Chapter Eleven:Cards on the Table

  [content warning: police violence, sexual abuse]

  The sharp coldness of the predawn mountain air isn’t apparent until she’s getting ready to slide back into the sleeping bag. Only the side near Sophia is warm. Gravity went right to bed after they got back but Ivy stood out in the dark for a few minutes, watching the forest where nothing moved. All her retions and traumas woven together through the history of her life. Far into the depth of night sounds are alien and thoughts are echoes that distort themselves as they persist. Although she’s happy to be able to y down next to Sophia, who, mercifully, is still deep asleep, she isn’t able to stop her anxious fidgeting before the glow of sunlight broadens across the small polygon of visible sky. Sophia starts snoring right around sunrise, just as Ivy hears Jaime and Nylon getting up. The sounds of them moving around and talking brings her enough comfort that she can drift off for a few hours. She wakes from the heat of the sun bearing down on the tent. Sophia is sprawled out next to her, reading a book. Les Guerilleres.

  “What’s that?” Ivy asks, her voice doing that croaking thing it does sometimes in the morning, coming out too deep and making her cringe a little with dysphoria. Over a decade since she finished voice training.

  “I got recommended it by some of my friends online,” says Sophia. “It’s a feminist specutive novel. All the women in the world rise up and kill all the men.”

  “Wow, that sounds fun. You like it?”

  “It’s interesting,” says Sophia. “It’s conceptual. It’s less about the plot and more about, like, challenging the reader to think about what a world without men could actually be like. Like if we really got rid of patriarchy, not just striving for equality or some other stopgap measure, what kinds of society, what kinds of thinking could come out of that?”

  Ivy smiles. Sophia has a distinct way of talking when she’s passionate about a book. Caught up in the rhapsody of engagement, pulled into the words and concepts of some stranger from the past. It’s a beautiful thing to see, and despite how uncomfortably hot the tent is getting in the sun she looks so pretty with the warm light shining off the pages and onto her face that Ivy wriggles out of the sleeping bag and wraps her sweaty arms and legs around Sophia.

  “You’re beautiful,” she says and pecks her girlfriend on the cheek. Sophia turns her head just enough to catch her lips for a prolonged kiss.

  “I love you but it’s too hot in here to cuddle,” says Sophia. She slides a bookmark in. “Let’s get up. It’s probably almost noon anyway, I think Gravity and Nylon already went on another hike.”

  “Perfect timing,” Emiko says as they crawl out of the tent, “The new pot of coffee’s almost done.” She’s got a little metal kettle set up on a gas burner.

  “Good morning sleepy ones,” says Jaime. “Good to see you’re finally up. Nylon made some breakfast.” She gestures to a metal bowl full of scrambled eggs and bell peppers. “It might be a little cold.”

  “That’s great,” says Ivy. She immediately starts picking at it with her fingers. They’re dirty, she likes the feeling of eating with dirty hands. It reminds her of the old days hanging out with Scatter and Houndstooth, frequently without a way to stay clean. A lot of the queer punks that would meet up with them to squat houses gmorized it, crusties who would be offended at the idea of washing their hands. That didn’t stick with Ivy afterward; she’s fully internalized the appeal of indoor plumbing. But it’s nice to get back to it from time to time, remember how they had lived.

  “I’m gonna go use the big girls’ room,” says Sophia, gesturing to a stand of bushes a few paces into the woods. “Are Gravity and Nylon gone?”

  Jaime stops picking at the scab on her knuckles and nods. “Yeah they’re taking a morning hike. Should be back sometime soon, then I figured maybe we could all head over to the river for a bit? Everyone could use some time by the water.”

  “Oh, that sounds nice,” says Sophia.

  “And in the meantime, while you’re here, guess what?” says Emiko.

  “What?” asks Ivy.

  “I brought my tarot deck!”

  “She already gave me a reading,” says Jaime. “She’s real excited. It’s a new deck, right?”

  “Yeah! It’s a gift from a friend of mine. I used to do tarot all the time for my hustle but I lost that deck cuz someone stole my pack. It’s been forever since then but I guess I said something about it to Zoey and next time she sees me she insists I take this one which, like, it wasn’t very hard to talk me into. It’s fucking gorgeous, not just like the illustrations but the energy behind them, you know? I’ve just been vibing, getting back into the swing of it all, connecting with the cards and everything.”

  “I’ve never done a tarot reading,” says Ivy.

  “What? Impossible! You’ve been out for so long!”

  Ivy shrugs, “I’ve been around people doing readings, just never really wanted to.”

  “But you’re like obsessed with—I mean, nevermind, but like that’s actually surprising. Okay well, now I’m really excited to show you.”

  Before the reading, Emiko insists on showing Ivy every single card, despite the fact that it’s all very obscure to her. Some of them she thinks she can pick up on, but then Emiko tells her that The Empress is not really about rulers, and Death is not really about death, and that leaves her even more confused when Emiko is commenting on how utterly ideal she finds the genderqueer Knight of Pentacles. In the meantime, Ivy eats breakfast, drinks coffee, smokes a few bowls, makes flirtatious eye contact with Sophia, and manages to get a frustrating splinter out of her cuticle.

  “I hope you realize there’s no way I’m going to remember these,” Ivy says as Emiko concludes.

  “I mean, I know, I just wanted to show you them. I really like this deck. It corrects so much of what’s problematic about the Rider-Waite decks.”

  “So do—I’m not trying to be mean or anything, but do you believe in this stuff?” Jaime asks.

  “What’s to believe in?” says Emiko. “It just works.”

  *****

  As Emiko shuffles the deck she straightens her back and looks directly at Ivy. The dark circles of her pupils, the shadows at the center of her eyes, connect with Ivy’s, eye-to-eye, a little portal of light between their skulls, and maybe it’s the weed hitting or something of the ck of sleep from the night before because Ivy feels herself instantly slipping into a loosened state. Maybe she wants to believe that there’s something to all of this, that in Emiko’s talent lies the secret to her future. Maybe it’s just years of cultural training taking hold. In this moment her housemate seems magical, a priestess possessed by hidden forces. Ivy would believe she could see auras, read minds.

  When Emiko speaks, she speaks with a new tone. “Remember that all that has been written is only about the past. No longer bound by the experiences of the past, every moment you and I are creating this moment. As we call upon the spirits in this deck, we invoke their wisdom and their guidance.”

  She taps the deck to stillness. “Eight cards, two for each position.” She pulls from the middle of the deck, her fingers hovering before picking each card, like a dowsing rod looking for water, and pces them face down. Two, and then a line above them, three sets of two, making a T-shape.

  “First, your past.” She reaches for the first of the line. A figure with a sword, in armor, the sky afme behind her, a blindfold over her eyes.

  “Justice, reversed. The forces of justice follow their own ethical codes, and impose it on others, sometimes unfairly. You have been subject to this violence. Your past has been marked by the forces that should have represented justice, but reversed, they have not been fair to you.”

