Wolgast pulled the car out of line and drew up to the nearest uniform. He rolled down the window and held up his credentials.

"Federal agents. Any way you can wave us through?"

The guard was just a kid, his face soft and spotted with pimples. The body armor bulked him up, but Wolgast could tell he was probably no more than a welterweight. He should be back at home, Wolgast thought, wherever that was, snug in bed and dreaming of some girl in his algebra class, not standing on a highway in Mississippi wearing thirty pounds of Kevlar, holding an assault rifle over his chest.

He eyed Wolgast's credentials with only vague interest, then tipped his head toward a concrete building sitting off the highway.

"You'll have to pull over to the station, sir."

Wolgast sighed with irritation. "Son, I don't have time for this."

"You want to skip the lines, you do."

At that moment, a second guard stepped into their headlights. He turned his hips to their vehicle and unslung his weapon. What the fuck, Wolgast thought.

"For Pete's sake. Is that really necessary?"

"Hands where we can see them, sir!" the second man barked.

"For crying out loud," Doyle said.

The first guard turned toward the man in the headlights. He waved his hand to tell him to lower his weapon. "Cool it, Duane. They're feds." The second man hesitated, then shrugged and walked away.

"Sorry about that. Just pull around. They'll have you out fast."

"They better," Wolgast said.

In the station, the OD took their credentials and asked them to wait while he phoned in their ID numbers. FBI, Homeland Security, even state and local cops; everybody was on a centralized system now, their movements tracked. Wolgast poured himself a cup of sludgy coffee from the urn, took a few halfhearted sips, and tossed it in the trash. There was a No Smoking sign, but the room reeked like an old ashtray. The clock on the wall said it was just past six; in about an hour the sun would be coming up.

The OD stepped back to the counter with their credentials. He was a trim man, nondescript, wearing the ash gray uniform of Homeland Security. "Okay, gentlemen. Let's get you on your merry way. Just one thing: the system says you were booked to fly to Denver tonight. Probably just an error, but I need to log it."

Wolgast had his answer ready. "We were. We were redirected to Nashville to pick up a federal witness."

The duty officer considered this a minute, then nodded. He typed the information into his computer. "Fair enough. Raw deal, they didn't fly you. That must be a thousand miles."

"Tell me about it. I just go where I'm told."

"Amen, brother."

They returned to their car, and a guard waved them to the exit. Moments later they were back on the highway.

"Nashville?" Doyle asked.

Wolgast nodded, fixing his eyes on the road ahead. "Think about it. I-55 has checkpoints in Arkansas and Illinois, one just south of St. Louis and one about halfway between Normal and Chicago. But you take 40 east across Tennessee, the first checkpoint is all the way across the state, at the I-40 and 75 interchange. Ergo, this is the last checkpoint between here and Nashville, so the system won't know we never went there. We can make the pickup in Memphis, cross into Arkansas, bypass the Oklahoma checkpoint by driving the long way around Tulsa, pick up 70 north of Wichita, and meet Richards at the Colorado border. One checkpoint between here and Telluride, and Sykes can handle that. And nowhere does it say we went to Memphis."

Doyle frowned. "What about the bridge on 40?"

"We'll have to avoid it, but there's a pretty easy detour. About fifty miles south of Memphis there's an older bridge across the river, connects to a state highway on the Arkansas side. The bridge isn't rated for the big tankers coming up from the N.O., so it's passenger cars only and mostly automated. The bar-code scanner will pick us up, and so will the cameras. But that's easy to take care of later if we have to. Then we just work our way north and pick up I-40 south of Little Rock."

They drove on. Wolgast thought about turning on the radio, maybe getting a weather report, but decided against it; he was still alert, despite the hour, and needed to keep his mind focused. When the sky paled to gray, they were a little north of Jackson, making good time. The rain stopped, then started again. Around them the land rose in gentle swells like waves far out to sea. Though it seemed like days ago, Wolgast was still thinking about the message from Sykes.

Caucasian female. Amy NLN. Zero footprint. 20323 Poplar Ave., Memphis, TN. Make pickup by Saturday noon latest. No contact. TUR. Sykes.

TUR: travel under radar.

Don't just catch a ghost, Agent Wolgast; be a ghost.

