Date: 2023-04-21 04:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Science Fiction; Short Stories; Collections
Description: Sleep and the Soul contains ten stories from Hugo Award-winning author Greg Egan.

Sleep and the Soul

Greg Egan

First Edition, 2023

ISBN 978-1-922240-45-3

Copyright © Greg Egan, 2023. All rights reserved.

Visit the author’s web site at www.gregegan.net

Also by Greg Egan

Novels

Quarantine

Permutation City

Distress

Diaspora

Teranesia

Schild’s Ladder

Incandescence

Zendegi

Dichronauts

The Book of All Skies

Scale

Orthogonal trilogy

The Clockwork Rocket

The Eternal Flame

The Arrows of Time

Collections

Axiomatic

Luminous

Oceanic

Instantiation

Novellas

The Four Thousand, the Eight Hundred

Phoresis

Perihelion Summer

Dispersion

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

“You and Whose Army?” was first published in Clarkesworld, October 2020.

“This Is Not the Way Home” was first published in Mission Critical, edited by Jonathan Strahan; Solaris, Oxford, 2019.

“Zeitgeber” was first published in Tor.com, September 2019.

“Crisis Actors” was first published in Tomorrow’s Parties: Life in the Anthropocene, edited by Jonathan Strahan; MIT Press/Technology Review, 2022.

“Sleep and the Soul” was first published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, September/October 2021.

“After Zero” was first published in Phase Change: New SF Energies, edited by Matthew Chrulew; Twelfth Planet Press, 2022.

“Dream Factory” was first published in Clarkesworld, April 2022.

“Light Up the Clouds” was first published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, March/April 2021.

“Night Running” was first published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, March/April 2023.

“Solidity” was first published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, September/October 2022.

YOU AND WHOSE ARMY?

1

The last thing Rufus could recall his brother Linus doing was swimming laps, in the aquatic center twenty minutes’ walk from his apartment in West Ryde. Rufus hadn’t been near a pool in years, but he booked a lane, went to the center and climbed, shivering, down into the water.

He floundered at first, thrashing about, getting the acrid, chlorinated water up his nose. Then Linus’s memories took over, and Rufus found himself gliding along, if not effortlessly, at least competently. The sound of children shouting in the paddling pool, coming and going as he turned his head to breathe, anchored him with its familiarity, and whenever his technique began to falter he managed to think back to some moment when Linus had corrected a similar flaw in his own stroke.

Linus had completed his usual twenty laps. Rufus settled for eight; his lungs and limbs should have been in good enough shape from his running and weights, but his shoulders were protesting and his breathing was growing labored. He climbed out and went looking for his towel, chilly again, pondering the dissonance between his own mixture of pride in this mildly uncomfortable achievement, and Linus’s memory of emerging from the water, far more invigorated and physically at ease, but too accustomed to that for it to mean much.

He dried himself and pulled on his T-shirt, then sat on the lowest tier of the spectators’ benches, watching the other swimmers for a while. After a few minutes he noticed a woman approaching, goggles on her forehead, arms still dripping, frowning at him uncertainly.

“Linus?”

Rufus shook his head. “I’m his brother.” He recognized the woman: Beth, a regular in the same time slot, whom Linus had chatted with now and then.

She laughed with surprise and came closer, and they introduced themselves. “Linus never told me he had a twin! Do you live nearby?”

“No, I just flew in from Adelaide.”

“Oh, it must be nice to catch up.” She looked back toward the water. “Is he still going? I can’t see which lane he’s in.”

“I didn’t come here with Linus,” Rufus replied. “Actually, he hasn’t been in touch for a while.”

Beth digested that. “You’re looking for him?”

“Yes.”

She thought for a moment. “The last time I saw him here was Thursday.”

That was the last session Rufus remembered. “Did you speak to him?” he asked, though he believed he knew the answer.

“No,” she confirmed. “I just saw him getting out of the pool.” She hovered, concerned, clearly struggling to think of something more tangible she could offer. “If I see him, should I tell him to call you?”

“That would be great, thank you.”

“I’m sure he’s fine.”

Rufus nodded and smiled, and she departed.

Even if Linus had dropped this part of his routine at the same time as he’d stopped sharing his memories, that didn’t necessarily mean he’d come to harm. But it did suggest that he hadn’t merely decided to pull the plug, and then continue with his life as if nothing had changed.

Rufus returned to Linus’s apartment. He knocked a few times, then tried Linus’s phone again, listening in vain for any hint of the ring tone coming through the walls. Either it was on silent, or it was somewhere else entirely – and there really was no reason to think that Linus was lying comatose on the floor. He couldn’t go to the police with nothing but the fact that a healthy twenty-four-year-old man didn’t seem to be at home, and had had no contact with his brothers for five days.

As he headed down to the railway station, he set up a group call with Caius in Bonn and Silus in London.

“Any news?” Caius asked.

“It looks like he hasn’t been to the pool since Thursday.” Rufus felt strange conversing this way, but their usual mode of interaction didn’t make for a speedy exchange of information.

“You need to get into his apartment,” Silus insisted.

“How?” However many memories they had of Linus opening the door and walking straight in, the biometric lock wasn’t so shoddy as to succumb to either their shared knowledge or their shared DNA.

“Break a window,” Caius suggested. “Quietly.”

“Yeah, thanks for that last bit.” The apartment had no alarm system, and the building wasn’t known for its late-night parties; by midnight, the chance of him encountering any neighbors coming or going would be minimal. “I’ll buy a glass cutter,” he decided, talking over Silus who’d just come up with the same idea.

“I’ll call back if I find something,” Rufus said. “But if I end up in prison, I’m going to expect both of you to start pulling your weight and having a lot more fun.”

2

When Rufus had bought the tools he needed, he got a pizza and took it to his hotel room, then he lay on the bed and passed the time watching the same shows as he would have streamed at home: a couple of comedies, a police procedural, a supernatural thriller, a psychological drama. He hadn’t much liked Louisiana Nights at first, but recalling Linus mulling over his own memories of the first few episodes had really turned him around, and anticipating Caius’s groans and eye rolls did nothing to change his mind.

Around eleven o’clock, he left and caught a train to West Ryde. When he reached the apartment his nerve almost failed him, but then he convinced himself that if a neighbor showed up he could probably bluff his way through the encounter by pretending to be the rightful occupant, wielding a desperate solution to a malfunctioning lock. Linus hadn’t had much contact with anyone in the building, but he’d been there long enough for the people on either side to know his face.

Rufus attached a suction-cupped handle to the kitchen window and started rolling the cutting wheel along the edge of the pane, oiling it to silence its squeaking, feeling like a jewel-thief from a heist comedy transplanted into some kind of weird suburban melodrama. He’d tried Linus’s phone again while he was on the train, but hadn’t risked waking the neighbors by knocking, so it was entirely possible he was about to blunder in and find his brother, safe and well, in bed with someone whose intimacies he’d had no wish to share.

The square of glass came free; Rufus set it down on the balcony, lifted out the insect screen, placed a bath towel over the remaining sharp edges, and then climbed through the curtains onto the kitchen sink.

He pulled out his phone to light up the scene. The kitchen looked completely bare, and the refrigerator stood with its door ajar, unplugged and empty.

When he got down off the sink and tried the light switch, it confirmed that the power had been disconnected. Linus wasn’t lying dead in an alley; he’d simply moved out of the apartment.

A fraternal corpse was the last thing Rufus had been hoping for, but robbed of the potential exculpatory gravitas, he suddenly felt ten times more embarrassed at the prospect of being caught. He quickly opened the front door and brought the excised pane inside, pretty sure that the deglazed window itself would attract no attention from a casual passerby.

He moved from room to room, checking the landlord’s furniture for anything Linus might have left in a drawer or a cupboard. It was strange to see bare plywood where he was accustomed to recalling socks or stationary, and however presumptuous it would be to feel as shocked as if he’d come home to his own place and found it burgled, he couldn’t deny the skin-prickling sense that a sudden change had been wrought on things he’d always thought of as lying fixed beneath his gaze.

Linus had left no possessions behind, let alone any revelatory clues. If he’d wanted out, why hadn’t he just said so? Rufus couldn’t deny that the loss would have been painful, but he did not believe that any of them would have stood in his way.

Then again, if he hadn’t even known what Linus was planning, how much were his predictions of his other siblings worth?

Rufus booked a glazier to come and repair the window in the morning, charging everything to his credit card; the landlord was sure to discover the whole story eventually, but restoring the damage as swiftly as possible seemed like an honorable compromise that would probably keep him out of court.

He called the others as he walked to the train station, and described what he’d seen.

“If he doesn’t want to be found,” Caius said, “then I don’t know what else we can do.”

“Hire a private investigator?” Silus proposed.

“That could make things worse,” Rufus replied. “If he wanted to get away from us, and we start chasing after him, it isn’t going to help.”

“Why would he throw away four weeks’ rent by moving out without giving notice?” Silus protested. “And even if he felt like he had to act on the spur of the moment – at the very same time as he decided to pull the plug on us – don’t you think that sounds as if someone pressured him into it?”

Rufus could feel his memories of Caius agreeing with Caius, those of Silus agreeing with Silus. His memories of Linus stayed silent on the matter, just gliding through the water, content with the rhythm of his stroke.

“I’m tired,” he said. “Let me look into some options in the morning.”

Back at the hotel, Rufus undressed and crawled into bed, almost tempted to switch off the link himself. He could understand Linus doing that if they’d been badgering him, ganging up against him, trying to control his life. But no one had filled his head with reproach or disapproval; they’d accepted him as he was, as they always had.

Rufus dreamed his own dream first: breaking into his father’s prison cell, carrying the glass cutter and a birthday cake. “Shouldn’t you have hidden it in the cake?” his father complained. “What good is it out here in plain sight?”

“It’s not your birthday,” Rufus replied. “None of this is for you.”

As Caius, he hung like a sloth from a power line, inching his way along the live wire, sure that he was safe so long as he remained scrupulously isolated. Urchins down on the ground tossed their shoes at him, but he didn’t flinch. He could smell burning rubber, though: maybe from the shoes, maybe something closer.

Then he was Silus, eight years old again, in their first foster home: the Coopers. He had found a ball of wool, and he was using it to tie the cat’s collar to the dog’s. Mrs. Cooper came in and began denouncing him angrily.

“But they don’t mind,” Silus pointed out. The cat was tentatively licking the dog’s nose, and the dog, so far, was tolerating it.

“That’s the worst part!” Mrs. Cooper raged. “We trained them to fight! They should be fighting!”

The alarm dragged Rufus back to the hotel room. He lay still for a moment, sorting out exactly who and where he was. His expatriate brothers had not yet shared their still-unfinished Tuesday; on the European Monday he now recalled, both of them had tried and failed to make progress on their theses, too distracted by their worries about Linus as they’d waited for Rufus to arrive in Sydney and report back. This kind of lag had rarely mattered before, but Rufus found it annoyingly disorienting, now that they were trying to coordinate in real time as well.

As he started to rise, the absence hit him anew. At the back of his mind he’d still been hoping for a miraculous reconnection, but where the signal from Radio Linus should have been there was nothing but dead air.

When he’d showered and eaten breakfast, Rufus sat glumly scrolling through advertisements for investigators. The fact that everyone promised “discretion” only made the whole business seem sleazier. If Linus had found a girlfriend who’d persuaded him to walk away from the shared house of his brothers’ skulls, all power to her; the two of them should be left in peace, not chased down with a telephoto lens as if they were adulterers hiding from jealous spouses.

But ... persuaded him in the space of a day? As far as Rufus could tell, there’d been no candidate waiting in the wings to take on the role of liberator. Silus was right: the sheer speed with which Linus had cut all his ties with them raised doubts about how freely he’d acted. And if the PI found him blissfully shacked up with some mono-cerebral Juliet after all, the happy couple need be none the wiser. Linus’s brothers could step back and give him space, reassured that he was safe, and hope for invitations to the wedding.

Rufus picked a firm in Lane Cove, reasonably close to Linus’s haunts, and diligently checked the details against the official register. The web site offered him an appointment at eleven o’clock, so he steeled himself and prepared to rip away the bandage. Sharing the family’s secrets with a total stranger almost never went smoothly, but if that was what it took to protect their brother, so be it.

3

As Rufus entered the waiting room, his phone pinged with a message telling him he’d be seen shortly, and in less than a minute this promise was fulfilled.

“Mr. Bennett? I’m Catherine Leong. Please come through.”

Rufus followed her into her office. She ushered him into a seat, then sat behind the desk and glanced down at a tablet.

“You’re concerned for your brother, but you don’t believe this is a matter the police would be willing to take up?”

“That’s right,” Rufus confirmed. In fact, the firm’s web site had stated that it would redirect him to the police if he checked any of a list of potential red flags.

“Why do you think he might be in trouble?” Leong asked.

“He cut off contact with the whole family very suddenly. No arguments, no warnings.”

“He just stopped returning your calls? Since last Thursday?”

“Yes. And it looks like he moved out of his apartment at the same time.”

“Is it possible he just lost his phone,” Leong suggested, “and with the move he’s been too busy to replace it?”

“Not really.” Rufus squirmed inside, unprepared despite all his rehearsals. If this woman was so good at her job, why didn’t she know everything about the family already? But the names had all been redacted from the court files, and no one had paid her to go trawling yet.

Leong paused expectantly, giving him a chance to explain what he meant, but when he remained silent she tried prompting him. “You live in Adelaide, right? So do you meet up in person regularly?”

“Not in person.” Rufus clenched his fists and inhaled slowly. “We have neural links. All four of us. We share each other’s memories. They took us off the boat when we were eight.”

Leong was clearly thrown for a moment, but she retained a professional demeanor. Rufus guessed she was in her early forties, so mid-twenties when the story broke. Unless she’d been living in a cult of her own, she’d know exactly what he was talking about.

“You were born on the Physalia?”

“That’s right.” Rufus had to give her full marks for not only recalling the name, but pronouncing it correctly.

“And you and Linus are quadruplets?”

“Yes. The others are overseas, studying.” No idiotic blather confusing them with “clones.” Rufus’s experience had set the bar low, but he felt entitled to a small celebration at every sensible word that came out of her mouth.

“Forgive me if I’m not clear on exactly how this works,” Leong said. “When you say you share each other’s memories ... ?”

“We wake up recalling what the other three did,” Rufus replied. “When we sleep, as well as consolidating our own experience into long-term memory, we receive enough data to do the same with the others’. We remember being them, as well as ourselves.”

Leong pondered this. “Does that stretch to everything they planned as well? Everything they imagined?”

Rufus said, “Maybe not everything. I mean, when we were on the boat, Linus used to tell us he was building a castle under the sea – which confused the hell out of me, because I couldn’t even remember him imagining it. But I doubt he could plan something as concrete as cutting his ties and moving home without any of us knowing about it.”

“Okay.” Leong consulted the tablet again. “You’ve said that Linus wasn’t working. Is he on unemployment benefits?”

“No. There was a settlement a few years ago with the organization that ran the Physalia; all the children got some compensation.”

“So you’re independently wealthy?”

Rufus laughed. “More like independently not-quite-starving. It’s a small income stream, not a lump sum. Caius and Silus use theirs to supplement their scholarships while they’re finishing their PhDs; I’m the only one of us with a job, so I pool mine with Linus’s to keep him afloat.”

“What do you do?”

“I’m a high school teacher. Mathematics.”

“And how does Linus pass the time?”

“Swimming,” Rufus replied. “Walking. Reading.”

“What kind of books?”

“Nineteenth century fiction, mostly.”

Leong grimaced. “So what’s his plan? What does he want from life?”

Rufus had no definitive verdict on that, so he confined himself to the facts. “He’s tried to get work in the past. Mostly seasonal, like fruit-picking. But it’s been hard to find for the last few years.”

“Could he be working on a farm right now?”

“I suppose so. But I don’t know why he wouldn’t have told us.”

Leong hesitated. Rufus said, “You can ask me anything, I won’t get angry.”

“Does he share your skills? Yours and your brothers’?”

“Up to a point. I’m sure he could teach my classes, and he probably understands most of the research the others are doing. But if you’re wondering about employment, since he has no formal qualifications he couldn’t just walk into a teaching job, let alone a PhD.”

“What are your brothers studying?”

“Mathematics. Different subfields, but ... not wildly different.”

“Wasn’t the original idea that you’d all have complementary talents?”

Rufus said, “You’re giving the cult a bit too much credit. The original idea was that we’d form the first layer of building blocks in the construction of a vast, transcendental hive mind.” He couldn’t quite believe he’d just said that, in a mundane office in suburban Lane Cove. “My parents were gullible idiots, caught up in a group delusion with some unscrupulous, mildly tech-savvy nut-jobs. The plan wasn’t about giving us a head start getting into Harvard; they thought they were on the verge of conquering the galaxy.”

Leong persisted. “So it gave you no advantages at all?”

“Well, we might have been prodigies early on,” Rufus conceded. “We learned very quickly, if not quite four times as fast, or four times as broadly. We could all speak five languages by the time we were six, but there were a lot of nationalities on the boat, so I’m not sure we would have needed the link for that. In the real world, we were thrown off balance by the dislocation for the first few years, but we did all get straight As in high school by sharing everything we learned. So we were more like members of a moderately efficient study group than potential cogs in a global superintelligence.”

Leong smiled warily. “You haven’t switched it off, though? After sixteen years?”

“It’s who we are,” Rufus said. “When they tried to wean us off it after the raids we went ballistic, and the psychologists decided to leave it in our hands.”

“I get the sense that you don’t tell many people about it.”

“No.” Rufus knew what she was driving at, and decided to spare her any need for delicacy. “We’ve all had relationships with women who had no idea that three other people would remember everything that happened. If that sounds unethical, maybe it is, but full disclosure is a lot to expect of someone if they know it’s either going to ruin their chances or turn them into some kind of ... novelty.”

Leong nodded slightly, suggesting that none of this even registered on the scale of improprieties she was inured to. “You’d probably know if Linus had commenced a new relationship,” she said. “But what about someone from his past? Could someone have turned up, with enough of a prior connection to persuade him to make a sudden change like this?”

“It’s possible,” Rufus admitted. By Linus’s own assessment every break-up had been final, but it didn’t necessarily follow that he would have turned down a second chance.

“If you could send me a list, that would be helpful.” Leong caught the flicker of unease on his face, and added, “All I’ll tell them is that Linus’s family are concerned for him, and want to know that he’s safe.”

“Sure.”

“What about other people from his past?” Leong wondered. “Your parents ... ?”

Rufus said, “They won’t get out of prison for at least four more years, and none of us have been in touch with them since the trial.”

“Can you give me a list of his school friends? And anyone else with enough of a history that he might hear them out if they showed up on his doorstep.”

“Okay.”

“Do you have a recent photo?”

“This is four years old, sorry.” He showed her a picture on his phone of Linus standing in a mango orchard, visibly wilting at the end of his first day laboring in the tropical heat. Rufus still felt a second-hand ache in half the muscles of his body every time he smelled the fruit.

Leong accepted a copy via airdrop then leaned back in her chair. “Those names will be a start, and I can talk to his neighbors as well. But before we move ahead ... you will have seen the rates on our web site. There’s a six-hour minimum, payable in advance, and then each extension will require the same payment. Are you ready to sign up for that?”

Rufus said, “I’ll need to confer with my brothers first.”

For a second, Leong betrayed a hint of discomfort, as if she was afraid that his eyes were about to roll back into his skull while he muttered to himself in three different voices.

Rufus rose from his seat and held up his phone as he headed for the waiting room. “Can you give me two minutes?” he asked. “It’s pretty late in Bonn and London, but I messaged them earlier, so I know they’re waiting for my call.”

4

Rufus dreamed that he was Caius, contemplating a lattice of spheres in a space of some unspecified higher dimension, trying to decide if a certain kind of hyperplane lay entirely within the gaps between the spheres, or if it would be forced to intersect some of them. He swung the hyperplane back and forth, agitated, hunting for a solution. But the problem was not purely mathematical; Caius was sure that the answer would determine whether or not the police would be able to prove that he had murdered Linus.

As Silus, Rufus dreamed that he was back on the boat, half-watching their favorite cartoon, half-living inside it. The plucky meerkat Lano had tracked down the villainous hyena, Raggler, to a desolate canyon, where he was holding a litter of baby meerkats hostage.

“Let them go!” Lano demanded angrily. As he approached the cave where his foe lay in wait, his voice echoed from the rock face, but it faded with each reverberation, ending in a plaintive whisper. And though his shadow stretched for ten times his height along the dried river bed, it remained so slender that it was lost in the vastness of the canyon.

“Let them go!” Lano bellowed. “Don’t make me come and get them!”

Raggler laughed derisively. “Come and get them, will you? You and whose army?”

Silus knew exactly what that line foretold; every time a hapless wrong-doer invoked it, it summoned the same kind of triumphant finale. But as he looked back toward the top of the canyon, there was no meerkat cavalry, no swarm of brotherly solidarity to transform the villain’s taunt into an unwitting prophecy.

And then Rufus dreamed that he was Linus, swimming across the ocean, away from the boat toward the invisible shore. But after a certain number of strokes, anticipating by sheer force of habit the wall at the end of the swimming pool, he curled up, tumbled over in the water, and reversed, back toward the Physalia.

When the alarm went off, Rufus was sure of it: Linus was back. Why else would he have dreamed through his eyes? But as he searched his memories, there was nothing new. The dreams had left a hazy penumbra around the border, but everything still ended on the same Thursday.

With the room still in darkness he cast the blankets aside, then he saw a pale light shine briefly from the skin of his forefinger. He touched it again with his thumbnail, which had dug into it a moment before. The glow returned, then died away as he increased the pressure. The genes that made some of his neurons glow for the benefit of the link weren’t meant to be expressed in his peripheral nervous system, but it happened now and then. He remembered trying to convince a confused bedmate that the fluorescent dye from a nightclub stamp could glow without being bathed in ultraviolet – but he wasn’t sure now if he’d been the one making the argument.

It was his first day back at work after his trip. He’d only been away for a week, but every class was a struggle; the substitute teacher had followed his lesson plans, but as he reviewed the material his students seemed to seize upon any opportunity to disrupt the flow, as if he was a student teacher again and they all smelled blood in the water. Rufus hunted for the ease and self-confidence he’d had in front of the same audience just days before, but he kept finding himself saying something clumsy or misjudged every time he tried to restore the status quo.

In the staff room at lunchtime, Dianne Unger caught him staring at her copy of The Brothers Karamazov.

“Any good?” he asked.

“Wait until I’ve finished it,” she said. “Then I can loan it to you if you like.”

“Thanks.”

In the evening, when he’d finished his usual routine in the gym, he tried swimming a few laps in the pool. But it was a quarter the length of the one Linus was used to, fracturing his rhythm, throwing him off balance over and over, even when he thought he’d prepared himself for the too-frequent turns.

In the changing room, he checked his phone and saw a message from Catherine Leong: Can you confirm that this is Linus?

The picture below came with metadata stating that it was taken six days ago, in the international terminal at Sydney airport – about an hour before Rufus’s own domestic flight had touched down. Linus was wheeling a suitcase across the carpet, caught in the background of another traveler’s social media snap. He wasn’t facing the camera, but in profile he seemed no more anxious than anyone with a boarding time to meet and a gate to find. Rufus could see no obvious companion, no woman or man who was looking toward Linus with even a trace of interest. If he was eloping, his beloved was off queueing for the toilets. If he was being kidnapped, his abductors had him on a very long leash.

Rufus phoned Leong. “It’s him,” he said. “Do you know what flight he caught?”

“Sorry, no. That’s the only image I could find. From the time stamp it’s most likely he was going to Singapore or Kuala Lumpur, but, well ... ”

“Yeah.” That ruled out the Americas and the Pacific, but left the entire remainder of the planet. “There’s no way that Linus could afford a ticket himself, though. When he checked his bank balance a fortnight ago, he had thirty-six dollars.”

“You can’t access his current records?” Leong asked, clearly as frustrated by Rufus’s truncated omniscience on all things Linus as he was himself. “Not that I’d encourage you to break the law.”

“All our online security is iris and fingerprint,” Rufus explained. He didn’t have the heart to tell Leong that no one under thirty had ever used a password, whether or not they were a neurally linked quadruplet.

“He doesn’t look as if he’s under duress,” Leong said reluctantly.

“No. But who decides to skip the country like that, without telling any of the people who’ll be worried?”

“Stranger things have happened,” Leong replied. “Maybe he had some simmering resentment you never picked up on. Maybe he bumped into someone who offered him a chance for a fresh start, and he was afraid you’d try to talk him out of it. His life was going nowhere; he didn’t need to blame you for that to decide that the ties to his family were part of what was holding him back.”

Rufus couldn’t dismiss any of this, but he didn’t believe it. “What now?” he asked.

“I talked to everyone on the lists you gave me,” she said. “None of them admitted to any recent contact with Linus, and none of them were out of the country.”

“Okay. So ... ?”

Leong hesitated. “Is it fair to say that growing up on the Physalia was the most formative experience in your brother’s life?”

“Absolutely.”

“So as a driving force, it would be off the charts compared to some old girlfriend showing up?”

“Sure, but ... ” Rufus was about to object that Linus hadn’t been brooding about the past in the run up to his flight, but that wasn’t what Leong was suggesting. “You think someone from the boat got in touch with him?”

“You don’t believe that’s possible?”

“All the adults are in prison. I suppose there’s a chance one of the other kids could have tracked him down somehow – but I wouldn’t know where to begin finding any of them myself.”

“Okay.” Leong didn’t push him. “Maybe take some time to think about it, and let me know if it’s a line you want me to pursue.”

As Rufus walked home, he tried to decide exactly what position he should take when he broke the news to the others. None of Leong’s suggestions made much sense to him, but he had no better hypothesis of his own.

He closed his eyes for a moment, and did his best to set his own preconceptions aside and defer to the expert. But all that the Linus inside him wished to dwell on was the Dostoyevsky novel he’d been promised, and the chances of finding a better place to swim. Maybe the power of whatever had lured him out of the country lay in their shared past – but the actual trigger must have fallen from the sky, as much of a shock to Linus as it would have been to any of them.

5

As Silus listened to his brothers arguing, he stepped back from the conversation and let their doppelgängers follow along in his stead, nodding in all the right places while he thought through a plan of his own.

Leong must have requested a targeted search from a face recognition service, limited to Sydney’s transport hubs; any wider scan would have been too expensive. But now that Linus had left the country, the possibilities had exploded exponentially. They couldn’t afford to hunt through half the planet’s social media posts, hoping to get lucky again. Not at commercial rates.

So they really had no choice but to crowd-source it. The official missing persons apps only matched against official lists; they would need something of their own. And they’d need a rapid take-up, since they were starting from a base of zero. Their app would need to go viral, even if it was a joke a few days later, and entirely forgotten a week after that.

When the chance finally came to get a word in, he said, “Which Noah do you know?”

Caius scowled. “What are you gibbering about?”

But Rufus got it. “Noah Tribedi,” he explained to Caius. “He was in Idiot Empire, about four years ago. You must remember me watching that. But the point is, Tribedi’s had a wildly different look in every show he’s ever been in; people joke that it’s only a matter of time until he plays a character who resembles your favorite food.”

Caius’s face was already crumpled in resignation, and his doppelgänger was thinking: These fools are going to do this whatever I say, so there’s no point arguing about it.

Silus took up the thread, touting the idea with exaggerated enthusiasm just to annoy Caius. “So we put out a free app called ‘Which Noah do you know?’ that scans your social media feed and tells you the closest matches between your friends and each of Noah’s characters. It even offers you some side-by-side comparisons to post: ‘Here’s Diego at Vera’s party last week, the spitting image of Noah in All the Pretty Murderers!’”

Caius said, “Just pretend I’m not here.”

Silus talked over the logistics with Rufus. The code itself would be trivial, invoking standard toolkits in any of the phones it ran on. The permissions it needed from the user would be precisely those that the advertised purpose required. And though the pictures of Noah were subject to copyright, and couldn’t be embedded in the app if it was to pass the vetting process, they could embed URLs for the officially published versions that the app then worked from – and at the end of the process, they could outsource the merging and captioning of the images to one of the meme-building sites that the studios already tolerated, or positively encouraged.

“How do we smuggle a picture of Linus into the app without giving the game away?” Rufus wondered. “I mean, we can obfuscate the image itself, but whatever encoding we use ... last I heard, Apple wanted ten-page explanations for every chunk of data that goes into the bundle.”

Silus was stumped for a moment, but then he had it. “I’ll change my profile picture on GitHub to a picture of Linus, and then we’ll disguise the comparison with Linus as a calibration run. We don’t even need to embed the image; we just have the app use the developer’s own, publicly available picture of himself as test data. What could be more innocuous than that?”

Caius said, “If anyone decompiles this and inspects it properly—”

Rufus laughed. “Why would they bother?”

“Some people have a lot of time on their hands.”

Silus said, “There are a thousand times more phone apps than there are people in the world. If ours ever gets so popular that it starts to draw enough attention for any human being to care exactly what it’s doing behind the scenes, we will already have completed a few hundred grands’ worth of Linus-hunting for free.”

6

When Silus tested the app on his own feed, it turned out that nobody he knew looked like any Noah at all. Rufus and Caius had no better luck.

“Keep the name,” Rufus suggested. “But add a few more chameleonic celebrities.”

Silus dredged through the swoon accounts of his target demographic, scooping up dozens of actors and singers he’d never even heard of. What he really needed was a list so complete that no customer would walk away unsatisfied.

“‘Sorry, you know no Noahs,’” Rufus read from his results, “‘but here are your best three Lydias, your top two Simons, and your number one Ga-yoon.’”

“I think we’re at a sweet spot,” Silus decided. “If we loosen the resemblance criteria, or go further down the B-list, people will just groan.”

Caius opened his mouth, but then thought better of it. Rufus said, “Time to launch.”

Silus had a meeting with his adviser in ten minutes. He drained his mug of hot chocolate, submitted the app to the six stores they were aiming to reach, then switched his phone off and set off across the campus.

As he was leaving the café, Linus’s doppelgänger said, “This is all very touching, but what if I don’t want you to find me?”

“Do you know for a fact that you don’t?” Silus countered.

“No,” the doppelgänger admitted.

“What’s the worst that can happen?” Silus pressed him. “If we find you, when you’d rather we didn’t?”

“I don’t know. But whatever made me leave without a word, I know it must have been important. Don’t you trust me on that?”

“I trust you,” Silus assured him. “But what if it wasn’t your decision? What if there was a gun to your head? You need to trust the three of us as well.”

The doppelgänger fell silent. Silus strode across the grass, trying to clear his head.

In the weekly meeting with his thesis adviser, he was meant to describe any progress he’d made and any obstacles he’d encountered. But the truth was, he’d barely given his work any thought since Linus had gone missing. So he sat beside Dr. Tamura and bluffed his way through forty excruciating minutes, pretending that an idea that had come to Caius out of the blue while he flossed his teeth a few nights ago was the product of his own tortured efforts over the last seven days.

“Will you name me as a co-author?” Caius’s doppelgänger enquired as Silus finally escaped from the room.

“Fuck off. Next week I’ll tell her the whole thing was a dead end.”

“I think it’s exactly what you’ve been looking for,” the doppelgänger taunted him.

“I don’t care. I’ll find a better method myself.”

Silus sat down at the edge of the quadrangle. He steeled himself and switched on his phone. The app had been accepted into five of the stores; the sixth had raised a long list of trivial issues because the automated checker didn’t understand its own company’s policies. Silus fixed them all, resubmitted the app, received five new objections, and went through the cycle again. By the time he was done, the aggregated download count for the other five stores had already passed a hundred thousand.

A few minutes later, hits started coming through ... showing himself, Rufus and Caius. Silus had been expecting that, and though he’d set up a filter to screen out any of their previously known cameos in the lives of actual friends, the only way to find any of the cases when they’d been snapped in the background by a total stranger was the process now underway.

Rufus, who was seeing the same results, sent a message: At least we know everything’s working.

The download count kept rising, but the new matches slowed to a trickle. Silus had an ache in his gut; if he’d screwed this up, it might have cost them their only chance to find their brother before he covered his tracks. “Would you have guessed we’d do this, and taken countermeasures?” he asked Linus’s doppelgänger.

“I didn’t manage that in the airport, did I?”

“But once you’d reached your destination, would you have started walking around in a hoodie? Covering your face every time you saw someone raise their phone?”

The doppelgänger considered this. “Now that I know what you’re doing, it seems obvious in retrospect. But I’m not sure how long it would have taken me to think of it myself.”

“None of us are just ourselves,” Silus retorted.

“True. But I would have had as much trouble anticipating what you’d do as you’re having now anticipating what I’d do.”

Silus’s phone pinged. He glanced at the latest picture, and scrolled down to see the metadata, but it had been stripped out by a user intent on preserving their privacy.

He looked at the picture again. His first thought had been that the figure caught striding past behind the smiling couple was Caius, but now he was almost certain that it wasn’t. The backdrop was dominated by a wrought iron fence, in front of a courtyard with weeds growing through the cracks between paving stones. Neither he nor any of the doppelgängers could recall seeing the place before – though there were probably thousands of houses that they’d walked past dozens of times but would never have recognized out of context.

A few seconds later, Rufus initiated a group call. “That’s definitely Linus,” he said. “And it must be recent.”

“Why?”

“He never owned a jacket like that in Sydney.”

“Have you tried a Street View match?” Caius asked impatiently.

Silus laughed. “That’s ten thousand US dollars!”

“Globally. We’ve ruled out the Americas.”

Silus opened the app and got a quote. “Without the Americas, it’s still six thousand.”

“What about the jacket?” Linus’s doppelgänger suggested. “I’d only buy something like that if I didn’t have time to hunt down something I liked.”

“Give me a minute,” Silus told the others. There were more than seven hundred free apps that offered to find a product matching a photo; the first six that he tried returned links to items with only a superficial resemblance.

The seventh produced an exact match. Though the jacket was made in China, and a couple of online stores would ship it anywhere, the only bricks-and-mortar outlets that stocked it were in France.

Silus rejoined the chat and showed them what he’d found. “A Street View search of France is still a thousand,” he grumbled.

“And what would it tell us?” Rufus wondered. “Wherever this was taken, he might not be that close anymore.”

Silus’s phone pinged again. In this image, Linus was walking past a café, distracted, frowning slightly. The photo had been taken from inside, and the name of the establishment wasn’t visible, but the user had left the metadata intact. “Jouy-en-Josas,” Silus read. “Four days ago.”

Rufus beat him to the search. “Best known for HEC Paris: École des hautes études commerciales.”

Caius started laughing in disbelief, and Linus’s doppelgänger joined in.

Rufus said, “You know the joke: if I ever call you to say how much I enjoyed a Wagner opera, it means I’ve been kidnapped and they’re listening in. But even if you really want to ram the message home ... how do you talk the kidnappers into buying you tickets to the Bayreuth Festival?”

Silus didn’t want to rush to any conclusion, but whichever way he read it seemed equally bizarre. Unless Linus had chosen this particular Parisian suburb for some other, even more obscure reason, it looked as if he’d packed his bags, fled the country, and cut off all ties with his family, in order to enroll in a French business school.

7

Caius said, “Leave it with me. I can ask around; if he really is there, it shouldn’t take long to find out.”

He put down his phone and thought for a moment. Before he started imposing on his French colleagues, there was a chance he could resolve the whole question himself. He opened the HEC web site and looked through the section on international scholarships. Was there really a route by which a penniless foreigner who’d done no more than finish high school could win a coveted place in one of the most prestigious grandes écoles?

Incredibly, there was. A decade ago, a wealthy benefactor had endowed a program that allowed applicants from across the globe to sit an online admission test, with the ten highest scoring entrants flown to Paris for interviews. The last day to apply for the current round had been the day Linus had fallen silent.

No recipients of the scholarship were listed on the site, let alone current finalists, but that was probably just due to a cautious reading of EU privacy rules. Caius didn’t doubt that Linus could have mastered anything he’d put his mind to, given time. And a certain portion of the test might well have required no more than the level of purely mathematical aptitude that all four of them possessed. But there was nothing Linus could have drawn on, from any of their histories, that would have elevated him – within a few hours of making the decision to apply – into the top ten candidates when it came to economics, management theory, or business law.

Could he be wrong about that? Caius closed his eyes and pictured the memory palace he’d built from everything Linus had shared. He passed through the grand foyer with its swimming pool, the library with its shelves full of Balzac and Flaubert, the study lined with blackboards packed with mathematical exposition. Linus had pondered concrete examples to illustrate many of the abstract theorems on display, but his choices were geometrical: sculptural rather than mercantile. It was only after rummaging through a dozen increasingly small and dingy side-rooms that Caius finally found the word “Finance” – on a squashed cardboard box that looked like it might once have held washing powder, at the bottom of a pile of junk sitting in the corner of a disused garage.

And yet, there Linus was, in just the right place at just the right time to be interviewed for a scholarship he couldn’t possibly covet, let alone win.

Caius emailed a recent co-author, Sophie Allard, who worked in a complex-systems modeling group at the University of Lyon that had links to the econometric world. He tried to keep his dishonesty to a minimum, writing, “I heard a rumor that my brother Linus was shortlisted for this year’s Guinard scholarship at the HEC! He’s too modest to tell me something like that, but I wonder if there’s any way to check if it’s true? If it is, I want to surprise him there and offer congrats / support!”

As soon as he’d sent the message, the whole idea seemed ten times more absurd than before. Maybe Linus had won a few thousand dollars in a lottery, and decided to spend some time in the city where so many of his favorite novels were set. He might have passed through Jouy-en-Josas on his way to see the Palace of Versailles. And he’d pulled the plug on his brothers out of some misguided notion that they’d begrudge him not sharing the windfall. And though Linus had never actually bought a lottery ticket in his entire life, as far as anyone knew, if he’d acquired the money by some shadier route that would only make it more explicable that he’d decided to keep it to himself.

Caius pushed these speculations aside. There was no point trying to conjure all the answers out of thin air; he needed to be patient and wait for the facts. He picked up his notebook and started reviewing the calculations he’d been trying to finish for the past ten days. While Linus hovered at the edge of his thoughts, crisscrossing Paris in some kind of furtive homage to Jean Valjean, Caius turned his attention back to the lattice he was trying to characterize. Finding the shortest distance between neighbors by a brute force search would be an intractable computation, but he had a set of inequalities that he still hoped could be used to pin down the distance indirectly.

Three hours later, he’d made enough progress to think about taking a break, and the smell of cooking from the apartment below was making him salivate. He opened his laptop and checked his email; Sophie had replied more than an hour before. She’d pasted in a chain of replies from other correspondents on the matter, but her conclusion was right at the top.

“Hi Caius, yeah your brother’s at HEC! And not just shortlisted anymore, he got the place! Congratulations! I’m sure he’ll be happy to see you!”

8

“I’ve been looking into Marcel Guinard,” Rufus said. “He made his first billion in a micropayments startup at the turn of the millennium, then played the stock market well enough to keep getting richer, even while he blew half the profits on vaporware. He’s endowed a few chairs and funded a few institutes for tech bro bullshit around the world: Simulation Cosmology in Berkley, Superintelligent AI in London, Singularitarian Theology in Rome. I can’t link him to the Physalia directly, but even if he didn’t play some covert role in funding it, I don’t believe for one second that he wouldn’t know about Linus’s past.”

Caius had assembled the same sketch of the man for himself, but it still made no sense to him. “What’s the deal, though? He’s gathering up children from the boat to have another crack at the whole hive mind fantasy?”

Silus said, “As bribes for human experimentation go, offering an MBA to a Dostoyevsky fan ... ?”

Caius laughed wearily. It was after midnight, and he had to catch the train to Paris at six AM, but he couldn’t tell his brothers to be patient and wait for him to report back. None of them were going to sleep until they knew exactly what Linus had got himself into.

Rufus said, “So the scholarship’s just a pretext for him to be in Paris. The real bribe will be in cash, and I’m sure they’ll let him skip as many classes as he wants.”

“Why does he have to be in Paris?” Caius protested. “If Guinard has persuaded him to unplug us and link up with a different group, the participants could be anywhere.”

Rufus sighed at his obtuseness. “Whoever’s running this needs to have physical control over the guinea pigs, in case they start having second thoughts.”

“If this billionaire wants to stuff money into Linus’s bank account while he catches up with some old friends from the boat, he might have been tempted into humoring the fucker,” Silus conceded. “Taking in memories from a whole new set of people might even be fun for a while, and when they fail to evolve godlike powers – because they’re basically just swapping stories about their foster homes – they can all walk away a little richer, while Guinard walks away a little crazier.”

Rufus wasn’t so sanguine. “And what if he wants them there in person so he can open up their skulls for an upgrade?”

“If Guinard was going to take the risk of installing new hardware in his subjects’ heads,” Silus said, “why drag the Physalia kids into it at all? The only value someone like Linus has is that he comes with the link pre-installed, and the crime of putting it there has already been paid for.”

“And his neurons are already tweaked for optical channels,” Rufus added. “It takes time to raise an engineered child to the age they need to reach before they’re any use to you.”

Caius shared his anger, even as he observed it with a kind of detachment. They’d thought they’d put the Physalia behind them; for anyone to drag them back into that deranged world was unforgivable – and trying to pick off the most vulnerable of the survivors only made it worse. “What did Guinard think we’d do?” he wondered. “Just stop searching for Linus? Or swallow the whole ridiculous cover story?”

Silus said, “More to the point, what did Linus think we’d do? He must have had a plan when he pulled the plug on us. He must have had his reasons.”

“Yeah.” Caius ran a hand over his face. “But I’m sure he’ll make it all clear when I ask him.”

9

Caius didn’t actually doze on the train, so much as lapse into a sleep-deprived state in which his thoughts succumbed to a kind of dream logic. The journey from Bonn to Cologne was secretly taking him back to Adelaide, to the apartment he’d shared with Rufus and Silus when the three of them were undergraduates, and Linus had traipsed around the countryside looking for work. Silus had called it Schrödinger’s gap year: education and adventure at the same time, with none of them really missing out on anything.

When he stood on the platform in Cologne, waiting for his connection, the clock measured out the time for one of Linus’s high school swimming competitions. Caius could recall watching him powering through the water ahead of his rivals, but later he’d felt Linus’s own proprioceptive joy, which didn’t depend at all on beating the competition, but only on creating something entirely his own and sharing it with the rest of them.

The next train carried him back to the Coopers. Caius couldn’t blame them for their clumsy attempts to carve separate identities out of the strange, conjoined creature they’d agreed to take into their home. They’d had no one to advise them on the right way to deal with four traumatized children who’d just discovered that their parents had created them as a kind of technological asset to be deployed in a global war between different forms of superintelligence. The one blessing was that they’d been taken off the boat before anyone had considered them ready to be indoctrinated into that fantasy; they hadn’t needed to be deprogrammed from the cult, because the cult had merely brainwashed them into thinking they were perfectly normal.

In a rest room in Brussels, Caius splashed water on his face and slapped his cheeks until they stung. He grabbed some hot chocolate from a vending machine, then caught the train to Paris with the warmth still suffusing out from his esophagus. He took out his notebook and reread his calculations from the day before; he couldn’t move past the last stumbling block he’d hit, but the mechanical process of checking and re-checking what he had almost kept his mind occupied.

From Gare du Nord, he took the B line south to Massy-Palaiseau, then he changed for Jouy-en-Josas. This was still suburban Paris, but as the train approached the station the patches of woodland beside the tracks were lush green. There was a bus he could have taken all the way to the campus, but he needed a walk to clear his head, and as he made his way along Rue de la Libération birdsong rose up over the traffic noise.

The map of HEC showed ten different dorms, and Caius couldn’t parse the system by which the students in different courses were allocated between them. But the sixth place he checked had Linus’s name scribbled in on a directory in the foyer. Caius walked down to the room, but was unsurprised to find the door locked and no one answering. He sent Linus an email, telling him where he was and asking if they could meet; there was no point playing hard to get now that the two of them were a few hundred meters apart. Then he went and sat outside the dorm in the sunshine.

His eyes had fallen shut when he heard a voice close by. “You want to grab some lunch?”

Caius looked up; he hadn’t been dreaming.

“Sure,” he said. “Let’s do that.”

10

In the self-serve cafeteria, the first thing Linus put on his tray was a pot of tea. Caius was bemused, but he said nothing; a change in taste they might have joked about a month ago no longer really rated in the greater scheme of things.

When they were seated, Linus took a sip of tea then started eating. He didn’t seem angry that he’d been hunted down, but he showed no sign of being on the verge of volunteering any explanations.

“Hogy vagy?” Caius asked.

Linus smiled. “I’m fine, but my Hungarian’s pretty rusty. Can we stick with English or French?”

“I thought it might be worth it, just to give us some privacy.”

Linus glanced around. “No one’s going to be listening to us. We’re not that interesting. If we start speaking Hungarian, any Hungarians in the room will tune in straight away.”

Caius said, “I’m sure the odds of a Hungarian within earshot are less than a thousand to one.”

“You’re probably right. But I really am rusty.”

Caius nodded. “You had us worried,” he said. “Did you really need to pack up and leave without a word?”

“I’m sorry.” Linus twirled spaghetti around his fork. “But once I’d made up my mind, I wasn’t in the mood to have a big debate about it.”

“About what, exactly?” Caius pressed him. “I wouldn’t have thought it would be too hard to make your case. This place churned out more Fortune 500 CEOs in the last twenty years than Harvard. Who could turn down a chance like that?”

“Not me.”

“I’m just surprised it took so long for your hidden passion for the business world to reveal itself.”

Linus said, “You’d rather I spent my life squinting into the searing light of your genius?”

Caius laughed, but he was taken aback, less by the words themselves than his own uncertainty as to just how seriously he was meant to take them. “You could have done anything you liked. I know it’s been hard for Silus sometimes, because his interests are so close to mine. But if you’d become a writer, or an athlete, or any fucking thing short of stealing my thesis topic, neither of us would ever have had to feel like we were riding on the other’s coat-tails.” He shook his head irritably. “Anyway, can we drop the bullshit? I know you’re not here to polish your business acumen.”

“No? Why, then?”

Caius thought of trying Hungarian again, but he’d been told there was no need to censor himself. “You’re here because your benefactor wants to exploit what’s in your head.”

“Really?” Linus feigned astonishment. “Exploit it how?”

“I was hoping you’d clear that up, but my own tiny hive mind’s consensus is Physalia Mark Two.”

Linus gestured at the crowd of diners around them. “Do you see anyone else from the boat here?”

“It’s been sixteen years,” Caius replied. “I wouldn’t recognize them if I was staring right at them. Besides, they wouldn’t need to be physically close to you.”

“So I’m in Paris myself because ... ?”

“I don’t know,” Caius admitted. “The only thing I know for sure is that you’ve never had the slightest interest in anything this place has to teach you.”

Linus gazed at him with amused defiance, but didn’t contradict him. Finally he said, “Maybe I decided to acquire an interest.”

“What does that mean?”

“I spent twenty-four years acquiring interests from the three of you. Maybe I decided to look elsewhere.”

Caius said, “All right. But what exactly did Guinard offer you that made you want to look here, in particular?”

“A career path,” Linus replied. “Better prospects than I’ve ever had in my life.”

“And what does he get in return?”

“Every scholarship holder reports back regularly on their progress. That’s all that’s expected from me.”

Caius realized he’d been eating too quickly, risking indigestion. He slowed down, chewing his current mouthful thoroughly before swallowing.

Marcel Guinard was ninety-four years old. Over the decades, he’d thrown money at every crackpot scheme for longevity that had held out its supplicant hands to him, and seen them all come to nothing. No doubt he was still clinging to the hope that an antifreeze cocktail and a liquid nitrogen bath could turn him into something more than Ötzi with a manicure – but he’d made a career out of hedging his bets.

“You’re sharing memories?” Caius guessed. “With Guinard.”

Linus remained silent.

“You need to be discreet, because I’m wearing a wire?” Caius joked. “Or is the problem that you’re wearing one yourself?”

“I told you, I’ve chosen a career,” Linus replied. “At long last. Isn’t that what you wanted? You should be happy for me.”

So the course was not a sham, exactly: Linus would wake each morning with his mentor’s reflections on the previous day’s lessons to guide him. Guinard could have had his pick of conventional protégés, far better qualified and self-motivated, eager to hear his advice without any need for such intensive tutoring. But Linus’s value to him was as an empty vessel into which he could pour his accumulated wisdom – on the topics at hand, and much more.

“Where does this end?” Caius asked. “You graduate at the top of all your classes, then Guinard’s company snaps you up. You rise and rise, the golden child, taking on ever more responsibility, proving yourself to be a steady hand. Until ... what? People will finally believe that when he’s on his death bed, he’s handing you the keys to the empire on your merits?”

Linus said, “You make it sound as if there’s something wrong with me succeeding in my chosen profession.”

“No, the problem is why you’ve chosen it.”

Linus’s poker face cracked a little, but Caius wasn’t sure what was showing through. “What was I ever going to make of myself, without this? What could I ever have become? You chose the one thing we could all excel at, but then if anyone else tried to take the same path, they’d just end up having to fight you for space.”

“It wasn’t like that,” Caius protested. “And it still isn’t. You could still do anything you want.”

“All I ever wanted was what you wanted,” Linus said bitterly. “I never had the power to want anything else.”

Caius didn’t believe that, but it wasn’t the point anymore. “I’m not asking you to link up with us again. But how long did you wait between pulling the plug on us and letting Guinard into your head? What kind of chance did you give yourself to find a direction of your own?”

Linus laughed softly. “You make it sound as if I’m a normal person, who could just step out from my family’s shadow and thrive. But you know I’m not like that: I’m a vine, not a tree. On my own, I’d just fall to the ground and die. So I’ve chosen a tree to support me, and to shape my path, instead of tying me up in a race I can’t win. This is what I want, because it’s the best I can do with what I am.”

11

Caius was too agitated to call his brothers immediately, so he set about finding a place to stay for the night. His phone offered him four choices, but none had a check-in time before three PM, so he picked the one that would take that long to reach on foot.

As he walked, his surroundings barely registered; he felt as if his head was ringing from the aftermath of an explosion. How had he not seen how Linus had seen him: as someone setting the agenda and then seizing it for himself? He’d understood how it had worked with Silus, but that had always felt like a friendly rivalry, in which, for all his vanity, the two of them were more or less evenly matched. And Rufus, though he’d been infused with the same obsessions, had found his own entirely separate way to pursue them.

But Linus had had his swimming and his books; he had never seemed to have been jostling for space that the others had occupied. Because ... what, he’d given up his claim on it so early? Caius’s memories of Linus’s days had seemed to be full of tranquility, not resentment. But maybe the link’s imperfectly transcribed version had missed an underlying sense of resignation. If he’d been squeezed out of the light for so long that he could barely imagine regaining it, his numb acceptance might have been mistaken for genuine contentment.

Caius checked into the motel. He sat on the bed and made the call.

“I don’t know what to do,” he admitted, after tersely summarizing his conversation with Linus.

“Guinard must have tracked down everyone from the boat,” Rufus said, “and sent investigators around the world to observe them. And out of all those people, he judged Linus to be the one most receptive to the notion that the brightest future he could have would require his own erasure.” His voice was unsteady with anger and shame. “So what does that say about the way we treated him?”

Silus looked equally troubled, but he said nothing.

Caius said, “I keep thinking we should go to the police – but has Guinard actually broken any laws? Whatever he’s done to install his own link, he could have found a jurisdiction where it was legal for an adult. The fact that Linus has had his link since childhood isn’t Guinard’s fault, in any way that we can prove. And I don’t see how we could force either of them to admit that they’re connected at all, let alone confess to what the end game is.”

Rufus was contemptuous of this timidity. “So we stand by and let Guinard bury him?”

“Have we buried each other?” Silus asked. “Do you think we’re all just clones of Caius by now?”

“No,” Rufus replied. “But we seem to have squeezed enough life out of Linus, without even trying, that he’s ready to let someone else finish the job.”

“We need to get him out of there,” Caius decided. “Get him away from that place, and keep him unplugged from Guinard until he’s had a chance to think things through for himself.”

Silus was skeptical. “You think we’re commandos now?”

“I’m up for it,” Rufus promised. “I’ll be there on the first flight I can get.”

Caius addressed Silus. “I’m not talking about breaking into the dorm with knock-out gas. We find an excuse to invite him off campus, then take him somewhere with no internet access for a few days so he can come to his senses.”

Silus said, “There is nowhere in Europe without internet access.”

“Then we put him in a Faraday cage.”

Silus grimaced in disbelief. “Just listen to yourself! You want to kidnap your brother, drag him off to a cabin in the woods, and force him to wear a tinfoil hat?”

Caius shared his dismay at the prospect of resorting to coercion, but he couldn’t see any other choice. “We can’t let him walk away from his life, leaving nothing but an empty space for someone else to stand in. If the old way left no room for him, and he’s convinced himself that he can’t survive alone, the only way to put things right is to show him that we can support him from the outside. We need to do whatever it takes to prove that, without getting back inside his head.”

12

As Linus walked along Rue de la Libération, glimpses of the woods behind the wall that lined the road kept evoking memories of Marcel’s youth. He’d got drunk here with some friends on a summer night, in 1976. Linus could see a woman’s face, and he felt a nostalgic affection welling up ... but he pushed the image away irritably. Tonight he had to be entirely himself, if he was ever going to get his brothers off his back.

Trudging around the long arc in the road, he could envisage the earnest entreaties ahead. It had been naïve of him to hope that talking to Caius alone would have settled anything; the others were never going to be content with remembering the conversation second-hand. They would need to see him in the flesh, and hear the words straight from his mouth. Even the link hadn’t told them, clearly enough, exactly where he’d been headed; they’d just padded out his fading presence with their own ideas of him, and never really noticed how little of the original remained.

It was dusk when he reached the motel. He lingered by the roadside, working up the courage to take the last few steps. He’d prepared a long speech earlier that he’d hoped would convey what needed to be said, but running through it in his head now it just felt clumsy.

He walked across the parking lot and knocked on the door. Caius opened it, but the others were right behind him.

In the face of a quadruple reunion, Linus couldn’t help himself. “Me and this army!” he proclaimed, in his most triumphant meerkat voice.

Silus laughed, but no one else seemed to have retained their sense of humor. Rufus stepped forward and embraced him, so forcefully that Linus caught himself anticipating reliving the gesture from the other side. But that was never going to happen. The best he could guess was that it was meant as a message: an offering of strength in a common purpose. Linus thumped his back amiably in return, but they no longer shared a purpose.

“I know this is hard,” he said, once they’d parted, turning to take in Silus as well. “But you have to accept it. I can’t go on as a spare wheel, and I can’t go on by myself. I know you think Guinard is exploiting me, but he’s the one who’ll be giving me a clear direction and then stepping out of my way.”

Silus grew stony-faced. “If you can stand on your own feet once Guinard is dead, you can do it right now.”

“How would you know?” Linus retorted. “Whatever goals we had, the three of you divided them up between yourselves a long time ago. Just because I clung on as your backup drive—”

“We’re not a fucking computer network,” Silus interjected angrily. “That might have been what the cult wanted, but they didn’t succeed.”

“And we’re not four ordinary people,” Linus said. “That might have been what the Coopers wanted, but they didn’t succeed either.”

“We’re just asking you to give it a chance,” Rufus pleaded. “Stay unplugged from us, and from Guinard too, and see what happens.”

“That’s a good idea,” Linus replied. “Guinard suggested exactly the same thing. I didn’t start sharing his memories until a week after I unplugged from you.”

“And what was that week like?” Rufus asked, though he didn’t sound as if he wanted to hear the answer.

Linus said, “It felt like I was vanishing. It felt like I was dissolving into the air.”

Rufus glanced at Caius, as if this revelation had given him pause. But then he said, “Guinard was still pulling strings, though: fixing your test score, buying you plane tickets. What if you came back to Adelaide for a while, and just tried living by yourself?”

“Doing what?”

“Whatever you like.”

Linus said, “There is nothing I like, myself.”

“You don’t like swimming?” Rufus protested. “You don’t like Balzac?”

“A couple of hobbies don’t make a life. You want me to sit around living on your charity, struggling to find a reason to get up every morning, hoping that some kind of grand vocation will suddenly crystallize in my brain? Here, I have a curriculum to follow, a guaranteed career that starts at a six-figure salary, and a good chance I’ll be a billionaire before I’m forty.”

Caius said, “You, or Guinard in his new body?”

Linus shrugged. “How much of any of you is your own work, alone? Maybe I’m the only one of us who really faced up to what we are, but whatever you think about yourselves, it’s what I know about myself that counts.”

Rufus regarded him dolefully, and when he approached Linus braced himself for a farewell hug, but instead he found his hands forced together behind his back, while Caius stepped in and put cable ties around them.

“What the fuck is this?” Linus demanded. He contemplated bellowing for help, but a part of him flinched away from the sheer embarrassment of having a stranger walk in on this family dispute. “You’re so used to dictating what goes into my head, you can’t bear the thought of me choosing for myself?”

Rufus groaned. “Guinard would say that, wouldn’t he?” Caius pulled a long strip of white cloth from his pocket and proceeded to wind it between Linus’s lips and the back of his neck, before switching to a second loop aimed at holding his jaw closed. As a gag, the whole thing seemed less than ideal, but he guessed they were too afraid of choking him to shove a wad of material into his mouth – and too viscerally defensive of body parts they could all personally recall him using to breathe, eat, cough and kiss.

As they maneuvered him onto the bed to tie his feet together, Linus caught a glimpse of the scene in a mirror: the bandages around his face looked like he was being prepared for a role as the Invisible Man. He fought down the urge to keep arguing and complaining, reluctant to reveal how much noise he was still capable of producing. But when they started wrapping the blanket around him, he couldn’t help himself: he began to yell. Rufus knelt on his chest and clamped a hand over his mouth while Silus set to work with a roll of duct tape.

When he was cocooned in several blankets, he could still feel Rufus on top of him, trembling from the adrenaline. “Just stay still and keep quiet,” he begged Linus. “We don’t want to have to drug you.”

They lifted him and carried him out of the room. When they started lowering him into the trunk of a car, he needed to assume a near-fetal position in order to fit, but he cooperated placidly. If anything, he was more mortified than ever by the thought that they might be caught in the act. This had moved beyond a motel-room scuffle into a scene that police might treat as the prelude to a burial in the woods, and he wasn’t going to risk drawing a bullet into anyone’s brain.

Someone closed the trunk. The stale air around him smelled of scented cleaning products. Linus heard the soft purr of the motor and felt the car reversing, then moving across the lot. They couldn’t imagine they had any hope of spiriting him out of the country, but perhaps they’d rented a place where they wouldn’t be disturbed.

To what end? They genuinely believed he’d die if he stayed, so they’d do whatever they had to in order to protect him.

The car braked hard, and he heard tires squealing. Someone shouted in French: “Get out! Get out!”

Linus felt it through the chassis when the doors were flung open. Moments later, he was being lifted out of the trunk, laid down on the ground and his bindings unwrapped.

As he rose to his feet, he saw his brothers kneeling beside the car with their faces downturned and their hands behind their heads. He turned to the security guard beside him. “Don’t you dare fucking hurt them! And you can’t call the police.”

Linus had never seen the man before, but he nodded respectfully. “Of course. We will release them when you’re clear. They will be fine.”

Linus wanted to reply, “Merci,” but Marcel caught the word in his throat. He works for us. He works for you. Don’t thank him for doing his job.

13

Linus swam through the dark water, away from the boat. He paused and looked back over his shoulder: Rufus, Silus and Caius all stood on the deck, wretched and abandoned, watching him escape. Why would he leave them behind? His guilt and horror at the thought of his betrayal cut into him like a cord around his skin, and as he moved his arms he saw it: a loop of fishing line, tangled around him, biting into his shoulders and torso.

Oh, good, I’m dreaming, he thought. He took control, shaking off the silly metaphorical cord and parting the water, creating a slanted cylinder of air that reached from the surface to his house on the seafloor. He slid down the inside of the cylinder, passing through the library’s skylight as smoothly as the camera in Citizen Kane.

Inside it was warm and the lamps blazed brightly. He shook the water off his skin like a dog and walked barefoot over the carpet to the shelf where the new periodicals were kept.

The clock on the wall read three AM. A new pamphlet of Guinard’s memoirs had arrived; Linus settled into a plush armchair and read through the latest installment.

It opened with Guinard’s recollections of, and reflections on, Waking Linus’s encounter with his brothers at the motel. Linus read and re-read the passage carefully, but he could detect no trace of suspicion, no subtext of mistrust. Both Guinard’s spies, and everything he’d now seen and felt through Waking Linus’s eyes, told a story in which the three of them had fought desperately to save their wayward brother. Never mind if the protégé himself had not entirely faced up to the prospect of his own demise, and took solace in a vague conviction that he might endure as a significant component in an amalgamated Linus-Marcel; the three people who knew him best clearly believed otherwise. They understood how weak he was, and how easily he’d be subjugated, then snuffed out entirely.

Linus skimmed the rest, which consisted of Guinard’s tedious daily routine and even more dreary meditations and recollections, but it was up to Waking Linus to take this guff seriously as notes for his character’s role. He put the pamphlet aside, and walked over to the shelf that held the volumes recounting the lives of his brothers.

As he touched the spines of the bound copies of these temporarily suspended serials, he felt a pang of guilt; rereading old issues would help him pass the time while he lay dreaming – in between revisiting Zola and Proust – but how badly would the three of them be suffering while he bunkered down and waited for Guinard to die?

He wanted to believe that they would reason their way out of despair into an understanding of the secret he couldn’t reveal to them – and that they themselves, if they came to know it, could never speak out loud. Guinard would be watching them, gauging their progression from grief to resignation, and the long con they hadn’t known they were to be a part of would rely on them appearing to continue to mourn.

THIS IS NOT THE WAY HOME

1

When Aisha spotted Jingyi through the window, for a second she thought she was seeing a reflection in the glass. Suited to the neck but bare-headed, her helmet gripped in one hand by her side, Jingyi had to be standing behind her, facing away from her into the room.

But she wasn’t.

Aisha knelt on the floor and wept. It was Jingyi who had kept her from giving in to despair. It was Jingyi who had shaped the plan into something real, and found the strength to pursue it. But when she’d faltered, when she’d fallen into doubt herself, all of Aisha’s attempts to lift her spirits and restart the virtuous circle of encouragement that had kept them both sane and striving for close to a year, had come to nothing.

Aisha sobbed until the grief loosened its hold on her, long enough to grant her a choice: follow Jingyi into the darkness, or step back and try to skirt around the edge of the abyss. She rose to her feet and returned to the crib, then lifted Nuri into her sling. She could not afford to be crushed. Not by this, not by anything. Her daughter was fast asleep; Aisha even managed to put their shared suit on without waking her. Then she went out to pack for the trip.

The buggy’s trailer, with its open tray, looked like something she might have hired back in Dunedin to move a few pieces of furniture between share-houses in her student days. She didn’t shy away from the memory; she pictured Gianni beside her, smiling and teasing her as she fretted over the placement of each item in the tray. The struts were all short enough to fit, but she didn’t want them rolling back and forth. She hunted around in the workshop and found some cable ties, then she stood patiently binding the struts into a set of linked bundles that she could anchor to the tray at the corners.

She’d already folded the sheet of glistening silica fibers that she and Jingyi had spent the last four months weaving, but even in this compact form it was so bulky that when she squatted down to pick it up, it blocked her view completely. She fetched a sled with a pull cord, flipped the bundle onto it, then dragged it across the workshop floor and out onto the regolith.

As Aisha glanced up at the crescent Earth, Nuri woke and started crying. “Shh, shh!” It was impossible to stroke her through the suit, but Aisha managed to nudge breast and baby together, and once Nuri clamped her mouth in place she stopped complaining and just fed, more or less contentedly. “We’re going for a drive,” Aisha explained. “How about that?”

Jingyi was facing west: the way they’d planned to travel together, chasing the sun. Aisha saw no reason to lay her friend to rest; she must have locked the suit’s joints to keep her body upright, so she’d clearly had no desire to end up horizontal in the dirt.

Nuri stopped feeding to grizzle with displeasure then pungently defecate, but her diapers were as magical as Aisha’s and there was nothing to be done but endure the smell.

Aisha finished packing, then she covered everything on the trailer with a tarpaulin and started pulling the straps into place.

When she was done, she looked up at the Earth again. She’d always been good with landmarks; one glimpse of a distant spire and she could find her way home. But she was about as close to home right now as she could ever be on this world, and the idea of climbing into the buggy and driving until pretty much the opposite was true felt suicidally wrong-headed. How mortifying would it be if a rescue team finally arrived, a mere twelve months late, only to end their mission cracking each other up just by whispering, “She headed for the far side?”

Jingyi’s memorial statue remained resolute. “All right, I’m sticking to the plan,” Aisha told her. “Just like you should have done.”

2

“A honeymoon in Fiji! Thank you!” As Aisha embraced her father in gratitude, he interjected testily, “There’s more in the envelope. Have a proper look.”

Aisha flushed and did as he’d asked, wondering if the airline ticket and hotel booking were accompanied by some needlessly lavish spending money. But the extra slip of paper she’d missed was another kind of ticket entirely.

“I checked with Gianni before I bought it,” her father informed her. That had been prudent: the lottery’s prize was strictly for couples, and if she’d won only to find that her husband really couldn’t face the journey, it would have made both of them miserable. Better not to have a ticket at all.

That night, as she and Gianni lay in bed, she’d talked down their chances. “One in a hundred thousand,” she’d mused. “I’d have better odds of getting into the astronaut training program.”

“Only if you applied.”

“Yeah, well.” Going into space was the kind of thing that was easier to imagine at twelve than at twenty-seven. She was touched that her father recalled her childhood ambition, but he seemed to have taken it more seriously than she had herself. “And really, there’s no chance of us winning. They’ll give it to a Chinese couple.”

“Why? Just because China and America are squabbling doesn’t mean the company’s going to start blacklisting people from every other country.”

“No, but it’s a marketing gimmick. ‘Honeymoon on the Moon!’ Who else are you going to target but your biggest market?”

Gianni was bemused. “It’s a lottery with thousand-dollar tickets. If you mess with the outcome, that’s not marketing savvy, it’s fraud.”

And then, after all her cynicism and carefully managed expectations, the company live-streamed the draw. Five digits plucked from the hiss of the cosmic microwave background determined the winners, and the marketing department would just have to live with it.

Aisha’s class of moonstruck nine-year-olds gave her handmade bon voyage cards, with postscripts ranging from impressively specific requests for certain kinds of lunar minerals to pleas for photos of various action figures (enclosed) posed on the surface. She and Gianni passed their health checks and were whisked away to the Gobi Desert, where the centrifuge rides and spacesuit training felt more like scenes for a mockumentary than anything that would really serve them in their role as spam in a can. But Aisha let the company’s PR machine drag them along its strange conveyor belt, all the way to the launch pad.

“This is like being prepped for an operation,” Gianni decided, as they waited in their flight suits for the car that would take them to the Chang’e 20 itself.

Zhilin, the pilot, was amused. “Only if you mean the kind of brain surgery where you’re awake the whole time.”

“Are you ever afraid?” Aisha asked him.

“I was afraid the first time,” he confessed. “It’s a strange thing for a human to attempt, and it’s only right that it feels unnatural. But that’s true for anything our ancestors didn’t do: driving a car, flying a plane.”

“Walking on a tightrope between skyscrapers,” Gianni joked. Aisha wanted to punch him, but Zhilin just laughed.

From the gantry, looking out across the stark gray plains, Aisha waved cheerfully, knowing that her father and her students would be watching, but once she was strapped into her seat in the tiny cabin she gripped Gianni’s hand and closed her eyes.

“It’ll be fine,” he whispered.

She waited for the engines to ignite, wondering what had ever made her yearn to leave the Earth. She didn’t need a pale-blue-dot moment to convince her that her home world was a fragile oasis. And if she couldn’t inspire a love of science in her students without an overblown stunt like this, she was the worst teacher ever born.

When the moment came, she could hear the inferno unleashed beneath her, a wild conflagration that rattled all the flimsy structures that stood between the flames and her flesh. When Gianni squeezed her hand, she imagined the two of them spinning away into the air, lighting up the desert like a human Catherine wheel.

In the flight simulator, she’d watched the simulated rocket’s progress on a screen in front of her, helping her translate every burst of noise and thrust into the language of stages and separations, but now she shied away from interpreting the cues, afraid of getting it wrong and convincing herself that the worst was over when it was only just beginning. The force of the engines and the shaking of the cabin made her teeth ache in ways she’d never felt before; this wasn’t brain surgery, it was some kind of gonzo dentistry.

And when everything seemed still and quiet, she refused to trust her senses. Maybe she was just numb to the onslaught, or she was blocking it out in some kind of dissociative state.

“Aisha?”

She opened her eyes. Gianni was beaming madly. He took a pen out of his pocket and released it; it floated in the air like a magic trick, like a movie effect, like her phone doing a cheesy AR overlay. She’d watched 2001 a thousand times, but this couldn’t be happening to her in real life.

