“Yes, Cat, my first priority is rescuing your uncle’s house in Sarasota.”
“I’m just saying, Dad! There’s about a million unemployed construction workers down here ready to jump into the sea. It’s bad.”
Catherine looked healthy and vital, her cheeks plump, her smile mischievous again. Holly, on the other hand, was stick-thin, her pregnancy weight sloughing off along with too much else. She had Hannah on her lap when he called. (“Say hi to Grandpa! Say hi!,” waving the baby’s pudgy arm.) Her eyes were pitted, her cheeks hollow, but she did not want to talk about how she was doing. She wanted only to speak of the task force.
“You have to push them, Dad. This is a big opportunity.”
“Everyone keeps saying that.”
Hannah Gail Yu sucked on her fist while simultaneously trying to look up and behind at her mother. Hannah looked a lot like Dean, no bridge to her nose, enormous brown eyes, and straight coal-black hair.
“You have security in the building?” he asked.
“We’re taking precautions.”
“You’ve been in the public eye now, especially after the eulogy—”
“I know, Dad.”
“And it was an amazing speech, but—”
“Dad, I know.” This bubble of her irritation burst abruptly, and they were both quiet. He’d been at her apartment with the new baby when they heard about the shooting, and even as Holly began trembling and weeping, he’d felt almost exalted. Because Holly hadn’t been there. Her grief couldn’t match his blinding relief. She’d twice dodged the bullets of madmen, first Victor Love and then this David Joseph Madison. Because she’d been through so much, because she likely lived with the guilt and pain of having her friends die all around her for this cause, because she looked exhausted and angry every time he saw her, he did not feel like he should tell her about his diagnosis. Hannah craned her head back and tried to grab her mommy’s chin for attention.
“They’re monitoring our communications while we’re in Idaho,” he said. “So there are no leaks.”
“Go save the world,” she said, already reaching to end the call. “I’ll talk to you when you’re back.”
He’d spent one year and five months in a prison cell that wasn’t officially a prison cell somewhere in the New Mexico desert, and he knew in that time Holly had been screaming from the rooftops. She’d hassled every civil rights lawyer, called every news outlet, bombarded every reluctant politician with his story. She’d joined that ill-fated protest. She had championed his innocence while he sat in his white cell and fluctuated through despair, fury, and boredom, while he took his one-hour walk each day in a yard with a square of sky veiled by mesh wire. They only took him out in the early morning when it was still cool, his only contact a few rotating guards who were polite enough given the circumstances. There were others imprisoned there. He knew, because he heard them sometimes through vents or walls, weeping or screaming, and while the challenge to PRIRA was winding through the courts, he read whatever terrible books they’d allow him while he worried about his daughters.
That all felt like a nightmare now, long gone, but having come out the other side, he could sense there was some part of Holly that almost resented him for putting her through that. One year and five months because some peckerwood bomber once saw him speak to a crowd of thirty-five and was first in line for a selfie. One year and five months because a rogue authoritarian wanted to make an example of a scientist who was speaking out too much. One year and five months in which that president had his thugs fire into a protest and everyone just moved on, so that by the time Tony got out, the political class was more hysterical about food aid. One year and five months he would never have back, whether his lawsuit was successful or not. Hell, he still had mail he hadn’t gotten around to opening before he found out about the cancer.
That night he had a dream. He stood on the side of a midsize mountain overlooking a plateau of forest, gazing past boulders and ridges and red-yellow autumn trees. In the distance were more mountains and river valleys, green and lush. On the plateau were hundreds of people gathered in an enormous circle around dusty ground. They were dressed in red and white, faces obscured by black masks with no mouth or eye holes. They had their arms around each other, swaying back and forth as one. Humming a low, throaty song.
During the weeks they spent in Idaho, Tony could not have been more frustrated with the supposed crack team of experts assembled to deal with a civilization-threatening financial and environmental crisis. The outsized egos in the room made for nuclear brinkmanship with every exchange. Rathbone and Hasan he was at least used to; their arrogance was familiar and therefore navigable. Tufariello he’d known for some time, but he’d never been impressed with her as a scientist, and she and Hasan’s sister formed a coalition more interested in legislating social justice schemes than reducing emissions. Meanwhile Joe Otero, some slop bucket Republican mandarin whose sole qualification appeared to be that he’d mildly resisted The Pastor’s fascism, had a nervous breakdown halfway through and had to piss his pants back to whatever slit he’d crawled out of. McCowen was a vulgar narcissist but at least tried to keep to the topic at hand. Admiral Dahms, a needle-dicked Vic Love sycophant, played his conscience-of-the-military-industrial-complex card while steering funding to massive Pentagon infrastructure projects and base relocations. He also had the disgusting habit of picking his teeth with his overlong fingernails. Finally, there was Emii Li Song, who he erupted at on the first day and proceeded to shun. She sat through every meeting, stony and silent but listening so intently you could almost see her brain plotting. That they made any progress in those weeks at all was surprising, but this was done by basically accommodating everyone: giving Jane and Haniya their reorganization of American economic life, giving Dahms his funds, giving Rathbone his banking reform, et cetera. Still, the heart of the bill resembled what Hasan first proposed, and Tony was cautiously optimistic right up until he smelled the smoke.
He could rarely sniff that scent anymore without thinking of his terrifying scramble through the streets of Los Angeles as he searched for his daughter. Secret Service didn’t have to tell him there was a forest fire nearby because he’d already smelled it. That night, he never got into bed: he packed and took a car to the airport, where he waited for what he knew was coming.
On the flight out of Sun Valley, he watched the scarred and jagged horizon backlit by orange flame. They landed in Cleveland, and he couldn’t sleep without his dreams growing darker. He found himself standing on a patch of brittle ground, ankles tangled in tree roots, boxed in on all four sides by jets of fire. Black smoke curled from the cinders and snaked around his wrists and torso. Within the flames, he saw demons, shrieking and taunting, and he had a nagging fear that he’d left something or somebody behind. The worst part was that when he looked straight up, he could see the stars.
He woke in the middle of the night, soaked in sweat, and at first, he thought the knock was part of the fading nightmare. But it wasn’t. He answered to find Emii Li Song at the door.
“What?” he said. He didn’t have his glasses on, so she was blurry in a dark bathrobe.
“We share a wall. I heard you scream.”
“Yeah, I was having a bad dream.” And suddenly he wished he hadn’t admitted that. He also became aware of his gut hanging over his pajama pants.
“Can I come in?” she asked.