"Off in hippie college-towns you'll always find people with enough brains to realize that their neighbors aren't the boogieman. But there ain't so many hippie college towns these days. I wish you two luck, but I think you'd be nuts to walk out the door in the morning expecting anything better than a kick in the teeth."

That made Perry think of Death Waits, and the sense of urgency came back to him. "OK, we have to go now," he said. "Thanks, Francis."

"Nice to meet you, young woman," he said, and when he smiled, it was a painful thing, all pouches and wrinkles and sags, and he gimped away with his limp more p.r.o.nounced than ever.

They tracked down the crew at the tea-house's big table. Everyone roared greetings at them when they came through the door, a proper homecoming, but when Perry counted heads, he realized that there was no one watching the ride.

"Guys, who's running the ride?"

They told him about Brazil then, and Hilda listened with her head c.o.c.ked, her face animated with surprise, dismay, then delight. "You say there are *fifty* rides open?"

"All at once," Lester said. "All in one go."

"Holy mother of poo," Hilda breathed. Perry couldn't even bring himself to say *anything*. He couldn't even imagine Brazil in his head -- jungles? beaches? He knew nothing about the country. They'd built *fifty* rides, without even making contact with him. He and Lester had designed the protocol to be open because they thought it would make it easier for others to copy what they'd done, but he'd never thought --

It was like vertigo, that feeling.

"So you're Yoko, huh?" Lester said finally. It made everyone smile, but the tension was still there. Something big had just happened, bigger than any of them, bigger than the beating that had been laid on Death Waits, bigger than anything Perry had ever done. From his mind to a nation on another continent --

"You're the sidekick, huh?" Hilda said.

Lester laughed. "Touche. It's very nice to meet you and thank you for bringing him back home. We were starting to miss him, though G.o.d alone knows why."

"I plan on keeping him," she said, giving his bicep a squeeze. It brought Perry back to them. The little girls were staring at Hilda with saucer eyes. It made him realize that except for Suzanne and Eva, their whole little band was boys, all boys.

"Well, I'm home now," he said. He knelt down and showed the girls his cast. "I got a new one," he said. "They had to throw the old one out. So I need your help decorating this. Do you think you could do the job?"

Lyenitchka looked critically at the surface. "I think we could do the gig," she said. "What do you think, partner?"

Tjan snorted out his nose, but she was so solemn that the rest kept quiet. Ada matched Lyenitchka's critical posture and then nodded authoritatively. "Sure thing, partner."

"It's a date," Perry said. "We're gonna head home and put down our suitcases and come back and open the ride if it's ready. It's time Lester got some time off. I'm sure Suzanne will appreciate having him back again."

Another silence fell over the group, tense as a piano wire. Perry looked from Lester to Suzanne and saw in a second what was up. He had time to notice that his first emotional response was to be intrigued, not sorry or scared. Only after a moment did he have the reaction he thought he should have -- a mixture of sadness for his friend and irritation that they had yet another thing to deal with in the middle of a hundred other crises.

Hilda broke the tension -- "It was great to meet you all. Dinner tonight, right?"

"Absolutely," Kettlewell said, seizing on this. "Leave it to us -- we'll book someplace just great and have a great dinner to welcome you guys back."

Eva took his arm. "That's right," she said. "I'll get the girls to pick it out." The little girls jumped up and down with excitement at this, and the baby brothers caught their excitement and made happy kid-screeches that got everyone smiling again.

Perry gave Lester a solemn, supportive hug, kissed Suzanne and Eva on the cheeks (Suzanne smelled good, something like sandalwood), shook hands with Tjan and Kettlewell and tousled all four kids before lighting out for the ride, gasping out a breath as they stepped into the open air.

Death Waits regained consciousness several times over the next week, aware each time that he was waking up in a hospital bed on a crowded ward, that he'd woken here before, and that he hurt and couldn't remember much after the beating had started.

But after a week or so, he found himself awake and aware -- he still hurt all over, a dull and distant stoned ache that he could tell was being kept at bay by powerful painkillers. There was someone waiting for him.

"h.e.l.lo, Darren," the man said. "I'm an attorney working for your friends at the ride. My name is Tom Levine. We're suing Disney and we wanted to gather some evidence from you."

