“You know that thing?” Olena asked.
“Yes.”
“Then he’s a joker.”
“He was. But he wasn’t like this before. He’s changed.”
The figure turned and looked over his shoulder, his back twisting at an unnatural angle. His face was a distorted version of what it had been: his nose beak-like, his eyes tiny and deepset. He locked on Marcus. Recognition. And then he was clambering up the riverbank and running toward them. His large feet smacked the pavement. He ran teetering, legs seeming close to buckling with each stride, but he came on fast. His hands raked his chest, cupping up gallons of the potent muck that splashed away as he ran. He gabbled unintelligibly and looked like an excited, tottering child. For a moment Marcus thought it was boyish excitement that twisted his features. But as he got closer he knew it couldn’t be that.
Olena’s gun popped severals times in mechanical procession. Vaporlock flinched at each impact. But bullets weren’t going to stop him. His expression went ugly. He came on even faster. Marcus surged forward, his tail a weaving curl of straining muscle. He rose up, leaned forward, and slammed into the joker’s abdomen with all the force he had. His JV football coach would’ve been proud. He felt the air go out of him as the joker’s body caved around his shoulder. Then they were down in a writhing mass of long limbs and scales and Vaporub. Marcus punched and clawed at him, but his punches slipped away and he couldn’t keep hold of him. The smell was so overpowering that he tried not to breathe.
He broke free. He twisted away and circled with serpentine grace and power. Vaporlock rose awkwardly to his feet. Marcus tagged him with his tongue. It was a solid shot, hitting him at the protrusion of his Adam’s apple. The joker grasped at his neck. His face turned a shade of blue. But it was the impact that hurt him; not the poison. To the fists, then. Marcus swung for his head. Vaporlock dodged. It was an awkward dodge, more like a stumble than a planned move, but it worked. By the time Marcus had his torso back above his coils, Vaporlock was throwing handfuls of muck at him. Marcus knew what would happen if any of them hit his face full end. End of story. He writhed like a mad dancer, his head bobbing and weaving. He kept his face clear of all but a few droplets, but his torso took hits. His tail.
The adrenaline was scorching through him with such intensity that it took him a moment to notice the way his flesh stung where the muck stuck to it. Not only was it overpoweringly pungent, it burned like acid. He tried to wipe it away. It only spread all the more. He was smoking, the vapor clouding his vision and making him cough. He knew he had to end this fast, by whatever means necessary.
He surged in, his tail whipping up in a sidewinder motion. He feinted a punch. When Vaporlock pulled back, he swiped his legs out from under him with his tail. The joker’s big feet went up into the air as he came down hard on his back. Marcus coiled around him, being careful to keep his torso and face as far away as possible. And then he squeezed with every muscle in his tail. Vaporlock struggled. He gurgled and wrenched his head around. The serpent in Marcus loved the feel of it. A body struggling, trapped within the coiled vise of his muscles. He squeezed, hoping to feel bone crack and organs burst. He squeezed.
The joker wasn’t an easy kill, though. As moments passed, the heat on Marcus’s scales increased. He could smell them burning. Bitter smoke stung his eyes. He had Vaporlock in the death grip, but the touch of him was eating through his scales. It grew more and more painful frighteningly fast. Suffocation was going to take too long. Marcus writhed into a different position without loosening his grip. He grabbed for Vaporlock’s head. It was hard to get a grip on it as he twisted and fought, teeth gnashing. When he finally had him with a white-knuckled grip on both his ears, Marcus began smashing his face on the pavement. He cried out in pain and desperation and fury. Smashing. Smashing. Smashing until the man’s face caved in, skull broken and oozing new liquids. Disgusted, Marcus released him and squirmed away from his touch.
Olena ran toward him, but pulled up short. “Marcus, you’re burning!”
