NETFEED/ART: Bigger X—Dead Genius, or Just Dead?

(visual: Coxwell Avenue death scene, Toronto)

VO: The art world is talking about the death of forced-involvement artist Bigger X, killed in a hit and run accident in Toronto, Canada. Already several camps have formed. Many believe X was responding to a "suicide challenge" by another artist known as No-1, and may have arranged his own fatal "accident" both as an acceptance of No-1's challenge and a further homage to a favorite artist of X's, TT Jensen. Others suggest that TT Jensen himself may have arranged the death, either out of irritation at Bigger X's constant citation of him, or (an even stranger alternative) as a symbol of gratitude for Bigger X's praise. Yet another group suggests that No-1 may have engineered the death out of frustration that Bigger X did not publicly respond to his "suicide challenge." There is even one brave group who suggest that X's death is just what it seems—something that happens to people who walk into a busy street without looking. . . .

She had been staring at the wallscreen so long that she had fallen into a kind of dream. When the shouting began, she sat up so quickly she almost fell off her chair.

Dulcie darted a reflexive glance at the coma bed, but Dread had not moved. He had been back online for most of a day. She was beginning to feel like she was keeping a deathwatch.

Someone screamed in the street below, a shrill but still masculine cry of pain and outrage. Dulcie walked across the loft, legs tingling because she had been in one place too long, and lifted the corner of the blackout curtain on one of the windows.

It was dark outside, which startled her almost as much as the noises had—how had it become night again so quickly? People were moving in the alley below, shadowed bodies performing an aggressive posture-dance. It was a fight of sorts, three or four young men strutting and shoving, but there seemed to be more arguing than actual attacking. Dulcie had spent too many years in Manhattan to be either surprised or concerned, and she certainly wasn't going to waste any time worrying that they might hurt each other.

Men. They're programmed for it, aren't they? Like those little builder robots. Just walk forward until you bump into something, then shove it until it does what you want—unless it shoves harder than you do.

She wandered back across the loft toward the cabinet where, in a fit of bored domesticity while waiting for some of her security-cracking gear to work, she had set a chair and arranged all the squeeze packs, sweeteners, and other related objects into a sort of coffee-break area. As the argument raged on in the alley below she became conscious for the first time that she had no idea what kind of security Dread had in this place. She couldn't imagine him leaving himself open to robbery or assault, especially in a neighborhood as troubled as this one, but she also knew he was highly unlikely to have any of the more common deterrents like an alarm system connected to the private-subscription police lines: Dread was obviously not the kind of man who would be calling the police. She couldn't picture him waiting for a private security firm to come save him either, or even men he had personally assembled, like the ones from the Isla de Santuario invasion. In fact, she just couldn't imagine him waiting for anyone. Dread was the type who would want to handle everything himself.

Yeah, and fat lot of good that will do me if he's off in Never-Never Land somewhere when the rude boys come through the window.

Another shout, a sputtering curse that seemed to come from right under the window, made her flinch. By the time you could wake him up, she thought, someone might have already stuck a knife in you, Anwin. She put down her coffee and walked to the room Dread had given her, then dropped to her knees and pulled her suitcase and attache out from under the bed.

As she located and removed the various plastic components, some molded to blend into the corners and roller-wheels of the suitcase, others disguised as ordinary pieces of executive traveling equipment—a set of pens, an alarm clock for those exotic locales where you were occasionally denied net access, a purse-size curling iron—she considered her strange up-and-down relationship with her employer. He had made it pretty clear now that he was physically interested in her, and she had to admit that he in turn was pretty interesting himself. He had come up from his last session in the network bubbling with delight, and she had been surprised to find herself feeding off his mood, hurrying to tell him of her successes with Jongleur's personal files. He had praised her, laughing at her excitement, almost vibrating with that strange hyperactive glee that filled him sometimes, and for a moment she had wanted to have him right then, quick and nasty as something out of one of the paper-book potboilers her mother had left lying around the house in lieu of discussing the boring details of sex and love with her only child.

But although they had moved around the huge room in a kind of hyperkinetic dance, Dread shouting questions at her as he made himself coffee and banged in and out of the shower, her timing was bad: at that moment he seemed completely uninterested in her, at least sexually, sharing the joy of her success and his own upbeat mood, but only as her collaborator.

