Chapter Forty-One: Where One Does Not Belong

As soon as he had said it Boyle knew he’d made a terrible mistake and that Bryson was in trouble. He didn’t give a fuck about Felix but he wasn’t about to betray Bryson, not unless he had to. Still, Bradlee had made it clear whom he worked for and what price he’d pay for screwing up that end of things. Caught in the middle. Nothing new there. All he had now was luck.

There was enough time to give them the heads up on the way out. Bradlee sat fuming at his desk with that funny look he had. Bradlee was good at self control but the first thing Boyle did was learn to read his eyes. There was a sadness that passed into them when they turned pink and watered up, as if he saw something very clearly, something awful he was hopeless to stop. It was easy to recognize. When Bradlee made him shoot that lawyer it had happened and each time they pried lose a little information from a doctor it had happened too.

Boyle tried not to think about it, he didn’t want to make himself sick. Trinh Ma would be able to read his mind. She warned him when he took the job that they only wanted him to do their dirty work and then, when Laraby called about the Bryson job, she warned him again. Then she was a pain in the ass about the money, always buggin him about where is it. Why don’t you have any cash. But once he started taking in the bonuses she changed her tune and shook her head and said things like, It ain’t right takin’ blood money, as if there were any other kind. What did she know? She would say whatever and leave the details to him. You can’t tell a guy to go out and make some money and then get particular about how he does it. You don’t say you’d rather die than see your kids sink deeper into the shit they had the bad luck to be born into and not expect some sort of consequences. Money comes hard in this world and unless you’re rich it doesn’t come from nothing. And he had limited talents and opportunities. Those he had he took.

She was right of course. Laraby and Bradlee were using him. And at first he fell for the money without thinking about it either. He had no idea what was at stake. By the time he figured it out he was too deep in. They could take everything away. They could kill his family.

There was no way he was killing Bryson, not unless he absolutely had to. And even then he wasn’t sure. If it came to that, why not just kill Bradlee? Ha, a good fucking joke. He knew exactly why. His life would be worth shit then. So the thing is, is to never let it get to that. That was the plan.

Bryson and Felix were sitting around blowing steam off of their coffee and yacking as usual. Boyle missed the days when it was just him and the doc. Even when Felix played sleeping beauty it was better, they could hang out, go get a bite and a beer. But when he stopped taking Paregane and Bryson started working on the report, everything changed. She got nervous, started to hold back. Well, he could forgive her that. She didn’t tell him about the key, he found out about it cause a guy in the tool shop told him about the order. Hiding it from Bradlee wasn’t hard. Boyle had been hiding out from guys like Bradlee all his life. Sure, Bradlee made him sweat, but that was nothing.

He entered the lab and their backs went stiff. Felix was reading over some silver electraweave and she was going through another sheet of gold.

Sweaty and short of breath, he looked at him and then at her, his heartbeat tight and fast. This was the crucial move then. He wasn’t sure what to do exactly. Bradlee might be watching them. Bradlee was agitated, and he’d be more agitated as he put it together. He didn’t suspect Boyle yet but he was generally suspicious. Boyle had seen it before. Bradlee would cast his net and everyone caught in it would have to go.

“What’s wrong?” Bryson asked. Boyle said nothing. Felix lifted his eyes from the electraweave and frowned. “Spit it out, Boyle,” she continued. “You’re sweating more than I am.”

“It’s Bradlee,” he said. “I’m–” now he realized he felt like a fool. If only he’d kept his mouth shut. But he hadn’t, and this was probably his only chance to make good. “I blew it doc, I’m sorry.” He was trembling. Fuck! he thought, clenching his teeth and fists, but he couldn’t control the tremors shooting through his body. He had to pee. He wanted to cry. Sparks fired off the inside of his skull. He tried breathing slowly. He imagined his heart, which thumped loudly in his ears, slowing down.

“What, Boyle?” Now she was concerned. She put down her coffee and approached him.

Boyle swallowed. Time, he thought, time. Where the fuck is the time? “I meant to defend you doc. He was saying things. That you were fucking up, sabotaging Paregane. I didn’t want yous to get in trouble, understand? So I defended you, said how good ya been ta me and then,” he blinked and his face burned, “It just came out of me, I said how you helped Medear and called your friend Velodia.”

“Oh my god,” she sat down and pushed her hair off of her forehead.

“What? What’s wrong with you two?” Felix asked.

“Now we have to send the report,” she said in a low voice. “We’ll take the hovercraft. Or the car. I’ve got the keys. Go to Velodia and warn her, then make for Leonard’s.”

Boyle didn’t like it. “Can’t take the car. Bradlee asked for it. And you gotta send a message to Velodia now. There ain’t time for nothing else.”

Bryson nodded. “I’ll send a message with the report. I’ll send the report to everyone. It doesn’t matter what happens now. Everyone will know. Felix, get your bag.”

“We’re going?”

“Yes,” Bryson shrieked. “We’re going.”

The set up was no good. He watched them work. If Bradlee had them on the screen he’d be coming down to roust him or worse, suspect them all and shut the building down. “Hurry up,” he said. Bryson sat at her desk and Felix stood by the door with a funny look on his face.

Bryson yelled, “The hovercraft’s too easy to follow.”

“Now look doc, you can’t take the car–”

“Yes we can,” said Felix. He slugged Boyle in the stomach. “Bryson, let’s go.”

Bryson came out of the office clutching her straw overnight bag and the sack of jewels, which she hung around her neck. She patted down her pockets and then looked at Boyle, wheezing at the ground.

“Oh Boyle,” she said with a gentle cry. “I’m sorry about this.”

Boyle gasped for breath. He grunted, “Hurry.”

“I’m sorry too,” Felix said, before kicking him in the face. Then he took his gun. They closed the lab door behind them quietly and made for the parking lot. The lateral took forever but next they got on the private express lift down. When they finally opened the doors to the back parking lot it was like letting air into a shuttered house. The dumpsters stank in the hot sun.

“Which one is it?” Felix asked. The running had given him a headache. Vaguely he thought, I’ve had this headache for days.

“The silver Caddy. Can you drive it?”

“No problem.” She tossed him the keys. He opened the hot metal door and swung it closed, settling into the burning black upholstery. She got in beside him and they sped down the service road towards Manhattan.

Bradlee could not believe what he was watching. What on earth was Boyle doing in the lab talking to them? Did he know what he had done? He switched on audio but couldn’t make out the conversation. Damn. Then Felix slugged Boyle. That was it. He stowed the .45 revolver and took out two automatics loaded with implosion rounds and headed out the door. They wouldn’t get far. He called security as he ran and sent them to the hovercraft lot with orders to detain them. He went straight to the lab to get Boyle. The man was on the floor, his nose bleeding and panting.

“Get up, Boyle,” he said, pointing a gun at his head.

“Oh, boss,” he grumbled.

Time, Bradlee thought. He would interrogate all three and figure out what was up. But he needed Boyle if Boyle was salvageable. “Get your breath and come into her office, Boyle.” He futzed with Bryson’s computer and watched the entrances and exits. Security were converging on the hovercraft lot. Then he saw them, entering the rear parking lot. What? he wondered. It was Bryson and Felix. “Boyle, you didn’t give them the keys, did you?” he asked, checking the chamber of his gun. He didn’t want to kill him here but he would if he gave up the car.

Boyle, wheezing still and coughing, his face smeared with blood and his eyes dazed, stood in the office door. “No boss.”

Bradlee turned towards him. His car! They were getting into his car and driving off. They had stolen his car and Boyle had given them the keys. He rarely if ever felt the rage in him but now his eyes and ears were engulfed in flame. He felt like a child about to have a tantrum. He knew that physically he appeared calm. There was no sweat or even a tightening of his jaw but he could feel it in his eyes, they were molten. His car! He had eaten a lot of shit to get that car. The enormity of their escaping in it was overwhelming. He’d have to tip off the military police or risk losing them. They were totally free to go wherever they wished. The car had top clearance, they wouldn’t have to slow down, and it couldn’t be monitored or traced. It would probably even block the neuronanobot from transmitting. Shit, they’d be out of range in fifteen minutes anyway. He looked at Boyle. Boyle the traitor, the inconsequential, incompetent, sentimental little shit. Standing there, twitching, rubbing his face. Before he killed him he had to know the details. “Why’d you give them the keys, Boyle? Let’s have the whole thing. If you know what’s good for you.”

“I didn’t boss, I didn’t do nothing. I came by just to tell ’em I wouldn’t be here, that you and me was going out. Then the fucker slugs me. And I never gave ’em no keys.” He was cowering. “Don’t point that thing at me, boss, unless your planning on using it. Just shoot me now, then. But I swear I never did nothing.” He stared at Bradlee with a weird look of hostility and resignation. Then he fumbled in his pocket. “I’m gonna take ’em out now, real slow, so you can see.” Bradlee stared him in the eye, aiming the gun at his pupil. The keys jingled. He held out his other hand and lowered the gun.

“Where’s your gun, Boyle?”

He patted his pockets and looked sheepishly up at Bradlee, shaking his head. “I guess it ain’t my day. They got the gun.”

“Come on. We have work to do. Go get that box you use to monitor the neuronanobots and a couple of guns. And don’t bring anything fancy, powerful will do. Then meet me at Bryson’s hovercraft.”

“We’re going after them?”

Bradlee took a breath and looked around the lab. An urge to wreck it rippled through his head and vanished. He breathed again, slower. “Not yet. We have other work to do first.” Boyle narrowed his eyes. “If you don’t want a bullet in the back of the head you’d best get moving and do everything I say.” Then, darkly, against his will, he muttered, “You’re all I have at the moment.”

“Do you know how to drive?” Bryson asked as Felix jerked away from the curb and sped off.

“Sure, I can drive. But I don’t know where I am.”

“Queens.”

“How do I get to the city? How do I navigate this thing?” He searched around for the navigation equipment but every time he took his eye off the street he nearly went off the road. The accelerator, brake and steering wheel were all in place. It had been years since he’d driven a car but he had gotten good at freeform in his twenties. He’d played with cars all his life. He got his first drive simulator for christmas when he was three. He played Race Car and DemoDerb and had RemoteControlPatrol, a fleet of black police cars with yellow bubble lights and tail fins, which he and his father spent a few months racing in the park. Then there was the show Highway Doom, the road movie fad, especially Road Rage 3. He and Veronica used to have sex in cars on weekends. But this was not like that. He was pressed right up against it now, there was nothing between him and it. He had to keep the narrow street in his eyes and drive as fast as he could without crashing into walls that looked like they were about to slice them in half. Then zip, 50 centimeters on either side.

Bryson looked around on the dash and the floor. “These don’t have navigation equipment. He just drives it.”

“If I can get us into the city I can get us onto the highway to somewhere.”

“Follow this street. It gets wider up ahead and feeds onto the bridge, the Queensboro, into town.”

Felix leaned back in the seat a bit. He checked the mirrors, then sat up straight and started craning his head around. The hood was huge. “Won’t they come after us?”

“I don’t know what he’ll do. Here, take this.” She handed him an ampoule of silver liquid. “It’s BiteStop. For the bugs. We’re going to Leonard’s. I’m not sure he can follow us there. I have to think. I sent her a warning, with the report.”

“What happened?” he asked, facing her briefly. She was grinding her teeth. She looked like a human being now. Scared. Maybe he should be scared too. But his head hurt too much and then there was the road, looming. Nothing mattered. As it always does.

Low industrial buildings with broken windows went by. They shot up a composite ramp onto a metal causeway and then out over the river on the suspension bridge. He had a sense of the wheel now, of the gas. There were other cars on the bridge. He scanned the sky ahead and in the mirrors for police. It will all be over soon. Bryson said, “Bradlee knows we’re old friends. He figured it all out from that. He had it all anyway.”

“All what out? What was Boyle talking about?”

“Velodia is a friend of mine. A psychiatrist. I went to her last year to see if she would help stop transcryptasine. She got doctors not to prescribe it.”

“What doctors?”

“Any she could persuade. There was a conference in Lackawanna PA. She invited psychiatrists, doctors, top people mostly, but it filtered down. Bradlee knows I know Velodia. He’s met her. They hated each other. One of the worst weekends of my life. Leonard was there. Anyway, Bradlee’s first night back on the job he asked me about her and I lied. Then I neglected to tell Boyle not to say anything about helping his daughter get into Cornell. I was preoccupied.”

“With what?”

They were off the bridge, on the narrow streets between the walls of luxury high rise glass, along the walkways he had haunted while living in Midtown.

“You, things. I wanted, want, out. Everything I’ve done would appear to have been directed toward that end. But I don’t remember now if there was a plan. The intention was, that is, I thought I could manage things, to control events in such a way that people wouldn’t get hurt and I could escape.”

He eructated a laugh. “So, what’s the new plan?”

“Let’s just head west on 80. Figure out from there.”

Boyle sat squashed in the hovercraft. Bradlee was talking to him. He didn’t sneer but Boyle knew an unexpressed sneer when he heard it.

“Let’s just run through the program here, shall we?” said Bradlee. “Then we have an errand in Midtown.”

“What’s that?”

“Your colleague, Zack. Was that his name?” Boyle didn’t answer. Even cramped in the bubble Bradlee hadn’t lost his cool. He didn’t sweat or look inconvenienced, scrunched over reading the list of coordinates. When he reached August he slowed down and said, “That’s it, August 17th. The day she left for the GMZ. She stopped first at Cornell.” He rubbed his forehead, huffed a little and looked out the window. “Call home. Tell them you won’t be home for a couple of nights.”

“But–”

“Shut up and do as I say.”

The hovercraft surged forward and up before Boyle could get his belt buckled. He looked at the East River and felt woozy. He felt afraid and started to look out the windows for missiles or aircraft. Every boat, every window implied a position, a blind from which to shoot. It could come at them from anywhere. An old man fishing off a boat. A rusty water tanker. A tugboat towing barges.

Soon they were landing on the street, by a pile of garbage, stirring the flies into a hovering black cloud, and a few toothless, filthy men and women sharing a jar of wine.

“Are you sure you wanna do this boss? We took the PCP here.”

“We won’t be long.” He turned to Boyle with a scowl. “Try not to piss me off any more than you already have, Boyle.”

Boyle scratched his mustache and sneezed. “What’s it we want from Zack, boss? He ain’t into unannounced visits.”

“He surely won’t be into this one.”

They got out and the foul smelling drunks stared first at them, then at the hovercraft. Boyle’s gut tightened. This was all wrong. Sure, they were weak, easy to dispose of; but as soon as he and Bradlee were out of sight they’d disassemble the hovercraft. What then? Bradlee looked like sharing the air with them was dirty, but he smiled, like he was down right cheery and said, “Good afternoon gentlemen. Ah, and lady.”

The tall one in the middle, with long mats of black hair, smiled and started to laugh.

“Toil not nor trouble my friends,” Bradlee continued. They moved closer. Boyle swallowed another sneeze, which exploded in his chest. Bradlee the tough guy, holy fucking christ. Brainy bosses. As long as they have their torpedo for back up. Like little dogs in the park, always picking fights with their yapping. Boyle put his hand on the butt of his gun and released the safety. Bradlee cleared his throat. “So you see my friends, you have two choices.” Shut up shut up, they don’t respect you, they’re laughing at us. “You can keep your filthy, stinking paws off of my hovercraft, or you can die.” He took out his gun and pointed it at the big one’s head, squeezing his left eye shut to take aim. The man’s expression didn’t change. His eyes were jaundiced and bloodshot. They swelled a little in his head and sweat beads formed on his upper lip. He looked into the barrel of the gun. Then he stared into Bradlee’s eyes and Bradlee’s eyes started to water. Bradlee smiled and asked, “Deal then?”

“No problem,” the big one said. “We’re just having a drink here.” He hooked his finger into the handle of the glass jug, hoisted it up and gave it a shake.”Good. When we return, if you have the, er, balls to remain, there’ll be a monetary reward for your cooperation. Good day then.” He nodded, uncocked the gun and holstered it. “Come Boyle. Which of these, abodes, is Zack’s?”

“This way.”

They walked slowly up the creaking stairs. The walls of the hallway were just wide enough to walk through without brushing up against the side. Things scurried around past their feet. “Rather dark and noisome. At his prices you’d think he could afford better?”

Boyle panted behind him “Beats me. I’d better go first.”

“I was about to propose that. Now, I’ll need a word with him before you shoot him.”

“Shoot him!”

“Don’t act so surprised Boyle, it’ll tarnish your image.”

“I can’t do that.”

“Why not?”

“He’s my friend.”

“A business friend.”

“So what.”

“There are no friends in business.”

They came to the door. Boyle hesitated. How was he ever going to shoot his friend? Zack was a good guy. Poor Zack. So paranoid, so careful. And he’d given his word. Boyle knocked.

