farm girl from Idaho wouldn’t buy the idea a movie agent was interested in her so he’d invented Mr. Fontes and the Brookline Agency. “Your fourth-dimensional powers have some interesting applications, and we’d like to talk with you about employment.”
“Great. Let me get my coat.”
“Don’t you want to talk here?”
Mollie looked horrified. “Oh, God, no. There’s no privacy here.” She bestowed a glare on her brothers.
“But your parents…” Noel began.
“They’re watching Wheel of Fortune and they hate to be interrupted.”
Wheel of Fortune. It couldn’t be more perfect.
Once outside Noel made a production of having locked his keys in the car. “If we could get a coat hanger from the house,” he said.
Mollie made a face. “My brothers will think you’re lame, and I’ll get even more shit from them. I can get the keys.”
Noel watched as she focused on the car door. A small opening appeared in the metal. Mollie reached through and her hand vanished, and appeared out of the dashboard of the car. It was disturbing and rather creepy, as if her arm had bent into strange, twisted angles. But of course she was reaching through a fourth-dimensional gate. It wouldn’t be normal.
She snagged the keys and tossed them to Noel. He allowed himself to biff the catch, and had to fish them out of the snow and mud.
Special Camp Mulele
Guit District, South Sudan
The Caliphate of Arabia
Mid-afternoon in the sudd was the hottest part of the day. Some hippos drowsed in the nearest arm of the river with just their ears and bulbous eyes and road-humped backs showing above the brown water. Even the little birds that groomed their thick hides for ticks and parasites had given up and sought shelter until the heat of day passed.
Tom touched down on white dirt packed firm by small feet. Special Camp Mulele drowsed under open-sided tents and awnings that did little more than cut the sun’s sting. Some of the child aces sobbed quietly to themselves. A pair of the younger kids sat cross-legged playing patty-cake, one with child hands, the other with the blunt furry tips of giant spider legs. Ayiyi was an Ewe kid from Ghana’s Togo River region, west along the coast from Nigeria. His folks had moved to Lagos looking for work a year before its liberation. Only ten, he had a kid’s head sticking out of the body of a black-and-white spider with a yard-long body and an eight-foot span on his eight fuzzy legs. Like any spider, Ayiyi had humongous fangs and creepy little jointed leg-things to bring food to his maw. But he ate with his human mouth. It was a process Tom could never bear to watch. Those nasty fangs injected a venom that immobilized its victims with sheer pain, as it liquefied them inside their own skin.
“Listen up, kids,” Tom called in French, then repeated it in English. “We got things to do.”
They stopped and turned to him. Some faces were sad, some horrifying. In all of them he saw a kind of hunger, avid as that of any starving man peering through the window at a plutocrat’s feast. They’re looking at me, he thought. They know I have something to give them. A purpose to their poor twisted lives. Purpose to their suffering. Is that really such a bad thing?
“It’s time to step up and fight for the Revolution,” he said, and grinned. “We’re gonna have us some fun.”
International House of Pancakes
Coeur d’Alene, Idaho
They found a twenty-four-hour IHOP. Noel, fearing what would pass for cuisine, satisfied himself with a cup of coffee. Mollie was tucking into Stuffed French Toast drenched with strawberry syrup and piled high with strawberries and whipped cream.
“You know that came out of a can,” Noel said with a nod toward the whipped cream. “It has never come within even waving distance of an actual cow.”
“It’s good.”
Noel suddenly felt far older than thirty. He was preparing his opening statement when Mollie took it away from him. “So, is there really a Brookline Agency? ’Cause I’ve never heard of it, and I’ve been looking for some way out of here, and away from farming.”
Noel leaned in confidentially. “No. But I’m going to found it right after the holidays. It seems to me the most logical and frankly brilliant idea.”
“So, why did you come asking after me?”
“Because I do want to utilize your powers. Just not as a means of securing spent nuclear fuel.”
“Hey, now that’s a cool idea.” She took another huge bite of toast and mumbled, “Okay, but what is it you really want me to do?”
“Help me liberate some ill-gotten gains from some very bad people.”
Mollie frowned. “That doesn’t sound legal.”
“It’s not… technically… but morally it’s very pure.”
“I don’t want to go to jail.”
“The funds are in Africa.”
He watched the frown vanish, and he could even follow the thought process. Outside of the United States it’s anything goes. If you steal from foreigners it’s not really stealing.
“And I’d get paid for this?”
“Three million dollars.”
“Sign me up.”
In the Jungle, Congo
People’s Paradise of Africa
The jungle was their enemy, as much as any pursuers.
The jungle didn’t want them to walk straight east. It forced them to jog north or south to find a good place to ford the frequent streams, or to avoid pools where crocodiles lurked in the rushes. It made them bypass hills that were too steep for the children and the burden of the jokers like Eason who they carried. It laid tree roots and ravines across their path. It send hordes of mosquitoes and huge black flies to torment them. It yammered at them with a thousand eerie and strange sounds that made the children shudder and cry in return. It plagued them with heat and humidity; it wrapped them in a claustrophobic world of green and brown that smelled of wet earth and rot.
Despite Waikili’s continued insistence, they’d yet to have any visible indication of pursuit. Jerusha didn’t have time to worry about that. The environment itself was trial enough.
They were moving down a long slope to where-well below-Jerusha could see the glimmer of yet another stream. She was trying to help the kids carry the improvised stretcher with Eason, so that they didn’t spill the joker child onto the ground. That had already happened too many times. The sight of Eason flopping on the ground with his fish tail reminded Jerusha uncomfortably of her childhood when her goldfish had leaped from their bowl onto the table. “Careful, Saadi,” she said to one of the children. “Watch where you’re stepping.”
From behind her, upslope, there was a cry, then a shout of “Bibbi Jerusha!”
She left Eason and went running up to where several of the children were gathered around someone. “It’s Efia,” Cesar said as she approached. “She’s been bitten. A snake…”
Jerusha crouched down alongside Efia, who was sniffing and holding her right leg. At the girl’s ankle, there were beads of blood and the joint itself was puffy, the skin blotchy and dark. She was speaking in Baluba, her voice choked with sobs. “What’s she saying?” Jerusha asked Cesar.
“It bit her twice-on the ankle, then on the hand when she reached down.” Efia held out the hand. Like the ankle, it was already visibly swollen, the skin darkening around the puncture wounds.
Jerusha had already swung her pack from her shoulders, digging in it for the snakebite first-aid kit. “Did she see the snake? Does she know what it was?”
Cesar asked Efia, who shook her head and spoke a quick few words. She was panting, her breath too
