“We can’t just run off,” Niobe called out as he ran back into the bedroom. “They’ll be so angry.”
“Watch me. And fuck them.”
Noel pulled her long, fur-lined suede coat and his overcoat out of the closet. He returned to Niobe, got slippers on her feet, and tucked her into her coat. The hood framed her face. She looked like a figure on a Russian icon box. He slipped on his own slippers and guided her back into the bedroom.
He pulled back the blinds so he could map the sun’s progress. Come on, come on! They couldn’t lose another. Niobe couldn’t take much more. He wasn’t sure he could, either.
It was another four minutes before he could make the transformation to Bahir. The pajamas cut into his crotch, and the overcoat strained across Bahir’s broad chest. It didn’t matter. He would transform back once they reached the Jokertown Clinic.
Jackson Square
New Orleans, Louisiana
Michelle opened her eyes.
Juliet, Joey, her mother and father, and a couple of people dressed in hospital scrubs were ringed around her. Her throat was raw, like when she had strep throat. She tried to speak, but she had no voice.
“She’s alive!” Juliet said.
“You don’t know that,” snapped Michelle’s mother.
“It could be a reaction to the feeding tube being pulled,” said the woman in baby-blue scrubs.
Michelle tried to look around, but she couldn’t move her head much. Behind her mother, there was a table crammed with flowers and candles. The floor under the table was thick with store-bought bouquets. She looked up. The ceiling was bare plywood and had water stains.
A TV hung from the far corner with the sound turned off. It was tuned to a news channel, and there were bulletins scrolling across the bottom of the screen. She caught the last bit of one story: “. . . and the latest contestant voted off Season Three of American Hero is . . .”
She blinked. It couldn’t be Season Three. They hadn’t even finished Season Two. She was supposed to do a guest shot on Season Two.
She looked down at herself.
She was huge. Bigger than huge. Enormous. Bigger. Humongous. What was bigger than humongous? She didn’t even look like a girl anymore. They had draped something over her. A parachute maybe? She could feel the rolls of fat that rippled down her front. It was impossible for her to be this big.
It came back to her then. A spinning golden necklace. Drake grabbing his chest. His eyes. His eyes were white and glowed and burned. She had embraced him and—
No. No. No. No. NO!
Blythe van Rennsaeler
Memorial Clinic, Jokertown Manhattan,
New York
The darkness and the cold lasted the briefest second, and then they were standing just outside the emergency room of the Jokertown Clinic. Noel willed his body to shift back into his normal form. It felt like the muscles were crawling across his bones, and there was an ache in the bones themselves as he was returned to his normal height.
Niobe had already gone in ahead of him, and was talking to the joker receptionist. The clinic was relatively quiet at 7:00 a.m. There was only a wino sleeping in a corner and a joker mother clutching her four-year-old as he alternated between sobs and hacking coughs.
Niobe gazed at the little fellow with naked longing in her green eyes. Unlike his mother, he was completely normal though to Noel’s mind the green snot crusting his upper lip and his beet-red face made him a more unlovely sight than her.
The receptionist made a call, and he and Niobe settled into chairs to wait. A television hung on the wall was set to MSNBC. Noel’s attention was caught by the heading—The sudd. A helicopter shot was panning across an expanse of reeds and water. On bits of dry ground that humped like the backs of prehistoric water beasts hiding in the swamp, destroyed tanks belched smoke into the air. Bodies, doll-like at this height, floated in pools and bled onto the ground.
Noel read the scrolling subtitles. The Sudanese government had voted to join with the Caliphate. Dr. Nshombo, leader of the People’s Paradise of Africa, has charged the Sudanese with genocide against the non-Muslim black tribesmen of the south, and moved into the Sudan to protect them. Clearly a major battle between PPA and Caliphate forces has occurred.
Noel turned away from the lure of the flicking box. It wasn’t his problem. He was done with political games on a world stage. A pox on both of them.
But there was no way that Prince Siraj could be compared to the madman who led the armies of the PPA. Siraj was a cunning politician, and killed when expedient. Dr. Nshombo was a cold ideological killer. Tom Weathers was just a killer. And they all hate you. Why not take one of them off the table? Make Siraj an ally rather than an enemy? You were close friends once.
