She inspected me carefully. “No, you’re not.”

“I want to go to Eden.”

“Tell Police Chief Randall if he wants, him, to shut us down, to just do it. He don’t need no donkeys pretending to be sick, them, when you ain’t.” The woman said this mildly, without rancor.

“Down the rabbit hole,” I said. “ ‘Eat Me,’ ‘Drink Me.’ ” To which she naturally did not respond at all.

I walked to a gravrail monitor and asked it for information about train departures. It was broken. I tried another. On the fourth try, a working monitor answered me.

Track 25 was in another section of the station. There was more activity here, although not more garbage on the ground. Three techs worked on a small train. I sat cross-legged on the ground, not speaking to them, until they’d finished. They repaired only this one train, then left, looking tired. Colin Kowalski and Kenneth Koehler had known where I would go.

I was the only passenger. The train was direct. It was just barely the beginning of sunset when I stepped off onto the deserted main street of East Oleanta.

Annie’s apartment on Jay Street was empty, the door ajar. Nothing had been taken. Not the ugly garish wall hanging, not the water buckets, not the plasticloth throw pillows, not Lizzie’s discarded doll. I went in and lay down on Lizzie’s bed. After a while I walked to the Cafe.

Nobody was there, either. The foodbelt was stopped and empty, the holoterminal off. The Cafe hadn’t been trashed. It had just been evacuated, like the rest of the town. The government wanted everything extraneous cleared out for a while, which did not include me. I was not extraneous. From their point of view, I was one of the five most important people in the world: four walking biological laboratories and their captured mad scientist. I had the run of the laboratory, and so probably did three of the others. I only had to wait for them to arrive.

Before the light failed, I.walked through the snow to the flat, stony riverbank where Billy had poked at the brown snowshoe rabbit with the stick Lizzie had given him. The rabbit was gone. I sat for a long time on the embankment, watching the cold water, until the sun set and the rock chilled my butt.

I spent the night in Annie’s apartment, on the sofa. The heat unit still worked. Although I woke often during the night, it was only for brief periods. It wasn’t true insomnia. Each time, I listened carefully in the darkness. There was nothing to hear.

Once, from some half-conscious impulse, I fingered my ears. The holes for my earrings had closed. I ran a finger over my thigh, searching for the scar from a childhood accident. The scar was gone.

I spent the next morning watching the holoterminal. Bannock Falls, Ohio, had been wiped out by plague in twenty-four hours. Camera ’bots showed bodies dead where they’d fallen outside the Senator Ellen Piercy Devan Cafe, sprawled across each other in heavy winter jacks like fourteenth-century victims of bubonic plague.

Jupiter, Texas, had rioted, blowing up their town with nanotech explosives that Livers should not, could not, have obtained. The townspeople promised to move on Austin if 450,000 cubits of food, apparently a biblical measure, was not delivered within twenty-four hours.

The donkey enclave of Chevy Chase, Maryland, had imposed quarantine on itself: nobody in, nobody out.

Most of Europe, South America, and Asia had imposed embargoes on anything coming from North America, violations punishable by death. Half the countries claimed the embargoes were working and their borders were clean; the other half claimed legal vengeance for their failing infrastructures and dying people. Much of Africa made both claims at once.

Washington, D.C., outside of the Federal Protected Enclave, was in flames. It was hard to know how much government remained to answer claims of legal vengeance.

Timonsville, Pennsylvania, had disappeared. The entire town of twenty-three hundred people had just packed up and dispersed. That was the closest any newsgrid came to hinting at vast changes in where people went, or why, or what microorganisms they carried with them in their diaspora.

Nobody mentioned East Oleanta at all.

In the afternoon it started to snow, even though the temperature was just barely above freezing. I’d thought about hiking into the mountains, looking for the place Billy had led us to over a month ago, but the weather made that impossible.

All night I lay awake, listening to the silence.

In the morning I took a shower at the Salvatore John DeSanto Public Baths, which were mysteriously working again. Then I returned to the cafe. East Oleanta was still deserted. I sat on the edge of a chair, like an attentive donkey schoolgirl, and watched the HT as my country disintegrated into famine, pestilence, death, and war, and the rest of the world mobilized its most advanced technology to seal us within our own borders. If there was other news, the newsgrids weren’t reporting it. By 11:00 A.M. only three channels still transmitted.

At noon I felt a sudden, overwhelming urge to sit by the river. This urge struck me with the force of a religious revelation. It was not arguable. I must go sit by the river.

Once there, I took off my clothes, an act as uncharacteristic and as unstoppable as public diarrhea. It was forty degrees and sunny, but I had the feeling it wouldn’t have mattered if it were below zero. I had to take off my clothes. I did, and stretched full length on an expanse of exposed mud.

I lay on my back in the sun-softened mud, shivering violently, for maybe six or seven minutes. Stones poked into my shoulder blades, the backs of my thighs, the small of my back. The river mud smelled pungent. I was cold. I have never been so uncomfortable in my life. I lay there, one arm flung over my face to shield my eyes from the bright noon sun, unwilling to move. Unable to move. And then it was over, and, still shivering, I sat up and dressed again.

It was over.

Eat me, said the vials Alice found at the bottom of the rabbit hole. Drink me.

It had been two full days since I’d devoured the chicken and rice and genuine new peas in the Albany government hospital. I hadn’t felt hungry: shock, anxiety, depression. All those can arrest appetite. But the body needs fuel. Even when hunger is absent, glucose levels fall. There are hidden storages of starch in the liver and muscles, but eventually these get used up. The blood needs new sources of glucose to send to the body.

Glucose is nothing but atoms. Carbon, oxygen, hydrogen. Arranged one way in food. Arranged another way in mud and water and air. Just as energy exists in one form in chemical bonds, and another in sunlight.

Y-energy rearranged the forms of energy so there would always be a readily available, cheap supply.

Nanotechnology rearranged atoms, which could be found everywhere and anywhere.

Under my clothes, I could feel the mud still caking the backs of my thighs. I tried to remember what those openings were called through which plants took in air, those minute orifices in the epidermis of leaves and stems. The word wouldn’t come. My mind was watery.

My body had fed.

I walked carefully, setting my foot down cautiously on each step, transferring my weight slowly from one foot to the other. My arms hovered protectively six inches from my side, to catch myself if I fell. I held my head stiffly. I made very slow progress up the embankment, and it felt excruciating. It seemed to me I had no choice. I moved as if I were something rare and fragile that I myself were carrying, as if I shouldn’t jar myself. Nothing must happen to my body. I was the answer to the starving world. No. Huevos Verdes was the answer.

Once that thought came, I could walk normally. I scrambled up the hill to town. I was not the only one. By now there were hundreds, thousands of us. Eden existed in a gravrail station in Albany, beside the sunshine machine. The entire town of Ti-monsville, Pennsylvania, had disappeared. Miranda Sharifi had gone public with the Cell Cleaner, the most comprehensible part of her project, over three months ago. And in the last month Huevos Verdes could have stockpiled oceans of serum in forests of slim black syringes. That’s what they were doing all over the country, in all those places the plague was not killing people. I was not the only one. I had only been the first. Except for the Sleepless themselves.