FELICITY SAVAGE CYBERFATE Kazakhstan. Me and Jon're standing in a jumble of rocks outside the scarred bubbletown that the last people who gave us a lift went into. Sunlight whites out the sky. Cars zip past overhead, so far up that I can only see a glinting stream flowing from horizon' to horizon. Sweat trickles down inside my whitesuit. I hope they don't start the civil war again until we get the hell out of this skanky little republic. I close my eyes, concentrating on the rainbow-on-black display behind my lids which is worldspace's version of the airway, and stick out my info thumb. Help us out, I yell in my street-gleaned English, please, we gotta make the Western Hemisphere by p.m. ! Come on you motherfuckers! Tight asses! Right now the cars overhead are seeing my and Jon's I.D.s flash up, proving that we're safe, but nothing changes, all the little blips keep moving. Eyes still closed, fumbling with the wrist flap of my whitesuit, I peel the skin back from my inner arm and key the signal to keep repeating. Open. Over by the bubbletown, near-naked women and kids with cancerous skin are hoeing what looks like red dust. Now and again they glance suspiciously at us. They have lasers slung across their backs. A mutant rat scuttles between the rocks. Jon flops down on our suitcase and heaves a sigh. His protective suit billows around his gangly body. He doesn't say anything, but I know he's remembering that he told me to leave my whitesuit in our apartment for Daqing City to confiscate along with the rest of our things. I hated leaving the minute Mother died, but something cracked in me, and I knew it was our only chance. No Chinese, not even NPRC cadres, expect a daughter to take off when her mother's not mourned or even buried. To get back at us, the city'll sell everything Mother had, everything me and Jon had, too, to start paying off her death taxes. Government uses taxes to grab you and suck you down. Once someone close to you dies, that's it, you're screwed. Jon didn't care: he'd have been happy to sink into the snowdrift, scribbling away at his novel, as long as I was beside him. i made him come cause I need his citizenship to get into America. He told me the temp in Boston reaches forty C. Well, how was I supposed to believe him? I never was anywhere that there isn't snow on the ground, and it's acid, too. Even little kids know if they take off their whitesuits, they're dead. I don't think I could take mine off now. It'd be like ripping out my trodes. Nakedness. Jon opens his eyes and says in putonghua, which I must admit he speaks as well as I do, "Xiao. I just found a bounty the Vanuwes put on my head three years ago. You haven't used my I.D. to hitchhike, have you?" "No." I scowl at him. But inside my hood, I suck my teeth in worry. He doesn't risk offending me unless something is seriously wrong. "'S probably a blanket trace on anyone linked with your father. Jesus, your trodes dropped out of worldspace six years ago! They only took notice of your dad three years ago !" He squints behind his visor. "Xiao, I've been scouting. The Vanuwes've expanded since they swallowed my family's corp. Their prints are everywhere. It really wouldn't be good if they found me." Shit, I think, and I slither my hand inside my sleeve and blank Jon's I.D. off the signal. Pray Buddha I haven't done something really dumb. "Don't be so stiff. They probably don't even care about you." "Xiaoling, they killed --" "I know." I recite in singsong, looking into the sky, "Jon Carneira senior wouldn't let himself be clicked over. Straight operator in a crooked world. Poor motherfucker. So the Vanuwes killed him, killed his whole family, and swallowed your corp." "I don't think they're going to give up until they finish the job." I don't buy the saintly picture Jon paints of his father, but I'm ready to believe these Vanuwe ratfaces killed old Carneira, if only cause he screwed them over. We have Vanuwes in Daqing, too, on a lesser scale. Like my boss at Kuocorp. We used to find bodies in suits down the sewers all the time. But Jon seems too innocent to've had a corporate for a father: he's committed his life to writing a novel on paper. Paper! No one's gonna print it, let alone read it, not even in America, and he says he doesn't care. He has straight brown hair, no physique, and old-fashioned specs that make his blue eyes blend into his pale skin. I accepted his proposal before the Vanuwe disaster, when I thought he would take Mother and me back to America with him in a couple of months. Even then, I was scared her immuno-resistance was weakening. Then a distant relative of Jon's came by, traveling under a layer of aliases a kilometer thick, and told him what happened. So he never went back. But by then it was too late, I'd married him. I had a good few sleepless nights over that