Before Nando could move, David reached for a bag.

“Don’t, David,” René said. “Let Nando handle it.”

David smiled around his plastic e-smoke filter, the blinking Christmas lights casting his face in different colors. He pushed himself off the bar, walked across to Evan, and held out the bag. Manny and Nando moved closer, aiming at Evan’s head.

David shook the bag in front of Evan. “Go on,” he said.

Evan took the Doritos.

David scanned Evan’s body. “You don’t strike me as the junk-food type.”

“You don’t strike me as the e-cigarette type.”

“Oh. This. I’m trying to work my way up to real cigarettes, but I hate the taste. I just graduated from nicotine patches.”

“Congratulations.”

David gave a mock curtsy.

“Step away from him,” René said.

“He’s not gonna hurt me,” David said.

René tilted his head at Manny, who gently but firmly pulled David back toward the bar while Nando and his raised shotgun eased into Evan’s blind spot.

David returned to his overproof rum. “You’re such a dick,” he said into his rocks glass. “You think you can control everything.” He gulped down the rest, slammed the heavy tumbler on the sustainably farmed rain-forest wood, and ambled out.

René smiled indulgently.

He followed Evan’s gaze, looking down at his feet. In the tank the fish had clustered around his toes and heels. “You starve them, you see. Doctor fish. At a certain point of hunger, they develop a taste for human flesh. I suppose anything will. They eat away the dead skin, slough off the calluses and psoriasis patches.” The grin widened. “Nibble away my imperfections.” He waved a hand. “You’re welcome to have a treatment yourself.”

Evan pictured himself with cucumber slices on his eyes, slathered with mud, Manny and Nando zeroed in on him over shotgun sights.

“No thanks.”

“Maybe have Dr. Franklin do some laser treatment on that nasty scar on your stomach.”

Evan stared down at the white line on his abdomen where a woman had once slid his own knife beneath his ribs. He’d stitched it up himself on the floor of his bathroom, a bloody, painful affair during which he’d discovered fresh nuances in an already intimate relationship with pain.

“I like my scars,” he said. “They remind me of who I am.”

“I don’t understand that.”

“You don’t need to,” Evan said. “Why am I here? I assume not just to discuss your grooming habits?”

“Do you have somewhere you need to be?”

Evan thought of the Horizon Express, steaming onward. And the boy’s voice coming through the wrecked RoamZone: Will you help me? Will you? Promise me.

“Yes,” he said.

René said, “Two more days and you can be on your way.”

“Assuming I send the wire.”

“You haven’t resigned yourself to the outcome?”

“Why give up when I’m winning the war?”