Exit Party

1. Homeland

In the first spring after the collapse of the United States, the jacaranda trees bloom in the same week that international peacekeeping troops withdraw from Los Angeles, and the convergence feels to Ari like grace. She is forty-eight years old, out of prison for the first time in nearly two decades, and the city overwhelms her senses. She walks the streets for hours, stunned by the purple-blue blossoms, expecting the world to become ordinary again. It never does. Everyone in the spring of 2031 knows the city is one terrorist attack away from disaster, but that peril only makes the season more vivid. The United States came undone after a coup d'état. Several states seceded within a week, war broke out within a month, and now the fighting has mostly subsided. Ari has been released into an uneasy aftermath.

She lives in a very small apartment in Echo Park with Gloria, a refugee about a decade younger who fled fighting between rival militias in Tennessee. Gloria sleeps in the bedroom. Ari sleeps in the living room behind an old sheet stapled to the door frame. They meet in the tiny kitchen, where Gloria spends most of her time reading news online, her eyes wide and blank in the blue light of her laptop. Her favorite topic is what the city was like a year ago, and Ari says "I know" gently, although she doesn't, because a year ago Ari was imprisoned in what is now a different country.

Tonight the curfew has lifted, and everyone in Los Angeles seems to be going out. Gloria has been invited to her friend Kareem's party one neighborhood over and has asked Ari to come. But as dusk approaches, Gloria settles into her familiar position at the kitchen table and shows no signs of getting ready. When Ari asks what time they should leave, Gloria goes vague, her gaze sliding away, listening to imaginary curfew sirens. She suggests Ari could go alone and text Kareem that it will just be her. Ari protests, though her real reason is stranger: she has been beset all her life by premonitions, and she feels pulled toward the party by an invisible thread. They have to leave because they are going to be at the party later. She knows better than to explain this. She is also worried about Gloria, who has a dissipated look, an air of having spent too much time indoors. If Gloria has a nervous breakdown or fades into the wallpaper, Ari will lose her place to stay.

Gloria wonders aloud whether going to the party will jinx everything. The last time she went to a party was the night of the Sacramento Accord, which formally established the Republic of California, and also the night of the Highland Park attack, when a United States loyalist blew himself up in the living room of a crowded house party. News broke while Gloria was at a different party some distance away. Ari is certain Gloria is lying about something, though she doesn't know what. She tells Gloria that's magical thinking, that Gloria has been to other parties at Kareem's place where nothing bad happened the same night. Gloria agrees that Ari is right, but admits that when she thinks about parties, she thinks about bombs.

They walk down the hill to Sunset Boulevard, where California Republic soldiers with bomb-sniffer dogs have formed a gauntlet on the sidewalk. Terrorist attacks still come from United States loyalists trying to destabilize the breakaway republics, and from Shasta County Protectorate operatives trying to bring the border war into the cities, but the last bombing was months ago. The dogs sniff them, a soldier waves them through, and a cool breeze breaks through the heat. The boulevard feels alive. They pass a Walgreens taken over by the Red Cross to house displaced persons fleeing fighting in the interior, families congregating in the parking lot with music and card games, half-feral kids playing tag, entrepreneurs running taco stands, teenagers in a dance-off. Gloria had warned that the next stretch of Sunset would be desolate, but there are many more people in Los Angeles now. Shantytowns have sprung up in vacant lots. Strip malls have sprouted tents on their roofs, with plywood staircases running up between stores.

They climb into a quieter neighborhood of large houses and steep terraced gardens, though even here there are more people than before. The wealthiest Americans fled overseas or to Mexico or Canada, but that population has been replaced several times over by refugees fleeing more violent places in the interior. A soft rain starts to fall. There is a tent in seemingly every driveway, the streets clogged with parked cars, children's voices inside most of the tents, people cooking on camp stoves and barbecues out front. Gloria is gasping for breath by the time they reach the top of a flight of public stairs. Ari suggests she get outside more. Gloria says she likes being inside. The rain streaks light on every surface, and Gloria has put something in her hair to make it shine like lacquer, her lip gloss gleaming, the sequins on her shirt reflecting the streetlights. Ari admires the effect, but Gloria walks slower and slower until finally she stops.

Ari tells her it will be good for her, being around people again. She stifles the thought that being around people has rarely been good for her. Gloria nods, checks her phone, puts it away, looks again. Ari thinks a kinder person might suggest skipping the party, but she wants to go and she wants Gloria to come too. Gloria says she hopes it won't be like her dreams, with a little laugh that is not lighthearted at all. In those dreams, Gloria is talking to someone in a dimly lit room, just the two of them, until the other person tells her someone is wearing a bomb vest like at Highland Park. Then Gloria realizes she misjudged the situation entirely. They are in a packed room with one door, crowds blocking the exit. She fights through the gauntlet of people, but any second there will be an explosion, a clock ticking, and she can't get out. She sinks into blind panic and sometimes wakes up shouting, which is how Ari knows about the dream. Ari tells her it won't be like the dream. Gloria nods once and continues onward with a grim expression.

The address is a house clinging to the hillside, the second floor lit up. They ascend the side stairs and knock. Kareem opens the door, resplendent in a green silk shirt, and says, "You're here," with his gift for making you feel like exactly the person he most hoped to see. His apartment is cramped and glamorous. There are flowers everywhere. From the moment Kareem sweeps her into the room, the party carries an electric charge. All those people. It is overwhelming the way stepping into a grocery store after nearly twenty years in prison is overwhelming, a sensory-overload explosion. The air is warm and the mood ecstatic. Lilies in vases, roses spilling from glass bowls, either expensive air freshener or flowers in fragrance overdrive. The air by the windows is soft with rain. Someone says they thought the curfew would last forever. Ari pours red wine for herself and Gloria, hands Gloria a glass. Gloria says she is going to the terrace and disappears before Ari can ask where that is.

Ari introduces herself to a man named James, who didn't want to be part of history. A woman nearby asks how the collapse of the country is going for her. Ari says it could have been worse. The woman launches into a boring story Ari has heard a dozen variations of, about the day Texas seceded in the morning and Arizona followed in the afternoon, how she knew it was real because the gas line extended around the corner and she went to the bank and withdrew most of her checking account. The woman asks when Ari knew it was real. Ari says she doesn't think about the past at all. James approves. The woman looks like she might cry, so Ari relents and says she was living with a few other people, and one night she woke up and someone was listening to the radio. A man jokes that he is a Taurus and can't live with other people, and Ari says she had a lot of roommates. She had been drifting in and out of sleep while her cellmate listened to a radio tuned low in the lower bunk, and caught the words: troops, militias, secession, shots fired. What she remembers is lying unblinking in the darkness thinking, at last this is something new. Her life had been unchanging for so long. When had she last felt excitement or dread about anything? The murmured radio voices followed her into sleep and became dreams of dark streets and faceless soldiers.

James leans in close and says what he didn't expect about living in a dramatic historic moment is how unbelievably boring it is, because everyone lived through the exact same thing and needs to process their complicated feelings. Ari smiles and says he read her mind. He asks where she was living with all those roommates, a DP camp, and she says no, then asks where the terrace is. The party is crowded now. Ari tries to remember when she was last in a room with so many people, but what dazzles her is the way everyone wears different colors and fabrics instead of a sea of prison-issue beige. A pretty woman with soft lips in a silver dress like tinfoil passes by, and Ari would have liked to kiss her. The terrace is a balcony with a view of a hillside, trees, distant glimmering lights. A handwritten sign forbids smoking. Gloria and Kareem are among the few people out here, talking about the long-closed West Hollywood restaurant where they met as servers. Ari asks James how he knows Kareem. He says they lived in the same dorm in college and now they are roommates again. He crashes in the living room on a fold-out sofa. Kareem, he says, is much better than he used to be, better able to not completely lose his shit at the slightest provocation. This interests Ari, who toys intermittently with the idea of becoming a better person.

Gloria appears and says, "There you are," looking a bit lost, so Ari puts an arm over her shoulder. James asks how they know each other. Gloria says they are roommates, and Ari feels a flush of something like love. She knows Gloria because she was in prison with Gloria's cousin. Time passes. Kareem goes inside. At some point Ari looks up and a woman she doesn't know is standing in the doorway, staring at them. Someone calls her Saraya and asks if she is coming out, the rain stopped. Ari realizes this is the same woman she saw earlier in the silver pleated dress, but now she wears jean shorts and a T-shirt. There is something oddly focused in the way she looks at them, specifically at Ari. Saraya says, "Ibari, where are we?" A beat of silence. Gloria says, "Who?" Ari stares at this stranger and says Ibari is her legal name, then asks how she knew that name. Gloria says she didn't know that was Ari's name. Ari says she has literally never used it, it is just the name on her ID. Saraya says she doesn't know where she is, panic in her voice. She looks at Gloria now, at the scar on Gloria's forehead. Gloria's hand drifts up to touch the scar. Saraya says Gloria looks like someone. Gloria frowns. James, in a choked voice, says he thought she'd left the party. Ari sees fear on his face. He is afraid of Saraya, which makes no sense to her, since Saraya is small, much smaller than James, and seems disoriented. Then Saraya turns away and slips back inside, and James exhales. Someone asks if she is on something. Someone else says it is a stressful world and who isn't on something.

Ari goes to find Saraya, baffled. She moves through crowded rooms, looks into every face, circles back through the kitchen, steps onto the landing to look down the stairs. Saraya is gone. But in the crowded living room, by the window, a small knot of people are talking and laughing, and one of them is the woman in the silver pleated dress, the fabric gleaming as she moves. Her back is to Ari, but it is Saraya, Ari is certain. That isn't possible. Saraya must have had a twin. Ari moves on and finds one room she hasn't checked, a closed door by the bathroom. It is Kareem's bedroom, jackets piled on the bed. James is sitting on the bed with his eyes closed. She asks if he is okay. He says he feels crazy. She closes the door behind her and, on impulse, locks it, and sits beside him. They sit in silence, listening to the party on the other side of the door. James says there are too many people out there, which she won't fully understand for several years. She thinks he just doesn't like crowds. He murmurs that nothing makes sense, and asks if he could kiss her. She says yes.

The rest of the party is a blur of snapshots: a passing comment, a drink, a feeling of companionship, a green silk shirt, a rain jacket pressed to the side of her face in a locked bedroom. Around midnight Gloria seems tearful because she can't find Kareem, which is confusing since it is his own party, but she recovers and dances with Ari in the living room, furniture pushed to the sides. James is on the periphery, talking with everyone, a little flushed. Ari wants fresh air and quiet. She slips out and sits on the bottom step of the stairs, wet but uncaring, listening to insects and distant music, far-off voices and a barking dog. It still feels like a revelation to be outdoors and alone, unsupervised, with nowhere to be. She thinks of Saraya, wishing she could have found her. Kareem approaches, walking up the street, looking wild-eyed, his silk shirt dark from the rain. He asks if she is Ari. She wants to ask why he left his own party, but he speaks first, saying there is something wrong with the party. He looks up at the windows with deep apprehension. She asks what he means. He says he would tell her more but she would think he is insane. She doubts that. He insists it is actually crazy, that she doesn't want to know. She says if she didn't want to know she wouldn't have asked, keeping her voice light, because she is a guest and one of the things she hates most is being told what she does or doesn't want.

Kareem asks about the tattoo on her wrist. She pushes up her sleeve to show him. True DILIGENCE is tattooed in uneven letters on the back of her left wrist. She has had it for a decade or so. He asks if she got it done in prison, then apologizes, saying Gloria let it slip. Ari says it is okay. He asks if she was in for a while. She says eighteen years, out for two months. He asks if he can ask what for. She says she took out a contract on her cousin, that it was a mistake and she is not that person anymore. Kareem says, just when he thought the evening couldn't get any stranger. She asks what was strange before. He says he can't, that there is something really wrong with this party. He looks troubled and bereft. The party meant so much to him, he went to such effort to create something beautiful after such a long and awful time, and now something has gone wrong. Ari is shocked by the compassion she feels for him. She closed herself off from sympathy in prison because it made things easier, and the sensation now is unexpected. She wishes she could say the right thing, but he is clearly done talking, moving past her, and she ascends the stairs behind him in awkward silence. The party has quieted, shifted into intimate conversations. Many people have left. James is still here, talking with a pretty woman on the couch. He winks at Ari, then sees Kareem and rises with unmistakable relief, asking if someone spiked their drinks, laughing nervously, trying to turn something horrible into a joke. But Kareem is preoccupied, checking the apartment for something or someone. They disappear into the hallway together.

Ari wonders what it would be like to have a friend like that. Or any friend at all. Could she be friends with Kareem? She joins the dancers to assuage her loneliness. Some time later she is sitting in an armchair with an open beer bottle, a little dazed. It is around two a.m., the party winding down. She is exhausted, and realizes it is not the sex or the dancing or the late hour. Social interaction is deeply taxing, like playing a sport for which she hasn't trained. Gloria has disappeared. Ari searches and finds her in the dining nook, looking at a painting above the table. Kareem comes in from the terrace, murmurs "Excuse me" as he moves past them, hesitating when he sees Gloria looking at the painting, then disappears into the kitchen. Gloria says Kareem told her she could take it, he is redecorating. It is an oil painting about the size of two sheets of office paper, mostly blue, dark waves, a cold ocean far from the tropics, with a little pair of feet disappearing into the upper-right corner. Ari finds it beautiful. As she watches, Gloria carefully lifts it down from the wall. Ari asks if she is sure he said she could take it off the wall. Gloria says yep, in a bored voice, and turns the painting over. On the back of the frame, neat pencil lettering: Swan Dive / L. Alkaitis 1960. Gloria says she always liked it. She asks if Ari wants to head home. Ari says sure, she just wants to thank Kareem.

But when she looks into the kitchen, he isn't there. Ari stands in the doorway, confused. How could Kareem have slipped by again without her seeing him? There is no other door. A window by the stove is open just a crack. She crosses the tiny room and examines it. The window has a guard on it and will open no further. She turns back, and the painting, Swan Dive, is lying in the middle of the kitchen floor. No one else is in the room with her. Ari is perfectly still, staring at the painting, except that now it is gone, blinked out of existence.

The Blank Kitchen Floor

Ari stands in the kitchen of the party apartment and the floor is blank. Just linoleum, a bottle cap, a few broken chips left where people spilled them. She closes her eyes, opens them, and the floor stays blank. Her drink was spiked, she decides, or she is so overstimulated by the ex-prison world that she is hallucinating, or she has a brain tumor, or she is having a stroke.

Gloria appears in the doorway, absorbed in her phone, mapping the walk back to Echo Park, the painting tucked under her arm where it has always been. Ari asks for one moment and makes a quick search of the living room, the bedroom, the bathroom, the terrace. The apartment isn't large. Kareem isn't in it. Gloria catches her eye, slips out without saying goodbye to anyone, and Ari follows.

The street carries a breath of menace now, given the hour. Gloria seems tired, walking slowly, hugging the painting to her chest. Ari asks if she saw Kareem leave, starts to say she thought he was in the kitchen. Gloria stops her, hooks an arm around the nearest streetlight, and closes her eyes. A little nauseous. Forehead pressed to the steel, a few deep breaths, and then she can walk again. Ari offers to carry the painting and is refused. She offers her arm instead, and they walk on very slowly.

Ari asks if Gloria is okay. "I don't know what that word means," Gloria says. Ari isn't sure she has a working definition either, now that she thinks about it. "Me neither," she admits, and it frightens her to admit it. Never show weakness has been the mantra of her entire life, but she has emerged from prison into a different world, even the country is gone now, and in the disorientation it seems possible that she has changed too.

Gloria says no, it wasn't something she ate. Who the fuck gets pregnant by accident at thirty-seven? Ari is awed on someone else's behalf. It's early, Gloria says, looking away, clearly trying not to cry. Nobody knows except Kareem. She thought Ari probably noticed she hasn't been drinking. Ari hadn't noticed, and makes a mental note to try to pay more attention to other people. She could be a different person, she finds herself thinking. More attentive, less hard.

She asks, though it's none of her business, whether Gloria is dating the father. It was a one-time thing, Gloria says miserably. The father is Kareem. This surprises Ari, who had thought Kareem was gay. He knows. They were supposed to talk at the party but kept missing each other. Ari suggests texting him to find a time. Gloria already did. Just now.

The Seventh Morning

The next morning Gloria still hasn't heard from Kareem. Ari is trying to find a job and is mostly gone from the apartment, papering the neighborhood with résumés that get ignored, because there is an eighteen-year gap in her employment and more people in this city than jobs. On the fourth day after the party she walks into a restaurant seconds after someone hangs a handwritten NECESITA LAVAPLATOS sign in the window and talks her way into a dishwashing job. After that she is never home.

She has some money from her old, pre-prison life. Not enough to live on by itself, enough to stretch for a while with the dishwashing money. What keeps her up at night is: Is this it? Not that she thinks she deserves more than what she has, or more than other people. It's that she once had a considerable amount of money, her own business, and a beautiful apartment in a tower in New York City, and now she feels disoriented and a little incredulous. Before prison she operated under the assumption that she could bend reality to her will, but that was an entirely different version of the world. Was this going to be the rest of her life?

She is thinking about exactly that when she wakes on the seventh morning, which is to say afternoon, after the party, drifts into the kitchen in her bathrobe, and almost walks into James. He is leaning on the stove, arms crossed, holding a little spiral notebook and a pen. Gloria is at the table with another man Ari vaguely remembers from the party. James apologizes for materializing in her kitchen. Ari says good morning. The bathrobe is long, but she feels naked. Gloria introduces James and Bruno. Both men have notebooks and pens. There are only two chairs, which is why James is standing by the oven. Ari takes another step in and stands with her back pressed to the fridge. The kitchen is too small for four people.

Gloria says softly that they are here about Kareem. He's missing. Ari asks if she still hasn't heard from him. Not since the party, Gloria says. She thought he was just ghosting her, but. Bruno asks if Ari is the roommate, glances at his notes, guesses at her name. Ari corrects him: Waker, not Walker. She asks if he's a detective. James says the LAPD doesn't have time for this kind of thing. They're doing their best. Bruno says they're just talking to everyone who was at the party, trying to figure out if anyone saw anything, if he said anything to anyone.

James asks if she has seen him since the party. This close, she can smell the detergent on his clothes. She hasn't. She asks whether no one has heard from Kareem. No one, Bruno says. Did she talk to him at the party? Not really. One brief conversation, nothing memorable. Did she see him leave? No. She remembers seeing him go into the kitchen, and then they left a few minutes later. Around two or two thirty. Someone else said that, James tells Bruno. The kitchen, and then not being able to find him after. Gloria says they told her everyone said the same thing. No one has talked to him since the party, and it seems like no one actually saw him leave. Her voice wavers.

Ari asks if anyone has searched the house, meaning the building where the party was, with its two apartments, one upstairs, one downstairs. She is thinking of a woman she knew in prison, mild-mannered, with pretty blond hair, who shot her husband five times and then tried to conceal the body in the basement. Gloria and the two men stare at her, and she watches Bruno recalibrate his initial impression. After a pause James says they talked to the downstairs neighbor and checked the basement. "The basement?" Gloria asks. "Why would he be living there?" In that verb Ari feels the vastness of the gulf between their respective life experiences. Gloria knows about collapse, but she doesn't understand murder.

Missing Posters and the Garage

Weeks pass. Dirty dishes become clean. Hands chapped from soap and hot water. Drinking with the kitchen staff after work, walking home too late at night through quiet streets, rising in desperate need of coffee in the guilt-inducing light of late morning. Kareem remains missing, his face appearing among all the other missing person posters on the east side. Seven weeks after the party, Gloria decides to leave the city. A sous-chef at the restaurant wants to rent out her garage, so Ari moves out of Gloria's apartment and into the garage, then out of the garage and out of Los Angeles.

Five exhausting years follow, of retail and restaurant jobs, of three relationships of varying quality, two women and one man, from the West Coast over the mountains into the city-state of Las Vegas, to the Kingdom of Deseret, and then through innumerable small countries until she comes to rest in exurban Ohio. The Republic of California is fairly stable by then, and therefore unaffordable. Elsewhere it is a time of collapse and disarray. Some cities have declared themselves city-states. Others have been swallowed by larger new countries. Most territory is contested. Militias everywhere, flashes of gunfire at night. The skirmishes are constant but stop just short of all-out war. Militias form and break apart in ever-shifting allegiances. Gun runners pass through towns like smoke. There is constant migration, cars laden with luggage and boxes, because what does it mean to belong to a territory? Some people stay where they are, because for them home is a physical place. For others home means something like memory or blood, so they move closer to the people and places they don't want to lose, back to hometowns and aging parents.

Ari has driven east and north in search of cheaper housing and jobs and less violence, but it is undeniable that this drift is bringing her ever closer to New York. New York is the capital of the Atlantic Republic now, and the Atlantic Republic isn't affordable either, because it is the most stable part of the entire former nation and people will pay anything for the feeling of not living in a war.

In the Ohio Republic she lives in a motel and works in a retail stockroom, handling clothes mostly. The borders are more or less settled, except for an area in the east held by a consortium of militias from Pittsburgh, and the would-be city-states remain an open question. She keeps expecting outright anarchy, and it keeps not arriving. There are displaced people living in malls, but there are also functional stores, a few jobs, gas in the gas stations. People still get married, sign leases, send their children to makeshift schools, buy things. A few doctors remain, paid in cash or trade. The only functional hospitals are run by Doctors Without Borders and the Red Cross. There is no mail. There are unending supply chain issues, gunfights between rival militias on the edge of town, permanent unease.

She is long past believing her life will be extraordinary except in bad, unmentionable ways. What she sometimes hopes for is a more interesting job. Boxes arrive at irregular intervals and the contents are always a surprise. She unloads them, sorts them into categories, lays them out for her boss to examine. Someone else figures out what the things should cost. She unboxes, she sorts, she listens to music and moves quietly through the days with her earbuds. A relationship ended a month before she arrived here, and now she spends her evenings alone. There are entire afternoons she can't account for later. In those months she feels like she is haunting her own life.

