Amy is chirping away, her hair a painful shade of orange under the garish florescent lights. Damien is sitting in one of the bolted down chairs against the wall, watching her with a quiet bemusement, arms crossed over his thin chest. He doesn't seem so creepy in the full light of the backroom… His hair is a muddied brown, hacked to a presentable length. His overcoat lies on his lap, and I can see the clothes that were underneath are simple: slacks, and an overworn tee shirt, belonging to no profession in particular.

He squints at me, and I can tell he doesn't put me and the girl who sat next to him just minutes before together immediately. When he does, he doesn't really do anything but look at me in a curious, yet confused way. "Um, this is a restricted area," he says uncertainly, though he doesn't rise to challenge me.

"I know," I say, and I hold up the ring. "I'm a friend of Charlie's, so it's not so restricted to me."

Amy's chatter shuts off like a faucet, and she turns to stare at me. She's wide and doe eyed, at least, doe eyed like the only one's I've seen, in faded nature documentaries. Her eyes are blue, so blue as to be clichéd, and I wonder if they're as natural as her poorly dyed hair. "Oh, really?" she chirps, setting down her brush. "What kind of friend? You looking to audition? Because I think Charity is on her way out, so there might be an opening… You have the body for it." She motions at my legs, my hips, my chest, in one swooping, crooked finger wave.

I shake my head dumbly. "No, I just came back here…" Now I feel like a moron, like someone who's shown up at her first day of school not wearing any clothes. What do I say? I came back here because I think I'd like to audition to be your stalker? Charlie thinks you two would be stunning replacements for my dead friends? "I just thought I'd say hi," I finish lamely.

"Cherry, right?" Damien pulls himself to his feet and moves forward, placing himself between Amy and I. He doesn't look so peculiar now… Instead of the sick, dangerous feeling, I pick up vibes of brotherly concern.

"Cherry," I reply, nodding. "And you're Damien." He nods. "And Amy." She nods. All having nodded, we stand there for a handful of moments, not knowing quite what to say. Amy is the first to jump in.

"So, how do you know Charlie?" she asks, cheerily returning to brushing her hair.

"Uh, you remember a place called Roddy's?" She doesn't. "Well, this used to be a pub by that name… It went under a while back, and he reopened under this… medium. I knew him back when he tended Roddy's. I was one of the regulars."

Amy nods vaguely, and I get the impression she's only half hearing me, waiting for me to stop so she can start talking again. "Oh, that was a few years back, wasn't it? I was living a few secs up, in the northeast quad then… Not my neighborhood at all. It's kinda boring. Ever been there?" I shake my head no. "Well, it's trying to be real dressed up, you know? What's that word, De? Posh, that's right. Real posh. But it wasn't. People always talked about what you did, where you went, who went up to your rooms… Don't laugh, De, you wish you had people talking about you. Anyway, you couldn't sneeze and ask for a tissue without having some old broad glaring at you. I moved… well, okay, I was evicted… and I thought I'd try my luck down here. Got pretty sick thought." She pauses, and stares at her face in the mirror, blinking a handful of times, as if not quite recognizing the face in the mirror. She half shakes it off, and continues. "Got pretty sick, and that's where I met De. He'd gotten the same thing a few months before, so he kind of showed me the ropes of the clinic…"

"You don't look very sick now," I break in, something beginning to gnaw way at my brain, a vague worry, a shapeless suspicion.

Damien shakes his head, Amy being, for the moment, tongue-locked. I guess she wasn't used to being interrupted. "We went through a few clinics until one worked… I think everyone in this quad has had a needle into us at one point or another. Still," he smiles at Amy's back in this sick, sweet way that makes me want to punch him, "At least we had each other. That made it easier."

Amy doesn't share the tenderhearted moment, now digging through a rough run back pack. "Huh? Oh, yeah… You have no idea how boring waiting rooms can be, Candy—"

"Cherry."

"Whatever."

"Actually," I say, taking a seat on one of the unused sinks. "I do have a fair idea… I was pretty sick for a while."

"Really?" Amy looks up at me, doe eyes blinking over her shoulder like a blue sun sunset. "You don't look like you've been sick! You look great… Better than most dancers I know, and they're always in top shape."

