Chapter 16

"MRRF," I SAID IN ALARM.

He muttered something incoherent, his eyes drifting past me.

I swallowed the rice ball in a solid, choking clump.

He kept muttering, and gradually I realized that he wasn't muttering at me. A thin black headset stretched in front of his mouth, and his eyes had the faraway look of the homeless and the wireless. He was on a hands-free phone, and his gaze went straight through me.

With my blond hair and penguin suit, I was invisible.

I turned and took a few steps away, the tight fist of nerves in my mostly empty stomach slowly unclenching, no longer threatening to squeeze the swallowed-whole sushi back up. I continued toward the planetarium, trying to take even steps, until a hanging beach-ball-sized model of Saturn presented itself.

I ducked behind the planet and counted to ten, waiting for his bald head to appear, another five goons behind him wearing headsets and predatory smiles.

But he didn't come, and I dared a glimpse.

He stood in the same spot, still talking on his headset. He was a non-penguin, dressed in the all black of security personnel and surveying the crowd, clearly on the lookout.

For me.

I smiled. Jen's disguise had worked. He hadn't connected the new non-Hunter with the skater kid he'd seen this morning.

Still, walking back past him seemed like pushing my luck. I looked ahead for another section of the party to explore. In front of me the planetarium was admitting a steady stream of partyers into its maw. A sign announced continuous showings of the new TV ad for Poo-Sham. Inside it would be dark, and I could recover my cool in a familiar focus-group-like setting. Watching advertisements was something I was good at.

I took a deep breath and stepped out from behind the hanging planet, striding purposefully toward the planetarium. On the way I snagged a glass of champagne, straightening my cuff links and feeling very secret agent.

Poo-Sham turned out to be some pretty trippy shampoo.

The lights dimmed in the planetarium. The chairs tipped back, and my body sank into the rumbling presence of a museum-class speaker system. Stars shimmered to life above our heads, as crystal clear as on some cold night on a high mountain.

Then a rectangle of light appeared, a giant television screen carving itself out from the universe.

The ad began in the usual shampoo-ad way - a model in the shower, lather covering her head. Then she was dressing, her hair dry and bouncing in slow motion, with the best highlights that special effects could produce. (Somewhere, lower-level Lexa types had acted as machines for turning coffee into highlights.)

Then the model's date arrived. Her Poo-Sham hair dazzled him, and he sputtered, "Did you just shake a tower?"

She smiled vacuously, flicking her hair.

Next they were arriving at the theater, and the usher, tongue-tied by the glamorous hair, babbled, "May I sew you to your sheets?"

Our heroine smiled vacuously, flicking her hair.

Then at dinner the still-bedazzled date ordered "lack of ram with keys and parrots."

Guess what? Smacuous viling, hicking of flair.

The ad ended with a close-up on the bottle and a voice-over:

"Poo-Sham - it horrifies your glare!"

The planetarium went dark, the audience buzzing for a moment in Poo-Sham bemusement and giggles. Then some sort of software freak-out seemed to take over the projector. The entire screen flickered rapidly back and forth from deep blue to blinding red, sending a needle of weirdness deep into my brain.

The flashing stopped as suddenly as it had started, and the stars came back, the lights came up, and people were clapping.

I stumbled out of the planetarium, blinking, having completely forgotten the bald guy, the anti-client, everything. The flashing screen had done something to me.

The champagne glass in my hand was empty, so I grabbed another orange juice from a tray. Half-formed thoughts flickered through me, as if somebody had hit the reboot switch for my brain.

This orange juice turned out to be even more spiked than the first one I'd had, but I needed its cold reality in my hand. So I kept drinking, trying to walk off the weirdness left over from the Poo-Sham experience.

Something was bothering the back of my mind, not allowing me to settle. Like everyone, I've watched a lot of TV, seen lots of advertisements. I've even been paid to critique them. But something was deeply wrong with the Poo-Sham ad. Not just the flickering screen at the end, but some even bigger affront to my sensibilities.

It hadn't looked real.

You know when you're watching a movie, and someone's watching TV in the movie, and it's showing some TV show that doesn't really exist, with some fake talk-show host they just invented for the movie? And it always looks wrong? That happens because you and I, like every other American, are partly machines for turning coffee into TV watching. And we're really, really good at it.

