The Last President

^{THE NEXT DAY. PUEBLO. 10 AM MOUNTAIN TIME. MONDAY, MAY 11, 2026.}

James wished they had met at his home; Heather’s office was comfortable enough, and the logbooks and records were there, but it would have felt good to be cooking. Here, he had nothing to do. A review of the facts would have been useless.

All three of them were miserably aware that there had been an EMP over Pueblo, just after Carol May’s last fragmentary radio message, in clear, that the tribal horde was inside the walls. About an hour later, Phat had sent the cryptic message from Paducah that he was going to take a look himself with Bambi Castro, and nothing had been heard since. The Army of the Wabash had only reached Terre Haute yesterday, finding everything destroyed, and would not have air reconnaissance that could reach Pale Bluff until Sally Osterhaus reached them in her Piper Cub later this week.

It was what they had known last night, what they had known this morning, what they had known while they pretended to eat breakfast.

So they sat and waited. Leslie was restlessly patting her dog; Wonder had picked up on her nervousness and was whining and nervously licking her. Heather was fussing over Leo much more than usual, and he wasn’t happy about it. The Good Soldier lay neglected in James’s lap.

Something caught the corner of his eye out the window. “Patrick’s coming, and he’s running hard.”

Heather moved Leo into his crib, opened the door, and called down to the guards to wave Patrick through. She shoved a wad of meal tickets into the boy’s hand. “Sorry, guy, urgent and secret, no socializing this time. Take a rest someplace where you can hear us yell from the window.”

Patrick looked—stunned? James thought. No, scared. Because he’s never seen us so scared before, and we’re the people he depends on to keep the world working. Man, I wish I had someone I could depend on like he depends on us.

The moment the door closed, Heather ripped the envelope open, pulling out an inner envelope on which Ruth Odawa had written I suggest highest possible security.

Heather sighed, sat, opened it, read, looked again, and said, “She wasn’t kidding. It’s from Bambi. Here’s the short version: as far as she could determine, everyone in Pale Bluff was killed, though there may still be some survivors hiding out. The city is a total loss. Quattro died on takeoff, and the Gooney Express was totally destroyed. Here’s a strange sentence: ‘You may assume Lyndon Phat is also dead.’ She’s in Columbia, Missouri—or she was, she’s in the air now, she’ll refuel at Hays and then come here—and she says, full report then. And one last detail: she won’t come here to my office, or anywhere in the city. We have to meet her at the airport.”

“What the hell could that mean?”

“We’ll probably find that out at the airport,” Heather said. “She’s estimating she’ll come in about four p.m.”

“Wow,” Leslie said quietly. “A week ago we thought we were winning the war, worried about getting Phat elected if Grayson ran well or Weisbrod was a spoiler… now, there’s no Phat, no Grayson, no Graham Weisbrod… no Quattro…” Her voice cracked. “Sorry, the rest were people I’d worked with and respected, but Quattro was like, like—”

“Everybody’s hero. I feel like crying myself. And there’s no Pale Bluff,” James said quietly. “We’ve lost the living presence of almost anything we could build a myth out of, to put the country back together. God, I’ll miss Pale Bluff the most. Every issue of the Post-Times, you had this little town struggling bravely on, making the new America. I mean, I knew how Arnie Yang was playing those sentimental cards, he showed me before he was turned, and I’ve been doing it myself for months, now, too, and… that story’s over, in the worst possible way. Including that when the Army of the Wabash finally gets there, there will be a thousand real horror stories, and within a year ten thousand made-up ones, about the death of that town. You know, neither Leslie nor I ever even visited it before it was gone. And the symbolic value…”

Heather stared into space. “And Allie Sok Banh is in a hospital bed and it’ll be months before she’s up and around, and of course Bambi is going to be some kind of psychological wreck, she was my favorite employee back before, and she was so happy with Quattro, it was like he changed her whole life… .” She got up and walked over to her string-and-card chart, which was lying on the table, and raked through it with her fingers, tearing everything out, flinging it over her shoulder. “There is not going to be a Restored Republic, or a United States,” she said. “Everyone is out of action, most are dead, we’ve lost every useable resource. Texas will secede today. White Fang says that the Commandant is probably never going to make an official declaration, but he’s got at least twenty people in jail on suspicion of ‘spying for the United States,’ so whether we admit it or not, we’ve already lost Manbrookstat too. Red Dog reports that Jenny Whilmire Grayson doesn’t have the votes and might have to flee here for political asylum. No options left. We’ve lost. We’ve just plain lost.”

Very quietly, James said, “I have two arrows left in the quiver, actually. One you’ll hate and one that you will never forgive me for.”

Tears were trickling from her eyes, and she said, “Well, let’s start with the one you think I will hate. You know me, James. You know if someone tells me there’s a chance, I have to know what it is.”

“Graham Weisbrod was technically, correctly, the legitimate President of the United States. Everyone who knows the law admits that now.”

“Now that he’s dead and they don’t have to put up with him,” Leslie said, bitterly.

“True but irrelevant; the relevance is that everyone agrees he should have been President, and therefore he was, in retrospect. Clear as a bell, actually, a sitting cabinet official appointed by the last elected president and confirmed by a fully legitimate Acting President. The TNG was all the result of a series of mistakes: if Cameron Nguyen-Peters hadn’t been so full of doubt, if Norm McIntyre had found some guts, or if Lyndon Phat had thought things through, there’d never have been a Temporary National Government.” James sighed. “The trouble was that Graham was highly partisan and, forgive me, Heather, but kind of a rude jerk, and even people who liked him didn’t like Allie, and President Weisbrod would really have meant President Allie in all but name. But now that everyone is dead, if we have a legitimate successor to Weisbrod, that’s the President of the United States.”

“Doesn’t that mean the whole Provi government is?”

He shook his head. “No. Graham Weisbrod was a legitimate President of the US but setting up the Provisional Constitutional Government exceeded his authority by astronomical distances. He was a president who violated the Constitution, but he was legitimately the President; the PCG was never legitimately the government. Now, there’s a provision in the Succession Act that an acting or an emergency appointment to the cabinet is in the line of succession, same as one confirmed by the Senate. So anyone Graham appointed to his cabinet—”

“Doesn’t that make Allie Sok Banh next in line? They’ve got her in an induced coma, and she may not be fully conscious for another few days. And you were right in the first place, even her closest friends don’t want her to be the president. So the next one is… Treasury?”