After six months she is laid off with a few other people, and then spends a week trying to find a new job. No one is hiring. At the end of that week she comes home exhausted one late afternoon, worried about affording gas, so she has been walking for miles, and finds her next-door neighbor sitting outside his door admiring the sunset. He is a few years younger than Ari. He arrived a few days earlier in the middle of the night, and she thinks he might be an arms dealer, because people come and go from his room at all hours, walking in empty-handed and leaving with duffel bags. "Good evening," he says. She says evening and sinks into the lawn chair outside her door. Why not. She is tired and the sunset is beautiful, rose shades fading to watery blue, one cloud lit red.

Felix

He is Felix. She is Ari. A truck pulls up, and she sees the way his attention goes to it. She sits in the plastic lawn chair and carefully does not look at the two men who get out, though she feels their eyes on her. They disappear into his room, emerge with two black duffel bags, and drive away. The truck is painted with the thin blue stripe of the Blue Night Militia. After some time Felix comes back out and says he guesses he missed the sunset. Ari angles her chair to face him.

"Felix," she says, "obviously I don't know the details of your operation, but if you happen to be hiring, I'm looking for a job." He isn't hiring, but as it happens he knows someone who is. Militia? That a problem? No. Tell me about yourself, he says. She describes this version of her life: motels, retail, laid off, needing something else. Before that, retail and waitressing and dishwashing, whatever she could find. But there was another version of her life, a long time ago, where she had an interesting business in New York City. All these years and lives later, it is like talking about a stranger.

Not long after the 9/11 attacks, she says, immigration was a problem for a lot of people. She provided her clients with US passports. Felix whistles softly and asks for more. The human element was important, she explains. A clerk signed off on the application, checked the ID, confirmed that the photo matched the face. Felix says a single clerk was all that stood between the State Department and chaos. A single fallible human with considerable discretion, she agrees. Find a clerk with a debt problem and a weak moral character, and that's an opportunity. Felix has a working theory that almost everyone has a debt problem and weak moral character. She doesn't disagree. It wasn't that hard to find the clerk. She made money.

Until she paid someone to kill her cousin Anton. Felix's eyes widen, just slightly. He survived, she says. It was a mistake. It was an evil thing to do and she will always regret it. Why did she do it? He was obstructing her in a way that felt existential. She overreacted.

He says she needs a new job. Retail and waitressing isn't sustainable. He nods. Difficult landscape now, economically speaking. They are momentarily silent, to let the understatement settle around them. She asks what he did before whatever he is doing now. He warns her that he will tell the truth and she won't believe him, because his previous job sounds like a utopian fantasy at this point. He was a professional ballet dancer. She tells him he's right. She doesn't believe him. No one does, he says. Did she ever go to the ballet? Once, she says, and is ambushed by memory: sitting between her parents at six or seven years old, feeling grown-up and pretty in a stiff new dress, waiting in the hushed dark for the New York City Ballet's Nutcracker to begin. A feeling of joy. Where are her parents? Could they possibly still be alive? She pushes the thought away and tries to concentrate on the present. Bruised colors on the horizon, night coming in across the sky, streetlights flickering on, off, on again. Could Felix have been a ballet dancer? It seems improbable. On the other hand, there had been ballet companies, which meant there had been ballet dancers, and they had to have gone somewhere.

Felix rises and says he will tell his friend about her. He's looking for an assistant, and he believes he will find her interesting. Thank you, she says. Three hours later she sits in her room listening to Bach's cello suites with her eyes closed, visualizing her lost apartment in Manhattan from the years just before prison. Almost everything in that space was white. Anton called it sterile, but it felt like living in some pristine kingdom high above everyday life, or like living in a cloud. She has returned so often in memory that certain details are beginning to rearrange themselves, the bathroom door sometimes to the left of the coat closet, sometimes to the right, but the tranquility remains.

A knock at the door makes her jump. As she opens it, Felix steps back. Ari is moved by the gesture. She is a woman alone in a motel room, and he is demonstrating that he won't step in uninvited. These small kindnesses mean everything, she is thinking, when he speaks. He spoke with his friend. The one who's hiring. He'd like to meet her. Where? The mall with the TGI Fridays, about three miles south. Tomorrow morning, around ten, working out of the real estate office. She thanks him, and thanks him so much. It was kind of him to speak with him. Felix smiles. It's not an easy time, he says. Helping each other where you can, maybe that's how you keep mayhem at bay.

The Real Estate Office

In the morning Ari walks to the mall to save money on gas, arriving early, with time to wander. The interior is one of the more interesting places she has seen in a while. A flag and a sign identify it as territory held by one of the larger militias, Cincinnati United. A whole section has been converted into housing for displaced persons, tents in orderly rows on the two mezzanine levels. There seems to be an operational school in the former TGI Fridays, students grouped by age in the booths and at the tables. At the far end the population thins and there are a few businesses: a grocery store where food is kept in what look like Starbucks pastry cases and glass freezers that previously only held ice cream cakes, where she buys a cheap sandwich; a pharmacy that also sells clothes; a business that apparently handles wire transfers, divorces, adoptions, loans funded by individual sharks, and insurance. Eventually she finds an old RE/MAX office, a papered-up window with five-year-old listings still on display. The door is unlocked.

The real estate office is a dull, quiet place, just a few desks around the edges of the room and a stack of plastic crates in the middle. Much more officelike than she would have expected of a militia headquarters. Filing cabinets, a calendar on the wall, a table for meetings. The space is gentle, that is Ari's first thought. Nothing terrible has ever happened here. At the same time the filing cabinets bristle with interest, and she feels certain she would like to do whatever work is being done here. A woman at the nearest desk asks if she can help. She might be in her eighties, with a benign smile, tightly curled white hair, pink lipstick, dressed like a church grandma in a cardigan and flower dress and honest-to-god pearls. But an old knife scar runs down the entire left side of her face. Ari says she is looking for Eduardo.

An older man on the other side of the room looks up at the name. He is thin, perhaps in his sixties, dressed in an aggressively bland style designed to blend in. He says she must be Felix's neighbor and brings over two chairs. Ari has been to more job interviews than she can remember, but never one for which she knew so little about the job. She says she understands he is looking for an assistant.

In a manner of speaking, yes. The job involves some errands, but mostly surveillance. Ari nods. Something in the idea appeals to her; she has been studying other people all her life. She asks why he surveils people. He is involved in a large organization. Does she know what Cincinnati United is? The largest of the local militias, she says. They control traffic on the river. Correct. They hold the territory now, and it has been a calm few months, with the local population on their side thanks to improved security and a school, but there is always the possibility of incursion by rival groups. He runs a surveillance operation, keeping an eye on things. Detective work, essentially? She thought she was long past feeling excitement about a job, but the idea is stirring. More or less, he says. He can't pay a retainer, but he'll pay a day rate. She's interested.

He warns her it is boring most of the time. He doesn't want to misrepresent it. It is hanging around a given bar for hours to see if a particular man walks in, and who he talks to if he does. Sitting in cars with a camera. Following people, on occasion, which means blending into the scenery while they take their goddamn time eating lunch. She is still interested. Why, aside from needing a new job? She has always been drawn to the idea of detective work, ever since she was a kid. She knows that makes her sound naive. So much of the job is waiting, he says. Waiting, following, observing. Is she patient? Yes. Very. Can she give him an example of her patience?

"I served eighteen years in a federal prison and I didn't lose my mind," Ari says. "That is eighteen years of waiting patiently." There was a time when she would have gone to any length to avoid revealing her prison record to a potential employer, but that world and its rules have fallen away. It isn't clear what would either win or lose the job, and therefore it is possible to say anything. He says that is a reasonable qualification, and that he did some time himself once. He extends a hand. Eduardo Harris. She comes up with a surname at that moment: Ari Smith. He asks if it was a violent crime. "I wasn't the one committing the violence," Ari says.

A Year Later

A year later, in a parking lot five miles from the office, Ari sits in her car with a camera. She has been waiting forty minutes behind a massive development that is both a mall and a village. The shops and condos are mostly hidden from the lot, which is framed on one side by a sheer concrete wall, the back of a department store, with loading docks located some distance away. Otherwise the view is the kind of exurban hinterland that isn't really anywhere or anything in particular: an overgrown meadow that seems to be no one's responsibility, an expressway, the building-block shapes of a housing development and a prison for juvenile offenders in the near distance. But these are the golden minutes just before sunset, and the parking lot is awash in the kind of light that lends an undeserved beauty to the scene. In the distance the beige rectangle of the children's prison is warm and benign.

She is taking pictures of another woman, a retail manager named Nico, who is oblivious in her own car some distance away. Nico is a very thin woman with a platinum blond buzz cut, who dresses entirely in black, wears utilitarian glasses, and never smiles. Nico's husband is Eduardo's cousin, and the husband is certain that Nico is having an affair. So certain that he came to the RE/MAX office, which was irritating. Eduardo called Ari over and told her he would like her to surveil Nico for a week as a favor to his cousin. Ari prefers to avoid face-to-face meetings whenever possible, because by this point in her life she has met too many people and finds them mostly annoying.

"Ari," the husband said, "can I call you that?" You already did, she didn't say. "Of course. Ari or Ms. Smith, either's fine." Even after a year the surname retains a sheen of unfamiliarity, which pleases her.

The husband sits with Ari and Eduardo, wanting to be taken seriously. He explains that his wife, Nico, works at the home store and has recently started coming home late, an hour or two past her usual shift, almost every night. What bothers him most is that she has always already eaten. He is a trained cook, a graduate of culinary school, and he wants to give her the benefit of the doubt, but he cannot stop wondering who she is meeting for dinner. Nico always claims she is starving after work and grabs something on her own, but she never wants to have dinner with him anymore. One evening last week she came home three hours late with no real explanation, evasive about where she had been. There are no checkpoints nearby and no serious violence in over a year, so traffic cannot account for the delay. Ari asks whether Nico has shown any behavioral changes, a diplomatic way of asking if she seems happier. The husband says no, she is the same as always. She is reserved, hard to read. He once found that mystery attractive, but sometimes mystery is exhausting. When Ari asks if Nico has secrets, he says he knows she does. Early in their relationship they agreed not to tell each other everything. It has been a bad decade, and everyone has lost a great deal, so they decided to move forward together and stay out of the past. But living with someone, you pick up intimations of past lives. He knows Nico was married before, somewhere long ago and far away, though he does not know where or when or to whom. He suspects, though he does not know for certain, that she may have had a child or children in some other life.

The following evening Ari sits in the parking lot outside Nico's workplace, glancing at her watch and hiding behind a magazine. She has taken a dozen photos, but so far Nico's secret life consists of eating a takeout salad and reading The Economist in her car. As the last light of afternoon fades and the parking lot is cast in a soft half-light, Nico closes her magazine, sets it on the seat beside her, and gets out of her car. Ari tenses, hand on the door latch, ready to follow, but Nico is only throwing out her trash. Ari stays still and makes herself invisible. She watches Nico spray air freshener into the car's interior and open all four windows. Then Nico pulls out of the lot, and Ari follows.

She trails Nico for twenty minutes, out onto the expressway and south, until Nico makes a right turn into Willow Gardens, the gated community where she lives with her husband. Cincinnati United gunmen stand on either side of the entry road. Ari pulls over to the side of the expressway. She wishes she could keep driving. Sometimes when she first came to the Ohio Republic she drove with no real destination, just for the solitude and motion, but gas is more expensive now. She leans back in her seat, closes her eyes, and tries to empty her mind of conscious thought. She is waiting to see if something pulls at her. Ari does not think of herself as having a particularly good memory. There are years of her life she hardly remembers, because one way to speed up time in prison is to make every day as similar as possible to the day before. But something about Nico is bothering her. She feels a strange certainty, improbable but impossible to ignore: she knows Nico from somewhere. True diligence means following the improbable path, her favorite line from a book she read as a child, a story about a girl detective.

The following evening Ari is back in the same parking lot, at the same time, waiting. She likes this line of work. This is what being a detective might have been like, she thinks. Why hadn't she just become a detective instead of turning to crime? She could have saved herself some trouble. It is interesting to imagine a life played out in the ranks of the NYPD. At 7:20 p.m. Nico emerges from the employee exit at the back of the complex, carrying a takeout bag that turns out to contain a barbecue sandwich. For an hour Nico sits in her car and does absolutely nothing of note. She reads The Economist, using her phone as a reading light. She eats her sandwich. Sometimes she gazes through the windshield, as if considering the twilight landscape. Ari stares at her through the viewfinder, trying to map this woman onto her life. Nothing fits, but the sense of having known her at some point is inescapable.

A wail of sirens rises from the expressway and Ari looks up to watch a convoy pass, a long line of mismatched pickup trucks with the Ohio Republic and Cincinnati United flags fluttering. Some of the militia commanders have taken to using sirens to get wherever they are going faster, though this time of day it is hardly necessary. She watches the convoy and then turns back to Nico. The answer comes to her, so unlikely that she has to close her eyes momentarily to absorb it. She has lived with this woman. Except the woman had been fundamentally different. Not just her name, which had not been Nico, or her hair, which had been a good twelve inches longer and a different color, or her glasses, which in Ari's memory did not exist, but something in the way she carried herself. And yet the woman's face is exactly the same. Ari is looking at her former roommate Gloria, whom she last saw six years ago in Los Angeles. Impossible, but there it is.

Ari decides her work is done. She will report to Nico's husband that his wife is not having an affair, that she simply prefers eating sandwiches alone in her car to dinner with her spouse. There is no good reason, Ari decides, why she cannot suddenly come upon her former roommate here in the parking lot, in a strictly personal and nonprofessional capacity. The word that flits through her mind is unprofessional. She gets out of her car, walks over to Nico's car, and waves through the driver's-side window. Nico starts when she sees her and lowers the window. "Ibari," she says. Ari steps back. Perhaps if she had not just been thinking about her time in Los Angeles with Gloria, which is to say thinking about Kareem's party, it would not have registered. But these are the facts: although the name Ibari is on her birth certificate, in homage to a long-ago woman who saved her father from drowning, she has never once in her life used that name. She has been Ari as a very small child, Aria from the beginning of kindergarten through the end of her prison sentence, Ari again afterward. "I've never gone by that name," Ari says. "Are you...you're not Gloria, are you?" Nico hesitates, as if trying to think of how to explain something extremely complicated. "No," she says, "but I know who you mean." Her voice is Gloria's voice. It is unmistakable.

Ari tells her she looks exactly like Gloria, that she has her voice, that it is kind of uncanny. Nico agrees it is uncanny, but it is obvious to Ari that she is only playing along. She knows something Ari does not. There is one small difference, Ari sees now, between Nico and Gloria. Gloria had a scar on her forehead, and Nico does not. Ari asks if she can ask something. Nico says sure. Ari asks whether she is the second person in her life who has called her Ibari, and whether she looks like another Ibari, someone who looks like her. Nico sighs and says yes, she looks like someone else. Someone in Los Angeles? Someone very far away, Nico says. She does not think she can explain it. Ari asks her to try. Nico says she would, but she does not think she understands it herself. Nico is quiet, gazing out at the meadow again. She says she hopes Ari finds the person she wanted to find. Ari thanks her and says she hopes Nico finds Ibari. Nico's pleasant expression does not waver, but Ari feels her sadness. Nico says she won't find Ibari. She is, Nico begins, then shakes her head. Ari asks softly what she is. Nico says she is elsewhere, in a very fundamental way. She says she is going to go now. Ari steps back. It seems to her that Nico is not talking about death but something quite different. Nico closes her window and is gone seconds later, pulling out of the lot.

Ari watches her taillights recede before she turns back to the meadow. She wonders if meadow is the word for it. She knows the tall grass hides all manner of foulness, discarded beer bottles and random trash. If a person were going to hide a body, which she realizes is a morbid line of thinking, but that is what comes from forced association with murderers, the middle of the meadow would not be the worst choice. It is a forgotten, neglected place, just an acre or two between a parking lot and an expressway. It is not clear who owns it. And yet it is beautiful sometimes. The wind has picked up, and the grass ripples in the fading light. There is a burst of gunfire. Ari drops into the grass at the edge of the meadow and lies flat, listening. It is on the other side of the mall, she thinks. Sure enough, two pickup trucks come screeching around the side of the building, full-speed toward the expressway, flying the black-and-yellow flag of one of the Pittsburgh militias. Why have they ventured so far into Ohio? Ari rolls over and lies on her back, looking up at the sky. Small clouds pass slowly against the darkening blue. Another vehicle, no, another two or three vehicles, marked with the Cincinnati United insignia, are chasing the Pittsburgh trucks. She watches the clouds and listens to the gunfight moving away from her.

The following evening she has dinner with her boss. Eduardo Harris has an uncanny talent for invisibility. It takes a moment to spot him when she comes into the diner. Her gaze slides over him twice before she sees him, sitting against the far wall, reading something on his phone. "Interesting," he says, when she tells him about her day. She sometimes thinks they are friends, but it is hard to be certain when you are working for someone. If they are friends, then she has exactly one friend in the world. She asks if he thinks Gloria has a twin. Maybe, he says, but that is like a bad B movie, right? He likes B movies, he says, but he smiles in a way that concedes the point. Ari goes quiet, concentrating on her chicken wings. It is the thing with the name, she says. Ibari, Eduardo says. Unusual name in this country. He does not know that he has heard it. She knows, she says, it is, but she is afraid of being called crazy, so she does not finish the thought. Eduardo says they are talking about a kind of doubling, aren't they? This is something she likes about him, his willingness to put things into words when sometimes she is not able to. There is her, and also apparently someone who looks exactly like her, with the same name. There is his cousin's wife, Nico, and also this Gloria person, who looks like her. Ari says she does not know if there is a word for what they are talking about. There is, he says, and they are silent, because it is a word that Ari is not ready to say. He tells her that if it were him, he would probably start running down leads, just to satisfy his own curiosity. She asks if he has any work for her this week. She has done nothing for him in the two weeks before photographing Nico. His operation is shrinking, he says. A lot of his people defected to the new militia. The Pittsburgh group? He nods. She asks what is going to happen, to him, to the region. He does not know the answer either way. He sighs. He thought Nico might be meeting with them. That is why he had Ari watch her. But it sounds like she is just eating sandwiches. Yes. He signals for the check. It is an exhausting moment to be alive, he says, don't you think?

That night after dinner Ari lets herself into her motel room and switches on the bedside lamp, which casts the room in her favorite kind of light. Apartment rent is cheap here, but she prefers the scale and anonymity of motel rooms. She does not like signing leases. She will never have enough money to buy a home. Her belongings fit in the trunk of her car, and she goes to some effort to keep it that way. Her most treasured possession is a record player, which she loves for reasons that extend back into childhood. She has placed it on the room's small table, and now she carefully selects a record from her crate, Bach's cello suites, played by Yo-Yo Ma, and settles down with her laptop and a beer. First the soft crackle of static, which she loves, and then the first notes, for which she momentarily closes her eyes. Then she opens her laptop and begins looking for Gloria, but quickly comes up against an impediment: she absolutely cannot remember Gloria's last name. She knew it once, but there have been too many people and too many names since, and the information has been crowded out. After a while the wifi stops working. She falls asleep a few hours later, lying on top of her bed with an arm draped over her forehead, trying and trying and trying to remember.

Ari wakes from a confused dream of prison at three in the morning, sweaty and disoriented. She has left the record spinning on the player. She lies for a while listening to the crackling static, resting in the sound. She has always liked these early in-between hours. She lets her thoughts drift, hoping that Gloria's last name might come to her, but there is nothing. Who remembers their roommate's surname, years later? They lived together for four months, give or take, before Gloria went to Europe and Ari began her northeasterly drift across a fracturing continent, to come to rest in this territory of big box stores and strip malls and ever-shifting governance. Four months that nonetheless loom large in memory, because those were the first months out of prison, and in those months the non-prison world held a wonder and sheen that is gone now, however much she might have wished to hold on to it. She fills the kettle in the white glare of the bathroom and begins the ritual of instant coffee. She stands gazing at the kettle's blue light, hoping something will come to her, and then something does: Kareem's last name had been Fayed. She saw it on the missing posters. But data is throttled on her phone because she has not paid her bill on time, and the motel wifi is still down.

Ari dresses in her usual uniform, jeans, white button-down shirt, black sneakers, lipstick, and this morning she adds a jacket. The motel parking lot glitters with frost when she leaves the room around seven in the morning. The walk to the RE/MAX office takes her across an expressway, along a back road that leads to the service entrance of a massive convention center that has functioned as a Red Cross regional headquarters for the past three years, through several parking lots, past all of the usual names and places: Chili's, McDonald's, Dunkin' Donuts. She steps over a drainage ditch behind the doughnut shop and crosses a strip of long grass to the parking lot behind the Walmart. At the back of the parking lot there is a mass of blackberry vines that no one seems to care about, a thicket of thorns and green. This is her favorite part of the walk. The Cincinnati United mall is just ahead. No one else is in the office at this hour, so she lets herself in and settles in front of a computer. It takes her some time to find Kareem. There are so many missing people now, dead or just out of touch with loved ones, and she is unsure of the spelling of his name. But once she finds him, she pieces the story together quickly, mostly through his friend James's social media posts. Kareem disappeared from a party in Los Angeles in the spring of 2031. He never resurfaced, and his body was never found. It takes very little time to find James's phone number.

