Chapter Twenty-Four
“The Fish Below the Ice”

•

•

Well the mouth is open
And the noise comes out

"Have you been watering this?" asked Professor Morowitz.

"What, me, water plants?" Shelby snorted. "There's a reason I'm a Chemistry major."

Professor Morowitz decided to ignore the joke, which, like most of Shelby's jokes, seemed funny enough on the surface, but didn't track quite properly if you parsed it. Which is not to say she didn't get the joke. It hinged, of course, on the perceived rivalry between the Chemistry and Biology departments, of which, of course, Morowitz was well aware; how could one not be, at Herschberg?. The problem was that neither of them had alluded to this perception as yet in this morning's conversation—or, for that matter, as far as Morowitz could remember, ever—at least, in the course of their relationship. For want of a better word. What else would one call it? Odd? Uncharacteristic? An indulgence, a divertissement? A widow's comfort, maybe? Widow? Why—

She blinked, and her next breath caught in her throat. Jack. Oh. Jack. I didn't, I haven't, I—

She blinked, and sighed. What else would one call it? An indulgence, a divertissement? A divertimento, perhaps? Is this more Italian than French? She looked over the kitchen counter into the living room, where Shelby was tugging on a pair of ratty, stained jeans, bouncing in front of the dead glass eye of the television set as she worked them over her hips, her pendulous breasts jiggling under the flannel nightshirt she'd borrowed last night, breasts too large and soft for Morowitz's taste, breasts which felt like old, deflating helium balloons under her fingertips, a decidedly non-erotic image which never failed to derail her ardor when she thought of it, so of course Shelby had pouted last night, why don't you ever pay any attention to my tits, don't you like them, and Morowitz had protested, of course, they're lovely, but it was no use; she'd had to spend an eternity (or so it seemed) paying them attention, all the while trying not to think of parades long gone by, of cleaning up the rec room the day after a birthday party, of Shelby crying out "Mmm, yes, that, like that," in a helium-induced chipmunk's voice. Trying not to laugh, and, failing that, trying to turn the laughter into something else, something...presentable. God. There goes the nightshirt, and there's the tits, and did she like all of her lovers short and plump, now? Jack had been short. And plump. But now he's—

There's the tits. Her taste? Since when did she have a taste in other women's breasts? When was the last time she'd slept with a girl? Before Shelby? That mousey little thing who didn't shave her armpits with the apartment that reeked of—there is no other word for it—cunt—nothing else is as earthy, as earth-mothery, as that smell—but that had been when, after the Dolls concert? Or that Anti-Folk thing? In the East Village, at least, which meant almost ten years ago, and she hadn't been plump, not at all, just skin and bones, but she had been short, and anyway the point was Morowitz had been straight since then, well, as straight as an almost entirely celibate person can be; there's been that on-again, off-again fling with Arthur in Berkeley, who was short, and the one night stand with the Jeff who turned out to be Dr. Jeffrey Davidoff at that conference in Ann Arbor, hadn't that been a laugh, but he had been neither short nor plump, and then, well—

"I said," said Shelby, "what's with the plant?" She was looking up with a Popeye scowl as her hands worked behind her back, twisting her bra around.

Morowitz shook her head. The plant. The orchid, to be precise, still drooping slightly in the absurd, cat-shaped vase stuck to the refrigerator with a magnet. Which Jack—which had been given to her over a week ago. Which she didn't recall watering. Not once. She didn't even really remember noticing it before now, waiting for the coffee-maker's death-rattle, and staying out of the living room, where Shelby was getting dressed. Why was she getting dressed in the living room? Oh. Right. Because that's where she'd gotten undressed, last night. Her shirts, both of them, were still lying sprawled across the back of Morowitz's favorite chair. Sloppy. Always leaving things lying around. Christ, Shelby's Tarot cards, still lying willy-nill across what multitasked as dining room table and study desk and bookshelf and filing cabinet. Her own papers, the wretched, wretched essays from Overview of Medieval Europe 135, shoved to one side, graded and as-yet unread all mixed together, fuck! And late last night, disentangling herself carefully from Shelby's sleep-heavy arms and legs so she could go to the bathroom, she'd stepped on Shelby's goddamn dildo, that ridiculously translucent pink thing that reminded her of those awful shoes everyone had worn, what, ten years ago, jellies, jellies, that's what they were called, jellied plastic, and it had been bad enough that she'd almost sprained her ankle, hell, almost fallen and broken something, maybe, but the damn thing, the pink plastic jelly thing, had been wet still, slimy, sticky, it had squished cold and soft and almost liquid under her toes, and she'd spent an eternity (or so it seemed) sitting on the toilet scrubbing her foot with a towel, trying to rid the awful feeling of cold and sticky and jelly from between her toes...

"It ought to be dead," said Morowitz.

"What?" said Shelby, reaching for her T-shirt.

"I said," said Morowitz, tugging on the belt of her robe, "it should be dead. I haven't watered it. You haven't watered it. In fact—" She reached out, plucked the vase from the refrigerator, shook it. The green and purple flower bobbed absurdly, but the vase was otherwise empty. Bone dry. "There's no water in it at all."

"Well, geeze," said Shelby. "Remind me never to buy you flowers."

"Like you'd ever buy me flowers," said Morowitz. She took the vase over to the sink but stopped before turning on the water, frowning.

"Well," Shelby was saying, "why should I? I mean, weren't you the one who wooed me? Aren't flowers and chocolates and holding doors the wooer's responsibility?"

"So I should buy you something from Victoria's Secret, is that what you're saying?" Jack had bought her the flower, and the vase, not two days before he—and wasn't that just like a man, to go and do something like that not two days before he, he flew off to Nome, Alaska, with her graduate student, and then they both— Jack—

Shelby was saying something. Had said something. Something like, "Well, if you really want something that cheap and tawdry..."

"The joke doesn't work," said Morowitz.

"What?" said Shelby, buttoning up her flannel shirt.

"The joke. Biology majors don't water plants any more. If they ever did. It's all molecular now, isn't it? I mean, you'd have to be talking about a Botany major, or something. Forestry."

"Lisa?" Shelby said, coming around the island that separated the kitchen from the living room. "Are you feeling okay?"

It's Professor Morowitz, you little undergraduate tramp, Morowitz didn't say.

"I mean," Shelby said, her mouth quirking in that half-smile, "there aren't any Botany majors. Not at Herschberg." Her hand reached out, squeezed Morowitz's shoulder, and it was all she could do not to flinch at Shelby's touch. "Not anymore."

Morowitz turned to turn on the water, and Shelby's hand mercifully fell away. The water crashed into the sink. Morowitz didn't move to fill the cat-shaped vase. After a moment, she shut the water off again. "Shelby," she said.

"Love?" said Shelby.

Morowitz bit her lip, and didn't say what popped into her head. Stay on target, she thought. Stay on target. "Do you ever," she said, and her hand was white-knuckled on the edge of the sink, she could see the veins bulging blue under her unhealthily pale skin, as if she'd been taking arsenic in tiny teaspoonfuls with her tea for the pallor. And why was it cat-shaped? What on earth was he trying—had he been trying to—she shook her head. Stay on target. "Do you ever," and she sighed, it was an effort, "find yourself thinking of," and her voice trailed off, and she took another breath, and Shelby, her heavy hand on Morowitz's shoulder again, Shelby, pale herself and plump and too, too young for her by any ethical or legal or, hell, aesthetic standard, Shelby said, "Professor Bitsumi?" in a weird, choked little voice, even as Morowitz finally managed to finish her thought with a whispered, "Jack?" They stared at each other. An uncomfortable silence reigned, punctuated only by the plop of a fat drop of water into the stainless steel sink.

•

It stepped out of that uncomfortable silence, so suddenly that the other it shrieked. "You!" The other it dashed behind the shorter, plumper person.

"Me," said the first it, drily. "Me, indeed."

"You—I—what do you—what—"

"I name you," said the first it, flicking a finger-shaped cloud of smoke the color of charcoal idly through the bobbing orchid, "Torpor and Apathy. Side-track. Hoodman Blind and Tip-of- Tongue Bane."

Each name wracked the other it, sending ambiguous gusts of greasy smoke sloughing off its face and hands, revealing a brief sheen of something dark and gleaming that made the shorter, plumper person reach up absently and rub her left eye with a fingertip. "Then I name you," it gasped, gasped Torpor, "I name you—Face-in-Frost! And, and Beneath-the-Bed!"

The first it, the Face, blinked twice, and raised what would have been an eyebrow in a suddenly bristly, scribbled face that wasn't really a face. "Now that the preliminaries are out of the way," it muttered.

"What do you want?" said Torpor.

The taller, older person did something to the sink. The water fell slowly, so slowly Torpor could watch the first few drops of the rush tumble and crash into the sink. The Face sighed and made a snapping sound with insubstantial fingers, startling Torpor.

"Please," said the Face. "Don't try to tell me about the stains in the stainless steel, or how pointless this makes the name, or anything else you're suddenly reminded of. Just tell me how long you've been here; that will do."

