The Chronoliths

Ten

What strikes me now — if you can forgive an old man second-guessing the text of his own memoirs — is how strange the advent of the Chronoliths must have seemed to the generation that came of age after the fall of the Soviet Union… my father’s generation, though he didn’t live to see the worst of it.

They were a generation that had looked on third-world dictatorships less with outrage than with impatience, a generation to whom grandiose palaces and monuments were the embarrassments of an earlier age, haunted houses ready to topple in the stiff winds blowing from the Nikkei and the NASDAQ.

The rise of Kuin caught them utterly off guard. They were serious about the threat but deaf to its appeal. They could imagine a million underfed Asians paying fealty to the name of Kuin. That was at least distantly plausible. But when they were scorned by their own children and grandchildren, their confidence evaporated.

They escaped, by and large, into the shelter of arms. Kuin’s monuments might seem magical but they predicted and were ultimately derived from military conquests, and a well-defended nation could not be conquered. Or so the reasoning went. The Jerusalem arrival provoked a second surge of federal investment: in research, detector satellite arrays, a new generation of missile-hunting drones, smart mines, battlefield and supply robots. The draft was reintroduced in 2029 and the standing army increased by half a million inductees. (Which helped to disguise the decline in the civilian economy that followed the aquifer crisis, the battered condition of Asian trade, and the beginning of the years-long Atchafalaya Basin disaster.)

We would have bombed Kuin in his infancy if anyone had been able to find him. But southern China and most of Southeast Asia were in a state of ungoverned barbarism, a place where warlords in armored ATVs terrorized starving peasants. Any or all of these petty tyrants might have been Kuin. Most of them claimed to be. Probably none of them was. It was far from certain that Kuin was even Chinese. He could have been anywhere.

What seems obvious now (but wasn’t then) is that Kuin was dangerous precisely because he hadn’t declared himself. He possessed no platform but conquest, no ideology but ultimate victory. Promising nothing, he promised everything. The dispossessed, the disenfranchised, and the merely unhappy were all drawn toward an identification with Kuin. Kuin, who would level the mountains and make the valleys high. Kuin, who must speak with their voice, since no one else did.

For the generation that followed mine Kuin represented the radically new, the overthrow of antiquated structures of authority and the ascension of powers as cold and ruthlessly modern as the Chronoliths themselves.

In brief, he took our children from us.

When I got the call about Kait (from Janice, her video window blanked to hide her tears) I understood that I would have to leave Baltimore and that I would have to do so without Morris Torrance tailing me across seven states.

Which wouldn’t be easy, but might be easier than it would have been before Jerusalem. Before Jerusalem, Sue Chopra had been overseeing Chronolith research under a generous federal dispensation. That preeminence had been compromised by her devotion to the purely theoretical aspects of Chronolith theory — her obsession with the mathematics of tau turbulence, as opposed to practical questions of detection and defense — and by her disastrous congressional appearance in June of ‘28. In public questioning she had refused to accommodate Senator Lazar’s theory that the Jerusalem Chronolith might be a signal of the End Times. (She called the senator “poorly educated” and the notion of impending apocalypse “an absurd mythology that abets the very process we’re struggling to contain.” Lazar, a former Republican turned Federal Party hatchetman, called Sue “an ivory-tower atheist” who needed to be “weaned from the public teat.”)

She was, of course, too valuable to cut loose entirely. But she ceased to be the central figure in the effort to coordinate Chronolith research. She was, instead, kept away from public scrutiny. She remained the nation’s foremost expert on the esoterica of tau turbulence but had ceased to be its poster child.

The upside of this was that the FBI took a less direct interest in such small fish as myself, even if my files still languished in the digital catacombs of the Hoover Building.

Morris Torrance had resigned from the Bureau rather than accept reassignment. Morris was a believer. He believed in the divinity of Jesus Christ, the goodness of Sulamith Chopra, and the veracity of his own dreams. The age of the Chronoliths had made such conversions possible. I think, too, he was a little in love with Sue, though (unlike Ray Mosely) he had never harbored any illusions about her sexuality. He remained as her bodyguard and chief of security, drawing a salary that could only have been a fraction of his government income.

Both Sue and Morris wanted to keep me close to the project — Sue because I figured into her evolving pattern of meaningful coincidence; Morris because he believed I was important to Sue. Whether they could use legal leverage to keep me there had become debatable. Morris was a civilian now. But I didn’t doubt he would pursue me if I announced I was leaving. Maybe even pull a few strings to keep me in my place. Morris liked me, in his cautious style, but his first loyalty was to Sue.

Sue was meanwhile trying to reconstruct her fragmented Chronolith project as an Internet circle, sharing any data the Defense Department left unclassified, deepening and expanding the mathematics of tau turbulence. In February of 2031 she lost her Department of Energy bursary and was reduced to another round of fundraising, while money flowed copiously into the glamor projects: the gamma-ray laser collider at Stanford; the Exotic Matter Group working out of Chicago.

I spent the morning cleaning up some code I had grown for her, a little routine that would go out into the world and search media nodes for relevant synchronicities, according to a noun-sorting algorithm Sue herself had cooked up. Morris passed in and out of the office a couple of times, looking leaner than he used to. Older, too. But still obstinately cheerful.

Sue was in her own office, and I stopped and knocked to tell her I was leaving. For lunch, I meant, but she must have heard something in my voice. “Long lunch? How far are you planning to go, Scotty?”

“Not far.”

“We’re not done, you know.”

She might have been talking about the code we’d been evolving, but I doubted it.

Sue’s leg wound had healed years ago, but the Jerusalem experience had left other scars. Jerusalem, she told me once, had made clear to her how dangerous her work was — that by placing herself near the center of the tau turbulence she had put at risk not only herself but the people around her.

“But I suppose it’s inevitable,” she had said sadly, “that’s the worst of it. You stand on the train tracks long enough, sooner or later you meet a train.”

I told her I’d finish the debugging that afternoon. She gave me a long, skeptical glare. “Anything else you want to tell me?”

“Not at the moment.”

“We’ll talk again,” she said.

Like most of her prophecies, this one would come true, too.

Morris offered to join me for lunch but I told him no, I had some errands to do and I’d probably just grab a sandwich on the run. If he found this suspicious, he didn’t show it.

I closed out my account at Zurich American, transferred most of the funds to a transit card and took the rest in old-fashioned folding green. I drove around a while longer to make sure Morris wasn’t tailing me, unlikely as that was. More probably he had tapped the locator in my car. So I traded in the Chrysler at a downtown dealership, told the salesperson there was nothing I liked on the lot and would she mind if I shopped the other franchises? No, she said, and she’d be happy to walk me through the virtual inventory in the back room. I tentatively selected a snub-nosed Volks Edison in dusty blue, possibly the most anonymous-looking automobile ever manufactured; left my Chrysler at the lot and accepted a courtesy ride halfway across the city. Up close, the Volks looked a little more battered than it had in the virts, but its power plant was sturdy and clean, as near as I could judge.

All of this amateur espionage bullshit left an e-trail as wide as the Missouri, of course. But while Morris Torrance could surely make a few connections and hunt me down, he couldn’t do it fast enough to keep me in Baltimore. I was two hundred miles west by nightfall, driving into a warm June evening with the windows open, popping antacids to calm the churning in my stomach.

There was a big ration camp where the highway crossed the Ohio, maybe a thousand threadbare canvas tents flapping in the spring breeze, dozens of barrel fires burning fitfully. Most of these people would have been refugees from the Louisiana bottomlands, unemployed refinery and petrochemical workers, farmers flooded out of their property. The consolidating clay of the Atchafalaya Basin had at last begun to draw the Mississippi River out of its own silted birdfoot deltas, despite the best efforts of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. More than a million families had been displaced by this spring’s floods, not to mention the chaos that resulted from collapsed bridges and navigational locks and mud-choked roads.

Men lined the breakdown lane begging rides in both directions. Hitchhiking had been illegal here for fifty years and rides were scarce. But these men (almost all men) had ceased caring. They stood stiff as scarecrows, blinking into the glare of the headlights.

I hoped Kait had found a safe place to sleep tonight.

When I reached the outskirts of Minneapolis I registered at a motel. The desk clerk, an ancient turtle of a man, opened his eyes wide when I took cash out of my wallet. “I’ll have to go to the bank with that,” he said. So I added fifty dollars for his trouble and he was kind enough not to process my ID. The room he gave me was a cubicle containing a bed and a courtesy terminal and a window that overlooked the parking lot.

I desperately needed sleep, but before that I needed to talk to Janice.

It was Whit who answered the phone. “Scott,” he said, cordially but not happily. He looked like he needed some sleep himself. “I assume you’re calling about Kaitlin. I’m sorry to say there’s been no further information. The police seem to think she’s still in the city, so we’re cautiously optimistic. Obviously, we’re doing all we can.”

“Thank you, Whit, but I need to talk to Janice right now.”

“It’s late. I hate to disturb her.”

“I’ll be quick.”

“Well,” Whit said, and wandered away from the terminal. Janice showed up a few moments later, wearing her nightgown but obviously wide awake.

“Scotty,” she said. “I tried to call you but there was nobody home.”

“That’s all right. I’m in town. Can we get together tomorrow and talk this over?”

“You’re in town? You didn’t have to come all this way.”

“I think I did. Janice? Can you make an hour for me? I can drop by the house, or—”

“No,” she said, “I’ll meet you. Where are you staying?”

“I’d as soon not meet here. What about that little steak house on Dukane, you know the one?”

“I think it’s still in business.”

“Meet you at noon?”

“Make it one.”

“Try to get some sleep,” I said.

“You, too.” She hesitated. “It’s been four days no Scotty. Four nights. I think about her all the time.”

“We’ll talk tomorrow,” I said.

Eleven

There’s a difference between seeing someone in a phone window and seeing the same person in the flesh. I had phoned Janice half a dozen times in the last couple of months. But I almost failed to recognize her when she walked through the door of the steak house.

What had changed her, I think, was the combination of prosperity and dread.

Whit had done well despite the economic downturn. Janice wore a visibly expensive blue tweed suit and day jacket, but she wore it as if she had reached into her closet and yanked it off the hanger — collar bent, pockets unbuttoned. Her eyes were red, the skin under them swollen and gray.

We hugged cordially but neutrally and she took the chair opposite mine.

“No news,” she said. She fingered her handbag, where her phone undoubtedly was. “The police said they would call if anything turned up.”

She ordered a salad she didn’t touch and a Margarita she drank too eagerly. It might have been nice to talk about something else, but we both knew why we were there. I said, “I’m going to have to walk you through this whole thing one more time. Can you deal with that?”

“Yes,” she said, “I think I can, but Scott, you have to tell me what you intend to do.”

“What I intend to do?”

“About — all this. Because it’s in the hands of the police now, and you could create a problem if you get too involved.”

“I’m her father. I think I have a right to know.”

“To know, yes, certainly. But not to interfere.”

“I’m not planning to interfere.”

She offered a wan smile. “Why do I find that less than convincing?”

I began a question, but Janice said, “No, wait a minute. I want you to have this.”

She took a manila envelope from her handbag and passed it to me. I opened it and found a recent photograph of Kaitlin. Janice had printed it on slick stock; the image was crisp and defined.

Kait, at sixteen, was tall for her age and undeniably pretty. Fate had spared her the curse of adolescent acne and, judging by the poise in her expression, adolescent awkwardness as well. She looked somber but healthy.

For a moment I didn’t recognize what was unusual about the picture. Then I thought: Her hair. Kait had tied back her long dirty-blond hair in a braid, showing off her ears.

Both of them.

“That’s what you gave her, Scott. I wanted to thank you for that.”

The inner-ear prosthesis was of course invisible, but the cosmetic work was flawless. As it should be. The ear wasn’t false; genetically, it was hers, grown from Kaitlin’s own stem cells. There were no scars except for a faded suture line. But she had been self-conscious for years after the operation.

“When the bandages came off it was all still pink, you know, but perfect. Just like a new rose.”

I had been there for the surgery but not for the unveiling. That had happened during the crisis provoked by the Damascus arrival, and I’d been with Sue.

Janice went on, “I told her she was beautiful, right there in the hospital in front of the doctor and the nurses. She cocked her head, as if she wasn’t sure where my voice was coming from. It takes time to, you know, adjust. You know what she said to me?”

“What?”

A single tear tracked down Janice’s cheek. “She said, ‘You don’t have to shout.’”

The trouble started, Janice said, when Kaitlin failed to come home from a youth group meeting.

“What kind of youth group?”

“It’s just a — well—” Janice faltered.

“There’s no point doing this if we’re not honest,” I said.

“It’s a youth division of this organization Whit belongs to. You have to understand, Scott. It’s not a pro-Kuin thing. It’s just people who want to talk about alternatives to armed conflict.”

“Jesus Christ,” I said. “Janice — Whit is a Copperhead?”

Lately the newspapers had revived the Civil War term “Copperhead” as a blanket insult for the various Kuinist movements. Janice lowered her eyes and said, “We don’t use that term,” by which I gathered she meant Whit didn’t like it. “I’m not into politics. You know that. Even Whit, he only got involved because some of the people in upper management were joining. Preparing for a war we probably won’t even have to fight, that’s just not good economic sense, Whit says.”

This was a standard Copperhead argument, and it was disturbing to hear it from Janice’s lips. Not that it didn’t contain a mote of truth. But beating under it was the Kuinist disdain for democratic process, the notion that Kuin might bring order to a planet divided along too many economic, religious, and ecological fracture lines.

I had followed the rise of the Copperhead movement on the web — inevitably, since Sue considered it significant and Morris considered it a potential threat. What I had seen, I disliked.

“And he dragged Kaitlin into this?”

“Kait wanted to go. At first he took her to the grownup meetings, but then she got interested in the youth arm.”

“So you let her join — just like that?”

She looked at me pleadingly. “Honestly, Scotty, I didn’t see anything wrong with it. They weren’t making pipe bombs, for God’s sake. It was just a social thing. I mean, they played baseball. They put on plays. Teenagers, Scott. She was making all these new friends — she had real friends for the first time in her life. What was I supposed to do, lock her in the house?”

“I’m not here to judge.”

“Right.”

“Just tell me what happened.”

She sighed. “Well, I guess there were some radicals in the membership. It’s hard to get away from it, you know. The young people are especially vulnerable. It’s in the news, the net. She used to talk about it sometimes, about—” She lowered her voice. “About Kuin, and how you shouldn’t condemn what you don’t understand, that kind of thing. She was more serious about it than I imagined.”

“She went to a meeting and didn’t come back.”

“No, nor did ten others, most of them older than Kait. Apparently they had been talking for weeks about the idea of a pilgrimage, what they call a haj.”

I closed my eyes.