His scales sizzled and smoked. Some of them began to fall away, revealing the naked, blistering skin underneath. Marcus cast around for something to help him. He went over the railing of the bridge in an arch, hitting the river as he twisted onto his back. For a moment he squirmed in the water, bumping boulders as the current flushed him under the bridge. The touch of the water was beautifully cooling. He rubbed at his scorched flesh, hard, feeling it flake away and leave the raw skin underneath. He was out of the river as quickly as he could, driving himself through the pain and back to Olena. She had already attracted the attention of a naked, aroused man who was lumbering toward her on legs that buckled and hyperextended, barely seeming to keep him upright. The only thing steady about him was his erection, which directed him unerringly toward Olena. She didn’t even see him, so intent was she on Marcus.
Marcus swept around her and punched the guy, sending him spinning. He grabbed Olena’s hand. Holding it tight, he turned and found the mountain they’d sighted on before. “There’s our mountain,” he said. “Come on.”
“That’s her?” Wally asked, a shocked expression creasing his metallic face. “I mean, you told me about how you found her, but, but I never thought…”
“I was hoping you might know someone,” Michelle said with a thread of panic in her voice. “Because of Ghost.”
Wally shook his head. “I don’t think the doctor I used would help. She’s a psychologist who deals with joker kids and trauma. But she’d have to talk to Adesina. And I don’t see how she could.”
They went into the living room. Joey was watching the TV with the sound turned down low. The same film of Talas was playing, but now there were drone photographs of the city. These showed a thick cloud almost completely obscuring the buildings below. And then a banner saying “Breaking Footage” appeared below shaky video of people running out of the fog. Most of them looked terrified, but some, well, Michelle knew what jokers looked like. Yet another PPA situation, she thought. And more people will suffer. She tried hard not to care, but she didn’t succeed.
The scene cut to a man dressed in military garb standing in front of a group of soldiers. Even with the sound off, Michelle could tell he was doing a PR spin on the situation.
And that was where they wanted her to go. Well, whatever was happening, Babel and Lohengrin could handle it without her. But despite everything going on with Adesina, she couldn’t just ignore that something wrong was happening in Talas. Something messy and bad.
“Got any ideas how to help the niblet, Wally?” Joey asked, snapping Michelle back.
Wally shook his head and eased his weight onto the sofa. It gave a groan as he sat. He looked at the TV and said, “Have you been watching this? It’s very strange.”
Michelle glanced back as the camera panned across a broad swath of land and came to rest on the city in the distance. The puke-green miasma was obscuring much of the city now.
Michelle’s phone rang. She looked at it and saw Babel’s name on the screen. Shit, she thought. For a moment, she considered letting it go to voice mail, but she picked up.
“Michelle here,” she said.
There was a brief pause, then Barbara began talking. “Have you been watching the news?” she asked.
“Sort of,” Michelle replied. “I have bigger things on my plate. As you know.”
“It’s not bigger than this,” Barbara snapped. “I’m not sure exactly what’s happening—that’s why we need you there—but whatever it is, it can’t be good.”
A bubble began forming in Michelle’s free hand. It quivered there with a promise of destruction or beauty. She’d been Johnny-on-the-spot for the Committee since joining. It was only when she had adopted Adesina that she’d backed off some of her duties. She popped the bubble, absorbing its energy.
“I can’t go. I told you yesterday.”
“Michelle, don’t make me beg.” There was a thread of real anxiety in her voice.
“Jesus,”
Michelle replied with exasperation. She rubbed her forehead with her index finger. “I’m not pulling some power play here. I just can’t leave. I’m not sure how much clearer I can make this.” And then she disconnected the call.
Enough was enough.
“They really on you?” Wally asked. The sofa gave a little groan as he shifted his weight.
“That place,” she said, pointing at the TV. “They want me to go there. To Talas. Help with some mission, as usual.”
Joey looked at the TV. “Looks like some weird shit is going down,” she said. And Michelle was surprised that she wore a concerned expression on her face. Normally, big world events didn’t interest Joey much. “Whatever it is, some asshole is behind it. Might even be some wild card thing.” Her mouth twisted into an angry line.
“I hope not,” Wally said. He looked at the TV, and Michelle could see he was getting more upset. They’d all three been in the PPA together—and it had ended especially badly for Wally. Joey had almost died—as had Michelle. But it was losing Jerusha that had marked him. After Gardener’s death Wally was never the same.
