"And so in quarantine," says Beau, reclaiming the conversation, "we learn that the Republic is a system of responsibility, not just of privilege. That there is no such thing as a utopia for one-it must be a utopia for all."

Sport nods solemnly, picks up the phrase and murmurs it in echo: "no such thing as a utopia for one ..."

Okay, I'm thinking. Got it. Let's cut to the chase here. "How long is quarantine?"

"Five days," says Beau. Sport winces apologetically.

Damn it. Julia Stone is in there somewhere, I'm sure of it, seated between the Doric columns of one or another collegiate hall, with Brett Cavatone laying his heavy head in her lap. In five days, who knows? I take a look at Nico, who still looks relaxed, all smiles, but I can see the unease flashing in her eyes-this quarantine business is as much a surprise to her as it is to me.

"But it's easy," says Sport. "Seriously. It's in Woodside Apartments, the big dorm on the other side of Wallace? And in terms of the divestment or whatever, you can keep super-personal items. Family pictures and stuff."

"Actually, not anymore," says Beau.

"Really?"

"Yeah. Comfort just decided."

"When?"

"Yesterday."

"I didn't even know they were conferencing on it."

"Yes," says Beau. "No more personal or sentimental items. It's rearview."

She says the word "rearview" with a definite and meaningful emphasis, like it's been lifted from the language and glossed with a shiny new meaning, one accessible only to those who've undergone five days of quarantine at the Woodside Apartments. I look up at the banner, the flapping bed sheet, the proud standard of asteroidland.

"Come on, guys," says Nico. "Henry's not trouble. Can we give him a pass?"

"Like a hand stamp?" says Sport, but her laugh is fleeting; Beau is quiet, stone-faced.

"No," she says, and her hand drops back to the butt of her gun. "The quarantine is a pretty firm rule."

"Well, yesterday-" starts Sports, and Beau cuts her off. "Yeah, I know, and they got serious shit for it."

"Right, right."

Sport looks at Beau, and Beau looks over her shoulders at the Black Bloc guys, the crows watching us from the wall. Nice egalitarian utopian society, I'm thinking, everybody making sure everybody else is following the rules.

"Listen-" I start, and then Nico turns a quarter turn toward me and stares, just for an instant, all the time she needs to tell me very clearly with her eyes and eyebrows to shut up. I do so. This is why I brought her, and I might as well let her do her thing; this is Nico's element, if ever she had one.

"Look, totally honest with you? This girl that Henry is looking for? Her mother is sick. She's dying."

Beau doesn't say anything, but Sport whistles lightly. "Sucks."

I follow Nico's lead. "Yeah," I say softly. "It's cancer."

"Brain cancer," says Nico, and Sport's eyes grow wider. Beau's fingertips remain on the handle of her gun.

"Yeah, she's got a tumor," I say. "A chordoma it's called, actually, at the base of her skull. And because the hospitals are all screwed up, so many doctors are gone, there isn't much they can do."

I'm picturing McGully, of course, big vaudeville hands: six months to live ... wakka-wakka. It was Grandfather who had the chordoma, though; they're mostly seen in geriatric patients, but no one here seems likely to know that.

Sport looks at me, then at Beau, who shakes her head.

"No," she says. "We can't."

"All he's got to do is find her," says Nico softly, "let this kid know her mom is sick, in case she wants to say goodbye. That's all. If it's not possible, we understand."

"It's not possible," says Beau, immediately.

Sport turns to her. "Don't be a jerk."

"I'm just following the rules.

"It's not your mom."

"Fine," says Beau abruptly. "You know what? Fuck it."

She stomps over to the steps and sits down sullenly while Sport walks over to the two on the wall and whispers something to the one with the cigarette, jokingly plucks it from his hands. Sport and the anarchists crack up-one lunges for his cigarette, the other shrugs and turns away-Beau sulks on the steps. They're just a bunch of kids, these people: goofing around, flirting, fighting, smoking, running their principality.

At last Sport trots back over to us, flashing a small thumbs-up, and I exhale, see Nico smiling from the corner of my eye. We get four hours, Sport tells us, and not a second more.

"And come out through this exit. Okay? Only this exit."

"Okay," I say, and Nico says, "Thanks."

"She uh-" she angles her head toward Beau. "She told her mom she was gay. Because of the asteroid. Radical-honesty time, right? Her mother told her she would burn in hell. So." She sighs. "I don't know."