"Do you want me to drive?" Doyle asked, cutting the silence, and Wolgast could tell from his voice that he'd been thinking the same thing. Amy NLN. Who was Amy NLN?

He shook his head. Around them, the day's first light spread over the Mississippi Delta like a sodden blanket. He tapped the wipers to clear the mist away.

"No," he said. "I'm good."

FIVE.

Something was wrong with Subject Zero.

For six days straight he hadn't come out of the corner, not even to feed. He just kind of hung there, like some kind of giant insect. Grey could see him on the infrared, a glowing blob in the shadows. From time to time he'd change positions, a few feet to the left or right, but that was it, and Grey had never seen him actually do this. Grey would just lift his face from the monitor, or leave containment to get a cup of coffee or sneak a smoke in the break room, and by the time he looked again, he'd find Zero hanging someplace else.

Hanging? Sticking? Hell, levitating?

No one had explained a goddamn thing to Grey. Not word one. Like, for starters, what Zero actually was. There were things about him that Grey would say were sort of human. Such as, he had two arms and two legs. There was a head where a head should be, and ears and eyes and a mouth. He even had something like a johnson dangling down south, a curled-up little seahorse of a thing. But that's where the similarities stopped.

For instance: Subject Zero glowed. In the infrared, any heat source would do that. But the image of Subject Zero flared on the screen like a lit match, almost too bright to look at. Even his crap glowed. His hairless body, smooth and shiny as glass, looked coiled-that was the word Grey thought of, like the skin was stretched over lengths of coiled rope-and his eyes were the orange of highway cones. But the teeth were the worst. Every once in a while Grey would hear a little tinkling sound on the audio, and know it was the sound of one more tooth dropped from Zero's mouth to the cement. They rained down at the rate of half a dozen a day. These went into the incinerator, like everything else; it was one of Grey's jobs to sweep them up, and it gave him the shivers to see them, long as the little swords you'd get in a fancy drink. Just the thing if, say, you wanted to unzip a rabbit and empty it out in two seconds flat.

There was something about him that was different than the others, too. Not that he looked all that different. The glowsticks were all a bunch of ugly bastards, and over the six months Grey had been working on Level 4, he'd gotten used to their appearance. There were little differences, of course, that you could pick up if you looked hard. Number Six was a little shorter than the others, Number Nine a little more active, Number Seven liked to eat hanging upside down and made a goddamn mess, Number One was always chatting away, that weird sound they made, a wet clicking from deep in their throats that reminded Grey of nothing.

No, it wasn't something physical that made Zero stand out; it was how he made you feel. That was the best way Grey could explain it. The others seemed about as interested in the people behind the glass as a bunch of chimps at the zoo. But not Zero: Zero was paying attention. Whenever they dropped the bars, sealing Zero on the back side of the room, and Grey squeezed into his biohazard suit and went in through the air lock to clean up or bring in the rabbits-rabbits, for Christsakes; why did it have to be rabbits?-a kind of prickling climbed up his neck, like his skin was crawling with ants. He'd go about his work quickly, not even really looking up from the floor, and by the time he got out of there and into decon, he'd be glazed with sweat and breathing hard. Even now, a wall of glass two inches thick between them and Zero hanging so that all Grey could see was his big glowing backside and spreading, clawlike feet-Grey could still feel Zero's mind roving around the dark room, trolling like an invisible net.

Still, Grey had to say it wasn't a bad job on the whole. He'd certainly had worse in his life. Most of the time all he did was just sit there through an eight-hour shift, penning his way through a crossword and checking the monitor and logging in his reports, what Zero ate and didn't eat and how much of his piss and shit went down the drain, and backing up the hard drives when they maxed out with a hundred hours of video footage of Zero doing nothing.

He wondered if the others weren't eating, either. He thought he'd ask one of the techs about that. Maybe they'd all gone on some kind of hunger strike; maybe they were just tired of rabbits and wanted squirrel instead, or possum, or kangaroo. It was funny to think it, given the way the glow-sticks ate-Grey had let himself watch this only once, and that was one time too many; it had practically turned him into a vegetarian-but he had to say there was something fussy about them, like they had rules about eating, starting with the whole business with the tenth rabbit. Who knew what that was about? You gave them ten rabbits, they'd eat only nine, leave the tenth just where it was, like they were saving it for later. Grey had owned a dog once who was like that. He'd called him Brownbear, for no particular reason; he didn't look especially bearish, and he wasn't even really brown but kind of a mellow tan color, with flecks of white on his muzzle and chest. Brownbear would eat exactly half his bowl each morning, then finish it at night. Grey was usually asleep when this happened; he'd wake up at two or three A.M. to the sound of the dog in the kitchen, cracking the kibble on his molars, and in the morning, the dish would be sitting empty in its spot by the stove. Brownbear was a good dog, the best he'd ever had. But that was years ago; he'd had to give him up, and Brownbear would be long dead by now.

