warnings for: gratuitous hunter s. thompson, pretentiousness, hasty writing, and being 5,000 words of zero making out. what can i say? some posts just exist to make you hate yourself, and this is definitely one of them.

*

Turns out Vegas glamour isn't quite what it's cracked up to be.

They wind up at the neon museum in the morning after: tottering together down the narrow lane with their heads sunk low as shadows, scraping up dust in white-smudged loafers. The boneyard lanes are quiet, all discarded lights and old casino signs in heaps, a dyslexic riot of bulbs and burnt circuits. GIRLS! shouts one sign with rusting sincerity. Past its jolting corner, STARLIGHT tilts in red coils and curves against a fallen duck, its eyes spiraling with wires, beak drawn in a sidelong slavering smile. The desert sky burns with the kind of stripped light that Tokyo, at least, would've been ashamed to let flash through its bustle and tarnished towers: blue as gas jets, as radiation, naked and inviolable and obscene.

If he thinks too hard, Izumo can actually feel fire filming over the backs of his eyes.

Something soft impacts his shoulder. Through yesterday's crumpled shirt, he registers a long-lashed blink; then his companion presses harder into the curve, enough to feel the snub of a nose, the helpless goldfish mouth.

A tiny hangdog moan bubbles between them.

Izumo thinks of all the things that he would've liked to hear after his first hangover, and weighs up such comforts against Totsuka Tatara's existence. "Just so's you know," he says, briskly tender, "I'm still not holding your hair back when you throw up."

"Wasn't that the idea behind the walk?" The question frays: a thread, a wisp, a silkworm's dream. A slow hand clasps his temple; his light-touched brows tighten with the pull of a breath. "Mm. The ticket-seller said that everyone who came out of this place left hangover-free! Shouldn't—" He stumbles, but Izumo's caught his elbow midstep: they steady together. "Shouldn't that kick in sometime soon?"

Izumo, whose English can actually handle full sentences, says, "Kill-or-cure, he said. Pretty sure that everybody walks out of this place with no hangover 'cause the weak die on the way."

"Ah," Totsuka says. He drags up a woe-cracked smile. "That's good."

He pulls free and collapses at once, a weary spill of migraine across the pale earth.

"Totsuka!"

"That was it," Totsuka says. "My very last step. There's no more left in me: I'm at rest in the afterlife now. Ah, I should've known that America was too strange to belong to the mortal world. A land where they drive everywhere! And put coffeeshops on each corner! Where some people have never been through an earthquake drill, not once in all their lives!"

The signs hang still, the torn-down leavings of a hundred boulevards risen to new life in this vintage forest. Through their metallic silence, the aching sun beats on.

Izumo toes his ribs. "Real life callin'," he sighs, "your number's up. Time to take that resurrection."

"It's too late—I already know the truth." He settles his cheek to the comfortable grit; light winks over his knuckles as he waves. Trust Totsuka to milk a hangover for all the pageantry he can. "None of this is real anymore."

"If this weren't real, I'd be in bed right now, making good use of the hotel mattress."

"Last night, I met a tattooist at the pachinko table who told me that she'd met Elvis, but that she's never eaten rice before. Not even once! Do you think that would happen to a real person?"

"You happen to real people," Izumo says, and Totsuka turns his head up with a wrung-out moue.

"That's so mean, Kusanagi-san." But light tips the edge of a near-felt smile, a ghost of his usual coltish parade. "How will you ever find someone to marry you if you're always talking like an old man?"

"Right. Imagine me having to run the bar by myself. Just me and two useless brats, watching seven other kids and paying all my own bills. The horror, the horror."

This is the wrong thing to say. Totsuka's waving hand topples. His head rears up, only to plant back down into a thud. "You said that too convincingly," he says. Sorrow trembles in every word like another heart; the effect's just a little spoiled by being mumbled into dirt. "I can definitely, truly, and absolutely feel horror rising at the back of my throat again."

By nature a kind man, a sensible man, Izumo crouches—suspends his balance and clean slacks above the dirt where countless tourists have trodden, spat their tobacco, dripped sweat and ice cream. He presses a gentling touch to Totsuka's nape, smoothes the pearled, warming skin, the first prickles of vertebrae. "C'mon," he says instead. "What kind of honeymoon's it gonna be if you spend the whole day crawling?"

