He recognized the truth of this. All his study and practice, yet he'd failed to notice the obvious fact, which Pim had laid bare to him in mere seconds: signing was a language of complete forthrightness. Within its compact rhetoric, little space remained for evasion, for the self-protecting half-truths that were most of what people said to one another.

Do you want to?

She stood and faced him. Okay.

So they did. He closed his eyes, thinking this was something he should do, tilted his head slightly, and leaned forward. Their noses bumped, then passed each other, their lips meeting in a soft collision. It was over before he knew it.

Did you like it?

He barely believed this was actually happening. He spelled out his answer: Lots.

Open your mouth this time.

That was even better. A soft pressure entered his mouth that he realized was her tongue. He followed her lead; now they were kissing for real. He had always imagined the act to be a simple grazing of surfaces, lips upon lips, but kissing was, he now understood, far more complex. It was more a mingling than a touching. They did this for a while, exploring one another's mouths, then she backed away in a manner that indicated that the kissing was over. Caleb wished it weren't; he could have done it for a long while more. Then he understood the nature of the interruption. Sara was calling to them from the bottom of the dam.

Pim smiled at him. You're a good kisser.

And that was all, at least for a time. In due course, they had kissed again, and done different things as well, but it hadn't amounted to much, and other girls had come along. Yet always those slender minutes on the dam remained in his mind as a singular point in his life. When he joined the Army, at eighteen, his CO said he should find someone back home to write to. He chose Pim. His letters were all cheerful nonsense, complaints about the food and lighthearted stories of his friends, but hers were unlike anything he'd ever read, richly observant and full of life. At times they read like poetry. A single phrase, even describing something trivial-how the sun looked on leaves, a passing remark by an acquaintance, the smell of cooking food-would catch his mind and linger for days. Unlike sign language, with its unequivocal compactness, Pim's words on the page seemed to overflow with feeling-a richer kind of truth, closer to the heart of her. He wrote to Pim as often as he could, hungering for more of her. It was her voice he was hearing-hearing at last-and it wasn't long before he began to fall in love with her. When he told her, not in a letter but in person when he returned to Kerrville on a three-day pass, she laughed with her eyes, then signed, When did you finally figure it out?

To these memories, Caleb drifted into sleep. Sometime later he awoke to find her gone. He didn't worry; Pim was something of a night owl. Theo was still asleep. Caleb slid into his trousers, lit the lantern, got his rifle from its place by the door, and stepped outside. Pim was sitting with her back against the stump he used for splitting.

Everything okay?

Douse the light, she signed. Come sit.

She was wearing only her nightgown, though it was actually quite chilly; her feet were bare. He took his place beside her and extinguished the lantern. In the dark, they had a system. She took his hand and in his palm signed in miniature: Look.

At what?.

Everything.

He understood what she was saying, between the lines. This is ours.

I like it here.

I'm glad.

Caleb detected movement in the brush. The sound came again, a grassy rustling to their left. Not a raccoon or possum-something larger.

Pim sensed his sudden alertness. What?

Wait.

He relit the lantern, casting a pool of light on the ground. The rustling was coming from several places now, though generally in the same direction. He positioned the rifle under his arm and clenched it to his side with his elbow. Holding the lantern in one hand, the rifle in the other, he crept forward, toward the heart of the sounds.

The light caught something: a flash of eyes.

It was a young deer. It froze in the light, staring at him. He saw the others, six in all. For a moment nothing moved, man and deer regarding one another with mutual astonishment. Then, as if guided by a common mind, the herd turned as one and burst away.

What could he do? What else could Caleb Jaxon do but laugh?

26.

"Okay, Rand, try it now."

Michael was lying on his back, wedged into the slender gap between the floor and the base of the compressor. He heard the valve opening; gas began to move through the line.

"What's it say?"

"Looks like it's holding."

Don't you dare leak, Michael thought. I've given you half my morning.

"Nope. Pressure's dropping."

"Goddamnit." He'd checked every seal he could think of. Where the hell was the gas coming from? "The hell with it. Shut it off."

Michael wriggled free. They were on the lower engineering level. From the catwalk above came the sounds of metal striking metal, the crackling hiss of arc welders, men calling to one another, all of it amplified by the acoustics of the engine compartment. Michael hadn't seen sunshine for forty-eight hours.

"Any ideas?" he asked Rand.

The man was standing with his hands in the pockets of his trousers. There was something equine about him. He had small eyes, delicate-seeming in his strong face, and black hair wavy that, despite his age-somewhere north of forty-five-failed to show more than scattered threads of gray. Calm, reliable Rand. He had never spoken of a wife or girlfriend; he never visited Dunk's whores. Michael had never pressed, the matter being one of supreme unimportance.

