"We're going to take out every under-utilized ride in the land, effective immediately. Lay off the dead-wood employees. We're going to get a couple off-the-shelf thrill rides and give them a solid working-over for theming -- build our own ride vehicles, queue areas and enclosures, big ones, weenies that will draw your eye from outside the main gate. But that's just a stopgap.

"Next I'm going to start focus-grouping the fatkins. They're ready-made for this stuff. All about having fun. Most of those ex-fatties used to pack this place when they were stuck in electric wheelchairs, but now they're too busy --" he stopped himself from saying "f.u.c.king" -- "Having more adult fun to come back, but anyone who can afford fatkins has discretionary income and we should have a piece of it.

"It's hard to say without research, but I'm willing to bet that these guys will respond strongly to nostalgia. I'm thinking of reinstating the old Fantasyland dark-rides, digging parts out of storage, whatever we haven't auctioned off on the collectibles market, anyway, and cloning the rest, but remaking them with a little, you know, darkness. Like the Pinocchio thing, but more so. Captain Hook's grisly death. Tinker Bell's inherent p.o.r.niness. What kind of friendship did Snow White have with the dwarfs? You see where I'm going. Ironic -- we haven't done ironic in a long time. It's probably due for a comeback."

They stared at him in shocked silence.

"You say you're going to do this when?" Wiener said. He'd want to know so he could get someone senior to intervene.

"You know, research first. We'll shut down the c.r.a.p rides next week and can the dead-wood. Want to commission the research today if I can. Start work on the filler thrill-rides next week too."

He sat down. They continued to boggle.

"You're serious about this?"

"About what? Getting rid of unprofitable stuff? Researching profitable directions? Yes and yes."

There were other routine agenda items, which reminded Sammy of why he didn't come to these meetings. He spent the time surfing readymade coasters and checking the intranet for engineer availability. He was just getting into the HR records to see who he'd have to lay off when they finally wound down and he sauntered out, giving his wolfy grin to all, with a special flash of it for Wiener.

"Death, I'd like a word, please?"

"I'd be delighted." Death talked like someone who'd learned to talk by being a precocious reader. He over-p.r.o.nounced his words, spoke in complete sentences, and paused at the commas. Sammy knew that speech pattern well, since he'd worked hard to train himself out of it. It was a geek accent, and it made you sound like a smart-a.s.s instead of a sharp operator. You got that way if you grew up trying to talk with a grown-up vocabulary and a child's control of your speech-muscles; you learned to hold your chin and cheeks still while you spoke to give you a little precision-boost. That was the geek accent.

"Remember what we talked about this morning?"

"Building a thrill ride?"

"Yes," Sammy said. He'd forgotten that Death Waits had suggested that in the first place. Good -- that was a good spin. "I've decided to take your suggestion. Of course, we need to make room for it, so I'm going to shut down some of the c.r.a.p -- you know which ones I mean."

Death Waits was green under his white makeup. "You mean --"

"All the walk-throughs. The coffin coaster, of course. The flying bats. Maybe one or two others. And I'm going to need to make some layoffs, of course. Gotta make room."

"You're going to lay people off? How many people? We're already barely staffed." Death was the official arbiter of shift-changing, schedule-swapping and cross-scheduling. If you wanted to take an afternoon off to get your mom out of the hospital or your dad out of jail, he was the one to talk to.

"That's why I'm coming to you. If I shut down six of the rides --"

Death gasped. Fantasyland had 10 rides in total. "Six of the rides. How many of the senior staffers can I get rid of and still have the warm bodies to keep everything running?" Senior people cost a *lot* more than the teenagers who came through. He could hire six juniors for what Death cost him. Frigging Florida labor laws meant that you had to give cost-of-living raises every year, and it added up.

Death looked like he was going to cry.

"I've got my own estimates," Sammy said. "But I wanted to get a reality check from you, since you're right there, on the ground. I'd hate to leave too much fat on the bone."

He knew what effect this would have on the kid. Death blinked back his tears, put his fist under his chin and pulled out his phone and started scribbling on it. He had a list of every employee in there and he began to transfer names from it to another place.