Because I don’t know if I can trust him now. Those boys of Cambridge are dead, Noel replied to that part of himself that sometimes missed the excitement of the game and that sense of serving a greater cause.
Fifteen minutes later the centaur doctor came clattering through the door. Dr. Finn took Niobe’s wrist in his hand, feeling for her pulse. “Worse or better?”
“Better,” she said.
“That’s good.”
“If . . . if something were to go wrong . . . I won’t try again. I can’t watch any more of my children die.”
Niobe wasn’t just talking about the miscarriages. She was thinking of the hundreds of “kids” born from her ace power. Her “tail” was actually an ovipositor. Within minutes of sex, two to five eggs would move through the tail, be laid, and hatch into tiny children. They were usually aces, and their powers seemed to be linked to Niobe’s needs at a given moment.
They were the primary reason she had been able to escape from a secure facility and help free the young boy whose nuclear ace had endangered them all. But these children only lived for a few hours or a few days. Their homes were filled with photographs of the kids. Niobe grieved for every one of them. The last four had been Noel’s. He grieved for them.
One of the reasons Niobe—or Genetrix as they had called her at BICC—had been studied was her ability to reverse the wild card odds. Instead of ninety percent black queens, her clutches were ninety percent aces. She and Noel had hoped that those odds would continue when they tried to conceive a normal baby.
Unfortunately that hadn’t been the case.
Like every other ace and joker/ace trying to have a baby, they had the same devastating odds of a black queen. Add to that the fact that Noel was a hermaphrodite and functionally sterile, and the odds of Niobe every achieving her dream of motherhood seemed remote . . . until they came to the Jokertown Clinic, where more authorities on the wild card practiced than in any other place in the world. Dr. Clara van Rennsaeler had designed an ingenious plan of treatment, which her husband Dr. Bradley Finn was implementing.
First he pumped Niobe full of hormones so her ovaries produced multiple eggs. Then Finn had combined the nucleus from one of Niobe’s wild card ovipositor eggs with Noel’s barely mobile sperm and a real egg from her womb. By Noel’s count they’d discarded forty-three zygotes. Sad little creatures who had begun and ended their lives in petri dishes when they turned out to be black queens or jokers. Four had been viable, but they’d lost three to miscarriages.
And now this one. They knew the sex—male. They knew he would be an ace. Finn told them that if they reached sixteen weeks they were home free. But now . . .
“Let’s see what we’ve got.” The centaur doctor led them out of the waiting room and into the examination room. Noel waited just beyond the screening curtains while Finn and a female nurse examined Niobe. A few moments later the steel rings chattered as Finn pulled back the curtain.
Niobe was beaming.
“We’re good,” the joker doctor said. “Thirteen weeks and counting. We’re not going to lose this little guy.” He made it sound like a vow.
Noel stepped up to the bed, and was surprised when Niobe took his hand and pulled him down. “Sit down before you fall dow
n,” she said.
Noel realized that relief had left him limp. “What caused the cramping?”
“Just a little gas,” Finn replied.
Niobe hung her head, taking refuge behind her mane of chestnut hair. “I’m sorry.”
“No problem. I understand why you’re jumpy as a cat,” Finn said.
“Can you blame us?” Noel snapped. Niobe shushed him, and stroked her hand down his arm.
“No, of course not. Not after three miscarriages,” Finn soothed. “But we’re in good shape.”
Noel looked at his wife’s wan face, and suddenly hugged her tight.
Finn cleared his throat. “I know you don’t want to take anything,” he said. “But I can prescribe a mild sedative.”
Niobe was already shaking her head.
“Just to take the edge off.”
A more emphatic shake.
Finn sighed. “All right.” He tapped Noel on the shoulder. “Take her home and keep her happy, okay?”
Noel nodded, and acknowledged to himself that going off to Baghdad would definitely not keep her happy.
Louis B. Armstrong
International Airport
New Orleans, Louisiana
The first thing wally noticed as he tromped down the jetway was the smell.
New Orleans smelled different from Manhattan. It didn’t smell like sidewalk garbage and truck exhaust; it smelled, faintly, of earth and water. There was humidity in the air, too, which along with the wet smell reminded him of summers at the lake cabin, back home in Minnesota. It had been that way the first time he came here, too, back when Bubbles saved the city.
