SAFEGUARD
                              by Nancy Kress

  Four innocent children may hold the key to our survival, or total
         annihilation, in this powerful and riveting new tale.

                                   ****

The uniformed military aide appeared at her elbow just as Katherine
Taney rose from her gilded chair to enter the Oval Office. “The president
will see you now,” his secretary said simultaneously with the aide’s
statement, “Wait a moment, Katie.”

      She turned to stare at him. Keep the president waiting? But his face
told. For a moment vertigo nearly took her, a swooping blackness, but
only for a moment. She said quietly to the aide, “Another one?”

     “Two more. Possibly three.”

     Dear God.

     “Ma’am,” chided the secretary, “the president is ready.”

      She straightened her aging back, thought a quick prayer, and went
to brief the commander-in-chief. No, not really to brief—to plead, with the
war-battered United States government, for compassion in the face of the
unthinkable.

                                   ****

     In the beginning, Li remembered, there had been big faceless
people, white as cartoons. These memories were quick and slippery, like
dreams. The other children didn’t have them at all. Since that time, there
had been only the real cartoons, the world, and Taney.

      He had realized a long time ago that Taney was a person inside a
white cartoon covering, and that he himself was a person inside the world,
another covering. The world must also have an outside because when
Taney left after each visit, she couldn’t have stayed for days in the space
behind the leaving door. The space was too small, not even room to lie
down to sleep. And what would she eat or drink in there until she came
back? And where did she get the fried cakes and other things she brought
them?
       “There’s another door, isn’t there, Taney?” he said yet again as the
five of them sat around the feeder in the Grove. The feeder had just
brought up bowls of food, but no one except Sudie was eating them
because Taney had brought a lot of fried cakes in a white bag. Sudie,
always greedy, had eaten three fried cakes and half a bowl of stew and now
slumped happily against a palm tree, her naked belly round and her lips
greasy. Jana sat with her knees drawn up to her chin, her thin arms clasped
around her legs. Kim stared at nothing.

      Li repeated, “Another door. You go out of the world through another
door, don’t you?”

     “I can’t answer that,” Taney said, as always. The girls didn’t even
glance at her. Li didn’t expect them to; he was the only one who ever
questioned Taney.

      But tonight Jana, still gazing over her clasped knees at the shadow of
trees against the sky, said, “Why can’t you answer, Taney?”

      Taney’s head swiveled toward Jana. It was hard to see Taney’s eyes
through the faceplate on her white covering; you had to get very close and
squint. The cartoons covered like Taney didn’t even have eyes, no matter
how much you squinted at them.

     There hadn’t been any new cartoons for a long while.

     Taney finally said, “I can’t answer you, Jana, because the world keeps
you safe.”

      The old answer, the one they’d heard all their lives from Taney, from
the cartoons. For the first time, Li challenged it. “How, Taney? How does
the world keep us safe? Sudie still fell over that stone and you had to come
and fix her arm. Jana ate that flower and all her food came out of her
mouth.” The next day, all of that kind of flower, all over the world, had
disappeared.

     Taney merely repeated, “The world keeps you safe.”

      Sudie said suddenly from her place against the tree, “Your voice is
sad, Taney.”

     Jana said, “When will we get new cartoons?”
       But Taney was already getting to her feet, slow and heavy in her white
covering. Even Kim knew what that meant. Kim climbed onto Taney’s lap
and started to lick frantically at Taney’s face, and it took both Sudie and Li
to pull her back. Kim was tall and strong. Taney said, as always, “Be well,
dear hearts,” and started away.

       Li, clutching the screaming Kim, watched Taney walk the path
between the trees until he couldn’t see her anymore. The leaving door was
in a big pink rock at the small end of the world, near the pond. Maybe
tomorrow they would splash in the pond. That might be fun.

      Except that nothing was as much fun as it used to be. Li didn’t know
why, but it was true.

      Eventually Kim stopped screaming and they let her go. Jana folded
and refolded the white paper bag Taney had left her, making pretty shapes.
The sky overhead and beside the Grove darkened. The feeder with its
three untouched bowls and one empty one sank into the ground. The
blankets rose, clean even though last night Kim had shit hers again.

      The four children wrapped themselves in blankets and lay down on
the grass. Within minutes all were asleep in the circling grove of antiseptic
palm trees that produced no fruit, and whose fronds never rustled in the
motionless air.

                                    ****

       “Two-and-a-half enclosed acres. Double-built dome construction,
translucent and virtually impenetrable. Negative air pressure with triple
filters. Inside, semi-tropical flora, no fauna, monitors throughout.
Life-maintenance machinery to be concentrated by the east wall within a
circle of trees, including the input screen. All instructional programs to
feature only cartoon characters in biohazard suits, to minimize curiosity
about other people.”

      Katherine said, “Two-and-a-half acres isn’t sufficient for a
self-sustaining biosphere.”

      “Of course not, ma’am,” the high-clearance DOD engineer said,
barely concealing his impatience. “An outside computer will control all
plant-maintenance and atmospheric functions.”

      “And personnel?”
     “Once the biosphere is up and running, it will need little human
oversight. Both functional and contact personnel will be your agency’s
responsibility. Our involvement extends only to the construction and
maintenance of the cage.”

      “Don’t call it that!”

      The engineer, whom Katherine knew she should be thanking
instead of reprimanding, merely shrugged. His blue eyes glittered with
dislike. “Whatever you say, ma’am.”

                                     ****

      Three days later, Taney didn’t come.

       It was her day. But lunch came up on the feeder, and then dinner, and
then the sky got dark, and the leaving door never opened. Kim sat staring at
it the whole day, her mouth hanging open until Jana pressed it closed. Kim
couldn’t talk or do much of anything, but somehow she always knew when it
was Taney’s day. So she sat, while the others splashed in the pond and
pretended to have fun.

      All at once the water in the pond gave a small hiccup and sloshed
gently onto the sandy beach.

      “Did you feel that?” Sudie said. “The ground moved!”

     “Ground can’t move,” Li said, because he was the leader. But it had.
He waited for the ground to do something else but it just lay there, ground
under water. Li got out of the pond.

      “Where are you going?” Jana said.

      “Feeder time,” Li said, although it wasn’t.

      They pulled Kim to her feet and ran. By the time they reached the
Grove, their naked bodies were dry. Li could feel his hair, which Taney
sometimes cut, curling wetly on the back of his neck. Jana’s hair, shorter
than his, stood up in yellow fluff that Li liked. Maybe Jana would want to play
bodies with him tonight.

