"Can't sleep," Michael told her.

  A shrug and a smile. "Bon. Then—"

  "Not right now. Go back to sleep. I'll be in later."

  Her gaze drifted over to the television. "The problems in Egypt? That is bothering you? You know them, oui? From American Hero?"

  He didn't answer. With his middle left hand, he tapped at one of the tympanic membranes on his chest—a low, steady dhoomp-dhoomp-dhoomp that reverberated through the room and his body. The sound was somehow comforting. Chaton finally shrugged and padded back into the bedroom. A few minutes later he heard her purr-snore again.

  "Michael, you're a great guy," Kate had said with her soft, quiet voice, not long after they'd met. "But I don't think I'm ready for this." He started to protest, but she cut him off with a smile. "Maybe when this whole thing is over. When we're not so distracted."

  But it would never be over. The cameras would always be there for both of them, no matter where they were or what they did. And Fortune . . . goddamn John Fortune had somehow managed to say the right things that she wanted to hear. Kate saw Michael as the lightweight, the entertainer, the womanizer.

  He'd slept with a dozen of the contestants and staff of American Hero after his stupid affair with Pop Tart, after it was apparent that Kate was never going to forgive him for the slip. It was stupid and he knew it, but if she thought of him as the slut rock star, then he'd play the role to the hilt. The tactic earned him the response it deserved. After he'd been "drafted" by the Diamonds, after Fat Chick had been voted off the show, after the show had revealed that he was sleeping with Tiffani, he'd tried again to patch things up with Kate and she had stared at him as if he were a stranger. When he'd persisted, things were suddenly flying at him very hard and very fast, and he was too busy ducking and shielding himself to make any reply at all. The other Hearts took judicious cover.

  "You're an ass, Michael!" Kate shouted in the midst of the barrage. "Go bang your drums!" A vase exploded on the wall nearest him, scattering water and petals and china shrapnel and leaving a hole he could have put his head through. "Go bang your groupies, too!" A pencil caught him on the ass, punching through his jeans and embedding itself point-first in his buttocks. He gave up trying to cover himself and retreated entirely. He heard glass hit the wall beside the door and shatter. "Stay away from me!" he heard her say as he fled.

  Fortune was serious; he had a vision that included more than CDs and concerts and screaming fans, even if that vision was driven by the goddamned bug inside him. Fortune was also dangerous. Michael felt that instinctively; but Kate . . . Kate didn't see him that way, just as he felt she couldn't see beyond the persona of Drummer Boy.

  Hell, sometimes he couldn't do that either.

  He'd been sent to the Discard Pile after the Blacks had lost their challenge, and that's when his growing fury and discontent couldn't be contained any longer. He lasted a single day there, listening to the stupid prattling, the ego games, the posturing all of them did for the cameras. It was stupid, all of it—fake drama and fake heroism. That same evening, he packed his clothes and headed for the door, only to find his way blocked by King Cobalt and Hardhat. Other discards watched the confrontation: Ana, standing in the middle of the huge living room with hands on hips, shook her head as if she'd been expecting something like this; Toad Man lurked in the archway to the kitchen like a wart-ridden VW Beetle; Brave Hawk, his arms folded on his chest, gazed down stoically from the balcony above them; two five-foot-tall Matryoshkas huddled against the wall. And the cameras. Always the cameras.

  "Where the hell you going, DB?" King Cobalt said.

  "I'm outta here," Michael told them. "Fuck this shit. I got music to play with people I actually like. I'm done with this crap."

  King Cobalt shook his masked head, the silver lightning bolts sewn there glistening. "Uh-uh. That ain't how it works, and you know it." Hardhat gestured, and a crosshatch of glowing steel beams barred the door of the mansion.

  "You think that shit's gonna stop me from leaving?" Michael told him. He flexed his six arms, looking at all of them. "It's gonna fucking take most of you to do that, and it's gonna be real. No stuntmen, no dummies, no breakaway furniture, no pulled punches. Real." He wanted them to try, in that moment. He wanted to lose himself in blind rage. All it would have taken was a word or a movement. Hardhat glared. King Cobalt's eyes glittered behind the blue mask, but then King Cobalt stepped to one side. He waved at Hardhat; the barrier at the door vanished.

