"Yes, it's us. We brought you back safe. You seem to have been hit on the head. What happened?"
He groaned again, but this time it was more a sound of frustration than pain. "I'm . . . I'm not sure. I was just coming back from the elevator when something up on the ceiling went boom!" He squinted and tried to turn away from the lights, but the pad kept his head from rolling. Jeremiah leaned forward to shade his eyes. "I think . . . I think maybe they're using some kind of explosives up there. Trying to blast through to our part of the base." He winced and slowly brought a hand up to his head, his eyes widening slightly as he felt the bandages. "What . . . how bad is it?"
"Not bad," Jeremiah said. "A pipe fell down, I think. If they set something off upstairs, that would make sense. I heard loud noises, three of them. I think—bang, hang, bang!"
"What, so they are trying to bomb us out now?" Joseph said. "Foolish. They not going to get me out so easy. They blow a hole, I come out of it and knock in some heads."
Jeremiah rolled his eyes. "He's right about one thing, though," he told Del Ray. "I don't think they'll get through that concrete or that heavy door on the elevator—not right away, anyway."
Del Ray murmured something, then tried to sit up. Jeremiah leaned forward to restrain him but the younger man would not be stopped. His skin had paled and he was shaking, but he seemed otherwise almost normal.
"The question is," Del Ray said at last, "how long do we have to hold them off? A week? We might be able to do it. Forever? That's not going to work."
"Not if you are going to get knocked out, walking into pipes," declared Joseph. "I told you, you should let me go and do that."
Tired and irritated, Jeremiah could not resist. "You know, Del Ray, it's been a real pleasure to see you with your shirt off. Joseph was right—you're a very handsome young man."
"What?" Long Joseph Sulaweyo leaped up, almost spitting with indignation. "What are you talking about? I didn't say nothing like that! What are you talking about?"
Jeremiah was laughing too hard to push it any farther. Even Del Ray managed a wincing smile as the older man stomped off to the other room, presumably to drown the insult to his manliness in a few swallows of his precious wine.
"I shouldn't do it," Jeremiah said when he was gone, but could not restrain a last quiet chuckle. "He's not all bad, and we need to stick together. Help each other."
"You helped me," said Del Ray. "Thanks."
Jeremiah waved it off. "It's nothing. But I was scared. I thought they'd broken in, shooting. They're still out there, though, and we're still safe in here—for the moment. Ah!" Reminded, he bent and picked up Del Ray's jacket off the floor. "And we even have a gun."
Del Ray took the heavy pistol out of his pocket and turned it over, looking at it as though it were some completely new object. "Yes," he said. "One gun, but only two bullets." He wiped a tiny trickle of blood off his ear and gave Jeremiah a mournful look. "When they do manage to get in, that's not even enough to shoot ourselves."
CHAPTER 12
The Boy in the Well
NETFEED/MUSIC: Christ Not Happy As "Superstar"
(visuaclass="underline" Christ with Blond Bitch on stage)
VO: The story of singer Johann Sebastian Christ, who came back from both a crippling adrenochrome addiction and the loss of his band in a freak stage accident, is to be made into a partially fictionalized net drama—if it can get past one crucial snag.
(visuaclass="underline" entertainment journalist Patsy Lou Corry)
CORRY: "Apparently the network is under huge pressure from Bible Belt advertisers not to have a character named Christ who wears a dog mask and performs naked from the waist down, among his more presentable habits. The network has suggested they could rename the character Johann Sebastian Superstar.' Christ wants to call off the project, but he doesn't want to return the network's money. It'll wind up in court."
(visuaclass="underline" Christ in press conference)
CHRIST: "Lawsuit? You know what International Entertainment can do? It can bend right over and start counting shower tiles. . . ."
Like school, this is," said T4b miserably.
It had been a long time since Paul had been in school, but he knew what their Goggleboy companion meant.
They had been trapped in the bubble for what felt to Paul like hours, perhaps half a day. In a different situation the bobbing journey atop the swell of the river would have been fascinating: the current had pushed them past a great deal of Kunohara's jungle, past huge mangrove trees with roots sunk deep into the water, monstrously tangled edifices of bark proportionately large as entire cities. Strange fish had nosed them, leviathans up from the river mud to investigate, but fortunately none had decided the strange bubble was worth trying to swallow. Birds with wingspans like jumbo jets and colored like an explosion in God's own fireworks factory, a rat the size of a warehouse, water beetles big as motorboats—they had floated past all kinds of wonders. But the four of them were trapped in a sphere scarcely large enough to allow them all to sit with their legs stretched out, and they were bored, stiff, and miserable.
Worse, Renie's unfinished message seemed to hang in the sealed air of the bubble like a curl of poisonous gas. She was in trouble somewhere and her friends could do nothing.
With nothing to do but rest and talk, they had puzzled and argued for hours, but Paul thought they were no closer to solving any of the riddles that haunted them. He had related all that he had remembered so far of his life in Jongleur's tower, but although the others had been fascinated, they could offer nothing to help him make sense of what the fragments meant.
"So what happens?" T4b said, breaking the long silence. "Just go on, us, all rub-a-dub-dub like this, forever?"
Paul smiled sadly. Personally, he had been thinking of Wynken, Blynken, and Nod adrift in their wooden shoe, but the idea was much the same.
"We will go through to the next simulation," Florimel said wearily. "When we get to the gateway, Martine will try to manipulate it to send us back to Troy, so that we might perhaps cross through to the place where Renie and the others are. We have said all this before."
Paul looked to Martine, who at the moment didn't appear capable of manipulating anything more complicated than a bath towel or a spoon. The blind woman sagged, her earlier confidence gone, or at least worn down for the moment. Her lips were moving, as though she were talking to herself. Or praying.
I hope she doesn't give up, he thought in sudden fear. Without Renie to push us along, she's all we have. Florimel's smart and brave, but she doesn't think ahead like the two of them, she gets angry and discouraged. T4b—well, he's a teenager, and not a very patient one at that.
But what about me? Even the thought of taking responsibility for the lives of these people made him feel a little queasy. Yes, but that's shit, man, and you know it. You've been through things in the last weeks that nobody—nobody!—in the real world has experienced, let alone survived. Chased by monsters, fought in the bloody Trojan War. Why shouldn't you take the lead if it were necessary?
Because it feels like it's hard enough just being Paul Jonas, he answered himself. Because it's hard enough getting by when it feels like a big piece of my life is missing. Because I'm damned tired, that's why.
Somehow, they didn't sound like very good excuses.