A/N: This is it, folks. Will likely be back to yammer more later on; for now, I've just gotta say: IT'S DONE. Enjoy. If there must be pelting, let it be with the lighter of the rocks and garbage. And, as always, thanks for being here. I do appreciate it.
*****
Lisa had in the pocket of her coveralls a money clip: her I.D., enough cash to cover the cab fare. When the cab stopped outside the main gates of the British Museum, she didn't wait for her change. She assumed the front doors would be locked, so she circled to the left, running along the iron fence outside the half-length of the long, dark building: she'd heard Carter say yesterday that Simon Dermott's office was in the museum's west wing. Outside a parking lot large enough for a mere fistful of cars near the rear of the museum, off Bloomsbury Street, she pushed at one side of a two-sided gate, and it gave way. She followed its inward swing, her boots crunching on gravel as she crossed the tiny empty car park. Ahead of her, set in the granite wall, was a solid paneled door.
And she saw, before she touched it, even in the dark: the door wasn't completely shut.
She hesitated before it. She touched the weathered wood without applying pressure--
She wanted to be wrong. She wanted to believe that Rosemary Wheeler hadn't followed Jackson here. She wanted to believe that he wasn't serving himself up as bait for said pursuit. She wanted to believe that he was on the phone to Claire or Carter even now, and that they were telling him how she, Lisa, had run off half-cocked, impulsive, and panicked for no good reason--
Speaking of Carter--
Almost of its own volition, her palm pushed the door. It was as heavy as it looked: it swung but slightly inward before it stopped again.
-- where was he?
No alarm sounded. Lisa looked in: a corridor stretched before her. Two more corridors opened to her right and left. It was very quiet. From behind her, from Bloomsbury, came the sound of traffic; before her yawned a silence seeming to stretch back centuries, as if from all the ancient things stored here were flaking and collecting motes of stillness, invisible by day, inviolate at night.
She stepped inside, onto a polished tile floor. Still no alarm. And no sudden stab of a flashlight beam in the dark, no guard barking "Stop right there!" The place was absolutely deser--
Blam.
Like a ball-bearing splitting. Lisa stopped short. The shot seemed to crack the next beat of her heart. Her ears tracked the sound even as her eyes saw the muzzle flash, then the glow that lingered afterward: light coming from a door on the right side of the corridor, far ahead. She ran toward it.
*****
Bullet wounds to the chest-- shots from an automatic, that is, or a pistol, certainly not shots from a shotgun or, God forbid, the slovenly pulping of assault-rifle dum-dums-- always seemed to Rosemary not unlike holes punched in cardboard: the moment when the slug's entrance-point was tidy, round, and dry, followed by the welling up of blood around the intrusion of muscle tissue and bone from the sternum. Rippner leaned for a moment on the desk, panting, his expression disbelieving.
Then his legs went out from under him and he slumped to the floor.
She gave him a leg's-length of distance as she stepped around him en route to the safe. Out of respect, not necessity: she could see the blood already spreading, out and away from that tidy hole in his chest, darkening to black the gray of his shirt; and he was coughing softly, rhythmically: the sound of his heart drowning as his pericardium filled with blood.
She felt his glazing eyes watch her as she looked into the safe. Two containers. One: the modeling compound, the Play Doh Rippner had just stolen from Rosemary and Mason's suite at the Mandarin Oriental. And two: Professor Becker's precious, elusive nanites. She packed both into the pulse-proof case Seth Patterson had been kind, clever, and naive enough to design for Mason's scheme; she sent the boy a silent, sincere wish that Rippner had allowed him the kindness of a quick death--
And then she took a second look into the safe. A crack between the back wall and the top: she tapped the wall, and it rang hollow; she gave its base a quick, hard punch, and it fell forward.
She looked at what waited behind the false back wall. Then she smirked over her shoulder, apologetically, at Rippner.
"Oh, Jackson, I wasn't meant to see the real ones, was I--?"
At the back of the safe were two more containers. The real nanites. The real modeling compound.
"No--" Rippner's voice was a gurgling whisper. He reached for her without coming anywhere near her; she looked at him sympathetically as she packed away the second set of containers.
"You don't take mind if I take the lot, do you, darling--?" She kept her eyes on him as she stepped back around him. He'd be dead within seconds; nevertheless, she'd never known him to misspend time, and she couldn't imagine him as anything less than perfectly efficient, even if he were dying. "Just to be on the safe--"
"Hey," a woman's voice said. From right in front of her.
