ASTRID ALL AT ONCE FELT VERY DIZZY AND clumsy, and she fell again to her knees, right beside the banquet table of Flōt and champagnes and Stilton and foie gras, still naked from the waist down. And her heart seemed to be struggling to beat, as the gorilla’s was. Had the cultists somehow slipped her the fatal ingredients, too? she wondered. She did not have time to speculate—she soon found that the redoubtable Mason was by her side again.
“Can I help you up?” he asked, his lip quivering a bit.
“No,” she said. “Yes.”
And when with his arm he pulled her to her feet, for a moment her legs straddled his thigh, and a shudder of pleasure hit her, and she nearly pushed Mason back to the floor so that she could take him inside her.
He seemed to scramble for a few moments, as if twisting and weaseling away from her.
“Fuck,” she said. “For some reason . . . I’m really hot for you. I’m sorry. It’s . . .”
He pulled her to her feet, and she spun around. She looked all around herself.
“It’s OK,” he said. “I just—I’m kind of slow, you know? And you’re so . . . you’re beautiful. But there’s something going on with you.”
“He’s . . . left?” asked Astrid.
“Who?”
“The creepy cult man, holding the shot glasses.”
“Um, sure,” Mason said, in a way Astrid read as sure, whatever you say.
Astrid leaned hard against Mason, trying to calm herself, to still her body—but a big part of her remained like an unsocketed eye, looking everywhere helplessly, unable to move, stuck upon Mason. She wondered if this helpless nakedness, this abject dependency on the animal warmth of another, was somehow a sign that she had indeed cleared the last hurdle of the second withdrawal, and that a new life could unfold from here. She hated the feeling of need. She longed to be the otter queen again, with legs as big and hard as the trunks of oak trees and a mind as big as the sky.
“You saw him?” asked Astrid.
Mason just smiled at her and said, “We need to get you some trousers.” In his own buttoned-down and overly competent way, he felt oddly liberated, too. The loop d’loopers in matching white had taken the night into realms beyond the diplomatic service. Questions swarmed his mind: Was America also under attack? Had he been drugged? Was he somehow mentally ill? Was he alive? He didn’t see a way that the events of the night would not leave his outlook forever altered. But delusions or not, drugs or not, live or dead—he, for one, wasn’t going to let an obviously suffering woman walk around half-naked in the chancery without getting her some clothes.
He opened Suleiman’s giant bag and dug out a pair of ancient, tattered Phineas and Ferb pajama bottoms. They must have been half a century old. Astrid jumped into them gladly.
“Now,” said Mason. “I want to see about the animals.”
“Come with me,” Astrid said to Suleiman and Mason. “Let’s try to move them into the center of the square. We need to move away from here.”
At that moment, not far beyond the trees west of Grosvenor, and growing closer and closer, there arose again the chilling noise Astrid had heard earlier, like a phalanx of holy dragons, puffing purgatorial fires and spitting sizzling golden bolts.
“Jesus,” said Mason. “Let’s go. That doesn’t sound like it wants to be our friend.”
“But my visa,” Suleiman said.
“You’ll get the visa,” said Mason. “We can’t stay here.”
The three of them began to move down the chancery steps and into the crowded square. The elephant Layang was raging again, bucking up and screaming. Help me, the elephant said to Astrid. Take me to a warm country. As Astrid moved toward her, the elephant almost instantly settled down.
Astrid looked back toward Mason and Suleiman. “Oh my god,” she said. “I just heard—I heard the elephant, speaking to me.”
Mason said, “Oh boy.”
Astrid didn’t get to enjoy her new interspecies linguistic skill. When she saw some of the Neuters’ faces now, a new horror hit her: all of them seemed to have become Marshall Applewhite. All wore the same blue-eyed, thick-browed look of happy, gelded contempt for her.
“He’s going to kill me,” she said. “He’ll try to kill all of us. We need to go!”
An old-tech gunshot cracked out from the crowd and Layang the elephant dropped into a gray heap beside Astrid, with a thud so powerful the trees of the square rustled and windows rattled. Mason and Suleiman felt it in their knees. The shot seemed to have come from a tumult of rowdy Indigents, but it was hard to tell. The animal’s death was instant and monumentally total. No limbs quivered, no ears twitched.
“No!” cried Mason, running toward Astrid and the elephant. “Goddamnit, no!”