“Who’s that with you?” came a child’s voice.

“You didn’t mention that Zack was a child,” Bradlee whispered.

“Would it make a difference? He’s my boss, Zack.”

“Your boss is a woman.”

“He’s her boss.”

“Sounds serious,” said the voice, now deep and smooth. A chorus of hoots and laughs battered the door as it opened. Zack was seated behind the desk sorting through stacks of photographic negatives under a large magnifying glass mounted on a FlexiStem. “What do you need now, Boyle?”

Bradlee smiled and pushed forward, surveying the dark, hot room crammed full of equipment, with feigned interest. A naked bulb dangled from a wire just above his head. When he moved his hair brushed against it and it swung back and forth. “Quite a place you have here.”

“I do all right.”

“Synthetic voice?”

“Not only that, I’ve got an electronic turbocharged mAXiflEX RealFluid discharge dildo device with 10 billion synthetic nerve connections in the glans and head.” Up popped a steel rod between his legs. “Oh, Bradlee!” he cried, jerking it off.

“I’m amused,” Bradlee said. “Tell me. Have you had any occasion to share information about our dealings with anyone in the trade?”

“The man is worried, I can tell. He didn’t come here to ask a lot of stupid questions,” Zack said.

“Boyle.”

Boyle swallowed hard. His breathing was bad. He sniffled and pulled out the gun. He looked at Bradlee’s head, at the light bulb turning his hair yellow. There was no way out of this. He took pity on Zack, who was amusing himself by talking in rapid, squeaky tones back and forth, pretending to be mad, his synthetic eye roving up and down Bradlee’s body, clacking his hands and jaw. There was no point in torturing him. Boyle took aim at his head. “I hate to do this, Zack.”

Zack swung around to face Boyle and opened his real, human eye wide. “Boyle,” he croaked in his own voice. “What are you doing?”

“His job,” said Bradlee.

Zack swept the photographs and magnifying glass off of the table and frantically hit at buzzers on his console and desk. Lights popped on and there was a sound of engaging gears, of wheels spinning on wire and pneumatic sighs and puffs. “We trusted you! The war Boyle, the war!”

Before whatever it was he was setting off with the buzzers could happen, Boyle took very careful aim at the human part of Zack’s head.

“Get on with it Boyle,” Bradlee said.

Bam! The gun had a light snap and wasn’t even loud. The charge entered Zack’s head and imploded, crushing the flesh and bone inward so that blood poured out of his crumpled face and down his chest while the real parts sagged away from the metal.

“I shouldna done that,” said Boyle.

“It does show rather bad character to shoot a friend. Let’s go.”

Felix arrived at the George Washington Bridge with a banging headache. Every now and then a spark moved around in front of his eyes. There were a few delivery trucks in the commercial lanes but the ramp to the private entrance was empty. Guards manned the old metal turrets and peered out through slits in the composite walls on either side of the approach. Mounted on the walls were curved blades of steel, reflecting glints of sunlight. Blinds above these emitted scatter rays. Eyes in the roadbed registered vehicles. He guided the car up the ramp and into the tight ceramic and crystal booth wondering if it was going to be the last thing he ever did. They were naked before the law now. If Bradlee had reported the car stolen they would know momentarily. Without incident the car passed through the scanning web and they were going forty above the Hudson. He glanced down at the white wake of the amphibatrains and at little boats. They were airborne, gliding out over the Hudson, arcing to the end of the bridge, where they entered a series of exchanges. In no time they were doing 75 down InterState 80.

“Man!” he said. “I’ve never done this for real. The highway in Canada is automated. Have you?”

“No. Well, I rode on the back of a motorcycle once on the autobahn and we had cars growing up. Bradlee took me places.”

“The car is cleared for travel without a registered route and destination.”

“Fully armoured, assassination proof, ElectroShield filtration and deflection devices. We’re invisible.”

With a pang he recognized this part of Jersey. There was a billboard for the CarPark. Another for the Antique Barn and Cafe. Behind one of the exits lay Pocono Village.

“Isn’t this where you and Veronica lived after college?”

She knew so much about him. His whole life, inside and out. There was no part of him she hadn’t taken the measure of. But he knew nothing about her. She was this remote anomaly of a human being. There was no evidence she was even real. He had only seen her in the presence of Boyle and Bradlee. They could easily all have been aliases. Except that one time in Cafe Bereshit. Others saw them then. They ate, they drank. They interacted physically. And they had not yet invented substance projection. He said, “Yeah.”

“And you were happy here, right?” He nodded. He couldn’t take his eye off of one of the sparks. It wanted him to follow it. “Why did you leave?”

“Money.” She nodded and looked out the window at the composite wall, like a dam holding back a green ocean wave of trees, ailanthus, pine and maple wrapped in kudzu. Every kilometre a billboard leered at them, projected out into the road like Wyndham Lewis teeth, withdrawing as they passed. The road was like a hook, the kind Egyptian embalmers used to extract the king’s brain through the nose.

The spark shot out to the left, hovered in the distance and then did a few loops before vanishing at the extreme right of his peripheral field of vision. Words bubbled up out of his mouth. “Paregane has nothing to do with Umbra or Grembo or Onto or Vovulos. Umbra and Grembo and Onto are just words. Some elusive totality or hopelessly fragmented entity. So your eye tells you at this energy level or distribution or at the conjunction of these two fields in twelve dimensions this or that occurs. I know all about the wobbles in numbers. It’s what I used to do. I had a knack for it. You watch for patterns of the drone and define a threshold. But its not Dodecahedron or Tetrahedron it’s the garden, where we don’t belong. A glitch, a moment of Grembo, and it’s zip, flatline, nothing there. But you don’t see a man ripped to pieces by dogs.”

“Dogs, or angels?”

A spark skittered down the highway going about twice as fast as he was, but it didn’t recede properly, it never changed size nor did it disappear into the vanishing point. She seemed to genuinely like him but what was that desperation and guilt? He did not want to be her moral scourge or aid in her expiation. Their relationship was much more sinister than that of doctor and patient. They were established together by something horrible to each of them. It was not benign happenstance that brought them here. There were agencies involved. Agendas and catastrophes. And if it included as some essential component the doctor-patient relationship, then where was his aspirin?

The only way he could doctor her sickness was by becoming the medicine himself, the homeopathic dose, hatred diluted to near nothingness, till a mere memory of the ripple remained to induce its opposite. She probed and measured with her eyes and fingers but in her gut she was screaming for punishment and forgiveness. And he had, except for the murder attempt, refused both.

The sun scorched the hills of recombinant pines. Thunderheads were blooming on the horizon. “Angels,” he said, “are dogs. Thrones, Dominations, Princedoms, Virtues, Powers. Plastic form amuses them. To them we are the rubes of physical existence. You’ve opened a door into a dimension where we aren’t wanted.”

“So you really do believe that Veronica didn’t trough out in Grembo. But she wasn’t eaten alive by angels either.”

“No. She became a bird and flew away. She was mad, right? Lovers, poets and lunatics. Everyone goes to Paradise. Is this your lucky day?”

She winced against the glass briefly and then, after ignoring him for a few minutes, said, “To betray you.”

“I’ve thought that over a lot. In my memory I think of him as weeping but I know this isn’t true. He’s watching, all the time. Not sad, not happy. not anything at all. His physical and mental awareness are indivisible. Matter, soul, being, endlessly recycled through the universe, dispersed and gathered in again.”

They drove along. He relaxed into monotony. She said, “Who’s he?”

“He?”

“Yeah, in your story, he.”

He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel and stretched his back. “Him I guess is me.”

He looked at her. She was affectless. The tinted light brightened and shadowed on her face and her eyes were fixed on the air. Sometimes she became physically agitated, as if she could not contain whatever thought she was having. She wiggled briefly and coughed loudly, mumbling something in the aftermath that he just couldn’t make out. Finally, after a bout of agita, she said, “So, do you think we should just go straight to Leonard’s? He’ll know what to do. That’s what Velodia will do when she gets the message.”

“They’re coming after us.”

“Bradlee’s very thorough. When he sees she’s gone he’ll try to track her down and then come for us. It will buy us time.”

“How long by hovercraft’s the trip?”

“About two hours. If he takes a hovercraft.”

“And how far by car to Leonard’s?”

“I have no idea. How fast can you drive?”

Felix gave it some more gas. The speedometer went as high as 140. A red line was stretched out beneath the slanted numbers. Assuming the 140 is miles per hour, how many k would that be? Was it 2.2? Or was that pounds to kilos? 1.75. 1.75 k to the mile. Or 9/5ths? Double and add thirty. That’s 310 kph. It did not matter, he was having a hard enough time steering at hundred.

He had no sense of connection to the events of the past hours. He had no connection to the events of the past days, weeks, months. When was it he only wanted to die? Now he had no goal, no Paregane. His only feeling was the desire to walk away from things. He had wanted to walk away from the lab but stayed because Bryson said he’d be in danger if he left. But he doubted that would have mattered at all had she not been writing the report. Veronica’s ass. So perfect! There simply was no other ass like it anywhere on earth and yet it would always appear now covered by Sammael’s reptilian haunches, claws dug into the soil, tail switching back and forth. Stung by scorpions, creeping like a toad through the red and black wasteland, mountains ever receding. And the man, gazing out at nothing. His life there was really over. He could tell the story over and over and it would only make less sense. Maybe what he had said was right. Death would not reunite them. Everything he learned in the garden could be a lie. The structure of existence, the dimensions of reality, the hosts of intelligences, consciousness pulsing through the universe, the one radiation of being dispersed, the field of love, all a lie. It would never end, this playing of prosecution and defense. Chiasmus. A lifelong trial. Thoughts were in session but there was nothing sweet about it.

Veronica, after all, was innocent. Real or not she had, for whatever reason, stayed. They were no longer the same type of entity. There was only one overlap, his highest touching her lowest. The hem of her garment. They were united and untied by desire. She was free and he was not. He was free and she was not. Chiasmus. Dialect. They performed a play for his benefit, to release him from himself. If he could not die then could he not live? Yes, the longer the life, the longer the dying.

“What?” Bryson asked.

Her voice startled him from the road. Treetops hovered like green clouds above the high concrete and stonewalls of the highways and showers of sparks fell like snow and melted on those treetops. “I didn’t say anything.”

“Yes you did.” She smiled. “I’m going to smoke.” She rolled a cigarette and lit up. An acrid odor filled the car briefly and then was sucked out by the vents.

He had slowed to eighty. He mashed the pedal and they raced forward over the straight, smooth highway. His foot was getting tired. There were unfamiliar pains. How do you stop a car at these speeds? The drive silenced his thoughts.

The first of many roadtrains bore down on them in the rearview. Felix didn’t note the situation till it was well advanced. The highway had a shoulder and two lanes. Straddling the two lanes and coming up behind him was the grill of a six-trailer truck. Its horn blasted them forward in their seats. Felix craned around and the car drifted towards the middle of the road.

“The road!” Bryson yelled.

They were headed towards the wall. He had to speed up and straighten out. The walls were close, the turns tight. The car rocked and screeched, he pulled forward and then swerved onto the shoulder. The truck whipped by. They were walled in by black rubber, engulfed in a cloud of road dirt.

“Oh christ,” she said. “God, I just want to get there.” She blew smoke at the passenger window. It spread out flat and filled the car. “I mean, Velodia wouldn’t wait around for them to show up. Right? She’d read the message and get the hell out. And the only place she could go would be Leonard’s. Velodia has to understand that they are coming to get her.” She looked at him apprehensively but he said nothing.

A car approached. It was small, distant in the rearview mirror. “So, at some point, we have to turn north. Do you know what highway I should take?”

“Beats me.” She rolled down the window and flicked the cigarette butt out. It skittered away. Wind whoomfed into the car and roared in their ears.

“There’s a car behind us. What makes you so sure he won’t report us to the police?”

“Well, it’s like this. Bradlee can’t afford for us to talk to anyone. He’ll want to take care of things because he won’t want the people he works for to think he fucked up. I was supposed to fix transcryptasine if I could, but the important thing is to not have any contrary finding, nothing in writing or official that could be used as evidence in court. Transcryptasine, for Bradlee, was a just a means to an end, a council seat. He works for this general, Priss Valdez, as well as for Monozone. They’re an alliance, a power bloc. Without Bradlee they’re nothing, but the power is in their hands. He has no army; he has no money to speak of. Rich, yes. But Fripp controls a fortune. Valdez has ten thousand troops under her command, loyal to her. So if Bradlee fails, they’ll kill him. If he kills us first, he can do one of two things: disappear with his money, or, if the situation is salvageable, move onto the next game. But he won’t trust anyone else. He won’t send the army or police after us.”

A red light on the dash flashed and the car said, “Danger. Approaching vehicle.” The car slowly filled the rearview. Felix found himself becoming absorbed in the side and rearview mirrors. He watched the curved walls vanish and open. “Why is that car following us? Could he have gotten another car?”

“Sure. But we don’t know that it is following us.”

The official markings only became clear when it was right on his bumper and moved into the left lane to pass. As it pulled up alongside, Felix pushed down harder on the pedal and they surged ahead to 120. The other car accelerated to keep up. It was a blue car, marked state highway patrol. A uniformed man in the passenger seat was grinning, darkly, behind the tinted glass. When he had Felix’s eye he gave him the thumbs up. They slowed down and became a speck in the rearview mirror. Felix swallowed hard. “I thought I was going to throw up,” he said.

A sign read, Highway North Next Exit. He hit the brakes too hard. They surged against the seatbelts and took the exit, jerking down through a spiral ramp into a warren of roads and tunnels with scanning devices and speed bumps, electric gates opening and closing behind them. A sign above read, CAUTION Rough Road

Unprotected Boundaries.

It was a rough road. The tires thudded in and out of potholes. There were no walls and the countryside stretched out in all directions. It had been a hot spring in the city but out here it had rained incessantly. The low areas were flooded. He almost wrecked the car hitting a cavernous pothole concealed by water. Water splashed up over the roof and mud poured in streams down the windshield. He slowed down to almost nothing to cross running creak beds. Off to either side were woods and farmland. The high land was ploughed, dark brown, bright feathery green with young corn and soybeans, but the hollows and valleys were tracts of mud, water reflecting broken sun and cloud. The trees awoke in their new leaves, lush and full. Clouds collided in the distance. Rain fell on the hills that marked the horizon.

They came to an enormous sign. Large black letters on a white background, in another language. Underneath, in smaller letters, was the translation:

Welcome to Iroquoia

Land of the Haudenosaunee

Est. 1390

Territory of The Cayuga. Come and Go in Peace.

There were no towns, only stands of trees concealing isolated farmsteads. Enormous roadtrains full of logs lumbered by, burying them in wakes of mud. The farms diminished in size and the road passed over brown, swollen rivers. Raptors and vultures circled overhead. Trees grew up to the edge of the highway. They passed through a village that had been burnt to the ground. All the people were gone. Their homes were piles of wet black wood. Then there were wrecks, of roadtrains, hovercraft and charred trucks under blankets of poison ivy. They slowed and drove around big cracks in the roadbed. Finally they came upon a barrier of parked trucks parked across the highway. Makeshift guard towers were built on either side. They looked up through the windshield at rifles pointed down at them.

“I can’t run it,” Felix said.

“No.”

Two uniformed men approached. Felix rolled down his window and attempted an affable look, feeling for his innocence. The men were young, under twenty, clean-shaven and very nervous. They smiled, despite the fact that they had drawn their weapons and were pointing them at Felix’s head.

“This is an official state car,” one of the men said. Felix didn’t know how to answer.

The other said, “And a beaut.”

“Who do you work for, sir?”

“Uh–”

“Who are you?” asked Bryson.

“Cayuga Militia.”

“We’re headed to Keuka lake.”

“I can’t let any state vehicles pass ma’am, unless you state your business.”

“It’s not actually a state vehicle. And we’re here on private business. My husband’s a GMZer.”

They conferred. “We have to search the car. Go on up ahead. About a quarter mile up the road, past these trucks, is a guardhouse. We need to ask some questions.”

The guards got in the trucks and drove them apart so they could pass. The ground about was cratered mud. They parked in front of the guardhouse and were led from the car by two teenagers in clean blue jeans, black t-shirts and blue-visored caps. Clouds of biting black flies descended on their heads. The BiteStop prevented most of them from stinging. Other guards milled about in partial silver armor and with CellPack helmets. They looked thrown together. An air of informality prevailed.

The guardhouse was made of corrugated composite with a flat, solar-paneled roof and a crooked metal chimney. In the distance windmills turned slowly. Alongside, an elderly man squatted on a slab of concrete, washing out pots and dishes in a blue enamel tub beneath a gushing spigot. He looked up at them briefly and went back to working up a pile of soap bubbles and rinsing them off, setting the clean plates down in a stack.

