"He wasn't going to make the rendezvous. He was skittish from the start and getting more so the closer he got to Rosario's."

"But now we don't have Peralta. There's no evidence."

"You wouldn't have him even if they had met. Not until Peralta tried to cash in. Now you've got Franks on your side."

"We do?"

"He's expecting someone to call on him tomorrow morning. His office. I didn't say who. Didn't know if you'd want to talk to him or the captain or whoever, but he'll cooperate. He'll help you sting Peralta and testify."

"So he never went to Rosario's?"

"Not last night. After our little talk, he went home. I followed. He was playing with his kids in the front yard when I left." He scratched his head. "You might want to send someone to keep an eye out. Be a shame if Peralta got to him tonight."

Lieutenant Durant swore and threw down a territorial twenty-dollar bill. "Pay my bill." She tucked El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha under her arm and left, hips swinging.

Though Kimble thought he would regret it in the morning, he watched until she was out of sight.

AFTER supper Kimble told Thay Hahn that he would be leaving the next day after an eleven o'clock meeting with Bentham, and immediately regretted it.

"Eleven? Ah, good. We can sit for six hours." He laughed at Kimble's expression. "It will be my gift." Suddenly Thay Hahn reached out with both his hands and grasped Kimble's head. "What happened?"

Kimble blinked. "Thay Hahn, I may not tell what I do in the day."

Thay Hahn rapped him on top of the head. "Not that! I don't care what you were doing or who you were talking to. There was a moment when things came undone, yes? And when it came back together there was something more there."

Kimble's eyes went wide. "The street shook and a great bell rang and, yes, I realized something when it was done."

Thay Hahn released his head. "Were you meditating?"

Kimble licked his lips. "Not intentionally. I was watching some ... thing and I was trying to relax, to observe without judgment, without-"

"Without attachment," said Thay Hahn, with certainty.

Kimble turned his hands palm up. "Perhaps."

"Have you done cong an study? You may know it by the Japanese word, koan."

Kimble shook his head. "I've read about it. Sensei said she wasn't qualified. That it was enough to sit and breathe for now."

"Until it is time to stop breathing, it is always good to breathe. Take this, if you will: A man walks through the territory carrying his Buddha nature in a metal cup. The bugs come and eat the cup. Where is his Buddha nature?"

Kimble opened his mouth and Thay Hahn held up his hand. "Not now. Tomorrow, after you sit."

Kimble slept hard and deep and if he dreamed he did not remember. When Thayet came to waken him, he was sitting upright in bed. "Yes," he said first. "Time to sit."

They did six sitting and two walking meditations and he was shocked at how quickly it went.

"Do you have an answer for me?" Thay Hahn asked.

"Will you hit me with your sandal?"

"Do you want to be hit with my sandal? Doesn't your sensei hit you enough?"

"I don't know where his Buddha nature is, but it was never in the cup."

Thay Hahn put his hands together. "Travel safely."

"YOU don't follow orders very well," commented Captain Bentham.

Kimble felt his ears go hot. He hated blushing. He knew he had the criticism coming, but Lieutenant Durant was also in the room, and this morning he was feeling less certain about his actions of the night before.

"Any word on Pritts?"

"And you like to change the subject," Bentham said. "No. Nothing yet."

"Okay. Did you make contact with Franks? Is that working out?"

Lieutenant Durant started to speak but stopped herself. She looked sideways at Captain Bentham, who gave her a short nod. "Yes," she said. "I read him the riot act this morning in his office. He's talking and he'll cooperate. I strongly urged him to confess to his wife, too. If he ends up testifying in court, it could come out. Better if he opens that can of worms now."

Kimble nodded "I'm glad. During meditation this morning I had a panic attack. I was convinced they'd killed him during the night."

Bentham, for some reason, looked pleased at this confession. "Right. Something like that could've happened. Oddly enough, it could've happened if you'd said nothing and Franks had still skipped the rendezvous." He raised his bushy eyebrows. "You know, this reminds me of your incident back in Perro Frio."

This seemed unfair. "I didn't kick anybody in the head!"

Bentham laughed. "That's not what I was referring to. It was the other thing that you learned."

Kimble thought for a moment, recalling the conversation. "Sometimes things aren't black and white?"

"Exactly. Sometimes things aren't black and white and sometimes strictly following orders is the wrong thing to do." He pulled an envelope out of an inside pocket and handed it to Kimble.

"Not another court order?"

"No. It's your GED results. You averaged 765."

Kimble blinked. "Uh, is that good?"

"Out of 800. You needed to average 450 to pass. You're in the top five percent."

"Congratulations," said Lieutenant Durant, and she kissed him on the cheek.

For the second time that morning Kimble turned bright red.

11.

Broken Glass Ruth wanted a small greenhouse so that she could grow vegetables in the winter like Mr. Covas, so, one sunny day in late March, Kimble floated down the Rio Grande on a plywood deck over bundles of netted plastic soda bottles. Mr. Covas' cousin, Julio, accompanied him.

They'd entered the river between the rubble of Algodones and Bernalillo, moving across a bug-free stretch of the Santa Ana Pueblo. Julio's unmarried sister, Patrice, drove them and the disassembled raft by wagon.

"In a week, then, right?"

"Seguro," said Julio, "where the Puerco joins the Grande."

The river widened to a lake where the old 550 bridge had collapsed. Flood detritus, helped by beavers, had plugged gaps, but the bugs still mined the metal from the dry side, following the embedded metal reinforcing rods and wire mesh like the veins of ore they were. Occasionally they'd succeed too well and a part of the dam would collapse, but then the beavers would drop trees into the water and guide them across the gap.

The dry parts of the dam were covered by an iridescent mass of aluminum, steel, copper, and crystalline blue.

"I've never seen so many bugs," said Kimble.

