"The Outsider. He swallowed his mother. He swallowed her fear and it hurts him. He s confused. He s. lost. He wants it all to end, Javier."
"This is a trick."
"You must do what you came to do. I didn t come to stop you. I only came to say goodbye."
It was Mira. It was a trick, yes. A forgery. But it was still Mira at the same time. He knew it. He just didn t want to believe it. And yet, he was also desperate to believe it.
"I m sorry I didn t save you," he croaked. Tears had started from his eyes.
"You can save me now. Please hurry. Part of him wants to die. Part of him wants to stop hurting. But part of him wants to destroy. Destroy everything. And that part is growing. Soon, that s all of him that will be left."
The outline extended both its short arms, like a child asking for a hug. A lover asking for a parting embrace. But Javier knew, without her voice in his mind even having to tell him, what she really wanted him to do.
He closed the distance between them. As he came, he thumbed the pouch s strap off his shoulder. He got just close enough to pass the pouch of explosives into her waiting hands. He did not want to brush her imitation flesh. He did not want to see her face any more clearly. He backed off quickly once she had folded the pouch against her chest.
"Thank you, Javier. You have to go now. Please hurry."
"I m sorry, Mira," he said, backing off further for the doorway behind him. The night and the rain.
"Don t be sorry. It will be okay now."
He paused at the very threshold again. "Love you." He d never said it before. To a girlfriend, to his mother, to any of the Snarlers.
The one buried light flickered out. The voice flickered out in his head, but he heard in a trailing, ghostly whisper, "I love you, too."
The others had just managed to get Satin inside the car when Javier arrived and let himself into the driver s seat. Patryk, Barbie, and Theo piled in, and the hovercar lifted from the wet pavement.
"Where were you?" Barbie asked.
"Inside. I left my bag in there. We got to get out of here, fast."
She saw the remote gripped in his right hand as he started the vehicle moving with his left.
The remote had an impressive range, its signal not scattered or impeded by the rain or intervening structures. The lime-green car had left the parking lot of Steward Gardens. It had returned to Beaumonde Street and sailed further down that affluent boulevard until they d lost sight of the building in their wake. Only then, when he could no longer see it, did Javier push the key on the remote. He didn't point it behind him; he didn't have to. He didn t even turn his head to look.
But the others looked back, astonished by their handiwork.
Over the tops of the office blocks arose a miniature mushroom cloud, growing fast as if nourished by the rain, like a towering tree with a storm-churned head of leaves. Even with the hovercar making no contact with the street itself, they felt the vibration of the blast ripple through it, rattle them in their seats.
The column subsided quickly, its ominous head dissipating, but before it did it billowed and seethed against the black sky, like a gray mass of formless flesh.
EPILOGUE
limbo
It made Jeremy Stake angry to find a message from Thi Gonh on his wrist comp, once he was conscious enough to realize that he lay in a hospital bed. Once he had remembered her face, hovering over him, inside the lobby of Steward Gardens.
It made him angrier still that it was not even a recorded message with her face, her voice, addressing him from the wrist comp s screen. Instead, it was a written message. And to further his disappointment, the English was just too good, indicating that she had used a Ha Jiin-to-English translation program to compose it. To him, it did not sound like her at all.
"Ga Noh,
I am back home now. Before I left the doctor told me you would be well.
I hope you understand why I could not stay. I had to lie to my husband about where I was going.
I told him it was business on Oasis about our farm. I don't know if he believes me.
I hope you understand why I watched you for several days but never let you see me. I have already dishonored my husband with my deception. But I was concerned when I saw your face on the phone screen. I followed you a while and you seemed okay. I was going to leave but I am glad I remained a little longer. I was pleased that I could help you fight your enemies.
If you need me again please you must be honest next time and tell me."
"Okay. I need you," Stake whispered as he read the words. He read on, gazing directly down at the device so that its screen filled the front of his mind itself. The words would leave their afterimage there, etched into his brain like a stinging tattoo.
"Once you took care of me. I was happy to repay that debt…"
"Debt," Stake echoed bitterly.
".and I would repay it again a thousand times.
Be well Ga Noh.
Your Ban Ta, T "
For a few moments he had to digest the Ha Jiin words "ban ta," which she had not translated to English. But Stake knew perfectly well what they meant. Henderson had told him, long ago. He just wanted to be sure he was reading them right, be sure that they would not change when he looked back at them. So he read them again and again.
"Ban ta," Henderson had told him, meant, "your lover."
Stake closed the message and lay back heavily on his pillow. Then he reached out and beeped for a nurse.
"Yes?" a dry voice asked from a speaker. He didn't know if it were a human or a robot. Not that it made much difference, he'd found from previous hospital stays. A tough business at times, being a soldier. And a hired investigator.
"When can I get out of here?" he asked. And in a low murmur, he added for his own benefit, "I need a drink."
But he found he wasn't angry anymore.
Bass-heavy music thudded from a jukebox, a sports program played on one giant VT screen and a muted soap opera (watched avidly by several drunken gray-haired men) on another. Neons glowed fuzzily through cigarette smoke, and a genie-like holographic woman belly-danced inside a large plastic bottle advertising Knickerson beer. Stake seated himself on one of the stools at the bar.
Without having to be asked, Watt pulled a tap with his insect-like prosthetic arm to fill a glass with Zub beer and placed it in front of him. "You doing okay, man?" the Choom asked him gravely.
"Never been better. I think I ll take a shot today, Watt."
"Hey, Stake," slurred a hulk down at the end of the bar. Still no one had told Lark that Stake was responsible for his own recent trip to the emergency room. He momentarily diverted his attention from the alcohol-dazed woman on the stool beside him. Stake had to admit she was attractive for a mutant, except for having one bulbous eye four times the size of the other. Defiantly, she called further attention to their mismatched state by wearing too much makeup around them. Lark went on, "What the hell did you come home in one piece for if you re going to get yourself all shot up now?"
"It s something to kill the time."
"Well, I hear that. Time s all we got left to kill these days, huh? But next time you run into some trouble on the job, you call your buddies down here at LOV 69, will ya? We'll cover your ass. Right, Watt?"
"I d be more afraid of taking a stray bullet from you than from someone else," Watt told him.
"Aw, blast you, ya fuckin wanker."
Lark turned back to the woman weaving precariously on her perch, her larger eye looking especially glassy and bloodshot, and Watt pulled a Clemens Light for another veteran.