"I," said Torpor. "A, uh. A while."

"A while," said the Face. "And this," his scratchy, jumpy arm passing through both people lazily, though only the taller, older person seemed to feel it; she shivered and pulled her robe more tightly about her, "this is all you've accomplished?"

"This," sniffed Torpor, "is a personal project. I, I've been about the Dark's business, too."

"Yes, yes. Last night. Quite a few of us were. But before? During the 'while'?"

"I said that—I had been about, uh, the Dark's business. I think that's all I, I need to say."

"Well," said the Face. "There's the Dark, and then there's the Dark."

"You can't hurt me!" cried Torpor, sidling around to keep the shorter, plumper person between them.

"Whyever would I want to?" asked the Face, disingenuously. "Still. I think we should talk."

"I can't," said Torpor. "I can't leave them. I have to stay. I have to, to make sure they don't think of—him. Of him. That way. The—"

"Professor?" said the Face. Its smile was unpleasant. "I'd thought this was a personal project."

"It," said Torpor, "uh, is. It is. A side-effect?"

"Well," said the Face. "This side-effect won't dissipate too much in the few minutes it will take me to show you what it is I want to show you. If you should decide to return, you can rebuild it—and the memory of a lapse like this will, when you finally get around to pulling your scaffolding away and letting the scales drop from their eyes—I assume that's the point of this exercise? Remembering that they had remembered, once or twice, and still went about—this, well, that will make the ultimate collapse all the more sweet to savor." Now its eyes were unpleasant, too. "Won't it?"

"I hadn't, uh," said Torpor, "I hadn't, I mean—"

"You hadn't thought about it like that, had you."

"No. I mean—no. I hadn't."

"But trust me. You won't want to come back to—this. Not after seeing what I will show you." The Face stood to one side, gesturing as if there were a doorway through which Torpor ought to precede him. "What, by the way, was the point of the flower?"

"Flower?" said Torpor, with what passed for a foot dangling in the air, as if it had been caught in the middle of stepping over a threshold. "What flower?"

"I see," said the Face, frowning as much as it could be said to frown.

•

"—want to try to find out what I can about the stuff, still, I mean— Lisa? Lisa, what's—"

"Jack," said Morowitz. "Oh, God, Jack, you're, oh my God. Jack. You're dead. I—"

The cat-shaped vase, freshly poured water and thirsty orchid dropped from nerveless fingers and made a distant smash on the floor so very far below.

Somewhere, a phone began to ring.

•

Ain't no reason for it
Just a need to shout

Private First Class Eric "Squared" Ericsson leaned back against the wall and shook a Camel out of his crumpled, half-empty pack. He shivered, cursing the health-Nazi bureaucracy which forbade smoking indoors on this University campus. He could be in Iraq right now, had they drawn his reserve unit. Saudi Arabia, really. At least it was warm, there. "Yee hah," he said to himself, quietly; "yee fuckin' hah."

"Couldn't agree more, soldier," said a weary voice from somewhere behind him. He jumped and dropped his match, but it turned out to be a civilian paramedic, the guy with the sandy mustache he'd seen a couple of times already today. Cute, in a sandy-mustached kind of way, but this was neither the time nor the place. Squared offered up his Camels. The paramedic shook his head. Squared shrugged, and fished out another match. "Mind?"

"Your lungs."

Damn straight, Squared didn't say. He lit his smoke instead.

"Hell of a day," said the paramedic. "And not even noon, yet."

"I," said Squared, "was asleep at three o'clock this morning. At home. In a lovely warm bed. At three fifteen, I was awake. The phone had rung, you see. At four thirty, I was suited up and shivering my ass off waiting for a helicopter that didn't end up taking off for another two hours. Since then, I've been hustling crates of medical supplies from point A to point B. And back. And jugs of water, to boot." Squared sucked down a mouthful of smoke. "Yes." He blew it out explosively. "You could say it's one hell of a day."

"You're not medical, are you?"

Squared snorted. "Far from it. Motorized infantry." He tapped his unit patch on his sleeve. "First Brigade of the fighting Thirty-fourth. The Red Bulls."

The paramedic peered at it. "Attack, attack, attack?" he said, reading the slogan, a sandy eyebrow raised, hazel eyes—lovely hazel eyes, really—looking mischievous, but maybe mocking, too.

Okay. Maybe showing off the patch hadn't been such a good idea. "I didn't write it."

"Motorized infantry. Isn't that an oxymoron or something?"

The eyes were still mischievous. But maybe flirtatious, too— instead of mocking? Neither the time nor the place, of course. But what harm could a couple of minutes do anyone? "You're expecting consistency and intelligence from your Army National Guard?"

The paramedic nodded thoughtfully, conceding the point. "So maybe I don't know why we're taking blood samples from everyone in town, but at least that explains why the medical battalion—"

"Just a company, really—"

"—whatever. But why are you guys here?"

Squared smoked a moment, pondering the best way to answer that. The shortest and, truth be told, most honest would be to say, "Fucked if I know." But where would that leave things? And yet, while this paramedic was undoubtedly drinking now from the bottled water supply that had been flown in that morning—or the bottles that had been trucked in and unloaded two hours ago—it would probably not do to allude darkly to standing orders about not drinking the water and that sort of thing. Bad if that talk got back to the Sergeant or the Lieutenant or, God knew, Captain She-Bitch. Just be gnomic, he decided. "Well," he said, in a cloud of smoke, "the National Guard is only called out in times of natural disaster or civil disturbance..."

"So something's up with the water supply, that much is for sure..." said the paramedic, letting his sentence trail off suggestively, as well. I am being pumped! thought Squared delightedly, but he neglected to rise to the bait. "But that's hardly a natural disaster," finished the paramedic, lamely. "Or is it..?"

"Maybe," said Squared, grinning, "we were expecting more of a riot."

"Oh, but you're going to have one."

Squared blinked. "What?"

"You hadn't heard? Hang on—" The paramedic ducked through the double glass doors into the hallway, snatched something from the bulletin board just inside, and brought it back out. A flyer, copied on cheap red paper, with big black letters:

"Well," said Squared, peering at his cigarette—a couple of minutes left, maybe, if smoked judiciously—"They're protesting us." He chuckled. "Occupation of Herschberg. Who else would occupy it?"

"So?" said the paramedic.

"So," said Squared, "this can't be the riot we were expecting. That's like, post facto or something. Post hoc? Propter hoc? Whatever the fuck."

"Now who's expecting logic and consistency of the Army National Guard?"

Okay. Definitely flirtatious. So of course that would be the precise moment that Sergeant Striebek popped around the corner of the building. "Squared! The fuck you think you're doing?"

"Mandated rest break, Sarge," Squared said. "Five minutes every two hours."

"I'll mandate you if you don't round up Casey and the Lapp and Double-D and hustle your asses back to the hummers. Two minutes, let's go."

Squared had already stomped out his cigarette, and he looked apologetically at the paramedic, who had the grace to shrug. "What's up, Sarge?"

"You know as much as I do, Squared. Move!"

Just to make a point of not moving immediately—not at all because he thought he was in any way providing vital or heretofore unknown intelligence—Squared offered up the flyer. "You see this, Sarge?"

Sergeant Striebek, who was a security guard when he wasn't on active duty, frowned at it. "I don't know what the fuck we're doing with all this goddamn blood we're drawing," he said, after a moment, "but we sure as shit aren't trading it for oil."

Squared looked one last time at the paramedic as he double-timed after Striebek, and the paramedic looked right back, and it was pretty damn obvious to both of them that neither had any idea whether or not Striebek was being sarcastic.

•

It's malnutrition
We could fall apart

"'I regret,'" said Riggs, "'to say that we of the FBI are powerless to act in cases of oral-genital intimacy,'" and she leaned across the desk, driving each stressed syllable home with a finger jab in Captain McConnell's general direction, "'unless it has in some way obstructed interstate commerce.'"

"You're kidding," murmured Drasil, though it really wasn't her place, or her conversation.

"J.," said Riggs, triumphantly, "Edgar Hoover."

"That," said Captain McConnell, folding her arms and looking distinctly unimpressed, "is what you have taped over your desk?"

"Damn straight."

"To remind you of the absurd lengths to which the FBI has sometimes carried itself, no doubt," said Sheriff Little Bear, who was sitting next to Drasil, on the couch.

"No," said Riggs, her absurdly well-defined eyebrows—really, thought Drasil, she must use a French curve to guide her tweezers—arched in theatrically exaggerated dismay, "not at all. Far from it. It's there to remind me of what is possible—which is anything, anything at all—as long as one's paperwork is in order."

"There is no amount of paperwork in this world," said McConnell, her drawl slowly and carefully enunciated and as theatrically exaggerated, no doubt, as Riggs's expressions, "that will make any element of the 34th Division of the United States Army National Guard into a posse comitatus."

