The Living

WE

WE FEEL PRESSURE. We feel strain. We feel rumbles and tremors and the rushing of rivers. Hills heave up from flatlands, mountains pierce peaceful fields. Earth bulges with potential, stretching and distorting its perfect sphere as it tries to decide what to be. Earth is a quantum particle. An indecisive electron waiting on its observers.

Two of its observers are called Gael and Gebre, and they are looking for someone they lost. Like all sane humans, they avoid the existential sinkhole of the Midwaste. They stick to the places with people. At major junctions they find guidance sprayed onto the pavement: skulls for the roads to nowhere, smiling faces for active arterials, the handful of highways that still have a pulse.

“Graffiti artists are the new Department of Transportation,” Gael chuckles as he guides the van toward the recommended lane. “The world’s upside-down. I love it!”

“Could be tricks,” Gebre says. “Or traps.”

Gael shrugs. “Anything could be anything. Why default to bad?”

“Well, historically…”—Gael groans—“…historically, vandals were lashing out at the society that excluded them. The last thing they wanted was to assist it.”

“History was a long time ago, love.” Gael gestures to the strange landscape around them, the murals on the road, the sculptures of stacked cars towering above the desert. “This is new territory.”

He hits the gas. The van roars over the big yellow smile and onto the highway.

It’s barely an hour before they see the first car. Then another, and another, until the lanes are full and brake lights begin to flare.

“Traffic!” Gael squeals with delight. “We’re in traffic!”

“I haven’t seen a jam like this in fifteen years,” Gebre says. “Where are they coming from?”

The answer to this question takes shape from town to town, from rest stop to truck stop to roadside diner as they work their way west.

They buy beers for Axiom troops from Chicago, who deserted in the night as grumbles rose to shouts.

They change a tire for youths from the UT-AZ Sovereignty, who hopped the fence of their feudal kingdom in search of the wider world.

They share intel with scouts from Montreal and Juarez, who climbed their border walls to investigate the cancer growing in the land between them.

And they listen quietly to people from the wilderness: families and tribes and underground enclaves who grew tired of isolation, who ventured from their hills and caves on some obscure impulse—some call it a pull, others a voice—in search of something they can’t name.

The long-sleeping continent is in motion. Gael and Gebre sense it too, this pull, this voice, but they force themselves to ignore it. They are looking for someone they lost.

“Have you seen any civilian transports?”

“Where does Axiom take Dead children?”

“Have you seen a boy with yellow eyes?”

The clues that emerge are less than conclusive. A man saw a caravan heading into Post. A woman saw helicopters circling around Portland. A little girl saw a ghost boy flying toward the sun.

“Well?” Gael says as they come to another crossroads: Portland or Post, both sprayed with smiles. “What do you think?”

Gebre sighs and leans against the steering wheel. “I think we should have discussed it further before deciding to adopt.”

“He was alone. He needed someone.”

“And so did we, I know, I know.”

They are on the outskirts of yet another empty town surrounded by crumbling factories. The highway splits off into the sagebrush hills, its two halves indistinguishable.

“Well, old man?” Gael persists. “Post or Portland? I defer to your ancient wisdom.”

Gebre rubs his goatee. “The Almanac said Post was ‘closed, hostile,’ which certainly sounds like Axiom…”

“But it said Portland was ‘no gov.’ Farming and barter markets…”

“Which sounds like something Axiom would love to invade…”

“Right. So it’s a variable. But if we go to Portland and he’s not there, we might still find something worth finding.”

“You mean our anarchist utopia?” Gebre says with an affectionate smirk.

Gael gestures toward the two sides of the crossroads, the highways like mirrored lines. “It’s a vacillation. It’s a potential reality waiting on our perception. What do we want to see?”

Gebre laughs. “Did you just reference The Suggestible Universe? I thought real physicists hated that pop-sci mysticism.”

Gael shrugs. “Dubious science. Intriguing metaphor.”

“Okay. Here goes.” Gebre takes a deep breath and closes his eyes. “I want to see a peaceful, Edenic commune. I want to see our little friend Rover, alive and Living.”

“And alone with no guards,” Gael adds.

“Alone with no guards,” Gebre agrees. Then he opens his eyes and hits the gas and the camper surges forward.

We watch the van dwindle into the distance. We savor the love inside it, subtle and nuanced but strong. And we are not the only ones observing this particle as it hurtles through the universe. Faces linger in the windows of obsolete factories—film stock, vinyl records, radios, paper; long-dead industries that are ready to revive. Eyes glimmer in the shadows with a dull metallic sheen, silver and lead with occasional glints of gold.

In this town, in the next town, in abandoned places from one coast to another, the Dead are waiting. It was months ago when they heard the first call, like an immense bell tolling across the world, announcing the arrival of…something. They woke from their sleep and cocked their heads, hearing a certain suspense in the bell’s lingering resonance. A promise of more to come.

So they continue to gather, in all stages of plague and cure, some contemplative, some hungry, all following the same subterranean current. They fill buildings and swarm in streets, forming vast populations not far from Living enclaves, but not even the hungry ones hunt. They listen to radios and stare at televisions and gaze up at the clouds, waiting for a signal to emerge from all this noise.

We have been dreaming of this moment. The world is not a closed cycle, endlessly resetting to zero. There is accretion. With every rise and fall, there is increase. We slip one rung down the ladder and climb two back up, and after so many epochs, from unquestioned bestial cruelty to a clumsy but fervent reach for progress, we are surely approaching a plateau.

We are ten thousand generations of humans and millions more of simpler things, a vast history of lives and experiences condensed like an ocean of oil, growing deeper and more refined with each new moment of beauty.

We want to ignite. We want to be heat and light. After billions of years, we are running out of patience.

WE

THE WOUND is so small. Two arcs, barely an inch across. Reddened skin, mostly unbroken, more of a welt than a wound. Abram refuses to believe this is enough to bring the change. This insignificant nip from a child’s little cuspids? Four tiny holes in his wife’s soft skin, barely even bleeding? After all they’ve survived together, this can’t be what tears them apart.

He closes his eyes. His mind races backward, searching for answers in the moments that brought them here.

“You all know what’s happening,” Branch Manager Warden says to the assembly. “Axiom is a walking corpse and we’re all in its belly. We have to cut our way out before it digests us.”

A hundred feet below Pittsburgh’s humming HQ, thirty-six young men stand crammed into the subway staff office, gathered to plan a revolution. Abram hovers at the back, near the door, listening.

“I know a lot of you grew up in this company,” Warden says. He’s older than any of them and probably stronger, his hairy forearms corded with muscle, but his eyes are sunken and tired. “Some of you were even born in it, and maybe it’s hard to imagine a life outside. But if we’re going to do this thing, we all have to be committed, so let’s hear it, guys. What scares you the most?”

There’s an uneasy silence.

“I know nobody wants to answer a question like that but I phrased it that way on purpose. I don’t want any macho bullshit compromising this mission. They train you to pack down your feelings and seal yourselves off, but that’s how you build a bomb. If one of you goes off we all die. So come on now, let it all out there if you’re man enough. What scares you?”

The assembly squirms, struggling to grasp this inversion of bravado.

“Is it the combat?” Warden prompts. “Afraid of getting hurt? Maybe dying?”

Still nothing.

“Is it punishment? What they’ll do to us if we lose?”

Abram stiffens his chin. “No,” he says over all the heads in front of him. “It’s what happens to us if we win.”

A murmur of nervous agreement passes through the assembly.

Warden nods. “The instability. The unknown.”

“I have a family,” Abram says. “I know the company has problems or I wouldn’t be here right now, but Axiom puts food on my table. How do I tell my daughter there’s no dinner tonight because Daddy had to chase a dream?”

The wave of agreement intensifies and all eyes turn to Warden for his response.

“I hear you,” Warden says. “I’ve got kids too, and yeah, that’d be a very tough thing to tell them. But I can think of tougher things.”

Abram crosses his arms but says nothing.

“How do I tell my kids that food is all I can give them? How do I tell them they have to spend their lives working in the dark to keep a broken machine running, sweating and bleeding for insane men they’ll never see? Men who don’t give a shit what happens to us as long as nothing interrupts their party?” His eyes are bleary and haunted in their deep sockets, glistening with emotion. “Ask that question, Kelvin. How do you tell your daughter her future will be a nightmare because Daddy didn’t chase a dream?”

Abram’s mouth tightens and his hands clench into fists. He turns and marches out. He’s heard enough poetry from weepy idealists. No matter how unstable Axiom may have become, it has to be a safer bet than this.

So Abram returns to his post. He collects his weekly rations and smiles as his wife cooks them. When he receives a new assignment, he follows it, even though it doesn’t quite make sense. Even though it relocates them to an outpost that’s off the supply route—the route will connect soon, Management assures him. Even though the convoy lacks adequate defensive support—the territory has already been cleared, Management assures him. Even though Management doesn’t answer his calls on the day of departure and his stomach is boiling with unease, he puts on a smile for his family and he follows his instructions.

They find the outpost abandoned and crumbling. No water source. No perimeter fence. The first messenger they send to HQ returns with a brief reply: Out of office for holiday weekend! Will get back to you next week!

The second messenger never returns.

One by one, the promises collapse. No supplies. No reinforcements. And no, the territory is not clear.

These last six months pulse through Abram’s brain like poison, congealing into a conclusion he can’t bear to face, a guilt too heavy to carry all at once. So he focuses on the wound in front of him. He can’t even call it that; it’s a nick, a poke. Kenrei’s skin is creamy soft and Abram has left worse marks than this in their lovemaking. Perhaps it won’t be counted. Perhaps the judges of this hideous sport will look the other way and give them both another chance.

“It’s happening,” Kenrei says flatly.

“No it’s not,” Abram mumbles. “Your eyes are normal, I don’t think it…” He trails off. The trickle of blood is darkening. Purple. Blue. Black.

“Abram.”

Gently, lovingly, she touches the gun on his hip.

He shakes his head. “There has to be some other—”

“There isn’t.”

“If we can keep you safe for a while…maybe they’ll figure something out…maybe something will change.”

“Daddy?” Sprout calls from behind the bathroom door. “Can I come out now?”

Kenrei gives him a hard look. “I won’t let her remember me like that.” Her voice used to be timid, her gaze always downcast and demure. Where is she getting this sudden strength? “I’ll do it if you won’t…” She slides the gun out of his holster and places it in his palm, pressing her hands around it like a gift. “…but I want you to.”

The barrel is still hot. Abram squeezes it until his hand burns. Then one by one, his fingers slide down to the grip.

“She’s yours now,” his wife whispers as her brown eyes pulse gray. “Find her a better life than this.”

Abram stares down at Sprout’s head as she rests against his shoulder, twitching and whimpering in her sleep. Most children are eager to share their nightmares, but she’s always kept hers locked away, crawling into his bed without speaking a word of the visions that haunt her. Where did they come from? Did he put them there?

Her eyes open at the grinding squeal of the stadium gates. When they boom shut behind the SUV she jolts upright, peeling her sweaty cheek away from Abram’s arm.

“We’re back here again?” she croaks.

The simple observation slides into him like a dull knife. Without malice, without calculation, she cuts through his denial like paper.

“It’s no Manhattan,” Abbot says as they climb out of the SUV, misinterpreting the defeat on Abram’s face. “Or Nashville for that matter. But it’s secure, and it has certain strategic assets, so I’m told. When I’m told anything.”

Sprout looks up at Abram with an expression he’s never seen on her. Tight lips and jutted chin, her eye like a sharp probe penetrating his skull. And the other eye, covered by the patch but not blinded by it, disregarding barriers in ways he’s never understood—what does that terrible orb see when it fixes on him? Does it judge him harshly for hiding it from the world?

“Abram!”

He whirls toward the sound of his name before he remembers it’s not his name anymore. Half a block away, his former friends—no, travel partners—are being unloaded from their van, wrists cuffed behind their backs. Four more sets of eyes join his daughter’s in hard appraisal.

“Are you really doing this?” Nora shouts as a guard prods her forward with his rifle barrel. “After everything you’ve seen, you’re just running right back?”

“Shut up,” the guard tells her, but she doesn’t register his presence.

“You’re really gonna feed Sprout to these people?”

Abram finds no suitable response. Instead of trying to distance himself from the prisoners, he just stands there, blank-faced, waiting.

The Dead boy with the gilded irises emerges from the van, and Sprout’s attention shifts away from Abram; he feels it go like a hot iron lifting from his skin. The two children watch each other from across the distance, their thoughts unreadable in the ever-evolving language of the young.

“Maybe you can’t help us,” Nora says as the guards march her and the others toward a doorway in the stadium’s concrete wall, “maybe you don’t even want to, but for fuck’s sake, man, get your daughter out of here.”

The guard jabs the butt of his rifle into the back of her head. She topples forward and grinds her face into the dried mud. A strange noise comes out of the boy, a little howl that’s not part of the usual human repertoire, and then it’s drowned out by shouts as Marcus head-butts the guard behind him and kicks Nora’s abuser in the back with such force the man flies right over her and ruins his face on the steel steps.

The ensuing scuffle is short-lived but brutal, and Abram finds himself wondering if there is anything besides his daughter that would make him fight like that. There was, once. He was not a meek youth. It took many harsh years to cut him from the Kelvin tree and graft him onto Axiom. Many Physical Disincentive sessions before he learned to obey his father-boss. Countless cold nights in those dark, dripping tunnels, sketching visions of airplanes and jetpacks and wings.

And Kenrei. He fought for her. He fought so hard he never quite stopped.

But that was all a long time ago. Today, there’s only one cause he believes in: this girl at his side. This girl who’s staring at him, into him, through him, filling his belly with fear.

He jumps when Abbot’s meaty palm claps onto his shoulder. “Listen, ‘Jim,’” the older man sighs, “we need to talk.”

Abram stiffens. Did he imagine the scare quotes?

“I’m going to settle into my new office,” Abbot continues. “The triple stack on Gun Avenue and Rooster Street. Why don’t you drop your kid off at Foster Care and meet me there in twenty.”

Abram struggles to remain professional. “Yes sir.”

Abbot nods and strolls away, relaxed and avuncular, but his final glance glints with a warning, like the flash of a weapon beneath a coat.

Abram rarely dreams. He wakes in a lukewarm blankness, the night a perfect nothing, and resumes exactly where he left off. The dreams he does have are always the same: misplacing something, failing someone, forgetting who he is. He wonders if he’s dreaming now as he leads his daughter through these narrow streets to a crooked tower full of children without parents. Is Sprout one of them? Is Abram already gone?

“I don’t want to go here,” she whimpers on the doorstep.

“Just for a little while. I have to go to a meeting, but then I’ll come get you.”

“And then we’ll leave?” Her eye goes round with hope. “We’ll escape and go find our friends?”

Abram’s mouth is a flat line. He should shower her with lies, tell her whatever will make her feel secure, but it won’t come out. He can feel the eye behind the patch burning into him like a laser, sealing the lies in his throat.

“When it’s the right time,” he croaks. “When it’s safe.”

The door opens and the foster mother takes his daughter and he walks off into the city, refusing to wonder if he’ll see her again.

“I’ll make this quick,” Abbot says. “I did some digging. I know who you are.”

Abram’s eyes roam the bare walls of Abbot’s office, a cheap movie set, a faded drawing, a memory of a memory.

“I know you were on the list a while back for some serious infractions. I know you helped some assets escape and may have been involved in a branch break.”

Abram wonders where he’ll be when he wakes up from this dream. Will he still be father in that distant reality? Will he find himself napping on the couch while Dad reads books and Perry builds blocks? How much of his life will vanish?

“I also know that you came back,” Abbot says. “I know you realized your mistake quickly and did your best to undo it. But more importantly, I know you’re a talented pilot and an effective acquisition assistant with a long and impressive record, and Axiom can’t afford to throw away resources in times like these.”

Three figures hover behind Abbot, gray shirts, colorful ties, gazing down at Abram with cheerful grins.

“We would like to offer you your former position,” the woman in the yellow tie says.

“All we need from you are assurances,” the man in the blue tie says, “that you resonate with our mission statement.”

“We need to know that you feel good,” the woman says with a radiant smile. “That you feel fantastic. That you’re ready to give a hundred and ten percent twenty-five hours a day so we can live in a world of certainty.”

“And we need to know that you care about your daughter,” the man says. “That you want her to be safe and stable and untroubled by dreams and urges.”

“Imagine such peace of mind,” the woman says, “to never worry again.”

“To never see her take risks or rebel or run off with some degenerate.”

“To never see her grow up,” the woman says softly. “To never see her leave you.”

Abram closes his eyes. Dry. Burning. The building sways in the breeze; the floor heaves like water.

“…so what I’m saying,” Abbot says, “is that I can offer you a probationary position, but I’ll be watching you closely until I’m satisfied that you’re not a liability. You did good work at the Fire Church compound, but that goat-fuck is far from over. Scouts haven’t been able to locate their…”

The floor is the deck of a storm-tossed ship and he’s staring down into dark water, catching glimpses of something huge rising from the depths.

“…attack any day now, so we need…”

It’s opening in the green-black below, a vast mouth, a throat.

“Well, Roberts? Are you onboard?”

He looks at Abbot. He swallows hard, holding back the nausea. He nods. He says something affirmative. Abbot smiles. Then Abram excuses himself, runs down the stairs, and vomits into the street while the buildings dance around him and helicopters hum overhead.

I

WE EMERGE FROM THE FOREST like remnants of an earlier age, man and woman, dirty and bloody, clothed in tattered rags. Below us is the city. The suburbs where we once tried to start a life. The urban center beyond it, a mirage of crumbled buildings rippling on the horizon.

“So this is home?” I wonder aloud.

“Well…” Julie squints. “It’s the closest thing we’ve got.”

We descend the hilltop, following the same trail that brought us through the woods. Julie recognized it as a route once used by the stadium’s salvage teams, safer and more direct than the highway, and we have indeed reached Post in half the time I expected. Just enough time to make a plan.

At the bottom of the hill, we’re greeted by the familiar ruins of our old neighborhood, and I’m about to indulge in some sweet nostalgia when I notice the smell. I glance at Julie; her wrinkled nose says she smells it too.

“Wow,” she mumbles. “I don’t remember it being this bad.”

“It wasn’t.” I sniff the air, detecting faint notes of pollen and rosemary, but mostly rotting flesh. And then I notice we’re being watched.

Every window. Every room. Every home in the neighborhood is filled with silent, motionless figures, like the world’s dullest block party. Rounding a corner to the main thoroughfare, we find that the gathering has spilled out into the yards. There are thousands of Dead here. Perhaps tens of thousands. Mostly Dead, Nearly Living—whatever their level of life, the important thing is they’re not trying to eat us. They watch us with muted curiosity in their monochrome eyes, a hint of childlike wonder like we’re a two-person parade.

“B has new friends,” Julie whispers.

I glance into our neighbor’s open door and see him sitting exactly where we left him, ensconced in his easy chair in front of his TV, watching the flickering gibberish of the LOTUS Feed. But he’s not alone now. His house is full.

Ands ours has a few guests, too. A young couple sits on our couch, staring through the hole we never finished patching. A man stands in our kitchen, slowly pouring one of Julie’s beers into the sink and watching the foam like it’s a miracle. We move through the house carefully, trying not to disturb whatever strange process they’re in, but Julie draws the line at the four boys huddled around the bedroom dresser, digging through her underwear.

“Okay guys, can we get a little privacy?”

They turn toward us. One of them looks down at the bra in his hand, then at Julie, then back at the bra.

“Out!” she barks.

They shuffle out. The boy keeps the bra.

Julie locks the door behind them and leans against it. “Okay. So you’re sure this will work?”

I answer without hesitation. “No.”

She sighs. “Let me rephrase it—you’re sure there’s some chance it will work?”

I think for a moment. “Yes. Some chance.”

“Good enough.” She looks me up and down and smiles. “Well, handsome, this should be a lot easier than your last makeover. All you need this time is a shower.”

I look down at the metal briefcase in my hand. I have this weapon today because of the man I once was. That wretch carried it across the country and left it for me in the woods. A corner of my mouth quirks at the thought: he was searching for BABL too.

Very carefully, I set the briefcase on the floor. Does age make a bomb less likely to go off, or more? Will anything even happen when I press its trigger? A question for Huntress Tomsen, if we can find her in the city. If she’s even there. If any of our friends are even still alive. We are entering a world of ifs, but I prefer it to a world of dismal certainty.

I enter the bathroom. I peel the clothes off my body. This shirt, these jeans—they were new when we left this house a few weeks ago. Now there’s little left of them, but each rip and stain is a story. Holes from a bombing, burns from torture, blood from carrying a wounded friend, mud from digging a grave…enough stories for a very long book.

I look in the mirror. My stubble is almost a beard now. It doesn’t quite fit the character I’ll be playing, but it’s the most visible sign that I’m no longer lifeless, and I can’t bring myself to shave it.

I step into the shower and pull the chain. Up on the roof, a valve opens in a tank, and collected rainwater sprays from the shower head, steaming with the sun’s heat. It’s my one real contribution to the building of this home, and a comforting reminder that sometimes my plans do work.

I close my eyes and let the rain strike my face. I don’t notice that I’m not alone until I feel Julie’s hands on my chest, her naked body soft against my back. I watch her hands rub away the stubborn grime that covers me like a second skin. Will this be our only moment? Our one chance to enjoy such simple sweetness? Will we ever return to this house and the life we hoped to build?

Ungrateful questions. Insults to a generous universe. I won’t reject a gift because it isn’t two gifts.

I turn around and pull her against me. Her skin is smooth, despite all her scars. I kiss her lips, her neck, her breasts, sucking rainwater off her skin. We let friction do its wondrous work. Our bodies scrub each other clean.

“Don’t think of it as an Axiom uniform,” Julie tells me as I stare at my old clothes laid out on the bed—my graveclothes, as I once called them. The gray shirt, the red tie, their high-tech fibers as eerily well-preserved as the body they once clothed. “Think of it as that fashion statement you always wanted to make.”

“That you always wanted me to make.”

“R,” she says, picking up the shirt and slipping it over my shoulders, “these were your clothes. You said you designed them, didn’t you?”

With difficulty, I nod, straining to connect the lines between my disparate lives.

“So reclaim them. Make them mean what you want them to. And when we’re done…we can fucking burn them.”

I see the wretch standing in the shadows at the top of the basement stairs. He thrusts out his filthy, blood-smeared hand.

I grit my teeth and shake it.

I put on the shirt. The pants. That garish red tie, the color of power, fire, hunger—everything I thought a strong leader needed—but also love, passion, the will to act. A color with many shades.