He had been pleased, though, and that was certainly something. For the first time since she had come to Sydney she had made her value unmistakable. He had told her as he stood with his black hair lank and gleaming from the shower, his robe carelessly open down to his tight stomach muscles, that Dulcie's work would give him the last tools he needed for his big strike.

She paused, absently contemplating the scatter of small plastic parts now lying on the discount-store rug beside The bed. What was his big strike, anyway? He seemed to have gained control of his employer's VR network, which was certainly impressive, and might even be in and of itself enough to make him wealthy, although it was hard to imagine quite how that would work. Would he continue the Grail Project, selling the prospect of immortality to wealthy people, but with himself taking the tolls instead of Felix Jongleur? Or, more likely, was he planning to sell his employer's secrets off to the highest bidder? Where was Jongleur, anyway? Had Dread arranged the same fate for him that he had for Bolivar Atasco? Then why hadn't anyone heard about it? Surely if one of the world's richest, most influential men had died at least a rumor of it would have made the newsnets by now.

Dulcie took the tube from the curling iron and screwed it into the case of the travel clock, working slowly through the unfamiliar design. She almost hadn't brought a gun with her—the dreams about Cartagena were still strong—but the ingrained habits of a professional woman, especially in her particular profession, were hard to shake. The gun she had used on the gearhead in Colombia had never left that country, of course: Dread had volunteered to dispose of it for her, but she had read and watched enough thrillers to know she wasn't going to give anyone incriminating evidence against herself. She had disassembled it, wiped it as forensically clean as she could with nail-polish remover, and dropped the pieces in a dozen different trash cans across downtown Cartagena.

So you wouldn't trust him not to blackmail you with a murder weapon, but you'd sleep with him? Interesting selection process, Anwin.

It was so hard to figure out how she felt. He was mercurial, of course, never the same from moment to moment, but wasn't that what she wanted? She had discovered a long time ago that advertising copywriters from Long Island and stockbrokers thrilled to be under warranty on their first armored Benz didn't make her heart go pitty-pat.

Face it, Anwin. You do like bad boys.

And even more, she liked knowing that she herself was at least as wicked, just more discreet. But when you moved out to the fringe neighborhoods of sex, more than the scenery changed. You got . . . well, a weirder selection.

Jesus, Dulcie, so you have a fling with him and it doesn't work out. So you go back to New York and spend a couple of days drinking and watching netsoaps and feeling sorry for yourself—worse things could happen. Do you really think he's long-term material anyway?

She had to admit that she couldn't imagine herself living in the same city with the guy for any stretch of time, let alone picking out curtains together. But was that so bad? He excited her. She thought about him all the time, alternating between fascination and, occasionally, something much stronger and more dangerous than irritation or dislike, something closer to hatred and fear.

So what? He's what you want—a bad one. He's just badder than most, and that scares you. But you can't walk the high wire and still use a net or there's no point in the high wire at all, is there? So his social skills are a little alien. The guy's an international criminal. At least he isn't boring.

Her hands had been moving reflexively, but it didn't matter: despite the differences from model to model, once you'd put together a few of these plastic stealth guns you could pretty much do it in your sleep. She got up off her knees and sat on the bed, shaking ceramic bullets out of a vitamin bottle and slotting them into the magazine. Click, click, click . . . like little babies, octuplets, being packed into a shared cradle. Babies, guns, virtual worlds, old men pretending to be Egyptian gods—her brain, she reflected, was definitely scrambled.

You need a vacation, Anwin. A long one.

She considered for a moment, then walked back to the main room of the loft. The loud argument outside was over; a peek through the window showed the alley was empty. She put the gun in the middle shelf of the coffee cabinet, under some napkins.

Or maybe I need something exciting to happen. Something big.

Christabel stood holding the glass in one hand. Her other hand was on the faucet but she didn't dare turn it on, even though she was so thirsty she was about to cry. She was angry at herself for being thirsty, angry at herself for getting out of bed to get a drink of water. Now she had to stand like a scared mouse in the dark bathroom and hear her mother and father having an argument in the next room.

". . . It's gone far enough, Mike. I can't make you come back with me, but I'm certainly not going to stay here with Christabel, put her in danger, while all this is going on. We'll be perfectly safe at my mother's."

"Jesus H. Christ, Kay!" Daddy's voice was so loud and full of hurt that Christabel almost dropped the glass to smash on the hard bathroom floor. "Haven't you been paying attention to what's going on here?"

