Dealer's Choice

  “Shadow, you all right?” Ray asked cautiously.

  “Been better,” came a weak voice from the darkness. The black dissipated slowly like squid ink in water, to reveal Black Shadow and the flash-frozen corpse of the second assailant. “Think he got a lung.”

  Ray knelt down beside him. “Take it easy. We’ll get you back.”

  Battle loomed over them, looking more annoyed than concerned. I thought you said these things were only immaterial manifestations.” He kicked the frozen corpse that lay next to Black Shadow. “This one feels pretty real to me.”

  Puckett squatted by the one whose throat Ray had crushed. “This one’s real too. But he’s dead as shit now.”

  Black Shadow shook his head, then closed his eyes in pain. “They were only ghosts the first time I was here.”

  “Bloat must be getting stronger,” Danny said.

  “How come these phantoms — or whatever they are — aren’t attacking us?” Cameo asked.

  “Takes a while,” Shadow said through gritted teeth, “before they zero in on you. I been here before. I guess they were ready for me.”

  “Right,” Battle said crisply. He looked at Ackroyd. “Send Shadow back to the mouth of the tunnel. He’s no more use here.”

  Ackroyd looked at Battle, then Black Shadow, and wet his lips with his tongue.

  “Well?” Battle said. “We don’t have all day. Get popping, man.”

  Ackroyd smiled apologetically and shrugged. “I can’t.”

  “What?” Battle said. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “I’m not Jay Ackroyd.” Ray closed his eyes and rocked back on his heels. “Jesus Christ,” he said in a low voice.

  Battle blustered wordlessly. “Are you serious?” he finally spluttered. “If you’re lying to me”

  “I’m not,” the ersatz Ackroyd said in the same quiet, apologetic tone. “Jay Ackroyd has disappeared. I’m also a detective. I’ve been trying to figure out what happened to him. I’m an ace too. I can change my appearance,” he explained unnecessarily.

  “Jesus Christ,” Ray repeated.

  “Who the hell are you?” Battle barked.

  The Ackroyd-imposter shrugged. “I don’t think you need to know that. You can call me Nemo.”

  “Can you do anything besides change the look of your face, or are you totally useless?” Battle asked.

  “Look, I didn’t want to come along on this thing. You made me.” Nemo looked thoughtful for a moment. “But maybe I can come up with something useful.”

  He frowned, concentrating, then everything went black. All their flashlights went dark and the fear crawling around the back of Ray’s head turned to panic. Then the lights came back on, dimly at first, then brighter.

  “Shit,” Ray said in a low voice.

  Battle, for once, was speechless.

  The Frankenstein Monster stood before them. “How’s this?” it asked in a growling rumble.

  “Right,” Battle said, unconvinced. He turned his attention back to Black Shadow. “Well, there’s nothing we can do for you.”

  “We can’t just leave him,” Danny said.

  Battle looked at her coldly. “We can’t take him with us and we can’t spare anyone to escort him back to our lines.”

  “You’re all heart, man,” Shadow mumbled. He made a move to sit up. “Don’t worry. I can make it on my own.”

  Battle nodded crisply. “Good.”

  Danny looked at Ray, who slowly shook his head. As much as he hated to admit it, Battle was right. They couldn’t afford to weaken the team any further by having someone nursemaid Black Shadow, and they couldn’t wait for someone to escort him back and then return. They had to move on through this area before their fears ate them away mentally or, worse, came to life and ate them up physically.

  “At least,” Danny said, kneeling down by Shadow, “let’s bandage his wound.” She shrugged off her backpack, cracked it open, and rummaged through it for the first-aid kit.

  Battle sighed. “All right, but hurry up.”

  “’Preciate it,” Shadow said.

  Ray, who had a certain amount of practical knowledge about field-dressing wounds, helped Danny, half the time glancing over his shoulder for a glimpse of his own personal ghosts of fear and failure to come haunting. He didn’t know what form they would take. He didn’t want to know. Hartmann, maybe, whom he’d failed in Atlanta. Or maybe Hartmann’s wife who’d fallen down a stairway and lost their child after Ray’s desperate lunge missed her as she’d stumbled. He made himself look at the ugly wound they were bandaging, forcing himself not to think of the things that scared him so he wouldn’t give them shape and substance. It was hard, very hard.

