Remembering the deformed, drooling old man enmeshed in a confusion of tubes and respirators, Marcus said, “Who said all this about him?”

Olena walked on a moment without answering, and then said, curtly, “Guards. Sometimes they talked and talked.”

Marcus immediately wished he hadn’t asked the question. It didn’t take much for him to imagine the worst. Guards, talking and talking because they had Olena alone, because she was a whore in there and they had just …

He cut the thought off and changed the subject. “Where are we headed anyway?”

“That way.” Olena pointed through a gap in the buildings. A snowcapped peak rose in the distance, in shadow against the red-hued sky. “Toward that mountain.”

“Why that one?”

She brushed her short hair from her face. “You know a better mountain? We go toward that one because it’s outside the city. We’re not. If we reach it, we are.”

“I can’t fault your logic.”

“Come. We go.” She took his hand.

Marcus slithered beside her. His tail was sluggish and aching. It shot jagged shards of pain through him. He hoped they’d be able to avoid people, to move cautiously and get out unobserved. It didn’t take him long to give up on that.

Once out from their hidden back lot, they found a city alive with people and cars. It wasn’t a normal busy, though. A driver careened down the street, swerving and cutting others off. He pounded on his horn and shouted out his window. As if racing with him, one boxy little car jumped the curb and whined down the sidewalk. Marcus and Olena barely managed to get out of its way.

“What the fuck’s going on?” Marcus asked. “Nobody wants to get to work that much!”

Olena didn’t answer. She waded into the crowd of pedestrians. Seeing his serpentine bulk, people cleared out of their way. Mouths gaped and eyes went wide. Marcus couldn’t tell if they were surprised by his tail or his ethnicity. Either way, they parted.

The city would’ve been strange enough to Marcus’s eye even in normal circumstances. The buildings were squat and ugly, cement facades that seemed designed to warn people away. The cars were different makes than he was used to, older-looking and shaped funny. He thought he’d seen just about every type of person—and every kind of joker—in New York, but he’d never seen people quite like these. Light-skinned and black-haired, Asian-looking but distinct somehow from the Chinese and Koreans Marcus knew from Jokertown. Their clothes were exotically colorful in some ways, drab and bulky in others, just normal sometimes. He registered all of this vaguely, but it was the chaos that really baffled him.

An old man yanked on a dog’s leash, trying to get the frightened canine to move. It wouldn’t, and the man began walloping it with his cane. Young men climbed into a truck already piled high with furniture and household items. One of them waved an ax above his head and said something sharp and threatening to Marcus. A girl stood on a street corner, turning around and around, calling for someone. A guy on a bicycle weaved one-handed through the traffic, a flat-screen TV perched precariously on his shoulder. There was something in the air, a panic that seemed to have touched everyone. That was obvious, but just what caused it Marcus couldn’t figure out. It wasn’t like they were running in any one direction, or like there was anything causing the chaos other than themselves.