The guy scrunches his nose, and I realize too late the word defendant might be considered significantly rearview. "What did he do?"

"I don't know, actually," he says, peering down at the shirtless shivering man at the front of the room as if for the first time. "Something, I guess. The next agenda item after this is the nudity policy. Pretty sure that's why it's so packed today."

"Oh," I say, and the guy turns back to his iPhone.

"So, okay," says the chair, addressing the defendant directly. "We should start by apologizing to you, as a member of our community. We understand there was some unnecessary violence involved in your, uh, your detention."

The prisoner mutters something I can't hear, and the chair nods. The other judges have notebook-paper signs, too. The curly-haired one's sign says VICE, and the pudgy-faced boy's says VICE TO THE VICE.

"If you couldn't hear, everyone," says the vice, "he said it's cool."

Scattered laughter from the crowd.

"Oh, great," someone yells sarcastically, and everyone turns to see who it is: a great big fat dude in overalls and a painter's cap. "It's cool, everyone. He's cool. Don't worry."

More laughter. More people seem to be paying attention now. Someone from a distant corner, by the door, shouts "Thank God!" The couple making out a few seats up pause in their exertions for a moment, glance in the general direction of the stage, and then get back to business. During all this back and forth, I'm trying to work out a plan, trying first of all to figure out how many people are in this room: maybe a hundred rows of seats, maybe fifty to seventy-five seats per row, maybe eighty percent occupied, maybe fifty-five percent female. I have no photograph of Julia Stone, no physical description of any kind: no race or ethnicity, no distinguishing characteristics, no distinctive mode of dress. All I know is that she is a female between twenty and twenty-four years of age, and I am seated in a room with between one hundred seventy-five and two hundred people matching that description.

"Okay, so," the chair is saying. "Theft from the community of the Free Republic is among our most serious infractions. It's a big fucking deal. There are a lot of things we might do to handle this sort of situation. But it's obviously important that everyone gets a chance to give their input and have their feelings on the subject heard."

I look around the room, trying to narrow down somehow who Julia might be. If I were Brett, who here would I fall in love with? Who would I follow to doomsday? But I'm not Brett. I've never met him. Forty-five minutes until I'm supposed to be back at the Thompson Hall exit, collecting my dog and getting out of here.

"And-sorry, were you done?" says the vice, glancing respectfully at the chair, who nods, shrugs. "And so anyone who wants to say something is invited to do so at this time." A handful of people are already making their way down the aisles, raising their hands to speak. The third judge, the vice to the vice, turns up his chin and watches them come. He's quiet, watchful, little beady eyes scanning the room over and over. He has yet to speak.

There is a woman with red hair, dark red, so dark as to be almost brown. She's three rows up from mine, across the aisle, and she seems to be taking notes or minutes on a pad of paper balanced on her bare knee. She's wearing a very short black skirt, black boots. Brett, I think, would have found her attractive.

The first speaker to offer his input is a small man in cargo pants and a plain red T-shirt. He stands in one of the aisles and reads rapidly, almost agitatedly, from a stack of index cards. "The whole idea of theft from a communal store is itself a reflection of capitalist thinking. In other words, the crime of theft cannot and should not exist in a postcapitalist society, because property"-he leans into the word, his voice charged with disdain-"cannot and should not exist." He flips to a new card; the vice to the vice looks irritated. "Our vigilance is required against attitudes that reflect not only explicit capitalist dogma, but vestigial reflections of same."

"Okay, thanks," says the chair. The little man looks up from his cards; clearly, he wasn't finished.

"Thanks," she says again, and someone says "Point of order" from the back-it's the fat man in the overalls, and the chair acknowledges him with a nod. "I just want to say, in regard to what that guy just said: That's stupid."

The vigilant anticapitalist looks around the room, doe eyed, wounded. The chair smiles softly and nods for the next speaker. Small lines are forming in two different aisles of the auditorium. I keep my eye on the dark-haired woman three rows up. What is my move here? How long do these meetings last?

