Neverland hangs in the darkness before Mina's eyes, a shimmering blur of flesh and neon mixed with the brilliant green of shivvering leaves. The view dives towards it, blur splitting into a thousand casinos and whorehouses seen through a curtain of bromeliads and vines. She flies down Carnival Street until the view stops, focuses on one particular hooker. She's tall, with a microskirt and long brown legs. Green luminescent paint stripes her full breasts.

"Do you like what you see?" she asks. Her voice is dubbed, and it sounds like a white woman, however well it follows the dark lips. "There's plenty more where this comes from, in Neverland." The hooker puts her leg up on the hood of a car, exposing shockingly red panties which in turn reveal almost everything they are supposed to cover.

The viewpoint looks her up and down in full zoom from sky high heels to tight curled hair, with scenic stops to observe recent advances in hair removal and silicone implant technology.

The hooker's lips move and the white woman speaks again. "If you want it, it's yours. Enjoy a vacation in Neverland, and you'll never want to leave."

"We are beginning our final approach to Rio, please return your seat backs and tray tables to the full upright and locked position."

Mina pulls the goggles from her eyes and pushes her tray up into the seat in front. The lock broke off some time before, and Mina secures it with tape already thoughtfully stuck there by CheaAir. The man in the next seat elbows her in the ribs when she raises her arm, but not intentionally. When he touches her arm to apologize, his hand lingers.

"Are you staying long in Rio?"

"Go away."

Her direct response causes two expressions to chase each other across his face. He settles on cheerfully inoffensive, raises his hand, and gets up. Neverland lies right offshore, but some guys still think that they can get it for free.

Mina waits until he's moved away before getting up to pull her bag out of the overhead bin. It's a big gray knapsack, battered. The patch saying Alabama Christian College has been ripped off it, but if that accident hadn't occurred, it would match her baggy t-shirt. She has on a pair of slacks as well, although she has been regretting choosing them over shorts for a thousand miles in the hot and stuffy airplane.

The Rio airport, in contrast, is air conditioned to within an degree of Icelandic. Neverland revenue has paid for the best climate control system in the world, part of an airport that makes all other cities jealous. The airport has an art deco look, with slim naked copper women arching themselves overhead to support the roof. The color scheme is pastels and chromes on the ceiling blending into stronger colors at floor level.

The luggage carousel is also bedecked with nymphs, arms outstretched as though reuniting passengers with their belongings is an act of love. Mina waits and watches it go around, until almost everyone has collected their bags. Then she heads for customs.

The customs man grins at her, exposing a gold front tooth. "What a nice girl like you do in Rio? No be go to Neverland for vacation like these -- " he gestures at the men making their way through customs " -- and you no be hooker." His hand goes back into her bag and rummages.

Mina smiles at him. "How can you be so sure?"

He holds up a pair of panties, plain white and cotton. "You don' got the panties to be hooker!" He laughs loudly, and waves the underwear at the next customs agent, who starts laughing as well. Mina looks as if she wants to hit him, but the guards standing by the door are looking at her, watching the excitement. She settles for snatching her panties from his hand and grabbing her bag. He doesn't stop her, too busy laughing, and she storms out past the guards.

Transport to Neverland is available by boat, or by helicopter for significantly more money. Posters proclaim that the view on a helicopter ride is incredible. "Better than taking acid!" shouts one mediatronic poster from the wall as Mina passes. Other posters show a smiling Peter Velas, owner of Neverland, alone or with beautiful companions. "Come for your health," he says. "Come back for your enjoyment." She heads for the docks.

The air outside is hot and oppressive, coating Mina in sweat an instant after she steps onto the docks. Her shirt clings to her body and her legs are tortured by her long pants. Waves slapping against the pier sound cool, but the little salt sprays they create are almost as hot as the air. A tall man in an open Hawaiian shirt leers at her, so she turns to look out across the water, to Neverland. At this distance it is tiny, but it is twelve miles or perhaps more from the docks. A hydrofoil is speeding towards them, throwing sheets of spray behind it like a rooster's tail. Soon it slows and settles to the water, and disgorges a laughing throng of men. Women wave to them, but stay on the boat. Their smiles are turned to those who board, and their hands move in business. The air inside the boat smells of sweat, and Mina climbs to the top deck to be out in the breeze.

