The Last Days - By Scott Westerfeld Page 0,4

on a grave-hating face.

"Excellent. Perfect. But you'd still go to the Taj Mahal, wouldn't you?" I spread my hands in explanatory triumph.

"Um, I'd go where?"

"The Taj Mahal! The most beautiful building in the world! You know all those Indian restaurants around the corner, the murals on the walls?"

He nodded slowly. "Yeah, I know the one you mean: lots of arches, a pond out front, with kind of an onion on top?"

"Exactly. And gorgeous."

"I guess. And somebody's buried there?"

"Yeah, Moz, some old queen. It's a total tomb. But you don't suddenly think it's ugly, just because of its category, do you?"

His expression changed from tomb-hating to lateral-thinking. "So, in other words..." Brief pause. "You don't mind if you're in a band that plays alternative death-metal< cypherfunk, as long as it's the Taj Mahal of alternative death-metal cypherfunk. Right?"

"Exactly!" I cried. "You guys can worry about the category. All the death metal you want. Just be good at it." I picked up the Stratocaster, wrapped it tighter. "How's tomorrow? Two o'clock."

He shrugged. "Okay, I guess. Let's give it a shot. Maybe keyboards are what we need."

Or maybe I am, I thought, but out loud I just told him my buzzer number, pointing across the street. "Oh, and two more questions, Moz."

"Sure?"

"One: do you guys really play death-metal cypherfunk?"

He smiled. "Don't worry. That was hypothetical death-metal cypherfunk."

"Phew," I said, trying not to notice how that little smile had made him even cuter. Now that we were going to jam together, it didn't pay to notice things like that. "Question two: does your half a band have a name?"

He shook his head. "Nope."

"No problem," I said. "That'll be the easy part."

3. POISONBLACK

- MOZ-

The next day, Zahler and I saw our first black water.

We'd just met outside my building, on our way to Pearl's. A gang of kids across the street was gathered around a fire hydrant, prying at it with a two-foot wrench, hoping to get some relief from the early afternoon heat. Zahler stopped to watch, like he always did when kids were doing anything more or less illegal.

"Check it out!" He grinned, pointing at a convertible coming down the street. If the hydrant erupted in the next ten seconds, the unwitting driver was going to get soaked.

"Watch your guitar," I said. We were twenty feet away, but you never knew how much pressure was lurking in a hydrant on a hot summer day.

"It's protected, Moz," he said, but he stood the instrument case upright behind himself. I felt empty-handed, headed to a jam session with nothing but a few guitar picks in my pocket. My fingers were itching to play their first notes on the Strat.

We were sort of late, but the car was a BMW, its driver in a suit and tie and talking on his cell phone. Back when Zahler and I had been little, soaking a guy like that would have been worth about ten thousand fire-hydrant points. We could spare ten seconds.

But the kids were still fiddling as the convertible passed.

"Incompetent little twerps." Zahler sighed. "Should we give them a hand?"

"It's already after two." I turned and headed up the street.

But as I walked I heard the cries behind us change from squeals of excitement to shrieks of fear.

We spun around. The hydrant was spraying black water in all directions, covering the kids with a sticky, shimmering coat. A thick, dark mist rose into the air, breaking the sunlight into a gleaming spectrum, like a rainbow on an oil slick. The screaming kids were stumbling back, bare skin glistening with the stuff. A couple of the little ones just stood in the torrent, crying.

"What the hell?" Zahler whispered.

I took a step forward, but the smell - earthy and fetid and rotten - forced me to a halt. The dark cloud was still rising up between the buildings, roiling like smoke overhead, and the wind was shifting toward us. Tiny black dots began to spatter the street, closer and closer, like a sudden summer rain starting up. Zahler and I backed away, staring down at the pavement. The drops were as luminous as tiny black pearls.

The hydrant seemed to cough once, the gush of black water sputtering, and then the water turned clear. Above us, the cloud was already dissolving, turning into nothing more than a shadowy haze across the sky.

I knelt on the sidewalk, peering down at one of the black drops. It glimmered unsteadily for a moment, reflecting sunlight as the shadow from the cloud overhead