"-- side," Rosemary finished. Shocked but moving smoothly, she swung the Walther around, brought it to bear. She had an impression of a woman roughly her size and age, dark hair caught up in a bun on her head, in gray coveralls, her face a mask of anger and grief; she found herself thinking, in the second before she squeezed the trigger, What is a janitor doing here, and why in the hell is she so upset--?
And then the janitor's boot caught Rosemary's hand with a razor-sharp close-quarters kick, and the Walther spun off, unfired, into the air.
*****
Lisa felt as surprised as Rosemary Wheeler looked. She'd practiced that kick with Jackson back in Miami; she never dreamed it would work. But she wasn't dreaming now, or even really thinking. Her body was acting on its own. She was just a spectator, it seemed, and what she saw next, both she and Rosemary, in fact, was her right fist colliding with Rosemary's nose.
*****
Cartilage meeting knuckle: a sponge-push impact. Maybe a crunch of bone. A surprisingly delicate red ribbon of blood arcing through the air. And a tremendous jolt of pain--
She stumbled back a step, Rosemary did. Looked incredulously at the janitor-- the desk clerk-- dropping to a balanced fighting stance before her. Left leg forward, right fist back. Gray eyes focused, face angrily calm. Rosemary didn't bother looking for the Walther.
She grabbed the leather satchel holding the nanites and the modeling compound, pulled the lamp off the desk, and ran for the door.
*****
Lisa, operating purely on instinct, became a predator when Rosemary fled. Rosemary reached the office door; Lisa, blind with anger, ran after her.
And, just inside the door, she was tackled in the dark. Sideswiped. She and her attacker fell into a bookshelf, a tall vase or two, a table stacked with papers. The wind grunted out of both of them. A forearm blocked her mouth, and she bit down on it as hard as she could; she thrashed and kicked against a man's large, powerful torso, tried to angle her head for a shot to his face or jaw. But he held on. Wheeler's running footsteps faded in the tiled distance. From the pocket-sized car park beyond the end of the hall, a door slammed shut, an engine roared, tires kicked up gravel.
"Jesus, woman," John Carter whispered, in irritation and pain, as he let Lisa go. "That fucking hurt."
Carter. It was John climbing off of her, stumbling to his feet.
Lisa lay for a moment, stunned, on the floor, the air still half-knocked out of her. She looked toward the rear of the office, and even in the darkness, she could see--
--
--
-- Jackson, pulling himself slowly into the chair behind the desk. Lisa got up. Her heart was slamming against her sternum. Adrenaline was pulsing through her like electroshock. Carter switched on the overhead light.
"Baby, don't move," Lisa whispered. She stepped toward Jackson tentatively, as if death were a bomb inside him waiting to explode. Her eyes were locked on the gore darkening his chest. "You have to stay still--"
He was pale, but very much alive. He smiled painfully up at her and lifted the hem of his sweatshirt to reveal the bulletproof vest below. He fingered the hole in the tight black mesh above his heart. The squib bleeding fake blood.
"You never asked where I went on my errand this afternoon," he said. He patted his chest. "The latest in thin-panel Kevlar. Our guys at Three Mills were good enough to set me up with a blood pack, too."
"Does it hurt?" Lisa asked.
"Yes."
Her voice was absolutely flat. "Good."
"It's kind of like being kicked by a cow," said Carter.
"So speaks the former farm boy," Jackson countered, panting.
By then, Carter was again looking incredulously at his forearm. "She bit me."
"I'd say you got off easy." Jackson returned his attention to the interloper. "Christ, Lisa, what are you doing here? You could have been shot--!"
Anger flared in her, suddenly, hot enough to take her breath away. "You were shot--!"
"That was all part of the plan--"
"Fucking-- the fuck--" Lisa stared at him. "God damn it, Jackson, who makes plans like that--?"
He did, obviously. He looked honestly surprised. "You weren't supposed to be here. Baby, you were supposed to be with Claire and Fallon--"
"Don't you fucking 'baby' me." She was trying not to cry. Lisa pulled her hands along her temples hard enough, painfully enough, to keep her tears at bay. She drew and released a deep breath, then another, while Jackson and Carter stayed quiet; she said, finally, more evenly: "I mean, it didn't work, did it--? She got what she came for: she has the nanites and the compound--"
Jackson's tone was sly: "Does she?"
