Just across the lake, in upstate New York, Marley was scheduled to interview an aggrieved Constitutionalist town supervisor for the streaming show. Lyric’s parents, whom Marley had met at the funeral, had more than once urged Marley to come visit them, but even knowing they’d be doing an interview less than 20 miles away, they had hesitated about calling. If Marley hadn’t dragged Lyric along, first to the Scotty Ross interview, then to shelter with the Louvre, Lyric would still be alive. That was a fact.

If Lyric hadn’t distracted the soldiers, though, then all of the Louvre people, along with Marley and Gene and Audrey, would have been captured or worse. There wouldn’t have been a reunification plan to promote, nor anyone who could help it reach the Cascadian government and the American people. Cascadia might have been overrun by the Americans, or the war might still be sowing ruin these years later. Those, too, were facts. As hard as it was to accept Lyric’s death, it was even harder to accept what might have happened if she hadn’t let herself be seen. The question of what should have happened was a knot in Marley’s chest they couldn’t untie.

Marley made the bed, even though Lyric’s parents, Wendy and Pete, had a bot that would have done it. They opened the door as quietly as they could, but Wendy and Pete’s doors had antiquated iron latches rather than usual doorknobs, and Marley couldn’t open them without clanking. They crept down the pale green, vine-patterned rug that ran the length of the hallway, past the room where Callum, Lyric’s much-younger brother who was home from college for the winter break, slept.

What Lyric had told her parents about the two of them, Marley could only guess. There had never been time for them to formally sort out where they stood with each other, but something between them had sprung up fully formed, and clearly Lyric had shared something about Marley in the short time they’d known each other.

Pete and Wendy had sent Marley a letter not long after Lyric’s death. It had been days before Marley could bear to bring it up on their lenses, and at the time, it seemed unreal. Lyric’s parents said they had gotten the sense that Lyric and Marley had a special bond. They talked about Marley’s loss as if it resided in the same district of grief as their own, something that made Marley feel anxious and embarrassed. It seemed greedy to claim that kind of grief when others were more rightly entitled.

After the funeral, Marley wrote back, and then Pete, the busybody of the couple, had kept up the correspondence. In the end, Marley felt they had to visit.

Wendy could stand next to Marley and look out the window at the falling snow, saying nothing, as she had when Marley arrived late the previous afternoon. Pete, who was in his late sixties, was constantly in motion whenever he wasn’t asleep, as he and Wendy were right now. Marley was grateful for to not have to face their kindness for a little while.

The main room of Lyric’s childhood house combined kitchen, dining room, and living room in one. It had a high, sloped ceiling supported by rough-hewn beams; skylights; and walls made of old barn board. A bank of tall windows looked out onto a meadow, where naked pear trees caught snowflakes in their tangled branches.

The autokitchen, contained mostly in a pantry off the main room, was an old model with separate baking and dishwashing units of bleary glass chambers and white baked enamel. An add-on from at least a decade ago, with windows that were still clear, added two more chambers and jutted into the open central room. Marley accessed it through their lenses, set quiet mode on, and requested green tea and a bowl of leftover dhal from last night’s dinner. Inside one of the chambers, pale shapes stirred. Invisibly, a microwave hummed.

A clank from the hallway made Marley turn in time to see Callum, wrapped in a thick, brick-red bathrobe, step into view. He was slim, darked-haired, and blind, his blue eyes fixed on a point far beyond the walls of the house.

“Marley,” he said, by way of greeting. His voice was beautiful, but dark, like a tea-colored creek steeping the shadows out of long-fallen leaves. Though he didn’t speak much, Marley was fairly sure he blamed them for Lyric’s death.

“I have an interview in a little while,” Marley said.

“The town supervisor,” Callum said. “What do you think she’ll say?”

“I don’t know. I guess I try not to guess, so I can listen better.”

“Mmm,” Callum said. There was an interactive braillescreen on the wall near the bathroom that was connected to all of the house’s devices, and Callum went to this now and pressed some command, tiny bumps on the rectangular, beige buttons raising and flattening under his fingertips. He must not have his earpiece in yet.

When he finished, he turned to Marley and walked up until he was less than an arm’s length away. “It’s weird having you here and not my sister,” he said.

“I’m sorry,” Marley said.

“That doesn’t help,” he said. Marley began to turn away, but he reached out with both hands and touched their arms, finding his way to their shoulders, and turned them back toward him. Then he reached around Marley and drew them to him with a hug. Marley tensed at first, almost expecting him hurt them, but then they made themselves relaxed, and they hugged him back, tentatively.

“I hate the word hero,” he said. “It’s a stupid word.”

“But it fits her,” Marley said.

“It fits her,” he said. “She’d probably be pretty pleased with how it came out.”

“Everybody’s confused,” Marley said. “Nobody even knows if the reunification is going to work.”

“Yeah,” Callum said. He finally let go. “I don’t know if you should visit here. It’s hard on my parents.”

“They ...” Marley said, but they didn’t know how to finish.

“They like you,” he said. “And you’re like a link to her. She couldn’t keep in touch with us the regular ways, after she left, and you’re a window into that. You know? So they hardly know her from then, just some paper letters Gia had for them. But it’s a lot on them. It’s a lot on me. You don’t know what she was like here.”

“I wish I did,” said Marley.

“But you don’t,” he said. He walked into the pantry, sighing, and felt in the serving area until he had a good grip on the top tray. He carried it out, with a little bowl of green tea on it for Marley, a bowl of dhal with a spoon, and a mug of coffee swirled with cream. He set the tray down near Marley on the butcher block island that bounded most of the kitchen and took the coffee for himself.

“I don’t know, you visiting is bad and it’s good,” he said. “Maybe you should. Maybe they need it. Lyric probably would want you to. Anyway, I’m not setting rules. I’m just saying.”

Marley nodded, then winced internally, realizing he couldn’t see the nod. “OK,” they said. They slid the tray over to the other side of the island, where they’d be able to sit in one of the tall, worn, wooden seats.

“Do you feel like ...” they began, but again they didn’t know how to finish.

“Like it was your fault?” he said. “Yes. And hers. And it was necessary. I wish you were some kind of an asshole, though. It would feel good to really blame someone. You know, without reservation.”

“I’ll try to be worse,” Marley said.

Callum nodded. “I’d appreciate that.”

The shuttle to the ferry dock would have diverted to the house, but Marley didn’t mind walking the half a kilometer or so to the main road to wait for it. There was no sidewalk or bike path on way, but the road was deserted, and Marley trudged down it while snowflakes settled in their short hair and melted against their face.

Their feet were cold, and they wished they’d thought to get some better snow boots before coming to Vermont in the dead of winter. Apart from that, their mind was calm, even with the interview coming up, even having come so recently from facing Lyric’s family. From the life they’d more or less planned, the life where they were a writer living in a beautiful-if-backwards town, they never would have pictured themself walking down a silent road in the snow far in the East of the United States, headed for an interview that would be seen by hundreds of thousands of people—one where once it was out, you could never take your mistakes back. But then, few things are like writing. There aren’t many aspects of life where you can make mistakes, then go back and fix them without penalty. Even with writing, there’s a point at which you have to stand behind your choices. Marley supposed that was what they were doing.

They reached the main road and crossed it to wait. They stood at the head of a tiny lane lined with pastel-colored houses that led to an open whiteness Marley assumed was part of the frozen-over lake. They waited there for a few minutes as the snow sifted down and settled into the folds in their coat. They were early still, and the falling snow made the world a quiet chamber where Marley’s heart settled as it hadn’t for a long time. The knot was still there in their chest. It might always be there. Even so, they could feel that there was a way to move forward in the world, despite the tugging of everything lost, despite the terrifying uncertainty of everything that might yet go well.

The shuttle appeared now, fading in from a ghostly image in the snow to a solid thing that coasted to a stop just a few yards away. The door opened, and Marley stepped up.

“Yes,” Audrey admitted. “There’s some danger. Some people consider me a traitor, here and in the rest of America. I mean ... technically, I am a traitor.”

Adam shook his head, opened his mouth to say something, seemed confounded, and looked down to think. The conversation had been warm and welcome, as it was every time Audrey spoke with him, but they were still awkward with each other. Adam was so grateful for his older sister to be back in his life that, at the same time that filled a deep-seated need for her, Audrey felt embarrassed.

Finally, Adam spoke. “It’s not that I think you can’t take care of yourself—but just ... Are you ... Has anybody ...”

“I have friends here,” Audrey said, “to my surprise. As many people as seem to hate the sight of me, there are just as many who see me like some kind of folk hero. I don’t know what to tell them, but they look out for me.”

“Oh, that’s definitely good,” Adam said. “I mean, it must feel strange—? But I was worried, when you got transferred—”

“It seems like it’s the same everywhere,” Audrey said. “Crazier since the new elections, though.”

“Here too!” Adam said. “I’m glad we’re living in the same country, but I wish they did things the same way over there that we do here.”

“I think it’s coming. With the Cascadian vote coming in so strong for the Progressives and all the Cascadian representatives in Washington now ...”

“It’s not Cascadia anymore.”

“Right, all of the representatives from the West Coast states ...”

Adam cocked his head, brightened, and called out “Audrey? Is that you, honey?”

It took Audrey a minute to realize he must be calling to his daughter Audrey. Adam half-rose, then stopped himself and one-quarter sat back down.

“No, go see her,” Audrey said. “I can wait.”

“Your time limit, though—” Adam said.

“It’s fine,” she said. It would be breathing room for them both. They’d been talking through virtual calls for four years now, and it was still awkward. Maybe being apart for forty-eight years had been too much to overcome, but there was still love between them, and as uncomfortable as Audrey always felt during the calls, she looked forward to them like nothing else in her week.

Adam got up and raised a finger. “I’ll be back in just one minute,” he said. “We haven’t seen her since Christmas—”

“I know.”

The reunification, now that it had actually happened, rushed in to occupy Audrey’s mind while Adam was away. It had been a rough ride. There were jubilant parades and angry protests that in a few cases turned violent. Someone had rigged an old self-driving car up with explosives and overridden its obsolete safety systems, then tried to send it racing into a park where there was a combined celebration and racial justice rally. Police AIs had identified the threat and taken over the car before it got to its destination.

U.S. Progressives were by and large thrilled at being reunited with the Pacific states, and they’d begun agitating as soon as the initial deal was worked out for universal basic income, universal health care, and some other key Cascadian programs to be adopted across the new, re-enlarged U.S. Under the agreement, Cascadia was able to keep most of its existing policies, but it would take new laws in Washington to expand any of those programs to the rest of the U.S. Those were being debated now, but the Constitutionalist party was finding itself out of favor, between an influx of mostly Progressive Pacific state voters, long-term backlash from the multiple Tyler Godbout scandals, especially the Washington wildfires and the Citizen Dividend fraud, and the tide of public opinion that condemned President Jimenez’s 2068 Cascadian invasion.

With all of this in play, it seemed likely the Progressive agenda would push through, bringing universal basic income, greater taxation of corporations and wealthy individuals, and other applecart-upsetting changes. There was even talk of extending the advertising ban to cover all of the new U.S., but no one seemed to expect that bill would pass—at least, not right away.

Like Audrey, Tyler Godbout himself was in prison. Audrey took some comfort in that.

In the face of massive setbacks, the Constitutionalist party had already begun to change, and new centrist voices were doing their best to shed some of most contentious parts of their platform.

Adam reappeared, smiling. “She says hi, and she loves you,” he said.

“Tell her I love her, too,” Audrey said awkwardly. She wasn’t used to saying things like this. Having a niece, a nonbinary niefling, and a nephew who all called her Aunt Audrey and seemed to think she was some kind of war hero felt utterly unreal to her, perhaps because she had yet to see them in person. Even so, she liked having family.

“Oh,” Adam said. “I almost forgot: I called Elena about us picking up your cat.”

“Thank you. Is she feeling any better?” Audrey said.

“She still sounded pretty weak,” Adam said, “but she said they’ve been telling her she’s responding well to the treatments, and they think there’s a good chance she’ll come out with a clean scan.”

Elena had been diagnosed with breast cancer a few months earlier. New treatments that had emerged in the last decade were promising, but they tended to really take it out of a person. Audrey wished she could visit to check in on her, but that wasn’t going to be possible for a while.

“But you have Matilda now?” Audrey said.

“Well, that’s the thing,” said Adam. “She didn’t have her. It turns out Noah never turned her over.”

“What do you mean? He kept her?”

“He kept her. I called him to ask. She’s doing just fine. He says she gets grumpy sometimes, and he thinks she’s looking for you.”

“Is he ...” she began, but she didn’t know how to finish the question. All this time, she’d assumed Elena had been taking care of the cat, assumed Noah had written Audrey off entirely.

“And he says to take care, and he’ll see you when you’re back out here.”

“How does he know I’ll be back out there?” she said. “Oh, I guess he knows I’ll want to see you.”

“You should come live here for a while,” Adam said. “Tansy says the same.” Adam’s wife, Tansy, was about the sweetest and most accommodating person Audrey had ever talked to, but Audrey was fairly certain that trying to live with Adam and his family would kill her. As a private and non-demonstrative person, she pictured being hugged to death. It wouldn’t even take many hugs.

“Fifteen seconds!” called the AI guard.

“All right, I have to sign off,” Audrey said. “Take care of yourself and give those kids hugs for me. And Tansy.” Hugs another person gave on your behalf were free, Audrey figured.

“Next week, same time?” Adam said.

“I’ll be here,” Audrey said. “I mean, where else would I be?”

“Just seventeen more months,” Adam said. “That’s not long.”

He smiled, still awkward, but also still warm. The VR connection snapped off, and Audrey found herself back in the featureless little cinder block room with the one plastic chair. She went to the tiny sink in the corner, washed her hands, then took out her lenses and earpiece and put them away in the case. They’d be locked up again until her next allowed virtual visit the following week.

“Please deposit your lens case in the return slot,” said the AI guard from speakers all around her. She slid the case into the slot and waited for the door to open.

On her way back to her cell, Audrey found herself thinking about Bennet Culkin. It was hard not to think of him as more of a villain that she was, but apart from following his superiors’ orders and allowing Audrey to be thrown under the bus, what had he done that was so different from what she’d done?

His consequences were certainly different, though. Apparently, Gene Ajou had spoken with him at work soon after the war broke out, and Bennet had been spooked, from what Audrey could gather. He’d made a dash for the U.S. border but got picked up trying to sneak across and had been sentenced to eight years of community service and two years of restorative justice meetings. There were few prisons left in Cascadia, and almost all crimes were handled through work assignments in and discussions with the people who had been wronged. In this case, the people wronged were all of Cascadia, so they were represented by a board of twelve volunteers. These measures were often, as with Bennet’s case, accompanied by mental health counseling.

Somewhere behind her, a door slammed. Audrey emerged from the hallway into the cubicle farm of sleeping quarters and made her way to her own corner, where she sat tiredly on her bed. In a cell nearby, two women argued heatedly about a picture.

So while Bennet got to continue living in his apartment and worked a decent, if boring, job day after day, he’d also had to sit through two years of weekly earnest discussions about the harm he’d done, why he’d done it, what he owed to his fellow citizens, and similar topics. Audrey, personally, felt she might have gotten the better end of the deal. On the other hand, she suspected that the excellent Cascadian mental health system had helped Bennet navigate to a place where he could feel some comfort and resolution. At this point, Bennet probably had the last laugh, although if all had gone well, he would have become too compassionate to take it.

It was another example of how far the two countries had to go to truly unite. Maybe they never really would, whatever the treaty said. Maybe the two perspectives had split too much to ever be reconciled into one way of seeing the world.

Audrey’s cellmate, Pamela, a forty-something white woman with graying red hair, shuffled into the cell, smiled unconvincingly at Audrey, and took out one of the scratched-up, putty-colored plastic tablets the prison supplied for reading and learning activities. She called something up on the tablet, squinting as she read it. She looked up at Audrey guardedly, and Audrey nodded to her and turned away.

The political pendulum had swung far over, which was good, as far as it went, but whether it took decades or only years, the pendulum always seemed to swing back, and if all the two sides ever did was try to undo each other’s work, it was hard to be optimistic.

Now that she thought about it, there was at least one person she knew who was working to break that cycle. There might even be a new interview posted. She reached for her own tablet to see. After all, she was going to need things to occupy her attention for quite a while yet.

Political progress was slow. Politicians in both countries made speeches and promises and dire predictions, working slowly toward January 1st, 2072, the day of the reunification, if the plan didn’t fall apart. 2072 was an election year in the U.S., or whatever the country would be called at that point—there were arguments for everything from keeping the current name to calling it Cascadia to combining the names to trying something new. The reunification would be a shock, but the election afterward might be the larger shock, as the new-old nation had its first test of what it could be in its new form. The current administration, the Progressive president elected at the end of 2068, struggled to make changes, embattled with a Constitutionalist-dominated legislature. Real transformation would have to wait.

In front of Gene, the construction printer had the next wall ready. Once it was slotted into place and glued in, Gene was responsible for setting the interior finishing robot to work while the roof was assembled. They’d only just started printing the new houses that day, and already they had three in various stages of assembly. The gardens and many of the trees, on the other hand, had been a complete loss. Regrowing would take much longer than rebuilding.

“Dad? The wall?” Samantha said. Gene realized he’d been woolgathering: the wall was right behind him, ready to be dropped in as soon as he got out of the way. Will, who was working on the house across the courtyard with Kiara and Vi, looked meaningfully at Samantha and shook his head in mock dismay.

Lawrence—“Lan”—was out of Samantha’s life—and out of the Louvre, for that matter. It wasn’t only that he’d made a mistake that night at the restaurant: it was that he was so ungraceful about rebuilding trust afterward. Samantha had kept Gene up to date on the Louvre’s doings for several months after that night, and he let her, even though he didn’t want to know. In the end, though, she picked up on his discomfort and stopped. More recently, around Thanksgiving 2069, she’d decided to take a break from the group. She was going to go back to finish her degree and see what kind of work she could get as an AI wrangler. Jobs continued to get scarcer, and the newer AIs needed less and less guidance, so it wasn’t clear that she’d continue to have work into the future. On the other hand, who could guarantee anything about the future?

Gene still missed Edison. He would never stop missing Edison, and he was becoming increasingly convinced that he was one of those people who loved once, without reservation, and afterward was not meant to love again. It wasn’t a bitter thought. He had more love in his life than he knew what to do with, between Samantha and Mark, who was now in Italy trying to become a sculptor, and Kiara and Vi and Will, and all of Zora, and even occasionally fond messages from Marley, who was continuing to make a stir with their streaming interviews. There was something to be said for doing a thing right the first time and then not trying again. He’d had the right husband; he still had the right kids, the right family, the right home, the right work . If he wasn’t helping things get better in the world, it wasn’t for lack of trying. In the end, that was as close to a proper life as he could imagine.

They recorded the speech as soon as possible, late on the afternoon of the day they fled the Sakura Grill. Alice brought Audrey a conservative, off-white dress to wear and showed up with a human hairdresser, which Audrey found unnecessary and uncomfortable—but then, Alice had worked in streaming entertainment. Audrey should probably be grateful she didn’t have a massive American flag waving in the breeze behind her or a choir of earnest children. That said, Audrey wouldn’t be there for the editing. Maybe they’d add the flag and the children later.

She spoke from behind a podium on the stage of a high school that wasn’t yet open for the new school year.

“My name is Audrey Adams. I’ve served the United States as an intelligence analyst and sometimes a field agent for the past fourteen years ... although after this message, I assume I’ll be fired.

“I was the field coordinator for a covert mission we conducted on Cascadian soil. During this mission, we compromised Cascadia’s Citizen Dividend system and diverted money from the Cascadian government to a number of unwitting Cascadians. We wanted to create the appearance of massive fraud within the Citizen Dividend system, but our audience was not Cascadia: it was you, my fellow American citizens. Some of my superiors believed that unrest in the American public over the lack of jobs and the treatment of unemployed Americans could be quieted, or that you could be distracted from it, if we could make you believe that the Cascadian system was corrupt.

“My official, non-intelligence work for many years has been trying to help unemployed Americans find new work, but the reality we must face is that the world has changed. There aren’t jobs for everyone anymore. In America, that’s a catastrophe, because in America, you’re told that without a job, you’re worthless. In America, you’re told that not having a job is your own fault for not trying hard enough—for not being enough. In America, you’re told everyone has the same opportunity and is responsible for their own success.

“But how can we all have the same opportunity if some of us start life with little or nothing to our names and can only make money through paying work, which is scarcer every year, while others start life with vast reserves of wealth, more than they will ever need for their comfort and well-being? When one American’s honest job disappears because a robot can do it, whoever had the money to buy that robot gets all of the financial benefit.

“Cascadia does not have a perfect system. However, the Cascadian Citizen Dividend is a different solution to the same problem, a solution that takes much of the wealth that is generated by automation in our society and distributes it. While that solution might or might not be right for America, it should be up to regular Americans to decide. That’s not what’s happening. Instead, some of the wealthiest and most powerful in America are fighting a war at home, a war of information, trying to make you think that the Cascadian system is hopeless and corrupt so that you will continue to put up with the poverty and degradation these wealthy power brokers are forcing on you and other Americans.

“I am ashamed of my part in trying to force this lie on you. I did it with the best of intentions. I thought I was trying to prevent a war. What I didn’t realize was that the same wealthy string-pullers who came up with this scheme were planning a war with Cascadia that they would start regardless of how my operation went. I discovered only recently that they’ve been preparing for this war and sending drones into Cascadian territory for months, and possibly for years.

“Good intentions are no excuse for harming the people I should have been helping to protect. I’m sorry for being part of this hoax, and I’m sorry I didn’t see through these lies sooner.

“Of the many people who have forced first poverty and now war on you, I would like to introduce you to one in particular: Tyler Godbout. As a citizen of the Mountain Republic, he betrayed what was then his country in exchange for favors from our own government. More recently, he was in charge of the fraud I spoke of, in which we sabotaged the Cascadian Citizen Dividend system in an attempt to keep American citizens pacified. But his motives weren’t just to manipulate American opinion: it turns out he was also engineering personal gain. He attempted to use our sabotage in Cascadia to frame Cascadian citizens who owned assets he wanted to acquire. If he’d been successful, he would have been able to buy many of those assets at far below their real worth, while their owners would have been treated as criminals.

“Tyler Godbout isn’t the only wealthy and powerful person in our government who needs to be brought to account. I urge you to seek out him and the others and make them answer for what they’ve done. As for me, I will be negotiating my return to the United States, where I will turn myself in to await justice. I’m concerned that justice may not be what’s waiting for me, because I realize now that many of the most powerful in our government don’t much care for life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness. Instead, they’re obsessed with amassing more and more and always more wealth and influence.

“Attached to this broadcast, you will find several hundred documents with details of some of the criminal behavior I’ve just described. I hope you will make good use of them and take America forward into an era of greater justice, greater compassion, and greater integrity.

“Thank you for listening, and may we all come out of this present crisis safely and with renewed resolve.”

Tracey and Pez, along with some other Louvre specialists, Audrey was told, hacked an American severe weather warning network and used it to push Audrey’s speech as an urgent bulletin to every American with a pair of lenses. They also hijacked thirteen popular streaming channels and broadcast the speech on each of those on a loop. Within half an hour, most American adults had seen the speech, or at least heard a summary of it.

Audrey had reversed her priorities, she realized. She’d counted for years on her ability to be ignored, and now here she was, voluntarily being, for the moment, the most noticeable human being in both America and Cascadia. She had a hard time imagining anything more unpleasant.

The Louvre arranged for a self-driving car to bring Audrey to a train station, where she boarded train to the American border. There, the FBI would take her into custody. She waited until she had locked herself into her tiny, private compartment on the train before contacting Noah. He’d sent her two messages since her speech, both short. One thanked her for having the courage to stand up and speak. In the other, he asked if she was sure going back to America was the best option.

From what Audrey could see, it was the only good option. Some American social media personalities were claiming she’d been captured by Cascadians and forced to “confess” at gunpoint, or that she’d been brainwashed, or that she was a fraud who wasn’t even from America. Going back was the best way to respond to all of that.

The Cascadian government, which by rights should have tried to find and arrest her as soon as she released the speech, seemed lackadaisical about pursuing her, though she received a few notifications from the CBI that made it clear they expected her to follow through with her plan to go back. Probably the Cascadians realized she was more valuable back in America than serving time in a Cascadian restorative justice program.

Even if she didn’t seriously consider other alternatives, returning to the U.S. petrified her. American prisons had never been great, but in recent years, they had become massively overcrowded, and it seemed as though every month, a scandal surfaced about a different private prison company’s negligence or abuse of prisoners.

As bad as prison would be, a worse possibility was that someone upset by her speech would step out of a crowd and shoot her down with a one hundred percent legal, computer-targeted handgun.

Alternatively, she might be hailed as a brave patriot, exonerated, and sent into happy retirement with a generous pension ... or maybe the heavens would open up and transport her to Heaven in a beam of golden light. The two possibilities seemed equally likely.

As the train accelerated to traveling speed, she took a deep breath and typed out a command to voice call Noah. The icon went dim and bright, dim and bright, waiting for him to pick up. She was just reaching forward to disconnect when he picked up.

“Audrey,” he said.

“Hi. I’m on a train back to America.”

“I hope you enjoyed your visit,” he said.

“Is that supposed to be funny?” she said. “I may have lost my ability to tell.”

“Do you think you’ll be back?”

“I don’t know. They might hang me in the town square. If so, no.”

“What if they don’t hang you in the town square?”

“Are you angling for another date?”

“I don’t know if we should have any more dates,” Noah said. “Every time we do, there’s a war.”

“The first one was nice, though.”

“True. Audrey, I don’t want you to think I’m ... I’m not necessarily ... I don’t know if I’m anything more than a supportive acquaintance anymore.”

“That’s fine. I’m not expecting conjugal visits.”

“You’re an unusually plain-spoken person, Audrey.”

“So they tell me. I got the impression you liked that about me.”

“Well, I do. You know, Audrey ...”

She waited, but he didn’t finish the sentence.

“What?” she said.

“Nothing. I just ... Take care of yourself. Try not to get lined up against any walls. Don’t lose hope. There are a lot of people in your corner.”

“Even if they’re not on my side,” Audrey said.

“I don’t know,” Noah said. “I think at this point, they’re mostly on your side, too.”

Audrey gave him another few moments. When he didn’t have anything to add, she disconnected.

She leaned against the window and wished Matilda were there, maybe in a carrier on the seat beside her. She could have poked her fingers through the mesh to touch the cat’s fur. Elena had agreed to get Matilda from Noah and take care of her while Audrey was, as they had put it when talking together, “away.” That had surely been the right decision. Even so, Matilda had been the one constant in Audrey’s life for the last eleven years. Now, there was nothing familiar left.

She lay her forehead against the glass, watching the yellowing landscape flicker by, waiting for nothing, returning home.

“Perimeter breach,” it said. “There are two armed individuals outside the building. Update: there are now four armed individuals outside the building.”

The hackers were running to a set of displays Marley had seen earlier, ones that showed views outside. They now showed people in black uniforms moving toward the restaurant, each one emphasized with a red glow. Two of the soldiers were approaching the front of the building, and two were in back. There was little hope the soldiers would think the place was empty: both of the vans were parked in back. There was another shape back there too, among the live oaks, but Marley only caught a glimpse of streaming dark hair—Lyric. They sent an urgent voice message to her.

“Lyric, stay away from the building!” they said. “There are soldiers!”

“I see them. Is there some way for you to get out of here?” Lyric’s voice came back. Her words had that flattened inflection you get when you subvocalize.

“Not yet,” said Marley. “I’m sure they’re working on something. Just run! We’ll find you after.”

Marley was not actually sure the Louvre had anything they could pull out of their magic hat for this situation. There was a good chance they wouldn’t be getting out without being captured, or even that the Louvre’s backup plan involved something more dire than letting themselves be captured. They weren’t going to say anything like that if it might make Lyric hesitate, though.

“We need drones, someone!” Tobias-Henry shouted. “Does anyone have a line on drones nearby?”

“Delivery drones!” called a woman with dark hair in a Caesar cut. “Fourteen of them, at a hardware store about a kilometer from here! They’re running on Paris 140s.”

Marley couldn’t begin to guess what a Paris 140 was, but they heard sighs of relief all around them. Whatever that was, it was obviously helpful.

“I’m assigning them to Fulang,” the dark-haired woman shouted. “I told him to get them as close as possible to the soldiers’ faces—just keep knocking into them, don’t give them room to shoot.”

“Dongmei, you’re my favorite person right now,” said Tobias-Henry. “How long?”

The dark-haired woman, Dongmei, shook her head in frustration. “Three minutes?”

“Shit,” said Alice. She was watching the monitors. Marley looked. The soldiers were nearly at the doors.

“Hey!” said a distant voice. It took a moment for Marley to register that it was coming from the surveillance screens, from outside the building. In the video feed, the soldiers in back turned, and one’s lips moved as she subvocalized something. The soldiers in front stopped advancing, but they pointed their weapons at the front door, waiting.

It was another few seconds before Marley could see what the soldiers in back were seeing: it was Lyric, stepping out from the trees, her hands in the air. The two soldiers there leveled their weapons at her and moved closer. Their movements were slow and exaggerated, like water birds.

“Don’t move, please,” said the lead soldier, the one who had subvocalized before. “Cox, are you looking her up?”

“Records don’t link her to the Louvre,” said the other soldier, apparently Cox. “But listen to this: she’s a wanted insurgent from the Mountain Republic.”

“Out here?” said the lead soldier.

“I guess they’ve got to hide somewhere,” said Cox.

“OK, not my job to figure out why. Cuff her to the bicycle rack. There must be more inside.”

Lyric looked around her with an expression not of panic, but of livid anger. Inside the restaurant, everyone stared, silent.

“Where are those drones?” Alice snapped.

“They only go so fast,” said Dongmei. “Wait.”

Alice made a fierce noise.

Marley teetered, wanting to run out there and do something—but that wouldn’t help anyone, and it might mean someone would get shot. They had to hope the drones would arrive and create enough confusion for Lyric to get away.

Why was this happening? Marley had thought they’d be safe with the Louvre.

“How could they possibly know we were here?” Marley said.

Samantha, Gene’s daughter, shot a look across a table at the young man she’d been hip-to-hip with earlier. “Lawrence. He sent the call my dad was making through an insecure connection.”

“I fixed it!” Lawrence said. “It was barely open for thirty seconds!”

“I guess that was long enough,” said Tobias-Henry.

Cox, in back, was stepping forward, pulling a loop of cord off his belt, while the lead soldier kept her rifle trained on Lyric. Lyric turned her head to look at the building, then back to Cox. Suddenly, she dashed into the trees.

“Stop where you are!” said the lead soldier. “Miss! Please don’t run!”

One of the views was an overhead camera, and someone made it pull back to show more area as Lyric dashed into the trees. There was a sound like a crack, and for a second Marley thought a branch was falling. Lyric stumbled, then spilled forward, crashing into a heap at the base of a tree. She lay there crumpled, her head folded forward, her body disarranged, absolutely still. The two soldiers ran toward her.

The soldiers in front, at the sound of the rifle, ran out back, guns at the ready, advancing cautiously, sweeping from side to side. Marley was reminded, sickeningly, of how accurate those self-aiming guns were.

“We need to run now!” someone behind Marley said.

“No!” shouted Alice. “There won’t be enough time. Jesus, I hope—”

The lead soldier and Cox had reached Lyric, and the leader hauled Lyric into a sitting position against the tree and put her fingers on the side of Lyric’s throat. Cox said something, but it was too quiet for the mics to pick up. The lead soldier stood, turning away from Lyric, subvocalizing something, and Cox followed.

“No,” said Marley. “They ...” Words failed them, and they looked at Lyric’s still form, slumped against the tree, until they couldn’t look any more. They clamped their hands over their mouth to keep from howling and ran into the kitchen. They could hear someone following, but they made it to the back door first. They opened the lock, wrenched the door open, and threw themself out into the parking lot. The soldiers, now all in the open, stopped short in surprise, and then Cox swung his rifle up so that all Marley could see in his hands was a little black object with a round hole in the center. When it was pointed right at you, it didn’t even look like a gun anymore. It looked like some kind of navigational instrument, as though Cox was trying to sight a way forward through Marley.

Then an orange drone emblazoned with a green logo that said “Robinson’s Hardware” dropped down between Marley and the soldier. Within moments, thirteen more appeared, all from the same direction, surrounding the Americans.

“What the fuck?” said the lead soldier.

The drones, which were shaped like round-cornered, slanting boxes, each with three angled rotors sprouting from its top, lurched suddenly toward the soldiers. Marley heard Cox’s rifle go off, and a fraction of a second later a noise like a nail gun, but Marley never saw the bullet. In the next moment, the drones had engulfed the soldiers, butting at them until they were backed up together in a tangle. As the soldiers tried to dodge or duck out of the group, the drones moved with them as though tethered, keeping their rotors just clear of the soldiers’ heads. Within moments, the attempts to duck under the drones had left the soldiers trapped in an awkward, crouching position. One of the soldiers tried to grab one of the drones, but it tilted suddenly, its rotor slashing open the soldier’s hand.

Marley ran past this bizarre display into the woods, straight to where Lyric lay slumped against the tree. Vivid blood had streamed down the left side of her chest, staining her dress down to her thighs. Her eyes were open, but they were fixed and unfocused.

Marley gestured spasmodically for a voice command, then had to do it again, more slowly, for the gesture to be recognized. “How do I check for a pulse?” they cried. A phantom hand on their lenses demonstrated as a patient voice explained the process. Marley reached forward and put their fingers on Lyric’s throat, just where the phantom hand had been, but it was still as rock.

“Lyric?” Marley said. “Lyric, come on! We have to go now, come on!”

Someone grabbed Marley from behind, and Marley jabbed an elbow viciously into their chest. “Ow! Marley!” they shouted—Alice’s voice. “We have to go now.”

“Lyric—!” Marley shouted.

“Honey, I know,” Alice said, gasping for breath. “And we have to go. Lawrence?”

Marley felt someone’s arms wrap around them and pull them up, and this time they didn’t fight, their eyes fixed on Lyric’s face, as they were dragged out of the trees and into the parking lot. The soldiers were still struggling with the drones, but three of the drones had been damaged somehow and were lying on the ground. Marley saw without interest that the vans were both crammed with people, and that someone was helping Tracey lift one of the coolers in. Gene jumped down from the other van and picked up Marley’s feet, and Marley felt themself suspended in air as they were heaved into the van. Lawrence and Gene piled in, and then the van began to roll away before the door could even slide closed. All the seats were full, but someone held Marley between their knees as the van took a sharp turn and accelerated away, hard. Marley could see the sunrise through the rear window. The trees raced away behind them, but the sun never grew smaller.

No one talked in the van. Gene slid down to sit on the floor opposite Marley and took their hand. Marley tried fitfully to pull it away, but Gene held on—not gripping hard, not unshakable, but tightly enough that Marley would have had to make a concerted effort, and they didn’t care enough to do that. They closed their eyes as the van shot along the road, and the only presence they could really feel was Gene’s hand holding theirs.

Gene and Samantha stayed with Marley in a hotel room in Stockton for the next several days, watching over them there, though Marley hadn’t asked them to. They gave Marley food, and sometimes Marley ate some of it, never paying attention to what it was. The first day, Alice sent so many unanswered messages that Marley took out their lenses. Samantha tried to console Marley at first, but Gene took her aside and said something to her, and she stopped. Later that day, Samantha brought in an external display, and she seemed to go back to her Louvre work. Or she could have been doing anything at all—Marley didn’t care.

Gene said very little, but he was there, always a few feet away. He had gotten his hand on some old-style books somewhere and spent much of his time reading them. The sound of the pages turning sedately was like the wingbeats of a moth, slowed nearly to stillness. Sometimes Marley cried, and then Gene would put down his book, sit on Marley’s bed, and put his hand on their back.

On the third day, Gene said something about going out and left. When he wasn’t back hours later, Marley got up and looked around. Samantha was in the corner at her display, but she wasn’t working, and her cheeks were shiny with tears.

“Where did Gene go?” Marley croaked. They weren’t sure, but it might have been the first thing they’d said in days.

Samantha looked up at them in amazement and, Marley thought, irritation. “He turned himself in,” she said. “He told you.”

“I’m sorry,” Marley said. “I’m really sorry. Is he going to be OK?”

“No, he’s not going to be OK! He’s under arrest for some huge crime he had nothing to do with!”

“I’m sorry,” Marley said again, stupidly. They stood there for an uncomfortable stretch of silence, then they went over and very awkwardly hugged Samantha. Samantha started crying in earnest now. Marley held her tighter, and Samantha held tighter back.

When Samantha was cried out, she went and washed her face, and then she went to the room’s mini-kitchen to get tea. Marley, realizing they hadn’t washed properly in days, shut themself in the bathroom, where they found a bioplastic bag full of supplies and a stack of fresh clothes with a little piece of paper on top that said “Marley.” They brushed their teeth, shaved their scraggly version of stubble, and took a shower. They put on a pair of jeans and a black T-shirt with a pair of crossed arrows that said “Stockton CA 1850.” They felt no better, but at least they weren’t filthy.

Back in the hotel room, they searched for their lenses, not wanting to disturb Samantha. They found them in a labeled envelope inside a drawer in their bedside table. They put in the earpiece, went into the bathroom, swirled the lenses in some cleaning fluid, rinsed them, and put them in. They had hundreds of messages. The most recent one was from Gia. The subject was “If you don’t message me back, I get to keep your dog.”

Gia had been sending messages for a day and a half now, wondering where Marley and Lyric were and whether they were still OK. Marley sent a quick update to her saying, “Just got your messages, reading now.” They couldn’t say they were OK, because it wasn’t true, and because they wouldn’t be able to say that Lyric was OK, too.

From the messages, Marley found that Gia had run after Anthem for hours until finally catching up with her. Anthem had snagged her leash between two trees. Some of the fires were out by then, and Gia had gone to the nearest town, where she’d been rounded up with some other citizens by American soldiers. They were kept in a guarded sports arena and given water and food that Gia described as “literally the most disgusting sandwiches I have ever eaten.” Gia had no idea why they’d been held there. They’d taken Anthem away from her, but one of the American soldiers, whom Gia described as “not entirely not cute for an imperialist shit” had brought the dog back and told Gia just to keep her out of sight.

“Anthem is the world’s smartest dog and would not eat the disgusting sandwiches,” Gia said. “All she ate for two days was corn chips we stole from the vending area. She was into those. She might not eat dog food anymore.”

Gia had woken the previous morning to find the American soldiers had left. “They didn’t even leave a note,” she said. “But they left the sandwiches. I don’t blame them. If I were them, I would have left the sandwiches, too.”

Marley put off replying to Gia by reading messages from Alice first. There were too many to read in their entirety, so they skimmed them instead. The first messages asked how Marley was over and over, and over and over Alice said how sorry she was, and that it was her fault. Those topics of discussion disappeared from the messages suddenly. The next one mentioned that she had talked to Gene, and Marley read between the lines that he’d told Alice to stop.

The e-mails after that became more upbeat. Alice talked about an “amazing” AI that Audrey had somehow brought from America; it sounded from the letters that it was somehow in a scarf. Marley puzzled over that for a few minutes before coming to the conclusion that the word “scarf” must have some special technical meaning.

Marley didn’t remember well who Tyler Godbout was, though apparently, he was some kind of high-powered American. In any case, he had gotten in serious trouble. With the help of information from Audrey and some assistance from her “scarf,” the Louvre apparently had uncovered not only the gruesome details of Godbout’s attempt to frame many Cascadians whose property he wanted to acquire, but also the fact that he’d sent unauthorized, armed missions both into Cascadia during the current war and into the Mountain Republic during the annexation. He’d had a number of personal enemies in both places killed, including a young woman from the Mountain Republic who was currently living in Cascadia, found shot dead in the woods near a shuttered restaurant. She’d had an information tab with her that turned out to have yet more incriminating information about Godbout. Then, most spectacularly, he was revealed as the architect of both the attempt to defraud Cascadia’s Citizen Dividend system and the war itself, which turned out to have been in preparation since well before the incidents President Jimenez had claimed had fomented it. The public might not have been so interested in that information if it hadn’t been for a speech they’d watched, given by Audrey Adams, a former American intelligence operative who’d worked under Godbout in the Cascadian fraud.

Alice’s most recent letter, from that morning, just said “stream the news,” and it had an untitled link. Marley opened it to find it played one of the leading streaming news shows, “Cascadia Now.” The lead story was a peace deal Cascadia had offered the U.S. It made a long series of demands, but it offered reunification. Cascadians were arguing violently about the offer all across the networks, but in America the deal, which had been immediately rejected by the Jimenez administration, had upwards of sixty-five percent popular support. A cease fire had been negotiated. For now, the war was halted.

Marley turned their lenses back off and lay on the bed, staring at the ceiling.

Two hours later, they got up and composed a short message to Gia explaining what had happened to Lyric. Then they hugged Samantha goodbye and left to find a train back to Stone. Their house hadn’t sold yet. They still, in a sense, had a home.

Marley wandered through the empty rooms of their house, trying to decide whether to move back in or leave again, but several hours of this hadn’t gotten them to care enough to make any kind of a decision.

Outside, a dog barked. It was a familiar bark, and Marley was running to the front of the house before they even consciously realized what it meant. When they yanked the door open, Gia hurled herself at Marley and nearly knocked them over.

“Mwah mwah mwah!” Gia cried, kissing Marley exaggeratedly on each cheek. Anthem shoved herself into the tangle and began licking Marley’s face. Her breath smelled of corn chips. Marley hugged both friend and dog to their chest until Anthem struggled away and ran through the house, barking joyfully.

Later in the day, they were eating takeout Thai food on the floor of the empty dining room. Marley had forbidden further corn chips but had gotten Anthem a sow’s ear to chew, and the dog lay against Marley’s back, cheerfully destroying the ear.

“You should come back to Lewis Lake,” Gia said, pointing her chopsticks at Marley. “You don’t want to live here.”

“No,” Marley said, “Probably true, but—hey, don’t point your chopsticks. It’s rude.”

Gia rolled her eyes. “OK,” she said, spearing a piece of chicken with one chopstick. Marley shook their head and gave up.

They wouldn’t—couldn’t—go back to Lewis Lake, but it looked like Gia was settling there, so they decided to hold off telling her until later. They wouldn’t stay in Stone, either. There would be some new place to be. As averse as they were to the idea, they would probably go back to doing interviews for No Divide. An edited version of the cut-short interview Marley had done with Scotty Ross had already aired, which was a surprise to Marley but perfectly in line with their agreement with the organization. In light of the war and especially after the reunification proposal, its popularity had skyrocketed, making it No Divide’s most popular program to date. Gia had done Marley the favor of letting No Divide know that Marley wasn’t available for now and shouldn’t be contacted, but as Marley looked into the days stretching on into the future, they knew they would need to do something, and No Divide was the one meaningful thing they had found apart from their short collaboration with the Louvre.

They would not be going back to the Louvre, though. That kind of work still didn’t appeal to them, and they needed to move for a while, not stay put. Maybe some day soon, after the reunification, they’d go to Vermont. Lyric had grown up there.

Their range of possible destinations, the people they could speak to, might soon expand. If the reunification actually went through, Cascadia would soon become a lot larger—or America would, depending on who was telling the story—and help bridging differences might be needed more than ever.

Gene sorely craved time to sit and compose himself, and after a few minutes, Alice picked up on this and brought him to an empty two-person table a little distance from the young hackers. He noticed his seat faced a wall rather than out into the room, where he would’ve had to watch Sammi and Lawrence—or Lan, or whatever his name was—work so close their arms were touching and occasionally whisper in each other’s ears. He knew that’s what he would’ve had to see because he kept turning around and seeing it, and then turning back and staring at the wall, waiting for his brain to process everything that had happened and was still happening.

A short while later, he saw he had an incoming call, audio only, and he discovered he was relieved to have something to focus on. He didn’t recognize the caller: it was someone named Noah Drell. There was a note with the call that said Drell was acting as an intermediary for someone who wanted to share “some important information.” When had Gene become the tip line for “important information”? Regardless, he was curious about this new development. Something dangerous? That did seem to be the recent trend.

He circled Drell’s name with his finger for more information. His lenses brought up a picture of a balding white man with a wide nose and a clear gaze. The capsule summary said he was some kind of auditor for the Cascadian government and that he lived in Davis, California, which was near Sacramento. Gene wouldn’t know more unless he refused the call and took the time to look Drell up. Was he working with the CBI? Then again, if Gene couldn’t be traced or tracked, it was hard to see how it could be dangerous to talk audio only—though he did wonder why the audio call, what needed to be hidden on the other end. Instead of answering the call directly, Gene told his lenses to ask who the caller was acting as an intermediary for and what kind of information they were offering.

You have a lot of trouble coming down on you, said Drell’s text response. This is someone who was part of that.

Was as in, they had changed their mind? Or was as in, they had helped set it in motion but were now just watching it play out? Gene gave up and answered the call.

“This is Dr. Ajou. Do you want to put the other person through?”

The “important information” turned out to be a rehash of what the Louvre had told him about the CitDiv fraud and the bank account. The call might even be from someone else in the Louvre, he reflected, made to shore up the story he’d been told. On a gut level, though, Gene didn’t think so, and he was tired of second-guessing the Louvre at every turn. He’d seen enough; his alarms hadn’t gone off so far, so unless the Louvre did something that made them seem unreliable or false, he’d just trust them, he decided. Some part of him that had been standing guard, questioning every piece of information they’d given him, exhaustedly gave up. For the time being, he resolved, he and the Louvre were allies. If they were what he believed them to be, they had already gone to enormous lengths to help him, and they hadn’t asked for much in return.

Alice walked over; she must have seen he was talking on the phone. She gave him a questioning look, and he held up a finger for her to wait. The woman on the other end—well, possibly a woman; he thought the voice might be synthetic—was talking about the plan she’d been a part of.

“I’d love to know how attacking another country’s economic system is supposed to prevent war,” Gene said, “but I don’t think we have time for a long discussion right now. I do need to ask, though—aren’t you going to get in trouble for sharing this kind of information?”

“I’m already in trouble,” the woman said. “One of my superiors set a trap for me, and actually, I suspect he’s trying to game the whole process to make himself a bundle of money.”

“Really?” Gene said. “That’s interesting. Can you hold for a minute?”

“You’re asking me to hold?” the woman said.

“Just for a minute. I might be able to help you with something. Hang on.”

He muted the call and turned to Alice. “I have someone on the line who says they’re an American intelligence asset who isn’t happy about the invasion,” he said. “I have no way of knowing whether they’re telling the truth. They’re calling through an intermediary, and I think they’re using a synthetic voice. Anyway, they say they’re in trouble from their own organization. Are we interested?”

Alice stared at him, dumbfounded. “Are you joking with me right now?” she said. “We have other ...”

Gene was shaking his head. “Like I said, I don’t know if it’s true. You can probably find out, though—can’t you?”

“But you’re serious,” she said.

“Of course.”

“Who’s the intermediary?”

“Someone named Noah Drell. He works for the Cascadian government, some kind of auditor.”

“Tracey?” Alice said, turning to the room. “Can you see if you can get a location on a Noah Drell? It can’t be that common a name. Where he is, ideally whom he’s with?”

A young woman with shoulder-length box braids and a broad frame turned around, taking in Alice and Gene. “Let me see what I can find,” she said. She turned back to her display and began typing and subvocalizing at the same time, which Gene had never seen anyone do. Was she interfacing with an AI? He had very little idea how these things worked.

They all waited while Tracey searched. Gene wondered if Drell or the informant would hang up, but he would have to leave that up to them.

When Tracey spoke up, she sounded amused. “They’re not using a secure line. He’s in an apartment in Esparto. Pez says all of the sensors in the place are off, and I mean really locked down, but the public directory says that it’s rented to an Audrey Adams, a U.S./Cascadian dual citizen who just moved here a few weeks ago.” Gene wondered who or what Pez was. An AI? “She’s got some connection to Tyler Godbout ... She works in reemployment, but she’s on the list of people to look into. Basic psych profile says she’s more driven by ethics than nationalism. What’s going on over there?”

“Gene,” Alice said in surprise. “Is this my birthday?” She turned and called out to someone else. “Tobias-Henry?”

A smallish, older person with tiny, bright eyes responded from a corner table. Tobias-Henry Ma, he/him or they/them, Gene’s lenses captioned him. Tobias-Henry looked like he’d been following the conversation, and now he nodded. “If this is someone from Godbout’s organization,” he said, “she might be exactly what we need to take him down, or to make the Americans think twice about their war.”

Alice looked back to Gene. “All right, then,” she said. “Tell her we’d like to see her. We’ll call her back with instructions. Tracey, can you and Pez get a full psych profile together on her? Lan and Samantha, can you find her some transportation and get Maebel looking into her background? We need to know whether to bring her here or to do something else with her.”

