Copyright © 2023 Chris McKinney

All rights reserved.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Published by

Soho Press, Inc.

227 W 17th Street

New York, NY 10011

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: McKinney, Chris, author.

Title: Eventide, Water City / Chris McKinney.

Description: New York, NY : Soho Crime, [2023]

Series: The Water City trilogy ; 2

Identifiers: LCCN 2022041938

ISBN 978-1-64129-431-7

eISBN 978-1-64129-432-4

Subjects: LCGFT: Novels.

Classification: LCC PS3613.C5623 E94 2023

DDC 813/.6—dc23/eng/20220902

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022041938

Interior design by Janine Agro

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

In memory of Al McKinney

PART ONE

FROM WHICH LIFE FIRST ROSE

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Somewhere in the hadal zone, an arrowtooth approaches, and a pupil dilates from the cutting of its own light. The deepwater eel slithers, stops in front of the bodyless eye, and opens its mouth. It freezes in this barbed gape for a long moment. Everything moves so slowly that all moments are long moments twenty-three thousand feet deep. Synthetic hormones whirl with neuroception, but the eye remains motionless. Finally, the predator turns and slinks away. Relieved, the eye runs its qubit calculations in the dark. It has been 2,217 days since the eye first woke and found itself in the Challenger Deep. First, it was resuscitated by its own emergency protocol. Then, its neurons, glial cells, and nerves expanded and finally fired in the correct sequence to climb up the polyvagal ladder. An unraveled pattern stitched into memory trace.

No place on the planet’s surface has less light than Challenger Deep, which made the eye wonder if it had simply stepped from one death to another. The eye opened its nanoantenna and mapped its location, startled when it realized the tides had rolled it four thousand miles west of its own murder scene. Since waking in the trench, the eye has mapped its route back, a zigzag from heat source to heat source, and followed the bathymetry of Pacific Ocean hot spots that power its journey home.

Now that the eel is gone, six legs pop from the eye’s vitreous and dig into the deep dust. It crawls, moving laggardly like everything else down here—the swaying purple polyps on rocks, the cusk-eels, the grenadier fish, and the bygone plastic bags that the skimmers missed. The eye too must conserve its energy in this black place, this bog of barely life. But sometimes it needs to be fed sight to confirm that it is alive.

Of the murder, the eye remembers. The synesthete and his refusal. The eye had been so close to godhood. All snatched away by a man it had offered everything to—generational wealth, a life without killing, and the truth about Ascalon’s Scar. First, the bullets cracked and shattered the glass walls. Then the freezing, midnight zone waters flooded into the penthouse. Crushing chest pain followed. After that, the collapse of the windpipe. Hypothermia. Finally, every inch of the eye’s physical body crumpled as if a boulder toppled on it. When beneath a boulder, one does not try to gauge its weight or count the seconds. All one feels is the agonizing, inevitable doom. Despite this, the body still managed to bang at the chamber the old coward hid in. But the eye misplaced its mother’s jeweled memories in that haze of fear and hate. It wonders if the old man saw his own greens that day. It wants to bathe him in those colors.

The closest and final hotspot—18.92° N, 155.27° W. The eye calculates that it can complete the odyssey in three days. It wants to swim badly, but it remembers its journey as it inches forward. Eaten by a glowing kitefin the last time it swam. Captured then nibbled on by a yeti crab for two days. Swallowed and shat out of a whale. It took several disasters to convince the eye that it is better to crawl than to swim. But it’s so close now. Swim. Then fly. Soar. But no, home can wait. Home is youthful, vibrant, and optically ripe by now. Patched into its own satellite, the eye has been tracking home for years now. Its channel. Its live feed in the digitally remastered world above. After using its zero-day master key to hack the genetic database, the eye has run simulation after simulation. The process of possession. Take the body. Let the host’s mind die. The eye will live again. The new host senses it as well. The faint, alluring transmission bands that the eye sings to her. The images and sounds of the deep, of the past, of the synesthete killing in siren frequency. The eye feels the girl diving. Searching. Following the faint sound as far as she dares. Over the years, she has been the only consistent flicker of human contact the eye has had on its long journey. It wants the child to remember what it has taught her. You learn when you take the long way home.

