Suicide Kings

2

Friday,

November 27

The Winslow Household

Boston, Massachusetts

A Legacy of Noel’s previous profession was an inability to sleep any deeper than a doze. He awakened when the mattress shifted as Niobe left the bed. Cold grey dawn seeped around the edges of the blue velvet drapes, and Noel could hear snow pecking at the windows. He snuggled deeper under the down comforter, and was headed back to sleep when a tiny whimper of fear from the bathroom sent him leaping out of bed. “Niobe!”

At the same moment she called out, “Noel!” The panic in her voice squeezed his heart.

He ran to the bathroom, the legs of his pajamas whipping at his ankles. She was sitting on the toilet with her arms wrapped around her stomach. He dropped to his knees in front of her.

“I’m cramping.”

“Bad?” he asked.

“Not as bad as last time,” she replied through white lips.

Oddly she was staring at a point where the tile met the porcelain side of the bathtub rather than at him. Noel had a sudden memory as they had stood on the rocky beach of a distant Scottish island, and she had told him how she had tried to cut off the damning mark of her jokerdom, and win back her parents’ love. He glanced at the thick white scars that twisted across her tail. She had nearly bled to death in the bathroom of her family home. Noel realized this was the room. And that bitch put us in here. He again felt that shaking desire to kill his mother-in-law. “I’m taking you to the clinic.”

“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 down,” 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 Cafe 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 while back. After me and DB went to the Caliphate.”

A memory grabbed him. Instead of sitting in a cafe, 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 Cafe 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 cafe 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.”

The hope in Wally’s face was now transcendent and obvious. “So

… you’re coming with me?”

Sure. I’m black, aren’t I? she wanted to retort angrily, but she only shook her head. “I still have work here. All the marshlands that need to be reclaimed before the next big storm hits here…” Alone. Out in the swamp. Alone.

Wally looked down at the table, dusted with the remnants of beignets. “I guess you make the plants grow a lot faster…” She saw him start to rise, his shoulders lifting. “Well, thanks for looking at those maps. That will help.” His face scrunched up stiffly, the stiff iron skin over his eyes furrowing. “So where’s this Tanzania place?”

Jerusha sighed. “Tanzania is…” she began. Stopped. He won’t last five minutes out there on his own. She realized that somewhere in the midst of this, she’d made the decision. What’s here for you? You’ve nothing. No friends, just Committee work. And when Michelle dies, now you’ll get the blame for that, not the Committee. You have a chance to save a life…

“Oh, hell,” she said. “I’ll show you on a map on the way over.”

Jackson Square

New Orleans, Louisiana

Michelle reaches a hand out in front of her face. Five fingers. That’s good. She pulls her legs up to her chest, reaches down, feels her feet. “That’s better,” she says. Even though she’s in the pit again, she’s happy about her feet and hands being back.

The spider pops down in front of her, points up to the edge of the pit. “Yeah, leopards, I know. I’m really the wrong person to try and scare with kitties.”

The spider grabs Michelle’s hair. Its body lengthens and grows and the four middle legs shrink into its torso. The mandibles slide back into its head and the eight eyes move toward each other until there are only two.

Sitting on Michelle’s lap is a little girl, maybe eight or nine. She wears a threadbare dress. The pattern is faded, and in the dim light of the pit it’s a mottled grey. The girl places her hand over Michelle’s mouth, then leans forward and whispers in her ear.

Michelle whispers back, “I can’t understand you.”

The girl pulls away from her, and a tear slides down her cheek. Michelle reaches up and wipes it away. “I’m sorry,” she says.

The girl puts her hands on either side of Michelle’s temples. The girl shuts her eyes and suddenly Michelle is slammed by a barrage of images.

Trees limbs whip her face as she runs. Vines grab at her legs, but she can’t stop. She can hear her own harsh breathing. Are they closer now? Close enough that they can reach out and… a claw rips open her back.

She shrieks. Warm blood wells up and burns. She trips and begins to fall.

Wait a minute, Michelle thinks. Claws don’t do anything to me. She reaches up and gently pulls the girl’s hands away.

The girl gazes at Michelle with such longing and pain it makes her want to cry. Michelle reaches out and touches her own hands to the girl’s temples, imagines pointing at herself, whispers, “Michelle.”

An image blossoms in Michelle’s mind. It’s the girl in her lap, but now she’s wearing a pale blue checkered dress. Her hair is plaited with a pretty pink headband. The girl points to herself and says, “Adesina.”

United Nations

Manhattan, New York

The United Nations perched at the edge of Manhattan like the guest at a party who really needs to leave now, but has just one more very important thing to say.

Bugsy showed his ID to the guards at the front who all knew him anyway, and took the brushed steel elevator up to the seventh floor. In the brief time that the Committee had existed, they had commandeered much more space than Bugsy would have expected the international bureaucracy to permit. Having a lot of superhuman powers probably helped with that.

Lohengrin’s office was on the western side, its windows facing out toward the skyscraper mosh pit of uptown. The hallways were filled with people in thousand-dollar suits looking harried. He nodded at the people who nodded to him and ignored the ones that didn’t.