And then Michelle flashed on the moment that Mummy—a child ace whose power allowed her to suck the water from her victim’s body—had latched on to her arm. Michelle had felt herself desiccating with every moment. First, her mouth had gone dry. Then her arms had withered. Then her skin had tightened on her body. She had warned Mummy to stop. Warned her that only one of them would be walking away. And still the girl had kept her hand clamped around Michelle’s wrist.
Then Michelle had killed Mummy.
Killed a child whose only crime was being injected with the wild card virus. But as Michelle had looked into Mummy’s eyes and told her to stop, she’d seen nothing there. Nothing human anymore. Either the wild card virus had done it, or the training from the PPA had. It didn’t matter now, though, because Michelle had to live with the fact she’d killed a child.
We make terrible choices, Michelle thought. Terrible choices when we use our powers.
“You okay, Michelle?” Wally asked, pulling her back to the present.
Michelle blinked and gave a little start. “Yeah,” she said, rubbing her arm absentmindedly. “Yeah, just fine.”
The first portal pair Mollie ever created was just about the size of a baseball. Which in retrospect wasn’t all that surprising, given that her card turned on a late spring evening like so many others at the Steunenberg farm: with the boys doing some batting practice behind the barn and deliberately aiming for her head. After that it took a while before she felt confident enough to make a portal large enough to step through. So much of her early practice had involved going into town the old-fashioned way, in Mom’s minivan, and trying to shoplift or swipe cash from open registers. Sometimes one or two of the boys came along to serve as distractions. But back in those very early days Mollie lacked the nerve to be quick and decisive while the boys lacked subtlety (which they still did, and always would). So Mollie Steunenberg’s ace became a notorious source of aggravation (and no small amount of amusement) for Coeur d’Alene’s finest.
Which might be why, in the aftermath of the chaos that erupted when Mollie folded space between the barn and Kootenai Emergency Health Center in downtown CdA, the cop on duty at the hospital didn’t believe a single thing she said. It wasn’t the best lying she’d ever done. In fact, it was pretty much the worst. Mollie was exhausted as hell, still recovering from her rage-fugue, and so traumatized by what she’d seen and done in the barn she could barely stand much less spin a tale. But the cop started pelting her with questions even while a parade of stretchers went squeak-squeak-squeaking through the hole in space, trailing hay, manure, and shouted medical jargon.
She vaguely recognized the cop from her early days trying to swipe caramel bars and petty cash from the Walgreens. He touched her gently on the shoulder and pulled her aside to make way for the medics.
“Okay. Can you tell me what happened?”
(On the other side of the portal, the first EMT on the scene gasped even as she rushed to stabilize the injured. “Jesus. What the fuck happened here?”)
Mollie cleared her throat. It hurt like somebody had tried to cut her head off with a shoelace.
She spoke with a rasp. “Well, see, we—”
The cop bent forward, staring at her neck. She caught her own reflection in a windowpane; she had vicious purple wheals around her throat. She’d have to hide them under a scarf until they healed.
“Good God. Who did that to you?”
“What?” she rasped. “No, no, this was an accident—”
The welts from the blows she’d taken to the head were easily hidden under her hair; thank God Dad hadn’t managed to hit her in the face or blacken her eyes.
(“We have two Caucasian males, ages unidentifiable, extreme facial and cranial trauma!” First came the stretchers with Jim and Troy, who had beaten each other’s faces into unrecognizable pulp. Mollie wondered if the EMTs noticed the bloody crowbars, or the teeth scattered across the barn floor like hailstones. Ages unidentifiable. Mollie coughed wetly and tasted warm vomit.)
The cop said, “What kind of accident?”
“Um, we were working on some, uh…” She shook her head, but nothing could clear her muddled thoughts. “See, our dad got some hydraulic equipment at auction a few years ago. From an estate sale, back when Mr. Geitzen died of that heart attack and his wife gave up and sold their land to Monsanto. His second wife, I think. Dad figured—”
The cop gestured at her neck and the barn on the other side of the portal.
