 
No Dogs in Philly

By Andy Futuro

Copyright 2014 June Day Press

Smashwords Edition

This book is available in print at most online retailers.

To Teofil, MC, G.E., Jamike, and Sky

Pronunciation Guide

Gaespora: Guy-ass-pour-a

Elzi: El-zee

Saru: Sah-roo

Ria: Ree-uh

UausuaU: You-ows-you-ow. Often abbreviated to Uau.

Wekba: Wake-bah

ElilE: Ee-lie-uh-lee

Hemu: He-moo

IlusithariusuirahtisulI: Ill-oo-suh-thar-ee-us-ear-ah-tuh-sul-eye

Chapter 1

Saru had ignored the calls from the Philadelphia Daily, the call from Frank Galloway to appear on _Wake the Hell Up! Philly_ , the call from Lorelei Ilesella to be interviewed on _Tonight Tonight_ , and even a call from Mayor Whitlow's press secretary requesting a photo op. The call that gave her the greatest pleasure to ignore came from the Gaespora. It came in the usual fashion of summons from the ultra-wealthy and ultra-powerful wishing to impress. There was a custom sonata su-tone that had been attuned to her psychosomatic profile. The image that appeared on her player was of a peaceful green forest with a trickling brook—it was a pretty accurate re-creation of the forest behind her parents' farmhouse in Tyrone. This told her all she needed know: they wanted her, and her specifically. She hit ignore.

Five seconds later the su-tone appeared again, the sonata and the image of her parents' forest. She hit ignore again. Five seconds later there was a new su-tone—not pleasant piano, just a horrible grating, like scratched vinyl and kitchen knives clattering in the sink. The forest was burned to the ground and the river ran with blood. What the fuck? She hit ignore. She'd never seen any su-tone like it. She ordered her player to ignore all messages from suspected Gaesporan nodes.

The su-tone appeared again, about five minutes later, and now she was pissed. She had spent good money on an override, floating a standard bid of over $3,000 to block commercial calls. Any jackass dumb enough to call her private line would have to pay at least that amount to make an attempt. It worked in screening out the riffraff but she realized there was no way she could win a bidding war with the Gaespora. They could keep her player ringing day and night for a lifetime. She unfastened the dime-sized player from below her right earlobe and placed it on the center of her desk. She retrieved _Ethics in the Age of Knowing_ (a gift from Eugene, never opened) from the otherwise empty bookshelf, held it over her head, and smashed the player just as it began the vinyl scratching again. Problem solved.

The next morning her office was closed. The whole damn building, forty-five stories, right on the corner of Thirteenth and Locust. There was a crowd of confused workers out front surrounding the superintendent, who was trying pudgily to answer their questions: What's going on? Why is the building closed? Why can't we get to work and trundle on in our sad, sad lives?

"The building is under new ownership," the super said, shouting over the crowd. "They've changed all the locks."

"What do you mean 'new ownership'? How is that possible?"

"Please, people, I know just as much as you do at this point. I got the call this morning. No one gets in."

"That's not legal!"

"You can't do that!"

"What about our jobs?"

"What about our stuff?"

Saru left and turned down Walnut Street, walking east, no particular destination in mind. They had taken her player and her office—for there could be no misunderstanding the message. They wanted her, bad, and they were willing to spend a lot of money and inconvenience a lot of other people to get to her. There were, as far as she knew, over sixty different businesses, large and small in her building—she occupied a tiny two-room office on the thirteenth floor that didn't even have its own bathroom. They could have sent two toughs to stand in front of her door or bribed someone to change the locks, but they bought the whole damn building and all that headache.

She found a Nikafe and bought a small black that she jazzed up with a splash or five of bourbon from her flask. She sat at a small table facing the window and watched the people hurry by. It had started to rain, gray drops for a black sky. An elzi lay outside in front of her, body blocking the gutter. The water pooled around him, black, acidic, rising to his neck. She wondered if he would drown.

This was a lucrative age for the private investigator—so many people disappearing, and a weak, underfunded, unmotivated, amoralized police force more likely to take a bribe than a stab at a criminal. Saru was good, she knew, but hardly the best, and maybe no one else realized how lucky she'd been in the Favre case. Nine times out of ten it was a kid looking into the UausuaU, no real mystery to solve—fuck, her job was 90 percent maid service—but the Favre job just happened to be an honest kidnapping and she just happened to be friends with enough scumbags to get a good tip.

The rescue was a solid piece of work, she had to admit. The kidnappers were suspected Puritans, crusaders, implant and improvement free as whatever God made them. They had taken the child not for ransom but to bring him over to their way of thinking with good old-fashioned torture—the family had gotten some fingernails in the mail. The kid was a scion of the Favre, the family that owned Priamco that owned Freedom Innovation Technologies (FIT) that begat Diasis that manufactured all manner of vaccines against the diseases of sin. It was an odd target as the Favre had about as much operational knowledge of Diasis as Saru did of her own small intestine, but the Puritans didn't strike her as being a particularly educated bunch.

She had hired a few mercenaries to go on the hunt with her. There was a Net ranger named Pollycock, who'd proved useless as the Puritans obviously didn't use Net technology. She'd found a sniffer on South Street, a scent fetishist who had jammed a screwdriver in his eyes and ears to focus on his favored sense. He had a keyboard on his wrist, a real hack job held in place with chicken wire, but it worked well enough to communicate and hammer out a deal. She'd figured that if these folks were serious in their beliefs they'd have to stick to a pretty narrow diet to avoid Gaesporan food alteration and they'd have a unique smell. It didn't turn out to be the case—the sniffer was good but not that good and there were all kinds of other things that got in the way. Leading him around the city on a leash, she'd seen how the general reek of shit and garbage confused even a man who could sniff out a pig from his donut farts.

They had to be in the AZ, the Assistance Zone. There was barely any technology there, no cornercams or autometers, fuck, not even running water or a security spike in most places. Any Net access points would be illegal and unmonitored. There was a great mass of elzi, lured by the unmonitored Net access and the assistance points, the great pillbox buildings that delivered food weekly to the poor and useless. Originally actual humans had distributed the food aid, but that plan had been scuttled quick as the elzi didn't wait in line and they didn't fill out paperwork. Every Monday underground trolleys brought in food to the distribution centers. It was raised up on elevators, the domes opened, and elzi swarmed over the feast in an orgy of consumption. Paradoxically, this was the safest day to venture into the Assistance Zone—an elzi was less likely to take a lick at your throat if he had bread in his belly. Every month or so a resolution was entered in council to poison the food and clear out the elzi menace, but the rehabbers always shot it down. Idiots.

She had ventured in on a Monday with the sniffer, no real plan other than to follow his nose and find some granola-munching zealots. They had wandered aimlessly, almost running into an elzi frenzy, which seemed to excite the sniffer for some reason. The very odors that repelled her, the diarrhea reek of decay the elzi exuded, were ambrosia to him. She thanked her private God that she'd been blessed with fetishes considered close enough to normal.

There amidst the shrieks and growls of the elzi and the ecstatic panting of the sniffer, she had had her breakthrough. The kidnappers had nabbed this kid off the street, shot the fuck out of his Royce, dragged out the driver and two bodyguards and executed them. They'd used blenders to liquefy the brains and prevent memory recreation, but the bullets themselves were the key. They cost a fat buck—these were high-class, tuxedo bullets, not something your standard thug could afford even if he saved his welfare checks and mugging spoils for a lifetime. She checked the three munitions stores in Rittenhouse that stocked blenders. No robberies, but a sale at Franklin's Freedom Assurance Emporium to a Walter Fran four days earlier—two days before the kidnapping.

From there it had been almost too easy. She'd hopped onto the Net and plugged in Walter Fran and the Favre Group. There were sixteen connections. Walter Fran had gone to school with Charles Favre, the boy's father. They had started a company together, Glorium, a religious update impulse motivator that identified sinful thought and generated warnings ranging from flashing red hallucinations to migraines. They had argued over the scope. Walter believed it should be a tool to guide the McFaithful and Charles saw it as a corrective measure for the prison population.

The feds got involved. They wanted the impulse to become a standard input in all citizens—part of the birth cocktail. It would warn citizens away from thinking treasonous or law-breaking thoughts. The bill made it out of committee, but then it was squashed by the Hawks with Gaesporan backing. The Gaespora, of course, opposed any mass impulse programming of the population.

The whole deal had become a distraction to Charles. He was by then involved in building Priamco. He bought out Walter and as a final fuck you he changed the company to Glorium Galorium, a sex impulse that delivered pleasure depending on the degree of transgressive thought. It became a best seller. The whole kidnapping was a grudge, nothing more, an attack of opportunity by one elite on another.

Proof would have been impossible, and even if she'd gotten it the momentum of the legal system favored the aggressor. She'd found Fran's condo in Rittenhouse, a penthouse suite, though not in the nicest building and nowhere near as nice as the Favre estate. She'd bribed the garage guard with a few hundred bucks and waited behind a pylon next to Fran's car. When he came out she'd zapped him unconscious with her cattle prod and tied him up with zip wires. The old ways are best, her mother used to say. She'd driven Fran in his own GMW to the Favre estate and handed him over to their director of security, along with her report. They would've tapped his brain and ripped out the memories of the thugs he'd hired, or maybe just straight tortured him. There was a chance he'd hired the thugs and been vague on the instructions, but she didn't think so. If it was a grudge he'd want the proof, want to know, want to see his revenge on the big screen.

She'd taken a cab to the police station and turned herself in. Eugene had phoned and argued her case and the Favre had paid her fine. She was in and out in forty-five minutes. The Favre security people had found the boy in a church basement in the AZ. The kidnappers had broken a few bones and pulled a few teeth, but he was fine. He took a trip to the Gaespora and was healthier than he'd ever been. The whole adventure was quite exciting for him, quite a win—a good story to impress the fun girls. He could have died in a ditch for all Saru cared, but finding him alive and pretty earned her a fat bonus, so all in all she was happy. It had been an exciting week, a lively news cycle for April, and somehow in all the excitement some dipshit security guard somewhere had mentioned her name to the press and now Saru Solan was famous. A hero, a true face of private justice, a symbol that the system worked. Shit.

And now her brand-new player was broken—not her fault—and her office building had been bought by the Gaespora. That's what it was. They were using her. She was the star of the moment, good looking, she reasoned (hoped?), for a law bitch—she still had all her teeth, at least, and only one fair scar down her cheek—and they wanted to bring media attention to some bullshit issue or other. It was that bastard Whitlow trying to polish his dick with star power so people would forget what an awful job he was doing. To be fair, she didn't know any cities that had succeeded in scrubbing the streets of the elzi, but at least they'd spent less money failing. A third-plus of her winnings each year went to city taxes, and they sure hadn't fixed any fucking potholes yet.

She finished her coffee and then her flask and walked out into the rain. A homeless man was offering umbrella service and after a quick negotiation she paid him eight bucks to walk her as many blocks south. He grabbed the bills and took off; she clubbed him in the back of the knee with the prod (off) and took his umbrella, throwing the eight Ws down into the wet filth of the sidewalk. Bastard, it's more than you deserve. She walked down Pine Street to an old brownstone mansion with a fancy copper sign on the gate that read: "Eugene Gercer-han Bernstein, Attorney at Law." She opened the gate and, ignoring the buzzer, pounded on the heavy oak door.

Sissy, his secretary, opened the door. Petite woman, mid thirties, dressed in the latest fashion—a dress of brown bands that wrapped around her body and left visible just a hint of black panties and bra. It went well with the leather gun belt around her waist.

"How many times have I told you to use the buzzer?" she said, annoyed.

Saru shoved past her into the antechamber, tracking mud onto the rug and draping her purple peacoat over the chair by the fireplace. She felt a hand on her shoulder, a surprisingly strong grip. She tensed.

"You're not special," Sissy hissed. "You're not different."

Saru took a deep breath. She felt the rage of the unwanted, unasked-for touch, her blood quickening, body warming.

"I'm going to break your wrist," she said.

The grip didn't waver; Saru wondered what was going through the other woman's mind. What would happen if they fought? What would Sissy's move be? To jerk down and slip a tranq dart in her neck, most likely. She'd wake up in the gutter like an elzi, wallet gone, piss on her face, maybe some freak would steal her clothes and feel her up. Of course she'd get a good, hard zap at Sissy's thighs before she dropped, give the cunt some action, and what a pretty picture that would be, the two of them passed out in Eugene's fancy-ass foyer.

The fingers let go. Stiffly, Sissy dropped her arms to her sides.

"He's with another client," she spat. "You'll have to wait."

"No thank you."

Saru stomped down the hallway, making her presence good and known, scuffing up the wood floor with her boots, trailing a hand along the wood-paneled wall and skewing all the paintings along the way. She half expected to feel the needle prick of a dart in her back, but Sissy contented herself with sucking in a breath sharp enough to cut. There was no reason to antagonize Sissy, other than it was easy. Whatever stick was up her ass would have to be carved out.

She got to the office door and prepared to bang, but it swung open and a short, portly, balding man in a tweed jacket stood in the doorway, her fist in rap position a centimeter from his face. He didn't blink. Friar.

"Hello, Saru," he said. "Congratulations on the Favre case. Excellent work."

"Thank you," she said. Somehow Friar always managed to disarm her with his politeness. If she was the pudding cup of detectives, Morgan Friar was tiramisu. His specialty was UausuaU crimes, and there weren't too many out there with the stomach to poke at those. He went way beyond your typical elzi disappearance case, investigating the darker crimes, crimes that most people considered nothing more than rumor—feasters and queens, the people that supposedly looked at the UausuaU and didn't go mad, or they went mad but kept their ability to think and plan and take action.

"So nice to run into you like this," he said. "Seeing your face always brings me cheer. You're too pretty for this line of work."

"And you're too fat."

He chuckled. "True, true. I'm too busy to exercise and too cheap to buy a better body. Besides," his voice changed; it was warm still in character, but she could feel the chill below, "it would only get ruined anyway."

She stood to the side and watched his fat rump shuffle down the hallway. How did he do it? Even if he hired mercs to do the dirty work, there were too many everyday near-death sits for a PI to have the body of a pastry chef. Any scum worth talking to would doodle a wound in his paunch and tap dance away with his wallet. She filed an idea: follow him, see what he does, how he operates.

She went into the office and offered her customary sneer at the opulence. The PIs of the private justice system did the work and the lawyers saw the rewards. Shiny wood floors, fancy rugs from foreign zones, paintings of his family everywhere—was that a new chandelier?

"Jesus Christ, what's next? A golden throne?" she said aloud.

Eugene gave a snort and stood to offer her his hand. He was tall, taller even than she was, and stupidly handsome. She had thought a few times of pumping him full of drink and running her hands through that curly black hair, but she'd probably get an invoice in the mail for it. She slapped his hand away and collapsed into the overly plush seat before his altar-desk.

"The Gaespora want me for something," she said. "What is it?"

"Saru, I appreciate your patronage, but you can't just barge in here like this. I was in a meeting with Mr. Friar, which he kindly—let me stress that— _kindly_ , agreed to postpone because I didn't want you kicking down my door again."

"They were calling me all night, outbid my call blocking, custom summon tone, a sonata that made me almost cry and a picture of my parents' farm."

"Are you listening to me?"

"They bought my building today."

"What?"

"They bought the whole office building. Thirteen Oh Six Walnut. Shut it down. I'm guessing by this point they've found where I live and they got that too. What's going on?"

"I don't know. This is unusual."

"I want to get a case together. Start putting together some sort of action, something aggressive, to put them on the defensive. Money's no object; I'm flush from the Favre case. They can't get away with this."

Eugene stared at her flatly and then burst out laughing—God he was pretty when he laughed. He went to his liquor cabinet and poured them each a tumbler of bourbon—his on the rocks and hers a straight fistful. He handed her her glass and then sat, swirling the bourbon, serious.

"I'm flattered, really, that you think I'm up for this, but what you're proposing is ridiculous. Launch a case against the Gaespora? On what grounds?"

"I don't know," she said, hotly. "You're the lawyer, make something up, reckless intimidation, intent to violate American freedom, do _something_."

"What do you think I can do here? What judge do you think would even hear the case? Their salaries, their mistresses, their kids' medicines and their wives' fake tits all come from the Gaespora. I'd be laughed out of court and if I didn't shut up you'd find me dying of diphtheria."

"So you believe that bullshit."

"I don't believe—I know. They bought your office building for crissakes."

"So what am I supposed to do, get on my knees and suck their alien dicks?"

"You could talk to them—maybe not hang up and ignore their phone calls. Jesus, most people would give their right arm to have a sit-down with the Gaespora and you're ignoring their phone calls. I don't believe you sometimes."

"I don't enjoy being pushed around."

"This isn't the playground; you can't beat up every other kid and call yourself king shit of the turd pile. There are rules."

They glared at each other. Eugene looked away, out the window. The rain was coming harder now, coming up to be a good ol' spring thunderstorm. Saru downed her bourbon and held the glass out for a refill. Eugene filled her glass. He squinted his eyes shut and Saru guessed he was shooting out a command to Sissy to cancel his next meeting. Wordlessly he packed a long, curving vape with some hash and a few stimulants. They smoked and stared out at the storm. An elzi had gotten stuck on one of the barbs on the iron fence around the building. They watched him jerk himself free, leaving his hand and most of the forearm behind. He stumbled down the street, causing pedestrians to scuttle to the other side. A cop came over and herded him into a paddy wagon.

"Shit," Saru said. "There's no way out of this, is there?"

Almost as soon as she said it, there was a knock on the door, soft, polite, Sissy.

"Come in," Eugene said. The door opened and she stepped in. She looked ruffled, uncomfortable—uncharacteristic. Even before she spoke Saru knew what she would say:

"Mr. Gercer-han Bernstein? There are two gentlemen here to see you. They say they belong to the Gaespora."

Chapter 2

What they didn't understand was the simplicity—it was killing him. He'd been operating on three to seven layers of consciousness since he was sixteen years old and now that was gone. They had hacked away all his distractions, all his facets—his virtual kingdoms, virtual sex, his mischief, news feeds, criminal enterprises, and voyeurism. He'd been flitting from implant to implant, seeing life through other people's eyes and tongues and cocks and skin for so long that now, trapped in his own fat body, he was disgusted with himself. Is this what he was? A blob of flesh in a ratty armchair with a catheter and a feeding tube—when had he even put that in? Had it been a good idea at the time? Now without the freedom to eat the meals of others he was stuck sucking down the phlegmy white goo that sustained him. He shouldn't have been fat—he hadn't even bothered to measure the input. He'd just jammed it in and swum back to the Net. God, would he have swollen up like a balloon, would he have burst eventually? Or would the fat have squeezed against his veins until they clamped shut and his brain went dead?

Now his whole existence was focused on the search, the girl, the streets of Philadelphia, the homeless shelters, the crack dens, the whorehouses and strip clubs, the private sex clubs, and the orphanages. How old was she? They didn't know. What did she look like? Blue eyes, eyes so blue they hurt. Was that it? Yes. He was starting to despair. He twitched his eyes to the left, the bucket with his toes. What would they take next? A new day was dawning. It occurred to him that traveling up from his feet they would eventually reach his cock, and then he thrust himself back into the search, records, records, records. Blue-eyed girls, and one other clue—the arson. She had killed a man apparently, allegedly, burned him to ash. A friend of theirs? Maybe. How did they know? They just knew.

He found himself cursing the police for their incompetence, cursing the media for their neglect—couldn't they even note a building burning down? Wasn't that worth a footnote in the paper? If it even was a building. It could have been a car or an outhouse or a submarine for all he knew, vaporized by a girl with blue, blue eyes. He was going to die, he realized. He was going to be chopped apart piece by piece by piece. The creepiest part was the way they watched him. All four of them—maybe there was a fifth standing guard upstairs—they sat, eyes closed but pointed at him. They were still, perfectly still like statues, and silent. The only sound was the hum of his computer and the squeak of the chair or a fart from his fleshy prison.

They were feasters, they had to be; it was the only explanation. They weren't thugs or robbers; he'd been in enough of them to understand their way. They weren't twitchy or angry or greedy or even cruel. In ten toes he hadn't seen them move or eat. Only the leader spoke. They carried no weapons but knives, and he didn't know a lot about knives but he knew these were sharp. The leader's knife had gone through his toe like it was nothing, not even butter, just a quick flick and the toe slid off. There was no pain—they had injected him with drugs, mind-focusers, analgesics, and their own blood. This last fact convinced him of their nature. The feasters were blood worshippers; they believed if you ate a man you gained his strength. And he suspected that would be the fate of this girl. They believed she had some power and they meant to eat her.

The leader's eyes flickered open. He stood and withdrew a syringe from his jacket. He calmly slid the needlepoint into his neck and sucked out about a juice-box full of blood. The leader walked over and jammed the needle into his neck. He felt nothing with the needle but oddly the blood entering his body burned. He could feel it spreading out through him, warm like piss in a pool but not diluting, just filling his body with heat. He wondered what diseases were coming along for the ride—a fancy new hepatitis perhaps?

He realized then, that there was no randomness involved here. What he had taken for brutal motivation was a ritual. Every twenty-four hours, on the exact second, a toe was removed. Every twelve hours blood was injected. Every six hours a new cocktail of drugs to keep him awake. He was being transformed—like a club with a notch for every skull it had broken. These were creatures of ritual, moved by ritual, obsessed with ritual. They were clocks, machines, vampires, slaves to a higher order. He felt a comfort—was it the blood?—in this ritual. He had thought his search methods to be perfect and orderly, but now he recognized how crazy, how random they were. He began again, from the beginning, from birth records, genetics. He knew, somehow, that the eyes were natural blue and not a bought alteration. He knew much more now, the knowing a great staff he could lean upon. It was wonderful to _know_.

There it was, all the girls in Philadelphia born with blue eyes in the last forty years. Now their medical records. It was a phenomenal amount of data, more than he could ever know or process, but it seemed to glide by. He felt his consciousness divide like a cell, and then again and again and again until he was a thousand cells, a million, all working in tandem to solve this problem. In the background, time was passing, seconds, days? Millennia? He felt light and free, a mind without a body, a creature of pure data. And girls, surrounded by girls, so many in just one area, beautiful, ugly, horrid, filthy sacks of copulation making more and more girls—did they never stop? Why was he here? This girl, Charlene M. Farrow, grew up in Kensington, black with blue eyes, was this the girl? No, she was dead, beaten by her husband into a coma. And this girl, Ramona Ko, she was the one! No, she was married, three kids, Glish teacher in the suburbs.

And what was this? A cell-mind trembling in the foreground, bursting with excitement, rushing, exploding, destroying all the other tiny minds around him. It was the girl! The one they wanted—they, who were they? It didn't matter, they knew, they knew already he had found her; he had done it. She had made a call, called her mother and he had heard the voice, all the bits of data going through the line, and he knew the voice belonged to those eyes because all data was one, any form of information expressed as any other; a stream is a star is a tree is a limb is an arm or a drop of blood or a snowflake, a scrap of cloth, my God, no, God, he understood, understood everything!

In the climax of knowing he died—or at least his new self, his transformed self. He found himself, his old self, alone in a chair in a cold basement. He looked down and saw stumps where his legs should have been. He looked to his sides and saw similar stumps where once had been arms. The pain was coming now, the drugs, the blood, the bliss, all fading. He understood now. He had glimpsed the UausuaU—there was no doubt. He had seen into the dark and emerged sane, but he had paid the price in flesh—he knew now, there was always a price to be paid. This task was his task; it had always been his task, his gift from the Uau, his purpose to serve. He spat out the feeding tube. There was a tremor in his throat, a tickle, a vibration, traveling up to tremble on his lips. He burped, then he groaned, and he coughed. And then he laughed, a quick, harsh bark, and then another and another until he could no longer stop and the laughter raced madly out to echo through his tomb.

Chapter 3

It was a mistake, Ria thought, to go into the subway. She had taken the normal route, sliding through the oversized storm grate on Logan Boulevard, climbing down the iron spikes that some nameless hip had hammered into the walls, dropping carefully onto the cinder-block island—now practically submerged from the pounding rain—and then feeling her way along the wall until she came to the hatch that lead to the abandoned Logan Station. She had stepped carefully over the mounds of dozing elzi, careful not to even brush against the coat-hanger or chicken-wire antennae poking from their eyes or ears or throats. The boojie were afraid of the elzi, but to her they were a comfort. They were the canaries of the underground, their snores and growls and whimpers a sign that all was safe.

The dog had followed her, of course. She had thought the trip underground might shake it, but of course the dog wasn't real and didn't have to climb ladders or slide through grates or tippy-toe hop from cinder block to cinder block to find his way to Lo City. It was there, in the shadows, in the corner of her eye, prowling, watching her. It grew and shrank with the light. Black as a pit with golden eyes or suddenly gold with black eyes. It wasn't a breed she had ever seen on vision but it looked maybe like the bastard freak of a wolf nailed down by a lion. Lately it had been growing larger, huge sometimes, like a parade balloon swelling to fill the streets and the terror would overtake her, a suffocating sense of _impending_ and she would run, tear down the street, shoving the sneering boojie out of the way and confirming to all the world that she was indeed a crazy woman unfit to handle herself.

Fuck you, she thought at the dog. It stared at her from the shadows. You ruined my life.

It had appeared five years ago—was it really so long?—on her thirteenth birthday. Or was it fourteenth? Was it her birthday? She couldn't recall. A birthday was no different than any other day back then unless it fell on a Friday and the free lunch program had cheesecake. She loved cheesecake. It had come in the same little plastic cups that all the other deserts had come in and she had licked it clean every Friday. Mom had called her fat, but that wasn't true, she was skinny as a stick, which was what Derrick used to say, laughing at her, but it didn't stop him from kissing her under the bleachers. Was that when the dog had first appeared? Under the bleachers with Derrick Wilson, between his sloppy tongue kisses and him grabbing her boob so hard it hurt? She had slapped him for that and then she'd let him do it again.

She wasn't crazy though; she knew that. The dog was there, even if no one else could see it. Sometimes it left—but never because of the pills they gave her or the words they said, condescending—but it always came back. At first it was tiny, not a puppy, not cute or juvenile, just smaller, a little wiener-dog version of itself. At first she thought it was because of the acid or the pink powder that Bobby had given her that she later discovered was lolacaine, another sex drug, and he was just trying to get her to put out. Why was it that all the "nice" guys were just trying to wet their cocks? The only one she had even really liked was Cale—he was an asshole but at least he never made his plans a secret. He always brought over a bottle of sweet rum, and not the dollar-store kind, and she'd let him touch her a few times, even use his tongue when she was feeling really foggy, but it felt better to shoot him down each time he thought he was going to score. Once he'd pinned her arms to the floor and told her he could just take it if he wanted and she'd said nothing, almost hoping that he would. But he pussied out and zipped up his shitty thrift-store jeans and slunk away.

It wasn't the drugs though because she didn't know a drug on the planet that made a tiny golden dog appear and follow you around for half your fucking life. At times she thought maybe she _was_ mad, that maybe she had gone too far and peaked into the Uau and this was all her personal nightmare and she was actually rolling around in a pile of trash somewhere with a computer stapled to her forehead. But that seemed too far-fetched, too anti-climactic that the darkness driving all the poor sobs insane was a virtual pet simulator.

It was warm underground, and dry, but she had been soaked in the rain and she shivered. Up ahead was a flickering and she followed it to a group of four other hips huddling around a trash fire. She approached the group cautiously, holding up her hands and walking slowly so they didn't mistake her for a hungry elzi. She saw them tense and then relax. Close to the fire she saw their faces, two boys, a girl, and one that was a toss up. They were older than her, except for the girl, who seemed very young to be hip. She must've ditched foster or a bad sit at home. Ria felt a surge of sympathy.

She took a seat on an old tire close to the fire but slightly apart from the rest. The others said nothing. They stared at the flames. Wordlessly, one of the older men withdrew a flask, took a long swig, and then passed it to his left. It went around and Ria drank gratefully; it was harsh in a good way, and she felt herself warming. She took off her jacket and lay it on a pile of bricks and subway tiles close to the flames.

"Bad nigh'," the other man said. He could've been thirty or sixty. His face was shriveled and most of his teeth were gone. She guessed he'd been using a bit. His words had a chewy, gummy-like feel as though he couldn't quite remember how to form them.

"Lossa rain," he continued. No one could argue with this. Ria stared at the curving wall beyond the fire, enjoying the dancing shadows. It was quiet here; she liked it. She wondered how many other small groups like this were scattered throughout the station. There was a slight tremor, a few stones rolled; some dust fell from the ceiling. A train, probably, from another line, or one of the big dumb waiters bringing food to the distribution points. Could she get to there from here? There must be a way. Her stomach growled. The thought of all that food—still in its neat, pristine packaging—made her mouth water.

The dog was back. He stepped out of the shadows on the wall, stood in mid air and stared down the subway tunnel. Ria thought this might mean something, but she had resolved to ignore the dog. She could have lived with the dog, ignored it completely, if it hadn't started killing people. That had caused her some problems, all her problems, really. The man at Lourdes, what was his name? Dr. Stermdrick? Stern Dick? Why not? He had said that she had started the fire, that she couldn't remember it, that she was blaming her imaginary dog, but that wasn't true! Sure, she had been drinking, but they seemed to think that meant she was drunk. She could pound a liter of vodka and walk a line and thread a needle and she remembered exactly what had happened.

The john had come at her, stiffed her, was going to kill her, maybe. He had his meaty hands locked on her throat, thrashing her, slamming her head into the car door, stars exploding in her face. She'd struggled and flailed her legs but he sat his fat hairy ass on her body and pinned her to the seat. She was ninety pounds with a meal in her and he was a fat fucking gorilla man that felt like a bus crushing her sternum. In the end he had broken two of her ribs and torn something in her gut that made blood show up every day of the month, and that was what forced her into the hospital in the first place.

Then there was the dog, two eyes in the shadows, growing, filling the van. The john letting go, the look of terror in his mongoloid eyes, the gooey sweat on his fat neck and the hole opening in his chest, like a fist-sized cigarette burn, and his scream. He was too big, she couldn't get him off, and the hole widened and widened and burned away his mass, his chest, his face, his arms dropping off like sausages, and then her squirming out from under his melted belly and running into the night. It was the dog, she knew it was the dog, not her—how was she going to start a fire like that? How could she even get free? They didn't care; they didn't listen.

