room.
Jerusha watched it mostly because it was easier than turning her head. Peregrine was interviewing someone called Adamantine, whose disturbingly smooth body looked like it was computer-generated rather than real. Their words sounded like so much mush in Jerusha’s ear. “I’m very proud to have been chosen for this show,” Adamantine droned in a voice pitched heroically low. “I’m ready to prove myself here, and to prove to America that I deserve to be the next American Hero, like the great heroes who have been here before me.”
Do you know how stupid you all sound? she wanted to rail at Peregrine, at Adamantine. It was all so petty, so unimportant. That was the one lesson she’d taken away from her own stint on the program: none of it mattered at all.
Dr. Finn cantered into the room, his hooves bagged in sterile slippers, muffling the clatter against the linoleum floors. The centaur snagged the chart from the wall holder, glancing over it. His blond head-the hair touched with grey at the temples-shook as he made a note and placed it back. He placed his pen back in the pocket of the lab coat he wore.
“Take two aspirin and call you in the morning?” Jerusha said.
He favored her with a wry smile. “I wish it were that simple.”
“Pretty much anything would be simpler than this.” Jerusha lifted an arm, stabbed with a double set of IVs. She was surrounded by a metal forest of poles with plastic fluid bags hanging from them. A tray piled with plastic- domed plates sat on one side of the bed, from which wafted the smell of cafeteria food.
Finn’s tail flicked, almost angrily. “Your body’s locked in overdrive, Jerusha. You’re burning up calories at an impossible rate. But your digestive system isn’t absorbing nutrients very well at all. That’s why you’re constantly famished. Your body’s devouring itself because that’s all it has to feed on.”
“So tell me that you can fix it.” She saw the answer before he spoke, and fear stabbed her. “You can’t, can you?”
“Not yet. We’re still running tests, and we have a few ideas to try. We’ll figure this out.”
“You do a good job of sounding confident, Doc. And if you don’t figure it out?”
“We will,” he said firmly. “Now, get some rest, and let me get back to my lab work. I’d hate for you to think that we’ve been taking all that blood for nothing.” He checked her IV levels, patted her shoulder, and left the room. She smiled at him, because she thought it was what he would want to see. The brave patient, suffering in silence.
When the door closed, she let the smile collapse. Dying. You’re dying. She could feel it, a certainty in the pit of her stomach. She was going to leave this all. Soon.
She wanted to cry, but she wouldn’t let herself. She shouldn’t feel pity for herself, not when so many others were suffering and had suffered worse. She thought of New Orleans, of Bubbles, Ink, and Hoodoo Mama. She thought of her parents-on their way here from Yosemite, Dr. Finn had told her.
She would miss them all.
She thought of Wally, wandering somewhere in the People’s Paradise, intent on his quest. He was still alive. She was certain of that. He had promised her… and she had made the same promise for him, a promise she was going to break. You stay alive for me, Wally. And I’ll stay alive for you…
She would miss him most of all.
Jerusha clenched her hands in the bedsheets. Her arms were brown, dry sticks on the white bedsheet. She let the sobs come then. She could not hold them back.
Ellen Allworth’s Apartment
Manhattan, New York
Bugsy sat in cameo’s bed. Ellen was in the living room, humming to herself. The last couple of days, she’d been in a pretty good mood, or if she hadn’t, she’d faked it well enough that he couldn’t tell the difference. She’d even put the earring in, giving Bugsy and Simoon the night and most of the morning together.
He didn’t know why she’d done that. He’d been on the edge of calling the whole thing off and going back to his own much-neglected place, but she’d become Simoon. She’d pulled him back. And that was what he didn’t understand.
He thought about Popinjay’s description of the Radical. The one face of a multiple personality who knew what all the others were up to. Was that Cameo, too? Was it really Simoon he was kissing, or was that echo of her just another facet of Cameo? Was Nick really Nick, or the embodied memory? Were there four of them sharing this apartment, or really only two?
The fact was Ellen’s wild card didn’t bring people back from the dead. The objects she used to channel people only held the memories from the last time the thing and the person had been together. Simoon-the real Simoon-had experienced that last fight, had known she was dying at the hands of the Righteous Djinn. The one he’d been sleeping with had never had that experience.
So what did that tell you?
The phone rang, and Ellen picked it up. Bugsy rolled over onto the pillow. He had to do it. He had to call this whole thing off, go start hanging out at the bars around entomology conferences. Get a normal girlfriend. Just before he did it, he had to finish talking himself into the belief that breaking up wouldn’t mean killing Aliyah all over again. He had to believe that she’d never really been there, and he hadn’t managed that yet.
“Hi, Babs. What’s up? What? Jerusha’s in town!” Ellen said from the other room. “No, I didn’t know. How is she?”
A silence. When Ellen’s voice came again, it was as harsh as sandpaper. “What do you mean dying?”
Somewhere North of Kindu, Congo
People’s Paradise of Africa
It was the strangest thing.
Wally slowed again when he passed the village of Kindu, a few days after destroying the floating laboratory. He wanted folks to get a good look at him. He expected much the same reaction he’d received in Kongolo, where the sight and sound of a PPA boat had caused most folks to flee.
But they didn’t.
It began with just a handful of folks out on the docks. They pointed at Wally, jumped up and down, shouted to one another. More people came outside, and more still, until they lined the docks and shoreline. He couldn’t tell what they were saying.
But it sounded, for all the world, like cheering.
Huh. Wonder what that’s all about. Holiday, maybe.
Past Kindu, he sped downriver as fast as possible, leading what he hoped would become a concerted effort to chase and catch him. Anything to give Jerusha an edge.
He also felt a great urgency to get to the Bunia lab while he could still fight. Before all of his skin rusted and rotted apart. Because that was getting worse every day.
By the time he passed Kindu, Wally had burned through both of the fuel canisters he’d salvaged from the barge. He turned for the riverbank around sunset, the engine coughing and sputtering. He coasted the last few feet, saving a few splashes of gasoline for the morning, when he’d set the boat on fire. With luck, the smoke would draw more pursuers. It had worked before.
At some point he had to leave the river anyway. According to the GPS, he’d traveled a few hundred miles since splitting off from Jerusha. Eventually the Lualaba would turn west and become the Congo River; following it all the way to a tributary that flowed down from around Bunia would take him hundreds of miles out of his way. And that was ignoring the little problem of Boyoma Falls: six miles of waterfalls at the transition from Lualaba to Congo.
Striking out overland was the only choice.
The evening’s first stars glimmered overhead in a clear sky with no threat of overnight rain. Which was a nice break, since his tent was ruined. He whistled. A guy sure could see the stars here, out in the middle of nowhere. Better than he’d ever seen them anywhere else, even better than from the middle of the Persian Gulf.
He wondered if Lucien had known many constellations. It would have been fun to ask him about that.
Ghost hovered nearby while Wally succeeded, with much difficulty, to clean the leopard scratches on his back. He treated them with disinfectant lotion, and even managed to place clean new bandages on them. It would have been a lot easier with Jerusha’s help. It would have felt better, too. The lotion felt hot and itchy when Wally
