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let it fall from the trunk. "What… what are they?"
    "Told you: scorpions. Sort of a gang. Maybe it's more than one gang. I don't really know. You get fond of them after a while, if you know how to stay out of their way. If you can't… well, you either join, I guess; or get messed up. Least, that's how I found it."
    "I mean the… the dragons and things?"
    "Pretty, huh?"
    "What are they?"
    "You know what is it a hologram? They're projected from interference patterns off a very small, very low-powered laser. It's not complicated. But it looks impressive. They call them light-shields."
    "Oh." He glanced at his shoulder where Tak had dropped his hand. "I've heard of holograms."
    Tak led him out of the hidden niche of brush onto the concrete. A few yards down the path, in the direction the scorpions had come from, a lamp was working. They started in that direction.
    "Are there more of them around?"
    "Maybe." Tak's upper face was again masked. "Their light-shields don't really shield them from anything—other than our prying eyes, from the ones who want to walk around bare-assed. When I first got here, all you saw were scorpions. Then griffins and the other kinds started showing up a little while ago. But the genre name stuck." Tak slid his hands into his jean pockets. His jacket, joined at the bottom by the zipper fastener, rode up in front for non-existent breasts. Tak stared down at them as he walked. When he looked up, his smile had no eyes over it. "You forget people don't know about scorpions. About Calkins. They're famous here. Bellona's a big city; with something that famous in any other city in the country, why I guess people in L.A., Chicago, Pittsburgh, Washington would be dropping it all over the carpet at the in cocktail parties, huh? But they've forgotten we're here."
    "No. They haven't forgotten." Though he couldn't see Tak's eyes, he knew they had narrowed.
    "So they send in people who don't know their own name. Like you?"
    He laughed, sharply; it felt like a bark.
    Tak returned the hoarse sound that was his own laughter. "Oh, yeah! You're quite a kid." Laughter trailed on.
    "Where we going now?"
    But Tak lowered his chin, strode ahead.
    From this play of night, light, and leather, can I let myself take identity? How can I recreate this roasted park in some meaningful matrix? Equipped with contradictory visions, an ugly hand caged in pretty metal, I observe a new mechanique. I am the wild machinist, past destroyed, reconstructing the present.

4
     
     
    "Tak!" she called across the fire, rose, and shook back fire-colored hair. "Who'd you bring?" She swung around the cinderblock furnace and came on, a silhouette now, stepping over sleeping bags, blanket rolls, a lawn of reposing forms. Two glanced at her, then turned over. Two others snored at different pitches.
    A girl on a blanket, with no shirt and really nice breasts, stopped playing her harmonica, banged it on her palm for spit, and blew once more.
    The redhead rounded the harmonica player and seized Tak's cuff, close enough now to have a face again. "We haven't seen you in days! What happened? You used to come around for dinner practically every night. John was worried about you." It was a pretty face in half light.
    "I wasn't worried." A tall, long-haired man in a Peruvian vest walked over from the picnic table. "Tak comes. Tak goes. You know how Tak is." Around the miniature flames, reflected in his glasses, even in this light his tan suggested chemicals or sunlamps. His hair was pale and thin and looked as if day would show sun streaks. "You're closer to breakfast time than you are to dinner, right now." He—John?—tapped a rolled newspaper against his thigh.
    "Come on. Tell me, Tak." She smiled; her face wedged with deeper shadows. "Who have you brought John and me this time?" while John glanced up (twin flames slid off his lenses) for hints of dawn.
    Tak said: "This is the Kid."
    "Kit?" she asked.
    "Kid."
    "K-y-d-d…?"
    "- i -d."
    "…d," she added