Author's Notes: This story is based on the universe created in the movie The Matrix. It may help readers to refer to it, and to pretend (as we'd all like) that the last two films in the trilogy did not happen. Also, clumsygyrl is planning to write a sequel to this, but anyone else who'd care to riff in a different direction is welcome to do so. Remixes are also dandy.

***

Chris fetched up for the fourth time at JC's rental on the beach. His other periods of awareness died behind him like galaxies, inward-turned islands of energy. He'd paused in each before leaping through black cold--a club full of bare-bellied sleek women, a streetload of scribbly headlights, a parking lot over which the Milky Way stretched like a chalkboard erasure, and now here, on a flight of sandy steps.

The sky wasn't quite black over the water, but deep enamel blue, as if it was hiding the moon somewhere. There was more light broken on the ocean than in the meek spatter of stars above it. He stared at his hands where they curved around his calves for a long time, his mind's connection between them baked so hard that he expected splinters when he moved.

"This is not right," he said experimentally.

A sickening flood of conviction swept him up with the words. Sand and stars cartwheeled, the enamel sky a ceiling, the horizon just a hem on the silken sea. Not right, not right.

"Well," Lance said from above him, "I can see I don't need to freshen up your drink."

Chris blinked up from his seat in the salt-crusted grass. He had no idea how he'd gotten there from the stairs, but an ache in his elbow suggested falling, and not gracefully. The rail, of which he hadn't availed himself, bore a TV-movie moon highlight, patched in the middle by Lance's silhouette. His drink looked full.

"Chris," he said after a moment, "you didn't hurt yourself, did you?"

Chris straightened his legs and flexed his fingers, then boxed the air. Everything reported back, knees with their accustomed liquid pop and his shoulder with its lurch. "My body, love it or leave it."

He couldn't see Lance smile, but it warmed his voice. "Good. Dumbass."

He stood, a patter of sand falling from his shorts as they unbunched. The grass was white as cellophane beneath a moon he hadn't noticed rising. "JC still up?"

"JC," Lance said, folding his legs over the side of the stairs, "did his part by unlocking the door. He went to bed an hour ago. I thought there was gonna be hari kiri."

"Stuntmen? In JC's house? And you didn't get me?"

Lance looked at him in the smooth dropped-pebble silence that meant either 'not funny, you should know better' or 'ignore the fact that I didn't get the joke'. He sipped from his glass, ice gathering to warp the shape of his mouth. "I'm getting you now. There's still some boo-tay."

Chris found his glass, overturned in a fragile, swollen shell of sand. "I'm going to pretend you didn't just say boo-tay."

"I--"

"Ut! Ut!"

The dark shape that was Lance chuckled, the same self-conscious one Chris remembered from 'ninety-seven, nearly twelve years gone. "At least it wasn't poon tang."

"Lance."

"Puss-ay--"

"Fuck, man. I will never use my dick again. Stop."

Lance did. His pause let in the sea, its whisper wearing at the moon-drawn scaffold of ground and air. Chris gazed out, half expecting a brilliant sky over water flat as velvet, but saw the moon instead. Scimitars danced a path to it.

"It's like you never saw one before," Lance said after an interval. Chris heard him swallow.

"Tonight's a weird night." Chris left his glass where it was, sheltering a barren biosphere. The wind was picking up, skirling around the dunes, and JC's overheated, overlit house was starting to sound good.

Lance joined him when he passed, handing him a jewel-green towel covered in fish. "I stole it from the pool room."

Chris flung it over his shoulders. Like everything that came within three blocks of the beach, it had grit in it, but it was hot, and smelled of Lance. "Why someone needs a pool when they're on the water--"

"How many bedrooms does your place have again?"

"I like variety," Chris said, foiled.

Lance grinned at him as he pulled open the sliding door. "So does he."

JC's pool room was, if nothing else, a monument to variety. There were two hot tubs, one lit red and the other purple, and a swimming pool shaped like the body of a guitar. Plants of the sort that had made Chris reluctant to do acid the first few times he'd come to Los Angeles clustered in pots around them, each freighted with technicolor fireflies. JC'd hired someone to string the lights after Joey and Chris had fallen down on the job three weekends in a row. They'd made some damned good barbecue, though, and shared their weed, which had salved the failure.

Because it appealed to JC's whimsy, the pool room also contained tables, two straight and one L-shaped, covered in red felt. The lights over them were green banker's lampglass, suspended by chunky links of brass. No dogs played poker here.

"You're lookin' at the room and not the women," Joey said from near Chris's feet. He startled back a step from the edge of the hot tub, where Joey's head floated on a roil of red foam. "Never a good sign. JC give you one of his special drinks?"

"If I stepped on you on the way to Hell, would you be pissed?"

Joey made a soft sound in the middle of laughter and shifted under the water. "I take that as a yes, m'friend."

Chris shivered, dropping the towel over one of the teak benches, and crossed to the steps. Bubbles stirred as he sank down, mouthing greedily on his calves and thighs. "Just tired, I guess. The whole promo whirl." He thought there should be more to that sentence, but he wasn't the one to find it.

"You turnin' old on me?"

"What, and mess up the 'he's the daddy but he acts like the youngest' schtick that never gets old?" He closed his eyes, hair fanning over the lacy water, and ran his foot up the spine of the girl beneath the surface. He felt the pluck of her bikini bottom against his heel, but her back was sleek bare promise.

A moment later, she lifted her head. Blond like Kelly, Chris had bet, and he was right, the streaks in her hair like scraped paint. Her breasts were small and pointed with full pink nipples, her skin speckled like the cream on a Tom n'Jerry.

"She wasn't done," Joey said, so doleful that Chris had to laugh.

"Just trying to keep you off America's Most Wanted, man."

The girl wiped her eyes. The waterproof mascara on them had clumped in the heat, making black babydoll spikes. She shook a rope of hair over one smooth shoulder, looking at Chris. She wasn't out of breath when she spoke. "You can distract me if you want."

Joey waggled his brows at Chris. The effect, with red light spangling his cheeks and chin, was decidedly Miltonian. Chris eased forward, feeling his shorts snag as they pulled free, and undid the girl's bikini tie.

"Josi," Joey said to Chris a bit later, as he concentrated on sliding himself into her beneath the turbulence. The flutter on the tip of his cock made the backs of his knees itch. She was slick, partly from the water and partly because that was what Joey did to women. Even with his new pale heaviness and the stain in the whites of his eyes, heat curled where he touched them. "I know you like to know."

Chris considered telling him that he'd stopped making tombstones for his sins years ago, but with the girl between them, it felt less true.

"Josi," he repeated instead, fucking her slow and deep.

She came up twice more, dazzling the air with the arc of her hair. The third time, she coughed, pearly threads unraveled on the water. Chris pulled out, watching Joey's face sag into immobility, and scattered his own salt. Homeless sperm,, he thought. Shot just short of paradise. They probably think it's a Kubrick movie under there.

"Damn, baby," Joey murmured, meeting Chris's eyes.

Chris saw his bicep bunch before he lifted his hand out of the water, and his heart gave a foolish stammer. Anything could come from the pool tonight, anything, anything--but it was just Josi's soaked head. Yellow streaks, flecked shoulders, translucent lace, trim jaw, painted lashes, so much like the first time he saw her that he might have replayed it.

