Eight Dragon's 03 The Spent Cicada's Song - 02 A Veil Barely Seen
By Rebekkah deMere

The Spent Cicada's Song, pt. 2, ch 19 Salt and Rice
The Spent Cicada's Song, pt. 2, ch 20 The Sky's Mirror
The Spent Cicada's Song, pt. 2, ch 21 Parking Speed

The Spent Cicada's Song, pt. 2, ch 22 Goblin Fruit
The Spent Cicada's Song, pt. 2, ch 23 Looking for the Moon
The Spent Cicada's Song, pt. 2, ch 24 The Acquisition of Syntax

The Spent Cicada's Song, pt. 2, ch. 25 Foam and Shadow
The Spent Cicada's Song, pt. 2, ch. 26 Crime and Courtesy
The Spent Cicada's Song, pt. 2, ch. 27 In Such Dark

The Spent Cicada's Song, pt. 2, ch. 28: Skill Levels
The Spent Cicada's Song, pt. 2, ch. 29: Crow Food
The Spent Cicada's Song, pt. 2, ch. 30: Elemental Symmetries   


Bev's Balcony & Saphires do not have the missing chapters. I am therefore posting them for your convenience.


Chapter 22: Goblin Fruit
"No! That's a freakin' lie!"
I hadn't expected Sierra to scream. I thought she'd help me calm Grunts, but Sierra was going bonkers.
"I'm about 98% sure." I hauled a slab of dark meat off the sled to the table and let it land with a meaningful thump. "Besides, I can't think of a reason I'd lie about it."
I cut the muscle from the bone, removed the veins, and pushed the meat toward Sierra. Somehow, being in a kitchen made me think it was a good idea to give a large knife to a hysterical woman. "Cut it into one-inch cubes, then make a cut about halfway through each cube. Anyway, you knew all this. Aurie carried two patches of cells. Hold on a minute." I spun and threw an empty can at the edge of the kitchen shelter. "Outta here, Hunter!" I shouted. "Eavesdrop again and I'll knock out that one brain cell you're using!"
"You can't see me!" Hunter yelled back, though it was more a loud pout than a shout. "Boss lady says this works on you all the time."
"Does everybody talk like movie gangsters now?" I asked no one in particular, then shouted back, "You let her know it never worked. And if you or any of your cronies come back before you're called, you'll be singing soprano. That means you, too." I crouched and poked a slotted spoon where the second crony would be.
"I already sing soprano," Slither laughed as she ran away.
"That's how his parents got out," I continued when I was sure that no one was eavesdropping. "That is, got out what they thought was important. But there's three of you, which doesn't make sense no matter how you figure it. It should be either just two or, like, thousands of you. The latter's like mosquitoes or roaches, survival by numbers. But more likely they wanted just two. They weren't trying to take over the world; they just had a slightly skewed concept of personal diversity. So three of you was either one too many or many too few. The problem was figuring out which one of you was whom."
"Thought you were bass-ackward," Grunts explained. "I'm way more a guy, like a sack 'a taters."
"First," I lectured, "and don't cringe; there's only two this time. First, you do not look like a sack of potatoes. No woman who works out like you do looks like a sack of potatoes." Maybe a brick, I thought but refrained from saying. "You look strong. That's a good thing. Which is why we figured you come from Aurie's mom. Out of a man and a woman, which is going to see strength as a good thing for a woman? And for that matter, Sierra, which do you guess will decide that large breasts are particularly useful? Aunt Anne would know that, so Ulysses probably is just one chromosome from being Sierra's identical twin. Think of him as a really, really close brother, but also like a son."
"Oh shit," Sierra was hyperventilating against the work table. "This isn't happening."
"Sierra, why are you... Oh no! You didn't!"
"I didn't know!"
"I would'na," Grunts observed. She almost was back to her regular monosyllables, which I guessed was a good thing.
"Oh shit," Sierra said again, this time halfway back to normal, the color coming back to her cheeks.
"You guys really thrive on Greek tragedy, don't you? I hoped you used something. Remember, a guy also designed your reproductive system, so you just know all those little ova are really eager to sprout."
"Oh shit," Sierra said, then stopped, thought about it, swore, then gave a smile just a bit sharper than the knife she was holding. "It's okay. Shit, I was worried there a minute. That would have been bad."
"What we making?" Grunts asked as she examined the ingredients Warner delivered.
"Sort of a white stew, but gallons and gallons of it."
"Sounds fun." Sierra smiled again.
"It is. I wanted to make something fun for dinner, fun and easy. So this is quick and fun. Well, the hard part's quick, but then you get to sit around and stir every now and then. Best of all, somebody else does cleanup, which will be a pain in the patoot."
"So what do we do?" The look of panic had completely faded from Sierra's eyes.
"First, we finish cutting the meat. It'd help a lot if you got that slicer set up."
"Is there four?" Grunts asked with what was, I decided, a smile.
I stopped and counted. "Um, I think there's 10. It depends on whether you count one step as one or two."
"So 11?"
"Um, yeah. More or less."
"Twelve?"
"More like 13."
"Mmm. Cool."
"You seem a lot happier, Grunts," I observed.
"Found out I'm not as weird as Sierra."

Dinner was going very well, and Grunts and Sierra seemed happier than they'd been in days. I had no idea why they were happy. As far as I could tell, we hadn't talked about anything that had anything to do with anything; but maybe I guessed wrong about that. I never did understand Aurie and his crew. It was a shame because I had thought of all these profound things to say to Grunts, and now I wouldn't have a chance to use them.
As she stirred a pot, Sierra sang a really graphic song about "Yowling Jocasta, who's breeding her own." I was a little slow on getting the cream ready because I was trying to memorize the lyrics.

September dashed into the kitchen, hopped over the work table, and crouched behind an empty carton of canned mushrooms. "Let me help cook, Rickie? I promise I won't say anything bad about it ever again."
"Whom you hiding from?"
"Um... What makes you think I'm hiding?" She waited a minute to see if that had a chance of flying, then peeked over the carton and mumbled, "Zach. He's pretty mad."
"You know, the whole point is judging the result. You can't take it back once you've done it, so it's a good idea not to do it."
"You should of told us that when you taught this to us."
"I didn't teach it to _you_," I pointed out.
"Oh, um, yeah. I wasn't bein' a style queen," she lied. "Honest. It's just this once."
"Well, you better be careful."
"Jeez, those animals must have fleas. They're all over me."
"I told you to be careful."

"So did you clarify the lamb's fat?"
"Do what?"
"See? If you'd spent a little more time in the kitchen, you'd have known that. Did you think the cooking lessons were just for fun?"
"Um, no. I can honestly say I never thought they were for fun."
"Lamb's fat's one you always clarify, except for a few things you wouldn't like. Mutton fat's even worse. Especially if it's touching any part of your body. Yuck!"
"You really should tell us all this stuff _before_ we get in trouble," September complained. "Gah, it itches."
"Don't worry, the itching goes away in a couple minutes. Then you have maybe an hour to explain all this to Warner. You know, like explaining just how your lipstick got smeared on Zach's mouth."
"Oh crap! Maybe I could... Nah. I could try telling him the truth, but he'd never fall for it. Oh no, what time is it?"
"Um, Tembie, like I told the girls whom I actually did teach this to, it's not exactly clock time. There's a margin of error."
"A margin? Like hours?"
"More like weeks."
"Rickie, 'weeks' is not a margin. 'Weeks' is a range."
"Yeah. It's more like a range of error."
"Range of error? You are _not_ making me feel confident."
"Yeah, that's probably a good thing. You really shouldn't feel confident."
"Ack!"
"'Ack' is good. You should practice saying 'Ack,' since I'm not sure what our teeny symbionts will make of that stuff; they might like it and keep it around."
"Ack! Ack!"

"Pretty flowers have thorns."
It took me a moment to realize that Grunts had said that.
"What?" Grunts glared back at me. "You think I don't read books?"
"I, um... Sorry. I was a little surprised."
"I like that, Grunts," September said cheerily. She looked at me and shrugged her shoulders, resigned to her coming embarrassments. "Can I use that?"
"Sure," Grunts agreed. "S'not mine."
"Great! Thanks!" September ran down the hill, looking for May.
"Huh?" Grunts asked.
"They like to find weird names for stuff. They think Swan Rises from the Waves sounds a lot cooler than Stand and Kick the Guy in the Nuts."
"Dunno," Grunts considered. "Second one's good."
"Um, Rickie?" Sierra asked between tasting the pots. "Did you really not test whatever that stuff is? You really don't know what it'll do?"
"Not exactly."
"How not exactly?"
"You are entirely too into this, Sierra. What's wrong?"
"Rick-ie!"
"Well, you know, testing is pretty much just setting things up so you can check the one thing you're looking for. You really can miss a lot of what's..."
"Rick-ie!"
"Well, I'm testing it _now_, aren't I?"
"Rick-ie!!"

"Well, I was pretty itchy a while ago. I thought I might have gotten it from someone who had it."
"Someone we won't name. Like Ulysses, right? Don't worry, you can't get it second hand. Unless someone was mad at you, you're okay. Besides, it's all stuff that's good for you, stuff you'd take on purpose."
"Thought it was s'posed to be white?" Grunts asked. It took me a second to realize she was talking about the white stew. "Why cream?" she asked.
"When you brown the meat like that, you break the sauce. The cream restores it."
"Huh?"
"When it gets too hot for too long, all the juices and wine and everything else in the pan start to separate into layers. That's called breaking. You can't just stir it back together. Well, you can, but it doesn't cook right. The cream helps to mix it."
"Cool." Grunts looked back at the pan. "S'not white."
"I think they call it that because it's made with white wine, instead of red. Usually, dark meats are stewed with red wine."
"Mmm. Cool."
"I hope it works; this meat smells pretty strong. Let's pour this into the big pot and simmer the sheep out of it. One more batch and we've done everything but the stirring."
"S'fun," Grunts enthused as she poured. "Easy."
"Yeah. The secret is waiting for those big, clear bubbles. Not the little ones. I learned that from... from Kieran's mom. She made a great white stew. Kieran's pretty good, too. Maybe as good as her mom."
"Somethin' survives," Grunts said.
That was the second time that night I was surprised by Grunts' burst of philosophy. I wondered if her sudden loquaciousness was cause for worry.
"Sam talks at us a _lot_," Sierra explained, spreading her hands to show me how much. "Some of it sticks."

"So how come we suddenly have a truck full of mutton?" I asked.
"It's 'cause they never see chicken," Sierra explained. "Frozen chickens are better than gold up here. That Buck guy gave them two whole skids of frozen chicken. They gave us a bunch of other stuff, too. Some of it's really pretty." Sierra showed me her necklace, a loop of heavily carved beads spaced in groups of 10 and one; and hanging from that was a short string of five beads ending in a filigree figure of two entangled fish.
"I got a bracelet," Grunts said happily. "Goes here to here." She dragged her index finger from her wrist to her elbow. "Carved wood. Little fishes."
"I'd like to see that."
"She put it somewhere safe for now," Sierra explained. "For if you hit us."
"For if I do what?!"
"I'm sorry! They said..."
"Who they? Exactly which they said what?"
"Well, um... She, um..."
'Gina!' I thought at max volume.
'I'm sorry. The brain you have reached is temporarily out of service. Please try again tomorrow. Buzzzzzzz.'
'Gina!' I sort of yelled again until I noticed Grunts and Sierra looking anxious, probably worried that I was having a psychotic moment. I'd already been told that I looked looney when I sort of talked with Gina; but I didn't want to explain what I was doing, so I said, "My sister is a... well, not a liar, but... she can exaggerate a bit. It's not like I just hit people for no reason. Usually. It's just that some things people learn best when they get hit with a stick."

"As the light dims, the first scavengers scent the fresh kill and creep through the veldt." I lowered my voice like an announcer's and used a clean ladle as a microphone. "They are cautious because the lioness could be lurking nearby."
"Scavengers?" Sierra asked.
"Pre-first shift," I explained. "Everybody on third shift tries to sneak food early. Watch your back. Two or three will try to charm you while another steals from behind."
"So if you cook it low," Grunts asked, "it doesn't, um, break?"
"Well, it will if you cook it long enough. The trick is not to boil away too much liquid. But with meat this strong, you're going to break the sauce, so don't worry. Try to get it just as it breaks. That takes practice. Just before the sauce breaks, it _sounds_ different. Once you've heard it, you'll get it every time."
"Cool."
"You scoundrels wait in line!" I ordered as Glinda and her pack ran slobbering into the kitchen. "Don't worry; I made some just for you, no pepper, no garlic." And not much cooking, but I didn't say that. "And we've got a lot of bones tonight. So go wait in line like everyone else."
Maybe they understood me, or maybe they just recognized my tone of voice. The dogs stopped barking and drooling, turned slowly, and lurked at the edge of the inflatable quarter-sphere, which shook as they dog-wrestled against it.
"Don't knock over the tent, either!" I shouted.
The dogs grew immediately and suspiciously quiet.
"Jeez, I thought only Kay did that." Sierra rubbed her cheek with two fingertips. "Talk to dogs, I mean."
"Everybody talks to dogs if they're around them enough. Dogs are easy," I explained. "They're a lot like guys, but they listen better and aren't as messy."
"Cheaper, too." Sierra looked at Tigger as if she was judging him.
"Jeez, Sierra, You're kidding, right?"
"'Course I am," she answered. "At the moment."
"Oh jeez. I can imagine the litter."
"I hope they have his eyes." Sierra pretended to swoon.
"Your ears," Grunts suggested.
"I don't know," Sierra considered. "Big floppy ears would be really cute."
"Kids'd fetch good," Grunts mumbled encouragingly. "Be a big help."
"I was wrong," I admitted. "You folks make Greek tragedy look like a kid's cartoon."
"Could have three heads," Grunts admitted. "That'd be cool."
Chapter 23: Looking for the Moon
"Well, the first thing I'm going to do is change my clothes."
"You are kind of gussied up," Sierra observed.
I had to think about that for a moment because I wasn't thinking of myself as dressed up. Perhaps that was because I'd spent most of the day with the wallflowers, who always dressed like something from a teen magazine, so my perspective was a lot skewed. Most of the camp dressed in lumpy layers, so my blouse and black suit probably were a lot too much. Still, as long as everything was clean, I was almost comfortable. I was long past the point of caring about fashion.
"Is d'shirt," Grunts grunted.
"It's all I had clean this morning," I explained.
"S'good."
"You know," Sierra thought carefully, holding her elbow and rubbing her fingertips on her chin. "What you really need is one of those huge black hats with the long feather."
I noticed that she was a face-toucher, and that occasionally she'd move casually into one of Sam's nastier starting positions. Traveling with the wasps taught me never to leave an opening when I'm near knives and pots of hot grease, so Sierra gave up on her stance and swirled to stir the stew. Being able to stir oneself out of a tight spot is the second-best thing about cooking.
"Sword," Grunts agreed.
"Thought of that," I answered as soon as I remembered what we were talking about. "But swords are a pain when you sit down." I discreetly adjusted all the sheaths in my PJs before I sat. "I guess I was bored when I got up. But I've been wearing the same thing all week, so I had to do something."
"I like it," Sierra decided. "Wish I had a suit like that. It's really hot-looking, but it looks sooo comfortable. Might be nice in another color. Maybe silk."
I wrapped my scarf like a long pirate's bandanna and made a swashbuckling move. "I had a dress like that once," I told her. "I mean silk with the mandarin collar and an absolutely obscene slit. It was sooo embarrassing."
"Do tell."