"Hey, I like it." A stubby man with gray in his hair approaches her. "College girl, huh? How much?" Taking her stare for incomprehension, he makes a gesture with finger and hand.

She turns herself to face the rail and looks down at the waves, but he presses himself against her. "Come on, I'm good for it. You're pretty." Mina plants her feet and grabs him by the collar and crotch. "That's more like it!" She grabs harder, "Ow!" and twists him over the rail. The splash he makes isn't as satisfying as it ought to be. Mina stares defiantly at the only other person up on deck, but the tall black woman shrugs and laughs. She walks over towards Mina and leans out over the rail.

"You go throw him something?"

Mina shrugs. "It's too far now." And indeed, the hydrofoil has raced away from the man who struggles in the water.

"Sometimes there be sharks."

Mina shrugs again.

The hooker laughs. "I like you. My name's Chaco."

"Mina."

"Hi." Chaco sticks out her hand, and Mina shakes it. They stare at the wake for a while before Chaco speaks again.

"What a woman do come to Neverland? You no be working girl." She looks Mina up and down. "You be gambler?" She sounds skeptical.

Mina shakes her head. "Business."

Chaco raises her hands and backs away. "I won' ask no more. I no talk about it."

Mina smiles and interrupts. "Not that kind of business. No drugs, no guns."

"Oh." Chaco stops backing away, but doesn't get any closer either.

"I'm here for the end of a research project."

Chaco smiles and nods. "You really be college girl?"

"Yeah."

The prostitute comes back to the railing. "I thought you be someone else."

Neverland, closer now, does not so much ride the waves as oppress them. It's built on huge floating platforms, and tethered to the ocean floor with cables the size of trains. It is green, incredibly so, plants growing on every surface in profusion. Neverland desalinizes more water for the plants than for the people, and there are a million visitors almost all the time, with perhaps half as many permanent residents. The hydrofoil slows and drops to the water as it nears the docks.

"Chaco?"

"A yeah?"

"Could you do something for me?"

Chaco looks Mina over. "Maybe. What do you want?"

"I don't want the security people to go through my stuff. The man at the airport played with my underwear... and I've heard that some of these guys will take a woman's passport, so she can't leave, and force her to --"

"Yeah, some of them." Chaco thinks a moment. "I'll tell them you be one of the girls. But you have to be like one. No more --" Chaco makes a throwing gesture over the railing.

Mina grins. "Sure, no more of that."

Chaco looks at Mina. "You never go like that. You wearing under?"

"Yes."

"Good. You go take pants off, put in bag."

Mina is about to say something, but doesn't, and instead strips off her slacks. It is more comfortable, certainly. Chaco looks her over, and then grabs Mina's hips and begins tugging.

"What are you --"

"Shhhh. I be making you look more like real working girl." Chaco rolls down the top of Mina's sensible cotton underwear until they look considerably smaller. "There. No real girl wear panties so big."

When Chaco saunters down the gangplank, Mina follows in her wake. She salutes the security men, who are checking through the passengers' luggage one last time. They whistle appreciatively.

"Who be this one, Chaco? Be new girl?"

Chaco nods. "Show the nice men what you got, girl." She gives Mina a meaningful stare, and Mina obediently turns around. One of the men flaps his shirt at her. Mina pauses.

"Go on, girl. You go show them."

Mina slowly raises her shirt.

The men whistle. "Nice, but too small."

Mina gives them the finger, and they laugh. She hurries after Chaco, who is pushing forward. Once out of the chaos of the docks, Mina gets her slacks out of her bag and pulls them back on.

"Sorry. But it was what you had to do."

