THURSDAY

(Jonah)

At midnight his fever woke him with figments: The warmth he felt was an oven he’d been laid in – an oven someone had carried to him across the snow. The pressure at his wrists and ankles was the grip of bony fingers – a bony rival pinning him on a warm mat in a heated gym. The dryness in his throat was fur (this also explained the softness on his cheek; had anything ever been so soft?) – he was back in Jewel Cave, in a nest of baby bats, some of them had crawled inside him to sleep in the smaller cave his open mouth made. But each of these shivery notions came back to strike him like boomerangs: No. No sting of oven rack. No breath of a captor. No quiver of wing or scrape of talon against his tongue.

He opened his eyes. Cold light. Shiny walls. The truth wobbled into focus, and through the soft substance of his confusion, he took inventory of his disadvantages. He was lying on his side, his hands tied behind his back and his ankles bound by something hard and sharp – zip ties, he guessed. But he was inside. In a bed. With a blanket drawn up to his chin. And on a tray by his pillow, a water bottle with an accordion straw, its neck bent thoughtfully toward his lips. The white metal frame from an upper bunk hovered over him like the lid of a coffin, and to his right was another pair of bunks. On the counter next to a little sink, a single toothbrush and a deck of cards so worn they looked soft. On a milk crate in the corner, a string of colored Christmas lights blinked on a tiny plastic tree. And underneath the bunk opposite, a pair of men’s snow boots, still wet. He had seen a 60 Minutes on bunkers like these after the ratings started to drop on quarantine-ward footage and reunion stories. The people with doomsday shelters had been the big winners; the pandemics had finally proven them right. Ultra-low-particulate air filter. Big steel door filled with concrete. Access hatch hidden at the back of a cupboard so no one would guess it was there. The snowy totalitarian military theater of his imagination receded. This was JT’s new terrain.

He zeroed in on that bottle of water. He was feeling too disconnected to do what he’d need to do next, the parts of him spread out and embedded in the soft stuff of the bed. His head a full jerry-can sloshing. His eyes spots of tree light. His lips blind inchworms straining for the straw. The water tasted weird, a little plasticky from the walls of a five-year tank under six feet of Black Hills topsoil, but it felt so good on his throat it was like the cool trickle that surprised him awake after his tonsillectomy, drew him out of his propofol stupor like a hand: not just alive and safe, but also tended and contained, not by bed rails and nurses tipping ice water to his lips in paper cups, but by lime popsicle from his father’s hand in his father’s arms in his father’s lap.

He heard a rustling above him. A pair of reindeer pajamas slid off the upper bunk.

“You’re awake!” A boy, big, fifteen or sixteen JT guessed, but too openly pleased to be like any teenager JT had ever been or known. In one hand he held a forehead thermometer, and in the other he had JT’s binoculars. “How do you feel? Are you hungry? Do you need to pee?”

He panned the slippery silt of his memory (the dripping in the cave; endless trek through the forest; hours watching the cabin on his belly in the snow), but no trace of how he got inside here came. Had he been passed out the whole time? Or could he have been awake, feverish and babbling? JT had been held for twelve weeks in a jungle prison, collared and walled, and he had given up nothing, but he had never been asked friendly questions in a state of hypothermic delirium.

“Sorry about the zip ties. I just did that so my mom would help you. She used to be a nurse.” Each of these sentences seemed to drag the boy lower. JT felt heavy himself. He pictured the parts of him sliding together and filling with water from the boy’s bottle – one big wavering bag, weighty, soft, ungrippable, collapsing through a hole in the mattress and disappearing into the earth. His face felt pliant, like a mask filled with jello. He felt his eyelids sinking. No combat had ever been more difficult than the struggle against this slide. “Who are you? What happened to you? How can I help?”

Each of these questions released something buoyant in JT’s chest, like helium balloons. If he had done any babbling, at least it had been nothing clear. His professional and personal needs lined up like stars. Shut up. Accept care. Sleep.

“Wait!” the boy said. “Hang on. Hey, hang in there.”

The insides of his eyelids were a shimmery yellow, almost gold. He felt little slaps on his cheek like the talc-scented pats his sister gave her baby in his soft yellow nursery.

“My mom is going to be back soon, and believe me you will be much better off if you can tell me something about yourself before she gets here. Ha.” JT didn’t know why everything was making him think of his sister. The boy kept on talking, giving him those light little baby-butt slaps, checking his temperature, probing his lips with the straw, but JT didn’t open his eyes again. He didn’t even stir. He just kept lying there, drifting in and out of sleep, waiting for the water to work its magic and filing away little details to help him get ready for what came next.

Once he heard him say: “You’ve seen her on TV probably. The prize lady. That’s my mother.”

Later: “Shit. 104. That’s high.”

Then: “Just my luck, after all these months, somebody who can’t even talk.”

And finally this: “Whatever you do, don’t be nice to her. It will just piss her off.” Then the smell of something good. Was it chocolate? “Maybe you’re just hungry. Try this.” (He felt another straw at his lips, something creamy going down – god – and sweet.) “I only have eight left of these, but they’re my favorite.”

This fever was bad, but cutting through the slipstream of symptom and setback was a rudder of clarity like the one that kept him centered in his calls with his sister. Heat, pain, exhaustion, the strain of listening for information he could use to his advantage, his pity for the boy, the heaviness of his eyelids, all the detail and discomfort bearing him backward seemed at once epic and irrelevant. When the boy panicked at the sound of dogs barking, JT felt a jump-cut of relief. Now he could get out of here. The crucible of work and suffering between now and then didn’t seem to matter. A series of sounds through the bunker’s surveillance mics skimmed him forward like pages in a flipbook. Footsteps. Tire treads. Pleading. The woman standing at the door with a gun was almost welcome, like a long-expected death.

“Go get the cable ties,” she said.

(Liv)

She had been expecting bad, obviously, based on Will’s panicky disjointed porch story alone. Hypothermia, my ass. He might have it, yes, but it was clearly going to be the smallest of his problems. You don’t lie in a yard with binoculars until you pass out unless you’ve got something to hide. If you are a lost hiker, say, or a bird watcher with a poor sense of direction, you knock on the door, or follow the driveway to a road you can hitchhike out on. Moving through the house with Will pleading at her heels, she’d ticked through a mental list of plenty of bad things he might be – drunk on a dare, medical desperate, freelance spy trolling for a traitorous high officer they could turn in for points on the peace channel – but as soon as she saw him, she had a new guess. His groundwork of thank-you’s and no-problem’s and ill-advised flirtations while she hectored her soft-hearted son through re-tethering him to the bedposts didn’t change it, and neither did this. She dropped the scissors. (No time-saving disclosures for the blindsided mother cutting off all his clothes pants-first in a fallout shelter, you’ll notice.) When she pressed the skin around the stitches, it gave and shifted like the surface of a waterbed.

“What did you clean it with?”

“Vodka.”

“Where’d you get it?”

“Gift bag at a party.”

Bullshit. And she didn’t like how calmly he was staring at her, just more evidence that her new guess was right, he was one of the deluded savior fantasists they were rounding up at the border. Not germ mules like the truthcasters had been instructed to say (whatever brutal tactics the Pentagon employed, suicide attacks had never been among them), but the American operative part seemed like a reasonable bet. Why Washington kept trying, she would never understand. Even if they managed to assassinate him, (doubtful given the off-duty spying among his secret service agents, the rotating residences, and the invincibility flex of the system of mediocre body doubles and cheap plastic Halloween masks he wore during his appearances at parties), they should be banking on a succession hierarchy of six eager cabinet members with a menu of the twelve Nixon-era nukes snugged under the wheat fields that they’d be authorized to launch if he were dead. The US had already annoyed him so much with their first two insultingly undermanned regime-change missions, he had underground-tested one just to prove he wasn’t kidding. Liv got distracted for a second mentally revising her plan for where she and Will might head when they got out of here. California might be too juicy a target for an escalation of his capricious-mass-destruction prerogative. She might have to downgrade to a sunny place with fewer people. Key Largo maybe.

This guy was still staring at her, trying to look trustworthy and accommodating, difficult under the circumstances, but he was doing as well as he could when he was jacked like a hatchet man, bound naked to a bunkbed, and doling out snippets of pretext too innocuous and uncheckable to be believed. Hike too close to the border. Deer stepped on a landmine. His face wavered in the flashes of colored light from Will’s sad, sentimental tree.

“His wound looks infected,” she said. “Go upstairs and get me some rubbing alcohol and the sharpest knife in the kitchen.”

Frantic footsteps receding.

“You’re smart to be so careful.”

“Boy did you pick the wrong house.” She yanked the plastic curtain from the rod in front of the toilet and shoved it under his torso. “I don’t care who you really are or what you’re doing here, but if you share the truth with him while I’m gone, I’ll be able to tell and I will leave you for dead in this bunker.”

Then she stabbed herself in the forearm and took the cable ties, the scissors, and every knife in the damn house with her to the hospital at midnight to talk a nurse into giving her a take-home prescription for antibiotics, drove home, locked the pills in the glovebox, gave him a single dose, and slept in the shelter watching over both of them with a pistol beneath her sheets.

(Francine)

Standing at the bus stop, Fran feels all the thoughts she’d been holding at bay in her head inside the hospital break free. It’s strange. Out here she’s still surrounded, and the thoughts running wild inside her head are bad, but out here she feels safe. These people surrounding her are nurses, night shift nurses crowded close, swaying tired, their shoulders bumping up against her shoulders, their blown hair blowing across her own mouth, and it’s foggy out, the fog blurring their bumping bodies further, even the bright spots of individual parking lot lamps fading and disappearing as the rising sun whites the fog itself from above, and the uniforms that unite and unify them underneath are covered up by thick coats that further close and cushion their gaps, but still Francine can’t shake it, the feeling of freedom and safety fresh air delivers to her. It’s a reflex now, she can’t stop it, the stampede of thoughts and feelings the second she steps outside. Because outside (Francine tells herself) -- outside she cannot be monitored. Outside her thoughts (even this first thought, the rabble rouser, the one that wakes and unleashes all the others) -- outside her thoughts whisper her awake by telling her they cannot be heard.

When she pulled the medical chart from the plastic holder and saw the name of her last patient, she had pinned her apprehension to it like a butterfly to a board – settled, celebrated, explained. Of course. She must have overheard something, sensed some tremor of excitement or awe in the energy of the intake nurses or the footsteps of the med techs behind her as she washed her hands. There was greatness among them. And yes, maybe opportunity she shouldn’t miss. Liv Lockhart had been a nurse herself during the pandemics, so there was that to talk about. And motherhood too – she was a mother, with one son, the Peace Channel had said. Her hand hovered over the brushed stainless door handle to the exam room. Should she take off her cardigan? Or would the eyes interpret that as calculating? She pressed the handle down and stepped inside.

The fresh surge in her pulse when she saw Liv sitting on the paper-covered table had been almost soothing. It was as if the free-floating panic she’d felt in the hall had reappeared just in time dressed in uniform for the eyes in the ceiling above. She hoped the very same eyes and auditors she had hoped missed the trembling in her hands as she lathered them in the hallway zoomed in on it now. Good girl, they would think. Of course she was nervous. Face-to-actual-face with a face she saw ten dozen times a day in Grand Prize ads -- tiny and frozen on flyers on bulletin boards and telephone poles, miniature and waving on screens in lobbies and break rooms and the truths she kept always-on-in-every-room at home, giant on billboards looming over exit ramps and rooftops on her drive to work. Here that face was in three dimensions. And attached to a body. And smiling at her. At her for real, Fran meant. Able to actually see her. Able to speak.

But Liv Lockhart didn’t speak. Not first. Not yet. And she wasn’t wearing a paper gown. She was still dressed. Still wearing a fur coat even. And there was snow on her black boots. And an unfamiliar look on her face. What was it? Just some physical discomfort, Fran hoped. Not judgment. Not suspicion. And through it all Fran had had the clear sense that whatever personal misfortune or public beneficence or just-for-Fran favor had brought this woman here to her was clearly fated, not actually surprising, the welcome explanation for five years of expectant anxiety Fran had been feeling, and then Fran found herself speaking first to stop this selfish, self-centered, solipsistic train of thoughts. To cover it. To contradict it. “I can’t believe it’s really you,” she had said.

But now out here at the bus stop, here they all came, each thought calling olly-oxen-free to a gaggle of rowdy companions:

What had Liv Lockhart been doing there? The cut in her arm looked deliberate. Too clean and careful to get infected. Why drive in the night to ask for antibiotics? Why break rules if you’re powerful enough not to do it? Love! That’s crazy, who would she be hiding? Who is Fran hiding? What self is she hiding inside herself, she means. So suspicious, not suspicious enough, the eyes could see that wound too from above when she examined her, could doubt Liv’s motives like Fran did, could doubt Fran for not following procedures, or for not bending them for a gold-circle citizen (platinum-level patriot… A-level ally… 7-star sentiment-setter… outstanding officer… member most memorable… natural national… prosocial pro…) or for not asking a supervisor what she should do then, or now, or later, at the bus stop now waiting for a bus she could rush back into the hospital to miss, or tonight sitting across the table from Burt eating cold soup from a can with a spoon she could set down to ready herself to speak in a moment of patriotic invention.

Feelings always lagged the thoughts, but they caught up so quickly, bandy-legged and wild, running circles around them or outrunning, encouraging or taunting, tripping them up and helping them back to their feet, carrying them ahead and shoving them roughly aside into ditches. Fear, shame, anger, disappointment, sorrow. Self-pity, self-judgment, self-justification, anger again. It was loud in there – riotous, terrifying, exhausting – but at least something was happening, bringing her closer to what must come.

She saw the bus headlights approaching in the fog now, a yellow smudge she felt the women around her perceive, the bump of their soft coats against her ceasing as they alerted and tensed their muscles to board and go home to whatever home meant to them, maybe tensing for the effort of muzzling and tying up thoughts of their own. Fran pictured Burt waiting for her with a breakfast before he left to take the kids to school on his way to work. It was sweet the way he made it for her before she dropped into sleep in the bed their separate surveillance work kept them from sharing. She tried to keep her thoughts frozen there: it was sweet the way he made it for her. Tried never to look at his thumb while she ate his sweet breakfast. It wasn’t enough not to ask him the question that looking at his clicker thumb would trigger, she needed not even to think it: What is it like to use a part of yourself to punish a person just for being herself?

(Tracy)

By afternoon, Tracy wouldn’t be able to remember what she had intended. Driving to work she had felt some sense of resolve; it was still possible to be a person who had integrity. You did it just like this. You got in your car with the twin of a mug you had made for a teacher who was the only person who loved you (loved you), and you inched your way through streets full of people as full as your mug full of things they would never tell anyone, and you drove to your bad job to do a bad thing badly.

She’d felt a shiver go through her in the car that was not the cold when she thought that. The people crossing in front of her bumper looked so tired (they didn’t track tired looks yet) – as tired as her parents had looked; as tired as Tracy felt waking up and making herself tea in the house her tired parents had died in, but she did it anyway. She muscled through the muffled air in her ghost house, and she put her tea in the twin of a mug she had made for a woman who said you could use them: you could find yourself shivering in an office made cold by the withheld coals of your own missed choices, and you could use a ghost for good. Integrity could look just like this.

When she pushed through the lobby doors, she still had some sense of it. The air inside was warm, and warmly lit, but tinged with beer, and the floors shifted in her vision like snakes. It wasn’t just optical. It wasn’t just shapes or repeating patterns, it was the history of those patterns, a history that hadn’t yet happened when they were laid. It made Tracy feel off-kilter thinking about that. That someone could choose a shape sacred to Native Americans, a beautiful reaching shape they used to remind themselves of the four sacred corners of the earth, and then Hitler could co-opt it, and for almost a hundred years the swastika tiles would be the subject of tourist inquiry and corrective explanation, a footnote, harmless, and then a pair of microbes could make his hotel the seat of propaganda for a dictator rescuing citizens from a crisis caused by the genetically impure, and suddenly the hotel man’s love of state history, of its German immigrants and Sioux ascendants, could make something spooky and tragic of Germanic Tudor architecture and a grateful symbol and a war-spear chandelier.

Liv Lockhart was standing right under it. Hands-on-hips looking up at Gary on a ladder hanging mistletoe from its tips. That was the first big blow to Tracy’s intention. She had expected to have to meet with them separately. With breaks in between to sneak back to her ghost office to summon the ghost of her own resolve.

“Dangle them lower,” Liv said.

Tracy headed for the elevator. Her moccasin boots were almost silent on the swastikas. Anticipation of this crossing always made her reach for her quietest shoes.

But it didn’t matter. “Tracy, hang on!” Gary shouted from his ladder. “We were just talking about you!”

Would her snowball-self have found a way to deflect them? Soon Gary was descending, and Liv was teasing him about something, and then they were all headed up in the same elevator together. Tracy’s knees felt heavy as they rose. Their banter was the stuff of sit-coms. It wasn’t right for a rise like this.

“We need an update,” Gary started to say to Tracy.

“Hold your horses, Tonto,” Liv told him. (Tonto!) “First things first.”

Gary’s office was in the penthouse. He had given himself the whole floor. Tracy had never been in it with them together, and something clicked in her mind when she saw Liv act like she owned it. She sat down in Gary’s desk chair, and Gary laughed. Then she took a piece of paper out of her purse.

Gary’s office was gross. It had a gold replica of a nuclear missile, and a Women-of-the-Dakotas swimsuit calendar, and a cage with a rat on a wheel. It was gross in the way that Liv Lockhart’s tight dresses and giant breasts were gross. It gave you a place to focus your despair that could be managed. Sometimes (she hated to admit this) Tracy was almost grateful for the awfulness of the details. The cartoon of badness was easier. It was why laughing along with a comedian back when there were comedians felt good.

Liv took a piece of paper from her purse and slid it toward him on the guest side of his own desk. Behind her head to the left the rat was running, and to the right a second self on his TV screen, her red lips counting down time to his prize (2 Days!).

“You’re kidding,” Gary said.

“Not kidding.”

“Deluded.”

“Not deluded.”

He turned to Tracy as if Tracy were some sort of straight man. “It’s a visa application.”

“He should be thanking me.”

“She wants to drive over the border for a bottle of whiskey.”

“Prohibition whiskey. For the President’s artifacts of U.S. Policy Blunders collection.”

“In our busiest week of the year.”

She’d be back in twenty-four hours, she told him. She could handle everything for the week after she got back remotely, she said. The President asked for this, going herself was the only way her source would give it to her, Paxton liked that she would have to get it that way. He had joked about missing her in person at his Christmas shindigs, but looking forward to video support from her in her quarantine jammies.

Here was a surprising undiscussed thing: Liv Lockhart wasn’t beautiful. If Tracy pictured her features one at a time, they were just normal, but they were stuffed into a costume of sexuality like parts in a sausage casing. There was a thin spot shrouded under her heaps of some poor person’s hair, and a dusk of exhaustion bluing her concealer, and her dress buckled where some tyrannical shape-ware cut through the legacy of flesh that softened every mother. Tracy marveled that in some women the tells of life experience were ennobling, but the attempt to hide them made them ugly. Shame was ugly. Why did people reach for a tomato tormented into round redness until it tasted mealy and watery and gray? When did the packaging start making people hungry? The way your mouth can water looking at a photo of motor oil poured over pancakes, or a dollop of shaving cream on a slice of pie, or cereal floating in a bowl of glue, or your heart can swell when the music lifts at a boring part of a movie, or a laugh track can make you laugh. When did a fake of the world start to replace it?

Liv took a lime out of her purse.

Then a knife and a tiny cutting board.

Then a pint of rum with a girl in bikini, and a cut crystal glass in a quilted cozy, and a pen she slid to Gary across his own desk.

Laughter tumbled out of him, like coins from a slot. “Tracy, honey, go down to your office and get your event sheets in order for Liv to give the once-over later.”

“Don’t underestimate her,” Liv said winking at Tracy. “Tracy’s event is going to be great.”

(Enrique)

“I told you should have worn a tie.”

Enrique said nothing. Lydia herself was wearing a nighttime dress, like you’d wear to a party. Red and black flowers with a little black velvet jacket over the top and a sparkly white purse. The small kind you only carry if you don’t need to do anything because nothing fits inside. Red and black and white like the flag. He knew what she was doing. It was a Thursday morning, ten o’clock. They were in Resort Banquet Room D. It was on the second floor of the Courage Center and it had a table for eight and a window overlooking the ninth hole of the golf course. A white flag stood up out of the white snow. At the head of the table was a pot of coffee and a plate of Christmas cookies Enrique could tell had been made in a factory.

“Why did you wear your cooking clothes?”

“I don’t know how long this will take, and I’m working lunch.”

They didn’t know why they were there. Their phone had rung at six am, the double tone that meant it was a call from the Resort administration, a call not to be ignored. Lydia had lunged over his body in bed to answer it as if it were a call from a secret lover.

“Of course,” she said. “We’d be honored.”

On the way across the golf course, her high heels had filled with snow, but she didn’t seem to feel the cold, she was so excited.

“Who did they say we’re meeting with?” Enrique asked her.

“They never tell you a thing like that. They don’t have to say. They like you to see they don’t have to.”

Now Enrique looked down at her shiny black shoes sinking into the plush red carpet. There was a water mark on her stockings all the way up to the middle of her plump foot. Her feet must be numb. On the ceiling one light fixture was missing, and a square of painter’s tape marked where the paint would have to be re-done after the fixture was repaired. He saw Lydia’s eyes go up to it. He thought about what she might say later about this when they were alone in their apartment with the music playing: if his job were better, they might have been left in a conference room with a finished ceiling. But she wouldn’t say it here. Lydia was rude, and selfish, but she wasn’t stupid. Sometimes Enrique thought he’d be better off if she was.

If Enrique stood all the way to the right at the end of the plate glass window, he could just see the loading dock of the hospital building, where workers in parkas unloaded the crates of medicine and gloves and food. Before she went into a coma, Natalia had liked the vanilla yogurt they gave her on her tray. On the other side of the table, Lydia was fluffing her fluffy hair in the dim reflection of the black TV screen. Was the TV screen a test? Usually everywhere they went, the screens were on. Were they supposed to turn it on to show that they wanted to watch Membership TV? Or were they supposed to show that they respected boundaries by leaving things as they were? Enrique didn’t know.

At last, two people entered: a woman in a skirt and blouse less dressy than Lydia’s, and a red-haired man wearing a jogging suit. They both had clipboards. The red-haired man looked like he had been jogging recently. Sweat beaded on his forehead.