It was impossible to feel grateful to the dog, even though it had saved her life. It was too much, to burn a man alive that way, even if he did deserve it. It couldn't have scared him away or pushed him off—if you can burn him, why can't you do that? She didn't feel safer after, merely hunted. She had killed a man, apparently; she was insane, dangerous. What would happen the next time she felt threatened? Was the dog going to vaporize anyone that came at her? Could it tell the difference between unease and terror? A good pain and a bad pain? A real threat from some dumb punk trying to snatch her purse? How much did the dog understand her?—because she didn't understand the dog at all.

There was another tremor, greater, and then noises, hundreds of bodies scrambling to their feet, cans and garbage kicked around, and then a mass of people. All around them the elzi were rising from their stupor and shuffling or scrambling or sprinting if they hadn't decayed too far. A herd leapt into the pit of the subway track and began racing south. Another group scrabbled for the sewer entrance. The hips thrust themselves up to their feet and looked wildly around for the danger. Ria stayed seated and stared at the dog. The dog stared down the subway tunnel.

"What do we do?" the young girl asked.

"Run," the man with the flask said, but it was a question more than an answer.

"No," Ria said, "We can't, not yet."

She felt that same cold sweat like when she couldn't find booze, and a queasiness in her stomach. All the hairs across her back stood on end, but she knew they couldn't run. There were too many elzi, clogging the exits with their mass, dumb beasts getting stuck and crammed in the narrow exits. If they tried to follow, one of them would touch an implant and then the elzi would rip them all apart.

"Shit," the man with the flask said. "Shit, shit, shit..."

"What about the tunnel?" the androgynous one said. "We could run down that way. Follow the elzi."

This seemed like the only answer, but as she thought it the dog turned and looked at her and she knew it was wrong.

"No, we can't."

"Fuck this."

The androgynous one ran to the platform edge and hopped down. After a second's hesitation the man with the flask followed far less gracefully, and then the other man. Ria stayed where she was and the young girl's head jerked between her and the others now running down the tunnel. The androgynous one disappeared into the black beyond the firelight and then the young girl sprang after them screaming:

"Wait, wait for me, don't leave me!"

They disappeared.

Ria sat there, staring at the black mouth of the tunnel where they had gone. Her heart pounded a thousand beats a minute. She felt the sweat wetting her clothes again. The scrabbling of the elzi began to fade. It was quiet, so quiet she could hear the drip drop of water falling from the ceiling. She was alone, except for the dog. It walked toward her slowly, coming as close as it ever had, touching her, and then not stopping, entering her body. It was a strange feeling, like heat and cold at the same time and a thousand needle pricks on every inch of skin. She looked at her hand and saw that it both was and wasn't, understood that only her eyes could see the hand before her, that the light no longer obeyed the rules of a dumb universe, but a new set of rules, rules of a magical ghost dog that said, "Back, away, this person is not yours to touch. She is hidden."

There was a sound, a slithering nail on a vinyl record, a sound that crawled inside her ears and wriggled down her spine and made her want to jam knitting needles in her tits and scream. In the flickering light of the trash fire the creature looked like a train-sized centipede, countless legs jutting out at strange angles, scratching along any surface they could grasp to push the body forward. At the front was a mass of flesh—bodies, at least a dozen torsos, crammed together, and they were alive. They moved together, swaying like seaweed, eyes all closed, and as they passed she saw their mouths all twitching together as they whimpered—a dozen men, women, and children all whimpering together in tenors and basses and sopranos.

The creature stopped and then reared its head, its mass of human bodies, twenty spindly metal legs clawing into the floor and walls and ceiling to force the head up to the fire to bring the dozens of bodies within five feet of her, and in unison their eyes opened and they stared at her, right at her, and she sat, frozen in terror and horror. The whimpering stopped. They reached, arms grasping as far as they could out from the fused lump of flesh they shared, licking their lips. And then they spoke: "Come...come...come...come..." a whisper, all of them over and over in her ears and in her brain: "Come...come...come...come..."

The words trickled through her nerves, nudging her, moving her, she felt herself stand. The arms were welcoming; it was her family, they wanted her, they loved her. She felt it, the warm beam of love from her family drawing her in. She would reach out, touch them, join them.

A jagged pain cut through her, a dagger of ice cutting through the warmth. It was that damn dog! It had taken everything else from her and now it was taking this too! She took another step, and another dagger of ice and then another and two more in her eyes and she saw herself suddenly inches from the grasping hands, the fingertips worn to yellow bone from scratching, the eyes white and dead, the lips cracked and torn and bloody, and she screamed. The hands drew back and the eyes rolled wildly and the mouths shot open and screamed back at her. Then the creature reared up and crashed back onto the tracks, shaking the ground and showering dust and bricks and tile from the ceiling. The legs twitched frantically and it tore down the tunnel, segment after segment of twisted metal, and was gone.

Chapter 4

The Gaespora were a group of scientists who had pushed human experimentation to the point of becoming a new (superior) species. They were invaders from another dimension. They were people born naturally with psychic powers. They were a hoax perpetrated by the American oligarchs. They could have sprung from radioactive dog shit for all Saru cared—the fact that mattered was they had her clit in a vice and were predisposed to squeeze.

The office was nice, she had to admit, top floor of the Vericast building, open air, with an ungodly expensive cloud shear to cut through the smog and bring real, honest-to-God daylight down around her. She had seen the light from the ground of course—the bright, golden beam that swiveled around the big, funky skyscraper in the city center—but she hadn't realized it was the sun. It felt good, the light; it was warm, and gazing up she saw blue. There were birds up here, and not just pigeons and crows—little blue birds and red birds and birds with big funny tufts and brightly colored feathers. They sang and flew from tree to tree, more trees than she had ever seen. She couldn't even believe there were that many kinds of trees in the world—short and fat and tall and with wrinkly bark and smooth bark and apples and long limbs that drooped down; there must have been hundreds. There was a pond too, and the water was clear and reflected the blue of the sky. It was so perfect and beautiful it made her angry. She felt like crying and she didn't know why.

"We had planned to shear the whole city," ElilE said, making his third attempt at pleasantries. "But the city council would not partner with us. Imagine: sun and sky for all of Philadelphia."

"Then why didn't you just go ahead and do it yourselves?" she said, taking the bait, even angrier now that she'd spoken. "Who would stop you?"

"We are guests in this world. We act only in partnership with humans."

"Bullshit," she laughed (but why did she still want to cry?) The man, ElilE, was definitely human, even if he had a fairy-ass name. Human face: check. Human body: check. He was barefoot like all the other Gaesporans—they had winced as she stomped through the grass in her steel-toed boots—ten human toes: check. He even wore a high-fashion black and silver pinstripe caji suit like any other dickhole bizman...and yet there were things that were odd about him. His eyes, green, normal, but so steady—yes, steady, that was the word. She wasn't a psychologist by any stretch, but she'd talked to a fair spectrum of humanity and could identify some cause-and-effect emotions: I whack your knee with a bludgeon; you scream. I accuse you of fucking your sister; you look shocked—or at least feign it. I drop hints and clues and suppositions—subtle and not—and your eyes twitch or your tongue licks your lips, or you blush or redden or sweat or gasp.

There was none of that with ElilE. He sat cross-legged on a smooth, moss-covered bolder—they'd brought her a chair, hard wood that made her sit too straight—hands on his knees, staring and sometimes giving words. He was still, perfectly still. His breathing never varied, his eyes blinked but it was strangely regular. She decided to risk a scan, a quick visual—camera based—that wouldn't trigger any alarms. He might notice the dilation of her pupils and the processing power might cause her to slur a word or skip a beat, but for all he knew she was drunk and high.

Amazing. Eight breaths a minute in even intervals. Six blinks per minute, again in even intervals. Pulse: forty. He was controlled for sure, but that didn't signify anything inhuman. Good dopple training could get you the same result, or psycho yoga, and of course there were drugs you could take to make your body do anything you wanted—drugs manufactured by the Gaespora.

"Okay, what do you want? Why did you bring me here?"

It was time to get this over with. The chair was starting to hurt her back and the sun was in her eyes—damn it was bright, and it felt like it was burning her skin. She wanted to get back into the cool shade of the city below, away from this wind and bright and the goddamn loud-ass birds chirping everywhere. Also, she was fairly certain that something had crawled up her pants and was biting its way to the money spot.

"You are a private investigator," ElilE said.

"Obviously you know that already."

"We want you to find a girl."

"Kidnapping?"

"We don't know. She is in danger. There are others looking for her. If they find her they will kill her."

"What kind of 'others' are we talking about? I don't do riv jobs. I play nice with my fellow PIs."

"We believe she is hunted by feasters."

She stopped scratching her thigh. Well that was interesting.

"Sorry, I'm not the one you want. You need to talk to Morgan Friar—he deals with that mumbo jumbo."

"We have already contacted Dr. Friar. He has refused. You are our second choice."

If this was a ploy to grab her attention it had worked. Friar refusing a case? _Doctor_ Friar? He'd never mentioned he was a doctor. Did he think it was a goose chase? Or was it real, too real, too dangerous? She thought again of the pudgy little man hunting down feasters—creatures, if rumor was to be believed, that made vampires look like fairies.

"Why didn't he take the case?"

"He would not say."

"Why do you think he turned it down?"

"We do not speculate."

"Honey, this whole case is speculation so far. You _believe_ she's in danger? You _believe_ there are feasters involved? The only fact you've managed to produce is that the best man for the job doesn't want it."

Seven blinks—an extra half-blink at the end. Did that signal annoyance? Frustration? Persuasion? She took it as a victory she'd managed to stick a pinhole in his poker face. He said nothing. He closed his eyes. The vast, glassy, sail-like wind shear suddenly stopped—she hadn't even noticed the sheen of energy across it until it stopped. The wind picked up, the birds chirped more frantically, the black clouds of smog spiraled overhead.

In a fraction of a second, ElilE darted forward, so quickly her eyelids had just reached their peak in surprise as his finger touched her forehead. She blinked; it was night, quiet, the birds chirping softly, the sound of insects in the bushes, a black sky overhead crowded with a billion stars, so bright it lit the world around her—and color, she had never known there was so much _color_ in the universe. ElilE sat across from her still, as though he had never even moved. He stared and his eyes reflected the sky—black, so black, with a billion points of light.

"You are a skeptic," he said, and his voice was different now, not the tenor of a man, but a rustling many-voice of wind in trees and rippling ponds and clicking insects and even a few human sounds laughing on the sidelines.

"You do not believe in us. You think us human—and we are, but only so. Your world and our world are alike but not perfectly. We built this world ages ago, back when we were different from what we are now. We accept your presence here though it was unplanned. We recognize your existence and we are grateful for the shelter you provide, flawed as your doings are."

He pointed up to the sky and her gaze followed, transfixed.

"Know that as many stars as are in this universe, there are universes within a higher plane of existence, which itself is as common as the universes within it. These universes are not static beings—they live and move and touch and consume one another. Your universe and our universe touch for we have made it so, and we can exist in your universe in the margin of similarity. We live as we can as thoughts within your kind and through thought we drive action and with action we bring your world closer to our own.

"There is another force that has touched your universe, a force which you would understand as evil but we understand as the impetus of hunger. It is a universe vaster than our own collective and far vaster than your own, and it seeks no such union, no shared knowledge, no balance, no compromise, no existence other than its own. It has consumed many other universes and grown in power with each consumption, eventually to stand alone and form the basis of a new universal plane, to ascend in existence and birth smaller existences based upon its own. We do not understand its ultimate motive—if it can be understood—but we know in its motion it will destroy and consume all other universes.

"You have seen this force and named it even; it is the dark place in your shared consciousness, the place you call the UausuaU. It besets your universe as it besets ours, and no action we have seen will stay its course. It grows in power as it turns the margin of similarity towards its own. We grow here, slowly, and as our powers increase we have seen other universes appear, sensing the kill, carving off what they can to strengthen themselves. Far beyond this planet are other organisms, other wars, other visitors to your universe.

"We see a girl. A girl with blue eyes and a dog that is not a dog. We know this creature—have seen it. It is strong and it fights, fighting the UausuaU across the universal plane. We see opportunity in this creature, yet it waits. We believe it waits for you, for mankind, to see if _you_ will fight, if this corner of this universe is worth the battle."

It was day, the sun shone, the birds were back to their annoying chirping and the chair was just as hard as ever. ElilE sat staring at her as he had been. When he spoke his voice was the normal tenor:

"This girl is very important. She is the foothold upon which this creature relies. The fraction of similarity that allows it to exist in your universe. The feasters serve the UausuaU though they may not know it. If they find this girl they will kill her and destroy the margin."

"Well that's fucking great," Saru said. She took out her jacket flask (damn her hands were shaking, had it really just been night? Had they drugged her or hacked her implants?) and found it was empty. She got the hip flask and downed it. "What will you do if she dies?"

"We will do as we have always done."

"And let the world be destroyed? Assuming I believe your hocus pocus."

"Not destroyed—consumed. But yes, it is likely that all mass on Earth, at least, will disassociate from this universe and become part of the UausuaU."

"Jesus Christ. And this is your plan? To hire one detective to track down this girl? Why not put out an APB, get the cops on it, the army, or at least get me a big fat load of mercenaries to come along."

"There is...danger in that route. It would be a great loss if the girl were to die...but it would be...safer."

"What do you mean, 'safer'?"

"The creature that lives in her is powerful. Our understanding of it is...incomplete. We know it battles the UausuaU but its actions are at times unclear. It does not understand humanity well, does not communicate. It could interpret such pursuit as a threat and...overreact."

"Like, what, kill somebody?" She was fairly certain that however this ended it was going to involve a few body bags.

"It would likely kill many...the city perhaps. We do not know its power or constraint."

Saru began to laugh, a real laugh, not some bitter chuckle. This was _funny_. Oh man, Eugene was right, no wonder people loved working for these guys. A mission to rescue an alien that sure didn't need her help, with a bonus of potentially destroying Philadelphia? Sign me up! She imagined the parking authority going up in flames, the rat-infested slum housing, the banking district with its swarms of self-righteous yuppies. She was perfect for the job—this was a pretty low-pressure consequence as far as she was concerned. And her qualifications—

"So basically you want me because I'm too clumsy to be seen as a threat, and simple-minded enough to be understood by the dumbest of aliens."

"You are not subtle. You think and act directly. Yes, this could be easier for the being to understand. And the girl has had a difficult childhood; given your own difficult childhood, we think you two can relate."

Ooh, bringing up her childhood. That was a foul. She thought about giving him a light tickle with the prod—nothing too _subtle_ —and then did it. He caught the prod lazily and locked eyes with her, unblinking. She dialed up the power and returned his stare. His forearm shook, the blue arcs of electricity danced up and down his arm, little flames poked up from his hand and the scent of steak filled the air. He yanked the prod from her grip and dropped it on the ground between them. His hand was black and red, burned, destroyed. She felt suddenly guilty, sympathetic almost; she hadn't meant to hurt him, had she even hurt him? There was that strange urge to cry again.

"Sorry," she said, softly. "That was stupid." Then a thought occurred: "Wait, won't this creature interpret any feasters as a threat and 'overreact'?"

"It may," he said. He picked up a clump of dirt from around the boulder and massaged it into his wound. "When you find the girl you must gain her trust, convince her to follow you of her own free will. We will provide transportation to take her far from the city, far from the reach of the feasters, where she will be safe and we can observe the being. Do you understand?"

Away from Philadelphia, a place where she was safe. Jeeze, take me with you.

"Surprisingly, I do," she said. "So now the real question: what does all this pay? Keep in mind the imminent destruction of the universe and my uniquely moronic qualifications—I don't know if you've seen the feeds lately, but I'm a celebrity too."

"We are prepared to offer you the same contract we offered Dr. Friar. Ten million American dollars upon successful closure. Five hundred thousand to be paid up front for necessary expenses."

"Holy shit!" Saru yelled. "Why didn't you just spit that out at the beginning instead of all this mumbo jumbo bullshit? Holy shit!"

She jumped up and half jogged to the glass box of the elevator, then jogged back to grab her prod and then jogged back again. Holy shit, holy shit, ten million dollars! She had to find this bitch. ElilE was jogging after her; he was saying things and yadda yadda yadda. Holy shit! Ten million dollars!

Chapter 5

"Are you surprised? They bought your building after all."

"My God, I'm going to be rich. I am rich! I have five hundred thousand dollars in my account right now, I checked, oh my God!"

"You need to settle down, Saru, you haven't done anything yet. Don't think they'll let you keep that money if you fail."

"I don't need to listen to you anymore! I'm rich!"

She grabbed Eugene's $900 bottle of Baron Foran scotch and tore out the cork. She took a deep, long swig, so long Eugene tried to grab the bottle away, but she pressed a stiletto heel into his thigh and he doubled over. Right after the briefing with ElilE she'd raced back to her apartment and thrown on the best clothes she had—she looked pretty good, she thought. Now she sat on the corner of Eugene's desk, heels on his thighs, skirt flirting open and closed in front of him as she swayed her knees back and forth—damn, she couldn't seem to keep them still, another swig'd do the trick. It touched and annoyed her that Eugene refused to look up her skirt, tilting his head uncomfortably in any direction but right in front of him.

"Jesus, what's gotten into you?" he said. "You've got to get to work."

"Work?" she said. This annoyed her. She kicked Eugene's chair, pushing it back so it banged into the copper radiator behind it. She clamped her knees together. Fine then.

"I don't need to work, Yoo Jeen, because I, am rich."

Eugene sighed. He held out his hand for her to hand him the scotch. She held up a finger and took another long swig before handing it to him. He started to reach for a glass and then gave up and drank right from the bottle. It was like their lips were touching through scotch. Rich people scotch. How much money did Eugene have? Was he ten-million-dollars rich?

"Look, I'm thrilled you got this contract but it is serious business. I'm looking at this brief and you do not have a lot to go on."

That annoyed her more. She found herself hating Eugene suddenly, lecturing her on work and responsibility. What did he know? All he did was shuffle papers around and take bribes.

"Don't you mean 'we'? _We_ don't have a lot to go on. You're my partner after all," she said.

"I'm your lawyer—that's not quite the same thing."

"Huh, I dunno, I thought you'd be a bit more supportive of me."

He slapped his knees and threw his hands up in exasperation.

"No, I don't know. What do you want? What do you want from me?"

Isn't it obvious? she wanted to scream. I'm going to die out there you idiot and I just want one good screw before they cut my tits off! She just growled at him and the growl ended in a scream. She flipped herself backwards over the desk and landed in a pile. She picked herself up, grinning through her tangled hair, and threw a bunch of hundreds in the air.

"Sorry to interrupt," she said. "Here's for your trouble, _sir_."

He put his head in his hand. Sissy came in, glaring daggers. Saru grabbed her by the waist and planted a sloppy kiss on her mouth, then pushed her away and stormed down the hallway, knocking over all the tables and ornaments she passed. She got to the street and puked on the sidewalk.

She dry swallowed two Claritol, and then two more—she'd grabbed about ten pounds of them from the Gaespora pharmacy. The familiar effervescent tingle washed over her brain, a bit more intense than usual, and all the fog and the joy and the delusion rolled out. All that was left was the terror. It wasn't something she was used to—sure, fear, that was normal, that was the once-in-a-while, kick-in-the-pants, get-you-moving sensation that was just part of the job, part of life. But this was something else; this was fear even when there was nothing to be afraid of, no men with guns or hungry elzi or torture fetishist around the corner. It was stupid to be afraid of things that weren't right in front of you, but she couldn't help it.

It was those damn Gaespora. That trick ElilE had pulled with the night and the Dracula voice. Way to go brother, way to psych out your star player before the big game. She'd always been able to trust her eyes, or at least some other sense. No matter how strong the drugs or how sophisticated the hack, there was always that nagging knowledge that something was amiss, that she was being played. But up there on the roof—that was _real_. It was night, everything felt _right_ , but it wasn't true. That was new. She was dealing with aliens, maybe, or people that thought they were aliens, which was just as bad in her book—especially if they could pull a trick like that. That was the problem—she didn't know what she was up against. She needed to inject some logic and flush that doubt.

In the classifieds he was listed as Dr. Morgan Friar, Private Investigator, Wekba specialist. Huh, so everyone knew he was a doctor but her. She called him up on her brand-new player, which was a goddamn necessary expense for sure. He answered on the first ring.

"Hello, Saru," he said. He was in what must have been his office, or maybe laboratory was a better word. She saw what looked like a missile in the background. "I was expecting your call."

"Really?" she said, dumbly. Tiramisu.

"Yes. You're the best in your field of course; it's natural they should ask you after me."

"I guess you know the word then."

"Guess is correct, but I should have warned you—the Gaespora are very persuasive."

"Yep. Well I took the case."

"Ah," he said. He looked sad, and that look was enough to bring back the terror. The reception wasn't perfect, the image was a little choppy, but for the first time she realized how old he was.

"Are you going to tell me how stupid I am?"

"No, no. But I would advise you to reconsider."

"I don't think that's an option."

"No, maybe not. I hope you won't take this as a critique of your professionalism, but perhaps you would allow me to offer some advice? Some information that may be of use?"

"That's actually why I called. You're the expert."

"It would be better if we met in person. When are you free?"

"Now, if you like."

"Very good, here is my address."

He sent her the address and she hailed a cab. No walking for this rich bitch. She tipped the cabby a hundred—there you go bud, buy yourself a toothbrush—and he dropped her in front of a nondescript brownstone. There was no plaque announcing who lived there; even the number was tiny and hard to read. That was just like Friar—attention to detail, subtlety, discretion; he was like her polar opposite.

She knocked softly, noticing the door was not wood, as it appeared, but some sort of hard alloy. She guessed it was bullet proof and fire and acid resistant. She looked at the stone and wondered what was beneath—reinforced concrete? Steel micromesh? This wasn't a house; it was a fortress. She wondered who the neighbors were. No neighbors of course, he would own the other two houses and they would be just as tricked. Interesting. Not a lot of crime in this part of the city, so what was he expecting? Enemies? Old scores? The apocalypse?

The door swung open and he was there, tit-height and grave-faced.

"Come in please," he said, ushering her in with his hand. He wore the same tweed jacket that she now suspected was more than just tweed. She stepped inside. Yes, it was like she expected—the house of an old bachelor professor, a little dusty, full of knick-knacks and relics, artwork, carved wood furniture, globes, and other gilded trash. She would buy it all when she solved the case and cram it into her foyer so you'd have to shuffle sideways to get through the maze.

"This way please." He guided her down the hall; she caught a glimpse of the living room with a grand piano and the dining room with a crystal chandelier. They passed the kitchen ("Would you like anything?" "No thanks") and he lead her down to the basement. This was more like it. It was part workshop, part lab, part hospital room and—oh my God there was a man in a cage. No, not a man. An elzi, a once-man. That was a little shocking.

"Yes, you see my friend Jonathan."

"You keep him locked up in here?"

"I do. It's for his benefit."

She could believe that. It was common knowledge the rehab centers were fancy crematoriums and she couldn't see much difference between him roaming the streets and being locked in a cage in her colleague's basement. At least he couldn't take a chunk out of anyone this way. The elzi dozed, serene, fingers clenching and unclenching in typical stereotyped behavior. She approached the cage and saw that it was suspended from the ceiling by chains. The floor was actually a deck and the cage hung a few feet out from the railing. She looked down and was surprised to see that there was no ground below—it disappeared in darkness.

"How deep does that go?" she asked.

"It's quite deep. Let me show you."

Friar flicked a switch and harsh yellow lights popped on at regular intervals, going down what must have been eight stories. At the bottom they formed a circle around a hatch the size of an aboveground pool.

"Where does that lead?"

"To the under city, of course."

"The under city?"

"Yes. The sewers, the abandoned Broad Street Line and all its stations. It is quite large, and grows larger. There are things down there, digging things, things that tunnel and carve and build."

He was almost reverent as he spoke. She shivered.

"Why do you have this? How did you even build this?"

He smiled sadly.

"What did they offer you? A million? Five million? Ten million? Twenty?"

"Uh, it was ten."

He nodded. "Yes, what they offered me. That was not the first job I have been offered, but it was the first I refused. As a younger man I thought them fools the way they tossed around their riches, that they did not understand human concepts of value and money. Now, wiser, perhaps, I see they understand it far better than we, that it is worthless compared to life—and sanity."

"So that's how you built this? Working for the Gaespora?"

"Indeed. A fascinating species, but too niggardly with their secrets. My curiosity is better rewarded by the UausuaU."

"So you believe their spiel about being from another planet, or another universe, I guess? You don't think they're human?"

"Human? Yes, partly. And also other. They have touched the knowledge of a different existence and the idea of that existence has brought them closer to it."

"Yeah...I think they mentioned something like that. They also drugged me and messed with my head or something."

"Ah yes, I remember my first time. Nothing quite like it, is there? I guess the best word would be telepathy, but it's purely physical, of course."

"Okay."

She did not like this. He was saying more and more and she was understanding less and less. The opposite was supposed to be happening. She'd come here to simplify things, not complicate them with dumb philosophical chatter. She went over to an operating table, which no longer seemed out of place. It was a hard metal slab, smeared with blood.

"And I'm guessing this is where you chop up the elzi?"

"Correct."

He waddled over to a sink and donned two yellow gloves. He sprayed a rag with some solution and attacked the bloodstains.

"Sorry for the mess," he said. "I was just conducting an experiment before you came."

"What kind of experiment?"

"I'm trying to see if I can remove the elzi implants without killing the host."

She laughed. He was insane, clearly. It wasn't too surprising—he'd spent his life studying the Wekba and working around criminals and beasts. As far as madnesses went, Friar's was pretty mild. But thinking he could cure the elzi, that was the kind of shit that would get him killed. Better to round them all up and burn them. Smash up every computer, car, and sentient vibrator and return to an agrarian utopia.

He smiled at her. "I know. It seems hopeless, but I must try. Actually, I have learned one neat trick. Let me show you."

He went to a control panel, an old-fashioned analogue dealy with buttons and levers. It swung the cage around above the operating table and the bottom opened, dropping the elzi like a turd onto the table. He groaned a little and then curled up into a fetal position. Saru stepped back. She wasn't afraid of the elzi—she'd zapped her share of the angry ones—but she didn't trust this "trick" that Friar was about to perform. He fastened chains to the elzi's wrists and ankles and then she noticed that Friar had pulled out the elzi's teeth and chopped off his fingers. To declaw him? To make him less dangerous? Or was that part of the trick?

Friar went over to a machine that looked like a giant radio with a computer console sticking out like a pouty mouth. He tapped at it a bit and then went to a counter covered in strange tools, soldering irons, and what looked like medical instruments. He grabbed a syringe the size of a squirt gun, walked over to the elzi's neck and then jammed it in. She saw a scaly rash of similar punctures and wondered how many elzi had sat on that table, and where they were coming from, and what happened when they were no longer useful. Did Friar just dump them down the hole? Why not?

The elzi hardly reacted to the syringe—could they feel pain? Its eyes opened and they were still human, not rotted, wormy holes, or white with cataracts. They looked at Friar accusatorially and then grew droopy and unfocused. The elzi's jaw went slack and he drooled. Friar beamed.

"It's different for everyone, but about a pint of zoloctepine is enough to disable the hate response of the typical elzi. Watch."

He flicked the elzi's implant. Saru's hand shot to her prod. The elzi twitched but did nothing. Saru sucked in a breath.

"That's not funny."

"I assure you he's quite harmless. The effect will last about twelve minutes before the implants discover a suitable counter. That's what I couldn't figure out before—almost lost a few fingers—you need to mix in different drugs every time or they counter it. And once one of them knows the counter, they all do. Fascinating."

He went to the workbench and picked up what looked like a thumb-sized satellite, and then walked over to the operating table. She flinched when Friar clipped it onto the elzi's neck, but the elzi didn't react other than to twitch.

"Now, watch this," Friar said. He leaned in close—closer than Saru would have liked—to the elzi's, cracked, rashy ear. "Jonathan. Where is the girl?" Nothing happened. Saru realized suddenly that she was wasting her time here and that precious minutes in the hunt for ten million dollars were slipping away.

"Well, this has been fun..."

"Jonathan, where is the girl?"

"Caaan't tell..."

She nearly pissed herself. The elzi spoke—it fucking spoke!—but not in any voice that a live person ever used. It was like someone squeezing his guts to force the air out of his throat.

"Please, Jonathan, we must know where the girl is."

"How would he..."

Friar gave a look to silence her.

"Do you know where she is, Jonathan?"

"Yessss."

"You must tell me Jonathan!"

"No...no!"

He screamed and his body tensed and he thrashed and tore against the chains. Friar jumped back, away from the flailing arms.

"Noooooo!" the elzi screamed. Lines appeared in his skin, like fat worms crawling beneath the surface. Bubbles formed and popped, splattering blood. There was the cracking of bones, over and over like kids throwing poppers on the ground, and they burst through the skin and ripped it apart. The elzi dissolved before them, torn apart from the inside. And then there was nothing left—a small pond of gore and viscera and the implants glinting evilly. The tiny satellite had melted.

"Thank you, Jonathan," Friar said. He seemed shaken, but not as shaken as he should have been. Saru felt like she was going to barf again.

"You...sick fuck," she said. "What did you do to him?"

"I? I did nothing, though I admit that was a likely outcome."

"You knew that would happen?"

"Not that, exactly. It was very likely Jonathan would die helping us, but the manner of his death I did not know."

"What...what...did you do to him?"

"I offered him a conduit, a moment's escape from the Uau. Imagine a paper bag over your head and a single pinprick of light—that's about as much as I can do to penetrate the spectrum. His mind belonged to the UausuaU; it was his price, you see, for the ecstasy, the knowing. I tried to steal that knowledge, appeal to his forgotten humanity."

"What are you saying?" She couldn't take her eyes off the bloodstain. "That some random elzi you clubbed and dragged into your torture chamber knows where this fucking girl is?"

"He knows what Uau know—and he knew where the girl was. That means the feasters know where she is, or have a good idea."

"Well shit, that doesn't help. I don't know where to look even!"