  She draws the next card. A snake, a skull.

  “Death.” A humming sound fills Ivy’s skull and she can barely hear Emiko’s words. Emiko is saying things like, “Now, recall that in the tarot the card of Death, it’s frequently misunderstood, it doesn’t really represent what we think of as mortal, bodily death.” Emiko’s words are a hum.

  Overdose. Car accident. Heart Disease. Cancer. Diabetes. Drowning. Disappearance. Explosion. Disease. Suicide. Bodies tumbling through a void, buried in the dirt, in the water. On the card is an illustration of a snake shedding its skin. Her heartrate is accelerated, and she tries to calm it down, focusing on that snake, imagining the fear as an old, dried skin she is shedding. An image comes to her mind: a rabbit’s foot, from Gravity’s story the night before. She imagines the image tattooed on the scales of the old skin, being shed. The past is still there, but it is apart from me.

  “Are you alright?” Emiko asks, breaking tone. Apparently Ivy didn’t keep it together as well as she wanted to.

  “Yeah, sorry, continue.”

  Emiko moves on to the next two cards, in the center of the row. “The present, the state of things in your life at the moment.” She flips the first one. A heart pierced by three daggers, dripping bck ink to the bottom of the illustration, in front of a cloudy background. “The three of swords. You are being confronted with knowledge that causes you pain, but that it is important for you to know. This is a critical time of growth. Although it hurts, it hurts because the truth hurts, and what you are learning will teach you, and continue your spiritual journey.”

  Ivy’s mind wanders to Gravity, still off on a hike. To her nightmares and memories. Truth hurts. The corolry of ignorance being bliss: knowledge is suffering.

  Emiko flips the next card. A figure on horseback, riding before sunny fields, surrounded by sticks poking out of the ground. It doesn’t look as negative. “The six of wands. You’ve accomplished meaningful things, and you should revel in your accomplishments. You have achieved something of significance, and others recognize your success.”

  It’s hard to square with her self-hatred, but then she thinks back to the previous night, to what Gravity was telling her about how she’s had a hand in faer life. To things Sophia has said. But is that really true and meaningful, or is she just trying to find things that match the cards? On the other hand, why is she only questioning it when it’s a positive reading?

  Emiko’s fingers dance over to the next two cards. “The future,” she says, and Ivy feels the apprehension creeping in. Even if it’s all bullshit, the future remains a weighty prospect.

  The first card shows a brick tower struck by lightning, crumbling to pieces and burning from the inside. “The tower. Something of the world you’ve built up will fall apart. Your life will be shaken up, and it will feel like everything’s falling apart. It’s not the end though, it’s a transition, a house of cards crumbling down and taking with it illusions, providing a solid foundation for new truths to be revealed.”

  The second card is flipped to reveal a woman lying on the ground, an array of swords stabbed into her body, before a dreary and desote sky, a crow flying overhead. Emiko sucks in a breath. “The ten of swords. Betrayal, crisis, and loss. Looking at the two of these, something heavy is going to happen, it’s going to shake things up for you a lot.”

  “So what, am I going to die? Get struck by lightning and stabbed in the back?” Ivy’s tired, and she can’t keep the little edge of desperation out of her voice.

  “No, not like that, none of the images are literal. It’s just going to be very difficult, but it will also be a process of growth and renewal. When the tower comes down, illusions are stripped away, but that can be a healing process. The loss in the ten of swords causes grief, but it’s also, as the end of the cycle, the beginning of a new cycle.”

  It hasn’t solved the sinking feeling in her stomach. So, the future: ruin.

  “Now the st two cards are the root,” says Emiko, moving to the two cards beneath the row. “Essentially, this is what’s underlying the problems being expressed here.”

  “The problems of my life?” asks Ivy, feeling a little incredulous and defensive. Looking at the woman with all the swords stabbed into her back and sides.

  “Everyone’s life is multifaceted,” says Emiko. “The deck is expressing a particur understanding, a particur narrative, about your life. The root cards can help hone in on what that understanding is. They reflect on all the other cards at py.”

  She flips the first one. A demonic figure, grinning, holding two others on chains. “The devil. Control, manipution, lies, addiction. The forces that bind people, deny them their freedom.”

  The second one, the final card. A face stares at Ivy, descending from the heavens. Arms and a trumpet and rays of light coming out of the sky over people dancing below. “Judgment reversed,” says Emiko. “Judgment is the final reckoning, when the truth comes out and a major stage in things passes on to a new form. Reversed, it means either that this process has been unduly blocked or forestalled, or that the process is misfiring, going wrong in some way. So, together with the devil, it would mean that in the course of your life, in what’s being looked at here, there are forces that are controlling you, are preventing the release that should come with a change. In the past, you dealt with injustice and moved through life transitions, in the present you are dealing with uncomfortable knowledge around these things but are accomplished in what you have achieved, and in the future you will face a crisis that will disrupt what you know and create space for a new context.”

  Ivy lets her eyes py over the little illustrations on each of the cards like someone studying a painting at a gallery.

  The Devil. Judgment. Ivy always thought of the tarot as being some kind of pagan, witchy thing, but now staring at these two figures it’s taking her right back to her childhood.

  “Today,” the pastor is saying, “I hate to tell you this, but we have to talk a little about the dark side of things. And we have to talk about God’s judgment.”

  That word stands over her: judgment. She knows that judgment is a problem. She has experienced judgment again and again. The first sermon she remembers about judgment was about AIDS, about how all those queers were going to die because that was the righteous judgment of God. She was just a kid then. Now she’s nearly an adult, and she’s thinking this is the st sermon about judgment she’s ever going to sit through, even if her mother doesn’t know it. The apartment’s rental contract was just signed two days before.

  “And you might be scared,” he’s saying, “of this threat hanging over us. These weapons of mass destruction. Why are you scared? Are you afraid of death? Maybe you think you know when you’re supposed to die, and God doesn’t?”

  The pastor has been in her life so long, she can’t imagine saying goodbye. She won’t, though, not really. She’ll say that she’ll see him next week, and then she’ll go home and pack up her stuff, the stuff that actually matters to her, including the three secret dresses and the secret bra and the two secret panties she stole from her mother’s undry pile months before and the tights she bought from K-Mart.

  “Some people say, things may have happened differently. You can’t say this is God’s will, because I can imagine, with my great mind, something else! Imagination. It’s a powerful tool, when you use it for good. It’s also lies. Right? Imagination. Some people say, maybe things just happen the way they do. I say no! Things happen the way they do for a reason! I know that, I feel it, because Christ wants me to know it. This is the way things are supposed to happen. Now all these atheists, communists, homosexualists, they get, let’s be honest, some pretty funny ideas. They’re a little funny in the head, aren’t they?” Laughter. “These atheists, they say oh it’s all just chance. This watch just got built by chance. Shakespeare was just written by chance by a bunch of monkeys. You evolved from a monkey, and it’s all just chance. Maybe they’re evolving into monkeys, huh?” Laughter. “No, no, no. We know. We know that none of this is happenstance. There’s another name for chance: providence. There is a war right now, a war for the human soul. A world war, and we have the greatest weapon of all in America: we have God.”