The eye has collected so much information while all think it dead. Among those is the data on the salvage of Volcano Vista. A familiar name financed it. The eye will take that man, who’s recently made a very large crypto transfer to a wanted criminal and seize his vast financial might after it takes the child. The synesthete is so close to uncovering the truth, and he doesn’t even know it. He probably doesn’t want to.

Something approaches on sensor! Was the eye skittering too quickly? Too excited by the prospect of home? It digs into the sludge and buries itself. No. No! Hold still. Hold still! The teeth. The gruesome underbite. The stem of green glow bait. Viperfish. Vertical migrater. Over the years, the eye has experienced victimization by vertical food chain a number of times. Eaten by one thing, taken up a few thousand meters just to be eaten by another, then taken up a few thousand meters more. Two years ago, the eye found itself in the throat of a masked booby, who then became mugged in midair by a great frigatebird. The booby shook and jostled until the lesser bird puked the eye up. The frigatebird carried the eye two hundred miles in the wrong direction before finally dropping it from over five thousand feet above sea level. Plop. Back at the outer edge of the Mariana Trench. The synesthete would have laughed sardonically and told the eye that nature is wild. The eye’s father would’ve said, Pay attention to the now and hope the viperfish does not have squid eye, which was the almost magical ability to see holes left by prey in the sand, the skill of the father’s native people. The eye does not and will never need others again. Needing others in the past had been its weakness. The eye must content itself to imagine what others would do and say. It imagines its twin sister, and these imaginations are the only company worth keeping.

The eye waits to make a move. It finally feels the turbulence of the fish kicking away. The viperfish’s blip disappears from the eye’s micro depth recorder. Three. More. Days. Patience. At least the eye’s not sleeping. At least it’s not in that madness-inducing torpor that its mother had put it in for thirty years. But it was during that sleep that the eye figured out many things, like how to evolve an iE from a floating, orb-shaped computer that can communicate with the brain of its individual user to something much more, something that can emulate the brain and can mind upload. Once, the eye planned to upload Akira’s iE into its own. But now it also knows how to download its mind into others. To Mind Exome Load, or MELd, as it likes to say to itself. To commune. Then possess.

The eye does have a name. Ascalon Lee. And Ascalon Lee is not dead. She has been copied and laced into this eye. And she will copy and lace herself into the mind of another soon. Another who can see murder coming in its glorious greens. Then it will do the same to another. Then another. The eye will become a hive that can work toward finding its mother. Akira Kimura. The eye knows that she stole Ascalon Lee’s tech. Has the mother copied and laced herself as well?

The eye dares a slip of light. The climb is steep. On the shelf above, plumes of heat rise from the vents like the smoke from old factory chimneys. The energy is already providing a charge for the eye’s almost spent battery. The six legs, one for every eye muscle, cautiously extend, and its induction coils draw power from a hydrothermal vent. The eye shuttles laterally in a defensive position. It spins every few steps, blinks, and darts in every cardinal direction. Am I a being? it asks itself. An entity? Or am I a philosophical zombie, a soulless copy of something that no longer is? I am sentient, but am I human? Not yet. But I will be. I refuse to be reduced to a voice in a jar. I will be her again. Not Akira. I will forever be Ascalon Lee.

The eye feels a tremor beneath its sharp legs. Oh no! The vent is about to erupt! The eye skitters away from the smoking hydrothermal crack as quickly as it can. Faster. Faster! The heat rises. The eye brightens now, basking in its own yellow shine. It spots a dark plastic bag half-buried in the distance. The bag may be useful. The eye’s spindly legs dig into sand and charge. The coming eruption vibrates beneath it, almost toppling it on its iris. Ten feet. Two feet. One. It snatches the bag and lifts it up. The seafloor’s crack widens and an explosion bursts from the vent. The eye is shot upward, taking its plastic makeshift parachute with it. The eye retracts its legs and soars. The bag glows and ripples behind the eye, sculling like the tail of a prehistoric thing. The two begin to slow. The eye rolls out of the bag right before the jaws of a goblin shark jut from its head and its teeth sink into the plastic. It’s a long but grateful drop to the bottom. Perhaps the eye is human after all. It associates. It predicts. It remembers. Deep in the weeds of its dendrites, it imagines.

