The Affinities

Chapter 12

One January night when I was sixteen years old my stepbrother Geddy came into my room, terrified for no apparent reason.

When the sound of his anxious breathing woke me, my first thought was that something was wrong in the house: a fire, a break-in, somebody was sick. A glance at the window showed winter darkness and a lacework of ice and a few snowflakes drifting past the fogged glass, as the clock on my nightstand ticked from 4:10 to 4:11. “Geddy?” I said. “What the fuck?”

“You shouldn’t swear,” he said.

Geddy was a month shy of ten and still very much under the influence of Mama Laura, for whom even “hell” and “damn” were forbidden words. I told him that if he wanted to wake me up in the middle of the night he should brace himself for the possibility of a curse or two. Then I said, “So what’s wrong? Bad dream?”

It was a reasonable guess. Geddy suffered from chronic bad dreams. He was also an occasional bed-wetter, though the flap of his PJs looked dry tonight. He was pretty amorphous in his pajamas: a heavy kid, clumsily proportioned, strands of hair pasted to his forehead with sweat. Mama Laura kept the house swelteringly hot in winter. The furnace was roaring like a chained dragon down in the basement.

“Can I ask you a question?” His voice was plaintive.

“Can’t you ask Mama Laura?”

He hung his head. “No.”

“Why not?”

“I’d wake up Daddy Fisk.”

Fair enough. My father was pretty touchy. Geddy was still getting used to his hair-trigger temper. Dad had not yet uttered an unkind word to or about his new wife in the six months they had been married, but his attitude toward Laura’s son Geddy was increasingly impatient. If Geddy was reluctant to wake the old man with a question, I couldn’t blame him.

Nor could he have gone to my brother Aaron. Aaron resented the way the family had changed since Dad’s second marriage. He was polite to Mama Laura—Aaron was too fond of being the old man’s firstborn and favorite son to put that status at risk. But he was only barely cordial to Geddy, and only when he thought he was being watched. When he figured the rest of us were out of earshot he could reduce Geddy to tears with a few choice words.

“Okay,” I said, “ask.”

“Can I sit on the bed?”

“Is that the question?”

He was impervious to irony. “No.”

“Okay, sit. If you’re dry.”

He blushed. “I’m dry.”

“Okay then.”

He perched at the foot of the bed. I felt the mattress compress under his weight. “Adam,” he said, “is the world old or is it young?”

He stared at me intently, waiting for an answer.

“Jesus, Geddy, is that what’s bugging you?”

“Please don’t swear!”

“What’s the question even mean?”

He frowned even harder and groped for an explanation. “It’s like, is everything all used up? Is history almost over? Or is it just getting started?”

Crazy little guy. I had no real idea what he was talking about it, but he wanted an answer so badly I felt obliged to give him one. “Jesus, Geddy—sorry—but how should I know? I guess it’s kind of in the middle.”

“In the middle?”

“Not so old it’s finished. Not so young it’s new.”

“Really?”

“Sure. I guess. I mean, that’s how it seems to me.”

He thought it over, and finally he smiled. I didn’t think I’d solved the problem for him—whatever his problem was—but I seemed to have made it easier for him to bear. “Thank you, Adam.”

“You’re incredibly weird, Geddy.”

I had said those words often but I always said them affectionately, and Geddy’s smile widened. “You too,” he said. As always.

“Go to bed now, ’kay?”

“Okay,” he said.

Neither of us would mention the conversation in the morning. Nor would we report to anyone in the family. Geddy probably figured I would forget about it altogether.

But I didn’t, and neither did he.

Four years had passed since I had sat with Amanda Mehta and Trevor Holst in an attic room in our tranche house in Toronto, confronting a future we could barely comprehend. Many things had changed since then.

For one, I was wearing an absurdly expensive suit. For another, I was in New York City. For a third, I was doing something I was good at.

But I was not, at the moment, doing it very successfully.

I sat in a midtown restaurant opposite a woman I had met more than once, for professional reasons, since that night in Toronto. The woman’s name was Thalia Novak. She was in her forties, skinny, with a narrow face and a halo of tautly curled hair. She wore a green blouse and a necklace of strung glass beads the size of playground marbles. Thalia was a sodality rep for the Eyn Affinity, and I had a feeling she was about to deliver some bad news.

But we shared dinner first, like civilized people. I supposed it was even possible she might change her mind as we talked, if the decision in question had not already been taken at some higher level of the Eyn hierarchy. I was acting as a Tau negotiator, fully empowered to make a deal on behalf of the North American sodalities, and Thalia was my opposite number.

The restaurant was fairly new. By the look of it and the faint smell of sawdust and plaster, it had opened or been remodeled within the last few weeks. The prices were high and the customer count was low—we very nearly had the place to ourselves. I guessed most folks were home, checking screens to find out whether Pakistan and India had graduated from conventional warfare to the thermonuclear variety. The food was good, maybe because the chef wasn’t juggling a lot of orders. Thalia had ordered salmon and I had ordered paella, both on Tau’s tab. The Eyns were a small Affinity with no financial superstructure and very little collective wealth, and it didn’t hurt to remind her of that.

I let her talk through dinner. The stereotype was that Eyns loved to talk and that they were a little goofy. I liked Thalia—we had negotiated complex inter-sodality covenants on a couple of other occasions, most notably when Eyn and Tau organized opposition to an insurance-reform act that threatened Affinity-based pension funds—but she wouldn’t have overturned anyone’s preconceptions about her Affinity. She told me she had just started a course in “tantric flexing,” an exercise routine with some kind of spiritual component. She said it made her feel more centered. I wondered if it made her feel better about backing out of her Affinity’s commitment to Tau.

I raised the question over dessert, in the bluntest possible way. “If you sign this agreement with Het, you know you’ll be out of the Bourse.”

She raised her napkin to her mouth and then folded it over the remains of her raspberry zabaglione. “I do understand that. Obviously, it’s an important concern for us.”

Four years ago Damian Levay had opened up TauBourse to investors representing other Affinities. To date, we had created rock-solid pension funds for twelve of the extant Affinities. The Eyns could certainly pull out their money and invest it elsewhere. But TauBourse had outperformed benchmark Wall Street funds for all our members, and by a wide margin, in part because we invested preferentially in Tau-operated enterprises. Leaving TauBourse would have an immediate financial downside for Thalia’s Eyns.

But she was still talking. “We see potential legal issues with the Bourse, though, Adam. We’re not sure it’s a stable, sustainable business model.”

“It’s perfectly stable, unless the Griggs-Haskell bill passes.”

“Which looks increasingly likely, however.”

“More than just likely, if you throw the support of Eyn behind it.”

“We’re not a political Affinity. You know that.”

“But Het is. And if you back them up—”

“If we back them up, and if Griggs-Haskell passes, and if the president signs the bill, we’ll be better off if our money isn’t tied up in TauBourse. That’s the bottom line.”

“Did Garrison tell you that?”

“I can’t talk about what I discussed with Vince Garrison.”

Vince, not Vincent. She was already on familiar terms with the Het negotiator. That was when I realized she was trying to let me down easy. Which meant Eyn had already secured an accord with Het.

“I’m sorry, Adam,” she said. “I like you personally. You’ve been more than fair to me and to the Affinity I represent. I do appreciate that. But you have to understand, it’s an existential issue for us. Even if the Griggs-Haskell bill doesn’t make it out of the Senate, some kind of legislation is inevitable. Sure, I’d prefer the kind of legislation Tau would write. And I know the Hets are jockeying for king-Affinity status. But it was only three weeks ago that the Russians blamed Tau for its role in the attempted coup—”

“It was a revolution, not a coup. And Tau’s role has been exaggerated. We don’t really have a huge footprint in the Russian Federation.”

“No, and it won’t be getting any bigger, will it?”

“United Russia is running an authoritarian regime. Are we supposed to collaborate with it?”

“Het did.”

“Het kissed Valenkov’s ass. Repeatedly. Until he gave them everything they wanted.”

“What Het did was eminently practical. Call it realpolitik if you like—it carved out a space for the Affinities in a closed society.”

“Except for Tau.”

“Well, yes.”

“What does that tell you?”

“It tells me the writing is on the wall. Do you know the story from the Old Testament? It’s where the saying comes from. King Belshazzar stole the sacred vessels from Solomon’s Temple and used them to praise false gods. A disembodied hand wrote on the wall: Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin. It meant Belshazzar’s days were numbered. He was killed by Persian soldiers the same night. Moral of the story, there’s nothing to be gained from signing up with the wrong god, even for a short-term benefit. Gods are jealous, and gods remember. And right now, Tau is the wrong god.”

She stood up. I stood up. She gave me her hand. “The world’s moving on, Adam. Tau can’t stand still. Compromise or be left behind. That would be my advice to you.”

“I guess Eyn’s famous concern for social justice only goes so far.”

“Don’t make this worse. You’re alone in a world of trouble, and you know it.” She turned away, then turned back. “Thank you for dinner. It was very good.”

I called Trevor from the sidewalk outside the restaurant. This early on a Thursday evening midtown should have been crowded, but the street was mostly empty. “How was dinner?” he asked.

“The restaurant was lucky to have us. The city feels like a ghost town.”

“Otherwise?”

“No joy,” I said. “So it looks like Plan B.”

Which meant we were heading for Schuyler, New York. My old hometown. To do something that would tear my family apart.

Chapter 13

We got on the road in the morning. Trev took first turn at the wheel. It was a warm day in late May, pretty enough to make our troubles seem distant. Once we left the city the road wound through farmland and fallow fields where faded exit signs announced the names of equally faded small towns, and Trev cracked his window and let in a breeze that smelled of alfalfa and manure, and sunlight swayed across the dashboard as the road curved west and north.

Somewhere behind us was a second vehicle, a van, with six of Trev’s security guys in it. They were keeping a protective eye on us. So were various Taus along the route, locals alerted to watch out for suspicious or unusual vehicles. We didn’t really expect trouble. But we took precautions: there had been trouble in the past. In February a delegation of English Taus from a Manchester tranche had been run off the road and killed as their bus passed through the Lake District—no charges were laid, but we had reason to suspect the work of a Het undercover team. A month later one of our sodality leaders had been found dead in his hotel room in Chicago. Again, no actionable evidence, but the victim had been about to finalize an agreement that would have allied us with the Res Affinity and disadvantaged Het. And we had known for years that Het was capable of extreme action. The scar Amanda Mehta still carried was evidence of that.

It was possible but not likely that a Het team might follow us to Schuyler. I had good personal reasons to visit the town. Sure, there would be a sitting congressman in Schuyler at the same time. Yes, that congressman would soon be casting a potentially decisive vote on the Griggs-Haskell bill. And yes, I would be meeting that congressman face-to-face.

But none of that was surprising, given that the congressman was my brother.

On the road to Schuyler I took one call and made another.

The call I took was from Damian Levay, from the Laguna Beach property he shared with Amanda. I docked the phone to the dashboard port and tilted it toward me. Damian frowned out of the tiny screen, and beyond him I could just make out the suggestion of a balcony railing and the blue sweep of the Pacific in early-morning sunlight. I told him we were on our way to Schuyler. He said, “I just want to make sure you’re okay with this.”

“If Jenny’s okay with it, I’m okay with it.”

“That’s good. But things are never really simple, though, are they? When it comes to family.”

He said the word family with a faintly disparaging emphasis. Non-Tau family, he meant. Biological family. Family as tether.

“It’s not a one-way deal. She helps us, we help her.”

“If we succeed, you probably won’t be going back to Schuyler for any more family reunions.”

Meaning I would probably never speak to my brother or my father again, after this weekend. But it wasn’t as if we spoke much now. It wasn’t as if I stood to lose much in the way of happy familial intimacy. Tranche or family: I wasn’t the first Tau to face the choice.

And Damian knew that. There was something else on his mind. It wasn’t about my family, it was about me. Damian was a sodality leader now, and he had assigned me diplomatic duties because he believed I had a knack for dealing with non-Taus, a little extra dollop of empathy or something: supposedly, the trait showed up in my Affinity-test numbers. But that could cut two ways. A little sympathy for those outside the tribe was a useful thing, as long as it didn’t generate dangerous mixed loyalties.

But I understood what I was getting into, and I reassured him of that. Going back to Schuyler wasn’t “going home.” I had just one real home, the home I retreated to whenever possible, a house in Toronto (Lisa’s house, since Loretta’s death last year), where there was a room set aside for me, folks who genuinely loved me, no simmering rivalries, no hidden sexual violence … “I just hope what we do this weekend makes a difference.”

“It will,” Damian said. Then he looked away from the screen and looked back. “Somebody wants to say hi.”

Amanda.

The last few years hadn’t much changed her. The same hair, shiny as the wings of a perfect black bird; same flawless skin, the color of coffee with cream; same sharp, observant gaze. Time had left subtle marks, ghosts of expressions that had lingered long enough to set, a hardness of purpose where there had been a playful openness, resolve where there had been uncertainty. But the smile she gave me was eternal. “Hi, Adam,” she said.

We hadn’t talked much since her marriage to Damian. Not out of any awkwardness, just lack of opportunity. She had moved to California with Damian; I had stayed in Toronto. She was a sodality leader, I was just a functionary. She had made it clear, as had Damian, that although the marriage solemnized a real commitment, it didn’t mean she and I were finished. But we saw each other far less often than we once had. And to be honest, I was a little uncomfortable about sleeping with a married woman. Not because the relationship was immoral but because it was brutally asymmetrical.

So we said pleasant and inconsequential things to each other for a couple of minutes and finished the conversation with smiles that were genuine but seemed weirdly distanced from the present crisis. Then Damian got back on the line.

“One more thing. And this is for Trevor as much as it is for you. We’ve got information that there’s a Het security detail en route to Schuyler.”

I relayed this news to Trev, who gave me a look signifying something like: “Whoa—really? Why?”

“I can’t tell you anything more than that. It might be they want to keep an eye on Congressman Fisk prior to the vote. Or it could be more sinister. So keep your guard up, right?”

Right.

Getting closer to Schuyler, as farmland gave way to scrubby forest and outcrops of glacial debris, I called my father’s house.

A voice call, not a video call. Neither Mama Laura nor my father believed in paying good money for a little extra bandwidth. The last time I’d been there, the phone had been a landline with a clunky handset. My father carried a contemporary phone for business purposes, but he had never given me the number.

“Adam!” Mama Laura exclaimed. “So good to hear your voice! Where are you?”

“Just a few miles out of town, actually.”

“Wonderful! Your old room is all ready for you. You’re not the first to arrive—Aaron and Jenny aren’t here yet, but can you guess who is?”

“Geddy?” I hoped it was Geddy. I hadn’t seen Geddy for years, but he still called from time to time.

“Yes, Geddy! And he brought a friend!”

“Oh?”

“A girl friend.” I could hear the pause she put between the two words: she wasn’t sure whether the girl friend was in fact a girlfriend. “Her name is Rebecca. Rebecca Drabinsky. She’s from New York City, one of those places in New York you read about, I don’t know, Brooklyn? Queens? I forget.”

This was Mama Laura’s way of telling me two things. One, Geddy’s new friend was Jewish; and two, Mama Laura was okay with that. Which suggested to me that my father wasn’t okay with it, and that Mama Laura wanted to get her own opinion on record before any controversy erupted.

“I look forward to meeting her.”

“She’s quite a character! But I like her. Can you still find your way to the house or do you need directions?”

“I could find it in my sleep.”

“That’s good. I can’t wait to see you! And I can tell you Geddy’s very excited, too.”

And still not a word about my father. “What time do you want people arriving for dinner?”

“You’re welcome anytime. Say five o’clock if you want to freshen up first?”

“Five it is.”

I ended the call and Trevor drove a few more miles. We passed what I recognized as the quarry road, winding into a patch of wild scrubland where you could break your leg tripping over glacial till or stumbling into some ancient kettle hole buried in the duff. “Family,” Trevor said philosophically. “Remember what Robert Frost called it? The place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”

“Doesn’t always work that way,” I said.

We approached the outskirts of Schuyler. There was the usual strip of highway-exit businesses—gas stations and fast-food franchises—and then a couple of motels, sparsely populated. We could have stopped there, but Trev wanted accommodations closer to town. That left two obvious choices, a Motel 6 just off the main drag or a Holiday Inn a little farther north. Trev started to pull into the Motel 6 but paused before making the turn. We could see most of the parking lot in front of us, cars fronting a two-story row of rooms with doors painted Pepto-Bismol pink. “Huh,” he said, and pulled back into traffic.

“What?”

“You see that? In the lot? Four black Chevy SUVs, identical models.”

“So?”

“Those are Het cars, bet you any money. And I’d rather not share accommodations with Het enforcers if I can help it.”

So he registered at the Holiday Inn. He talked to the concierge about arranging a rental car, and I took the vehicle we had come in. Alone on the drive to Mama Laura’s, I turned on the radio and tuned in a news site. The announcer was using solemn words like “international crisis” and “ultimatum,” but nobody had actually nuked anybody. Yet.

Chapter 14

Polite commentators liked to call the state of affairs between Tau and Het a “rivalry.” In reality it was a fight—a fight for the future of the Affinities. Tau wanted to preserve and defend what Meir Klein and InterAlia had created. Het wanted to take absolute control of it.

Het was winning.

Het had about as many members as Tau, according to a recent census, and we were the most populous of the twenty-two Affinities. So we brought roughly equivalent numbers to the field, but Het had an immediate advantage: in sociodynamic terms, Het was monohierarchical. Which meant it possessed a single hierarchy: just one rigorously denominated chain of command, one leader, stacked ranks of followers. It was a classic form of human collaboration: horizontal equality among members of any rank, but top-down decision-making. Usually that takes a certain amount of policing and coercion, but the genius of Het is that its members tended to fall into place as neatly as Tetris pieces. The result was a kind of instinctive monarchy. They didn’t call him that, but the Hets had a king: I had seen him in passing, during sodality negotiations. His name was Garrison, and when Garrison said jump, Het jumped.

Tau, on the other hand, was polyhierarchical. When we did the leader-follower thing, we did it to address some specific task or local problem. You want to put out a fire, you let the fire chief call the shots. You want to build a house, you defer to an architect and a carpenter. We had hierarchies, but we were constantly constructing and dismantling them, hierarchies like temporary circuits in a vast neural network.

It made us versatile, adaptable. It also made us loose and complex and slow, where Het was blunt and simple and fast.

And Het had brought blunt, simple weapons to the battlefield. Weapons like bribery and expensive lobbyists, backroom threats and hired lawyers. Not to mention, should you step out of the light and into the shadows, actual guns and muscle. Whereas Tau had come to the fight like earnest Quakers, armed with little more than a love of justice and the power of persuasion. In brief, our asses had been kicked.

At least at first. Slowly, slowly, we were bringing our own weight to bear. We didn’t punch with much strength but we knew how to swarm. How to find a vulnerable point and work it from many angles. How to crowdsource a counterattack.