Julie straightens the knot and brushes my shoulders. She steps back and glances me over. “Okay. So we’re doing this?”

My mind floods with images of failure, all the many ways my plan could get her killed, and I fight the doglike reflex to bury the things I love. Since the day I met Julie, I’ve been trying to keep her safe. But what I’ve come to realize is that Julie will never be safe, because she doesn’t want to be. She wants to fight hard and love hard and eat life raw and bleeding. So I won’t try to keep her out of danger. If it’s time for war, I won’t hold her back. I’ll charge in beside her and make sure we win.

“R?” she says. “Are you ready?”

I nod.

She opens her mouth for her favorite correction but I beat her to it.

“I’m ready,” I say loudly. “I am so fucking ready.”

She grins. She hands me my briefcase. We go to work.

WE

NORA REMEMBERS when this room was not a prison cell. It’s emptied out now, a bare plywood cube, but under the Grigio administration it was a Security barracks, and after Grigio, during those two short months of thrilling uncertainty, it was a rehab room for the Nearly Living. A place where they could share fears and ask questions, where they could get counseling from someone reasonably well-versed in the very new field of undead psychology. Nora wonders what happened to those aspiring humans, those “uncategorized Dead.” Were they incorporated into Axiom’s glorious new society of smiling corpses? Or were they promptly liquidated? Nora isn’t sure which answer she hopes for.

It’s strange to think that this man sitting next to her—or rather, an awkward distance away from her—used to be one of them. He sat in this very room, listening intently to the counselor while Nora watched from the doorway. She told herself her interest was clinical—he was her patient, after all—but there was something about him that lingered in her thoughts after their surgery sessions. Was it the traces of the nightmare lurking in her past? No. If that were it, his presence would have repulsed her, not drawn her in. There’s something else.

He is not a handsome man. When they first met, he was downright ugly, and the Gleam’s restoration of his face only took him so far. But maybe it’s not quite done with him, because his features look a little finer every day, though Nora can’t pinpoint what’s actually changed.

“Marcus,” she says, and he jolts to attention. He hasn’t ventured a word to her since their capture. “Do you remember it? Do you remember what happened?”

Addis looks up. Marcus glances at both of them, then the floor. “Some of it.”

“Which parts?”

He sighs. “I remember dying. I remember you…trying to save me.”

“Do you remember hunting us?”

He shakes his head. “She was hunting you. I wasn’t.”

“Then why did you follow us?”

“I was…curious.”

“About what?”

He glances up. “You.”

“What about me?”

He holds her gaze. “You were different. Tough and kind. I wanted to understand.”

Nora squints at him for a moment. She notices Addis doing the same. “And you remember what happened next, right?” She touches the dried black wound on her brother’s shoulder. “You remember this?”

She expects him to avert his eyes in shame, but he stares at the wound, then at Nora, then surprises her with a glint of anger. “You know the plague,” he says. “You know I didn’t choose what I did. And you know I’m sorry anyway. So forgive me or don’t. Beat the shit out of me if you need to. But come on, Nora…don’t just fuck with me.”

Nora wants to smile. She is beginning to understand what she feels. But she keeps her face stony. “I’m not the one whose life you stole.” She ruffles Addis’s dusty hair. “I’ll forgive you when he does.”

Marcus looks at Addis. So do Tomsen and Joan and Alex, this unlikely ensemble of Living and Dead, all so exhausted that the distinction is barely there. They’ve been in this room for days, waiting for whatever fate their captors will assign them, but right now they’re waiting for Addis. For this quiet boy’s answer to the heartbroken man who killed him. They have little hope left for their futures—even the kids seem to understand this—but to witness one last moment of warmth before they’re herded into the machine…that would be nice.

Addis looks into Marcus’s eyes. Marcus winces, his eyes glisten, but he doesn’t look away.

Then the door unbolts and squeals open, and three pitchmen file in, beaming like they’re here to announce the winner of some grotesque gameshow.

“Thank you for waiting,” the woman in the yellow tie says. “We have cleared spaces for you in the facility and are ready to begin.” She smiles while the burly man in the black tie grabs Marcus by his cuffed wrists and lifts him to his feet. “Please wait while we transfer you.”

“Another prison?” Tomsen says, blinking furiously. “Two prisons in two months?”

“It’s three for me,” Nora mutters. “Third time’s the charm, right?”

“Incarceration is a waste of valuable resources,” Blue Tie says. “The Axiom Group can’t afford waste in these difficult times.”

“Over the next few months,” Yellow Tie says, her voice moist with pride and pleasure, “through the process of Orientation, we will be converting all of Axiom’s detainees into employees. Felons, dissidents, even enemy combatants—all of them can become useful assets!”

“There is a part of everyone that craves simplicity,” Blue Tie says. “Security, certainty, clarity of purpose. But these goals are prevented by all our contradictions. We want too many different things. We are confused.”

“Orientation narrows the path,” Yellow Tie declares. “Orientation draws a single line that anyone can follow.”

Yellow Tie grabs Nora’s wrist and lifts her to her feet with a strength that her spindly arms don’t suggest.

“At this time, please come with us to the facility,” Yellow Tie says, her voice overflowing with enthusiasm. “We can’t wait to get started!”

WE

IN THE CENTER OF THE HUMAN BRAIN, there are two structures shaped like coiled snakes. They are called the basal ganglia, and they are the stone tablets on which we carve our sacred laws. They store our habits, our instinctive reactions, the learned patterns of our lives.

In Paul Bark’s brain, these structures are throbbing. A surge of unexpected input has bruised them, hammered their neural pathways and attempted to redraw them. He resisted. He maintained the integrity of the grid. But it hurt.

He soothes himself now with the comfort of familiarity. The straight lines and right angles of this empty white room. The hardness of the laminate floor pressing into his tail bone as he sits cross-legged in the corner. He has lived in this house before, one of many scattered throughout the region in obscure towns far from freeways. Towns that embrace him and his teachings. Towns that are not soggy with sentiment and self-love and attachments to this life. Towns that are ready for the Fire.

The rest of the world will always hate him, and he welcomes their hate. He clings to it. What would be left of Paul Bark if he sank into the world’s acceptance? If he let his borders soften in that warm ocean, his power and purpose dissolving into a blissfully impotent slurry? No. He inhabits the world’s hate like a shell, and it gives him his shape.

And yet…his head pounds. He is trying to read scripture but his thoughts scrape and clatter against each other and the ancient verses lose their meaning. He closes his eyes and focuses on the voices outside instead, the reassuring presence of his followers. They shout instructions up and down the streets, loading supplies and fueling vehicles, preparing for their final test of faith. These people are with him. These people are like him: set apart—in the world but not of it—so he can allow himself the comfort of their love.

He is not quite alone with his burden. He is not quite alone with the truth.

Someone knocks on the front door. Paul closes the black book in his lap but doesn’t get up. “Yes?”

A young man enters, a girl close behind. Paul doesn’t remember their names, but he knows they were part of the outreach teams. Of the hundreds he sent out to reap souls and skeletons, barely half came back. Whether killed by their quarry or seduced by the world, Paul will never know, but it matters to no one but God. They’re gone.

Not these two. They are survivors twice over: the mission abroad and the massacre at home. God must have big plans for them. Perhaps they’ll be Elders someday. Well, one of them anyway.

“You don’t have to knock,” Paul says. “This isn’t my home.” He gestures to the bare floor around him. “Have a seat.”

They sit, folding their legs on the oak-patterned laminate. They look nervous. Perhaps they’re here to make a confession. They’ve probably been fucking.

“I don’t know if you remember us, Pastor Bark,” the young man says. “I’m Peter, and this is Miriam.”

Paul smiles and nods. “How’s it going out there?”

“It’s um…it’s going well. They’ll be ready soon. That’s actually what we came to talk to you about.”

Paul cocks his head. Have they not been fucking? It seems impossible. The girl is obscenely attractive, a masterfully crafted temptation, and few possess the self-mastery Paul has achieved.

“There’s something we need to confess,” Miriam says, glancing nervously at the young man, and Paul smiles inwardly; there it is.

Peter clears his throat. “We need to confess the sin of doubt.”

Paul’s smile cools. “Doubt?”

“About what we’re doing. About God’s Jury.”

Paul stiffens his jaw. “Fine,” he says. “You’ve confessed. Now swallow those doubts, repent, and get back out there. Go and sin no more.”

Peter and Miriam glance at each other, surprised.

“Is that not what you wanted to hear?” Paul says. “Were you expecting a pep talk? Did you want me to tell you doubt is only natural and you shouldn’t beat yourself up over it? Well doubt is natural, just like all sin, and if you won’t beat yourself up over it, I fucking will.”

Peter swallows hard and avoids Paul’s gaze. “We just…we were hoping you could help us through this. Help us focus, like you do.”

“It’s just so many people,” Miriam says. Her voice quavers. “And most of them are probably unbelievers, so…won’t we be sending them to Hell?”

“We won’t be sending them anywhere,” Paul snaps. “We don’t control the Dead. Whatever happens to that city will be God’s will.”

“But how do we know for sure?”

“Because everything that happens is God’s will.”

“Then…why even do this?” Miriam’s eyes are moist. “Why do any of what we’re doing? Why not just live our lives as righteously as we can and let God handle his own business?”

Paul blinks. His patient smile contorts into a grimace. Oh, they are definitely fucking. How could they not be? Just look at this girl, her back arched with the intensity of her emotion, her tits thrusting into Paul’s eyes, violating his brain, her pussy opening like a trap to drag him down to Hell just like all the other whores all these long years; of course they’re fucking, everyone but Paul is fucking and eating and drinking and sleeping because everyone but him is weak, enslaved to their humanity, and he will walk the empty streets of Heaven alone with his righteousness.

“Miriam,” he says stiffly. “You’re passionate. You’ll make someone a very good wife, and if the Lord keeps us here longer than I hope, you’ll be a good mother too. But it’s not your role to speak out on issues of doctrine.”

Miriam’s spine sags. Her eyes drop to the floor.

“Peter,” Paul says, dismissing the girl and turning his attention to the young man. “I have to say I’m disappointed. God has made it clear to me that you’ve been living in sin with Miriam, and it’s this sin that planted the doubt in your heads.”

Peter drops his eyes too, and Paul smiles grimly. He’s right again. He’s always right.

“You’ve allowed lust to cloud your vision, but remember, it’s not just lust you have to guard against. Even love can tie you to this world and make you forget what you’re here to do: to work and struggle and fight for the world to come.”

The two youths are silent, ashamed, as they should be.

“But you asked me to help you through your doubt.” Paul Bark stands up and looks down at his audience, his squat frame towering over these statuesque youths. “So I’ll say this to you. There is nothing more dangerous than doubt.”

He begins to pace slowly around the room, his boots clicking on the hard floor.

“And that’s because there’s nothing more wonderful than truth!” He feels his bitter rage subsiding in the glow of these words. “When you follow truth, you know exactly who you are, what you are, and what’s expected of you. We talk about the straight and narrow path like it’s some terrible challenge, but it’s actually the easiest way!”

The youths look up, replacing their shame with attentiveness, which is just as good.

“Because you can get lost on a wide path!” He gestures expansively with his palms. “You can bump into people and get turned around and end up somewhere you never meant to go. The narrow path keeps you focused on the goal, no matter what distractions the enemy throws at you. The narrow path is perfect, and doubt is the rain that erodes it.”

Paul Bark doesn’t write his sermons. He doesn’t even think them; the words flow effortlessly from somewhere deep inside, and he speaks them before they can be tainted by the tangled nest of his brain. It’s a rapturous feeling, this freedom from doubt. It’s what he hopes to impart to these confused youths at his feet.

“Fight your doubt.” He crouches down and touches Miriam’s cheek, squeezes Peter’s shoulder. “Don’t let it wash you away.”

He holds their gaze until they give him small, timid nods, then he stands again and stares at the blank white wall. “What we’re doing is right. We’re following the truth like no church ever has. All the way to its conclusion.”

I

LIKE ME, Citi Stadium has lived three lives. It was born as the ultimate expression of the spirit of its era: size, strength, and heedless excess, a sprawling expanse of concrete that smothered six square blocks and could host a football game on one end and a pyrotechnic political rally on the other. Then its life of flamboyance came to a violent end, and it became a grim, gray tomb for people waiting to die.

Now, after a flicker of hope, it’s becoming something else.

From a hill on the edge of the suburbs, I can see the signs of its transformation. Construction scaffolds creep up its walls like dark veins. Oily fumes rise through its open roof. And there’s a new structure sticking up from one half of that roof, a huge, pale lump that I can’t quite identify, like a tumor on a giant’s lip.

Axiom egressed from New York on the city’s dying breath. It floated across the country on a malign breeze. And now it’s here in the city I tried to call home, busily replicating in the cells of its new host. As Julie and I descend the grassy slopes toward the edge of downtown Post, I hear shouts and revving engines, the occasional gunshot. The ruins are crawling with activity, but it doesn’t feel like life. It feels like decomposition.

I see soldiers rounding up the Dead, herding them into fenced-off holding pens. I see soldiers rounding up the Living, herding them into fenced-off refugee camps. Main Street is a solid line of people all the way to the stadium gates; it resembles a protest but it’s the opposite. This mob has gathered to await their government’s pleasure, to be assigned work and housing and to cheer for the troops overrunning their streets. Most will end up in the camps or tenements; some will be brought into the stadium to serve in slightly higher capacities. None will have any idea who or what or why they serve. They will wonder in brief moments, perhaps grumble aloud when drunk or stoned, then sleep it off and return to work with all the old adages ringing in their heads: The way things are. Same shit, different day. Nothing new under the sun.

Black helicopters buzz over the stadium like flies on meat. Unlike me, this place has not found hope in its third life. At least not yet.

A wind is rising. I tug at my collar to let it cool my sweaty neck, but the tie is like the knot on a balloon, sealing all that damp air inside. We keep to the side streets, avoiding the active areas, but we still encounter a few stray soldiers here and there. I straighten my posture and flash them an insane grin, and they nod nervously and move on. It’s easy at a distance. My big acting challenge is a few blocks ahead.

I glance at Julie and my eyes stick. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen her clean. Her skin glows. Her hair is silky gold, tied back in a stubby ponytail, and her clothes—olive drab shorts and a light gray tank top—have a look of military purpose. Like my beard stubble, they don’t quite fit the character she’ll be playing—a stretchy red dress would be more convincing—but the shorts are short and the top is tight and Julie makes any outfit distracting.

“Should probably do this now,” I mumble, pulling the zip-tie out of my pocket.

She nods and holds her wrists out to me. I avoid her gaze as I cinch them together, but when I look up, she’s smirking.

“I never thought you’d be a kinky one,” she says.

I try to ignore her but I feel a faint flush. “You’re sure you’re okay with this?”

“It’s a story they understand, right? I don’t care. I just want to get this done.” She blows a strand of hair out of her face. “And I trust you.”

Casual. Off-hand. I forbid myself to grin.

“Okay. But I’m going to improvise…and it might get ugly. So promise you’ll forget whatever I say.”

She uses her thumbs to cross her heart.

“Say it.”

She smiles. “I promise.”

The closer we get to the stadium gate, the greater the tension in the immigration line. These people have probably been camped here for days, waiting for their big moment at the gate, and their desperation shows in wide eyes and clenched fists. I wonder where they came from and what they’re expecting to find here. I wonder what they’ve been promised by the fever dream flashing on their televisions.

The gate is open. One trio of soldiers interviews applicants while another points rifles at them. With a grimace, I knock on my basement door. One last job, I tell the basement’s occupant. Time to pay our debts.

The door opens. The wretch smiles.

Dragging Julie by the wrists, I shove my way into the front of the line.

“Hey!” shouts a grizzled man with two kids clinging to his legs. He grabs my shirt and I give him a fierce backhand; he collapses while his kids scream. I hear Julie mumbling, “Jesus,” but I stride forward, chest out, grinning.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” one of the guards says, putting a hand out. “What’s this about? Who are you”—he glances at my tie and falters slightly—“sir?”

I infuse my grin with murder. “If you have to ask who I am, I think you won’t be working here long. I haven’t made it to many meetings lately but I expect a basic awareness of Executive hierarchy, even from front desk girls like you.”

He hesitates. “Sorry, sir, I’m new to the company and communication’s been—”

“Shut up,” I say pleasantly. “I don’t care. I’m Mr. Atvist’s grandson. Get out of my way.”

I step forward, but the guards don’t part for me. They look nervous, but they watch the officer for a signal.

“I’m sorry, sir,” he says, “I just—I have orders to—”

“Who do you think gave those orders?” I snap, stepping into his personal space.

He swallows, then points at Julie. “But…who’s that?”

I shove Julie in front of me, toward the gate. “That’s my birthday present.”

He eyes Julie and I see lust and envy filling the space reserved for reason. He nods and reaches for a clipboard. “I’ll just need to check your—”

I move in close to his face, making the veins of my neck bulge. “Listen to me, kid. My family conquered New York and stuck our crown on the tallest building in America. We pissed the Atvist name all over this country, and I’m not having this conversation with whoever the fuck you are.”

He reflexively steps back. “Sir, I just—”

I put my face inches from his in that bizarre old ritual of domination, proving my superior manhood by threatening to kiss him. “Disappear quickly,” I growl, “and maybe I won’t remember you.”

He drops his eyes. He waves to the guards. They step aside for us.

With a decisive nod, I prod Julie into the lobby, and in the darkness of the entry tunnel, I stuff the wretch back into the basement, shuddering with revulsion.

“Wow,” Julie says. “‘Just…wow.”

“Please don’t,” I mutter.

“‘That’s my birthday present’? Where’d you dig up that one?”

“Julie. You promised.”

“I know, I know.” She chuckles and shakes her head. “But I’m gonna need a minute.”

I glance around for something to cut her zip-tie and end my humiliation—and it really is just mine; Julie is too self-assured to be affected by fake degradation. She seems to be having fun.

“Were you really like that?” she says through clamped teeth as she bites the end of the zip-tie and cinches it tight. “How could you have been like that?” She slams her elbows against her waist, forcing her arms apart, and the tie snaps.

“I wasn’t…quite that bad,” I reply. “But I would’ve been if I’d stayed in that world.”

She rubs her wrists and stares down the tunnel at the roiling crowds inside. “We have to destroy it.”

As much as I agree with Julie’s lethal intent, our ambitions today are more measured. We can’t topple Axiom and erase all its influence with one little bomb. We’re just here to break the silence. To show the world the dirt on its face and hope it has the sense to clean itself.

Our plan was simple, but I can already smell complications as we emerge from the tunnel into the stadium’s narrow streets, now so densely populated they’re almost solid. I can’t seem to find my bearings in the grid; all the familiar landmarks are gone or changed. A building that might be the Agriculture hothouse is covered in black plastic sheeting for no conceivable reason. The open space where I expected to find the cattle pens now houses some kind of assembly line manned by sweating, sunburned children. All of the street signs are gone.

“What the hell are they trying to do?” Julie wonders aloud, taking in the inexplicable renovations.

This pseudo-city once felt cramped, but now I feel lost in a labyrinth of plywood and trash. Julie gives up on landmarks and looks to the stadium’s retracted roof panels, using stains and broken girders like a sailor uses the stars. She navigates to a tiny “house” of rusty metal sheets and knocks on the door. There’s no answer, so she opens it, and we step inside.

Once, this was the home of Lawrence Rosso and Ella Desconsado. I remember it through two sets of eyes. Through Perry’s, it was a place of sorrow and decline. He browsed Rosso’s old books, searching for clues to blurry riddles. He watched Julie and Ella pretend to enjoy their dinner, he watched Rosso pretend to enjoy their conversations, he watched everyone around him fight to stay afloat, and he muttered, Fools, while he let himself sink.

Perry discarded his life here. I picked it up, dusted it off, and resumed it. Through my eyes, this is a place of rising, not sinking. A place of rebirth. It’s where I began my efforts to reenter Living society, where I sat at Ella’s table and tasted my first home-cooked meal, where I practiced my small talk and my big talk, where I drank tea in Rosso’s reading room and discoursed late into the night, both of us bloviating on topics mundane and esoteric. In this house as I remember it, no one was pretending. We may have been fools, but we were earnest fools. We believed in every mad act.

Lawrence Rosso is gone now. The house is dark except for one lamp in the living room, where his widow rocks slowly in a creaking recliner, a pen gripped in her veiny fingers, moving across the pages of a diary. She looks up as we enter, and I barely recognize her. That incongruous youthful vitality has drained from her face. She finally looks her age.

I can tell by her squint that we are just blurs at this distance, and I can tell by her scowl who she thinks those blurs are.

“What the fuck do you want?” she snaps. “Doesn’t Balt have anything better to do than bother sick old ladies? Tell him and his bosses to—” She cuts off in a fit of coughing.

“Ella,” Julie says.

Ella goes still. Her fit subsides. Julie steps into the lamplight and crouches down next to the old woman’s chair. She smiles, and her voice quavers as she says, “I’m back, Ella.”

Ella reaches out with trembling fingers. She touches Julie’s cheek, as if testing a mirage. Her eyes roam across Julie’s many cuts and bruises and come to rest on her finger stump.

Julie pulls it away. She tries to maintain her smile, though her eyes are glistening. “It’s been a rough month, hasn’t it?”

Ella grabs her, pulls her into a tight embrace, and they let the tears flow. I keep a respectful distance, but I can’t help joining them in this release. It feels good to cry. It feels curative, like washing out a wound.

“Where did you go?” Ella says, straightening up and wiping her eyes. “What happened to you?”

“It’s a really long story,” Julie says.

“But what are you doing here?” Ella is regaining her composure, and the anger of a few minutes ago comes flooding back. “Why on earth would you come back to this shit hole? Do you have any idea what’s happening?”

“Tell us,” Julie says.

Ella springs out of her chair and paces the room, not quite as infirm as she looked. “Well, where to begin?” she says venomously, and counts off on her fingers, starting with the thumb. “They’ve converted all the gardens and livestock pens into munition factories. No mention of where our food’s going to come from when the warehouse is empty.” She adds the index to the thumb, making a gun. “They’ve sent ‘acquisition teams’ to invade Portland, even though they’re barely holding Post together.” Now the middle finger, and an extra surge of vitriol. “They’ve put ‘Captain Balt’ in charge of Security”—she lowers the other fingers, leaving the middle one stiff—“so that’s been fun.”

Julie shakes her head.

