I jerked my head toward her. She still sat with her back against the custard-apple tree, but now her upper body leaned forward, gracefully, as if she had fallen asleep. There were two red spots on her forehead, one below the other, the higher spot matting a strand of bright blonde hair that had somehow escaped the mud. I heard a long low moan and I thought “She’s alive!” — the thought a desperate bright bubble — until I realized the moan was mine.

The man who had said “Hail, yes” leaned over me. His breath blew in my face; it smelled of mint and tobacco. “Don’t you worry none, Mr. Arlen. We know you ain’t no abomination against nature. You’re safe as houses.”

“Jimmy,” a woman’s voice said sharply, “Here they come!”

“Well, Abigail, y’all are ready for ’em, ain’t you?” Jimmy said in a reasonable voice. I tried to crawl toward Leisha. She was dead.

Leisha was dead.

A plane droned overhead. The medical team. They could help Leisha. But Leisha was dead. But Leisha was a Sleepless. Sleepless didn’t die. They lived, on and on, Kevin Baker was 110. Leisha couldn’t be dead—

The woman called Abigail stepped off the high ground into the swamp. She wore hip-high waders and tattered pants and shirt, and she carried a shoulder-mounted rocket launcher, ancient in design but gleaming with spit and polish. The medical plane folded its wings for a grav-powered landing. Abigail aimed, fired, and blew it into a second torch in the swamp.

“Okay,” Jimmy said cheerfully. “That’s it. Come on y’all, make tracks, they’ll be all over here in no time. Mr. Arlen, I’m sorry this is going to be a rough ride for y’all, sir.”

“No! I can’t leave Leisha!” I didn’t know what I was saying. I didn’t know—

“Sure you can,” Jimmy said. “She ain’t going to get no deader. And you ain’t none of her kind anyways. You’re with James Francis Marion Hubbley now. Campbell? Where you at? Carry him.”

“No! Leisha! Leisha!”

“Have a little dignity, son. You ain’t no child bawlin’ after its mama.”

A huge man, fully seven feet high, picked me up and swung me over his shoulder. There was no pain in my leg but as soon as my body struck his, red fire darted up my spine to my neck and I screamed. The fire filled my mind, and the last view I ever had of Leisha Camden was of her slumped gracefully against the custard-apple tree, enveloped in the red fire of my mind, looking as if she had just fallen quietly asleep.

I woke in a small, windowless room with smooth walls. Too smooth — not a nanodeviance from the smooth, the perpendicular, the unblemished. I didn’t realize at the time that I noticed this.

My mind filled with grief, welling up in spurts, geysers, rivers of hot lava the color of the two spots on Leisha’s forehead.

She really was dead. She really was.

I closed my eyes. The hot lava was still there. I beat on the ground with my fists, and cursed my useless body. If I could have moved to shield her, to put myself between her and the ragged gunmen…

Not even trained GSEA agents had been able to shield her. Or themselves.

I couldn’t hold back my tears, which embarrassed me. The lava had swamped the furled lattice in my mind, buried it, as it was burying me. Leisha…

“Now, y’all stop that, son. Keep a little dignity. Ain’t no woman sired by man worth that kind of carry in’ on.”

The voice was kind. I opened my eyes, and hatred replaced the hot lava. I was glad. Hatred was a better shape: sharp, and cold, and very compact. That shape would not bury me. I looked at the concerned face of James Francis Marion Hubbley looming over me, and I let the cold compact shapes slide through me, and I knew that I was going to stay alive, and stay alert, and stay in control of myself, because otherwise I might not be able to kill him. And I knew I was going to kill him. Even if that meant his was the last face I ever saw.

“That’s better,” Hubbley said genially, and sat down on a tree stump, hands on his knees, nodding encouragingly.

It really was a tree stump. The walls snapped into sharp focus, then, and I knew what kind of place I was in. I had seen the same kind of walls with Carmela Clemente-Rice, and at Huevos Verdes. This was an underground bunker, dug out of the earth by the tiny precise machines of nanotechnology, plastered over with alloy by other tiny precise machines. Eating dirt and laying down a thin layer of alloy were not hard, Miri had told me once. Any competent nanoscientist could create nonorganic mechanisms to do that. Corporations did it all the time, despite government regulations. It was only organic-based replicating nanotechnology that was hard. Anyone could dig a hole, but only Huevos Verdes could build an island.

But Hubbley didn’t look like a scientist. He leaned forward and smiled at me. His teeth were rotten. Wisps of graying hair hung on either side of a long, bony face with .deeply sunburned skin and pale blue eyes. An odd lump under the skin disfigured the right side of his neck. He might have been forty, or sixty. He wore cloth rags, not jacks, of a streaky dull brown, but his boots, whole and high, were almost certainly from some goods warehouse someplace. I had never seen him before, but I recognized him. He belonged to the backwater South.

In most of the country, the donkey-run District Supervisor This Warehouse or Congressman That Cafe had forced out all independent businesses. Livers could get everything they needed for free, so why pay for it? But in the rural South, and sometimes in the West, you still found hardscrabble businesses, weedy motels and chicken farms and whorehouses, getting poorer and poorer over forty years but hanging on, because damn it the gov’mint don’t have no business runnin’ our lives, them. Such people didn’t mind much being poor. They were used to being poor. It was better than being owned by the donkeys. They took handicrafts or chickens or beans or other services in trade. They disdained jacks and medunits and school software. And wherever these pathetic business held on, so did criminals like Hubbley. Stealing, too, was outside the gov’mint, and so a mark of pride.

Hubbley and his band would rob warehouses, apartment blocks, even gravrails, for what they absolutely needed. They would hunt in the deep swamps, and fish, and maybe grow a little of this and that. There would be a still someplace. Oh, I knew Jimmy Hubbley, all right. I’d known him all my life, before Leisha took me in. My daddy was a Jimmy Hubbley without the independence to break free from the system he cursed until the day free government whiskey — not even home-distilled — killed him.

And this was the man that had killed Leisha Camden.

The shapes of hatred have great energy, like robotic knives.

I said, “This is an illegal genemod lab.”

Hubbley’s face creased into a huge grin. “That’s exactly right! Y’all are sharp, boy. Only this is just a bitty little outstation, where Abigail can see to her equipment and we can pick up supplies. And this place ain’t used by the gene abominators no more. Y’all are visitin’ the Francis Marion Freedom Outpost, Mr. Arlen. And let me say we’re honored to have y’all. We all seen all your concerts. You’re a Liver, all right. Livin’ with the donkeys and the Sleepless ain’t harmed you at all. But then that’s the way with the true blood, ain’t At?”

There was something wrong with his speech. I fumbled, then got it. He didn’t talk like a Liver — none of what Miri called “intensifying reflexive pronouns” — but he didn’t talk like a donkey, either. There was something artificial about his sentences. And I’d heard this kind of speech before, but I couldn’t remember where.

I said, to keep him talking, “The Francis Marion Freedom Outpost? Who was Francis Marion?”

Hubbley squinted at me. He rubbed the lump on the side of his neck. “Y’all never heard of Francis Marion, Mr. Arlen? Really? An educated man like you? He was a hero, maybe the biggest hero this here country ever had. Y’all really never heard of him, sir?”