“I was getting to that. Yeah. Bindel wouldn’t make a bad choice, either, but he’s naturalized, born in India. But their Secretary of the Armed Forces—which is what Graham renamed the Secretary of Defense—is Norm McIntyre.”

“But Norm is a wreck, you say so yourself. Even if he takes the job—”

“He probably won’t,” James said. “Blue Heeler reports that he’s despondent, not even in Olympia right now, he’s outside the city, pretty much just hiding. But technically speaking, he’s the Acting President. He could appoint a Vice President and resign. Then we have a president with at least a fig leaf of legitimacy and some shreds of authority. Then if a new Congress was elected—this year is an election year on the old calendar—they could validate the whole thing. Retroactively we’d be back under the old Constitution with a mess to straighten out, but technically it would be legit.”

“Well, I wouldn’t have wanted Norm before, to tell the truth, and if he’s hiding in a cabin in the woods, I guess he’d better keep hiding. But what good would it do to have a President with no government?”

James said, “This is the part you’ll really hate. Then the President calls a summit meeting of state governors and everyone else controlling former American territory—even Lord Robert—and demands that they plan for a national election. Kharif, that guy the PCG just appointed. Jenny Whilmire Grayson if she can get in. Bambi. Governor Faaj down in Texas. All of those would probably go for it. Others, we’d have to campaign over the leadership’s heads, stir up trouble for them with their own people, because we know most Americans do want to put the Constitution and the Republic back together, even if it’s just out of pure sentiment. Get all the little governments and alliances to play as much as we can. Elect the Congress, we already have a President, start setting up, pretend that the last couple of years didn’t happen.”

“So whoever we made the president that way would have to serve out the rest of the term?”

“For stability and legitimacy, yeah. So it can’t be just a figurehead. It has to be somebody who can actually run a government putting the country back on its feet, and play by the rules, and while we’re at it, if we don’t want guerrilla uprisings, it’ll have to be someone that most people in the country have heard of and trust. Someone who already has contacts everywhere and that people think of as wielding some power in her own right.”

Heather O’Grainne stared at him; she had seen it. “You are working your way around to saying that it has to be me.”

“I told you you’d hate it.”

“That’s why you’re my main advisor, you’re so good at predicting.”

“Then you know I’ve already thought through the rest of the list of possibles and I’m not suggesting this just to be mean or because I want my boss to move up in the world, or anything of the sort. Is there anyone else you’d pick?”

“Doesn’t mean I want to do it. Wouldn’t it make more sense to just let the Republic quietly fade out, and give up? I can find something useful to do somewhere, so can everyone else, and, well, we tried to keep our oaths, kept them as long as we could, but there’s no more America.”

“You could do that.” He looked down at his hands. “I hate to bring this up but there’s another kind of trouble we might head off if you were willing to be President for a day or two. If we don’t do this now, when Allie Sok Banh recovers, she’s much too smart and ambitious not to realize that she is the President.”

“Ouch. That would tear the country apart.”

“If we do this now, your appointment would supersede her position. And while we’re at it, it also shuts off half a dozen other minor people, various deputy undersecretaries and so forth, who might be able to contend that since they were legitimately the acting secretary of something or other, they are now legitimately the president. If you read your Shakespeare or you know the Wars of the Roses, you know that there is only one good number of legitimate successors, and that’s one. Any more than that is an invitation to civil war, and we’ve been close to that a few times already, in fact you could pretty much say the Lost Quarter Campaign was a civil war—just one we lost. So one clear succession would be good to establish even if you decide you don’t want to do anything more than that.”

“And it would have to be now, wouldn’t it? Who knows how long till Allie recovers and tries to take power? Much as I love the lady, personally, I don’t want to see if she can make a bigger mess than Jefferson Davis did.”

“So…” Leslie said, “has James talked you into this?”

Heather sighed. “I might have known you were in on it.”

“And Wonder. And he agreed with us too.”

“Well, then, I guess it’s unanimous, and it does make sense. Set up a voice encryption, and let’s get hold of Norm McIntyre and see if he’ll go along with it. He probably will, because he has enough sense to be terrified of the idea of being stuck as president. And promise me that I’ll be the president for the shortest possible time that works.”

^{2 HOURS LATER. PUEBLO. 1:00 PM MOUNTAIN TIME. MONDAY, MAY 11, 2026.}

“We haven’t been using the voice encryptor much,” Heather observed. “They seemed kind of surprised that we wanted to. A few months ago they pretty much had staff on it all the time.”

James sighed. “A few months ago, we were actively conspiring with Cameron Nguyen-Peters, Graham Weisbrod, Allie Sok Banh, Bambi Castro, and half a dozen other people that were important in various places around the country. Now we get our reports from the few spies we still have in place and there’s nobody working on our side in most of the other capitals on the continent. The gadgets still work but nobody wants to talk.”

The operator was going through the complicated process of encrypting a request to the Olympia voice encryption room, sending it by Morse, and getting back an acknowledgment that included a time check so that they could synchronize the big wooden cams that controlled the encryption and decryption process, and in between stints at the headset, jumping up to make sure that the recently-disused machine was back in shape: camshaft turning freely, locking screws snugly in place, contacts clean and free of crusty white nanospawn, and the handbuilt jelly-jar vacuum tubes warm and ready to go. After one more trip around the machinery, she looked up at them and said, “All right, we’ll start running in seven minutes.”

“Hey,” James said, smiling, “I didn’t recognize you with your head down over the machinery, Melissa. How are things for the new Watch Captain?”

“Considering I’d never been a school crossing guard before, and now I’ve got the Graveyard Company, I don’t think I’m doing too badly,” she said. “Still a little surprised to be promoted, but at least the job is easier than it was, now that the general’s got his wall built.” She hesitated a moment and then said, “The rumor is all through the crypto section here. Is it true? Is General Phat dead?”

“It’s true,” James said. “Public announcement is probably tomorrow morning.”

Melissa was wiping her eyes. “Who’s going to be president, then?”

“We’re working on that right now,” Heather said.

“It’s just, the general was such a down-to-earth guy. He walked to work, you know? We guarded him a lot, my squad and me. He knew our names, and he asked us to show up at City Council to put the pressure on to get us the city wall built, and… well, he was just good for the place. I know we’d’ve been losing him to Springfield, anyway, but I’m sorry to see him go. They say he was killed at Pale Bluff?”

