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"And why are we leaving?" Ahn-Kha said.
"I'll come up with a reason."
* * * *
Evenings at the rec center were typically a bore, and that night was no different. The cavernlike garage had a few games of cards going, an almost-unwatched video, a pickup basketball game, and a "reading circle" where a group of nurses took turns reading a novel-a tattered old gothic about some siblings locked in an attic by a cruel grandmother-and performing the different voices. The only things new were several taped-up orange flyers for the Halloween Dance at the NUC hall, and a table where some of the workers were sewing together odds and ends and adding colored feathers or glitter to masks and hairpieces. The result was more Mardi Gras than Halloween. Valentine wasn't planning on attending. Since he had been to the previous dance, and his lover didn't feel the need to go trolling again, he offered to work that evening.
He opened a "coke" and took a swig of the syrupy concoction with its saliva-like texture. Xanadu cokes had never seen a cola nut but they did give one a brief rush of caffeine-charged glycemic energy.
The pickup basketball game had a lot of noisy energy. Valentine watched Ski, the hand who liked to call him "Grogfucker," sink a three-point shot over the heads of the other hands. An easy man to dislike. Valentine counted heads, nerved himself.
"You've only got five players. Need a sixth?" he asked.
They ignored him.
Valentine set down his bottle and moved around under the basket.
"Clear out, Nursey," Ski said. "Boys only." The jumble of arms and legs shifted back to the basket to the beat of the bouncing ball. Ski tipped it in and Valentine reached out and snatched the ball. He gave it an experimental bounce.
"How about a little one-on-one?" Valentine asked, looking at Ski. The others lined up next to Ski.
"How about you fuck off," Ski said. "Before I bruise up those pretty little eyes."
Let's get it over with, big boy.
Valentine bounced the basketball off Ski's forehead, feeling oddly like he was facing Vista again. He caught the ball on the rebound.
"Naaaah"-Ski let loose with a scream, charging at Valentine with fists flailing. He was big, but a sloppy fighter. It would have been so easy for Valentine to slip under his guard, take his elbow, and use the big hand's momentum to tip him over the point of Valentine's hip. Instead Valentine put up a guard as Ski rained blows on him. He put his head down and rammed it into Ski's stomach. Ski gripped him by the waist and they locked.
A couple of the others saw Ski winning and joined in. Valentine felt himself pulled upright, took the better part of a punch on the temple, a grazing blow to his chin, then another in the gut. Air- and a little coke-wheezed out as his diaphragm contracted. He tasted blood from a cut lip-
Then they were pulled apart, Ski by two of his fellow hands, Valentine by a burly blue arm. Valentine realized it was one of the security staff, talking into his radio even as he put him on the ground with a knee across his back.
Xanadu's security arrived faster than he would have given them credit for-perhaps they were better than they appeared-and didn't let the fight go with a simple "shake hands." Valentine, Ski, and a third hand all made a trip to the long security complex between the hospital and the Grands, where they were put into whitewashed cells to cool down. Valentine gathered from the exchanges at the admissions desk that Ski had caused trouble before, and Valentine had been scooped up in the administrative overkill. Almost as an afterthought they fingerprinted him.
Valentine sat in his cell with a rough brown paper towel, wiping the ink off his hands, wondering-
He'd been printed before in the Kurian Zone. A set of fingerprints existed in the Great Lakes Shipping Security Service, inserted there as part of the long-ago operation that brought him to the Gulf Coast with a good work record that could survive a detailed background check. He imagined the Ordnance had some kind of connection with the GLSSS, and he just might be able to explain away a connection if the old "David Rowan" identity pinged.
But if the connection was made to the renegade officer of the late Thunderbolt . . .
Valentine felt a Reaper's presence in the building. Somewhere above.
A warty, one-eyed officer had the three brawlers brought up a level so they stood before his desk. The Reaper lurked somewhere nearby, not in the room. Valentine felt cold sweat on his belly and back, and his eyes searched the desk and file cabinets for something, anything, that could be used as a weapon.
"Brawling, eh?" the officer said from his paper-littered desk. His desk plate read LIEUTENANT STRAND.
"Hot blood, Strand," Ski said. "Nobody was aiming at murder."
"Little too much hot blood. You didn't join in the blood drive this fall."
"I get woozy when they-" Ski said as his companion winced.
"Corporal!" Strand said. "Take them over to the hospital. Liter each, all at once. They won't feel like fighting for a while."
"I get spells-" Ski's accomplice said. Valentine felt only knee-buckling relief. Anything was better than the hovering Reaper.
They were marched over to the hospital under a single-security-officer escort. The security man had a limp worse than Valentine's. Perhaps a sinecure at Xanadu security was a form of payoff for commendable Ordnance service.