"I certainly have. And anyone with an inch of sense would know it's no place for a little girl. Mike, you let someone point a gun at her! At our daughter!"

For a long moment no one said anything. Christabel, who had been about to set the glass down so her arm would stop aching, stayed just where she was, like she was in a terrible game of Freeze Tag.

Her daddy's voice, when it came, was quiet and scary. She had never heard him sound mad in quite that way before—it made her want to run away. "That's about the worst thing you've ever said to me, you know? Do you think I haven't had nightmares about that every night? I didn't take her in to meet Ramsey. You let her go off to find a bathroom by herself. What was I supposed to do?"

"I'm sorry. It was an unfair thing to say." Her mommy was still mad, too. "But I'm terrified, Mike. I'm . . . there isn't even a word for how I feel. I just want to take my little girl and get out of here, and I'm going to. I'm taking the boy, too. Just because he's poor doesn't mean he's any less of a child and doesn't deserve protecting."

"Kaylene, will you listen to me? If I thought there was anywhere safer for you to be, I'd be the first one to send you both there—for God's sake, you have to believe that! But I'm only here right now because Yacoubian thought he could get away with using some of the ordinary base personnel. If it hadn't been Ron who picked me up, you would never have heard of me again. There's no doubt in my mind."

"This is supposed to make me feel better?"

"No! But however much of Sellars' story is true, I can tell you this—the way they took me, that whole thing the general was up to, it stank. There was nothing regulation about that at all—it was a kidnapping. Ron and Ramsey saved my life, just by being there."

"So?"

"So what if these people come looking for me again? Without bothering with the appearances of military law, this time—at night, maybe, disguised as burglars. Don't you think my wife's mother's place is somewhere they might look? And if I'm not there, don't you think that they might figure you and Christabel would make useful hostages? These aren't Boy Scouts. What's your mom going to do, sic the cat on them? Call that goddamn mobile home park committee she's always sending after the kids on skim-boards?"

"All right, Mike. It's not very funny."

"No, it's not. You were right before, Kay—it's terrifying. At least if I have you two near me I can protect you. We can keep moving, and Sellars seems to be pretty good with managing a low profile for us. You settle in one place, even somewhere not as obvious as your mom's, we'd just be hoping they don't find you."

"You sound like you believe in this . . . conspiracy. This whole big crazy thing."

"Don't you? Explain Sellars, then. Explain Yacoubian and his little hotel room and his matching Nazi weight-lifter bodyguards."

Christabel had been stiff in one place so long that she was afraid she would scream if she couldn't put the glass down. She inched her arm to the edge of the sink, looking for a flat spot.

"I can't explain it, Mike, and I don't want to try. I just want my child safe and away from all this . . . craziness."

"That's what I want, too, as soon as possible. But the only way I can see. . . ."

The glass teetered, then tipped. Christabel grabbed at it but it jumped out of her fingers and hit the floor with a sound like something blowing up on the net. An instant later the bathroom light flashed on bright, and her father was so big and angry in the door that Christabel took a bad step back and started to fall. Her father jumped forward and caught her arm so hard she squeaked, but she didn't fall down.

"Oh, my God, what are you doing? Ah! Jesus! There's glass everywhere!"

"Mike, what's going on?"

"Christabel just broke a glass. I got a piece in my foot the size of a steak knife. Jesus!"

"Honey, what happened?" Her mom lifted her up and carried her into the room where her parents had been arguing. "Did you have a bad dream?"

"I'll just clean up the glass, then," her father said from the bathroom. "And amputate my foot to save the leg. Don't mind me." He sounded angry, but Christabel relaxed a little—it wasn't the kind if divorce-angry she had been hearing.

"I . . . I was thirsty. Then I heard you. . . ." She didn't want to say it, but she still believed a little that if she told Mommy, something would happen to make things all right again. "I heard you arguing and it scared me."

"Oh, honey, of course." Her mother pulled her close and kissed her head. "Of course. But it's okay. Your daddy and I are just trying to decide what to do. Sometimes grownups argue."

"And then they get a divorce."

"Is that what's worrying you? Oh, sweetie, don't take it so seriously. It's just an argument." But her mother's voice still sounded funny and raw, and she didn't say, "Your daddy and I will never ever get a divorce." Christabel leaned into her and held on, wishing she had never been thirsty.