"You could hear them snort! There's this deep rumble from some massive testosterone frenzy; we thought they were going to eat each other. Gina and I were so weirded out that we almost turned and ran."
Sierra was laughing too hard to hold her tea, but Grunts just stirred her cup and made a low, lonely hum. It wasn't hard to tell what bothered her. She was feeling ugly, unwanted, and severely envious.
"You need to see Kay," I told her.
"Huh?"
"Kay. You know, the one who thought she'd look better with a crew cut."
"She does. She's hot."
"Maybe. But she definitely doesn't want to hear that. Anyway, that's where Sam gets her hair."
"Huh?"
"You know. Those couple times when Sam had really long hair. Kay did that. Kay can teach you all kinds of things about completely changing your look."
"She never tells us stuff like that," Grunts grumbled. When I looked confused, she explained, "Sam. Sophia. Whatever."
"I don't blame her. You two spent a lot of time trying to make her feel like crap. You're the last people she'd tell that she wore fake hair on her first date."
"I... I..." Grunts took a deep breath and tried again. "It wasn't fair."
"You're right. Who cares? Besides, Sam doesn't really understand fair. She does understand effective."
"She won't teach us nothing," Grunts complained.
I sighed, thought for a second, then snapped a curled hand just below Grunts' nose.
Grunts rolled her head off her palm as if she were passing out and let her elbow slide on the table. Her left hand held her tea out of harm's way while her free hand shot toward my elbow.
I pulled my arm back before she did anything I'd regret. "And where do you think you learned that?" I asked. "How many people you know can do that?"
"S'right," Grunts surrendered. "Guess I'm a shit."
"Everybody is sometimes," I lied. "It must've been a real bitch."
"She's not that bad," Grunts answered.
It took me a while to figure that one out. I considered, then asked, "How many people do you think know her real name? Even around here? Seems like she trusted you with something and you're not taking it seriously. Go see Kay."

"Oh, hi, Buck. Where's Don?"
"Helping to clean up your mess," Buck answered sharply.
"Huh?" I raised my eyes on the off chance that staring at Buck might tell me why he sounded angry. He didn't look angry, but his cheeks were bunched over his eyes.
"He's going around to all your victims, telling them it'll be okay. I tried, but I can't lie like that with a straight face."
I realized that Buck's look was his attempt to hold a laugh. "Bull... uh... dingies," I pointed out with less force than I intended. "You can lie with the best of them. Anyway, he shouldn't be doing that. Everybody's supposed to figure this out by themselves. I mean, together, but without outside help. It brings them closer together."
"No it doesn't," Buck answered.
"Sure it does. It..."
"No. It doesn't. But it _is_ funny."

"You're not still angry at me, are you, Don?"
"Huh? About what?"
"You know." I wasn't sure I wanted to remind him.
"You mean when you did that to me?"
"Um, I'm sorry. I didn't think it'd last that long. Besides, you deserved it."
"No I didn't."
"Sure, you..."
"Uh-uh. _Buck_ deserved it. I just happened to be standing there."
"But... You were staring at... I'm sorry."
"Angel, I was just looking. I was there, so I looked. Besides, it was you. It's not like I was staring at some strange girl or something. It's copacetic now. I won't fall for that again. I know what to look for."
"No you don't."
"Sure I..."
"No, Don. You haven't a clue."
"Uh-oh. Um, angel, you do know I love you. Right? And I'd never do anything to hurt you, so, um, if you..."
"Relax, goon," I laughed, letting it slide into a deep, horror-movie laugh.

"It's gotta be fleas."
"I checked the dogs, MJ. They're clean. Besides, it's too cold for fleas. You didn't piss off any of my girls, did you?"
"I thought you were saying 'sheeps' instead of cussing."
"It's been a long day."
"No. Besides, I figured out what they were doing right away."
"So you didn't kiss anybody strange?"
"Stranger than you? Nope."
"I don't see any fleas. Besides, those things we gave you should kill any parasites really quickly. Invertebrates are one of the things that sets them off."
"So I'll never have to worry about ticks? Good, I hate ticks. No way to get it without being scratched or kissed? I mean, nobody spiked my drink or anything, did they?"
"Nope. And I don't see any scratches." I turned her slightly and pulled up her sweater to inspect her back. "Maybe... MJ! You've got a monster rash!"
"Oh god! What did I do now?"

Most of the camp had ugly rashes across their backs. The only ones who didn't were Gina and I, Terri, Sam and the greenies, and those suffering from the wasps' latest lesson. The rashes were orange and red, and some of the bumps leaked an ugly goo.
Warner had it the worst of anyone; he also got it last. Everything except his face and hands was covered with oozing sores. September was frantic and desperate for me to do something, though I had no idea what to do except to keep him clean and dry.
May had a small spot on her shoulder, but she said it didn't bother her. Zach was hiding under a blanket, but he swore he didn't have a rash. May vouched for him, so I decided to believe him. September didn't have a rash, either.
"Nothing to worry about," Gina called as she scooted into the igloo. "Warner, I need samples." Gina took her specimen kit from her purse and drew out a sharp, stainless steel probe. "May, you, too."
"Hell no!" May answered. "You're not sticking me with no..."
"I'm not sticking anybody," Gina explained as she took a small piece of loose goo from Warner. She fitted a clean probe onto the handle and made May expose her shoulder.
"You know what it is?" May asked.
"I have a pretty good idea, and I should be able to see it under the microscope if I'm right. But if not, we don't have the equipment to make sure."
"So what is it?"
"You just caught one half of the plague. It won't last long."
"The plague?!" I didn't know May's voice could get that high.
"Just one half. It's like valley fever, but a different species."
"What's valley fever?"
"It's um..." Gina thought for a moment. "I'll tell you after this clears up. Don't worry, it'll be gone in no time."
"You had it worst, Warner; but you already look better," I said, then turned to Gina and pointed out, "Notice their tears are gone."
"Looks like our little friends prioritize their attack," Gina answered. "I bet when the tears come back, they're completely cured."
"I still got my tears," September pointed out. "And I didn't get like Zach, either."
Gina started laughing; and when Tembie got angry, Gina explained, "Ask Don what happens when you're the last person to get what you gave Zach."
September turned to me with eyes like saucers. "Rickie, that's not true. Is it?"
"Um, we don't know what it'll do," I answered honestly. "Especially not now, with the plague and all."
"Rick-ie!"
"I told you to be careful."

"Don! This could be our... You know!"
"But MJ thought, I mean, since you didn't get it and we've got it, then, um, we didn't want to give it to you, so, um..."
"Don, if you and MJ have it, then I've been about as exposed as it's humanly possible to be. I don't think I'm going to get it. Hey, wait a minute. Where's MJ?"
"She just grabbed a blanket and..."
"What? Come on, love. We're going to find her. I don't care if we've got to sit on the ice all night, I'm spending it with _both_ you guys."
"She's probably at the latrine. That's where I'm headed."
"Yeah, she is," I answered. "Buck's there, too."
"Huh? Oh, I see. Gina's there."
"Yeah, sorry. I wonder if that might be a little side effect of the plague? Not Gina being there. But the sudden dash to the latrine."
"I thought you always said there's no such thing as side effects, only effects."
"Yeah, well, at least your tears are coming back."
"Cool. They're like a real neat tattoo. Make me look mean."
"No they don't."
"They don't?"
"Nope. They make you look like a teddy bear."
"So it's like a big, mean, teddy bear. Right?"
"Nope."
"Hmm. I wasn't going for the cuddly look. What do you think, Mirielle?"
"Don't ask her if you don't believe, Don."
"You know how scary that sounds, angel?"
"Yeah, well. Probably not half as scary as I meant it."
"Um... I'm just going to hustle ahead here. I'll get someone to warn... um, I mean, tell MJ that you're coming. I might be a while." Don turned and dashed down the path.
"Of course, he _is_ a teddy bear," I told Mirielle. "With his hair all over the place and his coat crooked and all. So I guess he's got a right to ask you, since dolls and teddy bears always talk to each other in the stories."
Mirielle thought a moment, then decided that Don was a big, friendly, teddy bear.

"Hey, Rickie," Gina called as I approached the loo. "Looks like it's going to be a long night. Not exactly what we planned."
A line began to form, so Gina and I moved to the side. Just when the lines were identifiable as lines, about a dozen people dashed down the path, saw the lines, and veered into the shrubs without missing their stride. Each was carrying a roll of paper.
"Wonder how many thief points those things cost?" Gina said.
"Didn't you get one?" I asked innocently. "I thought everybody got one. I know I got one, and I'm pretty sure Buck got two."
"What?!" Gina pushed in front of the men's line and shouted in the door. "Buck, you asshole! You better not be on your second roll!"

"Hi, Gina, Rickie," Sam called as she pulled Aurie to where we were standing. "Watcha doin'?"
"Just wondering why we always put the kitchen at the top of the hill and the latrine at the bottom when, in real life, so many people are built the opposite."
"Oh... Right... Anyway, we heard what was happening, so we thought we'd better keep you company till they're finished in there. You know, since you two aren't supposed to be alone together."
"Thanks, but they might be a while."
"So is this something we should worry about?"
"I doubt it. There's a lot of pretty disgusting stuff they have to get rid of; and their salt levels seemed to go bonkers for a minute, but we're making sure everybody keeps an eye on their fluids. We're lucky that it's such a warm night. Comparatively, I mean. If it was even like yesterday, they'd be frozen to the seats by now."
"But weren't those things you put in everybody supposed to prevent this? And isn't the plague supposed to kill you?"
"Yeah, but the plague wasn't what everybody expected. In the last stage, the victims were covered in small, puss-colored sores. It actually separated all the skin from everything underneath, and the victims bled into themselves. It's a pretty nasty way to go. So all the doctors thought someone had released blackpox, which is a nasty kind of smallpox and does pretty much what the plague was doing. They even found a virus. Back then, everybody immediately thought, 'Weapon!' So when they found a virus, they stopped looking. By the time they realized what they'd done, it was too late. The plague already spread around the world."
"How do you know all this?" Aurie asked. "I thought nobody figured it out."
"Those discs we got from that collapsed lab. They found out some really interesting stuff just before they all died."
"I thought they were way outside the zone. And that place had to be super tight. They have an accident or something?"
"The lab was designed to keep inside stuff from getting out. It wasn't quite as good at keeping outside stuff from getting in. You probably couldn't contaminate a lab, but there was nothing to stop a janitor from talking to a techie. Somebody probably had a beer before night shift, and everybody was dead by the next night."
"Wait a minute. You said it spread around the world."
"Diseases usually spread around the world before anyone knows they exist. If there's a small outbreak of something, you can bet there's already a reservoir of the same disease halfway around the world. But for some reason, people tend to get sick in clumps."
"Glad you didn't get it," Aurie told Sam. He looked totally sweet about it.
"I don't get sick much," Sam answered. "Where I grew up, people didn't."
"Rickie." Aurie turned his head as if he suddenly noticed I was there. "I wanted to thank you. I don't know what you said to those two, but it definitely helped. They seem to be over whatever it was that was bothering them. They wouldn't tell me anything about it."
Aurie's face was innocently confused, as if he really didn't know what was bothering Grunts and Sierra. It was hard to believe he was that dense, but Sam made a face indicating that Aurie really was as clueless as he looked.
"Hey, angel," Don called from 10 feet behind me. He had learned not to sneak up. "All done for a while. Washed up and everything." He placed his arms around my shoulders. "That was pretty nasty."
"You know what they say." I turned to face Don, but I was talking to Aurelius. "If you think you're the only one suffering, you're just spoiled."

