Teddy looked down at her. "You're crying on the inside for me."
"Yes."
"Why don't you cry on the outside?"
"I can't. I've lost the ability," Tach said simply. "When?"
"After the rape." They studied each other for a long moment. "Now you're weeping for me," Tach added softly. "Yeah… but only on the inside. Wouldn't do for the governor of the Rox to show weakness."
Again silence fell between them. Tach remembered Peanut's admonition. "Teddy, the longer I stay here, the greater the danger. Peanut and I-"
"Bloat, the name's Bloat. Teddy belongs to another world… and haven't you forgotten something?" Tachyon cringed, eyes flicking guiltily from side to side. "No, you haven't forgotten, you were just hoping I had. I disgust you, don't I?" Tach just shook her head. She wished she could lie. Knew she couldn't. He was in her mind again. She couldn't hide anything from him. His face puckered like a baby about to cry.
"We've all revolted you. For forty-five years you've been totally grossed-out every time you touched one of us, cared for one of us." His tone wound higher, fueled by his growing anger.
"I'm sorry…"
"I thought you loved me!" The enormous body was quivering, sending shocks through the walls and floor of the old building. Tach tottered, struggled to maintain her footing. Peanut was terrified.
"You're a fraud, Tachyon, a total fucking fraud!"
Her shame collapsed before a wave of indignation. "No-I helped create you-I'll bear that guilt. But I have worked and lived among you, given half my life to your care, your protection, your well-being. I do care for you. You are my wounded step-children, but how can you ask me to love you when you can't even love yourselves?"
Snorting, gasping sobs emerged from the boy atop his hideous throne. Unable to help, Tachyon listened to the sounds of woe come falling down the joker's sides like the rivers of bloatblack.
"Somebody's coming," said Peanut suddenly. Tachyon hadn't even noticed him moving to the door.
"Has to be Blaise. My jokers are all under strict orders."
"Ideal," murmured Tachyon, and felt her bowels go to water. The boy's face hardened. He scrubbed at his eyes. Tach dug to her core. Takisian pride would support her. It was all she had left. "This is your moment. Revenge yourself and all your fellows upon me. You have the power."
Bloat stared at her. Fury fell away. He sighed. "I can't do that to you. For months you've cried, and sung, and talked in my mind. You're beautiful… I can't hurt you. Climb up."
Tachyon needed no urging. Revulsion gave way to selfpreservation. She picked her way through the mounds of fecal waste, placed a foot on one of the pipes jabbed IV-like into the joker's body. Fingers pinching at the skin she hauled herself upward, and fell forward into the folds of flesh. She lifted a flap of skin. It was like handling a sack of wet sand, but sweat made it oily. She slipped beneath it, and pulled it up like a blanket. It was horrible.
The sound of the doors slamming open brought back memories. Tach chewed on a corner of the handkerchief. "How dare you bust in on me like this!" Bloat roared. "This is joker territory, jumpers only come when invited."
"Looking for someone," wailed a boy in a cracking adolescent's tone. The door slammed again. Tach sagged with relief.
She stood and made her way to the head, her feet sinking several inches with every step. His head reached only to her breast. She pushed his hair off his forehead. It was silky, freshly washed. She caught the thought in preparation for meeting you.
Their thoughts continued to dance and weave about and through one another.
"I wish you could come with me too," said Tach in answer to an unspoken question.
"Will you ever come back?" Pleading without ever having asked.
"I must."
"Oh, yeah, your body'll still be here."
"More than that. There's you, and I'll help you if I can." Tach hesitated. Bloat's dark eyes were pleading with her. He looked away, mumbled, "Blaise knows you're gone, they're hunting… you better go."
Setting her jaw, Tach drew in a hissing breath between her teeth. Took Bloat's face between her hands, bent in for the kiss. His flabby arms wrapped about her waist, drew her in close, and Tachyon began to shake. This had nothing to do with Takisian revulsion for the deformed. This was gutwrenching terror.
Blaise's teeth drawing blood from her lower lip in his own grotesque and evil version of a kiss. Almost choking her as he thrust his penis down her throat.
Tachyon whimpered as Bloat's hands closed tightly about her wrists.
He forced her hands from his face, pushed her away. "NO!" The word twisted and vibrated with his emotional agony. "I'm not going to hurt you. You'll never remember me as someone who hurt you."
"I promised!" cried Tach.
"And I want it! But not this way. Not when all you can remember is a rape! Peanut, help her down." The joker scurried up onto Bloat's back, put a hand beneath Tachyon's elbow. "Hurry"
It was harder going down. Eventually Tachyon just sat down and slid. Her dress and hands were stained with bloatblack.
She looked back up the wall of flesh. "No, Peanut, I've got to do it. I've got to go back. I can't leave him with my word broken."
"No, Doctor, we've gotta go. It'll hurt him worse if you get caught."
They stepped through the secret door. The last sound Tachyon heard was a boy weeping.
Eventually fear can kill you. It starts by sapping the will and turning the body into a shivering sickly husk. Tach had reached that state. Without the support of Peanut's arm, she could never have reached the chamber in which they now stood. In another lifetime she would have shrunk from that rough contact. But she had endured the sweating, stinking, flaccid mound that was Bloat, and she had felt his love and his despair. She had been assaulted by the physical beauty that was Blaise and known his hate.
"It doesn't matter," she whispered as she sank down on the glittering sand that formed the floor of the cavern chamber. "What, Doctor?"
She looked up at him. The sad, sad eyes, the chiseled wrinkles about that slit of a mouth.
"Peanut… you're a very handsome man."
"No, Doctor, I'm a joker." Bending, he held out his single hand to her. "You rested enough? Can you go on? That Blaise… he knows we're running."
The tinkling of falling water drew her attention. She looked and located the source. "Let me bathe my face and hands. That will help."
"Okay," said Peanut dubiously.
The water was icy cold, but it revived her like a slap. She looked down at her dress, gave a little mew of disgust, and pulled it over her head. Immersed it beneath the tiny waterfall that had first attracted her. The waters of the pool were soon fouled and darkened with the bloatblack. She put the dress back on, shivering at its clammy touch, but at last she was clean, and the stink was gone.
They kept walking. Tachyon slid a hand into Peanut's. He looked back and smiled. Striations of mica in the rock walls threw off a soft phosphorescent glow. Tachyon was no geologist, but she didn't think that mica could do that. Elaborate stalagmites and stalactites yearned for each other from the floors and ceilings of the caverns, their colors shell pink, sea green, amber.
"Peanut, Ellis Island isn't a real island," Tach said conversationally. They were passing another underground grotto, and on a whim Tach kicked a small pebble into the mirror-like water. The reflected stalagmites and stalactites bowed and swayed like stony dancers.
Forehead buckling with a frown that made the horny skin erupt like the earth in an earthquake, Peanut said, "But it's surrounded by water."