  And she will never have to sit through another one of his sermons.

  Nylon and Gravity are coming back into the camp, and Ivy waves to them. Something about doing the tarot reading tickled her brain, and she’s wondering if it’s not faith. She sequestered faith in a very specific part of her past, deep inside the overpping onion yers of trauma she’s been through over the years. Being asked, now, to connect with something spiritual, to believe in it, makes her afraid and frustrated and exhausted, but so much of that is about the church she left behind. She feels blindsided by this Christian imagery. The Devil, Judgment. One time her pastor said the tarot was demonic, that it was witchcraft, evil magic summoning evil spirits. When Emiko sat her down to read for her, maybe that’s what she was expecting, or hoping for. A few evil spirits to guide her along. Instead, there again was the face of God. Or the Demiurge, whatever name He was wearing at the moment.

  It was only a short time after she moved out that she transitioned. On some deep level, her sense of her identity has been more connected to secur life than she realized. Even when she was doing yoga, all those meditations always felt like some wild psychological game. Even with everything that had happened to her, her dreams, her fear of the Demiurge, it had felt maybe magical, but never so directly evocative of the religion of her youth, the religion she thinks of as a hallmark of cis people and their violence. But that’s the real game, isn’t it? If she’s worried that something supernatural is watching her through all those cameras and badges—it’s not just a spirit, it’s a God.

  *****

  The whole time she’s packing the car back up with everyone’s stuff, she keeps getting fshes of the tarot reading in her mind, the image of the girl lying on the ground with ten swords sticking out of her back. She’s tired from the ck of sleep and maybe a little dehydrated, and in that woozy state the body being stabbed keeps changing. One moment it’s her, the next it’s Piper, then Sophia, then Gravity. Anxiety is a bitch.

  “Fear is a free hallucinogen,” Eff—Felicity at the time—had once told her while they walked the beach of Santa Cruz too te at night, “and it’s great if you can learn to control it. And it’s a much safer psychedelic than adrenaline.” The waves crashing in the dark, barely visible from the city lights reflecting off the cloud-shrouded sky. The old lighthouse, the shadows that made them run.

  “Or love,” Ivy had said, bitter from the earlier events of that day. A tangle of traumatized women figuring out how to push and pull each other with their emotional needs. That had been a bad situation, something she left three years in the past that she doesn’t wanna focus on right now.

  The Tower, burning down, the girl stabbed through with ten swords. She’s thinking now of Eff, back at the house, her worry finding a home. She hasn’t heard from Eff in days.

  She hasn’t said anything about it but she knows she wants to go out with Eff. She’s been thinking about her a lot tely, about their past together. The real problem is that even though she knows she’s poly, she’s never learned how to go about it. There aren’t any media analogues or anyone she knew growing up, and she found it hard enough to just push through all the cultural confusion to coming out as gay. Now, knowing how to do this, it feels like it will threaten her dynamic with Sophia. Is it just cultural coding, the idea that love is always something only reserved for one channel? Or is she just feeling anxious because things have been a little more fragile since her mental health declined again?

  When she looks at other poly people in her community, it seems like so many of them are either already very experienced, or are able to just derive the principles of poly retionships wholecloth from their political principles of autonomy and anarchy. Even still they have drama but she’s never seen a retionship without drama.

  In the moment, with the tower burning down in her mind, she wonders, is this about losing Sophia? Eff? Both of them? Will she be thrown out onto the streets again, left to choose her own path, bereft of friends?

  At one point, Nylon insisted they never let anyone read tarot for them because a person wasn’t meant to know, and they couldn’t deal with the weight of possibility on their mind. At the time Ivy had just taken it for one of the peculiar things they said, the kinds of opinions traveling street punks urgently spout with the voice of someone giving drunk advice at a bar, but now she can see what they meant. The figures are looming rge over her, the Devil and the Tower and all those swords. She tries to comfort herself with the ease with which Emiko read the cards and shuffled them back into the deck. It wasn’t like some racist horror movie scene where a stereotype of an old Romani woman tells a fortune and then looks horrified by what they’ve foretold, it was more like a therapy session.

  Before she can think about it too heavily, she steps aside for a cigarette and finds a spot on the ridge near the parking area where her phone has two bars of service. She calls Eff.

  Ring. Ring. Ring. Ring. Ring. Ring. Ring. “I’m sorry, but the customer you’re calling—” She hangs up. Stupid of her to worry about it, really. She calls again. Ring. Ring. Ring. Ring. “Hello?”

  “Hey, uh, sorry, just wanted to check in how’s it going? We’re headed back soon.”

  “Ask how Shinji’s doing!” Jaime shouts over to her. This is the longest they’ve been apart since they adopted the cat out of the gutter a few months before.

  “Oh, yeah, it’s all good. I went to work, otherwise just been chillin.”

  “Is Shinji okay?”

  “Yeah! They’re being a zy bum sleeping on the couch the whole time. Except at night they’re crushing my feet while I sleep. It’s too hot for that.” She ughs a little. “But no, for real everything’s fine.”

  “Is Ursu still out?”

  “Yeah, her thing sts until tomorrow I think. How’s it going there?”

  “It’s been good, getting to be out in nature, let my hair down a little.”

  “You see anything cool?”

  “Lotta trees, some cool birds, crows. I took a night walk to a waterfall. The sunsets are gorgeous out here, and the night sky is filled with stars.”

  “That’s awesome, I’m gd you ended up going.” Oh yeah, she had forgotten she almost didn’t go.

  “Yeah, I think it was really good for me. Well, I should get going, seems like everyone’s pretty much packed up. We should be there by nightfall.”

  “Cool, see you then. Oh, one weird thing, got a phonecall on the house phone from Ana, you remember her?”

  Ivy had the vaguest impression. Ana was Ursu’s friends and one of Emiko’s suppliers for her side business of selling entheogens to other trans people, but Ivy had first met her with Eff before they had moved into the Richmond house, at some parties in Sacramento.

  “Yeah, kinda, why, what’s up? She need a pce to stay?”

  “No, she just I guess heard y’all were driving back from the mountains and said there was someone Emiko should meet up with on the way? I already texted her about it, I figure you’re gonna stop off there, just wanted to say that if you see Ana tell her hi from me, I’m kinda trying to get in touch with her again but she’s a slippery person to befriend.”

  “Yeah, will do. Take care.”

  *****

  The detour isn’t in Sacramento or anywhere near it. It’s in a rural part of the Central Valley where the recent rain hasn’t even begun to address the drought. Dead grass, ravines, the occasional emaciated oak tree bent and twisted beneath branches that had once been verdant. The yellow spots of starthistles and their pale green stalks fill the empty space.