one. His only redeeming feature, as far as I can see, is that he's crazy over me and will do anything for me, though I've never let him lay a finger on me. (And Mother used to ask why we didn't have any children!) Even on our wedding night I wouldn't share a bed with him, so he let me have the bed and he slept on the floor. Sometimes, indoors, when I take off my whitesuit, I see him following me with his eyes, but he never ever tries to force himself on me. Don't make me explain. I can't. But I tell you this, it makes having things my way taste a bit sourer than I expected. "Well, if the Vanuwes're that single-minded, they're sure to find you sooner or later," I tell him, not cause I believe it, but to provoke him. I think we can beat them at their game. Hell, cyberspace is my game! Sitting in a software plant all day's so damn boring that it makes you red hot for whatever you do at night. And if that's not sex, you're bound to get pretty good at something. I think even in worldspace I can cope. I know Daqing cyberspace inside and out: me and the girls from Kuocorp thought we were such punks, using it as a hangout, a place to escape our husbands when we couldn't hit the sewers for the snow. I guess we never really realized we were living in a bubble. But at five this morning, me and Jon hit Tibet, and I nearly passed out. Worldspace is like a crowd of people murmuring at you day and night, pressing so dose you can't move. I can't believe Jon grew up in this static. But he didn't get trodes until he was twelve, he told me, in America it's illegal to implant them any younger than that. At home they implant you as soon as you're born. Maybe that's why the NPRC is the most powerful nation in the world, and America is sinking deeper into anarchy every year. Me, I don't care if it's one howling wilderness, as long as I can get in, get a divorce from Jon, and get free. No Mother keeping on and on at me about grandchildren. No school. No Kuocorp. Nothing. I look at Jon. His shoulders are hunched. He worries his lower lip. His hands wring each other like two mice fighting inside the sleeves of his protective suit. "But maybe they won't bother," I say cruelly. "It's not like you're any danger to them." His back straightens. His Adam's apple jogs as he swallows. The sun shins on the tip of his nose. "You're wrong. I'm going to hunt them down. And carve my revenge out of them." "Jesus," I say disgustedly. He is deadly serious. I turn my back on him Tan Xiaoling Carneira, Jon Carneira! inside my head, and east of the bubbletown, a car is swooping down, growing larger and larger, stabilizing its forward motion with thrust until it settles in a puff of dust. "Come on!" I run toward the car. I leave Jon to carry the duffel, as a matter of fact to come or not as he wants at this point cause I'm really pissed off with his stupidity. I hide my relief that the car has stopped. I was afraid we'd be here forever, alone. I hear a report, and laser sizzles on the shell of the car. It bounces with the impact, like an impatient child. Hurry, hurry! flashes in worldspace. I start to run. Jon flounders behind. "I am writing a novel," Mr. Melchisedec P. Assad says in English as we merge up into the airway with a muted roar of thrust. "That is why I pick the hitchhikers. I am harvesting material from the shores of the world. As the beachcomber strolling along the sandy shore, or the oily promenade, these days, but let us not be distracted by details, as he harvests the fruit of the tides, thus, thus 1 harvest the experience of the human race." He has a florid, dark face. Meaty hands on the steering-wheel. This cat's the chilliest thing I ever saw. The Kazakhs' beat-up Puffster disappointed the hell out of me: this's more like it. Soundproofed, so you can actually talk. Room behind the suede seats to stand up and stretch your legs. Before we took off from Kazakhstan, Assad poured us all cocktails, calmly ignoring the laserbeams zinging on the shell of his car. "I can't believe this," Jon says, grinning broadly. When I first saw him, sitting in the back of my schoolroom my senior year, looking out at us with a pad of paper on his knee, he had this same retarded grin on his face. "I'm writing a novel too!" "Really? On paper.?" Assad turns to him. "Yes! I'm fictionalizing the resurgence of Communism in China." "But this is fascinating. My work with history was also my inspiration. Ancient myths and legends; actual paper fragments; papyrus; stone --" "Mr. Assad, if you're any good, you should write real novels," I say harshly. "People read those. Even back home, in this little Chinese city I'm not gonna name, we used to swap cartridges at school and access them when we were supposed to be doing microelectronics." This is what I say in putonghua. I don't know how my patchy English' mangles it. But he has