He looked at me, startled. "Why, yes, she is, in a sense." He tapped the glass of the jukebox. "I made a mistake with Nicole. The children of famous people often crash and burn. How could they not, living in that kind of shadow? After all, it is the parent's job to eventually fade to the preeminence of the child, the new generation. But how can you, when you're a President or a Chairman or a billionaire or the discoverer of the cure for cancer? Some children, the strong ones, find their own identity and use the benefits of a powerful father to their advantage. But what if you're not smart or beautiful or talented? What if you're a movie star's kid and you can't act your way out of a wet paper bag? What if Dad won the Pulitzer for fiction and your prose sounds like the back of a cereal box? How could you not feel 'less than' and resent that?

"Nicole's hatred of this world has little to do with my parenting skills. Although I admit to failings there. It is simply because I am immortal and she is not. It doesn't matter to her that she has a gift shared by only one other person on the planet. It doesn't matter that I handed her an empire and stepped aside into self-imposed exile so she could rise. All that matters to her is that she cannot supersede me, ever. She will die and I will remain. And there's not a thing I can do about it."

"You could die," I offered.

"Kill myself?" He chuckled. "One thing about immortality, Mr. Donner-it makes you selfish. Why should I die just so my daughter can brush a chip off her shoulder?"

"So she hates Daddy. What has she got against the rest of us?"

"Every time she looks at you, she is reminded that she has more in common, in her eventual death, with you, than with me."

"So creating the Shift-that was her revenge?"

"Is that what you think?"

Then I had him bent backwards over the jukebox, my Beretta in his mouth, my hand around his throat, before I even knew I was moving. He gagged around the metal. I pulled it from between his gums and pressed it against his right eye.

"I think an immortal might not like going through eternity blind."

The eyes narrowed in defiance. I cocked the hammer. They flew wide again.

I caught a liquid motion out of the corner of my vision. I stepped back as fast as possible, hands up, the gun dangling from my forefinger.

"Stop!" choked Struldbrug.

Dottie made it all the way over the bar and across the space in the time it took me to step back. She shimmered in homicidal rage a foot away. If I hadn't been ready for it, I'd be lying on the floor in smoking pieces. She lashed out, batting the pistol out from my hand. It was like slamming into dry ice, so cold it burned. My wrist was instantly on fire.

"I said, stop!"

Struldbrug righted himself, rubbing his throat, coughing.

Dottie/The Lifetaker just glared at me. "Smarter than you look," it said in that unholy voice.

"Real bartenders fill the glass with ice first, then pour the drink," I said. "So it doesn't splash."

"You're the expert," it sneered.

"That's enough," said Struldbrug. "Get him a bandage."

It hated that idea, but obeyed and flowed out of the room.

I sat at the nearest deuce, my face covered in sweat. "You need a shorter leash for your dog."

He took the other chair across from me. "He and I have a great deal in common. Both outcasts."

He picked up the box of matches from the table. The cover said "The Blue Rose." He rotated the box in his fingers.

"I was tired, Donner. Not ready to jump off a bridge tired, but I wanted a rest. I'd been Abel Struldbrug, then his son Abraham, then his son Isodor. When the twins came along, I welcomed the chance to turn over the company to them. I was sick of humanity. The endless repeating of the same mistakes. So I went back to my old haunts. Babylon. Mesopotamia."

He suddenly looked all of his six thousand years. It was something haggard in his expression, some sheen of age on his olive skin.

"The Shift," I insisted.

"Yes," he sighed. "Nicole caused it."

So there it was, at long last. Confirmation.

There was no feeling of pride at having the answer. No relief, no elation. Nothing but a knot of fear at the base of my spine.

"Containment protocols at the lab failed, she said. The retroviral agent escaped. When the Shift started, she seemed as horrified as we were. She promised us-Adam and me-that she would make it right."

"Necropolis? That's how she made it right?"

"She wasn't running things, then. A lot of decisions were made by a lot of people."

"She fucking caused it, Izzy! All this horror, it's her fault, because she was trying to develop her fucking Retrozine and get even with Daddy! She killed me and my wife forty years ago so nothing would slow her down!"

"I didn't know then, of course," he said mildly. "I was in Iran. When the Shift happened, I took it as a sign and came here, to this manmade desert, and rebuilt my beloved citadel. To continue my retirement, but be a little closer to Nicole, just in case."

"So you just watched from afar as she built her little magnetic gulag across the river."

"I don't expect you to understand being a parent," he sighed. "If you step in every time they make a mistake, how will they ever learn?"

I gaped.

"Then I discovered it hadn't been an accident after all."

I gaped harder. He walked over to the bar and ran a long finger over the wood. "She... she did it on purpose. She deliberately seeded the Shift virus all over the world."

I could feel myself not wanting to believe. It was too extreme, even for this world. I could buy Nicole exploiting an accident, creating a police state, murdering thousands... but deliberately unleashing it in the first place was beyond monstrous.

