were served and the party started to break up into small conversational groups, Digger Downs approached Chrysalis and stuck his camera in her face.
"How about a smile, Chrysalis? Or should I say DebraJo? Perhaps you'd care to tell my readers why a native of Tulsa, Oklahoma, speaks with a British accent."
Chrysalis smiled a brittle smile, keeping the shock and anger she felt off her face. He knew who she was! The man had pried into her past, had discovered her deepest, if not most vital, secret. How did he do it? she wondered, and what else did he know? She glanced around, but it seemed that no one else was paying them any attention. Billy Ray and Asta Lenser, the ballerina-ace called Fantasy, were closest to them, but they seemed absorbed in their own little confrontation. Billy had a hand on her skinny flank and was pulling her close. She was smiling a slow, enigmatic smile at him. Chrysalis turned back to Digger, somehow managing to keep the anger she felt out of her voice.
"I have no idea what you're talking about."
Digger smiled. He was a rumpled, sallow-looking man. Chrysalis had had dealings with him in the past, and she knew that he was an inveterate snooper who wouldn't let go of a story, especially if it had a juicy, sensational angle.
"Come, come, Miss Jory. It's all down in black and white on your passport application."
She could have sighed with relief, but kept her expression stonily hostile. The application had had her real name on it, but if that was as far as Digger had probed, she'd be safe.
Thoughts of her family raced poisonously through her mind. When she was a little girl, shed been their darling with long blond hair and a naive young smile. Nothing had been too good for her. Ponies and dolls and baton twirling and piano and dancing lessons, her father had bought them all for her with his Oklahoma oil money. Her mother had taken her everywhere, to recitals and to church meetings and to society teas. But when the virus had struck her at puberty and turned her skin and flesh invisible, making her a walking abomination, they shut her up in a wing of the ranch house, for her own good of course, and took away her ponies and her playmates and all contact with the outside world. For seven years she was shut up, seven years. . . . '
Chrysalis shut off the hateful memories rushing through her mind. She was still, she realized, walking on tricky ground with Digger. She had to concentrate fully on him and forget the family that she'd robbed and fled from.
"That information is confidential," she told Digger coldly. He laughed aloud. "That's very funny, coming from you," he said, then suddenly sobered at her look of uncontainable fury. "Of course, perhaps the true story of your real past wouldn't be of much interest to my readers." He put a conciliatory expression on his pale face. "I know that you know everything that goes on in Jokertown. Maybe you know something interesting about him."
Digger gestured with his chin and let his eyes flicker in the direction of Senator Hartmann.
"What about him?" Hartmann was a powerful and influential politician who felt strongly about jokers' rights. He was one of the few politicians that Chrysalis supported financially because she liked his policies and not because she needed to keep the wheels greased.
"Let's go somewhere private and talk about it."
Digger was obviously reluctant to discuss Hartmann openly. Intrigued, Chrysalis glanced at the antique brooch watch pinned above the bodice of her gown. "I have to leave in ten minutes." She grinned like a Halloween skeleton. "I'm going to see a voodoo ceremony. Perhaps if you care to come along, we might find time to discuss things and come to a mutual understanding about the newsworthiness of my background."
Digger smiled. "Sounds fine to me. Voodoo ceremony, huh? They going to stick pins in dolls and stuff? Maybe have some kind of sacrifice?"
Chrysalis shrugged. "I don't know. I've never been to one before."
"Think they'll mind if I take photos?"
Chrysalis smiled blandly, wishing she was on familiar turf, wishing that she had something to use on this gossipmonger, and wondering, underneath it all, why his interest in Gregg Hartmann?
In a fit of sentiment Ti Malice chose one of his oldest mounts, a male with a body almost as frail and withered as his own, to be his steed for the night. Even