Kettlewell and Tjan looked up when Perry banged through the door of the tea-house they'd turned into their de facto headquarters.

Perry had gone through mad and back to calm on the ride home, but as he drew closer to the tea-house, pa.s.sing the people in the streets, the people living their lives without lawyers or bulls.h.i.t, his anger came back. He'd even stopped outside the tea-house and breathed deeply, but his heart was pounding and his hands kept balling into fists and sometimes, man, sometimes you've just got to go for it.

He got to the table and grabbed the papers there and tossed them over his shoulder.

"You're fired," he said. "Pack up and go, I want you out by morning. You're done here. You don't represent the ride and you never will. Get lost." He didn't know he was going to say it until he said it, but it felt right. This was what he was feeling -- *his* project had been stolen and bad things were being done in *his* name and it was going to stop, right now.

Tjan and Kettlewell got to their feet and looked at him, faces blank with shock. Kettlewell recovered first. "Perry, let's sit down and do an exit interview, all right? That's traditional."

Perry was shaking with anger now. These two friends of his, they'd f.u.c.king screwed him -- committed their dirty work in his name. But Kettlewell was holding a chair out to him and the others in the tea-house were staring and he thought about Eva and the kids and the baseball gloves, and he sat down.

He squeezed his thighs hard with his clenching hands, drew in a deep breath, and recited what Death Waits had told him in an even, wooden voice.

"So that's it. I don't know if you instructed the lawyers to do this or only just distanced yourself enough from them to let them do this on their own. The point is that the way you're running this campaign is victimizing people who believe in us, making life worse for people who already got a s.h.i.tty, s.h.i.tty deal on our account. I won't have it."

Kettlewell and Tjan looked at each other. They'd both stayed poker-faced through Perry's accusation, and now Kettlewell made a little go-ahead gesture at Tjan.

"There's no excuse for what that lawyer did. We didn't authorize it, we didn't know it had happened, and we wouldn't have permitted it if we had. In a suit like this, there are a lot of moving parts and there's no way to keep track of all of them all of the time. You don't know what every ride operator in the world is up to, you don't even know where all the rides in the world *are*. That's in the nature of a decentralized business.

"But here's the thing: the lawyer was at least partly right. Everything that kid blogs, emails, and says will potentially end up in the public record. Like it or not, that kid can no longer consider himself to have a private life, not until the court case is up. Neither can you or I, for that matter. That's in the nature of a lawsuit -- and it's not something any of us can change at this point."

Perry heard him as from a great distance, through the whooshing of the blood in his ears. He couldn't think of anything to say to that.

Tjan and Kettlewell looked at each other.

"So even if we're 'fired' --" Tjan said at last, making sarcastic finger-quotes, "this problem won't go away. We've floated the syndicate and given control of the legal case to them. If you try to ditch it, you're going to have to contend with *their* lawsuits, too."

"I didn't --" Perry started. But he had, he'd signed all kinds of papers: first, papers that incorporated the ride-runners' co-op; and, second, papers that gave legal representation over to the syndicate.

"Perry, I'm the chairman of the Boston ride collective. I'm their rep on the co-op's board. You can't fire me. You didn't hire me. They did. So stop breathing through your nose like a locomotive and calm down. None of us wanted that lawyer to go after that kid."

He knew they were making sense but he didn't want to care. He'd ended up in this place because these supposed pals of his had screwed up.

He knew that he was going to end up making up with them, going to end up getting deeper into this. He knew that this was how good people did s.h.i.tty things: one tiny rotten compromise at a time. Well, he wasn't going to go there.

"Tomorrow morning," he said. "Gone. We can figure out by email how to have a smooth transition, but no more of this. Not on my head. Not on my account."

He stalked away, which is what he should have done in the first place. f.u.c.k being reasonable. Reasonable sucked.

Death found out about the Disney-in-a-Box printers seconds after they were announced. He'd been tuning his feed-watchers to give him news about the Disney Parks for nearly a decade, and this little PR item on the Disney Parks newswire rang all the cherries on his filters, flagging the item red and rocketing it to the top of his news playlist, making all the icons in the sides of his screen bounce with delight.