"Yes, you do," he said. He too was staring at the blood now. She looked at him and then back at the blood and then the skin on the back of her neck began to crawl. There was a sensation in the room, a feeling like she had had with ElilE when the day had gone suddenly to night.

"I...may...have gone too far this time," Friar said. He hefted himself onto the operating table, right onto the pile of gore. It soaked into his pants, red stains climbing up the fabric. He unlocked the foot shackles, removing the scraps of flesh and fastening them around his own ankles.

"What are you doing?"

"I...have been...naughty."

He tightened the shackles around his legs and then started on his arms; his neck bulged strangely. She saw under his earlobe where a player would be was another tiny satellite device identical to the first, its legs jammed into his skin. A spasm crossed his face and a sound like a hyena laugh squirted from his mouth. He tightened the shackles on his arms, and before she could even process what he was doing, he flicked the key down into the hole.

"No!" she screamed.

"Yes," he said, calmly, and then there was another hyena laugh that set her skin crawling. "I'm afraid it is quite ne-necessary now. Please...if you have kindness in you, the syringe with the red label...please."

She stood still. The spasms happened more quickly now, more hyena laughs; he was shuddering and then he looked at her and she felt again the feeling of the day going to night and a fear radiating from him like a wave. It forced her back and then she ran to the worktable and scrambled to find the syringe. There it was, in a special holster of its own, packed and ready. For a second she marveled at how neatly it had been placed, how ready amidst the clutter, how he had prepared for this inevitability while working through his experiments. She ran back to the table.

"The girl..." he said. The twisted smile was lasting longer on his face; his arms and legs were straining against the chains. She saw that if he was free he would hurt her now, hurt many people. "Look for the girl...in the fish." His hand grabbed at her, stopped by the chains; she stabbed the syringe into his chest and pounded down the plunger, and then scrambled to the stairs. She stayed just long enough to make sure he was still, and then she flew up the stairs and out of the house.

Chapter 6

Morning. Shit—should have set an alarm. She jerked herself out of bed and lay on the floor. Across the dirty gray carpet and mounds of clothes and bottles she saw the clock—11:34 a.m. Time to get up, maybe. She stood and then shimmied to the toilet and barfed. She found her peacoat in a pile and grabbed a handful of Claritol. The sick in her stomach calmed and the jackhammer in her skull became a simple pat on the head. She surveyed her apartment—her third apartment in as many months—and was filled with disgust. No furniture but a mattress, no rooms but the kitchen-bedroom and toilet separated by a screen. What was she paying for this shit?

She found her nicest clothes in a pile and saw they were covered in blood. She'd broken the heels of her stilettos and tossed them in a dumpster on her flight back to the apartment, then when she'd gotten back she'd torn off her clothes, downed a bottle of gin, and cried herself to sleep. Sure she'd seen people dead, seen people killed, maybe even killed one or two herself in the end (it's not like she went around checking). But to see a man, even if he was an elzi, rip himself apart like that, and then her friend, well, colleague at least—she'd seen him around—strap himself in like that and then make her snuff him. That wasn't fair, Friar. You knew what you were doing. You brought me in because you didn't have the guts to do it yourself. You were a brave sonofabitch, braver than me for sure, but there's different kinds of brave and you tripped on that last step.

She found the faux-fox coat she'd bought after the Favre case; she'd had it less than a week and already it was covered in blood. A metaphor? A warning? The peacoat was as drab and dirty as ever and had that bitter all-night-drinking smell that never seemed to go away, but at least it wasn't bloody. She found some clean(?) panties and jeans and then chose the trickiest bra from her lineup—one with a micro-razor in the strap and a tiny dart launcher in each tit. The range was shit, six inches maybe, but enough to conk a lover if it ever got too hot. She wasn't the honeypot type and she'd never gotten the chance to use it, but hey, why not have it just in case?

It was time to get out the lucky shirt, the pink tank top with the big purple heart in the center. Alright lucky shirt, do your thing. She couldn't quite remember why it was lucky—did she win a scratch-off when she was wearing it? No, that wasn't it. It had something to do with Eugene, right? They went and had champagne at the Borazali after she nailed her first conviction and they both got a little too friendly. No...she'd dressed up for that, in that skimpy golden tube that her dad would've smacked her back to Jersey for wearing. Huh. It bothered her she couldn't remember why it was lucky. What's the point of a lucky shirt if you can't remember the thing that made it lucky?

Ah, now the real question—the gun. She didn't like guns, not because they were guns. The actual shooting and the ritual of caring for them she found relaxing. But carrying a gun complicated the justice process. With her trusty prod and a tranq or two she could apprehend a suspect, deliver justice, pay the levy at the Po-Stop and be gone. But a gun slowed everything down—why did she have the gun? Did she use it? Where did she get it? Did she have a permit? A license? What kind of bullets was she using? The longer she stayed in jail answering questions the more the risk. Better to be walking the streets with the elzi and the thugs, where you could run and fight and had options other than sucking down a beating and likely something more if you weren't too ugly to look at.

But if this charade got all magical her prod wasn't going to do much good. She still had that flank-steak smell of ElilE's hand roasting at full power, and if these feasters had any tricks up their sleeves she wanted a few of her own. She strapped on the pancake holster—nicely concealed by the peacoat—and did a quick check of her Betty. It was illegal, of course, like everything fun, for being made of layered composite materials that nine times out of ten showed up as nothing more than a blip on a scanner. In her wilder days she'd gotten some back-alley saw jockey to patch it into her implants because au natural she couldn't shoot for shit—apparently aiming took patience and discipline. But with her add-ons she could circumcise a newborn from fifty feet away with just a thought. The saw jockey must've gotten some nerves scrambled in the process because every time she used the damn thing it made her nipples thrill. Bastard probably did it on purpose—you don't get kicked out of med school for incompetence.

Alright, all dressed up and no place to go. Time to put the old brain to work. She grabbed a stick of Chew 20 to get some fuel in her system and then paced the room kicking at things in an attempt to mimic thinking. The girl is in the fish. Well, that's pretty obvious—she's in the Fish. It was a comforting thought. The Fish was a labyrinth of hip warrens, the kingdom of the homeless pseudo-society. It was huge and crowded and had a shitty network connection so it would be impossible to find her without more info. But what info did they have? She'd been dozing for twelve hours and her hunters, rivals, the dicks who were going to cost her ten million tickets out of Philly were out doing...what, exactly? How were they getting their information?

The Net of course, hacking security cameras, hacking private implants, arrest records, viks—what anyone did when they wanted to drag up dirt on someone or find them and kill 'em. But this girl was hard to find—unregistered, probably, no birthright implants or maybe she'd paid someone to dig 'em out. She had a small profile so she was probably hip herself, no real residence, no money, day-to-day scraping it together—probably never went to school. So they'd tracked her to the Fish, not a huge surprise, not a huge concern except...they seemed to have that other thing, that special sense, ways of knowing the things you lock up in your head all private from the Net. That was their advantage.

So how to beat that? Well, not by sitting around the apartment. Boots on the ground. Experience. Asking around about a girl with blue eyes—hopeless—and what was the other thing ElilE had said? Fires. Asking about strange fires. That was no help either. Fires were every day, all the time. An elzi wanders into a house and busts up the stove. Fire. An elzi wanders into a power plant and gets fried. Fire. A woman catches her husband cheating on her. She shoots him and sets a fire to cover it all up. Fires all over the friggin' place.

Alright, that was out. But the eyes...there was something there. They were strange eyes, pretty eyes. If this girl was like ElilE said then these eyes were magical, there was more to them than just the look. That was something you noticed. That was something that was worth something to a certain type of someone. And maybe this girl was a saint, but she had to eat, and probably needed a slap of something or other to shake reality for a spell, and if she was just regular folk she only had a few options. That meant pimps—no, too easy. She would have been found on the Net. That ruled out freelancing then too, she'd leave a footprint. Auction records too. Huh, was she just street walking? Then she was dead anyway...no, either she had another way of bringing or, or, or...a benefactor. A patron. Maybe a once-in-a-while thing when she really needed a fix or her stomach was caving in.

It was a shitty theory. There were infinite ways she could be occupying herself or scraping together what passed for a living. She could have worked in the hippy coop cleaning or cooking or planting vegetables. That would keep her off the Net and still give her a life. But she didn't think so. ElilE said this girl had a troubled childhood, like hers—bastard, how dare you dig in _my_ shit pile—and if she really did have an alien following her then that was sure to shake up her brain just a little. That meant drugs. That meant booze. Maybe it even meant body modding. All of that was expensive—more than a coop brought at least. The sell-sex theory was shit in a bag, but it felt right.

She giggled at the simplicity of it. She wouldn't have to tromp around the garbage pits of the Fish at all—she'd just put a price on the girl's head. Easy as pie. Whoever her benefactor was (if he existed) he'd be rich to her but he sure as hell wouldn't be downtown real-person rich. What was the price, ten? No, she'd make it really sweet. A straight twenty grand for a girl with blue eyes, the bluest they could find, they had to be _really_ blue. Get a picture and send it along, no Net, don't wanna get the porkies involved. Real pics on real paper. She clapped her hands together. A plan! A dangerous thin rope to hang herself on but better than she'd had five minutes ago.

Smokey Lou was at his bar, Smokey Lou's, as usual, smoking, as usual. The bar was famous in the Libs district for, what else? Smoking. And smoking accessories. And girls. The two worked together in the center stage, some poor skag in a woman-sized hookah with a thousand little squid dicks running out, sucked on by fat and for some reason always hairy men. It was quite a spectacle, Saru had to admit—the naked woman, somehow not puking out her lungs, swaying inside the swirling smoke, rubbing her bare tits and ass up against the glass from time to time. Different girls, different flavors.

"You're saying, twenty thousand for a girl with blue eyes?"

Lou looked shocked, almost offended by this. He was, like his clientele, fat, hairy, and unpleasant. He was always sweating and his fancy white shirts and suits always looked like they'd just come out of the wash. His breath smelled like an orangutan's nut sack and every conversation involved her warning him repeatedly to point his tongue-box somewhere else or she'd give him a bite of the prod. Now they sat in a booth in the back, side by side watching the show so he could only glance her. The plasticky seat was sticky with something and she didn't want to know what.

"No," she said, crossly—in her head this had not involved as much work. "I'm paying twenty thousand for a girl with really, crazy, terrific, out-of-this-world blue eyes."

He looked at her shrewdly, which was fair because he was shrewd. Packed as it was with sweaty men, this hookah bar was just a place to park his ass while he sucked on girl-sweat smoke and scanned the Net for prospects.

"You're not going to pay," he said. He had an accent—Eurokan? Sinomer? What did she know? "It's a plot."

"It is," she said. "But I'll tell you what—find the girl and keep your ten percent."

"That is not so much money considering the risk."

"What risk?"

"The risk of doing business with you, Saru."

She grit her teeth. Tough rap to beat.

"Fine, then. What price _is_ worth the risk? And remember there's no netting on this one. I want honest-to-God human interaction. Send your people out to talk, have a chat, get to know the trappers."

"In that, too, is a cost."

"That's why I'm saying it. Give it to me all up front, no surprises."

"Ten."

"Ten _thousand_?"

"It is much work."

"It's _one_ girl."

"That is the point. It is one girl. You are looking for one girl, a specific girl. This I see. A girl with very blue eyes. There will be many who want this money, and many false trails. This is much work. My associates do not work for free. I do not pay them in smoke."

"Fine. Half and half. Get to work."

She'd expected that. She handed him the first five thousand dollars and his eyes rolled a little as he sent out commands to all his runners. They'd spread out around the Fish dropping word of the bounty. She'd forgotten to specify that she wanted the girl intact, but Lou, for all his unpleasantness, treated his girls right enough. And anyway, that was the second part of the plan. If any of the catchers happened to die in a fire, well, then she'd know she was on the right track.

She left the bar and decided to take a stroll; it made her feel like she was doing something, contributing. Lou's was on the border, the crossover area between the real city with the real people with jobs and incomes and lives, and the Fish. You could see it—trash everywhere, fenced-in plots of nothing, and then a restaurant, a dive, a few homes with the lights on and then a line of crumbling, caved-in brownstones. She didn't like it, too much ambiguity. There needed to be clear lines: good city, bad city; elziland, and hippy coop. None of this blending; it made it too hard to see where she was going, what was about. This kid on the corner—what was he waiting for? Was that a gun bulge in his jacket; was he ready to spray? Or was it a trick, a fold of the cloth, a banana, a twelve-inch dick?

Condoms on the ground, needles, elzi lying in heaps of trash, and a dead elzi just lying there, guts all pulled out, run over and left. Another crawling his way over, easy meal, easy calories, easy way to keep going. She walked faster for no reason, moving closer to the Fish, away from the screech of cars and the angry honks. Not so much going on now. Getting into the hiplands, with their own rules. It was a safe place, safer than most, at least, with its rules and customs. Not quick to judge, the hips; she liked that much about them. Everyone was down for a reason and more often than not you were born to it. It was quieter here too; she saw gardens, passed a hip with a shotgun, took his nod and hustled by.

Something in the corner of her eye—a flicker, a motion. A tail? She kept on walking, activating the tiny camera on the back of her earlobe and looking through her implants. Nothing, just the hip scratching his ass. It happened again, a flicker, her whole vision now like a screen on the fritz. She switched back to her eyes. A cold, sick feeling was rolling up in her stomach. She pushed it down, gritting her teeth and walking faster. Again a flicker, longer this time. How much time did she lose, a second? A minute? The cold, sick knot moved up her throat and she recognized the fear, the dread. The brick wall to the left of her was swimming, swaying like a liquid but just the wall. A two-second delay on the right side of her vision, a crow flying past and then again and again, repeating his journey from telephone pole to roadkill.

She turned around but she couldn't tell where she'd come from. Her vision kept spinning even as her legs stopped. The fear had taken hold now, her breathing panicked, sweat staining her lucky heart tank. A flat, logical part of her wondered how much was natural and how much was induced by the hackers—because she had been hacked. Her worst fear—everyone's worst fear—to have your implants hacked, controlled by another person. They could do all kinds of nasty things—jack up your heart rate till you blew or just straight poison you on your own bile. Fuck up your vision so you saw your mom as a werewolf and stabbed her in the eye. Or make you think you could fly and leap off a building. Those were some of the better things you could hope for.

It wasn't easy to do. Sure, people could hop into your vision from time to time; it was a simple circuit. Maybe they'd get in your ears or catch a stray feed. But to take control—theoretically the implants were coded on the individual's brain signature. To take control you'd pretty much have to carve out the brain and scan it. Theoretically. Her vision flickered and she heard a laugh, a hyena laugh. Out of the corner of her eye she caught a shadow, then it was gone. Then she saw him. Friar, standing a few feet away, looking to the right of her. It was Friar, perfectly, had to be him, but he was faint, not quite part of the surroundings. He was talking:

"The L'eilith Zoriathan complex cannot be named a virus. Nor can it be understood within the more accurate, but still inadequate terming of information science. (An amusing coincidence of acronym, that IS truly is. Existence—information, a pattern of atomic particles, so easy to break and rearrange.) We perceive the Net in terms of place, and we assign the Wekba a location; it is quaint to the point of despair. In truth the Wekba is transactional, an exchange rather..."

"Friar?"

He turned to look at her as if he'd heard her. Her vision began to flicker, his eyes opened wide, too wide, and his mouth, and they stretched and merged and formed a black hole where his face should have been. Her hearing cut out—all but a loud ringing, and a sound like a tiny maggot crawling across her eardrum, every scrape of its legs against her skin magnified a thousand times. Friar started walking towards her, an unnatural, jerking walk, and she wanted to run but her legs wouldn't move. He drew closer and closer, jerking and twitching and she opened her mouth and screamed, but all that came out was thick, black, viscous strings, pouring out and then Friar was in front of her and she stared into the black and he reached up and—

A hand on her shoulder; she whirled and smacked him in the knee with her prod. He crumpled with an _oomf_ and she screamed and kicked him with her steel-toed boots. She kicked and screamed for about a minute until she realized she was back, the hack was gone and she was normal, beating the ever-loving shit out of the hip guard who had probably just come to help. She stopped and grasped her knees, shuddering, thankful the kick knives in her boots hadn't flipped out. She grabbed at her hip flask and took a long gulp. Fuck, she was too sober. The alcohol would flush her system, drunk her up, scramble her brain waves and make it harder for the hackers to lock onto her and crack her code. She took another swig and finished the flask and then snorted the contents of her ring stash—a mix of powdery accelerants that would blend with the alcohol and scramble her pattern further. Yeah, that'll do it. Already she felt the ups and downs pulling her in every direction.

The hip was on the ground, moaning. For a second she thought of dashing, but it was hard to ignore her role in this tragedy. Plus, the hips looked after one another—community and all that bullhickey. Word got around and she didn't want to alienate half the population of Philadelphia over a freak-out. She'd fix him up and then figure out the asshole trying to claw his way into her brain. Lou, maybe? Twenty grand was a lot to toss around, maybe too much. Maybe he sniffed more and was trying to drill into her accounts. Hah, fat chance, Eugene had all her cash, but of course Lou didn't know that—or maybe he did now. Had they taken anything, any important thoughts? The sick feeling came back—the feasters, they were hacking her, trying to beat her to the prey, but no, that didn't make any sense, they couldn't know about her. Or care, even.

"Huh," she said aloud. "Interesting. Alright buddy, let's get you fixed up."

She took a Panaceum Easy-Ject from her gun belt and jabbed it into his arm. He stopped whimpering. It would pump him up with painkillers, increase blood and platelet production, start him healing up. Wouldn't do shit for bones, she knew—Panaceum my ass—and it was too slow for a bullet hole or a deep cut, but it was handy for the smaller stuff. He was looking at her, more confused than afraid, curling up at the pain and making it harder for her to see if anything was broken. She sighed.

"Look bud, I'm sorry about that. I had a freak-out, okay? You know how it is. I really didn't mean to rough you and I'm gonna try and patch you up as soon as you unclench your asshole."

He relaxed, a little, and she felt him up, making sure she hadn't smashed any ribs or ruptured any organs. She didn't think so. He'd be making a lot more noise for one thing, and also she discovered a layer of hockey pads under his flannel. Say what you would about the hips; they were resourceful. She patted him on the head.

"There you go bud, all set." She hoisted him to his feet and peeled out a couple of hundreds. "For your troubles."

He took the money and looked at it, looked at her, and then back at the money. Mute? Retarded? Who cared? She set off, back to Lou's.

"You're not right," he called to her when she was about a dozen steps away. He had some kind of foreign/redneck accent. "You'd best come with me."

She switched on her lobe camera and looked at him. He wasn't pointing the shotgun at her. She turned and put her hands on her hips.

"Oh," she said. "How's that?"

"It looked to me from where I was lying," ha ha, "that someone had been messing with your head. You'd best come with me."

This took her a while to process. Was it a ploy? A robbery attempt? Had she over-dished again and now this idiot was after her money? But no, it didn't seem that way. If this guy was a true hip and played by the book then he was honest, relatively. Which still didn't explain why he wanted her to come back with him. So ask, dummy.

"Why?"

He nodded at a point just behind her. She turned and looked around, couldn't figure it out. Then she realized he was nodding at the security spike, the two-story steel tree of antennae and monitoring devices. They were so common as to be invisible. She realized immediately what he meant—he wasn't so dumb after all. If someone was hacking her implants then a good place to bounce a signal and sneak a peak was a good old-fashioned US security spike. There weren't too many of those in the Fish. It was a good bet that she'd be safer from hackers there than just about anywhere else in Philly. Well, why not? She had time to kill and she was just about out of booze anyway. They made a good grog, the hips.

"Alright," she said. "Lead on."

Chapter 7

The hip was leading her astray. She hadn't been much in the Fish but her map told her she wasn't heading towards any of the major hip coops. Possibly it was a smaller one, unknown—they moved around enough—or her map could've been fried in the hack, or maybe it was just a secret entrance, but she didn't think so. It smelled like a trap, or a hidden purpose at least. The terrain told her nothing—sinkhole streets with sewer-pipe bones and burning gas lines. Crumbling warehouses and factories, glimpses of gardens poking through—what were they growing? Corn? She was impressed with their horticulture, forcing green up out of ashy basements and asphalt fields.

She studied the hip, scanning for signs of deceit. He seemed relaxed enough—did he limp before or was that her handiwork?—not tensed, not glancing around for signs of compatriots. The shotgun he carried was an ancient Harrier model, more likely to blow up in his face than kick out a bullet, and she doubted any of the munitions he'd managed to scavenge or nick would put much oomph against the micromesh woven into her clothes. Still, he could get lucky and stick a pellet in her eye. Or a friend of his could drop a brick on her head. She sped up a little to walk by his side. He smiled and nodded at her. For the first time she really looked at him and saw he was good to look at, with kind green eyes, and younger than he'd appeared, though his beard had streaks of gray. He was dirty, but not filthy, and skin surprisingly free of blemish, boils, cuts, or disease. This wasn't some wretch—he was a healthy man in his prime.

It bothered her, somehow, that her judgment had been so off. She thought she knew about the hips—what was there to know? They didn't have jobs, didn't have homes, half of them weren't registered and they kept to themselves. She felt suddenly tired, incredibly tired, tired of thinking, and having her notions challenged. Why couldn't things be easy? She let her mind drift—ambush be damned—to straight lines and right angles, a city of walls and sharp divides, clean separations between good and evil, person and object, worthy and unfit to live.

For the thousandth time she thought of skipping town, taking her five hundred thousand buckaroos and hopping the first jet outta this joint. She'd have to head to another zone, another Net, across the ocean maybe with the Eurocrats or the Sinomer or even the Xing-2 if she got desperate. It was a pipe dream, of course. The Gaespora would never let her skip town, order unfulfilled. They'd slap an injustice lien on her and in ten seconds flat every roly-poly would-be hero with a gun would be on her ass, lickin' for the bounty. More and more she realized how stupid, how empty, how useless all this money was. Every bill had a string attached. Ten million. What would she do with it? She had no idea. It was just a number, a big, bold, impressive-sounding number that even the dumbest math reject could understand would make her rich. Friar, he was a thinking man—now haunting her for some reason (was that part of the hack or just her memory toilet coming unclogged while some bastard poked around in her skull?) He knew exactly where every dollar would go, what kind of instruments it would buy and how many fifty-foot holes he could secretly drill into the sewers. He had taken calculated risks until his sanity was worth more than a buck or two—and still lost in the end. She, she had just seen a fat piece of meat hanging from a tree and yanked, missing the bear trap underneath.

"You're a detective."

It was so quiet in this part of town that his voice startled her. Her Betty leapt halfway from the holster, drawn to her hand by twitchy nerves and custom magne-plants in her palm and trigger finger. He noticed the bustle at her side, like she had an angry pigeon in her pocket, but didn't comment. She cursed that dimwit saw jockey but really it was her fault. She'd dialed the twitch response up about as high as it would go—better to shoot first and scamper—but now she saw it was a liability, showing off all her secrets before she got a chance to tease. Had he seen the gun? Did he know the ball buster in the barrel would rip a hole in him the size of a beach ball, hockey pads or no? She sent a command to the holster, switching out the ammo for flashers. They'd make a fuck of a noise and were bright as the Fourth of July, but they wouldn't leave anyone in pieces.

"How do you know?" she said. How did he know?

"Saw you on the feed. You solved a mystery. Found a lost kid."

"I thought you hips didn't watch the feeds."

"We watch them on a screen, as God intended. Nothing in our brains. Our thoughts are our own."

"Sounds inconvenient."

"There are more important things in life than convenience."

"So, where are you taking me?"

"Somewhere safe."

"For who?"

"For the both of us. I mean you no harm...though by God's teaching you had given me the justice to raise a hand, you did ask forgiveness and I gave."

That wasn't strictly true, but whatever you want buddy. Somehow she trusted him. She got on the Net (already slow as hell here) and browsed information on the hips. There wasn't a whole lot to go on—who wanted to study the homeless anyway? They had an organization, of sorts, or at least principles handed down by their God. The damnedest thing was that they seemed to follow them. She tracked through all the police reports and couldn't find any incidences of hip aggression. There'd been posers, other homeless and vagabonds not taken by the Book, but it didn't seem like the real hips had so much as slapped an ass without permission. There were plenty of accounts of vandalism though, massive amounts actually, almost all against Net fixtures—power stations, routing stations, security spikes, and the underground pipelines. Shit, they'd even launched rockets at satellite dishes and antennae. It was a war on modern society. She understood now why Vericast was lobbying for a population cull—round 'em all up, fix 'em with a plee collar, and stick 'em in a factory gutting fish or folding sheets.

"What do you have against the Net—wait, no, what's your name?" There we go, manners.

"My name is Ibrahim. But many of us take old names, and there are only so many to go around, so you may call me Hemu."

"Delighted, I'm Saru." They shook hands, sort of. He went in for some strange sort of grip greeting but she gripped tighter and forced it into a strong American handshake.

"Saru is an unusual name."

"They told me it comes from another zone. My mom was a Eurocrat, Gaulian or one of those strange places, but I never knew her."

"Your father?"

"An asshole. I grew up in the HMH, Hathaway Morning House. Won the lottery or something and got an education—not that it stuck."

Yeah, the lottery for sure. Backwoods farm bitch to big-city boarding slut. Should've been a reporter, should've written a book on that place, blown it open. She oughta go back right now guns blazing and blow a hole in the wall, hold off the guards while the kids ran to freedom. She wondered how many got out, how many were right now filing their shitty plastic cafeteria knives into shanks, planning to slice the hall guard's Achilles tendon and steal his keys.

"What about you?" she asked, not really caring. This talk was boring. The past was the past and nothing fixed that so it didn't make no difference. Hemu seemed genuine in his requests so she'd given him more than a kick in the nuts, but all this talk was stupid. Who cared about families and parents and childhood tales? What the hell did that have to do with anything? Hemu started talking about his life, his parents growing up in the Fish...being cooks in the Walnut Coop, his great triumph stripping copper from an old subway car and trading it to buy long underwear for the whole coop. A hero. She switched on a comedy feed and watched two fat men run around slapping people with their cocks. She set her body to follow Hemu and her head to nod and her mouth to make a _huh_ or noise of interest now and then.

Her instincts pulled her out of the feed—the system worked. It wasn't danger but curiosity. They'd come to a building, a chapel, surrounded by a maze of massive brick warehouses and factories. Up in the darkening sky—how long had they been walking?—she could make out an artificial canopy of steel girders, rope nets, and carefully placed debris. Their location was hidden from surveillance, aerial and satellite, and nested in the middle of an industrial jungle. The chapel was pressed, squeezed between the walls of an alley, small, like a double-decker bus. It seemed ancient, carved of stone, gargoyles and monsters, and...fish? leaping out in master-crafted detail, stained-glass windows—real glass, real art, not a screen that switched to ads every thirty seconds—depicting...what did they depict? It seemed abstract, but the more she stared—was that a person? An ocean? A planet? What was this place?

She felt a hand on her shoulder, Hemu, and somehow it was reassuring. There was that feeling here, that tingle in her tits and hair along her spine, that something just shy of the natural was at work. Hemu was looking at her, and his face was serious.

"It was a risk, bringing you here," he said. "You are connected to the Net, and the dark God that hungers, but my God said to me it must be so."

"Oh did he?" she said, trying to sound wry but she was rattled. It was so quiet here, so strange, all these dead buildings with no noise. This wasn't a city; it was a forest. She saw the plants—so many plants, growing from the cracks in the building, the grime between the bricks, the vines crawling over everything and the flowers, the white flowers like tiny bells everywhere. Where had they all come from? Were they native? She'd never seen them anywhere else.

"Come," Hemu said. He led her inside, through the carved wooden doors into the warmth and light. There were pews, and hips, heads bowed, lips moving in quiet prayer. The floor was marble. Yes, this had been a chapel, McChristian maybe, but so old? Where had it come from? She tried to scan the Net but found a signal error. She was cut off, in a dead zone. At the far end where she guessed an altar would normally be was a large white statue. What was that girl the McChristians worshipped? Mara? Susan? Whatever, at some point it might have been her, but the face had been carved out, roughly, leaving an empty scoop in the head. Saru didn't like the statue. She could tell that it was the source of the bullshit, that it was the thing making her hair go all staticky and running the thrill-sex touch up and down her skin.

"What am I doing here?" she asked, loudly, causing the hips to look up. She should be at a bar, drinking to keep her mind scrambled, chasing leads, checking on Lou, hunting down the bastards that had hacked her—pornographers, maybe, trying to rip out her sex life and sell it? Ha, bad luck buddies. This was a waste of time.

"You're looking for a girl," Hemu said, bluntly, feeding her back her own get-to-it tone. "A girl with blue eyes. We know her. We can find her."

Well, that got her attention.

"You know her, her, specifically?" Wait, how? "Hey, how did you know I was looking for her?"

He gestured to the statue. "God told us."

"Oh." Goddamnit, what a waste of time. Hemu nodded at her, as if reading her thoughts.

"There are no dogs in the city," he said.

"So?" She was ten seconds away from desecrating this place and laughing her ass back to civilization. "There aren't many cats either, or—" but that wasn't true, she realized. She'd seen cats, not many, but a few. So what? They were harder to catch than dogs; they could climb trees and scurry better. And they weren't so dependent on handouts.

"So what?" she said.

"The other, the Blue God that follows the girl. It likes dogs. It wants to be a wolf."

That was something. The other...he was talking about the alien. He knew about that. But to him it was all mixed up in religion. To the Gaespora it was a marketing gimmick. To Friar it was science. To this poor bastard it was divine intervention. And to her it was all just a fat pain in the ass.

"So you know about the...others?"

He nodded. "We have known about them longer than anyone. We follow the First. The Slow God who knows time and waits. She came when the skies lost their blue and told us how we could live in a world of dark. From Her we have learned peace. We have learned simplicity. We have learned to trust one another, and above all to turn from the Hunger. She knows the Blue God, has seen him in other worlds beyond ours. They are not the same but they know how to live without destroying one another. The Hunger does not know this. It knows only Hunger."

"And what about the..." Shit, what would this nutcase call the Gaespora? The Green God? The Rich God? The Annoying God? Ah screw it; she couldn't play this game. "What about the Gaespora? You know, the plant people."