"It could be someplace in the charger," Rand suggested. "Tight fit, though."

Michael looked up at the catwalk and yelled, to whomever might hear him, "Where's Patch?"

Patch's real name was Byron Szumanski. The nickname came from the anomalous square of white in his otherwise coal-black stubble. Like many of Michael's men, he had been raised in the orphanage; he'd done a stint in the military, learning a thing or two about engines along the way, then worked for the civilian authority as a mechanic. He had no relatives, had never married and professed no desire to do so, possessed no bad habits Michael knew of, didn't mind the isolation, wasn't a talker, took orders without complaint, and liked to work-perfect, in other words, for Michael's purposes. A wiry five foot three, he spent whole days in pockets of the ship so cramped that another man wouldn't have been able to draw a breath. Michael paid him accordingly, though nobody could complain about the wages. Every cent Michael made from the stills went straight to the Bergensfjord.

A face appeared above: Weir's. He drew his welder's mask up to his forehead. "I think he's on the bridge."

"Send somebody to get him."

As Michael bent for his tool bag, Rand rapped him on the arm. "We've got company."

Michael looked up; Dunk was coming down the stairs. Michael needed the man, just as Dunk needed him, but their relationship was not an easy one. Needless to say, the man knew nothing of Michael's true purpose. Dunk regarded the Bergensfjord as an eccentric distraction, an elaborate pastime on which Michael wasted his time-time better spent putting more money in Dunk's pockets. That the man had never bothered to wonder just why Michael needed to refloat a six-hundred-foot freighter was just more evidence of the man's limited intelligence.

"Great," Michael said.

"You want me to get some guys together? He looks pissed."

"How can you tell?"

Rand moved away. At the base of the stairs Dunk halted, propped his hands on his hips, and surveyed the room with an expression of weary irritation. The tattoos on the man's face ended abruptly at his former hairline. A lifetime of hard living had done him few favors in the aging department, but he was still built like a tank. For entertainment, he liked to lift a truck by its bumper.

"What can I do for you, Dunk?"

He had a way of smiling that made Michael think of a cork in a bottle. "I really should get down here more often. I don't know what half this stuff is. Take those things over there." He wagged a meaty finger, thick as a sausage.

"Water jacket pumps."

"What do they do?"

The day was getting away without much to show for it; now he had to deal with this. "It's kind of technical. Not really your thing."

"Why am I here, Michael?"

Guessing games, as if they were five years old. "A sudden interest in marine repair?"

Dunk's eyes hardened on Michael's face. "I'm here, Michael, because you're not meeting your obligation to me. Mystic's open for settlement. That means demand. I need the new boiler up and running. Not later. Today."

Michael aimed his voice at the catwalk. "Has anybody found Patch yet?"

"We're looking!"

He turned toward Dunk again. What an ox the man was. He should've been strapped to a plow. "I'm kind of busy at the moment."

"Allow me to remind you of the terms. You do your magic with the stills, I give you ten percent of the profits. It's not hard to remember."

Michael yelled up to the catwalk again. "Sometime today would be nice!"

The next thing Michael knew, he was rammed up against the bulkhead, Dunk's forearm pressing against his throat.

"Do I have your attention now?"

The man's broad, pitted nose was inches from Michael's; his breath was sour as old wine.

"Easy, amigo. We don't have to do this in front of the kids."

"You work for me, goddamnit."

"If I could point something out. Breaking my neck might feel good in the moment, but it won't get you any more lick."

"Everything okay, Michael?"

Rand was standing behind Dunk with two others, Fastau and Weir. Rand was clutching a long wrench; the other two had lengths of pipe. They were holding these implements in an offhand manner, as if they'd merely picked them up in the course of a day's work.

"Just a little misunderstanding," Michael replied. "How about it, Dunk? We don't need to have a problem here. You've got my attention, I promise."

Dunk's arm pressed tighter against his throat. "Fuck you."

Michael glanced over Dunk's shoulder at Weir and Fastau. "You two, go check on the stills, see what the situation is, then report back to me. Got it?" He returned his attention to Dunk. "Got this covered. I'm hearing you loud and clear."

"Twenty years. I've had it with your bullshit. This ... hobby of yours."

"Totally understand your feelings. I spoke out of turn. New boilers up and running, no problem."