He said, “We’re astronauts now. How cool is that?”

3

Three days later, when they disembarked at Sinus Medii, Aisha was jubilant. She summoned up her twelve-year-old self to gaze in astonishment at the blazing daytime stars and the ancient fissured basalt stretching to the horizon, then she waddled precariously forward across the landing pad like her grandmother performing water aerobics. She knew that if she did X, Y or Z she would instantly die a horrible death – but she was no more likely to enact one of the fatal blunders she’d been warned against than she’d ever been inclined to open a window in a tall building and jump out.

Medii Base was a sprawling complex of factories and workshops open to the vacuum, but the sole pressurized habitat was about the size of a small suburban dwelling, albeit with a greenhouse in the back. Zhilin introduced the honeymooners to the staff: Jingyi, botanist and medical doctor; Martin, roboticist and mining engineer; and Yong, geologist and astrophysicist. These double-degreed geniuses all looked about thirty, and Aisha was intimidated at first, but that soon gave way to a kind of relief: envying them would be like envying an Olympic athlete. She wanted to enjoy the experience for what it was and emerge without any delusions or regrets: there’d be no if only she’d done a PhD, or it was not too late to leverage her flight hours as a passenger into a new, interplanetary career.

Jingyi sketched the whole complex system of nutrient and energy flows supporting the hydroponic crops, responding patiently to all the questions Aisha’s students had passed on to her. Martin showed them the solar-thermal smelter that was processing basaltic rubble into useful materials – albeit, so far, mostly just the silica fiber for Yong’s baby. The Moravec skyhook was a rotating cable, its length a full third the width of the Moon. Yong had spun it up to the point where the low end swung backward above the surface so rapidly as to momentarily cancel out the velocity due to its orbit. It was like a spoke on a giant wheel rolling around the Moon’s equator – except that the imaginary track it was rolling on was several kilometers above their heads, so there was no risk of decapitation even at the top of the most exuberant bound. One day the hook would grab vehicles and supplies and sling them away toward Mars. For now, it was just a beautiful proof of concept, a tireless, hyperactive stick-insect doing cartwheels over their heads.

Back in their room, Aisha Skyped her father. The three-second delays were impossible to ignore, but she’d had worse between continents.

“You’re healthy?” he asked. “You’re not sick from the journey?”

“Not at all.” She’d done all her vomiting in the ship.

“I’m so proud of you. Your mother would have been so proud!”

Aisha just smiled; it would have been heartless to protest that she’d done nothing more than accept his gift.

When they finished the call, she flopped back in her chair and sighed. “Where are we, again?”

“Are you jealous of my sister scuba-diving on the reefs?” Gianni joked. They’d given her the Fiji holiday; it would have been greedy to take both.

“No.” Some commentators had written sniffily that a smelter was hardly a tourist attraction. But in truth, nothing could be mundane here.

“They won’t have put cameras in the room, will they?” Gianni asked. Aisha hoped he was joking; whatever their role, it was still a notch or two above contestants on reality TV. But she shut down the computer anyway, just to be safe.

They kissed, tentatively, wary of performing some simple movement that would lead to a pratfall here. Anything that wasn’t Velcroed or magnetically locked to the floor might as well have been a banana skin.

She said, “Once we’re inside the bag, we should be right.” They undressed each other, trying not to laugh, unsure just how quiet they’d need to be to keep their neighbors from hearing.

“When your father asked me if I’d go on this trip, I almost said no,” Gianni admitted.

Aisha frowned. “Well, that’s a real turn-on.”

“I was trying to be honest.”

“I’m joking!” She kissed him. “I almost chickened out a dozen times myself.”

“Then I’m glad we both stuck with it,” he said. “Because I’m pretty sure this is going to make us happy for the rest of our lives.”

4

Aisha had switched her watch’s default display to Dunedin time, so she wouldn’t miss her appointment to talk to the school. She woke around six, showered, then stood by the sleeping bag and prodded Gianni’s shoulder with her foot.

“Do you want to get up and have breakfast?”

He squinted at his own watch. “It’s two AM!”

“Only in Beijing. Come on ... you need to be sitting next to me when I call the kids, or they’ll just spend the whole hour asking me what you’re doing.”

When they’d eaten and made themselves presentable, they sat down in front of the computer and powered it up. It booted without any problem, but when Aisha opened Skype it told her that she had no connection to the internet.

“Maybe we’re out of view of the dish,” Gianni suggested.

“I thought they had us covered around the clock.” There were ground stations in Mongolia, Nigeria and Honduras, and no one in the training camp or on the base had mentioned a particular time window for contacting Earth.

Gianni frowned. “Did you hear that?” The gentle thump had sounded like the airlock’s inner doors closing.

They walked out into the common room. Martin had just returned from outside; he was still suited, and holding his helmet.

“We’re having communications problems,” he said.

“Oh.” Aisha hesitated. “Is it going to be easy to fix?” Forget about her disappointed students; Martin and his colleagues were stuck here for another four months, and if they didn’t have the right replacement parts on hand, the link could remain broken until the new crew arrived.

“I don’t know,” he replied. “There’s nothing wrong at our end.”

“Okay.” Aisha wasn’t sure why his tone suggested that this was bad news. “So when we switch over to a different dish ... ?”

Martin said, “We should have been through one hand-over already.”

“So the problem’s at mission control?” Gianni suggested.

“No.” Martin sounded harried. “We should be getting carrier from the dishes themselves, whatever’s happening at Dongfeng.”

Aisha was bewildered now. “How can there be two separate problems at two different dishes, halfway around the world?”

Martin shook his head. “I have no idea.”

The other members of the crew joined them one by one, either woken by the conversation, or alerted by their own devices to the broken link. Yong talked over the technical issues with Martin, then went out to perform some supplementary tests. Aisha gathered that Martin had successfully established contact with a portable, self-contained transceiver that mimicked the protocols they would normally be following with a ground station. Medii’s own antenna required no active measures to keep it aligned; the Earth was essentially a fixed target, with all the careful tracking delegated to the other end. But Yong had a theory about some obscure defect that might still blind them to a distant transmitter without stopping them connecting to the proxy.

Gianni tried to make light of it all. “At home we just flick our modems on and off, but here you need to check in case we’ve jumped into another dimension where the dinosaurs stayed in charge down on Earth.”

Only Zhilin laughed, but then, he’d once flown commercial airliners. He had to be accustomed to setting his passengers’ minds at ease – no matter what was going on inside his own head.

Yong returned. “It’s not us,” he declared. “The problem’s back home.”

Jingyi and Martin gazed down at the dining room table, but Gianni couldn’t tolerate silence. “So maybe the Americans hacked all the Chinese ground stations? In some kind of ... pre-emptive cyber attack?” He stopped short of spelling out the reason, but the recent tensions had revolved around rumors of weapons in orbit.

Aisha said, “I didn’t think things had got that serious.”

Yong turned to the couple. “You had some sight-seeing scheduled, and I’m already suited up. The next dish won’t be in view for five hours, and there’s nothing we can do just by sitting here worrying.”

Aisha and Gianni got into their suits and the three of them cycled through the airlock together. Aisha did her best to surrender to the spectacle and concentrate on perfecting her regolith gait. Never mind that the ground around them looked like it had been melted in a nuclear blast, and the claustrophobic confines of her suit made her think of fallout protection gear.

Yong was in the middle of explaining a theory that the farside had fewer maria than the nearside because a collision with a second, much smaller satellite had thickened the Moon’s crust there, when Aisha noticed a high-pitched, metronomic beep.

“Does anyone else hear that?” she asked. She was afraid it was some kind of alarm, though she’d been told that even a malfunctioning suit would always manage to give a polite, informative message in the occupant’s preferred language.

“Sorry, that’s the beacon from the skyhook.” Yong did something and the sound went away. “I listen in to it sometimes, just to reassure myself that it’s still up there.”

“How could it not be?” Gianni wondered.

“A micrometeor could cut it in two.”

“So what would a micrometeor do to us?”

“Don’t worry, we’re much smaller targets.”

By the time they were back inside, the wait was almost over. Martin sat hunched over the console in the common room, gazing at the screen. Aisha tried to prepare herself not to take another dose of dead air too hard; there might be an entirely innocuous reason for it that hadn’t occurred to any of them.

“Nothing,” Martin announced. “They’re all down.”

Gianni said, “Can you try tuning in to one of the NASA dishes?”

“They won’t be pointed at us.”

“What about TV broadcasts?”

Martin grimaced impatiently. “The only antenna sensitive enough to pick up that shit is on the farside, precisely so it doesn’t have to listen to it.”

Gianni nodded, chastened. “Okay. So what’s the upshot? We should just relax and hope they get things working again soon?”

“Sure,” Zhilin replied. “No internet for a couple of days. That never hurt anyone, did it?”

5

As the silence stretched on, Aisha found herself equally committed to two ways of viewing the situation. On the one hand, for her and Gianni the inability to communicate with Earth was just a mild inconvenience – and in the short term, at least, that was probably also true for the base’s longer-term residents. And assuming that the problem with China’s network of ground stations wasn’t being treated as a state secret, no one’s relatives would have reason to be worried about the lack of contact. Her father would still be anxious, but at least he’d know why he hadn’t been able to talk with her.

On the other hand: short of hostilities, cyber or otherwise, what could have happened at three separate sites that was taking so long to repair? And if Beijing and Washington were merely sulking with each other, that shouldn’t have stopped the ground stations in Spain or Australia showing enough good will to step in and make contact with Medii, just to let them know what was going on.

But even with Gianni, Aisha stuck to version one, and shut down any pessimistic speculations. “We won’t need clearance from Earth to take off and head home,” she reminded him. “It’s not like it’s so crowded out here that we need a flight plan approved by air traffic control.” Zhilin would probably prefer to get a weather report before he took them all the way to Dongfeng, but in principle, they could still make the journey even if Earth’s whole population had ascended in the Rapture, and the last soul to depart had turned off the lights.

#

Aisha woke to the sound of Gianni repeating her name. “Something’s happening!” he whispered. “They’ve been sitting in the common room, arguing, and now some of them have gone outside.”

“Arguing about what?” Aisha wasn’t sure she wanted to know, but Gianni seemed too agitated to be told to stop worrying and go back to sleep.

“I don’t know, they were speaking Chinese.”

She said, “Maybe someone realized that the problem is at our end, after all, and they’ve gone to fix it.”

“I’ll go and find out.”

“No, just ... ” It was too late, he was out of the sleeping bag. Aisha watched him dress by the red glow of the safety lights. She was tired of the constant undertone of anxiety and paranoia, but in two more days they’d be heading home, and in five all their questions would be answered.

He left the room, and she heard him talking to Jingyi. At first their words were too soft to make out clearly, but then Gianni started shouting. “You’re fucking kidding me!” he bellowed.

“Please, don’t try anything!” Jingyi implored him.

Aisha clambered out of the bag and went to join them. Gianni was pacing the room, hugging himself.

“What’s happening?” she asked.

“They’re going home!”

“What?”

Jingyi said, “They’re afraid that if things are difficult, Earth might not send another ship for a long time.”

Aisha was stunned. The Chang’e 20 could only take three passengers and the pilot, so all six of them could not return together, but the idea that Earth would abandon the base’s crew seemed deranged to her. “So we’re the ones stranded here instead?”

Jingyi shook her head. “You’re guests; you’re here to make the company look good. They’ll try much harder for you. But we signed up for one year, and we’ve trained for longer stays. There won’t be the same pressure on them to help us.”

Aisha was torn between indignation and a degree of sympathy: maybe the deserters’ logic was sound. But if five days of silence really did mean that things were going badly on Earth, she very much doubted that all it would take to resurrect billions of dollars’ worth of sabotaged infrastructure would be a little extra pressure on the public relations front.

Gianni said, “I’m going to stop them.” He walked over to the airlock and began putting on his suit.

Jingyi turned to Aisha. “You need to talk him out of it. It’s too dangerous for anyone fighting out there.”

“I’m just going to talk to them!” Gianni retorted angrily.

“You can talk to them here,” Jingyi replied, gesturing toward the console. Gianni ignored her, but Aisha went with her and sat down at the microphone.

“Yong? Martin?” she tried. There was no response. “Please. Can we discuss this?”

Gianni had everything but his helmet on. “They’re not going to turn around and march back in because you asked them nicely!”

“So what do you think you’re going to do to change their minds?”

“They can’t ignore me if I’m standing right in front of them.”

Aisha said, “I don’t think it’s a good idea to confront them.” The suits didn’t exactly tear easily, but she did not want any kind of altercation in the vacuum. “They’re probably inside the ship by now, anyway.”

“We’ll see.” Gianni fixed his helmet in place and stepped into the airlock.

Aisha felt numb. If she went after him, would that just make things worse? When she heard the outer door close, she hit the button beside the microphone. “Gianni?”

“What?” He was breathing heavily, as if he was trying to run. The launch pad was five hundred meters away, but there was no way that he could overtake the men who’d left ten minutes earlier.

“Just leave it. They’ll probably send another ship within a week.”

“Fuck that! This is our ride home, and they don’t get to take it.”

“Just come back!”

Gianni did not reply.

“I have to go and get him,” she decided.

As Aisha was putting on her suit, Jingyi looked on forlornly. Why hadn’t she left with the others? There was room for her on the ship. Maybe they’d decided to draw straws to pick a babysitter to stay behind. Or maybe she was just too decent to walk out on a pair of novices who might not survive for one day on their own.

When Aisha emerged from the airlock she saw Gianni in the distance, bounding across the rock like a kangaroo wrapped in tinfoil. She couldn’t make out any figures moving around the launch pad.

“Come back, you idiot!” she implored him. “We’ll be fine here!” Even if the wait turned out to be a year or two, Jingyi knew how to keep the crops growing and the base habitable.

Gianni kept running. Aisha waddled forward as briskly as she could, resigned to the fact that she’d never catch up with him.

When he reached the launch pad, she waited, hoping he’d accept the evidence of his own eyes. Zhilin would be going through the final system checks, and nobody was going to step out to debate their plans. Maybe the pricks would end up in prison for this; Aisha was unsure of the legal issues, but she recalled a sea captain being jailed for leaving his foundering ship while his passengers remained trapped below deck.

Gianni climbed the ladder to the hatch. Aisha couldn’t make out exactly what he was doing, but she assumed he was pounding on the hull.

“I’m not leaving until you come out!” he shouted.

“Give it up!” Aisha begged him.

She heard the rattling first through his radio, then she felt the slight vibration of the ground through her boots. She stared at the lander; she couldn’t discern any flames from the engines, but maybe they were too diffuse.

“You need to get down,” she told Gianni, hoping he’d heed the note of terror in her voice when he’d ignored all her other entreaties.

“They’re bluffing!” he retorted. “They’re not going to take off.”

“Jump and run, or I’ll never forgive you!” She could see a ghostly blue light now, flickering around the base of the lander. “Jump!”

“Shut off the engines and come out,” Gianni commanded his adversaries. Aisha had once watched him stand, immovable and unflinching, in front of a carload of thugs, ordering them to step out and face him after they’d shouted insults at her. When he thought he was right, he thought he was invincible.

The lander ascended: five meters, ten meters. Aisha emitted an involuntary sob, then held her breath as Gianni finally let go of the railing. Free-falling, he parted from the spacecraft with a dreamlike lethargy, tumbling slowly into the blue fire of the exhaust.

6

The buggy needed sunlight, so Aisha kept it moving at a sedate sixteen kilometers an hour; there was no point in outracing its energy source. With the sun all but frozen in the sky, the subtle changes in the light to which she’d grown accustomed were held in abeyance, leaving her with a sense of stasis that was only rendered stranger by the flow of the terrain. She watched the vehicle’s progress on the GPS, and tried to distract herself by attempting to match her ground-level view of a crater or rille beside her with the corresponding features on the satellite map, but after a few days the endless variations on the same theme began to make her feel as if she were stuck in some barren, procedurally generated computer game. The verisimilitude was stunning, but she wanted someone to slip up and insert a shock of greenery, a building or two, a human figure.

Nuri mounted sporadic protests against her own, far more monotonous view. Aisha tried to soothe her without implying that the screams were unwarranted; no one should accept this kind of sensory deprivation, even when they had no choice but to endure it.

The suit recycled as much water as it could, and Aisha piped in liquid meal replacements from the tank at the back of the buggy. When she told the suit to make her faceplate opaque, it wasn’t hard to sleep, at least when Nuri was in a cooperative mood. The buggy had plotted a smooth, safe path across territory that had been mapped down to the centimeter, and which probably hadn’t changed in a billion years. It was not as if they were at risk of hitting an animal or going aquaplaning.

As they approached ninety degrees longitude, Aisha looked back at the Earth suspended above the horizon. Whatever the idiots had done, she doubted that they’d managed to render the whole blue world uninhabitable. Maybe they’d lost the means to send a radio signal – let alone a rocket – to their nearest neighbor, but that had been true for most of human history. So long as the air was still breathable and crops could still grow, to return would be worth the struggle.

#

“Why doesn’t the skyhook come lower?” Aisha had asked Yong. A gap of six kilometers above the base seemed excessively cautious.

“Because if it came much lower here,” he’d explained, “it would strike the ground at other points in its orbit. There are six locations where one hook or the other comes swinging down; the orbit needs to be high enough that all of them have some clearance.”

Six months later, when Aisha and Jingyi had been gestating the plan, they’d contemplated tweaking the skyhook’s orbit into an ellipse that came in low over the base while still avoiding the highlands of the farside. But the hub’s ion engine would take months to execute the change – and in just two weeks the farside and nearside would rotate into each other’s former locations.

So instead of making the orbit eccentric, they’d kept it circular but shrunk it as much as the safety margins hard-coded into the hub’s navigation system allowed. At the point on the farside opposite Medii, the bottom of the cable would come within ten meters of the ground.

When the buggy reached its destination, Aisha looked up into the star-filled sky, trying not to cower into her seat at the thought of the thousand-kilometer-long whip tumbling toward her.

Nuri woke and started crying. “I know,” Aisha commiserated. “Your mother stinks, and you’re tired of staring at her chin.”

She climbed out of the buggy and walked around for a few minutes, just to let her muscles know that their enforced idleness was over, then she unhooked the trailer and set to work.

She detached the roll cage from the buggy, undoing all the bolts and lifting off the tubular frame. Then she took the sheet of woven silica from the trailer and maneuvered it into the buggy, carefully positioning the loops of the connecting cords around the holes where the cage would re-attach.

She took twelve of the struts from the trailer and assembled them into a rectangular tower half a meter high, fitted two extra bars across the top, then had the buggy drive up onto it. If she hadn’t practiced the whole thing a dozen times back at the base she would have been panicking already, but by now this part seemed as unremarkable as automatic parallel parking.

Nuri redoubled her wails. “Shh, my darling, it’s going to be fine,” Aisha promised. “Just think of it as monster trucks meets Lego.”

She attached a second tower to the first, and made it a full meter tall. The buggy crossed over without complaint; it knew its own abilities well enough to assess her request and decide it was achievable. The integrity of the tower, though, was outside its domain of expertise; it was up to the builder to ensure that the structure was sound.

Level by level, she raised the scaffolding, and the buggy followed. When the tower was seven and a half meters high, she climbed down and stepped back to inspect it. Jingyi had seen her get this far in the rehearsals, but apparently that hadn’t been enough to convince her to come along for the ride.

Aisha went to the trailer and fetched the magic box Jingyi had found in Yong’s workshop. She woke it from its sleep and checked the status of the skyhook. It was due to make its next pass over the site in about twenty minutes.

If the lunar GPS was still accurate and both she and the skyhook were employing the same coordinates, the magnetic hook at the bottom of the cable would descend directly over the buggy, stop half a meter above the top of the roll cage, then ascend again. With the magnet switched off, the buggy wouldn’t move a millimeter, but she had to be sure that the encounter really played out that way. She climbed the tower again, and turned the dash cam on the buggy up toward the sky.

As the time approached, Aisha lay flat on the ground. The hook could not be coming down so low here as to strike the rock; the effect on the whole cable would have been unmissable. But if the real safety margin turned out to be less than advertised, she might be none the wiser until the proof smacked her in the head.

Nuri turned her face toward her, though they couldn’t make eye contact. “You’re my beautiful girl,” Aisha declared soothingly. “You know you are.”

She waited a few minutes, in case the timing was off, then rose to her feet; the suit did its best to help.

The tower remained standing, the buggy undisturbed. Aisha had the suit access the dash cam and play back the footage in slow motion.

Her faceplate went opaque, then filled with stars. “Skip forward until something changes,” she said.

A circular silhouette moved toward her, growing, blocking out the stars. It slowed as it approached, as if she were looking down at a very large frisbee tossed into the air, approaching the top of its arc.

She froze the image when the silhouette began to retreat. From the apparent size, the height was close to what she’d expected, but the thing was off-center by about six meters. She’d have to take the tower apart and rebuild it in the right location.

She took her time, instead of rushing to try to get the job finished in one orbit; if the tower collapsed and flipped the buggy, that would be the end. She hummed to Nuri as she worked; singing would have been nicer, but it made her throat dry.

Five hours later she was done, strapped into the buggy, perched high above the rock. She told the hub to power-up the hook’s electromagnet, and programmed the switch-off time to the millisecond. Now the whole process was out of her hands.

Nuri was asleep. “We’re going to see your grandfather,” Aisha whispered. “Very soon.”

She sat watching the countdown projected in red onto her faceplate. At T minus two, she was ready to believe that nothing would happen and she’d stay stranded forever. By T plus two, the feeling of half her Earth weight pressing her into the seat had already gone from a shock to a kind of ecstasy. The landscape was falling away around her ever faster, but the buggy hadn’t yet tipped by any perceptible angle; the hub was still an unimaginable distance above her.

Nuri woke, but she did not seem troubled. Perhaps she found the greater pressure against her mother’s skin more comforting. Perhaps she’d always known that she needed more weight, more force, more friction if she was ever to thrive.

Aisha talked to her, explaining what was happening, then hummed for a while as she fed. Ten minutes into the upswing, the ground lay to her left, a sheer wall of gray rock like a distant cliff face. But down was still down in the buggy; the centrifugal force overwhelmed mere lunar gravity. And as the cliff slowly receded and tilted into an impossible roof above the dark slab of the magnet, she finally perceived the whole world of her prison as a mere disk in the sky again. Whatever happened now, at least she was free of it.

A few degrees past upside-down, the magnet switched off and the buggy fell away into the void. Aisha grabbed at the seat, at the dashboard, but then the weightlessness lost its sense of danger, and once the magnet was out of sight there was nothing to tell her she was moving.

Nuri grizzled half-heartedly, then went quiet and contemplated the change. “We’re astronauts now!” Aisha told her. “How cool is that?”

7

They’d left the Moon traveling faster than most rockets, and the blue world grew more rapidly than it had diminished on the journey out. The buggy rotated slowly, taking hours to complete a turn, and each time the Earth rose over the dashboard Aisha could gauge its increased width against the instruments below.

The suit saw no difference between the lunar surface and deep space; it kept scrubbing the air and keeping the temperature tolerable. The liquid meals had transcended their distinctive unpleasantness and blended into the general background of itchiness and filth. Aisha’s stomach had bloated like a famine victim’s, but she wasn’t famished.

Two days after the hook had released them, the Earth filled almost half the view. Whatever errors she’d made in her calculations, at least she hadn’t dispatched the buggy straight into the sun. She gazed down at Africa, and took heart to see the cities lighting up as night fell.

She’d been afraid of cutting off the solar power prematurely, but as she followed the continent below into night she started unfolding the silica sheet and drawing it around the buggy. Inside this strange tent, she could just make out the objects around her by the lights from the dashboard.

They needed to scrape through the air where it was dense enough to slow them down and keep them from escaping the Earth’s pull, but not so dense that it would melt the improvised heat shield. She and Jingyi had pooled their knowledge and done their best with computer models, but the base had no local copies of any reference work that dealt with atmospheric density profiles – and even with perfect knowledge of the subject, they could never have accounted for the vagaries of mesospheric weather.

Aisha felt the first trace of heat through her gloves where she was touching the buggy’s chassis. As she drew her hands in, the drag force itself came to her aid, pushing the seat firmly away from her so she strained against the belt like a passenger hanging upside-down after a car crash. In front of her, the sheet began to glow a dull red, and radiant heat shone into her faceplate; the suit would be desperately sequestering thermal energy in its phase-change alloy, but that would only help for a while.

Nuri grew restless, but not distressed. Aisha was not in pain yet, but it felt like the times she’d lain too close to an electric radiator on a cold night, and the initially comforting warmth edged toward something damaging.

The force eased off; the glow faded. Aisha checked the data on the buggy’s accelerometer. The whole spike had lasted four minutes: not as long as her calculations had predicted.

She fed the numbers into her model. The buggy had shed enough velocity for the Earth to capture it, but it would swing out to an apogee some hundred thousand kilometers away. And though it would come in close again, it would be moving more slowly than at the first encounter, so the drag would be less. The model showed an excruciating succession of incremental changes, taking sixty-three orbits in almost fifty days before they were low enough to parachute down.

To remain in Medii, hoping for rescue, had been untenable. Any gamble had seemed worthwhile – even if the narrow path home would be flanked by fiery death and slow starvation. But now she understood why Jingyi had made her own choice: what she’d feared most was watching her friend, and the child she’d delivered, perish beside her as the food ran out, the water dried up, the air went stale.

Aisha gingerly opened the tent to give the suit a chance to radiate some heat away. Maybe there were errors in the model still to unfold, in her favor. She felt Nuri shift and nuzzle against her, the broken skin of a rash on her daughter’s cheek warm against her own skin.

Chance wouldn’t save them. If she left this to chance, they would die.

She watched the planet slowly recede. Their speed and altitude the next time they entered the atmosphere were immutable now. Which left ... what? The drag would depend on their shape, and the area they presented to the airflow. The sheet was much bigger than the buggy’s frame, in preparation for its later role as parachute, but if she tried to trail it behind her at this point, the unprotected buggy would fry. If she’d brought half the struts from the tower, she might have stretched the sheet out into a larger shield, but they were all sitting uselessly back on the farside.

Nuri slept and woke, fed and shat, oblivious. Aisha could not have faced her dying as a three-year-old in a medical emergency, as a teenager in Medii’s slide into disrepair, or, if the machines all proved resilient, as the loneliest centenarian in history.

But she could not face this either.

She closed her eyes and pictured the beautiful fabric she and Jingyi had toiled so long to weave, billowing out above her as the buggy drifted gently toward some green field or calm sea. Spread out by the force of the air alone. But when they grazed the unbreathably thin mesosphere ... how much pressure would it take, from within, to puff the tent out like a balloon?

Not a lot.

Aisha opened her eyes and did some calculations. It was possible. She believed she could spare it and survive.

She forced herself to wait until the perigee was just an hour away, to keep the batteries charging as long as possible. Then she spread the sheet around the buggy and knotted the cords as tightly as she could around the hole at the back. It would not be a hermetic seal, but it only had to retain its contents for a few minutes.

She checked the time, then told the suit to start venting.

The tent remained limp and crumpled.

“Vent more,” she commanded.

“That would put reserves below safe levels,” the suit replied.

Aisha placed her gloves against the sides of her helmet and turned it. The suit tried to dissuade her, but Jingyi had proved that it could be done. As the seal was breached the air hissed out and the tent inflated, the fabric taut against the vacuum.

Aisha reversed the twist. She took a breath. It felt inadequate. She took a deeper one; she was dizzy, but she was not suffocating.

The silica balloon began to shudder, buffeted by the thin, fast air outside. Aisha felt the growing heat on her face, breaking through her light-headedness.

The drag pushed her forward: a little weaker than before, but much more than her dire calculations had predicted for the status quo. She watched the time pass, until she was weightless again. Three minutes.

She crunched the accelerometer data. Six more orbits, and they would be spiraling down to Earth.

Nuri started babbling happily, making sounds Aisha had never heard before. Aisha let herself weep, for Gianni, for Jingyi, for whatever havoc she was yet to find below.

Then she composed herself and started singing softly to her daughter, waiting for the time they could look into each other’s eyes again.

ZEITGEBER

1

“Daddy?” Emma pleaded. “Why aren’t you awake?”

Sam opened his eyes and squinted toward the sound of her voice in the darkness, ready to offer whatever comfort she needed, but as he replayed the words that had penetrated his sleep she sounded not so much frightened or unwell as annoyed and censorious. “What’s wrong, sweetheart?” he asked. “Did you have a nightmare?”

“No!” Her tone was pure frustration now, as if the thing most troubling her was his obtuseness. She reached over and tugged his arm. “Why won’t you get up?”

Laura shifted beside him; Sam waited, afraid they’d woken her, but then he heard the rhythm of her breathing and he knew she was still asleep.

“Shh,” he whispered to his daughter. “Why don’t I get you a drink of water?”

He slipped out of bed and took her hand, then led her from the room and closed the door behind them before switching on the light in the passageway.

In the kitchen, he filled a cup from the sink and handed it to her. She gulped the water down eagerly, but when he took the cup back she said, “I want oats, please.”

“You can have oats for breakfast,” Sam replied. “It’s the middle of the night.”

Emma laughed. “No! It’s breakfast time.”

Sam gestured at the digital clock on the microwave. “What does that say?”

She frowned and moved her lips for a moment before announcing, correctly, “Twelve fifteen.”

“And what does that mean?”

Emma shrugged. “The power went off?”

Sam resisted the urge to congratulate her on her lateral thinking. “Sweetheart, it’s nighttime. You need to go back to bed or you’ll be too tired to get up in the morning.” He took her hand again. “Come on, I’ll tuck you in.”

“No!” She pulled free. “I want breakfast!”

Sam squatted beside her. “What’s going on? If you had a nightmare, you can tell me. You know that.”

Emma scowled impatiently, brushing off his attempt to change the subject. “Why can’t we have breakfast?”

Sam walked to the back door and opened it. “Look! It’s pitch black outside!” All he could see was the light from the kitchen spilling onto the dewy lawn; beyond that, the yard was lost in darkness. “Does it look like the sun’s coming up soon?”

Emma didn’t answer. Sam closed the door, afraid that he’d already risked giving her a cold. He reached down and scooped her up into his arms, rubbing her shoulders to warm her, and carried her to her room.

As he pulled the blankets up to her chin, she started, not so much crying, as emitting blubbery sounds of protest.

“That’s enough!” Sam said. “If something’s scaring you, tell me what it is and we’ll make it go away.” He waited, but Emma didn’t take up the offer. “Okay. So close your eyes and dream about breakfast, and before you know it, it really will be morning.”

Back in his room, as he lay down beside Laura, he heard Emma leaving her bed again. He waited, hoping she was just fetching one of her stuffed animals to cuddle beside her. But after a few minutes, he still hadn’t heard a second telltale squeak from the bedsprings.

He rose and walked down the passageway to her room, then stood outside the door, listening, not wanting to disturb her if he’d simply missed the sound of her settling back in under the covers. But then he heard her harrumphing to herself.

He opened the door. She was sitting on the floor in a patch of light coming through the window from a nearby streetlamp, fully dressed in her school clothes. She had a pad of paper in front of her, and she was drawing on it with her colored pencils.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Sam demanded.

She held up the paper to the light from the window. She’d drawn a yellow disk surrounded by radiating lines, with birds flying across the sky beside it.

“You didn’t believe me,” she replied accusingly. “So now I have to show you.”

2

“Are you sure you’re in control of her screen time?” Dr. Davis asked. “Sometimes parents don’t really know what’s going on.”

Laura said, “She has no devices of her own – no phone, no tablet, no TV in her room. Before this started, she’d watch TV for a couple of hours before dinner.”

“And she’d fall asleep after twenty minutes listening to one of us reading,” Sam added. “It was a pretty steady routine: in bed by seven-thirty, eyes shut by eight.” He turned to glance at Emma, lying on the pediatrician’s couch, dead to the world at two PM – the earliest appointment they’d been able to get. But from midnight to noon, she’d had as much energy as any healthy six-year-old ... just seven hours earlier than usual.

“The MRI and the blood tests rule out any kind of tumor,” Dr. Davis stressed. “And with no family history of sleep phase disorders, at this point the simplest explanation might be that she’s responding to something in her life that’s troubling her.”

Laura frowned. “Nothing’s changed for her recently. She settled into school with no problems – and she’s never been reluctant to go in the morning. Even now, the hard part’s making her wait. And when she started dozing off in the afternoons, she was mortified.”

“I’m not suggesting that she’s feigning sleepiness to get out of school,” Dr. Davis replied. “But if something’s persistently waking her at night – either some anxiety she’s feeling, or some external factor – that could be enough to disrupt her whole routine.”

Sam said, “She’s adamant she’s not having nightmares. And it’s a pretty quiet street. I’m a light sleeper myself; if the neighbors’ dog was barking, or the fridge motor was making a noise, I’d be the first to know.”

Dr. Davis scribbled something in his notes. Then he said, “I can recommend a psychologist, but the waiting list is brutal right now; you’d probably be looking at six or seven months. In the mean time, I’ll order genetic tests for all the familial sleep disorders, just in case there’s something we’re not seeing in the history, but I think that’s a long shot.”

“So what should we be doing,” Laura asked, “while we wait for all that?”

“Try to guide her back toward her old habits. Try to keep her awake a little later in the afternoons, so she’ll sleep through a little later as well. A few nudges like that, and it’s possible the whole thing will resolve itself.”

On the drive home, Laura sat in the back with an arm around Emma. Sam wasn’t sure what he’d do if he had to drive her somewhere by himself; she was far too big for her old baby seat, but the seatbelt alone couldn’t keep her from slumping.

“Do you think I should take a couple of weeks off?” he asked Laura. The substitute teacher who’d come in to cover his classes for the afternoon was always keen to do more hours.

“No, I can keep working from home,” she replied. “The firm doesn’t mind, and half our meetings are by Skype anyway.”

“What about site visits?” Sam knew she didn’t need to show up for every concrete pour, but she liked to keep a close eye on the details of every building.

“There’s nothing coming up for a while.”

As Sam carried Emma from the car, she stirred slightly, grimacing, but her eyes remained shut. “Look at that sleepy head!” Mrs. Munro called out from across the road. “Someone’s been up past their bedtime!” Laura raised a hand to her in greeting, muttering insults under her breath.

Inside, Sam got Emma into bed, then he knelt beside her and buried his face in his hands. He could feel himself trembling with relief. It wasn’t a brain tumor or a neurological disease. Most likely, it wasn’t anything dangerous at all.

Her sleep was out of phase, but it was a phase she could grow out of. All they had to do was gently pull her back into synch with the rest of the world.

3

“Big night on the town, sir?” someone called out.

Sam’s eyes snapped open, and half the class burst into laughter. “Very funny,” he said. “But you’ve only got ten minutes left, so you should probably save the jokes until then.”

He punched the side of his leg under the desk and stared at the clock at the back of the room, wondering if the collective will of the students, desperate for more time to finish the test, could actually freeze the minute hand in place. He and Laura had got through months of broken sleep when Emma was teething – but back then, after their interventions, she’d usually drifted off for a while. Now, once she was up, she stayed up, and even if she did her best to be helpful and pass the time quietly on her own, Sam felt too guilty to let her sit alone in her room, drawing, for hours on end. He wasn’t sure anymore where the line lay between unforgivable neglect and prolonging her wakefulness by making it more tolerable, but he couldn’t sleep through the night as if nothing was wrong while his daughter was going stir crazy.

After the siren rang and he’d gathered up the tests, he detoured to the staff room. He’d graduated to four spoonfuls of instant coffee and three of sugar; he usually drank it black, but now he added just enough milk so he could gulp it down quickly without burning his mouth. The brown sludge made his teeth ache and his stomach clench, but it cranked up the volume on the white noise buzzing behind his eyes, summoning fragmentary thoughts from the static to ricochet around his skull. However remote this state was from normal consciousness, the sheer rate of random mental activity ought to be enough to keep him from dozing off.

As he walked across the carpark, acid rose into his throat. He could feel his blood pumping, but it was not so much a rush of vigor as a sensation akin to the aftermath of hitting himself with a hammer. This wasn’t going to work; even if he’d managed to immunize himself against micro-sleeps for the next twenty minutes, he had no more faith in his judgment and reflexes than if he’d just drained a bottle of whiskey.

He looked around. “Sadiq?”

Sadiq paused, stooped at his open car door with an armful of paperwork.

“Any chance I could get a lift with you?”

“Sure.”

Sam approached, hoping his gait didn’t appear quite as unsteady as it felt. “Thank you.”

“Car trouble?”

“No. I was up half the night with Emma, and if I drive ... ”

Sadiq nodded. “No problem.”

As Sam buckled in beside him, Sadiq asked, “So Emma’s been sick?”

“Yeah.” Sam hesitated; Sadiq’s son had muscular dystrophy, which seemed to demand a recalibration of his own difficulties. “Something’s messing with her body clock. She wakes up in the middle of the night, and then she’s completely alert for the next twelve hours.”

Sadiq was silent as he drove through the carpark; Sam assumed he was trying to frame a polite response to such a trivial complaint. But as they turned onto the road he said, “I know how annoying it can be when people tell you they know someone with the same medical problems. Ninety percent of the time they have no idea what they’re talking about.”

“Okay.”

Sadiq grinned. “So take that as given, and feel free to ignore this. But my brother-in-law has the same symptoms.”

“Yeah? What did they diagnose?”

“Oh, he won’t see a doctor. He insists it’s not just insomnia, but he’s too much of a tough guy to admit that he might not be able to get back to normal by sheer force of willpower. It’s driving my sister crazy.”

“Hmm.” Sam’s eyelids fluttered closed and he pictured a scowling pugilist, tormented in the small hours by thwarted ambition and a history of concussions. What could a man like that possibly have in common with a six-year-old girl?

Sadiq said, “The thing is – and I know, Dr. Google is not our friend – but Noor did some rummaging around on the web, and there seem to be an awful lot of similar cases.”

Sam forced his eyes open. “The last time I looked, all I found were people burbling about their digital detoxes and their valerian enemas.”

“Yeah, and maybe this is nonsense too. But I’ll get her to send you a link, and you can make up your own mind what it’s worth.”

When Sadiq dropped him off, Sam opened the front door as quietly as he could, and made his way to the spare room where Laura had set up their shared home office.

“How was she?” he asked.

“When I picked her up at lunchtime,” Laura replied, “she said she wasn’t tired and she begged me to let her stay. And then she didn’t fall asleep until almost two o’clock.”

“That’s progress, isn’t it?” Sam hadn’t been keeping records of the time she woke; he’d been trying to leave her on her own until two AM or so, when she’d already been up for a while. But it did look as if the whole cycle was moving forward by about five minutes a day.

Laura seemed unwilling to raise her hopes too high. “What happened to the car?” she asked.

“I didn’t want to drive. I’m kind of wasted.”

“Okay. Why don’t you grab some sleep right now?”

“It’s my turn to cook dinner.”

“Forget it. I’ll order takeaway.”

Sam managed to stay awake just long enough to get undressed and crawl beneath the sheets. Three hours later, he was roused by the scent of fried rice. His caffeine binge hadn’t kept him from sleeping, but it had thrown enough grit into the clockwork that he emerged from the process out of synch with himself: ravenous as if it were morning, chilled to the bone as if it were three AM, and afflicted with the kind of headache and parched mouth that brought back distant memories of nights spent clubbing, when he’d staggered home at dawn and woken at noon.

When he walked into the kitchen, Laura was taking the lids off the food containers, sending aromatic vapors wafting up from the table. Sam listened for any sound from Emma’s room, but there was nothing. “She loves Chinese food,” he said. “I don’t know how she can sleep through this.”

As he ate, he began to feel better. It was seven o’clock now; if Emma hadn’t slept until two, she might not wake until one, so maybe he could sleep again from ten until ... three? Leaving her on her own for a couple of hours wasn’t torture, and if he didn’t start setting limits he’d end up either dead in a ditch or sacked for incompetence.

“How was work today?” he asked Laura.

“All right.”

“It’s not getting you down? Being stuck here?”

She frowned, thinking it over. “I probably get more work done in a day, even spending a couple of hours with Emma. It’s a bit numbing when I’m alone, though. Some of my colleagues are pretty annoying, but sitting at a desk in a silent house ... when you’re focused, it’s fine, but when you stop and look around, it feels like you’re the last person on Earth.”

When Sam had cleared the table he glanced at his phone. Sadiq’s sister, Noor, had emailed him a link.

Laura was in the living room, browsing the menus of the streaming services in search of something that would help her unwind. Sam walked down to the office and opened the link on the desktop.

Noor had found a long thread on a medical support group forum. Sam was generally skeptical of such venues, but at least this one was well-organized. The thread in question was dedicated to sleep-phase disorders where the sufferer had no family history or genetic markers, no psychiatric illness, no shift work or frequent long-distance travel, and no apparent brain injuries, tumors or lesions.

Despite this niche-like specificity, there were tens of thousands of individual posts. A moderator had helpfully pinned one entry to the top of the list, giving an overview of the results from a survey of the thread’s participants, to which more than three thousand people had responded. The sufferers seemed to lack any particular concentration by age, sex, occupation, ethnicity or geography, compared to the demographics of the forum as a whole. People’s “phase at onset” spanned the full gamut, from twelve hours’ advanced to twelve hours’ delayed – but however things had started, nobody’s phase remained unchanged relative to clock time. It usually slipped forward by a few minutes a day, but for a fraction of the group it went in the other direction. And as the moderator noted, this scatter was more or less in line with the range of endogenous circadian rhythms reported by sleep researchers for healthy volunteers who’d been deprived of sunlight and social cues, leaving their body as the only time-keeper.

Sam scrolled down a little further and skimmed the highest-rated posts, expecting to find testimonials to some suitably fashionable cure. But if there was snake oil on offer here, it had been down-voted out of sight; the majority opinion was that nothing worked. People had tried everything from phototherapy and warm baths to melatonin and modafinil, but their body clocks just kept stubbornly cycling at their natural rhythm, close to but not exactly twenty-four hours, oblivious to every natural or pharmacological “zeitgeber” that might have been expected to jolt them back into synch.

A sidebar offered links to academic sources on sleep disorders. Sam followed the one on “free-running sleep” to a review article in a medical journal. The vast majority of cases where people’s body clocks ceased to be entrained by the outside world involved total blindness, where the patient had lost, not just vision itself, but the retinal ganglion cells that were sensitive to ambient brightness. Sighted people with the disorder were supposedly rare, and often had tumors, head injuries, or other detectable causes of damage to the suprachiasmatic nucleus that orchestrated the circadian rhythm. In one study, they’d also been found to have significantly longer cycles than normal – unlike the people on the forum.

He heard Laura approaching. “What are you looking at?” she asked.

Sam described what he’d read so far, trying to downplay the pessimistic conclusion. “I’m sure there’s a selection effect here,” he said. “Anyone with a problem that went away quickly probably wouldn’t post on a site like this.”

But Laura seemed intent on preparing for the worst. “If Emma’s a free-running sleeper now, how often will she fit in with a normal school day? To really be able to concentrate, she’d have to be awake by seven, but not up so early that she’s falling asleep before five. That’s a three-hour window to wake in, between four AM and seven AM – one-eighth of the clock. So for a five-week block in every forty she’ll be fine, but for the rest ... ”

Sam said, “If it really does come to that, I could always home-school her. But it’s only been a fortnight! Maybe she’ll just keep waking later and later until she gets back to normal – and then she’ll be so happy that she’ll slam on the brakes, and that will be the end of it.”

4

Sam arrived for the first class of the new term feeling sharp-witted and thoroughly prepared. The day had started as well as he could have hoped: he’d woken at five, found Emma still asleep, then spent the hour until she rose reviewing his lesson plans. But each time he turned away from the blackboard to gauge how well his line of exposition was getting through, his gaze was drawn to the empty chairs in front of him, and he lost his thread completely.

A third of the class was missing. A cynical part of him was tempted to attribute this to copy-cat malingerers, but that couldn’t be the whole story: two of his most enthusiastic students had failed to show up. When he asked a question, he still found himself reflexively preparing to deflect their responses to give someone else a chance to answer, and the silence that greeted him instead was unsettling. No one had died, or was even ill in any normal sense, but the thinning numbers still felt like the sign of some terrible loss.

At lunchtime, the staffroom was less starkly depleted, but everyone in sight looked anxious. Sam joined one dispirited group.

“We need to start doing something more,” he said. “Sending students worksheets and hoping they’ll pick up what they miss from YouTube lectures at three in the morning isn’t going to cut it.”

“So are you volunteering to come in at three AM?” Gloria asked. “And if you are, who’s going to teach your regular classes?”

Sam said, “The overall numbers aren’t changing; there are exactly as many teachers per student across the district as before. We just need to reorganize things, matching up students and teachers by phase. I’m not free-running myself, but I’d be happiest following my daughter’s phase. If she could go to school when it suited her, I could work those hours, teaching any students in the area who were on the same schedule. My old classes would have to be merged with those from the closest two or three other schools—”

Sadiq cut him off. “That’s not going to work. The logistics for keeping the buildings open twenty-four hours a day would be unmanageable, let alone shuttling kids across three suburbs in the middle of the night. If students can’t make it in normal hours, we need to be flexible, but not like that. We need to use software, video lectures, whatever it takes to keep them up to speed. But they’ll have to do it from home.”

Tom regarded them both as if they’d lost their minds. “Whatever’s causing this,” he said, “it’s not going to last forever. In a couple of months, we’ll be back to normal.”

“You think it’s going to burn itself out, like a bad flu season?” Sam replied. “The way it’s spreading doesn’t look like an infection. Nor does the biology: there’s no inflammation, no antibodies.”

Tom snickered. “Yeah, well, if ninety percent of it’s ‘viral’ in a different sense, what would you expect?”

“Hardly ninety percent,” Sam retorted. “And even if you think that many kids don’t want to be here, most adults have nothing to gain by faking it; they don’t have enough paid sick leave or income protection insurance that they can lie in bed all day – and all it would take to prove that they’re frauds is one polysomnogram.”

Tom was unrepentant. “People manage to do shift work all the time. If a nurse can turn up for a graveyard shift, no one has any excuse not to show up when they’re needed.”

Sam was growing angry now. “Some people adapt better to shift work than others – but if they do, it’s because their circadian clock is responding to all the timing cues: they’re out of bed, moving around, eating, exposed to bright light. The whole problem for free-runners is that none of those cues affect them! It’s no different from being blind to sunlight – except you’re also blind to temperature, food, exercise, social interaction, and every jet lag pill ever invented.”

Tom didn’t reply, but he adopted the pained expression of a martyr badgered into silence. He knew the truth: anyone with a spine would grit their teeth and rise from their bed to meet their obligations.

When Sam picked up Emma, he watched the elaborate ritual of her parting from her best friend, Natalie. After the hug that was meant to finalize things and let them go their separate ways, they turned back to each other no less than five times, with afterthoughts and reminders.

“How was school?” he asked, as she approached.

She shrugged. Sam didn’t press her; he had no need to quiz her to see that she was perfectly alert. When she’d first resumed normal attendance, she’d spent half an hour telling him how happy it made her, but by now she was probably just taking it for granted. He hadn’t had the heart to warn her that the situation might not last.

“Olivia fell asleep before lunch,” Emma said, as Sam unlocked the car. “And Mitchell fell asleep after lunch. And Karen didn’t come until after recess because she didn’t wake up until then.”

Sam said, “Yeah, a lot of people are having the same problem as ... ” He cut himself off, unwilling to commit to any particular tense. As you had? As you have?

“But how will everyone stay friends if they can’t see each other?” Emma demanded indignantly, as if this whole state of affairs had been decreed by someone, who just needed to be told what a terrible idea it was.

“People stay friends when their friends get sick,” Sam replied. “Or when they go and live somewhere else. You don’t have to see someone every day to be their friend.”

“No,” Emma agreed reluctantly. She adjusted her seatbelt. “But I want to.”

Sam pulled the door shut beside him. He said, “Do you want to stay friends with Natalie?”

“Yes.”

“Then you’ll stay friends with Natalie. Even if it’s hard, even if it’s complicated, you’ll find a way to do it.”

When they arrived home, Laura’s car was in the driveway. Emma ran inside, calling out to her mother; Sam had thought she was going to be on site all day, but maybe there’d been a change in the schedule.

He found her in the bedroom, sitting on the edge of the bed, staring at the wall. Emma had stopped in the doorway, confused.

“What’s wrong?” Sam asked.

“There was an accident,” Laura said.

He turned to Emma. “Can you go and put your books away?”

Emma nodded uneasily and retreated.

Laura said, “One of the operators swung a crane into the scaffolding. Three people are dead, and five are in hospital.”

Sam bowed his head. It sounded like something that should have been impossible. “So was it equipment failure?”

“No,” she replied. “We’ve got video from inside the cab. The operator just kept his hand on the lever.”

“Why? Was he having a heart attack?”

“No. He closed his eyes and fell asleep.”

5

Halfway through the lesson on Al-Karaji’s triangle, two new students entered the room quietly, hung their dripping umbrellas over the bucket, and took seats at the back. Sam paused to greet them, then resumed, glad he’d managed to iron out the sound problems that had plagued his last few recordings, so they’d be able to play everything back from the start if they needed to.

The rain came down more heavily, slanted now, striking the window panes on the southern wall with tympanic effect, but he raised his voice and pressed on. “The number of ways you can get x cubed y squared in this row is the number of ways we got x squared y squared in the row above, six, plus the number of ways we got x cubed y, four, for a total of ten. Every time, we’re just adding two numbers from above to get the ones below and in between them. So we ought to be able to guess a formula for the numbers in any given row, and then prove it by induction.”

Hands shot up, gratifyingly, and Sam wrote each proposal on the blackboard. He glanced at the storm outside, and dared to marvel at the one small upside of the syndrome: not long ago, on a winter’s afternoon in a cozy room like this, half the class would have been dozing off, but even at two in the morning these runners seemed impervious to everything that might once have been conducive to a surreptitious nap.

At the end of the lesson, a group of students hung around, hunting for fresh identities between the binomial coefficients while they waited to spend a few minutes with their other-phase friends who were only now arriving. Sam walked down the corridor to the grade three classroom, where Emma was in the middle of a cross-temporal exchange of her own. She stood in a group of a dozen other girls, but it was easy to tell from their states of dampness that about half had just come in from the rain.

He kept his distance, reluctant to do anything to curtail the meeting, but after a couple of minutes the new teacher arrived and ejected everyone whose school day was officially over. Sam fished his phone from his pocket and checked the carpool app; he was scheduled to give three of Emma’s friends a ride home. “Sandra? Martin? Chloe?” he called out hopefully. No one responded, but the app showed him mug shots; he spotted the kids and corralled them toward the car.

As he drove through the rain, Sam concentrated on the road, but it was impossible to ignore his passengers’ conversation. “We’ll visit you in the hospital,” Martin promised Chloe.

“You won’t be awake for visiting hours,” Chloe replied.

“They should let us come any time!” Sandra protested.

But Chloe was resigned to the impending separation. “I won’t be awake when you want to come.”

When Sam had dropped off all three, he asked Emma, “What’s the time in your head?”

“Ten past three.”

He checked his watch. The second row of digits, which he’d programmed to follow her phase, was only two minutes out – and Emma never claimed greater precision than five minutes herself.

“So Chloe’s getting the implant?”

“Yes,” Emma confirmed. “Her parents aren’t rich, but her grandmother’s paying.”

Sam hesitated. “You know it’s not the cost that’s stopping us? We could probably get a loan to cover it. I just don’t think the safety record’s good enough yet.”

Emma said, “I don’t want it anyway.”

“I know. But in a couple of years, when the surgeons have had more practice and the technology’s improved ... ”

Emma sighed, irritated. “I told you, I don’t want it. Ever!”

As soon as they pulled into the driveway, Emma flung the door open. Sam watched as she ran to the porch; he could see her umbrella cinched in place in one of the net pockets at the side of her backpack.

He followed her, taking more care to stay dry, and by the time he was inside she’d disappeared into her room. He took his shoes off and trod lightly down the hall to the office. It was just after four, and Laura would be up at six; he could probably get most of his marking done before the three of them were due to have breakfast together.

He switched on the computer and checked his news feed. A story that had broken fifteen minutes ago had rocketed to the top: “Gang ‘hacked your sleep’, wants cash for cure.” Sam assumed it was a beat-up, but he followed the link anyway. Nothing was going to rival the Onion’s “Uber Sleep rolls out replacement for Sandman; CEO plays down ‘teething problems,’” but intent had long ago ceased to be a prerequisite for satire.

According to the story, a group calling themselves the Time Thieves had claimed responsibility for the free-running syndrome, and were soliciting offers from governments for exclusive access to the cure. The starting price in this auction was a trillion US dollars.

“This is less than one percent of the estimated loss to global GDP to date,” the self-proclaimed biohackers had noted, citing a study by a team of World Bank economists to back up the figure. Fair enough, then, Sam thought. The email scammers offering him ancient Chinese herbs to realign his family’s circadian rhythms for sixty dollars a bottle were clearly undercharging.

He was about to close the browser and get to work when he realized he’d skipped a paragraph near the top of the story, distracted by the astronomical sum below. “As evidence for their claims, the Time Thieves have published a digital key that decrypts a coded message describing the condition’s symptoms, which was posted on social media accounts six months before the first cases were reported.” Sam was skeptical; would it be that hard to hack a Twitter or Facebook post so it seemed to predate the outbreak? But then he searched for other coverage of the story that went into more technical details.

The times in question were not just social media metadata. Digital hashes of the message had been sent to half a dozen reputable time-stamping authorities, who’d used their private encryption keys to sign and date what they’d received, allowing anyone to verify that the message really had been signed at the times being claimed. But to counter any suggestion that the top six cybersecurity organizations in the world might have all been hacked – or been willing accomplices to fraud – the Time Thieves had also embedded the same hashes into several globally distributed block chains that offered their own kinds of certification.

Sam read through the full text of the decrypted post. Though its authors spelled out the symptoms of the coming plague clearly enough, they were coy when it came to the biochemistry, sprinkling in just enough jargon to suggest that they knew their target intimately, without revealing anything about the particular spanner they’d thrown into the works. A virus? A toxin? These and other details remained behind a very high paywall.

The current ransom demands had been written in a tone befitting a Sotheby’s catalog, but this screed from (supposedly) two years ago was a boastful, pretentious rant, full of the kind of raw self-aggrandizement only to be expected from someone who believed they’d devised a foolproof means to take the whole world hostage and come out the other end wealthier than a middle-sized nation. There were even some bad puns about the WannaCry computer virus – two of the key proteins in the circadian clock being the cryptochromes, CRY1 and CRY2 – as the Time Thieves gloated about their own, stupendously greater feat. Sam couldn’t help being goaded into anger, which in turn swayed him toward belief, though the fact that the document rang true as the heady manifesto of a gang of sociopaths would be by far the least challenging of all the forgeries required if the whole thing was actually a hoax.

The response from political leaders so far had been cautious; everyone who’d spoken had condemned the extortion attempt, but they’d described any link to the syndrome itself in hypothetical terms, and stressed that law enforcement agencies were still investigating the claims.

Sam rather hoped that behind this bland façade, someone had already located the perpetrators and dispatched a team of commandoes to liberate the cure with extreme prejudice. Along with the economic damage, there had been at least half a million deaths. His own family had been lucky; as the gears that had linked them to the world had stopped meshing, they’d managed to adapt to the changes without descending into poverty. But all the accidents on the roads, in the air and at sea, all the fatalities at building sites and factories were no different from the acts of a sniper, and the slow torture as loved ones had been dragged into different phases was as cruel as any forced exile. He’d gladly see the fuckers who’d done this reduced to bloody smears on the walls of their basement lab.

He closed the browser and tried to calm himself. He had work to do, and neither his Zero Dark Thirty fantasies nor any other followup was likely to be imminent. He believed that these criminals had done what they claimed, but that didn’t guarantee that they were in possession of a cure, let alone that anyone on the planet would be willing to pay what they were asking.

6

None of Sam’s students could focus on the lesson he’d prepared, so he made the best of the situation.

“A hash function takes some data, like a string of text, and gives you a single number that’s a whole lot shorter than the original message.” He drew a big box full of squiggles, joined by an arrow to a small box full of digits. “The correspondence can’t be unique, though; there are billions of messages that have the same hash code. So why doesn’t that matter? If someone shows you a message today that gives the hash X, along with proof that someone you trust saw that same number, X, two years ago ... why should that be enough to persuade you that they actually wrote the whole message back then?”

The tactic seemed to work, so he stuck to the same theme for the next few days, but there was only so much cryptography he could teach before it started squeezing out everything else. And then just when he thought he’d exhausted the subject, the Time Thieves dumped a truckload of new material into his lap.

Sam gave in and showed excerpts from the videos. The biohackers had apparently spent months testing their products on macaques, and they were offering up thousands of hours of recordings as evidence that they possessed both the agent behind the syndrome and an effective cure. Every shot contained a bank of screens behind the cages, showing international news channels playing live, along with a certified time-stamped hash of a previous, rolling segment of the video, to prove that the backdrop was not just a recording. But that left only the narrowest of windows between the original broadcast and the time stamps, so if everything involving the animals had been added with CGI, it must have been generated in something close to real time – a feat most experts judged unlikely. If the images were genuine, then according to a team of biologists with the patience to watch much more of the footage than Sam had, they showed that the macaques had entered a free-running state at the start of the experiment, and then abruptly returned to a normal circadian rhythm three months later.

“Maybe they put in brain implants before the experiment started – before the cameras started rolling,” Angela suggested.

“Good point,” Sam conceded. There was always going to be some potential loophole; macaques were too long-lived for the experiment to stretch back to their birth, and shorter-lived species like mice were too different in their circadian biology.

Ehsan said, “The technology didn’t exist two years ago, did it?”

“Not that we know of,” Angela replied.

“Yeah, but how many different things are these geniuses meant to have invented?” Ehsan retorted. “We’re talking about implants, now, because all the millionaires are getting them ... but I bet it never even crossed these people’s minds.”

“Forget implants,” Nora interjected. “They could have trained these monkeys to wake and sleep for any reason: some sound we can’t hear, some smell. They could be pulling all kinds of invisible strings.”

Sam let the debate run on, only intervening when necessary to keep it civil. These kids’ lives were in the balance; he couldn’t tell them to drop the subject and get back to the things they’d be tested on.

On the way home, after he’d dropped off Emma’s friends, he asked her if she had any questions about the Time Thieves. He’d done his best to give her a sense of why most people believed their claims, but he wasn’t sure if she’d really taken it in. “If there’s anything you don’t understand, I can try to explain it more clearly.”

“I don’t care about of any of that,” she replied. “I just hope no one pays them, because it would be a big waste of money.”

Sam kept his eyes on the road. “Why would it be a waste, to get back to normal? Don’t you miss seeing more of your mother?”

“She’s still around. I still see her. She doesn’t have to hold my hand every day.”

Sam fought to conceal his dismay. He’d wanted his daughter to adapt, to be resilient. And she wasn’t being cold toward Laura; this was just the reality she’d grown to accept, as surely as if the two of them lived on different planets that only came into proximity for brief stretches at a time.

In the street ahead, there were lights showing through the windows of most of the houses. The traffic around them was barely less, at four AM, than when they’d set out the evening before. And if none of that felt strange to him anymore, how could it feel anything but normal to someone who’d lived the last quarter of their life this way?

“I don’t know what will happen with the money,” he said. The extortionists had made a trillion dollars sound like a bargain, which had to irk all the biochemists who’d been slaving away trying to understand the syndrome with a fraction of that as their budget. “But my hunch is it won’t be long before we can all have the sun on our faces again.”

Emma was quiet for a while, and Sam thought she’d let the matter drop. But as they approached the house, she replied, “I already have the sun inside me. The one you see up in the sky doesn’t count.”

7

Three weeks after the ransom demands appeared, a group of neurologists, biochemists and cell biologists from seventeen nations announced a cure of their own. Sam really didn’t care if this was just a cover for paying off the hackers; whether the Nobel committee handed out medals to the researchers and pronounced them the saviors of the world, or some investigative journalist unmasked their work as a recipe their governments had bought on the sly, it would make no difference to whether the antidote worked or not.

But the timetable for the new, synthetic zeitgeber to hit the shelves kept changing. There had to be safety trials, starting on animals; no one could acknowledge prior experiments on monkeys, and in any case Sam wouldn’t have wanted the Time Thieves’ offering blindly accepted as benign. Then there was the question of manufacturing the substance in sufficient quantities for a fifth of the world’s population to take a few milligrams every day.

With each delay, the old scammers bombarded his inbox with new fervor, now offering bootleg versions of the untested cure. Sam remained patient; so long as the end was in sight, he could get through another year the way he had the last two. He’d learned to cherish the brief, glorious “spring,” when he woke with the sun and Laura emerged from what seemed like hibernation, to share his bed, and two or three meals a day. And when it slipped away, and he was dragged into the season of broken sleep through the heat of the morning, he told himself: This is the last time. I can live with anything, one last time.

8

“I don’t want it!” Emma declared vehemently.

“I know,” Sam replied. “But what if you try it for a week, to start with? Just to see what it’s like?”

“No!” Emma was close to tears.

Sam spun the bottle of pills on the table, seeing if he could get it to rotate like a top, but the rattling contents destabilized it. “Then talk to me,” he said. “What is it that you think will be so bad?”

“Everything’s better the way it is,” she insisted. “Why do you want to force me to stop being a runner?”

“Because all the other runners are going to stop. If you try to keep going, you’ll be all alone.”

“Only because they’re being forced as well!”

“Maybe some of them,” Sam conceded. “But we can’t keep the schools open all night for a couple of people. And if it’s been hard to keep up with your friends already, if you don’t switch back with them it will be even harder.”

Emma stared sullenly into her cereal bowl. Sam felt a brief flicker of regret for declining the suggestion from well-meaning colleagues to grind the pills up and slip them into her food.

She’d been awake since three AM, but Sam had hardened his heart and insisted she not eat until six. This was Realignment Day, and all the zeitgebers had to be lined up in a row. In the end, he’d compromised; it was half past five, and the sky wasn’t dark anymore. Even on Sunday mornings, Laura usually woke at six, and Sam was hoping he could get all the drama over before she joined them.

He rose from the table and switched off the light, then opened the kitchen blinds fully to let the dawn fill the room.

He said, “Remember the time before this happened? You’d always wake up with the birds.” He paused to let her hear the singing from the trees. “And you’d be smiling, full of energy, brighter than anyone else at that hour. Would it be so terrible, going back to that? Were you unhappy then? Honestly?”

Emma said nothing, but after a moment she picked up the pill from the table and swallowed it, then washed it down with orange juice.

He heard the bedroom door open; Laura padded down the hall. “Don’t eat yet!” she implored them. “I want to make pancakes!”

Emma glanced at her cereal, already wet with milk. Sam leaned down and whispered to her, “It’s all right, you can have both. Just finish it while she’s in the shower.”

9

“So we factor this term in the denominator ... into what?” Sam turned from the blackboard and looked around the room. “Come on, it’s easy! Anyone?”

Half the class offered no acknowledgment that he’d spoken, while the rest stared back at him uncomprehendingly, as if he’d asked them to compute the square root of a fish. He was facing a new mix of students, but he knew quite a few of them from the runners’ classes, and he knew what they were capable of. “Elena?” he prompted. If she couldn’t answer him, who would?

“You want to cancel one of the terms above?” she struggled.

“Right,” he replied encouragingly. “And that would mean ... ?”

She frowned and shook her head. “I’m sorry. It’s too hard.”

Sam surveyed the room. No one looked sleepy; if anything, they seemed wired, jittery with nervous energy. The holdouts wouldn’t have shown up at all; any ex-runners here must have dutifully taken their pills.

He glanced out the window. Walking to class beneath the blue sky, picturing the same scene repeating for a thousand days to come, he’d been as elated as if he’d returned from the dead. Surely he wasn’t the only one who felt that way?

“How’s it going for you?” he asked Elena.

“What?” She blinked, confused.

“Are you getting used to the new routine?”

Elena seemed lost for words. “Sure,” she managed eventually. “I’m sticking to the schedule.”

In the staffroom at lunchtime, Sam compared notes with his colleagues. “Oh, the runners are hopeless!” Tom declared bluntly. “I don’t know what your special schools were teaching them, but it’s going to take them months to catch up.”

Gloria said, “They do seem to be struggling. Maybe they’re still a bit jet-lagged from the shift.”

Tom rolled his eyes. “Wasn’t the whole point of the magic potion we shelled out for that it was going to bring them absolutely back into synch?”

Sam could only half follow the accounts of the cure; all he knew was that it helped phosphorylate some crucial proteins in the cells of the suprachiasmatic nucleus, a process that the syndrome’s sufferers had lost the ability to perform in response to the normal cues. Sunlight itself still couldn’t imbue them with wakefulness, but if they took the pill in the morning, the biochemical upshot was meant to be the same.

“Everything takes time,” he decided. “Even if it’s only old habits that they’re fighting. A few more weeks, and they should be back to normal.”

That night, the news showed thirty-eight people in handcuffs and orange jumpsuits paraded before the cameras in Shanghai. Prosecutors were claiming that they’d conspired to adulterate a fire-retardant chemical that had been applied to tens of thousands of different products: clothes, toys, furniture. If that was true, the cause of the syndrome might eventually be eliminated worldwide, as all the polluted items were identified and destroyed.

Or just preemptively destroyed. Sam kept Emma distracted while Laura went through her room with a garbage bag.

“What’s it like, seeing all your friends at the same time?” he asked. She’d hardly talked to him for the last few days, but however resentful she was at being pressured into taking the zeitgeber, the silent treatment couldn’t last forever.

“They’re not my friends anymore,” Emma replied.

Sam smiled at this hyperbolic declaration; playground politics could be tough for nine-year-olds, but the grudges rarely lasted long.

“Why not?” he asked.

She turned to Sam with a listless expression. “No one’s the same as before.” Her voice was flat; the last thing she was being was dramatic.

“I think the ex-runners are all a bit ... ” He didn’t know quite how to finish that. No one was dozing off, or zoning out. But everything seemed to be harder for them.

Emma said, “Before, it didn’t matter if it was day or night; we had our own sun inside us, and when it was up, it was brighter than the old one. Now you want us to pretend we don’t see it anymore.”

“It’s a big change,” Sam conceded. “It will take time to adjust.”

Emma smiled thinly. “The pills say wake up, and we wake up. We won’t ever fall asleep at the wrong time again. But it’s like being an animal in a factory farm, pushed along between the rails, going wherever you want us to go.”

Sam’s gut tightened. “You don’t mean that. Everyone has to follow some kind of routine; that’s hardly the same as being in prison. You’ll get used to it again. You just need to give it time.”

Emma gazed at him defiantly for a second or two, but then the energy she’d summoned ebbed away, and she turned back to the TV.

10

Laura shuddered fitfully, a sign that she was dreaming, but then she became ominously still. “Aren’t you ever going to sleep?” she asked Sam, exasperated. She turned to the clock beside her. “It’s a quarter past two!”

“I’m sorry.” He didn’t quite know how he managed to disturb her just by lying motionless beside her, but her ability to sense his wakefulness even as she slept only made the prospect of him joining her even more elusive. “Do you want me to move into the office?”

“Don’t be stupid. Those days are over.”

“Maybe they shouldn’t be.”

Laura raised herself up on the pillows and stared at him. The room was almost in darkness, but Sam’s eyes had adapted and he could see her face well enough.

“We can’t just give in to her,” she said. “It was one thing when she had no choice – and when the whole world was willing to accommodate the runners. But if she goes back to it now, it’ll ruin her life. What kind of job could she have? What kind of family?”

“And if we’re crushing all the joy out of her, what will that do?” Sam didn’t want to believe it himself, but he saw it on the faces of the other ex-runners every day.

“This was her thing,” Laura replied. “It made her feel special, and now she’s missing it. It’s like when they moved the children out of London into the countryside during World War Two, to escape the blitz. It was an adventure while it lasted, but now it’s just ... rationing and austerity and having to be normal again.”

Sam couldn’t deny that there might be some truth to that. Even in his early twenties, the freedom to stay up all night had seemed sweeter than any other perk of adulthood. If he’d been granted the same ability at Emma’s age, it would have felt like he’d conquered the world, and he would never have given up the power willingly.

“I’m not saying she’s dishonest, at heart,” Laura added. “But she’s nine years old, and she wants what she wants. When I was ten, I faked an illness for three months, without a moment’s compunction. Everyone thought I was an angel back then, but I would have said anything to get my own way.”

At breakfast, as Sam poured himself a third cup of coffee, Emma glanced at him knowingly: The pills say wake up, and we wake up. But unlike him, she’d slept through the night; he’d tiptoed into her room to check, afraid he might find her on the floor making sketches in the dark.

At school, his lessons went like clockwork, and not in a good way: he read from his notes, and transcribed them to the blackboard, barely thinking about what he was saying. His students dutifully wrote it all down. He didn’t pause to ask any questions, as much afraid that he’d lack the concentration to frame them properly as he was that nobody would offer an answer.

