The Last President

^{3 DAYS LATER. PUEBLO. 6:30 AM MOUNTAIN TIME. MONDAY, JANUARY 12, 2026.}

In Pueblo, the lockdown against the impending EMP had begun at 8:00 Sunday night and would continue until 2:00 this afternoon. For most people in the still-civilized parts of the Earth a lockdown was a chance to sleep in, with nothing to do but wait to hear that the EMP had fallen somewhere else before disconnecting all the protective grounds, taking the precious surviving gear out of its metal boxes, and resuming work. For a few people the lockdown meant a tense fire watch, but probably their concern was unnecessary: Pueblo went on and off the air briefly, at low power, much less than had ever been known to draw the moon gun’s fire before.

So this should have been sort of a nuclear-electronic snow day, Heather thought. Too bad Leo’s not verbal yet, so he missed the memo, and still expects his feeding on time.

Heather poked up the fire, and her little room underneath her office was cozy as she dragged her rocking chair over to the west window, perfect for watching the sunlight creep down the Wet Mountains.

She had been rocking for a few minutes, humming something silly to Leo, watching the stars fade and the sky creep from black to indigo, when the snow on the far-off mountains turned for an instant to burning silver, and the twilight-muted red, yellow, and brown bricks of Pueblo flashed in a second of full color.

Heather was already on her feet before she realized she’d heard crackling and smelled ozone. She set Leo down in his crib, grabbed the bucket, and poured sand over the glowing-red ground wire that connected her old metal filing cabinet to a water pipe. Watching to see that the wire didn’t smolder or flare, standing well back in case of a residual charge, she pulled her sweater down and picked up the wailing Leo. “Brekkers is interrupted, buddy, we gotta—”

A knock. “Ms. O’Grainne, sorry, but we’re evacuating—”

“On my way.”

She pulled on her boots, coat, and hat, put another blanket around Leo. In the stairwell, the ozone odor was strong, but without much smoke—yet, anyway.

Outside, the sun was still not quite above the horizon; the last upper edge of the crescent moon was a parenthesis enclosing the mountains. The first whispers of the east dawn wind were crisply chilly. She squeezed her tube of documents under her arm, freeing a hand to tuck Leo’s blanket.

“This is really bad news.” Ruth Odawa, her Chief of Cryptography, was standing beside her. “They’ve never targeted Pueblo before; they always just aimed at radio sources, and we were careful to stay fairly quiet. So now the moon gun knows we’re important.”

Lyndon Phat joined them. “Wow, it’s cold out here this—”

“People, listen up!” Kendall, the area’s Emergency Action Coordinator, was a stocky African-American woman who had been an MP at Fort Carson back before. “Mister Mendoza from the railroad says they’ve got a locomotive spot-welded into place on the main narrow gauge track, and they need a lot of hands on ropes and levers—”

Gunshot.

Phat said, “Down,” and guided Heather onto the hard-packed snow, her body sheltering Leo.

Two more shots. A man shouted, “Mother Earth! Mother Earth! Mother—”

Another shot.

Yells and shrieks. She clutched Leo close and stayed down, trying to look around, but seeing only hurrying feet and huddled backs.

An eternity later, Phat helped her to her feet. “Captain Kendall wants us to go to a safe house under guard,” General Phat said. “She is perturbed because I tackled the shooter.”

Heather smothered her exasperated scream into a croak. “Has it occurred to you that that was probably an assassin, and you are the most assassinatable person here, and you ran toward him?”

“I thought of that just after I took him down.”

“May I quote you on that?”

They turned and saw Cassie Cartland, the editor of the Pueblo Post-Times. Her brown hair had grown out from a practical pixie to an expedient shag in the last year, so that now she looked her actual age—seventeen—rather than several years younger. When Chris Manckiewicz had gone with Mensche on the long traverse of the Lost Quarter last fall, she’d taken over and run the Post-Times well enough so that on his return, he’d just left Cassie in charge. “Any tips for your fans about how to take down terrorists bare-handed, General Phat?”

“It was an act of complete irresponsible idiocy.”

She grinned. “Just let me get that down and read it back.”

Heather said, “Wow, the world has changed. Back before, nobody running for president would have dared to say anything like that.”

“Also,” Phat said, “an ugly runt, to quote my ex-wife, has a chance of winning a presidential election. You can quote that too, Cassie—on one condition. I want a news story that says ‘General urges common sense in walling city,’ and run it alongside a map I’ll lay out for you. It’s a disgrace we don’t have a city wall yet, and City Council is a bunch of whistleheads who need to get their job done. Quote me on that too, or the deal is off. Clear?”

“Clear.” She shook her head and brought her pencil back to her pad. “Now, what do you all see as the role of Pueblo under the Restored Republic, and do you think there will be more job opportunities locally?”

^{5 DAYS LATER. MOSCOW, IDAHO. 2:30 PM MOUNTAIN TIME. SATURDAY, JANUARY 17, 2026.}

Darcage heard footsteps. The door opened, sudden bright light hurting his eyes. Guards unbound him from his bunk, dragged him from the train, shoved him along the broken pavement of the platform. Big hands grabbed his arms and dragged him onto his back in the bed of a wagon.