  Central California wears the history of colonial violence close to its surface. Once a patchwork of interlinked wetnds, it’s now an endless agricultural zone. No simple farmer or feudal peasants here; the nd is managed by conservative owners who employ migrant borers pressed into situations of legal and financial extremity alongside industrial mechanisms that have only relieved the franchised and wealthy of bor. Between the sprawling agricultural farmnd that makes California one of the wealthiest pces on the pnet are dead zones—pasturend for cattle, sometimes left to fallow, the indigenous ecology thoroughly destroyed and repced with nothing but invasive grasses creating a furrowed prairie more reminiscent of an abandoned city lot than the paradise it had been a century and a half before. Intermittent towns built around mining and travel dot these highly productive wastends, and this is where their trail detours, a windy road leading away from repetitive orchard grids into winding hills of dry brush. Somewhere out here, spaces far from the monitoring of the security cameras proliferating in the cities and the nosy neighbors in the suburbs, feels like a strange pce for a plug at the tier Emiko’s been dealing. Maybe she means to move up.

  The Tower looming over her, Ivy’s uncomfortable with the circuitous route further and further from the highway, but Nylon, who’s driving, is not easily dissuaded from a task, and it’s clear Emiko is expecting money, drugs, or both from this visit. When they pass a trailer on stilts decorated with fgs for Trump, POW/MIA, and the Confederacy, Ivy presses the point until Emiko expins that this is one of Ana’s suppliers, for “really, exceptionally high quality acid. Like the stuff they were doing in the 60s.” While she makes some money moving MDMA and shrooms at dance events, it’s the high-tier LSD she can sell to techies and small business owners that really grounds Emiko’s bottom line, which is in turn currently paying for the house’s utilities.

  “It’s stupid but this is what I have,” says Emiko. “A lot of these scenes have been getting weird about me being kind of outspoken about transmisogyny. But they’ll put up with me as long as I’m dealing. So it’s not just money it’s—it’s the only way I can get respect. I’m being shut out, I can tell I am. You’ve probably noticed how I’ve been spending more time at home.”

  “Sorry, I’m not trying to make an issue of it,” says Ivy.

  “No, it’s just like, I guess this is ridiculous to say. It feels like activism. Like, you need me, I’m going to be in the room even if you’re uncomfortable with how I’m gonna call out your bullshit. Like it’s like trans programmers, right? If you have a useful skill, they have to put up with you and while you’re there you can do things. Kinda, like, change the scene on the inside. That’s how I feel about the party scenes.”

  “Aren’t they mostly trans women anyway?” asks Sophia.

  “Yes, but they’re trans women with jobs or social capital. They aren’t people who want to think about politics. Ever since Trump got elected more and more women treat ‘feminism’ like a dirty word.”

  They pass through a rusted barbwire fence with a gate that’s been thrown open. On it Ivy spots a number of signs: TRESPASSERS WILL BE SHOT, WE DON’T CALL 911. The road is thick and gravel but looks as if it hasn’t seen attention for decades. The thistles growing out of it scrape the underside of the station wagon.

  They crest a hill and on the other side is a pair of old barns decaying from weather and the burnt-down husk of what had been a farmhouse.

  “This is extremely sketchy,” Ivy remarks.

  “It’s a bit of an adventure,” says Nylon. “If we’ve got to, I can drive this thing real fast.”

  “And get stuck in a pothole,” says Ivy. “Speaking of which, are you sure this isn’t a honeypot?”

  “I don’t have anything on me,” says Emiko. “And I didn’t agree to anything. So if it is an attempt at that, they’re fucking it up.”

  “You’re sure this is the right pce?” asks Sophia. Her voice is practically trembling and Ivy grabs her hand to reassure her.

  “Yes, would everyone stop acting like we’re in a horror movie?” says Emiko as the house pulls up in front of the barn. “If the supplier wants to be melodramatic I don’t really care. They live out here anyway. I’ve been to sketchier setups in SF in the financial district.”

  Having once nearly been roofied in a chaser bar there, this doesn’t reassure Ivy.

  The station wagon pulls up to a stop in front of the barn that seems the least decrepit. Inside, just barely visible through wide cracks between weathered boards, are two brand new ATVs and a bunch of pstic tubs.

  “Someone’s been here,” says Ivy, and Gravity and Nylon nod.

  But nothing happens, and after two or three minutes Emiko gets antsy. “We’re early, is the thing. I said we’d be here at four, it’s only like three-thirty. I’m gonna have a cigarette.”

  Although she knows it’s not a good idea, Ivy also gets out to smoke and calm her nerves. After a moment so do Nylon and Jaime, and then Gravity. They sit in the shadow of the car to avoid the sun and share a joint.

  Ivy’s doing the math—six of them, one in the car, no guns, knives on everyone, two hatchets—when the barn door partially opens and the person Ivy vaguely recognizes as Ana steps out and waves haphazardly to Emiko.

  “Oh wow,” she says. “That’s a big group.”

  “Hey, what’s up?” says Emiko.

  “Hey, it’s been a minute. Look, uh, they’re a little, like, shy, okay? Cuz like they don’t know anyone here.”

  The whole situation’s making the hair stand up on Ivy’s neck.

  “Oh, yeah, totally, sorry about that, we were just on our way back from a trip, thought you knew.”

  “Yeah, no, it’s all good.” She raises her voice. “Hey Ivy!”

  Ivy waves back. “Hey! How’ve you been?”

  “It is what it is,” says Ana. Ivy realizes what’s bothering her. Ana’s tone is weird. It might just be embarrassment about the whole situation, or feeling awkward, but Ivy also recognizes it, because she’s acted the same way before, when someone had a gun on her and she had to fake it.

  She starts scanning with her eyes, keeping her head still. She can’t see anything in the other barn, and the burnt-down house looks too devastated to hide anything. She can’t see inside the barn Ana came out of. And she can’t see behind her, but the other four probably can and they haven’t said anything.

  “Can you come with me?” asks Ana, looking at Ivy.

  “Uh, yeah, I guess,” says Emiko.

  “Both of you.”

  Ivy looks over at Nylon. They shrug, clearly a little armed.

  “I mean, since I know both of you. There’s enough room on the ATV.”

  She turns and pulls open the door of the barn further, which it does with a desperate squeal, revealing one of the forest green four-wheel ATVs nested inside. Another behind it, in shadow, has a desert camoufge net over it.

  “Do you mind if I drive?” Ivy asks.

  “No,” says Ana. “It’s just—people I can vouch for, you know.”

  “Cool,” she says, feeling older and more cynical than she has in a minute. “Let’s go.”

  She gives Sophia a look, tries to make it symbolic, but Sophia’s eyes respond with confusion. She doesn’t know how to say I love you, to say that she wants to kiss her goodbye because she’s going into a dangerous situation, but she’s scared that they’re being watched and she doesn’t want whoever is watching them to see who matters more to her.

  It’s a part of her brain she doesn’t use frequently anymore, and it’s a little enticing. Survival brain isn’t intimidated by questions of what is or isn’t reality, or the true nature of humanity, it just assesses situations and moves through them.