Inside was a metal desk with a green blotter, two wooden chairs and a pot bellied stove. There was an air conditioning unit with a rattle and a couple of slowly spinning ceiling fans. It smelled of sweat and smoke and frying pork.

At the desk sat a middle-aged man in uniform reading a sheet of gold electraweave. He was big, dark skinned, with long, greyish-black hair spread out on his shoulder. His earlobes were pierced and distended. The uniform was peacock blue, crossed by a crimson sash with gold braid. After a minute he looked up from the desk at them and nodded.

“Sit down,” said one of the guards behind them. Felix took the chair on the left and Bryson took the one on the right. The man stared at them with a stern, but not unfriendly face and took out a pouch of dark tobacco. Slowly he rolled a long, thick cigarette, trimmed one end, admired it and applied a flame, which flared up on the loose tobacco threads. He blew smoke at the ceiling and sighed. “We don’t get many cars through here and those we do get aren’t like yours. You don’t look like officials, you look like spies. But spies don’t drive up in cars like that either. Spies come on donkey carts, dressed like Amish farmers, you understand? Spies try to fool us and we try to catch them. So I don’t know what you are. Fugitives?

Bandits? Fugitives are desperate enough to try this but bandits,” he spread his hands and smiled, “only bandits are smart enough to steal a car like that and stupid enough to think they can get away with it. How’m I doing?”

Felix, squinting at the light, said, “We stole the car but we’re not bandits.”

“Am I supposed to find your honesty refreshing? Whoever you stole it from most likely regards you as a bandit. And consider this. If you stole the car, what else will you steal? No doubt you needed it. But you’ll need other things too, money, food, weapons.”

Bryson said, “I’m sorry officer. My name is Dr. Ruth Bryson. This is my patient Mr. Felix Clay. What is your name sir?”

“Hmm. Always an interesting question. General Black Cloth in my current capacity.”

“General Black Cloth. We are not working for state. We are on an urgent mission. A colleague of mine, Dr. Quap Velodia of Cornell, is in great danger. We are heading up to meet her at my husband’s, Dr. Leonard Bryson, on Keuka Lake. He’s an eighth nation Sachem. Dennis Blanpied can vouch for him.”

General Black Cloth smoked a little and nodded. “Who’s Dennis Blanpied?”

“He’s a sheriff from Salamanca.”

General Black Cloth nodded again. “Send in Baker, will you?” he asked one of the guards. Baker, a middle aged man running to fat, sweating in his shabby silver armor, entered the hut huffing loudly.

“Ja sir?” he asked, coming to attention somewhat and wiping the sweat off of his pale forehead.

“You know the Blanpieds in Salamanca?”

“Ja sir. Ich went to de university mit a couple of ’em. We were neighbors.”

“You know Dennis the sheriff?”

“Ja sure. Ich went to his wedding. We hunt together sometimes, him und his brothers und me. Ich know him well.”

“Ne. See if you can’t track him down and ask about this Dr. Bryson.” He turned to them and smiled. “This could take a while.”

“Mind if I smoke?” Bryson asked. Felix wished then that he smoked. Maybe it would help the aching in his head and eyes. Maybe it would clear something up. He looked around uneasily. He wasn’t really afraid but he had never been in such a place. It felt rough, thrown together. The police weren’t intimidating at all. Behind General Black Cloth, and mostly blocked by his wide, square body, was a window with a crack in it. It looked out onto a muddy, weedy field. There were wrecked hovercraft and trucks piled up and heaps of garbage. A man ran in.

“We can’t get anything open to search,” he said.

“What’s in the car?” the general asked.

“I don’t know,” Felix answered, squeezing the bridge of his nose.

A large blue blob of light passed between them.

“Beats me,” Bryson said.

“What kind of doctor are you?”

“Research scientist. Drugs, the brain.”

“So you don’t do ingrown toenails and that kind of thing?” She shook her head. “I knew it wasn’t my luck day. Here. Have one of mine,” he said, watching her go for a pack of tailor-mades. His face subtly challenged her to take a pinch of the black tobacco.

“I’ve had your tobacco.”

His eyes became bright with surprise and delight. “There’s nothing like it, no?”

“Indeed not. This is your own?”

He shook his head. “No. A neighbor’s been working my field the past few years. I’ve got no time. This business with the water is killing us. It never ends, does it? They’ve been after our water from the start. So you say your husband’s a chief? I haven’t heard his name.” He took a pinch of tobacco and spread it out evenly on a rolling paper.

“Yes. It’s all very new.”

“I was at the council meeting in Onondaga but I have to say, I can’t keep the names straight. Anyway, you ought to know a little more about what’s going on here than most folks down there do.” He licked the edge and sealed the cigarette, rolling it between his fingers.

“I haven’t seen him in months. On the phone we watch what we say.” He pinched the end and handed her the cigarette. “Thank you,” she said.

“No doubt that’s why you’re alive. You?” he asked Felix, holding up the pouch.

“No thanks.”

He scrutinized Felix for a while. Felix felt that he was being probed. His eyes pinged. His throat caught. He had been feeling relaxed and in no immediate danger. He was watching it all unfold, their flight from the lab, stealing the car, the drive, as a sort of adventure that was happening to someone else. He was just a guy with a headache and lights dancing in his eyes. Some other guy had his foot on the pedal and hands on the wheel. He knew, intellectually, that Bradlee was a threat, that he had wanted to euthanize him, but there was no fear in him. More curiosity than anything. But when the general started to stare at him, narrowing his eyes, practically sniffing the air, he felt himself materialize, as if he were slowly assembling in the air, tile by tile, like a digitalized image.

The general nodded obscurely and said, “My grandmother would have known what to make of you. She had that old fashioned something or other. Just by being around someone she could tell you all about them. I don’t really have it though, just a hunch maybe, about people.” He shook his head. “It would come in handy here on the job, wouldn’t it? To see with the inner eye, to hear the thoughts of another, to know what goes on behind the face of things. A sense of certainty. Compared to that these feeling I get are very primitive. Still, it seems to me you aren’t quite right in some way. And you,” he turned to Bryson. “You are a bit of a witch!” He laughed. “Forgive me. It’s the white hair. For us, you know, white animals are both holy and terrifying. If you go in for that kind of thing. Up here, the old stories are still true. So. Your husband’s a GMZer?”

Bryson looked like she was about to lose her mind. Felix heard her heart pounding. Sweat poured down her temples and she crossed and uncrossed her feet. She sucked down the cigarette and swallowed hard, searched the bare, water stained walls. “Yes,” she said, forcing a smile. “He’s got an old vineyard up and running.”

“Terrible rains last summer. How’d he survive?”

Bryson smiled genuinely now. “Oh, General Black Cloth, you don’t expect a wily old witch like me to fall for that? It was a terrible drought till September and then October was dry right through to the end. We irrigated of course and brought in a small but sweet harvest, which he distilled into grappa. Stop by some time for a drink.”

He shifted around in his chair and laughed. “I told you I was no good at it!”

Baker came in with the phone, the door slamming behind him. “Here, Ich got him, but der sound’s nein gut.”

General Black Cloth took the phone and said to Baker, “Get these folks something to drink.” Then he shouted into the phone, “Hae’.” After talking for sometime he handed Bryson the phone. “He wants to talk to you.”

“Hi, Dennis?”

Through the roar of a motorcycle she heard his voice, small and distant. “Ruth, you’re in a jam there. I did my best, but you’re going to have to pay him. You got any money?”

“Jewels.”

“That’s even better. He’ll want four thousand bucks but don’t give him a dime over three. What’s going on?”

“I can’t explain. Go to Leonard. Tell him Bradlee’s coming after me and Velodia.”

“Who’s that? Vel-what?”

“Velodia. He’ll know. Bradlee’s after her. I’m in trouble.”

“I’m on my way.”

She handed the phone back to General Black Cloth, cleared her throat and took a steaming cup of kaffe from Baker. “You know, General, it occurs to me I should have offered to help out here with a little, uh, donation. This place is quite nice for a border crossing, but you fellows could probably use a few things.” She reached into her tunic and pulled out the velvet bag. “Would two of these help out?” She placed two tiny diamonds on the desk.

He looked at them with curiosity, picked each one up and examined it against the light. He took out a jeweler’s glass from the top drawer of the desk and squeezed it with his right eye. “These are very good. But with four we could totally renovate.”

She sipped her coffee and looked at Felix. “I bet a lot of folks cross over through the woods, or fly in.”

“If you look out the window behind me you’ll see that we have the skies pretty well covered. But the woods are a problem.”

“Four thousand’s quite a lot for me. I’m just a scientist, after all. But I have a few smaller stones here. Those there are worth about two thousand. This sapphire here goes for at least five hundred. Twenty five hundred is reasonable I think.”

He shrugged. “That’s a little low for us. We Gayogoho:nq are poor. We have to defend the southern door with whatever we can get. Twenty five hundred isn’t an insult, mind, just insufficient. Thirty eight hundred might squeak by.”

“That would clean me out, I’m afraid. We’ve got so many miles to go. There are bound to be other expenses along the way, especially when we cross into Canada. The Ojibwe–”

He snorted. “Dewaganha. They have a lot of toll roads.”

“You see. And I know you have no love of state.”

“I wouldn’t want to clean you out.” He scratched his face. “Thirty five hundred.”

She drank the coffee and looked at Felix again. “Well, seeing as how I’m in a hurry and all, I’ll go as high as twenty eight fifty.”

“Where are you headed again?”

“Keuka Lake.”

“And your friend, Velodia?”

“She’s at Cornell.”

“Beautiful campus. I spent four years there as an undergrad. Ag school, rural sociology. I never cared for farming.”

“The idiocy of rural life?”

He yielded to an arid chuckle. “Three thousand, not a penny less.”

She sighed sadly and looked at the bag of jewels as if it were her last possession on earth. “I suppose that’s all right. Yes, three thousand.”

She handed him another diamond. He stood and shook her hand, bowing slightly. “Is there anything else I can do?”

“That’s fine,” said Bryson.

He eyed Felix again. “I can’t shake this feeling. Have you been somewhere? Space perhaps? You have an air.”

“No sir. Just the city.”

General Black Cloth shook his head skeptically. “No, that’s not it,” he muttered. “Be careful on the road,” he said brightly, and then, seriously, “I don’t know what you two are up to. But don’t look for protection around here. Even if your husband’s an eighth nation hoya:neh. That car of yours is big trouble, understand? Anyone comes around looking for it, for you,” he stared at them. “Good luck, anyway.” He escorted them to their car. Two guards got in the trucks blocking the road up ahead and backed them off the highway. Felix eased past them, hitting the gas once they were clear. A sign obscured by vegetation said 81 North.

He couldn’t go as fast now. One by one lights moved around his eyes and vanished. He couldn’t ignore them, they commanded his attention, as if each one was significant, and yet they were nothing, mere sparks of light that vanished as quickly as they appeared.

He had to slow almost to a stop to navigate the washouts and gullies. Soon they hit a graded, dirt section that wound off between the low hills and flooded hollows. There were fields of creamy brown mud and stagnant puddles. Flocks of turkeys scattered at their approach.

“Take this for a while. There’s a turn off for Cornell. I’ve seen it from the air.” She lit a cigarette and rolled down the window. Hot air whipped around.

“Ah, my head,” he muttered. It was like an elastic band squeezing tighter and tighter. Not painful exactly, but almost worse than pain because it had pain as its ultimate end. The pain of pain to come. “Why Cornell? I thought we decided–”

“I know. I just can’t get it out of my head. I keep thinking over and over that we should go and get her before Bradlee does.”

“Look, Bryson, we’ve been over this. I don’t see how it makes sense. Either way, there’s nothing we can do.”

“Christ, it’s just not acceptable.” She was trembling.

“How much time did we lose back there?” “I don’t know.” She didn’t look at him. He glanced over at her. The tires thumped.

Her eyes were hard and fixed, like copper ore. “He’s got a hovercraft. I think we should stick to the plan.” He looked around for the windshield wipers and pushed the wash button to clean away the dirt and bug grease. That only made it worse. Between the sparks, the smeared glass, and the headache, he could barely discern the road. They came up to a running creek and he slowed to a stop. “I’ve got to wash the windshield,” he said, but she continued to stare out the window. Bryson neither talked nor moved.

Boyle sat cramped and sick. There was a horror about hovercraft he couldn’t name. It was a feeling. It was not the feeling he had of hating Bradlee. That was the sick to your stomach feeling, the feeling that you were gonna puke. That was the dizzy, Bradlee’s smell. Not BO or bad breath or that he was a farting old man. Any cop is used to that, it goes with the bad coffee and sleepless days. The dizzy sick came from the smell of lavender water, cigarettes and tailored clothes. The dizzy sick came from the odor of success.

This other feeling, it was like church. Mostly in church he slept with his eyes open. Mass was the boredom he had to put up with to stay married. But sometimes he walked into church and there was this vacuum that sucked his thoughts out and left him hollow and terrified. That was what the hovercraft did. He couldn’t name it, and that was part of the fear. Things were happening that reminded him of other things.

They were flying over nothing but creepy forests and rivers. Boyle wanted nothing to do with woods and wild animals and bugs. The bugs in the city were bad enough. But at least they mostly didn’t bite. Cock roaches and beetles he was used to. Bats, rats and clouds of gnats/ don’t bother my gal Pat/ just let me eat the seat where she just sat/ how I love to kiss the piss of her purring little cat. Funny, the songs you remember. Out here, the bugs are meat eaters. Everything out here ate meat, and he was meat. He’d seen it on the nature shows. Scavengers and predators. Wolves, coyotes, bear, cougar. What good was a gun against a three-inch hornet? And those nature shows, they didn’t show the half of it. No. Seeing wasn’t half of it. He knew his bugs from the Caspian, from Mexico. You think a man is the scariest thing on earth. What a man does to you because he can. At night, in a piece of shit hovercraft some asshole you don’t trust has been keeping together with wire and glue, in bad weather. There’s just no barrier, no protection. Even if you survive the crash. Cause that was when the animals came and got you. Lying in a wreck with a broken leg, crawling away, waiting for the enemy. The enemy at least will cut your throat after you talk. But a bear rips you to pieces. He felt his gun. He couldn’t stand to look at Bradlee or the racing ground underneath. It felt like they were the ones being pursued. It made him want to just shoot Bradlee and get out. He’d never wanted to shoot him more than now, in fact. My friend is that a gun you’re aiming at my heart? How did it go after that? Before it was just a fantasy. He’d wanted to shoot all of his bosses and once in the army he did. What a mistake that was. If they hadn’t pinned it on another guy, he’d have gone down for it and then what? It’s a gun all right but you’ve got no heart to aim at. That other guy, the Albanian, was a shit. He deserved it more than Boyle did. In the end they just named another lieutenant to break his balls. It was a straight up horizontal exchange. He couldn’t shoot them all, so what did it matter? Look a little closer it’s beating out your name. Tax rights, that was all a lieutenant was after, that and breaking his balls. There was no end of sons of bitches. So you might as well endure the one you got. It was like the world. Suicide was no way out. He shut his eyes. Geysers of blood burst around in his mind. What was happening? Shit! He imagined a large knife in his hand and he was stabbing Bradlee in the stomach. The blood pouring over his hands, warm and sticky. And the more Bradlee writhed about the better he felt. He was a killing machine. What he really wanted to do was drop to the ground and round up some sons of bitches and give each one a good prolonged beating. Then he gasped and opened his eyes. There were other hovercraft out there. That was the thing. He looked out in all directions. A bird made him cower and flinch. Any minute now they would explode. He shook his head to clear the noise. Why didn’t Bradlee say anything? The air was hot. Ever since they left the city. Zack! He groaned. His friend, boom. No fucking face. Brains, blood, metal. Hearts and bullets don’t have names. Why didn’t the vents fucking work?

He knew someone was after them, he could feel it. Somewhere in the middle of nowhere reality and paranoia collided. His heart seized up when lights and bleeps and sirens started to go off. He was half asleep, in a world of murder and revenge and exploding hovercraft when he awoke fully to the actual mayhem of the dashboard. He felt himself leaping around in his skin. His real eyes surged into his eyes and he sat upright and alert, searching around for some reason why the panel was going nuts.

“What on earth,” said Bradlee. He had been monkeying with the controls of the black box, hoping to pick up Felix’s neuronanobot again.

“I don’t know!” Boyle shouted.

“Calm down, Boyle. These things have parachutes.”

Suddenly they were surrounded by hovercraft. Bradlee sniffed. “What’s this?”

“What the fuck do you think it is!” Boyle said, nearly impaling his lip on his teeth.