The woman gestured for them to sit, and Lydia sat in front of the platter of cookies at the head of the table. The woman sat with her back to the golf course and the man in the jogging suit sat beside her. It occurred to Enrique that as mismatched as they were, and likely also only co-workers, they looked better matched than he was to Lydia, sitting far away in her finery. The woman glanced at the distance between them and made a note on her clipboard Enrique couldn’t read.

“Thank you for meeting us this morning,” the woman said. “I’m Mitzy VanDeen. This is Dr. Stanley Amos.”

Dr. Amos was pouring himself a glass of water, and at the same time taking a white handkerchief from his pocket to wipe his sweaty forehead. By way of greeting he only nodded at Enrique and slid his eyes down the table toward Lydia. He lifted his glass and took a greedy gulp.

“Looking forward to Christmas?” she said.

“Oh yes!” Lydia said. “The decorations going up here!” she said fervently, “I can’t believe my eyes when I see that tree in front of the Courage Center! First class all the way!”

Dr. Amos pulled a crumpled scrap of paper from the pocket of his zip-up and scribbled a note on it, then rested his hand on it while he took another sip of water. Mitzy VanDeen looked expectantly at Enrique. He considered different things he might say. “Yes, Ma’am,” he said finally. Increasingly it seemed to Enrique that it was better to say as little as possible: with Lydia… here in the Rewards Resort… at work at Residence A… Every day since Paxton took over, his words had been dwindling.

“What will you do to celebrate?” the woman asked them.

Who were these people? Enrique had been interviewed by twelve separate people to get the job with the President. Six people on the President’s staff, and six here in the Resort, three times together with Lydia. When he was interviewed alone he was asked endless disconnected questions -- about his high school curfew, his familiarity with certain books, his parents’ sleeping arrangements. His interviews with Lydia were more like bad double dates. Always with a pair of people, a woman and a man. Once, the man was very late, and the two colleagues had argued over who had been responsible for the confusion over the meeting time, and at another the four of them were served a full dinner at 3:00 in the afternoon in the empty golf clubhouse cafe, which featured fish that was clearly spoiled. But since moving into the Rewards Resort six months ago they had mostly been left alone. Enrique had never understood the point of any of those meetings. As a lover of mystery novels, it was a disappointment to him that he was so often confused. Maybe it was why he loved them. The detectives were not only people of action, but people of enough insight to know what they needed to do.

“…Go to the Jingle Ball, I hope,” Lydia was saying. “And any other balls we’re wanted to appear at,” Lydia was watching the lady’s eyes as she was talking. Lydia reminded Enrique of a small predator animal. Just that simple and cagey and focused. “And whatever rallies the President is recommending, of course.”

As she talked, Dr. Amos watched Enrique, as if he were the one talking, even though he was not. Enrique didn’t know what to say about their plans for Christmas. He didn’t really have any, just visiting Natalia in the hospital and reading another Hercule Poirot, and Lydia was really running with the question, as if it could possibly be the point of the meeting, what they were planning for Christmas. “And I’ll be decorating inside our Glory Condo to match the scene outside, but with a patriotic theme.” She went on like this, with details of no interest to anyone, until the temporary panel above her suddenly gave way and fell onto the table with a snow of plaster dust, as if it wanted to shut her up, Enrique would think later, but right then Enrique didn’t think. He was on his feet before he could think anything, shoving Lydia’s chair out of the way. It went rolling toward the TV screen, tipping back a little as it went so that her legs kicked up and splayed in a way that made her look foolish. In his head he heard her scream “Idiot! It’s only plaster dust!” as if she were saying it out loud, but that’s how cagey Lydia was. In front of these two she didn’t say it. Instead it was “my hero” she said.

Enrique looked at Mitzy VanDeen.

“Goodness,” she said brushing her hand through a thin layer of dust on the gleaming table. “Our apologies. We’ll make sure to get that repaired.”

Dr. Amos slipped the scrap of paper back into his pocket. “Well,” he said. “Maybe that’s as good a segue as any.”

“Maybe so,” Mitzy VanDeen said. She folded down the top sheet on her clipboard. “We didn’t want to rush into the news, but I’m afraid we have something difficult to tell you.”

Lydia was still brushing plaster dust off her skirt front, but she looked up now.

Dr. Amos pressed his lips together. “This morning your daughter gave up the fight.”

(Gregor)

In his role as Chief Examiner, Dr. Scanlon had been issued a small office. His predecessor, Dr. Parish, had kept the blinds closed, and when Dr. Scanlon pulled the nylon cord for the first time, he had understood why. A view no better than the backs of boards – just the galvanized sheet metal wall of a massive HVAC unit on the roof of the hospital cafeteria. Were his window operable, and were Dr. Scanlon to lift the sash and reach out with a yardstick, he would be able to touch it with a rumbling flex like a timpani drum. But his window was not. His window was sealed. Still, somehow the food smells seeped in, slipping through the slatted vent near the ceiling and gathering above his desk in an affronting cloud, but Dr. Scanlon would not be affronted. He would not be deterred. And while he did not enjoy the smell of coffee and fry oil, he grew to welcome the way it built and even lingered in the threads of his lab coat after he returned to his rounds on the 10^th floor, constant reminders of the distinct advantage he had been afforded: the privacy of a small space with a door he could close.

There were eyes in the ceiling, of course, or he had to assume there were, but the work he was doing (here and everywhere) had been assigned to him by the President. He had nothing to fear.

Dr. Scanlon roused his computer from its slumber with a click of the space bar on his keyboard. Black screen. White box with cursor blinking. This computer was not connected to any external network. Few were anymore. It served only one purpose. It rewarded the user with information when supplied a name.

President Paxton‘s Chief of Staff had specified just one this week when he finally came on the line. It was the first time he had ever spoken to him, and despite the obvious honor of a call from a senior delegate of a head of state (and it was honor, he hoped; why else speak to him directly? Why not let someone more junior convey his wishes?), he might have resented the assignment. It was well outside his purview, both as a physician and as a scientist, and he was already doing so many things, all of them of much graver importance, and all of them urgent. It was also distasteful, but at core it was not without justice, and its ends were high. Dr. Scanlon ordered the missing page from her medical file and had spent his spare hours in the intervening days dreaming of details that might make her susceptible to the kind of blackmail her cooperation with his unsavory errand would likely require. Given the value of the faithful disposition of any service to the President, perhaps it is not surprising that he had also found himself preoccupied with her name.

Dr. Scanlon liked names. The president’s, for example, particularly pleased him. Paxton, of course, meant settlement of peace, and Damian was a patron saint of physicians. He had invented a medieval electuary called opopira, a drug mixed with sugar or honey used to treat paralysis, not unlike the false-promising sweet-talk their doctor president had used to treat the nation’s panic-induced bureaucratic impotence. For the sake of the country and his own work, Dr. Scanlon certainly hoped the parallels would end there, because for his innovation St. Damian had been declared a criminal, arrested, and ordered to recant. When he stayed true to his beliefs, he was hung on a cross, stoned, shot by arrows, and finally beheaded. But his devotees had been undeterred. To this day he was so beloved, the disposition of his skull was disputed. Some say it was venerated in Rome, then transferred to Germany where it was forgotten in the choir in the Bremen Cathedral, and later found, enshrined in oak covered in gold and rolled silver, and moved to Bamberg. Others claimed it was in Vienna. But the devoted need no holy relics to kneel to. In Brazil, St. Damian is still worshipped as a protector of children, who go door-to-door for candy in bags printed with his picture on a day in his name. In Utica, over one hundred busloads of pilgrims from Canada and New England come for a festival that lasts two days. Or, at least, this had been true before the pandemics, and Dr. Scanlon couldn’t help but imagine how much Paxton would love to be celebrated in these ways.

He also felt the Greek translation of Damian was particularly apt. It meant “to tame”.

Dr. Scanlon’s own last name was something of a disappointment to him. Derived, as near as he could tell, from the Gaelic scannal, its closest translation was scandal, and he had gone through his childhood avoiding uttering it aloud, unable not to hear in it a harbinger of some widely publicized incident involving allegations of wrong-doing, moral outrage, disgrace. Some linguists might also say contention, and that suited him better, for he well understood that nothing of importance could be accomplished by a person who shied away from confrontation. But he felt a pure, unconflicted affection for his given name. Gregor meant watchful, and Dr. Scanlon had received each direct address from a teacher or scoutmaster like the honorific his last name seemed intent on denying him. Vigilance was so often portrayed as sinister, even paranoid, but in today’s world it was both a cardinal virtue and an early bellwether of future dominion. As disparate as this country’s most successful leaders had been in character and temperament, no historian could deny that this was one vital quality they both shared.

And woe to the misguided adversaries who had tried to belittle and demonize them for it.

When the talking heads in DC tried to cast Magnus Lockhart’s scientifically and geo-politically justified blog as paranoid, Lockhart simply posted details on the extensive “prepping” the government had been doing for themselves for years. For the President, Cabinet members, Supreme Court justices, and the top dogs from hundreds of agencies picked to keep things limping along after a nuclear war, he wrote, there was High Point, a hideaway under the Blue Ridge Mountains, which included a television studio the Emergency Censorship Agency could use to broadcast soothing messages to the tractable sheeple scurrying around above ground. For two thousand bigwigs at the Pentagon, the State Department, and the National Security Council, there was Raven Rock Mountain, a bunker carved out of granite airy enough to house underground reservoirs, power stations, clusters of three-story buildings, and a chapel. For the members of Congress, Project Greek Island, a shelter tucked under the Greenbrier Hotel, equipped with 25-ton blast doors, separate assembly halls for the House and Senate, decontamination showers, and a crematorium. For the Federal Reserve, a stronghold under Mount Pony, where they’d already stashed billions of dollars in shrink-wrapped bundles to help jump-start the economy after the apocalypse.

And it wasn’t just the US prepping for the worst, Lockhart had assured his viewers, preaching from his bunker in a hazmat suit. The Germans had sixty-seven rooms in Kindsbach Cave. The British had an abandoned aircraft engine factory hidden inside a limestone mine with miles of roads, housing for hundreds of members of Parliament, a BBC studio, and a pub called the Rose & Crown. And the Russians? No one knew for sure, but rumor had it they had hundreds of command bunkers linked by an underground railway system, including a 400-square-mile launch control complex with a stockpile of warheads and missiles, as well as several factories to keep churning out weapons after a nuclear showdown began.

As for those who had tried to dismiss Paxton’s warnings about the need for tighter quarantine procedures and an increase in biodefense as the rantings of a political fringe figure -- a scaremonger and a demagogue -- well, everyone knew how that had turned out.

Magnus Lockhart’s vigilance had earned him disciples and a church.

Damian Paxton’s, a nation.

Even beyond their borders, he had a loyal following of fans, true believers who promoted grassroots acts of bio-isolationism and augmented evolution on the pages of Rise magazine. Cults barricading themselves in shelters and far-flung communes and declaring independence from their nations. Medical tourism for in-utero editing of markers for criminality and rebellion and aggression. (Who knew that single genes were unlikely to be responsible for any of civilization’s problems? Who cared?)

Dr. Scanlon’s ambitions were at once smaller and more vague -- just salvation for Clara, and the sense of respect he felt had been eluding him -- but he felt certain the key to victory was the consistent application of his own vigilance to every task.

Even one so far beneath him. (He was a physician, not a gangster.)

Never mind.

Dr. Scanlon typed in her name, and he waited for the limited dole of information the hospital database would reveal to him (it was frustrating at times, being a man of science in this country; he adapted more naturally to the cordoning of feeling than to the siloing of information).

His mind busied him with questions while the cursor blinked. Was her last name Scottish? (There was certainly a kind of bravery to her efforts.) Germanic? (Herdsman in charge of a sheepfold indeed!) The government milked the comic-book consonance at every opportunity (“Let Loose with Liv Lockhart!” “Live It Up with Liv!”), but why they hadn’t exploited the history of her surname, he did not understand. Did they dislike the rebellious means her father had used for propagandistically compatible ends? (Every successful revolutionary hated revolutionaries.) Had she forbidden it herself? (The older he got, the stranger it seemed, that so many of us live our whole lives with a name chosen for us by others.)

Finally her file appeared.

It never ceased to surprise him, how easy it was to see signs of rebellion if you looked for them.

Dr. Scanlon reviewed them again, and wrote down her address.

(Jonah)

Each time the boy asks him how he’s feeling, JT thinks of the banana.

When he came-to in the snow at the border, he had propped up on one elbow to assess the source of his pain, and found himself face-to-face with her. She was lying on her side, on a spreading bed of red, and both of her forelegs were missing. The loss had left two ragged portholes on either side of her heart – frayed curtains of muscle, white shutter-slats of bone – and her eyes were still fixed on him, and her rear legs were still kicking and straining in an attitude of leaving. Far behind her, in the dirty mine-hole, the rat still attached to his lead-pole was feeding on some small part of her. A new reason to be glad he hadn’t given his rat a name replaced his old one, and when he reached the other side of the minefield, he was not sorry to bury it under the topsoil with the carrier and the rest of the banana.

“Are you thirsty?” the boy asks him. “Are you hungry at all? Do you need to pee?”

“That’s really kind of you.” (Click.)

He had buried the clicker too. Getting rid of it hadn’t been required – Paxton had imported clickers by the thousands; they were in the pocket of every gene-therapy-ward doctor, every self-improvement coach. He just hadn’t wanted to be reminded of the rat. But he finds he can’t shake it: every time he opens his mouth to say something to the boy, he feels the circle of plastic beneath his thumb.

The boy looks away. At any mention of kindness, his eyes water instantly.

“It’s not your fault,” JT tells him. (Click.)

The boy’s lip trembles.

JT says, “It’s not hers either. She just wants to protect you.” (Click.)

JT had been stationed once in a wind-swept snow-covered tundra. They encamped in the ice and he woke up each morning with frost in his lashes and his dreams were all shivering vibrating dreams: motorcycles, seizures, earthquakes, being shaken like an infant by an enraged parent, a parent encountering the darkest part of themselves, like that old painting of Saturn devouring his son, the wild look of terror at the startled discovery of one’s own savagery in desperation. It made him better understand his own feeling when he choked the stray dog who found him taking shelter from sniper fire in a hollowed oil tank. A want so fast and authoritative it did not even register as desire. It was part of his essence. He was the nightmare of a dog that had come to lick his hand.

When his mother died, there had been not only sorrow but also an ungovernable chest-flight of celebration. He was the boy who had loved her, and the boy who feared the intensity and greedy self-interest of her love, hated the nullification in it, the way his self-denial was the atom of her happiness, her wheedling on the phone, the guilt when he wanted to leave her, how effective and easy a weapon any mention of her was on the tongue of his sister, not a knife that required any force and proximity to twist, but a rifle with a bump stock, a single feather-light finger pull to riddle him with bullets from two thousand miles away. What would mom want, what would mom think, how would mom feel. His mother didn’t even need to be alive anymore to pull that trigger. Her name delivered more action at a distance than any sniper. Not just her name – photos, memories, the smell of chipped beef or butter cake, the first three notes of a Neil Diamond song, and he was the disappointing son who should be submitting pleasing consoling, offering up his life, have fewer secrets, what had Sally Bishop had to show off to her friends at First Presbyterian or hold in her heart or feed on at the end of her life when her Jonah never told her anything about his life anymore. He had left her completely. But why hadn’t it been enough just to see his face or hear his voice on the phone? He had found his way to a set of conditions that proved what he had always suspected. It had never been him, it was the way he made her feel about herself that she loved. Who wouldn’t want to kick free of a hold like that? At least the military was honest about it. We don’t love you. We love the number of kills you have the potential to deliver. How well you can train a rat to lead you across a minefield without injury. How calm you can stay when a beautiful animal is poised to detonate the world beneath your boots. How focused you can stay when the rat you trained to stay focused on your goal decides to feed on the doe instead of the banana. How detached you can be when a boy who has lost everything and wants nothing more than to follow you out of an exitless womb like the one you thought you’d found your way out of begins to trust you. How willing you can be to deceive him. So in the end he had traveled exactly nowhere. He was not in the belly of his mother, or the cage-bar cradle of a dominant democracy, but trapped in some other locked nursery altogether. His secrecy and emotional isolation were no protection. Somehow he always found his way back into this position. Enmeshed, enwombed by his own mind and heart. His mother was dead in a drawer in a mausoleum in Provo. His sister was a thousand miles away on the other side of a minefield. His SIM card was cut in half and flushed into the bowels of a sewer under a motel in Newcastle, Wyoming. He was locked in a hardened bunker, unreachable by any phone, and still he could not get free of it. He was cramped into the same uncomfortable shape, linked by the same twenty inches of cord, infiltrated by the same ceaselessly recirculating blood of this dynamic. The therapist at the base was on to him immediately, though she let him sit wordless through his first two mandatory appointments after he strangled the dog before she let on. “I hear you keep volunteering for deployments in the snow.”

Yes, he had welcomed it, the colder the better, some bleak intuition guiding him, some primitive childish idea that if he were cold enough he could stop the flow of softer feeling, but nothing stopped it. When he woke up on those mornings with frost in his lashes and his cap, his first thought was of his mother’s cinnamon Nicorette and his sister’s grape-smelling shampoo. How he hated those smells and all that went with them. There was no getting away from it no matter how far away or how inaccessible or silent or freezing he made himself. He could hear their words even if he didn’t answer the phone. He would always be a disappointment. His father was gone, and Jonah had stepped into that breach because he felt he had no choice, and he had been good at it, so good they unleashed decades of unmet needs on him, and they would never forgive him for wanting to break free and reclaim that piece of his childhood. He would never forgive himself. Never forgive himself for not forgiving his father for dying and putting him in that position. Never forgive himself for hating his dad for not being better at listening and caring for these women while he was alive. Being preferred by them was excruciating. A horrible pressure that filled him with shame. Resentment, revulsion, the guilt for resenting it and the guilt for feeling pride of achievement at besting his dad. The counselor at the base seemed to have intuited all this just from looking at his file. Or maybe this was the story of every young person who volunteered for death at this age. After a third silent session, she said, “Well,” and set down the empty bullet casing she’d been playing with to keep herself entertained. Or to focus Jonah’s attention. Probably both. “Everyone needs a purpose of their own. At some point you’re going to have to forgive yourself for wanting to escape them.”

(Will)

The last day before lockdown, Will’s class had gone on a field trip to a mining museum: pre-puberty, pre-pandemic-panic, dumb bodies buffeting on a ride down in an elevator. A dummy with a roll of toilet paper sitting on a hole in a modified mining cart. A probably-dead-now girl whose name he couldn’t remember saying “what?” for some fact to be repeated.

To cut through solid rock, miners needed freshly sharpened drill bits.

Gold ore had to be mined, crushed, and chemically treated to separate the gold from the waste.

Ore crushers smashed the rock into half-inch pebbles.

Rod-and-ball mills ground pebbles with water until it was finer than flour.

Potassium cyanide to separate it, zinc to extract it, sulfuric acid to dissolve the zinc.

Smoke and fumes filled the air, making citizens sick; chemicals spilled into streams killing thousands.

Unions formed to protect workers.

Union workers tried to force other workers into joining by refusing to work with them.

The company locked them all out.

There were mine horses who had lived their entire lives underground. During the lockout they had to be taught how to eat grass. Will imagined the feel of it, his eyes squinting shut in sympathy against a sun a horse had never seen, and against his own tears for it, the smell of the grass sprouting from a bright just-above it had never known, his hand guiding its muzzle down.

The mines had been worked mostly by immigrants, Irish, Finns, Italians, Germans. Each group brought new ethnic culture to the area. You could see traces of their history in Black Hills architecture, his teacher had said.

The Company offered housing to its workers. And a recreation center with a bowling alley, and a swimming pool, and a theater. Outdoor drilling contests on 4^th of July. Tree-planting ceremonies at the free kindergarten. Band uniforms for the Company band. A baseball field for the Company team.

Infections and blankets and Thanksgiving dinner and scraps of the land they had taken from the Indians for the Indians.

Ovens and refrigerators they had taken from Will’s neighbors for neighbors who would rat out their neighbors for tickets to a show.

Not Will’s third grade teacher answering the probably-dead girl’s what? this time, this was Will’s brain again, re-membering pasts as he peeled open a Courage Bar for the stranger.

As soon as Will’s mother had left this morning, the stranger had asked him for chocolate, just like Will used to ask his mother when he was sick in his old bunkbed above ground. Now these sickening pursefuls like ore carts of swag-bag candy bars his mom wouldn’t stop bringing home were the only chocolate he had. Beans imported in her trades from three continents, chokecherries from land the government had taken from the Sioux, gold flake left over from the mine in Lead mined by people and horses who’d been kept in the dark.

“What’s in them?” the stranger said. A stick of dynamite in a hole, that question. Just like “thank you” and “she just wants to protect you” slipped like paper cylinders of black powder into the folds in Will’s mind in this hole in the ground.

Will wasn’t dumb. Blasting had taken place at the ends of shifts because it filled the mines with dust. They used fuses of different lengths to get the sequence. The tour guide had paused there, among his nodding classmates and the cheap dummies, letting them imagine what might happen if you lit more than one fuse at a time.

The stranger would work carefully, incrementally, inching, but Will knew it wouldn’t be long:

“What else makes you angry?”

“What makes a good country?”

“What would you do if you were sure it wouldn’t hurt the people you love?”

Almost a hundred miners had fallen to their deaths in the mineshafts. Maybe those were the deaths Sitting Bull’s dream had predicted: soldiers falling thick as grasshoppers upside down into the Lakota camp. People had taken his dream as foreshadowing of a victory on some battlefield, and then declared themselves right, and it was true, Sitting Bull had defeated Custer. But next came: loss, escape, surrender, performance in a traveling show, compulsory or cooperative nobody knows, before being shot by someone who’d been shot by someone trying to protect him from a shot, round and round, while all the while under the ground beneath them, white men (immigrants actually, weary laborers actually) were being crushed and poisoned mining the gold other white men had forced Sitting Bull’s people to give up their land for. By 2001 the mine closed. They had gotten it all. Who?, he heard the ghost girl asking. Why?

In the basement of her father’s church, Will’s mother had told him, she and her classmates had been instructed to plant seeds. She couldn’t remember what kind, just the feel of the soil around the tip of her finger when she pressed it into the earth, and the skip in her heart weeks later when she saw the scalp of the white-green shoot pushing through. She had wondered but not said aloud that a basement seemed a strange place to expect anything to grow, and that classroom had had windows, high transoms that let in a weak surrogate dawn over their carpet squares in the late afternoons when they drank their juice. It couldn’t have been her dad’s plan, just what he could afford when he started, but what good preparation it turned out to have been, all of them learning to learn down there by the half-light. When he moved them into an underground compound, it had been familiar, that feeling of being buried to grow. When she closed her eyes on her own stack bunk, she saw the disembodied finger of her father’s god touching the shining part in her hair and pushing her into the ground.

