“I swear I’m not trying to poison you to get at the golf empire,” she said when I grimaced and spit it out.
“How do you know all this stuff?”
She made a face like she was sniffing the juice of a leatherback milkcap. “Dude, I read a book.”
We stripped down and crawled into a churning pool of freezing river water. This high in the mountains, the day could be hot and the water positively frigid. The trees towered overhead, catching the sun and sending light and shadows glittering across the forest. We swam over to the rocks by the waterfall because Kate wanted to look for salamanders in the crevices.
“Salamanders have the most biomass of any wild creature living in western North Carolina,” she said definitively, and when I only nodded, she looked at me. “Don’t you think that’s incredible?”
“Sure.”
“Matt, just think about how many salamanders you’d need to make up one bear!”
This made me laugh very hard.
We disappeared beneath the waterfall, scooting together, the skin of her hip chill but the thick muscle beneath it warm. Frigid water pounded my lap. Our backs rested against slimy green moss, which, Kate told me, was called rock snot.
“Really?”
“No, I have no idea what it’s called.”
“You’re impossible.”
“Tell me about it. Believe it or not, when I was a kid, it was not cool to know all the names of fungi and edible berries.”
“Yeah, I’m sure you really struggled socially.”
“Dude, I was a dork and a tomboy! You were the one who grew up popular and good-looking.” When I gave her a skeptical look, she said, “Really! Boys thought I was weird, and I hated everything girls talked about. Also, I was this tall when I was in sixth grade. I looked like a fucking circus act.”
Shivering under the cold thunder of the water, with sunlight cutting through the roaring shroud, there was no way I was buying that. She looked so beautiful, it scared me.
“Want to make out under this waterfall?” I asked.
“Why do you think I brought you here? Pretend like this is the first time.”
And so the kiss began delicately, tentatively, as pretend-Matt and pretend-Kate grew more confident. Later, we emerged to dry ourselves on a rock in the sun while she cut slices from an apple with a knife and fed every other one to me. Then we put our clothes back on as the sun set and the stars came out and the green forested mountains were limned with the silver light of a quarter moon. Of course, she knew most of the constellations. She put her head against mine so I could follow her index finger as she traced the line of Cassiopeia and told me stories I’ve long forgotten about this queen of the northern sky.
S
HANE
R
IDES THE
P
ANOPTICON
2028
She left for Kansas in a driving rain. The downpour had lasted two days, and even the dash from the back door of the safe house to her car left her half-soaked. Driving out of Berlin, New Hampshire, she cruised along the raging Androscoggin River. The muddy water crawled up the trees along the banks, threatening a blue-yellow NAPA Auto Parts store built too close to the floodplain. In the White Mountain Forest, a gray-black mist shrouded Mount Washington. She imagined illogical, long-lost beasts huddled from the storm: eastern elk lowering wet snouts and six-foot antlers or mountain gorillas sheltered beneath the sweet green depths of the red pine and balsam fir canopy.
She passed between the lakes dashed across the midsection of the state like spilled paint and stopped for lunch at a Subway outside Concord. She used the mirror to pin her hair back and affix the wig of dirty blond over her scalp, followed by a logo-less gray ballcap. When she held the switch hidden beneath the cloth, a low buzz briefly enveloped her skull. She paid cash for the sandwich. On returning to the car, tuna melt in hand, a bird fell out of the sky.
JANSI Had watched her drive away. When Jansi asked who she would be working with Shane With No Last Name gave her an impatient look but answered anyway: Jansi would be connected via a post office box to an engineering dropout in Georgia, an organic farmer in Maine, and a lawyer in Boston. Five years of proving herself useful, careful, and smart, three years of fortifying her cover, and now she was all the way in. It was going to be hard as hell to return to teaching seventh-graders geography after Thanksgiving break ended. “Will we see each other again?” Jansi asked. “No,” said Shane. “Definitely not.” Then, as an afterthought: “We’re calling you the Second Cell.”
She jumped as it cracked wetly off the pavement. Like a bolt from the storm had hit both her and the bird. It was still alive, twitching on the wet macadam, hammered by the downpour. Kneeling, she saw one of its wings mangled. Gray and white feathers torn. She couldn’t recognize the species, but Allen would know. She found a shoebox in the trunk and lifted the bird’s shivering body inside. It lay by her on the passenger seat for seventy miles. By the time she stopped again, it was dead.
The wipers raced back and forth in a frenzy. The rain was a white-noise thunder against the windshield. She drove the speed limit, and when impatient semis blew past, they sent up a blinding spray. She kept thinking of her mother, and the way rain had put her to sleep when she was a child and young to sorrow.
Because the highways were so heavily monitored now, she traveled outside the system of interstate rest stops. Rural highway bathrooms could be a dice roll. After a cup of coffee and sufficient pressure on her bowels, she pulled into a tidy-looking gas station in a one-stoplight town and got the key for the toilet. She regretted the meat and mayo at lunch. She could no longer reliably lose weight, so she went through phases of diet, and her pants size seemed to change with each meal or shit. Sitting on the toilet, listening to the raindrops chime on the aluminum roof, she noticed a marker left on the floor, some graffitist’s forgotten tool. She picked up the marker, tested it on the white surface. Between the nastiness, swastikas, and tired limericks, she childishly tagged their line. She bolded each letter, outlined the 6 and the D, washed her hands, and tossed the marker in the trash on her way out.
6DEGREES IS COMING.
The drive took another five hours. By the time she arrived at the next safe house a few miles outside Altoona, Pennsylvania, it was well past dark. Down a gravel lane, isolated from the road, sat a nondescript, one-story home, vinyl-sided and squat. She grabbed her pack and found the key taped to the underside of one of the green plastic lawn chairs sitting on the concrete slab that served as a porch. She let herself in. Without bothering to explore, she went to the freezer, which was empty except for three frozen dinners. She microwaved two and wolfed them down. Then she took a shower in the too-bright bathroom, unrolled her pad and sleeping bag on the living room’s empty carpet, and slept beneath the hum of the rain.
She woke to a knock on the back door. Though she knew it would be Allen, she looked out the side window and saw him waiting in a black rain slicker with the hood tucked over his smooth pink skull, still, when she put her hand on the doorknob, she almost couldn’t bring herself to turn it.
She ushered him into the kitchen, scanning the woods behind the house.
“Where’d you park?” she asked.