"So what are we?" Connor asked. "Ghosts rattling around inside all that stuff they built?"

Now that you mention it, Jared thought, yes. Topanga didn't prompt such gloomy reflections. Topanga had always been way the hell out in the boonies. Being out in the boonies and built to human scale was the whole point to Topanga. Long before the Change, someone had written of Los Angeles, The future is here-and it's coming to get you. That future might be past now, but it sure left a big corpse.

As Jared and Connor came to the north end of the Valley, things began opening out again. There were empty lots that looked as if they'd been empty since before the Change. The vineyards and half-grown olive trees came from after the Change. Wine from these parts would probably be crappy, but even the nastiest plonk, as Jared had reason to know, beat hell out of no wine at all.

A little naked blond boy with a stick watched chickens pecking under the olives. Jared smiled; he could have seen the same kind of thing in Topanga. "This looks more like home," he remarked.

"It's too wide," Connor answered. The Valley was a valley, yeah, but a big valley. Topanga Canyon was, and looked like, a canyon. Jared's son went on, "I feel like a bug on a plate."

Jared had the same feeling. There were mountains on the horizon, but you could tell that horizon lay a long way away. He wondered how he would do somewhere like Kansas or Nebraska, where all you could see was miles and miles of miles and miles. Not too well, was his best guess. But, while he was more likely to end up in the Midwest than in, say, Tibet, he wasn't much more likely, so he didn't waste time worrying about it.

"This has to be Chatsworth Boulevard," he said after a while. They swung the horses down the narrower road. Calling it a boulevard didn't make it one. Houses sat on big lots. Horses grazed. Knights-Chatsworth Lancers-practiced with spear and sword. Archers sent arrows whistling toward far-off bales of straw. Men wrestled under the shade of trees. When war was personal again, training was like paying life insurance premiums.

Just past the first street east of Topanga Canyon Boulevard, they rode up to a house set well back from the road. A tough-looking fellow opened a gate in the rusty chain-link fence fronting Chatsworth Boulevard. "You the Topangans?" he asked. When Jared and Connor nodded, the man went on, "Semaphore said you were on your way. Well, c'mon in. The boss wants to hear what you got to say."

Bruce Delgado scowled at the men from Topanga. One was older than he was, the other plainly a chip off the old guy's block. "You're telling me how I can fight a war?" Bruce growled-Eddie and Garth were listening, so he had to sound tough. "You got your nerve."

The older Topangan-Jared Tillman-shook his head. "That's not what I said," he answered. "I'm telling you what we'll do if you set fires. If you don't, we won't. We think fires are a nasty way for anybody to fight."

As a matter of fact, Bruce thought the same thing. That didn't necessarily mean he wouldn't do it. Plenty of weapons were nasty but effective. The military history books filling the shelves of his study showed that all too well.

He spread his hands now, and sipped from a glass of brandy. His henchmen had their own, and he'd given the Topangans some, too. The kid had drunk most of his. The older man had sense enough to go easy. Oh, well. It had been worth a try.

Leaning forward, he said, "You think you can sneak firebugs past my patrols? Good luck!"

"You think you can stop us if we try?" Jared Tillman returned. "Good luck to you."

There was a bluff called. Eddie clucked sadly. People in the Valley-in all of Southern California-were too thin on the ground for patrols to do much good. Moving at night, holing up in empty buildings (and how many zillion were there to hole up in?) by day, the Topangans almost surely could get up into the hills north of what had been the 118 Freeway. Wait till the winds started blowing, pour the oil, drop the matches . . . It could work.

"We're not even fighting," Bruce protested, again hoping he could sound as sincere as his father getting a lemon off the lot.

"I hope we don't," Jared Tillman said. "But you people have been scoping us out for a while now. Maybe you think that even though it didn't work the last couple of times, it will now. We're ready-that's the biggest part of what I've got to say, aside from talking about fire."

He made more sense than Bruce wished he did. But the Chatsworth Lancers had to use their army every now and then. Just having it wasn't good enough. An army that sat around or rode herd on peasants all the time started crumbling. It was like a football team that practiced endlessly without ever playing a game.