“But Julie…it gets crazier.” Her venom congeals into fear. “They’re doing something with the Dead. They’re changing them, making them docile, and they’re giving them jobs. They have these facilities…”

“We know that part,” Julie says. “We’ve toured a few of those facilities.”

“But do you know it’s not just zombies now? Do you know they’re using anyone they get ahold of, Living or Dead? Turning them into these ‘human resources’?”

Julie and I look at each other sharply.

“They’re making more arrests every week than John and Lawrence did in seven years, but they don’t even use the prisons anymore. Everyone goes straight to—”

“Where?” Julie says sharply. “Where are the facilities?”

Ella’s face crumples as understanding creeps in. “Oh,” she says. “Oh no. Nora?”

“Ella, where are they?”

“They’re in the schools—I mean the Morgue. Or where the Morgue used to be.”

Julie stands up. She grabs Ella’s hand and squeezes. “We have to go.”

Ella looks frightened. “What are you going to do?”

“We’re going to get Nora out of there and end this bullshit.”

Ella raises her eyebrows. “All of it?”

Julie steps back and links her arm in mine, looks up at me, then down at my briefcase. “As much as we can.”

WE

ADDIS HAS EXPERIENCED most varieties of pain. He has been cold, hungry, bruised, burned, and impaled by a spear of bone. But none of those simple signals ever troubled him as much as the torment of a fever. Physical pain can be isolated and ignored; a fever makes pain your whole reality, a distorted universe of nauseous colors and warped physics. A little taste of insanity.

He feels himself sinking into that universe now, through the floor of the Orientation building and down into some shuddering esophagus. The “school” in New York was just an antechamber. Now he’s inside.

He can’t begin to identify all the things stuck into his body. He can’t find categories in which to place the sounds and images, so they slip past his brain into deeper lakes of consciousness. They reach all the way to us. Black droplets of sickness splash up from the Lower and stain our books. Our pages curl, our words blur, whole pages become illegible.

We have never seen this before. We didn’t know there was a poison that could penetrate so deep. No mere machinery could do this; no amount of chemicals and psychological torture could stain the very roots of consciousness.

What did those old men discover while their bones buzzed in the dirt? What deep well did they tap?

Addis sees other people around him. Many are strangers, but a few he recognizes. Joan and Alex, his friends. Nora, his sister. And a big man who was once a monster and now insists he’s not. All strapped into chairs, stuck full of tubes pumping pink syrup from someplace he can’t see. All shaking, shuddering, eyes wide or squeezed shut. They are sinking faster than Addis. He has wrestled the plague before and managed to pin it down, and though this is a new and more insidious strain, he has a resistance that slows its advance. But the others…

A long moan rises from Alex’s throat.

Joan is crying.

“Addis!” Nora screams through gritted teeth. He looks at her, but her eyes are shut. Sweat pours from her forehead. “Addis!”

Addis is a child, and so his life has been passive. He’s been nourished, taught, and protected, and he’s been neglected, abused, and abandoned. He has been either a beneficiary or a victim of other people’s actions; he has rarely ever acted. So he assumes his sister is calling out to make sure he’s okay, but as her screams continue with increasing panic, it hits him in a horrible, disorienting flash—she isn’t screaming because she wants to help him. She is screaming for his help.

The world is upside-down. Everything is slipping.

On the far end of this shadowy warehouse, a door creaks open. Two men push a girl inside. Addis’s eyes strain toward her, fighting their way past all the video screens and flashing lights. Happiness and despair squeeze into one emotion.

“Where’s my dad?” Sprout shrieks at her captors. “My dad said he’d be right back!”

“Your father’s busy right now,” says a man in a white coat.

“But he said to stay at the home and wait for him!”

The man reaches down and ruffles her hair. “Sometimes grownups don’t know how to say what they really mean. So we have to read their actions.”

Sprout scowls up at him. “He doesn’t want me to be here!”

The man shrugs. “Your father wants you to be safe.” He waves a hand around the facility. “This is where we make people safe.”

I

HOW LONG AGO WAS it that a man in clothes like mine opened a briefcase like this and destroyed a chunk of this city? I don’t know exactly. Weeks, not months, but Axiom has already erased all memory of it. The buildings they destroyed are raised and repaired, cinched back into the grid with new support cables. There was no tragic disaster. No peaceful former leadership. No thrilling glimpse of a world without the plague. No past, no future—just the way things are.

I feel someone watching me, which is a strange thing to feel while ploughing through dense crowds, but after a quick scan, I find it: the beady black eye of a security camera, staring down at me from a rooftop. Another one across the street. Will they recognize me? Will they care if they do? My grandfather is long gone, swallowed by the angry earth, and my face will mean little to whoever’s running this mess now. I am just a man whose effect on the Dead was briefly intriguing, but now they’ve reproduced that effect—or a perverse imitation of it—and moved on. I am the past, and they live in the present.

Good.

“Can I help you, sir?”

The Orientation building. Once it was a place where the Living studied the Dead, looking for new ways to kill them. Then it inverted into a place of healing—of resurrection. And now? I can only guess. The windows are boarded over. Only the occasional muffled scream tells me we’ve come to the right place.

“Sir? Can you identify yourself please?”

Julie nudges me. With reluctance, I return to the present, and with even greater reluctance, I summon the wretch.

“What the hell is happening in this branch?” I snap back at the guard. “Is the founder’s grandson really getting ID’d? I’m here to inspect Orientation procedures. Open the door.”

“I’m sorry sir, this is a secure building and we need—”

“What you need is to know your fucking place, you beta piece of shit.” I step in close. “Does the name Atvist mean anything to you?”

He looks me up and down. He’s older than the one at the gate, his face leathery, his mustache flecked with gray, and my bully act is having less of an effect.

“Haven’t heard that name in a long time,” he says, meeting gaze just long enough for it to register as a challenge, then he looks down at his clipboard, snapping back to professionalism. “But Red Ties do have full access, so if I can just verify your SSN with the officer manifest…”

I like him, the wretch says. Management potential.

You’re done here, I reply, and shove him down the stairs.

“Okay,” I sigh. “How about this?”

I pop open the briefcase, lift the flap of black felt, and rest my finger on the red switch. Finally, I get a reaction.

“What’s that?” the guard says, but his cool sounds forced now.

“I think you know what it is.”

The other guards raise their rifles but the officer holds out his hand. He gives me a smirk that’s not very convincing. “Is this some kind of undead rights thing? Free the zombies?”

Without missing a beat, Julie jumps in. “Yeah, that’s right, that’s exactly right!” Her voice is shrill and twitchy and I almost laugh when I see her face: she’s a wild-eyed fanatic, twisting her hair and fidgeting from foot to foot. “Zombies are people, sick people, they’re us, they deserve to be free, they deserve to run…” Her scratches and bruises give the performance a druggy authenticity. The guard cringes away from her and she dials up the spittle flying off her syllables. “It’s time for you fascist fuckers to face the fact that people are people, plague or no plague, and we won’t put up with imprisonment!” She pauses for a breath while he wipes his face. “So there’s two ways we can set them free. By that”—she points to the door—“or by this.” She points to the briefcase. “Your choice.”

The guard looks uneasy but still unconvinced. He sizes me up and makes an exaggerated grimace of disdain, his mustache bristling like a dog’s hackles. “Bullshit. You’re no suicide bomber.”

“Julie,” I say calmly, “get clear. This is my sacrifice, not yours.”

“Bullshit!” he repeats as Julie backs away, but there’s some urgency in it now. “That bitch might be crazy enough but I know a pussy when I smell one. You’re not gonna blow yourself up for a few dozen corpses.”

Still gripping the briefcase’s handle, I hook my thumb into my collar and tug it aside, revealing the bite on my neck: raw purple flesh with deep teeth marks.

“I’m about to die anyway,” I say with a grin. “Might as well die for a reason.”

The guard’s face pales. “Shit,” he whispers.

He and his men scatter into the streets.

I feel the black worms shudder in outrage. How dare I put them to good use?

When the guards are out of sight, Julie comes back. She gives me an approving nod. “Strong performance.”

“You too.”

“Although this changes the plan a little.” She looks up at the security camera watching us and casually flips it off. “How long do you think we have?”

I feel the urge to laugh again. The “plan.” It was a ramshackle construction to begin with, built from gambles stacked on assumptions and duct-taped together with hope. Now it’s falling on our heads, and all we can do is run.

I answer Julie’s question with a firm shove to the door. I barge into the building like I own the place.

What I find inside might shock me more if I hadn’t seen each stage of its development, from a few bloody instruments in a log cabin to a university laboratory full of grotesque experiments to the entire population of Pittsburgh replaced by twisted corpses. What I find in this building is just one more rung down the ladder.

It’s a warehouse full of chairs. Office chairs, table chairs, folding chairs, recliners, a hellish discount furniture store. Each chair has a person strapped into it, connected to an array of wires and an IV line dangling from a hub on the ceiling. They all wear headphones, and some have screens in front of them, flashing incomprehensible text and imagery like an art installation that’s the opposite of thought-provoking. The flickering screens are the only illumination in the cavernous space. The only sound is the tinny noise shrieking from the headphones, along with the occasional scream or groan.

“Everybody out!” Julie bellows, startling a handful of men in white coats—doctors? Scientists? What do I call the practitioners of such strange arts? Do they even know what they’re creating here, or are they just following one order at a time, assembly line workers who never see the final product? They’re all listening to their walkies, no doubt receiving warnings of our little attack, so Julie doesn’t have to push her point. They flee the building without a word, and we’re left alone with the human resources.

“Julie!”

Sprout’s high voice carries from the far end of the warehouse, and we run toward it. They’re all there, a line of familiar faces inserted between rows of strangers, sweaty, feverish, but alive.

“Help,” Addis says, piercing me with those gleaming eyes. “Help Nora.”

Nora’s head hangs forward. Drool drips from her mouth.

“She’s bad,” M wheezes. “Get her first.”

Julie rushes to free her friend and I attend to my kids. They look like they have a bad flu, damp and paler than usual, but they’re lucid. “Hi,” Joan says as I disconnect tubes and wires.

“Hi, Joan,” I reply, going to work on their restraints. “Are you okay?”

“We’re okay,” Alex says. He looks down at the pink syrup oozing onto the floor. “Plague juice…supposed to make us Dead again.”

“Won’t work on us,” Joan says, shaking her head. “We’re over it.”

I feel a mist coming into my eyes. I tug my collar aside and show them my new bite. “Me too.”

A moment later everyone is free and ready to run. Except Nora. Nora can barely stand. She sways back and forth, head down, mumbling incoherently.

“I’ll take her and the kids,” M says, slinging Nora’s arm over his shoulders. He shoots me a meaningful look which I’m not sure how to translate. “You do…whatever you need to do here.”

He hauls Nora to the exit and Julie turns to Tomsen. “Are you good?”

Tomsen nods, blinking delirium out of her eyes. “So odd. So very odd. Such a sickly stew, psychology, pharmacology, virology, thanatology, manually triggered vacillations, impossible stuff, like they’ve tapped some reservoir of—”

“Huntress,” Julie cuts her off. “We need to get the rest of these people out. We have maybe five minutes. Are you good?”

Tomsen rubs her face and lets out a puff of breath. “Good. Great. Best.”

“Get a few more free and let them do the rest. We have to finish our job before the whole place locks down.”

“Our job?”

“See that briefcase—” She cuts off. “R! Where are you going?”

Where am I going?

Their voices are growing fainter as I wander toward the back of the warehouse. I am staring up at the jungle of IVs dangling from the ceiling. I am following the pink hose that runs from the ceiling hub to wherever the pink syrup comes from. I am moving past the last row of chairs and encountering a series of white curtains placed across the warehouse like office partitions. I am pushing through them.

The pink hose runs down from the ceiling into a machine that resembles a soda fountain: several pressurized canisters feeding into a central mixing unit, but the hose doesn’t end there. It continues out the other end of the machine and connects to the base of a clear tank. And in this tank, floating in cloudy pink syrup, are several grinning skeletons. They wriggle and writhe, clawing against the Plexiglas, and then go still, drifting. They thrash again; one rips an arm off the other, a rib, a foot, then they go still. They float in the syrup like scorpions in tequila, infusing it with plague—their shriveled thoughts, their mindless hunger, their dark, sub-animal emptiness. And the machine mixes this with other poisons and pumps it into people, a chemical-spiritual cocktail.

What human mind could create this? What unspeakable product is this company trying to produce?

From some distant overhead viewpoint, I watch myself pull the hose out of the tank and tip over the mixing machine and hammer it with one of the steel canisters until I’m sweating and gasping and the machine is a heap of smashed parts.

Only then do I notice I have an audience.

Behind me is a chain-link corral just like the one in Pittsburgh, except the Dead locked in this one are not a feral horde. They are clean and placid, like embalmed corpses propped upright. Human resources waiting to be spent.

“I know they’ve done things to you,” I tell them. “They’ve put things in your blood and brains. But you can push them out.”

Their expressions are mostly blank, but I catch faint hints of curiosity. A crowd of about two hundred, like the crowd I once faced from the community stage while Lawrence Rosso cheered me on. And what was it he told me a few hours later as he bled out in my arms?

Show them. Help them wake up.

I recognize one of them. Young and muscular, with pockmarked brown skin. His name comes to me easily now. “Evan Kenerly.”

His eyes widen, then they squint. I see him straining to remember.

“Your name is Evan Kenerly.” I move up close to the fence. “Major Evan Kenerly. You worked with Lawrence Rosso. You loved Nora Greene.”

“R!” Julie shouts from the other end of the warehouse. “We have to go!”

I hear the escapees stampeding for the exits. I hear distant shouts. Gunshots. No time to finish my little sermon. I raise the canister over my head and bring it down on the corral’s padlock once, twice—snap.

“You’re not dead,” I tell the people behind the fence. “You can come with us.”

Without waiting to see the results of my latest impulsive act, I drop the canister and run.

WE

“YOU’RE DOING THE RIGHT THING,” Abbot says.

Abram watches the manager take a drag of his cigarette and release it in puffs that the wind instantly erases.

“Axiom has its issues, but it’s the only game in town. It’s going to be the new government, and no branch breaks or religious pyromaniacs are going to change that. So we might as well get on-board.”

The smoke blows into Abram’s eyes but he’s already squinting, watching the horizon, the freeway. He and Abbot stand in the stadium’s open gate as troops buzz in and out, preparing.

“When you have a family,” Abbot says, “you don’t always get to ‘do the right thing’ anymore. You don’t get to take risks or make sacrifices to indulge your moral qualms. You have to do what’s best for them.” Another drag, another wind-swept cloud of tar. “Anything can be ‘the right thing’ if you’re doing it for your family.”

“Sir?” Abram says.

“Yeah?”

“Should I go help the defense set up?”

Abbot presses his lips together. “All business, aren’t you, Roberts? That’s okay. I’m preaching to myself anyway.”

“I just want to make sure we’re ready.”

Abbot grunts and looks out at the horizon. “We’re ready. This place is a vault. The old management just repelled a skeleton swarm two months ago, and we’re twice as well armed.”

“I heard Executive sent half of Security to acquire Portland.”

Abbot waves this off. “We have eight hundred men here and six hundred at Goldman for backup, not to mention three armed choppers. We’ll mow them down before they even reach the walls.”

Abram nods toward the line of panicked immigrants being herded away from the gates. “What about them?”

“We’re putting them in the camps. Sealing up a few highrises for shelter.” He shrugs. “They might get hit, but we’re overpopulated anyway.”

Abram watches a young couple that was at the front of the line into the stadium, now at the back of the line away from it. The man carries their bags, the woman carries their crying daughter; both of them look dumbfounded at their bad luck. But every line to every sold-out show has one tragedy like this, turned away a single step from the entrance.

“Hey,” Abbot says, flicking the ash from his cigarette. “There’s a lot of people in the world. Worry about your own.”

Abram does. He never stops. He had hoped to drop by the foster home before joining the defense to tell Sprout to hide in the basement. He wanted to assure her that they will leave this horrible place but they have to wait for the right moment, that perfect strategic window when the risk is low and they have plenty of time and they’re healthy and fed and well-rested. Until then, just a while longer, they have to play along.

The chance never came. Abbot brought him to the gate without ever letting him out of sight. He seems to have made Abram’s “probation” his own personal project, watching his every move with a calm but stern vigilance. But the man has been surprisingly lenient with him. Abram knows company policy; he should have been terminated ten times over for his countless infractions, but here he is working at the Team Manager’s side. Abram wonders how many times Abbot has served as father-boss, how many young men he’s raised into the Axiom family, and how long it’s been since his last.

“In the old days, Burners were pretty sneaky.” Abbot puffs smoke away from his eyes as he scans the surrounding streets. “They’d spread themselves thin, hide out in basements with their napalm, and no one suspected a thing until Bark came on the loudspeaker. But that shit doesn’t work when the city’s empty. We’ve got rat patrols on every block. And from the sounds of it, they’re not after the ruins anyway.”

Abram looks back at the stadium, then toward the thick forests in the east. His eyes narrow.

“Yeah,” Abbot says, following his gaze. “If they were smart, they’d come at us through the woods. Spread their little ‘army’ as wide as they can and try to surround us.” He shrugs. “But Bark’s not a tactician. He’s a fucking showman. I’ll bet you my last bottle he comes right through there.” He sights his finger like a gun down the length of Corridor 1. “Bet you he marches right up Main Street and dumps his little bone collection right on our doorstep. And then we just”—he pulls the trigger—“sweep it up.”

Abram is still staring into the forest, but Abbot has misread his interest. Abram isn’t calculating the Ardents’ plan of attack. He is trying to imagine how this happened to them. How they drifted out so far, became so hopeless and desperate for purpose that they would rally around anyone who offered it, no matter what the cost. So angry and alone that the whole world became their enemy.

Abram tries to imagine all this, and he finds it easy. He can see it a dozen different ways in a dozen different places. Staring out into the forest and the countryside beyond, he wonders how many other towns like Bark’s are out there, shunned and forgotten by society, left to fester in their bitterness until they’re ready to erupt.

A thought creeps down his spine like a cold worm.

“Sir?” he says. “Do we know how many skeletons were in that siege three months ago?”

Abbot shrugs. “Reports say about nine hundred.”

“And they almost breached the stadium?”

“Well…‘almost’ is a slippery word.”

“What if there are more this time?”

Abbot frowns. “You saw the Burners’ warehouse. Couldn’t have been more than a thousand in there.”

“But that was four days ago. It’s a two hour drive.”

Abbot opens his mouth, then closes it.

“So where are they?” Abram’s tone is slipping out of proper deference but he doesn’t care. “If they had their army in tow when they escaped, why wouldn’t they come straight here and set it loose? Why give us time to prepare?”

“We rattled them,” Abbot says. “They had to regroup.”

He’s preaching to himself again. Abram can tell the idea has already taken hold, but he says it anyway:

“Or maybe they have other warehouses. Other armies.”

Abbot stares at the end of his cigarette. It glows like a tiny sun, or a tiny burning planet. “Shit,” he whispers, and marches back inside.

I

SURPRISINGLY FEW SOLDIERS have responded to our disruption. The handful who did show up are busy chasing the other escapees, and we slip into the streets unnoticed. I wince at the sound of gunshots. Did we push those people out of their chairs and into an execution? Even if we did, it may have been a favor.

We spread out to avoid notice, letting our group dissolve into the crowd of lonely strangers. Nora’s delirious stagger attracts some attention, but she’ll probably pass for drunk. Once we’re a few blocks away from the Orientation building, we regroup in an alley, and Julie rushes to her friend.

“Nora,” she says, squeezing her arms and leaning close. “Talk to me.”

Nora’s eyes drift back and forth, pausing only briefly on Julie’s. “What words?” she mumbles. “I’ll say…do…Tell me what.”

“Nora, where are you right now?”

“Don’t know.” Her voice is dull and distant. “Wherever you want.”

“Jesus,” Julie says, pulling away in worried disgust as if Nora is vomiting blood. “Why did it hit her so much harder?”

I’m not surprised. I know the things that feed the plague—confusion, loneliness, hurt, resignation—and Nora has been marinating in all of them.

“It’s just a little poison,” M says. “She’ll be fine.” He says it with such simple, stolid confidence that I find myself wondering how suggestible the universe really is. How loudly do we have to believe before reality agrees?

There’s a strained silence, then Tomsen whirls on me and Julie. “So what happened to you? How did you escape the raid? And how did you get in here? And also, why?”

Julie hesitates. “No time to answer all of those, but that last one’s easy: because we love you guys.”

Tomsen blinks.

“And because that’s a bomb.” She points at my briefcase. “And we’re going to blow up BABL.”

Tomsen grins like a birthday girl getting ready to open her last present, the big one in the back, hidden under a sheet.

The four actual children are listening intently, and I wonder how much they understand. Totalitarian takeovers and suppression of information are probably beyond their ken, but one thing is clear enough: there are bad people here. Blunt, cruel, selfish wretches, aligned to life’s lowest drives and scornful of anything higher. And we can’t keep letting them win.

“So how do we find the tower?” Tomsen says, fidgeting with excitement. “It’s a big stadium. Lots of buildings. Lots of guards. Do we have to take a hostage and torture them for information? I don’t like doing that. Maybe with enough cannabis…”

I notice Julie’s face hardening as Tomsen rambles. We have reached the end of my half of our plan. Before we left our house, I asked Julie for the first page of hers, and her eyes glazed like she was going far away, exploring old rooms and reading old books. And then they cleared to a glittering sharpness. They narrowed and began to smolder, and she answered through her teeth just like she does now:

“I know where it is.”

Tomsen gapes at her. Even Nora registers some surprise.

“You do?” M says, tossing up his hands.

Julie’s jaw muscles flex. She says it again, lower and almost vicious. “I know where it is.”

And with that, she storms into the streets.

There are advantages to living under an unstable government. Axiom is a belligerent drunk, fighting and flailing its way across the country with no regard for human life or long-term consequences, and if left unchecked it will gleefully repeat every mistake in history. But like most drunks, its vision is blurry and its punches swing wide, and our gang of terrorists moves freely through its headquarters under the gaze of a dozen cameras.

Where is Security? I see only a few teenage soldiers patrolling the streets, looking scared and uncertain. This should be reassuring, but instead I feel a chill. If the troops were reassigned, I have a guess as to where and why.

I force myself to focus. Here and now. Joan’s hand in my left, the briefcase in my right.

“My family lived in a nice house,” Julie says as we move along the edge of the street, where the crowds are thinner. Her voice is tight with bitterness. “It was already there when they found this place, before they built the enclave. It was the biggest and most secure building, so of course it’s where the leader had to live. And Dad was the leader.” Her lips twist like she’s trying to swallow something vile. “Four stories all to ourselves. It even had a basement.”