Will had heard her talk in a sad way about what it might do to Will to grow up in a dictatorship, fed on a diet of so much propaganda. Would he ever be able to see things as they really are? But to Will it seemed like having freedom taken away from you blurred your vision more: her father’s, her sheepish mother and neighbors too weak to resist him, the government he’d killed them all to prove he was right to protect them from. And he had been right, the government did go on to take away their freedoms, but only exactly as he had done to all of them to try to prevent it. No wonder she was so suspicious. Every person one worry from caging and betraying the people they’re defending. Every hiding place one second from being set on friendly fire. For forty days, the National Guard had been occupying the ground above them, piping messages and music down the air ducts to persuade them to emerge, while down below, his mother’s mother whispered “trust your father,” and an angel-faced teacher presented a lesson on the Fourth Amendment in front of a blog-cam. In the final footage, her dad is standing in the background holding a fire extinguisher by a flag rippling in a current of air from an air duct dripping with a trickle of gasoline. “Look at the lengths they will go to control you. Stay with me; I’ll protect you,” he said.

The computer Will had in the long-ago had had something called hotlinks. Will had followed them in circles that had made him dizzy even then: Mining, mine, my. Cult, cultivate, culture. Internet, internment, inter. Doctor, indoctrinate, docile. Dominate, dominion, domain. Sometimes Will’s brain recited the things it remembered to himself for itself, he didn’t know what it was doing, reassembling some pulled-apart thing, bits and limbs of some past world or version of him, a process not that different than mining, the digging and the separating and refining, drills and gears, fuses and blasts, candles you only got three of, helmets against rock-fall that could crush you, fumes and spills you could breathe and drink and die from, for in the end what?: a bar of gold you could use or lose or stare at, glowing, a luminescence from having the elements nature fused it with blasted and stripped and crushed and separated caustically, chemically away. Waste, they called it. Tailings. Barbaric or beautiful. Barbaric and beautiful. Will wasn’t sure. Democracy, Membership… Dakotas, Still United… Indigenous, immigrant… Dominant, subordinate. Who cared? Because if Will had any belief approximating religious conviction, it was that a civilization full of separate people would keep emerging from their separate shelters after each disaster to continue their separate lurches toward love and freedom, and eventually a beautiful shared impulse like that had to yield something beautiful and shared. He knew what his mom thought of this idea (naïve, emotional, wishful thinking), but to Will it felt like math.

“What about you?” he asked the stranger. “What would you do? How can I help?”

(Garth)

Garth stepped into his boots on the porch as she pulled her truck to a stop. She looked pretty much like he expected. No different than on TV, although you didn’t usually see her standing in muddy ice with a bunch of buffalo chips scattered around behind her. It made her fur coat look foolish. Or his yard look shabby. The emblem on her truck too, with the dancing girl legs, looked wrong. She was a fish out of water for sure, but she didn’t seem to know it. She was smiling like a toothpaste ad.

“Garth Petrie,” she said. She had black leather gloves on that she put on her hips, so her red bag slung out behind her.

“Sorry about the driveway,” he said.

“Nonsense! Four generations of bison ranchers on your daddy’s side and three of durum farmers on your mom’s. I feel like I’m meeting South Dakota royalty.” And just like that, easy as a god, she slid her world and Garth’s beshitted side yard together, like those plates the earth was said to float on. She wasn’t a fish out of water anymore, and neither was he.

She closed the distance between them by walking – how so easily through the churned snow in those tall black boots, he wasn’t sure – but she was close to him quickly. She smelled spicy but also sweet.

“You’re a love to receive me today after I stood you up yesterday. You are doing me a big favor, I will tell you that.” She reached into her bag and pulled out a bag of crumpled paper he could tell by the heft and dampness was filled with something warm and freshly baked. He couldn’t be sure anymore what was her smell and what was the smell of the things she was offering. “I hope you like donuts. Or Margie and your grandson do. Can I come in out of the cold and serve you some?”

What could he say? Soon they were in the kitchen, and she was pulling something else out of that purse. A mini hotplate still in its box, which she plugged into the outlet. Then she washed her hands, and it was only then that Garth noticed the shine beneath her nose, and the redness there. It might have made him nervous – who wanted to get sick in this iffy afterworld, even with a cold? – but instead it gave him courage. She was suffering her own affliction, even if the affliction was small. She dried her hands on a paper towel from the rolls they gave away for free here; no one in the Dakotas used cloth towels anymore. Now she stood in the space where the stove used to be, so she could still use the counter and face him. With her long red nails, she took out a little jar of something that looked like caramel. She set it in one of Margie’s old pans – the one she used to use to make an omelet on Sunday – full of water on the little hot plate.

“Where is Margie?” Her M’s a little blunted, he heard now.

Keeping Angus out of sight, was the answer. Probably letting him pick through a trail mix she made with the tiny, stale chocolate chips they sometimes sold off at the pre-enrollment outlet. He always picked through it obsessively until he got every one; it could really kill some time. Especially if she did it up in the bathroom with the shower running, an excuse for why she wasn’t around to meet. Angus liked the sound of the shower anyway. It calmed him down. “She’s upstairs,” he said.

“Well let’s not call her down until we have these all ready. Let’s surprise her.”

“I think she was hoping to give us a minute to talk anyway. You said you wanted to come here to talk about a trade of some kind?”

“Ouch!” she said, and she put a finger in her mouth. “Burned myself. Dang it.” She moved to the sink to rinse it, so her back was turned, (a ruse, he could see, using the moment of privacy to press a paper towel to her tender nose). She was shaped just like a guitar, just like on TV. There was a time when the long look at her backside would have meant a lot to Garth, but Garth was seventy-one years old, he was past all that. He wondered if he’d be past all that if he lived in Nebraska. All he could think about now was how to move this meeting along, but the truth was he didn’t want to do or say much. Margie was right. This Liv Lockhart could do anything she wanted. She was a woman who worked for the government. Every one of them had a tracker under their skin. Someone was sure to know she was here with him. She might even be wearing some kind of wire. But what Garth saw that maybe Margie missed was that they were coming to the end of something anyway. He could feel it. It was time to take a chance.

“Yes,” she said, shifting her hips. The dress she was wearing was bright red. She shut the water off and turned. “I have a proposition for you.” Probably turning just then in that tight dress was supposed to make him think of something, but all Garth could see was the tiny tell of suffering in the raw skin where she’d worn away the makeup beneath her nose. “I’d like one of your bison. A bull.”

Garth felt his heart start a two-step. Why would she drive all the way here to ask him for such a thing? Why not broker that on the phone?

As if she had read his mind she said, “I want to hand pick him. So you can have the right one ready. I’d have a clean horse trailer delivered to you first thing tomorrow.”

The short timeline gave Garth courage. “What type are you looking for?”

“I’m glad you asked that,” she said. She stirred the little wooden spoon in her pot. What kind of woman carries a hot plate and a wooden spoon in her purse? “I want one that’s tough to handle. One with some spirit.”

Then she told him a story with a tone that matched her stirring, like she was readying a kid for bed. The first fight between a bison and a Texas fighting bull had been in Mexico long before Garth was born, with a bison from their very own Stanley County. Most people bet on the bull, but any ranch man like Garth would know better. She planned to start with just a small audience in the President’s compound, but when he saw the way a bull’s blows just bounced right off Garth’s bison, she was guessing Paxton would want to share it with the masses. It would probably end up being one of the RFC’s biggest drawing events. He would love the symbol – America vs. the Dakotas. She smiled when she said it. This President of theirs was a character, her tone said. A real hoot. Did the idea bring any particular bison to mind? Maybe a guy who put up a fight no matter what Garth was trying to do to him?

Sure it did, Garth told her.

“Maybe after our treat here, you could show me.” She was still stirring the caramel. “Meanwhile, you can tell me what you want in exchange.”

Was she wearing a wire? That dress was so tight, but these days it could be anything. It could be a chip. It could be under the skin in her hand. But if he didn’t risk it and ask for what he wanted, for sure it was only going to be a matter of months before they took Angus away. Last month he swept a row of cans off the shelf in front of a crowd at the pre-enrollment outlet. Leaving him home alone was just as risky. And soon he’d have to go into a hospital for a blood draw. He didn’t have the gene, but what would that matter to the hospital guards after he punched a nurse or screamed? Garth woke up in bed night after night picturing that. Thinking what would Jeanette do? What would she want me to do for her?

“Hmmm,” he said now, like he was considering what to ask for. Like he didn’t already have something planned.

The woman said, “Obviously there’s a lot I can get you in my position, “Privileges?... Appliances?...”

She opened the mouth of the paper bag and steam came out. That’s how warm they were. Garth wondered where she had just come from, that they were so fresh. They didn’t eat a lot of hot food anymore in this house. Probably she was trying to get him to think of a stove. Probably that was what she was expecting. But Margie had gotten pretty good with her way of cooking. They still had a cord of wood left in the barn. And sometimes she even used the buffalo chips like the Indians used to. That shamed him a little, but he knew it was wise. Meadow muffins she called them when she did it, to lighten it. Or nik-niks, giving the moment some defiant power because that’s what the Sioux used to call them, the same word they used for broken promises, especially broken promises from the government, and Margie said they both knew a thing or two about those.

“What about medications?” he said.

Garth thought he detected a little hitch in her movements when he said it, but she took the little spoon and drizzled it on a donut and then spread it out. It was frosting he saw now, maple flavored, like they used to give away at Wall Drug, a funny coincidence, although he knew you couldn’t buy drugs there anymore. Just patriot-party overstock and sample-silo souvenirs.

“What kind?” she said, and she passed him the donut. She hadn’t touched it with her hands; she had shaken it onto the plate straight from the bag, smooth, but no accident. It would have been easier to glaze it if she’d steadied it with her fingers, and this sensitivity to her illness, and the care not to infect him bolstered him again. There had to be a seed of compassion in a courtesy like that.

“Nothing illegal,” he said, in case of the wire. “I just thought you might know who we could ask for the take-home prescription.” These were impossible to get, except for government employees, but he didn’t need to understand that. He might not. There were so many rules to know. “Something for my father-in-law.”

Margie’s dad lived in the spare room upstairs. Margie fed him rice cereal she picked up at the outlet. The kind meant for infants. He was almost dead. He didn’t need any drugs.

Garth had done his homework. The drug he named was an antipsychotic used for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, but it was also used to treat dementia in old people, and Garth doubted the membership would care about that. “To make his last days better.”

Garth could hear the water still running. How long before she commented on that? Would he be able to claim a normal boy would miss donuts for another ten minutes in the shower? Garth took a bite of his donut, to look grateful.

“Good?” she said.

“Delicious, thank you.”

“Drugs are tough, Garth. I won’t lie to you about that.”

“I understand.”

“It’s a trip to the hospital, red tape, I have a lot of on my plate this week, and your competitor Phil Staymie said he could see me later today if I want one from his herd.”

Garth felt something slipping away, but he tried not to lose hope. There were other bison ranchers that’s true, but Phil Staymie’s ranch was over an hour from here. And there must be something that had made her choose him or she wouldn’t be here, with a hotplate in her handbag and bison dung on her fancy boots. They had left prints he saw now. Scritch-scritch, he heard Margie’s broom in his head. How she would sweep when this woman left them.

She said, “How about I move him to the best drugstay in the country? Then he’d have nursing help round the clock.”

“We’d like to keep him here.”

“I could get you anything. A stove, a refrigerator. Both.”

“We’re fine in that department. I know it’s not much, but it’s really all we want.” The drug was also used to eliminate aggressive behavior in autistic children. Would they lock up a kid who could adjust for leap years in his head if he was gentle? Maybe, but maybe not. It was worth a shot.

“Okay,” she said, and Garth felt his heart lift like a balloon. It had been a long time since he’d felt like that. It just kept on lifting. He wasn’t even disappointed when she said that with a request like that, he’d have to give her a little time. That she couldn’t have it tomorrow when they delivered the clean trailer, but if he could drive it to the Dickens Festival in Garrison the next day, she could hand it off to him then. She was going to be there to award the Grand Prize before she headed to the President’s party. She even gave him four Golden Boost vouchers. “You never know,” she said. “You might even win.”

(Francine)

Walking home from the bus stop she sees the billboard looming above and turns her face to it like you might to a cross at church -- like it might tell you what to do even though you know it can’t. It will just confuse and disappoint you. The hope for an answer outside of yourself will just make it worse.

The board is running prize loops, Liv Lockhart mouthing words they all know by heart from TV, they don’t need to hear them. Weeping, cheering, fist pumps, cork pops of champagne, beaming children being released from hospitals, cars pulling up to the doors of five-star hotels. Ovens for Oil Workers, Nights-Out for Nurses, Trips for Tipsters, Toys for TattleTots, Weddings for Whistleblowers, Cars for Confessions.

She and Burt had dreamed of paying for their wedding that way. If only there was something they could do that would really be helpful. Really protect people. Something someone was doing that was clearly and unequivocally wrong, but there had been nothing. They had gotten married at the courthouse and eaten two slices of leftover sheet cake they found packaged in individual clear plastic wedge-shaped clamshells on the day-old table at the pre-enrollment outlet. Instead of talking about their future, their talk strayed to speculation about what the picture on the cake had been. Fran’s slice had the tip of something black, and Burt’s a trace of gold. A caduceus Fran felt certain, but Burt thought it could have been a can-can leg.

Their dream of a future seemed to have faded with the dream of how they would pay for it. And now here it was, not in time for a beautiful wedding but in time for a married life it seemed like would always be out ahead of them, like a carrot on a stick.

She slowed down now in the slushy streets, felt the ice cooling her feet through her boots. It probably wasn’t too late. Out here she can still think about changing direction. She can imagine calling the hospital and saying on second thought… upon reflection… it occurred to her to wonder as she made her way home…. She can consider coming into their cramped apartment that smelled of Burt’s overnight oats and seeing Faith and Prosper bundled up for the cold walk to pre-school and ask him to come out with her onto the fire escape. She can think about whispering Burt… (not looking at the thumbs that had buttoned their coat buttons) something happened at the hospital. But as soon as she says even that much she will have doomed him. His thoughts (if they are tracking thoughts) can be used against him just like her own.

No.

When she gets home she will not tell him.

She will undress in the dark so she does not have to look at the caduceus on the chest of her uniform -- alone, so his touch and looks do not trigger thoughts he can wonder about and then be blamed for; after he leaves, so she does not have to explain why -- and she will fall into bed into dreams she hopes they still have not figured out a way to track.

In the coat-and-boot-strewn hallway, Faith and Prosper look cranky and tired. Burt is holding their mittened hands, his own hands with the thumbs she does not want to look at are gloved, and Fran says nothing. She kisses their foreheads, Burt’s lips, says I love you. Watches their dear backs turning. Waits for the last of them, (the leave-taking sound of their chirping and shuffling in the hallway), to escape her perception.

She undresses alone in the dark as she planned.

(Nick)

Even Nick’s thoughts about what he was going to do when he left the prison kept bringing him back to his dad.

On the common room TV there’d been a story. A rash of people had tried to climb Paxton’s head recently, whether to jump from it or to deface it the truthcasters hadn’t said, and now they had spies stationed in unmarked cars below all the best climbs near Mt. Rushmore, taking photos of potential rebels with a telephoto lens. They had added climbing rope and ascenders to the list of things to search for at traffic checkpoints too, but Nick didn’t need to worry about that. He wasn’t driving alone. The gear and the checkpoint chatter were in someone else’s hands.

He’d be alone on the climb. Nick didn’t mind going solo. Climbing with a partner was better, safer, but even with backup you had to be prepared to do stretches on your own. Your partner could get injured, or your belay could fail, and then you’d be glad that over the years you had done a few by yourself. His dad had taught him that. Those words Nick could recreate well enough, the wind soughing in the trees across the chasm, tossing their branches in the air like mothers at their wits’ end, while his father shouted down from above him: what would you do if I passed out right now? What about now? In books and movies, it seemed like fathers were always promising a future in which they hovered over their sons to dispense wisdom in loving apparition long after they were gone, but Nick’s dad was always trying to prepare him for his sudden permanent exit through some rickety generational trap door.

Which is what he had done, faster than Nick’s mother, but no easier on the stunned survivors in the hospital hallway, was Nick’s take. Be careful what you wish for. Or what you prep for, maybe – something like that was another thing his dad had always said, trying to shut Nick’s mother up as she spewed slim survival statistics over a dinner he wouldn’t eat. Nick was better at remembering the way people moved – the angry frisk of his mother’s hands crushing Funyuns over a salad while she talked about the inhumanity of placebo controls. The delicacy of their fork-falls in the silent five minutes after she snatched off her wig and snuffed his father’s chemo-consolation daisies like a flame. The spread and close of his father’s long arms as he butterflied a rope into a heavy swag to clip to his back on a post-funeral climb. His speckled knuckles tying Nick in with a double-bowline, easier to loosen than a figure-eight after a fall. The pivot and sweep of his body as he reached out into the open for a distant hold.

Nick used to climb with his dad at the spot they had showed the spies staking out on TV, mostly in summer but a few times in winter too. Harney Peak it was called, and by late November it had built up a beautiful, reliable ice flow on the back side that people called Black Elk’s Tear. Black Elk was a Lakota medicine man who’d had a vision of kind and loving grandfathers coming back to share their years of wisdom, like Nick’s dad never believed he’d be able to do -- like Nick wondered if Black Elk had been trying to do when he sat for interviews with a white poet. In the book, Black Elk told him of the sad time after the Battle of Little Bighorn, when the Lakota were forced to live as prisoners on their own land, and a brief flare of hope when the Ghost Dance religion made them believe their ancestors might return to fight back on their behalf. Maybe those interviews themselves were part of the fight. It made Nick feel a weird swell of something he had no name for, both comforted and grave, picturing Black Elk telling an Anglo stranger his stories in words he could never fully understand, while Black Elk’s son translated them from Lakota to English so the people who had taken their land away could read them.

For years after Black Elk died, it was Black Elk’s son who was known as the “fifth face on the mountain.” He spent three decades greeting people at the memorial, and thousands of pictures had been taken of him standing with strangers in front of the heads of presidents to bridge the distance between cultures in his sacred dress. Angry as it had made Nick watching Paxton carve his own face into Mount Rushmore, he had also taken heart seeing how no monument could enlarge him. Four hundred laborers, forty thousand cubic feet of rock, two hundred tons of explosives, three hundred laser light shows, no volume of effort or spectacle could displace the bigger image in Nick’s mind: Black Elk’s son standing shoulder-to-shoulder with any human from any culture in front of the inhumanly-high heads carved into his ancestral land to honor the leadership of a government that had wronged him.

Black Elk had predicted lights would fill the sky when he died, and there had been a meteor shower that night; Nick’s dad had talked about that when they lit a match to send a paper lantern up into the sky at the Dickens Festival, saying what-exactly Nick couldn’t remember. It had been a couple weeks after Nick had watched his father watch four cemetery employees lower Nick’s mother’s casket on creaking straps, his shoulders shaking as if the weight they bore was his own. Cleaning out his dad’s closet years later, Nick would find a diary that chronicled his bewildered compliance with his mother’s seduction of the head of an immunotherapy trial. Now Nick wondered which of Black Elk’s own losses had made him cry the big tear the ice flow hidden behind Harney Peak had been named for long after the shooting-star-filled night he died.

The first time they climbed Black Elk’s Tear together, Nick’s dad had led, but the last two he let Nick go first to set the anchors for him. Nick had liked the feel of that, working his way up the pillar with his hooks and setting the screws for the rope and ascender that would protect his dad from a fall, but it had also made him sad. Strong as it was, (masculine, gracious, heroic), in his father’s willing subordination, Nick could sense the beginning of his decline, like a mastodon’s stoic trumpets from the sticky border of an asphalt lake. He could sense it in his father’s rejection of his invitations to try climbing buildings too. “Just a variation on the ice climbs we’ve done together,” Nick said, “urban rock climbing, good practice, a fun change,” it didn’t matter how he said it, in all his fatherly trash-talk deflections (parkour douche-bags, hipsters playing action hero, not even that hard, just grappling hooks and walking uphill) Nick could hear the bubbling of the tar.

Good to air all these memories and feelings before it was time to finally do what he’d been planning, because although they would hover behind him in some way, his dad had been right, Nick knew that: he wouldn’t be cluttering Nick’s thoughts with emotion and words of wisdom. He’d just be in the background, his ghost a wellspring motivation and focus as Nick made the climb. His dad would have hated this world, like he hated the world that had taken Nick’s mother from them, like Nick hated the world that created a virus that arrested the thoughts of his dad.

It wouldn’t be long now, just twenty-four hours, and between sets of the little circuit he was doing in his cell to stay fit until they released him, he went over it in his mind, every step of the setup and ascent. Given all the alarm bells they were going to raise during the approach, it would probably be his last, he got that, but it was going to be worth it. Somehow, with some hospital-hallway exchange of words he couldn’t remember, he had promised that to his dad. Nick didn’t have his ashes. They didn’t let people have those anymore, but if he did he would have carried them in his pocket, for luck, or (an even harder thought to make sense of) to let his dad bear witness, or (here at least something physical he could picture) to scatter them in a cool updraft over the heads of his would-be arresters, if he lasted long enough to have the chance.

(Vaughn)

Mike Tyson, Luis Suarez. Vaughn hadn’t even been born yet, but who hadn’t laughed over those old clips on YouTube before it was gone? Vaughn’s sister had liked vampire movies, and he used to laugh about those too, but now Vaughn tossed in dreams about them, montages of bites that weren’t a joke to him anymore, but a map. A manual. That was the spot to do it, thought Vaughn. Right there on the side of the throat. Could he bite through a clean suit? Sure he could. These weren’t the thick yellow kind. They were the thin white. Whisper “Heya, Doc,” like he had some new symptom to describe. Get the guy to lean in like he did sometimes to say something creepy (Do you know what your name means, Vaughn?) Vaughn could get right through.

Vaughn laughed, and a little blood came up. Modified. They had modified him. (In through his nose with a needle like an ice pick; no sexy insider’s B-roll of that on the truths). He was a good boy now. His immune system had attacked it – even his immune system was rebellious! – but Scanlon could fix that too, he said. Fix the failed liver, and oops, the failed lungs, and oops, the failed kidney. All with a drug that had immobilized a roomful of monkeys. Vaughn laughed again. (His sense of humor too! His sense of humor was rebellious!)