"They are like the Hunger though they are not. They seek to grow, to become Gods of Gods, but through kinder means. The Slow God neither gives nor takes from the Sad Gods. She pities them, for they have lost much, and chastens them, for they have not learned. Of all the Gods, their end is least certain."

"Oh, okay. So, where's this girl? The Blue God's escort."

She noticed that all the hips in the joint were now watching them, staring almost reverently at her. There were at least thirty of them, and she saw they were armed with guns, knives and—was that a sword? She slapped herself mentally for letting down her guard. Lame as they may be they could still dog pile her and chop off her head. And she hadn't quite realized how nutty these guys were. They really believed this shit.

"We will help you, but you must help us."

"Ah, a capitalist God. I like that."

"We would not ask. We would help you freely, but we are desperate."

Desperate. That was something she could understand, that could make a body do some twisted shit. And if she said no? Awfully tempting, seeing as they seemed to be relying on voodoo just like everyone else. Would they beat her senseless and crucify her if she flipped them the bird and bounced? Although...Hemu had been sincere enough, and really what she needed was thousands of slaves to keep an eye out for all the blue-eyed girls in the Fish. That was almost exactly what Hemu could give her, if he wasn't bullshitting.

"What do you want me to do?"

"I will show you."

It was a tricky climb to the top of the warehouse, but the view was breathtaking. The city was a wall of lights and crawling ads, spilling into Jersey across the Hathaway Bridge. She'd never seen Philly like this before, the panorama of light, almost as far as you could see in any direction. It was like a fantasy world, a magical kingdom—it almost looked like a place where you would want to be. Above it all, a massive steel erection jutting from the wall of light, the Vericast building, illuminated by a bluish beam of what she could only suppose was moonlight, a symbol of absolute might. She got the odd sense that they could see her up in the Gaespora forest, that ElilE was still there on his rock, that he hadn't moved since their meeting, and that he was seeing through the miles of air and dark to warn her: time was running out.

But that wasn't what Hemu had brought her up here to see. He was pointing at something below, and shouting something—they had to shout the wind was so loud. She didn't like the wind. The heights she could handle, sort of, but all this blowing, whipping her hair in her eyes and chilling her through her coat; it seemed to be pushing her towards the edge, urging her to jump, calling her a pussy if she didn't make a try at flying. What was Hemu pointing at? It was a building, maybe, large, almost a quarter of a city block, illuminated by slow-blinking lights. It almost looked like a refinery. Oh speak up you mild-mannered twat. She grabbed his head, and brought it closer to hers, almost so their foreheads touched. She was pleasantly surprised that his breath didn't reek—was that peppermint?

"What. Are. You. Saying?"

"It's a fab dozer," he said, pointing at the building. "It's coming this way."

"So?"

"It will destroy the church, the Place of Communion."

"So? Build another one."

He shook his head.

"The Slow God cannot be in all places. This place is close to Her. This place is dear."

She thought back to what ElilE had said about similarity—what had he said, similarity margins? Margarine?—well, similarity. And this God, or alien, or inspired con artist preferred this particular spot.

"What will happen if it's destroyed?"

He shook his head again.

"It will be bad. She brings us peace."

The thought hit her hard—peace. That was the word. The quiet, the calm around the area, the green things growing everywhere and the flowers. And she hadn't seen an elzi in hours. She could believe that there was something here, a God, a gas leak, a fluke of topography that made it desirable real estate.

She activated her binoculars and night vision. She could see the fab dozer now, a box frame on bus-sized treads with wrecking balls, heat rays, grinders, chemical recyclers, auto-assemblers, and three-dimensional printers. She could see the line of apartments it had shit out behind it—nice, two-story buildings with brick facades, for the young techies and embyays. It was a billion-dollar automated development device—it had to be automated to keep Hathaway's hands clean in case an elzi or a hip got caught in the blender—and Hemu was asking her to destroy it, because she would have to destroy it. It was doubtful she could get a sharp enough program to reroute the thing, and even if she did they would eventually catch the error and fix it. This would carry a terrorism charge at the least and you couldn't buy your way out of that. The feds'd strap her to a metal cross and rip out her fingernails, peel off her nipples, rape her with cattle prods and snap her bones, one by one until she confessed. There was no way.

"I can't do that," she said. "I can't. I mean, I don't even know how, and even if I did—they'd catch me. That thing is a fortress. I'm sorry but no go."

He stared at the fab dozer, face unchanged.

"You don't understand."

"No, I think I understand alright."

"It is not you who can do this. It is the girl. When you find her, you must bring her here. She will destroy the machine."

"I can't do that. I have to bring her to the Gaes—the Sad Gods."

"Do you know why they seek this girl?"

"They want to protect her. There are men trying to find her, trying to kill her."

"Yes. Let us go below."

They climbed down three stories of dilapidated stairs and rickety ladders. The building was occupied in the lower floors, ruined but clean, and with the green vines everywhere with the white flowers—maybe that was the only thing keeping the building up. They stopped on the thirtieth floor—fuck that had been a climb—where a heavy scent of cooking vegetables filled the air. The smell made her mouth water; all she'd had was that stick of Chew 20 and half a liter of bourbon. Her stomach growled. Hemu lead her to a line of scraggly-looking men and women and handed her a bowl carved of wood. They followed the line to a huge pot, repurposed from an industrial container of some sort, full of bubbling stew. They were served by baggy old women and then found a place alone in a corner by a window. It was dark and hard to see without night vision, but the hips didn't seem to have a problem. There were fires, which seemed like a terrible idea, but they were careful to contain them in drums and piles of rocks, and the whole wide floor flickered between light and shadow. Peace. It was peaceful. There were no city sounds and the people hardly spoke. There was a moan, some couple having sex in the shadows somewhere. She sipped at the broth of the stew—not bad, needed salt. Her poison sniffer said it was fine.

"You must spend the night," Hemu said. "You will be safe here."

"Okay," she said. Strangely she was in no hurry to leave. Sheltered from the wind it wasn't too cold and she still had a fine view of the city. Her brain was acting funny, all sober now, and she felt she might actually get a full night of natural sleep.

"In the morning, we will help you," Hemu said. How did he know? Was he the leader? He hadn't talked to anyone but her this whole time. But she realized that didn't matter. No one talked here, in the Communion Place, but they communed. The decisions were made in conference with the Slow God. They were all together here, protected. She could feel it, just a little, in the corner of her mind. It was a nice feeling, but it made her sad.

"When you find the girl, you must decide. You must bring her to us or bring her to the Sad Gods."

"You were waiting for me," she said. Of course. That's why he was there.

"Not me. All of us. I found you."

"And the girl, is she one of you?"

"She is what you would call hip to mean she has no home and she relies on others like her. But she does not follow the Slow God. We are not many."

"But you control the hips?"

"We give as we can. The Slow God gives freely to man and we take all we can and give to others. But our understanding is small."

She felt very strange. This peace shit was getting to her. It was...relaxing. She felt all the disconnected strands of her brain, plugged into all the feeds, all the processes of checking her back and scanning for threats and searching, always searching—they all wound together and for what seemed like the first time she was living as a whole, focused, present, part of a moment. And the moment was shared. She reached out and held Hemu's hand, furious at both her need and her embarrassment. He took her hand and held it gently, and they stayed that way until she drifted off to sleep.

Chapter 8

The girl had been bound and gagged, trussed up like a turkey, no signs of a struggle—she'd probably thought it was part of the game. They'd slit her throat and then let the blood run into a trench about four inches deep, two feet wide, and four feet long. Now the trench was a rectangle of black, crusty, mud, like a giant chocolate bar. They'd scooped out the girl's eyes, cleanly, and then laid her down, spread her legs and arms, and unraveled her veins to make a blood angel in the dirt. It was the sixth girl in two weeks, and all Saru could feel—aside from an urge to fill the trench with vomit—was relief. This wasn't the girl; this wasn't her girl. She knew because of the flower in her hair. This was just a poor, sad, desperate woman who happened to have unusually bright blue eyes—she assumed.

Hemu had given her the flower—and a promise that the hips, or the worshippers of the Slow God would comb the Fish in search of the girl—plucked it seemingly at random from the chapel wall and placed it in her hair. She'd tossed it, of course, and ground it into the pavement with her boot. The memory of the night made her angry, each step away from the place had made her angrier and angrier. What were they playing at? What was this? More smoke and mirrors, more scams, more drugs and ploys to drill inside her brain and manipulate her. At the time it had felt real, believable, nice even. But back on the streets, away from the flowers and silent vagabonds and the city sky all lit up like stars, it seemed like she had just been played again, given just enough information to make her look like a sap, hooked, landed, and flayed.

And the damn flower wouldn't go away! A tiny white bell on a thin green stem and every morning it appeared in her hair again, exactly where Hemu had placed it, lovingly, reverently almost—had she really considered sleeping with a homeless man? The thought filled her with disgust and a self-loathing that was warm and comfortable like an old sweater. She'd crushed and burned the flower, flushed it down the toilet and tossed it off a rooftop—scene of a disemboweled schoolgirl—but always it came back. It was a glitch in her memory—her whole brain, her whole setup was glitched. There was no flower but for whatever reason her brain had fixated on it, forgotten to delete the memory when the flower itself was gone, and so she was haunted by it. That and other things. Her vision still flickered from time to time, she'd lose minutes and forget where she was, and sometimes she heard the laugh, the hyena laugh of Friar's death. She needed to find a saw jockey she could trust, someone to go into her brain and reset everything to factory settings. But she couldn't afford it now, couldn't afford the downtime of having her mind rebooted, the drooling, the potty training, the learning to walk all over again.

"The odd thing is," someone was talking. She'd zoned out, let her thoughts take her away. She brought herself back to the moment, back to the mutilated girl in front of her, the mounds of reeking garbage—a desperate woman turning tricks in a junkyard—the obnoxious cackling of crows, and the spindly man in a saggy gray uniform trying to make sense of it all. McCully, a vulture, private forensics and body auctioneer. Made a living as sell-serve to PIs and then selling the corpses back to the family, if they gave a shit.

"...is that this girl didn't suffer. They cut her throat, and with something sharp, before they took her apart. The other girls, well, it took them a long time to die."

"What are you thinking?" she said, mechanically. She didn't really care; the girl was dead, it wasn't her mark, time to move on. There were no clues here, hadn't been any clues before, not so much as a hair or a drop of blood or even a sign of a struggle. The girls had no traces of identifying drugs, no bullet holes or darts, not even particularly high levels of stress chemicals considering how they'd died. She'd pulled all their histories and given them to Jojran to investigate, but she didn't have any hope. The only thing that seemed to tie the murders together was they'd all had their eyes scooped out. One of the girls had a friend—yes, her eyes had been blue, but that was still hardly evidence. It was entirely possible these murders were just a lark for some psychopath—she'd even called Lou and told him to cancel the chase, just in case—but she didn't believe it. Too much coincidence. And there was that damn flower.

Deep in her gut, the part of her really steering the ship, she could feel it, feel the flower. It was like a wind chime in a warm breeze. Now it was tinkling, metal pipes gently knocking against each other as she looked down at the eyeless corpse with her veins spread out like angel wings. It touched her just enough to tell her this was important, but it wasn't the clanging she'd feel if this were her girl. A dumb game of Marco Polo. Marco! Polo! Marco! Polo!

"...I'd say she died late last night, early morning. Lucky that none of the elzi got at her, strange even, because this place is crawling with 'em." McCully gestured grandly at the panorama of garbage. "They love this place, there're piles of 'em here—are you listening to me?"

"Yeah," she said.

He squinted at her. His face was wrinkly, like a walnut. "I don't like this," he said. "A few more of these and the cops'll have to get involved."

That would be the end of her case, ruined. They'd storm the slums, kick down doors, round people up, chase every lead—not that too many were presenting themselves as it was—into a rat hole and then find some poor foreign schlep to take the fall and execute him on the evening news.

"What do I owe you?" she asked, wearily. At the time a half a million dollars had seemed pretty close to infinite money, but now having to pay out half the fucking city for tips and leads, Net tracks, thugs, pimps, vultures, dudaws, and mercs, she was pissing cash.

"Two thousand."

She counted it out. "You gonna take the body?"

"Family's got nothing. I'll leave it for the elzi."

"Okay. You know, the second you get word I want you to call me."

"You expecting more like this?"

"Yeah."

He glanced around nervously at the piles of trash. A vulture didn't spook easy, didn't go well with poking at corpses and lugging them around, but McCully seemed downright nervous, like whoever did the girl was going to pop out and lop off his dick. Fat chance; he had about the grayest, blandest eyes you could imagine, grayer than his drab vulture onesie.

"Walk away," he said. "Whatever you're doing, whatever they're paying you, walk away."

"Can't."

"You're in over your head."

"Boy don't I know it."

He glanced around again, conspiratorially, and then leaned in close. "Saru, whoever killed these girls knew what they were doing. I've never seen a throat cut like that before. It's like they used a machine, straight, measured, even. And the way they moved her..." He kept glancing around. Who did he think was listening? But he'd gotten her attention at least. "It, it's hard to say just from what we have...but it looks like she moved herself."

"What do you mean?" What did he mean?

"I mean, after they cut her throat and bled her out into the trench, it looks like she stood up and lay down on her own."

"Is that possible?"

"For an elzi maybe, who knows what keeps them moving, but they're clumsy...I don't know who or what could do this, but it stinks of Wekba...this isn't a normal crime."

"Well I know that already," she said crossly, and started walking away. "Keep this quiet," she yelled over her shoulder. "And let me know when you get the next one."

An elzi was lying on the hood of her Cadillac, basking in the midday haze like a lizard. She pulled a rusty pipe from a trash pile and used it to pry him off her hood. He fell to the ground and then crawled away on hands and knees, stopping to lick a gum wrapper he'd found. The Caddy was a piece of shit and she hated driving it—stuck in traffic, vulnerable—and paying $400 to fill it up, but cabs wouldn't run out to the city skirts. Too many cabbies had been called out to nowhere land only to be tapped in the back of the head and have their cars chopped up.

She grumbled the car to life and careened down the dirt path to the exit and onto something resembling a street—more potholes than anything. Halfway to the city center she got a call from Jojran. She switched the Caddy to auto and put Jojran up on the windshield. He used an avatar, an electric blue tiger-man in some sort of Gyptian-looking space suit. His avatar sat in a chair like he was commanding a starship and there were stars flying by in the background. What a fucking joker, but he was good at what he did.

"I've found something," he said. He used his own voice, squeaky, like a ball forgot to drop. It was ridiculous coming from the ultra-masculine tiger body he'd chosen for himself.

"What is it?"

"Come over and I'll show you." Always trying to get her to come over. Always trying to get in her pants. Maybe if he came out and said it she'd let him cop a feel but she couldn't stand his simpering innuendo, his false-confidence suave.

"Just patch me in."

"Bad idea, this is heavy shit. Might hurt."

"I can take it."

"Come on over, it'll be fun."

She sighed inwardly. If it was anything interesting it was probably a bad idea to just feed it to her over the Net. Glitched out as she was it could cause her to blow a neuron or if she really was being hacked then they could just lift it off of her. Besides, Jojran always had good booze. She'd raid his bar and skedaddle.

"Alright. Be there in a half hour."

She kicked it back into manual and revved up to ninety, flying onto the highway and zipping in between the SUVs and trucks, Hathaway chem tankers, minivans, motorcycles, and techie sports cars. Mentally she accessed her account and dropped a few thousand bucks into her exemption fund, just in case a copper was lurking somewhere. Half the fucking cars were ASA vehicles in disguise, and she'd already gone through the hassle once of being caught and having her Caddy seized. She'd had to drop almost ten grand in bribes to get it back—she would've let it rust if there hadn't been about forty grand worth of contraband implants hidden in the snicker case in the fuel tank. A woman in a beat-up go-fuck-yourself-mobile flipped her off as she passed, and the Betty slipped a few centimeters out of its holster. Damn that thing was twitchy.

First exit to downtown she screeched to a stop and got out. She told the Caddy to go back to the garage and prayed it found its way this time. Last week she'd sent it home and it went exploring instead—a typical GPS fuckup—and wedged itself in an alley ten blocks away with blood all over the grill. The dash cam showed an elzi skipping into the highway. Three grand to clean the damn thing and hammer out the dents. She thought again of plans to round up all the elzi and put them on a barge on the river and ship 'em to Jersey. Or just sink the barge.

Jojran lived in a fancy apartment building off Washington Park. The security guard wouldn't open the door for her.

"Listen," she said, pressing the com button and gritting her teeth. "I have an appointment with Alex Ramirez." She wasn't sure if that was Jojran's real name or just an identity he'd stolen for the real world, but it was the name he was using to live in this nice place and she did have every right to be there, and this guy was pissing her off. She could see him through the glass, talking to his sneering compatriot, shaking his head. He wasn't even responding to her. She knew there was an auto-rifle pointed at her somewhere, loaded with tranqs or rubber bullets or hell it could even be lead. It wouldn't do her any good to throw a tantrum outside but it might give her some emotional satisfaction. How strong was that glass? Mentally she rifled through the ammo in her holster—she had a few Bob's Big Boys that were closer to cruise missiles than bullets. Would that do it? She started calculating what her sentence would be. That was the problem with crimes against the rich—they could always outbid you. Not if she solved this case. She could shoot anyone she wanted then. But first she had to get into this fucking building. She called Jojran.

"These fucking pig men won't let me in," she said, wishing she could blame them.

"I'll talk to them," he said, self-important. She got the strange sense that he had arranged this in some ill-conceived plot to impress her. She saw the one guard's eyes go unfocused for a second, taking a call, and then he reached down to his console and she heard a buzz as the door unlocked. She strolled in and flashed them a smile.

"Thanks," she said.

"Sorry for the misunderstanding," he said. It was clear he still thought she belonged on the other side of the glass. The lobby was so clean and bright, and had abstract paintings on the wall. All the copper was polished and shiny, the uniforms crisp and clean. The guards themselves looked like competent men—tall, fit, poised, close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair and hard eyed—not the pudgy houseplants you normally saw parked behind a reception desk. The guard's eyes watched her sign in; she saw the twitch in his jaw as her thumbprint came up as Susan Greere, CPA, CFO, Meadow Media. He knew it was fake as a stripper tit but she was a guest. He walked her to the elevator and stood glaring at her. She glared right back and resisted the urge to flip him off just as the doors sucked closed.

Jojran lived in one of the top quarter suites, an open two-floor affair of dark wood, brushed steel, and wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling windows with a breathtaking view of the city below—away from the filth of humanity it almost looked nice. The view was a waste as Jojran spent 99 percent of his waking life on the Net—a self-titled super-user, uber, viking, elite, professional masturbator, whatever you called it. He greeted her in a leopard-print silk bathrobe that did little to distract from his height deficit and surplus fat. She hoped to God there were silk boxers on underneath—and why was he wearing just socks?

"Welcome," he said, dramatically, squeakily. "To my humble abode."

"Lovely," she said. She pushed past him and went to the bar, an actual bar in the corner, and began rummaging for the most expensive thing she could find. Dimly it occurred to her that if she solved this case then she could afford to live in a place like this, to stare out the windows at the little people below and drink vodka swirling with pulverized diamonds. She poured herself a glass and drank.

"Can I get you anything?" he asked, as she finished the first glass and started on a second. He was following a script, some rehearsed plan of seduction. There was a twinge of pity for him somewhere in her, but that was about it. If he wanted sex he could buy a girl or a guy or a mountain goat if that tickled his fancy. Whatever need made him act this way toward her was something she couldn't understand—or entirely afford to neglect. Certainly he didn't help her for the money; he made enough of that stealing IDs and scraping corporate accounts. Nor did she bring him particularly interesting cases, present case excepted.

"I'll have this," she said, now studying a bottle of what looked like potent grain alcohol that had been drunk by beautiful women and then urinated out and distilled again. Would there even be any alcohol left? Worth a shot. She took one. Not bad.

"Ah, yes. I have the full range of Virile Vodkas—I'm something of a connoisseur. Might I tempt you with this?"

He sallied over and found a small bottle of clear glass in the shape of a penis. He poured out a generous glass and handed it to her. She took it and sniffed. Her poison detectors found traces of an aphrodisiac cocktail, a mix of designer chems meant to make her horny, but nothing malicious. They'd been tailored to her to increase potency, which she found oddly touching, and she wondered where he'd gotten a sample of untainted DNA. She had a viral shedder that sprinkled taints of gobbledygook throughout her body so genetics were usually useless against her. Had they failed? Or had he spent the time to go through and extract what he could to match her somatic profile? That was a little creepy. The poison sniffer gave her the green; she could disassemble and neutralize the cocktail. It was simple enough that she copied it to study later, maybe she could reverse engineer it, have it secreted from her lips or pheromones and take a stab at Eugene one day. She sipped.

"Oh that's very nice," she said, and commanded her face to blush a little. Might as well play along. She tossed her coat on one of the white leather couches and adjusted her shirt and bra to maximize her cleavage. He noticed. Her scanners swept him, saw the quickening pulse, the anticipation, and the anxiety. For all his skill on the Net he lacked the sophistication of a person-to-person bout and he was naked before her. Another twinge of pity. Oh, well, time to get to the point.

"So what do you have for me?" she asked.

"Huh?" Staring at her tits. "Oh, right. Yeah. It's interesting." She could tell it was. He was torn between sharing his news and delaying to try...something with her.

"Oh?" She flattened her tone. "Show me."

"Okay."

He sat down on the small couch facing the floor-to-ceiling windows and patted the seat next to him. She poured herself a mix of everything at the bar and sat. He clapped his hands and the room went dark. There was the ozone feel of a Net wave and she found herself standing in Jojran's vik, his virtual kingdom, which appeared to be some sort of spaceship. He sat in the command chair as the electric blue man-leopard, and she sat at his side. In front of them was a screen that showed stars flying by. She'd been in viks before—most people had some form of escape—but they were usually patchy affairs, phoned-in, cardboard-fake theatre sets that did little more than disguise the ugliness of a sad-sack studio apartment. She'd considered building one herself, putting up some virtual wallpaper or a window or two but she didn't like the viks; they made it too hard to snatch truth from fiction.

Jojran's vik was especially unsettling. She knew she was sitting in the dark of his apartment on a too-cozy couch listening to him wheeze. But it took concentration to keep herself there. If she relaxed, let herself drift, she was back on the starship—she could feel the hum of the futuristic engines, the gentle murmur of the virtual crew and the faint blips and beeping. She could see the addictive factor, the power of controlling your reality that made so many poor saps into Net heads, working dead-end jobs, slogging through life just to get enough to pay the connection fee and stay logged in. Here, in this fantasy starship, she could even glimpse the motives that would lead a mind to explore, to push deeper and deeper into the fantasy, into the dark place of the Net that promised to make all dreams come true. What else was an elzi, really, other than a Net head with conviction?

"Do you like this setting?" Jojran asked, anxiously. "If you don't we can change it. I have a whole bunch. We could go to a forest or I've got some abstracts, and one where we fly around in a big feather bed." He seemed to be hoping for the last one.

"This is fine," she said tersely. Just being here was making her uneasy. She was pretty sure her hardware was glitched but if it was a hack then sitting in an open connection like this was dangerous. Of course Jojran had security measures and he could protect her, but she didn't know what she was up against. Even Jojran had never gone farther than peeking through another person's implants. He'd never tried seeding thoughts or mind control.

"Okay, so I looked up all the girls you gave me." Their faces appeared in the view screen—their real faces, thank God, from varying IDs, not the mutilated ones. They all had blue eyes. "And it was pretty much a no-go in terms of connection. Different ages, different backgrounds, though nobody especially important. The only connector seemed to be the fact that they had blue eyes."

"I know all that."

"Right, but then I found this."

A sphere appeared on the virtual screen, like a knot of hundreds of pieces of yarn all tangled together. It was absolutely meaningless to her.

"What am I looking at here?"

"A program rendered visually, an AI or bot. People use them to scrub the Net, do searches, machine tasks, but this, this is wild. Usually these'll have one or two strands but this has hundreds, this is a piece of work, like artistry right here. I've been trying to unravel it for days and it's had some pretty nasty surprises. It tried to send electrical feedback at me once and stop my heart, managed to dodge that one. And half of these are to hide it, to mask its presence. But everything leaves a trace."

"So, what does this have to do with the girls?"

"This is the connection," he said excitedly. This is the link between them. I found this strange, let's call it a presence, whenever I did a search on one of them. Like I found almost exactly what you would expect to find in a textbook search—the birth records, school records if they went to school, taxes, driver's license registration, job IDs, advertisements for sexual services, in one case. It was about as ordinary as you could get. Except I saw that someone else had been searching for these women, and after some digging I found this bot, tons of these bots going through, running these searches. And so I followed...that was a trip. And I found where they were taking this info. An uber, like me, someone else searching for these girls."

He couldn't contain himself any more. With an almost audible whoosh the virtual world vanished and they were sitting back in the living room, squinting in the light. Jojran was practically bouncing up and down with excitement.

"He made a list Saru! A list of these girls. And I found it. I _found_ it!"

Chapter 9

There were thirty-seven names on the list—she could cross out six—thirty-one, and there didn't seem to be one thing these girls had in common other than eye color. Whatever criteria the feasters were using was beyond anything that made sense to her, which itself made sense. She'd made Jojran print the list out so she had something to clutch while she paced back and forth tracking boot marks on his clean kitchen tiles.

"There has to be a connection," she said for the thousandth time.

"Uh huh," he said, not listening. He was doing the actual work of checking up on the women on the list, prying through their lives, checking to see if they'd gone to the same school, fucked the same guy, used the same hair dye or tampon, if they liked the same music, watched the same feeds, subscribed to the same religion or had any tiny thread that ran through all of their lives.

She unfurled the list and read it again. Melissa Caton, Emily Brown, Geraldine Fibreria, Fanny Duvak—why did that name seem familiar? She searched her memory, feeling as if she should know that name. Had she seen it somewhere? It was right on the edge of her memory...coming into focus and...lost it. Damn. Too many knocks on the head.

"Anything yet?" she asked Jojran.

"What are you expecting here? It took me a week to find this lead, you want me to do it again in three hours?"

She grumbled something and went back to pacing. The daylight outside was fading, the sunray over the Vericast tower growing faint. The city lights were coming on, thousands of points and squares of visibility in the gray-black evening. She could see right across to an office building where a worker was pissing into a plant by his desk. Was he drunk and desperate? Or was this a grudge? Or just routine, working hard, too lazy to go to the bathroom? She scanned the other windows, hoping to see a couple having sex. The feeds made it seem common, but nothing tonight.

A thought occurred. Five of the six women had been tortured before they died, but this most recent woman had been killed before they opened her up. Was that significant?

"Jojran."

"Uh."

"The woman killed last night that I told you about, Penny Wilshire. Let's focus on her."

"Why?"

"A hunch."

His eyes unglazed and the windows showed images of Penny. Saru didn't want to go back into his vik. It was draining, and besides, her vision was flickering again, her brain glitching out. Who knew what would happen—and that damn flower was back in her hair again. Penny had been pretty before they'd scooped out her eyes, and before she'd lost her cashier job at Selly's. She had a son but no husband or boyfriend, and an opiate dependency, which made her about as white-bread plain as you could get. She'd sold herself a few times to feed the kid or buy the heroin she needed—more often than not the latter. It wasn't a complete record, towards the end her sightings became sparse and were mostly police reports, getting picked up for possession and prostitution—ironically the easiest way to get out of jail. It seemed like the kid had fallen by the wayside.

"What about the kid, anything on him?"

His photo came up, only one. He was registered, a real person with a birthright chip, but he never got to school.

"Not much. He'd be about twelve now."

"Can you find him?"

"Doubtful." He went quiet and the quiet stayed. She got bored and started pacing again. Fanny Duvak, she knew that name, who was she? She tried to break the case down again and look at all the little pieces. The feasters wanted a girl, and they were guided by an alien evil, maybe. They thought this girl was a host for another alien. So they were killing all the girls that could possibly be the host and luckily they hadn't found the right one yet. So what made someone a good host? The Gaespora, ElilE, had been vague on that. There was something he was hiding for sure, but not something that would help her find the girl. It had to be genetics, some common trait they shared. A dead end. She didn't have genetic data, other than they all had blue eyes, and didn't know where to get it or have the skills to make any use of it. But then there was that other thing...what had Hemu said—if he was even a reliable source—that the other God, no, the other alien liked dogs?

"Did any of the women have a dog?" she asked.

"What?"

"Did any of the women own dogs. Or come in contact with dogs?"

"I'll...check. Doubt it."

She doubted it too. Owning a dog was a luxury of the rich—they had to be kept safe, after all, so the elzi didn't eat them—and most of these women were in that all-too-common, barely-scraping-by category.

"No...sorry."

"Yeah, I figured. Did any of them have any...dog-like traits?"

Jojran's eyes unglazed; he pulled out of the Net and craned his neck to look at her, incredulous.

"What does that even mean?"

"I don't know," she said angrily. "Did they ever bite anyone? Or have a good sense of smell, or get fucked on their knees?"

"I think you're drunk."

That was irrelevant. But he was right; it was a stupid question.

"Never mind," she said. "Forget it. Find the kid. And see if you can get genetics on any of the women."

"Oh I found the kid," he said. "You're going to love this. He's an elzi. He's in the registry, tagged and everything. You want to question him?"

"Shut up."

Damn, if only Friar was alive she could have. Why did he have to go and die like that? He couldn't have waited a week to help her out a bit more? And as she thought it her vision flickered like mad and the room began to spin faster and faster so it all swirled around like water going down a drain and taking her with it.

There he was, Friar, in the flesh. But where was there? They stood on a circular stone pillar about the diameter of a hot tub. Beyond the pillar was black, nothing but infinite black. She looked over the edge, far too close for her comfort, and saw more black. Up black, down black, left black, right black. If this was a vik it was about the most unimaginative she'd ever encountered, and easily the most realistic. The stone felt hard and real, she was honest-to-God freezing her tits off, and try as she might she couldn't bring her focus back to the real world. She was stuck here. Great.