In the staffroom, he sat at a table by himself, staring at the noticeboard on the opposite wall, not so much drifting toward sleep as hovering on the verge of a waking hallucination.

Someone clapped him on the shoulders. “You look like shit,” Sadiq announced cheerfully, pulling up a chair.

“But I showed up,” Sam replied. “That’s what we do, isn’t it? Because everything would fall apart if we all just followed our own rhythms.”

“Yeah, very funny. I’ve got to admit it, you proved me wrong: you and your friends made the whole thing work.”

“We did, didn’t we?” Sam managed a bemused smile. “The Apollo missions, the Manhattan project, Bletchley Park ... and the runners’ schools.”

But the government was never going to let them start up again. It was an open secret that they’d paid their share of the ransom, and whether or not they ever managed to claw the money back from the prisoners’ scattered cyptocurrency accounts, they expected that to be the end of it. No one wanted to hear that the cure that cost so much was worse than the disease. Sam didn’t want to hear it himself.

That night, exhaustion broke the spell: he fell into bed at nine and slept soundly, until Laura shook him awake at half past six. He hadn’t even heard the alarm.

His newfound clarity only made his classes more disturbing. He obtained an official list of ex-runners from the office, so he wouldn’t be relying on his own experience of who he had and hadn’t taught before – and the deficits they were suffering as a group went from anecdotal to indisputable. These kids showed up, more convincingly on some levels than any sleep-deprived caffeine zombie, but ... screw the somnograms and the body temperature charts from the clinical tests that had given the green light to the zeitgeber, because his students were not okay, however wide-eyed and ambulatory the pills rendered them.

When he raised his observations with Laura, she was skeptical. “Just because Emma’s not the only one dragging her feet doesn’t mean there’s anything more going on here than a collective sulk.”

“Really? You think my seventeen year-olds – with university admission and job prospects at stake – are willing to shoot themselves in the foot ... because they want to spend their nights, not at wild parties, but with me or some other teacher, talking about exactly the same things as we talk about by day?”

Laura was unmoved. “Some might be sulking, some might just be suffering from the disruption in their routine: a change of school, a change of teacher. You don’t have any evidence that it’s anything more.”

And Sam still wanted to believe that she was right: that the world would be restored to order, soon enough, just so long as everyone kept their resolve and didn’t pander to a few ungrateful runners.

“Are you feeling any better?” he asked Emma, on the drive home.

She didn’t answer. He glanced at her; she was gazing out the passenger window. “Did you hear me?”

She said, “Will it make any difference what I say?”

That stung. “Do you think I don’t care about you?”

“I think you don’t listen. I told you what it’s like, before, but that didn’t change anything.”

There was nothing self-serving in her tone; just a chillingly wary disillusionment. Sam didn’t believe she was trying to manipulate him, spinning him stories out of some childish desire to break the shackles of bedtime. “Tell me again. Tell me how you feel, right now.”

Emma took a while to reply. “I feel like it’s the middle of the night,” she said. “As if someone woke me up and dragged me out of bed, and everyone around me wants to do daytime things, but it’s not the time for all that. And even if I wanted to join in ... I can’t! I can’t just pretend and play along with them. I don’t have the energy.”

“So you’re tired?” Sam asked her. “Right now? As if it’s midnight?”

“Yes,” she agreed. “Tired, but not sleepy. That makes it worse. Even if I lie down in bed, I wouldn’t be able to sleep. And I know that when I really want to be reading, or talking to my friends, or playing, the sun will go down and the lights will go out and I’ll fall asleep before I can finish my thoughts that I couldn’t even think before, in the daytime.”

“Okay. I think I understand now.” Sam’s insomnia messed him up, but it always went away in the end. To have your body going through the motions, day after day, while you were trapped inside, never able to bring yourself into synch, would be a kind of torture.

“I’m sorry I didn’t listen to you,” he said.

Emma shrugged wearily. “So what now?”

“I don’t know,” he confessed. “But I’m not giving up; we’re going to fix this. Just let me find a way.”

11

Laura was the first hurdle; Sam couldn’t even think about backing away from the “cure” if he didn’t have her completely on board.

But Laura needed solid evidence; she’d convinced herself that Emma’s testimony alone could never prove anything. Sam was at a loss to imagine how he was meant to prove what none of the labs testing the zeitgeber had even noticed, with all of their expertise and equipment. Then again, they might have been instructed not to look too closely.

It came to him at night, as he stared at the digits of the bedside clock. The idea seemed so simple and right that he closed his eyes and let the afterimage fade, sinking into the darkness, before he could start questioning it. If there were obstacles, he could find them in his dreams.

When he woke, he hadn’t changed his mind. He waited until Laura emerged from the shower, and he explained the plan while she was dressing.

“It sort of makes sense,” she conceded reluctantly.

“That’s not good enough,” he pressed her. “Either you commit to this, or you tell me why you won’t. No going back on what it means after the fact.”

“I can choose the time? Without warning either of you?”

“Yes.” Sam wasn’t sure if she really believed he’d try to cheat and contrive the outcome, but he was happy to banish any opportunity for doubt.

Momentum was building on another front: the older ex-runners were beginning to disappear from his classes, taking their fate into their own hands. Sam wasn’t ready to join them yet, but he’d already had oblique enquiries from some of his ex-colleagues from the runners’ school. Just because they couldn’t use the same building didn’t mean it would be impossible to start again.

Laura bade her time, to the point where Sam began to wonder if she’d lost her nerve and decided to renege. But then, on the fourth night after they’d spoken, she shook him awake.

“You’ve covered the clock,” he observed, amused. She’d also taken his watch from the bedside table.

“That way, you can’t give her any secret signals.”

“Like Clever Hans?” Sam asked mockingly.

“What?”

“The horse that did arithmetic.”

“Don’t start. Are we going to do this?”

They walked together in the dark to Emma’s room, and Laura knelt beside the bed.

“Darling? Can you wake up for me, please?” She touched Emma’s arm and waited for her to respond.

“What is it?” Emma asked. Her voice was thick with sleep; she sounded like any child woken in the night. Sam’s confidence wavered. He’d committed to the experiment as much as Laura; if it failed, he’d have nothing left to argue.

Laura said, “I just want to know, can you tell me ... what’s the time in your head?”

Sam felt the darkness tipping. If Emma really was still a runner, in some deep place untouched by the zeitgeber, she would still be on the old schedule. But if it was all a ruse, a bid for attention, she’d have long ago forgotten what she was meant to be feeling, at some unknown hour with no clock in sight.

“Ten past ten,” she replied. “In the morning. And I wish I could get up and go outside, but my legs won’t let me.”

Laura started weeping as she handed Sam his watch. The second row of digits she’d summoned from the app read 10:13 AM. “I’m sorry,” she told Emma. “I’m so sorry!”

Emma said, “It’s all right. But can I please stop taking the pills now?”

CRISIS ACTORS

1

“Every year that you delay your midlife crisis adds another two years to your lifespan. That’s just simple arithmetic.”

Carl laughed, but his father’s demeanor remained entirely sincere. He hadn’t meant the remark as a joke.

“I’m long past the halfway point,” his father added stoically. “But there are higher harmonics where I still have the chance to intervene. There are peaks and troughs that represent every fraction of the human lifespan, and quantum mechanics teaches us that we can modify the shape of those waves, nudging their phase and changing all kinds of outcomes that used to be seen as inevitable.”

Carl’s first impulse was to bite his tongue and try to steer the conversation back toward reality without starting any arguments, but then he noticed the jar, as big as an ice-cream tub, sitting on top of the bookshelf behind his father’s armchair.

“It doesn’t teach anything of the kind,” he said bluntly. “How much did you pay for that crap?”

His father turned and followed his gaze to the jar of Harmonic Advantage Supplement. “None of your business. And when did a degree in geology make you an expert in quantum mechanics?”

“It doesn’t,” Carl replied, “but I did enough undergraduate physics to know the basics. You didn’t specialize in the history of England, but if some conman on the internet told me that the order of succession to the British throne was decided by a series of MMA cage matches, I’d be willing to defer to your own education when you assured me that that really wasn’t true.”

His father groaned. “So you think Fourier analysis is as much of a joke as Mixed Martial Arts in the Palace?”

Carl walked over to the shelf and picked up the jar. He’d been looking for a price tag, but he found himself morbidly skimming the spiel on the side. “I studied Fourier analysis, too,” he said. “You need it for seismology, among other things. And I can tell you with the utmost confidence that it does not say that your life is ‘built from harmonic waves’ or that you can ‘postpone the final node’ by taking pills full of ‘micro-crystalline quartz’. Now, there’s something I’m qualified to talk about. This is sand. You’ve bought a big tub of sand.”

“Yeah, yeah, like that’s nothing special!” his father retorted. “Except that this sand has been kept out of the light for thousands of years, building up energy in its crystalline defects. If you don’t believe that, maybe you should hand back your degree, because it’s precisely the science behind the most sophisticated methods for dating ancient artefacts.”

Carl was flummoxed for a moment; he reread the side of the jar, and found a line describing, more or less correctly, the principles behind luminescence dating.

“That’s not the point,” he said. “Yes, you can find the age of some sediments by seeing how much light buried grains of quartz give off. So what? All it proves is that these people can look up something on Wikipedia, and then pretend it makes their sand pills more credible.”

“Oh, so nothing ever counts in their favor!” his father replied heatedly. “They can be right about absolutely everything else, but you don’t want to believe in the health benefits, so you get to that point and then slam your mind shut.”

“Everything else?” Carl protested. “There are a thousand true things that can be said about sand! Listing them all on a jar of sand pills won’t make the sand into a cure for ... ” He looked at the label again. “ ... arthritis, hypertension, irritable bowel syndrome ... ”

His father raised his hands. “Can we just drop the whole thing? You come into my house and I try to share some good news with you, and you treat me like a child. I should have known better than to tell you anything.”

Carl felt chastened, even as his face burned with resentment. He wasn’t going to apologize for speaking the truth, but he was willing to change the subject. He returned to the couch and sat gazing at the carpet, listening to the air-conditioner laboring against the heat.

“It’s Caroline’s birthday next week,” he said finally. “She’ll be nine. Will you come to the party this Saturday?”

“Of course!” his father replied, all his anger melting away. “What should I get her? What’s she into these days?”

Carl hadn’t though about that. All the children’s books and toys came with their own hardcore agendas, and he didn’t want to step into another minefield by offering a list of items least likely to infuriate one parent or the other, only to find that his father objected to them all.

“Buy her a gift voucher,” Carl advised. “They grow up so fast,” he joked, “that if you buy them the thing they asked for a week ago, they’ll burst into tears because you should have known that, by now, it’s strictly for babies.”

2

When Carl arrived home from the party, he turned on his laptop and saw that there was a new message on his RStance channel. He did the date-and-day calculation in his head, then pulled out the carved wooden chess set from the junk pile at the bottom of the bedroom closet and held up the white queen for the laptop’s camera, turning the piece to expose the distinctive marbling.

Unlocked, the message appeared as a GIF, a crudely animated political cartoon that a casual onlooker could easily take to be the entire point of the communication – but the scribbled shading of a patch of the background included some wildly distorted text that few people or algorithms would notice. Carl placed a mirrored cylinder against the screen that reversed the distortion and let him read it; he memorized the details, writing nothing down, then quit the app, which zeroed every byte it had touched before exiting.

He sat for a while, pondering the assignment, wondering how many more minor tasks he’d need to complete before he’d proved he could be trusted with something bigger. His knees were aching from giving his daughter a shoulder ride for an hour while ducking down every few steps to avoid the decorations strung across his ex-wife’s living room. He loved every minute he spent with Caroline, but it worried him when she became so desperate and clingy. Whenever he’d suggested putting her down for a while so she could talk to her friends, she’d looked as crestfallen as if he’d threatened to disown her.

The message had given an address in Penrith and a time window between three and four PM the next day. Carl checked that his uniform was clean and pressed, and that his tools and supplies were ready.

On Sunday afternoon, he set out early in case there were problems with the traffic, but the M4 flowed smoothly most of the way. Whenever a gap opened up in front of him, the air shimmered over the baking asphalt. He arrived with fifteen minutes to spare, so he circled the area, hoping to get a sense of the kind of bystanders he might have to contend with, but the streets, and the front yards of the houses, were mostly deserted. He’d chosen three possible parking spots in advance, and the first one he reached was empty.

He put on his C-Ture cap, changed to a different pair of sunglasses, and patted some adversarial facial hair onto his cheeks. When he opened the car door it was like stepping into a sauna. Why were the tipoffs always in the hottest suburbs, at the hottest time of day? After walking one block he was drenched in sweat, and he had five more to go, but he didn’t want his own vehicle to be seen too close to the target.

The house was a two-story McMansion in off-white brick, the roof groaning under edge-to-edge PV. Carl didn’t knock on the front door; he’d learned that that just attracted more attention from the neighbors than going about his business directly. The C-Ture unit was at the side of the building, and as the tipoff had promised there was no gate blocking his way, and no security cameras. When he slipped on his white cotton gloves it was hard not to feel self-conscious, like a burglar intent on concealing his fingerprints, but they were exactly what the real technicians wore to protect both themselves and the equipment.

He shut off the power, then unscrewed the metal cover and set it aside. The membrane took much longer to detach, with sixteen separate bolts. Carl lifted it away carefully, making sure not to touch anything but the support frame; a physical rupture would prove that someone had meddled with the device.

With the membrane removed, the exposed catalyst glinted in diffracted rainbow colors, like some strange artwork built from discarded DVDs. Carl couldn’t help but marvel at the sheer technical accomplishment on display, however misdirected. Growing this kind of finely wrought fractal, with the surface area of a small forest’s worth of leaves packed into a cubic meter, had sounded preposterous when he first heard it mooted, but they hadn’t just made it possible, they’d made it affordable – at least to the sufficiently rich and vain.

He took the bottle out of his tool box and dispensed a dozen drops, carefully spread out over the top surface of the iridescent block. The mixture of hydrocarbons and alcohols with branching side chains had been tailored to bind to the active sites in the catalyst, but unlike the products the catalyst forged itself from carbon dioxide and water vapor, they remained lodged firmly in place. Within forty-eight hours, the whole thing would be irredeemably poisoned: a very shiny, expensive brick.

The owners might not feel much financial pain from losing a trickle of carbon-neutral aviation fuel – which wouldn’t have repaid the cost of the unit in their lifetime, anyway – but they’d be livid at having wasted their money on such a heap of junk, disinclined to fork out for a replacement once they realized that the warranty had expired, and more than willing to bad-mouth the technology to their friends. If the machine that was meant to buy them environmental prestige wouldn’t deliver, the next best thing would be to take the high ground and denounce it as a greenwashing stunt that wouldn’t even last long enough to recapture its own manufacturing footprint.

Carl reassembled everything and started toward the front of the house, then he heard a neighbor’s car pull into their driveway, on the opposite side. He retreated, standing behind the wall, listening to car doors slamming and children yelling at each other. It had to be fifty degrees, but the kids kept fighting and dawdling, taking forever to get inside.

He felt acid rising in his throat. The tip had to have come from someone in the neighborhood who knew the owner well enough to be apprised of their movements, so this irritating family might well include the anonymous informant. If that was the case, he could understand why they couldn’t risk carrying out the job themselves; they’d be much more likely to be recognized by another local. But if it wasn’t, and they noticed him, all it would take would be one conversation between the disgruntled owners and their neighbors to raise the possibility of sabotage.

He waited, sweat dripping down his arms, until the childish taunts became muffled and he heard the front door of the house finally close. He marched straight onto the street, not even glancing toward the adjoining house, turned in the other direction and set off toward his car. If anyone had seen him, it would not have been memorable. And he couldn’t let himself be rattled by a tiny glitch in a minor prank like this, if he ever hoped to graduate to the big league.

Just give me some C4, he thought, willing it, like a prayer. I’ve proved myself. I can hold my nerve. Let me take down something worth destroying.

3

Carl spent the evening updating his blog, blocking the trolls and catastrophists but replying at length to the merely unpersuaded.

“Even if the heating’s part of a natural cycle, why should we stand by and fry to death?” asked CandourMan.

As host Epictetus, Carl responded with scrupulous courtesy. “We should not accept a single death, but what we’re doing now is completely misguided. Carbon dioxide is plant food, and when its level rises in response to the heat, that’s part of a natural feedback process that allows the forests to grow more rapidly, bringing the planet back toward its long-term equilibrium temperature. Cutting emissions, let alone pulling the gas out of the air, is precisely the wrong thing to do, both for the crop yields needed to keep us all fed, and for the climate itself. In hotter weather, plants narrow their stomates – the pores they breathe through — which means they need extra CO2 just to maintain their normal metabolism, and still more to sustain the necessary growth spurt. We can plant as many trees as we like, but unless we fertilize them with sufficient CO2, they won’t bring the climate back under control.”

CandourMan wasn’t currently online, but Revellator chimed in. “If Earth recovered from the rise in heat before, without anyone burning fossil fuels to help it along, what’s the big deal? It will recover again, won’t it?”

“Even the natural cycle takes thousands of years,” Epictetus replied. “Carbon capture will double that!”

Revellator went silent for a while, then came back with a Gish gallop of half-baked science, spurious references, and deliberate misinterpretation. Carl deleted the comment and blocked him.

When he checked the time, it was after eleven. He had an interview for a two-week consulting job in the morning; he needed to be sharp. His severance package from the university was dwindling, and he was starting to suspect that the lawyers advising him on the wrongful dismissal suit were just stringing him along.

He closed the blog, but sat, unmoving. He was tired of squabbling with dilettantes and sneaking around the suburbs breaking rich people’s toys. There was too much at stake for him to be wasting his time this way.

He fetched the mirrored cylinder and started up RStance, then began composing a message to his cell leader. “I’m ready for something more,” he spelled out in awkward cursive with his fingertip on the trackpad, as it appeared in the mirror. “I’m smart, reliable, motivated.” He winced and erased the embarrassing squiggle; this wasn’t a corporate gig. “Give me the toughest job you have, and I’ll do it. Whatever the risks, whatever it costs me.” Short of mentioning dams or hydrogen plants by name, he could hardly make himself any clearer.

He sent the message. Going on past experience it was unlikely that he’d receive a reply for several days, but he was reluctant to shut down the laptop straight away. He went and brushed his teeth, thinking back over the words he’d used, hoping he hadn’t sounded too desperate. If a cop had infiltrated the cell, wouldn’t they keep pushing in the same direction, asking to be let in on ever larger crimes?

When he returned to the laptop, there was a message waiting for him. Hairs rose on the back of his neck; he was so used to being ignored that this felt as eerie as getting a response from a ouija board. He went to his minerals cabinet and took out the fragment of a chondrite he’d found in the Nullarbor, then held it up to the camera.

The GIF showed a cat fighting with a toy robot on someone’s lawn, but the mottled shadows of foliage on the grass unwarped to spell out the reply: “Are you willing to go undercover to expose the Big Lie? Knowing you’ll be putting yourself in danger?”

Carl’s stomach clenched with anxiety, but his heart soared. All the menial tasks had finally paid off; they were going to let him tear the whole farce wide open.

He paced the living room, struggling to compose his answer. It needed to be an enthusiastic yes, but it also needed to elicit more information – without disclosing the fact that he had no idea which particular Big Lie they meant, or exactly what they wanted him to do about it.

4

The training course for the Cyclone Emergency Response Volunteers started with a first aid certificate. Carl had kept his own certificate up to date, as he’d sometimes needed it for fieldwork, but he went along to the session anyway, to ensure that he didn’t miss out on any of the networking opportunities.

In a hall in Leichhardt that had once been a church, twenty people gathered around the instructor and her mannequin. The volunteers ranged in age from their twenties to their fifties, he guessed. Carl tried not to judge them by their appearance, as if he could sort everyone into fanatics and followers by a few simple cues, but he was disappointed that there wasn’t a single Extinction Rebellion tattoo on display.

The echoey acoustics of the wooden-floored hall gave the whole thing an earnest, amateurish feel, like a community theater group. None of the first aid protocols seemed to have changed since his last refresher course, but he kept his attention scrupulously focused on the instructor as she spoke; he needed to be perceived as absolutely serious about every aspect of his induction.

In the tea break, he stood a few paces from the urn and let people initiate contact, telling them the truth if they asked: he was a semi-retired geologist, hoping to make better use of his free time. Eventually, a small group crystallized around him, chatting, merely by virtue of the location he’d chosen.

“It was Cyclone Odette that really got to me,” Andrea said. She was a high school physical education teacher in her thirties, with an intense demeanor and a tightly wound ponytail. “When I saw what that did to Townsville, I just wanted to punch someone. We could have nipped this in the bud fifty years ago, if a few more politicians had grown a spine.”

Carl nodded sadly, but kept his mouth shut; if he started trying to mimic the true believers and parrot all their talking points, he was afraid it might sound as much like a parody to them as it did to him.

“It’s just a lack of scientific literacy,” Vinay, the dental student, opined. “People have had the evidence in front of them for decades, but every parliament is full of lawyers who believe there’s no problem you can’t talk your way around.”

“I think it runs deeper than that,” Bruno suggested. “I could list half a dozen Nobel laureates who bent over backward to minimize the problem, or pretend it wasn’t anthropogenic. People can convince themselves of anything, if they set their minds to it.” Bruno was a retired civil engineer, a balding man with a weathered face who made Carl feel slightly anxious, as if their similarities might render his own insincerity more visible.

The instructor called out, “Can we reassemble, please?”

“Time to stanch those robot hemorrhages!” Carl enthused, slapping his hands together with glee.

As they took turns learning to stop poor Resusci Annie from bleeding to death after a wind-borne branch had impaled her thigh, Carl tried to imagine how each of these students would respond when they realized that their mission on the ground would be every bit as staged. Maybe a few of them knew already, and were going into the charade with their eyes open, but CERV recruited from the general public, and he’d had no problem enrolling after nothing more than standard medical and police checks. Among these twenty people, he could hardly be the only one who’d be appalled at the cynical deceit they were being roped into.

Then again, if it was for a higher cause – and they were surrounded by peers who would encourage and enable them – hadn’t all the psychological research shown that most people would rationalize away their qualms?

5

Carl was asleep when the CERV app started wailing like an ambulance siren. He picked up his phone from his bedside table and stared groggily at the alert, his finger hovering above the DECLINE button; the best thing about being a volunteer was that no one could compel him to go through with this. But then his news app chimed in with its own portentous claims about the impending tragedy, and he knew he’d never forgive himself if he ended up having to stare impotently at the same kind of nonsense for the next four weeks.

He called a ride share to the airport, and ended up in the same car as Andrea. “This is it!” she said, as she climbed in beside him. Carl smiled and nodded, trying not to let her twitchy body language rattle him.

She pulled out her phone and summoned up a map showing a mix of satellite imagery and computer projections. Cyclone Uriah had formed midway between the Solomon Islands and Tuvalu six days before, and was tracking south-south-west toward Vanuatu. Carl didn’t doubt that it would be a significant nuisance, but everyone in its path would have had plenty of time to prepare and take shelter. The only real role for CERV would be to help orchestrate the disaster theater.

When they reached the airport, Carl spotted the remainder of the group, gathered around a snack kiosk while they waited for clearance to go further. He and Andrea checked in their luggage, then joined the others.

“I swear it was faster when you could just queue up and walk through a security gate,” Andrea grumbled. Carl couldn’t argue with that; the whole foyer was scanning its occupants in real time, but dealing with weaker signals and moving targets made the process more protracted.

“No stage fright, you two?” Vinay asked. He was smiling, but Carl could see how restless he was, screwing and unscrewing the cap of his water bottle.

“After all those rehearsals?” Carl replied. “We could do this in our sleep.”

Bruno glanced at his phone. “Oh, I’ve been green-lit,” he said. “See you in the cabin.”

Carl took out his own phone, and watched the red silhouette acquiring random blobs of green.

“At least they’re sure there’s nothing sharp in my hypothalamus,” Vinay joked.

Carl said, “I’m more worried about what they might find in my liver.”

The group trickled through into the terminal; by the time Carl joined them, the flight to Port Vila was boarding. CERV hadn’t needed to charter a plane, but the commercial jet, which would normally have been full of tourists, was returning almost empty. Watching the flight attendants go through the emergency procedures, Carl could see the worry on their faces. These beat-ups really were cruel to everyone.

With so much room, every passenger had been given a window seat, but once the lights of Sydney were behind them there was nothing outside but dark ocean and an overcast sky. Carl had purged his phone of anything incriminating, leaving him with none of his usual means of passing the time, so he picked an action movie from the inflight entertainment system and let the screen and earbuds feed him enough color and motion to keep him from dozing off.

The credits rolled just as dawn reached into the cabin. Carl looked out to see Efate Island emerging from choppy gray water, a blotch of impossibly lush green. People had lived and thrived here for millennia, and the forests had been around since the chain of volcanic islands first acquired enough soil to sustain them. There had been cyclones for all that time; one more was just a blip in the archipelago’s history.

“Thanks for coming,” the flight attendant said, as Carl disembarked. “We appreciate your help.”

“My pleasure,” Carl mumbled awkwardly, but as he walked out onto the airbridge he pushed aside the pang of shame the words had evoked. He had every right to be proud of his intentions; exposing the forces seeking to exploit the Vanuatuan people for their own agenda was as honorable a goal as any visitor could aspire to.

6

A minibus took the new arrivals to the CERV operations center, a school gymnasium where the local chapter, as well as those from Fiji, New Caledonia and New Zealand were already encamped. People were drifting in and out of the building, or lying on their sleeping bags talking on their phones. Carl caught Bruno glancing up at the ceiling, and asked jokingly, “You think it will hold?”

Bruno said, “As long as the walls stay up I’ll be happy.”

The next briefing was almost an hour away, so after placing their belongings in their allotted spaces on the floor the group walked out into the town in search of breakfast. A steady wind was blowing in from the ocean, but Carl was soon dripping with perspiration as he followed the others toward a café someone had picked from a map.

The owner of the café had already boarded up the windows, but it remained open for business, and there was some portable plastic furniture on the pavement outside. Carl ordered scrambled eggs and croissants, and sat gazing down at the water. Twice protected from the open ocean, a small bay facing the side of a larger one, it was still exhibiting a relentless swell, with wave after wave crashing against the mangrove-lined shore. On the gently sloping street before him, the colourfully painted buildings he could see looked like a mixture of timber and brick, far from shoddy but not exactly bunker-like either.

Back at the gymnasium, the CERV coordinator, Anton Seule, welcomed the new arrivals and explained the plans for the morning: basically, sandbagging. Everyone had been allocated a portion of a low-lying street that had been chosen as the site of a barricade against the possibility of rising water.

“They should build more sea walls,” Carl suggested as his team of five lined up to collect their shovels and a stack of empty woven bags.

“It’s complicated,” Bruno replied. “A hard barrier in the wrong place can accelerate erosion – reflecting back the waves so they carry sand away, undermining its own foundations. You can use a more porous structure, which traps sand like the roots in a mangrove swamp, but there’s a limit to how much protection that will give from a storm surge.”

Carl was sure there were ways around all of these quibbles, but he didn’t want to get bogged down in an argument, pitting his expertise against Bruno’s.

When they reached the street they’d been assigned, there was already a large pile of sand, presumably left by a dump truck. One of the team, Barbara, a quiet woman Carl hadn’t spoken with much, had brought a frame they could hang the bags from while shoveling in the sand, and they soon settled into a rhythm of filling and stacking.

It was a simple enough job, but in the training drills they’d never had to keep up the routine for more than half an hour. A couple of young kids appeared, watching them, shy at first then laughing and joking. When they addressed the group in Bislama, the local English creole, Carl struggled to grasp their meaning, but Bruno seemed to have no trouble. “It’s a little bit like Tok Pisin,” he explained. “I worked in PNG for a while.”

Carl stopped taking swigs from his water bottle; it just seemed to make him sweat more, and thanks to the humidity that did nothing to cool him. The sky was full of gray clouds, with the sun barely showing through as a pale white disk. He tried taking off his broad-brimmed hat, just to let more of the breeze reach his face, but then it felt as if the whole hemisphere above was raining heat down on him, and he quickly replaced it.

When they took a break, Andrea brought out her phone and checked the forecast. “Uriah is category four now,” she announced. “Expected to cross the northern islands by nightfall.”

“Most of them have concrete shelters,” Carl said.

“Sure,” she replied. “But what will be left outside? What will people be emerging to?”

Carl resisted the urge to respond that the pious note of concern in her voice would do nothing to improve the outcome. It was a cyclone, not a picnic; no one had been promised a good time. People would do their best, and get through it as they had before.

It took the whole morning for the five of them to use up all the sand – with the wind stealing a portion — but when Carl stood back and looked at the result it was impossible not to feel a sense of accomplishment. The barrier stood in a natural channel that any ascending water would be forced to take, and though it blocked the street, people could still detour onto the sloping ground on either side to get around it.

As they trudged back through the town, they found that all the shops and cafés along the way had shut their doors, and the streets were deserted. The clouds had darkened, all but blotting out the sun; battling the wind to make progress was comical at first, but then wearying, and the gusts were almost enough to knock an adult off their feet.

In the gymnasium, people returning from the various work parties were queuing up for a communal lunch, ladled out from a huge steaming pot with a fragrant odor that reached all the way to the door. With a virtuous ache in his limbs from the morning’s labor, Carl was tempted to surrender to the air of camaraderie and just celebrate a job well done. But he quashed the nascent Stockholm Syndrome and gathered his thoughts.

He excused himself and left his companions, heading in the direction of the bathrooms. With everyone intent on getting fed, it was easy to slip unseen into the passageway that led behind the stage. The building doubled as an auditorium, and not just for school assemblies; a quick search revealed a list of past musical performances and plays. It was hard to navigate in the gloom, but eventually he found a pair of rooms that seemed well placed for costume changes and other theatrical business. Once he was out of the passageway, he risked using the light from his phone, and the second room turned out to be exactly what he’d been seeking. Apart from a couple of filing cabinets and a wobbly table, there were three tall wooden cupboards, and one of them bore a hand-written label that read Accessoire de scène.

Inside were five plastic swords in metallic gray, a crumbling box full of stage make-up, wigs and beards, and something that might have been a royal scepter. He rummaged through the box, sure that a bottle of fake blood would be in there somewhere, but then it dawned on him that whoever had been charged with enacting the scenes of carnage must have taken it already. The props cupboard would be an innocent-seeming place to stash it, but it would be no use if it was still here at the height of the storm.

He leaned against the cupboard, disappointed; a geo-tagged picture of the bottle would have been the perfect start to his exposé. There were too many witnesses on the ground, and too many phones ready to capture every event from multiple angles, to try to manufacture casualties with deep fakes, however sophisticated the technology. It had to be done the old-fashioned way. The only question now was, by whom?

“What are you doing?”

Carl turned to see a woman standing in the doorway. Her lanyard read CERV Fiji, but he couldn’t make out her name.

“I was looking for the bathroom, then I got sidetracked.” He picked up one of the swords and brandished it. “Reliving my youth. I was Banquo in my high school Macbeth. I should have been the lead; I learned all the lines.”

The woman stared at him, entirely unmollified. “Would you put that back? We’re all guests here! You can’t rummage around in school property!”

“I’m sorry.” Carl replaced the sword and closed the cupboard.

“The bathroom is that way.” She pointed down the passage.

“Thank you.”

As he walked away, he tried to recall if there had been anything in the cupboard that could have served alongside the missing blood – something the catastrophe’s props master might have forgotten, and would need to return for. But any bandages used would be the real thing, taken from the first aid kits, and there’d been nothing like fake glass shards, or blocks of rubber masonry. In a Hollywood production, with scrupulous health and safety standards, no one would risk placing an actual piece of broken window pane within a hundred meters of an actor. But this performance would be far edgier, more improvised, with all manner of ad hoc practical effects. He just had to keep his eyes open, and be prepared to question everything he saw.

7

In the afternoon, at a new location, the work party took their sand straight from the back of a truck, with a tarpaulin helping to shelter the load from the wind. Even so, a constant stream of grit whipped out through the opening, stinging Carl’s arms and face, and each shovelful on its way into the bags seemed to be dissolving before his eyes, like sugar in hot water. They should have found an indoor space for this part of the job, but it was too late to try to organize anything.

It was barely four when they returned to the gym, but the sky had grown dark and it was spitting rain. The satellite images showed Uriah’s swirl impinging on all of the islands to the north, and bearing down fast on Efate.

Carl found his sleeping bag and lay down. There was more food on offer, but he was too tired to eat. Heavy rain began clattering on the metal roof, so loud that it took him a while to discern the separate groan and rattle of the building’s frame shuddering in the wind.

The lights in the hall went out. The gas flame warming the volunteers’ dinner revealed a small group of anxious faces, and then a swarm of phone screens lit up and faded in waves, as their owners checked something then decided to conserve their batteries. Carl joined in, and saw that there was no signal.

A few minutes later the lights came back on, and everyone cheered. Bruno sat down nearby, holding a plate of stew.

“You’re not hungry?” he asked Carl, yelling to be heard over the drumming on the roof.

“No.”

The rain quietened abruptly, but then the wind rose up to fill the silence, playing howling bass notes on the gymnasium. Carl was a long way from any entrance, but he could feel a powerful draft of cool air flowing through the hall.

The roof began making a new sound: sheet metal banging against the rafters, which meant a few of the fasteners had come loose. A faint mist of water began to fall from the ceiling, the droplets making a pallid rainbow before the lights went out again.

“If the building collapses,” Carl shouted, “wouldn’t we be safer outside?”

“It’s not going to collapse!” Bruno yelled back. “And if you go outside, there’ll be pieces of flying tin just waiting to decapitate you.”

Carl rose to his feet; he had no intention of fleeing, but he couldn’t stay still. The cooking flame had been snuffed out, but the rectangular fireflies winked on and off in the darkness as the spray grew heavier.

The roof screeched and peeled halfway open; rain pelted the floor, and Carl could dimly perceive people scrambling to move or protect their possessions. He picked up his sleeping bag and slung it over his shoulder with the opening pointing down; the exterior was waterproof, so this ought to be enough to keep it dry inside. With the rain soaking his clothes, he shuffled in the dark toward the side of the hall that was still partly sheltered.

He stood, huddled beside a stranger, his teeth chattering, telling himself there was nothing to fear. Even if the roof was stripped away completely, any airborne debris was more likely to sail right over the walls than to land a perfect shot between them.

8

Around four in the morning, the wind began to die down. There was still no phone signal, so it was impossible to be sure what Uriah was doing, but when Carl looked up and saw a patch of clear, star-filled sky through the gap in the ceiling, it seemed likely that the worst was over.

Someone found half a dozen battery-operated lamps, and Carl joined in mopping the water off the floor, while another group ascended the side of the building on ladders and managed to sling a series of tarpaulins over the hole.

By dawn, the command center was more or less habitable again, and a head count of the volunteers confirmed that no one was missing. But when he stepped outside, what Carl could see of the town from the school’s high ground made his heart sink. Hundreds of roofs had been torn away, dozens of buildings had collapsed, and those streets that weren’t inundated were strewn with debris. All the vivid blue and pink walls he recalled from the day before had vanished, the colors buried in water, splashed with mud, abraded away, or reduced to splinters.

The volunteers assembled for a briefing. “Uriah has left Vanuatu,” Seule assured them, solemn but resolute. “We have reports of mud slides from Espiritu Santo, and many roads are damaged there, but so far no casualties. Our first job now is to make a sweep of the town, identify problems and give assistance. Every team will be assigned an area to check.”

Carl’s phone still had no signal, but the GPS and peer-to-peer were working, so he was able to receive his instructions. He’d become separated from his team, but as he walked out of the school grounds carrying a first aid kit, he saw Bruno, Vinay, Andrea and Barbara ahead of him, and he ran to catch up with them.

They barely spoke as they entered the town. On the first street, the houses were mostly intact, and the one collapsed building had been empty when it fell, with the owners, just returned, surveying the ruins. Bruno offered help clearing up the site, but they insisted that they and their neighbors could manage.

On the second street, Carl saw a small crowd gathered, and he could hear frantic shouts and wailing. The five of them ran toward the hubbub; a house of wood and tin lay in ruins, and it was clear that the onlookers believed there was someone trapped beneath.

Half a dozen people were already moving through the wreckage, searching, though no one seemed sure where to look. Bruno approached and spoke with them, and out of the exchange a system emerged, with the searchers passing pieces of the walls and roof back along a chain of volunteers, clearing away the debris instead of lifting and replacing each piece where it had fallen.

Carl and Vinay took the splintered beams and scraps of tin from two of the searchers and handed them on to Bruno and Barbara. The crowd had grown quiet; one elderly woman, who Carl supposed was a relative of the missing occupants, was being comforted by friends, and everyone else had found a place in the chain.

One of the searchers shouted, and his friend helped him lift away a beam, exposing a woman lying motionless on the floor. Her eyes were closed, but the only wound Carl could see was a deep gash in her lower leg that was still bleeding.

The man who had found her squatted down and examined her, then called out excitedly. Carl didn’t understand what he’d said, but from the man’s tone it was clear that she had to be breathing.

Carl picked up the first aid kit and approached. He knelt down beside her, cleaned and disinfected the wound, then quickly bandaged it. It would need stitches at some point, but he was more afraid that the woman might have a spinal injury. He was about to raise the possibility that the neighbors could improvise some kind of stretcher when she stirred and sat up, agitated.

She spoke to the searchers, directing them as much with gestures as with words. Carl watched as they moved a short distance away and began stepping gingerly through the broken wood. Everyone was distressed now, but they kept to the system, passing each object they lifted down along the chain so it wouldn’t hamper their efforts.

When the child lying in the rubble started crying, his mother wailed, but the man who’d found him broke into a smile, then reached down and scooped him up into his arms. Carl looked around at the neighbors, some yelling in triumph, some weeping with joy.

Vinay put a hand on Carl’s shoulder, struggling to stay composed. Carl nodded to him in a kind of affirmation, afraid to speak lest he lose control himself.

Bruno called to them, “OK, well done! I’ve logged this for the medics, and they’ll be here when they can. Let’s get on to the next street!”

9

It was early afternoon when the flight landed in Sydney. After six weeks away, Carl’s apartment looked strange to him – all the shapes familiar, but the surfaces dull, like an imperfect attempt to recreate the place from memory.

He threw his clothes in the washing machine, took a long, hot shower, then microwaved a frozen lasagne.

His laptop lay in front of him on the table as he ate. When he was finished, he sat for a while, dreading what was coming. Then he booted it up and started the RStance app.

“I found no evidence of fake casualties,” he admitted. “Though I didn’t get to Espiritu Santo myself.”

He washed the plate and fork he’d used, then sat by the laptop, waiting.

After fifteen minutes, there was a reply. He unlocked it with an old bottle-opener, then dewarped the GIF of trolleys running back and forth over bodies on a tramline. “Good job,” the message read. “Your scrutiny must have scared off the crisis actors. Can you stay with CERV, to help keep them in check?”

Carl had been expecting to be upbraided and demoted: he’d failed in his mission, and let the Resistance down. For the last six weeks he’d been growing ever surer that when he’d been caught searching the props cupboard, that had blown his cover and guaranteed that he wouldn’t be allowed to see anything suspicious.

But even if they had guessed who he was and why he was there, if it had stopped the catastrophists lying to the world, faking deaths to milk people’s emotions, wasn’t that a kind of success, regardless?

He’d dreamed of rising to the highest level and being picked for a bombing or assassination – but if he was honest with himself, he had never been sure that when the time came he really would have been willing to risk his freedom. To risk never seeing his daughter again.

If he stayed with CERV, holding them to account, keeping them honest, that would not be a small thing. He couldn’t force them to accept the truth and acknowledge the real causes and solutions of the problems they claimed to care so much about – but in the end, the truth would assert itself. In the meantime, he could play a modest part, reining in their excesses and thwarting their attempts at disinformation.

He placed the mirrored cylinder against the screen again and scrawled his reply. “Understood. Remaining with CERV until further instructions.”

Then he picked up the phone. Caroline would be home from school now, and he’d promised that as soon as he was back he’d come and tell her about the cyclone, and everything he’d seen and done on the islands.

SLEEP AND THE SOUL

1

Jesse mopped up the gravy with the last of his bread, gulped down a final mouthful of tea, then took his mug, plate and utensils into the cooks’ tent.

Henry looked up from the dishwashing tub and nodded to him amiably. “What have they got you on now?”

“Rubble,” Jesse replied. “Just changed me from spikes.”

“As good as a rest,” Henry joked.

Jesse strode away from the tent, past the campfire, across the moonlit ground. Gage, the foreman of the blasting team, spotted him and called out impatiently, “Where have you been, Sloss? Your meal break finished five minutes ago.”

“If the Lord had intended us to work all night, He would have put a second sun up in the sky,” Jesse suggested.

Gage was unmoved, and parried with his own cracker-barrel theology. “And if He had wanted us to slacken, He would have rendered us as helpless as the brute animals.”

Jesse grunted resignedly and found his shovel. The latest blast had thoroughly demolished the slab of granite that had stood in the way of the track, but the pieces strewn across the ground were still about the size of a man’s fist. He joined his team-mates filling the cart, soon falling into the rhythm of the labor. The truth was, so long as he remained well fed, and his shifts alternated between tasks that put demands on different parts of his body, he had no real difficulty maintaining the pace. And how would he have passed the nights in this forsaken place, if they hadn’t kept him working? Staring into the campfire ruminating?

He didn’t need a fire for that; he could conjure images from the gloom as he shoveled, picturing Felicia on the day he returned. They’d find plenty of work for each other’s idle hands, once he was wealthy enough for the wedding.

When the cart was full he called to Clegg, and they wheeled it toward the edge of the embankment. Lifting it up to empty it, Jesse felt a muscle in his shoulder protesting, but he caught himself in time and shifted his posture just enough to spread the load more evenly, sparing himself a sprain that could have cost him who-knew-how-many days’ wages.

“Now I know how Sisyphus felt,” Clegg declared dourly as they dragged the cart back.

“When the track’s done, it will be done,” Jesse replied. “Ain’t nothing eternal about that.”

“When Sisyphus had rolled that boulder a thousand times, was his punishment eternal? A million times? Once you’ve lost count, what’s the difference?”

Jesse scowled. “We haven’t emptied this cart a million times. At a guess I’d say three thousand.”

The current layer of rubble was looking sparse now; it wouldn’t last until dawn. Gage and his fellow powder monkeys were already drilling into the next boulder; at the pace they’d set the whole track would be complete before the snow set in. There was nothing to be pessimistic about.

“I’m getting married in the spring,” Jesse said. He shook off his sense of annoyance and got back into the work, relishing the tension each shovelful’s weight induced in his shoulder, easing away the knotted sensation that lingered after his near-mishap with the cart.

“Stand clear!” Gage yelled.

Jesse looked up, but the blasting crew were twenty yards ahead; he had nothing to worry about.

As he resumed shoveling, he heard a whistling sound close by, then the skin of his temple began to sting. He raised one hand to his forehead, and felt a dampness on his fingers. Maybe a speck of gravel had come all this way from the blast. He rummaged in his pocket for a handkerchief, then noticed that the sense of vertigo he felt was not a derangement of his perceptions, but a consequence of the fact that he’d lost his balance and was toppling to the ground.

2

The darkness smelled of dirt. Pine, and dirt. Jesse was afraid to move, but the longer he put it off, the less of a gulf remained between the thing he feared would be revealed, and the fear he felt regardless.

He started to raise an arm, but he’d barely inclined it before his knuckles met wood. That was exactly what he’d anticipated, but his lack of surprise did nothing to lessen the shock.

So he was dead. Whatever hopes he’d held for the afterlife, he hadn’t expected his sojourn in the grave to be like this, with him thinking on the fact of it, and even moving around a bit. Was he expected to lie here patiently until Judgment Day?

The air around him was beginning to grow stale, not so much in its odor as its ability to satisfy his lungs. If he was dead, why would he still need fresh air?

But if he wasn’t dead, how could he have no memory of his journey from Cavendish back to Haverhill?

Deep in his lungs, the dissatisfaction took on an urgency that pushed all the bemused philosophizing out of his mind. Jesse was prepared to apologize to Jesus if his etiquette in this claustrophobic purgatory fell below the expected standards, but none of his Sunday School teachers had prepared him for a post-mortem endurance test resembling the breath-holding competitions he’d held with his cousins in the swimming hole when he was nine years old.

He placed his palms against the wood above him and strained. He could feel the boards flex a little; at least his parents had honored the request in his will that his hard-earned wages not be squandered on anything so vain as inch-thick mahogany or a plush velvet lining.

But if the pine was thin, the soil remained obstinate. Jesse had shoveled enough earth to be certain that a six-foot-tall, coffin-wide column weighed many times more than he could hope to lift.

Conceding the futility of his initial response, his body redirected its desperation: without thinking, he found himself kicking hard against the nearest wall of the box. With more play in his legs than his arms, he could deliver more force, and though he had no plan as to how he could benefit from an aperture in such an inconvenient location, for want of any alternative he persisted, with increasing vigor.

The panel yielded a little; it felt as if he’d forced the nails keeping it in place at least part-way out of their holes. Jesse kept kicking, wishing he could have been buried in his work boots, but grateful that he’d never really worn any holes in his church shoes.

The square of wood came entirely loose. Soil trickled into the coffin, piling up around his feet, but the tidal influx he’d feared did not eventuate.

Was this progress? The box that held him was open, but the way remained blocked by an enemy less solid but more treacherous; at least his wooden prison had kept his nostrils unclogged by dirt.

Jesse slid down a few inches toward the exit, until his knees struck the lid. He could not come close to touching his laces, but by pressing his left heel hard against the leather behind his right ankle, he managed to force that one shoe off. Repeating the act with his stockinged right heel took longer, but once he was unshod he felt a new kind of freedom. He’d climbed the tallest tree in Haverhill barefoot, and that had taken him much more than six feet from the safety of the ground.

He wiggled the severed panel with his feet, allowing more of the sand behind it to enter the coffin so he could push it backward, pursuing it with his body as it retreated. Once he’d moved far enough that his arms were almost fully extended when stretched toward the opposite panel, he began striking the wood with the heels of his palms. The blows were awkward, with his elbows tucked against his chest, but the extra room gave them some force, and eventually the second panel came free.

His breathing was less comfortable than ever, but he tried not to dwell on that. He dragged himself toward the new opening and reached up above the rim. The soil around his fingers was cool and a little damp, but as it had been freshly dug there were no roots entwined in it to hold it together, and when he scooped out a handful it was instantly replaced from above.

He needed to think this through. Any earth that descended fully, leaving a hollow in the ground above, would rob him of space he could never hope to reclaim. But any earth that fell in a contained fashion from the ceiling of an air-filled cavern to its floor would take nothing away, and would actually raise the cavern a little higher.

So, how to contain the fall?

He reached out and gripped the dislodged panel at the sides, then managed to prop it up, one edge resting on top of the coffin, so it formed a kind of porch. Still supporting it, he wriggled out awkwardly, thrusting his head into the dirt in fits and starts until his shoulders were free of the box but his nose and mouth remained sheltered. Then he pushed up on the panel so it tilted, sending soil flowing down over it, into the coffin.

As the dirt claimed ever more space around his body, he forced the panel upward, keeping the earth above from subsiding. By the time his arms were fully extended his chest was almost covered in soil, but it lay upon him loosely, not heavy enough to impede his breathing.

Jesse rested for a moment, conscious of the precariousness of the hollow he now inhabited. But whatever doubts he had about the wisdom of his strategy, it wasn’t as if he was in a position to concede defeat and walk away.

He proceeded to wriggle further backward, while raising his shoulders as much as he could, so that some of the soil that fell ended up beneath him, propping him up. His arms ached almost beyond endurance, but he kept them rigid; if he let the panel drop, that would be the end. By the time his waist emerged from the coffin, he was reclining at a considerable slope, with his back halfway to vertical.

He let the panel tilt more sharply, so the soil slid over it faster, and found he could push it up more easily. The weight above it was surely much less by now; his hands might well be halfway to the surface. His mouth and nostrils were full of grit, but the panel was still shielding him well enough to let him inhale without choking.

He worked his knees past the top edge of the box, then strained to straighten his hips. Loose soil cascaded down, but the panel bit through the dirt ceiling, letting him rise, until the soil had found a new home around his thighs and buttocks, supporting his stance and granting the muscles in his legs some respite.

He was giddy now, and the rest did nothing to assuage that; the air around him was all but exhausted of its potency. Jesse hesitated, but he could see no other way: he drew his arms down, lowering the panel, keeping his face beneath it but allowing the soil above to collapse into the space in front of him.

The avalanche that would decide his fate was so soft he barely heard it, but the darkness changed abruptly from black to gray. As he dropped the panel, a few handfuls of dirt fell onto his face, but the air already smelled a thousand times sweeter. He looked up, and was puzzled that he could see no stars, but then he reasoned that the moon was just out of sight, drowning out their light.

With his face no longer buried, he was tempted to spend a while just recovering his strength, but then he noticed the sand trickling down around him. He found the panel again and reached up with it, embedding it into the side of the pit to give him purchase, then he heaved himself up, pulling his feet out of the coffin, almost raising his eyes above the ground.

His next moves floundered, to a point he was almost willing to think of as comical; he did not believe he was at risk of suffocation anymore, and the mere indignity of thrashing around in a hole in the dirt rather tickled him by contrast. But then the whole business just became tiresome, and he wasn’t inclined to accept the further humiliation of bellowing for assistance.

He was also, he realized, more desperately parched than he’d ever been.

His efforts to ascend had twisted him around. He reached out reluctantly to grip the stone at the head of his grave; like the coffin, it wasn’t extravagant, but it was weighty enough not to yield completely and slide down into the hole on top of him.

He got his shoulders out of the pit, and then dragged the rest of his body up onto the ground. He lay there for a while, coughing, snorting and spitting until he was able to take a breath without immediately finding another particle that needed expelling.

When he rose to his feet and looked around, he knew exactly where he was: Horse Meadow Cemetery. His sister Charlotte was buried nearby. Jesse had been too young to have been told more than the barest details when she’d died, but now he fervently hoped that the poor child hadn’t endured anything akin to his own experience.

Though there was no one in sight, he walked over to the shelter of a tree that would hide him from the road, before disrobing and shaking the dirt out of his clothes. As he dressed again, he thought about his shoes, but decided they could wait until morning, and a penitent undertaker’s assistance.

Resolved on that final point, he set out for his parents’ house.

3

There was lamplight showing from the sitting room window, which likely meant guests were present. Jesse hesitated, unsure if a witness from outside the family would render the shock of his reappearance harder for his parents to deal with. But he could hardly pass the time wandering the streets until they were alone, and whatever he did, everyone in town was going to have to learn the truth eventually.

He knocked firmly three times, then waited. When the door opened, his father’s expression of stunned disbelief was exactly as Jesse had expected, but the only cure for that was a proper account of the situation.

“Looks like I got written off too soon,” Jesse explained. “Got some blow to my head that caused all this confusion, but didn’t come close to finishing me off.”

His father stood gaping at him, as if he were a talking dog. “It was all a mistake,” Jesse emphasized. “I ain’t never died. It just looked that way.”

This still brought no reply. Jesse was beginning to feel uncomfortable standing on the doorstep; he eased his way past his father and entered the house.

As he approached the sitting room, his mother was already rising from her chair, no doubt having overheard everything he’d said. But like his father, there was no hint of joy, or even relief, in her demeanor.

“I’m fine, Ma,” Jesse assured her. “It was a struggle getting out of that box, but ... ” He spread his arms and invited her scrutiny. “I must look a sight, but there’s nothing wrong with me a few cups of water won’t fix.”

His mother glanced off to the side, as if seeking someone else’s guidance. Jesse came closer, and saw that her companion was his fiancée.

Felicia gazed at him with a kind of astonishment that struck him as at least a little less morbid than the variety he’d experienced so far. Jesse was tongue-tied for a moment, though that was more due to the presence of his parents than any reticence she herself induced.

“I missed you sorely,” he declared, with awkward sincerity. Then he wondered if his choice of words, right at this moment, risked evoking some macabre image of an unnatural, tomb-shattering devotion, and added in clarification, “Every day in Vermont, I was waiting for the day I could get back to you.” A little romantic talk was fine, but no respectable woman wanted to hear that she’d lured a man right out of his grave.

Felicia opened her mouth as if to express a reciprocal sentiment, then caught herself. But if she wasn’t quite convinced yet that his post-funerary manifestation was entirely mundane, she seemed much further along that road than his parents.

“I’ll fetch some water,” she said.

Jesse moved further into the room to let her pass. As he turned, he saw his father eyeing her with disapproval.

“Aren’t you glad to have me back?” Jesse asked. He could sympathize with anyone confronted with a shock like this, but if he’d returned from a battlefield after a mistaken report of his demise, he would have expected a tearful embrace or two by now.

“If you didn’t die,” his father challenged him coldly, “then tell me about your journey.”

“My journey?”

His father nodded. “From Cavendish.”

“They put me in an oxcart,” Jesse replied. There’d been one at the work site that they’d used to bring in supplies. “I was resting my eyes to try to ease the headache from the blow, so I didn’t see a whole lot else.”

“Resting your eyes? For three whole days? And when the undertaker stripped you naked to put you in that suit, you didn’t feel it was time to complain?”

Jesse had no answer to that, but he was sure of his present state. “You know what a properly dead man smells like, after three days?” He offered the back of his hand, and when his father declined to sniff it, he did so himself. “Not like this. I might be due for a bath, but I ain’t putrid like spoiled meat.”

Felicia stood in the doorway with a pitcher of water and a cup. Jesse walked over and took them from her, then drank until his stomach was bloated.

“A demon has seized the body of my son,” his father proclaimed, with an air of grim resignation, as if he’d been resisting this conclusion but run out of alternatives. Jesse glanced at his mother, hoping she might choose the side of sanity in this debate, but she began to wail.

“That’s not what happened!” he said. “Just because I don’t recall one wagon ride in every last detail doesn’t mean I’m not your son!” Hadn’t he said he’d come in an oxcart? But for a thirty mile trip, when the cart was needed back at the site—

“‘The soul is like a silken thread,’” his mother declaimed wretchedly. “‘Stretching unbroken from birth to paradise.’”

“Well, I know that’s in the Scriptures,” Jesse conceded, “but what if the thread’s just a little worn? You mend what’s frayed, you don’t throw it out.”

“So you were dazed by the blow,” Felicia suggested, “but you never lost track of your sense of yourself.”

“Absolutely,” Jesse affirmed. Whatever else he’d been unsure about, he’d never had any doubts about his own name, or his own history ... except during the period in which, apparently, he hadn’t been thinking anything at all.

He turned to his father. “I know who I am. Ask me any question about my childhood. Ask me anything that only you and I could know.” He struggled to find an example to offer. “Didn’t I make a fool of myself when you tried to teach me fishing? That trout got right out of my hands and I fell flat on my face and started bawling.”

His father gazed back at him with a look of revulsion. “A demon pillaging a dead man’s memories doesn’t raise a man from the dead.”

“I never died!” Jesse insisted. “Did you listen for my breathing? My heartbeat?”

His mother said, “The life of the soul is not the life of the body.”

Jesse looked to Felicia. He could see that she believed him, but she was afraid to speak directly against his parents.

“I was dazed, and now I’ve recovered!” he pleaded. “When cousin Nathaniel became so drunk at his sister’s wedding that he lay down for the rest of the afternoon, did anyone declare he was a demon and banish him to Hell?”

His father’s face took on a hint of tenderness, but he wasn’t meeting Jesse’s gaze, he was staring past him. “I already buried my son. I don’t have it in me to mutilate his body, but the other townsfolk won’t be so reticent.”

Jesse was speechless. He’d survived an ordeal that should have garnered him at least a little admiration for his stubborn resilience – and his reward was to be threatened with a mob intent on his decapitation?

He strode out of the sitting room, and went to see the state of his own room at the back of the house. He didn’t need a lamp to find his way around; the moonlight through the window was more than enough to see by. His belongings had not yet been discarded. He packed a bag with clothes and a blanket, put on his work boots, then headed for the kitchen.

He took some bread, and a flask of water. He was still angry, but a part of him with a cooler head was wondering: perhaps his parents were looking out for his safety? Whatever stance they’d taken, they could not have fended off a throng of zealots intent on sending him back to his grave in pieces. Perhaps the only way to save his life was to shun him.

Jesse reached into the hole in the wall beside the pantry and pulled out a wad of bills. The railroad company didn’t seem to have cheated his next of kin out of the wages they’d owed him, and his funeral had clearly been suitably miserly, but he still felt reluctant to take too much. After thinking on it, he divided the sum fairly in two, and placed his parents’ half back into the hole.

As he turned, he saw Felicia standing in the doorway, the backs of her eyes catching the moonlight. She stepped forward and took his arm.

“I’ll come after you,” she whispered. “In a week or two.”

“You’ll need money for the journey,” he replied, holding out the bills he’d retained.

“I have enough. Just tell me where you’ll be.”

“New York City.” No one would know his face there, let alone that he’d clawed his way out of the ground.

“How will I find you?”

He thought for a moment. “I’ll look for work on the Hudson River Railroad.” Though he couldn’t bring a letter of recommendation, perhaps they’d give him a trial anyway, offering him the chance to demonstrate his skills. “Even if they don’t hire me, I’ll get lodgings close by.”

Jesse heard his father approaching. He had no stomach for a confrontation now, let alone putting Felicia in danger for taking his side. But as he retreated he caught the look on her face: she was every bit as resolute as he was.

On his way out of town he stopped at the cemetery and cleaned up his gravesite as best he could: straightening the tombstone and scooping dirt from the mounds he’d created back into the hole. Then he stood for a while at Charlotte’s grave, praying that she was – and had been – at peace.

He left the cemetery and headed south, walking in shadows wherever he could, turning his face to the ground and raising the collar of his coat against the chill, hoping that anyone seeing him pass would take him for a traveler and make no effort to recognize him.

Once he’d reached the open countryside, he moved more freely. He glanced up at the moon: three days skinnier than he recalled it on the night of the accident. Those days were lost to him; he couldn’t deny it. But what did that mean?

As a child, when his teachers had caught him with his mind wandering and told him that the Devil was tugging on his soul, he’d taken it as nothing but censorious nonsense. But he believed the Gospels, and when Jesus had roused the insensate whose grieving families had left them for dead, they really had been dead. Summoned to life again, they had described their journey to Heaven and back, leaving not a single moment unaccounted for.

And when Jesus had endured three days upon the cross without so much as closing His eyes, until His shamed persecutors took Him down to recuperate in the arms of His mother, He proved through His suffering that the soul could not be divided. He could have ascended into Heaven and seen His wounds healed in an instant, but instead He had stayed to show the world that whatever torment was inflicted on the flesh, the thread of consciousness itself remained unbroken.

Jesse had no memory of any trip to Heaven, nor reason to believe that the Lord had intervened to revoke his death. Of all the things his parents had been praying for, their son appearing on their doorstep had clearly not been one of them.

So what explanation remained? As far as he recalled, the Bible didn’t actually address his particular circumstances. Jesse couldn’t swear that a silver-tongued preacher might not have swayed him into believing that a man whose burial he’d witnessed with his own eyes could only have risen by demonic means – but with the shoe on his own foot it was considerably harder to take the proposition seriously. Could he actually be a demon pretending to be a man, and not even know it? Could he have stolen this body, and the dead man’s memories, with such diabolical efficiency as to deceive even himself?

Jesse gazed at the long road stretched out in front of him. Even if that were true ... who would be possessing whom? Because whoever he was, he had no intention of living an evil or dissolute life, or doing any harm to anyone. Whether he was the real Jesse Sloss, who’d risen from the grave out of sheer tenacity, or some abomination that had merely clothed itself in his flesh and his history ... Jesse Sloss’s history had somehow won the battle to dictate the terms of Jesse Sloss’s future, just as surely as if he were alive.

He knew what his plans were, and he knew Felicia would be there beside him. That was what mattered. To Hell with everything else.

4

Jesse was weary, but he took the stairs two at a time to complete the ascent more quickly. If he let himself grow sluggish, he just found himself resting on every landing, and the whole business lasted three times as long as it needed to.

When he entered the apartment, the only light was the glow from the wood stove; Felicia stood beside it, ladling broth over a simmering stew.

“That smells good,” Jesse told her. In fact, it smelled so glorious that he was ready to swoon from a mixture of hunger and gratitude.

“I’m going to have to leave as soon as I’ve eaten,” Felicia said. “They want me back at the workshop for a second shift.”

“You should have said no.”

“And lose the job completely?”

She lit a lamp before serving the food, which struck Jesse as an odd extravagance until he saw a copy of the New York Sun laid out on the table.

“Something here you want to show me?” he guessed.

“I don’t know if it will amuse you, or make you angry,” she said. “But I didn’t want you to learn about it indirectly.”

Jesse skimmed the front page, but failed to detect anything of interest. “Where is it?”

“Page six. Third column, halfway down.”

He found the piece and read it aloud. “‘The Vermont Phoenix reports that several witnesses in the town of Haverhill, NH, have spoken of their encounters with a recently deceased railway worker, Mr. Jesse Sloss. While known in life as a restrained and taciturn young man, Mr. Sloss was observed post-mortem acting wildly, brazenly and licentiously, causing a nuisance to many citizens, who were forced to drive him away with whatever implements lay to hand. His grave remains empty, but townsfolk believe their firm actions have succeeded in discouraging further visitations.’”

“No mention of sulfurous breath?” Felicia joked.

“I must not have left things as tidy as I thought at the cemetery,” Jesse concluded glumly. Or there’d been some subsidence after he was gone that filled in the coffin and left a hollow above it, prompting some busybody to investigate further.

“It’s not worth fretting over,” Felicia said. “With no portrait, and no one here knowing you as Sloss, I can’t see it causing any trouble.”

“Except that everyone in Haverhill will harbor suspicions about you now, wondering if you’re in cahoots with a corpse. And you can’t lie to your parents forever.”

“I never lied to them,” she insisted. “I’ve just omitted a few details from my letters.”

“They’re going to want to visit here, eventually.”

“Not if I visit them first,” Felicia retorted. “I’ve made it plain that I’d have no room to accommodate them, that my job keeps me busy, and that there’s nothing at all pleasant they could do to pass their time here.”

Jesse could see that he was beginning to annoy her, so he let the matter drop. When they sat down to eat, he confined his remarks to compliments about the meal.

“Sarah’s been told to come into the workshop too,” Felicia said. “Would you be able to watch her son while she’s away? He’s been poorly, and she doesn’t want him left alone.”

“Of course.” Jesse liked young Robby, and though he was too tired to face the prospect of playing games all night, if the boy was unwell he wouldn’t be intent on that either.

When Sarah let them in, Robby was lying on the couch, and even from the doorway Jesse could hear the rasping of his lungs. “That ain’t good,” he said quietly. “Has he seen a doctor?”

“Not yet,” she replied. “When I get back, if he’s no better I’ll take him to Dr. Harlow.”

Sarah looked harried, and Jesse didn’t want to add to her burden. “I’ll sit with him,” he said. “Don’t be worried.”

He bid the two women farewell, and settled in an armchair facing the couch. Sarah had left a lamp to keep her son’s attention from flagging; Robby’s face and neck glistened with sweat, and his eyes swept the room restlessly, not seeming to fix on anything.

“Would you care to hear a story?” Jesse offered.

“Sure.”

Jesse was stuck for a moment; he wanted a cheerful diversion, not a tale where the protagonists died horribly for the sake of the audience’s moral improvement. “In the town where I lived, there was a cat,” he began. “He walked on his hind legs, he wore a pair of fine britches, and he was as talkative and well-read as any of the townsfolk.”

“In your own town?” Robby asked.

“Absolutely. This cat’s name was Solomon, and everyone admired him for his lively conversation. He only had one vice: from the middle of the morning to the middle of the afternoon, he’d curl up in the sunshine and fall asleep.”

Robby laughed softly, then spluttered for a bit. Jesse was smiling himself, but then he wondered why he found the idea amusing. Of all the animals, cats had the eyes that most resembled a person’s. If a cat talked, you might be tempted to take its opinions seriously. But if it was, still, truly just a cat, it really would close its eyes and grow dead to the world for hours on end, every single day.

“One morning,” he continued, “Solomon was walking down the street when he came across two neighbors arguing. Mr. Parfitt had built a fence between his property and that of Mr. Truss, but Mr. Truss believed it took some of his own land and placed it on Mr. Parfitt’s side. The three of them discussed the matter, and after a while Solomon came up with a suggestion: Mr. Truss could build a fence of his own, on the line he believed was the true boundary. In between the fences the land would still be unreachable from both sides, so he wouldn’t gain any land for himself, but if he placed the fence correctly it would prevent Mr. Parfitt from retaining any ill-gotten acreage.”

Jesse paused. The boy’s eyelids were fluttering and his rasp was hoarser than ever. “Robby?”

“Hmm?”

“How are you feeling?”

That elicited no reply.

Jesse rose and walked over to the couch. Robby’s eyes had fallen entirely closed, and when Jesse touched his shoulder he didn’t stir. “You need to speak, or nod your head,” Jesse urged him. “I know you don’t feel well, but you need to speak.”

Jesse lifted him into his arms; he was limp, but he was certainly breathing: the sound was like a saw hacking through a log. His head lolled against Jesse’s shoulder, and the fever in his cheeks was palpable.

Jesse paced the room, torn between one instinct that told him to treat the ailing child gently and allow him as much rest as possible, and another that instructed him to rouse the boy at any cost. “You’re still with me, aren’t you?” he said. “When your Ma comes home, you can tell her the story of Solomon and the fences, from start to finish, as proof that you never been gone.”

The sound of Robby’s exhalations was growing more alarming: each breath was accompanied by a viscous gurgling, as if his lungs were pushing against something much thicker than air.

On a winter’s night, when he was barely six years old, Jesse had heard his parents arguing over his sister Charlotte’s crib. His father had wanted to call for the doctor, but his mother had begged him not to.

Why? Jesse had never understood before, but now it seemed plain: Charlotte had lost consciousness, and his mother was afraid that if the doctor saw her in that state, he’d insist on burying her.

So the doctor never came. But Charlotte had died anyway.

Still carrying Robby, Jesse walked out into the corridor and banged on the nearest door. After a moment Samuel Wilkinson emerged, looking annoyed at the disturbance.

“I’m watching him for his mother, but he’s ailing,” Jesse explained. “I’d be obliged if you could fetch Dr. Harlow.” Jesse kept the boy facing away from his neighbor, concealing his precise condition as much as possible.

“Of course,” Wilkinson agreed. “I’ll get my coat.”

Jesse returned to Sarah’s apartment and waited, walking with the boy, rocking him gently. He muttered soothing nonsense aloud and offered confused prayers from his heart. But if he was dead himself, a demon walking around in stolen flesh, why would the Lord heed him? And if Robby had already gone to Paradise, what point was there in willing him back?

When the knock came Jesse hesitated, suddenly fearful that he’d made the wrong decision, but he’d left the door unlatched. Dr. Harlow entered, and swiftly took charge of the situation.

“Put him down on the couch,” he said.

Jesse complied, then stood back while the doctor made his examination. He started rehearsing lies in his head: The boy was speaking until a minute ago. He’s surely just tired of me pressing him for conversation.

“Can you heat some water?” Harlow asked. “A pint or so. Not to boiling, but as hot as you would for a bath.”

When Jesse brought the water into the sitting room, Harlow added something to it from his bag, then he held Robby up so his face was above it. “Drape that over him, like a tent,” he said, nodding toward the blanket lying crumpled on the couch. The scented water smelled like peppermint oil, but there was something stronger too; Jesse could practically feel his own sinuses dilate as he backed away.

“He’s going to be fine,” Harlow said. “This will clear his lungs, and his own body will do the rest. He’ll just need to lie quietly for a while.”

“Thank you.”

Harlow scrutinized his face; Jesse knew his eyes were red from weeping, and he averted them self-consciously. “You’re a friend of the family?”

“Yes, sir. My name’s Jesse Cole.”

“You were right to call me, Mr. Cole. This treatment will ease his distress.”

Jesse didn’t know what to say. There was no talk of putting Robby in the ground just because he’d grown unresponsive, and no suggestion that his mother should recoil from him in horror if he emerged from this state of animalistic dormancy and tried to convince her he was still who he had always been.

“In my home town,” Jesse said, “the practice has sometimes been to rush to judgment on the question of the soul’s departure.” He looked up, wondering if he’d been unwise to raise the matter; if he forced the doctor to take a position, he might grow nervous and shift his ground.

But Harlow remained steadfast. “I have read the Bible, Mr. Cole. There is no verse I can recall that commends the premature interment of children. Or grown men and women, for that matter.”

Jesse could already hear the boy’s breathing growing more regular. “You won’t get no quarrel about that from me.”

Harlow laughed. “I wish every colleague and member of the public were as easy to persuade as you, sir.”

