Zoey couldn’t help but notice that their operation was getting less sophisticated by the minute. A mission that began with an invisible helicopter, a giant robot, and Hollywood-quality wound makeup ended with Zoey alone, on foot, in a smelly rented costume of a bikini-wearing monkey. She was pushing through the crowd along the sidewalk heading back toward the oncoming parade, occasionally glancing up at the lights of at least two helicopters that were circling up there. She was using her phone to track the location of her mother’s and it was, in fact, still creeping toward her at parade-speed.
Zoey reached the first float a few minutes later, out of breath and sweating in her stupid costume. She kept moving, largely ignoring the parade as it passed. She was vaguely aware of the crowd hooting and whistling when a particularly bawdy float or balloon went by, or groaning and jeering at one built around some intentionally terrible joke or bad pun. She heard everyone burst out laughing at one point and looked up to see a rolling fifty-foot-tall animatronic statue of the president sporting a grossly exaggerated stainless-steel penis. There’d been a rumor that he’d come to Tabula Ra$a to get an implant to combat erectile dysfunction. Behind and above him was one of the massive balloons, this one shaped like a crashing airliner, rigged to belch real black smoke behind it and to broadcast the screams of doomed passengers inside. The next float was a platform of actors on a set made up to look like a restaurant kitchen, one man in a bloody chef’s costume feeding a pile of stuffed dogs into a sausage grinder, each crank of the wheel spurting “blood” out onto the crowd as it passed. Zoey had no idea what scandal that was referencing, you couldn’t stay on top of them all.
The pulses of firelight were now just a couple of blocks down and it absolutely appeared to be an office building fully engulfed in roiling flames, somehow crawling down the street with the rest of the parade. Already Zoey could hear faint roars from the crowd where it passed. It was a stunning sight, and gave the impression that a strong breeze would cause the whole rolling inferno to tip over onto the crowd. A really good parade, Zoey thought, is one that can accidentally kill you at any moment.
She jogged a little faster. It was a cool night but the costume was stifling, her hot breath steaming her head inside the mask. No horror scenarios of what she would find ahead flashed through her mind. She was too exhausted for that. Plus, it would trigger all sorts of related thoughts she was not equipped to process right now, like the fact that she had spent hours tracking down a lost cat who wasn’t even missing, while her actual mother may have been the one who was—
Nope. Enough of that. Until she knew what happened, nothing had happened. She had to be ready for whatever, or whoever, was waiting up there.
She could hear guitar music overhead now; a live band was playing on a stage thirty feet above the street, the platform held aloft by cables and balloons overhead. People in the crowd were throwing bottles at them as they passed, trying to knock them off.
And now, here was the burning float that contained her mother. Or her mother’s phone. Or something.
The flames were definitely real, Zoey could feel the heat from where she was on the sidewalk. It was, as Echo had said, commemorating/mocking the infamous Goldstone building fire. That had been an office building in town holding several brokerage firms and other such businesses. When the blaze started, the alarm system and sprinklers both failed, or had never worked at all. Twenty-six people died, supposedly because the staff of one firm feared their boss so much that they stayed rooted at their desks even as smoke slowly filled the room. That boss had apparently told them they would all lose their jobs unless a certain report was finished by the end of the business day and without an alarm to give the order to evacuate, they just kept working. That was the story, anyway. The boss, who very much evacuated at the first sign of smoke, refused to speak of it in public.
The rolling re-creation of the building had no exterior walls, so that the burning victims inside were in full view. On each floor of the float were two rows of cubicles, each cubicle featuring a life-sized figure in a suit and tie working away at a computer. Everything was in flames—the desks, the chairs, the workers themselves. Fire rippled over their bodies, licking across faces that remained obliviously locked in concentration over some spreadsheet or other. Zoey figured they had to be extremely detailed animatronic dummies, ones designed so that the flesh would still cook and peel in an incredibly realistic manner …
Zoey studied the burning office inhabitants to see if there was anything that stood out. Not to see if any of them were her mother, of course, like if they had strapped her to a chair alongside the flammable dummies and set her on fire, her skin turning black while she screamed and the crowd cheered, because Zoey was past that, past imagining terrible things happening to her loved ones.
