87.

Winston walked with his eyes cast to the sidewalk before him. He was troubled. He had his guitar slung over his shoulder in its jerry-rigged case. The intensity in his eyes had people on the sidewalk moving out of his way, though he was unaware of this, caught up as he was in his thoughts.

The second body found in the rocks had put him on edge, unsure what he was supposed to make of it. But in the Community—a place that did not, as far as he could tell, operate under the normal laws of cause-and-effect or even reason—this had seemed just another event Winston couldn’t make sense of. He was certain that his understanding of the world was at best shaky, and at worst plainly wrong, so he’d resigned himself to not understanding. The discovery of a second body was just another increment in his growing sense of disquiet.

The third body was too much. Where he had been willing to grant the strange gods of the Uhuru Community a cloak of inscrutability, he was now filled with a dread certainty that they were malevolent. At least toward him. Was there another explanation? Winston had spent the previous night alternating between an unsuccessful attempt to understand the appearance of the two girls on the riverbank and a deep sleep that had strangely left him exhausted.

The Palace was just a block away. A beggar afflicted with St. Vitus’ dance shimmied manically up and down the sidewalk.

Winston needed to leave the City. He’d gone as far as he could go, from the Checkerboard up to the Palace. The Palace was the pinnacle in the City and look at him—still sleeping on the dirt floor in a shantytown shack on the nights when he wasn’t with a woman. Things weren’t going to get better here. It was time to get out before they got worse. But he had to leave the City on good terms with the Uhuru Community gods, and that meant staying for the next day’s Square. That was his chance to gain their goodwill, though he had no idea how to go about it.