"Oh yes. Your pets here" — looking at the other refugees— "they come to me whenever something requires initiative, yes? They tell me where the mermaid is, so I can go and deal with her."

"But you two are connected somehow. You're friends, or—"

"We are not sheep," Amitav said. "That is all we have in common. Here, it is enough."

"I want to know about her."

"That is wise," Amitav said, more quietly.

"Why do you say that?"

"Because she survived what you did to her. Because she knows you did it."

"I didn't do anything."

The stickman waved one dismissive hand. "No matter. She will come for you anyway."

"What happened? What was done to her?"

"She did not say, exactly. She says very little. And sometimes, when she does say things, she does not say them to anyone here, yes? At least, no one I can see. But they get her quite upset."

"She sees ghosts?"

Amitav shrugged. "Ghosts are not uncommon here. I am speaking to one now."

"You know I'm no ghost."

"Not a real one, perhaps. You only haunt machinery."

Sou-Hon Perreault looked for a filter to tweak. She couldn't find one that fit.

"She said you caused the earthquake," Amitav said suddenly. "She says you sent the wave that killed so many of us."

"That's ridiculous."

"And you would know, yes? Your leaders would share such things with the drivers of mechanical insects?"

"Why would anyone do something like that?"

Amitav shrugged. "Ask Clarke. If you can find her."

"Can you help me do that?"

"Certainly." He pointed to the Pacific. "She is out there."

"Will you see her again?"

"I do not know."

"Can you let me know if you do?"

"And how would I do that even if I wished to?"

"Sou-Hon," Perreault said.

"I do not understand."

"That's my name. Sou-Hon. I can program the botflies to recognize your voice. If they hear you calling me, they'll let me know."

"Ah," Amitav said.

"Well?"

Amitav smiled. "Don't call us. We'll call you."

In South Bend, the mermaid killed a man.

Willapa Bay ruptured the Strip like an ulcer twelve kilometers across. Official surveillance of that gap had not been designed to catch people for whom breathing was optional; now the coast was fifteen klicks behind her. This far in, the wave had been thwarted by headlands and a thick stubby island, clogging the inlet like a cyst. The Big One had merely trembled here. The wreckage and desolation was all of local origin.

She emerged past midnight onto a dark, corroded segment of waterfront, long since abandoned to a creeping blight of premillennial toluene. Nervous late-night pedestrians glimpsed her on the edge of the city core and increased their pace from A to B. The last time Clarke had wandered civilized streets there'd been free wristwatch dispensers on every second corner, a half-hearted sop to those who'd have empowered the masses through access to information. She could find no dispensers in this place, only an old public phone standing guard in fluorescent twilight. She interrogated it. She was here, it told her. Yves Scanlon lived there, three hundred kilometers to the northeast.

He wouldn't be expecting her. She faded to black. Indifferent security cameras reduced her to a transient assemblage of infrared pixels.

She clambered back down concrete scree to an oily waterline. Something called to her as she retrieved her fins: muffled, familiar sounds from an abandoned customs office.

It could have been the splintering of rotten pilings. Maybe a boot against ribs, with flesh getting in the way. Something knotted in Clarke's throat. There's no end to the things you can slam into a human body. She'd lost count of the different sounds they made.

Almost too faint to hear, more whimper than words: "Fuck, man…" The muted hum of an electrical discharge. A groan.

A walkway extended around the derelict office; junk piled along its length waited to trip anyone not gifted with night eyes. At the other side of the building, a dock jutted from the waterfront on wooden pilings. Two figures stood on that platform, a man and a woman. Four others lay twitching at their feet. A police botfly slept on the pier, conveniently offline.

Technically, of course, it was not an assault. Both aggressors wore uniforms and badges conferring the legal right to beat whomever they chose. Tonight they'd chosen an entrée of juveniles, laid out along the creosote-stained planks like gutted fish. Those bodies twitched with the spastic neural static of shockprod discharge; beyond that, they didn't react to the boots in their sides. Clarke could hear snatches of conversation from the uniforms, talk of curfew violations and unauthorized use of the Maelstrom.

And of trespassing.

"On government property, no less," remarked the male, lifting one arm in a grand gesture that took in the dock, the pilings, the derelict office, Lenie Clarke—

— Shit he's wearing nightshades they're both wearing nightshades—

"You!" The policeman took a single step toward the office, pointing his shockprod at the shadows in which she lay exposed. "Stand away from the building!"

There'd been a time, not so long ago, when Lenie Clarke would have obeyed without thinking. She'd have followed orders even though she knew what was coming, because she'd learned that you deal with violence by just shutting up and getting it over with. It would hurt, of course. That was the whole point. But it was better than the chronic queasiness, the expectation, the endless interludes between assaults where you could only wait for it to happen.

More recently, she would have simply fled. Or at least withdrawn. None of my business, she'd have told herself, and departed before anyone even knew she was there. She had done that when Mike Brander, denied revenge upon those who'd made his childhood a living hell, had used Gerry Fischer as a convenient proxy. It had been none of my business when Beebe Station resounded with the sound of Brander's rage and Fischer's breaking bones. It had been none of my business when Brander, shift after shift, had stood guard in the wet room, daring Fischer to come back inside. Eventually Fischer had faded from man to child to reptile, an empty inhuman cipher living on the edge of the rift. Even then, it had been none of Lenie Clarke's business.

But Gerry Fischer was dead now. So was Lenie Clarke, for that matter. She'd died with the others: Alice and Mike and Ken and Gerry, all turned into white-hot vapor. They were all dead, and when the stone had been rolled away and the voice had rung out, Lazarus! Come forth! it hadn't been any of Lenie Clarke's friends that had risen from the grave. It hadn't even been Lenie Clarke. Not the soft squirming career victim of her dryback days, anyway. Not the opaque chrysalis gestating down on the rift. It had been something newly-forged, acid-washed, some white-hot metamorph of Lenie Clarke that had never existed before.

Now it was confronted by a familiar icon—an authority, a giver of orders, an eager practitioner of the legal right to commit violence upon her. She did not regard its challenge as an order to be obeyed. She did not consider it a situation to be avoided.

For Lenie Clarke Mark II, it was a long-overdue invitation to dance.