Cam is not sure how to respond to all this, so he doesn’t. He slips his hands into his pockets, lest he still be accused of having them all over Miranda as she races down the hall, and he keeps a resolute poker face. The furious man looks like he might spontaneously combust.

Roberta arrives, hesitates, and asks, “What’s going on here?” She sounds uncharacteristically weak and powerless, which means this must be even worse than Cam thinks it is.

“I’ll tell you what’s going on,” growls the man. “Your . . . thing . . . was trying to have its way with my daughter.”

“Actually, she was trying to have her way with me,” Cam says. “And she was succeeding.”

That brings forth muted laughter from several in attendance.

“Do you expect me to believe that?” He stalks forward, and Cam pulls his hands out of his pockets, ready to defend himself if necessary.

Roberta tries to come between them. “Senator Marshall, if you’ll just—”

But he pushes her aside and wags a finger in Cam’s face. Part of Cam wants to reach up and break that finger. Part of him wants to bite it. Another part wants to turn and run, and yet another part wants to laugh. Cam reins in all those conflicting impulses and holds his ground without flinching as the senator says:

“If you come anywhere near my daughter, I will see to it that you are taken apart piece by bloody piece. Do I make myself clear?”

“Any clearer,” says Cam, “and you’d be invisible.”

The senator backs off and turns his rage to Roberta. “Don’t come looking for my support for your little ‘project,’ ” he hisses, “because you won’t get it.” Then he storms out, leaving an air of oppressive silence in his wake.

Roberta speechlessly looks to Cam with helpless disbelief. Why? Those eyes say. Why have you spat on all I’ve tried to give you? You’re ruined, Cam. We’re ruined. I’m ruined.

And then in the silence one man begins to applaud. He’s slightly older and larger around the middle than Senator Marshall. His heavy hands let loose a frightful peal as he brings them together. Clappers must envy him.

“Well done, son!” says the large man with a heavy Southern drawl. “I’ve been trying to get under Marshall’s skin for years, and you’ve managed to do it in a single evening. Kudos to you!” Then he lets loose a grand guffaw, and the tension bursts like a soap bubble.

One woman in a shimmering gold gown and a champagne glass in hand puts her arm around Cam and speaks with a slight alcoholic slur. “Trust me. You’re not the first boy Miranda Marshall has tried to devour whole. The girl is an anaconda!”

That makes Cam giggle. “Well, she did try to wrap herself around me.”

Laughter from all those gathered. The large man shakes his hand. “But we haven’t properly met, Mr. Comprix. I’m Barton Cobb, senior senator from Georgia.” Then he turns to Roberta, who looks as if she’s just stepped off a roller coaster. “You have my unconditional support for your project, Miss Griswold, and if Marshall doesn’t like it he can stick it where the sun don’t shine ’cept Tuesday.” He guffaws again, and as Cam looks around, it seems as if the entire party has moved into the library. Introductions are made—even people he’s already shaken hands with step forward to introduce themselves again.

Cam had arrived at the party as a novelty—a decorative mascot to add some flavor—but now he’s the very center of everyone’s attention. That’s a role he’s much more at home with, and so the more attention he gets, the more relaxed he becomes. The more spotlights, the fewer shadows.

Roberta is also at her best when he’s the center of attention. A tiger moth beating about his light. He wonders if she has the slightest clue how much he despises everything she stands for. And the odd thing of it is, he doesn’t even know what she really stands for, which makes him despise it even more.

“Cam,” she says, gently taking his elbow and manipulating him toward a man in uniform who clearly doesn’t move for anyone. “This, Cam, is General Edward Bodeker.”

Cam shakes the man’s hand and gives a polite obligatory bow. “An honor, sir.”

“Mutual,” says the general. “I was just asking Miss Griswold if you’ve considered a future in the military.”

“I don’t rule out anything, sir,” Cam tells him. It’s his favorite nonanswer.

“Good. We could put a young man like you to good use.”

“Well, sir, the only problem with that is that there are no ‘young men like me.’ ”

And the general laughs warmly, clapping a fatherly hand on his shoulder.

The tension from just a few minutes ago is completely forgotten. Apparently he’s made the right enemy, because now he has many, many friends.

4 • Night Manager

It’s a disease, plain and simple, rotting out the world from the inside out. Clappers! Goddamn clappers. Everywhere. A disease.

The night manager of the 7-Eleven on Palm Desert Drive has nothing much to do for most of his nights but mull over the state of his middle-aged life, the modern-age world, and the tabloids, which, aside from alien and dead celebrity sightings, just love to report on clapper carnage. Blood and gore at a fifth-grade reading level for your entertainment and pleasure. An office building taken out here, a restaurant blown sky-high. The latest clapper attack was at a freaking fitness club, for God’s sake. They just walked into the gym without as much as a hello-how’dya-do, and boom! Poor bastards working out didn’t stand a chance. Not much you can do to escape lead weights flying like shrapnel.

At 2:15 a.m. a customer shuffles in and buys a ToXin Energy drink and a pack of gum. Shady-looking guy. But then, anyone who shows up at a roadside 7-Eleven at this time of night looks questionable and has got a story you don’t want to hear.

The man notices the tabloid the night manager is reading. “Crazy, huh? Clappers. Where do they come from, right?”

“I know where they go,” says the night manager. “They oughta take all the clappers and AWOLs and ferals, put ’em on a plane and crash it.”

He had thought he’d found a sympathetic ear, but the customer looks at him with shock. “All of ’em, huh? Didn’t a planeload of AWOLs go down in the Salton Sea a couple of weeks ago?”

“Good riddance. I wish I’d been close enough to see it.” There’s an awkward silence between them. “That’ll be $5.65.”

The customer pays, but makes a point of making chilly eye contact with the night manager as he drops all of his change in the charity box for Runaway Rescue, which helps straighten out feral teens before someone can shove an unwind order up their worthless asses. It’s a cause the night manager despises, but keeping that charity box there is company policy.

The customer leaves, and the night manager has something else to grumble to himself about. Bleeding hearts. Way too many people are not willing to take a hard line on the unwindable. Sure there are ballot measures up the wazoo this year. Shall we set aside X billion to construct new harvest camps? Yes or no? Shall we allow for partial unwinding and slow sequential division? Yes or no? Even the constitutionality of the Cap-17 law is being challenged.

But with the population evenly divided in their support of unwinding, it all comes down to that huge 30 percent who either don’t have an opinion or are afraid to voice it. “The wishy-washy masses,” the night manager calls them, too weak to take a stand. If the glacier huggers and feral forgivers start to outnumber sensible folk, all the hard-line unwinding legislation could fail, and then what?

At 2:29 a woman with more baggage under her eyes than stuffed in her cluttered car buys chips and flashes a medical tobacco license for a pack of Camels.

“Have a good one,” he says as she leaves.

“Too late for that.”