“But the police say they’re probably still in town,” Janice hurried on, “probably squatting in an empty building with a bunch of other would-be radicals, talking big and shoplifting food. I hope that’s true, but it’s… bad enough.”

“Have you looked for her yourself?”

“The police said not to.”

“How about Whit?”

“Whit says we should cooperate with the police. And that goes for you, too, Scott.”

“Can you give me the name of somebody on the police force I can talk to?”

She took out her address book, copied a name and phone address onto a paper napkin, but she did it grudgingly, giving me long sour looks.

I said, “Also the name of this Copperhead club Whit belongs to.”

At that she balked. “I don’t want you making trouble.”

“That’s not why I’m here.”

“Bullshit. You come to town with all this, this moral outrage—”

“My daughter’s missing. That’s why I’m here. What part of that are you afraid of?”

She paused.

Then she said, “Kait’s been away less than a week. She could come home tomorrow. I have to believe that. I have to believe the police are doing all they can. But I can see that look in your eyes. And I hate it.”

“What look?”

“Like you’re getting ready to grieve.”

“Janice—”

She slapped the table with her open hand. “No. Scott. I’m sorry. I’m grateful for all you’ve done for Kait. I know how hard you tried. But I can’t tell you what organizations Whit belongs to. That’s his private life. We discussed all this with the police and that’s it, for now, anyway. So don’t look at me with those, those fucking funeral eyes.”

I was hurt, but I didn’t blame Janice, even when she stood up and stalked out into the sun-bleached street. I knew how she felt. Kaitlin was in danger, and Janice was asking herself what she could have done better, how she had dropped the ball, how things had gone so bad so fast.

I had been asking myself those same questions for ten years now. But it was a new experience for Janice.

After lunch I drove to Clarion Pharmaceuticals, a big industrial compound out where the suburbs met the wheat fields, and told the gate guard I wanted to see Mr. Delahunt. The guard stuck a card under the left front wiper and reminded me to pick up a visitor’s pass at the main entrance. But Clarion’s security was lax. I parked and walked through an open door near the loading bays and took an elevator up to what the directory said was Whit’s office.

And walked past his secretary as if I belonged there, into a warren of doorless rooms where men and women in crisp suits held phone conferences, until I found Whitman Delahunt himself draining filtered spring water from a cooler in the narrow hall. His eyes went wide when he saw me.

Whit was as impeccable as ever. A little grayer at the temples and wider at the waist, but he carried it well. He had even been smiling faintly to himself, though the smile vanished when he spotted me. He threw his paper cup into the trash. “Scott,” he said. “Jesus. You could have called.”

“I thought we should talk in person.”

“We should, and I don’t want to seem callous, I know what you’re going through, but this isn’t a good time for me.”

“I’d rather not wait.”

“Scott, be reasonable. Maybe tonight—”

“I don’t think I’m being unreasonable. My daughter has been God-knows-where for five days. Sleeping in the streets for all I know. So I’m sorry, Whit, if it interferes with your work and all, but we really do need to have a talk.”

He hesitated, then puffed himself up. “I would hate to have to call Security.”

“While you’re thinking it over, tell me about that Copperhead club you joined.”

His eyes widened. “Watch what you say.”

“Or we could discuss this in private.”

“Fuck, Scotty! All right. Jesus! Follow me.”

He took me to the executive cafeteria. The steam tables were empty, the food service finished for the day. The room was deserted. We sat at a lacquered wooden table like civilized people.

Whit loosened his tie. “Janice told me this might happen. That you’d come into town and complicate everything. You really should talk to the police, Scott, because I sure as hell intend to let them know what you’re up to.”

“You mentioned the Copperhead club.”

“No, you mentioned it, and will you please stop using that obscene word? It’s no such thing. It’s a citizen’s committee, for Christ’s sake. Yes, we talk about disarmament from time to time, but we talk about civil defense, too. We’re just average, churchgoing people. Don’t judge us by the fringe element you read about in the papers.”

“What should I call it, then?”

“We’re—” He had the grace to look embarrassed. “We’re the Twin Cities Peace with Honor Committee. You have to understand, there’s a lot at stake here. The kids have a point, Scott — the military buildup is distorting the economy, and there’s no evidence at all that guns and bombs are useful against Kuin, assuming he constitutes a threat to the United States, which is far from proven. We’re challenging the widespread belief that—”

“I don’t need the manifesto, Whit. What kind of people belong to this committee?”

“Prominent people.”

“How many?”

He blushed again. “Roughly thirty.”

“And you initiated Kait into the children’s auxiliary?”

“Far from it. The young people take these issues more seriously than we do. Than our generation, I mean. They’re not cynical about it. Kaitlin is a perfect example. She’d come home from youth group talking about all the things a leader like Kuin could do, if we weren’t fighting him at every turn. As if you could fight a man who controls time itself! Instead of finding a way to make the future a functional place.”

“You ever discuss this with her?”

“I didn’t indoctrinate her, if mat’s what you’re insinuating. I respect Kaitlin’s ideas.”

“But she fell in with radicals, is that right?”

Whit shifted in his seat. “I wouldn’t necessarily categorize them as radicals. I know some of those kids. They can be a little over the top, but it’s enthusiasm, not fanaticism.”

“None of them has been seen since Saturday.”

“My feeling is that they’re all right. Things like this happen sometimes. Kids dump their GPS tags, take an automobile and go off somewhere for a few days. It’s not good, but it’s hardly unique. I’m sorry if Kaitlin was misled by a few bad apples, Scott, but adolescence is never an easy time.”

“Did they ever talk about a haj?”

“Pardon me?”

“A haj. Janice used the word.”

“She shouldn’t have. We discourage that word, too. A haj is a pilgrimage to Mecca. But that’s not how the kids use it. They mean a trip to see a Kuin stone, or a place where one is supposed to arrive.”

“You think that’s what they had in mind?”

“I don’t know what they might have had in mind, but I doubt it was a haj. You can’t drive a Daimler to Madras or Tokyo.”

“So you’re not worried.”

He drew back and looked like he wanted to spit. “That’s a vicious thing to say. Of course I’m worried. The world is a dangerous place — more dangerous than it’s ever been, in my opinion. I dread what might happen to Kaitlin. That’s why I intend to let the police do their work without interference. I would suggest you do the same.”

“Thank you, Whit,” I said.

“Don’t make it worse for Janice than it already is.”

“I don’t see how I could do that.”

“Talk to the police. I mean it. Or I’ll talk to them on your behalf.”

He had recovered his poise. I stood up: I didn’t want to hear any more homilies about Kait, not from this man. He sat in his chair like a wounded princeling and watched me leave.

I called Janice again from the car — I wanted to speak to her once more before Whitman did.

Hard times had changed the city. I drove past barred or boarded windows, discount retailers where decent shops used to be, storefront churches of obscure denomination. The trash collectors’ strike had filled the sidewalks with garbage.

I told Janice over the phone that I’d talked to Whit.

“You had to do that, didn’t you? Just when I thought things couldn’t get worse.”

There was a note in her voice I didn’t like. “Janice — are you afraid of him?”

“Of course not, not physically, but what if he loses his job? What then? You don’t understand, Scotty. A lot of what Whit does is just… he has to go along to get along, you know what I mean?”

“My concern is with Kaitlin right now.”

“I’m not sure you’re doing Kait any good, either.” She sighed. “There’s a parents’ group the police told me about, you might want to look into it.”

“Parents’ group?”

“Parents whose kids ran off, usually kids with Kuinist ideas. Haj parents, if you know what I mean.”

“The last thing I’m looking for is a support group.”

“You could compare notes, see what other people are doing.”

I doubted it. But she zipped me the address and I copied it into my directory.

“Meanwhile,” she said, “I’ll apologize to Whit for you.”

“Has he apologized for letting Kait get mixed up in this?”

“That’s none of your business, Scott.”

Twelve

A month or so after the Jerusalem arrival I had taken myself to a doctor and had a long talk about genetics and madness.

It had occurred to me that Sue’s logic of correlation might have a personal side to it. She was saying, in effect, that our expectations shape the future, and that those of us exposed to extreme tau turbulence might influence it more than most.

And if what was happening to the world was madness, could I have factored in some of it from my own deepest psychic vaults? Had I inherited from my mother a faulty genetic sequence, and was it my own latent insanity that had filled a hotel suite on Mt. Scopus with bullets and glass?

The physician I talked to drew a blood sample and agreed to look at my genes for any markers that might suggest late-onset schizophrenia. But it wasn’t as simple as that, he said. Schizophrenia isn’t a purely heritable disorder, although susceptibility has a genetic aspect. That’s why they don’t gene-patch for it. There are complex environmental triggers. The most he could tell me was whether I might have inherited a tendency toward adult-onset schizophrenia — an almost meaningless factoid and utterly without predictive value.

I thought of it again when I used the motel terminal to call up a map of the world marked with Chronolith sites. If this was madness, here were its tangible symptoms. Asia was a red zone, dissolving into feverish anarchy, though fragile national governments continued to exist in Japan, where the ruling coalition had survived a plebiscite (barely), and in Beijing, though not in the Chinese countryside or far from the coast. The Indian subcontinent was pockmarked with arrivals and so was the Middle East, not only Jerusalem and Damascus but Baghdad, Tehran, Istanbul. Europe was free of the physical manifestation of Kuinism, which had so far stalled at the Bosporus, but not its political counterpart; there had been massive street riots in both Paris and Brussels staged by rival “Kuinist” factions. Northern Africa had endured five disastrous arrivals. A small Chronolith had cored the equatorial city of Kinshasa just last month. The planet was sick, sick unto death.

I dumped the map window and called one of the numbers Janice had given me, a police lieutenant by the name of Ramone Dudley. His interface told me he was unavailable but that my call had been logged for return.

While I waited I entered the other number Janice had pressed on me, the “support group,” which turned out to be the home terminal of a middle-aged woman named Regina Lee Sadler. She wore a bathrobe when she answered, and her hair was dripping. I apologized for calling her out of the shower.

“Makes no mind,” she said, her voice a Southern contralto as dark as her complexion. “Unless you’re calling from that goddamned collection agency, pardon my French.”

I explained about Kaitlin.

“Yes,” she said, “in fact I know about that. We have a couple other parents from that incident just joined us — mostly moms, of course. The dads tend to resist the kind of help we offer, God knows why. You seem not be a member of that stiff-necked clan, however.”

“I wasn’t here when Kait disappeared.” I told her about Janice and Whit.

“So you’re an absentee father,” she said.

“Not by choice. Mrs. Sadler, can I ask you a frank question?”

“I would prefer that to the other kind. And most people call me Regina Lee.”

“Do I have anything to gain by meeting these folks? Will it help me get my daughter home?”

“No. No, I can’t promise you that. Our group exists for our own purposes. We save ourselves. A lot of parents in this situation, they are very vulnerable to despair. It helps some people to be able to share then-feelings with others in similar straits. And I suspect you are tuning me out right now, saying to yourself, ‘Well, I don’t need that touchy-feely crap.’ And maybe you don’t. But some of us do, and we are not ashamed of it.”

“I see.”

“Not to say there isn’t a certain amount of networking. A lot of our people have hired private investigators, freelance skip-tracers, deprogrammers, and so on, and they do compare notes and share information, but I will tell you frankly that I have very little faith in such activity and the results I’ve seen bear that out.”

I told her those were the people I’d like to talk to, if only to learn from their failures.

“Well, if you come to our gathering tonight—” She gave me the address of a church hall. “If you show up, you’ll certainly be able to have a conversation of that nature. But may I ask something of you in return? Don’t come as a skeptic. Bring an open mind. About yourself, I mean. You seem all calm and collected, but I know from personal experience what you’re going through, how easy it is to grasp at straws when a loved one is in danger. And make no mistake, your Kaitlin is in danger.”

“I do know that, Mrs. Sadler.”

“There’s knowing it and there’s knowing it.” She looked over her shoulder, perhaps at a clock. “I ought to be getting fixed up, but may I say I hope to see you this evening?”

“Thank you.”

“I pray you find a positive outcome, Mr. Warden, whatever you do.”

I thanked her again.

The meeting took place in the assembly hall of a Presbyterian church in what had been a working-class neighborhood before it slipped into outright poverty some few years ago. Regina Lee Sadler, strutting across the stage in a flowered dress and with an old-fashioned handless mike bobbing in front of her head, looked both more robust and about twenty pounds heavier than she had looked in the video window. I wondered if Regina Lee was vain enough to have installed a slimming ap in her interface.

I didn’t introduce myself, just lurked in the back of the hall. It wasn’t exactly a Twelve-Step meeting, but it wasn’t far off. Five new members introduced themselves and their problems. Four had lost children to Kuinist or haj cells within the last month. One had been missing her daughter for more than a year and wanted a place where she could share her grief… not that she had given up hope, she insisted, not at all, but she was just very, very tired and thought she might be able to sleep through the night for a change, if only she had someone to talk to.

There was muted, sympathetic applause.

Then Regina Lee stood up again and read from a printed sheet of news and updates — children recovered, rumors of new Kuinist movements in the West and South, a truckload of underage pilgrims intercepted at the Mexican border. I took notes.

At that point the meeting became more personal as attendees divided up into “workshops” to discuss “coping strategies,” and I slipped quietly out the door.

I would have gone directly back to the motel if not for the woman sitting on the church steps smoking a cigarette.

She was about my age, her expression careworn but thoughtful and focused. Her hair was short and lustrous in the street light. Her eyes were shadowed as she glanced up at me. “Sorry,” she said automatically, stubbing out the cigarette.

I told her it was all right. Under a recent statute tobacco preparations were illegal for trade without an addict’s certificate and a prescription, but I considered myself broadminded — I had grown up in the days of legal tobacco. “Had enough?” she asked, waving a hand at the church door.

“For now,” I said.

She nodded. “Regina Lee is good for a lot of people, and God knows she’s unstoppable. But I don’t need what she’s handing out. I don’t think so, anyhow.”

We introduced ourselves. She was Ashlee Mills, and her son was Adam. Adam was eighteen years old, deeply involved in the local Kuinist network; he had been missing for six days now. Just like Kaitlin. So we compared notes. Adam had been involved with Whit Delahunt’s junior auxiliary, as well as a handful of other radical organizations. So they probably would have known each other.

“That’s a coincidence,” Ashlee said.

I told her no, there was no such thing.

We were still talking when Regina Lee’s meeting began to break up, crowding us off the church steps. I offered to buy her coffee somewhere nearby — she lived in the neighborhood.

Ashlee gave me a thoughtful look, frank and a little intimidating. She struck me as a woman who harbored no illusions about men. Then she said, “Okay. There’s an all-night coffee shop next to the drugstore, just around the corner.” We walked there.