listened gravely. "But, my dear, the book on paper is not basically a communication tool, but an art form. Has your friend here ever explained it to you in detail?" I can see that even if I say yes, he's going to explain it again. "The words are printed one after another. No layering. One can only move through it in one direction, forward, and the ending is a fixed thing: it does not respond to the wishes of the reader!" "But aren't you having trouble committing to a single resolution?" ;on breaks in. Happy as a baby. Forgotten all about his precious Vanuwes. I get up, leaving them interrupting each other so passionately that Assad takes his hands off the wheel to gesticulate, and move back. I lock myself in the tiny rest room and stare into the mirror. Flick on the faucet. Wet my hands, drag them down my cheeks. Why did ;on ever fall in love with this? What does he see in this specter? Black hair chopped off raggedly around my face; rat-tail coils round my neck like a choker. Skin that's never seen sun. Little slit eyes. People tell me I look Korean. I'm as fat as a swaddled baby in the phur-lined whitesuit Mother bought me for my fifteenth birthday. Mother. Because I had to get to the west, you don't even get an honorable burial for all the years you gave me. I rip the whitesuit off, bumping the door so that it quivers in its flanges. Stuff it in the toilet and flush. With a monstrous choking sound, the whitesuit vanishes, and I imagine phur mixed with sewage fluttering down on a mile-wide area of Turkestan. At least now I can see my body. My collarbone is as sharp as the ridge that a metal-wheeled bike leaves in the mud. It makes shadows in the valleys of my neck. I wear khaki Army cast-offs and a red brocade shirt that I didn't want to leave behind, held together with safety pins. I undo a pin, lift the shirt. My stomach is literally concave. I'm losing flesh off my bones. I need a food pill. Too bad. Both men turn to look at me when I come out. Mr. Assad's eyebrows go up and his thick lips purse. "Keep your eyes on the fucking air, man," I say, and Jon wraps an arm around my waist and drags me close to him, violently, so that I am squashed between the two front seats. Mr. Assad smiles and says something to Ion in a language I think is French. "Melchisedec is very kind," Jon says, not in putonghua but in the Daqing dialect that hardly anyone uses. His voice is expressionless. "He's treating us to a free vacation at Legend. We're going to stay with him in his penthouse. So we'll put America off for a week or two, okay?" "What's Legend.?" Assad hears the word, beams at me and says proudly: "My creation. I have never married, so I suppose one could say that it is my child." Jon explains, "It's an adventure park. Based on the myths and legends of the whole world. On a manmade island off the coast of Eritrea -- that's a country in East Africa. It's supposed to be the world's Eighth Wonder." Shit. I'm reminded of the way my boss at Kuocorp used to invite the prettiest girls to stay at his climate-controlled mansion in Beijing. "Why the fuck are we going?" "Xiao, I don't think we have much choice." I stare at Assad. He steers dexterously, arms wrapped round the wheel like it is a girl. He is smiling. The cyberspace visual, in a tank embedded in the dashboard, and the realtime visual both show cars flowing slowly backward on either side of us. He is speeding. I wrap my arms around myself. "Dirty old Euro --" I am close to tears. Jon lowers his voice, and I realize he's afraid of bugs, translators, or whatever else, and that he's right. "I think it's me." "He wants your scrawny ass?" I twist away, look Jon up and down. Can't imagine anybody ever thinking he is -- "No!" He lets out an explosive sigh. "He's connected me with the bounty posted by the Vanuwes. I should have expected this. Shouldn't have been so open with him. His kind is always ready to recycle their own mother for a few bucks." "In the Master's name," I hiss. I grab Jon's shoulder. Mr. Assad waggles an eyebrow inquiringly. So fucking deceptive, that fat friendly face. Still in Daqing dialect, "Come on, there's gotta be parachutes, ejectors, something --" "Don't be a little idiot!" Jon never talks to me that way. I fall still in shock. "Men of this kind don't travel unprotected! We know the cat's fully laserproof. We're sitting in a maximum security vault. There'll be explosives on every door, on the controls, on the bloody air vents --" And I see the visuals have changed. We're swooping down out of the airway into a dense swarm of cars, stubby-winged pastry puffs swooping past so close they fill the windshield, and then without warning a happy-faced clown brandishing a book painted on a landing pad plummets up at us as fast as if we are falling. Secrets of the tarot!" The smell of chocolate fudge wafts across