Page 127 of Antihero

Evan clicked the button. “Copy that.” He pocketed the device. “Thank you, J.”

On that not-quite-occluded window, endless membra virilia whipped by. How many mystifying selected social behaviors, moral derailments, and technological wrong turns had coaxed such a spectacle into possibility?

He backed out of the cage. “As you were.”

She gave him a chopsticks salute.

Devine waited in front of the steam room, towel around his waist. Evan had stripped in a changing stall and was likewise wrapped. The spa, large enough to accommodate a platoon, was preposterously luxurious—muted earth-tone tiles, shower enclosures hemmed with walls of blue glass, jugs of mint-infused water.

Devine adjusted the humidity dial, tugged open the thick glass door, and entered. As he reached to loose the towel, Evan gritted his teeth. He was not in the mood for dick games. He’d seen them played out in countless varieties, sunbathing nudists on display atop chaise longues, spread-legged sauna hogs, no-fucks-to-give old men parading around private-club locker rooms, their balls stretched low like prison laundry bags. The vory v zakonye in Muscovite banyas were the alphas of the sport. The way they sank into marble baths of freezing water, blue veins throbbing through their pale skin. Or how they thrashed themselves raw with birchwood branches. Evan preferred either to maintain a measure of modesty or fight to the death directly instead of sublimating all over the place, but that was his training, his measure, and the exacting nature of his sometimes disorder.

But when the towel fell away, Devine was wearing a bathing suit. It was surprisingly unfashionable, falling to midthigh, beige with an elastic waistband, and in it he looked pasty and fragile.

Evan followed him into the mist. In case of emergency, he’d brought his RoamZone, swathed protectively in a dry washcloth.

They sat opposite each other on the second tier as the steam vent exhaled an extended dragon burst, clouding the air so thickly Evan couldn’t see his own knees.

At last it ceased and there was no sound aside from their wet breathing and the occasional drops falling from the tiled ceiling. Devine picked up a spray bottle and shot mist liberally in all directions. As the eucalyptus essence diffused, Evan felt it open up his pores, his nasal passages, his lungs.

“Have you helped the young woman?” Devine asked.

“More to come.”

“Have you found those who harmed her?”

“Not yet.” Evan pointed through the ceiling to Joey countless stories above in the scarlet room. “Waiting.”

“I don’t envy them.”

“Whatever happens,” Evan said, “will not be pleasant for them.”

The vent emitted another burst, and then silence reasserted itself.

“I can’t slow down enough to stay sane and do everything that I’m doing,” Luke said. “And no one else can do everything that I’m doing.”

Evan gave that a few minutes. “Doesn’t excuse it.”

“Excuse what?”

Evan said, “Anything.”

The dripping sound quickened with the rising humidity, plunking musically at three- and four-second intervals. Evan felt the skin of his face as a membrane aflame from the eucalyptus, alive with heat and sensation.

The steam cleared enough for him to make out the shape of Devine across from him, heat rising off his shoulders and thighs, turning him into a mirage.

“Why did you come here?” Devine said. “I assume you have better things to do than scold me in a steam room.”

“Joey and I took down RedLite. For now.”

“So I’ve gathered from the chatter between her and Rawlings. And?”

“She has them on the ropes. But I want that company destroyed. Completely. For good. That’s more your bailiwick than mine.”

Devine leaned forward and thought about it, the temporal vein pulsating in his forehead, so pronounced that looking at it felt like looking at his insides.

At last, he said, “Let’s go to the sauna.”

When they stepped out, cold braced them like aftershave tonic, Evan’s skin tightening. The towel around his waist was soaked. What looked like a fat champagne stand housed a pinwheel of tightly rolled white towelettes that exuded a fragrance of fresh lavender. It had not been there forty minutes before when they’d entered the steam room.