. A smile bares brown broken teeth, "Where's your backup, Karl?"

A glowing brand, his name burns its way into his brain. How can he know? Throbbing arm cradled against chest, Karl concentrates on staying alert. "Let her out of the car, Darrell, and I'll let you drive away," he says, voice as low, as calm as he can make it. "No police, you just drive away." He lies. No cush life inside for this boy. Come what may, he's talking to the dead.

Kat starts to cry, and Darrell slaps her hard across the mouth with a free hand. Karl wants to kill him right now. The girl, used to him, quiets, gasping, eyes wide with terror. The thin man's eyes find Karl's. "Okay," he says, "I'll push her out, then I'll go."

Not believing, knowing it can't end this way, can't be all right, Karl nods, looking for a shot, seeing none, the girl shielding him. "I won't shoot, Darrell, not if you leave her with me."

Can it be a sin to lie to something like this? A sin to kill it? Karl doesn't think so. If he's wrong he'll tell his side when his time comes. Until then, he won't worry about it.

"You promise, no shooting?"

Already going to the place where he goes when he has to drop a hammer on a man, even a man like this one, Karl's ready. He's heard about cops who can't eat for three days after shooting somebody, and wonders if maybe there's something wrong with him because he can do it and go on with his life. Maybe there is. He doesn't know. Karl swallows. "I promise."

Satisfied, Darrell lifts the girl out of his lap. He holds her between them by long hair the color of clover honey, her tee shirt and jeans torn, smeared with something black—grease, Karl hopes. Darrell's gaze darts along the street, then back to Karl, "Take her, she's yours," he says, swiping the razor across the soft skin of her throat and shoving her into Karl's waiting arms.

As if reaching for dropped eggs, Karl reaches out for her as Darrell, gunning the engine, lurches, laughing, into the sunlight. Pressing her to him with his gun arm, Karl sights carefully over the back of her head, putting one shot into the dirty rear glass where Darrell's head should be.

Blood fogs the front windshield. The Ford rams a gnarled fig, breaking off a limb and showering overripe black fruit over sidewalk and hood. In a patter of wet slaps, they drop, bursting open as they land. Engine dead, the horn blares.

Panicked by searing pain, Kat tries to scream, but can only gurgle as she collapses into his arms, dragging him with her down to oil-stained cement. Helpless, Karl holds her as she calms, eyes fluttering, quiet now, as a mountain of filth, a tsunami of disease topples onto him from her mind—the last 36 hours of her life. In vain Karl gathers slippery edges of the wound together with one bare hand. All of it, the toxin of the last two days, pours out of her. Using fingers to plug the carotid artery, hands slick with blood, mind numb, past feeling, he waits. For what, he's not sure.

People gather. Neighbors, curious, snoop around the car, around him. He screams at them to send an ambulance, and though no one moves, several mumble. On his lap he rocks her, this sweet dying angel crying for her mama, even now, past talking, past words, still, she calls, as she moves away over them, looking down, puzzled.

Karl hears her laugh, though she can't make a sound, now, so much of her blood has run out hot and sticky under his hand.

In the dim air above them, he moves with her.

"How can you follow me?" She asks him. "How can you be here?"

Anchored to the world by shackles of grief, he doesn't answer, the pain too sharp, the tip of the ulna nosing out through the skin near his elbow, the dead girl he might have freed in his arms. Mutely he follows, watching them both down below, seeing the roof of the house, the ambulance coming from two blocks away, the neighbors peering in at the man in the car with no face. The windshield Karl thinks looks like the wall of a cave where aborigines chewed and spat sienna in an umber spatter.

They come.

They take them away.

Karl sees it all, knowing it doesn't matter.

They're free now, free of the evil, the ugliness, moving through the dark toward the light together. He won't leave her, won't go back, not to Darrell's world. Not to a world that breeds and succors Darrells.

When she moves into the love, the warmth, he can't follow. Like trying to fly. She goes on and he's left behind, the door shut, alone.

A bushy haired ER intern resets his arm, and Karl sits up, screaming profanity, swiping at the one who hurt him with his good arm.

Picking himself off the floor the MD yells. "Anesthesia for chrissake!"

A prick on the inside of his elbow and Karl's gone.

Twelve hours later he comes up out of the well, finds his clothes still warm from the dryer, dresses awkwardly one-handed, and calm as a dream, braced arm throbbing with every beat of his heart, heads for the door. A couple security men try to stop him and with one arm in a sling, not even thinking, only needing to get out, get away, he puts them down. Doesn't stop until he's home.

It takes him a week hitching, looking like he does. Winter is winter in Humboldt county, not like L.A., and he eats nothing but a few crackers and a bologna sandwich in seven days. But he makes it.

When he walks in the store, Mary sits him down and feeds him breakfast: dozen hotcakes and coffee milked and sugared up the way she used to fix it for him when they were kids. When he won't answer her questions, doesn't even seem to hear, she gives up asking.

