ruler of a feudal city-state. Apparently no one had learned from Hearst's mistakes. Without controls, fantasies are closer to nightmares than dreams.
When they reached the third floor, they picked their way cautiously past the people sleeping in the hallway or haggling over a deal or telling raunchy jokes over a Mason jar of BeBop's Brew. It looked like the corridors of a Las Vegas hotel during a Teamsters' convention.
'Recognize anybody?' Eric asked.
Tracy shook her head. 'I don't remember them from The Centurion.'
'Me neither,' Blackjack said.
'Okay, let's do it. As long as they aren't around, this shouldn't be too difficult.'
Eric gripped his bow with one hand, the arrow already nocked into place, and cupped his other hand around the door knob to Angel's room. He rocked backward as if to smash his shoulder into the door. Blackjack laid a restraining hand on his shoulder. 'The locks have been removed,' he whispered. 'BeBop's house rules.'
Eric pushed the door open.
'Come on,' Rhino snapped at Griffin. 'Grab your new toy and let's go.'
Griffin hefted Eric's Barnett Commando crossbow from his bed and leaned it against his shoulder. There were only two beds in the room, one a sixteenth-century fourposter, the other a copy. Griffin had one, the Peterson brothers shared the other. The rest of the crew flopped out on the floor.
'What's up, Cap?' Griffin said a little too loudly. He'd had too much of BeBop's Brew, but didn't want Rhino to know.
'I want you and a few of the others to go upstairs and escort Angel down to my room.'
'Can do, Cap,' Griffin said, but moaned to himself. That bitch would put up a fight about it. Oh, she'd come all right-no one refused a request by Rhino-but she'd make them all miserable the whole way down. And his head was already throbbing from the booze. He stuffed a few bolts for the crossbow in his belt. 'Kelly, Danton,' he pointed, snapping his fingers at them, 'you come with me.'
Kelly Furst was naked, sitting cross-legged on her blanket reading a year-old issue of Cosmopolitan she'd bought from a vendor in the courtyard. He'd wanted her to come to his room that night, but had settled for a hand job, which she'd performed right there in his booth in the middle of the flowing crowd. She'd opened his fly, reached in, and nodded. No one paid any attention while he thrust his skinny pelvis against her hand. It hadn't taken long. She took a copy of Redbook too, which wasn't part of the bargain, but he didn't bother arguing with her.
She bent the corner of the page to mark her place in the article entitled 'Barspeak: The Art of Conversation at Singles Bars,' stood up, pulled on her shorts and sleeveless T-shirt, and grabbed her bow.
Richard Danton did ten rapid-fire pushups before leaping to his feet with a crooked grin. At eighteen, he was always ready for something to do. He was one of the new recruits they'd just taken on today and he was looking forward to proving himself. The biggest shock in young Danton's life so far hadn't been the quakes or the subsequent death of his parents, but the fact that he didn't feel bad when he killed people. The discovery that his parents had been all wrong about that had set him free. He'd killed twelve people since, each represented by a notch on the handle of the axe he carried.
'I want her in my room in five minutes,' Rhino said, pacing. In the past couple of days he'd lost the ability to stand still at all. His body had to keep moving, constantly rocking, pacing, fidgeting. Even inside he felt like everything was moving, the organs vibrating, shifting uncomfortably, jockeying against each other for a more comfortable position. If you stopped and thought about it, you could go crazy…
'We'll be back faster than a cat can bury his shit,' Griffin said, cocking the crossbow and sliding a bolt into the groove. Kelly and Danton followed him out, their weapons clutched at their chests, ready.
Angel was already moving.
Wearing only blue panties and a white sweat shirt, she did a handspring over the bed, somersaulting lightly onto her feet next to her pile of weapons. Her hand passed over the pile and suddenly she was holding a stack of sharpened throwing stars.
Eric and Blackjack flanked toward her in separate arcs, like a wishbone. Eric held the bow string taut, but didn't yet draw it back. Blackjack drew his saber, holding the hilt with both hands like a Jimmy Connors backhand. Tracy leaned against the closed door, guarding it with her thick cane.
Angel's eyes darted back and forth among the three of them, her back slightly arched. Eric could see her mind flipping through strategies, countermoves, options, like a Go player rubbing a black stone before making the winning move. When her eyes finally settled on Tracy, he knew she planned to go straight for the door.
'Duck, Trace,' Eric shouted, echoing his plea from a couple days ago when they were still happily on their canoe.
Only this time she didn't argue. Tracy twisted away from the door just as Angel's wrist snapped, flicking a spinning star across the room like a tiny buzz-saw blade gone berserk. The star thudded into the oak door, splintering the carved face of an English hunter chasing a fox. A second star followed almost immediately, this one pinning a lock of Tracy's hair to the door. The metal points fanned out just two inches from her left eye.
'Enough, Angel,' Eric said, drawing the bow string back to his cheek. The tip of the arrow quivered slightly as it pointed at her small body.
Angel's smile was faint. A dare, he thought. She had more confidence in her perfect body's agility than she did fear of Eric's arrow. Suddenly she grabbed the ragged blanket from the bed and flipped it into the air toward Eric. He'd hesitated, not wanting to kill her until she'd reproduced Alabaster's map, but the ghosting blanket startled him into releasing his grip. The arrow plunged into the blanket like a missile, pulling the whole thing high over their heads, finally nailing the blanket to the wall.
But Angel had already cartwheeled over the bed, bouncing to her feet in time to fling two more stars. The first took a glancing bite out of Eric's thigh, chewing off a hunk of denim and skin before dropping tiredly to the floor. The second plunked below Blackjack's collarbone, lodging between bones.
'Damn,' he yelled, more from anger than pain, struggling to pluck it out of his body. It wouldn't give.
Angel's hand found the door knob.
Whoomp!
Tracy whirled around with her cane and smacked Angel in the lower spine. She was off balance because of her hip, so she wasn't able to put much power behind the blow. But the effort yanked her hair free, leaving a lock of her hair still stuck to the door under the throwing star.
Angel's body arced backward from the impact. She dropped to the floor, her hands still clutching the door knob. Weakly she tried to pull herself back up. Too late. Eric grabbed a handful of her long black hair and jerked her backward onto the floor.
Blackjack pressed the saber against the hollow of her throat, denting the skin slightly.
'At last, Eric, you have come to finish your assignment of so long ago.' Tears of pain spilled from Angel's eyes, but otherwise she showed no emotion.
'That was another planet, another man,' Eric said, kneeling beside her.
'Yes,' she said, squinting into his eyes, studying him. 'You are changed. I see something of our old friend in you now. Something dark behind the eyes. A tint of Fallows, perhaps.' She smiled. 'He bragged to me that he would turn you or kill you. I see he has succeeded.'
Eric smiled. 'If that's true, Angel, you have much to fear from me. N'est-ce pas?'
'Out of the way, asshole,' Griffin said, shoving the large drunk out of his way. The big man bounced into the wall, scraping his nose on the Italian Renaissance tempura-on-wood painting. In his stupor, he thought the woman in the painting resembled Betty, his ex-wife, as he furiously snatched it from the wall and spun around to clobber
