"Okay, I've probably seen enough," he conceded. "Just thought it was important, you know, to have a look for myself."

"That's why people like you, sir." Culver smiled. "You like to get your hands dirty. Come on, shall we get back to the convoy? This place gives me the creeps."

They retraced their steps along Wall Street, carefully picking their way around the occasional pile of rags that had not been blown or washed away. There weren't many left after so long. Jed and Kip both swerved to avoid a rusted three-wheeled baby stroller that had tipped on its side. They studiously avoided looking too closely at its contents. At one point a shaft of light between two burned-out buildings illuminated a small galaxy of twinkling stars on the footpath. Some of the smaller, more desperate freebooters did nothing but sweep the streets clear of rings, watches, bracelets, and other smaller bejeweled trinkets left behind when their owners died. There was a mountain of such stuff still lying around. As Kip sidestepped an pricey-looking silver watch, the thud of faraway gunfire reached them. His detail chief spoke briefly into a radio, but even Kip knew the small battle was too far off to concern them.

The convoy was waiting back at the intersection with William Street, four black Secret Service Humvees and three Strykers bristling with machine guns and grenade launchers. More security men hurried toward his walking party as they approached.

"Trouble?" Jed asked.

"Nothing we can't handle, sir," replied the agent in charge. "Just a little flare-up over on Canal. It won't bother us, but we should get moving anyway."

Kipper distinctly heard the crump of multiple explosions somewhere far off in the city. The muffled thrum of helicopters grew louder but faded away before he could see them. At least they're ours, he thought. You couldn't always be sure these days. The detail hurried him over to his vehicle and almost pushed him inside. Jed climbed right in after him, followed by Karen Milliner. The young woman's expensive-looking black silk slacks were covered in dust and grime. She pulled herself into the cabin and seated herself directly in front of Kipper.

"Sorry, sir, but I've just been talking to the Service, and I'm afraid I probably have to advise against going on with this. There's been three big-ass firefights across the island this morning and more over in Brooklyn. A real humdinger near JFK with air force security forces."

Kip enjoyed Karen's totally ingenuous use of words like "humdinger."

"Karen, there are gunfights all over this city every day and night," he said. "Mostly freebooters and pirates fighting among themselves. There's never going to be a time when you get the nice quiet background vision you want. Just roll with it."

Doors slammed up and down the convoy, and the engine turned over in their vehicle, a heavily armored SUV.

"And while we're on the topic, sir, respectfully and all, you really should have let me assign a camera crew to at least shoot some pool vision of your little walk around back there. I mean, what is the point of all that meetin' and greetin' if we don't get any good coverage out of it?"

Kip smiled and shrugged as the vehicle lurched forward. "The point? To meet and greet folks?"

Karen opened her mouth to protest, but Jed cut her off.

"Give it, up, darlin'. You'll never win. I've been trying to get him to dress like a grown-up ever since I took this job, and he still looks like he's about to go and boss a crew of ditchdiggers somewhere."

Kipper waved his hands back in the general direction of the salvage workers they had just met.

"Well, mostly that's what I do, Jed. This job is not what it used to be. Matter of fact, it's not far removed from my old job for the city, and I'm just fine with that. The country doesn't need a commander in chief nearly as much as it needs a chief engineer, if you ask me. Just look at the work that needs doing in this city if it's gonna be our main eastern settlement again."

Jed gazed morosely out the windows as the convoy slowly rumbled down Broad Street. The fire-blackened shell of Goldman Sachs loomed just ahead.

"But Mister President, we cannot do that work without securing the ground first. Those people we just met back there-they could not be doing what they're doing unless that part of the city had been cleared of raiders and pirates. And now that we have cleared them, that is, killed them all and cordoned off that part of Manhattan, we'll need to hold the area, which will mean sustaining militia forces and at least a brigade of regulars, and securing JFK, the bridges and roads between here and-"

Kipper held up his hands to cut Jed off.

"I know all that, Jed. You don't have to remind me. Some days I feel like I'm living in some weird-ass History Channel show and we're trying to settle, or resettle, the Wild East. I got hostile powers to three points of the compass, a weakened military, massive debt, feuding state and federal governments, and an economy that pretty much ceased to exist four years ago. None of this is news to me, buddy. But when I agreed to do this job, I agreed on one condition: that it was to be about rebuilding. And yes, I know that retaking ground and fighting off all comers is part of that. But it's not the main game. Not for me. Restoration, reconstruction, and renewal are my three R's. Otherwise I just walk away."

He shook his head and folded his arms to emphasize the point. Nobody would ever doubt that James Kipper meant what he said. He wasn't even sure he wanted to run in the next election, and he had been entirely open about that, a level of honesty that drove his handlers to distraction most days.

Culver threw up his hands in mock surrender. "You're the boss."

"Yes, I am," said Kip. "It says so on all my underwear."

Texas, the Federal Mandate An icy morning crust crunched and melted beneath Miguel Pieraro's boots as he knelt down to grab a fistful of cold, damp soil. He sniffed the richness of the East Texas earth, worked the black gritty loam between his fingers, and marveled at the sea of emerald that spread before him under a heavy gray sky. His horse, Flossie, tied to a fence post, dipped her head and pulled at the grass, tearing great clods and mouthfuls of feed from the ground with a hard, ripping sound while his oldest daughter patted and stroked the chestnut mare's twitching flanks. A warning rose in his throat, but he stifled it. Sofia was still a teen, a young teen, but she had an easy confidence around horses born of a lifetime's experience.

Miguel turned back to surveying his domain. One thousand acres of land. Government land for the moment, but it would be his in a few years. As would the livestock and all the capital, the homestead, the barns and equipment, everything. And something else, too, something even more precious. Citizenship. Belonging. For now, however, he and his family worked for Presidente Kipper, and he was a happy man for the chance to do so. As he watched, a dozen Bedak Whitetails wandered over the next ridgeline, big four-legged beef factories imported from Australia. Heads down, tails swishing, they methodically mowed through the dense carpet of feed at their hooves. Here and there the grass cover was thicker and appreciably more lush. Miguel had learned early on that such dense clumps of verdant growth often signaled the final resting place of a previous occupant of the ranch, usually a longhorn, but not always. Although many animals had survived the initial appearance of the Wave, many more had perished during the ecological collapse afterward.

"Sofia," he called out. "It is time to saddle up and check the back ninety."

He spoke in English to his daughter, as he insisted on speaking to all of his clan these days. English was the language of their new home, and they would settle in here with much greater ease if they all spoke it well. He did not ban Spanish or Portuguese, the two crib languages of the Pieraro household, but he did not encourage them, either. In Miguel's mind, his family members, all of his extended family, were not simply farmers. They were settlers, making a new history for this country, and he wanted his children especially to be able to play as full a part in that new story as possible. They, too, would probably work this ranch, but their children might one day go to one of the universities in the Northwest or even, God willing, in the East, once the bandits and criminals were driven away and the cities were reclaimed for respectable people.