"We're all secure here," K.C. Strange said. "Bloat's people are keeping the gawkers away."
Mark swallowed, nodded convulsively. He didn't look up from his work. "Ready in a minute, man. Don't rush me." The metal table was rickety, its washers rattling at every random gust that bulled its way into the fiberboard shack. The light from the alcohol lamp was thin and thready as a dying woman's pulse. Conditions were not ideal. But Mark in his way was an artist, who knew how to work around the limitations of his surroundings and his media. And this was a familiar task, even after so many months he didn't care to count. In the doing of it, he was even able to take a certain shelter: from thought, from demands the world and he laid upon him that he realized he in all likelihood could not fulfill. K. C. sat down and drew her knees under her chin. Her eyes glowed like coins in the lamplight as she watched Mark measure powder into glittering mounds of color.
Something passed behind Mark's eyes. His hand faltered, but none of the precious powder fell from the scoop. Even Bloat had only been able to obtain a fraction of the substances Mark needed. Enough to summon two of his friends for perhaps an hour apiece. Not necessarily the two he would have chosen.
He let his hand rest on the cold thin-gauge tabletop, suddenly uncertain. "I think there's something wrong with Tach," he said.
K. C. shifted her weight with a mouse rustle.
"This isn't like him. He'd never give up the clinic. He's stronger than he was back in the Forties. The clinic made him strong. It gave him something to live for."
"Fucking give it up!" Her voice rang like brass knucks on a steel surgical table. "He's ditched you. He's ditched the jokers and you and every fucking body. Sometimes people just turn their back and walk away from you, capisc'?"
He lowered his head and shut his eyes in pain. Instantly she was by his side, hand on arm. "I'm sorry, babe," she said. "I've gotten some pretty rough licks from life. Made me pretty cynical, okay? I don't have to lay it off on you."
"No," Mark said. "No, it's okay. I still cant believe he's abandoned me. I think something's happened to him."
Her nails dug into his arm. "What are you going to do about it?"
"Nothing." The word fell to the tabletop with scarcely more sound than a drop of sweat. "Not now. I hope he's okay."
"I'll do anything I can to help him-later. But Sprout that's stronger than friendship. I'm sorry."
She ran her hand up to his shoulder. He started to shy away, then relaxed with an audible sigh.
"You got nothin' to apologize for, babe," she said, low in her throat.
He emptied the contents of the scoop into a tiny vial, then stoppered it quickly, as if expecting the orange powder to escape. "Let's go."
K.C. followed him out onto the reeking beach. Mark stood with his feet spread wide in the sand, twisted the plastic cap off and tossed the orange powder down his throat. He sighed explosively, lowered his arm.
Then he burst into flame.
K. C. screamed and threw herself forward. Furnace heat threw her back. She smelled her eyebrows scorching. Reeling back, she saw that Mark was not fighting the flame. He had staggered several steps away from her, but now he seemed to be letting the fire have its way with him. "God, oh God, Mark, what have you done?"
He was charring down to a mummy right before her eyes. She had read that happened when you burned. She never thought it could happen so fast. God, he's already down to my size! The mummy spread its arms.
K.C. screamed. The flames began to die, seeming to be sucked into the burning man. Astonished, she saw a flash of unburned skin, and then a small man in an orange jogging suit was standing there, grinning, while a final few flames chased each other through his shock of red hair.
"So you're the kind of babe Mark's hanging with these days," he said. "Bit less Park Avenue than the last one, but I'm not sure that's not an improvement."
Her first attempt at speech failed. She swallowed and tried again. "Who are you?"
He laughed. "Jumpin' Jack Flash, at your service, dear." He spread his hands and a tiny fireball arced from palm to palm. "It's a gas-gas-gas."
"Then it's true. He really was Cap'n Trips."
The fragment of fire sizzled and died on the upturned palm. Its echo still glimmered in his eyes as he raised them to hers and said, "He still is Cap'n Trips, doll."
He twisted left and right, the locked his hands, held them up over his head and back, stretching.
"Let's do it," he said. An orange glow sprang up in the air around him, without apparent source.
K.C. looked around nervously. "Jesus, do you have to do that? We don't need to advertise the fact that Cap'n Trips is back to the immediate world."
"Yeah, you're right. When you're right, you're right. I don't need the FIX. It's just been so damn long, and I'm used to going in style ... oh, well."
He flexed his knees and leapt into the sky.
Half an hour later, Flash touched down again, flipping a finger at the white foam wake of a harbor patrol boat churning outside the wall a few hundred yards away.