“Probably. We don’t know all the details. Can you encourage your co-workers not to say too much till it’s official?”

“I can try. Most of’em are even bigger blabbermouths than me.” She looked at her carefully restored old railroad watch, and said, “Ninety seconds.”

Norm McIntyre sounded old and tired even through the wails and clicks of the encryptor. “So Shorty Phat is gone, and so is Jeff Grayson. I always thought I was lucky to be managing people who were better at their jobs than I was.” He coughed as if fighting for air.

“General Phat spoke highly of you,” Heather said, only lying slightly.

“I was a good administrator. I could get stuff to them when they asked. They were the fighters, and a general should fight.” He sighed. “You heard that they’re going to purge Graham’s cabinet while Allie’s out of action? Our little Congress up here was a lapdog till now, but they see a chance to get rid of everyone who did anything at the national level, and make the Congress of the PCG something more like the Tacoma Sanitation District Board, which is where most of these guys should be. And I guess I’ll probably just let them, there just doesn’t seem to be any point in it any more.” No mistaking the whine in his voice; this was a man who wanted things to be over.

James and Heather looked at each other, and Heather said, “General, there’s a fact that you may or may not be aware of, and something we need you to do for the country because of it. The fact is, you are the President of the United States. James, if you’ll explain—”

Understanding did not make McIntyre any happier. He pointed out that he had had a chance to put matters right, right after the superbombs, and had not taken the chance. “Heather, if you really need me to, I’m willing to be the last President, like the last guy in a game of hot potato who gets caught holding it, that’s fine. Kerensky, Pu Yi, and the Kaiser all found something to do with their time, and nobody bothered them because they clearly weren’t going to do anything. But you’re decades younger than I am, and the type that does things. Nobody’ll leave you alone. Are you sure you wouldn’t rather leave the whole mess in my hands?”

Heather sat very quietly for a long time before she said, “No, actually, I’m not sure. But I think I would rather have tried than not.”

They made the arrangements quickly; as far as they knew, the verbal appointment was enough, but they had him arrange for an encrypted Morse transmission, and he promised to handwrite a letter with the same text, dated today, and send that along as well, as soon as there was a train or plane headed for Pueblo.

^{ABOUT THE SAME TIME. RUINS OF PALE BLUFF. 3:00 PM CENTRAL TIME. MONDAY, MAY 11, 2026.}

“It’s a good thing you’re not worried about sanitation,” Bernstein said, gesturing at the corpse of General Phat, which lay on its back, stripped naked, with flies crawling in a dense black wad like a shower cap covering the missing top of the general’s head.

“Oh, I am worried about sanitation. Worried as can be. I want to make sure it’s bad, so bad that this little tight-ass all-American pull-together-and-bring-back-the-old-world town, this little boil on God’s ass, ain’t coming back, ever. Reminds me too much of where I came from, you know? Places like this are the seeds of that whole plaztatic thing, and even if I’m not a dirty hippie asshole like some Daybreak people”—he looked pointedly at Glad Ocean, but she had her eyes closed and was humming, hands folded in the prayer position in front of her—“I don’t want that old world back either. That’s why we had to make sure the orchards burned, and before we go we’ll get every house going good, that’s why we’ve been stuffing bodies down the wells, and leaving them out arranged to upset their dumbass soldiers when they get here.”

“Did Nathanson tell you about their old Town Hall? Rows and rows of heads on the tables in their meeting hall, bodies in a pile leaned up against the door, and then they climbed out the window to leave it that way. First soldier to open that door, avalanche of bodies without heads, and when they get through that, all the heads are facing the door.”

“Nice work.”

Glad Ocean opened her eyes and nodded enthusiastically. The slim, older woman was a senior shaman. Her eight-foot spirit stick was encrusted with so many decorations that she had a slave carry it for her most of the time. She was supposed to be Robert’s liaison to the Daybreaker leadership, to the tribes who had come with him, and to the moon gun, which she insisted on calling the Guardian on the Moon and referring to as “he.” “Absolutely right,” she said. “We can’t let the plaztatic world have places to grow back. I’m so glad you’re being thorough here, Lord Robert.”

He nodded slightly, just a slight dip of the head, which, as usual, she took for agreement. Even though Glad Ocean was old and scrawny, nothing like the hot chick that Daybreak had sent him to play with before, he thought about that one every time Glad Ocean favored him with her smug little tight-ass morally-correct smile. You have something in common with Pale Bluff, he thought at her. You are completely in my power. The only difference is, Pale Bluff has already found out what that means. But I’m still looking forward to you finding out.

He turned back to Nathanson and Bernstein and said, “Don’t call anyone away from the party right now. I know they’re still finding stuff and still finding dumbshits who are trying to hide or sneak away, and they’ll want to have time to play with all the new toys and pull out all the good parts before they burn it all. But around sundown, we’re having a little bit of… oh, I guess you’d call it a bonfire here tonight.” He pointed down at the corpse at his feet. “Tar the general here the way we did Ecco’s body last year, and nail it to a nice tall post. We’ll start with a little ceremony raising it up. You realized this was the last guy that really might have been the president? They are so fucked.”

^{ABOUT THE SAME TIME. PUEBLO. 2:15 PM MOUNTAIN TIME. MONDAY, MAY 11, 2026.}

“Wish we’d had a Federal judge living here, at least,” Heather said. “But James assures me that Calvin Coolidge took the oath from a Vermont notary public, and it counted. Let’s get this done.”

Michelle Trevor had been a Colorado Court of Appeals judge back before; her term had not expired, but the court hadn’t met since Daybreak day. Nowadays she worked in the general labor pool (usually cooking in the town mess hall), moonlighted as a waitress at Dell’s Brew, and taught history in the night school. Patrick had managed to locate her within fifteen minutes of James’s thinking of her, and she’d come over to the Old Pueblo Courthouse as soon as she had finished cubing a large elk steak and washed her hands. She seemed to be mildly amused. “Are you sure you don’t want me to make you the Pope, crown you queen of France, and marry you to somebody, as long as I already came over here?”

“Oh, I guess President is enough for one day,” Heather said. “You’re the history teacher. What do we need to make this legal?”

“Three witnesses is a good number,” she said. “It’s better if they’re public officials. That’s covered with James, Leslie, and Dr. Odawa. There’s no rule against a witness being a minor, so Patrick and Ntale, you count too, and Leo might, though he’d have a heck of a time giving testimony. Wonder, I’m afraid this country does not extend full civil rights to dogs yet.”