"Izzy..." I said, "That's like... that's like setting off a couple nukes in your backyard to see what the radiation would do."

Struldbrug knew as well. He was as unburdened by conscience as men come, but even he looked at his hands in shame. "She believes in the illusion of her control. You see... she's deliberately continuing its effects."

"What do you mean?"

"The Shift naturally dissipates over time. This concept of containing it within the Blister, this bill of goods that she sold to the world-it's a shell game. The Blister has nothing to do with containing it. The virus naturally disappeared everywhere else. She's still keeping it going artificially in Necropolis, regularly re-seeding the virus. The Blister is for an entirely different reason."

Elvis Costello came onto the juke box. "What's So Funny About Peace, Love and Understanding?" I felt like crying.

"You knew Nicole was deliberately continuing the Shift and you did nothing!"

"I am only one man, Mr. Donner. And Nicole had become very powerful indeed. Plus, there was a trade-off." He gestured to our surroundings. "How do you think this place goes undetected? How did I get the technology to create my little oasis, reverse the sterility in the ground? Nicole. I remained comfortable and alive, as long as I didn't get involved."

He saw the disgust on my face and chuckled, unfazed.

"And the Lifetaker?" I asked.

"I found him out there wandering, half-insane. I took him in, undid his programming."

"And started killing the scientists to thwart her without being discovered."

"Yes."

"But you didn't kill her."

"That would make me a monster as well, to kill my own daughter."

"So what's changed? Why intercede, bring us here?"

"I now know Nicole's plans for the city. She's given me no choice. I have to stop her."

The Lifetaker was back with a bandage and a tube of burn ointment. It dropped them onto the table and roiled away.

I zeroed in on Struldbrug's buggy baby browns. "What does she have planned, Izzy?"

"It's madness. Beyond madness."

"Be a little more specific," I growled.

He sighed, and then he told me.

51.

DONNER.

"We have to go back to Necropolis," I said.

Maggie and Max both started yelling. It even startled the Lifetaker, who briefly lost cohesion and resembled a splattered tomato in mid-air. I gave them time to squawk, then held up my hands.

The sun was clouded behind the Blister. Standing on Bam's parapets, the pale conjoined geodesics suddenly looked like their name: a bubbling, festering wound on the skin of the earth, swelled with disease.

I put the device on the edge of the battlement and turned it on.

TRANS00INTERCEPTGEOSAT231121754PRIORITY05-32CLASS5EYESONLY.

WEBSQUIRT INTERCEPT AS FOLLOWS:.

(NAMES AND OTHER IDENTIFYING INFORMATION HAVE BEEN DELETED PER NSA REG 1037459324).

1: McDermott.

2: Madame Struldbrug.

1: Are the preparations in order?

2: Two hundred thousand wasps have been loaded with aerosolized Retrozine-C. They will be released during the Joining Ceremony.

1: What about the President's biofilter suit?

2: It will fail at precisely the right moment.

1: How long will it take?

2: Probably fifteen minutes or so for complete saturation of the atmosphere within the Blister. Then, five minutes or so for everyone to succumb.

1: The world will see the whole thing happen?

2: The human camera crews will die, but the AI drones will continue recording. The whole world will watch millions of people, norms and reborns alike, youthe into nothingness in front of their eyes.

1: What about your men?

2: They only know what I've told them.

1: And the Vice President in Washington? He's still on board?

2: As soon as he's sworn in as President, he will launch an investigation that will prove without doubt that the Cadre are responsible for the terrorism. You and I escaped because we were pursuing Cadre terrorists in the Blasted Heath at the time of the attack, so we miraculously survived. Your brother Adam will not be so lucky. The new President, as is his right, will appoint you Vice President in honor of your heroic service. The two of you will preside over the resettlement of New York, now that the Shift has been eradicated.

1: And if the President is a good boy, I may let him live forever.

(RECORDING IS INTERRUPTED AT THIS POINT.).

END END END END TRANS00INTERCEPTGEOSAT231DATE END END END END.

When it was done, for a long time there was only the rasp of wind in the throats of the bagdir.

Finally, Max bellowed, "That's fucking crazy! That's the craziest thing I ever heard!"

Maggie looked weak. "How could she think that would work?"

"How did Hitler think he could conquer a continent and exterminate an entire race? The reason tyrants keep getting away with it is because the rest of us think it's too crazy for anyone to actually try."

"Surely someone will object-"

"With the wasps doing most of the work, she'll have to tell a remarkably small group of people. And she's got no shortage of fanatics. She's been preparing them for years."

"It's beyond belief. She's tricked the whole world into building the Blister. And they don't know it's not to keep the Shift out, it's to keep the aerolized Retrozine in."

Maggie said, "Why hasn't Struldbrug warned his own son that he's about to be killed?"