All the civilian workers, the sweeps and some of the technicals, were housed together in the barracks at the south end of the compound. The rooms weren't bad, with cable and a hot shower, and no bills to pay. Nobody was going anywhere for a while, that was part of the deal, but Grey didn't mind; everything he needed he had right here, and the pay was good, right up there with oil-rig money, all piling up in an offshore account with his name on it. They weren't even taking out any taxes, some kind of special arrangement for civilians employed under the Federal Emergency Homeland Protection Act. A year or two of this, Grey figured, and as long as he didn't piss away too much at the commissary on smokes and snacks, he'd have enough socked away to put some serious mileage between himself and Zero and all the rest of them. The other sweeps were an okay bunch, but he preferred to keep to himself. In his room at night, he liked to watch the Travel Channel or National Geographic, picking places he'd go when this was all over. For a while he'd been thinking Mexico; Grey figured there'd be plenty of room, since about half the country seemed to have emptied out and was now standing around the parking lot of the Home Depot. But then last week he'd seen a program on French Polynesia-the water blue like he'd never seen blue before, and little houses on stilts sitting right out over it-and now was giving that some serious consideration. Grey was forty-six years old and smoked like a fiend, so he figured he had only about ten good years left to enjoy himself. His old man, who'd smoked like he did, had spent the last five years of his life in a little cart sucking on a tank, until he'd done the big face-plant just a month before his sixtieth birthday.

Still, it would have been nice to get off the grounds every now and then, even just to have a look around. He knew they were in Colorado someplace, from the license plates on some of the cars, and every now and again somebody, probably one of the officers or else the scientific staff, who came and went as they chose, would leave a copy of The Denver Post lying around; so it was no big secret, really, where they were, no matter what Richards said. One day after a heavy snowfall, Grey and some of the other sweeps had gone up to the roof of the barracks to shovel it off, and Grey could see, rising above the line of snowy trees, what looked like some kind of ski resort, with a gondola inching up the hillside and a slope with tiny figures carving down it. It couldn't have been more than five miles from where he stood. Funny, with a war on and the world the way it was, everything in such a mess, to see a thing like that. Grey had never skied in his life, but he knew there'd be bars and restaurants too, out there beyond the wall of trees, and things like hot tubs and saunas, and people sitting around talking and sipping glasses of wine in the steam. He'd seen that on the Travel Channel, too.

It was March, still winter, and there was plenty of snow on the ground, which meant that once the sun went down the temperature fell like a rock. Tonight a nasty wind was blowing too, and trudging back to the barracks with his hands stuffed in his pockets and his chin tucked into the neck of his parka, Grey felt like his face was getting slapped a hundred times over. All of which made him think some more about Bora-Bora, and those little houses on stilts. Never mind Zero, who apparently had lost his taste for fresh Easter Bunny; what Zero ate and did not eat was none of Grey's business. If they told him to serve eggs Benedict on toast points from now on, he'd do it with a smile. He wondered what a house like that would cost. With a house like that, you wouldn't even need plumbing; you could just step to the rail and do your business, any time of the day or night. When Grey had worked rigs in the Gulf, he'd liked to do that, in the early morning or late at night when no one was around; you had to mind the wind, of course, but with a breeze pushing at your back, few pleasures in life compared to taking a leak off a platform two hundred feet over the Gulf and watching it arc into the air before raining down twenty stories into the blue. It made you feel small and big at the same time.