“This is turning out to be an even more interesting night than I thought,” Gene said. Then he unmuted.

#

After ending his call, Gene left the hackers to their work and wandered into an adjacent, unlit room where one unidentifiable person was curled up on an inflatable mattress, asleep. He found a small couch there and sat, his thoughts going in circles until he nodded off.

He blinked awake some span of time later, sprawled on the couch. He felt a little less tired and overwhelmed but not truly refreshed. Stretching, he found his way to the restroom, then headed for the kitchen. He needed coffee, and a sandwich or something wouldn’t be a bad idea.

There was no autokitchen per se, just a series of devices that could chop or clean or assemble ingredients, and Gene didn’t know how to use those. There was a machine that dispensed coffee, however. Not seeing any cups nearby, Gene took a small bowl down from a shelf and filled it halfway. As he turned around, Tobias-Henry entered the kitchen.

“Some coffee?” Gene said, indicating the machine with the tilt of his head.

“I was thinking of matcha,” Tobias-Henry said. He passed by Gene, patting him on the shoulder as he made his way by, and collected a bowl, a can, and something that looked like a shaving brush. He measured a green powder from the can into the bowl, then added steaming water from a tap and whisked the mixture into froth.

“Why don’t you come sit with me?” Tobias-Henry said. “I’m not needed for anything just now. I could provide some orientation.”

Tobias-Henry led the way into the dining room toward a corner table, but on the way, they were joined by Tracey, the young woman who’d been working with whoever or whatever Pez was. She wore a black shirt with a high neck and a pair of patchwork, multi-patterned, billowing pants of the kind that seemed to be popular with twenty-somethings. Sammi had a couple of pairs of that kind of thing. Tracey’s look contrasted sharply with Tobias-Henry’s powder blue, wraparound suit, which would have been more or less in style thirty years earlier.

“I thought you’d want to know that the American spy passed the psych review,” she said to Gene. “Kind of surprising how few red flags, considering, but the math works. She’s a known quantity now.”

“Mmm,” said Tobias-Henry skeptically.

“‘As much as one can ever know a person without meeting them,’ Tobias-Henry would want me to say,” Tracey said. “He doesn’t have as much faith as he should in his own machines.”

“You build computers?” Gene said.

They sat at the table. Tracey sat across from Tobias-Henry.

Tobias-Henry nodded and sipped his matcha. “I have built computers,” he said, “but my real work is bringing intelligences into the world. Pez and Maebel are two of mine.”

“I helped with Pez,” Tracey said.

“It’s true,” said Tobias-Henry. “She was instrumental. I’m glad there are some in our group who can keep the work up. It’s getting to be a little much for me, these days.”

Gene looked from Tracey to Tobias-Henry. There was something between them that he couldn’t quite put his finger on. Not animosity, but ... opposition?

Tracey studied Gene, and then she leaned forward. “Nobody wants me to tell you this,” she said, “but we don’t need you.”

Gene found the statement disconcerting, but he let it pass over him. “I didn’t think you did,” he said.

“We don’t need to get mixed up with the Cascadian government,” she said.

“Then you all shouldn’t have gone out of your way to ask me to vouch for the Louvre,” Gene said.

“That wasn’t my decision,” said Tracey.

That much was already obvious, but Gene refrained from antagonizing her by saying it.

Tracey shook her head. “Some people act like there’s a difference, but there isn’t,” she said. “Cascadia, America ... People of color are still outsiders. We’re still pushed around. We’re still elbowed out of the way.”

Gene wondered what exactly the Louvre had to do with people of color, although he’d noticed from the beginning that relatively few white people were there.

“I have to agree that’s still the case, some of the time,” Tobias-Henry said.

“‘Some of the time’?” said Tracey. “So, it’s OK to just get it right ‘some of the time’? ‘Some of the time, we’ll treat you like human beings. Some of the time, we’ll give you access to some of the wealth we stole from you. Some of the time, we’ll include you.’”

“Do you feel we can change that?” Tobias-Henry said. “Are we the ones who need to make the change?”

“We need to make them see,” Tracey said. “We shouldn’t sign up to join the army of the nation that oppresses us.”

“I agree with you that oppression against us hasn’t gone away,” said Tobias-Henry. “But would you agree with me that Cascadia has made some progress? Even the U.S. has made some progress. With race, with gender ...” He stopped for a moment, reflecting. Gene guessed, now that he thought about it, that Tobias-Henry was transgender, that he had been thought to be a girl at birth, just like Kiara and Vi’s son, Will.

“It’s not good enough,” Tracey said.

“No, I’m with you on this,” said Tobias-Henry. “But if they’re trying to improve, do we condemn them for falling short, or do we encourage them to do better?”

Tracey gritted her teeth. “What do you think?” she said to Gene. “Are you happy, bringing up your daughter in a world where she’s still a second-class citizen?”

“Honestly?” Gene said. “I have mixed feelings. Samantha was born in a community founded by five Black families. My husband and I moved there when we got married. It’s still almost ninety percent Black. But I know what you’re talking about. It was worse when I was growing up, but it hasn’t gone away.”

“And you think we should just join up with the government and let them use us?” Tracey said.

“I’m part of the government,” Gene pointed out. “So, I may not be the best one to ask—but I don’t know the answer to your question. I don’t even really know who the Louvre is. Are you named after the museum?”

“Our AIs are works of art,” Tracey said. “Pez is named after ‘Pez Dispenser’ by Jean-Michel Basquiat.”

Gene thought he knew the one: a painting of a black Tyrannosaurus rex with a golden crown.

Tracey pointed across the room at the cooler next to the station where Samantha and Lawrence were working. “Maebel’s name is from a painting by Toyin Odutola.”

“But that’s not where our group’s name comes from,” said Tobias-Henry.

Tracey looked confused. “It—” she began.

“Folks, can I introduce Audrey Adams?” said Alice, and Gene looked up to see Audrey standing there in person. She was an unprepossessing, middle-aged white woman. He stood up and held out his hand.

“I’m Gene,” he said. “We talked on the phone.”

“Dr. Ajou,” she said, shaking his hand and looking him over. Then she turned to the others.

Alice gestured at Tobias-Henry. “This is Tobias-Henry. He’s one of our founders and the leader of our cell,” she said. “And this is Tracey, a gifted wrangler.” Audrey shook their hands as well, and Tobias-Henry stood, pushing the table further out from the wall and pulling more chairs around it. “I have something to follow up on,” Alice told Tobias-Henry. “I’ll check back in later.”

Audrey looked at Tracey guardedly and sat. “Is there a plan of some kind?” she said.

“I believe Alice is working that out,” said Tobias-Henry. “She said she was bringing in an expert.”

“An expert what?” said Gene.

“A storyteller,” said Tobias-Henry. “Alice has that skill, too, but she invited a sort of specialist.”

Gene didn’t know what to make of that. It wasn’t clear to him what use a storyteller was to a group of hackers.

“You were just about to say where the name came from,” Tracey said. “I thought it was after the museum.”

“No,” said Tobias-Henry. “Do you know how the Louvre was made a museum?” he said.

Tracey shook her head.

“The Louvre had been a fortress and a palace and a residence for artists, but it was made into a museum by the French National Assembly after their Revolution. It had its birth in change, but they were still segregating work by people of color there even up to a few decades ago. They assembled grand displays of European artists who’d copied from people of color and call the Europeans’ work ‘modern art’ and the original works ‘primitive.’ Egyptian pieces, though the work of Africans, were kept with the European art. This would not have been an institution to name our group after. No, while no one calls us this anymore, our proper name is ‘L’Ouverture.’ Have you heard of Toussaint L’Ouverture?”

Tracey shook her head, grimacing. Gene imagined the last thing she’d enjoy would be appearing ignorant in front of strangers, but evidently, she cared more about filling in those gaps than about how she would look for not knowing. Gene could respect that.

“Toussaint L’Ouverture was born a slave in the mid-eighteenth century, in what the French called Saint-Domingue at the time—now Haiti,” Tobias-Henry said. “He led a successful slave rebellion against the French colonizers, and he helped drive out the British and Spanish. He was brilliant and successful, but we don’t hear very much about people like General L’Ouverture here in Cascadia, and they hear even less in America. I think this supports your point, Tracey, that even now, even here, people of color are often underestimated and ignored.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t know that,” Audrey said. “When you hear about the Louvre ... You’re always described as hackers first, criminals second ...”

“We’re activists,” Tracey said.

“I’m beginning to see that,” said Audrey.

Gene was starting to feel more confident that connecting Audrey and the Louvre had been a good idea. “Thank you for calling me,” Gene said to her.

“If you didn’t just lure me into a trap,” Audrey said, “then thank you for finding me a way out.”

“If you’re thanking me,” Gene said, “then you’re welcome.” He was conscious of the irony of him speaking Alice’s words back to Audrey. He tried to take another sip of coffee, but his bowl was empty. He stood. “Do you want some coffee? Does anyone?”

“I have work to do,” Tracey said, and she got up and left.

Tobias-Henry was still sipping his matcha. “Thank you,” he said. “I have everything I need.”

“I wouldn’t mind some,” said Audrey, and she began to get up. Gene could see how tired she was.

“No, sit,” he said. “I’ll get you some.”

#

While Gene was getting the coffee, Alice came into the kitchen with people in tow, a twenty-something white woman with odd-colored eyes and dark hair past her shoulders, together with a person about the same age in gray coveralls with short hair, pale gold skin, and luxurious sideburns. Gene put down his coffee bowl.

“This is Marley, and this is Lyric,” Alice said, pointing at them in turn. “Marley’s a writer. Lyric is along for moral support. Marley, Lyric, this man is helping us try to go legit.”

“Hi,” he said, extending a hand. “I’m Gene.”

They shook hands, and he tried again to imagine what the Louvre needed with a writer.

“Are you waiting for coffee?” he said. “I just need to get one more, for somebody else.” He saw a mug on one of the shelves and took it down. It had a lens-enabled, animated hologram on it of someone in red robes and a pointed hat on a sparkling surfboard. Below that, extravagant lettering animated to glimmer in gold and blue said Surf Sorcerer!

“How do you take it?” he called out to Audrey.

“Flax milk, if you have it?” she called back. “Otherwise, just black.”

He searched for flax milk while Marley found a cup and got some coffee of their own. There was no flax milk, so Gene headed back to Audrey and Tobias-Henry. Alice came with him and pulled over another table and some chairs. She waved Marley over as they and Lyric emerged from the kitchen. Lyric leaned in to murmur in Marley’s ear, and Gene realized there was some kind of romance between them, something quiet. Certainly they didn’t have their hands and faces all over each other the way that Sammi and Lawrence seemed to. Gene looked over at Sammi and Lawrence again, but they seemed to be disagreeing about something now, and they spoke sharply, in low voices.

Marley came to the table, while Lyric went into the darkened room where people were resting.

“So, Audrey here is an American spy,” Alice said as Marley joined them.

“That’s not the way I’m usually introduced,” Audrey said.

“You wouldn’t be much of a spy if it were,” Alice said. “Right? Marley, I was hoping you’d listen to what Audrey has to tell us and see what you can picture us making out of it. I have some ideas, but I think ... I don’t know. Honestly, I was thinking you might see something big, something I wouldn’t think of.”

“What’s this about?” Gene said. “Some kind of ... propaganda project? Or ... education ... ?”

“Life,” Tobias-Henry said. “We find ourselves in stories, often stories we didn’t choose, and we’ve been speaking recently about how we want to choose more of our own stories.”

“Tobias-Henry, I thought you were just a technology person!” Alice said admiringly.

“I’m a person person. This is not about technology; it’s about justice and finding a way to make things better. I’ve spent most of my life helping to collect power to use for positive change, but I’ve realized I often don’t know what good purpose to pursue with that power. I would like a vision of an improved world.”

“You all know I just write for streaming shows, right?” Marley said. “I’m not a ... I don’t know what kind of person you’re looking for, exactly.”

“You,” Alice said. “We’re looking for you. And you don’t write for streaming shows anymore, because they have AIs to do that. Now you need to write something a computer couldn’t write.”

“A future?” Marley said.

Alice nodded. “Audrey, can you share what you have? We think that Godbout, especially, might be a lever we can use to open some doors.”

“That’s a mixed metaphor,” Marley said.

“See? Better writer,” Alice said.

“I already did this once tonight,” Audrey said.

“Excellent,” Alice said. “Practice makes perfect.”

#

Audrey shared much of what she knew about Godbout, about the sabotage plan that until that afternoon she’d thought she was running, and more, but Gene noticed how careful she was. She was specific when she talked about Godbout and the Citizen Dividend fraud, but she said little about how her agency worked. In fact, she didn’t even say what her agency was. He was torn as to whether this was a reason to distrust her, since she still was clearly being protective of the country she had worked for, or a reason to trust her more, since she was repudiating a project and a person while staying loyal to her nation. Either way, what she had to say was eye-opening, and Tracey stopped by several times to listen, return to her display, and then come back with supporting information.

Audrey shared a list of Cascadians receiving money from the Citizen Dividend fraud, and Pez easily identified one thread common to a sizable number of those who otherwise didn’t seem to be especially good candidates: they all owned or controlled properties or rights relating to ports, import/export businesses, or shipping. The factor that connected many of the others, like Marley, was that their rough psych profiles, the ones amassed from public information, all suggested people who wouldn’t be comfortable receiving secret payments. Apparently, Godbout was trying to both goad Cascadia into fighting a war by exposing Audrey’s operation and also put a number of people owning assets that interested him in a difficult legal position—a position he or an intermediary could exploit to expand his empire.

As Audrey came to the end of her information, Gene found himself stepping in, talking about how the Cascadian government and President Muñoz, in particular, might react to some of the ideas that were coming up.

Around the time the sun came up, Marley said they had a suggestion: voluntary reunification.

“Isn’t that exactly what the Americans want?” said Tobias-Henry. “What’s the difference between that and surrender?”

“The Americans want to annex Cascadia while withholding full citizenship from Cascadians and nullifying all Cascadian laws,” Marley said. “They want to command our resources and gain our territory without us having any say. If we offer to reunify with conditions ...”

“They don’t want that, though,” Gene said. “They’d just turn us down.”

“The Americans who are currently in power, like Godbout and President Jimenez, don’t want that,” Audrey said. “I don’t know that the American people feel the same. If Cascadia wanted to rejoin the U.S. with a limited amount of self-determination, the will to continue the war might crash, and there might be widespread popular support for negotiating a re-entry.”

“That’s why the story is important,” Marley said, “to ensure that. If everyone in America knew what we know, about Godbout and the plot to defraud Cascadia and steal assets for himself ... I think that might help people feel more connection to Cascadia and more sympathy for us. We’d need AIs to run those scenarios, to see if that could work. If it would, though, and if Cascadia came back into the union with full voting rights, then we could turn the political balance around. The Constitutionalists in the U.S. only have a small edge over the Progressives. If the reunification were scheduled to coincide with the upcoming election, and if Cascadians were eligible to run—”

“You don’t want Cascadia to join America,” Gene said. “You want America to join Cascadia.”

Marley shook their head. “Justice and compassion don’t come from Cascadia. They’re already in America, waiting to break out. Some of the Progressive politicians have been calling for reparations and universal basic income and other reforms for years. But if we unite ...”

“That’s ...” Gene said, but he had no words for the kind of future Marley was talking about.

“That’s beautiful,” said Alice.

“I’m going to sit down in a quiet corner and write something,” Marley said. “If we decide we want to use it, we’ll have at least a rough draft.”

“I think I finally understand why you needed writers,” said Gene.

“Great,” said Alice, “because now it’s time for you to do your part.”

“I’m a disgraced former public servant and an escaped criminal,” Gene said. “What exactly is my part?”

“The same thing as before,” said Alice. “To get our proposal in front of the powers that be.”

“The president?”

“Unless she has a boss you know of,” Alice said.

“Why would anyone in the Muñoz administration listen to me?”

“You have to make them listen.”

“I know why they’d listen,” Marley chimed in. “But it’s not ideal.”

“What isn’t?” said Gene.

“Offer yourself,” Marley said. “Explain that you were informed, credibly, that an American operative wanted to kill you to prevent you from offering evidence about the fraud. Say you’ll be taken into custody, but only by the Secret Service, and only if they’ll hear what you have to say.”

The Cascadian Secret Service might be a good idea, Gene thought. They’d be closer to President Muñoz, and, unlike the CBI, they might not be compromised.

“That’s a terrible idea,” said Audrey. “Have him leave himself to the mercies of the current administration? It’s not safe.”

“You’re thinking of your president,” Gene said. “Ours is different.”

#

It was just past five in the morning when Gene voice-called Rosie, but the call didn’t go through to her: it was rerouted to ASAC Kimball.

“Dr. Ajou,” she said. “We got interrupted before we could have our conversation.”

“You have an American operative in your organization, ASAC Kimball,” Gene said. “Put me through to Rosie, please.”

“Come back in and talk to us about it, and then we’ll see if we can arrange contact with Ms. Furch. While we’re talking, maybe you can explain to me how you hacked our car, and why we can’t get a location out of your connection—unless you really are at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, as your call details claim.”

“I’ll try calling her again in ten minutes,” said Gene, and he hung up. He was trembling, but he didn’t know if it was from anxiety, lack of sleep, or just from all the coffee.

Ten minutes later, he called again, and again he got ASAC Kimball.

“Dr. Ajou,” she said, “please just give me a—”

He hung up. While he was waiting for ten more minutes to pass, Marley came over and, without saying anything, pushed something from their lenses over to his. It was a short piece with the title “A Newly United America.” Marley turned and left, but he read it immediately. It was a simple, direct, modest description of how Cascadia and the United States could reunite. Even though he’d already heard the idea described, reading it make him feel like he had swallowed sparks. It made sense. It sounded like it could work, and it sounded as though it could heal some of the harm the two nations had been inflicting on one another.

When ten minutes had passed, he called again. This time, he got Rosie.

“Gene?” she said. “Can you please turn yourself in?”

“Sure,” Gene said. “I have two conditions.”

“You don’t set conditions for turning yourself in,” Rosie said.

“Any reason why not?”

Rosie sighed. “Gene, I’m not law enforcement. Why do you even want to talk to me? Is this about your friends in the Louvre? We know they’re hiding you.”

“Of course they’re hiding me,” Gene said. “Do you know where they are?”

Rosie was silent.

“That’s what I thought. What I want to talk about is negotiating a peace with the Americans.”

“A ... Gene, I’m seriously and literally concerned that you have gone insane. You just called yesterday urging us to team up with a criminal hacker group against the Americans—”

“It all makes sense if you’re willing to hear me out.”

“You know what, Gene? I’m not. Turn yourself in, don’t turn yourself in—I don’t care.”

“OK,” Gene said. “I’ll call you back in ten minutes.”

“No—” she said, but he hung up.

It would help if Rosie wanted to hear what he had to say, but in the end, there were other people whose opinions would matter more than hers. Gene was fairly certain that President Muñoz would insist on being kept informed about him, considering the importance of his case and that he and she were, if not personal friends, then at least friendly, allied acquaintances. Muñoz knew when to delegate and when to be hands-on. Even in the middle of a war, he was confident he could get through to her.

When Gene called back yet again, Rosie had given in. “OK,” she said. “It’s out of my hands. I have President Muñoz on the line for you.”

“Thank you, Rosie,” Gene said. “I’m sorry to have disturbed you so early.”

“In the middle of a war?” she said. “You’re joking. Here’s the President.”

#

Gene kept it brief. He explained as concisely as he could what had happened to him, how he’d found out about it, and what he did in response. He even explained, with great reservations, his daughter’s connections with the Louvre, because without knowing that, his relationship with the Louvre made no sense.

Then, he read Muñoz “A Newly United America,” and he explained the leverage that Audrey was offering them, though at Audrey’s request, he didn’t give her name. He explained that not only did the Louvre have a message for the American people, they also had a way to ensure that message would be widely seen. Muñoz listened through his whole explanation, asking only two or three questions.

When he’d explained everything, he returned to his own situation. “As I told you, my allies at the Louvre tell me they have clear evidence that there are orders to have me killed as soon as I’m in CBI custody. So, I’m willing to turn myself in, but I want it to be to the Secret Service, and I’d take it as a personal favor if my whereabouts could be kept quiet until we get some of this sorted out.”

“No,” Muñoz said. “Let’s wait on that. If I need you to turn yourself in, I’ll call you back, all right?”

Gene was stunned.

“But what about the plan?”

“It’s an interesting idea,” she said. “I’ll have Rosie get back to you. I like it better than a drawn-out war, if we can make it work—but that’s a big ‘if.’ We have some scenarios to run on our AIs, and I need to talk to some of our representatives. You’ll hear from me soon. Good luck, Gene.”

“You too,” Gene said. Then the President hung up.

#

When Gene returned to the group, he found that plans were already in the works to disseminate Marley’s essay by hacking into a raft of popular publications in both countries and placing it on top of other content there.

Gene was still recounting the details of his call when Lawrence, who had been working alone for the last hour or so, swore, got up, and ran to Tobias-Henry’s table. Gene stopped talking for a moment, and Lawrence jumped in.

“The Americans are advancing through the Eldorado National Forest,” he said. “They have automated ground weapons, robotic attack units, drones, and human troops. They’re already well past the border.”

“Where? Not along the Route 50 corridor?” Gene said.

“Uh ...” Lawrence scanned something on his lenses. “Yes, the Route 50 corridor.” He looked stricken, realizing what Gene was thinking. Zora, Gene and Samantha’s home, was just off Route 50.

“How far is that from here?” said Tobias-Henry. “Seventy or eighty kilometers?”

“It’s ... something like that,” Lawrence confirmed.

“That’s too close,” Tobias-Henry said. “We should retreat to our backup location, but our host is worried about the war, and he rescinded his offer last night. We haven’t found an alternative yet.”

“So, we’re stuck here, unless we want to scatter,” said Alice.

“Lawrence, can you find us somewhere, even somewhere marginal, to relocate in case we need it?” said Tobias-Henry. “I think we’ll still be all right here for a little while.”

“We might be,” said Gene, his voice a hoarse whisper. “But Zora—our community—is just off Route 50.”

“Oh, no,” Tobias-Henry said. There was real pain in his voice.

Gene nodded. “Would you excuse me?” he said.

#

Gene was composing a message to Kiara and Vi when Vi sent him one herself, telling him they were getting out and to make sure Samantha didn’t go home. He deleted the warning he was about to send and sent back a message saying he was with Samantha and that they’d stay clear. Then he retreated to the back of the kitchen, the only place in the building where he thought he might not be interrupted. There, he sat on the floor with his back to a walk-in cooler and watched the news feeds, scanning for information about the encroaching American force. They had overwhelmed the scant Cascadian defense at the border, but more Cascadian military units were already on their way, from several directions at once.

The two forces met just east of the town of Pollock Pines, where Route 50 skirted a tall hill in an oxbow bend. That bend was where the turnoff to Zora was located.

News drones in the area provided a live feed. The Cascadian forces took cover behind the deserted buildings and in the gardens and playgrounds of Zora as the American forces bore down, raining artillery fire and strafing them with airborne drones. Cascadian anti-aircraft fire brought down a jet drone that crashed in flames into a building that held workshops and the Zora preschool.

Gene did not see the moment his home was destroyed—the house where Sammi and Mark and Will had grown up, where Gene and Kiara and Vi had raised them, the last place he’d lived with Edison, the place where he though he’d grow old, where all of his and his children’s possessions were stored—but he did catch a glimpse of the wreckage. Some kind of explosion had torn most of it apart, and the small piece left standing was in flames. On the walkway, entangled with a wrecked infantry robot that was five meters tall, two American corpses sprawled.

He turned off the feed and took out his lenses, which were distorting from his tears. He gave himself about three minutes to lie on the floor, crying in rage and grief, before he wiped his streaming face with his sleeve and forced himself to breathe. He had only begun to get a hold of himself before he noticed the white girl, the one who had come with Marley who had the different-colored eyes, standing in front of him. Lyric, was it? She got down on her knees and reached for his hand.

“What’s the matter?” she said. “I’m sorry, I just woke up ...”

He wiped his nose with his sleeve and shook his head, struggling to stand. “I’m all right,” he said. “It’s not people. It’s just things.”

“Things can matter,” Lyric said. She was beginning to cry herself.

Gene swallowed and got himself fully upright. “Excuse me,” he said. “I have to go wake up my daughter.”

“I’m just going outside,” she said helplessly. “Some air ...”

Gene nodded. “That’s a good idea,” he said. “Maybe stay close.”

She nodded back, and Gene went to find Samantha.

#

Gene didn’t tell Samantha in the dining room. Instead, he took her back into the kitchen, and she watched him warily as they went. Apparently, Lan hadn’t mentioned that the Americans were coming through Zora. Gene didn’t know whether to feel grateful or irritated.

Once again, he wished Edison were there. Edison would know how to talk about this. Gene had no idea.

They sat down at a Formica table near the walk-in cooler. “Uh,” Gene said. “The Americans attacked down Route 50. There was a fight at Zora. Everything ... it’s ...” he choked on the words, struggled to get them out. “The house, the whole place ...”

Sammi’s eyes were wide, and she was breathing too fast. “Who was there? Is everybody OK?”

“They’re OK,” Gene said. Sammi grabbed his hand so hard, it hurt, but he was glad for it, and he squeezed back, not as hard. “Everybody ran.”

Sammi nodded, her chin trembling, and tears ran down her face, dripping onto the table. Gene watched, even more miserable about what this was doing to Sammi than he was about Zora itself.

Her tears escalated to sobbing, and Gene pulled his chair next to hers and wrapped his arms around her before breaking down himself.

As terrible as the news was, sharing grief with Samantha made it feel a little less heavy. He only hoped his being with her was some consolation to Samantha. He was no Edison, but at least he was there.

When Samantha’s crying eased, Gene made himself calm down, too. She got up and found a roll of paper towels, which she brought back to the table. She tore one off and handed it to him, and she used another to mop the tears off her face and blow her nose. After Gene did the same, his daughter wrapped him in her arms and kissed his cheek, and he finally understood what it meant that she was a woman now, an adult. He couldn’t shield her anymore, and he shouldn’t, and she didn’t want to be shielded anyway. That’s what she had been trying to say about the Louvre, that there was sorrow and suffering in the world, and that it was time for her to step forward to try to help with that. It didn’t matter that it wasn’t a way of helping that he hadn’t agreed with. What mattered was that she was trying to make things better, just like he was. She had strength and courage, and she could offer comfort.

“Remember that pig?” Samantha said. Her voice was rough.

Despite himself, Gene felt a fragment of a laugh come out of him. Back when Samantha was five and her brother Mark was seven, a neighbor at Zora had adopted two potbellied pigs. One of them became obsessed with Mark, and for weeks, whenever Mark came out of the house, it trotted around after him. When Mark went away to summer camp, the pig came to their door five or six times, at all hours, squealing for Mark, until eventually, it gave up. When Mark got back from camp, the pig wouldn’t have anything to do with him.

“Oh, and that treehouse you and Vi made! You know kids still use that?” The smile that had started to come out on Samantha’s face fell. “Well, before this.”

“Vi built most of it. I mainly painted,” Gene said. “You know I’m not handy.”

Samantha snorted.

“What?” Gene said.

“That time you tried to fix my door.”

“At least it worked.”

“It was upside down!”

“OK, technically—”

“Perimeter breach,” called a loud, synthetic voice from the dining room. Gene got up, and he and Samantha hurried out there together. “There are two armed individuals outside the building,” it continued. Then, “Update: there are now four armed individuals outside the building.”

In the dining room, everyone was gathered around a set of displays that gave views of the building they were in, including an overhead view. Highlighted in red on several of the displays, two sets of two armed soldiers in black uniforms were approaching. Two were closing in on the front door, and the other two were nearing the back.

“You’re pretty intrusive,” she told him. “I didn’t ask you to become my friend. I didn’t ask you to come over here tonight, when I have so much else to worry about.”

“I came here because I like you,” Noah said.

Audrey felt the beginning of some feeling in her stomach and quickly crushed it. “I like you, too,” Audrey said. “Less now, but I can’t truthfully say I don’t think you’re interesting.”

“I don’t know,” said Noah. “You’re much more interesting than I am.”

Audrey frowned and shook her finger at him. “You see, that’s exactly the kind of thing I mean. Most people find me not interesting, which works very well for me, and then you come along ...”

Something occurred to her. “You know,” she said, “if I wanted to set a trap for someone like me, you know what I’d bait it with? Someone like you.”

“I’m what you see,” Noah said. “Nobody’s setting a trap for you.”

“Oh, that’s not true at all,” Audrey said. “I mean, you may be genuine, but the trap ...” she laughed, but it came out sounding angry. “The trap is already sprung.”

“Will you explain that to me?” Noah said. “Tell me what’s going on.”

Audrey clasped her hands together, noticed she was jiggling them, and made herself stop. “I haven’t had time to make decisions,” she said. “Everything’s changed now. It changed tonight. Why don’t you go home, give me time to sort all this out and maybe get some rest? We can talk in the morning.”

She wasn’t being entirely honest, she realized. There was no way she was going to get any rest that night, and she might be long gone by morning.

“No,” Noah said. “I think it should be now.”

“So, you don’t trust me.”

“I trust that you’re a good person,” Noah said. “I don’t trust that you’ll still be here tomorrow.”

“If you trust that I’m a good person, why not trust me to make the right choice about what to tell you and when?”

“Because I think you need help, and I don’t think you’re the kind of person who usually asks for help. And because something’s going on that I feel that I’m morally obligated to understand.”

“OK,” said Audrey. “So, what are you going to do? Will you call the police?”

Noah shook his head. “I’m going to rely on your good sense and ask you to let me know what’s happening,” he said. “You said everything’s changed. To me, that sounds like you’re in trouble. Who with? The police? Criminals? Someone in America?”

As muddy-headed as she still was from the wine, Audrey forced herself to step through her options. She wasn’t armed and had only basic self-defense training. Even if she did have some way to physically overwhelm Noah, she was sure that would be the wrong move, and even the idea of it turned her stomach.

Running was an appealing alternative, but Audrey wasn’t sure how that could work. Even if she got out of the room and out of the building, where would she go, and what would Noah feel like he had to do in response? It was nice that he was deferring to her judgment for the moment, but if she fled without talking to him, she’d be pushing him to take some other kind of action.

Yet telling Noah anything about her situation would mean declaring an absolute break. She couldn’t continue with the project if Noah knew: he couldn’t let her, and sharing that information would put a permanent end to her intelligence career. America wasn’t partial to spies getting drunk and spilling secrets. The consequences of breaking with the Agency like that, once they found out, might be prompt and violent.

The more she thought about it, though, the clearer it was that her intelligence career was already over. Someone—probably Godbout himself, though possibly one of his allies or underlings—had turned on her. She couldn’t continue the mission any more than you could continue petting a dog whose jaws were crushing your arm. It was disappointing and infuriating to suddenly realize that the decision she’d been fretting over the most, whether or not to abandon the mission, was already made for her—and by Tyler Godbout, of all people.

She glanced at Noah. He was simply waiting, giving her time. She could see from the tension in his body that he wasn’t waiting patiently, but you can’t have everything. A man who was interesting and interested and waited for you to think about what you were going to say ... No wonder she hadn’t done what she obviously should have—cut him off at the beginning.

She did have the choice of trying to salvage her career. As high as Godbout was, there were people she could go to who were officially over his head, and much of his power was influence rather than chain of command. She could contact the head of her agency, a woman she had never previously spoken with or met, explaining that her mission had been compromised from within the organization, and by whom. She could go to one of the safe houses and wait for extraction. Hell, with the war on, she might not even need to be extracted. America might come to her.

It was the war that settled it for her, not just that they hadn’t given her mission a real chance, not just that she had been allowed to run an operation everyone at the top knew was doomed to fail. It was that those who were making the decisions in America were willing—eager might be the better word—to go to war with Cascadia in the first place. Someone—many someones—had decided that rather than playing the hand America had been dealt, they were willing to cause untold harm, destruction, suffering, and death. They were willing to burn the forests of the Pacific Northwest, to take a nation that had figured out many of the problems America still had and crush that nation, to drag it back to the political morass and stagnation that America had become. There had been a time—say, back in the 2020s—when America had the opportunity to become something new, something profoundly better. The Cascadians had seen this opportunity, and they had embraced it, but America had turned away. Audrey liked to think that somehow, somewhere, there was a different America, a braver America, one that had never split or gone down that troubled road.

She had no mission now, no place in the American scheme. The one question that remained was what she would do for herself. Should she turn herself in, or run, or ... something else? Was there a something else?

If there was, she realized, that something else might well involve Noah. She looked back up at him, tilting her neck to try to stretch away some of the tension that had accumulated there, and took a breath.

“All right,” she said. “I’m going to tell you what I came here to do, and why that changed.”

And she told him.

Once the words started spilling out of Audrey, she couldn’t stop. She talked about being recruited back in the 2040s, about her career in American intelligence, and about the work she’d done. She talked about how they’d brought her the sabotage mission and asked her to take charge and about the mission itself, though she gave no identifying details. She talked about searching for her family, about her mother and about the brother she’d hadn’t thought to look for, about growing up left behind with her dour father, about meeting Noah himself, about how it felt to come to this strange yet strangely welcoming country, about not being able to speak to anyone. She talked about Godbout’s dismissive manner in Tucson and about what he or someone close to him had done to her, about the CitDiv money being sent to her brother and to people like Marley Jun. She talked about Gene Ajou being set up as a scapegoat, about wrestling with what to do when she realized her project had been compromised, and about how meaningless it had all become with the beginning of the war. Until now, there had been no one to talk to, and as well-regulated as Audrey was, her dammed-up need for human connection rushed in and took over. Everything had shifted. She wasn’t quite the same person she’d been just hours before.

Noah listened intently, stopping her only a handful of times to clarify details.

It was about ninety minutes before Audrey ran out of things to say and went silent. She was exhausted, but she also felt cleansed in a way, like the feeling you get after having cried.

Noah sat looking at her for a stretch, his brow creased as if he was trying to do complicated math in his head. Audrey was too empty to be worried about his reaction.

In the end, he spoke.

“Can you explain to me again,” he said, “why you agreed to take the mission?”

“To prevent a war,” Audrey said. “If we could make Cascadia look like it was faltering, it would quiet some of the voices in the U.S. who were demanding basic income and other Cascadian-style policies, and it would make Cascadia less threatening.”

Noah just kept looking at her, frowning.

“I know it was a terrible thing to undertake,” she said. “I know that even if it had worked, it would have perpetrated a lie that affected millions of people. But all that was nothing compared to war. This war could be terrible. The weapons we’ve seen so far are nothing compared to what we may see if either country gets truly desperate, and already the destruction is staggering. If they had just given me time to finish my work, and if my mission had helped delay the war long enough for something to change the course of relations between Cascadia and the U.S., it would’ve been worth it. Good people would’ve gotten hurt, and I’d have regrets for the rest of my life—I know that. But it would have been better than this.”

Noah nodded. “And what do you plan to do now?”

It wasn’t an entirely sensible question, because what he did in response to what he’d heard would shape what Audrey did next—although he had offered to help.

“Well,” Audrey said, “tell me what you’d suggest.”

“The first thing?” he said. “The first thing I’d do, if I were you, would be warn ... the man you talked about. The scapegoat.”

“Gene Ajou,” Audrey supplied.

“Yes, Gene Ajou.”

That wasn’t what Audrey had been expecting. To be honest, she didn’t know what she’d been expecting. She did like his answer, though. She’d helped cause a lot of harm, harm that had turned out to be pointless and unnecessary. The least she could do was limit the damage.

“That’s not a bad idea,” she said. “Do you mind if I make a call?”

“No,” said Noah. “Do you mind if I stay and listen?”

Well, why not? “Go ahead,” Audrey said. “Actually, why don’t you make the call, voice only, and conference me in?”

“Why me?” said Noah.

“Because it would help me if I weren’t making any on-the-record calls revealing state secrets,” Audrey said.

Noah thought about it for a moment. “All right,” he said. “Give me the name again?”

Audrey did, spelling it out, and then she engaged a voice substitution application. She’d be able to speak at an inaudibly low volume, and the application would re-speak her words using a completely synthesized voice and speech pattern.

“I sent a call request,” Noah said. “I wrote that I was acting as an intermediary for someone who wanted to share some important information. Ah ... he’s asking who. Don’t worry, I’ll just tell him it’s not safe for you to say ... and I’ll put him on the room speakers.”

Noah gestured up a keyboard, typed something, then made more gestures to transfer the call to the house audio. They waited, and after a moment, Ajou spoke in a clear, resonant voice.

“This is Dr. Ajou.”

“Hello,” Audrey subvocalized, and the voice substitution spoke almost as fast as she did, like a simultaneous translator. “I’m sorry to disturb you like this, but there are some things I think you should know. You’re in danger. You’re being set up.”

“By Bennet Culkin?” Gene said. “Thanks, I heard about that. Who is this, exactly?”

Audrey was stunned into silence. She glanced at Noah, whose expression said well, there’s a twist.

“I’m the head of the mission that made you the scapegoat,” she said. “I’m in charge of sabotaging the Cascadian Citizen Dividend for the benefit of the United States.”

“And you’re calling to tell me about it?” Gene said.

“I’ve always had some ... reservations about the mission,” Audrey said, “but the whole point was to stop a war. Now, there isn’t any point. I’m just trying to limit the damage.”

“I’d love to know how attacking another country’s economic system is supposed to prevent war,” Gene said, “but I don’t think we have time for a long conversation right now. I do need to ask, though—aren’t you going to get in trouble, talking to me like this?”

“I’m already in trouble,” Audrey said. “One of my superiors set a trap for me, and actually, I suspect he’s trying to game the whole process to make himself a bundle of money.”

“Really?” Gene said. “That’s interesting. Can you hold for a minute?”

“You’re asking me to hold?” Audrey said.

“Just for a minute. I might be able to help you with something. Hang on.”

What did he think he could help her with? Gene was gone for more than a minute, and Audrey very much wanted to disconnect. It was probably a terrible idea to let the call continue, but she waited.

His voice came through again, finally. “I know some people who’d like to work with you,” he said.

“Work with me on what?” she said.

“Undoing some of the damage you’ve done. Also helping to end the war, and maybe even bringing down Tyler Godbout.”

“How do you know that name?” Audrey demanded. “Who are these people you’re with?”

“This isn’t the best way to talk,” said Gene. “They said they’d get right back to you.”

“I don’t want to keep this going through my friend,” Audrey said. “Why don’t you tell me how I can get in touch with them instead?”

“Don’t worry, Audrey—they won’t involve Noah,” Gene said. “You’ll get a call you directly.”

Then he hung up.

“What was that?” said Noah.

“I ...” Audrey said, shaking her head. How did they know who she was? Who were “they,” even? Did she need to run? If she did, would Noah let her go?

It was down to that non-secure call. If it were her on the other end, and if she were speaking to someone unknown through a known individual’s connection, she would probably try to determine where the known person was and to trace their recent contacts, if she could get access to that kind of information. From there, it might not be difficult to guess who the third party was. She herself might be able to do it, given resources, luck, and a week or two. Who was Gene with who could do it in two minutes?

It had to be the Cascadian government. Gene knew much more than he should have known. Either he gained that information by being much sharper and more inquisitive than anyone gave him credit for, or someone was helping him, or the government had somehow already figured out he wasn’t behind the CitDiv fraud and was aiding him in finding out who was. None of those situations seemed safe for Audrey, and to imagine that Gene was with someone who had that power but who was willing to help Audrey seemed so far-fetched as to be laughable.

“I’m concerned,” Noah said.

“I’m concerned, too,” said Audrey. “Actually, concerned doesn’t begin to describe it. I think I’d better go.”

“Come with me, then,” said Noah.

“Where?” Audrey said. “And why?”

“To my house. We can figure out what to do next.”

“Noah, we called using your lenses. They know who you are, whoever they are. And now that we’re talking about this, I’m getting worried for you. Maybe you should go to the CBI and turn me in.”

“Is that what you want?”

“It’s not my first choice, but if you do that, you can tell them I confessed to you and supported you going to them, so you’d be in the clear, and I’d be ... Well, they might not come down as hard on me as they would otherwise. Also, you’d be safe, if you were with the CBI. Oh, here we go.”

An icon had appeared on her lenses—an icon she hadn’t approved. It was a black half-circle over an uneven red background. Investigating the application it invoked didn’t reveal anything useful. The account that had created it was a one-off that had no other history. Under normal circumstances, Audrey would have extracted the app into an analysis environment, where she could use an AI to find out more about it without the danger of it actually executing.

“What is it?” said Noah.

“Something from ‘them,’ I assume,” Audrey said. “I guess this is how they get in touch.”

“But talking to them ... is that wise?”

“I doubt it,” Audrey said, “but I need more information. Wait here. I’ll be in the bedroom.”

Noah didn’t look enthusiastic about the plan, but he stayed where he was, and Audrey went into the bedroom and shut the door. Matilda, who had probably been put off by all of the talking and the presence of strangers, was curled up at the foot of the bed, stretched out and fast asleep. Audrey was irrationally annoyed that Matilda could be so relaxed, given the circumstances.

Audrey sat on the bed and, suppressing all of her security instincts, gave the icon an activating long gaze. The icon began to pulse in different colors: red, green, mauve ... then someone picked up, and the room around her went black. She was in a projection of a featureless, inky bubble, and across from her was a cartoon or a sketch of a tall woman with a mahogany complexion. Audrey looked down at her own hands: she was a sketch, too.

“Audrey! I’m so glad to meet you,” said the sketch-woman. “My name is Alice.”

It was something like fifteen minutes before Audrey and Alice were done talking, by which time Audrey was fairly convinced they could work together. That was the outcome she had least expected.

She took an oversized shoulder bag down from her closet, went to the bedside table, and packed her data tab readers, her data tabs, and some other pieces of useful electronics. Her AI scarf was in her dresser, and she packed that next. Then she went to the kitchen, holding up a wait just a minute finger for Noah as she passed him, and got two bottles of filtered water, some protein bars, and four pouches of cat food. It might have been helpful to bring some clothes, but her bag was nearly at capacity, and she didn’t want to look like someone who was traveling with luggage. Whatever was ahead, she’d make do—assuming she even got out of her apartment.

Next came the part she knew was stupid. She took the folding cat carrier out of the hall closet, brought it into the bedroom, and transferred Matilda inside before the cat could wake enough to protest. While she was closing the carrier, Noah entered the room.

“Vet appointment?” he said.

Audrey almost laughed. “An appointment.”

“With ‘them’? You know who that is, now?”

“I know what they call themselves. I don’t think they’d like me to tell you.”

“Why does it matter what they’d like?”

Audrey set the carrier and the shoulder bag on the floor, walked over to Noah, and kissed him on the cheek. “They might be new friends.”

“You’re trying to leave?” he said.

“Are you trying to stop me?”

Audrey didn’t wait for an answer but picked up the bag and carrier and headed for the front door. Noah ran after her, catching up and blocking her exit.

“Audrey, stay here. We’ll work this out together.”

“What is there to work out?” she said. “This isn’t between us: it’s between Cascadia and America. That’s all that matters right now.”

“You can’t do anything about that,” he said.

“It turns out that maybe I can.”

She tried to shoulder him aside, but he was about as movable as a utility pole. Audrey looked into Noah’s eyes, and he looked directly back at her. Neither of them flinched, or moved, or spoke for a long, terrifying, naked moment. As it passed, Noah’s brow wrinkled, and he opened his mouth to speak. Audrey finally looked away.

“I think most people underestimate you, Audrey,” Noah said, “and I like to think that I don’t do that. But are you honestly telling me that if I move, if I don’t stop you or call someone else to stop you, that you might be able to help stop the war?”

“It’s probably a long shot,” Audrey said.

Noah guffawed, not cheerfully. “Of course it’s a long shot. As a matter of fact, it seems to me like an impossibility. What is it you think you can do?”

“I have information about my side that ... Well, it could be valuable.”

“If you want to stop the war, why not turn yourself in and give it to the Cascadian government?”

“It’s not that kind of information.”

“I’m having trouble believing you,” Noah said.

Audrey looked back into his face, where his gentle eyes contradicted his stern brow. “Believe me anyway,” she said.

He scanned her face, for what she didn’t know. Finally, he reached out and pried the handle to Matilda’s carrier out her hand. Then, holding the carrier, he stepped aside.

“Are you taking a hostage?” Audrey asked hoarsely.

“Ha,” Noah said. “What kind of food does she like?”

Audrey felt a flood of relief. It wasn’t just that Noah seemed ready to let her leave; the other part was that she couldn’t remember the last time someone had offered to assume a responsibility so that she wouldn’t have to.

“Jen-Marie’s,” she said. “Ocean fish flavor. It comes in the green pouches. Here.” She fished the four pouches she’d packed out of her bag and handed them to him. “It’s not my fault if she claws your furniture.”

Noah didn’t respond to that. Matilda meowed plaintively. Audrey grabbed the door handle and made herself step outside. Closing the door behind her, her eyes felt hot, and tears trickled down her face for reasons she didn’t entirely understand. Her nose running, she hurried down the stairs and out to the road. Within minutes, probably due to help from the Louvre, a half-sized public bus pulled up. She got on it.

Audrey followed instructions through her lenses when the minibus dropped her off at the train station. According to what she was being told, she would take the first train that arrived, transfer, take another train, and travel the remainder of the way in an autonomous car that would meet her at a transit hub.

She had time as she traveled to imagine her future, but her attempts weren’t promising. There was the scenario in which the train suddenly stopped, and she was dragged away by Cascadian counterintelligence, or by someone worse. There was the scenario in which an American agent who’d somehow been clued in to her betrayal boarded the train and escorted her off with some kind of tiny weapon poised to kill her if she made a wrong move. There were several scenarios in which someone simply showed up and shot her. There was also the scenario where she arrived at the Louvre location and they killed her. All in all, she hoped her future was something beyond the possibilities that were coming into her head.

She imagined herself somehow past all this, the war somehow over and Audrey herself free and out of danger. What would she do? Retire, she thought. Then she would probably devote some time to intensive therapy. If she stayed in Cascadia, the counseling would be free, whether she worked with a human therapist, an AI, or a human-AI team. In the U.S., fees were through the roof and often weren’t covered by medical insurance, at least not for people without serious mental illnesses.

What else? She couldn’t imagine. She had purposely kept from picturing what life might be like after her mission, and now probably wasn’t the best time to start. There was no way to know what was coming next, so none of the dangers chasing each other around her mind could be settled or set aside. Anyway, the main question was what to do about Godbout. Alice had made it sound like though the Louvre had some ideas, which was a good thing. There wasn’t much Audrey could do to reach him on her own.

When she boarded the first train, she turned off her seat light to gaze moodily out the window the whole ride. She got off at the appointed station, waited in near silence for the next train, got on it, and gazed out the window again. She wasn’t used to traveling into the future without having a course set, and she wasn’t used to not knowing for sure what was going on. She didn’t like either feeling, but one way or another, soon she’d move on to the next thing, whatever that was, and then maybe she could start making decisions again.

She arrived at Sakura Grill in the wee hours. The building was dark, but she’d expected that. Alice met her at the door.

“It’s nice to meet you, Audrey,” Alice said.

“Well, I hope it’s nice to meet you, too,” Audrey said. Alice showed her into the dining room, where despite the hour, the room was alive with people crowding around tables using keyboards, specialized controllers, physical displays. There were two objects on the floor that looked like picnic coolers, though based on the cables connected to them, they were most likely self-contained specialized computers or self-contained AIs, like her scarf—though considering their size, these might have much greater capabilities. Audrey guessed the group was working with a host of networked AIs as well, but there would be no way to know just from looking.

Audrey counted fourteen people in sight, including Alice and a man Audrey knew from images in her files to be Gene Ajou. He sat at a table in the corner with a young woman and a man in his seventies or thereabouts. Apart from those at the table with Ajou, everyone seemed to be hard at work on, Audrey assumed, some kind of hacking.

“This is just one cell,” said Audrey.

“Of course,” Alice said. “One of many. Most of us never meet anyone from other cells. I was fortunate enough to have been invited to join Tobias-Henry’s. We’re sort of the flagship.”

“Doesn’t look like much,” Audrey said.

“No,” Alice said, “but you know as well as I do that appearances can deceive.”

That was true enough. “What kind of mischief are we up to tonight?” Audrey asked.

“Oh, all kinds,” Alice said. “We’re especially busy now that the war’s started. One of the things we’ve been doing for the past ten or twelve years has been placing honeypots for black hat hackers and foreign cyber military operations, and the American attacks today fell into a boatload of them. You know what a honeypot is?”

Audrey nodded, wondering whether she was being probed or if Alice was just being a good host. “A trap that looks like a prize,” she said. “It attracts people and AIs to hack it, to get them to expose their information or vulnerabilities.”