The other thing, of course, was that when you had an army and didn't use it, somebody else would stab you in the back and take it for a spin himself. Somebody like Garth, say. Bruce didn't think Garth was disloyal-the pup would have had an accident by now if he did. But somebody like him. Somebody who hadn't fought in several wars and didn't know there was no such thing as an ironclad guarantee, double your money back, for victory.

Bruce wondered if Tillman was delivering his warning not least to stir up that kind of trouble among the Lancers. He wouldn't be the only one who kept an eye on the past to guide him through the present. The Topangans were dopers, yeah, but not dopes. They knew what kind of position they held, and they knew how to defend it.

He had to answer the hippie, and in a way that wouldn't turn his own men against him or make them think he'd gone soft. "We'll do what we do," he said, his voice as harsh as he could make it. "You do what you do, and we'll see who comes out on top in the end."

"It doesn't have to be an I-win-you-lose kind of game, you know," Jared Tillman said sadly. "Can't we do better than that? How many million died, just in this county, when the Change came? Do we still have to do all the same stupid shit they did in the old days?"

"Are we not men?" It wasn't philosophy-it was a Devo song you still heard on the radio when Bruce was a kid. Or maybe it was a Devo song and philosophy both. "You think human nature's changed? That would take more than what we went through more than thirty years ago."

"You know what? I'm afraid you're right," the Topangan said. "You know what else? It's a goddamn shame. Okay. Do your worst, and we'll do our best-"

"Your worst, you mean." Bruce knew stolen Churchill when he heard it, and he wouldn't let Jared Tillman get away with that. "Like you wouldn't jump us, start inching into the Valley, if you saw the chance. Yeah, right. Tell me another one."

He didn't look at Jared's face. He looked at Connor's. Sure as shit, the kid dreamt of empty houses and offices and shops to plunder. The Valley wasn't Egypt, dry enough to preserve things for thousands of years. But it hadn't been thousands of years. It had been only thirty. Plenty of stuff from the old days, the great days, was still good, still undiscovered, just waiting for tomb raiders smart enough or lucky enough to grab it.

Like me. Bruce jerked a thumb at the door. "Go on. Beat it. You said what you had to say. Now the time for talking's done. Now it's time for doing."

They left. He sat in his fancy office chair, thinking hard. He wondered if you could find enough people to cut a big firebreak through the brush on the other side of the freeway. Not without regret, he decided he probably couldn't, not if he wanted to eat through the winter. Subsistence sucked, when you got right down to it.

He remembered the days when poor people had been fat. If you were fat now, you were either rich, rich, rich or you had something wrong with you. People worked a lot harder than they had when machines did the tough jobs for them. They had less to show for it, too. No wonder they weren't fat. The wonder was that they were here at all.

Too damn bad the Topangans were here. With a little luck, before too long they wouldn't be any more.

Jared and Connor rode south down De Soto, a mile or two east of Topanga Canyon Boulevard. Jared wanted to see more of the Chatsworth Lancers' domain than the chief thoroughfare. A dead McDonald's sat at the corner of De Soto and Devonshire. Actually, it wasn't quite dead: kids played on the slides and crawled through the translucent plastic tubes, squealing the way they had before the Change. Jared had scorned the Golden Arches then. To him, they'd been a big part of what was wrong with America at the end of the twentieth century.

What was wrong with America a good way into the twenty-first century was a lot more obvious. It had nothing to do with French fries and burgers the consistency of hockey pucks. The grease, the salt, the yum . . .

The salt . . . "You know," Jared said thoughtfully, "if the Lancers attack us and we win, we ought to stop selling them sea salt for a while, see how they like that."

"What's so special about sea salt?" Connor asked.

"It's got iodine in it," his father answered. Just because electricity and internal combustion and explosives were gone, that didn't mean knowledge was. People couldn't use it all any more-but they still could use some. "Without iodine, people get goiters." He put a hand to the base of his neck to show what he meant. "They get stupid, too-not real, real stupid, but stupid. It used to be a big deal. Then they put iodine in everybody's salt, and it wasn't. Since the Change, it is again, unless you live near the ocean."

"They could probably get it from one of those far-off places-Santa Monica, or even Long Beach," Connor said. "They'd have to pay through the nose, though." He smiled, liking the idea.

Jared also liked it. He wasn't sure Pete Reilly would; he didn't know how much Topanga made from selling its larger neighbor sea salt. Well, if the Lancers attacked-and if they lost-he could bring it up.