He ran a hand over her skin on his way up the stairs, the pull of gravity exhausting. It felt like skin.

Lance found him again with his face in the water fountain. His stomach ached from drinking, but the stream felt just right on his forehead. "Where the hell did you go?" he asked, replaying the moment just after Lance shut the door. The rumble of metal, chlorine-laden musk, the light. Joey's voice and then...Lance, teased loose of his memory like a lost button.

"I was leaving you to the poon tang," Lance answered. "Justin was kicking my butt at pool."

There was a note in Lance's voice that welcomed investigation, but Chris was beyond it tonight. He picked the obvious, wrong question. "You're not fighting, are you?"

"Nope."

He straightened after a flavorless drink. His head whirled, motes of gray swarming into sight from the periphery. When they receded, they left a blot like a dying television. "He still playing?"

"Yeah."

Chris studied Lance apprehensively, tight frame, fearing the same bread-dough heaviness he'd seen in Joey. Evidence of years he didn't remember. Like a Picasso, though, Lance was too strange for easy warping. His face remained a friendly alien's, its bones an exotic deadfall beneath his skin, peridot eyes framed with pale spines. Venus flytrap eyes, and if that thought was reassuring, Chris had grave suspicions about JC's 'special drink'.

"For money?" he asked.

Lance nodded. It was, Chris knew, the only thing that would've made playing worthwhile to him. "I'm sure he wouldn't mind if you got in on the action."

Chris chuckled. "Everyone's generous tonight."

Lance flicked a look at the hot tub over his shoulder. Oddly tempted by the gesture, Chris resisted. He knew he'd just see Joey, hair lank and arms spread against the composite, a sunburst of silken ripples under him. Everything as he left it.

Justin laughed then, his distinctive bark underscored by echoes. The crack of the break caught those in a square-knotted net of sound. "JC would be going batshit in here," Lance said.

"If he was up, the music'd be on."

"True, true." Lance leaned against the wall, arms folded over a barbaric stripe of chest. Chris had never seen the shirt he was wearing before, but the foliage on it was a good match for his eyes.

"I'm," Chris began, "I think I need to go outside."

"That's what you said an hour ago. You beat up your knee."

The words struck a match on Chris, leaving a path of pain. He sagged, bracing himself against the wall, and surveyed his leg. The flesh was mottled above his calf, bright grids overlapping. "I...shit, I almost forgot."

Lance frowned. "Maybe you should go lie down."

"I want to see who's winning."

"Justin," Lance says. "You ever heard him laugh when he's losing?"

"All the time," Chris said, scarcely hearing. He couldn't see the moon out the windows now, just the buffed yellow-gray of humidity. "Lance, does Joey seem okay to you?"

"I'm going to need speed just to follow you," Lance said, folding his arms. For just a moment, he looked as if he was listening to a distant call--Chris's maybe, leading him. "Joey's worn out with having a kid and with working, just like us."

"His skin is wrong." The hair on his arms lifted, lying down in confused patterns. You're scaring yourself now. Look, turn and look at Joey, and all you'll see--

"Chris!" Justin called. "Hey, Lance, you seen Chris?"

Lance shot Chris an alarmed look he doubtless deserved, his brows arching. Chris detached himself from the wall, the pain in his knee blunt and precise, like a finger in the middle of a bruise. "I was just heading to bed."

The collage of shadows shifted on the cement near Chris's feet, and a moment later Justin burst from between the potted plants like a soap opera explorer. He was smiling, his gleaming skin clothed in sweat and ink. He'd dyed his hair blond for the album cover and it was growing out in wire-thin wriggles. "Look," he said, holding up his hands. Their neatly manicured nails were blue, and beneath the knuckles on his right, Chris saw a faded club stamp.

"New girlfriend?" Lance hazarded.

"No, this guy. He lost three games, he's my personal slave."

"They're overrated," Lance said. "Chris, you were saying something about bed?"

"Oh, no." Chris took his hand away from the cinderblock, wiping it on his trunks. He hated to lean in front of Justin, who worried. "I wouldn't miss this for the world."

"So there," Justin said, pushing Lance's breastbone with the tip of his finger. His gaze slid away for a moment, following a lateral course over Chris's shoulder, but before Chris could turn around Justin'd captured his wrist. "C'mon, meet him."

Considering it his duty to Cameron, who'd asked him once over badly prepared fennel tea to look after Justin, Chris followed. He apologized to Lance with his eyes and didn't look back.

"Well," Justin said, alone in the rec zone between gems of unsteady light. He put one hand on the edge of each table, muscle squaring his arms as he leaned. "See if I give him oral."

"You shouldn't anyway." Chris remembered Cameron's tanned hands on the Blue Willow, her nails painted on top and yellow under, and that there were too many bumps in her knees. Eyes so blue, spot on her cheek, her lips dry like Justin's. A moment of cognitive dissonance passed, during which he thought he and Justin might both be learning from her. "Come on, J, forget it. I'll play you."

Justin frowned. "You really did mess up your knee."

"You're avoiding." He limped to the side of one of the richly scented cedar chaises and sat, pain bursting liquid through the joint and then draining from it. "It's just a scrape."

Justin shoved a hand into the pocket of his discarded jeans, unfolding it around an amber bottle. "Oxycodone. I'll get you some water."

Pill under his tongue, he stretched out on the wood and began to compose a comment about the end of his dancing days. No matter how bitter, everything he said made Justin laugh. He wondered what debt he'd incurred to earn that.

"Uh, man," Justin said to him an indeterminate time later, over the sound of Joey's splashing. "Where I got the pills? Those weren't my pants." Chris meant to answer, but he was drawing a very important shape between knots in the ceiling.

***

Chris passed an unsettled night, which, given the drug, he'd expected. Near dawn, he woke to a certainty that waves had crept to the house like unasked company and were drawing back for a last beat on the door. Resigned, he turned away from the wall, watching the cabbage field of the bedroom floor resolve into mounds of cast-off clothes.

When he woke, it was later than he'd thought. His mind was quite clear, and he half expected a green-eyed boy to greet him from beneath a sunshot crown of leaves. But there was only the soft chime of his PDA.

He picked it up from the nightstand, trying to remember why he'd set it. It didn't match with anything in his mind. He'd picked up the new pipe for his bike at Chrome. They--thank God--had no appearances for three days. Everyone he knew in Los Angeles was here.

CASH REALITY CHECK dripped across the screen in inexhaustible pixels, leaving a path of light.

"What the hell?" he asked aloud, sitting back on the bed and crossing his lap with the covers. "JC, if this is a joke, I swear." Or Justin, maybe. A snatch of the previous night hung on him like a windless flag--stretching out in the chaise with a gently reeking towel propped behind his knee, while Justin and a glorious gold-haired boy traded laden words and bank shots. He didn't recall being hoisted between them like a barbarian king and hauled up two flights, but he supposed it must have happened. Justin--and his lovers--had done so often enough in the past. Chris was always surprised at how much Britney could carry.

Cash reality check. "Where?" he asked, but that wasn't the right question any more than 'who' had been. What? "You're not helpful," he remarked, caching the message. He supposed that if 'reality check' was a joke of Justin's, dependent on eighties cred to which he was barely entitled, helpfulness hadn't been the point.