Well.

He thought he could feel it now, the onset of whatever had come for the monkeys. There was a heaviness in his chest this morning, but that could just be loss maybe. Was it coffee time yet? There was no clock in here anymore, and the days were getting shorter. December. Dark and light were no help in telling anymore.

(“Vaughn” is a Welsh word, Scanlon had said when he leaned in close. It means “small”.)

He coughed again. More blood. Even if he couldn’t bite down hard enough, there would be blood on Scanlon’s clean suit that told her he had tried. Vaughn’s blood. Like the blood on the tips of Betty’s thorns, he thought. And how did that long scrap of a poem from her garden arms go? Not her words, she said, a poet’s, but wasn’t a poem yours if you inscribed it on your own skin? When Betty saw Vaughn’s blood on Scanlon’s white suit, she’d get to know he had seen what she’d offered him in her cup. Taken the gift she’d braved things to give him, and done something as big as he could make it to try to change her world.

(Damian)

By lunchtime, Paxton was losing his patience. “Not ‘everyone’,” he said. That was another problem with the kind of guy who works his way up to a chief of staff job. Lousy sense of audience. Always… never… everybody… nobody… Paxton loved a good baseless universal, but you had to know when to use it: great in the bedroom, or in a hunting story, or basically any story with a good stiff cocktail, but a mistake in a briefing with a guy who could have you relocated to a self-improvement gulag in Fargo. Paxton had been planning on waiting for him to say something, but after watching him glance nervously (desperately, pointlessly) at his little black notebook as if it were a life preserver, he changed his mind. “Put that thing back in your pocket, it doesn’t have the answers. The answers are in your head if they’re anywhere,” he said. “What do you mean by ‘everyone’?”

“Everyone who was on the night shift, sir.”

“That’s not everyone. There are people who manufactured the koi food, and people who manufactured the pond-balancing chemicals, and people who worked yesterday, and the day before.”

A little pie-faced girl poked her head in the dining room door. What happened to his request for beautiful serving girls? And what happened to training? – why poke your head in the door so he has to say something? Why not just come in? He would have to fire someone, he thought. Then the green-chili-cheese smell reached him. “Come in, come in,” he said, waving and smiling affably. She didn’t need to know she was about to be fired. She scuttled in with a plate with a silver dome cover and set it down. “Thank you, sweetie,” he said and mind-controlled her with a hard look at the door. Her ass was like two little basketballs under her skirt, he thought, watching it receding. Maybe he wouldn’t fire her after all.

To his Chief of Sass he said, “And what did you ask all these people you interviewed anyway?”

Buford stole another wistful glance at his notebook, stupider now because it was in his jacket pocket. “I’d have to look that up in my –“

“And did you have them hooked up to anything when you did it?”

“I don’t believe we –”

Paxton took the lid off his food. Enchiladas that would make a Tijuana mama cry. “Mother fucker, did you ever see a pair of enchiladas that good looking?”

“No sir.”

He clamped the lid back on the plate. “Go get me the guy who made them, I’ll show you an interview.”

“Would you like me to get the polygraph, sir?”

“Hell no. Not for me. I can tell a lie six ways from Sunday. Lie detectors are for people like you.”

(Enrique)

After hearing his daughter had died, Enrique became briefly like the detectives in the books he loved. He was careful, but not too careful -- just careful enough not to send an interrogator rushing out to collect him. He did not place a phone call to inquire about Dr. Amos, for example, but he did stop by the hospital directory and learn that he was not a doctor of pediatrics or of infectious medicine or even of pathology, but a doctor of psychology (with a specialty in couples therapy, a brochure on the cafeteria bulletin board said).

All Lydia had wanted to know after she heard the news was whether they’d be allowed to stay. The minimum for Resort admission was two dependents, and now he only had one. She had been smart enough not to ask outright, but she probed in ways obvious to Enrique, asking in the morgue if she could see the allocation form to make sure they had the address right -- the address for where they’d send the cremains next month after Natalia’s thirty days on Courage Display. Glory Condo 256 the form said, (signed not only by the Coroner and the Pathologist, but also by Mitzy VanDeen, Housing Eligibility Analyst, Enrique took note).

For the first few hours, he didn’t know where he was heading, only that he had changed direction. Or had a direction. It was like that feeling he got halfway through a great mystery, that things were coming together. That he almost knew something, almost enough, something grave and important was about to be perfectly clear. And underneath the heavy blanket of sorrow, he also had the strange, incompatible feeling of being unleashed. Like an arm had been tied behind his back, and now it wasn’t anymore. When they got back from the morgue, he could hear Lydia raving as he cried in a second shower over the loss of his baby girl. “What are you doing in there?” Lydia said. “Pull yourself together. What kind of man hides in a shower?” but he didn’t care anymore about her words. Was it because he didn’t have to feel disappointed or guilty on behalf of his daughter, that the same hardships that had robbed him of his words sharpened all of her mother’s like blades? He wasn’t sure, and even his confusion didn’t seem to matter.

Two hours later he was in the President’s kitchen staring into the walk-in freezer at the house ingredients, big frosty vacuum-sealed bag after bag of local foods: hickory-smoked slabs from the Bacon and Beer Fest in Fargo, leafy red and green stalks from the Rhubarb Festival in Grand Forks in June, sides of babybacks from the Ribfest in Watford City in July. He had been chopping onions, weeping, and he had some notion that the freezing air might stop the flow.

The Chief of Staff entered the kitchen. “Are you okay?” he said.

“Just chopping onions.”

“Well, buck up. You’re wanted in the dining room,” he said.

“Wanted?”

“By the President,” he said.

As Enrique washed his hands with powdered purple soap under the watch of the President’s Chief of Staff, his tears dried up immediately.

Minutes later he was standing outside the white painted doors to the dining room. Should he knock? The decisive sense of purpose he had been feeling all morning seemed to have left him.

“He who hesitates is lost,” the President barked from inside.

The brass door handle was like a lever. He pushed down on it to enter and there was President Paxton, seated at the far end of a gleaming wood table in a beige flowered chair. He was still wearing a robe, although it was one o’clock. “’Course they also say ‘Look before you leap,’ don’t they,” and then he burst out laughing. “Come in, come in. You’re the guy makes my enchiladas, they tell me. Anybody who can make something so good out of four ingredients deserves a handshake.”

Enrique closed the distance between them. His rubber sneakers made a squeaking sound on the tile floor. Paxton crumpled Enrique’s fingers and then let them go.

When Enrique’s eyes strayed to the back of the chair next to the President, he said, “Don’t sit, you’re not a dignitary. And you won’t be here long enough. I just had a few questions for you.”

Enrique’s heart picked up speed in his chest.

“You heard about my fish, I take it.”

Heard? It hadn’t been on his shift, but word was the President had his Chief of Staff round up all the employees in the three-car garage to wait there like hostages until the fishkeeper arrived. Enrique had been relieved not to be there, but he’d also felt a mild stirring of interest at the description of the scene. It sounded like the drawing room meetings in And Then There Were None. The President kept reappearing in the garage and ranting about herpes, but twenty koi could not die from herpes at the very same time the fishkeeper declared; it would be like lightning striking.

“It’s not a trick question. Have you heard about them?”

“Yes,” Enrique said. Not even yes, sir. He had the sudden image of himself waking up the next morning with no mouth at all.

“Then I’ve got another question for you,” Paxton said.

(Damian)

The guy Buford brought him was Enrique, short guy, and quiet, Paxton could just tell. Something about the crumpled shoulders and the blank face and the gait – not just a reflex from approaching a god, but permanent. When he inched close to the table, he brought with him the smell of raw onions. Paxton didn’t ask him to sit.

“Know anything about koi?”

Bam. Little head shake. Tiny. Like a teacup on a shelf in an earthquake. But his mocha-colored face went one shade whiter.

“Know who killed mine?”

Another little head tremor. This was how you did an interview for this kind of thing. The questions weren’t really questions. Who cared what the answers were?

“I didn’t think so. Thanks for your candor. And for this pair of enchiladas you conjured. You’re like a magician. I’ll let you get back to it. I’m sure you’ve got some kind of manna or nectar for me bubbling on the stove. But I’d like to ask you to do something for me.”

Enrique just stood there. Still hadn’t said a thing, you’ll notice. Interviews. Interviews were for people who didn’t already know what they wanted to do.

“Give it some thought.”

He let it hang there a minute. Enrique’s hands were still clasped behind his back, but there was a sheen of sweat now showing on his paling forehead.

“That’s it!” Paxton said throwing his hands in the air and letting out a bark of laughter. “That’s all! That’s all I really asked Buford to bring you to me to ask: to be my eyes and ears, because I had a good feeling about you. I have some guesses about you, I’m great at this kind of thing, you want to hear what they are?”

Another nod, just as tiny.

“You’re an observant person. Sometimes you notice things you think no one else can see.”

A flicker of recognition passed over Enrique’s face. Easy. Who didn’t?

“And you’re a man of honor and action. You might be afraid, but in the end you do what’s necessary.”

A reputation anyone would want to live up to. The guy was holding so still, he looked carved there.

“Uncanny. I know. If I ever felt like quitting my day job, I could get myself a gig in a travelling show.”

Enrique swallowed thickly, the biggest movement he’d made since he came in here. Like he had a big mouthful of chicken in there going down.

Paxton waved his hands. “One more! One more and then I’ll let you go. You have a family member in the Rewards Resort about whom you care deeply.” Easy again. Two, at least. He had set it up that way himself.

The poor guy said nothing.

“Speechless. I get that. Everyone feels that way thinking about someone they’d hate to lose. Me too.” He took the lid off his enchiladas and picked up his fork. “And if someone doesn’t tell me who betrayed me soon, let the losses begin.”

(Gwen)

Outside the mine-studded boundaries of her son’s country, Gwen was yelling at her EconoSleep screen. Shitspitality menu with happy-family picture hiding a submenu of booze and porn, and a picture-in-picture running a clip of President priss promising things she could never deliver, and a picture-in-picture-in-picture running loops of her Junior’s truths.

He was so handsome. People said that to her when he first started popping up on the news. What a looker you got there, they used to say when she told them he was hers; same as she used to tell Junior herself, looking at them side-by-side in her mirror while she cleaned him up after a fight.

And smart! Smarter than the shit-for-brains in Washington, people used to coo.

Then they all let themselves get brainwashed by the spokespeons in the priss-house pressroom, and Gwen had to chain a Rottweiler to her stoop rail and start wearing a mask to the grocery.

Never mind the pine-covered puke smell in Gwen’s rental car; the smell of the peacenik diaper-loads that self-appointed supermama was shoveling in this city that thought they could snuff him out was worse. No amount of fake-rose-smelling femininny buzzwords in the rose garden could cover it. If her namby-pamby husband wasn’t going to put her in her place, who would? Look at her! Eyes easy. Shoulders slack. Face soft. Words sliding from her unsuspecting mouth like no one had ever once lost their patience and let their fists fly with the truth.

Gwen took another swig from her quart jug of cosmic lessonade. Her hot-pink mix of hard lessonade. Took another old-lady-problem cookie from the old-lady-problem cookie sleeve. Took off one of her EasySoles and hurled that at the shitspitality screen too.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about, talking like you know something about anything, who’s the boss around here anyway, who’s got what it takes to take care of things, like you could have any power at all, look at you, weak spaghetti arms flying, scrawny lady legs kicking, squinchy crying face crying, any time you try to fight back you just end up hurting yourself, what a slow fucking learner, you deserve everything that’s coming to you.”

(Angela)

Angela had been sure they could see everything she did in the flicker of light from her Membership TV, so between long breaks from the horror, she had turned to face it and opened her eyes.

Gary cutting a ribbon.

Gary handing someone a ribbon-tied prize.

What she hadn’t been able to get over was the cufflinks.

And the smile.

She could understand, she supposed, the moral compromise of taking a job with the government. Could understand, even, the need for some sex. But what she had never been able to forgive was his look of relish.

In her sleep-deprived state what began as hatred of whatever forces had perverted him, had quickly changed to hatred of him. A transitivity that unnerved and energized her. Watching the clips loop with Gary and Liv holding hands and winking at each other and then the camera, she imagined kicking his head until he bled from his eyes. Oh, she would say, before she took her last kick. And where is our daughter.

Angela had been a gentle girl, she had always been gentle, she wasn’t sure where this violence came from. It was tempting to call it maternal instinct, but she suspected something truer, some rod of honesty forming the backbone of these fantasies. Maybe some lost piece of that gentle girl just loved finally finding the freedom in a solitary-confinement cell to hate.

It seemed to have taken him only a matter of weeks to sell out their entire lives. One minute she had been gagged and hooded and hustled into an unmarked minivan, and the next she was watching her husband on TV, a bedazzled devil version, jewels on every finger, and a perpetual smirk on his face. He had proposed to her with a pull-tab from a can of cat food. They had named their daughter after a flower. She had suggested their wedding vows be to wake up every morning eager to see who their spouse was becoming. To look at them with fresh eyes and never trap them in the identity they’d had when they’d first fallen in love. To be happy for them evolving.

When she searched for the punishing tyrant inside herself, she found it in two places:

It served her right.

And how dare he change.

(Tracy)

When Liv dropped the chocolate box on her desk, Tracy wasn’t surprised. For her all of this seemed so easy. Maybe it was her upbringing – raised by parents who had led their people to safety, stared down their government, died for their cause. Is this how Tracy would have ended up if she’d had a different childhood? Would she want that? Did any of Tracy’s agony and apology help anyone? Maybe Liv’s plastic surgery vouchers and party spectacles helped more. When she asked Tracy for an update she was smiling.

Briefly Tracy resolves to remember that she does not have to tell her whatever she wants to know. Funny how the certainty that she will disappoint people doesn’t make her feel any entitlement to do it. She still tries to avoid it at every turn. “Everything is in good shape,” she said, but her body belied it. Her heart was beating so wildly. No snowball wild. Not lifting and soaring. More like a bird in a box. Just that panicky and trapped and uselessly strong.

Liv opened the chocolate box Tracy was ignoring. Picked it up and held it out covered by a crinkly quilted white blanket, and when Tracy didn’t lift it, she did that for her too, and there were the cherries with their smooth dark coats. Something about the way they exploded in your mouth. Peter. His hair. The ice. Was this all her resolve amounted to? She could actually smell them.

Tracy focused on the striped wallpaper from Alex Johnson’s days here. Ms. Hamberger had told them ghosts could be our heralds – that any memory could be – but all Tracy’s memories did was leave her feeling distressed and confused. Even the ghost of a man she hadn’t known could do that. (Would Alex Johnson be sad he had picked swastikas for his lobby floors? Tracy didn’t know. Who could decipher the lessons any ghost had to tell?) She refocused her eyes on the woman in front of her and tried weakly, stupidly (who ever resisted someone like Liv Lockhart? If the devil were female she would look and act like her; she should have those spinning cartoon eyes) to change the subject: “How’s your son liking Youth Camp?” because shouldn’t remembering your child make you jump the track?

But Liv was relentless. “I thought these were your favorites. You don’t want to make me feel bad, do you? I hang my whole reputation on guessing right about what people want.”

And Tracy took one. It was lame to pretend that it was because saying yes to one thing would soften the blow of a no she was working up to. (Did she really think she could resist a woman like Liv? What would give a twelve-year-old girl the courage to crawl away from her parents through an air duct during a standoff? What kind of reservoir of love or terror fostered that kind of self-trust?) The bitter chocolate, and then the cherry exploded, so sweet. She actually thought about that as she swallowed. She really did.

“Now then,” Liv said winking. ”Let’s see your event sheets.”

Later Tracy would pluck this moment from the conversation and turn it in the hand of her mind so she could look at it from every angle. She could have mis-entered her password, to buy time to revise it. She could have resolved to call the bus number a typo. Or to pretend they were just extras -- backups in case of breakdown, or additionals for overflow... But her mind did none of this then. It was too busy talking her out of what she intended. Or not talking, really. The prelude to her self-subjugation was a two-second slide show. Her mother’s disappointed face. Her father’s sad one. Condescending teachers. Critical coaches. All of the images communicating this: somebody else knew better, even about what Tracy wanted and felt. Why had she been accurate on the event sheet in the first place if she meant to go through with it? What kind of subversive records her act of rebellion on a spreadsheet? Even the phone number required to fix it all was typed in the notes field. Maybe her heart wasn’t in it. Maybe even her beliefs weren’t her own.

The sectioning of her autonomy took less than a second, but it was a quarter-second Liv detected. The parts of it lay pulled apart and pinned to the paraffin. She was too dispirited even to hope Liv couldn’t see them.

“What’s the problem?” Liv said.

“Just nervous.” This at least was true. “Neil has gone over them,” (Neil was the senior planner they’d assigned to oversee her work on this project; the rain of sesame seeds from his bagel on her keyboard during his cursory review of her event sheets each morning made her feel peaceful; he was too self-absorbed to see her) “but you know, it’s you.”

Then she did it to herself: like a child handing over her car keys or an athlete taking her place on a bench before she is benched. Her fingers typed her password. Scrolled politely through her spreadsheet – food carts, port-a-potties, confession booths – inviting Liv to climb right into her brain. When she got to the line item for tour buses, Tracy stalled and paced in little rhetorical circles like a cornered animal -- more comfortable, increased capacity, more reliable, painted them red -- but it was hopeless.

“No one’s going to want to drink Smoking Bishop on the bus they take to work every day…. They’ll sit empty and block traffic while people wait for a turn on the real thing… Where’s the Elizabus?”

That night Tracy would dream of being further dissected by her own hands. “At a detailer in Sioux Falls,” she said.

(Liv)

Bumbling, forgetting, overlooking, under-checking. Second-guessing, handwringing, doubting, hesitating. She didn’t know which set of Tracy’s failings was responsible for this fuck-up, her incompetence or her pathological vacillation, but Liv strongly suspected the latter. If she didn’t want to do this job she shouldn’t have taken it. It wasn’t as if it hadn’t been clear what she was signing up for. Q&A on her attitudes about reporting seditious event-guest behavior. Working interview with a Surveillance and Compliance officer. Government-employee-tracker chip injected by a snickering med-tech in the fleshy location of his choosing. Liv was certain back in the states there were poodle-clipped dog packs of sanctimonious op-ed pontificators and reductive post-pandemic-lit critics gnawing on splintery leg bones like the leg bones of the headless chickens running in frantic circles in Tracy’s self-hating head, digesting the bland shreddy meat and forcing every story about the Dakotas through a narrow interpretive sphincter of “creeping complicity,” as if this were not only a legitimate story but the only story there could possibly be to tell. Nobody experiencing love or loss or loneliness or oppression in here, just another predatory pundit’s bone-studded, neighboring-countryman-scented thought turd to toss on the dung fire of an out-of-touch, pseudo-sensitive, citizenship-lottery winners’ conversation: how anyone surviving in the Dakotas was to some extent an accomplice, how this must eat away at them, how guilty they must feel as it caught up with them, but there was nothing about Liv’s complicity that crept. Who could be surprised by such a thing? What about anything that happened in this country was subtle? She had seen her opportunity to protect her son and embraced it, eagerly, openly, and without hesitation. Did she hate it? Yes. Did she feel bad about it? Of course. Would she be haunted, like any soldier or battlefield triage nurse or wartime president, by memories of the things she had and hadn’t done for the rest of her life? Obviously. But there would be no regret, and certainly none of the surprise these clueless, liberty-entitled, armchair moralizers imagined for her while they one-clicked Christmas gifts in their own developing autocracies, and she would do it again, a thousand times over. She loved Will enough to put his unmutilated survival over her ideological purity every morning when she woke up, and she hoped (although she knew better than anyone that it wasn’t true) that any parent would do the same. Watching someone like Tracy made her furious. On the one hand… on the other hand… was this maybe?... should she really?... CHOOSE! Liv wanted to shout. There are no good choices. This is not a fantasy buffet. It’s a smorgasbord of shit sandwiches. Just pick one, take bite after big smelly bite, digest, and belly up again. Thought turds, choice turds, every country had its turds, pooped out on a banquet table by lonely baby-men. Liv hadn’t voted for him in the recall, but she knew plenty of people who had; he had sneaked up on them in a moment of weakness with his scaremongering and his promise of a solution (I know you’re angry, I’m angry too, we can use that). They had duly elected the asshole, and then he hopped up on a table and just started shitting: crostinis and crostadas and tostadas, shit rolls, shit blinis, shits in blankets, shits on tiny cocktail-sized slices of bread. There was no use lamenting it. Maybe it would be easier for Tracy if she had someone to save.

“Those poor children,” Liv told her. “They’ve been watching old loops of people waving from the second story of that hokey bus for months. Do it for the kids.”

(Tracy)

She could have lied. She could have resolved to slash the tires. She could let Liv be surprised. Wasn’t that a key element of subversion? But the first efforts of her resistance had made her so tired, and the wheel rut of self-doubt was so deep and easy. Liv hadn’t even needed to utter her guilt-triggering imperative to recruit it. At the first shadow of disappointment on her face, Tracy forgot why she ever thought it was a good idea. How could eliminating the thing people were most looking forward to be helpful? How could she be so stupid? Not just stupid: selfish. Reckless. Cruel. How was she protesting the disillusionment of these people by deepening it?

Shame, alignment with authority, relief.

By the time Liv was gone, Tracy felt almost good.

(Hannah)

When Hannah saw Gary Handler approaching her workstation, her hindbrain panicked, but a part of her, the bigger, better part of her was glad. She knew what he’d make them do to her when he reviewed her work, and she knew it would hurt (you never got used to it), but it would also feel good somehow, knowing she was taking what might be his last one. He was holding a little clipboard, and his rings glinted under the warehouse lights. “Happy holidays,” he said to her keeper, but only to her keeper. At Hannah, he didn’t even look.

The overseer was with him. He ran the whole factory. He ran it before Paxton took over too, and maybe he felt he had no choice, running it still, but he did. There were only a million people in the Dakotas. If they all said no, they might all be dead, but then Paxton would be all alone. Wind whistling through his hair in the wheat fields above his silos. Without two people to press their separate buttons, none of it worked. It wasn’t conscience that had breathed life into Scrooge’s door knocker, it was isolation.

“Hannah is one of our best workers,” the overseer said. “She designed it herself. Show it to him, Hannah.”

Hannah took it from her drawer. Even to her eyes, the problem was obvious, but it was a problem with no solution. He liked to have it reduced, but at different scales the alteration had different effects. Too little, and it looked too much like him; enough and it stopped looking like him at all.