Chapter 24: The Acquisition of Syntax
Two hundred people stared at us. Children hung out of upper windows, eyes wide and mouths silently open. Women stood in doorways, holding smooth, curved lengths of hickory, the business ends hidden inside the doors. I guessed that the sticks did not end in brooms.
Even for a town where visitors were rare, we must have been a very strange crew sliding along the wet-ice path. The 10 leaders were in front: Don and Buck a little ahead; Bryan and Nancy on the flanks; MJ, Gina, and I as the shaft; and Terri and Sparks as the feathers of the arrow. Nobody was quite sure of Sam's whereabouts, but we guessed she was ahead and above.
The rest followed about 50 yards behind. Most of the wasps were dressed in their blacks, though the scarves were loosened to show their faces. A small contingent had blankets wrapped around their shoulders and draped over their heads, like monks.
Our cars were parked a mile back, in the last place that Buck decided could be easily defended by a few people. It was a place where the road began its curve through vaguely rectangular rubble, less than a mile from the towers and their town.
None of the townspeople spoke as we marched through the street. No doubt most of them were hidden, but those that didn't hide simply watched. It was eerie. Don tried to speak to them when we first met them, but they ignored him and continued to stare, not hostile but more curious and sad.
Now that we were among the broken towers, they did not look like ruins unless we twisted our necks to see higher than the second or third floor. Below that they were faced with clean, pastel stucco. There were awnings over neatly shuttered windows with faux flower boxes painted below the sills. The doors all were arched, each set five steps above the cobbled street. Where I could see inside, the homes were clean and bright with colorful carpets and heavy furniture. The clothes on the women and children were neat yet intricate, prosperous and respectable. But when I tilted back my head, I could see the raw girders and broken concrete twisting far above.
We were a hundred yards into the town before Bert, Mort, and Istvan ran out of their homes to greet us. They were yanking on jackets and tightening belts as if they hadn't known we were coming. Istvan gave me a sad, gentle look, so I cheerfully smiled back and helped Mirielle make a happy wave.

"And what of you folks?" Istvan asked the largest of the monk-like figures. I was sure it was Zach from his size, but it was hard to tell. All those wearing the blankets also wore wool face masks and heavy gloves, with scarves across their mouths and sunglasses on their eyes.
"It's nothing personal." I recognized Zach's voice. "We're just more comfortable like this right now."
"Did you lose a bet?" Bert asked innocently. "No. You did something boorish and so received a practical joke. No? Let me see, and then I will tell you what my long-suffering wife once did to me."
Zach slowly peeled off the black mask, then pushed back his hood.
Bert looked shocked, then fell against the wall. "No," he gasped, finally unable to hold his laughter. "No, my wife didn't come close." Bert sagged to the ground, his arms wrapped around his sides. "My... Oh my, that's good!"
Zach was covered in bright baby-blue and pale-pink polka dots, perfectly round, perfectly spaced, just absolutely perfect. They were even in his hair. He looked like a character from a child's picture book.
"We're not sure we all think this here's so funny," Zach whined.

"I can't. Compared to this, my pride in my wife's fury is a small thing. Pretty dangerous women you got there. How long must you remain so?"
"Now there's a point of contention," Don interjected.
"Yeah, how long's it supposed to last?" Zach demanded. "May said a couple hours, but that was last night."
"Well... but..."
"I know," Zach's whine slid into the same speed as my words, "it's..."
"... not exactly clock time," we said simultaneously.
I tried for an I'm-sorry smile, but that one is hard to keep from becoming an evil grin the moment you start laughing.
"Wasn't even May did this," Zach continued whining; but at least he wasn't swearing, so he couldn't be too angry. "Someone I _thought_ was a friend." Zach folded his arms on his chest and thought out loud. "Okay, she did warn me. But I thought she meant somethin' else."
"Looking for tea and sympathy, Zach?" I asked pointedly.
"Guess not."
"Besides, yours is already fading. Tembie's gonna have hers for a long time."
"Noooooo!" Tembie wailed from somewhere in the middle of the penitent group.
There was some scattered coughing, which I guessed came from the three other wasps who managed to poison themselves.
"I told you to be careful!" I shouted to everybody.
"Probably licked their lips," Gina concluded.
"Well, they shouldn't do that. It really chaps your lips."

"Stop that, Tigger!"
Tigger was challenging a white dog with an evil sharp snout. Both were growling, but neither moved. I put my arms around Tigger's neck to keep him from causing problems. The other dog already realized it had made a major mistake.
"Taras! Go home!" a woman ordered from her doorway; and the dog dashed away. The woman was only as old as me, but her skin was dark and creased. She looked nice, though. She wore a calf-length, light-blue skirt that looked like corduroy, though I suspected it was made from wool. A loose white sweater was tied at the bodice over a lace-embroidered, blue shirt that buttoned like a man's. The soft, brown leather of her tall boots had a definite crease over a reinforced toe. And her long black hair was plaited like mine, though hers didn't look weighted with steel. The end was tied with a white bow. "I'm sorry," she said pleasantly. "Taras is still just a puppy, but he's male. Already he has to be king of the street." She looked up, and her eyes were emerald green.
"No, really. It's Tigger's fault. He never learned to play nice with others."
"I'm Aaliyah, by the way. This other puppy behind me is Yakov."
"Hello, Yakov." I bent low to be closer to the boy's level. "My name is Rickie; and this mean, nasty beast is Tigger." I kept an eye on Tigger to make sure he didn't decide that little Yakov was food. I didn't know that Tigger had ever eaten a child, but I didn't like the way he was staring.
"Come in and have some tea," Aaliyah offered. "Your dog is welcome, too."
"He's not really my dog," I explained. "I'm just keeping an eye on him so he doesn't get in trouble. Besides, I'm not sure he's housebroken."
Aaliyah looked closer at Tigger and asked, "How old is he?"
"I don't really know," I answered. "He's only been hanging around us for a couple of weeks. But I think he's only a few years old. His teeth aren't very worn."
"That's a wild dog?" Aaliyah's green eyes grew hard, and she positioned herself between Yakov and Tigger.
"He should be okay." I tried to be reassuring, realizing that this woman would not appreciate our bringing a feral dog pack into her town. "One of us is watching each of them just in case, so they shouldn't be any trouble at all."
"Each of them?" She was even more horrified and glanced up and down the street.
I only briefly considered not telling her about the other seven dogs, but I decided to let her find out about the jaguar on her own. You don't win friends by hiding things from people; but you don't blurt everything you know, either.
Fortunately, Liz took that moment to pass, chatting happily with a girl holding a baby in a froth of pink blankets. Both waved a quick hello and turned back to their conversation. Tigger barked at Liz' back, and Milo stuck half his body out of her back collar and chattered angrily. Liz paid no attention as Mona scooted out of her waist and onto her shoulder to join Milo in berating Tigger, who barked again, then haughtily ignored them. Mona did the ferrets' version of a raspberry, which still sounded like chatter; and Tigger sat hard on my toes.
"Wooow!" Yakov inhaled when he spoke that word. He exhaled with the next words. "Can I pet him?"
Tigger gave a dark bark.
"I don't think so." I shook my head slowly to emphasize my point. "He's not much into petting. He might like a good scratching, though."
Tigger gave a much happier bark.
"See? He says it's okay. Just scratch right up his spine till you get about here." I pointed to the base of Tigger's neck. "Don't ever go past that unless Tigger asks you to."
"He talks?!" Yakov's eyes were wide and believing.
"Sort of. In dog talk. He's just learning people-talk right now, but he can't speak it."
"So how will he ask me? If he wants me to scratch higher, I mean."
"Usually he just swings his rump to knock your legs from under you. When you land on your bottom, he plops beside you and barks till you scratch behind his ears."
Yakov laughed and clawed large clumps of hair from Tigger's back.
Tigger drooled and rolled his eyes.

"This is really good. What kind of tea is it?"
"Belladonna."
"What? You mean like nightshade?"
"What? No, that's poison. This is from the greenhouses. It's real tea. They call this kind Belladonna. It's from a poem, I think."
"Yeah, I know the poem. I've heard it so many times I sometimes wanna club the poet. You have greenhouses?"
"Well, they are not ours. The people who keep them are another village. But they're very nice. They have the school for the children, too. Uncle Istvan says it used to be a college a long time ago. They almost never come out, and they don't usually let anyone inside except Uncle Istvan. He goes in all the time."
"I think I met your uncle."
"Yes, I know."
"Huh? Oh, yeah. This is Mirielle."
"And this is Nayeli," Aaliyah said as she stood in a graceful curve. With her back to me, she reached for her doll from a tall chest beside the family table. Both the chest and the table were made from a dark, gracefully twisted metal. Nayeli had long, straight black hair and deep-brown eyes. "I've had Nayeli since I was littler than Yakov here," she said as she flowed back into her seat. "I was hoping for a little girl I could give her to. I can't get Yakov to even play with her."
"Moo-oom." Yakov's whine managed to vibrate the cups.
"You know," I told Aaliyah and arched my brows. "I can do that very same whine."
"So can I," she smiled. Aaliyah perched Nayeli carefully on the table, then turned with that elbows-back bent-forward pose that kids hate to see their mothers do. "Whaa-aat?!" Aaliyah's screech was a descending whine that stopped all movement in the universe.
Yakov was suitably impressed.

"What? No. No superpowers. Not really. Not unless you count spilling things on myself. I've got this amazing ability to do that. If it can be spilled, I spill it. And if I don't have anything handy, I can make somebody else stumble across a crowded room to spill theirs all over me."
"I think I also have that power," Aaliyah sighed.
"Do you mind if I ask? Why do you live here? I mean, under these old buildings. It looks pretty dangerous."
"If you let something drop on your home, you don't deserve the harvest," Aaliyah said sternly, her eyes up, her shoulders back. When she saw me looking confused, she relaxed and explained. "Think of them as mines, only going up instead of down. These buildings are filled with wonderful things, and the most wonderful is the steel. You own your share of them by how good a job you do."
"Wooow!" I realized I was breathing in as I said that. I took a second look at the metal furniture, the plaster walls. "So you guys..." I pictured the tower I saw when I came in; it rose black into a grey haze. "There's so much left."
"Yes, we need to hurry. Perhaps our grandchild will be the last."
"Hurry? Why?"
"The Sky's Mirror," Aaliyah answered as if I should have known. "The lake," she explained. "It is larger and less salt each year. In 40 years, it will be over our doors."

Talking to Aaliyah while Tigger gave rides to Yakov was fun. I had no bodyguards any longer. Now things would come together only when Gina and I chose to be at the same place. We would be approached, but not separately. Thus we got to set the time.
Gina was far away, keeping Glinda from eating a nasty little kid while the kid's mom scolded her son. I was not sure what happened, except that it involved a stick.
Aaliyah was surprised that I knew about Go. That was why her uncle was permitted in the college, she explained. Uncle Istvan was always looking for someone better at the game than he was. Aaliyah could play, but she didn't like it.
"Um... I think he's playing a friend of ours right now. He might be getting his wish."
"You _think_ this?"
"Well, my sister's watching them play."
"Oh, I see."
"Well, um... Oh rats! I spilled tea all over me!"
"Mm-hmmm." Aaliyah smiled as she turned for a towel. Apparently the spill ploy hadn't worked. "And just how badly is my uncle losing?"
"Umm... He failed to connect and lost the center, but he doesn't seem to know it yet. Buck -- that's our friend -- he's trying to go easy on your uncle, not make it look too bad. But it's pretty bad."
"Thank you." Aaliyah poured another cup of tea. "You know, I always wondered how my mother does that to me, and now I know. Wish I could do it back at her."
"Oh lord, my mom is the worst at that ever." We chatted through a new set of stories.

"Lian hua!"
"Oh crap! Not here... Sir!"
"Relax, Lian hua," the rotten old bastard whispered slowly. "Perhaps you will find that it is good news."
I tried to warn Gina, but she had already been caught. She didn't seem angry, just sad. It was a soft sadness, but deep.
"I have come only to say goodbye, Lian hua. And to wish you well."
"Goo... good... bye?"

Chapter 25: Foam and Shadow
"Is it a ghost?"
Yakov jumped with excitement. For him, I supposed, ghosts were infinitely more exciting than two women chatting over a cup of belladonna.
I stared into the tea's sweet blackness while I considered how to explain.
"Not really." I raised a spoon of tea and let it spill slowly back into the cup. "Just someone who wasn't really there."
"Granpa says if you kill somebody, their spirit haunts you forever and ever."
"Yakov!" Aaliyah's shout had that mix of anger and embarrassment that all mothers of show-off sons had to suffer.
Aaliyah probably would have been better off letting that one pass with as little notice as possible, to pretend that it wasn't aimed at me. Now, at best, she would argue with Yakov, apologize to me, then sit through a painful silence. I started talking before any of that could happen.
"That's okay," I assured her, then quickly turned to Yakov. "Your granpa sounds like a very wise man. But if you're ever unlucky enough to kill someone, Yakov, it's not their spirits that will haunt you. It's a whole other kind of ghost, a real nasty one. But this wasn't that kind of ghost, and I didn't kill him."
"I'm sorry." Aaliyah sounded more concerned than apologetic, but was unsure how to show it. Yakov had said right out loud what I was, and Aaliyah was releasing a vague scent of fear. She couldn't reach for my hand even though she was what Gina called a 'touchaphiliac.' "You lost someone close," she asked in a tone that sounded nothing like a question, but more like an accusation against herself.
"Hmm?" It was like rising from a deep dive. "Yeah, I did. But this isn't about that. Except, I guess, it's kind of the reason I'm here, so it is about that in one way. But this one's still alive, if you can call it that. I didn't even like him."
"Oh?"
"It's kind of hard to explain without sounding crazy. I guess you could say that he showed up without being here to tell me that he wasn't going to suddenly not be here in the same way again. But he's gone now, and I just realized that I'm going to miss seeing him when he's not really here."
"Like with your sister?" Now Aaliyah was curious and even more excited than Yakov, and no better at containing it. Living in a tiny town, even if it was built in the skeleton of a ruined city, must be boring, I thought. Embarrassment would not survive her curiosity.
"No. There's a lot more of him here when he's, um, not here."
"Astral projection?" She said it as if astral projection was an everyday nuisance.
"I wish. You can just spray astral projections with air freshener and they go away. The filthy sonuv... um, this old guy is different. For one thing, he likes to kick people. He likes to kick people a lot, and that's his friendliest trait. I think he might be a bit of a pervert, too. No one's timing is always that bad."
Aaliyah was obviously confused. She started counting something on her fingers, then looked at me earnestly and asked, "What is air freshener?"