With slow, straining effort, Totsuka sprawls himself onto his back; he shakes away the bright netting that rolling's made of his hair, tries to wink. "You could come down here with me."

Izumo stares back. "Yeah, sure," he says. "Maybe if you weren't still talking about throwing up."

Totsuka sighs, short and gusty. "At least it'll make a good story later..."

"The story of how the only two adults on this trip got drunk off of Grey Goose and free cocktails, lost my glasses to a bet, danced in the dancing fountains, got banned from our first hotel, basically terrorised our way into hotel number two, wound up at a bowling alley where one of us almost set a bowling ball on fire, made it up to the drag queens who run the place, got married by one of the queens, and still woke up with all our internal organs. And with a goat, who's probably still bullying Yata-chan right now. That story?"

Totsuka smooths down his face, forehead to cheek to jaw. The ring's still gleaming stark on his left hand, thin copper with a dangling gem. One of a pair. "It really was a miracle, wasn't it?" His eye skids over a gnarled heap of corroded letters; a blurry smile crests, nostalgic. "Honestly, though—we should've tried harder to take pictures. Do you think we should go back and ask Marge-san for the security footage?"

Izumo stares into the distance. FCUK OY, a chintzy plastic-hewn board blares from across the way. He can empathise with that.

"Some days," he says, "I really wonder if there was some point in my life where I should've asked for the red pill."

*

In a twist of fate fit to offend alcoholics everywhere, Totsuka recovers remarkably—or maybe, Izumo thinks with his own private dry edge, it's that his body can't stand his complaints either. Within the hour they're at the gates, hailing a taxi headed by a driver with heavy knuckles and a white grin. Sliding in, Totsuka chirps out a street's name and they're off, chattering to bits of radio songs and what turns out to be a shared Tswana dialect that Totsuka once studied for three months. Sun floods the windows, bleaches out the finer lines at his brow, his jaw, illuminates his conductor's fingers through their wing-quick splaying.

Izumo settles back for the ride.

Las Vegas! A name that deserves its exclamation. Out of all the American pitstops, it stands as perhaps the least representative of its country: lacking New York's ever-lost temper, Washington D.C.'s glittering politics, the bawdy grace and lavish appetites of New Orleans. And yet it holds its own: an inevitable contender clawing at second-first-third place on any worthwhile list of American cities. A spendthrift mirage preening on foundations of neon tubing and corrosion, all boxing gloves and feather boas—an ouroboros of a city, so knotted in on itself that it doesn't so much fade at the outskirts as unravel, neon to daylight and dust to dust.

Outside the tourist's stately pleasure-dome, broad-nosed cars sag in the grime; half-tended high-rise buildings loiter with their windows shuttered, half-tende. The roads out of the city stretch wide as a dealer's opening offer, and ahead the grey crest of faraway hills, a landscape with all its colors bled out. Once, they'd written, you could strike sparks anywhere on this coast. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning, riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave...

But that was then. Now you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

They get out at the edge of the emptiness where dust grits into the finer sift that comes before sand. The driver tilts a pale side-eye at each of them; but he shrugs his shoulders and slides his tinted glasses up his horse's nose. The car wheels around with a greasy screech and goes sputtering away.

Izumo watches their last opportunity for a sensible day vanishing into the powdered ether. "So," he says, "this enough of a walking tour for you and that throbbing guest in your head yet?"

But Totsuka's already striding off, loafers flashing like fireflies. "Come on, come on! They say you have to try new things when you're on your honeymoon!"

"New things you figure you might like. Sane human beings only head out into the desert to make drugs or dump bodies."

"Hah!" One arm punches up, a solitary splinter of human defiance against the empty sky. Izumo doesn't sigh, for fear of what he might inhale in this pollenated drought, and follows. "That's the talk of a city slicker, you know."

"Whereas you're just waiting for the first opportunity to pick up a sugegasa hat and a rake for that rice paddy."