The tracking implied the phone was close, somewhere around that first level of the float. For all she knew, the phone was just lying up there, slowly getting melted. She needed a closer look, somehow. Well, the costume covered every inch of her body. It’d protect her enough to get up close, right? For just a few seconds? Long enough to see if any of the roasting human figures were …
Part of Zoey’s brain was still trying to run the numbers on that plan while another part was already making her feet go. That damned hand cream.
She climbed over the barrier that had been set up along the sidewalk, then ran around to the front of the float and jumped onto its bumper. She’d had some idea that because these were decorative special-effects pyrotechnics that they somehow wouldn’t be quite as hot as the flames you’d get in, say, an actual office fire. She now wasn’t sure that was the case, absolutely feeling like she was being cooked alive in her ridiculous costume. She could faintly hear people yelling and gasping from the crowd. To them, this float had just gotten about 50 percent more entertaining. Look, everyone! A drunk person could die!
In front of her, the two rows of flaming cubicles on the first floor were separated by a walkway, just as they would be in an actual office. There was a gap in the flames wide enough for a person to dash through if they were wearing good protective gear or were very stupid.
She squinted against the flames and tried to study the burning figures, to see if any of them were … not animatronic. The ones nearest seemed to be performing the same looping mechanical movements, their flaming hands comically tapping keyboards and shuffling burning papers, everything made of some kind of material that was never fully consumed by the blaze. She couldn’t see much beyond those first couple.
She heard someone shouting commands from the street behind her. A lone VOP security guard, jogging her way. Not because she was an organized crime queen with a bounty on her head, but because she was a presumably drunk idiot in a monkey costume climbing on a giant, rolling inferno. She heard a few hip people in the crowd yelling, “Bonnie! Where’s Raja?”
The guard reached out for Zoey’s leg and she pulled herself into the fire.
The air was instantly sucked from her lungs. Heat squeezed around her like a fist. What was she doing? She tried to shield her face with her arm. She ran forward, between the cubicles. The crowd was going insane, cheering like they were watching a daredevil jump a ravine in a motorcycle. Zoey tried to get a good look at each burning figure as she passed but the flames lashed out at her, flashing into her eyes, cooking her skin, whooshing and roaring around her like snarling demons. This was stupid, so stupid.
She rushed past the cubicles, sure these were just mannequins. This was all a stupid trap and she’d fallen for it. She reached the rear end of the float and jumped off, quickly trying to look around at herself to see if the costume was on fire.
It was. She felt it.
Zoey had to pull the zipper down the back. There were flames back there and she badly scorched her hand, even through the furry gloves. She was only able to yank the zipper down about halfway, but it was enough to get her shoulders out and shove the smoking suit of fur down to her feet.
She still had the mask on, so she was now just a woman in jeans, a sweat-matted HOW ABOUT I SLAP YOUR SHIT T-shirt, and a smoldering monkey head. Would the cameras detect her identity judging from the neck down? They probably could map out her arm cellulite or something. Who cares, at this point?
The fiery float had pulled away from her and Zoey turned to see the back of it, to take one last look. There was a sign on the rear positioned so it would flash to the crowd as a punchline, and in burning text it said, PROUDLY MAINTAINED BY ASHE CONSTRUCTION!
Zoey froze.
That … wasn’t right, was it?
It’s not like parade floats are held to some kind of journalistic standards. Someone would have told her if that building had been her father’s, that he was possibly to blame for its failing fire protection system and that, by extension, she was to blame for not fixing it.