While he eats she calls a number she has taped to the back of the malt mixer, the number a man left with her, saying to call if he came, saying he only wants to help him, which, in spite of her innate distrust for anybody smelling of government, she believes.

Tate drops in. Brings a nurse. Comes to make sure Karl has everything he needs or will say he wants, which is nothing. Tries talking him into coming back. No dice, so Tate goes back to take care of the mess. Keeps the press quiet. Somehow gets the coroner to declare Darrell's death a suicide. Does what he does best, muddies the waters.

A month later, Karl drives the nurse—a woman so unremittingly cheerful she sets Karl's teeth on edge—to Eureka, puts her on a Greyhound for L.A. Sends her with a message for Tate pecked out out on an antique Corona.

M.

Need nothing. Want nothing. Won't be back.

K.

 

 

 

 

* * *

 

On the bounding taxi Karl's headset shows Romy a red circle on a plat overlay. Three blue X's with her, maybe the men he'd just missed in the elevator at Auri's. He swallows, asks himself what the hell he's doing rushing to meet them, all for a beautiful freak. He watches the plat grow larger, a million lights glittering on tall casino towers—a potent vision of Hell.

Cold wind cuts into him through the open front of his jacket. He thinks of the steak and eggs he left on the counter to cool and tries to ignore the pangs in his stomach as the boat lurches through the chop. He misses the cape, the peppermint scent of pennyroyal crushed under boot, the cries of red tails soaring lazy on thermals wafting up from the sea. Mostly he misses Mary.

His headset shows Romy still moving and that's good, but they're already on the 20th floor of the casino hotel and that's not. The taxi starts to wind down. Too close to the casino to go to his room to get the twelve. The .44 will have to do.

The driver he points to an emergency access ladder off the north edge of the plat. Focusing on the overlay again, he sees his green X nearly on top of hers. He peers up at the sixty story monolith looming above him. Romy's up there in one of those rooms. As the boat slows, Karl reaches up for the rungs of the ladder, knowing as his hand contacts cold alloy, he won't make it home again. He'll end up with the others on the shelf, liver in some Orlando millionaire's gut.

Barnacles rasp his hands as he dangles from the bottom rung, feet scrabbling for a hold against a piling big around as the taxi is long. Boot catching on a buildup of mussels, he's up and climbing. A swell brings the taxi close enough to crush him against the ladder. He fends it off with his foot.

The driver curses in pidgin English. Karl's chip's hasty pass across the sensor was denied, and the jerk won't go away without being paid.The hack makes a grab for his pant leg. Karl kicks, catches him on the chin, pulls free. The bill he can take care of later—if he lives.

Dropping over the rail to the grid, the driver's curses following from below, he ducks inside, catching a lift as it's about to close. Young couple, maybe honeymooners, clinch in the corner of the car. Girl, short Latin, leans back against her tall, thin beau, giggling, whispering. Karl turns away, disgusted by the babble of love. Temporary insanity for the weak-minded. Not him. Nobody makes a cooing buffoon out of him.

Breathing heavily, heart racing, he leans back against the wall, calls out his floor as he tunes out the car's babbled ads. Heart feeling as if it may burst through his ribs, he focuses on the holo. They haven't moved. Good. Easily, he can imagine the scene in the room overhead. What's happening up there can't be pleasant, not with three of them.

Seeing again her eyes, the gun comes into his trembling hand. Opening the cylinder, he picks out a round, blows a bit of lint off the conical tip, slips it back. Five years ago the best vest cutters on the black market. Now, he doesn't know. A lot can change in five years. He closes the cylinder. Six rounds, three men with her. Should be easy.

Should be.

He notices the lovers are quiet and looks up to find them staring, eyes wide with fear.

"I'll be getting out in a minute, don't worry."

But they do, they worry plenty. With gun posession buying mandatory life, few witnesses live to talk. He can see they are sure they're about to die, thinks about reassuring them, decides not to bother. It'll all be over in a minute anyway.

"Please," she says, pleading.

Karl turns away, keeping the kid in the edge of his vision in case he decides to be stupid and he has to slap him.

The ads on the door fade. "Today on Uninet News, a deadly explosion on Pleasure Island."

Karl shushes the blubbering bride and she jumps, quieting.

"Investigators blame a leaking gas main for an early morning explosion on Platform 66 resulting in the death of three Genie personnel and two Sisters, as well as hundreds of billions in damage to Sister Tower itself."

"Liars," he says out loud.

"Work to repair the lobby is proceeding apace, and a Genie spokesperson offered assurances that in no way will the construction interfere with Genesistems' valued guests' enjoyment of their time on the island."

"Thank God for that." Impatient, he kicks the door. "Come on!"

