—Partial text of Gen. John D. Meyer’s evacuation order

“Think you’re superior to me?” jeers the dirty-faced homeless guy. “What do you carry, sir? Why are you so clean?”

My stomach clenches in on itself. This squirrelly little man came out of nowhere. Outside the federal detention center, I climbed down to the highway next to the river. Under seething skies, I crept along the riverbank until I was out of downtown. Stole clothes from a backyard. Crawled under a bush and wrapped my knees in my arms. It took thirty minutes of teeth-gritting concentration to come up from level five. Eventually, I fell asleep with the trash and leaves. Somewhere along the line, I ended up in the neighborhood of Polish Hill.

Tattered relocation posters are plastered everywhere. A whole lot has happened in the weeks I spent locked up. Lives have changed forever. It’s hard to grasp the fact that we have always been one executive order away from this.

Most of the row houses here are boarded up in plywood and squeezed together suffocatingly close. Each house split from its neighbor by a narrow three-story-tall slat of darkness. The bum must have been crouched in the gap-toothed void between abandoned homes. Hiding. Or waiting.

The amps who lived here have now been sequestered away like a virus, cut out of the heart of the city and dropped in a petri dish so they can’t infect the rest of the population. Traumatic surgery, leaving this hemorrhaging hole in the center of the neighborhood. Buildings, whole blocks, collapsing in on themselves without enough occupants inside to give them a purpose.

The hobo jabs a stubby finger at my temple and throws words like rocks. “I said what’re you endowed with, buddy? What foul gadgetry yet lingers in your nog? What’s your frequency?”

He creeps closer, hisses, “Are you with me or against me?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” I sputter. My hands rise up defensively, awkwardly filling the space between us. But the blue-eyed squirrel man bobs just out of reach.

The little guy is an amp, I realize. A nodule perches on his temple like a cancerous mole. He is standing too close to me, his lips moving too fast. His eyes are too pale—a clear, disturbing blueness that somehow floats apart from his dirt-smeared face.

“With me? Or against me?” he shouts at my face. “With me or against me!”

He’s loud and shrill and he moves too fast, but he’s an amp. My own kind. So I take two steps back and I put out my hand. “I’m Owen,” I say.

A sudden smile breaks out on the man’s face. He dives forward and grabs my hand in both of his. Shakes it up and down with gusto. It’s like nobody has shaken this man’s hand for years.

“Peregrine,” he says. “Name’s Peregrine, friend. But I’ve adopted the simple moniker of Perry on account of the laziness of idiots and impertinence of the fools who infest this burgh like a swarm of lice-ridden plague rats.”

“Okay,” I respond, gently pulling my arm back. Perry focuses intensely on my face and speaks in rapid-fire bursts. His sentences are studded with ten-dollar words.

“You’ll notice I’m loquacious and you’ll rightly surmise it’s on account of this medical implant lodged here in the old dusty cortex. I love the taste of words, sir. And each logos spawned from my lips, sui generis, mind you, carries the ambrosial tang of an exquisite candy. And I’m afraid that I’ve got quite the sweet tooth.”

He flashes bruised teeth at me.

“A gentleman such as yourself will understand that my intellectual curiosity is piqued by that telltale seal of otherness that stamps your temple and marks you as a fellow amp, as they call us. And at the risk of appearing obstinate and demanding, I’d like to return to the previous line of questioning in which I implored you to share the nature of the gadgetry cocooned within you.”

“You want to know about my implant?” I ask.

“Cocoon,” he purrs, eyes half lidded. “Oh, now that’s a good one. Ex-quisite.”

“Uh, Perry?”

His eyes flutter open, like headlights flickering on. “Sir?”

“It’s for epilepsy,” I say.

“Ah, the shakes. A woeful fate, indeed. But you’re not alone, friend. The United States government cured many a pal of mine. The schizos, the alkos, and the bipolars. Even cured my own indisposition toward the mental muddle of autism—with a heaping dollop of paranoia for flavor. But, praise God, the taxpayers fixed those of us under the bridge by the miracle of modern science.”

He flinches at the sound of his voice echoing. “How much did they cure you?” he whispers.

“How much?”

“Well, they can cure you a little or a lot, can’t they?”

I think of my father and Jim. The discussion they must have had when I was just a boy. I remember the flashing dance steps on the ground as I sidestepped that guard.

“They cured me a lot,” I say.

He considers me briefly, then digs out a worn plastic ruler from under his filthy coat. He dangles it over the cracked pavement.

“Put your fingers around this but don’t touch,” he says. “When I let go of it, pinch your fingers together.”

“Okay.”

“Sheep fucker,” he says, then drops the ruler. My fingers pinch by reflex, even as Perry’s strange words hit.

The little man grabs my wrist.

“Hold it. Right there. Don’t move a muscle.” Perry bends over and inspects the ruler. His lips twitch as he does the math in his head. “You caught it at zero point zero seven centimeters. With the speed of gravity, seven milliseconds. Visual reaction time …”

Perry looks at me, rubs his hands together greedily.

“Why, you have been cured a lot.”

Perry’s eyes go to my maintenance nub, then he glances up and down the empty street. “I don’t doubt your veracity a whit, young gentleman. Only the brainiest amongst us yet walk the streets unmolested. What with these confounded roundups.”

“Roundups?”

“Indeed, sir. How have you ever managed to fall truant to that information—”

“I’ve been in jail.”

Perry waits for me to continue. I don’t.

“Fair enough, then,” he says.

“Where are they taking the amps?”

“Why, to the under-bridge, sir.”

“Under what bridge?”

“The bridge is the fair shore where many of us once lived in peace—before tasting the apple, you see? The bridge dwellers dissipated, it’s true. Set sail for the shores of normalcy. Bewitched by that flirting specter of gainful employment.

“But lately, a great exodus from Mundania has begun. Under government mandate many a bridge dweller has returned and more. Countrywide they’ve come to the central repository. By train, by plane, and by hoof. The amps, sir, have come home to the under-bridge.”

Lucy and Nick.

“Do you mean the west Pittsburgh Federal Safety Zone? Can you take me there, Perry?”

“A wise notion, sir,” he says. Then the little man smiles up at me, a glint of anticipation in his eyes. “You’ll find that twisted folk linger out here. Some were amped before the technology was ripe, you see? These leftover amps are fierce and rotten. Under-bridge is the safest place to be, sir.”

As the sun sets, Perry leads me through the forgotten fissures of Polish Hill, down narrow alleys where our shoulders brush sweating concrete walls. Over weedy lots where the grass is ingrown with ancient trash. Down endless rusty railroad tracks.

We stop briefly in a back lot where trash bins squat in the shadow of a looming megastore out front. One arm hooked over a trash can, Perry roots for stale bread and continues his monologue. “Lucky, we are. Yes, sir. Lucky to live in this cutting-edge era of progress. When men can aspire not only to be well and healthy, but to be better than well. Better than healthy. If you ponder it, Owen, why, it’s clear that you and me are technological marvels of the modern age!”