I shook my head. It didn’t hurt. I realized then that my leg had been set. I was on painkillers. A doctor must have seen me, or at least a medunit.

“Now I don’t want to make y’all feel bad,” Hubbley said earnestly. His long bony face radiated regret. “Y’all’s our guest, and it ain’t right to make a guest feel bad about his ignorance. Especially ignorance he cain’t help. It’s the school system, a sorry disgrace for a democracy, that’s entirely to blame here. Entirely. So don’t you fret, sir, about ignorance that just ain’t your fault.”

He had killed Leisha. He had killed the GSEA agents. He had kidnapped me. And he sat there concerned about my feeling bad over not knowing who Francis Marion was.

For the first time, I realized I might be dealing with a madman.

“Francis Marion was a great hero of the American Revolution, son. The enemy called him the ‘Swamp Fox.’ He’d hide in the swamps of South Carolina and Georgia and just swoop down on them British, hit ’em when they was least expectin’ it, and then melt back into the swamp. Couldn’t never catch him. He was fightin’ for freedom and justice, and he was usin’ nature to help him. Not hinder.”

I had his speech now.

Once Leisha and I had spent a whole night watching ancient movies about a civil rights movement. Not civil rights for Sleepless but a movement before that — a hundred years earlier? — about blacks or women. Or maybe Asians. I was never too good at history. But I had to do a paper for one of the schools Leisha kept trying to get me through. I don’t remember the history, but I remember that Leisha searched for old movies adapted for decent technology because she thought I wouldn’t read through the assigned books. She was right, and I resented that. I was sixteen years old. But I liked the movies. I sat in my powerchair, pleased because it was 3:00 A.M. and I wasn’t sleepy, I was keeping up with Leisha. I still thought, at sixteen, that I could.

All night we watched sheriffs in groundcars busting up places where voters registered in person — this was even before computers. We watched old women sit at the backs of buses. We watched black Livers denied seats in cafes, even though they had meal chips. They all talked like James Francis Marion Hubbley. Or, rather, he talked like them. His speech was a deliberate creation, a reenactment of an earlier time: history as far back as it was electronically available. Maybe he thought they talked like that in the American Revolution. Maybe he knew better. Either way, it was disciplined and deliberate.

He was an artist.

Hubbley said, “Marion was puny, and none too firm in his education, and bad-tempered, and given to black moods. His knees were made wrong, right from the day his mother bore him. The British burned his plantation, his men deserted him whenever they got a hankerin’ after their families, and his own commandin* officer, Major General Nathanael Greene, wasn’t none too fond of him. But none of that slowed down Francis Marion. He did his duty by his country, his duty as he saw it, whether all hail busted out or not.”

I said, forcing the words out, “And what are you imagining is your duty by your country?”

Hubbley’s eyes gleamed. “I said y’all was sharp, son, and you are. Y’all got it right off. We’re doin’ our same duty as the Swamp Fox, which is to fight off foreign oppressors.”

“And this time the foreign oppressors are anybody genemod.”

“Y’all got that right, Mr. Arlen. Livers are the true people of this country, just like Marion’s army was. They had the will to decide for themselves what kind of country they wanted to live in, and we got the will to decide for ourselves, too. We got the will, and we got the idea of what this glorious nation ought to look like, even if it don’t look like it right now. We. Livers. And y’all don’t believe it, hail, just look at the mess the donkeys made of this great country. Debt to foreign nations, entanglin’ alliances that sap us dry, the infrastructure crumblin’ in our faces, the technology misused. Just like the British misused the cannons and guns of their day.”

My hip began to throb, distantly. The painkiller wasn’t quite strong enough. I had heard all this before. It was nothing more than anti-research hatred, dressed up as patriotism. They had gotten Leisha after all, the haters. I couldn’t stand to look at Hubbley, and I turned my head away.

“Course,” he said, “you cain’t stop genetic engineering. And nobody should stop it. We sure aren’t, or we wouldn’t have let go this here duragem dissembler.”

I turned my head slowly to stare at him. He grinned. His pale blue eyes gleamed in his sunburned face.

“Don’t look like that, son. I don’t mean me personally, Jimmy Hubbley. Or even this brigade. But y’all didn’t think this duragem dissembler got loose by accident, did you?”

That’s when I noticed the walls, nanotech perfect. And I saw again Miri’s printouts, unable to pinpoint a single source for the dissembler leak.

Hubbley said, serious again, “There’s a lot of us. Y’all need a lot of people to make a revolution. We got the will to decide what kind of country we want to live in, and we got the idea. The technology.”

I choked out, “What technology?”

“All of it. Well, maybe not all. But a lot. Some nonorganic nano, some low-level organic nano.”

“The duragem dissembler… How did you…”

“Now, y’all will learn that in good time. For today, just know that we did. And it’s going to bring down the false government, same as the Revolution brought down the British. We capture the technology we need, like Marion captured guns right from the enemy. Why, in 1781, right on the Santee River—”

“But you killed the GSEA agents—”

“Genemod,” Hubbley said briefly. “Abominations against nature. Hail, using nanotech to fight the good fight — that ain’t no different than using the cannon of General Marion’s time. But to use it on human beings — that’s a whole different war, son. That ain’t right. People ain’t things, and shouldn’t be treated like things, with their parts altered and retrofitted and realigned. They ain’t vehicles, nor factories, nor robots. The donkeys done been treating people like things way too long in this country. Liver people.”

“But you can’t just allow organic genetic engineering on microorganisms and expect that it won’t happen on people, too. If you allow one—”

“Hail, no.” Hubbley stood and flexed his legs. “It ain’t the same thing at all. It’s all right to kill germs, ain’t it? Even to kill animals to eat? But it ain’t all right to kill human beings. We make that distinction just fine in our laws about killin’, don’t we? What in hail thinks we cain’t make them in our laws about genemod engineering?”

I said, before I knew I was going to, “You can’t hide from the GSEA!”

Hubbley gazed at me mildly from those watery blue eyes. “Huevos Verdes does, don’t it?”

“That’s different. They’re Supers—”

“They ain’t gods. Or even angels.” He stretched his back. “Fact is, Mr. Arlen, we been hidin’ from the GSEA for nearly five years now. Oh, not all of us. The enemy has killed quite a few good soldiers so far. And we inflicted our casualties, too. But we’re still here. And the duragem dissembler’s out there bringin’ the whole war to a hastier conclusion.”

“But you can’t hide from Huevos Verdes!”

“Well, that’s tougher to call. But the fact is, I suspect we’re not. I suspect Huevos Verdes knows a whole lot more about us than the GSEA. Stands to reason.”

Miranda had never said. Not to me. Jonathan had never said, nor Christy, nor Nikos. Not to me. Not to me.

“Up till now, we ain’t been strong enough to take on Huevos Verdes as well, so it’s been a good thing they’ve kind of ignored us. But it’s all different now. Not even Huevos Verdes can stop the way this government’s losing control, now that the duragem dissembler is beyond stopping.”