Friar looked like he had looked alive: short, portly, balding, aged and wise with his professor getup. He seemed to be trying to talk but almost like he'd forgotten how. A lip-like indentation had formed in his forehead and was gabbing up and down. It migrated to his left cheek and then slithered down into his mouth. His real lips started moving and a sound came out like he was singing and moaning at the same time. The sound didn't dissipate; it just built and echoed and piled onto the previous notes echoing and bouncing through the black, louder and louder and louder. She clamped her hands over her ears but the sound was inside her, forcing her to her knees. Then there was a pop.

It was quiet and she was wet. She was kneeling in a puddle of orange...water? It felt strange on her, tingly. She stood and looked around and decided that if she was ever going to panic then now would be an excellent time. She wasn't on Earth, that was for sure, or any place she could conceive of as being Earth-like. It was a swamp of tiny orange pools amidst a veiny, purple and green ground that was spongy and slick with what seemed like phlegm. There were trees, if you could call them that—sharp, geometric arrangements, black, zigzagging, right-angle branches sprouting from furry testicles, climbing up and joining together to form a geodesic canopy. There were things moving through the canopy, things slithering through the muck, the whole place crawled and twitched with life. Her Betty flew to her hand; she was going to start blasting but the gun turned into a flower. Friar appeared in front of her and took it.

"I'm sorry, Saru. I'm so sorry," he said. It was his real voice.

"Tell me," she said, fighting the panic. "Tell me right now if this is real." As if she could trust him. He was as much a conjuring as anything else here—more so. Something fluttered overhead. Faint strings like strands of spider web slithered down from the canopy and caught a flitting—was it a bird? It had no wings, just a black, spiky/furry body with a large red hole that could have been its mouth or its ass or an eyeball. The spider strands constricted and she heard a shrill chitter as the creature was squeezed until its skin popped and its juices drizzled down to the sponge below, which gurgled and slurped at the drops of blood in apparent glee. She wanted go, right now.

"I'm sorry, Saru. I'm so sorry."

"Friar what's going on?"

"I'm sorry, Saru. I'm so sorry. I'm sorry, Saru. I'm so sorry. So sorry. So sorry. So sorry. So sorry. So sorry. So sorry."

His voice rose in pitch so he sounded like a chipmunk: "Sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry," and then fell and fell to become low, impossibly low, and the sound echoed as it had before, not dying but growing and building and bouncing around the swamp, and deep within the song of his repeated sorries she heard another song, a different song, one that it seemed to her had been sung for a very long time by a great number of people and living things that were not people, and even things that didn't live, stars and planets and empty space, humming in perfect atomic unison: _uausuausuausuausuausuau_ ... It was too much to bear; she screamed, adding her own voice to the sound so it became part of the song, and then she shot upright like a catapult arm and smacked her forehead into Jojran's nose.

"Ow, fuck!" he yelled. He put his hand up and yelped. Blood was pouring from his nostrils. Saru looked around frantically and saw she was in a bedroom, a nice, large bedroom with clean white sheets and neat white furniture and windows across one whole wall, and through the windows was the city of Philadelphia, thank God. Also she was wearing ill-fitting silk pajamas, which meant that at some point Jojran had taken the initiative to undress her.

"What happened?" she asked.

"You broke my nose!"

"Before that!"

"Ow, it hurts!"

She rolled out of bed and landed cat-like. Every danger sense, natural and enhanced, had leapt into activity and she felt herself operating in the lucid purity of combat instinct. In the corner she spied her clothes and she ran to her belt and clipped it on, Betty flying to her hand. Room by room she went through the apartment and scanned it for any threat. Nothing. Then she went back and got a Quick-e-Set strip and slapped it on Jojran's nose. It shot him full of painkillers and then wriggled into the work of massaging his cartilage back into place. She even helped him clean up, scrubbing his face with a vigor he insisted was killing him. Her heart was pounding and she was soaked in a cold, clammy sweat. It took a half hour for her body to calm itself. She dressed and paced and then finally sat. Jojran sat on the other couch in the living room, eyeing her warily.

"Are you okay?" he asked. "I'm fine, in case you care."

"What the fuck happened?"

"Well, I was chasing down leads on the Net and then you went quiet all of a sudden, which I greatly appreciated. Then when I got off I found you passed out on the floor and assumed you drank too much, because really, I hope you have other friends to tell you this, Saru, but you're an alcoholic. Anyway, I lovingly carried you to the bedroom and then when you didn't wake up for a while I got worried. You were sweating like crazy, turned my sheets into a swamp." He omitted the issue of undressing her. She didn't press.

"How long was I out?"

"Almost a day."

"A day! And you just left me there?"

"What was I going to do? Call a doctor? If I did that you'd be berating me right now for telling. You looked like shit; I thought you needed rest. So what happened, are you really okay? How do you feel now?"

"I'm fine," she said. "You were right, I'm tired. I needed to rest."

She couldn't tell him about the blackout. She couldn't tell anyone anything. While he'd been gabbing she'd been going through her implants and there was nothing, no recording, no poison indication, not even a red flag or suspicion she'd been hacked—nothing was missing, no thoughts were awry. She'd passed out for almost a day and all her systems showed was high levels of stress—just like she'd been in a nightmare. She was vulnerable, incredibly vulnerable like this. If this was a hack job it was the most sophisticated prank in all the universe. And if it was something that a bottle of rum and a security overhaul couldn't fix... She could still hear that sound, that echoing sound as Friar tried to speak, and that long, hidden, swirling black note behind, below, above, and beyond everything, running in the background. It was faint now, something she could only notice with her full attention in a quiet place. It called to her, beckoned, and it was growing louder.

Chapter 10

The dog was getting bigger, it was impossible to ignore, and closer too. It used to hang around the sides of her vision, watching her from a distance, but now it was close, a few feet away, and huge, the size of a wolf, of a motorcycle. Fine, dog, do whatever you need to do. She still felt tingly, days, weeks after it had entered her and what? Made her invisible? Now, in the light of day, it was hard to remember the creature, that thing with the metal centipede body and the head of human torsos. Had it been real? How lit was she at the time? Had someone cut her a bad dose of sky? Had she just been lying passed out on the subway platform having another nightmare? No, it had been real, just like the dog was real.

Someone was killing blue-eyed girls, as if she didn't have enough problems. It wasn't in the feeds, nothing official, but the rumor was out and the walkers were scared. It wasn't your normal having-a-bit-of-fun killing or choke-too-hard killing either. It was religious, freak shit, the kind of shit that didn't have a neatly tied shoelace ending. And that pig, sweaty Lou or gassy Lou or whatever the hell they called him was out putting bounties on her head—girls with great blue eyes, fantastic blue eyes. Well shit. She paused to study herself in the cracked window of an abandoned storefront. There goes your moneymaker. Men and women had paid a lot of money—or what seemed like a lot of money, more than she'd ever dish for a ride—to touch her while looking into those eyes, to have her kneel and let them stare down and dirty her. But who could say if it was an honest lay or a trap now—some freak wanting to carve out her sins with a knife.

She kept walking, wrapping her trench coat and scarf tighter, ducking her head so the passersby couldn't glimpse her face. With any luck they'd think she was a leper and keep to their way. She'd tried wearing sunglasses to complete her disguise, but with the clouds and the dark she couldn't see shit, kept stepping in it and glass and syringes and tripping and potholes and the last time she'd had a condom dragging from her heel for about four blocks until the cashier at the liquor store pointed it out by yelling in his angry foreigner language. But the real fear was that she'd accidentally trip over an elzi and kick his implants. So she ditched the shades. Contacts, micro lenses, ocular implants—those were the answer. But that took money and she didn't have any, or not the four-digit kind that she needed.

Walking, walking, walking—where was this place? It had been ages...was it even open still? But of course it was. As long as there was a need there was a way, and everyone had needs. She wondered what they would take this time, if she even had anything left to sell. But there were memories there, good ones, good fucks and weird fucks that she'd be glad be rid of—better to give them to someone else, someone who could use them, and why not make a bit of cash for herself?

There it was, the little wood door that wasn't wood, between the pizza place and the strip club—Pleasure Island. She'd thought of getting gainful there but it rankled her to pay to get paid and the cut they took was enormous. Besides, if someone wanted to buy you and maybe keep you, well, there you were on display like a supermarket turkey, bundled and plucked. Better to wander, to keep moving, to be a little discreet and to only sell when you really needed that fix. To live was easy, just go to the Fish and the hips would look after you, give you their shitty gruel, teach you to sit and think and sing songs to keep yourself from dying of boredom. If you wanted a little luxury in life—and who didn't deserve luxury?—then you had to work for it.

Five knocks, two up, two low, and then one on the third pressure point right in the middle, that rang the bell. The door swung open and a tough opened the door, one she didn't recognize. It had been a long time. He didn't smile, didn't react to her. But she could see him looking at her eyes, see a few calculations. Was the price still on her head, still out there for blue-eyed girls? Would he just conk her out and throw her in a sack and drive her to Lou's? Her hand tensed around the shiv hidden in her bodice, so thin, so clever, no one ever found it till she had it on their throat. She'd stick this tough in the groin, a straightforward, small-distance motion—God he was big—easy as ringing a doorbell.

"What do you want, _whore_?" he said, with the voice of a thousand cigarettes. She ignored him. Why don't you try it one day? Better than being stuck on your feet packing ham or folding pants or smiling and sniffing ass in retail. Better to have freedom, her own life, of her own choosing, that, hell, no one would ever acknowledge or recognize or even treat with a fair lack of judging, but goddamn it was her life, that she'd made, all by herself, and she was in control of it.

"I'm here to sell." She tapped the side of her head. "I've got some high-value material up here."

Up the stairs was a waiting room—that always made her laugh—just like a real doctor's office. Plain beige walls with a flower print, with your standard ugly chairs, a television, even, for the scum like her not plugged in, and a few magazines. She sat next to a nervous young man who couldn't stop wringing his hands. His clothes were nice, fancy even, must've been a mechie or an embyay—they were the best, self-important, insecure, liked to feel big and got a real high from tossing bills. She guessed he'd done something foul he wanted to forget, maybe he'd seen some shit on the Net, wandered into a bad neighborhood, or maybe his girlfriend had left him. But the way he twitched it looked like guilt, or at least a knowing that he'd done something other people thought was bad. Probably he'd run over an elzi and thought he'd killed an actual person.

She flipped through _Living with Less_ , and read an article on a cake she could bake if she had an oven, that used Gaesporan flour to actually burn the exact number of calories you were cooking. It was under the title "Zero Sum Sweets." Delicious. How nice to be so swimming in cash you could eat yourself to death. That was an actual problem that people had. She was glad she wasn't people, didn't want to be people, didn't want a house she had to paint, with cabinets that needed to have all the right fucking handles to match the wallpaper, glad she didn't live on a track of five different stops: work, home, work, restaurant (well, that would be nice), and home again. She was glad she didn't have to fuck the same guy every single night and dance around with him for fifty years. She tossed the magazine on the pile and picked up one about celebrities. They had the right idea—lie, and fuck, and lie, and be an asshole and everyone loved them. She could be a celebrity.

A nurse came out and called a name. The man next to her got up and went through the door to the operating room. She watched the television, but it was just thirty seconds of news crowded by ads. The ads pissed her off—they were loud and flashy and up in her face, and if they were people doing that they'd get beaten sideways. They were always trying to sell her stuff, but she didn't have any money so it was just a big fuck you. Buy this. You need this. You are nothing without this. This thing, right here, look at it, it's got colors and music. You fucking need this. She walked over and turned off the TV, glaring around to see if anyone would challenge her. No one said anything. They were mostly girls, like herself, reading magazines, or nodding off, or head in hands staring at the floor, and that one bitch in the corner was pregnant and sobbing and she didn't even want to know that story.

She sat back down. The dog had taken the young, nervous man's seat. It was looking around but seemed relaxed, and she took that as a good sign. Here, at this very office, she'd tried to have the dog removed, but the doctor couldn't find a thing that would be causing it, and short of a lobotomy there wasn't anything he could do. Ever since the run-in with that monster on the subway (had the others made it?) she'd felt, not affection, but a sense of tolerance towards the dog. Real or not, the dog had tried to do something, warn her, hide her, and so it was protecting her in a way. She would have preferred the fire in that case—hide from assholes, burn the monsters—but she was still alive and that was something, something she couldn't count on day to day anymore. The thing to do was enjoy herself more, drink more, buy more sky, find some men that she wanted because the future was looking less rosy every day.

"Ria..." the nurse frowned when she saw the last name. Ria didn't have one so she always put the filthiest thing she could imagine. She got up and followed the nurse through the door and into the operating room. The best part of coming here was the bathroom; it was so clean, impossibly clean, and sterile. She loved that smell, that alcohol smell of clean; it gave her a rush. The nurse didn't want to let her go but she threatened to piss herself right then and there so the nurse gave. Ria took her time and then cleaned herself up nice. Then she went and lay down on the operating table; it was so comfortable, she could just drift off. Dr. Alloche came in, a wrinkly old man like a prune stuck on a body made of toothpicks. He was hairless except for big white caterpillar eyebrows that gave out everything he was thinking.

"Hello, Ria, it's been a while. Seven months since your last visit," he said. God he was smart. He remembered her name, remembered everything about her, didn't even glance at his records. Of course maybe he had them all digital, plugged into his brain, but she didn't think so. There was no pause, no flicker of access—it was like he had them on the tip of his tongue, like he'd been thinking of her the whole time. Why was he here, operating in the Libs just shy of the Assistance Zone, between a caesarian-scar strip club and a saltine-ketchup pizza parlor? He should have been a TV doctor, in a big white hospital with sexy young nurses, running back and forth with his lab coat blowing behind him, driving a sports car. But they didn't let you do the kinds of things he liked in a real hospital.

"So what do you have for me today?" he asked. "Something interesting, I'm sure."

"Why don't you poke around and see what you like?" she said. "I've got no secrets."

"Very well."

He placed a mask over her face and pumped in that lovely gas...ah she should come here more often...it was like a spa...like in the magazines...She found herself lying in the apartment of a married man, the man himself licking her, doing a messy job but she moaned like he was Christ reborn. The first time she'd gone on a memory trip like this she'd freaked and panicked and jerked herself out of it. When Dr. Alloche finally calmed her down and eased her into it they saw her memories were so patchy that they were useless. He still gave her a few bucks for the trouble, such a nice man. Now she was a pro, probably better than most people at remembering things. She made mental notes, walked herself through each step of remembering to get all the little details that were so crucial to getting off—the noises he made and the noises she made, the sweat of their bodies, the wet slapping sounds, the hot breath on her neck, the scratches she dug in his back and the smell of two naked bodies forcing into one another. That was money.

She could see over the married man's head, Dr. Alloche in the background, projecting himself into her memory. He looked around, nodded, and then the scene blurred and changed. This one was darker, she knew that would happen, that's what the men wanted, what they would pay for, to see her hurt and put down. This had started in the back of a van but he'd tied her up and dragged her into the dirt, tearing her clothes to get to the prize and then forcing himself in roughly. She'd cried—but only because that's what he'd wanted—and for all his show of masculinity he'd finished in a few hard stabs. That had pissed her off—it made the memory too short, less valuable. The doctor could shorten it, cut out the part where he'd untied her and then helped her up and apologized (he'd even kissed her on the cheek and blushed) but he couldn't lengthen the act with any technical wizardry. Dr. Alloche nodded and then switched scenes again.

She was bent over a railing on a bridge in the Fish. He'd hurt her, hit her too hard, brought up a bruise or two. It hurt having her stomach pressed against the railing, hurt when he wrapped his lumberjack hands around her neck and squeezed too hard, hurt when he pulled her hair. She remembered the pain, focused on it, gritting her teeth. It seemed to last forever. And when he was done he'd thrown her to the ground, let her head clack against the pavement and then sprinkled the bills around her, laughing. She focused on that, capturing all the details, bringing up the pain, the disgust, the self-pity. This was a good memory, she knew, she was proud of this one, this was Hollywood quality right here. She'd even remembered the aftermath, dragging herself up from the pavement, the ache as she bent to pull on her panties and dress herself, and the limp away. She'd thought maybe he was going to snuff her that night.

"Very good, exquisitely done," Dr. Alloche said. He was watching the scene, mesmerized, a connoisseur, the perfect audience for her work.

"Thanks, Doc," she tried to say, but of course she was just her memory self and could say nothing.

"Now what's this...this is very interesting here..."

She sat in front of a trash fire in the abandoned subway station. The others sat there too, but they were puppets, faceless, motionless bodies. She'd tried to blank them out, didn't want to think about their fates. She didn't want to be here, didn't want him going into this memory, but of course he would find it, so recent, so terrifying, so thrilling, so many chemicals released—it was just what he wanted. Dr. Alloche stood in the shadows next to her, face illuminated by the flickering fire.

"What's this...?" he said. "So much fear here...what is this? A rape?"

She tried to speak again, tried to tell him to get away, to skip this memory. She was afraid now, afraid that he wouldn't believe it—who would?—and that he would think it was fake or tainted by sky bliss and then he would think her other memories were fake too and she wouldn't get anything for them. The quality of this memory was all off...the dog hadn't been sitting next to her, he'd been standing out on the platform, hovering like a ghost. Could the doctor even see the dog in her memory? Had he seen it lurking in the shadows when she was beaten on the bridge? What would show if he went far back, back years and years to when the dog had burned that john alive? Would it just show her in the car, would it look like she had killed him? Would that be worth anything?

There was a tremor, a shower of bricks and the dog looked at her. She got the odd sense that this was not the memory dog, that the dog couldn't exist in a memory like this, that it could only exist in the Now and this was her dog, acting in the Now within her memory. The dummies, the fake hips she'd tried so hard to forget shuffled to their feet and ran down the corridor. She was almost certain they had died now, because that's what she believed and so had tried to forget them. Another tremor.

"How curious," Dr. Alloche said.

It was curious, what would happen? What would the memory show without the dog making her invisible? And then she heard it, the slithering vinyl sound, the whimpering of men and women and then the creature, the ball of human flesh and the long centipede body of twisted metal legs scrabbling into the floor and walls and ceiling and then rearing up onto the platform. She heard a gasp and saw the doctor step back. The look on his face was of sheer terror, like he'd forgotten he was in a memory. And then she felt it too, her own terror, reaching up and playing the fiddle with her nerves, making the hair on her skin poke up. It's not real; it's a memory. It can't hurt me.

The head drew closer and closer, the whimpering as real as it had been, the eyes all closed, and the hands and fingers with the naked bone fluttering out, probing like the antennae on a cockroach. And then she saw, amidst the bodies, the nameless unknown dead, four faces that she recognized, vaguely, from a chance meeting—a young girl, an androgynous woman, an old man with a beard and no teeth, and his friend, their clothing hanging in scraps, arms out fluttering with the rest, eyes closed, moaning, she could hear their voices! And then the eyes all shot open at once and fixated on her, and the mouths twisted open, whispering in their dead-leaf voices: "Come...come...come...come...come..."

Footsteps, and the doctor walked past her, jerking like a puppet tugged by strings, reaching out his arms to embrace his loved ones, and then his finger touched theirs and the arms reached and clamped around him, the mouths now screeching in glee, baring their teeth, dragging him in and ripping at his flesh, licking his blood and devouring him. A scream, his own scream, loud and cutting through the sounds of tearing flesh, loud, overwhelming everything, her vision blurring and swimming back into focus, the light of the operating room glaring in her eyes, the sweet, sterile smell, and still the scream and claws on her skin, the doctor grabbing at her, and blood pouring from his mouth and ears and nose and the two black holes where his eyes had been.

Chapter 11

Saru watched the rec again, watched the woman open the door, saw the figure standing in the doorway, the figure without a face, just a swirling black where his head should have been. There were viz jammers available, bitchy things that didn't work half the time and drained calories like a motherfucker—that's why she didn't bother—but they always left a mark. The sophisticated ones could give you a whole new face, even someone else's face so you could stroll into a bank and shoot the place up as your boss or your neighbor. The dollar store variety just turned you into a bunch of pixels or a blur. None of them did this; nothing she knew turned your face into a tiny black hole. Even with the recording paused it seemed to move. Maybe it was a custom job.

"Do you remember what he looked like?" she asked the woman now sitting across from her on the tatty (like everything else in this rat-hole apartment) sofa just visible in the recording. Her name was Terry and she should have bought a lottery ticket because she was the luckiest woman in the world right now. Her ex was a jealous psycho twat, hence the cameras, the reinforced door, and the tiny six-shooter she was massaging on her lap. He'd decided to come pay her a visit the same time as this mysterious gentleman and had forced a confrontation. He was in the hospital with a throat zipped open like a suitcase, but he'd managed to shoot a few holes into the stranger before he bolted. McCully was shifting around the doorway collecting samples.

"Yeah," Terry said. "And no. No, It's hard to say. He was good looking, that I remember, had skin like, well..." she flushed. "He was very attractive."

"Did he say anything to you?"

"No. Well yeah, actually. I don't think he really said it. But he opened the door and he was kind of talking to me."

"Did he say what he wanted?"

"No he didn't say anything."

You can't have it both ways lady, make up your mind. "You mean you can't remember."

"No, I remember," Terry said crossly. "Well, not _everything_. I mean, I heard the doorbell, and I thought it was Henry because we had plans, you know, to go see the Black Jaws tonight—they're in town—but he was early. So I went and I looked through the camera first, because Josh right, my ex, but it wasn't Josh or Henry, it was this man. And when I looked at him through the screen I couldn't see his face—you can see it on the screen, all blacked out—but I felt like...well, I opened the door and it seemed to take a long time, you know? Like hours to open the door, and it felt like I was looking at him for hours but it couldn't have been more than a few seconds. And then Josh showed up and started yelling and pushed the guy and then the next thing I know the bastard was shooting—coulda hit me, I was right there—shooting with one hand and grabbing his neck with the other and there was all this blood..."

This woman was no help. A handsome man shows up at her door and she lets him in and gets rescued by her shitty past. Because it was a rescue. There was no doubt, none—every instinct Saru had earned from every hard knock and fuckup on the job told her this was the guy, or one of the guys. That alone was valuable. They didn't have infinite resources; they were splitting up, working alone. They could be hurt and chased away—of course she knew that, anything could die with the right incentive, but it was refreshing to get a reminder. This whole case was spiraling into the hopeless, like these clowns were a step ahead of her in every way, shapeless supernatural beings with freaky powers. But this proved what she'd known all along—they were men, assholes, and they were just as vulnerable to a trigger-happy ex as the next guy. Bullets, the great indiscriminate equalizer.

"You're gonna catch this guy, right?" Terry said.

"Huh? Oh, no. I'm not a cop."

"What? But—"

"No, I'm private justice." Saru stood up. The whole place smelled like a litter box and she wanted to be scarce.

"But when I called..."

"Yeah, I know. It's confusing. You called the cops and they called me." Of course they'd called her. Any dispatch officer who wanted a bit of nice in his life made a side business selling cases to the PIs. Saru had put out a standing order of $1,000 for any calls from names on that fabulous list Jojran had discovered. Terry Hatcher, domestic disturbance, 4:47 p.m., 1137 Christian Street.

"You see your case falls into what we call 'the gap' in the justice system. Don't feel too special; it's a pretty large gap. Most people fall into 'the gap.' You don't make enough to afford private justice, me, and you're not dealing with people who have anything worth seizing—drugs, money, illegal hardware, guns—so the cops don't really care. You can make a stink about it or take out a justice loan, but here's a free piece of advice—forget about it."

"But what if he comes back?"

"Doubtful. Here, watch the recording." She unpaused it and the scene played out more or less as Terry had described it—Josh, her ex, a big man, balding, hustling his lard up the stairs, pushing the tall figure and not moving him an inch. Terry screaming and trying to smack at Josh with a baseball bat, swinging around the figure. The gun appearing in Josh's meaty hand, the knife—was it a knife?—a blur from the figure and then the white flares of gunshots overloading the camera sensors and Josh tumbling down the stairs clutching his throat. For two seconds the stranger and Terry stood alone on the top of the stoop. He could have turned her into a sieve in those two seconds but he didn't. He just stood there, staring at her maybe? Talking about the weather? Then he left, walking almost casually down the steps and out of view, leaving a wonderful clue-filled trail of blood, Hallelujah.

"See, right there, he could have killed you but he didn't. I think you're fine."

"But he came to my house; he knows where I live!" Terry was freaking out now, and in the whiniest way possible. Saru couldn't stand whiners.

"Yes, but he's not after you. He wants to kill someone else but he's not sure who it is so he's just killing everyone that looks like it could be her. Here, take this." She poked Terry in the forehead and through the contact plates in her finger she transferred a standard victim kit into Terry's address-book program—not even protected. Come on Terry; smarten up.

"That has the names and numbers for your friendly neighborhood cops, as well as information on some good mercenary services I recommend, and a nifty pamphlet on keeping your home safe."

Saru's head buzzed. McCully had finished taking his samples. She patted Terry on the head and left before she had the chance to voice any more fears. Out in the open air she took a breath and exhaled. God that place stank. McCully studied the vial of blood he'd collected in the gray light of day. She wasn't an expert but it seemed oddly black and thick.

"That was cold," McCully said, pocketing the vial. "You could reassure the poor woman."

"I did," Saru said, nonchalant. What more did he expect? The Gaespora were paying her ten million bucks to find a girl, not hunt down psychopaths. What did Terry have to offer? Microwave lasagna? Sixty bucks out of her monthly assistance check? A carton of smokes? Get real.

"Do you really think she's safe in there? Shouldn't she move?"

"You saw the tape. The man could have killed her but he didn't. If he didn't kill her then, why would he come back and kill her later?" QED.

"Do you want my opinion?"

"No." She started walking to the Caddy. McCully shuffled after her, breaking into a half-skip jog to keep up.

"I was there, there for all six bodies. I looked them over. That took time to do what they did. These guys don't kill casually."

"What about the ex? Cut him up without a thought."

"He wasn't a target; he was just in the way. I'm saying that woman, back there—they came for her and they're going to try again."

"Who's the detective here?"

"Neither of us right now."

He jumped in front of her and blocked her path, glaring through his nutty wrinkles. How old was he? Had he never heard of moisturizer?

"I'm not going to analyze this sample until—"

Saru punched him in the gut, hard, and threw him to the ground. He landed with an _oomph_ and then she crouched over him with a knee in his chest that she could drop to crush his sternum. She rifled through his coat until she found the vial and then pocketed it. He stared up at her wild-eyed. His fear felt good.

"Don't ever tell me how to do my job," she hissed, and then got up and walked away.

She hated herself a little, back in the Caddy, stuck still in rush-hour traffic, with nowhere to go except her own head. That was a mistake—why couldn't she control herself? McCully was her lead on this case, had been her go-to vulture for three years now, and finding a quality vulture wasn't a lark—the profession was cluttered with creeps and freaks, people who liked being around the dead, got off on horror, could soak up the misery and eat it with relish. She'd never wondered what got McCully into the business, never thought to ask him, but looking back on today it seemed likely he was that rare man, a sympathetic man—not to the dead, he'd tossed his share of bodies to the elzi—but to the living. He believed in his supposed mission, really thought he was helping to solve crimes, that each body he found meant one less body he'd have to find in the future. Fuck.

She slammed on the horn, beat it like a bongo, and told the Caddy to go on without her. She hopped out and then wove her way through the frozen river of vehicles, clamored over a few hoods, and shot every lewd sign and expletive she knew until she made it to the sidewalk. The first bar she came to was a basement dive with puke on the stairs—perfect. Three shots and a lager later she started to feel better. She'd find McCully, apologize, blame it on the period she couldn't get any more, or a hangover, or maybe a bad dose of sky. A few crisp Reagans would smooth it all over and he'd analyze the sample for her and get a match. Jojran would work his magic and then she'd have a perp. Beautiful.

It wasn't her fault, really, that she was twitchy, but she couldn't tell him the real reason, tell him about the flickering, the glitches, the lost time and the hallucinations of her dead colleague and alien worlds. She hadn't been back to that place, thank God, but she could still hear that song, whenever she wasn't expecting it, that droning, noteless, toneless melody that seemed to be woven into her consciousness. How did it go again...?

The hairs on the back of her neck stood up. She grabbed the bartender by the arm, a burly man with muttonchops.

"Do you hear that?" she asked.

"Yeah," he said, jerking his arm free. He nodded at the jukebox, a shiny, colorful relic, not even networked. "If you don't like it you can change it."

She froze, listening intently to the song, some rockabilly tune about a cheating lover. No...she was imagining things. She relaxed. A new song came on, some techno Elvis revival, and she ordered another shot.

Take me down to the river, I don't wanna do this shit anymore

You sing it brother.

I got forty-two dollars in checking, and I'm looking for a dollar whore

She's got taste and class and a body, but her mind ain't what it should be

She thinks everything comes on a platter, and life is so cheap it's freeeeeeeeaaaaaauuuuaaaaauaaauauauauauauaua

The note held long, impossibly long, and time slowed. She could see it, see the sound, a rich golden thread, woven of smaller colored threads. It was beautiful. She flew around the thread, a bird, zooming in close, cresting the note as if it were a wave and looking down at the ocean, the sea of notes and colors, a dark shape below the surface, a whale, no, larger, a submarine, a squid, a leviathan. There was danger there, she was flying too close, too close to the wave and the dark shape rising, filling the sea, suffocating the light within its body, no beginning and no end, swallowing her. And there it was, of course, it had always been there, in the song, before it was written even, the greater song in the back of every living creature's mind, the fear song, the song of melting atoms: _uausuausuausuausuausuau_ ...

"Hey, wake up!"

Someone was jostling her.

"Wake up! You can't sleep here."

His arm shot out and she heard a satisfying yelp as her fingers clamped around flesh and her steel-reinforced fingernails bit down. Then she lurched upright and let go.

"How long have I been out?"

"You bitch! You cut me!"

"How long?"

"I dunno, a half hour. What's your fucking problem?"

She jolted to her feet and ran to the door.

"Hey, you gonna pay for that?"