As he rode through the streets, he pressed his bound hands awkwardly against his face to block the sunlight, sobbing to recover his breath, until his eyes adjusted; as soon as he could bear it he stared into the deep blue sky and let himself feel sun on his face, sucking in the freezing air. It had been so long.

When the wagon halted, they flung him headlong off the tailgate, catching him with his face barely off the pavement, laughing at his wince.

He was pushed up a flight of stairs and through a building door. Inside, they yanked him by the arms up three more flights of stairs and through several doors till, without pity or apology, they dropped him onto the floor near the rostrum of a college lecture hall.

She was there.

Beautiful and elegant as ever, Allie Sok Banh wore a handmade linen suit that must have taken someone two weeks to sew. “Take the gag off. Turn him to face the room.”

The people chained to the seats were leaders, counselors, and shamans among the tribes of the Hells Canyon area. Darcage had met most of them when he carried messages to them from the Guardian on the Moon. If anyone had been going to rescue him, it would have been ordered by one of these—

“I am so glad you are all here,” Allie said from the podium. “I only wish the rest of your tribes were, as well.” She barked a forced laugh through bared teeth. “When I invited you to negotiate, I was lying. We do lie to terrorists, criminals, and traitors, but here’s the truth: you are here to witness that the United States does not negotiate with criminals or terrorists, regardless of what silly stories you make up about yourselves. The United States and the Constitution are real. Mother Gaia and the tribes are made up. We’re here to show you that.”

“Now, Mister Darcage here, as you know, was my controller during the time when Daybreak invaded my mind. I am paying him back for that, personally—when someone attempts to seize my personality, that is personal.”

She held out her hand. A guard put a pistol into it. She walked to Darcage and held it a handsbreadth from his head, pointed directly into his left eye. “Darcage, you will say, ‘Daybreak is a lie,’ before I count down from five. Five.” She paused, drew a breath, and with curious gentleness, brushed the muzzle of the gun against his eyelids, making him blink, before pulling it back a bare inch. “Three-one!” The hammer slapped closed.

The inside of his head rang with a high-pitched whistle, drowning out every other sound. Everything in his vision had a bright blinding rainbow-hued halo. His mouth opened so far it hurt his jaw, and his vocal cords were in dry agony as he forced all his air back and forth through them with all his strength. The world rolled madly.

He woke with his face chafed and sore from weeping, thinking, She fast counted, then dry-fired.

He had probably only been out for a minute or two. Allison Sok Banh was explaining, “—no use to us; he does not exhibit the brief lucid post-seizure period that less thoroughly indoctrinated Daybreakers do, so we cannot free him from Daybreak. We will try to induce a Daybreak seizure in all of you. If you emerge like Darcage here, without enough of your old self for our doctors to work with, we will hold a short, fair trial and hang you. We’ll do the same if you successfully resist going into a seizure. But if you emerge able to communicate, we will attempt rehabilitation.”

Somewhere out in the seats, someone asked, “And our proposals—”

“You may take this as our answer.”

Darcage’s mind retreated toward the gentle, cool press of linoleum against his face, crossing over into the schoolroom smell of remembered childhood, and down into deep unconsciousness.

^{THE NEXT DAY. CASTLE LARSEN (NEAR THE FORMER JENNER, CALIFORNIA). 3:30 PM PACIFIC TIME. SUNDAY, JANUARY 18, 2026.}

Five days before their coronation as Duke and Duchess of California—a consolidation of fiefs and titles for their hypothetical future children to inherit—the Countess of the South Coast and the Earl of the Russian River were walking together on the rammed-earth fortress wall of Castle Larsen, laying some awe and majesty on the locals, as Quattro called it. “What I don’t get is the way they act like they like it,” he said. “Before Daybreak I’d ride my bicycle down to Sandy’s place for a hamburger and ice cream, and she’d be, like, ‘What’ll it be, Quattro?’ all friendly but nothing special. Now she yells at her help to set up the private room for the Earl, and you can tell she’s getting off on how grand that is, and once they Duke me, she’ll probably roll out a literal red carpet with a bunch of guys in tights blowing horns.” He stopped to watch a Newberry Dieselplane taxi down the runway, turn around, and taxi back; his technicians were testing ND-3, the third one built. “Nowadays I can’t even test-fly my own new airplanes.”

“Quattro, they’d rather bet their families’ lives on the Earl of the Russian River, or better yet the Duke of California, than on that rich surfer dude up the road, you know?”

“Yeah, I do know. I just hate having to be the most responsible man in California when there are airplanes to fly and adventures to have.”

“Me too. But Heather needs a loyal Duck and a trustworthy Doochess to get the country glued back together, and like it or not, that’s us. Now keep laying on the awe.”

She guided him away from the side of the parapet that faced the airfield; no sense rubbing his nose in his frustrations. From the sea side, they watched the Russian River pour down between the snow-covered, deep green banks. The chilly wet long winter had been good for grass, but the extra rain had brought down huge loads of mud.

Quattro looked out over the new land forming in the sea. “With the grass and brush to secure all this silt, Goat Rock Beach will end up as a lea, but there’ll be another beach beyond it, and people will love that too. This is going to be a good place.”

“As far as I’m concerned it already is.”