“I don’t claim to understand the whole business myself,” Jesse confessed. “But after eighteen hundred years of Christendom, why can’t people be settled on this?” Arguments over the finer points of theology might continue to the end of time, but that was no excuse for leaving the question of burying a person who might yet be revived down to local custom, or some layman’s opinion.

“Aristotle thought it was the absence of sleep that most clearly elevated man above the animals,” Harlow mused. “He believed that the continuity of self-awareness was crucial for the development of the rational soul. Galen, however, was quite relaxed about the matter, and believed that whenever sleep was curative it should not be discouraged. Many cultures have taken the same view; in much of Africa, there is no shame or ostracism associated with a temporary loss of consciousness.

“But in Europe, a tradition arose in which the Passion of Christ – with His eyes wide open, and His senses unflinching – was viewed in opposition to the ‘abomination’ of sleep. The Gospels themselves say nothing about sleep, but the convenience of this stance seems to have proved irresistible.”

“Convenience?” Jesse held his anger in check. “How is it convenient to bury our children alive?”

“We don’t, for the most part,” Harlow replied. “More often, we just keep quiet about the lapse. But since there are other cultures who make no secret of experiencing this condition – no more common to them than to us, but less hidden by shame – that offers us a pretext to question their humanity. To subjugate them, to steal from them, to enslave them.”

Jesse was not convinced. He could accept that greed and hypocrisy had the power to shape people’s beliefs – but weren’t there genuine questions of theology that remained, regardless?

“If we lose consciousness without dying,” he said, “then where is the soul for the duration of that event?”

“The Scriptures say the soul is unbroken,” Harlow replied. “They never say that it can’t, itself, sleep.”

“But when Jesus roused the insensate,” Jesse protested, “they all told their families that they’d been to Heaven!”

“They did indeed. But why would He have bothered rousing anyone who was, in fact, merely asleep, and would have woken of their own accord?”

That did make some sense, but it only left Jesse more frustrated. “You have an answer for everything. But an awful lot of folks see it very differently.”

“We understand many things imperfectly,” Harlow conceded. “But however contentious a matter might be, my own counsel would always be to avoid taking a position that justifies barbarity.”

He motioned to Jesse to approach and take the blanket away. Together they set the pan of water aside and eased Robby onto the couch.

“What do I owe you?” Jesse asked.

“A quarter. That will cover these drops, which you can administer the same way again if the congestion recurs.”

Jesse handed over the payment, and Harlow insisted on writing out a receipt.

“What should I tell the boy’s mother?” Jesse asked.

“Just tell her about the treatment I administered, that the child is recovering, and that I recommended rest. The less emphasis you place on the nature of that rest, the less it should trouble her – but from the dealings I’ve had with her in the past, I doubt there’s anything to fear in that regard.”

As Jesse closed the door, he felt as if he’d spent the last half hour in an entirely different world, where every malign force that had upended his life since the accident could be banished through nothing more than the application of reason and moderation.

It was an appealing place to visit. But it was not the world he inhabited.

5

“Mr. Cole?” someone shouted. “A very good evening to you, sir!”

Jesse turned to see a carriage moving down the street beside him, with a well-dressed but burly-looking man leaning out the window.

“What can I do for you?” Jesse asked, unsure how this stranger had come by his name. If he worked for the railroad company, Jesse had no memory of ever seeing him there.

“My employer would like to meet you, to discuss a business proposition.”

Jesse could only think of one thing that singled him out from the other workers heading home from their shifts. He shook his head apologetically. “Thank you, but I’m satisfied with my present position.”

The man was undeterred, and continued with a firm cheerfulness. “Can I ask you to reconsider? My employer only wants a few minutes of your time, and the outcome could be very profitable for you.”

Jesse smiled politely. “Please give your employer my regards, and my humble thanks for his generosity. But I’m expected in my home for dinner, and my wife will be concerned if I’m tardy.”

“Just a few minutes, Mr. Sloss,” the man insisted. “Sorry, my mistake – of course you’re going by Cole now.”

Jesse stopped walking, and the driver brought the carriage to a halt.

“What do you want from me?” he asked.

“Exactly what I said. Just meet this gentleman and hear him out. Do him that courtesy, and you won’t be troubled again.”

Jesse considered asking what the cost of him refusing would be, but thought better of it. “Very well,” he said.

The man opened the carriage door and Jesse joined him.

“My name’s Stang.” He shook Jesse’s hand firmly then banged the roof of the carriage, and the driver set the horses trotting again. “Don’t worry, it’s a short trip.” They turned into Broadway, heading south.

“What is it you do, Mr. Stang?”

“Me?” He gave a puzzled smile, as if the question was one he’d never been asked before. “Mostly, I look into things. Get to the bottom of them, so to speak.”

“So you’re a philosopher?” Jesse said dryly.

Stang was amused. “I believe I am. I should have that printed on my business cards: G. C. Stang Esquire, Practical Philosopher.”

Jesse felt no need to inquire exactly who had sought Stang’s aid in getting to the bottom of the strange reports out of Haverhill. He’d had a suspicion from the start, and the direction of their journey was doing nothing to dispel it.

They pulled up outside the Museum on the corner of Broadway and Ann Street. Dusk had fallen, and the building’s white façade was already a dazzle of limelight.

“It is painful to the eyes this close,” Stang conceded, shielding his own as they disembarked. “But it does catch the attention from quite a distance.”

Jesse could see a stream of enthusiastic customers filing into the street entrance, but Stang led him around the building, into an alley. He fished a keyring out of his pocket and opened a gate that blocked their way, then a door that gave admittance to the building itself. The hubbub of the crowd, approaching and within, could still be heard, muted, as they took three flights of carpeted stairs, with gas lighting flickering on every landing.

They walked down a short corridor to an antechamber, where a young man glanced up from a ledger he was writing in and nodded to Stang. “He’s expecting you.”

Stang knocked on the office door, and a voice replied, “Enter!” But after holding the door wide open, he hung back, leaving Jesse to go in alone.

Barnum rose from his desk and approached to shake Jesse’s hand, then ushered him into an armchair. “I’m so pleased to meet you, Mr. Sloss!” he enthused.

“Likewise,” Jesse replied, seeing little value in denying his identity. It was hard not to be distracted by all the garish posters plastered over the walls; even through the corner of his eye, the foot-high rendering of FEEJEE MERMAID! and GENERAL TOM THUMB! forced their way into his attention.

“I shall get directly to the point,” Barnum said. “As soon as I heard your story, I knew it could be the basis for a highly educative and entertaining performance. We would commence with a dramatic portrayal of the events leading up to your accident, followed by a live re-enactment of your escape from the grave. A tank full of soil, with one side built of sturdy glass, would allow the audience to observe every detail as you burrow your way to freedom. I have even procured the original coffin, for the sake of ensuring the utmost authenticity.”

Jesse doubted that, but it was the least of his concerns. “To what end would I involve myself in any of this tomfoolery?”

“I’d pay you fifty dollars a week, Mr. Sloss.”

“And what good would that do me, once I’m recognized on the street as a dead man? As a corpse animated by a demon?”

Barnum laughed. “This is New York! No one will come after you with pitch-forks! People will be scandalized, or moved to pity, as their own temperaments and beliefs dictate, but no one has ever died from the public’s fascination.”

Fifty dollars a week. Jesse sat staring at the carpet, wondering if it might actually be the right thing to do. Once people tired of the act, he could grow a beard and change his name again. He and Felicia could buy a house in a small town somewhere; she’d write poetry and he’d farm hogs, and their children need never have an inkling of his history.

“After the thrill of the escape,” Barnum continued, “you would have the opportunity to address the audience directly, and solemnly recount your experience of death. The blinding light, the pearly gates ... whatever details you feel comfortable disclosing.”

“There are no details to disclose,” Jesse replied. “That time was a blank page for me.”

“Then I’d be happy to help scrawl a little ink on it,” Barnum offered. “I’m sure we could agree on an account that respects all of your own religious sensibilities, while offering the customers something to appeal to their hunger for both wonder and piety.”

Jesse glanced up at the posters of Barnum’s past attractions, then recalled the precise source of the unease that had been lingering at the back of his mind.

“I don’t see one for Joice Heth,” he said. He’d only been a boy when he’d heard his parents discussing the exhibit, but their disgust for the man behind it had been clear. “‘The Greatest Curiosity in the World.’ Wasn’t that what you called her? Surely she deserves a place on your wall?”

Barnum shifted in his chair. “That was fifteen years ago. These days, I’m serving a more refined clientele. In a few months, I’ll be bringing the most renowned singer in Europe to these shores, for the very first time—”

Jesse cut him off. “You bought an old, blind slave woman, pulled out all her teeth, and paraded her around as General Washington’s nursemaid.”

“I leased her,” Barnum corrected him tetchily. “Look, the whole business was a youthful misjudgment, I admit that.”

More of the story was coming back to Jesse now. “Then you cut her up! When she died, you cut her up, and took money to let people watch!”

“A reputable surgeon performed the autopsy,” Barnum stressed. “Purely to settle the question of her age. Having benefited from her claims to be one hundred and sixty years old, I owed it to the public to resolve the matter, openly and honestly.”

Jesse rose to his feet. “Forgive me, sir, but I think our business is concluded.”

“Don’t be such a hypocrite,” Barnum said sharply. “In a perfect world, we might all be ardent abolitionists, but no one’s principles are quite as firm as they pretend them to be. For example, I’m told that your wife works in the garment district.”

“What of it?” Jesse demanded.

“You don’t know?” Barnum cackled. “Whose clothes do you think she’s making – those crude things whipped up in five minutes? Poor folk make their own, gentlemen use tailors. So whose bodies do you think she’s cutting her cloth for?”

Jesse turned and walked to the door.

“Sit down!” Barnum said impatiently. “If you agree to my proposal, it will make you a small fortune. But either way, your secret’s coming out. Either you’ll see your portrait on a poster – knowing that it’s drawing customers who’ll contribute handsomely to your livelihood – or you’ll see it in the papers, and know it’s doing nothing but bringing suspicion and ire down on your head. That’s your choice, Mr. Sloss. What’s it to be?”

6

Jesse was spreading ballast when the foreman, Stephenson, came and drew him aside. “Put your shovel in the tool shed, then go to the office and collect your wages. You won’t be needed anymore.”

Jesse glanced back at the rest of the work gang for support, but no one would meet his gaze. These brawny, stalwart men who’d worked and joked beside him for months now looked like a gaggle of grimy-faced urchins who’d broken a window but lacked the courage to own up to it. “Why? What have I done wrong?”

“Nothing,” Stephenson replied. “But the office hired a few too many hands, and you’re surplus to requirements.”

“You know that’s not true.” They were at least a week behind schedule. “Are you going to look me in the eye and tell me you believe I’m some kind of spawn of Hell?”

Stephenson winced. “Don’t mistake me for a Bible-clutching spinster. You’re a hard worker, and you never gave me any trouble; I don’t care if you were buried in New Hampshire or not. But most of the men think you’re bad luck. We’ve had three accidents since you joined—”

“And how many in the same time before that?” Jesse demanded.

Stephenson shook his head. “It’s out of my hands, Cole. Collect your wages.”

As Jesse headed home, it began snowing gently. If anyone on the street recognized him, they showed no interest, let alone fear or revulsion. Most people had more important things to worry about than foolish stories in the newspapers. He’d find another job, where his fellow workers were less prone to childish superstitions.

When he arrived at the apartment, he saw that someone had attempted to paint an extensive passage of text on the door, but they had lacked the skill to execute such detailed work while preventing the letters from running, and the result was an incomprehensible blur. The smudge at the lower right looked like it might have been a reference to chapter and verse, but however much Jesse squinted at it, it refused to resolve into anything decipherable. He fetched rags and a bucket of water and set about scrubbing off the mess.

When he was done, he made himself useful, starting a meal cooking so it would be ready when Felicia arrived home.

“What’s this?” she asked as she entered the apartment, pleased for a moment, but then wary. “How did you find the time?”

Jesse hesitated, contemplating an equivocal answer that would spare her from worry, but then he realized how transparent any lie would be and explained what had happened.

“Never mind,” she said, though Jesse could see her brow furrow and her shoulders slump. “I’ll go back for another shift.”

“You don’t need to do that.”

“We need to pay the rent,” Felicia replied.

“If no one will hire me in New York, we can move to another town,” Jesse suggested. “Surely even Barnum can’t afford to get my picture into every newspaper in the country. And once his Swedish nightingale is here, he’ll be busy with her, and have no more time to waste on me.”

Felicia said, “I’m famished. Will you let me serve dinner?”

After Felicia had left for the workshop, Jesse sat in the dark. Maybe he’d done the wrong thing by digging his way out. Maybe God had intended him to surrender his pride and die in that coffin, after all.

And every sick child, as well? But perhaps the innocent never woke in their graves; they just slipped away untroubled. He must have sinned, and been tested, and failed that test. But if this was his Purgatory, what had Felicia ever done to be forced to share it with him? Was her love and loyalty toward him a crime against God?

Someone pounded on the door. Jesse remained still for a moment, unsure if he was fit for company, but then the urgency of the summons shook him out of his self-pity. If a neighbor was sick, he wasn’t going to skulk in the dark, refusing to acknowledge them.

But the caller had already grown impatient. “We know you’re in there, Sloss!” a man’s voice bellowed. “It’s time to return to the grave!”

Jesse’s own morbid rumination on the subject suddenly lost its appeal; the jolt of vigor to his blood that these threatening words induced did not feel sinful in the least. He swung the door open, fists balled, prepared to beat some common courtesy into this insolent stranger’s jaw.

A dozen men stood before him in the corridor, all of them holding wooden clubs. As the nearest approached, Jesse grabbed him by the lapels and flung him back against his comrades, unbalancing them. Then he stepped back inside and bolted the door.

He ran to the window and looked down, but there was a group of men idling on the street below – too many to be gathered by chance for some other purpose. He wondered if the whole mob might be a ruse that Barnum had contrived, to frighten him into seeking the protection of a wealthy benefactor; in that case they would be under strict instructions to do him no actual harm. But it seemed more likely that the spiteful exposure of his secret had summoned up genuine antipathies in a small group of citizens who were oblivious to Barnum’s schemes, and quite prepared to destroy this side-show freak without the least concern for his potential earnings.

“Come out, you coward!” the same man taunted him. There was an impact, less harsh to the ear than the pounding of a fist, that nonetheless made the door rattle in its frame; Jesse suspected one or more shoulders brought hard against it. The insult rankled, but if he was serious about purging himself of pride, pretending he could fight his way past twelve men with clubs would not be much of a step in that direction, let alone a successful strategy for deferring his demise.

Jesse took a dining chair and placed it beneath the hatch that led into the roof; he moved the cover aside, but then climbed down and put the chair back in its proper place, so it would not guide his persecutors’ gaze.

Then he stood beneath the opening in the ceiling, muttered a short prayer, and sprung up as high as he could.

His fingers caught the edge of the hole. He pulled himself into the roof, brushed the hatch cover clean with the unsoiled back of his hand, and carefully replaced it.

The roof space was dark, but after a few seconds the grayness resolved into an orderly arrangement of wooden beams, coated in dust and draped in cobwebs. The Lord hadn’t put a second sun in the sky, but there was no denying that He had given his children the eyes of a nocturnal hunter.

Jesse knew it would be unwise to linger, but he was unsure exactly where to go. If he tried to lift the tiles above him, he’d risk making a noise and drawing attention to himself, and he doubted he could reach the ground safely from the rooftop in any case. He pictured the apartments directly below; Sarah and Robby were around a bend in the corridor, out of sight of the mob gathered at his door.

He moved as quietly as he could, keeping his knees and forearms supported by solid beams as he made his way across his neighbors’ ceilings. He could have sworn he’d heard rats and other animals up here in the past, but if they were present now they were doing their best to hide from the intruder.

When he reached what he hoped was the right hatch, he paused to listen. He heard Sarah speak, though her words were muffled, then Robby replied. Would they cry out in alarm if he emerged before them? Jesse hadn’t spoken to Sarah since the newspapers had done Barnum’s dirty work; he had no idea how she would receive him.

He lifted the cover and lowered his head into the room, with a finger to his lips. Robby saw him first and laughed with delight; Sarah looked up, startled, but then recovered her composure and bent to shush her son.

Then she fetched a chair and Jesse descended into the room.

“Thank you,” he whispered.

“It’s the least I can do,” she replied. “I don’t know where those louts came from, but I promise you we’re all on your side.”

Jesse lowered his eyes in gratitude, though he wasn’t sure just who that “we” encompassed.

He walked over to the door and listened. He could only hear snatches of shouted curses and commands exchanged within the mob, but it sounded as if they’d breached his apartment and were making a thorough search.

“You can stay here as long as you like,” Sarah said.

“That might not be safe for any of us,” he decided. “Better that I move on, and do it quickly before they come looking.”

“They left people posted at the entrance,” Sarah warned him. “You can’t just walk out.”

“I see.” Jesse moved to the window and looked down; he was on a side of the building now different from his own, and there was no one in the alley below.

“That’s too dangerous!” Sarah protested.

Jesse glanced back at her, a little annoyed by her solicitousness, but on reflection he had to admit that she was probably correct. “What, then?”

“I have friends, two stories down, who might shelter you,” she said. “And if you don’t want to stay, it’s a much smaller drop from there.”

“Very well.”

Sarah bent down and kissed Robby on the forehead. “I’ll be back in a minute. Just stay here quietly.”

Jesse followed her out. The ruckus from his apartment was growing louder, the tone of the exchanges more confused and resentful. As they approached the stairwell he was afraid they’d find yet another group of look-outs waiting, but the way was clear.

When Sarah knocked on her friends’ door a man answered; a woman and three young children were visible behind him.

“William, this is Jesse Cole,” Sarah explained. “He saved my son’s life, and now those ruffians are after him.” She gestured upward, as if that was enough to make the source of the danger clear; apparently everyone in the building was aware of the men’s presence, even if the news hadn’t traveled quickly enough to alert their actual target.

William shook Jesse’s hand and gestured for them to enter. Jesse nodded to the man’s wife, who regarded him with suspicion.

“I apologize for the imposition,” Jesse said. “I’m only here to ask leave to depart through your window, so as not to end the night with my skull in pieces.”

“The kitchen would offer the easiest exit,” William said, leading the way.

“You’ll look out for Felicia?” Jesse asked Sarah. He wasn’t sure he’d get a chance to meet up with her before she returned.

“I’ll make certain she’s out of harm’s way,” Sarah promised.

William opened the kitchen window. There was a drainpipe beside it; Jesse took his boots off and dropped them into the alley, then clambered out. There was only one story further to the ground, but he clung firmly to the pipe and moved down slowly all the way, knowing that if he so much as sprained an ankle it might be the death of him.

In the alley, he got his boots back on and crept to the corner of the building. As Sarah had warned him, there was a group of six men waiting outside the street entrance, and while some were intent on watching the doorway, others were glancing idly in all directions, understandably bored by their task.

Jesse looked around the alley for anything he could use as a club of his own, but then he set aside the urge to teach these men a lesson and forced himself to be content with the prospect of slipping their net. He waited until the lookouts least interested in the doorway were occupied with the sight of an approaching carriage, and then he strode out of the alley onto the street and turned away from the building. He proceeded at a brisk but dignified pace, confident that no one had seen him emerge from the alley, and hoping they were too distracted to reason that there was nowhere else he could have come from.

That proved too optimistic. He had not gone far when he heard heavy footfalls approaching; as they drew closer he glanced back and saw that two men had split from the group to investigate his identity. Jesse was still disinclined to flee; the published likeness had been imperfect, and there was a chance that if he kept his nerve and merely scowled with annoyance at these fools, they would retain enough doubt to hesitate before bludgeoning a stranger on a public street.

“Jesse Sloss?” one of the men asked breathlessly as he came alongside Jesse’s shoulder.

“My name’s Stephenson,” Jesse replied, without stopping.

“I don’t think so,” the other remarked, flanking him. Both clutched at his arms; he broke free, stepped back, spread his arms across their shoulders as if in a brotherly embrace, then pushed the two men hard into each other. They both lost their balance and fell to the sidewalk; Jesse skirted around them and walked on, then glanced back to see that the other four were now running toward him. Reluctantly, he broke into a run himself, his face burning at the prospect of onlookers attributing his undignified haste to guilt, or cowardice.

After two blocks, only two of his pursuers remained in sight, but they were gaining on him, and both were carrying clubs. Jesse cursed himself for his half-hearted start to the race, and redoubled his efforts to lose them, but willing himself more speed was not enough to attain it.

“Mr. Cole?” someone called from the street. “Can I assist you?” Jesse looked toward the carriage, imprecations ready on his lips, sure that it could only be Stang or some other lackey sent by Barnum to scoop him up like an animal cornered by hounds. But after staring angrily for a moment, he realized his mistake.

“Dr. Harlow?”

Harlow signaled to the driver to halt the carriage. Jesse approached, still suspicious.

“Did you just chance to find me here,” he asked, “or did someone send you?”

“Half the neighborhood is talking about the commotion at your building,” Harlow replied. “I did come by to see if my services were needed, and then I saw you fleeing.” He poked his head out of the carriage and glanced down the street at the two men approaching. “You might want to get in now, sir, if that’s your intention.”

7

“Is there somewhere I can take you?” Dr. Harlow asked, once the shouted curses had receded into the distance.

“The garment district,” Jesse replied. “I need to find my wife.”

Harlow conveyed these instructions to the driver, then settled back in his seat. “I was surprised to see the papers all latching on to your private affairs in such detail,” he said. “These stories are usually curiosity pieces, with third-hand reports from unreliable witnesses.”

Jesse described his encounter with Barnum, and his suspicions about the aftermath.

“What an unpleasant fellow,” Harlow commiserated.

“He’s cost me my job and a roof over my head, at least for the moment.”

“Do you have friends you can stay with?”

“The ones I trust are all in that building, where I’d just be bringing danger to them.”

“Hmm.”

They reached the place where Felicia worked. Jesse was in two minds about entering the premises; he didn’t want to poison Felicia’s reputation with her fellow workers. Then he spotted one of her friends, Jane Sewell, whom he’d already met previously, departing from the building. He left the carriage and approached her.

“Miss Sewell? I beg your pardon, but could I trouble you for a moment?”

“Mr. Cole.” She paused, smiling, then guessed his intentions. “You’re looking for your wife? Felicia left half an hour ago; she wanted a full shift, but it hadn’t been arranged for her, so the foreman was only able to give her some odds and ends.”

Jesse thanked her and returned to Harlow. “She’ll be home by now,” he said. “But I’m hoping one of my neighbors will have taken her in.” Much as he wanted to ride up and sweep her away, his presence back at the building would risk the louts seeing her in his company, and do nothing to make her safer.

“Where to now?” Harlow enquired.

“Do you know of any boarding house where the landlord doesn’t read the newspapers?” It was snowing heavily now, and Jesse wasn’t keen to spend the night huddled in an alleyway.

Harlow said, “I know a place where you’ll be safe, if you don’t mind sharing a basement with another guest.”

“I’d be grateful for any kind of shelter,” Jesse replied.

“It’s not too far,” Harlow assured him.

Jesse leaned back and closed his eyes, listening to the steady clop as the carriage made its way north, trying to stay thankful for his blessings. He might have died at the hands of the rabble, but he hadn’t. Felicia would be safe with Sarah. Things seemed bleak, but it was surely only temporary.

“We’re here,” Harlow said. They’d stopped beside an alleyway, and he pointed out the stairs leading down to the basement’s back entrance.

“Who owns this place?” Jesse asked.

“Friends of mine,” Harlow replied. “They’re always happy to offer temporary accommodation. But they’re busy folk, so I hope you won’t mind if I don’t make introductions.”

“So long as I’m not trespassing, I’ll take your word for it.”

Harlow told him where he could find the key, and Jesse bid him farewell. He moved quickly through the snow, wishing he had fled in warmer clothes and wondering if anything remained of his possessions.

Harlow had mentioned that there might be another guest present, so Jesse gave a warning knock first and called out, “I’m an acquaintance of Dr. Harlow. He believed the building’s owners would be agreeable if I lodged here for the night.” There was no reply, so he unlocked the door and stepped inside.

The room was entirely unlit, so Jesse left the door open until he’d apprised himself of the layout of the furniture: a table, a couple of chairs, a tattered couch, and a wooden cabinet. A man was seated in one of the chairs, regarding him warily.

“Good evening,” Jesse said. “I’m sorry for intruding.”

“Good evening,” the man replied. “Could you close the door, lest we both freeze to death.”

Jesse obliged him, and introduced himself.

“My name’s Joshua,” the man replied. “You want me to light a candle?”

“It might help me avoid breaking my neck.” Jesse had finally realized that the basement wasn’t just poorly illuminated by virtue of its architecture: the windows had actually been painted over.

He waited, listening to Joshua move about, then he heard the flint strike and a candle flame appeared. Joshua placed the candlestick on the table, then motioned to Jesse to take a seat.

“There’s some bread and fruit if you’re hungry, and some water,” Joshua said.

“Thank you, but I ate not long ago.”

“Hmm.” Joshua had a few days’ growth of beard, flecked with gray, and from the look of his clothes he had been traveling for a while. “You heading to Canada too?”

Jesse wasn’t sure if this was meant as a joke, though he supposed there might be a handful of white men who’d been caught out aiding fugitives, and sought to escape their punishment that way. “I hope not,” he replied. “I ain’t done nothing that requires that kind of remedy, unless I’m suffering from some seriously misplaced optimism.”

Joshua laughed. “So can I ask what you did do, if that ain’t impolite?”

Jesse hesitated, unsure of the wisdom of risking being seen yet again as a bearer of bad luck. “I fell asleep,” he said. “For so long that they put me in the ground. And now that word’s got out, a few folk seem to think I need to go back there.”

“Hmm.” Joshua showed no sign of any particular opinion on the subject.

“You have friends who made it to Canada?” Jesse asked.

Joshua nodded. “I only wish I followed them sooner, before the whole thing got harder.” Jesse took a moment to catch his meaning: the new Federal law meant that even in the free states, the authorities were obliged to assist with any fugitive’s return. It was illegal to own a slave in New York, but it was also illegal not to send a man back into slavery.

Jesse had been a child when he’d first heard a pastor preaching about the wickedness of the world, when a man could own another as if he were an animal. But at the time, it had all seemed as distant from his own life as stories about Moses and the Pharaoh. The few freed slaves he’d worked beside later had never spoken in his presence about their past, and he’d let that lull him into a kind of indifference.

But now he was sitting three feet away from a man who could be seized off the street and dragged away in chains, with the blessing of the law. Moses was dust in the desert; Joshua was flesh and blood, right before his eyes.

“I’ll tell you one thing,” Joshua said. “I seen men work so long and hard it almost killed them. But some of them, when it came to rest, fell into a deeper rest. For an hour or two, for half a day, they might have been dead. But then they stood up and walked among us, like nothing ever happened.”

“And how did that strike you?” Jesse asked. “Did you fear them?”

“Fear them?” Joshua shook his head. “Only thing I felt about that was envy.”

8

Around four o’clock in the morning, someone knocked on the door and spoke a phrase that Joshua said he’d been told to expect, and he departed on the next leg of his journey. Jesse found a blanket in a corner of the basement and wrapped it around himself, then he sat in the dark trying to decide what to do next.

An hour or so later, just as he was thinking of braving the cold, there was another knock. “It’s Harlow, Mr. Cole. Could we speak for a moment?”

Jesse relit the candle, then he let the doctor in and offered him a chair, as if the basement were his own front parlor.

“I’ve been thinking about your situation,” Harlow began. “Barnum has made you notorious, in the hope that you’ll allow him to exploit that for his own gain, but it occurs to me that you might choose to turn it to your own advantage instead.”

“In what way?”

“I would suppose that you wish to be able to live a normal life again, with no need to conceal your identity. If you embarked upon your own speaking tour, to clarify for the public the true nature of your experience, you might succeed in winning them over.”

“Winning them over?” Jesse laughed. “Just like that?”

“Not everyone,” Harlow conceded. “But you have the opportunity to exert a considerable influence on the way the phenomenon of sleep is perceived. It’s not absurd to hope that events like last night’s hostilities could be reduced to rare exceptions.”

“Or I could choose a new name,” Jesse proposed, “find a small town, cook up a good story, and invest in some elaborate sideburns.”

“Then nothing changes – and the next man or woman who gets a blow to the head is left to take their chances trying to dig their way to the surface.”

Jesse didn’t reply. Since leaving Haverhill, he’d done his best to pretend that his awakening beneath the ground was as rare as his emergence, even though every trace of common sense told him that the latter could be a rarity even if the former was happening daily.

“How am I meant to organize a speaking tour?” he asked scornfully. “I don’t own anything but the clothes I’m standing in.”

“I can help you,” Harlow replied. “I can make introductions to other abolitionists who would be eager to see your message disseminated.”

“Abolitionists?” Jesse was bemused. “You think my story is going to win anyone over to that cause? If they ain’t been moved by hearing Mr. Douglass, what will they care about a white man from New Hampshire who spent a few minutes in a coffin?”

Harlow said, “The abolitionist movement, and the wider populace, have a complicated patchwork of beliefs. Some people have convinced themselves that they can justify slavery through the tenet that sleep implies the absence of a soul, combined with the myth that every child in Africa catches an endemic disease that robs them of their consciousness. But there is also a strand of vehement abolitionists who nonetheless cling to the very same tenet, and choose instead to insist that no one on God’s earth ever sleeps. And since there is ample evidence that they’re mistaken in that belief, they waste their time and energy trying to refute the irrefutable, undermining the credibility of the movement.”

Jesse couldn’t argue with him about the second group; his own parents, while abhorring slavery, had clearly reconciled that abhorrence with their congregation’s uncompromising attitude to sleep. And though they’d tied their beliefs into a strange kind of knot, it might not be beyond untying.

But the first? “You really think there’s a single slave-holder who’ll come over to the light, just because I can convince an audience of waverers and ditherers that I’ve still got a soul?” he asked. “If a plantation owner can’t acknowledge that trait in the people in whose company he’s spent his whole life ... ”

Harlow said, “The house that needs demolishing has planks running in every direction. If someone wants to find a pretext to keep slaves, when we kick away the planks about sleep, they’ll take their support from some other nonsense about the shape of people’s skulls, or some Biblical passage about the Children of Ham. Believe me, I don’t imagine for one second that you hold the match that can burn the whole thing down. But if you can help weaken it, even slightly – while aiding your own situation, and discouraging other premature burials – what is there to lose?”

Jesse snorted. “I might just aggravate a whole lot of people, while making it harder to escape their attention. What’s to stop the kind of zealot who tried to kill me last night from using this for a second try?”

“You think Mr. Douglass doesn’t attract rather more numerous and fervent critics?” Harlow replied. “We know how to protect our guests.”

“And how am I meant to make a living while I’m gallivanting around?”

“We’d feed and shelter you,” Harlow said. “And your wife, if she wished to accompany you, or we could help find her somewhere safe to live in New York if she preferred to stay.”

“This is just like Barnum’s offer,” Jesse grumbled, “except I don’t end up a rich man at the end.”

Harlow smiled. “I think you know that’s not true.”

Jesse said, “If you’ll excuse me, I need to talk to my wife.”

He declined the offer of a carriage ride, and made his way on foot to a corner that he knew Felicia would pass. When he spotted her approaching, she was with Sarah, who went ahead and left them to talk.

“There are still people outside the building,” Felicia said, as they took shelter from the snow beneath an awning. “Lurking about, trying to look as if they’re doing something else. But I’ve been back to the apartment and moved most of our things to Sarah’s.” She held up a bag she’d been carrying. “There are some clothes of yours in here. A warm coat, a scarf ... ”

Jesse took the bag, and tried to read her face. “Do you want to be rid of me?”

“No!” She took his hand. “Don’t ask me that again, or there’ll be trouble between us.”

“Do you want to leave town?”

“I’m not sure,” she said. “I still have the job, and I don’t think they’re going to dismiss me. A few of the workers recognized the man in the papers as being my husband, but most of them are my friends, and the others don’t seem all that interested in making trouble just for the sake of it.”

Jesse described Harlow’s proposal. “If I agreed, it might be for two or three months.”

“I’d be fine here,” Felicia assured him. “Sarah would be happy for the company, and someone to share the rent.”

“All right.” Jesse had half wished she’d given him an excuse to abandon the idea. “Do you think it’s wise, though? Me blabbing my mouth off about the whole thing?”

Felicia said, “If it had stayed a secret, all the better. But it didn’t, and we can’t undo that. If you can’t speak up for yourself against the nonsense people are spreading about you, it might never go away. So if you have a chance to set things straight, why not take it?”

9

“It was like stepping out of an impenetrable fog,” Jesse said. “It was dark inside the coffin, but I could see myself in my mind’s eye, plain as ever. I could feel the wood against my back. I could smell the pine boards, and the dirt around them.”

He looked out across the pews of the small church hall. In the front row, someone coughed.

“At first, I thought I might be dead,” he confessed. “But then I got so desperate to breathe fresh air, that didn’t make any sense. So I did what it took to free myself.”

He went on to describe the events of that night, as truthfully as he could without speaking ill of his parents or dragging Felicia into the story. He sketched his journey into exile, his life in New York, the offer from Barnum, the mob at his door.

“I ain’t no physician,” he said. “And I ain’t no theologian. All I know is, I’m the very same person as I was before the accident. Our Lord didn’t close His eyes for the three days He hung upon the cross, but I don’t recall one word in the Gospels saying that if we sinners fall short of that divine endurance, we are damned. All I’m asking for is the right to keep living the life that God’s grace allowed me to resume – and for every decent Christian to think twice before they consign their child, or their mother, or their brother to the grave, without asking if that grace is being offered to them, as it was to me.”

Jesse lowered his eyes and stared at the lectern. There was a smattering of polite applause. Harlow joined him, and clasped him on the shoulder. “Does anyone have a question for Mr. Sloss?”

The cougher in the front row cleared his throat, but not to speak. Jesse looked up at the unsmiling faces, trying to guess which of them were gazing at him sourly because they seriously doubted that he possessed an immortal soul, and which were merely skeptical that he’d spent a single moment six feet underground.

“Mr. Sloss,” a red-cheeked man in a velvet waistcoat began, “can you explain to us how you know you are the same person as you were before the accident?”

“I don’t get your meaning, sir.”

“When I think back over my own life,” the man replied, “I can always follow the thread. I can recall the events of yesterday, and the day before, and so on. Far enough back, the fine details might be lost in the mists of childhood, but I know who I am because I have always been here, keeping watch, without interruption. If I ask myself, ‘Am I myself?’ the answer is indisputable. Because a dutiful sentry knows when no one came, or departed, beneath his gaze.”

“And if a sentry looks away for one moment,” Jesse replied, “if his mind wanders, should the house he was guarding be burned to the ground? If his neighbors look inside and find no enemy, but just the same old furniture and keepsakes as ever, what harm has been done?”

“But is that all we are, sir? Furniture and keepsakes?”

Jesse was starting to get a headache; these amateur philosophers always introduced some clumsy metaphor of their own choosing, and then he fell into the trap of adopting it himself, as if he had agreed that it captured the truth perfectly.

“I have the same memories and dispositions as ever,” he said. “And the same soul watching over them. If you doubt that, tell me: who is it you think you’re addressing right now? Do you believe that some unholy spirit would stand before you in the Lord’s house, and hear the Lord’s word without flinching?”

“Perhaps not,” the man conceded. “Perhaps I am addressing no spirit at all. A dog or a horse, though it sleeps, retains memories of its training, and persists in its disposition, waking to perform the same tasks that it learned long ago, with the same meekness or stubbornness as ever.”

“Does your dog debate the nature of its spirit with you?” Jesse retorted.

“No. But it never housed an intelligence capable of that skill. Your body may have learned the reflexes of rational speech while a soul resided within it. That those reflexes remain proves nothing – unless your aim is to convince us that those reflexes are all we are.”

Jesse’s patience deserted him. “And can you prove to this gathering that you possess any aspect of humanity yourself, beyond the reflexes you acquired years ago? Or do you demand the benefit of the doubt, afforded to you out of common decency, but resting in the end on your assurances alone?”

The man laughed, perplexed. “But I am not the one boasting of the absence of a soul, for three whole days in succession! If you had been accused of that, and angrily denied it, I would indeed have given you the benefit of the doubt. But instead you are touring the country, eagerly affirming everything said against you. That clearly shifts the onus onto you, sir.”

Jesse just wanted to strike him now. Harlow must have sensed this; he stepped forward and announced that the talk was finished, thanked the audience and bid them good night.

“There’ll always be good days and bad days,” he said, as they left the hall and headed across town. “And remember, it’s often the people with nothing to say who are taking you most seriously. They don’t need to be sobbing in the aisles to be thinking about some relative who might have been buried too soon, or making an oath to themselves that their own child will never experience what you went through.”

“Maybe,” Jesse replied. He didn’t doubt the doctor’s reasoning, but the hope was too abstract to offer him much encouragement. He was starting to wonder if he would have been better off giving in to Barnum’s extortion; however despicable the man, he knew how to whip up the crowds and incite their passion. Jesse had never imagined himself to be any kind of orator, but if he was just a carnival strongman who had kicked his way out of a box in the ground, why had he held himself up as too high and mighty for Barnum’s menagerie?

“Mr. Sloss? Dr. Harlow?”

Jesse turned. A man had followed them from the hall, no doubt intent on pursuing the subject of the talk further. “My name’s Morton,” he said, approaching. “Forgive me for troubling you on your way to your lodgings, but there’s a matter I hope to discuss with you, that I had no wish to disclose to all and sundry.”

Harlow said, “That’s quite all right, sir. I’m sure you’d be welcome to join us for dinner.”

While in Hartford, Jesse and Harlow were staying at the house of Mr. and Mrs. Betts and their three children, and they obligingly set an extra plate for their new guest. In response to their polite enquiries, Morton revealed that he was from Massachusetts, and described his profession as dentistry, but throughout the meal, and in the conversation that followed, he confined himself to vague pleasantries. Eventually, the members of the family made excuses to depart to other rooms, allowing the three of them some privacy.

“I believe you have persuaded me that a man can succumb to unconsciousness without damage to his body, or his wits, or his immortal soul,” Morton proclaimed.

“Well, good,” Jesse replied, gratified to have won a convert, but a little annoyed that he couldn’t have said this a couple of hours earlier.

“To any other man, this might be a source of profound philosophical reflection, and, I would hope, a resolve to do no harm of the kind that was done to you, Mr. Sloss. But in my case, the import is far greater. Greater than most men could imagine.”

Harlow exchanged a forbearing glance with Jesse, and enquired, “And why is that, sir? If you can trust us to do our humble best to stretch our own imaginations toward the same lofty endpoint.”

“For the past four years,” Morton explained, “I have been investigating the matter of sensitivity to pain, and developing a substance, which I call Letheon, that I have shown to be capable of rendering dogs, cats, pigs, cows and horses all equally insensible to suffering. Under the influence of this substance, these animals can endure not only the removal of teeth, but all manner of surgery that would otherwise be painful in the extreme. When administered Letheon, they fall into a state akin to their ordinary sleep, but far deeper. It’s well known that the slightest noise from an intruder, let alone a sharp jab to its body, would easily wake a faithful hound. With the aid of Letheon, I have cut into a dog’s skin an incision six inches long, and then sutured it closed, all without the animal stirring, or uttering the faintest whimper of complaint. What’s more, upon regaining consciousness, it showed itself no less amicably disposed toward me than it had been prior to the surgery; what would have been an act of the utmost cruelty, leaving the animal cowed, surly, or dangerously aggressive toward its tormentor, made no impression on it at all.”

Jesse’s annoyance had not entirely vanished, but after looking to Harlow for any sign that Morton’s account might have struck a fellow medical man as implausible, he was prepared to concede that the invention’s significance might excuse a degree of portentousness.

“So this would be better than opium?” Jesse asked.

“For surgery, certainly!” Morton replied. “Opium would likely remain the superior remedy for ongoing pain, where the patient needs to maintain some degree of activity. But if I were to have a tumor carved out of my body, I’d rather be absent entirely than merely looking on through an opium haze.”

Harlow said, “You mention a variety of animal subjects. But have you tried it on a human patient?”

“Not as yet,” Morton admitted. “Until now, my philosophical qualms have held me back from that final step. That’s precisely why I chose to attend your lecture: to hear the testimony of a man who willingly confessed to a lapse in consciousness, but showed no sign of impairment as a consequence.” He turned to face Jesse squarely. “Sir, I do not perceive you as some kind of plaything of the Devil, nor as a man reduced to a brute beast. I believe you have provided an honest account of your experience and its aftermath, and that has given me the courage to make this request.” He turned to Harlow. “Dr. Harlow, I would be honored if you would agree to cut this wart out of my hand with a scalpel, while I am under the influence of Letheon. That is: while my soul is absent, and the pain cannot touch me. And then I hope to return, as intact in every physical, moral and intellectual faculty as Mr. Sloss, so I can add my testimony to his own – and embark upon the enterprise of making Letheon, in good conscience, the first choice of every surgeon in the world.”

10

Morton had insisted on fasting for a day before the three of them met in his lodgings to conduct the procedure. “Many of the animals would vomit up their food,” he’d explained, “which would be neither safe for the subject nor pleasant for any of the participants.”

“You seem anxious,” Jesse told Harlow as they ascended the stairs of the boarding house.

“No surgery is without risk,” Harlow replied. “This man could die from gangrene, when he had no need of the operation in the first place.”

“But you’re not troubled by anything else?”

“Oh, the concoction he’s devised might yet prove dangerous, but if he’s been honest with us about its effect on all those animals, I see no reason to suspect that he will fare any worse.”

Jesse was uneasy now. “Do you believe that a horse, or a dog, has a soul?”

“I believe many animals can suffer grievously, and exhibit genuine devotion,” Harlow said. “They are not clockwork mechanisms, merely pretending to those things.”

That didn’t answer Jesse’s question, but they’d arrived at their destination. Morton answered on the first knock and admitted them excitedly.

“This is history in the making,” he declared. “I hope you are both keeping diaries, and will write letters to your wives and colleagues recording the event for posterity.”

“Can you show me the agent you want administered?” Harlow asked.

Morton handed him a flask that was sitting on the table. Harlow removed the stopper and took a cautious sniff. “It needs to be kept well away from any flame,” Morton warned him. “But I have constructed an inhaler that will mostly contain the fumes.” The device was a glass bulb with two apertures, one spouting a flexible tube that terminated in a mask.

Harlow unpacked his own bag of instruments, laying them out on the table. Morton removed his coat and took a seat, regarding Jesse with a solemnly fraternal gaze, as if about to follow him into battle.

He filled the bulb of the inhaler with Letheon from the flask, then closed the first aperture and placed the mask over his mouth and nose, held up by loops of string behind his ears. Jesse was standing a few feet away, but he caught a trace of a sweet, pungent odor wafting out of the apparatus.

At first Morton scowled with displeasure, plain enough to be seen in the uncovered parts of his face, and he coughed several times with considerable vehemence, as if his lungs were violently opposed to the reeking vapor they were being forced to take in. Then his face relaxed, his eyelids came together, and his body grew limp.

Harlow put an ear to Morton’s chest, then held his wrist between thumb and forefinger. The sleeping man’s arm dropped back to the table with no more hesitation than a scarecrow’s. Harlow removed the mask and summoned Jesse to hold Morton’s right hand still, the palm facing up, over a cloth pad. When he made the first incision into the skin beside the wart, Jesse tensed, instinctively expecting the patient to struggle and require forcible restraint. But Jesse’s entire job consisted of steadying what might as well have been an inert object against the disturbances Harlow himself was creating.

He turned to examine Morton’s face, and tried to discern some emotion in it. But it was not peaceful, or distracted, or resolute; it was entirely vacant. Even Robby, limp in Jesse’s arms, had grimaced now and then with discomfort. Was this how he had appeared himself, as he traveled the bumpy road home to Haverhill? But if God had chosen to restore Jesse’s soul in the wake of that misfortune, would He show the same mercy when the parting of soul from body was entirely self-imposed?

Harlow emitted a satisfied grunt and placed the severed wart aside. The wound he had made was bleeding copiously, but it was shallow, and once he’d put in the sutures to pull it closed and applied a bandage, the flow was stanched.

“It should be kept elevated,” he muttered. He took out a longer strip of cloth and formed a sling, holding up Morton’s hand and freeing Jesse from the task of keeping it from sliding off the table.

“Are you sure he’s not dead?” Jesse asked anxiously.

Harlow checked for a heartbeat again, and held his hand beside Morton’s nostrils. “He’s not dead. The question is whether he’ll recover from this state – preferably faster than you did, but every bit as hale and quick-witted.”

“If Letheon is a cousin of whiskey, he might not be hale and quick-witted for a while.”

Harlow laughed. “True. But it can’t be too close a cousin; the amount of alcohol needed to render a man insensible to a scalpel blade is scarcely less than would kill him. And I’ll thank you not to raise the comparison with our hosts, who are firmly devoted to the cause of temperance.”

Jesse was happy to distinguish Morton’s endeavor from wanton drunkenness, but he was no clearer as to what it actually entailed. “Where is his soul?” he asked.

“Where it always is, I suppose. But resting, as his body is.”

“So these fumes have affected it, as much as they have his flesh?”

Harlow seemed to grow uncomfortable. “They have certainly affected his brain, which I believe mediates all conscious activity. But why are you asking me these questions, when you’re the one best placed to answer them first-hand?”

“I don’t remember anything from that time.”

“Then that’s your answer,” Harlow replied. “If you remember nothing, there is nothing to remember.”

Jesse wasn’t satisfied. He didn’t doubt that he was the man he had always been; what he wished was that he truly understood what that meant. The soul was aware of itself; it knew itself to be. Wasn’t that quality alone what raised humans above the animals? But then, once awareness was gone completely, how could the soul still exist at all? It was like claiming to possess a body that had lost its power to tip a scale, register to the eye, or impede any object. If those properties vanished for a time and then returned, no one would declare that the body had just been resting.

Morton groaned and raised his head, then opened his eyes slightly. “Have you started the surgery?” he asked hoarsely.

“I’m entirely finished,” Harlow replied.

Jesse moved the bucket into place just in time; Morton might have fasted, but his stomach still found something to expel.

“My head is throbbing,” Morton complained. Harlow had him sip some water, then splash his face. After a few minutes, he was lucid enough to converse normally.

“You don’t remember anything since inhaling the fumes?” Harlow asked.

“No,” Morton confirmed. “It’s not that I was there, waiting in darkness to become reacquainted with my senses. There was no thought at all. When I look back across the fissure ... there is the clarity of the events prior to administering the Letheon, then a brief jumble of confusion, and then my emergence into the present.” He glanced down at his bandaged hand. “It’s as if that stretch of time has been excised from my experience – and yet I’m no more divided by its removal than I am by this excision of the flesh.”

“Is the wound painful now?”

“It is,” Morton conceded. “But it’s tolerable, and nothing like the pain I would have felt had I been present for the surgery itself.”

“I’d call that a success,” Harlow decided.

“So I might join your tour? And repeat the demonstration alongside your talks?”

“How many warts do you have?” Harlow asked in jest.

“We can omit the surgery,” Morton clarified. “Though I’d be happy for any reputable physicians in the audience to come to the stage and examine me – prodding my skin with a needle, or such like, to satisfy themselves that the treatment really does have the desired effect.”

Jesse remained uneasy, but he had no good argument against Morton’s proposal. If Letheon continued to work in the same fashion, with its after-effects no worse than a mild emetic, such demonstrations might well persuade people that integrity was possible across the gulf of unconsciousness. And if the Lord hadn’t chosen to punish this man, here and now, for willfully extinguishing his awareness, surely He would continue His forbearance when the act was repeated in aid of the discouragement of ignorance, slavery, and burying children alive.

11

When Jesse and his companions arrived at the home of their host in New Bedford, he was surprised to find a letter waiting for him that was not from Felicia, but from a Professor Jackson of Marquette, Michigan. He opened it and read it twice before taking Harlow aside and consulting him on the contents.

“This man is claiming Morton stole Letheon from him, and he’s threatening to sue all three of us.”

Harlow was unfazed. “He wrote to me earlier, and I gave him short shrift. I suppose that’s why he’s taken to bothering you instead.”

“He says he taught Morton chemistry at Harvard, where they discussed his own experiments with something called ‘sulfuric ether.’”

“Which might well be the same thing as Letheon,” Harlow admitted. “But if the two of them want to argue about patent rights, that’s not our problem. I’d rather none be granted, so everyone can use the substance freely.”

“All right.” Jesse hoped that the talk of a law suit was bluster; he could not afford to get mired in anything of the kind, whatever the outcome.

When they returned to the parlor where Morton was seated with their host, Mrs. Edgecombe, he announced some correspondence of his own. “There’s a Mrs. Helen Williams here who has read reports of our previous demonstrations,” Morton explained. “She has volunteered to have me extract a troublesome molar – in public, under the influence of Letheon!”

Mrs. Edgecombe, an elderly widow, nodded approvingly. “I know Mrs. Williams quite well. She would not make an offer like that frivolously, or insincerely.”

“Perhaps we could call on her together,” Harlow suggested to Morton. “We should be satisfied first that her health is robust, and explain the necessary preparations.”

Jesse was dispatched to find a suitable chair for the demonstration. The town’s dentist proved unwilling to part with his, but Jesse was able to come to an arrangement with the barber.

That night, the hall was almost full. Jesse gave his usual testimony, and the audience listened politely, but he knew they were impatient to see for themselves what he was merely describing.

Harlow took Jesse’s place at the lectern. “Tonight,” he said, “it will not be Mr. Morton experiencing the effects of Letheon. Rather, he will keep his wits about him, and practice his craft of dentistry on a willing volunteer.”

Morton, Mrs. Williams and her husband, who had been waiting to one side, all walked into view. A murmur of disquiet spread throughout the crowd, and then, as Mrs. Williams took her place in the barber’s chair and Morton wheeled a trolley bearing his inhaler and dental instruments beside her, a dozen or so people stood up and began shouting.

“Quiet, please!” Harlow implored them. “This lady has graciously offered to have an infected tooth removed in your presence, to demonstrate both the absence of pain and the harmlessness of the treatment itself. Please show her some respect.”

“I’ll show no respect to murderers!” a man retorted. He was already on his feet; now he left his pew and approached the front of the hall.

Jesse moved to intercept him. “Sir, you need to stay seated, or leave,” he said. “We can’t allow any disruption.”

“Stick to reciting your third-rate Poe,” the man replied contemptuously. Other men, and a few women, were coming forward now, jostling to try to reach Morton and his patient. Jesse looked around for the volunteers who had offered to help guard the visiting speakers; they were joining the fray, but they were outnumbered.

“You need to leave,” Jesse said. When the man tried to brush past him, Jesse took his arm and forced it behind his back, then spun him around and marched him toward the exit. A few feet from the door the man recovered from his surprise and began to offer resistance; Jesse twisted his arm toward his shoulder, and he dropped to his knees, cursing. A short while later, he agreed to depart.

Jesse turned toward the front of the hall. While the guards were doing their best, a phalanx of impromptu assistants had emerged from the audience to help them, blocking the way forward for the people shouting accusations of “murder!” and “debauchery!”

Jesse steeled himself and approached the line of objectors, trying to persuade each one to retake their seat, before seizing them and dragging them out. He could feel his blood rising, but he forced himself to be as calm and civil as he could, even when he was struck or spat upon.

When the last of the troublemakers had been expelled, and the doors locked, a few lingered outside near the entrance, bellowing threats and insults. Jesse saw that most of the guards had torn clothes, and scratches or bruises on their faces. He supposed he looked the same; when he put his hand to his forearm, he felt a trickle of warm blood beneath the cloth, where a woman had stuck him with a hat-pin.

Harlow returned to the lectern, and glanced toward Mrs. Williams for her assent. “I have not changed my mind,” she announced resolutely.

As the procedure began, the audience in the hall was silent, though interjections from outside continued. Jesse wondered if any of the protesters would have behaved in the same fashion if it had been Morton volunteering to be “murdered” in public, for the seventh time. Had they all assumed he was a humbug, feigning sleep and pretending not to notice the doctors poking needles into the soles of his feet? Or was the crucial difference that Mrs. Williams was a respected member of their own community, to whom they felt some duty of protection, and through whom they would henceforth be reminded of the unsettling truth?

Mrs. Williams seemed to have fallen into Letheon’s embrace, but Morton pinched her hand several times to be sure. Her husband stepped forward and aided in the procedure, holding her head firmly while Morton worked on the tooth with his pliers. The yelling through the doors had died away, and Jesse was sure he heard the root of the molar tear free. Mercifully, the tooth emerged whole; if it had fragmented, the operation might have lasted an hour. When Morton dropped the bloody object in a metal dish with a satisfying clink, half the audience exhaled in unison.

“I have visited the same blank landscape as this brave lady inhabits now,” Morton assured the onlookers as they waited for her to be roused. “I would not otherwise have dared subject another soul to that strange exile. And Mr. Sloss, before me, paved the way and gave me courage. One by one, we can explore this territory, and though we return with no maps, or sketches, or diaries, it is our safe return itself that we mark upon our charts. Here, there be no dragons.”

Had the performers in the night’s drama been conspiring, this would have been the perfect time for Mrs. Williams to stir, but she remained motionless. Jesse saw people bowing their heads in prayer.

“God will not be mocked!” a man screamed from outside the door. The loudness of this cry finally roused the sleeper, who coughed and opened her eyes.

Morton and her husband attended to her, offering her water and speaking to her quietly. After a time, they helped her to her feet and supported her as she stepped forward to address the hall.

“My name is Helen Elizabeth Williams,” she said. “I was born in Lynn, Massachusetts, on September 7th, 1812.”

She proceeded with further details of her biography, along with professions of faith and devotion for her family. Jesse wasn’t sure if she had planned the whole recitation in advance, or was extemporizing, but though he could see that she was still suffering a degree of nausea and disorientation, there was a lively, unrehearsed sincerity to her words. Might he have won his parents over, if he’d been as eloquent in his own defense?

When she was finished, the audience applauded, but the mood seemed more somber than celebratory. This woman, whom many of them knew and admired, had returned, safe and uncorrupted, from the void – and in doing so had turned their minds to all the loved ones who might have done the same, given the chance.

12

Jesse was late arriving at the hospital, and though Morton had arranged for a seat to be reserved for him in the front row, by the time he entered the operating theater someone else had taken it. He was about to turn around and leave when a gentleman near the back gestured to him, indicating an empty chair beside his own. Jesse nodded to him in thanks, and squeezed his way in.

Morton was already speaking, heaping praise upon the powers of Letheon in his customary grandiloquent fashion. When he was done, Dr. Warren described the patient’s condition, and the course the surgery would take. His language was aimed at his fellow surgeons, but Jesse had been given the gist of it earlier by Morton and Harlow: the man on the table had a tumor in his neck, and Dr. Warren was going to cut it out.

“Cuthbert, from the New York Sun,” the man who’d shown Jesse the seat whispered. “I’d swear I know you, sir, but I can’t place you exactly.”

“My name’s Stephenson,” Jesse replied. “I’m married to Dr. Warren’s niece, and he was kind enough to offer me a chance to witness this demonstration.”

Cuthbert shook his hand. “Lucky your wife’s uncle isn’t a Virginian.” Seeing the confusion on Jesse’s face, he added, “Their bill passed into law yesterday. ‘Loss of consciousness, induced by any method or agent,’ is now legally equivalent to death. That makes seven states where the activity we’re watching right now would be classified as murder, and the instigators liable to hang.”

“Hmm.” Jesse turned away from him to concentrate on the proceedings, hoping his once mildly-infamous features really had vanished to the edge of even this muckraker’s recollection. With new sleepers to write about every day, their journeys along the river Lethe witnessed by hundreds of good citizens, some laughable tale about a railway worker climbing out of his grave would soon be relegated to its proper place among the ghost stories given credence only by the gullible and the morbid.

The operation took close to an hour, with Morton administering more Letheon at regular intervals. When the sutures were in place and the patient had recovered consciousness, Dr. Warren asked the man how he was.

“It feels like I got a little scratch,” he replied. The physicians and journalists assembled, having seen the gory truth for themselves, rose to their feet and cheered.

Back at his lodgings, Jesse sat in his room, sorely tempted to pack at once and take the next train out of Boston. But it would be rude of him to disappear without a proper farewell to Morton and Harlow, who remained busy with Dr. Warren and his colleagues. He could leave in the morning, and still be beside Felicia before dark.

There was a knock on the door. “Who is it?” Jesse asked.

“Anderson.”

Jesse let him in and offered him a seat. Mr. Anderson had helped guard the speakers throughout the Massachusetts leg of the tour; he was probably eager to return to his family in New Bedford and, like Jesse, was saying his goodbyes.

“I was hoping for your help in extracting a favor from Mr. Morton,” Anderson said.

“What favor?” Jesse asked. “I don’t know what sway I have with him, but I’ll do what I can.”

Anderson said, “I need half a dozen doses of Letheon.”

Jesse was confused. “Do you have six friends with toothaches? If you do, Morton could give you the full service, not just help you avoid the pain.”

Anderson was silent for a moment, then he asked Jesse to swear to keep what he was about to disclose a secret.

“I swear,” Jesse replied, resisting the urge to add, “on my own grave.”

“We’ve made a plan to cross into Virginia,” Anderson confided. “There are ten of us, including two men who escaped from the same plantation we got in our sights, so they’re well informed on all the particulars.”

“You might need something stronger than Letheon to protect yourself,” Jesse suggested.

Anderson smiled. “We got arms already, but we aim to use them as little as we can. The thing is, if we send the owners to sleep, not only can we bring a few of our brothers and sisters to freedom, the proof of what we done will make a better kind of mischief than any carnage. We’ll have made that family of slave-owners dead by law, without spilling a drop of their blood – and captured it all in a nice daguerrotype for the papers.”

Jesse wasn’t sure just how much good that would do. “Won’t their so-called property just be inherited?”

“Sure. They got cousins we won’t be able to reach. But do you s’pose the dead ones will sit happily by while their poor relations walk away with all their wealth?”

“Making fools of everyone, the law included.” Jesse had to admire the plan, and though it was heartbreaking to think of the raid doing anything less than freeing the whole plantation, he’d gleaned enough about the difficulties escapees faced to realize that such a large group, trying to travel in secret all at once, would not get far.

“But you want me to ask Morton for the Letheon, without telling him what it’s for?”

“Would you trust him to keep quiet?” Anderson asked. “Or to grant the request, once he knew the purpose? He’s not a bad man, but I have a feeling this wouldn’t fit with his intentions for his beloved child.”

Jesse mulled it over. “You’re probably right, but I don’t know what other story I could feed him to convince him to hand it over.”

“You can’t tell him you want to demonstrate it in New York, while he’s busy here?” Anderson suggested. “Spreading the good news farther and faster?”

Jesse shook his head. “He’s so jealous of anyone else getting their hands on this potion—” He caught himself. “But maybe we don’t have to ask him at all. Maybe there’s another way.”

“What other way?”

Jesse didn’t want to raise the man’s hopes without reason. “Give me half a day,” he said. “I might be mistaken, but it shouldn’t take long to find out.”

Harlow had mentioned that sulfuric ether was one of the ingredients of a popular remedy known as “Hoffman’s Drops.” Jesse spent an hour walking around Boston, until he finally came across a pharmacist willing to sell him, not the compounded drug, but a bottle of the crucial component in its pure form.

One sniff of the contents told him that Letheon contained the same substance, though that didn’t quite prove that there was nothing else in Morton’s formulation. Prof. Jackson had insisted that sulfuric ether alone could send an animal safely to sleep, but Jesse wasn’t going to hand the bottle over without verifying its effectiveness.

In his room, alone, he sat on a chair in his shirt-sleeves, and took one of the bath towels his hosts had provided. He soaked the cloth in ether, and held it over his face.

The fumes were sickly sweet, but irritating beyond the most cloying perfume, leaving his eyes watering, his nose running, his throat stinging. He started coughing, and it was all he could do not to cast the towel aside and spit up every trace of the odious residue trickling down from his burning palate.

At the same time, he felt his head growing light, and the unpleasant sensations, without changing in any detail, lost their oppressiveness, leaving him curiously happy and carefree.

Don’t bury me, he thought, unable to speak the words, wishing he had written a note in case someone found him in this state. He tried to decide if his spirit was merely loosening its ties to his body, or if the Letheon was leaching into his soul and diminishing its capacity, but then he concluded that his struggle to settle on an answer was the answer itself. Even the preternatural bliss that had accompanied him as he receded from his senses now cut itself loose and drifted away, a smear of white light falling into darkness.

13

At first, the oddness of his posture was all there was: a brute fact connected to nothing else. Then, like an ice crystal growing around a speck of dirt, other aspects of the situation accreted. His body was twisted, slumped in the chair. The towel had fallen across his lap. His throat was dry, and his stomach tight.

Jesse opened his eyes and groped for the bucket he’d left beside the chair. When he was done, he checked his pocket watch. He had been gone for more than half an hour.

He felt cold. He fetched a basin of water and splashed his face, but a dull ache remained behind his eyes. The dust in the room, on the sideboard and mirror, seemed thicker than he remembered, or at least more prominent.

For the second time in his life, he had stopped being himself, and then started again. But now he had no struggle for air to distract him – and no cheering crowd to laud his feat, nor solicitous friends to offer their opinions.

He had stopped, and he had started. The furniture and keepsakes of his memory and character had survived beneath the drop cloths while the house fell silent, but he hadn’t borne them away for safe-keeping elsewhere. Everything was, and always had been, contained within his skin. His soul was simply the way his body felt, when it was capable of feeling. When he slept, it was absent. When he died, it would be gone forever.

Jesse put on a coat, tidied the room, gathered his thoughts. Anderson returned, promptly at five as they’d agreed.

“Any luck with your plan?” he asked.

“Yes. I have it.” Jesse handed him the bottle.

“You stole this from Morton?”

“No.” Jesse explained what he’d bought, and how he’d tested it. “The secret won’t last long; every dentist and surgeon in the country will know soon. Morton won’t end up a rich man, though perhaps he’ll retain the glory of being the first to reach a few milestones.”

“Hmm.” Anderson had other things on his mind.

“This raid into Virginia,” Jesse began. “Could you use an extra pair of hands? I ain’t no military man, but I’m not bad with my fists if it comes to that.”

“You want to end up hanged?” Anderson asked dubiously.

“Not if I can help it. But now I got my life back, I can’t just sit around wishing and praying that everything else will make itself right.”

Anderson laughed. “You don’t sound like the usual firebrand for the cause, but I won’t hold that against you. I seen you handle yourself all right when it mattered. We got six more days before we leave, and if the others are agreeable, we can get you acquainted with the details.”

Jesse wrote to Felicia, trying to walk a line between his wish not to deceive her and the risk of implicating her in the conspiracy he was joining.

Morton’s demonstrations, and most especially this last one in Boston, look to have set things on the right course for us, and I am hopeful that I will be restored very soon to sufficient respectability, or at least anonymity, to have no trouble finding employment again. But there remains some further business that I am obliged to attend to, that will prevent me from returning for two or three more weeks.

Until then, know that you are in my heart every minute of the day. All my strength and comfort comes from knowing that we’ll be together soon, and all my worth from recalling that you stood by me when no one else would.

Your devoted husband,

Jesse

AFTER ZERO

2060

Latifa’s watch hummed, softly but persistently, until she stirred and raised her wrist above her face in the darkness. The display brightened slowly, giving her eyes time to adapt; it was just after three o’clock, but apparently her assistant had judged the message important enough to wake her.

“Play,” she requested hoarsely.

The watch painted a scene on her retinas: Sian MacDonald standing in the workshop in Boston, in front of the reactor.

“There is no easy way to put this,” Sian began. “The finance we’ve been seeking hasn’t come through, and we’ve run out of other possibilities. In a couple of days, Mass Fusion will be going into liquidation.”

Latifa barely listened to the rest: the thanks, the apologies, the promises of the staff’s priority among creditors. She was sure that Sian was sincere in all of this, but none of it changed what really mattered. After twenty-three years of striving, the team’s efforts had come to nothing.

She curled up against the blanket and closed her eyes, falling into the pit that had opened up beneath her. Surrendering to despondency felt better than fighting it – and when a part of her mind started interjecting with all manner of implausible last-minute reprieves, it was about as useful as if her descent was being punctuated by a tangle of slender rootlets: too flimsy to grab on to, too abrasive to ignore.

After a while, though, she found herself seeking more honest reasons for solace. If Mass Fusion was dead, at least they’d fallen to a worthy rival. She’d always hoped there’d be room for both themselves and Aneutronic, but so long as at least one of them thrived, the larger dream survived. Had she wasted her time? Maybe. But if both designs had not remained in play for so long, the question of which was most viable might never have been truly settled.

She opened her eyes and checked her watch again; on the street above it had come down to 36 degrees, but the forecast for the day ahead had been revised up to 50. Whatever balm she found for her ego, the real harm would be spread much wider. Aneutronic might prosper, but the rollout of fusion would still suffer from the lack of a second supplier. All the optimistic curves showing powered CO2 capture clawing back the overshoot by 2070 would need to be redrawn. The immiserated world would stay hotter for longer, forcing people who were barely hanging on to endure another decade of what was already unendurable. More species would die, more ecosystems collapse, and the chance of methane erupting from the melting permafrost would just keep ratcheting up.

Latifa rose to her feet, massaging her lower back as the room lights came on. She poured herself a glass of water and drained it; the air in the burrow wasn’t hot, but it remained as relentlessly dry as it was up on the surface.

Her watch hummed again. It was Emily, querying her wakefulness and willingness to talk; Latifa answered without hesitation.

“You’re up,” Emily began. “So you’ve heard the news?”

“Yes. How are you taking it?”

“I think I’ve finished screaming obscenities, but if I suddenly mute myself you’ll know why.”

Latifa smiled. “Did the screaming help?”

“Absolutely. And now it’s out of my system, so I can move on.”

“All right.” Latifa found the notion jarring, but it wasn’t as if a prolonged mourning would do any good. “Move on to what? Have you had an offer from Aneutronic already?”

Emily chortled. “Hardly! They poached all the people they wanted years ago.”

“So you’re planning to retire and grow vegetables?”

“No. I’m planning to build the Scatterer.”

Latifa hesitated, searching her friend’s face for some hint that she was teasing her in a misconceived attempt to cheer her up. “Fair enough,” she replied. “But if we’re playing that game, I want world peace, and a pony too.”

“It’s doable,” Emily insisted. “And you know it would work.”

“There are a thousand things that would work.”

“Yes, and it’s a shame people didn’t try more of them, sooner. But this is our chance. We’ll have time on our hands, and no better way to spend it.”

Latifa swallowed a reflexive retort about how happy she’d be spending time with her grandchildren. Her own response to the complaints from her daughters had always been that she could do far more for their welfare by working than any amount of grandmotherly devotion could achieve.

“So who’s going to pay for this daydream, when we can’t even get a working fusion reactor bankrolled?”

“I have no idea,” Emily confessed. “I’m plasma, you’re magnets, but it’s only been thirty minutes; you can’t expect me to have assembled the whole team.”

Latifa said, “You make it sound like a heist. All we’re missing is the safe-cracker and the get-away driver.”

“Except we won’t be stealing anything, just ... redistributing it.”

“Seriously, though. I don’t think we ever costed it, but it must come to at least—”

Emily cut her off. “Don’t you dare pluck a number out of the air, as an excuse to give up. We need to dust off the old files first, and bring them up to date. There are better materials now, for everything. Once we know exactly what we’re talking about, we can start being brutal about the costs.”

“All right.”

Emily beamed at her. “So you’re in?”

“I agree that we should look at it,” Latifa replied warily. “That’s all.”

“I’ll do a first pass through the specification. It’s morning here in Sydney, so it makes sense for me to get started while you get back to sleep.”

Latifa murmured assent. Emily said, “I’ll be in touch.”

Latifa lay down, and when the lights faded she stared into the darkness. She didn’t want to spend her last years bitterly rehashing all the old lost battles. As likely as not, she would fail again, but at least she’d get to fail at something new.

#

Half an hour before dawn, Latifa left the burrow and walked into the village. The sky was bright enough to light the way; on either side of the road, fields of stunted wheat with curled brown edges on the leaves stretched out beneath a canopy of protective gauze. There was a mineral scent lingering in the air from the irrigation water, forced up from some insane depth by the solar-powered pumps chasing the retreating aquifer. When she was a girl, the Kajaki Dam had drawn both power and water from the Helmand River, but now her memories of that vast green reservoir felt like something out of a dream.

In the market, she bought enough food to last three or four days. Okra had almost doubled in price since the last time she’d checked, and even flour and oil were creeping up again. The families she was helping needed more assistance every month, and every month there were more needing help. Now that her absurd salary from Boston was about to be cut off, she was going to need to juggle everything more carefully.

She set off home, quickening her step to escape the sun rising behind her.

“Latifa!”