      They sat in a circle under the trees, hungry and pleasantly tired from
splashing in the pond. Sudie studied the keypad under the screen, each
button with a little picture on it, and chose the cartoon about four children
helping each other to make sand paintings. Li was tired of that cartoon,
although when it first appeared, they’d all loved it. Days and days had been
spent making sand paintings with the many-colored sands on the beach by
the pond.

    The cartoon played, but only Kim really watched it. The feeder rose
and—

      “The bowls are empty!” Jana cried.

      Li leaped up and examined the four wooden bowls. Empty. How
could that be? Why would the feeder bring empty bowls?

      The ground moved gently beneath them.

       “The feeder is broken!” Sudie jumped up and ran to the keypad. Each
of its buttons had a picture of a cartoon showing the right thing to do for
eating, for playing, for cleaning themselves, for fixing bloody scratches if
they fell, for not using up all their kindness if they got angry with each other.
But nothing for a broken feeder, a thing that couldn’t happen because the
feeder was part of the world. But if there was an inside to the covering that
was the world and therefore an outside then maybe—Li had never thought
this before—maybe the feeder, like Taney, went outside and things could
break there?

      Cold slid along Li’s neck. Kim started licking everyone’s face, running
from one to another. Li let her because Kim was stronger than he was and
anyway he was used to it.

       “I’m calling Taney,” Sudie said, but she looked questioningly at Li.
Calling Taney was, they had all been told over and over, very serious. The
only times they’d ever called her was when Sudie broke her arm and when
Jana ate the bad flower and all her food came back up through her mouth.
Only twice.

      “Do it,” Li said, and Sudie pushed at the exact same time both
buttons with Taney’s picture.

                                     ****

      Katherine sat very erect, the back of her best suit not touching the
back of her chair, her face stone. A secret congressional hearing didn’t
scare her, veteran of far too many. But what this particular committee
might decide, did.

     “Dr. Taney, are they, in your expert opinion, the result of deliberate
genetic experimentation?”

      “Of course they are, Mr. Chairman.”

     “And intended by the enemy for use as a covert terrorist weapon
against the United States?”

      “The enemy does not inform me of its intentions.”

      “But if released, these things—”

      “Children, Senator. And no one is suggesting releasing them.”

      “But—”

      “They are children. Have you even seen them?” Katherine pressed
the button on her purse. Equipment she should not have been able to get
into the committee room suddenly flashed an image on the far wall. Four
babies, three of them beautiful with skin pink or brown or golden, one
with a shock of thick black hair and eyes already the color of coffee
beans. They could have posed for a diversity poster. Smiling,
plump-armed, adorable.

      Lethal.

                                    ****

      Li hadn’t expected Taney to come right away, maybe not until
morning. He couldn’t sleep. He didn’t want to play bodies with Jana or
Sudie. All night, it seemed, he lay in his blanket, listening to Kim breathe
heavily beside him, her mouth open. And in the morning, the world broke.

      It began with a big shake of the ground, much harder than yesterday,
that would have knocked them all down if anyone had been standing. Next
came a terrible grinding noise like scraping rocks together but so loud that
Kim clapped her hands over her ears. Sudie screamed. Then the ground
shook even more, and the sky cracked, and pieces fell down on Li.
       He rolled over and shut his eyes tight. The noise went on and on. A
tree fell over—he knew it was a tree even without looking, and that made
him jump up and shout, “Get away from the Grove! Go! Go!”

     No one moved. Another tree toppled and something went bang!

     All at once, it was over.

      Kim began licking Li’s face, then Jana’s. Sudie still screamed. Jana
cried, “Stop that!” and hit her. Sudie stopped. Kim did not; she licked
Sudie’s face until Sudie shoved her away.

     Silence.

                                   ****

      “Children,” Katherine said into the silence. “And I have more
pictures. So do others, who know these babies’ stories.”

      The chairman leaned forward, his face colder than the medals on
the chest of the general beside him. “Dr. Taney, are you saying you have
breached national security by leaking this information to others? And
further, that you are attempting to blackmail—”

      “I attempt nothing, Mr. Chairman. I don’t have to. Secrets extend
only so far, even secret terrorist weapons. Which these children are, in a
long and shameful tradition. Children have been used to blow up
American soldiers—and themselves—on four continents, to smuggle
poisons into military camps, to deliver biological bombs. We all know
that. Right now your impulse is to destroy these children as soon as
researchers have taken enough blood and tissue samples. You want to
destroy them partly because they are truly dangerous and partly to avoid
widespread panic. With the war so recently ended, you don’t want the
populace to know what the enemy was—and may still be—capable of,
both technically and morally. That’s understandable. But—”

      Katherine leaned forward, her gaze locked with the chairman’s.
“But I am telling you, Senator Blaine, that your information chain is not
secure, and that if you destroy these children—these innocent and very
photogenic babies—that fact will become known. This
administration—and your political party—has worked very hard to
position themselves as the new world force that acts compassionately,
that does the right thing. You’ve had a hard row to hoe in that regard,
given your predecessors’ actions on the world stage. Do you really want
to undo all that careful positioning by destroying four innocent children?”

      The senator said angrily, “This is not a partisan—”

     “Of course not,” Katherine said wearily. “But you’ve already
commissioned a feasibility study for a self-contained and completely
secure dome to—”

      “How do you know that, madame? How?”

      She just stared at him. Then she said, in a different voice, “I was
with the original team that extracted the children from behind enemy
lines, and I just told you that your information chain is not secure. How
would I not know?

      “Senator—grow up.”

                                      ****

      Cautiously Li stamped one bare foot on the ground. It didn’t move. He
said, startled to hear his own voice so high, so squeaky, “Is anybody hurt?”

       “No,” Jana said. Sudie said, “Find the cartoon about the right thing to
do if the world breaks.”

     “There’s no cartoon for that,” Jana said. She looked at Li. “What
should we do?”

      “I don’t know,” Li said, because he didn’t. How could the world break?

      “Let’s go to the leaving door,” Jana said. “Maybe Taney will come.”

      They wound their way to the far end of the world, Jana in the lead, Li
lagging behind to look at everything. Trees fallen to the ground or leaning
over. Big pieces of the sky on the ground—what if one of those had fallen
on the Grove? And then, almost to the pond and the leaving door—

      “Stop,” Li said, and looked, and couldn’t stop looking.

      Sudie breathed, “What is it?”