She calls him. When they have gotten names out of the way, she says she is not sure if he will remember her, but they met at the party where Kareem disappeared. He laughs. He is not sure if he will remember her? He does not know what kind of parties she goes to, but that was not the kind of thing he would normally do. She says that was memorable. He agrees it certainly was. He asks if she is calling to reminisce, because he is here for that. She says she is trying to track down her friend Gloria. Gloria was at that party. Did he know her? James is quiet. Yeah, he says, in a guarded way. She moved to Europe, right? Ari thinks Paris, but that was years ago, who knows where she is now. She asks if Gloria had a twin. He says nothing, but there is tension in his silence. Ari tells him she lives in Ohio now, outside Cincinnati. He says he heard the Republic of Ohio is splintering, north and south republics or something. She says it seems like it, that it is definitely less stable now than a year ago. She works for a militia. He says that sounds like a dangerous line of work. She says it is more boring than he would think, a lot of sitting around in cars and hanging out in bars waiting for people. No one really notices her. But the other day she was assigned to photograph a woman, and she looks exactly like Gloria. Exactly the same face. James murmurs "Christ" seemingly to himself. Ari says it took her a while to see it, because every detail is different. When she knew Gloria she had long dark hair, no glasses, too much makeup. This woman has buzzed and bleached hair, wears big glasses, but their faces are exactly the same. A lot of people look alike, she says. But it is her voice, her voice is the same too. And even then, that is weird but not impossible, but she called her Ibari. James asks if she is Ari, right? She says yeah, Ibari is the name on her birth certificate, but she literally never uses it, and the last time a stranger called her Ibari, it was at that party in LA. There is a sound from outside, gunfire in the far distance. Ari listens but it does not come again.

James says this woman, this other Gloria, she looks the same, but she does not have the scar on her forehead, right? Ari says right. Does he know her? He says no. But he has seen her before. He will spend the rest of his life trying to understand what happened at that party, he says, but he is afraid she will think he is some kind of maniac if he tries to describe it. She promises she will not think he is crazy. James sighs. There was a problem at that party, even before Kareem disappeared. Hours before. There were, he pauses, seemingly searching for words, there were extra people. She asks if he means uninvited guests. He laughs in a rough, mirthless way. You could say that, yeah. She asks him to please just tell her what he is talking about. He says he is not trying to be mysterious. It is just, they had a fun time together, but he hardly knows her. She says okay, her name is Ari Smith, she is from New York City. He says yeah, okay, but he still hardly knows her. She says there was this thing a friend of hers used to say when she wanted something. She would say, can we trade a story for a story? And then she would tell the other person something they did not know, in exchange for information. James says interesting, he likes that. She says me too. So let her tell him something she never tells anyone, and then maybe he will feel like he knows her better. Okay? There is a beat of silence on the line. Okay, he says. Why not. He is literally just sitting here waiting for his laundry. Ari says she had a business selling fake passports in her twenties, but that is not why she went to prison. He asks, wait, what? Like, are they talking prison prison? As in actual, literal? She says yes, an actual literal medium-security federal penitentiary, because she committed an actual serious crime. He asks what kind of crime. She asks if he will tell her about the party if she tells him. He says sure, yes. She says she tried to kill someone. She took out a contract on her cousin. He is fine, by the way. The plan failed. James says Jesus Christ. She says listen, she is not that person anymore. But now she is here, in this place, and there is a person who is very much like Gloria but is not Gloria, in a way that she does not understand, and she just... James, now he knows more about her than anyone except possibly her cousin and her parents, and she does not even know if any of those people are still alive. Whatever happened at that party, she promises she will not think he is crazy. James draws a shaky breath. Okay, he says, and it seems to Ari that he is speaking more to himself now. Okay. There was this girl, there was this woman at the party, Saraya. She arrived not that long after he did, but then a little while later, another Saraya was there too. She asks what he means, another Saraya. He says he had gone out to get more alcohol when the first guests started arriving, because Kareem was worried they did not have enough. When he got back, people were coming in. He took the beer to the kitchen, and then he came out to the living room and Kareem was staring at someone across the room. So he looks, and there is his friend Saraya, by the window, in this beautiful silver dress. She asks okay, why was that strange? He says because another Saraya had just come in from the kitchen, wearing a pink shirt and shorts. He remembers Kareem said something like "James, there's two of them." He remembers they just stood there for a minute, staring from one to the other, then Kareem went into the kitchen and he followed. He was so freaked out. She asks what happened then. He says Kareem was dissociating, he thinks. He did not know what to do, so he was just busying himself. He was looking for a bottle opener or something, he remembers he was kneeling down looking in a cupboard. Then he saw a woman kneeling next to him. He got a funny feeling, something about the way Kareem was staring at her. He knew something was wrong. Kareem stands up, the woman stands too, and it is another Gloria. Ari asks, it was Gloria? He says no, another Gloria. It was a version of Gloria, but with different hair and no scar on her face. The woman Ari just met, presumably. Then a second later, their friend Gloria comes into the kitchen, and the other Gloria slips out. He went out into the living room, and there was only one Saraya, the Saraya in the silver dress. They were out on the terrace together a little while later, and that is when the other Saraya appeared again, the woman in the T-shirt and shorts who called Ari Ibari. They had their little thing in the bedroom, Ari and he, which by the way he has never had that much fun at a party before or since. Later he looked everywhere but the second Saraya was gone, and he could only find one Gloria. Their Gloria. So those two extra women, those two copies, they must have slipped out. She asks if he knows what happened to Kareem. He says no. He left for a while. Just kind of wandered out with a dazed look on his face. He came back a long time later, like over an hour. That whole night he was trying to act normal, and also he felt a little crazy.

James tells her he was trying to act normal at the party but felt like he was on the edge of some great mystery. He apologizes for sounding grandiose. Ari reassures him he doesn't, and when he calls her kind, she truthfully says she's never been an especially kind person. James continues: at a certain point in the evening he couldn't find Kareem anymore. Ari supplies the rest: no one ever saw him again. She has a vague memory of having followed Kareem into a kitchen and then finding he wasn't there, but the details are hazy now, too much having happened since.

James asks what happened to the other Saraya, the one who came out on the terrace and called Ari "Ibari." Ari doesn't know. She wandered out of the party and into the city, and Ari has no idea how that story ends. James says he's going to say one more thing and then end the call and go scream into a pillow or run circles around the reservoir, because thinking about this gives him panic attacks. Ari speaks very softly, consciously trying to soothe him over the phone line. She stares at the bulletin board in front of her, which features phone numbers with initials and code names, but she sees nothing. In memory she's back at the party, moving oblivious through crowded rooms: drinking beer, fucking James, dancing, watching Gloria steal a painting, skirting the edges of some incomprehensible mystery she failed to notice at the time.

James tells her he thinks there's another place, maybe a different version of reality with different versions of them in it. Ari says okay. He says he told her she'd think he was crazy. She says she doesn't. When he asks why not, she tells him that her entire life she's known things that were about to happen. He asks if she means premonitions. She confirms it, and says she doesn't think he's crazy, that there are things in the universe that can't be explained. His voice is almost a whisper when he thanks her. He says the thing about that party is he doesn't think the party was just a party, he thinks it was also a door, that it swung one way and another Gloria and another Saraya entered, and then it swung the other way and Kareem was gone. Ari says his name, but the line goes dead.

She hangs up and sits for a moment in the quiet office. No one else is there and she feels like a trespasser. She wonders if Eduardo even realizes she still has the key, since he's had no work for her in a while. Ari needs groceries, which in those days is an all-day errand. She lets thoughts of the party carry her through the tedium of the day. It's hard to find the things she wants now, given supply chain disruptions. But the stores haven't shrunk yet, so there are acres of empty aisles, and then enormous quantities of oranges because a shipment broke through the Florida blockade, or in another store no oranges but a small mountain of off-brand breakfast cereal. After several hours she's gathered everything except milk and eggs.

In the late afternoon she finds oat milk in a gas station convenience store. She asks the clerk if he ever gets real milk anymore. He shrugs and says milk trucks keep getting robbed at the border. She isn't sure which border he means, or from which direction milk arrived in the more tranquil past. The thought crosses her mind that you don't notice the supply chain until it collapses. She asks where she can find eggs. He tells her there's a new chicken guy behind the Exxon, about a mile north. The chicken guy turns out to be a chicken family, a couple and two dead-eyed teenage boys who've built a coop behind the gas station and set up a roadside stand that one of the boys guards with an AR-15. She buys six eggs for a sum that immediately makes her sick with remorse.

Back at the hotel she takes a hot shower in search of clarity, but none comes. When she steps out, a silvery house centipede ripples over the wall and she shudders. She considers returning to the inexplicably named Motel Petersburg a mile down the expressway, but she likes this place, and the Petersburg isn't less likely to have bugs. Thinking about bugs is easier than thinking about the unsettling madness of James's story, thoughts of a party that functioned like a swing door between worlds.

She towels off and dresses. The sun is setting, rosy light coming through the curtains. She puts on her jacket and steps out into the winter air. The parking lot is quiet, but there's an unmarked black SUV parked nearby. She can't tell which militia it belongs to. A new unease is settling over the landscape. She sits breathing the cold air until the door next to hers opens and three men come out with black duffel bags. She's careful not to look at them or their vehicle as they leave.

Felix steps out behind them to see them off and greets her. They've chatted occasionally in the year she's been here. He tells her he heard Eduardo left town. She stares at him, thanks him for telling her, and says she guesses she hasn't seen him in a few days. Felix says it's hard to persist in this kind of environment. She delivers a line about his gift for understatement with a smile, and he smiles back. He tells her Eduardo said she was reliable and that he might need some help if she's looking to pick up work.

Felix has to make a supply run and is gone for a week. It's been a week of increasingly inadequate dinners, walking for hours to avoid buying gas, submitting job applications at restaurants and retail outlets, none of which call her back. Ari wouldn't describe herself as afraid exactly, but she's increasingly aware that this version of her life is drawing to a close. Eduardo is gone. New militias are moving into the territory. She knows the logical thing would be to relocate a hundred miles north where she's heard rumors of warehouse jobs, but she's interested in Felix's business, interested in the unmistakable whiff of criminality if she's honest with herself, and she wants to give him a few more days.

When he knocks on the door that night, it feels like deliverance. He tells her he has a client coming by in a half-hour and asks if she'd like to come observe. She says she would love to. A half-hour later she's in his room, which looks identical to hers except for locked cases chained together behind a makeshift curtain. His clients are a silent man in his fifties or sixties and a boy who looks about fifteen. The boy does the talking, speaking in little machine-gun bursts with long pauses between them. The kids are all a little messed up in those days, but so is everyone. The man is mostly silent and is clearly the money. The boy wants six semiautomatics and five handguns, but the man shakes his head. They leave with three semiautomatics and two handguns. The boy is flushed and won't meet anyone's eyes.

The next clients are different: four large men in red bandannas whose eyes flicker over Ari without interest before turning to the goods. They linger longer than necessary, talking about guns and territory. They want more guns than Felix has on hand and are irritated when he says they'll have to come back tomorrow, but they acquiesce and leave with half their order.

Ari is woken twice that night by gunfire and once by an eerie wail of militia sirens, a convoy passing on the expressway. She wakes a third and final time around five a.m. and lies without moving, sleep-deprived in a way that makes her face feel bruised. She thinks of Felix in the next room, his business and his clientele. For a long time now, possibly her entire life, she's been training herself to recognize endings, and she has a sense that morning of having slipped into a new life.

That afternoon Ari drives back to the mall where Nico works and waits in the parking lot by the overgrown meadow. There's movement in the far distance, a man working at something by the expressway, and when she gets out of her car she sees he's digging. There's no real reason to think he's digging a grave, she tells herself, but the thought won't leave her. Nico emerges from the building with a sandwich wrapped in paper and says, "You again." Ari replies, "Me again. The person who disappointed you by not being Ibari." Nico shrugs and says it's hardly her fault. To Ari's surprise, Nico comes to stand nearby.

Ari asks if Gloria is still in LA. Nico says she moved to Europe a few years back. Ari mentions her kid must be school-age by now, looking out at the meadow and the digging man, and doesn't immediately notice Nico staring at her. Nico's voice is a whisper: "Her kid?" Ari says Gloria was pregnant when she left California. Ari had hoped Nico might tell her something in response to this indiscretion, a fact for a fact, but instead Nico begins to cry. When Nico asks if she doesn't remember where in Europe, Ari says Paris. Sensing an opening, Ari asks if Nico was at Kareem's party in Los Angeles. Nico says yes.

Ari says Nico was the woman in the kitchen, kneeling by the cupboard beside Kareem. Nico remembers, and says she'd thought she knew him but he wasn't the person she thought he was. Ari draws the parallel to herself turning out not to be Ibari. Nico agrees, exactly. Ari asks if Nico knows what happened to Kareem. Nico asks what she means. Ari explains that she hadn't actually known Kareem, he'd been a momentary presence, but still it's a terrible weight to have to tell someone. She says he disappeared, that he was at the party and then no one ever saw him again. Nico says, "He must have gone the other way." Ari asks what she means, but Nico is staring out over the meadow, talking to herself.

Then Nico says, "You said Gloria was pregnant. Who was the other parent?" Ari tells her the father was Kareem, but like she said, he disappeared at the party. Nico thanks her for telling her and leaves Ari in the parking lot. In the far distance the digging man is leaving too, a small figure receding toward a car parked on the shoulder of the expressway, carrying his shovel over his shoulder. Ari is alone in the scene, in the end-of-day light. She knows things, although it's difficult to say whether they're obvious things anyone might know just then. She knows Nico has lost a child, or children. She knows the man in the distance has been digging a grave.

Ari is back in Felix's motel room that night and the night after. She realizes the customers want to talk, and that's the key that unlocks the business. They begin offering customers a drink, a cigarette, bowls of chips. The customers relax, spend more money. The motel room becomes a lounge. There are long nights with the militias, the air dense with cigarette smoke. She learns their language and their fears. Protect the homeland, they say, and they understand the homeland to be Ohio, or at least most of Ohio, sectors having been lost to the Pittsburgh militias and to two cities that want to become city-states. Some of them feel this is just as well. "Cultural differences" is another line she hears often in the haze, delivered in a sarcastic tone but meant sincerely. Ghost strikes, they say, which is shorthand for the way they operate: they rise up in insurgency and then melt back into the crowd before the remnants of the US military arrive.

There's a morning when Ari wakes with a sense of imminent departure. She lies in bed for a long time before getting up, trying to understand why she's leaving, but comes to no conclusions. She's alert through the day for signs and portents, but feels only a series of certainties: this is the last shower she'll take in this bathroom, the last time she'll pull these jeans from this drawer, the last time she'll brush her hair with this hairbrush. She can't account for it, but has suffered these certainties often enough in her life to accept them as facts.

In the late afternoon she drives down the expressway a few miles toward the store where Nico works. There are fewer cars than there have been. Gas is so expensive that motorists often drive to within a mile or two of their destination and walk. Everyone has locks on their gas caps. Demand for bicycles far outpaces supply. Ari parks a mile from the mall and walks, a route that brings her eventually to the far side of the derelict meadow between expressway and mall parking lot. She can see Nico's car parked up there. She's tempted to cut across the meadow, but she doesn't want to know what's hidden in that grass, so she walks all the way around. By the time she reaches the parking lot Nico is already in her car eating her dinner sandwich. Ari waves as she walks in front of the windshield. Nico stares at her, frozen, sandwich in mouth.

Ari is very tired, less from the walk than from the certainty that her life is about to change again. She wishes she could rest. She sits on a cement block with her back to the parking lot and waits until Nico comes to sit beside her. Ari tells her there's something she remembered from the party that she wanted to tell her, in case she doesn't see her again. Nico asks if she's leaving. Ari says she doesn't know, maybe. She describes a woman at the party who seemed confused, whom she later saw on the street asking what city she was in. Nico frowns and asks if she remembers her name. Ari says Sarah, something like Sarah, and that she feels like she's getting the name wrong. The reason she thought of it is that the woman called her Ibari too. Nico says flatly: "Saraya. She came through too, but she didn't really make it." Ari asks what she means. Nico says she last saw her in a psych ward in LA, that she wasn't able to adjust.

Ari asks if the party was also some kind of door. Nico says it's complicated, that she doesn't understand it so she can't even try to explain. A long silence passes while Ari tries to think of how to get Nico to tell her more, because whatever happened at that party is beginning to seem like the strangest thing she's encountered in her entire life. She gives up and opts for a different line of questioning: why did Nico come to Ohio? Nico says she met her husband in LA, he wanted to move back to the Midwest, and Ohio was cheap and not that dangerous.

Ari asks if she can ask something about Ibari, framing it as a fair transaction for what she's just told Nico. Nico asks what about her. Ari asks if she's from New York. Yes. Did she ever know when things were going to happen? Sometimes, Nico says, just little things. Like what? Nico describes how they'd be going out and Ibari would say she felt like she'd need a pair of scissors later, and Nico would dissuade her from putting scissors in her handbag because that's insane, but then later there'd be some unforeseen circumstance where they actually did need scissors. Ari is distracted imagining what a scissors emergency might look like. She asks if Ibari was like that her whole life. Nico thinks so, as long as she knew her.

Ari asks where she met her. Nico asks why she wants to know. Ari says she can't blame her for being curious, since Ibari is another her. Nico says she doesn't know, and it seems to Ari that she's making a considerable effort to hide her despair. She doesn't know how much like Ari she actually is, or how similar she is to Gloria. Ari says she doesn't know either, that it's been too long since she's seen Gloria and she doesn't know Nico well enough to say. A breeze ripples across the long grass in the quiet.

Nico says they met at university: she was doing a master's degree and Nico was in undergrad, they were always studying in the library at the same time, then one day they got lunch together and became friends. Ari says she didn't go to college. Nico seems genuinely startled. Ari says she had some business opportunities, but can't meet Nico's eyes, because what she actually had was corruption. She'd discovered in the tenth grade that she could make a lot of money buying and selling luxury goods with stolen credit card numbers, after which it was difficult to seriously entertain the idea of either a straight job or college. Nico says Ibari held two master's degrees. Ari says then they aren't much alike. She has a sense of another, unimaginable life passing by in the near distance, like a ship with no lights.

Nico says she doesn't know, looking at Ari with such sadness, that Ari might be more like her than she thinks. The last time she saw her, Ibari had just been promoted to detective. Ari asks if she was police. Nico says something like that, then falls silent, lost somewhere distant. Ari asks who Ibari was to her. Nico says she was someone she trusted, her closest friend. Ari wonders if Nico is her friend. Friendship is a puzzle to Ari and always has been.

That night a group of buyers comes to the motel room with a girl Ari has never seen before. The girl is about nineteen, quiet and polite, dressed all in black with a feather in her hair. They're all regular customers except for the girl. The others say she's cool, offhandedly, but their tone is too casual, the girl too watchful, and Ari feels death moving through the room. The girl and Ari spend hours engaged in a dance: Ari offers drinks, the girl sips just enough to make it look like she's drinking but not enough to get drunk. The last customers leave at four in the morning, all drunk except the girl, who is only pretending.

Felix is yawning as he closes the door and asks why she's brewing more coffee. Ari says because they're not sleeping tonight. They're gone in under forty minutes, in Felix's van packed to the ceiling with guns and ammunition. On the expressway, Felix asks for what must be the fifth time how she knew the girl was casing the room. Ari says she just knows things sometimes. He seems to accept this. It's a time in which almost anything seems possible.

The van has false plates because no one is checking plates by then. Ari wears big glasses and they both wear wigs. They join a flow of displaced people moving south and west.

Traffic is slow until after the first checkpoint. It's more elaborate than Ari has seen in a while. Young men and women with bandannas over their faces and mismatched guns peer into the car and shine lights in their faces for an agonizingly long time before they're allowed to drive away. It isn't clear who they're looking for, but they wave half the cars into a Target parking lot where makeshift cages have been set up in the darkness. Ari breathes very slowly as she drives past. She prefers driving cars to vans, and the armaments behind their seats are not particularly well disguised. In the parking lot there are more militia fighters than Ari has ever seen in one place, shadows moving between cars. Her window is open and there's a trace of chemical smoke in the cold air. Felix says that's going to explode any moment, talking about the parking lot. Ari tells him not to look, that it doesn't concern them. He asks if she thinks the cars they pulled were random. She says she doesn't know, maybe.

The checkpoint feels like a border, but it isn't a border that exists on any map, just some new demarcation between shifting territories. Ari drives at a medium speed, hands at ten and two, nothing to see here, trying to be invisible. Just another displaced couple traveling with our worldly belongings, she thinks, calm because we've done nothing wrong, absolutely not carrying a small fortune's worth of weaponry, and she hopes the thought reflects on her face, in her demeanor, in the speed at which she drives.

They're headed for a northern district of Phoenix, where Felix has a friend. They take turns driving through days and nights of checkpoints and expressways, overlapping with the migration patterns of the people around them. Sometimes everyone seems to be driving in the opposite direction, suitcases and mattresses and bins strapped to car tops, then they pass through eerily empty areas where the only people are hitchhikers in a line down both sides of the expressway, everyone trying to get out, and then after some interminable stretch everyone is traveling with them, so they're absorbed into a convoy that seems miles long. Ari likes the anonymity of driving in a crowd.

Somewhere in the middle of Oklahoma the skeletal trees of the Midwest disappear and the land becomes perfectly flat. They pull over at a former rest stop where someone has rigged a makeshift shower, where they pay $10 each for five minutes of lukewarm water. Afterward, Ari feels shockingly clean. She finds Felix talking with another driver who says to avoid Tulsa, that it's apparently a death trap. Ari says she's in favor of avoiding death traps.

Avoiding Tulsa takes them a day out of their way. There are few signs of life on the periphery of the city, just abandoned farms and businesses, fast-food places with broken signs and smashed windows. There are wind farms out here, turbines spinning silently in the dark, then the plains subside to desert, to plateaus and sandy buttes. The expressway is full but few people seem to live out here. There are places where stopping feels like death and other places where stopping seems reasonable. The dirt is orange now, and the air warmer. As they near Phoenix, checkpoints appear more often. In the distance there are massive tracts of housing, patrolled by armed guards. The men at the checkpoints tell them to keep moving, that they're not welcome here, that they cannot stop.

They arrive at two in the morning in a territory of big box stores and strip malls and find Felix's friend and his wife waiting at the designated meeting point, the parking lot of an office supply store, with bottled water that tastes like plastic. Drew performs an elaborate handshake/pull-in/half-hug choreography with Felix that Ari has only ever seen between men. Drew has a body like a wire and dark hair that flops over one eye. He says Felix Washington, and then turns to Ari, saying she must be Cali. Cali is Drew's new wife, a small woman with spiked short hair dyed the color of a pomegranate, eyes a little wild in a way that makes Ari nervous. Felix apologizes for making Cali get up at this hour. Cali says they never leave each other's side, and that way they can't lose each other.