The next speaker is a woman with long matted dreadlocks, who wants to propose a complicated redemption-based system, wherein those accused of rule breaking would engage in a dialog with the community about the nature of their transgression. This idea the vice chair gets excited about, nodding vigorously as the woman speaks, his curls bouncing. It goes on like this, speaker after speaker: someone wonders if today's proceedings might in fact inspire further infractions; a man asks politely if the public-nudity policy is still on the agenda, and the affirmative answer from the vice draws cheers; a young woman with earnest eyes and a single thick braid running down her back rises and says that she's been carefully noting the speakers at this meeting, as well as the six previous R&R meetings, and can report that people of color are participating at a ratio of just one in twelve.

"Huh," says the vice chair. "Maybe because radical movements have always been the province of the privileged?"

"Maybe because we're in fucking New Hampshire," says the class clown in the overalls.

In the laughter that follows, the woman with dark red hair looks around and sees me watching her. She does not look down: Instead she meets and holds my gaze. It occurs to me that I could pass her a note, and the idea is so absurd that I very nearly laugh out loud. Are you Julia Stone? Check this box if yes.

"Okay," says the chair. "I think that's enough. Just in terms of time?"

The vice looks surprised, but the vice to the vice nods. The defendant shivers, hunching forward, glancing from side to side. Male shirtlessness can in the right circumstances be powerful, leonine, but it can also make a person seem exposed and helpless, the knobs of the spine quivering and fragile like surfacing fish.

"I'm sorry," I say "Excuse me." I stand up. This is stupid. This is the stupidest thing I could possibly be doing right now. "What is it he is accused of stealing?"

A room full of people turn their heads toward me, the man who fits in least with this crowd now drawing the maximum amount of attention to himself.

"It's not really relevant," says the vice, after glancing respectively at the chair for permission to handle this one. "Our protocol says, given limited time and resources, to focus on outcomes when the cause of action is relatively straightforward."

"Yup," says the chair. "Bingo."

The vice vice's beady eyes are fixed on me, birdlike and unpleasant.

"But he has the right to know the charges against him," I say, nodding my head toward the defendant. The crowd has settled into near silence now, drawn out of their chatty genial atmosphere by this novelty. The guy next to me, with his iPhone, scootches over a little in his seat, putting some distance between us. My presumptive Julia Stone, the attractive woman with dark red hair, is staring at me with the same frank interest as everyone else. A wash of nervousness passes over me. This really was idiotic, but I'm still standing, so I go ahead and press my case.

"He also has the right to face his accusers," I say. "If someone is saying he stole something, he gets to confront them in open court."

The defendant cranes around, then glances anxiously back at his judges, trying to figure out if this mysterious interjection is aiding or hindering his case. I'm not sure, my friend, I tell him telepathically. I honestly don't know. Somewhere in the room, someone opens a beer bottle with a pop and hiss. On the seatback in front of me is graffiti, RON LOVES CELIA, etched by some bored undergrad in days gone by.

"It's not that we are unaware of the rules of evidence," says the vice, shifting back in his chair and squinting at me. "I went to law school at Duke, okay? But those rules are moot in this context."

"But how can you pass sentence-"

"We don't call it 'passing sentence'-"

"-without a fair trial?"

"Excuse me?" says the third judge, the vice to the vice, speaking at last and loudly, his voice high and reedy and charged with anger. "Who are you?"

I open my mouth but say nothing, cycling rapidly through a series of possible answers, sharply aware of the insufficiency of them all. They could kill me, these people-I could truly die here. The Free Republic of New Hampshire, for all its easy egalitarian spirit and New Age trappings, is a world unto itself, beyond the reach even of what little law remains; as the man said, certain rules are moot in this context. I could be murdered here, easily, if the mood of this crowd should change; I could be beaten to death or shot, my corpse abandoned in the dirt of the quad, my sister and my dog left to wonder why I never emerged.

"Well?" says the vice vice, rising from his chair. And then the chair says, "I knew it."

"What?" says the vice.

"I knew someone would be coming to find him."

