You've won."
"No. You don't understand. They won. I'm not innocent anymore, man. I've lost the purity. Lost the dream."
"It's the drugs. You're just crashing." She put her arm around him. "You'll be okay in a while."
"No!" He tore away, lunged to his feet. "You don't understand. I'm no good any more."
"You'd do anything, right? For her?" He nodded.
"Mark. Listen to me. That's love. That's loyalty. I've seen aces, dude. I know plenty of people who can do weird stuff. Shit, I can chase people out of their own heads and party hearty inside, bust up all the furniture if I want to. But to have that much loyalty to a person, to love her that much-" It was her turn to move away. "Nobody's ever felt that way about me. Nobody."
He slumped to the floor. "Yeah. I let you down too. I let everybody down. And now Sprout shit, man, I can't even help her."
"What?"
"I can't do it any more. It just isn't right. I wanted to be more than an ace. I wanted to be a hero. But that's all just illusion." He hung his head. "At least for me it is."
"What the fuck?" She grabbed him under the arms, hauled him to his feet with a strength she didn't know she had. "Listen to me, you son of a bitch. You don't think you got what it takes to be a hero? Then be a fucking villain."
"The world thinks you're fucked up. The world thinks you're evil. The world thinks it's a good idea to stick your little girl in kid jail where the other girls can use her for a punching bag. Where sooner or later some counselor is going to get the idea how very pretty her blonde little head would look bobbing up and down on his needle dick. Decide that's just the therapy she needs."
"Don't say that!"
"Don't tell me you don't know! It's the only thing that kept you going all these months. What brought you out of the gutter and onto the Rox. It's real, Jack. I can tell you it is. Okay? We are not talking hearsay. This doesn't just happen in Linda Blair movies. I know. I fucking know."
She had backed him into the wall. He slid slowly down. "But what am I gonna do?"
"Welcome to the jungle, babe. You're on the Rox now."
"You're an outlaw. The first thing you do is accept that. The second is, kick some ass."
He stared at his hands. "Yeah. I guess so."
Her leather jacket slumped down beside him. He jumped, looked up at her.
She was skinning her Jane's Addiction T-shirt off over her head. Her breasts were small and conical. The nipples stood up into points.
" I lied," she said, undoing her fly. "There is something else you're going to do first."
He was instantly hard. To his horror, his erection tented up the front of the blanket he had wrapped around him poncho-style. He tried to edge away.
"But, uh, Blaise--" he stammered. "But Bloat-"
"But nothing." She covered his mouth with hers.
There were eight million stories in the naked city. Most of them were about assholes. The Great and Powerful Turtle looked over the monitor screens around the control console of his shell and thought pissed-off thoughts about how there was never anything good on television.
He canted his shell and slid down for a look at the crowds by Madison Square. "Imagine," he said aloud. "I'm up here looking out for that asshole, George Bush."
The president was in town to confer with the new mayor. A number of the more prominent public aces had volunteered to help ensure there were no incidents, with the grudging acquiescence of police and city officials. It wasn't that they liked Bush. The very idea that anyone might think he did pissed Turtle off no end. But this jumper thing was getting way the hell out of hand. It was more than mere media hype.
Given the country's current mood, anything that happened to Bush was liable to be blamed on aces and the Medellin cartel, a connection George had done so much to establish in the public mind. And if an ace, even a jumper, had anything to do with actually harming the president. ..
It would be easy to call the consequences unthinkable. But they were all too thinkable. They'd make McCarthy look like the Phil Donahue Show. So the Turtle was up here farting around to watch over a man who'd just as soon see him in a concentration camp.