Kettlewell snapped a nod at her. "Right as ever, darling. OK, I apologize, all right?" "Me too," Lester said. "I was kidding about going to Brazil -- at least while Perry's still away." "He's coming home," Tjan said. "He called me this morning. He's bringing the girl, too." "Yoko!" Lester said, and grinned. "OK, someone should get online and find out how all the other rides are coping with this. I'm sure they're going nutso out there." "You do that," Kettlewell said. "We've got another call with the lawyers in ten minutes." "How's all that going?" "Let me put it this way," Kettlewell said, and for a second he was back in his glory days, slick and formidable, a shark. "I liquidated my shares in Disney this morning. They're down fifty points since the NYSE opened. You wait until Tokyo wakes up, they're going to bail and bail and bail." Lester smiled back. "OK, well that's good, then." He hunkered down with a laptop and got his homebrew wireless rig up and running -- a card would have been cheaper, but his rig gave him lots of robustness against malicious interference, multi-path and plain old attenuation -- and got his headline reader running. He set to reading the posts and dispelling the popups that tried to call his attention to this or that. His filters had lots to tell him about, and the areas of his screen designated for different interests were starting to pinken as they accumulated greater urgency. He waved them away and concentrated on getting through to all the ride-maintainers who had questions about his patches. But there was one pink area that wouldn't go. It was his serendipity zone, where things that didn't match his filters but had lots of interestingness -- comments and reposts from people he paid attention to -- and some confluence with his keywords turned up. Impatiently, he waved it up, and a page made of bits of LiveJournals and news reports and photo-streams assembled itself. His eye fell first on the photos. But for the shock of black and neon green hair, he wouldn't have recognized the kid in the pictures as Death Waits. His face was a ruin. His nose was a bloody rose, his eyes were both swollen shut. One ear was ruined -- apparently he'd been dragged some distance with that side of his head on the ground. His cheeks were pulpy and bruised. Then he clicked through to the photos from where they'd found Death, before they'd cleaned him up in the ambulance, and he had to turn his head away and breathe deeply. Both legs and both arms were clearly broken, with at least one compound fracture. His crotch -- Jesus. Lester looked away again, then quickly closed the window. He switched to text accounts from Death's friends who'd been to see him in the hospital. He would live, but he might not walk again. He was lucid, and he was telling stories about the man who'd beaten him -- *You should just shut the fuck up about Disney on the fucking Internet, you know that, kid?*