Minette lost all ability to judge the pace of the passage of time. Whether the invasion of her whispering room and, therefore, her mind lasted minutes or hours, she couldn’t say. But the sense that something essential was eroding from her continued, although the disquiet that initially troubled her soon passed, and in its place arose an agreeable anticipation.

Moments after her apprehension was rinsed from Minette, her Bobby came out of the fetal position, whereupon he did something unexpected and exciting.

1

LUTHER TILLMAN, FOUR TIMES ELECTED SHERIFF of a mostly rural county in Minnesota, was tall and solidly built, yet he moved with catlike quiet. When he opened the door of the motor home and stepped inside, Jane knew at once that he’d arrived, not because the vehicle softly protested when it took his weight, but because the man had presence.

She’d last seen him twelve days earlier, when he and his daughter Jolie had gone to ground in Texas with friends of hers, Leland and Nadine Sacket, entrepreneurs and now philanthropists, operators of the Sacket Home and School for orphaned children. At Jane’s request, Leland had flown Luther to Palm Springs in the Sackets’ Learjet this morning and had driven him to Indio in a rental car.

Because he had been tied to Jane by the authorities and the press, he had shaved his head since she’d last seen him, and his face was beginning to disappear behind a flourishing salt-and-pepper beard. He had spent most of his life in uniforms and suits, a pillar of the community; now he wore red sneakers, black jeans, a killer T-shirt featuring the face of the singer and actress Janelle Monáe, a loose black-denim jacket cut to mid-thigh, the better to carry a concealed weapon, and a bling necklace of silver chain links. He looked like Dennis Haysbert might have looked in the role of a fiftysomething gang leader in the hood, a godfather of street crime, if Haysbert had ever been given a chance to play such a character.

Jane slid out of the dinette booth, where she’d been checking out various items she had purchased from her forged-documents source in Reseda, and got to her feet. “You’re not as pretty as Janelle Monáe, but you look damn good to me.”

As they hugged each other, he said, “I doubt I can kick ass like Janelle, but I’m ready to do my best.”

They had been through a lot together in the two days between when they met in Iron Furnace, Kentucky, and parted in Texas. Jane not only trusted him with her own life but with that of her child.

He said, “I don’t know how you don’t look tired, all you’ve been through.”

“I’m tired enough,” she said, “and scared. Travis is safe for the moment, hidden away. But they know he’s somewhere in Borrego Valley, and if we don’t get to him soon, these sonsofbitches will.”

She led him to the dinette booth, and they sat facing each other across the table.

Luther had picked up the trail of the Arcadian conspiracy when a friend of his, a schoolteacher named Cora Gundersun, had committed suicide in a flamboyant fashion, taking forty-six other people with her, including a governor and congressman. He had not believed she was capable of such an atrocity. His reward for dogged and brilliant detective work had been the loss of his wife, Rebecca, and his older daughter, Twyla, who had been injected with control mechanisms and were now enslaved. His younger daughter, seventeen-year-old Jolie, remained in hiding with the Sackets in Texas.

“How did Jolie take it when you told her you were coming here?”

“Pretty much how a Marine wife like you takes bad news. Jolie doesn’t swoon and get the vapors. She thinks I can single-handedly break these bastards, so she’s all for us taking them down to get your boy. For such a smart girl, she has too much faith in me.”

“Only what’s been earned,” Jane said. “You’re not carrying any ID, are you?”

“No.”

“Now you are.”

She slid a driver’s license across the table. The photo was the one he had emailed to the house of the dancing gnomes in Reseda.

“It’s on file with the DMV in Sacramento,” she said. “So it’ll pass any police check. You’re now Wilson Ellington from Burbank. The street address is real, and it’s an apartment complex, but there’s no apartment twenty-five. They stop at twenty-four.”

“You know the best sources. Incredible quality,” Luther said, studying the hologram of the Great Seal of the State of California that appeared and disappeared as the license was viewed from different angles.

“Maybe I’ve always belonged on the dark side of the law.”

“In this topsy-turvy time, your side is the right side. I imagine you have a plan.”

“I’ll go over it with you. You ever fired an automatic assault shotgun?”

He raised his eyebrows. “I’ve never even seen one.”

“You’ll like it.”

“What do we need it for?”

“Insurance. Just in case.”

2

THE RANT WAS A RIVER RACING, currents of words rippled through with wordless expressions of rage and need and hatred, a tireless primal scream as nuanced as Nature herself, a corrosive erosive flood tide surging through Minette, so loud now that no sound in the world around her could compete.…

Such a great volume poured into her and nothing poured out, for she had been struck dumb by the power of this tsunami of sound and primitive emotion. She sat behind the desk with her mouth agape but issuing only silence. To make room for the incoming dark deluge, structures within her dissolved.

The fear evoked by the assault faded. A tentative excitement rose in her and soon grew into a thrill born from a sense of wild possibilities, feral freedom.

Bob, Bobby, her man, he let go, let loose, went for it, tore a picture off the wall and smashed it repeatedly against an armchair, glass shattering-flying, frame splintering. He dropped the ruined picture and picked up the chair, the big chair—such strength, such power—and threw it, just threw the chair into a freestanding set of bookshelves, and the shelves toppled and the books spilled across the floor. He snatched up a book and tore it apart and threw it away and snatched up another, ripped off the dust jacket, ripped off the boards, ripped with the animal glee of a predator rending its prey. His face wrenched with rage, yet she thought he might be laughing, delighting in both his fury and the destruction.

She understood, she did, how all this clutter of humanity could infuriate, the way they lived, their pretension, so many things all around, too many things. The voice screaming in her whispering room was calling her to something better, to something pure, calling her to break free of this humdrum existence, to shuck off the bonds of bullshit civilization, admit to her true essence, which was animal, to stop striving for the sake of striving, to cast off the burden that millions of years of change had layered on her kind until it crushed her animal spirit.

He, the man, he ripped the shade off a floor lamp, picked the lamp up by its pole, swung it like a hammer, the heavy base smashing several porcelain figures, ladies in fine gowns. It was so exciting to see the fancy bitches’ hands torn from their glossy arms, their arms from their bodies, exhilarating to see their bodies shattered and headless on the floor. The man sweating and red-faced and so powerful. She couldn’t remember his name. Her own name eluded her, didn’t matter, any name was a burden, like a brand on cattle, the hateful slave mark society burned onto you.

He looked at her, the man, the male, he looked. She could feel his wild delight, joy, rapture in throwing off all restraints. There was a thing on the desk before her—the word computer passed through her mind but meant nothing to her—and she picked it up, raised it high, threw it. Tethered to the wall by cords of some kind, it took brief flight, came to a sudden stop in midair, and ripped free of the wall with a spurt of sparks. It crashed to the floor, and the sound of the impact shivered through her, untying knots that she’d never known existed. She began to come loose and free.

3

EGON GOTTFREY CHECKS into a hotel in Beaumont to take time to discern what the script expects of him. The hotel is so lacking in character that he feels as though he has taken a room in the mere concept of a hotel—which, given his radical philosophical nihilism, is exactly what he’s done.

Nevertheless, because food and drink have taste and effect even if they are unreal, he goes downstairs for lunch, to have a sandwich and a drink or two at the hotel bar. A pressed-copper ceiling, walls and floor and booths and tables and chairs of dark wood, and red-vinyl upholstery are reflected in a long back-bar mirror, so the place seems immense and even lonelier than it is.

The bartender is a tall guy with big hair and a bigger gut. But with a cold stare and a grim expression, Gottfrey turns the man from a hearty-Texas-howdy type into a quiet, efficient server.