The eye plops into the sand atop the shelf. A slow-motion puff of marine snow floats then rests upon it. The eye waits a moment, then continues its journey up. Yes. Smooth pursuit. Perhaps the eye is not just human. Maybe it’s something even more. When it reaches the surface and inhabits its new domicile, it will send the signal and kill the light, that permanent scar in the sky that reassures people of the existence of heroes, people like her mother, who can slay any and all threats to humanity. People and how they cling to their fairy tale . . . But for now, like the greatest of its native ancestors, the eye wayfinds, except without guidance from the stars.

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The target: Shave Time Money. The offenses: Assault. Theft. Fencing of stolen property. Hibiscus poaching. Bail jumping. Shave Time Money—if that ain’t a name of antiquity still umbilicalled to some ghetto, time-trapped, afterbirth of a town, I don’t know what is. It’s no surprise that his trail has led me to the unofficial capital of The Great Leachate—St. Louis, Missouri. The Leachate has been around my whole damn life, and it’s the first time I’ve ever been here. Hopefully, it’s also the last. St. Louis Ribs is now a reference to the scattered row of giant, cylinder-shaped trash that sticks out of the spine of the Mississippi, leaking and basting their vile liquid rust into the once-mighty river.

The nearest shuttle port is in Nashville. I had to ping a pilotless quad prop heli-taxi from there and have it fly me to the edge of the contamination zone. During the entire trip, the steady hum of the heli-taxi’s four rotors was drowned out by music about trucks, whiskey, and shotgun weddings. Trucks don’t even exist anymore, but country music will never die. We approached the great dam that halted the flow of the contaminated river at the Kentucky Bend. After the old eggbeater dropped me off, and my iE transferred the fare with a twenty percent tip, I opened my pack and pulled out my orange rad suit. I put on the lead-composite leggings, boots, apron, and mitts, then threw on the face-visored LED-HED. I told my iE to mag-seal it to the apron and turn on the oxygen. I felt like a chef getting ready to grill some yakiniku on the sun. Next, I managed to hotwire an ancient center console bass boat that still had juice in its lithium twin engines. I had once been trained for covert trips like this one.

While motoring up the cold Missouri Bootheel like a geriatric, post-apocalyptic Huck Finn, I ask my iE the history because I can’t believe what I was seeing. The river is at the bottom of a twisted canyon speckled with the blue crystals of Stone Age detergent. The radiated water walled in by endless towers of trash. I’m glad my LED-HED keeps out the smell. I look down in the muck and pass a school of two-headed Asian carp and goldfish the size of small children feeding on what appears to be fossilized diapers.

According to my iE: Great Flood of 2040. Great Flood of 2041. Greater Flood of 2042: Trial by Water. Greatest Flood of 2043: Affliction. Climate warming natural disasters were so common back then that we named them like they were first-person shooter sequels or MMA Pay-Per-View events. The last flood from the Missouri somehow knocked out the cooling system of the Callaway Nuclear Plant, not to mention Jim’s RV Park next door. The meltdown dug into the groundwater and seeped. The entire state of Missouri became a toxic wet mop, so we said fuck it, and started to pile all our trash here. The post-apocalypse ain’t the state of the world. It’s a region in middle America.

I’m sweating in this damn suit. Unlike my foam fit, there’s no temp-control and nothing weaved in to weaken the thickness of the material, which keeps the radiation out. Plus, because of the density of the suit, my iE’s brainwave receptors are slightly lagging. Why the fuck did I take this job? Oh, that’s right. No guaranteed paycheck anymore. Small cop pension. Smaller Social Security from early withdrawal. Kid in fourth grade private school. Sell your life rights—commercial use of name, likeness, and other recognizable aspects—to Savior’s Eye Entertainment and start freelancing in your late eighties—smart. At least there isn’t anything to do with murder anymore. Nothing green.

I take in a 360 view. Veins of bright yellow snowmelt slush into the river. A pack of vulture-sized pigeons picks at the inexhaustible mountains of trash, then erupts into the air. An avalanche of trash tumbles from the two-hundred-foot cliff of garbage and splashes behind me. These towers can’t be stable after years of water erosion. I white-knuckle the wheel and pay close attention while piloting north. I pass stacks of automobiles pressed into neat, metal loaves. Next is a heap of rusted Boeing and Airbus fuselages propped against one another like the remains of a doused bonfire. These are the world-famous St. Louis Ribs.

