"I'm jerking your chain, man." He points back over his shoulder at the committee meeting. "These dingleberries are in there for forty-five minutes arguing about toilet paper rationing, even though the world is about to explode. It's fucking retarded."

"I see," I say, speaking slowly to control the anger in my voice. "If that's how you feel, why are you here?"

"Resources. Recruitment. And because I happen to know that the world is not about to explode. Right Nico?"

"Damn right," she says.

"The woman that I'm looking for is named Julia Stone." I give him the campus address that I have from the file: Hunter Hall 415.

"She won't be there," he says. "Nobody's stayed put."

"I figured. I need to know where she is."

"You got a picture?"

"I do not."

He whistles, jogs his head back and forth, blows out a plume of smoke.

"Well, Nico's brother the cop, it shan't be easy. Everything is scrambled like an egg around here. I'll do what I can."

"Okay," I say. I'm thinking of Brett slipping away, further and further into the future-thinking, too, of the four hours I've been given by my new friends at the entrance to Thompson Hall. That dog has suffered enough already. "How long?"

"How long?" Jordan turns to Nico. "Is that how policemen say thank you?"

"God," she says, laughing, shoving him lightly in the chest. "You're such a prick."

"Meet me in the grub tent in an hour and a half," Jordan tells me. "If I don't have something by then, I never will."

Around the corner from Dimond Library is a cluster of residence halls, each shaped like a parenthesis and arranged around a shared courtyard, where, at present, there's a dozen or so young people playing a game. A kid in some sort of Victorian derby hat shakes a Styrofoam cup to spill dice out onto the sidewalk with a loud clatter, and the other players cheer and then start racing around the courtyard. A chalk sign says ANTIPODAL VOLCANISM WORKING GROUP.

"Do you know what that means?" I ask Nico, and she shrugs, lights a cigarette, disinterested.

The players aren't just running, they're drawing, stopping to make marks on a massive game board that's been drawn out on the pavement. The kid with the hat gathers up the dice, puts them back in the cup, and hands it to the next player, a homely girl in a flowing skirt and Dr. Who T-shirt. These kids remind me of certain people in high school I was never friends with but always liked, the ones who played D&D and worked backstage: scruffy, unstylish, ill-fitting clothes and glasses, deeply uncomfortable outside their small group. The girl tosses the dice, and this time everyone yells "ka-boom!" I take a step closer, and now I can see that it's a map of the world they've drawn, laid out on the hot unshaded pavement of the courtyard, a big blown-up Mercator projection of the earth. Now they're unspooling long loops of ribbon along the map, tracing trajectories somehow keyed to the numbers that came up on the roll of the dice. The ribbons go off in various directions, out from the impact site: one wave of destruction rolling over southern Europe; another through Tokyo and on across the Pacific. A dark-haired young man is squatting over cities, one after another, joyfully marking them with big red X's.

"No! Not San Francisco!" says another, a girl with an awkward pixie haircut, snorting laughter. "That's my old apartment!"

At last I let Nico lead me away, follow her back through the paths of what used to be UNH. Again I find myself imagining O. Cavatone, if he really was here, picturing him navigating these tortuous paths. What did he make of it, the tents, the kids, the antipodal volcanism working group? The tough and righteous state trooper in the land of the permanent asteroid party? Then I stop myself, shake my head. What do you think, Henry? You think that if you imagine him hard enough, you can make him appear?

All the food in the grub tent is free and hot and delicious. There is a no-nonsense woman in a stained yellow apron, serving tea and miso soup and gooey chocolate desserts from a long table. Dinner rolls and cups of tea are help-yourself. I look down the buffet line, daring to hope-it's a different world, a different infrastructure, you never know-but there is no coffee. People drift in and out of the tent, pushing back the flap and saying "hey" to the cook and grabbing food and trays; most of the citizens of the Free Republic are of college age or even younger, although there are a handful of grown-ups. In fact, there's a middle-aged man with a long gray beard and a potbelly seated next to Nico and me at our picnic table, wearing a loud-print bowling shirt and shooting what I presume to be heroin into the veins of his forearm, having tied off above the elbow with an extension cord.

I try to ignore him. I break my roll and open a small foil packet of margarine.

"So," I say to Nico. "Jordan. Is he your boyfriend?"

She grins. "Yes, Dad. He's my boyfriend. And I'm thinking about going all the way. Don't tell Jesus, okay?"

"That's hilarious."

"I know."

"Well, just for the record ..." I dab on the margarine with a plastic knife. "I don't like him."

"For the record, I do not care." Nico laughs again. "But, to tell you the truth, I don't like him much, either. Okay? He's part of my thing, that's all. He's a teammate."