She ran up the stairs, slipping on the vomit, and tore down the sidewalk at a sprint. Dread, jagged tumors of dread squeezing her arteries, forcing the blood to race drunkenly from one organ to another. She was wrong, horribly wrong, and late, too late. She ran and ran and ran, but she couldn't burn away the fear, the song tendrils tracing after her, couldn't look back or she would see them. There was a screech and blare of car horns as the Caddy tore up next to her, screeching onto the sidewalk and smashing into a fire hydrant. She dove inside, slamming into reverse and then pounding the accelerator, zigzagging through the lingering evening jam and racing back to Broad. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Red lights and headlights, car-horn drones and screaming tires, angry shouts and sirens blurring behind her as she raced, her heart unable to slow, accelerating, pounding faster and faster, pushing itself into a madness, no, no, no, begging to slow down time. The vial of blood, hot with joy against her skin, laughing, laughing, throbbing with the pulse of her heart.

There was a crick and a pop and an odd stereo division of numbness and agony throughout her body as her head bucked forward and bounce-crunched against the steering wheel. An alarm was ringing, faintly almost. She kicked open her car door and dragged herself over the crumpled hood of the Caddy, feeling a grassy tickle on her palms as the metal opened her skin. Stumbling, shambling she reached the stoop, the stoop from the afternoon; had it been today or years ago? Her hand left a wet red turkey on the door, which slid open easily. In a second she took it in, dirty rat-hole apartment, dust bunnies and rat shit, torn, shabby furniture, cracked walls, peeling paint, a yellow drip from the ceiling.

McCully lay on the coffee table, arms and legs hanging over the side. They'd opened his belly, peeled up his wrinkled, white-tuft-happy-trail skin and unraveled his intestines. She recognized the pattern, saw them twist and wind around the floor in a beautiful circle, the notes from the song on the jukebox, laid bare for her to see: _uausuausuausuau_ ... The look on his face was more baffled than anything. How long had he lived this way? Had he been alive five minutes ago? Gasping, whimpering, burbling blood, and cursing her with his last breathe? Was it one shot that had killed him or three together, or perhaps the slow sips of the lager? Her face was wet, was she crying?

She stumbled to the kitchen and found Terry. She lay on the kitchen table, thighs opened, split from sex to neck so her insides spread out like a crimson flower. The black where she should have had eyes seemed to accuse. You said I was safe. Hah, I showed you! Look at me, look inside me! You can if you want. I'd be alive now if you'd cared, cared about anything but your next fix and the dollars to drive you there. Ha!

The room was spinning. She sat on the chair—there was only one—that was the life Terry had, a one-chair life in a dirty hole. I'm sorry Terry...I missed it, I fucked up. She rested her head on Terry's arm, still warm, and lay there. It was comfortable. She listened to the drip drip drip of the faucet, the drop drop drop of Terry's blood: drip, drop, drip, drop, drip, drop... _uausuausuau_ ...and the alarm in the background, the gentle shouting from outside, the grumbling of a crowd, sirens, and then heavy boots inside, swearing, rough arms grabbing her shoulder, twisting her arms back, and the cold metal jaws of handcuffs closing around her wrists.

Chapter 12

They cut her hair and shaved her head, locking her skull in a vice after she smashed up the first would-be barber's chin with a head-butt. They stripped her down and sprayed her with a hose and tossed floury burning delousing powder. She got in a few good kicks and punches before they got the straight jacket on her. It took three zaps of a prod (the third was so high she pissed herself) to drag her to a cell and she got a solid crack in the ribs when she managed to squirt blood in the sergeant's eye. She screamed and swore and tried to bite and kick, but none of the pigs would really touch her, really let loose and break something, give her a hard, satisfying pain that she could clutch and nurture and giggle with. Her cell had even been washed—no shit or spit or cum or blood anywhere—and then a medic had calmly shot her full of darts (a proud, high dose that turned her into a fish) while he bandaged her hands.

Then there was nothing to do but sit, so she screamed and then they gagged her, and then there really was nothing to do but lie on the cold cement and think. She didn't want to do that, didn't like that the drugs were wearing off, the tranqs and the booze, and the damping field shut down all her feeds so she was alone in her own mind with no news or chat or porn or comedy or foreign tragedy to distract her from her own. She tried to hum but the humming became a whimper and then tried screaming through the gag again but no one could hear her and no one reacted. She was alone, alone, alone, alone, and her thoughts were her own.

McCully was there, telling her to go back, but she was busy. Terry was there too, in less detail, except for the voice, which came through in agonizing clarity, the terror, the panic—how had she missed it before? It had gone right through her, right past her. But now she was stuck with it. Am I safe? What if he comes back? He won't come back. I'm a detective. I know what I'm doing. You see, Terry, you fall into a gap, a wide gap, the gap that most people fall into—you aren't important. You are powerless, and if someone wants to hurt you, they can and no one will stop them. Not the cops, because they don't care. Not me, because I don't care. Not McCully, he cares, he cared, enough to go back. What did he say, what did he even do? Her gun, the little six-shooter, hadn't even been fired. They hadn't even had a chance. Did they die together, two perps torturing them as a team? Or was it the one, the same man she'd dismissed? Had Terry heard McCully screaming from the living room? Had they been able to scream? She could never know. She wasn't there.

And Friar, now you're back, eh? Lecturing me again. What would you make of this? Would you have stayed? Of course, because you were good at this job. You had a method, a purpose, a skill other than cracking skulls and an easy association with filth. You bastard, why didn't you take the case? Why did you leave it to amateur night? And Hemu, the peacenik. Let you down buddy. Just a big disappointment. Tell the Slow God to get her socks all paired and her panties packed cuz ain't nobody finding that girl from inside a jail cell, and really, I think we both knew that I wasn't going to bring her to you anyway, you, just a homeless man with a philosophy, versus ten million American dollars. I'd let that dozer crush you for fifty.

The cell door swung open and two pigs grabbed her by the feet and dragged her down the hall _wheeeeee_! They hefted her to her feet and made her hop through a door into a small interrogation room—cement floor, metal walls with a one-way mirror, hard metal chairs and a metal table. Ah, shit. There he was, the reason all these pigs had been pussyfooting around, afraid to break a few teeth, fuck her in the ass and let her bleed out on the floor—ElilE sitting calmly, so straight in the chair across from her. The cops undid the straight jacket, carefully, tasers at the ready, but she was out of fight. There was no point anymore. They left her in the paper hospital gown and slunk away, closing the door behind them. She smirked and leaned back in her chair, spreading her legs, casual, calm, fooling not even herself. ElilE said nothing. They stayed that way for a long time and then she broke.

"Well?" she said angrily. "Are you here to scold me? Dad? Go ahead, have at it."

"Those deaths were not your fault."

"Just shut the fuck up right now."

He did. They sat in silence again. She felt very tired. She wanted to go back to the cell, to curl up and sleep, maybe get them to beat her again.

"Well, I guess you can take this as my resignation because—"

"Don't be flippant," he said, sharply, breaking his calm. She felt the words like a whip, felt herself rising, reaching for the prod that wasn't there, bearing the steel nails they'd ripped out, hissing like some monster and then she was empty. She collapsed back into her chair and she felt a shiver like all her anger turning to poison, and she hated herself like she had never hated anything before. Then that too was gone and she was empty again, nothing.

"I'm sorry," she said, and maybe she really was. "People...people are dead...it's my fault."

He said nothing.

"Anyway, I quit," she said. "Find someone else."

"You can't quit."

"Watch me."

"Do you know the name Fanny Duvak?"

"I do, how do you?"

"We've been going over your evidence."

"You mean you've been going through my shit, scanning my implants—hey can you do anything about this flower? It won't go away. You can see it, can't you, no one else can but I bet you can."

"Yes. You have visited IlusithariusuirahtisulI."

"Come again? Oh I get it, yes. Yeah, but they called her the Slow God. They call you guys the Sad Gods, do you know why that is?"

He blinked. "We found the list of girls. We believe it is accurate."

"Good to hear. Why don't you go find them, go protect them, so they don't all get goddamn murdered!" She hadn't meant to shout but that's how she found herself, and standing too, slamming a fist into the table.

"We cannot."

"Bullshit!"

She fell back into her chair and glowered at him. He just sat there like a fucking plant. It was amazing how much she disliked him.

"Oh...oh, I get it now." She laughed. "I know why you can't do this. You guys don't like each other, do you? You and this other alien, the Blue God. If you go running around and do find this girl, he's not going to be happy." She took his silence as an admission. "But that still doesn't explain why you can't get the cops or mercs or some other people at arm's length to go round up these women and ship 'em off to Hawaii and then sort out which one is which later on."

His silence was pissing her off. He had all the cards, all the options, all the information, and all the power—just as he'd had from the start.

"You don't understand," he said.

"You're damn right I don't." Standing again, where did this anger come from, what was she? Why was he playing her like this, why couldn't he give her a straight fucking answer? Was she looking in a mirror? He couldn't help for the same reason that she couldn't—he didn't care. It wasn't important enough.

Then ElilE smiled, the ugliest thing she'd ever seen, a smile with no warmth, no love, no joy, nothing that deserved a human smile—the smile of a cruel joke. And then he laughed, a laugh to match his smile, bitter, horrid laughter. It made her skin crawl.

"You've talked to the Slow God then, eh?" he said, the timbre of his voice completely changed, a hateful, vicious sound. "What did she tell you? Did you meet her servants, the ones you call hips, the ones that wear flowers in their hair? They were human, right?" He leaned forward eagerly, hands gripping the table, grinning, and she recoiled. "I am no different, no less human than you, except that I am touched by the Gods, I feel their presence and know their thoughts and guess what?" He laughed again, hysterical, and stood and threw up his hands. "I hate it! Hate! Hate, _hate_ , _hate,_ it's all I can feel anymore. Do you know what it's like," his voice became a hiss, "to hear the Gods whispering in your ear, always whispering, and to see the things beyond this world, great things, that really, as a human, I couldn't give a shit about, but I must know, and understand and always fight, fight, fight—it is a nightmare."

His arm slashed down in a blur and the table crumpled into a V against the force. He grabbed his chair and slammed it against the wall and it flattened, smashed, pieces flying across the room. She scrambled back into a corner; it seemed like he grew and the light bent around him so he was a giant towering over her, surrounded in shadows.

"Do you think I want it this way? To tiptoe around, to take this power," he held up his arms, "and use it to plant window gardens, and feed bureaucrats and businessmen, children and fools and shit scum like you, always coaxing and prodding and pleasing and asking—no!" He punched his fist into the wall up to the elbow and then drew it out and laughed again.

"I would rule you! Command you. Lay down the laws of my Gods and force humanity to join the fight, to step up and look past your narcissistic masochism and play a significant role in the universe! But no. No. Never that. Never direct action, never bold, never strong, never open. You see, Saru, you look at us and think that we have power, but you don't know what power is—of course not or you would see your own. The truth is that we're hiding, cowering here on this planet, terrified of the UausuaU, the Hungry God, terrified it will notice us and act. The horror it has wrought on you would be nothing, _nothing_ , if for the briefest particle of time it were to focus its attention on this universe and actually perceive it as an object worthy of attention. We hide, and lurk, and plot, and plan because any time we act it must count; every blow must land, every strike find its target or the Hungry God will flick a hair of its tail and extinguish us all like fleas.

"Find the girl! Find all these girls! Sweep out across the city. Protect them. Do something; you must do something! Ha! You see now, we will not. We cannot. Because we are afraid. Afraid that these feasters, these servants of the UausuaU will see our actions, see our power, see that we are capable of thwarting a plan no matter how weak and tattered. And if their inconvenience is perceived as anything other than the retarded blundering of a sub-sentient life form then this planet will go from food source to threat, and if you dislike how they treat their food you cannot comprehend the doom that awaits their enemies. Then you would know why they call my Gods the Sad Gods."

His face was twisted like some creature, a gargoyle on a cathedral, his skin warped and wrinkled, jutting out in hard lines, reptilian, demonic. She felt the hatred, the rage, more than emotion; it was energy, heat washing through her, hurting her, burning her insides. Her mouth was wet and her tracing finger came away with blood. ElilE hissed out a breath and then inhaled deeply. And then again, and again, and the rage sucked back, and the hate was drawn out of her, making her lighter, freer. She realized she'd been holding her breath and her heart was vibrating in her chest. The shadows fell away, back to the harsh white LED brightness. ElilE shrank down to his normal height, regaining his normal, impeccable, mannequin calm. He held out a hand to help her to her feet, but she scrambled away and stood on her own. They eyed each other, falling into another silence.

She heard Terry in her mind, the words that should have stuck the first time. Catch the bastard. Catch the bastard. Catch him. She'd been going about this wrong the whole time, searching and following. It was weak, reactionary, un-American. Forget the girl. She would find the people doing things, find where they lived, where they slept, where they kept their polished skulls and scalpels, and hunt them down one by one and open them, see how they liked having their intestines juggled. Then, when she had their dicks on a spit and their pleas for mercy as a su-tone, then she'd find the girl. She grinned, it bubbled, impossible to choke down. She'd had ElilE pegged wrong the whole time—the bastard was alright, relatable almost. She punched him in the arm, for solidarity, and he took it. Maybe he grinned back, gave her the flicker of a grin, or maybe she imagined it, fuck, who cared?

"Alright," she said, still grinning, ah, she couldn't help it. It was just so damn _funny_. She laughed, a little at first, and then a whole lot—ass-clenching, belly-aching laughter that bounced around the room and only made her laugh more. Oh my God she was gonna piss herself again. She laughed so hard she started to cry and had to lean against the wall for support. Then she sorted herself out, giggled and tried again. She looked ElilE in the eyes again, her grin spilling out, biting down on it. She thought what it would be like to fuck him, to see him unleash that power—that's what he needed, a good lay—and swore she would make it happen if she ever got out of this mess tits-intact. Then she laughed all over again.

"Okay," she said at last, gasping, grabbing her belly. "I buy what you're selling. Let's do it. Let's find this bitch."

Chapter 13

The doorbell rang, a happy melody indicating a friend. How strange, who would visit him here? Who even knew where he lived? Saru, probably, stopping by uninvited, sneaking by security somehow, ready to kick down the door if he didn't answer. But he'd programmed a special ring for her, a sweet melody that was nothing like her personality, but what he imagined her to be if he ever really got to know her, to break down that tough facade and meet the girl within. One day. And why wasn't the camera working? The security camera in the light fixture pointed right at the doormat but he couldn't make out the figure; it was tall, so it could be Saru, but there was just a black smudge where the face should have been.

Something was wrong here. The hairs across his body were standing on end and it had nothing to do with what he was doing on the Net. He started to unplug himself, feeling suddenly very vulnerable, lying in a bathrobe on his couch with his brain tugged in every direction. He left all the conversations, paused all the videos, stopped the search for information about the girls on the list. When his eyes returned to the real world he found them crusty and blurry and saw that it was night. How many nights had passed, how long had he been lying there? His stomach growled. The doorbell rang again, and this time he heard it with his ears, the sound chiming around his empty apartment—big, heavy, crystal noises that filled him with dread. He buzzed security, no response. He stumbled to his feet, tripped over the coffee table, and shuffled to the drawer where he kept his gun. He'd never used it, wasn't sure how it worked or even what kind it was—shit, was it even loaded? He backed up against the window, whirling when his ass touched the glass and then whirled back and aimed at the door. Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit...

There was a click and slide of the door unlocking itself—how? It swung open slowly and the light from the hallway crept in, a long, growing rectangle that cast Jojran in a spotlight.

"Freeze," Jojran shouted, or tried to—his voice cracked and came out cartoony. The gun shook in his hands, slippery wet with sweat, hard to hold onto; he gripped it tighter and then BANG! it went off with the sound of a cannon in his ears, flying backward, snapping his wrist, slamming into his mouth and bending back his two front teeth. He yelped at the pain and the panic splashed out of him through his low-level connections to the apartment. Every light, faucet and appliance sprang to life—the kitchen and living room overheads, the LEDs and heaters in the floor, the lamps, the oven, the microwave, the waffle iron, the percolator, the pizzafast, and the mixing bowl, all the window screens, the sonic shower, the autovacs shooting from their cubbies and rolling around the floor, and his stereo blasting metal at maximum volume. He fell to his knees and crawled to the bedroom where the drawers rattled with the vibrations of his sex machines, and his love doll moaned and begged for him. He slammed the door behind him, swiped the lock, and dove onto the bed.

He sat, resisting the urge to crawl under the covers, cradling his wrist, which was sending sharp, nauseating pain through his arm and down to his stomach, every motion a fresh nausea, a new threat of vomit. The gun was gone. He found his mind bouncing around in his skull, desperate to escape, running down the long hall of doors to the Net with so many wonderful distractions—cute animals and naked women, bad puns, witty jokes, endless streams of news and recipes for biscotti, games and viks where he was safe and in control. He felt the familiar pull of the Net and fought, fought to keep his focus on the terrifying present, buzzing the guard station over and over again, calling everyone he knew in the real world, which seemed suddenly to be no one.

Saru wasn't picking up—you bitch I'm gonna die because of you! Where are you, passed out in a drunken stupor somewhere? Grunting on your knees with that lawyer you love so much? His mom answered the call and immediately started to complain—you thief, you liar, what, do you need money? He hung up. The cops, thank God, they were on their way! He just needed to hold on. But when would they arrive? What had he told the officer? There was a stranger in his house; he needed help. He felt a coldness down his spine, mixing with the nausea in his stomach. What had Saru told him about dealing with the cops? Rule number one: cash upfront. He called back, ready to offer a fortune, but all he got was a busy signal. It was hard to focus with the pain in his stomach and his wrist and his mouth; he needed to search, find the number of a mercenary, or private justice, get someone over but he kept losing the thread, distracted by the fear.

The music outside stopped and his drawers stopped clattering, the love doll stopped rubbing her nipples and lay still. Footsteps, soft, coming close, stopping outside the door.

"Come out, Brian. You're safe now." Oh thank God, it was Saru, and in the voice he'd always imagined she'd use with him, breathy, soft, sweet, heavy with suggestion. She'd even used his name, his real name that he'd never told her, but somehow that contradiction didn't bother him, the voice was too sweet, he could feel it like a delicate finger tracing down his neck, felt his pain recede, fall back, felt other things, other sensations more pleasing rise to the surface. He stood and walked to the door, unlocked and opened it. There she was, as beautiful—no, more beautiful than he remembered, her features finer, lips and breasts fuller, and she was smiling. She smelled of tropical fruits and it looked like she'd even showered and washed her hair.

"Come," she said, giving him a smile that made him gasp. She held out her hand and led him back to the living room, which was now quiet and dimly lit with candles that he didn't own. He knew now, knew that this was not Saru, not the real Saru, but that if he wanted it he could have her, have her forever and more, anything he wanted, anything at all if he would pay the price. She guided him to a couch and pushed him down gently so he floated into the cushions. His hand brushed her naked thigh as she turned—of course, the real Saru never wore a dress like that, shimmery and scant, that actually fit her and made every curve a tease. She sat across from him, crossing her legs, and he saw a flash of red lace between them. He felt himself melting in an agony of desire, the pain of the broken wrist and teeth nothing compared to this longing. She smiled at him.

"You want me, Brian."

"Yes," he breathed.

"What else do you do want?"

There were things he knew, power probably, not like a king or a businessman, but power inside him, to be strong, to be tall, to be brave maybe. To be perhaps the hero of a fantasy, to wield a sword against the darkness, to be admired and loved and to feel those deep, deep emotions that come from adventure. They were stray thoughts, stupid thoughts, childish thoughts, hard to control with her sex washing through him.

"Don't worry," she said. "Whatever you want you will have. Anything."

From somewhere the fear returned, a small, nagging thing. Memories of the women being cut open, of elzi covered in sores and worms, wandering the streets, eating cigarette butts and scraps and fresh meat when they could get it. Why would he think of those awful things now? It annoyed him. But he should ask, make sure everything was on the level. It seemed too good to be true.

"What do I have to do?" he asked.

She looked away and touched her neck.

"There is a price," she said. "But one you have nearly paid."

"I don't want to be an elzi," he said suddenly, unexpectedly, desperately. He couldn't resist, he knew; whatever this was had owned him, knew him and controlled him. He would give in now, later, one day or another. It had come and he would follow and he was just a small mind, a weak soul—had always been weak, everyone had known that about him, he had always known. He would surrender, but he had to fight, just a little, struggle at least a bit. He would not become an elzi, he wouldn't, wouldn't let the real Saru find him like some beast, naked and broken and mindless, rolling in the garbage. The other Saru laughed, a tinkling kindness that warmed him, set his mind at ease, like she knew his thoughts and was gently guiding him back to safety, back on a course that led to her, his only course, the inevitable.

"Don't be silly," she said, leaning forward with her hands back so her breasts rose up. "The elzi pay a different price. They aren't like you. You're intelligent, Brian. You have a good mind, a _strong_ mind. No one would ask you to give that up. No Brian, keep your mind, but give me your body. What do you need it for anyway?"

She leaned forward and touched his knee. Heat spread out from her touch, traveling up his leg into his groin, his heart, his brain. What did he need his body for anyway? Everything good was in the Net, that was the real world, that was where he could do anything he wanted. All his body did was slow him down—it was a big sack of chores with all the eating and sleeping and shitting. He wouldn't need to do any of that. She would give him a place where he was free.

"If I say no, will you leave me alone?" he asked.

She smiled. "Oh Brian, you can't say no. You could never say no to me."

Of course she was right. He didn't remember saying yes, but he remembered her standing and coming over to him, crossing her legs as she walked, bending over and kissing him on the forehead and then her kisses traveling down his neck and finding his mouth. He remembered her hand tugging at his hair, her body wrapping around his, and the two of them coming together at last. He felt her nails digging into his back, felt the heat of her breath, the soft, delicious moans, and the sound of his name whispered in his ear. It seemed at some point in all of that he died, leaving his body and going into hers, that inside her was a whole new world, vaster and more beautiful than he had ever imagined, and that his old, lumpy bone and skin had been a burden all along.

Chapter 14

She was free! Free to waltz out, to kick the guard in the shins and laugh, to click her heels and give little love smacks to every pig she met. Fear. And anger. But mostly fear in their faces as she skipped by, the bitch that had smashed up half of Broad Street, untouchable, unstoppable. She had friends, the barefoot man in the suit who didn't seem quite right, who told their bosses behind the big oak desks what was what, who went to jail, which bothers disappeared, and which lucky cunts ran free. They handed her back her gun, loaded, right there in the office, and the prod, and the dart launcher, and the micro grenades, and her clothes, of course, that someone had even washed. She was pleased that half her tricks had remained a mystery, delighted they'd never found the hair-thin shiv lying just under the skin of her outer thigh.

It was a challenge not to press her luck, not to hop into one of the squad cars in the parking lot and race off into the sunset. How far did ElilE's protection go? How much would he stick his dick out for her? What were the stakes? A girl? A dog? The city? The world? Or ten million American dollars? Pick up the phone, Jojran! Her implants were back online, brain awash in smut and news and wacky videos—it was a lonely cage without them. And even though she laughed into the cold night air, it was hard to forget why she'd been tossed in a cell. Her great pile of fuckups that kept killing people she knew—and who would have thought that she actually cared? That woman was nothing but an annoyance, but for some reason she wouldn't get out of Saru's head, that image of her, that last glimpse, looking so scared, and McCully had seen it and gone back...

Pick up the phone! She needed information, leads or the appearance of leads. It was clear that even if she found the women on this list she couldn't babysit them, and the Gaespora were too afraid to do anything. Ha! Free. She truly was free, freer than any of them, freer than the mopey Gods, because she could do whatever she wanted and no one could mistake it for anything but retarded blundering. Yes, she was perfect for the job. She would find these bastards and make them pay as soon as Jojran answered the goddamn phone. What was he playing at? He never ignored her calls. She'd have to go put a boot up his ass, but hell he'd probably enjoy that.

Security let her in without hesitation. It was the same men; she recognized the hard-ass that had hassled her before. He was polite now, "Ma'am," and he smiled at her. It was a knowing smile, a smile that made her feel naked to the bone. She didn't want to turn her back on him, and she watched him through her earlobe cam the whole way to the elevator; he smiled the whole time, watching her back. She jammed the button, fifty-seven, and then pressed it a few thousand more times, sensing suddenly the urgency. The music in the elevator was a sterile tune that seemed to her full of menace. She wanted it to stop, searched for some way to end it, but it cackled on.

The doors slid open. The hallway was quiet, perfectly quiet. She walked to the door and rang the doorbell. Almost immediately the door swung open and Jojran stood there. He was dressed nicely, in clothes that fit for a change, and it made him look almost like a man. He seemed relaxed, truly at ease, not the nervous faux confidence, no twitching, no grinding his teeth, no unconscious vocalizations. He wore the same knowing smile as the guard.

"Saru," he said. "What a pleasant surprise."

"Shouldn't be," she said, pushing past him. Their skin touched as she went by and the area of contact exploded in a crawling sensation, like fleas swarming on her skin. She shivered. "I've been calling for hours."

"Sorry," he said. He closed the door behind him. Every motion was so smooth now. The apartment smelled funny, like sex, almost, and something else, something sweet like garbage. "I was occupied. I was trying to reach you too, where were you?"

"Got picked up," she said. "Broke a few road rules, but they let me out for good behavior. Listen, I need you to find me a vulture, someone with good vibes. I need someone to analyze this." She withdrew the vial of blood McCully had collected. "This came off of one of our perps, killed a woman this morning." He didn't need any more detail.

He took the vial and held it up to the light, swirling it. He smiled even more broadly. She noticed that his teeth were whiter, like he'd gone out and finally seen a dentist, fixed those odd yellow spots. His teeth were almost perfect now.

"I think I can help you with this," he said. He winked. "I've been doing some research, you know, on our friends, the UausuaU."

She shuddered. The name was nonsensical, some alien transliteration, something with no semantic power, just a sound. She'd stumbled through it, heard other people stumble through it, even ElilE and Friar with their good technical pronunciation—it didn't sound like this. When Jojran said it it was perfect, a perfect, slithering re-creation of the song, the hidden song she'd heard in the jukebox, in the elevator, in the hallucinations with Friar, the street player with his saxophone, and the screech of brakes as she'd slammed into that car and crawled over her crumpled hood.

"What kind of research have you been doing?" she asked, taking a step backwards, nonchalant. He noticed of course, and his smile grew, even broader now, straining at the edges of his mouth.

"Wonderful research," he said. "In fact, I've found a lead. Fanny Duvak. Do you know who she is?"

Saru sensed they were moving in tandem, that he acted only in response to her but so quickly it was like they were mirroring each other. Her Betty jolted to her hand and she fired three rubbers into his chest. He brought up his arm and flicked his wrist, casually, like he was trying to dry his hands. A pain like a knife cut across her chest. She looked down and saw indeed she had been cut, a straight red line from her right hip up through her left breast to her left shoulder. The cut had gone right through her steel-armor shirt. For a second the pain was too much, overloading her senses, and then her combat implants kicked in and shot her full of painkillers and adrenaline. She dove behind the kitchen counter and then peeked over the top.

Jojran stood there, exactly where he'd been, not moved an inch by three rubber bullets from two feet away. They had put holes in his shirt, holes in his skin; she could see blood trickling out. His head swiveled a hundred degrees to look at her, swiveled without the rest of the body moving an inch, bones cricking at the motion.

"Why Saru," he said, sounding hurt. "Why would you do that to me?"

She stood and leveled the gun at him. Her scans swept up and down telling her over and over again that this was Jojran, their somatic profiles matched—slower heartbeat, slower blinks, regularly timed, like with ElilE, a stopwatch arrangement to every breath and motion, like a machine pretending to be a man.

"What have you done with Jojran?" she asked.

"But I am Jojran," he said. "You know that."

"You're good, but I've seen dopples before. You aren't fooling anyone so cut the bullshit. Where's the real Jojran, and I swear to God if you've hurt him I will show you pain."

He laughed, neck springing back into forward position, and then he leaned-sat on the back of the sofa causing the nose of her gun to twitch down and stay level with his heart. She didn't know if a regular bullet would slow him down but the ball buster in the barrel could shred a tank; it would turn a person—even a drugged-up, body-modded psychopath—into goulash.

"You think I'm a clone? No, sorry. This is the real deal." He held up a forearm and she flinched—what had he used on her before? Some sort of sonic sword or a ring laser? Whatever it was it hurt like a motherfucker and it had gone right through her. Her whole chest felt tight as her platelet injectors flooded the area and accelerated the scarring process. That was one unfortunate side effect of the technology—big ugly scars for everything. She hoped she hadn't lost a nipple; it was hard to tell. He wagged his forearm at her so the skin jiggled and then he grabbed a pinch and ripped it out, holding it up and shaking it.

"Yep, this is the real Jojran—his body at least. He gave it to me."

"You sick fuck."

"No. I helped him. He was sad and afraid and alone and his life was pain. I gave him peace."

"You murdered him like you murdered those women."

"Hardly. Murder implies malice and I act only out of love. This world is in disarray, the planets and stars scattered about at random, the organisms fighting each other willy-nilly—what an odd word, willy-nilly. Willy-nilly, willy-nilly, willy-nilly...you see what I mean? It could just as easily be nilly-willy. There's no order here, no structure. No _unity_."

She resisted the urge to just shoot him. This mad rambling was garbage, but he might let something slip, a clue about his hideout or his methods. The danger was if he started making sense, started getting inside her head.

"And you do that by killing?"

"Killing is a meaningless concept. The information is the same no matter how it is expressed, but more useful in the aggregate. An individual can be just as easily unkilled as killed, but then you would lessen the whole. It is better to be whole."

"I don't understand."

"Of course not. You're just one mind, one body, ninety years at most of life to learn and save a copy of any wisdom that manages to penetrate your selfishness. I didn't kill those women. I freed them, and they begged, _begged_ me to do it. They died in pain only because they made it so, according to the rules of your species—nothing is free, there is no love, everything has a price. They forced their payment upon me—for some reason your species has a fascination with pain, and pleasure too, and all the sordid acts of the body. They asked for pain in measure of the gift, and I gave. But we would give freely, without pain, to all if you would only allow us, for mine are the Giving Gods, the Gods of Eternal Life, the Loving Gods."

"And Jojran? What have you done with him?"

"He is with us now, happy."

"You mean he's dead."

"You aren't _listening_. There is no such thing as death. Do you wish him to be back here? As an individual again, a lonely mind trapped in a bag of fluid? Or what about your friend McCully or the woman Terry? Do you wish to see them again? To return them to the pain of this world?"

"You bastard."

