Scar smiled a genuinely happy smile and stepped out onto the patio after him. He whistled tunelessly and watched Brennan run into the yard and blunder into a thick patch of trees.

"Hey, nat!" he called out. "Where are you, man? I tell you what. You give me a good hunt, I'll cut you a few times then finish you fast. You disappoint me, I'll cut your balls off. Even the gook chick won't be able to grow you a new pair."

Scar laughed at his joke, then followed Brennan into the dark. He stopped after a moment and listened. He heard nothing but the sounds of the wind in the trees and, distantly, occasional cars moving in the far streets. His prey was gone, vanished into the night. Scar frowned. Something was wrong. He walked deeper into the trees.

And from nowhere, a ghost silent among shadows, Brennan rose from his hiding place, his waxed nylon bowstring wrapped around his fists. He looped the string around Scars throat from behind, yanked, and twisted. Flesh and gristle crumpled and Scar vanished. He reappeared a few feet away, clutching at his crushed windpipe. He tried to suck in air, but nothing reached his laboring lungs. He opened his mouth to say something at Brennan, to curse him or plead with him, but no words came. He vanished again, but reappeared a microsecond later in the same place, his tattooed face screwed up in pain and fear, his concentration shattered, his control gone. Brennan watched him flicker crazily among the trees, desperation on his face, teleporting madly, nonsensically. Finally he appeared spewing blood from his mouth, staggered against a tree, dropped his razor, and fell face up. Brennan approached cautiously, but he was dead. He hunkered over him, and took out the felt-tip pen that the waiter had given him in Minh's restaurant. He drew an ace of spades on the back of Scar's right hand, and, to be sure that Kien wouldn't miss it, placed the hand over Scar's marked face.

He made his way back through the trees silently, like the ghost of a forest animal. Mai was waiting for him on the patio. She didn't seem surprised when it was he who emerged from the trees. She knew him, and what he could do.

"Captain Brennan, is Father really dead?"

He nodded, unable to say the words. She seemed to shrink, to look frailer, more tired, if that were possible. She closed her eyes and tears welled silently from beneath their lids.

"Let's go home."

He led her into the welcome darkness of the night.

He left after she bandaged his wounds, promising to drop by when he could, sadness for her welling inside him, merging with the grief he himself felt at Minh's death. Another comrade, another friend, gone.

Kien had to be brought down. It was up to him, one man, alone, with nothing but the strength of his hands and the cunning of his mind. It would take a long time. He needed a base to operate from, and equipment. Special bows, special arrows. He needed money.

He drew back into the shadows of the Jokertown night, waiting for a certain type of man to come by, a street merchant who exchanged packets of white powder for green bills crumpled in sweaty desperation.

He breathed deeply. The night stank with the countless scents of seven million people and their myriad hopes, fears, and desperations. He was one of them now. He had left the mountains and returned to humanity and he knew that this return would bring with it disappointment and grief and lost hopes. And comfort, some part of him said, wondering at the warm touch of invisible flesh and the sight of a visible heart beating faster and faster with growing passion.

A sudden noise, a softly scraping step, caught his attention. A man passed him. He was dressed richly for a poor neighborhood, and he walked with jaunty arrogance. This was the one for whom he waited.

Brennan slipped quietly among the shadows, following him. The hunter had come to the city.

EPILOGUE: THIRD GENERATION

by Lewis Shiner

Jetboy dove out of the sky in his rocket-sleek plane, speed lines roarin off the swept-back wings. Twenty-millimeter cannons bared ragged calligraphy and the tyrannosaur staggered as the shells tore into him.

"Arnie? Arnie, turn out that light!"

"Yes, Mother," Arnie said. He slid the fifty-four-page special Jetboy on Dinosaur island back into its plastic bag. He switched of his reading light and carried the comic across the familiar darkness of his bedroom and put it away in the closet. He had a complete run of Jetboy Comics in one of the waxed cardboard boxes they used to ship chickens to grocery stores. On the shelf above it were stacked scrapbooks full of clippings about the Great and Powerful Turtle and the Howler and Jumpin' Jack Flash. And next to them stood the dinosaur books, not just the kid stuff with the crude drawings, but textbooks on paleontology and botany and zoology.

Hidden in the back of another box of comics was the Playboy that had Peregrine in it. Lately, looking at those pictures had made Arnie feel strange, kind of nervous and excited and guilty all at the same time.

His parents knew about his obsessions, all but the Playboy, anyway. It was only the wild card business that bothered them. Arnie's grandfather had been on the street that day, had seen it with his own eyes when Jetboy exploded into history. A year later Arnie's mother had been born with lowgrade telekinesis, just enough to move a coin a few inches across a plastic tablecloth. Sometimes Arnie wished she'd just been normal. Better that than to get a power that wasn't good for anything.

He'd made his grandfather tell him about it over and over. "He wanted to die," the old man would say. "He saw the future, and he wasn't in it. just wasn't any place for him anymore. "

"Hush, Grandpa," Arnie's mother would say. "Don't talk that way in front of Arnie."

"I know what I saw," the old man would say, and shake his head. "I was there."

Arnie crept quietly back to bed and lay on his stomach, pleasantly aware of the pressure on his groin. He thought about Dinosaur Island. There was no question in his mind that it was real. Aces were real. Aliens were real-they had brought the wild card to earth.

He turned on his side and pulled his knees up toward his chest. What would it be like? When he was eight he'd driven through Utah with his parents and he'd made them stop at Vernal. They'd gone on the Prehistoric Nature Trail, and Arnie had run ahead to be by himself with the life-sized dinosaur models. Dinosaur Island would look like that, he thought, the rugged brush-covered hills in the background, the diplodocus big enough that he could walk under its belly, the struthiomimus like a huge, scaly ostrich, the pteranodon crouched like it had just glided in for a landing.

His eyes closed and he could see them moving now, not just the crummy dinosaurs you could see on TV but the special ones: the tiny, vicious deinonychus, the "terrible claw. " Or the hideous, lumpy ankylosaur, a thirty-five-foot horned toad with a club on its tail that could dent steel plate.

And deep in his brain, inflamed by the rich, yeasty endocrine soup in which it floated, the wild card virus hovered over a cell, paused, then pumped out its alien message and died. And so, on and on it went, spiraling down through the years in a double helix of fear and ecstasy, mutilation and miraculous change…