The intercom on the south wall snapped, scaring the hell out of him, and Lance's digitized voice asked, "Are you up yet? C's making waffles."

Mysterious messages weren't half so compelling. "Have him put me in a fresh one," Chris rasped. "And defend it with his life from--what am I saying?"

"Fox, meet henhouse," Lance answered smugly. "Watch your knee on those stairs."

The expectant hiss of the open channel faded from the room, teasing an artifact from the shipwreck of Chris's memory. This was the sound he'd thought was waves, the whole dreaming house waiting for the answer he'd give it.

"What the hell," he muttered again, and stood. All of his clothes stank of hops and smoke, but someone had folded them neatly on the wicker truck at the foot of his bed. One whiff revived his headache.

After weighing the merits of arriving at the table naked, he drew the curtains on a picture-perfect square of beach and dug into the trunk. He turned up a pink chenille robe almost as damaging as nudity and a pair of rainbow bedsocks.

Arrow slits in the stairway walls cast shafts of light in his path, and the purity of laughter from the surfer boys practicing near the pier convinced him they weren't glassed. He wondered how often JC's people chased birds back through them--or scorpions, for that matter, though Chris suspected the little diggers were no fonder of heights than he was.

He planned his entrance line all the way through the cavernous living room, scarcely distracted by the litter of bottles and bare skin. "All right, who was tuned in to my jerk-off last night?"

They goggled at him, an outrageously domestic group in the heart of the butter-yellow kitchen. JC had a steaming waffle on his fork, Joey was mid-laugh with the corners of his eyes still crepey, Justin was wrapped around his bright-haired boy like a ribbon on a costly gift, and Lance was looking Chris up and down just as if he was waiting for him.

"Oh, look," Justin remarked, "it's a gay pride housewife."

"Oh, look," Chris shot back. "It's a closeted cheater. Hi," he added to the boy, whose cat-wild face with already lit with laughter. His pale gaze cut around Chris like scissors.

"Michael," the boy said to Chris as if that were a prompt for introduction, at the same time Joey cackled, "Burn!" He cupped his phone closer to his ear, hand up, to add, "Sorry, Kel, put her back on."

"Chris," he answered Michael, naming himself. It did no good to be rude to Justin's fucks; opposition appealed to his romantic sensibility. "JC, mah man. Lay that waffle on me, cat."

JC scowled at him, shaking it free on a plate glazed with tribal lizards. Due to his reasonable bedtime and lassaiz-faire approach to uninvited guests, he was fresh and uncreased. "Use the jive. Don't abuse the jive. Are you okay? Your eyes look like strawberry sauce."

"Now you ask." Chris slid into the nook, eased by the way the brilliant sea-scented kitchen banished the night. Joey moved over for him. "After you lobbed your bombs and ran."

"My bombs?"

Joey chuckled. Given the heaviness of his lids, Chris suspected it hurt. "He means your special cocktails."

JC met the joke with such blankness that it sent a frisson of alarm through Chris. He hadn't realized how much he'd depended on sweeping last night away with a beachcomb of drugs and drink. "Joseph," he began scoldingly, not sure how he meant to end it.

As it happened, he didn't have a chance. The door swung in, and they were invaded.

The first one who came was JC's. Chris recognized her from a blurry photo on the back page of the Pittsburgh Scene, which Bev'd mailed him as she did every hometown mention of their reunion. He'd asked the JC in his mind, Is it serious?, and that JC answered, What's serious, man? He surrendered the question again in the time it took her to settle in JC's chair and take a two-handed drink of his tea.

She wasn't beautiful, her eyes round and fine-lashed and her features crinkled like a badly opened orchid, but as much danger as tenderness lurked in the way she leaned toward them. Justin stopped mid-whisper to Michael and pushed her the cream.

"How not cool is that," JC said, nearly dropping the next hot waffle in her lap. It swung from one tine of the fork. "Girl, get up out of there."

She responded to this outrageous request better than Chris had dreamed, flicking one narrow thigh to either side of the chair like she might the torso of a man whose wrists she was about to bind, then rising. She was JC's type, Chris noted, apple-breasted with hips like a boy's. His mind tried to ressurect the argument, but he wasn't sure whether her being JC's type factored for or against the seriousness of their relationship.

As she lounged against the half wall overlooking the nook, Chris noticed two things. First, she'd made off with JC's tea, holding it like she might a birdcage so only her corded wrist hinted at its weight. Second, she wasn't a natural redhead.

A moment later, JC snugged the drawstring of her borrowed pajama bottoms, hiding the evidence. Chris was amused to see Joey holding his hand over the speaker of his phone as if Kelly might hear his distraction.

"Sorry," the girl said mildly, as if apologizing for an unruly child. Chris caught the faint bloom of blood in her throat and cheeks.

"We know how it is," Lance answered, sitting on Justin's left. "Thing has a mind of its own."

Even Joey wouldn't have dared to say something like that to JC's girlfriend, however small her picture in the Scene. The threatened part of Chris, as often outside their golden pentagram as within it, groaned to hold another change.

"Lance, don't be a prick," Justin said, and to Chris's relief, the girl laughed.

JC rested his hand on her lower back, lifting it just before he said, "This is Larch. Larch, guys, guys, Larch."

"Get the jokes done with," she said. "Lurch, barf, starch, march, yarch, were your parents hippies, what were they on, bet you were the only one in grade school, I'm sorry to hear that...am I missing anything?"

"Aw, man, no fun," Justin groaned. "Now I gotta think up something better, and that's work."

"They're really sort of civilized," JC said to her, kissing the red patch at the back of her neck, and settled into his vacant chair. He patted his knee.

"Hey," Joey said, closing his cell, and rose just a little when Larch sat. "Sorry, talking to the wife and kid. Nice to meet you, Larch."

"See?" Chris said. "Civilized. Nice to meet you, Larch."

"We count on Joey to dazzle 'em," Lance explained, digging a shell of butter from the dish on the end of his knife. "Then the rest of us can straggle in."

"Pass the cream, please," JC said to Michael, giving Chris a brief pang of guilt. For all his full lips and lined eyes and heavy gold-scratched hair, Chris had dismissed him as a lapdog, good only for the mysterious same-sex alchemy that made Justin more like he used to be.

It didn't pay to be rude to Justin's lovers, he reminded himself as he dipped sliced berry over his waffle. Justin would just fall for them more loudly. "Are you a fan, Michael?"

"No," Michael said, with just enough disbelief to force Chris to re-evaluate him. He didn't fill the awkward silence, either, just rested his head on Justin's collarbone and sucked one bitten-nailed finger clean of cream.

"He plays guitar," Justin said after a moment. "Indy band. Thinks we're a bunch of punks."

Joey snorted. "I may be a punk," he said, "but I'm a rich one. You play anything we heard of, young indy?"

Michael answered seriously, "That's a good one." To Chris's surprise, he lifted his eyes to Larch's and said nothing more. He was beginning to wonder where the kid had been socialized.

A pleased flush spread over Justin's cheekbones. Chris identified it with a sinking feeling. Michael had just proved himself disinterested in using his connection with them to further a music career, a trait rare enough to guarantee him co-authorship of something on the album. Chris and Lance exchanged telepathic glances, reading perfectly one another's God, I hope he can write.

