Monsters, he thought, and his skin crawled. "Governor wants to see you," Mustelina said.
Blaise smiled his beautiful smile at the ferretlike joker. "Ah, but I regret, urgent business requires me-" Andiron's handless arms pealed like a bell. "Now," he said.
Blaise's eyes became slits. "I could make you dance a waltz into the river and drown."
"Sure you could," Mustelina agreed easily, "but you won't."
Blaise stood a moment longer, his lips stretching across his teeth so tightly he feared they'd tear. "Someday," he hissed.
Mustelina levered the AK from full auto to safe with two loud clacks. "Someday," she agreed.
Blaise turned to K. C., gripped her by the arms. "Go find Meadows. Get to know him. Find out what he wants." She nodded and slipped away.
He turned to the two Bloat guards, straightened, pulled back his shoulders, and adjusted the fit of his leather jacket. "Well? We burn the daylight."
Mark settled down with his rump propped on a mostly horizontal slab of asphalt, part of a stack of paving chunks piled at the tip of the southern arm of the blocky U that was Ellis Island, next to the mouth of the tiny little harbor. It was a crisp, clear morning. His breath smoked like a dragon's as he tried to get comfortable with his plastic plate of lukewarm beans perched on his knees.
"Hey there."
He started at the voice, looked up furtively, prepared to run. He still wasn't sure he was entitled to eat. The fooddistribution system on the Rox was pretty rough and ready:
Some plundered steam tables out on the sand, where a pair of truly horrible-looking puswad jokers in stained paper hats ladled out crud to queues of shabby, surly residents. Another joker, as big and as ugly as any two of the bunch who'd hassled him yesterday, stood watch with a pair of lean mean kids, not jokers-which meant they probably were jumpersarmed with bats. They scrutinized him when he took his place in line behind somebody with a head like a burn-victim mushroom growing out of a black leather jacket, but didn't challenge. He guessed the drill was if you looked too familiar, they figured you were trying to jump seconds and thumped you accordingly.
For a moment he feared they'd belatedly decided he didn't look familiar enough, but the shadow between him and the sun rising over Manhattan was small. Also familiar.
"Mind if I sit down?" K. C. Strange asked. "No, no. Uh, like, go ahead."
She hunkered down next to him. He tried hard not to notice the contours of her black Spandex pants. This wasn't the time or the place or the person. He was an outsider. Just an old nat.
He proffered his plate. She waved him off. "You like the water?" she asked.
"I never thought the smell of the Hudson would be a relief."
He regretted it immediately. She seemed to be a big Rox booster. But she laughed.
"Well, it isn't your white-bread world here, that's for sure." She glanced down at him. "Sleep okay?"
"Done worse." Right after the trial he'd spent a few weeks on the street, just wandering, sleeping in alleys or the occasional midnight mission, while Pretorius did all he could, which unfortunately wasn't much. That had been in summer. The makeshift dorms of the Rox smelled so bad, the stench was like a weight, and the debris rustled constantly with small unseen things, but they kept the winter wind off. He didn't care that some of the bodies pressed against his were human only by ancestry; they were warm.
"Thought I'd check on you. After all, it isn't everybody out here I can talk about One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest with."
"Not even your, uh, your boyfriend?"
Why did you ask that, you nitwit? the little guy who sat in the peanut gallery of his mind asked. It used to be Flash and the Traveler who sat back there and gave him a hard time. Now it was just a little gray guy, anonymous as everybody else in New York. Mark didn't have a ready answer anyway.
She looked at him from the sides of her eyes. They were gray eyes, pale, almost silver. "He doesn't read much. What brings you to the Rox?"
"Had a little… run-in with the law."
It was funny. Here he'd been a member of the counterculture most of his adult life, even when the original countercultural heavies were all joining brokerage firms or flogging diet plans and self-help seminars on paid-programming TV shows. And now that he was at last genuinely, authentically underground, it embarrassed the hell out of him. Also, he understood in an inchoate sort of way that it wasn't exactly survival-positive to trot out his personal problems in front of strangers. It's 1990, and, as Gilbert Shelton used to say, government spies are everywhere.
She laughed. "Come on. It had to be more than that." He stuck out his lower lip, mulish, and she laughed louder.
"Give me a break. We don't have informers here, even if President George is coming to town to encourage us all to turn in our neighbors. Take a look over there."
She pointed with her chin. A shape was just breaking water out in the miniature harbor, streaming water thousandcolored like an oil slick: a translucent glabrosity, a Portuguese man-o'-war the size of Godzilla's piles. "That's Charon. Making a late run; he usually doesn't like to surface by daylight. He's how you got here, right?"
"Uh, yeah."
He didn't know it-he-was called Charon. All he knew was what the joker who looked like a clump of seaweed in an Orioles cap and Coors Light jacket and oozed into the record store to warn him the DEA were on their way had told him: If he thought he might need the sanctuary of the Rox, he ought to blow what roll he carried on a bag of groceries at some late-night bodega, go down to the river, fire up a flashlight, and think real hard about how bad he wanted to go there. It smacked to Mark of clicking his tiny heels together and chanting "There's No Place Like Home," three times, but the drug-war dogs were on his track, and if they took him, he'd never get Sprout free, and so he did what he was told.
And the damnedest thing of all, it worked.
"He's how most people get here. Now look real close. What do you see inside him?"
Mark squinted into the spindrift sun. From this perspective, Charon looked like a grotesque exaggerated glass Oliver Hardy-shaped Christmas-tree ornament; you could just see a hint of face, up near the top. With the late-dawn light shining through his body, you could see-
"Nothing."
"Good answer. But think about this. Charon never makes dry runs."
He felt the greasy congealed beans he'd choked down start becoming buoyant. "But-"
"Yeah. And when you come to the wall-Bloat's Wall that surrounds this place-you start to feel Big Fear. And then you better want to get here real bad. Because if you don't, you stick-and Charon never stops, either. So the wall holds you in place, and he just sort of oozes out from around you and leaves you on the bottom. Osmosis, like."
Mark bit his lip and put his plate down on the damp sand. But he took care not to spill it; his appetite might come back in a bit. He'd learned to be practical that way these last few months.
K.C. shaded her face with her hand and looked at him. She was quite pretty, once you got past the crown-of-thorns hair.
"So what're you really doing on the Rox? You're not just on the run for knocking over a 7-11."
"It's my little girl. My daughter. I need to get her back."
"She's on the Rox? Joker or jumper, let me tell you, dude, if she's here, you don't really want to see her. Capisc'?" "No. It isn't that. She's in a juvenile detention center. I don't know which one. I need to find her and get her out." Something passed behind her ice-fleck eyes. Then her face hardened. "A middle-class wimp who's spun out on the ice past thirty-something, run a jailbreak? Give me a break. You wouldn't know the first thing about it."
"Hey, I can do it!" he exclaimed, outraged. "I can do something, anyway," he mumbled, coming all over uncertain. "Yeah. Like what?" Her smile taunted him.
"Uhh-" His ears got hot. Aware he'd said too much, he turned quickly away.