Wonder wagged his tail slightly. “He’s not big on irony,” Leslie said.

“Oh, well. Anyway, the text of the oath is prescribed in the Constitution, which I have here. The Bible is traditional, not required, but I think it’s a good idea given the politics of the southeastern part of the country. As for my authority, as you said, I’m at least a couple jumps up from a notary public. Coolidge retook the oath from the Chief Justice, on the sly, when he got back to Washington, just in case there was any question, but there never was. I guess you could do the same if you’re ever around a Federal judge. And that, my friends, should cover all the issues. Shall we get back to swearing in the President?”

“Sure.”

Heather followed the instructions and said the words. Afterward, she said, “You know, that’s probably the first all-hugging inauguration.”

“I shook your hand,” James pointed out.

“History is always open to revision,” Judge Michelle said. “Give him a good hug before we go, Heather. And I do have to go; I have an afternoon shift at Dell’s and papers to grade.”

^{30 MINUTES LATER. AUSTIN, TEXAS. 4:15 PM CENTRAL TIME. MONDAY, MAY 11, 2026.}

Big cumulus clouds piled across the deep blue Texas sky, and Governor Faaj Tong-George read faster than he would have liked, afraid that there might be rain before the end of the ceremony. When he read fast, he could sound too much Kennedy School, where he had been a professor, and not enough Brownsville, where he had grown up, and that could be very bad for re-election.

Yet though his words were coming out softer and faster than he intended, the crowd was still cheering wildly at each point. When he began his paragraph about the pride every Texan felt in the TexICs and pain of their irreparable loss, the cheering became so heated that he had to start that part again. Without microphones or loudspeakers to quiet the crowd, he finally had to ask them to keep it down so he could finish. At last, he went on:

He still wasn’t sure how much the crowd heard, or cared whether they heard, over the rising roar of their own cheering.

At the visible end of the speech, they gave up all restraint and cheered madly for what the words did, whether or not they knew what they said.

He put his speech text carefully into its leatherbound folder. His aides were to take it to a frame shop immediately, and within a few days it would hang next to the first Texas Declaration of Independence, in the Capitol building behind him. Funny. Weird. Hunh. There’ll never be a recording of this; kids in school won’t complain that they can’t understand my old- fashioned accent or make fun of my weird olden-days clothing.

Governor Faaj nodded at the honor guard, which hauled down the Temper Cross and Eagle and the Provi nineteen-star double-circle Stars and Stripes from the two flanking poles where they had been flying. As soon as they were down, the Lone Star flags went up, and the cheering became deafening.

Faaj felt an ocean of sadness surge within him when he nodded again, and the crew pulled down the old fifty-star flag from the high center pole. Not quite 250 years. Missed by less than two months.

Something of that feeling must have been there in the crowd. There had been cries of “Shame!” from some demonstrators, and another bunch had been singing “Ding Dong the Witch Is Dead” and still another group was bellowing a Carlene Redbone hit from a few years ago, “Don’t Let That Door Hit Your Ass,” and here and there people were trying to start up “The Star-Spangled Banner” and “The Eyes of Texas” but being drowned out by their neighbors. One very old man in the front row, tears streaming down his face, was trying to sing “You’re a Grand Old Flag” but couldn’t seem to recall it past the first couple of lines, and kept starting over and over.

In different parts of the crowd, people were enthusiastically waving the Stars and Bars, the rattlesnake, the pine tree, and one lone Jolly Roger.

But when the old flag had descended a couple of feet, the crowd plunged into a hush, like the moment when a casket is lowered into the grave, and you could hear the creaking of the pulleys as it came down. In the rising wind of the coming storm, it snapped and rippled as if it were trying, one more time, to get back into another fight.

The honor guard of US Army Rangers at the base of the pole were openly weeping as they folded the flag. This flag would be framed and displayed in the Texas Capitol, between the two Declarations.

Then the Texas Rangers stepped forward and briskly ran up the Lone Star, and the applause was so much like thunder that many of the crowd didn’t realize that the storm was coming in, till gusts of silvery rain fell on them in sheets, and they fled through the gardens surrounding the Capitol.

Faaj had already handed off the folder, and the aides were gathering up the folding chairs, suddenly emptied of dignitaries. No one was paying much attention to the governor, so he looked around once more before going in. The old man was still standing there, still trying to sing, and Faaj walked down the steps to stand next to him. He had learned “You’re a Grand Old Flag” for a President’s Day concert in eleventh grade, and he put his arm around the old guy, and sang it all the way through. That seemed to break the spell, and the old man went off sniveling, wiping his face uselessly in the rain.

I was singing it for him, but I wonder if he was singing it for the Stars and Stripes or for the Lone Star? I guess in the long history of the universe that question probably won’t matter.

“Governor Faaj, aren’t you going to come inside?”

“Son, my people are Hmong and my first job was on a fishing boat. This ain’t rain, this is a sprinkle.” Lightning cracked nearby with a deafening boom. “Coming right along, though.”

At the top of the steps he paused and looked. All the flags on all the staffs were now so soaked that you couldn’t really see what they were.

^{ABOUT THE SAME TIME. PUEBLO. 3:45 PM MOUNTAIN TIME. MONDAY, MAY 11, 2026.}

They were at the airfield early because “Let’s face it, we want to know what’s going on,” Leslie said. “We’d’ve been no use anyway, sitting around at the office, right?”

“Well, we could have pretended to work, but that’s probably your point,” James said.

“I think Leo was just relieved to be dropped off at the sitter’s,” Heather said. “He’s sort of sensitive to my moods lately and I was making him nervous.” She touched her shoulder holster. “Also I think that I feel weird to him because I’m always extra careful whenever I’m carrying.”

James said, “Why are you? We have guards around and no reason to think Bambi is dangerous.”

“No, but Bambi thinks something is,” Heather said. “Why is she insisting on meeting at the airport? All I can think of is that either she’s got urgent information that she can’t trust to encryption, or she has reason to fear being attacked in town. Either way means something bad going on that we have no idea about.”

“Is there any possibility that it’s us? That she’s decided we’re the enemy, somehow?”

“James, based on what we know right now anything is possible. Bambi worked for me for three years back before, and I like to think there’s a lot of friendship and respect. But she just lost a husband and we don’t know the circumstances except it happened in battle, and something killed General Phat and all we know is that she’s apparently the only witness, and we’ve had traitors in the ranks before, as both of you would know. So I’m just thinking that till I know what’s going on, I’d rather have my gun close by and my baby far away. And besides—there she is.” They looked to where Heather pointed to the tiny buzzing dot in the sky.