  "Michael," Ana said as he stalked past them to the door and wrenched it open. "All you're proving is that you're still an ass. Kate—"

  He hadn't allowed her to finish the sentence. "Fuck Kate. Fuck you. Fuck John Fortune and Peregrine and this whole goddamn show." He doubted that they would play those exit lines on the weekly wrap-up, and the slamming of the door behind him was entirely unsatisfactory. He took some small pleasure in ripping the locked steel gates of the driveway from their hinges and tossing them aside. He gave a sextuplet of fingers to the cameraman filming his exit.

  As he walked down the street looking for a taxi and drumming irritated riffs on himself, his anger slowly cooled. He wondered what Kate would think when she heard, and how he could ever apologize, how he could ever apologize to any of them.

  He would never be able to apologize to King Cobalt. Not now.

  The new program had turned to another story now—floodwaters and boats rescuing stranded people in some local city—and he picked up the remote and channel-surfed, looking for Kate or Fortune or anything to do with the escalating crisis in Egypt. Nothing. He tapped on his chest with his free hands as he pressed the channel button with his lower left hand. Drumbeats surrounded him, fast and hard. He focused the sound through the open throats on his thick neck, tightening the muscles there and shaping the sound—he could feel it in his own body, though someone standing five feet to his side would have heard very little. But a person standing right in front of him, where he was staring . . .

  The television set vibrated on in its wooden cabinet.

  Tighter yet. Tighter . . .

  A jagged crack ran quickly across the screen, from lower left to upper right. The television hissed, sparked, and went dead. Michael tossed the remote across the room.

  He rose from the couch and went into the bedroom. Without waking Chaton, he dressed quickly and packed a small duffel bag with underwear, jeans, T-shirts, and a bundle of his signature graphite drumsticks. He left the room and took the elevator down to the lobby. The night staff looked up with surprise at his appearance. "Scusilo. There's a young lady in my room," he told the woman at the desk as he placed a hundred-euro note conspicuously on the counter. "Make sure someone sends breakfast up to her around eleven-thirty. I need a cab, also, and I'd prefer that no one knows that I've gone out." He tapped the note for emphasis. "Oh, and there's a slight problem with the TV—just put it on my bill."

  The woman blinked. "Surely, Mr. Vogali," she said, her English accented with the Roman lilt. "The concierge will help you with a cab."

  A half-hour later, he was at the airport.

  The call on his cell phone came about 8:30—hours earlier than he'd been hoping it would come. It seemed that a hundred euros wasn't as much of a tip as he'd thought, or maybe Grady just tipped better. At least it was Cohen and not one of the guys in the group; that would have been much harder. "Hey, KA," Michael said as he flipped open the phone. "I figured you'd be calling eventually."

  "DB, where the hell are you and what the fuck are you doing?"

  "I'm just taking a walk, Grady. Enjoying the scenery. Y'know, the Coliseum, the Parthenon . . ."

  "The Parthenon's in Athens."

  "It's been a long walk."

  He heard an exasperated huff. "The desk clerk from the hotel called me. I've talked to the concierge and I've been to your room, DB. I've talked to the girl, I've seen what's missing, and I'd appreciate it if you'd treat me like an adult. Now, where are you?"

  "At the airport," Michael told him. The private prop-jet was idling on the runway a hundred yards from him. He could feel the prop wash whipping his pants legs and whistling past the throats on his neck. From the open door of the plane, a hand gestured toward him.

  "Please tell me you're going to Berlin," Cohen said.

  "I'm going the other way, actually."

  "You can't do that, DB. You can't cancel this concert at the last minute. Forget that it violates your contract, it's not fair to the rest of Joker Plague. It's not fair to your fans." A pause. "It's not fair to me."

  "This is more important right now. To me."

  Cohen's exasperation rasped the phone's speaker. "What? What's more important? You think you're fucking Bono, off to save the goddamn world?"

  "Wow, KA. Didn't mean to touch a nerve."

  "Fuck!" The blast of fury made Michael lift the phone away from his ear. "DB, you blow off this tour and Joker Plague is finished. The label won't touch you again. Your career—and everyone else's—gets flushed down the toilet."

