Burning Paradise

1

_{BUFFALO, NEW YORK}

EVERYTHING THAT FOLLOWED MIGHT HAVE happened differently—or might not have happened at all—had Cassie been able to sleep that night.

She had tried to sleep, had wanted to sleep, had dutifully gone to bed at 11:30, but now it was three hours and some minutes past midnight and her thoughts were running like hamsters in an exercise wheel. She stood up, switched on the light, dressed herself in gray sweat pants and a yellow flannel shirt, and padded barefoot down the chilly parquet floor of the hallway to the kitchen.

Unusually, she was alone in the apartment. Except for Thomas, of course. Thomas was her little brother, twelve years old and soundly asleep in the second bedroom, a negligible presence. Cassie and Thomas lived with their aunt Nerissa, and Cassie still thought of this as Aunt Ris’s apartment although it had been her home for almost seven years now. Usually her aunt would have been asleep on the fold-out sofa in the living room, but to night Aunt Ris was on a date, which meant she might not be back until Saturday afternoon.

Cassie had welcomed the chance to spend some time alone. She was eigh teen years old, had graduated from high school last spring, worked days at Lassiter’s Department Store three blocks away, and was legally and functionally an adult, but her aunt’s protectiveness remained a force to be reckoned with. Aunt Ris had made a completely unnecessary fuss about going out: You’ll be all right? Yes. Are you sure? Of course. You’ll keep a close eye on Thomas? Yes! Go! Have a good time! Don’t worry about us!

The evening had passed quickly and pleasantly. There was no television in the apartment, but she had played rec ords after dinner. Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier had the useful effect of making Thomas drowsy even as it rang in Cassie’s head like the tolling of a divine bell, echoing even after Thomas was in bed and the house was eerily quiet. Then she had turned off most of the lights except for the lamp on the living-room end table and had huddled on the sofa with a bowl of popcorn and a book until she was tired enough to turn in.

So why was she prowling around now like a nervous cat? Cassie opened the refrigerator door. Nothing inside seemed appetizing. The linoleum floor was cold under her feet. She should have put on slippers.

She scooted a kitchen chair next to the window and sat down, resting her elbows on the dusty sill. The corpses of six summer flies lay interred behind the sash-tied cotton blind. “Disgusting,” Cassie said quietly. November had been windy and cold, and wisps of late-autumn air slipped through the single-pane window like probing fingers.

The window overlooked Liberty Street. Aunt Ris’s apartment occupied the floor above a store that sold and repaired secondhand furniture, in a two-story brick building like every other building on the block. The next-door neighbors were a Chinese restaurant on the north side and a grubby antique shop on the south. From where she sat Cassie could see the wide glass display windows of the Groceteria and a half dozen other businesses on the north side of Liberty, all the way to Pippin Street and Antioch Avenue. Not much traffic this time of night, but the after-hours clubs in the entertainment district were just closing. On other sleepless Fridays—Cassie was a restless sleeper at the best of times—she had watched cars rolling through red lights in drunken oblivion, had heard drivers gunning their engines in mad displays of masculine enthusiasm. But just now the street was silent and empty. Of pedestrians there were none.

Or, she corrected herself, no. There was one pedestrian: a man standing alone in the mouth of the narrow alley that separated the Groceteria from Tuck’s Used Books.

Cassie hadn’t seen him at first because of the Armistice Day banners strapped to the high standards of the streetlights. The city had put up the banners a couple of days ago. There was a parade every year to mark the 1914 Armistice, but this year the city (the state, the nation, the world in general) was making a big deal out of the centenary: one hundred years of peace. Relative peace. Approximate peace.

Cassie had always loved Armistice Day. Next to Christmas, it was her favorite holiday. She still remembered her parents taking her to watch the parade back in Boston—remembered the sidewalk vendors who sold roasted chestnuts in twists of paper, the Floats of the Nations populated by schoolchildren in implausibly colorful ethnic dress, the battling cacophonies of high-school marching bands. The violent death of her mother and father had taught Cassie things about the world that would never be acknowledged in any Armistice Day parade, but she still felt the bittersweet tug of those times.

The Centennial banner flapped in a brisk wind, alternately revealing and concealing the man in the shadows. Now that Cassie had seen him she couldn’t look away. He was a drab man, an ordinary man, probably a businessman, dressed for the season in a gray coat down to his knees and with a fedora on his head, but what unsettled Cassie was the impression that he had been looking up at her—that he had turned his head away the moment she had seen him.

Well, but why not? At this hour, hers might be the only lighted window on the block. Why shouldn’t it catch his eye? It was only deeplyingrained habit that made her suspicious. Aunt Ris and the other local survivors of the Correspondence Society had trained Cassie in their secret protocols, of which the first rule was the simplest: Beware the attention of strangers.

The solitary stranger was no longer looking at her window, but his attention still seemed fixed on the building where she lived. His gaze was flat and unwavering and on closer inspection subtly lunatic. Cassie felt a knot tighten in her stomach. This would happen on a night when Aunt Ris was out. Not that anything had really happened, but it would have been nice to have a second opinion to call on. Should she really be worried about a lone man standing in the windy street after midnight? It was a calculation difficult to make when she was too conscious of the empty rooms around her and the shadows they contained.

These thoughts were so absorbing that she was startled when the wind lifted the Armistice Day banner once more and she saw that the man had moved. He had taken a few steps out of the alley and across the sidewalk; he was standing at the edge of Liberty Street now, the toes of his brown shoes poised where the curb met the gutter. His face was upturned once again, and although Cassie couldn’t see his eyes she imagined she felt the pressure of their attention as he scanned the building. She ducked away from the window, crossed the kitchen floor and switched off the overhead light. Now she could watch him from the shadows.

During the time it took her to return to her chair by the window he had moved only slightly, one foot on the sidewalk, one foot in the street. What next? Was he armed? Would he cross the street, come inside the building, knock on the door of the apartment, try to break it down if she refused to let him in? If so, Cassie knew what to do: grab Thomas and leave by the fire escape. Once she was sure she wasn’t being followed she would hurry to the home of the nearest Society member… even though the nearest Society member was the disagreeable Leo Beck, who lived in a cheap apartment five blocks closer to the lake.

But the man seemed to hesitate again. Would a killer hesitate? Of course, she had no real reason to believe he was a murderer or a simulacrum. There had been no violence since the flurry of killings seven years ago. Probably the man was just a drunk disappointed by a luckless night at the bars, or maybe an insomniac with a mind as restless as her own. His interest in the building where she lived might be only an optical illusion; he could have been staring at his own sad reflection in the window of Pike Brothers Furniture Restoration and Sales.

He took another step into the street just as a car turned the corner from Pippin onto Liberty. The car was a dark-colored sedan, blue or black, she couldn’t tell which under the uncertain light of the streetlamps. The driver gunned the engine crazily and the car fishtailed as it took the corner. Cassie supposed the driver must be drunk.

But the solitary stranger didn’t seem to notice. He began to stride across the street as if he had suddenly made up his mind, while the car sped on heedlessly. Cassie looked from the vehicle to the pedestrian, calculating the obvious trajectory but not quite believing it. Surely the car would swerve at the last minute? Or the stranger would turn and leap out of the way?

But neither of these things happened.

The Armistice Day banner flapped twice in the November wind. Cassie pressed her forehead against the chill glass of the window. Her hands gripped the fly-littered sill, and she watched with sick anticipation as the collision evolved from possibility to inevitability to sickening fact.

The car’s fender took the pedestrian at knee level. He dropped and rolled under the grille as if he had been inhaled by it. For one awful moment he simply vanished. All Cassie could see—resisting an almost overpowering urge to close her eyes—was the double bounce of the car’s suspension as its wheels passed over him. She heard the shrilling of the brakes. The car swerved sidelong before it came to a stop. White smoke billowed from the exhaust pipe and swirled away in the wind. The driver turned off the engine, and silence was briefly restored to Liberty Street.

The pedestrian wasn’t just hurt—he was dying, was probably already dead. Cassie forced herself to look. His neck was broken, his head skewed so that he seemed to be staring at his own left shoulder. His chest had been crushed and split. Only his legs seemed completely intact—a perfectly good pair of legs, Cassie thought madly.

The car door swung open and the driver lurched out. The driver was a young man in a disheveled suit. His collar was open and he wore no tie. He leaned on the hood of the car to steady himself. He shook his head twice. He looked at the remains of the pedestrian, then looked away as if from a blinding light. The Armistice banner (CELEBRATING A CENTURY OF PEACE) flapped above him with a popping sound that made Cassie think of gunfire. The driver opened his mouth as if to speak. Then he doubled over and delivered the contents of his stomach onto the asphalt of Liberty Street.

The dead man had made a far bigger mess. There was a lot of blood. Blood everywhere. But not just blood. Something else had come out of him—a syrupy green fluid that steamed in the night air.

Cassie stood silent and rigid, the events she had witnessed doubling in her mind with a memory of other deaths, far away, years ago.

Because she had to be sure—because there must be no mistake this time—she threw a jacket over her flannel shirt and hurried down the stairs that led from Aunt Ris’s apartment to the small tiled lobby and the street door.

She opened the door just a crack. She dared not leave the building while Thomas was asleep. She just needed to be sure she had seen what she thought she had seen.

Cold air rushed past her. The popping of the Armistice banner was angry and random. The driver sat on the hood of his car, sobbing. Lights had begun to wink on in upper-story apartments all along the street. Faces like pale or occulted moons appeared at windows. The police would be here before long, Cassie supposed.

She put her head out far enough to get a good look at the corpse of the pedestrian.

One of the last monographs circulated by the Correspondence Society—it had been written after the killings—had been Notes on the Physical Anatomy of a Simulacrum. The author was Werner Beck, the wealthy father of Leo Beck. Of course Cassie hadn’t read it at the time, but last winter she had found a copy among Aunt Ris’s keepsakes and had studied it carefully. She could recite parts of it from memory. The lungs, heart, and digestive system, along with the skeleton and musculature, comprise the simulacrum’s only identifiable internal organs. Those organs are contained in an amorphous green matrix, covered in turn by layers of adipose tissue and human skin. The rudimentary circulatory system produces less bleeding with traumatic injury, and it is not obvious that even massive blood loss would be immediately fatal to a simulacrum. The undifferentiated green matter suffuses much of the chest and abdominal cavity as well as most of the interior of the skull. It evaporates on exposure to air, leaving a pliant green film of desiccated cells.

Werner Beck had written that, and he would know: he had killed one of the things in his home with a shotgun, then had retained the presence of mind to attempt a dissection.

The mess in the street was consistent with his description, and Cassie tried to look at it with the same soldierly dispassion. Blood, but not as much as you might expect. Yellowish fatty tissue. And the green “matrix,” which was everywhere. Cassie could smell it. She had a fleeting memory of her mother, who had cultivated roses every summer and occasionally recruited Cassie in her garden work. At the age of eight Cassie had spent one endless afternoon pinching aphids and thrips from the leaves and stems of Alba roses, until her hands were coated with an aromatic grime of chlorophyll, garden loam, leafy matter and insect parts. The smell had lingered on her hands for hours even after she washed them with soap and water.

That was what the dead pedestrian smelled like.

Mrs. Theodorus, who lived over a shoe store on the opposite side of the street, emerged onto the sidewalk wearing a pink nighty and fuzzy white slippers. She seemed about to scold the weeping driver for disturbing her sleep, but stopped when she came within sight of the corpse. She stared at it for a long moment. Then she put her hand to her mouth, stifling a scream.

Above all these sounds—Mrs. Theodorus’s scream, the driver’s sobs, the popping banner—Cassie heard the distant howl of a police siren, louder by the second.

Time to leave, she thought. She was surprisingly calm. It was a mechanical calm, as exact as algebra, beneath which Cassie felt panic gliding like a shark in a sunny estuary. But she couldn’t afford the luxury of panic. Her life was at stake. Hers, and Thomas’s.

In a crisis always assume the worst, Aunt Ris had taught her, and Cassie tried to do that, which meant she had to believe that another general attack was underway. And this time no one associated with the Society would be spared. If not for a fortunate accident, the simulacrum who was currently spread across Liberty Street like a sloppy green-and-red compote would have come to the apartment and killed Cassie and Thomas. Aunt Ris might already be dead, a possibility Cassie refused to dwell on for more than a moment. At best, Aunt Ris would come home to an empty apartment and the discovery that her life had changed yet again, irrevocably and for the worse.

I could wait for her, Cassie reasoned. A Friday night date meant her aunt probably wouldn’t be back before Saturday noon, but she might show up sooner than that. And it might be safe to wait, given that the sim who had come for her was dead. A few hours wouldn’t make much difference, would it?

Maybe not… but Cassie had been trained for this moment since the death of her parents, not least by Aunt Ris herself, and she couldn’t bring herself to break protocol. Pack, warn and run, that was the rule. Packing was simple. Like her aunt, like her little brother, Cassie kept a fully-loaded suitcase in her bedroom at all times. She hurried there now and yanked the suitcase from under the bed. It had been inspected and repacked just last month, to make sure she hadn’t outgrown any of the clothes in it. Cassie put the case on the bed and quickly dressed herself, keeping in mind that it was cold outside and winter was coming. She double-layered two shirts and covered them with an old woolen sweater. She caught a glimpse of herself in the vanity mirror—pale, lumpy and terrified, but who cared how she looked?

Aunt Ris had left a number where she could be reached in an emergency—and this was surely an emergency—but Cassie didn’t even consider calling it. That was another rule: no telephone calls. Under the circumstances, anything important had to be said face-to-face or not at all. Even an innocuous call from this number would be a red flag to the entity they called the hypercolony. Out there in the darkness, mindless but meticulously attentive, it would hear. And it would act.

She could leave a note, of course, but even then she would have to be careful what she said.

She took her knapsack from the closet in the hallway and filled it with simple food from the kitchen cupboard: a half-dozen trail-mix bars, apple juice in single-serving boxes, a foil bag of mixed nuts and raisins. On impulse she grabbed a book from the shelf in the hallway and tucked it into a side pocket. It was a book her uncle had written: The Fisherman and the Spider, a tattered paperback edition Cassie had read twice before.

Time was passing. She strapped her watch to her wrist and saw that almost twenty minutes had slipped by since the death of the sim. The police were in the street now. Whirling red lights blinked through the window blinds. She guessed the police officers would be bewildered by the corpse of the victim—as much of it as hadn’t already evaporated into the night air. And the city coroner, tasked with analyzing the remains, might end up questioning his own sanity. But no report would be published in the morning papers. The sobbing, drunken driver would never come to trial. That was a foregone conclusion.

Cassie took a pen and a sheet of paper into the kitchen and controlled the trembling of her hand long enough to write,

It would have been dangerous to say more, and her aunt would understand the shorthand—“gotta run” was their personal Code Red. But it wasn’t enough, it wasn’t nearly enough. How could it be? For seven years Aunt Ris had looked after Cassie and Thomas with kindness, patience and—well, if not love, at least something like love. It was Aunt Ris who had calmed Cassie’s night terrors after the death of her parents, Aunt Ris who had gently introduced her to the truth about the Correspondence Society. And if she had been a little more protective than Cassie would have liked, Aunt Ris had also helped her strike a balance between the world as it appeared and the world as it really was—between the world as Cassie had loved it and the world she had come to dread.

“Thanks” was hardly adequate. She hesitated, wanting to say more. But if she tried to do so she would have to fight back tears, and that wasn’t helpful right now. So she taped the note, unaltered and inelegant as it was, to the refrigerator door, and forced her attention to the necessities of the moment.

Finally, she tiptoed into Thomas’s room and woke him with a hand on his shoulder.

She envied her younger brother’s aptitude for sleep. Thomas slept deeply, silently and reliably. His small bedroom was tidy at the moment. Thomas’s toys sat neatly on a wooden shelf, his clothes hung freshly-laundered in the closet. Thomas himself lay on his back with the comforter up to his chin, as if he hadn’t moved since Cassie tucked him in a few hours ago. Maybe he hadn’t. Twelve years old, but his face had kept its childhood roundness; his blond hair, even in disarray, made him look like a fat angel in yellow jammies. He woke as if he were returning to his body after a long absence. “Cassie,” he croaked, blinking at her. “What’s wrong?”

She told him to get dressed and get his suitcase from under the bed. They had to leave, she said. Now.

Dazed as he was, the implication wasn’t lost on him. “Aunt Ris—” he began.

“She’s not home. We have to leave without her.”

She hated the anxiety that surged from his eyes and felt reproached by it. She wanted to say, It’s not my fault! Don’t blame me—I don’t have a choice!

Worse, perhaps, was the look of frightened resignation that followed. Thomas was too young to remember much about the murder of their parents. But what he did remember, he remembered with his body as much as his mind. He sat up and steadied himself with a hand on the edge of the mattress. “Where are we going?”

“To see Leo Beck. After that—we’ll figure it out. Now get dressed. Hurry! You know the drill. And dress warm, okay?”

He nodded and stood up straight, like a soldier at reveille. The sight of him made her want to cry.

The high window at the end of the hallway opened onto a wooden fire escape bolted to the building’s sooty brickwork. The stairs descended into the alley behind the building, which meant that Cassie and Thomas, climbing down, would be invisible to the police, who in any case were probably too busy sorting out the events on Liberty Street to worry about what was happening in a vacant back lane.

As she raised the window Cassie caught a reflection of herself in the dusty glass. A young woman, dowdy in an oversized sweater, wary eyes peering out from under a black woolen watch cap—mouth too big, eyebrows too darkly generous, unattractive in what Cassie considered the best sense: she would never be stared at for her looks, which suited her fine.

In high school she had been considered not just odd-looking but personally odd. She had heard boys calling her “dead fish” behind her back. And it was true that she had become expert at concealing her feelings. That was part of what it meant to be a Society kid. There were truths you could never acknowledge, feelings that had to stay hidden. So it was okay to be a dead fish, to stand outside the hallway alliances and weekend social circles, to be looked at sidelong as you walked from class to class. Even to be sneered at, if you couldn’t avoid it. Her slightly geeky looks were helpful in that respect, a useful barrier between herself and others. She knew how to fly under the radar: never volunteer an answer, never expect or demand real friendship, do your work well but not conspicuously well.