A loud voice sounded in the air, “Land your craft now or we will shoot you down.”

“Land it?” Boyle shouted. He took out his gun and started to wave it around. “Motherfuckers,” he growled, taking aim.

“God damn you Boyle, relax. Calm down. Get a hold of yourself.” He pushed a button. “I don’t know what this is, but let me do the talking. Don’t start shooting till I give the order, understand? And when you do, aim for the head.”

“You don’t needa tell me that,” he said, sniffing like a dog and looking back and forth out of the windows at the other hovercraft, at the men hunched in them with helmets and rifles. They sank quickly to a clearing below.

“Indeed. Then what was your dickering with Zack all about?”

“Again boss? Zack was my buddy. Maybe it don’t mean nothin’ to yous, but to us guys, that’s everything. You don’t go and shoot a buddy for no reason at all. And even if you got a reason you don’t do it without regret.”

“Save it for later Boyle. I’m sorry I brought it up.” They were surrounded on the ground by blinking bleeping hovercraft and men in mismatched, incomplete body armour pointing assault rifles at them. “Bloody hell,” Bradlee mumbled. They got out. Boyle tried to control his hyperventilating. The enemy.

“Hands above your head, now!” They complied. Two men ran in and disarmed them. Then they were led to a guardhouse. Boyle looked at his captors with a disgust born of familiarity. The whole area around the guardhouse was filthy. Men lounged about on wooden crates eating food out of tin pots, playing cards around a composite table and smoking. There was a thin drizzle that no one seemed to mind spritzing the puddles . A waterlogged field of dead weeds and trees stretched out to a line of woods in full leaf. There were trucks blocking off the highway that ran through the camp. It was all the same, like outposts everywhere. The smell of coffee and the latrine and wood smoke, burning wires. Warlords, loyal to no one but themselves, doing the work of the highest bidder. The Third Caspian War was the worst action he had seen. He had missed the nuclear exchanges of forty years before but the ground was still hot and everyone had birth defects. He hated mud, he hated latrines and he hated retards in uniform.

Immediately they were set upon by a swarm of biting black flies. The first was like a pinprick on the back of his neck, which he slapped, leaving a red mark. “Ow,” he said. Then they came like a crescendo, each bite worse than the last. Ten, fifteen bloody bites on his neck, behind his ears and on his forehead. His hand was smeared with blood. Each fly that he smacked and killed stuck to his fingers and one by one he flicked them away. The guards stopped eating and yacking to watch and laugh. Bradlee meanwhile tried not to flinch. Boyle stopped long enough to realize only a couple had landed on Bradlee. What, had he paid them off too? Ow! He slapped again.

By the time they were seated in front of General Black Cloth he was panting from the pain and itch. The bites were swelling up into welts. He could feel them fill with fluid. They were like chicken pox. Bradlee sat fuming next to him. Boyle attempted to sum up their host. The place was an asshole. If Bradlee were smart he’d pay them whatever they asked and get the fuck out of there. They were just a rabble, undisciplined, with a vain general. Then he looked at all of the wrecked and cannibalized hovercraft and trucks strewn about behind the guard house and, more ominously, at a wooden post driven into the ground some distance off, about two and a half meters high, and what looked like fresh graves beneath the windmills.

“Gentlemen. My name is General Black Cloth. Whom do I have the honor of addressing?” He gave them a big, fake smile.

“Boyle,” Boyle said.

Bradlee looked indignantly at General Black Cloth and said, “May I retrieve an ID from my pocket?”

General Black Cloth lifted his eyebrows and Baker stepped forward. “Tell Corporal Baker which pocket.”

“Upper right, inside.”

Bradlee winced a little when Baker inserted his damp, doughy hand into his suit pocket and withdrew the black leather wallet and handed it to the general, who studied all of its contents, including several biometric and photo IDs. “Owen Bradlee?”

“Indeed.” Bradlee snapped his fingers and held out his palm. General Black Cloth didn’t budge, he didn’t breathe, he held his smile and stared at Bradlee. There was a stunned feeling in the room not at all relieved when the General started to laugh, a laugh Bradlee interrupted to ask, “Do you mind telling me what the fuck is going on here?”

“Calm down Mr. Bradlee,” the general said in a jovial voice. “No one’s looking for an international incident. Our nations, after all, are friends. We got off to a bad start there, and the first five hundred years weren’t so wonderful but the past, oh, hundred, hundred and fifty years have been quite good, despite the recent, tragic events. We wouldn’t want to spoil that, would we?” Bradlee said nothing but looked obdurate and bored. “Our people enjoy a long and eventful history together. You might say–but, you are a very important man and you didn’t come here to discuss the past. I can see that. The problem, if you want me to cut to the quick as it were, is that you’ve flown into our airspace in an unmarked hovercraft. I’m charged with bringing in all vehicles entering Iroquoia from state.”

“General Black Cloth. We are in pursuit of two fugitives. They’ve stolen my car. We, my partner Mr. Boyle and I, have good reason to believe they came through here.”

General Black Cloth nodded sympathetically and rolled a large cigarette. Boyle’s neck was on fire. Sweat rolled down his face and dripped off of his nose. He could not stop staring at the stake. If they blindfolded him and tied him to it, what would he do? Pray? Or cry out for his mother? “We haven’t seen any cars today, have we Corporal Baker.”

“Nein, general.”

“Don’t bullshit me. You see who I am. I must find these two and get my car back. When did they leave here?”

General Black Cloth shrugged. “How do I know you are who you say you are?”

“Oh, but this is preposterous. Don’t you realize I could get on the phone and in one hour level this place with an air strike?”

General Black Cloth looked startled now. “Level? This place? You mean the hut we’re sitting in? Maybe you could flatten the field!” He laughed and all the guards in the room joined in. “I just don’t see anything here that isn’t already flat.”

“Do you think I have all day to listen to your pathetic chatter? Our papers are in order. We’re here in pursuit of known criminals. You have neither the right nor the power to detain us. I must insist on the restoration of our weapons and your guarantee of safe passage. Moreover, this is territory in dispute. There is no question of your sovereignty over certain specific areas but you and I both know that state retains an interest and a recognized claim on certain specific lands in this region. Again, I insist that you yield.”

“I’m going to have to check out your ID. And these fugitives, I suppose an APB was issued with all of the usual attendant notifications, mutual security operations, extradition applications as well as a biometric profile etc.?”

“But we haven’t got the time for all of that. Perhaps they came in on foot. A tall man, quite handsome, dark reddish skin, clean shaven, early forties, and a woman, very striking, older, with white hair, blue eyes, tanned skin. They were driving a silver 1967 repro Cadillac.”

“I’m sure I would remember a car like that, if not the people. We aren’t what you’d call terribly busy here. Mostly trucks, you know, shipping manifests, smuggling sometimes, that kind of thing. No, we’re just a sleepy outpost, Mr. Bradlee. But let me ask around the room. Anyone seen such a couple? No? Maybe they crossed at another border.”

“I picked them up, briefly, at these coordinates.”

General Black Cloth leaned back in his chair regally, inhaled and blew smoke at the ceiling and rested his hands on his chest. “I would really like to help you, Mr. Bradlee. In these times of regrettable, mutual tensions, it is incumbent upon both of our peoples to do everything possible, whenever possible, to honor the cooperation and friendship we have traditionally practiced and enjoyed. If such a couple driving such a car comes through here I will certainly detain them and turn them back. Fugitives from state justice will find no safe harbour among the people of the longhouse, no matter what door they try to enter. As an official representative of the Haudenosaunee, you have my guarantee.”

Boyle had sunk into a potent miasma of boredom and horror. It was war. War on his skin, war in his heart, war in his mind. And now, Bradlee was making things worse. He never expected that. Fucking soldiers. They take the ID cards and scatter them over the tortured corpses, gunned down into a ditch they themselves are forced to dig. Everything but the images of men gunned down in a ditch, of blood, dirt and hair matted and mingling, of eyes and mouths broken open, angry, of the helplessness of humans shitting themselves with fright and the pain, of the burning itch radiating out of each bite, seemed far away. Life, the real world, was drawn in black specks on the horizon. So he was truly startled when Bradlee, so calm, so sarcastic, so grey, the very definition of chilliness and cool, stood up. Before anyone could react he grabbed Corporal Baker and smashed his head against the desk. The first blow knocked Baker out. The next broke the skin on his forehead and nose open. Blood sprayed everywhere.

The third he aimed at the corner of the desk. That one broke his skull. Bradlee seized Baker’s gun and pointed it at General Black Cloth’s face. “I want my car back.”

Nothing happened. There were just the three blows against the desk, thunk! thunk! thunk!, blood pooling on the green blotter, into his hair and face, and the cocking of the gun. Bradlee held Baker up by the collar of his mismatched body armour. Then, like he was throwing him away, he dropped him to the floor.

General Black Cloth didn’t flinch or move. His expression remained the same, benign, controlled, as unflappable as Bradlee. He looked at the gun pointed at his head as if it were nothing at all. Boyle had no time to consider what a colossal miscalculation this was. His instinct was to grab the nearest soldier, disarm him and start shooting. They all had this half a second of calculation. In it Boyle fell out of his chair, lifted it and smashed the soldier to his left over the head. But as he took his guns, an out of date assault rifle and a pistol, all the others, outside and in, reacted. An instant after Bradlee cocked his gun, as Boyle smashed the soldier and disarmed him, every soldier in the outpost mobilized around them and took aim. Boyle was staring down the barrels of twelve machine guns. The puddle of blood under Baker’s head thinned out into a stream, flowing into the center of the room.

“I want my car back. Tell your men to stand down.”

General Black Cloth said nothing. Boyle figured he could take out half of the guards. They’d be firing at Bradlee. If Bradlee pulled the trigger first their leader would be down. Then it would be easier to shoot his way out. But with all those bullets flying around he’d probably be hit pretty bad. And if they were both organized and loyal then they’d want revenge. It wouldn’t matter so much about the general being down. He just didn’t know enough about their operation. He had to guess.

Finally General Black Cloth spoke. “You’ve made your point, Mr. Bradlee,” he said quietly.

“You bloody better believe it. You have five seconds to stand down.”

He nodded. “Tell Boyle to stand down too.”

“No deal, general.” Bradlee moved behind the desk. “Up,” he said. “Put your guns on the desk.” He put them in his pockets.

“I don’t think you understand, Mr. Bradlee. My men won’t stand down, even if you kill me.”

“We’ll find out, won’t we? Stand up I say.”

Slowly he stood. The three of them backed towards the door, the soldiers slowly but deliberately inching away just enough for them to pass. Their half assed appearance had vanished. They were focused, still. Each step they took was through the absolute clarity of certain immediate death. There was then a hail of gunfire, bullets thudding off the composite building.

“Tell them to cease their fire or I’ll kill you.”

“I can’t do that. I won’t do that.”

“Then you’ll die.”

“So will you.”

“Order your men out then.”

“Mr. Bradlee,” he said, as if they were seated around gin and tonics in the bar car of an amphibatrain, “let’s try to be reasonable. You wish to leave. I have no desire to detain you. Surely we can–”

“Not trust each other. We’re going out that door. When I reach the hovercraft I’ll release you.”

The general took a few deep breaths and licked his lips. “Very well.”

“Get the door, Boyle.”

Boyle’s eyes popped open. “Are you–” he didn’t finish the sentence. “Can’t we make one of them?”

“Do it Boyle.”

Motherfucker. Gingerly, ducking low, with his hand on the trigger, Boyle reached for the knob and turned it. Again a hail of bullets, which he answered. General Black Cloth spoke in the suspended, smoky silence. “We’re coming out. Back off and hold your fire.” He spoke to Bradlee. “O.K.?”

Bradlee nodded and pushed the general out first while Boyle held the soldiers in the room. Then Boyle backed away and they crossed the muddy yard to the hovercraft, every gun at the outpost aimed at them. The flies descended again, biting where they had already bitten and Boyle was afraid he might shit his pants. He cursed Bradlee, he cursed the Cayugas, he cursed god. He hoped Trinh Ma would be satisfied.

Bradlee held General Black Cloth while Boyle started the hovercraft. He programmed it to fly straight up and then zig zag and loop away before resuming its course, a basic evasion maneuver he had by heart. Bradlee looked at him and the word passed silently between them. Bradlee kicked General Black Cloth away and slammed the door shut as Boyle hit the take off button and they shot straight up with a beep and a whirr. Bullets whizzed and pinged and smacked off of the scruffy bubble till they were out of range.

Boyle covered his mouth, sick from the speed of the ascent. When he could think a little he said, “Boss, I know I work for Laraby and Laraby works for you and shit, but I gotta tell ya, from now on, it’s everyone for hisself. You understand?” He was shaking, trying not to scratch the welts, which he could feel were starting to weep. “That was the fucking craziest–”

“Shut up Boyle. We’d have been there all day.”

“All he wanted was a bribe.”

Bradlee got the look he always got when his back was up about something. “Good lord. You don’t expect me to pay those bastards. It’s banditry.”

Boyle got his breath back. He tried flowing with the pain instead of fighting it but it was a little like jumping out of a window into nothing. “Where da hell’d ya learn ta move like that anyway?”

Bradlee was hunched over the black tracking device intent almost to the point of snarling. “English Expeditionary Forces. Five years in India and another five in Ireland. Those bloody Cayuga Indians don’t hold a candle to the Irish. They taught me a thing or two I’ll never forget. And those other bloody Indians, in the Sundarbans–” he looked up from the box at Boyle and his eyes seemed to cloud over before welling up with tears. “Well, it was not a fucking picnic, let me tell you. You don’t know about loyalty and character till you’ve ridden point on the hydrofoils of the Sundarbans. I was a young man then but I still have the dreams that soldiers have. As for your observation that it’s every man for himself now, allow me to point out to you that it is always implicitly that; if you didn’t know that then you’re even stupider than I imagined. Anyway, we’re alive and we haven’t spent a dime and those blokes will remember us! They’ll think twice before fucking with me again.”

Yeah, Boyle thought. They won’t forget.

Bradlee shook the box. “Why did he come in for that hour and now he’s gone? Ah. It must be when he gets out of the car and we happen to be in range. Just my bloody luck. We’ll just have to proceed as planned, get to Cornell and take care of Vadge Velodia. We’ll track them down later.”

The spots displayed more purpose now. They were fuzzy white starsized spots with Brownian movement. If he didn’t stare at a particular one, however, they would assemble together into one big spot and hover just at the edge of his vision. Then a bunch more would swarm, coalesce and hover. If he stared directly at one of the super spots it broke up into random particles again. As he drove he played a game, seeing how many of these super spots he could assemble. It was a feverish activity and he felt feverish in other ways too. The headache, presaged by the tightening band around his head, had indeed returned. It was different than the one he had earlier. That one had been jagged, a crack. This was more like a pulsing blackness deep in his skull.

The road was all mud, walled in by encroaching woods. They moved slowly so as not to skid out. Water flowed everywhere. It came down in a drizzle, despite the partly cloudy sky. The leaves of the trees were wet and glistened in the filtered light. To either side of the road, through the woods, were gullies, lakes and ponds, streams and gorges. Water splashed and flowed over rocks and fallen trunks, it gurgled and hissed, gathered in watercress and cattail choked ditches full of iridescent frogs, dragonflies and mallard ducks. It stood, pestilential, in fields rotting the hay. Hazy waterfalls gushed down into muddy swollen creaks, bulging up over the banks and into small woods. A pink haze spread out before his eyes. The pulsing headache began to throb rhythmically. Maybe they had poisoned him. Maybe he was mad. Anything was possible. All those weeks asleep in that lab. Bryson could have implanted memories, altered his past and future. She could have poisoned him with a long acting poison that would allow him to drive her away and then eliminate him. Or General Black Cloth might have cursed him. He said himself that the old stories were still true here. What old stories? Were there still stories about places, as he had read about in school and seen on T.V.? “Do you feel strange?” he asked.

“Can’t you go any faster?” Bryson asked, her lips tight.

“No. Do you feel strange?”

“Always. Strange, estranged, deranged. All variations on a well- known theme, induced by life itself, not early childhood trauma. We are overcoming a congenital human emotional condition. It accounts for the uniformity of myth across cultures, space and time, the details of which differ as one language does from another, but the structure, the substance of which remain the same, whether the account is scientific, religious, cultic or aesthetic. The theme–”

“No. Strange. Physically. Like I think we may have been poisoned, or cursed. I’m seeing spots.”

“You were seeing spots before. How’s your headache?”

“Worse.”

“It’s a coincidence. I feel fine.”

“But I feel worse, more out of it.”

“It’s probably a tick, or a mosquito.”

“But we took BiteStop.”

“One got through. As I said, I feel fine.”

