olo swallows the vial of golden joy and leans back against an old holly to watch.

Tilly and Ana have already succumbed to the bliss of polymethamphetamine--or polly, or PM, or kaon--and madness takes its toll. Ana floats high above the field and releases a handful of dimes she’s found in her attic. The silver coins are worthless now; there’s been no real economy for some 30 years. As they fall, Tilly explodes them with a point of a finger. The dimes make cheap firecrackers, sparking in brilliant blues and reds before disintegrating. As the last dime evaporates, Ana returns to earth, but never touches down. Class F Kaonics rarely touch the earth. She digs into her pocket and pulls out a golden vial. There’s no side effects to polly, no hangover, but Ana suffers from KIF--Kaonic Immune Failure--and she’s already at the start of a pretty big downer.

Tilly wobbles toward Paul with a silly grin on her face. She takes a step to the right for every two steps forward, but makes it to him somehow. Paul is not a Kaonic so his drug of choice is marijuana, and he has an even sillier grin on his face and his eyes are just barely open. Tilly whispers something in his ear as she leans against him suggestively, but Volo knows her technique and it is too blunt for a married man with three children.

Sy enters the playing field with her infant child sleeping against her back. She searches for her triplet and is upset. She is not an addict, does not understand that Tilly is choiceless. Like the other Kaonics, she was forced to take the drug while imprisoned at Hatchfield. There is no way to escape polly.

The triplets look nothing like each other. It is a casualty of the kaonic mutation. The poison overtook them from the womb, as it did all Kaonics, but its effects were random. Like Volo, Tilly is a Class S. Muscles built from the excess energy quietly ripple through her reddened skin and a static field sparks from the spikes of her orange hair to her unshod feet. Sy has the willowy frame of a Class C and looks sickly from the gray tint to her skin. But then, she can look like anything in the world when she chooses to.

The triplets fight. Sy storms off but before she leaves, she threatens Tilly. "If you keep on with the polly, you can say goodbye to all of this and hello to oblivion!"

Tilly is also afflicted with KIF. She will eventually die of it. No one knows how to stop it or even how to prevent it, but polly aggravates it.

Lightning crashes. Volo and Tilly are the only ones capable of such energy and he knows he did not invoke it.

Tilly approaches with smoke issuing from her ears. She sits down across from him and stares at him, hard. "I need more," she growls.

"I don't have any," he lies.

"I thought you were the candy man."

"Not for you."

She collapses back with a huff. "My life is a misery," she moans with all the drama of the fourteen-year-old mind she possesses. She'd witnessed the murder of her family as the government fought to seize her and her sisters. Sy got over it with time. Tara, the third triplet, became an assassin and hasn't been seen since Hatchfield. Tilly remains an almost adult after ten years.

It puts Volo in an awkward situation. He wants children and they can only form within a Class. Tilly is the only S in the township. And he loves her, in some strange way that could be the bond between to fire conjurers or simple human emotion.

Tilly is an oversexed teenager with a brain telling her to seek affection in any way and a body that men confuse with a rational adult's. And her taste is the natural men in the township, the ones without mutations.

"Why did you try to get Paul?" Volo asks.

"Give me a strong man," she says.

"But the wrong man?"

Tilly rolls away from him, rests her head on her hands. She knows Volo's been advancing on her. She likes him in a more adult way than she usually feels, and it scares her. Even more, it upsets her. She only knows how to love in one way and if consummated, there would be a baby. She doesn't want it, doesn't want to curse another with her mangled genes. And she knows she might not live to watch it grow.

"With them, I see blue skies through the tears in my eyes. The KIF, it makes me sad."

Volo massages her back tenderly, feeling muscles tense and relax beneath his hands. "Does it hurt?"

"All I know is down inside, I’m bleeding."

Volo reaches into his pocket and pulls out a vial. He hands it to Tilly with a smile. "Here, give yourself over to absolute pleasure."

She takes it greedily. The bounce affects her almost immediately. She grins and grabs Volo's hands. "Come dance with me!" she laughs.

He helps her up and chases after her. His bounce has kicked in finally and for now, he is satisfied with her frantic bursts of white heat as they join the crush of people in the field. Together, they detonate Ana's recent acquisitions--a handful of quarters. While the polly works its way through their minds, Tilly and Volo find happiness.