She turned to see a woman silhouetted against the glare. “Fatema?” She waited for her cousin to catch up.

“Let me carry some of that,” Fatema offered.

“I’m fine, thank you,” Latifa insisted.

“How have you been? We never see you!”

“You know what it’s like.”

“How is your work going?” Fatema asked. “The reactor?”

Latifa was embarrassed. She had stood in front of the girls in Fatema’s science class, year after year, supposedly inspiring them with her efforts. “I’ve moved on to something new,” she said. “Maybe even more useful.”

“Really?”

“We call it the Scatterer. I probably mentioned it to you, years ago, but it’s only just started coming together.”

Fatema frowned thoughtfully, but her efforts to recall the term didn’t seem to bear fruit. Latifa said, “You know the first Lagrange point, between the Earth and the sun?”

“Where the forces cancel out, and a spacecraft can stay in place without much effort?”

“Exactly. Suppose you put a device there that makes a strong magnetic field. When the solar wind hits the field, it piles up in front of the magnet, a bit like the way the Earth’s magnetic field keeps the same particles at bay. But if you modulate the field in just the right way, the plasma will be full of ripples. The refractive index of plasma is a little less than one; a convex lens like that would bend light away from its axis, and if the ripples are shaped carefully you get the same effect. So now you have a kind of corrugated lens built of plasma, thousands of kilometers wide, sitting between the Earth and the sun, scattering light away from us.”

“How much of the light?” Fatema asked skeptically.

“Less than one percent,” Latifa admitted. “The plasma’s not that dense. But one percent less irradiance ... ” She looked around at the parched landscape. “It could make all the difference, while we wait for the CO2 to be drawn down.”

Fatema was too polite to remind her of all her predictions that Mass Fusion’s reactors would do the job in a decade.

They reached Latifa’s burrow and parted. Inside, her workstation had already downloaded Emily’s new file from the repository and was running the revised model through a set of simulations.

There were better high-temperature superconductors available than the last time they’d worked on the idea, supporting much higher current densities for the same mass. Emily had incorporated the new materials, but now Latifa set up a search to optimize the geometry of the coils under the new constraints. She watched the magnets morph in front of her, deforming and shrinking as they probed the landscape of possibilities; the software did a good job, but she went back and nudged it into some valleys it had skirted, and managed to find a better solution than its first, fully automated attempt.

After three days’ work, the final result looked like a strange, three-dimensional labyrinth rendered in almost invisibly fine wire. If this material had been meant as a shield, nothing could have been flimsier. But when Latifa ran the plasma simulator, the approaching wind spiraled back on itself along a vast, curved shock-front, swirling with turbulent eddies, that carried the field out far beyond the structure that seeded it. When she ray-traced an image of the sun seen from Earth, the softening of the disk was almost imperceptible – but the total radiance was reduced by four-fifths of a percent.

It was late when she updated the repository, but Emily responded straight away.

“You think we’re ready to build something and put it in a plasma chamber?”

“Do we have a plasma chamber?”

“MF aren’t doing anything with theirs. If we make an offer, the liquidators might be happy to get it off their hands.”

“And ... we rehire the technicians to run it?”

Emily said, “That seems the simplest way.”

They still had no backers, and no legal structure for the venture. They didn’t even have any intellectual property; they’d designed the Scatterer outside work hours, so Mass Fusion didn’t own it, but they’d put it into the public domain in the hope that someone else would build it while they carried on with the main game.

“I can’t help with the funding,” Latifa confessed. “I know it sounds crazy for me to be crying poor, but I’ve taken on obligations that I can’t just drop.”

Emily said, “I understand. Don’t worry; I’ve roped in another twenty people, and I think they’ll be able to pitch in enough to get us the chamber.”

“All right. So who exactly will own it?”

“Scatterbrain LLC,” Emily replied. “I’ve had a draft contract of incorporation drawn up; you can find it in the repo and tweak anything you don’t like.”

Latifa felt a pang of vertigo. She was almost sixty years old, and she was about to launch herself into a new career. “Will I need to go up into space and assemble the coils by hand?”

“Only if the robots go on strike,” Emily promised. “If we treat them well, I’m sure they’ll be happy to play their part.”

2062

“You want us to donate a year’s worth of our entire deep space launch capacity?” Ben Kershaw’s image glitched for a second, as if the connection was manifesting his private response to this impertinence.

Latifa said, “Ideally, yes – but even a quarter of that might be enough to persuade some of the other players to join in.”

Kershaw said, “We’re ten years behind schedule on the Mars habitats. If you want us to toss up a few cubesats for the kids in your village, that’s one thing, but we can’t just put everything aside for a huge, speculative project like this.”

Latifa had read the articles of the trust he administered, and she understood that he was legally obliged to adhere to the late beneficiary’s wishes. But she was sure there was room to read between the lines. “If there’s a methane burst in the next thirty years, do you really think a nascent Mars colony would survive the turmoil back home?”

“Only if it’s well enough established,” Kershaw replied. “Which is why we’re committed to avoiding more slippage.”

“What about avoiding the disruption itself?” she suggested.

“Can you really promise that your device would do that?”

“No,” Latifa conceded. “But all the climate models show it lowering the risk by at least a factor of four.”

“That’s assuming the real thing works the way you hope it will, based on a prototype one ten-thousandth the size.”

“Yes.”

“So once you allow for the possibility of screw-ups, the odds don’t look so great.”

“What if you gave us a tenth of the launches?” she suggested. “What’s a few weeks, in the scheme of things?”

“A few weeks, and you want us to foot the bill!” Kershaw reminded her sharply.

“Other companies have agreed to contribute,” she countered. “And not just the wire makers. Aerospace engineers, robotics manufacturers – many of them working with you on the Mars project. They must think this is worth doing, for some reason.”

That only seemed to irritate him further. “I’m speaking to you as a courtesy, out of respect for your work on superconductors, but do you seriously expect us to transport thousands of tonnes to L1 for you, purely as a public relations exercise?”

Latifa said, “Methane or no methane, millions of people won’t make it to the end of the century without some major intervention. I don’t know if things will get bad enough to interfere with your Earth-to-Mars supply chain, but ... isn’t the whole rationale for what you’re doing that we need to shift everyone to a more robust state?”

“Our operations have been carbon neutral for decades,” Kershaw replied. “If you want to guilt someone about the excess ppm, go after the old polluters.”

Latifa doubted that even a battalion of lawyers could prize another dollar out of those rotting carcasses. “It’s not about guilt. You have the power to do this. No one else does.”

Kershaw said, “The only power I have is to comply with the foundation’s charter. I have discretion for some charitable works along the way – but anything that actively delays the moment we become a multiplanetary species would be a clear violation of my fiduciary duties that would send me straight to prison.”

2064

“Remember when that mining company payload crashed on the moon, in ’43?” Emily asked Latifa.

“Not specifically,” Latifa admitted. “There were so many crashes in the ’40s, they all blur together. Do you mean the Israeli one?”

“No, this was Australian.”

“You must be so proud,” Latifa teased her.

“Someone’s planning to salvage it,” Emily replied.

Latifa had clearly forgotten some crucial details. “How do you hit the moon without turning to scrap metal?”

“Very slowly. Their descent engines almost gave them a soft landing. A few wires came loose, a few bolts snapped. If it happened back home, you could fix it in a day. But now some people are crowd-funding a couple of robots to repair it, in situ. While bringing along a few modern additions.”

She sent Latifa the details. “Between the old mining rig and the new fabrication system,” she said, “I believe they could construct most of what we need for the Scatterer.”

“And get it to L1?”

“There’s ice at the site,” Emily stressed. “But they could also launch with a solar-powered railgun.”

Latifa skimmed through the document. “We’d need to change the superconductor.” The regolith was missing the minerals required for a viable pathway to their original choice.

“So maybe the total mass goes up twenty percent. But compared to our chances on Earth ... ”

Latifa’s mind balked; it sounded like trying to create a whole spacefaring civilization on a barren patch of rock, with two robots, a fancy 3D printer, and a toy excavator. But they wouldn’t be trying to grow food or build cities; they just needed to sinter a very large quantity of wire, and hurl it out of a shallow gravity well – along with enough accompanying rocketry to slow it down when it reached its destination. The fancier, complicated parts of the Scatterer could still be built on Earth, and sent up with the robots needed to assemble the pieces.

“This is all very enticing,” Latifa said. “But assuming the salvage goes to plan, who exactly will end up controlling these facilities?”

“Everyone who contributes will have a say,” Emily explained. “The coordinators are a group of space enthusiasts with dozens of projects of their own in mind, but the actual choice will belong to their backers.”

“I doubt we have the funds to buy a controlling share,” Latifa replied.

“I’m sure we don’t,” Emily agreed. “Which means it will come down to persuasion. Six million people have already pledged donations, and I don’t think there’ll be any trouble meeting the target. But then it will be up to us to convince them that the best use of their shiny new space factory will be spending a few years making wire to help blur the sun.”

2065

Latifa rose before dawn and walked into the village, masked against the dust blowing in from the desert. The food truck was late, and there was already a queue fifty meters long leading up to the distribution point.

The sun rose red, but no less fierce than ever. As she stood in the sweltering throng, she swayed on her feet, suddenly uncertain about everything she was doing; it took her several long minutes to reason her way back to solid ground. She’d been confused by the heat and her lack of sleep, but it was still a good lesson: she ought to be able to explain to any villager plucked from the crowd why the dust all around them couldn’t spare them from discomfort, but the distant Scatterer would.

Back home with her rations, she called her cousin Fashard, who was handling logistics for her in Chaman. “Can we send a second truck out each day? There were people going home empty-handed.”

“That’s all the food we’re allowed to take through the border now,” he replied. “A second truck would have nothing to carry.”

“All right.”

Latifa sat down at her workstation. The feed from the salvage mission had already started.

The image showed a cratered terrain raked with shadows; the old mining rig, still in its landing capsule, was a small white blotch just off-center. The altitude display in the corner was dropping precipitously, but then the descent engines began firing and the digits slowed. The numbers were hard to take in; Latifa had her assistant replace them with a plot of altitude against time. Now she could see the curve leveling nicely, and when the down-facing camera went dark, she was perfectly relaxed, because it was obvious that the craft had come to a smooth halt.

As system checks began running, some kind of advertisement appeared as an inset. Latifa was amused at first; the landing would have a significant audience, and the project’s coordinators might as well milk it for every cent.

Then she unmuted the sound.

“Vote now to build the Time Portal,” a warm female voice implored her, while the inset showed CGI of a strange gimballed machine rising up from the lunar surface. “So much has gone wrong in our timeline, but this is your chance to put it all right.”

She watched the ad to the end, but then followed the link to a site that reiterated the same spiel at a more leisurely pace. A group called The Repurposed World was lobbying the factory owners to construct a device that they claimed could be used to launch four brave chrononauts back in time – armed with suitable knowledge, and the necessary cultural and linguistic skills, to send Earth’s history swerving away from the present, searing disaster toward a far happier outcome. The first traveler would warn the Americas to prepare to fend off European conquest; this seemed like a rather geographically dispersed mission for one person, but their early arrival among the Incas was meant to plant a seed for a continent-wide transformation that would unfold over the following century. Similarly, the second traveler had all of Africa covered. The third would knock some sense into James Watt, dissuading him from trying to use coal-fired steam engines to compete with the venerable solar-powered version from Africa, and encouraging him to opt for electrolytic hydrogen instead. And finally, Svante Arrhenius would be offered some Ghost of Christmas Future visions, to keep him from reporting his discovery of the Greenhouse Effect in the original, rose-tinted language that had promised “more equable and better climates.”

Bemused, Latifa went to the site where the votes were being tallied. Most people had been holding off until the salvage payload had actually landed, but now some hundred thousand ballots had been cast. The Time Portal had received sixty thousand, the Scatterer thirty thousand, and various other projects had claimed the rest.

Was this a prank? A scam? A sincere endeavor?

She’d been worried that she’d find the Scatterer up against the Mars crowd, trying to garner even more resources for themselves. But whoever was behind this insanity, they were outpolling her two to one.

#

“This machine can’t work,” Latifa explained. “It really is that simple. General relativity isn’t a mysterious grab-bag of random possibilities; it’s a rigorous, well-tested theory. It tells us exactly what different configurations of matter will do to the shape of space-time – and a spinning basketball hoop won’t send anyone back in time, even if you build it on the moon.”

“My opponent is as closed-minded as she is self-serving,” Mira Wolf replied. “She’s been nurturing her absurd folly for years, hoping to rescue something from the ruins of a failed career in the nuclear power industry. This is absolutely symptomatic of the mind-set that got us into this mess: look for a technological solution, and when it doesn’t work out, just try to repackage it as something new.”

Their host was nodding enthusiastically. Latifa had never heard of Ryan Sullivan before, but fifty million people across the planet streamed his talk show. He’d introduced Wolf’s vision of The Repurposed World to the actual world a few months before, so it had seemed like the best way to counter her message would be to ask for equal time to address the same audience. Latifa’s goal was to present a concise, lethal rebuttal to the premise behind the Time Portal, and she believed she’d done that in the first five minutes. But the show just kept stretching on and on, with Wolf and Sullivan demonstrating an apparently limitless ability to adorn the whole matter with fresh verbiage — and the live viewer count, astoundingly, showing no signs of flagging. Latifa had always feared that civilization would be brought down by people with thirty-second attention spans, but now she was beginning to suspect that the greater danger came from those who could sit through three-hour vodcasts, robbed of the ordinary human reflexes that should have compelled them to switch to something new instead of marinating in the stream of inanities.

“The question, surely,” Wolf insisted, “is whether we should be satisfied scrabbling around for some half-baked, techno-delusional fix, or whether we should plunge a sword deep into the bones of the system of oppression and injustice that underlies humanity’s plight. Deep into the bones of history itself.”

Latifa said, “No – the question is what’s actually possible, right now.”

Wolf shook her head, smiling with a kind of grim satisfaction. “And there it is! In the end, all you have to offer us is a defense of the status quo.”

#

“So what do we do now?” Latifa asked, surveying the grid of her colleagues’ grim faces.

“I know Lisa Stein,” Jurgen offered tentatively. “No disrespect to you, Latifa, but her Nobel was for quantum gravity; if she declares that this time machine is a joke, no one can tell her to stay in her lane.”

Hakeem said, “I’m pretty sure Wolf would tell Einstein to butt out, without a moment’s hesitation.”

“We should have started our own cult,” Daiyu joked. “We could have said we needed a lens at L1 to signal the aliens and summon them to save us.”

“Or at least market-tested the idea,” Lindsay replied.

The panel went quiet, as if they were seriously considering this proposition. But Latifa was sure that there was no point wishing they’d taken the low road, any more than there was in wishing that Columbus had been met with cannonballs. “We can’t just rebrand ourselves to appeal to the reality-averse,” she said. “We’d never win them all over, and we’d risk losing everyone else.”

“We don’t need an absolute majority of votes,” Daiyu reminded her. “We just have to get more than any other project.”

“So how do we bring down the Time Portal’s share?” Jurgen asked.

Emily said, “Go after their supporters, with other projects that push the same buttons. Splinter the vote, by stealing the essence of what it is Wolf’s offering, and doling it out in half a dozen other packages.”

“And what is it she’s offering?” Latifa asked.

“A certain kind of placebo,” Emily replied. “A gesture so grand that it makes no difference that it’s completely ineffectual.”

There was silence again. Then Hakeem said, “What about ... a black box for the planet? A repository of data, stored safely on the moon, that chronicles the Earth’s decline in every masochistic detail?”

Emily smiled. “I love it. And in ten million years, when the cockroaches invent spaceships, they’ll get to have their own Ozymandias moment.”

“Maybe something about Gaia?” Jurgen suggested. “Gaia’s tomb? No, Gaia’s sanctuary ... a sort of spa retreat, where she can hang out on the moon for a thousand years, waiting for humanity to die so she can reclaim the biosphere.”

Latifa groaned. “No one would vote for any of this nonsense.”

“No one who cares who lives and dies, in reality,” Emily corrected her. “But if they’re tempted to pretend that they could jump through a hoop and rewrite six hundred years of history, I think there’s still a chance of luring them into an adjacent fantasy.”

Latifa said, “Maybe. Or maybe they’d just circle the wagons, and strengthen their commitment.”

“Hmm.” Emily looked troubled. “That’s possible. But do you have a better idea?”

Latifa said, “The best schism cleaves close to the root. What if a rival project offers to build the very same time machine, but use it just a tiny bit differently? The Repurposed World is selling Paradise on Earth ... but even among people who’ve convinced themselves that’s possible, no one actually agrees about what it would look like, or how we should get there.”

2072

When Latifa invited the whole family to visit her, the deafening chatter, the wailing babies, the sheer mass of people in her place of habitual solitude, threatened to overwhelm her. But she let herself float through the noisy crowd, accepting the barrage of sensations as the price of her belated return to the fold.

Her grandchildren had forbidden her to cook, and they all brought dishes of their own, filling the burrow with mouth-watering aromas. Latifa tried to treat the comparative feast in the spirit in which it was intended: not as an arrogant display of the family’s wealth, but a gesture of hope that, before too long, everyone might eat as well as this again.

When the time came and she switched on the feed from the Scatterer, Fashard moved through the room gently hushing the guests.

“Are you quite sure it won’t work backward, focusing the rays and burning us to a crisp?” Fatema asked, deadpan.

“Nothing’s impossible,” Latifa replied. “I swear there were a few seconds, sometime last decade, when I really did wonder if I might accidentally foment a Marxist revolution in the Qin dynasty.”

As the current began to flow through the coils, Latifa watched the instrument readings with as much equanimity as she could muster. The system would work, or it wouldn’t; no intervention in the form of directives from Earth could make the slightest difference now.

The growing magnetic field, and its effects, were utterly invisible, but between the detectors deployed across the structure, and an array of radio frequency antennas, the software garnered enough information to paint a false-color aurora, shown in profile, blossoming against the stars. The plasma was gathering in front of the device, then rippling out in concentric waves, just as Emily had predicted thirty-six years before.

“If we go outside, could we see it?” Latifa’s first great-grandchild, Haroun, enquired.

“The sunlight’s too strong, coming from behind it,” she replied. “And we don’t have the right kind of eyes.”

He laughed, maybe half-understanding. Latifa bent down and kissed him, then wrapped her arms around him.

DREAM FACTORY

1

“Any pets?” Justine asked, glancing up from the checklist on her phone.

“No,” James replied, hopeful that this might count in his favor, though it was hard to read his interrogator’s demeanor. She’d said she was a law student, and he could already imagine her in a courtroom, calmly trapping duplicitous witnesses in the web of their own lies. Her two current housemates, both philosophy majors, were sitting on the couch beside her, but whatever they were doing on their own phones seemed entirely unrelated to the interview.

“Any allergies?” Justine continued.

“Umm, only pollen. As far as I know.”

“I meant allergies to pets,” Justine explained. “We have a cat, Pawpaw. Though if you have any serious food allergies, that would be good to know, too.”

James said, “We had a cat when I was a kid. I’m definitely not allergic to cats. Or peanuts.”

“Can you pay two weeks’ rent in advance, plus one more for the security deposit?”

“Yes.”

At the mention of rent, Ferouz and Lisa looked up. They exchanged glances with Justine; none of them seemed to need spoken language to confer.

Justine said, “Welcome to number 37.”

“Thank you.” James transferred the money, and when the real estate agent’s computer responded with a receipt acknowledging that his name had been added to the lease, he felt the tension in his shoulders ebbing away. He’d only had three more days left to find a new place.

As the interview panel rose to their feet, a small black-and-white cat padded into the room, tail high, mewing. Lisa crouched down and stroked its head, and it immediately began purring loudly and pressing back against her fingers.

“Wow, he’s affectionate,” James observed. “Or she?”

“He, but he’s neutered,” Ferouz replied.

“You should introduce yourself,” Lisa suggested. When she stepped away, the cat turned around and stared up at her pleadingly, so James quickly squatted down and took her place. Pawpaw responded as enthusiastically as he had to the more familiar human, rubbing his skull against James’s knuckles as if nothing could be more satisfying.

James couldn’t help smiling, but then he realized that the odd changes in texture he’d noticed were not tangled bits of fur, but small lumps beneath the skin. “Has he got ticks or something? On his head?” Maybe all this rubbing was about trying to dislodge the parasites, or at least deal with the itch.

Lisa laughed. “No, that’s the interface.”

“I’m sorry?”

She gestured with her hands spread above her skull. “The Bluetooth antennas for the electrodes.”

“You put electrodes in your cat’s brain?”

“Noemi had them installed,” Ferouz interjected. “Pawpaw was hers. But then she had to leave the country, and she couldn’t take him with her.”

“Okay.” James didn’t want to assume it would be safe to badmouth the housemate he was replacing; they might have all adored her, and entirely approved of her decision.

“She only did it so he wouldn’t attack the native wildlife,” Lisa said, taking over stroking duty. “It would be cruel to keep him locked up inside; the software stops him catching birds when he goes out.”

“Wouldn’t a bell on his collar do the same?”

“The studies show that this is four times more effective. And it doesn’t bother him at all. I mean, does he look miserable to you?”

“No,” James admitted. The cat was purring madly. But was that a genuine response to the company of the housemates, or just the software in his collar dictating how he felt?

The whole thing made him queasy, but what was he supposed to do? Make plans to spirit Pawpaw away to a deprogramming facility? Give up his place here, and spend the next month trying to claw his money back, so he could feel virtuous while changing nothing?

There were a million worse things happening every day, and the cat wasn’t suffering, in any ordinary sense of the word. Lecturing these people about a situation they hadn’t even chosen themselves would just make him seem obnoxious, and set him up for a miserable tenancy until they managed to eject him.

“Can I move in today?” he asked.

2

“Remember the product rule?” James prompted Leon. “The swimming pool, with both sides getting larger?”

“No,” Leon replied stubbornly. “You never told me anything about a swimming pool.”

James knew better than to contradict him. “If you increase the lengths of both sides of a swimming pool, the biggest change in the area will come along the sides: the length of one side times the change in the other, plus the length of the second side times the change in the first.” He sketched the rectangles, for the ninth or tenth time.

“Yeah, but the water will just get lower,” Leon pointed out. “Which is where your whole argument falls down. You’re ignoring the conservation of water.” He tipped his chair back and regarded James with triumphant contempt.

“So what’s the slope of x times cos x?” James pressed him. “If you don’t think you need the product rule, find it another way, but there has to be an answer.”

Leon disagreed. “It’s a trick question. You can’t just multiply anything you want. x is an angle, but cos x is something else. It’s like multiplying apples and oranges.”

“You mean like ... newtons and meters? Or persons and hours?”

“Exactly,” Leon agreed. “It’s just a word salad.”

When his person-hour was up, Mrs. Cooper walked James out onto the verandah and addressed him quietly. “I’m sorry, but Leon’s failed four tests in a row now. It’s just not working out for us.”

James said, “Okay. I understand.” There was no point telling her that her son was a lazy, entitled prick, and that no tutor in the world would ever summon better results from him. “Can I still list you as a reference?”

She grimaced. “If anyone asks about you, I can only be honest, and I’m not sure that would do you much good.”

“All right. But if we’re being honest, Leon isn’t trying at all.”

Mrs. Cooper laughed. “Your job was to make him passionate about the subject! His teachers couldn’t do it, which was why I was paying you.” She shook her head, bemused, and walked back into the house.

“Maybe next time hire a super-model,” James muttered. “A cocaine dealing super-model, who’ll tell him how calculus will make him rich.” The cicadas ignored him.

It was a stinking hot night, and as he sat at the bus stop he could smell his own sweat fermenting, drowning out the floral notes from the suburb’s manicured gardens. He wished he could go home and grab a shower before his shift, but the bus timetable had changed, it was impossible. At the restaurant, in the staff toilet, he splashed water on his face and torso, then he put on his uniform and walked out into the furnace of the kitchen.

“Any chance of more hours?” he asked Ken, when he came around checking on the burger line.

Ken snorted. “I offered you more hours a month ago, and you said it would make you too tired for your lectures.”

“But if I could start earlier ... ”

“I don’t need people earlier.”

“All right,” James decided. “Any time, then.”

“We’ve got everyone we need, right now. But I’ll let you know.”

“Thanks.”

On the bus home, James skimmed through the employment listings. Before Leon, his students Chris and Andrea had both been a joy to teach, curious and eager, just needing someone with the patience to reframe what they couldn’t always grasp the first time. But there were no tutoring jobs on offer close enough that he could make them fit in with his schedule.

It was after midnight when he entered the house; with everyone else asleep, he felt more like a burglar than a fellow resident. As he poured himself a glass of water, Pawpaw appeared and began performing tight figure-8s around his feet. He opened the back door then waited for the cat to bury his feces and return.

“Go back in with Lisa,” James whispered, with a shooing gesture. She always left her door slightly open, and he gathered Papaw usually slept on her bed, since Noemi had departed. But his own verticality seemed to render him more interesting; it was all he could do to slip into his room and close the door.

As he lay in the dark, sleep seemed impossible; he kept rerunning the calculations for the time that remained until the water flowing into his own financial swimming pool was overtaken by the quantity pouring out. But then he noticed the pool expanding, each side growing without the level dropping, the volume of water magically increasing to fill the extra room.

3

James woke to the sound of someone playing Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” on a tinny electric keyboard. “Make it stop!” he bellowed; newcomer or not, there were some things he shouldn’t have to put up with. When the dirge continued, he leaped out of bed and stomped into the kitchen.

The keyboard sat on the table, but the player seemed to have fled. All he could see was Pawpaw standing over it, treading on keys at random.

Except the keys the cat was pressing weren’t random. The rhythm was halting, as it had been from the start, but as far as James could tell the melody was note-perfect.

Lisa, crouched in a corner with her phone held up to record everything, burst out laughing. Pawpaw stopped playing and began mewing plaintively, apparently confused by the mixed messages from his audience.

“That’s a post!” Lisa announced.

“Whatever fresh Hell this is, leave me out of it,” James snarled.

“Oh, come on, the expression on your face was priceless!”

Ferouz entered the kitchen, smiling. “We were trying out the new collar app last night, saying, wait until James sees this ... ”

James realized he’d slept through his alarm, or shut it off on autopilot; he had a lecture in forty minutes. He took a shower, and grabbed a muesli bar to eat at the bus stop.

Lisa emailed him a link to her video. On the bus, James tried to get it taken down, on the basis that he hadn’t consented to being recorded, but after the YouTube Complaints app had confirmed that his current face was indeed a “probable match” to his face fifteen minutes before, it also determined that he was an “incidental bystander” in the contested material, and ruled that imposing his wishes would be “unduly onerous on the content creator, and/or disproportionately chilling for free speech.”

“You may still tag your likeness here with non-binding re-use advice,” the app added helpfully. “Just check one or more of the following. This image is inappropriate for general media release if I am (a) arrested, (b) deceased, (c) a victim of crime.”

When he arrived at the campus, he sprinted to the lecture theater, and managed to reach a seat in the back before the demerit siren sounded. The Machine Learning classes had been packed for the first four or five weeks, full of people who fondly imagined that the course would enable them to found their own billion-dollar start-ups, but as the truth sank in, the numbers had thinned. Some of the methods they were studying could be extremely useful for certain kinds of problems, but there were no magic bullets, and the most noisily hyped commercial applications were pure snake oil.

After the lecture, as he joined the students filing out, someone touched his shoulder. He turned, and saw Sarah frowning at him. “You look terrible,” she said. “Did you find a new place, or are you sleeping on someone’s couch?”

“I found a place,” he insisted. “It’s not perfect, but ... ”

“What?”

He described the morning’s musical interlude, but that wasn’t actually the reason he was tired. “I lost a tutoring job last night,” he added. All his troubles sounded petty when he spelled them out this way, but the line from David Copperfield was hard to argue with. How many shillings was he away from misery?

“Are you still working at the casino?” he asked, as they emerged into the glare of the courtyard.

“Yeah. I’ll let you know if there are any openings.”

“Thanks. Though I’d rather just take them for a few grand, if you can swing it. What’s the point of a computer science degree if I can’t even empty out a poker machine?”

Sarah nodded. “I’ll see what I can do. But maybe you should practice first by hacking the cat.”

“The cat’s been through enough.”

“Exactly,” she agreed. “Hack it so those clowns can’t keep messing with it.”

“I’m not sure I want to start a feud with people I have to live with.”

“Cover your tracks!” she urged him. “You think they’re going to hire a digital forensics team to find out why their kitty’s stopped doing party tricks?”

“I wouldn’t put it past them. Lisa has sixty thousand followers on YouTube.”

“That’s not going to pay for anything,” Sarah scoffed.

“I know, but I think she has rich parents, and she really likes the likes.”

They were approaching the library. “Is everything okay with you?” James asked. In between their banter he was sure he’d sensed something nagging at her.

“I broke up with Andrew last week,” she said.

“I’m sorry. How long were you together?”

“Seven months. But I met someone on the weekend, so there’s that.”

“Okay. That’s ... efficient.”

Sarah smiled, and replied in a Tennessee Williams drawl, “I have always depended on the strangeness of Tinder.”

James glanced toward the entrance to the library. “I have an assignment due.”

“Okay. I’ll see you around.”

4

James was in the kitchen, cooking pasta, when a small blue-and-white marble rolled between his feet and rebounded off the cupboard beneath the sink.

“That’s a goal!” Ferouz proclaimed from the doorway. Pawpaw stood in front of him, wearing tiny roller skates and holding a miniature hockey stick in his mouth. Lisa was off to one side, recording, as always.

James said nothing, but Lisa caught the look on his face and launched into a defense. “He loves doing these videos! It’s an enriching experience for him!”

“You ever thought of getting him a toy mouse?” James suggested. “One of those motorized ones he could chase around the house?”

“Eew, that would be creepy,” Lisa declared.

Pawpaw began to slip on the linoleum; he looked alarmed for a moment, but managed to flop down on his side. Ferouz approached and took the skates off. “We’re the ones who pay for his food, and vet bills,” he pointed out. “Justine doesn’t help. We could have just sent him to a shelter when Noemi moved out.”

“So what if I pay my share?” James asked rashly. “Would I get a say in how he’s treated?”

Lisa did not look happy, but Ferouz replied, “You’d get an equal vote.”

James pondered the proposition. If he wanted to have the collar turned off, Ferouz and Lisa would vote him down, but maybe he could chip away at their bloc by starting with smaller issues.

“If I agree to pay a third of his upkeep, and I buy a toy mouse, will you vote to let him play with it?” It wouldn’t be so bad going for broke if he was guaranteed at least one success.

Ferouz did not seem discomfited at all. Maybe he was looking for a chance to save money, while still holding on to the balance of power – and needling Lisa would just be a bonus. “It’s a deal,” he replied.

James ordered the mouse online; it arrived three days later. He unpacked it and tested it in his room. It had obstacle detectors and motion sensors that allowed it to give a reasonably convincing imitation of a creature trying to sneak along out of sight, freezing if it came under scrutiny, fleeing if it was pursued. At least it was a pure dumb robot, incapable of actual fear or pain. He’d read that the military were still perfecting their cyborg surveillance rats and pigeons, but every species posed its own set of challenges, and so far the only consumer product the research had spawned had been for cats.

He inactivated the mouse and carried it to the living room. Lisa and Ferouz were playing a video game that appeared to involve zombies driving racing cars; Pawpaw was nuzzling Lisa’s calves, and she occasionally reached down and stroked his head.

James placed the mouse on the floor, and switched it on with the remote. It scurried across the carpet and hid behind the monitor stand. Pawpaw didn’t react, but Ferouz turned to James. “Ah, you got it! Cool.”

He paused the game, and Lisa picked up her phone.

James stood in the doorway, feeling slightly foolish; the mouse wasn’t moving, and Pawpaw was yet to show the slightest interest in this lump of plastic covered in synthetic fur. The mouse’s courage level could be set on a scale from zero to toxoplasmosis; he raised it a notch. With no actual goal, it nonetheless left its sheltered spot and began a cautious traversal of the skirting boards.

As the mouse scrabbled across a discarded pizza menu, the crinkling paper made Pawpaw’s ears prick up. The cat turned and stared, and James could see him tracking and assessing the intruder from where he stood. But he still wasn’t stalking it. James dialed up the mouse’s brazenness again; it veered away from the wall, and dared to attempt to cut across the corner of the room.

Pawpaw jumped up onto the couch, cowering against Lisa, who was recording everything. The cat squirmed around and peeked again, then buried his head in the space between the backrest and the cushions.

Ferouz burst out laughing, but waited until Lisa had finished her video to avoid spoiling the soundtrack with his gloating. “Did you get what you wanted?” he asked James. “Looking out for the poor tortured animal’s interests?”

James didn’t reply, but as angry as he was, he could only blame his own lack of research. How had he supposed the collar kept native rats safe? Some magical species-specific filter? Or just a powerful aversion to every kind of stimulus that normally characterized prey?

Ferouz said, “Domesticated really means domesticated now; he’s not some half-neotenous would-be jaguar who just tolerates us for the sake of an easy life. He’s our widdul puddy cat, and if we want to dress him up as Santa and pimp him out on YouTube, he’ll have no choice but to love every minute of it. If you have a problem with that, you can fuck right off.”

James powered the mouse down and took it back to his room. Wherever his stubbornness was trying to lead him, he really did not have time to go there. What he needed to do now was swallow his pride, find more work, and keep his head clear for the sake of his studies. If he still had the urge to salve his conscience, he could give a few dollars to an animal shelter. Everything else was out of his hands.

5

“Go back to Lisa!” James pleaded. It was two in the morning, and he was asleep on his feet, but Pawpaw wouldn’t let him take a step without, not so much following him, as weaving between his ankles in a shackling maneuver that made it impossible to go anywhere without his pursuer arriving simultaneously.

“All right, I give up.” He let the cat into his room. Pawpaw jumped up onto the bed and began digging his front claws into the sheet.

James opened his mouth to scold him, but then decided he didn’t care. And who knew to what degree the collar would amplify his displeasure?

But that question didn’t have to remain unanswered.

He sat down and booted up his laptop, then went and made a cup of coffee. Pawpaw didn’t follow him into the kitchen; it seemed he was content with having been granted access to the previously forbidden haven.

When James returned, the cat was curled up on the end of the bed. As he unbuckled the collar, he half expected an ear-splitting alarm to go off on Lisa’s phone, rousing her to furious vengeance, but nothing disturbed the night’s silence. Pawpaw scratched some of his newly uncovered fur with his back foot, then appeared to doze off completely.

The collar talked to the electrodes with Bluetooth, and the home network with WiFi. The default password for the admin account was stamped into the plastic; the dye in the hollow that had made it readable was gone, but a pencil rubbing revealed it easily. Neither Noemi nor anyone else had bothered to change it.

James made copies of all the apps, and decompiled them with a tool that produced source code with helpful annotations, rendering the structure of the programs easy to discern. As a bonus, the apps called hundreds of routines in a dynamically linked library that needed actual names, rather than raw binary addresses, to be specified in the file at hand, so the code was peppered with invocations that bordered on the self-explanatory: InstallPreyMotionResponder, RampAversiveStimulus, TriggerPositiveAffect.

The Keyboard Maestro app was actually a cross between an augmented reality system and a bad drug trip, in which a nameless, formless sense-of-something-moving appeared overlaid on each key as required, compelling the victim to reach out and swipe at it. You could encode whatever piece of kitsch you wanted played into a series of impressions of having not quite glimpsed a cockroach burrowing through from another dimension. James remembered teasing his own cat, Silver, with a spot of reflected sunlight that she’d chased across the floor, but at least she’d always had the option of walking away.

Once he had a sense of what the apps were doing, the question was what the best way to undermine them would be. If he simply blocked them all from running, Lisa and Ferouz would just take the collar to be repaired. Even if he could avoid being blamed for the sabotage, any victory would be short-lived.

He needed something more like a slow fade-out, which could plausibly be explained by the cat gradually habituating to the signals from the collar, or the performance of the electrodes degrading. He looked up the warranty conditions; if anything went wrong after thirty days, you were on your own, regardless – but once the problem shifted from the collar to the electrodes, the cost of any remedy would be astronomically greater. There weren’t that many vets who did the surgery in the first place, but finding one who would dive back into the skull in order to address, not a swelling or infection arising from the implants, but merely a lack of compliance by the animal, would raise hurdles that even the most deranged petfluencer might balk at.

The collar ran a common variant of Linux for wearable devices that tens of thousands of people had already had reason to mess with. James found a description online for a fairly simple way to unlock the bootloader, and then he installed new firmware that let him run unsigned code. All he had to do now was modify a few low-level library routines, so that the signals to the electrodes tapered down to nothing over the next couple of weeks. Aside from aiding in the subterfuge, that would probably be easier for Pawpaw than going cold turkey.

He made the changes, but then wondered how he could verify that he’d actually done what he thought he had. So far, this was all just symbols on the laptop’s screen. Pawpaw was breathing slowly and deeply, his head twitching slightly every now and then. It seemed cruel to wake him just to test the apps’ potency for various settings of the fade-out parameter.

What was going on inside his skull, right now? James hesitated, but then laughed off his qualms and wrote a small program that extracted all the available data and displayed a summary in real time. He couldn’t create an image of the cat’s visual field, but he could track which kinds of objects and motions were being hallucinated, and the actions that the motor cortex would be producing if not for the paralysis of sleep.

Pawpaw was dreaming of something scurrying across the ground. The usual background process that made him fear his natural prey was no longer running on the collar, and, at least in this state, he had not internalized the conditioning: he was stalking the animal, not fleeing from it, and the electrodes’ crude emotional register declared that he was both excited and focused.

James watched the dream unfold. There were episodes of pursuit, and the dispatching of prey, but also affectionate tousling with animals of the dreamer’s own size, as if he was reliving wrestling with his siblings. Larger figures strode across the landscape too, eliciting a more complicated response, part fearful, part fraternal.

It was mesmerizing ... but the household would be awake soon, and James needed to be sure that his changes to the library really could damp down the prodding from the electrodes. He injected a keyboard-cockroach into Pawpaw’s dream, at full strength, and saw the swipe response it evoked. Then he set the dial to zero and tried again; there was nothing. At fifty percent, the dreamer noticed the incursion, but the reaction was tentative. The apps would lose their grip slowly, their decay seeming more like natural causes than foul play.

James rebooted the collar and put it back in place. Pawpaw stirred and eyed him resentfully.

“Two weeks, and all the crap will be out of your head,” James promised.

6

“A kernel machine generalizes this approach, identifying the separating hyperplane without explicitly mapping the raw data into a higher-dimensional feature space.”

James already knew the material, but he didn’t dare surrender to exhaustion and close his eyes, when the facial monitors were primed to record every lapse of attention. So he stared at the whiteboard intently, even as he tuned out the lecturer and began free associating, hoping to stay on the right side of the separating hyperplane.

Maybe he could grab a nap on the grass at lunch time. He couldn’t afford to miss his shift tonight; he was already scraping along the bottom of his bank account, skirting the edges of his credit card’s interest-free zone. He’d been given as many hours at the restaurant as he could hope for, but even if he could find more work, he didn’t have the time for it.

What he needed was a way to earn money in his sleep. Would anyone pay to watch him lying in bed, through a webcam, with no sexual content at all? Probably not – even if it was a thing, the market would already be flooded. Were there tasks he could do on Mechanical Turk without being awake? Maybe check an audio stream for the sound of children being tortured; the content moderation bots weren’t up to that yet. Would he grimace detectably if he heard an atrocity? Some fraction of the time, he might, but it seemed unlikely that he could do it reliably. And how did they get away with calling it “Mechanical Turk” anyway, as if eighteenth century orientalist shit was just fine if it was a historical reference? Why hadn’t anyone launched a competitor called “Mechanical Habsburg”?

It was too hard to get information in and out of his skull while he slept. But Pawpaw had a channel wide open, twenty-four hours a day. While the cat was dreaming, he could also be ... saving self-driving cars from collisions? Millions of cats had been hit by cars, but so had millions of human pedestrians; both species were still better at object detection than any car without lidar.

The siren sounded for the end of the lecture. James gathered his things and headed out, letting his idiotic fantasy slip away. The electrodes in the cat’s brain couldn’t induce detailed visual perceptions; the best they could manage were vague intimations. Whatever feats Pawpaw could perform in his sleep, he was never going to earn his keep as a node in the global network of computing resources.

In the courtyard, James caught up with Sarah, and described his adventures with the collar’s software.

“I didn’t think you’d actually do it!” she said. They found a patch of shade and sat on the low wall. “You should think about the other cats, though. You might have unplugged one, but what about the rest?”

“I was going to move on to the American President’s First Kitten, but then I realized they’d whisk me off to a black site the moment it refused to play ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’”

“I’m serious.”

“Okay, but how? Getting malware onto the app store is beyond me. Maybe if I had a free month or two I could learn what I needed, but ... ”

“What about non-malware, then?” Sarah suggested. “A genuine app, as far as the collar is concerned – but one that might dissuade the owners themselves from running the other apps?”

James was on the verge of retorting that social engineering wasn’t always easier than malware, when a possibility crystallized in his mind. “Instead of entertaining them by jumping through hoops, what if the cat could show them what it was dreaming of doing?”

Sarah was skeptical. “You said all you could extract was a kind of textual running commentary.”

“I did. But if artificial neural networks are good at anything, it’s confabulation. Feed those prompts I saw this morning into the right kind of image generator, and maybe half the demographic who think that their pet being goaded into playing Pachelbel’s Canon is adorable might either get a jolt of empathy when they grasp what it would rather be doing – or if that’s too much to hope for, find something trippy enough, or twee enough, in the neural net’s imagery to scratch the same itch.”

Sarah didn’t reply. James was so tired that he started to wonder if he’d actually spoken, or just spelled out the proposal in his head.

“You should do it,” she said finally. “I’ll help, if you like.”

“I’m dead on my feet right now,” James admitted.

She smiled. “I can see that. Maybe next week?”

“Absolutely.”

It was insane, but it wasn’t impossible; once he’d caught up on his sleep they could probably find a few hours between lectures to start putting the app together. And he’d completed the hardest part already: he had a direct line to Pawpaw’s brain. He could log the cat’s dreams, build up a data set, and then start to work out what kind of shiny distractions he could dangle in front of the humans, in the hope of overcoming their primal compulsions and rendering them fit for a domestic life in the company of another species.

7

“Stupid animal,” Lisa muttered, scowling at her phone. Pawpaw walked past her and rubbed his head satisfyingly against a table leg, before strolling over to his food bowl.

James kept quiet, but later that night he went through the activity logs from the collar, and saw that Lisa had run the diagnostics three times in the last twenty-four hours. All the reports were listing no faults, of course. He had no idea what she’d do when Pawpaw’s immunity to the apps proved to be more than a temporary glitch, but even if she was willing to shell out the money for a new collar, he’d found a Bluetooth exploit that could mess with the electrodes directly. The puppet show was over – in this house, at least.

He started up the latest iteration of the dream app. After feedback from the beta testers, he’d made the style transfer much smoother; he could even slide mid-playback between different forms of pastiche now, from van Gogh to Francis Bacon, from Watership Down to Studio Ghibli.

He leaned back and watched the customized Dream Cat (emerald-eyed, dainty, black-and-white coat) padding through a wheat field beneath a swirling starry night. When the stalks of the crop rustled, the Cat paused, and crouched down low. The tension after each small sound made it clear that it had been wise not to try to add musical embellishments; the YouTubers could smother their version with anything they wanted once they got it in their editing suites, but even though the unadorned original was ninety-five percent concocted, it had a kind of esthetic unity.

When the Cat finally pounced, this style spared the viewer from explicit gore, but it still portrayed the act with no ambiguity. The Dream Cat played with his prey, then tore it apart. While the dream-logging portion of the app was running, it would disable everything else on the collar; there would be no punishment meted out for these transgressions. The owner would see their pet’s idea of normal behavior – and with luck, that might sway some of them into offering a substitute during waking hours. An information screen on the app explained how the imposed aversion to prey-seeking could be shut off while the animal was indoors, expanding the possibilities for play. Telling people to throw away the collars completely would be sure to get the app rejected from the store, but encouraging them to change one simple default wouldn’t threaten the whole business model. If anyone’s conscience took them further, that was up to them.

James heard scratching at the door. He let Pawpaw in, expecting the cat to curl up on the bed, but instead he circled around the room restlessly.

“What is it?”

Pawpaw stopped beside his desk, rubbing his head against the drawers. James opened the top drawer and took out the toy mouse. “Really? You knew it was in there?”

He switched the mouse on, then placed it on the floor. Pawpaw stared at it, but it remained frozen.

James dialed up the mouse’s risk-taking behavior, and it scurried away. Pawpaw went after it, but it managed to escape into the space beneath the closet. The cat stretched a paw into the dark gap a few times, then concluded that this was unlikely to be fruitful, and sat back to wait.

This was all just an artifice, too, but holding out for the cat’s right to ravage actual wildlife would be untenable. There had to be some pragmatic balance between allowing domesticated animals to follow their instincts, entirely untrammeled, and forcing them to submit to whatever humans found amusing. “One must imagine Pawpaw happy,” James suggested in his best David Attenborough voice.

His laptop pinged; he had a message from Sarah.

“Are we ready to submit?”

James could easily imagine spending another week or two just playing with the style selector, but they’d reached the point of diminishing returns.

“The code’s ready,” he replied. “But we still don’t have a name.” They’d kept putting it off while they tackled more important things.

“Any ideas?”

He’d thought of half a dozen, but none of them really grabbed him. He trusted Sarah’s judgment more than his own; she’d usually had more sleep.

“You decide.”

8

James was pouring rancid fryer oil into the tank in the alley behind the restaurant when the email arrived. “Congratulations! Your app Ghost Cat has now passed verification and is live on the Collar Store!”

On the bus home, he checked the statistics; there’d been three downloads in the past two hours. He and Sarah needed five hundred to break even on the fee for their developer’s account. He refreshed the page a few times, but the count hadn’t budged when he collapsed into bed, and in the morning he resolved not to look again for at least a week.

“Nineteen sales!” Sarah announced cheerfully, when he ran into her the next day.

James laughed. “Oh well. It wasn’t a complete waste: we can probably recycle it as an undergraduate project.”

“How’s Pawpaw doing?” she asked.

“Fine. Lisa and Ferouz have lost interest in him completely; all he does now is eat, sleep, and chase the mouse. I showed him his old roller skates once, just out of curiosity, and he looked at me like I’d shat on the carpet.”

“Ha.” Sarah hesitated. “You know how we weren’t going to advertise?”

James steeled himself for a fight. “We can’t afford it. Seriously! I’ve already sunk more into this than I can spare.”

“I’ve already paid for it myself,” she replied. “I won’t ask you to split the fee unless we go into profit.”

“Who’s the advertisement with?”

“A woman named Frida with a YouTube channel called Fully Wired Kitten. Ten times more followers than Lisa. She wanted fifty dollars and a free copy of the app, to test it and run a review.”

“So she might not even like it?” James didn’t want to harangue Sarah when she was bearing the whole cost of the strategy, but it sounded like a grift either way: if payment guaranteed a positive “review” then Frida was cheating her audience out of an honest assessment – but if it didn’t, how could she justify the fee?

Sarah said, “We’ll find out soon enough. It’s going out tonight, around ten o’clock.”

When he arrived at the restaurant, James switched his phone off, so he wouldn’t give in to the masochistic urge to monitor events he had no power to control. There’d been a time when he would have claimed that the raison d’être of any software he wrote would be to fulfill some user’s genuine, pre-existing need. But almost every app was a kind of weapon now, however grand or petty the cultural skirmishes it enabled. He didn’t regret the payload he was trying to deliver, but now that he’d committed to a strategy of manipulation, he’d stepped into a world that he’d once vowed he’d never be a part of.

The griller was beeping; one of the patties was stuck. “Are you fixing that?” Ken called to him.

“I’m on it!” James replied.

When he finished the shift, he kept his phone off; he didn’t have the stomach for the near-certainty of bad news. When he woke the next morning, any itch of curiosity, and even the desire to tear away the bandage quickly, had all but vanished. He fed Pawpaw, and ate breakfast, without switching on his laptop or his phone.

He felt calm as he left the house. The lectures he attended seemed imbued with a startling new clarity, as if he’d updated the prescription on his glasses.

“James? Where have you been?”

Sarah stood in front of him, with a look on her face that might have made sense if he’d fallen from the sky after a decade’s unexplained absence.

“Here. I just ... ” He pointed back toward the lecture theater.

“I’ve been trying to reach you all morning!”

James couldn’t read her expression. “Is there a bug in the app? Are we turning all the cats catatonic?”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Why are you so upset, then? We got a bad review, the app bombed. It’s not the end of the world.”

Sarah said, “You really haven’t checked again, since Frida panned it?”

James was silent; he’d guessed one thing correctly, but what was he missing?

“After the review went out,” Sarah explained, “someone saw the clip on Fully Wired Kitten of the dream that was supposed to damn the whole thing ... and reached the opposite conclusion.”

“Okay. So not all the commenters agreed with Frida.”

“I’m not talking about some random commenter. Calista saw the clip. Calista disagreed. She bought the app and ran it for her own cat, and loved it.”

“Who’s Calista?” James caught himself. “You don’t mean ... the singer?”

“Yes.”

“I probably shouldn’t call her that, when she’s ninety percent autotune, ten percent sighing.”

“She’s won four Grammies,” Sarah replied. “I don’t like her songs either, but she has fifty million followers. Since she posted about the app, we’ve had ten thousand downloads.”

James absorbed this revelation. Their cut on each sale was about a dollar, so five thousand each. He could probably afford to reduce his shifts, maybe drop the last two hours and finish at eleven, the way he used to. “Not bad for an undergraduate project,” he joked. Money aside, the number of downloads was only two percent of the half million collars currently installed, so they hadn’t exactly liberated the wired cats of the world from their oppressors. But if a celebrity was championing dream-watching, that might yet shift the balance a little further.

On the bus to the restaurant, he watched both posts, immune to Frida’s scorn. “What this app spews out is nothing but a form of face-swapping revenge porn!” she fumed. “This is not my Prince Whiskers at all. Over the last few months, you and I have been on a marvelous journey with him that uncovered so many of his hidden talents: as a jazz musician, a fashion model, an imperfect but ever-striving pastry chef. Now these ham-fisted morons are trying to foist a cartoonish parody of the feline character onto all of our beloved companions.”

Calista’s take was different. “Finally seeing into Lady Lydia’s soul, not only does this prove that she has always been my spirit animal, it has empowered me to fully embrace my own dark, predatory instincts. Expect new tracks that take you where no human can walk alone; only our mingled essence can survive the way of the carnivore.”

9

“I’m giving two weeks’ notice,” James said, clutching his hairnet awkwardly in one hand. “I hope you can get someone to replace me by then.”

“You’ll come back when you need the money,” Ken predicted.

“Maybe.”

“What? Someone died and left you an inheritance?”

“I got a couple of tutoring jobs,” James lied. “The rate’s pretty good, so it works out better. And I can get more sleep.”

For a second, Ken looked envious. “Okay,” he said. “Good luck.”

“I’ll stick around for two more weeks,” James promised.

Outside the restaurant he strolled through the humid night, relieved but weary. He’d parked the car eight blocks away, afraid of having to explain the purchase if a fellow worker saw him with it. “You’re dealing drugs now, right?” “No.” “Then how could you ... ?” “It’s a long story.”

It was only a ten-minute drive to his new place. Inside, when he switched on the light, Pawpaw and Phantom stirred briefly, but remained curled up on the couch together.

The light was still on in Sarah’s room, so he knocked on the door. “Come in,” she said. She was in bed, but she was looking at something on her laptop.

“I gave notice,” James told her, standing in the doorway.

“Finally!”

He shrugged. “I was never sure our sales weren’t going to tank. I mean, the hype can’t last forever.”

“We have something better than hype: controversy.” Sarah turned the laptop around to show him the screen; she’d been watching a clip from a US talk show. “They interviewed an animal behaviorist, who explained that the Ghost Cat dreams are just embellishments that shouldn’t be taken literally.”

“You mean, exactly what we admit ourselves in the disclaimer?”

“Yeah, but it’s nice to know that even people with PhDs don’t read terms and conditions. And on the plus side, he also said the electrodes themselves should be banned.”

“You think that’s going to happen?”

“Eventually,” Sarah replied. “But no one made it a priority when the things first came out, so I can’t see any jurisdiction rushing through legislation, just because the hardware’s getting more attention thanks to a more benign use.”

“And one bad singer.”

“Be nice. Calista’s catching all the flak from the old school collar users, while we hide behind our brand name. Has anyone released a diss track about you, lately?”

“Not that I’m aware of.” James gathered up his courage. “So maybe we’ve got a window. A few months in which we can ... leverage this.” Sarah didn’t reply immediately, and he felt his face burning, as if he’d just confessed to an unspeakable crime.

“You mean go after venture capital?”

“Yes.”

“I’ve been thinking about that myself,” she confessed. “But I always thought you were committed to a life of open source projects for philanthropic foundations.”

James frowned. “Are you mocking me?”

“Absolutely.” She smiled. “Anyway, if some VC is willing to fund us because a pop star threw a spotlight on Ghost Cat, so long as the new project has merit there’s nothing to feel guilty about. We’re the ones who struck a blow for animal liberation, aren’t we?”

“Maybe.”

“So.” Sarah set her laptop aside. “What’s the project? What’s the pitch?”

10

“Suppose your grandmother lives in a sprawling retirement complex,” James began. “There are six different gates by which a vehicle can enter. One is fifty meters from her front door; the others might not even give access to her location. But every time she calls a taxi, or a ride share – or an ambulance – and gives her full address as a resident within the complex, some half-baked Geographical Information System from one of the big providers redirects the vehicle to what it wrongly thinks is the correct street address for the whole complex. The wrong gate, on the wrong street.”

Celia Davenport interrupted him. “Surely Google have this covered?”

“You’d think so,” James replied, “but they don’t. This isn’t hypothetical.” He scrolled to the survey results on his deck. “Six percent of our respondents said they’ve experienced problems due to GIS errors, ranging from having to stand in an alley in the rain to collect a supposedly home-delivered pizza, to ambulances delayed because they’re unable to locate their patients. And it’s not just summoning vehicles: three percent of people who try to type their true postal address into a web form are told it doesn’t exist, so they’re forced to abandon the interaction, or accept some approximation such as dropping the suffix that specifies the halves of a duplex. So the effects range from nuisance level to life-threatening, but even misdirected parcels add up to millions of dollars in lost productivity. These systems are marvelous when they’re accurate, but when they’re not, they’re like an invisible brick wall.”

“So what’s the solution?” Davenport pressed him. “How do you train your networks to do a better job than everyone else?”

“We don’t make it a machine-learning problem at all,” James replied. “We buy access to multiple databases, we identify the discrepancies between them, and we classify and remedy the problems using traditional, robust, deterministic code. I don’t care if someone has a neural net that gets ninety-five percent of addresses right. I’m aiming for software with so few errors that the dozen or so cases per million it can’t deal with can be handled manually by a staff of two or three.”

He waited for the shockingly sane proposal to sink in. He wasn’t pitching a mashup of sexy buzzwords. He wasn’t claiming to cure death, or world hunger. He wasn’t even hoping to get millions of people hooked on some vacuous time-sink they’d never even known they’d wanted before. He just aimed to do one job properly that no one else could be bothered getting right.

Davenport grilled him, but after his rehearsals with Sarah he was well prepared. Finally, she said, “I’ll get back to you in a couple of days, but I think we’d be willing to partner in your pilot program, if you can match us dollar for dollar on the costs.”

“All right.” That wasn’t quite what James had anticipated, but the revenue from Ghost Cat ought to cover his share. “I’ll look forward to hearing from you.”

When he’d hung up the call, all the implications that would flow from a favorable decision began to seem a lot more real. For a start, he’d have to drop out of his degree – with most of the debt remaining, but no qualification to show for it. There was no way he’d have time to run even the pilot program and keep studying.

He’d always laughed at the aspiring tech moguls sitting in the lecture theaters beside him, convinced that they were about to make their fortune from the latest overblown trend. But his project was solid: it solved a real problem that wasn’t going away. Just because it was a celebrity endorsement for fabricated imagery of cats’ dreams that had brought him here, that didn’t mean his feet weren’t still planted firmly on the ground.

11

“I noticed something today,” Sarah said, as she joined James at the dinner table. “You know how we’ve been getting roughly the same sales for the last twelve weeks?”

James smiled. “Yeah, but I’ve been trying not to dwell on it, because I’m sure it can’t last. To be honest, I thought we’d saturate the market much sooner.”

“So why do you think the sales are holding up so well?”

“Because Calista’s side is winning people over?”

“They’re not, though,” Sarah replied bluntly. “There’s still a huge number of collar owners who aren’t buying Ghost Cat. They’re not being won over.”

James was confused. “So who are we selling to?”

“Brand new collar owners,” she said. “People who are putting electrodes into their cats’ brains, because it’s more fashionable now. Thanks to Calista, but ... also thanks to us.”

James said, “I don’t believe that. The numbers must have been growing anyway.”

Sarah took out her laptop and showed him a plot. The sales of new collars had spiked a week or so after Calista’s post; it had dropped back since then, but it was still almost fifty percent higher than it had been before.

“Fuck. Fuck!” James stood up and walked away from the table. “Why did you have to tell me that?”

“Seriously? You wish I’d kept my mouth shut?”

It took him a few heartbeats to calm down enough to relent. “No,” he said. “I’m sorry. But ... ” Even if the new collar owners were wholly uninterested in puppetry, the surgery itself was risky. And once they got bored with their cats’ dreams, would they really eschew all the other novelties the electrodes enabled?

“Just imagine what Celia Davenport will think, if we tell her we’re pulling the plug on the app that’s keeping us afloat while we work on Abode ... because it grew the market too much.” He could forget about anyone ever taking a pitch from him again.

Sarah said, “Even if we pull the app, there are clones like Oneiro that have all the same features. We’re on top because we were first, and the price is reasonable, and Calista touted us. But if Ghost Cat vanishes, it won’t kill the trend.”

James couldn’t argue with that. “So what do we do?” Accept that things had spiraled out of their control, and just keep taking the money? He glanced over at Pawpaw and Phantom, happily gorging themselves on sheep liver. Nature was a bloodbath, and humans were shit; if he and Sarah were treating their own pets well enough, maybe that was the most they had a right to aspire to.

Sarah said, “I have an idea. But it’s pretty extreme.”

“A way to slow down the sales of new collars?”

“Yes. Maybe even get the electrodes outlawed, and put the kibosh on any canine version in the works.”

“Is it legal?”

“Ummm ... ”

“Can we cover our tracks?”

Sarah hesitated. “Probably.”

James braced himself. “Will we have an alibi with Davenport, when our revenue dries up?” If she canceled her investment, he could live with that; he could re-enroll in his degree and treat the whole entrepreneurial detour as a fever dream. But if she believed he’d flat out lied to her, that could mean anything from permanent unemployability to a jail term for fraud.

Sarah said, “Of all the people she might blame for the death of Ghost Cat, I think we’ll be a long way down the list.”

12

“We need to make it look like there are two versions of the app,” Sarah stressed. “One that actually worked, and did everything it claimed to do. Then someone took that version, kept the user interface and enough of the original code to pass a superficial inspection, but stripped out all the true functionality, and added a sting in the tail.”

“That’s a lot of work,” James protested. “And it’s not as if anyone’s going to take the broken version to Consumer Affairs.”

Sarah said, “If this all pans out, don’t you think there’ll be competent tech journalists looking into it, eventually? If they examine the app we actually release, and it looks like it was written from scratch as a kind of poisoned honeypot, the spin on the story will be completely different than if it looks like someone used a pre-existing app with an established user base as camouflage for the same thing.”

James took their plates over to the sink and started washing up. “Do you think there is an actual pre-existing app, with an established user base?”

“There might well be,” Sarah replied. “But do you want to go on the dark web and search for it? It’s risky enough faking something like this; do you want to get caught downloading the real thing?”

“No,” James conceded.

Since he was already familiar with apps from the Collar Store, the first part of the coding fell to him. He tried to think of the task functionally, breaking it down into the gathering of the user’s preferences, and then the means by which the sensors in the collar and the signals sent to the electrodes could be used to enact the required result. It was instrumentality in its purest form: line after line of code that treated the collared animal as a device to which a series of commands could be sent.

After three days, he was numb, but he had something that he believed looked like a genuine attempt to achieve the goals they wished to mimic. When he passed it to Sarah, he said, “Make sure you eviscerate the fuck out of this. If someone ‘fixes’ it and makes it work ... ”

She said, “I’ll gut it so the cuts don’t show, but they’re still completely fatal. I promise.”

James had a long shower, then went to bed.

He spent the next week working on the Abode database, unsure if it was now just a kind of cover, or if he might yet stand a chance of getting it running. Sarah still had lectures to attend and assignments to complete, so her half of the shadow project took her longer. But on the weekend, she spent the whole of Saturday disabling and booby-trapping his app, and on Sunday morning they reconvened.

James said, “Okay, people might create shit like this. But who would be stupid enough to draw attention to it?” If the dark web did harbor non-defanged cousins of the app they’d written, even at the height of media interest in the collars this fact had not been splashed across the home screens of every news site. So how were they meant to bring their own version to prominence without tipping their hand?

“There’s a precedent for evangelism,” Sarah replied. “Believe me, you don’t want to wade through the results of that web search, but ... a while back, there was a British crackpot named Jasper Mellick, whose fifteen seconds of infamy came when a couple of universities sued him for squatting on domain names that were slight misspellings of their own, and redirecting all the traffic to his BLTZ manifesto.”

“BLTZ? Is that a rap group?”

“Better Living Through Zoophilia. His long loony screed praising the utilitarian benefits of genetically engineering animals that would enjoy having sex with people.”

“Umm ... you’re not suggesting we frame him for the app?”

Sarah said, “He’s dead. But the internet hasn’t quite washed away every trace of him. If we use the BLTZ name, and quote from the manifesto, we can make it seem as if he still has anonymous disciples willing to go all out to spread the message.”

“So we make a video, with masks and ranting?”

“Yes.”

“Synthetic voice or disguised voice?”

“Disguised synthetic voice,” Sarah decided. “It has to sound like a disguised voice, or the media won’t take it seriously.”

The masked figure was CGI, of course, with glimpses of eyelids blinking behind the holes. “We are ushering in a new age of universal flourishing,” the mask read from Mellick’s manifesto. “When no one, man or beast, need be sad, frustrated, or lonely.”

They put the video, and the butchered app, out onto the torrents and IPFS, then sprinkled links to the video in comments to half a dozen posts in the Ghost Cat flame wars. A couple of hours later, it had started garnering some attention — and while it was easy for anyone to check that the app it referred to actually existed, the need to hack the bootloader in a collar in order to run it, and a reluctance by most people to even touch the cursed thing with six-foot tongs, meant the claims in the video were spreading much faster and wider than the truth that some or all copies of the app (who could say?) had been corrupted with malware that would freeze the cat’s Bluetooth.

James said, “When your grandchildren ask you—”

“No,” Sarah cut him off. “Neither of us are ever going to speak of this again. If it works, it works; if it doesn’t, we did our best. But no bragging, ever. If we don’t end up in court, we take this to our graves.”

13

“If you can keep him calm and hold him still for about five minutes,” Dr. Feldman said, “we’ll only need a local anesthetic.”

James said, “I think that’ll work.”

He stroked Pawpaw’s neck then gripped the back of his head tightly; the vet slipped the needle into the skin midway between the three antennas. Pawpaw looked startled, then annoyed, but he didn’t go berserk, and James didn’t let him pull free until the needle was out.

“Okay. Now just try to get him to relax while that takes effect.”

“Sure.”

Dr. Feldman dropped the hypodermic into his sharps bin. “This is the tenth of these procedures I’ve done this week; everyone’s rushing to get ahead of the ban. I wish people had thought a bit more before they buried wires in their pets’ skulls, in the first place.”

“I inherited him like this,” James protested. “It wasn’t my idea.”

Dr. Feldman said nothing, but still managed to convey with one eloquently skeptical glance: That’s what they all say.

For each antenna, he made a small incision, snipped the active circuitry off with something that looked like a small pair of bolt-cutters, then deburred the top of what remained with a polishing tool and stitched up the cut. Pawpaw grew increasingly impatient: doing this weird shit once was just human-level annoying, but again? And then again?

“Okay, we’re done.” Dr. Feldman handed James a pamphlet on wound care.

James got Pawpaw back into the cage for the ride home. When Silver’s cancer had been judged incurable, he’d carried her body home in the cage he’d brought her in, and he’d sworn he’d never have a pet again. But here he was.

At the bus stop, he poked a finger through the wires and stroked the top of Pawpaw’s nose. “It’s going to sting when the anesthetic wears off,” he said. “But not for long. Just take it easy. It’s almost over now.”

LIGHT UP THE CLOUDS

1

Tirell stood on the platform at the edge of the forest, looking out at the banks of red clouds. As he waited for Anna’s glider to come swooping down, his eyes were drawn to the swirling patterns below, where stronger winds set the thicker clouds roiling, spinning off vortices in thrillingly strange hues: deep blues, rich browns, grays shading almost into white.

“If you fall, it won’t look so pretty,” Selik joked.

“That’s true.” You could only see the patterns from above; if you were down among them, at any one point you’d be surrounded by a monochromatic fog – while being crushed to death with nothing to show for it.

Tirell took a few steps back from the edge.

“Here she comes,” Rada announced.

Tirell followed Rada’s gaze and caught sight of the glider, descending in a broad, shallow helix that brought it almost directly above them before carrying it away again. He knew that Anna was an old hand at this maneuver, but he couldn’t help feeling a visceral sense of how terrified he would have been in her place, if he’d been the one controlling the rudder.

On its second approach, the glider was much lower. For a moment Tirell thought it might miss its target, but then he realized he was blind to the true curvature of its path, misjudging it by its foreshortened appearance. The glider flew directly into the mouth of the clearing, shot straight past him and the other onlookers, and dived into the wall of soft foliage that some ancestral aviator must have cultivated generations ago, and a thousand grateful successors had tended ever since.

The three of them ran toward the site of the impact, but before they could reach it Anna had already clambered out, apparently unharmed. As Tirell drew nearer, he could see that the glider, though strewn with leaves and tangled in the vines, had suffered no real damage either.

Everyone worked together to pull it free, then they dragged it across the platform and secured it in its proper place – using thicker vines, in a more orderly arrangement.

With the job done, Anna turned to them and announced, “I think the cousins might be back.”

Tirell strove to interpret her demeanor, wondering if she was teasing her friends. As far as he could tell she was perfectly serious, but he would have thought this claim was something only a child could believe.

“The thing’s still up there?” Selik asked warily.

“Absolutely,” Anna confirmed. “But now there are three of them. All in similar orbits.”

Selik hesitated. “Are you sure you’re not just seeing different asteroids every time, coming and going from the equilibrium point?”

“Not if they’re doing it at random,” Anna replied. “There’s an object of the same size and brightness in the same orbit as I saw on the last trip. So either it’s the same thing as before, or whatever took its place managed to mimic its appearance and slip into exactly the same trajectory. I can’t speak to the fate of the other two yet, but if they’re still following their present course when I return, that would stretch the bounds of coincidence.”

Rada said, “With three asteroids all disturbing each other, it would be absurd to expect them to remain in the region at all, let alone retrace their orbits.”

“Of course,” Anna agreed. “If these are natural objects, moving under gravity alone, they couldn’t possibly hang around much longer.”

The group fell silent. Tirell could almost hear a collective rejoinder that only tact was keeping anyone from uttering: If these are natural objects?

Anna scowled. “So do you all think the cousins are dead?”

Selik snorted. “Dead or alive, I can’t say I’ve been expecting a visit.”

“Why not? Because it wasn’t sooner?” Anna brushed an insect off her shoulder and sat down on the platform, gesturing to the others to do the same. “I’m serious! If our own ancestors struggled with the Changes, why wouldn’t the cousins have struggled just as much? They could have lost everything and had to start over, as many times as we did. And if we still lack the means to visit them, why should we be shocked that it took them this long to make the same journey in reverse?”

“But we don’t know that they survived at all,” Rada stressed.

“That’s true. But we survived what they thought was unsurvivable, so we could have been as wrong about their chances as they were about ours. And that’s just the way we tell the story now: because we didn’t die, we pretend we always knew that we’d made the better choice. But maybe at the time, both groups were glad that the other would be trying a different strategy – improving the odds that at least one would succeed.”

Selik was unconvinced. “All these ‘maybes’ have been plucked out of the sky before. That’s the trouble with invoking the cousins: you can call on them to explain anything.”

“So how do you account for these observations?” Anna demanded.

“The observations could be wrong,” Selik replied. His tone was respectful, but Tirell was still shocked by the bluntness of his words.

“I know what I saw,” Anna said mildly.

“Anyone’s eyes can deceive them.” Selik looked uncomfortable, but he wasn’t retreating.

“You mean, especially at my age?” Anna asked. She turned and gestured at the glider. “So why don’t you go up and check for yourself?”

