Michelle tried to take a deep breath, but it didn’t work. It felt like someone had punched her in the gut. Except that that usually felt pretty good. This felt horrible. Her parents had tried to kill her.
“You okay, Michelle?” Juliet asked. “You’re looking pale. Should we get the doctor?”
Joey threw up her arms. “Jesus H. Motherfucking Christ on a pogo stick, Ink. She’s not dying. She just heard that her dick-lickin’ parents tried to kill her to get at her money. No one would take that good.”
Michelle closed her eyes. She wanted to throw up. She wanted to run away. She wanted to scream. She wanted to cry. Was she just going to be some kind of freak for the rest of her life? A mound of flesh with so much power inside her that it hurt?
Tears stung her eyes. She hoped that Juliet wouldn’t notice. She hated being this repulsive and she hated being so helpless.
4
Sunday,
November 29
Paraguacu River
Bahia State, Brazil
Big crocs swam the muddy river around him. As the dolphin slid through the water with near effortless undulations of his sleek and powerful body, driven by his tail flukes, he sensed them with sonic sprays emitted from his jaw, processing the echoes with the liquid mass that gave the distinctive bulge to his forehead.
He felt no fear. For he was the baddest motherfucker in the Paraguacu River. A dolphin had a rostrum-a beak-capable of killing great white sharks. What were overgrown aquatic river lizards to him?
The warm fresh water had a land taste, an oleaginous feel. He reveled in it anyway. Almost reluctantly, he steered toward the island.
As he began to break water he saw the hut waiting among mangroves, the woman on its porch, as blurs in sundry shades. Greater detail emerged as he approached, but what were mere eyes, especially in the desiccating air, against the sensory richness of sound in water?
On his last arcing lunge he left the river’s embrace completely. The sandy silt of the bottom caressed his belly when he splashed down. It took an effort of will to will the change. When he emerged from the water, dripping water from his leanly muscled, naked bipedal form, he was Tom Weathers again.
“Hoo,” he said, shaking water from his golden hair. “And to think that just a moment ago I was thinking of this air as dry. There’s a perspective change.” To his human nostrils the air smelled so ripely of tannin-rich water and wet-leaved mangrove forest it almost made his head swim.
The woman laughed. His human eyes made her out clearly. Forty-something or not, a naked Sun Hei-lian was well worth seeing. “I can never get over that particular power of yours,” she called as he trudged up the gravel- paved trail from the water’s edge to the rough plank steps with the slanting late-afternoon spring sun stinging his skin from upriver. “How’d you ever get the ability to do something like that?”
The question made his nut-sac tense up as if to crawl back in his belly. “There’s no limit to what the power of world revolution can do,” he said. “You should know that, Shang Xiao.”
It meant “Colonel.” The world at large knew Hei-lian as an intrepid trouble telejournalist for Chinese Central Television’s English-language news service. The intelligence community knew her as a top agent of China’s well- feared Ministry of State Security: the Guojia Anquan Bu, or Guoanbu for short. Beijing had set her to seduce the PPA’s superpotent and mercurial Western ace.
She’d succeeded so well she was now the People’s Republic’s chief advisor to its ally Nshombo, the hard-core male chauvinism of her communist gerontocrat bosses notwithstanding. And in the process she’d fallen in love with her chief subject.
“If you say so,” she said.
As he clomped up the steps beneath the thatch overhang of the roof she handed him an open bottle of almost self-luminous green fluid. It chilled his palm, meaning it came straight from the cooler they’d brought with them from Salvador, capital of Brazil’s Bahia state, about thirty miles downstream where the river emptied into the Atlantic. The little shack had no electricity or running water or any modern conveniences.
Which didn’t seem to impair its popularity as a weekend retreat for urban baianos; getting it hadn’t been easy. Especially since Tom couldn’t exactly flash his ace powers to impress the booking agent. This was supposed to be a hideout, after all: he never spent the night in the same place twice running. That running-dog teleport Bahir was still on his case, too, and he had to sleep sometime.
More and more he was growing reluctant to let himself sleep at all, for reasons having nothing to do with the golden-eyed Arab ace.
Tom twisted off the cap and took a hit. The coolness suffusing outward from his throat was welcome relief after walking a mere thirty feet. Although it was “cool” only by comparison to the mind-blowing tropic heat.
Holding a half-full beer, Hei-lian leaned against the side of the doorway, an oblong cut through warped wood to the darkness of the interior. Her long black hair was pulled back in a ponytail. Her skin, normally ivory tinged pink, glowed gold in the angled light.
She wasn’t his usual type. He’d be the first to admit that. It wasn’t that he went for the big-boobed blond cheerleader types, especially not with augments out to here: fake tits symbolized capitalism’s obsession with conspicuous consumption. But he usually did like his women fuller-figured.
Not to mention younger. Sun Hei-lian wore her years lightly, although he knew they’d been spent in hard service. She kept herself in remarkable shape, gymnast shape, martial-artist shape. She’d been taught taijiquan and internal martial arts by her Daoist-priest father, and more violent applications by her employers.
She claimed he made her feel years younger. She’d laughed more in the last year, she said, their year together, than in her entire life previously. As serious as she still normally was, he believed that.
She was the most beautiful woman he’d ever met, not despite her years but because of them. And she was smart, fierce smart, a trait he respected. More than a skilled, and now passionate, lover, Hei-lian was something the Radical had never known in his brief years of freedom: a confidante.
“You seem thoughtful, lover,” Sun said.
He turned and leaned on the rail. Sun-heated wood stung his arms. “I miss Sprout,” he said softly. “I miss being able to have her with me.”
“You could’ve brought her along.”
“Would you be running around like that?”
“Of course not,” Sun said in mock outrage. “Not in front of a child.” She came up to put her chin on his shoulder and tousle his hair. He felt the heat and yielding firmness of her body on his back and buttocks, skin on skin, the slight rasp of her bush. Unlike a lot of chicks these days she didn’t shave her pussy. Her pubic hair was on the sparse and wispy side anyway.
As sunset approached, vast flocks of scarlet ibises, pink-pale from their season in the north and long flight back to southern summer, fell on sandbanks and overgrown islands and the dense mangal on either bank like cotton-candy rain, to feed on mangrove crabs among the tough, gnarly roots knuckling down into black water. Their cries bubbled into a sky being overtaken by bands of orange and yellow.
With a sloshing of syrupy water a crocodile, what the locals called a jacare, emerged from the water by the little dock. No boat was tied there now: no need for one. The jacare was a big fucker, maybe twelve feet long. It dragged itself up by the gravel path and stared insolently at the humans from gelatinous armor-lidded eyes, as if laying claim on them for supper.
Tom pointed. A pencil of fire stabbed from his finger and crisped a tuft of grass a couple of inches in front of the croc’s sharp snout. Moisture in plant and mud flashed to steam, scorching the animal’s nose and shooting grains of dirt against it. Opening its yellow-pink mouth to roar surprise, displaying impressive teeth, the beast wigwagged its fat tail hastily backward into the water and was gone.
“Arrogant prick,” Tom said. He raised the finger and blew away imaginary gunsmoke.
Hei-lian laughed. “That’s more like it. I was wondering why you brought us here to this rustic tropic paradise for the night. Other than the usual security considerations, of course. I didn’t think you went in much for that whole