      Li took a long time to find the right words. “It’s a crack in the world.”
      A narrow jagged break, just like when he cracked a stick on a hard
stone. The break started at the ground and he could follow it with his eyes
up the sky to a place where pieces of sky had fallen, making a white pile.
Jana started toward the crack, stopped, started again. Li followed her. After
a moment Kim darted after them both, frantically trying to lick their faces.

      “Not now, Kim!” Li snapped. He stood beside Jana at the crack and
they both peered through.

      “What is it, Li?” Jana whispered.

      “It’s ... it’s another world. Where Taney goes when she leaves us.”

      Jana turned her thin body sideways and squeezed through. Li said,
“No! You don’t—”

      “We need to find Taney, don’t we?” Jana said.

      Li didn’t know. He didn’t know anything any more. The world on the
other side of the crack looked so different.... All at once he wanted to see
more of it, see it all. He turned sideways and pushed himself through,
scraping skin off his shoulders. Immediately Sudie and Kim began to howl.

      “Stop that!” Jana said. “We’re going to find Taney! Sudie, push Kim
through.”

      Kim was the biggest but very strong and flexible; she wiggled herself
through easily. Once out, she just stared from the tiny eyes in her broad, flat
face. She didn’t even try to lick anybody. For once Li knew how Kim felt. He
had walked a few steps away from the old world and he couldn’t stop
staring.

      Rocky, wrinkled ground stretched away on all sides—so much
ground! Li’s stomach flopped; this world was so big. But empty. He saw no
palms, no bushes, no flowers, nothing but ground that was red and white
and brown, endless ground, and far, far away the ground rose up high, blue
with white on top, and above that—

        The sky of this world was blue, not white, and it went on forever.
Forever, so high above that Li’s head wrinkled inside just like the ground. All
this ... and Taney had never told them. Why not?

      “Li, Sudie won’t fit,” Jana said. “She’s too fat for the break in the
world.”

      Sudie had reached one arm through the crack and was frantically
waving it and howling. Li wanted her to shut up; he wanted to go on looking
and looking. The endless ground was covered with rocks, hundreds of
rocks; for the first time, Li understood what the numbers cartoon meant by
“hundreds.” Rocks red and white and gray and black, all sizes and shapes,
some tiny as a thumb and some bigger than Li, some—

      “Li, she won’t fit,” Jana said. Sudie howled louder. Jana said, “Oh, be
quiet, Sudie, we’re not going to leave you. Li?”

      “Tell her to go roll in the mud by the pond and get all wet and
slippery.”

      Sudie did, and eventually they pulled her through, although not without
making blood come out on her arms and shoulders and hips. Sudie didn’t
seem to mind the blood. But she took one look at the new world and
promptly began howling again, plopping down onto the ground and
covering her head with her bloody arms.

      Something very bright came into the new sky over the top of the old
world. Li tried to look at it and couldn’t; it hurt his eyes too much. Fear filled
him.

       Jana gasped, “What’s that? Sudie, shut up!” Kim began licking all
their faces.

       The bright thing didn’t seem to be falling on them. Li said, “I think ... I
think it’s morning.”

    “That’s silly,” Jana said. “Morning comes all over the whole sky at the
same time.”

      “Not in this world,” Li said. He felt a little dizzy, as if he’d been playing
the spinning game. “Jana, this place is so big.”

      “Then how are we going to find Taney? I think we should walk on the
path.” She pointed.

      Li had to turn his back on the morning and squint before he could see
what she pointed at. A faint path, no more than a pressing down of rocks,
led away from the real world. Closest to him, it had a broken pattern of
triangles in the dust.
      “Come on, Sudie,” Jana said. “Get up. We’re going to find Taney. Li,
follow me and she’ll come, too.”

       Li followed Jana, who didn’t look around but just walked fast on her
thin, long legs. Sudie and Kim stumbled after them, Sudie complaining that
all the stones on the ground hurt her feet. Jana seemed to have become
the leader now, but Li didn’t care about that, or his feet. All he wanted to do
was look and look.

     Rocks, growing redder as the morning rose in the sky. The morning
looked like a rock, too, brighter and brighter, so that looking at it for even a
second hurt Li’s eyes. And there, on that flat rock...

      Sudie started to scream again. Jana, who had used up all her
kindness, hit her. The thing on the rock scurried away, underneath more
stones. Li said, “Don’t hit Sudie, Jana!” at the same minute that Jana said,
“I’m sorry. She won’t—what was that, Li?”

      “It was alive, I think,” Li said uncertainly. “Like birds.”

      “Then why didn’t it fly away?”

      “I don’t know.” He had never seen anything alive except themselves,
Taney, and the birds in the old world. A memory came, himself asking
Taney, “What do the birds eat?” “The world gives them food high up on
the sky,” she’d answered, “just like the feeder gives you food. The world
keeps you both safe.”

      They weren’t in that world anymore. Li said, “Watch out for other living
things. Don’t step on any because you might hurt them. You might even
make them dead.” They had all seen dead birds in the real world. Taney
always took the bodies away with her.

        They walked for a long time. The morning rock in the sky got brighter
still. Something was wrong with the air; it got way too hot. Li was very thirsty
but there was nothing to drink. They walked silently, even Sudie, and Li
began to feel very afraid. The hard-to-see path didn’t seem to go anywhere.
Why would there be a path that didn’t go anywhere? What if they couldn’t
find Taney?

      “Look,” Sudie said as they trudged over a low rise, “a big path!”

      She was right, but this path was different: very wide and very straight
and very hot. Putting a foot on the black stone, Li yelped and immediately
pulled it back. But immediately he forgot about the pain. Something was
coming very fast along the path.

      Sudie screamed until Jana raised her hand and Sudie stopped. Li
could feel Jana tremble beside him. All four children huddled into a knot.
The thing made a lot of noise, growing bigger and bigger until it stopped
with the loudest noise yet and a person jumped out.

      A person who was not Taney, and not in a slippery white covering
or a faceplate. Again Li’s mind wrinkled and dizzied. Even Sudie was too
scared to make noise. The only one who moved was Kim, licking
everyone’s faces.

     “Oh my God, you kids caught in the earthquake? What in hell
happened to you? Jack, one of ‘em’s bleeding!”

      Another person got out of the moving thing. Now Li could see that the
thing wasn’t alive, like the not-bird had been, but it still made puffing noises.
The second person had a lot of hair growing on his face, which looked silly
and scary. But his voice was kind. “Where’s your folks? And your clothes?
Sally, they look damn near dehydrated. Get the water. Kids, what
happened?”