Oh, shit, she realized. If he looks he’s going to see the slot machines. She inched back, around the side of the hole in space, so that if he stood near to question her he wouldn’t be able to see through the portal. But what the hell was she going to do about the EMTs? Just hope they were too busy saving lives to notice a pile of stolen casino equipment? Shit, shit, shit.
“Okay. So this was a machinery accident?”
“Yeah. Uh, yeah. The machinery. It was hydraulic, see.”
(“—male with multiple deep abdominal punctures!” That was Brent’s stretcher. Mollie shouted at the scrum of nurses and doctors sprinting past. “He got a dirty pitchfork in the gut! He could have tetanus!”)
“Pitchfork?” The cop squinted at Brent’s stretcher, already receding down the corridor, then frowned at her. “I thought you said something about machinery?”
“Oh, yeah, it was. Both, I mean. See, the hydraulic line, it, um, there was a really big pressure surge and when it blew it sent a pitchfork, um, across the barn.”
(“—multiple compound fractures to the arm, possible dislocated shoulder—” Mick screamed like the madmen of Talas every time his stretcher hit a bump. His shattered arm had more kinks in it than a carpenter’s rule.)
The cop blinked. “Jesus. What happened to him?”
“Oh. Uh, Mick was standing too close and when the compressor came apart it tossed him higher than the hay loft. He came down really hard. People think dirt floors are soft, but they’re not, you know, not when they’re hard-packed by people and cows and equipment coming and going all the time.”
“Sure.”
(“—White male, early fifties, multiple deep punctures to the abdomen, massive internal bleeding—”
“That’s my dad,” she shouted. “Check him for tetanus, too!”)
“Another pitchfork injury?” The cop cocked his head a little bit, squinting at her as though trying to read fine print tattooed under her eyes.
“Yes. I mean, no. I mean, yes, but it wasn’t another pitchfork. It was the, uh, the same one.”
“The same pitchfork got your brother and your dad in the gut?”
“Yeah. The tines went right through Brent and got Dad, too.” At least that was mostly true. The cop grunted and shifted his pose, clearly a little squicked out by the mental image of a dirty, rusty, manure-flecked pitchfork going straight through somebody’s stomach and poking out his back— r />
Mollie doubled over. Panted. Fought to swallow down the gorge before it splattered all over her shoes.
At least some of the sympathy had returned to the cop’s gaze when she levered herself upright again. But it winked out like a snuffed candle when, just before Dad’s medical scrum turned the corner, an ER nurse shouted plain as fucking day: “—multiple bite wounds and a severed ear!”
The puke surged up her throat so violently it actually jetted from her nostrils as well as her mouth. It splattered across a row of chairs in the clinic entryway and the backsplash stippled the cop, whose quick reflexes had saved him from the worst of it.
Kneeling on all fours on the hospital floor, Mollie couldn’t remember if she was the one to have bitten Dad’s ear off, and if so, if she had swallowed it. Watching the last streamers of puke and spittle trailing from her lips, she wondered if they’d find Dad’s ear in the contents of her stomach. The thought made her stomach convulse again; she tasted bile. How would they ever be able to look at Dad and his lopsided head without remembering how they’d temporarily become mindless eaters of their own kin?
An orderly put Mollie in a wheelchair, wiped her face, and wheeled her out of the way while others started the tricky task of disinfecting the whole damn waiting room. The cop knelt beside her chair. He ran a hand through his hair. “Did I just hear something about bite marks?”
Three gold bracelets and a Krugerrand had gotten them past the guard at a back gate. They were in an area with hangars and warehouses and relatively far from the activity going on closer to the terminal and the main runways. Franny hoped they would be overlooked.
He also had a feeling chartering a plane to get them back to the States was going to cost a hell of a lot more than the baubles he’d traded. That’s why he’d parked next to a hangar and was making a careful inspection of the contents of the satchel. In addition to the stack of passports and the bundle of cassette tapes there was a heavy emerald and gold necklace, a diamond and pearl choker—he found himself wondering how Abby would look in the choker and nothing else—a tangle of diamond tennis bracelets. There were rings with multi-carat gemstones. A velvet pouch held an array of loose gems. They threw prismatic fire in the sunlight.