Mina grimaces. "You're right. But thanks, Chaco."

"Be welcome." Chaco is about to go when she thinks of something. "If you go stay here long, stay at the Belfonte. They be honest, no go sell your room key to some man." She waves, and her long legs carry her off into the crowd.

"Thanks!" yells Mina after her.

The streets of Neverland are thronged with people. It's almost Fat Tuesday, and the number of people jammed onto the island is immense. Mina moves through the crowd in diagonals, forced sideways as much as she makes progress forward. It's hard: she can't feel how the crowd is moving, she has to fight it to get to the Belfonte. In the square near the hotel, a band is warming up. Before they start the set, the leader steps to the microphone.

"Y'all are soldiers in the fight against the plague." The crowd whoops. "A twenty-one gun salute to you soldiers!" The crowd cheers louder, and behind the man, a rack of fireworks go off, shooting streamers skyward. "A twenty one gun salute to General Velas!" Everyone laughs and howls, and another rack of fireworks is set off. The band starts into a loud song: heavy metal rammed into Latin rhythms.

"How do you know you aren't still infected with the bad one?" A man is suddenly in front of Mina, smiling at her. "I know I've got the six, the good one, drives out the bad. What say I give it to you?"

Mina looks at him coldly. "The entire world has AIDS-6 by now," she tells him. "You aren't a soldier. You're just a pervert." He falls back at the rejection, and Mina pushes past him into the hotel.

The decor at the Belfonte is dominated by velvet. Velvet wallpaper, naked women painted on black velvet, velvet curtains, even little velvet swatches affixed to the keys. Her room is only slightly bigger than the king sized bed with red velvet bedspread, but it has a small balcony overlooking a park. To open the door to the balcony, Mina has to stand on the bed.

In the middle of the park, a fountain pushes skyward, almost as high as the trees which shade it. Lianas drape from those trees, and bromeliads and orchids grow on their sides. At the roots, water and nutrient feed lines take the place of soil. The fountain splashes down into a wide basin, where fat golden fish swim and nuzzle coins and condoms thrown in for luck.

Mina turns away from the view and pulls the door and then the blind closed. She then checks the blind for peepholes and, finding three, covers them with tape out of her pocket. Then she picks up her knapsack and dumps it out on the bed.

At the top are a pair of underwear, an extra t-shirt, and a pair of khaki shorts. Under that, a slim paperback and a bag containing half a pound of granola. And under that, a red plastic lunch box with a picture of Snoopy on the side. Pushing the rest away, Mina pulls the surprisingly heavy lunch box closer, and opens it. Inside is a pistol, a plastic one, a squat thermos, its outside wet with condensation, and a cheese sandwich in plastic wrap. Mina takes the clip out of the pistol and checks the action. She then breaks it down, cleans it, reassembles it, puts the clip back in, and returns it to the lunch box. The thermos goes in the freezer. The sandwich goes into Mina. There's plenty of room on the bed even if she doesn't bother to put the bag on the floor, so Mina folds the bedspread over the bag, flips back the blanket, and sleeps.

In the morning, Mina grabs her bag and heads out into city, to the street where the parade will run. She has left the book and yesterday's clothes on the bed, with the granola that remained after breakfast. Out on Festival Street, vendors are already selling plastic toys, drinks, stimulants, balloons, snap-pops and spray string at a ferocious mark-up. Mina finds a man selling 'line.

"Twenty five," he tells her.

"Ten."

"Ten? Ten? I paid fifteen for these! I'll sell for twenty two, nice girl like you."

"Twelve."

"Twelve each? I can't give you that. I can give you, ah, nineteen. But that's final."

"Okay." Mina turns away. "Wait!" The sweating merchant reaches out to her. "Maybe I could do seventeen."

"Thirteen, maybe."

"Thirteen? Fifteen, and I'm just breaking even!"

"Fourteen, then."

"Fourteen? Done."

Mina pulls fourteen tens off of a roll from her pocket. "I'll take ten."