The Stearman made a slight whump on landing, the greased linen tires having deflated during the long flight from Hays, Kansas. The plane taxied around in a broad circle to stop about ten yards in front of them.

Bambi shut the engine off, braked the prop, climbed out, and walked toward them. Leslie said, very softly, “Her hand is by her holster.”

“I know,” Heather murmured. “I’m keeping my hand away from mine.”

Bambi walked as if she had counted and measured the steps between her plane and her colleagues, and was putting each foot carefully on its mark, like an unconfident movie actor or as if she were crossing a river on not-quite remembered stepping-stones. She had not taken off her flying helmet, but her goggles were pushed up onto her forehead; despite the warm afternoon, she left her jacket zipped. And, as Leslie had noticed, her right hand was resting by the grip of the pistol strapped to her thigh, almost as if she expected a gunfight.

Quietly, Heather said, “You can just tell us what happened, Bambi. We haven’t heard anything from anyone else.”

She nodded. “Lyndon Phat decided that my plane and I should stay in Paducah because he needed us and wanted to keep us. He arrested me and locked me up. He didn’t let me fly to Pale Bluff, where my husband was fighting for his life, kept me locked up while bad news was pouring in over the radio and barely bothered to tell me about it afterward. Then ten minutes after the EMP, he ordered me to fly him to Pale Bluff for a reconnaissance. I saw Quattro’s burned body in the wreckage; all the ground crew died with him too. I think maybe they tried to fly out just as the EMP hit, or maybe they were shot down and the plane flipped. I don’t know. It was too badly burned. So… I walked back to my plane, and I pointed a gun at General Lyndon Phat, and made him get out of my airplane. I left him there on the runway with tribals starting to run up on him. I’m pretty sure he’s dead by now but I’m hoping Lord Robert got to take a personal interest and treated him like Steve Ecco.”

The hideous silence stretched as if it might go on forever.

James didn’t see any point in bringing up any arguments that she should not have done it; it was done, with nothing to change. He didn’t see a reason to blame her; either she would blame herself, or not. He didn’t fear the gun at her hip; she clearly had control of herself. He just wished someone would think of something to say.

When it seemed painfully clear that no one else was going to break the silence, James said, “Is there any chance anyone survived, or there might be anybody holding out there?”

Bambi shook her head, and now tears were flowing. “Not a chance. We circled. No fighting. Bodies everywhere. If anyone was still alive they were hiding in a cellar or something, and the tribals were lighting fires everywhere.”

Leslie said, “I am so sorry about Quattro. He was special to all of us but he was your husband and you’d loved him a long time.”

“Even before I knew I did,” Bambi said softly. Her hand moved decisively down away from her holster. “What now?”

Heather asked, “Are we the only people who know? Because if we are, then I think we’re the only people who decide. There’s nobody I have to report it to, now, and there never will be.”

Bambi’s shoulders began to shake, and Heather said, “I don’t want any accidents, so, is it okay if I come over there and hold you? You know, old friend to old friend, not—”

Bambi raised her hands away from her weapon, and the two women embraced.

Heather looked at James and Leslie over her friend’s shoulder. “Uh, guys.”

Taking their cue, they went into the office.

After a long time, Heather and Bambi joined them. Bambi sat quietly, looking at her boots. Heather said, “Well, to begin with, Bambi knows I’m now the President. So really, this is the President and her closest advisors dealing with a difficult situation. I guess… Bambi, can you tell them about how you feel about the Duchy of California? The same way you told me?”

Bambi said, “I can try. It’s hard to say this. Look, my father… the whole time I was raised with his libertarian Ayn Rand right-wing thing going on, and hating it, because, well, Daddy always thought somehow or other that everything that happened around all that money and all those people working, he thought he did it. Like, all by himself, you know? Ten years after Obama said ‘You didn’t build that’ he was still in hysterics about it because he couldn’t stand the idea that the people who drew a paycheck from him had anything to do with the work that got done.

“So you know, you want to piss off your parents, or anyway at least I wanted to piss off mine. In eighth grade, I showed him a copy of ‘Questions from a Worker Who Reads’ and he tried to get my English teacher fired, and I went to the School Board meeting to testify against him. He had a whole career track laid out for me at Castro Enterprises and I never showed up to do anything he wanted me to, instead I went to a public university and volunteered for all kinds of unpaid do-gooding and ended up as a Federal agent. I don’t think you can imagine how angry that made him, that I was working for the tax-and-spenders and revenuers and gun-grabbers, even if I was carrying a gun myself.

“But he was proud of me too, in his weird way. And he kept telling me to take care of things, make sure guys like Donald, his favorite chauffeur, were taken care of. And then later… Quattro was one of the few other people in the world who understood me, I think. You know he was raised all his life to figure that someday the government would be all gone, and it would just be crazy looters in the street and red barbarians in the Statehouse, and… but he’d loved me, forever, really, I guess, since we were kids, and since putting the United States back together was what mattered to me, and my oath, and being part of society, and being in it for something bigger than myself, and all that”—her hands sawed the air—“it’s important and I can’t seem to keep it all in order, but you get the idea. Since I wanted my United States put back together, Quattro wanted me to have that.

“But he always wanted to go home and take care of the duchy—his duchy, as far as he was concerned. He joked about it and made fun of it and wore those silly hats, but he thought about California as ours. Ours to take care of, ours to protect and guide… it was all personal to Quattro Larsen, and, well, I think he was right. Or if he wasn’t right then, he sure is now. We need to look after our own.

“I had a lot of time flying to think. I know that the general saw a pilot and a plane and said, vital resource, have to have that for the country. Well, I say, fuck that. My airplane. Me. My duchy. I will take better care of them and besides they are mine. So I left him there to take care of his own shit, with the tribals, and I sure hope they took care of it for him.

“I still love you all and you can come for asylum any time.” She made a strange choking noise, and then smiled strangely. “After all, Daddy always said California was one big asylum. Or a visit or because you’d just like to say hi. But the years I put into the United States of America… and the husband I lost for the cause… none of that was worth shit, and I wish I had everything back. From now on, I take care of my duchy. And Heather, I wish you’d just resign as President, come out to California, I’ll give you a fief somewhere where you can have your dad with you and raise Leo and make your part of the world decent. Because I think you’re going to end up losing everything else, and there still won’t be any United States, and even if there was, it would never be what you imagine. It never even was, you know?”