Ari looks at the office supply store and asks if people live here. The doors are open and people pass in and out, but the lighting is strange. It isn't the glaring overhead lighting she remembers from big box stores of the past. It's bright little lights strung up inside, Christmas lights disappearing down the aisles. Drew says it's called Staplestown, that they've lived here for a year, and it's not a bad place. Ari observes it's busy for this hour. A family is coming out with children, headed for a taco stand near the doors. One of the children, a little girl, turns a quick cartwheel on her way to the tacos. Cali explains that it's too hot during the day in summer, dangerous, that if that kid did a cartwheel in daylight in August she'd have third-degree burns on both hands. So a lot of people sleep all day and stay up all night in summer, and some never switch back when the seasons change. Drew says if you stay here long enough, you'll turn into a night creature.

Drew knows the owner of a motel nearby. He calls ahead, then they drive a few more minutes and Ari and Felix unload the merchandise while Drew and Cali talk to the owner. A short time later Ari finds herself sitting in the new motel room with a sense of déjà vu. Days of travel to come to a place almost identical to the place she left. Only the details vary. There's a generic painting of a meadow hanging above the bed. She's brought her record player from the old place and she sets it up carefully on a fake-wood dresser. Felix is lying on one of the beds, too tired for sleep. She asks if he minds music. He says please.

Ari asks if Felix minds music. Felix says they made it. Ari asks made it to where and goes to the window. Across the expressway, flickers in the hills are a distant firefight. She asks if this isn't almost identical to the place they left. Felix says no one from Ohio knows where they are. They can do business here. What happened in Ohio wasn't personal. They wanted the merchandise. Ari says it's almost never personal, but the thought exhausts her. She wishes she could return to Los Angeles, but those months after prison in Echo Park feel like a lost world. Nico made her time in Los Angeles feel real. Felix suggests she sleep. She lies thinking of Nico, then the party, then James. When she turns her head, Felix is looking at her. She says come here.

Business is good in the outer suburbs because Phoenix is trying to become a city-state and the boundaries are unclear. Felix and Ari are low on stock. Felix needs to meet his contact who brings weapons in by sea, so they drive to the Port of Houston. He says he'd invite her but is afraid she might die. Ari says she'll be safer with him. She feels the van is less likely to get shot up at a checkpoint if a woman is in the front seat. They travel through checkpoints. Ari wears a dress, makeup, a voluminous wig. They're traveling to see her sister, who is having a baby, she tells the teenagers at checkpoints. Eleven hundred dollars in bribes gets them to the port, where they wait six hours. Ari says he isn't coming. Felix sighs. He knew. Felix says there's a secondary location. They've never used it.

They drive into a neighborhood of decrepit houses and razor wire. Ari knows something dangerous will happen soon. Felix says this seems like a bad place. They keep the radio off, listening. Then the world turns white. Someone ahead shines a powerful light into her face. Felix says turn left, turn left now, his voice hysterical. She drives blind, shielding her face. They're on an identical street. She sees lights ahead and speeds toward sanctuary. A couple of shots fire behind them, but no pursuit. He says the checkpoints are dangerous, the whole country is dangerous. Ari doesn't know which country she means. Texas is an independent republic, but the territory between cities is contested. The lights are a strip mall and a gas station with a tent city. She asks where they're going. Felix says make a right at the lights. Unease flickers. She's moving toward death. Felix says they're going behind that Denny's.

Behind the Denny's is another tent city, half shantytown. Ari is deeply afraid. She says Felix. He is about to get out but stops. She says they should leave now. He asks why. She says they're going to die if they stay. He says it's always dangerous, Ari, but death drifts toward them like mist. She realizes she cares about him. He stares into the shantytown, trying not to hear her. She touches his shoulder. A knock interrupts. A girl about eight, wild with hunger, says, Message from Gopher. Felix mutters that's his contact, and something's wrong. The girl drops a folded paper on Ari's lap and runs into the shadows. Felix reaches for the note as Ari pulls out of the parking lot. She pulls onto the expressway. Ari asks how the kid knew them. Felix says his contact had the plate numbers. One word: RUN. Felix says run. He sighs. Run where?

2. Paris

The rain falls over Paris, a soft percussion on the illegally installed skylights of Ari Soriano’s apartment in the 7th arrondissement. Ari sits with a glass of scotch, only half listening to her visitor, a young man named Sebastian, who drones on about Post-Collapse Formalism. He is in his early twenties, wears glasses, and possesses a nervous manner. He claims to be an art history student seeking to write about a painting in her collection for his dissertation. Ari, however, has been aware for some time that he is a liar. This is their first meeting. She observes him, turning down the volume on his words as she visualizes a still pool, and then a realization comes to her. She sets her glass down abruptly, stopping him mid-sentence.

She proposes a thought experiment: what if his entire dissertation story were a cover and he were actually an art thief? A furtive tone creeps into his voice as he denies it, looking for his umbrella. Ari, who has met several of his kind over the years, asks him to stay, finding him the most interesting visitor she’s had in some time. He reluctantly settles back. He then shares a story about a recent health scare involving an MRI, describing the coffin-like dimensions of the tube. He explains that after the featureless experience, he stepped outside and was completely mesmerized by the ordinary details of the world—the trees, the branches, the way leaves moved in the wind. He uses this feeling of sensory overload to frame his concept of Post-Collapse Formalism, but in reverse. Ari calls his analogy tortured. He claims to have been born in the thirties, mentioning a “prolonged period of unrest” from his mother’s stories, a phrase Ari recognizes as a direct quote from a Wikipedia page. She watches him closely.

Pilar, Ari’s housekeeper and manager of her entire life, enters to switch on the lamps. The lamplight alters the painting Ari was gazing at earlier, Lucas Alkaitis’s Swan Dive, turning its deep blue wash into a dark, menacing sea. Ari proposes a game: if he were an art thief, which painting would he steal? He plays along, eventually pointing to a small portrait, Olivia on Yellow Sofa. But Ari has been watching him, and she saw the way he considered all the paintings except one. The one he carefully avoided looking at is Swan Dive, which hangs on the wall to his right.

As they prepare for a tour of her other paintings, Sebastian reveals they have met before, when he was a boy; she knew his mother. This room was formerly four separate apartments, which Ari bought one at a time. As he helps her walk with her cane past the kitchen, where Pilar is cooking her signature soup, the memory slowly returns. Ari sinks into a pink velvet armchair in a book-lined corridor, noting the ghost of her first husband, Felix, in the shadows. Sebastian asks for the restroom and vanishes.

Ari closes her eyes, and the memory of Gloria comes back to her fully. It was the late 2030s, shortly after her arrival in Paris, when she was married to her second husband, Bill. Her life then was one of criminality and ill-gotten means, and she was thinking a great deal about corruption. Her former Los Angeles roommate, Gloria, had called, offering to sell her a painting. When Ari visited her apartment in Vincennes, the elegant yet shabby Gloria introduced her son, a boy of maybe seven or nine wearing enormous red headphones, who watched a tablet and did not look up. The painting, Swan Dive, was propped against the wall. Gloria, who needed money, was willing to part with it. It had belonged to Kareem, her vanished partner.

Over terrible coffee, Gloria confessed that Kareem had disappeared from a party eight years ago and had never used his phone or credit cards since. She was haunted by his obsession with an internet site where people sent in secrets, particularly a postcard that read, “Everyone who knew me before 9/11 thinks I’m dead.” Ari steered the conversation to mundane expat topics, finding Gloria uninteresting. The boy, who had been sleeping on the couch, finally took off his headphones to say he was hungry. Ari settled the purchase for five thousand euros. She knew the painting was worth around a hundred thousand, but she didn’t want it for its value. She wanted it because it was her only link to an unimaginably distant life.

In the present, Ari realizes Sebastian is the boy from Vincennes. But he has not returned from the restroom, and Pilar, distracted by her podcast and with her back to the room, could have easily missed him passing by. Ari makes her way to the gallery and finds the naked white rectangle of wall where Swan Dive hung. It is gone. Pilar joins her, and they sit together in the quiet, lamp-lit room as the rain continues to fall. Ari explains that the theft was personal; the painting belonged to Sebastian’s mother. Pilar suggests they start with his mother. Ari says they should start with him, but Pilar has already run a search and found nothing under his name. The good news, Pilar reports, is that his mother is apparently still in Vincennes. Ari asks for a phone number, and then thinks better of it.

She thinks better of leaving, and decides a visit would be better. There is more space in Vincennes than in Paris, something she either appreciates or dislikes depending on her mood. The first time she came here it was indistinguishable from Paris, but after all these years the distinctions are obvious: lower buildings, wider streets, a massive keep on the edge of town, and beyond that a forest park, surprisingly wild given its proximity to the Paris metro. She is certain the address Pilar found is the place she visited all those years ago, and there is a sense of closing a loop here. The painting came into her life and then left via Vincennes, as if Vincennes were some kind of trapdoor in a stage set. In the back of a taxi she watches the passing streets and tries to imagine how the conversation will go. She wonders: does Gloria know the degree to which she underpaid her for the painting? Does she think of her kindly? Gare de Lyon slips past in the twilight and she is remembering past voyages. In her first few years in France she traveled all over the country, when France was dangerous because everywhere was dangerous, but she loved moving through it, all the ancient towns. She wants to fall asleep aboard a southbound train, green fields slipping past the window.

"Madame," the driver says. Apparently she has fallen asleep aboard an eastbound car. She thanks him. He jumps out quickly, opens the door for her, and offers his arm. She emerges very carefully onto the wet pavement with her ugliest, most stable cane. Night is falling, and when her driver leaves, the street holds an air of abandonment. Gloria's building has not changed at all since she was here last, or perhaps her memories are shifting to accommodate present conditions. She has been thinking a great deal about memory lately, because she has too much time on her hands. The doorbell system has changed, though. She presses a button and a light shines in her eyes, illuminating her face for the camera.

"Who is it?" Gloria's voice is surprisingly clear through the little speaker. Ari gazes into the camera lens and tries to look as harmless as possible. "Hello," she says, in English. "It's me. Ari Soriano. Your old roommate." She says nothing, so Ari adds more detail: "From that apartment in Echo Park? In LA?" There are a few beats of quiet, during which Ari feels her staring through the camera. Then the door buzzes, and she is in. There is an elevator, thank god. The hallway has been repainted since she was here last, a dreamy blue that dulls the senses. A short time later she is once again before that apartment door. When it opens, Gloria is standing there, and Ari has a sense of collapsing time: they have been in this moment before, but at an interval of thirteen years.

"Ari," Gloria says. "Please. Come in." Her face is softer now, her hair streaked elegantly with gray, but her style has not changed: the white shirt, the jeans, the red lipstick, the carefully unkempt hair pulled back with strands escaping. She has put considerable effort into the appearance of not trying too hard, and Ari respects that. The lipstick is perfect.

"Good evening." Ari can go months at a time without speaking English, except for greeting passing dogs, and then the language sounds discordant to her. "I'm sorry to drop in on you like this."

"Not at all." Gloria has slipped into French. She steps aside, and Ari walks into one of the stranger apartments she has ever seen. In memory it is bland and standard-issue, white walls, wood floors, unremarkable detailing, but now the walls are entirely taken over by a mural. It is a garden at night, almost photorealistic. Deep sky, wide dark leaves, white flowers, a white birdbath glowing softly in the dark.

"My sister commissioned that," Gloria says, almost apologetically. "She lived with me for a while when she first came to Paris. She has...interesting tastes."

"You have a sister?" Gloria looks away immediately. "May I take your coat?"

"I—" There is no easy way to say it. "Gloria, this is somewhat unpleasant, but I'm trying to find your son." Something in Gloria falters. Ari can see that Sebastian is a person she worries about.

"Oh," she says softly. And then, "Did he...did he do something wrong?"

"Yes. He stole a painting." Gloria sighs.

"Did you go to the police?"

"People like me don't go to the police." She nods and does not quite meet Ari's eyes. "But I have to imagine he already knew that," Ari says, "or he wouldn't have stolen it so brazenly. He wanted me to know who he was."

"I was about to have dinner," Gloria says. "Please, won't you join me?"

"Thank you," Ari says, because engaging with her seems like the best way to get the painting back, and she sits at the little round table. "Dinner seems like the least I can do, considering." Gloria disappears into the kitchen, and Ari is alone in the strange apartment. She has been in apartments with murals before, but there is something oddly, determinedly immersive about this one. The person who painted it, or the person who commissioned it, wanted to be in a specific place, it seems to her, and tried very hard to re-create that place here in this room. Gloria returns with two grilled cheese sandwiches.

"Why did your sister commission a mural in your apartment?"

"Well, she was here for a while," Gloria says, "and it's a place she misses. Her garden, I mean, not my apartment."

"Does Sebastian come here sometimes?" Ari asks, when it becomes apparent that she is not going to say anything more. Gloria's gaze keeps shifting toward the bedroom door, in a way that makes Ari wonder if he is here now.

"Sometimes," she says placidly, "but not tonight. Sometimes he stays with my sister."

"Wait," Ari says, "are we talking about Nico?"

"Yes." She absolutely cannot meet Ari's eyes. "My sister Nico." Ari puts her sandwich down and stares at her.

"I understand why you lie about Nico," Ari says, when Gloria finally looks at her. "Anyone would, under the circumstances. But I wish you wouldn't lie to me, Gloria. I was at that party." Gloria looks at her for another moment, unreadable, and then returns to placidly eating her grilled cheese. She has lapsed into distance. Ari remembers this from the time when they lived together, the way you could be sitting across from her and she would somehow recede without leaving the table, until you were alone with a kind of Gloria placeholder.

"You'd like Nico," she says finally. "You and she have some things in common. She lived in Ohio too, you know."

"Yes, I know," Ari says. "I met her there."

"What? You met her?"

"I came across her by chance in Ohio, and told her you were in Paris. I'm the reason she's here." Gloria's eyes widen. She was always a discreet person, Ari remembers that about her, and it is interesting to realize that Nico shares that quality. There was a time in Ari's life, back in Ohio, when how alike or unalike Nico and Gloria were was something she spent a lot of time thinking about.

"I didn't know any of that," Gloria says, after a moment. "Have you seen her since?"

"I got hurt a few years ago, in an explosion. She came to visit me in the hospital afterward."

"That was kind of her."

"I thought so too, but unfortunately we got into a screaming argument."

"In your hospital room?" Gloria sounds incredulous.

"I have some regrets," Ari says.

"I can't believe you got into a screaming fight from your hospital bed," she says.

"Well." Ari shrugs. She cannot believe Gloria used to believe in tarot cards, but she manages, just barely, not to say this aloud. Instead, after a moment of consideration, she goes for her throat: "Why do you pretend that Nico's your sister?"

"She is my sister."

"We both know Nico's not your sister, and we both know your degenerate son is in this apartment with my stolen painting." Gloria has gone very still.

"Look," Ari says, "I'm not saying you owe me anything, Gloria. Maybe we owe each other nothing at all. But I wish you wouldn't be such a liar."

"I think you should leave," Gloria says quietly. She rises, walks to the door, and holds it open, face like a closed fist. After that Ari has no choice but to gather her rain jacket and cane and walk out with as much dignity as she can find in that moment. She is the one harboring a thief, Ari tells herself, she has no reason to be embarrassed here. She is back out in the dream-blue corridor, the elevator, the rain.

She waits for a while in the shadows of a doorway across the street, a rectangle of darkness. Under the Paris dome the weather is never terrible, but tonight she has worn the wrong jacket for a scheduled rainfall, and she is cold. She expects to see Sebastian at any moment. There are so few constants in her life, but this is one of them, this unpleasant awareness of pending events. He emerges within a half-hour, with a suspiciously Swan Dive-shaped bundle under his arm. He looks both ways, then sets off to the south. Ari follows as rapidly as she can, breathing hard, trying to strike a balance between not losing him and not falling. One misjudged footfall on a rain-slick night street and she will break her already shattered and pinned-together leg. But the street curves just ahead and he disappears. There is a light coming from around the curve, from high above, a dim blue glow that she does not quite understand. She approaches the corner very cautiously, don't fall, don't fall, and on the other side of a dark building, she sees the massive shadow of a castle keep, the Chateau de Vincennes, and beyond that, lights and movement in the sky. It is a moment before she understands what she is looking at: this section of the Paris dome has been undergoing maintenance and upgrades for some weeks. The construction project is directly above the forest. She cannot see Sebastian, or anyone, actually, the street by the chateau is all but deserted tonight, but she is certain that this is the direction he walked, and so she follows as quickly as possible.

Alongside the chateau, past the goats grazing peacefully behind fences and a guard in a raincoat who is there to prevent people from stealing the goats, to the thoroughfare that has been empty of cars since the dome was constructed. Before her, across the deserted road, there is an empty square, beyond which the forest is a mass of darkness. A billboard-sized sign warns of danger from the construction project overhead, access forbidden, but there is no one around to enforce this rule. What she should do, if she is being rational, is summon a taxi and go home. But she has a sense of fulfilling an appointment. She needs to go into the forest, because she is meant to be somewhere up ahead, at a specific time, in a specific place. There is something she needs to see, or perhaps someone she needs to meet. In any event she is crossing the empty expressway, making her way over the gravel square that lies between her and the woods. Walking is an excruciatingly slow meditation, placing the cane deliberately before each step. It is almost impossible to think of anything else. She hears someone growling and realizes that it is her. When she was a child in Brooklyn she loved to run through the streets after a rainstorm, and the speed and momentum are so close to the surface that the memory makes her muscles twitch. After approximately a half-century she is on the other side of the square, just on the edge of the woods. Before her, the avenue extends into the darkness of the park. There are lamps at intervals, sentry-like, but their pools of light serve only to deepen the shadows. She sees no one, but she is certain that she is not alone, and the disquieting next thought is that anyone out here will, like her, be a person who pays little attention to boundaries. In another life she had a boyfriend in Brooklyn who had an enormous dog, and when they went out walking at night people crossed the street to avoid them. She has not thought of that animal in years, but she wishes now it were with her.

She resumes walking, her bad leg throbbing, and there is a shift: the forest is abruptly cast in a silvery light. It is like being onstage. The construction workers above her have switched on a new, intensely brilliant work light that casts a faint glow down to the ground, like starlight. She stands for a moment looking up at the workers, tiny dark figures suspended on their safety wires, sounds of music and machinery coming from above. What if she chose, just once, not to look into the future? She always thought of it as an involuntary tic, but on the other hand she never really tried to control it. Perhaps the hazy knowledge of coming events might be dialed back somehow, like turning down the volume on a radio. What good does it do? There were protests all over Paris when the dome was announced, and again when construction began. Some protestors resorted to violence to try to stop the dome. One group tried to blow up a construction site and instead blew up her left leg and her second husband. But the future arrives regardless.

She walks forward again, into the dark, until finally she hears voices and music in the distance. There are settlements here and there in the forest, little clusters of tarps and tents under the trees, and she knows they are hypothetically dangerous but she does not really care. She is coming up on a village of sorts, a settlement constructed on the grounds of a former equestrian center, a blaze of light in the forest. She smells meat cooking on a grill. Here, finally, is Sebastian. He is standing some distance away, waiting for food from a roadside stand where an old woman is ladling something over rice. He is clearly nervous, bouncing on the balls of his feet, the painting under his arm. Out here in the dim light, he looks younger than she thought he was. But her attention is drawn to another man, approaching rapidly. This man's attention is directed at her, and she realizes her mistake: she is carrying an expensive handbag. She cannot run.

"Sebastian," she calls out. He turns and sees her, and then registers the other man, who is by now quite close and smiling in a predatory way. But Sebastian seems to not quite understand what is unfolding. The man is almost upon her. In a swift, practiced motion, he separates her from her handbag with one hand and shoves her with the other, the fall too fast to register: she is standing and then there is a sound that she realizes is her skull connecting with the pavement. Footsteps running away.

"Ari." Sebastian is kneeling beside her. "Ari, Ms. Soriano, keep your eyes open, let me just call..." Felix is standing behind him, peering down at her with a look of concern. She blinks hard, trying to stay awake, but it is useless. Someone has turned down the volume on Sebastian, his lips are still moving, but now without sound, and she feels herself receding from the scene. When she was a child she used to run full-speed over the Williamsburg Bridge and the thing she most wanted when she was six and seven and eight, which she knew better than to ever admit aloud, was to take off like an airplane. She wanted to run so fast that her feet skimmed over the pavement, so fast that she might begin to rise, perhaps to float. She recedes from Sebastian, she is on the ground, then floating, just as she had always wished for, then there is a lurching sensation and she realizes that she has been mistaken. She was not floating at all.

Sebastian is beside her. She is propped up against glass, looking at an abstract pattern of blurred lights that resolve gradually into passing windows and streetlights, details filling in until she understands that she is in the back of a taxi. The pain hits her just then, and she gasps aloud.

"Ari," Sebastian says, "Ms. Soriano, can you hear me?"

"You stole my painting." The words take some effort. The pain is dazzling. It has form and substance. It has hammers. It is made of light.

"We're going to the hospital," he says, as if she had not spoken.

"No," she says, "no hospitals."

"You need a hospital."

"I hate hospitals. I won't go." The driver is taking some interest in the conversation, but trying not to show it. He looks like a nightclub bouncer.

"Don't be...You have to," Sebastian says. "You were just knocked out."

"Oh, now you're telling me what to do? What are you, seventeen?"

"Twenty," he says. "I'm sorry, but it's just—"

"If you take me to the hospital," she says, "I will tell them that you stole my painting."

"I'm trying to help," Sebastian says. "You were unconscious in the forest, and I—"

"Shall we talk about what I was doing in the forest in the first place? I was recovering the painting you stole from me, thief."

"Is there a problem?" the driver asks, interested. Ari can tell he is a man who likes problems that can be solved with fists.

