be flat desperate to retreat into one of the crumbling turn-of-the-century buildings crammed together on Ellis. She hunkered behind him, seemingly inured to cold in her thin jacket and thinner pants. "'Diagnostic and Development'?" he said.
"Yeah. Combine sure talks purty, don't it? Pig Latin for `kid jail,' pal. It's in a pretty decent neighborhood, never run too far down, starting to maybe catch a case of the yuppies. Not too bad. As hellholes go."
He turned and looked at her, disbelief struggling with the will to believe on the battlefield of his face. "How could you find out, when the best lawyer in Jokertown drew a blank?"
"Best lawyer in Jokertown is by definition not a juvenile delinquent, darlin'. Capisc'? `You wanna find a missing kid, ask an outlaw,' or words to that effect."
He jumped up, walked toward the water, walked back, sidestepping a drunk or drugged joker face down in the sand. He began to pace in front of K. C. "I have to make plans. I have to do this right. Think now, Mark. Think." He plumped down in the depression he'd made before, feeling heavy and overwhelmed.
"Maybe you should get some sleep first." She bent over and kissed him lightly on the forehead, then melted into black.
Mark stood on the sidewalk in front of the Blythe van Rensselaer Clinic with tears standing like small hot crowds on his face. Tachyon wasn't in, the surly and unfamiliar face behind the desk of the strangely deserted reception room had told him. And when the doctor was in, he wasn't receiving visitors. Any visitors.
Cody was dead. The news lay in Mark's stomach like a gallon of ice. That lady had meant so much to Tach, had done so much to bring him back from the terrible events of the Atlanta Convention.
Sprout had always loved her. And now she was gone, apparent victim of Tachyon's enemies.
Tach had crawled back into the bottle. As he had when honor had forced him to destroy the mind of Blythe van Rensselaer. It would not be easy for him to escape a second time.
And that was tough.
Mark rubbed spidery hands over his face as if scrubbing his cheeks clean with the tears. As he closed his eyes, he saw his daughter's hand reaching out for him again, while he asCosmic Traveler sank through the floor of the courthouse and the bailiffs closed in.
I'm sorry, Doc. She needs me worse than you do. No matter what's happening to you.
I'm sorry.
He raised his head. A patrol car prowled by. The flat black face of the cop on the passenger side seemed to track him through the chicken-wire mesh that covered the windows of all the cars from the jokertown precinct as it slid sharklike through the sightseers huddled in schools against the strangeness of the scene.
Time for my boot heels to be wandering, his nascent street-sense told him.
He stuck his hands in the pocket of his army jacket and walked away. But not too fast.
The Demon Princes had shot out the streetlights again. The man walking home from swing shift down the Jokertown side street paid no mind. It would take more than cracks in the sidewalk to disrupt the primo ballerino grace with which he walked, as it would take more than the chill of a New York January evening to require him to add the threadbare windbreaker thrown over one shoulder to the black Cinderella T-shirt. Besides, he saw in the dark like a leopard.
His chest and shoulders were those of a much taller man, swollen with muscle. His head was small and narrow, the features almost elfin. His eyes were slanted, the color of lilacs. He diverged far enough from the human somatotype to be considered a joker. Yet he carried no trace of the wild-card virus.
He wasn't a nat, either. He wasn't human at all.
"Hey, man." The voice came from the dark alley, a few feet away to his right: a sick-crow caw. The lilac eyes never wavered. He had no time for importunate groundlings. And if it was more than a panhandler ...
Seventeen months ago, a nat youth had attempted to mug him at gunpoint on a street much like this one. The youth was unduly confident in the superstitious terror in which the denizens of this vast, reeking, unaesthetic jumble of a city held their primitive firearms, or perhaps his confidence was chemically enhanced. He had been so little challenge that the man with lilac eyes had been merciful. There was a chance