the berm and entered the grounds tonight, Elijah wanted his defenders to be able to see them.
The amusement zone’s entrance was framed by a tall arch made of bands of wrought iron. Human-sized statuettes capered across it. Because Jak had never seen a cartoon, he didn’t recognize them as fictional characters. With their distorted heads and bodies, spindly legs and oversize hands, he thought Mumbly Mouse, Wazoo Wildcat, and Peewee Poodle were muties. He thought the arch had been specially constructed to mark the way to the baron’s zoo.
At that moment Jak felt more kinship to the cartoon characters than to his trusted companions of so many years. Since die jump dream his attitude toward his friends had changed.
The stickle nightmare had done something to him that he couldn’t explain to the others. New and powerful ideas swirled through his head in a torrent After all, he had sat at the feet of Lord Kaa and listened to his teachings not with ears, because he had none in the dream, but with the core of his mind. He was an albino, not a mutie, but the seed had been planted that told him who his true enemies were.
The norms. He was one, but not.
According to Kaa, norms had only one purpose in the great scheme of things, and that was to bring Death-lands and its people into being. Having done that, the norms were worse than useless; they were an obstacle to further progress because they refused to relinquish the power they had held for so long.
Throughout their history the norms had proved they had no lasting allegiance to their own kind. And yet they continually fooled themselves into believing such bonds existed. Ryan Cawdor was no exception. Hardened fighter though he was, he still thought that Baron Elijah would see the light and act according to reason, in the best interests of all. Ryan believed that Willie ville and everything it stood for was worth not only his blood, but the blood of his comrades. How long he would hold this opinion, it was impossible to say. In the jump dream Kaa had shown Jak that norms couldn’t be trusted to see past their own short-term self-interest. Their federations and alliances were doomed to split apart. They would die as they had been born, as individuals, in isolation-and in isolation they would become extinct
Kaa had explained that at the root of much of the endless dissension and bloodshed among the norms were arguments over which of their many races had come first-and which, therefore, were the most favored children of their creator. Kaa taught that the new people had no such internal divisions. Muties of every stripe, no matter when they were bora, shared a common date of origin: January 20, 2001. Nuke day. They suffered a common oppression. They had a common destiny, which was to unite and remake, to unite and rule Death lands forever.
There was glory here on a scale that Jak had never imagined.
And in that glory was a place for him.
As they penetrated the amusement zone, the sec men set fire to the torches atop the lampposts. Ahead of them the wide, curving asphalt lane was dark. The place practically cried out for an ambush. Jak could sense the guards* growing nervousness. Even if they didn’t completely believe die stickles were drawing near, the idea made them jumpy all the same.
On either side of the path loomed the strange, mechanical-looking structures of the fun rides: cylinders of wire mesh, hoops of steel I-beams, cages attached to long metal arms. All were frozen, dead. At the entrances to each ride were low chain-link fences and steel turnstiles, for crowd and ticket control, which hadn’t been a concern for more than a century.
Then they approached a two-story building with more of the mutielike figures decorating its side and roof. Jak could hear moans and sobs coming from inside and thought they’d already arrived at the zoo. For a moment he was sure that he’d blown it, that he’d waited too long to make his break. But the building turned out to be just another deserted ride: the Ghost Castle Spook Train. Like the other amusement rides, it was no longer powered by fossil fuel or electricity; it was powered by live beings. Mutie slaves dragged the miniature railroad cars through the darkened spook house; muties in chains leaped out of hiding places in the blackness to try to scare the norm passengers.