It gapes. At a trot, .44 behind his thigh, he rounds one thirty degree bend in the hall and then another. By the third, he is very close, and nearly runs past it—room 40143. Listening with his whole body, not breathing, he stops, pressing his back to the wall. No one outside. Strange.

He expected one to be outside watching. The security override he passes over the sensor in the wall and the door springs open a finger width.

A low groan sounds in this throat as he winds up, breath coming deeper, faster. Certain he's going to die, he feels the rounds cycloning through his out-of-date vest like tissue, warm seeping blood wet against his skin.

In a burst of pent energy violent as a released bungy, he goes in.

 

* * *

 

Heart cold dead with disappointment, Vincent Vici steps into the elevator, "Quay."

"Quay," the lift echoes seductively, humming to life.

Fiftieth floor of Genesistems Sister Tower, and for all the tightened security, he still has the run of the place—they have that much contempt for him.

In Sasha's apartment a few moments before, she'd laughed at him, laughed her bitter laugh at him for being old, for telling her she was in danger, for wanting to save her.

Silly, shallow thing! Grown too used to attention, adoration, praise, she is vain, too vain to listen to an old man, even if he is her father. Oh, no, she has plans, big plans. She will open a fortune telling shop, somehow believing they will let her do that here of all places, let a recombinant carrying 1.5 billion in Genesistems' organs read a crystal ball for tourists on their very doorstep—amazing. For one so bright, she is very dim. But then what can he expect from a woman who has never thought for herself?

They are children, he realizes, conditioned to accept their position as non-persona as the natural state of life. Robbed of themselves, of the clarity of view to see that each is flawed as a snowflake, each unique, an accident, a confluence.

But how can he expect them to know, when he had not? None of them had understood that the code was just the beginning. That one plus one yields three. That the more they do, the less they understand. That there will always be a shadow land closed to them—whether they choose to believe or not. Always there, mocking, taunting—the ghost in the machine.

Years before, he'd seen good scientists shrink before it. Confident as he was in his youth, he'd shaken his head, pitied them for not being able to rise above superstition. He'd looked down from the sublime height of pure logic, the rare ether of the proven, the replicated, as a god looks down from Olympus, and pitied their ignorance. Now, after a life working to prove the darkness was never there, he's face to face with it himself.

Back in '98 Genesistems was three men, two women, all unknowns. Friends, all sharp, all hungry, working twenty hour shifts in a double garage off Figuroa. Borrowed equipment. No money for salaries, they worked for the sheer rush of being on the edge of an emerging technology.

They pooled their money to buy the gene enhancer, three models obsolete, but still working. Ova they scrounged from abortion clinics. Sperm they got for free—he always said he'd jerked his way to the top.

When they found they could do it, they got the backing and issued stock. After five two-for-one splits, one of those shares is now thirty two. Each share worth more than the five thousand each took at the original offering.

When his partners took their profit and ran, he held on. That made him Genesistems' single largest stockholder. Worth what? he doesn't even know, trillions. He gave up keeping track long ago. A hostile takeover back in '22 put the Chicoms in charge of it all. He'd met them, come away disgusted. Sleazy vacuum cleaner salesmen, their only interest lay in wringing every last dime from his children. That's how he thought of them, and that's what they were. A midnight trip to the lab made sure of that. A switch of a dozen tubes of sperm and the rest was, as they say, history. All of them, the entire first generation—his girls.

Then came little men with abacus minds. No more studies, no more science for the sake of learning. Now they must earn their keep. High priced whores without the sex, then, like nags to a glue factory, sold off for their organs. Now, Auri's suit. Two more days and he would take them away to someplace where they'll never see another tourist, another businessman. If any are still alive....

Himself he isn't worried about. They don't dare kill him. He's taken care of that. But of his girls, only fifty remain. Of which Romy is his favorite. In the empty car he smiles a bitter smile. Romy—the only one who neither hates nor fears him. To the others he offers safe haven, as much comfort and safety as his fortune can provide. And though he begs, they shy.

Though they can see what awaits them, they refuse. Though Romy appeals to them, they prefer what they know, conditioning overcoming even desire for life. They teach him yet.

His life has been satire, black comedy. Morally rudderless, he has drifted. And now, too late, he would change it. Sighing, he sinks to lean against the back of the car.It's all dead, all over. Nothing matters, not now.

Of a sudden, the car jars, shudders to a stop between floors, instantly moving upward again at a speed that sends his insides dragging. Surprised, more than a little frightened, he watches the indicator over the door.

Never in a long life has he known an elevator to change directions in travel for no reason. What can it mean? Is he about to die?

Remembering it is best to be off the floor when impact comes, he reaches out to the rail. Then, thinking better of it, steps to the middle of the floor. What can it matter?

Let it come.

Resigned, he lets the elevator carry him where it will.

One thing haunts him.

One thing he must know.

Will he be forgiven?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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