One thing you look for is the unexpected connection: say, between a Tau member and a congressman who might be about to cast a critical vote.

Say, between me and my brother Aaron.

Then you look for an exploitable weakness. A troubled marriage, maybe, in which one partner has a great many secrets to keep.

Like Aaron’s marriage to Jenny.

You find the weak point. Then you press until something breaks.

It was Mama Laura who had engineered this family reunion, and it was Mama Laura who answered the door when I knocked.

Late afternoon, and the sun was behind me. Sunlight came through the branches of the budding willow, and Mama Laura shaded her eyes as the door swung open. She gave me what she sometimes called her “big old welcome-home smile,” but with a hint of uneasiness in it. “Adam,” she said. Then, almost as an afterthought, she opened her arms and I hugged her. “Come on in,” she said.

She had grown a little grayer and a little portlier in the years since I had left Schuyler, but time had been relatively kind. The same was true of the house itself, from what I could see from the entrance hall. Same carpet, same faded furniture, same heavy drapes, but all of it freshly scrubbed and dusted. The air smelled of wood polish and savory overtones from a slow roast sweating in the oven. “Geddy absolutely cannot wait to see you! He’s up in his old room. And your father is upstairs, too … Can I get you something to wash away the road dust? We have lemonade, Coke…”

“I’m fine,” I began to say, but I was interrupted by the pounding of footsteps on the stairs.

I doubt Geddy could have reached me any faster if he’d slid down the banister. He had never been good at concealing his feelings, and now he wasn’t even trying. He had a grin as wide as his mouth could make it. He was practically laughing with pleasure. “Adam!” he said, and took me in an embrace that nearly bowled both of us over. “I heard the doorbell!”

“Hey, Geddy,” I said.

He stood back. “You look great! You dress better than you used to.”

Mama Laura and I both laughed. I wasn’t wearing my thousand-dollar suit—it would have gotten me expelled from the house for the crime of pretension, I suspected—but I guessed a tailored shirt and wool pants looked upscale to Geddy. Geddy wore blue jeans with a checked cotton shirt tucked in at the waist, a style Mama Laura called “Walmart formal.” He was thin enough to be called skinny these days: this was what had emerged from the chubby cocoon of his adolescence.

“Still playing the changes?” It was the question I asked whenever I talked to Geddy on the phone. Originally a reference to his music career, now a general-purpose what’s-up.

“Still working at the warehouse,” he said. “Mostly indoors now. I sit in with a band on weekends. Some guys I know. Trad jazz, but we’re pretty tight. Rebecca says—but you have to meet Rebecca! She’s in the basement, going through some old boxes—”

Mama Laura took my arm in a firm grip. “I think Adam should say hello to his father first.”

It was why this reunion had been arranged, after all. It was why Geddy had come from Boston, it was why Aaron and Jenny had traveled from DC, and it was at least one reason why I was here.

My father had received his diagnosis last winter, but he had forbidden Mama Laura to share it with us until a month ago. Even then she had been reluctant to talk about the details, as if his disease were an intimacy she dared not discuss except in the most basic outline. Cancer. Inoperable. Stage IV. Originally in the lungs, now throughout the body.

He had refused chemo out of some combination of terrified denial and stoic acceptance. He said he felt fine, which meant his pain was mostly under control. His main symptoms, Mama Laura said, were debilitating fatigue and loss of appetite. Plus heightened irritability and moments of confusion.

I went upstairs to see him. He was in the bedroom he shared with Mama Laura, but he wasn’t in bed; he was dressed and sitting stiffly upright in the upholstered chair by the window. The little video monitor on the dresser was babbling quietly away, but he had turned his face to the sunlight. Maybe he was appreciating the spring of a year that would likely not include, for him, an autumn or a winter.

“Adam,” he said, swiveling to face me, putting his features in shadow. “Nice you could make it.”

“Good to be here.”

“Laura was real happy about you coming. She sets great store by family.”

“You can tell by her cooking. The roast smells great.”

“It’s lost on me. I can’t smell a damn thing anymore. Food tastes like sawdust and library paste.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“It’s not your fault. It’s not anybody’s fault but God. You look like you’re doing all right.”

“More or less.”

“Still working for your club?”

“It’s not a club.”

“Yeah, I know, it’s been in the news. The Affinities. They got in everywhere, didn’t they? Like Communists. Or Freemasons. You don’t know who is one, unless they tell you. But you’ve obviously had some success at it. Good for you, I guess. It’s just that we can’t boast about it, the way we can boast about Aaron.”

“Well, at least you can boast about one of your sons.”

It occurred to me that I didn’t know what to call him. When we were kids Aaron and I had been trained to call him “sir.” But I hadn’t addressed him as “sir” since the day he insulted Amanda. It was decades too late to start calling him “Dad.” And if I had called him by his first name he would have considered it a shooting offense.

He gestured at the TV, a little Samsung panel at least twenty years old, and said, “All this shit going on.”

“Anything new?”

“Is there ever? Bullshit threats from one side, bullshit threats from the other. Now and then a bomb goes off. Only difference this time is, the bombs are getting bigger. I guess I won’t live to see who’s left standing. I can’t bring myself to feel much regret about that.” He raised his hand—it shook a little—and smoothed the wing of graying hair that was supposed to disguise his baldness. The expression in his eyes grew vague. “I want to tell you something. While I’m thinking of it, before I forget. That’s a problem these days, forgetting things.”

“Okay. What is it?”

“You know I sold the business. Couldn’t stand up to those chain-store bastards forever. So there’s money. Enough to pay for my dying, enough to support Laura. And plenty left over. I had my lawyer draft a final will. Most of the money’s going to Aaron. I’m sorry if you feel insulted by that. The thing is, Aaron has been around when you weren’t. He doesn’t need the cash, but he’ll be a good custodian. I set up a trust fund for Geddy, and Aaron agreed to manage it. If it ever happens you fall on hard times, talk to Aaron—I told him to let you have whatever you need, if you really need it.”

“Okay.”

“Like I said, it’s not an insult. I’m thinking of you. It’s just that…” His words faded; maybe he lost track of the thought.

But I wasn’t insulted, and I understood perfectly. The family was a hierarchy. My father had always been the indisputable boss. Aaron had never openly challenged that presumption, though I suspected he honored it only when he was within spitting distance of the old man. He performed the part of the dutiful son impeccably, whereas I had left Schuyler at the first opportunity and found myself a more congenial sort of family. That was the sin my father could never forgive.

“Okay,” I said again.

“What?”

“It’s fine. Whatever you want to do about your will, I’m okay with it.”

“You just don’t give a shit, huh?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“But it’s what you meant.”

“No.” I took a step closer. Close enough to smell the illness on him. His body was starting to burn fatty acids as his illness advanced. The chemical products of the process included acetone, exhaled through the lungs. His breath smelled like nail polish remover. “What I meant was that you don’t need to worry about me, and you aren’t obliged to take care of me, and I don’t expect anything from you.”

“You haven’t expected anything from me since you left this town.”

Which was about absolutely true but not worth acknowledging. “I think I’ll head on downstairs now. Will you be joining us for dinner?”

“I’ll sit with you,” he said. “I don’t promise to eat.”

As I approached the kitchen I heard Geddy talking with Mama Laura, a flow of happy conversation I was reluctant to interrupt. So I turned the opposite way and opened the door to the basement, where Geddy had said his friend Rebecca was sorting through boxes.

She looked up as I came down the steps. She was sitting on a pea-green folding chair, one of the set Mama Laura had retired from the backyard a decade ago, and she had her hands in a cardboard carton on which GEDDY’S THINGS was scrawled in enthusiastic black letters—Geddy’s own printing, years old. The basement was as gloomy as it had ever been, raw drywall and exposed cinderblock, an elderly washer/dryer vented to the exterior world through a dusty aluminum port. Rebecca Drabinsky looked tiny, perched among the boxes in what we called “the storage corner.” She stood up when she saw me. I said, “I’m Adam.”

“Hi, yes!” Small body, small face, a pair of oval glasses that magnified her eyes, dark wirebrush hair that reminded me of a fox terrier one of my tranchemates owned. Off-brand sneakers, jeans, a black t-shirt under an unbuttoned flannel shirt. She would have looked at home in the cafeteria of any American university, sitting at a table with a book or tablet propped in front of her. “I didn’t hear you at the door.”

“I was just upstairs saying hello to my father. Geddy was going to introduce us, but he’s busy in the kitchen. You’re going through his old stuff?”

She nodded, a decisive bob of her head. “Geddy asked me to. To set aside anything I think is important and maybe organize it a little bit. He wants to take the best stuff back home. He’ll go through it himself, of course. I just think he wanted me to see what he left here. Like, pieces of his life before he knew me.”

I saw what she had selected and set aside on a yellow blanket thrown over the dusty concrete floor. Paperback books, including some I had given Geddy. Staff paper and practice sheets from when he was first learning to play the saxophone, plus some unused Vandoren reeds in their original boxes. A stack of Grammy Fisk’s old LPs. What Rebecca was going through at the moment was a box of childhood drawings. I remembered Geddy’s drawings: mainly fire trucks, tall buildings, and airplanes, meticulous as blueprints.

But she had a particular drawing in her hand, and she held it out to me. “You must have done this one.”

I took it from her. It was a pencil sketch of Geddy when he was about ten years old, executed on yellowing printer paper. It was mine, but I barely remembered it. I must have drawn it out at the quarry, by the suggestion of trees and water in the background. Amateur as hell, but it caught a little of Geddy’s wide-eyed gaze and big toothy grin.

“You must have said something funny, to get that smile out of him.”

“It’s a good smile. I used to tell him jokes, just to see him laugh.”

“I know what you mean. When he’s happy, it’s just so—wholehearted.”

I liked her for using the word. “How did you guys meet?”

“Well, that’s kind of a story. I tell people I first saw Geddy when he was busking in the MBTA. Which is true, in a way. I must have passed him dozens of times on my way through Davis Station. But that’s not really how I met him. You’re a Tau, right?”

It wasn’t exactly a polite question in the current social climate. But of course Geddy would have told her about me. “Yeah,” I said warily. “Why?”

“No offense. I like Taus. I think they’re the best Affinity. You know Geddy took the test, back when InterAlia was running it? He was really disappointed when he didn’t qualify. Deep down, I think he wanted to be a Tau like you.”

“It’s not a question of failing, Rebecca. It’s not that kind of test. I mean, it’s too bad Geddy doesn’t have an Affinity, but—”

“No, I know all about that; that’s not my point. He envied what you found in Tau. He wanted what you had, and he never stopped looking for his own version of it. He bought a test kit when they came out, one of the old clunky ones with the scalp sensors. Just to make sure. He recorded his own teleodynamic profile. And that’s how we met.”

“I don’t understand.”

“New Socionome.”

“Ah.”

“An algorithm hooked us up.” She watched my face. “You don’t approve?”

“No, I just—I don’t know a whole lot about it.”

Which wasn’t entirely true. I understood the general concept. Hackers and activist math geeks were trying to find new, non-Affinity ways of linking people together. Maybe that was useful for people like Geddy, who couldn’t be sorted into a proper Affinity. But it had no relevance for me and I had pretty much ignored the phenomenon.

“Anyway, that’s how we met. Geddy submitted his teleo profile to New Socionome. I was already registered. His name popped up on my linklist and we got in touch. He invited me to one of his weekend gigs. So that’s how we really met—I was at a table in South End bar and Geddy was up on stage with a singer and a drummer and bass player and a rhythm guitarist. Under the lights he looked…” She laughed, a high happy sound. “Earnest and goofy and, I guess you know how he gets, kind of outside of himself. He came over after the set and we started to talk.”

“So what do people talk about, when they’ve been introduced by an algorithm?”

“Making a better world,” she said.

Upstairs, the afternoon was wearing on. Sunlight from the dining room window tracked over the big table as I helped Mama Laura set it. My father remained upstairs, and we were all conscious of the fact that he was mortally ill, but that didn’t stop the talk or the laughter—it was therapeutic, not insensitive, and Mama Laura said at one point it might be doing him good, the sound of us all together down here, like the old days.

Around five o’clock the phone rang. Mama Laura had never replaced the slate-black landline phone my parents had owned when I was a teenager; picking up the handset, she looked like a character from a historical drama. It was easy to guess by her grin who was on the other end. “Aaron,” she announced when the call ended. “He and Jenny just landed.” At the Onenia County regional airport west of Schuyler, that would have been, probably on a chartered flight from DC. “They’ll be here in forty-five minutes or so.”

Geddy and Rebecca exchanged uneasy glances, by which I guessed Geddy had shared some of the family’s less savory secrets with her. I excused myself, went into the bathroom, and took out my own phone. I called Trevor Holst at the Holiday Inn. “They’re coming,” I said.

“Okay. Keep me posted.”

Five hours before the lights went out.

Chapter 15

Much later, I looked at some of the posts Rebecca Drabinsky had left on her own website and others. Some of what she had written struck me as prescient, and this is one of the passages I bookmarked:

We are falling.

Everything made of matter is falling. We call it entropy. Matter decays. Stars eventually stop shining; planets grow cold, or are scorched to embers which themselves grow cold. Matter falls, and sooner or later it hits bottom.

Life is part of that process. Life is entropic. We dissipate the energy of the sun. Life is a falling-in-progress.

What makes living things unique is that they are teleodynamic. By dissipating the sunlight stored in food we sustain ourselves at a level above our natural rest state, which is death. Our falling is an act of self-creation. We FALL FORWARD, as individuals and as a species.

For most of the history of our species, the goals we fell toward were simple. Food to eat, food for our families, food for our tribe. Shelter for ourselves, our families, our tribes. The imperatives of love and reproduction.

But in the contemporary world, for a significant proportion of the world’s human beings, those basic needs have been met, if only partially and inadequately and unjustly. Under such circumstances, what does it mean to fall forward?

The Affinities were an attempt to harness and enhance the human genius for collaboration. And they succeeded … for those who qualified for membership. But the Affinities are a tribal model. Twenty-two pocket utopias, each with an entrance fee. Twenty-two Edens, and every Eden with a wall around it and with a crowd of hostile, envious outsiders peering in.

Because it’s not enough just to favor collaboration. Collaboration is a means, not an end. Tribes devise goals that benefit the tribe, and tribes come into conflict. Endless Affinity warfare—or the capture of political power by any single Affinity—is not an outcome we should endorse or permit.

New Socionome works differently. The social nuclei we create are open and polyvalent. We make social molecules that hook up complexly and create the possibility of new emergent behavior. Our algorithms of connection favor non-zero-sum transactions, as the Affinities do, but they also facilitate long-term panhuman goals: prosperity, peace, fairness, sustainability. The arc of human history is long but our algorithms bend toward justice. We aren’t just falling. We’re FALLING FORWARD.

I was struck by what she had written because it explained much of what happened that weekend in Schuyler. And my role in it, and hers.

Aaron and Jenny arrived an hour before dinner, carried from the regional airport in one of the ancient black Lincoln MKTs the local taxi company passed off as limousines. Aaron rang the bell, he and Jenny were duly hugged and handshaken, and Mama Laura sent Geddy out to fetch their luggage: two identical hardshell travel cases of a high-end German brand.

My elder brother had learned to carry himself with the kind of assumed authority people call “statesmanlike.” Shoulders square, chin up. His hair was styled and streaked with gray at the temples. The gray didn’t look natural, and I pictured him in front of a bathroom mirror, painting it on. Maybe a good move for an inexperienced junior congressman. His handshake was a quick, decisive squeeze. This, too, felt rehearsed. “Hey, little brother,” he said.

“Hey back at you, Aaron.”

Jenny gave me a hug. She lingered a moment before we broke apart, but I tried not to read anything into it. The obvious question was on my mind: was she still willing to do what she had offered to do?

But there seemed to be no uncertainty or indecision about her. The old tentative, soft-spoken Jenny—the it’s-okay-with-me-if-it’s-okay-with-you Jenny, the Jenny I had known and halfheartedly courted as a teenager—was gone. In her place was someone not just older but vastly more cynical. Her eyes were wary, her smile more mechanical than genuine.

Mama Laura called us to dinner as soon as Aaron and Jenny had dropped their bags and washed up: “You got here just in time!”

We took our places. The head of the table was empty until my father came shambling downstairs. He wore dress pants and a crisply starched white shirt, tragically loose on him now. We waited in silence until he had eased his body into the chair. He nodded at Jenny and gave Aaron what was probably intended as a cheery wink. “All right then,” he said. “Let’s eat.”

“Not before the blessing,” Mama Laura said. She asked Aaron to say some words, and he bowed his head and reminded the Lord that we were all thankful for what we were about to receive.

Four hours before the lights went out.

I harbored a faint hope that my father’s illness had mellowed him, but there wasn’t much evidence of that. True, there were no lengthy tirades, and for most of the meal it seemed as if he had abandoned his lifelong habit of correcting the opinions of others. He put a serving of Mama Laura’s glazed ham and a mound of Mama Laura’s candied sweet potatoes on his plate but did little more than poke at them with his fork. He looked at each of us in turn, rotating his gaze around the table, pausing at each face as if he needed to commit it to memory. Our talk was amiable but subdued and he listened to it with an unreadable expression.

Then, as the serving dishes made a second round, Rebecca asked him whether there was any news from India.

She knew he had been upstairs watching television news, and I guessed she meant to include him in the conversation. Full credit for good intentions, but I held my breath like everyone else at the table.

My father focused his eyes on her and pursed his lips in an expression of distaste. After a long moment in which the only sound was the screech of Geddy chasing peas across his plate with a fork, he said, “There are drones.”

“Drones?”

“Yeah, drones, you know, pilotless aircraft?”

“I know what a drone is, but—”

“Probably Chinese. From their ships in the Arabian Sea.”

“Surveillance drones?” The Indian government had been complaining about Chinese surveillance drones for weeks now; they had shot down a couple and put the wreckage on display.

“No. They’re blowing things up. Big news.”

That caught the attention of Aaron, who had recently been appointed to a House subcommittee on military affairs. He said, “Blowing what up?”

“Military installations. Whole cities, maybe. The TV people don’t know anything. Communications are down all across the subcontinent.”

“Jesus!” Aaron said. Mama Laura shot him an injured look. “I apologize for the language,” he said, “but if things get really hot I might be called back to DC.”

He started to reach for his phone. “Aaron,” Mama Laura said before his hand made it past his lapel.

“I should check my messages, at least.”

“Did the people you work for have our home number?”

“Sure, but—”

“In that case, in the event of an emergency, the phone on the side table will ring. Until then, please enjoy your meal with the rest of us, no matter what’s happening halfway across the planet.”

It was not a negotiable demand. “Of course,” Aaron said, though for the next few minutes he cast reflexive glances at the video screen in the next room, blank and silent in its corner. I couldn’t help exchanging a look with Jenny. If Aaron’s visit was cut short, we might have to change our plan. Or abandon it altogether.