Lisa frowned at him. "But I thought-- they were here, in the safe, in Simon Dermott's office--"
He hazarded the beginning of a smile. "They are in the safe in Simon Dermott's office, Lisa."
"Next door," Carter continued for him. "This isn't Simon's office." He gave Lisa a moment to absorb the words before he continued. "The nanites and the modeling compound are safe: I was in Simon's office, right there, in fact--" -- and he pointed toward a space invisible beyond the right-hand wall-- "-- keeping watch over them the whole time. Up until you decided to hand Rosemary her ass on a platter, that is. Have to admit: that alone was worth the price of admission."
"But you didn't want me to catch her," Lisa said. "She had to get away."
"Precisely. That's why you didn't see any guards when you came in, either: per our good Mr. Dermott's orders, they're all off in the south wing until ten-thirty."
Jackson winced as he got to his feet. Lisa, concern getting the better of her diminishing anger, went to help him.
Straightening his clothes, checking himself for hidden damage, Carter watched. "Someday, Jackson, someone is going to aim for your head," he said.
"I am trying to change jobs, John: remember--?"
*****
A neighborhood or so away, Amy Kendrick and Roland Mason dropped Ken Warwick at his flat before they headed for a hotel near Heathrow. The container Seth Patterson designed for the nanites was working; it was green-lit; the nanites were safely insulated from any kill-pulse Professor Becker might send their way. In the back of the van, Rosemary Wheeler was in pain and grumbling: "That bitch broke my nose." Or by doze. Ken could see Amy trying desperately not to smirk; after all, her wincing female partner-in-crime might still have a gun. When they reached his block of flats and he climbed out, she followed him.
"You'll get your money," she said, looking up at him, standing there on the worn and weedy sidewalk. "Don't worry."
"It's been fun," he replied, looking back at her. "Take care, Miss Kendrick."
"You too, Mr. Warwick." She leaned up and kissed his cheek. "Thank you."
In her face was the freshness he'd seen in her the day she first approached his cubicle at Transport for London. He chose to believe, now as then, that it wasn't a front.
He smiled. "You're welcome."
She laid her hand, just for a moment, on his arm. Then she got back in the van, and Ken watched her drive off before he climbed the dark steps to the door of his flat.
*****
What Ken Warwick and Amy Kendrick and Rosemary Wheeler and Roland Mason didn't know, as they drove their soon-to-be-abandoned Transport for London van to Heathrow, was just how little real material they possessed, and how near to destruction all of that material really was. Jackson explained it for Lisa as he and she and John rode in an ambulance to St. Thomas' Hospital (Carter had insisted on that, the ambulance ride: all part of authenticating the end of the ruse).
"We asked three things of Professor Becker in addition to the second Icarus," Jackson told Lisa, as they sat side by side on med-tech jump-seats. He'd refused to play his "man down" role to the point of lying on the red-blanketed gurney. "One, a set of samples that look 'live,' but aren't."
"That was what Rosemary found at the back of the safe," Carter said, seated opposite them and leaning near to make himself heard without raising his voice. "Neutral material masquerading as nanites and modeling compound in a set of green-lit jars."
"Two," Jackson continued, "a real nanite sample that's actually nothing more than a very thin layer of nanites over neutral material. Underneath the neutral stuff is a tiny transmitter programmed to pulse the nanites from within the jar, in approximately seventy-two hours. The kill signal, so to say, will be coming from inside the house."
"When a Stranger Calls," Lisa said.
Jackson smiled. "I knew you'd appreciate that."
She rested her hand over his, on his right knee. "What's number three?"
"Something I added to the modeling compound I stole back from Mason and Rosemary's suite: a command injection of nanites that will neutralize the compound and then die. When that jar is next opened, the stuff inside will be as dead as dirt."
Carter finished for him: "All this in addition to an Icarus that will melt into a puddle of gunk by the time the weekend rolls around."
Lisa raised her eyebrows. "Mr. Mason's buyer will not be happy."
Jackson gently thatched his fingers with hers. She didn't draw away. "That's what we're hoping," he said.
*****
In the emergency ward of St. Thomas', all three of them were seen by a doctor friendly to the company, a whippet-trim balding man in his young fifties whose brown eyes seemed to have seen it all and then some. Jackson had a contusion and nasty bruising to his left pectoral; Lisa actually broke the skin on Carter's forearm when she bit him. Lisa herself, as Carter's one-time tackling dummy, had a new set of bruises to add to those she'd acquired fleeing from Robert Grant three nights back.