Gotcha there, thought Drasil, though really, the whole thing had pretty much been conceded, she thought, when Riggs had been obliged to come to the desk McConnell had commandeered in this rinky-dink University's administrative building, whatever the hell it was called, instead of McConnell stirring herself to go to Riggs's field headquarters at the Ramada Inn. Riggs took a deep breath. "You are directed to aid and assist the FBI in—"

"In containing civil unrest, enforcing water rationing, and organizing the logistics of testing the blood of everyone who gets their water from the Herschberg Municipal Reservoir." Drasil found herself wondering how on earth someone in the Minnesota National Guard ended up with such a thick West Virginia accent. Maybe it was some unconscious Good Ol' Boys tic, kind of like how all airline pilots end up talking like Chuck Yeager. Who, come to think of it, was from West Virginia, wasn't he? Maybe McConnell had done time in the Air branch— "Y'all's investigation," she was saying, leaning back in her chair and showily—brazenly—crossing her legs, "Agent Riggs, is a separate matter entirely."

"I," said Riggs, "am the ranking Federal operative on the ground—"

"And I'm a Captain in the Army National Guard," McConnell countered. "Your point?" And then she had the alacrity to look away, look up over Riggs's shoulder at the sergeant who'd come up to the doorway, tapping on the frame. "Yes?" said McConnell.

"C Company reports they're fully set up at the hospital, Captain. The 125th is assembling in Student Parking. Lieutenant Smythe wants to know the final word on the house-to-house."

"Captain," said Riggs, "I—"

"Just a minute," said McConnell, holding up her hand. "Doctor Drasil?"

Oh, fuck, thought Drasil. "Captain?" she said, and did her best to stifle the yawn that had suddenly snuck up on her.

"Are we still at six positives?"

She nodded. "So far." Since the blood testing had begun that morning, at the county hospital and in the University's gym complex, six individuals had tested positive for PMD80—three at each location, though it was hardly a statistically significant sample. And none of them was hallucinating, speaking in tongues, climbing the walls—or reporting their sudden disappearance, for that matter—and none of them, thank God, was showing any of the projected physical complications. Yet. Knock wood.

"And still no sign of contamination in the water supply?"

As Drasil opened her mouth to reply, Riggs jumped in. "None today," she said, brittlely. McConnell arched an eyebrow. Drasil nodded wearily, Riggs's temper tantrum of less than an hour ago still echoing in her memory. This is the last time I work with this woman, Drasil swore to herself. Hell or high water, it's the last time. "PMD80," she said, with a sigh, "is a sneaky, nasty, cranky little alkaloid with a nightmarishly complex structure that is, uh, I don't know, I'm running out of extreme descriptors. Really fucking volatile, okay? So—"

"So it could already have broken down," McConnell said, frowning.

Riggs leaped in. "No. No, it might well not have." She turned to Drasil. "Tell her about Bitsumi's theory."

"Just to check," asked Little Bear, "he's the guy that created this stuff for the government, right?"

Drasil sighed. "Well, one of his grants came from the NIH, and he did stumble over the stuff before anyone else did, as far as anyone knows. So that much is true. But—"

"If, ah, we could cut to the chase, Dr. Drasil?"

"Sorry, Captain. Bitsumi's notes—what I've seen of them—are terribly fragmentary, but he referred to what he called the molecule's 'holographic' nature. That the order of the whole would be implicit in any of its parts. I mean, you break it all the way down to carbon and hydrogen atoms and it's toast—but it could break down into simpler hydrocarbon structures that, under the right circumstances—"

"Could recombine." McConnell pursed her lips.

"That's—mostly—simple organic chemistry, though. Bitsumi thought a fragment could rebuild itself from scratch. That's the theory, anyway. I thought it was bullshit when I first read it—covering up bad methodology and shitty results with Outer Limits ramblings about viral alkaloids and a new form of proto-life."

"And now?"

"We have six positives already in the population, scattered across the water district—and yet no positives currently present in the water supply itself," said Riggs.

"Dr. Drasil?"

Drasil sighed, again. "I still think Bitsumi's full of shit. But there's some concern for false negatives in the water tests, yes, given that we had positives in the two days previous."

"And how do we rule that out?"

"Test and test again," said Drasil. "Get me water samples, at least a hundred, from randomly selected sites. And stop dragging me into these pointless meetings so I can grab some quality time alone with this baby, figure out how to test for the fragments it's most likely to break up into, and try to find those."

McConnell nodded. "Sergeant, have Smythe detail a squad at Dr. Drasil's disposal for expediting these water tests—do you have laboratory space, yet?"

"Excuse me," said Riggs, quietly—dangerously quietly, Drasil thought, even as she shook her head in response to McConnell. "I understand it's being seen to, but I haven't heard for sure, yet."

"Excuse me," said Riggs, a little louder, even as McConnell smiled thinly. "We'll see to that, Doctor. Sheriff, how's the town holding up so far?"

Little Bear harrumphed, and stirred, spreading her hands with a vaguely puzzled expression. "I, uh," she said, sounding irritated, and Drasil realized Little Bear hadn't yet sussed out that this wasn't a genuine request for information; this whole meeting had segued into a little show played out for Riggs's benefit—or detriment, as it were. But Little Bear's hesitation was enough to let Riggs get more than two words in edgewise. "Excuse me," she said, "but I would like to take this moment to point out that you are encroaching on my authority and usurping my—"

"Now," said McConnell, interrupting with breathtaking insouciance, "how on earth do you reckon it that way, exactly?"

"I—usurping, that is, my..." Riggs's mouth worked a moment in silent fury, chewing over what must have been the first time in recent memory she'd ever lost her elocutive momentum.

"I mean," said McConnell, "usurping... That's a mighty strong word. Especially when I'm doing everything I can—within the dictates of my mission—to give you and your people the resources you need."

Ouch, thought Drasil. That was broadly played. Too broadly, really; almost clumsy. And what about the Sergeant, who really ought to be tapping his foot impatiently right about now if he really were waiting to take word to Lieutenant Smythe? Then, perhaps the tone—shading on the farcical, really—was itself calculated? To drive home the point that this was nothing more, really, than a waste of everyone's time?

Whatever. It had worked in this much, at least: Riggs was—quite literally—speechless.

"Now," said McConnell. "Sheriff Little Bear?"

Little Bear looked at Riggs, then at McConnell, then back at Riggs.

"Sheriff?" said McConnell, again.

"There's nothing, really, to report yet," said Little Bear, still looking at Riggs. Whose left hand, Drasil noted, was clenching and unclenching with metronomic regularity. "Nobody's rioting in the streets, that's about it. I don't have any meaningful numbers on turnout yet, myself—might be a good idea for your boys to do a census of wristbands, see how many have been tested so far, coordinate that with the hospital's records. And there's the university to worry about, this protest over—I think it's supposed to be Iraq—"

"I don't think that will be a problem," said McConnell. "Symbolic, mostly, and very little to do with why we're actually here. I've already agreed to the basic agenda drawn up by the Ad Hoc Protest Consensus—I think that's what they're calling themselves. We've set the handoff for fifteen thirty."

"Handoff?" asked the Sheriff, frowning.

"Their list of demands. There'll be a parade up to this building, lots of chanting and drumming—'Hey, hey, ho, ho,' that sort of thing, then some representative will hand me their list of demands."

"Is that smart?" asked Little Bear. Riggs's hand, Drasil noted, was now still—except for the twitching of her middle finger.

"Standard practice, really," said McConnell. "Oh, we might have some human chains or something similar—we've got a meeting with the Civil Disobedience Committee to hammer out those details in—" she checked her watch—"twenty-two minutes, actually. You probably want to be there, yourself, but I wouldn't worry too much—my, ah, 'boys' are fully trained in urban crowd control. Girls, too." She leaned back, looked out the door at the Sergeant, who was smiling, just a little. "Sergeant, let's go with Plan B on the house-to-house: leaflets, five-gallon drums, one per family or equivalent group—add the census of wristbands, that's a good idea—but no dragging people in, yet. Friendly but firm reminders."

"Sir," said the Sergeant, snapping off a parade-ground salute and departing with showy alacrity.

"Now," said McConnell, who wasn't smiling at all, "anything else?"

"I would," said Riggs, resting her hands on the edge of McConnell's desk and leaning down to peer directly into the Captain's cold blue eyes, "respectively request, once again, your assistance in our search of the Hiawatha Towers apartment complex for material evidence pertaining to this terrorist attack upon the water supply of a city within the American heartland."

And then McConnell burst into a bright and sunny smile. "God damn," she said, "but that would sound just amazing on the TV, wouldn't it? Too bad there's a press blackout." She leaned forward until her nose was maybe an inch from Riggs's and looked up into the agent's blazing brown eyes. "Posse comitatus," she said. "I take my limitations very seriously, Agent. I suggest you do so, as well."

For maybe a minute, nobody moved. Little Bear sniffed, once, and Drasil nearly jumped.

Then McConnell said, without moving, "Now. Y'all don't mind, I've got some busy-work to see to."