I nod, then cock my head to the side. "Bone marrow degradation," I say, straight faced. They stare at me, then at each other. "Sores. Back pains. Unexplained chills. Trouble sleeping. Shooting pains." At this point, Damien rises. "Sound familiar."

"A little too familiar," he says cautiously, laying a hand on Amy, as my mere words could infect her.

"Did they give you a name for this thing you had?"

He shakes his head. "It was something new, they said… They could name the symptoms, but not the disease—"

Amy's eyes are wide. "You… You had it, too, didn't you?" I nod. And once again, we are all staring at each other, not quite knowing what to say. I couldn't picture them sick, especially not Amy, caught halfway between her silky dancers outfit and mundane street clothes. Then again, the image of myself, dying, scrawled over a few hundred nights, was fading now as well, and it had only been a day.

Amy finishes dressing quickly, adjusting her top in minute tugs and pulls so it sits just right on her. I realize now, the vanity, but it doesn't seem so bad, not if this is a new body now. I wonder what she looked like before.

Amy breaks off my train of thought, standing facing us again, her things collected, and top sufficiently arranged. "Call me crazy, but I knew there was something about you… Well, besides being a girl drinking in a titty bar. Usually Char throws them out. There's gay bars down the row. He doesn't need some dyke making the regulars uncomfortable. But I kept wanting to look over at you, and I never do that. I'm a professional." She adds the last with more than a hint of pride (more like a truckload, really) and I begin to wonder how long she's been dancing. Most everyone else I knew in the sex industry tended to be at least jaded about their work, if not downright dark-hearted. She's good, true… but I begin to think of my own escapades, like shimmying down an intralevel pole, or jogging the half-mile to the bar without so much as breaking a sweat. Maybe this is how her new body came out for her… Or hell, maybe I should pick up dancing.

"My shift's over, until tonight," says Amy. "I always work a broken double. Where are you off to?"

"Nowhere, really," I reply, embarrassed that it's true. "I've been a hermit for the past few years, so there's not really much to go out to see. It's all gone."

"What about work?" asks Damien. "What do you do for a living?" He glances in what I'm sure he thinks is a subtle way at my arms, and their slightly muscled appearance.

"I'm an artist," I admit, embarrassed. Saying that always got at least a few jeers… I didn't think I'd get it from Amy. After all, on the food chain, dancers, especially exotic, are always on the bottom. But this Damien guy, he looked like someone who toiled away in a pink-walled office somewhere, poking at numbers until they went from red to black. That would fit with my pervert impression: aren't all accountants perverts, deep down?

He doesn't laugh, though. Instead, he meets my embarrassment with a dose of his own. "I'm not that much of a step up. I'm a writer."

I laugh, fidgeting with the drawstring on my pullover. "Well, as long as it pays the rent…"

"If yours actually pays the rent, then you're a step ahead of me in the 'starving NEP' game."

The air eased a bit. At least we had more than a close brush with death in common. We were all deemed the hangers on of society, NEP's: non-essential personnel. Those that have nothing that hangs in the balance if they cease to breath one morning. no offspring depended on us, no industry would be behind. The machinery of the city would keep on churning. Some fight to gain an EP status, but I've grown to like my NEP tag on my id. There's no burden when I wake up in the morning, no clock screaming at me to move move move, or face the consequences... No sensible, government mandated shoes and uniform for me...

Amy breezes past us, pulling her hair back into a bushy ponytail. "Come on," she says, looking over her shoulder and crooking a finger at us. "You've seen what I do... And trust me, you'd need a coupla degrees to figure out poor Damien. I want to see your stuff!"

I blink, and my mind rushes out of the room and back to my flat, and it's disaster quality state of being. Underwear on the heater (I like mine warm in the morning... don't tell me you don't), leggings and pants scattered about like snake skins, a bed that hasn't been made since mom died...

"Uh... well..."

It's too late. She's out the door. I entertain the possibility of showing them Mrs. Crater's impeccable rooms two doors down, since I should still be on her emergency entry list... But she doesn't paint. Hell, she doesn't even have anything hanging up, save a picture of the Pope, a thousand copies removed from the original. They wouldn't buy it... I don't smell like soap and lavender.

