"Nobody better steal that boy's backpack," the mutant named Satin quipped. "They'll have all the food and all the phones."

"Nobody should be panicking," Javier snarled at Nhu, but then he ran his hot eyes over all the other faces, whole and mutated, as well. Barbie with her five. "We lose our nerve, and our cooperation, and we die. You wankers think I've lived to be twenty-five by acting all panicky every time I was in danger?"

"Yeah," Tiny Meat told Nhu. "You get out of Folger Street and suddenly you forget what you are?"

"Shut it, scrotum-face."

"Bitch."

"All of you!" Javier roared. Silence prevailed at last.

Tall, quiet Patryk collected a few devices and stowed them in his backpack. Nhu had begun to sob. She backed into one wall, slid down to its bottom, and wrapped her arms around her legs. "I'm sorry, okay?" she whimpered. "I'm sorry."

Near her, the spidery Choom mutant named Haanz cooed, "You'll be all right. It will all be okay." He started to reach out with his extra-long fingers to stroke the silky black hair that hung down to obscure her face, now that she had freed it of her lime-green swimming cap, but Nhu lifted her head abruptly.

"Don't touch me!"

The mutant withdrew his hand and averted his eyes shamefully.

"Patryk," Javier said, taking him aside, "get on Nhu's comp and look up Steward Gardens on the net. Maybe you can find us something useful, blueprints or whatever. Maybe something we can use to fight or shut down those zombies out there."

Patryk nodded, and moved into the next room.

Javier sighed, then lifted one arm and sniffed at himself. "So the showers work?" he asked Mira.

"Yeah. Come on, I'll show you how to use them." She preceded the leader of the Snarlers to the bathroom.

"I'm sure he isn't quite that dumb that he can't figure out how to use a shower," grumbled Satin, strapped in his cybernetic pony.

Flattened-faced Nick gave a snort of amusement. "Jealous, man?"

Satin turned his bald head and gave his friend a withering look.

In the bathroom, Javier watched Mira lean into the shower stall to point out the various controls to him. When she was done explaining, she turned around to see that he already had his shirt off. She seemed stunned by the bared sight of his lean upper body, with its scattered scars and tattoos. The stylized dog head baring its fangs, the insignia of the Folger Street Snarlers, adorning his left pectoral.

When he saw her embarrassment, or whatever else was there on her face, Javier smiled and said, "Sorry."

Her eyes moved to a long raised scar above his collarbone. She reached up to touch it lightly with one finger. "What was this?"

"We got into it last year with a Tikkihotto gang. They had those axes of theirs-what do you call 'em-e-ikkos. This kid whacked me with his e-ikko.

I could've had this smoothed away, but that's money, and…" He shrugged. Obviously he was fond of his battle scars.

She still rubbed the scar with her finger, her face as absorbed as a doctor's. When she finally started to lower her hand, Javier closed his own over it. He guided it down his chest, her finger like a pencil. Tracing across his nipple, lingeringly. Down the steps of his ribs. Into the hair of his belly.

His eyes held hers. Neither of them smiled now. It would be too vulnerable, just then, to do so. Or it might make things seem joking. This was not a time for joking. Their situation was very serious, here: in matters of war, and in matters of attraction.

Stake despised the situation comedy called Buddy Balloon, starring a mutant discovered by the producers in Tin Town, by the name of Buddy Vrolik. Buddy was a 150-pound sphere, without limbs, without facial features, without anything but artificial ports into which nutrients were fed and from which wastes were pumped, these substances contained in tanks stored under the motorized cart he rested in. He could move this cart about via a chip implanted in his brain, which resided inside that globe like a yolk in an egg. Similarly, he could have his thoughts expressed through a speaker in his cart, in the form of a synthetic voice.

In Tin Town, prior to his discovery, his sister had let Buddy sit all day in a child's plastic swimming pool in her living room, soaking up a nutrient solution usually fed to malnourished infants from a baby bottle.

In the comedy, Buddy-whose mutation, Stake had read, was called Acardia amorphus-was the centerpiece of a lovable if trouble-prone family, berating them or giving them smart-alecky wisecracks in a city tough accent. He was famous for his lewd comments and double entendres, when female friends visited the apartment.

Stake couldn't fault Vrolik for humiliating himself this way. It was a better life than he'd ever known. He'd been able to move his family out of Tin Town. But Stake knew that Vrolik's benefactors had not been motivated by concern for his welfare. And if other mutants, each more grotesque than the last, became the subjects of their own sitcoms produced by rival networks, then it would not set into motion a wave of public concern for the horrendous living conditions of Tin Town, the epidemic lack of health care for the poor, the toxins in the air. It would set into motion a wave of laughter, from viewers smugly relieved that they had two arms, two legs, two eyes.

Janice Poole returned to the bedroom, wrapped in a purple silk robe and toweling her gray-threaded dark hair. She saw what he was watching as he still lay nude on her bed, but with the skin sheet pulled up to his chest. "Oh, this guy is so funny," she said, sitting down on the edge of the mattress. "I saw him interviewed on VT a few weeks ago and he really is funny in real life, too."

"The indomitable human spirit," Stake said drily.

Janice looked around at him. "I missed you in the shower, lazybones. We could have had fun in there." She leaned down over him and pressed the side of her face to his crotch, the living flesh of her bed sheet forming a thin barrier between his flesh and hers. She pretended to be listening to a baby inside the womb of its mother. "I hear something kicking in there."

Stake ruffled a hand through her hair in a gesture more obligatory than affectionate. He had not been too lazy to shower with her. He had needed the few minutes alone, after the hours they had spent in bed together tonight. They had been watching movies on the entertainment system opposite the foot of her bed. Some of her favorite movies, starring some of her favorite actors.

She had instructed Stake to keep his eyes on the screen. Occasionally she had even touched her remote in order to freeze a huge close-up, so that he could focus on his subject all the better. Like a sniper, keeping her target in her sights. In this way, Janice Poole had at first made love to the hot new actor, Crow Tidwell. And after she had had her fill of Crow, she had exchanged him for the leading man Harris Docker, but in a movie a few decades old, from when he'd first become popular. Stake had not objected. He had complied, passive beneath her, or even behind her. Once in a while stealing a look at her skin, instead, to keep himself aroused.

She raised her head to smile up at his face. "My toy," she said. She was so honest about it; how could he hate her for it? "Back to your 'default' mode, I see."

"Sorry."

She narrowed her eyes perceptively, but didn't say anything. She followed his gaze back to the screen, watched Buddy Vrolik for a few moments. In a slapstick scene, his rascally sitcom nephews were trying to roll him down a bowling lane in the hopes of winning a competition. It was VT; of course they'd get the trophy. Janice said, "How come your face isn't turning all blank right now? What keeps it from trying to copy him?"