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What is your name? Nothing. How old are you? Nothing. He hesitates before his next question. Who was the woman by the river? Something surges up from his core, a surprise heave of emotional vomit, but he gags it back down. Her name was—the weight in your hand, the trigger—
    GUNS CAN KILL YOU! YOUR BRAIN I Vbutvee wS IMPORTANT! DO NOT GET SHOT IN THE HEAD!
    He is deeply relieved when this second voice interrupts. Its simple information is much easier to process than that terrifying eruption of feeling.
    What you did—all the people you—
    FIND OTHER THINGS LIKE YOU! THEY CAN HELP YOU GET THINGS YOU WANT!
    And so a strange bartering session begins in his mind. He gives up the grief he felt upon seeing the woman and remembers what guns do and that he should avoid people who have them. He hands over the aching desire to see his mother again and receives the knowledge that he will be safer if he can find a group to join. It seems a very fair bargain.
    A jolt ripples through the cloud of hands and his eyes snap open wide. His new sense has found something. The hands have reached very far, perhaps miles, and touched something that arouses them. They stretch off into the darkness of the woods, sending pulses of excitement back to him like morse code.
    Come. Follow. Take.
    He obeys.
    His muscles, which begin to cool and stiffen any time he stands still, become supple again with whatever unknown energy drives them, and he walks at a brisk pace. The forest grows darker as he nears its heart. He glimpses strange things from the corner of his eyes: crystalline frogs and birds that glow, doors in the dirt and cyclones of bones, but he doesn’t stop to wonder at these things. He has traded wonder for hunger. He follows the brute.

 
    The sun sets faster than it used to. Nora is almost sure of this. It plummets like a glob of wax in a lava lamp, so rapidly she swears she can trace its motion, and she wonders if the earth has sped up. If perhaps somehow, all the bombs pummeling its crust have actually increased its spin. A ridiculous thought, but she still raises her walking pace. It’s unfair to Addis’s little legs, but he doesn’t complain. He maintains a half-run to keep up.
    “Why don’t we find a car?” he pants.
    “Dad never showed me how to hotwire.”
    “What if somebody left their keys?”
    “Those ones are probably all gone by now. But keep an eye out.”
    Addis abruptly stops and turns around. “What was that?”
    Nora didn’t actually hear it, so she feels okay saying, “Nothing. Probably boats knocking against each other. Come on.”
    They pass several motels on their way up the hill, but a bed isn’t much use if you can’t sleep, and she knows she won’t be able to tonight without a gun under her pillow. She pushes forward, scanning the shopfront windows.
    “Why aren’t we stopping?” Addis says after keeping quiet for an impressive ten minutes.
    “We need guns.”
    “But I’m tired .”
    “There are things out there that don’t get tired. We need guns.”
    Addis sighs.
    “Tell you what, A.D.D. If we find a lot of bullets, I’ll let you shoot the next thing we need to shoot.”
    Addis smiles.
    The neighborhood gets seedier as they move north. Pawn shops, smoke shops, dark alleys littered with condoms and syringes. This is encouraging. The “bad neighborhoods” of yesterday are the survival buffets of ^butveeys ltoday, full of guns and drugs and all the other equipment necessary for living the low life. No neighborhood built for prosperity has any place in the new era—no one needs parks or cafes or fitness centers, much less schools or libraries. What’s useful now is the infrastructure of the underworld, with its triple-bolted doors and barred windows, its hidden passages and plentiful supplies of vice. The slums and ghettos had the right idea all along. They were just ahead of their time.
    “There!” Addis says, pointing wildly at a storefront.
    Nora stops and stares at it. A lovingly