      Jana said, “We have to find Taney.”

      “Taney? Is that a town?”

      Jana said, Li wondering at her bravery, “Taney’s a person. The world
broke and before that the feeders didn’t give us any food and we have to
find Taney!”

     The person with the hair on his face looked away from Jana. His face
above the hair looked very red. The other person came hurrying toward
them with a white thing in her hand. “Here, drink first. Jack, go get some
sheets or something from the trunk. Poor kids must have been asleep
when the quake hit, you know these hippie tourists just let their kids sleep
buck naked, it’s a disgrace but even so—”

        Li stopped listening to her words, which after all didn’t even make
sense. The white thing was sort of like a food bowl closed at the top and
sort of like the spring faucet in the real world, giving out water. Li passed it
first to Kim, as always, who drank greedily, the water dribbling down her
chest. Then Jana, then Sudie, and by the time it got to Li, he felt he couldn’t
wait another moment. Nothing had ever tasted as good as that water,
nothing.

      The person called Sally handed a big thin blanket to Jana, who let it
drop to the ground. “Put it on you, for God’s sake,” Sally said, and the
kindness in her voice was getting used up.

     Jack still not looking at them, said, “Sal, I think maybe they’re in
shock. Or maybe a little feeble-minded.”

      “Oh!” Sally said, and she looked at Kim, still trying to lick Sudie’s face.
“Oh, of course, poor things. Here, honey, let me help you.” She picked up
the blanket, tore it in half, and began to wrap Jana in it.

      Jana pushed away. “It’s not time to sleep!”

      “Jana, let her,” Li said. He didn’t know what these people were doing,
but the kindness had come back into Sally’s voice, and they were going to
need kindness, Li realized, to find Taney. This place was much different
from the real world. Brighter and harder and hungrier and bigger.

      From the corner of his eye he saw another of the not-birds watching
him, stretched out on a flat gray rock. Its eyes were shiny and black as
pebbles.

      Sally tied blanket pieces around all of them and said, very slowly,
“Now get out of this sun and into the car before you all broil. Honey, you’re
burning already, and bleeding, too. You get hit by debris in the quake?”

      She was looking at Sudie, but Li answered. “She got scraped by the
crack in the world.”

      “I knew it. Get in, get in!”

       The “car” was just another covering, made of the same material as
the place the sky met the ground in the real world. Inside the car, however,
the air was more like the real world: cooler and not so bright. The four of
them squeezed into a space in the back, and Sally and Jack climbed into
the front space. Sally turned around.

     “Now what all are your names?” She still spoke very slowly, making
each word with her lips all pushed out.

      Li said, “I’m Li. This is Jana and Sudie and Kim.”
      “Good,” Sally said, smiling wide as a cartoon person. “Now tell Aunt
Sally what happened. How you got all alone out on the desert.”

      Li said, “The ground shook last night and then this morning the world
broke. We squeezed out through a crack in the sky and walked. We have to
find Taney.”

       “Is Taney a town, son?” Jack said.

       Li didn’t know what a town was. “Taney’s a person. She takes care of
us.”

       “A foster mother?” Sally said.

     Jack said, “I don’t think a foster mother could handle four retards, Sal.
More likely some sort of institution. Might be in East Lancaster.”

      “Doubt it,” Sally said. “East Lancaster got hit pretty hard by the
depression, only been minimal facilities there for fifteen years, and now with
the quake and all....”

      “Well, them kids didn’t walk very far buck-naked in the desert,” Jack
said. Li could hear that the kindness was getting used up in his voice.
“Somebody must of took them camping or something. But I can’t go
racketing around looking for some institution when we need to see how
badly our place got hit. Best bring them home with us tonight and check the
Internet for this ‘Taney.’”

       “Right,” Sally said. “Kids, don’t worry, everything’ll be all right.”

       Jack snorted.

        The covering round them leapt forward and Sudie screamed. Jana
pinched her hard and Sudie stopped, although she didn’t look any less
terrified. Kim began licking Sudie’s face. Sally watched a minute and then
turned away, the tips of her mouth turning down. Li didn’t want Sally’s
kindness to get used up again. He leaned forward.

       “Sally, thank you so much for the water. It was very good.”

       “Oh, God, you’re welcome,” Sally said.

       “My name is Li. Not God.”
      Jack laughed. “He’s not so dumb after all!”

                                    ****

      The “car” walked a long way, and everywhere on the long way looked
the same. Li watched everything, inside and outside the car, until despite
himself, he fell asleep. He woke up when the car stopped at a big square
thing which, Li realized when they went inside it, was another world, with its
own ground and sky. How many worlds were there?

      “Still standing, by the grace of God,” Sally said. “We’re damn lucky.
Jack, you get on that computer and start searching. Li, what did you say
your last name was?”

      “My name is Li.”

      “No, honey, your other name.”

      Li just stared. He had no other name. Jack sighed and went around a
part of this world’s sky. The place the children stood in was cool and dim,
with large, funny-shaped rocks covered in blankets to sit on, and a feeder.
The children crowded near it, waiting.

     “Y’all are hungry, right?” Sally said. “Can’t say as I blame you. Well,
go ahead sit at the table and I’ll rustle up something. A lot of smashed
crockery in the kitchen, but that can wait.”

       This feeder was broken, too; no bowls rose from it. But apparently
Sally had saved food from before it broke because she brought out big
bowls. The food looked strange but tasted wonderful, and Li ate until his
belly felt full and round. Afterward sleepiness took him again, and he
stretched out on the floor beside Jana, who was making strange sounds in
her throat.

      “You got allergies, hon?” Sally said. “Never mind, I don’t expect you
to know. Jack, you making any progress in there?”

     “Just over a million hits on ‘Taney,’ is all,” Jack said, which made no
sense. Nobody was hitting anybody. “This ain’t going to be easy.”

      Li’s throat felt strange, and not in a good way. Jana kept making
strange noises in her throat. Li must have slept, because when he woke it
was night again, and very dark. Something glowed in a far corner of the
room, and at first that scared Li. He lay on the ground, watching to see if the
glowing thing moved. It didn’t. Slowly he crawled toward it, until he could
see that it was a tiny ball of morning, like the big one in the sky of the big
world, but not so bright. Li touched it, and snatched back his finger. The tiny
morning was hot.

       Carefully he studied it. It was a made thing, like the pretty folded
things Jana made from Taney’s paper bags. Li’s breath came faster. All
these things were made: the feeder and the bowls and the blanket-covered
rocks—”chairs” Sally had called them—to sit on, and maybe even the sky
of this world.