Ashlee was conspicuously not wealthy. Her skirt and blouse looked like Goodwill purchases, cared-for but a long way from new. But she wore them with a dignity that was innate, not practiced. At the restaurant she counted out dollar coins to pay for her coffee; I told her not to bother and pushed my card across the counter. She gave me another long look, then nodded. We found a quiet corner table away from the jabbering video panels.

She said, “You’ll want to know about my son.”

I nodded. “But this isn’t one of Regina Lee’s workshops. What I really want to know is how I can help my daughter.”

“I can’t promise you anything to that effect, Mr. Warden.”

“That’s what everybody tells me.”

“Everybody is right, I’m sorry to say. At least in my experience.”

Ashlee had been born and educated in Southern California, had come to Minneapolis to work as a medical receptionist for her uncle, a podiatrist who had since died of an aneurysm. At the reception desk she had met Tucker Kellog, a tool and dye programmer, and married him at the age of twenty. Tucker left home when their son Adam was five years old. He had been unavailable since. Ashlee filed for divorce and could have sued for child support but chose not to. She was better off without Tucker in her life, she said, even peripherally. She had reverted to her maiden name ten years ago.

She loved her son Adam, but he had been a trial. “Parent to parent, Mr. Warden, there were times when I was in despair. Even when he was little, it was hard keeping Adam in school. Nobody likes school, I guess, but whatever it is that made the rest of us show up every day, sense of duty or fear of the consequences, whatever it is, Adam didn’t feel it. He couldn’t be bullied into it and he couldn’t be shamed into it.”

He had been in and out of psychiatric programs, apprenticeship programs, special learning facilities, and occasionally Juvenile Hall. Not that Adam wasn’t bright. “He reads constantly. Not just storybooks, either. And, frankly, it takes a certain amount of smarts to survive the way he has — on the street half the time. Adam is actually very clever.”

When Ashlee talked about her son her expression was a mixture of pride, guilt, and apprehension, sometimes all three at once. Her large eyes darted from side to side as if she expected to be overheard. She played with her napkin, folding it and refolding it, finally tearing it into long strips that lay on the tabletop like aborted acts of origami.

“He ran away once when he was twelve, but that had nothing to do with this Copperhead thing. I swear I don’t know what Adam imagines this Kuin is all about, apart from the business of destroying cities and making people’s lives miserable. But it fascinates him. The way he watches the news nets is almost frightening.” She dipped her head. “I’m reluctant to say it, but I think what Adam likes is basically just this crushing of things. I think he puts himself in Kuin’s place. He wants to lift his foot and obliterate everything he hates. The talk about a new kind of world government is just set-dressing, in my opinion.”

“Did he ever talk to you about Kaitlin or her group?”

Ashlee smiled sadly. “That’s a question and a half. Did your Kaitlin ever talk to you about this stuff?”

“We talked. But no, she never mentioned anything political.”

“That still puts you a step up from me. Adam has never confided in me about anything. Anything at all. Everything I know about my own son, I learned from observation. Excuse me, I think I need another coffee.”

What she needed, I imagined, was another smoke. She paused at the counter, asked the clerk for a double-double, then ducked into the restroom for a while. She came out looking calmer. I think the counterman smelled tobacco when she picked up her coffee. He gave her a hard look, then rolled his eyes.

She sat down again, sighing. “No, Adam never talked about his meetings. Adam is seventeen, but like I said, he’s not naive. He conducts his business pretty carefully. But, you know, I would overhear things once in a while. I knew he’d hooked up with one of the suburban Copperhead clubs, but for a while it seemed like that was almost a good thing. He was with people who had some, you know, background. Prospects. I guess in the back of my head was the idea that he would make friends and maybe that would lead to something, some opportunities, after all this time-travel shit blows over, excuse me. I thought he might meet a girl, or maybe somebody’s dad would offer him a job.”

I thought of Janice’s plaintive, What was I supposed to do? Lock her in the house?

Janice had clearly not imagined her daughter in the company of an Adam Mills.

“I changed my mind when I walked in on one of his phone calls. He was talking about those people — I guess including your Kait, I’m sorry to say. And he was just vicious, contemptuous. He said the group was full of—” She lowered her head, ashamed. “Full of ‘whitebread virgins.’”

She must have seen my reaction. Ashlee put her chin up, and her manner hardened. “I love my son, Mr. Warden. I don’t have any illusions about the kind of person Adam is — or will be, unless he turns himself around. Adam has serious, serious problems. But he’s my son, and I love him.”

“I respect that,” I said.

“I hope so.”

“They’re both missing. That’s what we have to worry about now.”

She frowned then, maybe reluctant to be included in the pronoun. Ashlee was accustomed to dealing with her own troubles in her own way; that was why she had bailed out of Regina Lee’s meeting.

But then, so had I.

She said, “I would be very frankly pissed if you were trying to pick me up, Mr. Warden.”

“That’s not what this is about.”

“Because I want to ask you for your phone number so we can keep in touch about Adam and Kaitlin. I don’t have any hard information, but my guess is that their whole little group is attempting some kind of half-assed pilgrimage, Christ only knows where. So they’re probably together. So we should keep in touch. I just don’t want to be misunderstood.”

I gave her my portable address. She gave me her home terminal.

She finished her coffee and said, “This is pretty much all bad news for you.”

“Not all,” I said.

She stood up. “Well, it was good meeting you.” She turned and walked through the door into the street. I watched her through the window as she strode a half block between islands of lamplight, to a doorway adjoining a Chinese restaurant, where she fumbled with a key. An apartment over a restaurant. I pictured a threadbare sofa, maybe a cat. A rose in a wine bottle or a framed poster on the wall. The echoing absence of her son.

Ramone Dudley, the police lieutenant in charge of local missing persons, agreed to see me in his office the following afternoon. The meeting was brief.

Dudley was an obviously overworked desk cop who had delivered the same bad news too many times. “These kids,” he said (clearly a homogenous mass, in Dudley’s mind: these kids), “they have no future, and they know it. The thing is, it’s true. The economy sucks, that’s no secret. And what else do we have to offer them? Everything they hear about the future is all Kuin, Kuin, Kuin. Fucking Kuin. According to the fun-dies, Kuin is the Antichrist; all you can do is say your prayers and wait for the Rapture. Washington is drafting kids for some war we may never fight. And the Copperheads are saying maybe Kuin won’t hurt us so bad if we bend over politely. That’s not a real bouquet of options, when you think about it. Plus all that shit they hear in the music or learn in those encrypted chatrooms.”

Plainly, Lieutenant Dudley blamed most of this on my generation. He must have met some inadequate parents in the course of his work. By the way he looked at me, he was pretty sure I was one of them.

I said, “About Kaitlin—”

He took a file from his desktop and read me the contents. There were no surprises. A total of eight youths, all involved in the junior arm of Whitman’s social club, had failed to return home from a meeting. Friends and parents of the missing children had been extensively interviewed — “With the exception of yourself, Mr. Warden, and I was expecting you to turn up.”

“Whit Delahunt told you about me,” I guessed.

“He mentioned you briefly when we interviewed him, but no, not exactly. The call I got was from a retired fed named Morris Torrance.”

Fast work. But then, Morris had always been diligent. “What did he tell you?”

“He asked me to give you as much cooperation as possible. This is it, as far as I’m concerned. I don’t have a whole lot more to tell you, unless you have some specific questions. Oh, and he asked me one other thing.”

“What’s that?”

“He asked me to tell you to get in touch with him. He said he was sorry to hear about Kaitlin and he said he might be able to help you out.”

Thirteen

Maybe I should have taken advantage of Regina Lee’s communal therapy and admitted my fear for Kaitlin — fear, and the premonition of grief that drifted into consciousness whenever I closed my eyes. But that wasn’t my style. I had learned at an early age to fake calm in the face of disaster. To keep my anxiety to myself, like a dirty secret.

But I thought about Kait constantly. In my mind she was still the Kaitlin of Chumphon, five years old and as fearless as she was curious. Children wear their natures like brightly-colored clothes; mat’s why they lie so transparently. Adulthood is the art of deceit. Because I had known Kaitlin as a child I had never lost sight of the vulnerable heart of her. Which made it all the more painful to imagine (or struggle not to imagine) where Kaitlin might be now, with whom. The most fundamental parental urge is the urge to nurture and protect. To grieve for a child is to admit ultimate impotence. You can’t protect what goes into the ground. You can’t tuck a blanket around a grave.

I spent much of every night awake, staring out the motel window and drinking, alternately, beer and diet cola (and peeing every half hour), until sleep broke over me like a glutinous wave. What dreams I had were chaotic and futile. Waking up to the brutal irony of spring, of sunlight in a bottomless blue sky, was like waking from a dream into a dream.

I had figured my contact with Ashlee Mills was a one-shot, but she called me on my pocket phone ten days after Kaitlin’s disappearance. Her voice was businesslike and she came to the point quickly: “I arranged to meet someone,” she said, “a man who might know something about Adam and Kaitlin, but I don’t want to meet him alone.”

“I’m free this afternoon,” I said.

“He works nights. If you call what he does work. This might not be pretty.”

“What is he, a pimp?”

“Uh-uh,” she said. “He’s a sort of a drug dealer.”

I had spent much of the last week on the net, researching the phenomenon of “haj youth” and the Kuinist movement, tunneling into their hidden chatrooms.

There was, of course, no unified Kuinist movement. Lacking a flesh-and-blood Kuin, the “movement” was a patchwork of utopian ideologies and quasi-religious cults, each competing for the title. What they had in common was simply the act of veneration, the worship of the Chronoliths. For the hajists, any Chronolith was a holy object. Hajists attributed all sorts of powers to the physical proximity of a Kuin stone: enlightenment, healing, psychological transformation, epiphanies great and small. But unlike the pilgrims at Lourdes, for instance, the vast majority of hajists were young. It was, in the twentieth century term, a “youth movement.” Like most such movements, it was as much style as substance. Very few Americans ever made a physical pilgrimage to a Chronolith site, but it was not uncommon to see a teenager with a Kuinist logo on his hat or shirt — most often the ubiquitous “K+” in a red or orange circle. (Or any of the subtler and supposedly secret signs: scarred nipples or earlobes, silver ankle bracelets, white headbands.)

The K+ symbol abounded in Ashlee’s neighborhood, chalked or painted on walls and sidewalks. I pulled up outside the Chinese restaurant at the appointed time, and Ashlee scurried out of her apartment door and into the passenger seat. “It’s good you have a cheap car,” she said. “It won’t attract attention.”

“Where are we going?”

She gave me an address five blocks farther into the city, where the only surviving businesses were stock-houses, window-service fast-food outlets, and liquor stores.

“The guy’s name,” Ashlee said without preamble, “is Cheever Cox, and he’s tied into pretty much all the trade you can’t report on your IRS form. I know him because I used to buy tobacco from him.” She said this in a carefully neutral tone but glanced at me for signs of disapproval. “Before I got my addict’s license, I mean.”

“What does he know about Kait and Adam?”

“Maybe nothing, but when I called him yesterday he said he’d heard about a cut-rate haj and some new rumor about Kuin and he didn’t want to talk about it over an unencrypted line. Cheever’s kind of paranoid that way.”

“You think this is legitimate?”

“Tell you the truth? I don’t really know.”

She rolled down the window and lit a cigarette, almost defiantly, waiting for my reaction. Minnesota had some of the harshest tobacco laws in the country. But I was from out-of-state and old enough not to be shocked. I said, “Ashlee? Did you ever consider quitting?”

“Oh, please.”

“I’m not passing judgment, I’m making conversation.”

“I don’t especially want to talk about it.” She exhaled noisily. “There hasn’t been a whole lot holding me together the last few years, Mr. Warden.”

“Scott.”

“Scott, then. It’s not that I’m a weak person. But… did you ever smoke?”

“No.” I had been spared the anti-abuse vaccines that were pushed on so many young people in those days (and the resultant risk of adult antibody disorders), but tobacco simply wasn’t my vice.

“It’s probably killing me, but I don’t have much else.” She seemed to struggle after a thought, then let it go. “It calms me down.”

“I’m not condemning you for it. Actually, I always liked the smell of burning tobacco. At least from a distance.”

She smiled wryly. “Uh-huh. You’re a real degenerate, I can tell that about you.”

“You miss California?”

“Do I miss California?” She rolled her eyes. “Is this a real conversation or are you just nervous about meeting Cheever? Because you don’t have to be. He’s a little shady but he’s not a bad person.”

“That’s reassuring,” I said.

“You’ll see.”

The address was a run-down semidetached wood-frame house. The porch light was out, probably permanently. The stairs sagged. Ashlee pulled open the rusty fly screen and rapped at the door.

Cheever Cox opened up when Ashlee identified herself. Cox was a bald man of about thirty-five, wearing Levis and a pale blue shirt with what looked like marinara sauce dribbled down the collar. “Hey, Ashlee,” he barked, hugging her. He gave me a brief glance.

Ashlee introduced me and said, “It’s about what we talked about on the phone.”

The front room contained a faded sofa, two wooden folding chairs, and a coffee table with ashtray. Down the dim hallway I could see a corner of the kitchen. If Cox made a lot of money in the illicit drug trade, he wasn’t spending it on decor. But maybe he had a country house.

He spotted the pack of cigarettes sticking out of Ashlee’s shirt pocket. “Shit, Ashlee,” he said, “you on a script, too? Fucking government’s taking away my business with those little pussy prescription sticks.”

“I’ll lose my script next year,” Ashlee said, “if I’m not on a patch or a program. Worse, I’ll lose my health insurance.”

He grinned. “So maybe I’ll see more of you then?”

“Not a chance.” She glanced at me. “I’ll get my teeth whitened and find a good job.”

“Be a citizen,” Cox said.

“Damn right.”

“Marry your boyfriend, too?”

“He’s not my boyfriend.”

“Okay, Ash, I’m sorry, don’t mind me. You want something? A little more than the druggist is willing to sell you?”

“I want to ask you some questions about Adam.”

“Yeah, but that can’t be all you want.”

Cox made it obvious that he would have nothing to say unless Ashlee bought something from him. Business is business, he said.

“It’s about my son, Cheever.”

“I know, and I love you and Adam both, but Ashlee, it’s business.”

So she paid him for a carton of what she called “loose smokes,” which Cox fetched from the basement. She held the box in her lap. The box reeked.

Cox settled into his chair. “What it is,” he told Ashlee, “is, I go into the squatters’ buildings a lot, especially down on Franklin, or Lowertown, or the old Cargill warehouses, so I see these kids. And, you know, Adam hung with that crowd, too. It’s not a big market for me because these kids don’t have any money, basically. They’re shoplifting food. But every once in a while one of ‘em comes by some cash, I don’t ask how, and they want a carton, two cartons, smokes and drinks and chemicals and so forth. A lot of times it was Adam who would come to me, because I knew him from when you and I did business on a more regular basis.”