  They climb into the ATV and it only takes her a moment to get it rolling. There’s been few technological changes since she st drove one in 2002. Ana directs her on a path past the burned down husk of a farmhouse and over a few more hills. Beyond one is a big round ft area half overgrown with weeds. On the other side of it is a rusty mud-spattered pickup truck, but the condition belies what she can see about it: it’s lifted, and its wheels and tires are high quality. It’s meant to look like a junker, but she’d bet under the hood it’s got something that could outrun a highway patrol. The windows are unevenly tinted, impossible to see into.

  “That’s them,” says Ana, in an almost apologetic voice. Neither Emiko nor Ivy say anything. She really hopes Nylon is watching them from the crest of the hill behind her. It’s what Scatter would have done.

  She pulls the ATV up to twenty feet away from the pickup and lets it idle for a minute but no one’s moving so eventually she turns it off. It all feels too scripted to her. She’s ready to go.

  “Okay,” says Ana. She turns to Emiko. “They’ve got some stuff they’re ready to move with you. It’s the stuff I normally handle.”

  “So are they cutting you out?” asks Emiko. “What’s the deal?”

  “No, it’s—it’s complicated. Things are shifting. They’re not gonna have a supply anymore, so we’re trying to get a lot of it into the Bay. We wanna move it in several amounts, decrease risk. I’m still getting a cut but the idea is just, making the money we can right now.”

  Ivy can sense Emiko’s frustration. So this isn’t the start of more income, this is a one-time deal.

  The door of the pickup pops open and a woman’s voice says, “Well, you’re looking well-fed!”

  Ivy looks up and time goes cold.

  The person she sees looks so much like her. She recognizes, instantly, that face, even changed as it is by years of trauma.

  Ellie.

  The other pickup door opens and a tall, muscur man in a silk button-up shirt and bck tactical shorts gets out. “It’s been a minute,” Buzz says. “Ivy now, right?”

  Ellie grins, her smile all teeth and unreadable hostility. “What’s the matter, sweetie? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  *****

  The world drops out and disappears, instantly, like she were pying a videogame and suddenly someone dropped an anvil on the console. Everything vanishes and there is no ‘she’ even, just absence. Then a whir, a humming noise, things begin to turn back on, go back to work. There is a ‘she’, and another, many different, iterated, strung out in time and space and possibility. One is vomiting, not physically, but engaged in vomiting in essence, repulsed, disgusted, nauseated and nauseating. One is crying, weeping, vanishing into a crymal tsunami. One is ughing, cackling madly, the echoing of clowns dancing through abandoned alleyways of empty cities. There is a sense of these things with little sense of them, vague impressions, a pastiche of sensation strung out along a dozen lines of conceptual webbing, the texture of tears, the smell of vomit, the sound of ughter, the feeling of the drip drip drip inside sinuses, heads and arms, pain in the hip sockets, in the pubic symphysis, fingers straining taut tendons, the sky, the nd, concrete, blood. Things are trying to arrange themselves but they are lost retive to each other. Space exists, is not fixed, has no precise terms, objects colliding with each other, perceiving each other, some of these objects are versions of self, she, her, it, sliding through self like a bullet through flesh, like two cars sliding through an intersection at different times, with time colpsed and ruined. Wandering the city in pursuit of themselves, wailing at the cross-section uncoiling in naked exposure the liquefying patterns of so-called self. Information grappling rapacious cws around a slick nugget of identity. Senses of sound, and light, things she cannot and can handle, arbitrated by the arbitrary selves that are and are not ‘her’. There is a desert filled with suburban houses and she is running along, exhausted, her feet sore, blood on her clothes. There is an empty office, the buzzing of fluorescent lights. There is a manicured field, the taste of another woman’s saliva in her mouth, the chthonic celebration of cicadas in the wet heat of the summer air. There is the pstic skin of a vehicle interior, humming overhead and the prophetic thought death comes from above. There is a man sitting in front of her in a square concrete room, he is wearing a pin white t-shirt that barely disguises how rich he clearly is and is working her mind backwards down a mental staircase, a series of trigger words, pstic bel slipped around her wrists and ankles as she cowers into the chainlink shelter and waits to starve. There is a 747 taking off from the airport, all rumbling and the fear of dropping out of space, floating free of tethers, moving just a moment too soon for the vessel and falling down, down, down, colliding with the historical ndmarks and expensive real estate stretched out below.

  So many things below. Children winding their ways to school, trucks full of boxes for delivery, crops to be harvested, gas lines and sewers and telephone lines. Dead animals in the gutters, farmhouses full of dairy cows, salt mines, choirs, pamphlets, cosmic rays. Fields of poppies and pesticides, museums and fresh lumber. Oil pumping from below to meet its fate in combustion engines and injection molds.

  There is fear, and unfamiliar melodies ringing through the night. You don’t know this, you don’t know this sound. Lights shining in her eyes.

  The cops arrive to the park at 3am but they don’t do anything. Five cruisers pull up along one side, two along the other. Everyone is on edge. Those who had been getting some sleep are awoken in their tents. It might be going down.

  The police announce that this is an unwful assembly on private property, and that anyone who does not leave now will be arrested. No one budges. They aren’t here in the middle of the night because they don’t know the stakes.

  Just before dawn, all but two cruisers leave, and those two take up spots at opposite corners. A pair of people Lilly doesn’t know decide that they’re gonna hazard a trip down to the corner store for energy drinks and snacks. They collect some cash from people and walk off in a direction that seems to be away from the cops. They don’t return. No one new is arriving now. Yesterday morning when the cops showed up, people had begun filing in, supporting. No one new today.

  An hour ter and the sun’s light is overhead. The city is starting to awaken with all its businesses coming to life. A pair of social workers dressed like youth pastors make their way into the park and start talking to the homeless residents. They both have clipboards. They cim that they’re trying to make sure everyone has an opportunity to access support services. Scatter warns Lilly not to talk to them, but this one she already knew, she could pick up the vibe. They move like she used to, back when she worked for Coordination Division. Officials.

  They’re writing down people’s names. If people have phone numbers, they’re taking them down. If people have IDs, they’re taking pictures of them with a little digital camera that one of them has. They move through the encampment, very friendly in their demeanor but highly efficient. Anyone they don’t get information from, they get a photograph of, ciming they’re photographing the difficult conditions. Scatter, Houndstooth, Arsenal and Lilly all make sure to turn their heads, and their faces are covered, but they are still photographed from behind.

  After the social workers leave, not a minute passes before Houndstooth comes over to Lilly from their position near the corner of the park. They just spotted cruisers moving two blocks away, at least four, moving into position beyond where most in the park can see.

  There are two other people who came with Houndstooth. The six of them form a huddle between some tents and debate what to do. Two of them want to run. Lilly wants to see how things py out. Houndstooth says they’re ready to get arrested. Scatter and the other say nothing at all. Before they come to a decision, someone else in the encampment starts hollering.