Heather said, “Bambi, I’m so close to agreeing with you.”

“Come down to Castle Castro at San Diego. Stay with me for a long while. Get reacquainted with your father and let him get to know his grandson. Seriously, think about it. You could get Leo, climb into the front cockpit, and be gone with me today. You have your oath, but there’s no country to keep it to.”

Heather thought for a long while. At last she said, “James, maybe it is just because of the compliment you paid me earlier, about how I don’t give up and so on. But I can’t help thinking, before we all part company, you said there was one more thing we might try before we give up forever. And you said it was something I might not forgive you for.”

“Actually I don’t think anyone will forgive me for it. Anyone on our side, I mean. And it really… it isn’t something we can do. I don’t think it will even lead to anything we can do. But it’s one last place we could look for a suggestion, or an idea, or some pathway or approach. And chances are there will be nothing in it.”

“You’re a hell of a salesman,” Leslie said flatly, and they all began to laugh, even James. “Seriously, dude, do you want us all to think about this, or is this something you’re trying to scare us away from before we even hear it?”

“Some of both.” James looked back at each of them, drew a deep breath, and said it. “I kept Arnie Yang alive. He’s Interrogation Subject 162. I switched in a different prisoner when he had that seizure on the way to his hanging, and we hooded him. He wasn’t very happy when he woke up from his seizure and found us still prying at the Daybreak in his head. About half the time he warns us about how dangerous it is, and the other half he sounds perfectly reasonable and helpful—sometimes because he’s actually providing insights and helping us, and sometimes because Daybreak has taken him back over and he’s trying to trick us into doing something against our interests. The problem the interrogation team and I have is sorting out which is which, at any given time. But he’s alive, and we’ve been using him all along.”

Heather was staring at him, slowly shaking her head. “So your little digs at me about getting carried away and executing him and how much that was senseless, you were just… getting me ready for when you pulled him out of your hat?”

“I’m afraid so.”

She shrugged. “He was one of my closest friends for a long time. A day hasn’t gone by that I haven’t missed him. I think I might even be glad to see him alive. You’d better take me to him. Bambi, would you like to join us for this?”

“Arn and I used to be regulars at the departmental happy hour, back before,” Bambi reminded her. “I guess it’s going to be old home week. Keep our guns or check them at the door?”

“We’ve never allowed weapons near him,” James said. “Well, let me send out some runners.” He thought for a moment. “We’ll need to get the interrogation team together to meet us there; that’s just safety. Then a carriage for us, I guess, we have him in the super-secure wing of Facility 1 and that’s about a mile and a half, unless you want to walk.”

“How about two carriages?” Leslie said. “One for you guys to do old home week in, one for James and I to talk. Because, frankly, we need to talk.”

“I think the budget can stand that,” Heather said. “Considering there’s about to be no government of the United States, and we run on its credit.”

James nodded and headed for the messenger’s bench at the other end of the building.

“Besides,” Heather said, “I might as well spend it now before it goes away.”

Bambi smiled. “Spoken like a true bureaucrat. You really think you’re going to lose your budget?”

“Oh, hell, yeah. One big funding source is going to disappear when the Tempers turn into the Christian States of America. Who knows how long the PCG will want to keep funding us, especially once Allie wakes up and finds out I prevented her from being President?”

Bambi snorted. “Jeez. Our old office politics are now running the continent. Well, look, hon, I’m a duchess. You were a pretty good bureaucrat, and I bet you’ll make a pretty good vassal. And one advantage of being a duchess is, le budget, c’est moi.”

“Well,” James said, closing the carriage door, “You said you wanted to talk.”

“Yeah.” She reached out and grasped his wrist. “James, I—shit. I don’t have any idea what I feel. I mean, he almost killed me.”

“He did. For what it’s worth, he’s gone after me or one of the others with his bare hands, or silverware he stole, or a piece of broken plate or a garotte he tore out of his underwear. More times than I can count. About a third of the time he’s plain old, gentle, nerdy, numbers-and-graphs-loving Arnie. Another third, he’s a treacherous evil snake of a liar, but very persuasive, and he sounds just like he does when he’s himself. And the last third… well, no predicting, but he’s tried to kill us, sometimes by biting out our carotids, sometimes by sounding as reasonable and mellow as a stoned kindergarten teacher. And he jumps from one to the other and there’s no warning.”

“Yeah. But… okay, whether you feel good about it or not, this is about me.” She sighed, and played with Wonder’s ears; he panted and looked up at James.

“Yeah,” James said, “I knew it was going to be.”

“Why did you save Arnie Yang’s life? I mean, James, just this once, I’ll admit I know how you feel about me, that you haven’t changed, you’re still forcing yourself to be the best friend I could ever wish for, but that’s not what you want—”

He sat up stiffly, looked out the window, and kept his voice very flat. “You’re right, we don’t talk about all that.”

“But—”

“You wanted me to let him be hanged, as revenge for what he almost did to you? Don’t think I didn’t consider that. I would honest to god have enjoyed hearing that cable snap his neck. Because he tried to frame you, because he betrayed Ecco, because he fooled me, because he smiled right into the faces of people who thought he was their friend and were trying to be good friends to him. Ten million reasons I would have liked to see him dangling dead.

“But I did it all, anyway, instead. I arranged with MaryBeth to handle the switch, and got the note from Allie that we could be sure would trigger a Daybreak seizure. Then when he had the attack, MaryBeth and I took him to the infirmary. We only needed a couple of minutes because we had a prisoner we hadn’t logged. Deb and Larry Mensche knew a guy about Arnie’s size and coloration, who had been a Daybreaker, and killed his own family while he was under it, and didn’t want to live. They were waiting with him in the infirmary, and they had already dosed him up on barbiturates and got him all weepy and sleepy and hooded him, and that’s the man we took back out to ride in the wagon to his hanging.

“Meanwhile Jason and Beth took Arnie Yang to the high security section we had just set up in Facility 1; there are about a dozen high-level deeply infected Daybreakers in there at any given time, and the roster tends to change pretty fast because what we do to interrogate them, um, uses them up.”

“Kills them?”