      Of any world.

      Li’s mind raced. He never got back to sleep. All the rest of the night
he either crawled around, touching things and trying to figure out how they’d
been made, or else lay still, thinking. His throat still hurt but he ignored it.
Made things. Other people. Worlds within worlds.

       When morning—the big morning—returned, the girls still lay sleeping
on the ground. All of them breathed too heavily. Li stood, stretched, and
went to look around the parts of sky that touched the ground for Jack and
Sally.

       Jack sat slumped over a small screen, which still glowed. Sally lay on
the floor. Both of them were dead.

                                     ****

      Not here.

      Katherine made another, equally futile tour of the biosphere, stumping
heavily, leaning on her cane. She’d fallen two days ago, twisting her knee,
which had led her to put off her visit to the children. Then had come the first
quake, which had made her fall again as she hobbled across her living
room. No one had predicted the second, massive quake.

      She called again, knowing it was pointless. She’d seen the blood on
the crack in the supposedly shatter-proof dome. The children had
squeezed themselves through and set off, probably looking for her. They
wouldn’t get far, naked in the desert, without water. There was, by design,
nothing within fifty miles of the biosphere. Scavengers, of air or ground,
would get the bodies.
       Tears welled in her eyes, behind the faceplate. Stupid. This was one
solution, maybe the only solution, to a problem that could only grow as
years passed. Katherine was nearly seventy—what would have happened
after she could no longer carry on this long, painful fight? Some days she
felt ninety. Some days she felt already dead, even as the world slowly
revived itself from the bad years of the war.

      Li, with his dark expressive eyes and quick mind ... delicate Jana, who
in another world would have been a startling beauty ... funny emotional
Sudie ... even Kim, afflicted with both Down’s and autism ... even Kim she
would miss. Her children. She’d had no other.

      Katherine put herself through detox, leaving her biohazard suit behind,
even as she doubted that detox was any longer necessary. She hobbled
toward her car. The AC felt blessedly cool. Fifty miles to the village of Las
Verdes, where a group of Native American descendents eked out a
subsistence existence, survivors of past injustices just as the children had
been of a future one. A mile outside Las Verdes, Katherine had built a
house, which was now a pile of debris. The Indians would rebuild it for her;
they were good at starting over. Although now there was no reason for her
to stay.

      Li. Jana. Sudie. Kim.

      She drove home through a desert wavery with heat and tears.

                                    ****

      “Why don’t the buttons have cartoon pictures on them?” Jana said.

       “It isn’t for cartoons,” Li said slowly. They stood around the little
screen where Jack had died. Li and Sudie had pulled him off the chair and
laid him on the floor beside Sally, and Jana had covered the people with a
blanket. Li didn’t know why she’d done that, but it seemed a good thing to
do.

      The children had examined this world. It had four places, two with
faucet springs. In those two places a lot of things were broken, and sharp
pieces of clear sky had fallen down. Jana cut her foot on one piece, but it
only bled a little. One of the places had more of the strange food, but not
very much of it. They’d eaten it all.

     “If the screen isn’t for cartoons, what is it for?” Sudie said. She stood
behind Li, breathing heavily into his neck, and her voice sounded ... thick,
somehow. Like food was stuck in her throat, although she said it wasn’t.

     “I don’t know what it’s for,” Li said. “But we can’t take it with us
because it’s tied to where this sky touches the ground.”

     “Take it with us? Where are we going?” Sudie sounded frightened
and Kim began to lick her face.

      Jana said, “We can’t just walk like yesterday, Li.”

      “We’re not going to walk. I watched Jack make the car go. I think I can
do that.”

      “But where?”

      “We’ll go along the big path. There’s no more food here, Jana. Maybe
the path will take us to Taney.”

      Jana considered. “Okay. You’re right, we can’t stay here. We have to
find Taney. But first fill those white bowls with water from the faucet spring.”

       They went out the leaving door and climbed into the car, lugging
blankets and water. Sudie had untied the blanket from her body, but Li
made her put it back on. “People here are different,” he said. “They use up
their kindness faster if you don’t have blankets around you. Oh—wait!”

       He went back inside and brought out a big armful of the blankets
behind another leaving door in the biggest place. They were like the
blankets around Jack and Sally, all shaped like bodies and fastened
together with tiny little strings or hard bumps that Li had examined in great
detail. “Put these coverings on you,” he told the girls.

      “Like Taney has,” Sudie said happily, even though none of Jack’s and
Sally’s coverings were slippery like Taney’s. But some were white, and
Sudie picked one of those.

      Li turned the thing that Jack had turned to make the car go, and it
started making noises. But it wouldn’t go forward until he pushed down with
his feet on the flat things on the car’s ground. Then the car stopped.

      “It’s dead,” Sudie said.

     Li made it start again, and pushed the flat things. The car stopped.
“Maybe I should just push one.”
      The car raced away so fast that Sudie screamed, even Jana gasped,
and Kim started licking everyone frantically. Li pushed on the other flat thing
and the car stopped.

      Eventually he figured out how to make it go-stop-go-stop-go-stop,
and they started down the wide dusty path, under the hot ball of morning
high in the sky, to look for Taney.

                                     ****

      “—eight point one on the Richter scale, slightly higher than the San
Francisco earthquake of 1906. The president has declared southern
California a federal disaster area, and the Department of Domestic Rescue
is mobilizing to—” Katherine turned off the car radio.

       She drove past the village. Las Verdes—a bitter joke of a name, if
there ever was one—had gotten off fairly lightly because when all buildings
were one-story adobe brick, collapse was quick and clean. No fires, no
burst gas mains, no floods. The underground spring, the only reason this
village existed at all, was still there, although the well-house had crumbled.
The windmills and lone cell tower lay on their sides; TV satellite dishes
littered the rubble; somewhere a woman wailed, a high keening borne on
the thin wind.

      Katherine’s house was a pile of dirt, but the shed in the back yard still
stood. Under its deceptive façade of cheap plastic was a reinforced steel
frame, thief-proof and, unlike the biosphere dome, far too small to crack.
She let herself inside with the key around her neck. A generator-powered
computer running encrypted, military-grade software sat on a table that
nearly filled the small space. It had a direct uplink to a military satellite.