Alice nodded. “We spread ours everywhere we can, with no up-front plan of action,” she said. “We gather information that lets us access systems, and then we get into those systems and establish more durable back door access, or we compromise AIs and leave them available for us to co-opt as needed. We like to play a long game.”

“That’s surprisingly patient for a bunch of anarchists,” Audrey said. She realized she was being contentious. Reflecting on that, it occurred to her why: if this group wasn’t what she thought it was, then whoever they really were, they were a great danger to her. If they were who they said they were, though, then the danger was much greater. She was trying to establish that they shouldn’t try to play around with her, like a cat trying to big by making her fur stand on end. It was a little sad, the way Audrey was puffing up. Then again, even if there’s puffing up involved, a smart person knows not to fool with an angry cat.

“We aren’t as much anarchist as loosely organized activists,” Alice said. “We have procedures for starting and governing cells, a mission, and a set of non-negotiable principles. Apart from that, we just accumulate access and leverage, and we share that, and each cell uses it as they see fit.”

If Alice was actually sharing meaningful details about the Louvre’s operations, that was a either a sign of trust or a sign that Audrey wasn’t ever going to have a chance to share that information. Another possibility was that Alice was feeding Audrey misinformation and hoping Audrey would spread it around, maybe encouraging someone to attack the Louvre in the wrong place or in the wrong way—ironically, a strategy not too different from a honeypot.

If Alice was offering trust, that would be bold, but appropriate if the Louvre wanted Audrey on their side. It’s much easier to trust someone who’s already shared secrets with you.

Normally, Audrey would have bet on the misinformation scenario. Offering sensitive details of your operation to someone you’d just met seemed reckless. With the Louvre, though, the situation was different. It was very likely that they had access to detailed behavioral profiles for most of the people they dealt with. If they made a point of using AIs or expert systems that specialized in psychological and behavioral analytics, they might have a fairly good idea how Audrey or anyone else they targeted would respond in most situations. In other words, they might trust Audrey simply because their data made it clear she was trustworthy.

Or maybe it was simpler than that, and they just knew Audrey had no one to run to. Godbout had made her a sacrificed asset. She could also be considered a defector.

“We have another advantage that’s proving to be very helpful, too,” Alice said. “Years ago, we began infiltrating third party companies that handle later phases of computing hardware manufacture. At the tail end of the manufacturing process, after most of the inspections, we modify or add on to some of that hardware, providing ourselves with built-in, hard-wired back doors. The components we’ve compromised then get used in computers around the world by corporations, universities, governments, private individuals—anyone.”

That was disturbing—shocking, actually. That kind of access could give the Louvre enormous power, and Alice, if she was being truthful, had made it clear that nobody in the organization was really in charge. Given a choice of having the people with that power working with her or against her, though, Audrey knew which she’d go with.

“So, you’re not relying so much on exploits and software vulnerabilities as you are on access you’ve gotten through your honeypots and on interventions in manufacturing,” Audrey said.

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” said Alice. “We do a lot of things. We have world-class hackers and AI wranglers, and we’re just starting to involve some people like me, who are responsible for planning a series of actions that can accomplish more of our goals than simply doxxing or damaging a target. We have custom-developed AIs that are unlike anything anyone else has—governments, militaries, and big corporations included. Actually, one of the meanings ‘The Louvre’ has come to take on is a place full of works of art, meaning our specialized AIs.”

“That’s where the name comes from?”

“No,” said Alice. “Here, let me introduce you to Tobias-Henry—and Gene, for that matter. Tobias-Henry can give you an idea of what we’re about. Technology is only a means to an end for us. At heart, we’re revolutionaries.”

Along with the interference in equipment manufacture, the word “revolutionary” was Audrey’s second red flag. Who were these people she’d so abruptly chosen to trust?

Well, she was about to find out.

“Just ... south,” Lyric said. “We mainly want to get away from the war and the fires.”

“Surprisingly sensible for young people,” Sophia said.

“What about you two?” said Lyric.

“We’re still thinking through our options,” Burke said.

Marley got the sense that was as much as he was going to say about that changed the subject. “So, Sophia, you were electrician?” they said.

“I was. Now, I guess I’m retired,” said Sophia.

“Are you enjoying retirement?”

“Retirement isn’t something you enjoy,” said Sophia. “It’s something you put up with. You’re out of work. You should understand.”

Marley didn’t volunteer that they’d were supposed to be doing interviews for a streaming show. Even an unpaid job might be unkind to mention, given how Sophia seemed to feel about her own profession having been made obsolete years before.

“What about you, Burke?” Lyric asked. “Are you retired, too?”

“I’m a chemist,” Burke said. “I’m semi-retired.”

Sophia shot him a dirty look. Burke sat a little straighter and kept his eyes fixed on the road. Marley was even more curious about what was in the aluminum case now, but it was none of their business, and they had other things to worry about. Not every question had to be answered.

The conversation flagged from there, and after a few minutes Burke said, “Robby, put on some music, would you?” Robby didn’t seem to need further instructions: from a speaker somewhere in his body, music came on, some old-time singer with a surprisingly wobbly voice. Marley was sure they’d heard the singer before, but they didn’t know who it was.

I’ve been to Hollywood, I’ve been to Redwood. I crossed the ocean for a heart of gold ... the singer crooned. Up in front, Sophia and Burke were having a whispered conversation.

“We have to find Gia,” Lyric said to Marley in a very quiet voice. “Anthem, too. I hope they’re together. They’d both feel a lot safer that way.”

“I’ll go back and look for them when you’re settled,” Marley whispered back.

Lyric looked back at Marley with a surprised expression. She seemed on the verge of crying.

“Or ...” Marley said, thinking. “Actually, once we’re somewhere safe, we can just turn our lenses back on and call Gia. Maybe she’ll have hers on, too, and we can find out if she’s OK and if she has Anthem.” Marley shoved down another in a series of thoughts about the terrible things that might be happening to both their friend and their dog. “Did you see her get the leash? Do you think she has her?”

Lyric took Marley’s hand and squeezed it. “I don’t know,” Lyric said. “I do know that if Gia had even half a chance to go after Anthem, she did, and she’ll make sure Anthem’s safe.”

Marley nodded.

“Gia idolizes you,” Lyric said. “You knew that, right?”

“I don’t think Gia idolizes anyone except Gia,” Marley said. They smiled, even though they could feel tears trying to break through. “But who can blame her?”

“OK, don’t believe me,” Lyric said. “Anyway, I bet we’ll turn on our lenses and have a message from her, and she’ll be fine.”

“Probably,” Marley said without conviction. “You think we’re safe with these two, right? There’s nothing nefarious going on?”

“I’m pretty sure there is something nefarious going on,” Lyric said, “but I don’t think it has to do with us, and it’s probably not as nefarious as they think it is.”

What do you think is in that case? Marley wanted to ask, but glancing up, they saw Sophia watching them in the strange little oblong mirror hanging from the roof of the car near the windshield. A “rear-view mirror,” Marley remembered belatedly. Those had been in all the manually driven cars in Deaf Ears. Marley never knew they could be used for spying on people. They resolved to be more aware.

Marley woke when the van jarred to a halt in a way that an autonomous vehicle never would. They realized they were slumped against Lyric, who had an arm around them.

“Did I fall asleep?” Marley said, sitting up reluctantly.

Lyric nodded.

“Where are we?”

“I don’t know,” Lyric said.

Burke turned around from the front. “Pee break!” he announced. “Get out, stretch your legs! Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em!”

Marley sat up, yawning and stiff, and looked out the grimy window. A tiny cinder block stood alone in a scrub-filled field. Other than that little cube of a structure, there was no sign of civilization except for power lines stretching monotonously along the road. Marley pulled the door open, shoving hard to shift its unwilling mechanism, and sidled past the robot to climb out. Lyric followed.

The fresh air was surprisingly cool. Maybe that was just compared to the confines of the musty van, but it could be the weather had shifted. Marley gestured for a weather report, but nothing happened. Sophia watched them from her seat. When she saw the confused expression on Marley’s face, she nodded, satisfied.

“Forgot your lenses were off?” she said.

That was what it was. Marley nodded.

Burke had hustled off to the cinder block building, which Marley could now see had two doors with labels that each said “restroom.” Sophia eased herself out of her van and down to the ground, groaning.

“Would you be comfortable if I turn my lenses on for a couple of minutes?” Marley said. “We were separated from our friend and my dog, and we just want to be sure they’re OK.”

Sophia grunted. “We’re trying to keep a low profile,” she said severely, but then she thought for a moment and said, “What kind of dog?”

“She’s a mutt,” Marley said. “She’s sweet.”

“Anyone looking for you?” Sophia said.

“Me?” said Marley. “No.”

Sophia looked at Lyric. She groaned again, stretching her back. “OK, I guess just get away from the van when you’re connected. Only a couple of minutes, right? And check the bulletins while you’re at it.”

Marley nodded. Lyric followed them past the restrooms and at least eighty meters out into the field, where they stood together under an alder tree. Marley tapped twice on their earpiece to restart their lenses. A moment later, the start-up interface appeared. There was a large stack of bulletin icons, too many to go through in a short time.

“It looks like it’s up!” Marley said. They gestured up the messages icon, which brought up a listing of a dozen or more messages, but none was from Gia. Marley gestured for a voice command. “Please answer any messages from family or good friends who seem like they might be worried about me to let them know I’m all right and that I’ll get back to them when I have a chance,” they said. Then, just to be sure. “Any messages from Gia?”

“Nothing,” Marley’s interface said.

“Send a priority message to Gia now: ‘Are you OK? We’re heading south and are safe. Is Anthem with you?’ End of message.”

An icon appeared to show that the message had been sent. Marley waited. Seconds ticked by.

“Nothing?” asked Lyric unnecessarily.

“Nothing,” Marley said, dismayed. “I’ll get a quick news bulletin while I wait.” They gestured for another voice command. “Give me a very brief summary to read, with maps, of what’s happening with the invasion and the wildfires and any other immediate dangers,” they said.

They scanned over the results, relaying them to Lyric as they read. “Wildfires to the west and south of Seattle. Cyberattacks have taken down some power stations and banks and things, and there are drones ... but it looks like we fought back most of the cyberattacks and took down a lot of the drones. The flotilla hasn’t landed yet. The American president made some kind of address ... He’s claiming we provoked the attacks with cyberwarfare. Western Oregon and Western California are still mostly safe, except for some of the cyberattacks.” They gestured for another voice command. “Where are we now?”

“About 15 kilometers north of Corvallis, Oregon, near route 99W,” said Marley’s earpiece.

“We’re a little north of Corvallis,” Marley told Lyric. They flipped back to messages, but there was nothing from Gia yet. It hadn’t been necessary to check: there would have been a notification.

They waited under the tree for several more long, chilly minutes, until Sophia walked around the bathroom building and yelled back, “Are you coming?”

“We’re coming!” Lyric called back.

Reluctantly, Marley powered down their lenses. They and Lyric trudged over to use the grim little restrooms, and then they both shut themselves back into the van.

After more whispered discussion between Burke and Sophia, Burke declared they’d be taking the Redwood Highway and asked Marley and Lyric where they wanted to be dropped off.

“Doesn’t that go through Eureka?” Marley said.

“It does,” said Burke. “You have friends there?”

“Yes!” Marley said. They clarified for Lyric: “Alice, from my old job at Deaf Ears.”

“You worked on Deaf Ears?” said Sophia.

“I was one of the writers.”

“On Deaf Ears?” Sophia said disbelievingly. “What’s your name again?”

“Marley Jun.”

“I’m going to look that up later to see if it’s true.”

“Sure,” Marley said. “So is Eureka OK?”

“Sounds fine,” said Burke.

“You really worked on Deaf Ears?” Sophia said. “I didn’t expect that.”

She had some kind of snack in a small bag, and she crunched some of whatever it was pensively. “That’s a decent show,” she said finally. “Good job.” She seemed uncomfortable giving the compliment.

“Thank you,” said Marley.

After sharing what they’d found out with Sophia and Burke, Marley fell back asleep against Lyric. Their dreams were uneasy: they were lost in smoky, tangled forest, looking for someone or something, constantly hearing Anthem behind them and turning to find her not there.

They woke in the middle of the night, when the van jerked to a halt in front of a bedding store. Like the other businesses on the block, it was closed and dark.

“This stop, Eureka” said Burke, sotto voce. Sophia had tilted back her seat and was fast asleep, snoring. Lyric yawned and stretched.

“We can’t thank you enough for giving us a ride,” Lyric said. “Is there anything we can do for you? Maybe there’s something Marley can check on their lenses before you go?”

Burke glanced at Sophia. “Maybe just get the news for us,” he said. “Not near the van! But come back over when you’re done and let us know what’s going on. And ... see if they mention us.”

“In news bulletins?”

“Just in case,” Burke said. He hesitated, then, seeming to realize it was necessary, added “I’m Burke Fawcett, F-A-W-C-E-T-T, and Sophia is Sophia Lingenfelter ... L - I - N - G - E - N - F - E - L - T - E - R. Don’t tell anybody you saw us, though. Deal?”

“Absolutely,” Marley said, and Lyric said, “Deal.”

Marley wanted to ask what Burke and Sophia had done that might be newsworthy, but they were fairly sure whatever the reason for the request, Burke and Sophia wouldn’t want to share it.

They walked down the sidewalk with Lyric and sat at a picnic table outside a darkened Venezuelan restaurant. There, they restarted their lenses.

“Anything from Gia?” Lyric said hopefully.

Marley called up the message interface just to make sure, then shook their head. Was the lens network still offline up north? They searched on that, and yes, there were pockets where the lens network was out. Still, wouldn’t Gia have had time to get to a place where there was service? But then, she wouldn’t have been able to find out where service was still up without her lenses working, and it was the middle of the night, and she must have been exhausted. Maybe she and Anthem had found safe shelter and were just asleep. Marley dictated a quick follow-up message.

“Lyric and I are in Eureka now, and we’ll try to stay with a friend of mine here, or maybe find a hotel. We’re worried about you! Call me as soon as you get this, OK?” They sent it, then did a quick scan of the news for Burke.

The wildfires were still burning, though one was partly contained. There had been new American cyberattacks: nothing on the scale of the initial blitz, but a constant barrage of new exploits. The worst news was of the American flotilla, which had met with a lot of trouble, especially with Cascadians hacking on-board systems, but had still managed to attack the city. They had hit Seattle with electromagnetic pulse weapons designed to take out Cascadian electronics and computerized defenses, and American soldiers had landed and were now occupying some parts of the city, though Cascadian troops in the area seemed to have stopped the American advance for the time being.

Marley felt sick to their stomach.

Last, they checked to see if there was any mention of Burke or Sophia in recent news, but there was nothing. There were some older pieces, though, one a feature on a local news site about Robby, one from the late 2040s about Burke retiring from teaching, and some others. Some other time, Marley thought, they might want to look at those.

Marley turned off their lenses again and walked back to the van to pass on what they’d found out. Burke seemed encouraged there was no mention of Sophia and himself, and he shook Marley’s and Lyric’s hands through the window before driving off. As the van pulled out onto the road, Robby stuck his torso out the window and waved goodbye with all four hands by rotating slowly like a miniature ferris wheel. The silent vehicle turned a corner, and then they were gone.

It was just as chilly there in the parking lot as it had been outside the little restroom building.

“I’ll call Alice now, OK?” Marley said.

“Definitely. And I was thinking it’s probably safe for me to turn my lenses back on. Can you think of any reason not to?”

Marley considered. The only reason to turn their lenses off in the first place had been to avoid the danger of attracting the attention of American soldiers, and they were well away from the front now. “It seems fine to me,” they said. Lyric nodded decisively and tapped her earpiece. Marley gestured up her contacts and called Alice, voice only.

“Hello,” answered a voice Marley didn’t recognize, at an androgynous pitch that wasn’t very far from where Marley’s had settled since they started hormone replacement therapy back in college.

“I’m calling for Alice,” Marley said. They felt disorientingly like they were making an old-time “telephone” call, the way characters were always doing in Deaf Ears. Some telephones had been used by multiple people, so you might call for one person and end up talking to another. That was never the case with lenses, though—so who was the voice?

“She’s not taking calls just at the moment,” the voice said. “This is Sobat, Alice’s AI.”

“Why is Alice having her AI answer calls?” Marley said. “Why not let it just go to a message?”

“She asked me to take your call if you got in touch some time when she was busy,” said Sobat.

“Isn’t she sleeping?”

“She’s working,” Sobat said. “You can call her at work.”

“Call her at ... ?” Marley said. “Wait, you mean with the other app?”

“Yes, please,” Sobat said. “Good night, Marley.”

“Thank you,” Marley said, and they disconnected.

“Alice’s AI is answering her calls?” Lyric said.

Marley nodded. “I have a different way to get in touch with her, but I should probably be somewhere more private.”

Lyric looked at Marley quizzically.

“I don’t think I can explain without sharing things she might not want me to share,” Marley said.

“Well, now you’re just making me more curious,” said Lyric.

“I’ll go back to the picnic table. Meanwhile ... maybe you can come up with a theory about what Burke and Sophia have in that case.”

“Oh, definitely drugs,” said Lyric. “Or a doomsday device. Or a bunch of tiny robots.”

Marley was too concerned about too many things to laugh, but they felt a hint of a smile pass over their lips. They walked back to the picnic table and sat down. They had temporarily forgotten about Alice being involved with the Louvre. Between the interview and the war and the fires and Gia being missing, it had been crowded out of their head. They sighed and brought up the red and black icon. After hesitating for a minute, they let their gaze settle on it long enough to activate it. The icon had a chance to cycle through only three or four colors before the black bubble enveloped Marley and the stylized version of Alice appeared.

“Honey! I’m so glad you called,” Alice said. “I was worried, with everything that’s going on. Did you think more about that opportunity?”

“No,” said Marley. “But I’m here in Eureka, with a ... friend ... I was just wondering if it might be OK to come stay with you.”

“Oh, I’m not there,” Alice said. “I’ve been pretty busy. You could stay at my apartment if you want—but I really wish you’d think more about helping us. We could use you.”

“I don’t—” Marley began, but then they stopped.

“What?” Alice said. “Do you need something?”

“I have some things I’m worried about,” Marley said slowly. “We’re missing a friend, and she’s not answering when I message her. Anthem’s with her.”

“And you think she might not be OK?”

“We were separated trying to get away from the American invasion. We were up near Seattle at the time.”

“Marley! Are you all right?”

Marley nodded. “And I have another friend who might ... well, if the Americans do take over, she might need help.”

“You have some interesting friends,” Alice said. “I mean, me most of all, but it sounds like some other interesting friends, too. So we might be able to help you with your friends, and in return you might be able to help us?”

“Not with anything destructive! But if I can help with something that’s not, you know ...”

“Terrible?”

Marley nodded again. “I mean, if there’s nothing like that, don’t—”

“No, I get it, Marley. I’ve been reflecting on that a lot since we talked. I should have thought more before I contacted you in the first place. The work they were doing here, before I joined up—that’s not really up your alley. We’re doing some new things now, though. We want to help protect Cascadia—you know, from the Americans. There might be something. But you’ll come talk to us? I’m pretty sure I can get some help for your friends. I’ll definitely try.”

“I have to check with my ... friend—the one who’s here with me—to make sure. Maybe you can take us somewhere the Americans wouldn’t be able to get to, even if they, you know ...”

Alice nodded. “That sounds good. Call me after you have your talk.”

#

When Marley brought the question to Lyric, they did their best to explain everything in a nutshell.

“I don’t like the idea of you getting involved with this group just to find a safe place for me. I can just turn off my lenses and hide somewhere.”

“No, I think I might want to help them,” Marley said. “I mean, I have to hear what they want me to do first—”

“Is that safe?”

“Alice isn’t going to put me in a situation where I have to do anything I don’t want to. I mean, I don’t know if she’s making a good choice, but I completely trust her. She’s almost like family.”

“Oh, so you’re already bringing me to meet your family?” Lyric said, and she grinned.

Apparently they were going, Marley thought, and they realized they were actually a bit excited to introduce Alice to Lyric.

Marley sent a message to Sobat, who sent one back a few minutes later letting them know a car was on its way to pick them up. They sat at a picnic table while they waited. Far above, stars glittered.

“What would you be doing for the Louvre?” said Lyric.

Marley laughed shortly. “Coming up with stories, I think. Sort of ... narratives.”

“What does that mean?”

“Well ... I mean, we use stories all the time, right? To tell ourselves who we are and what we’re doing.”

Lyric nodded.

“So it’s like writing a script, in a way,” Marley continued. “Making choices about what to include in our stories and what not to, about who the characters really are, what the basic problems are that we’re trying to solve. If we didn’t tell ourselves stories about our lives, I don’t think we’d know how to react to anything. I mean, I think of it as being about choices.

“For example: we’re going to go see a group of people who are technically criminals and who we know very little about, right? And I’m talking about maybe working with them. There are all kinds of ways we could describe that, but the way I’m describing it to myself is: This group seems like my best opportunity to keep you safe, and they might be able to help us find Gia, and maybe I can even contribute to keeping the whole country safe, in some kind of small way, if I help them. But you could just as easily tell a different story that would also be true.”

“You think about your stories a lot more than I do about mine,” Lyric said. “I think I usually follow whatever feels strongest. When I think, it’s not about structure, it’s about the words.” She leaned back against the table, looking up into the star-scattered blackness.

Marley wanted to ask more about that, about how Lyric wrote, but Lyric spoke first. “What’s the story of the war? Or ... I guess, what should the story of the war be?”

“Um,” said Marley. “Who are the characters?”

“Cascadia and America,” Lyric said. “You know, to stand in for their people. America is the jaded industrialist who was with Cascadia for a while and undervalued them until Cascadia set out on its own and did all these exciting things. Now America wants Cascadia to come back home and for things to be the way they used to be, but Cascadia has changed and grown and can’t just go back to how it was before.”

“Oh!” Marley said. “That’s interesting ... so ... one story could be that America has the power to force Cascadia to come back the way America wants, and then they’re trapped in this loveless relationship. Or we could take it darker, and Cascadia could do something desperate and destructive rather than go back. Or another story could be that Cascadia has grown and become more independent and proves too strong for America to take back, so they part ways forever, and America remains bitter and trapped in their attachments until something else forces them to grow.”

“None of those sound like a story you would write,” Lyric said.

“No, that’s true,” Marley said, a little surprised that Lyric could say that so confidently after such a short time. They stood up and began to pace. The sound of the gravel crunching under their shoes was homely and grounding. They experimented in their mind with different directions the story could take, brainstorming unlikely ideas, looking for a storyline that went somewhere worth going. Lyric waited, still watching the stars.

“Ah,” said Marley. “I know. Cascadia goes back to America.”

“It does?”

“It does, but it goes back on its own terms. It says, ‘I still love you, but if we’re going to be together, things are going to have to change. I’m not the same as I was, and I won’t live the way we used to live.’“

“Would America even accept that?” said Lyric.

“It would have to have a change of heart. Something would have to pierce its self-assurance, its idea that it was always the one who was right.”

“Its love for Cascadia?” said Lyric.

“I don’t think that,” said Marley. “Well, not that alone. Something humbling. Something about America itself. But if it could have that humility, and if Cascadia returned willingly, bringing with it all it had learned ...”

“That’s a beautiful story,” Lyric said. “I mean, hopefully we’re talking about a version of that story where little escaped refugees from the Mountain Republic are not crushed in the process of Cascadia and America getting back together.”

“Definitely a version like that,” said Marley.

A small autonomous van pulled up by the curb in front of Lyric and Marley. The windows were currently untinted, and they could see it was empty. A logo across the door said “Golden Valley Senior Day Program.”

A message popped up on Marley’s lenses, an arrow pointing to the van and the words “your ride.”

“Is this us, or should we be worried?” said Lyric.

“This is us,” said Marley. “But we should probably also be worried.”

“Let’s go, then,” said Lyric. “I’ve always wanted to see the Louvre.”

Marley had never ridden around in cars so much in their life. Mass transportation was the norm in most places. Cars and vans were usually just for connections and last miles and the occasional emergency.

Hours passed as the Golden Valley van drove south and west. Marley didn’t know where they were going, and it seemed petty to interrupt Alice in the middle of who knew what kind of war-related activity to get an answer that wouldn’t change anything. There didn’t seem to be any attempt to hide their route, which Marley had almost expected, so they were able to set the windows to clear or opaque as they liked. All that told Marley was that they were heading south and west, away from the coast.

“She didn’t say how far?” Lyric asked, half an hour in.

Marley shook their head. “Hey van?” she said.

“Hello,” said the van’s AI.

“Where are we going?”

“I don’t know,” the AI said. “They’re giving me instructions one turn at a time.”

“Who’s ‘they’?”

“I don’t know.”

“I guess it makes sense,” Lyric said. “If somebody got to the van, they wouldn’t want it to be able to tell them where the hideout is.”

“Who could get to the van?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Lyric said. “I’m just trying to be creatively paranoid.”

That probably was the right point of view for the moment. Marley tried not to think about how they were getting farther and farther from Gia and Anthem by the minute. They stared out the window at the dark landscape and occasional lights of civilization until, with Lyric’s head resting on their shoulder, they eventually fell asleep.

The darkness was only just beginning to gray when Marley and Lyric woke to the van playing a standard birdsong wake-up sound. The door slid open, and they climbed out, legs stiff, into a parking lot. In front of them stood a darkened restaurant surrounded by live oaks, with a sign that said “Sakura Grill.” A two-lane road led past them. Across the way, a yellowed pasture rippled in the moonlight.

Lyric stepped out next to Marley and took their arm. The van behind them slid its door closed, then rolled down a narrow track to the back of the building. Marley could hear the wind and, from somewhere, the rasping screech of a barn owl.

“Shall we check out this dark, mysterious building?” Lyric said.

Marley couldn’t muster a laugh, but they smiled. Together, the two walked to the entrance, but they found it locked. Lyric shrugged and rapped on the glass with her knuckles. They stood there in the chill evening, waiting. A dozen breaths later, there was a click, and the door unlocked and swung itself out, releasing light around a figure Marley was too dazzled to make out at first. The inside of the glass door had been covered with thick, black paper.

The figure resolved into Alice. She gathered Marley in, squeezing the breath out of them. Marley felt one knot of tension inside them relax. Alice held on for a few extra moments before letting them go.

“This is Lyric,” they said. Alice gave Marley a significant look, and they did their best not to react.

“I’m so glad you’re here,” Alice said. She turned to Lyric. “OK, first you two are going to need to sign our non-disclosure agreement, in fresh blood, obviously—”

“Does it have to be our blood?” Lyric said.

Alice gave Marley an approving glance, locked the front door, and opened another black-papered glass door to the inside.

Like the sign said, the place had clearly been a restaurant, and it still had tables and chairs, but there were darkened rectangles on the walls where pictures had once hung, and the kitchen area was silent, while the dining room tables were mostly covered with physical screens and boxes with wires trailing out of them. Two large picnic coolers near the center of the room were inexplicably connected by wires to some of the screens and other equipment. At least half a dozen people were sleeping on inflatable mattresses in a smaller, adjacent dining room where the lights were off. Another four or five were seated at tables, working at screens using physical keyboards or having conversations with voices coming from compact speakers—AIs, Marley assumed. Two older people stood in a corner, talking.

Of those people Marley could see, sleeping and awake, almost all were people of color. Other than the two in the corner, most people seemed to be in their twenties or thirties. Everyone was dressed as though for a long day of lounging: leggings or loose pants or casual dresses, tunics, T-shirts, the occasional bandana or scarf.

A handsome young man with bronze skin and an aquiline nose was sitting at one of the screens, arguing with a young woman who had black-and-violet, spiraling hair and was standing well within his personal space.

“It’s not a problem,” he said. “It happens all the time. And I fixed it.”

“Yeah, but if someone’s watching that server ...”

“I said I fixed it!” the young man said. “Believe me, there’s nothing to worry about.”

The young woman shrugged, gave him a brief kiss on the lips, and went to sit at another table.

“Is it everything you imagined?” Alice said dryly. “No, don’t answer that. A lot of us were up late into the night and barely slept. Some of us are still up. If you want to rest, I think we have a mattress or two free in the other room.”

Marley glanced over at Lyric.

“Coffee, maybe?” Lyric said.

“We can definitely do coffee,” Alice said. “And Chinwe will probably make some omelets and things soon. Come on.”

She led them back into the kitchen, where a fifty-something, suited Black man with a dignified bearing and gentle eyes was filling a small bowl with coffee.

“This is Marley, and this is Lyric,” Alice told him. “Marley’s a writer. Lyric is here for sanctuary and moral support. Marley, Lyric, this is the man who’s trying to help us go legit.”

“Hi,” the man said, extending a hand and smiling tiredly. “I’m Gene.”

“Sorry, no,” Gene said. “You’ll hear about it from elsewhere soon—I have to go. What did you need to tell me?”

“What I was trying to tell you is that an offshore bank account was opened in your name, and a lot of money is going into it.”

“I don’t want—”

Alice made a small, angry noise. “Not by us, Gene. The money is coming from the Citizen Dividend Office.”

“What? Why?”

“We can’t be sure, but we have a guess. It has to do with someone called Bennet Culkin?”

Gene had been distracted, but now all his attention turned to Alice.

“He opened the account,” Alice said. “We think he may be working for the American government.”

“That’s ...” Gene trailed off. He had been going to say that’s impossible, but in what way would it be impossible?

“Here,” Alice said. She handed him a small, pale blue slip of paper on which someone had hand-printed an account number and a bank name. “You can confirm that the account is in your name and that the deposits are being made if you want to—but if you do, they’ll record that you saw it, so don’t look unless you’re ready to have that evidence exist. Deposits are coming indirectly from the Cascadian government through a bunch of fake and defunct companies. You won’t see Culkin’s fingerprints.”

Gene stared at the account number. After a minute, he folded the paper and put it in his pocket.

“So, that’s our gift to you,” Alice continued. “If it makes you feel generous, we do have a request, but you don’t have to listen. Nobody’s expecting anything from you.”

“Then why help me? Assuming that’s what you’re really trying to do.”

“Because as far as we can tell, you’ve been chosen to be the scapegoat in some kind of plot against Cascadia. We don’t like plots against Cascadia. That’s the main reason.”

“But there are also other reasons?”

Alice just looked back at him, impassive. For Samantha’s sake? It wasn’t essential to know, but it would mean something if the Louvre was going out of its way for the family of one of its members.

“What’s the quickest version of your request?” Gene said.

“We know the Americans are planning to attack Cascadia,” Alice said. “We want to work with the government, but no one is listening to our offer. We thought if it was coming through you, someone might listen.”

“Why would people listen to me?”

“You’re trusted—for good reason, from what we can see.”

“You want me to tell people I know in the national government that I’m friendly with a high-profile criminal group, and then make a request on behalf of those criminals?”

Alice smiled. “Oh, that’s nice to hear, that we’re friendly. Sure, say that. Or say something else. We’re not trying to put words in your mouth. Or just forget we ever asked and go on about your business of trying to get out of this jam you’re in. We’d appreciate the introduction, but we’ll be fighting the Americans either way.”

Gene reached back into his pocket and felt the blue paper with the tips of his fingers. “If this turns out to be true,” he said, “then I appreciate the help.”

“If you do appreciate it,” Alice said, “then you’re welcome.”

Gene could have called a private car to get back to the agency, but the next train would arrive within minutes, so taking that would be faster. Waiting on the sparsely peopled platform, Gene told Ollie to let the office know he was on his way back in and would be there in about an hour. Meanwhile, he needed to come up to speed on all the information he was being sent about the war. Unfortunately, he had a couple of other things he needed to figure out first.

The first question was whether Samantha was really safe. She certainly seemed like it, but there had been someone with her the whole time. Could she have been a prisoner, forced to act like nothing was wrong ... ? Gene shook his head. Even at his most skeptical, he couldn’t convince himself that Samantha would have seemed perfectly at ease if she thought she was in danger. He knew her better than that. If she were in danger, she could pretend to be at ease but slip in something that would make it clear to Gene it was just an act.

That being the case, he should stop worrying about her—and he would have, if his brain worked that way. As it was, he pushed back worries about Samantha as far as he could, until they were just a faint crackling behind his other thoughts.

He couldn’t wrap his head around the story Alice had told him: that he was being framed, that it was Culkin who’d done it, and that Culkin was acting on behalf of the Americans. It made no sense. How could it possibly serve American interests to divert money to him from the Cascadian government? Why would Culkin be involved? The most likely thing was that this was some kind of mind game the Louvre was playing with him, maybe to get him to help them connect with the Cascadian government under false pretenses. If so, Gene doubted Samantha knew. They would have fed her lies, convinced her they were acting in good faith—but on the other hand, who knew? Maybe they were. Giving Gene the account number and the bank name helped make it convincing, but Alice and her associates might be counting on Gene not examining the account so as not to risk leaving evidence.

Samantha’s apparent trust these people made it rash to dismiss them as liars out of hand. Also, they’d given Gene an easy way to find out whether they were above board, at least about the existence of the account—though even if the account was real, Gene couldn’t just take their word for it that Culkin had set it up.

Accessing the account would leave evidence that he knew it existed, so if the account existed and really was what Alice said it was, then Gene would have to report it to law enforcement as soon as he’d viewed it. If it didn’t exist, then his next step would be to decide what to do about the Louvre. If they’d lied about the account, then he couldn’t trust them, and that would mean Samantha wasn’t safe no matter what she thought.

The train slid into the station with a rush of air. He boarded and took a seat by himself against the front wall of the car, facing back. As the train boosted up to speed, bending him forward with the momentum, he brought up a keyboard on his lenses and, after a moment of glancing around at the other passengers, most of whom were absorbed in reading or watching or writing on their own lenses, he scrambled the keyboard so that no one could see what he was typing. It made the process of entering information painfully slow, as he had to search for each letter and number, but it would be fairly secure from prying eyes, and he wouldn’t need to type much.

He took out the blue paper and unfolded it. “Lantzendörffer Bank,” it said, followed by a long string of numbers and letters. He typed the name into an open prompt box.

The bank was real, headquartered in Luxembourg. Its interface had an ornate, bas relief logo that was animated to look as though there was sunlight moving over it. He selected the account access option and filled in the account number by using his lenses to scan it from the paper.

The bank must have verified his identity via his lenses, because he was immediately admitted to the site, which showed him a pale gold rectangle containing a summary of his account. The account did exist. It was in his name. The current balance was nearly thirty-two million Cascadian thuns.

The balance went up even as he watched. When he tapped an icon to bring up account detail, he was presented with a long list of deposits in mostly the range of twenty to a few hundred Cascadian dollars, each from a different company Gene had never heard of. He looked up the first one on the list: it turned out to be a handkerchief manufacturer that had been closed for about eight months. It was listed as a sponsored business in the national directory. The second company had no network presence at all, but it was also listed in the registry.

Gene hadn’t really believed Alice could be telling the truth, he realized now. He thought he’d been withholding judgment, but seeing the bank account was the kind of shock you only get when you’re sure you’ve been lied to, but you haven’t.

He did a quick search for information about the bank, which was well-known and had been established in 1926. He couldn’t rule out the possibility that what he thought was a legitimate bank interface might be a complicated hoax set up by the Louvre, but he didn’t think that was what it was. Still, he had to verify.

“Ollie,” he subvocalized, phrasing his request carefully, wary of the other passengers, “can you please contact a human being at this institution and confirm the information I’m looking at is real?”

“Sure,” Ollie replied. “That should take a few minutes.”

Clearly Gene was being framed for something, and possibly it was exactly as Alice had said, that it was Bennet Culkin who’d made him the target. Gene realized just then that he did have a way to see whether that was true. He’d take care of that as soon as he got back.

Since the account really existed, he now had no sane choice but to contact the authorities. Neither delaying nor trying to pretend he didn’t know about the money would do him any good. He needed to be on the record as trying to stop whatever this was as soon as possible.

At the same time, he wasn’t eager to be taken into custody or held for questioning: he had a job to do, as well as a question he needed to get answered in person. Between those limitations and having no law enforcement contacts, he ended up accessing the contact portal for the Cascadian Bureau of Investigation. One of the options in the portal was to leave information on a crime or suspected crime. He used that, briefly describing what he knew: the bank, the account number, the current balance, and the fact that he’d had no inkling of the account’s existence until that hour. He left out any mention of his source. He’d have to decide later if he could share anything about that.

He reviewed his letter at least three times before he was satisfied, making small changes with each pass. By then Ollie had gotten back to confirm: the bank account was real, confirmed through several types of AI inquiries and a short conversation with a bank official at Lantzendörffer.

Gene took a deep breath and sent the message.

A part of Gene expected something to happen that instant. After all, AIs would be screening those incoming messages and prioritizing them. At the same time, Gene wondered if his note might not get lost in the shuffle for a little while, given that war had just begun. He hoped it would.

Back at the Agency, Gene took the stairs at the back of the building instead of the elevator at the front, even though he knew it would cost him precious time. At the top of the stairs, instead of going down the main hallway to the right, he turned left to go around the far side of the building. This brought him past Bennet Culkin’s office.

Unfortunately, it was empty. Gene stopped to think for a moment, disappointed. He’d have to go to his own office and message Culkin, asking to come by. He’d been trying to avoid that. He had just begun planning the message in his head when he saw Culkin turn the corner, walking toward him. Culkin slowed when he saw Gene, but Gene smiled and strode forward.

“Bennet!” he said. “How are you holding up? All right?”

Culkin hesitated, then shrugged. “I’m fine. I’m worried, obviously. The war ...”

Gene nodded. “Me too—very much so. We’ll just have to do our jobs and hope it’s enough. Oh, hey, do you have a minute for a question?”

“Sure,” Culkin said.

“By any chance, did you open an offshore bank account in my name to frame me in, I guess, some kind of fraud scheme?”

Several emotions crossed Culkin’s face before he settled on shock. “What?”

Gene waited.

“No!” Culkin elaborated. “God, no!”

Gene shook his head, laughing. “I’m sorry, that was a crazy question. But you should have seen your face! Somebody’s definitely trying to prank me, though ... and you know, I shouldn’t take it so lightly at a time like this, but it’s pretty ridiculous, isn’t it? I mean, my God!”

Culkin laughed weakly. “That’s ... crazy,” he said.

“I know!” said Gene. “Honestly, I’m sorry, Bennet. This war has me on edge, and my daughter was sick the other day—she’s fine now, don’t worry. I don’t know why seemed so funny. It doesn’t seem funny now. Anyway, we should both get back to what we were doing. I’ll catch up with you in a bit.”

“Sounds good,” Culkin said, and with a fixed smile, he continued past Gene to his office.

Gene strode on to his own office, not hurrying, but keeping his head down to discourage interaction. A member of his emergency operations center team tried to stop him, but he waved her back. “Sorry, it’s going to have to wait,” he said.

When he reached his office, he sat down at his desk and brought back up the message he’d sent to the CBI. “Ollie, add an update to this,” he said. The update would be filed with the original message, and anyone who might have already read the original would be alerted that there was more information. Rather than dictating, Gene opened a keyboard and typed his addition:

It appears that the person responsible for opening the account is Bennet Culkin, who works with me at the Agency of Resilience and Disaster Relief as my acting Chief of Staff. I’m about as certain of that as I can be, but I don’t have direct evidence.

“OK Ollie,” he said. “What can we assign Bennet to do that will keep him away from sensitive information without spooking him any more than he already is?”

Back in his office, Gene trampled some painstakingly orchestrated personnel assignments so that he could detail Culkin to coordinate communications and support from Cascadia’s allies. Unfortunately, most of Cascadia’s allies were also allied with the United States, and it was unlikely that any other large nation would be interested in interfering beyond perhaps a toothless condemnation of the initial U.S. attack. Even so, there was enough work in that area to keep Culkin busy indefinitely, and it would keep him away from most of the classified information. It was also an important role, which Gene hoped might reassure Culkin that he hadn’t been found out after all.

With that done, Gene went down to the ARDR Emergency Operations Center, a circular conference room in the basement that was set up for managing crises and had encrypted and redundant communications connections to other agencies and bureaus.

He stepped out of the elevator at the basement level and entered the command center through an identity-controlled steel door. The dozens of people inside were so intent on the chaotic situation that his arrival went more or less unnoticed. He had a ridiculous urge to act like he was in an old-time movie and shout “OK people, what’ve we got?” Instead, he claimed the first open station he saw and began reviewing the projections both at the station and around the room.

There were no screens or holographic models in the command center, but a lens program made it look as though there were, projecting two-dimensional displays as though they were on walls and showing a sprawling, three-dimensional model of the entire country at table height in the middle of the room. All of the projections were keyed to appear in the same location via everyone’s lenses, though you could easily pull any of them closer for a better view. If you kept your display on the default, though, and if you looked around you at everything in its designated location, you could coordinate with others who were physically or virtually in the room. You could point at things, display data on shared monitor panels, and otherwise work as though you were physically together, surrounded by physical screens. To add to the personnel who were physically present, many dozens more were there virtually, but none of them would be displayed in Gene’s lenses unless Gene connected to talk with them, or unless they sought him out. Similarly, all of Gene’s staff were virtually available in the designated command centers at other agencies, where the same displays were being shown.

The news panels at Gene’s station and the information being shown around the room told a rapidly evolving story. Cascadia had formally declared war. The flotilla had entered Puget Sound and was only minutes from the Seattle sea wall, and the Americans had simultaneously launched attacks on several other fronts. Cyberattacks and satellite jamming systems had taken down the lens network in locations throughout northwest Washington, and further cyberattacks had compromised electric micro-grids, banks, transportation systems, and other key targets. Multiple types of American drones had been spotted in locations as far south as Portland and as far north as Sumas, at the Canadian border. There had been a rash of confirmed laser attacks from U.S. military satellites, silent and invisible weapons that heated their targets to the point of catastrophic explosion in a fraction of a second. Gene was surprised to see, however, that each of the U.S. space-based laser weapons that could reach Cascadia had quickly been disabled. However, he apparently wasn’t on the list of people cleared to know how Cascadia had managed that. His guess was space-based anti-satellite systems with focused microwave weapons, or something similar. Cascadia’s satellites were often touted as the most sophisticated in the world, though the Americans disputed it. Based on how things were playing out in orbit, it seemed the Americans might be mistaken.

In some ways more disturbing than the outright attacks were reports of a rash of wildfires south and west of Seattle. It was early August, the peak of the wildfire season, but there had been no lightning in the affected areas recently, and for that many fires to spring up all at the same time suggested the cause might not be natural. It would be easy to ignite blazes like that with drones or, until they were disabled, with satellite-based lasers, Gene reflected uneasily.

When he’d caught up with the most important of the latest developments, Gene shifted his attention to the model of Cascadia, gesturing to bring it closer. Staff between him and the map were edited out of his field of view to make room for the magnification. He could turn layers of the model on and off to view cyberattacks, wildfires, drones, and other elements of the American attack, as well as some of Cascadia’s military capabilities.

Many of Cascadia’s defenses, however, wouldn’t appear on a map. Unlike the United States, Cascadia had no offensive objective in this war, and as a result it could concentrate solely on undermining the Americans’ capabilities. Cascadia’s physical military forces—humans, robots, planes, autonomous weapons and vehicles, drones, and more—had already scrambled to protect Seattle from the invading flotilla, and more such forces, especially drones, were being deployed to repel some of the American drone attacks.

Much of Cascadia’s response, however, would be invisible: Cascadian military AIs, with some guidance from human cyberwarfare experts, would strike everything from American communications channels to drone controls to financial systems.

The American attack dominated the displays at first, and Gene spent several hours following developments, fielding requests, coordinating with fire departments and other local resources to evacuate threatened areas, deploying emergency equipment, and answering a steady stream of questions from his direct reports, starting with the backlog that had accrued while he was meeting with Alice and sounding out Bennet.

He let his emotional responses stay distant and unresolved. Displaced families, missing children, communities wrecked ... Now was not the time to empathize, not if he was going to stay focused on his job.

Within the first forty minutes after Gene arrived, Cascadian defenses and counterattacks began to change the picture of the war. First, tens of thousands of American drones went suddenly dead when a Cascadian zero-day exploit—a type of hack—began rewriting their operating systems and communications controls en masse. Not five minutes later, operations maps of U.S. financial and communications systems took over several of the wall displays, disruptive icons appearing across them like a time lapse video of wildflowers blooming. To Gene’s surprise, even the flotilla of American ships sprouted graphics that, when Gene zoomed in to read them, turned out to symbolize sudden electrical fires and engine failures.

He took a moment to understand what had happened there, and it turned out the problems on the American ships were not the work of the Cascadian government. Some independent group of hackers was probably responsible—maybe the Louvre. If so, Samantha might even have been involved. Gene didn’t know how he should feel about that, if it turned out to be true. Proud? Horrified? Worried for her safety again, in case the Louvre attracted special attention from the American military?

Over the next hour, component by component, the American blitz fell apart. Reprogrammed American drones flew back to attack their places of origin. American satellite lasers remained offline. The flotilla threatening Seattle had still not reached the city and seemed to be at a standstill while the ships that were still functioning repositioned themselves to aid their disabled fellows. American soldiers and robotic troops had penetrated well into Cascadian territory, especially in Washington, but they were experiencing communication and systems problems from Cascadian cyberattacks and radio frequency pulse disruptions, and for the most part, their advances had stopped.

Gene hoped no one was reading too much into these encouraging developments. The Americans were still extremely dangerous, and it seemed likely that as they learned more about Cascadian defenses, they would either find ways around them or shift to less vulnerable or more devastating attacks. Even so, most of the direct fighting had ceased for the moment. In just a few hours, Cascadian cyberdefenses had turned an overwhelming offensive into a partial rout.

Apparently the Americans had decided not to immediately use their air power, which was good for Cascadia since air power was one of America’s clear areas of advantage. The Americans were probably holding off because that kind of attack tended to cause a great deal of collateral damage, which was politically problematic, both in America and in terms of encouraging Cascadia to escalate as well. Either country could cause huge devastation to the other if that’s all they were trying to do. Gene was thankful it hadn’t come to that yet.

Gene had wondered more than once how a modern war would operate in the real world, and now he and everyone else were finding out. It had been decades since major technological powers had engaged each other in combat, and over those decades, everything had changed. In the past, wars had been fought mainly with forces that were physically moved from one place to the next. Physical weapons had been used in a way that could be seen in the physical world. Even missiles, one of the fastest ways to attack in historical wars, took time to travel to their targets.

This war was different: AIs on opposing sides could grapple and resolve conflicts within seconds or fractions of a second, with the outcome leading to nearly instantaneous repercussions for whatever military or civilian area an AI was attacking or protecting. Space-based weapons could strike anywhere without warning. Vehicles and weapons could be disabled, sabotaged, or hijacked from anywhere. Gene had been bracing himself for a raging, clearly observable war that would start at the Cascadian border and possibly drive well into the interior. Would it instead be only a sudden clash of technologies, where whichever side wrecked or disabled the most of its opponent’s systems and equipment would quickly win? Or was this just the opening sally in something that would become bloody and entrenched?

If it was a question of technology, there was reason for Cascadia to hope. Cascadia had been home to many of the world’s largest tech companies and most innovative technology research facilities at the time of the split, and while some of those organizations had left the country in reaction to Cascadia passing laws that restricted marketing and hugely limiting the ability of corporations to act for profit against the public interest, others had flourished in an environment that attracted the brightest and most innovative workers and eliminated the need for massive spending on health insurance and domestic advertising.

Cascadians took it as a given that Cascadia was the most technologically empowered country in the world, an attitude that Gene had always been concerned might be exaggerated by pride. Maybe, though, it was no exaggeration.

After Gene was up to date, he moved around the room, checking in with each person or group, prioritizing work and resources, sometimes coming back to his station to focus on new information. He was not paying close attention to the time as hours went by. At some point, a bot brought him a nutritional shake, which he took sips of as he went from station to station before putting it down somewhere. By evening, new developments had slowed to a trickle, and he took the opportunity to retreat to his office and regroup.

He’d half expected some kind of law enforcement to be waiting for him in his office, but he reached it undisturbed. He unlocked the door, locked it again behind him, and sat at his desk to think through his remaining major decision: should he bring the Louvre’s offer to President Muñoz’s office or leave the situation be?

Gene knew how woefully ignorant he was of the Louvre’s capabilities and for that matter, the government’s cyberwarfare organization. He was no judge of whether they should work together or not. He also didn’t pretend to himself that he knew whether the Louvre was trustworthy. However, he reflected, he did have reason to suspect that they were trying to act in Cascadia’s best interests and that they were driven by what they, at least, felt were ethical motives.