“Yeah.” He pulled his cloak closer around him. “Bambi, it’s so beautiful here, and I’m so proud of what we’ve been able to do.” His arm extended toward the fields of snow-spattered deep green, then swung out to encompass the docks along the river, the many smoking chimneys in Jenner, and back to the awe-inspiring ocean and coast. “If anything happens to me—”

Against the spitting wind, Bambi shielded her face on his chest. “Morbid morbid morbid.”

A big slow wave curled in, breaking over the new sandbars. Sea lions hurried out of the way.

He sighed, and folded his arm back over Bambi. “You’re right, I’m being morbid. And I’ve got no reason to. Just, right this second, I’m not feeling lucky.”

^{15 HOURS LATER. SAVANNAH, GEORGIA. 11:15 AM EASTERN TIME. MONDAY, JANUARY 19, 2026.}

“Back before, I hated to admit I knew what a sailboat was. Ferengi was like Pop incarnate—a Hudson River schooner, much too authentic of a replica,” Whorf said, “every bit as much heavy physical labor as the original. It was what you’d expect from a super-achieving overcompensating Nerd of Color. I mean, good god, he named his kids Deanna, Geordie, Whorf, and Uhura, even if Mom made him compromise about how he spelled a couple of them so it wouldn’t be so obvious.”

Whorf was splitting a fish-and-okra pizza, the only thing on the menu, with Ihor Reshetnyk, the other scholar-sailor who had joined the ship in Manbrookstat. Not to be outpaced, Whorf took a large piece and took another couple of bites before continuing. “It embarrassed the shit out of a five-A like me, the most humiliating—”

“Whoa up, homie.” Ihor was working on his American slang. “What is a five-A?”

“From a TV series a few years ago. Affluent artistic achiever African-American. Snobby black teenager who pretends not to know pop culture, talks a lot about being authentic, into jazz and the Harlem Renaissance and Spike Lee and all that. Looking back it was strictly a pose to piss off Pop.” He took another bite of the hot, chewy pizza. “I’m horrified at how good this is.”

“And we don’t have to wash dishes!” Ihor tore off another slice. “Sailing wasn’t no hobby with my whole family, we all followed the sea. That’s how you say it, like Conrad?”

“‘Followed the sea’ is right, but that should be something like ‘wasn’t just’ or ‘wasn’t merely.’”

“Sailing wasn’t merely a hobby to my family. I like ‘merely.’ We all followed the sea. We followed it right out of Odessa—you live in Odessa, you figure out real young, out is the direction you want to go. And now I’m away from my family. That Captain Halleck, he’s strict, right?”

“‘Strict’ is the word.”

“But he don’t—doesn’t—hit and he says what it’s about. How I know I’m not with my family, eh? I was surprised my old man, he said, go with my blessing. Like he liked me.”

Whorf thought, If I don’t change the subject away from family I’m going to be homesick. He checked his pocket watch. “We should probably start walking. Some policeman might decide he doesn’t care about our uniforms, and decide to notice we don’t have a Chapel Pass.”

“Right.” Ihor rose and gazed at the scattered crumbs that were all that was left of the pizza. “The tide’ll turn in three hours, and I don’t think the Captain will want to bail us out of the slutter.”

“The slut—oh, the slammer. I can sure tell where your mind is, dude. You wish they’d throw us in the slutter.” That was the only area of endeavor valued by young men in which Whorf felt superior to Ihor.

Ihor laughed. “If they were going to do that, they should’ve did it—should have done it first thing this week so we’d have time to enjoy it. Anyhow, I don’t know English, but I do know tides, and it’s time to go, eh?”

The white ship gleamed at the far end of the street like the future itself. “With you all the way.”

^{3 DAYS LATER. PUEBLO. 12:15 PM MOUNTAIN TIME. THURSDAY, JANUARY 22, 2026.}

Back before, Johanna Schrenck had run a diner in downtown Pueblo for twenty years, sold it when her husband retired, and spent ten years working on a fresh-game cookbook by cooking all the things her husband caught or shot. But when the modern world had stopped working, so had Kurt Schrenck’s pacemaker.

Johanna had come home from the funeral, hauled up the old hand tools from the basement, paid orphaned kids with food and worked harder than any of them, and in a few weeks had converted her big old house back to a wood-fired kitchen, gravity coal furnace, and candle sconces. Just after the first EMP had destroyed the tech center at Pittsburgh, she had opened Johanna’s What There Is.

Since the Reconstruction Research Center had opened half a mile away, “this old frame house has hosted a lot of history,” Heather remarked as she sat down to dinner with James Hendrix and Lyndon Phat. “Today what there is, is elk stroganoff and trout cakes on polenta.”

James beamed. “History and current events in one convenient lunch—”

“Oh, god, you brought the critic,” Johanna said, stopping at their table; she generally waited the exclusive upstairs back room herself.

James protested. “I’ve never said—”

“You think loudly. When I finally give you what you deserve, your last thoughts will be ‘needs more coriander to balance the strychnine.’ First course today is raccoon bisque, coming up.” She hurried away.

“Listen.” Phat held up a palm. Rumble and clatter in the distance. “They started knocking down old buildings for the wall this morning. In a few weeks, I’ll be able to go to bed knowing ten guys on horses can’t ride in, shoot the watch, and throw a bomb through my window.”

“Except the Daybreakers don’t like horses or guns,” Heather said.

“It’s not just Daybreakers. Grayson might send someone; he assassinated poor old Cam Nguyen-Peters. I certainly would not put it past Allie Sok Banh. And there are rich men here in Pueblo angry about where I put the wall.”