The announcement made him want to throw up. They were totally ripping off the rides, and he knew for a fact that most of the three-d meshes of the old yesterland rides and even the contemporary ones were fan-made, so those'd be ripped off, too.

And the worst part was, he could feel himself getting excited. This was just the kind of thing that would have given him major fanboy drool as recently as a month ago.

He just stared angrily at his screen. Being angry made the painkillers wear off, so the madder he got the more he hurt. He could nail the rocker-switch and dose himself with more of whatever the painkiller plugged into his IV was today, but since Perry and Lester and their girlfriends (had that other one been Suzanne Church? It sure looked like her) had told him he could use his laptop again, he'd stayed off the juice as much as possible. The computer could make him forget he hurt.

He looked at the clock. It was 4AM. The blinds on the ward were shut most of the time, and he kept to his own schedule, napping and then surfing, then nodding off and then surfing some more. The hospital staff just left his food on the table beside him if he was asleep when it arrived, though they woke him for his sponge baths and to stick fresh needles in his arms, which were filled with bruisey collapsed veins.

There was no one he could tell about this. Sure, there were chat-rooms with 24/7 chatter from Disney freaks, but he didn't much want to chat with them. Some of his friends would still be up and tweaking, but Christ, who wanted to IM with a speed freak at four in the morning?

His typing was down to less than 30 wpm, and he couldn't keep it up for long. What he really wanted was to talk to someone about this.

He really wanted to talk to Perry about this. He should send him an email, but he had the inkling of an idea and he didn't want to put it in writing, because it was a deliciously naughty idea.

It was dumb to even think about phoning him, he barely knew him, and no one liked to get calls at four am. Besides -- he'd checked -- Perry's number was unlisted.

From: [email protected] To: Subject: What's your phone number?

Perry, I know that it's presumptuous, but I'd really like to talk to you v2v about something important that I'd prefer not to put in writing. I don't have any right to impose on you, especially not after you've already done me the kindness of coming to see me in the hospital, but I hope you'll send me your number anyway. Alternatively, please call me on my enum -- 1800DEATHWAITS-GGFSAH.

Your admirer,

Death Waits

It was five minutes later when his laptop rang. It was unnaturally loud on the ward, and he heard his roommates stir when the tone played. He didn't have a headset -- Christ, he was an idiot. Wait, there was one, dangling from the TV. No mic, but at least he could pair it with his laptop for sound. He stabbed at the mute b.u.t.ton and reached for the headset and slipped it on. Then he held the computer close to his face and whispered "h.e.l.lo?" into its little mic. His voice was a croak, his ruined mouth distorting the word. Why had he decided to call this guy? He was such an idiot.

"This is Perry Gibbons. Is that Death Waits?"

"Yes, sorry, I don't have a mic. Can you hear me OK?"

"If I turn the volume all the way up I can."

There was an awkward silence. Death tried to think of how to begin.

"What's on your mind, Death?"

"I didn't expect you to be awake at this hour."

"I had a rough night," Perry said. It occurred to Death that he was talking to one of his heros, a man who had come to visit him in the hospital that day. He grew even more tongue-tied.

"What happened?"

"Nothing important," Perry said and swallowed, and Death suddenly understood that Perry had had a rough night because of *him*, because of what *he'd* told Perry. It made him want to cry.

"I'm sorry," Death said.

"What's on your mind, Death?" Perry said again.

Death told him what he'd found, about the Disney printers. He read Perry the URLs so he could look them up.

"OK, that's interesting," Perry said. Death could tell he didn't really think it was that interesting.

"I haven't told you my idea yet." He groped for the words. His mouth had gone dry. "OK, so Disney's going to ship these things to tons of people's houses, they'll sell them cheap at the parks and mail them as freebies to Magic Kingdom Club gold-card holders. So in a week or two, there's going to be just, you know, tons of these across the country."

"Right."