At the same time, he worried what the Louvre would do if the government wouldn’t partner with them. Their actions so far, motivations aside, might well have contributed to starting the war in the first place. American president Jimenez’s public reason for the invasion was nothing more than a weak excuse, but at the same time, it was true that a powerful organization in Cascadia, the Louvre, was illegally targeting Americans with cyberattacks, for instance when they publicly exposed billionaire Terence Palmer’s private data.

Now that the two nations were formally at war, Gene couldn’t guess how far the Louvre might go. If the hackers were in constructive dialog with the Cascadian war department, he reflected, it might be possible to convince them not to disrupt efforts for peace.

Gene would have liked to invest much more thought and research before acting, but realistically, a new emergency could come up at any minute, and then who know when he might have a chance to consider the topic again? If he was going to do something, now was the time.

“Ollie, can you see if it’s possible for me to talk to Rosie Furch in President Muñoz’s office?”

“Certainly,” Ollie said. “Today?”

“Right now, if possible. It’s urgent.”

“Checking ... All right, her AI reports she can be free within a few minutes.”

Gene spent those few minutes uncharacteristically idle. There was no point looking at reports or rehashing his decision. He simply waited, tapping a stylus restlessly against his desk. It seemed like at least fifteen minutes before the communications icon appeared for Rosie’s call, though the clock told him only four minutes had gone by. He gave the icon a long gaze, and Rosie appeared.

“I don’t have much time right now, Gene—sorry. I can probably get back to you in about ninety minutes if this is going to take long. Assuming you’re available then.”

Did she mean, assuming he wasn’t tied up with his official responsibilities ... or something else?

“It won’t take long, because I don’t know much,” Gene said. “I was contacted by the Louvre.”

“The Louvre?” Rosie said, startled. Until this point, Gene had wondered if the government had somehow been watching the whole time he was in communication with Alice. Apparently not.

“They offered me some information,” Gene said. “They said there was a secret offshore account piling up millions of dollars in my name. I checked that out, and it looks like it’s true. They also said the money was coming from the Citizen Dividend Office, which it seems to be, and that the person responsible was my acting Chief of Staff, Bennet Culkin. I have reason to believe that’s true, too. They said this was part of a fraud scheme, and that the Americans are behind it. I have no way of knowing if that’s true or not.”

“We know about the fraud,” Rosie said. “Who exactly spoke to you?”

Gene went cold at the matter-of-fact way Rosie confirmed the fraud, though he noticed she hadn’t said anything about Gene being implicated.

“They didn’t share much about who they were,” Gene said. “But they asked me to contact you.”

“To contact me?”

“Not you specifically: they said they want to work with the Cascadian government to repel the Americans. They asked me to bring that offer forward for them, because they said it might be taken more seriously coming from me. I’m not sure that’s true, but I thought about it, and it seemed to me that I should at least pass along the message.”

“How can you be sure it’s really them?”

Gene had to be careful. The biggest reason he believed them was because Sammi was there, but he couldn’t say that.

“I can’t,” he said. “You probably have people who could do that better than I can—but for what it’s worth, my gut feeling is that they’re who they say.”

“And you’re recommending we ally ourselves with them?” Rosie said.

“No,” said Gene. “I’m telling you they say they’re willing to collaborate, and I’m suggesting you have someone who understands the situation a lot better than I do come up with a recommendation. For what it’s worth, they did seem to demonstrate they cared about this from an ethical and patriotic point of view. They acted in good faith, as far as I could tell, when they talked to me.”

“All right,” Rosie said. “I’ll speak to the President soon. I don’t know what she’ll do with it.”

“Thank you,” Gene said. “That’s all I’ve got.”

“Well, thank you,” Rosie said. Then she hesitated, and it seemed to Gene that her attitude had shifted compared to the beginning of the call.

“Gene,” she said, “Don’t worry too much about anything that happens over the next little while. It might not be a lost cause.”

“You mean the war?” he said.

“No,” Rosie said. “I don’t mean the war.” Then she disconnected.

Gene had a belated dinner brought in—quinoa with vegetables and grilled tilapia—but he barely tasted it. As he ate, he drafted a priority message to his permanent chief of staff, Daniela, who was on parental leave. It seemed likely he’d be forced away to deal with the fraud problem soon, and he told her he might have to attend to other matters soon, asked her if that happened to come in and run the agency a temporary basis.

Next, he turned his attention to the wildfires. Firefighting drones and autonomous water cannons had been deployed, but the war efforts meant fewer units could be mobilized, and lens-controlled units couldn’t be used in that area due to the outage, and the fires were fierce. If they had been set purposely, based on where they were, it seemed likely they were meant to trap people or troops in the Seattle area, and they hugely complicated evacuations. Fortunately, routes north into Canada were clear, and despite U.S. disapproval, Canadian officials were welcoming Cascadian refugees.

Gene’s locked, AI-guarded door opened suddenly. Three people in blandly-colored suits entered, while Gene glimpsed an Agency security guard behind them, just outside the door, facing away.

The woman in the lead had short, dark hair that flared out around her head. The other two were an alert white woman with long, incongruously vibrant red hair and a white man who looked like a brick wall with a haircut.

“Gene Ajou?” the woman in the lead said. “I’m A.S.A.C. Kimball of the Cascadian Bureau of Investigation.” Gene’s lenses elaborated automatically: ASAC=Assistant Special Agent in Charge.

“This is Special Agent Owen and Senior Special Agent Graves,” ASAC Kimball continued. “Would you come with us, please?”

Gene got up resignedly. “I see you got my message,” he said.

“This isn’t the best place to talk,” ASAC Kimball said, tilting her head to indicate the door. “After you?”

Gene nodded and walked out. A number of his staff members outside the office stopped to stare.

Gene turned his head around to look at ASAC Kimball. “Am I under arrest, or am I helping with an investigation?” he said.

“Are you coming voluntarily?” Kimball said.

“Of course.”

“Then let’s say you’re helping with an investigation.”

Gene felt strangely light, free of care. He’d made his choices. He’d taken action where he could. Samantha seemed to be with people who could protect her, and if Daniela Vargas came in to take over, the agency would be in good hands. Gene would have much preferred to stay at his post, but he’d have to take what he could get. Owen and Graves flanked him as they went to the elevators, descended to the ground floor, and exited through the starry evening toward a dark-windowed car.

The CBI agents’ car, it turned out, was not designed for conversation. On getting in and sitting down, Gene found himself in a dim, one-seat cell with no windows to the outside and no connection to the rest of the passenger compartment. The interior of the door was blank, and when it shut, his lenses abruptly flashed a No connection error. The seat was comfortable enough, but there was a warning buzzer sound, and every muscle in his body seemed to lock in panic when automatic seat belts snaked out to restrain his waist and chest.

The momentary peace had passed. Gene couldn’t slow the frantic pace of his breathing or the drumming of his heart, which was running like a motor with a loose part. He felt dizzy, and he had a sudden and vivid memory of his father swearing, which Philip Ajou had hardly ever done when Gene was a child.

It took him a moment to place the memory. He’d been 8, so it must have been around 2018, and he was walking home from dinner at his grandparents’ in Sacramento with his father and his Aunt Michelle, who was going to stay over to visit Gene’s mom, her sister. He didn’t remember why his mom wasn’t with them.

As they walked, Philip loudly offered his opinion on why Michelle’s new boyfriend was trouble. Abruptly, there’d been a flash of blue light and the choked whoop of a police siren. Two white policemen passed them, pulled over, and stepped out of the vehicle. They played the glare of their flashlights over Gene and his aunt and dad.

“Sir, can I see some ID?” one of the policemen said.

Gene’s dad took out his driver’s license. Michelle protested, but Gene’s dad said, “It’s all right. There’s no problem.”

Gene couldn’t remember all of what the police and his dad said, but he remembered his father getting more and more frustrated. Apparently he “fit the description” of someone who had done something—Gene never heard what. Philip didn’t get angry, though, until they had handcuffed him and were pushing him into the back seat of the police car, at which point he shouted “I’m not that fucking person!”

One of the policemen pushed down on the back of Philip’s head while the other forced him into the back of the cruiser. They slammed the door shut, got back in themselves, and drove off, not saying another word to Gene or Aunt Michelle.

Gene had spent most of that night in bed, awake and terrified, while his mother and Aunt Michelle spoke in low voices in the next room. Sometime in the wee hours, Gene heard the front door, and he ran out into the dark hallway, stopping in the shadows. He saw his dad walking in, a strained expression on his face. Gene’s mom and Aunt Michelle ran over and wrapped their arms around him.

“It’s all right,” Philip told them, several times. “They figured out I wasn’t the guy. They let me go. Where’s Gene?”

“He’s asleep,” Gene heard his mom say. “We’ll leave the bedroom door open. He can come see you when he wakes up.”

Michelle started to say something about the policemen, but Philip cut her off.

“It’s over now,” he’d said. “Let me just get to bed and end this day.”

Gene had seen the police change since then. They weren’t allowed to carry guns for most duties anymore. They’d been barred from some of the more violent responses that used to be common, and they’d been held responsible for more kinds of mistreatment. Police departments had been scaled down and social workers brought in to fill some of the gaps.

Prisons too had been closed, in Cascadia and many other countries—though not in the U.S.—and Cascadian sentences were based on supporting communities and restorative justice. The CBI weren’t the police, though, and Gene wasn’t being accused of a break-in or an assault. How would justice work with the impersonal, seditious crime Gene had been framed for?

Gene felt himself pushed back in the seat as the car moved out to join traffic, and his weight shifted gently as it slowed and accelerated, changed lanes and turned. For several minutes, those shifts were all the connection he had to the world. He made himself breathe mindfully, just concentrating on the air coursing into his lungs, filling them, streaming out of his lungs, the pause at the end of the exhale ... then breathing again.

About ten minutes into the ride, ASAC Kimball’s voice sounded from speakers. “Dr. Ajou, we’re experiencing trouble with the car’s navigation,” she said. “We may be delayed.”

Gene was in custody, no longer in charge of his own life, so he wasn’t sure how that information was supposed to help him. Also, what did “trouble with the car’s navigation” mean? Kimball’s voice had been steady and professional, but Gene thought he’d heard an undercurrent of tension.

The next few minutes went much like the first few, with no information from the outside world except for the forces that leaned him in one direction or another. Then Gene felt the car shift to the right and rapidly decelerate. The moment they came to a complete stop, everything went dark except for the faint glow of emergency lighting.

“There has been a vehicle malfunction,” said a calm, synthesized voice. “For your safety, please exit the car immediately.”

“I can’t—” Gene began, but his seat belts released, and the door beside him popped open. Hesitantly, he stepped out.

The street lights were blinding for the first moment, but a familiar voice said “Get in, please!”

It took him a second to place that voice, but it clicked when he saw her in a car pulled up next to the CBI vehicle: inside it was Alice, from the Louvre. Sitting across from her was Samantha, her expression desperate.

Gene turned to look at the car he’d gotten out of. The windows were tinted full black now. From inside, he thought he heard thumping.

“Gene!” Alice said urgently. “They’re going to kill you. Please get in the car.”

Kill him? Why would CBI agents kill him? Gene looked back again at the car he’d just exited.

“Dad! Just get in!” Samantha shouted, and when he turned, she was getting out of the car, reaching for him. Uncertainly, he took her hand and let her pull him in. He sat next to her, facing Alice. Alice slammed the door closed, and the car shot off down the street.

Gene fastened his seat belt, his hands shaking. “Are you telling me those weren’t CBI agents?” he said.

Alice shook her head. “No, they were,” she said.

“And you’re saying they were going to kill me? That’s not how the CBI works.”

“Probably not them personally. There’s a CBI agent working for the Americans—we don’t know who yet.”

Gene was getting angry now. “Why would the Americans—”

“There’s a man in the American Government,” Alice said. “Tyler Godbout. We think that back in May, he gave the order for you to be killed as soon as you were in CBI custody.”

“Three months ago?” Gene said in disbelief.

“They didn’t know who you’d be, just that they’d have someone like you set up. It looks like they’ve been planning it for a long time. Frame someone with a good reputation for the fraud, then kill them while they’re in CBI custody and make it look like a suicide.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Gene said. “How can they make me their scapegoat if I’m dead?”

Samantha put her hand on his arm. “Dad, think about it. You didn’t have anything to do with this, and you’re pretty believable in person. You might have made people at least look a lot closer at the whole thing. Somebody might have believed you, and maybe they’d figure out the truth. It could backfire on the Americans.”

“But killing me?” Gene protested weakly.

“Picture it the way they planned it,” said Alice. “A supposedly trustworthy, highly-placed government official whom most of the population has never heard of is found to have diverted millions in CitDiv money into an offshore account as part of a much bigger fraud. They’re taken into custody, but they commit suicide in their cell before they can be questioned. That person sounds guilty. It’s a simple story. Simple stories are easy to believe.”

“That’s terrible,” Gene said. Alice nodded. Samantha reached over and took his hand.

The narrative Alice had laid out made sense to him in the abstract, but as literal truth, as something that would happen to him, out of the blue, for no reason—?

If the Louvre needed something from him, Gene thought, then this might all be a hoax they’d put together. Maybe they didn’t know he’d already done the favor they’d asked for. Samantha was no fool, but Gene felt sure the Louvre could create details to convince her they were on her side, if they needed to. Yet to do all that, and to somehow find out when he was being taken into custody and by whom, and to find a way to hack the CBI agents’ car, and to physically appear there to rescue him ... It strained his imagination to dream that there was something they needed from him so badly that they’d go to all that trouble, especially since, if they understood him at all, they would know he’d find the story hard to swallow.

There was irony in that: the fact that their story was so hard to believe made it more likely to be true.

They were going to a Louvre location, Gene was told. While that didn’t appeal to him, he couldn’t think of any better option, and Samantha seemed reassured.

“I’m sending you an app to run on your lenses,” Alice said as they drove on. “It will prevent them from tracing or tracking you through your electronics.” Gene saw the icon appear a moment later: it was animated in the form of a disappearing cat. He hesitated, then tapped on it. Nothing seemed to happen, but a moment later the icon turned into a green check mark, and then that faded away.

Something on Alice’s lenses attracted her attention soon after, because she excused herself to type and subvocalize as the car raced on through the night.

Gene looked out the window, too exhausted to make any progress in processing it all, too worried to fall asleep. Samantha was propped against him, dozing, and he wrapped his arm around her and left it there for most of the ride, even when it began to ache.

Outside, the world was mostly dark, and Gene guessed the car was taking smaller, less frequented routes to its destination. They turned down a road that followed a river for a time, and there they passed a huge hill, in and out of which Gene could see the lights of robots moving, as if it were some kind of fairy mound. Gene recognized it as a decommissioned landfill, the kind of place they dumped garbage in days when recycling was much less common. The robots would be excavating it for recyclable materials—some plastic and glass, but metal especially—to be used in manufacturing or 3D printing.

It was nearly ten when they rolled to a stop outside a dark building somewhere far from Sacramento.

They stepped out into moonlight, and by that light Gene could make out an unlit sign over the building that read “Sakura Grill,” with a picture of a magenta flower. A young man waited for them there, the same young man Gene had seen with Sammi at the arena. When she got groggily out of the car, he strode forward, and she let him enfold her in his arms and give her a short kiss on the lips. So apparently, this was “Lan.”

Only then did the young man seemed to notice Gene. When Sammi disengaged, he cleared his throat and offered his hand. “Sir, I’m Lawrence,” he said. “Welcome to the Louvre.”

“This is the Louvre?” said Gene.

Alice stepped up beside Gene, putting her hand on his back and guiding him forward. “It’s temporary headquarters for one cell of the Louvre,” she said. “One small cloud in a stormy sky. Come on, let’s go in.”

Elena put her glass down and left her dinner unfinished as she read or watched something on her lenses. “I don’t understand,” she said. “Why would they do this?”

Audrey would have liked an answer to that question herself. Her project had barely started. Why hadn’t it been given the chance to head this war off? Godbout and his ilk must be delighted—but the attack couldn’t have been launched without Godbout knowing about it in advance. Did he already know at the Tucson meeting? It seemed likely, but if so, why let Audrey go west? Why not just declare her project canceled? The entire point of the Citizen Dividend hoax, as far as Audrey was concerned, was preventing a war.

Maybe Godbout had other plans. Would he have let the project go forward as a way to demoralize Cascadians, or to encourage Americans to support the invasion? That could be it—and if that were the case, it wouldn’t be surprising if Audrey hadn’t been told about the invasion. She didn’t have that level of clearance. That was a plausible explanation. Yet on a gut level, for reasons she would have found hard to explain short of describing the look on Godbout’s face during the Tucson meeting, Audrey thought there must be more to it.

What about the impact on the American people? Maybe the goal of making Cascadia look inept was less about lowering tensions between the two countries than about lowering tensions within America itself. Unfortunately, that seemed all too possible, that the wealthy American interests with so much government influence were creating a Cascadian scandal to undermine the arguments of economic justice agitators in the U.S., the people who had been shunted to the least affluent end of American society by the automation that had multiplied the wealth of the industrialists—industrialists like Godbout.

Yet ... even that didn’t entirely explain Godbout’s attitude. Audrey wondered if he didn’t have something else at stake, something private.

“I guess you’ll both want to go home,” Audrey said. “I’m sorry dinner got interrupted.”

“Are you crazy?” Elena said. “I’m not going anywhere! There’s a war on.”

“The war is hundreds of miles away,” Audrey said.

“You don’t know that!” Elena said. “That could just be the first front. You know how Americans like their wars. They like to bring out all everything on day one to try to frighten the natives back into the forest!”

Noah frowned at Elena. “I’d like to stay, Audrey—if you’re not completely against it,” he said.

Audrey nodded. She could insist they both leave, but what would be the point of that? If Control had anything to say to her, they’d send a message through a secure channel, but the fact that she hadn’t received anything so far suggested there were no new instructions or updates. Generally speaking, she was expected to carry on her assignment until it was complete, until she was instructed differently, or until one of the predefined abort conditions occurred. During preparation for the mission, they had specifically talked about war—in the abstract, with no reason for Audrey to expect it to actually occur—and it had not been set as one of the abort conditions.

What they hadn’t discussed was what should happen if Audrey herself decided the project should be stopped. She had wide latitude in how she conducted the mission, but she didn’t have the authority to call it off entirely.

Did she want to cut the mission short? She was fairly sure she did. It was too late, now, to prevent a war. All she was accomplishing at this point was damaging a working system in a foreign country, in a way that would benefit the United States little or not at all, except perhaps for a certain class of Americans who had ulterior motives. She’d been thinking of herself as a queen in this chess game, or at least a rook, but it appeared that she’d been demoted to pawn. Although ... a pawn that got all the way to the other side could become a queen—not that that applied here.

“Are you OK?” Noah said.

“No,” said Audrey. The wine hadn’t worn off yet. “I’m upset, and I’m angry, and I’d like to know whose brilliant idea this was.”

“It’s infuriating,” he said.

More bulletin icons were showing up in Audrey’s lenses now. Not surprisingly, the attack seemed to include more than just the warships.

“Why don’t we sit down in the living room and share feeds?” Noah said.

Elena nodded. She drained the wine in her glass and went into the living room. Audrey followed, making for the couch until she realized that would mean she’d end up sitting right next to Noah. She changed course at the last minute and took the straight-backed chair Barbara had occupied earlier that day.

Had Barbara known about the impending attack? She did have a higher clearance than Audrey, and Audrey was willing to bet Barbara was more than capable of keeping a secret.

Audrey gestured for voice and said, “Share my news feed with Noah Drell and Elena Bahe, please.” The side of the room that included the front door turned blank and opaque in her display, and a list of text, video, and immersive items appeared.

Noah tried to organize all of the incoming information, but he was slow at it and seemed out of his element. The second time he used an outdated gesture and accidentally opened the wrong item, Audrey stepped in.

“Why don’t I?” she said.

“Please,” Noah said. “There’s too much for me to make any sense of it.”

“I don’t want to see blood!” Elena said.

Audrey made the voice command gesture. “We need information on the American invasion,” she said, “but please steer us clear of anything bloody.”

“There have been no major injuries or fatalities reported yet,” said her AI. Audrey wasn’t reassured. The war had barely started.

She gestured to divide most of the display area into four quarters, plus a fifth area at the bottom for new information. Using that layout, she began to sort through bulletins and other incoming items. There were three articles that appeared almost at once about cyberattacks: one about a widespread attack on electric micro-grids, one about financial institutions, and one about the Jet Train network. Audrey directed all three to the top left quarter of the screen. There was a real-time map tracking the American flotilla and projecting where and how it would attack, and Audrey steered that into the top right quarter, along with written updates. She brought up a keyboard and typed a filter to direct information about drone attacks into the lower left quarter, and she used the lower right for political analysis and information about the response within Cascadia.

She added display settings to highlight the items dealing with the most dangerous attacks, based on automated text analysis, with a red border that could vary in intensity.

“Where did you learn how do this?” Noah said admiringly. “It’s like you’re conducting an orchestra.”

“Maybe if the French horns were trying to kill us,” Elena said. She went back to the dining table and retrieved Noah’s and Audrey’s glasses. She filled them from the bottle Noah had brought and carried them back into the living room. Audrey set hers on a side table, nearly out of reach. She had no intention of getting more muddled than she already was.

An item came up about attacks on the lens network around Seattle. Audrey typed in a command to convert it into a visual overlay on the map that was already on the screen. A hazy green net of innumerable points overlaid itself on the area, turning yellow in isolated places, then suddenly turning at least eighty percent red: only small pockets of green showed up as still working. Meanwhile, the American flotilla icons could be seen rounding the Dungeness National Wildlife Refuge, ten miles from Puget Sound.

Audrey set her AI to use her layout for new items as they came in and changed her focus to watching and reading. One of the cyberattack items had a sharp red border, and she brought that up in its quarter of the screen. It was a video feed with AI-generated narration in a subdued, male-range synthetic voice.

“An unprecedented number of cyberattacks on local power grids have created blackouts in six areas scattered throughout Cascadia, and hundreds to thousands of additional targets are thought to be vulnerable to similar attacks,” the narrating voice said. The video feed showed a vast array of solar panels in a desert area; then a row of slowly turning wind turbines on a ridge; then a blocky, gleaming battery-based power storage facility; then a downtown area from above, with a mosaic of darkened and powered buildings; then another solar installation; and so on.

“While no one has yet claimed responsibility for the attacks,” said the narration, “our best analysis at this time suggests they’re part of a coordinated U.S. offensive against Cascadia, connected to the surprise drone attacks and to the approaching flotilla of American warships. Local and household battery systems are helping prevent complete blackouts in the already-affected areas, which have now grown to twenty-three, but disruptions are already causing difficulty with transportation, communications, and other vital systems.”

A new, red-outlined item appeared in the unclassified feed area: in northwest Washington, wildfires had begun, suddenly and for no apparent reason. On the Seattle area map, flickering shapes representing the fires appeared south of the Olympic peninsula, south of Tacoma, and in two locations west of Seattle. That struck Audrey like nothing else had, not even the warships. Had America actually planned and purposely set fires? That might tie up Cascadian soldiers and bots that might otherwise have resisted the invasion, but also interfere with citizens trying to flee the war zone and contribute to a massive climate impact. It would have been easy enough to do, perhaps using satellite-based lasers or insect-sized, fire-starting drones ... but if it was drones, the U.S. would have had to plan at least weeks and probably months beforehand so that the slow-moving drones had time to crawl dozens or hundreds of miles to their destinations. Small flying drones might do the job as easily, but they would have been far more likely to have been intercepted by Cascadian defenses.

“What are they doing?” Elena said in a strained voice. “What is happening?”

Audrey glanced at Noah, and his face was stormy, his jaw tight.

Audrey was no expert on the laws of war, but if America really had started those fires, she was sure they had at least violated some of the key climate treaties that had been crucial to turning the tide against climate change. For decades now, it had been clear that humanity was on the right path, but if nations were going to throw those agreements aside in wartime ...

Audrey’s hand was shaking, and she had to put her wine glass back down. She hadn’t even noticed she’d picked it up, but it was empty now, and she felt dizzy from the sudden and unaccustomed wash of alcohol through her body. That had been her third glass.

Her emotional landscape was a riot of conflict: anger, sadness, surprise, confusion, and even a kind of giddiness she didn’t understand. Stronger than any of these feelings, now, was an overwhelming revulsion: revulsion for what her country was doing, revulsion for the political mechanisms that had driven this offensive in a way that she was certain few Americans wanted, and revulsion for her own part in American operations against Cascadia. What was she doing in Cascadia? Why had they let her come here? What good could she possibly make out of the sabotage she had helped perpetrate?

They watched the catastrophe of war unfold without speaking for some time, each choosing videos or text articles to come forward as needed. A new writing AI had recently been released, and Audrey was surprised by the large number of AI-generated pieces that read like stories. In the past, AI reporting had been mostly a neatly-arranged litany of facts.

It was harder to watch events unfold this way. Every minute, new articles were being generated that took the war down to a human level. There was a story about a family losing the farm they’d worked for generations, and another about the wildfires reaching a hospital before it could be fully evacuated, while humans rushed around trying to do the work of bots that lifelessly waited for the lens network to reconnect.

The hospital was west of Tacoma, and when they closed that article, Noah waved away the display temporarily so that he was no longer seeing it. Glad for the excuse, Audrey did the same, and Elena followed suit.

“My son’s boyfriend is in Tacoma,” Noah said in a raw voice. “He’s visiting family there.”

“Where’s your son? Where’s the rest of your family?” Elena said.

“Down South,” Noah said. “Bakersfield. He has an apartment in the same cluster as my father and my sister’s family.”

“My brother lives in Las Vegas,” Elena said. Audrey knew about the brother: his daughters were Elena’s legendary nieces. “I hope he goes east to stay away from the fighting. My nieces are at Wellesley and Princeton, so I think they’ll be safe. They’re brilliant girls. I’m sure they can fend for themselves if necessary ... Audrey has just one great-aunt in Spokane, and no other living family—”

“Uh,” said Audrey, and her uncharacteristic hesitation caught the others’ attention. “Actually, Elena ... I found my mother and brother ...”

“Brother? You said you had a sister! You should get your story straight.”

Audrey’s face felt hot, and she guessed she shouldn’t be talking about her family, but she kept on. “He’s trans, I found out. That’s one of the reasons I had trouble finding them.”

“What do you mean, you found them?” Noah said.

“It’s a long story. My mother and my, uh, brother left when I was nine. They changed their names, and I didn’t know Adam was a boy. A man, now, I mean. I’d been trying to find out what happened to them, and ... something came through today.”

“Where are they?” said Noah.

“I don’t know. I didn’t check yet. It was a lot to take in. I thought I could use a little time to think before I got in touch, and now this ...” She gestured toward where the display had been projected, and she felt a sharp chill. “So I guess I don’t know for sure that they aren’t in the war zone ...” She thought about the map: the fires had been spreading, and the lens network in much of Washington was still down, meaning most people had no access to news or resources.

“Do you want to check now?” Noah said.

Audrey stared back at him. He and Elena were watching her, waiting. Finally, she nodded.

It occurred to her that she hadn’t changed her virtual keyboard layout since Noah and Elena arrived, so she cycled to a new one just out of habit. She did a linked search for Lauren and Adam in the Jackson Trust System, where in Cascadia, at least, you could find almost anyone in order to add them to your trust networks. All she had to do was search for a Lauren Fisher born in 1990 who had a 55-year-old son named Adam.

She came up immediately: Lauren Fisher, 1990-2068. Dead of a heart attack in the spring.

Noah must have seen something in her expression, because he moved toward her, reaching out, as Elena said, “What’s the matter? Are they OK?”

Audrey waved Noah off, more sharply than she’d meant to, and he froze in place. She switched to Adam’s record. He was a Major in the Cascadian Marines. He lived in Eugene, and he had a wife and three children, ages 17, 20, and 22. The eldest was a girl named Audrey.

Audrey wasn’t able to speak at first. She tried to clear her throat, but it felt tight and obstructed. “My mother died this year,” she said hoarsely. “My brother is in the military, so I don’t know if I can reach him. I’m going to try now.”

Audrey went to her bedroom and closed the door. She wasn’t ready to talk to Adam. A few hours ago, she didn’t even know she had a brother. At the same time, with the war beginning, who knew what would happen to him—or to Audrey herself—in the coming days? She tapped an icon to request a call. It was only seconds before he picked up, and the side of the room Audrey was facing merged with a small, blandly-lit room with steel furniture. Ten or twelve spots in the room, including something on the wall and several items on a table, were redacted by security software, just black squares.

Audrey recognized him. He certainly looked different as a 55-year-old man than he had as a 7-year-old, when he’d been thought of as a girl, but there were the wide brown eyes with the quizzical eyebrows, the prominent ridge of the nose, even much the same whorled brown hair he’d had all those years ago, though most of it was gray now. He’d always insisted it be cut short, even then.

He was dressed in a dark blue, short-sleeved shirt over a white T-shirt, and he seemed to be alone in the room.

“Audrey?” he said, bewildered.

Audrey cleared her throat again. “How are you? Are you OK?”

“I’m fine,” he said. “I’m ... well, I’m really happy to hear from you. Really happy. Are you OK? Where are you? Are you with Dad?”

“Dad died,” Audrey said. She grimaced when she realized how artlessly she’d said it, especially seeing his expression: it seemed like he might be about to cry. “That was years ago.” That didn’t seem to be enough, so she added, “he looked for you for a long time.”

Adam looked angry now, though still possibly on the verge of tears. “I bet he did,” he said. “Listen, about Mom—”

“I know,” Audrey said. “I mean, I just found out.” She laughed, a choked and unhappy noise. “Just before I called you.”

“Are you OK, sis?” he said. “I ...”

“No, I’m fine,” she said. “I’m doing fine. I’m here in Cascadia now, working at the Reemployment Bureau. Everything’s fine. Not, I mean—”

“Yeah,” he said grimly. He took a deep breath, composing himself. “Audrey, I’m so sorry—”

“No,” Audrey said, “I know that mom—”

“No, I’m sorry ...” he said, but he couldn’t seem to find more words to go with it. Then his brow creased, and he said, “You work at the Reemployment Bureau? Is that why we’re getting all this extra CitDiv money?”

“What?” said Audrey.

“Oh,” he said. “Sorry, forget I said that. I guess I’m not supposed to talk about it.”

“Adam—” Audrey said, but infuriatingly, an urgent bulletin icon appeared in the corner of her vision. What now? was her gut response. She saw Adam’s glance flit to one side, then saw him gesture to open something, and his expression hardened. Audrey looked at her own icon and opened it. U.S. President Marco Jimenez will address Americans in three minutes, it said. The icon turned into a little counter.

“I’d better watch that,” Adam said. “I may not be able to talk for a while—they’ll have orders for me. But I’ll call you as soon as I can, OK? I have so much to tell you. And I was worried that you might not—you know, me not being like you remembered—”

Audrey shook her head. “No, call me as soon as you can. I understand. Stay safe.”

“Yeah, stay safe,” Adam said. He looked like he wanted to say something more, but he shook his head and broke the connection. Audrey found herself staring at her dresser.

Is that why we’re getting all this extra CitDiv money? In a way, Audrey was sure, it was because of her. Obviously she hadn’t done anything on her own to make that happen, but the CitDiv fraud had only affected about twelve hundred people so far. The chances of Adam being part of the program just through dumb luck were next to zero. Now, too, Audrey remembered the red flag she had seen in her office just before Noah had asked her to lunch and derailed her train of thought: Marley Jun. That was someone she had specifically told them not to include in the program, because their profile indicated they’d most likely be uncomfortable taking unexplained, free money. Then there were the names that had been sent directly to Bennet to “help” with the project. Someone—either Godbout or someone who reported to him—was setting her up. Probably the intention was to expose her through honest people like Marley Jun, with the damning evidence that own brother was one of the payees. To add insult to injury, Godbout’s people had clearly found Adam before Audrey had, and they’d kept him hidden from her. She was in deep trouble—as bad as or worse than that scapegoat at the ARDR, Gene.

Audrey went back to the living room. To Noah and Elena’s questioning glances, she said “It was fine. He’s fine, but he had to go because of the American president’s address.

“Let’s bring it up,” Elena said. “I want to hear what that rat has to say for himself.”

Audrey nodded and motioned back up the shared screen, then temporarily tucked away the quartered display of mayhem and destruction and expanded the bulletin icon about Jimenez. There in front of them was an ivory-colored hallway, presumably in the White House, with tall marble pillars to the right, arched niches with statuary to the left, and a red carpet with gold detail running down the center under two crystal chandeliers, ending in a wooden door. In the extreme foreground was a podium with the U.S. presidential seal, flanked on the left with an American flag and on the right with a flag bearing the presidential seal, an eagle and a circle of stars on a navy background.

Two men were beside the pillars. One wore a general’s uniform and stood stiffly, while the other wore a brown business suit and had his arms crossed over his chest: Tyler Godbout.

“Godbout,” Audrey whispered harshly, not meaning to say anything aloud. She didn’t look to see if Noah or Elena had noticed, but she felt like kicking herself. The anger in her voice would have been hard to miss.

In the White House broadcast, a tall man appeared through a doorway on the left: President Jimenez. Jimenez had a square head with cropped gray hair and a mustache like a shoe brush. His nose looked like it had long ago been broken in a prize fight, and his expression was severe. He walked forward, and Godbout and the general stepped in to stand behind him.

When Jimenez reached the podium, his face softened, and he looked at the same time troubled and resolute.

“My fellow Americans,” he said. He had a rich voice that matched the depth of his expression. “In the wake of the devastating cyberattacks of this past week, our cyber warfare experts have been working tirelessly to trace the source of this aggression and to protect us from further cowardly and unwarranted assaults.”

It took Audrey a moment to understand what he meant by devastating cyberattacks. There had been two hacking incidents recently that had caused massive delay and confusion, but little direct damage, in Omaha and Dallas. The reports Audrey had heard had concluded that both attacks originated inside the United States, but U.S. media had attributed them to the Louvre, even though the group had not claimed responsibility, and even though as far as Audrey knew, they had only ever made attacks for the purpose of what they considered social justice.

“It pains me to say,” Jimenez continued, “that these attacks have been traced to a hacker group that is working on behalf of and with the full, clandestine support of the government of Cascadia. These Cascadian hackers have attempted more destructive actions in the past days, the details of which I cannot share with you yet, that fortunately our cyber defenses and national security AIs have been able to anticipate and successfully defend against—but Cascadia is increasing its level of the aggression at the same time that it denies all knowledge and responsibility. This must stop. We cannot allow acts of war to be perpetrated against America and its people, especially by a nation that attempts to undermine us while pretending to be our friend. We cannot allow our freedoms and our great national wealth and resources to be looted by a country that seeks to exploit us in order to shore up its own disastrous economic and social policies. Therefore, in accordance with the War Powers Resolution of 1973, I have authorized American forces to move against this hostile government in order to force an end to these cowardly actions, to respond in kind to the damage that has been inflicted on us, and to reunify us with the territories that twenty-six years ago unlawfully declared themselves a sovereign nation.

“This day has been many years coming, and if Cascadia had not turned on us, we whose people are its friends and neighbors and family, it may have been able to survive a few years longer in its dysfunction and isolation. Yet inevitably, Cascadia must answer for both the disloyalty of its secession and for these new crimes against the American people. The states of the American Pacific coast must be brought back into the U.S. to stop the perfidy and destruction those in power there are attempting to wreak.

“As I speak, American naval vessels are approaching Seattle, whose people are already preparing for their surrender to and reunification with the United States. We have deployed all our might on the sea, on the land, in the skies, and through the networks, and Cascadia is only now realizing the extent of the power it tried to defy. To the Cascadian people I say: hold out a little longer. You will soon be safely back under our protection. To the Cascadian government and its villainous allies I say: heed our warnings and give back the powers you have seized from our citizens. And to the people of these great United States I say, God be with us and keep us until this action is quickly resolved and we can turn our hands to reconstructing the greatness and dignity of an America that once again reaches from sea to shining sea. Thank you.”

The broadcast from the White House ended, replaced by American newscasters, some real and some simulated, who launched immediately into talking about the war as though Cascadia had already been crushed. Audrey, furious, cut the stream.

“That pompous shit!” Elena said. “Can you believe that? Who does he think is going to believe that fairy tale?”

Noah just shook his head. He looked pensive and troubled.

Elena must have seen a message pop up in her private display, because she reached out and tapped something. “Oh, this is from Jeremy,” she said. “He’s my husband, Noah. He’s already headed home. They shut down the convention as soon as the news about the American warships came through. He’s upset—I think I should go. Audrey, honey, are you going to be OK? I mean, on top of all this, your family ... ?”

Audrey nodded and tried to smile. Elena looked sad.

“Just call me if you need me, OK?” she said. “I’m sorry I have to go. It’s just, Jeremy’s so shaken up ...”

“No, it’s fine,” Audrey said. “We’ll talk later. Noah, it was good to see you, but I’d like to be alone for a while now.”

“Of course,” Noah said. “I’ll just use your bathroom before I leave?”

“Oh,” Audrey said. She pointed toward the hallway. “It’s the first door on your right.”

Elena gave Audrey a sudden hug, squeezed her hand, and slipped out the door. Audrey collected the wine glasses—Noah’s was still full—and brought them back to the kitchen for cleaning. She placed them in the busing area, and then she brought over the plates, silverware, and empty Syrah bottle and set those in the busing area as well. The kitchen reached in with multiple robotic arms to take everything inside and sort it into compost, trash, recycling and dishes to be cleaned, and Audrey set the puck-like sanitizer on the table to wipe up and dispose of crumbs. In the hallway next to her bedroom, she heard the door open, and she went back into the living room to say goodbye to Noah. He entered at the same time, but instead of going to the door, he sat down in the armchair.

“I see you know who Tyler Godbout is,” he said. “And here I thought I was the only one who followed American politics.”

“Oh,” said Audrey. Why wasn’t Noah leaving? She thought she’d been clear that it was time to go. She hoped he wasn’t picturing things turning romantic. “I met him at work once,” she said. “I didn’t like him.”

“No, I can see that,” Noah said. “How many keyboard layouts do you have memorized?”

“Sorry?”

“I use a government-issue application that reads typing gestures. It’s helpful in my work sometimes. People type all kinds of things when they think you can’t see.”

“I can imagine.”

“But yours I couldn’t read even if I’d tried to,” Noah said. “You don’t use a standard keyboard layout, but you were touch typing.”

“That’s true,” Audrey said. “I try to be careful about those things.”

“Yes, you do. You disabled your built-in door monitor, I saw. And you don’t use room mics.”

“Can we talk about security another time?” Audrey said. “I really need some space to think about everything that’s happening. The war, my family ...”

He didn’t get up. “Actually, I noticed you use more than one non-standard keyboard layout—fluently,” Noah said. “That’s hard to learn.”

“Yes, it was.” Audrey felt her heart beating fast again, and it wasn’t from romance. “I already said I’m careful about security.”

“Audrey,” Noah said, leaning forward. “I’m sorry, but I can see there’s something going on. You just arrived from the U.S. a few weeks ago, which turned out to be right before the Americans started a war. You have better security hygiene than anyone I’ve ever met. You seem to be personally familiar with the meanest snake in the United States government—and don’t try to tell me the way you said his name was just from having met him once at some Reemployment Bureau meeting! I promise you, I’m in your corner, even if I’m not on your side. I can’t help but see that there’s something going on here, and it would mean a lot if you’d tell me what it is instead of forcing me to guess.”

Audrey was afraid to move, afraid even to blink. She desperately needed to be alone so that she could figure out what Godbout’s exact plan for her was and stop it before it was too late—assuming it wasn’t too late already. Almost as urgently, she needed to make firm plans about whether or not to shut down the project she’d worked so hard on. Right now she was leaning toward shutting it down, with or without the permission of her superiors. Should she go to the Cascadian government? Flee back to the United States? Try to escape to somewhere else in the world through Mexico, where she was neither the target of a powerful political figure nor a saboteuse?

“Audrey?” Noah said. “Do you need help?”

The question surprised her. Did she need help? She was used to always relying on herself—when she was growing up and her dad left her to run the household, when she made her way through school, when she fought her way up through a long career, and especially during this operation in Cascadia.

She looked up at Noah again, meeting his gaze directly. “I don’t know yet,” she said. “Maybe so.”

No one asked where they were going, because there was no real answer to that question. They were going South, and they were keeping out of populated areas, and if they were lucky, they’d find a way to safely get out of the area.

“Does anybody else smell smoke?” Gia said, out of breath.

“I think you’re right,” Lyric said. Marley noticed it now, too, and they nodded. Lyric picked up the pace, and Marley did their best to match it.

Catching up with Lyric at the bank of a little stream soon after, they looked back to see that Gia was far behind. They waited, and when she caught up, no one said a word, but they splashed across together. From then on, Lyric went more slowly.

They avoided open areas and buildings as best they could, passing through fields of mixed crops where spindly farming robots stood motionless like slim, white trees, their long legs stopped in mid-stride, their many arms each frozen in the act of pulling a weed or plucking an insect. These robots must have been controlled through the lens network, as many robots were. When the network went offline, they had stopped in mid-motion.

Some of the buildings Marley saw had power, while others didn’t. The increasing localization of electricity generation and distribution since the turn of the century meant that in many locations, power could come from any of a number of directions and sources. Urban areas were the most susceptible to disruption, while many homes and farms and businesses in suburban and rural locations drew power from smaller, local solar, wind, and battery systems. The fact that any building nearby was out of power seemed like a bad sign. It suggested the power problem was widespread—probably a successful cyberattack.

The burning smell grew stronger. The sky was growing dark, making it harder to see where they were going. When Marley looked across a field of grass and scrub behind them, a reddish glow edged the sky under dark clouds. Another, fainter red slash glowed to the northwest. Fires? But a wildfire wouldn’t have started in two places at once, would it?

A little ahead, Lyric stepped into an open area and stopped. When Marley caught up, they saw that they’re reached a recreational trail that ran roughly northeast to southwest through the trees. Marley waited with Lyric until, after another couple of minutes, Gia and Anthem emerged from the woods.

“Do you want me to take Anthem?” Marley said, reaching for the leash. Gia shook her head.

“Anthem’s my pace dog,” she said, huffing. “That’s why I’m so fast.”

Marley glanced at Lyric. She hadn’t said anything or tried to rush them along, but her usual warmth was missing.

“Trail or woods?” Lyric said.

Gia gulped breath. “Trail?” she said.

Marley instinctively gestured for a map, waiting for a response for a couple of seconds before they remembered they’d turned their lenses off. They were tempted to turn them back on just long enough to figure out where they were, but for all they knew, that would make them a beacon if American forces had a way to track lens use and were rounding up citizens. There was no reason to think anything like that was happening, but if so, there’d be no way to know until soldiers or bots showed up and grabbed them. Marley wished they had some idea what was even possible. They’d never been interested in warfare or military technology, and there was a lot of military technology out there to know about.

They followed the path, a peaceful corridor of packed gravel through trees. They couldn’t have gone much more than a couple of hundred meters, though, before the trail bent to the right.

“I think it heads west now, maybe even northwest,” Marley said. “We should keep going south.”

They looked at Gia, as did Lyric. Gia had stopped to take a few deep breaths, bent over with one hand on her thigh, but she nodded and gave the thumbs up. They ducked through a line of trees and found themselves looking across a field of yellowing weeds to a river as wide as a four-lane highway.

“Let’s see if the trail bends south soon,” Lyric said. No one replied, but Gia and Marley followed Lyric back onto the path and trotted down it at the best pace Gia could maintain. Marley took Anthem’s leash now, and Gia didn’t have the breath to protest. Anthem whined and stuck close.

The trail showed no immediate sign of wanting to turn south. While sunlight waned, the red glow grew stronger up north, to their right. The river turned sharply south, leaving the trail. Lyric stopped to look down the the river, and she pointed at some faint lights. “I think that’s a bridge,” she said. “If we can cross, we can continue south from there, and we’ll have the river between us and ... anything that might be coming.”

To the north, a sound was growing like a torrent of water. Looking back through the trees in that direction, Marley could see a baleful, red flickering, reflected from the bottom of a sky-wide cloud.

“We’d better go,” Marley said. “We need to go now.”

They surged forward into the tall grass. “Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck!” Gia gasped as she half-ran, trying to keep up. They all scrambled over uneven, weedy ground for a short way before finding themselves at the edge of a mowed field, which they followed down to a tiny two-lane road and yes, a bridge. It was narrow and had no shoulder, but they ran to it. On the far side, trees buffered the river from civilization, but there was a road that ran south along the far bank. Directly across the bridge, there was a lighted parking lot and a low, brick building. There were vehicles there, and people. Marley heard someone shouting.

“Let’s get across fast,” Lyric said.

They ran onto the bridge and were most of the way across when a car turned sharply from the southerly road, pinning them in its headlights. It decelerated hard, its horn blaring, and Anthem barked in panic, yanking so hard on her leash that it came out of Marley’s hand. Anthem turned and and ran in the wrong direction—north, across the field.

“Anthem!” Marley shrieked, running after her. Gia ran with her, but Marley realized after only a few steps that Lyric wasn’t with them. She had tried to finish crossing the bridge, but two men got out of the car, backlit by the glare from the building beyond them. “Who’s that?” one of them demanded, coming around to the front of the vehicle.

Their heart pounding, Marley turned and ran back to Lyric. The men looked up as they arrived, grabbing Lyric’s arm. “We’re going to go check on Joe!” they shouted. Then they pulled Lyric with them past the car, shielding her from view with their body. When they reached the other side, Marley pulled Lyric after them into the trees.

“Who the fuck is Joe?” yelled one of the men.

Marley wished they had come up with something that would have made the men give up on them and Lyric entirely, but at least it had caused enough confusion to allow slipping past. Marley wasn’t used to lying in the real world, but writing fiction was a matter of expressing your truth through situations you’d made up, and Marley’s instinct in that moment had been to begin a story: Two out-of-towners are crossing a bridge at night in a war zone. What are they doing there? They’re going to see a friend, someone everyone knows. The friend’s name is Joe or Jo, which is a common and unremarkable name that could apply to any gender. Why are they going to see this person? They’re worried that Joe or Jo, who might be old or sick or just not great at taking care of themself, might need a hand. As a story, it wasn’t terrible. It was believable, and looking after a friend in need made the out-of-towners more sympathetic.

Marley dragged Lyric on and willed them both invisible. The trees on this bank of the river were just a narrow band, and on the other side of them, they had to run across a narrow road while a car—maybe the one with the two men, maybe some other car—raced down it toward them. They plunged into a stand of trees on the other side, and Marley found themself flailing through thorny brush, scratching up their arms. They wished they had worn something with sleeves. If Lyric was getting scratched too, as she probably was, she didn’t complain.

Beyond the brush, they had to cross a local highway, running parallel to the road they’d already crossed, but then they were in woods again. They pushed on by the faint red glow in the sky until the lights and sounds behind them were gone completely.

They stopped to rest, and Marley broke down in tears. Lyric slid to the ground, sitting on a bed of pine needles with her back against an eight-foot knuckle of rock. She pulled Marley over to her and gathered them into her lap, one hand on their shoulder, the other stroking their hair.

“Maybe they were just people from the town,” Marley said. “Maybe Gia and Anthem are with them now.”

“Maybe,” Lyric said. “Probably.”

Marley couldn’t stop thinking about the two men in the car. They couldn’t be soldiers, could they? Why would two soldiers be driving around in a regular car? But they’d sounded so angry.

If they were soldiers, and if they had guns and were inclined to use them, it wouldn’t help Gia to run. Historically, Marley gathered, guns had been unreliable. Sometimes they hit their target, sometimes not. There were long, bewildering sequences in old time 2D “movies” where people would shoot whole clips of bullets at each other and not hit anything. If someone was hit, an expendable character always died with the first bullet, while heroes either weren’t hit, or they were heroically and non-catastrophically hit in the shoulder or thigh.

Real guns hadn’t worked that way for decades, except for some old manual guns used by antiquarians and sport hunters. In war, computer-controlled targeting meant hitting the target almost every time.

If things were back to normal, Marley could use their lenses to find out exactly where Anthem was, either from the monitor in her collar or from the chip embedded in her back when Marley got her from the shelter. If things were back to normal, they could just message Gia and ask how she was. Probably their friend and their dog were both fine. Even if there were American soldiers there, they wouldn’t hurt a Cascadian civilian and a dog, right? There’d be no reason for it. Maybe they’d detain Gia, but they’d let her go soon enough. The only person who’d be in real danger if they went back would be Lyric. No, Lyric couldn’t go back—and if Marley went back by themself, there was no guarantee they’d find Gia or Anthem, and then they’d all be separated.

Lyric needed to get to safety, somewhere where she could stay and keep out of sight. Marley resolved to see her safely settled somewhere like that. Once she was, Marley would go back to find Gia and Anthem.

The woods ended, and Marley and Lyric followed an old dirt road bordered by trees to the west. There was hardly any traffic, and whenever a car did come along, they hid in the trees until it passed.