“But they’re inside the wall—”

“Once the wall is built, it’ll be obvious if it’s an inside job. And a rich man without a fall guy is a cowardly thing indeed, as Thucydides could tell you.”

Heather laughed. “You and Graham Weisbrod would have understood each other. He wanted all us policy wonks to be able to debate the tax code by teasing out the wisdom in something Marcus Aurelius said to Socrates—”

“Ouch,” James said.

“What?”

“Marcus Aurelius lived about as long after Socrates as we do after Columbus.”

“Whatever. I’m still thinking about what you guys said about the ancient rhythm coming back. I liked it better when the past was history.”

Phat seemed to be listening to a faint, far away voice, perhaps from the distant mountains. “Maybe the past still is history, but the great joke on all of us is that it is, maybe, not the history it was before.”

^{4 DAYS LATER. CASTLE EARTHSTONE (NEAR THE FORMER TOWNS OF PALESTINE AND WARSAW, KOSCIUSKO COUNTY, INDIANA). 11:30 AM LOCAL SOLAR. MONDAY, JANUARY 26, 2026.}

Robert had to love it: this time, Daybreak had sent him a chick. The first Council of Daybreak herald, just before Christmas, had been a rude young guy with a bushy beard who came in giving orders like a highway cop ticketing your expired plate. The second herald, a couple weeks ago, had looked and dressed like Gandalf in the movies. And old Karl, who had founded this place, had looked like fuckin’ Santy Claus. Wonder why Daybreak hates razors?

But Daybreak-Enchantress-Chickie’s red-blonde hair, worn long and loose, looked clean and unratty. The soft white dress underneath her hooded cloak was clean and form-fitting. And my god, that’s a rack. Well, let’s get the talking part done and move on to the fun part.

They stood facing her at the outer gate of Castle Earthstone, where the barbed wire came up to a spline-curve wooden arch festooned with skulls, capped with a sign:

Robert was flanked by Bernstein, his chief steward, and Nathanson, who commanded his soldiers; behind them was an honor guard of six soldiers.

She nodded in a snotty who-are-you-anyway fashion that set his teeth on edge, even before she asked, “You are Robert Cheranko?”

“I am Lord Robert of Castle Earthstone. You may call me Lord Robert. What is your name and what is your business?” His thoughts added, And why don’t you fuckin’ mind it?

“The Council of Daybreak has charged me with a mission of grave import,” she said. “Word has reached even to the Guardian on the Moon that we have heard nothing from this Castle, Mister Cheranko—”

“Lord Robert,” he said.

There was a long pause. “Lord Robert, then.” She drew a breath and returned to her memorized text. “Two missions have been sent, and neither has returned. We on the Council of Daybreak have heard strange stories since the death of Lord Karl, and so I am sent to demand”—she saw him touch his belt knife—“uh, to ask, uh, Lord Robert to inform us—”

“Walk into the Castle with me,” he said. Carefully not looking to see if she followed, he turned and walked. A moment later, flustered, pretending she hadn’t just run to catch up with him, she was walking beside him.

He glanced sideways. Yeah, make’em bounce, baby. He wondered how Daybreak decided who to send out. First that bush-hippie cop, then that boogie-boogie wizard man, now this big-tits spirit girl. I guess they tried discipline, then spookiness, and now what? Sweet mama nature?

He smiled, and saw her notice and relax slightly. Wait till you find out.

When the bushy-bearded cop type had started right off giving orders, and Robert had told him to shut up, he’d raised his spirit stick and spoken some gibberish, and all of Robert’s men had had some kind of spaz attack.

But not Robert. He just threw a straight, hard punch, knocked the herald down, jumped on him, pulled his knife, and sliced the man’s carotid. By the time Robert’s deputies came out of their spaz attacks, he’d already picked out where to display the herald’s head.

Not long after, one of his scouts had brought back a brochure by some Pueblo guy named James Hendrix, A procedure for the negation of Daybreak-originated deep suggestions, which apparently they were using in the Provi and Temper states.

He made Bernstein, Nathanson, and the rest of his inner circle practice the resisting-Daybreak tricks daily. By the time old Gandalf came along, and launched into the religious-y spiritualisticalish intoning bullshit like he was going to fucking change Robert into a fucking frog, Robert just said, “Fuck Daybreak, it’s a load of shit.” The herald’s eyes opened in surprise, the two men escorting him reached for weapons, but Robert’s men had already been on them with knives and hatchets.

He really wanted to see how this one would go.

It went great. When Little Miss Shamaness saw the heads of the previous heralds on posts by Robert’s private drinking patio, she raised the spirit stick, but Robert plucked it from her hand and broke it over his knee. She came out of her seizure nearly mindless, the way the more severe Daybreakers tended to, and lay quietly weeping on the table while they cut her robe off.

When everyone had finished, Robert told his officers, “Give her a blanket and some moccasins and put her out on the road.”

Nathanson looked startled. “We gonna let her go?”

“Yeah.” To the shamaness, Robert said, “Go back to the Council, and tell them what we did to you and what we did to the ones before you. Tell them Lord Robert rules at Castle Earthstone, and Daybreak don’t say he do or he don’t.” He grabbed her face and pointed it toward himself. “Repeat.”