I lead them, fretting over whether I even have anything to offer them once we get there, and I remember the last bottle of vodka I had managed to hoard is three months drank. My door looms in front of me, and I press my hand to the id plate.

Click. Click. Churn. Think.

We wait. Amy chews on something pink and pliable, and I wonder where she got gum from...

Churn. Churn. Damn door... The words 'Incompatible entry' flash in front of me, and I give the wall a swift kick. The red, burning letters turn green, and with a sigh, I enter, already apologizing, swiping my kid white panties off the radiator and trying not to look at either of them.

Amy skips over the disarray cheerily, hop scotching from one smattering of floor to another, taking up the canvases in her fingers and beginning to flip through them. Damien looks over her shoulder.

The one that holds her attention first is one of the jungle series, started when there was a run on lush rememberances. I hate jungle scenes… There's too much to get wrong. Amy seems taken by it though, pulling out the unframed canvas and setting it on her knee, eyes skimming over the bumps and smears of green and black.

"Wow… you did all of this? No tech help?" I nod. "Wow… Really… But what's wrong with that guy?" She points at my one human in the scene, a nut brown young boy perched on a tree limb, string caught up in his fingers as he plays some version of 'Cat's Cradle.'

"Nothing… what, you mean why he's doing the string thing with his hands?"

"No, I mean what's wrong with his skin? Was he, like, in an accident or something? Some of the guys that get too close to the boilers down in the really low sections look like that, but redder… Is that it?"

I stare at her. Can someone be this bubbleheaded? The guy fits perfectly with his jungle backdrop… I copied the skin tone from a few scanned photos I had grabbed five years ago. I copied it exactly. That's what he was supposed to look like! She didn't mean anything by it, but I was still slightly insulted.

Damien catches my look and coughs, pulling my attention from the puzzled Amy, who now seemed to be moving her critiques over to my flowers. "She, um… She lived kind of a sheltered life," he says, pulling me over to the pile of canvases he seems to be perusing. "Don't take it personal. She's your regular Rapunzel. I think the guy looks just fine." He smiles wanly, and I smile back. Maybe this guy was beginning to make just a little bit of sense.

"What's she doing in the dancing scene, then?" I ask, glancing back, making certain Amy was still wrapped up in my painting. She wasn't. She'd moved on to my closet. Good enough.

"She likes to be looked at, I guess… That, and she doesn't really open her eyes to it. I try to tell her how the girls really make their money, but she doesn't listen. She thinks it's all about standing on a table and being a cocktease. She doesn't see that the other girls are just advertising after hours… She has to pull a double shift to survive."

I nod. "Not a bright kid… but how could she not know what a freakin' hispanic looks like?"

He hesitates. "I think—think, mind you, not know—I think she's from one of the better sectors. I think she's some kind of runaway or something… Who knows? She's got a wild hair. She's bigger than this city, in her mind."

"You've never asked her about it?"

"Yup. Got a different story every time."

"And they keep getting better!" Amy chirps while she holds one of my more skimpy tops to her chest, studying the effect on her reflection. Damien winces.

"Brains like a mouse, ears like a goddamn elephant," he mutters, flipping one more canvas, then gasping. I look down again.

It's one of my better works, though I set it aside halfway through… Why did I do that? Some commissioned project? Some new inspiration? Drop in the Western motif market? I can't remember anymore, but now, I feel the waste of it, of half-finished painting staring sadly back at me.

It's a grasslands, burned to a crisp in the summer heat. A sun rises or sets, casting a golden mist onto the cacti and tumbleweeds. Damien runs his hand over it, as if feeling for the warmth. "This… this is the kind of stuff I write about sometimes," he says softly, "But not that genre, romance crap… What it must have really been like, in those days."

"That's too bad," I say, and he looks up, his glare melting under my sympathetic smile. "Genre and pandering sell." I motion to the canvases. "As you can see, I'm a complete sell-out." I pause, settling into a lotus position. "Tell me about your West. Maybe you'll make me finish my painting."

He settles across from me, pulling the canvas out and studying it, tracing places lacking paint, where I had reserved places for elements unspun.