He comes level with Totsuka's stride—gets, for his troubles, a dazzling snap-flash smile: like a camera going off, powder and film, the starlet inexorable. "I did grow a tomato in a pot once," he says. "And I've eaten weeds—mm, at least a few times before."

"I just bet you did," Izumo says, above the familiar seething knot in his ribcage for the bare smiles and empty wallets that had built Totsuka Tatara. "But not in the last decade, and we're keeping it that way. That's including that moss cake recipe you bookmarked back home."

"Eh? Moss? What moss—"

Ignoring this champion effort at denial, Izumo keeps walking; his long steps beat out Totsuka's as he follows the swing of the road up the nearest dune. But Totsuka darts up on his own hummingbird speed. Fingers snag through his sleeve, quick and sharp enough to feel the stitchery of his nails through cloth, the buzzing warmth like sparks, fingertips to wrist.

Then he's past and spinning around, arms whirling akimbo as he clambers up the hill. A dancer's mannerisms, all artless arrangement. "You can't take all the fun out of everything, Kusanagi-san!"

But another sound snags his attention out of frame. At the top of the stony crest, he stoops—then gestures, three flicks quick as spinning clay for Izumo to follow. "Come, come, come—quick! We've found it!"

Izumo goes, goes, goes, obedient in every plodding step. Below, milling in listless waves, there's—

"Sheep," he says. "Desert... sheep."

"Someone told me last night that they're always all over the roads," Totsuka whispers, hushed and beaming. Together they watch a cluster of horns and stringy coats totter around on matchstick legs. One wandering lump strays just far enough to jaw up a blade of grass, with the sullen yellow-eyed tedium peculiar to the animal kingdom. "They're really a nuisance for the drivers, but I guess they were here first. I'm not sure how they survive the heat, but they do! Isn't it amazing?"

Izumo looks down at the bent bright head, the eager crane of his throat down the slope and the sweat that gilds its edge. "Oh yeah," he says, and hates himself. "Something here sure is."

The rest of their chatter suspends in light of ticking their tourist's checkbox. Totsuka lopes off to test for better angles, perching on rock after rock with nimble heels, an artist's eye, and a convenience-store camera. Izumo meanders back down the slope. Like most urban men, he feels a deep suspicion of the outdoors and its green-riddled ability to swallow cell service. The idea that Las Vegas itself might ebb again beneath some spiteful sweep of sand and stone ridges isn't beyond imagining.

He's about halfway down the road again when a deliberate push drags down the base of his spine, dredging up fresh twinges and static. There's something to be said about a man who sees a playground of cacti and shaggy wildlife, and chooses that particular moment to start flirting.

He keeps walking.

The next nudge comes a little more firmly, with a warm puff skirting the gap between shirt and belt.

"Totsuka," he says, and jerks around.

From waist-height, a beast lows like a foghorn. Its fringed skull sways; light flickers from beneath the heavy eyelids, a beleaguered gold-eyed malice.

Slower, all deliberacy, its jaws stretch up in a yellowing grin.

"Kusanagi-san?" Too late, Totsuka crops up from a higher dune. "Ah," he said. "I wouldn't move just yet. One of the natives told me that some of the local wildlife feed... on the sheep..."

In desperate times, the mind saturates with thoughts—as if anything slower than base caveman reflex's gotten the species to survive. Izumo thinks about karma—about his aura—then, inexorably, about the hangover still massing behind his brows, and for that matter, the odds that heat could weaken something that lurked in the desert, feeding off of massive things with horns.

"They call them chupacabras! Maybe!"

The beast paws the ground; its horns sink. In the rising desert light, Izumo feels its eyes flare.

"I," Totsuka says. "You might want to run now, Kusanagi-san! It doesn't look like he likes you!"

"Thanks for the understateme—"

The chupacabra roars, a sound fit to swallow up the rest of the snap. Izumo's already running headlong for Vegas.

*

"Do you think an American marriage has legal effects in Japan?" Totsuka wonders later, tapping his lip with a fork. "Does this mean I own half of all your things now?"

Izumo lifts his head from the woodgrain just long enough to glower. Times like these, he refines his appreciation for what Suoh Mikoto goes through in every waking hour. "Order before you start gambling away all my worldly possessions," he says, milder than ever. "Sheep-whisperer."