She did, voice low, eyes shut.

At the gate, when she didn’t begin to walk right away, he hit her ass with his walking stick. That got her going; she ran up the mud-and-snow trail, blanket and hair streaming behind her pale nakedness, like a deer that feels the hounds’ breath on its flanks.

“Why’d you let her go?” Bernstein asked.

“Do you think any of us will ever be forgiven, or allowed to come back into Daybreak, after that?” Robert asked. “Will Daybreak ever stop trying to catch us and kill us?”

Bernstein shuddered. “God, never.”

“Then we’re all in it together, ain’t we, for good, now?” Robert clapped the shorter, older man around the shoulders. “Walk with me. We have things to talk about.”

^{3 DAYS LATER. SOUTH OF MIAMI. 6:00 AM EASTERN TIME. THURSDAY, JANUARY 29, 2026.}

“Steady, Whorf, but stay alert. The charts are pretty near worthless from Key Biscayne south,” Captain Halleck said. He was comparing the air photo prints taken by the very last reconnaissance planes from USS Bush, two months before, with the old paper charts.

At the helm, Whorf was bringing Discovery into Biscayne Bay on the last of the high tide, letting it carry them in so that later the receding tide could help pull them back out. Sounding lines brought up so much muck and junk that all they really knew was that about thirty feet below them, thick muddy water became thin watery mud.

Morning wore on; when the wind shifted, the stench from the land was overpowering. Jorge relieved Whorf at eight. Not quite ready for his bunk, he went forward to see what the scientists were doing. Lisa Reyes, from Stone Lab, was fiddling with a microscope, the sort of thing that might have been a toy for a brainy eight-year-old a few decades ago. Satisfied with the light the mirror sent through the slide, she looked up, shoving stray black curls back under her bandanna. “Take a look, Whorf, and please draw.” She opened her record pad beside the microscope.

Whorf stretched his shoulder, a little stiff from four hours at the wheel, and flexed his hand. He bent carefully to look without disturbing anything; one eye saw through the scope and the other saw the page. He barely had to compensate for the rise and fall of the gentle sea. Quickly, he copied the dots, whorls, smears, and blobs his left eye saw onto the pad his right eye saw.

“Beautiful,” she said, as he finished. “Now, do you know what it’s a picture of?”

“It’s better if I don’t think of words while I draw. But that looks like—hunh. Are those E. coli?”

“Well, their ancestors were. I suspect Daybreak used them because they could pass through the human gut and spread rapidly.” She tapped the page. “And these?”

“A filament of pennate diatoms, right?”

“Right. I’m calling them Phaeodactylum morticomedentis incognans. I think I have the genus right—it’s pretty similar, anyway, to the Phaeodactylum that genetic engineers had been working with for a long time, so there would have been easily available commercial versions for Daybreak to modify. The species name just means ‘unknown dead-stuff-eater.’ The one thing we’ve established in the tanks so far is that coral love them, and that at least partly solves the mystery of what’s not here.”

Whorf asked, “What’s not here?”

“Yeah. Right over the horizon, we have a few million decaying bodies, plus hundreds of square miles of fertilized lawns and burned real estate, plus all those artificial materials that decayed—tires and gasoline, plastics and nylon, all that lawn furniture and all the polyester on the old people. All those nutrients lying out in the rain on soft, shifting soil must have washed down here. Biscayne Bay should be pretty much a brackish sewage lagoon, crawling with conventional decay bacteria and buried under algal blooms. Instead, those nutrients are being snaffled up by these diatoms that fast-track it into coral.”

“You think Daybreak meant to do that?”

“Well, it sure looks like in the next thousand years, Florida is going to get much bigger, as all those dead people and their stuff turn into coral reefs. Doesn’t that sound like a Daybreaker program?”

Whorf looked out over the barely-moving green sea. The overpowering reek brought home the realization that there was a thousand-square-mile mausoleum just over the horizon. Almost, he could imagine bony hands reaching out from the land, empty skulls staring out to sea and looking for him. “You sound like you approve.”

“I don’t approve of people being dead,” Reyes said. “Or the world being a wreck. But I do like seeing things grow.”

^{THE NEXT DAY. CASTLE EARTHSTONE. 7:15 AM LOCAL SOLAR. FRIDAY, JANUARY 30, 2026.}

Roger Jackson had been followed for ten days, ever since walking northeast out of Pale Bluff, the last secure town on the frontier with the Lost Quarter. He was used to the shadow extending beyond the tree, the flicker of motion at the corner of his eye that wasn’t a feral dog, the creak of a low branch in still air. He felt their eyes on him as he walked the empty streets of burned-out towns along the Wabash, and crossed the big bridge into the ruins of Terre Haute. When he walked along the brushy overgrown trail that followed the Tippecanoe they were still there.

He had seen no one till the sentries challenged him at the skull-festooned outer gate. After almost an hour of too many sentries, skulls, and pompous Shakespearo-Tolkienesque greetings, he now stood before Lord Robert and his… lordlings? flunkies? Flunklings, Roger decided.

Lord Robert smiled. “The door is closed, and everyone in here is past that ritual ceremony bullshit, ’kay? Let’s deal. So Daybreak is your enemy. It ain’t ours but it’s not exactly our friend either, and we don’t want it to own us like it does the tribes, got me? We’ve been using your James Hendrix’s pamphlet about turning off the seizures, and we want whatever else you know.”