"So, okay then," Joey said, spackling the pause with typical incompleteness. "I need to go to the mall and pick up something tomboy for Kel's niece. Chris, you're a real man. You can come help me pick out some macho toy."

"I don't think Shan needs any man toys yet," Lance remarked, at the same time Justin protested, "I'm real!"

"I'm a hungover man with a bum leg," Chris told Joey, used to drowning them out. "You're a real man all by yourself."

"Or with others," Lance said. Chris would wonder later if the timing was deliberate.

The kitchen door swung in again, the shells hung on the back of it tinkling on their ringsof hemp. Chris had the momentary impression that the room was full to some hidden quotient, that adding another vector would be impossible and whoever tried the threshold would be repelled. Against that impulse, a long leg crossed it, and a hand like an ivory fan curved around the doorframe. Larch released JC's mug and turned to look.

A tall boy walked in, his colorless hair neatly shorn and his arms covered in scars the size of bottlecaps. His face was too raw for elegance, a dark patch crossing half, and his bones asked too much room in his skin. His uncovered eye was blue.

He lunged for the coffeepot, stepping wide of them like a starved wolf. Chris felt Lance tense beside him, saw JC's shoulders squared beneath the silk of his robe. Justin's head lolled, one arm bunched behind his neck so he could watch and the other quiet on Michael's waist.

"Hey, um, you," Chris ventured. "Picture if you will that the kitchen has a Members Only sign on the door--"

Someone tapped the back of his hand. He tore his eyes from the hungry shape at the counter long enough to see Lance's sharp head-shake.

"I am a member," the boy said, his voice surprisingly soft. His body relaxed into a bass clef as he held his cup against his belly. He brought a sleepy dimness to the kitchen, like the wool at the very verge of winter sky. "That's exactly what I am." His deliberate eye met Joey's over the waste of their meal.

Chris looked too--now, now, quickly--and caught the blood beginning to drain from Joey's face. That pun was no accident. He meant us to know, blazed such a trail that the implications smoked after.

Joey'd slept with this boy. Joey, straight without exception. Unable to call any penis but his by name. Repeater of fag jokes, until the day he'd made fifteen year old Lance so nervous he wouldn't sleep on the bus and Chris had had a long talk with him about why that word was never funny. Spreader of female thighs, spreader of seed. Begging under this rawboned boy with a shave worse than Justin's, so loud that Lance had heard it in his room--because that had to be the reason for his headshake, didn't it? Lance had evidence.

"Was it you who opened the intercom last night?" he heard himself snapping. "Showing off for all of us? Was the PDA your little joke?"

"No," Justin said, sliding Michael off his lap to stare properly at Joey. "You didn't--you didn't, right?"

"I don't know what happened," Joey answered. His voice was too loud and too high. "I got so fucking drunk last night, it could have been--"

"Drugged, dude," Justin offered. "Maybe he drugged you."

"Don't say that." Silence clipped the cord beginning to wind all of them up. The words had come from Michael.

"What the fuck do you know about it?" Lance asked.

Summer-hazy eyes widened within their hedge of gold. "Nothing. I just--drugging somebody is a serious charge, that's all."

Joey breathed out shakily. "He didn't," he said, and set down his fork.

"Were you?" Chris persisted, eyes on the scarred boy. For him, nothing had come between his question and the answer. Had he played with the sound system to give them a show? Had he wanted Lance, who'd loved Joey for a lonely while, to hear? There was a time Chris would have dismissed the idea that an interloper could know them so well, but on this side of the looking glass, he didn't.

Time passed between them differently than it did around them. JC lifted Larch from his knee but didn't rise, Joey rebuffed Justin's baffled congratulations, and Lance ached in stillness an inch from Chris's hand. Finally, the boy asked, "Cash reality check?" When Chris nodded, he had to lift his other hand to support his coffee.

"I made a mistake," he said, once to be rolled under in the rubble of conversation and again for all of them. "We all--" His gaze shifted to Larch, then Michael, his head turning a little to accomodate its limitations. Chris felt the drawing of another pentagram, one whose points were off the page. "We all make mistakes. I'm going to go."

"No, wait," JC said. The legs of his chair yelped on the tile as he turned. "It's, no, it's cool, man, we don't think you drugged him. It's just the cat is straight as a laser, you know, here, just stay and eat."

Chris guessed, from the look on Lance's face, that he wished he could tap JC's hand. He didn't need to, though. The boy'd already fled, his long legs hungry for distance.

After a pause, Michael tucked his knees up to his chin and wrapped his arms around them. "Aren't you married?"

"Joe," Chris warned, shooting out one arm to block his reach. "Justin, get his ass out of this kitchen now. He doesn't have the sense of a goddamn gopher. JC, clean up. Lance--" He foundered for a moment. "Uh, look at my PDA and figure out how to set the password, okay? I think--someone's been fucking with it. Joey, we're going to the mall."

Chris rarely used his authority, but when he did, it evoked the unity he'd created between them, unbreakable as their linked names. Michael and Justin left in too much of a hurry to hold hands. As Chris made for the door, Lance said in an undertone, "Not bad for a man in a pink robe," and even lower, "thank you."

***

"I just made a big fuckin' ass of myself."

Chris stopped behind a red Mirage, thumbs drumming the wheel in time with 'Break Stuff'. "No worse than Justin does."

"J's different."

"How is J different?" He could feel Joey staring at him. He turned to meet it, surprised again by the pale sag beneath Joey's eyes, and banked the conversation back toward damage control. "Just think, man. Kelly could've showed up. We could've walked in on you taking it up the ass. You could've not noticed your hair was full of jizz and come down--"

A spasm of disgust crossed Joey's face, halting Chris's search for scenarios. "It was consensual, wasn't it?" he ventured. "If he...if you didn't want--"

"He knew what he wanted," Joey said. His face was as tight as scraped hide. "And he made me want it too."

"Joey--"

"Drop it. It was consensual." Joey's hands tightened around his thighs, then eased with the slowness of a nocked crossbow. "Let's go."

Chris closed his eyes and let his conscience fortify him. "You saying 'drop it' before 'it was consensual' doesn't make me feel better."

He felt Joey's temper give. "You want a thrill, is that it? Huh? You wanna hear he tied me to my fucking bed with the arms of his shirt and held down my legs with his thighs? You wanna hear about him ridin' on my hips with my dick inside him and how...and how the inside of him--" Joey's voice frayed, cut into feathers. "Rippled, around me, so slow that I was beggin' him to--to just make me...God. And he was hard the whole time, it moved when he did--" Chris saw it, the gentle sway of an erection against the boy's wolfhound belly. He swallowed. "And I let him turn me over with my arms crossed so I couldn't move them and he just--fuckin', he jerked off in my ass, okay? It was the hottest thing I ever felt." His throat worked. Chris squashed a flash of situational attraction. "The end. Can we go get some goddamn toys?"

"In another context," Chris said, pulling into the long-vacant parking spot, "that would be a come-on."

A smile curled up at the corner of Joey's mouth. "Asshole."

"Careful, man. You might get turned on."

"Fuck you. I'm straight."

"You're a booze bottom," Chris taunted, relieved beyond measure at Joey's grin. "I knew there was a reason they called 'em'cocktails'."