At the booth's side, a beak-lipped waitress plucks the thin stem of a pen from the tufting beehive piled above her head. Wordless, she fixes her angular stare on the shakers lined between them, cracks her gum with a filmy pop and doesn't budge.

At once, Totsuka folds himself behind his menu. "Yes, yes, ah! Please, can-na uii getto—"

Usually his spoken English’s passable—courtesy of months with Izumo exhausted in needling and knocking him by turns through the fat chapters of their high school textbook, not to mention a recent terrifying foray into the land of film noir. But Totsuka's kept that delight peculiar to men who answer to only one mother tongue, and who therefore take license to mangle others with those deadliest of linguistic weapons: drawn-out vowels, the intricate, misplaced consonants and, above all, the tourist's relishing, embellished gratitude for the patience of others. After he rolls omelette into five syllables, Izumo takes pity on the waitress and orders for him, too: —and he will have stuffed strawberry French toast and eggs sunny side up—with a ketchup smile on top, if you do that? Thanks, miss.

"Now that that's done!" Totsuka says as their waitress sails away, grim-shouldered with ink-lined wrists. "Did you think about where we should go next?"

"I've heard about a place. Got a lot of pillows, nice shade, doesn't need you to move much."

Laughter tumbles over his bridging hands. "That's scandalous, Kusanagi-san! You're supposed to start with the parts of your honeymoon that you can actually spend outside, then work your way down at night."

On a whim, Izumo leans forward. He pinches a pepper-shaker, clinks glass against its neighbor's silvery head before sliding it across the table to the end of their ghostly board. King me—and how's that for irony? "How 'bout you tell me," he croaks, "and I tell you no for the ones that are actually insane."

Considering, Totsuka hums as he twists their array of saltshakers and battered napkin holders into a new game. Behind him, the door rolls through its strange bicycle-chiming: a little hubbub swells and dwindles again as a crowd meanders in.

A popular place—but that's no surprise, greenhouse strawberries or no. The diner has the look of a franchise bankrolled by nostalgia: candied colors printed in its glossy overheads and gleaming seats, chrome stools spinning over checkerboard floors, the poles set between each booth like pieces pried out of an old bus. Servers and cashiers swing to and fro behind the counter, flouncing wide skirts, checkered stockings and hoop earrings, their brimming aprons trimmed with pale lace. Fifties-style, Izumo guesses—but that's suspicion talking over educated history.

Each new sight and piece sits at odds against the parts of Vegas in which people actually seem to live—its squat, doughy tenements milling in herds, the glassy, factory-neat strip malls at odds with their worn parking lots. There's something to be said about a city like that—so stark in marketing wistfulness for decades just gone, efforts that probably have less to do with any ache for those vanished eras than some half-built dream of all the things that might have been. Rootless and fierce, a sentimentality drawn so deeply inwards that that even tourists can feel the tide—mostly by way of how it strands them outside that wash of verve and opaline feeling.

Something to be said, sure. But Izumo's never been much for open statements.

“There’s a forest made entirely out of recycled bottles,” Totsuka says, wandering back into their conversation. “It’s only two hours’ drive from—”

“Next.”

“They also have a site close by, where they host a festival called 'Burning Man’.”

“We live with a burning man every day,” Izumo says. “Next.”

“Ah! I just remembered, we’re not that far from Area 51—and even if we can’t get in, there’s a paid drive that’ll take us right to the gates!”

“A cab service?”

Totsuka glows. “Actually,” he says, all confidences, “I found a friend of a friend who has a car that’s perfect for desert runs! He’s traveled a little bit all over the country—it was really pretty interesting, he’ll have to start moving again soon so that the FBI won’t catch up to him over a little misunderstanding. But in the meantime he’s thinking about starting up a passenger service—”

“Next.”

"All right, all right." The syllable draws out between his teeth, singing. "But you have to give me time to think about it!"

Izumo slouches onto his elbow, cuts away the bubbling desire to laugh. There's an ache still running down his spine like a current. "We've got no sympathy for the devil here," he says instead: a compromise. "Keep that in mind. Buy the ticket, take the ride."