In the presence of other Society offspring she could let her hair down a little. But she had never really enjoyed the company of that crowd, either. Society brats tended to be gnarly, cliquish, complexly screwed-up. Herself most certainly included.

She bit her lip and took a deep breath. Then she clambered over the low sill onto the wooden stairs, lifted out her suitcase and Thomas’s, and helped Thomas climb out behind her. The weather-worn wooden platform lurched under their combined weight. The alley below was a brick-lined asphalt corridor, empty of everything but a solitary Dumpster and the fitful November wind. That suited her, too.

She tried not to think about what she was leaving behind. When they reached ground level she gripped Thomas’s hand in hers (“Ow,” he said) and led him through the alley to the corner where it opened onto Pippin Street. Then she turned left, heading for the home of the disagreeable Leo Beck and a future she was afraid even to imagine.

2

_{RURAL VERMONT}

EARLY IN THE MORNING, NOT LONG AFTER the first sunlight touched the barren branches of the maple trees and began to burn the skin of frost out of the shadows, a man approached Ethan Iverson’s farm house. The man was alone and walked slowly, which meant Ethan had plenty of warning.

Ethan watched the stranger’s progress on a video screen in the attic room in which he kept his typewriter, his Correspondence Society files and a small arsenal of firearms. He had been in the kitchen when the alarm sounded, preparing his standard breakfast of eggs and ham fried in an iron skillet. Now the meal was going cold on the stovetop downstairs, the eggs congealing in grease.

Ethan had lived alone in the farm house for seven years—seven years and three months now. Entire weeks passed when he spoke to no one but the check-out girl at Kierson’s Grocery and the counter clerk at Back Pages Books, his two inevitable stops whenever he drove into Jacobstown for supplies. One useful device by which a solitary man could keep touch with sanity, he had discovered, was a regular schedule, strictly obeyed. Every night he set his alarm clock for seven o’clock, every morning he showered and dressed and finished breakfast by eight, regardless of the day of the week or the season of the year. Just as meticulously, he was careful to maintain and keep in good repair the array of motion detectors and video cameras he had installed on the property not long after he moved in.

For seven years, that system had registered nothing but a few stray hunters and mushroom pickers, a religious pamphleteer who believed God had granted him an exemption from the many and conspicuous NO TRESPASSING signs on the property, one determined census taker, and on two occasions a member of the family of black bears that lived beyond the western boundary of Ethan’s property. Every time the alarm sounded Ethan had hurried up to this attic room, where he could see the intruder on his video monitor and evaluate the possible threat. Every time—until now—the intruder had proved to be essentially harmless.

He switched the monitor to a new camera as the man walked up the unpaved access road toward the house at a steady pace. The man Ethan saw on the monitor seemed surpassingly ordinary, though a little out of place. He was probably not older than twenty-five, bare-headed and brown-haired and twenty pounds overweight, dressed like a city dweller in a drab overcoat and black shoes that had surrendered their shine to the moist clay of the road. From his looks he could have been a real-estate agent, come to ask whether Ethan had considered putting the property up for sale. But Ethan was fairly sure the guy wasn’t even human.

Of course, the man’s physical appearance meant nothing. (Unless the very blandness of him could be construed as a strategic choice.) What tipped Ethan off—what was, perhaps, meant to tip Ethan off—was the way the stranger gazed at each camera lens as he passed it, as if he knew he was being observed and didn’t care, as if he wanted Ethan to know he was coming.

As the man approached the thousand-yard mark, Ethan considered his choice of weapons.

He kept a small armory up here. Mostly hunting rifles, since those could be acquired easily and legally, but including a couple of military-style handguns. In the rack by the window he kept a fully-loaded Remington moose rifle with a German scope, and he had trained himself in its use well enough that he could easily pick off the invader at this distance with a single shot from the attic’s small window. The peculiar anatomy of the simulacra made them less susceptible to injury than human beings, of course, but they were far from invulnerable. A well-placed head shot would do the trick.

Ethan thought about that. It would be the simplest way to handle the situation. Pick off the invader, then pack a bag and leave. Because if the hypercolony had located him, it would be suicidal to stay. If he killed one sim, more would come.

…if he was sure this man was a sim. Was he sure?

Well, his instinct was pretty strong. If he had to bet, he’d have put money on it. But he couldn’t trust a man’s life to instinct.

He eyed the long gun wistfully but let it be. Instead he picked out a shotgun and a device that looked like a stocky pistol but was built to deliver 300 kilovolts from a pair of copper prongs. His research had led him to believe the latter would an effective short-range weapon against a simulacrum but probably not lethal to a human being. He had not, however, tested this theory.

He watched the monitor a moment longer, trying to shake off his fear. He had known this day might come. He had planned for it; it had played out in his imagination a thousand times. So why were his hands shaking? But the answer was so obvious he didn’t have to frame it. His hands were shaking because, despite all the precautions he had taken, despite his superior firepower and his carefully calculated avenues of escape, what was approaching the house might be one of the creatures who had already taken the lives of too many of Ethan’s friends and family—a thing neither human nor self-aware, as casually lethal as a bolt of lightning.

He tucked the shock pistol into his belt and made sure the shotgun was loaded. He put a pair of extra shells in his shirt pocket. He felt a sudden urge to empty his bladder, but there wasn’t time.

Death came up the creaking porch stair and politely rang the doorbell. Ethan went down to answer.

The green-on-the-inside men (and women: Ethan reminded himself that some of them were women) had already cost him his marriage and his career. They had achieved that remarkable feat over the course of a single day in 2007.

On that day Ethan had been a tenured professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst campus, author of several well-received journal papers and a couple of reasonably successful popular-science books, an asset to his department and an active researcher who could command a cadre of undergraduate students. His specialty was entomology but lately his research had taken him into the field of paleobotany, the study of ancient plant life; he had joined a team of researchers who were isolating airborne spores from ten-thousand-year-old Antarctic ice cores. He was also engaged in a more clandestine sort of research—the kind that interested the Correspondence Society.

The members of the Correspondence Society were scientists and scholars, but they never published their findings in peer-reviewed journals. The Society was known only to itself, and its members were sworn to secrecy. As a grad student Ethan had been introduced to the Society by his mentor at MIT, a man whose mind and ethics Ethan had admired without reserve. Even so, Ethan had been skeptical at first. The Society had sounded like something eccentric and deeply old-fashioned, a survival of some Edwardian dons’ club that had once flourished in the cloisters of Oxford or Cambridge. He would have dismissed it as a joke—a frankly preposterous joke—if not for the names associated with it. Mathematicians, physicists, anthropologists, many with impressive pedigrees, and the roster of the dead was even more impressive, if true: Dirac, von Neumann, Fermi…

He had been warned of the risks he would be running if he agreed to ally himself with the group. The rules were stringent. Members could communicate about Society business only by mail or face-to-face. People who spoke about the Society too publically faced reprisals, not from the Society itself but from sources unknown. If he said the wrong thing to the wrong person Ethan might begin to find his research proposals rejected without cause, might fall out of favor with academic and peer review committees, might lose tenure. He understood these risks, and once he joined the Society he had been scrupulously careful. But no one had warned him that he might be killed. That his family might be put at risk of their lives.

Ethan had survived the massacre of June 2007 purely by accident. He had been recruited as a last-minute delegate to the annual ESA Conference, and he was at Logan Airport waiting for a flight to Phoenix when the first reports flashed across the TV in the boarding-area lounge. His attention was drawn by the photographs alternating on the screen—chillingly, all of them people he knew. Benson at Yale, Kammerov at Cornell, Neiderman at Edinburgh, Linde at Saint Petersburg. And more, a dozen in all. The caption under the newscast said UNIVERSITY MURDERS. Ethan moved closer to the screen, already sick with dread; the volume was turned low, but he heard enough of the newscaster’s murmuring to confirm his fears. There is no conclusive evidence linking the various murders which took place on three continents this Wednesday, but it seems more than coincidental that so many well-known academics and scholars should die violently in such a short period of time… Local authorities are cooperating with the police arm of the League of Nations to determine whether the deaths are part of a larger pattern…

The news must just have made the wire services. The Asian and European killings had happened overnight; the American murders were only hours old. And Ethan didn’t need the help of the League of Nations to recognize “a larger pattern.” All of the named victims had been members of the Correspondence Society.

He found a pay phone and placed a call to his office in Amherst. The Society had taught him to distrust telephones—even local calls were routinely bounced through the radiosphere, part of the global telecom radio-relay system—but he hoped a quick call wouldn’t at tract undue attention. The business-class boarding announcement for his Phoenix flight came while he was dialing; he ignored it.

Amy Winslow, Ethan’s office assistant, answered after three rings. “Professor Iverson! Are you okay?”

He kept his voice carefully neutral and told her he was fine. Before he could say anything more, she asked whether he was in Phoenix yet or whether he could come right back to the office. It was terrible, she said. Tommy Chopra had been shot! Shot and killed! A janitor found him dead! The police were everywhere, talking to people, collecting evidence!

Ethan couldn’t disguise his shock. Tommy Chopra was one of his grad students. Tommy was an early riser and a compulsive perfectionist; Ethan had given him a key to his office and Tommy was often there before sunrise, compiling data while the rest of the campus was just flickering to life. According to Amy, he had been shot and killed sometime before seven this morning. No one had seen his assailant.

But it wasn’t Tommy they meant to kill. It was me.

“Can you come back and talk to the police?”

“Of course. In the meantime, call the conference and tell them I had to cancel. The number’s in the literature on my desk. I’ll be right in.”

It was a deliberate lie. Ethan didn’t mean to go anywhere near his office, not that day or ever again.

Instead he drove for two hours directly to the South Amherst apartment where Nerissa had been staying during their “trial separation,” as she liked to call their rehearsal for divorce. He had agreed not to drop in unannounced, but circumstances overruled that polite agreement. He understood very little about what happened to the Society, but his next move was obvious. He needed to tell her what had happened, why this might be the last time she would see him, and what she had to do next.

The green-on-the-inside man stood patiently on the porch. Ethan, inside, watched the man’s image on a monitor mounted above the door and connected to the video camera hidden in the porch rafters. He tried not to wince when, again, the man looked directly into the camera lens.

If this was a simulacrum, it was running some new kind of strategy, since it didn’t appear to be armed and hadn’t tried to disguise its approach. Ethan figured that made it more dangerous, not less.

The camera hookup included a microphone and speaker. Never engage a sim in conversation was one of the rules Ethan had written for himself, based on his and Werner Beck’s theories about the way the hypercolony functioned. But what was the alternative? Throw open the door and putting a load of buckshot into the face of someone who might, just might, be an innocent civilian?

He keyed the microphone and said, “What ever you’re selling, I’m not interested. This is private property. Please leave.”

“Hello, Dr. Iverson.” The sim’s voice was calm and reedy, with an upstate New York accent. “I know who you are, and you know what I am. But I’m not here to hurt you. We have a common interest. May I explain?”

There was no mind in back of those words, Ethan reminded himself. Nothing but a series of highly-evolved algorithms aimed at achieving a strategic result. Engaging in dialogue with such a creature was no more useful than trying to fend off a scorpion by quoting Voltaire. Still, Ethan was curious in spite of himself. “Are you carrying a weapon?”

The simulacrum gave the camera aningratiating smile. “No, sir, I am not.”

“You care to prove that? You can start by taking off your hat and coat.”

The simulacrum nodded and removed its hat. The sim had brown hair and a bald spot at the crown of its head. It shrugged off its jacket, folded it and placed it alongside the hat on a sun-faded Adirondack chair.

“Now your shirt and pants,” Ethan said.

“Really, Dr. Iverson?”

He didn’t answer. The silence lengthened, until the simulacrum began unbuttoning its shirt. Shirt and pants joined hat and coat, revealing the sim’s pale, pot-bellied, impeccably human-seeming body. “Shoes and socks, too,” Ethan said.

“It’s chilly out here, Professor.”

But the creature cooperated. Which left it standing in nothing but a pair of white briefs. A monster in its underwear, Ethan thought.

“Now may I come in and speak to you?”

Ethan threw open the door, leaving only the wire screen between himself and the green-on-the-inside man. Ethan leveled his short-barrel shotgun at the creature’s chest. The sim focused its attention on the gun. “Please don’t shoot me,” it said.

“What do you want?”

“A few minutes of your time. I want to explain something.”

“How about you give me the short version right now?”

“You and some other members of the Correspondence Society are in real and immediate danger. That’s not a threat. I’m not your enemy. We have mutual interests.”

“Why should I believe any of that?”

“I can explain. Whether you believe me is up to you. May I come in?”

Ethan kept the gun leveled and pulled open the screen door with one hand. “Move slowly.”

The simulacrum stepped across the threshold. “Are you going to keep that shotgun on me?”

“I guess not.” Ethan shifted the shotgun to his left hand and let the barrel droop.

“Thank you.”

“This’ll do fine,” Ethan said, taking the shock pistol from where he had tucked it into his belt and forcing the prongs into the sim’s flabby belly as he pulled the trigger.

Three hundred kilovolts. The green-on-the-inside man dropped like a felled tree.

3

_{BUFFALO, NEW YORK}

THE WALK TO THE LOW-RISE APARTMENT building where Leo Beck lived kept Cassie warm in the face of the wind, but her little brother was beginning to show symptoms of anxiety. He had her left hand in a grip she was afraid would leave her bruised, though Thomas hadn’t held hands with his sister since he was six years old. “Sun’ll be up soon,” she said, trying to distract him. They passed a ponderous slow-moving machine that sent torrents of soapy water into the sewer grates. “Street sweepers already at work, see?” Thomas shrugged.

Buffalo was a prosperous city, but that prosperity had bypassed these old South Side buildings. Leo’s low-rise squatted on its corner lot like a tired troll, tattooed by coal smoke that had drifted in from the mills and refineries of West Seneca and Lackawanna in the decades before the EPA mandates. She had to be careful here, in case the simulacra had come or were coming for Leo. She tugged open the sheet-metal outer door and stepped into the foyer of the building. The air inside was warm but smelled like cabbage and sour milk. She examined the bank of electrical bells—a row of buttons with the names of tenants printed beside them. One of the buttons had come loose and dangled from its socket like a poked-out eye. Just below it was the button marked BECK, LEO.

“Is it safe here?” Thomas asked, echoing Cassie’s own thought.

During their walk she had told Thomas about the sim who had been killed by a car on Liberty Street. What it meant was that she and Thomas had to get away even if Aunt Ris couldn’t join them. So where are we going? Thomas had asked, but Cassie didn’t have an answer. It depends.

I have to go to school.

Not anymore. We’re sort of on vacation.

But Thomas was too perceptive to be easily consoled. And no, it wasn’t safe here; she couldn’t honestly say so. Leo Beck might be dead on the floor of his single-bedroom apartment for all Cassie knew. But it was her duty as a Society survivor to warn the nearest potential victim, if that was possible. She kept an eye on the stairs beyond the foyer’s inner door, ready to run at the first sight of a suspicious stranger. She pushed the buzzer again.

After a moment Leo answered, and he wasn’t pleased. “Whoever the fuck you are, push that buzzer one more time and I’ll be down there kicking your sorry ass.”

Thomas went owl-eyed. “It’s Cassie Iverson,” Cassie said hastily. “I need to come in, Leo.”

Silence. After a long pause the electronic lock on the inner door clicked open. Cassie hustled Thomas up the stairwell to a second-floor corridor lined with peeling floral wallpaper. Leo’s apartment was 206. She knocked lightly, not wanting to wake the neighbors.

But it wasn’t Leo who opened the door—it was Beth Vance.

Cassie supposed she shouldn’t have been surprised. She had seen Leo and Beth together at the last survivors’ meeting, acting more than friendly toward each other. Beth was the daughter of John Vance, whose wife Amanda had been a tenured professor at NYU and a member of the Correspondence Society. Amanda Vance had been one of the victims of the 2007 attacks.

Beth was only a year older than Cassie, though she tried to appear vastly more sophisticated (and usually succeeded, Cassie had to admit). Beth was tall, dramatically skinny, and she wore her straw-yellow hair fashionably short. This morning she was dressed in jeans and a flannel shirt that looked as if she had just thrown them on. The shirt might have been one of Leo’s. She gave Cassie a condescending glare.

“I need to talk to Leo,” Cassie said.

Beth rolled her eyes but called out, “Yeah, it’s the Iverson girl. And her little brother.”

Leo’s voice came from elsewhere in the apartment: “Her what?”

“Little brother!”

As if Beth didn’t know Thomas’s name.

Cassie pushed past Beth and tugged Thomas inside. Leo came out of the bedroom barefoot, wearing black denim pants and a sleeveless undershirt. He was twenty-one years old and a little over six feet tall. Conventionally good-looking but there was something odd about his eyes, Cassie had often thought: the way they turned down at the corners, as if they had been installed upside-down. It made him look smug.

But he wasn’t actually smug and he certainly wasn’t stupid. He looked at Cassie, at Thomas, read their expressions, then took a breath and said, “Oh, fuck. It’s happening again, isn’t it?”

Cassie managed to nod. “Again.”

“And you came here first?”

“Aunt Ris is out. Yeah. We haven’t talked to anyone else.”

She told him the story of what she had seen from the kitchen window, sparing no details even though Thomas grew visibly more frightened as she spoke.

“Okay,” Leo said, frowning massively. “Thank you, Cassie.” He turned to Beth. “Anything you want to keep,” Leo told her, “get it quick and throw it in the car.”

“The car?”

“We’re leaving.”

Thomas sat next to her on Leo’s grubby sofa while Leo and Beth finished dressing.

She wondered how much he understood. Aunt Ris hadn’t neglected Thomas’s education. He knew about the 2007 massacre, at least in general terms. He knew he shouldn’t discuss certain subjects, like the death of his parents, outside of the family. He knew the suitcase under his bed had been put there for a purpose. That burdensome knowledge had made him more reserved and cautious than most twelve-year-olds. Thomas seldom talked about any of this, but he occasionally came to Cassie with questions that troubled him: Is it true the radiosphere is alive? Or, How does the hypercolony hear us when we talk on the phone? Or, Why does it want to kill people? Cassie had always tried to answer as honestly as she knew how. Which meant Thomas had to be satisfied with a whole lot of I-don’t-know.