M looks at me with raised eyebrows. I shrug.

“Mom loved the basement. It was cool on hot days, but she’d sit down there even in the winter just to listen to the hum.”

I recognize the street we’re on. I remember stopping to ask directions from two kids named David and Marie. She lives on a corner. Daisy Street and Devil Avenue.

“Dad said it was just the power inverters under the floor, but it sounded so far away, like it was coming up from some deep hole. It sounded like a bunch of different songs playing over each other and there was this vibration…” She shakes her head. “I couldn’t stand it. It made my brain feel numb. But Mom said it was soothing. She said it quieted her thoughts.”

We come around a corner, and I indulge in another memory. A precious scent. A familiar voice drifting down from a balcony. A few tender seconds before the world interrupted.

“It’s here,” she says, staring up at the building with murderous intensity. “BABL is under my house.”

In my memory, her house is a lovely old manor covered in vines and flowers, marble columns leading up to a balcony where fair maidens sigh and pine. My memory is full of shit. Her house is a prison watchtower of white aluminum siding, tiny grated windows, a balcony mounted with sniper rifles.

“Shouldn’t bring them into this,” M says, indicating the kids and the unwell woman leaning against him. “I’ll take them somewhere safe.”

Sprout is shaking her head. “I want to stay.”

“Sprout,” I say, kneeling down in front of her, “where’s your dad?”

She doesn’t answer for a moment. Her chin quivers. “I don’t know.” A tear glistens in her right eye. “He let them take me.”

Julie crouches down and hugs her. Sprout accepts it but remains upright, arms at her side, teary but not crying. “I want to stay with you,” she says, and her voice is firm. “I want to help.”

Behind her, Joan and Alex nod. Addis remains neutral, his face clouded.

“Guys,” M starts to object, but Julie interrupts him.

“Stay out here and keep a lookout,” she says to Sprout, including M with a glance. “We’ll be quick.”

M looks unconvinced, but the kids start scanning the streets with militant squints. Nora mumbles inaudibly.

“R?” Julie says, and heads around the side of the house.

I follow her with our payload in hand.

There is a tiny sunken door in a concrete stairwell. A basement door. Julie takes a deep breath, then a step down—a bullet turns the next step into a spray of concrete chips.

“Welcome home, kids!”

Above us. The balcony.

Captain Balt.

In the weeks since I last encountered this man, I’ve seen stacked mounds of corpses oozing in basements. I’ve seen people shot, eaten, and liquefied, and I’ve crushed a dozen heads with my own hands. None of it filled me with as much revulsion as the sight of this man’s face.

He leans over the railing, pointing one of the sniper rifles at Julie. He swivels it up and down, ogling her through the scope. “Nice view from up here! No doubt about it, Julie, you’re all grown up.”

This man who exploited a young girl’s pain and broke her even further, who remained a leering presence year after year only to join the forces that destroyed her home. This man who has suffered no consequences for any of his vile acts—except for the night I cracked his skull.

Three more soldiers emerge behind him, taking aim at M and the kids.

“What the fuck are you doing in my house?” Julie shouts up at them, her anger drowning out any trace of fear.

“Oh you didn’t hear about my promotion?” Balt pulls his eye away from the scope and grins, but he keeps the rifle aimed. He looks professional. His Homo erectus jaw is clean-shaven, his hair slicked back and cropped on the sides, his tattoos covered by the sleeves of his beige jacket. “The Axiom Group knows a strong leader when it sees one. I got your dad’s job, so I took your dad’s house.”

Julie’s hands clench. My eyes dart to M, but he’s as helpless as we are in the sights of three AK-47s.

“You left dirty clothes all over your room. You’re a dirty girl!” Balt clucks his tongue. “But if you want to move back in, I’m sure we could figure something out. My boys would be more focused if they didn’t have to hunt for pussy.”

For the first time in my life, I wish I had a gun. I wish I could pull a little lever on a shiny little machine and watch it delete this grotesque mutation from the genome of mankind.

Julie dashes for the door. A bullet blows the knob off as she reaches out for it; she pulls her hand back with a gasp as spots of blood bloom from the side of her palm.

“Where you going?” Balt says. “We’re having a conversa-tion.”

“Fuck the fuck off, Tim!” Julie shrieks up at him. “Are you gonna kill me or what?”

Balt pulls away from the scope and finally quits the performance. “I saw your little activist act on the cameras. The fuck was that bullshit? I know you’re crazy but not that kind of crazy.” He squints at Julie, then at me. “What are you really here for?” His eyes move to my briefcase. Then the basement door. I see it dawning on him. But as he opens his mouth to express his opinion of our improbable plan, a noise interrupts him. A low growl rises to a sustained wail and then falls again—an air raid siren, the universal sound of fear.

I feel a vibration in my feet as massive motors jolt into motion. I see a shadow moving toward us from the far end of the stadium, rushing down the streets and engulfing the buildings like a tsunami of gloom. I see Balt and his men craning their necks upward to take in an incredible sight:

The sky is closing.

The rectangle of blue shrinks as distant roof panels grind toward each other, and I can’t help imagining the lid of a sarcophagus. Even a dull ape like Balt is awestruck by the spectacle, and I notice all the guns pointing at us have drooped.

Julie brushes past me without a sound and races to join M and the others, who are already halfway down the block. I understand what we’re doing just a few seconds before Balt does; I hear shouts behind me and then shots; bullets crater the asphalt close enough to spray me with stinging chips, but then I’m behind a building and momentarily safe, though it’s hard to use that word while sirens howl all around us.

“Due to higher than usual threat levels,” blares a cheerful voice from the stadium’s PA system, “we are initiating enclave lockdown at this time. Please remain where you are and we will provide further instructions shortly. Do not move at all.”

“What’s happening?” Tomsen says. “Is this all for us?”

“They’ve shut the roof three times in the last seven years,” Julie says between breaths. “Once for a hurricane, once for a siege, and once for a thousand Boneys. Whatever this is…” She looks up at the narrowing strip of sky. “…it’s bigger than us.”

The roof closes with a soft boom like far-off thunder. The floodlights kick on, replacing daylight with their pale imitation. People stand frozen in the street, perhaps wondering how literally they should take Axiom’s instructions not to move.

I hear Balt a few blocks behind us, bellowing orders and threats to his men and nearly out-shouting the sirens. Julie points to a gap in the stadium wall leading into its shadowy guts. “There,” she says, and disappears into the hole.

No one lives in the wall. Some of its hollow spaces have become storage rooms, packed with canned goods and building materials, but not even the dull-eyed citizens of this dead-end society were willing to spend their last days in these lightless corridors. I wonder how long before Axiom convinces them.

We are going up. Our footsteps make a pipe-like echo in the narrow stairwell. Julie leads with a confidence that deflects questions. She spent half her childhood locked in the stadium, and this concrete labyrinth was her one escape, her secret clubhouse away from it all. I have no doubt she knows it well.

At the sixth level she exits the stairwell into a long, dark hallway and starts to turn left, then stops and cocks her ear. The sirens have stopped. From somewhere outside the stadium, I hear the distorted squawk of a megaphone. I can’t make out the words, but the tone is fiery and melodramatic, more theatrical than military.

“Who is that?” Julie mumbles under her breath and moves toward the outer wall. I follow with mounting dread, the answer rising in my throat like vomit.

At the end of a hallway, there is a section missing from the wall and covered by a sheet of black plastic. The plastic undulates in the wind, heaving in and out like a cancerous lung. The megaphone sounds like someone speaking through a kazoo, shrill and piercing but stripped of its phonemes, a loud but meaningless buzzing.

“What the hell’s happening out there?” Julie says. She grabs a corner of the plastic and gives it a hard yank. The corner tears away, then the wind catches it and pulls the rest free. The black sheet floats off into the city like a wraith, drifting over broken towers and flooded parking lots, toward a horizon that’s hazy with dust and windblown trash. There’s a sad and desolate beauty to the ruins, but I spare only a second for the view before my eyes drop to the ground.

We are almost directly above the stadium’s front gate, where a small contingent of troops waits with weapons at the ready. I see many more lining the walls, guns bristling from every window, deck, catwalk, and fire escape. All of them point toward the mouth of the unfinished Corridor 1, where a strange traffic jam is in progress.

Main Street is backed up from the stadium to the freeway, a line of armored bank trucks hauling armored cargo trailers—at least five times as many as I saw in the Ardents’ town. The truck at the front stands out from the procession because it’s painted solid white from top to bottom, including the wheels and tires. The noise is coming from this one, of course, from the roof-mounted megaphone and the man shouting into it somewhere inside that metal box.

A shift in the wind carries his voice up to us, and I can finally make out the words.

“…has been trying to tell us for so long, in so many ways, to let go. To surrender to his plan. The story is over and he’s closing the book, but we keep trying to hold it open. We keep trying to write new chapters, but we are creations, not creators, and God is not interested in our contributions. The world is God’s story, this is the last chapter, and there is no sequel!”

M looks at me quizzically. “Why’s he driving an ice cream truck?”

I see a faint smile twitch on Nora’s lips, though her eyes are still glassy. Her brother watches her intently, as if trying to cure her with sheer will.

The wind muffles Paul Bark’s sermon for a moment, and when it blows back, it seems to be concluding.

“…allow you all a chance to leave this enclave before we surrender it. We are not here to kill you; life belongs to God. But we will tear down these idols of progress. We will lie naked in the dust before God until the Last Sunset burns us away.”

I hear the pulsing growl of helicopters behind us. The sun winks out as they pass overhead. Two local news choppers with large-caliber cannons welded onto them. One National Guard gunship.

“What is your answer?” Bark demands from the dim interior of his truck as the gunship hovers in front of him. “What will you submit to? God’s will, or his judgment?”

There’s a streak of smoke and a loud concussion and the trailer Bark was towing leaps into the air, flinging the truck up with it before snapping free. Both the truck and the trailer crash down on their sides, dented and smoking but apparently undamaged—except for a man-sized hole in the trailer.

The only sound now is the whir of the choppers. Then the megaphone crackles and squeals with feedback. I hear Bark’s distorted breathing as he struggles with the mic in his overturned vehicle. But he sounds barely perturbed when he says:

“God’s Jury is just. He guides their hands and teeth. We will pray for you.”

Like a torn spider’s nest, the trailer spews forth a stream of skeletons, scrabbling through the hole and spreading into the streets. Behind it, Ardents in riot armor hop out of all the trucks and run to the rear of their trailers, pushing through the Boneys with their Plexiglas shields. All three choppers open fire and a few of the men go down…but not enough.

They unlatch the trailer doors. They run back to their trucks and lock themselves inside. And then, almost all at once, like an explosion, thousands of skeletons spread out across the city.

-

I CAN’T HELP IT. I laugh out loud. The great pratfalling clown show of human rapacity. A plague strikes the world, and we see opportunity for advancement. It turns people into walking corpses, and we see cheap labor. Two months ago, through means I still don’t understand, Julie and I sent out a signal that the Boneys would no longer profit from us, and they scattered. And then my old friend Paul saw those festering swarms of skeletons and thought, Just what I need to grow my business!

A few blocks behind the church’s convoy, a white phosphorus grenade flashes on the roof of a highrise, a cheap special effect lost in the big-budget horror they’ve unleashed.

I laugh harder.

“Hey.”

M punches me in the shoulder. “Don’t you go crazy on me too. Got enough to deal with here.”

Nora is drooling on his shoulder. Tomsen is pacing in a circle, rubbing her scalp and muttering to herself. Julie is staring at the chaos below with a faraway expression.

“They’re going to lose,” she murmurs.

I can barely hear her over the racket of war, the drumroll of gunfire from the wall, the steady roar of the helicopters punctuated by thumping missile blasts. In a world where most battles involve ragged gangs with revolvers and machetes, this is an awesome display of military might. But it’s three choppers and a few hundred soldiers against several thousand ravenous skeletons. Even if Axiom hadn’t spread itself thin with its ill-timed foreign invasions, I’m not sure they could stop this.

“They’ll run out of ammo before they get halfway through that swarm,” Julie says, shaking her head. “Axiom’s going to lose.”

For the moment, the Boneys are focused on the Ardents, clawing at their armored trucks like bears trying to open campsite canisters. But hunting is the one area in which their minds are still adaptable, and they quickly recognize the futility of this effort. In almost perfect unison, they abandon the trucks and rush toward the stadium, where a richer pot of flesh awaits. They die in waves as bullets strafe their ranks. Their skulls explode like ceramic urns, scattering their ashes to the wind. But for each one that goes down, three more rush in behind it.

“Hate to tell you,” M says to Julie, “but that’s not good news. If they lose, we lose.”

Julie nods. “Oh I know. We’re probably going to die.”

M raises his eyebrows. “Well shit! What happened to Miss Sunshine?”

Julie finally pulls her eyes away from the battle. She looks at me like she’s been talking to me the whole time. “Everything’s going to fall apart.” Her voice is faint, her eyes slightly widened. “But like that guy at the diner said…like Gael said…maybe that’s what we need.”

“What do you mean?” I ask, though I’m starting to understand.

“Maybe this loosens Axiom’s grip enough to shake it off.” She looks down at the mayhem on the ground. “Maybe if everyone sees what’s happening here, they’ll realize nothing’s as solid as they thought. That the powers that be aren’t invulnerable. That we have a chance.”

I feel a tingle rising in my spine. Did the scope of today’s ambitions just widen by a mile?

Tomsen snatches the briefcase out of my hand with the twitchy speed of a pickpocket.

“Whoa, whoa!” M says, reaching out to stop her, but she ignores him and crouches to the floor, pops the case open, and pulls a little electronics kit from one of her many pockets.

“Where did you find this thing?” she says. “It’s ancient! Does it even work?”

“Let’s not find out,” M says, watching her nervously as she pokes around in the wiring. He jumps half a foot when a grenade detonates in the battle below. But after a minute of tinkering, Tomsen shuts the case and stands up.

“Trigger is good. Now what?” She doesn’t give the case back to me and I don’t ask for it. BABL has been her life’s work; she deserves to be the one who finishes it.

“I know a way into my house,” Julie says and starts to head back the way we came, then stops when she sees Sprout following at her heels. “But Marcus was right, Sprout. We can’t bring you into this.”

“I want to help!” Sprout says.

“I know you do, but this is too dangerous. Your dad would kill me if I let you come.”

“But me and Addis can see things,” Sprout says, and she doesn’t sound like a six-year-old arguing. She doesn’t sound whiny or pouty. She sounds strong. “See?”

She pulls off her eyepatch and drops it on the ground. Her “bad” eye gleams yellow like Addis’s. Like mine and Julie’s, once upon a time. I can feel it drilling past my flesh, seeking the spaces inside me.

“We can read the Library,” she says. “The books tell us secrets.”

A chill runs down my back. Julie and I exchange a glance. Addis watches us with his unreadable stare.

“Decision, now!” Tomsen says, passing the briefcase from hand to hand like the handle is hot.

“Sprout,” Julie says. “I know you can see things. I know you might be able to help. But you’re too small for what we’re doing and you’ll probably get hurt, or even get us hurt.”

Sprout’s stiff spine slumps a little.

“So I think if you really want to help, you should stay here with your friends and take care of Nora. You have your own brain, but I’ve been around longer, and that’s what I think you should do. Your choice.”

With that, she turns and heads down the hall.

M eases Nora to the floor and props her against the wall. “Listen,” he says, trying to catch her swimming gaze. “You’re Nora Greene. Baddest ass I ever met. Gonna take a lot more than poison to knock you down.”

Her eyes hold his for just a moment, then slip away again.

I glance back at the kids as we leave them in the corridor, the noise of battle rumbling up through the rectangle of daylight behind them. Sprout looks frustrated and confused. The others are harder to read.

“You really think they’ll stay?” I ask Julie.

She shrugs. “I said all I could. I’m not going to tie them up. They’re people.”

Tomsen is already to the stairwell, bouncing on her heels while she waits for us. “Faster! Sooner! Time is Russian roulette and every second is a trigger pull, tick tick tick, click click click.”

“Jesus Christ,” M grumbles.

We move past the stairwell, heading toward the interior side of the wall, and after a claustrophobic squeeze through a pitch-black service tunnel, we emerge into harsh white artificial daylight, perched on a narrow ledge of grating.

Directly below us, at the end of a rusty ladder: the sheet metal roof of Julie’s house.

“I was a teenager and my dad was a paranoid alcoholic general,” Julie explains. “I had to sneak out a lot.”

“What if Balt left some guards?” I ask. The streets are mostly empty now, despite the remain where you are message blinking on the Jumbotron. People must have decided to make their own decisions.

“What do you think I brought you and Marcus for?” Julie says with a wry grin. “You used to be some kind of ninja, apparently, and Marcus…he’s good at absorbing bullets.”

M sighs and slaps his barrel of a stomach. “One advantage of being big. You skinny bitches can’t hold your lead.”

Tomsen loops her belt through the briefcase handle and scurries down the ladder with the case bouncing against her hip. Julie is close behind and then M, leaving me alone on the ledge, staring at the ladder. I think of another ladder, much longer and made of living bone. These brutal skills I have—do I climb downward every time I use them? Are they stored in those primordial pits below the basement? The Library is messy. There are Lower pages tucked into Higher books and the opposite as well, and sometimes down is up.

I descend the ladder and pad across the roof of Julie’s house, limbering my hands for whatever they need to do.

WE

“TEAM MANAGER ABBOT to anyone in Goldman Dome! Do you read me? Does anyone read me?”

Abbot pulls his walkie away and curses at it like it’s an insubordinate officer. “Of all the fucking times for a jammer surge.”

Security forces have withdrawn into the stadium walls, digging in for a siege, but the nature of this fortress necessitates strange formations. They’re not gathered together in organized ranks but scattered throughout the tunnels, each soldier finding his own solitary perch from which to shoot. Only Abram’s probation keeps him tied to Abbot on this particular ledge.

“Line sounds clean, sir,” Abram says as he pops out a spent clip and replaces it. “They’re just not answering.”

Abbot presses the button again. The squeal of the jamming signal is indeed faint. “There was no attack on Goldman…” He looks in the direction of the dome as if visualizing it through the intervening buildings. “Why wouldn’t they answer?”

Abram fires carefully, trying not to waste any bullets, but the targets are small and fast and erratic; it’s like trying to shoot a wasp out of the air. He used to enjoy the challenge. All the new hires looked forward to Boney encounters because it was a chance to show their worth, to impress their father-bosses and perhaps earn a few Approval Credits. And there was a sickly gratification in the feat itself, the way a good headshot made them collapse like a snipped marionette, a clean, bloodless deletion of the enemy.

But today he feels nothing. No one is keeping score as he guns down these absurd stacks of animate calcium. Abbot is still shouting into his walkie, trying to reach Goldman or the acquisition teams en route to Portland, but no one is listening. Grenades turn clusters of skeletons into clouds of osseous shrapnel, but they’re spreading out to make harder targets, surrounding the stadium like a swarm of termites.

“You said it’s a vault, right?” Abram calls to Abbot. “They can’t get in, right?”

Abbot lowers his walkie and watches the skeletons mount the wall, their pointy fingers digging into cracks and lifting their weightless frames. “You see this watch?” he says in a disconcertingly subdued voice, lifting his wrist to display a gold Rolex. “Water resistant down to a thousand feet, it says. But I don’t take it swimming.”

Abram leans over the edge of the opening to pick off a few Boneys that were getting too close. The sound of their claws ripping free of the concrete reminds him of ticks. The sight of his calves dotted with them like gray warts after an afternoon in the woods with Perry. That hideous sensation of being inhabited. Of being fed upon. And that horrible tug as his father pulled them out.

“Sir,” he says, lowering his gun and looking directly at his superior, hoping to draw out some honesty. “Do we have any backup?”

Abbot shakes out of his introspection and his face resumes its glowering. “We have Goldman if they’ll fucking show up!”

“When I left Post, the merger was struggling. A lot of public firings, rumors of another branch break.”

“They’ve had some HR issues,” Abbot says sourly. “Locals aren’t merging as smoothly as we hoped, but I thought it was quelled by now.” He spits a glob of mucus onto the floor in front of him. “This is the goddamn Axiom Group! We’ve been doing this shit for decades! We don’t let a few religious nut-jobs walk in and take our—”

He cuts off. A smile creases his craggy face.

Two ancient, dented Apache helicopters have appeared in the sky to the west. They move in to join the three hovering over the stadium.

“About fucking time!” Abbot says, thumping the balcony railing. “If they brought their ground troops with them, we might have a—”

Missiles streak out from the Apaches, but not into the swarm of Boneys. The National Guard gunship spirals down in a swirl of smoke.

“No,” Abbot mumbles, but Abram feels oddly unsurprised.

The two news choppers turn to face Goldman’s Apaches. There’s an exchange of loud noises. Both news choppers fall in groaning masses of fire. One of the Apaches spins out of control and crashes into an office building, blasting a flurry of documents out over the street like parade confetti. The last one wobbles in the air for a moment before its rotors lock up and it drops to the ground like a stone.

Then the ground troops Abbot hoped for appear, pouring out of Corridor 2 with shouts of “For General Cinza!” They open fire on the skeletons, and on Axiom’s men, and the battle is suddenly very confusing.

So we stop watching it. We attune to Abram Kelvin, whose mind is also drifting away from the madness around him. How he hates it all. How he’s always hated it, even while he was making it. How he wishes there were other directions the earth could spin.

A small skeleton is climbing toward him. He has never seen a child Boney before but he supposes there’s no reason they wouldn’t exist. He locks eyes with its gaping sockets.

Is this what you want for her? whispers that maddeningly familiar voice, flickering on every syllable from boy to man and back. Is this the best you’ve come up with after all your years on this planet?

The skeleton is getting close. Abbot has retreated into the wall and he’s yelling at Abram to join him, but Abram doesn’t move.

If this is really all you can see, then let it eat you and be done with it, because this isn’t worth the pain.

Abbot is sliding the door shut. It squeals on its rusty track.

But we know you, Abram. I know you. And I know you can see more.

His bullet disintegrates the tiny skull, close enough to spray his face with bone chips. He ducks through the remaining gap and helps Abbot lock the door.

There are many distortions in Abram’s perception. Many scratches on his lens from a lifetime of rough handling. But one of his simplest mistakes is believing that no one is watching him. Many people are watching him, including the small girl five floors up, leaning over the edge and squinting, wondering if that’s her father down there.