Ashlee lowered her eyes at this assertion but said nothing.

“Also, frankly, Adam has a little more on the ball than most of those people. They call themselves hajists or Kuinists but they’re about as political as bricks. You know who does the real haj thing? Rich kids. Rich kids and celebs. They go to Israel or Egypt and burn their scented candles or whatever. Downtown, it’s different. Most of these kids wouldn’t go out of their way for Kuin if he was holding a coronation ball in their back yard. Well, Adam figured that out. That’s why he was fooling around with the Copperhead clubs in Wayzata, Edina — looking for people who think the way he does but are maybe a little more gullible and a little more flush than the downtown crowd.”

“Cheever,” Ashlee said, “can you tell me if he’s still in town?”

“I can’t tell you a firm yes or no, but I doubt it. If he is, I haven’t seen him. I talk to people, you know, I follow the links, I keep my ear to ground. There are always rumors. You remember Kirkwell?”

Last summer, a clinically paranoid retired butcher in Kirkwell, New Mexico, had announced that he was measuring increased background radiation at a dry spring outside the city limits — his own property, by coincidence. Probably he hoped to make the site a tourist attraction. He succeeded. By September, ten thousand destitute young hajists had camped there. The National Guard dropped food and water rations and exhorted the pilgrims to go home, but it was an outbreak of cholera that finally succeeded in clearing the property. The retired butcher promptly disappeared, leaving a number of class-action and public nuisance lawsuits in his wake.

“These rumors come and go,” Cox said, “but the big one right now is Mexico. Ciudad Portillo. Adam was in this room three weeks ago and he was talking about it then — not that anybody paid much attention to him. That’s why he hooked up with the suburban Copperheads, I think, because he wanted to go to Mexico and he thought that crowd could supply at least a little money, some transportation.”

Ashlee said, “He went to Mexico?”

Cox held up his hands. “I can’t tell you that for sure. But if I had to bet I’d say he was on the road and bound for the border, if he hasn’t already crossed it.”

Ashlee said nothing. She looked pensive and pale, almost beaten. Cox made a sympathetic sound. “That’s the trouble,” he said. “Stupid people do stupid things, but Adam is smart enough to do something really stupid.”

We talked it around a little more, but Cox had said all he had to say. Finally Ashlee stood up and stepped toward the door.

Cox hugged her again.

“Come see me when your script runs out,” he said.

I asked her on the drive back how she had known Adam was missing.

She said, “What do you mean?”

“It sounds like Adam was connected with squatter circles. If he wasn’t living at home, how did you know he was missing?”

We pulled up at the curb. Ashlee said, “I’ll show you.”

She unlocked the street door and walked me up a narrow flight of stairs to her apartment. The apartment was laid out like any other railway flat: a big front room facing the street, two tiny bedrooms off a corridor, a square kitchen with a window over the rear alley. The apartment was stuffy; Ashlee said she preferred to keep the windows shut during the garbage strike. But it was neatly and sensibly furnished. It was the home of someone possessing taste and common sense, if not much capital.

“This door,” Ashlee told me, “is Adam’s room. He doesn’t like people going in there, but he’s not around to object.”

In a sense, my first real contact with Adam was this glimpse of his room. I suppose I expected the worst: pornography, graffiti, maybe a shotgun buried in the laundry hamper.

But Adam’s room was nothing like that. It was more than orderly, it was icily neat. The bed was made. The closet door was open and the number of bare hangers suggested that Adam had packed for a long trip, but what remained of his wardrobe was neatly arrayed. The bookshelves were makeshift brick-and-board arrangements but the books were upright and in alphabetical order, not by author but by title.

Books tell you a lot about the people who choose and read them. Adam clearly leaned toward the more technical sort of nonfiction — electronics manuals, textbooks (including organic chemistry and American history), Fundamentals of Computation, plus random biographies (Picasso, Lincoln, Mao Zedong), Famous Trials of the Twentieth Century, How to Repair Almost Anything, Ten Steps to a More Efficient Fuel Cell. A child’s astronomy book and a spotter’s guide to manned satellite orbits. Ice and Fire: The Untold Story of the Lunar Base Tragedy. And, of course, books about Kuin. Some of these were mainstream works, including McNeil and Cassel’s Asia Under Siege; most were gaudy fringe publications with titles like End of Days and Fifth Horseman.

There were no photographs of living human beings visible, but the walls were papered with magazine shots of various Chronoliths. (Briefly, and uncomfortably, I was reminded of Sue Chopra’s office in Baltimore.)

Ashlee said, “Does it look like he never comes home? This is Adam’s ground zero. Maybe he didn’t sleep here every night, but he was here for a good eight or ten hours out of every twenty-four. Always.”

She closed the door.

“Funny,” she said, “I always thought of myself as making a home for Adam. But that’s not how it worked. He made his own home. It just happened to be inside mine.”

She fixed coffee and we talked a while longer, sitting on Ashlee’s long sofa with the sound of street traffic coming through the closed but single-glazed windows. There was something deeply comforting about the moment — Ashlee moving in the kitchen, absentmindedly smoothing her bristly hair with her hand — something almost viscerally comforting, a shadow of the kind of domesticity I had misplaced more than a decade ago. I was grateful to her for that.

But the moment couldn’t last. She asked me about Kaitlin and I told her something (not everything) about Chumphon and the way I had spent the last ten years. She was impressed that I had seen the Jerusalem arrival, not because she felt any reverence for Kuin but because it meant I had moved, if only peripherally, among the kind of people she imagined were relatively rich and vaguely famous. “At least you were doing something,” she said, “not just spinning your wheels.”

I told her she had obviously done more than spin her wheels: It couldn’t have been easy for a single woman to raise a child during the economic crisis.

“They call it spinning your wheels,” she said, “when you can’t get traction. And I guess that’s how I feel about Adam. I tried to help him, but I couldn’t get traction.” She paused and then turned to face me, her expression less guarded than it had been. “Suppose they did go to Mexico — Adam and Kaitlin and all that group. What do we do?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I have to talk to some people.”

“Would you follow Kaitlin all the way to Portillo?”

“If I thought I could help her. If I thought it would do any good.”

“But you’re not sure.”

“No. I’m not sure.”

My pocket phone rang. It was set to take messages, but I checked the display to see who was calling. It might have been Janice saying Kait had come home, that the whole thing was a stupid misunderstanding. Or it might have been Ramone Dudley calling to tell me the police had found Kait’s body.

It was neither. According to the text display, the call was from Sue Chopra. She had tracked down my private terminal address (despite the fact that I had changed it when I left Baltimore), and she wanted me to reply as soon as possible.

“I should take this in private,” I told Ashlee.

She walked me down the stairs and out to the car I took her hand. It was late, and the street was empty. The streetlights were the old-fashioned mercury vapor kind, and they put amber highlights in Ashlee’s short blond hair. Her hand was warm.

“If you find out something,” she said, “you have to tell me. Promise me that.”

I promised.

“Call me, Scott.”

I believe she genuinely wanted me to call her. I believe she doubted that I would.

“First of all,” Sue said, leaning into the lens so that her face filled the motel terminal’s phone window like a myopic brown moon, “I want you to know I’m not pissed about the way you left town. I understand what that was all about, and if you chose not to confide in me, I guess I have myself to blame. Although — I don’t know why it is, Scotty, you always expect the worst of people. Did it even occur to you we might want to help?”

“You know about Kait,” I said.

“We looked into the situation, yeah.”

“You talked to the police.”

“I know you’re going to do what you have to do, but I want to make sure you don’t feel like a fugitive.” She added, more plaintively, “I would still like to talk to you once in a while. As far as I’m concerned, you still work here. Ray is a good foil for the math work, and Morris tries hard to understand what we’re doing, but I need someone who’s bright enough to pay attention but doesn’t have any preconceived ideas.” She lowered her eyes and added, “Or maybe that’s just an excuse. Maybe I just need somebody to talk to.”

This was, among other things, her way of apologizing for all the invasive prodding of the last few years. But I had never blamed Sue for that. It might have been her ideas about tau turbulence that put me in a vulnerable position, but she had been careful to build a wall between me and the federal juggernaut. The juggernaut had lately turned its attention elsewhere; Sue still wanted to be my friend.

She said, “I’m so unhappy about what happened with Kaitlin.”

“The only thing I can tell you about Kait is that she hasn’t come home yet. I’d as soon not dwell on it. So distract me. Gossip. Has Ray found a girlfriend? Have you?”

“Are you drinking, Scotty?”

“Yes, but not enough to justify the question.”

She smiled sadly. “All right. Ray is still wandering in the wilderness. Me, I’m seeing this woman I met at a bar. She’s very sweet. She has red hair and collects Dresden china and tropical fish. But it’s not serious.”

Of course not. Sue conducted her love affairs almost at a distance, deferentially and with the expectation of disappointment.

Her real romance was with her work, which was what she preferred to talk about. “The thing is, Scotty, we’ve had a little bit of a breakthrough. That’s what’s obsessing everybody right now. Most of this is classified, but since there are rumors all over the net I can tell you at least a little bit about it.”

She told me probably more than she should have, but much of it went over my head. The gist was that someone at MIT had succeeded in conjuring negative-tau particles out of the vacuum (which is in any case a seething cauldron of what physicists call “virtual” particles) and stabilizing them long enough to demonstrate the effect. These were hadrons with, essentially, negative duration. They carved holes, if you like, into the past — about a millisecond of the past, not Kuin’s ponderous twenty years and three months, but in principle it was the same phenomenon.

“We’re very close,” Sue said, “to understanding exactly what it is Kuin is doing. And even Kuin might not have figured all the angles. Given enough time, we can create whole new technologies. I mean, star travel, Scotty: that’s a real possibility!”

“Does it matter?”

“Of course it matters! We’re talking about a potential new era in the history of the fucking species — yes it matters!”

“Kuin has already put his fingerprints on half the world, Sue. I would hate to see him extend his reach beyond the surface of the planet.”

“Well, but this is the key to that, too. If we can figure out how a Chronolith works, we can interfere with it. With the right application we might be able to make a Chronolith simply go away.”

“And achieve what?” The last few days had pumped up my cynicism. “It’s a little late for that, don’t you think?”

“No,” she said, “I don’t. Remember, it isn’t Kuin we have to be afraid of. It’s not even the Chronoliths. Feedback, Scotty, that’s the key. The real problem here is the perception of Kuin’s invincibility, which rests on the invincibility of his monuments. Destroy one, and you destroy the myth. Suddenly he’s not a godlike force anymore, he’s just another would-be Hitler or Stalin.”

Still, I suggested, it might be too late for that.

“Not if we can demonstrate his weakness.”

“Can you?”

She paused. Her smile faltered. “Well, maybe. Maybe soon,” she said.

But not soon enough for Kait, who was probably in Mexico, imbued with her own notions of Kuin’s invincibility and promise. I reminded Sue that I had things to do. She said, “I’m sorry if I kept you up, Scotty, but I really do think it’s important for us to keep in touch.”

Because, of course, she had not abandoned her own faux-Jungian idea that our futures were intertwined — that Kuin, among other things, had imposed on us a fate.

“Anyway, that’s the real reason I called,” she said. “I told somebody about your problem. And he wants to help you.”

“Not Morris,” I said. “I like Morris well enough, but even Morris will tell you he’s not an experienced field agent.”

“No, not Morris, although he’d love to help. No, this is someone with a whole different kind of experience.”

I should have seen it coming. It was Sue, after all, who had looked most deeply into my past, particularly the time at Chumphon. But I was blindsided all the same.

“Maybe you remember him,” she said. “His name is Hitch Paley.”

Fourteen

Sometime during that week — before Hitch arrived, before events began to tumble out of control — Ashlee said, in the middle of a phone conversation, “You know the Charles Dickens story, A Christmas Carol?”

“What about it?”

“I was thinking about Kuin and the Chronoliths and all that. You know in Dickens where Scrooge goes into the future and sees his own funeral? And he says to the ghost, ‘Are these the shades of things that must be, or things that may be?’ Or something like that?”

“Right,” I said.

“So the Chronoliths, Scott, are they must be or may be?”

I told her no one was certain about that. But if I understood Sue correctly, the events marked by the already existing Chronoliths were must-bes in one form or another. There was no bright alternative future in which we stopped Kuin before his conquests and made the Chronoliths into harmless free-floating paradoxes. Kuin would conquer Chumphon, Thailand, Vietnam, Southeast Asia; time might be fluid, but the monuments themselves were immutable and fundamental.

Then why not despair? I suppose Sue’s answer would be that the battle wasn’t finished. Much of the civilized world was still free of Chronoliths, which suggested that Kuin’s conquests were a steplike process with gains and reversals. There had not yet been a Chronolith on North American soil. Maybe there never would be, if we did the right thing. Whatever the right thing was.

Sue had broached to me the idea of “negative feedback.” If what Kuin was doing with the Chronoliths represented a kind of positive feedback — a signal reinforced and amplified through time and human expectation — then the solution might be the opposite. A Chronolith that appeared and was subsequently destroyed would cast doubt on the process; the cancerous impression of Kuin’s invincibility would be, if not shattered, at least weakened.

He might take half the Earth, but not our half.

That was Sue Chopra’s faith. I hoped she was right I was prepared to act on that assumption.

In all honesty, however, I cannot say that I believed it.

Well, then, here was Hitch Paley, stepping out of a battered Sony compact (which by all rights should have been a motorbike) into the motel parking lot. We had agreed to meet at nine this morning. He was fifteen minutes late. In a sense, ten years late.

He hadn’t changed much. I recognized him immediately, even from a dozen yards away under the shade of the coffee shop awning. I was delighted and I was afraid.

He wore a full beard and a dung-green leather jacket. He had put on a little weight, which only served to emphasize his broad nose, his high cheekbones, the Neanderthal slope of his skull. He spotted me, walked bandy-legged across the sunny space between us, and put out his huge right hand.

“Hey, buddy,” he said. “You got that package I asked you to pick up?”

I muttered something about the package; he grinned and slapped me on the back and said, “I’m just shitting you, Scotty; we’ll talk about that later.” We went into the coffee shop and occupied a booth.

Of course Sue Chopra had known about Hitch. All my efforts on his behalf — to avoid implicating him during the polygraph interview, for instance — had been obvious and futile. Hitch was one of Sue’s so-called primary observers, and he must have figured in her connect-the-dots project from the very beginning. Hitch had been deep into the tau turbulence, certainly as deep as I had been.

I had assumed Hitch would also be unfindable, but he had probably hung around Chumphon a little longer than he might have had he understood just how closely witnesses were being scrutinized — long enough for the FBI to target his internet signature or even plant a locator on him. In any case, they had found him.

They had found him, and Sue had offered him the alternative of prompt arrest or a job. Hitch had made the wise choice.