Thinking about Michelle saddened him. Part of him had never wanted to come back here, and part of him felt badly for not visiting Michelle.
He waited in the airport, watching people buff the floors for an hour, before calling Jerusha. He figured she might not be that happy to hear from him again, and that would only be worse if he woke her up. Was she an early riser? They hadn’t shared a tent in Timor, like he and DB had done a number of times, so he had no idea. DB snored.
“Hello?” Her voice didn’t sound gravelly, like most people when awakened by the phone. Whew.
“Jerusha? This is Wally.”
“Oh, hey, Wally. Look, I hope you’re not upset about yesterday—”
“Nah, I understand. I did sorta spring the whole thing on you outta the blue.”
“Well, yeah. I’m glad you understand.”
“Sure. But hey, can I show you something? It’ll be real quick, I promise.” Farther down the terminal, a buzzer launched into a series of short, loud bursts. A baggage carousel creaked to life.
Jerusha heard it, too. “Where are you right now?”
“I’m at the airport. I caught a flight.”
“Wally . . .” She was doing it again—cradling her head. He could tell.
He said, “It won’t take long.”
A sigh. And then: “I don’t know why, but I spent a lot of time yesterday thinking about your trip. So, I do have some advice for you.”
Wally sat up straighter. “Wow! That’s great!” His voice echoed through the carousels. A few heads turned among the people waiting for their bags to come tumbling down the conveyor belt. “Um, where should I meet ya?”
“I’m with Michelle right now, in Jackson Square. Any taxi driver can take you here.”
Wally thanked her and rang off. He hiked his backpack over his shoulder and tromped off in search of a taxi stand.
As often happened when Wally used a taxi, the driver heard his accent and immediately assumed Wally was an easy way to make a few extra bucks. Wally’s taxi drivers tended to take long, circuitous routes that ran up the meter. Usually he didn’t mind; he liked seeing the sights in unfamiliar places. He’d been here before, so he got impatient when the driver tried pointing out some of the sights in the French Quarter. But the driver waived the fare when he learned that Wally knew Michelle.
Jackson Square was a little different than he’d last seen it. For one thing, it looked like they’d had a pretty bad kudzu infestation not too long ago. Most of it had been cut away, but he could see tendrils here and there on the sides of booths and poking up through cracks in the pavement. Weird.
But the main change was the wooden enclosure beneath the statue in the center of the square. It was covered with flowers, candles, cards, and homemade signs. Prayers and thank yous. The flowers and signs fluttered in the breeze; Wally caught a whiff of magnolias. The wind rattled the slats of the shrine where a pair of nails had come loose. Wally peered through the gap. He glimpsed something pale. It took a few seconds before he realized that he was staring at the white cloth draped over Michelle’s body. That made him want to cry.
Wally strolled around the shrine, reading signs and cards until he found the entrance. A cop waved him through the gate. Jerusha must have told her he was coming.
If the tiny glimpse he’d had of Michelle from outside made him feel sad, what he saw inside made him feel rotten. Her body—she wasn’t recognizable, but who else would it be?—quivered beneath bolts of cloth, like the biggest dress he’d ever seen. She smelled . . . not good. A water pump hummed to itself, sucking away the water that continually seeped into Michelle’s crater.
There were bundles of pipes, too, draped across her. Feeding tubes, he realized. They were still. Silent.
“Hey, Wally. Over here.” Jerusha waved at him from halfway around the enclosure.
Wally waved back. He trotted over to her, his iron feet echoing on what had once been a sidewalk and was now the floor of Michelle’s shrine. “Holy cripes,” he said. “Poor Michelle. How is she?”
Jerusha frowned at him. “She’s still alive, if that’s what you mean. But she’s still unresponsive, too.”
“I wish there was something we could do,” he said.
“I like to think that deep down she knows we’re here.”
Huh. “Hey, Michelle,” he said. “Hang in there.”
Jerusha looked at him sideways, a funny look in her eye. “Come on. Let’s get something to eat,” she said.