  Forty or fifty officers are approaching the park from every angle. Some are unarmed, most have batons out, a few have assault rifles. Those that are unarmed have thick white zipties hanging from their belt. They don’t even stop as they hit the edge of the encampment, they just start throwing the pieces of the barricade aside and grabbing people, immediately restraining them and shouting at them to get on the ground. They grab tents and pull them aside with unconcealed fury, dropping the people inside onto the ground. When people try to get away, they swing with their batons. One is beating a middle-aged bck woman on the back as she cries, another grabs a younger white hippie by his hair and starts dragging him across the concrete sidewalk. There is already more blood than Lilly would have expected. Someone tries to push a cop off the woman he’s beating, and another raises the assault rifle and fires from only a few feet away. Rubber bullets like stones from a slingshot collide with the man and he colpses, clutching his gut. Someone else tries to bodysm the cop with the rifle and three more cops close in on him and knock him to the ground and his leg bends in a way it’s not supposed to that makes Lilly feel nauseous to see.

  One of the officers opens fire, and then another, sporadically, into the tents. Children are crying. Scatter grabs Lilly’s hand: someone has found an alleyway that the cops haven’t closed off yet. As Lilly’s running for it she sees a baton come down on the head of a child who couldn’t be more than ten years old, who couldn’t pose a threat. No one is taking photographs, there are no journalists present. Voices cry out for medics from multiple directions. Sanitation workers in coveralls have already arrived and are ruthlessly shoving the tents into a dumpster, filled with people’s clothes and sleeping bags, their wallets and personal information and all their possessions. Lilly knows that within an hour the only sign anything happened here will be some broken gss and the blood being washed off the pavement.

  And then she makes it into the alleyway, and they’re running, running. Two cops come in after them but someone she doesn’t know throws a brick and it hits one in the helmet, causing him to stumble for a minute. When they emerge from the other side of the alley there are squad cars everywhere with their lights silently fshing but mercifully they’re nearly empty and the few officers on the block are either busy talking into their radios or seem more focused on the carnage a block away. One of the kids running with them zigs when he should have zagged and bumps into a squad car, and then two officers rush over to grab him. Scatter and Lilly kick at their shins but they’re wearing body armor and now more are closing in, and the two cops already have him in a hold twisting his arms behind his back, so they run. They run out into the city, faces covered with bck bandanas, a small mob of nine anarchists, and try to navigate through alleys and back passages away from any storefront cameras. They spend the better part of the day hiding in a massive storm drain, waiting for the helicopters to leave the sky overhead.

  They make it back to the squat just after sunset. Exhausted, Lilly strips off her clothes, throws them in a barrel with the clothes others had been wearing, sprays it down with lighter fluid. In goes any evidence. They stand near the fire and talk. This was an escation, but they’re all the more solid in their pns for the future. The authorities will allow no compromise, the time has come to take the fight home to them. The burning pstic doesn’t smell good but when everything’s just a pile of charred bck crumbs and ashes she feels safe enough to get to sleep.

  It’s morning again. Weeks ter, weeks she can’t remember.

  They’re breaking down the door. They’ve got Houndstooth. Scatter is running.

  The police are ying hands on her, and it’s not just them. A man in a suit is saying some words to her and she can’t understand them but she knows what they mean. When she tries to understand them, it’s like her mind slips off of them, like they’re a blurred image, trying to grab a wet bar of soap. She knows it’s words she knows, she knows they’re meaningful, but all she experiences is the sensation of losing control, watching the images slip away from her, of the squat, of Scatter running away, and then she’s in the back of a police cruiser, and then she’s in a parking garage and she sees Houndstooth being loaded up into a police station wagon while a number of officers sit around talking and then hand some papers over to the men in suits. Then she’s somewhere she doesn’t recognize, a dark, big indoor space, a huge metal hall, a hanger or a warehouse, with shipping containers around the edges. There are rows of humans on the ground, staring facedown at the concrete. She can’t tell if they’re asleep or dead. They’re all wearing casual clothes, most of them look poor or homeless. A few workers in white tyvek suits with their faces covered are walking among them, taking notes on clipboards. She’s one of a dozen sitting in cheap folding chairs near to the shipping containers, tied to the chairs. She drifts out again.

  *****

  And stumbles against a textured concrete wall covered in a years of moss and weather damage. She’s high as fuck, wandering through the decrepit amusement park, listening to the sounds of rich girls ughing. It’s harder than she thought it would be, to stay focused on the mission with a head full of whatever they gave her. She can’t even remember why she wandered away from the party, why she’s out here among the garden pnts and the trees and the cool night air.

  There’s a horrible feeling she sometimes gets when she’s dissociating, when she’s time-traveling, when she’s high as fuck on psychedelics or nearly bckout crossfaded. All the world feels like a hallucination, just thin specks of energy-matter hallucinating solidity, and underneath it a spinning, tumultuous void, and she’s not really there, she’s not really anywhere, she’s floating, falling through the void, like an astronaut falling from the rings of Saturn towards the gaseous core, flying through emptiness towards certain doom with only her isotion. And she feels it now, the stones and mud and grass are beneath her feet but they aren’t really there, she’s perched on a tremendous precipice in time and space and at any moment she could shuffle off of it. This is the thing they’re fighting, she thinks, the ones who cling to every piece of the world given to them. They’re fighting this tremendous spinning whirling emptiness, an emptiness made of nothing but filled with everything, embedded all as dark flows of unknowable immanence. Nothing is real: everything is real: nothing is real. Every moment that’s all she’s really doing, struggling with the unbelievable nature of all things and the horrible emptiness it leaves her in. Where is Kant now, or the Demiurge, when she needs the little illusions to make sense of space and time, extension and continuity, causality, that nightmare that she has started to peel away from like a scab? Or is she the scab the universe is peeling off of itself, to discard in favor of the pus of some unknown infection she will never measure up to?

  One more step and she’s falling again, the vague impression around her of an orgy of bodies, or a mass grave she’s sinking into. Hungry, thirsty, angry souls, and she feels so much terror among them. Whatever she has left, she thinks, is what they will tch onto, what they will take from her.

  *****

  Maybe it’s not real. Maybe you’ve been dead since it happened.

  Since what happened?

  You were just a child then. Maybe all of this is the hallucination of a child’s mind, decaying in the infinite stygian abyss of death.

  *****

  Construction equipment roaring. Down the embankment crossed with erosion-control waddles is the vast concrete fts, skeletal wooden frames rising out of them, more wood neatly piled all around, and beyond it, the irregur fields being made regur by the backhoe moving earth in heavy chunks. Workers wander around, moving things, surveying, assessing, smoking, eating lunch.

  The man in the gray suit turns to her. “We’re doing great things, Amelia.”

  Amelia is her name now, for this operation. That’s the pn, in the hearing of the developers. Half-attentive middlemen, they’re chosen for their capacity not to notice things, like what had been here before the backhoes got to work, or who has the ear of their company’s shareholders.