Handler’s phone rang. “Davey! I have a special request,” and stepped aside, out of view, and the overseer followed.

Hannah’s keeper took a step closer. (She would not say coach; this was not self-improvement; she was not his student.) There were partitions between the stations so that no one could be influenced by any acts of defiance on the part of their neighbors, but in practice it turned out they were mostly used to allow their keepers to feel them up. Today she had hidden the piece of broken glass in her bra to use on herself if things didn’t go as planned – she wasn’t going to let them execute her.

She could hear Handler laughing at something funny this Davey was saying. Hannah couldn’t imagine what his special request was going to be, but it didn’t matter. This was a person who served champagne to doctors who identified people for genetic mutilation.

Above his head, above all their heads, hovering above them anywhere you looked on all four walls of the factory were big screens running loops of Liv Lockhart showing you what to do and say and be to get the things they had taken away from you so she could make you want them. Even her body was one of those things, breasts padded and push-upped and tit-taped big as grapefruits. Hannah didn’t excuse her method of survival, but she understood it. Hannah still remembered the footage of her escaping the machinery of her father’s cult-in-the-ground. Twelve years old waving her way through a cloud of smoke with trace of rohypnol in her blood. When Paxton and Handler flickered to life on her TV screen decades later, the flavor of their evangelism must have been so familiar. People run from relationships into the arms of relationships like the relationships they know. The greatest engine of history is childhood trauma.

“Did you get my thank-you present?” Handler asked him. Through the space in the partition, Hannah could see Beth and Viola wheeling by with the mops and buckets. This time the jugs of soap were full of gasoline. The clock on the wall said 10:50. In five minutes the buzzer would go off, signaling that it was time to change shifts. “I thought you would like that,” Handler was saying as his voice receded. “Grass-fed and free-range. I bet it sells better over there than tickets to Cirque du Soleil.”

Hannah could imagine the arguments against US intervention. She understood how the nuclear weapons disarmed them. What she couldn’t stomach was the idea that they were serving Dakota lambs butchered-to-order at restaurants in Las Vegas. This Davey must have been making a killing off the not-quite-killing of the people in her joke of a country.

Now she was poised holding this model she had made. This poor impossible thing that would never satisfy a man preoccupied with the shape of his own nose. Her keeper smelled of the barbecue bison that steamed all day on the Surveillance and Compliance Workers Chuck Wagon, and his hand was grazing her ass, and he still wore a trace of the smile that had creased his face when he looked at Handler, just like the smile creasing the overseer’s face. Some people smile when they see a person smiling and this seemed to be what happened to people around Gary Handler. He had been a good choice.

She heard Handler’s footsteps again, and then he appeared at the overseer’s side in the opening to her cubicle. He had rung off with Davey, and he clapped his hands together and rubbed them with relish, back on task, but his smile faded. He cleared his throat. “The nose isn’t quite right.”

And she couldn’t help herself. She wanted this to take a little longer. She wanted Handler to be here when the shift whistle blew. “He doesn’t like it when it looks like him either,” she said.

Hannah collapsed. Twitching and arcing. Every cell in every muscle of her body invaded and ruled by a ruthless current. Then nothing. She could never decide what about it was the most dehumanizing – the loss of control of her body, or of her mind, or the traitorous surge of gratitude she felt when her keeper took his thumb off the button.

She stood. Through the blur of tears, she saw ghost shapes, Beth and Viola slipping into the bathroom. Women had been sneaking bits of styrofoam from the party-favor packaging into the toilet tanks for weeks. There were eyes everywhere in the ceiling -- above the cubicle where her keeper groped her; above the shelves in the storage closet where they shelved the powders for the perk printers, big bags of titanium and aluminum, combustible as gunpowder -- but there were no eyes above the toilet stalls, and because only prisoners cleaned the toilets, they knew no one would ever find them.

(Burt)

Burt didn’t see Francine on the mezzanine above him. If he had seen her, bundled up in her coat, her cheeks flushed, it might have given him hope. His parents had been nudists (such a juvenile form of rebellion, no less embarrassing as he aged) and he had entered every classroom, every situation, with that same blend of shame and bafflement, like the little boy in the corner covering his privates at one of his parents’ potlucks. Francine had rescued him from this. Something about the blend of her own puritan’s purity and her unconcealed hum of pleasure the first time he touched her between the legs. A hiding/not hideable he recognized from a place deep in his own core. He didn’t have to explain it or feel comfortable any other moment of the day. Her unstifleable sigh was the only language he needed. Her moans were home to him. Each time he touched her or saw her love of his touch in her eyes on his hands, he felt understood.

He still couldn’t fathom the mechanics of how that had been taken from him. Even the jolt of parenthood hadn’t been able to take it, the months of perfunctory sex, infrequent and efficient, the sleep-deprived bickering, but still her eyes sometimes watching his hands buttering bread, still her spreading bottom sheathed in maternity underwear sometimes finding him and pressing trustfully against him in her sleep. His recent dreams had all been of machines. He had seen one once that pulled apart the parts of a chicken. Whatever sex they had now was hurried, but they’d been through that. It had been months since she had looked at his hands, or sought them out asleep in her separate sleep. He didn’t know what was missing, only that he felt lost, both invisible and exposed, ashamed. When his self-improvement student brushed up against him, he felt a double-dose of his 11-year old self’s guilty exposure and confusion. What could he say about something so awkward? How could he recoil from someone he had caused so much pain to? Why did any part of it feel good?

(Hannah)

Hannah opened her eyes. Handler and the overseer were staring not at her but at her statuette, as if they were giving her privacy to recover, while her keeper feigned an appalling kind of chivalry by cupping her elbow to help her up. Could she stall? Her keeper would still be in here when it happened, all of them busy checking their stations for early warning signs of rebellion: checklists left unchecked, corners cut. Some of the prisoners themselves would be in here too, but being in the dorm or the commissary would be no safer. The survivors would be collected and punished. Maybe they would even be executed. Hannah felt sorry for the new ones (a girl named Jenny she had seen crying as she unpacked her suitcase this morning; a flush-cheeked visitor stepping into the mezzanine above), but that was the wrong kind of injustice to be worrying about. One of Hannah’s ancestors had been shot to death at the mouth of a grave she had helped dig for herself at Staszów. Hannah welcomed her through a chilly window in her mind to prepare herself. Hannah’s mother was wrong; strong feelings are what move the world.

“I say let’s make it a mirror. Shrink it way down so he sees his vanity, or blow it way up so he sees his own fear.”

Another shock. Another fall. From her place on the floor, through the rush of blood in her ears, she heard the overseer’s apology. “She’s like a poster child for his policies, I wish they were getting this on film. I’m very sorry.”

“No problem,” Handler said.

“I can introduce you to another worker. You can watch while they make adjustments to the design.”

Handler told him it was okay, he had another appointment to get to, and as he turned to leave, Hannah raised her head to spit on him, but her keeper shocked her again, really holding it down, and when the twitching stopped and her heart rate slowed, she saw that he was already halfway out of the building.

She pulled herself up.

The overseer locked eyes with her tear-filled eyes. “Burt will stay here and watch you compose a letter of apology to Minister Handler.”

Then he left them alone in her cubicle.

She had seen a video once at a holocaust museum where a survivor said he didn’t think the resistance fighters were heroes: they only killed a few people; it was the people who saved Jews by hiding them who were brave. And she had been baffled by this. Why rank them? Any resistance is good. And opportunity counts for something. It was too late for her to save anyone. Killing was what she had.

The buckets of styrofoam and gasoline hadn’t been lit, but she knew they would be, and then she would be gone. Hannah suddenly wanted, very badly, for her keeper to know that she herself has resisted him. She really wanted him to feel it. If the plot failed, she will have ruined nothing – just another selfish rebel fulfilling her genetic destiny with a reckless act of violence. They could try again without her. Meanwhile maybe it would give some of them courage. And think how good it would feel.

Her keeper laid a sheet of stationery in front of her. Whispered “I’m sorry.” He knew a rebel could never rat him out, never be believed. As long as he was quiet he could use her, not just for arousal, but for confession, as if what he said to her could absolve him. “I don’t like this job,” he whispered once. “They told me if I took it I could keep my children.” He had been telling himself his survival was better for them than his refusal, but they were orphaned either way. The dad they needed him to be was already gone.

The building had cleared, and as he reached around her to lay the pen on her workstation, the pen with which she was meant to write her apology, his wrist grazed her breast.

“Wait,” she said softly. “Let me make it easier for you,” and in the private walls of her work station, Hannah reached into her bra as if she meant to unhook it, and buried the shard of bottle deep in the peacemark on his barbecue-scented neck.

His blood sprayed her cheek, and her own hand was bleeding, but in the thirty seconds before the print-powder closet exploded (smell of napalm… screams… brief, impossibly bright flash of light), Hannah felt truly happy.

(Francine)

Waking up from her dayshifted slumber, Francine knows what to do. The fog is gone. Through her window, across the alley, she sees clearly the birdcage, a prison-form of wire so weak you could flex it open with a downward press of your hand, a bright yellow canary puffed into itself at its center, asleep. Faith and Prosper loved to hear it sing as she dressed them for bed each night, and Fran nodded, yes lovely, smiling while its drilling trills drilled her, a pattern of panic and protest no one but she seemed to be able to hear.

She lifts the wire latch in her mind now, and sets it free.

She dresses in the uniform she hates. She does not cover it with a sweater. She has some thought that wearing it might lessen the duration, some subliminal sigil of off-duty loyalty, and she does not need to suppress any of it, this calculating thought, her dread or longing, her pity for the bird or her joy for the thought bird, because if there is some interpretive mechanism above her bed, in the mattress, in her mind, it no longer matters. It can only help now. Francine puts on her boots.

And inside her little boot space, her narrow hallways, she enjoys the brief guiltless release of it, letting the thoughts fly free, tracing a streak of yellow in the gray sky of her mind, with a drilling trill that doesn’t fall like a fear fugue anymore, but a bridge, a building to finale, a celebration. Last week her brain had spun a dream from the silk traces of a History Channel show. The real symbol of medicine had just one snake, the truthcasters said, the Rod of Asclepius, the Greek god of healing, but people had been using the Caduceus instead for years. It had first been confused by the US Army when they adopted it in 1902 for their Medical Corps uniforms, printed it up (whoops!) with a pair of snakes like the staff of Hermes – the messenger god; protector of merchants, liars, gamblers and thieves; the guide of the dead. And as such, said some different voice from some different broadcast from some different authority in some soundproof sound room in the basement of her head, it was the perfect emblem for Paxton, con artist with a megaphone, pied piper of the terminally ill, peddler of medical miracles, thief of nuclear weapons, oil, and the genetic code of his citizens, who without apology, with swagger even, had co-opted their bungled symbol, Betsy-Rossed it for his flag and blown it up big on the boobs of the healthcare workers he used to strip people of their freedoms in his despicable little insta-nation.

She had woken with a start. Chest clamor, then relief. The girls were at school. Burt was not snoring softly beside her. His hand was not resting trustfully on her hip. They used to wake each other with an invitation their bodies made without thinking, his open hand finding the opening of warmth between her legs. It has been so long since he touched her.

The perk factory is only five blocks from their walk-up. One of the perks of the assignment, the career counselor had said. She walks past Liv’s billboard. She walks past the chain-link behind which her daughters’ recess voices would later float. She had always wanted to live near a school yard, the sounds of children playing had given her the same uplift as the sound of bird song used to. Maybe it would again.

She takes off her coat as she enters, so whoever sees her can see her wings. Burt is down below on the factory floor, cupping the elbow of some woman like the one she is about to make herself into, helping her stand with his beautiful hand, and Fran thinks she will take his hand in her own when she utters the words that will save him. She does not see the younger women passing below her with their mops and buckets. Does not see the fervid look of the woman he is helping stand. She is picturing Burt’s face, hearing the shift whistle, not a note of toil, or compliance, or submission this time, but a courage-call, a call to self-determination, the end to their troubles, no hand of god or hammer blow after all, but a fate stroke of her own. The worry that they could hear her thoughts dies with her. She dies not knowing that Paxton could not monitor her there. Would never have bothered to try or wished to. Knew he didn’t need to. The prison she made of them was always her own.

“I’ve been having thoughts that can hurt you,” she’d been about to whisper. “I need self-improving. Turn me in.”

(Jonah)

When they heard the crunch of tires in the ice in the driveway, JT felt the ghost of an old tension returning. Not the ghost of basic training, or of simulations, but the ghost of his phone calls with people he loved. The hopeful blink of the lights on the boy’s tree and the unhesitant skip of his gaze to JT. So helpful and painful the way people kept turning to him in trust when he had wants at odds with their wants from him. The set-ups for his next move had been like a ribbon of dominoes laid by the boy himself, the tells everywhere in this tiny room for what the boy wished the world to be. The boughs on his branches sagging low with the weight of a set of ornaments he’d bought at a street fair, merry Ghost of Christmas Present, chain-laden Marley, happy Tiny Tim and Cratchitt and ebullient morning-after Scrooge, nameless bonneted and top-hatted clerks and tailors and shopkeepers, rosy or pale, compassionate or cross, too singular and simple to be believed. When he asked JT what his mission was, JT hadn’t needed to know who or what he thought JT was fighting for. All he’d had to do was give the boy a chance to share his most outlandish fantasies about how he might do the job himself. Tunnels. Ultralights. Nitrogen into the air supply to the command centers. Ambien in the chocolate pudding for the missileers.

Now JT was sitting up in a pair of the boy’s pajamas with a pair of aces in his hand, and belly full of California shrimp and Kentucky ham. The boy was handing him jeweled seeds he mined from a pomegranate by immersing it in a bowl of water. In all that water, the pith just floated to the top.

“Who do you think it is up there?” the boy asked him. The dogs were barking hoarsely, because it turned out the tires they’d heard hadn’t been hers.

“It’ll be okay,” JT told him (click).

And the boy believed him. His shoulders relaxed, and he signaled the deck for JT to hit him, though JT had three royal diamonds face-up in his own lap. “What will we do if it sounds like she needs help with them when she gets here?”

“We’ll help her.”

“She won’t want us to. We should wait down here as long as we can. It happens a lot.”

“Okay.”

“Sometimes she stabs them.”

“That’s understandable.”

“With a wine knife from a swag bag she’s pretending to give them.”

“She must really love you.” (Click.)

Instant glaze of tears. All day JT had been priming the boy’s trust to prepare for his next move. “She just wants to protect you.” “It’s brave what she’s doing.” “If she could find a way to help you and help other people at the same time, I’m sure she would.” (Click, click, click.)

Nothing would interfere with his mission. Which was right because he was right because look around: the cause of his mission was so obviously right.

The boy took a fistful of peanuts. They seemed to be all he let himself eat. (See there?)

Nothing should interfere with his mission. (Click.)

And nothing would. One glance at this room was a mandate. She could say no, but if she didn’t let him go, her son would cut him free while she was gone and go with him.

(Liv)

On the long drive home, Liv drained her head. As long she was moving, this cold ran freely, but when she held still it backed up in the dark corridors behind her eyes, so strapped behind Gary’s wheel, she drew soft white tissues from her travel packs and emptied them with a sickening sound no one but she could hear. He had issued her an old armored Brinks truck, wideset, painted gold and tricked out with his contemptible red-and-black logo, a half-pinwheel of can-can-girls’ legs arrayed against the stylized beams of a rising sun. When the cars ahead of her slowed and stopped, red eyes of their taillights unblinking, and she pulled onto the shoulder, no one honked. In fact, they gave her room, inching left to let her pass, smiling and waving, college boys in bandanas patterned after the membership flag, girls in sequined dresses they picked up at a Rewards Store, all of them imagining she had something they needed, just like the party they were enduring this wait in their cars for. She loomed over them on billboards, invaded their private moments on their TVs, and they reached out to her from behind velvet ropes, called to her from crowds, trailed behind her in streets. She chained dogs in her yard, papered her windows with warnings, yet still they came, hiding in the woods, dropping from trees, sneaking onto her porch with entreaties and beery breaths. Each day she lingered in the lobby of the Alex Johnson Hotel, bantering with Gary while all around them milled people who feared and admired them both, as if they are the same. She has made herself the same, she knows it. The body people stare at is not her own. The words that come out of her mouth are the words of another person. She breathed life into this person five years ago watching him on the news, a bolt of instinct like Frankenstein’s spark: all she had to do was take herself apart and replace herself piece by piece with a person this person needed.

Before the pandemics the fear had been constant, but she was almost nostalgic for it now, electrical outlets, blind cords, busy streets, bad teachers, the vertiginous hundredth-story window of generalized maternal anxiety had been papered over so quickly: shuttered, boarded, bricked, no gaps or light leaks, just a peep hole of relentless tactical thinking.

How to find enough hand sanitizer.

How to find enough toilet paper.

How to fake the results of his gene test.

How to get him out of a state-of-emergency state safeguarded with poison and mines.

How to get the gatekeepers to trust her.

How to get the dumbfucks at border control gassing station to let her through without gassing her son.

Swab the cheek of a stillborn baby.

Quit your job at the hospital.

Take a job with a yes-man.

Make yourself indispensable.

Flirtation, innovation, manipulation, dissimulation, exploitation.

Crates of live doves for the party for new members.

Bar-top beer derricks for the party for the frackers.

Missile-shaped corn dogs served in missile-strewn bikinis for the party for the missileers.

Pitch export of novelty-nation livestock Vegas hotel can serve butchered-to-order from glass pen in their savior-nation restaurant.

Watch terrified dumbfucks at border control chase fresh Dakota game hens around surveillance-cameraed waiting area while they gassed the cargo container.

Watch weary dumbfucks see truckload of milk-fed Dakota lambs and skip gassing to avoid embarrassing record of their procedural gaffes.

She should be happy now, Gary had had questions, but she had had answers, and ten minutes of banter and two glasses of purse rum later, he had signed her visa and thanked her. Everything was in place. Nothing left but the separate thoughts and feelings of the person whose freedom to express his separate thoughts and feelings she was suppressing so many of her own thoughts and feelings to protect. In the tired visualization ground above her pressure-filled sinuses, the bulky and misguided sentries aligned against his cooperation marched into formation every time: his empathy, his naiveté, his idealism, his introspection, his heroic fantasy, his anxiety, his inflexibility, his moral preoccupation, his moral dread. Again the unwelcome image of her sprinkling Ambien in his oatmeal and dragging his sleeping body on a tarp came to mind. She pulled another tissue and blew with a thick clicking sound like the lonely ticks of pressure you hear when you sink alone to the bottom of a pool.

He was her worst enemy.

She understood that even when he was small.

Spiders, hornets, anything that could bite or sting him, she wanted to kill and he wanted to save. When she cut the head off a prairie rattle snake with a shovel, he sobbed. Once she found him sitting quietly watching a mosquito drink from his arm, and she slapped it with a force that shocked both of them. When he told her how he had waited politely while an older boy stood on his foot in the lunch line, the only word that might matter to him had flown fast from her mouth like a blow-dart tipped with poison. “Selfish. You’re not helping him, you’re making him worse. You are sealing his fate as a bully, and victimizing all of his future victims besides. There’s nothing kind about what you’re doing at all.”

Watching her clean and stitch her incision before she left for the ER last night, he had kept up a familiar stream of self-annihilatingly softhearted suggestions. “Remember Maureen. Does Alice still work there? Just go up to the Nurse’s Lounge. Anyone up there would be happy to help.” The Nurse’s Lounge had been full of traps, but Liv had never stepped into any of them. She could never figure out what it was that lulled everyone into a false sense of security. The single-cup brew-to-order coffee maker? The music piped in? The microwave? All the songs had been government approved soft rock, the lyrics pored over in some tiny office for objectionable words, and the microwave was set to a two-minute maximum, just enough to make a bag of the suspiciously bottomless supply of popcorn. The whole room smelled like fake butter, but the rest of the women had kicked off their heels on the vinyl plank floors and leaned in over the white formica table to trade worries and comforts without even bothering to lower their voices. The whole room could have been bugged, and undoubtedly was, although to Liv that had hardly seemed the only danger. She wouldn’t have talked to one of these women about anything substantive on a windy street corner. Who knew who they’d tell? Everyone was desperate for something, even if it was only an oven.

In her new-mother nightmares, she never got to see how she lost him. Even her subconscious, cradled safe in a warm bath of fluid in the cradle of her skull in the cradle of her bed had been too afraid to step up to the high windy rim and peer. It always feinted with symbols – a fall down an elevator shaft; her hands made of spiders; her hair bursting into flames – placeholders for details to awful to imagine, but she understood what it was hiding from her now. Often her first conscious thought when the image of him rescuing a bee or saying hi to a stranger faded was how sad and strange it was that the world had forged a monstrous proving ground for her earliest maternal fear: In this country it might be her rage that no one had protected her like she protected him that destroyed him.

When she got home and found an ambulance in her driveway, she was not surprised.

A doctor pretending to need to examine her arm wound: not surprised.

Doctor who knew she was hiding Will inside: not surprised.

Doctor being extorted to extort her to break into Gary’s office for evidence they could use to extort him: not surprised.

Doctor easy to get rid of by offering to slip into a ball gown and take care of it that night: not surprised.

Will cut stranger free and playing cards with him in the shelter: not surprised.

Expressed outrage by refusing to re-tether him while she held him at gunpoint: not surprised.

Stranger fanned flames by offering to re-tether himself: not surprised.

Cooperated while she lanced his gut wound unnecessarily: not surprised.

Nodded along while she told them it was important that he hold still until it drained: not surprised.

Appeared in her slant-ceilinged bathroom with his drainage cup to tell her he was there to recruit her: okay, a little surprised.

But shouldn’t have been.

It was disappointing actually.

“Recruit me for what?”

“To drive my team to a missile silo Saturday in the back of your armored van.”

“On one of my surprise visits to hand out snacks and swag to the crew.”

“Exactly.”

Paxton’s nuclear test had been a stockpile bluff.

Never had twelve. Only ever had two.

So just one now.

Disabled for 48 hours while they replaced a malfunctioning blast door.

Impossible to detonate accidentally.

All they had to do was damage the shielding and it was useless for launch.

