"Hello, Captain Swartz," Flora said. "What can I do for you?" She had no doubt that the earnest young officer with a roll of papers under one arm was on the up and up. Whether Herman Bruck had an ulterior motive in introducing him…Well, she'd find out about that.

"Very pleased to meet you, ma'am," Alex Swartz said. He had broad, Slavic cheekbones and a narrow chin, giving his face a foxy cast. "I graduated from Columbia with a degree in architecture two weeks before the war started. I'm on leave right now-in a week, I go back down to occupation duty in Mississippi. But I wanted to show you some of the sketches I've made for how things might look once we put them back together."

"I'd like to see," Flora said, not exaggerating too much. If the sketches turned out to be garbage, she could come out with polite nothings, let the captain down easy, and then get on with her reelection campaign and with taking care of the damage in the district.

But they weren't garbage. As he unrolled them one by one and talked about what he had in mind, she saw she wasn't the only one who'd been thinking along those lines. The sketches showed a more spacious, less jam-packed, less hurried place than the one her constituents lived in now.

"This is a lot like what I have in mind," she said. "I particularly like the way you use green space, and the way you don't forget about theaters and libraries. The next question is, how much does it all cost?" That was the one that separated amateurs from professionals. She wouldn't have been surprised if Alex Swartz hadn't worried about it at all.

He had, though. "Here-I've made some estimates," he said, and pulled a couple of folded sheets of paper from his left breast pocket. "Not cheap, but I hope not too outrageous."

"Let's have a look." Flora peered through the bottoms of her bifocals. She found herself nodding. Captain Swartz had it just about right-what he was proposing wasn't cheap, but it wasn't too expensive, either. If you wanted to do things right, you had to spend some money. "Not bad, Captain. Not bad at all."

"Do you think…there's any chance it will happen?" he asked.

"There's some chance that some of it will," she answered. "I can't say any more than that. Nothing the government touches ever ends up looking just the way you thought it would before you started-you need to understand that right from the beginning, or else you start going crazy."

Swartz nodded. "Got you."

"Are you sure? You'd better, or you'll end up very disappointed. Most things end up as compromises, as committee decisions that don't make too many people too unhappy. Some good stuff goes down the drain. So does some crap. Which is which…depends on who's talking a lot of the time."

"Getting some of this built is better than leaving it all as pretty pictures," Captain Swartz insisted. "Pretty pictures are too easy."

"That sounds like the right attitude," Flora said.

"One thing you find out pretty darn quick in the Army-you won't get everything you want," Swartz said.

"It's no different in politics," Flora said. "We don't always have to shoot at people to make that clear, though, which is all to the good."

Captain Swartz looked about sixteen when he grinned. "I bet." Then the grin slipped. "Didn't I hear your son got wounded? How's he doing?"

"He's getting better," Flora answered. "It was a hand wound-nothing life-threatening, thank God." And it kept him out of action while the war finally ran down. Maybe it kept him from stopping something worse. She could hope so, anyway. Hoping so made her feel not quite so bad when she thought about what did happen to Joshua.

"Glad to hear it," the architect said. "I admire you for not keeping him out of the Army or getting him a job counting paper clips in Nevada or something. You would've had the clout to do it-I know that."

"Captain, I'll tell you what isn't even close to a secret. I'm his mother, after all. If he'd let me do something like that, I would have done it in a heartbeat," Flora answered. "But he didn't, and so I didn't. If, God forbid, anything worse would have happened, I don't know how I would have looked at myself in a mirror afterwards."

"Well, I can see that," Alex Swartz said. "But I can see how he feels about it, too. You don't want to think your mother's apron strings kept you out of danger everybody else had to face."

"No, and you don't want to get killed, either." Flora sighed. "He came through it, and he didn't get hurt too bad. That means I don't hate myself…too much." She tapped an unrolled drawing with the nail of her right index finger. "I really think you're on to something here with these sketches. I hope we can make some of them more than sketches, if you know what I mean. The district will be better off if we can."

His eyes glowed. "Thank you!"

"You're welcome," she said. "Remember, I grew up here, in a coldwater flat. We're too crowded. I like the open space that's part of your plan. We need more of it here. We'd be better off if the whole district had more, not just the parts the Confederates bombed."

"Using war as an engine for urban improvement-" Captain Swartz began.

"Is wasteful," Flora finished for him. She didn't know if that was what he was going to say, but it was the truth. She went on, "But if it's the only engine we've got, not using it would be a crime. And the way things are on the Lower East Side, I'm afraid it is."

"If I got out of the Army before Election Day, I was going to vote for you anyway," he said. "Now I want to vote for you two or three times."

From behind Flora, Herman Bruck said, "That can probably be arranged."

"Hush, Herman," Flora said, though she knew he might not be kidding. She turned back to Captain Swartz. "Instead of doing that, take your plans to Morris Kramer. If he wins, he can do his best to push them through, too. And they're important. They ought to go forward regardless of politics." Did she really say that? Did she really mean it? She nodded to herself. She did. When it came down to the district, you could…every once in a while.

F rom Virginia all the way down to Florida-except the area around Lexington, Virginia, which was the most special of special cases-Irving Morrell's word was law. Military governor was a bland title, but it was the one he had. In the Roman Empire, he would have been a proconsul. That held more flavor, at least to him. A Roman, to whom Latin came naturally, might have disagreed.

Morrell had always had a bitch of a time with Latin. He set up shop in Atlanta. It was centrally located for his current command, and it also hadn't taken the pounding Richmond had. One of these days, the states under his jurisdiction might rejoin the USA. That was the long-term outlook in Philadelphia. Morrell would believe it when he saw it. Right now, his main job was making sure smoldering resentment didn't burst into flaming revolt.

Thick tangles of barbed wire strengthened by iron and concrete pillars made sure autos couldn't come within a couple of hundred yards of his headquarters. No auto bomb was going to take out the whole building. Everyone who approached on foot, male or female, was methodically searched.

Security was just as tight at other U.S. headquarters throughout the fallen Confederacy. Neither that nor brutal retaliation for attacks had kept a couple of colonels and a brigadier general from joining their ancestors.

"And these people are supposed to become citizens?" Morrell said to his second-in-command. "How long do they expect us to wait?"

"The French and Germans don't love each other, either," Harlan Parsons replied.

"But they both know they're foreigners," Morrell said. "The Confederates speak English. These states used to belong to the USA. And because of that, the bigwigs in Philadelphia think it can happen again, easy as pie. And I've got one thing to say to that: bullshit!"