"Officious fucks. Don't even let me have a final flourish. 'Scuse me just a moment, hon. My exits aren't quite as stagy as my entrances." He stepped around the end of the shack.
K.C. stood, brushed wet sand off the taut seat of her black leather pants. "I've seen some scaly shit," she said, "I've done some. But this could take some getting used to."
She heard a strange whump like gasoline lighting off, and then a moan. She ran to find Mark Meadows lying in the fetal position in a depression in the sand, buck naked and turning blue.
She helped him sit up. Inside the shack was an army blanket. She brought it, wrapped it around Mark's shoulders. "Come on," she said. "Let's get inside out of the cold."
K.C. threaded one of Mark's arms around her shoulders, urged him to his feet. He lurched into the shack like a radio mast that had come to life and decided to take a hike. Inside she sat him on a second blanket thrown over a pad of old newspapers.
Mark turned his face toward the wall. His shoulders shook. "You're crying!" She touched his shoulder. He shrugged her off. "Why? What's the matter?"
"I can't do it," he sobbed.
"What? What are you talking about? You're an ace again. You changed. You got to fly. How long has it been, babe?"
"Too-too long. I don't know" He sat up shaking his head. Tears streamed down his wasted cheeks, glinting like melted butter in the yellow lamplight. "I don't think I can handle it."
"What do you mean? You ought to be high as a kite right now. You've won."
"No. You don't understand. They won. I'm not innocent anymore, man. I've lost the purity. Lost the dream."
"It's the drugs. You're just crashing." She put her arm around him. "You'll be okay in a while."
"No!" He tore away, lunged to his feet. "You don't understand. I'm no good any more."
"You'd do anything, right? For her?" He nodded.
"Mark. Listen to me. That's love. That's loyalty. I've seen aces, dude. I know plenty of people who can do weird stuff. Shit, I can chase people out of their own heads and party hearty inside, bust up all the furniture if I want to. But to have that much loyalty to a person, to love her that much-" It was her turn to move away. "Nobody's ever felt that way about me. Nobody."
He slumped to the floor. "Yeah. I let you down too. I let everybody down. And now Sprout shit, man, I can't even help her."
"What?"
"I can't do it any more. It just isn't right. I wanted to be more than an ace. I wanted to be a hero. But that's all just illusion." He hung his head. "At least for me it is."
"What the fuck?" She grabbed him under the arms, hauled him to his feet with a strength she didn't know she had. "Listen to me, you son of a bitch. You don't think you got what it takes to be a hero? Then be a fucking villain."
"The world thinks you're fucked up. The world thinks you're evil. The world thinks it's a good idea to stick your little girl in kid jail where the other girls can use her for a punching bag. Where sooner or later some counselor is going to get the idea how very pretty her blonde little head would look bobbing up and down on his needle dick. Decide that's just the therapy she needs."
"Don't say that!"
"Don't tell me you don't know! It's the only thing that kept you going all these months. What brought you out of the gutter and onto the Rox. It's real, Jack. I can tell you it is. Okay? We are not talking hearsay. This doesn't just happen in Linda Blair movies. I know. I fucking know."
She had backed him into the wall. He slid slowly down. "But what am I gonna do?"
"Welcome to the jungle, babe. You're on the Rox now."
"You're an outlaw. The first thing you do is accept that. The second is, kick some ass."
He stared at his hands. "Yeah. I guess so."
Her leather jacket slumped down beside him. He jumped, looked up at her.
She was skinning her Jane's Addiction T-shirt off over her head. Her breasts were small and conical. The nipples stood up into points.
" I lied," she said, undoing her fly. "There is something else you're going to do first."
He was instantly hard. To his horror, his erection tented up the front of the blanket he had wrapped around him poncho-style. He tried to edge away.
"But, uh, Blaise--" he stammered. "But Bloat-"
"But nothing." She covered his mouth with hers.
There were eight million stories in the naked city. Most of them were about assholes. The Great and Powerful Turtle looked over the monitor screens around the control console of his shell and thought pissed-off thoughts about how there was never anything good on television.
He canted his shell and slid down for a look at the crowds by Madison Square.
"Imagine," he said aloud. "I'm up here looking out for that asshole, George Bush."
The president was in town to confer with the new mayor. A number of the more prominent public aces had volunteered to help ensure there were no incidents, with the grudging acquiescence of police and city officials. It wasn't that they liked Bush. The very idea that anyone might think he did pissed Turtle off no end. But this jumper thing was getting way the hell out of hand. It was more than mere media hype.
