"Exclusive star interviews." They were ancient rituals. They always made her long for death.

Yet the fans had to be fed. For the fans were forever hungry.

"Yes, my John brings truth and justice to some of the most desperate people in the world…I miss John every day. I want John to fly home to me. He promised he would break his own rules and he'll fly here in a rocket. Yes, those rumors are true. No, not that we're breaking up. That'll never happen! The rumors are true that the fire is back in our relationship! John and I had our rough spots, we had our trouble and grief, but you just can't keep us down! Just you wait and see, you're going to see some very good, very happy news from both of us…"

When the interview at last expired in its puddle of flaccid lies, she fled in a Family limo, then went to join Lionel. Lionel was kind to her, because Lionel understood these things.

Lionel was having a late lunch at a posh restaurant. The restaurant was noted for its excellent seafood, because it marched on gleaming centipede legs deep into the restive ocean and it grew all its seafood by itself. The "swordfish," for instance…that gleaming white flesh on Lionel's platter was very far from a wild, sea-native swordfish, but a DNA scan would never tell.

Lionel had matured a great deal since Toddy had (as the Family privately phrased it) "passed up." His personal upgrades had cost much more than Radmila's makeover, and since Lionel was so young and ductile, the effects on him were drastic.

Lionel had put on kilos of male muscle in his back, legs, and shoulders. His eyebrows were thicker, and blue stubble haunted his lips and chin.

Most critically, Lionel had changed his signature look. The new personal dresser had swiftly ditched his Peter Pan delinquent street-kid costumes, and made Lionel sexier, more transgressive. He looked like a bad boy in power now. He looked slicker, like the upscale version of an undercover cop.

Radmila arrived at the table, hidden in stage-ninja gear. None of the diners took much notice of her: Lionel always had his bodyguards in this restaurant. Lately he'd had a whole posse of them. The Angeleno street gangs loved Lionel. They were his biggest fans.

Glyn silently passed her a menu and a half-empty shaker of tequila. Radmila poured and drank. Alcohol was blue ruin, but she wouldn't have to look so painfully sexy again for quite a while. She was going to put on weight. John was going to get her pregnant. That was all arranged.

The older Family folks-Guillermo, Freddy, Buffy, Raph-they'd been surprisingly calm and accepting about the new Family order. In the sudden power vacuum of Toddy's absence, it was Lionel, Toddy's grandchild, who was proving the hardest to handle.

Lionel was starting to have adult ideas. His generation's take on reality was unique.

"What does that mean, 'grasp the nettle'?" Lionel demanded.

"A nettle is a weed," Glyn told him. "It stings you when you touch it."

"But why would people let plants sting them? Plants don't even have brains."

"Our Family budget is like a nettle," Glyn told him patiently. "When you stick to that budget, that hurts, but you just have to accept that."

"We're rich."

"We're not infinitely rich, and a Family star is supposed to spend his star allowance on enhancing his star potential."

"That's what I did," said Lionel. "I know that I spent money, but I'm almost eighteen."

"Lionel: You bought weapons."

"Glyn: Just listen to me for once, okay? I'm not Little Mary Montalban, the world's most adorable child star! I'm a tough guy! I'm a ghetto, barrio, Los Angeles dirty-pop, kick-your-ass, street-credibility star! We do agree on that, don't we? I'm the Family's gangster star."

"You're Dispensation. You're a spontaneous-reaction, volunteer grassroots star of our street militias. Those people aren't 'gangsters. "

Lionel sighed and looked to Radmila. "Mila, just tell her. Please."

"Lionel does have a certain point," Radmila said. "His core demographic is rebellious male teens. Especially, lower-income."

"That is where the Family placed me as an idol," Lionel said. "I am playing the role I was given. I'm playing straight to my fan base."

" Weapons, Lionel?"

"Sure, technically, shoulder-launched rockets are 'weapons. But practically speaking, they're rapid urban-demolition equipment. You wouldn't know this, being a girl-but very few people ever get killed by shoulder-launched rockets. It's the buildings that get killed by shoulder-launched rockets. It's all about 'warchitecture. "

Lionel pointed his leather-gloved finger outside the gorgeously lit restaurant window and at the gray, lightless, derelict structures lining the shore of the Pacific. That endless mummified seaside slum was a sight to daunt the bravest real-estate developer: armored in chain-link fencing, wrapped in razor wire, with ancient vidcams and hand-lettered death-threat signs. Many of the buildings were swathed in tattered plastic shrink-wrap against the rising damp.

"Ever since I was born," said Lionel, "I've had to look at that mess. That giant monument to human stupidity. I want that all gone. And no, I don't mean some nice legal settlement. I don't mean forty more years of insurance cheats and litigation. These are abandoned, uninhabitable ruins, ruined by the climate crisis. They belong to morons who don't even live there now and will never live there again. While my people, my viewers, my core audience, the poor people, Glyn, the street kids without shirts and shoes-they are living heaped up in their Little Foreign Ghetto villages. They are piled on top of each other like used tires."

Lionel clenched his gloved fists dramatically. "So we have two basic moral choices here. Either we do nothing about that, and the poor people eventually riot and set fire to their own slums. That would be the traditional Los Angeles method. Or else we provide some inspired civic leadership. My people charge out here and they just set fire to all that. Yes. My people just smash it. They blow it to pieces, and burn it to the ground. It's all abandoned anyway-so that takes my fans maybe a week."

Glyn was nervously fiddling with the restaurant's gorgeous silverware. The silverware was tagged and interactive and came with a dazzling panoply of oyster forks, butter knives, and two-tined olive piercers. "You're really serious about this."

"Think it through, Glyn. Two years later, we've got a bunch of flood-friendly projects built on high pilings. We get a major construction boom in LA. Sure, we get some legal trouble first-of course we get that-but the casualties, very low, and suddenly we are right into a brand-new era. Low-income housing-during a climate crisis-that's got to be within the shoreline areas. That's got to happen. It's the only urban policy that makes any sense. And if we had any guts, we'd just do it."

Glyn glared at Radmila. "Your political scripter wrote that for him. Lionel never used to talk like this. Never."

"No, no," Radmila said. "My scripter's not that good! I never heard that kind of talk before."

"Who's writing your set-speeches, Lionel? Who have you been linking to?"

"Admit it," said Lionel smugly, "my set-speech just now was fantastic. You don't have, like, one single good word to say against my awesome new set-speech."

"Your gangster fans are gonna shoot each other with rockets! It'll be a total bloodbath."

"Like you care about that!" scoffed Lionel. "All you want to do is write games that send them running the streets like bowling pins. You've got them where they can't tell immersive games from the LA street grid."

Glyn shook her head. "I know that we can get away with some demolition work right after an earthquake. You're talking about smashing the oldest, biggest real-estate mess in all of California. We'd be held responsible."