"I won't ask what happened," the doctor said.
"Sometimes we like it a little rough." Seated, shirtless and pallid, on an examining table, Jackson kept his eyes on Lisa as he spoke. Apologetically. A little beseechingly, maybe. Once again, he wasn't looking at her; he was looking into her.
And she knew, with a tremor of realization, that she was looking into him as well.
"But only sometimes," she said, softly.
*****
*****
Two days later.
*****
"We have to ask-- we at the museum have to ask: what will become of the Icarus now?" In a pub of Richard Fallon's choosing, knocking elbows with the early afternoon lunch crowd at a table too near the front windows for his liking, Simon Dermott sipped with distaste at a pint of Guinness.
Fallon good-naturedly leaned his broad shoulders out of the way of a young man squeezing by with a pint glass in one hand, two sandwich-and-chips baskets balanced in the other. "What Icarus might that be, Simon?"
"Do I need to quote the catalogue number--?" Dermott snapped.
"We never found it, Simon," said Fallon. He took a long drink from his foam-filigreed glass while Dermott absorbed the words. "The good professor made his copies from the stock photo in the museum's missing-items database."
"You never-- Copies. Plural."
"Yes. One for Mason and his gang, one for me and mine. For my students." Fallon fixed his wry eyes on Dermott's befuddled face. Dermott seemed frozen at the brink of incredulity. His mouth was half-open, wordless and empty. "Come visit us sometime, Simon," Fallon said, draining his glass and easing away from the table into the bump and current of the lunch crowd. "You're always welcome."
*****
He stopped for a visit before his three o'clock seminar.
Not Dermott, of course. He would need time, Simon would, to sift through the implications, to tamp down his pride, to come, with luck, to the conclusion that the thing belonged where it was.
Richard Fallon stood in the front hallway of the grand old building that the Society of Archaeological Students of University College London and looked through the main parlor at the Icarus, the real one, where it stood in its place of honor: centered against the back wall between the high windows, behind the long ash-wood buffet that served sometimes as a meeting-table, more often as a bar. On party nights, all the ales and whiskeys and vodkas of Christendom would be the fallen son of Daedalus's to survey.
He was running late, but he lingered. Took a step closer, though not near enough to read the plaque already affixed to the wall near the boy's gloriously spread wings. Not an encomium, certainly not a description or history. Just two simple rules:
1. No polka-dot boxers.
2. No lipstick. He's pretty enough as he is.
Let him soar, unencumbered, to the sun, Fallon thought. Without vanity. Without shame. With only his pride to keep him aloft. That'll do.
"I'm glad we found him, Dad," he said to the empty room.
Across campus, a tower clock chimed three. Richard Fallon left the Icarus and the clubhouse of the S.A.S. and let his long legs carry him, across the green thick grass of the quad, in the direction of the building that housed his third-year seminar on Bronze and Iron Age Britain.
*****
London Transport, three p.m.
*****
Ken Warwick rapped on the doorframe of Stan Burton's office. "You wanted to see me, Mr. Burton?"
"Mm." Burton motioned to a chair opposite his, across his desk. Ken sat. Burton said, half-absently, without looking up from the splay of papers before him: "I've been reviewing your report on Aldwych."
Ken eased to the edge of his seat. "Yes, sir--?"
"Very interesting reading." Burton tipped his head back slightly, as if focusing down through an imaginary set of bifocals. "You do realize that falsifying a signature and an employee number on corporate paperwork is a sackable offense, don't you, Ken...?"
A moment of shock. "I don't follow, sir--"
"Certainly you do, Ken. Or should I say 'William'--?" Burton raised his eyes now, and those eyes were sharp and uncomfortably intent. "'William Donne.' Ring any bells?"
"No... sir."
"Well, hearken to the merry pealing."
The papers he'd been looking at when Ken walked in: he turned two of them toward Ken now. The first was a copy of the rental agreement that Ken had drawn up for Amy Kendrick, for the vault below St. Paul's.
The second was a requisition for maintenance equipment to be routed onto the tracks of Aldwych station, dated three days earlier. A request also initiated by "William Donne."
"It appears you crashed that cleaning train as well. Odd--" Burton added, drolly, "-- you neglected to mention that in your report, Ken."
Ken nearly protested: the vault under St. Paul's was his doing, yes, but he'd had nothing to do with that cleaning train. He opened his mouth--
Stopped.