“Beware of false prophets.” Why did he say that? He hadn’t thought it. He didn’t even know what it meant. “The Witch of Endor. Samuel resurrected for Saul. It flows from the first divine radiance, into the basin of a fountain. The spray of this fountain plays in the light, each atomized drop a precious jewel. Thence it flows into the four rivers of PaRDeS. These encircle the world. Each river is fed by a jewel and each jewel is a sensual doorway into the garden. The carbuncle is the infernal fire, one enters the garden through the gateway of the flesh and sexual desire: the house of love is built on excrement. The beryl is the river of the earth, eternally young, one enters the garden through the intimacies of smell. The emerald is the sea, giving and receiving, mother of us all and one enters the garden through the doorway of the tongue. The sapphire is the river of sky and air, invisible singer of song and one enters the garden through the labyrinth of the ear. The diamond is the heavenly fire, foot of the throne, the pleroma, it is the highest gateway to the garden, entered through the eyes from above and below.

“Whoever tells you this is a madman and a liar. PaRDeS is a natural place of rivers and fountains. The jewels are simply the fruits of ancient trees.”

Bryson didn’t appear to be listening. “If there’s a store anywhere I’ll find you an aspirin. Do you want me to drive?”

Felix lost control of the wheel. The car skidded sideways in a long slow curve coming to rest on a muddy bank by a clearing. He pushed the accelerator but the wheels whined helplessly. There was no cover here but the woods were not far off. The field was covered in standing water, with clumps of green and tan weeds and bales of rotten hay stranded like islands, and clouds, pearly and dim, reflected on the surface.

“We’re stuck?” she asked irritably.

“It wasn’t my idea to drive.”

“You slugged Boyle.”

“It seemed like the thing to do. They’d have shot us down in the hovercraft, you said so yourself. And the keys were your copy.” His mood flashed hot. “None of this was my idea. One minute I’m sitting at home with my wife and then boom, because of you I’m a fugitive. And,” he said, his indignation growing, “not even a fugitive from the law! We are quite literally outlaws. The medieval, feudal order–”

“No one put a gun to your head! No one said, Here, take transcryptasine till you go mad and drop dead.”

“That’s everyone’s answer. No one told you to do it,” he said in a mincing voice. “The ethical standard here is basically nonexistent.”

“Oh, I see, personal responsibility is abrogated. Only those in authority are to be held to account.”

“If those in authority profit by withholding essential information for an exercise of free will, then yes. It isn’t a decision if–” he paused to think and looked out the windows, at the partly clouded over sky, the sun lowering as they spoke and the stand of enormous trees that began just beyond the flooded field and covered the hills for as far as he could see. “A fine mess this is. You forcing me to drive through this miasmic thoroughfare to nothing, to meet up with a friend I’ve never met or known, at the house of a man who means nothing to me and might turn out to be god knows what, a mutant, or a demon, or a scientist, or just a man, which basically is far worse a prospect than any paranoid fantasy about beings from other worlds holding us to account for the first sin, which we have only participated in by virtue of the river of DNA and flesh whose flow we constitute for a brief interval, for the sake of what? I’ve always dreamt of travel, of driving across the prairie, of the great out of doors. Then dreams and actuality explode in a living nightmare. Mired down in the mud. I guess it all comes down to this, action in pursuit of survival without purpose or end beyond survival for the present. Like sharks we’d sink and die if we stayed still. At least in the garden simple being was its own reward, love and knowledge of love at once coinciding, the mortal and eternal as one. Let’s stop arguing. Let’s get out and take a look.”

They got out of the car and sank up to their ankles in rust colored mud. Swarms of mosquitoes with their high-pitched buzz flew in on them, repelled to about an inch off of their skin. The clouds were merging and growing dark and dense. A cold wind whipped down from the north cutting across the warm bubble of humid air. They examined the tires. The right side was mired up to the bumper. It was too soupy to gain any purchase.

“Maybe I should try pushing,” Felix said.

Bryson scowled. “All right.” She got in behind the wheel and started the engine.

“Don’t give it any gas till I say,” Felix shouted. The engine grunted. He applied his weight to the trunk and yelled, “O.K.” She hit the gas and the wheels spun furiously about, covering him with mud. “Ah!” he screamed. “Stop!” He wiped the mud off of his face and felt his clothes. The water slowly soaked in. Now he was cold and wet as well as hungry. But the headache ceased and the lights were gone.

She got out of the car and stood in front of the open door. When she saw his condition her tense, angry face fell. She smiled a little and looked on him kindly. “What next?”

Felix shrugged. They looked around. The road was between two boggy fields. The woods were a couple of hundred meters away. The clumps of grass were vivid with an inner light as the sky and water darkened. “Let’s go to those woods and collect branches. We’ll put them under the tires and see if we can get enough traction,” Felix said.

“It’s getting late,” she said, her face and voice touched by concern.

“I’m hungry.”

“Yeah. Well, let’s go then.”

The field was deceptive. What appeared to be a shallow continuous puddle was really varied terrain. There were enough clumps of grass and weed for them to jump to for part of the way, but there were stretches where they had to walk through the water. Under the surface the ground was riven by last year’s furrows, which the running water had deepened. There was higher ground cut by rivulets. But there was no real solid ground. The grasses grew in spongy earth that sank beneath their weight and the cold fresh water welled up into their shoes. The deeper parts were up to their knees. Mud sucked at their feet. Across the surface an astonishing variety of bugs skittered, darted and played. Giant dragonflies, indigo, emerald and ruby, took off and landed, water spiders skated in crowds, a calico of giant buzzing bees, wasps and hornets; blue butterflies; pugnacious stink bugs. Schools of fish swished by. And there were birds. Ducks, herons, red winged black birds, canada geese, gulls.

The woods were hardly any better. There was no path, just a wall of growth, bramble, and then the trees. Skunk cabbage and ferns marked the verge. Just above the bank of the field they found saplings and small trees. Without speaking they ripped down cypress boughs and silver birch branches till they had a decent pile, as much as they could carry, and headed back. The return was both quicker and more arduous. They no longer took care of where they stepped. Flies nipped at their necks before giving up. Their hair was full of ticks. The air was loud with peepers. The smell of the skunk cabbage was still strong in their noses when they reached the car an hour after setting out. They put down the boughs and started to make a bridge of them for the tires to cross. His hands were sticky with sap and cut up. She was scratched on her cheeks and arms. They were wet from the neck down, muddy and soggy and the odor of rotting vegetation, like cow manure, clung to them. She got in the car and this time he was able to rock it just enough to get it started rolling. She pulled up onto the road and sat down, exhausted on the ground. They looked at each other with the vacant weariness of hopeless labor, a little proud of their achievement but both questioning what it had cost. The clouds gathered together some more and the breeze felt fresh.

“Lift your pant’s leg,” she said, finally. He did as she said. A dozen fat leeches dangled off of his ankles and shins. She pulled up her pant’s legs and stared at the engorged black bodies. She ran her hand through her hair and the ticks came off. “Fucking christ.”

They burned the leeches and picked as many ticks as they could find. When they were done another hour had passed. It was getting late. They were nowhere.

“Maybe we should just say fuck it,” Felix said.

“She’s my only friend. And I can’t leave you here.”

Cornell University, a collection of beautiful old stone buildings on a hill above Cayuga Lake, with many less impressive, ugly buildings dating back to the last century, spread around the ivy covered core, loomed into sight. Bradlee became excited. “Boyle, I’ve got them! There’s a strong signal. They’re less than an hour from here, by hovercraft anyway.”

Boyle pretended to care. “I’m hungry, boss.”

“We’ll stop here for a bite when we’re done with our business. How can you think of eating now?”

“It’s the violence. Shit like what went down back there always makes me hungry. It’s a stress response. And you know what

Napoleon said, right? An army lives on its belly.”

“He didn’t say that.”

“Well, who did?”

“I have no idea who said it and he didn’t say that whoever did.

And, Boyle, it hasn’t escaped my notice that you merely pretended to look when I said I’d picked them up again.”

“Yeah yeah, so he’s stopped.”

Bradlee looked at him. “The man slugged you and stole my car. The least you could do is show a little passion for the chase.”

Boyle tried to contain himself but he could not. He was like a dam holding back this big, amorphous terror and he had no time for anything else. There was just his tiny little finger in that enormous dike. “I don’t give a fuck!” They were cramped. Their knees were always touching. It was hot. His neck and face throbbed and itched. He felt hungry and simultaneously nauseous. High winds buffeted the craft. At any minute it could crash into the woods below, all it would take is a strong down gust. “Look at me!” he yelled. “I’m a fucking mess. What’re we doin’ here? Who gives a fuck? So they get away. So what. You got money. You’re a powerful guy.” Boyle instantly regretted saying it. But Bradlee just nodded grimly, as he did when the truth was stated. He looked at the box, cradled between his knees. His eyes welled up. “Indeed, Boyle. Who gives a fuck. Certainly not I. But we must clean up what we started.” He shook his head. “One only has as much power as one uses. To hold back at the wrong time is a fatal resignation to one’s natural diffidence. The desire for dark and quiet, to go out silently, without a mark, leaves one open to be mauled, raped and discarded by those who act without hesitation. They both come to the same end but to do so judiciously is to miss out on the opportunities and instant pleasures seizing the moment affords. I’ve done my life’s waiting. We’ll act now and rest later, on the profits I have every intention of recovering and retaining from that treacherous bitch. I still have not made up my mind whether to punish or forgive her but either way I will come out on top. Now is not the time to take the finger off of the trigger. In your rude parlance, the stakes have never been higher.”

“Phph. The stake’s never been higher up my ass, boss. And let me tell you, I had my fucking fill of places like dis twenty years ago. You had your Simperdans and I had my Caspian Sea. Albanian devils, Afghan mercenaries, Turcomen, soviet spies, blah. It’ll make a man sick to live in the world! I mean wild.”

“Buildings are full of men no less dangerous than those in jungles. Oh yes, land on that roof over there.” Just ahead was a large rectangular building with a white ceramic facade and a hovercraft lot on the roof. There were just a few hovercraft anchored in the center. Boyle took it down next to the stairway, an illegal spot. When it finally touched down and he opened the door the relatively cool air rushed in and he fell into a sort of swoon that was half relief and half letting go into madness. Get a grip, he snarled to himself. The hunger was a steadily opening breech in his gut. He swallowed and winced. The periphery was all clear. He bent down and secured the anchor loops and checked his weapon. Bradlee swung down and hurried for the stairs, Boyle in trail.

The campus was incredibly green. The air almost smelled sweet. To the north, thunderheads were bearing down, but directly overhead the sky was patched with satiny blue between the clouds. As the sun declined into afternoon, there was a hazy weary feel to the air. Students walked aimlessly down the paths, stopping to chat, or reclined under trees reading electraweave. Boyle was entranced by the scene, it was so odd and beautiful and new. He could see Medea here and yet the thought that his child, his daughter, a daughter of Boyles and Trinhs, could be here, among these green lawns and stone facades, no, not just be but belong here, was astonishing. He was proud then, proud for himself and proud for her. Wipe the worry and fear from your face, child, he wanted to say.

Bradlee was searching about, mumbling to himself as if calculating. Boyle followed him along a path till Bradlee, having made his mark, stopped a barefoot man in cutoff linen overalls, with long feathered hair and a chaotic beard, and said, “Excuse me. Where might I find a campus map?”

“Where you going?”

“I’m looking for the Department of Psychiatric Medicine.”

“Science Quad. Just follow this path up the hill. When you get to the first road make a right. The quad’s just beyond that. Ask someone there for Helen Krasner Hall.”

At the science quad they received further directions. Boyle had to trot along to keep up with Bradlee. People were staring at them. They were the only ones in suits and Boyle couldn’t stop scratching. He looked like someone had boiled his head.

Helen Krasner Hall was a large, composite brick sculpture in the shape of a bow tie. Other than its shape it had nothing to recommend it. They ascended the crushed stone steps up the middle to the knot and entered the revolving doors. The lobby was dark and cool. Lights came on as they walked and went out after they had passed. A directory informed them that Dr. Velodia’s lab was located on the fifth floor of the west wing.

They found Dr. Velodia seated at her desk reading a sheet of silver electraweave and drinking a steaming mug of coffee. She had been out of her office all day and had only returned to check her messages and do a little busy work before meeting Callista Reubens for drinks, and, hopefully, a long bout of spirited pussy eating, followed by dinner and a movie. But the first message, from Bryson, distracted her from thoughts of Callista Reubens’ thighs squeezing her face. She didn’t hear Boyle and Bradlee enter and was startled, at first, by the strange men. Dividing her attention between the Bryson’s message and them, she said, “How may I help you?”

Boyle had never seen anyone who looked like her, up close. He’d never seen skin so white. He couldn’t decide if she were beautiful or not, just that she was strange. She looked like crazy celebrities on t.v., with her sculpted yellow hair, long black eyelashes and ruby red lips.

Bradlee smiled and said, “Dr. Velodia.”

Velodia nodded her head and then read some more off the sheet of electraweave. Her face changed. She just got Bryson’s message, Boyle thought. Her eyes opened with alarm. She stood up and backed away from the desk, from Boyle and Bradlee. “Owen Bradlee.” She glared at him.

“Did I interrupt your reading, Vadge?”

“It’s Quap, you bastard. Where’s Ruth?” She looked at the electraweave. “Hm, I was hoping you could tell me that. She stole my car and kidnapped a test subject this morning.”

“Well I haven’t seen her. Not in years.”

He paused, nodded and looked around the office. “Not this past summer?”

“We’ve both been too busy.”

“That’s not what I hear.” He stepped around the desk and faced her. She moved backwards.

“Don’t come any closer.”

“Boyle–” Bradlee said.

Velodia looked at Boyle. Now he felt totally ashamed. Why’d Bradlee have to go and call him by his name.

“Are you Medea’s father?” she asked.

He nodded. “I’m sorry doc. He’s making me do this.”

“Making you do what?” She looked at Bradlee. “Oh my god, you’re here to kill me. But I haven’t done a thing.” She dove to the floor and Bradlee caught her by the arm and with a grimace, forced her to her feet. He pulled the gun out of his jacket and waved it around. “Have a seat, Vadge.”

Her hair had come undone and parts of it were breaking off and falling to the floor. She was breathing loudly, staring at Boyle. She’s already begging, Boyle thought. This is gonna suck.

“I don’t know what you want from me,” Velodia said. Boyle wondered how much she’d bargain.

Bradlee said, “I need to know if, when Bryson came to you in August, she told you to sabotage Paregane?”

She shook her head tearfully. “No. I never saw her. There was no conspiracy.”

“What about the Lackawanna Psychoanalytic Association conference.”

“So, what about it.”

“Didn’t you there tell other doctors not to prescribe Paregane?”

“I didn’t think you were this stupid Bradlee. You’re scraping out a new low for yourself.”

“You don’t recommend Paregane.”

“Not as a general Euphoric, no.”

“Why?”

Boyle covered his mouth and thought, get on with it. Her face was now all red. She was looking about frantically, shaking against the calm, quiet demeanor of Bradlee. But Boyle could feel the totally unexpressed maelstrom in the room. As Bradlee spoke, conversationally, the words, despite how soft they were, were aimed at picking her apart. It didn’t matter now why she had done anything. He was either going to let her go or not. It was a ritual to him. She leaned back against the desk. Bradlee no longer pointed the gun at her, he was gesturing with it.

Despite the panic it was obvious she was searching the room for an escape. Bradlee was relying upon him to stop her. But Boyle thought if she could make it out the door she might get away. There were people around and Bradlee wouldn’t gun her down in front of witnesses. As Bradlee asked her questions, trying to trip her up, Boyle searched for some way to distract him long enough for Velodia to escape.

He stared at her, tried to catch her eye. She was afraid of him. She was a person in collapse. They all did it. Small time, one-time chiselers were like that. They didn’t really know the stakes in their gut because they were new to the game. They had never faced a gun, hadn’t looked their own murderer in the eye. They had lied to themselves just enough to feel sufficient confidence to launch their plan. And they built it up on this puff of hot air. When the failure came, they knew suddenly that everything was just so much crap. All you are is a lucky chance. A body at the mercy of other bodies. Your voice, your spirit, your god and your prayers were worthless. Whoever pulls the trigger first, and pulls it last, and never stops shooting in between, walks away, and probably with nothing to show for it.

Boyle fired orders at her with his eyes: look at me! don’t be stupid. Finally, her face hardened. She took a deep breath. Her lips trembled. She made a fist. He noticed then on her desk, the cup of coffee. It was still hot.