They were still talking in the other room, but much more quietly now. Christabel lay in her bed, just across a space like a little valley from the boy Cho-Cho, who was tangled up in his covers on his own bed like an Egyptian mummy. Christabel tried to breathe slowly like her mommy told her, but she kept feeling the crying about to come out and her breaths sounded all raggedy.

"Shut up, mu'chita." Cho-Cho's voice was muffled by his pillow, which lay over his face. "People tryin' to sleep."

She ignored him. What did he know? He didn't have a mommy and daddy who were arguing and were going to get a divorce. It wasn't his fault everyone was angry, like it was hers. Even though she was so sad it hurt, she also felt a little brave.

"This far crash," Cho-Cho said, rolling out of bed and taking most of his covers with him, so the sheeted mattress suddenly was bare and white, like an ice cream sandwich with the top peeled off. "Can't nobody sleep with this mierda." Skinny in his T-shirt and underwear when the blankets fell away, he walked toward the bathroom.

"Where are you going? You can't go in there."

He didn't bother to look at her and didn't even close the door. Christabel buried her head under her own blankets when he started to pee. After the noisy flush of the toilet, it was quiet for a long time. When she at last stuck her head out from under the covers he was sitting up in his bed, staring at her with his big dark eyes.

"You afraid some monsters gonna come get you, something?"

Christabel had met a real monster, a smiling man in a hotel room with eyes like little nails. She didn't need to answer to this mean boy.

"Just go to sleep," he said after a while. "Got nothing to worry about."

It was so unfair she couldn't keep quiet any more. "You don't know about anything!"

"I know nothing happens to little ricas like you." He stared at her, smiling a mean little smile, but he didn't look happy. "What you think gonna happen? I tell you what's gonna happen to me, you wanna know that? When all this over, you gonna go back to some mamapapa house somewhere, little Cho-Cho's going to work camp. See, your daddy, he one of the nice ones. Los otros, man, they maybe just take me out and shoot me."

"What kind of camp?" It didn't sound that bad—Christabel's friend Ophelia had been to Bluebird camp, and they made art projects and ate marshmallow sandwiches.

Cho-Cho waved his hand at her. "Cross City, that was one they put my tio in. Digging and like that. Bread with, like, little bichos cooked right in it."

Christabel put a hand to her mouth. "You said a bad word."

"What?" He thought for a second, then laughed, showing his missing tooth. "Bichos? That just mean bugs." He laughed again. "You thought I said 'bitches,' huh?"

She gasped. "You did say it!"

The boy let himself slide back into his bed, staring up at the ceiling. All she could see was the tip of his nose above the pillow. "Tell you what, not gonna wait around, me. Next chance I get, Cho-Cho be too much gone."

"You're . . . you're going to run away? But . . . Mister Sellars, he needs you!" She couldn't understand—it seemed like the kind of wickedness they talked about in church sometimes, not Sunday school, but the big room with the benches and the glass window of Jesus. Run away from that poor old man?

And her mother would be sad, too, Christabel realized. Mommy complained about it a lot, but she really seemed to like making Cho-Cho bathe and wear clean clothes, giving him extra food to eat.

The boy made a noise she could just barely hear—it might have been another laugh. "I thought there was some efectivo around here, some money, but it's just a bunch of crazy people trying on some spyflick mierda. Little Cho-Cho, soon he going to be too . . . much . . . gone."

He didn't say any more. Christabel could only lie in the bed next to his; straining to hear her parents' low voices, and wonder how the world could have turned so strange.

She had drawn enough hieroglyphs on the countertop with powdered creamer for an entirely lactose-free edition of the Book of the Dead. She had listened to the quiet hiss and hum of her employer's expensive coma bed adjusting itself until she wanted to scream. A thousand channels of net input and she couldn't muster interest in any of them.

Dulcie knew she ought to go lie down, but knew equally firmly that she wouldn't sleep for hours. She pulled on her lightweight raincoat and keyed the security sequence for the front door lock. When it chimed she hesitated, then went back and got her newly-assembled gun from its hiding place in the coffee cabinet.