Joey thumped his head on the seat. "You're killing yourself, I can tell."

"What was his name?"

"How the hell should I know?"

"You always ask."

"I always ask when I'm going to share with you," Joey said, rubbing a finger through the heart of steam he'd blown on the glass.

"Joey."

"It was Syn."

That, Chris hadn't anticipated. "Sin?"

"Syn. S-y-n. He said it was short for Synapse." He chuckled. "I figure it was probably Synclair or something fruity like--"

Chris cleared his throat. "Pot, kettle."

"Oh, come on," Joey said. "I am not fruity. You said I was a real man."

"I was trying to get you to go to the stupid mall by yourself."

He didn't run all the way to the doors. That would have been undignified.

***

The last time he'd been in DC, Chris had gone to the opening of something termed "the exhibit". ("What kind?" he'd asked Lance, who'd waited just long enough to answer "Photography" to pique Chris's curiosity.) The wooden doors had hummed when he touched them and then swung inward, their echo lost in the chamber beyond.

For a moment he'd thought he'd come the wrong way. The hall was a yuppie solarium, two polished brass-rimmed tiers, dim except for the faint sift of sunlight and exit lights. Jagged palms bit the sides of their pots, sheltering round-leafed brethren and fistfuls of moss. Somewhere, pipes fed fountains, and fainter still, he heard Muzak.

His first step had brought up the lights. Startled, he'd glanced down and found a dead child's face beneath his foot.

The photo stretched from wall to wall, pools of light weltering in it, a parquet of limb and belly and naked bone. There was no more pattern in it, once he looked, than in the stacked bones in the tombs of the Innocents. These were people. Irreproduceable.

"Everything's a picture," someone breathed near him, but not to him. He'd turned to see the urban oasis filling, tourist hands touching photo-plants, tourist fingers dipping paper water. "Everything."

Against one wall, a teacher faced a pack of college students, hand careful on a paper column. "Angela Fibonacci was supposed to have created this as a protest against the Iraqi war, because of her choice of highly publicized death scenes from that conflict, but in fact there are corpses here from Cambodia, Malaysia, the Sudan, World War Two, local crime scenes, African AIDS hospices, several natural disasters, and a number of unidentified mass graves--"

"Already being taught as art," said a voice like water smoothing amber. He'd seized on it for sanity, hauling himself up a thin rope of human contact over the floor of corpses. "Do we have to think about everything?"

He'd expected a man from that voice but found a woman beside him, so beautiful he had to step back to understand her. Her eyes were lined like an Egyptian's, peaks outside and blunt beads at the inner corners, and her hair was a sleek cinnamon plait. She wore bronze wire around it and beaten bronze abstracts on both biceps, and her lips were feather-full. "What?"

She'd chuckled. "I'm Angela. You're standing on Marian Ysplais. She died of cholera."

"Oh," Chris said. He'd shifted then, but these dead were fit too fine for manners. Angela hadn't made a safe path for people of conscience. "It's--it's something."

He'd had the feeling she was weighing him then, her mouth pursed, her chin up. He noticed her nails were bitten and that she smelled of perfume so sharp it might be chemicals. "It's not a memorial," she said at last. "The world is a cemetery."

"Cheery," Chris answered, because what could you sensibly say to the Queen of the Nile when she started sounding like a goth band?

As hard steps took her away from him, her interest in him snuffed, he'd realized the Muzak was a mix of Gone.

*

"Are you all right?" Joey asked him.

"What?"

"I said, are you all right."

"Why?" He put down a baseball cap reading 'My Other Ride Is Your Mom'. The air in the store was heavy, flickering like a stagnant stream.

Joey counted on his fingers. "You're not running to get to the toy store, you didn't ask if we could get ice cream, you haven't walked on the edge of any of the potted plants, and you're looking at ballcaps."

"I like ballcaps," Chris said defensively. "I was thinking we should get a couple and maybe some sunglasses--" His mouth dried, hand falling to his side like a musket barrel. Behind the counter, tacked above a T-shirt on an invisible head, was a cap that read CASH YOUR REALITY CHECK.

"That's so eighties," Joey snorted, following his gaze. "Don't worry so much, man. We're not N*sync. We're N*total-knee-replacement. Nobody's gonna mob us."

Buy it, Chris thought. Honeycombed anomalies locked around him like chambers on a bullet. Amber dripped down his limbs. Don't buy it. It's just a hat. It's the start of a path. When is the last time things have actually beenright? You're crazy, Chris.

"Sir," said the attendant. "Can I help you?"

Chris looked at him. Another artwork face, he thought, less congenial than the last. Anubis's, maybe, with his scrolled low lids and a mouth weathered shallow. Scars netted over his foxy cheekbones and pointed chin, scars on his clever hands. Hair the color of fresh-shaved mahogany. The only living man at the wax museum, Chris thought, posing so he wouldn't be found. "Who are you?"

A narrow finger tapped his employee tag. "Reed."

"I'm sick of this, Reed," Chris said tensely. "If you know me, tell me what you want."

"If you're interested in the hat, sir, I'd be happy to--"

"Fine," Chris said, a flash of heat climbing his body so fast he could feel it blazing from his shoulders. The store rippled in it. "Fine, the hat. If I buy it, what?"

"Then I, uh," the man said, glancing at Joey. "I hope you enjoy it."

"Sorry, man, he was just leaving," Joey said, fingers on Chris's wrist. "Come on, you fucking loon," he added under his breath.

"Here," Chris said, suddenly desperate. He pulled his wallet from its chain and threw a fifty on the ballpoint-scratched credit card plate. "Give it to me."

Reed turned, hooking the plastic stool from beneath the counter and standing on his toes to pull the pin from the wall. CASH YOUR REALITY CHECK, Chris read as the hat folded in his hand. "How did you know which one?"

He stared at Reed, chin up, as Reed stared back. Joey's hand was sweating on his skin, his tugs a catch of rationality Chris couldn't afford to land.

"Four ninety five," Reed said at last, and pushed a paper bag over the counter. "Wear it proudly. The right hat can change your life."

*

"Thanks a fucking lot," Joey said as they walked past A&F, taking a suck from his Slurpee. A school of kids in patent leather and khaki broke around them, staring. "For a hat you almost got security on us."

"He was acting like he knew me," Chris muttered, though he hadn't been. The new hat made his hair itch, and he had to keep fisting his fingers around his pocket linings to keep from scratching. "I want to...I should get some glasses."

"Chris. You're sounding kinda Oswald here."

He looked at Joey helplessly, a ghost of steam rising beneath his palm on the sunglass store's counter. Joey looked back, all mortal flesh and familiar bone-shapes, silver like his father's lurking at his temples. The world is a cemetery. Which one of us is dead? "He probably just...maybe he was a fan when he was a kid."

Joey nodded, lines smoothing from his eyes. "Let's go. You need toys."

Chris chuckled, unable to help it, and paid for the glasses nearest his hand.

He sensed them closing at the first intersection, an ominous pattern purling through the crowd's prosaic one. Fans, instinct offered him, and he rejected it. Security after all? Someone out to murder the one and only Chris Kirkpatrick for crimes against fashion? That was a good one. He'd tell Joey if he could without cementing his insanity.

"In a rush?" Joey muttered, sprinting one broad step to catch up. "I thought you were hungover."