Each of his cocksure revelations briefly interrupted her fury, like the sudden quiet in a car under an overpass in a bucket-dumping rain, but then there it was again. People in positions of power were always so sure you should give up your plans for their own. She stepped past him and flung her closet open. Or wanted to fling it. Really she had to drag it. Cheap vinyl accordion door rotting on its tracks. Her evening gowns exploded out. Silver, gold, black, red. She started riffling through them roughly, like pages in a book she hated, while he stumped for her subordination, you’re a hero, fuck Paxton, Will needs this, democracy, as she squeezed herself into a sheath, yanked a zipper, clawed for shoes. She didn’t wonder if they had a plan B (what kind of military intervention hinges at the last minute on the cooperation of a woman who has been doing favors for a dictator?), or what he was supposed to do if she said no (kill her), or if they failed (die), or what happened if they succeeded (panic, firefights, looting, riots, lengthy military occupation) because it solved her problem.

“Shut up,” she said: “Yes. I’ll do it. But here’s what you’re going to tell Will.”

Then she drove herself to a party at the Alex Johnson to lure Gary to his office for an Ambien mojito, and when his eyes to drifted shut, she stuck his zip drive in her purse and took her lime knife into his tacky gold bootlicker’s bathroom to cut the tracker out of her breast.

(Gary)

When she waved at him from across the ballroom, he should have known better. She was too angry, he’d already decided. Not just at him, but at the whole world. Fair enough. But the thing he was pretending not to know she was doing with that travel visa was unnecessary. And dangerous. And unlikely to work. He felt sorry for her was the problem. Anyone who saw the old footage of her escape from her regime-of-origin would. No wonder she didn’t trust anybody.

But then: signals at him through the crowd at a party she didn’t have to come to? Grabs him by the bowtie? Gives him a flirty grin? Maybe five years of hints and overtures were finally getting through, was his thought.

Plus the drink she said she’d make him upstairs sounded fantastic.

And was.

More banter.

He was just working up to another try with her.

Then the room went soft and swimmy and he was out.

(Gregor)

Watching the elevator doors slide shut behind that pair of impresarios, Dr. Scanlon felt a chimera of relief. The other revelers were still waiting for the curtain to part on whatever spectacle they had devised to entrance them, but Dr. Scanlon had no further use for the party. His work was done. He had parked just a few blocks away, and as he put some distance between himself and the seat of diversion, he felt his chest filling with a familiar peace. Later tonight Liv Lockhart would page him. The distraction from his own objectives would be complete.

It was snowing again, light flakes that blanketed everything so delicately that the fresh footprints near his car stood out like a path of stones. A black SUV idled behind it, a plume of smoke rising into the night sky like an animal’s tail. Two men stepped out.

They were not wearing uniforms, but the President’s most trusted police did not. They stepped forward and parted their suitcoats to show him their guns.

“You’ve been asked to do your nation a service,” one of them said.

“I’ve been asked for several.”

“This one involves getting in our car.”

“I need to get back to the hospital.”

“You run your hospital well. It’ll be all right without you.”

“What is this about?”

Neither of them answered. They asked him to empty his pockets. Took away his phone.

His heart sank further when he opened the car door – it was so heavy, clearly armored. He hadn’t been able to tell at first glance, but once he was inside he could see other signs. The rubber gusset missing from along the edge of the windows told him they would not open. And they were blackened, not just from the outside but also from the inside, so that he could see nothing.

“Where are we going?”

His only answer was the slow rise of a partition, and as they drove, Dr. Scanlon realized he could be going anywhere. The few sips of champagne he had consumed were making him slightly sleepy, and to his astonishment, after the adrenaline wore off, he dozed, waking from time to time as they went around a particularly sharp turn. A mountain road, it seemed. South Dakota was very flat except for the Black Hills. Perhaps they were going there. But he fell asleep again (had they had an associate at the party slip something into his glass? Like a girl at a turn of the century fraternity party he thought wildly, then he drifted off again). For the last hour or so of the car ride he was awake, and the road was flat and straight, but he had no idea how long he had been asleep. He could be in North Dakota by now for all he knew, and the windows were not just tinted he understood, but completely opaque. He would not know if it was light outside. Why abduct him on a night when he was executing a task for the President? Surely they had spies who could see he was in the middle of completing it.

Finally they slowed to a stop and he heard a whirring sound and the parking break was set. His heavy car door swung open. He was in some kind of enclosed garage. A bank of washing machines along the back wall. A walk-through metal detector.

“Where are we?” he said.

“Remove your clothing.”

Scanlon had a horrified moment of concern. He always felt that the comparisons to Nazi Germany were farfetched – exaggerated, hysterical – but it was possible, wasn’t it, that in addition to self-improvement centers, there were camps somewhere of which he was unaware? The traditional news was gone. There was no internet. Perhaps they were all being kept in the dark. Even him. Perhaps there was only one segment of the population – including doctors surely, but they need not include him – that were being involved in the experiment. Hitler had sent not only genetic defectives to his death camps, but officers as well. Opposition party members, and surely also people he felt were failing him, not producing results.

He removed his cummerbund. He was fumble-fingered anyway putting on cufflinks, and now he was hopeless. When the guard held out a dish for him to set them in, the clink brought to mind gold fillings; wedding rings.

“What is this all about?” he said, although he knew they wouldn’t answer.

He removed his starched shirt, and the more slender of the two guards hung it over the back of a laundry cart. Dr. Scanlon’s tuxedo socks were silk. The guard took these as well. They fluttered as they fell.

When he was in his underwear, the slender guard gestured toward the metal detector. All the while, the other one held his gun limp at his side. He didn’t need to do more. Scanlon understood the futility of a physical fight in this situation. And it was possible (was it not?) that this was not a situation that merited fighting. It was possible (although Dr. Scanlon understood that the possibility was remote) that he was even about to be offered another opportunity of some kind. That, good or bad, this was merely part of the procedure for a meeting with the President.

Now he stood before them, and they walked him into a bathroom. That it was a small bathroom, a bathroom for one person, eased his fears. Not just small – residential. A white ceramic sink with gold-tone faucets. A gap beneath a hollow core door. No gas could come out of a shower head here.

On the counter top sat a bucket with a small sprinkling of black powder at the bottom. Dr. Scanlon thought he knew what it was.

“Don’t empty the powder...” one of his guards began.

“What is it?”

“Fill the bucket to the top with warm water. Wait for it to dissolve, and then wash with that rag.”

“With the door open,” the other one said.

“Who am I here to meet?”

“Whoever we want you to meet.”

“What is that powder called?”

“It’s called you have to do whatever the fuck we say.”

Dr. Scanlon filled the bucket with water, and the water turned purple. Potassium permanganate (caustic at the wrong concentration) would kill most bacteria and fungus. E coli, even cholera. He opened the shower door. The fiberglass bottom was stained a pale violet.

“Don’t turn the shower on yet. Wash first with the rag and bucket. Including your hair.”

The two of them watched as he rubbed the washcloth along his body. But even as he did it, the fog of fear began to lift. If Paxton wanted to kill him, he could simply have done so. Besides: he wanted things from him. Not only the fruit of his assigned research, but now also the seedy intelligence he was mere hours from being able to deliver The doctors in the Dakotas had access, as the President’s Chief of Staff had put it, to certain information. They were well positioned to know who had broken certain laws critical to the safety of this nation, and they were expected not only to share that information but also to apply it. How? (he had asked rhetorically, refilling Dr. Scanlon’s coffee cup). To compel the disclosure of other information. Information that may be harder to uncover. Yes, of course, he explained, sensing Dr. Scanlon’s confusion, anyone could be arrested at any time, but sometimes it was not only the removal of an enemy of the state that was desired. Sometimes it was the discovery of his collaborators and their methods.

Now Dr. Scanlon stepped into the shower and rinsed, the purple water draining. The skin on his hands was stained a reddish brown.

One of the guards handed him a towel.

“What clothes have you for me?” Dr. Scanlon said.

The other one handed him a white terry-cloth bathrobe, as if he were here for a spa treatment. Slippers too. Then they walked him down a long hall to a door covered in a sheet of cloudy construction plastic.

“We aren’t going in with you.”

Passing through the door, he found himself in a large indoor pool room that smelled not of chlorine but green, like a pond. Over the windows, shades had been drawn so that he could still tell nothing about the surrounding terrain. The swimming pool was filled with hundreds of tiny fish. There were two new guards in the room. One of them said to him, “Sit in this chair, facing us. When the President enters, stand up, but don’t shake his hand. Don’t touch him anywhere on his body. He’ll sit in this chair.”

The two chairs had five feet between them. The second guard was fiddling with something in what appeared to be an equipment room. The sound of Frank Sinatra came over a stereo, tinny and thin.

When he sat down in his chair, the wicker creaked. Dr. Scanlon had this thought: this is the chair I will sit in to meet the man with the power to determine my fate.

He did not know how many doctors had been favored with special assignments for the President, but he did know who had been asked last at his own hospital because the chief of staff had told him. Dr. Parish’s recent reassignment had been covered heavily on the truths, with his wife and son standing by proudly while cameras flashed. He had been asked by the president to move to Fargo to head up a new lab, and Dr. Scanlon had never heard from him again. A few times he had tried to contact him via telephone to locate certain records, but the calls had not been returned. Arrogance, he assumed at first. Snubbing. But then a kind of cold fear had gripped him. Eventually he stopped leaving messages. He had not known at the time exactly what he was afraid of, only that the auditors may note the pattern and call it to someone’s attention, and in the Dakotas all patterns carried some risk. And something else. Some other concern that had been just beyond his reach. Something graver he had avoided understanding.

Underneath the music, somewhere behind a wall, an engine of the pool equipment kicked on with a low hum. In the water, the movements of the tiny fish were soundless.

Finally a door opened, and the President entered. He was dressed in a robe himself, although it was not a bathrobe. It was silk, patterned with rooks and bishops. And a pair of black velvet slippers with a single large wolf head embroidered over each toe.

Scanlon stood and bowed. “Mr. President,” he said.

“Don’t bow, we’re not in Japan.” He put out his hand for Dr. Scanlon to shake, and with some trepidation Dr. Scanlon offered his own. The President squeezed it and gave it one hearty pump. “I go to parties all the time and shake hands with people who have probably been fingering each other in broom closets. I’m not afraid of your germs. I got rid of all the germs. It’s why people love this country. The point of the scrub down is I can do whatever I want. People will follow any damn procedures I ask them to follow. Come here and check out my fish.”

He walked to the edge of the pool and Dr. Scanlon followed.

“You know what kind they are?”

He knew the President kept koi, but these were much too small to be koi. “I’m afraid not.”

“Afraid not. Crazy expression. What’s to be afraid of not knowing something? You ask a question, then you know. They’re koi.”

“Ah.”

“You’re wondering why they’re so small aren’t you?”

“No, sir.”

“And people wonder why I go to parties and wear a mask when I do it. You kidnap people and bring them to your house, you invite them to a cabinet meeting, they clam right up. Half the words are sir, the other half are horseshit. Of course you’re wondering. Have you ever seen koi that small?”

“No I haven’t.”

“It’s because they’re babies. Liv Lockhart got them for me in twenty-four hours. You know how they ship hatched koi? Triple-sealed polyethylene bags in a styrofoam tailgate cooler. They float through the nitrogen lock at the border like a cosmonaut mugging for the camera in a top-grade space suit. That woman can get me anything.”

Why had Paxton mentioned her? Did he know the task of extorting her to steal files from Gary Handler’s office had been assigned to him? Had she betrayed Dr. Scanlon by calling the President to deliver the intelligence directly? There was no upside in asking. Dr. Scanlon blinked, waiting for the axe to fall.

“You know why I asked her for baby koi?”

“No, sir.”

“Because yesterday I came in here and every one of my koi was dead. People disappoint me all the time, Scanlon. And sometimes they actually do it on purpose, if you can believe it. I don’t know who did it, but I’ll find out. Meanwhile, I wanted to give you a present.”

“A present?”

“That’s why I brought you here. Some people would say the opportunities I’ve given you to be of service to me were a whopper of a gift. They might say that was plenty, and those ass-kissers would be right, but what can I say, I’m a giver.”

He took something from his pocket. His gift, Dr. Scanlon had to assume. It was a packet of something. Poison! he thought wildly, but then he saw a fish printed on the shiny paper. Paxton tore it open and sprinkled brown pellets on his own palm. Then he crouched, the flaps of his robe parting to show one hairy knee, and held out his hand over the surface of the pool. The baby koi swarmed, their lips opening and closing reflexively and frantically, but only the mouths of a fast few met in his palm to devour what he was feeding them. “Survival of the fittest,” he muttered happily, clapping the moisture from his hands. “Natural selection at work.”

He stood. “Thanks for coming.” He didn’t offer a handshake this time. “Your gift’s waiting in the car for you. Don’t open it until you get home.”

The guards stepped from behind the potted palm, (they had been listening to them all along), and ushered Dr. Scanlon into the car with the tomb-like doors. On the black leather seat, a gift the size of a shoebox sat waiting like a small second passenger. Its gold foil paper winked under the dome light. On top, tucked under a gold satin ribbon, was a thick white envelope, unmarked.

He didn’t sleep this time. And he noticed less the blackness of the windows, the lack of passing scenery. His mind was full of questions. What’s inside? What does he have in store for me? What will it mean for Clara? What had seemed such a long drive before passed quickly. Maybe it was because they had driven in circles to confuse him. Or maybe it was because he was watching his gift. When they pulled to a stop and opened his door, he was not in front of the Alex Johnson, or even the hospital, but in front of his own house. He was not at all surprised that they knew where he lived.

He went inside and removed his coat, set his package on the kitchen table.

He opened the envelope first. In blue ink (watery, from an expensive fountain pen, and crabbed like a school-child’s):

“With thanks in advance. You’re off to a slow start, but I’m counting on you to make better use of your appointment than your predecessor.”

Dr. Scanlon pulled the end of the gold satin ribbon slowly, a little afraid to see what was inside. He lifted a white lid and parted the rustling tissue. A gold caduceus statuette. They were issued as awards to doctors for their research, and although it might have been reasonable, based on his contributions, to assume that Dr. Scanlon was being honored, he understood that this was not happening. These awards were presented at large public events, given a lot of play on TV. Also, this particular statuette was a little dirty, clouded with small spots as if it had been sitting by while a woman applied hairspray. Dr. Scanlon looked at the bottom: “Dr. Alistair Parish.” And a date from two years before.

He set it on the table, his heart pounding. There was more tissue in the box. He assumed at first it was just extra padding for the trophy, but now he thought not. He reached inside and squeezed the tissue and discovered two more bundles. A pair of eyeglasses, also misted with residue. And a leather wallet.

Though what he wanted to do was withdraw his hands, he forced himself to open it. Inside he saw Dr. Parish’s identification and a photo of the wife and son he had seen on TV. Personal effects. Which should have been delivered to his loved ones were either of them still living to receive them.

Dr. Scanlon stood and washed his hands then -- not to prepare (he had disposed of his home microscope and slides before the Cleaning; they were far more illegal for home use, had been portrayed as far more threatening and symbolic of dangerous rebel tinkering and selfishness, than either stoves or refrigeration). Dr. Scanlon washed his hands because he did not like germs, and he knew without confirming (although he would do so tomorrow, with slides at the hospital and a glance at Dr. Parish’s medical records) that the residue on the glasses and statue was comprised of fine droplets of blood. Dr. Parish’s own…? his wife’s…? his son’s…? It hardly mattered, but Dr. Scanlon was curious.

(Damian)

Perched on a folding chair with her hands cuffed behind her back, she was doing her best to look relaxed and sexy. Turned to the side. Crossed her legs. They’d removed the bulky coat, and the moon boots, which helped. But they’d also cleaned her face, and when they’d stripped away the dirt and the soot, they’d stripped away all her makeup, exposing not just a fresh bruise on her cheek, but also a deepening rawness around her nose and mouth. The room was empty, but when the intake officer led her in, he had positioned her in the chair opposite the two-way mirror. She knew someone was watching.

Who? Why? No idea. No doubt she’d been expecting something like this for a long time (what despot with any staying power doesn’t send a message by rounding up his top officers to purge the ranks with some duress confessions and desperate accusations every now and then?), but in the last couple weeks it seemed like she had stopped expecting it. Probably not that she thought that particular shoe was never going to drop. Just that she had begun to think it would drop after she was gone.

What kind of interrogator they assigned to her didn’t matter: an unimaginative we-already-know-so-you-might-as-well-admit-it type; a gloomy your-friends-and-family-have already-turned-on-you-so-you-might-as-well-turn-on-them demoralizer; a sorry-about-all-this let-your-guard-down nice guy. In the end her strategy would be the same. Humor them for a while by answering their questions (it wouldn’t hurt to know, during her last couple days here, exactly what kind of traitorous behavior they were on highest alert for). Then, at the first sign that the inquisition was going to drag on too long for her taste, interrupt them with a record scratch: I know you’re just doing your job, boys, but let’s make sure the President doesn’t blame you for the failure of his Christmas blowouts.

The guy they sent in was in his early fifties, thinning hair, soft friendly face and rolled up shirtsleeves, extra twenty pounds hanging over his belt. He was carrying the kind of paper sack kids used to carry their school lunches in. He set it on the table and came around and unlocked her handcuffs with a small key. Then he took a seat and pulled a rectangle of waxed paper from the little brown bag and set it on the table between them.

“I thought you might be hungry,” he said. “That was a long time running around outside.”

Little convulsion like she was holding back a cough buckled her kitten posture, but then there it was again. She smiled and shook her head.

“You sure?”

“I’m okay.”

“Listen to you! I have some hard candies in my desk drawer might be good for that if you want.”

She waved a dirt-laced hand.

“Even this here what I brought you might help. Melts all warm down your throat while you chew. Try some.”

“I don’t have much of a sweet tooth.”

“No? That’s a shame,” he said. He looked genuinely disappointed. “My wife Stella made it.”

A picture came to Paxton’s mind of the pair of them coming to work every day through the bleak steel doors, this guy heading to wait for his cue in the interrogator’s green room, his wife to inject holiday treats with scopolamine in the precinct kitchen. “You know what the secret ingredient is?”

“No idea.”

“You don’t say.” His sweetly rounded midwestern ‘o’ exaggerated his already outsized surprise at this answer. “Used to be you could find it on the internet. They hand out the recipe at your Rewards Stores now. Christmas Sack Fudge.”

Paxton clocked her inner click of adjustment, and he agreed. The twist was good. Not Nice Guy after all: intimidation.

“Those sacks are hotly anticipated this time of year, let me tell you. And it’s mostly for the fudge. Well, the Christmas cards too, because they never get anything homemade. Families aren’t allowed to send food or gifts. These Christmas sacks are it.”

For decades before the pandemics, every prison inmate in South Dakota had been getting the same sorry sack of goodies on Christmas morning: cup of peanuts, five hard candies, Christmas card made by a Sunday school student, a candy cane, and two squares of homemade fudge. She had resuscitated and repurposed the program for the self-improvement centers herself. For more than half a century, Dakotans have been showing broken citizens they care… Help our peacekeepers-in-training make the transition! Whip up some Christmas spirit on a brand new stove!… Like his own Frank Capra.

“Glad I could help,” she said.

“You surely did.”

“Good.”

“Makes our job easier…” he went on, patting his pockets distractedly. “And nice to lift everyone’s spirits a little this time of year…”

When he stood, she straightened. Not afraid he was leaving to get a bad-cop partner. Just afraid he was leaving. The worst tactic of all: no one to hustle.

“What else can I do to help?” She had pine needles in her hair. She’d been intercepted by a firefighter outside the smoking remains of her safe house. Patted down by who-knows-how-many bored and horny precinct intake guards. It surprised Paxton that so many men had passed up the chance to brush them away for her.

“Oh nothing for me,” Sad Christmas Sack said. He pulled scalloped-edge handkerchief from his pocket, a bottle of water from his wrinkled bag. Then he ran his fingers along the frame of the mirror. “He just asked me to make sure you were comfortable before you talk to him.” A little spinning circle appeared on her side of the darkened pane. “Good luck,” he said, and as the door shut behind the saggy butt of his Dockers, Paxton appeared on the screen.

He was wearing another one of his robes, the one patterned with stars and schooners, and the cheap plastic rhinoceros mask he’d been wearing earlier at the Alex Johnson.

He watched the sight of him move through her: little more flex in her shoulders, tilt the chin, extra arch in the spine. This was a terrible moment to look cowed and vulnerable, let alone unmasked and disheveled. She knew beauty was important to him, and she wasn’t wrong, but she was wrong that vulnerability repelled him.

“Jesus, Lockhart, it’s after midnight. I should be getting a look at you in your nightie.”

“Maybe they have some negligees mixed in with the prison jumpsuits.”

“Or at least that sexy red number and slippery black satin cat-eye you were wearing earlier. Whatever after-party you changed for, you should skip it next time.”

“It’s a pretty good story, actually –“

“That’s not what I had you picked up to ask you about. I don’t need to hear that story. It has the same ending as every story everybody ever tells me: I wasn’t fucking you over. That’s your story.”

He took off his mask. Flimsy thing like you used to get at Party Galaxy or Gatherings-a-Go-Go at an end-of-hallway eddy at some end-of-empire devolution of a Roman mall. She imported these for him for parties by the thousand, along with Tennessee whiskey and Kentucky ham. The US sanctions had lasted just forty-two days before post-pandemic, post-green, post-piety, post-hope realities set in and the White House replaced them with a ban on a list of things of no consequence: corn, wheat. These toothless embargos must have delighted him, she’d whispered the first time she’d met him – like an admission of defeat. With so much oil, he didn’t even have to produce anything.

“If you really want to be masked yourself at one of those flag-and-tuba shindigs next time, you’d have to go for one of those bulky costumes the shy girls wore in middle school – bag of chips or cereal box or something. That body of yours is going to give you away every time.”

“If I didn’t give myself away, how would my favorite men ogle me from across the room?”

“That’s what I like about you, Lockhart, the things we want line up perfectly.”

“I aim to please.”

“Please schmese. Even when you don’t aim it ends up helping me.”