"They'll be back, right? To operate the new rides?"

"The ones we don't bring back, we'll get them unemployment counseling. Enroll them in a networking club for the jobless, one of the really good ones. We can get a group rate. A job reference from this place goes a long way, too. They'll be OK."

Death looked at him, a long look. The kid wasn't stupid, Sammy knew. None of these people were stupid, not Wiener, not the kid, not the goths who led each other around Fantasyland on leashes. Not the fatkins who'd soon pack the place. They were none of them stupid. They were just -- soft. Unwilling to make the hard choices. Sammy was good at hard choices.

Perry got home that night and walked in on Lester and Suzanne. They were tangled on the living-room carpet, mostly naked, and Lester blushed right to his a.s.s-cheeks when Perry came through the door.

"Sorry, sorry!" Lester called as he grabbed a sofa cushion and pa.s.sed it to Suzanne, then got one for himself. Perry averted his eyes and tried not to laugh.

"Jesus, guys, what's wrong with the bedroom?"

"We would've gotten there eventually," Lester said as he helped Suzanne to her feet. Perry pointedly turned to face the wall. "You were supposed to be at dinner with the gang," Lester said.

"Close-up on the ride was crazy. Everything was changing and the printers were out of goop. Lots of action on the network -- Boston and San Francisco are introducing a lot of new items to the ride. By the time I got to the guest-house, the Kettlewells were already putting the kids to bed." He decided not to mention Eva's angry storm-out to Suzanne. No doubt she had already figured out that all was not well in the House of Kettlewell.

Suzanne ahem'd.

"Sorry, sorry," Lester said. "Let's talk about this later, OK? Sorry."

They scurried off to Lester's room and Perry whipped out a computer, put on some short humor videos in shuffle-mode, and grabbed a big tub of spare parts he kept around to fiddle with. It could be soothing to take apart and rea.s.semble a complex mechanism, and sometimes you got ideas from it.

Five minutes later, he heard the shower running and then Suzanne came into the living room.

"I'm going to order some food. What do you feel like?"

"Whatever you get, you'll have to order it from one of the fatkins places. It's not practical to feed Lester any other way. Get me a small chicken tikka pizza."

She pored over the stack of menus in the kitchen. "Does Food in Twenty Minutes really deliver in 20 minutes?"

"Usually 15. They do most of the prep in the vans and use a lot of predictive math in their routing. There's usually a van within about ten minutes of here, no matter what the traffic. They deliver to traffic-jams, too, on scooters."

Suzanne made a face. "I thought *Russia* was weird." She showed the number on the brochure to her phone and then started to order.

Lester came out a minute later, dressed to the nines as always. He was barely capable of entering his bedroom without effecting a wardrobe change.

He gave Perry a slightly p.i.s.sed off look and Perry shrugged apologetically, though he didn't feel all that bad. Lester's fault.

Christ on a bike, it was weird to think of the two of them together, especially going at it on the living room rug like a couple of h.o.r.n.y teens. Suzanne had always been the grownup in their little family. But that had been back when there was a big company involved. Something about being a piece of a big company made you want to act like you'd always figured grownups should act. Once you were a free agent, there wasn't any reason not to embrace your urges.

When the food came, the two of them attacked it like hungry dogs. It was clear that they'd forgotten their embarra.s.sment and were planning another retreat to the bedroom once they'd refueled. Perry left.

"Hey, Francis." Francis was sitting on the second-storey balcony of his mayoral house, surveying the electric glow of the shantytown. As usual now, he was alone, without any of his old gang of boys hanging around him. He waved an arm toward Perry and beckoned him inside, buzzing him in with his phone.

Perry tracked up the narrow stairs, wondering how Francis negotiated them with his bad knee and his propensity to have one beer too many.

"What's the good word?"

"Oh, not much," Perry said. He helped himself to a beer. They made it in the shantytown and fortified it with fruits, like a Belgian beer. The resulting suds were strong and sweet. This one was raspberry and it tasted a little pink, like red soda.