She headed northeast, through upmarket Fernside, then through Big Box with its tracts of smallish, badly built houses, slipping along the narrowest streets, which were dimly lit and not crowded. Several people passed her, intent on their own stories. Two teenagers paused as if to try a mugging, but she began coughing and croaked out, “Help me!” and they scurried away.

Around midnight, and after a few wrong turns – the streets in Big Box looked so much alike – she reached her parents’ former house. No lights were on, the door to the garage was open, and the plate-glass window at the front was smashed, so she didn’t think anyone was in there. The current occupants were either dead or elsewhere. It was the same with the identical house next door, the one where the rifle was buried.

She stood for a moment, calming herself down, listening to the blood in her head: katoush, katoush, katoush. Either the rifle was still there or it was gone. If it was there, she’d have a rifle. If it was gone, she wouldn’t have one. Nothing to panic about.

She opened the neighbours’ garden gate, stealthy as a thief. Darkness, no movement. The scent of night flowers: lilies, nicotiana. Mixed with that, a whiff of smoke from something burning, blocks away: she could see the flare. A kudzu moth flickered against her face.

She stuck the crowbar under a patio stone, lifted, grabbed the edge, heaved the stone over. Did it again, and again. Three patio stones. Then she dug with the shovel.

A heartbeat, then another.

It was there.

Don’t cry, she told herself. Just cut open the plastic, grab the rifle and the ammunition, and get out of here.

It took her three days to get back to AnooYoo, skirting the worst rioting. There were muddy footprints on the outside steps, but no one had broken in.

6

The rifle is a primitive weapon – a Ruger 44/99 Deerfield. It had been her father’s. He was the one who’d taught her to shoot, when she was twelve, back in those days that seem now like some mushroom-induced Technicolour brain vacation. Aim for the centre of the body, he’d said. Don’t waste your time with heads. He said he just meant animals.

They’d been living in the semi-country, before the sprawl had rolled over that stretch of landscape. Their white frame house had ten acres of trees around it, and there were squirrels, and the first green rabbits. No rakunks, those hadn’t been put together yet. There were a lot of deer; they’d get into her mother’s vegetable garden. Toby had shot a couple, and helped to dress them; she can still remember the smell, and the slither of shining viscera. They’d eaten deer stew, and her mother had made soup with the bones. But mostly Toby and her father shot tin cans, and rats at the dump – there’d still been a dump. She’d practised a lot, which had pleased her dad. “Great shot, pal,” he’d say.

Had he wanted a son? Perhaps. What he’d said was that everyone needed to know how to shoot. His generation believed that if there was trouble all you’d have to do was shoot someone and then it would be okay.

Then the CorpSeCorps had outlawed firearms in the interests of public security, reserving the newly invented sprayguns for themselves, and suddenly people were officially weaponless. Her father had buried his rifle and a supply of ammunition under a pile of discarded picket fencing and shown Toby where it was in case she ever needed it. The CorpSeCorps could have found it with their metal detectors – they were rumoured to be doing sweeps – but they couldn’t look everywhere, and her father was innocuous from their point of view. He sold air conditioning. He was a small potato.

Then a developer wanted to buy his land. The offer was good, but Toby’s father refused to sell. He liked it where he was, he said. So did Toby’s mother, who ran the HelthWyzer supplements franchise in the nearest shopping area. They turned down another offer, then a third. “We’ll build around you,” said the developer. Toby’s father said that was okay with him: by this time it had become a matter of principle.

He thought the world was still the way it had been fifty years before, thinks Toby. He shouldn’t have been so stubborn. Already, back then, the CorpSeCorps were consolidating their power. They’d started as a private security firm for the Corporations, but then they’d taken over when the local police forces collapsed for lack of funding, and people liked that at first because the Corporations paid, but now CorpSeCorps were sending their tentacles everywhere. He should have caved.

First he’d lost his job with the air-conditioning corp. He got another one selling thermal windows, but it paid less. Then Toby’s mother came down with a strange illness. She couldn’t understand it, because she’d always been so careful about her health: she worked out, she ate a lot of vegetables, she took a dose of HelthWyzer Hi-Potency VitalVite supplements daily. Franchise operators like her got a deal on the supplements – their own customized package, just like the ones for the higher-ups at HelthWyzer.

She took more supplements, but despite that she became weak and confused and lost weight rapidly: it was as if her body had turned against itself. No doctor could give her a diagnosis, though many tests were done by the HelthWyzer Corp clinics; they took an interest because she’d been such a faithful user of their products. They arranged for special care, with their own doctors. They charged for it, though, and even with the discount for members of the HelthWyzer Franchise Family it was a lot of money; and because the condition had no name, her parents’ modest health insurance plan refused to cover the costs. Nobody could get public wellness coverage unless they had no money of their own whatsoever.

Not that you’d want to go to one of those public dump bins anyway, thought Toby. All they did was poke at your tongue and give you a few germs and viruses you didn’t already have, and send you home.

Toby’s father took out a second mortgage and poured the money into the doctors and the drugs and the hired nurses and the hospitals. But Toby’s mother continued to wither away.

Her father had to sell their white frame house then, for a much lower price than the one he’d first been offered. The day after the sale closed, the bulldozers flattened the place. Her father bought another house, a tiny split-level in a new subdivision – the one nicknamed Big Box because it was flanked by a whole flotilla of megastores. He’d dug up his rifle from under the picket fencing, smuggled it to the new house, and buried it again, this time under the patio stones in the barren little backyard.

Then he’d lost his thermal-window job because he’d taken too much time off due to his wife’s illness. His solarcar had to be sold. Then the furniture disappeared, piece by piece; not that Toby’s father could get much for it. People can smell desperation on you, he said to Toby. They take advantage.

This conversation took place over the phone because Toby had made it to college despite the lack of family cash. She’d got a meagre scholarship from the Martha Graham Academy, which she was fleshing out by waiting tables in the student cafeteria. She wanted to come home and help out with her mother, who’d been shipped back from the hospital and was sleeping on the main-floor sofa because she couldn’t climb stairs, but her father said no, Toby should stay at college, because there was nothing she could do.

Finally even the tacky Big Box house had to be put up for sale. The sign was on the lawn when Toby came home for her mother’s funeral. Her father by that time was a wreck; humiliation, pain, and failure had eaten away at him until there was almost nothing left.

Her mother’s funeral was short and dreary. After it, Toby sat with her father in the stripped-down kitchen. They drank a six-pack between them, Toby two, her father four. Then, after Toby had gone to bed, her father went into the empty garage and stuck the Ruger into his mouth, and pulled the trigger.