"He's your friend. You tell me what it's all about."

Peter took a long breath. "I wish I could. I haven't seen the guy in over twenty years. On top of which, we tell the trade we're out of ammo, we've tipped our hand. Dunk will be sitting in this chair in a weekend."

"So threaten him. He comes through for us or that's it, the deal's off, we storm the isthmus and put him out of business."

"Across that causeway? It'd be a bloodbath. He'll smell a bluff before I stop talking."

Peter leaned back in his chair. He imagined himself laying out Apgar's terms to Dunk. What could the man do but laugh in his face?

"This is all stick. There's no way it's going to work. What can we offer him?"

Gunnar scowled. "What, besides money, guns, and whores? Last time I checked, Dunk had all of those in plentiful supply. Plus, the guy's practically a folk hero. You know what happened last Sunday? Out of the blue, a five-ton full of women shows up at the encampment in Bandera where they're housing the road crews. The driver has a note. 'Compliments of your good friend Dunk Withers.' On a fucking Sunday."

"Did they send them away?"

Gunnar snorted through his nose. "No, they took them to church. What do you think?"

"Well, there has to be something."

"You could ask him yourself."

A joke, but not entirely. There was also Michael to consider. Despite everything, Peter liked to think that the man would at least agree to talk to him.

"Maybe I'll do that."

As Gunnar rose, Chase appeared in the doorway.

"What is it, Ford?" Peter asked.

"We've got another sinkhole. A big one. Two houses this time."

This had been happening all spring. A rumbling in the earth; then, within moments, the ground would collapse. The largest hole had been over fifty feet wide. This place really is falling apart, Peter thought.

"Anybody hurt?" he asked.

"Not this time. Both houses were empty."

"Well, that's lucky." Ford was still looking at him expectantly. "Is there something else?"

"I'm thinking we should make a statement. People are going to want to know what you're doing about it."

"Such as what? Telling the ground to behave itself?" When Ford said nothing, Peter sighed. "Fine, write something up, and I'll sign it. Engineering on the case, situation in hand, et cetera." He raised an eyebrow at Ford. "Okay?"

Apgar looked like he was about to laugh. Jesus, Peter thought, it never ends. He got to his feet.

"Come on, Gunnar. Let's get some air."

He had become president not because he desired the job particularly but as a favor to Vicky. Right after her election to a third term, she had developed a tremor in her right hand. This was followed by a series of accidents, including a fall on the capitol steps that had broken her ankle. Her handwriting, always precise, decayed to a scrawl; her speech adopted a weirdly monotonic quality, lacking all inflection; the tremors spread to her other hand, and she began to make involuntary rocking motions with her neck. Peter and Chase had managed to hide the situation by keeping her public schedule to a minimum, but halfway into her second year, it became clear that she could no longer continue. The Texas Constitution, which had superseded the Code of Modified Martial Law, allowed her to name a president pro-tem.

At the time, Peter was serving as secretary of territorial affairs, a position he had taken on midway through her second term. It was one of the most visible jobs in the cabinet, and Vicky made no secret of the fact that she was grooming him for something more. Still, he had assumed that Chase would be the one to step in; the man had been with her for years. When Vicky called Peter to her office, he wholly expected a meeting to discuss the transition to Chase's administration; what he found was a judge with a Bible. Two minutes later, he was president of the Texas Republic.

This was, he came to understand, what the woman had intended from the start: to create her successor from the ground up. Peter had stood for election two years later, won easily, and ran unopposed for his second term. Some of this was his personal popularity as a chief executive; as Vicky had predicted, his stock was very high. But it was also true that he had assumed the office at a time when it was easy to make people happy.

Kerrville itself was on its way to becoming irrelevant. How long before it was just one more provincial town? The farther out people settled, the less the idea of centralized authority held sway. The legislature had relocated to Boerne and almost never met. Financial capital had followed human capital to the townships; people were opening businesses, trading commodities at market-established prices, negotiating life on their own terms. In Fredericksburg, a group of private investors had pooled their money to open a bank, the first of its kind. There were still problems, and only the federal administration possessed the resources for major infrastructure projects: roads, dams, telegraph lines. But even this wouldn't last indefinitely. When Peter was being honest with himself, he understood that he was not so much running the place as guiding it into port. Let Chase have his chance, he thought. Two decades in public life, with its endless closed-door bickering, was plenty for any man. Peter had never farmed; he'd never so much as planted a tomato. But he could learn, and best of all, a plow had no opinions.

