street like a cool breeze, feeding as he walked, taking little pieces of body heat that no one would miss, pieces that made him stronger, made him glow with warmth. The mellow buzz of all the stolen photons zoomed along his nerves and were far more satisfying than the cocaine could ever be. People shivered as he passed, glanced behind them, looked wary. As if someone had walked across their graves.
As he walked, he found old chalk drawings, faded with time or rain. Fantasy landscapes, green and inviting, smeared or beaten by pedestrians. Urban scenes, some that Shad recognized, some so strange as to be almost impressionistic. None of them signed. But all of them, Shad knew, from the same hand.
Chalktalk. The perfect name. JUMP THE RICH.
He found her across the street from the graffito, under the theater marquee advertising Polanski's Jokertown. She had paused there, an old brown blanket around her shoulders, her stuff in a white plastic shopping bag. She paused in the theater's glow and glanced around as if she were looking for someone.
Shad couldn't remember ever having seen her before. He wrapped darkness around himself and waited.
The joker paused for a while, then shrugged her blanket further around her shoulders and walked on. The top of one of her tennis shoes, Shad saw, was flapping loose.
Darkness cloaked him as he walked across the street. He put out a hand, touched her shoulder, saw her jump. Took a little body heat as well. "What do you want with Simon?" His voice was low, raspy, faintly amused. Black Shadow's voice.
She jumped, turned around. Her hound eyes widened, and she backed away. He knew she was looking at... nothing. An opaque cloud of black, featureless, untextured, taller than a man, a nullity with a voice.
"Nothing," she said, backpedaling. "Someone-someone I used to know"
"Perhaps I can find him." Advancing toward her. "Perhaps I can give him a message."
"You-" she pushed out a breath, gasped air in, "you don't have to=" Her wrinkled face worked. Tears began to fall from her hound-dog eyes. "Tell him Shelley is, is..." She broke down.
Shad let the darkness swirl away from him, reveal his upper body.
"Simon!" Her voice was almost a shriek. She held out her arms, reached for him. "Simon, it's Shelley. I'm Shelley. This is what I look like now"
Shelley, he thought. He looked at her in stunned surprise as her arms went around him.
Shelley. Oh shit.
He took her to an all-night coffee shop and bought her a watery vanilla shake. She chewed on the plastic straw till it was useless, and tore up several napkins.
"I got jumped," she said. "I-somebody must have pointed me out to them."
"How do you know that?"
"Because whoever jumped me marched my body to the bank and cleaned out my trust fund. I'd just turned twentyone and got control of it. Almost half a million dollars." JUMP THE RICH, Shad thought.
"I went to court," she said, "and I proved who I am, but it was too late. Whoever was in my body just disappeared. I never went back to drama school-what's the point? And I got fired from my job at the restaurant. I can't carry trays with these hands." She held up padded flippers with fused fingers and a tiny useless thumb. Tears poured from her brown eyes. Little bits of paper stuck to her furry face as she dabbed at tears with bits of torn napkins.
"Why did you go away?" she wailed.
"That was a bad scene you were in. I told you it was time to leave."
She stirred her shake with her useless straw. "Everyone started getting killed."
"I told you."
"You didn't tell me they'd start dying."
"I told you it would get as bad as it gets." "Why didn't you take me with you?"
He just looked at her while guilt planted barbed hooks in his insides. He'd done what he'd done and just walked away, as if Shelley had been no more to him than one of the freaks he left hanging from lampposts or as if she were as invulnerable as she seemed to think she was.
He hadn't thought he could save her, a little rich white girl stuck in a scene so evil, so decadent, so glamorous that it probably would have crumbled into violence and madness even without his prodding. But she hadn't seen it comingshe led a charmed life, like everyone in her set, protected by her beauty, her trust fund, her sense of life as something to be devoured, inhaled, like the