It was getting harder and harder to keep track of who exactly was with the Committee. It seemed like every time he turned around, it was Let me introduce Glassteel. He can shatter anything made from hard metal. Or Noppera-bo here can mimic anyone’s appearance. Then Bugsy would shake hands (with Noppera-bo it had been particularly creepy since she’d taken on his face as soon as their fingers touched), exchange some pleasantries, and scurry off to someplace he could add their names into his database. Even so, he forgot the newbies more often than he remembered them.

Lohengrin, at least, was familiar. The long, blond hair actually looked really good with a dark grey power suit. Maybe a little tired around the eyes, but that went with the suit, too.

Bugsy closed the office door behind him and plopped down on the couch while the Teutonic God finished his phone call. “No,” he said. “I have nothing to do with the prosecution on a day-to-day basis. You’ll have to call the World Court. At the Hague.” He put down the handset with a sigh.

“Highwayman’s lawyers still giving you shit?” Bugsy asked.

“Captain Flint today,” Lohengrin said. CAHptain flEHnt. No one could do round vowel sounds like the Germans. Except maybe the Austrians. And the Dutch. “There was a time, my friend, that I believed this would be fulfilling work. There are weeks I spend fighting and fighting and fighting and at the end, I think I might just as well have stayed at home.”

It had been a long time since they’d gotten drunk and burned Peregrine’s house down. There weren’t many people Bugsy had actually known that long. Not that were still alive, anyway.

“Brokering world peace keeping you busy,” he said, his tone making it an offer of sympathy.

“Water rights. Human rights abuses. The slave trade. I come in every morning, and I find something new and terrible. And every afternoon, I find why we can do nothing direct. Nothing final. I am becoming tired,” Lohengrin said, then sighed. “What do you know about the Sudd?”

“Their second album sucked.”

Someone in the next office ran their shredder for a second. “You don’t know what I’m talking about, do you?” Lohengrin said.

“Yeah, not really. No.”

Lohengrin nodded like he’d just won a bet with himself and leaned forward over his desk. “The Muslim government of the Sudan has taken steps to join their nation to the Caliphate.”

“Ah,” Bugsy said. “That’s a bad thing.”

“No,” Lohengrin said. “That’s the background.”

“That’s not the problem?”

“No.”

“Ok-ay.”

“The People’s Paradise of Africa,” Lohengrin said, “under the leadership of Dr. Kitengi Nshombo, has accused Khartoum of enacting a policy of genocide against the black tribal population of the south and west Sudan.”

“Got it. Genocide. Problem.”

“No,” Lohengrin said.

“Genocide not a problem?”

“Genocide isn’t happening. It is an excuse. The PPA has manufactured evidence and generated propaganda to make a case for the invasion of the Sudan. Its forces are making incursions across the border, and the Caliphate has mobilized to defend Sudanese national territory. Yesterday there was a battle in the Sudd. A terrible battle.”

“And that’s the problem, right?”

“Yes,” Lohengrin said. “In the bigger picture, that is the problem. But it gets worse. The PPA forces are being led by Tom Weathers. The Radical.”

Bugsy sat up straighter. “Hold it,” he said. “Same guy who tried to set off Little Fat Boy and nuke New Orleans last year?”

“Same guy, ja.”

“I don’t like him much, you know. He tried to kill me. I mean, I don’t like the Caliphate much either. They tried to kill me too.”

“Tom Weathers tried to kill many hundreds of thousands of people,” Lohengrin said.

“Yeah. And I was one of them.”

“The PPA has been a destabilizing influence for years. Now they have begun to use aces to further their own political agenda.”

The silence was a hum of climate-controlled heating and the distant ringing of phones. Lohengrin looked serious and waited for Bugsy to work through the implications.

“World war,” Bugsy said. “Only fought with aces. Meaning probably the Committee.”

“And a great many dead people,” Lohengrin said.

“What about getting Little Fat Boy back in play? A fourteen-year-old nuke with a personal grudge against Weathers should rein the PPA in, right?”

“Ra,” Lohengrin said. “His name is Ra now, and no. So long as Old Egypt is not attacked, the Living Gods are determined to stay out of the conflict.”

“How very Swiss of them.”

“There is a further problem with Tom Weathers. We’ve always known that Weathers had more powers than most aces. Insubstantiality. Strength. Ultraflight. Heat beams. We know he was involved in the battle in part because these powers were in play. But other powers have been reported as well. The wave of darkness? The terrible mauling of the bodies?”

“You think he’s like the Djinn?” Bugsy said, sitting forward on the couch. Nothing took the humor out of a situation like the Djinn. “You think Weathers is picking up new powers.”

“I do not know,” Lohengrin said. “New powers. Or new allies. We know little about the man himself. Where he comes from, how he drew the wild card, what his weaknesses might be. What exactly his powers are. That is what I want you to uncover, Jonathan. Tom Weathers is likely the most powerful ace in the world, he is starting a war, and I know nothing substantial about him.”

“And so,” Bugsy said, “who the fuck is the Radical?”