the fairway. Saliva fills my mouth. "Relive your ancestors' lives! New bio-memory tech!" Do I love this place or does it make me vomit? Can't make up my mind. The info-burst at the entrance said this part of Legend is designed to look like a Moroccan souk, whatever that was. As noisy as Kuocorp gates at the end of a shift, I can tell you that, and the stall keepers got a blistering hard sell. The sideshow bouncers're even worse. "Do you have criminal tendencies? Accredited phrenologist tells all!" "The ambrosia of the Greek Gods! Only one credit!" And all the time, boulders, which are actually cars filled with laughing, screaming people, whistle overhead, hurled by a red-haired giant who (the part of him I can see over the booths, anyway) looks fucking realistic even though he's twenty meters tall and anchored to the ground. On the other side of the souk, the boulders are landing in a tank of sea. The drops splatting on my face might have come from there, or they might just have come off the chickens being boiled in that stall there. I'm gonna buy something to eat soon. Real food. Not pills. I wonder if I'll be able to digest it? Jon could tell me, but he's gone. Finished. Dead. By this time anyway. I get my ears pierced. My lobes are flaming hot and the earrings feel funny against my jaw -- but I have to do something to celebrate. "I flatter myself in believing you will like the park," Assad asshole said to me after breakfast, when we were standing in the ninetieth-floor lounge of his scraper, looking down at the huge, wobbling, flashing bubble that covers Legend. "Many of our patrons are regular customers. As water flows to the low places. We hardly need to advertise anymore." Jon smiled sickly. What's he doing quoting the Tao? I thought, and I didn't answer. I couldn't sleep last night in spite of us having had a waterbed; Jon didn't either. We lay there on our backs not speaking. Over by the other window-wall, an African girl in violet chiffon, an old Japanese man, and a couple of American kids-- hitchhikers too, suckers who Assad caught just like he caught us, for whatever they were worth --were playing cards. Some game I don't know. They were laughing. You're gonna get chewed up and spit out, too, I warned them inside my head, and I looked down through the glass. Far off over the sea, I could see Eritrea, like a shadow. Mr. Assad grabbed my hand in his big soft one, making me jump. Digging into his trousers pocket, he stuffed my fist with Legend credits. I haven't even counted them yet. "Buy yourself something pretty." He sounded almost worried. "These rags simply don't do, my dear." "What about you and Jon?" I said suspiciously. "What you gonna do?" Jon grabbed me. He was pale, his lower lip red with biting. "Get out, Xiao!" he whispered. "Don't you see? He feels sorry for you! Don't waste your chance!" He was right. What was I thinking? "Sorry. Yeah." My heart thudded. Ducking my head to Assad asshole, I went for the elevator. I could feel Jon wanting me to wave or blow a kiss or something. I didn't. While I dropped like a stone in the gilded box of the elevator, so fast I felt dizzy, I said aloud, "You crazy, girl? Fuck America! Fuck Jon! You're free, right now right here, free!" And I like this place. Hate to give that to Assad, but I do like it. 'S chill. Assad was right about my rags, too -- I've caught quite a few tourists giving me funny glances cause my Chinese face and my punk hair and the cast-offs all together mark me out. As soon as I find the right store I'm gonna buy -- "The Three Fates tell your darkest secrets! Proved right time after time!" The bald, near-naked bouncer grins at me. "Don't you wanna know if you really love him, Punksie?" "I'm married," I say, but then I remember I'm not, not anymore. I glance up at the velvet-draped entrance. Blink into cyberspace -- the cloth's real, the bouncer's just a collection of interface chips. Almost desperately, I think, I gotta spend some of this cash! I duck through a gaggle of Indian tourists and stick a thousand-credit bill in the bouncer's hand. "That's a lot of money, Punksie --" "Better not charge me extra, skanker," I say. But I barely glance at the change he gives me before I slip inside. The noise of the crowd shuts off like somebody hit a switch. Panic. I can't see, but I can feel the open space all around me. More space than could possibly fit in the booth. More space than ought to fit in this whole goddamn bubble. And my eyes adjust to the light. And the sun is brilliant, fresh, and I'm standing on a green cliff under a huge blue windy sky. Far below, the sea murmurs on rocks. On my other side, grassy dunes roll gently away into a haze. The slopes are dotted with yellow-and-white flowers. The wind blowing in my face smells salty. Nothing moves in the whole huge vista except my hair, ruffling