Beth remained skeptical, and Leo Beck came out of the bedroom still talking down her objections. “Cassie wouldn’t lie about something like this,” Leo said, gratifyingly. “It’s code-fucking-red.” He jammed a few items of canned food into a sports bag along with his spare clothes. “We knew this could happen.” He added, “At least we’re together,” which Cassie guessed was meant to mollify Beth, though she gave him nothing in return but a queasy stare. The process of packing up was brief and efficient. Leo didn’t seem to own much, from what Cassie could see of his apartment, apart from a couple of shelves of books. All Beth had was her overnight bag, which Cassie suspected amounted to little more than a makeup kit, emergency tampons and a couple of condoms.

“So where’s the car?” Beth asked.

“Parked a couple of blocks away. Anything else you think we need?”

Beth looked around unhappily, then shook her head.

“Okay. Let’s go.”

“What about them?” Beth asked—rudely, but Cassie had been wondering the same thing.

“Can’t leave ’em here. Is that all right, Cassie? Do what you like, but you’re probably better off with us than out in the street.”

“Yes,” Thomas said before Cassie could answer. Cassie just nodded. Leo knew the drill as well as anyone; what ever else he might be, he was the son of Werner Beck, the most influential man in the Society. They would be safer together.

They left the building. Outside, the first light of morning raked the street. A few workers had begun to trickle out of these old residential buildings, burly men and a few women, most of them bound for the Lackawanna and West Seneca production lines. Once, driving through this part of the city with Aunt Ris, Cassie had wondered aloud whether the men then trudging home really believed the world was as prosperous and forward-moving as her high-school civics classes had made it sound. “Probably not,” Aunt Ris had said. “They don’t look terribly inspired, do they? They’re not rich by a long stretch. But they have jobs. The mills and machine shops pay a living wage plus benefits. A lot of these men could probably afford to live somewhere better if not for liquor or alimony or bad luck. Their lives might improve in the long run. And if they need help, they can get it.” In other words, the civics classes had been mostly right.

Aunt Ris had always been scrupulous about giving the devil his due.

Leo’s car was an old Ford, its brown paint bubbled with rust. It was probably older than Thomas, but it was the best transportation Leo could afford on the money he made at the restaurant where he worked nights. His father, though famously wealthy, hadn’t set him up with a fancy income. But as of now, Cassie thought, Leo had spent his last day bussing tables at Julio’s. She heaved her suitcase and Thomas’s into the empty trunk of the car, next to Beth and Leo’s few things, then slid into the backseat with Thomas.

“So where are we going?” Beth asked.

It was a good question. Cassie waited to hear the answer. Sooner or later she would have to ask herself the same thing.

“First stop, your place. See if your father’s okay. What we do then depends on what we find.”

Ten Society families had fled to Buffalo after the massacre. Most had been associated with (or had lost loved ones associated with) Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or UMass. Aunt Ris had known them all socially, and it was she who had organized the exodus.

All those families had sustained attacks. All were grieving for lost husbands or fathers, mothers or wives. Wisely, they had been unwilling to go on living in the homes where their loved ones had been killed. They may not have been in immediate danger—the attacks had been narrowly targeted at active members of the Society—but they had been made exquisitely aware of their vulnerability. The last generally-distributed Society document (a letter to survivors from Werner Beck) had been laced with dire warnings and tips on preserving anonymity.

There were other such enclaves of survivors around the country and elsewhere in the world. Only a shadow of the old Correspondence Society still existed, but the emotional and occasional financial support it provided had been invaluable. Survivor gatherings were the only occasions when grief and anger that had to remain hidden from strangers could be openly expressed and understood.

But the need for secrecy was always corrosive, especially for the children of such families. Cassie and Thomas fell into that category. So did Leo and Beth.

School, for instance. Cassie had attended Millard Fillmore Secondary School until her graduation last year, and every day had brought some sharp reminder that she was an outsider only passing for normal, a refugee from a different and darker country. History classes had been a particular torment. Before the massacres of 2007, she had been allowed by her parents to believe the narrative of technological and social progress the textbooks loved to portray: the discovery of the radio-propagative layer above the Earth’s atmosphere (the so-called radiosphere) in the 1890s, the Great War and its aftermath, the abolition of segregation in the U.S. in the 1930s, the European and Eurasian peace pacts, the gender liberation of the 1950s… above all, the comforting near-certainty that the world was every day a little wealthier and a little more just. It was only after the death of her parents that Cassie had been introduced to the real truth: that there was an invisible hand at work in human history, indifferent despite its apparent benevolence, often cruel, occasionally murderous.

That knowledge had set her apart from her classmates. Her few friendships were really just temporary alliances with other social outsiders—with Annie Jessup, for instance, who wore a stainless-steel leg brace; with Patrice Kossuth, who stuttered uncontrollably on the rare occasions when she attempted to speak. And what good was friendship when Cassie was obliged to conceal so much about herself? The only people of Cassie’s age to whom she could truly unburden herself were the children of the Society, who all had stories like hers and whose sympathy was therefore generic and often insincere.

Despite all that, she had methodically planned a future for herself. Since she left high school she had been working as a counter clerk at a Main Street department store called Lassiter’s, saving tuition and book fees for a semester at NYU. Her ambition had been to take a biology major that would ultimately allow her to focus on the study of invertebrates: her uncle’s career and his books on entomology had been an obvious inspiration. She would get a post-graduate degree, maybe end up teaching at some regional college; she would lead a quiet but useful life and make a modest contribution to the sum of human knowledge. She had imagined herself living in a book-lined room on a tree-lined campus, with a window through which she could watch the seasons change. She would be alone, perhaps, but she would also be contented, useful, safe.

It was a stupid delusion, and she blushed at the thought of it. Because now the green-on-the-inside men had come back, and there would be no sheltered room, no window from which to watch the winter snow. The events of the last few hours meant she would lead the rest of her life in strict anonymity, perhaps under an assumed name, taking the sort of jobs that required no experience or documentation, probably living in a sequence of rented apartments in a sequence of obscure towns. And the same, she realized with belated anguish, would be true of Thomas.

Thomas put his head against her shoulder and closed his eyes. The motion of the car and the emotional overload of the morning had made him sleepy. That was a blessing, Cassie thought. She stroked his hair and let him doze.

Leo drove with an eye on the rearview mirror, making sure they weren’t being followed. The route to Beth’s place took them across town through thickening traffic. Cassie spared a thought for Beth, sitting pale and silent in the passenger seat up front. Cassie had always felt a cordial dislike for Beth, richly reciprocated, but they were in the same boat now.

“If my father—I mean,” Beth said, “if he’s not home—if we can’t find him—where do we go after this?”

“Depends,” Leo said.

“Because even if he is home, I don’t want to stay with him. We had this discussion once, what to do if the sims come back. He has fake ID for both of us and he says he has enough cash to keep us in some little place, maybe Florida—but I don’t want to live in fucking Florida! I don’t want to live with him anywhere.”

“Okay,” Leo said gently. “It’s up to you. What ever happens. But if he’s home, we need to warn him.”

“So where are you going?”

“West.”

“Where west?”

“To where my own father lives.”

Leo’s father: Werner Beck, patron of the Correspondence Society

and the closest thing to a leader the fractious and disorganized Society had ever had. Famously intelligent, famously well-organized, and famously difficult to deal with. Cassie had once heard Aunt Ris describe Werner Beck as “a smart man, but a classic authoritarian.”

They left the parkway for a neighborhood of tall apartment buildings much nicer than Leo’s low-rise. Cassie caught a glimpse of Beth’s face in the rearview mirror, now a mask of silent apprehension.

The Society kids in Cassie’s circle had given each other nicknames. Cassie was “Raccoon,” probably for the way her eyes looked after a typical sleepless night. Beth when she was younger had been “Angel,” but lately she had been called meaner and more explicit names. She had gone out with a lot of guys in school, mostly of the leather-jacket-and-flick-knife persuasion. Leo himself had credentials with that crowd… though, by Beth’s standards, Leo constituted a step toward respectability. Cassie had tried to ignore all that talk.

No angel could have looked as terrified as Beth did now. At the first sight of flashing red lights a few blocks away she went rigid.

And so did Cassie. Cassie had been harboring an unexpressed hope that they would find Beth’s father safe at home, that the death of the sim on Liberty Street had been a weird anomaly, that Aunt Ris was therefore also safe, that a semblance of sanity or at least continuity would be restored to her life….

But the ambulance in front of Beth’s building was flanked by police cars, and as Leo drove past she saw two paramedics came through the lobby door with a blanket-covered body on a wheeled gurney.

“Stop,” Beth whispered.

“I can’t.”

“Leo, for fuck’s sake!”

“I can’t stop, Beth. We shouldn’t even be this close.”

“Jesus!”

He sped up, though he was careful not to attract the attention of the police. Beth pounded her fist on the dash and started to cry—choked sobs, not loud enough to wake Thomas. At the corner Leo turned left and headed back to the parkway.

After a fill-up at a National Oil station in Cheektowaga Leo merged onto the Interstate, following the long curve of Lake Erie toward Cleveland. Thomas dozed fitfully, his head on Cassie’s shoulder as she watched exit signs announce the names of pleasant-sounding small towns: Mount Vernon, Wanakah, Pinehurst. Bars of November sunlight angled across Cassie’s eyes. From time to time Leo cracked the driver’s-side window, admitting gusts of chilly air. The four-lane highway glinted with mica flecks and sun mirages.

Cassie respected Beth’s grief with her silence. Leo had already said everything that could be said, including that the body on the gurney cart might not have belonged to Beth’s father. Beth had retreated into a sullen, steely indifference. “I don’t want to talk about it.” So no one talked.

Once they crossed the state border Leo left the Interstate for secondary roads where, he said, they were less likely to be followed. Outside Medina, Ohio, he stopped at another gas station so they could top off the tank and use the toilets. Cassie and Beth took turns at the ladies’ room, wordlessly. Back at the car Thomas complained that he was hungry. Cassie went into the convenience store and bought him a chocolate bar (Hershey’s with almonds) plus one for herself and a bottle of orange juice to share, along with an activity book she imagined might keep him busy. Puzzles, mazes, connect-the-dots. He looked at it with disdain. “Are we going home now?”

“No. You know that.”

“So where do we sleep?”

“We’ll stop at a motel, I guess. Soon.”

As the sun drifted toward the horizon Leo switched on the vehicle’s anemic heater. Lodi, Mount Gilead, Cardington: All these little towns, Cassie thought. Here a main street, a hardware store, a Chinese restaurant announcing itself with a neon dragon. Here a neatly whitewashed church with a wooden steeple. Here the last of the season’s dry leaves, wind-delivered to curbs and windowsills.

Small houses leaked yellow light from curtained windows. These were the homes of people who had never seen past the skin of the world and never would. Once, Cassie thought, she had been one of them. This was the world from which she had been banished: warm as a winter blanket, seen and abandoned in the same moment. She loved it with an exile’s love. It ran past the car in fading colors. She was tempted to wave good-bye.

4

_{RURAL VERMONT}

ONCE THE SIM WAS INCAPACITATED—THE 300-KV shock pistol was spectacularly effective—Ethan dragged the creature down to the cellar of the farm house.

What ever he did here, he would have to do quickly. The sim had come unarmed and begging for a conversation, and it might be important to find out why. But he couldn’t waste time. Obviously, the hypercolony knew where to find him. Which meant his sabbatical at the farm house had come to an end, and every second he lingered here put him at risk.

In the meantime his cameras and trip wires and automatic alarms continued to survey the property for intruders. Ethan bound the unconscious simulacrum to a heavy chair with duct tape, then went upstairs to consider his options.

He retrieved the sim’s jacket and shirt from the front porch and examined them. Both items bore midprice store-brand labels and could have been purchased anywhere in the country. There was a wallet in the sim’s jacket pocket—that was unusual.

The assassins of 2007 hadn’t carried identification, which was part of the reason local and federal investigations had failed to learn anything useful about them. (The fact that the few sims who were killed in the attacks had left radically unconventional corpses might also have had something to do with it.) Ethan opened the wallet cautiously.

He pulled out a hundred and fifty dollars in tens and twenties and a raft of cards, including two major credit cards, a Social Security card and a driver’s license. The documents had all been issued in the name of Winston C. Bayliss. The address on the driver’s license was 22 Major Street, Montmorency, Pennsylvania, and the laminated photograph resembled the face on the thing in the cellar.

Interesting. The simulacra were in most ways a mystery. None of the surviving members of the Correspondence Society had been able to determine how they faked their human appearance or to what extent they had infiltrated conventional human society. So how did an artificially-created monstrosity come to possess a Social Security number? Had it stolen the identity of a real (presumably now deceased) Winston Bayliss? Or were the cards simply forgeries?

How was he supposed to picture this? An inhuman monster living a quiet life in a small Pennsylvania town, waiting for the right moment to strike? Or, even more absurdly, an inhuman monster churning out fake ID on a clandestine printing press? And why had Bayliss (call him that for now) carried these documents to the farmhouse, knowing they might fall into Ethan’s hands?

But those were only footnotes to the larger question: Why had Bayliss shown up, unarmed and apparently defenseless?

It’s chilly out here, the creature had said. May I come in and speak to you?

And it had said something else:

You know what I am.

“Yeah, I know what you are.” Living alone had given Ethan the habit of thinking out loud. His voice bounced between the walls of the farm house kitchen. “And I know it’s no use listening to you.”

No use at all, because—if Ethan’s research and the conjectures of the Correspondence Society were correct—it wouldn’t be “Winston Bayliss” who did the talking. It would be the hypercolony itself, using Winston as its puppet. And the hypercolony would lie. More precisely, it would say what ever advanced its interests. The distinction between truth and falsehood was irrelevant to the hypercolony, perhaps even imperceptible to it. It generated human language solely for the purpose of manipulating human behavior.

Would Ethan discover anything useful by listening to it talk?

He guessed there was only one way to find out.

“What are you doing with that pistol, Professor Iverson?” the simulacrum asked.

It was awake again. The creature was still securely bound to the chair, wearing nothing but its underwear and taut ribbons of duct tape. Its head was immobilized, but it managed to dart sidelong glances at Ethan and at the revolver Ethan wanted it to see. The creature looked convincingly like a frightened, slightly pudgy Caucasian man shivering in the cool air of the cellar.

Ethan didn’t answer its question. His first order of business was to make absolutely sure that what he had here was one of the green-on-the-inside men, not some misguided or demented human being. He aimed the pistol at a point between the knee and the ankle of the creature’s left leg.

“Wait,” Bayliss said. “You don’t need to do that.”

Ethan pulled the trigger. The detonation was painfully loud in the enclosed space of the cellar. The bullet passed through Bayliss’s leg and cratered into the floor beneath him. Ethan ignored the ringing in his ears and assessed the results. Bright red blood gushed from the wound, along with a slower pulse of green viscous material. A sliver of bone showed through the damaged tissue, pale and moist.

After the gunshot, Bayliss’s expression became impassive and thoughtful. Ethan knelt and wrapped the wound with more duct tape to staunch the bleeding, wrinkling his nose at the rotting-flower stink of the green matter.

“That wasn’t necessary,” Bayliss said.

On the contrary. Now Ethan knew for sure what he was dealing with. “You said you wanted to tell me something.”

The simulacrum hesitated as if considering its answer, but Ethan put that down as theater: these creatures lied with gestures as easily as with words. “We have a common interest, Professor Iverson. It’s complicated—”

Ethan put the barrel of the pistol to the creature’s head. “Just speak.”

“You know what I am. I’m the same sort of thing that killed so many of your colleagues seven years ago. But I represent a different interest.”

“That makes no sense.”

“Most of what the Correspondence Society conjectured is true. The radio-reflective layer around the Earth is an active, living entity—that was a clever deduction and a correct one. It constitutes the body of what you call the hypercolony. The hypercolony is a living thing, another correct conjecture. But like any living thing, the hypercolony is mortal. It’s also subject to infection and predation. I represent an autonomous parasitical network that has infected the hypercolony and is struggling to control it. My interests are inimical to the hypercolony’s interests. I believe you’re capable of understanding that. That’s why I came to you unarmed and alone.”

The sim had simply reiterated what the Society had already inferred, with the addition of that claim about a “parasitical network.” Ethan would consider the plausibility of it some other time. “What exactly do you want?”

“I want your help. I can explain, but I’ll need more time.”

“Why would I help you do anything?”

“It would prevent a humanitarian catastrophe. And it might save the life of your niece.”

Startled, Ethan tightened his finger on the trigger of the pistol.

“That wasn’t a threat,” Bayliss said.

“What do you know about my niece?”

“It’s not safe here. It’s not safe for either of us. Take me away, and I’ll explain.

Of the many humiliating aspects of Ethan’s life since the events of 2007, perhaps the most demeaning was the veneer of craziness he had been obliged to assume. He refused to own a telephone, a television or a radio; he lived inside a lunatic’s cordon of security devices; he maintained an arsenal of handguns and rifles in his attic; and now there was a captive in his cellar, bound with duct tape and shot through the leg. How would that look to an outsider? Nothing short of rabidly, dangerously, self-evidently psychopathic.

It had been years since he had socialized with anyone who shared his ideas. Most of his old friends and colleagues were dead or isolated. Should he need to defend his sanity, he could call no living witnesses. He still had his letters, his Society papers, his unpublished research. But those would have looked as about as crazy as he appeared to be.

His ex-wife Nerissa would have understood all this, as would any of the surviving families of Correspondence Society insiders, and in his loneliness he had been sorely tempted to talk to her—but there was no way Ethan could get in touch without putting her at risk. He had remained in contact with the Society’s financial and intellectual leader, Werner Beck, but only by mail… and Beck was, if anything, more complexly paranoid than Ethan himself.

The sim calling itself Winston Bayliss had implied that the life of Ethan’s niece, Cassie, was somehow at risk. Like everything else the creature said, that might be a lie. Sickeningly, however, it might equally well be true. Ethan hadn’t seen his sister-in-law’s daughter for seven years now. He remembered Cassie as a quiet child, moody but thoughtful and easy to like. She would have turned eigh teen this year.

What did the hypercolony want with Cassie Iverson?