Now the whole oil industry was under federal protection, and it seemed like practically everybody he knew from the old days had disappeared. After that Minneapolis thing, the bombing at the gas depot in Secaucus, the subway attack in L.A. and all the rest, and, of course, what happened in Iran or Iraq or whichever it was, the whole economy had locked up like a bad transmission. With his knees and the smoking and the thing on his record, no goddamn way they were taking Grey in Homeland, or anywhere else. He'd been out of work most of a year when he'd gotten the call. He'd thought for sure it was more rig work, maybe for some foreign supplier. They'd somehow made it sound that way without actually saying it, and he was surprised when he'd driven to the address and found it was just an empty storefront in an abandoned strip mall near the Dallas fairgrounds, with white soap smeared on the windows. The place had once housed a video store; Grey could still make out the name, Movie World West, in a ghostly formation of missing letters on the grimy stucco over the door. The place next to it had been a Chinese restaurant; another, a dry cleaner's; the rest, you couldn't say. He'd driven up and down in front a couple of times, thinking he must have had the address wrong and reluctant to climb from the air-conditioned cab of his truck for some pointless goose chase, before he'd stopped. It was about a hundred degrees out, typical for August in north Texas but still nothing you could ever get used to, the air thick and dirty-smelling, the sun gleaming like the head of a hammer coming down. The door was locked but there was a buzzer; he rang and waited a minute as the sweat started to pool under his shirt, then heard a big ring of keys jangling on the other side and the clunk of the unlocking door.

They'd set up a little desk and a couple of file cabinets in the back; the room was still full of empty racks that had once held DVDs, and a lot of tangled wires and other junk was hanging from open spaces in the droppanel ceiling. Leaned against the rear wall of the store was a life-size cardboard figure, coated with a film of dust, of some movie star Grey couldn't place, a bald black dude in wraparounds, with biceps that bulged under his T-shirt like a couple of canned hams he was trying to smuggle out of a supermarket. The movie was nothing Grey remembered, either. Grey filled out the form but the people there, a man and a woman, barely seemed to look at it. While they typed into the computer they asked him to pee in a cup and then gave him a polygraph, but that was standard stuff. He did his best not to feel like he was lying even when he was telling the truth, and when they asked him about the time he'd done at Beeville, as he knew they would, he told them the story straight out: no way to hide it with the wires, and it was a matter of record besides, especially in Texas, with the website you could go to and see everybody's faces and all the rest. But even this seemed not to be a problem. They seemed to know a lot about him already, and most of their questions had to do with his personal life, the stuff you couldn't learn except by asking. Did he have friends? (Not really.) Did he live alone? (When hadn't he?) Did he have any living family? (Just an aunt in Odessa he hadn't seen in about twenty years and a couple of cousins he wasn't even sure he knew the names of.) The trailer park where he was living, up in Allen-who were his neighbors? (Neighbors?) And so on, in that vein. Everything he told them seemed to make them happier and happier. They were trying to hide it, but you could see it on their faces, plain as the words in a book. When he decided they weren't police, he realized he'd been thinking maybe they were.

Two days later-by which time he realized he'd never learned the names of the man and the woman, couldn't even have said what they looked like-he was on the plane to Cheyenne. They'd explained the money and the part about not being able to leave for a year, which was all right by him, and made it clear that he shouldn't tell anybody where he was going, which, in fact, he couldn't; he didn't know. At the airport in Cheyenne he was met by a man in a black tracksuit, whom he'd later come to know as Richards-a wiry guy no more than five foot six with a permanent scowl on his face. Richards walked him to the curb; two other men, who must have come in on different flights, were standing by a van. Richards opened the driver's door and returned with a cloth bag the size of a pillowcase. He held it open like a mouth.

"Wallets, cell phones, any personal stuff, photographs, anything with writing on it, right down to the pen you got at the bank," he told them. "I don't care if it's a fucking fortune cookie. In it goes."

They emptied their pockets, hoisted their duffels into the luggage rack, and climbed in through the side. It was only when Richards closed the door behind them that Grey realized the windows were blacked out. From the outside the vehicle looked like an ordinary van, but inside it was a different story: the driver's compartment was sealed off, the passenger compartment nothing but a metal box with vinyl bench seats bolted to the floor. Richards had said they were allowed to trade first names but that was all. The other two men were Jack and Sam. They looked so much like Grey he might have been staring into a mirror: middle-aged white guys with buzz cuts and puffed red hands and workingman's tans that stopped at the wrists and collar. Grey's first name was Lawrence, but he'd barely ever used it. It sounded odd coming from his mouth. As soon as he said it, shaking hands with the one named Sam, he felt like somebody different, like he'd boarded the plane in Dallas as one person and landed in Cheyenne as another.