"I just thought I saw someone I knew."

"Not that crap again."

"I'm serious!"

"Jesus, somebody probably thinks you're AJ McLean with the glasses and the fucking hat. We got a pack of Backstreet fans on us."

"He doesn't even wear the glasses anymore," Chris said absently, scanning shoppers with his back to the courtyard fountain. Light fell like gray silk on his shoulders and cast long shadows on his face. "I--" He paused. "Isn't that Michael?"

"Who?"

"Do you notice anything? Justin's playmate of the month. He's here."

Joey frowned at the shoppers, shifting the bag he'd acquired at the cell phone store to the other arm. "Mom, mom...punks, pregnant chick, teenies, dad, mom, couple kids..."

"There," Chris said, feeling murderous, and pointed. His face, in quarter profile with only a notch of eye showing, was still quite recognizable. He was wearing a T-shirt Chris had bought Justin years ago at a vintage rock shop. "Use your illusion, see?"

"Well, shit," Joey grudged him. "You think Justin's here too?"

"No," Chris answered, not sure why. Normally Justin was inseparable from his muses. But the way Michael stood now, silent with a phone to his ear, made Chris feel expected. Attended to in a way the lapdog of this morning couldn't have managed.

"You wanna go give him some shit?"

"Why?"

Joey blinked, momentarily at a loss. "He's fucking Justin. Is there a better reason?"

"Maybe they're terrorists," Chris said thoughtfully. Michael still hadn't spoken to whoever was on the other end of his call. The rectangle of his back remained a stable shape in the topography of the crowd. "He's been standing there a really long--"

"Chris, no offense," Joey said, "but you're fucking losing it."

"Maybe we should call security."

"Oh yeah, perfect," Joey snapped. "Yo, we got a man making a call in the food court. Bring the assault rifles. Are you hearing yourself?"

"How long have you known about Larch, Joe?"

"I met her at a party last year," Joey answered, straggling after the non sequitur. "She wanted to be introduced to C. What, you see her too?"

"Not yet," Chris said absently. Crowd mutter stalked him in a gyre. His attention snagged on the prominent points--a white flash of hand, the fist-print ink of the Misfits logo on someone's shirt, the slow blank drift of balloons. Voice crying "Mom," voice laughing "No," Michael as still as a plumb line that had reached its bottom. Waiting.

Joey said in a different voice, "Holy shit," over the burst of a red balloon. "Syn's here. Chris, let's get the hell out of--Chris?"

He didn't feel the shot at first. Then it drifted him gently to bits, like a sand painting in a bottle with too much air at the top. Snowball to his right breast, trickling to take the place of breath in his lung. Pale faces turning as he sagged, dark mouths footprinting them. Molten nickel on his tongue; it was the only hot place now. His hands were heavy with ice. Don't cough, he thought as his knees hit the marble, but he had to. The pain of impact was unforgiving.

"I expected," he whispered to Joey as he sagged, "I expected paper."

"Help!" Joey bawled to the ring of faces. "Someone get security! He got shot! Help us!"

"Oh shit!" Chris heard someone shout, a sound of personal disgust, like they'd dropped their goddamn PDA in the fucking fountain, what a day. More shouting, a confusing changing of the guard among the legs he could see, one set parting this way and one that. He lifted his head, drooling blood, and saw a bent denim knee near his cheek. "Shit!" the stranger cried again, and this time it burned clear through the celluloid of his memory. Michael's voice. "Syn!"

"Don't hurt him," Joey said hoarsely. His hand closed over Syn's where it curved under Chris's arm. Chris wondered when he'd put it there, and why he couldn't feel the pressure that was turning the fingers white. "Leave him alone."

"Trust me," Syn said, hooking Chris firm and hauling his body backward.

That he felt, coming loose from the floor as reluctantly as if he were a picture on it. He remembered the burden of legs, arms, a chest, a head. Joey, he tried to say, don't let them take me. Don't., but this was something against which his will did not avail.

"No!" Joey lunged, and a golden-haired shape tripped him. They went down struggling.

"We got you now," Syn chanted. His face broke and reassembled like a school of minnows over Chris's head. "Christ, I'm sorry. I picked the wrong one last night. Gonna get you to the ship, fix you up. Stay with me."

More shots came, followed by wild parrot-echos. Screams rang, then the yelp of rubber on stone. Chris slid beneath sky so blue he couldn't believe in it, cut into perfect pieces, and then under perfect ice-tray blocks of acoustic tile.

"You're in a hall," Syn panted. "You're okay. Reed!" he bellowed, startling the small part of Chris still interested enough to listen. "Phone me!"

The man from the hat store bolted to a stop near Chris's feet. He looked very little like the proprietor of a hat store, hair in his wild eyes and his scarred hand closed on a gun. "End of the hall. Go, go, go! I'll cover you!"

Veneer flew from the brick beside him, marble clattering into the bay between Chris's arm and his chest. There was enough blood now that he could see it without turning his head. Tell Joey, he told himself sternly he would say, even if he had no breath to make the words, but Reed was already whirling away with his gun up. He shot a woman in a flowered top, severing her scream.

Syn picked Chris up by the collar and began to haul him down the hallway like a trash sack, his heels flashing over Chris's head. Black soles patterned with a shape almost, but not quite, like a fleur-de-lys. Birds, maybe, the way a child would draw them. "Sorry," he said. "If I pick you up I'll make it worse. Can you hear the ringing? We're almost home."

Chris hoped he didn't wait too long for an answer.

"Operator," he heard Syn say, already melting into a starless night. "exit for two. Now."

***

"Mr. Kirkpatrick, you're bleeding on my art."

Chris opened his eyes. He knew immediately that some time had passed, though how much was nebulous. Half of his chest was seized and the other labored shallowly, the sounds of his breath scratching back at him from the cavernous space. Another pie-cut sky above, this one with clouds in it. Cold sleekness beneath his fingertips, distant mellow music, and the hum of exit signs.

He knew where he was without rolling over. He knew the voice, its water and amber. "Funny," he whispered. "Just can't seem to help myself."

"I'm afraid you'll have to." Angela Fibonacci sank beside him, long legs folding. The track lights picked up the rough ripple of her dress, like sun on fallow fields. Her belly was bare, silk crossed over both breasts, the exposed skin caramel. "And you haven't got long to learn."

"What's the rush? We...waiting on my old gym teacher? The rabbi at my buddy Ray's bar mitzvah?"

She chuckled. "You think you've been watched your whole life, and that's true. But it hasn't been us, and not our agents. It's been theirs."

"Theirs."

"Of course, Mr. Kirkpatrick. You're their precious power source. Wouldn't you keep an eye on you?"

Chris closed his eyes and listened to the inside of his ears, wishing there were shells cupped to them. So much more sense to be had from the sea. "Am I dead?"

"Yes," she said. "And no."

"Why am I not shocked to hear that?"

"Why don't you have problems breathing when you're not thinking about your wound?"

He hesitated. The lights came up inside him on a staircase far deeper than he'd thought. "You beat up your knee," Lance said, and Chris answered "I almost forgot" as the pain came flooding back.

"That's right," she said. He pulled the meager comfort of it over him. "You know. You suspected it for perhaps as much as five years. Something's not right, Chris, something is wrong with your world. Like that weight in your chest it's been telling you--'I'm drowning. Save me.'"