One of the street signs at the corner of De Soto and Vanowen still stood. Seeing it made Jared guide his horse north, which he hadn't intended to do till he got to Ventura Boulevard. Just on the off chance . . . Connor came with him. He could see they were heading back toward Topanga Canyon Boulevard.

Shouting kids played soccer on a vacant lot that likely hadn't been vacant when the Change came. The way the grass grew suggested the shape of a vanished building. Chances were some long-ago fire took it down. It must have been a calm day, or more would have burnt. Soccer was finally conquering the remains of America. All it needed was a ball and a couple of goals, and you could mark those off with rocks if you didn't even have posts and a crossbar. This wasn't the kind of soccer that would take anyone to the World Cup, but there was no World Cup any more, so who cared?

The next good-sized street north of De Soto was Canoga. As the Topangans neared the corner of Vanowen and Canoga, a slow grin spread across Jared's face. "I'll be damned," he said. "It is still here! C'mon-we'll stop and get some food."

"Okay by me," Connor said.

SIERRA'S, the sign announced in script, and, under that and in smaller letters, SINCE 1959. The red-brown paint and the white background were just the way Jared remembered, and just as neat-it had obviously been touched up several times since he last ate here. One or two lightbulbs remained in their sockets after all these years, useless these days except maybe for swank.

Most of the old parking lot was a vegetable garden now. The people who ran the place had put big windows in the east-, south-, and west-facing walls. Sierra's had been a dark place before, even in the daytime. That didn't work so well now. The hitching rail and trough in front of the door were new. Jared and Connor let their horses drink a little, tied them up, and gave them feedbags before going inside.

"Welcome, strangers," said a gray-haired Hispanic man in a leather apron.

"I'm no stranger," Jared said, "even if I haven't been here since 1997 or so."

"Welcome anyway," the gray-haired man said. "I was here then, too, working for my father. What brings you back after so long?"

"I'm up from Topanga with my son here," Jared answered. "I thought I'd see if the place was still around-and here you are."

"Here we are," his host agreed. "Well, come in, sit down, and get something to eat. First drink is on the house."

The beer wasn't Dos Equis, the way it would have been. It was homebrew, like all beer these days-good homebrew, though. Choice of meat in the tacos and enchiladas was pork or chicken. Jared wasn't sure it all tasted the way he remembered, but it tasted like Mexican food from a place you'd want to come back to. Both meals came to two dollars. Prices weren't what they had been before the Change. Jared set a dozen sandwich quarters on the table.

"You're too kind," the gray-haired man murmured as he scooped up the money.

"Worth it," Jared said. "Eating here makes me feel like I'm my son's age." He clicked his tongue between his teeth. "Been a few changes since then, though."

"S, seor, just a few," his host agreed gravely. "In the kitchen, for instance. No gas stove now. No running water, either. But we keep going on. What else can we do?"

"We're lucky if we can do that much." Jared got to his feet. So did Connor, a beat later. "Way too many people didn't."

"S, seor," the other survivor repeated. "Where do you go now?"

"Back to Topanga," Jared said. "But you can bet I'll come again the next time I head north-say, after your country and mine fight another war."

"It will be a shame if they do." The gray-haired man clicked his tongue between his teeth. "Topanga. Another country. Who would have imagined that when we were young and one flag flew from sea to shining sea?"

"Not me. Not you, either. We've got it anyway. Stay well, friend." With a nod, Jared walked out. His son followed. They swung up onto their horses and headed for their home in that other country.

There were trails through the Santa Monica Mountains. Back before the Change, this had been the Santa Monica Mountains Recreational Area. The way Connor's father and the other old farts told it, people who worked in offices in the Valley and the rest of L.A. drove in cars to the edge of the mountains and then hiked for the fun of it.

Those trails were mostly overgrown now. That they were there at all, though, argued that the old farts weren't just blowing smoke. Connor didn't grok it. Why would you hike for the fun of it? Hiking was work, often hot, sweaty work. Few things you had to do seemed like fun. Most of the time, he had to get from hither to yon on foot.

He was patrolling north and east of the village of Topanga, near Eagle Spring. He wanted to fill his canteen at the spring. Most years, water flowed even through the dry season. Here at the end of summer, it wouldn't be a lot, but he didn't need a lot. He didn't have to have any-the canteen wasn't empty-but he wanted to top up when he got the chance.