While she stared, Zoey was swallowed up by a flock of dancers and a rapper who was freestyling insults to random people he found in the crowd. Zoey tried to step out of their way, then pulled out her phone and looked at the tracking info for her mother again …
It no longer showed she was in the fire float. She—or the phone—was ahead of Zoey now, moving down the parade. They were toying with her, she knew. She considered going back, finding the Suits, calling it all off. Then the VOP guy came around the fire float, yelling commands at her.
Zoey ran through the dancers, vaguely aware that the rapper was now also berating her. (“Get out the parade, Bonnie, you gonna get run over for real / these floats don’t float, bitch, that shit’s on wheels. Also can we get a round of applause for Bonnie’s titties?”)
Zoey looked back at her pursuer in time to see the yellow jacket get “accidentally” tripped by one of the dancers, who did an impressive job of managing to make it look like part of the choreography. Zoey ran, making her way back down the parade, having seen no sign whatsoever of her mother or her mother’s phone or anything else. She ran around the next float. A quick glance to the side revealed it to be several actors in yellow VOP jackets comically brutalizing a young man who had stolen a loaf of bread, the victim on the ground yelling, “I told y’all, I paid for it! I got the receipt right here! Ow! Ow!”
Then she was moving through a group of marchers in Rasta costumes, or actual Rastas, one or the other. There were several huge Jamaican flags and they were towing the cables of a balloon shaped like an enormous joint, a mechanism spraying smoke down at the crowd from the lit end. If it wasn’t weed smoke, it sure as hell smelled like it.
Her phone showed her target was still up ahead, somewhere.
Zoey passed some clowns who were tossing out little bags of pills like they were candy, then a group of strippers wearing little-girl dresses and holding oversized lollipops. Zoey tried not to think about that and jumped onto the front of the next float, her phone insisting her target was right there with her. Zoey saw the scene they had staged and sucked in a breath.
On one hand, this float seemed like it had been hastily put together, lacking the production value of the others. Many of the floats were the result of professional teams working sometimes years in advance, but this one featured only a clean white “room” (a floor and few pieces of furniture) and in the middle was a banquet table. Lying on it was a man who was vaguely intended to look like Dexter Tilley. Same buzz cut, some crudely applied acne, drawn-on stitches in the appropriate spots. On his abdomen was piled loops of sausage and other meat parts they’d thrown on to suggest he’d been gutted, fake blood splattered over everything, running off the sides of the table and onto the floor. The man playing Tilley screamed for help, improvising lines about how he was being eaten, begging for death.
At the head of the table, sitting in front of a plate full of bloody guts, shirt and face smeared with red, was a person in a costume who was clearly supposed to be … Titus Chobb.
It wasn’t like it was hard to get the costume together, all the guy had to do was shave the sides of his head, add some gray hair coloring, and put on a wrinkled work shirt and khakis. The fake Chobb stood up from his seat and turned to show the crowd a comically exaggerated erection in his pants. He shouted, “Look, I’m getting my youth back already!”
That’s how quickly Budd’s rumor had spread. This float would have already been in the staging area when the talk began to radiate outward from Budd’s contacts. The ambitious designers of this one apparently tore down the original idea they’d worked on for who knows how long and threw together this scene with what they could get their hands on at the last minute, figuring that being on the cutting edge of a scandal would trump production value. From the reaction of the crowd—stunned into silence, with only the drunkest of them daring to laugh—they’d done it. They’d managed to actually cross a boundary.
The only other player on the set was a muscular guy they’d found to play Dirk Vikerness, who stood humorlessly behind “Chobb,” staring Zoey down. They hadn’t been able to find the armor, he was just in a tank top and black leather pants with a ridiculous glowing yellow codpiece. But they at least did get the stupid snake beard right. They’d even added an eye patch, as apparently word of him having died via scissors to the skull had hit the streets.
Zoey glanced down at her phone and saw her mother’s signal crawl her way at the same moment the eye-patched muscle man was walking toward her, reaching out, grabbing her.
The guy on the table lifted his head and said, “Hey, that’s Dirk Vikerness!”
By the time Zoey realized the same, she was flying through the air.