Vicky had retired to a small, wood-frame house on the east side of town. A lot of the neighborhood was empty, folks having cleared out long ago. It was getting dark when he stepped onto the porch. A single light was burning in the front parlor. He heard footsteps; then the door opened to reveal Meredith, Vicky's partner, wiping her hands on a cloth.

"Peter." About sixty, she was a petite woman with sharp blue eyes. She and Vicky had been together for years. "I didn't know you were coming."

"I'm sorry, I should have sent word."

"No, come in, of course." She stepped back. "She's awake-I was just about to feed her some supper. I know she'll be happy to see you."

Vicky's bed was in the parlor. As Peter entered, she glanced his direction, her head jerking side to side against the elevated pillows.

"Ssss ... bout tahm ... Misss ... ter ... P ... p ... reeee ... sa ... dent."

It was as if she were swallowing the words, then spitting them out again. He drew a chair to the side of her bed. "How are you feeling?"

"Toooo ... day ... n ... not ssso ... b ... b ... a-duh."

"I'm sorry I've been away."

Her hands were moving about restlessly on the blanket. She gave a crooked smile. "Thasss ... oh ... k ... kay. Aaas you ... caaan see ... I ... fff ... been ... bizzz ... ee."

Meredith appeared in the door with a tray, which she placed on the bedside table. On the tray were bowl of clear broth and a glass of water with a straw. She cupped the back of Vicky's head to lift it forward from the pillow and tied a cotton bib around her neck. Night had fallen, making mirrors of the windows.

"Do you want me to do it?" Peter asked Meredith.

"Vicky, do you want Peter to help you with dinner?"

"W ... w ... why ... n ... n ... not."

"Small sips," Meredith told him, and patted him on the arm. She gave him the faintest of smiles; her face was heavy with fatigue. The woman probably hadn't slept a solid night in months and was simply grateful for the help. "If you need me, I'll be in the kitchen."

Peter began with the water, holding the straw to Vicky's lips, which were flaked with dryness, then moved on to the broth. He could see the tremendous effort it required for her to swallow even the tiniest amount. Most of it dribbled from the corners of her mouth; he used the bib to wipe her chin.

"Sss ... sss ... fun ... neee."

"What's that?"

"You ... ffff ... fff ... eed ... ing ... me. Like ... a ... bay ... beeee."

He gave her more of the broth. "The least I could do. You spoon-fed me more than once."

Her neck made a sinewy pumping motion as she tried to swallow. It exhausted him, just watching it.

"How ... ssss ... the ... cam ... p ... p ... aign?"

"Not really gotten started yet. Been a bit tied up."

"Yyyyy ... you're ... f ... full of ... sh ... sh ... shit."

She had him dead to rights, but of course she always did. He fed her another spoonful, without much luck. "Caleb and Pim left for the townships today."

"You're ... j ... j ... ust ... blue. It ... will ... lll ... passss."

"What? You don't think I can farm?"

"I ... I kn ... know ... you ... P ... eter. You'lllll ... go ... c ... c ... craze ... ee."

She said nothing else. Peter put the bowl aside; she'd consumed only a fraction. When he looked up again, Vicky's eyes were closed. He doused the lamp and watched her. Only in sleep did the restless turmoil of her body cease. A few minutes passed; he heard a sound behind him and saw Meredith standing in the kitchen doorway.

"It happens like that," the woman said quietly. "One minute she's there, the next ..." She left the thought unfinished.

"Is there anything I can do?"

Meredith placed one hand on his arm and met his eye. "She was so proud of you, Peter. It made her so happy, watching all you've done."

"Will you call me if you need me? Anything at all."

"I think this was a perfect visit, don't you? Let's let it be the last one."

He returned to Vicky's bedside and lifted one of her hands from the blanket. The woman didn't stir. He held it for a minute, thinking about her, then leaned down and kissed her on the cheek, something he had never done before.

"Thank you," he whispered.

He followed Meredith to the porch. "She loved you, you know," the woman said. "It wasn't the kind of thing she said very often, not even to me. That's just how she was. But she did."

"I loved her, too."

"She knows you did." They embraced. "Goodbye, Peter."

The street was silent, no lights burning. He touched a finger to his eye; it came away wet. Well, he was the president, he could cry if he wanted to. His son was gone; others would follow. He had entered the era of his life when things would drop away. Peter tipped his face to the sky. It was true, what they said about the stars. The more you looked, the more you saw. They were a comfort, their watchful presence a force of reassurance; yet this had not always been so. He stood and looked at them, remembering a time when the sight of so many stars had meant something else entirely.

25.