Unnamed Island

Aegean Sea, Greece

“Daddy!”

The woman who came flying at him across rocky soil tufted with pale green grass was tall and slender. Despite the fact her handsome face was clearly middle-aged, it showed few lines. Her hair, long and blond, had begun by slowly evident degrees to turn to silver. Yet her manner was that of a seven-year-old girl.

A very happy one. She caught him in a hug that for all his superhuman strength still almost overbalanced him. She was just four inches shorter than his six-two.

He kissed her. “Sprout. Hey, sweetie.” He tousled the long straight hair. “I missed you.”

“I missed you, too. Can we go to the park soon?”

“Aye, that’s a good idea,” said Mrs. Clark, emerging from the modest field-stone cottage behind her. “It’s not fit for her to spend all her days cooped up here alone, with no one for company but an iPod and a dried-up old biddy like me.”

“I wouldn’t call you dried up, Mrs. Clark,” he said, past the woman’s cheek, wet with happy tears.

“You’d not dare.”

“You got that right.”

This was true. The caretaker was a middle-aged to elderly New Zealander, half Maori with a crisp Scots brogue. Her coloration and build were those of a brick wall; her tight bun of curly hair was nearly the same hue. Sprout loved her. She treated Sprout with patient cheerful firmness and took absolutely not ounce one of shit from anybody else. Not even Tom.

Which was fine. It was what he paid her for. Fantastically well, he vaguely gathered. Unlike most of the self-proclaimed socialist revolutionaries he met, Tom had no interest in money whatsoever; it was one of the reasons he always wound up getting pissed off at the posers, and then there was trouble. Dr. Nshombo-more often Alicia-always gave him whatever he asked for. Most, in fact, went toward keeping his daughter well cared for and as happy as possible in a succession of the remotest locations Earth provided.

It was the only way he knew of keeping her safe from that teleporting puke. Until he hunted him down and killed him, of course.

“I could use a day’s shopping as well, I admit,” Mrs. Clark said. “Time to myself and a few necessities for the child and me. Maybe tomorrow, Mr. L?”

She didn’t even try to pronounce the name he gave her, which was Karl Liebknecht. Among the things he paid her so well for was not to wonder about such things as why his daughter sometimes called herself by the last name Weathers, and other times Meadows. Or why the daughter looked older than her father. Her main concern was that there was no funny business between her employer and her charge. Once he had convinced her of that, she was content to live in isolation with her charge, so long as she got the occasional day off in civilization. And in between had a sufficient supply of mystery novels.

“Tomorrow?” his daughter said, blue eyes shining eagerly. “You promise?”

He nodded. “I promise.”

Sprout hugged him fiercely. “I wish I could stay with you, Daddy.”

“Someday you can, sweetie. Someday. But I got some things to take care of first.”

Noel Matthews’s Apartment

Manhattan, New York

Niobe was sleeping, worn-out by the emotional upheaval of the past few hours. Noel wandered around the apartment they had rented while they underwent the fertility treatments. It had come furnished with sofas and chairs designed more for magazine covers than the human body. They had tried to personalize an impersonal space by putting up lots of framed photos-most of them of Niobe’s “children”-the little aces who had lived and died like mayflies. Noel found the pictures depressing, but they were important to Niobe so he never said a word. His own efforts had consisted of leaving magazines piled on the glass coffee table and used teacups on the side tables. Niobe had also crocheted an afghan to throw across the black leather and chrome sofa.

Three more weeks and we can really go home. Noel entered the kitchen and set about brewing a pot of tea. He realized he was hungry and set out a muffin. His back felt tight. He hadn’t worked out in weeks and hadn’t attended a karate class in months. The fact that he had been complacent suddenly alarmed him, and he decided to get back to the gym.

He snapped on the TV in the kitchen, headed to CNBC for the latest financial news, and found himself passing through CNN. He caught a quick flash of the Presidential Palace in Baghdad and a grim-faced Prince Siraj surrounded by security rushing up the steps. Siraj looked old. Shockingly old.

I need your help… I really do need your help.

His old friend’s words echoed filled with sadness, reproach, and might-have-beens.

Noel pulled out his phone and dialed. “What exactly do you want me to do?” he said.

Jackson Square

New Orleans, Louisiana

Michelle was in that strange room again. Juliet and Joey were there. But her mother and father were gone now.

Her throat was still brutally raw. She could barely swallow, much less try to speak. Her arms and legs were as useless as her throat.

And the power was like napalm in her veins. Drake, she thought. Oh, God, Drake. What happened? Did I kill him? Did Sekhmet kill him? Tom Weathers? Was that wound from the medallion worse than it seemed? And how am I not dead? How are we all not dead?

“Wha…” Her voice was a rusty hinge. Her throat felt as if it were being stabbed by a knife when she swallowed.

Juliet started crying, and Michelle wanted to comfort her. To tell her it was all right. Whatever had happened to Michelle had clearly hurt Juliet. Juliet didn’t even have any tats scrolling across her body.

Michelle closed her eyes. Maybe if she went back to sleep, she’d wake up later and everything would be all right.