Croyd yawned again. “Uh, y’know, man,” he said, looking down at his splayed skink feet, “I was wondering if you could do me a favor when we get back to Venceremos tomorrow.”

“What do you need?”

“Well, you’re the Brigade pharmacist now and all. I was wondering if you could maybe slip me a little something to help keep me, y’know, sharp.”

Mark looked at him and sighed. Maybe nothing did change.

“I guess,” he said in a carefully neutral tone.

“Now, don’t get me wrong, guy. I just need to keep my” – yawn – “my edge, if you know what I mean. Lizards don’t sleep.”

“Of course not,” Mark said.

“What does it mean,” she asked, accepting a tin plate of steaming rice and vegetables, “when the jokers say, ‘The Rox lives’?”

“It means they come from a TV generation that never learned to tell the difference between reality and spun-sugar Steven Spielberg Technicolor bullshit,” said Eric the Dreamer. To the light of his bunker’s single lantern his eyes showed the depth and shimmer of the layered glazes of a seventeenth-century Japanese cup. It was hard to say what color they were – harder, perhaps, to say which they weren’t. From somewhere in the depths of her, Moonchild summoned the knowledge that such varicolored eyes were called “hazel.”

He nodded his heavy jut-encrusted head at the plate, which his guest had yet to touch. “There’s no meat in there, if that’s bothering you,” he said. “I don’t eat it myself.”

“Koreans are not necessarily vegetarians,” she said.

We are a harsh people in some ways, I suppose.” She dropped her eyes. Her black yin-yang half mask and a heavy fall of black hair hid most of her face in shadow. “But I eat no meat either. It is against my… my principles to take life.”

He took a bite, chewed slowly, watching her the while. She found she couldn’t look at him for any length of time without her cheeks growing uncomfortably warm.

“Strange to find you in the camp of Mars, then,” he said. “We are an army, Ms. Moonchild.”

“Isis,” she said quickly. “Isis Moon. ‘Moonchild’ is an ace name. I don’t know where I got it, to be honest. There are so many things I don’t know… To use an ace name seems so ego-bound, yet that’s how Mark and his other friends refer to me.”

“Isis, then. If I may.”

“Oh, yes – Eric.”

“So why are you here? This seems like a funny place to find a pacifist.”

“Perhaps pacifist is not the right word to use – oh. Forgive me if I seem to contradict you.”

He shook his head, mouth full.

“This food is excellent. The vegetables are crisp and flavorful.”

“Thank you. The Sterno-can cooking method adapts well to stir-frying. Sorry I’m not able to offer you kimchi.

“This probably tastes a little on the anemic side to you.”

“Oh, no, not at all. It’s wonderful.”

“You still haven’t answered my question.”

She lowered her eyes again. “I lack the skill with words that I have with my body. I have no gift of verbal evasion.”

She took a few bites in silence. He let her. He watched her closely.

“I do not forswear – is this the word? I have not renounced the use of force. There are times when it is necessary to defend the weak or needy, or to defend oneself. But I do renounce the doing of harm. Therefore I use force to subdue an attacker without hurting him, so that I can leave his presence. And so, with luck, he can cool down, let go his anger and perhaps through meditation realize that there is no need for violence.”

“But there is need for violence sometimes. However gently applied, the means you use to subdue your attacker still are violence.”

She sighed. “As I say, I have no skill for debate. The violence – I use is restrained, defensive. None suffer it who do not intend harm, and even they suffer as little as possible.”

He smiled, shaking his head. “That’s a sweet sentiment. I really applaud you for it, Ms. Moon – Isis. But what happens when your attacker isn’t just coming after you in the heat of passion? What happens when he really comes to kill you, and he won’t cool down? When he keeps picking himself up and dusting himself off and coming after you?”

“You saw how I dealt with Rhino. His anger and his fear of seeming weak before his peers caused him to come at me after it was obvious he could not best me, nor harm me unless I let him. I met his attacks, and finally he desisted.”

“That’s fine,” Eric said, gesturing with his fork. “But you’re an ace, Isis. How about the rest of us, who don’t have your meta-human strength and speed and skills, and God knows what else?”

She looked at him. She moistened her lips with a neat pink tongue. She could find nothing to say.

“That’s why we’re needed. The New Joker Brigade. The nats aren’t going to be satisfied with their laws and their hate rallies much longer. Their thirst is only going to be quenched in a flood of joker blood – and ace blood, too, don’t jive yourself. They got a taste of it at the Rox. Do you think the lynch mobs will calm down and start loving us humble jokers after you’ve roughed them up some and given them time to think about it?”

Her mind filled with images of a nat mob coming for her with torches and knives and rope, their white-dough faces twisted into hate pastries. There were dozens of them, hundreds, thousands – too many for her to deal with for all her skill and meta-human traits, surrounding her so that she could not run. Coming to kill her.

“But if you hurt them, do you not lower yourself to their level?” Desperation tinged her voice.

“If that’s so, why isn’t it lowering yourself to the level of your attacker to use violence at all?”

“Perhaps -” She looked all around now, everywhere but at him. “Perhaps we can agree to disagree, yes? I live as I do and act as I do because I have sworn to. If I cause lasting harm, if I take life, I lose what powers I have.”

“Nonsense. Your powers come from the wild card virus, not some mystic vow.”

“Please. I know what I speak of. Could – could Peregrine fly without her wings?”

Eric looked thoughtful. “I read somewhere her wings aren’t near big enough to lift her weight, and that in reality she flies by a kind of telekinesis. Sort of like the Turtle.”

“But she cannot. She cannot fly if her wings are bound, or if they are damaged. If she lacked her wings, she would not believe she could fly, and so she could not. It is the same with me.”

“But the world isn’t about what you believe. It’s about what is.”

She raised her head and looked him in the eye. “Do you truly believe that? You, who call yourself the Dreamer?”

He looked at her a moment. Then he laughed. “Got me with that one. But let’s see. I dream of a better world and ask, ’Why not?’ I don’t imagine the better world really exists, here and now, just because I dream it. That’s what I’m doing here in Fort Venceremos. Laying my life on the line alongside Colonel Sobel and the rest of the comrades to make the world that better one I dream about. Okay?”

“Perhaps I am naпve. That is why I am here, as well, to work – yes, to fight – for your better world, Eric-sonsaang. But mine is the gentle way. It must be so.”

“Let’s hope you enjoy the luxury of keeping your feet on that gentle path.”

For several minutes they ate in silence. The bunker was smaller than the one Mark shared with Croyd, lower-ceilinged. It was also neater.

“You’re fascinating,” Eric told her. “Where do you come from?”

“I was born in Korea,” she said. “My father fought with Inmun Gun – the army of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. He was captured during the invasion of the South. At the end of the war he refused repatriation to the North, as so many did.

“My mother was a nurse who tended him in hospital when he was stricken by appendicitis. They fell in love. When he was finally released from the internment camp, they married.”