Beau is still sitting on the steps, glaring at the sky. There are times I think the world is better off in some ways-I do-I think in some ways it's better off. One of the anarchists slides down from the wall and ambles over, skinny and sloe-eyed, black bandana draped loosely at his collarbone. "Hey, so, four hours, man," he says. He smells like hand-rolled cigarettes and sweat.

"I told them," says Sport.

"Cool. And in the meantime, we gotta hold on to your dog."

The skinny kid reaches out his arms. Nico looks at me-I look at Houdini. I scoop him up, rub his neck, hold him for a long second. He looks into my eyes, then shakes his body and pulls for the ground. I put him back down, and he resumes chewing grass under the watchful eyes of his captors.

"Four hours," I say, and Nico heaves her duffel bag onto her shoulder, and we're ready to go.

Once, in high school, as part of a short-lived and ill-fated campaign to gain the attention of a "cool" girl named Alessandra Loomis, I accompanied some friends to a day-long popular-music festival hosted by the Manchester radio station Rock 101. This is like that, what I'm looking at now, standing at the rear exit of Thompson Hall gazing down the long slope toward the main quad. It's like the rock-fest but to a factor of ten: brightly colored tents and sleeping bags stretch out in all directions, studded by what look like giant shipping cartons, overturned and transformed into baroquely decorated forts. Long snaking lines of drummers move through the crowds, dancing in rhythmic interlocking circles. At the center of the quad is a towering junk-shop sculpture painted in neons and pastels, built of car doors and computer monitors and children's toys and aquarium parts. Puffs of cigarette and marijuana smoke float up, drifting over the crowds like smoke signals. It's like a concert with no stage, no bands, no electricity; a concert that's all audience.

Nico was right. I should have worn shorts.

"So great," murmurs my sister. She leans back, throws her arms open and closes her eyes, breathing it in-the marijuana smoke, certainly, but all of it, the whole thing. And I am surprised to be feeling how I do, confronted with the massive and chaotic scene-not at all how I felt driving the long hour back to Concord after a day at the Rock 101 festival, my ears ringing alternately with Alessandra Loomis's kind but unequivocal demurrals and Soundgarden's egregious cover of "Buckets of Rain."

We make our way down the slope and into the crowd. I unknot my tie and take it off. Nico laughs. "There you go, Starsky," she says. "Deep cover."

"Shut up," I say. "Where are we going?"

"We gotta find my man Jordan," says Nico. "He's got this place wired."

"Okay," I say. "And where's Jordan?"

"In Dimond," she says. "The library. If his committee is sitting. Follow me."

I follow her down into the wonderland, trotting a few paces behind as she picks a route through the crowded tents and revelers. Nico pauses here and there to say hello to people she knows, ducking into one tent to hug a fine-boned girl in a miniskirt, jog bra, and elaborate Native American headdress.

At the far end of the main quad the crowd thins and we pick up a narrow winding path and follow it into and out of a stand of thin sapling elms. After a few minutes of walking, the noises of the drums and the singing have faded, and we are wandering through the campus, passing nondescript low-slung brick academic buildings-Geology department, Kinesiology, Mathematics. After ten minutes or so we come out onto a plaza where there's just a single drummer, tapping away all on his own, wearing sweatpants and a Brooklyn Dodgers jersey. The chiseled brick cornerstone says PERFORMING ARTS, and a sandwich board is propped up at the base of the wide steps, between the columns, advertising a lecture: "The Asteroid as Metaphor: Collision, Chaos, and Perceptions of Doom."

Nico peers at the sign.

"Is this where we're going?" I ask.

"Nope."

"Do you know where we're going?"

"Yup," she says, and we keep walking. I'm picturing Brett Cavatone making his way through the campus in his heavy policeman boots, looking for Julia Stone just as I am now. How did he circumvent the perimeter guards, I wonder? If I had to guess, his stratagem was more tactile than mine, more direct. He would have cased the campus, selected the least-defended of the various checkpoints, and employed overwhelming but nonlethal force to get past one of these skinny twenty-somethings playing tough guy.

I keep following Nico, who is still lugging her heavy duffel bag, deeper and deeper into the bewildering campus. The paths roll back on themselves, the woods grow thick, then thin out again. On a volleyball court outside the athletic complex is a row of young people clutching Civil Warstyle bayonets, practicing their form: someone yells "Charge!" and they charge, sprinting full bore, lunging with bayonets extended, stopping on a line, laughing, retreating.