The question was probably unanswerable, a distraction. Coming up from the cellar to the kitchen, he glanced at the clock. An hour had passed since the sim’s arrival. Too long. He pictured himself dousing the floor of the farm house with kerosene—he kept jerricans of it in the barn where his car was parked—and setting it on fire. Burn the farm house, burn the barn, burn Winston Bayliss. Get behind the wheel of his old Ford and drive away. The charred bones and skull in the cellar, if they were discovered, would raise questions, but by then Ethan would be long gone… and he doubted any merely human agency could track him down.

But if the best he could hope for was to live out the rest of his life in some new and even more hermetic state of solitude, he might as well burn himself along with the building.

I want your help, Winston Bayliss had said. It might save the life of your niece.

But the thing in the cellar couldn’t be trusted. That was the bottom line.

He cradled the pistol in his hand. Killing the sim might be a tactical error, but it was the closest thing to revenge he would ever be able to take.

He was headed for the cellar when the alarm sounded a second time.

5

_{ON THE ROAD}

LEO, WHOSE FATHER MADE SURE HE received every year a generous selection of fake ID and matching credit cards, rented a room in a roadside motel. The motel—pine forest on three sides, an empty pool behind a chain-link fence—was shabby but quiet in the off-season. Leo and Beth had signed in as a couple, so Cassie had to hurry from the car to the room with Thomas on one hand and her suitcase in the other in order not to be seen from the lobby. Sunset was fading from a cloudless sky, and although Cassie took only a cursory interest in astronomy she guessed the bright star on the horizon was the planet Venus. She caught a glimpse of it as the door closed behind her. One clear, cold eye.

The air of the room carried an undernote of mildew and Lysol. There was a small TV on the pitted and ring-stained dresser, and Thomas gazed at it with undisguised longing. Aunt Ris had not owned a TV set, on principle. Cassie had occasionally attempted to raise counter-arguments—even if television broadcasts were subtly deceptive, you could watch them as long as you kept that in mind, couldn’t you?—but her aunt’s ban had been non-negotiable.

Cassie guessed she understood. All radio and television signals were bounced through the radiosphere. That had been true since the days of Marconi and Edison. She remembered a photograph from her high-school history text, of Marconi and a crew of assistants at an experimental antenna station in Newfoundland, demonstrating what they called “resonant contact” with a sister station in the French town of Saint-Malo. Marconi’s feeble signals had been amplified by the radiosphere and accurately recorded by his counterparts in France. Of course, no one in those days had called it the radiosphere. “Radiosphere” was a term devised in the 1920s: a high-altitude boundary layer that had the surprisingly useful effect of propagating radio signals around the circumference of the Earth, depending on signal strength and frequency. What this layer was made of and how it worked remained open theoretical questions (in fact research was subtly discouraged), but broadcast engineers had rushed to exploit it. Global radio broadcasts had begun after the Great War, in 1921. Primitive black-and-white television broadcasting followed in 1935. Cassie had seen one of those vintage receivers for sale in a dusty antique shop: a comically small glass screen in a comically large wooden case; the proprietor had claimed it still worked.

So all radio and television was modulated by the radiosphere, as everyone knew. What everyone didn’t know was that the radiosphere was the distributed body of a living entity, and that the signals passing through it didn’t necessarily pass unaltered.

Three years ago Cassie had discovered a box of Correspondence Society monographs buried in the hallway cupboard where Aunt Ris kept the things she couldn’t bear to throw away but never looked at. The papers had belonged to Cassie’s parents; perhaps they had come to Aunt Ris after the murders, as a macabre heirloom, much like Cassie herself. Therefore she had had no compunction about rooting through the box and reading anything that captured her attention.

Most of the monographs had been incomprehensible to her, with titles like “Intracellular Signaling in Isolated Etheric Cell Cultures,” and these she quickly set aside. But one of the papers concerned TV broadcasting, and she had understood almost every word of it. The author, a television engineer, had compared studio recordings of nightly news programs with his own recordings of the same programs as they appeared after they had been broadcast. (Cassie imagined him poring over the footage frame by frame, with the sort of fanatical attention Thomas brought to the puzzles in his puzzle books—find five differences between these pictures.) In each case, the changes he discovered were numerous but dauntingly subtle. The most blatant example was a glitch (a momentary blackout) that obscured the spoken word “hatred” in a report about ethnic tension in Uganda. The least obvious were countless small but measurable modifications of the image and voice of the news hosts and reporters. What these subtle alteration of expression and inflection were meant to achieve the author couldn’t say, though he noted “a general softening of emotional affect.” It was really just one more data point in what Cassie had come to think of as the mysteries of the hypercolony (which was what Society documents called the collection of tiny living cells that comprised the radiosphere), but it helped explain her aunt’s distrust of television and radio. What emerged from the speaker or appeared on the screen was tainted, poisonous, a subtle and insidious lie.

Cassie understood and agreed, but Aunt Ris’s absolutism had still annoyed her. TV couldn’t be trusted, but did that mean it shouldn’t be watched? The shows people talked about at school sounded interesting, and Cassie was treated as slightly dim for not having seen them. Thomas’s exposure to television had been the same: it was a rare treat, forbidden for reasons he didn’t entirely understand and often resented.

Thomas looked at the motel-room TV, then at Cassie. Cassie sighed. “Go ahead,” she said. “Turn it on.” (It wasn’t as if it watched you.) Moments later Thomas was sitting cross-legged on the bed, smiling at the dumb jokes on Piggy’s Island, a sitcom about a group of shipwrecked British schoolboys.

On the dresser next to the TV was a telephone, white plastic gone the color of old bone. It was another device less useful to Cassie than to ordinary people. An ordinary person could pick up the receiver and make a call without a second thought, not caring that all calls, even local ones, were routinely routed through the radiosphere. If she were an ordinary person Cassie could have tried to call Aunt Ris. But such a call would be insanely risky, endangering both parties. Better not to think about Aunt Ris at all, if she could help it.

Leo and Beth retreated to the back of the room, talking in tones too low for Cassie to hear. Beth shot periodic aggrieved glances at Cassie, while Leo spoke slowly and showed her the palms of his big hands. Cassie ignored them.

Eventually Leo grabbed his jacket. “Beth and I are going out to pick up some food. Anything you guys need while we’re out?”

Not really. Cassie’s emergency suitcase was well and wisely packed. “Let me chip in,” she said, going for her purse.

“To night’s on me. Save your money. We might need to pool our resources later.”

Moments later Cassie was alone with her little brother. She forced herself to pay attention to Piggy’s Island. The two protagonists, Piggy and Ralph, had discovered a parachutist stuck in a treetop. Their attempts to get him down somehow involved pelting him with coconuts. Thomas watched somberly and laughed only once, a sound Cassie found startling in the wintry silence.

After an hour of television Thomas started to look drowsy, but the sound of voices as Beth and Leo came in—not to mention the smell of the pizza—brought him back to ready alertness. He grabbed two slices from the box and settled back in front of the TV.

Beth ate a little, then announced she wanted a shower. As soon as she had locked herself into bathroom, Leo asked Cassie to step outside. Cassie was surprised and immediately apprehensive. Bad news, she suspected. Maybe Beth convinced Leo to dump her and Thomas at the nearest bus depot. And if so, she thought, so be it. She left Thomas to his pizza and joined Leo in the darkness just beyond the door, her woolen jacket draped over her shoulders. She waited stoically for the dismissal.

Leo took a cigarette from the pack in his pocket. He lit it, shook out the match, gazed at the pine tops silhouetted against a moon-blue sky. “Don’t mind Beth,” he said, breathing smoke into the November air. “She’s dealing with what happened to her father. What might have happened to him. No love lost there, but… you know.”

“I guess,” Cassie said.

For most of her adolescence Cassie had been aware of Leo and Beth. They had been part of the older contingent of Society offspring, not quite in her circle. The Society survivors who had come to Buffalo were like family: quarrelsome, not always close, bound by shared secrets. Leo usually ignored her at the periodic gatherings, but she had made a careful study of him.

His tobacco habit, for instance. He smoked, Cassie suspected, for the same reason he carried around paperback editions of bohemian novels, for the same reason he affected an interest in the music played in downtown clubs and coffee houses: it defined him as other in a way that required no explanation. It made his otherness seem like a choice.

But at least for to night he had dropped the act. He coughed and said, “It’s pretty obvious Beth isn’t happy about you and Thomas coming along for the ride.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I just wanted to say, you shouldn’t blame her. She can’t see past her own unhappiness. She’ll calm down sooner or later. So don’t take it personally.” He took more smoke into his lungs and let it seep from his nostrils. A truck rumbled past on the highway. “Do what you want, Cassie, but I think we ought to stick together at least until we get to Ohio.”

Which was slightly surprising. “Until we see your father, you mean.”

“Right. Because it’s different this time. If the sims are going after people like your aunt, they must be going after everybody who knows anything at all about the Society. You, me, Beth—even Thomas. Do you have a plan to deal with that?”

“I have two sets of ID and I’m of legal age. I have enough cash to get by for now. I can find work somewhere and just… blend in.”

“Blend in,” Leo repeated, with a smile Cassie found irksome. “Are you sure the ID hasn’t been compromised?”

She shrugged. “Can’t be sure of anything.”

“Which is why I think we’re better off watching each other’s back. At least until Ohio.”

“I guess. Okay, so what happens in Ohio? What do you expect to find when you knock on your father’s door?”

Leo dropped the cigarette and ground it under his heel, then parked his hands in his jacket pockets. “You know my father’s reputation.”

“Just that he has deep pockets. And some strong ideas.”

“Of all the people who lived through ’07, he was the only one who wanted to do something more than turn tail and hide. He told me once, the sims wouldn’t have come for us if they weren’t afraid of us. And if they’re afraid of us that means we must have the power to hurt them. Hurt it.” He turned his face to the sky. “That thing. Wouldn’t you like to hurt it, Cassie?”

“If I thought we could. Sure. But—”

“What?”

“Well, I have Thomas to look after. Also, no offence, but I’m not sure you know what you’re talking about.”

Leo’s sharp look morphed into a smile. “You’re right about your little brother. But stick with us, Cassie. I mean it. Stick with us at least until we’re sure we’re not being followed. Maybe until you get a chance to talk to my father, if…”

“If he’s alive.”

“If he’s alive. After that you can find yourself a job in one of these dumb little towns. If that’s really what you want.” He opened the door to the room and held it for Cassie as she stepped back inside.

They’re not dumb little towns, she thought. If saying so made Leo feel superior to the people who lived in them, so be it. But he was wrong. And at the root of the wrongness was envy.

All those little towns out there in the dark, she thought, and all those cities, too, all the people behind their yellow windows taking for granted the sanity and predictability of things in general. It would be easy and satisfying simply to hate them. But Cassie remembered too well the time when her own life had been like that, when she had been unambiguously proud to stand up on Armistice Day and salute the flags of the United States and the League of Nations and everything they seemed to represent: the century of peace, the inexorable advance of freedom and prosperity. Things she still wanted to believe in.

Thomas sat slumped on the bed, his eyes drifting closed though they were still fixed on the television screen. A news broadcast had come on, a woman in a neat blue suit talking about crop failures in Tanzania. Massive shipments from the International Grain Reserve had arrived at the port of Dar es Salaam. The newscaster’s expression conveyed her sympathy. But that could have been an adjustment performed by the hypercolony, a subtle enhancement, what movie people called a special effect.

Beth came out of the bathroom wrapped in a towel, water dripping from her hair to her shoulders. “Turn that shit off,” she told Cassie. “And get your brother off the fucking bed. I need some sleep.”

6

_{RURAL VERMONT}

ETHAN GRABBED HIS PISTOL—FULLY loaded apart from the round he had already fired into the leg of the creature in the cellar—and hurried to the door. He was in time to see a grimy blue Ford Elektra bumping down the unpaved access road. It pulled up nearly at his doorstep, the rear end fishtailing in a cloud of dust. The driver’s side door flew open and a woman stepped out. A shock of recognition left Ethan blinking.

Nerissa.

Seven years since he had last seen her. Even then, in the months before the murders, they had been living separately, only technically husband and wife. And even now, the sight of her provoked an upwelling of nostalgia and longing that was hard to suppress. He lowered the pistol and stepped onto the porch.

Her taste in clothing hadn’t changed, though she’d obviously dressed in a hurry. She wore blue jeans, a plaid cotton shirt, and a wide orange scarf that dangled to her hips. A pair of glasses—those were new; she used to favor contacts—amplified her already large eyes. She was older now, of course, but apart from a few trivial lines she looked pretty much the way she had when he first met her at a faculty party in Amherst.

She walked steadily toward him as his initial rush of plea sure soured into dread. She came up the steps onto the porch. Then she was inches from him and he had no choice but to take her in his arms.

“Jesus,” he whispered. “Ris, Ris—it’s not safe here!”

She accepted the embrace, then stepped back from it. “I came for a reason, Ethan.”

“You don’t understand. You have to leave. The sooner the better. I’m leaving.”

“Then we’ll leave together. This is about Cassie.”

Not the first time today his niece’s name had come up. He tried to meet her eyes and couldn’t. “You’d better come in,” he said.

Her name had been Nerissa Stewart the day he met her, and by the end of the faculty mixer he realized he had fallen in love—if not with her, exactly, since he hardly knew her, then with her quick curiosity and the way she squinted at him as if he were a puzzle she wanted to solve. She was an English instructor specializing in William Blake, an English poet whose work Ethan had not read since a high-school encounter with Blake’s Tyger, and Ethan’s work in entomology had been equally bewildering to her. Later he would say he could find no truth in poetry and she could discover no poetry in invertebrates. But that was a packaged answer for people who asked about their separation. In fact, during the few years they were together, they had shared more than a few poetic truths.

And in the seven years since the last time he had spoken to her Ethan had rehearsed their reunion countless times. It was a fantasy he found shameful but couldn’t resist, especially when he was locked in by winter snow and helpless before the momentum of his own thoughts. Sometimes these fantasies were erotic: the sex had always been good, a foundation stone in the otherwise flimsy architecture of their marriage, and it was difficult not to replay those scenes when the wind came butting against the walls of the farm house like an angry bull. On easier days he might imagine apologizing to her, forgiving her, being forgiven by her, laughing with her or listening to her laugh. But none of that mattered now. There was urgent business between them. The old business, the inevitable business.

“Cassie’s gone,” she said. “I mean, missing. I can explain, but… do you have coffee? I haven’t had a coffee since yesterday. I drove here without sleep. Could use a bathroom break, too.”

He apologized for the condition of the bathroom, and while she was in it he tried to organize his whirling thoughts. Cassie was missing. Which meant Ethan wasn’t the only one who had received a visit. The terror had started again. That fucking thing in the cellar! He had let it live—that had been a mistake, one he would soon correct. But he needed to talk to Nerissa first: listen to her, offer what advice he could, help her get away safely. And quickly.

She came back to the kitchen table and accepted a cup of lukewarm coffee without looking at it. Before he could assemble his thoughts she said, “I know you weren’t expecting me. I could hardly warn you. I wasn’t even sure you’d still be here. You gave me this address a long time ago. I was afraid you’d moved on. It’s strange for me, too, being here, seeing you. But I came because of Cassie. Let me tell you what happened, what was it, my God, just two days ago. Then we can decide what to do about it.”

“Time is an issue here.”

“Then just let me talk.”

Nerissa told him she had been away from her apartment the night a simulacrum came to Liberty Street. The next morning—arriving home to find the apartment empty and a dire note from Cassie taped to the refrigerator door—she had canvassed the neighbors and reconstructed what had happened. In the early hours of the morning and well before dawn, a man had been killed in a traffic accident directly outside the apartment. The neighbors’ halting “you won’t believe this” descriptions made it clear that the dead man had been a simulacrum.

Cassie, always a light sleeper, must have witnessed the event. And Cassie—like all the children of survivor families—had been trained to react instantly to the appearance of a sim.

“She would have assumed it was coming to kill her. And maybe it was. So she took Thomas and her suitcase and went to the nearest Society contact to warn him. Unfortunately, the nearest contact was Leo Beck.”

“Werner’s son?”

“Leo’s twenty-two years old now, and he’s as much a contrarian as his father. Society people were all the family he ever really had, but I think he hated us as much as he loved us. He was popular with Cassie’s cohort, though. I guess he seemed less, I don’t know, passive than the rest of us.”

Werner Beck, Leo’s father, had taken a similar position. Werner believed the hypercolony might be vulnerable to human attack, that the Correspondence Society’s accumulated knowledge constituted a weapon that could be used against it. And it was an attractive idea, Ethan thought. At least until you began to calculate the potential cost in human lives.

“When Cassie told him about the sim, Leo must have assumed we were all under attack—that sims had been sent to wipe out every last remnant of the Society.”

“Are you sure that’s not true?”

“Of course I’m not sure. Everyone’s terrified. The protocol we set up for this situation was, if you come under attack and survive, you warn one person, then you disappear. I’m guessing the sim who died on Liberty Street was meant for me. So I talked to Edie Forsythe, who convinced me to stay with her until she talked to Sue Nakamura, who talked to—well, it went around the circle. And as far as we can tell, only two sims ever showed up. One was killed outside my apartment; the other was shot in the head by John Vance when it knocked at his door, asking for a conversation, if you can believe that. The sim John shot was unarmed, by the way. The one who was run down, I don’t know. All very strange. But Leo bolted, and he took John’s daughter, Beth, and Cassie along with him.”

A simulacrum, unarmed and asking for a conversation… “Still, Ris. You shouldn’t have come here.”

“I’m not finished. The thing is, Leo idolizes his father. They’ve stayed in close contact. Everyone who knows Leo figures he’s on the way to join Werner, maybe help Werner conduct what ever paranoid project he has in mind.”

“Maybe so, but—”

“Just listen. Apart from his son, Werner Beck keeps his distance from survivor families. He writes occasionally, he sends money, he supplies us with fake ID on a regular basis, but none of that comes with a return address. But you’re a full-fledged Society insider and you were always one of his favorites—you must know how to contact him. And if you do know, you have to tell me where he is, because we have to go there. We have to go there, Ethan. We have to go there and get Cassie and take her home.”

She sat back in her chair and swiped her hair away from her eyes with a flick of her left hand, a gesture he had forgotten but which was instantly familiar.

“Ris… the situation is more complicated than you might think.”

She looked at him impatiently.

“I had a visitor, too,” he said.