The fire to the north still seemed uncomfortably close. Had it come as far south as that river? Had it somehow made it across? If so, did the people at that building near the bridge have to evacuate? Were Gia and Anthem with them?

Marley’s imagination conjured a cruel image of Anthem struggling, her leash caught on a branch, the fire closing in. Forcefully, they dismissed it. There was enough trouble already without imagining more. They’d have time to be an emotional mess later.

Continuing down the road, they came on a scrapyard. Old vehicles were made long rows, many with tires or motors removed. Some had bashed windows or crumpled hoods; some were rusting; some were half-crushed.

Back among these vehicles, a small, pale light shone—nothing bigger than a lantern. They both came to a stop, looking toward the light, and were startled by a noise behind them. They turned to see an old white man in a denim shirt pushing a wheelbarrow with a tire in it. He looked them over warily, and they did the same.

“What are you doing here?” he said, not harshly. He coughed.

“We’re running from the fire,” Lyric said.

“On foot?” the man said, squinting.

“The lens net was down,” Marley said.

“Are your lenses on now? Is it back up?” he said.

Lyric shook her head. “We turned our lenses off. We don’t want to attract attention.”

“Hmm,” the man said approvingly. “Hmm. OK, come with me. I’m Burke, he/him. My wife is Sophia, she/her. You can ride with us if you want to.”

It took Marley a minute to realize why he was giving pronouns. Giving your pronouns used to be common courtesy, Marley knew, back before everyone had lenses, but all Marley’s life, they had been used to seeing pronouns literally floating over any new acquaintance’s head. Burke saying his own pronouns struck Marley as exotically quaint.

“I ...” Lyric said. Marley watched her face. Burke seemed all right, but any autonomous car was going to mean they’d be back on the network.

“It’s all right,” Burke said, grinning unexpectedly. “Come over and see what we’re cooking up.” He had gone from calculating to almost gleeful in a few moments, and Marley wondered whether he was safe and entirely right in the head, cheerfully offering rides to strangers while fleeing a war and a fire.

They glanced at Lyric again. She had the same querying expression Marley must have had. After a moment, Marley nodded, and they followed Burke back toward the little light.

Sophia turned out to be a round white woman with a cap of snowy hair. She wore brown coveralls and had a robot with her, which surprisingly was operational. The bot was shorter than Sophia, with a cylindrical body of rugged, once-white plastic and four multi-jointed arms arranged around the top of its torso. Its body was held up by four spindly legs that were jointed inward and ended in wide metal treads.

Marley pointed at the robot. “Is the network—”

“Who’s this?” Sophia asked Burke sharply.

“Hello,” said the robot. “I am Robby, human-cyborg relations.”

“Human-cyborg ... ?” said Lyric.

“Oh, that’s just a joke,” said Burke. “Robby’s a self-contained AI. Not networked, since you asked. I mean, he can be, but we had him turn it off.”

“Which is all a waste if we’ve got these two with us,” Sophia said irritably.

“Scan 'em for live connections, Robby,” Burke said.

“Sure!” Robby said. “All done. No live traffic found. They're offline.”

Sophia eyed them with new interest. “Oh?” she said. “What are you worried about?”

“I’m Lyric,” Lyric said. “Uh, she/her. Their name is Marley. We’re writers.”

“You mean you’re unemployed,” said Sophia.

“That’s a hundred percent correct,” Lyric said. “Burke said we might be able to ride with you. We’ve been on foot for a couple of hours now. Maybe we could help?”

“Either of you licensed electricians?” Sophia said, not without sarcasm. “No, just me? All right, help Burke get those tires on.”

“I had to 3-D print them at the house,” Burke said, rolling the wheelbarrow to a stack of three identical tires standing next to a pink minivan. The minivan must have been at least forty years old and was sitting up off the ground on blocks. Protruding from the dashboard inside, Marley could see a steering wheel—not even a retractable one.

“Is this a manually-driven minivan?”

“It is!” said Burke. “Perfect, isn’t it? Robby and Sophia are replacing the battery—we can’t find anything like the old one, but Sophia’s making it work. We’ll travel completely offline. It doesn’t even have an autonomous mode! Now, let me show you: we need to mount these tires on the old rims and inflate them with this thing here. Either of you ever replaced a tire?”

“I have,” Lyric said. “Not one of these old-style ones, though.”

“All goes well, we’ll be on the road in twenty minutes,” Burke said.

Burke set up Lyric to put the tires on the rims and Marley to inflate them with a battery-powered compressor. Robby chatted with Sophia about the minivan’s circuitry while he soldered connections and connected parts under her direction.

The tires took more than an hour to prepare, partly because of a damaged rim for which Marley and Lyric had to go find a replacement among the other vehicles. The battery took even longer, and it didn’t work when it was first connected, which made Marley begin to doubt their and Lyric’s decision to throw in their lot with Burke and Sophia and Robby. Still, none of the five commented on the fiercely glowing hills or the growing smell of smoke in the air.

“You did something wrong,” Sophia complained to Robby.

“As I mentioned before, the master power switch needs to be rewired,” Robby said cheerfully. “Would you like me to do it?”

“It doesn’t need to be rewired!” Sophia said. “It’s probably the connections at the terminal.”

“They do this all the time,” Burke said. “They’ll get it sorted out.”

Burke turned out to be right. After a few more minutes, Sophia snappishly agreed to take a second look at the master power switch.

“It’s just this!” she exclaimed with disgust. “OK, you can rewire it. You get the points for this one.”

“I’m ahead three thousand and forty points to four hundred and six,” Robby said, already manipulating wires and making connections so quickly, Marley could hardly follow.

“You don’t have to always give the score!” Sophia said.

Burke supervised jacking the vehicle up, two corners at a time, then removing the blocks and mounting the tires. Amazingly, when they closed the hood and Sophia pressed the start button, the van hummed to life. Marley and Lyric climbed in and went to the far back, where they cleaned years of dust and trash off the seat with an old towel they found. They sat there quietly while Burke and Sophia situated themselves in front.

The couple had a few items of luggage with them, most old and road-weary, but one of which was an aluminum briefcase that looked nearly new. Burke pushed it under the front passenger seat, his eyes on Marley and Lyric. Marley was powerfully curious to know what it was, but they held their tongue. Burke didn’t seem interested in sharing.

“We are going south?” Lyric said.

“Of course we’re going South!” said Sophia. She must have noticed her sharp tone, because she spoke more gently when she continued. “Is it all right back there? Not full of squirrel poop or anything?”

“It’s fine,” Lyric said. “Thank you so much for giving us a ride.”

“Yes, thank you,” Marley said.

“Everything’s going to Hell,” Sophia said. “Burke, get us out of here.”

“As you wish,” Burke said.

Burke took the driver’s seat, with Sophia riding shotgun. Robby climbed into the seat behind his owners and belted himself in. The minivan jolted once when Burke tried pull forward, but he adjusted something, and then it rolled out more or less the way you’d want a vehicle to do. He turned on the lights and turned onto the dirt road, turning south. Sophia sighed, and they accelerated into the night, the way ahead black, the way behind glowering red.

First, Alice might be lying, or at least exaggerating wildly, about someone being out to get him. The “information” she was offering might be some kind of trap. They might not care about the optional favor they claimed to want from Gene and instead might be setting him up to act on what they told him about somebody “gunning for” him. It would be hard not to, if what they shared seemed truly dangerous to him, and if he couldn’t confirm whether or not it was true.

So they might be trying to trick him into doing some specific thing—maybe even a seemingly innocuous thing—that would play right into their hands. The idea was even more disconcerting considering they’d clearly spent some time delving into Gene’s personality profile. Everything Alice had said about him had been spot on.

As plausible as that seemed, Gene’s gut told him there really was something there. True, he’d only seen an animation of Alice, one that may well have been altered or even generated by an AI to appear as honest as possible, but he didn’t think so. He had a very good track record of judging whether someone could be relied on, and for all the concerns strange circumstances, Alice had seemed to him like a genuine person who was genuinely trying to trade information for his help. He even thought she might have given him her real name. Also, not insignificantly, Samantha had chosen to be part of that group, and while it was always possible she was also a mark, or that including her had all been part of a strategy for getting to Gene, Samantha was generally a good judge of people—with the exception, based on what Gene had read so far of her diary, of boyfriends.

A second possibility was that the information was made-up but that there was no trap. Maybe the Louvre was needed Gene’s help but didn’t have anything else they could bargain with. Yet they did have his daughter. What better bargaining chip could they have? The fact that they weren’t offering to put him in touch with her or even pass along his messages was, weirdly, a point in favor of trusting them.

In theory, a third possibility was that they had real information about a real threat to him, or at least thought they did. The problem with believing that was that it struck Gene as unconvincingly convenient that they had come across that information just as he was contacting them about Samantha. Together with the fact that they were technically a criminal vigilante group, this made trusting them very difficult, if not impossible.

Even so, coincidences did happen—and Alice had said the danger originated with the American government, which would have been a strange thing to make up and which made some sense considering the current threat of war. If what they were claiming was true—that someone was about to cause havoc for Gene and they knew who—then Gene getting through to them when he did could be just a case of him being very lucky.

On the other hand, it was hard to imagine what the point could possibly be of an American intelligence operation against him. Blackmail didn’t seem likely. Apart from stealing a pack of gum when he was ten, something he’d regretted disproportionately ever since, Gene was kind of a straight arrow. Edison used to tease him about it. Threatening him physically didn’t seem likely, either. It was hard to imagine what the Americans could get from anything like that.

Although ... maybe he wasn’t the target per se. Maybe this person, if they existed in the first place, was going to threaten someone close to Gene to try to force Gene to do ... something. Share state secrets? He didn’t have much in the way of that kind of information. Gain access to someone, or something?

Was Mark safe because he was in France, or was he in greater danger away from Cascadia than in it? Was Samantha safer with the Louvre than she would have been at home? Or was the Louvre part of the threat? Alice had claimed Samantha was there of her own free will and in no danger, and Gene was inclined to believe her, but there was no guarantee that was true.

And what about Kiara and Vi and Will? What about Zora itself? Gene loved too many people and cared about too many things to avoid being an easy target.

He grunted with frustration. There was no point in endlessly speculating about unnamed dangers, and there was no chance Gene was going to guess what was going on, if anything was going on, without further clues.

The first question was whether Samantha really was with the Louvre of her own free will and perfectly safe, but there was very little he could do to learn more about that. He could hire a private investigator, either an AI or a human/AI partnership, but that hardly seemed like a smart move. His daughter, apparently, was part of a criminal organization, which is something he couldn’t risk anyone else finding out about at this point. That organization itself would be much too dangerous for most PIs anyway.

He could try to get Mi to connect him by telling him who her contact was, but Mi had clearly been very uncomfortable even contacting that person herself. Gene might need to ask her to get him in touch with the group again, and if he alienated her by pushing too hard, that option might go away.

That left him with very little he could do about Samantha or the supposed threat until Alice contacted him again, and he had no intention of promising an unnamed favor, regardless of the conditions, which meant even that wouldn’t offer much in the way of new options.

The only other connection he could think of was the boy Samantha had mentioned, Lan, whom he didn’t know and had no way of finding—except that Samantha’s diary had mentioned he was the friend of a school friend. He brought up the page where she first mentioned him: he was a friend of someone named Naya. This was not a lot of help, since “Naya” was the name of a character from a wildly popular streaming series around the time Samantha was born. When Samantha first went to school outside Zora, it seemed as though every other girl in her class plus a good number of the nonbinary kids were named Naya. Gene didn’t know of any particular Naya in Samantha’s circle, and she hadn’t come up elsewhere yet in the diaries. Still, it was a lead.

“Ollie, I need your help with something,” he said. “I’m trying to find out who ‘Lan’ is in Samantha’s diaries.”

“I haven’t read the diaries,” Ollie said. “I don’t have permission.”

“Can I give you permission?” Gene said.

“Yes, Samantha left it open for you to share.” Gene was stopped for a moment, realizing how much trust his daughter actually seemed to have in him—enough that she would let him share her diary. He was beginning to realize that there was a lot he was missing about their relationship, and about Sammi herself.

“I am granting you permission,” Gene said. “So she mentions Lan, and she mentions that Lan is a friend of her friend Naya, but I don’t know who exactly either of them is. Can you search public records, especially school records, to try to identify either one? I don’t know if ‘Lan’ is a regular name or a nickname or what.”

“It could also be made up by Samantha,” Ollie said. “She might prefer to keep him private.”

“This is a matter of Samantha’s safety,” Gene said.

“Oh, don’t worry: I do what I’m told,” Ollie said. “But I did want to be sure you had taken that possibility into account.”

“Maybe ‘Lan’ is short for something. Lance? Landon? Even Alan or Orlando?

“I’ll try all of those, and any other name with ‘lan’ in it.”

“And can you cross-reference those with any public records or Zora records of places Samantha has been? Maybe they were at a coffee shop together? Maybe she’s had him to the house?”

“I’ll do what I can,” Ollie said. “The records we have legal access to are limited.”

Gene hesitated, unsure whether Ollie was implying that there were more records they might be able to reference that weren’t legal. Then he shook it off. There was no point going down that road. Criminal behavior was exactly what he was trying to save Samantha from.

“That’s all right,” Gene said. “Do what you can.”

The only other thing Gene could do that might be useful was reading the diary itself. Ollie would have read it instantly after receiving permission, and he’d be using anything he’d found to aid in his search, but maybe there were clues in there that wouldn’t be obvious to an AI, or that would only be visible only to someone who knew Sammi well—though Gene questioned now whether he still fit that description.

He checked the time on his lenses. He’d slept poorly and gotten up early, and now it was just before six a.m. He set himself a timer, allowing one hour to read more of Sammi’s diary and see what he could find. With luck, Ollie would break in with something useful, or Gene would find a lead he could give Ollie to pursue.

He tried to skim, at first. Sammi said little about the Louvre, though it was clear that she’d shown Lan her skills and that he’d gotten her some kind of try-out. Gene found himself slowing down and reading carefully, though, as he read about her feelings about Lan, about herself, about Gene and Will and Edison. She was as romantic as Edison had been, something Gene wouldn’t have guessed from how she spoke about her life to him. Mark was the one with the romantic flights of imagination. Sammi seemed to keep her passions quiet, but they ran deep. She was particularly upset about the many millions of disenfranchised, permanently unemployed people in America.

Most of the diary had to do with friends, school, romantic relationships, and economic justice. The Louvre seemed to come up from time to time, but Sammi spoke about it in such general terms that it was hard to be sure, and not once did Gene read any details that might help him locate Lan or anyone else from the organization.

He was near the end of the diary when the hour ran out.

“Ollie, any luck with that search for Lan?”

“I’m sorry. I still have a few inquiries out, but so far nothing promising has come through,” Ollie said.

“All right,” said Gene. “Have the kitchen make me a cup of coffee. I need to head in to work.”

As soon as Gene let himself focus on work, a hundred thoughts crowded in. Based on what Tom Sato had shared about American bug drones, it seemed possible war might break out at any minute, and Gene needed to help Cascadia prepare.

If a war resulted in refugees and catastrophes, the organization Gene’s ran, the Agency of Resilience and Disaster Recovery, would activate an emergency operations center. In any disaster, up to nine national agencies, aided by many local agencies, would connect and become part of the effort as coordinated by the ARDR. These were the National Housing Agency, the Cascadian Transportation Agency, the Reemployment Initiatives Bureau (for emergency workers and volunteers), the Bureau of Cultural Affairs (for historic preservation), the Bureau of Economic Development, the Department of Agriculture (when food production was threatened), the Department of Human Services, and the Agency of Information and Communications.

During normal times, counties around Cascadia were responsible for submitting proposals and writing grants to, say, create rain gardens to help handle excessive stormwater or to build sea walls. The ARDR reviewed the requests and packaged many of them into funding requests to submit to the legislature. In the case of something as disruptive as war, local disaster management efforts would be led by local emergency management officials or fire chiefs, all of whom would coordinate through Gene’s office, and there wouldn’t be time for proposals and grant applications. Instead, Gene needed to ensure that his organization had the funds, personnel, and AI resources they would need to respond to wartime catastrophes without delays. That meant preparing financial materials, getting funding, hiring and training personnel, and preparing for greatly increased AI use, which in turn meant coordinating with human and AI workers within the agency to get all of that planning and all of those projections completed as soon as possible, which in turn meant pulling personnel off some of the less urgent matters the ARDR was dealing with, such as longer-term resilience projects around the country. Unfortunately, disrupting those efforts also meant having to handle the outcry from officials in counties around Cascadia who would wonder why their projects and requests were suddenly stopped dead in their tracks. Gene had to make sure that was done without it being obvious that war preparations were in progress. Gene’s instructions so far were all wrapped in confidentiality.

All of this meant an endless procession of messages and meetings, with Ollie mediating to allow Gene to focus on whatever priority was the most important at any given moment. Gene spent his first couple of hours in the office untangling those priorities in constant dialog with Ollie, who organized the information he gathered into massive task lists that he and Gene then dove into, item by item.

By mid-morning the meetings began. Gene and Ollie, with some help from Bennet, briefed one group after another, sidelined and prioritized projects, and handed out requirements and directives. Unfortunately, most of this time was spent trying to find answers to questions like “Where are we getting the personnel for this?” and “Where do I take funds from to follow through?” or statements like “That’s impossible. We don’t have the resources.”

Lunchtime went by unnoticed, and it was past three when Gene was interrupted in the middle of hurried preparations for yet another meeting by a blinking icon in his lenses: a black arc on a splash of red. His first thought was irritation that someone was trying to get around normal channels to contact him, and his second was more irritation that for some reason his lenses weren’t displaying who exactly was calling. Then he realized what the icon must meant.

“Ollie, hold everything off for a little bit; I have something I have to do, and I don’t know how long I’ll be.”

“And the meeting?”

“Push it back, please,” Gene said. Then he gave the icon a long gaze and opened the call.

Suddenly, he was back in the black sphere with drawing-style Alice standing across from him. He wondered if he also appeared to her as a sophisticated cartoon.

“Is it Samantha?” he said. “Is she all right?”

“She’s still fine,” said Alice. “She still doesn’t want to talk to you. I called because our situation change.”

“What do you mean? You mean your situation with Samantha?”

“Samantha is fine,” Alice said, clearly irritated. “But one of our people was killed.”

“I’m truly sorry to hear that,” Gene said. “But what’s it got to do with me?”

“It’s the person who found out the Americans were out to get you,” Alice said. “Apparently the Americans didn’t like being noticed. We hadn’t counted on physical violence. That’s not our area.”

Gene shifted in his chair, his anxiety about the ARDR’s preparations spilling into his anxiety about communicating with a criminal hacker organization like two rivers joining in rough terrain. “That’s not my area, either,” he said finally.

“Of course not,” said Alice. “Look ... you really need to know what’s going on. Can we meet?”

“Meet?” Gene said. He thought they were meeting. They were meeting as cartoons in a globe of darkness, but it was still a meeting.

“In person,” Alice said.

Gene couldn’t make any sense of that. Why would a secret hacker organization want to meet in person? That sounded difficult—and dangerous. Gene still didn’t know if he believed there was any real threat to him, though it was true it would be easier to tell if he saw Alice in person. He could read a person much better than a cartoon. But why would she want to meet in person? Wasn’t meeting this way much safer for her?

“Why do you want to meet in person?” Gene said.

“Because that way, we can talk like human beings,” Alice said.

“And having researched me, you think that will make me more inclined to help you,” Gene said.

Alice shrugged. “Maybe? That’s not why, though. There are terrible things beginning. I know you probably have access to some information because of your position, but I don’t think you really understand what’s coming, and we do. I mean, part of it. You’re worried about a war starting, but we just found out we’re already in one.”

Gene hesitated, but he didn’t know why. He just had to tell her no, because there was no way he could safely meet with her. He doubted the real reason for an in-person meeting was that Alice preferred talking face to face. People had done some of that when Gene was young, but Alice appeared to be young enough that connecting virtually should be second nature, the most comfortable form of communication possible.

It hit him suddenly what his hesitation was about.

“I want to see Samantha,” he said.

“We’ve been over this,” said Alice. “She doesn’t want to see you.”

“If you want to meet in person, let’s have the meeting wherever Samantha is. I need to know that she’s OK, and I don’t mean to be inconsiderate, but I don’t know you. She doesn’t have to talk to me. She doesn’t even have to acknowledge I’m there. I just want to see her in person. That’s the one thing that would get me to meet with you in person.”

“Not threats to Cascadia? Not the end of your career, public humiliation ... ?”

Gene felt a finger of cold push down his spine. What did she mean by that?

“Just Samantha. If you don’t understand why I’m more worried about Samantha than about these threats you’re telling me I should care about, go back and read my profile again.”

“All right,” Alice said brusquely. “Wait. I’ll see if anything like that is possible.”

She vanished, and Gene was alone in the bubble. Some light music started: a flute, guitar, bass ... It took a moment, but he realized he recognized the tune, “The Girl from Ipanema.” He had a sudden and surprisingly vivid memory of standing in an elevator next to his mom in an office building somewhere. There had been a smell, like burnt electronics—

Alice reappeared. “Samantha says OK. She’ll come to the meeting, but she won’t stay, and she says don’t get your hopes up for a conversation.”

“I won’t,” Gene said. “Where and when?”

“Now we’re getting somewhere,” Alice said. “Do you have any paper? You need to write this down. You don’t want it recorded electronically.”

Alice wanted to meet that afternoon at the Delia Rhodes Sports Arena in Antioch. Gene had pictured a sporting event, and the idea of having so many people around was reassuring, but he realized on the way that it was a Tuesday afternoon. It seemed unlikely any sporting event would be going on in that time frame unless it was some kind of practice. He wanted to check the arena’s schedule on his lenses, but Alice had advised strongly against leaving a digital trail. As it was, it would still be recorded that he’d taken the train to the arena stop, but that information wouldn’t be accessible through any easy means, and it wouldn’t be a definite indication he was going to the arena itself. There were home, restaurants, and businesses in that area as well.

The arena was smaller than he’d pictured, a squat, cylindrical building partly surrounded by a park. When Gene was very young, sports venues were always provided with vast parking lots, but parking in most places had been turned into better-used space as people turned to mass transit, on-demand shuttles, and on-demand autonomous electric cars to get from place to place. By the time Gene graduated from college, few people owned cars of their own. Gene himself had never owned one, although Edison had for a little while when he was young, living for a time on an isolated farm in eastern Oregon.

Per Alice’s instructions, Gene walked around the building to a service entrance, where a robotic vehicle was in the process of loading recyclables. He walked up stained concrete steps to a steel door. It was locked, and he stood there, uncertain whether to knock or try another entrance, when the door clicked and swung open by itself. He walked in, and the door clunked shut behind him.

He found himself in a trash room that opened onto a service corridor. The air smelled of stale beer, mildew, and pretzels. When Gene stepped into the corridor to get his bearings, he saw he wasn’t far from a room-sized opening into the main arena, through which he could hear children yelling. The corridor was empty, and Gene took the few steps to the opening to look in. Two groups of schoolchildren were playing some kind of volleyball with trampolines. The sight was bittersweet and painful, children at play with no worries about war, America, secret dangers.

“Gene,” someone said. He turned, and there was Alice. Her voice sounded different than in had in the calls—it must have been masked during those. Standing behind her was Samantha, and standing close to Samantha was a lean, bristly-haired, bronze-skinned boy with a prominent nose. Man, not boy, Gene corrected himself. Samantha wasn’t a child anymore. Never had that been more painfully clear to him than at that moment. He couldn’t compel her to do anything, not even to come home, which he realized on some level he’d meant to insist on.

She looked well. She was dressed in jeans and a dandelion-yellow top he didn’t recognize. She seemed healthy, alert, even relaxed. She was certainly more relaxed than he was.

“Samantha!” Gene said. “Are you all right? Do you want to come home?”

Samantha breathed in, frowning, and glanced at the young man next to her. Gene realized belatedly who it must be.

“Are you Lan?” Gene said.

The young man looked puzzled. “Lan?” he said.

“You’ve been reading my diary,” Samantha said.

Gene nodded.

“I’m surprised,” she said. “But it’s good. Come on.” This last part was directed at her boyfriend—if that’s what that person was? Gene realized that “Lan” must be an alias, but that didn’t clarify whether or not this was “Lan.” Then Samantha was turning away, and they were leaving. Gene wanted to shout after them, but what would he shout, and what good would it do? Caution won out over desperation. He watched Samantha until she and her companion turned the corner, and then he shifted his attention back to Alice.

“What did you want to tell me?” he said.

“You’re being—” she began, but an icon for an urgent bulletin appeared in his lenses, and he gestured to cut her off.

“Just a minute,” he said.

“You’re taking a call?” she said, glaring.

“It’s an urgent bulletin from my office. It would be suspicious if I didn’t open it right away.” That wasn’t strictly true, but it was true that someone might take note, and it was also true that now that he’d seen Samantha and confirmed as well as he could that she was all right, his work was the highest priority.

He tapped the bulletin with two fingers to get the summary description. He thought he’d been prepared for the worst, but the message made his stomach twist as though someone had reached into it and grabbed it with both hands.

A flotilla of American warships left Juneau 18 minutes ago and is traveling south at full speed, just skirting Canadian waters. AI assessments rate it very likely to extremely likely that they intend to enter Cascadian territory. At the current speed, they could reach the Salish Sea within 51 minutes or the Columbia River in one hour and 14 minutes. Tap here for maps.

Alice must have read the expression on his face.

“What?” she said. “Is it the Americans?”

Gene dismissed the bulletin and focused on Alice. “I think you’d better give me the quickest version of what you’ve got to say,” he said. “All Hell’s about to break loose.”

“I’m sorry to bother you,” the woman said in a flat voice, “but I think you may have gotten a package addressed to me. It had blue pillowcases and green towels.”

Audrey knew what that meant. “I don’t think so,” she said, “but come in and I’ll double check.” She stood to one side. The woman entered, scanned the area, and took a seat in a straight-backed chair in the living room. Her posture was so beautiful it was practically a rebuke.

A lost package with blue pillowcases and green towels was one of a few dozen ways Audrey had been taught for indicating to another American agent that you were one yourself. It wasn’t proof of anything, though. Proof was the next step.

“I’m Barbara Victor,” the woman said. “Here.” She presented a data tab, a small, white, figure-eight-shaped piece of plastic with an embedded chip and a tiny contact point at one end. They weren’t used much anymore except for certain kinds of identity confirmation, but they were useful for that because, each one having a unique chip design, they were difficult to forge. Audrey took the tab into her bedroom, where she kept a data tab reader in her night table drawer for lack of a better place. She inserted the tab in the reader, and it sent a code based on its structure together with the date, time, and location to Audrey’s lenses. The lenses forwarded the data through a satellite communication hub in the closet as an encrypted and disguised signal to a particular satellite, which communicated with a computer in a location Audrey wasn’t cleared to know about. After about two seconds, a signal came back from the satellite: a holographic picture of the woman currently sitting in the living and the name “Barbara Victor” with a rank code. Barbara was highly placed, it turned out. Technically, she outranked Audrey, though in a different agency.

None of that explained what she was doing at Audrey’s apartment.

Audrey took one of her own pale orange identifying data tabs from the drawer along with Barbara’s and brought both back out to the living room.

“Barbara, I’m Audrey. I’m sure you know that already,” Audrey said, holding out the two data tabs. Barbara put her own in a small pouch that was attached to the belt of her dress, took out a reader, and inserted Audrey’s tab in it. After a few seconds she smiled briefly in satisfaction, put the reader away, and handed Audrey back her tab.

“Is this a good place to talk?” she said. She meant: Can we be certain we’re not being monitored?

Audrey nodded. In addition to deactivating a lot of the usual privacy-invading technologies people had gotten used to having in their homes, Audrey had a self-contained AI that ran regular sweeps and vulnerability assessments on the apartment, most recently the previous night. That kind of AI was popular with people concerned about privacy and was available from normal civilian retailers.

“Would you like some coffee or tea?” Audrey said.

Barbara shook her head. “Maybe a glass of water when we’re done,” she said. “Now, you can’t share anything I’m about to tell you with Bennet Culkin.”

“All right,” Audrey said, taking a seat in her blue armchair.

“We identified a hacker, a Cascadian national, who has been surveilling Culkin’s intelligence activities for at least eight days,” said Barbara. “They were aware he was collecting names, but we’re fairly sure they don’t know what for yet. We think they have somehow identified Culkin as an American asset.”

“Is my project considered compromised?” said Audrey.

“Not at this time. However, we believe you should be on alert.”

“What’s the status of this person now? Is this ongoing?”

“No, the—they are no longer a concern.” Barbara cleared her throat. “There was an accident—they were on a scooter. It went off a bridge.”

“Oh,” Audrey said. The question she wanted to ask was Did we kill them? She was pretty sure she knew the answer, but she knew that even if Barbara was cleared for that information, she wouldn’t be allowed to share it. “And ... were they part of a group or network? Has any of their information been passed on?”

“We’re don’t think anything has been passed on,” said Barbara, “but we haven’t been able to determine whether or not this person was affiliated with a hacker group. You know how informal those connections can be.”

Audrey nodded.

“That’s all the information I can share,” Barbara said. “Maybe I could take you up on that glass of water now?”

After Barbara was gone, Audrey turned back to reviewing data from the project on her lenses. The news of a hacker following Bennet was unsettling, but the problem appeared to be resolved. Audrey was disturbed to imagine how that had been accomplished, not to mention disturbed that the problem had arisen in the first place. None of this suggested anything needed to change, however. Audrey would have said she’d be more vigilant, but she was already as vigilant as she could be without drawing attention—unless you counted having gone to lunch with Noah, or for that matter her friendship with Elena ... but isolating herself too much would also stand out in an undesirable way, she argued mentally. Human connections were not only normal and healthy, they contributed to her invisibility. Except that with Noah, come to think of it, her invisibility didn’t seem to work.

With the first payments out and most participants already engaged, Audrey was beginning to see what level of concern and resistance was coming back. Considering how carefully she’d directed the participant selection, that level was surprisingly high.

The biggest danger was of someone being disturbed about the payments and complaining about it to the wrong person. Despite the dire warnings each participant received, and despite the psychological profiling that had gone into vetting the list, some small proportion of participants would object to getting extra money for nothing. Of those, some proportion would want to complain directly to the Citizen Dividend Office or somewhere else that would be problematic.

So far there had been two such complainers, but thanks to the loophole the professor had discovered, which allowed cancellations of CitDiv payment transactions within a certain period of time to leave no obvious trace, neither had compromised the project. While monitoring communications of civilians was difficult, more so in Cascadia than in America, an intelligence AI that Audrey’s contacts had embedded in the Citizen Dividend Office support system made it possible to identify most CitDiv complaints in real time, as soon as they were entered by the screening system and before any human being heard about them. The intelligence AI sent a command to make an immediate cancellation of the original payment and a records change that made it appear that the person complaining had either intentionally or through error been trying to qualify for additional benefits to which they weren’t entitled. In other words, anyone who tried to report what Audrey and her contacts and AIs were doing was likely to find themselves, at best, in an embarrassing situation or, at worst, in trouble with the law.

Messages that had been sent to participants by the scarf AI were set to auto-expire and disallow forwarding using standard security settings. The AIs that reversed the financial transactions also updated the leases on messages sent to complainers so that they were withdrawn immediately. It was common for some business and government messages to auto-expire and not unusual for the sender to be able to change the expiration after the fact. That aspect of the operation wasn’t even difficult.

Meanwhile, participants who simply had questions were being handled by Audrey’s contacts in the CitDiv Office and by AIs they operated, who sent messages claiming the Cascadian government was exploring whether an increase of CitDiv for all citizens might stimulate the economy enough to compensate for the increased government expense, but the pilot program to test this needed to be kept quiet to prevent outcry from the majority of citizens who had not been selected to participate. It wasn’t the most plausible explanation, but it had been deemed adequate and the best available option by the AIs who had reviewed the original plan before Audrey left the U.S.

Most of the people who had concerns were reportedly communicating that they were reassured by these conversations, and the great majority of participants seemed to have just taken the money and kept quiet, as instructed. After all, why argue with a government that was trying to give you more money, especially when it was safer to say nothing than to complain?

The reports Audrey was seeing from the first week of payments were promising. Once the scarf AI had set up the business accounts and determined who would be paid from them, the CitDiv Office had handled the actual payments as though they were legitimate, since to all appearances, they were.

Audrey sat back in the armchair and tried to feel some kind of triumph. Not that the project had achieved its goals yet—far from it—but getting to the point where payments were going out and the malcontent problem appeared to be handled effectively was a huge accomplishment. Even so, all that Audrey felt was drained. All of the time preparing for this mission had aged her much more than the actual two years it had taken. Despite the disturbing news about the hacker, the plan was going almost as well as Audrey could possibly have hoped, yet at that moment, she just wished she could have back the last two years of her life.

She chuckled tiredly to herself, thinking of the birthday cards she’d gotten from Great-Aunt Ruth when she and Carrie were young: Ruth had always gotten the year wrong. Audrey remembered getting a card that said “Now You’re 4!” when she turned six, and a seventh birthday card when she turned nine. At the time, she’d been upset. What nine-year-old wants to be treated like a mere seven-year-old? That aside, the presents were often good. Thinking back now, Audrey wished Great-Aunt Ruth could roll back the last two years for her with some kind of magically erroneous birthday card, even though realistically, Audrey would have made the same choices and would still have ended up exactly where she was. It was just nice to imagine a life in which she wasn’t constantly afraid of arrest and imprisonment.

Two years ...

When Audrey had checked the Marzouk Elder Home visitor logs, she’d only gone back one extra year. Maybe it wasn’t this past Passover, or Passover last year: maybe it had been two years ago. Maybe Ruth had just been off by two years. Actually, Audrey wasn’t sure that Ruth had really said what year it was. Maybe Audrey had just made the assumption that the visit had been recent.

She got up and took the scarf out of its fingerprint-locked drawer in the bedroom, then logged into it with her lenses. She didn’t have a good reason to be gathering more names just then, but if anyone ever asked about it, she could make a case that she wanted to have more participants ready in case the program needed to be expanded on short notice. That was an unlikely thing to prepare for, but not impossible, and Audrey was known as a stickler for preparation. She set up a small batch of sources to scrape for information on likely participants, and she made sure Marzouk Elder Home and two other institutions she’d already checked were included in the search. This time, instead of going back just one year, she went back five. She had high hopes for this, and she found herself unable to simply wait while the scarf worked through its list, since as before, it was spacing out its queries to avoid creating a suspicious access pattern.

To distract herself, she brought up the dashboard for her legitimate work, where she found a new set of reemployment plans to review. Her attention was fragmented, and although she knew better than to keep the scarf output running in a corner of her viewing area, she found herself repeatedly bringing up the status of the search even though the summary output showed nothing more than the network of resources being consulted and the number of individuals being reviewed, a constellation of color-coded dots representing data stores, with details that appeared next to each when Audrey focused on them. There was nothing there for her to see. She couldn’t even have it alert her when it finished with the Marzouk records specifically, since that information would stand out in the AI’s audit logs for her organization to review when this was all over. She tried her best to keep her attention on her reemployment tasks.

One of the reemployment plans for a town north of Fresno seemed to have been drawn up by either someone who had no idea what they were doing or by a badly configured AI. It adhered to the specifications technically, but the work distribution section of the plan was a lopsided mess: most of the opportunities were optimized for people over the age of 63 who had last names beginning with K, L, or M. Technically, Audrey was only responsible for flagging any issues she came across, but in this case she dug in. She was closing in on the root of the problem when a notification flashed saying the scarf had finished.

She resisted the urge to go directly to the Marzouk records. Instead, she started a series of queries that could plausibly have been sampling the data to ensure it fit real world requirements. She would have done something like this for real data; failing to check the results with these kinds of techniques resulted in problems like the one in the reemployment plan, in which an innocent mistake at any step in the process could render the results worthless.

Several minutes in, it seemed safe to view a slice of the Marzouk visitor logs covering late March through early May for 2064, 2065, and 2066, limiting for parties with people whose first name began with L.

Lauren Hsu showed up again. There was also a Lauren Washington, but she was 40 years old and publicly transgender. Then there was a Lauren Fisher, who might have been the right age. There was no history of a legal name change in what was now Cascadia, but Ms. Fisher had moved to Oregon from out east, which meant that the U.S. and not Cascadia would have those records. Even so, that was nearly a year later than when Audrey’s mother had left her and her father, and Lauren Fisher was listed as having one child: a son, Adam.

Audrey almost moved on then, but the name Adam ... that’s right, Great-Aunt Ruth had said something about her young man, Adam. Had Audrey’s mother stayed east before going back to Oregon? Audrey had always assumed they’d moved directly to Oregon when they left, but it was certainly possible that it had happened later. Still, what was the theory? That Lauren had changed her name legally before coming to Oregon and had also adopted a son? If so, what had happened to Carrie?

Audrey suddenly wanted to smack herself on the forehead. She pulled up Adam Fisher’s birth date, and there it was: September 22, 2012. Now she remembered something else Great-Aunt Ruth had said: You don’t have a sister.

Adam was transgender. She didn’t have a sister because she had a brother.

She closed down the scarf AI interface, dizzy, her pulse racing. She could find them right away in public directories if she wanted. She could message her mother that minute and say “Why did you leave me behind?” The thought made her queasy with anxiety and doubt ... and hunger, she realized. She’d been too busy for lunch, and now it was getting close to dinner time. Finally finding them after all these years was more than she could handle, especially in her tired state. There was no rush. She would look them up after she figured out what to say.

Meanwhile, she needed distraction, and she felt suddenly grateful that she had an actual friend who lived next door—a friend who never shut up. Elena’s husband, Jeremy, was away at some kind of plumbing convention, a kind of event Audrey would never have imagined existing.

With Jeremy out of town, Audrey could invite Elena over to eat with her. They could come up with something fun to have the autokitchen make, and it would give Elena a chance to effuse over her nieces more, which Audrey found comically entertaining. Elena talked about those girls with such hyperbole, it sounded as though she was just making up one wild lie after another, but the facts at the heart of each of her claims seemed true: Audrey had checked on a few of them just to be sure. They were impressive young women in their individual ways, and Elena a whole booster society in one person. Audrey hoped they knew how much delight their every accomplishment gave their aunt.

It would have been easy just to message Elena, but Audrey felt like she had used her lenses more than enough that day. She would walk over and say hello in person.

The autokitchen air fried chicken dumplings as Audrey finished her second glass of Syrah. She had always avoided learning much about wine, since that would only mean getting pickier about it, and anyway, drinking made her less sharp. On those occasions when she did drink, she usually limited herself to one glass, but today she’d felt uncharacteristically reckless and had a second. It was coming out in the conversation.

“I don’t want it to go anywhere,” Audrey was telling Elena. “I didn’t even really want to go to lunch.”

Elena, who was lying on the couch sipping her own second glass, shook her head and waggled a finger at Audrey. “You’re telling me that you, Audrey Adams, who could stand in the way of a falling tree and stubborn it into going to one side of you, couldn’t get out of a lunch date? You obviously like this guy ... whose name is?”

“Noah.”

“Noah what?”

“Don’t look him up.”

“I’m already looking him up. I searched for ‘Noah’ and ‘Citizen Dividend Office.’ There are only a few. Here, is it this one?” She flicked a picture from her display over to Audrey’s lenses. It was Noah.

“Elena—”

“I like him! He’s a nice choice. He’s a little handsome, isn’t he? Kind of in a used-to-play-sports way?”

“He’s not handsome.”

“You don’t get to say that. So, what happens next?” Elena sat up on the couch. She was wearing another one of her multicolored dresses, this one in a vivid interlocking tree pattern that was inarguably fun but also hard to look at it directly without going crosseyed.

“Nothing,” Audrey said emphatically, looking away from the dress. “I’m not at a point when I can spare attention for dating.”

“Really,” Elena said. She drank the last of her wine and poured a few fingers more. “Can’t spare the attention.”

“I just moved here, and I’m still getting used to my job, and I have that family project.”

“Of course you do. What other terrible excuses do you have? Have you researched him?”

“No.”

“You haven’t researched him?” Elena said in amazement. She was more right to be surprised than she knew, Audrey thought to herself. Checking up on people she came in contact with was second nature for Audrey and essential for her work, but she had been going out of her way to block Noah from her mind, and learning everything about him was the wrong way to do that. Even though she’d let herself go to that second lunch, Audrey knew she couldn’t consider actually dating him. Also, since they weren’t going to stay in contact, she’d told herself, it wouldn’t help to know his background.

“OK, no problem,” Elena was saying. “I’m researching him now. Not married—that’s good, there are those polyamorous guys, but I don’t think that’s your type ... He was married, once, I’m looking at a picture, and ... well, hmm. I don’t know if this is good or bad.”

“What?”

“I don’t know. She doesn’t look like you, exactly ...”

“What do you mean, not exactly?”

“It’s sort of something in the eyes, though? The expression? Look.” Elena flicked over a video loop of a Latina woman with a determined expression. Araceli Ruiz-Drell, 2013-2056, the caption said.

“I don’t see it,” said Audrey.

“I can’t help that,” said Elena. “And he works at the Citizen Dividend Office, which you knew, but he doesn’t work for the Office ... He’s some kind of investigator.”

“I think he’s an auditor,” Audrey said.

“I’m not sure ...” Elena said. “Oh, fraud! He investigates fraud for the Office of the Auditor General.”

“He what?” said Audrey.

“So he’s kind of like a detective? That’s attractive. Is any of this helping pique the interest that you already obviously have?”

“Dinner is ready,” the autokitchen said over the living room sound system. Audrey ignored it: she was already bringing up information from the Office of the Auditor General on Noah Drell and his position. Elena was right: he was an investigator. Specifically, he was an investigator assigned to investigate Citizen Dividend fraud. Was he investigating her? That didn’t make sense, though: you wouldn’t send a civilian auditor after someone you suspected of being an agent of a foreign power—and you wouldn’t investigate someone by taking them to lunch.

“Are you looking for pictures of him in some kind of uniform?” Elena said. “I think he’d look very good in some kind of uniform. Ready for dumplings?”

There was a knock at the door. Firm, but not Barbara Victor’s three sharp raps. Not the pounding she’d imagined on a daily basis, coming from soldiers she kept half-expecting to show up at her door without warning. Not the polite knock of a stranger. Not the knock of someone who had been there before and knew there was a doorbell. What now?

Audrey heaved herself out of the chair and went to do the door, simultaneously working out words to send whoever it was away and figuring out whether she could non-suspiciously call off dinner with Elena so she could figure out whether Noah was a threat. When she flung the door open, however, there he was.

Noah smiled. “I hope I’m not barging in.” He lifted a bottle he was carrying. “I brought wine.”

“Who is it?” Elena called, but she had already gotten up and come close enough to look out the door. When she saw who it was, she burst out laughing.

“I was just sitting down to dinner with my friend Elena,” Audrey said.

“Is the laughing a good sign or a bad sign?” said Noah.

“We were just talking about you!” Elena said with delight.

Noah looked at Audrey, who hoped she wasn’t blushing.

“Please ignore her,” Audrey said emphatically. “We had a little wine. I’m sorry that it’s not a good time.”

“It’s the perfect time,” Elena said. “Dinner is just ready.”

“I don’t think there’s enough,” Audrey said.

“There’s plenty!” Elena said.

“I don’t think there is,” Audrey said.

“Maybe this isn’t a good time,” said Noah.

“If there isn’t enough,” Elena said, “I’ll just have salad, and Noah can have mine.”

“I’m sorry. Maybe we can talk some other time,” Audrey said.

Elena made a disgusted noise. “No wonder you’re still single,” she said. She elbowed past Audrey, took Noah’s arm, and pulled him inside.

“I don’t want to interrupt,” Noah said.

“Sure you do!” Elena said. She took the bottle of wine from him, a Pinot Grigio, and studied it. “This is local,” she said.

“My friend Eric owns the vineyard,” said Noah.

“Hmm,” Elena said. “So just to recap, you’re healthy—you are healthy, aren’t you?—you’re widowed, you have an important job at the Auditor General’s office, and you have friends, suggesting you’re not a terrible person.”

“You have been talking about me,” said Noah. “By the way, that’s the most colorful dress I think I’ve ever seen.”

“Thank you,” said Elena.

“It wasn’t necessarily a compliment,” Audrey said, irritated. Having few other options, she closed the door.

“I’m Elena,” Elena said, “since Audrey forgot to introduce me. I don’t know your boss, but I have met the governor—twice. Do you have any nieces? And have you ever worn a uniform?”

Dinner was excruciating, and Audrey didn’t trust herself, in her tipsy state, to intervene. Elena questioned Noah closely and pointedly while bringing him up to speed on some of the famous people she’d met and on the accomplishments of her brilliant nieces. Noah took it all in good humor and tried repeatedly to involve Audrey in the conversation, but she let Elena do the talking.

There did turn out to be enough dumplings, and it took the autokitchen less than two minutes to make a third salad. Noah sipped at a glass of Syrah Elena had poured him while Elena had another glass herself. They had nearly finished the meal when Noah stopped mid-sentence, looking up: clearly something had appeared in his lenses. He reached out and tapped what must have been a notification.

Audrey watched as Noah’s eyes widened, and then his face flushed with what looked like it might be anger. She opened her mouth to ask what it was when an urgent news bulletin notification appeared in her own lenses.

American Warships Enter Cascadian Waters, the title said. It had come up on her personal newsfeed, not through any of the communications channels associated with her intelligence work.

She opened the notification, bringing up a video feed looking down on several dozen ships cutting through the ocean, ranging in size from nimble corvettes to mid-sized drone carriers to three massive, troop-carrying, amphibious assault ships. She scanned the accompanying column of text for details, then tapped a link for a map. The flotilla had just entered the Salish Sea, skirting Vancouver Island north of the Olympic Peninsula. It appeared to be headed directly for Puget Sound—and just beyond, for Seattle.

Gia was grinning. “That’s ...” she said, and she made an expression with wide eyes and fluttering hands.

“Congratulations,” Lyric said. “How are you feeling? I’d be nervous.”

Marley doubted that, but maybe they were assuming too much about Lyric. Maybe Lyric, like Marley, was less steady inside than she seemed from the outside. Then again, Lyric had been part of a dangerous resistance movement and had fled thousands of miles to live as an illegal alien far from home, and despite it all, she seemed at peace. Marley didn’t doubt she meant it when she said she’d be nervous in Marley’s place, but they were betting it would be a less gut-wrenching level of nervousness.

“I’m doing my best to focus on preparing,” Marley said. “Thinking about questions, mainly. If I focus on the details, it helps.”

“Marley’s going to be crazy famous,” Gia said.

“That’s not helping,” Lyric chided.

Gia shrugged. “I just want them to be prepared for adoration. It’s not always easy. I should know.” She blinked adorably.

“If you were any more adorable, you’d be a baby unicorn,” Marley said.

“Exactly,” said Gia. “When are we going?”

“We?” said Marley.

Gia laughed. “You don’t think we’re letting you go by yourself?” She counted off reasons on her fingers. “One, you’re visiting some man you’ve never met who is a complete political weirdo. Alone? I don’t think so. Two, we’ll distract you on the way there so that you don’t freak yourself out, which otherwise you will absolutely do. Three, we’ll point out how amazing you are when you’re done. Four, somebody has to come along to take care of Anthem.”

“Why can’t Anthem stay here with you?” said Marley.

“Because we’re going to be wherever you’re going!” Lyric said. “Come on, Marley, try to keep up.”

Late that afternoon, Gia left to help a group of the Lewis Lake kids who were rehearsing a play that was apparently about a sasquatch in love. Marley and Lyric sat on the couch in Marley’s guest apartment. Lyric was humming something low and intricate. Marley listened for a good minute or two before speaking.

“Come for a walk with me,” they said.

“OK,” said Lyric, taking Marley’s hand. The pressure of her warm palm felt good even in the heat of the afternoon. “Where should we walk?”

Marley’s throat felt tight all of a sudden, and they had to clear it. “You’d know better than me. Off in the woods somewhere?” they said.

Lyric raised an eyebrow, but instead of speaking, she tugged at Marley’s hand and led them outside, around the community dining room and away from the lake.

There was barely a path. Marley could just make out its windings through the dappled shade, up hillocks and through ranks of still evergreens that suffused the air with the bright scent of pine. Wrens squeaked and whistled, hidden in high branches. Away in the underbrush, some small animal moved. Their footsteps barely whispered in the soft earth and tea-colored old pine needles.

“Gia told me I’d like you,” Lyric said.

“She likes to be right about everything,” Marley said. Their heart was pounding, but it was more from excitement than worry. Lyric felt like someone who had always been in their life.

“True,” Lyric said. “And it’s hard to talk to her about it, because she generally is.”

“It’s one of her bad qualities,” Marley said. “I keep telling her she has to work on that.”