  Danny helped a shaky Black Shadow to his feet. The ace’s face was almost white with pain and shock.

  “Can you make it?” Ray asked quietly.

  “I’ll make it,” the ace said.

  “Good luck,” Ray told him. Danny echoed the sentiment while Battle, Puckett, Nemo, and Cameo looked on as Shadow stumbled off, leaning heavily against the tunnel wall.

  “All right,” Battle said crisply. He beckoned Ray to his side. “Good luck,” Battle repeated with a snort. “He’ll need it all right. I suppose it’ll just make it easier for the soldiers to handle him, if he even makes it back to their lines.”

  “What do you mean?” Ray asked in a low voice. “You sound like you expect them to arrest him or something.”

  “I do,” Battle said with one of his bright little smiles. “Indeed I do. He’s a wanted criminal, after all.”

  “What about his pardon? The one signed by Bush and all?” Battle looked at him. “Signed by Bush? Really now? Do you know what George Bush’s signature looks like?”

  “You mean it was a fake?” Ray hissed.

  Battle shrugged blandly. “Black Shadow is a wanted criminal. And after all, what good was he to us here? He got himself hurt at the first sign of danger and then limped off. I don’t think he fulfilled his part of the bargain, do you?”

  Ray clamped his mouth shut so tight that his misshapen jaw ached. Bastard, he thought. Dirty, lying bastard.

  Battle nodded. “With Shadow gone and Ackroyd, that is, Nemo…” he gestured helplessly, “you’ll have to take point.” Battle looked around at the others, his face sharp with what Ray recognized as worry and fear. “Let’s get the hell out of here,” he said. “We don’t have all day.”

  What fears, Ray wondered as he set off at the head of the team, were nipping at George Battle’s ass?

  Modular Man found it easy to get Patchwork’s second eye. He kicked his way through the balcony door of Aces High, found the eye behind the potted plant where it had been hidden, and — while buzzing alarms punished the air — ran some clean water from the bar tap and washed all Patchwork’s various parts.

  He tried to be gentle. He knew the eyes were watching him. They were brown, with little gold and green flecks. The ear had a gold stud in the lobe and two delicate gold rings on the upper flange.

  The android hoped the ear didn’t mind the alarm buzzer overmuch.

  The eyes and ear were sealed in a plastic container meant for maraschino cherries. From midtown it took longer than the android expected to return to the Rox. The fog had covered the southern tip of Manhattan, and the Rox was absolutely lost in it. He triangulated off the tall buildings surrounding the harbor, then dropped down until ramparts and battlements became visible.

  It occurred to him that if he could accomplish that, sooner or later so would the military. It didn’t improve his state of mind.

  Patchwork was alone in her room high in the keep, sitting patiently on the swan couch. The maps and stacks of printout had been moved, leaving only the couch and an empty desk.

  “They’re moving the intelligence center somewhere safer,” Patchwork said. “It occurred to them that a bomb could drop right through the ceiling and”

  “It occurred to me as well.”

  He took her hand and put the plas
tic container into it. Eagerly she tore away the lid. Her two gleaming brown eyes stared at her.

  Patchwork handled her parts with far less care than had Modular Man. The android cringed mentally at the sight of the way she jammed her eyes back into place, then poked and prodded till they were comfortable.

  Despite how they got there, the eyes looked very nice once they were back where they belonged.

  The ear, which contained the organs of the middle and outer ear in a kind of twisted tube, had to be sort of screwed back into the side of Patchwork’s head, with little noises that sounded like two blocks of Styrofoam being rubbed together.

  Patchwork took the beret off her head, rearranged her brown hair, and looked up at Modular Man.

  “Very attractive,” he said.

  “Jesus. You must be the blind one.”

  “What would have happened if I hadn’t got them back?”

  “The detached parts die after a week or so. Then they’ll grow back, but that takes weeks. Months sometimes.”