  "Bullshit," Michael spat back. "Let's cut the crap. You're just worried about your own ass, KA. The label still has a best-selling CD, and they're not going to flush that. It's all about the money, Grady, and we both know it. You'll be getting plenty of publicity to sell CDs and concert tickets by the time I get back. I promise you that."

  "When? When are you coming back?" Another pause, and a long sigh. "Look, maybe I can do something with Berlin, even London if I have to. But when are you getting back here? By New York? Tell me it will be by New York."

  "Talk to you later, KA."

  "DB! Goddamn it—"

  Michael closed the cover. With his middle hand, he sidearmed the phone at the concrete wall of the terminal. It shattered. He strode quickly toward the open door of the plane and hauled himself inside. The pilot was checking off instruments. He glanced back at Michael as he strapped into the nearest seat.

  "Let's get the hell out of here before I change my mind," he told the pilot.

  The long road from the Aswan airport was drifted with sand, and the air above the asphalt wavered and rippled. The wind through the open windows of the taxi only seemed to stir the heat. "It has not rained here in six years," the driver said, glancing over his shoulder to where Michael was crammed uncomfortably into the rear seat. His eyes widened slightly, and Michael figured he must look like a large spider stuffed into a too-small box. "When our people weep, we save the tears."

  The car seemed ready to shed side panels like a snake's discarded skin with every pothole and bump. The vehicle shuddered from badly out-of-alignment tires, every inch of the interior was coated with a fine layer of sand, and the driver—"Ahmed," he said. "It is like 'Bob' in your language. A common name, but I am a man of uncommon talent"—used his horn at every possible opportunity, or simply as punctuation. Ahmed spoke English well enough, but he also spoke it constantly. "The Living Gods, they say 'Ah, we will take us back to the old ways, the right ways, the way it should be for us.' Egypt, she is ancient and that's why she likes them, but these Ikhlas al-Din and the Caliph . . ." He shook his head and swerved violently around a slower car, horn blaring, as Michael's head banged first against the roof, then the side.

  "Ta'ala musso!" Ahmed shouted from the window. Michael assumed it was a curse. Ahmed wrestled the car back into its lane and continued his monologue. Michael wished that Ahmed would look more at the road and less at him. "You are what they call a 'joker,' yes? Myself, I have many friends who are jokers and a few even in my family, so I am not offended to look at you. Here, so many with the virus take on the shapes of the old gods—it is the very land that does this. Their forms are in the sand and the stones and the air. The waters of the Nile flow with it. You, in your United States, you take on whatever shape you wish, like you with your many arms to make much noise, but here—here the old gods use the virus to allow their shapes to return to their ancient home. These Ikhlas al-Din, they believe that Allah has cursed the deformed ones for their sins, but even though I am Muslim I am not so certain. I wonder if the Old Ones aren't truly attempting to return. When you go see the temples and the places of the gods here, you'll wonder, too. Go to Phileas Island, or even to Sehel; I will take you."

  Michael grunted, his head slamming against the roof of the car with every bump, his legs folded up against his chest, his several hands clutching at any hold he could find. The heat made him sweat, which made the sand stick to his bare skin, and he could taste the gritty stuff in his mouth. They drove rapidly east, through a village where people watched the taxi from open doorways or behind shuttered windows. The market they passed was closed and deserted; Michael suspected that most of the inhabitants had already fled the area. The driver turned onto a four-lane highway, and Michael saw ahead the curve of the massive dam that held Lake Nasser. "Saad el Aali," Ahmed said, pointing through the sandblasted windshield. "The High Dam. And there, that is our memorial, celebrating the cooperation of Egypt and the Soviet Union which allowed us to build such a wonderful dam."

  The memorial was monumentally ugly to Michael's eyes: five huge pillars like the petals of a concrete flower holding up a concrete ring at the summit. There were tents erected in the open space around the memorial. As they approached, guards with automatic weapons waved the taxi to the side of the road. All of the guards appeared to be jokers. Ahmed honked at the men and appeared prepared to run them down, but Michael reached over the seat with a muscular top hand and pulled the wheel hard to the right. "This is my stop," he said, and Ahmed shrugged and braked. Michael opened one of the rear doors and managed to unfold himself from the car without quite falling down. He rummaged in a pocket and tossed several bills onto the passenger seat of the taxi. "Salam alekum," he said.