"Is that a poem?"

In spite of all he's done to quell and forbid Totsuka's delighted quest to forget all he ever learned in school, his brows flick. "Seriously?"

"What?"

He considers the question and its source: the slant of his eyes; hair gleaming, in a trembling ray of afternoon light, like zinfandel foam; a sly, dimpling smile on the verge of breaking. Never mind. "Came from the delusional ramblings of a guy far out of his right mind," Izumo says, humoring. "Journalism does that to people. And he did Vegas for a while. So I guess it's pretty close."

On cue, their waitress flurries by with two plates; she flicks each across their table and departs while they're scrambling to save lunch from knocking into the windowpanes.

Having rescued his strawberries, Totsuka squints. "Steak?"

Slowly, Izumo's gaze wanders to his plate, where a lambshank lies steaming, fresh and contrary. "Vengeance," he says, and cuts deep to the seeping bone.

Let the goddamn chupacabras of the world starve.

They eat without hurrying, staving off the brittle edges of a cloudy hangover. Totsuka pores over his plate, his phone and his tiny tourist's camera, picture after picture in turns. He lifts the last eventually, snaps a shot of Izumo as he cuts away another slice of lamb.

Izumo swoops his knife through the world's tiniest bow. Well, every man to his role. "This all you wanted?"

"What else could anyone want," Totsuka says, "from a honeymoon?"

It's hard to say what gives him away: his still hands, that smile like an islet, adrift along the curve of his mouth. Every other sense sweeps between them: outside, the watered neon pouring across the daylit pavement; a orlorn man slapping cards against his palm on the corner; the knife gleaming blunt above his plate. He breathes, folds the absurd tidal ache back beneath his bones.

"Hey," he says. "Don't say it like that."

"Like?"

Like a boy stitched out of old habits and forgotten things, stepping out into the daylight. Like somewhere there's a count ticking for them, a clock which knows only a single rounding swing.

"Forget it," Izumo says, and bends to work through a cooling shank. "Let's hurry up. We're not driving out, but there's got to be something inside city limits that you haven't seen yet."

Totsuka slouches back against the booth, sugarspun summer in the flesh. "What a good husband," he says, and looks away.

*

Turns out, too, that five hours feel amazingly longer when they're spent chasing regrets.

"Are you pouting?"

Reflex betrays him—he's got the door open before the second thought registers: that this is Totsuka Tatara, and any comedy of manners that might have played out between them died on the day that he talked Izumo's best friend into skipping school to play model for an artist's sketch series on unconventional gods. But Totsuka breezes by, and Izumo trails after, toting grimly with him the load of an afternoon's worth of tourism.

"Just wondering who I've got written up in my will," he says. The door snaps behind them; the poster of a masked, grinning man waves and flutters against its glass. "On the bright side, I'm pretty sure it's not you."

The hallway lolls dim beneath their steps, pocketed with shadows; farther ahead, the alcoves shiver with glass-eyed gleaming and pointed hats.

If nothing else, Clown Motel plays true to its advertising.

"I thought only children were afraid of clowns."

"Not afraid," Izumo says, and it's more petulance than reproach. "Just always figured that I'd go down fighting something big."

Totsuka cocks his head; his faint smile skews. "Ah. That sounds a little romantic."

"Best lies always are." He shifts the potted cactus from one arm to the other and doesn't complain—it'll do no better to see Totsuka carrying it. At least he has muscles in his arms. "Remind me how much we're paying to take this tour again."

But Totsuka pops up onto his heels—the pad of a finger flattens the next recrimination. "Don't ask terrible questions," he says, "not here, Kusanagi-san. Just think of what you might wake."

Retorts froth and sting on his tongue. Izumo swallows each, conscious with the flex of his throat of the faint imprint weighing against his every breath. He reaches up, clasps the offending hand. The ring flickers cool against his palm as their fingers slide together.

They keep walking.

"Still can't believe you've never read Hunter S. Thompson," he says, because it's the only thing he can say.

"I might have! Maybe. I've probably at least seen a quote of his somewhere online." But Totsuka tips his head back. "You've always been the reader out of us, Kusanagi-san. I guess that lowers our compatibility a little, doesn't it? I should try a little harder."