“Do you think she set us up?” said Lyric.

“I hope not,” Marley said. “If she did, she’ll never stop congratulating herself.”

“We should probably avoid, you know, getting interested in each other, then,” Lyric said.

“Uh,” said Marley. They were trying to keep up the banter, but they didn’t feel like joking about it.

“Or just try to ignore her,” Lyric suggested.

“Ignore Gia? I don’t think that’s possible. We should, um, probably just let her win this one.”

Lyric let go of Marley’s hand and put her arm around Marley’s waist instead as they walked.

“That’s probably best,” she said.

Marley had to clear their throat again and stopped to turn their head away and make a little, rough-voiced cough. Lyric’s arm wavered on Marley’s back, and Marley wanted to take her hand and pull the arm back more tightly around them, but the moment passed, and Lyric’s arm drifted away. Marley turned to look at Lyric and was caught by the beauty of her odd-colored eyes, the deep brown one and the dazzling green one. There was a sense of vertigo, almost of danger, and Marley pulled back from it, reminded of their other worry.

“Not to change the subject ...” they said.

“No, it’s fine,” said Lyric. “What’s up?” The two of them began walking again, side by side, shoulders a few inches apart.

“So ... I don’t know where to start with this, exactly,” Marley said. “I’ve been getting these messages. From the government.”

“From the government?” Lyric said. She glanced at Marley’s face, concerned. “What’s wrong? What do they say?”

“It’s ... They’re actually giving me a lot more money than I’m normally supposed to get.” Marley said. “And they send these messages saying I can’t tell anyone about it.”

“The government is?” said Lyric. “The Cascadian government?”

“I know, it sounds weird. It is weird.”

“It sounds like some kind of scam—you know?”

“Yes, I wondered about that—but they’re actually depositing the money. It’s from the same account as usual.”

“And why are they giving you extra money?”

Marley shrugged. “It’s supposed to be some kind of pilot program. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. I guess I should just be grateful.”

Lyric shook her head. “No, that’s definitely weird. I mean, you know I’m kind of new to your government, but when somebody tells you they’re doing something nice for you, but you’re not supposed to tell anyone—”

“They say it’s because it’s a small pilot, and a lot of people would want to be included—something like that.”

“That still seems strange,” Lyric said. “Like, suspicious-strange. What do you think?”

“I think it’s strange and suspicious.”

Lyric nodded. “Can you show me? Since you already told me about it?”

“Sure.” They gestured up their message history and scrolled through. The messages weren’t there.

“This is weird ...” Marley said. They gestured for a voice command and said, “Show me any messages I’ve received in the last week about my CitDiv payment.” Marley had always preferred a gesture rather than a name for their AI interface, to minimize the illusion that the AI was a person.

There were no matching messages. “Show me any messages in the last month that have anything to do with money,” they said. There were a few matches for that, but none that had anything to do with CitDiv. Marley gestured for a voice command again. “Hey, did any messages get deleted recently?”

“Two messages expired late yesterday,” Marley’s AI said.

“Expired? Can you retrieve them?”

“Sorry, the sender didn’t authorize that.”

“Expired messages?” Lyric said.

“I guess so,” said Marley. Expiring resources were fairly common when security precautions were needed, so it wasn’t unusual in itself that the CitDiv messages had an expiration date. If Marley had been paying closer attention, they might have seen a notice when they’d first read them. “So what do I do?”

“You could always take the money and let it be,” Lyric said. “But it doesn’t sound like you want to. If it were me, I’d be wary too.”

“I’d like to tell them I just don’t want to participate.”

“And there’s no way to do that?” said Lyric.

“They make it sound like you can’t opt out,” Marley said, “but now that you ask, they don’t say specifically you can’t—they just don’t give you any way to do it.”

“How about contacting them and asking?”

They came to a small clearing where an old tree trunk had fallen. Lyric sat down on it, pulling Marley in to sit close to her side and putting an arm around Marley’s waist again. Marley shifted and put their arm over Lyric’s shoulders.

“I should have tried that,” Marley said. “Except ... I’m not sure who to contact.”

“Do you want to find somebody to message now?” Lyric said. “I can wait.”

“No, that’s all right. I’ll do it later,” Marley said. Lyric leaned into Marley’s chest, and the two of them sat without speaking, listening to birds calling across the glade.

On Tuesday, Marley, Lyric, and Gia ate an early dinner. Then they called an autonomous car and climbed in with Anthem, and shared stories of Marley and Lyric’s college days until they arrived at the home of their interviewee, Scotty Ross.

The Ross home was an oversized, dark red, clapboard farmhouse that looked at least a century old, though it was well-kept. Behind the house, acres upon acres of farm stretched, with intermingled fruit trees and vegetables, beans and grains in a complex, variegated and mutually beneficial pattern of plantings that were thriving despite the heat. Slim, many-armed farming robots moved through the crops, manually pulling weeds, plucking unwanted insects from leaves, and strategically applying water where it was needed. The crops would be grown from heat-resistant and drought-resistant strains, pollinated in large part by bug-sized drones to take the place of the pollinators whose numbers had decreased so dramatically in the last decades. In the old days, as Marley understood it, farmers had to spray poison on their crops to fight pests and weeds, dig up entire fields on an annual basis even though it destroyed important microorganisms, spray water all over the place just to get some to the plants, and mix chemical fertilizers into soil that got more depleted with each passing season.

It also used to be the case that farming required a lot of manual labor, though, and Marley found themself wistful for a time when you could spend your day getting plants to grow and caring for animals. Not that they couldn’t have done that now if they wanted, but there was a difference between doing something because it was needed and doing something just to keep busy.

“It’s pretty,” Gia said. “Not ...” she made an expression of rapture “... but, you know, pretty.”

Anthem was excited to get out of the car and sniff everything. Since she’d follow Marley given half a chance, Gia had her on a leash, which Anthem tugged at whenever Gia was too slow to follow her to a new and fascinating smell.

Scotty stepped out the front door to meet them on the covered porch. He was a maybe forty-something white man, squatly built, with short, black hair, a wide-ranging beard, and eyes set deep under thick eyebrows. He raised one hand to wave a greeting. Marley walked briskly up to meet him, holding out a hand to shake, which he took when they reached the steps.

“You’re Marley,” he said. “And these two?”

“These are friends of mine, Gia and Lyric,” Marley said, pointing to each in turn. They’d decided not to worry about justifying having friends with them to Scotty. If he didn’t like them being there, they could wait outside, as long as it seemed safe.

“Well, come on in, everybody. Tiffany will get you something to drink.”

Gia waved away the car that had brought them. It closed its doors, made a three-point turn, and drove off, raising a trail of fine dust.

Scotty looked at Anthem. “That’s a beautiful dog you’ve got there. Some kind of mix?”

“Thanks,” Marley said. “Yes, Anthem’s a mutt. If you don’t want her in the house—”

“No, she’s welcome,” Scotty said. “I have kids. There’s no way a dog is going to track in more dirt than those kids. Do you have some kind of equipment you have to set up? I don’t know how these things work.”

“Some of the more elaborate shows have robot and drone cameras, but we’ll be shooting with just lenses and house recorders. Jessica said you gave the OK to share your feeds?”

“Oh, right. Yeah, that’s fine. I forgot she asked about that.”

Inside, the house was dim, lit mainly with old-style corded lamps. Scotty steered them into a living room with pine board floors, a couch, and several armchairs. He took a seat in a large, brown one and gestured for Marley to take the couch.

“Thanks,” Marley said. Lyric and Gia stood apart near the arch that led back toward the front door, and after some prodding, Anthem sat down by Gia and consented to a doggie massage. The editing software would remove all three from the scene.

Marley brought up their notes for the interview. A woman about Scotty’s age with white-blonde hair came in, carrying a tray full of glasses.

“Iced tea?” she said. Gia and Lyric took a glass each, as did Scotty.

“Thanks, girl,” Scotty told the woman.

Marley smiled as they shook their head to the tea. “You must be Tiffany,” they said.

Tiffany gave a short smile and left the room without answering.

“So you’re what, Japanese?” Scotty said.

“My father’s Korean,” said Marley. “My mother’s mostly German. I was born here. What about you?”

“Me?” Scotty said. He seemed a little surprised. “Well, I’m American back at least as far as my great-grandfather—or ‘Cascadian,’ I guess.” Marley could hear the quotes. “I was born here, but my sister was born after we moved to Idaho, when I was two or three, so when my grandmother left us this farm, I moved here, but Alicia wasn’t a citizen, so she couldn’t come. This place is plenty big enough for both our families, but she can’t come.”

“It’s hard to get citizenship,” Marley said.

“Sure, but she also doesn’t want to give up being American. I don’t blame her. I have dual because I was born here, but I don’t see why it’s got to be a separate country. That’s the thing.”

“So you support reunification?”

“Everybody should. They can call this place whatever they want: it’s still America. Meanwhile, I’m working this farm that’s been in my family for four generations, and the money I make is helping pay people to sit around and do nothing! In the United States, they don’t tax you all the way to death.”

“But you get CitDiv back?”

“No, ma—” he began, but he seemed to catch himself. Marley had been pretty sure he’d been about to call them “ma’am.” He was stuck for a moment, probably considering “sir” and throwing that out, too. Finally, he just said, “No, we don’t. We get some subsidy money for the farm, but we turned the socialist dividend down. We take responsibility for paying our own way. I don’t see why more people can’t do that, why they can’t let people make their own living like they used to.”

“What about people who don’t have jobs?”

“They can go out and find them! You’ll find a job if you look hard enough. I found work here. You’ve got work. You ever been laid off?”

“Actually, yes—less than two weeks ago. I used to write for a streaming series, Deaf Ears, but now there’s an AI that writes all the shows.”

“And look at you, you’ve already got another job.”

“Well, it’s volunteer work at this point.”

“See, that’s one of the problems. They expect people to volunteer for everything and accept whatever money the government wants to give them. It’s all backwards.”

“I feel a lot better having work to do,” Marley said. “But it seems like people often can’t find new jobs—even in America.”

Scotty shook his head. “I’m not saying they’ve got a perfect system, but the thing is, over there everybody’s got opportunity. Here, they take away the opportunity to fend for yourself, and people get lazy, and they get irresponsible, and then that leads to immorality.”

Marley felt like they were failing to do the job they’d been sent to do. True, they were having a civil conversation with Scotty, but they seriously doubted that anything he’d said so far would cause people with different views to listen.

Then again, the first constructive part of most hard conversations was letting people get everything out. If you were used to arguing, you’d want to make your point and make sure it was heard. Once you were sure you’d been heard, there might be a room for something more.

Scotty had a lot to get out. His grievances were especially focused on money going out to people who, he felt, hadn’t earned it, especially through the CitDiv, but also through reparations and other programs. He dismissed Sponsored Businesses as government trickery designed to reap profits rightly belonging to entrepreneurs. For all that, what seemed to bother him the most was that he’d been separated from the America he’d grown up in.

“Do you feel isolated?” Marley said. “Cut off?”

“Of course I do!” he said. “My friends from when I was a kid are all in America, and none of them will come out here because this whole country’s a big socialist experiment, and they don’t want to get caught up in that. The government here decides what’s right and wrong, what words you can use to call people, what you’re supposed to do with your time and your money and your family ... I know America doesn’t get everything right, but at least there, they’re free! And here’s this rich place we live in with all these resources and all this money, and by rights that should be part of America! My sister’s family is trying to make do on my brother-in-law’s salary—he’s a dentist, and there most of the dentists own their own AIs and bots, instead of the government owning them.”

“I hate to see how many Americans are struggling,” Marley said. “I feel like they could be doing as well as we are if they managed things the same way.”

“Oh, don’t be fooled,” Scotty said. “Cascadia’s not a wealthy nation because of these Shangri-La policies. It’s the other way around: we’re a wealthy nation because we have all these natural resources and tech businesses, everything we took from America, and we use all that money to prop up these crazy government programs.”

“You feel like we should share what we have here with America,” they said.

“Exactly,” said Scotty.

Marley wasn’t sure what to say. Scotty seemed frustrated, but part of his frustration seemed to be based on genuine worry about Americans who weren’t doing that well. Marley had always thought about the two countries like two paths that forked from the same road. Cascadia had chosen a path of caring for its citizens, they felt, and America had chosen a path of letting everyone fend for themselves, which meant that the people who had advantages to begin with kept gathering more advantages, while anyone who was just trying to live on their own labor and citizenship was in danger of being left behind.

At the same time, was it possible that some large part of Cascadia’s well-being came from having resources America didn’t have? Marley didn’t think that was the heart of the issue, but they had to admit that they hadn’t seriously considered the possibility. They’d learned a narrative about why Cascadia was a place where people were more likely to thrive, and they hadn’t questioned that narrative.

Even so, the story of Cascadia’s flourishing that Marley knew seemed to fit the facts better than the story Scotty believed in. Out of respect for Scotty, though, Marley resolved to learn more about how he was seeing it. Even if their conclusion wasn’t changed, it would be good to talk specifics with someone like Scotty. Maybe they could get closer to agreement about what the facts actually were.

Scotty was shaking his head and sighing. “It’s not that I don’t love this place,” he said. “I mean, we’re doing all right, even if the government has its nose in everything we do. There are good people here. It’s a good place for the kids to grow up, as long as we keep them out of the government school programs. I just think they made a mistake, splitting off like that.”

“Were you—” Marley started, but they were interrupted by an urgent bulletin icon flashing in their lenses.

“What the hell?” said Scotty, reaching out to tap something in his field of view. Marley assumed it was the same bulletin.

Marley tapped the icon themself.

American warships have entered Cascadian waters and are launching drones over Seattle, the bulletin read. There was none of the usual interactive content and explanatory materials. Citizens are now reporting American drones and satellite weapon attacks. Take shelter in—

With a sudden and shocking crackle, the bulletin vanished. A no connection message flashed on Marley’s lenses. They tried to gesture the bulletin back up, but there was nothing on their display, and their gestures got no response.

“Shit!” said Gia. Then, with more conviction, “Shit!”

Marley launched themself off the couch and ran to the front porch, looking to the sky, half expecting to see planes or swarms of drones or distant mushroom clouds, but there was no sign of chaos so far. The sun was low in the sky, nearly touching the horizon. To the east, something just above the trees glinted. Then there was another glint, further south, and another one next to that. A smudge of something—dark clouds?—rose above the hills in that direction.

Anthem began to bark, and Gia came out wrestling against Anthem’s pull on the leash, Lyric beside her. Scotty came with them, scanned the sky, then pointed to the east, where Marley had been looking.

Marley turned to Scotty, looking in his eyes.

“Not like this,” he said, barely audible. “It doesn’t need to happen like this.”

“Are those drones?” Gia said, looking where Scotty had pointed. “Or ... aircraft or something?”

“I need to go,” Lyric said, and she started down the steps. Marley kept pace with her, and Gia was right behind.

Lyric stopped short, turning back toward her friends. “I need to get out of here. You don’t. If they come here, they’ll probably leave you two alone.”

“I’m coming with you,” Marley said. “You told me to try to keep up.”

“That’s not funny right now!” Gia shouted.

“It’s a little funny,” said Lyric. “OK, we have to turn off our lens systems, everything. No electronics. We don’t know if they’ll be tracking that stuff when the lens network comes back on.”

“You girls need to stay put,” Scotty called from the porch. “It’s not safe out there. Come back in. We’ve got an emergency radio we can try. We’ll go down in the basement if there’s any danger.”

“Thank you,” Marley said, not bothering to respond to you girls. “But we have to go.”

“Go where?” Scott said.

Marley didn’t have an answer for that. They just followed Lyric as she made a beeline south, across a meadow and toward the woods.

It might have been their imagination, but Marley thought they smelled smoke.

In his seat on the train, he switched to subvocalizing instead of speaking commands aloud. He wanted privacy while he looked for Samantha.

He messaged Will first: Good morning! I hope I’m not waking you up. Did Samantha get in touch with you?

Ugh, what time is it? Will messaged back. I haven’t talked to her since last night. Is she all right?

She’s fine. The hospital released her. I was hoping you could help me figure out where she is.

You can’t ask her?

We had an argument. She’s not talking to me.

Ohhhhh, Will messaged. Sorry to hear that. Don’t worry, she won’t stay mad long.

Could you try getting in touch with her now?

Sure, hang on.

Gene waited. On both sides, towns flashed by: housing clusters, gardens, streets lined with stores, parks, warehouses, construction printers erecting new buildings, trees ...

She didn’t pick up when I called, Will messaged. I sent her a note. I’ll let you know when she gets back, OK?

Thanks, Will, Gene messaged.

He’d hoped that would work. Samantha would never cut off Will. At the same time, there was no guarantee she’d get back to him soon, and even when she did, Gene wasn’t optimistic she’s share where she was or let him put her in touch with Gene.

“Ollie, I need you to get in touch with Samantha’s friends,” Gene subvocalized. “Everyone you can come up with that she might be in contact with these days. Ask them if Samantha’s gotten in touch today or if they’ve seen her. Can you make it sound casual? I don’t want to make it sound like she’s missing.”

“Although, she is missing,” Ollie said.

“Just don’t let it scare anyone, please,” Gene said. “Oh, and keep an eye on arrest records and ... other hospitals in the area, I guess. Any public source of information where she might show up.”

“Sure,” said Ollie.

“And what about places she goes ... school, any of the businesses at Zora, that cafe with the cats ... Is there anything you can check for those? Anything public?”

“I can confirm she hasn’t been to Zora today,” Ollie said. “I checked the gate logs. I’m not finding any indication she’s been to any of those other locations today, either, but there’s not much I can check for that. I’ll widen the search, but there’s not much information available to us.”

“Do whatever you can,” Gene said.

Probably Samantha would get back in touch soon on her own. At least, Gene could hope.

Then again, if she had gone to the Louvre, Gene wondered if she might cut ties for a time. He couldn’t abide not knowing where she was, though, not at a time like this. Not when he’d learned what kinds of games she was playing with her own life, and not when Cascadia itself might soon become a much more dangerous place.

Gene’s first order of business was an urgent message from Tom Sato. When he reached the agency, he directly to Tom’s office and took a seat as Tom looked up.

“Do you want some coffee, or some green tea?” Tom said. Gene had never once sat down in Tom’s office without being offered coffee or green tea. He had the sense that if the building was collapsing and Gene rushed in to get Tom to safety, Tom would offer him coffee or green tea.

“Thanks, I’m fine,” Gene said. “I came as quickly as I could. What did you find?”

“Is your chair comfortable?” Tom said. He didn’t wait for the answer, which was just as well, since it actually wasn’t a very comfortable chair. “So, when I read your report, I started doing some research. I borrowed RDR Cole to help.”

Cole was one of the high-caliber AIs the Cascadian government made available to each agency and department on a limited basis. RDR Cole was the partition or instance of Cole that was available to Gene’s agency, the ARDR.

“What kind of research?” Gene said.

“Hmm, anything that stuck out,” said Tom. “You know, anything suspicious. I kept feeling like we had missed something—you know, to do with the war.”

“Suspicious?”

“Cyber attacks against the agency, disasters occurring under unusual circumstances, that kind of thing.”

“Oh,” Gene said. Cyber attacks against government agencies weren’t uncommon, though they were usually batted away without difficulty by government-owned protector AIs. Also, there was no reason to imagine that any of those kinds of attacks had anything to do with the Americans, as far as Gene knew. As for disasters occurring under unusual circumstances ... it was hard to know what Tom had been imagining he might find.

On the other hand, as hard as Gene always found it to know what Tom was thinking, the man was consistently brilliant at anticipating problems and marshaling resources to address them. Also, as terrible a job as he was doing getting to the point, he clearly was worked up about something. Tom had only received Gene’s report late the previous afternoon, which meant he must have spent most the night looking through data with Cole.

“And you found something,” Gene said.

“Not just one thing,” said Tom. “Two. First: that mudslide in May, in Santa Barbara?”

“You think the Americans were responsible for that?”

Tom shook his head impatiently. “No, but we found things.”

“What things?”

“Bugs. Little bug drones. Most of them were burned out—we couldn’t figure out why. One was intact, but it had been wiped.”

“What do bug drones have to do with a mudslide?”

“There just seemed to be a lot of them. It was strange, so I looked into it, but at the time, I couldn’t come up with anything, and it didn’t seem important enough to requisition time on Cole. But last night, I had RDR Cole look at them, and they say the bugs are almost certainly American-made and that they were designed to self-destruct if they were damaged. The one that didn’t self-destruct ... I guess that one malfunctioned. But we found sixteen remnants from self-destructed drones, and if those were just the ones that were damaged by the mudslide and that we found, there could be hundreds more. Maybe thousands. Maybe more than that.”

“You’re saying the Americans sent tiny bug drones to hide in a hillside here in Cascadia?” Gene said.

“I know, it sounds weird,” Tom said. “But that’s what it looks like. Cole thinks they were designed to attack electronic equipment. If you had a swarm of them hidden somewhere, they could attack computers, power stations, communications equipment, vehicles, drones, robots ...”

“Why would the Americans hide drones here ... in Santa Barbara? Especially when we’re not at war yet?”

“If we start being at war, we’ll be watching for things like that, though, right?” said Tom. “Up until now, they’ve had time to sneak all kinds of things in. Probably not just in Santa Barbara—probably all over. Who knows how many they’ve got sitting around and waiting for orders? The drones crawl over from America, moving slowly so that nobody detects them, and when they get to their assigned location, they dig in and go dormant until they’re needed.”

“That’s ... but if America’s doing that, that means they’ve been planning a war for a long time, that they’re intending to invade—”

Tom shrugged. “I don’t know that,” he said. “Maybe they are, maybe not. Maybe they just have them in case there’s a war. But if they’re military drones, which Cole thinks they are, then sending them over here is an act of war, technically. So even if there’s no fighting yet—”

“Did you report this?”

“Of course: military command and President Muñoz’s office. I gave them everything I had. They said it fit with some other recent discoveries.”

“You said there were two things?”

Tom nodded. “Yes. You remember that virus that almost got through last month, the one somebody had engineered specifically to crack our systems?”

“Of course,” Gene said. It had been a close call. A brand new protector AI had discovered the virus just in time to prevent it from infecting the computer it was aimed at. If they’d missed it, it could have settled in and compromised the entire agency with no one knowing anything about it.

“American military,” Tom said. “They’re probably sending them over to all kinds of agencies and businesses here, to have some control over our systems if war breaks out. If so, probably some of them got through and are just sitting and waiting, like the bugs.”

Cyber espionage existed in a kind of gray space. No country wanted to get caught at it, but many countries were doing it, and it wasn’t necessarily a precursor to war. At the same time, as Tom had described, it very well could be preparation for war.

“We’re in more danger than I thought,” Gene said.

“And there’s probably a lot more we don’t know about,” Tom said. “Who knows what else they’ve got out there that we didn’t catch?

There wasn’t much time that morning to process what Tom Sato had shared, or even to worry about Samantha. If Samantha hadn’t gone to the hospital the night before, Gene would already have drafted messages to the other senior personnel in his organization about the danger of war, so there was that to catch up on and much else. Preparing for war refugees or human-driven disasters, as well as responding to current natural catastrophes and anticipating future ones, meant that Gene needed to mobilize all of the personnel he had and add more, which meant he needed additional space, infrastructure, and staff, which meant getting the government to approve additional funding. All of this needed to be done immediately. Even so, Gene checked in with Ollie at least five times, even though Ollie would have contacted him the minute anything turned up.

By lunchtime, Gene had begun to feel Samantha wouldn’t turn up any time soon. Despite having nothing new to go on, he’d was also convinced by that time that she was working with the Louvre, which if true probably meant that the boyfriend was there, too. She hadn’t checked in anywhere, which meant she was somewhere she didn’t want to be found.

If he wanted to find Samantha and warn her of the danger, then, Gene needed to find the Louvre. That would be easier said than done.

There was no time for an actual lunch. Gene ordered a nutritional smoothie to be brought up by an office robot, the carrot-kale-pea protein flavor he usually got when there wasn’t time for solid food. While he waited, he allowed himself a few minutes to consider whether there was any earthly way he could reach the Louvre.

There were government agencies that had their eye on the Louvre, but Gene had no authority to request help from those agencies, especially given that this was a personal matter. The group was covered often enough in the popular press, but they were always careful to control the information they gave news sources, and Gene couldn’t think of anything he’d find that way that would let him get in touch. He was beginning to consider ways he might try to publicly get their attention, maybe even an “advertisement” he could pay to have posted on an American news site, when he remembered Mi Zhao.

Gene knew Mi from an interagency panel they’d both been on a few years ago. Mi worked at the Cascadian Cybersecurity Agency, an intelligence organization concerned mainly with hackers and AI. Mi and her then-husband, Tianyu, had come to dinner at Zora a few times with their young daughter, Lindsey, whom both Samantha and Will had adored. Some time after Mi and Tianyu divorced, Gene and Mi had fallen out of touch.

Mi worked in the section of the CCA devoted to defending against rogue AIs, so she wouldn’t be likely to have intelligence on the Louvre—and even if she did have anything, she wouldn’t be able to share it. However, there had been one specific conversation he recalled, one he was fairly sure had been about the Louvre. Mi hadn’t been comfortable naming the organization she was talking about because a friend and former coworker of hers—Gene had the sense that the man in question had been more than just a friend—had joined the organization.

A notification appeared in Gene’s lenses that the lunch robot had arrived. He waved the door open, and the little unit rolled in. It had fifteen or twenty meals and some miscellaneous items tucked into compartments in its body, and it reached into one of these with a multi-jointed arm and produced Gene’s shake, which it set on his desk.

As it turned in place and cruised back out the door, Gene was already composing his message to Mi.

Gene had a regular daily meeting with Bennet after lunch, a meeting Bennet had inherited from his boss, Gene’s permanent Chief of Staff, Daniela, who had been on parental leave for two months so far with her new twins. Without intending it, Gene had found himself taking on some of Daniela’s work that otherwise would fall to Bennet.

It wasn’t exactly that Gene didn’t like Bennet, and Bennet had always been reliable and done everything that was asked of him ... but Gene couldn’t quite figure out what the man’s priorities were, and that made him cautious.

Meanwhile, Gene had a strong sense that behind Bennet’s surface courtesy, the man didn’t like him personally. Gene’s predecessor, Andy Olsen, who to be honest had left the agency a mess, had been a kind of mentor to Bennet. Olsen’s Chief of Staff had abruptly left the agency for a similar position in Immigration, and Gene gathered that Bennet had pictured being appointed Chief of Staff at about that time. He probably would have been, if Olsen hadn’t decided to retire around that same time. That was when Gene had been appointed to run the agency, had considered applications for the Chief of Staff position, and had chosen Daniela, an outside candidate. She turned out to be excellent at her job: a masterful communicator, impeccably organized, with an enthusiasm for and understanding of Cascadian politics that outstripped Gene’s and that of anyone else he could think of. Bennet’s skills, honestly, weren’t in the same league, but Bennet had apparently considered the job already his before Gene took charge of the agency.

“Hi Gene,” Bennet said when he arrived. “Drinking your lunch again?” He shut the door behind him.

“It’s about all I’ve had time for,” Gene said.

“Tell me about it,” said Bennet. “I have your briefing ready, but I wanted to know first whether you wanted me to get more involved in the war preparations.”

Gene winced. “We’re referring to that as the ‘Safe Haven Project,’“ he said. Bennet already knew that the war information they’d discussed was not approved for release to the staff at large. Gene wondered if Bennet had been trying to get a rise out of him. “For now, I need you to keep on top of all of the agency’s normal obligations. I’ll pull you in on Safe Haven as needed.”

“Great,” Bennet said flatly, and he launched immediately into Gene’s briefing.

As usual, the information Bennet presented was complete and useful. He summarized reports Gene had no time to read, highlighted decisions that needed to be made, and checked in on Gene’s priorities. Bennet had blind spots, though, especially in his habit of emphasizing dangers to wealthier communities. Gene was fairly certain Bennet believed himself to be absolutely objective, and to date Gene hadn’t brought the issue up, partly because he wasn’t optimistic that Bennet would listen.

After the briefing, Gene gave Bennet the bare minimum of information about war preparations so far, leaving out Tom Sato’s findings. For now, those would be just for Tom, Gene, the military, and President Muñoz’s office.

As Gene wound up, Bennet smiled, maybe assuming there would be more. When it became clear that there wouldn’t, Bennet cleared his throat. “How’s the family doing?” he said. “Heard from Mark lately? He’s still in France, isn’t he?”

“Oh, well ...” The real answer, Gene thought, would be My daughter went to the emergency room last night, and it turns out she was pregnant, but it wasn’t viable. I know nothing about the boy she was with, and she’s involved in a dangerous hacker organization and by the way has disappeared. I can’t find her, and God only knows what’s happening to her right now.

A call notification icon from Mi Zhao blinked in his lenses, saving Gene the trouble of covering his feelings by sharing some innocuous piece of news about Mark. “Sorry to cut us off, Bennet, but I have a call coming in,” he said. “Let’s touch base tomorrow.”

“Sounds good,” Bennet said, rising. He took his time putting back his chair and leaving the room. Gene had to gesture will answer in a moment over the icon while he waited. When Bennet departed, he left the door open behind him, and Gene had to gesture to close it before picking up Mi’s call.

Gene’s gave the icon a long gaze to start the VR call, and Mi’s office merged half and half with his. She was at her desk in a navy dress with an iris embroidered up one side, clutching an old-style ink pen with both hands.

“Mi, thanks so much for getting back to me,” Gene said.

Mi smiled tightly. “It’s not good to talk about this, Gene,” she said. “I probably wouldn’t have called back if it wasn’t about Sammi.”

“Did you find her? Or get in touch with ... those people?”

“I didn’t do much,” Mi said. “I just sent a message to my, uh, friend. He passed it along, and I guess someone is going to get back to you. I gave them your contact information. I hope that’s OK. I can’t be in the middle of this.”

“No, that’s fine,” Gene said. They could get much more than his contact information if they wanted, he was sure. “I really appreciate this. When? Will they call, or ... ?”

Mi shook her head. “I don’t know. They just said—my friend just said—they’ll contact you. So you’ll hear from them.”

“You should come see us when this is over,” Gene said.

Mi smiled a little less tightly. “That would be nice, but you know, there’s a lot going on. I’d like that, though. Listen, I have to go—”

“No, absolutely. I don’t want to keep you,” said Gene. “I’m so grateful ... I wouldn’t have bothered you if I had anywhere else I could turn.”

“Yeah, I get it,” said Mi. “But if I ever need someone to do some really awful favor for me, now I know who to call.”

“Yes, you do,” Gene said. “Give Lindsey a hug for me.”

“Sure, I will. If she sits still that long. She’s doing gymnastics and flag football and kids’ dance team. I don’t think I’ve seen her motionless for more than five seconds since she was seven. She even wiggles in her sleep.”

Gene laughed. “Thanks, Mi.”

Mi shrugged, waved, and cut the connection.

Gene arrived home around 9:30 that night, and he found the house atypically empty. Kiara and Vi, he guessed, must have concluded the danger was over now that Samantha was out of the hospital and resumed their vacation. Will might be at a late class or he might very well be out on a date, even considering the recent breakup. Still, it felt strange for yesterday’s crisis to be followed by this silence, with everyone scattered to the winds. What he would have liked, what he normally would have done, would have been to call Kiara and Vi and talk things through, but he couldn’t tell them anyone Samantha’s involvement in the Louvre. Well, he’d told Mi, or at least strongly implied it, but he’d had to, to have any chance of getting in touch with her.

So he would have to work things out with Samantha by himself. In most things, the six of them—Gene, Samantha, Mark, Vi, Kiara, and Will—functioned as a family, but there were limits to their family ties, and the person he most wished he could to talk to no longer existed.

He wandered up the stairs and into Samantha’s room. Her workout clothes were still in the pile on the floor where he’d dumped them to use her duffel bag, and one of her dresser drawers was still pulled halfway out. He closed the drawer, and then he picked up her workout clothes, folding each item. He stacked them neatly on her dresser, next to the antique jewelry box Edison had bought her for her eleventh birthday.

He looked around the room. There were the physical displays where he’d seen the data bloom. There above the bed was a long, narrow shelf displaying her collection of gecko sculptures, at least 25 of them. A dress and a couple of hats hung on the coat rack near the door. In the corner near the closet was a bag with her baseball equipment, although she hadn’t played in a couple of years. There was an oversized, pink-and-white armchair by the window where Samantha used to curl up and talk to her friends over her lenses. Oversized, active pictures on the wall flashed glimpses of musicians and performing artists in a constant flicker that would have driven Gene crazy but that Samantha had long considered basic decorating sense. At the foot of the bed, a large wooden box with a padded top, which had once been her toy box, held linens and clothes that didn’t fit. To Gene’s dismay, Samantha continued to buy clothes a size or two too small. She described them as “aspirational.”

“Ollie,” Gene said, “did Samantha leave any messages for me?” It was a hopeless question. If Samantha had been in touch, his lenses would have immediately displayed a notification.

“There is a message with her diary,” Ollie said. “Would you like to see that?”

“There’s a what?” Gene said. “When did she leave me a message?”

“Just over a year ago. It wasn’t a direct message. It’s a note meant to go with the diary.”

“Why would she leave me a note to go with the diary?” Gene said. “I can’t read the diary, can I?”

“I couldn’t speculate about what she was thinking,” Ollie said. “And yes, you have permission to read her diary.”

“Show me the note,” Gene said.

Samantha appeared in front of him—a projection, courtesy of his lenses. It was a slightly younger Samantha, her hair still long. She’d been straightening it at that age.

“Hi Dad,” she said. “So, I’m guessing you finally asked Ollie if I had a diary you could read, or something? Or you asked him to help you understand what’s going on in my life? I know you had to ask something weird to get to this point, so I guess I’m surprised if this is happening any time before I’m thirty. Actually, I bet you won’t ask, but I also figure that if you do, you must actually want to know. I gotta tell you Dad, I don’t think you even want to know what I’m doing with my life. I bet you wish I’d just stay ten years old forever. Whatever—what I’m saying is, you haven’t been showing a lot of interest in what’s really going on with me, so since I only have one parent left, and since he isn’t listening, I have to talk to a computer, which is what I do all the time anyway ... Why not, right?

“Anyway, this is my diary. Well, one of my diaries. I have other stuff that’s just for me, but this is everything I’d be sharing with you if you seemed like you actually wanted to know. I hope you do now.”

The projection sighed.

“I sound like such a bitch. I know you love me—don’t misunderstand that, Dad. I know you’re not always comfortable with personal things the way that Daddy was. We all have limitations, right? But I love you—I mean, I really do love you, and here’s proof: this diary, full of all kinds of things that you’re probably nowhere near ready to hear. I’m having the entries I add to it transcribed as text, because I know you’re a geek about old-timey things. So enjoy. And honestly, thank you for reading this. It means a lot that you wanted to.”

Then she disappeared, and an icon came up indicating a new, private document in his electronic library. He sat down on the pink-and-white chair and started to read.

There were about a hundred entries, sometimes two or three for a single day, sometimes going weeks between. He read the last one first, from about a week before. It was about Terence Palmer, the target of the Louvre’s most recent attack, and what a terrible person Samantha thought he was. Reading the entry, Gene found himself pretty much agreeing with her. Palmer apparently treated his workers and underlings with contempt, and his fortune, to hear Samantha tell it, had been built on one cold-blooded, selfish decision after another.

Gene selected an item a few entries back. This one turned out to be about Samantha’s friend Peri, who apparently was now dating a boy named Damien, who based on the entry must have been Samantha’s ex-boyfriend, though she’d never mentioned him to Gene. The gist was that Peri didn’t know what she was getting into and had no business dating Damien.

The entry after that, though, was enlightening. Samantha talked about reuniting with someone named Lan, whom she was clearly crazy about. Was this the father of the ill-fated baby?

Gene went back to read from the beginning. There were a lot of parties in the early entries, and some disturbingly casual encounters with a series of boys Gene instinctively disliked. Then, four or five months in, the tone of the diary changed. Lan appeared on the scene, a friend of a school friend of Samantha’s. Apparently they had liked each other from the beginning—and apparently, the relationship had become much more exciting when Samantha learned that Lan was part of the Louvre.

Gene was interrupted by an incoming call icon, which he almost brushed away, focused as he was on reading about his daughter’s life—but he was stopped by the strangeness of the symbol. It gave no information about who was calling, which he hadn’t thought was possible, and it required a third party application to answer. The symbol was a black arc on a splash of red. He brought up the information that was available on the application, but it was nothing—some developer’s throw-away learning project, it looked like. This must be the person from the Louvre. He gave the icon a long gaze, aware as he did so that it was not a wise thing to do. The line opened.

At first the icon just pulsed different colors. Gene guessed it was trying to connect. Then Samantha’s room vanished, and everything around Gene went black. It was like he was suspended in ink. The person who appeared across from him was a full-color, animated drawing, a tall, lean woman, probably in her thirties, with skin about the same shade as his. Even as a drawing, she seemed jumpy.

“Hello,” he said slowly. “Are you from the group I was asking about?”

“That’s right. You’re looking for Samantha? She’s with us.”

“Could I speak with her?”

“Didn’t she make it clear she’s not talking to you right now?” the woman said. “In case not: she’s not talking to you right now.”

“I just want to be sure she’s safe.”

“She’s safe and doing fine and with friends,” the woman said. “I’m sure that in time, she’ll be ready to reconnect. Definitely not right now, though.”

“Tell her—”

“I can’t relay messages. She doesn’t want to hear from you. Haven’t you ever been mad at anybody? You have to wait until she’s cooled down. Did you get the impression she was permanently cutting you out of her life? Because I’m pretty sure she’s not doing that.”

“I understand. But what she’s doing is dangerous. It’s more dangerous than she knows.”

“Since when do you have any idea what she knows? And I told you, I’m not relaying messages. Do you want to hear the rest?”

Gene shifted uncomfortably. “The rest of what?”

“I wanted to share some useful information. I’m hoping we can be friends.”

“I don’t even know your name.”

“You can call me ... Alice,” the woman said. “Let’s use that. But I don’t mean that I’m hoping you and I can be friends. I’m hoping you can be friends with us all. We might be able to help each other.”

Gene leaned forward. He could feel himself shaking, and he took a calming breath. “Is that a threat?”

Alice laughed. “No! I don’t know what kind of people you think we are, but Samantha’s fine, she’ll get back in touch with you whenever she feels like it, and we really are her friends. But I think that our group and you can help each other—”

“I don’t need any help right now, thank you.”

“I think maybe you do. Listen: we’ve been following this particular individual in the American government who seems to be in charge of an operation in Cascadia. We haven’t found out much about what this person is doing, but we do know that someone connected to him seems to be gunning for you.”

“What do you mean? Who’s ‘gunning for me’?”

“And that’s where the mutual help comes in. We’re not even asking for anything specific, but we do feel like you’re likely to be in a situation where you could help with some of our work. And we know enough about you to understand you aren’t much more of a fan of what the Americans plutocrats are doing than we are ... but you also seem to be the rule-following type. So what I’ll say is that we’d like to do a favor for you now by sharing the information we have, and in exchange, we’ll ask for a favor from you in the future. When that happens, if you don’t want to grant it, you don’t have to. We’ll try another favor later, although you can decide not to grant that, too. We don’t know what we’d be asking for right now, but we feel pretty sure we can come up with something we’d want that you’d be willing to do. And your profile suggests there’s no way you’d guarantee us a favor without knowing what it is, which is why—”

“That’s very generous. No thank you.”

“You should think about it,” said Alice.

“I don’t need to think about it,” said Gene.

“But you will,” Alice said. “We’ll check in some other time and see if you’ve had a change of heart. You might want to hurry up with that, honestly. I don’t know how long you have before the trouble we’ve seen comes knocking for you.”

“Tell Sammi I love her,” Gene said.

“I’m still not passing along messages. But good luck with your father-daughter situation. We’ll talk again soon.”

“I don’t need—” Gene said—but without warning, the blackness dropped away, and Alice vanished.

She took an electric train to Spokane, then a bus to the Marzouk Elder Home, a sprawling brick structure on a dry bluff northwest of town.

In front of the building, beside the walkway, a flower garden the size of a high school stage featured purple and yellow flowers going limp in the wavering heat of the afternoon. Audrey held tight to cake and went inside. As she passed through the sliding doors, a notice projected on the wall informed her that she’d been entered into the Home’s visitor log.

It was so much cooler in the building, Audrey imagined she could hear the pudding cake sigh with relief. A thin, bald man with huge glasses came out to meet her from behind a desk in a glassed-in office.

“Hello!” the man said. “What can we do for you? Visiting?”

Audrey nodded. “My great aunt, Ruth Frankel.”

“That’s wonderful. I’m Bernie,” he said. He eyed the plastic container she was holding. “Food?” he said, pointing. For one disoriented moment, Audrey thought he was asking for some.

“It’s chocolate pudding cake.”

Bernie raised his prodigious gray eyebrows. “Wonderful. OK if I check to make sure it won’t kill her?”

“You make it hard to object,” Audrey said. “Is an ingredient list all right?”

“Best thing,” Bernie said.

Audrey gestured up her dashboard in her lenses, brought forward the home interface, selected kitchen history, tapped the cake at the top, and opened the ingredient list. She pushed the information to Bernie, who made a catching gesture followed by a few others that must have been for bringing up Great-Aunt Ruth’s dietary information.

“Wonderful,” he said after a minute. “It won’t kill her—and even if it did, what a nice way to go!”

Audrey wondered if death jokes were the norm here, or if this was Bernie’s personality.

“Your great aunt is at a concert right now,” Bernie said, “but I think they’re finishing up, so why don’t you go meet her in the Plover room?” He pushed something from his display toward her. An arrow appeared on her lenses, pointing down a hallway to her right.

“It’s nice to meet you, Bernie,” Audrey said.

“Nice to meet you, too,” Bernie said, heading back to his desk. “Wonderful,” he added a moment later.

The arrow guided Audrey around a corner and down another hallway, into a long room with yellow walls that was crowded with seniors getting up from chairs or waiting for room to move their wheelchairs. A small crowd of middle schoolers in the front of the room milled around a man who must have been their teacher. From the lack of instruments, Audrey assumed they were a choir.

The arrow was still flashing in her display, and she looked where it was pointing to see a round, blinking woman with hair like wisps of cotton and a squarish face crowded with wrinkles: Great-Aunt Ruth. She was standing up, with no cane or walker to help, and then she waited patiently for the crowd to thin before moving forward. When she did, she looked around the room until her eyes came to a stop on Audrey. Great-Aunt Ruth turned and walked up to her, one careful step at a time.

“Why Lauren,” Ruth said. “Where have you been all this time?”

A chill went down the back of Audrey’s neck. Lauren was her mother.

“It’s Audrey, Lauren’s daughter,” Audrey said.

Ruth stopped, staring. “Is it?” she said. “Well, you look just like her. A little thicker around the middle, but that happens. Where’s your mother? I haven’t seen you since you were a baby.”

Audrey was taken aback by how unsurprised Ruth was. But then, if you were 96 and likely to confuse your grandniece with your niece, it was probably good policy to take things in stride.

“I’m looking for her, actually,” Audrey said. “And I brought you a—”

“Shh!” Ruth had caught sight of the plastic container and was looking around warily. An elderly man with a magnificently large head watched them with sudden interest. “Not here!” Ruth whispered. “Come with me.” She hobbled forward at a surprisingly quick pace, and Audrey followed.

Glancing behind her, Audrey saw the man with the head following, but he used a walker and was falling behind. Great-Aunt Ruth didn’t slow down. She led Audrey down a corridor to a small bedroom with family pictures and songbirds on one pale blue wall. Once Audrey followed her in, Ruth shut the door behind her and locked it.

“All right,” she said.

The container was one of the new ones that opened like a flower. Audrey undid the catch on the top to reveal the bowl of pudding cake, dark and glistening. Ruth drew in a sharp breath.

“I knew you’d turn out all right,” she said eagerly, taking the cake from Audrey and setting it on a little table by the window. She settled into a glider rocker, sighing, her eyes still on the cake. Then she looked back at Audrey. “Where’ve you been, girl?”

“America, most of the time,” Audrey said. “I just moved to California.”

“It took you long enough,” Ruth said. “Are you living with your mother?”

“I don’t know where she is, or where Carrie is,” said Audrey. “I was hoping you could tell me.”

“Carrie? Wasn’t there a girl named Carrie?” Ruth said.

“My sister,” Audrey said.

Great-Aunt Ruth shook her head. “You don’t have a sister,” she said. Audrey felt a second chill.

“Is my sister dead?” That would easily explain why she’d had trouble finding the two, but Audrey wished powerfully for the answer to be something else.

Ruth looked at her disapprovingly. “I just said you don’t have a sister, so obviously she isn’t dead.”

“What about my mother?”

“Well, I don’t know! But she was alive at Pesach.”

“You saw her? She was here at Passover?”

“First time in a few years, but yes, she was here. With her nice young man, Adam.”

“She’s with a young man?” Audrey said. Did Ruth mean some kind of boyfriend? Lauren would be in her seventies now, so it was hard to imagine she’d be dating anyone who could be called a “young man.” On the other hand, Great-Aunt Ruth was 96. Maybe seventy-somethings were spring chickens from that vantage.

“He’s very sweet,” Ruth said.

“Do you know where my mother is living now?” Audrey said. “Is she still Lauren Adams?”

“Adams!” said Great-Aunt Ruth. “That thug. No, it’s not Adams. I don’t know where she lives ... I can’t travel anymore, you see, and she just comes here when she comes.”

“What’s her new name?” Audrey said. “Did she remarry?”

“Oh, she did, but didn’t change it for that. It was when she moved. It was ...” Ruth stared up at the ceiling, humming under her breath, concentrating. “... I don’t know. I suppose that’s not much help.”

It wasn’t, but Ruth had already given Audrey the clue she needed to find out not only her mother’s new name, but her full contact information, as long as she was careful.

“It’s fine, Great-Aunt Ruth. I’m just happy to see you. Should we get a spoon so you can try some of that cake?” Audrey said.

Ruth nodded. “But Lauren!” she said in an exaggerated whisper. “Don’t let anyone see!”

By the time she got home that night, Audrey had worked out what she needed to do next. She’d known better than to ask Bernie or anyone else at the senior home for access to visitor records: privacy laws barred sharing that information. She, however, had other potential ways to get to it.

The AI hidden in her scarf was not specifically intended for the kind of search she had in mind, but it was excellent at a wide variety of searching, security bypassing, and information processing tasks, including its main role of setting up the fraudulent CitDiv payments. However, she assumed the scarf was reporting her activities to her American superiors, so she had to make it look like part of her mission.

Audrey would have the scarf search visitor logs for a mostly random selection of senior housing facilities, hospitals, and addiction recovery centers. She’d have it seek out individuals who were likely to be in a difficult financial situation and who, based on information from a variety of public and private sources, seemed to have the right personality type to accept a little help, no questions asked. The rationale she was using, as she was ready to explain if anyone asked, was that people with a vulnerable relative or romantic partner were more likely to be overextending themselves. This was less true in Cascadia, where universal health care and the CitDiv prevented the kinds of desperate economic situations illness, age, and drug addiction tended to visit on Americans, but it was still a reasonable approach to finding prospects for the CitDiv fraud.

Of course, the Marzouk Elder Home would be one of the senior housing facilities Audrey was “arbitrarily” including, and the raw information the scarf AI would collect to make its calculations would be available for Audrey to review in detail.

Audrey spent forty minutes providing the scarf AI with parameters for its search. The most difficult part was ensuring that Marzouk Elder Home was included without naming it specifically, but she was able to preview the hits as she tweaked the parameters, and soon Marzouk appeared on the list.

She left the scarf to do its work. In order to be as inconspicuous as possible, it would space its queries to the institutions out irregularly over the course of several hours.

While that ran, she ate seitan dumplings made ahead by the autokitchen. After, she found herself wishing she’d had the kitchen make an extra chocolate pudding cake. She could still do that, but her realistic assessment was that having a whole chocolate pudding cake would be a very bad idea.

Instead, she ate an oatmeal raisin cookie, which was completely unsatisfying. Audrey often wished she cared about food as little as some other people seemed to, but while she was carefully controlled in most ways, she’d never been able to make her peace with food. Her father had tasked her with all of the grocery shopping and cooking from when she was about eleven, and while he kept tight control over most of her behavior, he didn’t care what she bought at the grocery store. Having food felt free and empowered.

With hours of scarf research still to go, she tried to get some sleep, but she just lay restlessly on the bed, her mind jumping from one possibility to another while the minutes and hours ticked by.

Finally, at 1:37 in the morning, a nondescript notice appeared in her lenses. She heaved herself out of bed and went to the kitchen to see what the scarf had turned up.