Sprout Kelvin can see Abram perfectly well. Her special eye disregards the illusion of distance and sees every hair on his head, the grays here and there, the thinning patch at the back. But seeing his face does not answer her question.

Is that my father?

He disappears before she can decide. There are skeletons creeping up the wall. They advance slowly, wandering side to side in search of holds on the mostly smooth face of the stadium. It will be some time before they reach her perch, if they aren’t shot down first, so she doesn’t panic yet. But she is very, very scared.

She is scared of being eaten, of being imprisoned, of being pumped full of plague until she no longer has a self. But mostly she’s scared for the people around her, because she cares as much for each one of them as she does for herself, and there are more of them than of her.

We like this girl. She sees things. Sometimes, she sees us. She reads our fantastic tales of speculative fiction and projects them onto reality. And maybe someday, with enough projectors shining, someone will trace that image.

Sprout’s new friend Addis might have such talent, but the world has rapped his knuckles every time he’s reached out, and even with our voices inside him asking him to try again, he is not quite convinced. The world has much to prove before he will trust it with his hopes.

And yet here is his sister, who has given up everything for the people she loves. He can see the sludge coating her mind now, the puree of black worms chopped fine but still quivering, still sucking up her life and shitting out death. He can see her fighting to clean it off, spraying her soiled thoughts with a fire hose of will.

Nora stands up.

She blinks and shakes her head, swaying like a drunk. Her eyes manage to focus on Addis’s for just a second, communicating something like, I have to, and then she stumbles down the corridor.

Addis looks at Sprout.

“I’m going to stay,” she says. “I don’t want to get Julie hurt.” She glances down at the skeletons’ slow ascent, then at Joan and Alex, who nod. “We’ll be okay,” she tells Addis. “Go see what you need to see.” Then she smiles. “I think they’re almost ready.”

And she’s right. We are almost ready. We are fuel awaiting a spark.

I

ACROSS THE ROOF. Down the drain pipe. Through the balcony doors.

Julie’s bedroom is exactly how she left it. Her bed is there, but the sheets are gone. Her dresser drawers hang open, empty. Nails and thumbtacks mark the places where her art and mementos used to hang. The room is a gutted shell. A skeleton stripped of flesh.

It was a rushed moving day. It took her one hour to pack, stuffing her few meaningful possessions into boxes with violent haste, her eyes brimming but refusing to release. It was three hours after she watched her father die. Three hours after her father tried to kill her. But she didn’t want time to recover and mourn; she wanted to pull every trace of herself out of this place and wake up tomorrow somewhere new. She wanted to leave and never come back.

I see it in her eyes as we march through the wildly painted sanctuary of her youth, with its lingering scent of cheap incense and cigarettes. The struggle not to remember. To be here and now and nowhere else.

I know that struggle well.

I put an arm around her shoulders and pull her against me, forcing her to pause. She looks up at me, then buries her face in my neck. Just a moment. Just enough to acknowledge the thickly layered lives we’ve lived. Then she wipes her eyes and we move on.

The house is silent. I hear no gruff laughter or barked commands. The only sign of Axiom’s presence is the muffled noise outside the stadium, a jumble of shouts and explosions and inhuman roars, like all the world’s aggressors dumped into a blender.

We climb down stairs sticky with spilled beer and tobacco spit, past bunk beds, bean bags, TVs, and gun racks—empty, to my dismay and relief.

We reach the ground level. Julie stops in front of a separate staircase leading further down.

“Can you feel it?” she says.

I can’t at first, but it starts to rise as we descend the dark steps. It fills my head like viscous fluid, like a low vibration from some distant factory. By the time we reach the bottom, it’s actually audible, and Julie’s earlier description was accurate but understated. It’s not just a lot of songs playing at once; it’s every song—and every show and film and news broadcast, melodies clashing, beats overlapping into a shuddering rumble, a thousand voices shouting over each other.

The basement of Julie’s home is a perfect cube of concrete lit by a single red bulb, completely empty except for a beige rug in the middle of the floor. I see no cobwebs or rat droppings or other signs of life, just thin drifts of dust that have settled into strange patterns on the concrete: triangles and whorls of bristling fractals.

“She would sit right here,” Julie says, stepping onto the rug. “Like she was meditating.” She drops to the floor, cross-legged. The red light casts deep shadows on her face; she looks like a statue of some terrible goddess. “I don’t know how she could stand it.” She rubs the sides of her head. “Feels like I’m being buried.”

“It’s BABL,” Tomsen says, so giddy her voice cracks. “Same noise as the eastern generator. Harmonic resonance with the mantle? Tuning tectonic vibrations and distorting the magnetosphere? Maybe, maybe, but where is it?” She squirms and fidgets. She looks ready to set the bomb off right here. “Julie, where is it?”

Julie looks down at the rug. “This thing was Dad’s idea. To make Mom more comfortable, he said.”

It’s not actually a rug, just a rough-cut square of the same stiff commercial carpet that covers the floors above.

“She told him she didn’t need it, she liked the cool concrete, but he put it here anyway.” She tries to lift the edge—it doesn’t budge. Shaking her head in angry disbelief, she hops to a crouch, digs her fingers in deep, and pulls. The rug rips free of its glue and peels back, revealing the faint lines of a rectangle cut into the concrete. She pushes a tiny button, there’s a hiss, and a section of the floor swings upward on pneumatic hinges.

Another staircase awaits. But this one isn’t dark. This one is flashing with colored light, echoing with voices and snippets of music.

“Goddamnit, Dad,” Julie whispers. “You knew.”

Tomsen starts for the stairs but M pushes past her. “Bullet sponge coming through.”

I clench my hands into fists as I follow him.

The staircase is narrow and incredibly steep, sloping almost straight down into the flickering darkness. I have to keep my hands on the walls to stop the vertigo.

“He knew,” Julie murmurs into my back. She sounds far away, caught between anger and grief. “All those years, he could have cleared the fog and reached out to the world, and he sat on his hands.” Her voice trembles. “All those medals…and he was a coward.”

I can think of no possible way to comfort her. No wordless hug is enough for pain like this. But she won’t have long to dwell on it. After a descent of about four stories, we have reached the bottom.

Squinting against the flickering lights, we step into the basement beneath the basement.

This place bears no resemblance to the standardized structures above, as if it were built in a different era with a far bigger budget. It feels like we’ve crawled under a county permit office and discovered a pharaoh’s tomb. The huge, circular chamber rises sixty feet to a geodesic dome of tarnished green copper. The curving walls are lined with heavy-duty versions of familiar equipment: bulky monitors with inch-thick glass, mixing boards with palm-sized steel knobs and faders, computer towers encased in concrete and so overbuilt they’re the size of refrigerators. Technology that once strived to be as small and disposable as possible has reversed course, adapting to a world without repair or replenishment—adapting to live forever.

Because this place was precious to the former owners of the world. To control who can see and say what; this was always the dream of such people. In past eras they had to rely on social convention, political machination, and physical intimidation. All so very effortful. So when they found a way to silence the whole scary mess from the safety of their bunkers, it’s no surprise they poured their hearts into it.

BABL will last for centuries. Unless it doesn’t.

It gapes in the center of the chamber, Tomsen’s “inverted tower,” a perversion of its namesake in form as well as function—not an edifice reaching for the heavens but an absence plunging to the depths. The mouth of the pit is wide enough to swallow the house above us. The walls of the shaft are studded with green copper tetrahedrons that grow smaller as the shaft narrows, funneling toward some distant choke point deep in the blackness. Each stud seems to produce its own faint noise, bleeding together into that chaotic chorus, and from somewhere at the bottom…a churning. A thick, low rumble that I hear only in my bones, like the growl of some enormous stomach.

It’s good down there, says a voice near the base of my skull, perhaps my limbic cortex. We drank the deep dark and it was sweet.

Am I standing on the edge of the pit, staring into its dizzying regression of pyramids? Is the noise that fountains up from those depths actually in the air or only in my head?

A hand clamps onto my shoulder.

“R,” Julie hisses under her breath. “Look up.”

I tear my eyes away from the pit and raise them. Across the gap, on the far end of the chamber, I see what looks like a news broadcast studio. The colored light is from a wall of monitors displaying video streams and editing software. And a man and a woman in colorful ties are grinning and gesticulating into a camera while three men in white shirts operate the controls.

I had almost forgotten there’s more to this place than the jammer. Before we silence its noise and let the world start talking, we have one final message for it to shout.

The pitchmen and their assistants are so absorbed in their production that we’re close enough to smell their rancid cologne before they notice us. But of course they express no surprise. They just swivel their grins from the cameras to us.

“Hello!” Blue Tie says.

“How can we help you today?” Yellow Tie says.

Black Tie is notably absent. The other two seem somehow more absurd without his dull gravitas backing their prattle.

The pitchmen await our response patiently, but their more recognizably human assistants seem to understand the threat. Tomsen rushes toward them and they cower against their equipment. “Excuse me,” she says politely, like they’re blocking her path on the sidewalk, but they just cringe away from her. “Excuse me!” she shouts and starts hitting them with the briefcase like an old lady berating ruffians. I wince, imagining the contents of her “purse” turning us all into char, but the assistants scatter and she sets the bomb down and goes to work on the control panel.

“I’m afraid you’re interrupting an important announce-ment,” Blue Tie says, switching to his grave face. “The Axiom Group headquarters is under attack at this time.”

“Our employees are very important to us,” Yellow Tie says, still smiling. “If you’ll allow us to continue our announcement, we’ll get someone from the nearest branch to assist us right away.”

Above all the editing screens, I notice a bigger monitor that appears to be the actual Fed TV broadcast. I expect to see something like an emergency weather warning—flashing alerts and clear instructions, perhaps a screeching tone to get people’s attention—but to my amazement, even their distress call is embedded in LOTUS obfuscation. Stock footage of thunderstorms and forest fires intercut with old photos of the stadium and inspirational quotes about patriotism and preserving our way of life. The closest it gets to specificity is a repeating clip of the pitchmen gazing earnestly into the camera and urging America to “support our leadership in these difficult times.”

No casual viewer would guess that Axiom is on the brink of disaster, and I’m guessing that’s the point: to cry for help without looking vulnerable. Anyone watching this without the code key would get only a vague sense of unease. A generalized fear that only firms their support for the strongman rising in their midst.

“We’re going to make a different announcement,” Julie says.

“We advise against creating any further instability at this time,” Blue Tie says as if guessing our intent. “People need certainty in an uncertain world.”

“That’s literally impossible,” Julie says. “What does that even mean?”

“People don’t need meaning.” Yellow Tie’s smile takes on an unexpected subtlety that sends a chill down my spine. “They just need to feel safe while they die.”

What kind of minds remain behind these waxy, interchangeable faces? From what inhuman script are they reading? And can we shred it?

Julie steps up to Yellow Tie and stares into her glassy blue eyes. She sniffs. “You smell like death,” she says quietly. “You smell like the plague.”

I hear muffled noises above us. The hiss of the basement hatch. Then Timothy Balt and two dozen of his Cock Street Boys come thundering down the stairs.

I sigh. Julie grinds her teeth. Tomsen keeps working.

“That was a nice little jog around the city,” Balt says, swaggering toward us with his pistol at his hip like a cowboy. “I needed a good workout, been getting some flab.” He lifts his shirt a few inches, revealing chiseled abs. “But shit’s getting serious out there, we don’t have time for—hey you! Butch!” He jabs his gun at Tomsen. “Quit fucking with that. Hands up.”

With an agonized grimace, Tomsen pries her hands away from the console and puts them up.

“We appreciate your work, General Balt,” Yellow Tie says with a sultry smile. “It’s clear we weren’t wrong about your abilities.”

Balt gives the two pitchmen a quick nod, avoiding eye contact. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen him look uncomfortable, and I wonder how much he’s learned about the nature of his bosses.

“So you’re gonna hijack Fed TV?” Balt says to Julie. He forces a derisive chuckle, getting back into character.

“Yep,” Julie says.

“Gonna spread the news that Axiom is bad, get the people to rise up?”

“Yep.”

“Dumbest shit I ever heard,” Balt laughs. “You looked around lately? People are sick and tired. You think they’re gonna ‘rise up’ against the guys putting roofs over their heads?”

Julie stares at him, stone-faced. “Yep.”

Her voice is cold and blunt. This is one person she’ll make no effort to convince.

Balt’s grin flickers with frustration. No doubt he was hoping for a juicier tease. “Well,” he grunts, “if you’re gonna just lie there, I guess we’ll get on with—”

His mouth clamps shut. He spins around to face the staircase. “Who the fuck that?”

Another stampede of footsteps is rumbling in the house above us. A lot more than two dozen.

“You locked the hatch, right?” Balt shouts at one of his boys, who nods emphatically.

The noise is closer now, almost directly overhead. The sound of things banging and scraping on concrete echoes down the stairwell.

“Fuck me,” Balt mutters, putting on the fierce scowl he wears when he’s scared. “Fuckin’ Boneys got through the walls…”

But he’s wrong. I hear no warbling hum. No trace of the atonal theme music that accompanies those clattering horrors. This is something else.

“New orders from Executive!” Blue Tie announces suddenly, and Balt startles. “Please bring the intruders to the conference room for questioning at this time.”

Balt squints at the pitchmen. He squints at their walkies, which have not made any sound.

“Why?” he says. “We’re under attack, we don’t have time for—”

“Bring the intruders to the conference room,” Blue Tie repeats more forcefully, gesturing to a door on the opposite end of the chamber marked emergency exit.

Balt hesitates, gritting his teeth, then raises his gun. “All right.” He points it at me. “Move, corpse.”

Balt’s gun is huge. Some kind of high caliber magnum, so oversized it looks like a toy. How many times have I played this silly game? How many times have I stood frozen in the sightline of a gun, paralyzed by a bullet that hasn’t been fired? By the invisible threat, the fear of a possible future?

What if I don’t play? What if I walk away?

“Hey!” Balt shouts. “The fuck are you’re doing?”

I’m walking past the pitchmen. I’m walking around the edge of the pit. I’m walking away from Balt.

Incredulity pushes his voice to a girlish falsetto. “What the fuck? I’m pointing a gun at you, dipshit!”

I’ve circled behind his crew now, and they’re all staring at me, searching for some explanation for my behavior, but their frame of reference is limited. They begin to laugh—the corpse’s brain finally melted! Let’s watch the show!—and then I turn and sprint up the staircase, and their laughter dies.

Balt is probably shouting, guns are probably firing, but I hear only the scuffling and wheezing in the room above me. And my heartbeat, pounding slow, like I’ve never been more calm.

I flip the hatch’s lock and give it a nudge. Then I come back down the stairs at a leisurely pace, emerging into the chamber with my arms out, palms up, a gesture of surrender—not to Balt, but to whatever happens next.

I indulge in a small, slightly vindictive smile as Evan Kenerly and two hundred dis-Oriented people flood in behind me, swinging pipes and chunks of lumber.

WE

IN THE GLORIOUS MESS OF THE LIBRARY, books are bound loosely, pages migrate freely, and one moment of a life might disagree with the next. So when a corrupted man dies and can no longer cause harm, even his own memories rejoice. The better parts of his life, the Higher moments, they celebrate along with us and we bear them no grudge, because the Library is not a collection of people but a collection of moments, experiences, thoughts, and sensations, and we have only one goal: to elevate the whole.

This is how we endure the flood of fear that rushes from Axiom’s troops as their victims finally fight back. This is how we maintain a grim smile as a man cracks another man’s head with a pipe and a woman plunges a broken broom handle into another man’s gut. We focus on the Higher shelves, bracing them for the weight of books to come.

R wrestles a man’s gun away and jabs him in the throat with it.

Marcus hits a man so hard his whole face crumples inward.

Julie keeps her back against Tomsen’s while Tomsen scrambles to finish whatever she was doing with the broadcast station, oblivious to the conflagration behind her. Julie clutches a piece of rebar like a sword, swinging it without mercy whenever the battle gets too close to Tomsen. Only a few shots ring out. Kenerly’s crew presses in on Balt’s so tightly that the guns are reduced to bludgeons. Shouts and grunts and crunching noises bounce off the angular dome and echo in the bottomless pit.

It’s mayhem. It’s a miniature iteration of the mayhem in the city, and Addis wonders how far this fractal goes as he crouches in the shelter of the stairwell. He thinks of the Russian nesting doll he played with at his auntie’s house, and how he would scratch and pry at that final piece, certain there was an even smaller one sealed inside.

He looks at his sister standing next to him. She sways and twitches with confused agitation, her pinkish eyes darting between faces.

Nora watches her childhood crush, Evan, take a brutal punch and return it. She watches R, her strange new friend, slam a bloody elbow into someone’s temple. She watches Marcus—she doesn’t know how to classify him—kick a man in the chest, and she watches that man crash into Timothy Balt.

Balt sprawls out on the floor and his gun slides to the edge of the pit. Marcus rushes at him, but Balt jumps to his feet and fumbles a knife out of his belt just as Marcus tackles him.

The knife sinks into Marcus’s ribs.

Nora doubles over. A whimper escapes her throat.

Marcus falls to one knee. Balt raises the knife for a killing blow.

Julie hits him across the spine with a steel bar.

As Balt staggers forward, Julie locks the bar around his throat and pulls so hard she lifts herself off the ground. Balt reaches behind him with the knife and stabs blindly.

The blade sinks into Julie’s calf, then her thigh, once, twice…

Nora hears her friend’s screams like an alarm clock in a dream. Her mind tries to tell her it’s a bird tweeting or a violin playing, some innocuous nonsense that can disappear into the slurry oozing through her head. How much easier it would be to stay here in the dim shelter of this staircase and wait until the fight is over. How much simpler to forget the people she loves, to release her attachments, to cut her rope to the world and sink into the mud.

But the rope refuses to be cut. The rope is strong because it’s made of her. The rope breaks the knife.

Nora’s eyes snap open. She sucks in a breath. She runs through the scuffling mob and rams her boot into Balt’s testicles.

Balt drops to all fours and Julie rolls off of him.

“You…fucking…cunts!” Balt squeals.

Nora rears back for another kick, this time aiming for his face, but then her friend screams again.

“Nora!”

Where did that shotgun come from? Who slid it across the floor into Balt’s hands? Nora has just enough time for these pointless questions before something slams into her—but it can’t be a bullet. It’s a soft impact, almost gentle, and it comes from the wrong direction. She topples onto her side, stopping just before the edge of the pit, and then she hears the bang.

When she looks up, Evan is standing where she was a second ago. There is a hole in the center of his chest. He flashes Nora a sad smile, and she wishes there were time to say thank you, and I’m sorry, and a dozen other things, but Balt fires again, and Evan’s smile disappears.

Balt pumps the shotgun as he rises to his feet, his teeth bared in the ecstatic grin of a man winning his favorite game. Then his face flashes to incredulity—Julie is on his back again. This stupid girl isn’t respecting the rules. He already beat her and he’s on to his next target; this repetition is boring.

But it’s not quite the same. Julie is no longer armed with a steel bar. This time she has Balt’s knife. This time she doesn’t try to choke him. This time she cuts his throat.

Balt sinks to his knees. Julie stands over him and he glares up at her, clutching his gushing neck. Even now his face shows only outrage.

“Whore,” he gurgles.

With a snarl that’s been waiting seven years to come out, Julie kicks Balt in the face. Her boot catches his jutting chin and his head snaps back.

It almost snaps off.

Balt tips over the edge of the pit, and he’s gone.

Nora stares at that yawning void, though she refuses to look down into it. She stares at Evan, though only at his hands. She feels Julie’s arms around her, and for a moment she thinks Julie needs help walking. Then she remembers that Julie loves her, and this is an embrace between friends surrounded by death, and Nora returns it as her eyes burn and blur.

On the far end of the chamber, in the shadow of the stairwell, her brother watches. He doesn’t see violence and death. He sees risk and sacrifice. He sees love. And with our pages fluttering around him, a thought rings in his head:

Violence is concentric. Every great war grows from a thousand small ones. End the war at the center and you’ve ended them all.

How goes yours, Addis Greene? we ask him, for we are learning each other’s languages. Is anyone winning?

Addis watches his sister and her friend break their embrace and help the big man to his feet. He watches them pull him to safety while the tall man and the others close in on the remaining troops.

Does the world deserve forgiveness? Does it deserve another chance?

Addis bites his trembling lip. He doesn’t answer.

I

IT’S REMARKABLE what the death of a leader does to fighters who don’t know why they’re fighting. If these men had some noble cause, Balt would be their martyr and they’d fight twice as hard. But since their cause is some barely conscious blend of greed and fear, his death only releases them from his spell. They freeze. They glance around as if wondering how they got here. Then they run.

Kenerly’s army is unaffected by Kenerly’s death, because it’s not his army. These people are here for their own reasons, which have nothing to do with the charisma of one man. They chase the Cock Street Boys up the staircase without a backward glance, and suddenly it’s quiet.

As I gasp for breath and test a few broken knuckles, a sound that reached my ears earlier finally registers in my brain.

Julie’s scream.

I rush to the edge of the pit. Nora is helping her to her feet—or maybe they’re embracing; my attention is on her leg, where each heartbeat pumps tablespoons of blood out of three deep gashes.

“Are you okay?” Julie asks Nora.

Nora laughs darkly. “Fuck you, Cabernet. Worry about your—”

“Nora,” Julie insists, shaking her off and balancing on one leg. “Are you okay?”

Nora looks at the floor, wipes her eyes, and nods. “Yeah. I think I’m okay.” She looks over her shoulder; her little brother stands in front of the stairs, watching us with that strange, appraising gaze.

“Marcus is hurt,” Julie says, nodding toward M, who is upright but unsteady, pressing his hand to his side. “Go fix him up. I can handle my leg.”

Nora hesitates. “Sit down and keep it elevated. R, make some bandages.” She rushes to help M.

Julie finally looks at me. Her brows knit as she scans my body for injury, but most of the blood on my hands isn’t mine. I ease her to the floor and search the bodies for a reasonably clean shirt, then tear off three strips and wrap them around her wounds. She lets out of muffled shriek as I cinch them tight.

“Jesus Christ that hurts. I think he chipped my fucking femur…”

“Can you walk?”

She takes a deep breath and puts an arm over my shoulder. We stand up together and she takes a few cautious steps. When the initial rush of agony passes, she lets go of me and shuffles to the edge of the BABL pit. She looks down into its funneling depths. A smear of blood runs down its side, bits of clothing and flesh hanging off the points of the copper studs. There probably wasn’t much left of Balt by the time he reached the bottom.

