She put both palms flat on the table and leaned forward. I recognized what was coming. Leisha was a lawyer. “Drew — you never knew my father. He died when I was in law school. I adored him. He was the most stubborn human being I ever met. Until I met Miri, anyway.”

The spiky pain-shapes again. When Miri came down from Sanctuary thirteen years ago, she came to Leisha Camden, the only Sleepless not financially or ethically bound to Miri’s horror of a grandmother. Miri came to Leisha for help in starting a new life. Just as I once had.

Leisha said, “My father was stubborn, generous, convinced he was always right. He had boundless energy. He was capable of incredible discipline, manic reliance on will, complete obsessive-ness when he wanted something. He was willing to bend any rules that stood in his way, but he wasn’t a tyrant. He was just implacable.

Does that sound like anybody you know? Does that sound like Miri?”

“Yes,” I said. Where do they get all these words, Leisha and Miri and the rest of them? But these particular words fit. “It sounds like Miranda.”

“And another thing about my father,” Leisha said, looking directly at me. “He wore people out. He wore out two wives, one daughter, four business partners, and, finally, his own heart. Just wore them out. He was capable of destroying what he passionately loved just by applying his own impossible standards toward improving it.”

I put down my coffee cup. Leisha put her palms flat on the table and leaned toward me.

“Drew — I’m asking for the last time. What is Miri doing at Huevos Verdes? You have to understand — I’m scared for her. Miri’s not like my father in one important way. She’s not a loner. She’s desperate for a community, growing up the way she did on Sanctuary, with Jennifer Sharifi for a grandmother… but that’s not the point. Or maybe it is. She yearns to belong the way only an outsider can. And she doesn’t. She knows that. She put her grandmother and that gang in jail, and so the Sleepless have rejected her. She’s so superior to the donkeys they can’t accept her on principle; she’s too much of a threat. And the idea of her trying to find common ground communicating with Livers is ludicrous. There’s no common language.”

I looked carefully away, out the window, at the desert. You never see that clear crystalline light anywhere else. Like the air itself, the light is both solid and yet completely transparent.

Leisha says, “All Miri has, outside of you, is twenty-six other SuperSleepless. That’s it. Do you know what makes a revolutionary, Drew? Being an outsider looking in, coupled with the idealistic desire to create the one true, just community, coupled with the belief that you can. Idealists on the inside don’t become revolutionaries. They just become reformers. Like me. Reformers think that things need a little improvement, but the basic structure is sound. Revolutionaries think about wiping everything out and starting all over. Miri’s a revolutionary. A revolutionary with Su-perintelligent followers, unimaginable technology, huge amounts of money, and passionate ideals. Do you wonder that I’m scared?

“What are they doing in Huevos Verdes?”

I couldn’t meet Leisha’s eyes. So many words pouring out of her, so much argument, so many complicated definitions. The shapes in my mind were dark, confused, angry, with dangerous trailing cables hard as steel. But they weren’t Leisha’s shapes. They were mine.

“Drew,” Leisha said, softly now, the outsider pleading with me. “Please tell me what she’s doing?”

“I don’t know,” I lied.

Two days later I sat in a skimmer speeding over the open sea toward Huevos Verdes. The sun on the Gulf of Mexico was blinding. My driver, a freckled kid of about fourteen whom I’d never seen before, was young enough to enjoy skimming water. He edged the gravboat’s nose downward to just touch the ocean, and blue-white spray flew. The kid grinned. The second time he did it, he suddenly turned his head to make sure I wasn’t getting wet, sitting in my powerchair in the back of the skimmer. Clearly he’d forgotten I was there. Sudden guilt and the new angle changed his face, and I recognized him. One of Kevin Baker’s greatgrandchildren.

“Not wet at all,” I said, and the kid grinned again. A Sleepless, of course. I could see that now in the shape of him in my mind: compact and bright-colored and brisk-moving. Born owning the world. And, of course, no security risk for Huevos Verdes.

But with their defenses, Huevos Verdes wouldn’t be risking security even if passengers were being ferried by the director of the Genetic Standards Enforcement Agency.

I had worked hard to understand the triple-shield security around Huevos Verdes.

The first shield, a translucent shimmer, rose from the sea a quarter mile out from the island. Spherical, the shield extended underwater, cutting through the rock of the island itself, an all-enveloping egg. Terry Mwakambe, the Supers’ strangest genius, had invented the field. Nothing else like it existed anywhere in the world. It scanned DNA, and nothing not recorded in the data banks got through. Not dolphins, not navy frogmen, not seagulls, not drifting algae. Nada.

The second shield, a hundred yards beyond, stopped all nonliving matter not accompanied by DNA that was stored in the data banks. No unmanned ’bot vessel carrying anything — sensors, bombs, spores — passed this field. No matter how small. If there wasn’t a registered DNA code accompanying it, it didn’t get through. We skimmed through the shield’s faint blue shimmer as if through a soap bubble.

The third shield, at the docks, was manually controlled and visually monitored. The registered DNA had to be alive and talking. I don’t know how they checked for a drugged state. Nothing touched us, at least nothing I felt. The design was Terry Mwa-kambe’s. The monitoring was shared by everybody, in shifts. The paranoia was Miri’s. Unlike her grandmother, she didn’t want the Supers to secede permanently from the United States. But like her grandmother, she’d nonetheless constructed a defended refuge that government officials couldn’t touch. A sanctuary. She’d just done it better than Jennifer Sharifi had.

“Permission to dock,” the freckled kid said seriously. He gave a little half-mocking salute and grinned. This was still an adventure for him.

“Hi, Jason,” Christy Demetrios said. “Hello, Drew. Come on in.”

Jason Reynolds. That was the kid’s name. I remembered now. Kevin’s granddaughter Alexandra’s son. Something about him tugged at my memory, a nervous quick shape like a string of beads. I couldn’t remember.

Jason docked the boat expertly — they all did everything expertly — and we went ashore, Jason with quick bounds and me in my powerchair.

A hundred feet of genemod greenery, flowers and bushes and trees, all of it part of the project. Plants grew right to the water’s edge. When the sea threatened, a Y-shield switched on, capable of protecting even the most fragile genemod rose from a hurricane. Beyond the garden, the compound walls rose abruptly, thin as paper, stronger than diamonds. Miri told me they were only a dozen molecules thick, constructed by second-generation nano-machines that had themselves been made from nanomachines. In my mind I saw the walls’ glossy whiteness, to which no dirt could adhere, as hot dark red motion, thick and unstoppable as lava.

Nothing here was stoppable.

“Drew!” Miri ran to meet me, wearing white shorts and a loose shirt, her masses of dark hair tied back with a red ribbon. She had put on red lipstick. She still looked more like sixteen than twenty-nine. She threw her arms around me in my chair, and I felt the quick beating of her heart against my cheek. Super metabolism is revved up a lot higher than ours. I kissed her.

She murmured into my hair, “This time was too long. Four months!”