But Rebecca’s question seemed to have piqued my father’s interest in her. “You’re Geddy’s girlfriend,” he said, though they had already been introduced.

“That’s one thing I am.”

“I guess that means you’re a lot of things.”

“Aren’t we all?”

“They tell me you belong to one of those Affinity groups?”

“Actually, no—”

“Adam here works for one. I forget which.”

“He’s a Tau,” Rebecca said. “But I’m not a member of an Affinity, Mr. Fisk. I’m enlisted with New Socionome.”

“Enlisted with what now?”

“New Socionome. It’s kind of a global collective for designing new ways to connect people, outside of the framework of the Affinities.”

“You’re probably wise not to call it an Affinity, given that Aaron wants to pass a law against them.”

“He means the Griggs-Haskell bill,” Aaron said. “You’ve heard of it?”

“Of course,” Rebecca said.

“It’s just a way of regulating a troublesome and problematic business. I’m no fan of government regulation, but in this case it’s necessary. I guess you approve of that, given that you’ve chosen not to join an Affinity?”

“Actually no,” Rebecca said. “I don’t approve of it. I think it’s worse than unnecessary. As it’s written, the bill would grant oversight powers to the largest Affinity, which is Het, which would just give an authoritarian Affinity even more political clout than it already has. It’s a clusterfuck.” She blinked into the silence that descended on the table. “Uh, sorry, Mrs. Fisk.”

My father was less offended by her language than by her refusal to defer to Aaron. “How’s your club work?”

“New Socionome’s not a club. It puts together small circles of people in ways that enhance cooperation toward loosely defined long-term goals. Each circle has open valence, which means they can expand any way they want and include anyone they feel like including. It’s like creating the grain of dust that nucleates a snowflake.”

“My word,” Mama Laura said, awed and bewildered in equal parts. “I’ve never heard it put that way.”

My father said, “I guess it’s not a particularly exclusive club. For years, the golf club here in town? You couldn’t get in if you were a Jew. But they relaxed that rule.”

Geddy flushed but said nothing. Rebecca seemed, not startled, exactly, but at a loss for words.

It was Mama Laura who finally spoke up.

“Charles,” she said, in the tone she usually reserved for misbehaving children. She waited until she had my father’s complete attention—a hostile, skeletal stare. “Charles, we all know you’re ill. Believe me, I know it. The doctors told me exactly what to expect. I know what my duty is. I will feed you if necessary, clean you, see to your needs. Speaking plainly? I’ll empty your bedpan when the time comes, and I don’t expect to be thanked for it. But Geddy has come home with a new friend he wants us to meet. And I think she is a lovely person. And I am very happy for both of them. And it matters a great deal to me that my son is happy. So even though you’re sick, and even though the fact of your sickness has tied the tongue of everyone else at the table, I won’t let you ruin this meal as you have ruined so many others. Speak civilly or keep your mouth closed, because I mean to have a pleasant dinner this evening, with or without your help.”

My father gaped at her, eyes like cueballs in pockets of crepe-paper skin.

“There’s peach streusel for dessert,” she said. “Or ice cream, for those who don’t like streusel. And I can start a pot of coffee as soon as everyone’s ready.”

The conversation veered into less nervous territory. Mama Laura asked Jenny about her mother. Jenny’s father Ed Symanski had died a year and a half ago, of liver cancer. Her mom continued to live alone and in a condition of alcoholic dementia in the family house, which was falling into disrepair. Jenny had recently been granted power of attorney and was in the process of relocating her mother to an extended-care facility. There was a facility near Utica that was well regarded and prepared to deal with Mrs. Symanski’s alcoholism as well as her chronic confusion, but the chances that Jenny’s mom would move there without a fight were slim to none.

That was all true, but it was also a convenient excuse for Jenny to stay in Schuyler past the weekend, after Aaron would have flown back to Washington. And once Aaron was out of the way, Jenny could do what she had agreed to do for Tau. And for herself, of course. Mainly for herself. Incidentally for Tau.

My father had made no response to Mama Laura’s rebuke. He was silent during dessert but seemed more sleepy than sullen. After coffee he excused himself and allowed Mama Laura to escort him upstairs. Aaron took a bathroom break, but his hand was reaching for his phone even as he left the table. Soon we could hear his voice from behind the door off the hallway, terse unintelligible questions blurred by the echo of an enclosed space.

“I think it would probably be okay to turn on the TV in the living room,” Jenny said, meaning it would be better to get some news we could all share rather than insult Mama Laura by trawling our phones for information. Geddy located the remote and pushed the button. The old panel lit up weakly, already tuned to a news channel, a pixilated image of night over water with lights in the sky. The newscaster’s voice was offering carefully hedged speculation: according to the best available reports.… the fog of war … we cannot confirm …

Mama Laura came back downstairs, gave the TV a dubious glance, and asked whether anyone might be willing to help with the dishes. I volunteered. Dishwashing was traditionally a female task in my father’s household, but he wasn’t here to complain and Mama Laura accepted my offer with a smile. We were drying the china when she asked me about Amanda: “That girl from India you brought here years ago, do you still see her at all?”

“She’s from Canada, not India. And she lives in California now, so I don’t see her very often.”

“Too bad. I liked her. I know you did, too. Is there anyone special at the moment?”

“I know a lot of special people.”

“Yes, in your Affinity. But I meant someone, I guess you could say, intimately special. A girlfriend.”

“Lots.”

She toweled a chipped Noritake serving dish and set it in the drying rack. “That sounds kind of sad to me. Don’t you ever wish you could just be with someone you love, as simple as that?”

“Is it ever as simple as that?”

A rueful smile. “Maybe not. And, Adam, let me say I never did believe what your father said about Tau, that it’s all homosexuals and dope smokers.”

“Well, not all,” I said. “But we’re well supplied with both.”

“I’m not sure that’s funny.”

“I didn’t mean it to be.”

Three hours before the lights went out.

Aaron called us into the living room. He had been on his phone again, but he tucked it back into his pocket as we settled into chairs. Geddy left the TV on but turned down the volume so we could hear my brother’s news.

“Okay,” he said. “Mama Laura, I’m sorry, but we have to go back to Washington tonight. They’re prepping a plane at the local airport, and the very next thing I have to do is call a cab.”

“Is it as bad as that,” Mama Laura asked, “what’s happening in India?”

“No one’s sure. There’s absolutely no electronic communication of any kind coming out of the country right now. We think that’s because Chinese malware took down all the telecom infrastructure—Internet nodes, telephone exchanges, satellites, and relay stations.”

The Chinese were allied with Pakistan, and a small fleet of Chinese naval vessels had been parked in the Arabian Sea for weeks, but this was the first direct intervention by China, if that was in fact what had happened. “Most likely it’s just a smokescreen,” Aaron went on. “It’s not that the Chinese are attacking India, more like they’re drawing a curtain so Pakistan can stage an attack the rest of the world can’t see. Maybe also limiting India’s capacity to respond. We’ll know more in a few hours, if our own communications aren’t affected.”

Rebecca said, “Why would they be?”

“Part of the smokescreen. Our own military has the finest surveillance satellites in the world, but about half of them have stopped talking to us. We’ve also got unexplained power grid problems in New York City, Los Angeles, Seattle. Some kind of highly engineered, cleverly targeted software virus, possibly bleeding over from the attacks on Indian infrastructure. And it might get worse before it gets better. That’s why they need me in Washington. Congress is being recalled to convene an emergency session tomorrow morning.”

Mama Laura said, “Are we in danger?”

“Nobody’s bombing us, if that’s what you mean. But an infrastructure attack is technically an act of war. Of course, the Chinese are denying responsibility. Nobody really knows where it goes from here. The situation will get better eventually, but it might get worse before it improves. Jenny, you need to pack the bags. I’ll call a taxi.”

“I’m not going,” Jenny said.

We all stared at her.

“Not an option,” Aaron said. “Travel’s going to be disrupted. That’s inevitable. If you don’t fly back with me, you might be here a lot longer than you expect.”

“All the more reason. I can’t leave my mom where she is. Sooner or later she’ll hurt herself. And … dealing with her won’t be easy, but I’m psyched up for it now. Postponing it would be hard on both of us.”

This was the moment, I thought. If Aaron suspected anything, Jenny’s reluctance to leave would confirm his suspicions.

But he didn’t so much as glance at me, and the look he gave Jenny was merely contemptuous. “Look, if that’s what you want.…”

“It’s what I want.”

“Well … I’ll miss you, of course.” This was for the benefit of the family. I gave Jenny credit for not rolling her eyes. “The rest of you, please try not to worry. This is very bad news for the folks in Mumbai, but the most it’ll mean for Americans is a few days’ inconvenience. I’ll be in touch when I can.”

“Go on up and say good-bye to your father,” Mama Laura suggested.

“Right, of course,” my brother said.

Another limousine pulled up out front and carried my brother away.

It was a clear night, moonless, cool but not cold. An hour later we could have stood in the backyard and watched his chartered plane cross the sky from the regional airport on its trajectory to DC, navigation lights strobing green and red in the darkness. Two hours later we could have stood in the same place and seen the Milky Way wheeling overhead like a scatter of diamond dust, free from any obscuring urban glare. Because that was when the lights went out.

Chapter 16

Growing up, I had never considered my brother Aaron to be a bad person.

A pain in the ass, sure. Often. And with an undeniable streak of cruelty. The first time I noticed that streak—the first time his meanness struck me as something characteristic about my brother, distinct from the usual schoolyard cruelties—was when I was nine years old and Aaron was a week shy of his twelfth birthday. We had been in the park adjacent to the school on a slow Saturday morning, me pitching softballs (pitching was my only athletic skill) and Aaron taking practice swings. Neither of us was likely to make the MLB draft, but I was drawing my own measure of smug satisfaction from Aaron’s inability to hit my slider.

Also enjoying Aaron’s swing-throughs was Billy-Ann Blake, ten years old, who lived three streets east of us and who was amusing herself by heckling from the otherwise empty bleachers. Billy-Ann was a tall, gawky girl whose parents let her run around in pink denim overalls. That morning, the summer sun hammering down from a silvery-blue sky, she repeated what must have been every scatological epithet she had ever overheard at the town’s Little League tournaments, which was quite a catalog. Aaron was frustrated and embarrassed, and with every taunt from Billy-Ann his complexion turned a deeper shade of red. Finally he threw down the bat (“Sore loser!” Billy-Ann shrieked) and walked off the field, tossing a terse see you later in my direction.

I gathered up glove, bat, and ball and made my own way home. Aaron showed up around lunchtime, sweaty and sullen and uncommunicative.

Not long after lunch, Billy-Ann Blake’s mom knocked at the front door. Mama Laura took her into the living room, and after a brief talk Aaron and I were called to join them. It seemed that Billy-Ann, after taunting Aaron, had been walking through one of the park’s paved trails when she was pushed from behind, fell face-first into the asphalt, and suffered a spectacularly bloody broken nose. She was at the hospital with her father now, and although she hadn’t seen who pushed her, she was certain it was Aaron Fisk.

Mama Laura asked Aaron whether this was true. Aaron gave her a somber, troubled look. “No,” he said flatly. “I mean, Billy-Ann was watching us play ball, but we came right home from the park. Somebody else must have pushed her.”

Mama Laura had spent the morning in the kitchen assembling her contribution to tomorrow’s church bake sale and she had not paid attention to our whereabouts. She returned Aaron’s stare without reaction. Then she turned to me. “Adam, is that so?”

I didn’t hesitate. I knew what was expected of me. “Yeah,” I said. “We came right back.”

Billy-Ann’s mom went away unsatisfied, and Mama Laura may have had her suspicions, but no more was said on the subject in the Fisk household. Because Aaron was gold. Firstborn son, pride of the family, star of the debating team … shitty on the baseball diamond, maybe, but a first pick for soccer and a rising star of the school’s swim team. Sure, Aaron had been angry, and yeah, he had probably shoved Billy-Ann hard enough to break her nose. But stuff like that happened. It didn’t make him a bad person, did it?

And lying to protect him: that was just family loyalty. Even if Mama Laura started looking at Aaron a little differently from then on. Even if she spared some of those same glances for me.

Jenny Symanski spent plenty of time at our house in those days, but she never seemed to buy into our idolization of Aaron. Which was good. As far as I was concerned, the best thing about Jenny was that she liked me more than she liked my brother. Which is why, years later, even after I joined Tau, even after Jenny and I broke up, I was astonished when she married him. It was flattering to think she had settled for Aaron because she couldn’t have me, but it was also possible that some kind of mutual attraction had smoldered away unacknowledged until they were in a position to act on it. And, well, why not? By that time Aaron was a college graduate, involved in the family business, and already catching the eye of the local Republican party elders; I was the standoffish art-boy geek who had traded his family for some kind of pretentious, dope-smoking social club.

Geddy stayed in touch with Aaron and Jenny more consistently than I did, and it was Geddy who had flagged the first signs of Aaron’s abuse. He had hinted at it back when I was in Vancouver, but it wasn’t until months later that he raised the subject in another phone call.

“He slaps her,” Geddy had said. “Punches her sometimes. Maybe worse things.”

“Really? You’ve seen this?”

“When I was staying with them. I mean, I didn’t see it happen. But some nights I could hear the yelling. And in the morning she might have a bruise. Or she might be walking a little carefully, like something hurt. So I knew. And she knew I knew. She tried to talk about it sometimes.”

Jenny had never been a complainer, but neither had she suffered fools gladly. I asked Geddy why she didn’t go to the police.

“She’s worried Aaron could pull strings and get a complaint shut down. And then it would be even worse for her. But she’s thinking about it.”

One thing I had learned from watching my tranchemates disentangle themselves from their tethers was that these things don’t get better all by themselves. “There are shelters,” I said. “There are people who can help her with legal problems. Geddy, if she wants to talk to me, I’m sure I can set up a secure line. Aaron wouldn’t have to know about it.”

“Okay,” Geddy said. “I’ll tell her that.”

But I didn’t hear from her. And a year later, Geddy said the trouble had been resolved.

“Resolved how? They’re still married, aren’t they?”

“That was part of the deal. Jenny decided she needed evidence, right? So she set up her tablet in the bedroom with the camera recording video. Night after night, until she had all the evidence she needed. Yelling, slapping, grabbing, hair-pulling—Aaron’s a hair-puller, did you know that? Including threats. What he’d do to her if she tried to tell anyone and how he’d bankrupt her if she left him. Because he’s afraid of a public scandal.”

And here was another aspect of Jenny’s personality I had failed to discern: this calculated stoicism, the ability to endure something terrible until she had devised a tool to end it. Twenty-five minutes of video recording, Geddy said, which she had wisely copied and stored in multiple locations. I pictured a thumb drive in a safety-deposit box in some DC bank, an insurance policy by any other name.

But still, she hadn’t divorced him.

“That’s part of the deal. She keeps the video to herself and goes on pretending they’re happily married. In return they lead totally separate lives, separate bedrooms, separate vacations, he pays her a monthly stipend and guarantees payments on her car, things like that. She hardly has to see him, except at public events.”

“Not as good as a clean separation.”

“It’s what she wants, Adam. She feels like it gives her some power over him. She’s saving all the money he gives her, in case he tries something. But he sees other women. What he calls discreet short-term relationships. Which Jenny says means high-priced hookers and bar pickups, basically.”

And that was how things had stood until a couple of months ago, when Jenny herself had called me. She used Geddy’s phone (he was in DC with his band), which meant she distrusted her own phone, which meant the situation with Aaron must have heated up again.

At first I didn’t recognize her voice. Jenny had been a social smoker almost as long as I had known her, but her years with Aaron had ramped it up into a full-blown pack-a-day habit, and her voice was a charcoal drawing of the voice I remembered. It had lost its tentativeness, too. “A while back you told Geddy you’d be willing to help me. Is that right?”

I felt blindsided. “Of course. But I’m not sure—I mean—”

“I know Geddy told you about Aaron and me. So I don’t have to rehash all that business, do I?”

I told her what I knew. “So you had an arrangement with Aaron—I guess something changed?”

“I want to go public,” she said. “I want the video to go viral. But I can’t just post it online. I need legal advice. And I need protection. I thought of you because I know Aaron has been cozy with the Het sodality, and I know Tau isn’t okay with that.”

This was when the Griggs-Haskell bill was being vetted in committee. Damian and other sodality leaders had been looking at how various congressmen were likely to cast votes. Aaron was one of the congressional reps who were firmly in the pocket of the Het lobby. He had benefited considerably from PAC funds we had traced to wealthy Het contributors. So yeah, Tau had an interest in seeing Aaron discredited, if it would affect his vote on Griggs-Haskell. Though I had a fleeting wish Jenny hadn’t pitched it quite so bluntly. Clearly, she wasn’t pinning her hopes on my own refined sense of moral duty.

“I can have a word with some people if you like. Can I ask what changed your mind?”

She paused, then said flatly, “Aaron’s in what I guess you would call a long-term extramarital relationship.”

“And you’re not okay with that?”

“I don’t give a rat’s asshole about Aaron’s affairs. Except … I’ve met this woman. She’s someone perfectly trivial, but she shows up now and then on the cocktail circuit. She’s reasonably good-looking but mousy and timid, which is how Aaron likes ’em. And lately I’ve noticed how she dresses. Long sleeves in summer. How she walks sometimes. I ran into her in a bathroom at the Blue Duck Tavern, putting makeup over what looked like a serious bruise. Doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to add it up.”

“That’s what changed your mind?”

“Well, yeah. Because I thought I had solved a problem. But I had only solved my problem. The real problem is Aaron. He’s still out there, doing what he does. The only difference is that some other woman is feeling the pain.”

“And you want to stop him.”

“I want to paint the word abuser on his fucking forehead. Or as close as I can get.”

Okay: I promised to speak to someone, see whether Tau could help. Then I said, “How are things otherwise? Jesus, Jenny. I haven’t talked to you in a dozen years.”

“Thanks, Adam.” The intensity drained from her voice. “I’m pretty busy, actually. No time to chat. But you can reach me through Geddy when you need to.”

Chapter 17

The lights went out all over North America and across much of the rest of the world that evening, but from Schuyler it looked, at least at first, like any other power blackout.

So we did what everyone else does when the lights wink off. Geddy peeked outside and reported that the whole neighborhood was dark, so we knew it was more than a blown fuse. Mama Laura handed me a flashlight from a drawer in the kitchen and sent me to the basement to fetch the emergency candles she kept there. (A years-old box of yahrzeit candles, no doubt from the tiny kosher aisle in the local supermarket. I was sure Mama Laura didn’t know the use for which they were intended, though Rebecca winced when she started lighting them.) Jenny tried to call her mother but reported that her phone was also dead. Mama Laura went upstairs to see if my father was still awake (he was not) and to fetch the battery-operated radio they kept by the bedside.

