Protecting them had become the central business of her life. It was what was left, after so much else had been taken from her. And it was a job for which she possessed, to her surprise, a certain aptitude.

But ultimately she had failed at it. She had been away from home the night the sims came back. And for purely selfish reasons. An evening at the theater with John Vance—Beth’s father, who was one of the Society’s singletons, separated from his wife after ’07. They had seen a Performing Arts Center production of Twelfth Night. Then drinks at John’s place. And then to bed, in the secure knowledge that Cassie could look after Thomas, that it was good for Cassie to feel in charge once in a while, to take on some of the responsibility she was beginning to assume as an adult… and other self-serving rationalizations.

You let your vigilance lapse, Nerissa thought. She had felt safe enough to let a little buried resentment leak out—resentment of a duty she had never wanted but couldn’t refuse; resentment that she had been relegated to a supporting role in the lives of these children rather than a starring role in her own. She had chosen to slake her loneliness in the company of a man for whom she felt nothing more than a passing affection. And as a result Cassie and Thomas were gone. Not dead (please God, not dead), but out there somewhere in the company of Werner Beck’s cocksure son and John Vance’s sullen daughter—bound, in all likelihood, for one of Werner Beck’s safe houses. Assuming Beck himself hadn’t been killed. The sims had been more selective this time around, but surely Beck was one of their primary targets. Because Beck, as Ethan had always insisted, was the heart of the Society. Its mainspring, its motivating force. Its most dedicated and most dangerous member.

The turnpike ribboned through Ohio into Indiana. By dusk the sky had grown clear, the air colder. Outside Indianapolis they passed a local radio station, its broadcast antenna aimed like a steel flower at the meridian, whispering to the radiosphere, which would whisper its message back to the neighboring counties and suburbs… to the entire world, given a powerful-enough signal.

Ethan tuned in the station in time for a newscast. The world was facing a nervous and unusual Christmas. In northern Africa, General Othmani’s forces had encircled and destroyed a brigade of League of Nations peacekeepers. In Europe, a conference on the Balkan crisis had adjourned without reaching an accord. And the Russian Commonwealth and the Pan-Asian Alliance were butting heads over an oil port on the Sea of Okhostsk, with reports of an exchange of artillery fire.

None of these small crises was unusual in itself, but the combination seemed ominous. “Sometimes I wonder if it’s starting to unravel,” Ethan said. “The peace they gave us.”

“Imposed on us. And I’m not sure we should call it peace.”

Pax formicae, she thought. The peace of the anthill.

“If any of what Bayliss said is true—if the hypercolony is infected

and at war with itself—that would obviously affect the way it manages the world.”

“Or else it’ll all be resolved by New Year’s.” Nerissa shrugged. “No way of knowing.”

Then the state and local news. The Indiana legislature had passed a bud get extension. The Farm Alliance was threatening to boycott the Midwest Corn Exchange unless prices stabilized. State Police were participating in the search for four young persons sought in a murder-assault case. The weather would be clear and seasonably cool for the next few days.

“If we drive through the night,” Ethan said, switching off the radio, “I think we can make Werner’s place by morning.”

She had met Werner Beck only once, at a Correspondence Society gathering in Boston before the massacres of ’07. Brief as it was, the meeting had soured her on the Society and helped derail her relationship with Ethan.

The Correspondence Society, true to its paranoid principles, was really two organizations. The majority of its members were academics or scientists who used the mailing list to share unpopular or even whimsical ideas related to their research. For those people it was little more than an academic equivalent of the Masons or the Shriners: a notionally secret social club, useful as a way of networking with other professionals. They weren’t required to take seriously the idea of the radiosphere as a living entity.

Those who did take the idea seriously were more likely to be members of the Society’s inner circle, numbering no more than five hundred individuals in universities and research facilities throughout the world. Invariably, their work had confronted them with evidence they could neither safely publish nor honestly ignore. Ethan, for example. Ethan had been one of those outer-circle Society academics until his work with Antarctic ice cores. He had shared some of his results with Werner Beck, who had pushed him into conducting isolations of the chondritic dust he discovered in his samples. It was Werner Beck who had recruited him into the inner circle.

The inner circle didn’t hold conferences in the conventional sense, but every few years there was an informal gathering somewhere in the world. That year, Beck had booked rooms in a motel in Framingham outside of Boston. It wasn’t necessary to rent function rooms—the Society attendees amounted to six men and two women (four from the U.S., one from Denmark, two from China and one from India); the entire gathering would fit comfortably in a single hotel room. Each delegate was scheduled to present a paper deemed too sensitive for the larger Society mailing list. Ethan would be reporting on his work with the ice cores; Beck, on the cultures he had succeeded in growing from Ethan’s extractions.

Ethan had introduced her to Beck in the motel’s coffee shop. She had expected someone slightly larger than life. And maybe he was, but only in the metaphorical sense: Beck was no taller than Nerissa herself, and she topped out at five and a half feet. His hair was dark and thinning. He wore a beard: a uniform quarter-inch of facial hair so carefully manicured that it had a topiary quality. He dressed casually, in spotless jeans and a white shirt open at the neck, and in contrast to most of the attendees he looked as if he’d spent some time at the gym—broad shoulders, thick upper arms.

His eyes were his most striking feature. There was nothing nervous or tentative about them. He looked at her steadily and with a bluntness that began to make her uncomfortable. Then he smiled. “You must be Mrs. Iverson.”

Ethan, typically, had forgotten to introduce her. “Nerissa,” she said. “Hi.”

“Werner Beck.” He shook her hand briskly and briefly, then turned to Ethan. “Last time we met you were single. You’ve done all right for yourself.”

“Thank you,” Ethan said—a smidgen too obsequiously, Nerissa thought.

“It’s unusual to bring a spouse to one of these events.”

“We’re both on a sort of sabbatical. Well, a vacation. After this weekend we’re headed to Hawaii. Two weeks at Turtle Bay.”

“Sounds nice. Anyway, welcome, Ethan. We have a lot to talk about. Mrs. Iverson, I hope you don’t feel left out. But Boston’s a big city. I’m sure you can keep yourself busy.”

It was a dismissal, and not a particularly gracious one. Nerissa fought the urge to say something condescending in return. She had hoped Ethan might stick up for her, but all he offered was a nervous laugh. “Ris knows the city pretty well—she’s lived here most of her life.”

“I’m sure. Anyway, we have our first gathering this afternoon at one. It’s Wickramasinghe’s session—he’ll be talking about organic inclusions in meteorite fragments. A great lead-up to your work.” Beck’s eyes flicked back to Nerissa. “Nice meeting you, Mrs. Iverson, and I hope to see you again soon.”