It was the survivors of ’07 who had coined the word “simulacrum” to describe their attackers. In his monographs Werner Beck sometimes called them “myrmidons.” The reference was to Ovid’s Metamorphosis, a passage in which Zeus turns ants into human beings in order to repopulate the country of Aegina. Ethan appreciated the insect reference, and as a literary scholar Nerissa would have recognized the allusion—but no one else did; simulacrum (or sim) had become the accepted word.

He told Nerissa as concisely as possible about the sim in the cellar, how it had shown up on his doorstep and what it had asked for and what it had offered him in return. She listened with careful attention and seemed surprised but not shocked until he got to the part about shooting it in the leg: “You really did that?”

“I had to be sure it wasn’t human. Is that hard to understand?”

“No, it’s just—I remember how you always hated guns.”

He still did. To Ethan, holding a firearm felt like assuming a responsibility no sane human being should want to accept. But after moving into the farm house he had signed up for a target and safety course at a shooting range outside of Jacobstown, where he discovered he had a modest talent for marksmanship. He had grown accustomed to the heft of the pistol in his hand in the same way he had grown inured to the shooting-range stink of raw plywood and scorched steel. Hunting deer with a long gun had been a more difficult act to stomach. The act of killing sickened him. But he had hardened himself to that, too. “It’s been a few years. I learned some things.”

“I’m sorry. Go on. What did the sim say?”

“It mentioned Cassie—”

“What—it knew her name? My God, why didn’t you tell me this?”

“I am telling you.”

“Jesus, Ethan!” She stood up, nearly knocking over her chair. “And the thing is still alive?”

“Yeah, but—”

“I need to talk to it.”

“Ris, it can’t tell the truth—it can’t distinguish between truth and lies. You know that. It uses words to manipulate people.”

“Yes, that was your theory, wasn’t it? Yours and Werner Beck’s.”

“It’s how the hypercolony works.”

“But it might be telling the truth.”

“If we try to interrogate it, we’re only giving it an opportunity to manipulate us.”

“So why haven’t you killed it?”

Good question. Because it has a human-seeming face? Because I’m as easy to manipulate as anyone else? “I was about to do that when you drove up.”

“I still want to talk to it.”

“Ris—”

“Now! We can’t afford to waste time.”

Of course they could not. He led her to the windowless cellar.

7

_{ON THE ROAD}

THAT FIRST NIGHT, LEO DICTATED WHERE everyone would sleep. He insisted that Cassie and Beth share the double bed, which they did, though Beth was ungracious about it. The cheap sofa pushed against the wall of the motel room was big enough for Thomas, who curled up with a spare sweater for a pillow and Cassie’s winter coat for a blanket. He fell asleep instantly. Leo insisted on sleeping on the floor. It was a silly gallantry—there was room in the bed for three—but Cassie guessed it was a well-intended gesture.

The next two days were slow repetitions of their first day on the road. Leo bought a Rand-McNally road map and calculated a route he called “indirect,” a drunkard’s walk on two-lane blacktop, meant to confuse anyone who might have followed them from Buffalo. And it was Leo who did most of the driving, though Cassie took the wheel for an hour or two each day and Beth did the same. They ate at roadside diners or small-town restaurants. It seemed to Cassie that they passed through dozens of identical towns, a town where every river met a creek, and in each one she was tempted to get out of the car, take Thomas to the nearest bus station and buy a ticket for some destination she could barely envision—Terra Haute, Cincinnati, Wheeling: a place where she could be nobody in particular, a place where she would never have to think of the Correspondence Society.

But that was a fantasy, and Cassie was quick to dismiss it. After a day on the road, and a second, and a third, bitter reality set in. Beth and Leo were both dealing with the possibility that they had been orphaned: Beth had seen the stretcher being carried from her father’s building, and Leo was driving toward what might well turn out to be a murder scene. Cassie was already an orphan (a word she despised), but now she might have lost Aunt Ris and should probably assume she had. On the second day of their road trip Leo stopped at a diner that sold newspapers from across the country, The New York Times, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the Buffalo News. Cassie picked up the News and scanned it, but there was nothing about any murders; the Liberty Street accident had gone unreported and she found no familiar names in the obituary columns. But that proved nothing. Nothing at all.

All we have, she thought, is each other. Leo and Beth, Cassie and Thomas. What bound them together was uncertainty and dread. And guilt—especially after the third day, the day they bloodied their hands.

It started with Leo’s paranoia and a confession from Beth.

Cassie failed to notice anything amiss until they pulled out of the parking lot of the motel where they had spent the night. She had slept badly and so had Thomas. During her wakeful moments, which seemed to arrive every half hour or so, she had seen her little brother tossing restlessly or lying passively awake, his eyes scanning the moonlit borders of the room. So far Thomas had been almost inhumanly patient, seldom complaining even when he was hungry or tired. But maybe that wasn’t a good thing. It might be a symptom of emotional shock. This morning his eyes were red and bruised-looking, and he refused breakfast—a granola bar and a bottle of orange juice—when she offered it to him. Today would be different, she told him. Today, Leo had said, they were going to get back on the Interstate and head directly for the place where Werner Beck lived. No more meandering back roads. But Thomas only shrugged.

Leo was almost as quiet as he drove from the motel lot onto the two-lane county road. From where she sat all Cassie could see of Leo him was the back of his head and his reflection in the rearview mirror. He kept glancing at the mirror and at Beth beside him as the road unreeled under trees with branches like outstretched fingers and a sky as flat as tinted glass.

After a while he broke the silence: “Any of you notice a guy in a dark suit, big glasses, old-fashioned hat?”

“Notice him where?” Cassie asked.

“Anywhere we stopped—restaurants, motels?”

Cassie hadn’t noticed anyone like that. Beth shook her head. Thomas ignored the question and gazed indifferently out the side window.

“Because he was in the lobby when I was checking out,” Leo said. “And he looked kind of familiar. I thought maybe… I don’t know. Maybe it doesn’t matter.”

“You think we might have been followed?”

Leo frowned. Cassie had come to appreciate that frown, the way it bracketed his mouth. Back in Buffalo, among survivors, she had seen him escalate trivial arguments to the point of shouting, a quality she hated in him. But out here on the road Leo had shown a more thoughtful side. The frown signaled a mood more quizzical than angry. “It’s possible,” he said. “We have to be careful, right?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Always. Of course.” But she honestly didn’t remember a guy with big glasses and a hat.

Twenty minutes later Leo glanced at the mirror and cursed. Cassie craned her head to check the road: there was a car behind them, far enough away that it disappeared when the road curved and reappeared when it straightened. A midnight-blue car, high-tailed and salted with road dust. It looked like it might be a few years old, though Cassie didn’t know about cars and couldn’t name the make or model. “Same as yesterday,” Leo muttered.

“You’ve seen that car before?”

“Or one just like it. Fuck!”

“So pull over,” Beth suggested. “Pull over and let it pass.”

Leo waited until they reached a gas station, a little two-pump depot where he could idle inconspicuously for a couple of minutes. Cassie and Thomas hunkered down, but Cassie kept her head high enough to see the car as it went by. It didn’t slow. It didn’t speed up. It just whooshed past, neatly centered in the right lane. There was a single driver at the wheel: a middle-aged man wearing oversized eyeglasses and a dowdy, old-fashioned hat.

They sat for ten more minutes before Leo pulled out of the gas station, grit crackling under the tires as he steered back onto the road. He said, “It’s possible we’ve been discovered. So don’t take offence, but I have to ask: did either of you—or Thomas—maybe try to call home, find out what happened back in Buffalo?”

In truth, Cassie had been tempted. In every room they stayed in, every restaurant where they ate, there had been a telephone in plain sight. She was always just one call away from knowing whether Aunt Ris had lived or died. So yeah, it was a constant irrational temptation, like putting poisoned food on a plate in front of a hungry person. But she wasn’t stupid enough to dig in. “No,” she said.

“Thomas? How about you?”

The question seemed to startle him. “What?”

“Call anybody on the phone lately?”

“No! Not since we left.”

“Are you sure about that? It’s okay to tell me. I’m not pissed or anything. I just need to know, right?”

“Right,” Thomas said uncertainly.

“So did you call somebody, talk to somebody?”

“No. But she did.”

She—Beth.

“Fucking little liar!” Beth said promptly.

“I saw her.”

“Nobody cares what you think you saw!”

Leo took his right hand off the wheel and put it on Beth’s thigh, to reassure her or to keep her quiet, Cassie couldn’t tell which. “When was this?”

Thomas gave Cassie a questioning look.

“Go on,” she said quietly. “Tell him. It’s okay.”

“At the motel. Two nights ago.”

“In the room?”

“After dinner. Outside. She was at a phone booth.”

“I was having a smoke,” Beth said. “Come on, Leo, this is bullshit!”

“You saw her use the phone?”

Thomas hesitated before he spoke. “I don’t know. I thought so. I was looking through the window. It was kind of dark. But it looked like she picked up the phone.”

“I was in the phone booth,” Beth said, “having a fucking smoke, all right?”

The car rolled on, silent apart from the growl of the engine and the asthmatic murmur of the heater. “I’m not passing judgment on anybody,” Leo said. “I just need to know. I mean, it wasn’t snowing or raining—you needed to go into a phone booth to have a smoke?”

After a longer and even weightier silence Beth said, “I never actually talked to anybody!”

“Okay, I guess I understand that. But you called?”

“I just thought… I’m talking about my father… if he picked up, at least I’d know he wasn’t dead.”

“Okay. And… did he?”

“Did he what?”

“Answer.”

“Oh. Well—no.”

“Uh-huh.”

Beth bit her lip and stared out the window. “I’m sorry. It was stupid. I know that. It won’t happen again.”

“Yeah, good.” Leo took his hand off her leg. “See that it doesn’t.”

The road curved through hilly, wooded land toward the Interstate. A few weeks ago, Cassie thought, the hills would have been gaudy with autumn colors, but November had stripped all the trees and burned the meadows brown.

Leo pulled off at a roadside stop, a gravel parking lot and a pair of cinderblock restrooms overlooking a broad valley. Away and below, a river stitched a quilt of forested allotments and freehold farms. The river must have a name, Cassie thought, but she didn’t know what it was. A pair of turkey buzzards drew circles in the cloudless sky.

Cassie and Thomas left the car, ostensibly to look at the view, really to let Leo and Beth talk in private.

Cassie had never been close to Beth but she felt sorry for her now. For more than a year, at gatherings of survivor families, Cassie had watched Beth deliberately and systematicallyingratiate herself with Leo, repeating his opinions as if she had always shared them, smiling when he smiled and sneering at what ever he disliked. Her hostility toward her father, her impatience with the timid and cloistered survivor world, even her raggedy-cuff Levi’s and thrift-shop costume jewelry, all had been calculated to capture Leo’s sympathy. And Leo had happily bought the act, much to Cassie’s disgust.

But a few days on the road had fractured Beth’s pretensions. Maybe Beth had resented her father, but she had cared enough about him to risk a phone call. And as stupid as that act may have been, Cassie understood it and sympathized with it.

“I wish we could just go home.” Thomas tossed a pebble and listened as it bounced down the slope toward the valley. He leaned over the plastic mesh fence meant to keep tourists from falling and hurting themselves. Not that there were any tourists this time of year.

“Yeah, I know,” Cassie said. “So do I.”

“So when do you think we’ll actually live somewhere?”

“It might take time. Try to patient, okay?”

Thomas nodded. Of course, he had already been heroically patient. “I think Beth hates us.”

“She acts like it. But really she’s just scared.”

“So? I’m scared too. That doesn’t mean I have to behave like an asshole.”

Cassie laughed. “You have a point there.”

Was she underestimating Thomas, treating him too much like a child? When Cassie was Thomas’s age she had dreamed of joining the Youth Corps, the branch of the League that sent young people to monitor elections in remote countries where new parliaments were being formed. She had pictured herself defending ballot boxes from marauding bandits (which of course Corps volunteers never really did). The murder of her parents had driven all such thoughts from her mind. Was it possible Thomas harbored some similar ambition? Could he, after all that had happened?

She was tempted to ask him. But before she could speak Thomas turned up his face, frowning and attentive. “Car coming,” he said.

Cassie heard it a second later. She turned apprehensively, spooked by everything Leo had said. To her dismay, the car pulled into the scenic overlook and parked in a spot next to the restrooms. It was the car Leo said had been following them, or a close match. The driver’s-side door opened. A middle-aged man got out, stretching and massaging the small of his back. He wore big glasses and an old-fashioned hat.

The man who may or may not have been following them walked into the men’s restroom. Cassie and Thomas scrambled back to the car. Leo and Beth got out, and Leo opened the trunk and began rummaging for something in one of his bags. He was tense and his arms moved jerkily. When he stood away from the bumper Cassie saw that he had found what he was looking for, a handgun.

That Leo carried a pistol was no surprise. His father would have encouraged him to keep one, might even have helped him acquire it, legally or illegally. But she was dismayed to see him holding it. It suggested possibilities she didn’t care to think about. Even Leo seemed intimidated by it. The weapon trembled in his hand.

He meant to confront the man, Cassie realized, and she could tell by his expression that there would be no arguing about it. Wisely or not, Leo would do this. She could only watch. Or help.

If he had a plan he didn’t stop to discuss it. Cassie, Thomas and Beth crouched behind the car while Leo posted himself outside the restroom door and made a shushing gesture, finger to lips. Cassie looked at Thomas, who had gone so bug-eyed she was afraid he might panic, but he held his body motionless and kept his mouth firmly closed. Was there some way to protect him? The man with the big glasses might be armed, too, if he was a sim. But there was nowhere better to hide than here, unless she wanted to tumble down the slope of the hill or run across the road to a stand of trees. Minutes passed, and Cassie became acutely aware of the cold air, the sun on her shoulders, the oily smell of the car and the beating of her heart. At last the crude wooden door of the restroom swung open and the man with the hat stepped out, blinking in the afternoon light. Belatedly, he registered the presence of Leo and offered a squinty, quizzical smile.

Leo came at him and shoved him against the cinderblock wall, showing him the pistol. “You’ve been following us,” he said, and Cassie heard a thrum in his voice that might have been anger but more likely was fear. Now that the confrontation had started Beth stood up boldly and went to stand behind Leo; Cassie took a few steps in that direction as if drawn by some poorly-understood duty, though she told Thomas to keep out of sight.

“You’re a fucking sim,” Beth said, “aren’t you?”

The man’s eyes, watery behind the lenses of his glasses, blinked frantically. “I’m—what?” He looked at Leo, at the pistol. “What do you want? You want money?” He reached for his wallet.

“Keep your hands down,” Leo said. “We know you’ve been following us.”

“Following you?” The man seemed about to deny it; then he said, “But it’s not—I mean, yeah, I heard you asking directions to the Interstate in the lobby at the motel. That’s where I’m going. I mean, I’m shitty at following directions. So I thought if I kept your car in sight… ? That’s all it was, really. So I wouldn’t get lost! Is that a problem? I apologize. Like I said, if you want money—”

“Fuck your money!” Beth said. She stood next to Leo. “He’s lying. He’s a sim.”

“Maybe,” Leo said, “but—”

“But what? You need to take care of it!”

“Shoot him?”

“Yes! Fuck! Shoot him! Now, while there’s nobody around!”

The wind blew and the trees on the hillside rattled their leafless limbs. Cassie felt a hand on her arm. Thomas. She bent down and whispered, “Go to the car. Get in the backseat. Get down. Close your eyes. Do it!”

The man with the hat and eyeglasses was beginning to look desperate. He held his hands out, palms up, and his face was as pale as the haze hanging over the river valley. “Come on,” he said. “Hey.”

Leo aimed the pistol at the center of the man’s body. Leo’s face became a mask of concentration. His eyes narrowed. He was going to shoot, Cassie realized. He had seen the man following them, he had passed a verdict, and he was going to shoot.

“If you have to shoot him,” Cassie said, “shoot him in the leg.”

Leo’s hand wavered. Cassie couldn’t look away from the gun, Leo’s knuckles pale and pink against the anodized metal.

“If he’s a sim,” she said, “we’ll know. If not… maybe it won’t kill him.”

Leo nodded and lowered the pistol, but the sound of the gunshot when it came was so loud it made her gasp. It seemed to surprise Leo, too. He stumbled back a step, looking at the weapon as if it had burned his hand. A flock of starlings erupted from a distant tree like sudden smoke.

The man with the big glasses and the old-fashioned hat dropped to the ground. His mouth was open but no sound came out, and one hand groped at the cinderblock wall of the restroom before it reached for his leg. His right leg was shattered below the knee and Cassie was shocked to see the glint of an exposed bone. Blood pulsed from the wound in frantic gouts.

There was nothing green inside him.

Cassie’s stomach clenched. She forced herself to stand and watch, furiously scrubbing her watering eyes. Leo was immobilized, staring. Beth had backed away and stood with her spine against the wall of the restroom.

Cassie spared a glance for the road—still empty.

The man on the ground clutched his leg at the thigh with both hands. His eyes had rolled up, showing the whites. “Guh,” he said—some senseless grunt.

“Oh, he’s not,” Leo whispered, “he’s not…”

Not a sim. Cassie felt a weightless sense of clarity, as if the world had grown simple and brightly lit. “Okay, we have to stop the bleeding.”

“How?”

She had taken a first-aid course at school but it hadn’t covered gunshot wounds. “Tourniquet,” she guessed. “Make a tourniquet.”

Leo nodded and took off his belt and bent down to wrap it around the wounded man’s leg. The man didn’t resist. He was barely moving now. His big glasses were askew on his face and his hat had rolled to the verge of the slope.

Cassie remembered what she had said to Leo (shoot him in the leg) and felt sick all over again. She had never seen a person shot at close range. She had imagined a neat hole, not this wholesale butchery. But if she hadn’t said anything it would have been worse, wouldn’t it?

Leo lifted the wounded leg and doubled his belt around the man’s blood-soaked pants, but his hands shook and he couldn’t find a notch for the buckle. “Here, let me,” Cassie said. Where had this absurd calmness come from? She bent down, cinched the belt tight. The rhythmic pulse of blood from the wound began to slow. But the damage was awful. An artery must have been cut. The man needed medical help, urgently.

There was a payphone just inside the restroom entrance: Cassie could see it from where she knelt. “Beth,” she said. “Call the police.”