Was he taunting her? The scans showed nothing, no body sign of lies or deception, no blush or elevated heart rate, no blink or the conspicuous absence of a reaction that tagged along with intent to deceive. Of course that could merely indicate training, the superior self-control all these alien worshippers seemed to exhibit. But her gut told her he was telling the truth, that he really believed he was some sort of murderous Good Samaritan, and he could bring people back from the dead. And there was no doubt he intended to do the same to her, to mesmerize her with whatever voodoo he could muster and then carve her up in some insane therapeutic exercise.

Fanny Duvak. At last she remembered the name. It was her, of course, one of the aliases she had used to navigate the security bureaucracy—a condom ID, something you used once and then tossed. But it had her picture, had a scrap of data winding back to her and someone with a deep knowledge of the Net had followed the path. The implications...too much to sort through. She was on the list, one of the targets. That bastard ElilE, he had known, suspected at least. Of course she had to take the case, she was part of it already, from the very beginning. Blue eyes, about as dull and gray as you could get, a cheap imitation, dollar-store blue, but enough to make her a target, to tie her in with these other lucky candidates. Did that mean she was a target for something else, for the so-called Blue God? Was he right now lurking in this room, watching this scene play out and judging on his own incomprehensible score card?

"Come," the impostor cooed. "Come join your friends." He took a step forward, holding out his hand. Her finger twitched over the trigger of her Betty. "Come, we're all here, Saru," it was McCully's voice. "It's so nice here. You can have whatever you want." And then Terry, in her three-packs-a-day croak: "It's wonderful here. I've never been so happy." And other voices, voices from her past, barely remembered—Johnny Creek, the first boy she'd kissed, in the Morning House after they'd stolen the janitor's flask of whiskey, trying not to grimace as they slurped it in the cleaning closet, pretending it wasn't their first time, and then the passion of the transgression bringing their mouths together. "Come Saru," he said, but was he dead? Or was it a trick of her mind? Emily Rothstein, the girl that had tattled on her for sneaking a boy—not Johnny—into the girl's dorm. She'd found her on the playground, the fenced-in asphalt on the building roof, and slammed her head into the ground, pinned her and pummeled her until both her eyes were swollen shut. Saru hadn't meant to hurt her, not that much, at least, but she'd needed stitches and she wasn't as pretty after that. She too sang along: "It's not your fault, Saru, it was my fault. I'm sorry. Come, come with us, it's alright."

Another step, the hand outstretched was less than a foot from the gun barrel now. She saw her hands were shaking and the Betty wasn't as firm as it had been. "It's okay, Saru, you did your best. I'm better now." Colton Mathews, one of her first cases, a kidnapping fuckup. He had almost the same name as Colton L. Mathews, of the Rittenhouse Mathews, but his parents were the Richmond Mathews, living in assistance housing, paycheck to paycheck off the mother's truck-driving salary. The kidnappers had learned their error, but they'd poked the kid full of holes and left him behind a dumpster anyway. She'd never caught them, hadn't gotten close, hadn't even taken the time to bring back the kid's body. She'd taken the family's $2,000 and hit the bar. "It's okay," Colton said. "I'm better now. I'm safe, I'm happy."

She dropped the gun, let it snuggle back into its holster. Her hand stayed where it was, just a few inches from Jojran's. "It's okay," Jojran said. "It's all okay. We're happy. We're safe. We're complete." It was true; they were happy, she could see that. All these mistakes were just the symptoms of her humanity, inevitable. And beyond that waited a better form of life, a form that was perfect, that could not err, and she could be part of it. There it was, the certainty, the absolute, a diamond, irrefutable Truth. She had not erred. The very world she lived in was an error, a false step on the path to existence, an abortion, a failed world. Of course she caused pain and hurt others. It was life, the life that she was part of and she could no more control her nature than the maggots that wriggled in the meat of the dead.

She saw that she was immaterial, that her actions were meaningless, but she could join in something greater, something real, a purpose, to bring joy to the joyless, to liberate the other horrid, mistaken abominations of this tiny planet. All the men and women mindlessly killing and fucking and scrabbling together piles of junk—for what? Pointless action. Carnal routine. The urge to fuck and murder propelling a horde of hairless monkeys further and further into a hell of their own creation. She was dead, they were all dead, even though they may move and copy they were just machines, air-powered bags of gas and blood. Life! She wanted life! Truth! Purpose! Certainty. Here, here was reality, and everything she had known was nothing more than the lizard-brain impulse, amebic stimulus-response. Oh God, she wanted it!

She reached and their fingers touched. His warmth flowed into her, a trickle, a river, an ocean of souls, caressing her, running through their hands and over her skin, welcoming her to reality. She was home. She was whole. Somewhere, a distant part of her put its hands on her hips and clucked. Saru, you moron, you fell for it, you swallowed his Kool-Aid. Oh well, it was too late now. She luxuriated in the warmth, the joy, the physical ecstasy of every atom in her body cumming at once. Yes, this was better, oh how much better it was. It was hard to tell amidst the torrent of souls, but somewhere in the process—amidst the satisfaction of her own gullible stupidity and the ecstasy of an alien touch—she realized that she was dead, or her body was at least, and she was finally free.

Chapter 15

The sun was hot, a wonderful, luxurious hot on her naked skin. She wriggled and dug herself deeper into the sand, massaging herself against its cool, abrading yield. Oh yes, that was it. The water was warm, coming in gentle waves to tickle her feet. And it was quiet, so quiet, quieter than she had known was possible. Not a sound except for the gentle lapping of the waves and the crush of sand on her back. She dozed and woke and repeated. How long had she been there? Forever of course. There was nowhere else to be. No distracting hunger, no worry, no need to piss or shit—was she even breathing? Yes, her lungs moved in and out in a long, slow, relaxing rhythm, but she sensed this was merely a feature for her comfort, that the action served no purpose other than its absence would be frightening.

It was annoying when she realized this would have to end, that this wasn't life, and it wasn't death. There were memories, distant, from ages ago, but they were there, nagging, poking her, prowling the edge of her calm. They were becoming aggressive. She'd have to do something about it. She sat up and opened her eyes. Her other senses had been right; she was on an island. It was tiny, a hump of sand with a single palm tree amidst an infinite blue ocean beneath an infinite blue sky. She marveled at the blue, how it blended flawlessly from shade to shade, light where it touched the ocean and steadily darkening until directly overhead it was almost black. She could see stars amidst the darker blue, scattered silver freckles in the sky.

"It's beautiful, is it not?"

Friar, of course. She'd known he'd be here. Known he'd find her eventually. He was standing next to her—had he been there the whole time? He was naked too, she noticed, observing this simply as a fact without any of the baggage of nudity imposed by society, no judgment or breeding urge. He was naked, the sky was blue, the sand was white, and the ocean had no end.

"Yes," she said. "Did you make this place?"

"No," he said sadly. "You did."

"I did?"

"Yes. A part of you. This is your margin, where your existence," he gestured to the water, "intersects with all the existences that are. It is your atomic memory, the memory of your atoms as they were born, when they were part of the super-universe before our own universe was born. They remember their brothers and sisters and welcome them."

She remembered herself, knew on an intellectual level that this kind of talk bothered her, but there was no anger or annoyance. She accepted what he said as fact, even if she did not understand. The sky was blue. The sand was white. The ocean had no end.

"Friar?"

"Yes."

"What am I doing here?"

"I'm not sure," he said. "I think you are making a decision."

"A decision?"

"Yes," he said. "You've met the enemy."

"Yes," she said. It was strange to call it an enemy. "He told me things, told me I'd be happy, that others were happy. Is that true? He said that the women made him torture them...that it was their humanity. He said we saw him as evil only because we ourselves were evil."

"Yes," Friar said, "It is true. The UausuaU is truth. In our world it exists as we would have it. And if we are monsters then the UausuaU is merely a reflection of that."

"Then what's the point?" she yelled, and there was anger now, a familiar feeling, comfortable. "Then it's right! We're the bad guys here, we're the shit heads. We should just join it, become part of it. Be happy."

Friar said nothing. He looked out across the water.

"It may be that in the end it is our only option."

"Well thanks, Friar, so glad you stopped by, fat lot of good you are."

"I'm sorry, Saru, I can't help you."

"No shit. God, I have to do everything myself." She stomped around the island, kicking at the sand. She picked up the single coconut and hurled it into the sea, where it made a satisfying plop.

"Rargh!" she yelled. "Let me out of here. Friar!" She grabbed him by the shoulders and shook. "I know you're doing this. You were in my head, weren't you, fucking around, and now you brought me here."

"I was trying to warn you."

"Of what?"

"From coming here."

"You are useless!" she said, pushing him so he stumbled back. "Some friend you are; I go looking to you for answers and then you go and die—no, you make me kill you—and then you camp out in my head like some squatter and when I really need some help, some fucking coaching, all you can do is vomit out this fatalist bullshit!" She yelled again, beating her chest, screaming into the bored air. Ah that felt good; there was the real joy, the real warmth. That instinct, the inside touch. That was who she was and God she loved it, relished it, every lick of it. Fuck this other shit, this alien bullshit and Friar's cryptic dithering.

"Fuck this," she said aloud. "I'm out of here."

She walked into the ocean, resolute, wading out to her hips. The water was warm.

"That's not the way out," Friar said.

"Whatever," she called back. She kept going. The water was up to her neck, then over her head and her feet no longer touched the ground. She paddled forward awkwardly, she didn't really know how to swim, but it didn't matter. This wasn't really water. She kept paddling until the island disappeared, realizing it was accomplishing nothing and she wasn't getting tired. She let herself sink, let the water fill her lungs, and at last she felt a pain, a pressure, a panic as the blue sky disappeared under the darkness of the water, sinking, sinking, sinking, and the pain growing and morphing into a body pain, and then a face staring at her, some broken mask of a face, Jojran, cackling at her, and she saw that they were holding hands, standing in his kitchen.

She whipped the prod from its holster and slammed it like a club into his temple. The soft bone crumpled and the prod sank half an inch into his skull, crackling at full power. He closed his eyes and opened them slowly, sighing as if impatient.

"How disappointing," he said. His right hand blurred forward, too fast for her response implants to follow, and formed a vice around her neck. In a casual, whoopsie-daisy motion, he lifted her up and dragged her across the counter; the tiles cracked as he slammed her into the floor. Stars floated across her vision—why was she staring at the ceiling? It was hard to breathe, like one of her ribs had gotten lost and wandered into a lung. Ow. The prod wriggled in her noodle grip, still sending out sparks and arcs of electricity. Jojran, broken-mask, crumpled-skull Jojran stood over her, massaging one hand in the other. He laughed and threw up his hands.

"Why is it so hard with you, Saru? Why can't you just be happy?"

She tried to spit and blood dribbled out the side of her mouth—had she bitten her tongue? There was something to say to that, something witty and defiant, but it wouldn't come. She seemed to be having trouble keeping a single thought in focus, it kept getting pushed out by the pain in the back of her head. Sitting up was impossible, but an arm managed to flop up and poke at the wet sensation in the back of her head. Her nails came back painted red. How pretty. She should paint her nails more, treat herself more. It was okay to spoil yourself every once in a while, maybe she'd even enjoy it. But first she needed to live.

She tried a leg sweep, a half-assed affair that didn't budge his foot, didn't even make him look down. Then she tried to kick him in the testicles, but he swatted her boot away like it was a humping terrier. He reached out a hand, presumably to help her up, and she tried to stab it with her boot knife. He evaded easily, grabbing her wrist and pulling her to her feet, where she swayed, tottered, and then slammed the flip dagger in her heel into his foot. Of course he didn't react. She was beginning to realize that pain was not a useful negotiating tool in this scenario. The Jojran impersonator didn't seem to care—didn't seem to feel it.

"Is there nothing you want?" he asked, grabbing her by the shoulders. "Do you really want to be like this? Angry, sad, afraid, fighting without knowing why? You could be so much more."

"I...want..." she had the hiccups for some reason, perhaps a result of the meandering rib bone. "I want to kick your ass."

"Yes..." he said. "You do...you really do." He let her go and spread his arms wide, vulnerable. "Do what you must, Saru. It doesn't make any difference, really. Today, tomorrow. Seven years or a million. You will know our love and—"

She shot him, a real bullet this time, right in the chest from a foot away.

"...you will be happy..."

Again.

"...you will know peace..."

Again.

"...and joy..."

And again and again, she emptied the whole automatic clip, closing her eyes and screaming. When she opened them it was quiet. Jojran, his body, the alien impostor, or whatever it had been, was lying on the ground in front of her in a puddle of blood, riddled with holes. He looked peaceful, happy even, somehow, and that annoyed her. The blood was pooling around her boots, soaking into Jojran's white fuzzy carpet, splattered on his nice white couches. Her head was killing her, she couldn't focus, her feeds and her implants were scrambled from the touch or the trip to the island, or the blow to the back of her head. Her hair was wet and she could feel the wet trickling down the back of her neck, sliding down the channel of her spine. She swayed to her knees and pried the vial of blood from Jojran's fingers. Then she limped and rummaged and gasped her way around the kitchen until she found a plastic baggy. She dragged it through the blood pool until it was full and put it in her pocket along with the vial.

The music in the elevator was a tropical melody, blue skies and white sands. The doors slid open at the lobby and she sucked in a breath and tried to look normal as she walked to the doors, ignoring the security guards. She'd washed as much of the blood off as she could but there were still splatters on her coat and jeans, and she couldn't really walk out naked. She pushed hard against the doors, leaning in to support her body weight. They wouldn't open.

"It's only a matter of time," the security guard called. There was a click and the doors swung open. She stumbled into the night.

Chapter 16

The blood was a lie—more than a red herring, a joke. Four different vultures and one shady lab tech at the MercyCorp Hospital, and they all came back with a different analysis. It was McCully's blood. Terry's blood. Jojran's blood. Her blood. Had she mixed up the samples? No, of course not. The needle ring on her middle finger did all the work, one quick, painless prick on McCully and Terry to get their samples, impossible to mistake for the nigh-quart of blood she'd wrung from Jojran/his impersonator or the vial she'd snatched from McCully. Didn't she know that doppleganger blood was a trickster, that it could corrode and corrupt and play havoc with your data? Of course she did, that's why she kept the vial and the blood bag separate from her prick ring. And anyway, this wasn't a case of dopple contamination—that would mess with the results, ruin them, not change them every time. But everyone who looked at the bag of blood came back with a different idea of who it belonged to. The skeevy lab tech had even found Friar's blood in the mix.

Friar. He knew all about this magical bullshit, understood it even to the point that it was a science for him. And now his ghost was banging around her skull, inviting her to tropical getaways in the midst of some extremely tense situations. Was he really helping her? Or was he just another symptom of this enemy, a stray scrap of misery, a bodiless victim that had gotten stuck in the drunken, angry maze of her brain.

Feasters. The man, the thing, whatever it was wearing Jojran's skin was a feaster for sure, or one of their servants. What was she expecting? Not that, for sure. Crazy, yes, strong, probably, and clever, a psychopath with an education and a dollop of religious zeal. But that was something else—there was a power there, and she needed to admit it, internalize this as fact, because the sooner she really let herself believe there was alien magic at work, the sooner she could stop underestimating her enemies. Now, in the light of day, walking down Broad Street, surrounded by men in caji suits and women in posh dresses, it seemed silly, like a bad dream that she'd confused with grown-up life. But she could still remember the voices calling to her, that urge she'd felt within her—physical, emotional, spiritual, sexual—to give herself up and join into something greater. She remembered the skin-crawl terror of the security guard calling to her in Jojran's voice as she slunk away, remembered the way every man and woman on the trek to her hotel—no way she could go home now—had seemed to stop and watch her pass, to whisper nice things in strange voices and offer themselves. She remembered the elzi she passed scattering before her, which frightened her perhaps more than anything, because of course they couldn't see or hear or know that she was there, and yet they ran from her like she was doom.

Instinct brought her to a bar but she didn't go in. Somehow, perhaps for the first time in her life, drinking did not seem likely to provide a solution to her problems. She kept sipping from her flask to keep her mind a little zagged, just in case the Friar ghost in her head hypothesis was whack and she was being hacked, but it seemed unlikely. And now what? No trail of blood to lead her to her prey, and she herself was a mark. Flee? Where? The Gaespora would freeze her accounts and she wouldn't be able to buy an exit visa. And they'd find her anyway. She wasn't going to let herself be hunted—she was the hunter, she was the aggressive one who kicked down doors and shot first and asked questions maybe later if she needed to find a liquor store. But there were no more doors to kick, no one to beat up and cough up answers.

She spent the afternoon in Rittenhouse Park on a bench, scanning the Net. It was a nice, light-hazy day where you could see pretty far in front of you and breathe without a cheese-grater feeling in your lungs, so there were a lot of people out. It felt comforting to be around other people, people she thought were unlikely to be servants of an alien death God. Passing through the censor walls was a breeze and she quickly found herself in the Wekba, the dark part of the Net where everything fun happened. It was important to have a high-quality spam filter and AI countermeasures or your brain would be overloaded with ads and you'd find yourself sprinting to the nearest alley to buy sky from a tricked soda machine, or you'd be hacked by a prowling viking like Jojran and wake up with your accounts empty and all your sex memories hung like panties on a flagpole for the world to see.

Most of what she could find on the feasters was trashy horror stories. Feasters were vampires that sucked your blood and could kill with a thought. They injected you with their blood and turned you into their slaves. If you looked them in the eyes they could hypnotize you. They were demons who struck bargains in exchange for your soul. They were beings of astonishing romance and had lots and lots of sex with young women and misunderstood young men. Why was she doing this? What did she hope to learn? There were accounts of people who had met with feasters, made deals with them—a businessman who had traded his beating heart for wealth, a lonely mother who had jammed ice picks in her ears to hear the voices of her dead children, a man who had given his cock and balls in exchange for true love. And what would she trade? Was it her body they wanted, or her mind—she couldn't imagine it being the latter. What made a person? What was their appeal to others or to aliens? And what had that Jojran impostor said? That there really was no price and that we humans were just too dumb of an organism to accept a gift. She could buy that. She'd seen enough sad, desperate people do crazy things for less than the promise of eternal love.

What she really needed to know was how many of them there were—how many people she was going to have to kill to save her own life (and maybe some other people's lives too, as a bonus). She'd killed one, hadn't she? She'd checked on the police scanner and saw a murder had been committed at Jojran's address, a single body—no suspects of course. That was the kind of murder the police liked, a single man with no ties and a good deal of seizable cash. And even if they traced it back to her and decided to wobble their lard asses into action, ElilE would make it all disappear. So the body hadn't gotten up and walked away, thank God. But what about the mind, the presence, that intellect making him tap dance around. Had that died too? Or was it like an AI virus living in the Net, lurking in your coffee maker and your car and your player? Would she have to destroy the goddamn Net to be free? No, this wasn't some twisted AI; it was too smart and too dumb at the same time—too organic.

Friar. Of course. Friar had known—and she had known he'd known in the back of her mind, but still couldn't bring herself to go back. But now she was out of options. She drew herself out of another so-called experience with the feasters, which had turned yet again into porn, and got to her feet. The answer wasn't in the Net—it was here, in real life, and her problems could only be solved with fist and gun. She shut down all her feeds—all the comedies, coupons, fun facts, and erotic sensory waves, shutting down every distraction and setting herself in business mode. Nothing to interrupt her thoughts but the body scanners, police feeds, and tip offs—the tools of the trade.

She walked to Friar's house and rested a hand on the fortress door. It swung open easily. Something clicked in her brain—the Friar presence that had been haunting her. A clever man would take his security seriously and the cleverest—and richest—would train his equipment to recognize his psychosomatic profile. She'd thought his presence in her brain could be a fluke, a mistake of his mad-scientist experiments. But perhaps not. Perhaps he had done it on purpose (poorly), trying to help her, so she could continue on when he was gone. And perhaps he'd even known that she would need to come back here. She walked down the hallway, past the study, the living room that looked to be never used, the kitchen with a half-full teacup still on the counter. She found the second fortress door leading to the basement, which also swung open at her touch. Her footsteps echoed, boots clanging on the metal stairs. The lights were off and her waving arms couldn't find a switch. She tried to activate them with a mental command, and with the effort of the concentration she missed the last step and tumbled face first onto the metal platform.

"God damn it to fuck!" she yelled, words too echoing with the clang of her body against the metal—how big was this place? She picked herself up and rubbed her knee. It was the kind of injury just lame enough to hurt and not activate any combat or healing procedures. She stood still and let her eyes adjust to the near-dark, light supplied by the glowing of instruments. Guided by this she found some promising switches, and after trying several the lights came on. Finally. Now to find a clue and—all the hairs on the back of her neck stood straight. The operating table was empty. No stinky, decayed Friar—she was ready for that. No chance the pigs could have been here, no enterprising vulture or worried relative. She'd told no one, and how could they even get in? Who would take a body and leave all the expensive crap? Friar was dead; she knew that, he was dead for sure...wasn't he? She'd felt him go still, stuck around to check. But had he faked it? What reason would he have? With a sinking feeling she walked to the edge of the platform. Her eyes followed the lights down, down, down into the pit, to where the massive steel door now lay open.

Chapter 17

Twenty-seven standard bullets, four ball busters, two incendiaries, ten rubbers, three micro-grenades, the prod at 64 percent power, the boot knife, the thigh shivs, a garroting lasso, the poison-injector ring...it seemed like a shit arsenal against the darkness of that black pit. She searched the lab three times over, but it didn't seem that Friar had any weapons—how could he be private justice without at least a taser or a tranquilizer gun? Manners only took you so far in a gunfight. Did he stab people with his scalpel? She'd have to go in with what she had. Or she could run away. She could go to the gun store and buy a bazooka, a machine gun, a flamethrower, a laser, or a sixty-thousand-dollar plasma launcher. But even then would she be ready? Could she make it down those steps again knowing that door was open? The surprise was a gift and she needed to take it. Friar was down there, alive or dead, and if he was fucking with her he would have to pay.

There was an elevator, she saw, a large steel platform the size of an industrial dumpster that slid down two metal rails to drop her just in front of the door. It moved damn slow, giving her more time to think than she needed. The bare light bulbs down passed one by slow-ass one, the platform above getting smaller and smaller, and she reflected on her own stupidity. Mercenaries—she could have hired a dozen crack heads with shotguns to run ahead and eat bullets for her. Another light. Hemu, he might have had some mystical answer for Friar's disappearance. Another light. ElilE. Bastard. Bastard, bastard, bastard, bastard. Another light. And why did she care anyway? If Friar wanted to fake his own death and live in a sewer, how was that any of her concern? Maybe he had an ex-wife giving him grief or he was in debt or forgot to pay his taxes. What did he have to do with her case—with her survival? Everything, of course.

The elevator came to a jolting stop right in front of the door. Truly massive, larger than she'd thought, you could drive a whole subway car through it. Why did Friar need such a large door anyway? She realized she had to pee and shuffled into a corner behind one of the door's hinges to relieve herself. Better. There was a control panel with seemingly obvious open and close buttons, but also a keypad that she assumed was to lock the damn thing. Which meant he was trying to keep something from getting out, right? Or maybe he kept his gold in there in great heaps and piles—wouldn't that be a happy ending? A ring of the same bare bulbs that traced the elevator illuminated the area around the door but didn't do much to punch away the darkness beyond. She could see about eight feet through the door—it appeared to be dirt floor and naked rock and there was the faint outline of a concrete frame amidst the rock. Oh well, here goes nothing.

She stepped into the darkness and then took another step. Nothing happened. She took another step and then a skip. "Hello!" she yelled down the tunnel. Her voice echoed back, except it seemed to be saying, "Idiot." What had she expected? The door to slam shut and the lights to go off? The door weighed fifty tons. She could roast a chicken and limbo to safety in the time it took to close. As for lights...she took enough steps that the entrance was a small bright circle and then switched on her night vision. Perfect. She certainly was in a tunnel, about the same width and height as the door, and dank and wet and clammy. There were footprints in the dirt—a clue!—and her scanners told her they belonged to size-nine male loafers. That sounded like something Friar would wear. Obviously, this was his mysterious tunnel.

She kept walking. It seemed like she walked for a very long time, but maybe it was just the lack of entertainment feeds and her creeping sobriety. Crap. She hadn't taken stock of her barsenal before heading out. There were just a few swills—now her flask was empty and the backup flask was low. She had some diluted sky in her pocket ring, but would that be enough? Walking and walking and walking and—a door. It had snuck up on her, another door, similar to the first, closing off the tunnel. Well now what? There was a symbol on this door, something crazy that a retarded child might draw. It was a bunch of straight and squiggly lines, crossing and connecting and blending and flowing together, and now as she looked she saw they were changing and moving and seemed to have color beyond the green tinge of the night vision. She wanted to touch the symbol and so she did, and then gasped as the lines came up from the door and slid into her veins. She felt them pumping and sucking and draining her blood, a delicious joy and near-sexual pleasure rushing up and distracting her brain with ecstasy as they killed her. She jerked her hand away and screamed as her skin tore and blood splashed out, more of her precious blood spilled, lost. The strings had fused to her veins, melding into them so it was impossible to see where they ended and her body began. She grabbed her boot knife and slashed upwards in a long arc, severing the strings. Instantly the ecstasy was gone, replaced by an agony that overwhelmed her pain filters for a full five seconds. Her veins dangled from a ragged gash along her wrist and her whole arm shook. She fell to her knees and then back on her ass and choked back vomit and the urge to sob.

It took about eight minutes for her machinery to get the situation under control. She slapped on three knit patches, cotton-candy threads soaking up her blood and melding into her flesh to create a nice temporary skin. Her platelet injectors were on overdrive and they informed her she'd lost about a liter of blood, which might explain the wooziness, the headache, the exhaustion and possibly the self-disgust. Or maybe that was because she'd managed to spring the very first trap she'd come across and nearly die. But what kind of trap was it? Her night vision was good, top notch—she'd spared no expense—but obviously it had missed a few details. She switched it off and supercharged the contact plates in her left hand to form a lackluster flashlight. It'd drain calories like a motherfucker and with less than a full tank o' blood that might be an issue, but damn it she needed to see. The scribble design was still there, no longer moving, no longer mesmerizing. It seemed to her the black lines had assumed a reddish tinge from drinking her blood. What kind of trap was that? She'd never seen anything like it. Wires that cut you, yeah, drugs that made you feel good, yeah, needles that drained your blood, all the time—but never in a neat little package like this.

Her head started to hurt and she switched off the makeshift flashlight and went back into night vision. The expedition was a failure, just like everything else she'd done. There was no control panel here, nothing she could find anyway with eyes or scanners—and she wasn't about to run her fingers across any more surfaces. The door was closed, she didn't know how it opened; it was time to go home and get drunk, and maybe go to a hospital. And she would have, too, if a crack of light hadn't appeared almost with that thought and the door hadn't swung silently open with a deal more speed than she had anticipated. And the view beyond—once her vision adjusted—took her breath away. Great, my blood, my breath, my sanity—what more do you want? My tits in a basket?

In front of her was a cavern the size of a football field. She knew it had to be at least that large because there was a cathedral inside, right in front of her. A stone bridge extended from the mouth of the door across a four-lane-highway chasm to an equally impressive door in the side of the cathedral. To her left and right were more doors, closed, with their own stone bridges leading to their own cathedral doors. Assuming they went all the way around, she guessed there were fourteen doors in all. She switched off her night vision and found she could still see. The cavern narrowed at the top, disappearing in a luminescent golden cloud. She stepped onto the stone bridge—it seemed so old, but how could it be?—and her footsteps sounded loud but didn't echo. There was a noise, she realized, in the background, faint and present like an engine hum or rushing water. She hadn't noticed it at first, couldn't notice it unless she was really paying attention. What was it? It sounded like voices, hundreds, thousands of voices, singing softly, men, women, children, tenors, basses, whatevers, high and low all singing together. With that same crawling, slithering-vinyl sensation up her spine, with a sickness in her heart and groin and belly, she recognized the song pouring up from the pit below and echoing from the walls, the song in the screams of newborns and the gasps of the newly dead, in car honks and sex ballads, the song of an eye grating against its socket and a worm digging its way through human flesh: _uausuausuausuausuausuausuausuau_ ...

She followed the song, walked to the edge of the bridge and looked down. There they were, the bodies, thousands of them, hundreds of thousands maybe, dead—or alive? They moved, or seemed to, writhing like maggots around one another in a great fleshy soup that filled the cavern. From another hole—a lower hole, a hole with no bridge, one of hundreds—came the creature. It looked like a pile of human torsos fused together and jammed onto the body of a train-sized centipede. It slithered out of the hole and down the side of the cavern, coming, coming, coming, seemingly no end to its body. The first fifty feet of it detached from the wall and swung gracefully out over the pit of bodies below. It reared and Saru saw on its belly a long line of human bodies—oh God, children too!—held by smaller arms. The flesh pool seemed to rise up, the arms of bodies within it reaching out to embrace the bodies trapped in the centipede. They were cradled and carried down with care and love to disappear into the flesh pool. Then the centipede slithered back up the wall and back into its hole and was gone.

"Beautiful, isn't it?"

She screamed and whirled, the Betty leapt to her hand and she barely adjusted her aim enough to keep the bullet from going right through Friar's skull. It nicked the top of his ear, taking about three centimeters of skin with it. He didn't flinch.

"Friar!" she yelled. The Betty wobbled in her hand. Her arm was still shaking and from more than just the blood loss. She forced herself to take a deep breath and then managed to speak in a semi-normal voice. "Give me a reason not to hit you this time, because I am freaked the fuck out."

He waved his hand like he was brushing away a piece of dust and the Betty jerked out of her hand and flew over the side of the bridge. Well, fuck. She tried to laugh but all she felt was defeated. "You're one of them then, eh?"

"Yes," he said. "I am."

She sat on the stone railing of the bridge and put her chin in her hands. Then she looked over the side, down at the writhing pool of flesh. One of those fuckers had her gun. Could she get it back? How far was the Betty's jump distance? Not three hundred feet. She turned back to Friar. How had he snuck up on her like that? He was the same as he'd been before except now instead of the professor getup he was wearing a black caji suit. He still had that potbelly, still had that balding head with the gray-hair sides, still had those tired eyes that still looked sad. Not an athlete, not a warrior. But he was one of them. He was part of this. And so it seemed the rules did not apply. She'd have to kill him, kill him for real this time. Get some real satisfaction.