“You know I don’t have the experience.” Selik seemed to regret his choice of words immediately; if he deferred to her skills as a pilot, why not to those as an observer?

Rada said, “Why not take a fresh pair of eyes with you, next time?” She glanced at Tirell. “In a body still light enough not to weigh you down?”

Everyone turned to him at once, eyeing him appraisingly. Tirell felt his stomach tense, and he struggled to quell the fear rising in his blood. They’re joking, he told himself. About everything. Anna was joking about the cousins, and they were all in on the joke except him. But now they were putting an end to the ruse by pushing it beyond their victim’s threshold of gullibility.

“Would you be willing to do that?” Anna enquired. “It’s about time I had an apprentice.”

Her voice still betrayed no hint of mirth. And even Selik seemed to be taking the proposal seriously.

“I’m a fruit picker!” Tirell protested. He’d stumbled on the group in the market, overhearing one of their heated debates, but even when he’d started tagging along to their gatherings, he’d never expected to do anything more than listen – or at most, interject with a question or two.

“I’m not asking you to stop that,” Anna replied gently. “This wouldn’t take up all of your time.”

Tirell did his best to consider the offer calmly, with the seriousness it deserved. He’d always wanted to know what lay beyond the clouds; until now he’d been content just to listen to Anna’s reports, but if even her friends started doubting her, what would her testimony be worth? He might as well have stayed in the market, where story-tellers improvised wild confabulations that differed on each retelling, no more permanent than the clouds themselves.

“I’ve never flown before,” he admitted. “Not even to the closest forests.”

Anna was unfazed. “And why would you have? There’s nothing worth seeing there. We can take this as slowly as you like; you don’t need to become a pilot at all, if you don’t want to. For now, the most important thing is to have someone up there with me, to confirm what I’m seeing.”

Tirell put his fears aside. “All right,” he said. “I’ll come with you.” The next flight would still be many days away; he’d have plenty of time to change his mind.

The forest was already darkening, as the glistening bead of the Far Sun dropped away to the west. Tirell tried to imagine the time before the cousins left, when the Near Sun had supposedly been so much brighter that the whole warm half of the world had been uninhabitable.

He wasn’t sure if he believed that or not, though many people he trusted had repeated the same story. But it would take much more to persuade him that, not only were the most extravagant claims about the old days true, everything he’d once thought of as belonging either in the unfathomable past, or at an incomprehensible distance, had now reached into the present and was drifting around just above his head.

2

“Take as much fruit as you like,” Tirell encouraged Delia. “They were almost falling into the sack.”

She gauged the weight of half a dozen, and chose two. “What do you want for them?” she asked.

“Leave it for the future.”

Delia scowled, as if she resented the obligation, but Tirell wasn’t short of anything at present.

“If you pick too many, you’ll kill the trees,” she scolded him.

“That’s really not true.” All the fruit parted from the branches eventually, but plucking it before it was buoyant enough to survive outside the forest did no harm to the parent, other than thwarting its ambition to give rise to a whole new forest of its own.

“I heard you’re going flying with that madwoman,” Delia informed him. Tirell didn’t reply; he had no idea how she could have learned about his plans, but they were none of her concern. “You’ll get yourself killed for nothing,” she said. “If you want some excitement, my friends fly back and forth to Lappa all the time. It’s a short trip, but the winds can really set you spinning, so at least you’ll be having fun if it all goes wrong.”

“I’d rather die from a lack of air than too much of it,” Tirell joked. “Anyone can fall into the depths, but how many people do you know who’ve fallen into the sky?”

“You’re an idiot.” Delia ambled away across the floor of dead branches, toward the pile of juicy larvae Madeleine was offering.

“You can weave me some new clothes,” he called after her, fairly sure that she hadn’t taken enough fruit in his entire tenure to have earned him anything of the kind. “Or just a new sack,” he added.

Three of the infants who hung around the market crawled up to him, babbling happily, so he sat with them for a while, talking to them and feeding them mouthfuls of chewed fruit.

After a while they grew bored with him, and headed over to try their luck with Madeleine. Tirell lay down beside his wares, and felt a patch of bark scrape against his shirt. Before the cousins left, or so the story went, even the cold half of the world had been so hot that everyone went naked. But surely they would have been scratched a lot more? Or was people’s skin tougher then? Like his soles and his palms, but all over?

He drifted off to sleep, then was woken by someone prodding him with their foot.

Selik said, “If you still want to do this, Anna’s getting the glider ready.”

“Now?” Tirell had thought he had a few more days.

“She wants to take advantage of the weather while it lasts.”

Tirell clambered to his feet. “I’ll do it,” he said. “She’s a good pilot, I know she won’t kill me.”

“Of course she won’t.” Selik noted his hesitancy. “But?”

Tirell said, “I know you don’t think the cousins have come back – but do you really think they ever left at all? Flew beyond the clouds, all the way to the Far Sun?”

“Not all the way,” Selik corrected him. “The inner worlds keep their distance from it; it’s not the same as we are with this one.”

“You know what I mean.” Tirell didn’t doubt that there’d been some parting of the ways long ago, but falling out of touch with a group of distant relatives didn’t really strike him as a convincing proof that they’d left the world behind.

“The cousins might have failed,” Selik replied, “but I believe they did try to make the journey.”

“How? How is that even possible?”

“They must have built some kind of vessel.”

Tirell laughed. “That doesn’t explain anything! If you ask me how to build a glider, I couldn’t do it myself, but I could probably still convince you that someone else could. But once the air thins out to nothing, what is there to discuss? Gliders won’t work. Buoyancy won’t work. ‘They built some kind of vessel’ is just another way of saying that they did something no one understands, in order to achieve something no one knows how to achieve.”

“We’ve lost a lot of knowledge,” Selik conceded. “But I don’t believe we could be wrong about the entire history of the Changes.”

“People tell greater lies all the time,” Tirell argued. “Just for amusement. ‘The trees that talked’ ... ‘The birds that raised a child’ ... ‘The mite that slew the lizard’ ...”

“No one puts children’s stories into the Recitation.”

“But they do leave things out, apparently.” The versions of the Recitation Tirell had heard were missing all kinds of things that Selik, Anna and Rada had learned from their own reciters.

They reached the edge of the marketplace and began scrambling up the branches. Bark-colored lizards fled Tirell’s approaching grip, always choosing the last moment to abandon the camouflage of stillness for escape, sometimes scampering over his body, sometimes dropping and trusting the forest to catch them on a lower branch. Tirell felt perfectly secure as he climbed; if he did fall, the branches and foliage here were more than dense enough to stop him very quickly. But all this talk of the cousins was forcing him to picture a time when the trees themselves had fallen, and people had fled from forest to forest as everything in the cold half of the world began to die.

When they arrived at the platform, Anna and Rada were waiting. “Ah, there’s my apprentice!” Anna exclaimed, as if she’d just spotted an awl or a chisel she’d mislaid.

Tirell said, “Can we start with ‘passenger’, and work up from there?”

The glider was already untied, but it took the four of them to drag it into place between the pulleys. Anna climbed inside, and motioned to Tirell to join her. He complied, but he was already regretting his decision. Now that he was on the verge of trusting his life to it, he couldn’t help noting that the glider was really just a hollow log with some fancily shaped boards attached. And unlike a living log, it possessed no buoyancy at all.

“Are you sure I won’t weigh you down?” Tirell fretted. Squeezed in behind Anna with his knees pressed against her back, he found it hard to believe that the burden he contributed was negligible. “I was planning to fast for a couple of days before the flight, but Selik caught me by surprise.”

“I never fast,” Anna replied, “but if I find we’re overloaded you might need to empty your bowels at short notice.” Tirell spent a moment in horrified contemplation before deciding it would be best to assume that she was joking.

“Are you ready?” Rada asked. She’d threaded the vine from the pulleys around the capstan at the front of the glider, and was waiting impatiently for Anna’s assent to proceed.

“We’re ready.”

Rada joined Selik behind the glider. Tirell turned and watched them at first, but as they began hauling on the other end of the vine it seemed wiser for him to look where he was going, even if he had no control over his destination.

The glider shuddered, then slid forward. Tirell had helped with the previous launch, running backward across the platform, amused at how light the strange arrangement of vines and capstans made the glider feel, while compensating for this generosity by making the platform runners move twice as far as the glider was advancing.

“Hold on!” Anna instructed him.

“To what?” But then he saw the two curved branches that Anna was holding, attached within the hollow, and he gripped them behind her.

Ahead, the mouth of the clearing grew nearer, exposing endless ranks of red cloud. Tirell weighed up the benefits of jumping out onto the platform while he still had a chance. If nature had wanted people to leave the forests, it would have let them retain the gas from the fruit they ate, instead of belching it out. But he was weighed down with pulp, and entirely free of the one ingredient from his diet that might have saved him.

The glider passed over the edge of the platform – and instead of soaring skyward it dipped alarmingly, heading for an elaborately twisted blue-and-white vortex far below. Tirell squeezed the handles so hard he could feel splinters digging into his skin, but then he saw Anna’s legs moving slightly, working the pedals that controlled the wing flaps, and the glider leveled out, leaving him staring over her shoulder at a sight less terrifying but still utterly wrong: red clouds spread out ahead forever, without a single branch or leaf in sight.

He glanced back toward Maldo, but it was already dwindling into insignificance, like a tangled ball of twigs someone had tossed into the sky. “How will we find our way home?” he asked.

“I know the winds,” Anna replied.

“What does that mean?” Tirell complained. When someone asked for directions to the market, you didn’t just smile and say: trust in the leaves.

“It’ll be easier to explain when we’re on our way back. For now, what we need is altitude.”

Tirell had many more questions, but he decided to shut up and stop distracting the pilot. While he was in no position to rank the dangers they faced, his presence was certainly the most novel factor in the current journey, so the less impact he had on the way it unfolded, the better.

Anna muttered to herself as she examined the clouds, then she seemed to make a choice, and sent the glider swerving gently to the right. The destination she’d selected was a disheveled red column, full of wind-streaked wisps that suggested some vertical motion of the air, though if Tirell was honest he could not have determined by eye if the current was ascending or descending.

When they reached the edge of the column the answer became palpable. As the glider rose, Anna kept its path curving slightly, so it circled the strange cloud formation like a vine wrapping around a tree trunk. Tirell tried to take comfort in his instinctive response to gaining height: inside the forest, it almost always meant that he was safer, with more obstacles to break his fall. And perhaps it wasn’t entirely foolish to feel the same way, even in the open air. If something went wrong, the higher they were, the more time Anna would have to correct the problem before they hit the depths.

When they broke free of the column, Tirell looked around, then upward. There were yet more clouds above, as red as those surrounding the forest, but he could already discern gaps between them, filled with pallid light in the direction of the Far Sun, but shading into darkness elsewhere.

Anna did not disguise her frustration as she searched for the next opportunity to ascend. Once she picked a target Tirell fixed his gaze on it, trying to commit to memory every feature that distinguished it. If he ever decided to become a pilot himself, he was going to need a very long list from Anna of all the signs he should heed, but for now he could just watch, and try to learn a little.

Close up, whatever order Anna had discerned in the second column was less apparent than ever; to Tirell they just seemed to have reached a scraggly mess of fragmented clouds. But while the currents buffeted them unevenly, as the glider looped around it was lifted more often than it dropped, and gradually they rose above the thicket of red.

The Far Sun had almost set, and the cloudless sky was darkening in the east. But at the zenith, there it was: a dull magenta disk a sixth as wide as the entire view.

Tirell felt a new kind of dizziness that had nothing to do with the motion of the glider. He had never doubted that the Near Sun was real; he had explained its cloud-hidden presence to children who’d fretted on the days when the Far Sun briefly vanished behind it at noon. But seeing it for himself made all the other claims in the Recitation, if not more convincing, certainly more urgent. The Near Sun wasn’t just an idea, it was a thing as solid as a tree. So either it had once blazed a thousand times brighter than it did now, or it hadn’t. That wasn’t a matter of opinion, or whether it sounded appealing, or exciting, or strange. Either the Changes really had come about because this disk had gone from outshining the Far Sun to its present, barely illuminated state, or the whole account of the past was nonsense.

“Why is one side brighter?” Tirell asked Anna.

She turned to face him. “One side of what?”

He nodded upward, wishing he hadn’t let his curiosity overpower his resolve not to divert her attention from the glider’s controls.

“That’s to do with the way we orbit each other.” When Tirell replied with uncomprehending silence, she added, “Some of our air is still falling onto it, even now. But it doesn’t fall in a straight line, so it hits one side more than the other. That’s the cause of the hot spot.”

“I see,” Tirell replied. Her explanation made a certain amount of sense, but it only increased his vertigo. If the air of the world was raining down gently on the Near Sun, right before his eyes, and doing even a little of the thing that made the Far Sun shine, then it no longer seemed such a stretch to imagine that the very same current had once been much stronger.

“We’re just waiting for sunset now,” Anna explained. Mercifully, she was no longer twisted around toward him. “If these things are still where I saw them last, it won’t be hard to spot them.”

“Circling around the ... equilibrium point?” Tirell didn’t feel that he’d earned the right to employ that term so casually, as if he truly understood how the tug of the world, the tug of the Near Sun, and the effect of being whirled around in a circle all added up to zero. He was prepared to believe, though, that such a balance might be precarious, and that anything that drifted by and lodged there by chance was unlikely to linger.

“That’s where I’ll be looking.”

“And if this is the cousins ... how are they doing it?”

Anna laughed. “If they could overcome the gravity of the Near Sun entirely, this would be nothing to them.”

Tirell was confused. “You mean the gravity of the world? It was the world they escaped from, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, but that’s the easy part.” Anna raised one hand to point straight up. “The tiniest push will get you over the equilibrium point, but then you’d just crash into the thing that did most of the work for you. If you want to go and take your pick of the inner worlds, your real fight is with the Near Sun, not the world you were born on.”

Tirell was prepared to take her word for it, though the Near Sun was clearly much farther from the equilibrium point than the world was. He wriggled a little in the hollow to relieve the cramp that had been growing in his forearms, though it wasn’t easy to stretch his muscles without letting go of the handles.

“We could add vines here that we tie around our bodies, to keep us from falling out,” he suggested. But vines might dig into their skin. “Or strips of cloth?”

“Mmm.” Anna wasn’t really interested in such luxuries.

The Far Sun moved behind the bank of red clouds below them to the west, and though that wasn’t enough to extinguish its light, when Tirell looked to the east he saw a smattering of white dots emerging from the grayness: stars, the farthest of Far Suns. He really had no right to be surprised that so many things from the Recitation were turning out to be true – but Anna’s skills were rare enough that he could imagine whole forests where no one took up the same role, and the stories people told children about the void beyond the clouds were entirely unconstrained by the possibility of anyone checking them.

“Here they come now,” Anna said. Tirell took a moment to realize that she was speaking not of anything approaching, but the objects of her interest finally attaining visibility. Peering upward, all he could see at first were a few faint stars struggling to compete with the dull but undiminished light of the Near Sun. Then he realized that one of the “stars” was moving – slowly, but still too fast, and in the wrong direction, to be merely crossing the sky the way the Far Sun did.

“I can see one,” he confirmed.

“Cover up the Near Sun with your fist,” Anna suggested, demonstrating.

Tirell didn’t want to let go of either handle; the glider was still circling the air column, shuddering and bouncing in response to the vagaries of the currents. “I might give my eyes a chance to adjust first.”

He closed one eye and turned his head back and forth, trying to obscure the Near Sun while he scrutinized the region around it. “Oh, I can see two more!” he blurted out, before realizing that he’d confused himself and was double-counting the first one. But then a moment later there was no need to retract; he’d sighted three distinct specks, all circling the zenith.

“How do we know they’re going around the equilibrium point?” he asked Anna. “Couldn’t they be orbiting the Near Sun?”

“Be patient,” she said. “There’ll be evidence soon enough.”

Tirell raised his gaze again, waiting for the promised revelation. After a while, he was rewarded in a different way. “I think there are four now. Definitely four.”

“Aha.” Anna sounded underwhelmed, as if she’d been offered a low bid for something she was selling in the market.

Tirell tightened his grip with his left hand, then raised the right one to help him. With the Near Sun better masked, he could see at least one more point of light. Shifting his gaze and his hand and keeping careful track of everything was harder than he would have anticipated; he could appreciate Selik’s skepticism now, as less a slight against Anna than an honest assessment of the difficulties for any observer. But eventually he settled on a verdict.

“There are six,” he said.

“I think that’s right,” Anna replied.

As Tirell tried to make one more recount, he found himself coming up short. “Wait, no, there’s only ... ”

“Look again,” Anna suggested.

“Only two. No, not even ... ” They were gone, all six. “What happened?”

Anna said, “The Far Sun’s dropped too low now to illuminate them. And it didn’t take long; that’s how we know they’re at the equilibrium point, not farther away.”

Tirell pictured it: the shifting shadow of the world rising up to encompass the strange visitors. “If this is the cousins, what are they doing up there?”

“Watching us?” Anna suggested. “Waiting to see what we’re like now, after all this time apart, before they introduce themselves.”

“Watching us through the clouds?” Just how magical were the cousins meant to be? “And why would they need to watch us from six different places?”

“Maybe they came here from their new home in six vessels, and the stragglers have just caught up.”

“How big are those things?” Tirell wondered.

Anna hesitated. “From their brightness, I’d guess about a hundred times larger than Maldo.”

“That’s a lot to bring along for a casual visit.” Even if the cousins needed to pack enough food for a long journey, six hundred forests’ worth seemed excessive. “You’d think they’d start with a couple of emissaries, traveling light, just to make contact.”

“I don’t know what any of this means,” Anna confessed. “But at least you can tell the others I wasn’t imagining it.”

“Of course.”

Now that the task was completed, Tirell had nothing to distract him from the fact that he was sitting inside a tree trunk, swooping around above the clouds in darkness, with no idea which way was home.

Anna sensed his disquiet. “I know it’s hard, but the safest thing will be to wait for sunrise; if we tried to go back now, we could end up anywhere.”

“I understand.” Tirell had witnessed the timing of her returns often enough to have known what to expect.

He glanced up at the lopsided magenta glow; he could feel the warmth of it on his skin. Without that lingering heat, would the world be entirely dead now? The Far Sun was brighter in its own kind of light, but too distant to pierce the chill.

“Just tell me we won’t follow the air that’s falling on our neighbor,” he joked.

“We won’t,” Anna replied. “Not unless we really try.”

3

“How’d you go?” Selik asked, as he helped Tirell to his feet.

“Good.” Tirell realized he was shaking. He was ecstatic to be back in the safe boughs of the forest, but as the glider had turned toward Maldo for the final approach, it had taken all his strength not to leap into the depths just to avoid the impending collision.

Selik and Rada helped the returning travelers get the glider safely tied up, but then Tirell glanced at Anna and realized that she was leaving it to him to speak first.

“I saw them,” he said. “Just where Anna said they’d be. Except now there are six.”

“Six?” Selik regarded him dubiously, as if this new detail somehow made his testimony less reliable.

Tirell was annoyed. “Go up there yourself, if you don’t believe me.”

“Are you sure they weren’t just stars?” Selik pressed him. “Because—”

“I know how stars move,” Tirell replied. “These weren’t stars. They were six bright objects, circling the zenith, that lost their light not long after sunset.”

“That does sound like something solid, nearby,” Rada said, clearly aiming for a conciliatory tone. “Like asteroids, but ... ” She made a cupping gesture with her hands, as if to suggest a constraining force that was preventing the objects from slipping away.

“What are asteroids made of, anyway?” Tirell asked. People had used the word in front of him ever since he’d joined the group, but he still didn’t really understand it.

“Rock,” Rada offered, unhelpfully. “The same as the inner worlds.”

“But what exactly is ‘rock’?”

“It’s a bit like bone, but it’s not from anything living.”

Tirell grimaced “Have you ever touched rock?”

“Of course not.”

“Then how do you know what it’s like?”

Rada said, “It’s in the Full Recitation. Before the cousins left, people studied these things; they weren’t going to flee to the inner worlds without some idea of what they’d find there.”

Tirell felt very tired. What he’d seen with his own eyes was real, and he was persuaded that the general story of the Changes was probably correct, but he had less faith in the details that no one could confirm, and only a fraction of people seemed to bother retelling.

The four of them sat on the platform together, trying to make sense of the growing number of objects the latest expedition had revealed.

“Why would the cousins hang back for so long?” Selik mused. “Do they think they’d be unwelcome?”

“Maybe they can’t survive among us,” Rada suggested. “Even the ancestors would shiver at the temperatures and pressures we’re used to, and who knows what the cousins ended up having to adapt to. Whatever kind of life they have on the inner worlds, I doubt it’s much like ours.”

“But either they have a way to deal with that, or there was no point coming in the first place,” Selik protested.

“I think they’re being cautious,” Anna said. “It’s been ... well, longer than anyone knows for sure. They wouldn’t want to rush in unprepared.”

“Maybe we should give them a signal,” Tirell proposed. “Let them know that we’re still as friendly as ever, but we’re growing impatient to meet them.”

Selik was amused. “What kind of signal could we send, from this distance?”

Anna said, “It shouldn’t be necessary. If they’re looking for us at all, they’ll find us.”

“Then maybe they’re just not looking,” Selik replied. “They’ve returned to their old world, for some reason – but as far as they’re concerned, it’s obvious from the state of things that the people they left behind would have died out long ago.”

4

“Can we call it nineteen and be done with it?” Tirell pleaded. There’d been a time when he would never have believed that counting dots in the sky could be painful, but he was aching in places that no amount of fruit-picking had ever reached.

“Just check it once more,” Anna insisted, as if the exact number might carry some significance, beyond the fact that it was always increasing.

Tirell closed his eyes for a moment and tipped his head from side to side to stretch the muscles in his neck, acutely aware that if he waited too long the encroaching shadow would render his observations meaningless. He adjusted his restraint and positioned himself beneath the occultation disk again.

“One, two, three,” he muttered, tapping his thigh with his thumb to make the numbers more palpable as he counted. The objects weren’t even moving so rapidly that he had any real excuse to confuse one for another, but the way they traveled at slightly different speeds disrupted any temporary pattern they formed, undermined his confidence that he wasn’t missing any of them, or double counting.

“Nineteen,” he declared, as close to sure as he was ever going to be. He made a guess as to which of them would be the first to vanish, and followed it until he was proven right. “Nineteen,” he repeated. As he watched the lights wink out, he began to believe that he’d actually grasped the true geometry of the whole strange constellation.

“Now we wait for morning.” He looked down at the jumble of red clouds below the glider, surprised at how clearly he could still see them. “Are we higher than usual?” he asked Anna. That wouldn’t affect the timing of the objects’ extinguishment, but it could prolong their own dusk.

“I don’t think so,” Anna replied. “But tell me what you think about the Near Sun.”

Tirell folded the occultation disk away, to give himself a clear view. At first he was unsure if his eyes, having adapted to the Near Sun’s absence, were now reacting more strongly to its light, but after a while that no longer seemed like an adequate explanation. “It looks brighter. And the brightest part is larger than before.”

“That’s what I thought,” Anna said. “I’m glad I’m not losing my mind.”

Tirell was fairly sure that Anna had been making these trips for at least a couple of years; if there was some seasonal change in the strength of the wind that blew from the world onto the Near Sun, she would have been expecting it.

But if not the season, what else had changed?

“Even an asteroid would have some gravity, wouldn’t it?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“So if these things are asteroids that the cousins have put into place, then just as the Near Sun competes with the world for our air, they’d be pulling it in the same direction?”

“That’s right.”

Tirell wasn’t sure if Anna was humoring him, leading him into some kind of logical trap where he’d just be displaying his ignorance. “But then, after the air fell past them, they’d pull back on it, wouldn’t they? Fighting the Near Sun’s pull? So the two effects would cancel each other out?”

Anna said, “I don’t think they would cancel each other. So long as there’s a stronger upward pull on the atmosphere, and more air is flowing away from the world, the extra amount is never going to turn around and come back to us. And the asteroids certainly can’t hold on to it. So if we’re losing more air, there’s only one place it can go.”

As Tirell was turning that over in his mind, a flash of light burst out of the darkness. It was gone in an instant, but it left a lingering impression on his eyes, which gave him a fair idea of its direction. It had not come from the Near Sun, but it had been close.

“Did you see that?” he asked Anna. He didn’t dare move his gaze toward her, lest he lose what little information he retained about the origin of the light.

“I saw something illuminate the cloud tops,” she replied. “What did you see?”

“A point of light, close to where the objects were circling – but much brighter. Maybe brighter than the Far Sun, while it lasted.”

Anna was silent for a time, then she said, “You know that’s what they say about the cousins’ vessels? When they finally departed, they were brighter than the Far Sun.”

Tirell had heard the same verses, but he had always taken that detail to be some kind of soppy metaphor for the hope the cousins carried with them.

“They’re adjusting their motion,” he guessed. “If they start to slip too far from the equilibrium point, they push themselves back to where they need to be.”

“That would make sense,” Anna replied.

Tirell had long given up arguing for any natural account of the objects’ behavior, but now he was losing, not just his last traces of skepticism, but any sense of the cousins as a mere abstraction. A few points of light moving across the sky had never been enough to convince him that he was on the verge of coming face to face with his long lost relatives, but now they had to go and flaunt their prowess and make themselves a thousand times more real.

“If we understand that the asteroids are helping to convey more air to the Near Sun,” he said, “then the cousins could hardly have failed to anticipate it, could they?”

“No.” Anna’s voice sounded strange, as if it was floating away on the wind.

“So it might even be the whole point of the exercise,” Tirell reasoned. “Not so much a peculiar side effect, as the reason they’re doing what they’re doing at all.”

“If that’s true,” Anna said, “then there’s nothing to be gained from doing it by halves. To make the Near Sun just a fraction brighter, when they have their own means to summon brightness at will, would be a complete waste of effort.”

Tirell was silent for a while. It felt as if the glider was following the same wide circle as ever, but the lingering illumination of the clouds below revealed shifting patterns among them that would normally have been lost in the twilight.

“If they knew we were here, and knew how we lived,” he said finally, “then surely they wouldn’t be doing this for our benefit? No one could imagine that bringing the Near Sun back to its old glory, after so long, would be the slightest bit helpful to us.”

“You’d hope not.” Anna seemed to be reserving judgment on just how confused the cousins might be.

“But if they’ve remained accustomed to the old temperatures, and they believe they’re the only survivors of the Changes ... ” Tirell couldn’t quite bring himself to say it.

“Then they might be preparing for a triumphant homecoming,” Anna concluded, “by rendering the world they were forced to abandon habitable once more.”

5

“If the cousins really can’t see us,” Rada said, “then we only have two choices. We find a way to make ourselves more visible, or we find a way to reach up and tap them on the shoulder.”

Tirell glanced at Madeleine and Cyril, the only people in the market who’d agreed to listen to the bizarre tale that Anna’s group was peddling. So far, they seemed to be keeping an open mind – or perhaps they were just exercising an extraordinary degree of courtesy and restraint, while they waited for a chance to slip away.

“What could we possibly do to make ourselves more visible?” Selik complained. “Persuade a forest to rise above the clouds?”

“They could see right through the clouds, if they wanted to,” Anna insisted. “Or fly below them to inspect what was beneath. Either would be trivial compared to everything else they’ve done.”

“So we tap them on the shoulder,” Rada said. “We visit one of their asteroids. If they’re blazing with light every time they drift off course, they can’t be unattended.”

Tirell said, “Visit them how? Do you think we’re going to reinvent the cousins’ vessels, in our lifetime?”

“No,” Rada replied. “But we don’t need to make a journey like theirs. Just the shortest, easiest step.”

“How much air is there, at the equilibrium point?” Tirell wondered. Could the very wind they were trying to quell actually make the journey survivable?

Anna said, “The pressure would be tiny. We’d need to take our own air with us.”

“Which would weigh much more than its surroundings,” Selik mused. “Even if we used the light air from the trees, it wouldn’t be buoyant at that altitude.”

“But all weight grows less as you ascend,” Anna countered. “The push we’d need to reach the equilibrium point would be less than the push to rise from the depths to the forests’ height.”

“Maybe,” Selik conceded. “But you make that sound easy, when a glider would struggle to do it with even the most favorable winds. And where you want to go, the wind will be impalpable.”

The gathering fell silent. Madeleine caught Tirell’s eye, with a look that seemed to ask him what he’d dragged her into. He’d vouched for his friends’ sincerity, but what was the point of the meeting if all they were going to do was squabble for a while, then admit that if the cousins were intent on intervening, there was nothing to be done about it?

Tirell glanced down at the floor, trying not to surrender to a sense of helplessness. How could a vessel gain speed, without relying on the air? The only time Anna’s glider did that was when the crew first launched it from the platform – and the whole population of Maldo pulling on the vines wasn’t going to send it rising above the atmosphere.

Cyril said, “I should go tend to my stall.”

“Wait,” Tirell begged him. “What if we used pulleys,” he said. “To give the glider speed, in the usual way. But instead of people at the far end of the vines, we use lumps of dead wood. And we just ... drop them. We let them fall to the depths.”

Cyril frowned, but said nothing, as if he was struggling to picture the scene before passing judgment. Tirell was still hazy about the details himself; he rushed to fill them in.

“As the logs descend, the pulleys drag the glider in the opposite direction, building up speed. But we add more capstans, so instead of the glider moving half as far as the vine is pulled, it’s a much smaller fraction. That way, the logs can fall a vast distance before the glider is released.”

Anna chuckled with delight. “That almost sounds audacious enough to work,” she said. “Harnessing the bottomlessness of the depths! The trouble is, if the logs fall much farther than the glider rises, then however fast the logs end up moving, the glider will have a velocity proportionately smaller, in the same ratio as the distances. So most of the energy would go to the logs themselves, not the glider.”

Tirell wanted to protest; in his mind’s eye, the glider burst free from its restraints at a phenomenal speed. But when he forced himself to think it through, Anna’s logic was inescapable.

But didn’t that just mean that his proposal had things backward? “So we reverse the attachments,” he suggested. “Make the glider move farther than the logs, and then it will move faster as well.”

Selik said, “That might work, up to a point. All things being equal, if you quadrupled the pulley ratio, you’d halve the logs’ speed, and double the glider’s. But that’s only going to hold if the glider isn’t slowing the logs down too much. As you increase the ratio, unless you make the logs heavier as well, they’ll be struggling to raise the glider, so they won’t just fall a shorter distance, they’ll be moving even slower at the end.”

“Can you remind me of verse eighty-two?” Rada asked Anna. “I’m always hazy on that.”

Anna recited it, but Tirell couldn’t understand half the words she was using. No wonder some verses had ended up omitted from most of the retellings, when it took so long to grasp what they actually meant.

Anna and Rada huddled together for a while, talking among themselves, then Rada announced, “Even if we could keep the glider attached to the pulleys while it rose two hundred spans, we’d need to drop more than one hundred thousand times its weight to give it the speed it needed – and we’d need to wrap the vines around the pulleys in some fashion that multiplied the distance by a factor of three hundred.”

Selik laughed. “All right, then! Good try, Tirell, but nature has spoken.”

“You people are idiots,” Cyril announced scornfully.

Rada frowned. “Tirell was just trying—”

“Not Tirell! You people with your Full Recitation. If you’re so steeped in the wisdom of the ancestors, why isn’t it obvious to you how to make this work?”

Anna said, “I’m all ears.”

“A toymaker in Lappa sold me some gewgaws a while back,” Cyril replied, “though I never could interest anyone here in them. You take a slender rod and mount it so it’s free to turn, then wrap a string around it, with a weight on the end. Attach a disk to the end of the rod, so it spins along with it as the weight drops. The toys had amusing patterns painted on the disks, and fans around the edges to make a breeze. But if the disk was large enough, surely it would multiply the speed of the falling weight at least as well as any system of pulleys and capstans? And forget about stopping after two hundred spans; just let the thing spin until it unspools completely.”

“With the glider out on the rim, and you release it when it’s on an upswing?” Rada said. “That sounds tricky. I’m not sure I’d want to be on that flight.”

“Then send up something with no passengers, and hope it catches the cousins’ attention,” Madeleine suggested.

Anna said, “Let’s see if this is even feasible, first.” She conferred with Rada again, and Selik joined them. Tirell was impressed by Cyril’s vision of a toy repurposed, but no one without the Full Recitation was going to be able to put numbers to the idea.

After some time, Rada emerged with the verdict. “Suppose we took logs that were fifty times the weight of the glider. We lower them on a rope two thousand spans long that’s wrapped around a rod six spans wide. If we can place the glider sixty spans outward from the rod, then by the time the logs have unwound all the rope, the glider will have gained enough speed to reach the equilibrium point.”

Tirell absorbed that. “We’d need a disk sixty spans from center to rim?”

“Not a disk,” Rada replied. “We couldn’t even build a solid beam that long. But the glider could be played out on the end of a rope. Not the full length immediately, or the rope would go slack as it approached the top of the circle. But as the rod turned faster, more rope could be unreeled.”

Tirell tried to read her face, not trusting his own judgment on the meaning of it all. Some of the numbers sounded well within reach: fifty times a glider’s weight in logs, a rod six spans wide. Even a rope two thousand spans long didn’t seem entirely preposterous; Maldo probably had a hundred times that in loose vines just waiting to be gathered. But if a mere sixty spans for the shorter rope was nothing, the problem would be ensuring the absence of obstacles when you swung it.

“So where is all this meant to be happening?” he asked. “Where is the end of the rod that holds the rope with the glider attached? Sticking out into the air, from some platform?”

“Exactly,” Selik confirmed.

Tirell had no alternative to offer; they could hardly launch the vessel from some cozy little clearing surrounded by trees. But the vision of a platform hanging over the depths – jutting out so far that all the ropes and weights were free to swing and drop without encountering anything but air – made his chest tighten with anticipatory fear.

Because someone was going to have to build this thing, and it seemed unlikely that the project was going to be burdened with an excess of volunteers.

6

“Next time I’ll pick my own fruit,” Delia muttered, as Tirell placed another bundle of stripped vines on the floor beside her loom.

“Don’t be like that,” he pleaded. “You should be happy. You’re helping to make history!”

“No, I’m helping to make rope.” She stared at the loom in horror, as if she might never recover from this indignity. “And you won’t even let me do it properly.”

Tirell could understand her frustration; he was chopping up the vines into absurdly short segments, when longer, unbroken strands would have made the weaving process simpler, and the final product much stronger. But since there were no vines two thousand spans long, there wasn’t much point doing a test launch with stronger ropes than the ones they’d need to use for the real event.

In any case, Delia seemed to have established an impressively elegant rhythm for the task she despised. A simple pedal action drove the rotating bobbins that twisted the strands together into pairs of pairs of pairs, but whenever one of the feeds ran out, switching to the new strand required a meticulous intervention. Left to chance, the two ends would have protruded from the rope, risking it fraying and unraveling. But Delia anticipated each break and trimmed the feed to just the right length to ensure that the ends were always in the center of the rope, surrounded by unbroken neighbors.

“Is that the last of the vines?” she asked, without looking up from the loom.

“Yes.” The coil of finished rope had already reached an impressive bulk; Tirell didn’t dare remind her that this was just a rehearsal for a version twenty times longer.

“Then if you’ve got nothing else to do,” Delia suggested, “why not visit the hollow?”

Tirell grunted with amusement. “I should check if Selik needs help with the glider,” he replied.

He walked to the edge of the marketplace, making sure he was out of Delia’s sight before doubling back and climbing the trunk that led to the breeding hollow. When he peered inside he could see that about a third of the eggs were still light blue. So had Delia looked in just to check on the ones she’d left herself? And sent him here, in the hope that he of all people—

He cut off the disturbing line of thought, and let his instincts take over. When he was finished, half the eggs had changed color.

On his way back, Tirell tried to picture the children who’d emerge from the hollow in the next scrum. If the cousins persisted with their project, there would be no place for his offspring in the only part of the world he’d ever known, and perhaps no place for them anywhere at all.

So was what he’d just done an act of cruelty? Was he offering those children nothing but an early death?

He had to stay hopeful. His ancestors had confronted a far greater adversary, and defeated it in two entirely different ways. If only they’d been half as lucky instead.

But then, that was all his contemporaries would need: half the ancestors’ luck.

7

Tirell had wanted to finish the winding himself, but when his forearms began to cramp he relented. He called to Anna to take his place on the steps beside the rod.

“When we do this full size, do you really think the rope will hold together?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” Anna conceded. “But keep in mind, most things in the forest are still much stronger than they need to be. Everything weighed a hundred times more, where we were before the Changes. And during the migration it was even worse.”

“It’s a long time since the migration,” Tirell replied.

“It is. But nature doesn’t always rush to throw away a trait.” Anna took a length of rope between her hands and tugged it as hard as she could. “There are threads running along those stems that weigh almost nothing themselves, but could once hold three hundred times the weight of the whole plant, as it is now. The question isn’t whether that’s still needed, it’s whether there was an easy way to replace it with something weaker, or whether the cost was so small that the simplest thing was to let it be.”

“Hmm.” Tirell had always struggled to understand how the forests could have survived the Changes at all, but maybe it was more comprehensible if they’d actually changed far less than he’d imagined.

When Anna was done, she slipped the end of the rope over a hook at the side of the frame, to keep it from unwinding. The rod, in its support frame, was twice her height; she stayed on the steps while Tirell took hold of the middle of the frame, and together they got it horizontal before Tirell lowered it to the floor.

When he looked up, he saw Selik already approaching with the new test vessel. Shaping it as a miniature glider had seemed like a wasted effort to Tirell at first, but Rada had assured him that the details were worth mimicking for the sake of observing its dynamics, not when it was flying free, but while it remained bound.

The three of them carried the frame over to the edge of the platform, then Tirell walked back beneath the trees to the corner where Cyril had set up his tools.

“Is it ready?” Tirell asked.

“I think so.” Cyril turned the contraption over and examined it, blowing into it to dislodge a speck of grit. “The new cam is smoother, it’s a better shape. I don’t think it will stick this time.”

Tirell nodded. There was no recipe for any of this, even in the Full Recitation; no one had ever faced the particular mismatch of means and ambition that was shaping their efforts.

Selik and Tirell propped the frame up while Cyril attached the end-cap to the rod, slipping the hexagonal hole in the center over the portion that jutted beyond the frame, and pushing the locking pins into place. Then he hung the miniature glider from the short length of rope that dangled from the cap.

There was a slot carved into the platform to hold the frame, matching the mildly tapered shape but only two-thirds as long, in order to give the far end plenty of clearance. So to get the frame in, they needed to position it with about a third of its length protruding over the edge of the platform.

The four of them took hold of the frame together, then they shuffled their grip toward the near end, until no one was beyond the mark that showed where the overhang would begin. A third was not a half, and even with the extra weight of the end-cap and glider the frame wasn’t pushing up at the back, but Tirell still felt a precarious sense of asymmetry from the mere fact that the same object was putting more weight on one of his hands than the other. The slot was only a few paces in front of them, but they moved slowly together, making sure the frame was centered as they approached.

As they crouched down, Anna and Selik grunted, not so much with effort as sheer discomfort from contorting their age-worn joints. On the last trial, Tirell had made the mistake of laughing at them. “You should hope you live long enough to know what we’re going through,” Anna had rebuked him.

With the frame in place, Tirell set about locking it down, pushing more than a dozen wooden pins into the holes that ran from the frame into the surrounding timber of the platform. Then he unhooked the rope from the near end of the frame, and unwound about a span’s worth and let it dangle.

“This is it, everyone!” Selik called out. Anna, Rada, Cyril and Madeleine moved into position, ready to witness whatever unfolded from a range of angles, while Tirell and Selik picked up the drop-log together and headed for the ramp that led below the platform.

On the ramp, Tirell moved with all the care he could muster; there was a safety rail, but he had no intention of relying on it. The ramp leveled out into a miniature platform suspended below the main one, which stopped a span or so before the underside of the rod’s support frame.

Tirell glanced at Selik to be sure they were acting in concert, then together they lifted the log above the rail and maneuvered it into contact with the rope Tirell had left dangling from the rod. The hook Selik had carved into the wood was as thick as Tirell’s thumb and completed seven-eighths of a circle; getting the bottom of the loop to pass through the narrow gap took patience, but once it was in place, there was no chance of it slipping free.

Selik nodded to Tirell. “Ready?”

“Yes.”

“One!” Selik bellowed, to make himself heard to the others up on the platform. “Two! Three! Four!”

They released the log. Tirell’s instinctive response would have been to keep his eyes on the dead tree that was powering their hopes of ascent as it plummeted toward the vortices below, but he tore his gaze away in time to see the spinning end-cap begin unreeling the glider.

The start of the process was unnerving: the glider lagged behind, reluctantly dragged along by the end-cap, but as it picked up speed it swung outward, only to overtake the rod’s rotation, briefly, and then fall back again. As Rada had explained it, it was like a pendulum swinging to and fro – but instead of doing so compared to a fixed vertical, it was swinging either side of a line of net force that spun around with the rod, and grew stronger with the quickening rotation.

With each downswing of the glider a little more rope played out, making the excursions wider, but at least the range of angles the rope made with the end-cap didn’t seem to be growing. Tirell could only hope that Cyril’s ingenious cam – which progressively tightened the brake on the reel so that only a greater tug could overcome it – was acting just as it should, neither letting too much rope out, nor unduly inhibiting it.

As the glider moved away from the rod it began to oppose the falling weight more strenuously. Tirell watched, caught between anxiety and delight, as the spinning slowed – inasmuch as each turn of the rod took longer – but the glider itself continued to gain speed, thanks to its greater distance. On one swing it lurched back alarmingly, and he was afraid that the cam might have become stuck again, but the overshoot was less, and the back-swing less again, until the diversions grew so small that it was hard to be sure if they were even persisting.

With the glider’s rope fully extended, there was no choice but for everything to move faster. Tirell could see that the descending rope had almost unwound completely, with just a dozen or so coils around the rod remaining. He wished he was up on the main platform, but observers were required everywhere; if something went wrong, there was no telling which vantage would be most revelatory.

He gripped the rail in front of him as the last of the rope uncoiled. The string he’d looped around the final three coils pulled on a lever inside the end-cap and unlatched the glider’s rope, freeing the glider from any attachment to the rod, to the platform, to the forest itself. And as far as Tirell could judge, the calibration had been perfect: the separation occurred while the rope was horizontal, the glider moving skyward. Glider and rope both vanished from his sight, but a few moments later the rope reappeared on its way to the depths, freed from the hook by the change of alignment and diminished tension.

He and Selik hurried up the ramp.

“Did you see how high it went?” Tirell asked impatiently, of anyone who was listening.

Madeleine smiled. “High! Right through the clouds.”

Tirell knew this was as much due to it catching a favorable wind as it was to the impetus from the launch; in the absence of air it would have come down as swiftly as the un-winged rope. But at least it hadn’t departed in the wrong direction entirely.

“What do you think?” Selik asked Anna.

“We’ll need a few more tests,” she said, “to be sure that the whole approach is reliable and we weren’t just lucky.”

“But if they work as well as this one?”

Anna said, “Then we build the thing itself, and see if we can finally poke our idiot cousins in the eye.”

8

“Where’s your safety rope?” Tirell called out sharply. He didn’t recognize the carpenter, but she must have been one of the new arrivals from Lappa.

“If I fall,” she replied, amused, “I’ll have plenty of time to grab something.”

“I’m not going to argue. If you don’t like the rules, get off the scaffolding.”

She hesitated, and Tirell sensed that she was on the verge of holding to her opinion and departing. But then she sidled back along the beam, hooked the nearest rope to her belt, and then returned to the place where she’d been working.

“Thank you,” Tirell said. He introduced himself.

“I know who you are,” she replied, in a tone that suggested he was famous for precisely the kind of irritation to which he’d just subjected her. “I’m Maxine.”

“No one’s died yet,” he said. “I want to keep it that way.” He glanced up at the platform above them, protruding so far from the edge of the forest that he couldn’t make out the start of it through the artificial jungle of ropes and beams suspended beneath it for the carpenters’ benefit.

“In Lappa, we wouldn’t treat a child like this,” she said scornfully.

“Is your rope secure now?” Tirell pressed her.

“Yes.”

Tirell put his hand to his own and tested it. “The hook is closed? It can’t come loose?”

“No.”

Tirell wasn’t sure if her undisguised disdain was just signaling her right to be annoyed with these precautions, or if she was actually determined to unhook the belt the moment she was out of his sight.

“You don’t mind if I check?”

She held her arms to either side, inviting him. He moved carefully along the cross-beam toward her, then reached down and felt the latch on the hook. “Seems good,” he declared. Then he kicked her shin and they both lost their balance, toppling in opposite directions through the gaps between the beams.

Tirell didn’t fight the urge to claw at the air for a handhold as he fell; he had no expectation of succeeding, but he valued the instinct too highly to want to suppress it. It did not take long for the rope to go taut, but it was long enough for him to fall right out of the scaffolding. He hung, suspended, over the depths.

He looked up and saw Maxine, sharing his predicament a couple of spans away.

“You don’t deserve our help,” she said. “I’m going back to Lappa to tell everyone not to bother.”

“As you wish. Do you remember the recovery moves from your training?”

Maxine glared at him, but before he could begin demonstrating she deftly began hauling herself up the rope.

Tirell glanced down at the blue-and-white clouds swirling below. The terror of the drop was reverberating in his skull, but the sight of the depths still brought on the same atavistic longing as ever. The funniest part was that when the ancestors had lived among clouds like this, they might never have seen them from above until the Changes began to bite. His nostalgia for a lost home revolved around a view of it that belonged to those who were already fleeing.

9

“Can you keep a secret?”

Tirell opened his eyes and surveyed the circle of silhouetted figures gathered around him. “Of course,” he replied.

“Then come with us.”

He rose, deciding not to protest. He recognized some of the people now: scaffolders, carpenters, weavers. If he was about to be punished for what he’d done to Maxine, it was a curious way to start. They could have just kicked him awake, and kept on kicking.

He followed them from the project’s encampment at the rear of the platform into the darkness of the forest, but he knew the area well, and as they clambered single file onto a broad, familiar trunk, he could already guess their destination. It made no sense, but nor did any of this.

Tirell moved carefully, and his eyes began to pick up the faint hints of orange light that penetrated the foliage, but he still kept jabbing his hands on the trunk’s protuberances – its attempts to form new side branches that all the traffic frustrated. If people had let them grow instead of snapping them off they would probably have posed less of a hazard at night.

His silent traveling companions crossed to another trunk, disconcertingly confirming his original conjecture. And maybe there was some logic to it: a body would vanish just as easily from the larger platform, but here they would be less likely to be caught in the act.

As they emerged onto the old test platform, Tirell could see the support frame jutting out beyond the shadow of the forest canopy, lit by the glow of the Near Sun through the clouds.

One of the weavers, Martin, said, “We would have invited you earlier, but we were afraid you might have blabbed to the elders.”

Tirell was bemused to learn that his encounter with Maxine had been perceived as an act of rebellion on his part against strictures passed down from on high. But he still had no idea what he was doing here. “Blabbed about what?” he finally found the courage to ask.

“Riding the spinner. You’re up for it, aren’t you?”

Was this another question where there was only one safe answer? “Everyone here’s done it?” he asked.

“Of course.”

“And no one’s been injured? No one’s been lost?” He should have heard of any injuries among the team, however they’d been sustained, but as people came and went from Lappa a disappearance might actually have been easier to conceal.

“No one’s been hurt at all,” Martin insisted.

“But what’s the attraction?” Tirell asked. Didn’t all these people get a large enough dose of controlled danger by daylight?

“It feels ... ” Martin struggled for a moment. “It feels right. It’s not easy to take, but in the end it feels right.”

Tirell glanced around at the others. No one here was actually planning to murder him, either for the overzealous safety lesson he’d given Maxine, or for fear that he’d rob them of their nocturnal entertainment. If he promised to keep quiet, he could head back to the camp unmolested.

“What have you changed in the equipment?” he wondered. “Apart from removing all the bits that would toss you into the air?”

“We drop a heavier weight.”

“As much heavier than the old one as you’re heavier than a toy glider?”

“No. Maybe half that.”

So the ride would be a little less frantic. Tirell considered asking for someone else to go before him, to convince him that he wasn’t being tricked. But the last thing he wanted was to put his life in the hands of people he’d alienated with his mistrust. Either he accepted that the group had invited him here in good faith, or he walked away.

“I’ll do it,” he declared.

There were murmurs of approval from the gathering.

“How do I ... ?”

“Crawl out along the frame and get into the basket,” Martin explained. “Hold on tight. It won’t take us long to drop the weight; the slow part comes later, when we reel it back up.”

I’ve lost my mind, Tirell decided, as he walked toward the frame. But if anything here could fail, so could any beam in the scaffolding on the main project, any hook, any safety rope.

He strode along the frame, one foot on either side of the rod, barely trusting his eyes in the feeble light. Before he reached the edge of the platform he got down on his hands and knees, to get the transition over with before a stumble became much more than an annoyance. When he crossed onto the protruding part of the frame he felt a gentle breeze beside him, rising up from the depths; it could no more have dislodged him than a gnat landing on his arm, but its vertical caress still unnerved him.

He stopped before his hands made contact with the end-cap and peered down at the shadowy form of the basket; he was not at all sure that it was large enough to catch him if he fell. He turned and lowered his legs from the side of the frame, then caught the basket’s rope between his feet to take some of his weight as he brought his torso over the edge. When he was gripping the frame with both hands above his head, he pulled himself closer and transferred one hand to the rope. Then he moved the other hand across and slid the short distance down the rope into the basket.

It swayed back and forth for a while before settling. He sat on the wooden floor with his knees raised and felt around for the handles. He ought not need them until the very end, when the thing came to a halt, but it seemed wise to commit himself to them from the start. It had taken him a while to persuade Anna to fit restraints for the pilot and passenger to her glider, but maybe he could institute some similar reforms here, once he was accepted into the clique of Spinners.

“Are you ready?” Martin yelled.

“Yes!” Tirell called back. He heard nothing more, but the people waiting to release the weight must have acted on his reply alone, because a moment later the end-cap started turning.

At first the basket swayed gently, then suddenly the rope yanked on it sharply and it flew up, halfway to upside-down, before swinging back. Tirell braced himself against the handles and pushed his body toward the floor, unwilling to trust the force of the rotation to hold him in place as the basket finally swung over the top.

Moments later, he saw the orange clouds above him once more, but there was no real respite. As he endured a second rotation, then a third, he realized that every part of the cycle was horrifying in its own way: even when he was right way up, the lagging rope already felt like a portent for what was to come.

He’d lost count of the revolutions when he first realized that the swinging had died away: the rope was all but turning with the end-cap, as if it were a rigid beam fixed to the spinning rod itself. When he peered along it, the pallid clouds above and the untouched gloom of the depths were changing places every three slow breaths. The force pressing him against the floor was firm now, verging on uncomfortable; it was as if he’d lost a fight to an opponent who insisted on keeping him down with their full weight, even after he’d surrendered.

As the pressure grew, he tried to accommodate it, but he could neither turn his body nor flatten it more closely against the floor. His knees, jutting into the air, ached as if he was trying to rise up from kneeling with a heavy load on his shoulders. Each inhalation took more effort than the last, as if his overzealous opponent had decided not just to hold him down, but to gleefully crush the air out of his lungs.

Tirell tried relaxing his muscles, but yielding only increased the pain. So he stiffened his body instead, fighting the weight, which hurt just as much in a slightly different way. There was no amelioration, let alone any hope of escape, and he knew it would only get worse. As he gasped for breath, he saw strange bands of light and darkness twisting in front of his eyes, as if the roiling vortices of the depths had risen up to meet him. If this wasn’t death, what was it? His nighttime visitors had lied; no one had ever survived this torture. This was his punishment: instead of tossing him from the platform, they’d found an even crueler way to end his life.

Suddenly, the basket shuddered; Tirell could picture the whole platform trembling as the weight they’d dropped reached the end of the rope. He waited for the basket to come to a halt, but though he could feel it recover from the jolt, it didn’t seem to be slowing at all. Then he understood: even when the rod had stopped turning, unlike the released glider the basket would keep circling until its energy was dissipated.

Or, not so much circling as spiraling in, until it wrapped itself so tightly around the rod that it smashed into the support frame. Tirell fought against that vision – and having survived this far, he was ready to trust his fellow Spinners again. Even before they’d tried it themselves, they must have tested the whole thing with an empty basket, and seen that the endpoint was, if not safe by any stretch of the word, not actually fatal either.

The pressure began to decline. Tirell grew genuinely dizzy for the first time; as the rotations slowed, his inner sense of where the basket ought to be struggled to catch up. The striations were fading, but when he closed his eyes he saw afterimages of the orange clouds rolling by, at a rate that no longer matched his actual motion.

The basket struggled to the top of its arc, then the rope went slack and the basket fell. Tirell was already grasping the handles as tightly as possible, though for a moment that was redundant: he and the basket fell together; gravity wasn’t trying to tear them apart.

Then the basket pulled the rope taut and jerked sideways, almost breaking Tirell’s grip.

As the final swaying died away, he huddled against the floor, afraid to test himself for injuries. After a while, he dared move a little; he ached all over, and he was bruised in places, but he did not think he’d suffered any permanent harm.

“Are you all right?” Martin yelled.

“Yes,” Tirell shouted back, surprised at how normal his voice sounded.

“Take your time,” Martin advised him. Tirell laughed; he had no intention of rushing his climb back up.

How had he survived these forces, so much greater than any he was accustomed to? Maybe it was the same for people as Anna believed it was for the vines: nature had not yet thrown away the traits they had once relied on. His own ancestors, as much as the forests themselves, had lived through the three-hundredfold greater weights of the migration.

The trembling in his arms began to subside. He reached up and took hold of the rope. Martin hadn’t deceived him: what he’d been through had been hard to endure, but in the end it did feel right.

10

“You’re not disappointed, are you?” Anna asked. “Not being down there with the others?”

“This is exactly what I wanted,” Tirell replied. “No responsibilities, and the perfect view for the occasion.”

The glider curved lazily around as Anna hunted for a current that would keep it from rising too much higher above the forest. “‘No responsibilities?’” she rebuked him. “If we lose sight of the vessel, it will all have been for nothing.”

“You know what I mean.” Tirell felt as if he’d spent his entire life working on the launcher, and he’d grown tired of fearing that some rope, or plank, or person that he prodded the wrong way would go crashing into the other components and tear the whole structure apart. Let Cyril and his assistants oversee the crucial state of the end-cap; let Selik and his team prepare to drop the weights. He was happy to soar above them all and observe the outcome.

Looking down, he could see the platform itself protruding from the edge of the forest, but the people he knew were arrayed there were not even insect-like to his gaze.

“If this reaches the equilibrium point,” Anna declared, “then there’s no way it will pass unnoticed. That’s where all their effort and attention is concentrated: where every last rock is tracked, and kept in its proper place.”

Tirell didn’t reply. He knew she wasn’t soliciting his opinion; she was just reassuring herself that their own efforts had been directed in the best possible way. He wasn’t sure how much longer it would be before the forests began declining from the rising heat, but however bright the clouds at midnight, no one wanted to start planning for a new migration while there was still a chance of bringing the cousins to their senses.

“Come on,” Anna muttered impatiently. “What are they doing down there?”

Tirell tried not to laugh; she knew as well as he did how fastidiously the final checks would be conducted. “Just relax and enjoy the view,” he teased her. “It’s not often we get to go up in this thing without rushing off somewhere.”

He took his own advice and gazed down at Maldo, reveling in the luxury of a sustained vantage. The great, unruly dome of foliage that had built itself from air and light was beautiful enough from within, but from above its isolation gave it a shocking poignancy. As ancient as it was, he believed it had not, itself, endured the migration, but was merely a descendant of other forests that had.

Beside the forest, a speck hung in the air, barely shifting, but growing in size. Here at last was the insect that the people below were too remote to mimic. “You do see it?” Tirell checked, afraid that Anna might have been irritably staring off into the clouds.

“I do.”

The speck blurred and vanished, passing by too quickly to be perceived, but Tirell looked up and managed to catch it receding, silhouetted against the brightness, about a third of the way down from the zenith on the west side. If it fell, or tumbled, or broke apart before penetrating all the layers of cloud above, they might never know, but they had as much evidence as they could have hoped for: the glider was ascending along the correct trajectory, at a rate comparable to their expectations.

“I never thought we’d do it,” Anna confessed. “Not in my lifetime.”

“But we did.”

“You want to take the controls and bring us down?” Anna offered.

“Really?” Tirell’s lessons had been sporadic for a while; their other obligations had taken precedence.

“I think you’re ready,” Anna assured him.

As they exchanged places, she said, “I hope this isn’t rude, but your body seems different lately. Not just heavier; more solid.”

“That’s what hard work does,” Tirell replied. “I’m not just a lazy fruit-picker anymore.” But if this was her way of telling him that she knew the actual cause, he’d take that more as tacit approval than any kind of reprimand.

He found the pedals, and glanced back at his passenger. “So let’s go join the celebrations. Today, we told the cousins we’re alive and well, and it’s time for them to stop meddling.”

11

“It’s never going to stop!” Delia said angrily. “Everything we did was a waste of time.”

Tirell was starting to regret telling her what he’d seen on his latest flight with Anna. “Those extra asteroids might have been on their way to the equilibrium point long before we launched our messenger. Heavy objects moving rapidly can’t be turned around in a hurry.”

Delia was unimpressed. “Really? So when they light up with whatever it is that keeps them from drifting away, the same thing couldn’t be used to make them drift away faster?”

“I don’t know. It could be more complicated than that.” The truth was, Tirell couldn’t fault her argument. If the cousins had decided to disassemble the collection of rocks that were driving the flow of gas onto the Near Sun, they could surely have made a start by now, and the results ought to have been visible.

A couple of infants crawled toward them, whining hungrily. Tirell glanced dubiously at the pile of sickly looking fruit stacked up behind him, but then he recalled where he’d put the most palatable specimen.

He bit into it and chewed a mouthful for the supplicants. “When you’re old enough for the Recitation,” he told them, “make sure you get it from someone who’s heard the whole thing.”

The stories of the migration had never disguised just how arduous it had been, but Tirell had made a habit of taking comfort from the fact that there’d been survivors to tell the tale. He’d never dwelt too much on the other participants, who had died along the way. But if he was honest about it, there was no real symmetry between that past ordeal and any journey yet to come. He could not look around and say: All these people, whose ancestors came through the first, are also promised that they and their children will not perish in the second.

He turned to Delia. “If you and the other weavers were willing to make a new drop rope ... ”

“You should have taken better care of the one you had,” Delia retorted. “It wasn’t our fault, what happened to it.”

“No, of course it wasn’t.” The rope had performed flawlessly right to the end, when its attempt to bring the falling weight to a halt hadn’t torn it, but rather yanked it free of the rod. “If we get a chance to try again, we can look at ways to make sure that we don’t lose it.”

“Why? So you can have a third try after that, then a fourth? Don’t you believe the glider reached the equilibrium point the first time?”

“We can’t know that it did.”

“So you want to keep launching gliders for the next hundred years, hoping that the cousins will finally notice one of them?”

Tirell said, “No. If we try one more launch, we can make it different, so at least we know if it succeeded or not.”

“How?” Delia demanded. “Are you going to ... pack a giant white cloth inside it that unfurls when it’s gone above the clouds, so you and Anna can fly up and see if it’s catching the light?”

Tirell was silent for a moment, wondering if this was actually such a good idea that he ought to take it to the others, and forget his own ridiculous plan. But he was afraid that if he let anything divert him, by the time he found the courage again it would be too late.

“I want to go up in the glider,” he said. “Find a way to take the air I’ll need, find a way to come back safely, and then we’ll know for sure where the thing really went.”

Delia gazed at him with an expression that Tirell couldn’t quite decipher. Maybe nine parts scorn, one part admiration – the latter for audacity, if nothing else.

“You really do want to fall into the sky,” she marveled. “You really are completely deranged.”

12

Anna said, “It’s an interesting proposal. What would you do for air?”

Selik was horrified. “Air? He wouldn’t even survive the launch!”

Anna snorted. “He’s been practicing for ... who knows how long.”

“More than a hundred days,” Tirell confessed. “We do it at the old test site. It feels almost normal by now.”

“How would the forces compare?” Rada asked, ever practical.

“A real launch would impose a bit more,” Anna conceded. “They don’t use a heavy enough weight to maintain the original scaling, but they go through a period of elevated centrifugal force when the rope starts winding itself in at the end, which won’t be present in an actual launch.”

“Have you been watching us?” Tirell was annoyed that she hadn’t come right out and told him, though he wasn’t sure that the Spinners would have continued at all if they’d known their activities were no longer clandestine.

“I have my informants,” Anna replied. “The important thing is, if you can get through dozens of tests to the point where it’s almost comfortable, there’s no reason to think a real launch would be ... ”

“Unendurable?” Tirell suggested.

“I was going to say ‘fatal.’”

Tirell looked out across the abandoned platform. The thought of riding a glider higher than he and Anna had ever flown didn’t really frighten him, but the disparity in scale between the real launcher and the toy he’d been playing with was beginning to unnerve him. He knew that the centrifugal force would actually be more when spinning from a shorter rope, if the speed of the swinging objects were the same, though if he understood Anna correctly, the twenty-fold smaller test rig in its initial configuration would in fact have roughly matched its larger sibling’s force, by combining the shorter rope with a slower-moving vessel. But none of that helped reconcile him to the intimidating prospect of whirling around on the end of a rope sixty spans long.

Anna hadn’t forgotten her original question. “So what about the air?”

Tirell said, “The whole trip should take about four thousand breaths, right?” That had been the predicted time for the empty glider to fall back, albeit with no hope of catching sight of it when it returned.

“Yes.”

“Cloth soaked in resin will hold air, without completely blocking the light. If I can observe the angle of the Far Sun throughout the journey, then along with the time the whole thing takes, that should be enough to check whether I ascended most of the way to the equilibrium point or not.”

“Four thousand breaths,” Rada mused. “Maybe twenty-seven cubic spans. That would mean a bigger glider.”

“Not much bigger,” Tirell insisted. “And it need not be much heavier at all; it’s more about the shape.”

Selik caught Tirell’s eye. “This is madness,” he said. “It’s suicide.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“How will you slow yourself during the descent?” Selik challenged him.

“The same cloth, spread out on ropes above the glider.”

“And what if the cloth frays?”

“That would probably kill me,” Tirell conceded. “But the weavers haven’t let us down so far.”

“The biggest risk,” Rada suggested, “might lie with our calculations.”

Tirell caught her meaning. If the Full Recitationists had underestimated the speed required to reach the equilibrium point, or overestimated the speed achieved at the launch, he might ascend only part of the way, and fall back without any hope of attracting the cousins’ attention.

But if they’d erred in the other direction, he’d arrive at the equilibrium point with energy to spare, still ascending, and there’d be nothing he could do to prevent the journey from continuing.

He said, “But the good news is, I’m sure to have run out of air long before I hit the Near Sun.”

13

Tirell lay as still as he could inside the hollowed log, trying to keep his breathing calm and steady. The canopy stretched out above him let plenty of light through, but it seemed to scatter it in such a way that wherever he looked he saw some portion of the glare from the zenith, making it impossible even to guess where the Near Sun lay in the sky.

He reached a count of seven hundred and twenty before he began to gasp. He punched at the canopy and broke the seal, then lay back for a while until he felt steady enough to climb out. At least his discomfort proved that if any air was passing through the resin-treated cloth, it was far too little to make a difference.

“It’s always good to see someone practicing for their death,” Delia declared sardonically. “So is the cloth working?”

“It’s holding in the air. The only problem is the view. I can’t really distinguish anything.”

Delia pondered this. “There are a few variations we could try. A coarser weave, with more gaps for the light. Or two layers with a finer weave, crossed at an angle to each other.”

“Why the second one?”

Delia rummaged in her bag of samples, and brought out two pieces of fine cloth. She laid them together, then approached Tirell and held them up in front of him.

Everything was subdued through the combination, but the glare from the wider sky was diminished far more than the light coming directly through the clouds. Tirell could distinguish the Far Sun easily.

“Will the resin spoil that effect?” he asked.

“I have no idea.” She took the samples over to the wound she’d made in the nearest tree, and set about coating them.

“Can I help with anything?” Tirell asked.

“You could get me some food, I’m starving.”

Chastened, he left the platform and made his way into the forest.

He’d set off with a clear destination in mind: a knot of entwined, middle-sized trees that had always proved bountiful when he’d visited them before. But as his eyes adapted to the softer light scattered down through the foliage, he found himself, not so much lost, as struggling to recognize the familiar, encouraging signs that had led him to the site previously. Crawling along the same branches, he could feel the bark flaking beneath his fingers, and the wilting leaves around him drooped against his body, where once they would have rebounded from the intrusion.

When he arrived, it was only the distinctive shapes of the trunks that convinced him he hadn’t taken a wrong turn and ended up somewhere else entirely. He’d imagined there’d be at least a few stunted globes hanging from the once-crowded branches. But there was nothing.

Tirell felt a strange sensation in his stomach; he wasn’t yet hungry himself, but it was an angry, jealous tightness, anticipating an absence and a struggle yet to come. He clung to the branch he was on and closed his eyes for a moment, trying to clear his head and make a plan.

If the heat was proving too strong for the trees here, maybe they’d fared better further down, where they had the benefit of more sheltering leaves above them. It would be an inversion of the usual pattern, in which the lower portion of the forest was rendered less productive by the thinning of the light, but what did he expect? Nothing was normal anymore.

He found a descending bough that looked sturdy and traversable, and pursued it as far as he could, pushing his way with disconcerting ease through the limp foliage, sometimes snapping off slender branches that he’d merely meant to bend aside. If the air grew any cooler, or the light dimmer, the change was imperceptible to him. Apparently the trees felt the same; there was still no fruit in sight.

He found another branch and continued, though he was starting to suspect that it would have been quicker to turn around and go back to his usual source near the markets – assuming it hadn’t failed entirely, or been plucked clean by other pickers in his absence. A stubborn curiosity kept him descending; if the spot above was no longer fecund, it seemed important to know if the bounty had vanished, or merely shifted.

Something crunched beneath his hand, digging into his skin. He turned his palm up to inspect the damage, and saw half of a small lizard’s corpse adhering to it, the bones barely cushioned in flesh. He shook it off and continued. If the lizard had been dead already it would have fallen off the branch; it must have been clinging on, but too weak and famished to move out of his way.

Each time he stopped to switch branches, or to inspect a favorable looking glade, the forest proved barren. He could already imagine Delia’s curses at his tardiness, but he kept going. The trunks around him were growing thicker, if not healthier, as a testament to the imperfect distribution of the effort needed to keep the forest aloft. The broader the cross-section, the more room for the buoyant gas within, but most of the trees above were freeloading to some extent, relying on the ones below to store more of the gas than they needed to support their own weight alone.

Something round caught Tirell’s eye. He stopped and squinted into the gloom, through the unruly mass of bedraggled leaves and half-naked twigs.

Fruit, at last: half a dozen, all decently sized. He picked his way carefully across a tangle of narrow branches, and scooped the fruit into the sack he’d brought.

Retracing his path, he put too much weight on one foothold, and the brittle wood snapped beneath him. He grabbed desperately at the surrounding thicket; the twigs his hands closed on held him up for a moment, then yielded. He dropped and slowed, dropped and slowed, his skin scratched and pierced from all directions, but the endless assault of small, splintering obstacles couldn’t bring him to a halt.

Something solid slapped the back of his shoulder; he reached up, clutched at it with his other hand, and managed to get a purchase on the branch. He clung on tightly, waiting to see how it reacted to his weight before trying to raise himself up.

Looking down, he saw a distant swirl of blue and white, barely obstructed by a few intervening twigs. About a dozen spans remained between him and the bottom of the forest.

He lifted himself onto the branch and peered along it, locating the trunk, not far away. The sack of fruit was still hanging from his neck.

Maldo wasn’t dead yet; the forest wasn’t barren, and it wasn’t falling from the sky. But there was no time left for mistakes. The next launch had to reach the cousins’ gaze, and sway them.

14

As Tirell walked along the platform, he noticed the Spinners gathered together among the bystanders who’d come to wish him a safe journey. Most of the crowd were cheering ebulliently, but his fellow riders were subdued, as if they felt the gravity of what he was attempting more keenly than anyone else. Tirell nodded to them as he passed, and did his best to appear appropriately solemn, but the truth was, it was all he could do not to burst out laughing. The combined effort of half the people of Maldo and three neighboring forests was about to culminate in the act of tossing a fruit picker into the sky. If that wasn’t absurd, nothing was.

There was no crawling along the support frame, or awkward maneuvering with ropes; a pair of safety rails protected him as he strode out to the point where a ladder led all the way down to the glider. As he descended below the platform, Tirell glanced at the orange clouds in the distance, but he did not look down. Once he had his feet firmly on the floor of the hollow he gave the ladder a push and it retracted, folding up beneath the frame.