“That’s enough, Bradlee.” She stood up straight. Bradlee was taken aback, he seemed to have forgotten he had a gun. “I’ve said all I’m going to say. You and your sick, greedy, self serving hacks from state can go around killing tens of thousands of people to make a buck but I won’t go along with it. Ruth never said a word to me. She didn’t have to. I’ve spent my entire life trying to avoid lifeless bastards like you. You’re like a mushroom, sucking all of the life out of us. You can’t reduce life to a throbbing blood vessel or two and money in the bank. Too late I discovered there is simply no escaping this condition. The worst is the defining limit, not the best. The world is only as good as the evil we permit to breed in its interstices and thrive at our expense. There’s no destroying you and we can’t ignore you either. The best we can hope for is a sort of spiritual castration, to watch you slowly aetiolate in a dark chamber buried deep in the mind where all you can disturb and control are the dreams of children.” As she spoke she gazed directly into his blue and pink eyes and when she was done she picked up the mug of coffee and tossed it into them. Then she dove to the floor.

Bradlee didn’t react though the coffee was hot enough to scald flesh but he did drop the gun, which went off, and blustered, wiping at his face. The black coffee soaked into his mustache. “B-boyle!” he spluttered. Boyle did nothing but pray she would reach the door. GO! “Stop her!” It was too late. She had reached the door, still on her hands and knees, and had opened the knob and was out in the hall. “God damn it, you’re useless.”

“Sorry, boss.”

Bradlee found his gun and ran out into the dark hall. She was running now. The lights snapped on and off, following her. He took careful aim and squeezed the trigger three times. The shots sounded hollowly, striking her in the back, shoulder and butt. Velodia twisted as each one imploded after contact and fell with a shriek. “Help! Murder! God! No!”

Bradlee walked slowly towards her. “You shouldn’t have done that, Vadge.”

She crawled away from him, in agony, blood smearing out beneath her knees and thighs and hands. “Please,” she coughed up blood and gurgled, “don’t. I won’t tell a soul. I didn’t mean what I said.”

“I think that you did,” Bradlee said. She crawled slower and slower, dragging herself forward with one hand and pushing with one foot that slipped in the blood. Boyle caught up with them and drew his gun. His face was hot and he was panting. Poor Dr. Velodia, he thought. “You hurt my feelings,” Bradlee said. Boyle was fed up. He aimed at her head. “What are you doing Boyle?”

“I’m sorry doc,” he said. “I didn’t mean for none of this to happen, and I gotta tell you, it’s my fault. I shouldn’t never have involved yous. It don’t mean nothin now, to thank you, but,” he took aim at the back of her head and squeezed the trigger. The yellow hair crumpled into a mass of blood, skull and brain. Her body twitched and was quiet.

“Boyle. We weren’t done talking.”

“Don’t you think we oughta beat it?” he asked.

“After a quick perusal of her files.”

She couldn’t explain it to Felix but Felix understood why they were going to Cornell. “It’s just a feeling, Felix. Please just let’s go. She needs me, I know. She’s in danger. It’s my fault.”

“So what, we shoot our way out, against Bradlee and Boyle?”

“No, of course not.”

Well, it made no less sense than anything else. He was driving the car but she was still playing all the hands. At the same time he had a sense of desperation. The whole day had been a slow revelation of Bryson. She radiated feeling but the feelings swung about from extremes of contempt, certainty and hope on the one hand and self- recrimination, despair and a sort of stoical futility on the other. Well, they were going with time’s arrow anyway. Whichever way they went there was no center, no up and down, there was only the next thing. The sign said Cornell University 20 K. The road onto campus was paved and broad enough to accommodate the road train caravans delivering goods from the railheads at Albany and Scranton. Bryson sat low in her seat, grinding her teeth and checking the time, fitfully avoiding Felix. She was in full collapse, he thought. Or on the verge. That was it. A person in full collapse is relaxed. She was watching it approach.

Felix tried to concentrate on the road. The headache had returned, the radiating one, the nuclear one pulsing in his brain core. Without warning his vision would constrict to a tunnel of clarity surrounded by an ill-defined granular grey, as if the visual field were disintegrating at its edges. It seemed to affect his thoughts but he wasn’t so sure of that. Perhaps his self-perception was disintegrating at the edges too. Self as object of perception versus perceiving self. He felt cognitively disordered. Further more, emotions would rage and ebb. He couldn’t concentrate on a line of thought. He couldn’t even tell if he was silent or speaking his thoughts aloud. So he tried to make conversation.

“Tell me about Velodia.”

“She’s my best, only friend.”

It struck him that the last time he had a best or only friend was high school. Veronica had been everything. “I know that. How did you meet?”

Bryson stared at the rain. The wet trunks and leaves of trees and the fields, dry now that they were on higher ground, glowed. The sun was close to the horizon, shining out from behind clouds. Insect swarms knocked into and bloodied the windshield. “At Cornell. She and I started at the same time. She was in quantum psychiatry and I was studying the mathematics of twelve dimensional molecules. Our ideas just clicked. I don’t remember now if it was a seminar or what.

We had other interests of course. We both liked to hit the bottle and fuck our brains out when we weren’t working. For ten years we did everything together. And we wrote those theoretical papers which pretty much map out everything I’ve done, including transcryptasine.”

“And Bradlee?”

“Oh, Bradlee. He was at Monozone when I went there. Project supervisor. You know, the moneyman. Eyes of management.” She laughed. “Boy, they only met a couple of times, when Leonard and I had the house on the Island, but did they ever hate each other. Poor Quap and her principles. She gave it to him good, two or three times. You understand, with Bradlee, it was pure lust. It took me years to even respect him. I thought he was easy to control. Right up until yesterday.”

“No doubt he thought the same about you.”

“Why would you say that? Owen Bradlee never controls anything, not directly. He’s always the middle man, taking a cut.”

“We’re almost there?”

“Those are the gates, up ahead.”

They entered the campus between two huge, ruined stone columns. Vines and trees grew up through the sidewalks. The remains of old businesses lay where they had collapsed, by half broken walls of brick. Hunks of concrete impaled with rusty reinforcing rods were obscured by heavy vegetation. Steel I beams rose at angles across the trunks and branches of the woods. There was a block long warehouse with loading docks. The road went around a massive parking lot full of tractor-trailers, dump trucks and bulldozers, and then a small area for cars. They pulled into two spaces between a couple of grey, utilitarian vehicles, boxes on wheels. They got out, stretched, and headed wearily up a narrow path through a garden. Cherry, dogwood and lilac had dropped the last of their blooms but the azaleas were covered in crimson flowers. Ferns stood tall, in bright young green, along the running creek. Felix took a deep breath. The headache faded a little. The smell of the earth and water stirred up memories of the garden. But this is real. Yes, and the other wasn’t? He felt odd, almost sexually stimulated by the odor, and sad. The smell, the sounds of evening birds singing in the treetops made him wonder about what Veronica was doing right now. He expected to see her at any moment, seated by the brook, walking up ahead on the path.

The trip was dangerous and futile but there was no way to stop it. They crossed over broad, sloping lawns and then through level quads of carefully trimmed grass and hedges, bisected by paths over which the students bustled and milled. Then they arrived at a building like a bow tie. Bryson was practically running now. No one was about. There was an emptiness beyond the lack of people. Empty buildings, empty sidewalks. That was so much of the world. But here, in the quad before the building, was a vacuum of feeling. It all looked painted on. Inside it was dark and smelled of polished stone and old wood. The lights popped on and off as they walked. The closer they got the stranger he felt. He didn’t know or care about Velodia but he knew that she was trying to do the right thing, that she wanted to stop Paregane and that that was why Owen Bradlee wanted to kill her. But it also didn’t seem to matter anymore. The emptiness he felt outside grew bigger and engulfed the building and then it grew cold, slowing everything down. Night had descended on the day. All of the warmth and life had escaped the earth and disappeared into space where it would disperse forever and yet always remain in some tenuous sense connected. The web could be stretched to near nothing without quite reaching it.

Bryson burst out of the elevator and he followed her. They went straight to Velodia’s office. It was empty. The desk was a mess. Bryson picked up the electraweave and reviewed all of the indices of stored text. “She got the report at least. Yes, and she sent it on to everyone. My god, even the press.” Nothing else was disturbed. Then Bryson looked at the floor and her face grew pallid, and she mumbled, “No.” Felix looked down. There was a broken coffee mug. There was a splash of coffee on the desk.

They went to the hall. Down at the end, three metres from the exit and the stairs, was a black form barely distinguishable from the shadows. They walked and then ran towards it, through circles of soft yellow light. Bryson, seeing her friend’s mangled corpse, sank to her knees and gripped the air in her fists and let out a cry of pure pain, piercing through the dark and bringing tears up in Felix’s eyes. There was nothing to say to her now, she had become the instrument of the oldest fear and want, the cry that finds no answer. All he could do was stand by her till it ended.

“You said we could get something to eat. It’s like my stomach is roaring.”

“Like, or is?”

“Whatever.”

“How can you think of food at a time like this?”

Boyle skipped a little to catch up with Bradlee’s long, relentless stride. “I told you, it’s da violence. It makes me hungry. Ever since I was a kid. And it’s late. I ain’t eaten in like a day. Even widout da violence, it’s time to strap on a feedbag.”

“Lovely anachronistic colloquial locutions will not endear you to me. She’s just done us all in now. And for what? For what?”

“She wanted out.”

He stopped and punished Boyle with a look of seething contempt. “You know about this? I ask you how many times to tell me what’s going on with her and it’s always ‘Nuttin’ boss.’?”

“She never said so. I’m just speculatin’ is all. You axed the question.”

“Leave speculation to those who won’t go mad in the process.”

“Da food boss.”

“I don’t suppose it matters now,” he said quietly to himself, gazing off across the campus. The sun was peaking out between purple and white piles of cloud. “We need a plan. Damn! How could I be so stupid? To think I got her all that money–over fifty million in the end. Is this how she repays me? No–Velodia died too good a death.” He stared at Boyle. “And don’t think I don’t blame you for it. If it were up to me you’d be there on the floor with her too, in your own blood and feces!” His skin was red. He exhaled through his nose and faded back to grey. “Sorry Boyle. That was uncalled for. I’m a little upset. There’s a restaurant around here somewhere, on a terrace. Perhaps a bite will do us both good.”

The restaurant, on the top floor of a building that looked to Boyle like a castle, with turrets and stained glass windows depicting biblical scenes in medieval dress, was cavernous, dark, built like a Viking meadhall, with an arched, oak ceiling. Red and purple banners with gold braid and fringe and a lion in profile hung down off the rafters, each end of which was carved into the head of an eagle, a dragon or a griffin. Two giant iron chandeliers with fake candles lit the hall. The Maitre D’ didn’t want to seat Boyle. He looked like garbage. Huge red welts weeping clear fluid rose up off of the back of his neck. His eyes were nearly swollen shut. His suit was a mess too. Bradlee somehow looked totally unruffled. His grey linen pants and jacket fell without a fold or wrinkle and still held their crease. Even the coffee didn’t get on it, nor did it burn his eyes. Bradlee eased them in with a little palm scratch and soon Boyle was struggling to read the menu by the light of a single candle.

“I can’t make any of this shit out,” he said. Bradlee looked around. I’ve embarrassed him, Boyle thought. Good. Bradlee deserved it. He had embarrassed him with Velodia. It was wrong to kill her.

“Do I need to read it to you?” Bradlee asked.

“Don’t sneer at me boss. And I only gave it to her like that in the head cause she was suffering. It ain’t right to make civilians suffer.”

Bradlee put down his menu. “It most certainly is right. It’s also necessary. Now, what is it that you like to eat?”

Boyle worriedly moaned. “I don’t know.”

“Well, the food here is probably first rate. They’ve a hotel school you know. Perhaps if you told me what you eat at home.”

“Ah. Trinh Ma makes da usual stuff. Fried vegetables with garlic and ginger when she can get ’em. Hot dogs. A lotta dose, and da blue paste. We eat that all da time. What else. Cereal. Yogurt. We eat burgers. Da kids love burgers. Any kinda meat. We eat meat, maybe three times a week.” Now he was bragging. He hated the implication that he was too poor to eat well.

“As often as that? Then I pay you too much. Remind me when we get back and I’ll have Laraby cut your salary.”

“Dat ain’t what I meant.”

“A joke Boyle! Lighten up. Tonight, dinner’s on me. How about a big porterhouse steak, pomes frites, er, french fries and a salad?”

Steak. He’d had it in the army whenever they could kill a cow. And on his honeymoon. They had two nights in the Poconos and ate steak and baked potatoes and shrimp cocktail. Trinh Ma was a real beauty then. He never thought he’d ever get a chance with a woman like that. He only ever fucked whores for ten years. But she was so young. Her skin was firm and smooth, the light played in her black eyes like stars on a moonless night. They fucked like he’d never fucked before. It was like they were two flames consuming one branch. Six weeks later she started puking in the toilet. That was Medea.

“Steak’s good, boss.”

“Is something wrong Boyle? Your face is a fright. They almost didn’t seat us. It’s positively medieval, a sort of pustulence, if you’ll allow the pun.”

Boyle felt awful. He was hoping it was just hunger. His head pounded, his joints ached, his throat was sore and he felt chills and spacey, as if he were drifting free of his body. “I’m allergical to da flies. What is it with you, they don’t make you swell up?”

“In India I was exposed to a plethora of lethal insects. Ever since they’ve left me alone. I believe I’m slightly cold blooded. They just don’t like it.”

“Lucky you.”

The waiter took their order.

“And to drink?” Bradlee asked. The waiter was going through him, after a less than successful initial exchange with Boyle.

“I don’t give a fuck. Yeah. Beer. Whatever. Maybe whiskey first. That’s it. A shot.” He addressed the waiter directly. “None of that cheap watered down shit either. Whiskey from Scotland.”

Bradlee frowned. “Make it blended, waiter, off the speed rack. I’ll take a Manhattan, dry, two cherries. With dinner bring a bottle of….” he looked over the wine list. “This St. Estephe. The ’76 will do, two glasses. And bottled water, actual ice, no RealIce.”

“I don’t like wine, boss. Make it a lager with dinner. Nothin’ fancy, so long as it ain’t light or dry. Dry beer, that’s stupid, right? It ain’t dry, it’s wet and light’s even stupider. Light’s the stupidest thing I ever heard of. I mean, why don’t ya just drink half?”

“I’ll remember that the next time I’m grunting over sausage on a bun in a crowded, sunny stadium.”

They buttered and munched on poppyseed and pumpernickel rolls. The rolls and butter calmed his stomach. At first he wolfed them down so fast he didn’t even taste them. Bradlee was evidently preoccupied. He smoked, silently sipping his drink, left hand covering his mouth, finger tapping his chin. Boyle didn’t like it when Bradlee was thinking. He was beginning to understand that Bradlee’s thoughts, so calm in their gestation, were mayhem when put into action.

He sawed away at the steak with the biggest steak knife he’d ever seen. It was big enough and thick enough to stab a man to death. The meat was chewy, charred on the outside and bloody in the middle. The blood flooded his plate and soaked into the thin crispy fries. Bradlee picked at something weird. A chop of some sort. He drank the entire bottle of wine. His eyes were really red now, the color of raw meat.

“So, we head back now boss?” Boyle was suffused with a sense of well-being. His tongue was covered in a slick of flavourful fat. His extremities tingled with pleasure.

“Hm?”

Boyle decided not to spoil the mood by asking again. Instead he said, “How about a little dessert?”

“Indeed,” Bradlee said, brightening a bit, like the moon under thinning cloud. He snapped for the waiter. “Two chocolate tortes, armagnac for me, any reserve will do, bring my friend here a brandy, and two coffees. I’d like a cigar too, if you can produce a good Havana.” The waiter handed him the cigar menu. He glared at Boyle and Boyle could see him relent. “What the hell. Bring two Havana Hidalgo Grandes. You did good work Boyle.”

He handed Boyle the cigar and Boyle watched Bradlee carefully and did everything he did, snipping off the tip, sniffing the length, squeezing it gently and then, gently again, puffing it till a plume of smoke rose to the rafters. The cake, coffee, brandy and cigar were a concert of flavours Boyle recognized as the music of heaven without ever having heard it before. If only women smelled and tasted so good!