Riggs's jaw clenched and unclenched and clenched again. Then she pushed off from McConnell's desk and without a word spun about and marched out of the office. Drasil blinked and leaped to her feet, followed somewhat more slowly by Little Bear.

In the hall, Little Bear went left instead of right. Drasil frowned. "Sheriff?"

"No offense," said Little Bear, quietly, "but I don't exactly want to have anything to do with the FBI at the moment."

"Look," said Drasil, "I know she can be difficult—"

"Difficult?" Little Bear threw her hands into the air. "I have no idea what she thinks is going on at the Hiawatha, but if she's managed to get a warrant for her search, I'm a monkey's uncle, okay? She's looking for patsies, is my guess, which means I want as much plausible deniability as I can possibly get my hands on. Let the two of them butt heads, just leave my boys out of it." She shook her head. "'Plan B.' What the hell was Plan A, I wonder."

"Nonexistent?"

"Now, if you'll excuse me," said the Sheriff, not seeming at all to register Drasil's attempt to be friendly, "I have a Civil Disobedience meeting to avoid. Maybe I'll send Graves; that might be funny..."

"Iggy!" bellowed Riggs, from somewhere around a corner.

"That's, uh, my cue," said Drasil, to Little Bear's departing back. Sighing, Drasil headed the other way, to see Riggs's terribly sensible hairdo bouncing up a flight of steps, a field phone held to one ear. "You sure?" she was saying. "You sure? You're positive? Christ, it's Johnson? That son of a bitch?" Seeing Drasil, she pulled the phone away, shutting it off. "Come on. We're going to the hospital."

"Uh," said Drasil. "I should maybe stay, figure out what sort of lab set-up they've got available—"

"Doctor. You are neither deaf nor a congenital idiot. Therefore I'm going to presume I wasn't entirely clear in my intent: you are going, with me, to the hospital. The NSA has shown up, and they've just confiscated your blood samples."

Drasil blinked, and blinked again. I have, she thought, no response to that. Riggs certainly seemed to expect one, though. "I, uh," Drasil said, and she took a deep breath, "shouldn't we maybe tell the Captain about this?"

"I," said Riggs, as quietly as Drasil feared, "have no intention of feeding that cracker bitch one more iota of intelligence until I know exactly what is going on. Now—you. Me. Hospital. Now."

Right, thought Drasil, like I can do anything, anything at all, and she was opening her mouth to say something to this effect, when she saw one of those No Blood For Oil posters which someone had managed to stick on a message board on the landing. Her half-thought words turned into a bark of laughter, which she did her best to smother.

"Doctor?" said Riggs, sharply.

"Nothing, Riggs. Nothing at all."

You can take the girls out of the patriarchy... she thought to herself as she followed Riggs back down the stairs, and she had to cover her mouth with her hand. A second burst of laughter—hell, even an inopportune smile—wouldn't be prudent. Not at all.

•

It's never delicate
Like something from the Iron Age

So the Army medic hadn't rolled up Jens's sleeve or thumped his elbow or anything else Jens had been expecting; he'd just pricked Jens's finger and squeezed it, ouch, until a couple of fat drops slid slowly into a needle-thin tube—a pipette? Is that what they were called?—and then pressed a small round band-aid on the tip, ouch again, and wrapped the band-aid's wings around with deft, confident motions. Thirty seconds, tops.

"That's it?" said Jens.

"That's it." The medic had tagged the pipette with a UPC label which, Jens figured, matched up with the code on his questionnaire, and now was fumbling about in a tub filled with strips of shiny plastic strips in an assertively artificial shade of chartreuse. He plucked one up and grabbed Jens's wrist, quick as a—well, not a snake, exactly, but something fast. The strip was whipped around Jens's wrist and fastened with a simple snapping mechanism like a hospital wristband—which, Jens realized, it pretty much was. "What's this?" he asked.

"Don't, whatever you do, take it off," said the medic. "This is how we're keeping track of who's been tested and who hasn't."

"Oh."

"So scram already," said the medic. "Next!"

The gym was pretty full of university students and faculty and staff milling about, peppered with soldiers and medics in olive fatigues, all of them wearing the red bull patches of the 34th Division ("Attack! Attack! Attack!"), though it seemed to Jens's eye there were elements of at least two battalions milling about purposefully: an FSB, to be sure, what with the medics and all, but also some guys from an infantry battalion, to judge by their unit patches, loitering by the door in full BDUs and shotguns prepped with crowd-control beanbags. He hoped. And he'd seen more infantry guys loitering about Student Parking, where a whole line of jeeps and those ugly (but cool) new trucks—what were they called? Humvees, right—were parked. Heading out through the doors now, between the armed Guardsmen (not making eye contact; no one was), he looked over to see that two semis had pulled up, towing grey, unmarked trailers. Guardsmen were unloading pallets stacked with what looked like five gallon jugs of—of course. Water.

It hadn't been too hard to figure out everybody thought something was up with the water supply; the questionnaire everyone was supposed to fill out before the blood test was full of questions about when you'd last used tap water, and where, and the time before that, and where, going back five or six times, and if you'd drunk it or showered or washed your hands or what, like anyone could recall all those details, but hey, no reason not to do your best to try and help out, right? Jens was half convinced this was all some kind of elaborate drill; he'd read about the latest trend in urban SWAT teams running counter-terrorist assaults with full National Guard back-up—like the exercise that had used that empty office complex in downtown Houston last summer. This was undoubtedly something similar, except with the dicey addition of civilians to the mix. If something really had been done to the water supply, you'd think something would've, well, happened. People would be sick, or, well, dying. Maybe. And it would be hard to hide that sort of thing. Right? In a town this size? Or if it was a drug—LSD, say, or (ha) fluoride—people would be seeing things, hallucinating, and that would be—

Oh. Right.

Jens shook his head. She wasn't an hallucination. He'd tripped before. He wasn't tripping now.

Still. Drill or not, he was going to obey the dire warnings in the xeroexed pamphlets: DO NOT DRINK OR USE TAP WATER OR ANY WATER THAT HAS NOT COME FROM A PURIFIED AND SEALED CONTAINER. He'd be sticking to Guard water or fruit juice or soda or, what the fuck, whiskey, it was close enough to noon, and anyway, the sun was over the yardarm somewhere. And anyway again, he needed it. How often does the town get invaded the same day as you start to lose your mind, after all?

His feet had automatically taken himself to the back entrance of McBain, the one that opened on the Rocquelaire Quadrangle, and he was tugging absent-mindedly at the door handle, which appeared to be locked. Right—McBain was one of the first dorms with the new swipe locks. Jens patted down his second-hand camel coat, looking for his wallet, which he found stashed for whatever reason in his front pants pocket. His dining card was inside; swipe it through the little box by the door, wait for the clunk of the magnetic lock disengaging, and then, inside.

Elgin's room was up on the second floor, past a couple of Coke machines and a snack machine filled with those Hostess Fruit Pies—Jens, who foreswore berries of any type as a general rule, found the blueberry pies curiously unsatisfying, yet impossible to resist (though lemon would do in a pinch)—and a community board which seemed to have been avalanched with crudely xeroxed fliers reading NO BLOOD FOR OIL in a rainbow of cheap copyshop stationery colors. Jens shrugged and leaped up the stairs, covering two or three with every lanky stride. It occurred to him halfway up that it might have profited him to have called first, seen if Elgin was in—he shrugged, and kept going.

The corner lounge at the end of the hall was filled to overflowing, and more of those fliers were scattered everywhere—blood for oil? What? Something to do with Kuwait, or something—Jens stumbled over the memory of an old Doonesbury strip, Zonker registering for the draft: "Would you be willing to die to protect the overseas interests of oil companies?" Something like that. Loud, vaguely punkish music was playing, something Jens half- recognized: "Men were executed, women bled, beasts and fish changed hands and children stayed up late..." Then something about a taxidermist. "Only the stones remain," went the chorus. He was pretty sure. Damned if he could remember who sang it. He raised his hand to knock on Elgin's door, which was utterly bare except for a single postcard print, of Frederic Edwin Church's Syria by the Sea.

"Hey," said someone from down the hall before Jens could knock. Jens peered down the hall. Someone was standing in the doorway of the lounge, peering at him, a skinny guy with bushy hair and granny glasses with tiny clear lenses. "The stones have forgotten them," went the music behind him. "You got tested?" "The stones have forgotten them..."

"Uh," said Jens, shrugging. "Tested?"

"You've got an armband," said the skinny guy, pointing, the glare from the fluorescent lights on his glasses blanking his eyes. Jens looked. His upraised wrist, the one waiting to knock, was, indeed, the one with the wristband. "Did you get tested?"

"Yeah?" said Jens.

"What are you, some kind of idiot?" said the skinny guy. A couple of other people were milling behind him. "Did he get tested?" "He got tested." "He's wearing an armband."

"Sorry?" said Jens, hand still waiting to knock.

"Do you know," said a girl in a Che Guevara T-shirt and black jeans, "what the Army did in San Francisco in the early '70s?"