"None," she says, and switches to English: "Take me where you were going. Wherever you were going with my stolen property."

"What? Why?"

"I want to stay with the painting," she says.

"The thing is," Sebastian says, "I promise that painting means more to me than it does to you."

"What an assumption," she says. "You're probably too young to get this, but I've had too many lives. That painting is my only constant." Sebastian curses under his breath. He leans forward to address the driver.

"Sir," he says, "I need to change the destination."

"Not the hospital, then?"

"No. Madame is feeling much better." He rattles off an address with a street Ari has never heard of. The driver looks at her consideringly. She winks.

"Fine," the driver says. Ari does not quite recognize her surroundings, but once when they turn a corner she catches a glimpse of the dome, semi-opaque in the middle distance. They are outside the dome, then. Her eyesight blurs, then resolves. The pain throbs in a steady rhythm. She senses that it is very important to stay awake, but the warmth and movement of the car are working against her.

The taxi slows and comes to a stop. They have reached an uneven row of small apartment buildings in a derelict neighborhood. The nearest streetlight is broken and the street holds a general air of disarray.

"What is this place?" she asks.

"We can't all afford to live under the dome, princess," the driver says. Ari opens the car door in lieu of answering him, and only then does she realize that her cane is gone. She climbs out very slowly, using the door for support. The pain in her head is worse when she moves. She is alarmingly dizzy. Nearby, two men are sitting on the steps of an apartment building, watching them.

"Good evening," Sebastian says to one of them, who nods in grave acknowledgment.

"Sebastian," Ari says, "where is my cane?" She has made a terrible error in not going to the hospital, she sees that now. She was not thinking clearly. At the hospital, helpful authority figures would have contacted Pilar. In this desolate neighborhood outside the dome, her life is in the hands of the mendacious little fraud who stole her painting, because of course her phone has disappeared along with her handbag. But Sebastian hurries to her side, and extends his elbow. She takes his arm with reluctance.

"You know those men?" she asks.

"I went to school with one of them." They are walking toward the nearest building, very slowly. She is floating a little and feels sick, but all that matters is forward motion, one foot before the other to the elevator, where all that matters is remaining upright as they ascend. They come to a hallway with a flickering light. Sebastian fumbles with keys by a numbered door. Felix is approaching down the hallway. Ari refuses to look at him.

"Ari," Sebastian says. Had she fallen asleep? Time has skipped just a little. She is leaning against the corridor wall, her head pressed to the door frame. "In here," Sebastian says, "come in and sit down." She steps into an apartment, and feels a jolt of déjà vu: the artist who painted the garden mural in Gloria's apartment has come here too. But here, it seems, they were given more license, or were paid more, in any event being in the room is more like being outside in a garden at night. No, not a garden, the same garden. She recognizes the birdbath, the shine of glossy leaves in the half-light, a row of jasmine vines flowering along a fence, the unearthly purple-blue of a jacaranda tree in full bloom. Here, unlike the version in Gloria's apartment, the scene extends beyond the garden walls. Glass towers rise over the garden. Sebastian helps her into a chair.

"Sebastian," she says, "is this Nico's apartment?"

"Yes."

"That garden's a real place, isn't it?"

"Yes," he says. "Would you like some water?"

"Coffee, please, if you have it."

"On it," he says, and disappears into the kitchen. The sound of the coffee machine makes her dizzier. She closes her eyes for a second, but then time slips and Sebastian is there with a cup. "Thank you." A strange formality has settled over the scene. If you force a person to bring you somewhere, are you his guest? Sebastian nods, and sits on a couch nearby. But he is flustered, glancing at his watch and shifting the painting around, from the floor to the couch and then to a low table. Ari sips her coffee, but it is the wrong thing. The first sip makes her nauseous.

"Where's the garden?" she asks. "In real life."

"Far away," he says. "The place Nico's from." She cannot bear the coffee, so she sets it carefully on the side table, and closes her eyes. The pain in her head is extraordinary. This was her last coffee, she realizes. She has been paying attention to endings all her life.

"Sebastian, could I lie down somewhere?" It is difficult to form the words.

"Of course," he says. "There's a guest bedroom just through here." He helps her into a small room whose door she had not noticed, camouflaged by the mural.

"Was this your room?" she asks. The bedroom is aggressively minimalist, just a bed under a window, a narrow dresser, a mirror. It has possibly been intended as a walk-in closet.

"I stayed here on school breaks," he says. "Gloria didn't like it, but she couldn't really stop me. I'd run away from her apartment every time she brought me back there." The bed is so soft.

"I'm just going to rest for a moment."

"Okay. Nico should be home soon."

"Then what?" She is genuinely interested. She has no idea how any of this will play out.

"I don't know." Sebastian leaves the room, and returns with the painting. He unwraps it with a certain reverence, and places it carefully on the dresser, leaning against the wall, facing her. He closes the door then, and she is alone in the room, in the dim light coming in from the street. No, not entirely alone. The ghost of Felix is standing by the window, looking out. When she looks past him she can see the curve of the Paris dome in the distance, farther away than she would have thought. Sebastian is back in the room a moment later.

"I just looked it up," he says, "and it's important that you stay awake." He looks very young in the half-light. Also the ghost of her second husband has entered too, wandering in behind him.

"Soriano," she says, but Soriano pays her no mind, just stands in front of the painting and considers it with his hands behind his back.

"I'm not Soriano," Sebastian says, in tones of genuine fear.

"I know. You're Sebastian. Is that your real name?"

"It actually is."

"What's your real age?"

"Twenty," he says. She nods. She is drifting again. When she was about that age she had recently met her friend Ilieva, her only real friend in New York when she thinks about it. She was a waitress at the Russian Café in the East Village, and Ari had spent hours down there with her, crafting the beginnings of a business idea—

"Listen," Sebastian says, "you have to stay awake."

"I'm very tired."

"Can you keep talking?"

"About what?"

"Tell me about your life," he says.

"That's too general."

"Then tell me why you came to Paris."

"I chose the city at random," she says.

Because the avoidance of patterns can save your life. She was speeding through the dark down a Texas highway, Felix in shock beside her, that scrap of paper with one word, RUN, held loosely in his hand, and then a short time later in the Houston airport she stood in front of a screen showing departing flights, calculated that the next flight they could reasonably catch was the flight to London, but the former UK was at least as unstable as the former United States in those days, and also was the next flight too obvious? Possibly. She considered the next two flights after that, and flipped a coin: heads for Paris, tails for Vancouver. They were waiting at the Paris gate when a text came in on Felix's phone from an unknown number. Two photos, one each of his friends Cali and Drew, tied to chairs. The message: You have one hour to deliver the entirety of the Company merchandise to Staplestown parking lot.

"I've known him since I was nine," Felix said. His eyes were wide and panicked. "We were in The Nutcracker together."

"I'm so sorry," she said. "What is the Company?"

"A competitor." Felix was carefully maintaining eye contact, in the studied manner of a man who has been told to maintain eye contact while lying.

"You're a terrible liar and you have to tell me," she said.

"I made a mistake," he said, "about a month before I moved to Ohio. I cheated someone out of money I owed and left town."

"A lot of money?"

"A lot of money."

"Where was this?"

"Maryland," he said.

The two photographs come through while Felix sits beside her in the Houston terminal, and this time there is no ambiguity. Drew and Cali's throats have been cut. Ari takes Felix's phone, holds it for the better part of an hour, and then walks away from him toward the Vancouver gate, dropping the phone into a stranger's open handbag and watching until she is certain the woman and the device are both on the plane. When she returns, Felix is watching her. There was no way to get back in time, she tells him. We could have told them that, he says. We could have made arrangements. We could have, she agrees, but then we'd be dead too.

They land at Charles de Gaulle at 6:20 in the morning, grimy and hollowed out after a night in seats that don't recline, where water costs money and no one is allowed a suitcase. Ari has spent the flight staring into the darkness of the cabin, cycling through images of bullets, bombs wired to car engines, bodies pushed from tall buildings, and Cali's unblinking eyes in the second photograph. Every time she looks at Felix, his eyes are open too, fixed on nothing. They hold hands leaving the plane, his palm damp and hot, and move like ghosts toward passport control. She is too tired to be afraid. They are still wearing yesterday's clothes, the uniform of a previous country and a previous life, and Felix looks shell-shocked, though she suspects she looks no better. We've done all we could, she tells herself, and knows it isn't true. There is always one more precaution, always a way to go further.

Their passports are perfect. Adrienne and Jeremy Spanner of Philadelphia, citizens of the Atlantic Republic, with modest travel histories and years remaining before expiration. Felix's attention is fixed on the agents behind the glass, and Ari worries about what he might say if they are questioned. She is tired of being entirely in charge of their fates. The line moves slowly, then it is their turn, and a blank-faced young agent examines their documents without interest. He pauses over Ari's passport, stamp poised, and her heart seizes, but his gaze has been pulled sideways by a commotion at the neighboring window. A young woman is speaking urgently to an agent who keeps shaking his head. Desolée, madame, mais vous n'avez pas les papiers. Police officers materialize at her elbows and lead her away, crying silently, while their own passports slide back under the bulletproof glass.

Outside, they sway in a taxi line in the first sunlight of their first morning in France. Ari feels delirious. The sky is very blue. They take a taxi to Place St. Michel, chosen at random from the memory of a novel, because avoiding patterns matters. Patterns can be predicted. Patterns are death. They sit on a bench for a long time in silence, watching people, and Ari notes with relief that the security presence consists of state agents, not militias. Felix asks why Paris, and she explains again that she chose it at random. He says he likes Italy, also for the fourth or fifth time. She tells him they have both been to Italy, so anyone who knows that about them might look for them there. It is like being trapped in a conversational time loop. The sunlight is too bright and Felix is blinking in a way that makes it hard to look at him. Let's find a hotel, she says, meaning let's build a new life since we can't go back to the old one. But he isn't the right person for a new life, and the thought brings her real sadness. She likes him. Still, she rises from the bench, takes his hand, and leads him down streets chosen at random. He asks if anyone is following them. She doesn't answer. She has already answered several times, and her patience is not actually infinite.

They check into a narrow blue hotel wedged between other buildings, modest enough to possibly not be infested with cockroaches. At reception they use their second set of fake passports. Now they are Monica and Halston da Silva of Salt Lake City, Kingdom of Deseret. That first week they keep the curtains drawn and venture out only in the early mornings. The days in the room are long and strange. Ari watches for menace in the neighborhood and finds none. The bread truck is just a bread truck. The woman walking her sleek black dog at seven every morning is just walking her dog. The deliverymen who gather at the corner smoke, eat standing up, check their phones, and disperse on bikes and scooters, returning later to argue into the night in four or five languages. In the afternoons, the protests begin. There are plans to build a dome over Paris, a glass composite already deployed over Asian cities, which would protect the city from weather extremes and allow it to be sealed against pandemics or dirty bombs. The protests run both for and against. The cost falls on all French taxpayers while only the elite center is protected, and construction would demolish nearly a thousand buildings. Shouts, drums, and chanting ricochet off the walls. A militant faction is sabotaging construction equipment.

On day eight, Felix asks what her plan is. Away from his home continent, he has slipped into a passive state, spending his days reading news on a burner tablet, sometimes staring into space, and she knows he is thinking of Cali and Drew. She feels a familiar irritation at being the only one with a plan, but it is a fair question. How much money do we have, she asks. In the we, she lays claim to half the business, and she sees him absorb it. Whatever else she is now, she is no longer his employee. A lot, he says. The business was lucrative. It's too loud here, she says. Let's go somewhere quiet.

They go to Greece, through Athens and then to a hotel on a cliff in the Peloponnese, a white palace that glints aggressively in the sunlight. The hotel sits at the crest of a village that terraces down to the sea. On the first day they walk into the village for clothes, cocktail dresses for her and a consignment-shop suit for him, and in the late afternoon they walk behind the hotel, where they find staff quarters hidden behind cypress trees and, behind that, a disused gravel service road blocked by a heavy chain. Beyond the chain, garbage has been left to rot, lending the road an air of decrepitude and criminality that calls to both of them. They are Americans, which is another way of saying chaos feels like home. They look at each other, step over the chain, and keep walking.

The road winds down into scrubby trees and tinderbox grasses, trash strewn everywhere, and as they go further the trash takes on an unsettling coherence. Bouquets were placed here once, a memorial. Only desiccated husks remain, some still wrapped in dirty cellophane and ribbons. Ahead is the scene of a long-ago fire. Tiny plywood structures were crammed here once, and they burned. Tangled wiring, charred wood, scorched metal. Bright pink flowers push up from the blackened earth. Ari resists identifying what she is looking at, but what she thinks of is the tent city behind the Denny's in Texas, the musicians and dancers, the girl emerging from the night with the note that sent them flying over the Atlantic. RUN. This was a settlement, Felix says softly. I wonder what happened to the people here. They fled when they lost their homes or they died in the fire, Ari says. I don't know why you'd think that, he says.

He is wearing what she has come to think of as his dream face, the unfocused expression she first saw in the Houston airport, a desperate wish not to understand what is in front of him. He had said she was overreacting even after the photos of his murdered friends arrived, insisting it was probably random, that the note probably wasn't for them, while simultaneously letting her dispose of his phone and doing nothing to stop her from saving them both. He worked hard not to understand the danger then, just as he is working hard now not to understand what happened here. He is a man in a self-imposed trance, but she sees the strain beneath it. There were all those old bouquets on the road, she says. Her gaze has settled on something in the ruins that isn't quite a stick. Was that a human femur at the base of a leaning blackened wall? The shape is ambiguous. I didn't see flowers, I just saw garbage, Felix says. What she expects to feel is fury, this man will never grow up, but instead she is surprised by tenderness. He will never grow up, he is stuck in some fundamental way, and he has no one else in the world but her. There is a terrible vulnerability in it. Let's keep walking, she says, and his gratitude is so visible that she stops to kiss him. His lips are very warm.

They hold hands leaving the scene of the crime, and they have gone some distance before it occurs to Ari to wonder how she knows it was a crime scene and not, say, an accidental cooking fire. The road leads them uphill toward four villas dark against the sky. No movement in the landscape except grass rippling in the wind. A black rabbit appears on an overgrown pathway, then vanishes. They're abandoned, Felix says. All the windows are smashed. Ari climbs halfway up the steps of the first villa and turns to see the blackened ruins in the near distance. From here, there would have been a clear view of the shantytown. Clear view of the fire, clear sounds of the screaming. She knew it was a crime scene because it was obviously a crime scene. It really is that simple.

They walk around to the front of the villa. The sea glitters below. Stairs hidden behind overgrown bushes lead down to a lower cliff, where someone has built a stone platform with a diving board extended over the edge. Felix asks if she has ever jumped off a cliff into the ocean. No, she says. All lives have gaps in them, Felix says. The sun is too hot. She kicks off her shoes and takes the diving board at a run before she can think about it, and the terror and exhilaration of being airborne is like nothing she has felt in years, maybe ever, flight and then submersion, annihilation, the water cooling her skin. She surfaces laughing. Felix is high above, a small still figure on the distant board. She swims out of the way and watches him raise his arms as if in ceremony, step forward, and launch. His dive is beautiful. She sees the years of ballet training in his form. He breaks the surface like a seabird and emerges beside her in a cloud of white bubbles, catches her in his arms, and for just a second she feels something almost akin to surrender. She is weightless. I love you, he whispers. I love you too, she says into his ear, very softly. It isn't a lie, but it also isn't enough, and she understands that even as she says the words.

The moment passes. They swim to shore, climb up on the rocks, and walk back by a different route through the sun-blasted landscape. She doesn't notice until the hotel lobby that she has skinned her knee and has blood on her leg. She doesn't care. That night she wears a longer-than-usual cocktail dress and they dance to a jazz quartet on the terrace, languidly because the music is slow. Try to think of the dive, she tells herself, try to think of the dive and not the ruins of the shantytown near the diving cliff. Try to rest in the music. She thinks of the spring of 2031 in Los Angeles, just after the formation of the Republic of California, when the foreign soldiers were gone and the curfews had been lifted and war seemed temporarily at bay. She had returned to instability shortly afterward, that zigzagging drift through Ohio and Phoenix, but what she learned in the disorder was to recognize good moments. The party at Kareem's place was a good moment. This is a good moment, here on this terrace. Try to think of the dive, not the diver. Looking at Felix's face makes her sad, because she loves him but she feels the ending is very close. They will go back to Paris in a week or two, she decides, and then she will break things off. He is too much of a burden, and she is afraid he will get her killed. He will have to face this harrowing world alone.

They return to the diving cliff almost every day for the next four days. On the fourth night, Ari wakes at three in the morning and knows immediately that she is alone in the room. She dresses and makes her way down to the lobby and along a candlelit stone corridor to the bar, where Felix is drinking with two other men. One is bulky, in his sixties, with a shaved head gleaming in the dim light. The other is younger, perhaps in his thirties, dressed all in black with a military haircut. Felix is mid-story, saying that his wife, Ari, god bless her, procured fake passports and they drove like hell to the Houston airport. Felix, she says quietly, since apparently we are using real names. Oh hi, babe, he says. I couldn't sleep.

The bald man shifts over a stool and she sits between him and Felix. She orders a Coke, and the bartender brings an excellent local equivalent, a fizzy brown liquid with a bitter aftertaste that can only be negated by continuing to drink it. The bald man introduces himself as Bill Soriano. When she shakes his hand, his sleeve rides up and she sees the AB+ tattoo on his wrist. Only one kind of man requires a blood-type tattoo. The thought makes her tired. American, she asks. Canadian, he says. The younger man is Chris Jasper, with an Australian accent. Both men are dangerous, but Jasper is dangerous in a specific way. Something in his gaze tells her this is a man who likes to hurt women. How is it, Soriano asks about the drink. Small miracle we can get soda of any kind. Ari feels a familiar vertigo at the contrast between this life, with enough money to stay in a beautiful hotel, and all the lives she has lived since prison. The dishwasher in Los Angeles. The militia in Ohio. The months selling weapons outside Phoenix. Soriano says he is grateful for soda but more grateful for scotch, and then, having had one too many, tells them to ignore him. I'm grateful too, Felix says, smiling drunkenly at Ari. I was just telling them how you got us out of Texas. Is that wise, she asks lightly, telling our story to strangers at a bar. Absolutely fucking not, Jasper says warmly, in a good mood. You've married a careless man, darling. Are you careless, she asks Felix, in a tone meant to be mistaken for flirting. She senses a shift in Soriano's attention. He is watching her closely, less drunk than he seemed a moment ago. Let's get you to bed, she says softly to Felix, before you tell these gentlemen our entire life story. He is too drunk to protest seriously. It isn't difficult to draw him off the stool and toward the elevator. In the elevator he kisses her, slack-mouthed and drunken, and she flinches. You can't tell stories to strangers, she says. That and your general incompetence are going to get us killed. They're strangers, he says. We'll never see them again. What's the harm. How have you made it this far, she asks. There's so much luck in the world, he says, even now. I've been so lucky.

In the corridor, she unlocks the room and leads him in, sits him on the edge of the bed, and begins unlacing his boots like he is a child. But she has never once in her life wished for a child, and that is the problem. Look at how we escaped from Texas, he says. She stops mid-boot to stare at him. That wasn't luck, she says. That was me. I procured two separate sets of passports and kept them in the van in a go bag. You're my luck, he says, and falls back onto the bed, snoring within seconds.

When she finally sleeps, she dreams of Los Angeles for the first time in a while, walking with Gloria in the Silver Lake hills at twilight, talking about something she can't remember when she wakes. Felix has opened the curtains and the room is violently bright. She covers her eyes. Morning, love, he says. Join me for a walk. The dread she feels isn't the dream, she realizes. The dream was benign. The dread is premonition. I don't think I'm awake enough for a walk, she says, and as she speaks, the dread solidifies into understanding. If Felix goes for a walk this morning, he will die. She knows it the way she knows the name of the hotel, the day of the week, the color of his eyes. It is just a fact. Why don't I order you some coffee, he says. I'll be back before you know it. Thank you, yes, she says. She watches him pick up the room phone and order a latte for the last time, the sunlight on the side of his face, his hand on the phone, his beauty, his eyes when he turns to her. You okay, he asks. She knows that if he walks out of the room, he won't come back. I'm fine, she says. Enjoy your walk. Enjoy your latte, he says, and is gone.

Even after the door closes, it isn't too late. She could run after him, explain she has a bad feeling and endure his skepticism, or dispense with the truth and use the promise of sex to pull him back into bed. Instead she lies still, staring at the ceiling, for enough time that he must now be at the elevators, now in the lobby, now gone. Out of reach. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, what is a murder? A knock at the door makes her start, but it is only room service with the coffee. She showers, then goes out to the terrace and sits staring at the water beyond the village rooftops. There are a few bursts of gunfire far out at sea, but the morning is tranquil until it isn't. She has dropped her cup. She is standing. She is watching coffee spread in a pool around her feet. Felix is dead. There is no external sign of this truth in the world around her, but she knows it is true.

She runs down five flights of stairs to the lobby, where people stare. She must look frantic. Some of the guests are vacationing mercenaries and others are innocent old-school tourists, a breed that has hardly existed here anymore and has disappeared altogether on the other side of the Atlantic. She sees the two men who were drinking with Felix last night, sitting separately, staring at their phones. The older one, Soriano, rises with a look of concern as she runs past him into the hot still air. Outside, the sky is cloudless, and she is aware in a way she wasn't before of how scorched this place is, how the orderly cypress trees and the cacti are the only living things in a landscape of rocks and dry grass. Felix, she shouts, although of course she is too late.

The Diving Platform

Ari runs. Past the staff quarters, past the chained-off road, jumping the chain and sprinting past the burnt ruins of the shantytown, a nightmare blur, up to the villas. The second villa is occupied now, white curtains billowing in an open window. Down the empty path to the diving platform, deserted because Felix is dead. Ari walks to the end of the diving board and stands very still, feeling like she is standing on the edge of the world. The only movement is water and the ripples of dead cliffside grass in the wind. She is thinking clearly. This is the right place. She feels Felix's recent presence, then sees him, floating face down in the water far below.