He looked into Burton's eyes, and he thought: He knows. St. Paul's, Aldwych, British Museum station. The Icarus. Mason and Wheeler and Amy Kendrick. He knows everything.
He'd underestimated the old man. He knew that now, too.
"You might want to box up a few of your things, Ken," Burton said, his voice with its Welsh accent nearly gentle. "I've already rung Security; they'll be walking you out."
*****
New York City, two days later.
*****
I'm very pleased, Mr. Mason, said Makis Kazandzoglou.
Standing with the phone to his ear at the window of his twelfth-floor apartment, Roland Mason spoke to the sprawl, the jumbled traffic, the bulky rooftop air-conditioning units, the construction cranes and scaffolding, the worn gray pavement that made up his city, and he spoke to his buyer, too: "I'm glad to hear it."
I have just one question.
The doorbell rang. Mason was expecting a delivery, and Fed Ex had just buzzed up from below; as he went to answer the door, he prompted, politely: "Yes--?"
The Fed Ex driver was not alone. Three men stood to the sides. Mason signed for his package. As the deliveryman took his electronic sign box and stylus and made for the elevator, the men invited themselves in. Mason, who wasn't carrying a weapon, stepped aside as they entered.
Two of them were solid, dark-haired, as stoic as bricks, wearing good black suits. One of them lingered with Mason near the door; the man made an "after you" gesture toward the apartment's interior. He didn't gesture with his other hand at the gun holstered against his side. He didn't have to. Mason stepped back into his apartment, and the man closed the door.
The third man was wearing a suit in beautiful antiqued-oak silk. He was medium height, tidily built. His hair was light brown shot through with gray, combed back off his high forehead. His eyes were narrow, hazel, long-suffering; his face was weathered but aristocratic. He looked like a figure in a picture in an old newspaper, captioned in a language Mason wouldn't know. He was on the phone. As Mason came nearer, he terminated his call. From the receiver still in Mason's hand came silence, then the dial tone.
"Can you recommend a good carpet cleaner, Mr. Mason?" the buyer asked.
One of his man handed him a capped glass jar full of a viscous black substance like used engine oil. He held it out for Mason to see.
Genuinely puzzled, Mason asked: "What is that, Mr. Kazandzoglou?"
"The Icarus," the buyer replied. "Some of it." He looked back at Mason as one of his men traded him an automatic for the jar of gunk. "It is all over my favorite rug. So I would appreciate the name of a good cleaning company."
Mason, comprehending, incredulously stated the obvious: "It melted--?"
"Mm hm."
"But you have-- You have the modeling compound, the nanites--"
"I have four jars of sand."
He aimed the automatic at Mason's forehead and added, thoughtfully: "Maybe a cleaning company that specializes in blood stains as well."
Some things you just have to do yourself. In the three seconds before the slug punched a piece of skull into the middle of his brain, Mason thought: I can respect that.
"You tried to cheat me, Mr. Mason," the buyer said.
He pulled the trigger.
*****
Not one of the survivors of Roland Mason's gang received his or her money. Some of them cared less than others. Rosemary Wheeler, nursing a broken nose, contemplated the nursing of a grudge while deciding on a plastic surgeon. Ken Warwick, newly jobless, sat in his flat as night fell, waiting with his bank account on auto-refresh on the glowing screen of his P.C. for a wire transfer that never came through. Seth Patterson, parked at a table with his MacBook Pro and a double depth-charge in a Starbucks in Manhattan, watched the sun shining through the street-grimy window and thought how good it was to be alive. And Amy Kendrick wondered if now wouldn't be a good time to open a record store in London. A place where people could handle used vinyl, where they could relish the richness of the sound of records, real records, and savor the pops and scratches, too. Plenty of vintage Zeppelin. Maybe just a hole in the wall, an ex-bookstore, possibly, stuffed to the gills with flip-bins and worn cardboard sleeves. They-- she tried to tell herself that she was using that amorphous, semi-singular "they," that she wasn't thinking of Ken Warwick, pudgy, ordinary, loyal Ken-- might call it "Swan Song Records." Heaven knows, they'd have plenty of room for stock in the basement.
