Down And Dirty

"You'll stay away, goddammit," Gimli said loudly. "With all the shit going down in this city, the place'll be crawling with security."

She stared at him, and her gaze was more intense then he had thought it could be. He blinked. "You are not my father or my brother," she told him as if speaking to a slow child. "You are not my husband, you are not the Nur. You can't order me as you do the others."

Gimli could feel a blind, useless rage coming. He forced it down. Not much longer. Only a few more days. He stared back at her, each reading the other's dislike.

"Hartma

"I hate this place," Misha said. " I look forward to leaving." She shuddered, breaking eye contact with Gimli. "Yeah, there's a lot of fucking people about here who feel the same way." Misha's eyes narrowed at that; Gimli smiled i

"A few more days. Be patient," Gimli continued. And after that, all bets are off. I'll let File and the rest do whatever they damn well please with you.

"Until then, keep your goddamn opinions to yourself," he added.

Monday, 2:30 P.M.

Misha, who had once been known as Kahina, remembered the sermons. Her brother, Nur al-Allah, had been at his most eloquent describing the torment of the afterlife. His compelling, resonant voice hammered the faithful from the minbar while noontime heat swirled in the mosque of Badiyat Ashsham, and it had seemed that the pits of hell gaped open before them.

Nur al-Allah's hell had been full of capering, loathsome jokers, those si

The Nur had not known, but Misha did: Hell was New York. Hell was Jokertown. Hell was Roosevelt Park on a June afternoon. And the Great Satan himself capered there, before all his adoring followers: Hartma

She'd seen the papers, the headlines praising Hartma

Yet Allah's dreams had shown her the real Hartma

"You okay? You shivered."

Peanut touched her on the arm, and Misha felt herself draw away involuntarily from contact with his hornlike, inflexible fingers. She saw hurt in his eyes, nearly lost in the scaly shell of his face.

"You're not supposed to be here," she told him. "Gimli said-"

"It's all right, Misha," he whispered. The joker could barely move his lips; the voice was a poor ventriloquist's rasp. " I hate the way I look too. A lot of us do-like Stigmata, y'know. I understand."

Misha turned from the guilty pain that the sympathy in his ruined voice gave her. Her hands ached to pull the veils over her face and hide herself from Peanut. But the chador and veils were locked away in the trunk in her room. Her hair was unbound and loose around her shoulders.

"When you are in New York, you can't wear black, not on a summer day. They'll already suspect that you're there. If you must go out, at least take care that you blend in if you intend to stay free. Be glad you can at least go walking in daylight; Gimli won't dare show his face at all." Polyakov had told her that before she'd left Europe. It seemed small consolation.

Here in Roosevelt Park, despite what Gimli had said the night before, there was no chance she would be conspicuous. The place was packed and chaotic. Jokertown had spilled its vibrant, strange life onto the grass. It was '76 again, the masks of Jokertown placed gleefully aside. They walked unashamed of Allah's curse, flaunting the visible signs of their sins, mixing unchecked with the one they called nats. They stood shoulder to misshapen shoulder around the stage set at the north end of the park closest to Jokertown, cheering the speakers who preached solidarity and friendship. Misha listened, she watched, and she shivered again, as if the afternoon heat was a chimera, a dream-phantom like the rest.

"You really hate jokers, don't you?" Peanut whispered as they moved closer to the stage. The grass was torn and muddy under their feet, littered with newspapers and political tracts. It was another thing she detested about this hell; it was always crowded, always filthy. "Shroud, he told me what your brother preached. The Nur don't sound awful different from Barnett."

"We… the Qur'an teaches that God directly affects the world. He rewards the good and punishes the wicked. I don't find that horrible. Do you believe in God?"

"Sure. But God don't punish people by giving them no damn virus."

Kahina nodded, her dark eyes solemn. "Then yours is either an incredibly cruel God, who would inflict a life of pain and suffering on so many i

The sharp rebuttal confused Peanut-in the days since she'd been here, Misha had found the joker to be friendly but extraordinarily simple. He tried to shrug, his whole upper body lifting, and tears welled in his eyes. "It ain't our fault-" he began.

His pain touched Misha, stopping her even as she started to interrupt. Again she wished for the veil to hide her empathy. Haven't you listened to what Tachyon and the others have hinted at between the lines? she wanted to rage at him. Don't you see what they don't dare say, that the virus amplifies your own foibles and weaknesses, that it only takes what it finds inside the infected person? "I'm sorry," she breathed. "I'm very sorry, Peanut." She reached out and brushed her shoulder with her hand; she hoped he didn't notice how the fingers trembled, how fleeting the touch was. "Forget what I said. My brother was cruel and harsh; sometimes I'm too much like him."

Peanut sniffed. A smile dawned on his sharp-edged face. "S'okay, Misha," he said, and the instant forgiveness in his voice hurt more than the rest. He glanced at the stage, and the valleys deepened in his craggy skin. "Look, there's Hartma

Peanut's observation trailed off at that moment the packed masses around them shoved fists toward the sky and cheered. And Satan strode onto the stage.

Misha recognized some of those around him: Dr. Tachyon, dressed in outrageous colors; Hiram Worchester, rotund and bloated; the one called Carnifex, staring at the crowd so that she wanted to hide herself. A woman stood beside the senator, but it wasn't Sara, who had also been in her dreams so often, with whom she'd talked in Damascus-Ellen, his wife, then.

Hartma