A sound behind her. She turns and sees Soriano. "Are you all right?" he asks. She stares before shaking her head. "No," she says, "not at all." He followed her from the hotel. She seemed distressed. "Felix just died." He blinks, apologizes, asks her to come in off the diving board because she is making him nervous.

She walks in and sits on the cracked concrete, feeling weak. He looks around casually. "Is this a setup?" he asks. "If it's a setup," she says, "then I'm being set up too." He surveys the terrain, then sits near her. She asks why he came if he thought it might be a setup, who takes that kind of risk for a stranger. "I do," he says. "Depending on the stranger. I'm Bill Soriano, we met last night." She gives him her actual name, Ari Waker, a reckless move, but she senses his name is real. She is surprised to realize she is crying. She hasn't cried in so long. She thinks of nights with the militias in motel rooms, Felix's grace through cigarette smoke, his impeccable dives, his strength as a swimmer.

He asks if she saw it happen. No, but he is floating down there. He walks to the edge, looks down, winces. "Not a good swimmer?" She explains he was an excellent swimmer. He asks if Felix had enemies. Not here, back in Texas. Soriano bets a thousand dollars someone just wanted his wallet. He offers to help bring Felix to shore. Felix had been stabbed and his wallet was missing. Ari wants to set this world on fire and burn it to the ground.

Anton and the Invisible Jury

Ari thinks of her cousin Anton. They were close as children, less so as teenagers, in business together in their twenties, then she tried to have him killed and that ended their association. She is not sure where he is now, if he returned to New York or remained in Europe. Whether alive or dead, he belongs in the past tense. When she knew him, in the vanishingly distant part of her life before prison, he was passably intelligent and talked to himself. Sometimes he addressed an invisible jury: "Ladies and gentlemen of the jury," she once heard him say toward the end of their time together in New York, "allow me to explain. Some things weren't possible by normal channels. There were certain shortcuts I had to take." The imaginary jury was contagious. They followed her after that, a congregation of invisible witnesses she addressed too: that she knew gunrunning was wrong but was out of money and everything was collapsing, no jobs in that disastrous time. That she no longer loved Felix, or loved him but not enough, or their love was in a half-life stage. The particulars were confusing. But she didn't want him to die.

Soriano's Courtship

Ari isn't sure where she wanted to go, and lingered at the hotel another week before noticing Soriano was lingering too. After the initial shock, after the coroner was called twice and failed to arrive, after she helped two housemen bury Felix behind the hotel in an unnervingly bored way, after days on her terrace staring at the sea, she began to notice Soriano. Drinking orange juice in the lobby. Doing push-ups in the middle distance. Birdwatching on the path to the village, where later she would see him leaning on an outdoor bar with a beer. On the ninth or tenth evening, when she comes down to the nightly party for the first time since Felix's death, Soriano is dancing. Not with any dedicated partner. One woman after another, no particular type: tall, short, older, younger, larger, smaller, different races. She recognizes a man who also knows about avoiding patterns.

After a while he sits with her. "Evening, Ari. Beautiful night." She asks what he is doing here. Dancing. At the hotel. "Same thing as you, I suppose. Waiting for clarity on the next move." She asks what brought him. Business. A client was at the hotel a day or two ago. What kind of business? Sales. Of what? "Discreet arrangements." She laughs and they watch the dancers. "It's no good being alone," he says. She wasn't, Soriano. "Yes, but I'm talking about now, not a week and a half ago." He looks at her sharply. He is not talking about loneliness. He has been alone for years at a time, but pragmatically, operationally, it is not ideal. "It's easier than being with a person, though." Earlier that day she brought flowers to Felix's grave and wept, but she isn't too grief-stricken to recall his incomprehension, his total inability to absorb shocks, the feeling of being the only adult in the room. Soriano says it is more dangerous. He used to be a soldier. Obviously, she says, he has a blood-type tattoo. He smiles. One person can only do so much. On patrol you need another person to take turns keeping watch. This makes existential sense to her. If Felix hadn't been alone at the diving board, she would be thinking about breaking up with him, not grief. Beyond the lights, the ocean is a black abyss. "I'm not getting down on one knee," he says. "But I'm available for a partnership, should you so desire." Romantic, she says. "You know we don't live in a romantic world." He leans forward, speaking softly. One reason he wants to be with her is she seems to understand what kind of world they live in. She tests a theory: he did prison time. Yes, they have that in common. How could he tell? "Something in the way you carry yourself." She considers this. She never thinks about prison anymore, or rarely. It was terrible but it ended. Terrible in a way that didn't break her. If it marked her visibly, there are worse scars.

"What do you want?" he asks. The question unfurls into a dozen others he doesn't have to ask. She doesn't tell him because she doesn't know him well enough, but what she most longs for is to live in a different kind of world. He gives up waiting for an answer, rises, smooths his jacket. His smile is unreadable. "You don't have to tell me what you want. I'll ask again later." Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, perhaps we can agree: this is a bad timeline. She didn't have to do what she did. She wants to wake on that last morning and make love to Felix instead of waiting on the balcony, eat lunch, go swimming later to watch one last dive. Board trains and return him safely to Paris, separate in some mildly-sad-but-not-devastating way, because it was obvious by his death that he wasn't someone she could stay with forever, probably not even another month. But then, post-breakup, meet for drinks at some quiet bar and reminisce about fleeing a collapsing country together. She wants someone to get drunk with who was there in her past.

"Let's dance," Soriano says, and she takes his hand.

A Journey by Air, Land, and Sea

They board a flight from Athens to Barcelona, then a night train to Paris. The train is heavily fortified, steel plates outside, two men with heavy weaponry outside their private carriage. She realizes this is how Soriano habitually travels. He had to clean up after an exploded train once, giving him a lifelong appreciation for armor plating and armed guards. It seems expensive. The carriage has an air of faded luxury, plush seats in threadbare velvet, gilt wallpaper peeling. She takes a seat by the window. The glass is so thick it warps the station. The alternative is too stressful, he says. Most kinds of stress he can manage, but he struggles with traveling in a carriage with other passengers, wondering which might set off a bomb. Fair, she says. He sits across from her, traveling backward, peering through bulletproof glass. The lights of a passing town flare and recede. They don't speak. The train glides so smoothly she forgets they are moving. It feels like being suspended outside of time. Soriano falls asleep, head drooping, arms folded, but she senses he is never far from leaping to his feet, ready for combat. The thought makes her weary. She drifts into uneasy sleep and wakes when Soriano touches her shoulder.

"Come with me." He unbolts locks and she follows him out of their car into a narrow hallway, then an adjoining carriage, a regular train car but entirely empty. The train is slowing. At the end of the second carriage, she hears piano music, familiar and virtuosic. The next carriage has been stripped of seats, used for transporting goods. Crates stacked halfway to the ceiling, and at the far end, a piano tethered to a luggage rack. The pianist is a small man in an oversized coat, bent low over the keys. "Are we in a World War Two movie?" she mutters. Mozart, Soriano says, one of his favorite sonatas. The pianist glances at them and she sees she was mistaken. A woman in men's clothing, a small person in a large scarf, somewhere in her fifties. Beautiful eyes. Her face looks kind.

The train lurches to a stop. Through the music she hears the hiss of a hydraulic door. Someone stands between cars with a flashlight, gesturing toward an open door. "We're leaving the train?" she asks. What time is it? Just after four a.m. Careful on the steps. She descends into nowhere, in the woods, far from any station. Clear night, full moon, but the forest is made of shadow. Soriano comes down behind her. "Here, move quickly," and he takes her hand. Piano music leaks into the dark, then the doors hiss shut and the music is gone. He leads her down over gravel into the blackness of the pines. The train moves, slowly then picking up speed, gliding onward without them.

"You must think I'm insane, and you must think you're in danger. But I pose no threat to you, Ari, I hope you realize that." She is too old for this, she says, though she isn't sure what "this" is. She likes holding his hand, a useful data point. Aligning with him isn't the worst play. "That's the kind of thinking that'll get you killed. No one's ever too old for any given misfortune or inconvenience, just remember that." What are they doing? He has to tell her a story to make this make sense, but promises to be brief. He was in a unit, a long time ago. A private unit. A unit of discreet gentlemen and one lady with considerable expertise in firearms and explosives, dispatched as needed on an international basis. They would perform the duty for which they'd been dispatched, then disperse. His commander would point to each of them in turn and say air, land, sea, and the thing he said to you was how you'd leave that country and make your way home.

"Does this story have a point, Soriano?" It does. He realized: why not all three? What better way to throw someone off the trail if a person happened to be tracking you?

"We're returning to Paris by boat?" Yes, because they set out by air and then took a train. A flight, then a train, then a hike through the forest, then a boat. Why not. What about their luggage? It will be sent to his apartment. They stumble out onto a dusty road, pale in the moonlight. "Et voilà, la France profonde." Across the road is an enormous building set back in the field. Not a building. Ruins. She doesn't know what that means. The ruins had once been a cathedral, a tower and a shattered dome rising into the night. He tells her she should learn the language if she is going to stay here. She will learn French. She sits at the roadside. What are they waiting for? An owl calls softly, and a pale shape flies from the ruined cathedral. "We're waiting for my car. It's close." He sits beside her, and a moment later a small black car pulls up. The driver is a thin man in a dark suit and white shirt. He opens the door without a word. "Please," Soriano says, and climbs in beside her. They drive in silence through the countryside, headed north.

"We could've stayed on the train," she murmurs. But if anyone is after them, they are looking on the train as they speak. There is a gap in the logic, if assassins knew about the train itinerary, might they not also know about the car? She is too tired to chase it. She opens the window and fights for wakefulness in the rush of cool air. They are close to the ocean. Moving through dark streets of some provincial town, passing a bakery with warm light in the windows, a man moving about inside. The other windows are mostly dark. "You awake, Ari?" "I am, Soriano." She likes saying his name. Perhaps she could take it, her next thought. She has been Ari Smith since Ohio, and there is a certain pleasure in switching names again. "We're almost there."

The car turns a corner and the ocean is before them, deep gray to the horizon. The first colors of sunrise streak the sky. The car drives out onto a pier, wheels vibrating on uneven wood, toward a midsize yacht. "We'll move quickly again. Forgive me, it's a habit. The car stops, you open the door, you walk briskly out and directly onto that boat, and I'm beside you all the way. Do not stop for any reason." The car stops and she steps out into beautiful cool air. She walks up the gangway and moves rapidly across the rear deck, in through a door that opens to receive her. Soriano comes in behind and closes the door. They are in a very small but expensive-looking living room, with deep carpeting and armchairs, a miniature fridge, paintings on the walls. A young man who must be the captain nods to Soriano and disappears up a narrow flight of stairs. "If you'd like to sleep, there's a bedroom through there. You can have the bed, I'm quite happy on an armchair." She glances at him and he looks quickly away. What are they to one another? She has agreed to come with him, but the parameters are unclear. "I'll stay awake for a while," she says, and takes a seat by the window. The glass is tinted, rendering the sky and sea unnaturally dim. She is bone-tired.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury: You get more than one life. The transition between lives is sudden or slow. Sometimes it is a night flight to Paris, sometimes waking to the news that your country is ending, sometimes soldiers flooding the streets. Sometimes the FBI crashing through your Santa Monica rental house in a wave of black uniforms, pressing your face into the carpet while they snap cold metal on your wrists, you have the right to remain silent. Sometimes a prison sentence, sometimes a boat. She gazes at the seascape, choppy waves of the Atlantic under a dove-gray sky. Sleep is very close. The sound and vibration of the engine surround her. In a half-awake, half-dreaming state she sees a translucent periscope rise above the waves and fade out, a ghost submarine from long-ago memories of war movies.

"Wake up," Soriano says gently. Time has passed. She has been back in the motel room in Ohio, observing Felix's grace as he carries an AR-15 across the room and places it with reverence in the arms of the girl with a feather in her hair, the girl dressed in black pretending to be drunk. The boat is pulling into an industrial port, a landscape of warehouses, an unobtrusive rusted-steel pier that looks comically small beside the massive cranes. Involuntary memories of a parking lot by the Port of Houston, listening to distant gunfire with Felix in the gathering twilight, a white bird flying overhead. "We'll stay inside till the car pulls up." She follows his gaze and sees a gray sedan cruising slowly down the line of container stacks. "How do you know it's the right car?" "I think you should marry me," he says. "What?" "We think exactly alike. Watch." The car stops by the pier, and the driver, a dockworker or a man dressed as one, gets out, leaves the driver's door open, opens the back passenger door, and walks away. Then a woman emerges from some other part of the ship, walks briskly down to the car, and climbs into the driver's seat. "That's Pilar. I trust her." She has been working for him for a while? Yeah, and also she is his cousin. Same as before, then? She wishes she had slept longer. She isn't well. She can feel the beginnings of a fever, dull heat behind her eyes.

"Yes. No matter what happens, walk straight to the car. What will you do if I'm shot on the pier and fall dead beside you?" "I'll walk to the car." The outside air carries oil and saltwater brine, indistinguishable from the Port of Houston. She wishes she could stay outside longer, but in a moment she is inside the car and Soriano is closing the door. The door cuts off sound in a way that makes her understand the windows are bulletproof. Like being encased in a hermetically sealed pod. She fights off claustrophobia as they set off. Pilar's gaze flickers to hers in the mirror. She is younger by at least a decade. "Soriano, what exactly is your business?" He has several. His main business is transporting people. It isn't human trafficking. Willing individuals who desire to start over in an entirely different place, with a different name and identity papers. That sounds expensive. Very. He is good at his job and charges accordingly. She did that without him, the name, the place, the identity papers. "Yes, but you weren't in the Mafia. I'm using the Mafia as an example. There are countless people who've sworn fealty to organized crime, and the only way out of that is death, usually." Death or him? "Death or me."

They leave the port through a steel gate that closes behind them, then out into a larger territory of warehouses and parking lots, huge trucks passing. "We're a good match for several reasons, and one of them is that you understand how to operate in this environment. Felix's story about your flight from Texas made that clear." Why does he travel like this? Is someone specifically after him? Not that he is aware of, but he has learned to be careful. She can operate in this environment but dislikes it. Doesn't he wish life were easier? Of course. Doesn't everyone? He looks at her. "We don't get to choose the world we're born into. But you either learn to navigate that world, or you don't." She nods. She is very tired.

Pilar merges onto an expressway, and they lapse into silence. Time collapses and Ari is six years old again, drifting toward sleep in her mother's arms in the back of a yellow taxi, steel girders of the Williamsburg Bridge sliding past overhead, suspended between and above the lit-up shores of Manhattan and Brooklyn. A sense of blurred borders, of having traveled in so many cars between so many places that she is somehow in all of the cars at once. She drifts in and out of sleep through the gray hours between the ocean and Paris. "Not much longer," Pilar says. It is the first time she has spoken, and Ari is startled by an American accent. Who are these people, actually? She closes her eyes, trying not to sink too far into exhaustion. Thinking, how did I land in this life. Or how did I land in yet another life, how often do I get to blow my life up and start over, how many completely separate lives am I going to get to live before I run out of chances. They pass through a neighborhood of narrow streets, somewhere near the city center. The car halts in front of an elegant apartment building. "Welcome home," Soriano says, and looks confused when she laughs.

Paris at Last

She marries Soriano quickly. He needed a wife for social events. She could have built a new life on her own, in a new city, but the thought was exhausting. She would attach herself to Soriano's life for a while and see what comes next. It is a life of dinner parties, for the most part. At some point in the evening, the party divides: a selection of guests, mostly men, withdraw into another room to talk business, while the rest, mostly women, talk about everything except what their spouses are up to. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, she is not a monster. She doesn't think she is a monster. She held considerable doubts. But the world changes and you have to change with it, and it is that understanding that propelled her from one life into the next without dying. Their street is on a popular route for anti-dome demonstrations, and she wakes some mornings to the howls of protestors and the metallic clash of pots and pans below. She likes watching the surging crowds from Soriano's bedroom window. "It's adorable that they think they have problems," she says to Soriano, and this strikes her at the time as a reasonable stance for an American to take, but also it is true that she is floating through a city that she doesn't understand.

They leave the dinner in the 5th arrondissement at eleven, and Ari, over-caffeinated and restless, asks to walk instead of taking the car. Soriano sends Pilar ahead, and they set off on foot past a crowd of wealthy diners waiting for their cars. Ari notes the subversive thrill of walking away. They head toward the river, and the massive square tower of one of the Paris dome's support beams rises across the water. Soriano admits he is more worried about the dome than the protests. He explains that a structure meant to protect them could just as easily trap them. If something happens inside the dome, they will have nowhere to go.

They descend to the riverbank and walk in silence. Ari admires the dark water and finally opens up about her past, something she never does. She tells him she lived by the river as a child in Brooklyn, near the Williamsburg Bridge. After her mother was deported and her father followed back to Ecuador, leaving her with no parents at twelve, she used to slip out of her aunt and uncle's apartment at night and go down to the industrial waterfront. She liked inhabiting a secret night world that was only hers.

Soriano interrupts softly. Something is wrong. A small dark ship moves down the river with no lights, a passing shadow. Ari glances back and sees two armed figures in black masks at the top of the walkway, watching the boat. She tells Soriano they have to go forward. They increase their pace and reach a fork in the path. To the left, rough cobblestones along the water. To the right, a pedestrian tunnel lit with blue lights. Ari leads Soriano into the tunnel, holding his hand and forcing a strolling pace so the night does not dissolve into gunfire.

She explains that the people must be connected to the boat, so she wants to get away from the water. They break into a light jog. The tunnel is nearly empty at this hour. A cyclist passes, then returns moments later pedaling frantically, and behind them comes a sound that is almost certainly gunfire. Ari thinks of reaching fresh air. They run at a dead run now toward shouting and sirens ahead. Soriano stops. He thinks it is worse ahead. Ari insists it is worse behind. He tells her she is not thinking clearly, that he has spent time on battlefields and believes she will die if she goes forward. She says there are things she knows, and one of them is that they cannot go back.

Soriano stares at her, then proposes they test their theories. Whoever gets back to the apartment first wins. She agrees. He asks if she is in love. She says of course not, no offense. He smiles and says none taken, that he has enjoyed their alliance. She tells him he is her best friend. He says he likes her too and hopes to see her soon. They walk backward a step or two, then he salutes and runs back the way they came.

Ari runs onward alone at the tunnel's midpoint, slipping into a fugue state, thinking of Felix and the absurd, pointless death in Greece. She wonders if she will see him soon. The light changes and sirens grow louder. She emerges into clear night air into the last few seconds of her life when she is able to run. She hears no explosion, or retains no memory of it. She is running, then airborne, and for an exultant moment it feels like the impossible thing she longed for as a child, to run so fast her feet leave the cobblestones. Then she lands into shocking pain.

She lies still and feels an unexpected peace. The pain becomes a kind of transport. She is in the blue water under the diving board, Felix above her, but in the dream she runs time in reverse. He dives and then rises upward, smiling, back to the starting point. She thinks: I want to dive off a cliff, but I don't want to descend. I want gravity to reverse itself. What I want is to rise.

She opens her eyes into pain and soft light, the beeping of machines, the hum of hospital air circulation. Her throat is dry. The woman by her bed is familiar. Nico, unchanged from Ohio except her buzz cut is now pink instead of platinum. Ari tries to speak but cannot. Nico raises her head and holds a glass of water with a straw to her lips. Ari says she was far away. Nico tells her not to move, that she has had an elaborate surgery on her leg. Ari sees her left leg suspended in a sling from the ceiling. She turns her head slowly and sees someone else in the room. Nico looks but sees no one. Felix stands in the corner, watching her with an interested, neutral expression, hands in his pockets. He is insubstantial, and she thinks she can see the radiator lines through his sweater. She has returned from a far distance, but she has not come back alone.

3. Three Conversations after an Explosion

The hospital room in Paris holds two people and a recording device. Ari lies in bed with his leg shattered in five places, metal pins connecting to the bone, a controller within reach that dispenses painkillers when he presses its blue button. He tells Nico he cannot bear another night of boredom and asks why Nico records their conversations. Then, because Nico wants to know about the beginning, Ari takes him back.

He was raised with corruption. From age twelve he lived with his aunt and uncle and his cousin Anton, who was like a brother to him. His relatives dealt in stolen antiques, and Ari worked for them as a teenager, but the business did not interest him. He wanted his own operation, so he started one in his twenties. It was a strange time. The 9/11 attacks had just happened, and afterward immigration became much harder. There was demand for US passports. Ari had been committing thefts for a while, but he moved into selling passports. The whole business hinged on a single post office clerk named Luis, a lonely man in his sixties who would approve any passport application Ari gave him. Ari would visit Luis's apartment and watch TV with him, and he liked the man, though he could never tell whether Luis liked him back or whether the payment on top of the friendship made it impossible to know. His true friend back then was Ilieva, but he paid her too. She had been deported and he helped her back into the country, and she became part of his delivery system. His rule was to never be present when a passport or money changed hands, so the transactions involved only Ilieva and Anton. He paid them a cut and they took the risk, and he was paying them for the risk. It was a good business, for a while.

Then Ilieva got recruited by someone they sold a passport to, a man who frequented the Russian Café where she worked. He looked gentle, with a kind face and a soft voice, like a mild-mannered professor, the last person you would expect to do anything dangerous. It was a mask. He was Russian organized crime, and Ari began working with him on a new project, not just supplying passports but bringing people into the country. Human trafficking, yes, but the women desperately wanted in. They came from desolate ex-Soviet republics where the oligarchs had stripped away all the resources, places with organized crime and few options. In those countries, Ari says, there was no economy. The women were the economy. He knows he is justifying a serious crime. He is not an idiot. But the girls wanted out, most of them had been forced into prostitution, and they all wanted to come to New York. Ari could not leave New York for complicated reasons, so he needed someone on the ground in Europe to complete the transaction. Anton was going to Italy on his honeymoon. Then the transaction was delayed, Anton had to stay for weeks, and he grew anxious. He did not want to go through with it. He started calling Ari and demanding more money, and Ari was afraid Anton was about to go to the FBI. Ari did not think he was a psychopath, he says. He did not think he did not deserve punishment. It was more that he did not want to go to prison. He was obsessed with the idea of freedom. That was why he had gotten into a criminal life in the first place. He knew he was alone in the world and he wanted to be free. The alternative he saw all around him in Brooklyn, working yourself to the bone to barely get by, felt like the opposite of freedom. So he made an arrangement. It was shocking how easy it was. He paid someone a very large amount of money to remove Anton from the equation. Then he got the call that the job was done. Anton was gone. Dead.

