The spirit I have seen May be the devil, and the devil hath power T' assume a pleasing shape; yea, and perhaps Out of my weakness and my melancholy, As he is very potent with such spirits, Abuses me to damn me. I'll have grounds More relative than this. The play's the thing Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king.

When Alicia said nothing, he raised an eyebrow at her. "You're not a fan?"

Fanning's moods were like this. He could go silent for days, brooding incessantly, then, without warning, would emerge. Lately he had adopted a tone of dry cheerfulness, almost smug.

"I can see why you like it."

" 'Like' may not be the word."

"The end doesn't make sense, though. Who's the king?"

"Precisely."

Wedges of sunlight peeked through the drapes, making pale stripes on the floor. Fanning seemed unperturbed by them, though his sensitivity was far greater than her own. For Fanning, the sun's touch was deeply painful.

"They're waking up, Tim. Hunting. Moving through the tunnels."

Fanning continued reading.

"Are you listening?"

He looked up with a frown. "Well, what of it?"

"That's not our agreement."

His attentions had returned to his book, though he was only pretending to read. She got to her feet. "I'm going to see Soldier."

He yawned, showing his fangs, and gave her a pale-lipped smile. "I'll be here."

Alicia cinched on her goggles, exited onto Forty-third, and headed north on Madison Avenue. Spring had come on sluggishly; only a few trees were budding out, and pockets of snow still lay in the shadows. The stable was located on the east side of the park at Sixty-third, just south of the zoo. She removed Soldier's blanket and led him out of his stall. The park felt static, as if caught between the seasons. Alicia sat on a boulder at the edge of the pond and watched the horse graze. He had taken on the years with dignity; he tired more easily, but only a little, and was still strong, his gait firm. Strand of white had appeared in his tail and whiskers, more on the feathers at his feet. She watched him eat his fill, then saddled him and climbed aboard.

"A little exercise, boy, what do you say?"

She guided him across the meadow, into the shade of the trees. A memory came to her of the day she'd first seen him, all that coiled wildness inside him, standing alone outside the wreckage of the Kearney garrison, waiting for her like a message. I am yours as you are mine. For each of us there will always be one. Past the trees she brought him to a trot, then a canter. To their left lay the reservoir, a billion gallons, lifeblood of the city's green heart. At the Ninety-seventh Street Transverse, she dismounted.

"Back in a jiff."

She made her way into the woods, removed her boots, and scaled a suitable tree at the edge of the glade. There, balanced on her haunches, she waited.

Eventually her wish was granted: a young doe tiptoed into view, ears flicking, neck bent low. Alicia watched the animal approach. Closer. Closer.

Fanning hadn't moved from the table. He looked up from his book, smiled. "What's this I see?"

Alicia heaved the doe off her shoulders, onto the bar top. Its head hung with the looseness of death, the pink tongue unspooling from its mouth like a ribbon.

"I told you," she said. "You really need to eat."

29.

The first gunshots rang out on schedule, a series of distant pops from the end of the causeway. It was one A.M. Michael was concealed with Rand and the others outside the Quonset hut. The door swung open with a blaze of light and laughter; a man stumbled out, his arm draped over the shoulders of one of the whores.

He died with a gurgle. They left him where he fell, blood darkening the earth from the wire's incision around his neck. Michael stepped up to the woman. She wasn't one he knew. Rand's hand was covering her mouth, dampening her terrified shrieks. She couldn't have been a day over eighteen.

"Nothing's going to happen to you, if you keep quiet. Understand?"

She was a well-fed girl with short, red hair. Her eyes, heavily made up, were open very wide. She nodded.

"My friend is going to uncover your mouth, and you're going to tell me what room he's in."

Cautiously, Rand drew his hand away.

"The last one, at the end of the hall."

"You're certain?"

She nodded vigorously. Michael gave her a list of names. Four were playing cards in the front room; two more were back in the stalls.

"Okay, get out of here."

She dashed away. Michael looked at the others. "We go in in two groups. Rand with me; the rest of you hover in the outer room until everybody's ready."