Jens blinked. "You mean the one where they put a tank of flu virus in the trunk of a car and drove around pumping it into the air and then sat back and monitored spikes in the numbers of deaths from flu and pneumonia?"

The girl in the Che Guevara T-shirt had raised her hand to make a point; she frowned, opened her mouth, then closed it again. "Right," she said. "That one. Yeah. So. You know."

"And you still went to get tested?" said the skinny guy.

"This is the National Guard," said Jens.

Elgin opened his door at that point, about to say something, pipe in hand for rhetorical flourishing, when he saw Jens standing there. "Oh," he said. He lowered the pipe. "I was coming out to complain once again about the vociferous nature of the—one hesitates to call them debates of a political nature, per se; in fact, one hesitates to call them debates at all—but if you're involved, Jens —"

"No," said Jens, hastily, "no. Not at all. I was just, ah—"

"MK Ultra!" yelled the skinny guy.

"Look," said Jens, rolling his eyes, "it's just a blood test, okay?" He waved his band-aided finger at them. "They think there's something up with the water—"

"It's just a front," said the girl in the Che Guevara T-shirt.

"Yeah!" said the guy in the stained Lick Bush in '88 T-shirt. "It's a crack-down! Something big is going down in Iraq and they want to pre-emptively strike at the voices of dissent!"

"At the rate of a couple of battalions of National Guard per college campus? To stifle protest? And you're going to, what—protest this?"

"I should probably point out," said Elgin, flourishing his pipe, "that logic does little good at this point—"

"Send George Bush!" someone chanted. The rest began to fill in. "Send Dan Quayle! Send Neil Bush when he gets out of jail!"

"I warned you," said Elgin.

"Actually," said Jens, "that's not half-bad."

"I came up with it," said the guy in the Lick Bush T-shirt.

"You did not!" said the skinny guy.

Jens grinned distractedly. "Look, I'm just going to," and he stepped into Elgin's room, as Elgin stepped out of his way. The door blocked most of the sounds of the ensuing scuffle.

"What can I do for you, dear boy?" asked Elgin.

"Um," said Jens, "I, uh, just want to borrow your Warhammer book. You haven't been to get tested yet?"

"No," said Elgin, running his hand along the overstuffed unpainted bookshelf by his bed. "I was using the unexpected downtime to catch up on a few things. I imagine there's something of a line?"

"Not much," said Jens. "At least, not at the gym. Maybe everyone's paranoid, like those guys down the hall. They're also set up at the hospital across town—I don't know what that looks like."

Elgin nodded. "I never expected you for taking up miniatures," he said.

"Huh?" said Jens. "Oh. No. I meant the role-playing book."

"Oh!" said Elgin, tapping his teeth with the stem of his pipe. "Of course you did. Silly me. Doing something with Brielle?"

Jens blinked.

"Jens?" said Elgin, pulling down a battered hardbound book with a lurid cover painting, like a Tolkien battle reimagined by a football hooligan.

"Huh? Oh. No. I mean, Scott was maybe thinking of running a new campaign, and I wanted to see about, you know, refreshing my memory. That sort of thing."

"Hmm," said Elgin. "That could be fun. The last game was quite the doozy, eh? So would you be bringing Brielle back?"

"I don't, I don't know," said Jens, taking the book from Elgin. "I mean, it's just a whim, at the moment. And playing her was kind of—intense." His hand, he noted, did not shake unduly.

"Well," said Elgin, "it could be fun to have her and Cannon run into each other again. Let Scott know I'm up for it, if he'd like."

"Roger," said Jens. "Wilco. Now. I'd probably better—you might want to head out and get tested, you know."

"What, and get brainwashed?" Elgin tapped his teeth thoughtfully with the pipestem. "My frontal lobes could use a good cleaning..." He burst into what never ceased to be an alarmingly goofy grin, given his face and his glasses and his usual demeanor. "Sorry. Something about being invaded brings out the frivolity in me."

"That's, ah, okay. Thanks, Elgin. I'll get this back to you as soon as I'm done with it."

"No rush," said Elgin. "We seem to be in the middle of a civil emergency, after all."

It occurred to Jens as he made his way off campus that maybe lying to Elgin ought to feel worse than it did. He turned it over in his mind—he'd been nervous and rattled, but more because of his distraction and his general ineptitude at, well, lying, than any qualms over lying to Elgin in particular. It would be embarrassing, if Elgin happened to bump into Scott at some point in the next couple of days, and mention a non-existent Warhammer game. Though if Jens were to get to Scott first—suggest a possible hook for a sequel, a second run (though, more than most of his games, Scott's Warhammer run last summer had been a neatly contained "pocket-epic," as it had been coined; coming up with a sequel idea would be tough, very tough—and no matter what Elgin might like, the idea of Cannon and Brielle meeting again was—unpleasant, to say the least)—but if he could, and Scott decided to go with it, then it wouldn't technically speaking have been a lie—at least, in the technical sense that Elgin would never find out. But since Jens hadn't felt bad about lying to Elgin in the first place, this idea didn't really make him feel that much better.

He didn't open the book or look in it at all on his way home, even when he was waiting for the walk sign to light up to cross Main Street.

The Ministry of Truth, the house across the street from the one Jens and Lori and Alan had ended up naming the Taupe House out of lassitude more than anything else, had a giant hand-painted banner hanging over its sagging front porch:

Which, all things considered, was the most sensible thing Jens had seen or heard all day.

Alan was, of course, downstairs, still in his lounging ensemble of black T-shirt and plaid boxers, his legs (unduly skinny, considering the rest of him) half-tucked under the sour yellow thermal blanket which was inextricably entangled with the springs in the half-busted sleeper sofa. The television was on, but the sound was muted; a talking head was saying something about a Grandma Murderer, to judge from the graphic floating over his shoulder.

"Nothing about us on the telly," said Alan. "Did they tell you what's going on?"

"They're concerned there's something in the water," said Jens.

"Explains why the water main seems to have been shut off," said Alan.

"You should go—they want to test everybody, see if whatever it is is, I don't know, at large or whatever."

Alan nodded. "Lori took off yesterday, right?"

"Yeah, her flight was last night. Lucky her. Why?"

Alan sort of shrugged. "I thought I heard someone upstairs, is all."

Jens swallowed. "Oh. Well." But Alan didn't seem to think much of it; his attention remained focussed on the mute television. So Jens shrugged, and went upstairs.

She wasn't, apparently, a hallucination. And she was, apparently, still there.

It hadn't really occurred to him, what might have happened after he left. He hadn't been thinking about it much at all, really, and the sudden and unexpected presence of the National Guard and the rapidly escalating sideshows had been a welcome opportunity not to do just that. But he'd managed, nonetheless, to get what he'd desultorily set out to find, and he was back, and in the meantime, she might easily have wandered around, scared the shit out of Alan—and confused him no end—or worse—or better?—left, gone wandering about the town, bumped into a soldier or a cop or... Yeah. Right. She'd have gone wandering about in the frigid November day in just a blanket. She might have borrowed some of his clothes, or Lori's, even. Assuming she could figure out how to work a zipper.

The fact she hadn't seemed to have done any of these things didn't make him feel any better, though. She was, after all, still there.

Jens knew he had something of a reputation among his friends as something of a womanizer, which he'd never really done much of anything to dispel; it was more amusing than not, and, really, on the relative scale of things, more true than not. But the number of times he'd woken up next to a naked woman he did not know and had no memory of meeting was far less than his friends might suppose; it had, in fact, never happened to Jens—Sarah Anne didn't count; neither remembered hooking up the night before, to be sure, but they did know each other, and besides, she hadn't been naked. It had never happened, that is, before this morning.

He'd sleepily rolled over and bumped into the solid warmth of another person and he'd automatically shifted to spoon himself against her, laid his cold hand against the welcome warmth of her bare hip, murmured something—and she'd started awake, her head whipping to one side, cracking against his temple, one hand thrashing out from under the layered nest of blankets, an ankle kicking him in the shin, and all the while saying something it took his befuddled brain far too long to realize wasn't really English. He was waking up fast and trying to remember who and what and where and when, lifting himself on an elbow, saying something like, "Hey, hey," when she jackknifed, kicking herself off the bed and falling to the floor and scrabbling away from him. That first icy spike of recognition had driven itself in when she'd run into the wall and rolled over, hands up to protect herself, eyes wide with fear and fierce with determination and green, so very green, her dark red hair carelessly chopped short, the jagged white streak that had grown over the scar where the Chaos-tainted hobgoblin had once slashed her scalp with that polluted dagger—

He'd sat back on the bed, stunned. She'd stayed crouched against the wall, shivering, and she asked him something in a voice much calmer than he'd've been able to manage, given the circumstances, and what she'd said had sounded vaguely Germanic, but more vaguely like French. And he couldn't shake the conviction that even though he'd never seen her before in his life, he knew her. Quite well. Knew she was terrified; knew it had less to do with him and with the mystery of her sudden presence in this room than it did with the cold and relentless rage that burned within her and that she tried to control or at the very least channel; knew she liked the feel of cold metal and silk and emeralds as green as her eyes and more silliness besides, that he'd written last spring when he'd first gotten the idea in his head to play her in Scott's game; knew she'd started as a thief apprenticed to the great Elspet of Altdorf, in Brionne, City of Thieves; knew she'd gone on to become a highly paid courtesan and assassin in the Tilean City States; knew she'd begun studying sorcery in the hopes of controlling her temper, which had always been something more than just herself; knew she hated mornings and breakfast and most men and chirpily phlegmatic dwarves named Cannon and many more things besides with that same terrifying cold fury always rooted deep within her gut; knew that if he kept thinking like this he would go as mad as he seemed already to have gone, knew this was, this had to be some sort of hallucination or mistake or prank or something—and he knew it couldn't possibly be. This was her, somehow here. He had to deal with this as a fact, and proceed from there.