      TOP SECRET

      CODE WORD ACCESS ONLY

      NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION

      CASE NO. 254987-A

      CODE NAME: ACHILLES

      DATE: 6/12/28
      AGENT IN CHARGE: SIGMA INVESTIGATOR K.M. TANEY

      SUBJECT: DEATH OF GM JUVENILE AGENTS

                                    ****

     She typed swiftly, sent the report, and turned off the computer. With a
second key, Katherine turned a small lock set into the machine’s side. She
closed the door, hobbled back to the car, and drove several hundred feet
away. Five minutes later, the shed exploded.

      Now there was nothing to keep her here at all.

      Nonetheless, she drove toward Las Verdes. The village had regarded
Katherine with neither kindness nor suspicion. Mostly it had let her be: one
more crazy white inexplicably in love with the inhospitable desert, wasting
her time making bad paintings of rocks and sunsets, supported by means
beyond their world. Still, the trunk of her car held medical supplies, among
other things; perhaps she could help.

                                    ****

     The car stopped going and Li couldn’t make it start again no matter
what he did. “Is it broken?” Sudie said. “Like the feeder and the world?”

     “Yes,” Li said. He opened the door; it was getting very hot inside. It
was hot outside, too. The four children got out and sat in the brief shade on
one side of the dead car, trying to not touch its burning side.

      Jana started to say something, stopped, took Li’s hand.

      He gazed out across the big world, glanced briefly at the hot ball of
morning in the big sky, and anger grew in him. All this—all this had been out
here all the time, and Taney had never let them have it. All this, and now that
they had found it, they were going to die here. Li knew it, and he guessed
that Jana knew it, too. Sudie and Kim did not. But Kim might have known
something, deep in her different head, because she crawled over Sudie
and began to lick Li’s face.

     He pushed her away and dropped Jana’s hand. His kindness, he
knew, was all used up. He didn’t want to die.

      “I’m so thirsty,” Sudie said. No one answered.
     A long time later Sudie said, “Look at those big birds up there. Flying
around and around in circles. Why are they doing that, Li?”

      “I don’t know,” Li said.

      Jana said, “Something is coming on the big path. There.” She
pointed.

      Li strained his eyes. Finally he saw a sort of wiggle in the air—how
could Jana see so far?—with a black dot in it. The dot got bigger and
bigger and then it turned into another “car” but big, enormous, so that Sudie
whimpered and tried to hide behind Li. The car stopped and a person got
out.

      “What the ... what happened here, son?”

       “This car stopped,” Li said. He stood. The man didn’t have hair on his
face like Jack, and his voice sounded more like Taney’s.

      “You were driving? Where’s your folks?”

      Li didn’t know what “folks” might be; everything in this world was so
strange. He said, “We have to find Taney.”

     “But your parents ... hell, get out of the sun, first. We can help you,
son. We’re Department of Domestic Rescue. Climb in.”

      Inside the big car was another little world, with chairs and blankets and
a feeder. A woman gave them water and said, “Baker, where did they come
from?”

     Baker sat at another of the little screens and did something to it.
“They said ‘Taney,’ but GPS isn’t giving me anything like that.”

      “Well, we’re due in Las Verdes like, now. Shall I drive? And while
you’re on-line, is there any more email on why we’re being diverted to an
ass-end hole like Las Verdes when real population centers are screaming
for help?”

      “No. Presumably Las Verdes has an emergency situation.”

      “Two states have an emergency situation, Baker. Why the priority-one
diversion to Las Verdes?”
      “‘Ann, ours is not to reason why—’”

      “Oh, roast it. I’ll drive.”

      Baker gave them all food, and Li fell asleep on the moving ground of
the car. When he woke, Baker and Ann were leaving the big car. “You stay
here, Li,” Baker said. “Safest and coolest inside, and we’ve got work to do.
We’ll get you sorted out tonight, I promise. Okay, buddy?”

      There was kindness in Baker’s voice, so Li said, “Yes.”

      “You could maybe ... I know! Here.”

       Baker did something to the car’s sky, and all at once a screen came
down, glowed, and made cartoons. Sudie squealed with joy. A cartoon
bird—how could cartoons have birds, not just people?—flew toward the hot
ball of morning in the sky, chased by a person. Sudie, Kim, and Jana
crowded close.

      Li watched through the clear place in the car’s sky as Baker and Ann
walked toward piles of dirt and crying people. He watched for a long time.
The hot ball of morning sunk down into the ground (how did it do that?) and
the sky turned wonderful colors, purple and red and yellow. Baker and Ann
came in and out, carrying things out with them. On one coming in, Ann
touched a place on the wall and morning came inside the car’s world,
although not in the big world outside. The girls watched the cartoons, too
absorbed to even laugh. Li looked outside.

      Figures moved in and out of houses made of blankets, some of
which Ann had folded. Little bits of morning lighted the blanket houses. And
by that light, as he peered out of the car with his nose pushed flat against it,
Li saw her.

      “Taney!”

                                     ****

      Her back ached. She had moved too much, lifted too much, grown
too old for this sort of field work. For any sort of field work. But everything
was done that could be done tonight. Under the capable direction of the
DDR agents, Ann Lionti and Baker Tully, the wounded had been treated,
the homeless housed in evac inflatables, the spring water tested and found
safe. Everyone had been fed. Tomorrow the dead would be buried.
Katherine looked up and saw a ghost at the window of the DDR mobile.
      No. Not possible.

      But there he was.

       Li waved his arms and Katherine, dazed, half lifted her hand before
she let it drop. How ... But it didn’t matter how. What mattered was that
Lionti and Tully, that everyone here, that Katherine herself, were already
dead.

                                       ****

      The leaving door wouldn’t open. It wouldn’t open, no matter how Li
pushed it. He cried out in frustration and shoved Sudie, who was making
everything harder by pushing the door in a different direction from Li. But
then he got the door open and tumbled down the square rocks made of sky
material and he was with Taney, throwing his arms around her waist, Sudie
and Jana and Kim right behind him. Kim started licking Taney’s face,
jumping up in mute excitement.

      “Taney! Taney!”

      “You found us!”

      “You lost your covering! I can touch you!”

      “Taney, the world broke and we came out! It broke!”

      “Taney! Taney!”

        “You know these kids?” Baker said behind Taney. She turned, Li and
Sudie still clinging to her, and Baker said in a different voice, “Doctor—what
is it?”

      “We ... they ... Kim, stop!”

      They had never heard that voice from her before. Li, startled, stepped
back. But then Taney’s kindness was back, although she sounded very sad.

        “Li, take the others back inside the trailer. I promise I’ll come in just a
little while, okay? Just everybody go inside.”