“What?”

“He needs an ambulance! Call the police!”

Beth looked at the payphone but didn’t move. “I don’t think we should do that. Won’t we get arrested? We’ll get arrested!”

“Beth, he’s dying.” The man’s head was tilted back, his mouth was open, he was breathing in gasps, like snores, and although his eyes were open they weren’t looking at anything. Cassie put a finger against his throat to feel his pulse. His skin was cool but slick with sweat. The beat she felt was erratic.

“Okay, wait,” Leo said. “Cassie… I didn’t mean to hurt him so bad.”

“I know.”

“He was following us. He admitted it.”

“I know! He needs help.”

“We could… maybe we could call from somewhere down the road.”

And get away cleanly, he meant. Yes, but: “There’s no time. Look at him, Leo!”

“There’s nothing we can do for him.”

“Of course not! He needs a doctor!” Then she understood: “You want to drive away and leave him here?”

“I don’t want to do it. I don’t think we have a choice.”

“No! We shot him and we have to help him! Now! Now! Right away!”

“Cassie, listen to me… what about Thomas?”

She looked around guiltily. Her brother was standing back by the car. Not close enough to see the man’s injury in any detail, but close enough that he must have witnessed the shooting. (The killing, she corrected herself: that’s what it would be if they abandoned the man here.) But yes, it was true, if the police came, if they were arrested, who would look after Thomas? How could she protect him?

The man on the ground took a gurgling breath and fell silent. His hands ceased moving and his eyes looked at blankly at the sky. Cassie registered the sudden slackness of his body. Her head filled with the sound of the wind in the leafless trees.

“Is he dead?” Beth asked.

Cassie felt for a pulse again, pointlessly. She stood up and backed away.

“We have to hide him,” Leo said. “He’ll be found sooner or later. Better for us if it’s later.”

“Hide him?” Beth asked.

Leo nodded at a place where the plastic safety barrier had been bent to the ground by weather or reckless tourists. “Help me,” he said. “Beth?”

Beth swallowed hard but nodded.

Cassie watched in disbelief as they took the man’s arms and began to drag him toward the slope. The man’s shoes left an irregular trail of blood. Cassie scuffed gravel over the pond of blood where the man had been shot, concealing the evidence. Soon her own shoes were spattered with blood. Were they forgetting something?

“His hat,” she said.

Beth came back for the man’s hat and tossed it toward the distant valley. It sailed on the wind and then dropped out of sight.

“Now roll him down,” Leo said.

“We should go through his pockets first.”

Cassie turned away. She couldn’t bear to watch Leo turning the corpse on its side so Beth could extract the dead man’s wallet. She walked back to the car, to Thomas, trying not to hear the sound (though she could hardly ignore it) of the man’s body tumbling downhill through clumps of wild sumac and brittle brown grass. The noise dwindled and finally stopped. Somewhere in the woods a crow called out.

Later—after dark, the road unwinding under a shimmer of stars—Beth summoned the courage to look at what she had taken from the dead man’s pockets and stuck into her purse: A leather billfold. A couple of hundred dollars in cash. And a prescription bottle of a drug called Bisoprolol. “It’s a heart drug,” Leo said. “He must have had a condition.”

Leo dumped the billfold and the pills (all identifying labels removed) into a trash bin outside a post office in a nameless little town where all the stores were closed for the night. Later, at a twenty-four-hour gas station convenience shop off the Interstate, Beth used some of the dead man’s cash to buy a selection of fresh and dry food, which she secured in the trunk of Leo’s car.

Cassie sat in the backseat with Thomas as they drove on. During the night Thomas asked her whether the man with big glasses was really dead. “Yes,” she told him. No point in lying. Thomas could be protected from many things, but not from this obvious truth.

Since then her brother hadn’t said a word. He sat slumped with his head against Cassie’s shoulder, eyes closed, not asleep but not entirely awake, hiding in his own somnolent body as the car rolled on. He was the only innocent one among them, Cassie thought. She hadn’t been able to protect him from what they had done. But at least she had kept his hands clean.

8

_{RURAL VERMONT}

OF ALL THE NIGHTMARISH EVENTS OF THE last three days, Nerissa thought, this had to be the most grotesquely surreal: descending step by step into the cellar of her ex-husband’s farm house, where something both more and less than human was waiting to be interrogated.

She was physically and emotionally exhausted. Coming home to find Cassie and Thomas missing from the apartment had revived every fear she had so carefully repressed since the slaughter of ’07. During the drive from Buffalo she had been reluctant even to stop for gas, and when she did eventually stop she found herself wondering whether the station attendant (some acned teenager) was one of them. It was the kind of reflexive paranoia that might have protected Thomas and Cassie, had she practiced it consistently. But after seven quiet years she had relaxed her vigilance. A night out, she had thought, was a small thing to ask. A well-earned reward, in fact, after everything she had done (and done without complaint) for her sister’s children. She deserved it, no?

The empty apartment, the packed bag absent from its place under Cassie’s bed, the ransacked kitchen: that was her answer.

But she would find Cassie and Thomas, she promised herself. She would protect them. Bring them home. And to hell with Werner Beck and the Correspondence Society’s rules of conduct. The Correspondence Society was dead. The only thing left was family. The only thing that mattered.

Ethan walked ahead of her down the wooden stairs. He was still talking about the sim, how it couldn’t be trusted, but his words were only an ambient buzz. Nerissa didn’t care. She just wanted to see the monster. To force some kind of truth from its stupid, lying mouth.

Of course she knew Ethan was right: the simulacrum—that is to say, the hypercolony of which it was a part—couldn’t be trusted. It wasn’t a human being. It wasn’t even an animal. Ethan and Werner Beck had proved that.

Ethan had told Nerissa about the Society shortly after they were engaged to be married. He had confessed his membership as if it were an embarrassing truth she needed to know about him, like a minor case of herpes. At first she had thought of the Society as something trivial—Masonry for mathematicians, an academic boys’ club with the pretense of a conspiracy as its binding secret. The ideas he had blushingly put forward seemed hardly credible. The radio-reflective layer (itself only an engineer’s abstraction as far as Nerissa was concerned) as a living thing? Exercising subtle control over human history? Even if she had wanted to believe it, how could she?

She hadn’t taken it at all seriously until he escorted her to his lab and showed her his cell cultures. He had been working with samples recovered from Antarctic ice cores, ostensibly studying airborne pollen deposited by ancient snowfalls. (All Society research needed a legitimizing pretext, he said. Research that cut too close to certain subjects had a way of losing funding or getting derailed during peer review. Careers had been devastated, back in the days before Society members learned to be discreet. But the names he cited were only vaguely familiar to her: who was Alan Turing, for instance?) The pollen was present in the ice cores, and Ethan had dutifully categorized the samples by species, teasing out the implications for the ecology of pollinating insects; his findings had eventually appeared in Ecological Entomology. What he didn’t report were the tiny granules he had also isolated from the ice: microscopic spherules of what appeared to be carbonaceous chondrite, enclosing traces amounts of complex organic matter.

The spherules were few in absolute number and easily overlooked, hardly distinguishable from dust, but consistently present in a thousand years of deposited ice. The Society’s hypothesis was that they had sifted down through the atmosphere from the radio-reflective layer, the radiosphere—that the radiosphere itself was an orbital cloud of trillions of such granules, evenly distributed around the Earth. The cloud was too diffuse to block more than a fraction of incoming sunlight or to detect with the naked eye, but the distributed mass of it, Ethan had calculated, must be immense.

Without its enclosing membrane of rock, the fraction of organic matter preserved in the spherules decayed on exposure to air. But Ethan had been able to accumulate measurable amounts of it in chambers bathed in inert gases and maintained at temperatures and radiation levels commensurate with the vacuum of space. Add a few molecules of carbon and ice, and the substance would bind to them. Give it a sufficient substrate of raw material and it self-assembled new rocky granules, and the new granules revealed more complexity than the degraded ones isolated from the ice cores: complex crystallizations, venous lacings of carbon and silicon…

By the time of their marriage—an unspectacular civil ceremony followed by a catered dinner at a country-club function room—Ethan had shared samples of his cultures with Werner Beck and with a few of what he called “the digital computation people” for further study. And although Nerissa tried to wall herself off from the implications of her husband’s work, she had to admit it was a momentous and disturbing idea—that some ancient and actually cosmic force was screwing around with human communications. But what did that really mean, in practical terms? If the relative prosperity and tranquility of the twentieth century was a product of that intervention (which the Society had long believed), was it sensible to inquire too closely? Humanity’s earlier track record was hardly inspiring: endless cycles of war, famine, superstition, pestilence…

But these ideas were remote and conjectural and ultimately easy to set aside. Nerissa had managed to go about the business of her life—her teaching position at UMass, a book in progress, her newly-minted marriage—without giving more than a moment’s occasional thought to the nature of the fucking radiosphere.

It had seemed like a reasonable accommodation, in the years before the bloodshed began.

Ethan told her the monster in his cellar called itself Winston Bayliss. Nerissa wondered how it had come by the name. Had there been a real Winston Bayliss, perhaps killed and replaced by the sim? Or had the monster invented its name out of a statistical analysis of human nomenclature?

No way of knowing. And it didn’t matter.

The monster wore a pair of white briefs, its pale belly drooping over the elastic waistband. Its torso, arms and legs were duct-taped to a heavy wooden chair, effectively immobilizing it. The monster lifted its head as she approached. It wore the bland face of a middle-aged white male, not unhealthy but soft around the edges. Of course, its appearance meant nothing. The weary expression on its face meant nothing. Its beseeching eyes meant nothing. The creature’s body was simply a display surface, a signaling mechanism. In a human being the look it gave her might have meant, I’ve been through a lot. I’m all tired out. But from the monster all it signified was an attempt to arouse and exploit her sympathy.

Promptly—as if the monster had read her mind, though really it was just interpreting her body language—the pudgy face turned smooth and indifferent. As if to say: You know what I am, and I won’t try to fool you. And that was also a lie, albeit a subtler one.

Or not even a lie. If Ethan and Werner Beck were right, the monster operated by hive logic. Its verbalizations were neither knowingly true nor knowingly false. Ethan had explained this to her long ago: Hive insects—ants, for instance—operated according to a few simple rules, written on their genetics by evolution over the course of millions of years. They did amazing things: built cities in the soil, scavenged for food with startling efficiency. But no ant ever “decided” to do any of these things. Ants didn’t plot strategy, and there was no board of directors in the hive. There was no conscious mind at work—there was no mind at all, only chemistry and environmental triggers. A cascade of such interactions produced complex behavior. But only the behavior was complex. The rules themselves, and the beings that enacted them, were relatively simple.

It was the same way with the hypercolony. It was a sort of nest or hive that had enveloped the entire planet. Its smallest component parts were the spherules of rock and organic matter Ethan had learned to cultivate. As small as they were, the spherules were capable of generating and receiving impulses over a broad band of radio frequencies. They were also capable, Ethan said, of performing enormously elaborate calculations. (Correspondence Society people talked about “binary code” and “quantum-scale computation,” but Nerissa understood none of that; the only computers she had ever dealt with were the ponderous card-reading machines the utility companies used to generate her monthly bills; she took Ethan’s claim at face value.)

The spherules weren’t, in any plausible sense, individually intelligent. Like ants, they followed rules but didn’t write them. Like ants, they exchanged signals and responded in programmed ways to environmental cues. What made the hypercolony remarkable was its collective power to manipulate electronic signals and mimic human beings. Mindless as it was, it could somehow generate a sim like Winston Bayliss and pass it off as human. But when Bayliss said the word “I,” it was a noise that meant nothing. There was no “I” inside the monster. There was no one home. There was only the operation of a relentless, empty arithmetic.

She took a step closer to the chair. She could see where Ethan had shot the monster in the leg. He had bandaged the wound, either to keep the mess off the floor or to keep the creature from dying of blood loss. The bandage, improvised from a hand towel and a strip of duct tape, leaked viscous beads of red and green matter. The rotting-hay smell of it hovered cloyingly in the still air of the cellar.

She realized she was avoiding eye contact with the thing. That was cowardly, and the simulacrum would probably sense her fear and try to manipulate it. She refused to offer it even that slender advantage. She steeled herself and stared it in the face. Its eyes were brown and moist, its eyelashes almost femininely long. It returned her gaze unblinkingly. “Hello, Mrs. Iverson,” it said.

She was shocked despite her expectations. She swallowed her nausea and said, “How do you know me?” Not because she expected a truthful answer but because she wanted to hear what the monster would say.

“The hypercolony knows you. I share some of that knowledge.”

Its voice was a mild, reedy tenor. In itself, that wasn’t surprising. The parts of the monster that produced speech were all authentically human—throat, lungs, vocal cords.

“You are the hypercolony, isn’t that correct?”

“I understand why you believe that, but no. That’s what I came here to explain.”

She shrugged. “Say what you want to say.” Ethan stood beside her with the pistol in his hand. The simulacrum licked its lips.

“Most of what the Correspondence Society deduced about the hypercolony is true. It’s a living thing. Its origins are ancient and incompletely remembered, but it has spread over vast distances, star to star. Its cycle of life is very long. It identifies and engulfs biologically active planets on which tool-making cultures might emerge. If such a culture does emerge, the hypercolony then exploits it for its own ends. Under ideal circumstances the relationship is beneficial to both parties.”

“Is it?”

“Once such a culture begins to generate electronic communication, the hypercolony intervenes to foster certain outcomes. Peace as opposed to war, for example. In that way the relationship becomes fully symbiotic. The adopted species is freed from the consequences of its own bellicosity, while prosperity becomes generalized and formerly hostile tribes or nations grow mutually interdependent. Useful technologies then arise naturally and efficiently, and the hypercolony exploits these technologies.”

“Exploits them for what purpose?”

“Reproducing itself,” the monster said.

Symbiosis, she thought. In this context, the word was an obscenity. She had seen how that alleged mutual benefit actually worked.

It was Nerissa who had discovered the bodies of her sister and brother-in-law back in the autumn of ’07. She remembered the front door of their small Forest Park home standing ajar. She remembered the bullet holes in the floral living-room wallpaper Evelyn had loved (and Nerissa had hated: they had conducted countless amiable arguments over it). She remembered the sour, coppery smell of blood, thick enough to taste, and she remembered the blood spattered on her sister’s collection of Hummel figurines, the porcelain milk maids and shepherd boys smiling through crimson masks.

Evelyn, whom Nerissa had always called Evie, had been shot twice through the torso and once through the head. She hadn’t had time to get up from the sofa. Her husband Bob lay on the floor a few feet in front of her. He had also been shot through the body and had received a final killing shot to the head. Both their faces had been unspeakably distorted by their wounds.

It was a Wednesday afternoon, just past four o’clock. Nerissa had been trying to get in touch with her younger sister since noon and had finally decided to drive to Forest Park in hopes of catching her at home. She wanted to tell Evie about the disturbing telephone call she had received from Ethan, about a wave of killings running through the Correspondence Society, a wild claim but one which the TV news seemed to confirm. Bob Stoddart, Nerissa’s brother-in-law, was a longtime Society member and a friend of Ethan’s. It was Ethan and Nerissa who had introduced Bob to Evie. As she averted her eyes from their bodies Nerissa found her thoughts drifting back to the time some fifteen years earlier when she had been engaged to Ethan and Evie had been dating Bob… how she and Evie had laughed about these unlikely beaus they had somehow acquired, an entomologist and a mathematician (of all things), smart and funny but so often helpless about clothes or manners. Evie could no longer laugh, however, because a bullet had passed through her upper lip on its way through her skull. So Nerissa willed her attention back to the Hummel figurines, piebald with blood. She knew she ought to call the police, and she tried to focus on that task. She would call them from the kitchen telephone, she decided, because the phone on the end table next to the sofa, although it was closer, was clotted with Evie’s brain matter. She would do that as soon as she could get her legs to work properly. Until then she leaned against the wall and gazed at Evie’s Hummels. Evie had worked in advertising, and something about these figurines had appealed to her, not in spite of but because of their kitschiness: the Merry Wanderer, now lapped by a lake of blood; the Apple Tree Boy, the same color as his apples…

She almost screamed when she heard footsteps at the door. They’ve come back, was her first panicked thought. But no. It wasn’t the killers. A small voice called out, “Hello?”

Cassie.

Oh, God. Cassie.

Nerissa found her legs and turned. Of course, Cassie had come home. And Thomas… Thomas must be upstairs in his crib, must have slept through the murders or fallen asleep after the gunshots, or was he (no, this was unthinkable) also dead? But Cassie at twelve was old enough to walk the several blocks from Forest Park Elementary by herself. Cassie was an orphan but didn’t know it yet. And she must not be allowed to find out, not this way, not by discovering her parents lying in the antic postures of their awful deaths. Hurry, Nerissa thought, keep her away, push her out the door if necessary—but the girl had already come too far. She was standing in the tiled hall just outside the living room. She had dropped her book bag on the floor. She squinted into the darkened room as if it had filled with a searing light. Her mouth hung open, anticipating a scream that somehow never began.

It had taken all of Nerissa’s strength to pull the girl away, to kneel and to turn Cassie’s head against her own shoulder, to accept the weight of her tears.

That’s your fucking symbiosis, she thought, staring at the human-shaped thing in Ethan’s cellar.

“Why are you admitting this?”

“I’m not admitting anything,” the monster said. “I’m not the entity that committed the murders of 2007, if that’s what you’re thinking. Mrs. Iverson, when you look at the night sky, does it seem lifeless to you? It isn’t. Every star is an oasis in a desert—a warm place, rich with nutrients and complex chemistry. Many organisms compete for access to those riches. Their struggles are ethereal, protracted, and largely invisible to beings such as yourself. But the battles are as relentless and deadly as anything that happens in a forest or under the sea.”

“Even if that’s true, so what?”

The simulacrum glanced at Ethan, who was shifting his feet impatiently. “The organism of which I am a part has infected the hypercolony and taken control of its reproductive mechanisms.”

“What, like a virus or some kind of parasite?”

“Approximately. But the process isn’t finished. The hypercolony is still trying to reclaim itself. A struggle is underway.”

“We’re wasting time,” Ethan said.

Nerissa was inclined to agree. All this cosmic Manichaeism wasn’t getting them anywhere. “You said something about my niece, is that correct?”