He squatted down and set to work pegging the canopy into place around him; the soft resin alone made an airtight seal with the rim of the hollow, but the pegs would resist the pressure trying to part the surfaces. He left a gap in the rim, putting off the moment when he’d start using up his fixed quota of air. Then he lay down in the hollow, fixed the harness in place across his chest, and waited.

After a while, he heard footsteps on the frame above him. Selik called down, “Is everything all right?”

“Yes. I’m ready. The weights ... ?”

“They’re in place. As soon as I get back there, we’ll drop them.”

Tirell stared up at the canopy. “All right then. I’ll see you when I get back.”

“Good luck.”

The footsteps retreated.

Tirell stretched his arms above his head; the glider was certainly more comfortable than the Spinners’ basket. The few times he’d lain in it before, he’d longed for a rehearsal in which it was set in motion, but it would have been too much extra work to perform special drops with the conditions changed so the non-launch at the end wasn’t far more punishing than simply departing.

He heard a shout in the distance, then the creak of the rod beginning to turn. When the glider was finally dragged along, rising up then swinging back, the whole sequence felt entirely familiar, merely conducted at a more leisurely pace.

Five hundred breaths to launch. The swaying of the glider on its longer rope was slower and smoother than the basket, and it diminished with much less fuss; there was none of the frantic back and forth he’d grown used to. Through the canopy, each revolution was reduced to a cycle of light and dark; Delia had refined the cloth to the point where he could, with some effort, distinguish the Near Sun from the general glare, but with everything whirling around him every source of illumination just blurred together. Tirell squeezed his eyes shut and kept them closed for five breaths, to check his sense of time against Rada’s calculations. When he opened them, the light was at the same angle once more as when he’d closed them.

The force pinning him to the floor grew stronger, steadily but relentlessly. The rope joining him to the end-cap had to be close to half-extended now, but the image of the vast circle he was sweeping out in the open air around the platform no longer terrified him. There was something exhilarating about the sheer scale of it, befitting the path of a vessel preparing to leave the world behind – only made more wondrous by the fact that a toy version that could never have sent him anywhere had nonetheless helped to prepare him for the experience.

As his breath-count approached two hundred and fifty, his body tensed out of habit for the jolt of the stopped drop-weight and the wild spiraling-in that usually followed. Instead, the glider continued smoothly on its outward spiral, still taking five breaths per revolution, but following a longer path each time. No rapid escalation into short-lived agony, just an implacable prolongation of the ever-tighter squeezing of his flesh. Tirell tried to distract himself, tracking the cycles of light, focusing on keeping the count. The pain was insistent, elbowing its way into his attention, forcing each breath to be more shallow even as he fought to keep the rhythm unchanged.

In duration, just one more ride on the spinner; it hadn’t sounded too bad that way. He’d tried not to dwell on the fact that the force from the second would be growing from the level where the first had stopped. But once it was over, it would be over; he’d never have to tolerate it again.

The lights inside his eyes were competing with the glare through the canopy; they were tinged with purple in the dark half of the cycle, then changed to green when he was facing upward toward the clouds. But so long as he could still time his breathing against the motion of the glider, he was in control. The pain in his ribs had shifted from evoking the protruding branches he’d actually known, to the bone daggers he’d only ever imagined. But what did he have to fear, now that the count had passed four hundred?

The purple light began bleeding into the green. Tirell was no longer sure if his eyes were open or not. Don’t let me go blind, he pleaded. If he was blind, it would all be for nothing. He wouldn’t even know before he died if he’d reached the equilibrium point or not.

Abruptly, the stains on his vision began retreating. Except they weren’t changing in size at all; they were simply imbued with a sense of motion, as if that could arise entirely separately from their appearance, through something like smell. Then Tirell understood that, although the pain in his chest had barely diminished, the crushing weight itself was gone.

He did not have long to ensure the quality of his air supply; he reached across to the open portion of the canopy and pegged it into place, screaming back defiantly at the protests from his body that wanted him to scream from pain alone. His sight was returning to normal, and from the borders of the brightest region of the canopy he could tell that the glider was ascending with its long axis tilted back about a third of the way from vertical – exactly as it should be. He realized that he’d stopped counting, and had no idea what total he’d reached when he’d stopped; for a moment he was in despair, but then he shook off his befuddlement and recalled that it had always been the plan to start afresh from the moment of launch, and if he guessed and started from twenty he could not be too far wrong.

He was alive, aching, sighted, ascending. All but weightless; the resistance of the air against the glider was diminishing, leaving him hovering loosely in his harness. The canopy had swelled outward, pulling itself taut; Anna had told him to listen for any whistling sound as a symptom of a leak where the resin might have failed or a peg come loose, but everything was silent.

With no clouds to scatter the light, the sky had vanished as a discernible hemisphere, but even through the canopy the disk of the Far Sun was now utterly distinct from the broader light above. Tirell kept his gaze fixed on it, and put all his effort into a steady count; in the end, it would only be the delay of sunset that could attest to the altitude he’d reached.

How had the cousins felt, he wondered, as they made the same journey with no intention of returning? Before, it had always seemed pointless to dwell on their emotions at such a vast remove. But they had been people much like him, as fragile, and perhaps as fearful. Whatever knowledge and skills they’d possessed, the feat they’d attempted must have tested them, and terrified them, as much as this had tested and terrified him.

And if he could see through their eyes, surely they could see through his? Once they understood what they were doing, to people no different from themselves, to continue would be untenable.

15

When Tirell reached the count of two thousand, the Far Sun had still not set. As far as he could tell from the blurred disk showing through the canopy, it had not even touched the layer of clouds that he pictured spread out below him to the west. Unless his mind had become so addled that he’d raced through the numbers, this was proof that he’d come close to his intended destination.

He waited, still counting. Finally, he noticed a flattening at the bottom of the disk. He timed the duration of the whole event, until the upper limb had vanished. It was within the range he’d been told to expect if he was almost motionless: suspended between the worlds, waiting for one of them to claim him. Tirell had nodded along with Anna and Rada when they’d explained that he wouldn’t feel a thing as his home world battled the Near Sun to snatch his body back, but the truth was, even as his experience confirmed their claim, his intuition still struggled to accept it.

The Far Sun did not reappear: he was not accelerating upward, out of the world’s shadow. The evidence was not conclusive yet, but Tirell had no patience left. Until an unnatural dawn showed him otherwise, he would consider himself to be on his way home.

A shadow moved swiftly across the Near Sun, hiding it completely and plunging the hollow into darkness. Tirell was confused; it should have been impossible for him to end up close to any of the asteroids. Could the glider have turned around, to face away from the light? Anna had warned him that it might leave the atmosphere with a slow spin, but that didn’t mean it could suddenly rotate, long afterward, and then just as suddenly come to a halt.

Tirell heard something strike the glider, firmly but not catastrophically, on either side. When the sound was over, there was nothing more, leaving him wondering if he’d imagined it. Then he felt a slight tug, pulling his body upward toward the nose ... meaning the glider was being pushed in the opposite direction.

The cousins had noticed him in their workplace, and they were moving him away.

At first, Tirell was ecstatic. What surer sign of success could he have hoped for? But as the smooth, efficient act of discarding him continued, he felt his anger mounting.

“This is it?” he bellowed. “You see me in the way, and you get rid of me? Come and face me, and make a promise! We need to know that you’ve understood the message. We need to know that you’ll stop the harm you’ve started, and let us live safely again!”

Tirell kept ranting, repeating his demands ever more stridently, until he began to fear that he might be using up his air faster than planned.

“Talk to me,” he said quietly.

A voice replied, “I’ll talk to you. But what is there to say?”

Tirell swung around in his harness; it had sounded as though the speaker was right next to him.

“Where are you?”

“Far away. But you can think of the thing that’s holding you as my emissary.”

“You speak our language?” Tirell marveled. Most of the group had considered that unlikely, after such a long separation, but though the accent was strange, the speaker’s words were clear enough. “Is it close to your own?”

“Not close, but not too difficult to learn.”

“From your Recitations? From the language of the ancestors?”

“No. I’ve studied your people over the last few years.”

“You’ve studied us ... without even meeting us? You’ve hidden in the forests?”

“No. But I’ve listened from afar.”

That didn’t make much sense, but Tirell had more important questions to pursue. “Will you stop the flow onto the Near Sun?”

“That decision is not in my hands.”

“Then can I talk to whoever will decide?”

“All of us decided, long ago. A majority of us. It’s not going to stop.”

Tirell was perplexed. “Long ago? But did you know what it would do to us, then?”

“Of course.”

“You knew it would kill us, but you chose to do it anyway?”

“It won’t kill you all,” the voice replied. “The flow has risen and fallen for millions of years, and life has continued. There’s nothing you’re facing now that your ancestors didn’t survive.”

“People have migrated back, before?”

“Back and forth, hundreds of times. Though the last time was so long ago that perhaps you wouldn’t consider them to have been people.”

Tirell spent a moment absorbing this revelation, but then decided that he really didn’t care. “I’m not interested in ancient history. You still have no right to make us suffer like this.”

“So who will stop us?”

The words were delivered so casually that it took some time for Tirell to accept that he hadn’t misheard them, or misunderstood.

“That’s your answer: who will stop you killing us? When we meet you on the cold side, I don’t doubt you’ll have superior weapons to protect yourselves, but don’t expect to ever feel safe there again.”

“We won’t be meeting each other on the cold side. We don’t want any part of your world; it doesn’t suit us anymore, hot or cold.”

“Then why have you restarted the flow?” Tirell had moved beyond anger into incomprehension; however well this studious cousin spoke his language, he was starting to wonder if the mind behind the words was any less opaque than that of a lizard or a gnat.

“The light and heat of the rekindled Near Sun will give us two new worlds. They already orbit the Far Sun ahead and behind the Near Sun, each a sixth of a circle away. This will bring them to life.”

“You have your life already, on the inner worlds.”

“One world only; the others aren’t amenable to change.”

“One only! You can’t live with one?”

“There are billions of us,” the voice replied. “You are less than ten thousand in all.”

“Billions – and you’re unwilling to hatch fewer children?”

“Why should even one of us go childless, in order that your sleep remains undisturbed?”

Tirell didn’t understand this idiom. “You think we’re sleeping?”

“You abandoned your culture, you discarded your heritage. If you vanished entirely, what would be lost?”

Tirell felt a weight on his chest: the foot of his opponent, insisting that he yield.

“Aren’t we people like you? We feel everything you feel. We struggle like you do; we love life like you do. How is it possible for you to say that we could cease to exist, and it would mean nothing?”

“We all die,” the voice replied. “Every one of us. But the culture of the ancestors, their highest achievements, lives on in us alone.”

16

The cousins’ device released the glider, and its shadow slid away. Tirell had lost count of the time, and he had no real idea where he was now, or how fast he was moving. He hung suspended in his harness, blinking at the restored light filling the hollow.

After a while, he felt the air pushing back against the glider, but he waited until the canopy had lost its rigid outward bulge before daring to peel it open in one corner. The air rushing past had a strange odor, but it was not so thin as to leave him struggling for breath.

The canopy began to rattle in the airflow, then the glider gyrated and turned nose-down, leaving Tirell with his feet to the sky. He closed his eyes and pictured the vessel plunging into the depths. If everyone was destined for those beautiful clouds, why not get it over with right now?

The rattling intensified, shaking him out of his self-pitying reverie. He owed it to the people who’d worked on the launcher to return and tell them everything he’d learned.

He checked the ropes securing the canopy to the tail of the glider, then he took out the pegs, tore the rim free and threw the whole sheet into the raging air. The wind snatched at it wildly until it came to an uneasy equilibrium, stretched out on the ropes above him, squalling like a strange injured animal as the harness bit into his shoulders from below.

“Thanks to Delia, yet again,” he muttered, imagining her scowl when she heard what her handiwork had actually achieved.

Tirell pushed himself away from the floor of the hollow and peered down at the swirling depths. He loosened the harness enough to turn himself around and get his feet in contact with the pedals; he waited as long as he dared, trying to extract as much deceleration from the trailing canopy as possible without falling too low.

Then he cut the canopy loose and took control of the wing flaps, bringing the glider out of its dive.

When he was level, for a moment he was completely at a loss; it had just occurred to him that this would be the first time he’d be flying the glider without Anna beside him. But he wasn’t lost; he’d seen enough of the long-lived vortices in the depths below to get his bearings.

Long before he reached Maldo, he saw a small, unfamiliar forest, suspended in an updraft, visibly rising and falling even as he watched, still finding its balance. If it survived in the new conditions, maybe it could serve as a temporary home. A first step in the migration.

Tirell felt his body tense in anger, ashamed at his own acquiescence. But what choice would they have? Accept the hard fate the cousins had imposed on them, or reject it, rage at it, and die.

When he finally saw his home in the distance, the shame returned and he wanted to flee, but he forced himself to keep going. He found the mouth of the clearing, and he pictured Anna beside him, encouraging and berating him as he circled around a second time, then a third, before he could straighten his path out enough to fly in.

He struck the wall of vines with a bone-shaking jolt, but it felt like a friendly embrace. He sat in the hollow, unable to rise; Anna and Selik appeared beside him, squeezing his arms, talking to him, checking him for injuries.

“If I tell you what happened,” he said, “you won’t believe me. You’ll just say I lost my mind.”

“Come out of the glider,” Anna replied, “and you’ll see why that’s not true.”

She and Selik helped him out, and he staggered across the platform. His legs were impossibly weak. Could it really have been just a few thousand breaths since he’d departed? He felt like he’d returned from a long exile.

He looked back at the glider. Along the side, dozens of shallow but perfectly straight grooves had been carved – or rather, pressed – into the wood. No one who saw that would doubt that he’d been grabbed by the cousins’ strange dispatcher.

He sat down on the platform, and the others sat beside him. “I’ll tell you everything,” he said. “But then, you’ll need to give me something in return.”

Anna looked annoyed, but she indulged him. “Of course. What is it you want?”

Tirell said, “I need to hear the Full Recitation. Every word you know, everything I missed out on. We’re all going to need to hear it. The struggle that’s coming might last for a thousand generations, and we’re all going to need to make ourselves strong.”

NIGHT RUNNING

1

Luke heard the ping of the elevator arriving and glanced at the time on his screen: 9:49 PM. It was probably the cleaners coming through. The Roombas had started on the carpets about an hour before, but Ray and Elaine, the middle-aged couple who’d told Luke they’d held the cleaning contract for the building for the last eight years, still needed to empty the trash and wipe down all the desks and cubicle partitions.

He rose to his feet and rolled his neck for a few seconds, wondering if he should take their arrival as his cue to leave. The task he’d hoped to finish was now looking even more stubbornly intractable than when he’d begun, and if he didn’t get home before eleven he’d have no chance to do anything but fall into bed. He needed to spend an hour with a book, a game, or a TV show, just to lay down a clear memory that separated each day from the next, or he ended up back at his desk in the morning feeling like he’d never been away.

“How’s it going?” he called to Elaine, who was working her way along the row of cubicles with her spray bottle and cloth. When she didn’t reply, Luke wondered if he’d done something to offend her the last time he’d spoken with the couple. Maybe he’d held them up by talking too long, and then compounded the insult by rushing off suddenly when he realized he was about to miss his train.

Ray was following along behind her with the cleaning cart, and when he saw Luke he frowned and shook his head in mock reproach. “Don’t you ever go home?”

“Soon,” Luke replied, relieved that he wasn’t being ghosted entirely. Maybe Elaine was just listening to music; it was hard to tell if she was wearing earbuds. He walked up to the cart, while Ray pulled the dust cartridge out of a Roomba station and emptied it into the bag. “How’s Molly?” Luke asked. Their grandchild had had a nasty ear infection when they’d talked the week before.

“Much better, thanks,” Ray replied cheerfully, though he seemed a little distracted, watching Elaine through the corner of his eye. “We’re taking turns looking after her while her mother is back at work.”

“Oh, that’s nice.” Luke didn’t want to impose any further; he smiled and headed back to his cubicle. Elaine was still so absorbed in her work that she hadn’t even glanced at him – but then, he’d probably failed to acknowledge half a dozen colleagues himself throughout the day, as he sat staring at the seismic plots on his screen.

He shut down his computer, picked up his briefcase and started toward the elevator. Ray had his back to him as Luke passed, so Luke just called out, “Have a good night! You too, Elaine!” Elaine finally turned and gazed in his direction, but she remained silent, and there wasn’t so much as a flicker of recognition on her face.

Luke hesitated. If he’d offended her somehow, he wanted to put things right. But if she genuinely didn’t know who he was – if she was suffering from some kind of dementia – then she and Ray were entitled to their privacy. No one owed him an explanation.

Ray looked up from the cart and caught him gazing back in puzzlement. Elaine resumed her work, and Luke was about to continue on his way when Ray approached him.

“You won’t tell anyone, will you?” he urged Luke. “If our insurance company ever found out ... ”

“Of course not. I didn’t know she was sick, but it’s none of my business.”

Ray shook his head. “She’s not sick. We’re taking turns doing our shifts on FF, so we can look after Molly during the day.”

“Oh.” Luke recalled seeing a headline claiming that fruit-pickers were using the drug, but he’d assumed it was just clickbait. “You can really get the work done, while you’re sleepwalking? I’d be afraid of wandering off and falling down the stairs.”

“I wouldn’t try it alone,” Ray conceded. “But with a waking partner watching over you, you’re not in any danger. And when it’s something you’ve done a thousand times before ... ”

“I’ll take your word for it,” Luke replied. At least they weren’t window-washers, rappelling down the outside of the building. But if their job wasn’t hazardous, it certainly wasn’t purely repetitive either: Elaine was deftly shifting knickknacks around on Samantha’s desk so she could wipe the whole surface. Every cubicle was different like that in some way. No wonder the whole business was still too hard to automate.

“If you’re on your feet for hours, don’t you end up tired in the morning anyway?” he wondered.

“We don’t feel tired,” Ray assured him. “Whatever part of your brain needs resting seems to rest.”

Luke wasn’t convinced, but he was starting to feel anxious about distracting Ray from his zombie-watching duties. “I won’t tell anyone,” he promised. “Have a good night.”

On the train, he was too tired to read, but too agitated to listen to music; he just sat staring at the station signs coming and going in the dark. If the drug really functioned as Ray claimed, all power to the two of them; who wouldn’t relish arriving home from work feeling as refreshed as if they’d had a good night’s sleep? A part of him recoiled from the whiff of exploitation, but it wasn’t entirely clear how doing the same work for the same pay and finding it less tedious could be a bad thing.

Luke almost nodded off, but he’d set the GPS on his watch to vibrate when he reached Epping. As he trudged home through the empty streets, he tried letting his eyelids fall shut, curious as to how many steps he could take before he hit a lamppost or veered into someone’s front garden. But Elaine had not been moving blindly through the office; notwithstanding her indifference to his presence, she had been able to see, and react to, everything that mattered for the task at hand.

2

“I think this is the best I can do,” Luke admitted, as his boss, Andrew Keller, sat down and began to inspect the stratigraphic maps Luke had spent a fortnight trying to extract from a collection of sparse, noisy seismic data. The error bars on the accompanying plots were the giveaway; though in principle, Keller’s method could be used to infer the depth and density of all manner of mineral deposits, the same data that hinted at the possibility of their presence was also entirely consistent with their absence.

As Keller scrolled through the report, his scowl of disappointment deepened. “No, no, no,” he protested. “You’ve come at this all the wrong way!”

At the start of the project, Luke had begged him for more explicit instructions; in the end he’d had no choice but to proceed under his own assumptions. “There’s nothing in the literature about the method you described,” he said, which was the politest way he could think of to state that he’d been left to guess exactly what was required of him.

“Of course there isn’t,” Keller replied irritably. “Using wavelets this way is my own innovation. But I don’t have time to dot all the i’s for you; when we hired you, I thought you’d be flexible enough to go beyond what you’d read in the textbooks.”

Luke didn’t reply. He’d gone through three rounds of interviews to get this job; it had felt like he was the last applicant standing after they’d all been force-marched across a minefield. And whatever it meant to him personally, how would it look on his CV if he lost his first paid position in the industry after a mere six months?

Keller said, “Imagine being able to prospect for any kind of mineral, in any region on Earth, using nothing but ambient seismic waves. No blasting at all. And then in stage two, with no special instruments on site – just public data from existing seismic monitors. What do you think the future might hold, for the company that brought that technology to the marketplace?”

“Growth?” Luke suggested.

“Fucking spectacular growth!” Keller roared, before checking himself, possibly recalling some bullet point from an HR seminar regarding the wisdom of shouting obscenities at subordinates on company premises during work hours. “Do you want to be in on that spectacular growth?” he asked Luke, sounding now like a friendly uncle offering investment advice.

“Absolutely,” Luke replied. That wasn’t actually a lie, even if he wasn’t quite sure where the question stood on the continuum between the merely hypothetical and the downright counterfactual. But Keller had thirty years’ experience in the mining industry; Luke had one-sixtieth as much. Who was he to say that Keller’s method was impractical? And if he was part of the team that made it work, surely that would lead to a secure position here, and excellent prospects wherever he went.

“Good for you.” Keller smiled forgivingly. “Now try again. Only this time ... ”

Luke leaned forward eagerly, desperate to learn exactly what he’d missed the first time he’d been instructed about the method.

“This time, get it right,” Keller urged him. “I don’t care how long it takes you. The important thing is to get it right.”

3

When the packet of Fibrofilamide arrived in the mail from Delhi, Luke scanned the QR code on the side of the box. The manufacturer’s web site confirmed that it was an item they’d sent to the online store he’d bought it from, and that no one else had registered the same code before him. He took one pill out of the blister pack, shaved a small quantity off the side with a kitchen knife, dissolved it in warm water, and applied the fluid to the test strip he’d bought from a different store.

The strip turned green; this was the genuine product.

Fibrofilamide had been through six years of clinical trials, in the hope that it might halt the progress of Parkinson’s Disease. In the end, the benefits had turned out to be quite limited, but the side effects had proved equally mild. Even the somnambulism for which it was now famous went away after a week or so, under the high dosage regimen that had been evaluated for clinical use. If he stuck to fifty milligrams every twenty-four hours or so, he’d be taking much less than the trials had shown to be physiologically harmless – and if, as he hoped, the sleepwalking persisted, that would be a testament to the fact that his brain was not habituating to the chemical.

He set up his phone with the camera in wide-angle, low-light mode, swallowed the pill and climbed into bed. For a while he lay in the dark, too self-conscious to relax. His watch would sound an alarm if he stepped outside the apartment ... but if he retained enough cognitive ability in his sleep to scroll through the menus and free himself from house arrest before opening the door – or even the presence of mind to unstrap the device and leave it behind – then he’d probably be capable of completing a midnight stroll without coming to grief.

But the reality was likely to skew in the other direction. How clumsy, how confused, how irrational might he actually be?

He got out of bed, turned on the light, picked up the coffee table, and placed it on its side with the top resting against the wall. In the movies, people who died in furniture-related accidents always split their heads open on the coffee table. But would he now be at risk of tripping on the protruding legs? He fetched a laundry basket and positioned it so it would act as a buffer, keeping him away from the four perilous wooden poles.

Back in bed, he kept fretting, but he was too tired now to do anything but ridicule his remaining fears. The chance that he would wake to find himself in the park, miming some sex act while early-morning dog-walkers looked on in horror and recorded it all for the police, seemed slim. More likely he would just suffer a few hours of anxious, shallow sleep before waking with a splitting headache, wondering why he hadn’t waited until the weekend before subjecting himself to this stupid experiment.

4

When Luke heard his alarm go off, he reached for his watch, but it was not on his wrist. He glanced down and saw that he was standing in a steam-filled room, entirely naked, his skin warm and dripping wet. His muscles were suffused with an invigorating ache, as if they’d just performed some strenuous but entirely welcome task.

In front of him, condensation clouded the mirror on a small medicine cabinet. He cradled his head in his hands, too dazed to panic even though he had no idea where he was, or what he’d done.

The bathmat he was standing on looked familiar. He raised his eyes and examined his surroundings as the steam began to disperse. He was in his own bathroom, and his watch was sitting on the countertop, where he always put it when he showered. He silenced it, then wrapped a towel around his waist and opened the door.

The state of the apartment could not have been more orderly. He’d made his bed, and laid out his work clothes. He’d eaten breakfast – the cereal bowl was soaking in the kitchen sink – shaved, and cleaned his teeth. He was pretty sure he’d used the toilet as well, since he had no remaining need.

Luke skimmed through the time-stamped recording on his phone. He’d risen just after four AM. The monochrome image of a pallid figure pulling away the sheets and leaving his bed raised hairs on the back of his neck ... but then he’d switched on the light, transforming the movie into color, and walked around with such an ordinary gait and matter-of-fact demeanor that it swiftly dispelled the whole Paranormal Activity vibe.

As well as his ordinary morning routine, he’d fitted in almost an hour of body-weight exercises – chair dips, sit-ups, four kinds of push-ups, all the sets he’d done as a student when he had no money to join a gym. Now that he had a membership, he had no time to use it, and he’d pretty much resigned himself to the sluggish, desk-bound state he’d found himself in for the last six months.

He got dressed and walked down to the train station, marveling at how refreshed and clear-headed he felt. And though he’d stayed back at the office until 9:30 the previous night, that now seemed like a lifetime ago. With an early start and a new sense of energy, maybe he could finally make some progress cleaning out Keller’s Augean stables. The method had to be sound, or none of Geoscopy’s other partners would have allowed Keller to devote resources to it, but he was clearly too busy to develop it properly himself. He’d given the job to Luke, and Luke would handle it.

5

One set of parameters, Luke discovered, yielded decent results from the wavelet algorithm for about a third of his test data. Another set worked for another quarter of the cases. If he ignored all the rest, maybe he could find a useful middle ground, gathering the partial successes under one umbrella.

But after hours of telling himself he was homing in on the optimal choice, he realized he was just shifting a bump in the carpet from place to place. Basically, he was cheating: hiding the general awfulness of his latest version of the method by knowing in advance which particular tweaks had made it seem successful for particular cases.

In the distance, the elevator pinged. Luke switched off his computer and headed for the exit.

When he passed Ray, it was clear that his presence didn’t register, so he called to Elaine up ahead, “Your turn on duty tonight?” She glanced at him briefly, but didn’t reply.

He stood and watched as Elaine moved from cubicle to cubicle, while Ray pushed the cart and collected the trash. Not only were they both ignoring him, neither was checking on the other.

Luke coughed loudly, to no effect. Surely they couldn’t have both taken the pill on the same night, by mistake? But whatever was happening, he couldn’t leave them like this.

As they proceeded through the office, he followed them, scanning for dangerous obstacles and trying to decide who he should wake. If he could remember their schedule he might be able to guess who’d be the least tired. But maybe the whole problem was that they’d broken the pattern for some reason, and ended up confused themselves, in which case he might as well give up and toss a coin.

“Look out!” he called to Ray, who was walking straight toward a chair someone had left in the middle of the passageway. Ray did nothing to acknowledge the warning, but he picked up the chair and slid it under the desk where it belonged.

Elaine turned to Luke, glassy eyed as an animatronic mannequin, then broke into a smile. “Relax! I’m watching him.”

Luke wasn’t comfortable spouting obscenities at someone who might have been his mother, so he smiled back sheepishly. “You really had me there. I thought I was going to have to hang around all night, then drive you home in the van.”

Elaine shook her head, still amused, but perhaps a tiny bit repentant. “I wouldn’t have let it go on that long. You have a good night, Luke.”

“You too.”

In the lobby on the ground floor, Luke saw a bottle of disinfectant lying on the carpet, probably having fallen off the cart. He picked it up and placed it at the side of the exit, where it would be easy for Elaine to spot when they were on their way out.

6

When Luke arrived at the gym, it was deserted and pitch black, but his keycard opened the door and the lights near the entrance blinked on. As he walked to the locker room, panels brightened then faded in his wake.

He changed out of his office clothes and put in his earbuds, but then wondered if he should abandon his plan and just make the best of the situation. He could still use the equipment – wide awake – for half an hour or so, as he’d done for the last four visits, then go home and try to grab an ordinary night’s sleep. There were machines here that could crack his skull open if he did something sufficiently stupid, but even if he just dropped a dumbbell on his foot and bellowed in pain, that might trigger alarms and prompt some human review of the security camera footage.

Then again ... all his somnambulistic actions at home had been entirely free of slapstick. He had no reason to believe that he was likely to insert his hand into a weight stack, or wander around naked in a public area. He didn’t know if the videos people posted showing themselves skateboarding, cycling, and driving were all fake, but to the extent that he could filter out the obvious attention-seekers, the consensus of the online discussion seemed to be that most sleepwalkers followed the same instincts and cues as they obeyed in waking life.

He swallowed the pill, then lay down on a bench with his rolled-up towel as a pillow. After a while, the lights went out.

7

Luke woke in a shower stall, with the water still running; he shut it off, dried himself, and stepped out just in time to cancel the alarm on his watch. There were two other men in the locker room, and they ignored him completely, with nothing in their body language to suggest that they’d noticed him earlier doing anything unusual. He’d contemplated leaving his phone propped against the wall, out in the gym, to try to record his night’s activities, but though the customers here made videos of themselves all the time, surveilling the entire floor for hours would probably have crossed a line.

He left the locker room and glanced around the gym; it wasn’t quite the morning peak yet, but there were at least twenty people present. What had felt slightly daring when the place was empty seemed downright insane now; he might as well have been sleepwalking through a crowded shopping mall. What if someone had asked him how long he’d be using a machine – gesturing first for him to turn down his earbuds – and he’d just stared at them as if they were beneath contempt?

“Hey!”

Luke turned warily to face the speaker – a wiry man a few years older than him, pounding a treadmill – and braced himself for a tirade. The runner made a thumbs-up sign and gasped, “That was epic!”

“Thanks,” Luke replied, hoping his grimace of confusion might be mistaken for a kind of self-deprecating grin. He checked the tracker on his watch; ten minutes earlier, he’d been on the treadmill immediately to the right of this man. Ten minutes earlier – and for two full hours before that.

The tracker couldn’t tell him his speed; he might have jogged slowly, or he might have just stood there like a fool. Luke approached the treadmill, and hit the button to bring back the data for the last session. He’d run thirty kilometers.

“Did you doubt your own eyes the first time?” his neighbor joked.

“Yes.”

The man hit the stop button and mopped his face with his towel. “I’m Karim.”

“Luke.”

“You know you can get the treadmill to send the log to your watch automatically?” Karim went into a menu on the touchscreen in front of him. “Just pair your watch with your membership number, and it will do it every time – for any treadmill, in any of the clubs.”

“That’s cool. Thanks.”

Karim shook his head. “Thirty K? I might do that outdoors on the weekend, but ... a two-hour run before work? Where the fuck do you get that much energy?”

Luke said, “It’s a mystery.”

As he walked to the station he certainly felt the aftermath of his unintended feat, but though he was sore in places, and ravenous, he wasn’t weary in the slightest. He grabbed breakfast from a stall on the concourse, and arrived at the office feeling invincible.

As he booted up his computer, he knew the Keller problem would soon begin to take its toll. But what mattered was not whether this strange elation lasted forever; what mattered was whether he could acquire it again. The tracker had shown him eschewing the use of most of the gym equipment, and just doing his body-weight routine in the uncluttered stretching area before jumping on the treadmill. Notwithstanding a million staged YouTube videos of painful mishaps, this model’s default was to slow automatically if you failed to keep up, and even if you lost your footing, the whole design was curved and padded to limit the harm to a runner who tripped and fell. So, as far as he could tell, in his whole night at the gym he’d really done nothing unsafe or imprudent.

If this was what he needed to stay sane and healthy, so be it. Other people got drunk or high, or had the time to blow off steam while fully conscious. His own drug was safer than aspirin, and all it made him do was run in his sleep.

8

Luke gazed placidly at his computer’s desktop, wondering why he felt so peaceful. When he looked away, Samantha caught his eye and asked, “Are you still in the zone?”

“Sorry?”

She laughed. “I think that counts as a no. What’s with the big grin, though? Did you finally slay the monster?”

“Umm ... I’ll get back to you on that.”

It was a quarter to ten. What had he been doing all morning? Had he overslept and started late? But it was Friday, so he would have been coming from the gym. The last thing he remembered was falling asleep there the night before.

He reached under his desk; when he opened his gym bag, the towel was only slightly damp, so he hadn’t showered any later than usual. When he checked his computer’s log, it showed that it had booted at 7:07.

Luke opened his folder for the Keller project. There was a new version of the data analysis notebook, last modified at 8:23, and a new report, dated 9:40.

He opened the report, and skimmed through it. All the error bars had shrunk, by a factor of five. But ... how, exactly? Luke compared the current notebook with the previous version. He’d changed a single line in the function that performed the wavelet analysis, replacing one variable by its square root. Why, though? How did that make sense?

His email client pinged; there was a message from Keller, replying to one that Luke had sent at 9:42.

“Finally!” Keller had written. “Well done!”

Luke scrolled down to his own message, but he’d just attached the report without comment. He had come into the office still asleep, stared at the notebook for an hour, made one change, stared at it for another hour, then generated a report based on the new analysis and sent it to Keller.

He went back to the notebook, and the altered function. If he examined it carefully, he ought to be able to settle the matter decisively: either the version he’d been using before had been wrong, or this new one was. But when he tried to engage with the details, it was like trying to do mental arithmetic with thirty digits – his brain just snickered and said, “Nah, that’s not happening.”

Keller would check everything and make his own assessment. If Luke had screwed up, he’d get another reprimand, and maybe then he’d summon up the courage to walk away from the impossible task. But there was no point second-guessing the report, now that he’d sent it.

He forced himself to stop dwelling on the matter, and started catching up on some of the work he was meant to be doing alongside Keller’s project: assessing drone survey data for hints of lithium-bearing pegmatites. It was a subtle and demanding job, but his other boss, Graham Hunt, didn’t expect him to work miracles. An automated system had made a first pass through all the observations, but Luke could see dozens of cases where its verdict was clearly wrong.

By a quarter past five, Keller hadn’t followed up on his first response to the report. He probably wasn’t even in the building anymore. Luke shut down his computer.

“Are you actually leaving?” Samantha asked. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen that before.”

“Yeah, very funny.” Luke gathered his possessions.

“Some of us are having drinks at O’Brien’s,” she said. “Around six.”

“You know I don’t drink,” he said. “And I’m starving. I just want to get home and eat.”

Samantha groaned. “It’s a figure of speech; we go there for a meal as well.”

Luke hesitated. “Doesn’t everyone hate me already, for not coming before?” He’d genuinely never felt able, but all his late nights in the office had probably made him look poisonously ambitious.

“No one hates you!” Samantha scoffed. “We all remember how hard it was getting started here. Just ... come and meet people properly.”

“You said around six?” Luke had no idea what he could do until then.

Samantha said, “Yeah, but you can get there early and grab a table for the rest of us. It’s the least you can do, now that you’ve decided to start slacking off.”

9

In the pub, Luke mostly kept his mouth shut and listened to his colleagues joking with each other. He hadn’t watched most of the shows they were referring to, but at least he hadn’t stopped following the news, so not every quip went over his head.

Half an hour into the gathering, Samantha’s sister, Kaitlin, showed up, and Luke squeezed over on the bench to make room for her to join them.

“Have we met before?” she asked him.

“I don’t think so.”

Samantha said, “Luke doesn’t get out much. He’s chained to his desk.”

“Oh, that’s sad,” Kaitlin teased him.

“So what do you do, that gives you so much free time?” Luke asked her.

“Theatrical management.”

“You’re an impresario?”

“An impresario’s assistant’s assistant’s assistant,” Paul interjected, with admirably crisp enunciation. “Assistant ... assistant’s ... assistant,” Gareth added, making no effort at all.

Kaitlin gave them the finger. “I practically run the office.” She turned back to Luke. “So why are you chained to your desk so much?”

He said, “I got stuck on something, but I think I’ve sorted it out now.”

“So you’re celebrating your freedom?” Kaitlin suggested.

“Maybe. Or maybe on Monday I’ll discover it was all a dream.”

“Are you free tomorrow night?”

Luke hesitated, not quite sure what he was committing to. “Yes.”

Kaitlin said, “I’ve got some complimentary tickets to the Threepenny Circus.”

“Boo!” Gareth shouted. “Stop whipping those tigers!”

Kaitlin sighed. “There are no animals. It’s just acrobats and performers. It’s half circus, half burlesque.”

Luke was on the verge of retorting that burlesque was in the running for the most pretentious artform of the twenty-first century, but he swallowed the jibe. No one cared about his opinion, and he didn’t want Kaitlin to look at him and see another Gareth.

“So, who wants to join me?” Kaitlin asked.

10

Luke shifted restlessly on the unfamiliar mattress, and felt his shoulder make contact with warm, bare skin.

Even as the sensation jolted him awake, he did not pull away in shock; at some level, the situation felt entirely natural. It had been nine months since he’d broken up with Alison; why shouldn’t he have found someone else by now?

But he had no idea where he was, who was beside him, or how he’d got here.

He remembered arriving at the theater, and meeting up with Samantha and Kaitlin in the lobby. He remembered the start of the performance: a singer in a large purple wig, belting out sub-Brechtian schlock while they hung upside down from a trapeze. Maybe he’d dozed off; who could blame him? And though he hadn’t taken a pill, it had been less than 48 hours since his previous dose.

The room was not in total darkness; a streetlamp or a neighbor’s security light cast a patch of illumination on the floor. Luke rose as quietly as he could, found his clothes and started dressing.

The mattress creaked. “I thought you were staying.” Mercifully, the voice was Kaitlin’s – not Samantha’s, or some complete stranger’s.

“I promised my parents I’d have breakfast with them,” he lied.

“Okay. That’s cool.”

He glanced toward her, then turned away, discomfited by her nakedness and proximity. But he sat on the bed while he put his shoes on, aware of how strange it would look if he tried to do it standing up. Had they used a condom? He hadn’t been carrying one. If they’d staggered here blind drunk, at least he would have had an excuse to ask Kaitlin to help him fill in some gaps, but under the circumstances he suspected nothing would freak her out more than if he began confessing to a lack of certainty about everything that had transpired between them.

“I had a good time tonight,” Kaitlin said. “I didn’t think you’d be so into it!”

Luke spent a moment pondering this before he realized she probably wasn’t talking about the sex. “Well, it was ... different.”

“Oh, come on, you were cheering as loudly as anyone.”

That chilled him; just how Machiavellian was his sleepwalking self? He’d come along to the performance in the hope that it would lead somewhere with Kaitlin, eventually – but would he have been so shamelessly dishonest, awake?

“And it was nice, when we were talking afterward,” Kaitlin added. “Most men can’t shut up about themselves, but I could tell that you were really listening.”

Luke made a noncommittal sound that he hoped she’d take the right way, whatever that was. His mind was reeling now; he couldn’t decide if his alter ego was Patrick Bateman or Chauncey Gardiner.

“I’ll see you,” he said, as he approached the door, not daring to face her directly.

“Okay.”

He seemed to be in a shared house, on the ground floor; he walked down a corridor and found the front door. Outside, he checked the map on his phone; he was in Hurstville. The railway station was fifteen minutes away, but it would be another hour until the next train.

As he walked along the street, almost trafficless except for the occasional speeding reveler with sound system blaring, he tried to laugh the whole thing off. Kaitlin was a grown woman with her own fully developed bullshit detector, and they’d hardly be the first two people in history who’d ended up in bed after one of them had feigned enthusiasm for a terrible live show. Neither of them had come to any harm.

But he couldn’t pretend, now, that the only thing his Fibrofilamide side would try to do was rescue him from couch-potatohood. It wanted to fix all of his problems: work, health, love life. He suspected it was closer to an amiable simpleton than any kind of scheming pick-up artist, but then, the corollary was that its intervention in the wavelet algorithm was probably not down to some brilliant scientific revelation to rival Kekulé’s dream about the structure of benzene. Maybe it had gleaned just enough from his hundreds of hours staring at the problem to know how to fake success in a way that he would never have dared to do himself.

It was embarrassing, but it wasn’t the end of the world. On Monday, he’d steel himself and explain to Keller that he’d made a mistake.

By the time he arrived home it was almost three AM. He took the last remaining sheet of the blister pack of Fibrofilamide, pushed out all the pills, and flushed them down the toilet.

11

Luke waited outside Keller’s office for almost an hour before he caught him emerging.

“Excuse me, do you have a second?” He’d emailed Keller three days ago, asking if they could meet, but he’d received no reply, and this seemed less discourteous than spamming his inbox.

“Sure,” Keller replied, clearly impatient to get away.

“The wavelet thing,” Luke said. “I’m really sorry, but I messed it up.”

“You messed it up before,” Keller stressed, “but that’s not a problem. You’ve fixed it now.”

“I don’t think I have, though,” Luke insisted. “I looked over the notebook again, more carefully, and the error bars shouldn’t be that small.”

“That’s nonsense,” Keller said bluntly. “They’re exactly what they should be. Everything checks out.”

Luke’s conviction wavered. Was it possible that he was wrong in his current assessment? But this wasn’t a matter of taste, like a circus act. “There’s a square root I put in, by mistake,” he said.

Keller regarded him with bemusement. “Why would you insert a square root, for no reason? Look, the results all make perfect sense to me. I know it was a tough slog getting there, and you probably ended up doubting yourself along the way. But just relax now. You should be satisfied with a job well done. I’ll be moving on to field tests in a couple of months, and I’ll make sure you’re involved once they’re up and running, but for now I’m sure Graham’s keeping you busy.”

“He is,” Luke agreed.

“All right, then.”

Back at his desk, Luke waited for Samantha to glance away from her screen.

“Can I ask your advice?” he began.

“Are you sure you want it?” she replied coolly.

That gave him pause. He’d been embarrassed enough about the night at the circus that he’d kept their interactions to a minimum all week. Even if Kaitlin had found his behavior unobjectionable, to Samantha the sheer contrast with the version of him she knew might well have reeked of insincerity. But he’d made things even worse by keeping her at a distance.

“Never mind,” he said. How could he apologize, without telling her everything? He wasn’t ready to confess, and he wasn’t even sure she’d judge the circumstances to be exculpatory.

He’d wanted to ask her if she thought it would be wise to tell one of the other partners about his error. Luke hated the idea of going behind Keller’s back, but ... field tests? How much money would Geoscopy sink into this nonsense before someone realized that it was never going to work?

He turned the idea over in his mind, but by the end of the day he still hadn’t acted on it. As he walked to the elevator, he came to a decision. He’d already raised his concerns with Keller, directly; it wasn’t his place to do anything more.

The only trouble was, when it finally blew up, he was sure he would not look blameless.

12

Luke fell to his knees on an expanse of soft grass. Ahead of him, sunlight shimmered off the surface of a river. As he raised his hand against the glare, his eyes began to sting from the sweat pouring down his forehead. His calves were aching, he was parched, and he badly needed to urinate.

He found a public toilet, then a drinking fountain, and then he went looking for signage. He was in a park in Wiseman’s Ferry. He’d never been in the area before, but he knew roughly where it lay on a map of greater Sydney, well enough to guess that he was about fifty kilometers north of his apartment.

He didn’t have his phone or his wallet, and he wasn’t wearing his watch. With no money, no cards, no apps, and no travel pass, the only way home was on foot.

He set off south along Old Northern Road, jogging slowly. At first, he clung to a fantasy of arriving at the office by early afternoon and claiming a dental emergency, but as the sun climbed higher and his knees began to throb, he reconciled himself to missing the whole day. He’d think up some excuse for failing to call in sick; they weren’t going to fire him over his first ever absence in the whole time he’d been there.

The road weaved through a forest; it might have been a relaxing route for a leisurely run, under other circumstances. Had his night running in the gym become so ingrained that, in the absence of a treadmill, he’d just opted for the streets instead? It was more than a week since his last dose of FF, but having learned the skill, it seemed he didn’t need the drug itself in order to sleepwalk now. His decision to reinstate his GPS alarm to ensure he didn’t wander appeared to have backfired; either he’d thought of it in advance and removed his watch before he even opened the door, or the alarm had gone off without waking him, prompting him to get rid of it.

By the time he’d reached some still half-rural place called Middle Dural, it felt like noon. He was sick from thirst, and beginning to stagger. When a plumber’s van slowed down beside him and the driver asked if he needed help, he no longer had the pride to refuse.

“I ran too far,” Luke admitted. “If you can drop me off anywhere south of here, that would be a lifesaver.”

“Where’d you start from?” the man asked.

“Epping.”

He stared at Luke in disbelief for a moment, but then seemed to decide that the claim was entirely in accord with his wretched appearance. “Well, that was fucking stupid.”

The plumber insisted on driving him all the way home, mumbling something about negligent manslaughter charges if he didn’t. In his apartment, Luke drank five glasses of water, then threw up the last one. He found his watch on the floor; it was almost two PM. He took a shower, then emailed Geoscopy’s HR office, saying he’d been out of action from food poisoning, but would be in tomorrow. If they docked his pay because he didn’t have a medical certificate, so be it.

He went to the local electrical store and bought a motion-detector alarm. He set it to activate between ten PM and six AM, and gave it a twelve-digit shutoff code that he wrote down on a slip of paper but took care not to glance at again. He screwed the device to the wall beside the front door, then took his toolbox, with the code inside, and placed it behind some shrubs in the apartment block’s shared garden.

He ate some sandwiches then sat and watched TV for a while, too tired and distracted to choose anything, just letting a succession of forgettable images flow past in front of him.

13

When the burglar alarm began shrieking, Luke found himself halfway to the door. He ran out, sprinted down the stairs, opened up the toolbox, and ran back with the code.

When he’d shut off the alarm, he picked his watch up off the floor; it was 1:17 AM. He could hear someone cursing a few doors down. This really wasn’t fair on his neighbors, but now that he knew that the system worked, maybe his sleepwalking self would be warned off any further attempts.

He taped the code to the railing on the balcony outside, so he could reach it faster, then reactivated the alarm and lay in bed reciting random digits to purge the crucial sequence from his memory.

When he woke the second time, his hand was on the doorknob. He went out and grabbed the code from the balcony and managed to silence the alarm much more quickly.

Not quickly enough; a minute later, someone started pounding on the door. When Luke opened it, a burly man he recognized as a neighbor stood with one hand resting on the doorframe, filling the space as if he wanted to be sure that Luke wouldn’t try to squeeze out past him.

“If you wake me again,” he said, “I’m calling the police. And you’d better hope they come and sort you out, because if they don’t, I’ll do it myself. Are we clear?”

“Yes,” Luke replied.

His neighbor turned and walked away.

It was just after three AM. Luke was afraid to sleep, so he sat and watched TV, routing the sound to his earbuds to keep it from disturbing anyone.

When the sun came up, he knew he wouldn’t be able to face a day in the office with the problem unresolved. He went for a walk to clear his head, and try to formulate a new plan.

He ordered a safe with a time lock, paying extra for same-day delivery. Then he bought a reel of plastic weed-trimmer thread, a heat gun, and a pair of shears. If he knotted the thread then melted it, he found it was impossible to unpick, and too strong for him to break with his bare hands. But the shears could cut through it easily enough.

The safe arrived before noon, so Luke went in and did half a day’s work. Samantha frowned at the sight of him, and not just out of lingering antipathy.

“If you’re still sick, you should have stayed home,” she said. “This is how things spread.”

“I’m recovered,” he protested.

“You don’t look like you’re recovered.”

At home in the evening, he got ready to sleep. He put an empty bottle by the bed, in case he needed to urinate. He coiled a length of plastic thread around one ankle, tied the remainder to the base of the bed, then melted all the knots.

He slid the heat gun away across the floor, out of reach. He placed the shears inside the safe beside the bed, set the timer and slammed the door. Then he switched off the bedside lamp and closed his eyes.

14

A car-horn blared, and Luke froze in mid-step. He heard a squeal of brakes, then a thud.

He stepped back off the road, disoriented. A station wagon that had stopped to keep from hitting him had been rear-ended by a smaller car. The front of the second car had concertinaed, with steam rising from the wreckage.

The driver of the station wagon got out and approached Luke; he cowered in silence while the woman berated him. The other driver stood comforting a crying toddler. No one seemed to be injured, but Luke couldn’t stop trembling at the thought of how much worse it might have turned out.

He sat at the roadside and waited for the police to come and take a statement from him.

“Have you drunk alcohol or used any drugs or medication in the last 72 hours?” the officer asked him.

“No,” Luke replied.

“Blow into this tube.”

He gave his details to both drivers, and stayed until a tow-truck had taken the second car away. The police hadn’t charged him with any offense, but he guessed the insurance companies might come after him.

He was in Strathfield, which at least meant a much shorter journey home than the last time. When he arrived, his watch was on the floor as usual, with the alarm still set for six AM; it must have been far enough away not to wake him before the safe automatically unlocked. He knelt beside the bed, examining the pieces of thread that remained.

There had to be a way he could make his freedom contingent on his state of mind, instead of just the time of day. He was sure there were thousands of problems he could solve awake, but not in his sleep. The web held an endless supply of brain teasers and word games – which would be better than making up puzzles himself, when any inside knowledge might leak to his adversary. He just needed to get the setup right.

Luke ordered a new safe, with a WiFi connection. The product reviews were full of jokes about making it easy for hackers to steal your valuables, but however bad it was from a security angle, it was exactly what he needed.

He took out a subscription to a web site that provided an unlimited stream of puzzles, and adjusted the difficulty level to a point where he usually needed a couple of minutes to arrive at the answer. Then he wrote a program on his laptop that set the safe’s code at random, fetched a puzzle from the site, spoke it aloud, and listened for his reply. From six AM, it would keep offering him puzzles until he answered three in a row correctly, then it would stop and speak the code.

After testing the system, he was satisfied that he wouldn’t end up dying of hunger tied to the bed ... unless his internet connection went down. He couldn’t find a setting that unlocked the safe directly if that happened, but he modified his program to give up and release the code if it ever took more than five minutes to fetch the next puzzle. Then he put a jug of water and a glass by the bed, so he wouldn’t dehydrate if the power went off for a day.

It was the middle of the afternoon, too late to go to work. He didn’t know if he’d completely trashed his reputation as an employee yet, but if these three days of trial and error finally paid off, they might prove to be the only thing that saved him.

15

Luke was sure he’d been half-aware of his laptop’s voice for a while, as a series of utterances wafted toward him through a fog that rendered them largely indecipherable. “[muffled nonsense] arrives on an island, where they encounter [muffled nonsense]. If all of these are also [muffled nonsense], in the end how much [muffled nonsense] will there be?”

But then he heard the voice say clearly, “Give two anagrams of ‘grenade’ where none of the letters remain in their original positions.”

He fixed the word in his mind’s eye and then tried out different rearrangements below it. “‘Angered’ and ‘enraged,’” he managed eventually.

“Correct.”

His watch and phone were on the floor, out of reach, but from the glimpse of pale sky between the curtains he doubted that he’d slept too late. He made a note to add a time call to the program, just to set his mind at ease.

“A tortoise travels one kilometer on the first day of its journey, then on each subsequent day it travels a third as far as on the preceding day. On which day does it exceed 1.49 kilometers in total?”

Luke cursed under his breath, lest the words be mistaken for an answer. He worked out the general formula for a finite geometric series, hoping desperately he had the exponent right, then he tried out different numbers until the sum passed the threshold. “The fifth day?”

“Correct.”

He looked around the room; the water jug was empty, and the urine bottle was full. Well, no harm in that; at least he hadn’t pissed on the floor. He was lying on top of the sheets, and he could see that the skin around his ankle was red; he must have struggled for a while to get free. But he hadn’t succeeded. The system had worked.

“On this date 17 years from now, what day of the week will it be?”

Luke was beginning to contemplate gnawing through the thread with his teeth, but if the problems didn’t give him a headache when he was still barely awake, that probably would have meant they were too easy. An ordinary year, 365 days, was one more than a multiple of 7, so it advanced the day of the week by one. He just had to get the number of leap years right – or rather, the number of Februaries with extra days that the interval spanned, which meant the current leap year didn’t count.

“Friday,” he said.

“Incorrect. The answer is Saturday.”

Luke was sure he’d done the calculation correctly: 17 plus 4 extra days was 21, so the weekday was unchanged. Was it because the web site wasn’t properly accounting for the user’s time zone? But Friday morning in Australia was either Thursday or Friday everywhere; it wasn’t Saturday anywhere on the planet.

Unless it was, in fact, Saturday. Unless the runner – despite having nowhere to run – had chosen to hang around doing nothing, from Thursday night until Saturday morning, burning up another whole day.

16

Luke did the grocery shopping then cleaned his apartment, afraid that if he abandoned his Saturday morning routine he’d end up completely untethered. He had no idea how he was ever going to reclaim control over the entire week, but for now all he could do was cling to as many familiar landmarks as possible.

As he swept the floor, he wondered if he should start sleeping at the gym again, in the hope that he’d stick to the treadmill and wake up before arriving at work. But he couldn’t leave that to chance; he needed to know exactly what he would do after he closed his eyes, or he was going to lose his mind.

So what exactly drove him, when he closed his eyes? Asleep, he was not a rampaging monster; he was just a mildly disinhibited, slightly less principled version of his waking self. The two of them were not enemies. In fact, there really was no two of them, no plurality at all. Asleep, he was rash and hasty and careless, but he still wanted the same things.

What he needed was a reminder of the context of his actions. Running thirty kilometers on a treadmill was fine; running fifty in a straight line was idiotic. And anything that kept him from arriving at work on time, wide awake, would be ruinous.

In the afternoon, Luke sat down with a stack of paper, and wrote out a list of ... pleas? Arguments? Notes to self? He went through half a dozen drafts, trying to keep the verbiage to a minimum and the tone as far from nagging and censorious as possible. Awake or asleep, he had to understand that he couldn’t just surrender to every impulse, however benign it seemed in the moment. But if he was sufficiently aware of the workings of time to throw away his watch so he could sleep through an alarm, surely he could understand how foolish it was to run until he could run no longer?

He went to bed with no shackles, and no gadgets aimed at controlling his behavior, but he left a sheet of paper taped to the inside of the front door, and his phone set up to record his reaction.

17

From the pallor of the sky and the sparseness of the traffic, Luke could tell that it was half an hour or so before sunrise on Sunday morning. He was jogging south down Midson Road, back toward his apartment; it was probably less than five minutes away.

He felt like he’d been running for a while, but however far he’d gone, at least right now he wasn’t stranded in the boondocks. It was a clear, brisk morning, and his limbs were imbued with the same joyful ache of exertion as he recalled from the first time he’d used the drug. Was this all just good luck, or had he actually heeded his own entreaties?

When he arrived home, he shut off the recording on his phone but resisted the temptation to look at it. He showered, ate breakfast, checked the news, and started on a novel he’d bought six months before. He’d finally made it through the night without a disaster; if he could stick to this new pattern, everything would be fine.

But as the evening approached, he began to grow anxious. He’d missed too much work to risk being absent again. Maybe he should go and sleep on a friend’s couch – confess everything he’d done with FF, and beg them to keep him locked up at night until the side effects faded.

That was a lot to ask of anyone, though. And what he really needed to know was: had his messages to himself hit home?

He opened the video on his phone, and skimmed through the timeline. He’d risen around three AM, discarded his watch, turned on the light, put on his running gear, and prepared to leave.

As he approached the front door, he’d paused, and stared at the list. “Don’t go too far without circling back,” he’d read out loud. “Be careful when you cross the road.” Luke felt his cheeks flush, but he couldn’t decide if he felt ashamed at having dispensed such patronizing advice, or at the way he’d solemnly received these suggestions.

“Don’t be late for work.” He’d frowned at that one, weighing it up and clearly judging it less persuasive than the others. “If you’re late again, you could get fired.” Luke had felt obliged to spell out his reasoning; the downside of being struck by a car should be obvious, but the thin ice he was on with his employer was a more abstract matter.

“If you’re late again, you could get fired,” he’d repeated. Then he’d laughed and tapped the words. “Good!” he’d declared. “Good, good, good!”

Then he’d opened the door and run off into the night, ecstatic in his freedom.

18

“You look tired,” Hunt said, motioning to Luke to take a seat. “I know you were off sick last week, but if you’re still not better you should probably go home.”

“I haven’t been sick, exactly,” Luke admitted. “But there’s something I’ve done here that’s keeping me up at night.”

Hunt regarded him warily, as if he might be about to confess to embezzling from the company, or worse.

Luke said, “There’s some work I did for Mr. Keller. I made a mistake in the report I gave him, and I’ve tried to tell him that it’s wrong. But he doesn’t seem to believe me.”

Hunt’s expression of relief skirted the borders of amusement, before he read Luke’s face and grew more sober.

“I’m sorry that’s been weighing on you,” he said. “I don’t usually put it this bluntly, but ... every couple of years, Andrew gets one of the new graduate hires to try to make this idea of his work. But no one succeeds, because it’s really not possible.”

“You know it can’t work?” Luke pressed him, incredulous.

“Of course.”

Luke hesitated, not wanting to overstep the mark. “Has anyone told him that?”

“Sure. But he still thinks he’s going to find some hotshot one day who will prove us all wrong.”

Luke said, “I thought I was going to bankrupt the company.”

Hunt laughed. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but we’re never going to make any major decisions on the basis of a report by one junior employee.”

“Except ... Mr. Keller seems to want to do that.”

“Andrew sees what he wants to see,” Hunt replied. “This isn’t the first time someone’s given him false hope, but at some point he always just drops the matter quietly.”

“Am I going to get sacked, when he sees what I’ve done wrong?”

Hunt shook his head emphatically. “Of course not. I doubt he’ll ever raise it with you again.”

Luke didn’t know how to respond. For all his gratitude and relief, he also wanted to punch someone. If the other partners knew it was bullshit, why did they let Keller keep pursuing it? Luke had worked dozens of hours of unpaid overtime, trying to solve an insoluble problem, because he thought he was just too slow or too stupid to complete the project any other way in the timeframe Keller was expecting.

“Thanks for clearing that up,” he said. “I appreciate it.”

Back at his desk, Luke tried to get on with his work, but he hadn’t slept at all the night before, and he felt like his head was buried in molasses. He went to the break room to make a cup of coffee, and sat at the empty table sipping it, willing himself to slough off all the insanity of the last few weeks and start anew.

But he couldn’t tell if Hunt’s assurance would be enough to overturn his visceral sense of the job as a sinkhole of misery and anxiety that he desperately needed to flee. He wouldn’t know that until he slept on it, and by then, an unfavorable verdict would only make things worse.

Samantha came in and made a cup of tea. Luke wondered if she’d prefer that he left, but she gave no sign of wanting to get rid of him, and when she’d finished preparing the tea she walked straight toward him.

“What’s going on with you?” she asked. She sounded more bewildered than hostile.

“I know I was acting weirdly at the circus,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

She shook her head. “You can flirt with my sister any way you like; that’s none of my business. I thought you’d be okay when you finished the Keller thing, but seriously, if he’s still giving you a hard time, you should take it up with HR. I’ll come with you, if you need some support.”

Luke said, “That’s really kind of you, but it’s not Keller. It’s not anyone here.”

“Then what?”

His resistance buckled; he told her everything, only leaving out his encounters with Ray and Elaine. Samantha listened calmly, without interjecting; Luke was pretty sure that if he were in her place, he would have struggled to desist from offering advice with the benefit of hindsight in regard to every bad decision he’d made.

“So you’re not using FF at all now?” she asked.

“No. It doesn’t seem to matter; I can still find myself sleepwalking at any time.”

“Maybe you can make something work with a glorified ankle bracelet,” she mused. “But wouldn’t it be better if you could get a human being to look out for you instead?”

Luke said, “That’s going to be a winner on my dating profile: seeking a full-time security guard slash psychiatric nurse to watch me while I sleep.”

Samantha laughed. “Yeah ... but I’m not talking about a full-time partner. More like a fellow sufferer who knows exactly what you’re going through, and needs someone to return the favor.”

“A fellow sufferer?” Luke had stopped sifting through the online commentary, but between the exhibitionists making fire-stick juggling videos and the cautious pragmatists who’d managed to repaint their house and repave their driveway in their sleep before quitting the drug, there might actually be someone who’d fallen into the same kind of trap as he had.

“It’s a big city,” Samantha said. “No one’s ever really the only one of their kind; you just have to find each other.”

19

Luke ran up to Ji-ho’s door and knocked sharply three times, while Ben and Wasim continued down the street so as not to break their rhythm.

Luke didn’t have to wait long; the door opened, and Ji-ho stepped out, ready to join them. Luke nodded to him as they set off, but although he was sure Ji-ho still recognized him from the times when their roles were reversed, he knew there was no point speaking to him now.

They caught up with the others, and the four of them regrouped, running in single file with Wasim in front and Luke at the back as chaperones.

The side streets were deserted at this hour; even cars were rare, but Luke couldn’t recall the group encountering a single pedestrian in the six weeks since they’d started. The great loop they’d plotted around the northern suburbs managed to weave above and below the major thoroughfares via bridges and underpasses, so the danger of one of the sleepers going rogue and rushing ahead because they were waiting at a crossing was minimal, but the more they ran together, the more the habit of cohesion seemed to stick regardless. It had been a while since anyone had needed to be grabbed, pursued or awakened.

As they moved west through Baulkham Hills, Luke felt his body growing lighter, every cycle between footfalls as natural and effortless as a heartbeat. But his teammates were part of the cycle now, and if one of them stumbled, or veered away, the sight of it jolted him as sharply as if he’d lost his own footing.

They had nothing in common but their addiction, but he trusted them now with the only thing that could keep him sane: steering him gently back to the mundane world after each blissful escape. They all needed to believe that they could run forever, and they all needed to be home by dawn.

SOLIDITY

1

The air in the classroom was warm and still, the teacher’s voice a lullaby, with stress falling on syllables like the patter of sparse, heavy raindrops on the roof tiles. Omar fought to keep his eyes open, reading the words on the blackboard backward to sharpen the soft sentences into dnim sih rof selzzup gnizzub.

That only worked for a while. He turned his gaze to the window, hoping that a jolt from the outside world would be bracing enough to spare him the embarrassment of his chin falling against his chest. Brooding clouds stretched out above the empty playing field; he let himself escape through the glass for a moment, imagining the wind ruffling his clothes as he flew toward the horizon.

He looked back at the blackboard. The bullet-pointed list of factors determining the sites where cities were most likely to be founded had been replaced by an enumeration of the criteria for determining when two triangles were similar. Omar felt himself smiling unwillingly, and his face growing hot with shame; he must have dozed off and – somehow – been left undisturbed as his geography class filed out of the room and this mathematics class filed in. It was not one of his own classes; he didn’t recognize the teacher, or any of the students now sitting around him. After geography on Tuesdays, he had English. All he could do now was wait for the right moment to excuse himself and slink out.

The teacher paused and glanced over her shoulder, to check how her exposition was being received. Omar caught the startled expression on her face, before the confusion ignited into shock and panic. She turned fully to face the class – paying no special attention to him as she surveyed the whole room in disbelief. “Where ... ?” she demanded, before abandoning the question, as if she was unable to settle on who or what would be the appropriate subject of the inquiry.

Omar looked down at his desk. The open notebook was exactly the same kind as the one he’d been using for geography, but it showed sketches of half a dozen triangles, with annotations that were not in his handwriting.

A girl slid her chair back, rose to her feet and ran from the room. Omar watched as three other students did the same; the teacher made no effort to stop them, or even ask for an explanation. Omar was tempted to follow them, but his curiosity now was stronger than his embarrassment; whatever was happening in this class, it was not confined to some lapse on his own part.

A boy raised his hand. “Excuse me. What happened to Ms. Tham?”

The teacher gazed back at him for a while, then replied, “I don’t know who that is.”

“She was teaching us French, before you ... ” The boy stopped and scanned the room, maybe hunting for someone who might back him up, but Omar was fairly sure, from the growing distress on his face, that he, too, recognized no one around him.

“I think it might be best if we stop here,” the teacher declared. “You can go and get your books for your next class.”

Omar heard rapid footfalls echoing down the corridor. A group of students ran past the doorway, very fast. If they’d been let out early and erupted into rowdy celebration, he would have expected to hear whoops of elation from them; instead they were as silent as if they were being pursued by a terrifying adversary. He waited, tensed, but nothing followed.

The teacher said, “Please. Just depart in an orderly manner.”

Everyone stood up; however confused they were, it was clear that this substitute teacher was offering no answers, and was either as much a victim of the slickly staged prank as they were, or a prankster herself, sworn to deny all knowledge of the reality TV company that must have pulled the whole thing off. Omar left the notebook and pen on the desk, but picked up the backpack that hung from his chair. It was the same brand and color as his own, but he was afraid to look inside to check that it really belonged to him.

He waited for the crush near the doorway to thin. Out in the corridor, he could see other classrooms emptying; he watched the students filing out, regarding each other warily, mostly in silence. He didn’t recognize anyone at all. It wasn’t merely that he was yet to spot Bruno or Tuan, or any of his other friends or classmates; not one of the faces was familiar to him, in the way he normally knew most people in the school by sight even when he’d had no reason to learn their names.

He glanced back toward the room he’d just left. A woman he’d never seen before strode out, carrying a stack of papers. Omar walked over to the doorway and looked inside the empty classroom. The blackboard bore no discussion of triangles now, just “The Call of the Wild” written large at the top, and some thematic points spelled out below.

Omar felt his skin turn icy. Were there drugs that could do this, that he might have unwittingly imbibed? Or was he succumbing to some form of mental illness? He stared at the mundane chalk marks, daring them to mutate into leering neon serpents, but they remained stubbornly non-psychedelic. He pulled his phone from his pocket to search for the symptoms of ergot poisoning, but the solar eclipse wallpaper wasn’t his, and the phone rejected his PIN. That the date and time were exactly what he expected only seemed like an insult; if he could hallucinate entire classes in and out of existence, how hard could it be to make the display read twenty-nine o’clock on the fifty-fifth of May?

He joined the flow of students heading for the stairs. At first, he took his cue from the crowd and avoided eye contact, as if he was in hostile territory ... but that didn’t really make sense, when there was no one at all swaggering around like they owned the place.

As he reached the ground floor, Omar turned to a boy about his own age who was walking beside him, and nodded to him amiably. “What’s with this shit?” he asked.

The boy said, “Yeah?” He’d looked haunted before, but now he grinned and shook his head, as if they were just commiserating with each other over an especially tedious assembly.

“Is this the only high school you’ve been at?” Omar asked, glancing back to check that this still meant what he thought it did. The building they’d just left looked the same as it always had, at least from his current vantage.

“Yeah. I started here in Year 7, last year.”

“Me too. My home room teacher’s Alderson.”

The boy flinched a little, but reciprocated. “Mine’s Millar.”

“So ... I never met anyone with your home room teacher before, and I guess you never met anyone with mine?”

“No.”

By now that was more or less what Omar would have predicted, but discussing the anomaly out loud still felt like he was gingerly probing a wound, working up the courage to learn exactly how deep it went.

They were halfway across the playing field now. Looking ahead, to the quiet suburban street that ran past the back of the school, Omar could see no traffic, but that wasn’t unusual for this time of day.

“I’m Omar,” he said.

“I’m Tony.” They bumped forearms.

“Is your phone working?” Tony asked.

“It’s not dead, but it’s locked.” Omar fished it out and held it up; there was a cartoon wolf on the screen now. “What the hell is that?”

Tony peered at the wallpaper. “Looks like the mascot for a sports team.” That sounded plausible, but apparently he didn’t know the name of the team any more than Omar did. “You could call emergency services.”

“Yeah.” Omar pondered this. “What would I tell them, though?”

They’d reached the street. There were still no cars around, and all the pedestrians looked like fellow students – if “fellow” was the word for it.

“I go this way,” Omar said, gesturing left.

Tony said nothing, but Omar caught a flicker of fear in his eyes, as if he was being asked to stop clinging to the piece of wreckage they’d been sharing and swim off for the shore alone.

“Usually,” Omar added. “But I wasn’t expecting classes to finish this early. You want to hang out for a while?”

“Sure,” Tony replied.

They turned right.

Omar was encouraged to see that some of the other students walking ahead of them had gathered into small groups. Whatever was happening, sharing information seemed like a good start.

“Does this date look right to you?” Omar asked Tony, checking his phone to see that it hadn’t changed, then holding it up again.

“Yeah.”

“Same here. So neither of us are time travelers.”

Tony snorted with amusement, but then the mirth on his face decayed into something darker. “I keep hoping I’ll wake up, but I’ve never had a dream where everyone else wants to wake up, too.”

They were approaching the intersection with Gleason Street; Omar could hear the traffic, and see some vehicles passing by. “The cars haven’t all stopped working,” he mused. “It’s not like their batteries got replaced by fishtanks.”

“And your phone is still a phone, even if it isn’t yours.” Tony spread his arms. “My clothes still fit, and they’re almost what I put on this morning.”

“Almost?”

Tony reached into the side of his jeans and tugged a small portion of bright red fabric into view. “My boxers changed color. I don’t even own a pair like that!”