Roger said, “You don’t need to trade for any of that information, and you won’t even if we go to war with you later. We want people to free themselves.”

Lord Robert tightened his lips and bared his teeth. “We’ve broke with Daybreak, and put all our necks in the noose. We’d like to ally with the biggest thug on the block.”

Roger made himself speak calmly. “Lord Robert, as long as we are being truthful, we know you, you personally, tortured our agent Steve Ecco to death. You’re asking us to forgive a lot.”

“Yeah, it’s a lot to forgive.” In the warm, flicking lantern light, Lord Robert’s face was as innocent of lines as a little boy’s. “But you need allies too.”

After a long silence, Roger Jackson said, “What did you have in mind?” He felt slightly sick.

^{4 DAYS LATER. CASTLE EARTHSTONE. 1:00 PM LOCAL SOLAR TIME. MONDAY, FEBRUARY 2, 2026.}

Roger Jackson crouched comfortably in the slave shack where they had hidden him from view, trying not to listen to Lord Robert’s speech to the people of Castle Earthstone outside in the main yard. He’s not much of a speaker, but then supposedly Moses wasn’t either.

So far it had been an hour-long bragalogue on the career of Lord Robert, Mighty in Battle. Quite a promotion for Robert Cheranko, electric company lineman less than two years ago, to Lord Robert, Torturer and Slayer of the Tied Up and Helpless.

The slave shack in which Roger was concealed was a lean-to against the main wall. Clean rugs and blankets were laid carefully over the pea-gravel floor; the fire pan from an old outdoor grill was embedded in one corner, with a chimney-duct making a Z shape across the ceiling to the high corner above the door. Probably fairly efficient, he thought. He smiled at himself for that; you could make an engineering student into a scout but you couldn’t make him not be an engineering student.

When Lord Robert finished bragging about what a brave guy he was, he revealed that he was also the true interpreter of the True Daybreak of Lord Karl, which had been perverted by the Council of Daybreak. True Daybreak was opposed to poverty, misery, slavery, and forced infanticide.

I notice rape is still okay, though, Roger thought.

In a few sentences, Lord Robert freed all the slaves, granted them rights to marry and raise children, and commanded a cleanup for the boneyard of dead slaves and exposed newborns, with proper graves, a memorial, and freedom for everyone to pray and leave flowers.

Of course “for the duration of this emergency, my officers and I will still need your complete loyalty—”

The roar of applause made Roger wonder if Robert had arranged for claques. Probably; he thought of everything else. Still, around here, a plain old feudal tyranny is reform.

He watched through a crack in the shed as the crowd’s passion and joy mounted; at the height of it, Lord Robert raised the Castle Earthstone spirit stick into the air, and the crowd shrieked with pure ecstasy.

“I free you! Follow the True Daybreak!” Robert smashed the spirit stick across his thigh, breaking it in half.

A Daybreak seizure struck two thousand people in the courtyard simultaneously, the soldiers as helpless as the slaves. Ignoring the thrashing, writhing bodies at their feet, Lord Robert’s officers walked quickly to positions in the courtyard, and stood waiting for the first ones to come out of the seizure.

Lord Robert walked directly from the rostrum to Roger. “You’ll want to get going before they revive.” His slight smile was barely a twitch. “Tell that fat bitch in Pueblo that we’ll keep talking with you. Central heat, clean sheets, and antibiotics would kind of put the fun back into being a lord, you know?”

^{3 DAYS LATER. PORT ST. JOE, FLORIDA. 10:15 AM CENTRAL TIME. THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 5, 2026.}

Whorf held his voice low and even. “Doctor Reyes, don’t move.”

“Hmm?” she asked, intent on lowering her sampling jar into the pond.

The cobra reared fractionally higher, intent on her leg. Whorf said, “Don’t—”

A black-powder pistol roared beside Whorf; the cobra’s head vanished and the body thrashed in the grass. Reyes jumped. Ihor said, “Sorry if I startled you.”

Reyes was staring at the writhing body in the brush. “Startle all you want.”

“Good shot,” Whorf said.

“Just had to be careful, ’cause I was only going to get one shot. Do we got—have—to worry about a… wife?”

“Mate. Maybe,” Reyes said. “But everything I know about cobras I got from Rikki-Tikki-Tavi. I don’t want to stay here, anyway.”

They watched the brush and their feet all the way back to the crumbling pavement, where Pembrooke, their local guide, arrived huffing and panting. Running in the heat had turned him an even deeper brick red than his normal sunburn, in contrast to his white mustache, eyebrows, and soaking-wet wisps of hair slipping out from under his straw hat. “I heard a shot.” He bent over, hands on his knees, to catch his breath.

Reyes said, “You said people had seen cobras near that pond? Ihor just shot one that was getting ready to strike me.”

“You’re sure you got it?”

Ihor nodded. “These big pistols take the head right off. It was maybe a meter, maybe more—look, he’s got it!”

An eagle rose from the thicket back by the pond, something black and writhing in its talons.

Pembrooke nodded. “All fresh and wiggly, yum yum.”

Whorf asked, “What are cobras doing in Florida?”

Pembrooke grimaced. “Back before, idiot collectors and dumbasses who wanted a scary pet smuggled them in. Now with Daybreak they’ve gotten loose. Officially.”