A little before midnight and the hilly streets of Redfern were shiny with rain just fallen, although at the moment the skies were clear. A loud group of people were streaming out of a dirge club down the block, mostly young white and Asian kids dressed in funereal clothes, baggy black 'chutes and wrapped fellaheen hoods. She fell in behind the largest group, drawn down the street behind them as their voices rang off the building facades like the excited piping of a flock of bats. They seemed to be shouting things at each other in some pidgin Aboriginal dialect. Dulcie remembered a time when she could have stood on the streets of Soho or the Village next to a bunch of young people like this and done in-depth social anthropology on every word, every item of clothing and its positioning. Now she couldn't even remember if this particular sub-sub-group were Dirt Farmers or No-Siders, or anything much else about them except that they liked organic hallucinogens, loud slow music, and artificial skin bleaching.

It all seems so important when you're young, she thought. Marking yourself up so everyone knows who you are. People should just have ID readouts in real life like they do with VR sims, so instead of going to all the trouble to get your skin laced or your face branded, you could just display a little message—"I like cats and bondage, don't listen to any music older than six months ago, and am punishing my father by getting too many subdermals."

Or in my case, "I'm punishing my mother by doing things with my life that she probably wouldn't care about if she knew." Makes a lot of sense, doesn't it?

She was depressed, she realized. The missed moment with Dread, because of bad timing or whatever, had turned the possibility of something spontaneous and a little scary into another nightmare checklist of should-she, shouldn't-she. The fact was, although she rather enjoyed being played in that way he had—jerked back and forth emotionally, frightened and then petted—the too-long courtship, if that was what it was, had begun to lose her undivided attention. The fact that she didn't actually like him much was starting to weigh more heavily than it should.

The real truth is, he hasn't told me anything. He's dragged me into some major industrial espionage on pretty thin promises, paying me decent but unspectacular hourly rates, and for all I know he could have found a way to turn lead into gold. I have no guarantees. And what if it turns bad—I wouldn't let him take the gun for me, why should I let him keep me in the dark here in somebody else's country? I don't even know what the laws on this stuff are like in Australia.

And what else did he tell me, like it was the big payout—"Do you want to be a god, Dulcie?" Meaning what, immortality in the Grail network? Well, who knows? The fact is, he hasn't offered. He hasn't really offered me anything but himself, and although that's not bad, it isn't enough. Not for this girl.

The crowd was dispersing quickly, some to the bus stops, others flagging down taxis. Coming home from the apres-Jihad party, she thought with dry amusement as a group of black-turbaned youths jostled its way into a shared cab. Then she realized that a wide but dark street that had been crowded and noisy only moments ago was now nearly empty.

Where am I? That would be great—get lost out here in the middle of the night.

The street signs weren't particularly edifying and she had left her t-jack in the loft, so she couldn't even access a map. Angry with herself but not too worried—there were still people on the street, including some couples—she began to retrace her steps, doing her best to remember how many times she had turned while following the crowd. The old row houses with their rusting wrought-iron balconies seemed to watch her like blank but disapproving faces. She patted her coat pocket, reassuring herself. At least she was armed.

Three dark-skinned men watched her as she approached the corner on which they stood, and even though none of them moved or said anything—the youngest one even smiled very sweetly at her as she passed—she found her steps quickening as she moved away from them down a dark side street.

It's like we're always in the shadow of them, somehow, she thought. Men are just there, blocking the light, and there's nothing we can do about it. Is it only because society has been shaped that way over the years, or is there something more prehistoric going on—because they were stronger back in the beginning?

Felix Jongleur, a prime example of a predatory old man, flashed through her mind. His strange Ushabti file was apparently some kind of last will and testament—an if-you're-seeing-this-I-must'be-dead bit of drama carefully prepared for an heir who seemingly never was. What would his real successors think about that when he did finally give up his lamprey-grip on life? Would they be as puzzled as she was?

Men and their secrets. It was part of their power, wasn't it? So hard to get them to talk about important things that you'd think someone was trying to steal their souls. Dread was another example—a very pertinent example, now that she thought about it. What did she know about him anyway? Sure, with the work he did, she didn't expect to find anything very useful in her few early stabs at researching his background, but she had been impressed at how much of a nonperson he was—or had made himself. There wasn't even a Dread-shaped hole to be found in any of the international files, criminal record banks, anywhere. He was Australian and, by the looks of him, of mixed racial ancestry, which could describe millions of people. Where did he come from? What was his story? It must be an interesting one. Jongleur had secrets. All powerful men had secrets. So what was it that John More Dread was hiding?