He holds a bill up to the light, checks it. "Okay." He pulls a roll of paper, like button candy, from his pocket, rips off a length. "Ten. Best uncut 'line."

"Yeah, sure."

Mina walks down Festival Street, pushing the paper into her pocket with the bills. She pulls off the end, though, and pops the button onto her tongue. It's not very pure, he was ripping her off, but that's about what was expected. In any case, it doesn't take much to heighten her senses enough. She looks around with her eyes burning and pupils shrunk to pinpricks. Her backpack slaps her shoulder, and she can feel the weave of the strap through her shirt. The crowds are even thicker now, waiting for the parade, but she weaves through them with ease, towards the museum.

"Neverland was created in 2011 by businessman Peter Velas in concert with the World Health Organization in order to facilitate the distribution of AIDS-6. Originally it was merely several buildings on an abandoned oil test drilling rig, with attached rafts." Mina brushes through a hologram of the oil drilling rig. There's no one else in the museum, except for one bored security guard. With what's going on outside, who can blame them? Mina can hear the loud noises of the parade even here.

Mina reaches into her pocket, pulls the roll out, and pops the buttons off into her mouth one by one. In seconds her skin feels like ice is being pressed against it as the drug hypes her nerves up to the point of permanent damage. Time seems to break into a series of instants, like frames of film passing in front of her eyes, long pauses in between.

"Here, you can't do that in --" Mina is on the guard before he can finish, her knee in his groin, her hand hard against his throat. He's falling as her other hand strikes his face, fingers pushing into his eye socket. By the time he hits the floor Mina has his eye in her hand. The eye goes into a plastic bag and into a pocket. The guard goes into shock, and lies still.

She wipes her hands on her shorts, then takes the thermos in one hand, the pistol in the other, and heads to the back of the museum, leaving her bag in the middle of the holographic display. She kicks a door open and heads down rickety stairs, towards the slap of the ocean against the hull of Neverland. The corridors down near the water wind under the entire island, twisting like rabbit warrens. Mina runs, counting passages under her breath as she goes.

Mina has been running for ten minutes when she comes to the huge hydroponic gardens. She flings open a door to see them stretched out in front of her: acres of plants growing in trays under lighting tubes. Gardening tools move up and down the rows automatically, trimming and harvesting as Mina watches. They whir like dragonflies, the only sound other than the soft dripping of the water system. Mina moves slowly down a row of trays. The hanging gardens of Babylon could not have been more perfect, or more serene. A sprinkler overhead comes on as the humidity drops lower than the optimum for growth, and Mina shakes her head in the sudden spray, feeling each drop hit her skin like a little baptism. After a short while, the sprinkler feels that the air is moist enough, and turns itself off again.

For a moment, her tasks are forgotten, and she stands still in the calm, looking over the farm, for it is a farm, if nothing like the ones near where she used to live. Then she checks the pistol, thrust under her shirt when the sprinkler came on -- and lopes off through the room, past perhaps a kilometer of plastic trays. Checking markings on the doors, she quickly finds the one she wants, opens it, and passes through.

In the center of Neverland, built over the old oil-drilling rig, is the tower that constitutes the most expensive real estate on the ocean, not that there is very much real estate that can be said to be on the ocean. The access panels beneath have retina scans, so Mina reaches into her pocket and unwraps the eye. She presses the eye against the scanner, keys a memorized code into the pad. The door opens. She keeps the eye in her hand, holding the grip of the thermos in her teeth.

The service elevator is the only one which comes down this far. Mina waits for it, her eyes darting around the unfinished walls, striped with yellow in an ancient and unnecessary warning. The smell of the sea is very strong here: to Mina's nose it is as though she is drowning in it. The elevator arrives, and she enters. To get to the top floor requires clearance, and Mina again presses the eye to a scanner. She drops the eye, and it wobble-rolls to the corner of the elevator. Mina takes the thermos from her mouth, and rubs her chilled lips with the back of her hand. The bell rings.