We gathered in the living room. Geddy put the radio on the coffee table and cranked up the volume. The radio was an old analog model, and the only station we could tune in was a local one. The evening news-and-sports guy was struggling to keep up with the situation: he said the blackout appeared to be continent-wide and that wireless and internet service was disrupted and intermittent. There had been no official statement from the federal government, “that I know of.” He said people should shelter in their homes. He repeated something Aaron had suggested, and which the wire services must have announced shortly before the blackout became complete: telecom and utility problems were probably due to viral malware that had been released in India but had spread uncontrollably. There was still no reliable news from that part of the world, but the last social-media posts from the city of Surat showed “a bright cloud and column of smoke” from the direction of Mumbai more than a hundred miles distant. “But of course that doesn’t prove anything,” the newscaster added.

“Isn’t this awful,” Mama Laura said.

Mumbai. Amanda had relatives there. There were Tau communities there, too, not to mention countless people who would have qualified as Taus had they ever taken the test. Relatives of a different kind.

I took a candle and navigated my way to the bathroom, where I tried to call Trev. But my phone was as dead as Jenny’s. Which meant I was out of touch with my team. Which created a whole new set of problems, and I needed to talk to Jenny about that.

Fortunately for our chances of having a private conversation, Jenny was a smoker. Mama Laura wouldn’t allow a cigarette to be lit in the house, so Jenny excused herself to step outside. Geddy and I followed her onto the back porch, but Geddy hurried back inside as soon as she took out her pack of Marlboros—he hated the smell of burning tobacco. I waited for the screen door to swing shut behind him.

Jenny gave me a careful look. The night was cool but windless, and her face was softened by the light of the rising moon. She could almost have been her younger self, Jenny Symanski and Adam Fisk, just hanging out. She said, “Okay, so what now?”

The plan had been admirably simple. What Jenny wanted from Tau was protection. Not just from Aaron but from the media shitstorm that would follow her release of the video. One official press conference, one official statement, a signed affidavit, then she wanted to disappear. Because, as she had said when we first discussed this, “It’s not just a career-killer for Aaron. It’s an embarrassment to me. I look at myself in those videos and all I see is someone—what’s the word? Cowed. Cringing. Like a whipped dog! It’s fucking humiliating. Not exactly what I want to show the world.”

“But you weren’t cowed,” I told her. “That’s why the video exists, because you weren’t cringing, you aren’t letting him get away with it.”

At the end of the weekend I was supposed to take Jenny to a Tau enclave in Buffalo, with Trev and his security detail for escort, and after a prearranged press conference we would drive her over the border into Canada. She wanted a clean break with her past life, and that was what we promised her: our own version of the Witness Protection Program. A new name with all ancillary credentials, a new home in a pleasant university town out west. A job, if she wanted one. The sodality had ways of quietly and invisibly ensuring the employment of fellow Taus—and fellow travelers, in this case. Once the video was public she might be recognized, but I doubted it; Jenny had the kind of pleasant but commonplace looks that could be rendered utterly anonymous by a bottle of L’Oréal and a change of clothes.

“We should proceed as if nothing’s changed,” I said, though much had changed. For one thing, the international crisis might cause the vote on Griggs-Haskell to be postponed. For another, we wouldn’t be releasing any videos or staging any press conferences until power was restored. “We leave here Monday morning and head for Buffalo. By then we might have a better idea what’s going on in the rest of the world. In the meantime I’m going to have to find a way to contact my friend Trevor out at the Holiday Inn.” I didn’t mention the contingent of Het enforcers Trev had spotted earlier. No need for Jenny to worry about that. “And we need our own copy of the video.”

“Okay,” she said softly. “Now?”

“As good a time as any.”

She looked into my eyes as if she were hunting for some kind of reassurance there. Then she rummaged in her purse until she came up with a cheap thumb drive, which she pressed into my hand.

She smoked her cigarette and we listened to the night. In neighboring houses, candles moved like restless ghosts behind darkened windows. The backyard opened onto a stretch of marshy, unimproved land where bullfrogs croaked out what Mama Laura used to call “that jug o’ rum noise.” Jenny and I had caught a huge bullfrog there, a year or so before puberty began to complicate our relationship. The frog was six inches snout to tail—I had held it still while she applied a tape measure from her mom’s sewing box. The frog had croaked all night in a box in Jenny’s garage, and in the morning her parents had made her turn it loose.

“Must be strange for you,” she said, “being back here.”

I shrugged.

“It is for me,” she said. “So many memories kind of overlapping, you know, like a multiple exposure. Things we did back in the day. I look at Geddy and I still see the chubby, awkward kid he used to be. All the crazy enthusiasm he couldn’t keep inside himself. You ever think about that stuff?”

“Sometimes.”

“About your family?”

“Sure. Sometimes.”

“Because I think it must be strange, coming back here, your father on his deathbed or close to it, and you and me about to hand Aaron a nasty ticket to obscurity.”

I almost wished I could tell her I had spent sleepless nights worrying about it.

“I have a different family now,” I said. “I hope it doesn’t sound callous, but whatever love I got in this house, I got mainly from Grammy Fisk, and she’s been gone a long time. I’m sorry for my father. I really am. But I was never much more to him than an afterthought and a distraction. He fed me and he tolerated me and he allowed me a place in his house. And I guess that’s worth thanking him for. But it’s nothing like love, and I can’t say I ever really loved him.”

Jenny looked at me as if from a great distance. “Actually,” she said, “yeah, that does sound a little callous.”

“The first people who took me into their home with genuine love were two old women with a big house in Toronto. I expect my father would call them a pair of rich old dykes. I still live in that house when I’m not on the road. I love everyone who lives in it with me. One of those women—Loretta—died a couple of years ago. Cancer, not very different from my dad’s. I cried when she passed, and I feel her absence every day, even now. I know what grief is, Jenny. I know where it comes from, and I know how people earn it.”

She sighed a plume of smoke to the starry sky. “Okay,” she said. “The funny thing is, that’s how I used to feel about this house, back when my folks were drunk or arguing or both. I came here because Grammy Fisk was nice to me, and Mama Laura never yelled, and I liked being with you, and Geddy was pretty entertaining. And if Aaron ignored me, that’s just because he was older and so good at everything. Some nights the only way I could get to sleep was by pretending this was my family, and that the only reason I had to go home was because I’d been born at the wrong address.”

It was a memorable phrase. Born at the wrong address.

“So maybe I think about those days more than you do,” Jenny finished.

“Maybe so.”

“But I doubt it, because some things you just don’t walk away from.”

“I walked away from here a long time ago.”

She smiled, a humorless compression of her lips. “Well, one thing hasn’t changed. You’re still a lousy liar.”

“I hope that’s not entirely true. The work I do these days, I’m a kind of diplomat. I help Tau negotiate deals with other Affinities. I need to lie from time to time. I’m one of the best liars we’ve got.”

She stubbed out her cigarette on the rim of one of Mama Laura’s big ceramic planters. “Then God help Tau, and God help us.”

I tried twice more to call Trevor Holst, without success. I needed to talk to him, but it looked like I wouldn’t be doing that before morning. It was late now. Mama Laura was tidying up the kitchen for the night, and the rest of us huddled around the radio, learning nothing. Geddy began to yawn.

Then there was a terse knock at the front door. “I’ll get it,” Mama Laura called from the kitchen. Twice tonight we had had visitors come to the door: neighbors who were running portable generators, offering to let us join them if we needed anything. Probably more of the same, I thought, until I heard Mama Laura’s stifled screech of alarm.

We all leaped up, but I was first to grab a flashlight and reach the door. Mama Laura stood in the door frame with her hand to her mouth. I aimed the light outside and saw what had scared her: a huge dark-skinned man with elaborate facial tattoos and blood oozing from a gash above his right eye.

“Trevor, Jesus,” I managed.

“Sorry,” he said meekly. “I would have called first, but…”

“Adam,” Mama Laura said, “do you know this man?”

“Yes. He’s a friend. Mama Laura, this is Trevor Holst.”

She relaxed visibly and exhaled a pent-up breath. “Oh. Then come on in, Mr. Holst. You seem to be hurt—I’ll get the iodine and some washcloths.”

Trevor clearly needed to talk to me privately, but we were obliged to do introductions and explanations. I took him to the living room. The candlelight made him seem even more intimidating than usual: his kirituhi tats looked inky black, and drops of blood had trickled down the bridge of his nose and dried on his cheeks like tears. He wedged himself into a chair and put on his biggest hey-I’m-harmless smile, but even that seemed somehow vulpine.

I introduced him as a Tau friend who had been traveling with me and who had taken a room at the Holiday Inn for the weekend. Trev blamed the cut on his head on the blackout: “Streetlights went dark and I walked into a lamppost. Back at the hotel there was a bunch of folks trying to get rooms—a bus broke down at the town line and the driver couldn’t contact anybody for help. So I gave up my room for an older couple from Tennessee. Figured I’d transfer to the Days Inn, but they’re full too. Which is why I came by here to tell you I’ve got no place to stay and maybe get a recommendation—one of those motels up the highway closer to the county line, I’m thinking.”

By this time Mama Laura had come downstairs with a bowl of warm water and towels. She put the bowl on the coffee table and bent down to swab Trevor’s forehead. “Any other night,” she said, “I would recommend you get the folks at the Creekside Clinic to put in a couple of stitches in this cut. You gashed yourself pretty good. It might heal to a scar. But a cotton bandage will keep body and soul together for now. As for those motels on the highway, they’re chock full of bedbugs. You can stay here tonight, Mr. Holst.”

“That’s very generous, Mrs. Fisk—”

“You’ll have to sleep in the bed in the attic, I’m afraid, even though you’re too long for it by half. Is that all right?”

“Very much all right. Thank you. Please call me Trevor.”

“Everyone calls me Mama Laura.”

“Thank you, Mama Laura.”

She smiled. “You’re very welcome. You say you’re traveling with Adam?”

“From New York back to Toronto by way of Schuyler.”

“Then shame on Adam for leaving you at the Holiday Inn. His friends are always welcome here.”

Trev shot me an amused look. Yeah, shame on you. “It was my choice. I didn’t want to intrude on a family gathering.”

“Thoughtful of you, but I think it stopped being just a family gathering when the lights went out.”

Making up the bed in the attic, Mama Laura came across an ancient portable radio to supplement the one in the living room. Geddy installed fresh batteries and took it upstairs when he and Rachel retired.

Which left me and Trev and Jenny free to talk. Trev told Jenny he’d be driving when we left Schuyler and that he would make sure she was safe. Jenny gave the bandage on his head a careful look. Clearly, the plan had already gone awry. But she nodded her agreement and went upstairs without further questions.

Which made it possible for me to say: “Trevor, what the fuck?”

He kept his voice to a low rumble. “We lost the security detail. Both cars. I was riding in the lead vehicle, we were doing a drive-around to get the lay of the town. This was maybe an hour before the lights went out. The fucking Het guys ambushed us, forced both our vehicles off the road. My car went into a ditch, the other vehicle hit a concrete planter. Tracy Guitierrez was driving—she’s in the local hospital with most of the rest of my guys, not critical but definitely out of business for the time being. Lost a lot of skin on the right side of her face. Those of us who could walk quit the scene as soon as we called for help. I didn’t want to have to waste time telling stories to the cops while the Hets do whatever they feel like. And then the blackout. I had to walk here.”

I processed this. It was the news about Tracy that really made me angry. She was a fairly new Tau, still full of that oh-my-God-I’m-home-at-last giddiness. I wanted to hurt somebody on her behalf. And it didn’t take Tau telepathy to feel a similar sentiment radiating from Trev like heat from a woodstove.

But we had to be smart about this, too.

“Raises the question,” I said, “of why they would do that.”

“I’ve been thinking about that on the walk here. Obviously they know something is up. Probably they know it involves Jenny. My guess is, the Hets got wind of our plan. And they mean to do something about it.”

“Like what?”

“I wish I knew. Have you been able to get in touch with Damian or Amanda?”

“No.”

“Me neither. Which means we’re on our own right now. On the other hand, so are the Hets. And Hets are lousy at acting without orders, so maybe that buys us some time.”

“What do you suggest we do?”

“Tonight, post a watch. The two of us, I guess. One of us should be awake and vigilant at all times. And in the morning, we take your car and get Jenny Fisk out of town ASAP. How’s that sound?”

“Reasonable, I guess.”

“So who gets the first watch of the night?”

“I’ll take it. You look like you could use some rest.”

He didn’t object. “Show me the way to the attic room,” he said. He checked his watch. “And wake me at three. Sooner, if you see anything suspicious.”

He was at least a foot longer than the fold-out Mama Laura had set up for him, but he made himself comfortable. Back downstairs, I blew out the candles and put a chair by the big front window where I could watch the street. Then I poured myself a cup of cold coffee from the pot that was left after dinner and stared into the darkness.

Chapter 18

I had been on watch for about an hour, half dozing by the window, when there was a scream from the second-floor hallway, followed by violent shouting.

I grabbed a flashlight and ran upstairs. But when I made it to the landing all I saw was my father lying on the floor in a pair of white pajama bottoms, and Mama Laura bending over him, and Trevor at the far end of the hallway looking startled and contrite.

Apparently my father had gotten out of bed and headed for the bathroom, carrying one of Mama Laura’s yahrzeit candles on a saucer. He found the bathroom door locked. He knocked and rattled the knob, and when the door opened he dropped the candle and screamed. He screamed because he had been asleep when Trev arrived, and Mama Laura had neglected to warn him that if he needed to take a leak during the night he might encounter a muscular two-hundred-and-forty-pound stranger with extensive facial tattoos. He dropped his candle (it rolled to the verge of the stairs, flame extinguished) and managed to back away three steps before he tripped over a knitted rug and fell to the floor. Mama Laura, running from the bedroom, found Trev standing over her husband and repeating the words, “Dude, are you all right?”

It was possibly the first time in his life my father had been called “dude.” He wasn’t taking it well. Now that he was no longer frightened, his belligerence came roaring onto center stage. “Who the fuck invited you?”

“I did,” I said. I scooped up the fallen candle. “This is Trevor. He’s a friend of mine.”

“You have some pretty fucking peculiar friends!”

“He needed a place to stay for the night.”

“Well, welcome to the Fisk Hotel!”

“Don’t be ungracious,” Mama Laura said, helping him to his feet. Because he was dressed in pajamas it was easy to see how much weight he had lost. His knees poked at the white cotton fabric like knotted cords. He had no belly, just a declivity under the barrel of his ribs. “And don’t swear, if you can help it. Come back to bed, Charles.”

“I still need to take a piss, goddammit!”

Even by candlelight I could see Mama Laura blush. “Go on, then.”

He grunted and headed for the bathroom, skirting around Trev as if he were radioactive. Then he paused and looked back at me.

“Figures this is one of yours,” he said.

Mama Laura apologized for the excitement. I went downstairs with Trev behind me.

“Other than that,” he said, “anything happening?”

I smiled. “All quiet on the western front.”

“Okay. You want me to take my shift now? I mean, I’m fully awake.”

“So am I. You should get another couple of hours if you can.”

Alone again, I settled back into my chair. Outside, the street was empty and stayed empty. Silence inside and out, until I heard more footsteps on the stairway. This time it was Geddy’s friend Rebecca, barefoot in a cotton nightie. Her skinny frame and halo of dark hair gave her the look of a Q-tip dipped in black paint. “Couldn’t sleep,” she explained when she saw me. “What with the noise and all.”

I asked without thinking, “And Geddy slept through it?”

“I guess so. We’re in separate rooms, remember?”

Of course they were: Mama Laura’s Protestantism wouldn’t countenance an unmarried couple cohabiting under her roof. Rebecca headed for the kitchen, and I heard the refrigerator door open and close. She came back into the living room with a glass of milk in her hand. “I put the rest of the carton in the freezer, where it’s still a little cold. But if this blackout goes on much longer you’ll have to start throwing away perishables. Mind if I sit?”

I did mind, because as long as she was in the room my attention would be divided between her and the street. But I couldn’t say that. I shrugged, and she sank into the big easy chair that used to be reserved for my father. “I guess you couldn’t sleep either.”

“I’m a light sleeper at the best of times.”

“Uh-huh.” She sipped her milk.

Outside, a car drove past. It didn’t stop. I watched until its taillights vanished around the nearest corner. “I apologize about the candles.”

“I’m not religious, and I’m not sentimental about yahrzeit candles. Though I still light one on Yom HaShoah, like everyone else in my family.”

“Big family?”

“It seems like it, when we get together for the holidays.”

“Have you introduced Geddy to them?”

She sipped her milk and wiped her lip with her wrist. “My Gentile boyfriend? Of course I have. They love him. There’s no problem, except with a couple of Orthodox cousins whose opinions no one takes seriously. An awkward moment now and then, no big deal.”

“As awkward as all this?”

“Well, maybe not quite. But Geddy told me what to expect, especially concerning his dad. So no shocks there. And I know how it is with families.”

I nodded and looked back at the window.

“Conventional families, I mean,” she said. “Your friend Trevor is cute, by the way. I like the way you are with him. There’s obviously some real love there.”

Her gaydar had surely blipped when Trevor came within range, and I wondered if she was making an unwarranted assumption about my relationship with him. But if so, so what. “Real love” was a fair call.

“Being in an Affinity must be like that. That’s what I think. I mean all these wonderful, complex relationships just spilling out of the air practically—a million possibilities, a million flavors of potential happiness. You were an early adopter, right? It must have been great back then.”

“It’s great now. Anyway, I thought you disapproved.”

“No, I totally get it! I mean I do disapprove, in a way, but I don’t disapprove of what an Affinity gives you.”

“So what do you disapprove of?”

“The fact that it’s in an Affinity. The fact that there’s a wall around it. All due credit to Meir Klein—he knew utopia isn’t one-size-fits-all. You could put a hundred people together and they could live better, fuller, freer, happier, more collaborative lives—but only the right hundred people, not a hundred random people off the street. So once you know what to measure and how to crunch the numbers, voilà: the twenty-two Affinities. Twenty-two gardens, with twenty-two walls around them. No disputing it’s nice inside, for anyone who can get inside. But think about what that means for all the people not included. Suddenly you’ve segregated them from the best cooperators. Which puts outsiders in a walled garden too, but it’s not really a garden, ’cause all the competent gardeners buggered off and the trees don’t bear much fruit. And a walled garden that isn’t a garden looks like something different. It looks like a prison.”

“Colorful metaphor, but—”

“And that’s not the only problem. You’ve created twenty-two groups—twenty-three, if you count those of us left out—with competing interests. The Affinities are all about cooperation within the group, not between groups. So, hey, look, a new world order, twenty-three brand new para-ethnicities and meta-nations, and what prevents them from going to war with each other? Nothing. Apparently.”

“We’ve done good in the world, Rebecca. TauBourse, for instance. It benefited a lot of people who weren’t Taus, directly and indirectly. As for war, we had people in high places in India and even a few in Pakistan, trying to prevent all the trouble.”

“And how’s that going?”