In the dark van, it was impossible to tell where they were going, and a little nauseating. For all Grey knew, they were just circling the airport. With nothing to do or see, they all fell asleep soon enough. When Grey woke up he had no sense of the hour. He also had to pee like a jackrabbit. That was the Depo. He rose from his seat and rapped his knuckles on the sliding panel at the front of the compartment.

"Yo, I gotta stop," he said.

Richards slid the window open, affording Grey a view through the van's windshield. The sun had set; the road ahead, a two-lane blacktop, was dark and empty. In the distance he glimpsed a purple line of light where the sky met a mountain ridge.

"I need to take a leak," Grey explained. "Sorry."

In the passenger compartment behind him, the other men were rousing. Richards reached onto the floor and passed Grey a clear plastic bottle with a wide mouth.

"I gotta pee in this?"

"That's the idea."

Richards closed the window without another word. Grey sat back down on the bench and examined the bottle in his hand. He figured it was big enough. But the thought of taking his equipment out in the van, right in front of the other men, like this was no big deal, made all the muscles around his bladder clamp like a slipknot.

"No way I'm using that," the one named Sam said. His eyes were closed; he was sitting with his hands folded at his lap. His face wore a look of intense concentration. "I'm just holding it."

They rode a little farther. Grey tried to think of something that could keep his mind off his bursting bladder, but this only made matters worse. It felt like an ocean sloshing around inside him. They hit a pothole and the ocean crashed against the shoreline. He heard himself groan.

"Hey!" he said, banging on the window again. "Hey in there! I've got an emergency!"

Richards opened the panel. "What is it now?"

"Listen," Grey said, and pushed his head through the narrow space. He lowered his voice so the others wouldn't hear. "I can't. Seriously. I can't use the bottle. You've got to pull over."

"Just hold it, for fucksake."

"I'm serious. I'm begging you. I can't ... I can't go like this. I have a medical condition."

Richards sighed with irritation. Their eyes met quickly in the rearview, and Grey wondered if he knew. "Stay where I can see you and no looking around. I fucking mean it."

He pulled the vehicle to the side of the road. Grey was muttering under his breath, "C'mon, c'mon ... " Then the door opened and he was out, sprinting away from the rumbling light of the van. He stumbled down the embankment, each second ticking off like a bomb between his thighs. Grey was in some kind of pasture. A sliver of moon was up, wicking the tips of the grass with an icy glow. He had to get at least fifty feet away, he figured, maybe more, to do the thing right. He came to a fence line and despite his knees and the pressure of his bladder he was up and over it like a shot. He heard Richards's voice behind him yelling for him to stop, fucking stop right now, goddamnit, and then he heard Richards yelling at the other men to do the same. Dewy grass swished against Grey's pant legs, drenched the toes of his boots. A dot of red light was skipping across the field in front of him, but who knew what that was. He could smell cows, feel their presence around him, somewhere in the field. A fresh surge of panic pressed upon him: what if they were watching?

But it was too late, he simply had to go, there was no way he could wait another second. He stopped where he was and unzipped his fly and peed so hard into the darkness he moaned with relief. No tepid arc of gold: the water shot out of him like the contents of a busted hydrant. He peed and peed and peed some more. God almighty, it was the most wonderful feeling in the world, peeing like this, like a great plug had been pulled out of him. He was almost glad he'd waited so long.

Then it was over. His tank was dry. He stood a moment, feeling the cool night air on his exposed flesh. An immense calm filled him, an almost heavenly well-being. The field stretched around him like a vast carpet, creaking with the sound of crickets. He lit a Parliament from the pack in his shirt pocket, and as the smoke hit his lungs he tipped his face to the horizon. He'd barely noticed the moon before, a rind of light, like a fingernail trimming, suspended over the mountains. The sky was full of stars.

He turned to look in the direction he'd come. He could see the headlights of the van where it was parked by the side of the road, and Richards waiting there in his tracksuit, something bright and shiny in his hand. Grey climbed the fence in time to see Jack emerging from the field as well, then spied Sam crossing the roadway from the far side. They all converged on the van at the same instant.

Richards was standing in the conical glare of the headlights, his hands on his hips. Whatever he had been holding was gone from sight.