Felix and Bryson stood outside of Helen Krasner Hall in the approaching dusk. The sky overhead was broken up. Chunks of black cloud turned purple on the western horizon and where the sky showed through it was a glowing bluish green. The campus was on high ground and heavily sprayed so there were few insects. The lawns were deep and sweet. Flowering trees perfumed the air. Students sat on the grass eating and talking and napping. They walked along, hand in hand, thoughtlessly. A wave of intense eros washed over Felix. Their hormones, at full flood, like the swollen creaks and streams, were thrown off in a mist, which he inhaled and set his mind buzzing. It was impossible not to look at their legs and bellies and breasts. Even the plainest, dullest woman was enlivened by the late spring light and air. An enormous longing opened up in him, a longing for youth, for sex, for his own younger self. Time as it went took something from him that was, and replaced it with something that wasn’t, cell by cell, so that now he felt the accumulation of forty years of nothingness. Maybe he and Veronica had filtered out the feeling of this loss from each other. Love was a madness that appeared to reverse the flow of being into nothingness. A little bit of being diverted each time into a battery kept alive between them and parceled out in love acts. How long could two people pass the same thing back and forth without diminishing it? And then, with a single bullet it all rushes out. Chuang Tzu’s empty sack of rice.

Bryson stood by him, her face rigid.

He said, “The report went out. She died, but you succeeded.”

“Succeeded in what? Killing her? For what?”

“Look. I’m starving. Let’s find some food and make a plan.”

“Eat?”

“We’ve been going all day. My head is killing me. I’m exhausted. You’re in no condition to do anything.”

“Food–”

“Just let me get something. You wait here.”

She looked at him with red, swollen eyes. Fat tears formed along the lower lid, held on the lash like dew and fell down her cheek. “Don’t go anywhere! I know a place, here on campus.”

They walked off of the science quad along a crushed stone path between some buildings and onto the arts quad, a broad rectangle of lawn crossed by walkways and framed by stone, brick and concrete buildings. They came to a stone building with flying buttresses, turrets and a high pitched slate roof.

“It’s in here,” she said, holding open the tall metal doors. They stood then outside of the restaurant by a lectern manned by a severe Maitre D’, who scrutinized them through old fashioned reading glasses.

“The service entrance is in the rear.”

“Excuse me,” Bryson said, rising to the insult with imperious indignity. “Maybe your service entrance is in the rear but mine’s in the front and I want a table.”

He softened, a little, hearing her accent. “I’m afraid we have minimum standards of decency here, including cleanliness and dress.”

Felix looked at Bryson and then himself and started to laugh. “I’m sorry sir, we’ve had car trouble.”

“Evidently.”

Bryson was about to speak but Felix backed her away from the lectern. “Come,” he said, leading her by the hand to the bathroom. There, in the synthetic sun light and gold tinted mirrors he said, “Look at us.”

She looked at him and then herself in the mirrors and slowly they started to laugh together. They were covered head to toe ins mud. It was in their hair, dry and gritty, dangling down in lumps. It was in their fingernails. Their clothes were filthy and wet. Their arms and hands were covered with small cuts and scratches. They looked like they had climbed up out of their own graves on a rainy night.

“Come on,” Bryson said. “I need a drink. There’s a convenience store down the road.”

At the BritoMart they bought a loaf of bread, tins of sardines, potato chips, aspirin, water, beer, a bottle of whiskey, a pack of cigarettes and a lighter.

In the car Felix swallowed four aspirin and asked, “Where to now?”

“I don’t think it matters. He’ll find us anywhere we go. I suppose we should still get to Leonard’s, but I’m afraid of leading him there.” She covered her face with her hands and rubbed her eyes.

Felix started the car and they drove slowly back down the paved road to the dirt highway. It was twilight. The headlights played over the mud and trees. Bats circled in and out of the beams. Four legged creatures with glowing yellow eyes ran across the road. A raccoon thumped off the bumper and flew through the air into the bush. “Do you have any idea where we are?” he asked. She shook her head. “Look, this is a college town. There’s got to be a hotel or a dorm we can stay the night in. Let’s stop.”

“No! Too dangerous.”

“Why?”

“Because it is. Keep driving. I’ll think of something.”

After an hour during which it got darker and darker, till he was driving through a black tunnel of trees and night which seemed to absorb the headlights, sparks dancing in and out of his field of vision, and clouds of nocturnal insects bombarding the windshield, he said, “This is crazy. I can’t go more than ten. I can’t see a thing. The windshield looks like pizza.” He put on the wipers. They pushed the red, brown and yellow bug crap back and forth.

“There’s a trail along here somewhere that goes through the forest and comes out just north and east of Seneca Lake.”

“Forest? How the hell am I gonna find a trail through a forest?” Up ahead they saw a spotlight playing over the road and trees. “Jesus! What’s that?”

“Fucking bloody christ, it’s a hovercraft. Hit the lights.”

He stopped driving and turned the lights off. “Now we’re fucked,” he said. They couldn’t even see each other. All they saw were fireflies and the searchlight jerking around the woods and road. “It’s a left, marked by a green sign.”

“This car’s too wide for a trail.”

“The trail’s wide, like a road. The tree cover’s so thick you’d never be able to see us from above. If we can reach Ganudasaga I can find people there to get word to Leonard to meet us somewhere. Niagara Falls maybe.”

The light passed alongside them and then disappeared. He put on the low beam and started to drive slowly, looking out to the left for a green sign. He opened the bag of potato chips, put them in his lap and started to munch away. Why didn’t he just leave her here? He had money in the bank, Veronica’s ashes and a change of clothes. She could do fine without him. Hadn’t she gotten them through the border crossing? He could just walk away in the dark. Sleep on the ground. Make his way to Canada and out west. When he imagined western Canada he saw a paved highway passing through small mountain villages, chilly nights, meadows full of wild flowers covering the foothills of snowy mountains. She started to weep quietly. Bryson was devastated, lost. She was the kind of person who was fine as long as things went her way, which they always did. But once they started going wrong, everything else fell apart and she was helpless. He had been that way once. Everything gone. Then Peter took him in and gave him a home, family, friends. They drove past the sign.

“That was it!” she exclaimed, sniffling. “Back up.”

“O.K.,” he mumbled through a mouth full of greasy, salty starch, backing up to the sign: INTERLAKEN TRAIL DEYOTAHAKDONYO:GWEH KAGO

He turned onto the trail, between two boulders. Now there was no sky overhead. It was darker than he had ever seen it. They went down a steep embankment and onto a rutted dirt path meandering through the towering trees. They rolled up and down bumps. Fallen trees and brush scraped the doors of the car. After a while it widened out some.

“Look up there. It’s a sort of clearing. Pull off and we’ll check it out for water,” she said. There was an opening between the trees large enough to drive the car into. The ground scraped the undercarriage. It felt like they were sinking. They came to rest with a groan and a crack.

They got out and stretched. The air was loud with shrill dithyrambic peepers. Felix peed and got a torch out of the boot. He shined it around on some rocks and what looked like water. “Let’s eat up there, by the stream.”

“We’ll have a fire,” she said.

They gathered wood by torchlight and tried to light a fire but the wood was wet and it smouldered. He was excited now, by the woods, by the smell of mushrooms and leaf mold. Leaning back on his elbows to avoid the steaming, smoky, mess he opened the tins of sardines and ate with his fingers, licking the oil off hungrily. He took a glug of beer. “God this tastes good.”

Bryson swigged the whiskey and handed him the bottle. “Try this.” Felix swallowed a shot and leaned back again. “We shouldn’t stay long,” she said.

“Why?”

“Too dangerous.”

“Well, let’s just enjoy it for a while. This is what they go to so much trouble to try to synthesize. I never want to live with a synthetic odor unit again. For all the years we lived in that subterranean pod I thought it smelled like the real world. You know the ad, Bring the Country Home with SynAire? Then I went to the garden. Ruined the ‘real’ world for me.”

“Like the difference between a real strawberry and strawberry chew.”

“I’ve never had a real strawberry.”

“The last time I was in these woods was with Velodia. We planned our campaign against transcryptasine. We knew the danger. We said the words. But I didn’t really understand what it meant.”

“I still don’t understand the danger. I feel great. Except for this headache and the stars.”

“You still have the headache?”

“Comes and goes.”

She sighed and took a drink. “That’s not good.”

“I’m not worried for some reason.”

“It’s the transcryptasine. It’s still in your system.”

“But it’s been a while.”

“After Veronica died, and you stopped taking it, you must have noticed that things were still different, even if you stopped going to the garden.”

“But I was so crazy. I’m still crazy. As long as you have the garden it doesn’t matter how crazy you are and then, when you lose the garden, it doesn’t matter either. I tried so hard to die the only way I knew how. Something kept me alive, I don’t know what, but it wouldn’t let me be, it kept fighting for my life. I thought to let the angels take me. Veronica could have had me too. But she chose Sammael, or so it seemed at the time. I’m sure she did it for me, to make me free. Whatever that is.”

She drank the whiskey. “Well, I guess one way to think of freedom is the power to choose who or what you’ll serve. Velodia could have come with me to Monozone. They offered her a contract.” She did something between a snort and a laugh. “God how we plotted and planned the future as if it were ours to grow and feast on. In those days she completed my thoughts and I started hers. We were like one mind, complimentary, strong where the other was weak, yielding where the other was stubborn. We lived together, sat up all night drinking and talking and then got up with the dawn to work. People thought we were lovers but we were so much more than that. We shared the one idea and found peace in exhilaration, creating with our eyes and hands whole worlds. The power was amazing and it amazed all those who came within our orbit. As the years passed by we attracted older colleagues who had no business feeding off the work of two young women, but they couldn’t resist us. Leonard used to laugh. Even after we were married it was always Ruth and Quap. No one else knew me by my name, only Leonard and Velodia. One night I remember Leonard saying that time would eat us up, that we would see.”

“Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate/That time will come and take my love away.”

They sat quietly watching the smouldering, sputtering sticks and listening to the peepers. Felix stirred the sticks up and added a few others and the flame caught. “Can you tell me something? I don’t want to offend you but how on earth could you have been lovers with Owen Bradlee?”

She looked at him and thought about it, as if she had often done so. “I would have to understand myself better than I do to answer that. Velodia could never figure it out, Leonard is apoplectic at the thought. Funny, it’s not really sexual jealousy with him. Oh, maybe a little. I feel it for him, when I’ve had my face rubbed in the young women he’s always gone for. I believe you’re addressing the issue of character, his and mine. To say it is simple lust isn’t much of an answer. That could be satisfied by anyone, by myself even. But consider that lust is never quelled by masturbation, only another body can quiet the need. It isn’t even excess. Maybe I just felt comfortable being around a man who could never take anything from me. I needed someone I could hate if I felt like it and not stop wanting. What more does a slave deserve than a master? What is the first act of a slave with power but to enslave the master and make him pay for her servitude? That’s too abstract, it gets away from the cocktail lounges and the big dick nearly splitting me in two. It isn’t what is needed but it will do in a pinch. Owen Bradlee, when I met him, was charming, funny, cheap. There was no depth to him, and certainly no danger that he would fall in love with me. But I can’t justify it. If I’d had a noble lover would that have been any better? Would Leonard have understood? Velodia would have preferred it but look at who she took into her bed, any sweet muscular thing with a crew cut and a flat chest. We all have our types.”

“You don’t see it, do you? It’s so obvious to me that he loves you. I see it in his eyes when he looks at you, the way he tries to anticipate what you’ll do, the way he tries to please you.”

She made squealing laugh. “That’s just nuts. The man is devoid of strong emotion or attachment. I’d say he’s a corporate sociopath.”

“But you use his love to control him.”

“No no no. His desire, yes. We both know how to twang that string. But love? The only thing Owen Bradlee loves is himself and the only man I ever loved is Leonard.”

Felix threw a bigger piece of wood on the fire and the smoke rose in a column. “If you love Leonard so much why didn’t you go with him to the GMZ? I’d have followed Veronica anywhere.”

“The contract. It’s signed in blood, after all. Monozone bought it off of Genetel when I was sixteen. They have scouts you know. And I was one bad kid, let me tell you. There wasn’t another hellcat like me around in all of Switzerland. I believe if the lowest piece of shit Frenchman yodeled for me I’d have crawled twenty miles to get him drunk and fuck him. Anything to piss my parents off. I just wanted to get pregnant and pass these genes along illegally to some bum, give his lineage an illicit boost of longevity/blond/blue/big tit/smart and subject my family to the shame of bastardy and cacogenesis. Smart. Do you know what that means for me, what the big secret is, why they own me? I’m a trade secret. A suite of variant genes. And I can visualize 12 dimensions. I can see things others don’t. Abstractions. Every thought, every idea, every hunch I have is intellectual property. It wasn’t planned that way. It might have been a dud. Or maybe ‘it’ has nothing to do with that at all. It’s me, and what am I? Or you? At sixteen they sent in some Monozone bozo, someone like Owen Bradlee, who said, Well, she’s a bit of a slut but boy can she do math! It’s a stupid as that. So even if I’d wanted to go live up there with Leonard, Monozone wouldn’t let me retire yet. Actually, I thought transcryptasine would be my last big hit and then they’d let me move on. But I’m only sixty-seven and they want you till you’re within an inch of death.

Maybe it was the country. I don’t know. I just couldn’t stand the country. And he was too restless for suburbia. Put the man in a cube and he starts to pace. At my place in Nassau, when he was there, I literally couldn’t breathe. All of his huffing and puffing overwhelmed the system. The city, that was another story. Even if we had the money…he’s a native New Yorker. He hates the place. You know he came from one of those spooky families that live on the park. Central Park West. Not a mile from where we found you. As a child, he spent so much time in The Museum of Natural History, they could have dressed him up and put him in a diorama. The city was a trap for him. In suburbia he huffed and puffed. In the city he snarled. Transcryptasine changed everything. By the time we were done I’d lost all contact with the lab. I used to befriend them–they were work friendships–but real. I got remote. Theory, number crunching, schmoozing with the money people. Everyone was afraid of me, or they hated me. I lived in the lab growing fat and bitter. When we were finally done, instead of heading off to some island I went up to Leonard’s and fell in love with the place, and with him again.”

“Well, now we’re going back. That should be a good thing.” He looked at her face, red from the firelight. The blue eyes, shadowed, had big bags under them. Her lips were turned down. The skin around her neck sagged. She inhaled deeply off a cigarette and drank some whiskey with a wince. “Isn’t it?” he asked.

“Who gives a shit, Felix. Dreams are nothing at all.”

They watched the fire in silence. He felt himself drifting off to sleep. The headache was gone but the lights were still there. He hadn’t the energy to chase or coalesce them, they just drifted in and out of the fire, merging with the real sparks flying up into the trees. An owl hooted. Not far off he could hear animals moving through the woods. “I think I’ll sleep for a little while.”

“You take the back seat. I’ll sit out here for a while. I’m not tired.”

“I think I’ll just sleep right here. The air is fresher.”

“Don’t do that,” she said in a stern voice.

“Why?”

“What if it rains?”

“I’ll get wet.”

“But the animals,” she pleaded.

“I have a gun.”

“Felix, you can’t.”

He stood. “What is it? What is it about that car?”

Bryson looked at him oddly. “Felix, there’s something I have to tell you. We shot you with a neuronanobot. That’s how we found you. It’s in your brain.”

“You shot me with a what?”

“A neuronanobot. It’s a molecule-sized device programmed to enter your brain and broadcast a signal to a tiny booster in the back of your neck. It transmits information.”

“You can read my thoughts?” he had a look of disgust and horror, contemplating the as yet undetermined extent of this latest indignity.

“No, not your thoughts, though we could deduce your emotional state. What’s relevant here is that it broadcasts your position.”

The information worked its way through his brain like a termite through wood. There was something about this news that was enormous. Voice rising with each syllable he said, “What happens to me now? They can follow me around forever? Till I die?”

“No. It breaks down, decays. Sometimes it just malfunctions.”

“What’s the difference? What happens to me then? Do I just shit it out?”

“Usually.”

“Usually.”

“Usually the body absorbs it. There is a slight chance in the case of malfunction that radiation will be released. There could be some cell damage.”

“Cell damage.”

Her voice grew weaker and more fearful. “In the brain. In a tiny number of cases the result is paralysis, blindness or death from stroke. Depends on where it has lodged. I’m sorry Felix.”

He glared at her and she looked away. Angrily he threw another log on the fire, sending up a bloom of sparks. “When were you planning on telling me? I mean, is there anything you haven’t done to me now? Anything you haven’t robbed me of? What exactly am I to you?” She said nothing. “I have a right to an answer from you. What else is there?”

“Nothing. I’m sorry. I was trying to save lives.”

“Trying to save your own life you mean! Shit! Jesus!” He stamped his foot and paced about, eyes burning. “I’ve always been a stooge.” He picked up a big stick and swung it into the palm of his hand like a bat. “What’s to prevent me from beating your brains out now?”

“Felix, please–” she said, rising.

“I should kill you and take the car. It’s not just me they’re after. I can throw you to them like meat and put them off the trail.”

She was raw, defenseless. Her white hair glowed orange in the firelight. She looked haggard and weak, old. “You’re not a stooge, Felix.”

