"It's that joker!" Harvest said.
"Quasiman," Ray confirmed.
"Get him!"
"All right, cool down. It doesn't look like he's going anywhere." Ray turned to Quasiman, who was staring sightlessly past the both of them. There was a look of real horror on his face. Ray put his hands on Quasiman's shoulders and looked into his eyes. "What is it? What's the matter?"
Quasiman roused himself from his stupor. He focused slowly on Ray's face. "The mushroom flower," he said distinctly, "blooms where it's sunny."
Ray glanced at Harvest and shrugged. "Sure. Why don't you come with me and we'll talk about it?"
He tried to get Quasiman to fall into step, but the joker was going nowhere. He stood, rooted to the spot, a line of drool dribbling unnoticed on his chin. His eyes suddenly narrowed and his brow furrowed in concentration. It was as if he had to tell Ray something of great importance, but he couldn't force it out. "Duh - don't drink the wine," he finished in a rush.
"Don't drink the wine?" Ray asked, puzzled.
Quasiman nodded, his head bobbing up and down like a puppet's on a string. And then he vanished, popping away to wherever it was that he went to when he popped away. Ray staggered, finally catching his balance as Harvest looked on in disgust.
"You had him," she said, "and you let him get away."
"Well, how the hell was I supposed to stop him?"
She shook her head in disgust. "Never mind. Let's go."
Ray followed her up the stairs. "Don't drink the wine," he said, half to himself. "I never drink wine. I hate the stuff."
♥ ♦ ♣ ♠
"Miss Harris?" The voice was diffident, and there was a shy tapping at the locked door.
"Come in," Zoe said, which was the most ridiculous response she could imagine anyone making who was locked in a cell. The words just slipped out. Had it been three hours, four, since they locked her in here?
The door opened. A girl beckoned to her, a joker girl with a pearly unicorn horn in the center of her forehead. The girl wore Fist black and carried an Uzi. "Would you come with me, please?"
Please, and a gesture with the Uzi. Zoe blinked at the light in the corridor and went where the girl pointed.
To a thick metal door, polished and gleaming amber in the reflected light of eye-saver fixtures. A joker with a snail's foot came through it. That guy, yeah, the one from the souk. Faintly, she heard vendors calling out their wares, the morning bustle of the waking city.
Snailfoot looked up and smiled. Unmasked, he was handsome in a rather Peter O'Toolish fashion. "We meet again," he said.
Beside Zoe, a black robe rustled. She could have sworn there was no one else in the corridor.
"Zoe Harris," a tall joker said. His baritone voice was slightly muffled behind the black beast mask that covered his face. "You wanted to see the Black Dog. You're seeing him." He offered his arm and Zoe reached out for it, compelled by the man's presence, the aura of power that surrounded him. His forearm was muscular and very warm. "Come with me. Snailfoot, tell Balthazar to get his ass in here."
Snailfoot nodded and slithered away. The Black Dog opened the metal door. Stone steps lighted in amber led down to a landing and continued down into gods-knew-what.
"You've got to learn to control that ace of yours. All you did with that business at the gate was you let a lot of jokers know you've got powers," the Black Dog said. "You can't afford to panic."
Brooklyn? There was some Brooklyn in his voice, under the European sounds that Israelis used when they spoke English.
"Guns make me just a little tense," Zoe said.
"You'll get over it."
He started down the stairs, and Zoe found she was following him. She didn't want to go down those stairs. The guy was hypnotic, and scary as hell. She had expected to be brushed aside, dismissed, or challenged, and it seemed she was being welcomed. Something was a little skewed here.
"Hurry" The Black Dog's cloak swirled out behind him. Darth Vader, Zoe thought, and this is the Death Star. This should be funny, and it isn't. Someone was behind her on the steps. Needles. He shook his head at her, pleading for her silence.
"Go on, Zoe," Needles whispered.
The bottom of the stairway led into a rough stone corridor. The air was fresh and cool. Zoe heard a faint whine of ventilator fans.
"Why am I here? Why did your goons lock me up?"
"I let them ventilate some of their anger. You hurt one of our people. Remember?"
"I was only trying to communicate with you. They played rough."
"Communicate? What important communication did you have for the Twisted Fists?"
Her concern sounded so foolish, but she had to say it anyway. "I don't like what you're teaching my kids." He wouldn't listen to her. Why should he? "I'm royally pissed about the way you're using them."
"Are you?" the Black Dog asked. "They're getting the best training in Jerusalem."
"Training for murder?" Zoe asked "That's supposed to be good?"
"Training for survival," he said. "It's hard to educate corpses."
"They will become inhuman! Monsters!"
She hurried to stay behind him in the narrow space.
"They aren't human now, and 'monster' isn't the worst thing I've heard them called." He sounded amused.
"Please, Zoe, don't," Needles whispered behind her.
"Is life as a murderer worth living?" Zoe asked.
The procession traced its way down a slanted passage cut into rock.
"Is it, Zoe?"
No. No, her knowledge screamed at her. It's no life at all. Zoe remembered the spasms of the skinhead she had killed as he shuddered out his life, his arms clutching her father's corpse in an ugly embrace. Dreams, dreams and nightmares, when she dreamed it was her hand on the knife in her father's belly. In her dreams, she killed Bjorn, over and over. At night, she wanted to die, to rid herself of dreams. Every night, she forced herself to live one more day, to stay alive as long as Anne needed her. Anne's death had begun to seem a liberation, because then Zoe could stop living, stop sleeping, stop dreaming. A suicide. Was that the message she would leave the Escorts? Give up, die, your life is shameful?
The tall man with the yellow eyes of a goat came from a side corridor and fell into step beside Needles.
"Balthazar was impressed by your talents at the gate. That's why you're alive. Thank him, someday."
The corridor made a sharp turn and widened enough for two people to walk side by side. The walls were honeycombed with rectangular crypts, some occupied by stone sarcophagi, some, high up in the shadows, filled with reclining, placid skeletons.
"Where are we?" Zoe asked.
The Black Dog walked beside her in the wider space. He was tall, his masked face immobile and inhuman save for the moist gleam of the whites of his eyes, stained amber by the scattered lights in this quiet maze of catacombs.
"Under the City."
They left the graves and entered another stairway that led down. The air temperature dropped. Zoe pulled her cloak tight around her shoulders. Pipes and conduits mazed along the ceiling. Doorways led into dark, vast rooms, full of canisters and angular crates that could have held anything - guns, portable buildings, tractors or tanks. The City hid a city beneath its streets.
"Was I drugged? Are you so afraid of aces that you had that monkey-man put drugs in my tea?"
"Monkey? No. No drugs."
He sounded so puzzled that she believed him. Her sense of taste was still okay. She was just crazy. Great.
Side doors led to offices. The corridor ended in another armored door.
"Needles, come in with us," the Black Dog said.
Balthazar clenched his fist in salute and stayed in the corridor. The Black Dog led Zoe and Needles through a doorway screened with a beaded curtain, into a carpeted room scattered with pillows.