Julie screws her eyes shut and unleashes a scream into the pit. Her veins bulge, her fists clench at her sides, her lips stretch back from her teeth. It’s not a scream of pain but of rage and disgust—for the man at the bottom of the pit and for the pit itself and for the insane world that built them both.

Her voice breaks and she stumbles backward, spent. I catch her under the arms and hold her.

“What now?” she mumbles.

My brain races to find its track, to remember what we’re here to do, but while it’s still rebooting, Tomsen steps up next to us with the briefcase in hand.

“Now this!” she says cheerfully, and tosses it into the pit.

“Wait!” Julie gasps, snapping out of her daze and reaching out in a futile attempt to grab the case. We watch in horror as it bounces down the funnel with a series of bell-like clangs and disappears into the shadows.

“What the fuck, Tomsen?” Nora says, running to join us. “Did you just blow us up?”

I’m relieved to see M hobbling along behind Nora, clutching his bandaged midsection, but my relief might be short-lived if Tomsen just lost her mind.

“It was designed to be a suicide bomb,” she says, “but I added a timer circuit so we don’t have to die!” She beams like a kid showing off her science project.

“Okay but…how much time?” Nora says.

“Enough for us to get away, but not enough for anyone to fish out the bomb. It’s perfect! I’m so excited!”

“Huntress,” Julie says, grabbing her shoulders. “How much time?”

Tomsen’s giddy smile falters and she cocks her head. “Fifteen minutes?”

Julie claps a hand over her face.

“Is that…not perfect?” Tomsen asks.

M sighs. “We’re gonna have to run again, aren’t we?”

“We needed to use this place before we destroyed it,” I tell Tomsen. “We needed to show the world what’s happening here.”

Her face brightens. “Oh! We’re already doing that. See?”

She points to the control station. All the editing monitors now display security camera views of various locations in the stadium. The big screen at the top, the one that was showing the Fed TV broadcast, is now showing…us.

Four blood-smeared adults and a debatably Dead child, surrounded by bodies on the rim of a bottomless pit.

“Are you saying,” Julie says under her breath, “that we’re broadcasting to the whole country…right now?”

“Exactly! We have been for about ten minutes.”

A profoundly uncomfortable silence fills the room.

Slowly, with wide eyes, we turn to face the camera.

“Everyone’s watching,” Tomsen says, “and listening, and they’re probably getting pretty confused by now, so maybe you should say something.”

Julie gives the camera a cringing smile. “Um…hi.”

Tomsen runs back to the control station. “Go ahead. Tell and show. Give them a tour of Hell. I’ll keep the cameras on you from here. But hurry, okay? Because…fourteen minutes.” She grins and flashes a thumbs-up.

I stare into the glass eye of the camera and I feel it growing, filling my vision like a dark planet. It can’t really be the whole world in there. It’s just this country. And maybe Canada. And maybe Central America if the technology is as advanced as it looks. But there’s no way it reaches the eastern hemisphere. Unless there are relay stations…?

“R?” Julie whispers, reading the tremors on my face. “Do you have something to say?”

I open my mouth. “My name is—”

My voice sounds too loud, like I’m in a small bedroom shouting into a megaphone. I shut my mouth, startled. I take a deep breath, hoping the words will come when I release it, but someone interrupts me. That voice in my limbic cortex, bitter and wry like a heckler in the back row of my mind.

Let’s hear it, kid. Let’s see you change the world with an idea.

I grimace. I take a step back.

Let’s see you tell hungry people that there’s more to life than food. Let’s see you convince these weaklings that they don’t need a strongman to lead them. Let’s hear some poems about hope while an army of death swarms their homes.

It’s him. It’s not just his raspy timbre in a roar of other voices; it’s him. He surges out of the noise, pulling his scattered identity together and reaching for my throat.

My throat is tight. I can’t speak.

What’s the matter, Recessive Atvist? What’s wrong, Recreant Atvist? Did you forget your big speech or did you never have one? Did you come all this way to stand in front of the world only to realize you’ve got nothing to say?

The black worms are sliding through my grip, spreading out from my wound and wrapping around my neck like a noose. I can’t breathe. I see Julie’s worried eyes on me and I remember what I said to her the last time her asthma attacked. Think about breathing. The pleasure of it. The privilege. I try to follow my own advice, repeating it like a mantra, but he interrupts me again.

You don’t need to breathe, remember? You’re a corpse. You don’t need these people. You don’t need this fight. You’re dead, and everything is easy.

Something sparks inside me, and my panic flares into anger. I feel my blood boiling, my face flushing red.

Wheezing and clutching my throat, I stumble away from the camera toward the emergency exit on the other side of the pit.

“R!” Julie says. “Where are you going?”

I hear Nora’s voice behind me, nervous and thin. “Hey, uh…world? So, I don’t know if you caught this earlier, but in about fourteen minutes, BABL’s gonna be gone. You’ll be able to change the channel. But first we need to show you something, so, uh…stay tuned?”

I hear the footsteps of my friends following me but they sound miles away. I shove the door open and find myself in a narrow shaft, not stairs but a ladder, rising toward a distant square of daylight.

If down can be up then up can be down, my grandfather says, and do I detect a note of unease creeping into his snarl? Maybe you don’t want to climb this ladder. Maybe it’s safer down here. Didn’t you have a speech to make?

I start climbing, ignoring both my grandfather and the screams of my broken knuckles. I hear Julie and M behind me making little agonized noises as they strain their own injuries and I want to tell them to turn back, to keep themselves safe…but no, I don’t want that. I want them by my side.

The shaft emerges onto the stadium rooftop. The wind howls across its opening; I have to crouch to stay steady. It takes an effort to make myself turn and help Julie up, because everything in me is pointing ahead, toward the structure on the apex of the roof.

Glimpsed from the outskirts of Post, it was an ambiguous lump. Now that I can see it clearly, I’m still no closer to understanding it. It appears to be the dome from Post’s city hall—not a recreation but the actual dome itself, torn off that building and dumped here on the stadium roof. Its cracked walls and bent pillars reveal stone-textured fiberglass and marble-patterned plastic, but despite the late era flimsiness of its construction, the stadium still sags under its weight. It doesn’t take an engineer to see that this thing will fall through any day. Perhaps any minute.

I move toward the crooked, crumpled edifice with careful steps. The wind buffets me furiously, blowing my hair over my eyes and hissing in my ears, hot like an animal’s breath.

You’ve come to work for us. This is the right thing. The only thing. We are unsurprised.

The dome is modeled after the US Capitol’s grand old rotunda, but reduced to the size of a small house. At its crown is a statue of a woman in robes, and two flags have been drilled into her shoulders: Old Glory and the Axiom logo. She is a shrunken plastic replica of the capitol’s bronze colossus, a statue called Freedom that was forged and erected by slaves.

Everyone has a place. We saw it all in the deep dark.

The voice becomes less and less Mr. Atvist as I get closer to the dome. I can feel his fury as he sinks back into the group, losing his precious, peerless self in the noise of all his peers.

The earth swallowed us. We sank beneath the city and the city closed over us.

It’s not really addressing me anymore; its attention has wandered into some obscure reminiscence, like an old man lost in dementia.

We raged as we died. We had beaten all our enemies but we were still going to lose. It wasn’t fair. The earth had no right to ignore our success.

“Oh my God,” Julie says. She is looking over the edge at the war on the ground. I can hear it—the guns, the explosions, the screams of the Living and the dry roars of the Dead—but I decline to look. I can feel the Boneys’ hum rising up the walls as they climb, but my eyes are locked on the dome. The doorway ahead. A keypad just like the ones in Freedom Tower.

We died with the earth smothering our protests, filling our mouths with soil, and our rage was so strong that when we awoke from death, we still remembered. We refused to disappear.

I punch in the Atvist family code, that vestigial fragment of my DNA lingering in this ever-evolving monster. The door clicks open.

But we were buried, crushed inside the earth. We felt the hunger but we couldn’t satisfy it. We seethed and struggled. Our teeth gnashed on rocks, and the dirt pressed into our eyes. Months passed. Then years. We went mad and then sane again, and finally we saw the truth.

I step inside the dome. My footsteps echo flat and strange off its misshapen walls.

We saw the natural order of everything, like the strata of earth that surrounded us, timeless and inescapable. We saw the line of our ancestors and the history of civilization, from chieftain to king to president to us. We saw the gears of the machine and how smoothly they turned, and we knew it was our job to keep it running.

The dome has no functional spaces. No offices or living quarters. It’s an ornate empty shell. The only notable feature is a jarring incongruity amongst all the faux-marble classicism: a rusty red shipping container, resting in the center of the space like an artifact in a museum.

We had to come back. We had to do our job. So instead of starving, we conquered the hunger and twisted it into power. We heard other voices like ours and we seized them. And as we rotted away, we grew stronger. We shed the weight of our flesh and began to dig.

I can feel the presence of my friends behind me, but they’re silent. Can they hear the voices? Can they hear the buzz inside the shipping container, like an enraged nest of wasps?

My skin crawls as I reach out and lift the container’s door latch. The door swings open with a squeal of long disuse.

Bones pour out around my feet.

The container is full of them. Not full skeletons, just white and brown fragments, rising waist-high all the way to the back of the box. I feel them vibrating around my ankles, disembodied hands grasping, unpaired jawbones trying to bite. The whole heap rattles and chatters and buzzes and hisses; acrid dust rises from it and blows into my face, and I want to cough and vomit but I’m paralyzed with disgust.

Look what I built! my grandfather crows, oblivious to all the other voices shouting over him and each other. I carved my name on the world! No one will ever forget me!

He sounds distant, muffled, buried somewhere in that dusty pile.

Now it’s your turn, kid! Come claim your inheritance!

A thought flashes in my brain like a small explosion—my father. My weak, violent, fanatical father…he rejected this offer. As broken as he was, he took that one step off the path his father laid out for him. One step away from that whirlwind of bones and the grunting brutes at its center. He never got far in his miserable little life, but he took that step, and my life began where it landed.

I am not a lone aberration in a heritage of cruelty. I am another step.

Tears flood my eyes as I turn to face the people I love. They watch me with horror and confusion. Everyone except Addis, who lingers in the shadows, waiting with what looks like expectation in those strange yellow eyes. I catch movement above me and I look up. A security camera stares down at me and past me into the rusty metal box that is Axiom’s executive suite. As I gaze into the black depths of its lens, the camera nods up and down.

You’re on, Tomsen is telling me. Say what you came to say.

Julie once said she could tell me anything because I just sit there and listen. I’ve always been a good listener. Even before my undead impediments, I preferred to let others do the talking while I relaxed in the safety of silence. But life isn’t a story that the world is telling me. Life is a conversation, and I’ve been listening long enough. It’s time for me to speak.

WE

THE SHORT MAN is sitting in his living room, ensconced in his plush recliner. He has not moved from this chair in a very long time. The room gets dark, then bright, then dark again as the days pass. Sometimes he closes his eyes at night, but he doesn’t sleep. He thinks. He wants. He waits.

And he watches television. He was unhappy when the LOTUS Feed became an endless Axiom infomercial. He doesn’t like this new show. He didn’t exactly “like” the old one either; no one really enjoys the Feed, they watch because it’s less horrific than silence. But that balance has almost tipped for the short man. Sometimes, when the noises get too loud and the images too frenzied, he considers getting up. He considers walking outside to see what everyone’s doing—his neighborhood has been busy lately. He even considers talking to some of these people who are standing around him in his house, wandering from room to room or just sitting next to him. But so far, the best he’s managed is to close his eyes.

His eyes have been closed for about an hour when he hears a stirring around him. He opens them and sees that he has more guests. People are coming in from the street, crowding into his living room until there’s only room to stand. For an instant, he imagines drinks in their hands, music on the stereo, laughter, joy—a party!—and his blank face warms with a smile. Then the image fades. He does not know these people. They do not know each other. So why are they all together?

He looks at the TV.

Something is different.

Instead of the glossy stock footage of the classic Feed or the garish intensity of Axiom ads, there is a grainy, poorly lit shot of a tall man in a cavernous room. The man stares into the camera, and the shot holds on his face. It doesn’t cut between five different angles or zoom in and out or insert bursts of music and sound effects. It just watches his bruised, bloody, trembling face.

The short man realizes he knows this person. The tall man was his neighbor. So was the short girl standing next to him. He remembers them sitting on the floor in front of his chair and talking to him. Introducing themselves. Their names were…

The short man’s eyes widen. Does he actually remember their names?

One was…Julie.

The other, just a strange sound…Arr.

And they asked him his name. And he said…

“B.”

He smiles as the sound parts his lips. He makes it again, first as just a letter and then as the beginning of a word, testing its possibilities. “Be. Buh. Beh—”

“Shh,” someone says, and turns up the TV.

The tall man looks scared but determined. He wipes his eyes. He takes a deep breath.

“My name…is R,” he says, struggling with the words. “It’s…only name that…matters to me. Only name I have…in this life.”

He looks at the ground.

“But…had another life. Another name.”

He shakes his head.

“First name’s not important. Just a noise my parents liked. But last name…family name…”

He forces his eyes back to the camera, takes a shuddering breath, and firms his voice.

“I was an Atvist. My grandfather founded the Axiom Group.”

“At…vist,” B says, frowning, and someone shushes him again.

“What this group wants is to go back,” R continues, and his voice is solidifying, gaining speed and force. “Back to packs and pecking orders, predators and prey and the dominance of the strong. It wants a world driven by hunger and fear, where we kill our children to keep them safe.”

The video stutters between R and a menu screen, a scrawl of code, a quick scramble through a selection of clips—then a huge room filled with plush chairs. B grins—paradise! But then he notices the people strapped into those chairs and stuck full of tubes and wires. He sees a little girl with a blue eye patch bucking and kicking against her restraints. And he sees R and Julie and a few others storming into this room and releasing everyone.

“The Axiom I worked for was a dangerous thing, but it’s become something much worse.”

He speaks over a montage of security camera footage:

Axiom guards divide up a crowd, directing some into apartment towers and others into vans.

A corral full of people sway and stare with looks of utter emptiness, like they’re waiting to be told what they are.

Two men in lab coats carry a struggling woman up a ladder. They drop her into a tank of clear fluid, and the three skeletons drifting in the tank come to life. The woman disappears. The fluid turns pink.

“Axiom isn’t a government,” R says, and his face reappears on the screen, his eyes now dry and fierce. “It’s not a strong leader of a secure society. It’s this.”

He steps aside, letting the camera focus on what’s behind him: a shipping container filled with brownish-white debris. Concrete? Dirt?

Bones.

Rattling bones and buzzing skulls, like the ones in the airport where B used to live, the ones that hissed wordless sermons and meaningless rules and roared like battle horns whenever they were challenged.

“This is Axiom’s Executive branch. This is where your orders come from.”

A severed hand claws its way out of the pile and into the mouth of a leathery skull. The skull bites down and the hand writhes.

“It’s a single neuron in the lowest part of our brains, firing over and over, and it’s saying the same thing it’s been saying for billions of years. Take. Eat. Fight. Win. Fuck. Kill. Survive.”

He spits the words like the names of old friends who betrayed him.

“But there’s more to us than this, isn’t there? Haven’t we grown bigger brains? Bigger souls?”

“Brains,” B says. “Be. Buh. Beh.”

Someone elbows him but he keeps mumbling, sampling syllables on his thawing tongue.

“We have the vocabulary for bigger thoughts. Beautiful, intricate thoughts made of many words. Maybe some we’ve been thinking for a long time but have been too scared to say aloud.”

“Be…Beh…Ben.” His eyes widen. His chest swells with a deep breath. “Ben!” he shouts, and a few of his neighbors stare at him. “My name is Ben!”

Ben stands up so fast he knocks over his chair.

Gael ducks as the helicopters roar overhead. Gebre shields his face against the blast of dust and leaves. The wind obliterates the street market, scattering its food crates and clothes racks and invention demo tents, blowing away Portland’s experimental society like a puff of dandelion seeds. Gael wonders what wish they made, the children flying those helicopters and driving these trucks down Hawthorne Street.

“I knew it,” Gebre says, shaking his head. “I can’t believe it, but I knew it.”

“Sir,” says a soldier in a beige jacket, “I’m going to have to ask you to keep moving.” He jabs at them with his rifle. Gael and Gebre fall into the line of prisoners—though of course Axiom doesn’t use that term, preferring to avoid the uncomfortable association with the thing it actually is. Prisoners became “detainees” decades ago, and now they’ve graduated to “guests.”

Gael and Gebre shuffle into the community center to join the rest of the guests. Portland’s organizers gathered here at the first sign of attack, calling it an emergency strategy meeting, but there was no strategy to discuss. They’re not a militia; they’re farmers and builders and artists and scientists. Their only plan for a situation like this was for it to never happen. And so the strategy meeting transitioned into a prisoner camp without a shot fired. The invaders didn’t even speak. They just walked in with their guns and redefined the context.

“I wanted to be wrong,” Gebre mumbles as he and his husband take their place in the crowd. “I thought it could be different…”

“Stop it,” Gael says.

“…but it’s Catalonia and the Free Territories and Stalin all over again.”

“I’m serious, Geb. Don’t you dare say it.”

He shakes his head. “I won’t say it. But it rhymes with ‘blistery retreats.’”

“Why is the TV off?” shouts an officer with a gray tie hanging over his gray shirt. “You people don’t want Axiom’s exclusive offers and updates?”

He finds the remote and clicks on the big flatscreen that hangs above the help desk.

Something is different.

Instead of the montage of dissociative imagery that usually fills the screen, the TV shows what appears to be raw security footage. A tall, East African-looking woman is calling to the camera as she slowly backs away.

“…in about fourteen minutes, BABL’s gonna be gone. You’ll be able to change the channel.”

She is far away from the microphone and her voice is faint. The community center listens in total silence.

“But first we need to show you something. So, uh…stay tuned?”

She looks familiar, but before Gael can place her face, she turns and runs out of the frame. The scene cuts to a battle.

For a moment Gael thinks it’s a movie—it has all the wordless mayhem of an old-world blockbuster’s obligatory action climax—but there’s a distinct lack of drama in the spectacle. Just a long, steady shot of soldiers and trucks and a clattering swarm of human skeletons, all locked in a blur of combat so jumbled it’s not even clear who’s fighting whom.

The troops in the community center watch the footage in mute horror. Then it cuts from the battle to the roof of the stadium. It pans over to a bizarrely incongruous dome resting on the roof, then cuts to the interior of that dome, where a man is looking at the camera.

“My name…is R,” the man says, and as he continues to speak, the silence in the community center deepens. The soldiers begin to glance at each other. When the footage cuts to some kind of laboratory, the officer clicks the TV off.

“I think we’ve seen enough of whatever that was. I’m sure we’ll have the Feed back online in—”

A young man in a beige jacket walks up to the officer, looks him in the eyes, and snatches the remote out of his hand. While the officer gapes at him, the young man clicks the TV back on and looks up, ignoring his father-boss’s reddening face.

Gael can hear his own heartbeat as a parade of horrors marches across the screen. The hurricane that ejected him from New York suddenly seems like an act of providence.

When the tall man starts speaking again, Gael leans close to Gebre and whispers, “Don’t we know him from somewhere?”

Angry murmurs begin to rise from the troops as the camera zooms in on a metal box full of bones.

“What the fuck is this?” someone demands, but the officer offers no answer. His outrage is cooling into fear.

The man who called himself “R” walks away from the box. The camera follows him, revealing three more people: the brown woman from earlier in the feed, a bald, bearded giant, and a short, hard-looking girl with wild blond hair—Gael’s eyes go wide.

“Lynda’s Diner!” Gebre whispers to him. “The utopians!”

Gael remembers. He remembers the blond one diving into their debate with savage passion, her blue eyes sparking like an overloaded electrical socket about to catch fire. The man sitting next to her didn’t say a word the whole time. But now…

“We have the vocabulary for bigger thoughts. Beautiful, intricate thoughts made of many words. Maybe some we’ve been thinking for a long time but have been too scared to say aloud.”

His eyes are brown, but they flash with that same furious spark. And…are they brown? It’s probably just the bad video, but Gael could almost swear their color is fluctuating.

“We don’t need their world anymore. We have the materials to build a better one. All we need is the courage to start working.”

The camera pans a little farther, and Gael sees one more person hiding against the wall.

He stifles a joyful scream.

“Oh my God!” He manages to bring it down to a yelp, digging his fingers into Gebre’s shoulder. “Do you—”

“I see him,” Gebre says with a radiant grin.

The boy’s strange yellow eyes look into the camera as it pans past him. Gael wouldn’t be surprised if the boy can see him too.

“Kick their asses, Rover!” Gael blurts.

Gebre pumps his fist. “Woo!”

No one shoots them for their outburst. More and more soldiers are letting their guns wander off their targets. Without any signal or instruction, the crowd in the community center begins to tighten around the men in gray ties, the line between captor and captive rapidly blurring.

“I’m sure their troops are on their way right now,” R says with a quick glance toward the door, “so before they shut me up, I have one more thing to say…”

I

JULIE IS STARING AT ME wide-eyed like she’s witnessing a miracle, and maybe she is. I have said more in these three minutes than in my entire second life. No careful reserve, no self-conscious minimalism—I am cracked open. The words pour out of me without review or revision, rushing up from some deep, warm spring in my center.

“…all we need is the courage to start working,” I finish, and Julie’s mouth curves up into a silent laugh, half amusement—which I fully deserve for my shameless grandiloquence—and half genuine amazement.

She mouths Holy shit, and I can’t resist a grin.

Then I remember where I am and what I’m doing, and the fear sobers me up.

“I’m sure Axiom’s troops are on their way right now,” I tell the camera, the country, the world—no, keep it simple. Just a camera. Just Julie smiling behind the viewfinder, snapping Polaroids of me in an abandoned house. Just her and me.

“…so before they shut me up, I have one more thing to say. A word for the Dead.”

I take a deep breath.

“You don’t have to be what you are. Even the Dead can heal. I’m…I’m Living proof.”

Julie rolls her eyes, still smiling.

“And so is he.”

I point to M. He waves.

“And so is he.”

I point to Nora’s little brother and he presses his back against the wall as if uncomfortable with the attention.

“And so are the hundreds of former Dead who have been living in this stadium. Because nothing is absolute. ‘The way things are’ changes when we do.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I see one of the other cameras nodding vigorously. Remote applause from our friend in the basement? Or a signal to wrap it up? It occurs to me that Tomsen probably isn’t one to keep an eye on the clock. She might stay at the controls to the very end if I’m still talking when the bomb goes off. I could have done without this extra pressure for my first public speaking gig…

“Look at this,” I tell the camera, pulling my pant leg up, and the camera pans down to it. “This was my first infection.” The camera rises as I pull aside my shirt collar. “And this was my second.”

