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“We’re here, we have the area surrounded. Which door are you coming out of?”

“There should be one to the…to the south. You should see a bunch of tribal generals coming out now.” The General fell in at the very end of the line, taking his time and hoping that no one noticed. His men reported back; they couldn’t
see anyone
. The General checked his own GPS, but it wasn’t working inside.

“Hold on, I’m coming to you,” he said as he looked out the door. He held the new gun close, expecting that the other tribal leaders had also recognized the ambush opportunity. But what met his eyes was completely surprising. He wasn’t coming up from underground at all. In fact, he wasn’t anywhere near the café. He found himself looking down from a small building that he recognized as across the street and much further to the east of where he thought he was. He was just below the mist, overlooking several boxed flower gardens and standing next to a stairway going down to the street level. His GPS came online and confirmed how far he had travelled.

“Everyone, I am
not
near the café. I didn’t come out there. You need to move east…” But before he could finish calling his real position, a minor leader from some tribe he didn’t know pushed
back
passed him and tried to enter the door that had been shut behind them. In a
moment
, the General saw why. A sizeable Ahtzon patrol was closing in from one side of the street. Several tribal leaders were retreating and trying to return fire, but the patrol was advancing inexorably. They would overtake his position soon.

“Ahtzon coming in heavy on the east side of the street. I need back-up!” he yelled into his headset as he also backed up the stairway. He quickly assessed his options. Going down the stairs would just put him in the middle of the firefight. The railing in front of him led nowhere.

“Killer, I’m a sitting duck, you need to get here—”

“You’re too far away, Stud! There are all these freaking tourists!”

Something whizzed past his head, a
nd the General turned to see tha
t he’d been noticed by the Ahtzon. The other leader fell off the stairway to the ground below. Another shot, and bullets struck the General in the right arm, knocking his gun over the railing and rendering his arm useless. He jumped over the railing and steadied himself on a window box. Another quick jump and he was on a roof, running at an angle and trying to find a way up and over the buildings. There was none. A narrow alleyway, partially hidden, branched off below. It seemed like his only chance. With a risky jump, he awkwardly maneuvered around stone and windows and ungracefully fell down into the corridor. But it was a mistake. The alleyway was a dead end. He turned around and noticed two Ahtzon guards closing in. There were
no exits, no doors, no windows,
not even any convenient tourists to
use
as human shields. He was cornered.

They had him
.
The warning light in his head-up display indicated that he couldn’t jump out of the city—no one could leave without automatically dying once they were marked by the Ahtzon.
He was General Studblood; if he was to die, he would die fighting.
He turned low and away in a desperate attempt to duck, then he rolled forward and up to go out with a ferocious,
possibly
suicidal pounce.

Guns fired as the General landed, and then a voice. “Stud! Yo, Stud!” The General opened his eyes
wide
, stunned to see Lazaro in front of him with the two Ahtzon dead at his feet. “C’mon, Stud, there are more coming!” They snapped back into action, firing behind as they ran down the sidewalk and ducked around to safety behind a cluster of vendor stands.

“So,” said Lazaro as the General looked back. “This will be fun to talk about at my party.” The General sighed heavily and wondered if he should have just taken the bullets.

*
             
*
             
*
             
*

At one point during Perry’s drive that night, he realized that he couldn’t remember Lazaro’s real name. He hoped that wouldn’t be a problem.

There were lots of reasons for him not to go. For one, he was
too old for th
is
kind of stuff. He would certainly be older than any of Lazaro’s friends—not to mention more mature, not to mention more sane. He didn’t like parties. He especially didn’t like parties late at night when he could be doing other things, like sleeping or shooting something in Kaah Mukul or anything else in the world. He absolutely hated small talk. He couldn’t even remember what people were supposed to wear to parties, and he’d settled, after a few minutes of half-hearted worry, on a Hawaiian shirt and some wrinkled khakis. But trumping all of these complaints was the knowledge that a good leader always supported his people, and a good leader always kept his word. It was about trust. He’d already said he would go, so he had to go. But he never said he wouldn’t leave as soon as possible.

Both sides of the suburban street were lined with cars by the time Perry arrived. He took his time finding a parking spot, and then he took his time sitting in a silent car, mentally preparing to go in. Even from a full block away, he could hear the music. The neighbors could, too—he saw one man on his porch talking on the phone and gesturing down the street.
A good leader always keeps his word,
he repeated to himself like a mantra. Finally he sighed heavily and counted:

3…2…1…

Time to go in.

The basement entrance to the party was around the back of the house, the way marked by a paper sign with an arrow that was utterly unnecessary
,
given the throbbing music and shifting slivers of strobe lights that spilled into the yard. The screen door opened to a staircase that descended into the thick of the fray. Perry took a deep breath of air that consisted of a dizzying blend of smoke, alcohol, and something vaguely like the smell of a public pool, and he descended.
Just ten minutes
,
he decided.

Pausing at the bottom of the stairs, Perry found himself looking into a kitchen area, the counters covered with bottles and chip bags. A tall woman dressed in black was leaning against the counter, looking like she’d had too good a time already. She waved at Perry unsteadily and tossed him a bottle of beer,
then
gestured him on to the living room with a sick but evocative grin.