This snoozer had been huge, hundreds of monument workers, drillers and detonators and scaffolding builders and master carvers, all of them crowding the stairwells and wandering the spillover rooms and hallways, but leave it to any rave-maker but Liv to make a series of event-planning choices that made a party feel dull and small: tree hung with bison ornaments and tiny Membership flags, ass-kissing ice sculpture festooned with colored lights, all interred in the historic banquet hall of the Alex Johnson, where every big Rapid City hootenanny had been held for decades until she came along and rescued citizens everywhere from nodding off at yet another cheese-puff-stuffer in (he wasn’t making this name up): Yesterday’s Ballroom. When she stepped through the doorway, a military band playing a pompous brassy rendition of Hail to the Chief had just been wheezing to a stop as four over-serious youth soldiers lined up for the presentation of the colors, (Was there anything more boring than the presentation of the colors? If so Paxton didn’t want to see it. He’d liked it at first, but it was getting old; post-old, Yesterday’s Adulation. No music, just the tap of shoes on a narrow path of polycarbonate floor mats someone had laid out over the carpet so everyone could hear them, the steps paced out more ponderously than a funeral procession. Click! Pause portentously with flags. Allow guests lengthy gander of unnaturally blinkless eyes and stick-up-butt postures. God help them, he had plenty of time to think between every step. Just shoot them. Put them out of my misery. Click!), while all around the room people were mugging for the point-cams, jostling and jockeying to be seen jostling and jockeying for a position closer to this tranquilizing display, except Gary, whose hound-dog eyes were locked on Lockhart, and the moat of fit young masked men that separated her from Paxton, who were paid to devote every nerve-ending and muscle fiber to preventing things that could hurt him. No ripple among them when she lured Gary to the elevator with a crook of her come-hither finger, but when Paxton headed for his limo minutes later, they cut a trailing current in the sea of suck-ups like a school of fish.

“You know how watering holes get formed on the savannah?”

She cocked her head in a show of interest, like a lower-tier girl on the cheer squad. Or a dog. It made him pine a little for the energy of her effort in the ballroom, seeing her half-heart it in a precinct folding chair, but if God could reach out of a cloud and touch Adam to life with the tip of his finger, Paxton could breathe the focus back into a fighter over telecom.

“First the zebras find a bare spot to take a dust-bath to get rid of the parasites, make a little depression. Then the warthogs come after it rains to bathe in the mud there and cool off. Then the water buffalos come, god love ‘em, to rub their horns in the mud and make them look bigger to impress the ladies. Finally there’s enough mud to attract the elephants on a hot day, and they come and kick around to cool each other off. Each time it gets a little deeper. See what I mean?”

“Sure,” she said.

“Paraphrase it for me then. The only thing I love more than hearing myself talk is hearing the smart shit I say parroted back with breathy wonder by a woman in a tight dress – or a tight corner; sometimes we have to make do.” She was going to make him work for his hard-on for fun in this conversation.

“You’re saying everyone’s instincts serve you.”

“That’s it! And the beautiful part is, none of those animals are even trying to get water. They’re just following their baser instincts – survival, sex, comfort – and they end up building the bedrock resource that props up the whole ecosystem. I like to picture God up there when he gets these ideas, lazy bastard lounging on a gold fainting sofa while some courtesans of his own making (blue.. green… triple-boobed) massage him and drop grapes in his mouth. How can I get them to build it all for me without lifting a finger?”

She blinked, not a lash batt, just a reflex. The water the lackey he’d provided her had provided her still sat unopened on the table.

“Take those parties,” he said. “Rewards for Courage is a perfect example. A guy like Gary will come up with it for his own reasons. And then a girl like you will bust her hump for it for hers.”

“Speaking of which,” she said. “I’ve got a lot of calls to—“

“Enh!” He made a loud honking sound like the negative buzzer on an old game show. “I’m not done with you yet, Lockhart. I wasn’t finished making my point: You and Gary are like zebras. You can’t scratch an itch without strengthening the national infrastructure. Your moves might do anything for me. They might make people volunteer to do time in a self-improvement center.” He wished she’d lean forward a little. “And wouldn’t that be a coup? I built those things mostly for the deterrent factor, but it turns out they really work. The people who come out of them are our highest point earners.” Our he said. Like a bauble in a velvet clamshell, or a box of longstems. She was distracted, he could tell. “They’re so docile and hard-working they’re like finger puppets.”

Finally she uncapped the water and took a sip.

“That’s better,” he said.

She wiped her lips with the back of her wrist. She didn’t see it was muddy. He wished she had a mirror. He thought of holding one up for her. He could do it with a squinchy face, but disgust was wrong. It wasn’t disgust. He wished she’d just -- There! She wiped it away with the tips of her fingers. What a pro.

But then he couldn’t stop seeing it.

He took a sip of his scotch. Prohibition whiskey. With a prescription label and a dose cup for a cap!

“You got this for me,” he said.

“That I did.”

There we go. In a voice that made him picture her party lips.

“I’ve got another savannah story for you. I was out on safari once and my guide stumbled on a giraffe mother defending her baby against a pack of twenty hyenas. ‘Park and turn the engine off,’ I told him, ‘this is gonna be a doozy.’ And I was right. She was like a ninja. She kept the thing between her legs, kicking when they came in close. Sometimes she’d chase them off for hours, but I could tell she was getting exhausted. Eventually while she was chasing some away, the others came in and ripped the thing to pieces. Took the easy meaty parts and left the head, and here was the damndest thing: she ran back to defend it. When it got dark out, we left, but when we came back the next day to check, she was still there guarding it. She defended that head for three days, until she finally had to leave to eat or die. I waited around while the hyenas picked it clean, and then I kept the skull. I can show it to you some time. I keep it here in Residence A, right next to Teddy R’s bullet-damaged glasses case and Churchill’s dentures. Big fans of genetic improvement, both of them. Way ahead of their time.”

Her eyes strayed to her wrist, where a watch some box-checker had taken off her probably used to be. “That was a good story, sir—“

“Don’t call me sir. Sir isn’t sexy. The point of my giraffe story is: it blows me away, blows any man away, the lengths a good mother will go to, the incredible energy and ingenuity she’ll expend to protect her kid. But what you don’t get to see very often, the real standing-room-only side show, is what kind of weird shit they’ll do after they’ve already lost – the kid’s number is up; he’s as-good-as dead.”

He got up with a creak from his white wicker chair and walked out of the picture. He was in his pool room. The baby koi she’d surprised him with thronged in the center like a swarm of bees. He crouched down and splashed his empty hand in the water and they rushed to meet it.

“How’d you get these for me so quickly?”

“I have a guy in Vegas. I offered him a case of silo-wheat single-malt to show off to his friends.”

“And plenty of flirty banter, I hope.”

“That goes without saying.”

As the cloud of fish drifted away, toward the center, he splashed his fingers again, and they teemed back to him. “The blunderfucks I assigned it to have interviewed dozens of people, and they still haven’t figured out who killed my old ones. Any ideas?”

There was a pause. She knew this wasn’t the point of the interview. But it mattered, of course it did. He stood and turned away from the water to look at her. Whoever had wiped her down hadn’t gotten all the soot off. There was a little still there, in the raw patch under her nose from the cold she was still fighting. “Only a tactical one,” she said.

“My favorite kind.”

“They should focus less on access and more on competence.”

He liked this answer. She probably couldn’t see his smile over here next to the water. He kept the pool lights off. The overheads too. This wasn’t a rec center. Koi have circadian rhythms just like everyone else. If they don’t get eight hours of something like sun, they’ll lose their color, even get disoriented, but they need eight hours of something no brighter than moonlight too. Everyone does better with a period of darkness. “So you’re saying I should look for someone like you.”

“I’m a match in competence for sure, but not in motive.”

“Oh yeah? Why is that?”

“Because the happier you are, the safer I get.”

A clap of laughter escaped him. The acoustics in the pool room were otherworldly. The cries of Marco and Polo must have bounced around forever. “True story.” He walked back to his chair where she could see his face, but he didn’t sit. “Yet still you were running around after curfew with a wallet-sized photo in your wallet tonight,” he added sternly.

All twenty-seven of the captures at the border on Monday had been found with a 2x1 headshot of an assassination target, along with those sticky snack bars made of buffalo jerky, as if he’d be confused about where they came from by their backpacks full of local snacks.

“No Bison Bars, though,” she quipped.

“Detective Numbnuts suggested you ate them already.”

“Do I look like a girl who eats Bison Bars?”

“That’s exactly what I told him.”

“And that photo is of my son, not a cabinet member. Every mother has a photo of their kid that size in their wallet.” He flopped back down in the wicker chair, knees spread, robe gaping, too dark to see anything, but she’d have to wonder. LBJ used to get up in a briefing and tell them to keep talking while he pissed with the bathroom door open, but he never took a meeting commando, Paxton bet. “I know it’s your son, Lockhart. Of course it’s your son. Whatever you do, you’re doing for your son. It’s the only boring thing about you. The good news for you is that so far it’s all helping me.”

Her heart was probably hammering in her chest with so much force it would be visible, but the skimpy white bib on her snowsuit washed out on camera. He couldn’t see it. She picked up a square of the prison fudge. She wasn’t worried it was laced with truth serum anymore. That wasn’t the tactic. Authority was the tactic.

He said, “You leave your house in the middle of the night with all the lights on and three jiffy-logs burning. Get spotted chasing dogs through the snow. Sounds like mother giraffe behavior to me. How, I don’t know, but so far I don’t much care either. You know why?”

“Why?”

“Because I don’t need to,” he said, ignoring the sickly warp of her question. The prison fudge was terrible – mucousy mouth-feel and way too sweet. The secret ingredient of five decades of pre-pandemic Dakotan do-gooders was Velveeta. It curdled her purr even further, like she was talking to him through glue. All at once it occurred to him she wasn’t even trying to mask it for him. That she couldn’t focus on anything but her own objective.

“You’re all the same. A mother impala will eat her babies’ shit to keep predators from smelling it. All I need to do is scare you in the right direction.”

“What direction is that?”

“There are ingrates and complainers in every country; I don’t care about those. There’s no bang in bellyaching. But someone – some bastard long on brutality and access to incriminating information, or maybe a misguided bleeding-heart with moxie and charisma and outsized logistical skills – someone is organizing them.”

She opened her mouth, and he clapped it shut with a wave of his hand. “Don’t worry, I know it’s not you. You could do it. You could do it in a heartbeat. But running around outside and while your safehouse burns to the ground is too desperate and myopically personal an activity for someone puppeting a master plan. You, I didn’t bring here to probe for a confession. From you, all I want is a name.”

“No problem,” she said. “This week’s parties will be a great opportunity for me to —“

“Enh!” the buzzer noise again. “What is that? Your half-assed idea of leverage? You think I care so much about my parties? They’re fun, but I’ve got plenty of ways to have fun. I could cancel all my parties, take the show girls to Residence C for a week of skinny dips and naked bowling. I can keep you locked up for days if I want to – that’ll put a crimp in your late-night snow activities.”

She made a business of recrossing her legs, like he was some middle-school mouth breather back when the puberty lottery started spewing its powerball payout, her teachers and her uncles too, all of them staring her in the torso and tuning her out, like her boobs had blown off her head. But no testosterone-tunnel-vision for Paxton, Paxton saw everything, a part of the wiring, a gift and a curse: flinches, twitches, coughs, hubris, kids, daddy issues, shame, tick-tick ding! Tick-tick ding! on an endless ticker tape of tells in his brain.

“I just meant the quality of the intel I can get in a room full of tipsy cabinet members is –”

“Intel? I don’t care about intel. It doesn’t have to be true, it just has to be persuasive. This little school-photo plot will fail – who cares if half my senior ranks get assassinated? I’ll just replace them. The question is, who can I put up on the screen to send the best message, where that message is, don’t use the influence I blessed you with to fuck with me.”

She looked up and to the left, bit her still besmirched lip. She gave it a minute (more would undermine the certainty she thought he’d believe or give a fuck if she faked), and tried to offset the gluey timbre of her voice with a return to unflinching eye contact. “Chief Examiner Scanlon.”

Paxton threw his hands in the air. “See there? Boring. That’s exactly what I expected you to say. You’re thinking with your womb again. Why? Because he threatened to swab your house for DNA or pry your son out from under a floorboard and take him in for testing unless you give him a traitor to lay at my feet? It’s okay, Lockhart, I know you’ve been hiding your son because you don’t want him modified. And I like that. I’m happy to keep a few rebels around if they have loved ones useful enough to be worth motivating. Take this camera guy, or the room full of gumshoes watching this interrogation. They’ve got plenty of good reasons not to leak this footage. Number 1: It won’t make a damn bit of difference; I’ve got twelve nuclear missiles; I can do whatever I want. Number 2: They know a good thing when they see it. For once all the cards are in the hands of someone with the balls to really keep the peace. And to do it with a little pizzazz for god’s sake! In what other country can you take care of your family by going to parties? But are those their reasons? No. The reason that none of them will leak this footage is that their kids are playing hopscotch and wolfing wagyu burgers in a Rewards Resort, half of them rebels and the other half peacekeepers whose spunk these daddies couldn’t stand to see beaten out of them by anyone but themselves.”

Something hopped up in his voice seemed to have shaken her. He didn’t glance left to see if the camera clown’s hand on his own image for her was shaking. He kept his eyes on her. And tried to dial it down.

“So the question is, the question I just left a pair of dancing nurses in bed to hear you answer for me is: which obviously untrustworthy pervert do you want to see me serve up some justice to in exchange for me making sure everyone keeps their hands off your kid?”

But she still wouldn’t do it.

“Let me see your poor boob.”

She unbuckled the bib of her snowsuit, fumbling a bit, and lifted up her turtleneck to flash him. A bloom of her blood blossoming through a starburst of tape and gauze.

“Where’s the tracker?” he said.

“Passing through the small intestine of Gary Handler’s rat by now, I’m guessing.”

He didn’t like picturing any of her acts of gladiatorial grit in that pin-prick’s penthouse, but he shook his head appreciatively. She was too much, the head-shake said. A lonely, over-qualified autocrat should be so lucky, to have a smart, feisty plaything like her.

“I told you I didn’t care about your son. You didn’t have to lop off half a tit and burn your house to the ground to hide him from a scarecrow like Scanlon.”

“Better safe than sorry.”

“Why rely on just belt and suspenders when you can sew the fuckers right to your waist too, eh?”

“Exactly.”

But he knew it wasn’t belt and suspenders, it was belt and release. Inevitable irrational. Hysterical historical. Furious glorious. Self-annihilating self-expressing. Purgative purifying. Everything comes out in the endgame.

She took another piece of fudge between her fingers but she just held it there looking past him. Not at the fish she’d brokered for him. It was too dark to see his fish. At some secret faraway of her own.

“Never mind. I don’t need you to come up with someone to blame the school photo shenanigan on. I already have one.”

“Who?”

“Handler.” Paxton’s eyes were an indeterminate color, gray swamping a hint of green, and while ordinarily he let them wander as unselfconsciously and proprietarily as a toddler’s hands, right now all he wanted to see was her eyes. “He’s done a hell of a job with the RFC, but like everybody once they get a little taste of power, he’s getting greedy.”

She blinked.

“You don’t have to ham up your surprise. I know you aren’t in cahoots with him. I’ve been watching you closely since you took the job with him, and you’re a lone wolf if ever I saw one. You aren’t working with anybody, least of all Greedy Gary. If there’s one thing that’s obvious from my periodic peeps at your meetings, it’s how much you hate him. I actually started to feel a little sorry for the guy, and he was trying to have me assassinated.”

He took a remote from his pocket. “He confessed everything on video about twenty minutes ago,” he said. He turned his chair with a creak of wicker and Gary appeared on the mirror behind him, lying strapped to an injection bed. There was a sound after he finished his litany of made-up crimes – a mechanical click and whirr she would probably be remembering for a long time in her dreams – and then Gary’s eyelids fluttered, his hands twitched, his chest heaved once, and his body relaxed completely.

The screen went black.

“So,” Paxton said. He slipped the remote back in the pocket of his robe. “The RFC Minister job is yours obviously, with all its attendant holiday hassles. We’ll announce it in a crowd-pleasing spectacle of scepter-passing glory – whenever you get back from that trade junket you’re taking, that is.”

The surprise on her face was disappointing. “Yes I’ve seen your visa. Of course I’ve seen it. I’m like a termite queen. I’ve got pheromone sensors running through every square mile of this fucking mound. Denver, the form said. It’s to pick up the something nut-shriveling for my Who-Wants-To-Be-A-Cabinet-Member party next week I assume.”

“Yes,” she said in that floaty already-out-of-here way.

And he pretended to believe her.

“I’m a rare bird, Lockhart. And I’m sorry I never met your dad, because a guy like him would have known it.”

She put the second piece of fudge in her mouth, but he could tell she was sorry she’d done it. She stopped chewing and just let it melt there like You-Don’t-Say had suggested she do.

Paxton had been just twenty-two the month of the standoff, and watching it on TV, the obviousness of it had captivated him even then. All that bickering over whether her father had set the fire himself or the government was spreading that story to make him a scapegoat. Yes and yes. Of course this guy-on-his-high-horse had set it, and of course the opposing missionaries in their mission control knew if they kept up the pressure he would. It takes a power hoarder to know one. And when they played and replayed the footage of his twelve-year old daughter crawling out of an air vent, the sole survivor, Paxton thought: there’s your proof. Who better than a girl who’d spent her whole life under his thumb to see it all coming? Parents were the original cult leaders, their love of their cults-of-protection eclipsing their love of the people they’d pledged to protect. Claiming they were doing it for the kids instead of defending the ship when they went down with the ship. That big beautiful ship! I know better than you, sweetie. It’s for your own good, sweetie. This is going to hurt me more than it hurts you.

“But I’m also different.”

Some vent in her cell kicked on, making her hair float, releasing the ash from a wild fire of her own.

“Hot or cold?” he said.

“What?”

“The air they’re pumping in there…”

“Oh,” she said, but she still didn’t answer. She looked like she was underwater. Not just her hair, but some kind of dazed look.

“Have some more fudge. Sip some more water.”

But instead she just sat there, looking past the image of him on the screen. The little fish she’d gotten for him were spread out evenly again.

“Want to know the answer?”

“The answer to what?”

“Who killed my koi.”

“I thought you said they hadn’t figured it out.”

“Of course they didn’t, I did.”

Her eyes were still dangling on the space behind him. You could mistake it for focus, but he knew it was too dark. She couldn’t see them.

“Automatic fill valve malfunctioned. Let in a slow, continuous stream of chlorinated city water overnight that killed them all.”

“Oh good,” she said absently.

“Horseshit. I was so pissed I threw Churchill’s dentures right through this cow magnate’s ugly scavenger bird window.”

But she didn’t say anything. Far outside her field of view of his room, the sheet of plastic they’d used to cover the hole where the pane had been was filling and emptying like a sail tacking. It made a sudden noise like a slap, and still she sat still in her separate chamber, her fingers still poised like they were still holding the shitty piece of prison fudge she’d already eaten, the bib of her snowsuit dangling.

Why, she should obviously ask him.

W-w-why w-w-were you angry?

But she was back to playing dead for a second, and he couldn’t bring himself to ask her to ask him. He felt a fall in his chest like a stone dropping.

Never mind.

He could deliver his punchline without her.

“If there’s one thing I hate more than a rebellion, it’s a system failure.”

(Will)

Will was surprised to find himself still hiding. This hiding place was a snow pit two miles from his safe house, and he’d dug it with a grown man whose life he had saved. But they’d been shepherded there by his mom running a confusion of circles with her guard dogs to cover their tracks, and they were snugged into four-season mummy sacks like swaddled babies, and each time Will opened his mouth to ask a question, this grown man made a shh shape with his lips to remind him to keep it down. Voices carry farther than the sound of digging, JT whispered, and whether this was just another lie to protect him, Will was disappointed not to have enough life experience to know.

At least the pit was too small lie down in. It took some of the baby and mummy edge off the swaddling. And sitting was a better match for how he was feeling anyway. Better than lying down. He wanted to feel as if he was ready for something, although in actuality, there was nothing for him to do but wait.

Will wasn’t stupid. (Did they think he was stupid?) He knew she wasn’t going to smuggle him to a youth resistance meeting in the feed bin of a bison trailer. She had been working on her plan to get him out of the Dakotas for years, had flatly refused to help everyone who came to her door, had actively boosted Paxton with thousands of reams- and reels- and swag bags- and festivals- and booze-cruises- worth of very popular propaganda, all to make sure one teenaged kid lived to blow drinking straw wrappers in some imagined better cafeteria. She wasn’t going to suddenly have an attack of extrapersonal heroism and throw away her dream of his safety. When JT told him he was going upstairs to suggest it, Will had tried to imagine the pitch he was shaping. He was going to say: what? ‘I know you’re so maniacally focused on his safety you were willing to puncture my gut wound with a fruit knife to protect him, but now that I’ve underscored your impotence by getting him to cut me free a second time, how do you feel about rendering all your moral compromises over the last seven years irrelevant by risking his life to take him to join a resistance movement I may have made up just to manipulate him?’

Um, bad. Just a tetch disinclined, she’d have to say. I’m feeling that little gut-wave of guilt-free gladness a mom feels before she finally fires the frustrated bullet she’s had chambered for sixteen years in her brain.

Will had fretted in the basement, waiting to hear a gunshot. It was the only reason he’d stayed in the shelter actually. He felt sure that adding himself to the mix while JT was doing something so ill-advised only made a maternal rage shooting more likely. He was so stressed out by the time they came downstairs he made a sound like a balloon deflating. That’s what the tears had been all about. It was relief.

It was like crying in a movie. You know nobody’s really changing. Nobody’s really transforming. But after watching all the near deaths and last-minute escapes, all the fight scenes where people say the worst possible things anyone could say to each other, you’re so keyed up and nerve-wracked that when these pretend people finally say lines that show they really get it, they’re ready to give up what they thought they wanted and do something good, it just juices you. Squeezes you like an orange. The tears just start rolling.

Also sadness. For her. For himself. For JT. That was why he had cried on the porch last night when he told her he had brought a stranger inside. People never understood that about him, not even his mom – that the crying wasn’t a sign that he could handle less, but that he was handling more. All his life he’d been like that, crying more often and more easily than other kids, and adults always had the same reaction, babying him or backing off, thinking he couldn’t handle the intensity of a confrontation, instead of that he was in fact the only one noticing and handling it all – other people’s feelings, their unspoken agendas, their fears, the needs of people not present, forecasting outcomes, the potential for misunderstanding and loss, all the ripples of consequence likely and long-shot – and pushing ahead anyway, choosing to stand in the center of that storm and decide. Sometimes he released the tension in a burst of hot blotchy red blushing he hated, or a gush of tears that made everyone think he was weak, but he had learned to accept it. It was a kind of preparation. Or a byproduct of it, like the tailings from one of those mining operations. Something big was happening inside him, bigger than in other people (he was considering more factors, accepting more downsides), and it made a bit of a mess. It was just what came out of Will right before he did something brave.

It wasn’t happening right now, though. Right now he just felt disappointed. JT was right there, his knees touching Will’s knees, but Will had given up his incessant chattering, not because his teeth were chattering, but because he finally understood. They woke him right up, all those lies he watched JT nod along to. It gave a different quality to the listening he’d appeared to be doing -- while Will helped him hobble into the house, while Will thawed him, while Will probed his lips with the water bottle straw. As close as he’d seemed, he’d just been sitting beside Will in a shared snow hole shivering in a separate sack of his own.