“Before long the outcome of the struggle will be decided. One side would like to exploit what remains of the Correspondence Society as a weapon against the other. Your niece is being manipulated. And she’s not the only one.”

Nerissa leaned toward the sim and let her hatred show. “What, specifically, do you know about Cassie?”

“I can help you protect her.”

“If you have anything to say—” Nerissa felt Ethan’s hand on her shoulder. “What? And what’s that god-awful noise?”

“The alarm,” Ethan said. “Someone’s on the property.”

“Cut me loose,” the monster said.

Ethan told the monster to go to hell. But he didn’t kill it, Nerissa noticed. He kept his pistol at his side and hurried up the stairs.

9

_{ON THE ROAD}

CASSIE TOOK THE LAST SHIFT BEHIND THE wheel and drove until she spotted a Designated State Campground marker where a side road cut into the piney wilderness north of Decatur, Illinois. There was a chain across the road and a wooden sign hanging from it—FACILITIES CLOSED SEPT 20 TO MAY 30—but Leo kept a bolt cutter in the trunk, so that wasn’t a problem.

The campground was a clearing in the forest dotted with stone-lined fire pits. The night was too chilly for open-air camping, but Beth spotted a cabin set back among the pines, and the padlock on the door yielded to a second application of Leo’s bolt cutter. The cabin barely qualified as shelter—inside, they found a yellow mattress askew on an ancient box spring, a sofa pocked with cigarette burns, and patches of black mold like Rorschach blots on the bare board walls—but it kept out the wind.

Cassie’s first order of business was getting Thomas settled. She was increasingly worried about her brother. He had slept in the car, he was groggy now, and he closed his eyes as soon as she tucked him into his sleeping bag. His face was moist, his thatch of blond hair tangled and greasy—he needed a bath, badly, but there was no running water.

Beth surprised Cassie by fetching a spare pillow from the car. “Here, use this,” she said. “He’ll be quieter if he’s comfortable.” As if she needed an excuse for an act of kindness. (And not even a plausible excuse: Thomas had been nothing but quiet for hours now.) Cassie thanked her and arranged the pillow under Thomas’s head. He opened his eyes once, blinked, then sighed back to sleep.

But it wasn’t just a pillow Beth had fetched. She was also carrying a bottle of vodka, a picture of a bearded man in a fur hat on the label. “Where’d that come from?” Leo asked as she unscrewed the cap.

“Bought it when we picked up supplies. Why not, right? Don’t tell me you aren’t interested.” She offered him the bottle.

He didn’t take it. “Did the guy at the store card you? Because that’s not such a good idea, showing ID if you don’t have to.”

“No, he didn’t fucking card me. You want some or not?”

“This isn’t a good time.”

“No? Really?” She shrugged. “More for me, then.”

Beth used an empty thermos to mix the vodka with the contents of a can of Coke. She sipped and grimaced, sipped and grimaced. Stupid waste of money, Cassie thought, but if it put Beth to sleep it might be worth it. But twenty minutes later Beth was pacing maniacally in the space between the mattress and the sofa, the floorboards creaking with every pass. When Leo suggested (with what Cassie thought was admirable restraint) that Beth might want to sit down and “give it a rest,” Beth whirled to face him, staggered and aimed a finger at his chest. “Stop pretending you feel bad about what happened!”

“Beth… come on. Seriously. Don’t do this.”

“So sad and everything. All how could I have killed that guy? Get over it, Leo. You shot him in the leg so you wouldn’t kill him. If he had some kind of medical condition, how were you supposed to know?”

“Beth, stop.”

“Maybe you should have asked me to shoot him, if you didn’t want to do it yourself. You’re the one always telling us how dangerous everything is, how we can’t take any chances, don’t call home, don’t get carded at the grocery store, watch out for strangers—”

“You’ll wake up Thomas.”

“I doubt it. He looks like he’s fucking comatose. Seriously,” turning to Cassie, “is your brother retarded or something? He barely talks.”

“He’s scared,” Cassie said. But not as scared as you are, she wanted to add. “I think we all need to get some sleep.”

“Fine. Go ahead.”

“You’re not making it very easy.”

“If you’re so fucking delicate, go sleep in the car.”

“Maybe that’s what you should do,” Leo told her. “Take your sleeping bag out to the car, get as pissed as you want, and in the morning we’ll drive the rest of the way to my father’s place. Your hangover is your own business.”

“What, are you tired of me now? You feel like fucking Cassie tonight? Is that it?”

Cassie had seen Beth drunk before. Every survivor of ’07 in Cassie’s circle had a way of lifting a middle finger to the world, and Beth’s had been her nasty style of drinking—drinking as if to punish herself and everyone around her. But now, even drunk, Beth seemed to realize she had overstepped a boundary. Before Leo could answer she squared her shoulders and said, “Fine, maybe I want to be alone.” She reached for her jacket and bundled her sleeping bag under her arm, muttering to herself.

Cassie watched from the cabin door as Leo followed Beth out to the car—ostensibly to make sure she was safe, more likely to see that she didn’t damage anything. She harangued him from the enclosed space of the backseat while he put his key in the ignition and turned on the radio, maybe thinking a little music would distract her.

But the radio wasn’t playing music, it was announcing the local news. Cassie caught orphaned words and fractions of sentences. Body discovered, she heard. Wooded hillside. She stepped out into the chill of the night, pine duff crackling under her feet. “Turn that,” Beth demanded loudly, but she never got to off, because Leo whirled and told her to shut the hell up. Drunk as she was, Beth fell into a startled silence.

Cassie walked to the car as the newscaster finished the story: State police say they will be conducting an exhaustive investigation of this, Wattmount County’s first homicide in almost fifteen years. Then the broadcast moved on to an item about a sawmill fire in some town Cassie had never heard of. Leo switched the radio off, scowling.

I’m a criminal, Cassie thought. An accessory to murder, if not a murderer herself. We’re all criminals. At any moment the somnolent woods might fill with searchlights and bloodhounds. “Fuck!” Leo said.

“What do we do?”

He shrugged angrily. “Somebody might have seen the car, we have to make that assumption, but I doubt they’ll have a description of us. So… I guess we ditch the car in the morning and hike someplace where we can catch a bus.”

“You still think your father can help us?”

“If anyone can,” Leo said.

Cassie sat on the plank sill of the cabin door while Leo covered Beth with a sleeping bag and a couple of spare blankets. The night was cold but not cold enough to be dangerous, as long as she had some protection from the wind, and if Beth woke up achy and shivering come dawn, whose fault was that? Thomas was still asleep inside, but Cassie was too frightened even to think about bed. Eventually Leo came and sat beside her, dragging on a cigarette while she exhaled the tenuous fog of her own breath. A full moon had risen but it cast no light into the body of the forest around them.

Leo stared solemnly at the cigarette in his hand.

“That’s a nasty habit,” Cassie said. “It’s bad for you, you know.”

He gave her an incredulous stare… then they both began to laugh, quietly but helplessly.

When the laughter subsided she said, “I hope it’s true your father can help. My uncle Ethan was pretty close to him back before ’07, you know.”

“I know. In one of his letters, my father said Ethan Iverson was one of the few who wasn’t totally castrated by the attacks.” He gave Cassie a sidelong look. “His words, not mine. That’s actually pretty high praise, coming from him.”

“I like how you’re still in contact with him.” By mail, of course. The only medium of long-distance communication that wasn’t hostage to the hypercolony, and God bless Ben Franklin and the U.S. Postal Service.

“You don’t hear from your uncle?”

“Aunt Ris didn’t think it would be a good idea. Any kind of contact with anyone who was personally targeted back in 2007 is risky, she said. But I read his books… you know he wrote two books?”

“Mm. About bugs, right?”

“Insects. He’s an entomologist. But in a way the books are about the hypercolony, a way of talking about it without actually mentioning it, because it works by insect logic—hive logic. Like how you can get really sophisticated behavior without any kind of consciousness or self-knowledge…”

“I learned some of that from my father’s letters,” Leo said. “It’s true, he said, but the Society made the mistake of treating it like a philosophical question.”

“As opposed to?”

“Military intelligence. Know your enemy. Discover its weaknesses.”

That fit with what Aunt Ris had said about Werner Beck, that he was obsessed with the idea of waging war against the hypercolony. Which was stupid, she used to say, even on its own terms. Part of waging war is knowing when you’re outgunned. And as far as Aunt Ris could tell, humanity had been outgunned since Taft was president—probably for centuries before. Cassie said the idea of war seemed kind of unrealistic.

“Not necessarily. You have to ask yourself, what did the hypercolony take away from us? One answer is, the will to fight and the weapons to fight with. Every day they tell us how terrible war is, how lucky we are that the League of Nations is out there managing conflict, all that bullshit. So only a few of us are willing to make a fight of it. But even a few people can make a difference, if they have the right weapon.”

“How do you fight something like the hypercolony? A cloud of dust, basically. You can’t bomb it. You can’t take it prisoner.”

“I don’t know. I don’t have an answer to that. Maybe my father does. But if we weren’t dangerous, they wouldn’t be hunting us.”

“Who—us? One guy, two girls, and a twelve-year-old? Yeah, we’re pretty dangerous, all right. Dangerous to middle-aged men with heart conditions.”

As soon as she said it, she wished she could take it back. She could see from Leo’s pinched expression that she had hurt him.

“That was an accident.”

“No, you’re right, I know…”

“I never meant for it to happen. But even if it is our fault—my fault—he wouldn’t be dead if the sims hadn’t come after us. You think the sims feel guilty about it?”

“They don’t feel anything at all. That’s how we’re different from them.”

“You lost your parents, right?”

“Yes,” Cassie said, and of course Leo knew that; all the survivors of ’07 had heard each other’s horror stories at least once.

“You ever get angry about it?”

“Sure I do.”

“I mean really angry? Angry enough to want to do something about it? Or do you just try not to think about it?”

She shrugged, embarrassed.

“It’s nothing to be ashamed of. Anger, I mean.” Leo stood and crushed his cigarette under the heel of his shoe. A spark escaped into the wind and winked out in the darkness. “You don’t have to be nice all the time. Get angry once in a while. You’re entitled.”

She knew better than to believe that the hypercolony had extinguished the human capacity for violence and hatred. Violence happened every day, everywhere in the world. Wattmount County hadn’t seen a homicide in fifteen years, according to the newscast, but Cassie was willing to bet it still generated its share of bar fights and domestic arguments, maybe even a few racial set-tos. And internationally: no major wars, but there were enough violent rebellions and lethal border skirmishes to keep up the body count. It was only that these dangerous tendencies had been ameliorated or tamped down.

The relative peace since 1900 could be measured only statistically. Still, the numbers told a convincing story: a dramatic decline in violent conflict and all the consequences of war: famine, plague, economic collapse. Cassie’s high-school Poli-Sci text had credited material and moral progress for the change. And maybe that was true. But it wasn’t the whole story. If you inquired into the details of history—as countless Correspondence Society researchers had done—some obvious anomalies emerged. The crises averted, the battles won or lost, the cease-fires that eventually emerged, all seemed to turn on pivotal acts of communication or miscommunication. Radiograms vanished in transmission or were subtly altered. Bellicose ultimatums failed to reach their intended audience. Unbreakable codes were broken, battleships were dispatched to the wrong coordinates, artillery emplacements shelled empty trenches. All this was mediated through the radiosphere. And in the aftermath of the Great War, in the age of mass communication, public sentiment was swayed by cues far too subtle and clever to be called propaganda.

But why? For what ultimate purpose?

The Correspondence Society had offered only speculative answers. Maybe they had been closing in on the truth in the decade before ’07, when Ethan Iverson and Werner Beck produced conclusive evidence that the radiosphere was alive, a hypercolony (as Cassie’s uncle had called it) of microscopic living things. But that explained nothing. Did the hypercolony mean to keep humanity pacified as it pursued its own purposes? Or did it have some more specific use for the human species?

In any case, Cassie thought, though it had made human civilization more peaceful, the hypercolony itself was hardly nonviolent. You lost your parents, Leo had reminded her, not that she needed any reminding, and as she sagged toward sleep she had to suppress the memory of how her mother and father had looked when she had last seen them, their faces shattered and the contents of their heads splashed over the furniture where they had been sitting. What ever else that atrocity might be or mean, it was not the work of a peaceful entity.

She woke to the sound of rain on the cabin roof, of rain trickling down the crude cabin walls, of a pounding at the cabin door.

She sat up and saw Leo struggling out of his own sleeping bag. Feeble daylight penetrated the single window. Her dreams were still heavy in her head and she wondered whether this was one of them, until the door flew open and she saw the silhouette of a man in a yellow slicker and rain hat, his face obscure but his scowl unmistakable. “Park Service,” the man bellowed, giving Cassie a contemptuous glance but saving a fiercer glare for Leo, “and if you think you can come in here, cut these locks, have a little pot party or what ever you kids do, well, I got news for you.”

Cassie began scrambling out of her sleeping bag, which had become an entanglement, a cocoon she couldn’t shed. Leo managed to stand up, empty-handed and impotently angry. Cassie felt she could see it all through the stranger’s eyes: the Park Service man running some routine off-season patrol, discovering the severed chain at the road entrance, the unfamiliar car parked in the pine glade, the broken hasp on the cabin’s padlock, his temper not improved by the rain seething over everything… She stared through the open doorway. “Look,” she managed to say.

“No, you look! You damage State property, you pay for it—that’s the law, young lady.”

But what she meant was, Look behind you. Past him, Cassie could see the open space between the cabin and the pines. She could see the Park Service man’s white pickup truck, mud-spattered to the midline. She could see Leo’s car next to it, the windows fogged and wet. She saw the car door opening, and she saw Beth climbing out, holding Leo’s bolt cutter in her right hand, her hair slicked to her scalp. She saw Beth running toward the cabin through the vast wet rush of the storm. She saw Beth swing the bolt cutter by its handle. Look, she thought. Look!

But the Park Service man didn’t look.

He toppled over in the doorway, his body half in and half out of the cabin. His head began bleeding immediately.

The force of the blow had knocked the bolt cutter out of Beth’s hand, and she stooped to pluck it out of the mud. Her mouth twisted in some combination of a grin and a frown.

“Beth!” Leo said.

“He was going to arrest us,” Beth said. “Or something.”

“Yes, but—oh, Christ! All right—okay, we need to get our shit together—Cassie, get Thomas up. We need to get away from here, now. Make sure you don’t leave anything behind. Beth, put the bolt cutter in the trunk and bring me a roll of duct tape.”

Leo used the tape to bind the hands and feet of the Park Service man so he wouldn’t be able to follow them when he woke up. If he woke up. He probably had a concussion, Cassie thought. At least. Or worse. Though by the way he had begun to moan, he wouldn’t be unconscious for long.

Cassie couldn’t help staring. “Roll up your sleeping bag,” Leo told her curtly. “I mean it. And do something about your brother.”

Thomas was sitting up in a tangle of blankets, crying. Cassie put her arm around him until he began to relax, then opened his small suitcase and helped him dress. Thomas wouldn’t meet her eyes, but he held up his arms while she pulled his last clean T-shirt over his head. A bubble of snot dribbled over his upper lip. Go on, cry, Cassie thought. Some things were worth crying over.

Leo took a key ring from the belt of the moaning Park Service man and carried it out to the white pickup truck. He came back with a laminated map of the local conservation area. He looked it over quickly while Cassie loaded her suitcase and Thomas’s into the trunk of Leo’s car. She helped Thomas into the backseat, wishing she had set aside a dry towel: the rain had doused them and they would be wet for the rest of the day, damp even under their jackets.

Leo gave Beth the key to the Park Service man’s pickup and told her to start it up and to follow the car. There was a road through the forest that would take them to a connecting county route and a town called East Cut near the federal turnpike. “What about him?” Cassie asked—the Park Service man, who was writhing on the floor—but Leo shrugged and said, “You and Thomas ride in the car with me.”

Cassie forced herself not to look back.

A couple of miles down the road Leo stopped the car. Beth came over from the pickup and slid into the front passenger seat while Leo put the Park Service vehicle into neutral and pushed it over an embankment into a bushy declivity where some nameless creek ran brown and fast. The pickup wouldn’t be especially well-hidden—even a cursory search would turn it up—but it would be out of sight at least until someone came looking for it. Or so Leo said.

Cassie thought about the Park Service man back at the cabin.

Sooner or later he would wiggle out of his restraints. Without his truck he would have to walk to the public road, flag down a passing car, get a ride to the hospital or the nearest police station. All of that would buy them a little time. (Or, Cassie thought, the man might be too weak to set himself free; he might die of exposure on the filthy cabin floor, and they would be guilty of another murder… that was possible, too.)

Leo climbed back behind the wheel of the car, smelling of mud and pine needles, and drove wordlessly through the forest. The rain was a relentless obscuring wash against the windshield. Thomas, no longer sniffling, seemed comforted by the rhythmic noise of the windshield wipers. Cassie understood that. Since the death of her parents she had learned to value all the wordless consolations of the world—wind and rain, sunlight and moonlight, noonday shadows and darkened rooms—everything reliably felt and not treacherously unpredictable.

They reached the turnpike, and a mile outside the town of East Cut Leo parked the car behind the ruin of a failed and abandoned gas station. The rain had stopped, and they were able to hike through a gathering ground fog to the East Cut bus depot. A largely empty afternoon bus carried them to Kewanee, where they caught an express to Galesburg and from Galesburg a late-evening local that stopped in a town called Jordan Landing. On the outskirts of Jordan Landing was the house where Leo’s father lived.

Leo didn’t want to risk another payment on the credit card he had been using, so Cassie paid for the motel room where they spent the night. Come morning they set out on foot to find the address Leo had memorized.

The town of Jordan Landing had grown up around a Mississippi River wharf, a John Deere branch plant, and a brickworks. They stopped for breakfast at a Main Street diner with calendars from local businesses tacked to the wall behind the counter. Leo picked a booth by the restaurant’s big window, where they could see a shopkeep er rolling out his awning and a grocer stacking boxes of lettuce on the mica-flecked sidewalk. Today, Cassie realized belatedly, was Armistice Day. Banners had been strung between the lampposts, just like back home.

The waitress who brought their breakfasts ruffled Thomas’s hair and asked whether they were visiting or just passing through.