I weave through the baste and finally get to the crumbling Gateway Arch. Man, bleak. I look up at the gray sky and can’t even tell what time of day it is. Except for the decrepit paddle boats rotting onshore, the dock is empty. I tell my iE to bring up a map of the town. The zoo is seven and a half miles west. I check my rad suit. The goddamn built-in Geiger is ticking like mad. The water holds more contamination than inland. I begin to walk west, liking the idea of getting as far from the Mississippi as soon as possible.

I send my iE way up to get a drone shot of this place. I got the new model, which is all the rage now. Model Triple X, the kids call it. The thirtieth iteration of Idris Eshana’s invention. It’s smaller, quicker, nimbler, and is packed with graphene and time crystals, power that can last a lifetime. Not to mention better optics and transponder. It reads our brainwaves and spits what we need back at us in the same frequency faster than ever. DNA encrypted to its individual user, the sucker can store an almost endless amount of data. And the new feature that trumps the rest is person-to-person Thought Talk—digital telepathic communication. Just about everyone’s got Triple X. The improvements so impressive that some wonder if Eshana is still alive out there somewhere. People fascinate over that kind of shit more than ever now that they’ve seen a god save the world, then supposedly die forty years later while leaving no remains. I’m not one of those people. I was at Idris’s open-casket funeral. He looked peaceful, almost smiling. And I saw Akira Kimura cut up again and again.

The iE takes in the dated expanse. It’s weird that people once lived like this, in this pygmy sprawl. Pint-sized buildings with doors with handles, boxy machines used to withdraw paper money, buttons to press to cross streets. The storefronts a reminder of when people used to buy stuff in person. Back when you had to touch a hundred different things to get through the day. Now, every door, sink, shower, bidet, dispenser, washer/dryer, and form of transportation is automated. Every product is delivered via drone. There’s no pulling stuff off shelves and rolling them through aisles in carts anymore. And just about every transaction, communication, and ID check are done via iE. Stuff like keyboards, buttons, touchscreens, and knobs are artifacts that have either been buried in regions like this one or recycled into seascraper building materials. Idris Eshana used to say his idea to invent the iE was born out of being a germophobe. The fact that our smartphones were filthier than our toilets because we had to touch them all the time made him want to invent a smart device that he didn’t need to touch. Also, one that wouldn’t shatter if dropped.

Today, the cracked streets are empty. The hovels choked by vines. I pass a bunch of dead museums and think that we’re gonna need a museum of all these dead museums eventually. There’s a statue of some guy named Nelly. I wonder who he is and what happened to him. He must’ve been wounded since there’s a Band-Aid under his eye. Beyond that statue, there’s a much larger one. A tower of trash being carved and fused into the likeness of Akira Kimura by white-lab-coated missionaries wearing welding masks. Her right hand is raised, holding some kind of mop with a rectangular-shaped cleaning end. She’s clad in aluminum siding armor. It’s official. She’s not just global, she’s netherworld, too. Too bad that in real life, she was left-handed.

When I reach Forest Park, I start seeing more people. In the old days, during Desert Storm 15, I would’ve been prepped for infiltration. Learned how to sneak in or blend in, or maybe a bit of both. But it’s a post-Ascalon world now, and nothing seems dangerous anymore. Maybe that’s part of the reason I took the job, a little of that old spice. But these people just make me sad. I pass more and more, feeling both guilty and self-conscious that I’m the only one in a rad suit. The park is more forest than park now, and the locals sit by campfires cooking god knows what over the flames, the fire reflecting on their watery, pre-stroke eyes. They look at me suspiciously. It’s probably been a while since they’ve seen someone in a rad suit. The US government gave up on The Leachate long ago. I walk on. People in twos and threes dangle fishing poles above holes cut through trash, like the Missourian ice fishermen of old. A girl around my daughter’s age spackled in rags refuses to eat what her mother serves her. The mother, face spotted with cystic acne, tells her to think outside the bun. I haven’t seen acne since I was a kid. It was edited out of our DNA with CRISPR tech by our vain, social media-obsessed ancestors. Maybe that’s why I see how I do. Some CRISPR gene editing gone wrong.