She led him across Decatur Street, to a place called Café du Monde. It smelled like chicory and fresh doughnuts. They took a seat outside, at a small round table that gave them a clear view of Michelle’s enclosure. There wasn’t room for his legs under their table, so he sat sideways. Wally ordered hot chocolate and a plate of fancy French doughnuts heaped with powdered sugar. Jerusha got coffee.
“Okay,” she said, after they’d settled in. “What’s so important you had to fly all the way down here to show me?”
Powdered sugar from Wally’s lips snowed into his backpack as he fumbled with the zipper. He pulled out the three-ring binder where he kept the letters from his pen pals. Wally chanted off their names as he flipped through the binder. “Marcel, Antoinette, Nicolas . . .” He found the first page of Lucien’s section, and held it out to Jerusha. “This is my friend Lucien,” he said. In the photo, a little boy treated the camera to a wide, gap-toothed grin. He wore a brown-and-white-striped T-shirt that was easily three sizes too big for him. He had knobby knees, and his shaved head made his ears look ridiculously large. He was giving the camera a thumbs-up.
Jerusha looked at the photo. She asked, “Did you put this binder together just for the purpose of coming down here and showing it to me?” She sounded surprised, but not in a bad way. Almost like he’d done something good but he didn’t know what. If anything, she’d sounded a little bit annoyed when he’d said he was in town.
“Nah. I didn’t want to lose any letters.” Wally turned the page. “This is the first one I received from Lucien.” Like the photo, he kept the letter in a laminated sheet protector. He mentally recited the letter while Jerusha read the scrawly handwriting. Dear Wally, My name is Lucien I am ate years old. I live in Kalemie . . .
Quietly, almost to herself, Jerusha said, “Huh. Smart kid.” She asked, “When did you start doing all this?”
“A wh
ile back. After me and DB went to the Caliphate.”
A memory grabbed him. Instead of sitting in a café, he was on the deck of an aircraft carrier, drinking beer with DB while the sun set over the Persian Gulf.
Hey, Rusty.
Bad deal, huh.
Yeah. The fucking worst.
Kids. I don’t want to fight kids.
None of us should have had to.
Jerusha’s voice brought him back to the present. “Okay, I’ll bite. Can I see the last letter he sent?”
Wally found the page for her. Jerusha read it, looking thoughtful.
“So, what are you thinkin’?” he asked.
“So, what are you thinkin’?” Rusty—Wally—asked.
Jerusha had never seen the Café du Monde so quiet and empty, especially this early in the morning. People were drifting in from the street to buy their paper bags of beignets and café au lait. A few of the other tables were occupied, but no one sat near them. Perhaps it was Wally’s bulk and his appearance. Certainly it wasn’t Jerusha—she wondered how many of the patrons recognized her at all, an ordinary-looking black woman except for the belt with many pouches around her waist. The flashes of tourist cameras were constant, though, and the staff kept eyeing their table uneasily.
What are you thinking?
Now that she’d listened to Wally, now that she’d seen his binder, she wasn’t quite so certain anymore. She’d come here with the intention of giving Wally a firm “no” and trying to talk him out of this entirely. Now . . .
The picture of Lucien stared up at her. She could see the scratches on the plastic sheet protector from Wally’s metal fingers; there were a lot of scratches. He pawed through that binder frequently, then. And his mouth had been moving as she had read the boy’s poorly scrawled letter—he’d obviously memorized it.
Wally’s simple tenderness and compassion made her want to hug him. She just wasn’t sure it made her want to go with him.
Jerusha sipped at her coffee. The cup rattled on the table as she set it down. “I’ve been looking at maps, and I called Babel and talked to her a bit after your phone call.” Jerusha saw the hope rising in Wally’s eyes with her statement, and she frowned in an effort to quash it. You’re not doing this. You’re not. “Wally, she’s really not happy with the idea of you going to Africa, and she’s doubly not happy with you taking another Committee member with you. . . .” Jerusha paused, wondering if she really wanted to say the next words. “If I did this,” she said, with heavy emphasis on the first word and a long pause after the phrase, “or no matter who ends up going with you, Wally, I agree with Babel that you don’t want to go directly into the PPA. What looks best to me would be flying into Tanzania and crossing over Lake Tanganyika, especially since you say that Lucien’s in Kalemie, right on the lake.”