"How much are those T-shirts on the wall?"
She raised her eyebrows in surprise. "You don't look like the Earworm Cafe type. They're twelve dollars, two for twenty".
"I'll take six. But I don't have to walk out the door with them, if you'll just get Double Deck here".
"What do you want with him?"
"Babylon's going to make him an offer of extremely brief, extremely lucrative employment".
"If you're wanting to ditch your tracer for a night or two, you'll need an excuse". She stuck out a fleshless hip. "If the price is right, I could say you were tied up to me".
* * *
Thanks to a dead tracer and a borrowed mountain bike, Valentine made it to the north tip of Lake Sammamish. From there it was a fairly easy run to the borders of the Seattle Kurian Zone.
"We don't know how he kept himself fed", Captain LeHavre said. "There are a couple of theories, mostly flavors of shit whirling off the fan blades".
They spoke inside a sentry checkpoint just outside the headquarters, a little prefabricated set of roof and three walls built like an outhouse and just as cozy. Valentine didn't want his presence known to the men, so he waited until he saw a familiar face and hailed him from cover. He in turn got LeHavre.
"He liked to tour the nurseries a lot, where the babies grabbed in the Action Group raids would be taken. Seems like a crib death or two struck now and then. Some staff got suspicious at an Ellensburg orphanage and they all were 'disappeared.' "
"He had to have some help somewhere".
"There's a Kurian Tower out by the Grand Coulee Dam that might have been visited too. He kept going out that way to survey it with an eye toward taking the power station, but conditions never seemed right for him to give the go-ahead".
"On the inside too".
"I hope most of them took it in the neck at the Outlook".
"There's a witch hunt - maybe it should be called a wizard hunt, at that - going on right now. I hope Pacific Command doesn't fall apart again. Thunderbird and his Bears are all tainted by this".
Interesting as the political fallout was, Valentine's time was limited. "Speaking of Thunderbird's Bears, if you think a successful action would help restore things here, I have an idea or two along those lines. There's a dreary party being planned in my honor and I'd like to see it crashed. But you'll have to get the Resistance Network in Seattle and the Bears to work together. That's going to take a little diplomacy. One more thing. What are the chances of you helping me write a proposal that'll get a scout/sniper named Gide temporarily seconded to the PeaBees?"
"Can do", LeHavre said, and gave one of his dashing pirate-quarterdeck salutes.
* * *
Two weeks later, with plenty of notice about the date and time, Valentine stood tall on the field of honor.
Seattle's remade downtown around him, thanks to tricks of optics played on someone standing on the plaza, seemed to be bowing to the Seattle demigod's tower. The strange, clamshell-like growth extending from the central pillars hung in the sky as though suspended by invisible wires, linked to the pillars by joins so narrow they seemed to defy principles of engineering. No cantilevering, no braces, no suspension, assisted the mollusklike housings of Seattle's Kurians.
And above all the rest, a vast jellyfish-like shape, faintly luminescent like dying phosphors, squatted the home of the demigod, challenging even Mount Rainier for dominance of the horizon.
Madness, madness, madness. But Valentine wanted the ring. By blood and thundering rapids, it was his.
Despite the rain, the watching crowds seemed larger than usual.
Silas stood at his side, his elegant camel-hair coat taking the drizzle as if confident that it would be properly dried and pressed after doing its duty.
"Good crowd today, despite the cold. The so-called Radio Free Northwest reported the death of 'one of the leading minds of the Resistance,' " Silas said. "Our broadcasts have been reading locations and numbers of people killed".
"I wonder which epitaph he'd prefer", Valentine asked.
"Every lumberjack and longshoreman's ready to celebrate, it seems. Watch the stairs - they can get icy when it rains in this kind of cold", Silas advised.
"Don't let the echo from the loudspeakers throw you off either", Miss L. said, behind the pair of them. "Just do your speech".
Valentine had rehearsed it twice with Silas the night before. Not