I can’t see the wound, but I’ve seen plenty others like it. I’m looking at one right now, that dark pit on Addis’s shoulder, raw flesh dried up but never healed. It’s a mirror image of mine.

“The first bite took my first life. This one tried to take the life I’m living now. I didn’t let it.”

I glance at Julie. She has stopped laughing.

“Some people think the plague came from outside, like a foreign invader. They think it can be stopped with walls and guns and quarantines.” My voice has begun to tremble again. “But I think it comes from inside, and everyone’s infected. I think we’re born with it and we die with it and we’re never truly cured.”

I turn away from the camera and look at Julie, starting to believe my fantasy that it’s just me and her. “But that doesn’t mean it has to kill us!” I feel a pang in my chest, like the pluck of a piano wire strung between my ribs. A euphoric laugh bubbles out of me and tears dampen my eyes. “We don’t have to let it win.” I feel the world growing softer and quieter as warmth spreads through me. The cavernous dome shrinks to an intimate place, a secret. “We can fight it and hold it off,” I whisper to Julie, and there are tears in her eyes too. “Maybe just long enough to live a good life.”

I hear her voice as if from far away, and something in it troubles me. Something in her face isn’t right; there are more tears than there should be. The warmth in my chest is hot now, burning, and I look down and see that my gray shirt has turned the same color as my tie.

I look up again. Julie’s eyes are an open sky, boundless, fathomless, terrifying, beautiful.

I fall asleep.

WE

THE STADIUM had other gathering places, like the community center and the square, but the Orchard was the only place that didn’t have a purpose. It hosted no meetings, it stored no supplies, it served no function except to nudge people together and invite them to feel good.

Within six days of the stadium’s new management, the Orchard was rebranded as an emergency shelter. Nearly a third of the stadium’s buildings are now emergency shelters, though there is nothing particularly safe about them. Just a sign on the door indicating this is where you should wait while forces bigger than you determine an outcome.

Naturally, the alcohol is gone. The bar is buried under supply crates, though a few visible graffiti carvings hint at a messy human history. The TVs, however, were allowed to stay, because from their perches in the corners they shower the shelter’s patrons with Axiom’s stream of consciousness.

Or they did until five minutes ago. Now a different show is on.

Team Manager Abbot bursts into the crowded room of frightened people. He sees the TVs and the rapt faces watching them: live footage of the battle outside, if one can even call that clusterfuck a battle.

“Turn that off!” Abbot shouts. When no one jumps to obey, he draws his revolver and shoots out the screens. A dramatic, wild-west gesture, but that’s the point. The crowd huddles as glass rains down on them.

Abram watches through the doorway from the balcony outside as Abbot shouts orders at the refugees. And then a flash diverts his attention. He instinctively looks up, but it’s not lightning—the roof is closed; they’re locked in a skyless box. He turns to the railing, scanning the patchwork cityscape below, and he sees it: a blue-white brilliance pulsing out from the entrance lobby.

Arc cutters.

He feels himself sinking as the pieces click together. The Goldman rebels will open the gates. They’re too few to fight Axiom directly, but if they can help God’s Jury reach its verdict, there won’t be much left to fight.

It’s a strategy Axiom would admire. Didn’t they use it themselves not so long ago? Circling above the global fray until America exhausted itself, then swooping in to pick the bones clean? The new America will need a new bird to represent the new patriotism. A vulture will do nicely.

“Roberts!” Abbot shouts at Abram’s back. “Snap to it, son!”

“They’re cutting the gates,” Abram says quietly.

“Let the wall crew handle the siege. We’ve got other orders.”

Abram turns around. “Are we going to shoot all the TVs in the stadium?”

Abbot’s eyes narrow. “Executive is prioritizing the pirate broadcast. We can’t get into the basement, but we have pitchmen on the roof waiting to do damage control once we clear the terrorists.”

Abram can’t hide the incredulity in his voice. “Sir…Goldman’s cutting the gate. If the Boneys get inside, they’ll gut this place in an hour.”

“It’s just one branch,” Abbot says. “We have dozens.” There’s a stiffness in his voice that Abram hasn’t heard before, a reduction in personality, like he’s fighting his own thoughts—Path Narrowing. “But if we don’t stop this broadcast, we might not have any.”

Abbot’s walkie crackles, receiving that very broadcast on Fed FM.

“My name…is R.”

Gentle and hesitant. Weak and uncertain. If that voice ever convinces anyone of anything, Abram will give up on understanding the world. So why does Abbot look so worried?

“I was an Atvist. My grandfather founded the Axiom Group.”

The voice is a little firmer now.

“His grandfather?” Abram says. “What’s he talking about?”

Abbot’s face is pale.

“Sir?”

“Move,” Abbot growls, and runs toward the tunnel into the walls.

“This is Axiom’s Executive branch,” R says as they race up the stairwell. “This is where your orders come from.”

What could “this” possibly refer to? Did he take the executives hostage? Abram glances through the doorways of each landing, searching for the glow of a screen, but the wall is a dark, dead place.

Abbot radios for backup. Four men join them on the fourth floor—or is it the fifth? Abram feels disoriented. He feels places and people overlapping like the pages of different books, wet and translucent and blending together.

“Their troops are probably on their way here right now,” R says, and the soldiers chuckle darkly, but Abram’s face is blank. A memory flickers in his head. Men in beige jackets pointing guns at his daughter outside the flaming wreckage of his old truck. Are these the very same men? Of course not. Those men are dead, like Jim Roberts, the man whose name Abram wears like an animal’s hide.

“You don’t have to be what you are,” R says. “Even the Dead can heal.”

Abram feels the balloon in his brain stretching again. But before it can burst and flood him with toxic bile, he hears that other voice, far closer and clearer than R’s staticky monologue.

You thought you had to do it, Abram. So did Kenrei.

He flinches at the sound of her name. He thought he’d never hear it again.

You did it because you loved her, and that’s how it’s written on her final page. So let her go. Let the rules change.

He feels the balloon shrink a little, as if someone has sucked out some poison.

Who are you? Abram demands, and it’s strange to hear a tremor in the voice of his own thoughts.

Do you really not know?

He grits his teeth. He tries to pull himself together as the other men push through a door and daylight floods the stairwell. He steps out onto the stadium roof and into a wind so fierce he wonders if it’s another hurricane. But the sky is blue. The wind is hot and dry. He’s never seen weather like this.

He has seen the dome, but only from the ground, and even from that distance it seemed a tacky pastiche. Up close it’s fully ludicrous, a giant plastic playhouse dumped crookedly on a roof that can barely support it. But he’s surprised that he’s surprised. Especially when he sees the three pitchmen waiting around the back, grinning in their colorful costumes. Did he ever really believe he was working for men of sanity?

The pitchmen don’t say a word. They gesture to the door. Even Abbot shrinks away from them as he slips inside.

The dome is unlit, but shafts of light pour through the little arch windows and leak through cracks in the fiberglass walls. Abram feels dizzy in the surreal structure. Walking in a space that was designed as a ceiling creates a sense of floating. It doesn’t help that the whole thing heaves with each gust of wind. He reaches out to steady himself on the freight container that inexplicably dominates the room, but when his hand touches the metal he feels something crawling up his arm. A vibration, or maybe an electric current, humming through his shoulder and into his neck. It creeps around his skull and starts to cohere into voices and he jerks his hand away.

“Roberts,” Abbot hisses, elbowing him in the ribs. “Focus.” He jabs two fingers at his eyes and then forward.

There they are.

The dome is thick with shadows, but Abram can see his former travel partners in the dusty shafts of daylight. He starts to catalogue them by features—the black girl, the big guy, the blond bitch, the lanky fucker—but his mind surprises him with names.

Nora. Marcus. Julie. R.

They look like they’ve been through Hell. Abram saw some of it on the screens. He saw Marcus take a knife in the ribs. He saw Julie take it in the leg while trying to protect Marcus. And now they’re all here, bloody and gaunt, knowing full well that Axiom is coming for them and apparently not caring.

It is hard to call this weakness.

“Some people think the plague came from outside, like a foreign invader,” R is saying to the camera. “They think it can be stopped with walls and guns and quarantines…”

“Drop your weapons!” Abbot shouts, rushing out from behind the container with the four soldiers at his back. Marcus and Nora start to raise their pistols but Abbot fires an inch over Nora’s head, sending a tuft of hair flying. “Don’t do it, dumb-fucks! Drop ’em!”

Nora and Marcus drop their weapons. Abbot nods to his men and they move forward to secure the prisoners.

But R…

R is still talking, like a man in a dream, unaware of anything around him. Like a little boy smiling at a girl on a playground, oblivious to the dark clouds on the horizon.

“I think we’re born with it and we die with it, and no one is ever cured. But that doesn’t mean it has to kill us!”

Abbot sighs. “You’re never gonna shut up, are you?”

He fires.

R lurches forward but doesn’t fall. He doesn’t even turn around to see who shot him. He laughs, and it’s a joyful sound, like he’s discovered something too beautiful to believe.

“We don’t have to let it win.” He turns away from the camera and takes an unsteady step toward Julie, whose blood-speckled face is frozen in shock. “We can fight it and hold it off.”

Julie is shaking her head, eyes filling with tears as R touches her cheek.

“Maybe just long enough to live a good life.”

His knees buckle. His eyes roll up. He collapses in a puddle of bright red blood.

Julie releases a scream that sounds like “no.” It rises until her voice breaks. She drops to her knees and grabs R by the shoulders.

Abram is staring at the blood. There’s blood everywhere. There always is, wherever he goes. It oozes from Julie’s leg and from Marcus’s side and from R’s chest. It gushes from his wife’s forehead, and from his brother’s and his father’s and his mother’s, however and wherever they died.

And it seeps from three claw marks on his daughter’s cheek as she stands in the doorway of the dome, staring at him with two horrified eyes, one brown, the other yellow, uncovered and blazing with its strange and terrible fire.

The other two children rush in behind her and slam the door like they’re being pursued, but Abram doesn’t see whatever’s pursuing them. He sees only his daughter’s eyes as they move from the dying man on the floor to the gun in Abram’s hand.

“Daddy?” she says, incredulous and dismayed, and he finishes her accusation in his mind. Is this what you meant by waiting for the right moment? Stalling, bargaining, compromising, conceding, standing back and keeping silent while brave fools take the bullets?

Abbot is signaling to the pitchmen, giving them the all-clear so they can retake the stage and address the world and undo whatever damage this fool might have done with his words. But as that grinning trio steps into the dome, Julie leaps to her feet, fists clenched at her sides, and stares into the camera with savage intensity.

“Come here,” she growls. “All of you.”

Abbot raises his gun, then hesitates, cocks his head, turns to Abram. “You do this one, Roberts.”

“I know you’re out there,” Julie says to the camera, trembling with rage. “I’ve seen you filling up the towns, watching your TVs like you’re waiting for something…”

“Roberts,” Abbot says. “You put a bullet in her head, and you’re off probation. You get a job, a home, a comfortable life for you and your daughter.”

Abram’s rifle becomes buoyant in his hands. It begins to rise.

“Well it’s happening now,” Julie tells the Dead. “The world is ready for you. We want you back.” Tears are streaming from her eyes. “Help us!”

“Roberts!” Abbot snarls. “Shoot that bitch, now!”

Abram points his rifle at Julie, but he’s not looking at her. His daughter’s eyes hold him like a vise.

“Dad,” she says, stepping toward him. She shakes her head with such gravity that he barely recognizes the little girl he raised. The toddler who begged for late-night stories to clear away her nightmares. The baby whose sun yellow eye seemed to burn right through him until he could no longer stand it. “No more,” she says, and he’s amazed at the authority in her tiny voice, not just a plea but a command. “No more.”

Abram looks away.

“The gate’s wide open for you,” Julie tells the Dead. “Come home!”

Abram fires.

Team Manager Abbot looks perplexed. He wears the expression of a man searching for answers. We can feel him reaching into our shelves, digging for older stories from better times, some sort of context for how he came to this moment. His eyes are wide with confusion, and one of them is a tunnel through his head. For an instant, sunlight shines through it. Then it fills with blood.

Abram is aware of a hulking form rushing toward him from the shadows, but he doesn’t turn. He kills the soldier guarding Nora. He kills the soldier guarding Marcus. He takes a few bullets from the remaining two soldiers, but he kills them too. Only then does he address the man in the black tie, turning just in time to feel his ribs shatter as the man crashes into him.

He hits the ground. Fists as unyielding as granite pummel his body, snapping bones, spattering blood. He raises his arms to shield his face, and his eyes lock with his assailant’s. What he sees makes his arms sag.

A vivid blue contact lens has slipped to the side of the man’s eye, and what’s underneath is not a gray iris but no iris at all. It’s a hole, like the hollow gaze of ancient statues, leading back into the cave of his skull.

Crouched over Abram like a rabid animal, the thing in the black tie bares its teeth and takes a greedy bite of his neck.

Numbness creeps from the wound, and understanding comes with it. This is what he spent his life working for. This and the heap of bones in that box, now spilling out onto the floor and rattling toward his face. A beast that can’t be bargained with, appeased, or avoided. A beast that has to be fought.

He searches for his daughter in the mess of running feet and dying bodies that litter the floor. He sees her; she’s screaming, crying, but she looks tall and powerful from down here. So does Julie as she raises Abbot’s revolver, and Abram thinks, Do it. I let them kill your lover. This is the paycheck I’ve earned.

But Julie doesn’t point it at him. She doesn’t take her deserved revenge or deliver her verdict on his life. She points it at the creature that’s eating him and blows its head into dusty fragments.

“We apologize for this disruption,” Blue Tie is telling the camera. “If you found any of the preceding content confusing or upsetting, please disregard those feelings at this time.”

“We invite you to feel calm,” Yellow Tie says with a comforting smile. “Normal programming will resume in a—”

Julie shoots her through the mouth. Yellow Tie’s bright grin becomes a dark hole. The contents of her skull burst out the back of it, brittle and bloodless like freeze-dried meat.

Blue Tie’s face bends into a frown, a man mildly inconvenienced. “Your behavior may be negatively affecting—”

Marcus rips his head off. He cracks it open on his knee and raises it to the camera, displaying the crystallized brain inside. Blue Tie’s face is peeling around the edges, just barely clinging to the skull, but still grinning. Marcus gives the camera a shrug as if to say Your call, folks, and tosses the head aside.

And it’s done. For a moment at least, they’re safe.

The wind finds its way through the arch windows and stirs the strange debris on the floor, the fragments of the pitchmen and the buzzing bones of their bosses. Julie’s eyes are wide and blank as she watches Nora tear open R’s shirt and begin to examine his wound. And then Julie turns her gaze to Abram. It’s a cursory glance, a quick assessment of his bites and bullet holes and the blood pouring from them, but it baffles him. In the midst of all this pain and terror, while her lover bleeds out in front of her, she spares a moment for the person who helped make all this happen, a person who’s a stranger at best, an enemy at worst.

Why?

“Sprout,” she says, emerging from her shock just enough to soften her voice. “Your dad’s going away.”

Sprout is kneeling next to him. She doesn’t recoil as his blood reaches her knees and soaks into her jeans. “I know.”

“If he ever really comes back…it’ll only be for a minute. He’s hurt too bad.”

“I know.”

Julie glances at R again. The dullness in her eyes is starting to melt. She holds the gun out to Sprout.

“He’s your father. I can’t tell you what’s right.”

Sprout nods, dislodging fresh tears. She takes the gun.

“Abram,” Julie mumbles, struggling to meet his eyes. “Thank you.”

And then she’s gone. But her words ring in Abram’s head like dissonant bells. Thank you? After all this—thank you? His mind spirals back to the first day he met these people, their bizarre gratitude as they fled the smoking ruins of the home he helped destroy. No hate, no spite, just an acknowledgement of a tiny kindness.

What secret do these people know? Is it too late for him to learn it?

“Dad?”

His vision is dimming. The room is filling with black clouds.

“Do it,” he croaks.

Sprout shakes her head.

“You have to. I’ll—” He cuts off in a fit of coughing, spattering her face with blood. “I’ll hurt you.”

“But you won’t, Dad.” There’s an odd steel beneath her sniffling. A confidence that Abram doesn’t understand, the sound of hidden knowledge. “We’re going to change it.”

Abram lets out a slow, ragged sigh. He doesn’t know or care what she means. He only cares that she’s with him, and that she will get through this. Someone will take the gun from her and do what has to be done, and eventually her tears will subside. She will move on. She will weather this loss like she has so many others, and despite all he’s done to them, these strange, good people will keep her safe. Or as safe as a kid can be while climbing trees and ladders.

He feels layers of darkness splitting open as he sinks deeper. He tries to open his mouth to say one last thing, to tell his daughter something he’s always felt but never known how to say, but his lips won’t move, his breath won’t come, he can’t—

Rest, Abram, says that calm, familiar voice. This isn’t the end.

But I have to tell her.

Rest with us, says his brother, his father, his mother, and all of us. We’ll help you find the words.

-

ADDIS STANDS against the wall and watches. He sees the man-shaped thing try to eat Sprout’s father and he sees Julie shoot it. He sees its head vanish in a dry explosion, bits and pieces but no blood. And he sees the bite in Abram’s neck, the black worms wriggling toward his brain while his daughter waits with the gun. “We’re going to change it,” she tells him as he fades, and then she glances back at Addis.

Addis swallows. His hands clench. Are we? Can we?

A concussive thump jolts the floor. Not a grenade or a rocket or any of the other noises from the war outside. A resonant boom from deep underground.

Below the plastic dome, below the stadium’s sagging roof, Huntress Tomsen dances in the street in the red glare of the fireball. She leaps and laughs as Julie’s metal house collapses. She whoops and waves her fists as it sinks into the earth, burying the smoldering remains of BABL. She dances like a demon, but every nerve is singing hymns. She can feel the fog of noise evaporating. She doesn’t need her radio to know the air is clear, but she pulls it out anyway, spins the dial away from Fed FM, and cranks the volume.

Soft static. Background radiation from the birth of the universe, and nothing more. And then a click. A breath. A voice.

Hello?

“Hi!” she screams into the radio, but that’s all she can manage before it falls from her shaky hands. She’s too overwhelmed to converse right now, too jittery. It’s enough to know that she can. That everyone can.

Her legs give out. She drops to the ashy pavement. “We did it, Dad,” she whispers, making no effort to wipe the tears from her eyes or the snot from her nose. “We can finally go home.”

Addis reads all this in our fluttering pages. It joins the swirl of other moments circling his head. He has been tallying them for a long time, counting up good and bad, weighing the balance on some imaginary scale of justice, but he is suddenly ashamed of this petty bean-counting. His grand calculations shrink to a human scale as they play out on the stage in front of him. He sees people trying. He sees compassion and love and selfless sacrifice. He sees blood willingly shed and tears that are more than grief and people continuing to fight long after their strength is gone.

He sees goodness. He sees a lot of it.

He sees enough.

Addis closes his eyes. He drifts into the dim expanse of the Library, surrounded by our whispering books.

Will you do it now? he asks us.

We don’t answer.

You’ve never been so full, and we’ve never been so thirsty. Will you pour yourself out? Will you do it?

We don’t answer.

He opens his eyes. Nora is examining the hole in R’s chest. Julie and Joan and Alex are kneeling by his side, all quietly pleading.

I said will you do it? Addis shouts into our vastness, sounding much older than seven or even fourteen. Answer me!

His conviction seizes our vacillating voices. He presses them into a decision.

We won’t do it, we tell him. You will.

And then he hears the hum.

For a moment he thinks it could be the wind. Just innocent air whistling through the windows, playing the dome like an ocarina. R has everyone’s attention except Sprout’s, who remains by her father’s side. The grownups give no sign that they hear anything, but as the noise rises from a hum to a howl, Sprout looks up. She turns her head and catches Addis’s gaze. The fear in her wet eyes confirms it—this is not the wind.

Addis approaches the door. No one notices, not even Joan and Alex, and this is good. They might want him to stop, and he can’t stop. He feels something filling him, inflating him, like he’s inhaling continuously with no need to breathe out, an exhilarating absence of limit.

He opens the door and steps out into the hazy sun, the hot wind, the hammering din of war.

They’re here. One hand, then another, sharp fingers digging into the edge of the roof and dragging skulls and spines behind them. Their hum fills Addis’s mind, louder than the gunfire. He lacks the vocabulary to describe what he’s hearing, but we have all the words ever spoken, and we know this sound even better than he does. We have been enduring it for billions of years as it churns up from the Library’s sub-basement: the dissonant drone of a tone-deaf choir, the raspy chant of a thousand geriatric monks. It’s a sour chord built on an atonal root and it never pauses to retune, it just drones and drones, forever faithful to a pitch established by accident in some dark jungle swamp long before the world had heard music.

Join, it tells him as the skeletons crawl up the roof. Follow. Eat.

No, Addis says.

The hum twists into even harsher discord, tones and overtones grinding against each other. There is nothing else. Only this.

Addis’s eyes blaze like molten sulfur. How well he knows these creatures. Whether or not any of this crowd ever crossed his path in the airport, he knows them, because they are defined by their sameness. They are the toxic byproduct of unity. Cult, regime, unquestioned custom, party line, canon, convention, taboo. For the past seven years, since the day they killed him, they have been dragging him through the stations of their parodic civilization, assigning him parents and shoving him into homes, drilling him on loathsome skills and meaningless mashups of tradition, and he has followed them because he had no one else.

Now he does.

Now he has all of us, and he sees these creatures clearly. They are empty. They are hollow. The wind whistles through them.

As they creep toward the dome like insects toward meat, eager to eat him and everyone he loves, Addis does something that doesn’t make sense. Instead of running away like all prey should, he steps forward. He advances on the predators.

They stop.

Addis stands in a clear circle surrounded by the swarm. He is waist-high to most of the skeletons, and those behind the first row can’t even see him, but skeletons don’t have eyes. They don’t see light bouncing off matter, the detail and nuance of reality. They perceive only broad concepts, vague shapes in the extrasensory fog that surrounds their shriveled brains. They see with notions and assumptions, predictions and preconceptions, so what they see now moving toward them is not a harmless little boy. Like Dobermans cowed by a Dachshund, what they see is the boldness of his challenge.

The skeletons step back.

You can’t, they say, a statement without a predicate, a meaningless noise of negation.