"I've seen you go through a lot of phases, brat. I'm drawing the line at a quoting hipster phase."

"You quote," Totsuka observes. "You quote all the time."

Even without his shades, at least, he has the superiority of better posture on his side. "That," Izumo explains, from the heights of seniority and erudition, "is different."

There's no reason at all to stop in the middle of the hall, ogled by hundreds of beading porcelain faces. But Totsuka's still looking up at him, and it's the look that he can't quite untangle: two parts fondness, one part proximity—and probably a little flutter to obscenity in the mix, because it's Totsuka Tatara and Kusanagi Izumo, and there's a palm sliding a featherstroke along the nape of his neck, a faint sigh silvering the empty air between them, and his mouth's dry, dry, on the cusp of understanding and distraction with Totsuka's light-touched lashes—

And then a shadow shifts at the edge of vision.

As the clown's mechanical cackle rings out, Izumo shouts and swings the cactus.

*

And later—

"Wait!"

Back in the city again. He's walking faster than Totsuka can manage, even hours down from the gingery heights of their mutual skullcracking hangover. It doesn't matter—if there's one thing worth trusting in Totsuka, it's his magnetic sense of direction.

True to form, Totsuka finds him again on the edge of a conjoining street. Puffing, he seizes Izumo's sleeve. "Wait," Totsuka says, the words set in his teeth, fired out with the fervor of a young actor clutching his first script. "I don't know where we're going!"

"That's fine," Izumo says. "I know."

They march down the lane. Neon plays stark over cobblestones and glittering cement alike, but street after street gleams bare; the few passersby scurry from building to building. Not one head lifts.

"Hmmm." The avenue bears up under Totsuka's long-lashed sweep. "It wasn't this quiet last night, was it?"

Izumo shrugs, long and easy. "News gets around." The story of a foreign gang overtaking Vegas by fire and fury had probably been hard to miss. "At least the fuss for the last couple weeks was good for something." But they've reached the sidewalk's end—at the hem of the Bellagio's territory, Izumo looks around, a quick flicker. He makes for the fountain. "C'mon."

Totsuka's gaze swings from his fingers to his face. "Eh?"

But Izumo's already swinging himself over the barrier. Two quick steps and he twists along the fountain's edge, toeing off his shoes in neat steps. "Never got a chance to finish that dance," he says, rolling up each trouser leg. "did we."

He doesn't have to look—there dawns the bright thought, memory trickling back to light: the cocktail-hazy slouch out of the bar, the way they'd sloped and wobbled to the fountain ledge, drunken sloshing through the lit waters as guards and bespoke suits shouted and waved at either side.

Laughter trickles into the dusk, but Totsuka's hand strikes his. Like a match flaring—it's enough.

Together, they wade in. It won't be much of a dance, sopping and frantically dodging bursts of water—but that isn't the point.

You better take care of him, Lord; if you don't you're gonna have him on your hands.

Quoting again, quoting always, the soul of unoriginality—but if anything's true, Izumo thinks, he probably means it more.

*

And last of all:

"So, tell me—what have we learned about keeping track of when places close?"

"You have to be even more careful about breaking in than usual?"

"That's right," Izumo says. The fence rings as he drops from its mesh, pats some figment of dust off his rumpled drying trousers. "No blood, no bone, no ash, 'cause we're not here to burn anything. Now, what's this one gonna be? Zombies?"

In answer, Totsuka tucks his hands behind his back and whirls away.

The sky's burned out by now, embers beneath a rising dusk. It's a bare silhouette he follows, a slipping murmur, the suggestion of fingers curling as they head down into a bare plain.

Where bulldozer after bulldozer rests, a rusting metal horde at rest.

Izumo stops. "You're kidding."

But Totsuka's already in the seat, fiddling with things. "Come up!" he calls. "There's room. Ah, the park must have been busy today—they've left the keys in the front seat again."

"Seriously," Izumo says, even as he hefts himself up the first step, climbing into the seat, "you know I wasn't serious about that part with the bodies—"

"I know, I know. But after a day like today, you have to end it properly, don't you? Besides," Totsuka says, with the measured idleness, "shouldn't a married couple try to move the earth for one another at least once?"

