She had almost reached them when something seized her long hair from behind and brought her up short like a dog on a leash, with such violence that her neck almost snapped.

Light-needles stabbed through her brain. She reacted without thought, without intention, flowing with the momentum her own inertia and the sudden grasp on her hair provided. She flung herself up in a back-flip, using the gripping hand as a pivot, snapped around to stand momentarily upon the broad not-quite-even shoulders of the man behind her. A second back-flip set her on the ground facing him.

He spun, tossed away a handful of black hair. “That was a pretty cute trick,” he rasped, in a strange, raw voice. “Nobody plays cute with Carnifex twice, babe.”

He wore all white. His eyes were a green blaze of anger and hate and savage joy. He seemed at some point in the past to have been disassembled and then put back together by a careless child. Another might have taken him for a joker, but Moonchild’s warrior eye recognized him for what he was: a mass of old hurts, imperfectly if completely healed.

He watched her scrutiny with a smile that would probably have been twisted if his mouth were perfect. “Normally I pull up my hood for fighting,” he said, gesturing toward the back of his neck. “But I thought a fox like you deserved the sight of my handsome face.”

“You’re the one the German ace Mackie Messer killed, at the Democratic convention in Atlanta,” she said.

His face twisted. “He didn’t kill me, babe. He just messed me up some. I came back; I always do. And I kicked his twisted faggot ass for him good when we had our rematch on the Rox.”

That made no sense to her. The youthful assassin had exploded on live TV moments after gutting Carnifex with his buzz-saw hands. An estimated billion people worldwide had seen it.

Carnifex was grinning at her. “Reminding me of him is going to cost you extra in pain,” he said.

She slid into Bom-So-Ki, cat stance, weight on rear foot, right front forward and cocked, hands bladed and held before left shoulder and face to strike or to defend. “We shall see,” she said.

“Yeah,” he snarled, “and you’ll feel.”

He lunged for her. Firing blows from what seemed a hundred random directions. With blinding speed she blocked them. In moments her forearms were numb from slamming against his, her right thigh was a mass of bruises from intercepting kicks to belly and groin – a vulnerable target for a woman, too, though not quite as crippling as for a man.

She knew at once that he was stronger than she was.

Normally that wouldn’t have mattered – all skills are learned skills! – since he was not devastatingly more powerful, Starshine or Golden Boy or Harlem Hammer powerful, the way the unwieldy one who reeked of death was. She was quicker, if only slightly, and her skill was vastly greater.

As she curled up like a boxer under his untiring blow-storm, the realization hit her that it didn’t matter. Carnifex on the attack was like Croyd at chess: complete abandon. But this wasn’t the wildness of an amateur who knew no better, who didn’t know enough to fear. This man was skilled and seasoned. He just didn’t feel he had to fear.

As soon as she learned how fast and strong he was, her thought was to defend and let his fury spend itself on her defenses. She had been kicked in the belly once, in the left knee once, a cut was vomiting blood from her forehead near the hairline, her left eye was swelling. His attack was as ferocious as ever.

She had jabbed a few times, launched tentative kicks, more to feed his flames so he’d burn out more quickly than as serious attacks. That was obviously not working. He had started out pretty heedless of defense, though, and her lack of response was only making him more careless.

So be it, she thought. She stepped into him, her right hand lashing up and around in a back-fist that caved in his right cheek.

He didn’t flinch, didn’t pause. He came back with a straight right that caught her in the nose and sent her sprawling on her rump with blood pouring over her mouth.

He lunged for her. She jumped to her feet, turned a sidekick, a perfect stop-thrust to his solar plexus that blasted the air from his lungs and sat him down on his butt in turn.

“So you’re not invincible,” she said, circling.

She glanced around, looking for an opening to quick escape. Jokers had formed a leering ring around the combatants. They drove back the shadows with flashlights and torches. Eric betrayed me, she thought. The realization made her sag as if all her joints had loosened at once.

“Kill her!” the jokers screamed. “Rip her tits off!”

Carnifex wiped his mouth with his hand, looked at the blood on it, laughed. “Tae kwon do, uh?” he said. “Well, try a little ass-kick fu.”

He drove himself at her headlong off the ground, like a guard trying to cut down a rushing tackle. She brought double fists down on the crown of his skull. At the same time she brought a knee up hard in his face.

He uttered a groan and collapsed to his knees before her. His right hand lashed out, seized the great muscle of her thigh, pinched. It was an attack she had never experienced, never even contemplated. Unexpectedness as much as pain made her gasp and drop her guard. He drove a left into her belly.

She fell. He was on top of her, hot breath and hard muscle, groping for a pin. By sheer synapse-speed and desperation more than skill she threw him off, rolled over and over. She jumped to her feet, stood swaying to the head-rush. Waves of pain washed over her.

He took his own sweet time standing.

“Had enough?” he asked.

She flicked glances left and right. Jokers with lights and guns, backed up by the tall man, who was back on his feet and standing calm as if she had never snapped his collarbone. She lowered herself, as if into fighting stance, and suddenly leapt straight up.

Carnifex grunted, “I hoped not,” and jumped with her. Twenty feet in the air they soared, face-to-face, arms clashing like sabers.

They hit and rolled. She was quicker to recover. Spread-eagled facedown in a spider position, she whipped three quick kicks into his face. They weren’t strong blows; they couldn’t be from that posture. They were meant to disorient him, give her space.

She leapt up. He rose with her, but he was swaying now, ever so slightly. He tipped toward her, reaching.

She brought her open palms violently together on the sides of his head, an eardrum-bursting blow. He bellowed. She turned to run.

He seized her right wrist with his right hand, put his left hand on her ribcage, and wrenched the arm from its socket.

Chapter Forty-eight

For the third time in ten minutes Belew checked his pocket watch. For the third time in ten minutes a whole hour had failed to pass. He grimaced and put the watch away.

I’ve been out of the bush too long, he chided himself. I’m turning into a Nervous Nellie.

From the southwest, where three kilometers away lay the temple in which Moonchild was to meet with Colonel Sobel, came the pop-pop-popping of gunfire, distance-faint. It rose to a crescendo, faded, came back strong, in irregular pulses. The rhythm of a firefight.

“Maybe I’m not so nervous after all,” he said. The jokers and Viet rebels who stood clustered before the main house of the derelict plantation turned nervous faces toward him, then looked back to the noise, as if by sheer concentration they could see through ten thousand feet of trees and brush.

Belew picked up the hand-mike of the radiotelephone resting on the ground by his feet. He spoke into it with the falling inflection of Cambodian.

Nothing. No reply, not even a hum to announce that the Khmer squad he’d sent to shadow Mark to the rendezvous were even on the air. Their radio might have malfunctioned – common enough even in the high-tech nineties, and the radio was more sixties – but his old-soldier’s gut told him they had joined their erstwhile victims in whatever lay Beyond.