Outside my windshield, a misting rain was falling. I sat blinking for a while, adjusting to a gray light that now seemed foreign, like another man’s private worlde.
At home, I found Seth waiting for me. We each stood there for a moment in the home we’d made together, as in the final showdown of an old Western. I said: “You’re a surprisingly adept liar.”
“I wasn’t sure if I wanted to involve you in this. Then I knew I had to.”
I believed him. Or at least believed that he believed this. Carrying secrets in a relationship is a complicated thing. One must convince himself that he is telling his partner the truth in the moment, as when I first allowed Seth to believe there was a possibility I would want a child with him, when I knew that I did not. One convinces himself to allow for a gray area in which the truth is mutable. I told him I was going to my study.
“Stay. We have more to talk about, Ash.” He said it quite gently.
I knew Seth would get his way, on our child and on this thing a group of vapid activists was asking. I was powerless to deny him, my affection simply too uncompromising. I did not let him touch me, though. I left him alone in our expensive condominium and went back out into the one true world where the drizzle still fell.
Conclusion: The global order cries out for a hegemon. Cities of the developing world swell with peoples trudging out of the drought-stricken dust bowls of North Africa and the Middle East and the swamped lowlands of Asia. Europe’s militarization of the Mediterranean continues. Dwindling harvests in Central and South America as well as cyclonic activity in the Caribbean have created the same conundrum in our hemisphere. The fear of refugees arrives before they do, and a supranational nexus of right-wing xenophobia grows. Small groups of individuals are able to forge enormous social and political chaos through relatively small acts of violence, and the dispossessed and discarded internal and external proletariat will breed new and more vicious insurgencies. The problem with insurgents, however, is that unlike Donald Duck Trump and her crew of naive left-wing warriors, they tend not to bother with comprehensive governing philosophies. They simply want to make others feel their disillusionment. History demonstrates that the most powerful empires, in the end, turn out to be surprisingly fragile. With its expansive coastlines and fire exposure in the west, multiple studies have concluded that the North American continent is in fact extremely vulnerable to climate chaos. We see environmental calamity manifesting in the fracture of our political system, which over the course of the last thirty years has responded to increasingly frequent institutional crises with escalating degrees of gridlock and mismanagement. When I write of my mauve dread, the slice of the color spectrum that has followed me my entire life, I perhaps speak of what I long intuited before I even had the mathematics to explain it: A new dark age brims on the horizon. Religious fanaticism, ethnic factionalism, and political extremism will engulf the planet, and the pillage of the natural world will indeed accelerate as the elite make one last futile attempt to gather as much capital as possible in an effort to wall themselves off from the inevitable. Perhaps this is why I remain funereal about the coming election. Civilization’s abrupt retreat will be marked the world over by every flavor of warring chief in crisp, elegantly tailored suits murdering to obtain power in the hope that they might rule this barbaric and alien age.
Book IV 
NATION OF HEAT
6D
EGREES
I
S
C
OMING
2033
Shane had felt this combination of exhaustion and fear only once before, during Islali’s birth. Echoes of that ten-hour ordeal, and the postpartum darkness that followed, seemed to vibrate within her as her plane touched down in Charlotte. She exited to Gate B15, feeling like she wanted to collapse onto the grimy carpet. Every nerve ending humming with the dread. She wondered when she would ever get sleep again.
Quinn met her in short-term parking and handed her glasses and a face mask for all the cameras they’d pass on the way. Shane pushed her greasy hair back and slipped on the FaceRec-disrupting lenses.
“We’ll be picking up one more,” said Quinn after they pulled out of range of the airport.
“Who?”
“Jansi.”
Shane stared at blondie for a moment. Quinn wore a light purple cashmere sweater and had her hair carefully parted in the center. She wore a diamond engagement ring because, as she’d explained via the code, she’d decided to further her cover and their aims by marrying the CTO of her company. Quinn, of course, anticipated Shane’s reaction to the news they’d be picking up Jansi.
“You’re good, Shane. I didn’t find her. She found me. We’ve been in contact for a year now.”
GET ON A FLIGHT As soon as you can. Don’t contact anyone else. Quinn found Shane’s message in a multiplayer VR game where she and Shane had set up a dead drop after the last meeting in Wisconsin. They’d decided to open their own line of communication. So here they were. Smashing protocol in an emergency. Taking back control. Quinn had told her fiancé a friend back home had been in a car accident.
Shane ignored that her back channel with Quinn was not the only one, ignored the danger of their organization developing clandestine pockets within itself. “And Jansi knows the situation?”
“I had to bring her in.”
“Okay,” said Shane, nodding. “I’m not angry. That’s good.”
As they waded through traffic, she noticed that Quinn was wearing a boot on her left foot. She asked what happened. “I broke it a week ago getting out of the goddamn shower. Just another indignity of being a woman and getting old.” She thunked the boot against the side of the door.
As she and Quinn cobbled their plans together, she’d scrambled to find Lali a sitter at the last second. Obviously, she couldn’t go to Kai, so Teddy it was. His moon-face looked perfectly credulous as she explained that she had a cousin who’d been in a head-on collision and she needed to go home to Austin for a few days. Teddy was eager for any morsel of her trust after she’d put a stop to their infrequent sex. She’d dropped Lali off that afternoon, her girl crying and begging to go with her even as Teddy promised she could play VR with his boys. Then Shane rushed to the airport on no sleep, barely making the flight, too keyed up on adrenaline to nap.
“This could be the end of it,” said Quinn. Then she smacked the steering wheel and shrieked, the sound piercing in the close confines of the car. It made the hairs on Shane’s arms stand on end.
“We don’t know that,” said Shane.
Quinn only shook her head, furious. “Don’t kid yourself, Shane. Of course we do.”
They drove into the descending fire of the sunset, keeping an eye out for speed trap drones, though the act of piloting a vehicle would soon become conspicuous itself. Because the car was neutered, they had to drive in analog mode. They fled over nondescript highway and past the standard fast-food and gas station carnival that appeared to Americans as familiarity and homecoming, as if interstate sprawl was the natural state, and what one thought of as nature was nothing more than a curiosity, a relic of a time before civilization advanced to the state of a Whopper Value Meal.
Quinn looked at the battery gauge. “We need a charge.”
Shane hadn’t eaten anything that day and purchased a nutrition bar for an unbelievable $17 while Quinn got coffee and a full charge for the car. They sat outside at a picnic table waiting on the battery, watching the sun disappear and feeling a mild brush of winter air descend. That gust of cold air reminded her of what she’d been dwelling on all day: the time she’d taken Lali, as a newborn, to a taqueria off the highway.