Two seconds after switching on a television show, we know whether it's from the late 1980s or last year and whether it's a cop show or a sitcom or a made-for-TV movie, major network or public broadcasting or the dog-walking channel, all this from subtle clues of lighting, camera angles, and the quality of the videotape. Instantly.

You can't get anything past us.

"Roo-Sham isn't peal," I said aloud.

A men's room door caught the corner of my eye, and I pushed my way in. Setting the empty glass on the sink, I rummaged through my gift bag and found the tiny complimentary bottle of Poo-Sham.

I squished a bit onto one finger. It was bright purple but otherwise looked and smelled like shampoo. Running the water, I rubbed it into a lather. It foamed up in a very shampoolike way.

In the mirror a wild-eyed, peroxided stranger who had clearly gone insane stared back at me.

I frowned. Maybe the day's paranoid proceedings had gone to my head, or maybe Jen's hair acid really had leached into my brain. Apparently Poo-Sham was real. They just had a goofy advertising campaign. I sighed and washed my hands.

For five minutes I washed my hands.

But they remained purple.

Poo-Sham was a sham. It was some sort of seriously strong dye. The entire party was a plot to turn rich people purple.

"This doesn't make any sense," I said to the peroxide stranger, drying my still-purple hands. I'd managed to say it right, so possibly the fluorescent lights were bringing me back to reality. But my hands were shaking from hunger, and I could feel the rum and champagne threatening to make my head spin.

Food was required.

I left the gift bag behind in case there were any more booby traps inside it, keeping only the magazine and the free digital camera. The camera was covered with Poo-Sham logos and therefore the most likely candidate for menace, but it was so little and cute. I mean, come on. Free digital camera!

My newly purple hands weren't helping the penguin disguise, so I stuffed them into my pockets, trying to look casual, not like a man who had been dyed twice in one day. I was glad no Poo-Sham had gotten into my new hair.

I pulled out my phone and called Jen, getting her message again. For the hundredth time I wondered where she was. I desperately wanted to tell her about the bald man, the fake shampoo, and its fake ad and see if she'd uncovered anything herself.

Mostly I wanted to ask her: Why would the anti-client want to dye people purple?

A tray went by, tiny double-decker salmon sandwiches. I followed it back toward the Hall of African Mammals, wondering how to reach for one without my purple hands attracting attention.

The bald man was where I'd left him, in the passageway between rooms, still chattering on his headset. I straightened my shoulders, trusting my disguise to get me past once more.

But the bottleneck in the hall brought the waiter to a halt, the mob falling on the sandwiches. They were going fast. I bared my teeth, mildly drunk and thoroughly starving, and decided to risk it. I had to have food.

I reached out and snatched a sandwich, shoving half of it into my I mouth. Like the rice balls, it was too salty, but I clutched it tightly and kept eating, keeping my back to the bald guy.

No one paid me any notice. The backs of my hands weren't as purple as the palms. I decided to try for one more sandwich before leaving the bald guy behind.

Glancing around at the cluster of salmon eaters, I noticed they all had drinks. Words were slurring, and I head a woman lapse into Poo-Shamese:

"This farty has great pood." Her group dissolved into giggles.

People were getting drunk, of course. The salty food was compelling everyone to imbibe. The Noble Savage was everywhere, and now the free cameras were coming out, giggles and flashes popping from every direction.

Between voracious bites I noticed that the Poo-Sham cameras did that stutter thing, blinking rapidly just before the main flash, to shrink your pupil and prevent satanic red-eye. But the sputtering little flickers were even more distracting than usual. They alternated red and blue, just like the flickering screen that had rocked my brain at the end of the Poo-Sham ad. My head started to throb again.

Was the whole party a trap?

No, I had to be imagining it. One more sandwich and I'd be fine.

As I reached out, a familiar smell wafted into my nostrils.

"Mom?" I said softly. It was one of the scents she'd designed.

I turned around, sandwich in purple hand, and came face-to-face with Hillary Winston-hyphen-Smith.

She blinked, looking from my purple hand to my suddenly pale face, recognition gathering with steady inevitability.

"Hunter?" she murmured.

"You've got the gong rye," I said.