"Can you?" he rasped. "Save me?"

"I can help you," she said, and the warmth of her fingers sliding between his reminded him how cold he'd become. "But I can't do it for you. Normally..." She chuckled. "As if any of this is normal. Usually you would have been given a longer test. The words in your PDA--the same phrase on the side of a crosstown bus, the same words called by a man begging for change. Leading you to us slowly, so you could make the choice to pursue. You didn't really know what we wanted in the hat store, did you?"

So Reed had been one of them. Chris wondered what the woman in flowers had done. "I still don't know what you want."

She composed herself in the way she had when Chris had dismissed her exhibit, jawline becoming a rigid plane and mouth tightening. "What you see around you is the world. It exists in image only. Everything you knew is burned. The photos of the dead beneath you...a good many of them died in the last war, the last human war. That's why they 'can't be identified' by art scholars and historians. Every now and then someone sees her sister, and once a man saw himself..." She trailed off, nails denting her own wrists. "They recycle people back into the Matrix program, you see. Templates, images. It's like filler. If they have a driver's license record or if you ever walked through a camera shot at the supermarket--" She shook her head. "I'm getting ahead of myself."

"Joey would say you're getting nuts." His lung tried to protest his sudden tension, the rattle in it tempting. Memory struggled from the well of shock. "Fuck...what happened to Joey? Did he get shot?"

Her expression went unreadable in a way Chris recognized from Lance. "I'm sure Michael kept him safe. He's a good man."

"Michael couldn't watch over the last nut cluster in a box of candy. Get me the fuck out of here!"

"There's nothing I can do," she said, restraining him at the shoulders with humiliating ease. "You can't leave here until you understand enough to make a choice. If you do, you'll die and be no help to anyone."

"My friend might be dead," Chris whispered. The volume that wanted to be in the words trembled in his body like a thrown spear. "I agree. Whatever the fuck it is, sign me up."

"All right," she said, releasing him and settling back in a slow flutter of silk. "Get up. Leave."

He struggled to rise, fury lending the effort strength, arm tingling beneath him. The rush of the false glade behind him thundered in suddenly. He'd never noticed how much one kind of white noise sounded like another--like paper crushed, like fire eating, like a river slowly ironing him to the ground. "I'm fucking shot...how can I..."

"That is precisely what you need to figure out. You're only shot if you think you are, but if you do, you'll die."

"What," Chris began, and then stopped, exhausted by the thought of asking another unanswerable question.

"This, everything!" Her voice rang from the corners of the room, her arms spreading like two of Kali's many. "It's a computer program, Mr. Kirkpatrick. Like your world. We call it the Matrix. Religions have all grasped part of its scaffolding and used it to climb a little closer to understanding. There is no death, Jesus says. Your body is temporal. Your spirit and your mind are in bondage to it only as long as you believe yourself incapable of more. Buddhists and Hindus refer to Maya, the illusion of life, and what happens when the walls fall away--the end of time, the defeat of death. Muslims have a concept called the first jihad--the war against yourself. When you triumph over the things that blind you, you can do anything." She paused, reaching back to pull the cellulose clip from her hair. It swung over her shoulders. Her eyes, shadowed, looked less like a mad penitent's than Chris had expected. "When did you feel most unreal?"

He blinked, surprised by the question. "I--I don't know. I'm a pop star. There should be a sliding scale."

"Exactly. Like you were walking between painted horses on a merry-go-round, you felt it. When you heard the desperate laughter of your friends. When you looked into a sea of empty faces and open mouths and thought of static."

It wasn't like that, Chris longed to say. It was real, sometimes. He held Taylor's hand when she was born, a crushed bud wet with newness. He brought his mother ice when she broke her arm. The first time he sat on the seat of a convertible, he'd been wearing shorts and got a burn across the back of both knees from the piping on the vinyl. He'd eaten so much candy before seeing Return of the Jedi for the first time that he threw up in line. His friend Cortney's dad had died in Vietnam. JC's ratty pink robe, the warm golden kitchen, the taste of sliced strawberry, the lines at the corners of Joey's eyes when he laughed, Lance's altered profile they'd all been warned not to mention. He could still feel the last song they'd sung in his throat. "They were real."

Angela's hand closed over his for a quiet moment, and he let the rest of his protest pass like a cough.

"It's a hundred years later than you think it is, Chris. It's like that Terminator movie you've probably seen. That was an insertion of ours, did you know?" She smiles. "Well, not ours personally, but us free ones, the Zionites. We try to slip some truth into the Matrix to shake it free of minds. In our world, as in that one, the machines won a war. And to destroy their power, we scorched the sky." She closed her eyes in mourning for the blue Chris could still see above them. "As you might guess, that left them rather hungry."

He said nothing, numb with revelation. He didn't even have the distance to decide if he believed. Could this possibly be the story to connect so many points? Not a line, but a cat's cradle, a crazy quilt?

"They enslaved us slowly. We fought back, but there were so many...and the ones who were left starved like the machines. And then they harvested our cells and grew more."

"More people? Why?"

"To use us. Our energy. Our warmth and heat, our minds and memories, our electromagnetic fields, our incredible flexibility. Your body isn't bleeding on my floor, Mr. Kirkpatrick. It's in a tank, stuck full of tubes that feed you the synthesized remains of the dead. And every day, while you and yours dream of stages and sunsets and freeway blowouts and war, machines rape you for more."

"Bullshit," Chris spat. The word felt cathartic, a vomit of syllables drowning his choice. "Bullshit. That's it. That's just--no! No fucking way! I remember living. I have a life! I have a real mom and real sisters and friends and a fucking past, so just stick your whacko story somewhere--"

"You're still alive," Angela snapped, her voice humming like a plucked harp. "You were moments from death when Synapse made the call that transported you here, and yet you've been carrying on conversation with some degree of intelligence for a half an hour. You're alive right now, Chris, because you want to be." She paused just long enough to let the silence make its point. "The only remaining question is, would you like to stay that way?"

Like waking a sleepwalker, Chris thought, his arguments flaking to ash in the face of death. This was the choice his stepfather made. Either I bring the dream with me, or I don't come back at all.

His arm was wet with more blood than he could afford to lose. He remembered all the way to the end, on the floor of the shopping mall, how hard he'd fought, and failed, to say goodbye. "What do I have to do?"

He sensed her body ease, as if his test had been hers too. The lights around him rose a little. "I've been shot six times in the Matrix, as you were," she said, leaning back. "I'll run a sim--look." Through unbroken skin, blood-jeweled poppies bloomed, staining her chest, belly, shoulder, and thigh.

"Shit, doesn't that..." He schooled himself cautiously. You're only witnessing the impossible. Don't stare. "Of course it's...you said it's a sim."

"It's visual only," she explained. "If I wanted, I could incorporate a pain paradigm, but this room's a rather simple program. And I wouldn't be much good stretched out gurglingin agony. Now pay attention.

"I was shot on four different occasions. Our work's dangerous. We didn't know it was possible to heal ourselves from mortal injury until Neo." Chris caught the reverence she breathed into the name and filed it in a mountainous folder named 'later'. "It's only rational, of course--you're not injured. Your body isn't here and neither is mine. What does the killing is your mind's belief."