I lean back and bite into the roll. This whole time Nico has been lugging around her mysterious duffel bag, large and ungainly, and now it is slung on the bench beside her. The potbellied heroin addict at the end of the table makes a low grunt and depresses his plunger, grits his teeth, and throws back his head. There is something horrifying and mesmerizing about him doing this in front of us, almost as if he were performing a sexual act or a murder. I look away, back to Nico.

We chat. We catch up. We tell each other stories from the old days: stories about Grandfather, about our mom and dad, about Nico and her screw-up friends from high school, stealing cars, drinking beer in homeroom, shoplifting. I remind her of our mother's zealous and misplaced encouragement of Nico's early-life interest in gymnastics. My comically uncoordinated little sister would do some poorly executed somersault, land painfully on her tiny butt, and my mother would clap wildly, cup her hands into a megaphone: "Nico Palace, ladies and gentlemen! Nico Palace!"

We finish our soup. I check my watch. Jordan said an hour and a half. It's been fifty-five minutes. The heroin addict babbles to himself, murmuring his way through his private ecstasies.

"So, Henry," says Nico, in that same tone of voice that Culverson always used, fake casual, innocent, to ask if I'd been in touch with her. "How are you?"

"In what sense?"

"The girl," she says. I look up. The roof of the grub tent is not properly joined; there's a diagonal slash of open air, blue sky. "The one who died."

"Naomi," I say. "I'm fine."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah."

Nico sighs and pats me on the back of the hand, a sweet simple gesture glowing faintly with the ghost light of our dead mother. I can imagine my sister and me in some future that never will exist, some alternate dimension, Nico appearing on my doorstep on Thanksgiving Day or Christmas Eve, whatever dipshit husband she ended up with still parking the car, my beautiful sarcastic nieces and nephews tearing through the house, demanding their presents.

"Random question," I say. "Do you know the name Canliss?"

"No. I don't think so."

"It's not someone we went to school with?"

"I don't think so. Why?"

"No reason," I say. "Forget it."

She shrugs. The chef in her apron is singing, opera, something from Marriage of Figaro, I think. A new group wanders in, three boys and two girls, all of them in matching bright orange shirts and sneakers, like they're some sort of athletic team, and they're arguing, loudly but not angrily, about the future of humanity: "Okay, let's say that everybody's dead but ten people," says one of the men. "And let's say one of them opens a store ..."

"Capitalist pig!" interrupts one of the women, and they all crack up. The heroin addict's forehead hits the table with an audible thunk.

"Hey. You should come back to Concord with me," I say suddenly to my sister. "After I settle this case. We'll hole up in Grandfather's house. On Little Pond Road. We'll share resources. Wait it out together."

"Wish I could, big brother," says Nico, amused, eyes dancing. "But I gotta save the world."

Jordan slips through the flap of the grub tent right on time, as good as his word, Ray-Bans and shit-eating grin firmly in place. He's written Julia Stone's information on a tiny slip of cigarette paper, which he slides into my palm like a bellhop's tip.

"She's on R&R," he says cheerfully to Nico, who says, "No kidding?"

"What's R&R?" I say.

"One of the-whatever they call them. One of the grand committees," Nico says.

"Okay," I say, looking at the paper. All it says is what he just told me: Julia Stone. R&R. "So where is she?"

Jordan looks me over. "Do you have some kind of philosophical or moral objection to thanking people for things?"

"Thank you," I say. "Where is she?"

"Well, it's tricky. R&R meets in a series of rotating locations." He lifts his sunglasses and winks. "Kinda top secret."

"Oh, come on," says Nico, lighting a fresh cigarette.

"Why are you looking for her?" asks Jordan.

"I can't tell you that."

"Really?" he says. "You can't? You came this far for this tiny piece of information, and you're not prepared to barter for it? How are you gonna do when it's cannibal time, and you've gotta negotiate with Caveman Stan for a bite of the baby?"

"You're such a dick, Jordan," says Nico, exhaling.

"No, no," he says, "I'm not," and he turns on her, suddenly serious. "You come to me for information, because you know I can get it. Well, how do you think that happens? Information is a resource, the same as food, same as oxygen. Geez Louise!" He throws his hands in the air, turns back to me. "Everybody just wants, wants, wants. Nobody wants to give." He drops his cigarette in the dirt, jabs me in the chest. "So. You. Give. You're looking for Julia Stone. Why is that?"

I stay silent. I keep my arms crossed. I'm thinking, no way. I've got most of what I want, and I can figure out the rest on my own. I stare back at him. Sorry, clown.

"There's a man looking for her." Nico, mumbling, looking at the dirt. "A former state trooper."

"Nico," I say, astonished. She doesn't look at me.

"The trooper is in love with the girl. My brother is trying to find him. For the guy's wife."