“If they don’t find a way to kill themselves, or die of a related accident, or turn into gaping, drooling mannequins.” He rubbed his face. “It’s one hell of a job for an ex-librarian to take on, but there was no one else for it.”

“Did it have to be done?”

“Yeah, I still think so. If we’d won, anyway, I think it would have been justified. Anyway, it was the fake Arnie that went back out on the gurney, up the steps, and down the drop. Nobody saw his face till MaryBeth and I took his hood off, and you know, with the weights on his feet and using aircraft cable on such a long drop, we had turned his face into one big swollen bruise, with a big black tongue sticking out and red eyeballs bulging like Ping-Pong balls. No one who had been friends with Arnie was going to look closely. We let them have one glimpse, then MaryBeth signed the death certificate, I fed fake-Arnie head down into the incinerator—supposedly to prevent his grave becoming a pilgrimage site—and we made it work. That’s how we did it, and no, at the time, I didn’t tell you about it. You’d just been released from death row yourself and you were drinking and partying like all of a sudden there was a tomorrow.”

“When I’ve been scared, I like a lot of sex. And I’d never been so scared before.”

“I know. I understood that, Leslie. We’ve been friends a long time.”

“Yeah. I try to keep you from hearing too much about it, or seeing me when I’m that way.”

“I appreciate it. Anyway, the point is, I didn’t hang Arnie, and I decided not to hang Arnie, but it had nothing to do with you. Not that I wasn’t angry enough, just that it made no sense, if I was trying to do my job running an intelligence service. I certainly didn’t save Arnie because I loved him, or forgave him, or wanted to spend time in his company. So I’m sorry but for once in my stupid, infatuated, never-learn life, this wasn’t about you.”

Leslie leaned forward, looking at him with an expression he couldn’t read, astonishment, maybe, even shock. “James, James—shit, I’m handling this so badly, I was trying to be careful not to hurt you. I just wanted to say… James, you didn’t have to keep it secret from me, you don’t need my forgiveness because there’s nothing to forgive, I understand, James.”

She reached over and clutched his arm; he looked at her hand as if it had magically appeared there. “James,” she said again. “What I wanted to tell you was… of course you had to keep him alive, of course you had to have him for interrogation, because you are running an intelligence organization, with very fucking likely the fate of civilization at stake, and he’s the richest possible source of intelligence about the enemy you could have, the senior analyst from our own side infected by Daybreak.

“Naturally he was telling you that you had to hang him; it was the same thing as the suicide pills any spy carries. Executing him looked like the stupidest piece of melodrama in the world, just a show for the mob in the street because our big dumb sloppy public still hasn’t recovered from being raised on movies and comic books and they had this fixation that they needed to see ‘justice’ done. Justice? Emotional satisfaction because it makes a tidy story. Nothing to do with what works or what matters. Just melodramatic ‘justice,’ one more way people made themselves stupid, so stupid they couldn’t keep civilization going when the first bunch of dipshits came along and wanted to take it down. And I just wanted to apologize to you.”

“You? You apologize to me? For what?”

“I really thought you were that dumb. I thought you were so infatuated that you felt like you had to be loyal when it didn’t make any sense, and I thought… well, it was something I felt for a long time. Maybe ever since we became friends, ever since you got that crush.” She was looking down, now, embarrassed herself. “I had the impression that you thought I was a little bit dumb, myself, I mean, nice and articulate and all, but not really capable of thinking and deciding like a mature person, and your life was built around pleasing me even though you thought I was silly and dumb. Like, patronizing self-sacrifice, you know? Doing what you thought I wanted because you didn’t think I was smart enough to see what was right. So when you hanged Arnie Yang, or staged the hanging, anyway, I thought you did it for me because you thought I was stupid enough to want it and demand it.”

The carriage rolled another couple of blocks before James ventured to say, “And now you’re thinking… or feeling… differently?”

“You used the staged execution to convince Daybreak we didn’t have that intel source,” she said. “Didn’t you?”

“Yes, actually. At least that got some mileage out of that silly piece of theatre.”

“Well, I think that bit was brilliant, and pretty damned cool, and I’m proud of you.” The hand moved from his arm to caress his cheek; startled, he looked straight into her eyes, as he rarely dared to do for fear of revealing his feelings.

She smiled and winked. “Maybe we should have some long talks, later. Meanwhile, let’s go see if we can get anything more out of that little asshole.”

James had invited the whole “senior interrogation team,” which meant Jason, Beth, and Izzy. It was rare that they all worked together, so they knew something was up even before he showed up with Leslie, Bambi, and Heather. “So today’s the day we come clean?” Jason asked. He was grinning like a child at Christmas.

“It just might be the end of everything,” James said. “Or the beginning.” He looked around the group. “Now, everyone be ready. And if you’re carrying any concealed weapons as a backup, now is the time to leave them behind. He’s got literally inhuman abilities to detect them and he can move faster than you’d believe—I don’t know if that’s Daybreak, insanity, or that he spent so many years in martial arts. If you have a knife on you somewhere, he’ll take it from you and use it on all of us before you know it.”

“No shit,” Beth said. “I used to carry a little blackjack for just in case. Arnie was talking reasonable as could be this one time, just like the small talk before we started, and holy fuck, Jason slapped my blackjack out of Arnie’s hand and put him into a half-nelson strangle, or I’d’ve been dead, and the first I knew that my blackjack wasn’t in my coat pocket was when I saw it flying across the room.”

Heather and Bambi exchanged glances; Bambi pulled out a steel spring whip from somewhere, and Heather a short set of nunchaku.

“You can pick’em up on your way out,” James said, locking them into the box by the front door.

When James slid the door panel open, he stood well back, then looked through carefully. Arnie Yang sat on a single-piece poured concrete bench, big enough to be his bed as well as his seat, at the center of the floor in a windowless room. “Coming in, Arnie. Big group.”

“Good, it’s been lonely.”

When Arnie saw all of them, he said, “Something has happened since we talked last. Did Pale Bluff fall?”

“Yes,” James said.

“I had thought that sometime soon, there would be a bigger group to see me. It makes me happy to see you again, Heather, Bambi. Leslie, you probably won’t believe me, or accept it ever, but I really want to say I’m sorry about everything.”

“Actually I do believe you,” Leslie said. “That you want to say that, and even that you mean it. You know I’ll probably never accept it?”

“I know. I just wanted you to know I offered my apology, sincerely.” He paused a long time. “So Pale Bluff has been destroyed. I was rather thinking you would have brought along General Phat.”