  "Wa alekum es salam," Ahmed replied, glancing at the bills—that he didn't bother to haggle told Michael he'd drastically overpaid. "Though I doubt that you will find much peace here," Ahmed said solemnly. "Here, my number if you need me again." Michael took the crumpled business card as the guards approached, their weapons trained on his bare chest. He put down his duffel bag and raised his many hands.

  "Hey, Drummer Boy!" one of them said in Arabic-accented English. He lifted an iPod from the breast pocket of his fatigues, and Michael saw the white cord of headphones running up to a hairless head that looked more like a skull, the buds stuffed into earless holes. "Joker Plague—love your music. I have all your CDs."

  They slung their weapons over their shoulders and Michael lowered his hands. Ten minutes later, he knew the joker fan's name was Masud, the other guard had taken their picture together, and Michael picked up his duffel bag again. "I'm looking for Lohengrin or John Fortune," he said.

  "I'll take you to them," Masud said. He inclined his head toward the monument. "This way. Would you mind giving me an autograph, too?"

  There was a rusting and decrepit motorcycle parked outside the tent. Fortune was inside, standing alongside a table with maps spread out and held down by rocks against the furnacelike wind off the desert. The armpits of his white shirt were stained a pale yellow and his normal café au lait skin was tanned darkly; his blonde, curly hair was bleached by the sun, so that the contrast between skin and hair was stark. Lohengrin—looking more like a pudgy, badly sunburned college student than a warrior without the white armor—stood next to him, along with Jonathan Hive. Three of the Living Gods were gazing at the maps as well; the one called Sobek, who bore the head of a crocodile, the hippopotamus god Tawaret, and a dark-haired teenaged girl Michael remembered from her brief stint on American Hero: Aliyah Malik, also known as Simoon.

  He'd never been to bed with her. Not that he probably wouldn't have tried, if she'd stayed in the game long enough.

  Fortune touched a finger to the jewel of Sekhmet embedded in his forehead, as if trying to massage it. The lump was far too prominent for Michael's comfort. "What's left of the Egyptian army has pulled back north of Aswan, but all the reports we're hearing say that Ikhlas al-Din and the army of the caliphate are advancing southward along the road from Daraw and Kôm Ombo—the Djinn's with them, and so is the Caliph. Some are coming by rail, some in vehicles. They have C-130 transport planes, too. That means that taking out the airport is a priority, to keep them on the east side of the river and away from Sehel Island and Syrene. They're moving quickly. It'll be the same tactical situation we had with the Egyptians: they're on the east side, and will be looking to cross the Nile at the British dam, or maybe here at the High Dam where the road is wider. We don't know where they'll make their initial attack, or how. . . . "

  Fortune lifted up his head as Michael stepped under the shadow of the open-sided tent. He grimaced and his voice changed slightly. "Well, the Little Drummer Boy shows up," he said. "What are you doing here? Your tour cancelled already?"

  Michael held back the anger that surged through him at the hated nickname. "I figured you could use more help."

  Fortune snorted. "You know what? This isn't a goddamn television show and I'm not your Captain Cruller anymore. We don't need a guest star appearance, especially from someone who's only here for publicity. You just want to see your face on CNN so you can sell a few more CDs. This is serious. People are dying here." His face twisted, and for a moment Michael wondered who was talking, Fortune or Sekhmet. "We just buried King Cobalt. The Caliph intends to wipe out all the rest of us, along with the Living Gods and all their followers. This is war, and it's real. I—we—don't need dilettantes strolling in at the last minute."

  A wasp shrilled by Michael's ear. He ignored it. "That's what I figured you'd say. But you ain't the only one here. What would Kate say? Or you, Lohengrin? Bugsy? You know what I got to offer."

  Lohengrin neither smiled nor frowned. Sweat beaded on his forehead, but evaporated before it could slide down his pale, doughy features. "He's strong enough, ja? We shouldn't turn down allies, John. We need every ace."