Given the country's current mood, anything that happened to Bush was liable to be blamed on aces and the Medellin cartel, a connection George had done so much to establish in the public mind. And if an ace, even a jumper, had anything to do with actually harming the president. ..
It would be easy to call the consequences unthinkable. But they were all too thinkable. They'd make McCarthy look like the Phil Donahue Show. So the Turtle was up here farting around to watch over a man who'd just as soon see him in a concentration camp. Great. Just fucking great.
A disturbance below. A stout black woman, hat askew, sat on the sidewalk. A skinny youth elbowed his way through the tourist throngs clutching her handbag by a strap.
"Don't these assholes ever give it a break?" Turtle asked the air. He punched up the megaphone. "Okay, dickweed, this is the Great and Powerful Turtle. Hold it right there or I'll spoil your whole damn day."
The purse snatcher looked left and right, but not up. "What a weenie," Turtle said, and winced as he felt his amplified words reverberate through his armor plate. Forgot to dump the mike. Great.
He reached down with his teke hand and grabbed the kid by the ankle, swooping him into the air. While the crowd gawked and pointed- "git a picture o' that, Martha, or the folks'll never believe us back in Peoria"-he carried the kid, the top of his head ten feet off the pavement, back to where the stout black woman was picking herself up. He shook the kid up and down until he let go of the handbag. "Oh, thank you, Mr. Turtle," the woman called. "God bless you."
"Yeah, lady, anytime." He stuffed the kid in a dumpster and flew off.
"George fucking Bush," he said. "Jesus." Fortunately he'd turned the microphone off.
"This is never gonna work," Mark Meadows said, feeling his head again. The Grecian Formula he'd doused his head with to cover the punk racing stripes had reacted funny with some of the dye, and now it felt as if he'd been moussing with old paint.
Up front in the driver's seat, Durg impassively kept his eyes on the road and his hands upon the wheel, just like the old song. His head looked odd sprouting from his collar and broad, suit-coated shoulders, like some narrow vegetable.
Frowning, K.C. scrunched herself farther down next to Mark. "Quit fussing, will you? Jesus."
Mark plucked at his tan corduroy sport coat and improbably wide maroon tie, and ran his fingers under the harness of his shoulder holster. There was nothing in the shoulder holster; Mark had a terror of guns, and like a good modern liberal knew for a fact that if he carried one, it would instantly take possession of his mind and cause him to rush into a subway and start shooting black teenagers.
But K.C. insisted he at least wear the holster so he'd have the appropriate bulge under his left arm.
"I'm never gonna pass for a cop. I look like a total geek."
"You don't know much about cops, do you? We should have got you a bad hairpiece too. And maybe strapped a pillow to your stomach so you'd look like you'd put in your time on a Dunkin Donuts stool. Besides" she turned and stretched quickly to kiss his cheek-"you are kind of a geek, babe. Lucky for you I got kinky tastes."
He shuddered. " I don't know what I think I'm doing. I got no right to involve you and Durg in this."
K.C. fell back against the seat, bounced briefly. "You don't have a gun, sugar, so you couldn't hold one to my head."
" I live to serve," Durg said.
Mark's loosely strung-together collection of features twitched in irritation.
"That's just a cliche, man. Your life is your own."
"Perhaps it is a cliche among your kind. To the Morakh, it is biological fact.
For me, a master is like food-I can go without, but only for a short period of time. Then I must weaken and die."
"Things work different on our world, man."
"My genes are not of this world. They make me what I am."
"You must hate what they've done to you," K.C. said. "The people who created you."
He glanced over the butte of his shoulder. The look in the lilac eyes was amusement. It hit her like a blow. "What they have done to me, lady, is give me life. And strength, and agility, and skill. They have given me perfection. Among your kind I am an ace. Among Takisians I am an object of awe, even terror. Are these things not glorious? All they ask of me in return is that I do what I am uniquely equipped to do. I see no disparity."
"A man who knows what he wants." K. C. leaned forward and breathed in Mark's ear. "I think I love him."
She nipped Mark's earlobe. He blushed furiously. She giggled.
Durg cleared his throat. "We approach our objective."
"All right." K. C. subsided in her seat. "I'm back to being a bad little prisoner girl now. Kind of like a skinny, mean Michelle Pfeiffer."
Her short neutral-colored hair had been washed and combed out wet into bangs.
She wore a scuffed leather jacket over tight black pants and a white T-shirt with three defiant transverse slashes across the belly. No spikes; when they committed you to the juvie justice system, they relieved you of props like that.
She did look like a skinny, mean Michelle Pfeiffer.