They didn't shape steel so much as spin it. What first seemed solid cabinets or tables turned out to be an impossible lace of tiny figures. Glass was wildly colored and thickly twisted into wonderful bowls and vases and shades. The deep fireplace was made of white blocks kept scrupulously clean, with a glass and steel barrier between us and the fire. Above it was a wide steel mantel and Aaliyah's collection of spun-glass dancers. I couldn't see the trick they were using to keep that mantel cool and those thinnest strands in the glass dancers from sagging.
It wasn't what I expected. There was no sign of anything old, salvaged. Everything was new and bright and clean and comfortable. And unlike Indy and Vicky's house, this seemed very modern. There was no sign of electricity, but it didn't need it. It was warm and cozy but had room for kids, the kind of home I wanted to have.
"Did you think we'd live on the refuse?" Aaliyah asked when I mentioned my surprise.
"I didn't mean... I just meant, um... I guess I did. Sorry. I just keep imagining all this really neat stuff that must have been in these buildings, but I haven't seen anything anywhere."
"Most of it was gone before I was born," Aaliyah explained. "Uncle Mort says that it was all ugly and heavy. He says it was made so that people wouldn't like it."
"I met your Uncle Mort. He seems like a real nice guy."
"He and Uncle Bert are very nice men, and very funny when they are together."
"Uncle Bert? He's a brother, too?"
"No, he's married to my Aunt Omega."
"Omega?"
"My grandmother had four boys and four girls, and then Omega came to be the youngest. Grandmother said that she was determined that Omega was the last."
"Jeez, nine kids. I can't imagine one."
"It's... different from what I expected," Aaliyah said slowly. She looked at Yakov with a small, ambiguous smile. "I was sick for a while after he was born, and I had trouble nursing. But every now and then he does something that makes it more than worthwhile. But you will do fine," she quickly switched to a cheery voice through a willed smile. "Your little mother's face is very kind."
"Little mother? People've been calling me that since I, since the last couple weeks. How come?"
"You do not know? There is a saying that every woman has two faces, her face as a woman and her face as a mother. You wear your mother face always, when you talk to Yakov or even me, when you spoke to my uncles, even when you talk to your companions. My uncle said that he would like to see your woman face before you leave."
"So when's this one due?" I changed the subject, then quickly tried to grab the words and stuff them back into my stupid mouth.
"You... can tell?"
I looked for something heavy in order to beat myself. The way to inspire confidence and comfort was not to make it seem as if we could peer into people's bodies. And I'd learned that explaining that it was nothing mysterious, that I could smell the difference, did not do anything to make relations better. If anything, those kinds of revelations made people even more uncomfortable around us.
"I sorta learned when my oldest sister got pregnant. It's just a lot of little things," I tried. It wasn't _really_ a lie.
"I can do that a little, too," Aaliyah sighed with what looked like relief. "I think it's mostly the smell."

Aaliyah said that she was married when she was 16; but I was confused about how these people counted their ages, so she might have meant something closer to what I would call 15. She said it was a big scandal and that her parents were furious. But she was pregnant with Yakov; and among these people, a healthy child erased a lot of scandal. They believed that getting pregnant when you were too young meant that you wouldn't have many healthy children, and she was sick for a month after Yakov was born. So she waited before getting pregnant again in the hope of outgrowing any bad effects from having Yakov.
This time she was hoping for a girl. Apparently, it was girls who inherited the section that each family disassembled, and husbands usually moved into their wives' families. But girls were most important because babies meant that a town lived.
"I hope this world is not ruined when my daughters are ready to be mothers," she said happily. "I don't mean to be rude," she apologized quickly, "but there is talk that you people mean the barrier has fallen."
That brought a moment of tiny revelation. I had to hold that idea at arm's length and turn it to the other side. I had thought of the "barrier," as Aaliyah called it, as something to keep bad things in: the plague and all the people who carried it. Aaliyah thought of it as a wall to keep bad things out. Considering the spooks we killed and, for that matter, our fun little troupe, I had to admit that Aaliyah's view had more merit.
"We're probably a special case," I lied. "We just happened to stumble into the right information. If we hadn't met the right people... I guess you could say that the only reason we're here is because Sam once had trouble figuring out a soda fountain."
"Sam?"
"Mmmm," I finished a quick sip of tea. "You saw her. She was the short one with the really red hair."
Aaliyah started to giggle.
"I said the short one with the _red_ hair," I emphasized more testily than I intended.
"No," Aaliyah apologized hurriedly but struggled for a moment with her amusement. "No, it is just that I heard some of your people call her a hermit, but she is surrounded by friends. I thought it was funny that someone with so many friends is called a hermit."
"I don't know," I considered. "I think you usually find hermits in the middle of crowds. But the reason they call her that is because she lived most of her life in, like, the darkest cave you can imagine in a mountain that went further down than it did up. It was like an ugly maze, but really, really dangerous."
"Were there monsters?!" Yakov shouted from across the kitchen. He was sprawling by the stove with Tigger, clawing out huge clumps of old hair from behind Tigger's ears and making a mess while Tigger looked as if he was having multiple orgasms.
I thought about that for a minute, how to explain it to a little boy. "Yes, there were," I decided. "Probably the most horrible monsters you can imagine. And you had to spend all your life hiding in pitch dark because having even the teeniest light meant that some of those monsters would find you and eat you. You couldn't make a sound, either. Ever."
"That's horrible!" Yakov and Aaliyah said at the same time, but it was Aaliyah who shuddered. Yakov still thought monsters were fun.
"Don... That's my... Boy, that's a hard one to translate. Sort of publicly more than a boyfriend, but no actual ceremony. Unless you include everyone laughing at me and a stern but incoherent talk from my father."
"That is just how I was married," Aaliyah laughed.
"Anyway, Don says that Sam grew up in the Labrynth. That's sort of true."
"I know that story!" Yakov boasted loudly. "There was some guy, but he had a funny head, like a ram or something. Was he there?"
"It was pitch black. Blacker than anything you can imagine with your eyes closed," I explained. "So you couldn't tell what anything looked like. And if for some reason there was light, you really didn't want to see. Something with only a ram's head or a bull's head would have been a relief."
"You have seen this place?" Aaliyah asked.
"Yeah, but it's something you really don't want Yakov to hear."
Aaliyah leaned back in her chair and examined me more closely.

Aaliyah already knew about our trip across the plateau, and even what happened that started us on our chase. Again I had to remember that sitting near a stove in a house heated by something not as pleasant as wood did not mean I was visiting some primitive tribe. They had radios when they wanted, and books, and probably many other things. They worked metal and glass and stone and rode snowmobiles for fun. They had spun thread and dyed cloth and oil paints. The things they owned were made from what was available, but the products were sophisticated.
Maybe my perspective came from the sheepskin and thick wool that Vicky's people wore, from the horses and the plain winter cabins. But that clothing made sense in winter, and Vicky's people thought of those cabins as vacation homes, a sort of two-month camping trip with sheep.
More likely it was because of those cold weeks in the Empty with the nomads. Or, more likely still, it was because we were chasing spooks and living in tents ourselves, and I was expecting something equally primitive around me.
Whatever, I was glad that Aaliyah already knew. I didn't want to say any of it in front of Yakov. But as I watched Aaliyah deftly brush Yakov's questions aside, I could see that the knowledge had injured Aaliyah's innocence more than it would have hurt Yakov's.
"There never was a barrier, you know. We didn't see anything that'd keep people from going in or out. I know there were planes and soldiers and all at one time, but I think it's just stories now."
"But, if outsiders come, they quickly die. You and, um... You are the first."
"We've wondered about that. My sister's been asking everybody if they can remember outsiders coming before this winter, but nobody does. Until now, that's all been stuff they heard from older people. There probably are people going in or out, somebody trading across the barrier in secret, like smugglers. But we think that almost everybody outside has heard the same stories you have, so nobody wants to try."
"You mean the barrier will not kill them? More will come and not die?"
I ignored the implied rebuke for my immunity to their patron disease, and I thought carefully about how I would phrase my information. It was something I would tell them anyway; but our ostensible purpose was to trade, and trade always started with gifts. Information was the only gift I had on me.
Aaliyah and her people would not like this. They had been blessed with isolation, and they had used it to build their own little utopias. They would not want to hear about the meaninglessness of inside and outside. Unfortunately, the value of information is based entirely on whether the buyer accepts it.
"Aaliyah, there never was a real quarantine. Even back then, that couldn't be done. I've read a lot about it. Gazillions of people literally flew to every part of the world from every other part of the world every day, and the birds that carried another part of the plague had already migrated twice when it finally broke out. There was not only no reason for it to stop where it did, it didn't stop. There were outbreaks all over the world, which means there are reservoirs all over the world."
"Then why does it kill only here? Why do only we have the barrier?"
"I'm not sure, but I think the barrier was partly fear and partly the old government trying to keep people calm, make them think something constructive was being done. People outside still died from the plague, but at low enough rates that the authorities could hide them. Nobody wanted their town to be the next place quarantined. But plagues mutate pretty fast, since things that kill off most of their life support don't tend to last very long. So as more people developed immunities, they just forgot about it. That, and because there were a lot of other little plagues to worry them."
Aaliyah looked worried.
"But if it makes you feel any better, you do have a particularly nasty form of the fungus that's part of the plague. That makes a difference."
"You mean valley rash. I had that before Yakov was born. It was fearsome, but it goes away very quickly. But does that mean that you also know what causes the green death?"
"I'm pretty sure," I answered carefully. This was the information that would buy Buck whatever he needed to rescue us, so I waited for Aaliyah to find something to use for writing it down. What she found was a stick of charcoal with a piece of rag wrapped around its middle, and she wrote directly on the wall.
"There's two parts," I explained. "The first is any of several fairly common air-borne fungi infected by a relatively harmless bacterium. The second's a virus that most people already have, but it doesn't usually make them sick. But if the two bloom at the same time..."

While Aaliyah dressed for that night's dinner, I watched Yakov and sipped another cup of her belladonna tea. Yakov took the opportunity to bombard me with questions about monsters, and I had fun scaring him without telling him anything really scary.
I would have liked to change my clothes, too. It would have been nice to dress up for a party. Instead, I was dressed in my blacks with my long, black leather coat and the low-heeled boots with the double sheaths. My hair was in it's steel braid; and I wore my scarf, though I left the end trailing down my back instead of wrapped around my head. Later, after the dinner, Gina and I would take a walk, alone together; and we would never come back here. As much as I'd come to hate these clothes, I was dressed for work, not for a party. I wondered how that changed the way I spoke to people. Perhaps the clothes were the reason for the "mother face."
"Uncle Bert says you fight monsters. He says that's your job," Yakov announced with that excited curiosity of little boys. He was boasting that he knew something, but it was still a little boy's question.
"I guess it is," I said half to myself. I swirled the last drops of tea in the cup to see if the tea leaves left a message. "But I'd quit in a minute if I could."
"Why?" Yakov demanded. "It sounds fun!"
"It's not," I explained to him. "Mostly it's just hard work and a lot of hurt. And if you have to fight a monster, first it's really scary, and then it's just really, really sad. Everyone I know who does it really hates it. They'd all rather sit at home and read about it in a book. That's what I'd like to do, except I probably wouldn't like books like that anymore. But when I was your age, I liked to read those books a lot."
"Really? You used to be my age?"
I wondered for a moment just how old Yakov thought I was, but I decided it was better not to ask. He probably thought everybody over 13 was close to a hundred.
"Of course I used to be your age," I laughed. "Everybody starts as a tiny baby. Even your mom and your Uncle Mort."
"Really? Uncle Mort used to be a baby?"
"Sure, though I know it's hard to imagine. You used to, too."
"I know that!" Yakov shouted.
Tigger moaned as another clump of hair was clawed from the ruff around his neck.
"He really likes that!" Yakov bragged. "He really likes me, too."
Yakov stood to give Tigger an unfortunate hug, and Tigger's growl rose from deep in his chest. I tensed in my seat in case I had to leap across the kitchen. But Yakov quickly released his arms, and Tigger seemed satisfied.
"But he doesn't like that," Yakov explained seriously. "You better not hug him like that. He gets all mad and stuff."
"That's true," I agreed. "He's not like other dogs."
Tigger swung his hips to knock Yakov over so that Yakov would continue scratching.
"And he talks just like you said he would," Yakov agreed happily.

"Yakov! You're filthy!" Aaliyah scolded with the complaint of mothers everywhere, though Yakov wasn't appreciably more filthy than he had been before she got changed. "Go to your room and get those things off. I'll be there in a minute to help."
After Yakov ran off, complaining all the way, Aaliyah explained, "My sister always scolds me for getting dressed first. She says that I will just get dirty again when I clean my son. But even if I dress him first, he just gets dirty again." Her quick, small laugh was like one my mom made all the time, which reminded me that these people had a bad habit of making me feel five years old, even if I did wear my mother face. "Well, I better help him," Aaliyah said with a sudden determination. "If you want to clean, it's the door beneath the stairs."
I thanked her as she ran off to stop Yakov from doing whatever he might be doing. "What I need is the latrine," I told Tigger quietly as I opened the door.
"Ohmigod!"
I yelled too loudly, and I had to reassure Aaliyah when she ran to the top of the stairs. But I almost yelled again in my happy surprise. Civilization! Advanced technology!
A real, honest-for-goodness toilet!
I remembered what love was as I shut the door.