Eyes flicked up from the tables as they entered, but that was all. They were comrades, no doubt stopping by the hut for the same reasons everyone did: a drink, some cards, a few minutes of bliss in the stalls. The second group spread out across the room while Michael and the others faded to the hallway and took their positions outside the doors. The signal was passed, the doors were flung open.

Dunk was on his back, naked, a woman busily rocking astride his hips. "Michael, what the fuck?" But when he saw Rand and the others, his expression changed. "Oh, give me a break."

Michael looked at the whore. "Why don't you take a walk?"

She snatched her dress from the floor and ran out the door. From elsewhere in the building came an assortment of screams and shouts, the sound of glass breaking, a single gunshot.

"It was going to happen sooner or later," Michael said to Dunk. "Might as well make the best of it."

"You think you're so fucking smart? You'll be dead the minute you walk out of here."

"We've pretty much cleaned house, Dunk. I was saving you for last."

Dunk's face lit with a phony smile; beneath the bluster, the man knew he was looking into an abyss. "I get it. You want a bigger share. Well, you've certainly earned it. I can make that happen for you."

"Rand?"

The man moved forward, gripping the wire in his fists. Three others grabbed Dunk as he attempted to rise and shoved him hard onto the mattress.

"For fucksake, Michael!" He was squirming like a fish. "I treated you like a son!"

"You have no idea how funny that is."

As the wire slipped around Dunk's neck, Michael stepped from the room. The last of Dunk's lieutenants was putting up a bit of a struggle in the second stall, but then Michael heard a final grunt and the thump of something heavy striking the floor. Greer met him in the front room, where bodies lay strewn amid overturned card tables. One of them was Fastau; he'd been shot through the eye.

"Are we done?" Michael asked.

"McLean and Dybek got away in one of the trucks."

"They'll stop them at the causeway. They aren't going anywhere." Michael looked at Fastau, lying dead on the floor. "We lose anyone else?"

"Not that I've heard."

They loaded the bodies into the five-ton that waited outside. Thirty-six corpses in all, Dunk's inner circle of murderers, pimps, thieves: they'd be carted to the dock, loaded onto a launch, and dumped in the channel.

"What about the women?" Greer asked.

Michael was thinking of Fastau-the man had been one of his best welders. Any loss at this point was a concern.

"Have Patch put them under guard in one of the machine sheds. Once we're ready to move, get them on a transport out of here."

"They'll talk."

"Well, consider the source."

"I see your point."

The truck with the bodies drove away.

"I don't mean to press," Greer said, "but have you decided about Lore?"

The question had preoccupied Michael for weeks. Always he came back to the same answer. "I think she's the only one I trust enough to do this."

"I agree."

Michael turned toward Greer. "Are you sure you don't want to be the one to run things around here? I think you'd be good at it."

"That's not my role. The Bergensfjord is yours. Don't worry, I'll keep the troops in line."

They were quiet for a time. The only lights burning were the big spots on the dock. Michael's men would be working through the night.

"There's something I've been meaning to bring up," Michael said.

Greer cocked his head.

"In your vision, I know you couldn't see who else was on the ship-"

"Just the island, the five stars."

"I understand that." He hesitated. "I'm not sure how to put this. Did it ... feel like I was there?"

Greer seemed perplexed by the question. "I really couldn't say. That wasn't part of it."

"You can be honest with me."

"I know I can."

The sound of gunfire from the causeway: five shots, a pause, then two more, deliberate, final. Dybek and McLean.

"I guess that's that," said Greer.

Rand walked up to them. "Everybody's assembled at the dock."

Suddenly Michael felt the weight of it. Not ordering the deaths of so many; that had been easier than expected. He was in charge now-the isthmus was his. He checked the magazine on his sidearm, decocked the hammer, and slid the pistol back into its holster. From now on, he would never be apart from it.

"All right, that oil ships in thirty-six days. Let's get this show on the road."

30.