"So what?" she asked him. "Are you gonna kill me now, like you killed those girls? Was it you who killed them?"

"We gave them life."

"Yeah, your friend said something about that before I shot him. Are you going to give me life, then?"

"If you want it."

"I don't. I'm going to go get another gun, and I'll be back to kill you then."

She stood and walked to the door. It was closed, of course. She didn't want to touch it in case it sucked away more of her blood. Kicking seemed safe but it still didn't open. She looked over the side. Could she climb down into one of those holes? And accomplish what? Better to take her chances with Friar than the centipede from Hell. Ah Friar, what's your game? He just watched her, standing there, making no moves. Patient man. She sidled over casually and then charged him. Her shoulder slammed into his side and yes! she knocked him back a foot. The prod landed in his testicles and he didn't even wince, just stood there as the arcs of lightning jumped around his thighs. He raised an arm, fingers limp, and swished them around. Strings exploded from his hand and fingers like the strings of the door and shot into her neck this time. She screamed and fell to the ground as the sensation of ecstasy filled her yet again and the blood drained from her body.

"Stop," she gasped, and he stopped. The wires zipped out of her neck, leaving a dozen tiny wormholes, and slurped back into friar's hand, which he then extended to help her up.

"Bastard," she breathed, and tottered to her feet. It was hard to see. Her platelet injectors were saying her blood levels were dangerously low. No fucking duh. "Let me go," she said. "Open up that door. I don't want to be here!" She really didn't.

"Would you like to see inside?" he asked, gesturing towards the cathedral. "It is a work of art."

No, she didn't want to see inside. She didn't want him to drain any more of her blood either. Think! Think damn it! Stall. This is your life we're talking about here, missy. Granted, it ain't much but it's yours and he's trying to take it so think of a way to save yourself and then you can go home and drink forties and watch porn and never think again.

"Okay," she said.

He started walking and she followed. What was the range of those wires? What was the range of his little gravity manipulator that had flicked away her Betty? Did he need a line of sight? She didn't have enough guns or blood to be scientific about it.

At first the cathedral had looked kind of like a drip castle that a child would make out of mud, but as she drew closer she saw that it was all carved stone, more fluid and life-like than she had ever seen. There were more human bodies, and they were happy, embracing, kissing, and fucking in a huge orgy spread out across the surface of the cathedral. In a way it was beautiful, but if it was supposed to depict the pit below they were way off the mark. And of course, how did it even get there? Stall. She needed to stall. She needed time, time to think, time to be rescued. Who knew she was here? Anyone? Everyone who would care was already dead.

"Why did you fake your own death?" she asked him.

"I didn't."

"So you accidentally faked your own death?"

"No. I died—my human body died. And then I came back. Then I realized what I was, and what my role was in this world."

"So...you died and now you're what? A feaster?"

He smiled at her. It was warm, not condescending, like a grandpa delighted by a precocious child. Looking at his kindly old Santa Claus face it was almost impossible to imagine that he had just shot wires into her neck and sucked out her blood, that he was talking to her above a pit full of thousands of bodies in front of the cathedral of an alien death cult, and not in a mall somewhere with a child on his lap asking them what they wanted for Discount Day.

"A feaster...yes, that is what you would call me. No. I studied them, the UausuaU. I wanted to know about the elzi, what they saw, but I was always afraid to look myself. I made...others look for me, which I regret, forcing those people to join in the One. No, I don't regret the joining, but my methods were crude, blundering—human. I caused pain, too much pain, and some were lost. The meeting should come with joy. I think that's why they brought me here. To welcome you with joy."

He stopped in front of the cathedral door and she stopped a few feet behind him, resisting the temptation to split his domey skull with her prod and run away. She'd tried that already. He reached up a hand to stroke the carving of a naked thigh—more scenes of joy and love and Eden and frolicking under trees with your tits hanging out. A split appeared in the center of the carving, so faint she hadn't seen it. Light filled the gap and it grew. The scent of...incense? wafted out as the doors swung inward and Friar stepped inside. He turned, bathed in the light of the entrance, and beckoned with that Santa Claus smile. She sucked in a breath and followed.

Chapter 18

The dozer was coming. Yesterday it had eaten the old sneaker factory and vomited out an ocean of tar that its tentacular cranes had whisked into a parking lot. A strip mall—that's what their home would be, and then another strip mall across from it, and then more malls and stores and strips and malls and stores. The techies would come in, hungry for the kitsch of identity, and the embyays and the counters and adjusters and all those who saw the hoarding of objects as their purpose and comfort. Hemu pitied them, wished he could walk among them and lend flowers to their hair. Perhaps they pitied him, and wished to bring him to a nice house with a large bed and many closets. But that was unlikely. The hoarders could not look past themselves.

This night was cool—but no wind, a blessing—and the moon was full, a puddle of pale light amidst the haze. His brothers and sisters sat quietly, closely, with crossed knees that brushed against their neighbors'. From here the city was a waterfall of lights in the distance. They had chosen this building carefully—above the dozer's tallest antenna, and a good distance away, so that the dozer sat in an arena of sorts, clear to view.

The Slow God spoke to them, taking a long time as usual. The first note of the first word had come with the appearance of the strange and vulgar woman. Hemu had heard the note, and listened closely. You needed to be quiet to hear, and patient, and to keep your mind free of distraction. That was why the hoarders could never hear, never understand. Their things, their objects, hung like chains around them, dragging on their minds, clamoring with need. And the Sad Gods could not hear because they were afraid, and their fear was a scream that drove out wisdom. And the Blue God? Did it know the words of the Slow God? Did they speak to one another? The Blue God was strong. Strength could bring ignorance and ignorance eroded strength.

The second note had come in the chapel, loud, louder than any he had ever heard. It rang each time he touched the woman, Saru, when their hands brushed and then atop this very warehouse—when the dozer looked much smaller—the sound had nearly deafened him as she had grasped his hand. It was too loud to hear then, surrounding, indistinct. He had given Saru what comfort he could—so much chaos in her, so much violence. She was a creature of violence, and chaos, and many forms of motion that created more motion. The note then had seemed like a warning and he had chilled. Was Saru a threat? A danger? Was he to lift her as she slept in the Slow God's peace and drop her over the edge to die against the pavement? It was not the way of the Slow God, he admonished himself. It was his own fear, fear of her violence leading him to his own.

Tonight had come the third note and the word had become clear. It was a beautiful word, as all the words of the universe were when you took the time to listen—and also frightening. So they had come, in a long procession to the top of the building, and then sat and held hands for a while, to share comfort and let it grow among them. They had sung, a long, slow chant that came from the belly, each note guided into place by the Slow God so that together they could—in the crude mechanism of the human voice, the muscles slapping and strumming one another and the vibrations bouncing along their throats—find each other in the cool night air and dance and meet and join in love. It seemed that the haze lifted then and the lights of man all vanished, and all that was was the mood, bright and close, and a billion points of light spread over the galaxy that were the notes of their song. He had wept then, as had the others, because of the longing and the knowing, and then they had dried their tears and drawn apart and fallen each into his own silence and pondering of the Slow God's word.

A tiny star drifted up from below, like a pale blue lightning bug, he imagined, though he had never seen a real one. It was followed by another, and another—a dozen tiny blue-white stars drifting lazily through the dark. He watched the flower in front of him, dangling from a thin vine growing out of the cracks. What wisdom his God had, what power to bring life to this old building, to draw such green from the crumbling mortar, the matchstick crack between two bricks, and from that vine to bring such a pretty flower, a perfect white bell that rang with the words of peace. He watched as the delicate petals opened, unfolding, revealing a tiny galaxy of colors, no larger than a pinhead. It seemed as he stared into the flower, that he was again looking at the bright night sky with the moon and the stars and all of existence spread overhead. The galaxy in the flower went dark, and a blue-white speck of pollen drifted up to join the hundreds of its brothers and sisters to dance in the night sky.

More and more, and now they came together and formed crawling shapes of light. They seemed to have no fixed dimension, to be single points and then flat and then a full dynamic three, and it seemed they strayed into other dimensions, that he was watching and re-watching the colors come together and grow and merge and take shape. He looked down at his hands and they were old and wrinkled, with aches in the knuckles and wrists. He touched his face and felt the ridges of painful acne that had caused him loneliness and unhappiness before he was a man. And then he was a baby, a child, unable to control his head and the colors followed him as he tottered over, but he was always Hemu and he sat, cross-legged, and watched the Slow God enter his world.

The shape She chose was humanoid. They had told Her this was a good shape for navigating the world and would not cause much distress. She had chosen to be a woman for they showed greater patience and endurance in Her mind. She lamented the fact that there were so few forms of life to choose from on this planet—everything that thrived was vermin. They told Her it was not always like this, and She looked deep into their memories, the memories of their bodies and their fathers and their father's fathers, far, far back and saw all that Earth once was. She had wept for them to live like this, knowing what had been, but they could not see into their own flesh memories and could not know the way in which they had been cheated.

Now She was whole. Tall, taller than the dozer, taller than the warehouse, taller than the Gaesporan tower in the dark. She could be seen for hundreds of miles, a blue-white giant, nebulous, shifting, a body with two legs and two arms, that swam more than walked across the earth. What did the others feel, the hoarders and elzi, their ward hips, and the Sad Gods in their tower? Did they tremble? Did they rub their eyes and shake away their doubts, confused by the pollution of drugs they forced into their vessels? Did they run in fear or run with hope and joy towards the God striding amidst their city. Or could they even see Her, blinded as they were with their devotion to distraction, to the anything-but-life they clung to as their own form of spirit?

She turned towards the warehouse where Hemu sat, a shifting mass of color, twisting and melding so the arms swung around and passed through them. He felt the warmth and color of Her, a sensation of suckling at his mother's breast, a smell of clove and fresh rain. It seemed he was there in the warmth of Her for a long time, his whole life maybe, and that perhaps he had died and was in fact another person, and maybe this had happened many, many times. Then the color and the warmth withdrew, drifting away like a cloud, slowly, so that the knowledge of Her absence did not come too suddenly and strike them with despair. She was singing to them, every color a note, and they joined in, adding where they could, and he felt that their song reached across the city and touched each soul and told them of peace.

She moved towards the dozer, the hateful machine, grunting and sputtering, spewing noise and smoke. Her body wrapped around it, sinking down and becoming a sphere. How like an ocean She looked, he could almost see the fish and life swimming within Her. And then he realized it was a vision, and he saw as far as his mind could what She truly was in Her own dimension, an ocean, a living ocean of unified sentience. She was a single consciousness formed by the trillion creatures of a planet-sized sea. She and the beings like Her traveled through the space of Her universe and intermingled, coming together and separating in twos and threes and sometimes millions, the creatures within them forming new ecosystems, new consciousness, and new unified sentience. And he saw that this world, his world, was anathema to Her, with its dead, acid oceans and ponds of tar and oil, and the supreme dominance of a single species destroying any chance of shared life. But She came, came to show peace, to show what could be, and the gift of his life or every life on Earth was not a worthy show of gratitude.

He gasped and the vision broke, his mind strained and twisted by the knowledge of another world, and he did not weep but sob and cry and wail and beat his fists against the stones of the roof. As the vision faded, his memory dimmed, his mind moving back into its familiar ruts to save him from the knowing; he controlled his tears and stilled his breath and wrapped himself in the peace of his God who was good. He watched as the sphere around the dozer grew brighter and shimmered and then seemed to pop like a drop of water and splash through the city. Wherever the waves touched, the filth and decay of man's folly was washed away, and in its place lay a carpet of the Earth that was. Hemu knew that this was the Slow God's gift to man, and that in the new order, the new world that would be built in flames tonight, She would protect all who sought peace beneath the trees.

Chapter 19

Regret. The one time in her life she'd showed restraint it had come back to bite her in the ass. If she hadn't pulled her aim at the last second, that bullet would have gone right through Friar's skull. Sure she'd still be in a pickle, but at least she'd have the satisfaction of seeing his head pop open and his traitorous blood drizzle out, and she could skip over and kick him again and again and laugh and maybe sing a song. But now she was being led by his black-clad ass into a cathedral that as far as she could tell was hovering over/supported by a pile of bodies. In fact, she was starting to suspect that the cathedral itself was made of bodies. The columns and inner walls and the ceiling were all carved in impossible detail with frolicking, joyful bodies touching and feeling and fucking one another. The bases of the columns seemed to be wetter, rawer almost, and they melded with the floor—oh fuck, the floor. It felt like hard black marble but looking close she could see all the whirls and patterns were bodies, all melted together and flattened, grinning, yawning, and screaming up at her.

There were no candles or incense holders, golden watchamacallits or carpets or tapestries—the normal shit you'd find in a church. The shape was a little off too, more like a plus sign than a cross. There were arches (formed of stone? No, bodies of course) and windows, but there was no glass. The ceiling rose up into a dome, which was open up top, and all light came from that strange golden mist. It seemed to her that the singing was louder in here, which was odd because it seemed to be empty—not even any pews—except for her and Friar. Her boots were clacking too loudly against the flesh-marble, and she marveled that with all the other tension, the blood loss, the knowledge she was going to be killed in an awful way, the anger, a little bit of fear, maybe more than a little—despite it all she found room to be annoyed at the sound her boots made.

They came at last to the center of the cathedral, where all the rows of columns converged, all the aisles coming from all the doors and all the bridges and other tunnels leading to what she guessed were houses of other murderers. There was a dais and atop it was an altar, a solid black block of stone that, for a change, didn't seem to be made out of bodies. It was occupied. A pale white arm hung over the side and she could see that the veins had been opened. Blood trickled down the fingers to fall onto the dais.

"Here she is," Friar said, beaming back at her. "The girl. The very special girl."

Saru's heart lifted and then sank. For the briefest second she thought maybe Friar had been yanking her chain and had found the girl for her. Then for the second-briefest of seconds she realized he had found the girl and murdered her. For the third-briefest of seconds she thought he would let her go, mission accomplished, and then she realized how fucking stupid that was and only then did she feel the guilt for hoping another person's death meant that she could live. She followed Friar up to the dais and joined him by the altar. The girl was young—God how that twisted the guilt knife—twenty at most but her dark hair had the telltale streaks of gray from using sky. She was pretty, blue eyes open, staring dead at the ceiling, mouth a little open with a spot of blood blending with her lipstick. Her throat had been cut deep, and the veins of her other arm opened as well, arms and legs spread so she looked like she was just relaxing. They'd stripped her naked, pale skin all the way, signs of bruises, breaks, old scars and fuckups that had happened long before Friar had cut her up. There was the telltale triangular bite mark of a venereal inoculation on her mons so it was safe to guess she'd done a bit of bodywork. Shit, perhaps this really was a kindness.

"What was her name?" Saru asked, not really wanting to know, not sure if she cared.

"Ria," he said. "Just Ria."

Ria. It wasn't a name on the list. She hadn't even gotten that right. Or maybe Jojran had found one of her aliases, just like Fanny Duvak.

"How did you find her?"

"She found us," he said, sweeping his arm around to indicate all the doors leading into the cathedral. "She found us here, following our voice, the voice of her friend, her lover, her father, mother, brothers, and sisters. She wanted to be safe, wanted protection..."

He was blathering. What did it matter, anyway? Ria was dead; the other women were dead, maybe not now, but eventually. And Saru was dead, as soon as he stopped talking, probably. Better to enjoy her last moments thinking of the good times in life, the few good fucks she'd had and the scratches she'd left in some pretty boys, the time she'd taken LSD and ridden on the Ferris wheel, and that one day where the haze had thinned and turned a little blue and she'd put on a dress and had a picnic in the park. So what if it had been by herself, and the food was just a sandwich she'd bought at a corner store washed down with a forty? It was nice and it felt warm and she'd hiked up her dress and felt sun on her thighs. That was a good day, a good memory—but was it right to go out on? It felt like a lie, to have that as her ending note, as if she'd lived some happy sunshine life that was all doodly-dee and la-dee-da. Better to think about the real times, the good shots she'd made, the solid blows, the perps tied up and dragged, and the ten thousand cracks to her skull that gave her a blood-spit grin. She felt it now, coming for no reason she could tell, and it made her feel good to grin at death. Yeah, this was _right_.

"...she was afraid, in pain, lost..."

Just kill me already. Maybe she should kill herself, blow herself up with a micro grenade and maybe take him with her. Could she time it right and hit just him? And what if she missed or he whipped out more hocus pocus and ruined her—was that a dog? She blinked. Still there. She rubbed her eyes, still there, a giant golden dog that she could have just about saddled, sitting on his haunches about ten feet behind Friar. Her scans showed nothing, nothing but two live human bodies and a freshly dead body. No fur balls. She slapped herself. Still there. Friar stopped talking and looked at her. She slapped herself again and felt a twinge of satisfaction that with all her previous impotence she'd managed this tiny victory of confusing him.

"Here boy," she said. "Good dog."

Friar turned to follow her gaze. He stared at the spot where she was looking like he was trying to set the dog on fire with his eyes. She had the peculiar thought that Friar couldn't see the dog, that the dog was only for her. Friar smiled.

"I know you're there," he said calmly, but there was a hint of threat in his voice and that gave her hope. The entire time he'd been so relaxed, so calm and casual and unbothered by murder and combat and draining her blood and nearly getting shot in his fucking face—the bastard. To hear him suddenly threaten was—she hoped—a sign that he felt a threat. And almost to confirm her instinct she heard a slithering and a groan, like the gently singing voices had missed a note and were angry. With the slithering came the centipedes, appearing one by one in the entrances, their human-torso heads wriggling their arms like antennae.

The dog didn't seem bothered by any of this. He, or she, Saru couldn't tell if it had balls or not, got on all fours and padded to the altar, springing lightly up to rest on top of Ria. Friar followed the dog with his gaze—could he see it now?—and his jaw twitched like he was grinding his teeth. The voices grew angrier, louder. She could see the tips of his blood strings begin to poke from the skin of his hands.

"How dare you!" he called at Ria's dead body. "How dare you defile this holy place with your presence!"

There was a flash, a column of gold erupted from the dog and enveloped the altar and Ria's body. The heat forced Saru back but Friar stood firm—blood and pus dribbled from the cracks on his face as the skin charred and split. She decided now was as good a time as any to make a run for it, but as she started for the door the centipede—how was she planning to get past it again?—shot forward and reared up before her, the eyes of the torsos opening wide, the mouths all with mocking smiles, and they laughed at her with their dead mouths and throats, an awful sound of sputtering mufflers and forks caught in the garbage disposal. She skittered to a stop, an inch from a grasping hand covered in lice and worms and rot, and took a step back. The centipede slid back a few feet and she took another step—another step, another slither, another step, another slither, until she was right back where she'd started and the centipede was back in the doorway. Cute.

The column of gold faded and the altar was gone, melted and cooled into a pretty glass slag. Ria stood, alive, intact, skin glowing like pure light, no sign of cut or injury, and her eyes were blue jewels that shone and hurt to look at. Light seemed to pour out of her body, and it was warm and comfortable, and suddenly Saru felt safe, like her big sister had come over from the big kid's playground to kick that bully's ass.

"Begone!" Friar hollered at Ria, sounding like he'd smoked a case of cigars. "You are not welcome here!"

She looked at him like he was pigeon shit on her favorite shoes. A beam of blue light shot from her eyes and he vaporized. It happened in a flash, so quick Saru couldn't even process. He was gone. Ria walked over and put a hand on Saru's shoulder. It seemed her glow faded somewhat and she was just a girl now, a pretty, naked girl who had been dead a few minutes earlier.

"Sister," she said, and smiled. "I have come."

"Enough!"

Saru jolted back, the prod appearing in her hand. Ria turned and another blue beam shot from her eyes. It was Friar's voice that had called, and out of the corner of her eye she saw another Friar vaporize. And another, and another—they wriggled like tar up from the floor or detached themselves from the columns to swell or shrink and then harden into a new human, a new Friar, intact, dressed in his same ugly suit—that was a small mercy—to be vaporized until the latest of a dozen Friars caught the blue beam in his hand, grasped it like a bright blue tennis ball and then squeezed so it sparked and fizzled into nothing. Ria quit trying to vaporize him for a moment and stared with that same shit-on-my-new-carpet look.

"Go," Friar said. "It is not your time to know joy."

"You go," Ria sneered. "I claim this world."

"By what right?" he asked. "You are unknown, unwanted."

"By right of conquest," she bellowed and spread her arms. "Every organism, every atom of mass, every gasp of atmosphere I claim as mine and I shall destroy all who stand in opposition!"

She shot the beam from her eyes again, brighter, thicker, more intense. He caught it but couldn't hold on, and it washed over him and he died, Saru guessed. It was hard to tell anymore who was dead and alive and if it really made any difference at this point. Because he was back a second later, in another corner of the room—and maybe that's how he'd snuck up on her, come to think of it. He hadn't crept up or swooped down but just squirted up from the floor.

"These people do not want you!" the new Friar hissed. "They desire love!"

"What the chattel of this planet desire is of no concern to me," Ria said, vaporizing him again.

No new Friar emerged. Ria lifted her arm as though she were tossing a ball and lo and behold a ball appeared, a bright white orb that flew up and cast its harsh fluorescence through the cathedral. There was a flash of light, a thin white ray from the orb and the sound of wires crossing mixed with someone sucking spit. Another Friar, vaporized. Ria had offed the chore of murder to her toy. Lovely. Saru should get one. The flashes came faster and faster until the ball and its light faded. There was a groan behind her and she whirled to see a body detaching itself from a column. It came free with a _shcluck_ and then shivered and slouched its way towards her. The eyes and mouth opened, and from them burst tangles of hair-thin strings. Saru dodged but three stuck in her leg, three orgasmic knife thrusts, and she could feel the blood sucked greedily out. A flash and the wires burned away and the body _poofed_ into a cloud of ash. But more came from the walls, crawling down from the ceiling, men, women, and children with dancing bloody wires poking from their eyes and mouths, metal-spaghetti vomit writhing out, and it seemed they spoke to her then: "Come...come...come, Saru."

She tossed a micro grenade at the nearest group and blew them all to smithereens. At her back Ria sent more globes into the air, a circling halo of pearls that cackled out death rays. She laughed and shot blue death from her eyes, holding out her hands and bathing the area around them in wide cones of golden flame. Saru tossed another micro grenade, knife in the off-left, prod in the right hand, feeling inadequate. That's right assholes, come any closer and I'll zap ya. There was a voice in her ear, Friar, and she turned and strained her neck and looked in every possible direction, but his fat ass was nowhere to be seen. He was in her head, a spirit, a voice, like the singing voices of the pit and the cathedral, not physical but there.

"Do you really wish to serve this woman?" he asked. "Look at her. She is a creature who loves violence."

That was true enough. Ria was blasting and burning with the joy of a kid in a porno store. A particularly fat corpse waddled at her and she seemed to shiver with delight as she ignited his wires and watched the flames travel back and consume him. And so what?

"Doesn't bother me," Saru said, guessing Friar could hear her. A tiny child corpse tottered through the rays of light and fires to try and latch its wires onto her. She kicked it in the head and then nearly vomited when the head tore free and bounced away. Wires slithered through the gore of her neck, worms in mud, and then shot out in all directions. She batted them away with the prod, but one wrapped around her leg and burrowed into her shin. Oh God, oh God yes and no. She sank to her knees and grabbed at the wire but it was sharp and her hands came away with blood. She felt it burrow deep, yes! working its way up her calf into her kneecap.

"Make it stop," she whimpered—oh God it felt good. "Please make it stop."

"Come to us," Friar whispered. "Embrace us."

"No..." But oh fuck yes.

She kicked out with her left leg and tried to cut the wire with her heel dagger, managing to cut open her shin in the process. She got it the second time and stumbled to her feet, where she swayed back and forth and watched the scene before her like she was staring through an aquarium. They were surrounded now, she and Ria, by a horde of naked, dead bodies spraying bloody snake wires from their eyes and mouths. Ria seemed to dance and laugh as she spun and shot bright colors from her eyes and hands, turning the bodies into fire and ash. She clasped her hands together and shot out a ray of golden fire the width of a truck tire, spinning it around like a flashlight beam, passing through walls and columns and hundreds of bodies and leaving crackling bloody steam and slag behind her. The beam crossed a centipede—still perched in the doorway—and hung there, casting the creature as black swirling particles amidst the gold, and when the beam moved on there was nothing, just a few severed legs clattering against the melted stone in confusion.

"Is this what you want for your world?" Friar asked, still whispering in her ear. "Light and fire? Why not love? Why not have all your desires come to life?"

"You are trying to kill me," Saru slurred back. "How are you thinking this sounds to me right now?"

"Kill her," Friar hissed. "Kill the bitch before she burns your world. Before love is lost. Before you are doomed to die the True Death."

She looked down and saw a dagger in her hand, a black spike, swirled like the floor, and the stone-flesh walls. It was heavy and real, not her boot knife in disguise or her prod. Ria was right behind her, blind to betrayal, caught in the ecstasy of destruction. A hard thrust in her back would do the trick, that would wipe the smile off her face. Little bitch, making me chase you around the city, waiting until the last moment—why couldn't you have done this earlier? Before we were trapped in this hellhole? Before half the blood had been sucked out of her and aliens had raped her mind? But Saru knew the answer. The Blue God didn't waste its time with losers. It had only contempt for the weak. It was waiting, chillin' at the bar to see if anybody wanted to dance, any shapely bones with attitude and a bit of fierce in them. A partner that could throw a punch and take one too, and wouldn't squat and cry at the first little lost limb. It was her kind of God—an action God, a God of instinct and right-angle decisions, sharp teeth, big guns, hot fire and pain. She tossed the knife, whether it was real or a metaphor.

"Fuck you," she said to Friar, and in her mind she burned him, tied him to a post under a pile of dry logs and sent him in ashes to the sky. The heat was real, rushing through her brain, and she could feel it licking, lapping at the walls around her mind, human walls, God walls, barriers thrown up by the weak and fearful and now burned, burned, burned away to let the fire of her instinct free. The fire traveled to her eyes and flared, and the blurry half-dead spectator vision faded. She saw clearly, more clearly than she ever had, and stood straighter. Her hand grasped the handle of her prod, transformed, a scepter now, hard, heavy, bronzed with sharp blue jewels around a vicious head that crackled with lightning-fire energy. She raised her head to the heavens and screamed her war cry and embraced the gift of the Blue God. Ria let fly a wave of fire and paused to smile and say, "Welcome, sister."

And then she threw her hands up to the heavens as well, and the cathedral shook. Saru screamed and charged the hordes of bodies, each swing of the scepter an arc of lighting flame that splashed away her enemies in droves. She laughed at the tickles of their wires bouncing against her skin; their cries to come now sounding less like menace and more the pleading of a beggar. A smash to the face, an explosion of color and splatter of blood. Two quick knocks, two bodies on the floor. A backhand blow, an uppercut, a carefree spin that would leave her dead in the real world, every pat and tap of her new toy was death and she reveled in it. Here was love. Here was power. Here at last was an offer of real temptation. Fuck your peace, your love, your ten million bucks and luxury. I am home.

Ria kept her arms upraised and light burned through the fake light, the lying light of the golden mist. True light cut away the haze, bright, impossibly bright, and yet with her new eyes it felt good and right, growing more and more around them until the beast, the bodies began to sizzle and pop, the stone grew sweaty and moist and dribbled away, the centipedes screamed and thrashed as they burned and burst and her clothes caught flame and dissolved, an agony as her implants boiled in her skull, the shivs in her thighs and the armor plates and pins throughout her bones all vaporized, but her skin and blood and hair and tits and eyes were all intact and crying out in joy at the heat of the light now so strong and wide and powerful that all was white, the pure, perfect white of a star. And she felt herself rising then, the walls and ceiling gone, the floor itself now made of light, rising, rising, up now free of the ground, a perfect circle in a beam of light, rising like an elevator to the heavens.

The light dimmed somewhat, the whiteness fading, the glorious hot subsiding into a cool air on her naked body. She stood next to Ria on a pure white disk floating high in the air and caught in a beam of light. Below was a pit of fire, the cathedral and the soup of bodies burned away, the corruption of the UausuaU purged from the earth. The fire burned white hot, cresting in waves like an ocean, an ocean of fire in the city's heart that she knew would burn forever, a warning to those who would defy the Blue God. Were there innocents trapped in the beam? Men and women in their homes, unknown to the UausuaU, caught in the fire for no reason other than chance? No. There were no innocents. There were only the weak and the strong. Faithful servants of the Blue God and enemies to be destroyed. Above, the source of the beam, a galaxy of colors, a moon-sized chandelier hanging over the earth. She saw, knew this was the domain of the Blue God, its kingdom, its vessel, and that it had been there all along and only now was this world worthy of its vision.

She felt the fear of the people from below and reveled in it. The light called, demanded they come, and they came, all the people of the city, and with her new eyes she saw far, far to the streets where they gathered in crowds like a New Year's celebration, clamoring up stairs to stand on rooftops, to spill from their caves, out from sewers and from under bridges, from their lofts, and barracks, their hovels and mansions, all summoned by the light. The black clouds, the hateful haze that had for so long denied her servants light began as well to burn and die and vanish, great snaking vines of golden light wrapping through the sky and pushing away every speck and particle of interference. The chandelier hung heavy and bright in a black sky, all other light from the city dying before it, the trash fires and electric lights flickering to black, the stars themselves retreating so that all was black in the sky above, the city below and the chandelier casting its light down upon Ria and the pit of flames, and the new God of this realm. And her new eyes showed her with a sense more than sight alone that the people of the city knelt and prayed and wailed with fear and some with joy at the gifts of the Blue God. Ria surveyed her kingdom, the world she was to command, frowning at the silver forest to the east. She took Saru's hand and let it drop. She looked her in the eyes, and Saru saw that she was a God yes, and still a girl, young, terrified, who'd lived her whole life day to day on the streets of Philadelphia. She hugged her, gently, fearfully, not sure how it worked, and then, after a long moment, she let go and Ria was once more a God, commanding her to kneel. She knelt, and for the first time in her life, Saru Solan did as she was told.

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About Andy

Andy is a time traveler from the future. He lives in a tent and is frequently lost.

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