Chapter 26: Crime and Courtesy
"Are you okay?"
"Um, sorry," I answered through the door, then finished quickly and hurried out. "It's just that I haven't seen a real bathroom in a long time. I guess I was having too much fun."
"Oh, take your time," Aaliyah offered. "I did not think about that. You have been traveling all this way; it must have been terrible."
"Well, I guess this is what I missed most," I admitted. "You get to taking things for granted; and when they're not around anymore, you miss them probably more than you should. I've had dreams about real bathrooms."
"I feel the same way. When I was first married, I moved to my husband's town, though that is not our way. But he lived in the desert, and they had little water. There was none to spare for baths. After two months, I was sick and we had to come home."
"I don't blame you. I'm sorry I didn't get to see him. Is he away?"
"Oh no. He's helping to get ready for the dinner. Uncle Istvan said you made them such a wonderful meal that we have to show you what we can do."
I thought about Istvan and my dinner and couldn't entirely suppress my laugh, but Aaliyah joined in.
"Yes, I heard your food was so good that he ate far too much. I am very jealous. When he is fasting, my best meals do not tempt him."
I laughed again and explained, "I don't think he was too thrilled about it. It seemed to make him pretty sick."
"I heard he kept going back for more. He knew what would happen. It must have been wonderful food."
"Not really. It was just a thick something-or-other stew with noodles. One of those things where you throw in whatever's handy, then simmer the heck out of it and pray. Noodles and a big chunk of bread can fix just about anything."
"Oh! The Bread!" Aaliyah suddenly screamed.
It was a scream I knew far too well, the scream of having promised to do something and suddenly realizing that you had not done it.
"Oh, I cannot believe myself!" Aaliyah hit her forehead with the heel of her hand, a move I had practiced myself hundreds of times. "I am so sorry. I have to put something in the oven for a while. You had better go on without us, or you will be late."
"Let me help," I insisted. "I am _not_ in a real hurry. I mean, not that I don't want to go; but the sooner I get there, the sooner I have to leave. It's complicated. Besides, your Uncle Istvan just started another game of go with my Don."
"Poor Uncle Istvan."
"Yeah. Don's not as good as Buck at keeping the game close."

The bread had been rising in a warm pantry on the other side of the wall behind the stove. Wide, pale disks on rows of wooden shelves smelled thick and sweet. We carried them to the oven on thin wooden boards, smeared some kind of clear, yellowish fat across the tops, and shoved them onto stainless steel racks. We packed them as close as we dared, but we squeezed in only a third of the loaves. Aaliyah looked toward the pantry, then at Yakov covering himself in dog hair, and sighed. There was a look of despair in her eyes.
Her eyes grabbed my attention. They had changed to an even darker shade of green, with highlights that moved in slow ripples around the iris. Aaliyah caught me looking and quickly covered them with her hand.
"I'm sorry. I..." Aaliyah kept her face turned away.
I was angry at myself, since I had just begun to make her feel comfortable enough to use contractions and then had to blow it with my rudeness. But before I could say anything, there was a loud knock on the door.
"Oh no! They're here for the bread!" Aaliyah wiped her eyes with her sleeve and hurried to the door. When she opened it, she sucked in her breath and stumbled back.
"Oh, hi, Rickie! Didn't know you'd be here." Sam's hair was a red splash in the light of the doorway, with Aurelius peering over her head. "That guy Bert bet me five gourds of tequila that I couldn't find some woman named Aaliyah. You her?" Sam stared up at her quarry, the green of Sam's own eyes reflecting the light from inside.
"Um," Aurelius mumbled nervously from above and behind Sam. His face began to turn splotches of green, a sure sign that he was embarrassed and would like to disappear. "We were supposed to tell Mrs. Aaliyah to hold off on the bread for an hour or two. The poultry is still frozen. Someone thought they were supposed to be like that, so he didn't tell anybody. They're just thawing it now. You _are_ Mrs. Aaliyah, aren't you, Ma'am?"
Aaliyah nodded slowly as she silently stared at Aurelius.
"Oh, and, um... Soph... Sam, here. She'd like to climb your towers a little later. If she could, that is, um..."
"Aurie!" Sam complained. "So who's the next one on the list?"
"Hafiza," Aurie answered. "She's making some kind of dessert." And before Aaliyah could say anything, they were running down the street.
"He's..." Aaliyah said slowly after they left.
"A little green," I answered.
"She's..."
"A sister, sort of," I explained, "the one raised in the dark. She's not green."
"So you don't..." I watched her calculate the probabilities before she realized that I was not likely to be shocked by her telltale irises. "My eyes," Aaliyah confessed. "They're from my grandmother. No one else in the family has them."
"They're gorgeous," I said comfortingly. "They're the neatest three or four shades of green I've seen," I added unnecessarily.
"I... They are..."
"Aaliyah," I started quietly. I wasn't sure why I was bothering to explain to a stranger, except that I watched her pass her hands through her pain as if it was a fog before her face. "I know what they are. The color is beautiful."
"But... You do not understand."
"Sure I do. You have greenie genes. So does everybody else you know."
"That's not... Nobody..."
"Everybody. Everybody who is alive in this town is either part green or has something like what I did to my friends."
"You... Your friends..."
"Yeah. My sister and I borrowed something the Greens left for us."
"That man who was here..."
"Not him personally, but it sort of came from him at one point. It's hard to explain, so I'm not going to try. Your grandmother was a Green, wasn't she?"
"How... But..." Aaliyah took a deep breath. "Yes," she admitted sadly.
"So she should have told you. You know how they got that name?"
"No. I thought it had something to do with plants or fish or something like that."
"Long ago, scientists studying genes used to tag them with a gene they borrowed from a jellyfish. The jellyfish gene glowed green, so it was easy to find wherever it went. But the Greens never used that. They had better ways to check their experiments. They used something called a tadpole, but it didn't have anything to do with frogs. But some reporters who didn't know what they were talking about thought the word looked cool in headlines. They claimed the Greens were making human monsters with frog and jellyfish parts, and that at any time, extra-yucky jellyfish people were going to ravish everybody's daughters. But I'm willing to bet that almost everyone in the zone who survived the first outbreak of plague did so with a little help from the Greens. They just don't know it."
"Really?"
"I'm pretty sure. There are probably exceptions, but not a lot. Besides, remember my talking about monsters? Well, most of the monsters I've met were genetically pure human, and they were the least human things I've ever seen. Believe me, you're a lot more human than I am."
"Really?" When I nodded, she began to confess. "I was teased a lot when I was a girl. I was an early bloomer, and in addition to my eyes, the teasing sometimes made me want to run away. I thought I'd learned to live with it. But when I was married... it wasn't what I'd hoped. In the desert, they treat people like me as animals. My husband was sure he could change that. But I have always been embarrassed, I suppose."
"If that's the most you've got to feel embarrassed about, you're doing pretty good."

The bread was done in about two hours, a lot less time than I thought it would take; but still no one came to get it. We packed it in large, towel-lined baskets and set them near the stove, then Aaliyah decided she had time to change Yakov again before we left.
I wasn't sure why she bothered, since it was certain that Yakov would find more dirt before we reached the party. He reminded me a little of Bryan when we were that age, always finding mud or barbecue sauce or something to smear over his face and clothes when no parents were looking.
"So you made a new friend?" I asked Tigger. He was staring toward the stairs, where we could hear Yakov arguing about getting changed again. Tigger gave me a noncommittal growl, then stared suspiciously at the baskets. "You leave those alone," I told him. "I'll make sure you get something good later."
Instead of answering, Tigger swirled to face the front door and gave a deep, hateful growl. The hair on his neck fluffed and his eyes grew hard. He kept it up for only a few moments before he settled down again.
"I smelled them, too," I told Tigger. "Just leave them alone for now."

Two boys arrived for the bread while Aaliyah still was changing Yakov, so I helped them load the bread into a little two-wheeled cart. The cart was painted bright red and green, with two gold wings painted above the axle. The spokes for the huge wheels looked like steel wire, but the rims were wood. A dog about a third smaller than Tigger was harnessed in front to pull the cart, and he seemed happy with his job.
Tigger looked at the dog as if it wasn't worth killing, though Tigger might kill it out of pity. The dog began to whine and tried to put it's head on the ground, except the harness wouldn't let it. Tigger continued to stare.
"Stop it, Tigger," I ordered. I was surprised when he listened to me. But he continued to make significant glances while the boys and I loaded the bread.
They covered their load with thick blankets, then lifted the harness to make their dog stand. Tigger growled, and the boys had to run to keep up with the poor animal.
"Tigger," I tried to explain. "You can't be rude when you're somebody's guest. That's a major rule. Like number one in the list of rules. Unless they break hospitality first, even your friends will punish you if you're rude. That goes for me, too. Okay?"
Tigger looked at me as if he would at least think about behaving, which was an encouraging sign.
But what would a wild dog consider to be rude behavior, I wondered. What if it was showing your teeth? Someone would smile and Tigger would be on them. But smiling hadn't bothered him up till then. Neither had anything else, as far as I could tell, except for putting anything around his neck or poking him with a stick. Or trying to get close to his ears before he decided to let you.
I looked at Tigger closely and decided that no one would be tempted to pet him. Except for Kay and some of the other more out-of-kilter wasps. And Yakov, whom Tigger forgave for hanging on his neck. Yakov...

"Well, _you_ sure look handsome," I told him as he ran down the stairs. "Real spiffy."
Yakov stopped suddenly on the fourth stair from the bottom. "Spiffy?"
"Yeah. It means clean and bright and good looking."
"Spif-fy," Yakov rolled the word across his tongue.
"So, Yakov," I probed. "What do you see in your future."
"There's no future yet, silly," Yakov answered.
I had guessed right.

As we walked to the big hall, I couldn't stop myself from staring at the black towers twisting out of sight into the low clouds. Sometime while we were baking, a thick, high fog moved into the city, and the buildings' black skeletons faded into the grey. Someone on the street would open a door or window, and a yellow and orange light would dance up the girders, passing deep enough into the fog to cast a jagged red glare. A shadow flicked across one sudden glare, and I decided that must be Aurelius. Sam would never be that careless.
It was getting warmer. Despite our complaints about cold, that was not a good thing.
"She's up there," Yakov tattled knowingly.
"They both are," I answered him. "And they have their eyes shut."
"How?" Yakov asked wonderingly, staring at me with saucer eyes. "Why?"
"Because sometimes it hurts to see even the sky," I told him. "That's what it means to hunt monsters."
"That's sad," Yakov considered carefully. "Sanji told me you were really nice, but really sad. She said you couldn't be hugged."
"I can be hugged," I answered while I considered what he had said. "I just have to be dressed for it. Otherwise you can get hurt. I just haven't been dressed like that a lot lately. Tell Sanji, 'Hi,' for me. I liked her a lot."
"She says Hi back," Yakov answered. "She likes you, too."

Chapter 27: In Such Dark
Their animals and our animals were growling and hissing at each other, stalking around tables to corner each other against the walls. A sharp noise or sudden movement could turn this into a blood bath. I tried to calculate the best way to disable as many animals as I could before the killing began.
"If you critters want to play that way," Kay's voice quietly sliced into every cranny of the hall, "then I'm playing, too. We'll see who's left when _I'm_ done."
The growling and hissing stopped. Their animals and our animals didn't like each other any better, but at least they were polite about it.
"Tigger," I stopped him as he passed behind my chair.
He raised his ears and looked at me defiantly.
"Remember what I told you earlier. Besides that, if you hurt that leg again, after all I went through to fix it, I am going to personally rip it off and beat your head with it."
Tigger gave a hurt cry that ripped my heart, so I fed the shaggy fake a piece of my turkey, then shooed him away.
"Why do they hate our dogs, Mrs. Rickie?" Yakov asked innocently, but with a look in his eye that suggested he already knew the answer.
Aaliyah tried to shush him, but I let her know that I didn't mind. Mort and Istvan tried to look as if they weren't very interested in my answer.
"I'm not sure, Yakov," I said diplomatically. "Maybe because your dogs are domesticated. Glinda and her pack never had a lot of use for humans, except as an occasional snack."
"Snack?"
"Mm hmmm," I continued. "Where they come from, humans and dogs hunted each other. They never learned to get along."
"So why do they like you so much?"
"You know, I really have no idea. I think they were just bored and decided to see what crazy things we were going to do." I decided it was best not to tell everyone that the pack probably was following Kay, that her link with these feral dogs, at the moment, was probably stronger than her link with other humans. Kay was having enough troubles without having to explain herself to a thousand strangers.
"I see you are taking good care of your doll," Mort politely changed the subject and pointed to Mirielle perched carefully on my lap.
I smiled my thanks and took a moment to admire his face. Despite the scars and the hissing half-voice, I could find the beauty in what he had become. It was like Zach in a way, I thought. A face born in pain, one that should have been scary, instead making even the air around him seem to smile.
We were seated at a round table in a hall with many tables. Hundreds of flickering, mirrored lamps on the tables and walls and on wrought-iron posts made everything bright and cheerful. The tables were covered in white cloth, and tapestries in abstract designs covered the walls. There were long strips of white cloth hung just below the ceiling, giving the illusion of eating in a huge tent.
It wasn't until I arrived that I learned that no one in the hall knew who would attend until the crowd assembled. It was determined by whom the visitors spent time with, a process that the townspeople considered to be something like, but not quite, destiny. Even the gang who met us at the camp, and who had to be the first to greet us in the town, would not have been there unless someone from our group had hung out with them for a while on this day. Aaliyah and Yakov were there because Tigger growled at a dog on their street. Sam and Aurie were laughing with an old woman named Fakeeha or something, whom they had met while looking for someone else. Mort and Bert and Istvan and a dozen other old uncles and aunts were there because the more determinedly polka-dotted of our crew preferred to hide in the hall all day.
"So what are your intentions with the lovely Mirielle?" Istvan asked. It was a question by the doll's creator, but with no tones of ownership at all. I realized that Mirielle had been some bit of his knowledge or feeling that he carved into a shape, then cast into the cold world with, of all the unfortunate choices, me.
I thought for a moment to decide whether I had truly decided, and I decided that I had. "I'm going to find her a proper home," I told him. "Someplace she'll be safe and loved. She can't go where I'm going."
"Don't give her up too soon, little mother..." That seemed a lot more personal now that I knew what it meant. "... even hell can be better than a bad home..." I worried that Istvan's proverbs were beginning to make sense to me, though I was having trouble listening. "... my grandfather..." I did my best to not look in boredom around the hall, hopeful for an interruption before I yawned. "... makes a desert..."
Perhaps, I thought cheerfully, Tigger would be chewing on someone by now.