It's saintly forbearance that prevents Izumo from smacking him. He kicks back in his seat, tilts his head, and groans. Part of old age is, in fact, a mortal spine: his is registering distinct complaints with, it feels, every office available in his skull. "Get it over with."

But Totsuka stills, with his hands on the wheel.

"Thank you," he says, "for today."

Izumo looks over. One beat, two. Then he raps Totsuka's skull, for good measure. "Today and every other day."

A laugh bubbles up beneath his knuckles. Night flashes, metal brightening—it's the ring, gem and curve weighing in the palm of a derelict's hand.

"You know," he says, "it's not really that I want more things. Tax deductions and another honorific—or more shelves to keep my mason jars. Everything's fine the way it is."

"But?"

"You wonder sometimes, don't you? About things that might have been." Totsuka smiles, transparent through the sleeting dark. "I don't think I do—not in the same way. But I wanted to see if it would've made a difference."

Three, five, nine. The day fans wide behind them: a tottering dawn lit by neon and creaking signatures; slouching back to Vegas wearing new bruises and smeared loafers, their hour come at last; sharing strawberries and bones; gambling at an underground cactus game; an endless string of bright moments. Elsewhere, in another time, it might have fit. Another set of childhood friends, perhaps, who'd come to Vegas on a whirlwind tour, heartstruck and headlong.

"You're right," Izumo says, to the question beneath the question. "That'd be a different life."

Totsuka draws a breath.

Izumo says, "Doesn't mean this one isn't worth it."

It's a still sort of moment: sitting under the filtering shadows with the clarity of Totsuka's slanting look and his bright-tipped mouth. Beneath the bulldozer's awning, a finger hooks behind his jaw, presses him in against the seat. It's odd: the way they fit, Totsuka at the ideal height to tip up into him, resting a hand against his heart and another at his hip, all the little barriers necessary to keep their pace under control, unseen but starkly felt.

Two breaths. One.

In the end, he flicks his ring into the pit first. Totsuka shakes his head once, then follows suit. A laugh shivers between them, and it's not quite clear who first unearthed the sound.

What's sure is this: in the dark of the unfilled pit, rings lie in the sand winking like mirages, like stars, as the bulldozer's engine wakes and rumbles forward.

*

The last day goes by in a dizzy wave. Yata loses the goat. Security insists, frowning, that cacti do not constitute appropriate imports, and insist on depotting Totsuka's replacement for good measure. Duty-free's fresh out of the only brand of cactus brandy worth buying in the city—but that's probably just as well.

Totsuka laughs at him anyway, safe beyond the gate as check-in rescans Izumo's luggage for the third time—a sound to cut to the heart of any childish vanities.

They get through, one and all. That's enough, too.

Beware of enthusiasm and of love, he thinks; both are temporary and quick to sway. Fine words for a guntoting newshound who'd only dug up love for blotter acid and boozed his way to enthusiasm—but then, Thompson'd died on his own terms. There's something to be said for that.

Later, later. Overhead, the last song shivers to an end; announcements toll, bell after bell. Through humming speakers, a raw, honeyed voice counts off their boarding times: three hours to go. Izumo rolls his shoulders, flicks down some speck of desert from a cuff. Already Mikoto's stretching himself across four seats for his nap, and the self-preservatory instinct of beings about to board a plane means that he's got another three if he wants them. Yata's propped himself up on the next aisle, surreptitious in his pawing at collar and hip for goat-bites when he thinks nobody's looking.

Only Totsuka's at rest. Having levered up the arm between their chairs, he's spooled himself against Izumo's shoulder with a magazine splayed over his thigh—some glossy sprawl of gossip and bad prose.

Izumo says, "So? Think you'd stick around a couple extra days?"

In answer, fingers lace his. Warmth shivers through the gap where metal had clung. A day, a few thousand miles, and all the difference in the world.

"But we can't stop here," Totsuka says, easy, and the look that he's got is pure Vegas: sun-warmed and curling, with a wink like a desert mirage. "This is bat country."