Reyes nodded. “But unofficially?”

“Well, walk with me.” On their way back to his house, they walked slowly because of the heat. “Since March, I’ve had eleven dead cobras brought in; Fish and Wildlife doesn’t send me a paycheck anymore but people are used to me being the guy for invasive species. Now, the mayor used to sell used cars, and the city council’s all his cousins, and the big local business was always tourism, so they want me to tell everybody we got two escaped pets out there making babies. But the old print encyclopedia I have says there’s ten to thirty in a litter, they don’t roam far from where they’re hatched, and they’re kind of shy—people would go months or years before finding out they had a pair under the house. Now I’ve seen eleven dead—twelve counting what that eagle was carrying off—and we’ve had two hundred and nine sightings, as much as forty miles apart. And three of my dead ones didn’t have that spectacle pattern on the hood; based on more old paper encyclopedia research, those were Chinese cobras.

“So the official position, I guess, must be that we’ve got one multispecies litter of exhibitionist cobras who decided to go on tour.”

“What do you think?” Reyes asked.

“I would think it was Daybreak making it hard to restart civilization, except it doesn’t make sense to me that a bunch of save-Mother-Earth types would introduce invasive species.”

Whorf shrugged. “They used giant H-bombs. Their moon gun is probably the highest tech still working in the solar system. And Daybreak itself was coordinated and maybe created on the Internet. They aren’t environmentalists, at least not as we used to know them, and if they’re back-to- nature it’s not necessarily nature’s idea of nature.”

Reyes frowned, looking at her wristwatch. “Based on what we’ve seen all along the Florida coast, we need to assemble a report on the possibility that Daybreak is trying to re-shape the environment to make it more human-hostile. Unfortunately most of the supporting material belongs to Mister Pembrooke, who will need to keep it here for further research, so Whorf, you copy drawings, and Ihor, you copy text. We’ll need to be getting back aboard when the tide turns, in six hours.”

“On the other hand,” Pembrooke said, “your working conditions include a fresh boiled crab lunch and nearly unlimited lemonade—warm, though, I’m afraid.”

“And I suddenly realized I really should stay and help,” Reyes said. “We all make sacrifices.”

^{2 DAYS LATER. PUEBLO. 9:00 AM MOUNTAIN TIME. SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 7, 2026.}

When Heather carried the big, flat object, draped in cloth, into what had once been the judge’s chambers, there were three knots of people around the big table.

At one corner, the scouts lounged in their Walmart/mountain-man mixture of deerskin shirts, heavy jeans, slouch hats, and knee-high moccasin boots. Larry and Debbie Mensche, father and daughter, sat on the table; Dan Samson leaned back in a chair with his feet almost on Larry, and Freddie Pranger and Roger Jackson draped themselves sideways over the arms of the chairs.

Conveniently near the luxury of the coffee urn, Quattro, Bambi, Nancy Teirson, Sally Overhaus, and Bret Duquesne, the aviators, stood in leather jackets, scarves, coveralls, soft moccasins, and confident wide stances, with their leather helmets under their arms or dangling by straps from their hands. Bret was explaining something complex about the southern route to Mobile Bay.

At the far end of the table from the scouts were Heather’s wizards: Ruth Odawa and her academic group of codebreakers, and analysts like Chris Manckiewicz and Jason Nemarec, and librarians and archivists like Leslie Antonowicz. In old, worn suit jackets, pullover shirts, and rumpled pants, they looked like a shabby faculty club that shopped at Salvation Army. They were mostly scribbling and muttering to each other, making lists and notes, starting sentences that other people finished. All of them were constantly checking everything with James, who sat at the center of the group. The way Arnie Yang used to, Heather thought, with a pang. James had grown to be a close friend and he was quite possibly better at the Chief of Intel job than Arnie had been—at least he wasn’t a traitor—but the lack of Arnie still felt like a missing limb. How many times did I stop him from explaining something that we’re only realizing now we needed to know? How many clues to our situation was he holding in his head, how many insights were there because our best analyst had been all the way inside Daybreak, and how much irreplaceable knowledge went through the trap in the scaffold and out of our reach forever? We were always so crazy to do something, anything, that we wouldn’t listen to him. It’s a miracle he ever got to tell us anything besides “I told you so.”

She had let Arnie himself talk her into hanging him, and though his reasoning had seemed right at the time, and emotionally it had made sense to execute the biggest traitor they’d ever caught, she and James had concluded later that it might have been Daybreak they had been talking to, and that it was protecting itself by eliminating the most valuable witness they had in custody.

James was in Arnie’s spot; she just had to hope that neither he nor she would ever be in his situation.

She looked around again: scouts, aviators, wizards. Like characters from too many different movies.

Carefully, she lifted the three-by-six-foot chart onto the table, gently because she wasn’t completely confident of every thumbtack and drop of glue. “Only James and General Phat have seen this before, though it’s not officially secret. Some of you will recognize this as a grandchild, or maybe a cousin, of a critical path chart,” she said. “I started it in March, when the RRC moved into Pueblo. Up here at the top is where we started from: May 2025. Here we are today in February, and down there at the bottom where it says DONE is where we’re going: the day when a fully Constitutional elected government takes over, on January 20, 2027.