Ari left New York that night and went to California, renting a little house by the beach in Santa Monica. It was the most half-hearted effort at fleeing. He knew anyone could find him with half an hour of work. It was not that he wanted to be caught. It was that he knew he would be. It has been like that all his life, he says. He sometimes just knows what is coming. He knew he was going to prison. Then time kept passing and the police kept not coming. Those months were ghostly. He walked to the grocery store, walked on the beach, lay awake at night listening to the city. He had a feeling of being in between lives. Like now, he tells Nico. After a while he thought maybe he would stay free, but he knew that was not a true story. He made plans to travel, but there was no life in those plans. He knew prison was approaching. The delay was confusing. It did not matter what he did, because he was always going to go to prison. Then one morning he woke up and could not stop looking at the door. His attention was just drawn to it. He sat there staring at it like it was the most interesting thing in the world, like he was high, but he was not. In the late morning the FBI broke down that door and swarmed the house. He did not resist. He kept not resisting until all the guns and shouting started to seem a little stupid, and the agents looked embarrassed. He lay pinned to the carpet with his hands behind his back until it got quieter, and they took him in. After he confessed, they told him Anton was still alive in Italy. He thinks either his contact in Italy lied or the man was mistaken himself, which means he killed the wrong man. When the hit man called him, Ari felt he was telling the truth. Someone else died in Italy. A case of mistaken identity. He does not know who, but he knows someone did. He thinks about that other man all the time.

Nico, in the second conversation, asks Ari about the final dream. There is a whole religion devoted to the idea, in the place Nico is from. The idea is that after you die, your neurons keep firing for something like seven minutes. What is that time like, when your body is dead and your brain is trying to make sense of it? No one knows the subjective experience, but some people think when you die you get one last dream. And time in dreams works differently. Those seven minutes might feel like a lifetime. That is what Nico thought Kareem's party was, when he arrived there. He thought he had died and arrived in the final dream. His working life now is not interesting. He picks up retail shifts at a department store and transports packages for the men who run his neighborhood. He assumes the packages contain drugs, and that is not what he wanted for his life, but financially he has no real choice. In the other place, the place he came from, he had a more interesting job. He was a physicist. He does not want to talk about the other place because he does not want to think about how much he has lost. The sensation of getting from one place to the other was like plucking the string of a guitar, but he was the string. Then he was in a kitchen, at a party. He opened his eyes and thought, this is it, I am dead, this is the final dream. The only explanation that made sense. He had been in a lab in the other place, and then he was at a party, with no intermediate step. A man was kneeling beside him, looking for something in a cupboard. Nico crouched next to him and it was his husband, Kareem, but a dream version. It was not just the clothes or the haircut. There was something different about him, like he had a different soul. Nico asked where he was, and Kareem said, my kitchen. He called Nico by the wrong name. He called him Gloria. Nico did not understand why until much later. This Kareem was obviously not his husband. He was some kind of doppelganger. Nico felt like he was losing his mind. He moved into the next room, trying to get his bearings or find someone he recognized, but there was no one. All these strangers, talking about things he did not understand, place names he did not know, events he had never heard of. Saraya came through too, his colleague. He found her in a psych ward in Los Angeles, completely undone. The shock was too much and she had broken from reality. She was not coherent when he saw her. The kind thing would have been to stay and help her, but he had lost everything too and was trying to stay alive. He had to keep moving. After a while he left the apartment and walked down to the street, wandering for a long time, staring at the streetlights because they were completely wrong. The shape of them, the color of the light. A car passed and he almost did not understand what it was. He is used to all of it now, but at the beginning the tiny differences were jarring, all he could see. He kept walking with no idea where he was. After a while it seemed the dream was lasting too long, and it also did not feel like a dream anymore. He was in shock, crying and stumbling in the dark. Then he had an awful thought. Obviously the experiment had gone wrong and he had passed through some kind of door. What if the door opened again, in the same place as before, but he was not there to pass back through? He had to get back to the party. He had to get home. All he could think of was his children. He has two, Marlowe and Samir. Marlowe was two when he left, Samir almost four. Marlowe was named for a fictional detective, Samir for his husband's grandfather. His husband was a revolutionary, or wanted to be. He was secretive about it, and did not know that Nico knew. But to explain all that, Nico would have to tell Ari about an entire world he does not want to think about. He asks Ari to ask him about something different.

So Nico tried to retrace his steps, and it took until morning to find Kareem's apartment again. He walked back up the stairs at the side of the building. The door was unlocked, but the apartment was empty. Kareem had left by then. Nico knows no one saw him again. The party had been abandoned. All the lights were on. He smelled something burning. Someone had left a candle burning in the living room, and a flower had fallen into it and caught fire, smoldering, slowly ruining the shelf it sat on. Nico put it out and started looking around. He was desperately thirsty. It took him a minute to figure out how the taps worked, because the design of everything was completely different from where he is from. He ate and drank whatever he could find. He did not know what he was searching for, but he kept looking, walking in and out of rooms. There was nothing. He was not transported back. He could find no door. The empty rooms were just empty rooms. After a while he gave up on the idea of the door reopening, for the moment. He knew it was not his apartment and he had to leave, but he was desperate. He was in a foreign place with no money, nothing. He found a suitcase. All the clothes were men's clothes, but Kareem was not very large, so he found some things he could wear and packed them, along with soap and shampoo from the bathroom, a towel, all the things he thought he could use. He is not a thief. He is not usually a thief. Then he left with a packed suitcase and started asking people on the street where he could go. They kept pointing him toward a Red Cross processing center down on Sunset Boulevard. It felt like an unsettled time. He did not know what had happened, but it seemed like there had recently been a war or some kind of social unrest. There were signs everywhere that said respect the curfew, but they looked old, and it felt like maybe the curfew was over. Finally, late in the day, he found his way to the Red Cross and got in line for food. He told a worker he did not remember where he was from, and that got him a bed in a tent for people with mental health issues. He stayed quiet and tried to understand where he was. He woke the next morning, and he was still in the wrong world. What he could not stop thinking about was his children. Ari knows the next part. Nico met a man at a DP camp and went with him to Ohio, because why not. He wanted to find a way to stay alive, in case he could find a way to get home somehow. He tried not to hope the door would reopen. Then he met Ari in Ohio, when Ari was staking him out in the parking lot. After that Nico decided to leave his husband, but it took a while to save enough money to leave and come to Paris. He came because Ari told him Gloria was here. People leave their lives scattered all over the internet, and he found her within days. How did she react? How would anyone react, meeting their doppelganger? She was stunned. Nico called her and fudged it a little, telling her he had been at that party in LA and knew where Kareem was, because he is pretty sure that is true, pretty sure he actually does know where Kareem went. She agreed to meet. Nico warned her that she might find his appearance shocking, but he did not know how to warn her. They met in a café, and he thought she was going to faint. She sank into the chair across from him and stared. Nico had to order for her, even though she was the one who spoke French. It took her a long time to say anything. What is it like, talking to your double? You compare notes, and you find you have the same memories, until you do not. The same parents, except not. It is like a dream version of yourself. Nico went to her apartment the following night. That was when he started to understand that something was really wrong with her. There was a massive demonstration in Paris that night, and he was very late. Their train stopped between stations because protestors were on the tracks. He got out and had to walk to Vincennes, because there were no taxis. It was almost midnight when he arrived. She let him in, and there was her son, just a little kid, watching TV alone in the dark. Nico found out later that he had no bedtime. He was watching trash, old American reality TV, hour after hour. Dance Moms. Gloria did not seem to care about him very much. It took Nico a while to realize how messed up she was. She has two jobs, both entirely remote, and she works the way alcoholics drink. Work is the place where she hides. Every waking hour. All she wanted to do was work, all the time. It made Nico realize how extraordinary it was that she agreed to meet him in a café. She must have been incredibly lonely. But she did not seem to want to talk much with her son. She would make deals with him. I will take you to the park if you leave me alone and do not ask for anything for the next two weeks. Sometimes worse, for things he actually needed. I will buy you a winter coat that fits if you promise to leave me alone and let me work for a month. He was starved for any kind of interaction with her, so he always agreed. It is not a money thing. A lot of people with much less money than Gloria take better care of their kids. The thing is, the boy looked like Nico's children. Marlowe and Samir. Not just that he is Arab and Chinese, but the way he moves, little mannerisms. It is uncanny, and it still startles Nico sometimes. Nico asked Gloria's permission to spend time with him, to look after him after school and such. She said yes right away and retreated back into work. The boy has been like a son to Nico. Nico is certainly a much better parent to him than his mother ever was. He does not know what is wrong with Gloria. Something happened to her, and now she is unavailable.

In the third conversation, Ari announces he is getting out of the hospital tomorrow. He will go back to the apartment where he lived with his husband. Pilar said she would keep her job and help him. He cannot walk very well. No, of course he does not trust Nico. Nico should not be offended. Ari does not trust anyone. He is sorry that was the wrong answer, but he is trying to be honest. You absolutely cannot depend on other people. He has known that since he was a kid. Nico says something that makes Ari snap. For fuck's sake, Nico. What are you, twelve? Especially not the people who care about you. Then Ari tells him to stop recording, and he will tell him.

4. The Birthday Present

Sebastian starts researching Ari Soriano at fifteen. He lives at a boarding school in Normandy and can't sleep through the coastal wind, so he builds a fort under his blankets and digs into her past on his tablet in the dark. He's permanently angry and hates being fifteen. It's important to have a project.

Ari is a philanthropist. Half his classes are in Soriano Hall, named for her. The new opera house in Paris is the Soriano-Kalisa Opera House, named for Ari and her current spouse. She has a great deal of money from somewhere, and that's what interests him. Her past is complicated. She walks with a cane and a serious limp. Her left leg was badly injured in the explosion that killed her second husband, Bill Soriano, when anti-dome extremists sent a boat full of explosives down the Seine. Maybe her wealth came from his life insurance. But she's also done illegal things. Before Paris, she was a criminal in the former United States, or Italy, or both. His mother told him she served time in an American federal prison.

Gloria doesn't know why Ari was in prison. She's taking Sebastian back to school after the holidays, and they wait under an awning in the rain at the Bayeux train station. Sebastian asks about Ari's prison time. Gloria says, "It seemed rude to ask." He points out that if he were interviewing a potential roommate, he'd ask why she did time in federal prison. Gloria doesn't appreciate his tone. He tells her to get on the next fucking train and go back to Paris. He got drunk with a childhood friend the night before and has a headache.

Gloria says her cousin was Ari's cellmate for a while, and the cousin said Ari wasn't violent. Sebastian points out that Gloria said Ari was in prison for fifteen or twenty years, which implies violence. He uses "does it not," a formulation he's been trying out because it destabilizes adults. Gloria retreats into vagueness: "Not necessarily." Sebastian says it's an extreme sentence. Gloria says, "Not by American standards, my little Parisian." For a second he hears Nico in her voice. "My little Parisian" is the kind of thing Nico would say. On his list of things he hates most, any overlap between Nico and Gloria is near the top. Nico left France four days ago on a research trip, and he misses her already.

Gloria asks why he's so interested in Ari. He says, "She has my father's painting. That was the only thing I had of his in the world." Gloria starts to say it was hers to sell, but they've had this argument since he was seven, so she doesn't finish. The bus appears. Gloria asks if he's happy at school. He says, "Seriously, what do you care?" She says, "Of course I care. I'm your mother." He says, "If you say so, Gloria. I was raised by reality TV until Nico showed up." She says that isn't fair. He rolls his eyes but sees she's about to cry, so he stops. He doesn't want her weeping on a train platform. A guy from the year above approaches. They exchange stiff nods. His mother doesn't cry in front of him, and social disaster is averted.

If he'd answered honestly, he is happy at boarding school, for the most part. School is easy for him, and he's been learning about drugs and petty theft from the degenerate offspring of the international elite. Gloria offers to visit during the school year. He says, "Bit late to take an interest, isn't it?" He basks in victory as the bus stops. Then he asks who Ari's first husband was. Gloria says she doesn't know, and then, "I really don't, Sebastian. All of that drama was after I knew her."

Ari's current spouse is the pianist Eddie Kalisa. They have an enormous apartment in the 7th, and their dinner parties are legendary. Sebastian's friend Cole attended one with his parents. Sebastian grills Cole on Ari, the paintings, the layout, the guests, until Cole tells him to shut up. Cole says Ari was intimidating but can't articulate why. Nico laughs when Sebastian asks if she's ever been to a dinner party there. "I'm probably the last person she'd invite." She visited Ari in the hospital after the explosion. They talked, argued, nearly came to blows. Sebastian says, "But she still paid my tuition." Nico shrugs. "I asked her to, and she said yes. One thing I'll say for her, she does what she says she's going to do." Sebastian asks why she'd do that for a kid she doesn't know. Nico says, "Guilt, maybe? The source of her wealth isn't exactly aboveboard. She was a criminal for most of her life."

Cole says Ari seemed volatile. They're smoking on a park bench with Obie and Aurélie, who's dating Cole. Sebastian asks what volatile means. Cole says, "Like a panther at the zoo. Perfectly calm, but you felt like she'd kill you at the first opportunity." Obie says, "Tightly wound. Like a coiled spring. My dad's like that." Aurélie points out that all springs are coiled. Obie asks why Sebastian is so hung up on this person. Sebastian says, "I'm planning on stealing a painting from her." His friends' admiration increases. They respect criminality. Aurélie looks interested. Obie suggests talking to his dad, who's good at stealing. Cole asks why he wants the painting. Sebastian says, "I never met my father. The painting was his." He can't meet their eyes. Aurélie says, "Then you should get it back." What Sebastian doesn't say is that he used to stare at the painting for hours, imagining his father staring at it in the past, imagining time collapsing so they were looking at it together. When his mother sold it, the only trace of his father was gone.

Nico visits that winter. They walk to a café in the village. It's January and raining, but not cool enough for jackets. She looks tired from her research trips. Sebastian suspects she's been dismissed as a lunatic, asking fringe physicists about parallel universes. Sebastian asks about Ari Soriano. Nico gives him an appraising look. "You're talking about that painting Gloria sold her?" He says, "Swan Dive. I loved it. Gloria told me it belonged to my father, and then she sold it." Nico says he's told her that. He asks if the painting was in the other place too. Nico says quietly, "It hung in the lab. I always thought it was beautiful." Sebastian asks for more about Ari. Nico says, "She worked for a militia in the Republic of Ohio, then fled to Paris. Then she was a professional wife to a retired mercenary. I visited her in the hospital after he died, but we've barely spoken since." They reach the café. Sebastian gets boba tea. When he returns, he notices Cole and Aurélie at the next table. He gives a minimal wave and sits behind Aurélie. Her handbag hangs precariously on her chair.

Nico sighs about Copenhagen. She was talking to an ex-professor, defrocked, basically a paperweight, who had ideas about travel between parallel universes. He thinks objects might be where universes converge, and if an object exists in two universes, it might be possible to use it to travel between them. Sebastian asks how. Nico says, "Indeed, Sebastian. How." She explains: all objects emit electromagnetic radiation. Identical objects in different universes might emit precisely the same radiation, a unique signature that could link them in space-time. But there's no way to test it, and it wouldn't explain how a door could open. Sebastian says there would be doors everywhere. Nico says, "There aren't doors everywhere. I've looked." Sebastian says, "I know. You've been looking all my life." Nico glances at him, and the thing they never talk about flits between them: he needs her to be his parent, and she needs to get home to her children. Nico says, "The thing is, I'm a physicist, and it made no sense to me." Sebastian says, "But?" She smiles. "But I can't stop thinking about Swan Dive." Sebastian asks why. She says, "Because it hung in the lab, in the other place. But it's absurd. If I had any faith in the theory, I'd go looking for the painting myself. I think the painting's a red herring." Sebastian asks if she loved it. Nico blinks back tears. "I did love it. I suppose we have that in common, you and I."

Aurélie's handbag falls. Sebastian drops his straw and ducks under the table. Her purse is unzipped, wallet bright red. He palms a hundred-euro bill and surfaces with the handbag. He tells Aurélie her handbag fell. She turns and thanks him. Her smile is the most beautiful thing he's seen in a while. He keeps a neutral expression because she's Cole's girlfriend. He sees Aurélie's eyes widen when she notices Nico, who's watching a family with a dog. Nico is utilitarian-looking: buzzed hair, large dark glasses, oversized clothing, no makeup. She and Cole are talking about yesterday's math exam, which went poorly for him but beautifully for her. Sebastian asks if Copenhagen was a dead end. Nico says, "Probably. I'm not certain of anything. But I can't explain how the accident happened, so clearly there are variables I don't understand."

Ari moves in a cloud of rumors. Cole says her first husband was an assassin. Obie says they were both killers, and she did thirty years in an American prison. Sebastian looks at photos online. Ari is still beautiful, formidable, but has the haunted air of a refugee. Her spouse Eddie Kalisa no longer performs, except at fundraisers. She teaches at a conservatory, mentors at-risk youth, and smiles for photographers. Cole says Eddie and Ari often go to the opera. So when Sebastian returns to Paris for spring break, he asks Nico to go with him. He likes doing things with Nico. She sits perfectly still, recording conversations, making lists, absorbing experiences as a counterweight to despair. She's stuck in this world, unable to get home. At intermission, he asks if she used to go to the opera, before. She says opera hasn't been a thing since her parents' generation. She never had time, then her children, Samir and Marlowe, were very young when she was separated from them. She can't quite look at him. "Life gets in the way." She did go to the ballet occasionally.

Sebastian spots Ari and Eddie. Eddie is small in rumpled tweed. Ari is elegant in a dark suit, white hair, red scarf, lipstick, cane. Eddie stays by her side, hand on her back. Nico winces. "Did you know they'd be here?" He says he knew Eddie came sometimes, not her wife. Nico doesn't believe him. He says his plan was to approach Ari through Eddie. Nico says, "Perhaps now you won't have to." Ari vanishes into the crowd at intermission. Sebastian watches Eddie alone on a mezzanine staircase, then a side balcony, the chair next to hers empty. Her wife left at intermission.

Out on the street, walking toward the metro on a narrow street empty except for delivery robots, sweet-looking animalistic characters who glow softly on their wheels, Nico says, "It's data. Eddie likes the opera more than Ari." Sebastian says, "Eddie's the musician." Nico asks why he's fixated. He says, "I'm a fixative person." She says he's avoiding the question. "Before you, I was always by myself." He doesn't like talking about it. He says, "I'd never met someone so alone as you." She says, "With my mother in the same apartment." He chokes. She says, "You know she wasn't really there." He doesn't know what to say. He liked how Eddie stayed close to Ari, an impression of care, felt that she loved her. Nico says, "Your mother sold it. You have to accept that. The painting was hers to sell." Sebastian says, "I know. But it was my father's. It was the only thing I had of his. I'd like to see it again." Nico glances at him. I'd like to see him is what he doesn't say.

Sebastian doesn't return to Paris until he's seventeen. Nico drives him back the day after graduation in a rickety car she just bought. She's a wild driver because she purchased the license too. "I'm not sitting through classes," she says. "I've known some idiots who could drive." In her world, cars are different, but she insists the steering is the same. She brakes and veers on the expressway. His plan is to live with Nico and find a job while deciding what to do next. Gloria just works, always on the computer, talking to her office in LA.

Nico drives with a nervous energy that puts Sebastian on edge, and their conversation turns to Gloria as they pass through the scarred landscape outside the dome. Nico tells him that work has always been Gloria's coping mechanism. When Sebastian asks what she's coping with, Nico reminds him that he knows what happened to her. Sebastian does know, but only because Nico told him: that night in Los Angeles before he was born, when Gloria went to a party in Highland Park where someone blew himself up with a bomb vest, an attack tied to United States loyalists trying to destabilize the emerging Republic of California. She walked over pieces of bodies to escape, and the gash on her forehead needed ten stitches to close. The bomb is why she flinches at loud noises, why she avoids leaving the apartment, why she's such a ghost in the world. But Sebastian's unkind thought is simply get over it, and he knows the question makes him a bad person. He tests the waters aloud, saying it was a long time ago. Nico says you can't predict how you'll be affected by the things that happen to you. She attempts to switch lanes twice, horns blaring and tires screeching, before succeeding, and then the Paris dome comes into view. Sebastian's heart is racing but he feels exhilarated in a near-death-experience way. He remarks that he isn't sure how they all ended up living in a pile of soap bubbles. The dome looks dim and greasy on the horizon, far less iridescent than the architectural renderings had promised. Nico says it's the only domed city outside of Asia and that they should all be grateful. They pass through an area blasted by wildfires, blackened ruins collapsing in the distance. Sebastian mentions domes going up over Toronto and Sydney, and Nico says good for them, her information is outdated. She admits she's not a particularly good driver but thinks almost everyone else is worse.

Sebastian asks if Gloria ever talks about the bomb. Nico says never, that she had to pry it out of her, and that Gloria has a habit of telling people she was at an entirely different party that night. Nico needs to switch lanes again, and Sebastian closes his eyes. While his eyes are still closed, Nico tells him he can stay with her as long as he'd like, and she'll help him find his own apartment when he's ready. Nico's apartment isn't far from the dome, a kilometer or two from that inhuman wall of composite glass for which a thousand centuries-old buildings were razed. The glass breaks the city into an inside and an outside and rises too high into the air. The anti-dome protests kept Nico awake for a year, but now the dome is a reality. Sebastian doesn't like the way it looks outside his window, that grayish semitransparent wall where a building once stood, other buildings faded out like ghosts on the other side. In the quiet of his tiny bedroom, he reads through his notes on Ari Soriano and Eddie Kalisa, formulating a plan.