in the wind. A drop of sweat runs down between my shoulder blades. There isn't a sound except the sea on the rocks. And my rat-tail lashes my cheek as I break, and whirl round, gasping, but the entrance is gone, it's gone -- Eyes shut. Cyberspace. You idiot, Xiao. Colored mesh on black shows me the form of a low, empty tunnel stretching straight for a hundred meters. The booth. Nothing to be afraid of. It's all an illusion. Only one way to go. Straight ahead. And then there's out. But you're not gonna back out, are you, Xiao? Your mother always told you not to take no risks, syaujye, cause the officials they all the time look for somebody to pick on land outside the tunnel, the souk is teaming with color-mesh people, information coating their surfaces like oil, like they're in a giant's stir fry) and that means you just about have to stick with this, don't you, Xiao? Nails dig into palms. Breath ragged. I open my eyes. Violet bowl of sky. Woolly clouds skimming along the horizon. Relax. I kneel down: the turf smells sharp. This is green itself. I pick one of the white flowers and put a petal on my tongue. Of course there's no substance to it, but it evaporates with a bitter taste that makes my mouth go all sweet with saliva. Fuck, the sea's a long way down. A sandy path leads away in the direction I know I have to go. I start walking. The wind whistles softly in the grass. The path curves and dips and then dives over the edge of the cliff. I look down. There's a ledge carved out of the reddish rock. Steep, but I can see places for handholds. I edge down. My hip hurts for real when I bang it on the rock. And the cliff vanishes from under my hands and I tumble sideways, into a square, sunken pit brimful of sun. Three sides are vertical rock; the other is open to the view. Every time I move, I crush flowers that cover the turf like thick pile on velvet. I see them. One of them is blonde. One is dead. So is the third. All three of them are -- were -- white girls my age, or a little older, sprawling naked against the back of the pit. "Ask and we will answer," the living one says. She has a throaty accent which I think is Eastern European. She sits in the middle, with an arm around each of the others. Both of them have lips parted and eyes half lidded like they're sleeping, but the way their limbs are jumbled tells me they're ready to be dressed for burial. "You need keep no secrets from yourself any longer." Her eyes go blank for a moment. "Tan Xiaoling Carneira. You are a defector from the New People's Republic of China. You are eighteen. Your father died when you were three. Your mother died three days ago." "What the fuck," I whisper in amazement. Then I remember. This is a damn good illusion-- but that's all it is. They're cybervisions. Illusions. I shut my eyes. The undulating wall of the tunnel, rainbow on blackish-red. No blinking bits to indicate that any new chip is interfacing with my trodes. Open. Three girls. Close. Nothing. Open. "You're real," I say stupidly. "You're real. But you don't have trodes." "Ask and we will answer." Another one is speaking now. The one on the left. She's a brunette and her breasts are a bit fuller -- but she was dead! "Who are you?" The blonde slumps against her side, eyes vacant, reflecting the sky, one hand slack on the other girl's thigh. "We are Scarecrow, Nightmare, and Stickjoint. What do you wish to know'" Scarecrow's forehead wrinkles briefly. "Your mother died when--" and her voice shifts, so that if I didn't know better, I'd think I was hearing a recording of myself -- "when the heater went on the blink in the middle of the night --" And the voice changes -- "and you just shivered and curled tighter, too tired to get up and fix it, and when you brought her her morning tea, she lay spread-eagled on her back, frozen, with her mouth open where her soul got out." It's the third one. The redhead. Stickjoint. "Oh Xiao," her voice breaking, "your memories." The sun glows in the frizzy curls of her hair. "My sisters--" she looked down at them, pats their shoulders companionably, but they don't answer, they're dead-- "They can't really understand you, I don't think. I'm the youngest. I have the best idea of what it is to have to live in a welter of illusions, the way you outsiders do." She fixes me with a green gaze. "Just let yourself love him, Xiaoling! Why do you torture yourself like this?" I won't hear this. I won't. I grab her hand, rubbing the skin suspiciously. It's warm and smooth, but old scars bracelet her wrist. "Who are you? Where do you come from?" "Is that what you want to hear?" She curls her fingers around my hand. I wrench away. "We're triplets, congenitally joined at the mind. We have only one life between us. It's a documented condi --" Her eyes roll up, and she slips sideways. Nightmare thrusts herself