From the service elevator, a short hallway runs to the top lobby, and Mina takes it at a run. She flings that door open from a crouch, and fires her pistol twice, hitting the man standing in the lobby in the head and the shoulder before he can even reach his gun. As he falls, she is already moving towards the only door, whose plate, if it had one, she knows would say Peter Velas. Next to the door, Mina pauses to open the thermos. She takes a vial from inside and puts it into the pocket of her shorts, shivering a little as its cold penetrates the thin fabric. She leaves the thermos lying on the floor with the guard. The doors are heavy wood with brass fittings, but she kicks one hard and moves in quickly, gun extended in front of her.

One of the guards inside kicks her outstretched arm, hitting her wrist hard enough to knock the gun out of her grasp. The other merely points his nasty little submachine gun at her and stands well back.

The room is huge, and dominated by the floor to ceiling windows that make up the far wall. To the left, some rain forest tree has given its life to an immense desk, while to the right a set of leather sofas and chairs huddles on an oriental rug. Velas is sitting behind his desk, and on the desk in front of him rest another gun and a file folder. He picks up the folder as the guards gesture Mina towards the center of the floor.

Velas speaks. "Mina Clarke. Age twenty-three, recently graduated from Alabama Christian College in the United States. You are quite clever, getting your gun through security. But those tricks, my grandmother knows them." He looks at Mina, and begins to get annoyed when she doesn't react.

Velas opens the folder and looks it over. Mina continues to stand, silent.

"We expected you to hit an important visitor, but you had bigger plans than that, didn't you. I became very curious about you when I realized it was me you were after." He smiles at her, eyes tracing her outline. "I've read your articles for the college news. I know what you think of me." He smirks, and flips a few pages. "Your school is really quite militant. Surprising what they offer courses in, things you really can't learn in a classroom."

He puts down the folder and stands up. "It should not surprise you that you failed, if you were paying attention in your classes." He stoops and picks up the pistol. "It's amazing that you got this far. Trying to take me with just a gun and a strip of 'line." He walks to her, and runs a hand down her cheek. "You are going to have permanent damage from all of the 'line you took."

Mina shakes her head slowly. "Except I'm sure I won't live that long."

Velas laughs hugely. "I'll make sure you get to experience it all." He laughs again. Then he stops, suddenly, looking at Mina. She is grinning, tight lips against white teeth. "Enjoying the thought of going to heaven? Well, you won't: suicide is a sin, and this was suicide."

"Maybe I knew that security would pick up on what I was doing." Mina walks slowly towards the window, leans against it. It feels a little like falling, to look down so far, to the crowds below. Then she turns to look Velas in the eye.

The self-satisfied expression has slipped from Velas's face.

"And maybe I let you take the gun." She opens her hand, and in it is the vial. The men start forward, but Velas raises his hand to stop them. He gives her a cold, questioning look.

"This is AIDS-7. It will drive out all of its cousins once it gets in you, and it isn't benevolent like AIDS-6." She turns the vial over in her hand, watches a bubble rise. "And in microcapsules it is even contagious while airborne, for a little while. We made it just to send your island of fornicators to Hell. I'm here to deliver it to you personally."

"I don't believe you."

Mina says nothing, and holds the vial to her breast. Outside and far below, through the floor to ceiling glass, she can see the carnival crowds looking upwards, waiting for the fireworks.

"Give up the vial, then. I will order them to let you go." Velas has raised the pistol, and is pointing it at her, as the guards are doing with their guns.

She looks at them, watches the tension in them, watches the sweat roll down their foreheads. She crouches slightly, moves her other hand to twist open the tube. The 'line splits the seconds, time falling perfectly. They open fire, and as the bullets hit she leaps.

Behind her, tempered glass splinters into a crazy mosaic. Mina hits the window hard -- as the bullets pierce her, nail her, she breaks through the window. Then she is out and away, falling towards the crowd who look up to her blessing. She spreads her hands, and broken shards of glass fall with her.