The shell slid above the chain-link fence that surrounded the playground, silent and slow.
"We have something," Barbara said. "We have something special." Her finger traced patterns in the condensation on the outside of her glass. She looked up at him, her blue eyes bold and frank, as if she were challenging him. "He's asked me to marry him, Tom."
"What did you say?" Tom asked her, trying to keep his voice calm and steady.
"I said I'd think about it," Barbara said. "That's why I wanted to get together. I wanted to talk to you first."
Tom signaled for another beer. "It's your decision," he said. "I wish you'd let me meet this guy, but from everything you've told me he sounds pretty good."
"He's divorced," she said.
"So's half the world," Tom said, as his beer arrived. "Everyone but you and me," Barbara, said, smiling. "Yeah." He frowned down at the head of his beer and sighed uncomfortably. "Does the mystery beau have kids?"
"Two. His ex has custody. I've met them, though. They like me."
"Goes without saying," Tom said. "He wants to have more. With me." Tom looked her in the eye. "Do you love him?" Barbara met his gaze calmly. "I guess. Sometimes I'm not so sure these days. Maybe I'm not as romantic as I used to be." She shrugged. "Sometimes I wonder what my life would have been like if things had worked out differently for you and me. We could be celebrating our tenth anniversary."
"Or maybe the ninth anniversary of our acrimonious divorce," Tom said. He reached across the table and took Barbara's hand. "Things haven't turned out so badly, have they? It would never have worked the other way."
"The roads not chosen," she said wistfully. "I've had too many might-have-beens in my life, Tom, too many regrets for things left undone and choices not made. My biological clock is ticking. If I wait any longer, I'll wait forever."
"I just wish you'd known this guy longer," Tom said. "Oh, I've known him a long time," she said, tearing a corner off her cocktail napkin.
Tom was confused. "I thought you said you met him last month at a party."
"Yes. But we knew each other before. In high school." She looked at his face again. "That's why I didn't tell you his name. You would have been upset, and at first I didn't know it would lead anywhere."
Tom didn't have to be told. He and Barbara had been good friends for more than a decade. He looked into the blue depths of her eyes, and he knew. "Steve Bruder," he said numbly.
He hovered above the playground and floated the fallen warriors over the fence, one by one, to the police waiting outside. The two from the basketball court were dead meat. It would take a lot of scrubbing to wash the bloodstains from the cement. The boy draped over the barrel turned out to be a girl. She wimpered in pain when he lifted her with his teke, and from the way she was clutching herself it looked like her guts had been sliced open. He hoped they could do something for her.
All three were nats. The battleground was free of fallen jokers. Either the Demon Princes had really been kicking ass, or their own dead were somewhere else. Or both.
He touched a control on the arm of his chair, and all his floodlights came on, bathing the playground in a white-hot brilliance. "IT'S OVER," he said, and his loudspeakers roared the words into the twilight. Over the years, he'd learned that sheer volume scared the hell out of punks. "COME ON OUT, KID. THIS IS THE TURTLE."
"Go away," a hoarse thin voice screamed back at him from inside the cement barrel. "I'll disintegrate you, you joker fuckface. I got the thing here with me."
All day Tom had been looking for someone to hurt; a monster to pull apart, a killer to pound on, a target for his rage, a sponge to soak up his pain. Now the moment was finally at hand, and he found he had no more anger in him. He was tired. He wanted to go home. Behind his bravado, the boy in the barrel was obviously young and scared. "YOU'RE REAL TOUGH," Tom said. "YOU WANT TO PLAY THE SHELL GAME? GREAT" He concentrated on the barrel to the left of the boy's cover, held it in his mind, squeezed. It collapsed as suddenly as if a wrecking ball had smashed into it, shards and dust flying everywhere when the cement shattered. "NOT IN THAT ONE. GEE." He did the same thing to the barrel on the other side of the kid. "NOT IN THAT ONE
EITHER. GUESS I'LL TRY THE MIDDLE ONE."
The boy exited in such haste that he whacked his head on the overhang of the barrel as he stood up. The impact dazed him momentarily. The bowling ball he'd been clutching with both hands was suddenly whisked from his grip. It shot straight up. The boy screamed obscenities through shiny steelcapped teeth. He made a desperate leap for his weapon, but all he managed to do was brush the tips of his fingers against its underside. Then he came down hard, scraping his hands and knees along the concrete.
By then the cops were already moving in. Tom watched as they surrounded him, yanked him to his feet, and read him his rights. He was nineteen, maybe younger, wearing gang colors and a studded dog collar, shaggy black hair teased out in spikes. They asked him where all the people were, and he snarled curses at them and screamed that he didn't know.
As they hustled him toward the waiting cruisers, Tom opened an armored portal and floated the bowling ball inside his shell for a closer look, shivering in the blast of cold air that came with it. It was a weird thing. Too light to be a bowling ball, he thought when he hefted it; four pounds, maybe five. No holes either. When he ran his hand over it, his fingers tingled, and colors glimmered briefly on its surface, like the rainbows on an oil slick. It made him uneasy. Maybe Tachyon would know what to make of it. He set it aside.
Darkness was falling over the city. Tom pushed his shell higher and higher, until he floated up above even the distant tower of the Empire State Building. He stayed there for a long time, watching the lights go on all across the city, transforming Manhattan into an electric fairyland.
From this high up, on a clear cold night like this, he could even see the lights of Jersey over across the frigid black water. One of those dots was the Top Hat Lounge, he knew.
He shouldn't just float here, he thought. He ought to take the bowling ball to the clinic; that was the next order of business. He didn't move. He'd do it tomorrow, he thought. Tachyon wasn't going anywhere, and neither was the bowling ball. Somehow Tom could not bring himself to face Tachyon tonight. Not tonight of all nights.
In those days, his shell was a lot more primitive. No telephoto lenses, no zooms, no infrared cameras. Just a ring of hot spotlights, so bright that they left Tachyon squinting. But he needed them. It was dark on the roof on the clinic, where the shell had come to rest.
The photographs that Tachyon held up were not the sort that Tom wanted to see in more detail anyway. He sat in darkness, staring into his screens, saying nothing, as Tachyon shuffled through them one by one. They had all been taken in the clinic's maternity ward. One or two of the children had lived long enough to be moved to the nursery.
Finally he found his voice. "Their mothers are jokers," he said, his voice emphatic with false conviction. "Bar-She's normal, I tell you. A nat. She got it when she was two, damn it; it's like it never happened."