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wasn’t pretty. Even the vets looked more mangled, more in need of repair. As Joe walked, the hungry, gleaming stares of women followed him across the pavement. Most were subtle: a slyly cocked head, an eager smile, but a few of the older ones—women who sparked the moment their shining eyes spotted a male gait—called after him.
    “What’s your name? Where you headed to?”
    Joe kept his head down. None of it was personal. They were calling after ghosts, mostly: husbands or boyfriends who were gone, their bodies decaying in the soil of the jungle.
    Finally Joe spotted the Millhouse. On the side of an old motel next to the coffee shop was a large billboard: “Point Them Out”the letters demanded. No one knew what actually happened when you called the Point Line on someone, only that if that someone was on shaky status with the Registry, once the Point Line had the person’s name, that was it. Poof! Top of the pile, and then you were gone. Pointed.
    “Spare Currencies?”
    An unpleasant voice hoisted up from the sidewalk below. Joe paused to look at its owner, a man sitting there with his shaved head exposing a lacerated scalp. Newly returned from the jungle, probably just a year or two older than Benny or me, Joe thought. A red cleft adorned the right side of his head, an injury that looked pretty bad until Joe’s eyes spotted the man’s feet. One leg had been poorly amputated, and the skin of the nub was badly infected.
    Joe shook his head. “Sorry.”
    “I don’t need your sorrow,” the vet said. “I need some Currencies.”
    Joe took a breath and pushed his way into the coffee shop.
    There at the counter was Benny, asking for a free refill. All the blood in Joe’s body crowded into his face. To Benny, he could have said a million things.
    Benny spoke first. “Oh, wow.” His voice was a chilly reminder of the distance between them.
    But there were other problems, too, Joe saw, much more obvious ones than Benny’s stormy inner weather. To begin with, Benny’s face didn’t look good. Scabs marked its surface, and he needed a splash of water. Joe absorbed the expression of his oldest friend and felt a sad shudder within. No, Benny was not excited to see him. Never in the same way. Young Savior help me, he thought. But that phrase was automatic, and Joe pushed it out of his mind, too. The Young Savior had never helped him with anything.
    “What do you mean, ‘oh, wow’?” he asked Benny. “I waited for you. At the Unicorn. We were supposed to meet this morning. Where were you?”
    “Long story.” Benny shook his head. “Just got some free coffee, though.” A wide smile appeared on his face, and in a flash the scabby version perished and the old Benny came into sight, the one that gave Joe a route, a course. Here was the Benny he had been missing.
    They angled themselves toward an empty table. Neither had any money for food, but judging from the scattered plates abandoned on almost every surface, their poor finances were probably for the best. Even the panhandling vet outside would have rejected this stuff: spotted eggs boiled for so long their yolks were covered with a sick green film, bowls of damp figs with a rotten mold smell, old bread, sour yogurts.
    “Yeah, sorry I didn’t show,” Benny said, taking a seat. An unseen force pushed his eyelids down and hooded his pinhole pupils. He looked around more than Joe thought necessary.
    “Why are you over here? We never come here.”
    Benny shrugged his shoulders. He was dressed in the exact same clothes he had been wearing when they had said good-bye last week, only now they hung off his frame as though the dirt had stretched the fabric loose.
    “So according to our greetings,” Benny said, “we’ve got four days.” Reaching in his pocket, he came out with a crumpled letter.
    “Our greetings?” Joe looked at the paper. There was no runaround like on some of the forms. In bold letters at the top of the paper, this one said exactly what it