To Max, the seven-story home of Terminal City Artworks was a building with memories. It had been in the coffee shop on the first floor of this building that she and Detective Ramon Clemente began to finally share the truth with each other — in the critical Kelpy matter — and to Max the restaurant represented the beginning of a shared trust, even friendship, between transgenic and ordinary.
It had been necessary, of course, to open their arts-and-crafts mall outside the boundaries of Terminal City — the toxic industrial area where they had squatted was inhabitable only by the genetically altered transgenics themselves. That Terminal City loomed across the way — a vast steel and concrete ghost town haunted by transgenic specters, a shadow of capitalism run amok, free enterprise at its worst — provided yet another irony, a sweet one, as the counterculture mall flourished, a blossoming of free enterprise at its best.
The nearby presence of Terminal City also provided an air of mystery and celebrity that attracted ordinaries to the “exotic” mall. Sketchy had hyped the mall in the New World Weekly, and the rest of the media had quickly latched on.
Max liked the fact that the transgenics now owned the building — Logan Cale had loaned them the money, and was well on the way to getting paid back — and that first-floor restaurant had been reopened. Gem — the X5 who gave birth during the Jam Pony crisis that ignited the Terminal City siege — worked behind the counter, and two other X5s shared management responsibility (where food service was concerned, it was thought best to keep the more radically mutated transgenics behind the scenes). Most of the Jam Pony messengers stopped there to eat when they were making deliveries in this sector of the city, and with the cops still on duty around the perimeter, there was a constant threat to the doughnut inventory.
The rest of the building had been turned into the shops of an eclectic arts and antiques mall. Those transgenics who didn’t participate artistically worked the antiques booths. With tutoring from the former cat burglar Max — whose street-gang mentor Moody had taught her well, years ago, back in L.A. — the transgenic pupils learned which artifacts were worth saving and which could be ignored, not only within the boundaries of Terminal City, but at flea markets and dump sites throughout the city.
Sitting in the first-floor Terminal City Artworks restaurant, nursing her cup of coffee, Max let slip a tiny smile as she considered how much they had accomplished in so short a time.
“You look like the cat that ate the canary,” Logan Cale said as he walked up to her.
“You know I’m a vegetarian,” she said.
Logan swung into the booth across from Max. “I know you’re trying to be a vegetarian... How’s it working out?”
She smirked. “Let’s just say, next time you’re ready to cook up a batch of that beefy chili of yours... I’m there.”
Tall, with spiky dark blond hair, wire-frame glasses, and bright blue eyes, Logan Cale looked athletically fit. And, in a way, he was — maintaining a rigorous workout schedule in his modern apartment in a seemingly abandoned building just outside Terminal City’s toxic borders.
But beneath his casually stylish, baggy earth-tone trousers, Logan wore an exoskeleton that gave him the ability to walk, a skill stolen from him by the bullet lodged near his spine and regained through the use of the mechanical marvel that he wore all the time now.
Though wealthy, Logan was far from being one of the idle rich. Instead, he used his money to try to fight government and private sector wrongdoing, working in support of the disadvantaged. Thus, he spent nearly every waking moment as the underground cyberjournalist that the city — and now much of the nation — knew as a mysterious voice and an image limited to those piercing blue eyes: Eyes Only. Barely a handful of people knew that Logan led this double life; another handful thought he was an agent of Eyes Only. But Max knew the truth — she had been working with him for several years now.
“I see you’re reading Sketchy’s latest attempt at a Pulitzer,” Logan said.
“Oh yeah. He’s gonna pay.”
“Ooooh... you sound so sultry... enigmatic, even...”
She slapped at him with the tabloid, but she couldn’t hold back the grin. “Coal in your stocking this year — definitely coal.”
“We can always use the fuel,” he said. “You know what I want for Christmas? What I really want?”
“No. But I bet you’re gonna tell me.”
He reached his gloved hand out and took her black leather-gloved hand in his. He squeezed. “That’s what I want,” he said. “Only... I wish it was you and me...”
“With the gloves off?”
He grinned, almost shyly; but what he said was rather bold: “At least.”
Max loved this man.
She loved him, he loved her, and they should have been holding hands right now, really holding hands... Hell, they should have been living happily ever after, starting a long time ago...
“We should be living happily ever after, about now,” she blurted, sharing the thought. “Don’t you think?”
“We could be facing a much bleaker Christmas.”
“Only here we sit,” she said, ignoring his remark, “governing a biotech wasteland turned Jamestown for transgenics.”
“Don’t be so hard on the place. Or yourself. You’ve accomplished so much.”
Calling Terminal City a Jamestown had been harsh, she knew — “Jamestown” referred to the modern-day Hoovervilles that had sprung up post-Pulse and were named after then-President Michael James. Terminal City had become much more than that.
“Yes, we could be facing a much bleaker Christmas,” she finally admitted. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me, Logan — it’s like I have an itch I can’t scratch.”
He gave her a look. “I know the feeling.”
Max damn near blushed.
She waved for Gem to bring a cup of coffee for Logan.
The real reason she and Logan weren’t living happily ever after, of course, was because of a late and very unlamented blonde bitch Max had known only as Renfro. This was back at Manticore HQ — not long before Max had burned the place to the ground — where Renfro planted a designer virus inside Max, a time bomb ticking down to kill Logan.
Basically, Renfro had made Logan allergic to Max’s touch — fatally so.
Christmas always brought thoughts of home, didn’t it? Max reflected. And like it or not, to her and the other transgenics — whether the “normal”-looking X5s or the mutated freaks like Joshua and Dix — Manticore had been home.
The result of genetic experimentation on a scale unheard of in the rest of the world, the Manticore refugees were freaks, and a large segment of the city still wouldn’t let them forget that. After Colonel Donald Lydecker, the surrogate “father” of Manticore, had left, Renfro assumed command. She’d been in charge when Max was captured.
Before Max’s escape, Renfro and her team of conscienceless scientists — the Nazis might have relished having these “mad doctors” on staff — had injected Max with the virus, which was harmful to only one person on earth: Logan Cale. If Max and Logan touched in any way, he would get the virus... or rather, the virus would get him: Logan would die within twenty-four hours.
For this reason, the two were careful not to touch, and both constantly wore gloves, and long pants in the warmest of weather... and even in intimate situations like this one, as they sat in the restaurant in a booth, the couple kept a respectful distance, like a middle-school boy and girl on a first date.
Earlier this year they got a firsthand look at what the virus could do if it went unchecked. During Max’s capture of Kelpy — the chameleon-boy-turned-serial-killer — he had somehow caught the bug. Due to Kelpy’s fixation on Max, his ultimate target had been Logan, his prime goal to “become” Logan and thereby win Max’s affections. When Kelpy started his chameleonlike morphing, turning him into a pseudo-Logan, Max had touched the changeling transgenic, and somehow that had been enough for the virus to be passed on — that is, to be unleashed on Kelpy.