If nothing else—well, how would you explain the ear?

She was standing in front of the window when he opened the door to his room, and she turned, a little startled, when he stepped in. She'd figured out zippers after all—she was wearing a pair of his black jeans and a sweater and everything seemed to fit okay except for the length of sleeves and trouser legs which made, he thought, an odd sort of sense. The sunlight shown through her hair, setting it aflame, a glare, a fiercely burning nimbus that didn't begin to touch the leathery brown keloid monstrosity sweeping up along the left side of her head like a ragged bat's wing, past the streak of white hair, the knobbed tip bobbing a full two inches above the crown of her head. Where the demon Viydagg had touched her with one long blue pestilent nail, so very long ago, in that tower on the edge of the Wastelands, where her father had taken her to die.

Jens stood there, Elgin's battered fantasy role-playing book in his hands, and he felt small and foolish. Embarrassed to see his thoughts—such as they had been—bodied forth. As if he ought to apologize, for having saddled her with quite so many cliches.

"Um," he said.

"Been on Dante," she said, quite clearly.

He blinked. "I'm sorry?" he said.

"Been on Dante," she said. "Been. On. Dante." Her voice was pleasant, clear, if a little nasal. He realized he'd never really heard her voice before, for all the times he'd spoken for her.

"I, uh," he said, wondering what that meant in imaginary pseudo-French, and how on earth anyway a language never really imagined in any detail could be used for thought or language, "I brought this book," he said, holding it up, "this book, just to, um, check on..." She was peering at the book in his hands, and smiling broadly, if quizzically. He beckoned her over, sat down on the bed, opened it up. She stood next to him as he flipped through the pages, looking for the map. He tried to remember what it had felt like, playing her. Pretending to be her. He had a memory of a memory, a dim echo of the rage and the frustration he'd felt, that had always felt oddly cleansing, that he'd never really poked at too much at the time. But trying to call it back up now was difficult, if not impossible. What with—he presumed—the real thing standing right beside him, and all.

The map. Bretonnia—pseudo-France—fell in the middle of the two-page spread. There, just north of the Irrana Mountains, where the River Brienne flowed into the Great Western Ocean, was Brionne, City of Thieves. His finger pointed it out to her. "Brionne?" he said, his heart in his throat. He pointed to her. "Brielle d'Brionne?"

She sat next to him, looking down at the map in the book, her face lit up with something like wonder. When he said her name, she frowned, but did not look at him. Her fingers touched the page, running along the river Brienne, brushing his. Then moving across the page to brush the far-off city of Kislev, near the Wastelands. Her father's tower. The demon Viydagg.

"Brielle?" he said.

She looked at him, then, and her green, green eyes were sad. She shook her head.

He reached out before he thought and touched her left ear, stiff and hard under his fingertips, but warm. She flinched but did not pull away. "Brielle?" he said again, his voice quiet.

He let her take the book from his lap. She flipped clumsily through the slick pages, looking at the insanely detailed black-and-white washes of claustrophobic European cities straight out of the Hundred Years War, pausing to smile at the page of color photographs of painted lead miniatures. She wandered into the section on the Gods of the Old World, and stopped, her fingers hovering over the badly drawn pen-and-ink portrait of Ranald Trickster, God of Thieves and Gamblers, and her fingers brushed the black cat, the magpie, the scattered cards and dice. They crossed in unconscious obeisance. "Ranald," she said, clearly.

"Khaine," he said, his voice thick.

She looked at him sharply. "Khaine?" She shook her head, and said something in that liquidly sibilant pseudo-French.

He grabbed her left hand, gently, but firmly. She started, but did not pull away.

He turned it over.

There, on the palm, the angry red inch-and-a-half of half-healed cut, where she'd started to run the edge of a knife at least once a day or so, offering up the pain and the blood to Khaine, Lord of Murder, out of an inchoate desire to appease something, anything, as much as any other reason.

"Khaine," he said.

She stared down at her palm.

"Brielle," he said. "You're Brielle. You must be. It makes no sense, but there's no other explanation."

She was shaking her head, slowly, and she looked at him, biting her lip. She started to say something else, squeezed her eyes shut, and suddenly lashed out, punching the wall behind her with the heel of her hand. The plaster cracked and buckled under the impact, and Jens pushed back. "Hey!" he said. "Hey!"

"Been on Dante," she said, her voice frantic. "Been on Dante. Been on Dante."

"I don't," he said, reaching out to touch her, try to calm her somehow, "I don't understand—" She darted up then and scrambled through the clutter on the shelves at the foot of his bed, looking for something—and popping up triumphantly with his toothpaste.

His toothpaste? She'd gone to the bathroom, fumbled around, found his toothpaste and brought it back here? And this was supposed to have something to do with her Dante fixation? She held it out to him. "Been on Dante!" she said.

He blinked.

She stomped her foot, then thrust it out at him. He peered it at helplessly. Rolling her eyes, she jerked it back to herself, waving it under her nose and sniffing ostentatiously, then thrusting it back at him. She'd unscrewed the top at some point, and made a mess with it, no doubt. He sniffed. It smelled like toothpaste. Like fennel toothpaste, to be precise, which he bought not because it was all-natural but because he liked the taste. He shrugged. "Fennel?" he said. "I don't—it's toothpaste, I—" She was bobbing her head up and down. "Fennel?" he said again.

She set the tube down triumphantly. "Fennel," she said. "Fennel. Been on Dante." She tapped her chest, pointed at him, and made general shooing gestures with her hands. Out there, somewhere, she seemed to be saying. "Been on Dante. Been on Dante!"

Well, thought Jens, I can at least take comfort in the fact that I'm not the only one who's lost his mind.

•

Well we shake it up
And we break it down
We're the Voice of America
In your hometown

"Homeboy, Crack Pipe. Homeboy, Crack Pipe, over."

"Crack Pipe, Homeboy. Over."

"Homeboy, Crack Pipe. We have a situation, repeat, situation. Map grid 7A, corner of Marlowe and Elm, request back-up to flank down Elm from direction of downtown, copy."

"Crack Pipe, Homeboy. Ghetto Blaster is in position and will head down Elm in your direction, advise. What is the nature of the situation, over."

Squared lowered the handset of the radio, peering past Privates Catherine "Casey" Kasiewicz and Jan "the Lapp" Lappalainen, and Sergeant Pep Striebek, shotguns ready but pointed down, to see the three individuals—hard to say if they were men or women, in those long grey cloaks—on horseback. Horses. The fucking cops were supposed to have the equestrian units in these situations. Not the protestors. Or whatever the fuck. Terrorists? On horseback?

"Crack Pipe, Homeboy. Advise."

Squared looked over at Edd "Double-D" Peterssen, behind the wheel of the hummer. Double-D just shrugged. "Homeboy, Crack Pipe. Three individuals on horseback. Repeat, on horseback. We do not know if they are armed. Unknown if they are armed. They refuse to dismount or stand down. Over."

"Just get down off your horses," Striebek was bellowing. "Come on, get down."

"Crack Pipe, Homeboy. Ghetto Blaster should be in position."

Squared could see the other Guard unit turning the corner, a jeep loaded with jugs of water paced by four men, shotguns and—fuck—a rifle out and ready. "Homeboy, Crack Pipe. We see them."

The riders saw them, too. The one Squared presumed was the leader wheeled his horse around, and the horse kicked up a little at the sound of the jeep; the other two horses backed and filled nervously. Striebek was frantically signaling the other Sergeant, waving them to approach slowly. The lead horse nut suddenly threw his hand in the air and Squared's heart stopped until he saw there was nothing in it and apparently everybody else did, too, since no one opened fire.

"We are," said the lead horse nut, his horse kicking back around to face them, "the Sleepers!" The guy's voice was deep and loud and ringing, and his breath fogged the air before him alarmingly, as if it were a lot colder around him than anywhere else. "We seek," he cried, and his horse bucked some more, "the Benandanti! The Good Walkers! Take us to them!"

"Okay," Striebek was saying, "okay, come on down off those horses and we'll take you. Okay? Come on down so nobody gets hurt."

"You will take us to them?" said another of the nuts, and this one sounded like a woman from one of those British TV shows on PBS. "The Fennel Bearers?"