“Passing through,” Leo said.

“Too bad. We’re having a nice show in the park to night. Fireworks and all. Though I expect you’ve seen better—you look like city people to me, am I right?”

“Detroit,” Leo lied.

I could live here, Cassie thought. It would be easy to fall in love with this sunny street and all the sunny streets surrounding it. She pictured herself in a rooming house with a pillared porch. Shade-dappled summer days, snug winter nights. And if a mindless and conscienceless entity rolled through the sky like an insect god, a blind guarantor of human progress, maybe she could have lived with that knowledge… could have, if she hadn’t seen the blood.

They paid the waitress for their eggs and bacon and whole-wheat toast dabbed with butter, for their coffee and cream and for Thomas’s mug of hot chocolate. The restaurant had begun to fill up with locals, and Leo was looking fretful and impatient. Time to get on with business. They all knew there was a real possibility that Leo’s father had been targeted in the latest round of attacks. Werner Beck was famously wealthy and well-defended, but even Werner Beck was mortal.

The house where Leo’s father lived was located farther from the center of town than it had seemed on the map, and as they walked Cassie could see the tension rising in Leo’s body, the way he hitched his shoulders and glanced compulsively behind him. Twice she asked him to slow down so Thomas could keep up. The air was cool but the sunlight and the brisk pace raised a sweat on her face. Jordan Landing was a hilly town, and the Mississippi was occasionally visible to the west, brown and busy with shipping.

She was surprised, though she shouldn’t have been, when they finally came within sight of the house: it was modest and unremarkable, which was probably why Werner Beck had chosen it. Beck could have afforded a Manhattan pent house had he wanted one, but prudence had led him to choose this perfectly ordinary house in this perfectly ordinary town. It was the last home on a street that curved gently eastward from the Mississippi embankment. Cassie guessed most of these small houses belonged to workers at the brickworks or the John Deere plant. The houses backed on unimproved lots, each divided from its neighbor by a hedgerow or a picket fence. Some of the houses had elaborate gardens, now bedded in for winter; in one of these gardens an elderly woman looked up from her work—laying canvas sheets over rosebushes—and waved tentatively. Cassie waved back as if she belonged here. It was better not to look furtive.

Leo followed the patio-block pathway to his father’s door. Cassie saw with dismay that a few days’ worth of newspapers had been delivered to the porch but never picked up. Leo had brought his pistol, tucked into his waistband under his shirt and jacket, and he took it out now, keeping it concealed in front of him. He knocked at the door, waited, rang the bell, rang it again. There was no answer. And when he turned the knob the door swung open, unlocked.

“Stay here,” he said tersely.

Cassie felt Thomas grab her hand. Maybe it was reckless to have brought Thomas along, but leaving him at the motel had seemed equally risky. And she had not imagined that the sims, even if they had come to Werner Beck’s house, would still be here—why would they? But she backed a few paces away just in case, and she leaned and whispered to Thomas, “If you have to run, run. Don’t worry about me.” Which frightened him, but it couldn’t be helped.

Leo disappeared into the shadow of the house while Beth sulked on the porch. Minutes passed. Cassie heard the distant tolling of a church bell, muted by the morning air. It was if the day had been encased in cool blue glass.

Then Leo reappeared in the doorway, looking stricken, and waved them all inside.

There was no evidence that Leo’s father had been killed. No blood, no upturned furniture or broken glass, no bullet holes in the walls. But Werner Beck was gone, had apparently been gone for some days, and seemed to have left in haste. An uneaten meal sat on the kitchen table: roast beef congealed in its own gravy and a slice of buttered bread from which a few threads of mold had sprouted. A copy of the Jordan Landing Advertiser lay unfolded beside the plate.

Cassie followed Leo upstairs, to a room that must have been Beck’s study. An oaken desk shared the space with bookcases and filing cabinets. The filing cabinets had been rifled; the drawers were open, some pulled from their cabinets and dumped on the floor. “What happened here?” Beth asked.

Leo shrugged. “Somebody was looking for something, obviously.”

“You think they found it?”

“Couldn’t say. But I know a place they probably didn’t look.”

Downstairs to the small living room, which Werner Beck had furnished in a spare, almost offhand style: a plain sofa, a simple coffee table, no TV set or radio. Leo shoved the coffee table against the wall and pulled up the cloth rug, exposing the planked flooring. He examined the bare floor for a moment, then put his finger in a knothole and yanked.

A square chunk of flooring three planks wide came up in his hand. It had been set so finely that the seams hadn’t shown. Underneath, in the space between the floorboards and the concrete foundation, was a small steel safe, the dial of its combination lock facing upward. “He told me he put this here,” Leo said. “In case something happened to him.”

“So what’s inside?” Beth asked.

“What I would need. That’s all he ever said. He told me where to look for it and he told me to memorize the combination. Nothing else.”

He turned the dial, muttering the numbers to himself. Cassie crouched behind him next to Beth, peering over his shoulder as he opened the door on its oiled hinges. He reached inside and pulled out a fat manila envelope.

Leo emptied the contents of the envelope onto the coffee table. Not much there, Cassie thought wonderingly:

A map.

A handwritten list of what appeared to be town or cities.

A few typed pages, stapled at the corner.

And a key.

10

_{RURAL VERMONT}

ETHAN TOOK NERISSA TO THE FARM HOUSE attic and checked his surveillance feeds. Two sims were approaching from the direction of the main road. The afternoon light was fading but he could clearly see the automatic rifles the creatures held at a ready angle. Only members of the armed forces were legally permitted to carry such weapons, but these two men, roughly the same apparent age as the creature in the cellar, seemed not to be soldiers. One wore a business suit, the other wore blue jeans and corduroy shirt. They moved in parallel on opposite sides of the access road, keeping to the shadows of the trees.

That was the front of the house. Out back, the surveillance cameras had apparently shut down, leaving Ethan entirely blind in that direction. But he could only address one problem at a time. He took one of the three hunting rifles he kept in a rack on the wall and carried it to the west-facing window. He had replaced the original window and frame with a sheet of double-thick birchwood ply into which he had cut an embrasure large enough to allow him to sight along the barrel of the rifle.

The first target would be the easiest. He waited until the sim in the business suit reached the clearing in front of the house. There was no way to approach the house without crossing that empty space. The sim left the cover of the trees, running. Ethan’s first shot split the sim’s skull, spilling a cascade of green matter threaded with blood.

The next shot wouldn’t be as easy. The second sim, the one in blue jeans, broke from the woods before his companion had finished falling. He veered away from the front of the house, attempting to get out of Ethan’s range. The narrow embrasure in the plywood afforded Ethan some protection, but it also restricted his field of fire. He brought the rifle hard up against the wood and squeezed the trigger.

He hit the target, but he hit it low. Ethan guessed he had clipped the simulacrum’s spine, because the creature fell and couldn’t stand up again. After a moment it abandoned the struggle and used its arms to drag itself toward the house. Ethan managed to put a second bullet in the sim’s neck. Gouts of blood and green matter spewed from the wound and the creature stopped moving.

But Ethan still didn’t know what was happening out back, where the cameras had been destroyed or deactivated. He ran to the east-facing window and leveled his rifle, pulling away in time to avoid a hail of bullets from a third sim’s automatic weapon. Plywood splinters peppered his face and a flurry of dust and debris showered down from the attic ceiling. He glanced back to make sure Nerissa hadn’t been hit. She was still standing, unhurt but obviously terrified. He told her to get down on the floor.

The sim who fired on him had been crossing the open space in back of the house and was out of sight now, but Ethan didn’t have to wonder where it had gone: he heard the sound of the back door being kicked in. The creature had entered the house.

Everything Ethan knew about the anatomy of the simulacra he had learned from Werner Beck. Werner Beck had not only survived the attempt on his life in 2007, he had managed to wound and disarm both of his attackers. And in the days that followed Werner Beck had taken his captive sims apart—piece by piece, making notes.

He had distributed a monograph on the subject to all the survivors loyal or reckless enough to stay in touch with him. Ethan had a copy in his files. Anatomical Details of the Artificial Human Beings, with diagrams and photographs. The photographs had been particularly disturbing: two sims, still alive, mounted on dissection boards and opened from the chest down. The skin of their torsos had been peeled back and pinned in place like the pages of a book, ribs and bloody musculature fully exposed, several small but functional human organs partially removed. Ethan had forced himself to memorize the details. Sacs of green matter, essentially identical to the contents of the cells Ethan had cultured from Antarctic ice cores, occupied most of the gut and extended into the extremities including the skull. The skull sac was surrounded by a web of nervous tissue that presumably performed some of the functions of a human brain. The scaffolding of bone was indistinguishable from a human skeleton. In the abdominal and chest cavities, dwarfish human organs (a heart hardly bigger than a golf ball, a liver that might have been taken from a newborn infant) served the shell of flesh that gave the sims their human appearance. Cut a sim and it would bleed. Cut deeply and it would bleed green.

The green material was complex but amorphous, the same no matter where in the body it was located. That meant the sims were less vulnerable to some kinds of physical damage than human beings were. Attacking one with a knife would be nearly suicidal. A bullet through the soft parts would only slow it down, while a bullet through the spine would drop it in its tracks without killing it. A shot to the head was the best bet, Werner Beck had written, since the skein of nervous tissue under the skull was an essential interface, allowing the simulacrum to control its body.

Even then, death might not be instantaneous. Beck’s captive sims had survived for days as he systematically cut and flayed them—they had pretended pain at first, and when the pretense failed they lapsed into an observant silence. Loss of blood eventually killed one of them: its small heart simply stopped beating; the other sim died when Beck experimentally fired a bullet into its skull.

Ethan traded his rifle for a pistol, then took a second one from its rack and offered it to Nerissa. “You know how to use that?” She nodded: like many other survivors she had taken a course after the 2007 massacre. Her hands shook, but she checked the pistol to ensure that it was loaded, then clicked off the safety.

“Stay here. Wait for me.” And shoot anything that comes up in my place, he didn’t have to add. Then he opened the attic door and moved down the narrow stairs to the farm house’s second story, a hallway with more stairs at the far end. Daylight was fading and the hall was dim. Ethan paused every few paces, listening for sounds from below but hearing little more than the pounding of his own pulse.

If he had any advantage it was his intimate knowledge of the farm house, its angles, its shadows, its exposed places and its high ground. He hugged the left-hand wall until he reached the landing of the stairway, then leaned into the emptiness beyond the railing with his pistol sighted toward the front door. Nothing. But there was a rattle that might have come from the kitchen.

Ethan’s respect for his opponent was complete. He thought again of Werner Beck dissecting the captured sims, an act that seemed both cruel and vengeful until you realized it was neither—the sims felt no pain and were indifferent to indignity. They weren’t even individuals, in the human sense. They even were less autonomous than ants or termites, mere extensions of the superorganism that had created them: massive, complex, far-traveled, ancient. Not even remotely human, and above all, not to be underestimated.

Ethan hurried down the stairs, mindful that he was exposed to fire from the sim’s automatic rifle. From the bottom of the stairs he could see most of the farm house’s main room, which was empty. Which left the kitchen. The door to the kitchen was closed. He couldn’t remember if he had closed it himself. He had no choice but to announce his presence by throwing it open, pistol ready, thinking with some fraction of his mind of Nerissa: she was armed but terrified, and if he died here—

But the kitchen too was empty. The back door was askew in its frame, hanging by one hinge where the sim had kicked it in. A trail of muddy boot prints led from the broken door to the entrance to the cellar. Ethan looked at the stairwell with dismay. He could only conclude that the sim was down there with Winston Bayliss.

Move, he told himself. He had no choice but to attempt the cellar stairs.

He was halfway down when he saw the sim at the foot of the stairs with its back to him, looking utterly human with its upturned collar, its sagging blue jeans, the nascent bald spot at the crown of its head. The automatic rifle was raised, but not in Ethan’s direction. The sim began to turn as Ethan’s foot hit a creaking riser. But it was no faster than a mortal man. Ethan had been granted that rare gift, an easy target. He squeezed the trigger of the pistol.

Simultaneously, the sim began firing into the darkness of the cellar. In this enclosed space the sound was deafening. Ethan flinched, but not before his bullet took the simulacrum at the base of its skull. The sim’s automatic rifle sprayed a few more bullets, then fell silent. The sim toppled over, inert.

Ethan stood over the body and put a finishing shot into its head. Green matter gushed out, emitting a rank chemical-fertilizer stink.

Then he looked around the cellar, realizing what it was the sim had done: incredibly, it had shot Winston Bayliss.

The creature that called itself Winston Bayliss was still strapped to the chair where Ethan had left it, held in place by coils of duct tape, but its upper body slumped at a nasty angle: the invading sim’s rifle fire had nearly bisected it at the hip. Bayliss was leaking blood and green liquid at a furious rate.

It raised its head and looked at Ethan steadily. “Please,” it said faintly. “Please, will you bandage the wound? We still need to talk.”

Ethan could only stare.

“As quickly as possible,” Winston Bayliss said. “Please.”

The idea of staying here even an hour longer had become absurd. It was past time to leave, and everything would have to be burned. His notes, his video gear, the attic arsenal—the farm house from its foundation to the peak of its mossy roof. Ethan had been preparing for this contingency since his first days here. He had stored a dozen canisters of kerosene in the main floor closet, and every morning he put a fresh book of matches in his hip pocket.

He came up the stairs to the attic and found Nerissa waiting, her pistol aimed at his chest. She lowered the weapon instantly, to Ethan’s relief. The way her hands were shaking, one awkward twitch might have killed him. “Is it dead?” she asked.

He managed to nod. Though for all he knew there might be more on the way.

She relaxed so suddenly that he thought she might lose her footing. She put a hand on a shelf to steady herself.

All this must have been unimaginably hard on her. Ethan had loved this woman once and maybe still did, though the gap of doubt and blame between them had grown vast and was probably unbridgeable. He couldn’t look at her without seeing the Nerissa he had once known: Nerissa across a table in the faculty cafeteria, quoting writers he hadn’t read and whose names he barely recognized, her long hair threatening to interfere with a plate of French fries—her liveliness and her ready smile, then so available, now so completely erased. She looked unspeakably tired. Night was falling and he wished he had a comfortable bed to offer her, but there was much to be done and no time to hesitate. Miles to go, in the words of one of those poems she had liked to recite. Miles to go before we sleep.

He took the first of his dozen jerricans of kerosene into the cellar, where he poured the contents over the corpse of the dead sim and along the floorboards. Nerissa emptied another canister over the firewood stacked under the single window, which he had boarded over, and as she worked Winston Bayliss began to plead with her. “Bind my wounds,” it said. “Take me with you.”

The sim had bled out massively from its human parts, and now it was leaking its greener contents onto the cellar floor. A reeking mess, Ethan thought. But the fire would cleanse all that.

“He’s practically cut in half,” Nerissa said. “The one who broke in did that?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“What this thing said, about there being two kinds of sims, do you think that’s possible?”

“I don’t know. Half of what these things do is theater.”

“I can explain,” Winston Bayliss said. “If you bind my wounds. If you take me with you.”

“Maybe we should,” Nerissa said.

Startled, Ethan looked up from the trail of kerosene he had laid. “Are you serious?”

“I mean if it knows something about Cassie and Thomas.”

“Cut off my legs,” Winston Bayliss said. “They’re useless. Tourniquets above the stumps will keep me alive for a time, if you do it quickly.”

Madness, Ethan thought. But Nerissa turned to him and asked in a voice gone steely and indifferent, a voice he barely recognized, “What about it, Ethan? Do you have an axe down here? A hatchet?”

“Jesus, Ris!”

“Because if we burn it we’ll never know why those others wanted it dead.”

“What exactly are you suggesting? That we hack off its legs and, what, put it in the trunk of the car?”

“Well, it would fit,” she said. “If we did that.”

He hoped it was a macabre joke. Or maybe the kerosene fumes were getting to her. But no. He had always known when she was serious. “Ris… even if what you’re suggesting might be useful, and I’m not admitting such a thing even for a second, we’d be taking a crazy risk. We don’t know for sure what’s looking out through that thing’s eyes, but what ever it is, I don’t want it watching us.”

“That needn’t be a problem,” the sim said.

Ethan and Nerissa looked at it. The wounded sim had worked its right hand loose from its bonds—the flow of blood had slicked and softened the coils of duct tape. It raised its free hand to its face (its slightly pudgy face, now pale and unearthly in its bloodlessness), curled the thumb into a hook and thrust it into the socket of first one and then the other of its eyes.

Once the burning began they couldn’t linger. In the dark, the fire would be visible for miles.

Everything Ethan had wanted to keep—fake ID, a supply of cash and traveler’s checks, a fresh pistol—he had packed into a single cardboard filing box, which he slid it into the backseat of Nerissa’s car. His own car, the secondhand Chrysler he drove into town on weekends, was parked in an outbuilding separate from the house. But it would be smarter to take Nerissa’s car: no one had seen it here and there was nothing to associate it with Ethan or his farm house. He doused the wooden walls of the outbuilding with kerosene and tossed a match behind him. The tindery structure began to burn hastily, and by that time the farm house was already well along, flames creeping up from the foundation and licking out of the first-floor windows. Ethan hurried to the car: he wanted to be gone before the ammunition in the attic began to cook off.

He offered to drive and Nerissa nodded gratefully. She buckled herself into the passenger seat and allowed her head to slump against the head rest. Her breathing deepened into gentle snores as he drove away from the farm house. The fitful light of the fire reflected from the windshield, the dashboard, her face. Asleep, she looked exactly like the woman he remembered, but bent, Ethan thought, almost to the point of breaking: bent to the limit of her endurance.

He pulled over where the laneway met the county road. Nerissa opened her eyes and mumbled a word that might have been, “What?”

“Shh,” he said, reaching through the driver’s-side window. “Just picking up the mail.”

One last time. He lifted the hinged door of the rural delivery box, withdrew a single letter and switched on the car’s overhead light long enough to glance at it. The return address was illegible and probably meant to be, but he recognized the handwriting at once. The letter was from Werner Beck.

He tucked it into his shirt pocket.

Half an hour later he was on the federal turnpike, cold air from an open window flushing out the stink of kerosene and worse things. He hadn’t thought about a destination. He drove west in a river of red taillights, Nerissa asleep beside him, headed nowhere but away.