  “You sound as if it’s happened before.”

  She just gave him a look. Then she stood, reached behind the swan couch, and pulled up a heavy pack, an M16 rifle, and a new military-issue Kevlar helmet. She put the helmet on, shouldered the rifle, and grinned bravely.

  She was far too young, too pale, too thin, to make a convincing soldier.

  “Now that my special functions are over,” she said, “I’m just another damn grunt-on-the-ramparts.” She shrugged. “At least I don’t need help to go to the toilet anymore.”

  “Where are you stationed?”

  “The Iron Tower. That’s the one on the south side that’s sort of rust-colored.”

  “Shall I walk there with you?” He took her pack.

  “Don’t you have something else to do?”

  He ordered his face to assume a rueful grin. “If I don’t know I have something to do, Pat, then I don’t have to do it.”

  Patchwork assessed this, then nodded. “You’re an old soldier, all right.”

  He followed her out onto the battlements. The fog was dark and cold and slicked the walkway with wet. Their footsteps echoed in the mist.

  Modular Man looked at the crenellations atop the walls, put a hand on their damp, cold surface. “Does this seem like the work of an idealist to you?” he asked.

  Patchwork considered. “I wouldn’t know. Guess I haven’t met many idealists.”

  “The thing that keeps occurring to me is how much of all this benefits the governor. He’s deformed, and unhappy, and maybe eighteen years old, and he can’t move easily from place to place — so he gets himself an island where he can live. All his rhetoric is about freedom and independence and so forth, but get down to the bedrock, it all seems to benefit him, to serve his needs. He needs a place to stay, so he takes the Rox. He wants to be king of his own kingdom, so he builds this.” He slapped the wet stone. “If he had any sense, he would have built a geodesic dome of battleship plate. But it had to be a cast/e. Because he’s got some adolescent notion of what being a hero and a leader is, and it’s all tied up with” Words failed him.

  “Dungeons and Dragons, I guess,” Patchwork finished. “Or Tolkien. But I’ve never read that kind of stuff, so I don’t know.”

  “I’ve not, either. But the Rox — somehow it doesn’t seem to me like a real castle. Why a mile-wide circular moat? Everyone on the outer Wall is out of support of the main structure — they’re all alone out there. It’s like an idea of a castle from someone who’s never actually seen one.”

  “I wouldn’t know. I haven’t seen one either.”

  “Bloat talks about giving people a refuge from oppression, but he let the jumpers in. The jumpers weren’t oppressed, they were criminals. But they were rich criminals, with access to things Bloat needed, and their presence here enhanced his power, so he let them in. And the jumpers have brought their victims with them, like Pulse, and he lets those in too.

  “And now Bloat’s taking on the entire U.S. military. It’s not possible for him to win. It’s just not. But he’s going ahead with it, even though it doesn’t make any sense. And why” He searched for words carefully, found them. “Why does this suggest to me that the governor has a way out of here? That if he doesn’t win and become the king of New York Harbor, that there’ll still be a Bloat out there somewhere

  Patchwork looked at him in surprise. “How?” she said.

  “Bloat’s here with the rest of us.”

  “What seems to be characteristic of the governor is that he wants it both ways. He wants to be a noble idealist fighting for his freedom, and at the same time acquire money and power through the most vicious means. He wants to have slaves and be a freedom fighter. He wants us to feel sorry for the jokers but not think about the people the jumpers have killed. He wants to live in a castle and have fantasy servants but he doesn’t want to think about who the country under this domain actually belongs to. And he wants to be Bloat and the Outcast both.”

  Patchwork stared at him. “The Outcast? You think”

  “The Outcast could put on a suit of normal clothes and walk right out at any time.”

  “My impression is that the governor’s emanations can’t cross the Wall.”

  “Maybe I’m wrong. I’m not reasoning from knowledge. I’m only saying that Bloat’s behavior would be consistent if he had some kind of escape hatch. Maybe it’s the Outcast, maybe not.” Patchwork thought about it. The Iron Tower loomed ahead.