She stares at me from the table on the stage-arms crossed, glasses, pigtails-and I stare back at her.

"Excuse me?" The vice vice says, glaring and confused. "What the fuck are you talking about?"

But Julia Stone is unconcerned with his bafflement, with the confused attention of the crowd. She gazes cooly at me.

"I told him they would come for him. That's what your kind do, right? You come for people."

The low murmur of the room is beginning to bubble up again, people leaning across one another to whisper and nudge, people exchanging questioning expressions. I ignore them, keep my eyes locked on Julia Stone.

"Um, yes, point of order," says the vice, while the vice vice stands stonily, arms crossed. "What are you talking about?"

"This man has entered our space on a false pretense," says Julia, and points at me with one steady finger. "He's not here to take part in our community; he's here to infiltrate it. He is on a mission to hunt down another human being like a pig or a dog."

Silence, then, the room suddenly alive with tension, everybody staring at me or at Julia or back and forth, me to her. I feel it again, the dread gut-level certainty that these people could kill me: that I might die here, in this room, and no one the wiser. And at the same time, nevertheless, I am feeling these wild waves of excitement, looking at the woman for whom Brett named a pizza, the woman who drew him from Concord and from his wife, the woman I went looking for and found. I want to take a picture of her and send it to Detective Culverson and say, "See? See?"

"You don't understand where you are," Julia tells me. "This is a new world. We have no room for police-style tactics here."

"I'm not a policeman," I say.

"Oh, yeah?" she says, "But you are police-style, aren't you?"

"What is going on, Julia?" says the vice vice, and he takes an aggressive step toward her around the back of the table, and the vice rises to stop him with one hand pushed against his chest. "Whoa."

Julia keeps her eyes on mine. "You'll never kill him," she says.

"Kill him?" I say. "No, I-his wife sent me."

"His wife?"

She stands breathing for a second, taking this in, deciding what to do with it, while I'm thinking: Kill him? Who would be coming to kill him?

"Sorry about this," says Julia to her colleagues on the tribunal, and then turns to address the room. "I call for an extraordinary postponement. I need to speak to this man alone."

"Oh, come on," says the vice vice petulantly. "You just asked for an extraordinary postponement yesterday."

"Yes, well," she says drily. "These are extraordinary times."

Julia Stone steps down over the lip of the stage and motions for me to meet her at the door. As I pick my way over legs down the tiers, the kid with his hands tied sits down, confused, and the vice chair moves that the meeting advance to the question of public nudity. Everybody cheers and raises their hands, palms up.

The woman Brett loves, like the woman he married, is not beautiful, not in any conventional way. But where Martha Milano's plainness is redeemed by a sweet radiant quality and warmth of spirit, Julia Stone's small thin body and dark features are attractive in a whole other way. She doesn't speak, she pronounces, talking fast with her black eyes flashing, each word charged with energy.

"There," she says. "Those kids. On the roof. See?"

I look where she's pointing, to a cluster of busy shapes atop one of the dorm buildings off in the distance. "Exercise machines. Maybe twelve people up there now. Sometimes we get thirty or thirty-five. Bikes, treadmills. This is an example. You join us here, you do what you want, as long as, A, your action does not interfere with the ability of others to do what they want, and B, whenever possible, your action offers some concrete benefit to the community."

Julia pauses and stares at the air in front of her, as if scouring the words she has just said, satisfying herself of their soundness before plunging forward. We're on the roof of Kingfisher Hall: steam pipes, a wilted rooftop garden, a weather-beaten sofa someone lugged up the concrete stairwell and out the trap door.

"We have a team of engineering postdocs who rigged those machines to capture the electricity generated in a central battery. So that, for example ..." She swings her arm until she's pointing at another building, much closer, where on the first floor the curtains are pulled shut tightly. "... those people can watch movies. A French New Wave festival at present. Then they do Tarantino. And so on. They vote on it. There's a committee."

"That's interesting," I murmur, still trying to get a read on her, on this conversation. Where is he? is all I want to ask. Where's Brett?