We’re bored of your game, Addis replies. Play it by yourself.

He feels his hands on the living ladder, the rungs of generations warm in his grip, and he climbs.

There is no up or down, they tell him in their detuned chorus, only here.

He climbs toward that bright ceiling, as distant as the sun, and he feels its warmth on his cold skin. He feels its gravity pulling him upward, easing his ascent, and he silently thanks us. The books around him are more beautiful with every shelf, thick tomes bound in oil paintings with pages of green leaves and yellow flowers and living human skin, books of glass and books of water with words in floating coils, spherical books with nested pages that he doesn’t know how to turn—experiences beyond his understanding. But he doesn’t need to turn every page to share in the wealth we’ve gathered. The words flutter out to meet him and he breathes them in, expanding ever larger, filling himself with the Higher in this endless inhalation.

There is nothing above us, the skeletons hiss from a thousand miles below. Never has been, never will be.

Addis inhales the breaths of every life that’s ever lived.

Addis exhales an answer.

I

I AM FLOATING DOWN A RIVER.

I am lying on my back, gazing at the stars. I take quick breaths, keeping my lungs filled; my arms and legs trail limply behind me. It feels good to fill my lungs. I fill them tight and feel a shuddering pleasure, like stretching my limbs after years in a cramped cell. The air is warm and sweet and it saturates my blood. I am buoyant. I can float forever.

I wonder where my friends are. Will they be waiting for me in the parking lot with their tubes already packed in the car, impatient with my leisurely pace? I must have lost my tube. It must have popped and sank. I must have been on this river all day, back-floating effortlessly as the sun went down and the sky turned pink and then purple and then this inky blue spattered with stars.

How far might I have drifted in all those hours? Far past my friends, certainly. Well on my way to wherever this river ends.

But now the river is a road.

I hover three feet off the pavement, gliding like a parade float through downtown Missoula. The town is empty. The buildings are charred. I hear the echoing taunts of children as I drift past the remains of my school—Rear End! Reject! and of course, Retard!—all the clever names they invented to replace my mother’s puzzling choice, and then silence.

I drift past my church and I hear my pastor’s operatic shouting, the congregation’s simian hooting, then silence. Past my house. My father’s snarled scriptures. My mother’s secret sobs. Then silence.

I drift through the doors of a prison.

Through the training yard, where I learned how to fight. Past my old cell, where I learned how to kill. Past the bones of forgotten prisoners, left to die and come back and die again.

“Wow, R,” Julie says. “Hard to imagine you in a place like this. You don’t exactly have that ‘hardened convict’ vibe.”

“Although if I were a judge,” Perry says, “I’d convict you of first-degree cheese for that speech you made out there.”

They walk on either side of me as I float, like pallbearers. I don’t like that comparison, so I send my mind elsewhere in search of a better scene.

I am dreaming.

But if every moment is shared on the shelves of the Library, how real might a dream be? If the thoughts that compose us exist outside us, beyond the sealed vault of our skulls, who’s to say it’s not really Julie—or some loose fragment of her—walking next to me? Who’s to say it’s not really Perry—though he’s long dead—strolling on my left?

The prison’s stained ceiling is gone, replaced by a blue sky. We are on the roof of the stadium, and Julie and Perry sit on a red blanket while I float a foot above it. I worry that the wind will blow me away, but Julie keeps a hand on my foot, anchoring me.

I feel a wet warmth in my chest. I hear a steady dripping beneath my back. Memory creeps in like an unwelcome guest.

“Did I say it?” I ask, staring at the sky.

“You said enough,” Julie says.

“Did they listen?”

“We’ll find out,” Perry says.

“Am I dying?”

They both look at each other.

“No,” Julie says, and I notice moisture in her eyes. “You’re not dying.”

“Everyone’s dying,” Perry says. “But especially you.”

“Shut up, Perry,” Julie says.

The sky looks different. Deeper, somehow, like a bottomless lake. “Will I come back?” My voice sounds smaller with every question. “Will I start over again?”

“Maybe you would have”—Perry slaps my thigh—“but those rules are about to change. I think we’re just about done with the whole zombie thing.”

“Can you wait?” I plead. “Just until I come back?”

He tilts his head, disappointed. “Come on, corpse, do you really want to repeat yourself? You’ve learned all you can in this halfway house. Either die or start living.”

“No moving back,” Julie says with a sad smile. “Move forward.”

I’m in a forest. The sky is hidden behind a canopy of trees, but the sun glows around the leaves, leaking through in sparkling flashes. My friends stand around me in a circle, their hair and clothes whipping in the wind. Has it already happened? Will I be lowered into the earth now? Will I watch their faces recede from me in that rectangle of daylight, smaller and smaller until the first shovelful covers my face?

Lawrence Rosso smiles down at me. He is dressed like a priest, but the book in his hands is no particular scripture. It flickers through sizes and shapes, from gilded leather tomes to yellowed pulp paperbacks.

“Is it good to die?” I ask him desperately. “Is there a better place?”

His smile turns bittersweet. “There are other places,” he says. “Other forms, other ways. They’re too big for the narrow valve of your brain, and when you experience them you’ll gasp and weep.” He shakes his head ruefully. “But there’s nothing like living. There’s nothing like being in the world. A ripe pear. A soft hand. The sun behind leaves.” He closes his eyes and sighs. “This is your home, R, for as long as you’re here. Never be eager to leave.”

I clench my teeth. I ball my fists. I squeeze my dreaming eyes shut to gather my will, and in that darkness within darkness, I overhear a conversation.

Can you see it?

He’s hurt bad.

A boy and a girl, speaking in simple pulses of thought.

How bad? Alex asks Joan.

Just a little hole, Joan says. But it’s bleeding a lot.

I don’t want him to die, Alex says.

A pause.

Maybe we can fix it, Joan says.

Like how we fixed the window?

Sure. It’s such a little hole, and if it’s not there he won’t die. It’s silly, isn’t it?

It’s stupid, Alex says. I hate it.

So maybe we can make the hole forget it’s there. Maybe we can decide it’s not. And then he won’t have to die.

I feel a stirring in my faraway body. I hear a rustling of pages and a scratching of pens, old words crossed out, new ones written.

You’re not going to die, my son tells me.

You’re not going to die, my daughter tells me.

I feel the sensation of pulling out earplugs. The world rushes in, real voices now with breath and spittle.

“What was that?” Nora says. “Did he just say something?”

I hear the swish of their clothing. The creak of their knees. I hear Julie’s breath as she leans close to me, distinctly hers even before she shapes it into words. “R?” Her voice is raw and cracked. “Can you hear me?”

I feel two fingers on my throat.

“I don’t get it,” Nora mumbles. “Pulse is still strong. Why is the bleeding…?”

I open my eyes. I expect to see their faces hovering over me, but instead I see the backs of their heads. I see myself, sprawled on the floor in a red puddle. A tall, pale man in a ragged shirt and tie, his sad face in need of a shave.

Look at him. Look at that strange assemblage. How did nature ever arrive at this shape? When did that mass of organs decide to sprout those bony stalks, to stand up and walk, to reach out and grasp? Eyes, ears, nose, mouth. Does the whole wide river of the world pour into me through those seven little holes in my head?

I turn away from my heap of flesh and begin to drift upward. The grotesque plastic dome is gone, replaced by a blue sky of incredible depth and volume, and although my eyes are already open…I open them again.

The sky splits and sweeps aside like a second set of lids, and behind it is another place.

I’m in the Library.

The walls of books curve around me in a column and I’m floating in its center, rising toward that unfathomably distant light. And I am dissolving. Tiny pieces of me fly away from my body and into the shelves around me. Some go up toward the glow, others fall straight down. Empty spaces appear in my hands, my arms; I’ll be gone before I reach the next floor.

We are weary of death.

I hear Perry’s voice in the chorus. Rosso’s too, but it’s not just people who’ve died. Julie is in there. Nora and Marcus, Sprout and Addis and my kids—everyone. Perhaps even my mother and father, their voices faint, their contributions small but still counted. Everything is counted, gathered, and pooled, and the best of it glows above me.

We have outgrown death’s game. Its rigid rules and miserly prizes. We want more.

A tremor shakes the shelves. Books fall out but not down; they hover in place, their pages rustling.

We are vast. We are the mind of the universe, each life a neuron, each love a synapse. But we have been thinking a long time. It is time for us to speak.

Above me, that immense glow pulses like a heart. The shelves shudder from top to bottom. The moldy volumes below stay in place but the ones above leap free, filling the distant brightness like morning fog.

And I see a boy in that brightness.

He is drawing it into himself like he’s filling his lungs for a shout, and though I can’t imagine how he’ll articulate that monumental breath, I want to shout it with him.

We are ready for a new world, says the chorus of everyone, and I hear a new voice among them:

Mine.

And why should this be a shock? Why should tears spring from my eyes at the sound of my voice harmonizing with humanity?

You deserve to be here, my own voice tells me, and for the first time I can remember, there’s love in it.

The Library shakes. The boy shouts. The chorus shouts with him, and I join it.

I open my eyes.

I know these ones are flesh because the lids are heavy; I heave them up like rusty garage doors. I see a brief glimpse of faces looking down at me, then I lurch upright and cough a lungful of blood onto the floor. I stagger to my feet. My vision swirls in and out of focus and black spots swarm around me. There’s a pain in my chest unlike any I’ve ever felt and my shirt is soaked with blood, but I’m no longer dripping, and after a long fit of sloppy coughs, I’m able to put air in my lungs. It feels exquisite. It’s mint tea and honey flooding through my chest. I take a few breaths and savor them, unaware of anything else.

Then I feel a hand on my arm. “R?” Julie whispers.

On my left and right, my kids are beaming. I see joy and a little pride in their grins, like they’ve pulled off a magic trick they’ve been practicing for years. But Julie hasn’t been privy to the backstage dealings in my head. Her wide, wet eyes are full of fear and questions. “Are you…?”

I cup her face in my hands and kiss her. “I’ll live,” I murmur. Then I smile awkwardly as I wipe my blood off her lips.

The laugh that bubbles out of her is a giddy overflow, every emotion at once.

My vision dims again and I stagger. My knees buckle and Julie catches my arm.

“Lie down,” Nora orders. “I don’t know what the hell’s going on here, but you’ve lost too much blood to be conscious, much less walking.”

She says it with all the authority of a hardened combat nurse, but I can’t comply. The air in this plastic prison is thick and sticky, reeking of blood and musty perversions of death. I see the pitchmen’s petrified remains scattered across the floor. I see Abram Kelvin lying in a pool of darkening blood, his daughter crying softly by his side. What happened while I was gone?

I can’t ask now. I can’t breathe in here. I need air drawn fresh from the well of the sky, scented with rain and sun.

I stumble toward the door.

“R, wait,” Julie says, still gripping my arm. “We heard Boneys outside, they’re—”

“They’re done,” I say, not quite knowing what I mean. “Addis answered them.”

Nora’s eyes snap wide at her brother’s name. “Oh shit—Addis!” She whirls left and right, searching the shadows where her brother had been waiting, small and silent, through all the chaos. “Addis!”

“He’s out here,” I tell her as I reach for the door. “He’s getting some air.”

I open the latch. The door flies open. Nora shouts, Julie tries to pull me back, but then they see what I see and they go quiet.

Nora’s little brother is standing just outside the door, surrounded by a dozen skeletons. But the skeletons are still. They are slumped over and limp, like classroom props hanging from their stands. No buzz, no hum. Their fingers twitch faintly and I hear their teeth grinding, but these creatures are broken. Overloaded and burnt out. As if something filled them beyond their capacity and burst their brittle brains.

Addis turns to face us. He looks exhausted, but he smiles.

“Addis?” Nora whispers, confused and afraid.

“Hi, Norwhale,” he says, and his smile turns shy.

The world dims again. Dark spots and muffled voices. I am aware of Nora lifting her brother off the ground in a crushing embrace, crying into his dusty hair, but everything is soft. I’m aware of Julie pulling on my arm, trying to stop me as I step out into the circle of dry bones, but I turn around and look into her eyes and tell her, “It’ll be okay,” with a confidence I can’t explain, and after a moment of wide-eyed uncertainty, she nods. We shove our way through the Boneys and walk to the edge of the roof.

“Tell me that again,” she says as we take in the scene below. “Tell me it’ll be okay.”

I must have been unconscious longer than I thought. The battle has escalated. Someone has cut through the stadium’s front gate—I see a rounded slab of steel lying flat on the pavement—and Axiom’s remaining troops have left their positions in the wall to fill the gap as the skeletons converge like a filthy river. Whatever force halted the group on the roof doesn’t seem to have reached the swarm on the ground; they press in on the Living with unwavering conviction, and Goldman’s rebels continue to snipe at Axiom even as the swarm surrounds them both.

I feel my confidence bleeding out. I feel dizzy and I turn away. Over my shoulder, I see M hauling Abram’s inert form out of the dome while Nora keeps a gun trained on the paralyzed Boneys. My friends are moving toward the ladder, trying to get the kids to safety, but where on Earth is that? Not at the bottom of that ladder. Citi Stadium is about to become the world’s largest tomb.

I feel surprise, but I don’t know why. What was I expecting to see when I looked down from this roof? A magic wave of peace flooding the land? The instant, compulsory end to all wars? There can be no such sweeping legislation. We all decide the shape of the world, the sum of all minds together. Change has to be chosen.

Where is it? I ask that glorious chorus. Where’s our new world?

My knees buckle and I start to sway. Julie grabs my shirt and pulls me back from the edge. I realize I haven’t given her the reassurance she begged for, but I can’t seem to find it. The wonders I experienced in that Library feel remote and abstract, even foolish in the gritty clangor of war. Did I dream the whole thing? Was it just the old near-death light and tunnel show, the desperate illusion of a blood-starved brain?

“R,” Julie says.

There’s an odd note in her voice, a sudden change of key, but I can barely hear it over the din of my thoughts. I watch men from this place killing men from that place and creatures from no place killing both, a war of all against all. And I see the Ardents through the windows of their armored trucks. They’re cheering.

“R! Do you hear—do you feel that?”

Her voice finally reaches me through the fog. What is that emotion I hear in it? Is it wonder? Is it awe? I tear myself away from the battle and look at her. Her eyes are wide. Her ear is cocked to the sky.

“Something’s different,” she whispers.

I strain to hear it. I strain to feel it. And then I stop straining and it’s simply there. It’s been there the whole time, since the moment I opened my eyes: a faint but clear chiming, like church bells on a distant hill. Now that I’m listening, I hear it through all the noise of war: a signal. A pronouncement.

A call.

My eyes drift across the city to the forest that surrounds it, thick and ancient and full of secrets.

“Julie,” I say, grabbing her hand and squeezing hard. “It’ll be okay.”

There are people walking out of the forest. Up and down the length of it, from one end of Post to the other, they emerge from highways, freeways, rural backroads, and from the trees themselves, pooling together into a crowd so vast my brain struggles to find a comparison. I flip through images of rallies, protests, festivals, and wars, but nothing comes close.

Thousands. Hundreds of thousands.

Millions.

Julie once told me the entire population of America amounted to maybe three million. But whoever took that census wasn’t counting the Dead.

“What…” Julie gasps, searching for words the way I’m searching for pictures. “What is…where are…oh my God.”

Even from my rooftop perch, I recognize my people. The tattered clothing. The swaying and stumbling. The crowd doesn’t march; it doesn’t form ranks and advance in lock-step. It moves with a swirling fluidity, like a natural phenomenon, each person on their own path, wandering away and then returning but steadily moving forward. I stop picturing armies and start picturing waves and sand. Wind and clouds. A fog of quantum particles condensing into a shape.

“Is this happening?” Julie says in a wild, breathless giggle. “Did my message…are they really…is this happening?”

She’s not the only one unraveled by the sight. As the armies around the stadium become aware of their surroundings, the battle grinds to a halt. First the Living soldiers freeze, the shock overwhelming their combat instincts, and then, to my amazement, the Boneys freeze with them. They don’t take advantage of the troops’ sudden vulnerability. They wait, poised to attack but not attacking, their own instincts derailed by the unexpected behavior of their prey. They have no category for this. No prepared response. They watch the men like cats watching stunned mice, waiting for the hunt to resume.

But it doesn’t. While the Boneys wait, fixated on their targets, the Dead sweep in around them, outnumbering them on a scale so large it’s comical. More images flutter through my head—a house sucked up by a tornado, a sand castle caught in the tide—but the one I like best is a virus. Jagged, alien things invading humanity’s bloodstream, only to be surrounded and absorbed by our antibodies.

It takes only a moment. There are several dozen Fleshies for each and every Boney, pinning them in on all sides, so it happens all at once. The Dead seize their future selves and simply dismantle them. They remove limbs and toss aside heads. It’s somehow nonviolent, not so much a battle as a decision. Thousands of skulls hiss and chatter on the ground, but they have no words to express their will and no hands with which to enforce it.

Slowly, the Living soldiers thaw from their shock. The Dead watch them placidly, waiting for them to decide their response, but even the most mind-numbed Axiom soldier can see there’s only one.

Guns clatter to the ground.

Those who can still recognize absurdity put their hands up with grim smiles. A funny thing, to surrender to people without weapons, an unarmed army asserting its will through sheer presence. A silent majority that’s finally making noise.

What will it say when it finds words?

“Hey!” Nora shouts over the rising wind. “We need to go!”

I follow her gaze to the source of her concern. The skeletons around the dome are waking up. Their hum sputters and chokes like a flooded wasp nest. Their bones rattle; their jaws snap; they begin to move toward us.

Then the wind rises, and they blow away.

Despite their savage strength, despite the primal forces that drive them, they are still just hollow bones, and all it takes is a strong gust to reveal their lack of substance. They topple over the edge of the roof, carried aloft like dead leaves, and their hideous hum disappears.

The wind subsides. The roof is silent.

I explode with laughter.

My friends stare at me. My wound screams in protest as my chest convulses, but I can’t stop. I don’t want to stop. I stand up and pace the roof, clutching my sides. Tears stream from my eyes, a different flavor than the ones I’m used to, not the bitterness of loss but something piquant and sweet. I hear those distant bells ringing, but it’s not quite a sound; it sits between the senses like this new texture in the wind, this new color in my voice—even the light smells different.

My laughter subsides when my eyes land on Abram’s broken body, but I don’t erase my smile. Because his daughter is smiling too. Sitting by his side with a hand on his upturned palm, small and soft on her father’s scarred leather, she grins through the tears and snot.

“See, Dad?” she says, squeezing his palm. “See what we did?”

M watches the body carefully, his gun at the ready, but Abram remains at peace. No twitching. No groaning. Just rest.

Every choice has a price. We all owe a debt to this world for the things we take from it, right or wrong, cruel or kind. But these laws are soft, these laws are alive, and sometimes a debt is forgiven.

I feel a gentle weariness. I sit with my friends on the edge of the roof and take in the incredible view.

Like New York, the city of Post has been flooded. But this ocean is human. It fills every street, park, and parking lot—enough people to fully repopulate Post and much of the surrounding region. And this ocean is sparkling in the sun. The Gleam passes over it in waves of tiny lights. I can’t see its effects from this distance, so I turn to Addis. His yellow eyes are as wide as his grin. Sprout is squinting her left eye shut like her right is a telescope, hidden so long for the comfort of the world around her, now free to roam whatever strange vistas it sees.

“What’s happening down there?” I ask them.

“This!” Joan giggles, and points to a sunken patch of rot on her arm. A flash of light, and it’s gone.

“Dad, look!” Alex says as his chest flashes with inner illumination. He takes a deep breath and lets it out with a ta-da smile.

Julie grabs my hand. Her face is glowing with a light of its own. “I thought you said we can’t cure the plague.”

A sting in my neck. A sharp, cold rush. I clap my hand to the spot and find that the flesh is smooth. The bite is gone. If the black worms are still there, they’re sealed between the strata of my lives, dried up and buried like fossils of an earlier age.

“We can’t cure it,” I tell Julie. “But we can fight it.”

I kiss her, this person I love, this person who loves me. The wind blows our hair across our faces, hiding us from the world, and though we’re surrounded by our friends, I can almost believe we’re alone in a sun-soaked grove of trees. I barely feel the rumble behind us. I hardly hear the wrenching metal. I don’t bother to look back as the plastic dome and its obsolete flags break through the roof and fall.

WE

THE CITY IS ALMOST QUIET AGAIN.

Gulls call from nearby shorelines. Honeybees drone in the wildflowers that fill the cabs of old convertibles. A few of the Nearly Living still roam the streets, lost on inner pathways, but most have disappeared into the buildings or moved on to the next town, eager to find places to live.

Birds chirp. Insects click. The wind has dropped to a whisper.

The loudest sound by far is the megaphone on the roof of an overturned armored truck, squawking with rising desperation.

The man in the truck shouts dark prophecy to the inhabitants of the stadium. He shouts orders from God to the Nearly Living. He shouts encouragement to his followers, unaware that they dispersed hours ago.

Only two remain. While the others fled into the woods, these two stayed with their pastor. They pried open his truck’s door and tried to help him escape, but he ignored them and continued his sermon. The Holy Fire. The Last Sunset. The inescapable end of everything. Now the youths stand at a distance, waiting for the man to emerge from his ruined vehicle. But he won’t leave his megaphone. He stays inside and keeps shouting.

The young woman squeezes the young man’s hand. They look at each other. Their eyes are filled with uncertainty, with terrifying doubt, but they nod. They turn and walk away.

The pastor is alone. He begins to sense it, but he doesn’t stop. While he shouts about Hell, he thinks about Heaven: a golden ghost town, its sole occupant wandering its silent streets, his bare feet cold and sore on the hard metal, roaming from mansion to mansion and finding them all empty.

He shouts and shouts, but no one is listening. He shouts until his megaphone loses power.

On the other side of the stadium wall, there is a smoldering hole in the earth. First the explosion from below, then the dome from above, crashing into the pit and disappearing in the smoke—even with all the miracles unfolding outside, this kind of action still draws a few onlookers, and a crowd has gathered around the pit.

Somewhere down in the dark, locked in a box and buried under tons of debris, another voice is shouting. This one needs no megaphone, it shouts in thoughts and ideas, but even so, no one is hearing it. The voice has never experienced this before, this shocking lack of an audience, this flat wall of disregard. It doesn’t understand what could have changed; it has always enjoyed a direct line to humanity’s lowest instincts. So it keeps shouting.

The voice shouts and shouts, but people have stopped listening. One by one, they lose interest in the pit. One by one, they walk away.