I woke to my phone buzzing, and when I saw it was Kate, I thought I might still be moving through the ends of a dream. She told me to come downstairs. I dressed quickly, my hair sticking up all over the place, and found that downstairs meant she was in her truck. Its red bulk sat at the curb, engine off. She had her arm draped out the window, sunglasses blocking her eyes. The bed was packed with her bike, several duffel bags, and a slew of boxes restrained with a web of bungie cords. I smoothed my bedhead and hastily wiped the sleep gunk from my eyes as I approached. I wasn’t sure if I was furious at her for coming to say goodbye like this—basically slowing down on her way out of town—or forever grateful that she hadn’t left without doing so. Either way, I could already feel the despair deep in my chest, waiting to be set free.
“You at least going to get out of the car?” My tone as unkind as I could manage.
She looked at me as if deciding what to say, then picked at a scratch in the door’s upholstery.
“I’m not really a goodbye kinda person,” she said.
“There are a lot of things you’re not, Kate.”
She looked at the steering wheel, and I waited.
“Look, Matt.” Her grip on the wheel tightened. “I’m going to try to say this as clearly as I can, and I want you to think about it without your preconceived notions and social constructs—”
“Talk to me like a fucking person,” I begged. “Quit with the PC-robot jargonese.”
She smiled at me, and I wanted to scream.
“Okay, fine.” The smile faded. “Despite my best intentions, yes, I have grown quite fond of you as well. By which I mean, I went out of my way to make you feel like shit, like what you told me was one-sided. I promise you it is not. I’ve spent a lot of time telling myself it’s better that we just part ways. That would be the easiest path to sorting all this out.” Her blinding smile cracked open again and reached all the way back to her molars. I wanted to hold on to my anger, but the smile was so mischievous, so in love with life and all its bizarre possibilities. “Goddamnit, what I adore about you is you’re exactly what you say you are. I guess I didn’t realize how much I appreciate that or how good it did me in my own fucked headspace. So what I’m offering is this: If you can take me for who I am—and I mean, not try to change me, not try to make me into the person you wish I was, but just take me for the person I’ve told you I am… Then instead of goodbye, just get in my truck, dude. I’m thinking Cheyenne tonight, Lincoln tomorrow, Chicago the day after that. D.C. eventually. Go on this journey with me, and maybe it’ll be a huge mistake but that’s what life’s for, right? And it’s better to go with the wild, outrageous mistakes.”
Before she’d even finished her proposal, I knew I’d go back up to the apartment, pack the few things I cared about, and leave the rest behind. I was already gaming out how I’d abandon my lease and ask Damien to give away my furniture. I was already dreaming of the motel rooms Kate and I would stay in on the plains of Nebraska or in the palm of the Appalachian Mountains. How could I know then what would be born of that decision? The places I’d follow Kate, the people she’d draw into this cause, the passion she would spark within me, the years of rain and thunder—she once called them—that lay ahead. At that moment I was a twenty-two-year-old kid offered an adventure by a woman he’d never learn to refuse.
Kate grinned, and the dawn reflected off her sunglasses, the light flaring into my face, as bright and powerful as I’d ever known.
Book II 
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What is 6Degrees? Feds Respond to Shadowy Heartland Saboteurs
How an Elusive Group of Monkeywrenchers Has Cost Energy Giants Millions while Evading the FBI
By JENJI FISCHER
MARCH 30, 2025
The charred stalk of the pipeline twists up from the ground like an exposed root. George Wisniewski squats near the crater, a divot of metal and blackened earth. Here on the golden plains near the Colorado-Nebraska border, the damage looks almost artistic.
“They hit it in three different places. They knew to space out the charges, which makes repairs more costly,” he says. “It’ll probably take six months, but see this here”—he points to the carnage of the pipeline— “this is scrap now. We’ll have to tear all this out and rebuild. We got detection systems—the PIGs—that can locate a leak of around eight percent of max flow in under fifteen minutes, but it didn’t matter because they called the operator and told them to shut the pipeline off.”
Wisniewski is an engineer for Envige Energy. It’s his job to reconstruct this oil trunk pipeline—just a sliver of the 2.5 million miles of oil and natural gas pipelines that crisscross the country. At forty-two inches in diameter, this particular trunk line was carrying a load of around 800,000 barrels a day. It won’t take long, nor will it even be that expensive in the grand scheme of the oil economy. The problem is that the invisible infrastructure of gathering lines, trunk lines, refined product lines, and natural gas lines that supply American energy is highly vulnerable to these small-scale attacks. Groups like the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta in Nigeria or al-Qaeda in Yemen utilized pipeline attacks to further their political goals. Now they have an American equivalent.
Following the ransomware attacks of 2021 against Colonial Pipeline and a meat processing plant, the Department of Justice began working with the private sector to beef up cybersecurity protocols in vital infrastructure. Those ransom schemes were thought to be the work of cyber criminals with links to the Russian government, which is largely why the series of bombings beginning in early 2023 have been so misunderstood.
“If you worked in pipelines, you knew these attacks were more than just some computer geeks trying to make a buck,” said Wisniewski, adjusting his glasses and looking off at a field of picturesque golden wheat. “Not sure what took everyone so long to wake up to that.”
BENEATH THE RADAR, MONKEYWRENCHING IS NOT UNHEARD OF: wellheads cemented shut, gas pads vandalized, equipment destroyed, trees felled on access roads. These are common reactions of angry folks who don’t want to see their water sources compromised or the value of their homes go down. Resentment at fracking operations has been growing for some years in the heartland. Despite the promise of jobs, communities that have to live in the dense webs of oil and gas networks find themselves racked by everything from mysterious skin rashes to aborting farm animals. At first, local police thought the bombings were the work of antagonized locals. Until this group started leaving a tag:
6DEGREES IS COMING, read the graffiti at several of the attacks.
“Law enforcement, the energy and pipeline companies—they didn’t think this was the work of the same group,” said former FBI agent Sheryl Carney, who now consults for the ACLU. “They were dispersed geographically, and it looked like the work of amateurs, not Russian commandos suddenly invading Nebraska. It’s in the interest of the private sector to slow walk cybersecurity because it’s expensive. By the third or fourth pipeline bombing, though, they were screaming for the FBI and their allies in the media to do something.”
Oil and gas, already under pressure from the economic whiplash of Covid-19, lawsuits, environmental activists, and shareholder revolt, have indeed raised the profile of the attackers. In the winter of 2024–25, following the arrest of Miles Kroll, a twenty-one-year-old student from Brigham Young, Fox News and other conservative outlets turned their attention from a bad election defeat to this new “radical eco-terrorist.” Kroll admitted to having planted an IED after the Explosives Unit of the FBI Laboratory found scraps of a backpack used as a container at a bombing site in Colorado. He pled guilty and is serving a twenty-three-year sentence due to a “terrorism enhancement” at the Terre Haute, Indiana, communications management unit, one of three secretive sites intended for prisoners with “inspirational significance.” No further arrests have been made, and the attacks have continued.