Dunk kept glowering at him. It was hard to say how things were going to go. Finally, giving Michael a last hard shove against the bunker, Dunk backed away. He turned toward Michael's men and nailed them with a hard look.

"You three should be more careful."

Michael withheld his coughing until Dunk was out of sight.

"Jesus, Michael." Rand was staring at him.

"Oh, he's just having a bad day. He'll cool off. You two, back to work. Rand, you're with me."

Weir frowned. "You don't want us to go to the stills?"

"No, I don't. I'll look in on them later."

They walked away.

"You shouldn't goad him like that," Rand said.

Michael paused to cough again. He felt a little foolish, though on the other hand, the whole thing had been strangely gratifying. It was nice when people were themselves. "Have you seen Greer anywhere?"

"He took a launch up the channel this morning."

So, feeding day. Michael always worried-Amy still tried to kill Greer every time-but the man took it in stride. Except for Rand, who'd been with them from the beginning, none of Michael's men knew about that part of things: Amy, Carter, the Chevron Mariner, the jugs of blood that Greer dutifully delivered every sixty days.

Rand glanced around. "How long do you think we have before the virals come back?" he asked quietly. "It's got to be close by now."

Michael shrugged.

"It's not that I'm not grateful. We all are. But people want to be ready."

"If they do their damn jobs, we'll be long gone before it happens." Michael hitched his tool bag onto his shoulder. "And for fucksake, will somebody please go find Patch. I don't want to wait around all morning."

It was evening when Michael finally emerged from the bowels of the ship. His knees were killing him; he'd done something to his neck, too. He'd never found the leak, either.

But he would; he always did. He would find it, and every other leak and rusty rivet and frayed wire in the Bergensfjord's miles of cables and wires and pipes, and soon, in a matter of months, they would charge the batteries and test-fire the engines, and if all went as it should, they'd be ready. Michael liked to imagine that day. The pumps engaging, water pouring into the dock, the retaining wall opening, and the Bergensfjord, all twenty thousand tons of her, sliding gracefully from her braces into the sea.

For two decades, Michael had thought of little else. The trade had been Greer's idea-a stroke of genius, really. They needed money, a lot of it. What did they have to sell? A month after he'd shown Lucius the newspaper from the Bergensfjord, Michael had found himself in the back room of the gambling hall known as Cousin's Place, sitting across a table from Dunk Withers. Michael knew him to be a man of extraordinary temper, lacking all conscience, driven by only the most utilitarian concerns; Michael's life meant nothing to him, because no one's did. But Michael's reputation had preceded him, and he'd done his homework. The gates were about to open; people would be flooding into the townships. The opportunities were many, Michael pointed out, but did the trade possess the capacity to meet a rapidly growing demand? What would Dunk say if Michael told him that he could triple-no, quadruple-his output? That he could also guarantee an uninterrupted flow of ammunition? And furthermore, what if Michael knew about a place where the trade could operate in complete safety, beyond the reach of the military or the domestic authority but with quick access to Kerrville and the townships? That, in sum, he could make Dunk Withers richer than he could imagine?

Thus was the isthmus born.

A great deal of time was wasted at the start. Before Michael could so much as tighten a single bolt on the Bergensfjord, he had to win the man's confidence. For three years he had overseen the construction of the massive stills that would make Dunk Withers a legend. Michael was not unaware of the costs. How many fistfights would leave a man bloodied and toothless, how many bodies would be dumped into alleyways, how many wives and children would be beaten or even killed all because of the mental poison he provided? He tried not to think about it. The Bergensfjord was all the mattered; it was a price she demanded, paid in blood.

Along the way, he laid the groundwork for his true enterprise. He began with the refinery. Cautious inquiries: Who seemed bored? Dissatisfied? Restless? Rand Horgan was the first; he and Michael had worked the cookers together for years. Others followed, recruited from every corner. Greer would leave for a few days, then return with a man in a jeep with nothing but a duffel bag and his promise to stay on the isthmus for five years in exchange for wages so outrageous they would set him up for life. The numbers accumulated; soon they had fifty-four stout souls with nothing to lose. Michael noticed a pattern. The money was an inducement, but what these men really sought was something intangible. A great many people drifted through their lives without a feeling of purpose. Each day felt indistinguishable from the last, devoid of meaning. When he unveiled the Bergensfjord to each new recruit, Michael could see a change in the man's eyes. Here was something beyond the scope of ordinary days, something from before the time of mankind's diminishment. It was the past Michael was giving these men and, with it, the future. We're actually going to fix it? they always asked. Not "it," Michael corrected. "Her." And no, we're not going to fix her. We're going to wake her up.