Tonight Will’s mother had been at another party, seducing a seducer she had seduced into hiring her so she could seduce everyone into looking the other way while she got her own way. When she got home, she had been the kind of wild she was whenever she slapped or screamed at him, a stateless state that always made him picture her crawling out of her father’s church fire, puppeted by a part of herself over which she had no control: arms full of sleeping bags and snow clothes, stepping out of a ball gown with a bloody bandage she didn’t try or need to explain, stumbling and falling and rising and running to lead them away from her safe house before disappearing back the way she had come, alone. When he smelled the smoke drifting over their snowhole an hour later, he was neither surprised nor afraid. The wild part of his mother didn’t think, but it didn’t die; it didn’t tell him the truth with words, but it always told him her truth; and however much he hated it what it had to say, he loved her.

Soon she would come back in her armored van to pretend to be sacrificing her dream for Will’s, when the truth was she was sacrificing Will’s dream for a dream of her own. Sacrifice. That was all Will had been imagining for himself all this time. Some real sacrifice. Maybe this was it. Maybe moving from hidey-hole to hidey-hole accepting that there was nothing he could do without sacrificing the dreams of someone else was his sacrifice.

JT had told him the kids in the youth resistance group she would drive him to meet were doing one of the most important jobs, which Will understood to be code for staying still in each of her hiding places as if you believe this lie was one of the most important jobs. And there was some truth to this. If Will ran away now -- now in the snow… tomorrow morning from the back of her van on the ride to the prison block holding area where she’d agreed to take JT to meet his teammates… tomorrow afternoon from a crate of supplies on the prison loading dock before being carried to another last cell to wait while she completed another last task -- Will would jeopardize whatever plans they’d been making, in favor of that small resistance of his own. They shouldn’t stumble at the finish line JT had said.

Reminding himself of all those words helped. It made sitting and waiting in each of his mom’s hiding places feel a little more heroic. But he couldn’t shake the feeling that he was made for something more. When JT’s moment to do what he what he’d been dreaming of came, Will would know because he’d hear all the separate prison cells emptying, all those friends of JT’s filing out, their brains buzzing with adrenaline and their muscles tight for whatever they’d trained for, and there Will would sit, spending all his courage on not banging on his cell door to beg for a chance to wish them luck.

That was another version of the question Will could still feel trapped in his cooperative mouth, still beating against the walls of his unreasonably warm chest, snugged up in this bag at the bottom of this hole they were pretending to share. Each time JT raised a gloved finger to his lips to shhh him, it shifted, but at core it was always the same.

Why is it okay to lie to me?

What good is being alive if I don’t know what’s true?

If everything around me is fake?

If even the things in my own brain have been faked for me?

What kind of truth burns at the top of a candle dipped in everyone else’s deception?

What am I wishing you luck for?

Isn’t our luck the same luck?

(Vaughn)

Vaughn woke this time not to a clink, but to the sound of the thermos cap unscrewing. He opened his eyes and Betty’s little face was peering down at his mug through plastic. Scanlon hadn’t come, but Vaughn couldn’t pretend to himself that he was disappointed. He was still alive, and here he got to see her face one more time.

When she lifted the lid, a puff of steam rose like a dove from a handkerchief. No sheet change today? He couldn’t remember her ever skipping it. She poured his cup and her little blue-gloved hands were shaking. Her hands were so small.

Vaughn wished he could tell her what he was going to do, but he knew he shouldn’t. He could whisper now, and he thought she’d bend close, but then the auditors would interview her, and she’d have to choose to lie or tell, and Vaughn couldn’t put her through that all for the parting pleasure of sharing a secret. Was that all it would be? Or did he want to make sure she knew his reasons had changed? That he was doing it for her now. Because he could say other things while she was down close to his lips, her head sheathed in plastic, that dark cap of boy hair and that sweet white shell of an ear. But what would he say? Vaughn wished he were a poet. That’s how far he had come. Maybe the surgery had changed him after all. Congratulations, Captain Scanlon. Chief Examiner Scanlon. The evidence is in just in time, Dick Doc.

Betty finished pouring, but she didn’t hand him the cup. Her tiny blue hand was shaking like crazy. “Sorry,” she said. “I had too much myself this morning. I shouldn’t drink so much coffee. It makes me shake.” She held the tray closer to his own hand, so he could take it himself.

Damn. Were those tears in his eyes? That was no good for Betty. That wasn’t what he wanted at all. But even that she fixed.

“New detergent,” she said. “It’s been making some patients’ eyes water. I’ll make sure to change your sheets later.”

Vaughn bent over in his crabbed way to take a sip. To taste it, sure, that was part of it, but also to hide his eyes, from the ceiling, and even from her. She didn’t need to see him crying. He gulped a little, and it burned his throat. Vaughn had never gotten married. He hadn’t even wanted to. Felt sorry for guys who had. And now he never would. In his head he pictured Betty’s slim white fingers and he thought he could feel it, what it would feel like to slip a ring on a hand that small. He was trying to think of something he could say out loud that would mean something to her but wouldn’t mean anything to the auditors. Something from one of her poems maybe, that he could say back to show he’d been paying attention. Because he couldn’t sip this coffee forever. Soon Scanlon would come, and he didn’t want to do it in front of her, who knew how they’d think about a connection like that, but he also didn’t want to miss his chance to do that for her before he disappeared.

He gulped the hot coffee down, and at the bottom was another dish and another note, even smaller than the last to make room for more words: “I’m going to do it myself,” it said. “He should be here soon. I just wanted you to know it was for you.”

(Gregor)

In his clean suit, Dr. Scanlon watched Clara’s chest rise and fall. The window behind her bed was a murky black, a flat ceiling of snow clouds looming, withholding their silent white fall for the moment, hiding the stars. It was three o’clock. He hadn’t dressed for sleep at home after opening his gift. Of course he hadn’t. He had come here, to test the residue on the statuette and glasses (the blood of all three of them: not just Dr. Parish, but also his wife and child), to sleep near Clara, and to wait for Liv Lockhart to arrive. He had given her a deadline of eight am, but it was possible, he thought, that she would deliver her extortion package early, on her way home from her tryst with her target, on her way to work exalting a demagogue. He wanted to be here. Not because receiving it a few hours earlier would matter so much to President Paxton, but because Dr. Scanlon looked forward to the end of the distraction of this assignment. He resented thinking about it. He had been frightened last night (he would not pretend to himself he had not been afraid), but now that the imminent danger of unwarranted brutality had receded, he felt the rise of another emotion. Dr. Scanlon felt anger. At President Paxton. At Liv Lockhart herself. They were not so different, those two.

He had once thought of Paxton as a kindred spirit. He had once admired the man. When he first saw him as a guest expert on Face the Nation, calmly outlining an effective quarantine procedure and urging the governor of North Dakota to declare his own state of emergency to enforce it if POTUS would not. His charm and conviction on C-span during the debate for the gubernatorial recall. His humility and gratitude during his post-election victory address. He was a man of science and a man of interpersonal insight and political cunning as well. Who better to understand the truth of the situation? – both that eugenics were necessary to eliminate the threat of lone-wolf terrorism in a biotech enabled world, and that eugenics alone would not be enough to safeguard against it. It was not just a matter of eliminating or modifying people who had dangerous, blatantly anti-social genetic defects. Because if life circumstances could cause phenotypic trait variations, then fate and the faithless could undermine all their progress by performing a kind of lawless, back-alley epigenetic therapy every day. The country needed someone with the scientific insight and political savoir faire to protect against that as well.

But once he secured his position, well… Perhaps Paxton cared about real research and science at one point, but very quickly he had seen that real science had no place in a sound bite. It was no good for propaganda. It didn’t give good TV. On the contrary, the best science for ensuring his continued rise was pseudo-science. If he could make people believe banning stoves and refrigerators was necessary, he could rescue and pacify them daily with nothing more than a steady flow of hot hors d’oeuvres and cold beverages. He cribbed heavily (openly, shrewdly) from Magnus Lockhart’s founding manifestos for his Church of the Long Tomorrow. Before the first pandemic even struck, Liv Lockhart’s father had been taking daily pot-shots at the conventional wisdom with hand-grenades of gloomy counter-evidence through his blog. Sure, you needed knowledge and good tech to produce chemical weapons, he told his eager readers, but a religious cult in Japan had a “Health and Welfare Minister” with a graduate degree in chemistry and molecular biology, and they cooked up some sarin gas and released it into a Tokyo subway. As for bioweapons, although people will try to tell you the steps necessary for turning microbes into deadly weapons of mass destruction are too hard – drying, coating, aerosolizing, it all required special equipment operated by trained microbiologists – but special equipment, he assured his disciples, was not so hard for trained microbiologists to get. Iraqi scientists had bought starter germs from an American medical supplier. From a vendor in Italy, they bought aerosol generators small enough to fit in the flatbed of a Chevy or the cabin of a Bonanza that could release 800 gallons an hour. You could buy the right pipes and filters at a hardware store. A milling machine for grinding dried germs to the right size for human infection at an agricultural supply shop. And if you were one of the thousands of people in the country with both the know-how and access to a good lab, getting the ball rolling on a pandemic disaster would be even easier. An army vet had bought three vials of plague bacteria for $300 using the license number of the scientific company where he worked.

Magnus Lockhart had been correct. Not mere possibility, or even probability, but eventuality. One that when it came to pass, would be with them evermore.

Scanlon didn’t mind so much at first. These things were all true. Paxton’s scaremongering was all in service of the greater good. The American government had not proven themselves capable of handling a bioweapons attack. Not enough antibiotics. Ineffective and inconsistently executed quarantine procedures. Not enough capacity in the hospitals. No plan for storing the still-contaminated dead. With something like anthrax the unresolved dead-storing question would be disastrous. The spores were so persistent you could only get rid of them by burning the bodies or soaking them in bleach. Any pandemic outside of Paxton’s well-guarded borders was sure to end in more of the same widespread panic. Looting. Riots. People knifing each other in the aisles of a supermarket over a box of disposable filter masks or a bag of rice.

But increasingly, (hauntingly, ruinously, Dr. Scanlon felt), it seemed that all Paxton cared about using science and law for was maintaining his brutish hold. And his notions about how to do it were either grotesquely solipsistic and self-indulgent (I like tequila and sex toys, therefore…) or else bafflingly short-sighted. If homogeneity and compliance were the evolutionary virtues in most request, best not to strip people of their inhibitions. Best not to back them into corners, or ply them with alcohol. Desperate and drunk, everyone was a rebel. Intimidation and entertainment weren’t the way to forestall rebellion. Only bland, benevolent dictatorship could do that. Firm and dull in both punishment and reward.

And Liv Lockhart? Dr. Scanlon got a certain enjoyment from observing her as a scientist. She was such a perfect example of the complexity of the problem they had to solve – of why doctors as talented and devoted and scarce as he were so sorely needed. But because of this she was also infuriating. She was a genetic prosocial lawfully walking free among them, but what was she doing with that freedom? Recklessly nurturing a change within herself from the seed of her love for her son. And for no good reason! She would not lose her son if he were modified. She would get the son she should want. He would be himself but better: the offspring that human survival depended upon her to prefer. Yet here she was, not only trying to sneak another dangerously weak link past a perfectly good augmented-evolutionary process, but also in so doing, slowly but surely transforming herself from a valuable, obedient workaday nurse into a bold, disruptive, original, inventive creature herself – a poster child of rebel ingenuity and selfishness if only the rest of the country cared to see it.

Dr. Scanlon himself was careful to guard against that kind of evolution within his own nature. He monitored his feelings, kept them carefully controlled. Here was Clara, sick with a disease developed by a heedless hotshot with a mail-order CRISPR kit. But did Dr. Scanlon allow his love for her to lead him to behave rashly? Had he lost sight of the needs of others? Had he taken liberties with the law? No. He had applied through approved channels to conduct a novel side experiment, had taken pains to include trials that would benefit others. There had been some losses, of course there had. Monkeys mostly, and a few patients who were already sick and frankly should be grateful for the opportunity to make a sacrifice for once in their rebellious lives in reparation for the harm their kind had done. And a few moral reprobates from the prison rolls, who were in no danger of distorting their genomes with love certainly, but were making no contribution either… were of no use to anyone.

Dr. Scanlon heard the clink of handcuffs against bedrails in the next room. A swing-shift nurse was doing the rounds now. Even staffing was fraught with peril. Nurses so often began to love their patients. And if you could isolate one catalyst for all rebellion, that would be it: love. The good man who breaks the law to protect his loved ones. The child who rebels against a parent who doesn’t show them enough.

He checked his pager again: nothing.

Then he heard a knock at Clara’s door.

Betty Church. With her tattoos and her piercings. Dr. Scanlon had gene-tested her twice before accepting her for work on the 10^th floor, she was such a stereotype of the rebellious girl. But she had tested negative, and her personality and family history seemed an asset. Dispassionate. An orphan. No attachments. No fear of loss to twist her into something new.

“Yes, Betty?” he said.

“It’s Vaughn, sir. I think there’s something wrong with him.”

And that’s when Dr. Scanlon’s evening began to take another turn. Had he known? Some little premonition? A cue from Betty’s body language or tone? Because when he followed this tiny woman into the experimental testing ward and she led him to the corner where Vaughn lay cuffed to the steel rails in his bed, Dr. Scanlon could hear the pump of blood in his own ears inside the hood of his clean suit. He knew something was wrong, a different something than she was trying to lure him to see, and when he pivoted to question her more closely, he saw that her gloved hand was curled to secrete an object, and as he reached for her wrist – even before he grabbed it – Vaughn bucked in his bed. So. Not zero attachments after all. One. A new one. That’s how powerful it was. Love was so compelling, so quickly and fundamentally altering, it could be kindled in a ward monitored by microphones and cameras through everyday kindnesses alone.

She couldn’t fight him, she was too small, although she certainly tried. When he took the syringe from her gloved fist, she reached for it with her other hand, and when she saw that her arms were too short, she tried to bite him, right through the thick white plastic. He turned the needle on her and slipped it easily through the clean suit into her slender, tattooed neck, while Vaughn used a few calories of his last hours of energy to thrash uselessly in his bed.

In the pocket of his cleansuit Dr. Scanlon’s pager began buzzing: visitor on 1.

Eager as he was to receive what Liv Lockhart had to deliver, he changed slowly and carefully. He filled out a Cause of Death form for Betty (suicide by lethal injection; she had contracted one of the sample viruses – sloppy clean suit procedure, very sad) and called for the mortuary assistants to take her to the incinerator. Then he went downstairs.

But it was not Liv Lockhart. It was a pair of police officers who greeted him with handcuffs outstretched.

“We need you to come with us,” one of them told Dr. Scanlon.

“What is this all about?”

“New orders from Paxton,” the other one said.

(Damian)

The dancing girls had been gone when President Paxton returned to bed, which was the way he liked it. They were always cavity-searched before they were let in, but a lot of things made good weapons if you broke them, so guards would have to stand watch in his bedroom while he was gone, or take them away and bring them back, and the truth was he wasn’t much for the backtracking you had to do to pick up where you left off anyway, even without the dick-softener of security logistics.

Still, he hadn’t been able to sleep.

Lying awake in the dark, Paxton was thinking about his koi again.

It wasn’t worry about his own safety. It could have been a shot across the bow, the fill-valve failure, (look how easy, two dozen fish next to your bedroom from inside the walls of your guarded compound while you sleep). But they had plotted to take out Churchill with a flask bomb… bite-trigger chocolate… an exploding mess kit of bangers and mash…. They tried to take out Castro with a poisoned milkshake… a tuberculosis-laced scuba suit… an exploding cigar… It hadn’t worked on them, for sure it wasn’t going to work on him.

It was something different.

It was loss.

He was often awake by five, but he was seldom awake at three.

The footman outside his door tonight was his least favorite. The one last night was nervous around him (they all were), but he was also amused, which was more fun. This guy was just scared. He hadn’t even stuttered his first word (could have been w-w-what…? Or w-w-why…? Or w-w-where…?) before Paxton told him to stay behind. He wanted a drink, and it was nice sometimes to shake things up by getting it alone. But the bar in this house was… where? (w-w-where?) It was happening now even sometimes with the lights on. He needed to get more sleep. Oh yes, in his office with the big partner desk, the kind with the knee space a secretary could kneel under back in the day. The tequila would help. Paxton liked it neat. Why did everyone fuck up a good tequila with candy and fruit?

He’d seen Liv Lockhart drink it neat.

He sat down alone at the big double-sided desk and slid open a drawer. There was his pint of añejo, and there too was the pair of dentures and the glasses case with the bullet hole, but where was the skull of the inexhaustible mother giraffe? Not in Residence A after all. Damn. Never mind. That was not the kind of thing he got the big bucks for tracking. Motives. Weaknesses. Needs. Those he kept mapped and tallied. That’s all his rise to power had been. A shell game with civilization-scale needs.

He knew people were still scratching their heads over how he had done it, but it hadn’t been hard. It had been easy. The Pentagon had practically begged him to do it, not just by delegating the disarmament of the nukes in North Dakota to lock down the US arsenal in a time of disarray (talk about putting the fox in charge of the henhouse!), but also with their disastrous incompetence. The command and control of these weapons had been criminally sloppy and error-prone even when they weren’t bumbling through a state of emergency: instructions on how to issue a launch order spilling out of overstuffed safes; plutonium cores stored in cages at an old ice house; nuclear warheads sealed with screwdrivers inside. In the first twenty years of the program, they’d logged twelve hundred accidents. It was embarrassing: Keystone Cops with goofs that could get you megadeaths instead of laughs. They should be thanking their lucky stars he took over.

He knew the naysayers liked to paint a bad picture, but he was the good guy here. He could have made his point with a mushroom cloud, but he didn’t want to, not even on a day with a good stiff wind to blow the fallout toward Canada -- gamma rays floating through the walls of an igloo and killing the poor fuckers inside. Soft metals settling in the soil under crops and making their way into the bones of children. A year after Truman tested the first H-bomb over the Pacific, they found strontium-90 in milk in New York.

Paxton had given some thought to which city he would bomb if it ever came to that, and here’s one of the many places he parted ways with a guy like Henry Stimson. You couldn’t avoid cities like Kyoto on the basis that they’d played too big a role in art and culture. Any city good enough to send a message had. But then, this was a Secretary of War who had pushed for sharing specs on atomic weapons with the Soviets before the black eyes from appeasement with Hitler had even healed. “The only way you can make a man trustworthy,” Stimson demurred, “is to trust him,” – a steaming load of horseshit Paxton was happy to say Truman had been able to smell.

That was one of the pluses of the way Paxton had set things up here. You didn’t have to ask Caesar why divvying up power in government was a bad idea. Just look at all the backstabbing and drama in Washington the year the Russkies blew up their first nuke. Army and navy slinging mud at each other, war plans being leaked to newspapers, the Secretary of Defense leaping to his death from a hospital window. And Congressional hearings, for lord’s sake. Rear Admiral Ofstie showboating about “random mass slaughter of men, women and children”, warning “we must ensure that our military techniques do not strip us of self-respect,” (Paxton liked a god with a sense of humor; it couldn’t be an accident the guy’s name was an anagram for softie). No thanks. Better for everyone if just one guy had the wheel.

And kept the map to himself. No arguments. No betrayals. Or at least none that could bring him to his knees. The henchmen who knew he only had one nuke weren’t the same henchmen who knew he was hatching eggs in a separate basket.

The stutterer appeared in the doorway. “Another c-c-call from the p-p-precinct for you.”

The camera-man in his pool room was shaking like a leaf too. Paxton called over one of the guards skulking behind a palm tree to replace him. There. Ready. He shifted in the squeaky wicker seat.

Scanlon looked out from the monitor, eyes wide with fear and bloodshot with bedside devotion. He was wearing a white lab coat over his white tuxedo shirt and his face was white too. He looked very surprised to see Paxton’s face on the screen.

“How did you like the gift?”

“I appreciated it. I won’t disappoint you.”

“And how about your other assignment?”

He blinked.

“Liv Lockhart coming through for you?”

His wide eyes froze. Surprised again. (They were always surprised, like children. When would they get it? He knew everything.) He’d be trying to guess whether it was a plus or a minus that he knew he had already been to see her. “Yes actually, she’s –“

“Selling you out.”

“What?”

“Selling you out. I’ve been calling people in to ask who they think is responsible for this little school photo shenanigan, and she says it’s you.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“Of course it is. You need me even more than I’ve been pretending to need you.” He poured himself a second tequila to let that sink in. “How is your crack at a new vaccine coming, by the way?”

At ‘…I’ve been pretending…’ and ‘…your crack…’ his face went another couple shades whiter. “Good,” he said softly.

“And how is Clara?” Paxton said.

(Enrique)

That night after work, Enrique couldn’t sleep. It wasn’t the grief, or even Lydia’s taunting. She had exhausted herself berating him while he stood weeping in an endless shower. Her nastiness was its own kind of grief, he had long suspected, but it was the kind of thing it was no help to know – grief for the love that had somehow eluded them, for the illusion of safety, then finally for freedom, and throughout it all for the steady dwindling of her own character. He was surprised she had any left for a loss like this. Now she slept alone in their bed making a snoring sound that was just as relentless and grating (even lying in his easy chair beside Natalia’s empty crib he could hear it), but it was not her snoring that kept him awake either.

It was his memory.

Not memories of his little girl. (There would be time for those, he knew; they would follow him everywhere now until the end of his days, just barely lagging, bobbing in and out of view, like tethered balloons.)

It was memories from his books.

Methods and effects. Labored breathing. Twitching. Brief looks of understanding and surprise.

Arsenic was sweet, but slow.

Cyanide was faster, but bitter.

And where would Enrique find things like that?

Rhubarb leaves. Full of an acid that was quick and deadly if you slipped them into the stewing liquid. The first signs included bleeding from the nose and eyes, he remembered…. weakness, burning of mouth and throat… not that different from the things Natalia had suffered from the virus before they eased her into a coma.

And antifreeze. Right under the hood of the Chevy he had to jump start most mornings, a sweet syrup he could slip into a drink. Vomiting. Seizures. Kidney failure they could arrest with a dialysis machine if they were quick enough, but in the books Enrique read, they never were.

Lydia’s snores continued, each one drawing him back up briefly out of the hard slumber his train of thought was easing him toward. Vomiting… Seizures… Syrup… Leaves…

Enrique slept.

Contents