"Interesting?" Julia says. "Sure, it's interesting, but that's not the point. I'm answering your question from downstairs. How can we pass sentence on someone who might be innocent?" She glares at me through the thickness of her glasses. "Wasn't that your question?"

"Sort of."

"No, it was, that's what you asked. Don't backtrack. He didn't do it, by the way."

She thrusts out her chin, waiting for astonishment, anger, argument. And in fact I am a little astonished; I can see him clearly, the shivering nervous defendant, barely out of his teens, hands bound, waiting for the punishment of the mob.

But I hold my peace, I just raise my eyebrows, go, "Oh, really?"

"Yeah. Really. I set him up."

She's pushing, she's feeling me out, and I know exactly why. She thinks that she hates me and she wants to make sure. I come to her tainted by my association with Martha, with "the wife," and Julia Stone would therefore prefer to tell me to fuck off back to copland or wherever I came from. I therefore need to play it slow, hang back, save my questions until I think there's a chance she'll answer them.

"All I meant is that the kid deserved to be treated fairly," I say. "I didn't say he was innocent."

"Oh, he's not innocent," says Julia, "he's just not a thief. He's a rapist. Okay? Don't ask how I know, because I know what goes on here. I know. And I want him out of my community. But if I had him brought up for rape, then Jonathan-the vice to the vice? Remember him?"

I nod. Piggy eyes, flushed face, the sneer of a spoiled child.

"Jonathan would demand a hanging. Not because he gives two shits about violence against women. Because he wants to hang someone. I know he does. And once the hangings start-" She shakes her head, seeing the future. "Forget it."

I rub my forehead, finding the queer little divot in my temple, remembering when Cortez assaulted me in the elevator. Seems like a million years ago, a different lifetime. Julia is looking out over the campus again, brow furrowed, hands moving while she talks.

"Radical social theories when put into practice have a notoriously short half-life. They dissolve into anarchy. Or the people's power, even when carefully delegated to provisional authorities, is seized by totalitarians and autocrats. Can you think of a single counterexample?"

Julia flicks her gaze at me.

"No," I say. "I guess not."

"No," she says. "There isn't one."

Her passion, her confidence-I can see clearly how these qualities must have sung out to Brett Cavatone, whom I have come to see as quiet, quick-minded and intense, a philosopher in the thick tough body of a policeman. How, I wonder fleetingly, did he and Martha Milano end up together in the first place? How long did it take before he knew he had married the wrong sort of woman?

"We have this opportunity," Julia says. "We've struck this elusive balance between safety and personal liberty. This balance always gets fucked up, but now there's no time for it to get fucked up. We just have to keep the Jacobin shit at bay, keep from tipping over into Lord of the Flies for seventy-four more days." She's talking faster and faster, the words rattling along like train cars. "This is literally a unique opportunity in the history of civilization, and the preservation of public order trumps the specific form of justice doled out to one individual. Right?"

"Right," I say.

"Yes. Right. Is she paying you?" She turns to me, crosses her arms. "The wife?"

"No."

"So why are you doing it?"

"I don't know," I say, and give her a quick little half smile. "Although people do keep asking me that."

"I'll bet." And then she smiles back, just the tiniest secret hint of a smile. There's a small gap between her front teeth, like a rascally ten-year-old.

"You thought before that I had been sent to kill him. Why would someone be trying to kill him?"

The smile disappears. "Why the fuck should I tell you?"

"Are you in love with him?"

"Love is a bourgeois construct," Julia says immediately, but nevertheless she turns away from me, gazes out over the rooftops and treetops of the transformed campus. I wait, allow her a moment alone with whatever memories she's replaying. And then I gently push forward, talking softly, telling her the story she already knows.

"Brett arrested you a couple years ago, in Rumney, but you gave him an earful from the bars of the holding cell. You made him see the justice of your cause, and he came to respect you. You talked him out of testifying. You developed feelings for each other."

Julia gives me a quick sour look at the word feelings, and I nod in acknowledgment of the fact that feelings are a bourgeois construct, but I keep going.