*****
*****
Rippner and Lisa spent the better part of a rainy yesterday prowling bookstores, used and antiquarian, so sunny today was to be the London neophyte's choice of touristy doings. Lisa chose Camden Market by way of the London Zoo, which she'd wanted to see ever since she was a little girl. Carter and Claire, having deposited Professor Becker and his magical invention safely into the hands of the organizers of the freeze-tech summit, and due in Scotland at Claire's brother's house tomorrow, asked if they might tag along. Lisa, of course, was happy to welcome them; Rippner was pleased as well. Not that he wasn't willing, by now, to follow Lisa anywhere she might care to go, but Claire's interest, especially, lent a kind of dignity to the trip, even if, as Mrs. Carter confessed, she merely wanted to indulge in a zoo free of familial demands: no daughters and their friends begging for candy or soda or souvenirs, no declarations of boredom, no variations on "Can we go now--?"
So mid-morning found the four of them examining the contents of the reptile house. Carter and Rippner perused the tortoises; Lisa and Claire-- who, honest to God, seemed to relish reading each and every plaque detailing the habits and habitats of the creatures behind the steamy, sturdy windows-- were discussing the differences between geckos and skinks.
Rippner was relaxed and content, even if his chest still felt as if it had lost in overtime to a Holstein with World Cup aspirations. Lisa had asked, and Carter had fixed things with the Lux: Miss Reisert, the company's new freelance consultant, was free to enjoy an extended vacation, which was to include, in a week or so, a trip to the west coast of Scotland. The Hebrides. Fingal's Cave. Rippner had sensed himself glowing when she mentioned that: their love for Mendelssohn's tribute to the whispering sea-cave of Staffa was one more thing they shared.
For now, however, they had yet to best Camden Market. Carter, out of the girls' hearing, suggested that he and Rippner, in the stalls and shops full of vintage clothes and tie-dyes that awaited them north of the zoo, were about to be witness to a most thorough display of punitive shopping.
"By the end of the day, Jackson," he said, soberly, "you and I will be dressed like dirty hippies."
Rippner clasped his hands behind his back and replied to the pancake tortoise eating grass on the far side of the glass in front of them: "I think we've got it coming, John."
A commotion from the glass entrance doors: children spilled into the hall, seven or eight years old, wearing spring jackets over their blue school uniforms. It was as if someone had dumped a box of crickets out on the floor. A box of incredibly loud crickets. Rippner possessed an American's stereotyped notions about the reticence of British schoolchildren: these little thundering monsters put an immediate lie to his preconceptions.
He left Carter with the turtles and sought solace near the poisonous snakes. A little brown-haired boy shouldered in next to him and pressed his pudgy fingers to the case housing the green mamba. He leaned in close enough for his nostrils to make two tiny "o"s of condensation on the glass. He stared into the display-- a thick dry branch, a thicket of leaves, a background of brilliant painted sky-blue-- and as much as shouted:
"He's not in there!"
For Christ's sake. Rippner rolled his eyes, looked more closely at the display. One of the keepers of the herd, a pinched-looking thin man in his late thirties, said in passing:
"He's in there, Alex. He's hiding."
"Can't say I blame him," Rippner muttered.
"No, he's not." Alex's tone held a note of incipient hysteria. "He's gone--!"
Now Rippner stared into the display. It had to be there. Like a shock-green, shiny length of garden hose it was, according to the photo-plaque in the light-box above the glass cases: how could you miss it? And yet--
-- what if it got out? What if someone set it free in here? (Rosemary-- good God-- she was on the loose, wasn't she--? With a broken nose yet.) All these kids-- well, screw the kids-- but Lisa--
"There he is, Alex." The thin-faced horde-tender, now on Rippner's other side, pointed toward the back of the display. "See--?"
Sure enough, there it was, neon-green among the underbrush. Alex obligingly let out a shriek.
Rippner jumped. Bastard.
Lisa was drawing near; Rippner drifted toward her and said, under his breath, with a nod toward the mamba: "Now I know what I want for my birthday."
She looked where he was looking. Alex appeared to have multiplied. Now five children were staring at the mamba; ten tiny nostrils were making condensation-rings on the glass.
"Your birthday's in May, right? You might have let me know a few months ago," Lisa said.
Rippner looked at her, bemused. "What?"
"What--?"
Their eyebrows fought a brief and silent war of counter-queries. Then realization lit Lisa's face--
"Oh, you meant the snake."
"What did you think I meant--?"
"Nothing." She smiled at him. "Time for lunch?"
He was wise enough to let it drop. "Sounds good."
Outside the hall of reptiles, Claire and Carter were already waiting. Lisa took his hand, and Rippner followed her out into the sunlight.
*****
*****
THE END