"No kidding?" says Jordan thoughtfully. "See? That's interesting. And ... and ..." He looks me up and down, his mouth slightly open, eyes squinting, like I'm a manticore or a griffin, some exotic species. "And why are you doing this?"

"I don't know," I say. I've had enough of this. I'm ready to go. "Because I told her that I would."

"Well, well."

He gives me the rest of the information I need: R&R stands for Respect and Restraint, and they are meeting in Kingfisher room 110, a big lecture hall. They're meeting "right this exact second," as a matter of fact, so I better hurry up. I stand and Jordan takes Nico by the elbow and murmurs in her ear. "You're staying with me, right? Because we have big fun things to discuss."

"Henry?" Nico's eyes are bright again. She reaches up and pats me on the cheek. "See you in a few?"

"Sure," I say, swat her hand away.

I'm close-I'm this close. I start to go, and then I stop. "Nico? What's in that duffel bag?"

"Candy," she says, and laughs.

"Nico."

"Dope."

"Really?"

"Handguns. Human skulls. Maple syrup."

She cracks up, they both do, and then they're walking away arm in arm, the two of them slipping through the front flap of the grub tent and off into the crowded campus. Nico Palace, ladies and gentlemen. My sister.

Lining the approach to Kingfisher Hall are stately oaks, flanking the pathway, upright and orderly as a praetorian guard. They're strung with banners, primary colors and simple bold fonts, each announcing an extinction or near extinction: the Justinian Plague, 541 A.D. Toba supereruption, 75,000 years ago. The Permian Extinction. The K-T Boundary Extinction ... on and on, a parade of pandemics and catastrophes and species genocides festooning the approach.

In I go, into the building itself, into a spacious and sunlit atrium with a vaulted ceiling, then down a long hallway lined with bulletin boards, somehow untouched, still offering grants, scholarship money, internship opportunities for engineering students.

When I push open one of the big double doors to room 110, my immediate impression is that here we have another party, an auxiliary of the ongoing festivities on the main quad. It's a big lecture hall, packed and noisy, citizens of the Free Republic relaxed and at ease in their varied costumes, from track suits to tie-dye to what appears to be an adult-sized set of My Little Pony feetie pajamas. People hollering or engaged in intense conversation or, in one case, stretched out over three seats, asleep. As I pick my way as inconspicuously as possible up the raked tiers of seating in search of an empty spot, I count at least three ice-packed coolers, full of small unlabeled glass bottles of beer.

It is only when I have found a seat, in one of the very last rows, that I can focus my attention on the front of the room-and the young man standing with his back to the crowd, naked to the waist with his hands tied behind him with a length of bungee cord. Across from him, seated at a folding table on the shallow stage, are two men and a woman, all of approximately student age, all wearing serious, intent expressions, huddled together and whispering.

I settle into my seat, cross my long legs with difficulty, and watch the stage. One of the three at the table, a man with glasses and a head of wild curly hair, looks up and clears his throat.

"Okay," he says. "Can we get quiet?"

The man with hands tied shifts nervously on his feet.

I look around the room. I've seen plenty of trials-this is a trial. The curly-haired man asks for quiet again, and the crowd settles down, just a little bit.

She's in here. Somewhere, in this crowd, is Julia Stone.

"So we're down with the decision to proceed?" says the woman at the center of the little triumvirate on the stage. "Can we go ahead and just by voice vote reaffirm the provisional authority of R&R over maintaining safety and peace in our community. Everyone?"

She looks around the room. So do the other two judges, the one with the hair, and the third, the one farthest to the right, who has a small pudgy face and a turned-up nose and who looks to me no more than eighteen years old, if that. Most of the audience seems to have little interest in the proceedings. People keep talking, leaning forward in their seats to poke a friend or back to stretch. From where I'm sitting I watch a man rolling what will be, if completed, the largest marijuana cigarette I have ever seen. Two rows up from me a couple is vigorously making out, the female partner shifting as I watch into a full straddle atop her companion. The guy on my right, a sallow figure with hairy forearms, is absorbed in something he's got in his lap.

"Hello?" says the young woman on the stage. She has sharp small features, black horn-rim glasses, and pigtails. Taped in front of her is an eight-by-eleven piece of paper reading CHAIR, a slap-dash designation of authority. "Are we okay to proceed?" The crowd, those paying attention, half maybe, make the under-arrest gesture I spotted earlier in the library, hands in the air with palms up. I take this to be some understood signal of assent, because the young woman nods, goes, "Great."

The defendant cranes his neck around nervously, scanning the crowd. I whisper to my seatmate, "Who is he?"

"What?" he says, looking up blankly. It's an iPhone he's got in his lap, and even as we talk he runs his thumb over the blank dead screen, absently, over and over.

"The defendant?"