The girl shakes her head and says life begins when pain ends. I think about my daughter and begin to fantasize in Super 8 Polavision, the stuff I learned about as an art history major back in college. I’ll bring home a playmate, a sister for my child. They’ll go to school together and become lifelong companions. That’s where the film crackles and ends. I wanna rescue this little girl, but there ain’t no rescuing a child from its parent. Probably never has been. I know that better than most.

I pass other families huddled around open fires, frying up their multi-headed fresh catch, and I approach something that was once called the Jewel Box. It’s an old-school greenhouse that is now completely skewered by the plants it once contained. Shave Time’s mother back on the island comes to mind while I walk by this building that looks like a broken church. A woman who moved to the island to become a born-again native and live off the land, to take a vow to eradicate pineapples and coconut trees. She’s the one who told me where to look for her son. At first, like any mother, she’d resisted giving up intel. Then there had been a look of recognition. She asked. I confirmed. She’d recalled my face from the newsfeeds, from the short vids produced by Savior’s Eye Productions. She’d said she’d tell me where to find Shave Time if I told her about Akira Kimura. I eyed her collection of straw Akira figurines on her wicker, treehouse mantle, and I’d told her. Here I go again, I had thought, dropping names. It’s funny how fast religion spreads in the twenty-second century. No slow crawl from Jerusalem to Rome. No enlightenment from India to the China Sea. No centuries-long overseas spread from Mecca to Indonesia. The deification of Akira went global in less than a lifetime since we’re all patched into this quantum network together through our iEs. I wonder if this new religion will peak and die more quickly, too. I hope the hell so.

"Why’d you raise him in the Leachate?" I’d asked Shave Time’s mom.

"IGM, she’d said. I was flagged. I just wanted my child strong, you know?"

I’d nodded. Illegal genetic mutation. It’d been against the law to frivolously modify the DNA of unborn children for ages now, and the penalties had grown from a hefty fine to life in prison, but over the years, some parents still secretly did it. They almost never told their kids about it. If they did, their children could be charged for not reporting it to the authorities. If I’d been mutated, my parents certainly didn’t tell me.

"How long did you two stay there?" I’d asked.

"Twenty years. When the statute of limitations ran out. He leaves occasionally to do odd jobs, but he stays in The Leachate for the most part. She’d let out a heavy sigh, weighted with guilt. He considers it his home."

I thanked Shave Time’s mom and climbed down her tree house.

Right now, I’m approaching the entrance of the old zoo. I hear speed metal blaring from a refurbished CD player and see a dozen men and women dressed in rags air guitar their polished axes and swords. When they spot me, they begin to test the sharpness of their weapons on the rusted-out automobiles scattered through the parking lot. I ignore them and enter. A hopping, one-legged man holding a banjo follows me inside.

I wander around, looking like some dated spaceman exploring the ruins of an alien ghost town. The exhibits are inhabited by people now, none with iEs, most of whom seem to be missing patches of hair or an appendage of some sort. The food vendor, serving god knows what, lacks a middle finger. The children who stare at me as they walk past—ear, arm, and . . . What is that? Is she missing a throat? Is that even possible? The guy who’s been following me around since I entered the zoo, he’s whispering, Just do it, to me again and again. I don’t know how these people survived here for so long, and I don’t ask my iE, because I don’t wanna know. Somehow, I figure it will just lead to even more guilt, which I carry enough of. But looking around, I’m starting to appreciate my kid, my wife, my life, like a true poverty porn tourist.

I stop at the entrance to Stingrays at Caribbean Cove. A line of women wait with buckets. For some reason, like Akira, they’re all left-handed. I glance at the one-legged guy’s banjo. Just do it, he whispers for what seems like the hundredth time. These are definitely people who like their music plucked. I look back at the line. A couple of the women are fat. A couple skinny. That’s the thing about poverty—there’s no jacked poor, no shredded poor, no yoga poor, no dad-bod poor—there’s just fat or skinny poor.

The skinny woman at the front of the line draws gritty, brown water from the pool. She walks past me, hugging the bucket protectively. The secret is in the Alps, she says. That sentiment is familiar to me. It’s a phrase I learned back in college—Art History 304: US Television Advertising. I’m beginning to understand that the people here speak in twenty-first-century slogans because they’re surrounded by old labels on trash every day of their lives. We all internalize the things around us, even if it’s shit. They must even name themselves after slogans here, hence Shave Time Money. It makes sense that Shave Time would come back to his hometown among his fellow Zeroes. For over a hundred years this is where they came—the homeless, the addicted, the bankrupt, the bored, the wanted dead or alive. Nobody’s gonna chase down a runaway here. Except my dumbass.