"This is marvelous!" Aaliyah told me for the fifth time, though it was only chicken roasted a little too fast and rolled turkey that wasn't greased enough when cooking. "I've not had meat like this in all my life. It's so light and subtle."
I thought the birds were poorly done, too dry and too salty. But these people had built a mythology around chickens, and they probably would have loved them raw. The reason was that they had kept all the old books, including thousands of cookbooks; and most of the old cookbooks had large, elaborately illustrated sections on numerous ways to cook these birds, which once had been cheap meats. Since most of our crew were tired of chicken, I was glad our last frozen chickens would be traded for something spectacular.
We had a lot of pork of one kind or another, and that was another animal that these people had lost. I told Gina to remind Buck to save some bacon, or else our crew was going to rebel against all the mutton they would eat for the rest of the trip.
It occurred to me that the differences in foods was the biggest threat to the isolation in this zone. If outsiders found that they could grow rich by trading chickens for more valuable things, it wouldn't take them long to discover ways to keep from getting sick. The method Gina and I used on our friends wasn't new; it had been known before our grandparents were born. There also would be mechanical means, such as suits and sterilizers. The only reason this zone stayed safe is because people didn't want to come.
But these people had treasures they didn't want. For example, they were sitting on millions of barrels of old-fashioned gasoline; and their only concern was how to dispose of it before the lake rose this far. They didn't want it to poison the water. They could live on an inland sea only if it was alive. They couldn't live on gasoline.
"My father says we're a people who clean up after ourselves," Yakov told me, reminding me again that it could be dangerous to think too much around one of these kids.
But it was a good description. I hadn't seen a piece of litter in the town. While the nomads always had the foulest trash heaps at one end of their towns, I hadn't noticed even horse droppings in this city, despite all the animals being led around.
"We even use all the poop," Yakov said proudly.
It wasn't that he was reading my mind, I decided. It was just that he, as well as Sanji and who knew how many other children, were good at seeing how I _felt_. I wished I could give him a better image of the people from outside.
"So why don't you like hunting monsters?" Yakov suddenly asked.
I quickly reassured the adults before their scolds left their mouths. They all wanted to ask me; it was easy to tell. They just were afraid that asking was terribly rude.
"Because monsters aren't ever what you think they are," I tried to explain. "It's easy to see huge beasts with long fangs and red eyes..." I curled my fingers and gave Yakov a roar, which resulted in a suitable cringe. "But surprisingly few things with fangs and claws are monsters. Most of those are actually pretty nice once you get to know them. The real monsters don't look much different than anyone else. That makes it hard. And if you hunt them, it's too easy to become one yourself. That's why it's better to stay away from monsters and just be a happy little kid."
Everyone at the table looked both pleased and thoughtful about my answer.
"Were you a happy little kid, Mrs. Rickie?"
"You know, Yakov," I answered with a laugh and a little painful honesty. "Everyone always says I was a happy kid. But I think I was a sad little kid, too. I just overcompensated. A lot."
It was obvious that Yakov didn't understand what I said, which didn't stop him from commenting. "It's your eyes, Mrs. Rickie. They laugh for real, but they still stay sad. Is that why the ghost cat was afraid of you?"
"Did Sanji tell you that story?"
"Hmm hmmm," Yakov answered.
"Tell me," I asked, deciding it was time for Yakov to answer some questions. "Is Sanji a boy or a girl?"
"Of course, silly."

I lost track of time, but I assumed it was already dark outside. It was hard to tell in the hall because there were no windows, and I didn't want to look at my watch while Istvan launched another series of confusing proverbs. I wanted to look around the hall for Don and MJ, since I was almost desperate for a chance to say goodbye. But it would be rude, and also a tactical mistake.
I hadn't noticed before how long-winded Istvan was, but that probably was because back then I had just finished not listening to Bert. Bert, I was willing to bet, was the local champion of long-winded; but I would not be surprised if Istvan was the runner-up.
I watched Yakov play with his food. Like most little kids, he was determined not to like anything new; but his mother couldn't scold him this time because I also had been pushing my food around my plate. When he thought no one was looking, he held a large chunk of chicken behind his back for Tigger. When he saw that I was watching, he gave me a conspiratorial smile, apparently having caught me doing the same a few moments before. I put my finger to my lips, then gave Aaliyah a wink and smile before she scolded us.
I knew I should eat regardless of what I thought of the food, but my stomach was twisting so badly that I was sure I wouldn't keep it down. While not eating might be rude, I was pretty sure that tossing my dinner on the floor would be even worse.
I glanced across the hall and saw Gina stand up, which made my stomach even worse. But I managed to make a weak smile as I excused myself, promising everybody that I would be back. I watched Gina give Buck a small kiss goodbye, and then felt somehow relieved when I saw Don and MJ nonchalantly position themselves so that I could do the same for them.
It felt like walking in a nightmare, where rubber legs seem impossibly heavy and mired in a thick goo. But I tried to look cheerful as I forced myself to follow Gina to the big doors at the front of the hall.
Tigger tried to follow, so I crouched to give him my first goodbye. "Remember what I told you and behave," I warned, then hugged him so I could wipe my tears in his smelly fur. "You'll find me later," I whispered in his ear. "Make sure you help everyone." Then I stood before I really began to cry.
When I got to MJ, she squeezed my hand. When I reached Don, he squeezed my thigh. I hurried after Gina before all of us were crying.

"I've gotta use the bathroom."
"Rickie! You just went!"
"I'm nervous. I can't help it. I gotta pee."
"Okay, let's make this quick."
"Maybe you better wait outside the door, Gina."
"I'm nervous, too, ya' know."
"But what if... I mean, if we're alone together on the..."
"Nah. They'll wait till we're outside. They're probably somewhere close, where they can see the doors."
"You know, Gina, if we use the restroom windows, nobody would see us leave the party, and we can be found wherever we want."
"So hurry up, Rickie, before anybody else comes in."

The restroom window was a large, swinging panel of thick, leaded, colored glass. Some of the pieces were disks and looked as if they might have been the bottoms of bottles. Other pieces were curved diamonds with thousands of tiny bubbles. And every piece was a different color. It was pretty, but probably made it next to impossible to put on makeup in that room during the day.
Gina and I hopped through the window, but stopped in the middle of the street to stare back at the colors streaming onto the icy street. It was as if everything warm and friendly and beautiful was on the bright side of that window, and we were running off into the shadows. Again.
Unfortunately, the streets in this part of town were brightly lit. It would take a lot of work to find an appropriate shadow.

"Gah! You'd think there'd be one decent shadow with a good view of the doors."
"You're getting sloppy, sister dear."
"Already thought of that. If you noticed, Aurie was the only one of that bunch at the party. The others are up in the iron, doing what they do."
"I was talking senses. They're somewhere they can hear or smell."
"Downwind."
"By the way, were we just talking out loud?"
"We still are."
'Shit!'
"Don't worry. We're not _supposed_ to be quiet. We're supposed to be good little worms on the fishhook of life." "I figure the wind is blowing around this corner and down the next street." "So here we go." I expected hisses from shadows, bribes and threats. What we got was, "You're expecting us." Gina and I followed quietly.


28: Skill Levels   

 

A ghastly face. Greens, yellows, blinking reds from the instruments reflecting off the dead-white skin of the slug like a disease. She was slamming levers and buttons in an angry attempt to make the helicopter fly a hundred more yards, a dozen, even three; but the only direction it could fly was down.

 

I wasn't scared. We were going to crash into the icy black lake, going to freeze or drown. But it all seemed too unreal to scare me. Everything moved in slow motion, silent except for the coughing of the engine as it struggled to make the rotors turn one more time. This is how it ends, I thought calmly. Not with a whimper, but a splash.

 

This slug had skills, the kind you didn't learn in one lifetime. Or even in many lives if all those lives were your own. Her black eyes bulged slightly; her mouth twisted into a grin of impossibly sharp teeth. Her elbows rose to her ears. And she laughed and howled as she kicked the pig's hands from the other stick. She shouted something. It might have been "Wahoo!" or it might have been obscene; I couldn't hear. Then there was a lurch, and ice and water splashed across the plastic bubble.

 

When I started to breathe again, we were canted at a crazy angle. I was hanging in the harness, my right hand still clutching my stick. First I checked Gina, who looked as if she was about to throw up. I pulled a knife from my sleeve and began to cut myself free. Gina was free first and fell onto the seat in front of her, smashing the pig's face against the plastic windshield. I made sure to brace my feet before cutting the last strap.

The slug flipped another switch, and the searchlight on the front of the copter turned the outside blackness to a foggy white. It was no better for seeing where we were, but it helped the pig and slug to untangled themselves and to open the uppermost plastic door. But after a few moments, there was crackling in electric blue, and the light disappeared.

"Almost made it!" the slug shouted, pleased with herself. "Three more yards, and we'd be on dry ground. It's only a couple feet deep here, so at least we won't drown."

She squirmed out the door and stood on the bubble, then reached to offer me a hand. I didn't need the help, and I wasn't about to take it. The thought of touching the slug made my stomach turn, though I didn't mind stepping on the pig in my climb outside.

The slug jumped into the water and waded to the shore. I used my stick to vault the distance because wet feet on a frigid night would lead to the end of my mission. When I was safely on the dry salt beach, Gina climbed out and did the same. A few seconds later, the pig huffed his way through the opening and slid off the bubble into the lake. The slug just laughed.

'The pig just gave me a message,' Gina thought at me when we both were safe and dry. 'It's kinda weird.'

'Of course it's weird. He's a pig,' I thought back. 'What did he say?'

'He told me, "Tell Master Kyle that rootworms in the roses is only bad if you is growing roses. Remember them exact words." What do you think it means?'

I decided that "Master Kyle" would understand both the code and its countersign, though she might not be thrilled about the honorific. But it made me unsure about the pig. First he was working for Long, or at least for a half-rotted slug. Then he was somehow with Kay's dad. Now he was with Long again, but only maybe so. Maybe he was playing his own game. But whether it was a double or a triple cross, I had to admire the purity of that treachery.   

"You're supposed to be the damned pilot! It's your fault I'm freezin', ya damned cailleach!"

I knew he was supposed to be an enemy, but I couldn't help but sympathize with the pig. As wet as he was, he wouldn't live long in the frigid night. Gina already was gathering handfuls of dry grass and brush into a pile, but the slug was furious and had her rod raised as if to smash the pig's head.

"Girseach! I meant girseach!" the pig squealed.

The slug spat something I couldn't quite hear, but she lowered her hand.

Gina started a small fire, but the brush burned in an instant. It was going to take a lot of work to keep a fire going long enough to dry the pig, and I considered just letting him die. I started gathering more brush, but not much grew in the salty sand.

This slug was different from the others we had seen. She looked to be in her mid-30s, but she might have been a little younger or much older. She had too much makeup caked on her neck and around her eyes, too much perfume. Her hair was an unnatural shade of white. But her robe looked rich, a heavy, figured, black wool with a long cowl and wide sleeves. The rest of her clothes were white, from her furry boots to her knit cap.

This one was no vampire howling in the darkness of the Pile. Her eyes were sharp and hard, and she did things with intelligence, if not calm. I guessed that she still controlled the thing that shared her mind, for as long as she could hold it. Though she already stank of starving flesh, this creature seemed proud of what she had become.

That made her even more disgusting. I made a point of remembering that her kill spot was the base of her neck. With this one, I wouldn't have the luxury of wasting a knife in her chest or eye.

The pig was the same one we met in the city. He stripped off his clothes and held them above the fire to dry, and I recognized the scar from the cut I had made on his arm. He had a dozen newer scars on his back, and I wondered if his boss had punished him for his failures. I didn't care. It was the slug who worried me.

When we started this misadventure, the slug promised that we would be protected by hospitality, which was fine as far as it went. She even went so far as to ostentatiously _not_ search our purses or take our sticks, as if we would have let her. It was an elaborate charade, one that neither side wanted to stretch too far because that charade might keep Gina and me from killing them. I don't think either of them had any illusions about surviving this trip if Gina or I became displeased.

Buck had anticipated that our first ride would be a short hop, either a helicopter or a boat, something that would get us out of the range of our cars and take us to an airfield for the rest of our trip. Since it was necessary to our plans that we be spirited away quickly, he hoped that it would be a copter. I stared at the wreckage in the lake and realized that this was where Buck's plan and their incompetence parted ways.

Their problem, apparently, was old maps. They had calculated their fuel for a much smaller lake, one only half the size of what it had become. The crash came simply because they had run out of gas.

"Get your fat ass moving," the slug growled and kicked the pig into the fire. "We've got 10 miles to hike before dawn, and I really don't give a shit if you die on the way."

His clothes still were steaming as he yanked them on, and he was shivering and whimpering as he pulled on his still soggy shoes.   