They spent the night in Hunt, sleeping on the ground by the wagon, and arrived in Mystic Township on the second afternoon. The town was a threadbare outpost: a small main street with just a few houses, a general store, and a government building that acted as everything from the post office to the jail. They passed through and followed the river road west through a tunnel of thickening foliage. Pim had never been to the townships before; everything she saw seemed to fascinate her. Look at the trees, she signed to the baby. Look at the river. Look at the world.

The day had begun to fade when they reached the homestead. The house stood on a rise looking down toward the Guadalupe, with a paddock for the horses, fields of black soil between, and a privy in the rear. Caleb stepped down from the buckboard and reached up for Theo, who was sleeping in a basket.

"What do you think?"

Since Theo's birth, Caleb had made it his habit to speak and sign simultaneously whenever the boy was present. With nobody else around, he would grow up thinking that talking and signing were really no different from each other.

You did all this?

"Well, I had help."

Show me the rest.

He led her inside. There were two rooms on the main floor, with real glass windows and a kitchen with a stove and a pump, and a flight of stairs that led to a loft where the three of them would sleep. The floor, of sawn oak planks, felt solid underfoot.

"It'll be too hot to sleep inside in the summer, but I can build a sleeping porch out back."

Pim was smiling; she looked as if she couldn't believe her eyes. When will you have time for that?

"I'll do it, don't worry."

They unloaded a night's worth of gear. In a few days, Caleb would have to return to town, an eight-mile ride, to begin the process of securing stock: a milk cow, a goat or two, chickens. His seeds were ready to plant; the soil had been turned. They would be growing corn and beans in alternating rows, with a kitchen garden out back. The first year would be a race against time. After that, he hoped, things would settle into a more predictable rhythm, though life would never be easy, by any means.

They ate a simple dinner and lay down on the mattress he had moved inside from the wagon to the floor of the main room. He'd wondered if Pim would be afraid or at least anxious, being out here, just the three of them. She'd never spent a night beyond the city walls. But the opposite seemed true; she appeared completely at ease, eager to see how their situation unfolded. Of course, there was a reason. The things that had happened to her when she was a young girl had become for her a source of strength.

Pim had crept upon his life slowly. At the beginning, when Sara had brought her home from the orphanage, she had hardly seemed like a person to him. Her blunt gestures and guttural groans unnerved him. Extending even the simplest kindness was met with incomprehension, even anger. The situation had started to change when Sara taught Pim sign language. They moved through this improvisationally, beginning by spelling out every word, then advancing to whole phrases and ideas that could be captured with a single swoop of the hand. A book from the library had been involved, but later, when Kate gave it to Caleb to study, he realized that many of the gestures Pim used were made up: a bubble of private language that only she and her mother-and, to a degree, Kate and her father-shared. Caleb was, by this point, fourteen or fifteen. He was a clever boy, unused to problems he could not solve. Also, Pim had begun to seem interesting to him. What sort of person was she? The fact that he could not communicate with her as he could with everybody else was both frustrating and attractive. He made a point of carefully observing Pim's interactions with members of her family to encode these gestures into memory. Alone in his room, he practiced in front of a mirror for hours, signing both sides of dialogues on arbitrary topics. How are you today? I am very well, thank you. What do you think of the weather? I enjoy the rain but am looking forward to warmer days.

It became important that he delay the unveiling of his new abilities until he had acquired the confidence to engage her on a range of subjects. The opportunity presented itself on an afternoon outing their families had taken together to the spillway. While everyone else was enjoying their picnic by the water, he had climbed to the top of the dam. There he saw Pim, sitting on the concrete, writing in her journal. She was always writing; Caleb had wondered about this. She glanced up as he made his approach, her dark eyes narrowing on him in their intense way, then looked away dismissively. Her brown hair, long and glossy and tucked behind her ears, flared with captured sunshine. He stood for a moment, observing her. She was three years older than he was, basically an adult in his eyes. She had also become very pretty, though in a no-nonsense way that came across as condescending, even a little icy.

His presence was obviously unwelcome, but it was too late to back out. Caleb walked up to her. She regarded him with her head slightly cocked to the side, wearing an expression of bored mirth.

Hello, he signed.

She closed her book around her pencil. You want to kiss me, don't you?

The question was so unexpectedly direct that he actually startled. Did he? Was that what this was all about? Now she really was laughing at him-laughing with her eyes.

I know you know what I'm saying, she signed.

He found the answer with his hands: I learned.

For me or for yourself?

He felt caught. Both.

Have you kissed anyone before?

He hadn't. It was something he had been meaning to get around to. He knew he was blushing.

A few times.

No, you haven't. Hands don't lie.