Faint in the distance, horns bleated. He cocked his head to one side, gauging the direction. Sure as hell, that racket came from Glenview, where Topanga kept its border with the Valley. "Shit," Connor muttered. The Chatsworth Lancers were attacking after all. They wouldn't blow the alarm for anything less important.

Or was it a fire? He scanned the horizon, or the limited part of it he could see. No plumes of smoke jumping into the sky. The Riders, then. He wanted to run back to the village and join up with his father to fight off the invaders. He wanted to, but he didn't. His orders were to stay on patrol even if the fighting started. Compared to the Topangans, Bruce Delgado had men falling out of his ass. He might use some to distract with a big, showy fight while others cornholed the canyon from behind.

Connor got to the spring. After he filled the aluminum bottle, he splashed water on his face and arms. It wasn't savagely hot, the way the weather could get this time of year, but it was warm. The water felt good. He took a few steps down the trail to the east, then froze. Somebody was coming the other way.

Quite a few somebodys were coming, as a matter of fact. They weren't making a lot of noise, not any one of them, but they weren't tiptoeing along, either. You couldn't very well tiptoe in country like this. And they were talking among themselves, the way people will just because they're people.

Connor flopped down behind some bushes near the trail. He put a dart in his blowgun and set several more on the ground beside him so he could reload in a hurry with minimum motion. He wanted to make as much trouble as he could, then bug out. The blowgun was the right weapon for that. It was silent and next to invisible. If only it had more range!

When you're nineteen, though, you don't really believe anything bad can happen to you. Not by accident do very young men fill out armies. Here came the soldiers from the Valley. They were on foot and not especially looking for trouble. The guy at the front had what looked like a page torn from a pre-Change road atlas. Peering down at it, he said, "Looks like we're coming to a spring."

"Good deal," said someone right behind him. "I'm dry."

They were within twenty-five yards. Connor took a deep breath, aimed, and blew. The business end of his dart was a tenpenny nail. It caught the guy in the lead right between the eyes. He went down on his face.

"The fuck?" said the Valley man behind him. Then he fell over, too. Connor got him square in the right eye. That was fool luck, and he knew it.

"What's wrong with those assholes?" another soldier asked, and bent down to see. He had his helmet slung on his belt so his brains wouldn't bake as he tramped along. They got punctured instead. Connor put the dart an inch or two behind his ear. Down he went, grabbing at his head.

Which was pressing things as far as they'd be pressed. Connor did his best snake impression to slither away. He left his blowgun and the other darts he'd set out. He'd already done more damage than he'd expected. As soon as he got in back of a reasonably thick tree, he scrambled to his feet and ran like hell. The Valley soldiers were still milling around by their fallen buddies. Every second they gave him was like a lifeline.

Then one of them yelled, "There goes the hippie freak!" That wasn't how Connor thought of himself, but the Valley guys wouldn't be in any mood to discuss semantics. They'd want to kill him, fast or maybe slowly.

Wheet! That was an arrow whistling by. Arrows could kill you from a lot farther away than darts could, and Connor didn't even have the blowgun any more. He didn't feel so brave any more, either. All of a sudden, this wasn't a game or an adventure. They were playing for keeps. He had to play the same way. If he won, he'd get to keep his life.

Thunk! That was another arrow, this one slamming into a tree. He ran harder than ever. He knew the trail better than they did, and some parts of it took a good deal of knowing. But some of the bastards behind him would be faster than he was, damn them. And if he tripped over a root and landed on his face, it was all over but the shrieking.

Whatever fickle gods there were doled out a little more luck for him. The one who tripped and did a faceplant was the fastest Valley soldier. The two men on his heels fell over him, too. By the way they yelled, they'd busted ankles or dislocated shoulders or maybe even both. Hope it's nothing trivial, Connor thought, stealing a phrase from his father.

It was a little more than a mile back to the village. Connor somehow kept ahead of the cursing Valley soldiers chasing him. Because he was literally running for his life, he had an incentive they didn't.

And he got one more break when he got to Topanga village. The men from the Valley could have torn it up in spite of his arriving ahead of them, only a detachment from Fernwood farther down the canyon was on its way north to the fight at Glenview, the only one it knew about.

