Mac chewed on his thick bottom lip, cigarette dangling. “You got business here, son?”

His eyes lingered on Chandra’s T-shirt, and Ash felt a flash of anger deep in his gut.

“Heard you paid for girls,” Ash said, working hard to keep his voice steady.

Chandra shifted her eyes to the floor, shoulders bunched up around her ears. She sniffled in a small, pitiful way, and Ash felt a flush of pride. He knew she was scared, but this, at least, was pure performance. In fact, it reminded him of a television show about the Wild West that she’d been watching the week before. This was why he’d asked Chandra to help him out with this little mission. Zora was a crap actress.

Mac leaned back in his chair, considering her. After a moment he said, “She ain’t much to look at.”

It took every bit of willpower Ash had not to knock the cigarette from Mac’s mouth right then and there.

He caught a scowl shaping Chandra’s lips and elbowed her. She quickly transformed it into the beginning of a sob. Hands balled at her mouth, silent tears.

Mac let his chair drop back down to all fours. “But there’s no accounting for taste around here. Some of my clients like ’em different. I could give you . . .” He paused, digging something out of his teeth with his thumbnail. Shrugging, he tried, “Fifty?”

Ash swallowed, barely hearing the price. He prepared himself to say the thing he’d come here to say. “Would you take it in trade?”

The words turned his stomach. People weren’t things to be traded. Or, they shouldn’t be. But here he was.

Mac’s eyes narrowed, and Ash felt the muscles in his shoulders pull tight. Did he recognize him? Before the mega-quake, Ash’s face had been in the news here and there. He looked different now. His hair was longer and shaggier. He hadn’t bothered shaving since Dorothy had disappeared, and he had a little scruff on his cheeks.

But, still, there were people around these parts who might remember the young pilot who was brought back from the past by a mad scientist. Ash had been counting on Mac not being one of those people. He didn’t look like the type to watch the news.

Mac’s eyes lingered on him a moment longer. “You ain’t one of my regulars?”

It sounded like a question, like Mac was trying to figure out where he recognized him from.

Ash tensed. “No, sir, I’m not,” he said. “But I’ve been by the Rusty Nail now and then.”

The Rusty Nail was a bar at the end of Aurora that Mac was known to frequent. Mac nodded, apparently satisfied with this explanation.

Ash exhaled, relieved. “I heard you got a new girl. Real pretty. Brown hair.” I heard she bit the last guy who tried to touch her, Ash thought, but he didn’t say that part out loud.

It was the biting detail that had caught his attention. He’d been at some trash bar on the outskirts of town when the guy next to him had yanked back his sleeve, showing off two swollen, moon-shaped welts in the crook of his arm.