“You never ate Mister Chicken? Damn, how do you live?” Lyle asks me.

We’re outside a fast-food shack, a few hours outside Eden, sitting on molded plastic chairs that have faded to the color of dirty cotton candy. The building is perched on the side of a hill, hugging a winding road. A motley collection of trailer houses are roosted along the steep route, bleached and broken, like flotsam left behind after a flood.

“How have you lived this long, driving that shit heap?”

Lyle’s blue pickup truck is sitting ten feet away, engine still ticking. The sun-blanched dashboard is buckled with tectonic cracks, and coiled springs root through the foam seats, only occasionally, painfully, breaching. The rattling monster gives me bad memories of high school. And Lyle starts it with a screwdriver. No kidding.

The cowboy points at his car with a nugget of fry bread that trails gossamer tentacles of honey. “Sometimes you gotta go backward before you can go forward. That heap may be shitty, but she’s never been touched by the government.” Lyle takes a bite, talks with his mouth full. “Lucky for us, Oklahoma never bought into safety inspections.”

I poke fingers through the red plastic ribs of my chicken basket. The food is greasy, hot, and astonishingly good.

“Did you call Valentine?” I ask.

“Yeah,” says Lyle. He activates an e-cigarette and lounges back in the chair. “Couldn’t say much with him under surveillance. Told him enough to put him and his boys on lockdown.”

“Let’s hope we get there before Vaughn’s Priders,” I say.

Lyle nods lazily, pushes steam out of his nostrils. The hypnotically wailing cicadas and restless grasshoppers fill in the conversation for a few minutes. It’s peaceful out here. The sporadic rush of cars going past is like a fall wind.

“What do you really want out of this? Astra?” I ask Lyle.

He tosses an empty e-cigarette cartridge onto the ground, where it joins a hundred others in various states of decomposition. Activates another.

“Change, man,” he says. “You ever hear of the scala naturae?”

“Aristotle. The great chain of being. A medieval categorization of living things. Before there was a difference between science and religion.”

Lyle shakes his head at me, lips curling up at the corners, takes a drag.

“Teacher,” I say, shrugging.

“Then you know the order,” says Lyle. “Plants, animals, men, angels, then God. Difference between men and angels is that men are stuck in a body. They feel pain, hunger, thirst. But me and you, we don’t have to feel them things. Body diagnostics come on level one. Easy. We can turn off the human condition. So maybe we’re closer to angels, you know? Creatures of the mind. A higher morality.”

I push my food to the side. “The machine doesn’t make us into something new, Lyle. It only amplifies our abilities. More of the same.”

Lyle stands up, paces.

“But when you’re whole hog, the decisions come from so far down … goddamn. The machine takes us deeper into our souls. That far inside, we’re capable of anything. Way beyond right or wrong.”

“A friend of mine once said that if you’re good, you’ll do good things. If you’re not, you won’t.”

“Don’t let Jim fool you, Owen. We’ve all got a killer inside us.”

I watch the cowboy pace for a moment, trying to judge how serious he is. “We’re men, Lyle, not angels. The Zenith can’t take the blame. If anything, it makes us more responsible. We can do more.”

Lyle smokes and watches the road. I ignore the fluttering grasshoppers and winding cars, pulse pounding in my peripheral vision. If Lyle really believes that he is beyond right and wrong, then I have a serious problem.

Finally, Lyle turns and claps me on the shoulder. “Maybe you’re right,” he says, walking around the side of the shack. “Because I got to piss like a racehorse and I never seen an angel do that.”

Lyle and I drive maybe a couple hundred miles northeast before the cowboy wordlessly pulls off the main highway. Thirty minutes later, we’ve reached a dust-choked road lined with rusty barbed-wire fences. We follow it until we come upon a tractor trailer beached by the side of the road.

Lyle slams on the brakes, spraying rocks and gravel. Our rooster tail of dirt catches up to us on the breeze as we get out of the car. I sneeze as the haze swallows the tractor trailer. Leaves it looming there like a Jurassic dinosaur.

“Pit stop,” said Lyle.

We’re somewhere in Missouri, I’m guessing. Not to St. Louis yet. Maybe a quarter of the way to Detroit. “We don’t have time,” I say.

There are only four generals left in charge of protecting amps nationwide and one of them is on the verge of being ambushed.

“It’s worth it,” says Lyle, getting out of the truck. Reluctantly, I follow.

The rear half of the abandoned tractor trailer sits cockeyed, sunk hubcaps deep into the reddish dirt. It looks like it’s been here through a few prairie-swept rainstorms, leaning into a sagging barbed-wire fence like a bull scratching himself. Waves of brown grass lie down and stand up at the whim of a hot breeze. It’s been a long day driving.

Pretty soon the sun is going to go down and the rattlesnakes can all go home.

We walk closer and I see a beat-up generator sputtering around the side. Next to it, about a half dozen of Lyle’s soldiers sit in the shade of the trailer. A few of them pass an electronic cigarette between them, the LED tip of it glowing in time to their puffs. They nod to Lyle like soldiers.

Lyle’s got one blood-crusted hand on the clasp that will let those double doors swing wide. He flashes a wry smile my way and gives her a yank.

I’m hit by a sudden blast of refrigerated air from the back of the trailer. It carries a sharp antiseptic smell that reminds me of my dad. I blink a few times, trying to understand what I’m seeing.

Some kind of mobile surgery station.

A surgeon stands in the very back of the trailer, glaring at us with his eyes over his surgical mask. Several layers of clear hanging plastic separate us, but he’s outlined by bright circular spotlights that are mounted from the ceiling, hovering like alien spaceships. A patient sits facedown on a paper-covered massage chair, not moving.

The surgeon waves his latex-gloved hands at us, urging us to hurry up and get the fuck inside already.

Lyle nudges me in the small of my back, and I scramble inside, getting a lift from the trailer hitch. He follows me up and we stand in the leaning doorway.

“Shut the door,” says the surgeon, voice muffled behind his mask.

Lyle hauls the doors closed. The surgeon drops a magnifying monocle over his right eye and gets back to work.

“This looks like a bad idea,” I say, breath frosting.

“You need this,” says Lyle.

“I’m not going under the knife.”

Lyle sighs. “A lot of amps are depending on us. In Eden and all over.”

I remember that anatomy poster on my dad’s office wall. Frontal lobe. Temporal lobe. Motor cortex. Sensory cortex.

“What are we talking here?” I ask.

“A simple sensory suite. Retinal and cochlear. Eyes and ears. Outpatient shit. Takes fifteen minutes. It links up with your Zenith and I’m offering it to you for free. And it ain’t even close to free—right, Norman?”

In reply, the surgeon waves a small shiny tool at Lyle. Then he jams it into his patient’s temple, bracing the guy’s head with his other hand. I hear a pneumatic click, and shudder.

“Why?”

“You’ll see better in the dark. Hear better than a field mouse. All that shit. But the real advantage is in the connections. Zenith will use the extra information. Retinal talks. Cochlear talks. Zenith takes you to another level. Full sensory network.”