I'm growing more and more concerned about Nico's sense of direction every time she pauses at a forking path and chews on her lip for a moment before plunging forward.

"Here, wait," I say. "Here's a map."

"I don't need it," she says. "I know where I'm going."

"You sure?"

"Stop asking me that."

It doesn't matter; the map, when I look closer, has been imaginatively graffitied, the place names all crossed out and replaced: "Perdition." "Deathtown." "Dragons Here There Be."

"We're fine," says Nico, taking a seemingly arbitrary left turn onto a narrower path with a light handrail. "Come on."

We cross over a brown, bubbling creek and pass one more building, a dorm, with loud insistent music pouring out along with a series of modulated groans. There's a man on the roof, naked, waving to passers-by as if from a parade float.

"Holy moly," I say. "What are they doing in there?"

"Oh, you know," says Nico, looking down, blushing, uncharacteristically. "Fucking."

"Ah," I say, "right."

And then, thank God, we get to where we're going.

In Dimond Library, on the way to the basement stairs, I see a pale boy hunched over the desk in a carrel, sipping from a Styrofoam cup, surrounded by books, reading. His face is gaunt and his hair a greasy mass. On the ground beside him is a clotted leaking pile of discarded teabags, and beside that a bucket that I realize with horror is full of urine. There's a tall stack of books on one side of him and a taller stack on the other: out pile, in pile. I stand for a second watching this guy, frozen in place but alive with small action: muttering to himself as he reads, almost humming like an electric motor, his hands twitching at the edges of the pages until, with a sudden flash of motion, he turns the page, flings it over like he can't consume the words fast enough.

"Come on," says Nico, and we continue down the hall, passing four more of these carrels, each with its quiet intent occupant-earnestly, frantically reading.

In the basement, Nico slips in through a pair of green double doors marked BOOK REPAIR and I wait outside, until a moment later she emerges with a friend behind her. Jordan, presumably. In the few seconds before the door swings closed I glimpse a big workshop with the tables pushed to the sides, people sitting cross-legged on the floor in loose concentric rings. As the door opens, someone is saying "Agreed, with reservations ...," and the rest are raising their hands in the air-two hands up, palms out-and then the door closes all the way.

"So this is the brother, huh?" says Jordan, sticking his hand out. "I seriously don't think I've ever met a real cop before."

"Well," I say, shaking his hand, and I'm going to say that I'm not a cop anymore, actually, but then he says, "What's it like to shove a nightstick up someone's ass?"

I let go of his hand.

"I'm totally serious," he says. And Nico says, "Jordan, don't be a moron."

He looks at her, all innocence. "What?"

I just want to find my missing person. That's all I want. Jordan and Nico lean against a wall in the hallway, and I stand across from them. He's short, baby faced, fatuous, with a pair of Ray-Bans pushed back high on his head. Nico pulls out a cigarette and Jordan gives her an expectant expression, and she lights one for him, too, on the same match.

"How's Ars Republica?" she asks.

"Boring. Stupid. Ridiculous. As usual." Jordan looks over his shoulder at the BOOK REPAIR door. "Today it's immigrant policy: take 'em or leave 'em, basically." He talks fast, taking quick little puffs of the cigarette between choppy sentences. "Crowd mood is definitely take 'em, especially now with this quarantine jazz. How'd you get him in, by the way?"

"We told a story."

"Nice." Then, to me, "Like that outfit, by the way. You look like a funeral director." He keeps chattering, hyper and self-important. "Not that many of 'em are making it up here. The CI's I mean. Coasties must be doing a bang-up job of rounding 'em up and taking 'em camping. Oh, wait, not camping. Internment camp. My bad."

He smirks, then leans his neck one way till it cracks, and then the other way. "Okay, what do we need?"

"I'm looking for someone."

"Aren't we all."

"Someone specific, jackass," says Nico, and sticks out her tongue at him.

If it turns out that my sister is romantically involved with this man, I might actually have to murder him.

"A former student here," I say. "Would have been a senior last year, when all of this started up. Whatever this is."

" 'Whatever this is'?" Jordan's face becomes serious. "I'll tell you what this is, asshole, this is the apex of civilization. Okay? This is what democracy looks like, real democracy, you fucking Nazi cop asshole."

Jordan stares at me and I grope for some sort of placating language, wishing more than anything in the world that I didn't need help from this particular person-and then he drops the stone face and giggles like a hyena.