This was going to take a long time. We hadn't walked three miles when the slug called for a break. The pig was out of breath and chattering with the cold, but she didn't have any concern for him. She was the one who was tired, her breath ragged; and she was dragging her feet like we had walked for days instead of little more than an hour. She ordered the pig to gather brush for another fire and pulled her robe even tighter around her body.

I had noticed when we started that she had tucked the rod under her arm. And as soon as the pig had a few smoky flames rising from the reeds and bushes he'd found, she held that thing close to the heat. So those things don't like cold, I observed. I didn't believe that cold alone was enough to kill that thing in the rod, but it would be useful information the next time I killed one of their carriers and had to find a way to contain it.

The pig had found a few large bushes and dragged them into the fire, then quickly removed his shoes and socks and used a couple of thicker branches to hold them over the flames. I could smell the stink of his feet from five feet away, but I didn't see any black patches forming on his skin. I briefly considered warning him that cooking those shoes was not a good idea, but Gina let me know that she was looking forward to a good laugh when the shoes fell apart in another couple of miles.

I also was a bit disgusted with myself. How did these clowns ever cause us any real trouble? They were completely unprepared for the weather and terrain, and they were bumbling around on the salt. When we were walking, they couldn't keep up. If Gina and I had been skipping, we would have been wherever it was we were going by now; but even at a slow walk, these bozos were exhausted after only an hour. The shoes the pig was wearing were made for walking around a town, not for hiking in the snow. And though the slug's furry boots looked warm, the fur was on the outside, where it didn't do much good. If they hadn't found Gina and me, or if we had refused to go with them, these two would have killed themselves by now.

It looked as if our "short break" was going to last longer than our hike so far. At this rate, I wasn't sure that we'd make the 10 miles by dawn. That would pose a problem because Buck planned to follow in the morning, at which time we were supposed to be well on our way. If our group caught up to us on these flats, it might be difficult to hide long enough for these bozos to believe that they were succeeding with their own badly planned kidnapping. If that happened, Gina and I might have to kill them and wait for their boss to send another crew, which would mean at least another few days of delay. And there was no guarantee that the next crew would be any smarter or better prepared than these two.

About the time that the pig's shoes were beginning to smell like burned minute steaks, the slug announced that the break was over. The pig yanked on his shoes, and the leather laces came apart like wet tissue. Gina and I tried hard not to laugh, and we made a small production of getting ready to go in order to hide our giggles.

The slug made a bigger production of covering the small fire with snow. I was not sure why she bothered. She certainly was not worried about forest fires, and surely she didn't think that she was hiding anything from anyone who would follow. After all, there was a helicopter smashed at the side of the lake and a trail that a headless chicken could follow. Maybe she thought the light from the rapidly dying embers would attract pursuers. Or maybe she just wanted to make sure the pig got his hands wet.   

I had miscalculated. We had gone almost another three miles before the soles came off the pig's barbecued shoes. He started swearing profusely, which surprised me because I didn't think he had that much energy left.

The slug ordered him to keep going, but the pig just plopped his butt in the snow and began rubbing his feet. I thought the slug would threaten him again, but she was close to exhaustion herself. She ordered him to gather more brush for a fire, but he just held his feet, rocked slowly, and whined. Gina signaled me to let the slug build her own fire, so we pretended to be tired ourselves. That could have worked if we could have kept from laughing. But we still were not about to help the slug.   

The third act of that comedy was even slower than the previous two. The pig had torn strips from his undershirt to tie his shoes together, and he had to stop every few hundred yards to retie them. The slug used these stops to gulp air, always keeping that rod buried beneath one arm. And Gina used the time to show off, skipping around the two and bending at the waist to stare laughing into their faces.

The temperature continued to rise, and now it was above freezing. A thin mist was rising from the snow, and visibility was getting bad. Soon the mist would soak those two even further, and they could die before we got to wherever it was we were heading. Gina and I took care to shake the moisture from our clothes every few moments, but neither of us warned the clowns of that danger.

"Almost there," the slug gasped after less than two miles. "We'll be warm soon. Let's hurry."

I was going to mention something about her distance judgment; but it was an old joke, and she didn't seem to have much of a sense of humor at the moment. Besides, her first estimate of 10 miles might not have been even close to the actual distance. For all I knew, our destination might have been just beyond the next hillock.

The pig lurched ahead, apparently trying to run but not having the strength to do so. Even the slug picked up a little speed, so that now we were moving at the pace of a fast walk. That was a relief for Gina and me, since the biggest drag on our energy was moving slowly enough for them to keep up. But we had better get there soon, I decided, because it was going to start raining in a few hours, and the storm would probably last all day. Given their exhaustion, they would die quickly in a cold rain.   

It was only a half mile at that halting pace before both clowns collapsed into the now wet snow. Though I had been joking to myself about letting them die, I knew I couldn't do that. Our getting to our destination was important to Buck's plan, and having our guides die on the way would be a disaster for us as well. So Gina and I quickly gathered as much brush and grass as we could and piled it on top of them. Fortunately, they didn't have the strength to argue with us.

We left open the facing ends of these makeshift nests and built a fire between them. Gina and I collected more brush for us to sit on and tended the fire so that it didn't ignite the piles that held our supposed kidnappers. Both clowns curled themselves inside the nests and moaned. But after ten minutes or so, their shivering looked a lot less dangerous. In a half hour or so, perhaps we could get them moving again.   

Surprisingly, it was the pig who first crawled out of the brush and claimed to be ready to continue. The slug crawled out next, but it was obvious that she did not want to do so. She just refused to be less macho than the pig. Neither of them was really ready to travel, but Gina and I decided to let them go as far as they could.

We took just a few steps when a huge, orange ball of fire rose through the mist to our west. A few seconds later, the rumble of the explosion reached us. 'About half a mile,' Gina, who had been counting the seconds, calculated.

I looked at the stunned faces of the clowns and said, "I hope that wasn't our ride."    

 

 

29: Crow Food   

 

A screeching black heap flapped and quarreled at one end of the wreckage. At the other end, black, oily smoke rose through the fog. Between them, chunks of plane were scattered across a hundred yards of white salt: metal rods twisted into curls, pieces of wing and fuselage stuck at crazy angles, a burning tire still spinning like a toy. Black streaks radiated from where the plane had hit to where the pieces finally stopped. And above it all, the broken tail rose from the rubble like a grave marker.

I knew what was under the scavengers. When we first arrived, I threw a stone out of curiosity and immediately wished I hadn't. At that time, he was missing his eyes and his belly was open; but there was enough left of the pilot to see the bloated green agony. By now, he would be considerably more diminished.

The sun had cleared the mountains by the time we reached the scene, coloring the fog a bright orange. I couldn't see the sky, and there were no shadows. Everything was either black or orange or a wispy orange-grey. It looked like a cartoon version of Hell.

So much for the secret rendezvous. That smoke had to be visible for at least a hundred miles, even with the thick fog. Gina's and my "hosts" were up sheep's creek, and scavengers were eating their paddle.

The airstrip was just a narrow path plowed in the snow and a long, white hut with a round roof. There was a satellite dish on top of the hut and a pile of garbage against one side. The area around its only door had been trodden to a grey, lumpy ice. Thick ice stalactites hung beside the door from the roof to the ground.

The slug and pig tried to hurry to the hut, but it was a sorry sight. When they got near the door, both slipped on the ice and fell heavily on their backs. The slug used the doorknob to pull herself up and kicked the pig to get him out of the way so she could open the door. The pig cried, then tried to use an icicle to pull himself up; but the ice broke, and he was again on his back and crying. Gina and I pushed him to the side and followed the slug.

Inside was a long metal table, one of those cheap folding tables with four sets of tubular legs and a pair of hinges in the middle. There were three folding chairs at the table, and four rusty cots were pushed against the curved walls. The bedding on the cots was filthy and smelled, so Gina and I tried to clean two chairs enough to sit down.

The slug was pulling the cord on a battered generator but was not having much luck. She fiddled with knobs and switches, repeatedly squeezed a small rubber ball, cursed, and pulled six more times before the generator coughed it's way to a ragged start. A dim ceiling bulb began to glow without adding much useful light. But a small electric heater glowed a cheery orange, and the slug immediately pressed her rod against its grate.

The pig finally managed to get inside by the time the heater was glowing. He crawled across the floor and pressed his hands against the heater's top. After a few moments, he pulled off what was left of his shoes and tried to press his feet against it. The slug swore and batted his feet, but he wasn't giving up. They struggled a bit, then the heater fell over. Gina laughed as the electric glow began to fade.

The two bad-tempered clowns struggled weakly with each other before they finally righted the heater and found a comfortable position. Thankfully, we had 20 minutes of quiet while they cooked their hands and feet.

When the slug decided that she had sufficiently toasted her skin, she rose shakily to her feet and hobbled to the  flimsy door at the back of the hut. When it opened, I could see a small office lit by another dim bulb. A few boards on two sawhorses served as a desk, topped by an oversize radio with an old-fashioned microphone. She sat before the radio, flipped a few switches, and fiddled with a knob before taking the mic in her hand. When she saw me looking, she kicked the door shut.

I fished in my purse for a pipe and the pouch of my favorite, and foulest smelling, tobacco. I wasn't tired, even though I had been up all night. But even if I had been tired, there was no way I would sleep on one of those cots. As I went through the ritual of lighting and tamping and relighting, the pig gave a snort.

"Would you mind not smoking that in here?" the pig whined. "You could have a little consideration, you know."

"Are you kidding me? Have you _smelled_ this sty? A burning compost heap would be a big improvement.”

"Isn't _Burning Compost_ the name of that mixture?" Gina commented silently.

I was going to make a snappy retort, but Gina was filling her own pipe. '_Merde de Cheval_,' she explained as she held up her own pouch.

The slug poked her head out the office door. "We're leaving in three hours. I suggest you get some sleep till then." The hut's bulb made small red fires flicker in her black eyes as she turned to face the pig. "Get outside and put out those fires. And clear the runway for a plane." Then she pulled her head back into the office and slammed the door.

"I'm going to take a little walk," I announced to no one in particular. "Don't worry. I won't go very far."

Gina thought bad things at me because it meant that she would have to stay to keep an eye on the slug and to assure them that we weren't running away. The pig was searching through the bedding to find another pair of shoes.   

I found a small dune of sharp grass and thorns where I could perch uncomfortably and consider our situation. My real reason for coming outside was to try to use my little radio to let Buck know what was going on, though I doubted that the radio had enough range. If the pig was going to be outside, I would have to be careful not to show him what I was doing. Fortunately, it still was very foggy, though the fog's color had changed from deep orange to a blinding yellow.

There were elephants in the fog. At least, they sounded like elephants, like the way elephants sounded in old movies. While trying to adjust my bottom to avoid the largest thorns, I could see only large, blurry shadows, just out of clear sight. But they smelled different than I imagined elephants to smell. They smelled _shaggy_.

For the umpteenth time, I wondered what other critters had escaped from zoos and adapted to this wilderness. With my luck, I would be chased by rhinoceri.

A loud motor started, and I strained to see what was going on. The pig drove a tiny bulldozer from behind the hut and began pushing piles of snow against the still burning parts of plane. The dozer was painted bright blue with a black blade, and it looked new. Though it was smaller than a compact car, it made more noise than a large truck.

While the pig was working on the far side of the wreckage, I found the pieces of my radio and tried to get a message to Buck. I could hear only static on my end, but perhaps Sparks' base set was powerful enough to get my signal. I gave a quick but full report, then stashed the radio at the bottom of my purse.   

The plane was smaller than the one that had crashed. It circled the makeshift airfield several times before landing on a flat patch of salt about 400 hundred yards from the new runway the pig had plowed. I realized that the pig had plowed the runway in the wrong direction, and the pilot chose his landing to avoid a crosswind.

This plane had its wings on top, and two booms stretched from the back of the wings into a wide tail. One propeller was in the front, where one expects to see a propeller; but the second was in back, between the two booms. The top half was painted in a camouflage pattern of greys and browns, and the bottom half in white and blue. When I walked closer, I saw that it was designed to carry six people.

The pilot had made a smooth landing despite the roughness of the ground, and he stayed inside after landing, throwing switches and talking into a bulky headset. The pig used the small dozer to pull a fuel tank to the side of the plane, then he climbed on top to stick the nozzle of a long hose into one of the wings. He had to climb back down to turn on the pump; and while he was doing so, the hose came loose and fell on the ground. He climbed back up and used a rag to wedge the nozzle in place, then climbed back down to start the pump. Then he had to climb back up to fill the tanks, filling one on the right wing then crawling over the plane to fill the other.

As the pig worked on the plane, the pilot first stood to one side and watched calmly. Then he started to rub his back against the side of the plane. That apparently didn't relieve his itch, because he moved to one of the posts supporting a wing and began to rub his back even harder. After a few moments, he took off his brown leather jacket, then moved to use one of the plane's tires to get more friction. As I watched, he grew more desperate. He pulled off his shirt and rubbed more furiously. He tried to reach his arms to scratch the skin from his back, then began to scream and cry at the same time. Finally he fell on his back in the wet snow and started twitching. I could see the green spreading rapidly across his skin. He contorted into bone-snapping positions.

The slug strode past me toward the pilot, her rod in her bare hand.

"Perhaps you should repair to the hut," she called without turning her head. "At least until I'm finished."

The elephants were back. Or maybe these were different ones. I still couldn't see them.   

It took the slug more than 20 minutes to  feed. No one wanted to watch, so we huddled in the hut near the pitiful heater. Gina and I sat at the table and smoked our pipes again, not so much because we wanted to smoke but simply for something to do and to mask the foul smell of the bedding.

