On the television across the room, a fat sweaty guy with a sign is yelling. Face turning red. Other Free Body protesters surround him, screaming mouths on flushed faces. The yeller’s voice has gone hoarse and he barks the same two words again and again like a piece of broken machinery.

“No limits!” he is shouting. “No limits!”

“Turn that shit off,” snarls Jim, “and get me some light.”

I snap the television off. The front door is still open, a yawning mouth leading to a warm dark throat outside. The stars didn’t come out tonight and the crickets are singing about it in the shadowed grass.

On the couch, Nick’s small eyes are wide open and scared and sad.

Jim yells for light again. I trot to the kitchen table and grab a cheap desk lamp off a stack of old newspapers. Pens from forgotten companies and keys to long-junked cars spatter to the floor. I plug the lamp in next to the couch and hold it as high as the short electric cord lets me.

Jim’s got a thumb hooked under Nick’s eyelid, pulling down the skin. The lamp light shines down weakly and Nick’s pupil retreats, collapsing to a black decimal point. The outline of the retinal implant floats there, rudely visible. The shape of it is square and angular and so clearly man-made compared to the natural mottled brown of his eyes.

“What’s your name, son?” Jim asks.

Nick’s eyes slowly snap to attention, focusing on Jim’s face. The old man gently cradles the boy’s head. Nick blinks up at him. Moves his lips into the shape to make words.

“Nick,” he says, voice slurring. The boy turns and sees Lucy. “Momma?” he asks.

“I’m here, honey. Where did they hurt you?” asks Lucy.

Nick raises one fist and taps the side of his head. His wrist is bent, fingers curled up in a way that’s not good. Jim winces, tries to hide his reaction.

“Nowhere else?”

Nick shakes his head. Drops his fist.

“Who did this?”

Nick just looks up at Lucy. Eyes wide and brown. No response. The boy’s lips start to move, quivering. Again, nothing comes

out. The boy squeezes his eyes closed and shakes his head, tears slithering onto the couch cushions. He reaches up and wipes his eyes with one hand that’s still curled into a fist.

Like a baby.

Jim slumps onto his haunches. Lucy puts the back of her hand against her mouth. I lose concentration and the lamp doglegs. I feel Lucy’s gentle fingers on my spine and I reach behind me and take her hand. We don’t look at each other, just feel the warmth of each other’s hands.

I don’t know if Nick has got brain damage, but this isn’t good and he’s so young. I can’t even imagine it. Some reggie tried to tear the fucking amp right out of his head.

Maybe I should have let Lyle beat the shit out of those reggie kids.

Jim stops poking around and looks up, works the hunch out of his shoulders. There is relief on his face. “Looks like the maintenance nub came off clean. Implant is fine in there. I think he’ll be okay. But he’s gonna have to rest until we can find a replacement port,” says Jim. “Home is fine. Hospital won’t work on this anyway.”

“Whoever did this is outside right now,” I say, “laughing about it.”

“Nothing to be done,” says Jim.

The way the words catch in his throat makes me feel suddenly small. I have a vision of our trailer from high above. A tiny cube of warmth, jaundiced light spilling out the windows onto dead grass. Trailer sitting here like a rotten shipwreck, alone and long forgotten on the abyssal plain of the ocean floor.

Nick puts his fist on his chest. I reach over and take his fingers in mine. Our eyes connect, and he opens his hand. As his fingers uncurl, something small and yellowish and electronic falls onto his chest.

His missing maintenance nub.

“Good job, Nick,” I whisper. “Smart boy.”

Jim eagerly pulls out a pair of surgical tweezers. Plucks the device off Nick’s gently rising chest. The old man holds it up to the light and inspects it, squinting.

“Can you put it back in?” I ask.

“Need to sterilize it. But not yet. Drag that old TV over here,” Jim says, grunting as he stands up.

“Why?”

Jim holds up the implant. “Because if Nick can’t tell us what happened, why, we’ll just have to watch for ourselves.”

In a ditch, not far from here, little Nick is dragging himself up on bloody knees. Running as fast as he can. In a streaking flash he glances over his shoulder. A group of men are giving chase. They wear grins like Halloween masks. Mouths soundlessly coned into hooting O shapes. Lips peeling back and eyes glittering from flashlights, apelike and predatory.

We sit in the living room and watch the world through Nick’s eyes. The retinal chip floating in Nick’s eyeball never stopped recording. It sent images to his implant where the information was cached on a tiny hard drive. It only kept about twenty minutes, up until the moment it was disconnected. Now that the nub is plugged into the right receiver, we bear witness.

No sounds. Just a vision of violence.

Nick falls again, lands in the rough caress of his own shadow. Digs his torn fingernails through dead bristles, clawing forward. A spotlight is aimed at his back. Before him, his lunging silhouette slithers through spiny stalks of brown grass.

The spotlighters caught Nick coming into the field after dark. We’re free to come and go during the day—nobody has tried to set up roadblocks, yet. But it’s different at night. Some of the other trailer park kids must have thrown Nick’s Rubik’s cube over the fence. He was cautious, searching for it. He saw the spotlighters, watched them from a distance. But he got too close. The field was too dangerous after sunset.

Full of sharks. Sharks in lawn chairs. Cheap hollow-tubed aluminum chairs sitting cockeyed in the field. Shotguns leaning against them. Empty silver beer cans littering the grass like dead fish. A scene bathed from above in Rapturously bright light, inky shadows rooting through the dirt and stalks of grass. Like a little fake moon landing being staged every night here in our field.

The electric generator for the spotlights is on two wheels with a muddy trailer hitch jutting out. Looks like it used to be that trademark John Deere green color, but now it’s rusted and caked with sooty exhaust from spending long nights keeping an eye on us. It supports a leaning aluminum tower about twelve feet tall, sprouting four glowing spotlights like metal flowers.

To his credit, Nick tried to stick to the shadows. Stepped carefully. Kept an eye on the pool of light and scanned the grass for that familiar cube shape. He stayed in the darkness, but it wasn’t enough.

A handheld spotlight hits him and he freezes. Puts his palm out against the light and squints. All he can see is that acid burn of brightness from the dark. Looks like somebody says something to him, because he turns and starts to move away fast. Toward home and safety.

He doesn’t make it far.

Flashlights strafe back and forth across the grass. Nick is running now. His sneakers slash through shadow and light. The last thing I can make out clearly is Nick looking toward Eden. One small trailer with warm light spilling out. Home. He twists violently as someone grabs him from behind. A hairy forearm closes over his chest and then confusion. The image is blurred by hair and dirt and flashlight streaks, and then finally, tears.

Our world here is getting smaller every day.

I can feel the vise closing in. Those men in the fields. And an army of them beyond the field. A nation of reggies locked arm in arm and taking one step closer to us every night. Closing ranks around us and all the other Uplift sites, compressing our crowded neighborhoods into ghettos.

Lucy squeezes my hand tight but never turns away from the screen. Her teeth are clenched but she doesn’t look scared. She just looks sad.