“Nor a murderer.” He dropped the stick and crouched down. A torrent of fear poured down from his brain, through his gullet and heart and into his bowels. He screamed and gripped his head in his hands. “I’ll tell you what. I’ll drive you to your beloved husband’s tomorrow. I’ll do that for you but after that, you’re on your own. Then I take off with the car.”

“O.K.,” she whispered. “And Felix. We need to keep an eye on those headaches and the spots.”

He laughed and spat on the ground. “Is there anything you can do?”

“No.”

“So let’s just say fuck it then. I’ll sleep in the front seat with the window cracked for air.”

“Sure.”

“I take it the car blocks the signal?”

“Yes. But if it’s breaking down, or malfunctioning, then the signal would come and go.”

“I’ll take my chances. If I can find fuel I’ll head up to Canada. They won’t cross the border to get me.”

“Leonard can help get you across.”

“I’ve had enough help already.” He turned his back on her and the fire and got into the front seat of the car, which smelled like mud and sweat and fell into an uneasy sleep.

“Boss, that was great,” Boyle said, and then, thinking Bradlee would appreciate the comparison, observed, “I wish women smelled and tasted so good.”

“I find it hard to believe you’d make love to a woman who smelled and tasted like a cigar.”

“Well, you know what I mean.”

“Rarely, and when I do I almost always regret it. As the divine Donne wrote, Leave her, and I will leave comparing thus, She, and comparisons are odious.”

They headed for the hovercraft. It was dark out and the quad was lit by only a few cobalt light towers. Boyle looked up at the sky and saw some stars between the clouds. “So, we’ll go back now?”

“Back where?”

“The city.”

“A joke I hope.” Boyle felt around in the dark for the anchors and released them. They got into the hovercraft and it sagged a little beneath their weight. The repast had not only sated Boyle’s hunger but also enervated him. His brains were in his feet. But Bradlee seemed to be recharged. He bustled with energy. “Let’s see if we picked them up anywhere.” He bent close to the box and read the data. The lights flashed on his nose and eyes. His expression was grim. “Hmm. They got out of the car about ten k from here. Then nothing.” He grimaced. “Goddamnit. Stupidity! Damn stupidity. I should have known.”

“What–what?”

“They were here, Boyle, in this very place! While we ate they came and went. Headed north most likely. They won’t be stupid enough to go to Leonard, not now anyway. That is, if my assumption that they visited Velodia is correct.” He pondered. “They can’t have gotten far on these roads. I say we look around for a while and then–then we drop in on Leonard. That’s a plan.”

“But it’s late. And dark.” Then Boyle thought of the one argument he had, the indisputable fact. The hovercraft could only fly so long on a battery at night. It depended on solar power. “And boss, this thing can’t fly long at night, it needs the sun for the battery. It’s a piece of junk, you know that.”

He plugged the box in. “I’m going to download Leonard Bryson’s coordinates and we can continue on foot if need be. And nine o’clock isn’t late Boyle. It’s dinner time in the city.”

“Dinner time? By nine o’clock most nights I’ve thrown up and gone to bed.”

The craft ascended. Boyle swooned as they entered the dark. He leaned against the door but still touched shoulders with Bradlee. He had to fart. “Boss, you’re gonna kill me, but I feel a fart coming on.”

Bradlee opened the vent. Air flew into the tiny cabin. “It’s just nature, Boyle.”

“Trinh Ma kicks me outta da bed.”

“Another reason not to get married.”

“She has a point boss, stinking up the bed like that ain’t polite.”

Bradlee rubbed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Could we not discuss this? Where are the damn lights on this thing?”

“That’ll only run it down more.”

“Well it’s bloody better than crashing into the trees!” He switched on the exterior landing lights, a bright beam for unplanned night landings. They were over a road partly covered by the crowns of trees. “Let’s slow down here and have a look.” He dropped to the tree line. There was a scraping sound.

“Bradlee! Boss!”

“Relax, Boyle.” Boyle was writhing around gnashing his teeth. “Are you afraid?”

“It’s heights! Ever since the war. Getting shot down in these things is the scariest fucking thing.”

“War inures most men and women to danger.”

“It manured me to nothing at all but a warm bed and a woman’s arms,” Boyle shouted.

The trees buffeted the bottom of the hovercraft and the AutoDrive lifted them abruptly up three meters. Bradlee forced them down again and in the tug of war their flight path became chaotic. “There’s the road. Keep your eye on it while I try to pilot this thing.”

Boyle tried to look. His vision was blurry and he couldn’t stand the thought of looking but there indeed was the road, the landing lights were swinging over the trees as they careened about. Up ahead he saw light. “Look,” he said. “Are those headlights?”

“I’ll be damned. Come on,” Bradlee goaded the controls. They raced up above the road and he tried to tip the hovercraft to shine the spot on the vehicle but it went black and they knocked into a tree. The hovercraft rocked out and straight up again. They lost the road. “Where’s the road?”

“I don’t know boss.”

“Shit.” Bradlee looped around and went back and forth. The road came into view again but there was nothing there. He hovered in place. “I don’t know how far we’ve come. But that had to be them.”

Boyle said nothing. His mouth was dry. He felt like he had a hot poker up his ass. Cold sweat coated his brow and upper lip. It was a struggle just to stay conscious. But he was too afraid to fall asleep. He kept thinking of tossing prisoners out of hovercraft. It was a great way to make a man talk.

Bryson couldn’t sleep. She was drunk and exhausted. Only inertia prevented her from getting up. She tossed sticks on the fire and leaned back on her elbows, grew uncomfortable, sat up and hugged her knees. The whiskey made her wince and spin but she drank it down in timid sips. She wanted to feel bad. She wanted to remember her friend with tears. Recall days together long past. But the past remained as dead to her as Velodia was and no tears came. She was inert.

The woods were quiet and the fire was down to a bed of coals hot enough to dry and consume wood quickly. Everything was dark and bleary. The creek gurgled gently. Lightning flashed on the crowns and thunder grumbled distantly. The storm was getting closer but it didn’t feel like rain. There was no breeze and the air was warmer than before. She could just make out the hum of a hovercraft. Bradlee, searching, even at night, even after losing them on the road. He’d never give up.

It was Felix she had to save now. Felix. Even though he hated her. That he should hate her was not surprising. But she could at least get him to Leonard. Even if he didn’t want his help she would get it for him. Her own life wasn’t worth it.

Her insignificance saddened her a little, even though it was the universal condition of living things only to have significance to themselves. Just as Velodia went out so would she and every other thing, leaving behind husks, excrements and dwellings for others to occupy for a while. She drank. Finally, when the tears did come, she had no idea for whom she shed them. Perhaps they were only drunken tears of self-pity.

Bryson had intended to sleep in the car but sank deeper and deeper into a stupor and eventually passed out on the ground.

“I just know they’re here somewhere,” Bradlee said. “But it’s useless. If we at least had a moon. This cloud cover and wind are damnably inconvenient and this little bucket does no better than sputter about.” Boyle said nothing. “Boyle?” He looked over at him. Asleep. Mouth agape, breathing labored. “Boyle!” Boyle didn’t budge. “Thick skinned, slow, and now, unreliable!” Bradlee muttered, “Reptilian.” A gust of wind pushed him wide of his track and when he tried to get back he felt he didn’t have the power to go directly into a head wind. Rain splashed onto the bubble and thunder and lightning got closer. He was getting tired himself. The woods were endless, black. The spotlight passed over the trees but it was swallowed up by the foliage, tiny, without the power to illuminate. The monitor reported no signal. Briefly it had a position down in the forest but the signal flickered, weakened, surged and died. He searched the map for Keuka Lake. The hovercraft could take him straight to Leonard Bryson’s but given the distance he doubted he had the power to get there. And he might lose Bryson and Felix. It was all beginning to look pointless. Well, once he took care of Felix he could just run off to New Zealand with Bryson. Some of the rage had abated. In the night he felt second thoughts form, and he was in a more forgiving mood. She had money. Her betrayal was stupid but probably, he saw now, inevitable. He had been warned and had been willfully blind but that was in the past. She was playing the best hand she had. And he felt himself missing her. She would have turned that dinner into a grand occasion and he knew just how it would have ended, in a jolly hotel room with a big doughy bed and champagne brunch on the balcony. No. He could not, would not forgive her. Her motivations weren’t important.

More lightning. A storm would be quite bad. Hovercraft were not designed for heavy weather. He tried to determine the distance of the storm. It was hard to read the screen and steer. He put it on auto and circled around. The storm was not far. Then, something else flashed, not lightning, but lights, blinking in the distance. The hovercraft lurched and bounced around on air rolling like rough water. He scraped the tree line and again shot straight up. Every time it did that he thought he’d throw up. Then the bottom dropped out and he sank, shot up and out again. The controls were over compensating. The computer was blinking, shutting down peripheral systems. The battery light glowed green to blue to purple and started to redden at one end. He elbowed Boyle. “Boyle, I need your eyes. There, out there, at ten o’clock, do you see lights?”

Boyle snored. He opened his eyes and looked lifelessly at Bradlee. “Boss,” he groaned, “I don’t feel so good. I think I got fever. I can’t breathe.”

“You’re just drunk, Boyle.”

Boyle mumbled incoherently. Bradlee looked around and yelled at the computer. There were lights approaching from three directions. They were converging on his position. Three hovercraft. He dove towards the tree line and skimmed the leaves, forcing the controls, and the three hovercraft shot by overhead. He killed the lights and slowed down so he could navigate. The three hovercraft, 2k distant, returned and surrounded him. He shot straight up eighteen meters, the engine whined, and they followed. Their spots came on, blinding him. He pulled out his gun, aimed it out the vent and shot. “Bastards!” He could make out the markings. They were Cayuga Militia. There was a huge clap of thunder and a cold gust of wind that blew them apart. A lightning bolt struck a tree and flamed out. Water gushed down and thunder shook the hovercraft. “Boyle!” The hovercraft came in again. Bullets bounced off of clear walls. He fired out the vent. “Boyle, wake up.” Boyle didn’t move. The three hovercraft flew alongside but the wind scattered them and he could see their lights blink away through the dense rain. The dashboard was lit up and a siren like a whistle was going off. He couldn’t control it anymore. The downdrafts bounced him on the trees like a basketball. He calmly recalled Keuka Lake coordinates. The rain was too thick to see through and up and down had lost all distinction. If he could only hold a course he would reach Leonard Bryson in an hour. For a minute the hovercraft seemed to recover and the storm abated to a heavy, pounding rain with less wind. But the engine whined again and then hummed. The lights went off. They were silent, sinking straight down. He couldn’t see the dash to deploy the parachute. They crashed through some branches and landed with a jarring thud. He swallowed and felt his heart beating. Now he was afraid. It was over. They were safe. He wondered what they had landed on. It was impossible to see. The only thing to do was to wait. So he sat just as he was, shoulder touching Boyle, until he fell asleep.

Only gradually did Felix realize something was wrong. He had fallen asleep in the front seat of the car snoring, sweating into the upholstery. He dreamt of Veronica. They were sitting in their apartment uptown drinking coffee but they were middle aged. “You’re still dead then?” he said to her. “I want you to come with me,” she said. “There’s something I have to show you.” It was night. The sparks were out and one hovered just before them which they followed through the woods till they came to the bronze Alice in Wonderland statue in Central Park. The park was different, it wasn’t overgrown. The lawns were cut, the paths weeded and the trees orderly. Children with old faces climbed up and down the figures. Felix watched them and then he turned to Veronica and said, “I wish we had children.” But she was gone and he was walking a white cat on a leash. One of the children looked at him. He had the face of an old man. Felix followed him to a campfire where other old men a half a meter tall were seated roasting meat and laughing at a joke. The little person he had followed pointed off into the woods and then joied the others.

He half awoke, disturbed by the dream, though why he was disturbed he didn’t know. Thunder shook the ground. Bryson wasn’t in the car. Her absence alarmed him and he woke up more. A chill spread out across his neck and face. He trembled. Something was wrong. The air coming in from the window smelled strange. He couldn’t place the smell. It was vaguely familiar and disconcerting in the way events that seemed to have happened first in dreams are. He was then very awake and his awareness expanded. It was an exciting state to be in. It was as if he was in a state of awareness in which all things existed in potential, that things about to happen unalterably had a mutable moment. Not really a moment since a moment is in time and this state, this feeling, was distinctly out of time. The smell grew stronger. He looked out the window. Everything was clear. The thick bark of the oak trees. The thinner, smoother boles of beech. The underbrush they had driven over. He heard the stream splashing over the rocks and eruptions, concussions of thunder distantly ripping the sky apart. Inside of his body he felt energy uncoil and stretch out. Then, things happened all at once. He had that moment, he was able to watch what was happening and still slow it down enough to act quickly. So quickly he could not possibly have taken the time to consciously understand what was required, what his or Bryson’s predicament was. And if he had been aware he might just have stayed in the car or fired shots out the window. But by the time Bryson screamed he already had the door open and was crouching by the car like an animal.

Bryson’s scream was loud and primal, the sustained sound of pure pain and terror. It didn’t fade but came again and again. Her arms thrashed about and she kicked at the air. The mountain lion, growling, flanks flexing, was poised to leap on her neck. Felix was transfixed. A rage transformed him as if the cry had entered him from below and he stood over the giant cat, gun in his hand. Bryson was cowering by some rocks. The panther leapt onto her and had her by the neck. As it did so Felix dropped the gun and seized it by the loose folds of skin on the shoulders and pulled. He kicked it, he punched it as Bryson cried out in helpless pain and her thrashing became weaker. The smell of the cat filled his nostrils. He pounded and pulled but could not get any kind of a hold or shift its weight. But it did a strange thing then, it released Bryson and turned on Felix. It crouched back on its haunches and menaced him with its paw, swiping his cheek, and watched him with its vigilant hungry eyes. Felix stood his ground. His eyes burned in his face, he bared his teeth and fixed the eye of the cat with his own. Bryson, panting, had gotten up on her hands and knees but collapsed. Felix didn’t flinch or move or even blink but determined to kill the cat with his bare hands. It was much bigger than he was, four meters at least, nose to tail, and its weight was suffocating, its pelt, its saliva, stinking and palpable. The cat could kill them but Felix stood his ground because he knew the cougar would see him for what he was, a predator. Felix emitted a deep, guttural cry and lunged at the animal. It inched back, pawing the air between them, not yet conceding the fight but giving ground. It was a little confused. Hypnotized by the eyes and teeth and by the murderous power he felt emanating both from himself and the panther, Felix stepped closer. The cougar stepped back again and opened its jaws to emit a heart breaking, terrifying squeal, like a lost, injured child. He didn’t want to kill it. It was a beautiful animal. As it cried out and backed off he realized he was in the presence of something great and rare. He couldn’t stand the idea of watching it shrink into nothing at his feet. He took another step forward and it was gone, as quickly as it had come. A creature so big and powerful slipped off into the shadows as easily as a sparrow in a shrub.

He went to Bryson. She lay on the ground in a fetal position, dead or close to it. The enormity of that had not rushed in yet. He simply had to do things. Always one did things.

“Bryson?” he asked gently, afraid to touch her. She looked so small, crumpled on the ground, covered in mud. Her white hair was matted and stained with dark blood. Blood soaked her shirt. “Bryson?” He touched her lightly and she flinched. Her breath came in little short puffs. She was trembling. “Bryson, can you speak?” He wasn’t sure if he should move her or not. If her spine was injured he should leave her be. He searched her neck and back. There were four deep cuts as far as he could see, bleeding heavily, two on her head and two on her neck, but no artery or vein appeared to be hit and the blood was welling up slowly, not gushing or spraying. She was very cold and wouldn’t answer him. He lifted her and carried her to the car as best he could. She cried out when he put his hand under her head and back. He tried to soothe her. The woods were dark and impenetrable. They were aliens here. It was no paradise. The wild world in all its uncanny brutality, the world people had slowly destroyed in their mastery of it, had returned. On their own, they were nothing.

He laid her down on the back seat of the car. The wounds needed to be cleaned and stitched. He got out his old linen clothes and bandaged her head and neck as best he could to stanch the blood. There was a loud crack of thunder and a strong wind. Shit. Shit. It came. The storm eased in overhead. Thunder shook the earth and lightning bolts shattered trees. Rain pounded the ground into mud.

Still Bryson didn’t speak. She had seemed so powerful. Inhuman: intelligent, sexy, strong, in command of people and the elements. Now she was a quivering, frightened animal dying of its wounds. He started the car and tried to back it up the embankment but the wheels spun around uselessly. He squeezed into the back seat and arranged her head onto his lap, pressing the suit and shirt into the cuts and held her shivering body to his own while the rain drummed on the roof and water gushed over the windows. He was cold too. Feeling an itch he touched his cheek and his hand came away covered in blood.