“It’s not exactly an office job,” he said. “Good pay, travel, no strings. Supposedly a clean criminal record at the end of it, though the end is nowhere in sight. First thing they did was send me around the Pacific Rim hunting rumors about Kuin, not that anything substantial came of it. But I been busy, Scotty. Scouting touchdown sites in, you know, Ankara, Istanbul, doing little unofficial things here and there, talking to Kuinists — lately, talking to the homegrown kind. Copperheads and hajists.”

“You’re a spy?”

He gave me a sour look. “Right, I’m a spy. I drink martinis and play a lot of baccarat.”

“But you know about the haj thing.”

“I know more about the ‘haj thing’ than most people. I’ve been inside it. And I will do whatever I can to help you find Kait.”

I sat back in the booth, wondering if this was what I wanted. If this was wise.

“You know,” Hitch said, “when I think of Kaitlin, I still think of her at Chumphon. The way she’d run down the tide line in that pink one-piece Janice liked to dress her in, leaving these footprints in the sand like little bitty bird footprints, heel-and-toe. We should have taken better care of her, Scotty.”

He said “we” to be friendly. He was talking about me.

Hitch did not reminisce much, nor did he waste time. He had already gotten the details of the situation from Ramone Dudley, and I added what little I had personally learned while we stared at the coffee shop menus.

He said, “Mexico is a good bet. But we have to know more than we do before we come to any conclusions.”

He suggested another talk with Whit Delahunt. I agreed, on the condition that we not alarm Janice unduly. “And we should talk to Ashlee Mills, too. If she’s home, we could pick her up on the way to see Whit.”

“Not good,” Hitch said, “to get too many people involved here.”

“Ashlee’s as involved as I am. She’s been more helpful than the police, actually.”

“You vouch for her, Scotty?”

“Yes.”

“Okay.” He looked at me critically. “You haven’t been eating or sleeping much, it looks like.”

“It shows?”

“Maybe you ought to try the steak and eggs.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“Steak and eggs, Scotty. For Kait’s sake, let’s say.”

I didn’t want the food, but it looked good when the waitress delivered it. I had surprisingly little trouble emptying the plate.

“Feel better?” Hitch asked.

“What I feel is the hardening of my arteries.”

“Bullshit. You need the protein. We have some work ahead of us, and not just today.”

I heard myself say, “Can we really get her back?”

“We’ll get her back. Count on it.”

Ashlee did a double take when she saw Hitch Paley for the first time, then shot me a look: You have friends like this?

Which was fair enough. Hitch still looked like a small-time criminal — he could have passed for a drug dealer à la Cheever Cox, or maybe the kind of bulky individual who collects on bad debts. I sketched out some of our past and repeated some of what Hitch had told me. Ashlee nodded but clearly continued to suspect that Hitch was something more than Sue Chopra’s ears on the underworld.

She took me aside and said, “Can he help us find Kait and Adam? That’s all I really need to know.”

“I think he can.”

“Then let’s go see this Whitman Delahunt.”

I drove. The afternoon air was gently breezy, the sky raked with high cloud. Hitch was silent in the car. Ashlee hummed a tune I recognized as an old Lux Ebone song, something sad. Something from the time when songs still mattered, when everyone knew the same songs. This year’s popular songs all sounded like marching music to me: drums and cymbals and trumpet notes drowning in their own echoes. But I suppose every decade gets the music it deserves.

Hitch had spotted the nicotine stains on Ashlee’s fingers. “You can go ahead and smoke,” he said, “I don’t give a fuck.”

The house where Whit and Janice lived had not aged especially gracefully, nor had the neighborhood it inhabited, but both were still well above the national average. People here could afford to have their trash hauled away, even during the collectors’ strike. The lawns were green. Here and there, rust-speckled landscape robots crawled among the hedges like sluggish armadillos. If you squinted a little, it looked like the last ten years hadn’t happened.

Whitman answered the door and recoiled when he saw me. He didn’t like the looks of Hitch or Ashlee, either. His expression turned blank and he said, “Janice is upstairs, Scott. Do you want me to call her?”

“We just want to ask you a couple of questions,” I said. “Janice doesn’t need to be involved.”

He clearly didn’t want to invite us in, but he may also have been reluctant to discuss his Copperhead politics in front of any passing neighbors. We stepped into the cool shade of the house. I introduced Hitch and Ashlee without being specific about why I had brought them. When we were away from the door, Hitch took the initiative. He said, “Scotty told me about the club you belong to, Mr. Delahunt. What we need now is a list of the other adult members.”

“I already gave that to the police.”

“Yeah, but we need it too.”

“You have no right to make such a demand.”

“No,” Hitch said, “and you’re not obliged to give it to us, but it will help us find Kaitlin.”

“I doubt that.” Whit turned to me. “I could have talked to the police about you, Scott. I wish I had.”

“It’s okay,” I said, “I talked to them myself.”

“You’ll be talking to them again if you persist in—”

“In what,” Hitch interrupted, “trying to save your daughter from this mess she got herself into?”

Whit looked like he wanted to stamp his foot. “I don’t even know you! What do you have to do with Kaitlin?”

Hitch smiled faintly. “She used to have a scar under her left knee where she fell on a broken bottle outside the Haat Thai. Does she still have that scar, Mr. Delahunt?”

Whit opened his mouth to answer, but he was interrupted:

“Yes.”

Janice’s voice. It came from the stairway. She had been listening. She came the rest of the way down, regal in her grief. “It’s still there. But it’s mostly faded. Hi, Hitch.”

This time Hitch’s smile was genuine. “Janice,” he said.

“You’re helping Scott look for Kaitlin?”

He said he was.

“That’s good, then. Whit, would you give these people the information they want?”

“That’s absurd. They can’t come here and make this kind of demand.”

“It sounded more like a request. But they might help Kait, and that’s what matters, isn’t it?”

Whit choked back a protest. There was a ferocity hidden in Janice’s voice, an old and potent anger. Maybe Hitch and Ashlee didn’t hear it, but I did. And so did Whit.

It took a while, but he gave us a mostly-legible handwritten list of names, addresses, terminal numbers.

“Just keep my name out of it,” he muttered.

Hitch gave Janice a big hug and Janice returned it. She had never much cared for Hitch Paley, probably for good reason, but the fact that he was here and searching for Kait must have redeemed him in her eyes. She took my hand as we were leaving and said, “Thank you, Scott. I mean it. I’m sorry about what I said a few days ago.”

“Don’t be.”

“The police are still telling us Kait’s in town. But she’s not, is she?”

“Probably not.”

“God, Scott, it’s just so—” She couldn’t find a word for it. She put her hand to her mouth. “Be careful,” she said. “I mean, find her, but… you be careful.”

I promised her I would.

When we left the house Hitch said, “Does Janice know she’s married to an asshole?”

“She’s beginning to suspect,” I said.

We went to Ashlee’s for an evening meal and to plot strategy.

I helped Ash in the kitchen while Hitch used his pocket terminal to make a few calls. Ashlee put together a rice and chicken dish she called “poverty pilaf,” cubing the raw chicken neatly with a cheap steel cleaver. She asked me how long I’d been married to Janice.

“About five years,” I said. “We were both very young.”

“So you’ve been divorced a long time.”

“It doesn’t seem so long sometimes.”

“She strikes me as a very together person.”

“Together if not always very flexible. This has been hard on her.”

“She’s pretty lucky, living the life she does. She ought to appreciate that.”

“I don’t think she feels very lucky right now.”

“No, I didn’t mean—”

“I understand, Ashlee.”

“Putting my fucking foot in it again.” She brushed her hair out of her eyes.

“Can I chop those carrots for you?”

She seasoned the pilaf, meticulously and sensibly. We rejoined Hitch while it baked.

Hitch had rested his big booted feet on Ashlee’s coffee table. “Here’s what we have,” he said. “This is from Whitman and a couple of other sources including the cop, Ramone Dudley. Whit’s bullshit Copperhead club has twenty-eight regular dues-paying members, and ten of them are upper management from the company he works at, so maybe he’s right about joining for career reasons. Twenty-eight adults, of whom eighteen are single or childless couples. Ten members have kids of various ages but only nine actually introduced their offspring to the Youth Group. Including a pair of sibs, that’s ten kids plus six outsiders like Adam who applied independently. But there was a core group of eight who were deeply involved, including Kait and Adam. They’re the ones who disappeared.”

“Okay,” I said.

“So let’s assume they left town. They would have been too conspicuous on a plane or a bus, given that they’re traveling together. I doubt the suburban contingent would have agreed to hitchhike, considering the number of fucked-up adults already on the road. So that leaves private transportation. And probably something fairly big. You can stuff eight people into a landau, but not without attracting attention and making everybody grouchy.”

“This is pretty conjectural,” I said.

“Okay, but follow me for a minute. If they’re driving, what are they driving?”

Ashlee said, “Some of these kids must own cars.”

“Right. And Ramone Dudley looked into that. Four of the eight do have vehicles registered to their names, but the vehicles are all accounted for. None of the parents reported a stolen car, and in fact pretty much every auto theft in the city during the time these kids took off was either clearly professional or a joyride that ended with the vehicle trashed or burned. Stealing a car isn’t as easy as it used to be. Even if you get past the personalized locks, every car assembled or imported in the last ten years routinely broadcasts its serial number and GPS coordinates. Mostly people use it to find their car in a parking lot, but it also complicates auto theft considerably. A modern car thief is a technician with a lot of different cracking skills, not a kid out of high school.”

“So they didn’t use one of their own cars and they didn’t steal one,” Ashlee said. “Great. That leaves nothing. Maybe they are still in town.”

“That’s what Ramone Dudley thinks, but it doesn’t make any sense. These kids are pretty obviously on a haj. So I asked Dudley to check the four cars they own, a second time. So he did.”

“Ah — he found something?”

“Nope. Nothing’s changed. Three of the vehicles are still exactly where they’ve been parked for the last week. Only one’s been moved at all, and only for round trips to the local grocery pickup, not more than twenty miles on the odometer since the disappearance. The kid left a set of keys with his mom.”

“So we’re no farther ahead.”

“Except for one thing. This mom who’s driving her kid’s car to the store. On Whit’s list she’s Eleanor Helvig, member in good standing of the Copperhead club along with her husband Jeffrey. Jeffrey is a junior VP at Clarion Pharmaceuticals, a couple of levels above Whit. Jeff’s making pretty good money these days and there are three vehicles registered to the family: his, his wife’s, and his kid’s. Nice cars, too. A couple of Daimlers and a secondhand Edison for Jeff Jr.”

“So?”

“So why is the wife driving the Edison for groceries, when her Daimler’s a big utility vehicle with lots of room in the back?”

Ashlee said, “Could be all kinds of reasons.”

“Could be… but I think we should ask her, don’t you?”

Dinner was excellent — I told Ashlee so — but we couldn’t stay to savor it. Ashlee elected to stay home while Hitch and I did the leg work, on the condition that we would call her as soon as we learned anything.

In the car I said, “About that package…”

“Right, the package. Forget about it, Scotty.”

“I’m not going to forget an old debt. You fronted me the cash to leave Thailand. All I owed you was a favor, and it didn’t happen.”

“Yeah, but you tried, right?”

“I went to the place you told me about.”

“Easy’s?” Hitch was grinning now, the kind of grin that used to make me deeply uncomfortable (and was having that effect again).

I said, “I went to Easy’s, but—”

“You mentioned my name to the guy there?”

“Yeah—”

“Old guy, gray-haired, kinda tall, coffee-colored?”

“Sounds like the man. But there was no package, Hitch.”

“What, he told you that?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Did he tell you that in a gentle way?”

“Far from it.”

“Got a little irritated, did he?”

“Practically reached for a gun.”

Hitch was nodding. “Good… good.”

“Good? So the package was late, or what?”

“No. Scotty, there never was any package.”

“The one you told me to pick up for you — ?”

“No such object. Sorry.”

I said, “But the money you gave me—”

“Mainly, no offense, but I thought you’d be safer back in Minneapolis. I mean, there you were, stuck on the beach, Janice and Kaitlin gone, and you were starting to drink pretty heavy, and Chumphon wasn’t a good place to be a drunk American, especially with all the press guys getting rolled on a regular basis. So I took pity on you. I gave you the money. I had it to spare: Business was good. But I didn’t think you’d take it as a gift and I didn’t want to call it a loan because I didn’t want you trying to find me and pay it back like a good scout. Which, admit it, you would have. So I made up this ‘package’ thing.”

“You made it up?”

“I’m sorry, Scotty, I guess you thought you were a drag mule or something, but that kinda appealed to my sense of humor, too. Knowing your whole college-educated clean-cut image of yourself, I mean. I thought a little moral dilemma might put some variety into your life.”

“No,” I said, “this is bullshit. The guy at Easy’s recognized your name… and you just described him to me.”

I was driving into the sunset and the lights on the dash were just starting to brighten. The air coming in the window was cool and relatively sweet. Hitch took his time answering.

Then he said, “Let me tell you a little story, Scotty. When I was a kid I lived in Roxbury with my mom and my little sister. We were poor, but that was back when the relief money was enough to get you by if you were careful about things. It wasn’t especially bad for me, or at least I didn’t know any better than to be happy with what I had, plus maybe a little shoplifting on the side. But my mom was a lonely woman, and when I was sixteen she married this tough old piece of shit named Easy G. Tobin. Easy ran a mail pickup and sold coke and meth out the back door. I will say for Easy that he never actually hit her — or me or my sister, either. He wasn’t a monster. He kept his drug business away from the house, too. But he was mean. He talked mean. He was smart enough that he never had to raise his voice, he could cut you down with just a few words, because he had the talent for knowing what you hated about yourself. He did that to me and he did that to my sister, but we were the minor leagues. Mainly he did it to my mom, and by the time I was ready to leave home a couple years later I had seen more of her tears than I cared to. She wanted to get rid of him but she didn’t know how, and Easy had a couple of other ladies on the side. So me and a few of my friends, we followed Easy to one of his ladyfriends’ houses and we went in there and punished him a little bit. We didn’t, you know, beat him senseless, but we made him scared and we kicked him around some and we told him to get his ass out of my mom’s house or we’d do worse than that. He said that was okay with him, he was sick of me and my sister and he had used up my mom — his words — and he meant to leave anyhow, and I said that was fine as long he did it, and I would be keeping my eye on him. He said, ‘I’ll forget your name in a week, you little shit,’ and I said he’d hear from me now and then and he’d better not forget my name because I wouldn’t forget his. Well, we left it at that. But I made it a point for some years to see that he did come across my name, at least now and then, every once in a while. A card, a phone call, like a negative Hallmark moment. Just to keep him on his toes. I guess he remembered me, huh, Scotty?”

I said, “He could have killed me.”

“Yeah, but I didn’t think it was likely. Besides, that was a fair piece of change I gave you. I figured you understood it might entail a little bit of risk.”