"Thanks," Grey said over the sound of the idling engine. He finished the last of his cigarette and tossed it on the pavement. "I really had to go."

"Fuck you," Richards said. "You have no idea." Jack and Sam were looking at the ground. Richards tipped his head at the open door of the van. "All of you, in. And not one more fucking word."

They took their seats in chastened silence; Richards started the engine and pulled back onto the roadway. That was when Grey realized it. He didn't have to look at them to know. The other two, Jack and Sam: they were just like him. And something else. The thing Richards had been holding, which Grey guessed was now tucked away inside the waistband of his tracksuit or stashed in the glove compartment; that little dancing light in the grass, like a single dot of blood.

One more step, Grey knew, and Richards would have shot him.

Once a month, Grey took a shot of Depo-Povera, and every morning a little dot of a pill, star-shaped, of spironolactone. Grey had been following this regimen for a little over six years; it was a condition of his release.

And the truth was, he didn't mind. He didn't have to shave as much, there was that. The spironolactone, an antiandrogen, decreased the size of the testicles; since he'd begun taking it, he could shave every second or third day, and his hair was finer and less coarse, like when he was a boy. His skin was clearer and softer, even with the smoking. And of course there were the "psychological benefits," as the prison shrink had called them. Things didn't get to him the way they had, the way a feeling could twist inside him for days at a time, like a piece of glass he'd swallowed. He slept like a rock and never remembered his dreams. Whatever it was that made him pull over the truck that day, fifteen years ago-the day that started the whole thing-was long gone. Whenever he sent his mind back there, to that period of his life and all that came after, he still felt bad about it. But even this feeling was indistinct, a picture out of focus. It was like feeling bad about a rainy day, something no one could have helped.

The Depo, though, played hell with his bladder, because it was a steroid. As for not wanting anybody to see him, he guessed that was just part of the way his mind worked now. The shrink told him about this, and like everything else, it had come to pass exactly as he'd said. The inconveniences were slight, but Grey spent a certain amount of time looking away from things. Kids, for one, which was why he'd taken so well to rig work. Pregnant women. Highway rest stops. Most of what was on television-programs he'd watched before without a second thought, not just sexy things but things like boxing or even the news. He wasn't allowed within two hundred yards of a school or day-care center, which was fine by him-he never drove if he could help it between the hours of three and four and would go blocks out of his way just to avoid a school bus. He didn't even like the color yellow. It was all a little weird, and certainly nothing he could explain to anyone, but it sure beat the hell out of prison. More than that: it beat the way he lived before, always feeling like he was a bomb that was about to go off.

If his old man could see him now, he thought. With the way he felt on the meds, Grey might even have been able to see his way to forgiving him for the things he'd done. The prison shrink, Dr. Wilder, had spoken a lot about forgiveness. Forgiveness was just about his all-time, number one favorite word. Forgiveness, Wilder explained, was the first step on a long road, the long road of recovery. It was a road, but sometimes it was a door; and only by going through this door could you make peace with your past, and face the inner demon, the "bad you" inside the "good you." Wilder used his fingers a lot while he was talking, making little quotation marks in the air. Grey thought Wilder was basically full of shit. Probably he said the same crap to everybody. But Grey had to admit Wilder had a point with the "bad you" stuff. The bad Grey was real enough, and for a time, most of his life in fact, the bad Grey was really the only Grey there was. So that was the best thing about the meds, and why he planned to go on taking them the rest of his life, even after the court-ordered ten years were over: the bad Grey was nobody he ever wanted to meet again.