At first glance, Gleason Street looked normal: there were no ten-car pile-ups, no abandoned vehicles parked at strange angles, no signs that any drivers had vanished from behind their steering wheels. But the pedestrians were radiating confusion and anxiety; some kept their eyes downcast, others swept their gaze around in all directions, as if they were seeking some person or landmark that might guide or comfort them.

“That used to be Gino’s Convenience,” Omar said, pointing to ... a convenience store with slightly different signage. “You got any money?”

“Just a card.” Tony produced his wallet and pulled out a plastic rectangle. “No, that’s a library card.”

“It might not have worked anyway.” Omar checked his own wallet. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d used cash, so he didn’t really know what should have been inside, but he found a ten dollar bill that looked perfectly normal to him.

He passed it to Tony. “Is that real money, in your world?”

“Sure.”

“Then let’s test it out.”

They entered the store.

There were racks of bread, and bins of fruit and vegetables by the entrance. The names of the bakeries were all familiar, and the fruit didn’t look strange or exotic. They strolled past shelves of breakfast cereal and tinned food; a few of the brands didn’t ring any bells for Omar, but then, that was no different from walking into Aldi’s.

“You want a drink or something?” he asked Tony.

“Yeah.”

They approached the refrigerated cabinet. There was flavored milk from the usual dairies; he picked out a chocolate one for himself, and looked to Tony, who said, “I’ll have the same.”

The cashier was a bored-looking man in his twenties. “Eight dollars,” he said, when Omar put the drinks on the counter.

“Are you sure?” Omar could have sworn the tag on the shelf had said $3.20, though maybe that had been the price of a neighboring item. “Don’t you want to scan them?”

“The scanner’s on the fritz.”

Omar handed over his ten dollars, and the man barely glanced at it before giving him change.

On the street, he opened his carton and took a long swig. Tony hesitated. “What if the food’s different here? Like ... mirror-image molecules, or different isotopes?”

“We can still breathe the air, can’t we?” Omar replied. He didn’t really know what fears were reasonable, but weird chemistry seemed like the least of their problems.

“Okay.” Tony sampled the milk warily, then seemed to decide it was palatable.

“You want to check out your house?” Omar asked him.

Tony was quiet for a while. “I’ve got a key,” he said. “But what if it doesn’t fit?”

Omar shrugged. “Then I’ll help you break in.” There were far worse things that might have ceased to match than the lock and the key, and he suspected that the odds for all of them were more likely to grow worse over time than better.

They continued down the street, past shops and houses whose architecture all seemed familiar, whatever variations had been wrought at the level of paint and lettering. A few cars began speeding through the traffic, honking frantically as they weaved from lane to lane. Omar kept expecting to hear sirens closing in on the offenders, but the police were either dealing with more serious transgressions, or had gone off to tend to their own personal meltdowns.

“You got brothers and sisters?” he asked Tony.

“A little sister. She’s ten. What about you?”

“Two older brothers.”

“Still in high school?”

“No. One’s working in Darwin, one’s studying in America.” Omar wondered if they might have been spared the disruption, even if he was now separated from them.

Separated by what, though? If the world had been torn apart, where were the fault lines? “The roads all still join up,” he said. There were no sudden dead-ends, no mismatched strips of asphalt like an earthquake might have produced. “And the buildings have barely changed.”

“I think it’s mostly people that are different,” Tony replied. “People, phones and underwear.”

“Maybe it will all snap back into place,” Omar joked.

Tony checked his boxers again. “Oh, come on! Purple?”

“What did you put on this morning?”

“Black.” He sounded a little offended by the thought that he might have willingly chosen anything else. “So have I swapped bodies with someone who wears purple underwear ... or just swapped underwear with them?”

“I don’t feel like I’ve swapped bodies,” Omar said.

“I don’t either,” Tony admitted. “But swapping underwear would be gross.”

Omar tried to elevate the conversation. “Who was the Prime Minister, when you woke up this morning?”

“Tanya Plibersek.”

“Same here.” Omar floundered; did he really want to run through a list of heads of government, when neither of them could check their answers on the web? Winners of wars? Assassination attempts?

He settled on, “You remember Covid?”

Tony laughed. “How could I forget?”

“Then our worlds probably aren’t much different,” Omar decided. “But until half an hour ago, I wasn’t in your school, and you weren’t in mine.”

“So whose world is this?” Tony asked. “If we’ve both come from other places, is there anyone who’s stayed put?”

“I don’t know.”

They turned off Gleason Street, with Tony leading the way. A woman approached them. “Have you seen my son? Samuel?”

Omar said, “I’m sorry.” He’d never had a classmate by that name, and even if he had it wouldn’t have helped.

The woman grew distraught. “He can’t have just vanished!”

“Everyone seems to have ... shifted around,” Tony explained.

“He’s a very quiet boy,” the woman stressed. “Very shy.”

“We don’t know where he is,” Omar replied, resisting the urge to start inventing search strategies that he had no reason to believe would succeed, just to offer her some comfort.

She grimaced and shook her head, but let them pass. They walked on in silence. Omar was half-wishing now that he’d parted from Tony earlier; it might not have improved his chances of getting back to his family, but either way, he was dreading having to watch his new friend coming to terms with his own loss.

“It’s down here,” Tony said, taking a final turn. “The fifth from the corner. At least the house numbers are all the same.” He laughed softly. “That neighbor’s lawn was almost dead, before.” The front yard they were passing was a lush, reticulated green.

A dog began barking, out of sight but not far ahead.

“Is that yours?” Omar asked.

“No, but it sounds just like Leon from next door.” Tony turned to him, excited. “What if the animals have all ... ?” He trailed off, confused. Omar couldn’t blame him; any touch of familiarity seemed hopeful, but it was hard to flesh out a scenario in which someone else’s pet would guide him back to his own version of reality.

As they came to what should have been Leon’s house, a wiry gray-and-white dog ran back and forth behind the low garden fence, snarling at them. “It’s not him,” Tony admitted glumly. “His coat’s different.”

When they stopped outside number 12, Omar didn’t press Tony to start listing changes. So, his neighbor’s dog was new to him, and maybe the curtains or the letterbox here had been different when he’d left for school that morning. But if there were any exceptions to the shuffling of the deck, surely they’d be within families?

Tony walked up to the front door and took the key from his pocket. Omar approached, racking his brain for some words of consolation and encouragement he could utter when the inevitable happened.

Tony put the key in the lock, turned it, and opened the door.

Omar said, “Fuck me.”

“Are you coming?” Tony asked impatiently.

Omar followed him inside.

There was some kind of poster hanging in the hallway, with Chinese characters in gold on red. In the kitchen, pictures on the fridge showed two children, a boy and a girl – the boy too young to be his host, but with roughly similar features. The girl was also much younger than ten, so they could just be old photos.

Tony opened the fridge and took out a jug of orange juice. “You want some?”

“Sure.”

He poured two glasses and handed one to Omar. Omar took a sip, then looked around the room. “Is it similar?”

“Yes.”

“You think your family still lives here?”

Tony nodded toward the fridge. “That kid’s not me.”

“Oh, man.” Omar lowered his gaze. “That doesn’t settle it, though,” he reasoned. “If everyone’s moved, your parents could still end up here, just like you did.”

“Maybe.” Tony drained his glass in silence.

Omar said, “You want to see if there’s anything on TV?”

“The living room’s through there.” Tony gestured back down the hall. “I’ll be there in a minute.”

“Okay.”

Omar found the room, and hunted for the remote. The TV was working perfectly, but as he flicked through the channels all he saw was cartoons and old movies.

He heard a toilet flush and water running, then footsteps approaching. “There’s no news,” he said, turning from the screen.

The boy standing in the doorway looked a bit like Tony, and was dressed much the same, but it wasn’t him.

“What are you doing?” the boy demanded. “How did you get in here?”

“Tony let me in.”

“Who’s Tony? And what happened to Mehdi?”

Omar rose to his feet. “My name’s Omar,” he said. “I came here with Tony. He lives here; he had a key.”

The boy said, “I have the key. And I came here with Mehdi.”

Omar gazed back at him in silence, hoping he would at least reach the same conclusion.

“You replaced Mehdi, while I was in the bathroom?” the boy suggested.

“Or you replaced Tony,” Omar replied. “Or both. I don’t know the right way to think about it.”

“So we’re still moving? It hasn’t stopped?” The boy scowled. “But all the time me and Mehdi were walking here, I didn’t see anyone disappear off the street.”

Omar said, “Me neither. But even from the start, nothing’s changed right in front of my eyes, like a cut in a movie.” It was more like one of those seamless tricks where they panned away from a group of people, then panned back to reveal some impossible alteration.

The boy remained in the doorway, regarding Omar warily. “What’s your name?” Omar asked him.

“David.”

“Do you want me to go?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay.” Omar had hoped that they might still be allies, inheriting some of the camaraderie that had led both pairs of newly met strangers to the same place. But if David was unsettled by his presence, he didn’t want to outstay a welcome that had been meant for someone else.

“Good luck,” he said, picking up his backpack. “I hope you find your family.”

“You too,” David replied.

Omar left the house and headed back the way he’d come. The dog that wasn’t Leon had been replaced by another dog with darker fur, though it barked at him with similar fury. The lush lawn near the corner hadn’t died, but it was much less verdant.

When Omar reached the twice rebranded convenience store, he could see from the doorway that the checkout was unattended. He was starting to wish that he’d spent his money on something more substantial than chocolate milk, and he wondered if his last two dollars could at least get him a cheap pack of flatbread; he’d placed the coins in his pocket, and he could still feel them through the lining, pressing against his skin. But he was afraid to go inside now, lest the malleable world conspire to frame him as a shoplifter.

He walked on, but then he stopped in the street and opened his backpack, wondering if a previous owner might have stashed something edible. There was nothing inside but textbooks. Only half of the titles were familiar, but each book on its own seemed perfectly ordinary; when Omar flicked through them, the typeface and formatting remained consistent, the page numbers ascended in the usual fashion, and the subject matter didn’t jump from geography to mathematics halfway through.

He took out his phone and tried a PIN at random, with no luck, but maybe next time he’d chance on an unlocked state, and find his way into the settings to make that “permanent” ... before passing on the favor to someone else.

Walking by the school, he saw half a dozen students playing soccer, all in their street clothes. They were shouting at each other, happily engaged in the game as if nothing in the world was troubling them. He could probably join them if he wanted; it wouldn’t matter if he never saw any of them again.

But he kept walking, back toward his house.

It was mid-afternoon now, and the streets were almost empty. Omar passed a middle-aged man coming the other way, pushing a stroller with a screaming toddler. The man wasn’t quite ignoring the child, but each time he glanced down he seemed to recoil and look away. A woman jogged by, staring straight ahead. Two primary school kids in broad-brimmed hats chatted volubly as they dawdled along; Omar couldn’t tell if they were long-time best friends, miraculously unseparated, or new acquaintances doing their best to make each other welcome.

He didn’t recognize any of these people, but the neighborhood itself still felt utterly familiar. Maybe if he’d been away for a few years it would have been the same, with a smattering of small differences too numerous to ignore but too minor to apprehend individually. Nothing he saw could begin to dent the conviction that this was his territory – still conforming to the map carved deep into his brain over the decade since his family had moved here, before he could remember, at the age of three.

When he reached number 77, he paused to take in the changes one by one. The geraniums in the flower bed at the side of the yard had gone from red to purple. The paint on the front walls of the house was still white, but it was peeling from the eaves. The living room window was crystal clear, letting him see the grain in the wooden slats of the venetian blinds behind the pane; it had been grubby before, and his mother had been nagging him to clean it.

As he approached the screen door, it looked less worn than he remembered, and when he opened it, it emitted a different creak than he was accustomed to. The front door bore faint dirty finger marks that were only noticeable because they were not quite where they should have been. But his key slid into the lock, and turned smoothly, and when he pushed on the door it opened.

Inside, the carpet in the hallway looked the same, but smelled newer. Omar hesitated, wondering if there might yet be a way to recover everything. If he backed out now and retraced every step since he’d left the house that morning, maybe he could undo all the changes.

That plan was absurd – but then, the whole situation deserved to be rejected for the same reason. This wasn’t a dream, but it had to be a kind of fever. He couldn’t banish it with feverish rituals; all he could do was stare it down and hope it would wear off.

In the living room, the family photos showed a couple his parents’ age with three children, the eldest a girl. They might have been newly discovered cousins. Omar stared hard at the youngest boy in the portraits, his gaze penetrating the flesh. The little prick had stolen his cheekbones. Whatever subconscious casting director was orchestrating his breakdown, they seemed to have hired one of those forensic anthropologists who reconstructed people’s appearance from their skeletons. That didn’t really explain Rami turning into a woman, but then, he wasn’t around to complain.

Omar went to the room that ought to have been his own. The bed, the desk, the chest of drawers were all in the right position. The bookcase was just as full as he’d left it, though some of the books had been swapped for other volumes, matching the size and shape of the originals more closely than their content.

His map of the world had been replaced by a star chart, and the blanket on his bed was different, but his desktop computer was, as far as he could tell, exactly the same. His father had forbidden him from putting a password on it; Omar hoped that was a universal prohibition, or at least one entirely determined by bone structure. He hit the power button, and waited for the thing to boot up.

The desktop appeared, with no login screen demanding authorization. Omar opened a web browser and tried to reach a few news sites, but they all returned errors; search engines and social media were the same. Wasn’t the internet supposed to be so robust that it could weave connections around any obstacle? There were no broken streets, so why should there be broken fibers?

He leaned back in his chair, frustrated. The computer itself still worked – which meant the various components hadn’t ended up incompatible, and nor had different portions of the software found themselves working at cross-purposes. But if that feat of integrity was like his textbooks managing to stay on-topic, maybe traffic on the net was suffering something more akin to a delivery driver turning up at what should have been Gino’s Convenience, only to find that the paperwork for their consignment didn’t match the business’s new name. None of which explained how the whole phenomenon managed to walk the line between dreamlike incongruity and running a chainsaw through everything ... though if it had gone wild on the scale of his own body and turned him into some kind of composite, he probably wouldn’t have survived long enough to know about it.

He went back to the living room and tried the TV. Like the broadcasts he’d seen at Tony’s house, there was no news interrupting the bland daytime schedule. Had the journalists who’d usually rush to cover any local disaster all given up and gone home, or was he picking up signals from stations where there’d been no disruption at all? In the advertising breaks, some of the brands and businesses were familiar; others were like the fictional ads embedded in a drama, where just enough had been changed to avoid infringing anyone’s trademark. But that still didn’t tell him if the world these images came from was the world he was sitting in as he watched.

Omar left the house, walked around the block, and entered it again. The carpet was older now, the family in the photos was different, the star chart in his room was a poster of a rapper, and the computer he’d left powered up was no longer switched on.

He lay down on his bed and closed his eyes. The sheets smelled as if they’d been laundered with an unfamiliar detergent, but the mattress felt exactly right. Whenever he’d slept in a different bed, on a holiday or visiting relatives, he’d spent the night chafing like a runner in ill-fitting shoes. How could he be lost, how could he be exiled, when he could lie here, so at ease?

The sound of a car pulling into the driveway roused him from the edge of sleep. He jumped up – noticing in passing that the rapper had been usurped by a travel poster – and ran to the living room, where he peeked out through the blinds. The car was the same model as the one his family had had for the last few years, but he couldn’t see the number plates, or the driver who’d just emerged.

As Omar stepped into the hallway, a man walked through the front door. He was wearing black trousers, a white shirt, and a dark blue tie. Omar didn’t need to look at his face to be sure that it was his father; his mind had already filled in that final detail from all the other cues that led inexorably to the same conclusion.

But then he shifted his gaze a fraction, and his conviction shattered.

“What’s your name, son?” the man asked gently. He couldn’t hide his anguish at the absence of whoever he had hoped might still be here to greet him, but he’d clearly had time to brace himself for the likelihood of the encounter now unfolding.

“Omar.”

“I’m Rafiq.”

“What’s happening?” Omar begged him, as if there was the slightest chance that any human actually knew.

“We’ve lost our families,” Rafiq said. “And I don’t know how we’re going to find them. But in the mean time, we need to look out for each other – in the same way we hope some good-hearted strangers will be looking out for them.”

Omar started weeping, and he began to lower his gaze in shame. Rafiq reached over and grabbed his jaw. “No,” he said. “I know you have no reason to trust me. But the only way we can start to trust each other is if we stay in this together, side by side. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“Yes, uncle.” Omar reached up and brushed the tears away with the heel of his hand, one eye at a time.

“I don’t know if it’s possible,” Rafiq admitted. “But I don’t know what else to try. If we’re going to fight this together, we can’t lose each other. We can’t ever look away.”

2

Omar sat in the kitchen and watched Rafiq cooking. They’d found plenty of food in the fridge, and it had shown no tendency to vanish – or be magically replenished – when they closed the door and looked again.

Rafiq served the lablabi and invited him to eat.

Omar had been working up the courage to ask a question. “How did you get separated from your wife?”

“I was in the storeroom when it happened,” Rafiq replied. “She was at the till.”

“I’m sorry.” Omar could picture his parents suffering exactly the same fate, in their own store.

“I asked the woman at the till to come here with me, but she said she was leaving Sydney to look for her daughter.”

“I only have two brothers,” Omar confessed. “No sister.”

“And I only have three sons,” Rafiq replied. “It looks like our families are closer than I thought.”

Omar took another mouthful of soup and contemplated making a run for the door – not out of any ill will toward this man, but because he wanted the insanity to end. It was clear that nothing was ever going to change right before his eyes, which meant that as long as Rafiq was in front of him, he would never be reunited with his family.

But on all the evidence so far, rolling the dice wouldn’t bring him any closer either. So maybe it made sense for people to try to form alliances while they learned how to handle the situation, even as they hoped it was all a temporary aberration that would somehow be set right.

“My son Adnan is so much like you,” Rafiq added.

Omar was over the whole cheekbone thing. “When was he born?” he wondered.

“The 7th of August. He just turned thirteen last month.”

“I’m thirteen too, but I was born in February.” Omar found that oddly satisfying: they were not weird doppelgängers who had walked the same path in lockstep all their lives. He’d been out in the world, gurgling and bawling, while Adnan was still in the womb.

They ran through the families’ birthdays together; no one matched exactly, and Rafiq was more than a full year younger than Omar’s father.

“There’s no sense to any of this,” Rafiq decided.

“But you both wound up owning the same store in Marrickville,” Omar said. “You both have a son working as a bricklayer in Darwin, and another one studying at MIT.”

“Where was your father born?” Rafiq asked him.

“Gafsa.”

“Ah, the big smoke,” Rafiq joked. “I was born in Métlaoui. Very close, but not the same.”

Omar took their empty bowls over to the sink, trying not to feel self-conscious as Rafiq turned his chair around in order to keep him in sight.

“How are we going to feed ourselves, uncle?” he asked.

“I don’t know yet,” Rafiq replied candidly. “There are things we can try, but who knows what will work?”

Omar began washing the dishes. That they still had running water didn’t surprise him; like the roads, he did not expect to see breaks in the pipes, and a full reservoir might function without maintenance for weeks. But the electricity felt more like a precarious miracle; even with solar panels and batteries everywhere, it seemed unlikely that the whole power grid could keep running without human intervention. Enough operators and engineers must have kept showing up at their jobs – working beside colleagues they’d never met, with no idea if they would ever be paid for their efforts – to keep the network functioning.

“I need to use the toilet,” Rafiq announced, rising to his feet. Omar said nothing; he’d been dreading this moment, but given the way he’d ended up separated from Tony, he couldn’t just pretend that he could keep a normal distance and everything would be fine. “I’ll get a towel first,” Rafiq added, miming wrapping it around his waist. Omar got the picture; at least they could retain a degree of modesty. In fact, he’d had his back to Rafiq half the time he’d been standing at the sink, and they hadn’t parted worlds; staying together seemed to require only one of them watching the other.

Afterward, they sat in the living room – with the chairs suitably arranged – trying to make sense of what the TV disgorged. If they stuck with one channel it remained coherent, with scene after scene from a single program, but if they flicked to another station and back they usually found themselves watching something different. Omar half wished that Rafiq would stop working the remote, so they could sit back and try to escape into some comedy or cop show on its own weird, pre-apocalyptic terms, but he knew that if that happened he’d just grow restless, wondering what vital news they were missing.

And then, a reporter stood outside Parliament House, addressing the camera.

“—who claimed to be the Prime Minister spoke earlier, calling on the people of the nation to do their best to help each other through the emergency.”

The reporter hesitated, then lowered his eyes and spoke quietly. “We don’t have that footage?” He nodded glumly then looked back to his audience. “But the woman in question can no longer be located, and most offices in the building are empty now. If anyone really is in a position to take charge, they have not yet made themselves known. Back to you, Linda.”

The screen went blank. Omar waited, but no studio anchor named Linda or otherwise materialized to continue the story. After a few seconds, an ad for a gambling app appeared.

Rafiq said, “You should get some sleep.”

“What about you?”

“When you wake up tomorrow, I’ll grab a few hours.”

Omar said, “What if I wake up, and you’re gone? What if sleep breaks the connection?”

“Then you’ll know that the whole thing’s out of our hands,” Rafiq admitted. “Just remember to teach the other guys how to make good lablabi.”

When Omar climbed into bed, he left the desk lamp on, and Rafiq settled into a chair in the corner. Omar did not believe that this man might turn out to be some kind of child molester, but the only way he could accommodate another presence in the room was to half-pretend that he was still sharing it with Syed, who’d often sit studying long after Omar’s bedtime. He was tempted to cover his face with his pillow to block out the light, but he was afraid that might also stop him being the person Rafiq was watching.

He’d thought sleep would be impossible, but after a while he found himself sinking into a pleasant stupor, convinced that none of what he’d seen throughout the day had actually happened.

3

Rafiq insisted on Omar eating breakfast, before trusting him to stay alert for his own shift as watcher.

Omar was anxious at the start, worried that his mind might wander and Rafiq would get the blackboard treatment. “Just wake me if you need to,” Rafiq had stressed. “If someone knocks on the door. If you need the toilet again. Anything. I won’t be angry.”

Staring at a stranger sprawled across the bed he still thought of as belonging to his parents was unsettling, but Omar clung to the hope that, not only would they have approved, they were probably doing something similar themselves. And just because Rafiq had lost track of his own wife, that didn’t mean his father and mother were apart. Maybe they were taking turns napping and watching over their foster-Omar, as they worked on their short-term plans for food, and their long-term plans for restoring the world to order.

When Rafiq rose, it wasn’t even noon; he’d had less than four hours’ sleep. Omar suspected they’d both need to aim for six, at least, if they were going to stay sane, but it wasn’t his place to start lecturing an adult on the subject.

Rafiq filled some buckets in the laundry with water; the supply was still flowing normally, but he wanted to be prepared in case it failed. Omar was prepared to find the buckets empty when they returned to the room, but that didn’t happen; the buckets themselves changed color, but once the bulk of water was in place, it seemed to be as robust a feature of his world as any piece of furniture.

They each took a shower, keeping their underwear on, changing under a towel the way Omar’s father had taught him to do at the public swimming pool. Omar was beginning to feel less self-conscious; he’d now survived every embarrassing necessity, and he believed he could grow inured to the routine. His father had made it through a year of compulsory military service in Tunisia; for loss of privacy and enforced proximity to strangers, that must surely have been even worse.

Lunch didn’t exhaust their supplies of food, but it did extinguish any lingering fantasy that alter egos in some parallel world where the banking infrastructure had remained intact would devise a way to play poltergeist and slip care parcels into their pantry. The photos in the living room could manifest new faces a dozen times a day, while Omar’s bedroom wall flipped effortlessly from the Periodic Table to the Declaration of Human Rights, but if they wanted to keep eating, they’d need to bring fresh ingredients into the house the normal way.

When they stepped outside there was no one else in sight, though Omar saw a neighbor’s blind twitch. “We should try the store first,” Rafiq said. “I ran out without taking any money, but the woman yelled after me that she’d leave half the cash.”

The car hadn’t changed overnight in any significant way: Rafiq didn’t need to break the door locks for a second time, or repeat the surgery that allowed an easy hot-wire start. As they drove south toward the river, the traffic around them was sparse, but the vibe Omar felt was more public holiday than ghost town. The world hadn’t ended: no one was dropping dead in the street, no buildings were on fire, no bridges had collapsed. Omar did not believe that his family were any more likely to be in harm’s way than he was – and whatever had scattered them, he was sure it would eventually be understood, and reversed.

He had feared that there might have been looting, but as they turned into the parking lot at the back of the store, the premises looked perfectly intact.

“Ideal Electrics?” Rafiq protested. He caught himself and regarded Omar apologetically. “I’m sorry. If your father called it that—”

“Absolutely not,” Omar assured him.

Name change notwithstanding, Rafiq’s key still worked. Omar hadn’t been to the store since the weekend, but inside, it was instantly familiar-but-strange, with a subtly wrong scent to everything, and an alien color scheme for the price tags.

Rafiq opened the till. “She kept her promise!” he announced, taking out a handful of bills. “Or ... someone did.” Cash was not a big fraction of the business, but if money still meant anything they could eat for weeks. Omar experienced an odd pang of emotion, halfway between a genuine response and the kind of thing a tearjerking movie might have wrung out of him. Maybe one or all of his “mothers” had deserted him to go chasing after their firstborn, but at least they’d left a decent child support payment behind.

Rafiq held up a twenty-dollar bill, frowning. “The whole thing looks right, but ... have you heard of ‘Mary Reibey’? I don’t think that name was on my citizenship test.”

Omar shrugged. “It looks right to me, too.” Whatever it was, it wasn’t counterfeit in the criminal sense. All they could do was see if anyone was willing to accept it.

They drove to a nearby market, which appeared to be doing plenty of trade. It was only as they approached a vegetable stall that Omar spotted a handwritten sign that read: ALL BILLS VALUE $5.

Rafiq muttered obscenities under his breath, but when they reached the stall he addressed the vendor calmly, pointing to the sign. “What’s this, brother? Would you take advantage of people at a time like this?”

The man shook his head, apologetic but firm. “You give me a hundred-dollar bill, and tomorrow I check it. Will it be a hundred, or will it be twenty? Ten? Five?”

Omar thought this actually sounded defensible, but Rafiq was not persuaded. “American bills are all the same size. But you know that’s not true here.” He fished out a twenty and a fifty, and lined them up together. Omar had never noticed before, but the higher denomination was at least five millimeters longer.

The vendor grew angry. “I lost my daughter yesterday.” He held up a hand with his thumb and forefinger a few millimeters apart. “You think someone promised you nothing would change by that much?”

“We’ve all lost people,” Rafiq replied, with genuine sympathy. “But this cash sat in my till all night, and it’s lost no value.”

“Mashallah,” the vendor replied, sarcastically. “But here, each bill is worth five dollars. No more, no less.”

Rafiq stood in silence for several seconds, then he nodded slightly. “Okay.”

They walked around the stall, selecting vegetables from what remained; they’d probably come late in a surge of panic buying, but between the problems with cash and the lure of less perishable alternatives, the shelves here had not ended up stripped bare.

Omar tried to quash his own disappointment and think through the competing claims about the banknotes. Things changed, but they didn’t change at random, even within the constraints of size; the posters on his wall never turned into sheets of butcher’s paper, or priceless works of art. Because, he supposed, they could only be things that someone else who’d lived a life much like his own had actually put there.

So, what could a polymer banknote become? Not just any random object of about the same size and shape, because no one would have reason to carry such a thing in their wallet, or keep it in their till.

And not every till would be the same. He’d never seen anyone buy a fridge or a TV and pay for it with five-dollar bills. But equally, who paid for their vegetables with fifties? So maybe both men were right: Rafiq’s fifties hadn’t turned into fives, but the stall owner couldn’t count on the same thing holding true.

They paid for the vegetables and moved on. The whole market had adopted the $5 policy; by the time they were done, Omar guessed they’d spent half their cash on about a week’s worth of food.

They drove to a garden center, but all the seeds and seedlings for edible plants had sold out. Rafiq kept trying, visiting different horticultural outlets across the suburbs, until the battery range warning light came on.

Omar hadn’t been paying attention to the car’s navigation system, but when he looked from the console to the street signs around them, he realized that it was showing the car’s location as reliably as ever. It probably kept its own copies of the maps it used – only needing the internet for information about roadworks and traffic conditions – and the GPS signals themselves would be more like a one-way TV broadcast than an exchange of data over the net.

“If we could look down on the city from a satellite,” he wondered, “and our eyes were good enough to keep track of everyone ... would we see people disappearing?”

“I doubt it,” Rafiq replied. “We don’t see that any other time.”

“So would that be enough to keep them all together, from their own point of view?” Omar tried to think it through, but it wasn’t obvious to him what the outcome would be. “And if it was a machine watching, would that be just as good?”

Rafiq didn’t answer. Omar dropped the subject; what mattered most right now was food. With their cash half-gone, what else was left? The washing machines and TVs in the store seemed likely to remain as stable as any other weighty objects, but the fact that no one had bothered to loot them suggested that they wouldn’t be worth much.

“In the lockdowns,” he said, “and the bushfires, a lot of people helped each other. Like those Sikh food trucks handing out meals.”

“And Muslim groups, too,” Rafiq protested.

“Do you ever go to mosque?” Omar’s father was not religious at all.

“No, but credit where it’s due. And of course you should feed your neighbors, if they fall on hard times and you have enough to share. But charity’s not a bottomless well. The food has to come from somewhere in the end.”

“Why should the farmers stop growing food?”

“Should they work for nothing? They still need to look after their families. They still need fuel and fertilizer.”

“Why should the fertilizer factories shut down?”

Rafiq scowled. “And ... what? Will the farmers pay them in sacks of wheat? And will the factory workers pay for everything in fertilizer? There’s a reason people moved beyond bartering.”

Omar said, “I know.”

“Gold coins might work,” Rafiq mused, “if we can be sure they won’t turn into lead.”

Omar had never seen a gold coin in his life, outside a pirate movie. “Will the people with gold coins hire everyone in the country, and pay us all in gold before the food runs out?”

“Probably not. Do you have a better idea?”

“Why can’t we just keep doing all the things we were doing two days ago? It’s not money that makes a crop grow, or keeps a factory running.”

Rafiq said, “So if I go back to the markets, how much food should they give me, for free? How much food should the farmers give the markets? How much fuel should the oil refineries give the farmers?”

“As much as usual,” Omar declared stubbornly.

“What does that mean? No one knows if I have twelve mouths to feed, or just one, so what’s a fair amount of groceries to give me?”

“Why would anyone want more food than they can eat?” Omar protested. “It’s not like they could sell it for money.”

Rafiq said, “The black market would soon work something out.”

“Didn’t you just tell me that bartering doesn’t work?”

“Not in a good way. You want criminals hoarding food, making the shortages worse, using that to build up power over everyone?”

Omar fell silent. If there had been a drought or a plague of locusts, he could have accepted that. But for people to accept that they’d all just have to starve when there was no physical reason for it seemed like a kind of collective masochism, above and beyond the suffering that had already been imposed on them.

When they got home, Rafiq put the car on the charger; the electricity grid still hadn’t failed. The conversation about charity seemed to have pricked his conscience; he packed up a portion of the supplies they’d bought, and they walked three houses down the street.

“Who lived in 71, for you?” Omar asked, as Rafiq knocked on the door.

“Mrs. Bartoli. She was a widow, on her own.”

An elderly woman opened the door, sparing Omar the embarrassment of having to confess that he knew nothing about his own world’s equivalent.

She regarded them with a puzzled smile. “Can I give you these, Ma’am?” Rafiq asked. “I know how hard it is to do the shopping right now.”

She squinted at him, as if she was trying to put a name to his face, but then she gave up and said, “That’s very kind of you.”

She let them in, and they left the food in her kitchen. The house looked well kept, but Omar had no idea what she’d do now that her pension had disappeared into the ether.

“Can we keep coming back?” he asked Rafiq as they headed home.

“We’ll see,” he replied. “If we can’t feed ourselves, we can’t feed a thousand different strangers as well.”

After dinner, they watched TV for a while. Rafiq’s channel hopping yielded no news, and he finally gave up and let an old movie called Cliffhanger run to completion. Omar guessed the TV stations got their movies over the net like everyone else, but they must have had a few days’ worth of content sitting on their hard drives when their connections went down.

“Bedtime,” Rafiq declared, as the credits rolled. Omar was sure he resented the tedious job ahead, but at least they’d each get a chance to escape into their dreams.

He hadn’t been in his room since their trip to the markets; as he entered, he checked the poster to see what it had become. In its place were eight sheets of A4 paper, taped together into one big rectangle. They looked like they’d been printed on his computer, and they were all exactly the same.

Rafiq read the heading: “‘Solidity.’” Omar detached a sheet and placed it on the desk so he could read the whole thing properly. “‘While we wait for the old world to return, we need to hold our nerve and not let things fall apart. We’ve all done this before, one way or another. We all know in our hearts what is right. We will help those who need our help. We will ask, without shame, for our own needs to be met. We will not cheat or deceive, steal or coerce, and nor will we withhold trust for no reason. We will do everything in our power to maintain solidity. If you can, spread the word. If you can, be an example.’”

There was no author named; at the bottom there was just a large S enclosed in a circle.

Rafiq regarded Omar with bemusement. “This sounds like something you might have written.”

“Maybe Adnan wrote it,” Omar replied.

For a moment, Rafiq looked like he was going to crumple. Omar said, “I’m sorry, uncle.”

“It’s all right.” Rafiq recovered his composure. “But whoever it was, they were probably sitting right here an hour ago.”

“Great minds think alike,” Omar joked.

“Not that great, if they can’t spell ‘solidarity.’”

Omar didn’t think it was a mistake, but he didn’t want to argue about that. He said, “Is there anything here you disagree with?”

“It’s a little naïve,” Rafiq said. “But still, better to set your sights high than give up and do the opposite.”

Omar used the scanner on his printer to make thirty copies, before the ink ran out. Then they walked down the street, slipping them under their neighbors’ doors.

When he returned to his room, there was a poster of a Tunisian soccer player that neither he nor Rafiq had ever heard of. Omar took it down, and wrote out eight copies of the Solidity Manifesto by hand, to replace the ones that had vanished.

“What’s the plan for tomorrow?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” Rafiq replied. “All we can do is play it by ear.”

4

Omar cut one side off a cardboard box they found in the pantry, and drew the sign Rafiq had asked for. He said, “Once we put this on the front lawn, the words might change.”

“All we can do is check it now and then,” Rafiq decided. “And if anyone comes asking for tailoring services or judo lessons, tell them to walk around the block and try again.”

Omar put the sign up, attaching it to the letterbox. Half an hour later, the first customer knocked on the door.

“Can you repair a washing machine?” the man asked.

Rafiq said, “It depends on what’s broken, but I can try.”

The man introduced himself as Trevor. The three of them went together to the shed to fetch some tools, then they walked to Trevor’s house a few streets away.

Omar was surprised to find a woman inside, sitting in the kitchen as they passed through. Trevor nodded to her as if to acknowledge her presence, but neither of them spoke.

Trevor looked on as Omar handed Rafiq the tools he asked for. Once he had poked around for a while, Rafiq laughed with relief. “There’s a belt that’s come off, that’s all.” But the space around it was tight, and the components blocking the way were held in place with fasteners that needed a special tool to remove. He could pull and prod at the belt with a screwdriver, but whenever he tried to force it over the grooved disk that it was meant to wrap around, it just slipped off the screwdriver’s blade.

“Let me have a go,” Omar offered.

Rafiq said, “Be my guest.”

Lying beside the machine, Omar managed to squeeze his hand through the gap without quite losing the ability to move his fingers. He caught the belt between his forefinger and his middle finger, and succeeded in dragging it into place.

Rafiq plugged the cord in, switched on the power, and tried the motor. The belt stayed where it belonged, and the agitator swung back and forth smoothly.

“Good job,” Trevor said, as Rafiq screwed the back panel on again. “You want some sandwiches?”

Rafiq said, “Thank you.”

There was a different woman in the kitchen, but she did not seem surprised or disconcerted by their presence. As Trevor took a loaf of bread from the cupboard, Omar asked her, “Did you see someone else come here, to fix the washing machine?”

“Of course, love.”

“What were they like?”

She shrugged. “About the same age as you two. Pretty similar, I guess; I wasn’t paying much attention. People come and go in the blink of an eye.”

Omar felt queasy, but he ate the peanut butter sandwiches Trevor handed him, trying to keep everyone in the room in sight as he chewed the stale white bread.

They had three more jobs that afternoon: fixing a burst water pipe, reviving a failing freezer, and helping a couple hot-wire their car. The first customer had nothing to offer them, while the others paid in canned goods.

As dusk fell, Rafiq and Omar dropped in on number 71, and left the current resident, who said her name was Daniella, a tin of pumpkin soup.

“Did anyone bring you food yesterday?” Omar asked.

Daniella smiled. “How did you know? Are you working for the same charity?”

Omar said, “Not exactly.”

As he sat watching TV, Omar felt as if his chest was about to burst open. Could his father have been the ghost repairman who had pulled the freezer away from the wall, helped by his own apprentice, so that when Omar and Rafiq left the room and returned to find different colored melt stains on the side of the cabinet, the appliance they had never laid hands on was nonetheless in exactly the same position as the one they’d dragged across the floor?

He wanted to believe that. Because if it was true, all it would take would be one more round of musical chairs and suddenly he would be beside his father, Rafiq would be reunited with Adnan, his mother would meet up with Rami in Darwin, the internet would start working again, and they’d all get together with Syed over Zoom.

But why would his father have mimicked Rafiq’s actions in such detail? It hadn’t been true throughout their lives; they’d been born in different towns, more than a year apart. Whoever they were, the shadow crew weren’t puppets, any more than he and Rafiq. They all did what they did for their own reasons, and their encounters with shared witnesses like Daniella were just a consequence of their actions coinciding – purely by chance, and only for a while.

5

“That must be a Superman fan who can’t make a triangle,” Rafiq joked as they drove past the house.

“Stop,” Omar begged him. “They’re offering free apples!”

Rafiq stopped the car, but then he hesitated. “Do we really need apples?”

“They’ll go bad if they’re just left there. And we can take a couple to number 71.”

They walked up to the waist-high circle of bricks, mortared together with an S inside it; a few metal wires added extra support. There was no additional, written sign beside the sack of apples, but the invitation was clear. Omar put two in his jacket pockets, where they hung against the sides of his body, delivering enough tactile cues through the material that they were unlikely to morph into cricket balls. Then he tossed one to Rafiq and bit into a fourth himself.

They finished them, standing on the lawn, gnawing the cores down to stems that they placed in the household’s green bin that was sitting on the verge awaiting collection. Omar had been woken by a garbage truck earlier in the day; like the power station workers, and the bus drivers he’d seen, the sanitation workers seemed intent on refusing to let the city sink into squalor.

“We should ask if they need anything,” Rafiq suggested.

“Yeah.” Omar knocked on the door, while Rafiq hung back a little to keep him in view.

A man opened the door, but Omar could see two young girls and a woman gathered behind him.

“Thank you for the apples,” Omar said.

“You’re welcome.”

“We were wondering if we could do anything in return.”

The man hesitated, then one of the girls tugged his hand and interjected, “Ask him!”

The man laughed. “You don’t have a spare DVD player, by any chance?”

“I’m sorry.”

“Do you not have one at all,” Rafiq asked, “or do you still have a broken one?”

“A broken one. It’s pretty old, though.”

“There’s a chance I can help,” Rafiq said tentatively. “Can you watch us get some tools from the car?”

As the four of them emerged onto the front lawn, Omar saw that they were tied together like mountaineers, with a rope that ran from waist to waist. The woman introduced the family: she was Daisy, the girls were her daughters Nina and Lisa, and their father was Ivan.

Rafiq gathered his screwdrivers, soldering iron and multimeter, and they all filed into the house. Following the family from room to room felt like a strange kind of party game. There were children’s drawings taped to every surface in sight: misshapen people, houses and animals liberally sprinkled with glitter.

The family located the broken DVD player and took it to the living room. Omar looked on as Rafiq opened it up and began probing various points on the circuit-board, while the girls asked Omar questions and their mortified parents tried to hush them. “Why isn’t your mother with you?” “Do you have any brothers and sisters?”

Ivan caught his eye. “I’m sorry. They’re too young to get it.”

“It’s okay,” Omar replied. “You’re lucky you were all together.”

“Absolutely.” But from the shadow that crossed Ivan’s face it was clear that he was still mourning other losses.

“How’s that?” Rafiq asked triumphantly; the player’s menu had appeared on the TV screen.

The girls cheered.

“Do you have any DVDs to try?”

Daisy laughed. “Do we ever.”

“How did you watch them before?” Omar wondered, as they all filed out of the room to collect them. The player had looked like it had been gathering dust since before the children were born.

“Through the computer,” Daisy explained. “But we’ve lost the password.”

“I could try to reset it,” Rafiq offered.

“Oh, we’ve done that a couple of times. But it never lasts.”

The first movie they tried worked perfectly. The girls were ecstatic, and Rafiq nodded toward the door, suggesting they slip away.

“Did you make the S yourself?” Omar asked Ivan.

“No. There’s a couple of bricklayers driving around, offering to build them.”

“Cool.”

They excused themselves and left. “We should get our own Solidity symbol,” Omar suggested, as they returned to the car.

Rafiq was dubious. “It would just mean people knocking on the door all the time, expecting food we can’t give them.”

“It’s not about food; it’s about trusting each other.”

“I’d rather earn people’s trust by what we do.”

“But they’ll never meet us again,” Omar protested. “An S in the front yard would mean they can trust whoever lives there.”

Rafiq laughed. “Until it doesn’t. Until everyone who wants to deceive people decides it’s a useful shortcut.”

6

The woman on the doorstep introduced herself as Leanne. “Would you be willing to volunteer to do some food deliveries?” she asked. “Once a week, just in the local area?”

Rafiq regarded her warily. “Food from where?”

Leanne said, “From the supermarkets. A certain amount of stock is still coming to us, from the usual sources. The ordering systems are kaput, but everyone knows what used to go where, so for now they’re just sticking to what they remember.”

“Really?”

“Some gets skimmed along the way,” she admitted, “but most of it’s getting through.”

“So let the supermarkets pass it to their customers,” Rafiq suggested. “If they’re getting it for free, let them hand it out for free.” Omar stayed quiet, but he couldn’t help smiling; he was sure he could recall Rafiq mocking that idea when he’d suggested it himself.

“I’m a supermarket manager,” Leanne replied, “so I can tell you why I don’t want to do that. We get rushed, we get stampedes, we get hoarders. Our workers get hurt – especially if they try to enforce limits.”

“All right, I can believe that,” Rafiq conceded.

“Even if people only take reasonable quantities, our staff can’t police return visits. The only way to get a fair amount to everyone is to subcontract that to local distributors, who can take it right to the door. Your neighbors might look different every time you see them, but you’ll still know what you’ve delivered to each household.”

Rafiq grimaced. “So you want me to pass food on to a few dozen neighbors?”

“Yes.”

“Food that comes to me ... how?”

“Our drivers will bring it to your house.”

“How will they know where to come? Whatever you write down, or put in a computer file—”

Leanne said, “I have a map of the area on the floor of my stockroom. If I put a pebble on it, it doesn’t move; I’ve tested that, it’s always in the same place when I come back.”

“So if I agree, you’ll put a pebble there to mark my house?”

“Yes. The drivers look at the map and memorize the addresses they’ll be going to.”

Rafiq rubbed his temple, clearly struggling to assess the integrity of the system. “What if someone else who lives in this house doesn’t agree?”

“Then they won’t get a delivery, because for them there won’t be a pebble on the map.”

“What if they agree, but then decide to steal the food? And people come blaming me?”

Leanne said, “Anything substantial in a different place will keep you separate from them. We’ve all seen how that works: nothing heavy moves around for no reason.”

“What about my delivery area?” Rafiq pressed her. “You tell me which houses I should cover, but what if another manager allocates things differently?”

“It will all be done with stones on the map,” Leanne replied. “You can come and see the layout for yourself, if you like.”

They went with her to inspect the setup. Rafiq examined the map and spoke with one of the truck drivers.

“Anyone ever try to hijack you?” he asked.

“No,” the driver replied. He nodded toward a crate of pineapples. “What are you going to do with those, that would make it worth the hassle? Unless people are actually starving, they’re not going to bow down to you for a piece of fruit.”

“We’re not there yet,” Rafiq observed glumly.

The driver said, “So how about we try to keep it that way?”

7

Omar was slapping his own face to stay alert when, between the thwacks, he heard a scraping noise coming from in front of the house, and several voices trying unsuccessfully to whisper.

“Uncle, wake up!” he said.

Rafiq didn’t stir; Omar prodded his shoulder and repeated the plea, until Rafiq opened his eyes.

“What’s happening?”

“I think someone’s trying to steal the car.”

They made their way to the living room together without switching any more lights on; there was enough illumination to see where they were going, but Omar was afraid for a moment that the dimly lit figure in front of him might turn around and reveal a new face.

Rafiq, still Rafiq, peered out through the blinds and sighed. “I don’t think they’ll have much luck, but they’re going to leave a few scratches.” He’d welded brackets onto the doors with holes for some very large padlocks, the shackles too thick for most bolt-cutters.

“They might break the windshield,” Omar fretted.

“Not without a sledgehammer.”

Omar moved closer to the window and tried to position himself to get a glimpse between the slats without losing sight of Rafiq. There were four youths standing around the car; two were trying to prize open the front door with crowbars, while the other two stood guard, holding baseball bats.

The streetlights were bright enough to show their faces. They all seemed giddy and elated, reveling in the excitement of the act – while making no effort to keep each other in sight. Omar had visited households where the inhabitants had gone solo, but most had been as glum as the transient residents of a short-stay boarding house. He had never seen a group like this, enthralled by a common purpose but entirely oblivious to each other’s identities.

“Someone’s watching!” one of the guards announced. He must have noticed his companions’ unexpected stability; he looked around, scanning the street, but then settled on a closer target.

“Get back!” Rafiq whispered. As they retreated from the room there was a shattering noise; Rafiq pulled the door closed behind them, then took hold of the handle. There was no lock; if anyone tried to come through, it would be down to his grip on that piece of metal whether they were kept at bay or not.

“I should have put bars on all the windows,” he lamented. Omar listened to the thugs laughing and yelling, but it didn’t sound as if they’d braved the broken glass and climbed into the room.

After a few minutes, the voices went silent. Rafiq opened the door; the living room was empty. “We can clean that up in the morning,” he said. “Then start on the bars.”

As a temporary measure, they moved a table into the hallway and tied the door handle to it with several loops of wire. Omar’s heart was still racing. The street had always been quiet before. He’d never heard of a single neighbor being burgled.

“We might as well swap now,” Rafiq decided. “You sleep, I’ll keep watch.”

Omar lay in bed with his eyes closed, replaying the event in his head. As rattled as he was, he couldn’t deny that alongside his fear he felt a trace of envy. He wasn’t going to weep like a child because he missed Bruno and Tuan, but the prospect of never walking down the street with anyone he could talk to the way he could with them felt like a kind of torture. And if he could never hope to have an ordinary friend again – one with whom he shared a history – maybe the car thieves had the next best thing. They had made a plan and committed to it, regardless of exactly who was standing beside them.

But the more he dwelled on the notion of a camaraderie so pure that it transcended every comrade’s identity, the more he began to recoil. He had no problem delivering food to neighbors he’d never see again, but reducing his whole life to a piece of theater so generic that anyone could step into the roles would just be a new kind of nightmare.

And he hadn’t even witnessed the version with an endless flow of understudies: while he’d watched the thieves, the same four actors had remained together in a single troupe.

If he could do that, unwittingly – if he could bind four people together when they would otherwise have drifted apart – what else could achieve the same result?

He’d fantasized about looking down on the city from space – and for all he knew, a satellite engineer somewhere might be working on exactly that project. But in the mean time, there had to be smaller steps that ordinary people could take.

8

“Are you trying to get five Michelin stars from all your lab rats?” Martin joked, as he started on the lunch Rafiq had prepared.

“Of course,” Omar replied. It was a simple meal, but anything home-made was more enticing than the canned food most people were relying on, and with the aroma of freshly baked bread lingering, perhaps it did seem like a moment of artisanal luxury.

Valerie was more subdued, but she seemed just as satisfied with the food. Omar still wasn’t sure how he’d managed to lure these two solos off the street with nothing but a promise of bread and hummus and an earnest declaration that it was all in the aid of science. Maybe they were both carrying knives, and were confident that they could fend off any attempt by three other strangers to harm them. Or maybe they’d been longing for a chance to carry out exactly this experiment themselves.

When they’d finished eating, they all went into the living room. Omar had set up his computer with the webcam positioned to capture a view of the two armchairs facing in opposite directions. He started the video recording software, and turned to the participants to reiterate the instructions.

“Please just sit in the chairs in silence. Don’t talk to each other, don’t look at each other. It will only be for five minutes.”

“Have you got something I could read?” Valerie asked.

Omar said, “Sorry, I don’t want to complicate things with extra objects.” A woman reading could only be replaced by another woman reading, and the control subjects the previous day had not been allowed any distinguishing props.

“All right.” Valerie steeled herself. “See you later, then. Or at least ... someone with the same plan.”

Omar followed Rafiq out of the room, into the back yard – far enough away that nothing about their own presence ought to be detectable by the participants.

“If you can keep a couple together by having them sit in silence with their backs to each other, you should probably start a marriage counseling business,” Rafiq teased him.

Omar said, “If they fall for each other, I’m taking no credit. You did that, with the food.”

Rafiq smiled. “My cooking didn’t keep the controls together, did it?” He’d taken some persuading to go along with the study, but now that they were actually doing it, he’d become as enthusiastic as Omar.

Omar checked the time on his phone, the only thing it was good for. “Still three minutes to go.”

“If you want to pass the time, do sixty pushups,” Rafiq suggested. “I’ll count them for you.”

“No, they’d hear me breathing a mile away.”

“Ah, there’s always some excuse. With no school and no sport, you really need to keep fit somehow.”

Omar hoped this was just faux-parental nagging about his general well being, and not a desperate preparation for a state of dog-eat-dog anarchy. The bars on the windows had made him feel safer on one level, but seeing the same thing all around the neighborhood had left him with a dismaying sense that all the fortress-building might become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

When the five minutes were up, they returned to the living room. A man and a woman were sitting in the chairs, facing away from each other, but they bore only a superficial resemblance to Martin and Valerie.

Omar walked over to the computer and tore the masking tape off the indicator light beside the webcam. It wasn’t lit. He forced himself to stay calm, and addressed the couple quietly. “Thanks for taking part. Do you mind telling me exactly what you were told would be happening, by the other experimenters?”

The man recounted the spiel he’d been given. The woman’s version was phrased a little differently, but both followed the same basic idea as Omar’s protocol. They’d never seen each other until he came into the room and released them from their promise, but at least they hadn’t ended up in the house for some entirely different set of reasons.

Rafiq said, “Thank you, we really appreciate your help.”

“So, this was a control, right?” the woman asked. “To test what would happen if you didn’t switch the camera on?”

“Exactly.”

As he closed the front door, Rafiq turned to Omar. “Does that count as a failure?”

“It doesn’t count as a success.” Maybe Martin and Valerie had remained together in another version of the living room, thanks entirely to the camera Omar had switched on – to the delight of another team of experimenters ... and perhaps their confusion, too, if they’d been aiming for a control – but he had no evidence about it, either way.

“So we try again tomorrow.”

9

As Omar walked down Gleason Street, the wind blew a stream of flyers past his feet. He squatted down and picked up a handful.

“Anything interesting?” Rafiq asked.

There were two copies of the Solidity Manifesto, in a bilious green that was probably the result of someone with no black ink left in their printer trying to make do with a color cartridge whose magenta had run low.

There was a proclamation under the “Emergency Workforce Act of 2028,” requiring the members of a list of professions to show up for their jobs, while also compelling the public in general to provide “aid and sustenance” to anyone they “reasonably believed” to fall into the same categories. Omar had no idea if a parliament somewhere really had managed to convene and pass this law, or if the whole thing was just a well-intentioned hoax.

And there was a poster of a man wanted for murder, though it was not clear from the text beneath the mug shot whether the poster’s creator knew for sure that the man portrayed was on the loose, or whether they had felt obliged to release his replacement from their own custody, and had glumly assumed that their counterparts, wherever their suspect had ended up, had done the same.

Rafiq stopped reading over his shoulder; he’d spotted a potential volunteer. “Excuse me, sir,” he called out to the solo. “We’re trying to see if we can keep people together just by using video cameras. Would you be willing to take part in an experiment to test that?”

The man stopped walking, and beamed at them delightedly. “I absolutely would, but in return you need to be part of my own experiment.”

Rafiq was taken aback. Omar asked the man, “What are you testing?”

“Brick biographies.”

“Ummm ... ?”

“I’ll show you,” the man insisted. “It will only take two minutes; my house is just around the corner. Then I’ll come and do your camera thing.”

Omar looked to Rafiq. It wasn’t impossible that a solo had formed an elaborate plan, as part of some Ship-of-Theseus gang, to lure people into an ambush – but he was asking for less trust than the two of them had asked of him.

Rafiq said, “Sure.”

The man introduced himself as Evan, and true to his word, his house wasn’t far. They followed him inside, and he led them to a room that looked like it might have once served as a nursery; the wallpaper bore a motif of bears holding balloons. But it contained no furniture now. Arranged on the bare floorboards were dozens of bricks, spelling out the message: MY NAME IS EVAN CHRISTOPHER WILLIAMS. BORN 8 SEPTEMBER 2002. MY WIFE ALICE BORE MY SON GRAHAM ON 15 APRIL 2028.

Rafiq said, “I’m sorry about your family.”

“Everyone’s lost people,” Evan replied. “This isn’t a plea for sympathy; I’m just trying to set down an anchor.”

“When did you do this?” Omar asked.

“Yesterday. But I only finished it last night, so I haven’t had a chance to see what effect it has.”

“At least it was still here when you came back,” Rafiq noted.

“Yeah. But now I want you two to come back here tomorrow.”

Omar said, “Of course. But we can’t ask you to join our own experiment now; if you stay connected to us, we won’t know if it’s the camera or the bricks.”

Evan was disappointed, but he accepted the argument, and they assured him that they’d still honor their commitment.

They returned to Gleason Street, and after half an hour of begging they managed to persuade two other solos, Kieran and Daniel, to join them.

Back at the house, the four of them shared a meal together, then Omar started the recording, sending the video app into the background so its window no longer showed on the screen.

In the back yard, Rafiq said, “No one would keep doing controls forever, would they?”

Omar had no idea, but as far as he could tell he’d always encountered people whose history seemed unexceptional. This was only their third trial, so it would not be all that strange if some other experimenters were still running controls. But by the fifth trial? The tenth? If the webcam was still refusing to stay on, it would start to look as if the universe was going out of its way to mock them.

When he walked down the hall and turned into the living room, he saw that Kieran and Daniel were gone. He checked the computer; the web cam light was on, and the video app was still running in the background.

He halted the recording, and addressed the two strangers. “Thanks for taking part. My name’s Omar, and that’s Rafiq. Can I ask if you came in here together?”

They had already turned to face each other, and they were grinning with surprise and delight.

“Yes we did,” one of the men replied.

The other nodded. “It looks like it actually worked. I’m Colin, by the way.”

“I’m Pedro,” the first man added.

“Do you want to see the replay?” Rafiq asked.

The four of them sat and watched the recording. Omar felt a chill as a young cheekbone-thief squatted in front of the camera finishing the setup, while a middle-aged man stood in the doorway; despite all the family photos, he’d never seen a home movie of any of the house’s other occupants before. But what really mattered was that Colin and Pedro had been paired from the start. And they hadn’t cheated, they hadn’t messed with the protocol. They both looked bored out of their skulls, but they hadn’t spoken, or turned to peek at each other, for the entire five minutes.

“So far so good,” Pedro said. “But how do you scale it up?”

“We’re going to need more experiments,” Omar said. “And a way to send video wirelessly. I’m hoping that if we start recording from two cameras into one video file – like a split-screen – then people who start out in the same place and wander around separately with the cameras pointed at them will still be together when they return.”

“Do you have that kind of equipment?” Colin asked.

“Not yet,” Rafiq replied. “But if you spread the word about what happened here, it might reach someone who can take the whole idea further straight away.”

10

They managed to get four jobs in the afternoon, all of them paid in food. Omar went to bed tired but happy. Maybe the camera trick was nothing when judged against the scale of the disaster, and he might as well be celebrating finding a roll of duct tape while the house was dragged up into the sky by a tornado, but for now he didn’t care. He’d tamed one tiny whirlwind, and he wasn’t done trying.

When he woke, he could tell without opening his eyes that it was still night. He could hear Rafiq, over by the desk, breathing irregularly in a kind of controlled sobbing.

Omar thought about rising and trying to comfort him, but what he could say? The success they were both so proud of wouldn’t bring either of them closer to their families. If their most grandiose dreams came true, and people ended up pinning the whole world down the way it used to be, that would almost certainly mean that everyone remained lost and scattered – with a chance to put down new roots, but no hope of recovering the old ones.

11

“That’s the house, isn’t it?” Rafiq asked.

“Yes,” Omar affirmed. “Number 93, I remember.”

Rafiq knocked on the door. After a minute, a young man Omar hadn’t seen before opened it, barefoot and bleary-eyed.

“Can I help you?”

“We’re looking for Evan,” Rafiq explained. “He asked us to drop in this morning. I hope it’s not too early.”

The man said, “I’m Evan.”

The three of them stood in silence for a moment.

“Is your birthday the 8th of September?” Omar asked.

“Yes. How did you know that?”

Rafiq said, “The bricks. I mean, someone else who put the bricks down showed us.”

Evan digested this. “Why don’t you come in?”

He led them to the nursery. The wallpaper portrayed rabbits, swallows and acorns, but the mini-biography in bricks was exactly as Omar remembered it.

“You didn’t show this to anyone yourself, yesterday?” Omar asked.

“No,” Evan insisted. “Has it changed for you?”

“No,” Rafiq replied.

“So it works. Up to a point.” Evan regarded his handiwork despondently.

“Maybe if you add more detail,” Rafiq suggested. “It’s hard to write much with bricks, but I bet if you carved letters deep enough into the walls, they’d persist.”

“Maybe.”

As they left the house, Rafiq seemed to warm to the idea himself. “We should do that. The cameras look promising, but we need to try every method we can think of.”

Omar couldn’t argue with that, even if it felt stranger than ever to imagine sharing the house only with those cheekbone-thieves who also shared his name and birthday. “I wonder if any genome sequencing labs are still operating,” he joked.

Rafiq said, “All those C, A, G, Ts? I’d probably make a thousand errors, and hand the house over to a pack of mutants. Do you know your blood type?”

Omar tried to recall it, but failed. “I used to.” It was written down somewhere.

“I’m A negative.”

Birthdays were a lot more specific than blood types, and even that hadn’t been enough for Evan, but Omar supposed every additional factor would help. In any case, the whole idea seemed to cheer Rafiq up. Maybe he’d feel better just writing out his family’s history – as if that could draw him nearer to them. Omar pictured himself walking into a room engraved like a shrine of remembrance, to find Adnan beside him, summoned by his story. The ghost brothers would share a solemn embrace, then point each other to where their fathers were waiting.

They’d just arrived home when a customer came, wanting a leaking roof repaired. She offered two jars of tomato paste, but while Rafiq and Omar were on the roof, with the customer peering up from the back yard, she stepped out of sight, and the replacement who emerged denied ever making such a deal. Rafiq was gracious, and departed without making a fuss; they often did small jobs for no payment. But Omar could see the resentment eating away at him as they drove back to the house.

After lunch, Rafiq said, “I hope you didn’t have any plans for the spare room.”

That had been Rami’s bedroom until he left, but even before the disaster Omar’s parents had cheerfully repurposed it.

Rafiq fetched a power drill and a masonry bit. Omar said, “Please don’t drill into the wiring, my CPR isn’t that great.”

Rafiq donned his safety glasses. Omar stood back and watched him attack the wall.

MY NAME IS RAFIQ MESSADI. I WAS BORN ON 3 APRIL 1986 IN REDEYEF, TUNISIA.

When Rafiq paused to blow away brick dust and let the bit cool down, Omar said, “You mean 1988?”

“No.” Rafiq laughed. “I know my own birthday!”

“Of course. I just thought you might have missed closing the top loop.”

Omar was sure he remembered calculating that Rafiq was younger than his father, who’d been born in 1987. But maybe he’d got things backward; on that first night he’d still been in shock.

Redeyef, though? His mother had been born in Redeyef. If Rafiq had told him before that he’d been born there, it would have stuck in his mind.

Omar folded his arms and began swaying gently. How many Rafiqs had he shared the house with? Two? Three? A dozen? He had no complaints; they had all treated him well, sharing the hope that someone would do the same for Adnan. Though as he watched the biography unfolding, there was no Adnan recorded; this Rafiq’s youngest child was named Nayef.

Omar listened to the whining of the drill; if he turned and fled, his footsteps would be lost in the noise. Forget the cameras, forget the carved biographies; nothing would ever be enough. Not a parent doting on a newborn child, not a pair of lovers at each other’s side. What kind of life lay ahead for him, if even his own wife and children would be forever slipping away? Wouldn’t it be better to be honest and embrace the truth right now? Walk out of the house and find some gang of thieves who’d take him in, without caring who he was, who he had been or would be?

But he stood his ground, and kept his gaze fixed straight ahead. He started screaming, bellowing with all his strength. Rafiq switched off the drill and turned to him, alarmed. He tore off the goggles and approached tentatively.

“What is it? Omar? What’s wrong?”

Omar kept bellowing, but he refused to close his eyes. Rafiq put a hand on his shoulder and met his gaze, then joined him, screaming with rage and grief.

12

“Pick an eight-digit number, and commit it to memory. Then type it into the computer and hit the return key.”

Omar chose the last eight digits of his old phone number; this wasn’t like a password that needed to be difficult for an adversary to guess.

When he was done, Cathy led him into an adjoining room, closing the door behind them. “There are some tools here,” she said, pointing to a bench-top. “I’d like you to open up that gray box, plug in the unit beside it with the ribbon cable, press the red button, wait for the LED to turn green, then remove the unit and reseal the box.”

Omar wasn’t sure how much of this related simply to dexterity and the ability to follow instructions, and how much would be measuring something more elusive, but he set about completing the task. To release the cover of the box, he needed to apply a fair bit of pressure with the Phillips-head screwdriver to keep it from slipping as it turned, and the red button was recessed in a hole so deep and narrow that neither his fingers nor the screwdriver could reach it, requiring him to use a tool like a blunt needle to prod it. When he did, a red light came on at the top of the panel. He stared at it for what must have been two minutes, trying not to let his anxiety show, but just when he was at the point of asking if he’d failed the test, the light turned green.

He unplugged the ribbon cable, and put the cover back on the box.

“Good work,” Cathy said. She opened the door and invited him back into the first room. “Now enter the same number as before into the laptop.”

Omar typed the digits with scrupulous care, afraid that if he made a mistake some kind of siren would start blaring and he’d be ejected from the building before he had a chance to correct the error. When he hit the return key, the computer responded: Match.

Cathy said, “All right, then. You want to join the team?”

“Absolutely.”

She opened a new program on the laptop, and said, “Hold down the authorization button on your camera.” Omar complied, and the view of his head from the device on his right shoulder appeared on the screen. “Your feed will be logged alongside my own, and the other people you’re working with. Are you okay with that?”

“Yes.”

“Come back tomorrow, eight o’clock sharp.”

Omar walked out into the sunshine. He raised his face to the sky, letting the warmth strike his skin, and closed his eyes. When he opened them and looked down, it was a struggle to spot any changes. One camera-less woman, far down the street, was wearing a different dress. A poster for a music festival stapled to an electricity pole had changed color, from salmon pink to green.

When he got home, he walked down to number 71 to see how Mrs. Capaldi was. She’d just washed a load of laundry, so he helped her hang it out.

“Can I sweep the floors?” he asked. He could see that her back had been playing up.

“Thank you.”

When he was done, she made him a cup of tea and they sat in the kitchen.

“I got a job today,” Omar told her.

“You’re too young to be working,” she scolded him.

“I’ll go back to school when it opens. But this is important; I’ll be loading new software into the broadband nodes. Eventually we’ll have the internet working again.”

Mrs. Capaldi looked dubious. “Have you studied enough to do that?”

Omar laughed. “I didn’t say I wrote the software! They just need people who are stable enough to install the same version all along the network.”

“Hmm.”

Omar drained his cup. “Can I write something for you in your diary?”

“Nothing happened to me today,” she said. “Just make something up.”

“I can’t do that.” Omar fetched the engraving tool, and a fresh sheet of copper from the stack in the living room. “Tell me what you want me to write.” He had no wish to invade her privacy, but her hands were too shaky to do the job herself, and there was no need for the record to contain anything especially intimate, or even true. She just needed to pin a few things down, enough to stay in touch with the world around her.

“I had a dream about my husband last night,” she recalled. “He was shoving all our vinyl LPs into the microwave.”

Omar started engraving.

As he was preparing to leave, he asked, “I can’t get you to wear a camera?” He wasn’t sure if anyone had raised the subject with her before.

Mrs. Capaldi grimaced. “No, that’s not for me.”

“All right. I’m sure someone will drop in to see you tomorrow.”

“It will be you, Omar, won’t it?”

He didn’t want to quibble. “More or less.”

At home, he reheated the leftovers from the night before; they had some different spices than the ones he’d used himself, but they were still quite tasty.

He was washing up when he heard the key in the lock. He dried his hands and turned toward the kitchen doorway.

“How’s it going?” the man asked, with a kind of forced breeziness. “I’m Tallal. What’s your name?”

“Omar.”

“Do you mind if I sit down?”

Omar gestured at a seat beside the table. “Have you eaten?”

“I’m fine, thanks.”

Omar took a seat facing his guest. “I didn’t hear a car,” he said.

“Oh, that ... ” Tallal waved the matter away. “I won’t waste your time with my whole life story,” he said. “It doesn’t matter who I am, or who you are. I just know this: you must miss your family as much as I miss mine.”

He waited for Omar to respond, but when he received no reply he continued. “I spent a few months in this house, with a kid who was a bit like you. And I did my best to look after him. But in the end, it was no life for either of us. Everyone needs their own family back.”

Omar said, “And if we could have that, don’t you think we would?”

“You’ve got something holding you down, haven’t you?” Tallal challenged him. “I scraped my own stupid shit off the wall, but every time I visit here, it’s Omar, Omar, Omar. Your namesakes don’t all look the same yet, but I can tell their story’s growing, narrowing the focus. So I know you’ve got it carved in stone somewhere.”

“Somewhere safe,” Omar agreed.

Tallal regarded him sadly. “You really don’t want to see your father again? Because you know you can’t while I’m blocking the way – through no fault of my own, trapped by all the Omars.”

Omar said, “What I know is that he’s not coming back. Whatever I want, whatever I write, whatever I do. I’ve made my peace with that.”

Tallal nodded. “I understand; you don’t want to get your hopes up. But you haven’t changed the lock, have you? What’s that all about?”

“It just means I know you’d smash the door down.”

Omar waited in the kitchen while Tallal went through the house, hunting for the engraving that he was convinced was robbing him of his happiness.

When he was done, he stood before Omar, sweating and angry.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” he said. “Because who knows what that would do to my son? But if I stick with you for long enough, I’ll find it. You know that. So why don’t you just save us both the time?”

“I had a good friend called Rafiq,” Omar said. “He helped me a lot, and then he had to leave – like you did. But I’ll tell you, honestly, I don’t believe he ever came back to this house. I think he’s living somewhere with the new friends he’s made, doing the best he can.”

“If he was your friend,” Tallal insisted, “you’d give him his son back.”

“If it was in my power,” Omar replied, “every last one of us would be reunited. But it’s not. You know in your heart that’s impossible.”

When Tallal left, Omar went to bed, propping the camera up beside him on its charger. He pictured the new grid of images being logged, his face beside Cathy and the colleagues he’d be meeting tomorrow. Most of them would be in other grids too, like he was, in an intertwined mesh of overlapping images that would only keep growing, gradually stretching out to bind the whole city together.

His mother and father, Syed and Rami, Bruno, Tuan and Rafiq, all his cousins, aunties and uncles, might be unreachable, but they’d have as much of a chance as he had to build new lives. If he gave in to his grief there would be nothing left for him but prowling the streets like Tallal, pretending he could bring them back.

If he could find a way to be happy, that would prove that it was possible that they’d found a way too. It was the only thing he could do for them now, and it had to be enough.

Table of Contents

- Title Page
- ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
- YOU AND WHOSE ARMY?
- THIS IS NOT THE WAY HOME
- ZEITGEBER
- CRISIS ACTORS
- SLEEP AND THE SOUL
- AFTER ZERO
- DREAM FACTORY
- LIGHT UP THE CLOUDS
- NIGHT RUNNING
- SOLIDITY