She heard the noise before she saw the clump of shadow on the sidewalk half a block ahead of her—a soft retching sound like a cat bringing up a furball. She slowed as she tried to make sense of the shape, which only resolved a few slowing paces later into a man standing over a kneeling woman. At first Dulcie thought he was holding her head while she vomited—the results of a night's excess at one of the bars or clubs—but even as she began to step out into the gutter to swing around the pair she saw that the man was actually pushing her down, forcing her toward the sidewalk.

The pale-haired man looked up, his eyes assessing and dismissing Dulcie within a heartbeat in a way that infuriated her despite her sudden fear. He turned his attention back to the woman, saying something loud in a language that sounded Slavic, and the woman, weeping, choked out something in the same language. Dulcie remembered Dread mentioning all the immigrants who had come to Redfern after the Ukrainian grain belt disasters; he had said it with a sense almost of irritation, which she had thought at the time was some kind of anti-white racism, and only realized afterward was the exotic Mr. Dread experiencing a very common thing—discomfort at his old neighborhood changing.

The woman was bleeding a little from a cut on her lip, fighting clumsily to stand. The man, his wide jaw set in a line of fury, was holding her head down, the kind of thing a playground bully might do. Something about the situation pricked at nerves long Manhattan-numbed. Dulcie stopped a few meters from the slow-motion struggle and said loudly, "Leave her alone."

The man scowled at her, then turned back to the woman and shoved down hard, so that she gave up resisting and sank all the way to her hands and knees.

"I said, leave her alone."

"You want it too?" His accent was thick but the words quite understandable.

"Just let her stand up. If she's your girlfriend, that's no way to treat her. If she's not your girlfriend, I'll have the police on your ass in twenty seconds."

"No," the woman said in a kind of despair. The man's broad hand was still on top of her head; she looked out from beneath his spread fingers like a beaten dog. "No, okay. Is okay. He not hurt me."

"Bullshit. You're bleeding."

The man's face, which at first had showed a trace of amusement, began to shift. His scowl congealed into something quite frightening. He pushed the woman again so suddenly that she toppled over into the gutter, then he turned toward Dulcie. "You want? You come here, then."

Something that had been burning in Dulcie all day flared hotly. She tugged the gun out of her coat pocket and leveled it at him, bracing her wrist in best shooting-range style.

"No, you come here, asshole." It was strange to feel that power all the way up her arm, like godly lightning at her fingertips. "Get down on your knees, why don't you?" She saw the man's mouth drop open and her feverish high expanded. This was the way those Baptist snake-handlers must feel with thrashing, living death in their hands.

"You . . . you crazy!" The man began backing away, trying to keep his face hard but failing. The woman in the gutter was weeping and covering her head.

She was tempted to squeeze off a shot, just to let the bullying bastard feel the wind of it past his face, but she hadn't test-fired it, didn't know how sticky the pull was, anything.

So I miss and take his ear off instead, she thought. Or worse. So what?

But the face of the Colombian gearhead Celestino swam up out of the turbid darkness of her thoughts, his brown eyes big with fear like a wounded dog, although in real life she had never actually seen fear in his face, since he had been fiberlinked online and blind to her when she shot him.

The young Russian man turned and walked swiftly up the street, barely restraining the urge to run. Before Dulcie could take a step forward to help her up, the woman he had been brutalizing staggered upright, then—with only a brief scared-rabbit look at Dulcie—ran after him. She left both of her high-heeled shoes behind her on the sidewalk.

Dulcie was still breathing a little too fast, vibrating with an excitement that was beginning to turn a little sour, when she found her way back to the street that held the loft.

It's about power, isn't it? she thought. You give them all the power, let them keep all the secrets, and they can grind you down. Without some kind of equalizer the game just isn't fair.

So what's Dread hiding? Just his Swiss bank accounts? Blackmail-quality details on some of the Grail folk?

She thought about the little invisible box on his system, a boy's carton of dirty secrets slid under the bed, out of reach of Sister and Mom.

I can find out, can't I? If I can crack the whole J Corporation, I can sure as hell beat some hidden storage on Dread's home system. I can get in and out without him even guessing.

Then I'll have something on him for a change. I wonder how he'd feel about that?

She had a feeling he wouldn't like it very much, but just now, with fear and fury and triumph singing together in her veins, she didn't care.