      They went, of course; this was Taney. Jana and Li stared at each
other. Sudie went back to watching the cartoons still showing on the screen.
Kim pressed her nose against the clear sky-metal to watch Taney, mutely
following her every tiny movement in the gathering dark. Li joined Kim.

     A woman ran up to Taney and Baker, waving her arms and shouting.

                                    ****

     “Experiments?” Baker Tully said, bewildered and angry and,
Katherine could see, terrified. As well he should be. “Bioweaponry
experiments?”

     “From the very end of the war,” Katherine said. “Intelligence
discovered the operation and we sent in two entire battle groups five days
before the surrender.”

      “And Ann—” He couldn’t say it. It had been hard to pull him away from
Ann Lionti’s body, lying crumpled between a DDR inflatable and the ruins of
an adobe house. Beside her, incongruously, lay an unbroken planter filled
with carefully watered dahlias. Now Katherine and Baker stood behind the
huge mobile, away from the others. She looked at his young, suddenly
ravaged face, dimly lit by a rising gibbous moon, and she thought, I can’t do
this.

     He had courage. He got out, “How long? For me, I mean?”

     “I don’t know for sure. The only tests we could run, obviously, were on
animals. When did you and Ann first pick up the children?”

     “About six hours ago. Give it to me straight, doctor. Please. I have to
know.”

       She saw what he was doing: looking desperately for a way out. All his
training, like hers, had taught him that the way out of anything was
information, knowledge, reasoning. But not this time.

     I can’t do this.

       She said, “I have to sit down, I’m sorry ... knee injury.” She eased
herself onto the ground, partly cutting off the illumination from the
floodlamps, so that they sat in shadowed darkness. That should have made
it easier, but didn’t.
      “A virus in their breath gets into the bloodstream from the victim’s
lungs and makes a targeted, cytopathic toxin. When the virus has replicated
enough for the toxin to reach a critical level, it stops the heart. And the virus
is highly contagious, passed from person to person.”

      “So everyone here—”

      “Yes,” Katherine said quietly.

      “I don’t understand!” All at once he sounded like a child, like Li.
Simultaneously Katherine shuddered and put a hand on his arm. Baker
shook it off. “I just don’t understand. If that’s all true, the virus would spread
through the whole country, killing everybody—”

      “The—”

     “—and then the whole world! The enemy would have killed
themselves, too!”

       “No,” Katherine said. Her knee began to throb painfully. “There are
racial differences among genomes. Small differences, and not very many,
but enough. Think of genetic diseases: Tay-Sachs among Jews, sickle-cell
anemia among Blacks. We’ve found more, and much more subtle. This
virus exploits a tiny difference in genetic structure, and so in cellular
functioning, in anyone with certain Caucasian-heritage genes. Tully—”

      “The Indians here...”

       She peered at his face, shrouded in night, and loved him. She had
just told him he was going to die, and he had a soul generous enough to
think of others. She started to say, “Depends on whether any of their
ancestors intermarried with—” when his rage overcame his generosity.

     “You’re a fucking geneticist! You and the entire United States
government couldn’t come up with an antidote or vaccine or something!”

      “No. Do you think we didn’t try?”

      “Why didn’t you kill them all as soon as you found them?”

      Katherine didn’t answer. Either he hadn’t meant the question, or he
had. If it had been just more terrified rage, she certainly didn’t blame him. If
he meant it, nothing she could say would make it clear to him.
      He said bitterly, “There were political considerations, right? Ten years
ago it was fucking President DuBois, working so hard to undo the wrongs of
the previous screw-ups, ending the war with compassion, re-establishing
our fucking position as the so-called moral leader of the world, and so now
Ann is dead and I have to.... “Abruptly his anger ran out.

      She waited a long moment and then uttered what she knew to be, the
moment she said it, the stupidest, most futile statement of her entire life.
“I’m sorry.”

      He didn’t hear it. She sat dreading his reply, and it was a full minute,
more, before she realized there wouldn’t ever be one. Baker Tully still sat
with his head thrown back in fury and anguish against the mobile’s rear
wheel, but when she felt for his wrist, there was no pulse.

      Six hours, then, from the time of initial exposure.

       He was too heavy for her to move, but nobody would find him there
before morning. She returned to the tent where the villagers had laid Ann
Lionti’s body and told everyone that Baker was mourning alone, in the
trailer. Katherine checked on the patients in the medical tent, issued
instructions, and drank coffee to stay awake for the few hours until
everyone else slept. Then she removed the distributor caps from the three
working vehicles in the small camp and carried them with her inside the
DDR mobile, where the children waited.

                                     ****

      “Why doesn’t she come? Why doesn’t she come? Why doesn’t she
come?” Sudie made the words into a song, and it made Li’s face itch. But
he didn’t let his kindness get used up. Maybe the song helped Sudie wait.

      Eventually, however, she fell asleep, and so did Kim. Jana and Li
waited. In the light from the car’s sky, Jana’s hair looked yellow as the big
morning. She smelled bad because none of them had splashed in a pool
since the first world broke, but Li put his arms around her anyway, just to
feel her warmth.

       Finally—finally!—the door opened and Taney came in. This time Li
really looked at her, at Taney without her covering. Her face was wrinkled.
Her eyes sagged. She walked as if something was broken, pulling herself
up the square sky-metal rocks by holding onto the edge of the leaving door.
Slowly she sat on a chair. Li’s heart filled with love.
     “Taney,” Jana said softly, breaking free of Li’s arms and climbing onto
Taney’s lap. “I knew we’d find you.”

      “No, you didn’t,” Li said. He sat on the ground at Taney’s feet. “Taney,
I have a lot of questions.”

     “I’m sure you have, dear heart,” Taney said, and there was something
wrong with her voice. “So do I. Let me ask mine first.”

      So Li and Jana told her about the break in the world, and Jack and
Sally, and sitting beside the broken car on the wide hot path when Ann and
Baker came along. Sudie snored and Kim whuffled in her sleep.

      “Taney, why were we in that world and not this one?” Li said.

      “Tell you what, I’ll answer all your questions in the morning,” Taney
said. “I’m very tired right now and so are you. Look, Jana’s almost asleep!
You lie down here and sleep. I’m going to see about the other people once
more.”

      “Okay,” Li said, because he was sleepy.

      Taney kissed them all, covered them with blankets, and left. Li heard
the leaving door make a noise behind her.

                                    ****

     A voice in Katherine’s head said, Even the most passionate minds
are capable of trivial thoughts during tragedy.