Grey trudged to the barracks through the snow and ate a plate of tacos in the commissary before returning to his room. Tuesday was Bingo Night, but Grey couldn't work up a head of steam over that; he'd played a couple of times and come up at least twenty dollars down, and the soldiers always won, which made him think it was rigged. It was a stupid game anyway, really just an excuse to smoke, which he could do for free in his room. He lay on his bed, propped a couple of pillows behind his head and an ashtray on his stomach, and flipped on the television. A lot of the stations were blacked out; no CNN, no MSNBC, no GOVTV or MTV or E!-not that he ever looked at those stations anymore-and where commercials would have been the screen went blue for a minute or two until the program came back on. He surfed through the channels until he came to something interesting, a show on the War Network about the Allied invasion of France. Grey had always liked history, had even done pretty well in it back in school. He was good with dates and names, and it seemed that if you kept these straight in your head, the rest was just fill-in-the-blank. Stretched out on his bed, still wearing his coveralls, Grey watched and smoked. On the screen, GIs were tumbling onto the beaches by the boatload, blasting away and dodging shells and hurling their grenades. Behind them, out to sea, huge guns poured fire and thunder onto the cliff sides of Nazi-occupied France. Now that, Grey thought, was a war. The footage was jittery and out of focus half the time, but in one shot Grey could clearly see an arm-a Nazi arm-reaching out from the slotted window of a pillbox that some nice American kid had just used a flamethrower on. The arm was all burned up and smoking like a chicken wing left on a barbecue grill. Grey's old man had done two tours as a medic in Vietnam, and he wondered what he would have said about a thing like that. Grey sometimes forgot that his father was a medic; when Grey was a kid, the guy hadn't so much as put a Band-Aid on his knee, not once.

He smoked a last Parliament and turned off the television. Two days ago, the one named Jack and the one named Sam had up and left, not a word to anyone, so Grey had agreed to take a double shift. This would put him back on Level 4 by 06:00. It was a shame, those guys leaving like they had; unless you worked the full year, you forfeited the money. Richards had let it be known in no uncertain terms that this development did not make him one goddamn bit happy, and if anybody else was thinking of skipping, they had better think about this long and hard-very long and hard, he had said, giving the room a long, slow scan, like a pissed-off gym teacher. He gave this little speech in the dining hall during breakfast, and Grey locked his eyes on his scrambled eggs the whole time. He figured what happened to Sam and Jack was none of his business, and in any event the warning didn't apply to him: he, for one, wasn't going anywhere, and it wasn't like he'd been friends with those guys, not really. They'd talked a bit about this and that, but it was really just passing the time, and their leaving meant more money for Grey. An overtime shift was an extra five hundred; you pulled three in a week, they gave you an extra hundred as a bonus, too. As long as the money kept rolling in, filling up his account with all those zeros lined up like eggs in a carton, Grey would sit there on the mountaintop until the last cat was hung.

He peeled off his coveralls and doused the light. Pellets of snow were blowing against his window, a sound like sand shaking in a paper sack; every twenty seconds the blinds flared as the beacon on the west perimeter swung across the glass. Sometimes the drugs made Grey restless or he got leg cramps, but a couple of ibuprofen usually did the trick. He sometimes got up in the middle of the night to smoke or take a leak, though usually he slept straight through. He lay in the dark and tried to calm his thoughts but found himself thinking about Zero again. Maybe it was the burned-up Nazi arm; he couldn't seem to push the image of Zero from his mind. Zero was a prisoner of some kind. His table manners weren't anything to brag about, and it was nothing nice to look at, the business with the rabbits. Still, food was food and Zero wasn't having any of it. All he did was hang there like he was sleeping, though Grey didn't think he was. The chip in Zero's neck broadcast all kinds of data to the console, some of which Grey understood and some of which he didn't. But he knew what sleep looked like, that it looked different from being awake. Zero's heart rate was always the same, 102 beats per minute, give or take a beat. The technicians who came into the control room to read the data never said anything about this, just nodded and checked off the boxes on their handhelds. But 102 seemed mighty awake to Grey.

And the other thing was, Zero felt awake. There Grey went again, thinking about how Zero made him feel, which was nuts, but even so. Grey had never had much use for cats, but this was the same kind of thing. A cat sleeping on a step wasn't really sleeping. A cat sleeping on a step was a coiled spring waiting for a mouse to totter along. What was Zero waiting for? Maybe, Grey thought, he was just tired of rabbit. Maybe he wanted Ding Dongs, or a bologna hoagie, or turkey tetrazzini. For all Grey could tell, the guy would have eaten a piece of wood. With choppers like that, there pretty much wasn't anything he couldn't bore right through.