Audrey hadn’t been entirely sure whether Great-Aunt Ruth had meant that Lauren had visited at Pesach that same year or the year before: in further conversation, Ruth had said “this past Pesach.” Accordingly, Audrey had made sure the date range included both Passover 2068 and Passover 2067.

Pesach, or Passover, actually lasted eight days. In 2067, it had started at the end of March; in 2068, it started in mid-April. Audrey filtered the records for anyone named Lauren who had visited during those times.

There was nothing for either year.

She changed the filter to include to variations of the name “Lauren”, just as she had for earlier searches, and she expanded the dates ten days out to each side of Passover proper. A match finally appeared for April 30, 2068, well after the end of Passover: Lauren Hsu, visiting her father, Nicholas Hsu, age 71. Lauren Hsu was 48—definitely not Audrey’s mother.

It was past three by the time she gave up. There was no other trace of a person named Lauren—or any variation—nor of anyone named Carrie, including any variation of that. There wasn’t even a record of anyone named Adam visiting, though Audrey still had no idea who “Adam” was supposed to be. Had Ruth imagined the visit? Or maybe she was confusing Lauren with someone else? Either way, Audrey was at a dead end again. The only way forward she could see was paying Ruth another visit. As exhausted as she was, she couldn’t bring herself to even think about that.

She ran her dental cleaner, changed into her pajamas, and climbed back into bed. Before she took out her lenses, she started some very quiet Spanish guitar music on the bedroom audio system. It had helped her fall asleep before. Even so, she lay staring into the darkness for two hours, unable to stop thinking about the useless data she had collected. Sleep, when it came, brought restless dreams.

Six a.m. came without regard for Audrey’s late bedtime, but she dragged herself out of bed. The lack of sleep made her feel years older.

“Make me a large mug of coffee with flax milk, please,” she said to the house. The house mics were turned off for safety, but the speakers were on, and her earpiece beside the bed could pick up her voice. “No sugar, a piece of chicken breast, and ... I guess some snap peas.” Her body, rebelliously, was crying out for waffles with strawberry compote, whipped cream, and dark chocolate shavings—but then, when did her body not want waffles?

A protein-and-vegetable breakfast would give her a tiny edge in staying awake and alert, and since she was planning to get some international espionage done, she figured it was best not to nod off.

“We don’t have snap peas,” the room said. “But we do have some snow peas left and some broccoli. Do you want one of those, or should I order snap peas? It would take about 25 minutes.”

“The snow peas are fine, thank you,” Audrey said. She had never managed to lose the habit of saying please and thank you to AIs, even though she knew perfectly well they didn’t care. Younger people seemed to be fine just demanding things, but some stubborn part of her clung to the idea that courtesy was a habit, that if it weren’t exercised regularly, it would get used less with real people.

“Would you make the bed, please?” she said as she pulled on her blue robe. Matilda, who had been curled up on the end of the comforter, complained as a magnetic system pulled the covers into shape. The cat stretched, then jumped down to rub Audrey’s leg.

Audrey ruefully watched the bed make itself. She could get old-style sheets and make it up herself every day, but what was the point of that? If she felt like she wasn’t doing enough herself, what was her alternative—making everything unnecessarily difficult? Though she had to admit, the idea of having tedious chores was weirdly appealing. It would be nice sometimes to be preoccupied with changing the linens on the bed or scraping out an especially messy pot if it meant not fretting about all the bigger issues for a while.

Audrey shuffled barefoot to the kitchen to collect her coffee. She served Matilda some minced fish cat food, then shuffled off toward the shower, mug in hand.

The scarf was wonderful, Audrey decided after breakfast—as long as she didn’t have to wear it. She was connected to it through her lenses and had begun setting up the job for it to falsify businesses for the Reemployment Initiatives Bureau (RIB) overpayments.

The plan for the extra payments was not complicated. First, a large number of businesses would be set up in the Sponsored Businesses system, which was administered by the Reemployment Initiatives Bureau, the organization where Audrey worked and that was also responsible for the Citizen Dividend. Technically, business founder payments through the Sponsored Business program were separate from CitDiv payments, but in practice, the money arrived at the same time, and most people thought of founder payments as bonus CitDiv money rather than as something separate.

The companies the scarf AI would be using, according to Audrey’s parameters, would be a combination of closed businesses, temporarily dormant businesses, and new businesses. They would all be tagged as “suspend review”—that is, they wouldn’t be expected to break even for the time being, as though they were in a cyclical slump or a ramp-up period. “Suspend review” status was needed because none of these businesses would actually be earning anything.

The Cascadian citizens Audrey and Bennet had been identifying would be credited as founders of these businesses, sometimes original founders and sometimes “re-founders”—that is, people who had taken over failing or released businesses from the people who had previously gotten them running. As founders, they would be due founder payments in addition to their weekly CitDiv credit. Audrey and Bennet’s system had already sent out notifications about this to the first round of participants from the list Bennet had curated, much of which came from the names sent over by the U.S.

Each of these arrangements would also have a “minority co-founder,” normally a person or organization that had helped start the business or been instrumental in making it viable. In this case, the minority co-founder would be credited with anywhere between .75% and 2.5% of the founder payments, would always be an organization, and would lead back through a complicated chain of ownership to an account in the name of the scapegoat. When the scheme was discovered, as it inevitably would be, the electronic trail would lead to that person.

Audrey would have liked to have had a bigger part in choosing who the scapegoat was, but Bennet had presented an option who checked all the boxes: Dr. Gene Ajou, head of the Agency of Resilience and Disaster Relief, where Bennet worked. Audrey had pointed out that using someone in that organization would make it more likely that Bennet himself would come under scrutiny, but Bennet had argued that nothing he was doing would suggest any kind of complicity in the scheme that Ajou, supposedly, was masterminding. More importantly, he’d also argued that this would put him in an excellent position to give testimony that would support the damning evidence against Ajou.

In discussions with Bennet, Audrey had come away with the sense that he didn’t much like Ajou but didn’t specifically have it in for the man. If the selection had been more personal, Audrey would have vetoed it. As it was, she found it cold-blooded of Bennet to frame a man he knew well. At the same time, she had to admit that in his place, she wouldn’t have relied on electronic profiles, either: she would have looked for someone she knew. Bennet had attested, credibly, that Ajou would not suspect, that he was mildly technology-averse and therefore especially unlikely to discover what was going on before it was too late, and that his arrest would cause the kind of chaos and division they were aiming for.

Audrey would have preferred if Bennet could have told her that their scapegoat was not an especially good person, but Ajou didn’t seem to fit that mold: he was a widower and a father, and he seemed to be widely liked, even admired. On the other hand, it wasn’t any more ethical to victimize someone when you didn’t like their personality, and the faith others high in the government had in Ajou—President Muñoz included—would undermine their positions when his “crime” came to light. Bennet was right on this: a better human being made a better scapegoat.

There had been those that had argued during project planning that as soon as the fraud was found out and the scapegoat taken into custody, they should be killed. If it were made to look like a suicide, it would play in the press as proof of the scapegoat’s guilt, and it would make the Cascadian government look weak or corrupt for letting the suicide occur. Another benefit: a dead scapegoat wouldn’t have the opportunity to argue their innocence or to dig up any exonerating evidence.

As far as Audrey was concerned, however, killing people just because they’d be more useful dead was not the way to build a better America. She had argued forcefully against it, and that particular discussion had ended. As long as she was in charge of this operation, nobody was getting murdered.

All of these arrangements—the businesses, the founder statuses, the co-founder percentages, the shell organizations, the account in Ajou’s name, and more—were far too complex for Audrey or Bennet to handle, especially on the scale needed. This was where the scarf came in. Audrey was responsible for setting up the parameters for it to do its work and for running test cases against a self-contained, local database that mimicked some of what the AI would find in the Reemployment Initiatives Bureau system. She needed to perfect the test case output right off, because the next day she would be back in the office for her rescheduled meeting with Gordon, and it would be then that she’d connect the scarf to the CitDiv system to launch the more complicated stages of the plan.

On the commuter train into Sacramento, Audrey found herself thinking about her accidental lunch date and the man she’d met, Noah. She found herself thinking a lot about his eyes, which were coffee-brown and quick. Talking to him felt like stepping out of invisibility. It had been refreshing and, if she was being honest with herself, unnerving. She was rarely unnerved.

Let’s skip ahead to the conclusion, she told herself. Eyes aside, the answer to the question she hadn’t allowed to form in her mind, the question of whether to let this connection with Noah turn into something more substantial, was simple. The friend she’d made where she lived was bad enough, but making a friend of any kind where she worked would be idiotic. The idea of flirting with a local while perpetrating a massive fraud as a foreign intelligence asset was ridiculous.

For that matter, the idea of her flirting under any circumstances was laughable. She was a hard-nosed person, not suited to flirting ... nor had she ever turned heads, nor was she of an age to still turn heads even if she once had, nor was she interested in turning heads.

She reflected that she was working pretty hard to convince herself, which indicated that she was still resisting. Skip ahead further, she thought: what steps will you take to shut this down?

First, she had to refrain from contacting him. Second, if he contacted her, she’d reply by text only to say it was nice to meet him, but she didn’t expect to have time to connect in the near future. Third, if she saw him, she would pretend not to recognize him. Fourth, if he saw her and started to talk to her, she would be curt and unpleasant. She would say she had somewhere important to be, as rudely as possible, and leave.

She hoped it didn’t get to “fourth.” Playing that part would turn her stomach. While she was capable of pretending to be what she wasn’t, she had found it much more successful, most of the time, to be as honest as possible without compromising her priorities. Admittedly, it might be harder with someone who actually saw her, but it had worked well enough with Elena, and Elena was another person who actually seemed to see Audrey.

The train eased to a stop at the R Street Federal Complex, and Audrey rode the outflow of passengers onto the platform, letting go of any thought of Noah ... and his eyes.

Audrey’s meeting with Gordon was scheduled for 2:00, but she was arriving at 11:00 to have time to use the scarf. She’d connect it to the office network, and then it would need 15 to 20 minutes for the initial probing and data collection. After that, she’d disconnect it, and the scarf would need one to three hours to determine next steps. Finally, she’d connect it again for a short session of sending out the instructions and data it had prepared.

She had the scarf folded up in her purse. She couldn’t bring herself to wear it: it was just too out of character. She appreciated appropriate decoration, but she rarely felt the need to decorate herself.

On the way through the department, she smiled at any number of people she hadn’t met and a few she had on her way to the flex offices in back. With her lenses, she brought up a view of the flex cube reservations and chose an undersized, out-of-the-way workspace. When she reached it, she closed the door and sat at the workstation, reaching out onto the padded typing surface with one hand and gesturing up her work dashboard with the other. As an introductory process, they had her reviewing and commenting on a long list of local and municipal reemployment proposals. She worked single-mindedly at that for about thirty minutes, so as not to allow the scarf’s local login time to coincide with her own, then brought up the scarf interface on her lenses and gestured for it to begin.

There was no physical connection: the AI was designed to negotiate with the local network and log in as though it were a human worker. It was even set up to convince the network that it was connecting from a different flex office.

Audrey kept a small status window of the scarf AI up as it got started, and she went back to reviewing reemployment plans. There was one having to do with enhancements to Capay Open Space Park, and she moved that one to the top of the queue out of interest.

Names scrolled through the scarf status window as the AI retrieved records for participants, and Audrey glimpsed one that distracted her: Marley Jun. Why was that name familiar? Something was bothering her about seeing that name on that list, but before she had a chance to remind herself where she’d seen it, there was a knock on the door. Reflexively, she flicked the status window away, even though she knew no one could see what she was seeing. She crooked her head around toward the door.

“Come on in!” she called.

It was Noah. He swung the door wide, but he didn’t walk through. Instead, he looked at her. She felt her evaporating invisibility as warmth on the surface of her skin.

“Hello, Audrey,” he said.

“Noah,” Audrey said. She had forgotten steps three and four. Actually, she’d forgotten all of the steps.

“I just wondered if you were free for lunch.”

No, she wasn’t, she thought, but what she said was “I didn’t have any plans.” Then, ineffectually, she added, “I have a meeting at 2:00.”

“We can be back by two. Would you like to go out? There’s a good Thai restaurant, if you like Thai.”

“And if I don’t, there isn’t?” Damn it, that was repartée. She wasn’t supposed to be coming up with witty responses; she was supposed to be stopping things: putting on the brakes, turning away.

Noah smiled. Before he could banter back, she said “But I can’t ...”

He waited. She couldn’t what? She couldn’t have lunch with a coworker? Somewhere inside her, a voice was trying to tell her she was doing something stupid, but she disregarded it. “I should finish this plan I’m reviewing first,” she said. Then: “Thai is fine.”

“OK,” Noah said, smiling. “Send me a hello when you finish up. I’m flexible for time.” Then, before Audrey could respond, he closed the door and was gone.

That had been stupid. Now she was going to have to go back to step two and let him know that she had made a mistake and wouldn’t be able to have lunch—but because she had allowed herself those few moments of unguarded response, she was also going to have to be a bitch about it. Otherwise, it wouldn’t stick.

She brought the scarf’s status window back up. It was currently scanning through Sponsored Business data, and statistics on businesses reviewed were flickering by. There had been something questionable that had come up before Noah knocked; she remembered that, but she didn’t recall what it was. She hoped that it hadn’t been anything important.

In the end, Audrey failed to be a bitch. She wrote, re-wrote, and re-re-wrote the message she was supposed to send to Noah. It was crisp and unkind and abrupt and damning. It would cut things off clearly and unambiguously. She was still staring at the message, stopping short of making the send gesture, when her status window blinked green and vanished: the scarf was done, for now.

Instead of sending it, she deleted all the text and substituted Is now good? I can meet you in the lobby downstairs.

Kin Khao was a tiny restaurant just a few blocks from the RIB offices, across the street from Franklin D. Roosevelt Park. Noah and Audrey walked there together in surprisingly comfortable silence, bathed in sunlight from every direction by the reflective sidewalks, which sent some of the heat of the sun back out into space. They passed bus stops where people waited for the next bus or stopped at one of the benches to rest or socialize. These areas were sheltered from the force of the sun under shade structures or under trees grown from the spate of plantings in the 2020s and 2030s. The water fountains they saw at these locations were exotic to Audrey, who was used to having to pay for drinking water in cities.

At the restaurant, the cooks and servers were all human beings rather than robots, and nearly every table was full with patrons who ate, used their lenses, or exchanged rapid-fire conversation. Each booth gained privacy from wooden screens carved in intricate tableaux featuring serene figures with tall, pointed, almost architectural headdresses amid beautiful, symmetrical patterns of leaves and vines. Each screen was different, Audrey noticed. It seemed very likely they’d been computer-carved, but they gave the impression of being based on someone’s painstaking art, whether that was someone who lived a thousand years ago or a contemporary artist creating the patterns on their lenses.

Most of the diners seemed to be younger people who’d had too much caffeine. The entrees weren’t cheap, most costing around 50 thuns, but Þ50 wasn’t bad for midtown Sacramento, from what Audrey knew. Audrey had trouble hearing the server list the specials over the background noise, but Noah’s voice, when he asked a question, rumbled in its own space beneath the clamor, reaching her intact.

They had to lean in to talk, which they did while they drank tea from handmade ceramic cups shaped to look like squat, colorful birds. Audrey kept trying to be standoffish, or at least to find something about Noah to dislike, but they slipped into conversation that was by turns earnest and clever, and after a time she gave up, leaving the undoing of this mess to her future self.

Noah said something about having been married, and Audrey opened her mouth to ask about that when he looked suddenly surprised and pointed past her, out the window. She turned to see two rainbow-colored llamas running by on their hind legs. Noah stood, took her by the hand, and led her out onto the street. Unable to make sense of what was happening, Audrey let herself be led. As they passed through the door, her lenses flashed a note confirming she had automatically paid for her lunch.

The llamas were person-sized puppets operated by people dressed all in black. They danced and leaped across 10th Street, where other people in bright costumes had stopped traffic with orange flags. She saw now that each llama had a spear and that there were dozens of them converging on FDR park from all directions. On the far side of the park, three or four meters off the ground, huge, sky-blue whales floated. These too were puppets, swimming in graceful, wave-like motions through an imaginary sea. Smaller puppets flitted around them, red and gold and white fish, each about a meter long.

One of the whales opened its mouth wide, and there was a low, bone-shaking sound that made it seem like the whale was roaring. From the whale’s throat unfurled red, yellow, and orange fabric flames, a gout of fire that rushed out in front of the whale and then collapsed back in on itself, disappearing when the whale closed its mouth.

“What is this?” said Audrey.

“Some kind of flash mob ... puppet ... war?” Noah said. “It’s beautiful.”

“It is beautiful,” Audrey said. It wouldn’t have been too remarkable in virtual reality, but she had never seen anything like it in the physical world. The fact that people had taken the time and the care to build these puppets, these beautiful, articulated sculptures made out of fabric and papier-mâché ... that took Audrey’s breath away. She’d seen flash mobs in the U.S. from time to time, but even if you disregarded the huge scale of this show, with a dozen whales and maybe a hundred llamas, all with puppeteers, not to mention the fish and the traffic people and some other people who were rushing in with objects whose purpose Audrey couldn’t guess—even if you disregarded the scale, the delight and generosity of the performers were unlike anything she was used to. There was a basic difference between Cascadia and the United States, she reflected, something more than just the CitDiv: in Cascadia, there had come to be a kind of joy in day-to-day life that still eluded most Americans. Audrey knew it was possible, that Americans and Cascadians, despite their recent divergence, were really the same people at heart. It was just that the two countries had gone different ways.

Crowds were gathering around the park, and Audrey realized that she and Noah had had the blue-sky dumb luck to have ended up an excellent view of the spectacle.

When the llamas and the whales reached each other in the center of the park, it became clear what this pageant was: a whimsical, beautiful, deadly war. A group of llamas was reaching back in unison, preparing to throw their spears, when a whale surged forward and blasted them with fabric fire. A sound of brass instruments served as llamas cries, and their group was shattered, each llama flying back through the air in a different trajectory to collapse into a lifeless rainbow mass. A second group of llamas cast spears into the whale that had come forward, and it bellowed again with that bone-shaking noise, rolled onto its side, and collapsed into a pool of fabric. Infuriated, more whales moved in to fill the breach, while llamas danced forward to meet them. The blaring cries of the llamas and the bass roars of the whales combined into a cyclical, harmonious musical chaos.

The war lasted only ten minutes. There were llamas with cannons that exploded with confetti and sudden flanking attacks of schools of fish. In the end, twelve or thirteen llamas and only two whales were left, and all the puppets on both sides turned and gave up the fight. The fallen puppets were swept up and rolled into packages that were spirited away, the traffic directors disappeared, and with unexpected suddenness, the spectacle was over. The crowd cheered, clapped, and howled. When Audrey attempted to clap with them, she realized she had never let go of Noah’s hand.

Following Banjo down, they were struck by the elaborate and unusual woodwork, probably added in recent years with 3-D woodgrain printers or computer-controlled laser wood carving tools. The moldings had beautiful intertwining circle and chain patterns, and the baseboards were carved in a long, unrepeating scene showing people of every gender and description dancing in a meadow. One of the figures carved into the baseboard near the top of the stairs, with hands flung high and a nimbus of bushy hair, looked just like Banjo Hamilton.

Dinner was served at a table with at least twenty mismatched antique wood chairs and set with a hodgepodge of china and glassware that ranged from bas relief acrylic tumblers that might have come off a 3-D printer that afternoon to carefully mended porcelain tea cups that must have been many decades old. There were glass bottles of water; several large, wooden bowls filled with salad; and three pots of what looked like stew, each accompanied by a basket crammed with thick slices of brown bread.

“Sit anywhere,” Banjo said. They pointed at the pots. “That one’s seitan, that one’s mushroom, and that one’s rabbit.”

“As in, actual rabbit?”

“We raise them ourselves,” Banjo said. “It’s emotionally excruciating.” Marley took the nearest seat. Banjo sat next to them and passed them a bowl. “Can someone get me some mushroom?”

The conversation was far-ranging and lively. The combination of residents and long- and short-term guests around the table, chattered and joked about places they’d been, artistic projects, work, politics, the garden, the rabbits, the weather, and a dozen other topics. Partway through the meal, Marley’s attention was caught by Oskar, a German guest with a brushy blond beard who sat a few seats away. He was laughing at something somebody had said.

“That’s really true?” he said. “No advertising?”

“One hundred percent,” said an intense young woman with large glasses. “I didn’t even really understand what advertising was until I was thirteen and we went on a school trip to America. It’s awful.”

“But you need it to do business,” Oskar said. “How do people sell things if they can’t tell people about them?”

“It’s pretty simple,” said Uday, who sat on the other side of Banjo. “When you want to buy something or hire someone, you just look through one of the directories or have your AI find what you want. There’s a lot of information in there—all of the products or services on offer, pricing, how long the place has been in business, what the composition of its workforce is, whether it’s a sponsored business, customer reviews—”

Oskar snorted. “You mean bot reviews. And fake reviews.”

“Do you use Jackson Trust System in Germany?” Banjo asked.

“I don’t,” Oskar said. “I mean, I’ve heard of it, but nobody I know uses it.”

“I guess it’s just more popular here,” said Banjo. “If you have enough JTS reviews, you can filter for just high-trust entries.”

“Meaning from people you know?” Oskar said.

Banjo, chewing a bite of stew, shook their head. They swallowed. “Everybody indicates what people they trust for opinions, and those people say who they trust, and so on—so you get this network of trust where it’s easy to find out whether a review passes muster for people in your network.”

“How do you make any sense of reviews without JTS?” said the woman with the large glasses.

Oskar shrugged. “I just don’t think the advertising thing is fair to businesses. They have a right to get the word out about what they do. It’s important.”

Uday frowned. “But since nobody’s advertising, you don’t have to advertise just to compete. It saves businesses a lot of money, and they can still get out factual information about goods and services people want to buy, for free.”

“Yeah, super,” said Oskar dismissively. “But what about, if someone doesn’t know he wants something, so he doesn’t look for it?” he said.

The woman with the large glasses wrinkled her nose. “If you don’t know you want it, do you really need it? Why do people need new things all the time?”

“It moves the economy,” said Oskar.

“But it’s more economically sound just to never make the thing that isn’t needed,” said the woman with the large glasses. “As long as you’re distributing wealth equitably, you don’t need to make people spend more and more money all the time.”

“That’s exactly the problem with advertising,” Banjo said, reaching out and pulling the bread basket over. “It’s all about getting people to want things they don’t need. Do you know how they design advertising? They come up with a problem, try to make you think you have it, and then they offer what they’re selling as the solution. They try to make you think you have to look a certain way to be beautiful and then tell you their product will make you look like that. Or they try to make you think you’re bored and that you need their product to have fun. Their first job is always to try to make you think that you don’t have enough, or that there’s something wrong with you.”

“But you could just outlaw that kind of advertising,” Oskar said. “You don’t have to say, ‘No advertisements!’”

“Advertising,” said the woman with the large glasses seriously, “is people trying to influence you to do something that will benefit them regardless of whether it’s good or bad for you. So when people are exposed to advertising all the time, they’re constantly being emotionally manipulated.”

“It hasn’t hurt me,” Oskar said.

The woman looked skeptical. “How do you know? When was the last time you can think of that an ad made your life better?”

“Uh ...” Oskar said.

The woman nodded. “Exactly.”

The next day, Marley bought a Þ95 train ticket and rode meandering railways to Tacoma. From there, they called for a pet-friendly shared car to bring them the rest of the way to Lewis Lake. The car took nearly forty minutes to arrive and turned out to be an old, coffee-colored Sparrow hatchback—autonomous and electric, like virtually every other car—with two facing bench seats. When it pulled up to the curb by the train station, Marley’s lenses highlighted it so they’d know it was their ride.

There was only one other passenger apart from Marley and Anthem, a woman of indeterminate age with yellow, spiky hair and an oversized pea-green coat. She barely glanced at Marley when they got in with Anthem: she seemed engrossed in some kind of game on her lenses. Tired from the train ride, Marley took the opportunity to not start a conversation. As the sun settled behind the Willapa Hills to the west, the car drove itself down a road that paralled a railroad track through ranks of towering pine trees.

Lewis Lake turned out to be a shallow, runty body of water covered with lily pads and located somewhere between the blink-and-you-miss-them towns of Roy and Yelm, a few miles south of the southernmost fingers and inlets of Puget Sound. The writer’s collective wrapped along the eastern shoreline of the lake, three long, two-story strawbale buildings with big windows. Wooden tables and chairs were sprinkled strategically around the property. When the car stopped, the yellow-haired woman didn’t even look up.

“Bye,” Marley said quietly, taking their pack and climbing out. Anthem yawned and jumped down after them. Deep in the trees, Marley saw the flicker of a fire and heard boisterous, plinking music. They tried to walk toward it, but as the car drove off with a whir, Anthem followed her nose, reading an encyclopedia of scents along the edge of the wood. Marley waited. When Anthem was done, she whuffed and trotted over to follow Marley down a dirt path.

Marley sent a voice message to Gia: “I just arrived. I’m walking toward some kind of music thing in the woods?”

Gia didn’t send a message back, but less than a minute later, a shadowy figure came running up the path, brandishing what looked like a tiny guitar and making a high pitched noise like eeeeee! This turned out to be Gia holding a ukulele. She flung herself at Marley and threw her arms around them, clunking the ukulele against their back. Anthem, caught up in the excitement, jumped around them both and barked.

“Anthem, take it easy,” Marley squeaked out. It was difficult to talk through a full-force Gia hug. Marley hugged back. It must have been more than a year since they’d seen Gia, and now their shared profession had imploded.

Gia finally released Marley from her death grip, only to drop to her knees and hug Anthem nearly as hard. “Who’s the sweetest doggie? Who is it?” she rhapsodized.

Anthem looked mournfully up at Marley, but she bore Gia’s love patiently.

A delighted grin had taken over Gia’s face. “I can’t believe we got you out here!” she said. “I’m so ... !” She made motions with her hands, vaguely like her head was exploding. “Do you want to come to Wednesday Uke Night? Or are you hungry? There’s dinner in an hour or so. Oh, or do you need to set your things down? You didn’t bring much. And also—this is Lyric!”

Another figure emerged from the trees, this one also holding a ukulele, but it was moving much more calmly than Gia had and was not making any shrieking noises. As she came closer, Marley could make out Lyric’s dark hair falling in crumpled waves over her shoulders. She wore a loose-fitting brown dress that rippled as she walked, and while her smile wasn’t manic like Gia’s, it was just as broad. Marley was struck by how arresting the woman’s contrasting eyes were in person. VR calls didn’t do them justice.

Lyric stopped a few steps away, and Anthem ran over to her to inexplicably sit by her side, looking from her to Marley and back. Nothing came to mind for Marley to say, so instead they mustered their best courtly composure and bowed. Lyric nodded approvingly and curtsied back, then offered her arm—the one that wasn’t carrying a ukulele.

“Wednesday Uke Night?” Marley said, stepping forward and taking Lyric’s arm. Belatedly, they offered an arm to Gia, but Gia waved them away, instead lifting the ukulele, laboriously setting her fingers, and striking a chord.

“You need to get a ukulele,” Gia said as they walked toward the music.

“OK,” said Marley. “Why?”

“Because Yelm, Washington is going to be the first town in the world where everyone plays the ukulele! Even I have started to play the ukulele, and you know I have no other talents apart from writing, beauty, and broad-spectrum charisma.”

“A ukulele town? That’s a little strange,” Marley said.

“Here!” Gia said, stopping. She pushed her tiny ukulele into Marley’s hands and pressed one of Marley’s fingers down on a string. “No, next to the fret, not on top. OK, now ... strum.”

Marley strummed. The ukulele made a chord, like actual music. They handed the ukulele back and reconnected with Lyric. Linking arms with her felt weirdly normal, as though they always walked together.

“So is it strange?” Gia said. “Or is it amazing?” It took Marley a moment to realize she was talking about everyone playing the ukulele.

“There’s a man in town named Chuckie Bail,” Lyric said. “He’s been giving free group ukulele lessons forever, and he’s been trying to get everyone in town to learn, including us out here at Lewis Lake. Gia started two weeks ago.”

“And I can already play six songs!” Gia said.

“How many people make up the town?” said Marley.

“About fifteen thousand,” Lyric said.

“And how many people can play the ukulele so far?”

“There are only a couple dozen holdouts,” said Lyric. “Not counting young kids. He doesn’t start them until they’re five.”

“Oh,” Marley said. “That’s pretty good.”

The path led them to a clearing where knee-height rounds of wide tree trunk surrounded a stone-lined fire pit like seats in a theater. About forty people of all ages and appearances stood and sat around the fire. A few were in clusters, talking, but most held ukuleles and were heartily singing the chorus to “Lose Me, Darling,” a folk song that had been popular when Marley was a kid. Anthem stuck close to Marley and Lyric, confused by the noise. Lyric guided them to seats at the edge of the crowd and sat Marley between herself and Gia. Lyric lifted her ukulele, while Gia watched the other players and tried to imitate the chords.

“We can go settle you in whenever you want,” Lyric said. Then she picked up the chorus and sang along in a throaty alto, strumming on her ukulele:

You can lose me darling, if you can let me go.
You should make me know
That I should go
If you don’t love me so.

You can choose me darling, or you can choose me not,
If you can stand
To drop my hand
And give up what we’ve got.

Or I could stay, stay, stay,
Like the sunshine stays in May.
There is no way
If I should stay
That I could stay away.
No, there’s no way
If I should stay
That I could stay away!

The collective had guest rooms, but since some members had moved out soon after the Goldman AI was announced, there were whole apartments to spare, and Marley had been assigned one in the building farthest from the road. Lyric walked them there as Wednesday Uke Night wound down, and Gia went to the community room to pick up dinner for all three.

The door to the apartment was unlocked, and they walked together into a room that stretched from one side of the building to the other, with deep windows at each end. One large window had a cushioned window seat, while another was fitted with a plant rack. Marley was surprised, when they closed the door, how quiet it suddenly became, though it wasn’t surprising when you considered how thick the walls were: 40 centimeters of straw, with spray concrete on the outer wall and plaster covering the inside. The room’s interior was muted white and lacked sharp lines, which gave the place a cozy, handmade feel.

There were two built-in bookshelves and a few items of furniture in the room: a couch, a coffee table, and a little kitchen table with four chairs. A miniature autokitchen resided in a nook to one side, while an opening next to it led to a tiled bathroom with a beautiful mosaic tub. Across from the kitchen, a curtained archway led into a bedroom half the size of the main room, with an already-made queen bed on a low platform opposite a wide, built-in desk. From a window by the bed, Marley could just barely see the lake.

The lighting was homely and recessed, and the apartment was pleasantly cool despite the continuing heat outside.

Putting their bag down by the couch, Marley went first to the kitchen, where they rummaged in a cupboard until they found a large bowl. They filled this at the sink and set it on the floor for Anthem. Then they took down a plate and extracted a dog food packet from their pack to empty onto it. Anthem made a beeline for the dishes and ate intently.

Lyric sat at the little table, and Marley walked over and took the chair next to her.

“It’s a beautiful apartment,” they said.

“Yeah, it’s a pretty good,” Lyric agreed. “The community room will take your breath away, I bet.”

They were silent for a number of heartbeats. Marley was having trouble finding the right direction to take them in conversation, but Lyric didn’t seem concerned or impatient: she just sat, her head tilted to one side, watching Marley.

“You’re from Vermont?” Marley said finally.

Lyric nodded. “It’s beautiful here, but it’s more beautiful there,” she said. “Sorry—I know I’m biased.”

“What’s it like?”

“Well, I grew up in a converted barn on one of the Lake Champlain Islands. It’s a pretty big lake—not like the Great Lakes, but still. The house is up on a hill. We weren’t close enough to see the lake, but it was woods all around us, and you’d see deer and rabbits and wild turkeys and sometimes foxes and things. Oh, and lots of birds. You could hear barred owls sometimes, but we hardly ever saw them. Apart from the wind and the birds singing, it was so quiet! You could go outside on a winter night, with everything white and still around you, and you’d look up at the stars, and it would be like the whole sky was a slab of black granite embedded with stars.”

“It sounds like you miss it.”

“Sure, but I’m happy here, too. For now. I thought I’d be here for a long time, but I can’t be sure anymore. It was the first place in a long time that felt safe.”

“Safe from what?” said Marley, leaning forward.

“Oh,” Lyric said. “Well, you know how the Americans strong-armed the Mountain Republic back into the United States?”

Marley nodded.

“It wasn’t all of America,” Lyric clarified. “I mean, even when it was just economic pressure, there were protests in America, big ones ... A lot of Americans supported us, but Constitutionalists were in power, and they had their minds made up, and they sanctioned us and leaned on other countries until we were too isolated to make it.

“We should have known after the first time,” Lyric continued. “Did you know that parts of New York and New Hampshire joined Vermont in the late 18th century? Vermont was an independent republic after the American Revolution.”

“Really?”

“They did. Vermont had to give all those parts back as a condition for entering the union. Anyway, when the Americans started trying to re-annex the Mountain Republic, there was a resistance movement, and it kept going even after the annexation.”

“And you were part of that resistance?”

Lyric smiled. “Yes. I was working with a group that gathered intelligence on people inside the Mountain Republic who had aided the Americans. There were American sympathizers who were breaking all kinds of Mountain Republic laws, sometimes to encourage the reunification, sometimes just to make some money. Some of those things were still illegal by the new American laws after the Republic ended, but the Americans mostly didn’t prosecute those cases.”

Marley nodded. “Why were you gathering intelligence?”

Lyric sighed. “I guess we thought we had a chance of getting the American public on our side if we exposed some of the things people had done during the annexation.”

“So you found some things you could use? Smoking guns?”

“We found a lot. There was this one man particularly, in New Hampshire—well, but it doesn’t matter, because the Americans infiltrated our organization, and those of us who could had to escape.”

“What would they have done to you?”

“Locked me up and thrown away the key, I guess. They got a lot of friends of mine. They’re scattered across prisons all over the United States now.”

“But you got away.”

“I got away. I crossed the border into Quebec at night and made my way west from there. I applied for political asylum in Cascadia, but I wasn’t able to get it, at least not right away. The Americans were pressing the Canadians to extradite me, so I snuck into Cascadia the same way I snuck into Quebec.”

“You’re here illegally?”

“Don’t turn me in!” Lyric said, smiling.

Marley had to admire her confidence, considering.

“I think I’m all right for now,” Lyric said. “Technically, I’m not supposed to be in Cascadia, but in practice, they give some leeway to people who are applying for asylum. The problem is that there are a lot of Cascadians who don’t want to annoy the United States, so there’s debate over my case and over other refugees from the Mountain Republic.

“You seem like you’re OK, though,” Marley observed. “Right now.”

“I am OK,” said Lyric. “I’m happy where I am. We’ll see what tomorrow brings.”

Lyric and Gia stayed with Marley, talking animatedly long into the night until it became clear Marley was fading. As they left, Lyric blew Marley a kiss goodnight from the doorway, and Marley felt a warm shiver go through them.

Before taking their lenses out to sleep, Marley checked their messages. There was another one from the CitDiv office, flagged for importance by the messaging AI. Marley sat in the armchair to read it.

Dear Mx. Jun, it said. We are pleased to inform you that you have been approved for participation in the Citizen Dividend Selective Income Expansion pilot program. Because of the sensitive nature of this project, communication about it with any unauthorized person, including personnel from the Citizen Dividend Office or other government departments who are not directly involved in the pilot, is strictly prohibited and punishable by law.

Marley read on with increasing disbelief. The warnings and threats continued for paragraphs and got progressively more dire. As bizarre as that was, the main topic of the message was even more bewildering: it seemed to boil down to the Cascadian government secretly giving Marley more money for no clear reason. There were vague references to Marley having been selected for demonstrating “civic responsibility,” whatever that was supposed to mean. No way had been provided to opt out, and the confidentiality requirements were absolute.

A long block of legalese at the end explained where the authority came from to impose this secrecy, but it made little sense to Marley. Increasingly, they were trying to imagine how they could have gotten included and how they could turn it down. It wasn’t that extra money wouldn’t come in handy: it was just that Marley couldn’t see any reason extra money should come to them instead of someone else, and they weren’t interested in taking advantage of it just because they could. The problem was, it seemed possible they didn’t have any choice. Could they talk to a lawyer? They weren’t positive, and maybe it would be somewhere in that legalese section if they decoded it. The restrictions seemed to rule out even that, though. Maybe they weren’t expecting anyone to turn it down.

In the end, Marley resolved to sleep on it. Sometimes solutions emerged by themselves overnight. Even when they didn’t, Marley’s experience had been that difficult problems almost always got easier after a good rest.

Before settling down to sleep, Marley opened their bank statement to see whether any payments had already been deposited.

They had.

The bank records were a little hard to believe. There had been not one deposit, but six, all on the same day, all in different amounts but adding up to three or four times what Marley had made from their job on Deaf Ears—and that was already considered a respectable income. Marley knew they should be delighted, but the sense of a shoe waiting to drop was too strong to shake.

They would talk about it with Lyric, they decided, warnings or no warnings. Maybe it would make more sense to Lyric than it did to Marley. Marley hoped so.

They took out their lenses, washed their face, and took their tooth cleaner out of its case. Thoughts about the strange windfall gave way to thoughts about Lyric and her warm and lively way. She was a candle flame of a person. Marley slid the cleaner between their teeth and bit down gently. Its low hum resonated in their jaw as it flossed and scrubbed.

Maybe Marley should talk to Lyric and Gia about the No Divide opportunity, too—although ... hadn’t they decided not to do that? It surprised them that Néstor and Jessica had even imagined Marley could be a good candidate to host a streaming show. Marley knew their limits. They preferred to observe the world, compose their thoughts, and then distill them into something useful. Streaming interviews meant having to think off the cuff and keep up a conversation, and all the time you were doing that, you’d know you were in the direct path of the audience’s attention. There was no opportunity to correct mistakes, no way to come back to do things better or to pause to come up with the best thing to say.

Teeth clean, they popped out the tooth cleaner and set it in its tray, where it washed itself out. Anthem followed them into the bedroom and up the two steps to the bed, which in that high position felt strangely like a throne. Marley pulled back the covers and climbed in, sinking into the mattress with a grateful sigh. They had hardly pulled the sheet and blanket over them when Anthem leapt up, turned in circles, and then settled with a huff on Marley’s feet. Even with this comfort and the miraculous quiet the apartment offered—Anthem’s gently comic snoring aside—it took Marley a long time to shed thoughts of the CitDiv money, of No Divide, and of Lyric. In the end, though, the comfort and quiet won, and they slept.

They met Lyric and Gia for breakfast in the community dining room as other residents came and ate and talked and went. The autokitchen there was like nothing Marley had ever seen: some crazy person or genius had grafted on a variety of unusual modules that looked like they had been salvaged from other autokitchens. The result was bulky and antiquated-looking, but it turned out that between the modules it included and some AI customizations, the Lewis Lake autokitchen was capable of coming up with completely novel meals based on very little information beyond dietary restrictions.

Once Marley, Gia, and Lyric had checked in with the autokitchen using their lenses, Gia demonstrated: she pushed a large button on the side of the machine that had been painted with bright orange question marks. The three of them wound up with vegetable mochi puffs; slices of crisp-toasted, spicy mycoprotein; and little multicolored buildings constructed out of berries and cube-sliced fruit.

“I’ve never seen any of this before,” Marley said. They took a bite of mycoprotein as they carried their wooden tray across the room. “Mmm, and it’s good!”

Gia nodded, shrugging, her mouth full of mochi puff.

“You can order normal things, too,” Lyric said, “but we usually do this. Sometimes it’s just OK, but other times, it’s fantastic—and you never know what you’ll get.”

They put their trays down at a table in a distant corner of the room where they could look out through the trees at the tiny lake, where the morning sun silvered the water.

As much as the CitDiv money was on Marley’s mind, they weren’t going to talk about it in such a public place, so they brought up the next most pressing question—No Divide’s proposal. They recounted the meeting in North Bend for Gia and Lyric between bites of fruit and mochi puff.

“I like what they’re about,” they said when they finished. “I just don’t want to do that.”

“Why not that?” Gia said. “Streaming interviews? You’d kill at that. Do you know how many times I’ve seen you have actually constructive conversations with complete idiots?”

“It sounds like it’s terrifying for you, though,” Lyric said.

Gia made a rude noise, apparently to illustrate how likely it was that anything could frighten Marley.

“It’s not just that,” Marley said. “This isn’t just conversations with random people.”

“Isn’t it, though?” said Gia.

“Would you have a say in whether or not they aired an interview, after you saw how it turned out?” said Lyric.

“I don’t know,” Marley said. “I could ask. But even then, I’d still be wasting everyone’s time if it’s no good.”

“It sounds like they want you to try, though,” Gia said. “The worst that can happen is that it’s terrifying and it doesn’t go well, and then you’d just be like ...” She gestured with her hands, as if to say “you see?”

“That doesn’t sound great,” Marley said, poking at their mycoprotein.

Gia made a “who cares?” face. “It’s pretty good for a worst case scenario,” she said.

They ate in silence for a few minutes as Marley thought about it. Was there some way to do it and avoid the spotlight? Was there a chance they might somehow be good at it?

“Are you trying to find a reason to turn it down,” Lyric said, “or are you trying to find a way to make it work?”

Marley considered this. “I mean, it’s a good idea for a project ... I just don’t feel super confident about it.”

“That makes sense,” said Lyric. “But I wonder if maybe they specifically want somebody who doesn’t come in looking like they think they know everything. It sounds like they want somebody who just wants to understand people better.”

“Which is 100% you, Marley,” Gia added.

She was right. It was.

Marley’s went back to their apartment while Gia and Lyric stayed behind to handle some chores. The sky was heavy with storm clouds, with tiny gaps here and there lancing down shafts of sunlight. On a path through the trees, Marley was distracted when a sunbeam hit something just off the trail. It glittered, dark and moving, yet shiny, like metal.

They had to kneel in the leaves to see it. Their first thought was some kind of beetle, but leaning close, Marley could make out the strange, angular shape of the legs and the squareness of the carapace. It wasn’t an insect: it was a tiny drone.

What it was doing there, far from anywhere a business or hobbyist would be likely to use it, Marley had no idea. They picked up a stick nearby and poked at it, but they weren’t prepared for its sudden reaction, skittering under the leaf cover. Marley kicked over the leaves, but it had vanished.

Back in the apartment with Anthem, Marley messaged No Divide to ask whether they’d have a say in whether a completed interview would be aired. Jessica wrote back within minutes: Marley could decide not to let a full interview air, but if that happened, No Divide would have the option of editing together just parts of the interviewee’s responses to air, leaving Marley out of it.

In the same message, Jessica listed some of the streaming review sites that were offering to post about the series if it ran. Someone had been talking the series up: the list contained a good number of sites, some of which Marley often read themself. If the interviews went well, they had a fighting chance of getting a good-sized viewership.

Marley hadn’t given much thought to how people would find out about the program, but finding an audience was one of the biggest difficulties for any kind of streaming show, and No Divide seemed already to have a plan to address it. Imagining the interviews being seen by thousands or tens of thousands of people made the project feel better and worse at the same time.

Marley’s conversation about it with Lyric and Gia had made it clear to Marley that the job didn’t seem like a bad fit so much as simply terrifying. Coming out to their family, especially to their Korean grandma, had also been terrifying. Moving to Stone had been terrifying. Starting work on Deaf Ears had absolutely been terrifying, too—and those had all been good decisions. All Marley was gambling, it turned out, was comfort, and as far as they were concerned, comfort was overrated.

Before they could reconsider, they wrote a brief note to Jessica and Néstor to say that they were willing to try an interview and see how it went. Then they sat on the bed and took a few deep breaths. Anthem came over and leaned against their legs. Marley rubbed Anthem’s ears, something that calmed them both down.

Jessica’s response was speedy and enthusiastic. No Divide had already identified a number of prospective interviewees, and as it turned out, one lived not far from Lewis Lake. Within a few messages, Marley was scheduled to interview him early the next week. As they left the apartment to find Gia and Lyric and share the news, they wondered how they’d found themself on this new track so suddenly and with so little an idea of what they were getting into.

Sammi should wake soon, according to what Gene had been told. Will had wanted to stay by Sammi’s bed, but Gene couldn’t have him there when Sammi woke up and he confronted her, so Will was in the waiting room—and not pleased about it.

Unfortunately, there still was no real privacy: at any moment, the sleeping woman in the other hospital bed could wake or some member of the hospital staff could appear.

Sammi’s bed was by the window, separated from her roommate by a tall curtain patterned in sage green and muted blue. The room was paneled in blond wood, with a painting on the wall of a field of sunflowers. A unit beside the bed the size of a small filing cabinet held monitoring equipment and displays, one of which was unfolded and displayed Sammi’s vital signs. A small table by the bed held a cup of water with a straw for Sammi and another cup without a straw for Gene, but he had forgotten his was there.

Gene could hear the heavy exhalations of the sleeping woman on the other side of the curtain as well as distant voices, both human and synthesized, intermixed with chirps, electronic hums, and the sounds of air moving through vents. The room smelled like lemons and chlorine. Outside the window, the hospital grounds were only dimly lit, but in the distance, Gene could see the shifting lights of vehicles on the highway.

There was no expression on Sammi’s sleeping face. Gene remembered years ago, when the kids were young, how he and Edison would sit together watching Mark or Samantha sleep. Sammi’s sleeping face had always looked peaceful, but with a hint of surprise, as though she were walking in a quiet wood and had unexpectedly found herself back where she’d started.

He couldn’t look at her sleeping there without love welling up inside him, yet that love was clouded with worry, anger, dismay ... Thoughts and emotions churned and circled back in on themselves, not coming to rest and not resolving, as he watched over her and waited.

Sammi made a noise of surprise as she woke, a “huh” sound that she repeated a couple of times before her eyelids slowly lifted. She looked over at Gene, her eyes barely tracking, then blinked and cleared her throat.

“It doesn’t hurt a lot now,” she said hoarsely. “Am I OK?”

Gene nodded, barely moving his head. He’d been given access to the bed interface, and he brought it up in his lenses and gestured to gently lift Sammi’s upper body as he held out her water. She clamped her lips onto the straw and drank intently for a few long seconds. Then she laid her head back and sighed. Gene wanted to ask her about the pregnancy, about the Louvre, about whoever the father was, but the questions tangled in his throat. For a long moment, neither of them spoke.

Suddenly, Sammi seemed to remember something, and she glanced at Gene warily. “Did I remember to close out my AI homework?” she said. “I wasn’t supposed to leave that simulation running.”

Gene looked into her eyes. Sammi looked away.

“No,” he said. “I closed it for you.”

“Did ... ?” she began, but she didn’t seem to be able to find more words.

“I saw what you were working on,” he said. He wouldn’t have sounded angry to most people, but he knew Sammi could hear it. “Is that where you met the father? With those people?”

“The ... what?” she said. “What did—what happened to me?”

Of course she didn’t know about the pregnancy, Gene reminded himself: she’d been unconscious by the time they had a diagnosis. They would have taken out her lenses, too, before the procedure. Right now, those lense were in a white plastic case on the table by the bed.

“You had a ruptured ectopic pregnancy,” Gene said, keeping his voice low. He had known nothing about ectopic pregnancies before, but the term had now burned itself into his memory. “It means the fetus started to develop on the outside of your fallopian tube, and it ruptured. You’ll be fine. The baby—the fetus ... isn’t viable. Wasn’t viable.”

“Oh, shit,” said Sammi. Gene frowned. “Sorry, dad,” she said. “I mean about the swearing. And the ... the guy ...”

Belatedly, Gene realized the conversation was starting to focus on the less important thing. “Let’s talk about the guy later,” he said. “First, I want to hear about what you had on your display. I know what that was.”

“It wasn’t—” Sammi started, but she stopped herself. “That’s none of your business,” she said.

“None of my business?” said Gene. “You could be—” He reached for a word that wouldn’t make too strong an impression, in case anyone could overhear them. “... expelled—or worse, if your ‘research subjects’ knew what—”

“Do you really think I figured it was safe?” Sammi said, heatedly. “You think I don’t know?”

Gene glanced at the curtain. It shifted in the faint movement of ventilated air.

“I’m sure you understand there’s some danger, but you don’t understand what’s at stake. You think you’re just sharing information—”

“Do you have any idea what’s happening to those people? In America?” Sammi said. “The wealthy buy robots and AIs, they lay off human beings who have no way to make a living anymore, they make more money, they buy off the politicians, and then they buy more robots and AIs, and it keeps getting worse. The wealth gap there was bad enough when you were young, but dad, people are dying—”

“It’s their country,” Gene said. “We have to think about ours first.”

“Ours is fine! We are fine!” Sammi said. “Do you think they’re choosing this? Do you think they want this?”

“You’re interfering with things you don’t understand,” he said.

