that was why she was inside, they told her no, it was because her daddy was a bad man.
She sniffled. Her daddy wasn't a bad man. He was Daddy.
She threw herself down on the bed. Her roommate wasn't in. She liked this roommate. She didn't pick on her, didn't pay any attention to her at all.
The tears were overwhelming her now. Most of all, she missed her daddy, tall and strong and always there for her. He wasn't a bad man. And she knew that he wouldn't let her stay here forever. Someday he'd come for her. No matter what.
And a voice inside her head told her, You're what the other girls say you are. Just a stupid. You're going to be here forever and ever.
Alone.
She gathered the sad empty head of the elephant to her cheek. Its black-disc pupils rolled up in its plastic-button eyes. She hugged it to her and drifted into sleep, weeping for the death of her friend.
Head thrown back to let the dawn wind ruffle his red brush cut with bloatblack-stinking fingers, Blaise walked through the Rox's gray huddle. He was just in via the Charon Express from a night run with the jumpers. Just a casual cruise to see how some of their investment properties over in Manhattan were doing, and he was on top of the world.
You always lectured me about the proper uses of power, grandpere, he thought, and his smile turned edged and ugly. And I must hand it to you, you have indeed taught me to use it.
It came to him then that it might be time to go down below the medical building for a new lesson in the use of power. He was still fairly fresh, with a sixteen-year-old's endurance, and these little jaunts into town tended to leave him unsatisfied and maybe a trifle bored. His jumpers were too simple, too American. It wasn't that he didn't enjoy the same things they did. Only not as long.
And he wanted more. Putting the expensively cultured body of a millionaire's daughter through its paces while its owner looked on had its rewards. But mostly it served to draw his appetite thin and tight like the skin on a starving man's ribs. He could taste real power. That was what their victims commanded, why they were chosen.
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