I shrugged and looked back at the window. A pair of headlights appeared at the end of the street, approaching. The vehicle behind them was big, but it was too dark to make out more than a boxy shape. It drove past without slowing or stopping. Then the street was empty again.

“I don’t think you’re down here because you can’t sleep,” Rebecca said. “I think you’re down here standing guard.”

“What makes you say that?”

“In addition to the way you can’t keep your eyes off an empty street?”

“What would I be standing guard against?”

“Het, I’m guessing.”

“And why would you think that?”

“Because your sister-in-law talks to Geddy, and Geddy talks to me. I know what Jenny’s situation is. I know how Aaron treated her, and I know what she means to do about it. I also know you’re helping her—Tau is helping her—and I know why. You think her video will discredit Aaron and maybe force him to step down before the vote on Griggs-Haskell. Win-win, right? Except for Het.”

I looked at her with fresh respect and a degree of wariness. Maybe Geddy had trusted her enough to confide in her. But I wasn’t Geddy, and I wasn’t sure I trusted Geddy’s judgment.

“Assuming any of this is true,” I said, “what’s your interest?”

“Personally, you mean? Or from the point of view of New Socionome?”

“Either.”

“New Socionome isn’t an Affinity. There’s no us and them. No single point of view. No consensus. It has no interests to advance, except to facilitate non-zero-sum collaboration. So the only opinion I can offer is my own. I think the Affinities are doomed whether Griggs-Haskell passes or not. Because they have a toxic dynamic. The sooner they fail, the better. I think Jenny needs to get away from Aaron, and I think she’s brave to want to out him as an abuser. Short-term, I approve of what you’re doing to help her. Even though it’s messy. I assume you’ve thought about what it’s going to do to this family?”

At length. I told her so. “But I believe it’s worth it.”

“For Jenny, you mean. And to do the right thing.”

“For Tau,” I said. “And to do the right thing.”

Rebecca asked me one more question before she carried a yahrzeit candle back upstairs with her: “Do you really think there might be Het people out there who want to hurt us?”

I wondered whether it was wise to answer her question. I didn’t want to confirm her suspicions or reveal more than she already knew. “Look at it from Het’s point of view,” I said. “They’ve kept a close eye on Aaron and they probably know at least a little about his troubled marriage. If they don’t know about the video, they may at least suspect Jenny of being a loose cannon. They also know the most direct connection between Jenny and Tau is through me. So any occasion that brings me into contact with Jenny is going to interest them.”

“Interest isn’t the same as a threat.”

“Suppose they figured out what Jenny intends to do. How do they respond? They can’t take control of the video—it’s already been copied to remote servers, and they would have to assume Tau already has access to it. The only real leverage they can exercise is over Jenny herself, by making the price of releasing the video too high to bear.”

“How would they do that?”

“The usual tools are threats and intimidation.”

“What kind of threats and intimidation?”

“No way to predict. Plus there’s the communication shutdown. Hets are strongly hierarchical, which means the people they sent to Schuyler might be unwilling to act without authorization. Or maybe they have contingency orders—there’s no way of knowing.”

“You have any evidence they actually have hostile intentions?”

Solid evidence: a bunch of Tau security guys in the local hospital. But that was news Rebecca didn’t need to hear. “Better to assume the worst.”

“So your plan is to sit by the window and worry?”

“Until we can get Jenny out of town.”

“I see. Okay.”

“I’m glad you approve.”

She gave me another of her conflicted smiles, one part sincere, one part cynical. “I’m not sure I do. But I guess I understand.”

Trevor came down to relieve me in the chill hours of the morning, looming out of the darkness like a candlelit Goliath. “Hey, Trev,” I said. “Quiet so far.”

“Hope it stays that way,” he said, small-voiced and careful not to wake anyone, settling into the chair I had just left.

So I went to bed and got a useful few hours of sleep. When I opened my eyes it was morning, the house beginning to warm up in a bath of late-May sunlight. Downstairs, Mama Laura fixed breakfast for those of us who were awake (Rebecca was still sleeping). The electric stove wasn’t working, but she had fired up the gas grill in the backyard and used it to scramble eggs in an iron pan, standing in the dewy grass in her bedroom slippers with a goosedown jacket over her nightdress. She delivered the eggs to the table with a satisfied flourish: triumph over adversity. Plus coffee, boiled in a pan over the grill.

Trev ate heartily even as my father sat in sulky silence, glaring at the gigantic Maori who had somehow invaded his home. Geddy had been keeping an ear on the radio in the living room, and he brought us up to date on the latest news: phone and data services had been partially restored to parts of the west coast but were operating sporadically and unreliably. New York City and Washington, DC, also had intermittent telecom coverage, but the rest of the country, and most of Europe, and all of the Indian subcontinent, were still down. A few unconfirmed reports hinted that Mumbai was burning. All this information was being relayed through private broadcasters running on self-generated power, whispers passed from one ear to the next.

As soon as possible, I took Trevor and Jenny aside—once again, Jenny’s tobacco habit gave us an excuse to segregate ourselves in the backyard. I said we should leave for Buffalo as soon as possible. Trev was clearly uneasy about undertaking the trip without an escort, but he didn’t want to alarm Jenny by raising the possibility of a Het attack. Jenny herself was fine with leaving this afternoon. “I’ll pack,” she said, “and we can leave as soon as Geddy gets back.”

I said, “Geddy left?” Trev, simultaneously: “Back from where?”

“My mom’s. I need to know how she’s doing. She really does need to move out of that house and into a care facility, sooner rather than later. I can arrange that through Tau, though, right? Even when I’m in Canada living under an assumed name?”

I managed to nod.

“So Geddy offered to go check on her. She’s always been nice to Geddy, even at her worst.”

“When did he leave?”

“Just now. Said he’d be about an hour.”

But an hour passed. Then two. And Geddy didn’t come back.

Chapter 19

I borrowed the keys to Mama Laura’s Hyundai while Trev stood guard at the house. My plan was to check in at the Symanski house and see whether Geddy had been there. I was also prepared to check the local hospital and police station, and Trevor had supplied me with the names and addresses of some local Taus in case I needed help.

The car was well maintained but very old: it had always been hard to convince Mama Laura to trade in a vehicle that was “still perfectly good,” and she had never felt comfortable at the wheel of my father’s Cadillac. Which was actually helpful, because the car’s radio was an analog relic, which meant it brought in the local station, itself an analog relic. The announcer’s voice periodically gnarled into incomprehensibility, but the gist of the news came through. Such as it was.

And it seemed almost preternaturally strange, these rumors of apocalypse whispered against the morning calm of Schuyler, lawns just days shy of needing their first mowing of the season, a few cars on the road, a few pedestrians on the sidewalks, nobody hurrying, as if the blackout had created not panic but a sort of unpremeditated vacation. The most sinister thing I saw on the way to the Symanski house was a Great Dane lifting its leg over a maniacally grinning garden gnome.

It was clear that something dreadful had happened in Mumbai and elsewhere on the Indian subcontinent, though it wasn’t at all clear who was benefiting by it. Our own continent-wide blackout was an echo of that conflict, a reminder that we weren’t exempt from it. Before I left the house we had had a brief visit from our neighbor on the left, Toby Sanderval, who owned the Olive Garden franchise off the highway; he advised us to keep the doors and windows shut “so the fallout don’t get in.” Which terrified Mama Laura, until Rebecca and I assured her that any fallout from a nuclear exchange in India—had there been one—would have to travel across the equator and through nearly a dozen time zones before it presented any danger to the good citizens of Schuyler, New York.

But it was not all bad news that crackled through the car speakers. Municipal power had been restored to parts of Washington, DC. A presidential statement calling for calm and patience had been released to all extant media. There was even a report of intermittent cell phone service in New York State, though not locally—I tried.

As I drove, I kept my eyes open. I had biked and driven from my house to Jenny’s house so often that the route was familiar, even all these years later. I looked for Geddy’s car, an eye-poppingly yellow Nissan Elysium; I saws no sign of it, and it wasn’t in the driveway of the Symanski house when I pulled up.

The house where Jenny’s mother lived had not been well maintained. From the curling shingles to the faded siding, it announced neglect. Jenny’s dad had left enough money for upkeep, Jenny said, but her mom was too far in the bottle to hire a contractor or even a handyman. I parked and went up the three wooden stairs of her front porch and knocked at the door, wondering if she would recognize me.

A couple of minutes passed before she answered. As the door opened, the house exhaled a sour effluvium of tobacco smoke and body odor. Mrs. Symanski stood in that invisible wind, oblivious to it, wearing a stained gray nightdress, a nasty caricature of Jenny’s mom as I had once known her. She gazed at me and said, “Have you come to fix the electricity?”

“No. Mrs. Symanski? It’s me, Adam. Adam Fisk.”

She squinted. “Aaron?”

“No, Adam. Aaron’s brother.”

“Fuck me, I believe it is. Well, well. What brings you here?”

“Actually, I’m looking for Geddy. Has he been here today?”

“What—Geddy?”

“Yes. My stepbrother. Geddy.”

“What would Geddy Fisk be doing here?”

“Well, that’s the thing. When he went out this morning he said he was going to call on you. But that was quite a while ago, and he hasn’t come back. I was wondering if he made it here at all.”

“Why would he come here?”

“He’s in town and wanted to say hello.”

“Well, he didn’t. Say hello, I mean. Is he lost? How do you get lost in a one-horse town like Schuyler?”

“So you haven’t seen him at all?”

“Not since Jenny was a girl.” She gave me a longer look, as if trying to locate me in the crumbling firmament of her memory. “Adam Fisk. Looking for Geddy? Can’t you just, uh, phone him?”

“Unfortunately no. The phones aren’t working.”

“Or the lights. Or my fucking stove. Or the refrigerator. Food spoiling. Nothing works right anymore.”

I guessed on olfactory evidence that her food had been spoiling long before the blackout. Or else she didn’t bother taking out the trash. “Mrs. Symanski, I wish I could stay—”

“You should have married her.”

“Excuse me?”

“If you’d married Jenny she wouldn’t have to live with your brother. I guess it won’t shock you to learn Aaron’s an asshole. But I knew that about him. I always knew that about him, always, always. The way he looks at people. You were different. You didn’t have that, um, assholiness in your eyes. Yeah, but you didn’t marry her, did you? You gave her to Aaron like she was some bicycle you got too big for.”

“You haven’t seen Geddy, then?”

“No, I haven’t seen Geddy Fisk, for better or worse.”

“Then I need to keep looking. Thank you for your time, Mrs. Symanski.”

“Don’t you want to come in?”

It was an invitation to enter the kingdom of futility and despair she had made of her life. The world the Affinities were meant to redeem. “I can’t right now.”

“Should have married her,” she said, closing the door in my face.

I thought obsessively about Geddy as I drove to Schuyler’s small police station. And the memory that came to mind was of the night he had burst into my bedroom, tearfully demanding to know whether the world was old or young.

So typically Geddy, that attack of philosophical anxiety. So impossibly difficult to anticipate or answer. Moments like this were what had made Geddy an outsider, friendless at school, mocked behind his back and often enough to his face. I loved Geddy dearly, loved him maybe more than I loved my biological brother Aaron, but his strangeness was a constant admonition: There but for the grace of God go I. I had been a solitary kid with a sketchbook and a penchant for keeping my own company, and Geddy was just a few steps farther down the same road—and that much closer to the annihilating loneliness at the end of it.

The police station was on Schuyler’s main street. Downtown traffic was almost nonexistent today, and most businesses were closed for the obvious reason, but I noticed the Sunnyside Diner and a couple of coffee-and-muffin places running on generator power, doors open and decent crowds inside. It was Sunday, and the parking lots at both the Catholic and Methodist churches were full. I pulled into the first vacant space in front of the Town of Schuyler Police Department. Inside, I told the uniformed officer at the front desk that I was looking for someone who hadn’t come home and I wanted to make sure he hadn’t been in an accident.

The officer told me 911 was down or intermittent, so there could have been any number of situations not reported, and in any case his people were “working their asses off” responding to the calls or notifications they had received, so he couldn’t really help me—except to say that most of the problems they had encountered so far seemed relatively minor and he hadn’t heard about anything involving serious injuries. But I could check with the county hospital if I liked.

Onenia County Regional Hospital was on the other side of town, usually a ten-minute drive but I made it in eight, ignoring the speed limit and thinking about Het. It was likely that the Het enforcers who had run Trevor’s vehicles into a ditch were also responsible for Geddy’s disappearance. For that reason, Trev had not wanted me riding around town by myself—but his first duty now was to protect Jenny, and he had relented. The question was, if the Het guys had taken Geddy, what did they want with him?

Het was a secretive Affinity, but we had learned a few things about it since the time Amanda took a stray bullet from a Het rifle some years ago. Being a Het meant, among other things, knowing who was entitled to give orders and who was obliged to follow them—and being okay with that. Hets were happy to take orders from other Hets as long as the pecking order felt rational and clearly defined. Individual members deferred to their tranche leaders, tranches were organized by region, the regions elected representatives to national sodalities, the sodalities sent delegates to an annual pan-Het convention. They were cagey about publicly naming leaders, but there was rumored to be a ruling council of ten overseen by their head man, Garrison. Other Affinities tended to be less rigidly organized, Tau being an obvious example, and the laborious process of consensus-building meant we couldn’t carry off the kind of turn-on-a-dime political maneuvers for which Het had become famous.

Back when InterAlia was still fighting for control of the Affinities, the corporation had seen Het as a useful ally. InterAlia had offered them a deal: help us manipulate our opponents and we’ll make you a silent partner, a sort of King Affinity. And when Meir Klein defected from InterAlia, it was most likely Het assassins they had sent to deal with the problem.

Not that Het was an Affinity composed of cold-blooded murderers—far from it. Most Hets never learned about the occasionally lethal skirmishes their sodalities undertook, and no such case had ever been prosecuted in the courts. But individual Hets were fiercely loyal to their Affinity; only rarely would an individual Het question orders from above or pry into the sodality’s motives; and they were not above threatening or harming an innocent person to achieve their ends. They had made that abundantly clear. But still, if they had taken Geddy—why Geddy?

The waiting room in the emergency department of the regional hospital was mostly empty and the woman at the admissions desk seemed almost pleased to see me. I gave her Geddy’s name and description and asked whether he had been admitted this morning. She didn’t even have to check the records: Nope. She had been on duty all day, and the only admission had been a seventy-eight-year-old man who suffered a myocardial infarction while visiting his daughter in the maternity ward.

I thanked her and left.

I had a couple more places to visit. Trevor had given me the names and addresses of some Taus from the local tranche. But as it turned out, I only needed to see the first of them.

Her name was Shannon Handy.

Shannon was fifty-seven years old, a Tau for more than a decade, and she lived alone in a bungalow east of downtown and south of the highway. I knocked at the door, identified myself as a visiting Tau with sodality connections, and told her I needed to speak to her about an urgent matter. She invited me in.

Her home was clean and smelled faintly of maple smoke from a modern wood-burning stove in the kitchen. “Pollutes the atmosphere—it’s a carbon sin, I guess—but it comes in handy when the power goes off. Warms the house and I can make a pot of tea to pass the time. Would you care for a cup?”

We sat at her kitchen table while she waited for the water to boil. Because she was a Tau, we didn’t need to dance around the proprieties. She knew without asking that I was worried and I knew without asking that she was willing to help. She listened attentively as I explained the situation, twice asked me to clarify some detail or other, and when I finished she poured tea for both of us and doled out sugar and milk and sipped from her cup for a few silent moments.

“Big happenings for Schuyler,” she said eventually. “Huh! Aaron Fisk, local hero, junior congressman, friend to the beleaguered middle class—and raging asshole, apparently. So we need to find your brother Geddy, and we need to do it as soon as possible, assuming these Het folks haven’t already spirited him out of town.”

“I think the blackout might work in our favor,” I said. “Typically, Het enforcers won’t act without instructions from their superiors, and unless they have magic telephones, they aren’t getting any.”

“They might be working from some prearranged plan, no need for instructions.”

“They might. But as I said, Geddy’s not directly involved in any of this—he’s not even a Tau. Kidnapping him, if that’s what they’ve done, seems kind of, I don’t know, improvisational.”

“And even if the blackout does help us, it could end at any time. So whatever we do, we should do it as soon as possible. Which means we don’t really have time to appreciate a nice cup of Earl Grey.” She stood up. “Let’s go.”

“Go where?”

“I manage a store in Schuyler. It’s called Gizmos—you must have passed it on your way to the police station. We sell personal electronics, cell phones, coffeemakers, shit like that.”

“Sure, but—”

“See, there are twelve Tau households in Schuyler. More in the neighboring counties, especially Duchesne and Flaxborough—our tranches all party together—but twelve inside the city limits. We’re well connected in the community and we’re mostly long-time residents. We know the town and the people who live in it.”

“That’s great, but—”

“Hush and let me finish. I did the annual inventory at Gizmos just last week, so I know we’ve got at least sixteen pairs of two-way radios in stock—what you call walkie-talkies. Little Motorolas with a range of fifteen miles or so. You get one, your friend Trevor gets one, every ambulatory Tau in Schuyler gets one. Once we’re hooked up we can get coordinated, make a plan, do what we do best. How’s that sound?”

Strength in numbers. I felt a little surge of optimism, the possibility that this awful day might have a non-tragic ending. Shannon gave me a sympathetic smile. “We’ll take my car,” she said.

Chapter 20

Driving back from Gizmos with a trunkful of two-way radios, I shared a few more details about Jenny and Aaron and their relation to Geddy.

Shannon listened thoughtfully. “Well,” she said, “maybe these Het goons just screwed up. Maybe they wanted Jenny Fisk, but Geddy was the one they could get, so Geddy’s the one they took. My opinion, for what it’s worth? They’ll probably try to cut a deal. Give you Geddy in exchange for, I guess, not releasing the abuse video.”

“Either way, it’s an impasse until the blackout ends.”

“Because they can’t even negotiate Geddy’s release until they can talk to you. In the meantime, they keep Geddy somewhere we can’t find him.”

Geddy had never much liked traveling. He hated sleeping in strange rooms, rooms in which strangers had slept. That had been the worst of part of touring with a band, he once told me. All those ugly little beds in all those ugly little rooms.

“Well, hang in,” Shannon said. “This isn’t a big town. Unless he’s already gone, we’ll find him.”

We pulled up at her house. She offered to cook me dinner; I told her I needed to get back to Rebecca and Jenny and Mama Laura. She wanted to talk to Trev, who could describe the Het vehicles and maybe some faces. “He can contact me by radio,” she said. “And in the meantime—”

She didn’t finish the sentence. She was interrupted by a trilling that emanated from the left hip pocket of her faded jeans. Wide-eyed, she pulled out her phone. But the ringtone stopped before she could answer it. “False alarm,” she said. “Huh.”

