“Okay, right,” I said. “That’s all I wanted to know.” Somehow, now, it didn’t seem like she’d done anything so bad.

She moved the loose nail into position with her tongue and started chewing on it with the same level of unself-conscious purposefulness my Jasus crayfish exhibit when they eat their molted exoskeletons. “Okay,” she said. “My turn.”

“Okay.” Okay, I thought. Don’t stiffen up. But don’t flail either. Make normal-sized arm gestures. No hunching over. And if you have to lie, it’s just like with a polygraph, you have to make yourself believe you’re telling the truth. How’d I get into this? I don’t have to do-except I still wanted to find out about what had happened in Guatemala. If anything. After all, she’d been down there for months. The last I’d heard she’d still been at the Stake, trying to get permission from the Guates to dig officially at Ix Ruinas. But maybe something more had happened. Or was going to happen. Maybe they’d found the tomb and there was more info in it. And if it looked like Jed 2 ’s memories would get through, well, that would be huge. There “Okay. I think there’s something big going on, and it’s making you feel happy and powerful, but also you’re a bit worried about whether it’s going to come off. Am I right?”

Damn. Okay, I thought. Don’t make any partial shrugs. No quick changes of expression. I checked my hands-that is, without looking at them, I thought about them. They were open with the fingers extended. Good. Okay. I focused on the bridge of her nose and, lowering my usual pitch a bit, said, “Yes.”

“Okay, great. That’s progress. So what is it?”

“That’s a second question,” I said.

“Okay, fine. You go.”

“Okay. You guys are watching me. Right?”

“What do you mean us guys?”

“The Warren Spook Corporation.”

“They’re keeping an eye on all of us.”

“That’s not a good-I mean, I can tell I’m under surveillance.”

“So what’s the question?”

“Well…”

“Look, what do you think they’re going to do? The Game-you’re a Sacrifice Game specialist, right? It’s like you’re driving around with a trunkful of hydrogen bombs. We all are. They’re watching me too, I mean, of course, and, you know, I think Corporate’s being pretty reserved about it, frankly.”

She had a point. “Well, you have a point.”

“Okay, my turn,” she said. “What did you do to make yourself so excited?”

“I wouldn’t say I’m excited.”

“But you are happy about something. Or relieved.”

“No, I’m not-I mean, I’m relieved about the EOE.”

“What’s that stand for again?”

“The End of Everything.”

“Oh, right. Okay, you’re relieved that’s not happening?”‘

“Um, yeah. That’s right.”

“But that’s not new. You said something new was going on.”

“I did?” I had? I wondered. When? Or was she doing some hypno-thing on me? Bitch. Just be cool. Okay.

“Okay,” I said. “I went very long on some futures a little while ago and I’m doing super well on them. I’m completely on Easy Street.”

She looked at me. I tried to look back. Her eyes seemed bottomless. Finally it felt like I was staring into a gale-force wind. Fine, let her win the stare-down. I looked over at the Neo-Teo model. Most of the window lights and signs and had gone out, and its walls were a convincing range of deep-night blacks and blues.

“Well, that’s great,” she said finally. “Okay, ask me about Tony.”

Huh. Well, maybe I’d passed, I thought. “Okay, well, are you and-”

Hell.

The main phone, the one in my key pocket, had pulsed-silently, but it felt as loud as if were standing in a foghorn. Time to check on the, you know. The thing.

I said something like “Hang on, I’ve got a call I’ve got to blow off,” or something. I pulled the thing out. The CBT site had automatically come up on the screen. I hesitated. I looked closer.

Oh, Dios.

They’d suspended after-hours trading. The third domino had fallen. Oh God, oh God. I–I guess I should say even I-felt a twinge, and more than a twinge, of that gray free-falling terror, another notch of acceptance that it was really happening, that it was not reversible. My nefarious plan was working to perfection. Todo mi culpabilidad.

In a way, even-well, not in a way, forget the qualifiers-even I still couldn’t believe it. I know I said that because of the Game and everything I’d become uniquely able to comprehend astronomical figures, humanly unfathomable amounts of money, of grains of corn, of suffering… but even so, the thing that was going to happen-let alone the fact that I’d made it happen-the thing that would happen in about four and a half million seconds was I think more than any human or maybe any consciousness of any possible type could ever comprehend. By definition, for that matter. You’d need a brain the size of the Hyperbowl, one that had been living for millions of years, enough parallelism to weigh the mass of lived experience, human, animal, and probably, now, even artificial, against that infinity-times-infinity of oblivion, you’d have to live, love, and lose a trillion times over even to glimpse how “Are you okay?” Marena asked.

“I’m fine.”

“You were going to ask me about Tony.”

“Okay, what about Tony?”

“What about him?”

“Are you and he having a thing?”

“No.” She looked at me. I looked at she. Her eyes looked like she was-except, fuck, I thought, I really can’t tell, can I? Accursed Oriental inscrutability.

“Are you having a thing with anybody else?”

“That’s another question.”

“Oh, come on.”

“What are you, my mother?”

“Look-”

“Okay, fine. No. Nobody.”

Naturally, I tried to watch for tells, but I couldn’t see anything one way or the other. Damn, I thought. I’m at a big disadvantage here. I’d always had a little issue with facial expressions. When I was six I found a sheet in my Nephi K-12 folder-which was in a filing cabinet with a four-digit combination lock, as though that was going to hold me up for more than two minutes-that said I had “PTSD presenting as pervasive developmental disorder.” That is, savant skills without IQ loss, but with defects of emotional affect. It’s not autism, but it presents like it, as they say. So, for instance, you know how most kids get flash cards with words and numbers on them? I got cards with smiling or frowning or whatever faces on them, so that I could learn emotions. I couldn’t even tell whether she was happy or sad just by looking at her. Telling whether she was lying or not would be like reading page 100 of a book while it’s still on the shelf in the bookstore, in stretch wrap, and in Arabic.

“You said you were getting married to some jerk,” I said.

“Nope. As of now, Octy is out.” Octy? I wondered. Who the hell is that, Emperor Octavian? Dr. Octopus? No, don’t ask and use up a question.

“Okay, my turn,” she said.

“Right.”

“What did you do that’s making you feel so different?” she asked.

“Well, there’s, there’s that long shot on-”

“Okay, but why the hesitation just now?”

“Asking about the hesitation is another question already.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake.”

“Well-”

“Just-look, you have to answer the whole thing, you know, whole truth, not bits and pieces. Right?”

“Okay, fine.” Pause. “I just went very, very long on the corn futures and I’m-look, the reason I’m not talking about it is I feel a bit guilty, uh…”

“Now you feel guilty?”

“Yes.”

“And yet you’re relieved.”

“Well, yeah.”

“Hmm. Apparent paradox.”

“No, it’s, like-look, I said, I’m making a ton of cash but the longs, that is, some of the stuff I’m doing is going to cause some hardship, I mean, in fact, there are going to be more famine deaths than there are already, and of course I’m just getting on the bandwagon, but I still feel really guilty about it.” All true, I thought. “Okay?”