  She doesn’t really have a name, an identity. They come and go, contingent on the needs of the operation. Three months ago they were on this very spot, a hill then, not an embankment. She had no official name then, just a designation. Oh sure, there’s the name he calls her, the name on her paperwork, and the name on her documents—all three are different. If you generate enough information, things are reduced to what they are. Those in power have to py the perilous game, dancing along the border of unknowability. There was what would be remembered as an accident. Late in the night they dragged the bodies here, arranged them for the ritual, consigned the ground. Obliterating the history. She didn’t know what it might have been, that was by design, they wouldn’t have selected her if she knew the old name of the nd she was re-consecrating. It became Lakeview, one of a million Lakeviews in American suburbs. Just one among so many. She did not perform any of the rituals, but she helped with driving and with the paperwork, filling out pieces of the coroner’s report for him. He was used to these things. And the borders between things become solid again.

  Now the sun is overhead. It’s a hot day, and she can see the men working below to make the new office buildings so formless shell companies can find form. They smell like sweat and testosterone. The developer is a little too cheery, like he believes something is happening here among the wet concrete and diesel fumes. She has trained herself to remember that nothing is ever happening. Those who make the world real must leave their selves in the void. You’ve got to do what the man says.

  Ian, that’s the name, the bald man who always wears well-fitted gray suits that just barely show off his muscur physique. Her supervisor, manager, handler, whatever the appropriate term is in the given context. Early in her time at Coordination Division he selected her as a personal secretary and assistant. She knows it’s because she’s transsexual; sometimes he gets drunk on scotch and pys pornography while she’s around. He likes to think she likes him. She simply has a pce in the world, and is pying it out. Maybe she likes him, because what else can she do? He gives her paychecks.

  Sometimes it’s beautiful board rooms with Modernist sculptures where he functions as attache to some representative of Coordination Division meeting a banker, a stockbroker, a financier, a city official, or a dozen other such titles. She can py excellently an obedient female role, and though it’s dehumanizing, it can be satisfying to so perfectly fit into the background of things as to barely be noticed. Other times she’s running errands, getting coffee for him or one of his coworkers, getting lunch, filling out the schedule, filling out the bck schedule, cashing checks, moving rge unmarked packages across state lines, redacting documents, shredding documents, burning documents, cleaning up messes, clearing out locations so neatly that when the new tenants arrive for their first day they will think no one ever even lived there. Sometimes he fucks her on office desks or clean carpet floors and then she has to clean up every bit of evidence afterward. He has no interest in a retionship with anyone. Sometimes he goes to strip clubs with associates, and stands in the back. He hands cash to foolish young businessmen so they can have a good time, and makes her stand with him in a tight dress. More than once while he was going to the bathroom one of the strippers came up to her and ask if she’s alright. She’s aware that it looks like she’s being sex trafficked. She’s aware that, technically speaking, she might be being sex trafficked. She always tells the strippers she’s fine and gives that smile women give to each other that says, ‘there is no hope here, get away, save yourself.’

  Lately Ian has seemed increasingly frustrated. Something is coming to a head inside Coordination Division, something she hasn’t been allowed to know about. Work is getting more hectic. She’s been burning a lot of documents, being asked to stir around the ashes to make sure there are no discernible ink marks left. Sometimes they mix the ashes into the concrete. It’s these little rituals that keep him amused, keep him calm, because he has a quick temper. He’s a man with goals, aspirations, fears. New faces have been coming and going. There’s a culture of secrecy inside Coordination Division, an internal paranoia as strong as the NKVD, but people she used to see are no longer around. With that, there’s a growing dread. Some part of her, the part of her that doesn’t want to just be a secretary, a functionary, fulfilling a minor role in a banal conspiracy against all life, that little discrete part is warning her that if she stays here she’s going to die soon.

  But when she sees Ian’s face in the sun, watching with smug pride as backhoes dig away at something that her mind won’t remember, and the developer chatters on about abstract marketing strategies, she can feel only pure, unconditional loathing. She doesn’t even want to run. She just hopes to see his face when he drowns in it all.

  *****

  The dust is filling the air, the taste of the hot valley dust in her throat and lungs. California valley dust has a unique dry smell, like the end of the world, the nds of the dead always deferred to the West. It smells like you’re gonna get Valley Fever and die at the hands of the agricultural apparatus.

  With a rattling cough she hacks a wad of pus and dreck onto the truckbed.

  “Here’s the deal,” Buzz is expining unusually quickly. Almost like he’s embarrassed; he used to be so sure of himself. “I held off on contacting you for as long as possible so you could py house or whatever and fly under the radar. Time’s up now, and because we’ve made contact you have to know that it’s just a matter of time until NDS traces it down and you and yours are in danger. You need to brief your people, let them know what’s coming, so you can be prepared to move before it gets too bad.”

  He’s more muscur, she notices, but also more neurotic. Tension held in his muscles and the predatory gre of his eyes.

  “What’s going on?” Ivy asks. “Why are you—uh, how—how did you find me?”

  Ellie gives Buzz a look. “She doesn’t understand any of this. I told you, her memory’s been trashed again. Start from the beginning.”

  Buzz grimaces, irritated. “You really don’t remember shit, do you? Larry’s still fucking with me from beyond the grave.”

  “I mean,” Ivy frowns. She’s not in the ATV anymore, she’s lying on the hot pstic liner of the pickup’s bed. So she had another episode. Ana and Emiko are still sitting in the ATV, talking quietly, pointedly not looking. Emiko seems fairly at rest; Ivy wonders what Ana told her to justify the sequence of events. She wonders how long it’s been, if Sophia and the others are getting anxious waiting by the car.

  Buzz is standing in front of her, just beyond the truckbed. His posture isn’t too confrontational—the handgun on his belt is. Ellie has her arms crossed. She looks different than Ivy remembers. Skin wrinkled by the sun and stress. There’s a light scar working its way across her right cheek and down to the bottom of her nose. And she has a tattoo across her chest, two intricate centipedes crawling up from between her breasts and out toward her arms. Even still, she looks uncomfortably like Ivy. Had she gotten pstic surgery to match Ivy’s appearance? Or the other way around? Most the events at the Institute are still blurry or absent.

  “I remember both of you,” Ivy continues. “Not that well, it’s through a fog. And I think I remember things that happened, some of the things that happened. But I thought you died.”

  “I didn’t,” says Ellie curtly. Ivy flushes with guilt. The image crosses her mind, two scorpions on the hard desert ground, circling each other just after sunset, one of them saying, it’s just like the two of us. When she thinks back to that time on the run, it’s hard for her to remember which one of them was which, which words came from her mouth or from the mouth in front of her. Ellie’s lips are dry and cracked.

  “Wait, this is a lot,” says Ivy. “I—I mean, I’m feeling a little fucking cornered out here, st time I saw you—” gesturing to Buzz “—you were pointing a gun at me so I don’t really know what the fuck is going on right now.”