But it was more than a false alarm. It was a promise and a warning. The engineers and IT geeks of the world were working the problem. Communications would be restored soon, maybe any minute now. For better or for worse.

It was dusk by the time I got back to my father’s house. Trevor came down the front porch as I parked and met me when I stepped out of the car. I told him where I’d been and what I’d learned, and he nodded approvingly when I showed him the two-way radios.

“Gives us a fighting chance, anyway. I’ll talk to this woman—Shannon?”

“Shannon Handy.”

“Living up to her name, seems like. You go on inside.”

“I need to explain all this to Mama Laura.”

“Jenny already had a talk with her. About Aaron. And the video.”

“I should have been here.”

“They don’t know about the Het troops, but they both figure Geddy’s been kidnapped for the purpose of keeping the video quiet. This is hard on both of them, especially Mama Laura. We need to be solving the problem, not explaining it.”

“I still need to talk to her,” I said.

But Mama Laura was in no mood to talk.

I found her sitting on the bed in Geddy’s old room, her hands folded in her lap, surrounded by the relics of Geddy’s early life: his old desk, his record collection, the faint rectangles on the wall where his posters had once sheltered the paint from sunlight. She seemed to be studying these things, as if she wanted to commit them to memory. She barely glanced at me as I came through the door, and the glance was contemptuous.

“You came here under false pretenses,” she said.

“Mama Laura, I’m sorry. What happened is—”

“Stop! Just stop.” She clenched and unclenched her small hands. “Jenny told me everything I need to know. All about Aaron. And what he did to her. And what your interest in the matter is.”

“We should have told you sooner.”

“Perhaps you should. Or perhaps I should have guessed. You know, when I married your father, I was a single woman with a young child and poor prospects. Joining this family—I can’t quite say we were welcomed into it—it seemed like Geddy and I had been delivered from a world of trouble. But that was wrong, wasn’t it? On the contrary. We were delivered into a den of vipers.”

“I’m sorry,” I said again, uselessly.

“You were smart to leave this town. I wish you had stayed away. Because, I don’t know who or what you are when you’re with your friends, but here? You’re just another Fisk, no better than your brother or your father. Maybe you pretended to be nice to my boy, but—”

“I never pretended.”

She shook her head. “Don’t try to excuse yourself. There is only one thing I need to hear from you right now. Do you know what that one thing is?”

“We’ll bring him home, Mama Laura.”

“See that you do,” she said.

“The trouble with these walkie-talkies,” Trevor said, “is that anybody who cares to can listen in on them. Anybody with a scanner or a similar unit, anyway. And we have to assume anybody who owns one of these things maybe took it out of the closet during the blackout. So I don’t want us discussing anything critical over the air. I had a little chat with Shannon, and she says we can use her house as a base. Get the local Taus together and make plans where we won’t be overheard. Are you cool with that?”

“If we’re at Shannon’s house, who stands guard back here?”

“Jenny and Rebecca want to come with us—they pretty much insisted on it—and I don’t think Het is much interested in your father or Mama Laura. Also … Shannon couldn’t say much over the air, but it sounds like she might already have an idea about what happened to Geddy.”

So we ended up taking two cars. Rebecca drove with Trevor, and I went with Jenny. Jenny sat in the backseat, mostly silent, staring out the window as the headlights swept the darkened streets of suburban Schuyler. Twice she checked her phone, but there was no signal.

As we turned a corner onto Shannon’s street she said, “They took Geddy because of me, right?”

“If Het took Geddy, it was for the purpose of protecting Aaron.”

“To keep me from talking about him.”

“Almost certainly. But there hasn’t been any actual threat.”

“Because of the blackout.”

“Maybe.”

“Well, if they mean it as a threat, it’s working. I’m not saying anything about Aaron until Geddy’s safe. And even then … this is like an object lesson, that I’m vulnerable. That I’ll always be vulnerable. I can go to Canada, I can go into hiding, but they can always get to Geddy or my mother, say, or Mama Laura—somebody who matters to me. They can hurt me no matter where I am, and they will.”

“Once Aaron’s exposed, they have nothing to gain by threatening you.”

“Unless they want to punish me for crossing them. Can you tell me they wouldn’t do a thing like that?”

“It’s not likely.”

“But it’s possible.”

I had no answer for that.

“Look,” she said, “I don’t want Aaron to get away with what he did to me and what he’s doing to other women. But not at the price of someone’s life.”

“No one’s been killed.”

“But Geddy’s already been kidnapped. And it’s Geddy—it’s Geddy, Adam! Geddy wilts if someone looks hard at him. Being taken captive? Physically coerced, maybe beat up, kicked around?”

“We don’t know that anything like that has happened.”

“But it might have.”

I didn’t say anything. Because she was right, of course. It might have.

Trevor made some kind of instant emotional connection with Shannon Handy. It was a Tau thing, but more: Trev had dedicated himself to protecting Taus, and Shannon had honed her own protective instincts (and other skills) during a tour of duty in Afghanistan many years ago. They looked like the ultimate mismatch—a middle-aged white woman who owned a consumer-electronics franchise next to a dark-skinned guy with Maori-style facial tattoos and the body of a bar bouncer—but they fell into earnest, focused conversation as soon as they were introduced.

They turned Shannon’s kitchen into a command-and-control center. I waited in the living room with Rebecca and Jenny and a couple of local Taus who had already been briefed on the situation: a young IT guy named Clarence, who nodded a cautious hello, and a forklift driver, Jolinda Smith, who lived outside of town and who had brought with her some crucial information.

“Soon as Shannon came to my door and asked me whether I’d seen anything unusual,” Jolinda said, “I knew what she was talking about.” Jolinda was a big woman, muscular, and she leaned forward in her chair, eyes intent. “Because not much traffic comes out my way. I live on Spindevil Road, up past the gravel pit, you know that area? Nothing much past my house but some old hobby farms, most of ’em run down or abandoned. I was on my porch this morning, smoking a little kush and waiting for the power to come back on—not that it did. So I was surprised to see a, like, convoy coming up Spindevil away from the highway. Because that’s not something you ordinarily see up there. Four black SUVs and a late-model sedan of some kind, all together, all moving at a serious clip.”

“Any idea where they were headed?”

“Nope. But Clarence here has an idea.”

Clarence was a twenty-something stringbean in chinos who sat up straight and cleared his throat before he spoke. “We’ve been keeping an eye on the local Het tranche since the troubles started. No troubles here, but be prepared, right? So we know who all the Hets in Schuyler are.”

“And who are they?”

“Harmless people for the most part. Very tranche-loyal, but they work in local businesses like everybody else, so you run into them now and then. None of them has criminal records, or at least nothing beyond an occasional DUI or traffic ticket…”

“You checked?”

He smiled. “We have contacts with the DMV, local and state police, the municipal registrar. I’ve been in some databases, yeah. And like I said, nothing criminal or suspicious.”

“But?”

“But one of the local Hets is a guy named Carson Dix. He’s a foreman at Schneider’s Dairy. He also buys distressed properties, fixes them up and flips them. A couple of months ago he bought a two-story farmhouse on its last legs, real isolated, more like a vacation property than anything you could actually farm, with a view of Killdeer Pond which I guess Dix thought would be a selling point. He hasn’t started the renovation yet. Point is, that property is Het-owned, it’s remote, and the only way to reach it is to drive straight past Jolinda’s house.”

“So we need to check it out.”

“That work has already commenced,” Clarence said. “We thought it would be too obvious to be doing drive-bys, so we have a guy on the far side of the pond with a pair of binoculars and one of Shannon’s walkie-talkies. He says the house is definitely occupied. Smoke from the chimney and lights in the windows. The vehicles Jolinda saw are parked in back, bunched up so they’re not visible from the road. One of them is a sedan that meets the description of the car your guy was driving. We can’t confirm that your guy is present, but that’s the obvious inference.”

Your guy. It was strange to hear him use those words to describe Geddy.

“So if that’s where he is, how do we get him out?”

Jolinda said, “I believe that’s what Shannon and your friend Trevor are trying to figure out right this minute.”

Their voices droned out from the kitchen, the words indistinguishable, an ebb and flow of urgent talk that went on for more than an hour. Then the scrape of kitchen chairs on linoleum. Shannon led the way when they came into the living room, looking tired but flushed with excitement. “Let us run our idea past you. But if we decide to do this, we need to act real soon. All right?”

She outlined the plan, with explanatory asides from Trevor, and she ticked off a list of things we would need: a disposable vehicle, gasoline, people in place both here in Schuyler and at the farmhouse on Spindevil. What she described sounded plausibly effective but unavoidably dangerous. “So the question we have to ask is, are we sure it’s better to do this than to let the situation just kind of evolve?”

“If it evolves,” I said, “it’s likely to evolve right out of our control. If we don’t get Geddy back they’ll take him somewhere better defended, someplace we can’t find.”

“So we act now?” Shannon asked. “Can we get a consensus on this? Because it’ll take time to put everything in place.”

“Act now,” I said. “That’s my vote.”

Jolinda turned to Shannon. “You think this has a decent chance of working?”

“I make no promises, but yeah, I do think it might work.”

Jolinda nodded once. “All right. I say yes.”

And: “Yes,” Clarence said.

Trevor nodded. “Yes.”

No one asked Jenny or Rebecca to weigh in: they weren’t Taus. But they made no objection. “We go, then,” Shannon said.

She got on her walkie-talkie, summoning local Taus to the house for a briefing. The only thing that might hinder us now was an end of the blackout, which would put the Het detail back in contact with their leaders and probably back in motion—which was why Trevor let out an anguished “Oh, shit!” when the lights flickered on.

Followed by the pinging and chiming of multiple phones. I took mine out of my pocket. Signal strength was at two bars, and the incoming call was from Amanda Mehta in California.

Chapter 21

People grabbed their phones and walked in different directions. I took mine into Shannon Handy’s kitchen.

The link was dicey. I plugged in an earbud for privacy and so I could pay attention to the screen, since Amanda was using her standard video service. Her voice came through reasonably well, but the video was a cascade of Picasso distortions and checkerboard monstrosities. “We have to talk fast,” she said. “Coverage east of the Mississippi is still sporadic and we could lose it at any time.”

Then, momentarily, an image froze on the screen: Amanda with a wisp of hair spanning the bridge of her nose, black eyeshadow framing each eye in a paisley shape she called a boteh. I was helplessly reminded of the way she had looked the night we first met, the night she took me up to the roof of the tranche house in Toronto to smoke weed and listen to the sounds of the city. On that night I had fallen in love with her, and she with me, but with this difference: I was not her first Tau lover, but she was mine. She had known that, and she had gently and sweetly walked (and fucked) me through the process of learning to distinguish my love for her from my burgeoning love for my Affinity. The years since then had forged a connection between us, fragile but still more substantial than this image of her, which shattered into noise even as I was gazing at it.

I began by laying out the situation here in Schuyler. I told her Jenny was with us but that a group of Hets had kidnapped Geddy for the purpose of threatening her into silence. I explained that Jenny was now unwilling to cooperate with our release of the incriminating video, but she would likely change her mind if we got Geddy back, and I said Trev and some local Taus had cooked up a plan to recover him.

“You can’t do that,” she said.

Another image of her froze in place (her lips in a querulous frown, as if she had caught sight of something troubling on the periphery of her vision), provoking another memory: the way she looked when she talked about what she called my “unfortunate tendency” to form relationships outside my Affinity. There was never any real disappointment or disapproval in that look, just an acknowledgment of a problem that couldn’t be ignored or dismissed. As if to say, We’re Tau, but none of us is perfect; each of us carries some burden of veniality or naiveté; this is Adam’s. As if to say, Adam hasn’t quite learned how to love us exclusively.

“Things are more complicated than you can imagine,” she said. “We’re starting to get reports from every country with a Tau sodality—physical attacks on tranches all over the world. Some of it is probably random. There are plenty of people out there with grudges against the Affinities. But some of it looks targeted. We think Het’s taking advantage of the opportunity to do us some strategic damage. But it would be very hard to prove that, and any kind of clumsy retaliation will just make us look like the bad guys, reckless and violent. Which plays into their hands. Which is maybe the whole point. So, no—Damian and I have been in touch with every sodality rep who can take a call, and the consensus is, we have to stand pat until we can organize a coordinated response. This is critically important. You absolutely cannot go vigilante with an armed tranche right now.”

I thought of Geddy, locked in a room in some moldering farmhouse. He would be terrified. But he would also believe we were working to get him back. He would trust us to do that, without question. “We’re talking about my brother here.”

“Your stepbrother. Not even a blood relative.”

I wondered if it was possible that the bad connection had fucked up our Tau telepathy. “I grew up with him, Amanda.”

“I know. But, Adam, we all grew up with somebody.”

The camera captured an image of her bare right arm as she turned in her chair. A Chinese dragon lived between the dimple of her elbow and the ball of her shoulder, green-scaled and with black ophidian eyes, coiled around what could have been a letter X but was in fact a Phoenician tau. A declaration of fealty, carved in the clay of her body.

The kitchen ceiling light flickered. “We can do this,” I said. “We can do it cleanly. And with Jenny’s cooperation we can still release the video.”

“No—Jenny’s cooperation doesn’t matter anymore.”

“How do you figure that?”

“You copied the video to us before the blackout. We can release it as soon as we have reliable access to media, with or without her consent.”

“But it won’t work if Jenny doesn’t back it up. People will say it’s CGI. Nobody trusts raw video without corroboration.”

“Jenny’s not the only one Aaron pissed off. We’ve been in contact with his most recent ex-girlfriend, and she gave us a signed affidavit about his treatment of her. It’s all the corroboration we need. We can take it public anytime.”

But no one had told me that. The screen offered one more frozen image, Amanda with her head half turned, the bodeh curving from her left eye like a crow’s wing, and I thought of the night we had come back from Vancouver, her arm in a sling and her bullet wound still fretting her, how she had sat with me and Trevor in the attic room of the tranche house and confessed that she was going to California with Damian, how at the end of that confession she had turned to kiss Trevor and then leaned the other way to kiss me, long kisses fraught with meaning, three breaths conjoined.

Her voice began to break up. “Adam, are we clear on this? You absolutely cannot go after Geddy. We have complete consensus at the sodality level. Do you need Damian to confirm that? He’s in the next room talking to Europe, but I can fetch him if I have to.”

“No.” What would be the point?

“So it’s agreed?”

I said, “Agreed.”

Long pause. No image now, just a confetti of random pixels and a background noise that sounded like ghosts conversing in a language of sparks and echoes.

“Are you sure?”

Rrr you sssure?

“Of course I am.”

“Because it sounds like—”

Bekkkuz it sssouns lie-kkkkk—

Then the audio died, the signal bars on the display drained to zero, and the kitchen light went dark again.

I went back to the living room, where everyone was staring at dead phones. Trevor looked at me expectantly. I bought a moment by asking him who he had been talking to.

“Brecker,” he said, “at the hospital.” One of the Tau security guys who had been run off the road shortly before the blackout. “Everybody’s stitched and bandaged, but I don’t think they’ll be of much use to us in the short term.”

“Okay.”

“So—you were talking to Damian?”

“Amanda,” I said.

“And?”

“I made her aware of the situation regarding Geddy. I told her we’re working on a plan to get him back.”

“And?”

For the last eight months I had worked for Tau as a diplomatic liaison, and I had learned how to deploy a strategic lie. But lying to a tranchemate was different. Trev was giving me a puzzled look, which I met and held, because eye contact mattered: avoiding eye contact was a liar’s tell. But I felt like I was staring, and I had to remind myself to blink.

I said, “She wants us to go ahead and get Geddy back.”

He cocked his head as if he had heard a distant but ominous sound. Then he shrugged and smiled. “All right. Let’s get it done.”

Chapter 22

Shannon’s house was suddenly crowded with local Taus, and over the course of the next couple of hours we finalized the details of the plan to retrieve Geddy. It had a reasonable chance of succeeding, I thought, but we needed time to assemble resources, and it was already well past midnight. Best to come at them at dawn, Shannon suggested. Which gave us three or four hours to place people and supplies and make the necessary preparations.

Assuming the telecom system didn’t reboot during that time. A word from Damian or Amanda to Trevor was all it would take to stop the project in its tracks.

Shannon added more wood to the stove as the night progressed. A drizzling rain set in, fogging windows and slicking the dark streets. Rain would make everything more difficult. But we were committed now, and we told ourselves it didn’t matter. Trevor moved around Shannon’s living room briefing Taus, rehearsing them in their roles, making sure everyone knew his or her task and was suited for it. It was a kind of collaborative choreography, the genius of the Affinities manifesting itself in this apparently random collation of ordinary people: I felt it, and Trevor felt it, too. He sat with me for a few minutes as we waited for one of Shannon’s tranchemates to come back with a car. A gust of wind threw rain against the window like a handful of pebbles, and he said, “You know what this reminds me of? That time way back, not long after you joined the tranche, when Mouse was having trouble with her crazy ex.”

Mouse, right. Mouse had moved west a few years ago. She lived in Calgary now, working as an accountant for a mostly-Tau construction firm. But she kept in touch, called the tranche house every Christmas and always made a point of speaking with Trev and me. “We were amateurs,” I said. “It was lucky we didn’t get hurt. Worse.”

“We were learning what it means to be a Tau, taking risks we wouldn’t take for a stranger. But yeah, we’re better at it now. Still the same impulse, though, right? The way you feel when someone tries to hurt the people you love.”

“Right.”

“Except this time it’s not a jealous ex with a baseball bat, it’s a bunch of Hets who want to take down our entire Affinity. We’re not protecting one guy, we’re protecting Tau as a way of life.”

I nodded.

“So it’s not about Geddy, and it’s not about Jenny. It’s about all of us. We need to keep that in mind.”

He was looking hard at me again.

“Right,” I said.

“Okay. So you’re up for this?”

“I’m up for it.”

“Good.” He grinned. “Because I think that’s our ride pulling up at the curb.”

The car, supplied by one of Shannon’s tranchemates, was a Toyota sedan that had seen twelve winters; its paint was blistered and the interior smelled like tobacco smoke and stale Doritos. But its motor was fully functional, and it was a good choice, given what we had in mind for it. I volunteered to drive.

My passengers were three local Taus, and they were mostly quiet. We drove through the north end of Schuyler toward the highway, and the town was eerie in the misting rain, streets deserted, dawn just beginning to reveal a sky of tumbling clouds. The car’s radio picked up the analog radio station that had been our only source of news since the blackout, and the news this morning was mixed and mostly speculative. Something terrible had happened in Mumbai, and there were rumors of pitched battles in Karachi and Islamabad. Unnamed experts claimed that a cyberattack aimed at Indian military systems had spread catastrophically and globally, which had triggered retaliatory responses from major players: the unleashing of dozens of varieties of military malware targeting infrastructure nodes in virtually every industrialized nation on the surface of the earth. But electrical power had lately been restored to the west coast of the United States and to some urban areas in the east, and telecom providers were slowly and erratically coming back on line. Which was good news for the world, but maybe not for me—or Geddy.

