The others laughed their jackal laughs, and as painspikes jolted up his spine and down into his scrotum, the tall man wondered if he was actually going to survive. And he thought the thing he'd always sworn he never would: If my friends were here, you'd never dare treat me like this!

Laughter. "Hey, old dude, you got no friends! Or didn't you figure that out yet?"

There. It was out. He'd even spoken it aloud without meaning to. Shame as much as anger and pain and fear made his eyes run suddenly hot with tears as the impact of their limbs and their laughter redoubled.

And then a voice, cutting like a busted-off car antenna. "What the fuck is going on here?"

The blowstorm stopped. He rolled over and sat up, curiosity overcoming caution.

A woman-a girl-stood facing the joker quartet. Her hair was short, moussed into a nondescript-colored spike palisade to guard her scalp. Silver bangles and skull-and bones swung from one ear. "I said `What the fuck?' Don't try to hide from me, Foureyes," she added to the smallest, who had maneuvered himself behind his companions.

"Hey, hey," the joker said defensively, blinking his namesakes furiously. "Just trashin' this old nat, you know? Passin' the time."

"Whofuck you tellus wha'do?" the biggest one said, the one with the premium ham for a hand and a face that was all fissures and flanges, like a leaf-eating bat. Saliva shot from his face like Silly String when he spoke. "Juzda dumb cunt."

"Cool it, Tyrone," Foureyes said urgently. "She's a jumper." A slim black kid, normal-looking except for the hoof with which he'd tried to do street surgery on the tall man's kidneys, put a sneer on his chiseled handsome face. "She big time. She his squeeze." He added a head flip on his.

A quick steel veronica: balisong, a butterfly knife, unfolding its wings very pretty, like in the movies, and then just the tip stuck up the black kid's right nostril. "That's K.C. Strange to you, Footloose. And I don t need anybody's help to fuck up a bunch of detached assholes like you, capisc'? And don't be trying to circle around behind me anymore, Zero, or your friend here's gonna start looking lots more like Tyrone. In fact-"

Stung, or thinking he'd seen an opening, the gigantic Tyrone had begun to roll forward. K.C. smiled.

Footloose stepped back, looked Tyrone dead in the eyes, and laughed shrilly. Then his face changed, and he tried to take a step forward. The hoof didn't want to move. He pitched facefirst into sand caked with something dark, sticky, and sweetly fetid.

Tyrone stopped dead. He raised his hands to his face. The clubbed hand blundered heedlessly into his eye.

He screamed.

Zero was dancing around the perimeter. "What? Foureyes, what's going on?"

"Oh, fuck, oh, Tyrone, you useless fuck!" Foureyes moaned. Footloose raised his head to stare at him. Foureyes began to kick him. "She multiple jumped the stupid bastards, swapped their fucking minds."

K.C. smiled and made her knife disappear. "You're not as dumb as I thought you were. "

"Shit! Shit, we gotta get outta here," Zero gobbled. He grabbed Footloose his body, anyway-under the arm and dragged him upright as he began to roar incoherently. Foureyes caught hold of the weeping Tyrone-Footloose and hustled him away along the stinking beach.

"Come back tomorrow and ask nice, I may sort your little minds out again," she called after them. Then she shook her head. "Damn. The way we fight each other, all the Combine has to do is wait. We'll do the job on ourselves, and they won't have to worry about how to crash the wall." She looked down at the tall man. He slumped there, rubbing the ache in his face while the filthy waves of Upper New York Bay shot needles of sunlight in through his eyes and up to the roof of his skull. A twitch of breeze sent crinkled Ding Dong wrappers and styrofoam cup shards skittering like small animals to the shelter of his thin haunch. "So who are you?" she demanded.

"M-mark," he said. His lips felt big as basketballs. He saw no reason to lie to her. "Mark Meadows."

But she was looking away across the water, at the Circle Line ferry beyond the cordon of Harbor Police boats that surrounded the Rox, chugging toward the foreskin tip of Manhattan.

"Wha-" he gagged, spat sand that tasted like stuff you flossed from between your teeth, "what's the Combine?" She tossed her pointy little chin after the ferryboat. "Them. The straights, the nats, the outside world. The government. Everybody but us wretched refuse huddled here on the Rox, brother."

Oh. That was nothing new… a light dawned.

"Hey, man, I remember now. Randall McMurphyl He's the one with the Combine. Like, Nurse Ratched and them." She laughed. "You're the first person I've met on this damned island who knew that." She walked away whistling.

Some social worker had given her the small pink-plush elephant, back at another of the dim cold places with echoing halls. Now it lay on her metal-frame bed, slashed open, its cotton entrails strewn everywhere.

Tears filled her eyes. She didn't understand. Didn't understand the jeering taunts of the other girls, the makebelieve caring of the doctor people, the rough unconcern of the people who actually took care of her, to the extent anybody did. She had grown up with love and warmth and a constant glow of happy safety. Now, in only a few months' time, she'd learned to treasure being ignored. She began to gather up the fragments of the stuffed toy.

She didn't understand what she was doing here. The other girls said they were here for doing bad things, but she had never done anything bad. Her daddy always said she was a good girl. The doctor people said she was special. When she asked if that was why she was inside, they told her no, it was because her daddy was a bad man.

She sniffled. Her daddy wasn't a bad man. He was Daddy.

She threw herself down on the bed. Her roommate wasn't in. She liked this roommate. She didn't pick on her, didn't pay any attention to her at all.

The tears were overwhelming her now. Most of all, she missed her daddy, tall and strong and always there for her. He wasn't a bad man. And she knew that he wouldn't let her stay here forever. Someday he'd come for her. No matter what.

And a voice inside her head told her, You're what the other girls say you are. Just a stupid. You're going to be here forever and ever.

Alone.

She gathered the sad empty head of the elephant to her cheek. Its black-disc pupils rolled up in its plastic-button eyes. She hugged it to her and drifted into sleep, weeping for the death of her friend.

Head thrown back to let the dawn wind ruffle his red brush cut with bloatblack-stinking fingers, Blaise walked through the Rox's gray huddle. He was just in via the Charon Express from a night run with the jumpers. Just a casual cruise to see how some of their investment properties over in Manhattan were doing, and he was on top of the world.

You always lectured me about the proper uses of power, grandpere, he thought, and his smile turned edged and ugly. And I must hand it to you, you have indeed taught me to use it.

It came to him then that it might be time to go down below the medical building for a new lesson in the use of power. He was still fairly fresh, with a sixteen-year-old's endurance, and these little jaunts into town tended to leave him unsatisfied and maybe a trifle bored. His jumpers were too simple, too American. It wasn't that he didn't enjoy the same things they did. Only not as long.

And he wanted more. Putting the expensively cultured body of a millionaire's daughter through its paces while its owner looked on had its rewards. But mostly it served to draw his appetite thin and tight like the skin on a starving man's ribs. He could taste real power. That was what their victims commanded, why they were chosen.