       Standing there in the dark, it took her a long moment to identify the
speaker: Some professor back in college, droning on about some
Shakespearian play. Why had that random memory come to her now? She
even recalled the next thing he said: that only third-rate dramatists put
children in peril to create emotion, which was one reason Shakespeare was
infinitely superior to Thomas Hardy.

       That professor had been an ass. Children were always the first ones
put in peril by upheavals in the world. But not like this ... not like this.

      She unscrewed the gas cap of the DDR mobile and drew the lighter
from her pocket. Used for starting campfires at the center of the kindling, it
could flick out a long projection that generated a shower of sparks. The
village’s distributor caps were inside the mobile. Baker’s body lay beside it.
Everybody else, marooned here, would be dead by morning, except those
with no European ancestry in their genes. And although she’d spent the ten
years in Las Verdes mostly keeping to herself, Katherine was pretty sure
no such Indians existed in the small village. If they did, they might
conceivably be turned into carriers, like Li and Jana and Kim and Sudie, but
Katherine didn’t think so. The children had been designed to be carriers.
Their genomes showed many little-understood variations. The enemy, free
from laws against genetic experimentation, had done so with a vengeance.

      When all hosts died, so did their viruses.

     She clicked the lighter and the projection snaked out, already glowing.
Her hand moved toward the fuel tank, then drew back.

      I can’t.

       But what were the alternatives? Let the children, locked inside, die of
starvation. Or, either if they were picked up by other people or if Li
somehow learned to drive the mobile as he had Jack’s car, to let them
infect more people, who would infect still others, until the air-borne virus
with a 100 percent kill rate had, at a minimum, wiped out two continents.
Who in hell could decide among those three choices?

      Katherine had fought for these children’s lives, had tended them for
ten years, had loved them as her own. What mother would choose the
deaths of her children over the fate of the world?

      What rational human being would not?

      Hail Mary, Mother of God. ... More useless words, rising out of her
distant past like subterranean rocks in an earthquake. Her hand again
moved toward the fuel tank, again drew back.

       She couldn’t do it. It was physically impossible, like suddenly flying up
into the air. And in less than a few hours she, too, would be dead, and none
of this would matter to her any longer. That, too, was a choice: to do
nothing.

       From beyond the ruined village came wailing, many voices at once.
So everyone hadn’t gone to sleep, after all. The Indians were holding a
ritual mourning for the three dead in the quake. Sudden light flared in the
darkness: a bonfire.

      Katherine clicked off the lighter and sank hopelessly to the ground. In
a moment she would do it, in just another moment. The explosion would be
violent and instantaneous; the children would not suffer ... in just a moment.
There was no other choice. Light found its way to her eyes, and she closed
them because in such a world there should not be even the flickering light
of the bonfire, let alone the steady lying beauty of the silver moon in the
wide desert sky.

                                     ****

      She woke at dawn. Cold, stiff, shivering—but alive.

      With enormous effort, Katherine got to her feet. Limping, she made
her way to the medical tent. Everyone in it was dead. So were the villagers
in the emergency inflatables, and an old man lying beside the ashes of the
bonfire. Only Katherine lived.

      Trembling, she hobbled back to the mobile, climbed the steps, and
unlocked the door. Only Kim was awake, tearing at a loaf of bread with her
small sharp teeth. She took one look at Katherine, dropped the bread, and
began to lick Katherine’s face. Katherine, stretched almost to breaking,
started to shove Kim away ... and stopped.

      No. Not possible.

      Li woke. “Taney!” he said, rubbing his dark eyes. “I was sleeping.”

     “Yes.” It was a croak. Li noticed ... those dark eyes, that quick little
mind, missed nothing.

      “You said you will answer my questions today.”

     “Yes.” Her arms were tight around Kim, so tight the child squirmed.
When had Katherine put her arms around Kim, who usually had to be
shoved away? She couldn’t remember, couldn’t think.... She got out, “Li,
when does Kim lick people’s faces?”

     “When she thinks they’re sad or angry or hurt. Taney, you said it was
my turn to ask questions today.”

      “Yes.”

       He crowded close to her, smelling terrible. “You said the first world
was to keep us safe. But the feeder broke and we were hungry and then the
first world broke, Taney, it broke, and all this other world was out here. Why
did you say the first world would keep us safe?”

      “A safeguard,” Katherine said, and wasn’t sure what she was saying.
“Oh, the bastards—an antidotal safeguard for the first researchers. In her
saliva.”

      “What?”

      “Thousands of compounds in saliva. We couldn’t possibly have
tested them all.”

      “What—”

      “Taney,” Jana said sternly from the floor, “stop crying. There’s nothing
to cry about. We found you.... Stop it, please, Taney, stop it before my
kindness gets all used up.”

                                       ****

      The real fight was just beginning, she knew that. It would rage on so
many fronts: medical, military, political, even journalistic if they drove her to
that. So much energy would be required, so much strategy. She had won
ten years ago but she was older now, and much more tired.

       Nonetheless, her mind was already marshalling arguments. The
enemy’s research division had been thoroughly destroyed, and so had its
personnel. But there was no guarantee that the bombs had actually gotten
them all; there had never been any guarantee. The enemy was supposedly
our ally now, but if the world situation changed again ... and things always
changed. A biological antidote was the first step toward a vaccine ... No,
Mr. President, tissue samples cannot provide the same mechanisms as
a living organism....

       Katherine, driving the DDR mobile across the Mojave, glanced back
over her shoulder at Kim, the only ugly and unappealing child of the four.
Kim, erratic about controlling her bowels, screaming like a stuck siren,
forever licking the faces of people she loved. A child no one would want, a
child likely to have been stuck in the back ward of some institution
somewhere, while the other three babies would have been adopted,
cuddled, loved. Kim, now the most important child on the planet.

      “It’s my turn now!” Jana said.
       “In a minute,” Li answered, just as the computer said, “Cat. ‘Cat’ starts
with ‘c.’ Say ‘kuh’ for ‘c’.”

     “Kuh,” Li and Jana said simultaneously, and the computer broke into
congratulatory song. Li and Jana laughed with excitement.

      Sudie suddenly appeared beside the driver’s seat. “Taney,” she said
seriously, “Now that the real world got broke, are you going to keep us
safe?”

     Medical fights, military fights, political fights, journalistic fights.
Katherine’s knee throbbed. The desert shimmered in front of her,
murderous with heat, the earthquake disaster behind. Katherine was nearly
seventy years old, and her knee hurt.

     “Yes, dear heart, I am,” she said, and drove on across the desert,
toward the next world.