I told myself Geddy would be okay. He could be spectacularly earnest and naïve, but there was a strength in him, too, a stoicism he had learned the hard way. I had seen the change in him when he was just thirteen years old. Before that, my father could reduce him to sobs with an unkind word. After that, when my father said something vicious, Geddy’s face would cloud but he would clench his jaws and stare furiously. Not suppressing the hurt—I didn’t think he was capable of that—but refusing to give my father the satisfaction of tears.

I imagined Geddy in captivity, showing his captors the same silent defiance. Unless someone even less forgiving than my father had managed to beat it out of him.

The sky was light by the time we reached the highway and headed east. The rain had tapered a little but it was still coming down, soft shifting sheets of it. The Toyota’s wipers creaked over the windshield. After a few minutes of this we reached the unmarked exit for Spindevil Road.

Spindevil was two lanes of potholed blacktop, long neglected by county repair crews. It curved past the abandoned quarry where, many summers ago, I had gone on swimming expeditions with Aaron and Geddy and Jenny Symanski, and pushed on through scrub forest and rocky wild meadows, past isolated properties bounded by split-rail fences and weathered NO TRESPASSING signs. The only other cars I saw were Tau cars, part of our loose convoy, one ahead of me and three behind. We all stopped when we reached Jolinda Smith’s little house, which would serve as our outpost. The farmhouse where the Hets were holding Geddy was three miles farther north, and one of our guys was keeping it under surveillance from the other side of Killdeer Pond.

Trevor was essentially in charge now, and once the crowd at Jolinda’s place was more or less settled I approached him and asked where we stood.

“We need a little more time,” he said. “Maybe an hour, not more than two. Shannon’s headed to downtown Schuyler, she’s probably in place by now, and once everything else is set up we alert her by walkie-talkie and set this thing in motion. Plus we need to allow for travel time from Schuyler to here. But once our ducks are in a row I give it half an hour from first alert to showtime.”

Which was more time than I would have liked, but good work, considering.

Trevor’s radio crackled again. Since the majority of us were right here, the call could only have been from Shannon or the guy watching the Het house from the other side of Killdeer Pond. Either way, it might be bad news: a delay, a unexpected hitch in the plan.

We stood on the damp porch of Jolinda’s place, rain ticking on the eaves and sluicing down a drainpipe. The walkie-talkie was enormous by comparison with a phone, but it looked small in Trevor’s hand. He put it to his ear and listened for about ten seconds, an unreadable expression on his face. Then he lowered it again.

“I don’t know who the fuck it is,” he said. “But he’s asking for you. For Adam Fisk.”

I took the handset and clicked the send button and said, “This is Adam Fisk.”

A male voice said, “You’ve gone to a lot of trouble there, Adam. Don’t you think we should talk this over first?”

“Who is this?”

“One of the folks playing host to your stepbrother. We’ve been listening to your radio chatter for the last few hours. And we think you’re all needlessly upset. You’re a negotiator, I understand. A kind of diplomat. Well, maybe some negotiation is in order today.”

“What are you suggesting?”

“Just that you might want to come knock on our door before you break it down. You’re a little ways south on Spindevil, right? So come up the road and stop by for a chat. Just you.”

“And why would I want to do that?”

“To avoid unnecessary violence. Maybe get your stepbrother out of here in one piece, if we come to an agreement. You have our guarantee of safe passage, in and out. But this isn’t an unlimited offer. I figure you’re, what, five minutes from here by car? Plus a little time to sort this all out with your Tau buddies. So we’ll expect you in fifteen minutes, or not at all.”

I said, “Why should I believe you?”

But there was no answer.

Trevor was against it.

It was Trevor who drove me up Spindevil to the Het house, with Jolinda in the backseat to make sure we reached the right property. We took the Toyota: the disposable vehicle. He said, “You’ll be giving them another hostage—you know that, right?”

We had talked this through once already, though not to Trevor’s satisfaction. “They don’t need another hostage. That’s not what this is about.”

The Toyota’s rattletrap suspension was no match for the potholes on Spindevil. Trev kept his eyes on the road, though he spared the occasional sidelong glance in my direction. The rain had stopped, suddenly and finally, but a chilly wind bowed the roadside oaks and beeches. The clouds had thinned to show a disk of sunlight the color of milk.

I repeated what I had already said to him. Since the Hets were aware of our presence, they could put Geddy in a vehicle and leave the farmhouse, and once they were in motion there was little we could do to stop them. Any kind of direct intervention would endanger Geddy and risk the kind of law-enforcement attention we couldn’t afford. But as long as I was in the farmhouse talking, they would stay put until we were ready to intervene. And if everything went according to plan, it wouldn’t matter whether I was inside or out.

“That’s a huge fuckin’ if,” Trevor said. “We’re talking about the people who put four Taus in the hospital. They’ll do whatever they think they can get away with.”

“Just up around the bend ahead,” Jolinda said. “You’ll see the house once we pass that stand of oaks.”

“They’re Hets,” I said. “They won’t do anything violent unless they’ve cleared it with their bosses.”

“That might be true of most Hets,” Trevor said. “On a statistical basis. But you’ll be dealing with, like, one guy. Maybe somebody on the far end of the Het curve. Somebody willing to take action on his own hook.”

“There!” Jolinda exclaimed. “See it?”

Trev slowed down as the farmhouse came into view. From this distance it looked like any of a half dozen other properties we had passed. A two-story wood-frame house maybe fifty or sixty years old, painted a bilious, weathered green. Gaps on top where shingles had fallen from the roof. Sagging front porch. Wild oaks on the south side of it; on the north, a few acres of patchy scrub that someone might have tried to farm, once, long ago, in a fit of unjustified optimism. Surrounding all this, a chain-link fence on which signs had been posted:

NO TRESPASSING OR LOITERING

VIOLATORS WILL BE PROSECUTED

“It’s also possible I can talk Geddy out of there. Maybe they reconsidered the whole thing. Maybe they got a call when the telecom was up, telling them things had changed, they don’t need him anymore.”

“Like the way you talked to Amanda,” Trevor said.

“Right.”

The car came to a stop at the end of the laneway that led to the farmhouse, tires crunching on gravel. I took a long look down the laneway to the house, five dark windows facing us: two on the ground floor, two above, and a tiny dormer window in what must have been the attic. Probably a Het guy in each one, watching. Trev said, “There are three vehicles parked in back of it, four Het SUVs and the car Geddy was driving when they took him. We figure at least eight potential hostiles inside. You might not see all of them, so don’t make assumptions. You have the radio?”

One of Shannon’s walkie-talkies, strapped to my belt. We had arranged this before we got in the car. Fifteen minutes after I gained admission to the farmhouse, Trevor would make contact by radio. I would say certain words, or I would not; and as a result certain things would happen, or they wouldn’t.

“Best get on down there if you’re going,” Jolinda said from the backseat.

I opened the door and got out and closed the door behind me. I felt the wind on my face, moist from the morning’s rain. I heard the branches of the oaks groaning in the wind, the spastic idle of the car’s engine. My legs felt too heavy to move but I moved them anyway. I began to walk down the graveled drive to the sagging farmhouse porch, thinking about the people watching me from the lightless mirrors of the windows, wondering which of those rooms Geddy was in.

The porch was in even worse shape than it had looked from the road. The plank steps bowed under my feet, elastic with rot. A naked lightbulb above the door was half filled with rainwater and rust. The door itself was subtly askew on its hinges, and it opened as I raised my fist to knock. A man stood in the shadows behind it. “Come on in, Mr. Fisk,” he said.

I recognized the voice: it was the man I had spoken to over the radio.

And as I stepped inside, I recognized the face.

Chapter 23

At least I thought I recognized him. The face was familiar, but I couldn’t connect it with a name or a concrete memory. He was a tall man, white, probably in his forties, with a gym-rat body, bald head, and angular cheekbones that made him look faintly Slavic. He wore jeans and a black sweatshirt, plain but clean. His lips were compressed in a smile that verged on a sneer. He stood back and waved me in.

Where had I seen his face before?

Inside the farmhouse was a large square room, stairs leading to the second story, an arch opening into what appeared to be a kitchen. The floor was wood, floorboards scuffed and muddied to a smoky black. The walls were covered in scabbed green utility paint. The furniture consisted of a worn sofa, six plastic kitchen chairs, and a woodstove ticking away in one corner of the room.

Assuming the tall guy was the boss, three of his subordinates were also present in the room: one next to the window, one blocking the way to the kitchen, and a third (a woman) perched on the stairs. They all carried holstered handguns, and they looked at me with expressions ranging from contempt to indifference.

“Sit down, Adam,” the tall guy said. “Might as well make yourself comfortable while we discuss things.”

“There’s nothing to discuss until I know Geddy is safe.”

“Okay, that’s understandable. Maggie? Want to bring our guest on down?”

The woman nodded and stood and trudged upstairs.

“I’d offer you refreshments but we’re on slightly short rations here. So who’s waiting for you in the car? Your friend Trevor? That local woman who runs Gizmos on Main Street? Smart of her to dole out radios like that. Working the tranche, right? But we have friends in town, too. People who might notice something like a local Tau and some strange man hauling armloads of walkie-talkies out the back door of an electronics store.”

I said nothing. He shrugged. “Go on,” he said, “sit down,” waving his hand at a chair, and under the cuff of his sweatshirt I caught sight of a Het tattoo, small and black. A bisected rectangle, like a cartoon drawing of a sash window.

And then I realized: No, I hadn’t seen his face before.

I had drawn it.

The woman came back downstairs with Geddy behind her and another Het guy taking up the rear, as if they were afraid he’d make a run for it. Not that he seemed likely to do any such thing.

Geddy wore the clothes he’d had on when he left the house a day ago: linen slacks, khaki-green cotton shirt, a pair of ratty sneakers. He looked as grim as a prisoner on his way to the gallows. But he stopped moving the moment he spotted me. His face went through serial evolutions: he grinned; then he looked confused; then he looked frightened.

“Hey, Geddy,” I said.

“Hey,” he said tentatively.

“You all right? Did these folks hurt you in any way?”

He gave it a moment’s thought. “They won’t let me leave. They didn’t hurt me. But they threatened to.”

“We’ll get you out of here,” I said.

“Hold your horses,” the guy with the Het tattoo said. “That’s not an established fact just yet. That’s what we need to talk about. Sit over there on the sofa, Geddy.” He turned to me. “So did his mother name him after Geddy Lee? From that old-time Canadian band, Rush? Because we asked, but he wouldn’t tell us.”

“The name’s from his mother’s side of the family. Long line of Geddys. How about you? Do you have a name?”

“Call me Tom.”

“Is that your real name?”

“Of course not. And you really need to sit down.”

I sat in the chair next to the woodstove. I crossed my legs and put my left hand on my thigh so I could see my watch without obviously checking it. Five minutes had passed since I had left the car. Ten to go. I said, “There’s no point dancing around. Just tell me what you want.”

Tom pulled a chair away from the wall and put it in front of me and sat in it so that our knees were almost touching. When he spoke I could smell his breath, sour and pungent, as if he’d been living on black coffee and brie. “No offense, but you people must be pretty stupid if you don’t know what we want.”

“Who’s we in this case? You? Your tranche? Your sodality? Your Affinity?”

“Come on, Adam. We want your brother Aaron to vote on the Griggs-Haskell bill without interference. We know Tau has a different preference, and we know Tau is in possession of some video footage that might embarrass Aaron right out of the House of Representatives. We suspected something like that before we picked up Geddy, though he was kind enough to confirm it—right, Geddy?”

Geddy inspected the floorboards and said nothing.

“If you’re making a threat,” I said, “you need to be explicit about it.”

“You’re the folks making a threat. In your case, Adam, a threat against your own brother! We’re just responding in kind. So don’t talk like you have the moral high ground here.”

I had drawn this man’s face, years ago, in Vancouver, working from Rachel Ragland’s description of the men who had come to question her. (Bald as a bottle cap, she had said, head like a bread loaf, mouth that opens like a puppet’s jaw.) If this wasn’t the same man, it was at least someone who matched both the description and the drawing. Rachel had also mentioned the Het tattoo: same size, same place. So it was no surprise the guy seemed to know me. He worked for Het security, and he could have been keeping a file on me (and Amanda and Damian) ever since the disastrous Vancouver potlatch. He might even have been involved in the murder of Meir Klein.

I said, “You’re still not telling me what you want, Tom.”

“What we want is a guarantee that Aaron will be allowed to cast his vote unmolested, as God and the electorate intended.”

“God and the electorate and the Het lobby.”

“Sure, if you like. And let me emphasize, we have no interest in harming Geddy. But if you were to walk out that door with him, both Het and Aaron would be hanging in the wind. He’s our leverage against Jenny, and without Jenny you have no acceptable case to make. The video by itself won’t convince anybody. Jenny’s the key. So we need to be in a position to bargain. We need Jenny to know something bad might happen if she joins this conspiracy of yours.”

What this told me was that he didn’t know Tau had secured a second affidavit from one of Aaron’s recent girlfriends. As far as Tau was concerned, his threat was meaningless. Amanda had made it clear: the video would be released whether or not Jenny consented … and whether or not Geddy was still being held captive.

But I couldn’t tell him that. In all likelihood he wouldn’t believe me. He certainly wouldn’t consider it grounds to give up Geddy. And if, miraculously, he did believe me—or if he successfully communicated the news to some higher echelon of the Het command chain—I would have betrayed my own Affinity by revealing the secret.

Of course I had already betrayed Tau by lying to Trevor. But I hoped I could be forgiven for that once Geddy was safe. I figured I could make Trevor and Amanda and maybe even Damian understand why I had done what I was doing.

“So,” I said, “what are you proposing? Or do you have to wait for instructions before you can answer that question?”

He smirked. There was a twinkle in his eye: he actually looked merry. “That’s such a tired stereotype—hierarchical Hets, always need a boss to tell them what to do. Some truth in it, of course. When it comes to collective action, yeah, we make sure we’re all on the same page and doing the right thing. Situations like this, field operations? It’s not brain surgery. You send along someone who can assume the authority to issue orders. Pending the end of the blackout, I’m that person. If you think we’re paralyzed until the phones work, you’re not just wrong, you’re stupid.”

I looked at my watch. Twelve minutes had passed.

“So,” he said, “all I want to do here is lay out the terms. We can’t give you Geddy. Not today. You understand that, right? There’s no promise you can make that will secure his release. We need Aaron to vote as intended, and we need to hang on to Geddy until then. What I want to say is, that doesn’t have to be a hardship. The vote’s scheduled for next week, unless the crisis postpones it, and we can make Geddy perfectly comfortable until then. At an undisclosed location, of course, but somewhere comfortable and private.” He turned to give Geddy a puppet-jawed grin. “Think of it as a vacation. Eat, drink, relax, watch videos until this mess gets resolved. Het picks up the tab, and then you go free.”

Geddy continued inspecting the patch of floor between his sneakers.

I said, “And in exchange?”

“Isn’t it obvious? You have people down the road contemplating some kind of rescue attempt. Which, excuse me for saying so, is a truly idiotic idea. Which I imagine you hatched precisely because you’re out of contact with the, uh, Tau consensus, or whatever you call it. We both have so much to lose from a move like that. Somebody gets hurt. Or there’s police involvement, which neither of us wants. Or the conflict escalates out of control. A ridiculous risk.”

“You’re asking us to give up everything we’ve worked for since Klein was killed.”

“What, because of that bill before Congress? I won’t kid you; we want Aaron’s vote. But we’ve got our hands on lots of other levers. And even if this vote goes against us, what the fuck does that buy you?”

Fifteen minutes. The radio on my belt crackled. I said, “I need to check in with my people.”

The Het guy shrugged and said, “Keep it brief.”

Trev and I had arranged a kind of code. When I answered his call he said, “You’ve been in there a while—everything okay?”

Which meant the initial stage of the rescue plan had been set into motion and was evolving smoothly. Had there been a problem, he would have asked me what was taking so long. If the plan had been cancelled altogether, he would have told me he was getting impatient.

And I said, “We’re still talking.”

Which meant: Come get us ASAP.

Radio silence followed.

Tom said, “We need to wrap this up. I’m sure you know we have our vehicles behind the house. What’s going to happen is, my people will put Geddy in one of those vehicles and we’ll convoy down Spindevil to the highway. Nobody gets in the way. Nobody follows us. No contact until Aaron casts his vote, at which time we get in touch and tell you where to find Geddy. The video footage stays locked up in the meantime, or, if it does get released, Jenny Fisk tells the press it’s not authentic. That’s a win-win situation.”

“It might be,” I said. “Except we have no reason to believe you. You say you won’t hurt Geddy—”

“As long as Aaron isn’t interfered with, you can count on it.”

“History doesn’t bear out that assertion.”

“No idea what you’re talking about.”

“I was on Pender Island a few years ago when one of your guys shot Amanda Mehta. Maybe you remember that. You’d been trying to squeeze information out of Rachel Ragland, looking to find something you could pin on me or Amanda or Damian Levay. Then you sent some asshole with a rifle to intimidate us. Unfortunately he was also an incompetent asshole.”

The Het guy seemed less surprised than I had hoped, though he sat in silence for a moment. Then he sighed. “That ‘incompetent asshole’ was the father of three kids, did you know that?”

“Then he shouldn’t have come hunting us.”

“Father of three kids. His body was dumped into Georgia Strait from a height, according to the coroner, though he was dead twice over even before he was dropped—a drug overdose and a gunshot wound. You people are thorough, I’ll give you that. As for Rachel Ragland, all we did was ask her some questions. We didn’t hurt her. Harmed not a hair on her head. Hell, Adam, we didn’t even fuck her, unlike you. And unlike you, we keep track of the people we come into contact with.”

“Spy on them, you mean.”

“Whatever you care to call it. And according to our research, Rachel fell on some hard times after you left Vancouver. Moved in with a guy who had a pill and alcohol problem, which he was happy to share with her. Courts eventually took away that kid of hers—”

“Suze,” I said, involuntarily.

“Suze, who I guess was fostered out, but I don’t know, our records aren’t complete on that. The point is, you’re in no position to be claiming the moral high ground. You don’t trust us with Geddy? How about this: I promise not to shoot him, overdose him with narcotics, or push him out of a helicopter. So help me God.”

“At least,” I said, “we didn’t kill Meir Klein.”

He laughed. “It was InterAlia that killed Klein, not Het. But yeah, we knew they were concerned about him going public. InterAlia’s management trusted us with that knowledge, because we shared their concern. Het was thinking about the future long before you idiots started selling Affinity home-test kits, you know. The Affinities need real governance. If not InterAlia, then Het. If not Het, the government will step in and regulate us out of existence. We—”

A bare bulb in a ceiling fixture flickered to life. Everyone in the room paused to stare at it. Moments later there was a chorus of ringtones, including one from the phone in my pocket.

