It threw Tachyon completely off stride. She faltered, gaped. “What?”

“Aliens. I don’t give a rat’s ass about the sufferings of faggots from outer space. Your people brought the wild card to Earth. What was the toll on Wild Card Day? Sixty thousand dead? Let this Blaise do his worst.” Fortunato was talking to her back. A vise had closed around her chest as the guilt slammed home. Mental wails were coming from Illyana as she tried to absorb, understand, buffer against the fire storm of emotions that tore through her mother. It was almost a flashback. The peaceful garden became Central Park. The screams of the dying and the deformed. And the smell – smoke and feces and vomit. Wild Card Day. September 15, 1946.

“Hey, Tachyon.”

She kept walking.

“I’ll give you this much – Jube the Walrus isn’t a joker. In fact, he’s not even human.”

That got her. Frowning, Tach turned back to face the ace. “You’re mad.”

“No. I’m the most powerful ace in the world, remember?”

“Even if it’s true, how does that help? What in the fuck am I supposed to do with that?” Tachyon walked back to the bench, glared at the ace.

Fortunato stood and smoothed the folds of his kimono, glanced down into Tachyons bitter face, shrugged. “Hey, you’re not my problem. It’s not my responsibility to take care of you.”

“Or anyone else.” Tight and low the words had to fight their way past her lips.

“I thought you would have gotten that by now.”

“Oh, yes, I got it. Now get this!”

It was an effort to keep her balance, but Tach managed, and watched with satisfaction as the toe of her shoe impacted squarely with Fortunato’s crotch. He clutched himself and dropped, groaning, to his knees. The twilight bird song was punctuated with the sounds of gags and retching. Tach watched dispassionately as vomit and spittle decorated the grass.

“There must be a thousand women who wish they could have done that,” said Tach pleasantly. “I’m glad it got to be me.”

As she walked back across the bridge, Tach couldn’t help reflecting how soothing the sounds of a Zen garden could be.

“You went to Japan for a day?” The customs officer was a hirsute individual with a five o’clock shadow at ten o’clock, and brows that looked like knotted bird nests. “And you’ve got no luggage?”

“Yes… and yes.”

The line behind Tachyon was becoming restive. The Japanese might be patient about queues back home, but not in New York. They wanted to reach the fleshpots of Manhattan and find a blond cutie – rather like the one holding up the parade. Despite Tachyon’s fecund condition she had been groped five times on the flight back to the States. The fifth assailant had earned himself a black eye.

Resigning herself to the necessity of explanations, Tach began, “I went to Japan solely for a meeting. You have my passport with a letter from Senator Kennedy. It should be apparent what has happened to me.”

Cody was no doubt waiting beyond customs. It made Tach crazy to be so close to home, and to be stalled by an officious -

There were suddenly two men on either side of her. Dark suits, white shirts. Every thread of their polyester screamed federal cop.

“Dr. Tachyon, if you could come with us please.”

She took one last longing look at the sliding doors cycling open and closed, disgorging people into freedom. The man on her left closed a hand around her upper arm. Resistance melted under the hot breath of fear.

Interrogation rooms the world over have the same look and feel and smell. Tachyon had experienced them in France, Germany, and Spain. Had spent several memorable days in New York’s Tombs in the early sixties fighting off nightmares born of the d. t.’s. So, although the smiling General Zappa might describe this as a “debriefing,” Tach knew better. It was rubber-hoses time again.

Only the man wielding the hose would be the civilian representative of the United States government. She glanced again at Phillip von Herzenhagen’s blood-suffused face and took tighter rein on a mount called terror. The special assistant to Vice President Quayle was fat and pink like a marzipan bonbon, and he had entered the room just brimming with jocularity and bonhomie. Then he decided to interpret Tachyon’s ignorance for intransigence, and his mood had shifted.

Tach’s eyes roved the room, seeking inspiration from the cinder-block walls. There had been cinder blocks in her basement cell on the Rox, she recalled. Zappa was seated across a scarred wooden table from her. The scrape of chair legs against the concrete floor pulled her attention back to her inquisitors.

Von Herzenhagen strode across the room and yanked up the venetian blinds. Bloat’s castle bulked fantastic against the sky.

“How the hell does somebody create that?”

Tach shrugged. “You know as much as I do. It’s called wild card.”

“This creature is the most dangerous threat the United States has ever faced. Power like that -”

Resting her palms on the table, she leaned in intently. “- is paltry when compared to that of a Hitler, a Pol Pot. We’re talking about a boy, a desperate boy who is doing his best to protect and care for his people. If you would stop throwing soldiers at him and try talking -”

“We don’t negotiate with terrorists!”

“Since when did jokers become terrorists?” Tach shouted.

Zappa stepped in as peacemaker. “I’d call the jumps an act of terrorism.”

“You’re lumping two very diverse groups with competing interests into a single entity. Bloat – Teddy – represents the jokers, is trying to protect them, and the Ideal knows they have suffered at your hands.”

“How many jokers are on that island?” von Herzenhagen demanded.

“How many times do you want to hear the same words? I don’t know.”

“How the hell could you not know? You were on that fucking rock for seven months!”

Tach was furious now at his tone, the hardness of the wooden chair, the whole damn situation. “And for the first five months I was locked in a basement, and the remaining two in an attic! I wasn’t given a guided tour!”

“A guess,” Zappa said soothingly.

“A lot – thousands maybe.”

“You’re lying.” Von Herzenhagen’s face was inches from hers. Tach’s heart gave a skip, and nausea clawed at her guts. “Ellis Island is a quarter of a mile of ship ballast.”

His hand closed on her wrist, and her slender control snapped. Tach jerked hard to the left, sending herself and the chair careening to the floor.

“Holy Christ!” Zappa’s voice distant and above her.

Both the men dropped to their knees next to her. The male heat washed off them in waves. She could smell the stale cigarette smoke on von Herzenhagen’s breath. He gripped her shoulders, and Tach began screaming, a thin, tearing sound shattering off the brick was.

“Don’t hurt me! Ancestors, please don’t hurt me!”

“Then tell us what we want to know,” von Herzenhagen said.

“Jesus shit, Phil,” Zappa snapped. “She’s… he’s scared to death.”

“Tell me!”

“There are… caverns… miles and miles… of them. Please, please, don’t hurt me,” Tach whimpered. She had curled into a fetal position, arms folded protectively across Illyana.

With a forefinger Zappa pushed up her sleeves, lightly touched the bandages. “Phil, lay off her now, okay?”

The slamming of the door was the reply.

The accommodations were nicer than the Rox, but it was still a cell. The window gave her a view of Ellis Island, and Tachyon wondered if that was deliberate. She whiled away the hours watching military aircraft cut the skies over New York Harbor.

The sun went down, and the castle glittered with lights. Like stars peeking through massed thunderclouds. An Ab screamed past and disturbed from their rest a flock of winged creatures; they exploded off one of the tower battlements like wind-torn smoke.