The living room was crammed with people lined shoulder-to-
shoulder along three of the walls. It was hot, and the floor was pulsating with such loud music that screams and gestures were the only viable forms of communication. Everyone’s attention was focused on a free-standing bath tub along the fourth wall that was filled with water and topped with bobbing pink and yellow marshmallow chicks floating on rafts made of plastic bowls. In the middle of the room, Lazaro was
showing a girl how to operate a
cannon made of PVC pipe and a compressed air cylinder. She closed her eyes, pulled the trigger, and squealed as the cannon popped. Perry squinted at a fantastic burst of light, then squinted again at the bath-tub which now had a new chocolate smear on it. A chick was floating sideways in the water in a mess of sugary carnage, and the girl was kissing Lazaro passionately.

This was too much for Perry, and he wanted to run back up and away from noise and lights and people and chaos. But he felt transfixed by the scene, as though he w
ere
pinned to his spot in the doorway and everything was taking place in slow-motion. He stood for a few minutes against his own will before ditching his unopened bottle on the floor and moving out of the room. When he reached the top of the stairs, he was relieved to see Killergremlin about to go down.

“You don’t want to go in there,” said Perry.

“It’s bad?”

“Oh, yeah, it’s bad.”

Killergremlin grinned and ran downstairs to see for himself. In a few minutes he was back, holding two beers and looking shocked.

“That is bad,” he said.

“Told you.”

In one corner of the back patio was a table and a few tattered lawn chairs. They sat down together, listening to the sporadic sounds of merry insanity over beats. The street lamps illuminated the night with a benign yellow glow.

“So, what are we going to do about this Mascaab thing?” asked Killergremlin.

“I have no idea,” said Perry, turning toward him. “It definitely isn’t legal, but having constant recruits, new weapons, constant funds? That’s all stuff we could use. I don’t know.”

“How many other tribes do you think will join?”

“I don’t know.”

“Scarmada?”

Perry nodded as he drank. “I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re already in on it somehow. You should have seen their leader shoot that Ahtzon right in the head. He wants this for sure.”

“So
does that mean we need to be in it?” asked Killergremlin.

Perry resorted to his usual response. “Or we need to be against it. I don’t know. I’ll figure it out.” A good leader exercised caution when making big decisions.

They heard more screaming than usual coming from downstairs, but they ignored it.

“You know what that thing is with the tub?” Perry asked.

“Yeah, I found out when I was down there. You have to hit two chicks, one yellow, one pink, with your girlfriend or significant other or whatever. If you get both, that’s a good sign for your fertility that year.”

“Um, it’s a little creepy that he actually believes that.”

“No,” said Killergremlin. “What’s creepy is that he’s only doing it this way because he couldn’t find live chicks.”

A pair of laughing teens came up the stairs and disappeared around the side of the house. Perry noticed one of them wearing a pair of thick golden earrings. It was hard to see, but they looked like a trendy style invented in Kaah Mukul.

“Reality imitates art,” he remarked to himself as he took a drink.

“Huh?”

“Nothing, I was, I was just thinking about something that Myung-Ki Noh said in this interview I saw this morning. He was saying that Kaah Mukul was becoming so real to people that stuff that happened in the city would start to happen in real life, that the line would blur. I think he was talking about, maybe, like, things that were invented in the city could be useful in real life. I don’t know. It just popped into my head just now.” He shifted in his chair.

Killergremlin shrugged and took a swig. “You think that happens?”

“What?”

“Stuff in the city becoming real.”

“Maybe. I guess that’s why so many people like Ullamaball, because it’s like a real thing to them. Why?”

“Well…” thought Killergremlin.
“Well, just say this, and I’m just speaking like, hypothetically. What if it got so real down there that events that happened down there actually started to happen out here?”

“How would that happen?”

“I’m just saying, hypothetically.”

“It’s a pretty stupid hypothetical.”

“Listen, listen. You go in
to Kaah Mukul. You’re the same person
there
that you are in reality, up here, so even though everything you do down there isn’t like reality, you still think like you. It’s like dreaming, where even though everything is weird, it’s still you, and that’s why sometimes things in life come out like your dreams. And vice versa.”

Perry laughed. “If my real life were anything like my dreams, I wouldn’t be on a lawn chair in Lazaro’s backyard with you trying to avoid a party of lunatic Peeps worshipers.”

“I’m serious!” said Killergremlin, who felt like he was on to something. “Take what you told me about today. You went to the café and you went down these stairs, right? And it was dark and weird, and, um, there was water there! And people shot guys in the water, right? And there was a woman dressed in black, Tula. And Lazaro was there with a gun. Now—I’m just thinking about this—now here you are, you’re at a place and you go down these stairs to someplace dark and weird, and there’s that hot woman in black down there, you saw her? And they’re shooting stuff in the water…” His voice trailed off as he realized how it all sounded. “Never mind, that’s ridiculous.”

“Uh, yeah,” Perry said with a smirk. “If life were actually like a mirror of Kaah Mukul, it would be terrible. I mean, don’t get me wrong. I love KM. I think it’s actually better than reality sometimes. But it could never be reality. This morning, in the story you’re using as an example, I ended up getting shot in the arm and my safety depended on Lazaro having good aim. Can you imagine if that were our lives? Not only would we not survive very long, but it wouldn’t be fun, either. No, what happens in the city should stay in
the city, I don’t care if it’s art or not.”

Killergremlin was well past his first bottle and began to argue for argument’s sake. “Look, that’s not what I meant to say. I’m not saying that everything that happens is the same. I’m saying that people act the same down there as they act up here, so things that happen down there
could
happen up here. It’s retarded to think that the exact same things…” They heard
the
decisive click of a car door closing and looked up to see two police officers walking
toward
the house.