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but of course Victor Helios Frankenstein’s freak show wasn’t the only mortal danger in New Orleans. A pie-eyed prettyboy and his slack-jawed girlfriend, in a black Mercedes without headlights, barreled out of the night as if racing through a quantum doorway from Las Vegas.
    Carson stood on the brake pedal. The Mercedes shot across the bow of the Honda close enough for her headlights to reveal the Botox injection marks in the prettyboy’s face. The Honda hydroplaned on the slick pavement and then spun 180 degrees, the Mercedes raced away toward some other rendezvous with Death, and Carson cruised back the way they had come, impatient for Deucalion’s phone call.
    “Only three days ago, everything was so great,” she said. “We were just two homicide dicks, taking down bad guys, nothing worse to worry about than ax murderers and gang shootings, stuffing our faces with shrimp-and-ham jambalaya at Wondermous Eats when the bullets weren’t flying, just a couple of I’ve-got-your-back cops who never even thought about making moon eyes at each other—”
    “Well, I was thinking about it,” Michael said, and she refused to glance at him because he would be adorable.
    “—and suddenly we’re being hunted by a legion of inhuman, superhuman, posthuman, pass-for-human, hard-to-kill meat machines cooked up by the for-real Victor Frankenstein, and they’re all in a go-nuts mode,it’s Armageddon on the Bayou, and on top of all that, you suddenly want to have my babies.”
    He said, “We’ll negotiate who has the babies. Anyway, bad as things are right now, it wasn’t all jambalaya and roses before we discovered Transylvania had come to Louisiana. Don’t forget the psycho dentist who made himself a set of pointy steel dentures and bit three little girls to death. He was totally human.”
    “I’m not going to defend humanity. Real people can be as inhuman as anything Helios stitches together in his lab. Why hasn’t Deucalion called? Something must have gone wrong.”
    “What could go wrong,” Michael asked, “on a warm, languid night in the Big Easy?”

CHAPTER 6
    A STAIRWELL DESCENDED from the main lab all the way to the basement. Lester led Deucalion to the networking room, where three walls were lined with racks of electronic equipment.
    Against the back wall were handsome mahogany cabinets topped with a copper-flecked black-granite counter. Even in mechanical rooms, Victor had specified high-quality materials. His financial resources seemed bottomless.
    “That’s Annunciata,” said Lester, “in the middle box.”
    Lined up on the black granite were not boxes but instead five thick glass cylinders on stainless-steel cradles. The ends of the cylinders were capped with stainless steel, as well.
    In those transparent containers, floating in golden fluid, were five brains. Wires and clear plastic tubesfull of darker fluid rose from holes in the granite countertop, penetrated the steel caps in the ends of the cylinders, and were married to the brains in ways that Deucalion could not quite discern through the thick glass and the nutrient baths.
    “What are these four others?” Deucalion asked.
    “You’re talking to Lester,” said his companion, “and there’s more Lester doesn’t know than what he does.”
    Suspended from the ceiling above the counter, a video screen brightened with Annunciata’s beautiful virtual face.
    She said, “Mr. Helios believes that one day, one day, one day, one day … Excuse me. A moment. I am so sorry. All right. One day, biological machines will replace complex factory robots on production lines. Mr. Helios Helios believes also that computers will become true cybernetic organisms, electronics integrated with specially designed organic Alpha brains. Robotic and electronic systems are expensive. Flesh is cheap. Cheap. Flesh is cheap. I am honored to be the first cybernetic secretary. I am honored, honored, honored, but afraid.”
    “Of what are you afraid?” Deucalion