upright. Her voice vibrates with emotion. Her eyes stare. "We were born in Rumania. Xiaoling, never blame yourself for your mother's death. You did all you could for her, as she did for you, flesh of her flesh. Our mother sold us to a traveling circus. She was afraid of us. We nearly lost our minds when people crowded around our cages, ogling us, because we could not keep from speaking all of their memories at once, disjointedly. They thought we were speaking in tongues. They moved us to a church. It was Melchisedec Assad's kindness that saved us. He bought us and brought us here, where we are safe. He is not made to live in this world, any more than we are, and so he understands us, in the way that he understands the other strange, sad creatures who serve here . . ." Assad asshole? Saved them? Stickjoint sits up and smiles at me. My heart steadies. She's stabler than either of her sisters. I think she is sane. "Yes, Melchisedec is a good man." She reaches to the side, and it looks as though she picks a long-stemmed pink flower and holds it to her lips, but her throat bulges, and I know she's drinking because her hand is curved as if she is holding a cup. There's something underneath the illusion, then, though I never was anywhere so real as this sunny cliff. Never saw a blizzard as vast as this sky. "Where are we really?" I beg. "Are we sitting in a little dark tent? Where?" Stickjoint laughs. "You climbed six flights of stairs. You didn't know it, though -- there is an illusion that protects our privacy. From outside, the house is camouflaged even to cybersight. Right now my sisters and I are sitting on our futon; you're sitting on the floor. I can see the souk through the window behind you. We've got a cybervision set, a kitchen, a jacuzzi-- we're very comfortable." I work my fingers into the turf. The flowers smell like nothing I have ever smelled. Such an enormous gap between illusion and reality, and it's so difficult to see any gap at all-- Nightmare sits up again, pushing Stickjoint's body aside, and my voice spills from between her lips. Daqing dialect, nearly incomprehensible with passion. "I love him. Oh God oh God, I love him, and I'm letting him die, just like I let Mother die. But it's not too late. Not this time. Assad's harmless; the Vanuwes're the real danger and Assad doesn't know to protect Jon from them. It's a horrible mistake. I have to go back -have to go back --" I scramble to my feet. Fireworks of knowledge burs t inside my head. Sick knowledge I can't ward off any longer. Can't take my eyes off Nightmare's blue eyes, her cascades of real hair in the false sunlight. Can't shut my eyes to retreat into cybervision and erase them from my safe electronic world of lines and information. I reel backward. Rock crumbles under my boots, and I'm falling through the side of the booth fighting my way free of the folds of velvet. I'm in a narrow, dank alley between two booths. The smells of chocolate and olive oil and burnt sugar hit my nostrils, and the voices of the tourists crash into my ears like cymbals on either side of my head, and I stagger under the sheer weight of sensation. The bouncer looks down the alley at me, frowning under his bald unreal brows. "Punksie!" I take off at a run. And they're all around me now. I see them in the corners of my eyes: the nuggets of reality hidden in the tawdry, skanky mosaic that is Legend. The eye of the red-haired giant throwing the boulders meets mine, and his lips part in astonishment, and the next boulder wobbles in its flight. A Greek cook drops the chicken he is about to decapitate, and it flutters away as he stares at me. My shirt ripples around my body. Mother saved up to buy it for me. It's beautiful and festive, but at the same time red is the symbol of my nationality. But I can't escape the NPRC either, can It No matter how far I go -- and as vividly as a cybervision I see the farm where the cloth was produced, a boundless sea of cotton in southern China. Farm robots knuckle like metal apes between the rows. Waves of shadow travel across the whiteness as the breeze blows. Back in realtime. Assad's scraper is visible in the forest of things towering ahead. I dash out of the gates of the souk, across the plaza. Why do I feel this urgency? Assad is exactly what he appears to be, an eccentric trillionaire novelist with altruistic tendencies and a flair for reality. But Jon doesn't know that. Crowds are driving me crazy. Swerve around little kids, bump into a grandma. Each breath shreds my lungs. Inside, flash the wristpatch Assad gave me at security, into a waiting elevator. Collapse against the gilt wall. Piped music tinkles in my ears. After we get somewhere safe -- "I know it's sort of weird to say this after three years." I'll smile. "I want to thank you for being so patient, Jon. Did you know it