“… Uh, Jed,” he said. “Hi.”

“Hi,” I said. It was Tony Sic.

“Hi,” I mumbled again. “Tony. Hi.” At first I hadn’t recognized him because he’d gotten a vicious crew cut. He was in shorts and a blue-and-white-striped Merida Futbol Club shirt with a big number 28. Huh, I thought. Huh. Wonder what’s going on. He kind of stared at me. I felt a twinge of that old-rival feeling.

He asked how I was. I said better and asked him how he was. He said something. He seemed nervouser than usual. Were he and Marena having a thing? I wondered. She’d said she was getting married to somebody-but no way, she can’t, can’t, can’t have meant she was getting married to Tony Sic. That was too ghastly to contemplate, and I’d been contemplating some ghastly stuff lately. Although why so ghastly, really? I didn’t have anything against the guy. We were sort of competitive colleagues with the Game and I’d been terribly jealous of him when I’d thought he’d get to get downloaded into 9 Fanged Hummingbird, the Maya ahau, instead of me, and then when I’d gotten selected to go naturally I’d felt all guilty. He wasn’t my William Wilson, but his story was quite a bit like mine. He was a Maya speaker, he’d gotten into academics and worked with Taro, and he’d even spent some time working for one of the CPRs, the one in Ixcan that isn’t the same as Ix. Be nice to him, I thought. Remember, you’re going to kill him. Along with everybody else, of course, but still.

Eh, pues. I stepped into the dry frigidity. I’d never gotten used to the benthic depth of air conditioning in El Norte. And never would. Sic motioned me to edge past him in the narrow entryway and I started to, but then he rattled a sort of nonobjective coatrack, and I said I’d keep my jacket on and there was a sort of awkward moment. We after-youed into a little sort of vestibule. There was a Geiger tube lying on the sort of radiator housing thing, charging from a big hazardous extension tentacle, and I had to get my feet over that, and then there was an orange SleekerBoard-it had kind of runners on the bottom like on a sled, and with what looked like a pretty heavy battery on its undercarriage, which I was sure Warren would deal with in the iterations to come, or would have, rather-which I guess belonged to Max, leaning precariously against the concrete-block doorjamb, and I avoided that, and then there were all the shoes, and I got around those and took three steps and then remembered it was an Asian-style house and went back. Instead of having laces, the Sleekers were spring-loaded to sort of intelligently release your foot when you toe a thingy on the side. I parked them next to sextet of Sic’s big Diadora futbol shoes. Sic seemed to feel like he was being rude watching me but didn’t want to turn away from me, either, so he sort of backed away into the other side of the house, which didn’t seem really like him. I got a spider-sense that there were other people around. Ashley 3, probably-Marena’s housekeeper-and maybe her creepy driver with the ridiculously would-be scary name, Grgur.

“I’m in the orifice,” Marena’s voice called. Maybe she’d forgotten that I’d never been here before. Except that wasn’t like her. I looked back at Sic. He kind of indicated that it was to the right. I went to the right, across pseudoglyphish cast flagstones, through a stony living room with a sort of squashed cathedral ceiling-maybe they call it a hut ceiling? — and through a high trapezoidal door into a dimly lit room with a big table smattered with monitors and hard drives. There were big French doors on the far side with a dark garden and a narrow pool glowing phthalocyanine blue. Something stretched up and Whoa.

The something had kissed me on the lower lip. It was Marena. She was in a sort of anthracite-gray, probably pashmina sort of top and a matching sort of bottom, with a sort of hairband thingie and a necklace with a hundred and eight garnet beads on it. Her face-it was a square, flat face, maybe too ethnic for a lot of howlies, but the sort of thing you really like if you like that sort of thing-her face was tanner, as expected, and it seemed more so because of big silver clustery Bucellati earrings that seemed clunky for her. She stepped back and sank to her normal height. She looked a little uncomfortable.

“Hi, that was nice,” I said. She said hi.

I looked at her. She looked at me. I looked away first.

“You’re looking really good,” she said.

“Thanks.” Damn, now if I tell her she looks good it’ll sound insincere. Instead I started to tell her how she looked tan.

“No, I mean you really look healthy and happy and everything,” she said. Really? I wondered. I’d thought I was moping, what with the Sic business and everything. “What’s up?”

“Up? Nothing.”

“Really?”

“Nothing,” I said.

“You’ve been working out, right?”

“Well, I changed the fluidized bed filters in the sponge tanks.”

“No, really, you’re doing good, right?”

“Better never. I mean, never better.”

There was a pause. You know how they say that when you’re at a loss for words to talk about something that’s in the room? So I looked around the room. There was a huge monitor on a big wooden easel, like it was an oil painting, and there was a sketch on the monitor of a sort of Mayanesque city, and I indicated it.

“Did you do that freehand?” I asked. She said yes. I said that was really something. It was too. The girl really could sketch. “That’s what it’ll look like from the plaza,” she said.

“What will?”

“You know, Neo-Teo™.” That is, she didn’t pronounce the little ™ symbol, but I heard the name like it was there. “I mean, the analog version.”

“By analog you mean real, right?” I asked.

“Oh, yeah, real life, full scale, inhabitable, the whole thing. I’m the first single person in charge of designing a city this large since, like, Peter the Great.”

“Cool,” I inarticulated. Marena talked fast sometimes, almost like she was from 1940s radio, and it could take one a second to digest what she’d said. I liked it about her, though. These days if you take a business-presentations class or whatever they always tell you to speak as slow as sloth shit, not just so the ’tards can keep up but because they’ve done studies where people think the same exact speech is more important if it takes two minutes instead of one minute. On the other hand, if you’ve ever been in, say, any software-development meetings of more than three people, you might have seen how there’ll be two or three people who figure the problem out right away, and they work it out together speaking really fast with all this heavy jargon, and then when they’ve solved the problem they’ll take a break and one of them will explain the solution to all the lesser minds. Marena was one of those two or three people. It’s like, whoa, Brain on Board.

“Check this out,” she said. She sort of pulled me around the desk area to a pair of low side tables. One of them was displaying a little crowd of vinyl dolls, or I guess you’re supposed to call them action figures, and when I got closer I could see they were vinyl Barbie-gauge Maya mythological characters, all in that trendy sort of Jesse Hernandez Urban-Ocelomeh style. Each had its name in raised gold on its little fauxstone base. But even without the labels, “Jun Raqan,” that is, Hurricane, would have been easy to recognize because of his single leg, and it wasn’t too hard to pick out “One Ocelot,” “1 Turquoise Ocelot,” “Mam” (who, since he still turned up sometimes these days under the name Maximon, sported a nineteenth-century hat and bolo tie over his Classic Maya gear), “Waterlily Jaguar,” “Ix Chel,” and “Star Rattler,” which was a long feathery snake with goo-goo-googly eyes and a lot of centipedalian legs. There was also a quartet of hunchbacked dwarfs in different colors, which they’d called “Northeast Chak,” “Northwest Chak,” and “Southwest Chak,” and then a gang of creepshowy types, obviously the nine Lords of Xibalba, the Maya underworld. They’d named the tallest one, the leader, “4 Jaguar Night,” and then his posse of eight henchmen all had names beginning with S — Scab, Skitters, Spine (a mastiff-sized fanged rabbit), Scald, Snatchbat, Scurf (a big disembodied head), Sarcoma, and Serpigo-who, to me anyway, looked more Cthuluish than Maya, but what do I know?