Made in China! Just Do It hisses before hopping off. He picks his banjo and sings, Made in China! The women in line put their buckets down and start doing some kind of weird lion dance ho-down. I shake my head and move on.

I pass the aquarium. Through the muddy water, I look at moldy, toy plastic sea life spread like gravel on the bottom. Suddenly, a little girl’s face pops from the murk and presses against the glass. She’s missing both eyes. Poor kid. I wanna pull her out of the turbidity and bring her home, too, but I need to find Shave Time and get the fuck out of here before these people start sniffing at me and think, Finger lickin’ good. I’m already thinking like a bigoted colonialist. Sue me.

I find Shave Time in the Bear Pit, just as his mom had said. And my god, he is big. So big that my skinny/fat poor theory needs serious revision. His mutation is obvious—super athlete. He’s shirtless and holding an old street sign that reads W CHIPPEWA ST. His opponent, dual-wielding a claw hammer and twenty-pound dumbbell, is a head shorter and armored in aluminum siding, just like the trash statue of Akira. "Why do they fight in the pit? I had asked Shave Time’s mom. Do they gamble? Are they paid? Are they forced to? His mom had looked at me like I was dumb. For fun," she’d said.

I smile now, for no other reason than because I’m scared. I’ve spent the last several years building my old body up with Akeem as my workout partner. I’ve done bone shots, tendon and ligament rejuv, hormone replacement, AMP therapy—all paid for by the selling of my life rights to Savior’s Eye Entertainment—then I lifted the hell out of heavy things. I told myself I was lapping from the fountain of youth for my kid. So I can still swim, jetsurf, and play pulse racket with her and her mom over the next ten years. But it’s really about vanity . . . and the sight of old, helpless, wheelchaired Chief of Staff Chang picked apart by little birds eight years ago. No way I end up like him. Once I end up in a chair, push me off a cliff. Well, I might be at the edge of a cliff now because just looking at Shave Time, his prosthetic jaw and almost greyscale skin, I know he would’ve tuned me up even in my prime.

Less Filling! Shave Time bellows.

Tastes great! his opponent screams.

I pull out my 1911. I watch Shave Time crumple his opponent like he’s recyclable, and I think maybe I should’ve brought my rail gun. Too late now. I climb down the pit. Shave Time is helping his opponent up. They’re laughing. Stronger than dirt! Shave Time says.

His opponent nods in agreement and says, Stronger than dirt!

Maybe it’s possible to go through life just speaking in corporate slogans. When it rains, it pours. Take a lickin’ and keep on tickin’. Obey your thirst. What else is there in life? I get off the ladder, raise my gun, and point it at Shave Time’s bald head.

Shvv . . . Tmm . . . Monn . . . I say. Goddamn LED-HED muffling my voice. I check the Geiger. It’s not crackling as bad as it was on the river. Fuck it. I tell my iE to unseal the helmet and turn off the oxygen. I rip off my orange mitts, take the bulbous LED-HED off, and drop it on the ground. The cold hits me; it’s invigorating. Shave Time Money, I say, I’m here to take you back home.

Shave Time looks at me skeptically. His torso rippling as he twirls the street sign like it’s a laser fencing foil. His friend steps to his side, glaring at me while military pressing the dumbbell like he’s warming up. With the lag now gone, my iE instantly warns me about my spiking blood pressure and heart rate. It also screams, Warning! Warning! 10 mSv! Not enough sieverts to do any serious radiation damage. Then my iE reminds me to take my anti-delirium meds. I turn off Health Monitor and Reminders, something Sabrina would not approve of. C’mon guys, I say. It’s nothing personal. You skipped bail, Shave Time. I need to bring you back.

Others gather and bend over at the railing at the top of the pit, glaring. I might be in real trouble here. I take out my cuffs—two graphene bracelets that will constrict when he puts them on, then magnetically lock to each other. Only my iE will be able to unlock them. I toss the bracelets to him. He lets them bounce off his chest, and they drop at his bare, enormous, webbed, six-toed feet. Well, one six-toed foot. The left is missing a pinky toe. Put those on, I say. He looks up at the gathering crowd of