would take this long? Or were you just holding out? It's chill, love --" And I'll hug him. And maybe even kiss him. On the mouth. The elevator doors shush open. The African girl lies on the carpet, clawing toward me. Her back is blown away, her violet wrap fused to the remains of her ribs. Oh God, oh Master, Allah, Confucius, Jesus. Shit. The corridor to the lounge is littered with the bodies of Assad's hitchhikers. I pick my way between them, trying not to get blood on my boots, trying to keep quiet. Whoever it was might still be here. My heart hammers. I'm shaking. Was it Assad? Am I wrong? I couldn't've been, the Fates couldn't have lied to me, not them and the giant and the Greek cook -- they told me he was all right, he was good, and I was looking for danger in all the wrong-- Christ. Jon. Half-lying on an elegant sofa with a gaping rip out of which the stuffing flows in a shiny, fused waterfall. Blood trickles from his nose, and from an awful wound on his torso which he has tried to stanch by knotting his shirt around his ribs. Melchisedec P. Assad sprawls beside the sofa, dead as a doornail if not having much head left is anything to go by, and there probably isn't another one hundred percent good person left in the world. But I don't care, and I try to take Ion in my arms. But he goes as white as paper, and I jerk back. I bury my face in my hands, struggling to keep control. "Hhhhh-- darling--" His hand hits my back. He's trying to comfort me. "Get out. They're still here. They're ransacking the place --" "The Vanuwes. They came." Too late -- "Not them. Bounty hunters in their pay. Never thought --" he smiles on one side of his face -- "never thought I'd rank higher on a bounty hunter's wish list than a man like Melchisedec" He shuts his teeth, breasting a swell of pain. "But they killed him." "Wait. Bounty hunters -- how'd they get in? What 'bout security?" "Disguised themselves as parts of Legend. Melchisedec was too trusting. Left himself wide open to false appearances. Danger in disguise. Like me. I lured them here. I caused his death." He pushes me. "Get out, Xiao --" I'm about to tell him I love him, and hold on, tell him to hold on, because even if he can't move security's gotta figure out what's happening and if we can just stay alive for the next few minutes . . . when I hear a table being shoved over behind me and someone says in a harsh American accent, "Fuck-all in the east wing, Marge. Marge! Where you at?" "Hush, King. Hush. Quite a nice little haul I have here." And a giant chicken, two meters tall, strides with its head bobbing into my line of sight. First off it doesn't see me. The woman inside the the holosuit must be counting bills or jewels. Then the chicken windmills backward, startled, and a laser pokes out of its chest feathers like a broken metal rib. Grotesque. "Child, I would suggest you raise your hands. I'm going to shoot you, but first, who are you? Is there anyone else? Is security alerted?" I think about throwing myself at her. But somewhere among the potted plants and furniture, there is the other one. And I don't kid myself I'm faster than a laserbeam. I raise my hands. "I'll do anything you want!" Jon chokes with an urgency that makes tears spring to my eyes. "Don't hurt her! Please! Anything!" The muzzle swings. Laughter crackles inside the chicken, as if it is grinding rocks in its craw. It's a damn good illusion, right down to the beady eyes darting between us, as if we are tasty insects it can't choose between. "Mmm! Shall you tell us where your novel is hidden, then ? You told us you'd die rather than see it destroyed. Changed your mind? We know that is the thing most dear to you." She laughs again. "It's in the medicine compartment over the bathtub in the north wash room." Jon has my hand. He's rubbing it as if to keep me real. A polar bear even bigger than the chicken, so big its head flickers in the ceiling, waddles straight through the sofa. The weight of the man inside the illusion dents the seat beside me as he scrambles invisibly over the back of the sofa. "Love it, Marge," he says as he passes her, heading for the north wing, for Jon's novel. "Beautiful. The high-minded little prick. He deserves it." Marge laughs, but the silver mouth of the laser doesn't waver again until the bear returns with the heap of flutteringpages. Then, still staring at us with the chicken's face, Marge aims upward and incinerates the pages fifty at a time as the bear tosses them at the ceiling. I dig my nails into Jon's palm. I sense that he can't stand watching the work of six years being destroyed, but he can't take his eyes off it, the same way I couldn't take my eyes off Nightmare as she told me my secrets. His face is a mask. Blood is dripping from his nose into his mouth, but he doesn't seem to notice. "All right, girl." The chicken