“God damn,” I said faintly.

“And, see? This way, you don’t have to thank me.”

We were lucky enough to find Mrs. Jeffrey Helvig home alone.

She came to the door in casual clothes, wary as soon as she saw us in the porch light. We told her it was about her son, Jeff Jr. She told us she had already talked to the police and we certainly didn’t look like police to her, so who were we and what did we really want?

I showed her enough ID to establish that I was Kaitlin’s father. She knew Janice and Whit, though not very well, and had met Kait on more than one occasion. When I made it clear that I wanted to talk about Kaitlin she relented and asked us in, though she was clearly not happy about it.

The house was meticulously clean. Eleanor Helvig was fond of cork coasters and lace antimacassars. A dust precipitator hummed in one corner of the living room. She stood conspicuously next to the home security panel, where a touch of her finger would narrowcast an alarm and a camera view to the local police. We were probably already being recorded. She was not afraid of us, I thought, but she was deeply wary.

She said, “I know what you’re going through, Mr. Warden. I’m going through it myself. You understand if I’m not anxious to talk about Jeff’s disappearance yet again.”

She was defending herself against some accusation not yet made. I thought about that. Her husband was a Copperhead — a true believer, according to Whit. She had accompanied him to most but not all of the meetings. She would probably echo his opinions but she might not be deeply or genuinely convinced of them. I hoped not.

I said, “Would it surprise you, Mrs. Helvig, if I told you it looks like your son and his friends are on a haj?”

She blinked. “It would offend me, certainly. Using that word in that way is an insult to the Muslim faith, not to mention a great many sincere young people.”

“Sincere young people like Jeff?”

“I hope Jeff is sincere, but I won’t accept a facile explanation of what’s happened to him. I should tell you honestly that I’m skeptical of absentee fathers who rediscover their children in times of crisis. But that’s the kind of society we live in, isn’t it? People who think of parenthood as a genetic merger, not a sacred bond.”

Hitch said, “You think Kuin will make that better?”

She stared back at him defiantly. “I believe he could hardly make it worse.”

“Do you know what a haj is, Mrs. Helvig?”

“I told you, I don’t like that word—”

“But a lot of people use it. Including a lot of idealistic children. I’ve seen a few. You’re right, it’s a rough world we live in, and it’s hard on the children in particular. I’ve seen them. I’ve seen haj kids butchered by the side of the road. Children, Mrs. Helvig, raped and killed. They’re young and they may be idealistic, but they’re also very naive about what it takes to survive outside of suburban Minneapolis.”

Eleanor Helvig blanched. (I believe I did, too.) She said to Hitch, “Who are you?”

“A friend of Kaitlin. Did you ever meet Kait, Mrs. Helvig?”

“She came by the house once or twice, I think…”

“I’m sure your Jeff is a strong young man, but what about Kaitlin? How do you think she’ll do out there, Mrs. Helvig?”

“I don’t—”

“Out there on the road, I mean, with all the homeless men and soldiers. Because if these kids did go off on a haj, they’d be safer in a car. Even Jeff.”

“Jeff can take care of himself,” Eleanor Helvig whispered.

“You wouldn’t want him hitchhiking, would you?”

“Of course not—”

“Where’s your husband’s car, Mrs. Helvig?”

“He took it to work. He’s not home yet, but—”

“And Jeff’s car?”

“In the garage.”

“And yours?”

She hesitated just long enough to confirm Hitch’s suspicions. “In for repairs.”

“At what garage, exactly?”

She didn’t answer.

“We don’t have to discuss this,” Hitch said, “with the police.”

“He’s safer in the car. You said so yourself.”

She was whispering now.

“I’m sure you’re right.”

“Jeff Jr. didn’t talk about the… pilgrimage, but when he asked for the car I guess I should have suspected. His father said we ought not to tell the police. It would only make Jeff a criminal. Or us, for abetting him. He’ll be back, though. I know he will.”

“You could help us—” Hitch began.

“You see how upside-down everything is? Can you blame the children?”

“Give us your license and the car’s GPS signature. We won’t bring the police into it.”

She reached absently for her purse, then hesitated. “If you do find them, will you be nice to Jeff?”

We promised we would.

Hitch talked to Morris Torrance, who traced the car to El Paso. The GPS package was sitting in a local recycler’s yard; the rest of the car was missing, probably sold or bartered for safe passage across the border. “They’re bound for Portillo,” Hitch said, “almost certainly.”

“So we go there,” I said.

He nodded. “Morris is arranging the flight. We need to leave as soon as possible.”

I thought about that. “It’s not just a rumor, is it? Portillo, I mean. The Chronolith.”

“No,” he said flatly. “It’s not just a rumor. We need to be there soon.”

Fifteen

At the exit into Portillo we were turned away by soldiers who told us the town was already uninhabitable, full of Americans squatting like dogs on the street, a disgrace. As if to confirm this, they waved through a convoy of Red Cross relief trucks while we waited.

Hitch didn’t argue with the soldiers but drove a couple of miles farther south along the cracked and pot-holed highway. He said there was another way into Portillo, not much more than a goat track but passable enough in the battered van we had rented at the airport. “The back roads are safer anyway,” he said. “Long as we don’t stop.” Hitch had always preferred back roads.

“Why here?” Ashlee wondered, looking out the window into a blank Sonoran landscape, agaves and yellow scrub grass and the occasional struggling cattle ranch.

The Kuin recession had been hard on Mexico, rolling back the gains of the Gonsalvez administration and restoring the venerable and corrupt Partido Revolucionario Institucional to power. Rural poverty had reached pre-millennial levels. Mexico City was simultaneously the most densely populated city on the continent and the most polluted and crime-ridden. Portillo, contrarily, was a minor town without any known strategic or military significance, one more dusty village drained of prosperity and left to die.

“There are more Chronoliths outside urban centers than in them,” I told Ashlee. “Touchdown points seem almost random, excepting the large-scale markers like Bangkok or Jerusalem. Nobody knows why. Maybe it’s easier to build a Chronolith out where there’s some free space. Or maybe the smaller monuments are erected before the cities fall to the Kuinists.”

We had a cooler full of bottled water and a couple of boxes of camp food. More than enough to last us. Sue Chopra, back in Baltimore, was still correlating data from her unofficial network of informants and from the latest generation of surveillance satellites. The news about Portillo hadn’t been made public. Officials feared it would only attract more pilgrims. But Internet rumors had done that quite efficiently despite the official veil of silence.

We had food and water for five days at least, which was more than enough because, according to Sue’s best estimate, we were less than fifty hours away from touchdown.

The “goat track” was a rut through rocky chaparral, crowned by the endless turquoise sky. We were still a dozen miles outside of town when we saw the first corpse.

Ashlee insisted on stopping, though it was obvious there was nothing we could do. She wanted to be sure. The body, she said, was about Adam’s size.

But this young man dressed in a dirty white hemp shirt and yellow Kevlar pants had been dead quite a while. His shoes had been stolen, plus his watch and terminal, and surely his wallet, though we didn’t check. His skull had been fractured by some blunt instrument. The body was swollen with decomposition and had evidently attracted a number of predators, though only the ants were currently visible, commuting lazily up his sun-dried right arm.

“Most likely we’ll see more of this kind of thing,” Hitch said, looking from the corpse to the horizon. “There are more thieves than flies in this part of the country, at least since the PRI canceled the last election. A couple thousand obviously gullible Americans in one place is a magnet for every homicidal asshole south of Juarez, and they’re way too hungry to be scrupulous.”

I suppose he could have said this more gently, but what would be the point? The evidence lay on the sandy margin of the road, stinking.

I looked at Ashlee. Ashlee regarded the dead young American. Her face was pale, and her eyes glittered with dismay.

Ashlee had argued that she ought to come with us, and in the end I had agreed. I might be able to rescue Kaitlin from this debacle, but I had no leverage with Adam Mills. Even if I could find him, Ashlee said, I wouldn’t be able to argue him out of the haj. Maybe no one could, including herself, but she needed to try.

Of course it was dangerous, brutally dangerous, but Ashlee was determined enough to attempt the trip with or without us. And I understood the way she felt. Sometimes the conscience makes demands that are non-negotiable. Courage has nothing to do with it. We weren’t here because we were brave. We were here because we had to be here.

But the dead American was a demonstration of every truth we would have preferred to evade. The truth that our children had come to a place where things like this happened. That it might as easily have been Adam or Kaitlin discarded by the side of the road. That not every child in jeopardy can be saved.

Hitch climbed behind the wheel of the van. I sat in the back with Ash. She put her head against my shoulder, showing fatigue for the first time since we’d left the United States.

There was more evidence that we weren’t the only Americans to have taken this route into Portillo. We passed a sedan that had ridden up an embankment and broken an axle and been abandoned in place. A rust-eaten Edison with Oregon plates scooted recklessly around us, billowing clouds of alkaline dust into the afternoon air. And then, at last, we topped a rise, and the village of Portillo lay before us, dome tents clustered on the access roads like insect eggs. The main road through Portillo was lined with adobe garages, trash heaps generated by the haj, poverty housing, and a nearly impassable maze of American cars. The town itself, at least from this distance, was a smudge of colonial architecture bookended by a couple of franchise motels and service stations. All of it belonged now, by default, to the Kuinists. Haj youth of all kinds had gathered here, most with inadequate supplies and survival skills. The town’s permanent residents had largely abandoned their homes and left for the city, Hitch said; those who remained were the infirm or the elderly, thieves or water-sellers, opportunists or overwhelmed members of the local constabulary. There was very little food outside of the supply tents set up by international relief agencies. The army blockade was turning away vendors, hoping hunger would disperse the pilgrimage.

Ashlee gazed at this dust-bleached Mecca with obvious despair. “Even if they’re here,” she said, “how do we find them?”

“You let me do some leg work,” Hitch said, “that’s how. But first we have to get a little closer.”

We drove across rocky soil to a stretch of cracked tarmac. The stench of the haj came through the windows with the subtlety of a clenched fist, and Ashlee lit a cigarette, mostly to cover the smell.

Hitch parked us behind a fire-blackened adobe shack roughly half a mile out of town. The van was hidden from the main road by a stand of dry jacarandas and stacks of excrement-encrusted chicken coops.

Hitch had bought weapons after we crossed the border and he insisted on showing Ashlee and me how to use them. Not that we resisted. I had never discharged a weapon in my life — I had grown up in a gun-shy decade and had learned a civilized loathing of handguns — but Hitch left me a pistol with a full clip and made sure I knew how to disengage the safety mechanism and hold the weapon so that I wouldn’t break my wrist if I fired it.

The idea was that Ashlee and I would stay with the van, guarding our food, water, and transportation, while Hitch went into Portillo to locate Adam’s haj group and broker a meeting. Ashlee wanted to head directly into town — and I understood the need — but Hitch was adamant. The van was our major asset and needed protection; we would be useless to Kaitlin or Adam without the vehicle.

Hitch took a weapon of his own and walked toward town. I watched him vanish into the dusk. Then I locked the van’s doors and joined Ashlee in the front seat, where she had fixed us a meal of trail bars and apples and tepid instant coffee from a thermos. We ate silently while the light drained from the sky. Stars came out, bright and sharp even through the smoke haze and the dusty windshield.

Ashlee put her head against me. Neither of us had bathed since we entered the country, and that fact was conspicuously obvious, but it didn’t matter. The warmth mattered, the contact mattered. I said, “We’ll need to sleep in shifts.”

“You think it’s that dangerous here?”

“Yes, I do.”

“I don’t believe I can sleep.”

But she was fighting a yawn as she said it.

“Crawl into the back,” I said. “Cover up with the blanket and close your eyes for a while.”

She nodded and stretched out on one of the rear benches. I sat at the wheel with the pistol next to me, feeling lonely and futile and foolish, as the day’s heat leached away.

It was possible even at this distance to hear the night sounds of Portillo. It was one sound, really, a white rush of noise compounded of human voices, reproduced music, crackling fires, laughter, screams. It occurred to me that this was the millenarian madness we had escaped at the turn of the century, hundreds of hajists cashing in on the moral carte blanche of a guaranteed end-of-the-world. Redeemer or destroyer, Kuin owned tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, all the tomorrows, at least in the minds of the hajists. And at least on this occasion they wouldn’t be disappointed: The Chronolith would arrive as predicted; Kuin would put his mark on North American soil. Probably a great number of these same hajists would be killed by the cold shock or the concussion, but if they knew that, and in all likelihood they did, they didn’t care. It was a lottery, after all. Great prizes, grave risks. Kuin would reward the faithful… or at least the survivors among them.

I couldn’t help wondering how much of this madness Kait had bought into. Kaitlin was imaginative, and she had been a solitary child. Imaginative and naive: not a good combination, not in this world.

Did Kait genuinely believe in Kuin? In some version of Kuin she had conjured out of her own longing and insecurity? Or was this all just an adventure, a melodramatic lunge out of the cloistered household of Whitman Delahunt?

The fact was, she might not be glad to see me. But I would take her out of this nightmarish place if I had to do it by main force. I couldn’t make Kaitlin love me, but I could save her life. And that, for now, would be enough.

The night dragged. The roar of Portillo ebbed and rose in an elusive stochastic rhythm, like waves on a beach. There was a cricket in the wild sage east of the van adding his own distinct voice to the cacophony. I drank more of Ashlee’s coffee and left the van briefly to relieve myself, stepping around a rusted axle and drivetrain that lurked in the high weeds like an animal trap. Ashlee stirred and muttered in her sleep when I closed the door again.

There was a little traffic on the road, mainly hajists joyriding, hooting from the windows of their cars. Nobody spotted us; nobody stopped. I was beginning to doze in place when Ashlee tapped me on the shoulder. The dash clock said 2:30.

“My turn,” she said.

I didn’t argue. I showed her where I’d left the pistol and I stretched out on the back bench. The blanket was warm with her body heat. I slept as soon as I closed my eyes.

“Scott?”

She shook me gently but urgently.

“Scott!”

I sat up to find Ashlee leaning over the driver’s seat, rocking my shoulder with her hand. She whispered, “There are people outside. Listen!”

She turned forward and slumped down, keeping her head out of sight. The darkness was not absolute. A half moon had risen. There was, for a long moment, utter silence. Then, not very far away, a woman’s terrified moan, followed by stifled laughter.

I said, “Ashlee—”

“They came by a minute ago. A car on the road. They pulled up and stopped and there was a little, uh, yelling. And then — I couldn’t really see this until I turned the side mirror, and even then the tree was in the way, but it looked like somebody fell out of the car and ran into the field. I think a woman. And two guys ran out after her.”

I thought about this. “What time is it?”

“Just four.”

“Give me the pistol, Ash.”

She seemed reluctant to hand it over. “What should we do?”