  Something flashed in the distant periphery of the android’s radio consciousness.

  Something falling.

  He picked up Patchwork in his arms and flew at top speed to the Iron Tower, then down the spiral stairs to the dank thick-walled room beneath.

  The shells began landing a scant few seconds later.

  It began as a whisper… Jesus, there’s something on the screen —

  …shifted to a shout… Hey! Someone’s —

  …and ended in a roaring conflagration. They’re firing! Oh, shit, they’re really…!

  With the first tentative hint, the Outcast had slammed the end of his staff down on the tiles and disappeared in a gout of smoke. All over the Rox, from the thousand open throats of the gargoyles perched on every roof, came the ululating wall of alarm. The Outcast appeared in rapid succession to Travnicek and Modular Man, to Zelda in Pulse’s body. and to Kafka. To each of them, he had said only one word: “Showtime!” and was gone. He spent no more than ten seconds in doing that. Even so, the first barrage hit as he materialized on the Wall facing out into the bay.

  Something brilliant and glowing white slashed through the fog several meters from the Outcast and then disappeared again. He heard it twice, once with the dull concussion as it slammed into earth behind him, then again in his head — in the mindvoices of the Rox.

  The Outcast heard pain and loss and death. He heard wordless screaming and pleading; he glimpsed bloody images that he knew he could never again forget.

  …omigodomigodomigod where’s my leg where is it why can’t I feel it please let it be there please oh please…

  …Jesus so much blood it can’t be mine can’t be…

  …Tom please Tom don’t be dead answer me love please get up oh God get up …

  The Outcast screamed with them, raising his staff high. The crystal blazed like a nova. Reality shifted around him dizzily, everything slowing down. He opened the channels of power wide within Bloat, drawing at the power deeper than he had ever dared before. Dreamtime voices screamed at him in outrage, battering him with words of power. The blows were like the fists of a child against a parent. Teddy laughed at them; they annoyed, but they didn’t hurt.

  Thief! they shouted. Fool! Idiot! Teddy giggled. “Fuck off,” he answered back and drew the power into him. What happened then was something new.

  He was no longer Teddy or the Outcast or Bloat. He was, instead, everything that he had ever made here on the Rox. He was Crystal Castle and minaret towers, penguin and demon, unde
rground caverns and Wall. The energy coursed within him and he was no longer a flesh-and-blood body living within the confines of the Rox. The Rox was him; there was no difference. Teddy could feel the incoming missiles like needle pricks in an immense skin, and he stretched forth fingers shaped of wild energy to pluck them out.

  He could not catch the quicksilver things. Inside him, more jokers died.

  Raging, he did with them what he’d done with Modular Man — interposed Boschian apparitions between the missiles and the Rox.

  The missiles went through them like paper, their courses altered from the collisions but too little. Inside, more death and a burning conflagration.

  Thief! Fool! Idiot! “Shut up!” he screamed at the voices of the dreams. “Shut up!”

  Desperate now, he could think of only one thing to do. He snatched at the power, holding the sizzling, burning threads in the hands of his mind, and cast them to the sky. Where they struck the Wall of the world, sparking, he willed small openings to appear, ugly holes between the realities. He could not hold the gateway open long, could not enlarge them much at all.

  But they were large enough. The incoming bombardment fell through. For an instant, in this slowed and distorted space-time he inhabited, he thought he saw the warheads and shells changing as they passed the boundaries of the dreamtime, becoming strange war-birds or immense blue lightnings or writhing monsters consumed in flame.

  Then they were gone.

  He was exhausted from the exertion. So tired. Other than the wordless cry of the gargoyles, there was a strange waiting silence over the Rox. A quiet everywhere…

  …but inside…

  The figure of the Outcast wavered, then solidified. Back in the dreamtime.

  “Guess what?” said the Outcast.

  “Even here in the dreamtime,” said Wyungare, “there may be no time for twenty questions.” The two men stood in the shadows of a bayou glade. Herons flapped and cried out behind them. Through the thick canopy, Wyungare sensed the flickering uncertainty of clouds rushing in ranks across the southern sky.