I ignored my phone, and the Het guy ignored his, but he waved permission at his people: Go ahead, pick up.

A bad situation. But maybe not hopeless. Behind the buzz and tinkle of phones I heard another sound, one I liked a lot better: the wail of a distant siren.

That would be a truck from the Onenia County Fire Department, hurrying up Spindevil Road.

Part of our plan. By now some of the local Taus would have gathered just a few yards down the road, hidden from the farmhouse by the stand of oaks. The disposable Toyota would be there, too, with Trev at the wheel and a canister of gasoline in the passenger seat.

Dangerous as these Het enforcers were, they would have been instructed not to take any action that involved witnesses or would attract the attention of law enforcement. So what we needed was a way to take Geddy out of the farmhouse under civilian observation and without guns drawn. We needed a cat’s paw, and it had been Shannon who suggested the local fire department.

The most dangerous part of this plan was the setup, which required Trev to drive the rattletrap Ford up to the farmhouse and exit the vehicle after spilling and igniting enough gasoline to generate a vigorous blaze. The arrival of the Onenia County fire truck would block the road, leaving the Hets nowhere to go, and Jolinda would tell the firefighters there were squatters living inside the farmhouse. Best-case outcome: firefighters would evacuate the house, including Geddy and me, and civilian scrutiny would prevent any violent interference by frustrated Hets.

The Hets weren’t squatters, of course, and the owner of the farmhouse could testify to that, but by the time it was all sorted out Geddy and I would be safely elsewhere. The blazing Toyota would have to be explained, but the local tranche figured they could finesse that one. All good, then … assuming Trev could get the car close enough to the house to pose a plausible fire hazard.

The next thing we should have seen was the Toyota barreling down the lane. Soon, or the bluff wouldn’t work. The fire truck couldn’t be more than a mile or two away. We needed to make smoke.

But: nothing.

Radio silence.

And my phone had stopped ringing.

But the Het guy’s phone buzzed again, and this time he took it out of his pocket and looked at the display and put it to his ear. He said, “Yeah.” He listened intently. Looked at me. Looked at Geddy. Listened some more. Then, “Yeah, okay.” He turned to the woman on the stairs. “Rev up the cars,” he said. “Time to go.”

The sound of the siren came lofting across scrubland and groves of wild oak and maple on rain-damp air, too loud to ignore. The Het guy frowned and told one of his people to stay on the window until the convoy was ready to go. “Everybody else, move.” He stood up and looked down at me. “You. Unless you want to come with us, tell me what that noise is all about.”

I couldn’t help casting a glance at the dusty front window. No sign of the Toyota. “I don’t know.”

He slapped me. Open palm, but a hard physical blow. My head rocked back. The pain was as sudden and astonishing. For a moment I couldn’t see anything.

“Tell us what’s happening out there,” he said, “unless you want to come along with us.”

I tasted blood, like salty copper. “Fuck you,” I said. “I don’t know.” Which, at this point, was absolutely true.

“Fire truck,” the guy at the window said.

Tom turned. “What?”

“Looks like a fire truck up at the road.”

I could see it now from where I sat, a big fire-and-rescue vehicle, guys in yellow slickers climbing out of it. But no Toyota, no actual fire.

It wasn’t hard to imagine what had gone wrong. As soon as the phones came to life, Trev must have called Damian or taken a call from him. Trev would have said the rescue was underway. And Damian would have told him there was no rescue, that I had been told to drop it, that the entire thing was a completely unauthorized clusterfuck, to be cancelled immediately, full stop.

“Help,” Geddy said.

I guess it was the sight of the fire truck that set him off. Or the sight of the blood on my face. His voice was small at first, as if he couldn’t collect enough breath to squeeze out the word. His second try was better, more like a bark: “Help!” Then the panic welled up in him and took a grip on his lungs: “HELP! HELP!”

Not that anyone outside could hear him.

He leaped off the sofa. The nearest Het tried to put a hand on him, but Geddy bulled past him. He was halfway to the door when the guard by the window tackled him and pinned him to the floor. Geddy kept shouting, though the sound was strangled now by the pressure of the guard’s forearm on his throat.

I considered the window. Murky old glass. Maybe I could break it. And maybe that would attract the attention of the firefighters up the lane. But Tom had taken his pistol from under his belt, and he put it to my head. “Sit,” he said crisply. “Everybody else, out back and into the cars now. And secure that hostage!”

Three more Hets came down the stairs and headed for the rear of the house where the back door opened through the kitchen. The guard from the front window rolled Geddy over and tried to haul him to his feet. They were too busy to see what I saw:

The Toyota, at last, fishtailing around the rear of the Onenia fire truck, kicking up a plume of gravel as it steered wildly for the farmhouse.

“Two hostages,” the Het guy said. “Not your lucky day, Adam. Stand up.”

I stood up.

The car gained speed. I couldn’t make out who was behind the wheel, but it wasn’t Trevor Holst. Somebody smaller, somebody without the swirl of facial tattoos. The Het guy saw me looking and followed my gaze. “Shit!” he said.

The Toyota sped up as if the driver had no intention of stopping. And maybe she didn’t. The car was close enough now that I recognized the halo of curled hair behind the steering wheel. It was Geddy’s girlfriend, Rebecca.

The Het guy raised his pistol as if he meant to shoot through the window, and I grabbed his arm and put my weight on it, and we both fell to the floor. I felt more than saw what happened next. The car struck the farmhouse’s ancient porch, bounced up the wooden risers, and toppled a wooden pillar; the roof of the porch collapsed around it, shattering the front window and filling the room with billows of plaster dust and shards of rotted wood.

The Het guy struggled under me, eyes wide with rage and frustration. I felt him trying to raise his right arm and I let my knee bear down on his elbow until he screamed. Through the dust I saw Geddy break free of his captor and lunge toward the gap where the window had popped out of its jambs. Glass crunched under his feet. The farmhouse groaned as if the rafters had been stressed to their breaking point, as if the roof might come down around us.

I managed to stand up just as Geddy pushed himself through the empty window frame into the tumbled ruins of the porch. The Toyota was obscured by dust and debris, but Geddy had recognized Rebecca behind the driver’s-side window. He shouted her name. He used his hands to shovel away raw boards and broken lathing.

I looked down at the Het guy, who was trying to get up, but his injured arm wouldn’t cooperate. His face was white with plaster dust, a clown’s face. He met my eyes.

“You dumb fuck,” he said.

Then the room was full of Onenia County paramedics.

Chapter 24

Rebecca spent a night in the county hospital, under observation for the mild concussion she suffered when she drove the car up the farmhouse steps. The detonation of the airbag had left her with a pair of black eyes and a swollen nose worthy of a prizefighter, but she was basically okay. Geddy stayed at her bedside, apart from a brief interview with local police and a few hours’ sleep at my father’s house, until she was released.

I spent the night at the Motel 6. Telecommunications had been fully restored, but no one was returning my calls. Not Amanda, not Damian, not even Trevor Holst. By now, of course, they knew I had lied to them in order to get Geddy released, and I assumed they were working out some kind of appropriate response—whatever that might be. I did manage to get hold of Shannon Handy, but when I identified myself she said, “Uh, sorry, Adam—it’s complicated, I can’t talk,” and hung up.

So I watched the news, local and international. The end of the telecom blackout had produced a flood of footage from India and Pakistan, much of it terrifying. Mumbai had been hit by drone-delivered conventional weapons, not a nuclear device, but the destruction had been brutally widespread. No significant government building had been left untouched. A firestorm that began in the Dharavi slums had killed tens of thousands: the full accounting of the dead would eventually top one million.

Here in Schuyler, there was nothing about the events at the house on Spindevil Road. I guessed the local Taus, or Hets, or both, were well connected enough to shut down any real investigation. Rebecca had told the paramedics she couldn’t remember how she had “lost control” of the car, and the Het owner of the property would have been instructed not to press charges.

In the morning I took a cab to the hospital, shortly before Rebecca was discharged. Geddy told me it was no use calling Mama Laura—neither she nor my father was in a mood to speak to me right now.

In other words, I had no reason to stay in Schuyler. I also had no ride home. The hospital rolled Rebecca to the curb in a completely unnecessary wheelchair, and Geddy helped her into their car. They were driving straight back to Boston. I asked Geddy whether he could drop me at the regional airport.

Rebecca leaned out of the passenger-side seat and said, “You’ll need to take a puddle-jumper to some bigger airport. Why not come with us? Fly out of Logan?”

Geddy nodded vigorously: “Yes, come with us! Come with us, Adam.”

So I said yes. In part because I craved their company, in part because I didn’t want to face the other big question: when I went home, would I have a home to go to?

Rebecca was intermittently groggy from the pain meds she had been given, and Geddy had never been especially happy behind the wheel of a car, so I did most of the driving, which was easy enough, the New York State Thruway to the Massachusetts Turnpike, clear skies and cool weather all the way. Driving provided an excuse for my lapses into silence, during which I contemplated and then tried not to contemplate what I had done.

Geddy chatted with Rebecca whenever she was awake. I had been afraid the events of the weekend had traumatized Geddy, but he spoke about them freely, and though he tensed up when he described how the Hets had surrounded his car and forced him into one of their vehicles, it seemed to have affected him no more or less profoundly than the bullying he had occasionally suffered at the hands of my father. Geddy had always seemed to shrug off those episodes … at least by daylight, though they came back, weightier and more terrifying, in his dreams. Rebecca might have to learn how to deal with his nightmares.

Or maybe that was something she had already learned. She was as solicitous of Geddy as he was of her, and I began to recognize their relationship for the small miracle it was. In her presence Geddy was calm, relaxed, engaged. There were moments when they almost seemed to forget I was in the car with them, to forget what they had so recently endured, and their talk grew soft and murmuring, confident as the sunlight that glittered from the pavement of I-90 East.

We reached their tiny Allston Village apartment after dark. I made repeated but futile attempts to reach Damian or Amanda or Trevor by phone, and I thought about calling the tranche house in Toronto, but in the end I didn’t: I was afraid of what Lisa might say. I was still awake well past midnight, sitting in the kitchen reading the news and watching moonlight inch across the linoleum counter, when Geddy joined me, in shorts and a white t-shirt with a wry, sleepy smile. He said he’d heard me moving around. I apologized for keeping him up. “It’s okay,” he said. “I’m a light sleeper.”

He poured himself a glass of milk and sat at the table with me. The window was open, and a sudden breeze lifted the curtain and made him shiver. “You’re going home tomorrow,” he said.

“If I have a home to go to.”

He nodded. “I want to thank you for what you did for me.”

I shrugged.

“Seriously. I mean, you risked a lot. And now nobody will talk to you.”

“Seems like. But I’m a Tau, Geddy. Sooner or later, they’ll understand why I did what I did back in Schuyler. And they’ll forgive me.”

He blinked twice and said, “Is it really something you need to be forgiven for?”

We sat a while longer. He finished his milk and belched spectacularly. “I ought to go back to bed,” he said. “It’s late.”

But something, maybe nothing more than the cool spring air and the sound of a dog barking in the distance, had put me in a philosophical mood. “So what do you think,” I asked him, “is the world old or is it young?”

He looked startled. Then he smiled. “You remember!”

“Long time ago, huh?”

“Long time,” he agreed. “Long time.”

“So what’s the verdict, kiddo? Just between us grownups. Is the world old or young?”

He took the question seriously. “Well, Rebecca helped me figure that out. It’s about how it seems, right? How the world seems to people. Back in the dark ages the world must have seemed really old, like it was all, you know, Roman ruins and fallen empires. Like nothing big or good could ever happen again. Like you could stare at some crumbling aqueduct in the French countryside and wonder how it ever came to be built. But then there was the Renaissance and the Enlightenment and suddenly there were whole new ways of answering questions, and it made people feel like, no, they were at the beginning of something, a whole new world being born. Right?”

“I guess.”

“And when you and I were kids, I guess what worried me was, it was like people thought everything was over—religion was empty, science was useless, progress was phony: if you thought about the future it was like, you know, global warming and overpopulation and wars over food and water. Like the world was old, finished, used up.”

I said, “Those things are worth worrying about.”

“Sure, of course. But no one could do anything about them. No single person could make a difference or ever hope to, nobody with money wanted to risk it, nobody with real power cared to exercise it. It seemed like it was just … too late.”

“Isn’t it?”

“That’s what I learned from Rebecca. And New Socionome. When Meir Klein discovered social teleodynamics? That was a whole new way of looking at things. Like the Affinities—”

“To be honest,” I said, “I’m not sure that’s working out the way Klein hoped.”

“No, but it was only the beginning. The Affinities proved how powerful social algorithms could be. But the Affinities were, like, the Model T of socionomic structures. We’re building better ones! Evolutionary algorithms to enhance non-zero-sum exchanges of all kinds! A way to address the big problems!” He was starting to shout, the way he used to, years ago, when he talked about his enthusiasm-du-jour; but he caught himself and gave me a sheepish grin. “I don’t want to wake Rebecca. But it’s young, Adam. That’s the point. The world’s young! We’re at the beginning of something, and it’s big, and it’s scary, but in the end it might be—” He flung his arms wide, as if to embrace the whole spring night. “Beautiful!”

The next day I managed to secure a seat on a flight to Toronto. The woman who settled into the seat next to me asked whether I was beginning a trip or going home. “Going home,” I said, because it was the easiest answer.

And arguably true. Or not. Depending on how you defined “home.” After I cleared customs I took a cab to a downtown hotel and checked in for the night. My home address, of course, was the tranche house in Rosedale—it was where I lived when I wasn’t on the road—but I wasn’t sure I would be welcome there. So I spent another night alone, listening to the sound of the hotel elevators pushing air up and down their concrete shafts.

And in the morning I screwed my courage to the sticking point and called the house. When Lisa answered, I said, “It’s me. I’m back in town.”

A silence.

“Adam,” she said.

“Yeah. I wanted—” But what did I want? To pretend nothing had changed? Not possible. “Wanted to let you know I’ll be there soon.”

“You’re coming to the house?”

“Well, yeah. Of course.”

Which produced a more protracted silence. Then, “What time will you be here?”

“I don’t know. In an hour, say?”

“I suppose that would be all right. An hour.”

“Lisa,” I began. But she had hung up.

They say you never forget your first tranche house. In my case I had never really left it.

It looked as welcoming as ever, drowsing in the gentle heat of a spring afternoon. The lawn had been recently cut, the hedges trimmed. The big maple in the front yard was already putting out seed pods—years ago, Amanda had told me they were called samaras—and they fluttered around me as the wind shook the branches. Every step I took, I had taken a thousand or ten thousand times before. Along the paved walk, up the stairs to the porch. Fumbling in my pocket for the key. Needlessly, because the door opened before I reached it.

“Come in,” Lisa said from the cool darkness inside.

I stepped into the smell of baked bread, of wood polish, of the fresh flowers she had cut for the dining room table. Any other day, any other homecoming, Lisa would have taken me into her frail arms. Today she did not. She stood well back, cautiously, as if I had become radioactive. The house was quiet. Unusually quiet, even for a weekday afternoon. As if there had been some communal act of avoidance, a collective absence, perhaps orchestrated by Tau telepathy. “You can’t stay, of course,” she said.

If I did not find those words shocking, maybe it was because I had unconsciously anticipated them. “But I live here,” I said.

“No, not any longer,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

I had no compelling argument to make. I stood in the entrance hall, neither defiant nor penitent, as Lisa explained what would happen. I would arrange to have my possessions removed from my room. I could return once more, for that purpose. Today, I could take away anything I cared to carry. Otherwise, the tranche house was closed to me.

The afternoon had become unreal, as vague and unfocused as a dream. I went up the stairs to my room, which had become a dream of a room, all memory, no substance, all past, no present. The double bed, the desk, the shelf of books. The window, its bottom sash held open by an empty wine bottle. The lace curtains Lisa had installed years ago, before my time. The sound of the maple tree turning its branches in the fitful breeze, a sound that had lulled me to sleep on hot summer nights.

Most of what I owned was in this room. None of it felt like it belonged to me.

She was waiting when I came back downstairs, empty-handed. Her blank expression made me a little angry. “I’m still a Tau,” I said. “Despite all this. That doesn’t change.”

“But it does,” she said, and something that resembled sympathy finally came into her eyes. “It has. Poor Adam. This is our fault as much as yours. You were never curious about your numbers, were you? Meir Klein’s arithmetic was always a little beyond you.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Drift,” she said mournfully. “Just—drift. It’s what made you useful to us, these last few months. You were always good at talking to outsiders. You could see the world the way they did. You had that knack. Almost a sort of double vision, yes? Tau and non-Tau. The reason for that is simple. You’ve been on the edge for many years—a Tau by the skin of a decimal point, so to speak. But at your last requalification, you simply failed. No, Adam, you are not a Tau. Not any longer.”

I could not speak.

“Poor Adam,” she said again. “But you see, it’s not entirely your fault that you betrayed us. We should have anticipated it.”

“You knew this about me? And you said nothing?”

“Damian and Amanda knew. I was told. No one else. Trevor didn’t know, not until after you did what you did in Schuyler. We would have told you as soon as your sister-in-law’s video was released, of course. Until then … we thought it was better to postpone the revelation.”

“Because I was useful.”

“Bluntly, yes. We’re not proud of that. It was always a gamble. But we did it for the sake of the Affinity, Adam. You would have done the same, once, in our place.”

“Once. But not anymore.”

“No, not anymore. Because you used us, too, didn’t you? Lied to us so you could rescue your stepbrother. We failed to anticipate that. But we don’t blame you—it was the drift that made it possible.”

Because there was no way to process what she had told me, I tried to pretend she hadn’t said it. I told her I would arrange to have my things moved out as soon as I had a place to put them. Then I said good-bye, for the last time. Walked out the front door, for the last time. Passed under the maple tree with its papery rain of samaras, for the last time. I felt as if even my grief and anger had been stolen from me. I wasn’t entitled to them: I wasn’t a Tau. I was, in effect, no longer anything at all.

Jenny’s video was released to the Internet a few days later, along with an affidavit from Aaron’s most recent ex-girlfriend, who turned out to be a skinny forty-year-old with unconvincing red hair and a taste for leopard-skin-patterned clothing accessories. Maybe her testimony wasn’t as convincing as Damian had hoped—in the end Aaron was forced to resign his congressional seat, but serial denials kept him in office until after the vote on the Griggs-Haskell bill.

Which passed. Worse, it passed with a suite of draconian but bipartisan amendments that Het had lobbied hard to suppress. The law applied only to the American sodality, but it was a model for subsequent legislation in Canada and Europe and, ultimately, around the world.

In other words, it was the beginning of the end of the brief age of the Affinities. I told myself I didn’t care. But I continued to carry my Tau identity with me like a second skin, a name I could no longer call myself, a raft of memories too essential to be extinguished, though they became, with time, a collation of orphaned moments. A lighted window on a winter night, footsteps on a hidden stairway, the sound of distant voices.