“What we’ll do is, I’ll take the pistol and get out of the van. When I signal, you turn on the high beams and start the engine. I’ll try to stay in sight.”

“What if something happens to you?”

“Then you pull out of here fast as you can. If something happens to me, that means they’ve got the gun. Don’t hang around, Ash, all right?”

“So where would I go?”

It was a reasonable question. Into Portillo? Back toward the relief camps, the roadblock? I wasn’t sure what to tell her.

But then the woman outside screamed again, and I couldn’t help thinking that it might be Kaitlin out there. It didn’t sound like Kaitlin’s voice. But I hadn’t heard Kait scream since she was a toddler.

I told Ashlee I’d be careful but if anything happened the important thing was for her to get away — maybe hide the van closer to town and keep an eye out for Hitch come morning.

I left the vehicle and eased the door shut behind me. When I was a few feet away I signaled for her to hit the lights.

The van’s high beams sprang out of the starry night like military searchlights, and in the stillness the engine roared like some throaty wild animal. The woman and her two assailants froze in the glare, not more than ten yards distant.

All three were young, possibly Adam’s age. The men were engaged in an act of forcible intercourse. The woman was on her back in the weeds, one man pinning her shoulders while the other parted her legs. She had turned her face away from the light, while the men had raised their heads like prairie dogs sensing a predator.

They seemed not to be armed, which made me feel a little giddy with the weight of the pistol in my hand.

I raised the weapon toward their dumbfounded faces. I would have ordered them to get away from her — that was the plan — but I was nervous, and my finger twitched on the trigger and the pistol went off unexpectedly.

I nearly dropped it. I don’t know where the bullet went… it didn’t hit anyone. But it scared them very effectively. I was still half-blind from the muzzle flash but I tracked the would-be rapists as they ran for their car. I wondered if I should fire again, but I was afraid that might happen whether I wanted it to or not. (Hitch told me later the gun had been modified for low trigger resistance and had probably been used for criminal purposes before we got hold of it.)

The two men leaped into their automobile with a startling economy of motion. If there had been weapons in the car I might have been in trouble — that occurred to me, belatedly — but if they had them they didn’t use them. The car came alive and roared off toward town, spraying gravel against the stacked chicken coops.

Which left only the girl.

I turned back to her, remembering to keep the muzzle of the gun toward the ground this time. My right wrist still ached with the shock of the unexpected recoil.

The girl had stood up in the blaze of the headlights and was already buttoning a pair of torn Levis. She looked at me with an expression I could not quite fathom — mostly fear, I think; partly shame. She was young. Her face was smudged and tear-stained. She was so thin she looked almost anorexic, and there was a long clotting scratch across her left breast.

I cleared my throat and said, “They’re gone — you’re safe now.”

Maybe she didn’t speak English. More likely, she didn’t believe me. She turned and ran into the high weeds parallel to the road, exactly like a frightened animal.

I took a few steps but didn’t follow her. The night was too dark, and I didn’t want to leave Ashlee alone.

I hoped the girl would be safe, unlikely as that seemed.

Sleep, after that, was out of the question. I joined Ashlee up front and we sat together, vigilant and pumped with adrenaline. Ash put a cigarette between her lips and ignited the tip with a tiny propane lighter. We didn’t talk about the assault we had both witnessed, but a short time later, when the eastern sky began to show a faint blue, Ashlee said this:

“You have to not ask her. Kaitlin, I mean.”

“Ask her what?”

But it was a stupid question.

“Probably you don’t need this advice. It’s not like I’m a model parent or anything. But when you get Kaitlin back, don’t interrogate her. Maybe she’ll talk to you or maybe she won’t, but let her make that decision for herself.”

I said, “If she needs help—”

“If she needs help, she’ll ask for it.”

I left that alone. I didn’t want to speculate about what might or might not have happened to Kait. Ashlee had said what she meant to say and she turned back to the window, leaving me to wonder what had prompted her advice, what she herself might once have endured and refused to confess.

We dozed while the sun began to make the world warm. Hitch tapped on the window glass a little later, startling us out of sleep. Ashlee reached for the pistol but I caught her wrist.

I rolled the window down.

“Impressive guarding,” Hitch said. “I could have killed both of you.”

“Did you find them?”

“Kaitlin’s there. Adam, too. You want to feed me? We have a good deal of work ahead of us.”

Sixteen

We entered the village of Portillo slowly, crawling the van through foot traffic, down a single lane between parked or abandoned hajist vehicles. By morning light the main road was as crowded as a carnival midway and resembled one, though the crowds were subdued in the aftermath of the night. Pilgrims walked dazedly and aimlessly or slept on bedrolls under the town’s tattered awnings, safer in the daylight than in the dark. Water-sellers trawled the crowd with plastic gallon jugs slung over their shoulders. Kuinist flags and symbols had been draped from the upper windows of buildings. Local sanitary facilities had been overwhelmed and the smell of the trench latrines was pervasive and awful. Most of these people had arrived within the last three days, but there were already cases of dysentery, Hitch said, showing up at the relief tents.

Adam and company were camped west of the main drag. During the night Hitch had spoken briefly to Adam and not at all to Kait, though he had confirmed her presence. Adam had agreed to speak to Ashlee but had been reluctant to grant permission for Kait to see me. Adam was clearly in charge and speaking on behalf of the others, this information made Ashlee hang her head and mutter to herself.

Also present, at least on the outskirts of Portillo, were members of the press, riding bullet-resistant uplinked recording trucks with polarized windows. I had mixed feelings about that. In Sue’s interpretation of the Chronoliths and their metacausality, the press acted as an important amplifier in the feedback loop. It was precisely the globally broadcast image of these objects that served to burn the impression of Kuin’s invincibility into the collective imagination.

But what was the alternative? Repression, denial? That was the genius of Kuin’s monuments: They were grotesquely obvious, impossible to ignore.

“We get there,” Hitch said, “you let me do a little talking, then we’ll see what happens.”

“Not much of a plan,” I said.

“As much of a plan as we’ve got.”

We parked the van as close as possible to the cluster of tents where Adam and his friends had camped alongside dozens of others. The tents were almost ridiculously gaudy in this dry place, blue and red and yellow nylon mushrooming out of the packed earth of a masonry yard parking lot. Ashlee began to crane her head anxiously, looking for Adam. Of Kaitlin there was no sign.

“Stay here,” Hitch said. “I’ll negotiate us in.”

“Negotiate?” Ash asked, faintly indignant.

Hitch gave her a cautionary look and closed the door behind him.

He walked a few paces to an octagonal shelter of photosensitive silver mylar and called out something inaudible. Within moments the flap opened and Adam Mills stepped out. I knew it was Adam by the sound of Ashlee’s indrawn breath.

He was dressed in dust-caked khakis but seemed essentially healthy. He was skinny but tall, almost as tall as Hitch, a black backpack looped over his shoulders. He didn’t even glance at the van, just waited for Hitch to speak his piece. I couldn’t see his face in any great detail at this distance, but he was evidently relaxed, not frightened.

Ashlee reached for the door but I pulled her hand away. “Give it a minute.”

Hitch talked. Adam talked. Finally Hitch pulled a roll of bills out of his back pocket and counted them into Adam’s palm.

Ashlee said, “What’s that, a bribe? He’s bribing Adam?”

I said it looked that way.

“For what? For you to see Kait? Me to see him?”

“I don’t know, Ash.”

“God, that’s so—” She lacked a word for her contempt.

“It’s strange times,” I said. “Strange things happen.”

She slumped back in her seat, humiliated, and was silent until Hitch beckoned us out. I set the van’s security protocols, unlikely as that was to afford us any real protection. Outside, the air was dry and the stench was overwhelming. A few yards away a young man in once-white trousers was shoveling loose earth into a ditch latrine.

Ashlee approached Adam tentatively. I don’t know, but I suspect, that she was reluctant to face him now that the longed-for moment had finally arrived… reluctant to face the futility of the meeting, the fact of his resistance. She put her hand on his shoulder and looked into his eyes. Adam gazed back impassively. He was young, but he wasn’t a child. He gave no ground, only waited for Ashlee to speak, which I suppose was what he had been paid to do.

The two of them walked a few paces away down a trail between the tents. Hitch said to me, “It’s a fucking lost cause. She just doesn’t know it.”

“What about Kait?”

He gestured at a small sun-yellow tent.

I found myself thinking of the Cairo arrival of three years ago. Sue Chopra had obtained video recordings of the event from a dozen different angles, in all its phases — the calm before the manifestation, the cold shock and the thermal winds, a column of ice and dust boiling into a dry blue sky, and finally the Chronolith itself, glaringly bright, embedded in the sprawl of suburban Cairo like a sword driven into a rock.

(And who will pull this sword from the stone? The pure of heart, perhaps. Absent parents and failed husbands need not apply.)

I suppose it was the incongruity I had found so striking about Cairo: the tremulous waves of desert heat; the ice. The layers of mismatched history, office towers erected over the rubble of a thousand-year autarchy, and this newest of monuments, Kuin ponderous and remote as a pharaoh on his frigid throne.

I don’t know why the image came to me so vividly. Perhaps because this dry Sonoran village was about to receive its own throne of ice, and maybe there was already the faintest chill in the air, a shiver of premonition, the bitter smell of the future.

“Kaitlin?” I said.

A vagrant wind lifted the flap of the tent. I squatted and put my head inside.

Kait was alone, uncurling from a nest of dirty blankets. She blinked in the yellow nimbus of sun through nylon. Her face was thin. Her eyes were banded with fatigue.

She looked older than I remembered her, and I told myself that was because of what she must have endured on this haj, the hunger and the anxiety, but the fact was that she had slipped away from me, grown out of my mental image of her well before she left Minneapolis.

She looked at me a long time, her expression evolving through incredulity, suspicion, gratitude, relief, guilt. She said, “Daddy?”

It was all I could manage just to say her name. Which was probably for the best. It was all I needed to say.

She came out of the blankets and into my arms. I saw the bruises on her wrists, the deep cut that ran from her shoulder almost to her elbow in a track of clotted brown blood. But I did not ask her about these things, and I understood the wisdom of Ashlee’s advice: I couldn’t un-wound her. I could only hold her.

“I’m here to take you home,” I said.

She wouldn’t meet my eyes but she said, almost inaudibly, “Thank you.”

Another breeze kicked up the flap of the tent, and Kaitlin shivered. I told her to get dressed quick as she could. She pulled on a pair of ragged denims and a cheap serape.

And I shivered myself, and it occurred to me that the air was a little too cold for this sun-hammered morning — unnaturally cold.

Outside, Hitch was calling my name.

“Get her into the van,” he told me, “and you best be quick about it. This wasn’t part of the deal — I bargained for you to talk, not to take her away.” He turned his face into the wind. “I get the feeling things are happening a little faster than we planned.”

Kaitlin tumbled onto one of the van’s back benches and wrapped a loose blanket around herself. I told her to keep her head down, just a little while. Hitch locked the door and went to corral Ashlee.

Kait sniffled, and not just because she was close to tears. She had caught something, she said, a flu or possibly one of the intestinal diseases that were circulating through Portillo as the crowds grew thirstier and the water sellers less scrupulous. Her eyes were filmed and a little vague. She coughed into her fist.

Outside, tents and canvas shelters clapped in the stiffening wind. Hajists began to crawl out, evicted by the noisy weather, dozens of bewildered pilgrims in Kuinist gear and torn clothing shading their eyes and wondering — beginning to wonder — whether this gale might mark the beginning of a sacred event, a Chronolith announcing itself in the dropping temperature and the peaking breeze.

And maybe it was. The Kuin of Jerusalem had appeared more decisively than this and with less warning, but it was a fact that Chronolith arrivals varied from place to place (and time to time) in their intensity, duration, and destructiveness. Sue Chopra’s calculations were based on somewhat problematic satellite data and could have been skewed by several hours or more.

In other words, we might be in mortal danger.

A gust rocked the van and provoked Kaitlin’s attention. She pressed her face against the side window, gaped at scalloped clouds of Sonoran dust suddenly billowing inward from the desert. “Daddy, is this — ?”

I said, “I don’t know.”

I looked for Ash, but she was hidden by the increasingly anxious crowd of hajists. I wondered how far west of central Portillo we were, but that was impossible to estimate… a mile, say, at best. And there was no telling precisely where the Chronolith would appear, no way of calculating the perimeter of the danger zone.

I told Kait to stay under the blanket.

The crowd began to move then, almost as if the hajists had reached an unspoken consensus, out of this dirt-pack lot toward the connecting streets, toward town. I caught sight of Hitch’s coiled black beard, then Hitch himself, and Ashlee, and Adam.

Hitch appeared to be arguing with Ashlee, and Ash was arguing with her son, her hands on Adam’s arms as if she were begging him. Adam stood resolutely still, enduring the embrace, while the wind whipped his blond hair in front of his eyes. If the haj had been hard on him, he didn’t show it. He looked impassively from his mother’s face to the darkening sky. He retrieved what looked like a rolled thermal jacket from his backpack.

I don’t know what Ashlee said to Adam — she has never discussed this with me — but it was obvious even at this distance that Adam wouldn’t be coming back with us. A lifetime of frustration was written into the body language of that encounter. What Ashlee couldn’t admit — tugging at her son, pleading with him — was that Adam simply didn’t care what she wanted; that he hadn’t cared for a long time; that he might have been born unable to care. She was simply a distraction from the deeply interesting event that had apparently begun, the physical manifestation of Kuin, of the idea or the mythology in which he had invested all his loyalty.

Now Hitch was pulling at Ashlee, trying to bring her back to the van, his face screwed up against the abrasive wind but his gestures nearly frantic. Ashlee ignored him as long she could, until Adam broke away from her and only Hitch’s support kept her from falling to her knees.

She looked up at her son and said one more thing. I think it was his name, just as I had called Kaitlin’s name. I’m not sure, since the roar of the wind and the noise of the crowd had grown much louder very quickly, but I believe it was Ashlee’s keening of her son’s name that cut through the thickening air.

I got behind the wheel of the van. Kaitlin moaned into her blanket.

Hitch dragged Ashlee to the vehicle and pushed her inside, then climbed into the shotgun seat. I found I had already started the engine.

“Just fucking drive,” Hitch said.

But it was almost impossible to make rapid progress against the tide of hajists. If Adam had camped any closer to Portillo we would have been locked in. As it was, we were able to crawl toward the margin of the road and make slow but steady progress westward, the press of pilgrims thinning as we retreated.

But the sky had grown very dark, and it was cold now, and dust scored the windshield and cut visibility to a few feet.

I had no idea where this road might lead. This wasn’t the direction we had come. I asked Hitch but he said he didn’t know; the map was stashed in back somewhere, and anyway it didn’t matter; our options had come down to one.

