“Where is he now?” I asked. It would be so comforting if Zeb was there: he’d know what we should do next.

Shackie said, “We only talked to him online. He flew solo.”

“CorpSeCorps nabbed our MaddAddam splicers, though,” said Croze. “Tracked us down. I figure some creep in our chatroom was a plant.”

“They shot them?” Amanda asked. “The scientists?”

“Don’t know,” said Shackie, “but they didn’t end up with us in Painball.”

“We were only in there a couple of days,” said Oates. “In Painball.”

“Three of us, three of them. The Gold team – they were beyond vicious. One of them – remember Blanco, from the Sewage Lagoon? Rip off your head and eat it? Lost some weight, but it was him all right,” said Croze.

“You’re joking,” said Amanda. She looked – not frightened exactly. But concerned.

“Tossed in for trashing Scales – killed some people, sounded proud of it. Said Painball was like home to him, he’d done it so much.”

“Did he know who you were?” said Amanda.

“Definitely,” said Shackie. “Yelled at us. Said it was payback time for that brawl on the Edencliff Rooftop – he’d slit us like fish.”

“What brawl on the Edencliff Rooftop?” I said.

“You’d gone by then,” said Amanda. “How did you get out?”

“Walked,” said Shackie. “We were figuring out how to kill the other team before they killed us – they gave you three days to plan, before the Start gong – but all of a sudden there were no guards. They were just gone.”

“I’m really tired,” said Oates. “I need to sleep.” He put his head down on the bar.

“Guards were still there, it turned out,” said Shackie. “In the gatehouse. Only they were kind of melted.”

“So we went online,” said Croze, “The news was still working. Big disaster coverage, so we figured we shouldn’t go out and mingle. We locked ourselves into one of the guardhouses – they had some food in there.”

“Problem was, the Golds were in the guardhouse on the other side of the gate. We kept thinking they’d whack us when we were sleeping.”

“We took turns staying awake, but it was too much strain, just waiting. So we forced them out,” said Croze. “Shackie went through a window at night and cut their water lines.”

“Fuck!” said Amanda with admiration. “Really?”

“So they had to leave,” said Oates. “No water.”

“Then we ran out of food and we had to leave too,” said Shackie. “We thought maybe they’d be waiting for us, but they weren’t.” He shrugged. “End of story.”

“Why did you come here?” I said. “To Scales.”

Shackie grinned. “This place had a reputation,” he said.

“A legend,” said Croze. “Even though we didn’t think there’d be any girls still left in it. We could at least see it.”

“Something to do before you die,” said Oates. He yawned.

“Come on, Oatie,” said Amanda. “Let’s put you to bed.”

We took them upstairs and ran each of them through a Sticky Zone shower, and they came out a lot cleaner than when they went in. We gave them towels and they dried off, and then we tucked them into beds, one in each room.

It was me who took care of Oates – gave him his towel and soap, and showed him the bed where he could sleep. I hadn’t seen him for such a long time. When I left the Gardeners he was just a little kid. A little brat – always getting into trouble. That’s how I remembered him. But cute, even then.

“You’ve grown a lot,” I said. He was almost as tall as Shackie. His blond hair was all damp, like a dog that’s been swimming.

“I always thought you were the best,” he said. “I had a huge crush on you when I was eight.”

“I didn’t know,” I said.

“Can I kiss you?” he said. “I don’t mean in a sexy way.”

“Okay,” I said. And he did, he gave me the sweetest kiss, beside my nose.

“You’re so pretty,” he said. “Please keep your bird suit on.” He touched my feathers, the ones on my bum. Then he gave this shy little grin. It reminded me of Jimmy, the way he was at first, and I could feel my heart lurch. But I tiptoed out of the room.

“We could lock them in,” I whispered to Amanda out in the hallway.

“Why would we do that?” said Amanda.

“They’ve been in Painball.”

“So?”

“So, all Painball guys are unhinged. You don’t know what they’ll do, they just go crazy. Plus, they might have the germ. The plague thing.”

“We hugged them,” said Amanda. “We’ve already got every germ they’ve got. Anyway, they’re old Gardener.”

“Which means?” I said.

“Which means they’re our friends.”

“They weren’t exactly our friends back then. Not always.”

“Relax,” said Amanda. “Those guys and me did lots of stuff together. Why would they hurt us?”

“I don’t want to be a time-share meat-hole,” I said.

“That’s pretty crude,” said Amanda. “It’s not them you should be afraid of, it’s the three Painball guys who were in there with them. Blanco’s not a joke. They must be out there somewhere. I’m putting my real clothes back on.” She was already peeling off her flamingo suit, pulling on her khaki.

“We should lock the front door,” I said.

“The lock’s broken,” said Amanda.

Then we heard voices coming along the street. They were singing and yelling, the way men did at Scales when they’re more than drunk. Stinking drunk, smashing-up drunk. We heard the crash of glass.

We ran into the bedrooms and woke up our guys. They put on their clothes very fast, and we took them to the second-floor window that overlooked the street. Shackie listened, then peered cautiously out. “Oh shit,” he said.

“Is there another door in this place?” Croze whispered. His face was white, despite his sunburn. “We need to get out. Right now.”

We went down the back stairs and slipped out the trash door, into the yard where the garboil dumpsters were, and the bins for empty bottles. We could hear the Gold Teamers bashing around inside the Scales building, demolishing whatever hadn’t been demolished already. There was a giant smash: they must have pulled down the shelving behind the bar.

We squeezed through the gap in the fence and ran across the vacant lot to the far corner and down the alleyway there. They couldn’t possibly see us, yet I felt as if they could – as if their eyes could pierce through brick, like TV mutants.

Blocks away, we slowed to a walk. “Maybe they won’t figure it out,” I say. “That we were there.”

“They’ll know,” said Amanda. “The dirty plates. The wet towels. The beds. You can tell when a bed’s just been slept in.”

“They’ll come after us,” said Croze. “No question.”

We turned corners and went up alleyways to mix up our tracks. Tracks were a problem – there was a layer of ashy mud – but Shackie said the rain would wash away our marks, and anyway the Gold Team weren’t dogs, they wouldn’t be able to smell us.

It had to be them: the three Painballers who’d smashed up Scales, that first night of the Flood. The ones who’d killed Mordis. They’d seen me on the intercom. That’s why they’d come back to Scales – to open up the Sticky Zone like an oyster in order to get at me. They would have found tools. It might have taken a while, but they’d have done it in the end.

That thought gave me a very cold feeling, but I didn’t tell the others about it. They had enough to worry about anyway.

There was a lot of trash cluttering the streets – burnt things, broken things. Not only cars and trucks. Glass – a lot of that. Shackie said we had to be careful which buildings we went into: they’d been right near one when it collapsed. We should stay away from the tall ones because the fires could have eaten away at them, and if the glass windows fell on you, goodbye head. It would be safer in a forest than in a city now. Which was the reverse of what people used to think.

It was the small normal things that bothered me the most. Somebody’s old diary, with the words melting off the pages. The hats. The shoes – they were worse than the hats, and it was worse if there were two shoes the same. The kids’ toys. The strollers minus the babies.