Sara winced and let the newspaper fall into mud drenched by firehoses and churned by a thousand feet of various descriptions.

You're right, damn you, she thought, in case Tachyon happened to be listening in. He wouldn't, though that Takisian honor of his. That damned expedient Takisian honor.

He'd laid it right on the line, as straightforwardly as he'd laid her Friday night, and even less gently: You cannot unmask Hartmann. It would hand the election to Barnett on a platter. How many innocent joker lives are you willing to spend on your vengeance?

"None," she said.

A couple of joker faces looked at her with shellshock blankness. None of them recognized her; she had a leopard mask on today. It had been lying in a gutter on Peachtree. The riot hadn't mashed it beyond usefulness.

Something crunched beneath her foot. She kicked at it until a sign emerged from the mud, hand-lettered at the JADL headquarters tent for last night's demonstration. The message almost made her smile.

Judas Jack, 1950

Traitor Tach, I988

Two of A Kind

With Mackie dead she'd been able to return to her own room. She was dressed today in blue jeans and a loose pale-blue blouse. She let her Reeboks carry her past a CBS remote van, where an earnest young black stringer was talking into a yellow-foam phallus.

"Piedmont Park remains virtually deserted after a night of rioting in which three hundred jokers were arrested. Several dozen jokers wander, as if dazed, among the trampled ruins of the tent city; Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young has rescinded his order that any jokers found on the street should be arrested on sight, following a personal plea in the early hours of this morning by Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis. Debate still rages over Governor Harris's refusal to declare martial law… "

They were few enough, but they were in a sense her people. She walked among them for the last time. No joker would trust her again, and she had sworn on her soul never to reveal the secret that would vindicate her in their eyes. For their sake she had to let them hate her.

For my sake. Unless I never plan to pass another mirror with my eyes open.

Tom Brokaw spoke to her from a portable television resting on an upturned ice chest and being ignored by a listless black joker with glowing blue carbuncles covering his face and such of his body as his coveralls left bare.

". uneasy truce that prevails between a mixed force of police and aces and several hundred joker demonstrators outside the Blythe van Renssaeler Clinic.."

The camera cut to a sign supported either edge by six green sucker-tipped fingers: "The Knave of Hearts Beats Every Joker in the Deck." Then it panned to a joker Sara knew named Canker, for obvious reasons, with the beleaguered J-Town Clinic for backdrop.

"Aces are helping the pigs oppress jokers on this street," he told the camera, gesturing at the cordon that kept the protesters at bay. "An ace did Chrysalis and a joker stands to burn for it. It's us against them!"

Tachyon, Tachyon, did you know what you were sacrificing? She knew. That was one reason she was willing to burn her own career and reputation at his behest.

The other was that she had her vengeance, and nothing else mattered.

Puppetman was dead-that was what Hartmann called his power, Tachyon said. Demise had killed it, sucked it right out through Hartmann's eyes before: Mackie Messer decapitated him.

The evil wasn't dead; oh, no. No matter how much Gregg wept, how bitterly he protested his innocence. Puppetman had been the crystallization of Hartmann's lusts. Those lusts still lived.

But Gregg didn't have the ability to pull strings and make puppets dance to gratify his needs any more. That was what Demise had destroyed.

And Gregg would never have the balls to walk the night with a knife in his own hand.

Without his power, Gregg was trapped in hell. Sara no longer wished he'd die. Now she hoped he lived a long, long time.

She sat on an overturned trash can. Andi, she thought, this is vengeance, isn't it? You wouldn't want me to ruin the life of every wild card in America just to buy you a little more?

The spoiled little bitch probably would. But Andrea Whitman was dead now, too.

Sara shook out her winter-pale hair, smoothed it back from her face with her hands. A breeze blew across the park, almost cool. She lifted her head and looked out over the morning-after battlefield.

A black policeman rode around the outskirts of the park on a tall bay gelding. He watched her closely. A pig hunting more victims? A frightened man trying to do his job? It was a judgment call, and Sara Morgenstern was fresh out of judgments.

Victims.

Puppetman's strings were all cut. But Gregg Hartmann had one more victim left.

She stood up and left the park with a sense of purpose that tasted like an alien emotion to one who thought her purpose was all used up. She left the mask in a can that said Keep Atlanta Beautiful.

Tachyon closed the door to Gregg's suite behind him. Gregg looked up from the Samsonite suitcase he was packing. "Doctor," he said. "I'm surprised you came so quickly. Amy must have just called you a few minutes ago…"

"I suppose I felt I owed it to you." The alien was holding himself in stiffly, his chin cocked forward over a ruffled lace collar and a paisley, electric-blue silk shirt. Despite the pose,

Tachyon was obviously on the edge of exhaustion. His skin was too pale, the eyes too sunken and hollow, and Gregg noticed that he held the stump of his hand behind him. " I feel no guilt about what I did to you. I would do it again, gladly."

Gregg nodded. He closed the suitcase, latched it, locked it. "I'm picking up Ellen at the hospital in a few hours," he said conversationally. Setting the luggage down on the floor, he gestured silently to a chair.

Tachyon seated himself. The lilac gaze was utterly expressionless. "Well, let us play it-the final scene in this little drama. But quickly. There are other people I need to see."

Gregg tried to stare him down. It was difficult to hold the alien's intense, unblinking gaze. "You can't say anything, you know. You still can't."

Tachyon grimaced and his eyes darkened as if in implicit threat.

"No, you won't," Gregg said softly. "You tell the press what you know about me and you prove that Barnett was right all along. There was a secret ace with his hands on the strings of the government. The wild card virus is something to be feared. The nats do need to do something to protect themselves from us. You talk, Doctor, and all the old laws will seem like freedom. I know you. I've had twenty years to watch you and learn how you think and how you respond. No, you won't talk. After all, that's why you did what you did last night."

"Yes, you are quite correct." Tachyon sighed and pressed his stump to his chest as if it pained him. "What I did went against all my principles-some old ones, and some newfound ones. It was not something I did lightly or at whim. You are a murderer and you should pay." He shook his head in weary frustration. "And ships should be stars, but they're not, and nothing can ever make them so."

"What the hell is that-the Takisian version of spilt milk?"Gregg paced across the room, then whirled to face the alien. "Look, you've got to know one thing. I didn't do it,"

Gregg told him. "Puppetman did it. The wild card power. All of it was the wild card. Not me. You don't understand what it was like to have him inside. I had to feed him or he'd destroy me. I'd have given anything to have rid myself of him, and now I have. I can make a fresh start, I can begin again-"

"What!" Tachyon's roar interrupted.