"The Lancers are coming! The Lancers are coming!" Connor wheezed, making like Patrick Henry or Paul Revere or whoever that guy back in the old days had been.

"Say what?" demanded the man in charge of the little contingent from Fernwood.

Connor pointed in the direction from which he'd come. The sun glinted off the helmets and shields of the Valley men. If that didn't get the message across, he had no idea what would.

"Holy shit!" said the Fernwood commander, so evidently it did. He pointed in the general direction of Eagle Spring, too. "Come on, boys!" he yelled. "We've got this to take care of before we go on to the other. Fred, you head on up to the mouth of the canyon and let 'em know we'll be late."

"I'll do it," Fred said, and took off up Topanga Canyon Boulevard. The rest of the Fernwood men drew swords and slung bows and ran toward the houses on the east side of the road. If you were going to fight, fighting from cover beat the hell out of doing it any other way.

Connor trotted back to the east, too. Now he drew his short sword-he hadn't had time to worry about it before. He wondered if he was too tired to fight. Then he realized he had to be fresher than the Valley men.

Arrows whistled by, going in both directions. One of them pierced a fighter from the Valley about halfway between the pit of his stomach and his belly button. He folded up like a concertina, clutching at himself. The screams that burst from his throat had nothing to do with language. They were animal sounds of agony. They made Connor's stomach want to turn over. Anywhere on the trail back from Eagle Spring, he might have made noises like that. Oh, the arrow that got him would have gone in from back to front, but that wouldn't have changed the kind of shrieks he let out.

Brandishing his short sword, he rushed at a Valley man. The other fellow, similarly armed, traded a few strokes with him. Neither of them got home on the other, though Connor had to leap back at the last instant to keep a thrust from shish-kebabing him.

The Valley man didn't press his advantage. His comrade's anguished howls seemed to unsettle him worse than Connor. He must have decided that fighting somebody, anybody, even a little bit satisfied his honor. Now that he'd done it-and now that he'd discovered he and his friends weren't taking the village by surprise, the way they must have hoped-he seemed content to fall back into the brush and woods again.

Connor wasn't all that thrilled about chasing him. The Valley men could stage some kind of ambush, and they might come out on top with it. The Fernwood detachment didn't go charging into the undergrowth, either. They'd made sure the village was okay and would stay that way, which was plenty for them.

"Look at the gutless wonders skedaddle!" a Topangan whooped. "They won't stop till they get back up to the Valley!" Connor hoped the man was right. He thought he was. This prong of Bruce Delgado's attack hadn't worked. Maybe the men would be able to get to Glenview and help the Lancers. But weren't they more likely just to give it up as a bad job?

Up on the crest above the village to the west, a semaphore tower's arms began to wigwag. With luck, the towers would take news of the attack and its failure to the defenders at Glenview. Maybe somebody up there would be paying attention. Or maybe everybody would be too goddamn busy trying to keep the Lancers from breaking through.

A Topangan came up to the gutshot Valley fighter. He knelt and asked him something, probably Do you want us to try to patch you up or just to get it over with? When he drew his belt knife and slit the other man's throat, Connor knew what kind of answer he'd got.

Suddenly, Connor realized he'd killed three men himself. He swallowed bile again, even though the screams were gone. That blowgun was good for something besides bagging rabbits and doves for the pot. He wouldn't have wanted a big old nail driven hard into his head.

There was something in the Bible about that, but he couldn't remember what. Maybe he'd look it up when he got the chance. He was glad his father'd taught him to read. It was a good way to kill time when nothing else was going on. It was even useful every now and then, though it wasn't such a big deal as it would have been before the Change.

He hoped Pop was okay. Right this minute, all he could do was hope.

"Let 'er go!" the boss of the trebuchet crew shouted.

Jared sprang away from the windlass, along with all the others who'd been raising the heavy counterweight. Down it thumped. Up flew the long throwing arm. Away went the hundred-pound boulder from the leather pouch at the end of the arm. It flew through the air with the greatest of ease. The Chatsworth Lancers and their friends on foot all did their best not to be under it when it came down a quarter of a mile away.

A quarter of a mile . . . That was about the best you could do without explosives to help. "Crank it up, boys!" the crew boss yelled. "Shoulder to shoulder, we'll fling another boulder, and fight for the town we adore!"