The duststorm glazed the windshield into opacity and was, by the sound of it, also fouling the engine. I closed the windows and cranked up the vehicle’s heater until we were all sweating. Our dirt track dead-ended at a wooden bridge over a shallow, dry creek bed. The bridge was splintered, rocking in the intensifying wind, and would clearly not support the weight of the van. Hitch said, “Drive down that embankment, Scotty. At least put a little dirt between us and Portillo.”

“Pretty steep grade.”

“You have a better idea?”

So I turned off the road, drove over brittle scrub grasses and down the berm. The van braked itself sporadically and the dash lit up with function alarms, and I believe we would have overbalanced if not for my iron grip on the steering wheel — which was a matter of instinct, not skill. Hitch and Ashlee were silent, but Kaitlin let out a little sound, about the same pitch as the wind. We had just reached the flat and stony basin when an uprooted acacia flew overhead like a stiff black bird. Even Hitch gasped when he saw that.

“Cold,” Kaitlin moaned.

Ashlee unfolded the last of the blankets, gave two of them to Kait and tossed one up to us. The air inside reeked of hot heater coils, but the temperature had risen only marginally. I had seen the thermal shock in Jerusalem, from a distance, but I hadn’t guessed just how painful it would be, a sudden numbing cold that radiated inward from the extremities to the heart.

Stolen energy, drained from the immediate environment by whatever force it was that could unwind a massive object through time. A fresh wind howled above the arroyo and the sky turned the color of fish scales. We had packed thermally-adaptive body gear, and we broke this out; Ashlee helped Kait into a jacket a size too big for her.

A dire thought occurred to me, and I reached for the handle of the door.

“Scotty?” Hitch inquired.

“I need to drain the radiator,” I said. “If that water freezes, we lose our transportation.”

We had been wise enough to carry our drinking water in flexible bags which would expand as necessary. We had also dumped antifreeze into the van’s radiator. But we hadn’t anticipated being this close to the arrival. A serious flash-freeze would probably demolish the engine’s coolant system and strand us here.

“May not be time.”

“So wish me luck. And hand me the tool box.”

I let myself out into the gale. Wind slammed the door behind me. The wind came up the arroyo from the south, feeding the steep thermoclines of the arriving Chronolith. The air was choked with dust and sand. I had to shield my eyes with my hand in order to open them even a slit. I navigated to the front of the van by touch.

The vehicle had come down at a steep angle into a sandy ridge, and the front of it was entrenched up to the bumper. There was a burst of auroral light overhead as I scooped out a space with my hands. The thermal jacket was keeping my core temperature up — at least so far — but my breath turned to frost with every exhalation and my fingers were clumsy and fiery-numb. Too late to go back for gloves. I managed to open the tool box and fumble out a wrench.

The radiator system was designed to be drained from beneath by loosening a valve nut. I clasped the nut with the wrench but it refused to turn.

Leverage, I thought, bracing my feet against the tire, leaning into the angle of the wrench like a sculler leaning into an oar. The noise of the wind was overpowering, but under it there was another sound, the thunderclap of the arrival, then the shockwave through the ground, a hard mule-kick from below.

The valve nut popped, and I sprawled into the sand.

A trickle of water ran out and instantly froze against the ground — enough to relieve the pressure inside the radiator, though stray ice could still crack any number of vital systems, if we were unlucky.

I tried to stand and found that I couldn’t.

Instead I rolled into the meager shelter created by the angle of the van against the earth. My head was suddenly too heavy to hold erect, and I put my numbed hands between my thighs and curled into the meager warmth of my thermal jacket and promptly lost consciousness.

When I opened my eyes again the air was still and I was back inside the van.

Sunlight burned on the scrim of ice that had formed on the windshield. The heater was pumping out steamy warm air.

I sat up, shivering. Ashlee was already awake, chafing Kaitlin’s hands between her own, and that sight worried me; but Ashlee said at once, “She’s all right. She’s breathing.”

Hitch Paley had dragged me inside after the worst of the thermal shock had passed. Currently he was outside replacing the valve nut I had loosened. He stood, peered in through the fogged window, and gave me a thumbs-up when he saw that I was awake.

“I think we’ll be okay,” Ashlee said. Her voice was raw, and I realized that my own throat was sore when I swallowed, no doubt from the briefly supercooled air we had all inhaled. Lungs a little achy, too, and fingers and toes still bereft, at their tips, of sensation. Some crusted blood on the palm of my right hand where the freezing wrench had taken away a layer of skin. But Ashlee was right. We had survived.

Kait moaned again. “We’ll keep her covered up,” Ash said. “But she’s already sick, Scott. We need to worry about pneumonia.”

“We need to get her back to civilization.” And up that embankment again, to begin with. Not a sure thing.

When I felt able, I opened the driver’s-side door and climbed out. The air was relatively warm again, and surprisingly fresh, save for a haze of dust that was settling everywhere like fine snow. Prevailing winds had carried the ice fog off to the east.

Frost steamed off the rocks and sand of the creek bed. I climbed to the top of the embankment and looked back at the town — what remained of it.

The Kuin of Portillo was still shrouded in ice, but it was clearly a large monument. The figure of Kuin was standing, one arm upraised in a beckoning gesture.

The town of Portillo lay at his immense feet, dim in the mist but obviously devastated.

The radius of the thermal shock was enormous. All but a few of the hajists must have died, it seemed to me, though I did see some vehicles moving at the perimeter of the town, probably Red Cross mobile stations.

Ashlee came up the slope behind me, panting. Her breath halted briefly when she saw the scope of the destruction. Her lips trembled. Her face was brown with dust, rivered with tears.

“But he might have got away,” she whispered: meaning, of course, Adam.

I said that was possible.

Privately, I doubted it.

Seventeen

By means of a connecting series of dirt roads and cattle tracks we managed to skirt the steaming ruins of Portillo and connect at last with the main road.

The dead — no doubt massive numbers of them — remained in town, but we passed clusters of refugees along the highway. Many were limping, crippled by frostbite. Some had been blinded by ice crystals. Some had sustained injuries from falling masonry or other shockwave events. All sense of threat had vanished from them, and Ashlee twice insisted on stopping to distribute our few blankets and a little food, and to ask about Adam.

But none of these young people had heard of him, and they had more pressing concerns. They begged us to relay messages, call parents or spouses or family in L.A., in Dallas, in Seattle… The parade of misery was overwhelming, and at length even Ashlee had to turn away from it, though she continued to scan the refugees for any sign of Adam until we were farther north than even a healthy hajist could had walked. The sight of relief trucks and military ambulances streaming toward Portillo eased her conscience but not her fears. She lapsed into her seat, stirring only to tend to Kaitlin now and then.

My fears for Kait deepened during the drive. She was sicker than I had realized, and her exposure to the thermal shock had made matters worse. Ashlee took Kait’s temperature with the thermometer from the first-aid kit, then frowned and fed her a couple of antipyretic capsules and a long drink of water. We were forced to stop several times for Kaitlin to lope away from the van and relieve her bowels, and each time she stumbled back she was visibly weaker and unspeakably humiliated.

We needed to get her into a reputable hospital. Hitch placed a call to Sue Chopra and reassured her that we had survived, though Kait was ill. Sue recommended crossing the border, if possible, before admitting Kait for medical care, since young Americans in-country without papers were currently being jailed. The No-gales border crossing was swamped — there had been a rumor, this one false, of an impending arrival in that city — but Sue said she would arrange for someone from the consulate to escort us through. A hospital room would be waiting in Tucson.

Ashlee administered a broad-spectrum antibiotic from our medical kit and Kait slept fitfully through the hot afternoon. Hitch and I exchanged driving duties.

I thought about Ashlee. Ashlee had just lost her son, or believed she had. It was remarkable that she was able to care for Kaitlin at all — moving under the weight of her grief with great deliberation. And Kait responded to this kindness instinctively. She was at ease with her head in Ashlee’s lap.

It occurred to me that I loved them both.

I obeyed Ashlee’s injunction: I did not, then or later, ask Kaitlin what had happened to her during the haj.

Maybe I should qualify that. There was a time, as I sat with Kait in her hospital room in Tucson waiting for the doctor to come back with her bloodwork, when I couldn’t restrain myself. I didn’t ask her directly what had happened in Portillo; only why she had gone there — what had made her leave home and ally herself with the likes of Adam Mills.

She turned her head away from me in acute embarrassment. Her hair fell across the crisp white pillow, and I saw the suture line of her long-healed cochlear surgery, a very faint, pale seam along the descending line of her throat.

“I just wanted things to be different,” she said.

Ashlee stayed with me in Tucson while Kait recovered.

We rented a motel room and lived together chastely for a week. Ashlee’s grief was intensely private, often almost invisible. There were days when she seemed almost herself, days when she would smile when I came in the door with a bag of take-out Mexican or Chinese food. In some part, she may have harbored the hope that Adam had survived (though she refused to discuss the possibility or tolerate the mention of Adam’s name).

But she was subdued, quiet. She slept during the sweltering afternoons and was restless at night, often sitting in front of the ancient cable-linked video panel long after I had gone to bed.

Nevertheless, we had come together in an important way. Our futures had commingled.

We didn’t talk about any of this. All our conversation was pointedly trivial. Except once, when I was leaving the room for a run to the all-night convenience store down the block. I asked her if she wanted anything.

“I want a cigarette,” she said tightly. “I want my son back.”

Kait remained in the hospital for most of another week, regaining her strength and enduring a fresh set of tests. I visited daily, though I kept the visits brief — she seemed to prefer it that way.

During my last visit before her release, Kaitlin and her doctor shared some bad news with me.

I didn’t want to trouble Ashlee with this — at least, not yet. When I came back to the hotel room I found Ash somewhat recovered, more talkative. I took her out to dinner, though not very far out: the motel restaurant. It served us sirloin tips and coffee. The framed faux-Navajo prints and cattle-skull decor were reassuringly classless.

Ashlee talked (suddenly she seemed to need to talk) about her childhood, the time before she married Tucker Kellog, memories consisting not of narratives but of snapshots she had fixed in her mind. A dry, windy day in San Diego, shopping with her mother for linens. A school trip to a petting zoo. Her first year in Minneapolis, how astonished she had been by the winter storms, her commute to work blockaded by snowdrifts and windrows. Old shows she used to watch, some of which I had also seen: Someday, Blue Horizon, Next Week’s Family.

Over dessert she said, “I talked to the Red Cross. They’re still down in Portillo, taking names — counting the dead. If Adam survived, he didn’t register with any of the relief agencies. On the other hand, if he’s dead—” She said this with a studied nonchalance, obviously fake. “Well, they haven’t identified his body, and they’re very good at that. I let them call up his genome profile from his medical records. No match. So I don’t know if he’s alive or dead. But I realized something else.”

Her eyes glittered. I said, “We don’t have to talk about this.”

“No, Scott, it’s okay. What I realized is that, alive or dead, I’ve lost him. Maybe I’ll see him again, maybe I won’t, but that’s up to him, if he’s alive, I mean. That’s what he tried to tell me in Portillo. Not that he hates me. But that he’s not mine in any meaningful way anymore. He belongs to himself. I think he always did.”

She was silent for a while, then she drank the last of her coffee and turned away the waitress who offered more.

“He gave me something.”

I said, “Adam did?”

“Yes. In Portillo. He said I could remember him by it. Here, look.”

She had folded the gift into a handkerchief inside her purse. She unwrapped it and pushed it across the table.

It was a necklace, a cheap chain with a pendant. The pendant looked like a lump of pitted black plastic drilled to take an eyelet. It was almost defiantly ugly.

“He said he got it from a vendor in Portillo. It’s a kind of sacred object. The stone isn’t a stone, it’s—”

“An arrival relic.”

“Yes, that’s what Adam called it.”

The arrival of a Chronolith creates odd debris. The steep temperature and pressure gradients near the touchdown site will freeze, crack, warp and otherwise mangle ordinary materials. Souvenir-hunters sell such items to the gullible and they are seldom authentic.

“It’s from Jerusalem,” Ashlee added. “Supposedly.”

If that was true, this misshapen lump might once have been something useful: a doorknob, a paperweight, a pen, a comb.

I said, “I hope it isn’t.”

Ashlee looked crestfallen. “I thought you’d be interested. You were there, in Jerusalem, when it happened. Sort of a coincidence.”

“I don’t like those kinds of coincidences.”

I told her about Sue’s notion of tau turbulence. I said I had been in the turbulence too often, that it had affected my life (if “affected” is the word for an acausal connection) in ways I didn’t like.

Ashlee was dismayed. She mouthed the words, tau turbulence. “Can you catch it,” she asked, “from a thing like this?”

“I doubt it. It’s not a disease, Ash. It’s not contagious. I just don’t care to be reminded.”

She folded the necklace into its handkerchief and put the bundle into her purse again.

We went back to the room. Ashlee turned on the video panel but ignored it. I read a book. After a while she came to the bed and kissed me — not for the first time, but harder than she’d kissed me for a while.

It was good to have her back in my arms, good to fold myself around her small, lithe body.

Later on, I drew open the curtains and we lay invisible in the dark watching cars pass on the highway, headlights like parade torches, taillights like floating embers. Ashlee asked me how the visit with Kait had gone.

“She’s better,” I said. “Janice is flying in tomorrow to take her home.”

“Has she talked about the haj?”

“Very little.”

“She’s been through a lot.”

“There was some scarring,” I said.

“I’ll bet.”

“No. I mean, I talked to her doctor, too. There was a secondary infection, a uterine infection. Something she picked up in Portillo. It’s cured, but there was scarring. Kait can’t have children, not naturally, not without hiring a host. She’s infertile.”

Ashlee pulled away from me and stared out at the darkness and the highway. She groped at the side table for a cigarette.

“I’m sorry,” she said. There was a strained note in her voice.

“She’s alive. That’s what matters.”

(In fact Kait had been silent while the doctor gave me the bad news. She had watched me from her bed, unblinking, no doubt trying to divine my reaction from my face, wanting to know whether I would withdraw my sympathy and leave her stranded under those blank white hospital sheets.)

“I know how she feels,” Ashlee said.

“You’re trembling.”

“I know how she feels, Scott, because they told me the same thing after Adam was born. There were complications. I can’t have any more babies.”

More traffic came down the highway, rolling bars of light over the textured ceiling of the room. We sat in shadow, looking at each other like lost children, and then we came into each other’s arms again.

In the morning we packed for the trip back to Minneapolis. Ashlee left the room briefly while I was shaving.

She didn’t think I saw her when she stepped out the door.

I watched from the window as she crossed the parking lot, dodged the rear bumper of a floral delivery van, fished a folded handkerchief out of her purse, kissed the crumpled package and then tossed it into an open Dumpster.

I returned the favor later that day: I called Sue Chopra and told her I didn’t work for her anymore.