“You don’t understand!” Sammi barked. She tried to sit up, groaned, and lay back, but her gaze lost none of its fierceness.

“Keep your voice down,” Gene said in a hard whisper. “Please.”

“You think I’m still a child,” Sammi said, more quietly but no less hotly. “You think I can’t comprehend what’s going on in the world because—why? Because I’m twenty-three and you’re fifty-something? At what point, exactly, do you think I’ll know enough to make my own decisions? How long do I wait before I do something worth doing?”

“If you get hurt—” Gene said.

“You mean if I fail the class?” Sammi said, glancing toward the curtain.

“If you fail the class—”

“Dad, I’m sorry,” she said, and she looked it. “I didn’t want you to have to worry. That’s exactly why I didn’t tell you what we were doing. That and—you know, your job.”

“It’s not about telling me or not telling me! It’s about you getting involved with a bunch of—”

“Gene?” someone said. It was a moment before the voice registered. It was Vi, one of Will’s moms. She was supposed to be on vacation. Gene felt disoriented. How much time had passed since he’d first heard Samantha scream?

Vi pushed the curtain aside and came in. She was a broad-shouldered woman with short, gray-blonde hair, one of a small number of non-Black people living at Zora. She went straight to Sammi and took her hand, patting Gene on the shoulder as she stepped between them.

“Are you all right?” she asked Sammi. “Where’s Will?”

Gene raked back the emotions from the argument. “I asked for us to have a little time alone while she woke up,” he said.

“Dad!” Samantha protested. “Vi, can you get him?”

Vi nodded. She made a little shorthand gesture to her lenses and looked off into space as she said. “Honey? She’s awake.”

“We actually need a few minutes,” Gene said.

“No, we don’t,” said Samantha.

“We aren’t finished talking about school. And that boy.”

“‘Man,’ dad. Not ‘boy’. They call them ‘men’ when they grow up.”

“Apparently we missed a lot in five days,” said Vi. “Who’s the man?”

“Where’s Kiara?” Samantha said.

“On her way. We left Napa as soon as Will messaged us. She’ll have flowers.”

Samantha smiled weakly. “She always has flowers.”

“We aren’t done—” Gene said.

“Please leave, dad,” Samantha said.

“We have to—”

“Just leave. OK?” She sagged back in the bed, and for a moment, Gene thought she was going to cry. “This is a lot right now.”

Vi looked sidelong at Gene. He hesitated, but then he nodded and stood. He pushed himself in next to Vi and kissed Samantha on the cheek. She didn’t move, looking up at the ceiling. Gene hugged Vi and left.

This much was clear to Gene: Samantha needed to cut off all contact with the Louvre, immediately. But Samantha didn’t seem to see it. She obviously didn’t understand the real ramifications of what she was doing.

It wasn’t that Gene didn’t see his daughter becoming an adult. It was just that since Samantha had lived under his protection for so long, she probably believed he had much more power to keep her safe than he actually had.

And that boy—or man, a term that made it worse—if he was involved with the Louvre, too, that could be another obstacle to getting Samantha to see the importance of breaking ties. It might have been something short-lived, but if she hadn’t still cared about him, whoever he was, Gene bet she wouldn’t have cared when Gene called him a “boy.”

And what if it was the kind of organization that didn’t take kindly to people leaving? Even if Samantha went overseas, maybe to stay with her brother for a while, a hacker group like the Louvre could easily reach her. On the other hand, they thought of themselves as do-gooders, from what Gene could tell. He could even sympathize, in a way, with their goals. Samantha was absolutely right about American workers getting starved out of their own country’s economy. But aggravating the Americans into war didn’t solve anything. Cascadia could do the most good to Americans by remaining Cascadia, and it was clear when looking at what happened to the Mountain Republic that if the U.S. re-annexed Cascadia, they’d throw out every bit of non-profit-producing progress Cascadia had made.

Even putting the Louvre aside for the moment, Gene thought, how could Samantha have been so careless? Gene had been doing his best to pretend that Samantha wasn’t sexually active yet, and so in part this was on him for not being a more involved parent. Edison would have talked to her about it. He would have given her some relationship wisdom and laughed with her about disastrous dates. Unfortunately, those kinds of conversations weren’t in Gene’s skill set. Even so, he’d made sure both kids were clear on what safe sex meant, and Samantha wasn’t stupid or even very rash. What brought her to the point where she’d let her guard down on something so important?

He needed to think further about war preparations, he knew that, but he was emotionally exhausted and mentally dull. He’d go home, sleep for a few hours, then get up and continue work. He’d come by the hospital and talk to Samantha the next morning, before continuing on to the office.

Gene woke to his alarm at four and got himself ready for the day as quickly as possible. By 4:25, he was at his desk in his home office, drafting a message to send to his regional heads about a new initiative for evacuation routes and refugee provisions. He couldn’t mention the possibility of war, of course, but even with human greenhouse gas emissions shrinking each year, the climate would still be unleashing trouble for a long time. Wildfires and other natural disasters were enough of a pretext to ask for those plans.

After the letter, he worked through a task list, prioritizing his next steps, and he got a start on gathering the information he’d need for a country-wide plan. He had Ollie set up a separate area to store the new data, private for the time being. Soon enough, he’d begin confidentially briefing the rest of his leadership team and sharing these files with them. He’d already sent a confidential note to Tom Sato, his head of Response and Recovery, the day before.

Gene was already finishing his second cup of coffee and heading for the door before he realized he hadn’t had breakfast. Well, that could wait. Breakfast wasn’t as important a meal as people used to think, and he could eat after he saw Samantha. Sleep would have helped her, he thought. She’d be more reasonable in the light of morning, having had time to reflect. Gene himself still felt exhausted, but Samantha would probably have slept the whole night through.

He arrived at the hospital a few minutes before eight in a twenty-person DRT shuttle with a crowd of nurses and other medical personnel. He’d wait a minute or two before he went upstairs, he thought, in case Samantha wasn’t awake yet. Meanwhile, he sat on a couch in the hospital lobby to bring himself up to speed on her medical condition. They’d told him last night she would be fine, but it was difficult to feel that she was safe.

In his lenses, no medical records were displayed to him. Instead, a message appeared saying, Sorry, but you no longer have authorization to view Samantha’s medical records. Would you like to send Samantha a request for access?

She’d probably cut him off the night before, while she was angry, he thought. Disturbed, he took the elevator up to her floor and walked to her room.

Her bed was empty.

It probably wasn’t any of the things that leaped to his mind—that she had been arrested and taken into custody, that the Louvre had spirited her away, that her condition was much more dangerous than they’d thought and she’d died—but he went to the nurses’ station at just short of a run.

“Excuse me—” he said to a nurse behind the desk, a young white man with short red hair who was consulting a physical display. The nurse looked up. “I’m Samantha Ajou’s father,” Gene said. “Was she transferred? Is she in a different room?”

“Oh, no,” the nurse said, “She’s probably home by now. She checked herself out a few hours ago.”

“Checked herself out? Is that safe?”

“Her team would’ve liked to have her here a few more hours for observation, but there was no compelling reason to keep her.”

It hit Gene then that the nurse had said a few hours ago. If Samantha had gone home, she would have arrived long before Gene left. So where was she?

“Thank you,” he said to the nurse, and he retreated around the corner into a waiting area. He made the shorthand gesture to his lenses to call Samantha, but instead he got another message:

Samantha Ajou is not taking calls or messages from you at this time. Please try again later.

He was still trying to understand what had happened when an incoming call image appeared. It showed Thomas Sato, Gene’s Response and Recovery department head, and it was circled in red, which meant high priority. He wanted to wave it away, but he couldn’t responsibly ignore Sato, so he gestured for the call to start, voice only.

“Tom? What’s wrong?”

“I read the briefing you left me,” Sato said. Late the day before, with Sato still unavailable, Gene had left him a confidential summary of the potential for war as President Muñoz’s people had outlined it.

“And you have something new?”

“I do,” said Sato. “I think you’ll want to come in as soon as possible ... Gene, there’s a chance that it’s been going on already, and we just didn’t recognize it.”

“That what’s been going on already?”

“I’ve been going over some of the data, and I—well, I think the war may have already started.”

There was a stainless steel sink on the wall to the right of the autokitchen, underneath a window that looked out over the woods surrounding Lamb Valley. Next to it, a small prep counter was situated.

Audrey still remembered when cooking something was something you had to do to eat instead of a hobby. Even hobby cooking was less fun than it used to be, because it was harder to take joy in turning out a perfectly light soufflé when your kitchen could do it for you in half the time. For that matter, the kitchen could pull up a great recipe that used your forgotten extra asparagus, order supplies for delivery by automated trucks, wash up, and pack away the leftovers.

With no manual cooking equipment, Audrey couldn’t have cooked anything herself if she’d wanted to, but between learning the ropes at the Cascadian Reemployment Bureau, her search for her family, and especially carrying out her work for the U.S., there wouldn’t have been time anyway.

She’d spent most of the day shadowing Dylan Poppe, whom she found eccentric but likable. She was intimately familiar with unemployment back in the U.S. from her official job as a re-employment supervisor, but the Cascadian experience of losing a job was new to her. In the U.S., having work was about status, money, and dignity. A person without employment had few financial resources and fewer options, and many who fell out of the workforce never found their way back in. Not working meant being labeled as an economic freeloader and losing many of the advantages of the employed classes. The people Audrey had worked with in the U.S. were usually scared and resentful. The office she ran was considered a successful one, yet most of its clients never found a new job. Many became increasingly desperate as their options narrowed and their reserves were spent. Even the U.S. Climate Works Department and the military offered many fewer opportunities than either had decades before, when anyone who was desperate enough could fall back on one or the other.

In Cascadia, by contrast, losing a job seemed like more of an opportunity for self-discovery than a real crisis. It wasn’t just that everyone had access to a livable income: it was also that working had stopped being central to the idea of what constituted a responsible citizen. In Cascadia as well as the U.S., jobs were scarce: only a fraction of the population needed to contribute for everything to get done. In Cascadia, however, the shift from a mainly employed population to a mainly unemployed population had come with a shift in attitudes and some sharing of the wealth. In the U.S., attitudes hadn’t changed much since the early part of the century. With America lacking any serious commitment to sharing increased prosperity with the population at large, wealth there had become much more concentrated. Those who owned businesses had, for the most part, shifted from paying workers to paying much less for AIs and robots. The workers had shifted to being unemployed.

The problem was made worse by the faltering U.S. economy, which every year saw average citizens spend less money due to ever-expanding unemployment. Wealthy Americans held onto much more of their money than less affluent citizens ever had, because they didn’t need to spend most of their income on basic living expenses. A person with ten times the income and a hundred times the financial reserves of the average American family didn’t buy ten or a hundred times as many groceries or homes or cars. Meanwhile, all of the people who lost jobs and couldn’t get new ones struggled to survive, and many were left in desperate straits when their unemployment checks ran out. Even those still receiving unemployment had to complete laborious paperwork week after week to document that they were still applying for the few, out-of-reach jobs that were left. Many developed physical and mental health problems, and some of those managed to qualify for long-term disability and scrape by on that. No wonder so many Americans were desperate or angry, or both.

Audrey had known all this before she came, but sitting with Dylan and watching his Cascadian clients be mildly frustrated by an event that to Americans was a devastating loss ... It made her mission in Cascadia feel not just problematic, but bitter.

Yet none of that interfered with her resolve.

The kitchen machines sizzled, and Audrey glanced over to see a small mechanical arm in a windowed prep chamber scrape vegetables and sausage into a hot pan one chamber over. Moments later, a sharp, rich aroma of onions, peppers, and celery rose around her, purposely vented into the house instead of out of it, as per her kitchen settings. Audrey closed her eyes, remembering meals she’d cooked in the terrible little apartment she had in graduate school with her then-boyfriend, the perennially uncertain Francis. A wave of resentment came over her for the life she’d had to give up in America. She’d chosen America over Cascadia long ago, despite—maybe even because of—its troubles and limitations. Cascadia could have stayed part of the Union, could have been a source of positive change, but Cascadians had decided to leave instead, to abandon America to wallow in its long-standing problems and moral debts.

Even so, on some level she could understand Cascadia turning away from the endless political problems, the scandals and dangers of American life. Cascadians must have felt unsafe going along with the U.S. when they were all still one country.

She didn’t want America to take back Cascadia by force. She didn’t especially want reunification at all. What she really wanted was for Cascadia never to have left.

She felt the same, to be honest, about her mother, Lauren. Audrey’s family had lived in Oregon until Audrey was four, and then they moved east, to Ohio. It had all been one country back then.

Five years later, Audrey woke one morning to find a note on the kitchen table explaining that her mother had left, taking along Audrey’s seven-year-old sister, Carrie. They were moving back to Oregon, the note said, but there was no explanation of why.

Audrey’s father hadn’t seem surprised. First he’d been furious. He smashed aside the plate of muffins Audrey’s mom had left on the table, hammered on the stove with his fists, and shouted curses. Audrey ran to hide in her room. Later, she’d found him drunk and crying, slumped against the oven with the refrigerator wide open, streamers of vapor falling to the linoleum.

For years, Audrey had woken up every morning thinking maybe today they’ll come home—but they never had.

Audrey’s knew her father was no prize. He was moody and stiff-necked and spent too much time “out.” He made Audrey’s friends uncomfortable, to the point where it was hard to have friends. He didn’t always drink, when he did, he drank a lot. Even so, why would Audrey’s mother run off with no explanation, not even leaving a forwarding address? Actually, that wasn’t the real question. The real question was, why had she taken Carrie, but left Audrey behind? Was she as sick of Audrey as she was of her husband?

Audrey took a deep breath and turned her mind back to the work. When her mind was disordered, focusing on data and process usually cleared it. Data could be sprawling and inconsistent and messy, but there were always ways to order and refine it, to channel chaotic fragments of knowledge into answers and sense.

In recent years, Audrey had made detailed inquiries. It was possible Lauren and Carrie had not gone back to Oregon as the note had said, or that they’d since moved back East, but there was no sign of them in U.S. records, and two years after they’d left, Audrey’s Great-Aunt Ruth had mentioned they were in Oregon—though she refused to say where. It seemed most likely to Audrey that her mother and Carrie had stayed in Cascadia after the secession.

With the datasets Audrey had at her disposal now, it should have been easy to find Lauren and Carrie, unless they’d legally changed their names. Yet while there were people on record who matched Lauren’s name, none of them had a daughter named Carrie. If Lauren had changed both their names in Cascadia, it shouldn’t have been much harder for Audrey to find a record of that either, but there was nothing. Under Cascadian law, it was possible to keep name changes out of public records, but Audrey wasn’t looking in the public records: the database she had access to through the Agency, used by the Cascadian vital records office, should have been comprehensive.

Audrey restarted her search, widening the range of ages and allowing name variations and alternate spellings: Lauren Constance Adams, her mother’s married name. Lauren Constance Golden, her maiden name. Lauren Constance Golden Adams. Lauryn or Loren or Laurin instead of Lauren, Goldin and Goulden instead of Golden, Addams instead of Adams ...

Audrey engaged her personal AI—not the hyperpowered government one she’d been issued, but the one she used for personal tasks, like keeping her dental appointments or working out a fitness plan—and set it to continue the searches with different name spellings and combinations. Meanwhile, she took a different approach, looking for Lauren’s father, George Golden, and Lauren’s brother, Daniel. They were easy to find in the records, but they’d both been dead for years, and there wasn’t much of use for her there. Neither man had been good at keeping in touch with Audrey. She didn’t know if that was just the way the two men were or if for some reason, her mother had asked them to limit contact. Birthday presents had arrived from Uncle Daniel for a few years when Audrey was a teenager, but those turned out to be the work of Daniel’s then-husband, Kevin, and they stopped after Daniel and Kevin got a divorce—something Audrey only knew about because Kevin wrote to let her know.

The only other relative was Audrey’s Great-Aunt Ruth, but Audrey had only a few letters from her, and she’d never met her in person. It was very unlikely Ruth was still alive. She’d be in her late nineties by now.

Just to be thorough, though, Audrey checked. A match came up immediately: Great-Aunt Ruth was living in a Jewish retirement home in Spokane. Was there any chance she’d still be lucid enough to help? Even if she could help, would she?

A chiming sound interrupted Audrey’s research: the old-style wireless doorbell she’d installed after deactivating the built-in systems. She hadn’t realized it was 4:30 already. She saved and closed her documents and data views in her lenses, then got up and tried to stretch the stiffness out of her back. She had a habit of hunching when she was doing research.

Elena would be waiting at the door. They were going for a walk at Capay Open Space Park just a few miles away.

The disruption was courtesy of a fitness plan Audrey’s personal AI had worked up for her, but it wasn’t entirely unwelcome. Apart from her little picnic with Bennet and one visit to the office she worked for in Sacramento, Audrey had hardly stepped outside for days. Too much had needed doing to ramp up the CitDiv fraud project.

“I ran into the governor here once,” Elena said. “The Cache Creek dried up again that year, and she said she was touring some of the climate impact sites. She had a bunch of her people around her, but I came over and reminded her we’d met, when she talked with a group of us from the Benton Paiute Reservation about our geothermal projects.”

“Oh, you’re Paiute?” Audrey said. She knew far more about Elena than that she had Paiute heritage through her mother, but she wasn’t about to mention research she’d had to do to allow the friendship to go forward.

That was all Elena needed to launch into a discussion about illustrious ancestors, famous people she’d met while working for the tribe, and the prestigious school careers of her two nieces. Audrey listened half-attentively as they ambled down trails and through scraggly oak trees along the trickle of the creek. The temperature was in the nineties again that day—mid-thirties Celsius to Cascadians—and both Audrey and Elena wore battery-powered cooling collars. The grass to either side was thirsty and tinted with yellow. California and much of the American South was weathering another round of multi-year droughts, but it seemed to Audrey to be a little better in Cascadia, where more care seemed to be taken with water and more landscapes had been adapted to last through dry spells. Birth rates around the world had been brought down over decades, mostly through advocacy for women and women’s support services, and the world’s population was finally falling instead of rising, but even without ever-increasing populations, there were many places where water supplies were unreliable at best. Audrey knew enough to be grateful that most Americans and Cascadians still had access to water just by turning a faucet handle.

Keeping a bit of her attention on Elena’s monologue, Audrey refocused the rest of her mind on the CitDiv project. She’d made contact with each of the workers in the Citizen Dividend Office, none of whom knew about the others, and with an economics professor at U.C. Davis who was providing guidance on the finer details of defrauding the system. Bennet Culkin was gathering a list of potential participants, and Audrey had more from files at the Reemployment Initiatives Bureau. These were passed on to other American assets who were purposely unknown to Audrey, people who were responsible for the messaging and record-keeping.

She’d developed careful criteria to limit which names she passed along, because it was important to only include people who would take the windfall without asking too many questions. Others who might meet the more obvious criteria but who wouldn’t be easily distracted by money needed to be excluded—for example, that person Audrey had met while sitting in with Dylan Poppe, Marley. As long as Audrey’s unknown collaborators stuck to the lists Audrey sent them, nobody like Marley would be included.

“Come on, slowpoke,” Elena called back from further up the trail. “It’s not exercise if you don’t actually move! You know, down this way is where one of the locations they used in that movie back in the thirties ... what was it called? That one with Ashley Tallman ...”

Audrey picked up the pace.

Audrey’s work for the U.S. was going well, but unfortunately, she wasn’t being left alone to her task. In passing, Bennet had mentioned receiving a drone from Audrey’s superiors in the U.S. with a list of thousands of candidates for the program, people whom U.S. AIs had profiled as unusually likely to accept financial windfalls from dubious sources. Gathering that information in the U.S. had been unnecessary and likely a little laborious for someone, and the fact that the information was going to Bennet and not to her was concerning. Bennet didn’t seem to realize he had gotten the only copy, and Audrey hadn’t volunteered that it was new information to her.

Why were her superiors, who seemed lukewarm on the mission in the first place, sending unrequested help? Did she have an unknown ally?

Unless it wasn’t meant to be helpful. Was someone at the home office trying to undermine her in order to better the chances of war?

Or maybe it was just a new recruit trying to prove themself. From out in Cascadia, Audrey had no good way of knowing.

Elena was talking about her niece Dahlia, who apparently had been awarded some kind of fellowship. Up ahead, two lithe, black dogs ranged off-leash ahead of their owner.

The fact that a cross-border drone had been used meant that approval had to have come from high up—most likely from Audrey’s biggest detractor, Tyler Godbout, the New Hampshirite who had helped bring the Mountain Republic back into the U.S. If that was the case, it wasn’t likely to have been intended to help the mission, unless that hypothetical unknown ally had enough leverage to get Godbout’s people to assist. That seemed unlikely. She had to wonder whether there was an intentional problem with the particular names they’d sent. She wanted to turn the scarf AI loose on the problem, but she had no way to be sure she could trust it to do anything that might compromise the home office or Godbout himself.

“I could talk about those girls all day,” Elena said. Elena’s fast speech slowed to only medium fast when she talked about her nieces, and her voice took on a fond, musing quality Audrey enjoyed. So why had she stopped?

“We still have three hours of sunlight,” Audrey said.

“Don’t tempt me,” said Elena. “Anyway, I have some questions. I’ve been noticing some things about you.”

“That would make you just about the only person,” Audrey joked, but she felt a chill.

“You’re reminding me,” Elena said. “We have to talk about your man situation sooner or later. I’m keeping my eye out, but you’d need a very specific type, smart and level-headed. So far I don’t have any candidates—but let’s not change the subject. What’s your secret project?”

“My what?”

“Your secret project. Whatever you’re doing that you don’t want anyone to know about.”

Audrey had to force her voice to stay steady, her steps to continue at the same pace. “You mean my plot to steal your nieces? You can’t stop me. I already hired the kidnappers.”

“Audrey,” Elena said. “You come here from the U.S., and you immediately have a job, while regular people spend months and years trying to find one. And you turn down your CitDiv, which you have as much right to as anyone else and which would only make it easier to pay the bills.”

“I was offered the job while I was still in the U.S., trying to decide whether to move. I didn’t want to take CitDiv money because my job pays well enough, and I figured I wouldn’t have any trouble moving here if I promised not to cost the state money.”

Elena huffed dismissively. “First of all, taking the CitDiv is just normal. Nobody cares if you take it or not. Second of all, you were born on this side of the border, so even though this wasn’t Cascadia then, by law you have every right to move here regardless of Citizen Dividend or anything else.”

“I just didn’t want to take the chance.”

“I guess you didn’t,” Elena said. “You’re actually taking precious few chances since you arrived, considering how independent-minded you are. We’ll get back to that. I was also going to say: you decide to live in a nothing place like Esparto even though you have no family or connections here. Then once you move in, you disconnect half the electronics in your house.”

“You’re darn right I did,” Audrey said. “And you would, too, if you cared about your privacy.”

“There’s no such thing as privacy anymore,” Elena said. “It’s one of those old things they had before everything became electronic. You’re working on something secret. What is it?”

Spending time with Elena had clearly been a mistake. Even so, Audrey couldn’t help feeling a little proud of her friend.

“I’m amazed at you,” Audrey said. “Are you some kind of spy?”

“Are you?” said Elena.

Audrey was eighty to ninety percent sure Elena wasn’t serious.

“If I tell you,” Audrey said slowly, coming to a stop on the path, “Do you promise not to tell anyone?”

Elena hesitated. Then she said, “I promise.”

“I’m serious about this, Elena. You like to communicate. If you communicate with anyone about this, I could get in a lot of trouble.”

“No, I promise,” Elena said. Nearby, a bird keened.

“I’m searching for my mother and my sister,” Audrey said. “I haven’t heard from them for forty years.”

“Why is that a secret?” Elena said.

“I’ve been looking for a long time,” said Audrey. “I’ve exhausted all the legal means at my disposal. There are some systems and databases I’m not supposed to have access to, but my job gives me tools I wouldn’t have otherwise.”

“I was hoping for something more juicy,” Elena said. “But I’ll settle for a family mystery and a little bit of illegal data use. Why do you think they’re so hard to find?”

“I honestly don’t know,” Audrey said. Her hands were shaking, and she willed her body to settle down before it gave her away. “Any ideas?”

The next day was a Thursday, and since Audrey had finished the orientation phase of her work, she went back to the Reemployment Initiatives Bureau office in Sacramento to sit down with Gordon McGill, the director.

Gordon was a cheery white man with a gleaming, bald head and a gray beard the size of a Pomeranian. His greatest talents, in Audrey’s opinion, were as a facilitator and an encourager. An innovator, however, he was not. As new as the Cascadian system was to Audrey, given her long involvement in the field, she felt she had some useful ideas that could help solidify her place in the organization.

She showed up expecting to see Gordon right away, but he’d been rescheduled at the last minute to meet with an unexpected group of Chinese dignataries that had come for a jobs summit sponsored by the Cascadian government.

She spent her unplanned time touching base meeting some colleagues in person whom she’d only seen virtually so far. Later in the morning, Gordon carved out ten minutes to hear how her orientation had gone and to promise he would be all hers by 1:30.

If Audrey had known she’d be in Sacramento the whole day, she would have brought some gumbo for lunch. As it was, she went downstairs to try the cafeteria, which she’d heard wasn’t half bad.

It was the wrong day to try the cafeteria. The Chinese delegation turned out to be many dozens of members, all of whom seemed to be eating at the same time. It took nearly half an hour for Audrey to get a plate of fish tacos and a salad, and once she had it, she had trouble spotting an open seat. There, though: across the room, she could see an empty two-person table. Even as she watched, a man around her own age with tidy, gray-blond hair took one of the seats. She wended her way through the crowd to get there before someone else took the other one. The Chinese diners filled the room with a musical din.

When she reached the table, the man looked up. Audrey was struck by his eyes, which were deep brown and which, to her surprise, seemed to actually take her in. His appraisal was nothing like the transient glances she was used to. For just a moment, she was lost for words.

“Have a seat, if you don’t mind company,” he said. “I don’t think anyone’s getting a table to themself today.”

She sat, looking at his tray. He also had the fish tacos.

“I approve of your choice,” he said. He had a rich voice, like a radio announcer from the old days. He was broad-shouldered and more or less barrel-shaped, with quick eyes.

They ate their tacos in silence. The man finished his first. “It was nice of them to send someone to eat with me,” he said. “I don’t know many people in the building.”

“I’m new, too,” Audrey said. “That must be why they told me to go sit with you.”

The man’s eyes narrowed, and he seemed on the verge of asking who they were before he smiled.

“I’m encouraged to see that there are a few other people around our age who are still employed,” he said.

“Our age?” said Audrey.

“I’m twenty-six, myself,” he said. “You must be a few years younger?”

That wasn’t a bad save, Audrey thought, unless he’d been setting it up.

They spent a few minutes talking about the heat of the summer and what little they each knew about the jobs summit, but having finished their food, it became clear they needed to give up their table to less fortunate diners who were still milling around the room forlornly, trays in hand.

“I’m Noah,” the man said, standing. “This is too hectic a situation for good conversation. Maybe we should have a normal lunch together sometime.”

“Maybe we should,” said Audrey. The man motioned to his lenses, using a dated, inefficient gesture sequence, and his contact information appeared on her display. Noah Drell, it said, with a call-and-message link. She hesitated before gesturing to her own lenses and pushing her own contact information back. Noah nodded, gathered his tray, and left.

Fairly certain she’d somehow just agreed to a date, Audrey stared after him. Part of her wondered what in hell had just happened, while the rest just observed the calm, deft way he wove through the commotion until he was out of sight.

The truck’s cab had no windows and no compartment for human passengers, but it pulled a flat trailer carrying four moving bots and a glossy, white storage pod that would be packed full of the contents of Marley’s house.

They pulled up at the curb, and the storage pod doors slid open. Behind the cab, the moving robots unfolded themselves and jumped down to the ground. Designed for packing, lifting, and moving, they had a dark brown, cube-like central body, four lower limbs with retractable wheels, and two multi-jointed arms. They looked like a combination between a rollerblader, a horse, and a refrigerator.

Marley was torn between overseeing the robots’ work and leaving to catch the first train, but seeing the bots select and assemble the reusable moving and storage containers from the pod, their motions powerful, unhurried, and precise, Marley realized there was nothing to oversee. The bots were less likely to break something than Marley was. As in so many situations these days, human beings would only get in the way.

The bots would proceed meticulously through the house, cataloging and packing Marley’s clothes, vintage physical books, paintings, kitchenware, and so on into clear plastic storage containers. When they were done, Marley would get a directory of every item they had packed, with photos, specifying the exact container and location in that container where each item could be found. Marley could visit the storage facility at any time to retrieve anything they needed.

They didn’t expect to need any of it soon.

After it was emptied, the house would be thoroughly cleaned by different robots, then scanned and recorded for virtual tours and added to the national real estate database. Within minutes, AI agents working for buyers across in Cascadia would note the listing, and depending on whether the buyers wanted an in-person tour instead of a virtual one and whether Marley’s AI agent and a prospective buyer’s AI agent could agree on the price, the house might be sold within hours, or even minutes--or it might linger on the market for months. The AI agent Marley had subscribed to predicted the house would sell within 17 days for Þ714,000-Þ722,000, enough to pay off Marley’s mortgage with a little left over. Even if it didn’t sell quickly, though, it was unlikely they’d live there again. What business did they have in Stone anymore?

They’d thought about making a round of goodbyes. They had a few friends in Stone, people they’d dated or gone to plays with or met at the dog park, but Marley was already feeling disconnected from this place, already relegating it to a bygone phase of their life. For a while, the town had felt like a place outside time.

After the meeting, unless No Divide offered some kind of appealing work right there in North Bend, Marley was thinking about going to Lewis Lake to see Gia and meet Lyric in person. There were rooms that could be rented there, Gia said, now that it could no longer be the writers’ colony it once was. That might be a good place to stay for a while as they began the next phase of their life--whatever that was going to be.

Marley used their lenses first to order a dog-friendly automatic car that would take them to the train station, then bought their train ticket, with a second seat for Anthem. Most of trains and electric buses didn’t allow dogs except for service animals, which Anthem was much too lazy to be, but there was a slow train that allowed pets, and Marley was in no hurry. That train would meander north to the Washington border and then west to Portland, from which point dog-friendly transportation south was available.

Traveling with a dog would continue to keep transportation interesting. Anthem couldn’t go on the Jet Train, for instance, except in a crate, which wouldn’t suit either of them. Meanwhile, maybe traveling on the less speedy options would open up the opportunity for serendipity.

When the car dropped them off, they ate a slow breakfast sitting at an outdoor table beside an automated diner called the Pine Box, which was next door to the train station. Anthem, on her leash, lay across their feet as they ate.

When the train came, they found a double seat where Anthem could climb up and lay her chest across Marley’s lap.

It was mostly flat land north of Stone, with fields of corn and soy sliding by monotonously, stretching back to low mountains in the distance on both sides. Marley grew half-hypnotized, gazing out the window, the train knocking rhythmically down the tracks.

An hour or so into the trip, a priority message icon came up in their lenses. They were tempted to stay in that dreamy state and ignore it, but they gave the icon a long gaze to open the message. The message was from the Citizen Dividend Office at the Reemployment Initiatives Bureau, and it began by explaining that Marley had been accepted into some kind of pilot program ... not important. It sounded like they were saying that Marley’s CitDiv amount had been increased, or that there was some extra benefit Marley was collecting, but obviously that wasn’t right, because the CitDiv didn’t change based on whether or not you were employed or who you were. Probably it was just another data gathering initiative or something--Marley would try to get back to it later and figure out what the deal was. They wondered whose idea it had been to make it a priority message.

They went back to gazing out the window, waiting to see what would bubble up once the noise at the top of things quieted.

Only a few minutes later, another priority message appeared, this one from Alice. It came with some kind of link, using a connection service Marley wasn’t familiar with, but the message itself was through the usual channel and was verifiably from Alice. Alice’s message just said, “Hi! Thinking about you. Get in touch when you’re alone, OK? Use this link.”

Marley hadn’t heard from Alice since the layoff, and they might have considered coming out of their reverie to respond if they had actually been alone, especially since the “when you’re alone” part of the message was weird. Why wait until they were alone when no one else could see what was being projected on your eyeballs? Still, surrounded as they were by other travelers, they set it aside for later.

Turning back to the window, they let themself drift back into that liminal state of consciousness where there was no separation between them and the world outside. Fields fell away behind the train, kilometer after kilometer.

The last leg of the train trip struck out west from Eugene to the coast, then turned south in Florence and continued along parallel to the shore to get to North Bend.

Disappointingly, the tracks weren’t close enough to the sea for Marley to see it from the train, but they passed over rivers and estuaries the whole way. At one point, looking down from the railroad bridge, Marley could see the tops of half-wrecked buildings sticking out of the water below, where the rising sea had expanded the estuary and claimed what used to be neighborhoods along the river.

Further along, the train came upon a series of large, well-appointed houses raised two or three meters over the water on stilts. Marley knew about these: elevation grants had let the owners keep their homes in flooding areas. In some places, it was mainly wealthy people with ocean view homes who got most of the elevation grant money, which had probably not been the intention of the program.

South of Reedsport, Marley saw a queue of house-sized, gray construction bots unloading blocks of stone from a cargo train on a siding. Marley pulled up the construction index for the area and found the project information: they were repairing and extending a seawall that protected the tiny community of Winchester Bay. Some day, all of the work that had been done around the world to reverse climate change would pay off in a new way when sea rise stopped and eventually reversed. For the time being, the lingering effects of emissions from decades and decades ago were still being played out. Even so, sea levels would have already risen much more if humanity hadn’t taken decisive action when it did. It was hard to feel joyful about simply not making a problem worse, but Marley tried to remind themself of how fortunate they were to live in a world where climate change had not been allowed to go on unchecked.

No Divide’s North Bend offices were on the third floor of a pale pink, clapboard-sided corner building, with first-floor shop windows sheltered by a second-story deck held up by columns along the outer edge of the sidewalk. Marley led Anthem inside, up the stairs, and down the hallway. Anthem sniffed intently at a section of carpet where something had evidently left behind a intriguing scent. Marley knocked at the office door. Their backpack straps were digging into their shoulders, and half wished they’d checked into the Þ105 room they’d reserved at a cooperative house in the southern part of town. If they’d gone there first and spent their time checking in, though, they wouldn’t have had time to take Anthem for a walk, and Anthem had really needed a walk.

A square-shouldered thirty-something man opened the door, and Marley recognized him from the virtual call when they’d set the meeting. He was Néstor Echazarreta, co-director of the Oregon No Divide office. On the call, he’d expressed himself so neutrally that Marley had very little idea how he felt about anything.

“Marley, thanks for coming. And this is?”

Marley followed the direction of his gaze to Anthem. “That’s Anthem. Can she come in?”

For a fraction of a moment, Néstor didn’t respond. Then he said, “of course. Come have a seat.”

He led Marley through a narrow office between two desks. At one of these sat a much older, rangy, white woman whom Marley’s lenses identified as Jessica Kostic, she/her. “Marley Jun!” she called as they passed, looking up and pointing at Marley. “I’ll be two more minutes. Do you want some juice? Néstor, did you offer them juice?”

“Would you like some juice?” said Néstor, leading Marley into a larger room. Multicolored, cushioned chairs with little fold-out desks built into the arms lined the walls. “We have orange and guanabana.”

“I’ll have guanabana.”

“You like guanabana?”

“I don’t know, but I’ll find out soon.”

“Ah,” said Néstor. “Water for Anthem the dog?”

“She’d love that, I bet,” Marley said, and they took a seat in an orange chair near the windows. The room smelled like cinnamon and soap. Anthem tried climbing up, but Marley shook their head, and she dejectedly settled at their feet instead.

Jessica Kostic took much more than two minutes, but Marley didn’t mind sitting and sipping the guanabana juice while they waited. They did like it, it turned out. It had a milky consistency and tasted like a cross between strawberry and honeydew. Anthem sloppily lapped up a faceful of water, then resettled on Marley’s feet. Néstor smiled perfunctorily, sat a few chairs away from Marley, and brought something up on his lenses.

After at least fifteen minutes, Jessica strode in and sat down next to Marley.

“We have a project for you, if you’re willing,” she said. “Néstor thought of it. He’s very excited.”

“I am very excited,” Néstor confirmed in a monotone.

“We read some of the scripts you sent, from the streaming show you worked on. The thing that moved us both was how empathetically you portrayed some of the deniers. Is that the right term, deniers?”

“Thank you,” Marley said. “Yes, climate change deniers.”

“I didn’t realize there were people like that,” Néstor said. “People who literally didn’t believe in climate change.”

“It was common for a while,” Marley said. “I think it’s hard for people to let go of the way they’re taught to see the world--especially if the people around them feel the same way.”

Néstor looked at Jessica, who nodded energetically.

“We’re not specifically interested in political parties here,” she said. “Did Néstor mention that?”

“He did,” said Marley. “He talked about political parties creating an us-and-them point of view.”

“We’re also not against political parties,” said Jessica.

“We just don’t use those terms when we define our work or when we describe people,” Néstor added.

“At the same time,” Jessica said, “people do tend to group together, and one of the things we find is that people who think of themselves as belonging to one group usually describe people in other groups differently than those people describe themselves.”

“For example,” Néstor said, “someone who’s interested in economic justice might see people who value private capital and individual financial choice as being driven by greed or misinformation, while capitalists might think of themselves as being focused on traditional economics or self-determination.”

“Sure,” Marley said.

Jessica leaned forward, “Based on the personal information you provided us, you feel deeply about social and economic and environmental justice issues, but based on your writing, you have empathy and understanding for people who have very different perspectives, even people on the extremes. So, we think you might be a singularly good interviewer.”

“For ... research?”

Jessica glanced at Néstor. “Actually, for streaming shows. On-air talent.”

“Oh,” said Marley, stiffening. “I’m not really--”

“We know,” Jessica said.

“Sorry,” Néstor said.

“The thing is,” said Jessica. “We could have you do interviews for research and then write about or transcribe those interviews, but the readership for that ... honestly, people watch streams a lot more than they read articles. A lot more. And if we stream an interview rather than just posting an article about it, then the humanity of the interviewee comes through, and your humanity comes through. And in these interviews, you can bring out what’s human and unique about the person you’re interviewing in a way that people who group on the more liberal end of the political spectrum will really get.”

“How often have you seen anything targeted at liberal audiences that sympathetically portrays people with very conservative points of view?” Néstor said. “Hardly ever? Never at all? We look for these things all the time, but we rarely find them.”

“To break through these walls we’ve all constructed between ‘us’ and ‘them’,” Jessica said, “we need to see ‘them’ as real people making understandable decisions, not as demonic adversaries who are bent on our destruction. We’re actually thinking of a very specific group: people who support reunification.”

Marley felt their brow furrow. “Reunification of what?”

“Of Cascadia and the United States,” said Jessica. “Specifically, Cascadia becoming part of the United States again and adopting American policies and laws--ending the CitDiv, rolling back all the social justice legislation ... Some of the people supporting this even want to retroactively tax reparation payments.”

Marley didn’t know what to say. Even in Stone, that kind of opinion would be extreme.

“Liberal-leaning audiences will immediately understand that you’re someone they’d consider ‘us,’” Jessica said. “If they can see people with these completely different views through your eyes ...”

Jessica trailed off expectantly. Marley looked from her face to Néstor’s and back. Anthem lifted her head, huffed, and set it down between her paws.

“I’m sorry,” Marley said. “I think you’re looking for a different kind of person. I don’t like being in front of the camera. No, ‘don’t like’ doesn’t describe it. I-- See, I like people individually, and I’ll talk with anyone individually--you know, as a private conversation--but I absolutely can’t do public speaking, or especially what you’re asking--”

“We read through the work profile you shared with us,” Néstor said. “We get that this isn’t something you’d usually do, and we’re not asking it of you lightly. We think you’d surprise yourself.”

“We believe this could be really successful,” Jessica said. “There are grants out there--this could become a long-term, paid position for you. A position no AI could ever take over, because the work is about you as a human being helping other human beings bridge the gap--”

Marley stood, surprising Anthem, who jumped up and shook herself. “I’m sorry,” they said. “It sounds like a great idea, but it’s not for me. I’ll try to come up with some alternatives to pitch you. Some writing ideas, interviews for written work ... Thanks for making time for me.”

“You don’t have to go!” Jessica said.

“Thanks so much,” Marley said. “Come on, Anthem.” Then they picked up their backpack and hurried out the door.

When Marley got to the cooperative house and rang the bell, the door was answered by a pale, round-faced person with bushy hair and a fat smile. Marley’s lenses captioned them as Banjo Hamilton, any pronouns.

“Marley, welcome!” they said, gesturing and pulling the door wide. “I’m Banjo. Come on in! Can I take your pack for you? Wow, that is a beautiful dog.” They turned and yelled back toward a room with clattering noises, which Marley took for the kitchen. “Y’all, there is a beautiful dog out here!”

Banjo reached out and took Marley’s pack, swinging it neatly onto their back as if it weren’t half as big as Banjo themself. Then they kneeled down and energetically ruffled Anthem’s fur around her neck. Anthem broke out in a panting grin.

“I was so glad to find a place that took dogs,” Marley said.

“Oh, we hardly ever take them,” Banjo said, grinning. “But don’t tempt us with this one!”

Several people in their twenties or thirties, many of them white, filtered into the room from the kitchen. One was carrying a bowl of water, which she set down on the floor for Anthem. Banjo stepped aside, still patting Anthem, as Marley moved into the room with the sinking feeling that they were being absorbed into some kind of impromptu social gathering.

“Are you hungry?” Banjo said. “We’ve got dinner coming up in about half an hour--it’s included in the price.”

“Maybe you’d like to rest?” said a short, heavyset man with a fringe of mustache. He was captioned Uday Johar, he/him. Marley saw him look them over and then nod. “OK, everyone back into the kitchen, please!” he called. “Maybe our guest will come along later, if they’re hungry.” To Marley he said, “Does your dog need walking?”

“Thanks,” Marley said, with feeling. “Anthem’s fine. Come on, Anthem.” They followed Banjo and Uday up the beautiful, curving wooden stairway and down the hall.

As soon as Marley shut the door, Anthem jumped up and claimed the bed. Marley sank down next to her, still thinking about the discussion at No Divide. They knew themself: being some kind of streaming personality was not in their wheelhouse. At the same time, they couldn’t help thinking of an old story-patterning system from the mid-twentieth century, The Hero’s Journey. In it, the hero of the story would be called to travel into adventure and unknown lands, to face troubles and champion their people. Usually, the hero would refuse, at least until something happened to spur them on. Was that what this was? A challenge to rise to?

Or it could be exactly what it looked like, a bad fit. There was no virtue in rising to a challenge when you weren’t the right person to take that challenge on. No one could do everything well, and no one could take every opportunity that arose. Throwing your energies in the wrong direction meant wasting effort that could have gone toward something useful, and if the direction really was the wrong one, the most that could come of it would be a bit of self-knowledge.

They should probably talk it through with somebody. The most appealing idea was to forget they’d ever been asked, but someone who knew them well might help put things in better perspective. Alice--she’d be the perfect person for that ... which reminder Marley of her message.

Marley brought it back up. Why the strange link? The icon was a little black arc on a splash of red. They circled it with their finger to bring up more information, but there wasn’t much. The app was only a few years old and had been released by an unverified user who went by the name “Placide164” and who had published nothing else. There was no contact information, no description--and it appeared the application could only be accessed by invitation. Probably this was just a test project by someone who didn’t want to associate it with their better-known identity--but if that was the case, why in the world would Alice want Marley to contact her through it? And why wait until Marley was alone?

Marley activated the icon and waited. It pulsed gently, changing from one color to another, five seconds or so on red, then five seconds on green, then mauve, then burnt orange, maroon, aquamarine ... This continued much longer than it seemed like it ought to have. By this time it should have offered to have taken a message, or at least said that Alice was unavailable. Marley continued to wait. Chartreuse, dark brown, putty, navy--and abruptly, the whole room turned black. Instead of the usual my-location-faded-into-your-location call, Marley found themself sitting across from Alice in a dark bubble. The bed they were sitting on had become an unidentifiable pitch-colored projection, and Alice seemed to be sitting on something similar. The visuals, too, were simplified, with both Alice and Marley appearing as graphic novel-style sketches of themselves.

Alice was smiling, and she held out her hands. “Marley!” she said. “I’m sorry it took me so long to pick up. I had to find a more private space.”

“What is this?” said Marley. “An art project ... ? Somebody’s ...” They trailed off. Somebody’s what?

“It’s secure. A secure call. Subvocalize: it will keep it more private.”

Subvocalizing features were common in lens apps. You spoke at barely any volume, and your lens earpiece would pick up the sound through your skull and extrapolate it into normal-volume speech. It was a good way to give voice commands without bothering people around you, or to have personal conversations, although lip-reading apps were common, so subvocalizing couldn’t be used for real privacy in public.

“Why do we need a secure call?” Marley subvocalized.

“Because I’m going to ask you to do something that it would be better for no one else to know about.”

“Are you OK?” Marley said. “Do you need help?”

Alice smiled wider. “I’m great. I really am. I still can’t believe we lost our jobs to someone’s computer lit project, but I found something better to do. You are alone?”

“Anthem’s with me.”

“Well, I think we can trust Anthem,” Alice said. “So, what do you know about the Louvre? Not the museum.”

“It’s ... a hacker group? I think?”

“It’s a hacker group,” Alice agreed, leaning in. “It’s the hacker group, and they are laser focused on justice for all races and all people. So far, they’ve specialized in doxxing, putting out public information about wealthy Americans who exert undue influence on the government. They’ve been pretty successful, but they tend to just hit their target and then move on to the next one. They’re not really building anything.”

“What would they build?”

“A story,” Alice said. “They could be guiding Americans toward something bigger, creating a story arc that catches the public imagination and changes the direction of American politics. But they’re not storytellers: they’re hackers. They know AIs, they know how to find vulnerabilities in information systems and how to hide their tracks and things, but they don’t have a real plan.”

“Wait--” said Marley.

“They need writers,” Alice said. “They need people who understand how to engage an audience, how to choreograph surprises and keep public interest, how to lead to a meaningful conclusion.”

“But that’s not fiction,” Marley said. “That’s politics. Politics and money.”

“They have policy geeks and economists,” Alice said. “You’d work with them--”

“I’d work with them?”

“What did you think this call was about?” Alice said. “We need you, and you need a banner to take up.”

“I thought this was about you. I thought you were saying you were going to write for them.”

“I already am,” Alice said, “but I can’t do it alone. We need a writer’s room full of activists, people who care about changing things for the better.”

“By causing harm, though?” said Marley. “How do you make the world a better place when you’re hurting people to do it?”

“Marley,” Alice said severely. “Are you serious? If people abuse their power, we need to oppose them. There’s a man named Godbout. He was part of the group inside the Mountain Republic that helped America re-annex them, and now he’s involved with American espionage. We’ve found some evidence that he’s probably trying to start a war between America and Cascadia, some kind of economic--”

“Stop,” Marley said. “Don’t--I don’t think you should tell me anything else. You shouldn’t have told me what you already did.”

The thought that Alice was involved in this illegal, dangerous, confrontational group--however well-intentioned its members might be--made a sharp pain behind Marley’s ribs. Marley had trouble understanding why Alice would imagine they’d even consider getting involved.

“I need your help,” Alice said. “This is too complicated. You’re the one who can see things from points of view most of us would never even think of. I mean, we’re all Progressives and Libertarians, but you always seem to understand where the Constitutionalists and Conservatives are coming from, even though you don’t agree with them. We need that perspective. We need to reach those people, to understand how to--”

“That’s the exact point,” Marley said. “You don’t reach out to people by attacking them. You don’t build support by increasing the amount of harm the conflict is causing.”

“Sometimes you have to even the field before they’ll respect you enough to listen to you,” Alice said.

“That’s probably true, sometimes,” Marley said. “But it still escalates the conflict. People dig in their heels--they’re less willing to listen to each other.”

“You can make that case to the cell! Maybe that’s the direction we need.”

“I’m sorry, but I’m not the person you’re looking for.”

“Just think about it, honey.”

“I’m really glad you’ve found somewhere meaningful to bring your talents,” Marley said. “But I can’t help you.”

“Just think about it.”

“I’ll get in touch when I’m settled somewhere,” Marley said. “I mean, I’ll get in touch the usual way.”

“So we’ll talk again in a few days?” Alice said.

“I can’t be part of what you’re doing,” said Marley.

“OK. For now, OK,” Alice said.

“Dinner!” someone shouted from outside the bubble. Marley startled, almost falling off the edge of the bed. Anthem barked.

“I’d better go,” Marley said. “Stay safe, OK?”

“I will,” Alice said. “Go eat your dinner. We’ll talk soon.”

Then the bubble vanished, and Marley was left in the little bedroom, Anthem staring at them. Down the corridor, someone was ringing a bell.

Click here to continue to Chapter 8