Lyle throws himself at me like a predator. Like something that our ancestors might have drawn on cave walls by firelight. My body is trying to move, trying to save my life, but I’m tangled up in Vaughn. The politician has grabbed my arms from behind. I twist around to look at him, and he stares back at me with this look on his face like I just shit my pants in church.

“Moron,” he says.

Then I’m on the ground. Lyle is on me like a barbed-wire blanket. The pavement gobbles up chunks of my skin as I struggle. But Lyle is too fast, each move part of a series. The cowboy torques a bony elbow across my jaw, and for a moment my mouth doesn’t close quite like it should anymore.

Lyle’s got me pinned and he’s dropping fists on me mechanically. My bruised forearms are up, fending off the bombardment with equally mechanical precision.

“We coulda gone to the stars,” he says. “You could have been my brother.”

As I start to lose consciousness I catch his face in glimpses, twisted with hate.

“Stop!” shouts Vaughn. “Stop it, Lyle.”

It’s like shouting at a locomotive. Lyle stops punching and digs his thumbs into my windpipe. Now my arms are so much useless rubber. I’m retreating back to my inside room whether I want to or not. My eyes rolling up, and now I’m looking at the inside of my own skull.

“…  dammit, you animal …”

“…  need him …”

“…  the fucking plan …”

Silence.

I feel something like ants on my face. Stinging and tickling, running around in a blind confusion. It’s the blood returning. My vision blooms from tiny pinpricks, expands until I see the buildings looming over me, wavering and dancing.

I’m lying on my back, head bouncing as I cough uncontrollably. Specks of white foam arc away from my lips into the sunlight. The pavement is cool and gritty on my head. Level four is gone, not even a memory. I feel like I’ve been out for days, but it was just seconds.

Lyle sits a few feet away, arms on his knees. He picks a dandelion from a crack in the cement and twirls it, fingernails rimmed in my blood. He smiles at the flower, considers it. Like nothing happened. But I can still feel his phantom grasp around my throat.

Vaughn isn’t calm, though.

The politician wheels around and screams at the cowboy. Walks over to the car and leans on it, catching his breath. Somehow, the sounds don’t register in my ears. All I hear is the sluggish pounding of my heart, the crinkled-plastic rasp of my lungs.

“How could you do it?” I croak to Lyle.

He wipes his nose with one swollen fist. Sniffs. “What do you want me to say? Everything’s part of a plan,” he says. “This is happening all over the country. Right now, today. You could have owned it. But it’s all over for you. For me, it’s just beginning.”

“Why?” I ask, voice breaking.

The pain and hurt I feel are embedded in the question like a needle. Lyle winces at the sting of it, says nothing.

Vaughn kicks an empty can, sends it rattling down the alley. “Get this amp on his way. We’ve got a lot of work to do.”

Lyle’s eyes never leave mine. “Whatever you say, boss,” he says.

The laughing cowboy drags me onto my feet. I try to swallow through a half-collapsed throat and choke on it. I’m seeing the world through gauze as Lyle shoves me out of the alley. I stand there, swaying on my feet.

“You’re letting me go?” I ask, incredulous.

The tang of far-off smoke stings my nostrils.

“Sorta,” says Lyle, shrugging. He opens the car door and gets in. Slams it shut on my disbelief.

“You smell that?” Vaughn asks, leaning over the hood of the car. His voice seems to come from far away. “You better run home, my friend. Eden is burning.”

The White House Office of the Press Secretary

United States Capitol, Washington, D.C.

Mr. Speaker, Mr. Vice President, members of Congress, I come to this house of the people to speak to you and all Americans at a defining moment—as the impact of a volatile new technology rends at our union and tears at the bonds of human kinship—as our nation stands on the very precipice of civil war.

Yesterday, a coalition of extremists known as Astra, their bodies implanted with advanced technology, launched a series of coordinated, premeditated attacks on three American cities.

The attack yesterday posed a direct challenge to the constitutional rights of Americans to assemble and freely express their beliefs. Many innocent lives were lost to fanaticism. By choosing to reject rational discourse and to take the lives of their fellow citizens, these extremists have abandoned everything except for the will to power, and they have therefore abandoned their own cause.

I want to speak tonight directly to the hundreds of thousands of implanted individuals who are peaceful and who bear no ill will toward our union. We respect your decision to undergo medical implantation. We understand that over the last tumultuous months, tensions have run high between implanted and nonimplanted citizens. Debates have raged in our courts, our halls of Congress, and in our churches and homes. We ask that you be patient. Peace will come in time.

Tonight, however, we must seek to maintain the compact of our union that was sealed in the flames of a catastrophic civil war that took place more than a century and a half ago.

As commander in chief of the Army and Navy, I have directed that all measures be taken for the defense of the American people from the extremists who are in our midst. We will use every resource to hunt these extremists down, turn them against one another, and drive them from safe shelter and into the arms of the law. Likewise, we will not hesitate to use any means necessary to protect innocent individuals with implants.

A great task awaits us—a rectification of human nature itself. The continued existence of our union depends upon our success in this endeavor.

We must seek the unity of natural man with the artificial world that he has built—with the technology that can save or destroy him, with new capabilities that can bring about great good or great harm, and with the technological devices that can nourish or starve his spirit.

We must seek and find an ultimate harmony between body and machine, a common ground from which every citizen is free to contribute toward improving the quality of our entire civilization.

This is the search that we begin tonight.

Smoke is rising from Eden—thin black ribbons braiding themselves in the sky. I stumble and try to run harder. I’m sucking air in ragged breaths, my throat and ribs and fingers bruised and hurting. The breeze carries the sharp chemical smell of a whole lot of unnatural, man-made shit burning up fast.

Cancer on the wind.

The war has really started now. Jim told me it was coming. They’re just waiting for an excuse, he said. Maybe my dad even saw a twinkle of it on the horizon fifteen years ago when he healed me and gave me something extra while he was at it. Deep down, they must have feared that one day it would come to this: the new against the old.

Even Samantha saw it.

In my imagination, I envisioned a heroic battle. Guns and guts and glory. Instead, I’m sneaking into a burning trailer park to find a goofy kid and a woman who may have pretended to like me as a favor to her psychopath brother.