Of the two women, Eddie seems more approachable. Sebastian goes to some effort to secure a seat next to Eddie at the opera. Usually, but not always, Ari is there for the first half, and Sebastian is careful not to look at her or draw attention to himself. He sits on Eddie's other side. If Ari comes, she leaves at intermission. He suffers through three productions, careful to look engaged and moved and not bored out of his mind, the whole ordeal leading up to a moment where he nods casually to Eddie and wishes her a good evening. After the third opera, he finally judges the moment right to drop a pre-rehearsed opinion about the second act of Caravage, which makes Eddie's face light up. He sits through two more operas and two more similar exchanges before she asks if he might like to join her for a quick drink.

Eddie was born in Rwanda but grew up in Marseilles, she tells him. The city was run by a cartel at the time, but it could have been worse. She started playing piano at seven but didn't excel until her late teens. Sebastian asks what changed. They're at a sidewalk table of a forgettable café in the 15th arrondissement on a beautiful night in early April. Eddie tells him her mother died. Sebastian says he's sorry. Eddie says it happens, that parents don't stick around forever, and asks if he's young. He says twenty-one, a lie. She asks if his parents are still alive. He says that's a surprisingly complicated question. She says we live in complicated times. The thing he doesn't say aloud is you have no idea. He asks her to tell him about hers first. She takes a slow sip of wine and tells him she was in high school when her mother got sick and died a month later. On her deathbed, her mother said, "For fuck's sake, Edeline, take your foot off the brake." Sebastian asks if she was talking about piano, and Eddie confirms it. She started working harder and winning competitions. Life after that was complicated. She married a woman who died in a car accident, then married another woman. They had a daughter, Esme, after which an extraordinary percentage of Eddie's income went to childcare. Her second wife left her for someone else. Eddie rose in prominence until the chaos of the 2030s ended her touring career. She first saw Ari on an armored night train in the south of France during that era. Eddie was on her way home from one of her last concerts, and Ari was traveling with her second husband. Sebastian asks what her first impression of Ari was. Eddie says she was pretty and tired, but everyone was tired in those years, and societal breakdown is exhausting. What Eddie remembered was that at a certain point in the evening, Ari and her husband disappeared. They didn't emerge from the train in Paris, which made no sense because Paris was the only stop. Eddie remembered the train stopping for just a moment in the night, but there was nothing around, just pine forest. It was sinister. She thought for a long time they might have been killed on the train, their bodies shoved out into the dark. Later, when they met again at a dinner party, Ari told Eddie a confused tale about traveling on foot, then by car, then by boat, then another car to Paris, where she lived with Soriano for a year or two until the explosion that killed Soriano and ruined her leg.

Eddie says she's been talking endlessly about herself and knows almost nothing about Sebastian. He tells her he's twenty-one, born and raised in Paris, though technically Vincennes. He spent a few years at a boarding school in Normandy. He's studying art history. He loves opera and paintings. Eddie says that's why she stopped doing interviews, because summing up your life always sounds like cocktail party anecdotes or a tabloid story. She asks if his parents are in Paris. He says his father disappeared before he was born, back in California. He was raised by his mother and a sort of guardian who came to him when he was seven. Eddie asks if she was a good guardian. Sebastian says mostly, then corrects himself, saying he doesn't want to sell her short, that she saved him a little. Eddie is startled, looking at him differently, interested in a way she hadn't been before. Sebastian says she was the only adult in his life who cared about him, that before she came it was just him and his mother, and his mother didn't make an effort. He's made the moment fantastically awkward. Eddie nods tactfully.

It's a cool evening, and Sebastian isn't sweating for once. He remarks that it must be ten degrees cooler inside the dome than out. Eddie is grateful for the change of topic. She says the weather inside the dome is modeled on a previous version of Paris, sometime in the nineties, though she can't remember the exact year. Where there's a deadly heat wave outside, it's still the summer of 1997 inside. Maybe '96. Sebastian asks if she likes the dome. In those days the dome is still so new that no one takes it for granted, making it a reliably interesting topic, but Sebastian can feel the moment slipping away. Soon the dome will be so much a part of everyday life that no one will notice it anymore. Eddie says she believes in the dome, that it'll save them in the next heat wave or killer storm, but the problem is it only keeps out the weather. Sebastian asks what she means. Eddie tells him she was in a flood once, a very long time ago, in Valencia. She was being driven to a concert, wearing a ridiculous suit, and it had been raining. She realized the driver was nervous, then saw a sheen of water over the road. A moment later the water was halfway up the door. She asks if he's ever seen floodwater. He says yes. She describes it as not like bathwater, but muddy and dark. She climbed out the window onto the roof even though the driver shouted at her, not wanting the water on the upholstery. Then the water reached the roof, and she had to jump into it because another car came washing toward them and shifted on top of the car she'd been traveling in. She swam to safety. Sebastian asks what happened. Eddie says a lot of people died, including the driver. She wakes up in her beautiful apartment and sometimes before she's fully awake she hears the noises of the flood, the cars clanking together, the driver screaming. Sebastian says he's sorry, that it sounds horrible. Eddie says it was a long time ago, and that she does like the dome, that's the short answer. She asks what happened to his father. He says it's a mystery. His father went to a party with his mother when she was pregnant, and at some point in the evening he was gone and she never saw him again. Eddie asks if this was during the collapse years, and Sebastian confirms it. Eddie nods as though that explains everything, then says, still, what an awful thing.

Sebastian asks if Eddie's wife is a musician as well, nodding to her wedding ring. Eddie says no, she appreciates music but isn't a musician. Sebastian likes the way Eddie's face brightens when she talks about Ari. At eighteen, he's always on the lookout for evidence that true love might exist, though he would literally have died before admitting that. Eddie says Ari travels, collects art and friendships. Sebastian says she sounds interesting and asks what kind of art she collects. Eddie says abstract stuff from the late 2030s, also works from New York City in the mid-twentieth century. Sebastian names Cecile Gray Bazelon and Richard Pousette-Dart, having done his research. Eddie smiles and says possibly, those names ring a bell. Ari walks her through the apartment, names names, points out details, but Eddie gets lost in the images. Sebastian says what an extraordinary thing, getting to live with those works, that he's never even seen most of them. He's fishing desperately, trying to sound much older than he is. Eddie says it really is extraordinary and that she's a lucky woman. The conversation moves on. No dinner party invitation presents itself.

Eddie isn't at the opera the next week, or the week after, and then Sebastian reads her obituary: the noted pianist Eddie Kalisa has died unexpectedly in a Paris hospital following complications from surgery. She is survived by her wife, Ari Soriano of Paris, and her grown daughter, Esme Léon-Kalisa of Lisbon. Sebastian realizes he needs another angle of approach.

In that first year after high school, Sebastian works at a grocery store in the 2nd arrondissement and lives in a tiny apartment in Nico's neighborhood. The apartment is a single room with a tiny closet for a toilet carved out of the corner, a bathtub next to the kitchen sink, and a fridge he can open from his bed. He rented it sight unseen and never regretted it. Restocking grocery shelves doesn't pay well, and after all those years in dormitories he was desperate not to have roommates. But when he tries to think ahead, to consider living in this space in a year, five years, ten, the walls close in and he feels very tired. The girl he's dating, Marie-Eve, says what a gift to have his own apartment. They met at the grocery store, where they work overlapping shifts. She lives out in the Vincennes forest in a former equestrian center taken over by climate refugees. It isn't terrible, she says, but it's crowded, and the apartment she shares with another woman was previously an administrative office. Sebastian says it's incredibly fortunate. They're lying together after sex, and she's gotten chilled so he wrapped her in the blanket. He loves the weight of her head on his chest, her soft hair. Marie-Eve blinks shortsightedly at his kitchenette, her glasses on the side table, and says she doesn't want to know how he managed to get this place, that he must have serious connections. Did he have serious connections? He has Nico. She's the one who got him this place, but until that moment he hadn't thought through what that means. Nico works in a retail job, but there's no possibility that this work lines up financially with the size of her apartment a few blocks away, let alone her travels around Europe to speak with other scientists about parallel universes. Sebastian says it's not like they're inside the dome, though. Marie-Eve says still, with a heaviness in her voice that means she's falling asleep.

His apartment is south of the dome, on a street abandoned by the municipal government. A local gang negotiated control of the block, but the cost of that control is an absolute absence of municipal services. Garbage has to be hauled to a designated corner for a gang-affiliated service that misses pickup three Tuesdays out of four. The street is so dirty the sidewalk appears several shades darker than the rest of the neighborhood. A few old people go out with brooms sometimes, trying to restore order, but individuals can't fill the void left by absent systems, and an air of abandonment remains. The men who run the neighborhood are a constant presence, sitting on stoops, pulling up in cars at all hours, carrying boxes of who-knows-what in and out of buildings. They're elaborately polite in a manner that chills him. His school friend Obie is among them. Sebastian stumbles across him almost literally one night on his way home from a bar where he'd been drinking with Cole and Cole's girlfriend. They'd lost track of Obie after graduation, and now Sebastian understands why. Obie is on a corner with two older men Sebastian recognizes as local gangsters, the three of them speaking quietly and confidentially. Sebastian calls out Obie's name too loud, too bright. Obie responds with an unsmiling nod, and Sebastian thinks he detects a warning in the way he looks at him. Obie has moved past him somehow and seems much older than Sebastian feels. He's slipped into his father's underworld. The other two men stare flatly. Obie finally says they went to school together, and one of them nods. Sebastian doesn't like their gaze on him, the three of them. He thinks stupidly of a long-ago TV show about people who could see ghosts, where the portentous announcement was that if you can see ghosts, the ghosts can see you back. He's seen these men because Obie is among them, and now they can see him. He's drawn their attention. He says good night awkwardly and goes up to his apartment feeling like an idiot. But the weeks slide past without incident, and he tries not to think about it. He doesn't mind living there. The neighborhood isn't noticeably more dangerous than anywhere else, he's close to Nico, and so long as his hours don't get cut, he can make his rent. He doesn't have to think about how Nico got him the apartment.

Nico asks if he's happy working at the grocery store. It's a spring evening in her apartment, where they meet for dinner twice a week. He says it's fine, that he could imagine staying there for a while. They sit side by side so they can both look at the mural. She had it painted two or three years ago, but it retains a sheen of novelty for him. It's beautiful. He likes to imagine himself standing in that garden, looking up at the lights of towers. He likes to imagine that his mother is Nico. She asks what he wants to do with his life. He says he doesn't know, that he knows it sounds like an evasion, that he's just not sure, and that he doesn't think he's the most ambitious person. Nico says sometimes it's clarifying to pose the question in reverse: what doesn't he want his life to be? After a moment, Sebastian says he doesn't want to be violent, thinking of a bully at school who pushed him down a staircase and gave him a mild concussion when he was fourteen. He says he doesn't want to be mean, that he knows it sounds childish. Nico says it doesn't. She offers a word of advice if he doesn't want to be mean: the guys who run the neighborhood, don't get into debt with them. Not just money, but don't put himself in a position where they do him a favor of any kind, because then they'll own him. Sebastian wonders if they own Nico but doesn't want to ask.

After Eddie Kalisa dies, Sebastian decides to wait a beat. For two long, careful years he puts his mission on hold. He will steal the painting from Ari Soriano, but not yet. A man has to have a code, a character said in some reality TV episode he watched as a child, and he knows the idea is outdated but it's something he thinks about. He wants to steal his father's painting, but he doesn't want to steal from a woman reeling from the loss of her wife. He wants to give her time to recover and then steal it, instead of joining a parade of bad luck. He doesn't want to be mean. Waiting is difficult. Can you be the still point of the turning world? Can you remain still, purposefully still, when all your instincts bend toward action? For two years he works in the grocery store, commutes on the metro, says careful good mornings and good evenings to the quiet men who move through the neighborhood, sleeps with Marie-Eve and goes on dates with other girls on occasion, goes to Nico's apartment for dinner when she's in town, and ignores Gloria. Twenty-five months after Eddie Kalisa's death, he begins staking out Ari Soriano's apartment.

Ari is a surprisingly busy person, at least on the surface. Sebastian has known old people in Paris who settled into their apartments and almost never left, but Ari isn't like that. She's up early, walking very slowly down the block toward the park, her housekeeper following at a discreet distance. At the park she sits and watches people go by. She seems to like dogs. She goes to lunches with friends, sits in a café not far from her apartment, goes to concerts and the opera. On a spring morning, one of his days off from the grocery store, Sebastian dresses carefully and approaches her at the café. He asks in English if she's Ari Soriano. She looks at him appraisingly. She's impeccably dressed, as always, carrying what he's come to recognize as her opera cane: black, very elegant, with an ivory handle. She says he's an American. He says his parents were American, that he was born in Paris. She invites him to sit. He sits across from her and says he's sorry to bother her, but he's studying art history and has been working on a master's dissertation that involves some of her art collection.

On the appointed afternoon, Sebastian enters her building and takes the elevator to the fifth floor, which is as high as it goes, but she lives on the sixth. He does two laps of a silent carpeted square at the top of the stairwell before realizing that the closet-sized door furthest from the grand apartment entrances isn't a closet at all. It opens into a cavernous, oddly unfinished back stairwell with extremely sketchy electrical wiring flowing down the walls and bare lightbulbs suspended overhead. He climbs a long flight of wooden stairs to a plain white corridor with three doors. His instructions now make sense, and he follows the corridor to the end. The housekeeper answers. She's younger than Ari by at least a decade. Pilar. She says he must be Sebastian and invites him in. He follows her into a labyrinthine apartment lined with art and bookcases. Ari is reading at a dining room table, maintaining an air of formality even sitting with a book in her own home. It seems to him that she's someone who never fully relaxes. She looks up, and for just a heartbeat before she smiles, her expression is that of a hawk evaluating its prey. She's wearing full makeup. Sebastian glances around casually, and there it is: Swan Dive, his window into the sea from childhood, the last trace of his father in the world, crammed amidst all the other works on an overcrowded wall like it means nothing to her. Childhood memories flood back: lying on the couch after school, imagining being anywhere other than in the oppressively silent apartment where his mother worked hour upon hour behind a closed door, imagining swimming, diving, weightlessness, escape. Sometimes he imagined his father was the diver.

Ari says good afternoon. Sebastian stammers greetings, more nervous than he'd hoped. He shakes her hand, exchanges pleasantries, and launches into a prepared monologue about Post-Collapse Formalism, which he researched precisely because it has nothing to do with the painting he's about to steal. The theft itself isn't difficult. He finds a way to walk with her as far as possible from the painting, then tells her they'd met before, at Gloria's apartment in Vincennes. He'd noticed she closes her eyes whenever she's trying to remember something, and she doesn't disappoint. When he asks to use the bathroom, she nods distractedly. He walks back the way he came, past the bathroom door and silently through the kitchen, where Pilar is stirring soup with her back to him. She doesn't turn. He lifts Swan Dive from the wall, grabs his shoes, and slips out of the apartment. He feels wildly alive. He'd brought a thin piece of cloth and wraps the painting on his way down to the fifth floor, where by some miracle the elevator is waiting. He puts on his shoes in the elevator and within minutes is in a taxi bound for Vincennes. How had this been so easy? He could have done it years ago, that's the thing he keeps thinking.

Sebastian walks into Gloria's apartment. He hasn't lived here in a long time, but he'd kept a key on principle. Gloria is sitting cross-legged on her sofa with a laptop. The apartment is messier than he's ever seen it, cups here and there on surfaces. She says his name. Then she says he still has a key. He thanks her for not changing the locks. He hasn't seen her in three years, maybe four.

The uncertainty gnaws at him after Gloria's warning. Ari Soriano is on her way up, and he is not here. He stays hidden in his mother's room, a space he realizes he has never entered in all the years he lived in this apartment. It is her private realm: a desk with two monitors, a cascade of sticky notes, a professional camera for video calls, a wood screen serving as a backdrop, and behind it, just enough room for a single unmade bed. No art on the walls, just white paint. He wonders why he came here instead of his own apartment. The police would go to his place, yes, but does a person like Ari call the police? The thought chills him. Perhaps she has other contacts at her disposal. He wonders how she acquired her fortune, why she was imprisoned in the United States. An hour passes while he paces and wonders if he is going to die.

When he finally leaves, he does not expect Ari to follow him. But he stops at a food stand by the equestrian center settlement in the Vincennes forest, and before his curry rice is ready, Ari appears. She is walking toward him with a grim expression, but she is looking past him at another man approaching. Before he can process what is happening, the man pushes her hard with one hand and grabs her handbag with the other. She hits the pavement with a horrible thud. He runs to her, kneels by her side, says her name until she blinks back to consciousness. There is blood on the pavement under her head. He tells her she has to go to the hospital, and at first she does not protest. He helps her to her feet, awkwardly supporting her while holding on to the painting he stole from her, aware of the absurdity. He flags a cab and bundles her into the back seat.

She drifts off, then wakes and argues with him. She will not go to the hospital. If he tries to force her, she will tell everyone he stole the painting. Exasperated, he takes her back to Nico's place and somehow gets her up the stairs and into his old bedroom. In the lamplight she looks terrible, dazed and ill, one pupil larger than the other. He decides to wait for Nico to come home and then insist she go to the hospital. Ari says she is not going, as if reading his mind. He leaves her there with the painting and sits in the living room researching concussions. When he returns to ask her questions to keep her awake, she tells him a long strange story about fleeing the Republic of Texas, a flight across the Atlantic under an assumed name, a first husband, a second husband, murder, an explosion. Then she trails off, and he realizes she has fallen asleep. Her breathing sounds quiet and steady. Perhaps it is not the worst thing to let her rest.

He returns to the living room and paces. He has his father's painting, the thing he most longed for, but everything has gone catastrophically wrong. He considers the possibility that if she dies here in the apartment, he could call Obie or one of the local gangsters who spends time smoking in front of the café on the corner. He is fairly confident the body would disappear. But then he would owe a favor. He would be owned. He sees a life of crime unfolding before him, gray decades where he would not be the kind of person he hoped for. He has to wake her.

Nico's voice startles him. She has come in quietly while he was pacing. He says he wanted to see her on his birthday, and realizes he will soon have to explain why Ari Soriano is asleep in her guest bedroom. He forces himself to sit still. Nico takes off her coat, hangs her keys, and has a faraway look he knows too well. She asks how long he waited. She was out for hours. She asks if that is any kind of way to spend his birthday, and manages a thin smile. Birthdays are the worst days for her, the hardest. In another timeline, her birthday was when her children made her crayon drawings and helped her blow out candles.

She asks how old he is. Twenty, he says, maintaining steady eye contact, knowing sometimes that alone can bring her back. She repeats it, then says that means Marlowe is twenty-three now, and Samir is twenty-five. Yes, she says quietly. Twenty-five. He does not say aloud what he thinks: that time might move differently in the other place, that perhaps no one there has yet realized she is gone, or that a century has passed and her children are dead. Instead he tells her they are safe. She was pulled away into a bad timeline, but her children got to stay. She nods, blinks, takes a long wavering breath. She says she is glad he came, and when she looks at him, he sees something he had not expected. She is strangely peaceful.

She tells him she realized something today while walking in the park, thinking about Ari Soriano of all people. She spent time with her after the explosion, mostly arguing. She was thinking about the last argument, the one that ended any possibility of friendship. Ari made a comment about having lost a world too, because her country collapsed. Nico took offense. She said, you and three hundred sixty million other people, you think that makes you special? She shouted at her and left and never saw her again. But just now, walking, she realized Ari was right. If you live long enough, Nico says, you become a migrant from another timeline. There is the world you learn to navigate as you enter adulthood, and then that world slips away by degrees, and after a while there is nothing left of it, but you are still here. He asks if she is saying that if you live long enough, your life turns into sci-fi. He does not like to think about getting older. He hated being an adolescent but feared adulthood, and wished to stay in the in-between. He is desperate to change the subject.

He tells her he cannot bring back everything she lost, but he has something for her. He slips into the guest bedroom, closes the door, and stops, listening. Ari is speaking softly in the dark. Eddie, he hears her say very quietly, Eddie, my love, you're finally here. He whispers that it is him, Sebastian. But she does not respond. A creeping awareness comes over him: the silence emanating from the bed is too still, too deep. He takes a long breath and realizes he is the only person breathing in this space. There is a faint scent he recognizes, one that was not here before: cigar smoke and cedar. It is as if Eddie Kalisa had just passed through the room.

He grabs the painting quickly and goes back to the living room. His heart is beating too fast. He closes his eyes, trying to gather himself. Nico does not notice; she is gazing at the mural, that almost photo-real rendering of a garden. He knows now that there are times he will look back on this night and recognize a hinge moment, as Ari would have called it. There is his life before Ari Soriano died in Nico's apartment, and his life afterward. The break point can be isolated further: the moment before he calls Obie, before he comes with two other men who run the neighborhood and makes the body disappear, and the moment after. Or the moments after they take the body away, and before Obie's boss calls him with that dreaded and expected invitation to meet and discuss working with them. All of it is already in motion as he steps out of the bedroom with the painting. But for now there is only this: Nico turning to look at him, her eyes going wide when she sees Swan Dive in his hands.

She whispers, oh my god, how did you get this? He sits in the other armchair and hands her the painting. There are tears in her eyes. She takes it, runs her fingertips lightly over the oil-paint brushstrokes. He tells her he bought it back from Ari, that he thought she could hang it in her apartment and he would visit it here. She thanks him softly, thanks him so much. He wanted her to believe him, but it is painful when she does, because what he sees in her face is a belief in a version of himself that does not exist. She thinks he is a better person than he is. In a moment he will have to tell her, will have to make the call to someone who can make Ari's body disappear, and he will be sucked into a long gray vortex of crime and favors that he already knows will end badly. But not yet. For now he can just sit with Nico, this woman who has been his only parent, and observe her happiness. Happy birthday, he says.