Ugh, Grey thought with a shudder, the teeth, and that was when he knew he had to do something else to make himself sleep besides just lying there, stewing in his thoughts. It was already midnight. Six A.M. would jump out at him like a jack-in-the-box before he knew it. He rose and took a couple of ibuprofen, smoked a cigarette and emptied his bladder again for good measure, then slid back between the covers. The spotlights grazed the windows once, twice, three times. He made an effort to close his eyes and imagine the escalator. This was a trick Wilder had taught him. Grey was what Wilder called "suggestible," meaning he was easily hypnotized, and the escalator was the thing Wilder had used to do this. You imagined being on an escalator, slowly going down. It didn't matter where the escalator was, an airport or mall or whatever, and Grey's escalator wasn't anyplace in particular. The point was, it was an escalator, and you were on it, alone, and the escalator went down and down and down, headed toward the bottom, which wasn't a bottom in the ordinary sense of being the end of something but a place of cool, blue light. Sometimes it was one escalator; sometimes it was a series of shorter escalators that descended one floor at a time with turns in between. Tonight it was just the one. The mechanism clicked a little under his feet; the rubber handrail was smooth and cool to the touch. Riding the escalator, Grey could feel the blueness waiting below him, but he didn't avert his gaze to look at it, because it wasn't a thing you saw; it came from inside you. When it filled you up and took you over, you knew you were asleep.

Grey.

The light was in him now, but it wasn't blue; that was the funny thing. The light was a warm orange color, and throbbing like a heart. Part of his brain said, You are asleep, Grey; you are asleep and dreaming. But another part, the part that was actually in the dream, took no mind of this. He moved through the pulsing orange light.

Grey. I am here.

The light was different now, golden; Grey was in the barn, in the straw. A dream that was a memory, but not exactly: he had straw all over him from rolling around in it, sticking to his arms and face and hair, and the other boy was there, his cousin Roy, who wasn't his real cousin, but he called him that; and Roy was covered too, and laughing. They'd been rolling around, fighting, sort of, and then the feeling of it changed, the way a song changed. He could smell the straw, and his own sweat mixing with Roy's, all of it combining in his senses to make the smell of a summer afternoon as a boy. Roy was saying, quietly, It's okay, take off them jeans, I'll take mine off too, ain't nobody coming. Just do like I do, I'll show you how it's done, it's the best feeling in the world. Grey knelt beside him in the straw.

Grey. Grey.

And Roy was right; it was the best feeling. Like climbing a rope in gym class only better, like a big sneeze building inside him, starting from down low and climbing up through all the hallways and alleyways and channels inside him. He closed his eyes and let the feeling rise.

Yes. Yes. Grey, listen. I am coming.

But it wasn't just Roy with him, not anymore. Grey heard the roar and then the footsteps on the ladder, like the song changing again. He saw Roy one last time from the corner of his eye and he was all burned up and smoking. His father was using the belt, the heavy black one, he didn't need to see it to know, and he buried his face in the straw as the belt fell across his bare back, slapping and ripping, again, again; and then something else, deeper, tearing at him from the inside.

You like this, is this what you like, I'll show you, be quiet now and take it.

This man-he wasn't his father. Grey remembered now. It wasn't just the belt he was using and it wasn't his father who was using it; his father had been replaced by this man, this man named Kurt who'll be your daddy now, and by this feeling of being torn up inside, the way his real father had torn himself up in the front seat of his truck on the morning it had snowed. Grey couldn't have been more than six years old when it happened. He awoke one morning before anyone else was up and about, the light of his bedroom floating with a glowing weightlessness, and right away he knew what had called him out of sleep, that snow had fallen in the night. He threw the cover aside and yanked back the drapes of his window, blinking into the smooth brightness of the world. Snow! It never snowed, not in Texas. Sometimes they got ice but that wasn't the same, not like the snow he saw in books and on TV, this wonderful blanket of whiteness, the snow of sledding and skiing, of snow angels and snow forts and snowmen. His heart leapt with the wonder of it, the pure possibility and newness of it, this marvelous, impossible present waiting outside his window. He touched the glass and felt the coldness leap onto his fingertips, a sudden sharpness, like an electric current.

He hurried from the window and quickly drew on jeans, thrust his bare feet into sneakers, not even bothering to tie the laces; if there was snow outside, he had to be out there in it. He crept from his room and down the stairs to the living room. It was Saturday morning. There'd been a party the night before, folks over to the house, lots of talk and loud voices that he'd heard from his room, and the smell of cigarettes that even now clung to the air like a greasy cloud. Upstairs, his parents would sleep for hours.

He opened the front door and stepped onto the porch. The air was cool and still, and there was a smell to it, like clean laundry. He breathed it in.