“These ribbons running the length of the chart are the critical paths, the connected series of things that need to be done by a certain date. Green ribbons are clear sailing, nothing blocking the path; yellow ribbons are ones where there’s trouble, which usually means they end at a red card that names the trouble; red ribbons are ribbons that continue on beyond a red card, the roads we can’t get to right now.”

“There are no green ribbons touching DONE,” Quattro Larsen observed.

“Yet,” Heather said, quietly.

“Nineteen red cards,” Leslie Antonowicz said, counting. “And none of them is trivial. SECURE BORDER OF LOST QUARTER. DISRUPT OTHER TRIBAL-HELD AREAS. EMERGENCE OF NATIONAL CONSENSUS CANDIDATE FOR PRESIDENT. GRAYSON RENOUNCES TITLE NCCC. WEISBROD RENOUNCES TITLE ACTING PRESIDENT. MANBROOKSTAT JOINS AS NEW STATE. And I hate to point this out but a lot of the worst things happening aren’t on here.”

“Red cards aren’t necessarily the worst things happening, or the best things not happening,” Heather said. “Red cards are just the things that most interfere with putting a new President and Congress in place under the Constitution. We’re going to relaunch the Federal government in the middle of a famine, a civil war, and maybe the collapse of civilization.

“Objectively any of those are worse than not having a Federal government. The most comfortable parts of the country are back to about 1910 for standard of living, and in the worst-off areas we hold, it’s more like 1810, and in tribal territory, it’s the Dark Ages, at best. But none of that is the RRC’s concern right now. Our job is setting up and handing off to the Restored Republic. Once we do, dealing with the mess is their job.

“So I have red cards about tribals, not because they’re crazy, evil, and destructive bastards—although they are!—but because they will make the election difficult. I have red cards for getting Grayson to quit calling himself the NCCC, and the same deal about Weisbrod calling himself Acting President, because that makes either one of them a rallying point for sore losers to rebel against the Restored Republic in the name of the extinct one. That’s also why there’s a red card for finding someone that the whole country can vote for—because we also can’t afford too many sore losers, and we really can’t afford to have any important region with a majority of sore losers.” She purposely did not look at General Phat, but she could feel everyone else did. “So this chart has nothing about collapsing dams in Nevada and Arizona, or that cattle epidemic on the Great Plains, but I have a great big red card here for the Post Raptural Church because the Tempers declared them the National Church, and another one for Manbrookstat, because they have secret police, tribunal courts, and a state monopoly on exports. An established church and a fascist police state are not necessarily worse, or better for that matter, than collapsing dams and dying cattle, but they are not allowed under the Constitution, so we can’t have any such thing on January 20, 2027.

“Now, this is probably the last time we can all be together here, because we’re going to be busy. We have nineteen red cards to take off this chart, somehow, in the next nine months, so that twenty-four streams of green can flow down to that magic word DONE. I have you all here because it’s our last chance to talk, all together, before we plunge into it. Do we all still agree that Daybreak is planning a major tribal surge in the spring?”

Nancy Teirson spoke first. “Flying the Ohio Valley between the mouth of the Wabash and Fort Norcross, it’s one big camp after another. They’re packed.”

Roger Jackson said, “Coming back from Castle Earthstone I saw boat and canoe convoys on the rivers, some a mile long, all headed down to the camps.”

Heather took a deep breath. “Then does anyone see any reason to modify General Grayson’s plan to roll spoiling attacks down the Ohio and up the Wabash?”

Phat said, “I think General Patton said it best. ‘A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week.’”

Heather nodded. “Grayson is already at Fort Norcross as of today.”

“I flew him there on my way here,” Bret Duquesne explained. “Him and his wife. Picked him up outside Athens, after they faked a departure for a vacation on the Gulf Coast.”

Chris Manckiewicz added, “We don’t think that deception can hold more than three days.”

Heather asked Malcolm Cornwall, the only remaining meteorologist, “Forecast for the Ohio Valley for the next few days?”

“Clear and warming. Ground should stay hard another ten days; it froze pretty deep this winter. Ice will be breaking up below Uniontown in a week or two at most.”

“Last chance to say stop.” Heather looked around from face to face. “Ruth?”

“Everything from crypto looks like the tribals are not quite ready, and we are.”

“Freddie?”

Freddie Pranger drawled, “Wabash Valley’s quiet, right now. Ohio’s closer to ready to move. Just a matter of they gotta carry more stuff further to set up on the Wabash, like we always figured.”

“Roger?”

“No guarantees on what Lord Robert will do. He’s freakin’ nuts, Ms. O’Grainne. But he did just do several things that must’ve ticked Daybreak off pretty badly; they won’t be eager to be buddies with him again for a while.”

James Hendrix said, softly, “Agents in Athens, Olympia, Manbrookstat, San Antonio, and Tallahassee are reporting all the major decision makers are either with the program or at least won’t interfere. We’re as united as we are ever likely to be.”

“One more time, do I hear a ‘wait’?” Heather asked.

She watched the clock on the mantel, whose second hand was just crossing the two, and told herself wait, listen, give them a chance. It was so quiet that she heard every tick of the clock.

Just as the second hand crossed eight, Phat spoke. “So we don’t wait. Time to go. The die is cast.”

Slowly, emphatically, loudly, Larry Mensche began to clap, and the rest joined in.