"Just come on down and we'll get you sorted out," Striebek said.

The lead horse nut swung off his horse suddenly, decisively. It looked like he was dressed entirely in grey, down to a really snazzy pair of boots. The other two were also dismounting. Casey took up the reins for two of the horses, and the third rider handed his over to the Lapp. The Sergeant led the three of them to the hummer. They looked shitty, their hoods thrown back: pale, and skinny, and cold, and, well, washed-out. Most unpleasant of all were their eyes—a milky, almost silvery sheen seemed to cover them. This is what you got from drinking the water? Shit. The leader, who wore a beard which might have been blond, put his pale hands carefully on the side of the hummer, where they shivered, lightly.

"Just climb on into our horseless carriage," said the Sergeant, "and we'll run you along to the whoever-the-hell, these Walkers."

"We must," said the leader, "speak with the Benandanti. The Seven have been called. These are dire times."

"Yeah, yeah," said the Sergeant. "You're telling me."

"Um," said Squared, and then he thumbed on the handset. "Homeboy, Crack Pipe. Homeboy, Crack Pipe, over."

"Crack Pipe, Homeboy, go ahead."

"Homeboy, we have them in custody, no sweat. Breaking route to take them to the hospital as per standing orders, over."

"Crack Pipe breaking route, noted. Advise as soon as you've arrived at the hospital. Over."

"One more thing, Homeboy."

"Crack Pipe, Homeboy. What's your question, Squared? Over."

"Homeboy, Crack Pipe. What the hell do we do with the horses? Please advise. Over."

•

  
Well we shake it up
And we break it down
The sound of a satellite
Saying get me down

Pokey looked up. The furry little creature on his desk shuddered and looked away.

"You're, ruh," Pokey cleared his throat, "you're sure about this?"

The furry little creature nodded. "The Chairman really ought to know about this, is what I'm thinking, you know? I mean, you agree?"

"Chairman's out."

The furry little creature flattened itself, its hackles fluttering in dismay.

Pokey sighed. "Chairman's out cleaning up one mess and Herschberg decides to go to hell and back. This is not happening."

"It's going to be war, I think," the furry little creature said, "war, and no mistake."

"Certainly looks like that's what he wants, doesn't it." Pokey leaned over and punched the talk button on his intercom. Nifty invention, intercoms. To say nothing of telephones. He wanted one of those little portable ones, you could put it in your shirt pocket, take it anywhere, talk to anybody you wanted. "Find Elomina and Gedobonai and get them in my office, would you?"

"You're, what I'm thinking, see," the little furry creature was saying, "is that you're going to kill me. So I just wanted to let you know that I'd be willing to forgive, if that were the case. I know the score, I do."

Pokey shook his head and then grimaced at the twinge it produced. He had to break that habit. A simple "No," would have sufficed. "No," he said. "Half the Dark going walkabout in Minnesota is too big to sweep under the rug like that. But I would run away for a while, if I were you. Head out into the tundra, say, except it's going to be quite dark hereabouts for the next few months. Go south, find yourself a nice patch of sunlight. Sleep it off. We'll be in touch."

"Thank you. Oh, thank you. Thank you." The little furry creature licked Pokey's palm and then bounded down off his desk and out the door, past two small, childlike forms dressed all in green.

"You, uh," said one.

"Wanted to see us?" said the other.

"Boys," said Pokey, "I need to get to End of the Line as soon as fucking possible."

•

  
We get it right sometimes
We shine a light sometimes
We see the fish below the ice sometimes

—most concerned about the reputed death of Salamiel—

Alastair knelt before the mirror and did his very best to clear his thoughts of any image of that fat fuck Vikram the vyrolakos and instead focussed on the map on the ground before him. He daubed the tiny black spot next to the words "End of the Line" with a touch of saliva, and he muttered, "My spittle." He rubbed his fingers along his glistening forehead and daubed that on the spot, and muttered, "My sweat." He grimaced as he bit his thumb, hard, and smeared the blood firmly onto the map, muttering, "My blood."

—really think you should take a look at this—

Pokey. Pokey, actually, was okay. The rage was good, there. Focus it. Use it. He wouldn't be doing this incredibly stupid and dangerous thing if Pokey hadn't found out what he'd found out. Go with it. He repeated the daubings on the mirror, in the middle of his reflected face, calm and too still in the dim light: blood, and sweat, and spit. Tears would have been overkill, really.

—possible retribution over the death of the last of the Egoroi—

Shut up, Vikram. He picked up the candle stub and held it before his reflection and closed his eyes. When he opened them, it was lit.

—seven impossible things before breakfast—

He began to murmur. "How many miles to Babylon? Three-score miles and ten. Can I get there by candlelight? Yes, and back again. Yes, if your feet are nimble and light, you can get there by candlelight."

Nimble and light, he thought, and he stood, the candle flame fluttering with the passage of air. "How many miles to Babylon?" He placed one foot on the map. "Three score miles and ten. Can I get there by candlelight?" He lifted his other foot and placed the toe against the mirror, touching its reflection, only the narrow width of the pane of glass separating them. Nimble and light. "Yes, and back again." He pushed. His foot and its reflection met, and began, slowly, to pass into each other. He did his best not to notice how impossible this was, and was more successful than not. "Yes, if your feet are nimble and light," and now his calf was pushing through, and his knee, and somewhere on the other side he felt his foot touch ground, and he shifted his weight, evenly balanced on both feet, "you can get there by candlelight."

With a grunt, Alastair stepped through the mirror.

•

The Board meeting had been going so well. Late, but well. And then Vikram had licked his fingers and looked up with those bulbous black eyes and said, with a snort, "It must be said, Chairman, that we undead are most concerned about the reputed death of Salamiel, last of his name and kind."

The round of gasps that had greeted that little bombshell had neatly summed up Alastair's reaction, which he took great pains to keep from his face. "We?" he said, disdainfully, the bits of his brain not racing madly to buy time doing their best to make use of the time so dearly bought. "Do you now speak for the Community, Vikram?"

Vikram shook his head hastily, his jowls flapping, but it would not, of course, be nearly so easy. "No, no, of course not, Chairman. I merely express what I would assume to be the prudent concern on all our parts with regards to any possible retribution over the death of the last of the Egoroi, on the part of the Light."

Alastair had taken a moment to blink, and blink again. The fatal mistake in this sort of situation, of course, was to assume one must speak immediately. Waiting too long, though, could be just as fatal. He sighed. "I must congratulate you, then, on the quality of your intelligence. Our people are still trying to verify that rumor on the ground." And thank God the Gaunt Man decided to skip this meeting, for whatever reason. Not that the damn thing wouldn't find out, and soon. Worry about that later.

Vikram was nodding. "And you did not feel the need to inform us?"

"My staff is preparing a position paper as we speak; it'll be on your desks as soon as I get the thumbs-up. Or down, in this case. No use jumping till we know which way."

"The Chairman is wise, of course," said Vikram.

Alastair had to raise his eyebrows at that. "The Chair," he said, "is now accepting motions for adjournment."

"So move," said Matsumoto, that creepy—though useful—little gaki.

"Second?" said Alastair.

Ana Andalannangg, the penanggalen, nodded, caught her head, and put it back.

"All in favor?" said Alastair.

Grudgingly, the Board of Directors grunted, nodded, hissed, or otherwise signaled their assent.

"Then we're adjourned. See you next month."

And then he'd had to deal with the Gaunt Man anyway, though the damn thing hadn't heard Vikram's news yet, as far as he could tell, which made the game of pretending not to know what he was pressuring the Gaunt Man to tell him less enjoyable than usual. And then Pokey had shown up. And his late morning, such as it was, had gone to hell.

"Here," said Pokey, tossing a fax on his desk. The unpleasantly thin and slick thermal paper had curled under his hands as he read it.

"Why the fuck didn't we know this before?" he said, quietly.

"Government research at this level isn't usually something you put on your resume," said Pokey.

"Then why the fuck are we bothering to pay our people in Washington?" he said, a little louder. Profanity, he thought to himself. Watch the fucking profanity.

"They snagged it eventually," said Pokey, sticking up for his people. "We never would have known at all, without them."

"Out," said Alastair. "Get out. Hold everything for the next six hours."

"I could send some people," said Pokey. "You don't have to go yourself."

"No," said Alastair. "I need some exercise. I'm going to see to this personally."

And so he did.

•

Matthias looked up as Alastair stepped out of thin air. He blinked. "Chairman," he said. Matthias was an ustrel, which meant that even though he was at least six or seven hundred years old, he looked like a twelve-year-old boy.

Alastair staggered over to the wall and leaned against it, breathing heavily, trying to warm his frozen lungs. Never try to breathe in there, he reminded himself. "Where's," he said, "where's Bitsumi?"

"Professor's in with the Manitou," said Matthias. "What's up?"

"Get him in here," said Alastair, running a hand through his hair, straightening his turtleneck, checking his pants for dust motes, candle wax, mirrorstuff.

