Dead and Alive

loose flaps around his mouth and the brief touch of his sticky teeth were even more repellent than she expected, but Erika smiled and said, “You’re welcome, dear friend. Now there’s something I hope you can do for me.”
    “Jocko will read a book to you,” Jocko said, “two books at once, and one upside down!”
    “Later, you can read to me. First, I need your opinion about something.”
    The troll grabbed his feet with his hands and rocked back and forth on the floor. “Jocko doesn’t know about a whole lot besides storm drains, rats, and bugs, but he can try.”
    “You’re Jonathan Harker, or were Harker, whatever. So you know the New Race has little emotional life. When they do have emotional reactions, they’re limited to envy, anger, and hatred, only emotions that turn back on themselves and can’t lead to hope, because he says hope leads to a desire for freedom, to disobedience and rebellion.”
    “Jocko is different now. Jocko feels big good things with great exuberance.”
    “Yes, I’ve noticed that. Anyway, I don’t have the knowledge or the breadth of vision to understand fully why a genius like Victor would create his New Race this way. Only I, his wife, am different. He allows me humility and shame … which in a strange way lead to hope, and hope to tenderness.”
    Feet in his hands, rocking, his head turned toward her, the troll said, “You are the first ever, Old Race or New, to be kind to Jocko,” and again tears spilled down his cheeks.
    “I hope for many things,” Erika said. “I hope to become a better wife day by day. I hope to see approval in Victor’s eyes. If in time I become a very good wife and no longer deserve beatings, if in time he comes tocherish me, I will ask him to allow others of the New Race to have hope as I do. I will ask Victor to give my people gentler lives than they have now.”
    The troll stopped rocking. “Don’t ask Victor anytime soon.”
    “No. First I’ve got to be a better wife. I must learn to serve him to perfection. But I’ve been thinking maybe I could be Queen Esther to his King Ahasuerus.”
    “Remember,” he said, “Jocko is ignorant. An ignorant screwup.”
    “They’re figures in the Bible, which I’ve never read. Esther was the daughter of Mordecai. She persuaded King Ahasuerus, her husband, to spare her people, the Jews, from annihilation at the hands of Haman, a prince of the king’s realm.”
    “Don’t ask Victor anytime soon,” the troll repeated. “That is Jocko’s opinion. That is Jocko’s very strongly held opinion.”
    In her mind’s eye, Erika saw Christine lying on the floor of the master-suite vestibule, shot four times through her two hearts.
    “That isn’t what I want your opinion about,” she said, getting to her feet. “Come with me to the library. There’s something strange I need to show you.”
    The troll hesitated. “I who am came out of he who was only a few days ago, but I who am Jocko have had enough strange for as long as I live.”
    She held out a hand to him. “You are my only friend in the world. I have no one else to whom I can turn.”
    Jocko sprang off the floor and stood en pointe, as ifabout to pirouette, but still hesitated. “Jocko must be discreet. Jocko is
a secret
friend.”
    “Victor has gone to the Hands of Mercy. The staff is at the back of the estate, in their dormitory. We have the house to ourselves.”
    After a moment, he came down from his toes, slipped his hand in hers. “It’s gonna be a very, very funny hat, isn’t it?”
    “Very, very funny,” she promised.
    “With some little bells on it?”
    “If I find a funny hat without bells, I’ll sew as many on it as you want.”

CHAPTER 43
    CORRIDOR AFTER CORRIDOR , laboratory after laboratory, room after room, in stairways and lavatories and storage closets, a perfect hush has fallen over this place.
    With all of its windows bricked up, the building admits no sound from the world outside.
    Here and there, brainless bodies lie in groups. They are all EXEMPTS .
    No one moves who can be seen.
    Chameleon follows the tantalizing spoor of the TARGET until those pheromones come to an end at the workstation in the main lab, with no sign of the person who cast them off.
    Dim memories of this enormous room stir in Chameleon’s mind. It seems to have no recollections prior to these.
    Memories do not interest Chameleon. It lives for the future, for the infuriating smell of TARGETS .
    Frenzies of violence thrill the