Death didn't like being called Darren, and he didn't want to talk to this dork. He'd woken up with a profound sense of anger, remembering the dead-eyed guy shouting about Disney while bouncing his head off the ground, knowing that Sammy had done this, wanting nothing more than to get ahold of Sammy and, and... That's where he ran out of imagination. He was perfectly happy drawing medieval-style torture chambers and vampires in his sketch book, but he didn't actually have much stomach for, you know, *violence*.

Per se.

"Can we do this some other time?" His mouth hurt. He'd lost four teeth and had bitten his tongue hard enough to need st.i.tches. He could barely understand his own words.

"I wish we could, but time is of the essence here. You've heard that we're bringing a suit against Disney, right?"

"No," Death said.

"Must have come up while you were out. Anyway, we are, for unfair compet.i.tion. We've got a shot at cleaning them out, taking them for every cent. We're going through the pre-trial motions now and there's been a motion to summarily exclude any evidence related to your beating from the proceedings. We think that's BS. It's clear from what you've told your friends that they wanted to shut you up because you were making them look bad. So what we need is more information from you about what this guy said to you, and what you'd posted before, and anything anyone at Disney said to you while you were working there."

"You know that that guy said he was beating me up because I talked about this stuff in the first place?"

The lawyer waved a hand. "There's no way they'll come after you now. They look like total a.s.sholes for doing this. They're scared stupid. Now, I'm going to want to formally depose you later, but this is a pre-deposition interview just to get clear on everything."

The guy leaned forward and suddenly Death Waits had a bone-deep conviction that the guy was about to punch him. He gave a little squeak and shrank away, then cried out again as every inch of his body awoke in hot agony, a feeling like grating bones beneath his skin.

"Woah, take it easy there, champ," the lawyer said.

Death Waits held back tears. The guy wasn't going to hit him, but just the movement in his direction had scared him like he'd leapt out holding an axe. The magnitude of his own brokenness began to sink in and now he could barely hold back the tears.

"Look, the guys who run the ride have told me that I have to get this from you as soon as I can. If we're going to keep the ride safe and nail the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds who did this to you, I need to do this. If I had my way, I wouldn't bug you, but I've got my orders, OK?"

Death snuffled back the tears. The back of his throat felt like it had been sanded with a rusty file. "Water," he croaked.

The lawyer shook his head. "Sorry buddy, just the IV, I'm afraid. The nurses were very specific. Let's start, OK, and then we'll be done before you know it."

Defeated, Death closed his eyes. "Start," he said, his voice like something made from soft tar left too long in the sun.

Sammy knew he was a dead man. The only thing keeping him alive was legal's reluctance to read the net. Hackelberg had a couple of juniors who kept watch-lists running on hot subjects, but they liked to print them out and mark them up, and that meant that they lagged a day or two behind the blogosphere.

The Death Waits thing was a freaking disaster. The guy was just supposed to put a scare into him, not cripple him for life. Every time Sammy thought about what would happen when the Death Waits thing percolated up to him, he got gooseflesh.

d.a.m.n that idiot thug anyway. Sammy had been very clear. The guy who knew the guy who knew the guy had been rea.s.suring on the phone when Sammy put in the order -- sure, sure, nothing too rough, just a little shoving around.

And what's worse is the idiot kid hadn't gotten the hint. Sammy didn't get it. If a stranger beat him half to death and told him to stop hanging out in message-boards, well, the message-boards would go. d.a.m.ned right they would.

And with Freddy, there was a shoe waiting to drop. Freddy wouldn't report on their interview, he was pretty sure of that. "Off the record" means something, even to "journalists" like Honest Freddy. But Freddy wasn't going to be nice to him in follow-ups, that much was sure. And if -- when! -- Freddy got wind of the Death Waits situation...

He began to hyperventilate.

"I'm going to go check on the construction," he said to his personal a.s.sistant, a new girl they'd sent up when his last one had defected to work for Wiener (Wiener!) after Sammy'd shouted at her for putting through a press-call from some blogger who wanted to know when Fantasyland would be re-opening.

It had been a mistake to shut down Fantasyland just to get the other managers off his back. Sure the rides were sick dogs, but there had been life in them still. Construction sites don't bring in visitors, and the numbers for the park were down and everyone was looking at him. Never mind that the only reason the numbers had been as high as they were was that Sammy had saved everyone's a.s.s when he'd done the goth rehab. Never mind that the real reason that numbers were down was that no one else in management had the guts to keep the park moving and improving.