Iowa Freestate (Formerly the Homeland) Pop. 12,139 Sheriff Gordon Eustace began the morning of March 24-as he did every March 24-by hanging his holstered revolver on the bedpost.

Because a carrying a weapon wouldn't be right. It wouldn't be respectful. For the next few hours, he'd be just a man, like any man, standing in the cold on aching joints to think about the way things might have been.

He kept a room at the back the jail. For ten years, since the night he couldn't make himself return to the house, that was where he'd slept. He'd always considered himself the sort of man who could pick himself up and get on with things, and it wasn't as if he was the first person whose luck had turned bad. But something had gone out of him and never come back, and so this was where he lived, in a cinder-block box with nothing but a bed and a sink and a chair to sit in and a toilet down the hall, nobody but drunks sleeping it off for company.

Outside the sun was rising in a halfhearted, March-in-Iowa way. He heated a kettle on the stove and carried it to the basin with his straight razor and soap. His face looked back in the old cracked mirror. Well, wasn't that a pretty sight. Half his front teeth gone, left ear shot off to a pink nub, one eye clouded and useless: he looked like something in a children's story, the mean old ogre under the bridge. He shaved, splashed water on his face and under his arms, and dried himself off. All he had on hand for breakfast were some leftover biscuits, hard as rocks. Sitting at the table, he worked them over with his back teeth and washed them down with a shot of corn liquor from the jug beneath the sink. He wasn't much of a drinker, but he liked one in the morning, especially this morning of all mornings, the morning of March 24.

He put on his hat and coat and stepped outside. The last of the snow had melted, turning the earth to mud. The jailhouse was one of the few buildings in the old downtown that anybody still used; most had been empty for years. Blowing on his hands, he made his way past the ruins of the Dome-nothing left of it now but a pile of rocks and a few charred timbers-and down the hill into the area that everybody still called the Flatland, though the old workers' lodges had long since been dismantled and used as firewood. Some folks still lived down here, but not many; the memories were too bad. The ones who did were generally younger, born after the days of the redeyes, or else very old and unable to break the psychological chains of the old regime. It was a squalid dump of shacks without running water, miasmatic rivers of sewage running in the streets, and a roughly equivalent number of dirty children and skinny dogs picking through the trash. Eustace's heart broke every time he saw it.

It wasn't supposed to be this way. He'd had plans, hopes. Sure, a lot people had accepted the offer to evacuate to Texas in those first years; Eustace had expected that. Fine, he'd thought, let them go. The ones who remained would be the hearty souls, the true believers who viewed the end of the redeyes not merely as a liberation from bondage but something more: the chance to right a wrong, start over, build a new life from the bottom up.

But as he'd watched the population drain away, he'd begun to worry. The people who stayed behind weren't the builders, the dreamers. Many were simply too weak to travel; some were too afraid; others so accustomed to having everything decided for them that they were incapable of doing much of anything at all. Eustace had made a run at it, but nobody had the slightest idea how to make a city work. They had no engineers, no plumbers, no electricians, no doctors. They could operate the machines the redeyes left behind, but nobody knew how to fix them when they broke. The power plant had failed within three years, water and sanitation within five; a decade later, almost nothing functioned. Schooling the children proved impossible. Few of the adults could read, and most didn't see the sense of it. The winters were brutal-people froze to death in their own houses-and the summers were almost as bad, drought one year and drenching rains the next. The river was foul, but people filled their buckets anyway; the disease that everyone called "river fever" killed scores. Half the cattle had died, most of the horses and sheep, and all of the pigs.

The redeyes had left behind all the tools to build a functioning society but one: the will to actually do it.

The road through the Flatland joined the river and took him east to the stadium. Just beyond it was the cemetery. Eustace made his way through the rows of headstones. A number were decorated-guttered candles, children's toys, the long-desiccated sprigs of wildflowers exposed by the retreating snow. The arrangement was orderly; the one thing people were good at was digging graves. He came to the one he was looking for and crouched beside it.

NINA VORHEES EUSTACE.

SIMON TIFTY EUSTACE.