“He died in Pale Bluff,” James said, very quietly. “And nobody is here to gape at you. We want to ask your advice, just as I have regularly asked it. Could you say one of the phrases, please, while we watch you?”

“‘Daybreak is a mind virus,’” Arnie recited. “‘Daybreak exists only for its own purpose. Daybreak’s purpose is to degrade and destroy the human race, everyone I love, and me. Daybreak is entirely evil. The world must be rid of Daybreak so that it can resume the development of technological civilization, whose benefits are the birthright of the whole human race.’ Hey, no seizure, today is a special day.”

“Or Daybreak doesn’t want you to have that clear period like you get after a seizure,” Beth said. “You know it could be either, and we don’t know any more than you do if it’s got you right now. But you’re right all the same, it’s a good sign.”

“Well, then,” James said. “Here’s the situation. Pale Bluff is burned, orchards and all, and will probably never be rebuilt. The Army of the Wabash is so far behind Lord Robert’s horde that there’s really no likelihood that they’ll ever catch them; they just can’t move as fast and there’s still more than a hundred miles. They can loot their way down the south bank of the Ohio and arrive at Paducah in better shape than they are now. Then they can bypass Paducah or overwhelm it, and that’s the last thing between them and the really good looting on the other side of the Mississippi. So if you were right that this is basically one last giant suicide raid to try to crash what’s left of civilization on this continent, well, we’ve probably lost our last chance to stop them before the blizzards start on the Great Plains next fall, and it’s only May.

“Every competent person we could have elected president was killed in the last week.”

“Have you thought about Quattro—” Arnie saw it in Bambi’s face, and said, “Oh, god, no, I’m so sorry.”

“You may trust me, no one with the charisma, ability, and national reputation we need is left. Nobody. We played a little fast and loose with the succession rules, so Heather is now the President, officially, but as far as any of us can think, we don’t see any way to turn that to our advantage. So the current plan is that we’re going to give up here. Heather is going to join Bambi in the Duchy of California, the rest of us will fold up shop, and the middle of the country will do whatever it can in the face of the Great Raid. Maybe their death rate will be higher, sooner, and their raid will be less effective, than they are thinking, and they’ll empty out the Lost Quarter enough so that Manbrookstat or the Christian States of America—”

“Wait, has that been declared?”

“Going to be any minute. You’ll never believe it, but Jenny Whilmire Grayson is the biggest asset the Army has in trying to stop it. But she’s not enough, and it’s too late. They will formally declare the CSA within two weeks, according to our source. Anyway, maybe Manbrookstat, the CSA, or whatever the Provis organize will be able to reconquer the Lost Quarter, if the tribes pay too high a price this summer or stay out on the plains too long and get caught in the winter too far from home. But the dream of the Restored Republic is finished.”

“I’ve decided to resign as soon as I’m at Castle Castro,” Heather said. “And there’s no line of succession left after me. In a couple of days, I will have officially been the last President, of the United States that is no more.”

Arnie howled like a coyote with its balls in a trap, arched his back farther than any of them might have imagined possible, and tried to backflip toward the bench. Jason lunged forward, knocked him sideways, and tackled him to the floor. Beth and Ysabel joined in holding him down.

The seizure ran “longer than most, and more violent than anything we’ve seen this year,” as Beth noted.

When it was over, Arnie Yang seemed more unfocused and blurry too. They thought they would just put him onto his bench with his blankets and go, but then he spoke very softly. “That was a bad one. I think that was because Daybreak is giving up on me, trying to scramble my messages as it goes, I’m no longer useful it doesn’t want to leave me around as a record of what it did.” He was crying. “I think it will try to get me confused enough to have an accident or get me someplace where I just die. James, I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.”

“It’s all right, Arnie, but tell me what you are sorry for. I’ll forgive you.”

Normally a seizure didn’t come this quickly after a previous seizure, but this one tried; Arnie again arched and kicked, but subsided very quickly. “The whole thing. The whole thing. Daybreak gets gets gets stronger from people fighting it, and we got you to fight a whole war… .”

James seemed to sit back as if he’d been kicked.

Arnie babbled a little longer, then fell asleep. They covered him and left.

In the conference room, James said, “I know what he meant.”

Heather nodded. “Does it matter anymore?”

“We should all know, if only for the history books. Look, the big camps along the Ohio were on the brink of starvation if they didn’t start moving; we went in and attacked them and created our big scary army to motivate them. What if we’d just built up defenses for a rapid response, then sat down and traded with them? Kidnapped shamans, recruited defectors, sent over agents to sow doubt and confusion, let the camps collapse? Arnie steered us toward making it a war in the first place—one where Grayson would have to win eleven battles back-to-back.

“So then they retreated. We could have just said, the danger’s over for the summer, because it was. They couldn’t have come back to mount a raid across the whole territory. What they could do, though, was rally all the tribes against an invading army—and we sent them one. Not only that, they put themselves under Lord Robert’s command; now he’s surrounded by an army of loyal Daybreakers, who might reconvert him or his followers.

“And then… well, this one wasn’t through Arnie, but isn’t it interesting how Quattro suddenly pushed us all into defending Pale Bluff, which couldn’t be done, instead of evacuating it, which could? Where do you suppose a guy who had been fighting Daybreak for a couple years got that idea?” He looked down at the table, and then looked up again. “You see it? I absolutely blew it. I am the biggest idiot in the world. Daybreak knew that we would give it a war, and the war would be how it would unify the Lost Quarter around a plan that has now totally defeated us. Heather, I know the RRC probably won’t last another two weeks, but I would like it on the record that I resigned on grounds of manifest incompetence.”

“Only if we agree that I did too,” she said quietly. “It’s been a terrible day full of terrible news. I want us to all gather at James’s house, for one of those quiet evenings of food and being together, and then maybe tomorrow we will tackle Arnie again. But I’m very afraid you’re right, James. In fact I wouldn’t be surprised if Daybreak has only finally let us realize just to make its triumph more complete.”

“And to demoralize us,” Leslie said, very quietly. “I was just thinking how much I feel like giving up, and then I realized Daybreak wants me to think that. So we are going to hang on for a day longer, and if that doesn’t make a difference, maybe another. Meanwhile, tonight, there’s food at James’s, if he’ll cook.”

He sighed and spread his hands. “I’m not going to give up the only thing in the world that feels right. All right, let’s all give it one more day, after the best meal I can make you.”