"Not to, um, be rude or anything," said Matthias, carefully putting his hands behind his back, "but aren't you usually right-handed?"

"Put it away," said Alastair, suddenly very tired. "I came through the mirror."

"Oh," said Matthias, his hands still behind his back.

"Which also explains why my face looks a little funny."

"Oh," said Matthias.

"Get him," snapped Alastair, and Matthias nodded, and left.

Alastair coughed, and sat down in Matthias's chair. There was a white board over on the other wall, covered with a complex looking hexagonal diagram in four different colors. Matthias was back in about a minute, followed by short and pale and puffy little Professor Jack Bitsumi.

"I just want to say," said Bitsumi, "that I'm really, really close to a breakthrough, I think. I'm sorry things haven't gone as fast as you wanted, but—"

"Shut up," said Alastair.

Bitsumi froze, mouth open, eyes blinking.

"Tell me, Professor. Have you given any thought to magic?"

"Magic?" said Bitsumi.

"Runs With Nightmares is a highly unusual creature," said Alastair.

"Oh, yes," said Bitsumi. "Delightful. I've never seen—"

"Shut up," said Alastair. He stood. "Sit." Bitsumi sat. Matthias frowned. Alastair walked over to the white board and lifted the eraser. "This has been recorded?"

Matthias nodded.

Alastair wiped it clean. "Runs With Nightmares is a magical creature, Professor. Have you given any thought to magic?" Now that he was here, now that Bitsumi was sitting in front of him, he felt suddenly drained, empty. The rage he'd been nurturing through the interminable mirror walk was gone, and he just wanted to get this over with. He tried to focus on the smeared grey print from the fax. What it had said. What those word meant.

"I don't, ah, I," Bitsumi was stammering.

"Let me give you a quick pointer," said Alastair. "You're a smart guy. You should pick it up pretty quickly. Your chance, say, of performing magic can be represented by variable M—" he scrawled a large M on the board, in blue—"which can be calculated with the following equation—" and he scrawled some more, in green this time, taking great care to write it backwards, so they could read it:

"Where G is your gnosis, your level of general magical awareness, say, and L represents your magical link with what you intend to do —visualization, say, or your level of correspondence—and A is your conscious awareness of the world around you, and R is your subconscious resistance—that little voice in the back of your brain that even now is telling you how nuts all this is starting to sound." Alastair put the markers back on the trough. "I think it's quite clear you want your G and your L to be as high as possible, and your A and your R as low as possible, to maximize your return on M. You follow?"

Bitsumi shook his head slowly. "I, I don't see—"

"Oh, but you will," said Alastair. "You're a smart guy. Why else would I have brought you onto my team for studying the Manitou? And your theories about PMD80—you're already on any number of cutting edges. I think you're just the guy to benefit from this sort of thing—I mean, most folks, their G is low, real low. A point two at most. And while their A is rarely much better—a point six or point seven at best—their R is usually a point nine, a point nine five—just short of one. Which is precisely the wrong set-up to do magic, you see? But you, you're already working with stuff that lowers your A and your R considerably. It could even raise your G, you see?"

Bitsumi blinked.

"Let's try another equation." He picked up the red marker, resisting the urge to fling it across the room. "Your chance of doing something with magic can be expressed thusly—"

"P sub-M is your chance of doing it with magic, and P alone is just the real-world probability that what you're trying to do would just, you know, happen, without magic. You get a nice little curve with this—it's clear that your chances improve exponentially as the value of your M improves, and M, of course, is dependent on those other four variables. And if your gnosis and your link are as strong as they can be, and your awareness and resistance are at zero—why, even if P itself is zero, you can do anything. Anything at all." Alastair smiled. "Not that that's really feasible. But it's nice in theory, right?"

"I don't," said Bitsumi, "really see what bearing—"

"Well let's start to concretize it, Jack," said Alastair, smiling broadly. "Let's pick a P and run some numbers through it. For instance—what do you think the real-world probability is of you just spontaneously telling me the truth about what you were doing in Montauk, Long Island in 1987?"

Bitsumi opened his mouth, closed it, raised one hand and waved it, oddly, as if trying to pluck some resolve from the air. "I don't," he said, and he gathered himself, as if to stand; Matthias, the smart little ustrel, clamped one small cold implacable hand on his shoulder, and he stopped.

"Well, Jack?" said Alastair. "Come on. I need to know how strong my spells have to be, so my M can overcome your P. So tell me. What are the chances?"

"I don't know what you want to know about that," said Bitsumi, quietly.

"Everything, Jack," said Alastair. "Everything." He knelt in front of Bitsumi. "You know," he said, quietly, "there's a nuance of these equations that I'm sure hasn't escaped your quick, agile mind. You don't just have to increase M to make it work. You can also take steps to increase P. You follow? The more likely you make it to happen on its own, the easier it is to do it with magic. So. What steps do you suppose I ought to take to make it easier in the real world, Jack?" He reached up and placed a finger firmly against Jack's chest. The man's heart was beating madly beneath his sweater and T-shirt. Alastair felt old, and tired; he had to know, and this was perhaps the quickest way to find out for sure if Bitsumi were some sort of—God forbid—deep plant, or merely the victim of rather unfortunate circumstance. Didn't make it anywhere near pleasant. Crack, damn you, thought Alastair. Just fucking crack already. Or don't crack. Either way tells me what I want to know. "What do you think?" Bitsumi took a ragged breath. Alastair looked past him, at Matthias. "Let's find out. Matthias—take off his right—I mean, his left shoe. And sock."

The effect was electrifying. Bitsumi tried to surge up out of the chair, yelling, "No! No!" as Matthias grabbed him by the sweater and yanked, ripping it, but also pulling him down to the floor. Alastair kicked back out of the way as Matthias slammed Bitsumi's shoulders to the floor and knelt on them, holding the man down with his weight—more massive than it ought to be, given his size and apparent age. Bitsumi quieted. Alastair caught his left foot and held it firmly; Bitsumi stopped kicking after one unsuccessful attempt to pull it free.

"Now," said Alastair, yanking on the ratty brown laces of the ugly brown shoe. "Let's see what we shall see."

Shoe and sock removed, and bare foot in hand, Alastair peered at it. There, branded into the heel, was a small charred black cross. Alastair touched it, lightly. Bitsumi flinched.

"Why, Jack," said Alastair. "Look at this. Did you know this was here?" He'd have to shower after this. A long, hot shower, and more coffee, to wash the taste out of his mouth. He let Bitsumi's foot fall to the floor. "Tell you what, Jack. You start by telling me about that little brand, there, on your foot, and, well." He smiled again, though it wasn't much of a smile. "We'll see what that does to the P. Okay?"

•

  
Stand up and fight sometimes
We get the fright sometimes
How will we ever pay the price this time

It was dark in the desert. The general had arrived an hour ago, and now he and his two most trusted aides stood in the middle of the dark desert night miles away from the camp under nothing but starlight, and yet they were secure in their knowledge of the Light.

"Salamiel has passed," said the general. "First of the Egoroi, who taught us well."

"We mourn him," said the first aide.

"We mourn them all," said the second aide.

"Armaros," said the general, his voice ringing in the cold dry air, "who taught us the resolving of enchantments. Araqiel, who taught us the signs of the earth. Azazel, who taught us to beat our knives, and swords, and shields, and Gadriel, who taught us how to use them. Baraqijal and Ezequeel and Kokabel, who taught us to read the sky by light and dark, and Sariel and Samshiel, who taught us to read the Sun and the Moon. And Penemue, who taught us to write."

"Though we were not meant for it," said the first aide.

"Amen," said the second aide.

"And now Salamiel, first of the Egoroi, and last of his kind. We swear eternal vengeance against the Dark. By the Emim, and the Rephaim, the Giborrim and Zamzummim, the Rorrim and the Nephilim, we so swear."

"Amen," they all said, together.

Two small children stood next to the humvee, whose engine still tocked from the long fast drive out here. The general walked over to them and put his hands on their heads, twining his long, thin fingers in their crowns of red flowers.

"What do we do?" said the first aide.

"Washington's still balking," said the general, "but it's only a matter of time. We will prevail." He smiled at the children, who smiled back at him, faces shining in the starlight. No one could see them, whose hearts were not pure. "Air war first," said the general, turning around to look at his aides. "Bomb them back to the fucking Stone Age. Then we roll in, find it, and bring it out."

"And then?" said the second aide, whose name was, aptly enough, Thomas.

"And then it's war," said the general. He walked past them, staring out into the night, north and a little east. "Armageddon. If that's what they want, that's what we'll fucking give them."

"Amen," said the first aide, whose name, aptly enough, was Michael.

A long moment passed. "Let's head back," said the general, after taking a deep clean breath of free Arab air. "I could use a hot shower. And call ahead—I want a plate of chicken and creamed spinach hot and ready when we get in."

"Yessir," said Thomas.

They climbed into the humvee and drove away. The two children smiled to watch them go, and then linked hands and began walking north, into the desert—north, and a little east. They'd cross into Iraq sometime before dawn.

•

•

•

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