Blindly, he reached for her. Her eyes glowed in shadowed sockets, and columns of flame pulsed in her throat. "You'll keep me safe, won't you?" she said.
He felt masks sliding away one by one. He felt less safe than he had in years.
"I'll do what I can," he said.
Shelley slept like a baby. Shad prowled the two-room suite, trying to work things out in his head. Strange little Miles Davis etudes sang through his thoughts. He kept hoping the situation would define itself, that he'd look out the window and see a human eyeball on the sill outside staring at him; then he would know what needed doing.
No eyeball. No clue.
He kept thinking about that green landscape glowing on the sidewalk. There, maybe, people wouldn't need masks. In the pale predawn Shelley woke with a laugh. She threw up her arms and rolled across the Carlyle's sheets, giggling like a girl. Then she glanced up at Shad, who sat on the edge of the bed. Her eyes narrowed. "What's that on your shoulder?" she said. She reached out, touched the skin. "It's the CBS eye," Shad said.
Her face wrinkled in puzzlement. "You had it done? Why?"
"Scar tissue," Shad said. "Somebody carved it into me when I was little."
Shock rolled across her face.
"I don't want to talk about it," Shad said.
She sat up in bed, put her arms around him. "I can't understand how somebody could-"
"Somebody did. And somebody jumped you and put you in a joker body."
And some people string others up from lampposts. "People do these things," he said.
She rested her cheek on his shoulder. "I can't believe I didn't see those scars before." Her eyes narrowed. "Is that another one around your throat?"
Where the garrote had sawn into him and the tracheotomy had gone into the windpipe. Shad nodded. "The light's at the right angle or something. It happened years ago. It's hardly visible anymore."
She looked at him. "So what do you do with your time? You just live in hotels and carry a lot of cash with you and help people feel safe?"
"What are you going to do?"
She seemed surprised. "What do you mean?"
"I mean, what are you going to do? You've got money, a new body. A credit card that's probably good for a few more hours. So what's your plan?"
She lay back on the sheets. He looked at the dark nipples atop her soft mature breasts, and he couldn't help remembering the breasts of the old Shelley-smaller, firmer, with a dusting of freckles.
"I don't know," she said. "I feel too good to think about it right now. All I know is that I want to be safe again."
"People are going to start looking for Lisa Traeger in a little while, and I don't figure you want to be found."
"No." She leaned forward again, propped her chin on her knee. "I can pay you back your twenty grand. I've got enough with me."
"You don't have to. It wasn't my money anyway."
"You steal it or something?"
"Yes." Looking at her. "That's exactly what I did."
"Anyone get hurt?"
"Lots of anyones."
She frowned at him. "You're not making me feel safe anymore."
He shook his head. "I've never been what you'd call safe, Shelley."
She signed. Carefully her eyes queried his. "I know how to be safe if I have to."
"Yes?"
"I take the jumpers up on their offer. And I do the jump again and again, until I'm rich beyond my wildest dreams of avarice. And then I get jumped into a body more my own age-you know this Traeger body is all of thirty-eight?-and I live happily ever after in the Bahamas or wherever it is that retired jumpers go."
He looked at her. "I think you should quit while you're ahead. You don't want anything more to do with those people."
"I've lost twenty years. This body is going to be wanted by the police. And you say I'm ahead?"
"You're ahead of where you were a week ago. I'd settle for that."
"Twenty years." He saw tears in her eyes. "I've lost damn near twenty years. I don't want to be thirty-eight."
"Shelley." He reached out, took her hand. "Bad things are going to start happening to those people."
"Bad things. Meaning you."
"Me and about two hundred million other people. They can't keep this up. Not all those impersonations. Not people like Tachyon or Nelson Dixon or Constance Loeffler."
"Connie Loeffler?" Shelley sniffled, then shook her head. "She isn't being ridden."
"Then what does she have to do with all this?"
"They did jump her, yes. Put her in a joker body, one of the really disgusting ones, for a few hours. That was all it took." She shrugged. "She was a pretty young woman, okay? A pretty young woman with money, like I used to be. She jumped-heh, sorry-she jumped at the deal they offered. She pays fifty grand a month protection and allows them use of some of her cars and facilities. And she's living in L.A. now, to keep away from them, but that won't keep them away if they want her. The only way to keep safe from these people is to do what they want."
"That's not safe," Shad said. "It's as safe as I'm going to get."
"Listen," Shad said. "I can make you disappear. I can get you new ID, a place to live, whatever it takes…"
"And I put my new money in a trust fund, right? And then someone in the trust department gets jumped, and-"
"It doesn't have to be New York."
"There are more jumpers all the time, right? It's a mutant wild card-like what that carrier spread a few years ago, only slower. In another few years there won't be anyplace safe. The only way to keep safe is to keep on their good side."
A melancholy warning bell tolled slowly in Shad's heart. "I told you once," Shad said. "I told you bad things would start to happen. You didn't listen then."
"What about my missing years? How do I get them back?" Her voice was a wail.
"Think of the years you've got left. Make those the important ones."
"Shit! Shit!" She turned away and beat a pillow with her fist.
He reached for her, tried to stroke her shoulders and back. "You're ahead of the game. You've got lots of options."
"I was young!"
She clutched a pillow to her. Tears spilled from her eyes, and Shad's nerves twisted. "You were a joker," he said. "You're not anymore."
"I want to be safe."
"There isn't anyplace safe. The Rox least of all."
A vision of cool green fields passed before his mind. Shad held her till she stopped trembling. Then she jumped up and went to the bathroom to find some tissues. A few minutes later, she was back, red-faced and red-eyed, and began to pick up her clothing.
"I should think about getting out of here," she said. "I can hide you."
She frowned, considered, shook her head. Stepped into her underpants. "I want to be free," she said. "Free to make up my mind without any pressure."
"Don't hurt people, Shelley."
A little muscle in her cheek jumped. She gave him a resentful look. "The worst that'll happen to them is to end up in Lisa Traeger's body. You seem to think that's a good place to be."
"'That's not exactly what I said."
Shad watched her dress and felt hope trickling out of him. He reached for his own clothes.
Leave her alone. Let her make up her own mind. He couldn't tell her what to do-he'd made too many wrong decisions himself to tell anyone else how to behave-but he knew that decisions had consequences, that karma worked on that level if no other, that nothing good could come out of any of this.
But he couldn't really think of any way to make it better any other way, either. What had happened to Shelley was like what happened to people in prison. You got fucked up. It didn't matter if you were in for an unpaid traffic fine and were the best prisoner in the world, because prison fucked you over anyway. What you learned there was only good for survival in prison, and what you learned was only how to manipulate people and keep everyone at a certain distance and play the game to get what you want and not care about anyone else. And you couldn't help it, because that was what you had to do to survive the slams. And when those reflexes carried over to the outside, bad things would happen.