No one is immune, not even freckled little girls—or those who would kill them.

Before Janis can bring the muzzle of the pistol back to the hostage’s head, she receives a bullet of her own, a round of such high caliber and velocity that her skull comes apart like a hollow pumpkin in which Halloween pranksters have put a few cherry bombs, swatches of her hair in flight like strange wet birds borne out of some grim dream. Janis collapses as she’s flung backward, and the screaming girl bolts down the steps into the yard, flailing her hands in her hair as if to chase off a swarm of bees, screaming to her knees, and thereafter sobbing.

25

AT 4:10 A.M., in the bedroom of his suite in the Hyatt Regency Hotel, Egon Gottfrey is awakened by the ringtone of his smartphone. The script requires him to be at once alert, and he sits up in bed, wide awake after less than four hours of sleep.

From his immediate Arcadian superior, he receives a report of the events at Longrin Stables: Janis Dern dead following a psychotic episode; a tense standoff that could have led to additional deaths but did not; a negotiated exit by all the agents involved, whereby they do not acknowledge wrongdoing of any kind; an agreement by the mob of vigilantes not to question the validity of the agents’ FBI credentials as long as they depart at once and permanently; an understanding that there will be no prosecution of the sniper or vengeance of any kind against him; and adequate steps being taken by private-sector Arcadians to prevent Internet distribution of any vigilante account of these events or photographs of the agents involved.

Considering the Unknown Playwright’s usual style and narrative tendencies, this is surely not the way he intended this scene to be performed. Consequently, based on past experience, Gottfrey assumes that characters who were supposed to be administrators of pain will find themselves recipients of it, so that they might learn to intuit the intentions of the author more accurately.

Evidently, the Playwright has given up entirely on the learning ability of the Janis Dern character.

However, Gottfrey finds it difficult to believe that he himself will be blamed and made to suffer for this deviation from the script when he wasn’t even present for the action. He has been harried from Worstead to Killeen to Houston and has neither failed to follow the leads given him nor complained about the demands that the story has put upon him. Go with the flow. Nothing is real, anyway.

Subsequent to the report of the debacle at Longrin Stables, the caller reveals that agents have been following up on the many buses that departed the Houston terminal during the period when Ancel and Clare Hawk might have been stowaways, and that one of them has struck pay dirt. There is video of the fugitives disembarking from a bus that departed Houston at 3:30 P.M. the previous day and arrived in Beaumont less than two hours later, at 5:02. An Uber driver in Beaumont has additional information that will assist in the search.

“From your current location,” the caller says, “the drive to Beaumont will take approximately one hour and twenty-seven minutes if you depart prior to morning traffic.”

“We’ll be there before seven o’clock,” Gottfrey says.

“The Medexpress carrier containing the control mechanisms should maintain an appropriate temperature for at least another thirty-six hours.”

The carrier is on the nightstand. Gottfrey reports the number on the digital readout. “Forty-two degrees.”

“Good. Now, the clothes you were wearing yesterday have been cleaned and pressed. They’ll be sent up to you by a bellman when you call the front desk.”

“Another conflicting detail,” Gottfrey says.

“Excuse me?”

“The hotel’s own directory of services doesn’t offer four-hour laundry and dry cleaning, certainly not late-night.”

“Yes, but of course we made special arrangements.”

“A minor rewrite.”

“A what?”

“They say it’s good to be the king,” Gottfrey replies, “but the real power is with the author of the play, who can change details, rewrite anything he wants and make it turn out different.”

“I hadn’t thought of it that way,” the caller says. “We’re rewriting the play, and the play is this country, the world, the future.”

“Well,” Gottfrey says, throwing back the bedclothes, “the script calls for me to take a shower.”

The caller laughs. “Make it a short one and hit the road. We need to get the in-laws, brain-shag ’em, and find the damn kid. We break Jane’s heart, we’ll also break the bitch’s will.”

26

THE SAME NIGHT, THE SAME TEXAS plain infinite in appearance, the same sky overhead infinite in fact, the same radically hot, bespoke Range Rover by Overfinch North America …

Yet all is different. Chris Roberts marvels at how everything can change so profoundly in one hour. When he was cruising back and forth on this same highway, looking for the runaway Longrin girl, he’d been thinking about shacking up with Janis for a torrid week, picturing her naked, figuring that even at just thirty-five he might need a bottle of Viagra to keep up with her. Now her body and the jigsaw puzzle that is her head are wrapped in a waterproof tarp provided by Longrin Stables, the ends folded and secured with almost an entire roll of strapping tape, resting in the cargo area behind the backseat. Picturing her naked is neither as easy nor as appealing as it was an hour earlier.

This is a sobering journey even for Chris, who is neither a pessimist nor a deep thinker. Pessimism is a waste of time, because you can’t forestall disaster by sitting around and brooding about it. Anyway, you can’t be a pessimist and also a fun guy; Chris thinks of himself as a major fun guy.

As for deep thinkers … Well, the deep thinkers he’s known mostly become alcoholics, and if they don’t become alcoholics, they kill themselves. The few that have neither killed themselves nor become alcoholics are either in mental institutions or ought to be.

Nevertheless, cruising now through the last hours of the night, on a four-hour drive to the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex, Chris has what he believes to be a deep thought. It scares him a little: not just the fact that it’s deep, but the thought itself.

Because he’s the kind of guy who can get people to talk about themselves, he’s aware that a significant percentage of the Techno Arcadians he knows have come from dysfunctional families. Janis has said little about her folks, except that she not only renounced her parents and sisters and hadn’t seen them in fourteen years, but also wished they would all die of a painful, disfiguring disease. Now, in light of what happened at the Longrin place, Chris wonders if the fact that so many Arcadians come from dysfunctional families might result in the entire Techno Arcadian project becoming dysfunctional in the long run.

Fortunately, he doesn’t come from a dysfunctional family, and perhaps this gives him a competitive advantage within the ranks of the revolution. His mother and father love each other and never argue. They ran a prosperous business together, and five years ago—at the age of just fifty-eight—they retired to an ocean-view home in Laguna Beach. They shower him with affection, always have, and he has only excellent memories of his childhood, especially when he reached puberty, whereupon many of the girls in his mom and dad’s high-end super-discreet west-side-L.A. escort service thought he was a cute kid, a little blond Tom Cruise, and wanted to please his mother by doing him for free.

Nostalgic reveries aren’t enough to take his mind off Janis back there in the cargo area. Each time he hits a bump in the road or takes a sharp turn, the tarp slides around a little, and he imagines—hopes he only imagines—that he hears her making sounds within the shroud.

He has a long drive ahead of him before he can deliver Janis to the owner of a construction company, a fellow Techno Arcadian who builds entire communities in the outlying suburbs of Fort Worth and who will find a nice resting place for her under the concrete-slab foundation of one structure or another. They can’t very well blame her death on Jane Hawk, considering how many people know otherwise, and in the interest of putting the entire Longrin Stables operation behind them as though it never happened, it is best that Janis just disappear. Her name will be purged from the FBI, Homeland, and NSA personnel records; her pensions have not had time to vest, so they can just evaporate; and because her family, whether slowly dying of a disfiguring disease or healthy, have for fourteen years not known her whereabouts, no relative is going to come looking for her.