While we were waiting, the rain began. It splattered, half frozen, on the window, then froze as it trickled down the glass. Each drop made a small noise, each noise just slightly different from the others. When the wind picked up outside, there was a thumping on the metal roof. It sounded like a loose branch, but there wasn't a tree for miles. A frigid draft slithered across the floor.

The pig found a can of some kind of food, but the can didn't have a label. He spent the wait trying to open the can. First he broke the blade of a cheap penknife, then he repeatedly stabbed the can with what was left of the blade until that was gone as well. Finally he used a loose metal brace from one of the cots to pry off the lid, splashing half the lumpy yellow contents on his pants. He used his hand to scrape the whatever off his crotch and cram it into his face, getting most of it in his mouth. Then he pried the lid a little further and poured the remainder down his gullet. His throat made rapid gulping sounds, but much of the swill ran down his cheeks and neck. He wiped his hands on his coat and looked for more cans under another cot.

"Want something to eat?" he asked as he pulled three more cans from their hiding place. I would rather have watched the slug feed.

'Geez,' I thought to Gina. 'That crap looks like rancid sheep dip, and I'm not even sure what sheep dip is.'

'I think it's something you stick potato chips into,' Gina thought slowly. She was writing with her fingernail on the top of the table. 'Either that, or it's something perverted done with wet sheep.'

The pig went into the little office to find something to open the new cans. He apparently succeeded, because we soon heard more slurping noises. Gina got up and shut the office door.   

"Where the hell's that fat fuck," the slug growled as she came in after her feeding. Gina used her thumb to point over her shoulder at the office, and the slug stomped across the room and kicked at the door. "Hey, fatass!" she shouted. "Get your shit together. It's time to get going."

As the slug combed the rain out of her dead-white hair with her silver fingernails, Gina projected the image of maggots cleaning themselves, and I began to feel sick. Then a strong gust blew open the outside door and the rain flew in. The cold air felt good on my face. It certainly was better than the hut's rancid stink.

"This storm's gonna get a lot worse," I informed the slug. "There's a huge mass of thunderstorms headed our way, and they're gonna last all day, probably till tomorrow morning. We probably should wait till the weather clears."

"Can't," the slug replied. "We're late already. Besides, we need the thunderstorms. Parts of the quarantine's still working, and we need those storms if we're gonna keep from getting burned on the way out. Don't worry. It'll be a little rough, but it's safe enough. I done it before."

I had an unfortunate memory from first grade, when Bryan, Gina, and I bought balsa planes with the propellers driven by rubber bands. We taped fat firecrackers to them and launched them from the roof of his father's porch. On the last plane, Bryan had drawn passengers screaming at the windows while the pilot was climbing out the front with a parachute. It was only after I lit the fuse that I realized the passengers were Bryan, Gina, and me. It was a pretty deep trauma for a six-year-old, but it didn't compare to the fear I had of that slug trying to fly us over the mountains in a thunderstorm.

"Maybe we could walk and catch up with you later," I tried.    

 

 

30: Elemental Symmetries   

 

I don't know why I wasn't more scared. So far, every time I had flown with these twits, they had crashed. I didn't have any reason to believe that they might make it over the mountains in bad weather, but I still had the foolish faith that they would make at least this leg of the trip without serious incident. I told myself that they apparently made the trip into the zone safely, so they would at least have experience.

Gina didn't have any such confidence. She didn't like the idea of flying in planes before all this mess began; and now that she had crashed in one helicopter and seen the wreckage of another plane, she was sure that she was going to die. There was a little strap above the window next to her seat, and she was clutching it desperately. I wondered if she thought that, if the bottom of the plane fell, she might save herself by holding onto the top. I didn't say anything to her, or even think it, because she looked as if she could become hysterical at any moment.

The flight was beyond rough. The little plane was knocked around like dice in a shaker. Every few moments my stomach would rise to my chest as if we had just dropped a few hundred feet, then we'd shake from side to side. Several times I banged my head on the ceiling, though that should have been impossible given how tightly I had pulled the seat belt. My head and shoulder banged against the plastic window so hard that I couldn't imagine it not breaking, leaving me to be sucked out to fall through the black storm. At least a dozen times I was sure that we were flying backwards or upside down. My hands hurt from gripping the arm rests, my feet hurt from using them to hold onto the legs of the seat in front of me, and the rest of me hurt from the constant shaking.

The only light inside the plane came from the instrument panel, but it was enough to see Gina's terrified grimace. I tried to reach over to hold Gina's hand and offer what little comfort I could; then the plane twisted and fell, and I was thrown against my window.

"Not so bad this time," the slug shouted from the pilot's seat. "On the way out, it was really rough." And that might have been a little comforting if her co-pilot wasn't vomiting into a garbage bag.

Outside it was black, relieved only by flashes that were less like lightning than like end-of-the-world explosions. I knew it was still daytime, but it looked like an incredibly dark night. When we did have sudden periods of relative light, it was because we were between storms. Then it was really bad because the wind seemed to grab the little plane from opposite directions, threatening to tear us into pieces. Also, I could see the wings shivering as if they were about to tear off. The blackness was scary, but it still was better than the light.

I wondered constantly how the slug could tell where we were going. I had identified the compass mounted on the plane's dash, but it swung so wildly that it must have been useless. I also had identified the artificial horizon indicator, but that also was spinning crazily. With visibility through the windshield at absolute zero, I did not understand how we could keep from flying into the side of a mountain. But the slug didn't seem scared. She was concentrating intently, fighting the wheel and constantly adjusting things; but she didn't seem worried about anything.

Still, I decided that my next flight would be in a rubber airplane. That way, instead of crashing, it would bounce.

"Another hour and we'll be out of this crap," the slug shouted back. Then there was another flash and Gina and I bumped heads.

I was very glad that I hadn't eaten.   

The slug's sense of time was worse than her sense of distance. It was almost three hours before we came out of the storms. The last one was the worst of all, and I was sure that we had died but just didn't know it. Then suddenly the sky was blue and the air was calm. Below us was a thick forest on a steep slope, so green that it could have been made from emeralds. I looked back and saw a steep mountain, also covered in a thick green.

I looked at Gina, and she was just beginning to calm down. Her breath was still ragged, and I could see the tracks of at least five gallons of tears on her face. But the look of lunatic panic was gone. I also could feel the knots unraveling in my own intestines.

The slug fiddled with a dial, then there was a steady beeping from her radio. "Almost right on target," she announced and banked steeply to fly parallel with the mountains to our right. Then she pushed on the wheel and pushed the throttles, and the plane descended to fly right above the trees.   

In less than 15 minutes, we were over a small, flat meadow carved on the slope of the foothills. It didn't look nearly large enough to land a plane. But when the slug got below the treetops, I saw that most of the base was camouflaged. Past the small meadow was a long, dirt runway covered by nets stretched between wooden poles. The nets were filled with branches, which gave the illusion of forest when seen from the air. Beneath the real trees on either side were small cabins and large garages, about a dozen trucks of various types, a half-dozen cars, and about 30 spooks.

I thought Gina would dive out of the plane as soon as the pig got his door open, but she was almost back to normal. Her clothes were twisted, and her lip was bleeding where she had bitten it, but her color was back. "When this is over," she said out loud, "I'm _walking_back!"

A half-dozen spooks ran over and started pushing the plane to one of the garages. Another drove a large black car toward us, but the slug pointed at one of the cabins and said that we'd best make a bathroom break before we went. "It's about a three-hour drive to where we're goin', so you might want to get somethin' to eat before we start," she suggested. I needed both the bathroom and food, but I wasn't sure that Gina was in any shape to eat. The pig ran ahead of us as fast as his still-sore feet could carry him.

I took my time, partly because I wanted to look around, and partly because I was overdressed for the unexpected heat. The cabin looked like an old country restaurant. There were large picture windows and a narrow, rickety porch across the front. There were even the remnants of a sign above the door, though the paint was faded beyond readability and the wood was mottled with a dark green moss. When the slug opened the glass-paneled door with its tattered roll-up shade, I expected a brass bell to ring. What I heard was the grinding of rusty hinges.

The makeshift dining hall was brown shadows broken by splashes from those cheap oil lamps found in gift shops. The place reeked of something vaguely like food, and any appetite I'd had was twisting away. There was grease on the walls, and the tables were dirty. "Smells like they had bacon for breakfast a week ago," Gina observed while checking for a clean chair. She checked three more before she found one at the window.

Fortunately, there were two restrooms. I would have gone outside rather than use the one the pig was just leaving.   

I had never seen anything so bright and colorful. Though it was dark beneath the forest canopy, the space between the trees was filled with green-and-yellow ferns as big as houses. Huge fungi in electric colors grew in shelves on fallen black trunks. Flocks of huge parrots in greens and reds and blues and yellows harassed even brighter birds with ridiculously long and elaborate tails. A band of green monkeys was arguing loudly with several huge, orange apes, then all hid and became suddenly quiet as an otherworldly howl echoed between the trees.

We were riding slowly on a rutted dirt road in a car like the gang's hummings, only set up like a limo with a sliding glass window behind the driver and two bench seats facing each other in the back. I had my window closed partly because it was sticky hot outside and air conditioned in the car, but mostly because we frequently hit large puddles that threw sheets of muddy water against the car.

"When I was a kid, this was mostly desert," the slug was explaining like a tour guide. "Just brown scrub thorns and manzanita. It's amazing how quick the change in the rains changed everything else."

I changed my estimate of the slug's age. If she was a kid before California gained independence, then she had to be at least my father's age. But even staring closely through her badly applied makeup, she didn't look more than 10 years older than me.

"I thought you'd have more questions," the slug commented after an awkward silence. Her voice had changed now that she was just a passenger. Now it was low and musical. She was calmer, more assured, as if now that she was close to home, she wasn't trying to prove anything.

"So you grew up here?" I asked to fill the silence. I had decided that there was no point in asking her anything useful, because she wasn't going to tell me.

"Yeah. My folks had a run-down place about ten miles from here. My dad called it a ranch, but the only animals we had were a few half-wild cats and a nasty pit bull we kept on a chain. When he was sober, my dad used to take me hunting in these hills. Whatever we shot, my mom and sister would cook it for dinner."

That was an interesting piece of info, and I wasn't sure if she let it slip on purpose or if she was simply lost in nostalgia.

The car braked so suddenly I almost slid off my seat, and the spook driver leaned on the horn. I stretched to look through the windshield and saw two large bears standing in the road. They roared at us, then got back on all fours and shambled into the brush.

"I thought the Republic was pretty heavily populated," Gina fished for more useful information.

"Not so much here," the pig explained before the slug could stop him. "The cities are all to the south  and on the other side of the last set of hills. Out here it's just a small town every here and there."

The slug's kick probably was supposed to be surreptitious, but the pig howled.

"Once we're over this last set of hills, we'll be where we're going," the slug said with a sudden sharpness. "You'll see what you need to see when we get there."

I thought about pestering her with questions just to be annoying, but there really was no point to it. The rest of the ride was spent in a nervous silence.   

The gate, like the rest of the fence, was chain link topped by a coil of razor wire. Six spooks were stationed at the gate, and they were sliding it open before our car was close. The forest for ten yards on the outside of the fence had been cut down, and the space was covered with ragged stumps.

I couldn't see Long's lair from the gate. Since there were no trees or bushes, or even much grass, and because the land was flat, I should have easily seen any building. I thought of asking, but I didn't want to expose my worry. Gina gave me a mental nudge; and when I looked where she was thinking, I could just make out a low concrete slab, almost the color of the yellow mud that covered the compound.

The car pulled onto a concrete drive that curled around the slab. As we got closer, I could see that it actually was a three-story building plopped in the center of a large, rectangular hole. The bottom of the hole was covered with muddy water, and the drive turned into a bridge that ended at two large metal doors painted the same color as the surrounding mud. There was a series of narrow rectangular openings near the top of the structure, like windows without glass. The whole gave the impression of a parking garage that had sunk into the earth.

The metal doors opened before we reached them, and we pulled into a large garage with a small assortment of vehicles. There was another car like ours, a squat vehicle with treads that looked like a narrow tank without the cannon, and three battered, rusted pickup trucks. As we got out of our car, the slug warned, "We're going to see the master now. Behave yourselves or you'll be suddenly dead."

We followed the slug and pig through a metal door at the far end of the garage and down a concrete corridor with doors on one side and those open rectangles on the other. Near the end of the corridor were metal and concrete steps leading down, 13 steps then a landing, another 13 steps and a landing with a door. Six more doors down and I calculated that we were four stories underground.

The next corridor was much fancier. It was paneled with a highly polished yellow wood with ornate sconces on the walls. The floor was covered by a tough yellow and red carpet with an intricate design, and the ceiling was covered in carved squares painted a soft cream. After about 30 feet, it opened into a wide reception area even fancier than the hall. There were huge salt-water aquariums against the walls, each filled with a variety of brightly colored fish. Large sofas and chairs upholstered in tucked yellow leather were placed around low glass-topped tables. A pair of heavy wood doors inlaid with brass figures was centered in the far wall, and the slug led us to those, with the pig behind us.

The slug opened one of the doors and waved us in without saying a word, then shut the door behind us. There were more aquariums inside that room, which was more of a large study than an office. The walls were lined with shelves, most filled with books but others holding delicate Chinese statues and even more delicate bowls and plates. At the far end of the room was an elaborate desk with carved mermaids on the corners and a banker's lamp with a green shade in the center. Behind the desk was a huge aquarium that held what looked to be two small spotted sharks swirling gracefully near the white gravel bottom. And standing on a stool with his back to us, reaching into the shark tank with a long-handled net, was Yin Long.

He acted as if he hadn't heard us come in, or as if he couldn't care less. So I said the first thing that came to mind to break the silence.

"Hi, Barney. It's been a while."