pecks at my face. I feel nothing, of course, but I press back into the gaping rip in the sofa. Marge lets out her gravelly laugh. "Gonna get along okay without your little punk geisha till we reach Boston, Carneira?" The man inside the bear pulls me upright. "You'll skanking well have to, that's all." White flickering fur envelops me. I wonder how long it's going to take to die. Time seems to stretch as Marge levels her laser. I am back in the cotton sea, squinting in the white southern heat {the bolls are like whorls of light in my hand); twigs snag my clothes as I shuffle along, unnoticed by the metal orangutans in the distance, gripping my picking sack . . . And the cotton fragments in a shower of broken glass and laserbeams coming from the elevators. Real sun pours in through a smashed wall. Heavy, with jags in it, like half-frozen orange concentrate. I think at first I am dead; then I realize it is security, arriving too late to save Assad or Jon's novel land why am I thinking of Jon's novel when I am standing like a block of wood in the middle of the crossfire, dying?). Too late. The bear and chicken spasm jerkily, like flickering, perforated ghosts with gnarled cyborgs for cores, and I hear shouting, and something sears the back of my neck. It's all over. They let us go, reluctantly -- they wanted live criminals, not dead ones. But eventually they realized that because of the evidence, they couldn't make a legit case for us having killed Assad, Thank God for Rat laws. Poor old Assad. I still think about him sometimes. When I look at someone dying, for example, and try to remember why people were ever created. Once the officials of Rat World get their claws into you, they never let go. We're on our way back to China. Just two more deportees, shipped from Legend through Saudarabia to Kabul, Afghanistan. Jon spent three months in the hospital there -- Security stitched him up on the scene, but he needed some serious recuperation. I helped out with the kids at the holding point so I could stick around, too, and wait for him. Now we're in a slow carrier to Beijing. I rest my head in Jon's lap, making the best of the space we have on the cold metal floor. There's only so much room, cause the carrier was stripped down years ago, and by mutual consent, families with children get the most space. Young people like us make up most of the deportees. But I haven't seen any non-Chinese besides Jon. A fuzzy-headed kid tumbles over my feet; I grin at it to distract it from crying, and pull up my knees so it can get past, tilting them sideways against our Government-issue duffel. Jon strokes my cheek, gazing into the dark heights of the carrier. He has a faint smile on his lips. "What are you thinking about?" I ask. The smile broadens. "Being here. With you." "I still think you were stupid to come," I say severely. "You're not an NPRC citizen. Nobody was making you. Eritrea police would've filed your grievance against the Vanuwes. You would've got your revenge. Damages enough to live on for the rest of your life. Stead you chose this." He smiles, shaking his head. "The Vanuwes aren't the kind of people who'd be put off by a grievance." I break into a grin. "Jo-on. I wanted you to say it." "What? That I love you?' "Yes." He bends down and kisses me. A man nearby smiles tiredly at us. All around, depressed, vacant, resigned faces. I know the story: life savings wasted, nothing but taunts and penalties to look forward to at home. But you have to hold onto something. You have to make some gesture so you can hold up your head. "Why didn't you at least file a grievance?" He shrugs half shyly. "When that laserbeam went through me, I knew revenge didn't mean anything. It never did. That was the turning point. I used to lie awake asking myself what I'd do in different situations; the novel or this, the novel or that. But after death looked at me out of a laser muzzle, all my choices were easy." "I'm gonna hold a memorial service for Mother when we get back," I say. "They'll have recycled her body already. But that doesn't matter." Jon nods. "Good." Embarrassed, I look away. The young mother bounces her toddler up and down, singing to it under her breath. It grins across its face. One pearly tooth. "Cute little morsel," I say. "Cute little morsel yourself." Jon fingers the place where my rat-tail was seared off. "Don't," I say, grabbing his hand, unable to stop myself from squeezing until it must hurt. "That tickles!" He brings my hand up and kisses it. I shut my eyes, almost overwhelmed by love. And the carrier roars ponderously on. I can tell from the noise we're low in the airway; wallowing in the slipstream of exhaust pissed out by the westbound traffic, Japanese, Korean, Siberian cars and the limos of the NPRC ratfaces who feed off our blood, flying to Legend, or even to America.