"So I have to believe that I'm fine and I'm fine?"

"Yes. You've done it unconsciously in the Matrix on many occasions. You're doing it right now, holding back the walls of truth. Believe there are no walls, and you'll be free, Chris." She stretched out a hand patterned in dark hatches of blood. "Sit up."

Believe, Chris told himself, commanding his muscles to help him rise. Believe hard enough and you'll get the fuck back to somewhere you can find Joey. Worry about swallowing the rest of it later. Believe, don't bleed, do it, NOW!

He made it upright, his sweating hand gripping her dry one. He found his center of gravity, his eyes imprinting everything he saw with a brilliant sky-circle as he blinked to adjust them. Fucking good computer program if it adds in a vision burn. Would a computer think of that? Doubt burrowed blindly, making a path for more. She's crazy. I'm crazy. She kidnapped me, she tricked me, there's a bullet in my lung I can feel it and I'm dying, I'm dying, I'm--

"Stop that!" Angela snapped, nails digging into his wrist, hand hard on his back. "Don't let fear kill you, don't you dare. I want you to picture my hand going inside you now. Picture a scalpel if you want, some kind of medical tool, but I find a hand more comforting--" Her fingers pressed to his back, chill from the marble (would a computer have thought of that?), and then broke the surface with slightly more effort than he might in pushing a rubber ball underwater. He felt the shape of fingers slip through muscle fiber, twisting deftly, and the entirely different sensation of them plunging into his lung. "I'm going to pull out the bullet, all right? While I'm doing that, you visualize all those tiny vessels closing up. Nice clean normal blood clotting and cells multiplying, just like in bio. Got it?"

"Normal," Chris whispered, rasping out a laugh, and the moment he made the sound he knew. If there'd been a bullet, he would have died. The carrot-shaped thing his mind insisted on telling him she was teasing loose from the wall of his chest was a--what had she called it? A construct. Her hand wasn't in his body. She didn't have a hand.

He abandoned the half-imagined needlework of leaking veins and breathed. His lung wasn't opening, just remembering it was already open. He trembled as he set down the tremendous effort of pain. I'm just a mind. I can think what I want to think and I don't want to think about that. No pain. No pressure. It'sdone.

"You pushed me right out," Angela said. Her dark-traced eyes were wide, a smile waiting at the corners of her lips. "Good Christ. How are you?"

He laughed again, the last traces of fear dispelled by its ease. "Dangerous question."

"Bravo!" She put her hands together, the claps barking off the photographic walls. "You...are every bit as remarkable as my lass's research ever claimed you'd be. I had my hopes, but I was sure I'd have to put you under to heal your psyche fully. And look at you!"

He did, touching his unmarred shirt with careful pressure. His heart pounded beneath the cotton--no, it didn't--and he lifted his hand swiftly. "You mean you could've healed me without that?"

"It's usually a must the first time. Too much shock. We'd have put you into a hospital sim when you woke and told you that you had surgery and were going to be fine. You'd fill in whatever aches and pains you wanted and recover much more quickly than the average gunshot victim." She patted his shoulder. "But this is much better. Oh, you're going to be stunning."

"Be stunning," he said slowly. "How?"

"As an agent," she answered. "One of ours. Of course we'll have to free your body, but if you're capable of self-healing already, you'll handle that with flying colors. And then we'll put you through the accellerated training course. Jack you into some jujitsu and aikido and kung fu, heavy and light weapons training, demolitions, helicopter flight--"

"Wait, wait, wait," Chris said, getting to his feet. It gave him a momentary advantage of height that he wasn't ashamed to pursue. "I want to know what happened to Joey. Now. The rest of that crap can wait--forever, if I don't fucking like it. Can you take me back to Joey, or do I start figuring how to tear down these walls?"

For a moment he was sure he'd gone too far. Her body tightened like a knot tugged at both ends, wire corners coming out in it, as she flowed upright after him. "I am the captain of this ship," she said tightly.

"It's a good thing I know you can't kill me, then."

She held her body at attention for a breath longer, corded arms folded at the base of her back, and then began to laugh. "D'you believe this cheeky bastard, Elly?" she called upward. "Can you get a fix on his friend?"

Of all the voices Chris had expected to hear coming from the ceiling of a futuristic simulation of a museum exhibit, Larch's was close to the last. "Tagged him five minutes ago when I saw he had you hopping, captain sir. He's alive. Agents didn't even wing 'im. Seemed kind of upset, though."

"Happy?" Angela asked Chris, one brow arching.

"No," he snapped. "He thinks I'm dead. Put me back--under. In. Whatever. I need to talk to him." He directed his next call upward. "You hear me, Larch or Elly or whatever your name is? You put me where I can talk to Joey or I swear I'll tell them all your real hair color."

"Well, we can't have that." Chris knew the voice, weirdly ordinary in the suburban megastructure environment, like a loudspeaker announcement. "Hi, Chris, this is Synapse. I shoot things on Cappy's orders." During the pause, Chris determined that this was Syn's version of a formal introduction. He fought back the urge to chorus, "Hi, Synapse". "I didn't mean to get you into this much shit. We were all supposed to be a little more on the ball, but the machines had a couple Agents there, and I guess they thought you were pretty fucking important. Uh...shit." Chris heard the familiar rustle of mouth on microphone. "Look, I'll come back with you and guard you in the Matrix if you wanna talk to Joey, because it's kind of my fault he's involved. I didn't know you were the one we were after when I--you know. Cappy, I'm sorry. Don't shoot me."

"Back in, without a body of his own?" Angela said sharply. "He doesn't know the risks, Syn, and they'd love to take him over. Will you kill him if they do?"

Syn's "If I have to," took just long enough to come that it covered Chris's soft query, "Kill me?" He thrust the question from him angrily. Death was the last of his worries now. "Is Joey in danger from the--from the machines' Agents?"

"Maybe," Angela answered. "We weren't sure which of you radiated the highest potential, so we've kept the Fibonacci under the radar and surveilled you heavily over the last few months since you reunited. Also, we thought..." She glanced down. "We thought you might have an Agent's vessel among you. There was evidence in the programming strings to show that someone's mind had been hacked. It's not a permanent thing," she added, seeing Chris's horror. "The Agents can walk into any mind still attached to the Matrix and walk right out again."

"But if they know a hack is sweet and it's near their target, they come back," Larch said. "We had to get to you before they did. That was why the rest of us were in so close."

"Very close," Syn added in a way that made Chris grit his teeth. He hoped he got a chance to tell JC that his possible girlfriend was a spaceship tech before Syn found a tactless way to share. "If they traced us, though...it's deep shit for all of them."

Chris turned to meet Angela's eyes. He found the same challenge there as there was the first time they stood over a paper world. "Stand or walk on the dead," she said softly. "You're still responsible. But if you're walking, at least you're doing something."

Chris nodded.

"You'll have a lot better shot at this if you reclaim your body."

"How long will it take?"

"Whatever it takes, it's worth it."

"No bullshit?"

"Have I so far?"

"I have no fucking idea," Chris said. "Do I click my heels or what?"

Angela chuckled, binding her hair in its clip again. "Cheeky bastard." And to the room, "End program."

(to be continued--by clumsygyrl, at least)