He was tired of tasting it at one remove. It was like eating soup through a straw.

He came around a corner. To his right the river licked the beach like a wound. A knot of assorted seedballs was drifting though the wet cold sand toward the food tables, gray shapes half distinct in the false light. He paid them no mind. They were the basic flotsam that that fat fool Bloat got such a charge of clasping to his bosom, or whatever you called it: jokers, monstrous to the Takisian sensibilities Blaise had picked up as much despite his grandfather as because of him, nat trash not a lot more tasteful. The sort of scum he would've gotten a kick out of finding asleep in some alley, soaking down with gas, and lighting off if he'd been born a mere groundling.

Then Blaise saw him.

In cognition's ground-zero flash he went from a gangly shape stilting head and shoulders over the trash stream to a terror that yammered in Blaise's skull and pounded on the temples like a mad thing trying to get out. With a martial artist's backward leap, Blaise put the cold block of a building between him and the awful apparition. Burning Sky, could he have seen me?

"Blaise?"

Like a soft knife, the voice cut through the hammering in his temples. He looked up and saw K. C. Strange framed by his knees, realized he'd sunk into a sort of fetal crouch with his back to the chill cement wall.

"Blaise, what's the matter? You look like you're about to throw up."

He felt a stab of fury, a yellow ice pick through the purple throbbing fog in his brain. How dare she intrude? How dare she question? But the anger flickered and vanished like sparks from an oil-drum fire.

From the other jumpers he got fear and deference and awe-even from Molly Bolt, who hated his guts. From K.C. he got concern. He had never had people really care about him for his own sake before-he didn't count his grandfather or the one-eyed bitch. Tach's only interest was to keep him from becoming what he was truly meant to be, and Cody was only playing with him. In that last few years he had come to realize, to acknowledge, that for his beloved "Uncle George" he had never been more than a means to an end, and he'd been a kind of revolutionary mascot to the terrorist cells who raised him before that, before his accursed grandfather stumbled across him. K.C. of all the people he'd known gave a fuck for him._

Maybe that was why he kept her around in spite of her mouth. She was cute. But with his shoulders and attitude and sculpted looks, most of all with his power, he could have cute any time, any way.

He let out a long sobbing breath. "It's him. He's come for my grandfather."

"Who?"

"Him. He's cut his hair, he dresses differently, but it is him. I can smell him. I can feel his mind. He is here to rescue Tachyon."

"Don't be ridiculous."

He shot her a hot-eyed look, which she ignored. "Nobody knows about Tachyon except us-and Bloat, because he knows everything that goes down on the Rox. But Bloat's got a bigger hard-on for the straights than we do. He'd never spill."

"It doesn't matter," said Blaise. "He is an ace. He has his ways."

"Now go back to the beginning and tell me just who this he is."

"Mark Meadows," he said in a voice that rang with adolescent Sturm and Drang. "Captain Trips."

"Mark Meadows?" She laughed. "You're working up a sweat for nothing, lover boy. Why, I met him yesterday. He's just a harmless old-who did you say he was?"

"Captain Trips. The ace who has the friends. Jumpin' Jack Flash, Starshine, Moonchild-I am not sure how many more. He was one of Grandfather's best friends." He looked up at her with a face drawn like a Greco martyr's. "I must stop him. He will destroy us."

K.C. laughed. Blaise's face froze. She ruled his hair. Her fingers did a better job than the wind. As she teased and tickled his scalp, he relaxed slightly, knew again why he tolerated her.

He also knew that one day he would pay her back for each and every impertinence, with interest. But he was learning to defer gratification, sometimes. Grandpere would be so proud.

"Relax. He's just a harmless old geezer."

"He's an ace, I tell you-"

She laughed again. "He may have been a big ace, babe. He's nothing now, capisc'? When I tripped over him, he was in the process of getting his skinny butt kicked by Tyrone and Foureyes and company. Righteous dweebs. They were about to stomp his brains out through his big beaky nose until a little tiny teenage girl with a toy knife turned up to the rescue." She squatted beside him and played with the braided tail that hung down the back of Blaise's bombardier's jacket. "Some ace, huh?"

He shook his head clear with a flip of irritation. "He is undercover. He has to hide his powers. You never lived underground. You would not know"

"No, hey, I just lived out on the streets since I was twelve years old, I wouldn't know anything about that, and anyway I'm just a girl."

"That's right."

She reared back, ready to spit at him like a cobra. At the last instant before she said something he would have to destroy her for, he showed his teeth in a feral gin. She blinked, grinned back, hung her hands around his neck, and shook her head. "You son of a bitch."

This is our game, he thought, smiling complacently. I push her to see how far she pushes back. She pushes back to see how far I'll go.

And the stakes are her life. Wouldn't that surprise her? He remembered Mark, then, and lost his taste for games. He pushed her arms off his neck, only half roughly, and started to stand. "Enough of this, cheri."

"Ooh, I love it when you talk dirty"

He shook his head sharply, like a ferret with a mouse. She took the hint. "Your Mark Meadows has played a foolish game and lost. It's time to take from him the price="

"Andrieux."

He looked up. Mustelina and Andiron stood there. Mustelina cradled an AKM assault rifle in her furry paws-not one of the semiautomatics the liberals were so spastic about, but a real assault rifle, full auto as issued to a Baltic conscript with the Warsaw Pact in Poland, who had sold it for a lid. Andiron wasn't armed. He just tapped his blunt greenishblack forearms together gently with a ringing like weights dropped cn a carpeted gym floor.

Blaise snapped upright, heels together, and performed a mock bow, half Takisian, half French. "To what do I owe the honor?"

Monsters, he thought, and his skin crawled. "Governor wants to see you," Mustelina said.

Blaise smiled his beautiful smile at the ferretlike joker. "Ah, but I regret, urgent business requires me-" Andiron's handless arms pealed like a bell. "Now," he said.

Blaise's eyes became slits. "I could make you dance a waltz into the river and drown."

"Sure you could," Mustelina agreed easily, "but you won't."

Blaise stood a moment longer, his lips stretching across his teeth so tightly he feared they'd tear. "Someday," he hissed.

Mustelina levered the AK from full auto to safe with two loud clacks. "Someday," she agreed.

Blaise turned to K. C., gripped her by the arms. "Go find Meadows. Get to know him. Find out what he wants." She nodded and slipped away.

He turned to the two Bloat guards, straightened, pulled back his shoulders, and adjusted the fit of his leather jacket. "Well? We burn the daylight."

Mark settled down with his rump propped on a mostly horizontal slab of asphalt, part of a stack of paving chunks piled at the tip of the southern arm of the blocky U that was Ellis Island, next to the mouth of the tiny little harbor. It was a crisp, clear morning. His breath smoked like a dragon's as he tried to get comfortable with his plastic plate of lukewarm beans perched on his knees.

"Hey there."

He started at the voice, looked up furtively, prepared to run. He still wasn't sure he was entitled to eat. The fooddistribution system on the Rox was pretty rough and ready: