The Toyota sped up as if the driver had no intention of stopping. And maybe she didn’t. The car was close enough now that I recognized the halo of curled hair behind the steering wheel. It was Geddy’s girlfriend, Rebecca.

The Het guy raised his pistol as if he meant to shoot through the window, and I grabbed his arm and put my weight on it, and we both fell to the floor. I felt more than saw what happened next. The car struck the farmhouse’s ancient porch, bounced up the wooden risers, and toppled a wooden pillar; the roof of the porch collapsed around it, shattering the front window and filling the room with billows of plaster dust and shards of rotted wood.

The Het guy struggled under me, eyes wide with rage and frustration. I felt him trying to raise his right arm and I let my knee bear down on his elbow until he screamed. Through the dust I saw Geddy break free of his captor and lunge toward the gap where the window had popped out of its jambs. Glass crunched under his feet. The farmhouse groaned as if the rafters had been stressed to their breaking point, as if the roof might come down around us.

I managed to stand up just as Geddy pushed himself through the empty window frame into the tumbled ruins of the porch. The Toyota was obscured by dust and debris, but Geddy had recognized Rebecca behind the driver’s-side window. He shouted her name. He used his hands to shovel away raw boards and broken lathing.

I looked down at the Het guy, who was trying to get up, but his injured arm wouldn’t cooperate. His face was white with plaster dust, a clown’s face. He met my eyes.

“You dumb fuck,” he said.

Then the room was full of Onenia County paramedics.

CHAPTER 24

Rebecca spent a night in the county hospital, under observation for the mild concussion she suffered when she drove the car up the farmhouse steps. The detonation of the airbag had left her with a pair of black eyes and a swollen nose worthy of a prizefighter, but she was basically okay. Geddy stayed at her bedside, apart from a brief interview with local police and a few hours’ sleep at my father’s house, until she was released.

I spent the night at the Motel 6. Telecommunications had been fully restored, but no one was returning my calls. Not Amanda, not Damian, not even Trevor Holst. By now, of course, they knew I had lied to them in order to get Geddy released, and I assumed they were working out some kind of appropriate response—whatever that might be. I did manage to get hold of Shannon Handy, but when I identified myself she said, “Uh, sorry, Adam—it’s complicated, I can’t talk,” and hung up.

So I watched the news, local and international. The end of the telecom blackout had produced a flood of footage from India and Pakistan, much of it terrifying. Mumbai had been hit by drone-delivered conventional weapons, not a nuclear device, but the destruction had been brutally widespread. No significant government building had been left untouched. A firestorm that began in the Dharavi slums had killed tens of thousands: the full accounting of the dead would eventually top one million.

Here in Schuyler, there was nothing about the events at the house on Spindevil Road. I guessed the local Taus, or Hets, or both, were well connected enough to shut down any real investigation. Rebecca had told the paramedics she couldn’t remember how she had “lost control” of the car, and the Het owner of the property would have been instructed not to press charges.

In the morning I took a cab to the hospital, shortly before Rebecca was discharged. Geddy told me it was no use calling Mama Laura—neither she nor my father was in a mood to speak to me right now.

In other words, I had no reason to stay in Schuyler. I also had no ride home. The hospital rolled Rebecca to the curb in a completely unnecessary wheelchair, and Geddy helped her into their car. They were driving straight back to Boston. I asked Geddy whether he could drop me at the regional airport.

Rebecca leaned out of the passenger-side seat and said, “You’ll need to take a puddle-jumper to some bigger airport. Why not come with us? Fly out of Logan?”

Geddy nodded vigorously: “Yes, come with us! Come with us, Adam.”

So I said yes. In part because I craved their company, in part because I didn’t want to face the other big question: when I went home, would I have a home to go to?

*   *   *

Rebecca was intermittently groggy from the pain meds she had been given, and Geddy had never been especially happy behind the wheel of a car, so I did most of the driving, which was easy enough, the New York State Thruway to the Massachusetts Turnpike, clear skies and cool weather all the way. Driving provided an excuse for my lapses into silence, during which I contemplated and then tried not to contemplate what I had done.

Geddy chatted with Rebecca whenever she was awake. I had been afraid the events of the weekend had traumatized Geddy, but he spoke about them freely, and though he tensed up when he described how the Hets had surrounded his car and forced him into one of their vehicles, it seemed to have affected him no more or less profoundly than the bullying he had occasionally suffered at the hands of my father. Geddy had always seemed to shrug off those episodes … at least by daylight, though they came back, weightier and more terrifying, in his dreams. Rebecca might have to learn how to deal with his nightmares.

Or maybe that was something she had already learned. She was as solicitous of Geddy as he was of her, and I began to recognize their relationship for the small miracle it was. In her presence Geddy was calm, relaxed, engaged. There were moments when they almost seemed to forget I was in the car with them, to forget what they had so recently endured, and their talk grew soft and murmuring, confident as the sunlight that glittered from the pavement of I-90 East.

We reached their tiny Allston Village apartment after dark. I made repeated but futile attempts to reach Damian or Amanda or Trevor by phone, and I thought about calling the tranche house in Toronto, but in the end I didn’t: I was afraid of what Lisa might say. I was still awake well past midnight, sitting in the kitchen reading the news and watching moonlight inch across the linoleum counter, when Geddy joined me, in shorts and a white t-shirt with a wry, sleepy smile. He said he’d heard me moving around. I apologized for keeping him up. “It’s okay,” he said. “I’m a light sleeper.”

He poured himself a glass of milk and sat at the table with me. The window was open, and a sudden breeze lifted the curtain and made him shiver. “You’re going home tomorrow,” he said.

“If I have a home to go to.”

He nodded. “I want to thank you for what you did for me.”

I shrugged.

“Seriously. I mean, you risked a lot. And now nobody will talk to you.”

“Seems like. But I’m a Tau, Geddy. Sooner or later, they’ll understand why I did what I did back in Schuyler. And they’ll forgive me.”

He blinked twice and said, “Is it really something you need to be forgiven for?”

*   *   *

We sat a while longer. He finished his milk and belched spectacularly. “I ought to go back to bed,” he said. “It’s late.”

But something, maybe nothing more than the cool spring air and the sound of a dog barking in the distance, had put me in a philosophical mood. “So what do you think,” I asked him, “is the world old or is it young?”

He looked startled. Then he smiled. “You remember!”

“Long time ago, huh?”

“Long time,” he agreed. “Long time.”

“So what’s the verdict, kiddo? Just between us grownups. Is the world old or young?”

He took the question seriously. “Well, Rebecca helped me figure that out. It’s about how it seems, right? How the world seems to people. Back in the dark ages the world must have seemed really old, like it was all, you know, Roman ruins and fallen empires. Like nothing big or good could ever happen again. Like you could stare at some crumbling aqueduct in the French countryside and wonder how it ever came to be built. But then there was the Renaissance and the Enlightenment and suddenly there were whole new ways of answering questions, and it made people feel like, no, they were at the beginning of something, a whole new world being born. Right?”