living room to follow her. Nat threw open the back door, and a blast of sunlight filled the hall. Bear barked out after her but Nat stalked into the light, a black silhouette and then gone. The door slammed shut behind her.
After Nat left, Mitchell, the Fed sergeant who oversaw the house’s security, came in to brief us on the plan.
Their plane would be escorted into a landing at a nearby airport that evening. As soon as he had word that it was on its final approach, he would load all of us into a van and escort us to the airfield. Once we were safely away, he and his men would continue on to Philadelphia to join the forces getting ready to protect the capital.
Alec and the others took their last day in the house as an excuse to empty the place of food. Their party raged throughout the day, sending me down into the dark of a basement room to watch the news on a small TV with Bear in my lap.
What I heard changed from moment to moment as news teams struggled to keep up with a war that was moving almost too fast to be described. Reports of Nevada and Oregon falling were confirmed one moment, only to be retracted the next. There was talk of Path terrorists and hijacked planes and nuclear weapons, of pleas to Europe for assistance that were made and ignored. Late in the afternoon, there was breaking news that President Burke had been assassinated, but that too was disavowed within the hour.
All that was clear was that California was now in Path control and fighting was intense as they tried to push their advantage as far as they could.
The news cycle fell into a loop with ever more scant updates and one talking head after another. They were discussing a massive Midwestern blackout when I finally snapped the TV off for good.
A tense silence sat above me. No music. No movement. The glowing numbers on a digital clock across the room read 8:45. Where was Mitchell?
“Come on, Bear.”
Bear jumped down, staying right by my feet as we climbed up into the house. It was practically trashed. There were holes in the walls and burn marks on the furniture. Bottles and cans stood in piles among thickets of trash. The few scattered lights that were on filled the house with an eerie gloom.
Christos and Diane were passed out under a heavy blanket on the couch, their arms wrapped around each other. I tried to shake them awake, but they groaned and turned away.
I opened the porch door and stepped out into the night. Bear was tentative, sniffing at the empty porch before pressing his body into my calf and following me down to the lake. The fairy lights glistened over the dock and the water, filling the little valley with a white glow.
There was what sounded like a distant roll of thunder somewhere to our south and the ground shook. Bear whimpered, his head down and tail tucked between his legs as we continued on.
Alec was lying on his back at the end of the pier, arms spread wide and his feet in the water. Out on the lake, Reese was drifting on a large inflatable armchair.
“Cal?”
I turned. Kate was sitting cross-legged on the grassy shore, half in and half out of the light. She reached out to Bear, but he eyed her warily and moved behind the cover of my legs.
“Where have you been?” she asked in a sleepy drawl. “We were having fun.”
Even in the low light, I could see that her pupils had gone wide and were fringed in a maze of red.
“Inside,” I said. “Watching the news.”
“Any of it good?” she asked through a strange chuckle.
“The Path is on its way east,” I said. “We need to go. Has Sergeant Mitchell come back to—”
“What do you think it’ll be like if they win?”
“Kate.”
“Christos says it’ll be weird for a while, but sooner or later everything will go back to the way it was before because of, like, market forces, which are an inherently moderating force. Do you think it’ll be like that? Like a wheel? Or do you think it will be like something else?”
I felt a twinge of disgust and said nothing. A hard glimmer came into Kate’s eyes.
“Where’s your friend?”
“She left.”
Kate nodded, then went back to staring at the water. “It wasn’t nice, you know. What she said to us.”
“You should get ready to leave.”
Bear and I left her there, crossing the dock to where Alec lay sleeping. Out on the water Reese’s chair spun in lazy circles. When he saw me, he raised one hand in greeting, then paddled away into the dark.
“Alec,” I said, nudging him in the shoulder. “Alec, it’s Cal. Wake up.”
His eyes opened slowly. In the fairy lights they were shockingly blue with wide black pupils.
“Cal!” he said, then reached out to ruffle Bear’s fur. “Little dog!”
“Alec, you have to talk to Mitchell. We need to get—”
“Relax,” he said, moaning as he forced himself to sit up. “All is as it should be. Have a seat.”
“We don’t have time,” I said. “We have to get—”
Alec slapped the side of my leg. “Mitchell is getting ready as we speak, Cal. Now come on. Sit.”
Alec reached into the water and fished out a six-pack of cans. He tore two off and held one up to me. I looked back at the house, then took it and sat next to him. Alec cracked the can, and Bear settled down between us. There was another faraway rumble and the sky lit up in the distance.
Reese’s voice drifted to us from across the water.
Alec peered into the sky and began to recite — “‘If destruction be our lot,’ he said. ‘We must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen we must live through all time, or die by suicide.’ Honest Abe himself said that back before his Civil War started.”
“I don’t…”
“Everybody thinks this is just like Lincoln’s Civil War,” Alec said. “But this isn’t two sides fighting it out for the soul of a country. This is a suicide.”
Alec drained his can and threw it out into the water, where it spun among small eddies. He leaned forward, staring gloomily into the dark water, one hand on Bear’s side.
“We should start getting everyone together,” I said. “Get ready to—”
“We’re not going to New York, Cal.”
Everything around us seemed to cease all at once. The water went still and so did the sway of the trees and the air in my lungs.
“My dad got us clearance into Canada,” he said. “We fly west to meet him in Vancouver, then after that… I don’t know. We were thinking Sao Paulo, maybe. Or Shanghai.”
“Alec, if this is because of what Nat said—”
“I don’t blame you for that,” he said. “I asked my dad if we could fly to Toronto so you could get to New York from there, but the word is, it has to be Vancouver.” Alec turned to face me. “Look, you can still come.”
“Alec—”
“New York is
He waited for me to respond, and when I didn’t, Alec rolled up onto his feet and threw his arms over his head. He stood poised for a moment and then dove into the lake, barely making a splash. He sprang up to the surface again and pulled away from me on his back with easy strokes.
“Think about it, Cal. The future is coming whether you like it or not. I promise you, in a few years, we’ll all wonder what it is we got so worked up about. No one will even remember this dump!”
Alec began to sing as he pulled away, aiming at Reese in his revolving chair. Soon his voice and the splash of his strokes dissipated and the water re-formed its glassy surface behind him.
I sat at the end of the pier feeling everything inside of me grow more dense by the second, like I was collapsing in on myself. Was Alec right? Would it really be so bad to leave with them? To leave all of this? I thought of Ithaca, trying to re-ignite the flame that drove me this far, but home felt so far away and so cold. This place was dying. I looked over at Bear, leaning eagerly over the side of the pier. Why should we die along with it?
I recoiled from the thought; even the barest edge of it felt like a betrayal. I set my knuckles against the