  “Well sorry you’re triggered, princess, but we need to talk and I had no way of approaching you directly where I knew you wouldn’t just run, or text someone about it, or something equally stupid and dangerous.” He shakes his head. “One look at us and you fell to pieces, now you’re sitting here shaking not sure whether to follow orders or flee. What would you have preferred, a Carnival cruise?”

  “Just give me a moment, Jesus Christ,” says Ivy. The nausea of time dislocation catches up with her then, and she almost feels like she’s gonna hurl in the back of the pickup. But the breaths come back to her, and her gut calms down. “Why the fuck do you have a gun anyway?”

  “It’s a free country,” he says with a smirk.

  “Look,” says Ellie, her words carefully enunciated to drive in the point, “I get that you’re out of step right now. I need you to realize that for the better part of a decade we’ve been fighting the war you left behind. While you’ve been having fun and getting high, for me, for us, it never stopped.”

  “I’m always packing,” says Buzz. “You should be too.”

  “So you’ve been, what, running around assassinating people?” asks Ivy. She still feels disoriented. A gnce over at Emiko tells her that the two of them are still adamantly ignoring the conversation happening nearby.

  “It’s not that simple,” says Buzz. “A hell of a lot has happened. I can fill you in, but I need you to understand a few simple things. First of all, you cannot go back to the life you’ve been living as if this didn’t happen. You’re going to have to assume that NDS knows we made contact with you. Second, I expect your help with what’s coming next. I waited to approach you, gave you that time to heal or whatever the fuck you’ve been up to. I’ve known where you were for four years but I sat on that information and gave you space. That is my gift to you. You could say NDS did as well, but that’s just how they operate, they’ve been watching you too. Now I’m collecting on all that good will. You thought you could step over a bunch of bodies and walk away from everything but it’s just not like that. Now we need your help. And you’re gonna want to help me when you understand why.”

  “Frankly, I hate all of this,” says Ivy. “It doesn’t really sound like you’re giving me much of a choice in the matter.”

  “Choice is a fucking illusion,” says Buzz. Ivy doesn’t miss these authoritarian sophistries, but tries her best not to roll her eyes at the guy with a gun. “I’m telling you how it is and you’re going to go along with it because it’s the best outcome for you and all your little pinko friends.”

  Ivy gives a little miserable ugh. “You waited until I had friends so you’d have something to hold over me.”

  “You already had friends when the Division picked you up st time. Look at how quickly you forgot about them. Social connections do an amazing vanishing trick in your mind. Hell, you even walked away from your dying wife.”

  That one hits like a punch to the gut. Her muscles twist around the shock until she’s nearly puking again.

  “No,” Buzz continues, “I’m not trying to manipute you. I’ve never been too good at that sort of thing. That was Larry’s game, and look where it got him. I’m trying to get you up to speed on what’s really been happening. It’s not my fault you put a bunch of people in danger by associating with them.”

  “Well if you’re not trying to manipute me, don’t just blindside me with a bunch of traumatic shit out of memories I barely have. Please, can we like go back to that barn and smoke a joint or something to talk about this? I’d feel a lot more comfortable being around my friends and a way to leave.”

  “Are you gonna try to skip out on me?” asks Buzz.

  “It doesn’t sound like I could even if I wanted to. How did you know to reach out to us? You knew we were driving through the area? Been working your way into Emiko’s supplier network?”

  Buzz shrugs.

  Ivy stands up in the back of the pickup, almost falls over from vertigo, walks to the edge of the truck bed. She’s a few feet over Buzz’s head now, and it is satisfying to see him having to look up at her. It’s the kind of little power trip she used to really enjoy when she and Ellie were going around robbing people.

  “Then let’s go, dude.”

  *****

  There’s not enough room in the ATV for all five of them, and Ivy ends up crammed in the backseat between Emiko and Ellie on the ride back while Buzz drives. It’s exceptionally awkward, especially when she accidentally sits on Ellie’s hand, but she’s trying her best not to break the resolve she built up earlier. Her mind is speeding along trying to outpace everything coming after her and ghost images of her and Ellie fucking are flying up at her with every bump on the trail. The drive is brief, but long.

  *****

  When they get back, everyone gets out, and Ivy immediately lights up a cigarette, dry grass and fire risk be damned. In this moment, she could see the whole state, the whole world burn down and stare mindlessly at it, absorbing the information, not feeling anything. And then she too could burn.

  “Everything go well?” asks Nylon, for once completely failing to read the situation.

  “You know, it’s a little complicated,” says Ivy.

  Ellie walks over to the car and puts out her hand to Nylon. “Hi,” she says, and begins making introductions. Ivy sees Sophia raising her eyebrows in arm, and knows she’s put together the clues from the name and how much Ellie looks like Ivy, but she can’t deal with that right now, can’t think about her girlfriend meeting her wife (is Ellie still her wife, if she married a headmate who hasn’t fronted in years, if she’s been gone all the while, if Ivy and her never, directly, knew each other?) and she can’t think about everything Sophia’s having to process with the stories she’s told her. All the stories, why is she always telling people stories? Like Gravity, with those stories about dead kids. Just a bunch of hurt people spreading around the psychic disease of their trauma, as if that will do anything good for the world.

  Instead she focuses on Buzz’s gun. A solid, stable threat. Every time she’s seen the man he’s had a firearm on him, even in a hospital setting. Only once that she can recall did she see him use it. She had thought he was firing at her and Ellie, but he had been firing past them, and then Ellie was shot and some part of her torso turned into a sptter of pink and red. What happened after that? Ivy can’t remember. She doesn’t have any more memories from Ellie, she doesn’t have memories for months ter, not until she was driving around San Francisco doing a lot of drugs with a pathetic hipster fuckboy. Where did he go? Also vanished into the mists.

  Ivy can’t see Ellie’s body too well, she’s wearing a light, gray cardigan covered in rusty stains over a tank top and jeans, but she sees there’s another scar coming up from her chest, a thin line diagonal between the twin centipedes. New scars. She wants to grab Ellie’s hand, to feel again that electric connection, the two of them. At the same time, she wants to run, to erase the track of time, to make it so there’s no chance this moment could come to pass.

  “We don’t have all day,” Buzz says. Ellie wanders back over to the two of them. Ivy looks at the people she’s come here with, at Gravity, at Nylon, and especially at Sophia, and she wants to feel resolute, like she’s doing the right thing. But what is the right thing here? Instead she only feels a growing, crushing weight of guilt, an untamed guilt that doesn’t yet rest on any transgression, because she doesn’t know what harm is about to come from what she’s going to unleash.

  She had told the two of them she wanted to be the one to say it. Now she wishes she hadn’t, that she could shuffle the responsibility off onto someone else.

  “Alright,” she says. “Everyone, this is Buzz, this is Ellie. Buzz was just… has just been telling me that our lives are all about to change.” Her voice gravid with venom.