Julio laughed. "Wait until you see downtown."

They slid the raft over the dam at its lowest point and ran down the tumble of rapids to the river below.

They spent their first night on a sandbar near Corales, cooking with driftwood. The sandbar was less than a foot above water level and before the sun had dropped over the horizon, they'd made sure it was clear of any bugs.

"This bar wasn't here when we came five years ago," Julio said. "The river's always changing."

In the morning, they waded across to the west bosque and cautiously moved up the banks toward old Corrales, but the bugs were too thick.

"It's the old steel erosion bars."

Kimble raised his eyebrows.

"They were girders welded into crosses, no, that's not right, more like axis, like in math? X, Y, and Z? They put these through the brush, near the old embankments, to catch stuff during the floods. It looked like those obstructions they put on the Normandy beaches to keep troops off. There was steel cable strung between them. I think that's why the bugs are still here."

"Perhaps metal debris, too?" suggested Kimble. "Washed into the river during heavy rains and piled up here."

"Could be."

They retreated to the raft and headed farther downstream. The dam and lake formed by the collapsed Alameda Bridge got them past the bugs. The lake had flooded the bosque, submerging the erosion control beams there. Julio and Kimble floated the raft up to the old recreation area, a green area where the most metal had been vinyl-covered steel park benches. They beached the raft and threaded their way past an old strip mall into the old residential areas.

Bugs make a mess of frame houses. They go for metal window frames and metal roofs first, but there's so much metal used: nails, anchors, galvanized wall plate and joist hangers, and even the chicken wire fastened to the siding to anchor the stucco. Sometimes the houses remain standing, a fragile honeycombed froth of a building, but more often they come down, collapsing onto their slabs or into their crawlspaces. The bugs take longer to mine out the reinforcing rods in the slabs and foundations.

But sometimes the collapse is slow and surprisingly gentle.

That's where they looked for the glass panes they needed.

It was sweaty work. They needed the best light to make sure they didn't accidentally step on a bug, so they tended to work in the hottest part of the day, while the sun was high. They moved the debris cautiously, lest they uncover chunks of copper plumbing or conduit still being consumed by the bugs. They averaged a few panes of glass a house, doing better with vinyl-framed windows. If it was an old metal casement window, the edges of the glass tended to be uneven-not broken, but eaten where the bugs went right through the glass to get at the metal. Provided the pane had a large enough expanse of glass, they took these anyway.

They managed to pull several chunks of heavy glass from a bank, useless for window glazing because of its thickness, but almost as good as Jemez obsidian for flaking into cutting edges.

The second day, pushing aside some cinder block, Kimble uncovered a home security system. There was metal. But worse, an old sealed lead-acid battery shorted as he shifted the material above. The sudden surge in EMF was almost as bad as stomping a bug. He threw himself sideways, rolling across shards of glass and stucco and scrambled away as the sudden buzzing of descending bugs rose to a shriek.

He got down the bank without any bug burns but he was bleeding from several cuts.

Julio, walking back from taking a load of glass down to the bank, saw the incident from a safe distance. "Wow. You moved before I saw anything."

"Heard 'em," said Kimble.

Julio looked puzzled.

"That high-pitched sound they make. Like, oh, super high crickets."

"Huh. I don't hear that. I hear the buzzing when they fly."

Kimble shrugged.

Julio helped him clean out the cuts. "Young ears, I guess. You never used an MP3 player, I bet."

They had to abandon a small pile of their salvaged glass panes near that house.

Water flowed over the top of the Alameda dam and fell six feet straight down so they spent most of the next morning portaging glass around the dam. It would've taken half an hour if they could've stuck to the shoreline, but the bugs were there in droves and they had to go inland a bit to find a safe path.

This time of year, the water's source was snowmelt and it felt like it, but after hauling the raft and glass around, Kimble let himself fall full length into the shallows.

"We had good luck near Montano, last time," said Julio.

The bridge at Montano had not become a dam. The main span had fallen one section at a time and the first section had sunk deep into a sandy area of the riverbed, leaving most of it above water. This had allowed the bugs to eat it to rubble and floods had pushed the chunks downriver. The water rushed through the gap and down a set of rapids. They had no choice but to run it. Bugs heavily infested both banks along the old thoroughfare, so portaging the glass around was more dangerous than the river.

Though the run down the rapids took less than ten minutes, they spent half the day packing the glass between layers of dried reeds and lashing them securely to the middle of the raft. They caromed off rocks twice and Kimble stopped worrying about the glass and instead worried about the raft itself, but despite the shaking, they reached the still water below the rapids with both glass and craft intact.

The houses closest to the river in this part of the city had been large, with correspondingly large lots. The yards, once xeriscaped or green with grass, were now brush and weeds and young woods, fortunately threaded with game trails.

"The deer came back with a vengeance, and the coyotes, and the rabbits," said Julio. He set some snares in the rabbit runs. "But you really have to watch out for the dogs." Which is why they both carried spears.

They hit the jackpot working a street farther from the river than Julio had reached on his previous trip.

"Looks like it was a solarium."

On the south side of a large adobe house-almost a mansion-an exterior wall had been filled, ceiling to floor, with double-glazed windows, admitting light. The panes, two feet by three, had been set directly in the adobe. When the metal roof had been eaten, the rains had turned the exposed wall to mud, sloughing and sagging gently over the years. The glass had settled with the wall and was embedded now in loose dirt and rotting straw, overgrown with bindweed and goat-heads.

It took them less than half a day to pull more intact panes than they could carry on the raft and, though they once had to drive off a pack of feral dogs by throwing rocks, the worst thing they had to contend with was the quarter-inch barbs of the puncture vine.

"I hate goat-heads!" Kimble repeated for the twentieth time.

Julio nodded in agreement.