Mitch listened to Morgan in the shower in their room, then opened the front door. Kaye stood outside with her hand up, about to knock.

“We’re wasting a room,” she said. “We’ve taken on some responsibilities, haven’t we?”

Mitch hugged her. “Your instincts,” he said.

“What do your instincts tell you?” she asked, nuzzling his shoulder.

“They’re kids. They’ve been out on the road for weeks, months. Someone should call their parents.”

“Maybe they never had real parents. They’re desperate, Mitch.” Kaye pushed back to look up at him.

“They’re also independent enough to bury a dead baby and stay on the road. The doctor should have called the police, Kaye.”

“I know,” Kaye said. “I also know why he didn’t. The rules have changed. He thinks most of the babies are going to be born dead. Are we the only ones with any hope?”

The shower stopped and the stall door clicked open. The small bathroom was filled with steam.

“The girls,” Kaye said, and walked over to the next door. She gave Mitch a hand-open sign that he instantly recognized from the marching crowds in Albany, and he understood for the first time what the crowds had been trying to show: strong belief in and a cautious submission to the way of Life, belief in the ultimate wisdom of the human genome. No presumption of doom, no ignorant attempts to use new human powers to block the rivers of DNA flowing through the generations.

Faith in Life.

Morgan dressed quickly. “Jayce and Delia don’t need me,” he said as he stood in the small room. The holes in the sleeves of his black pullover were even more obvious now that his skin was clean. He let the dirty windbreaker dangle from one arm. “I don’t want to be a burden. I’ll go now. Give my thanks, hey, but—”

“Please be quiet and sit down,” Mitch said. “What the lady wants, goes. She wants you to stick around.”

Morgan blinked in surprise, then sat on the end of the bed. The springs squeaked and the frame groaned. “I think it’s the end of the world,” he said. “We’ve really made God angry.”

“Don’t jump to any conclusions,” Mitch said. “Believe it or not, all this has happened before.”

Jayce turned on the TV and watched from the bed while Delia took a long bath in the chipped and narrow tub. The girl hummed to herself, tunes from cartoon shows — Scooby Doo, Anima-niacs, Inspector Gadget. Kaye sat in the single chair. Jayce had found something old and affirming on the TV: Pollyanna, with Hayley Mills. Karl Maiden was kneeling in a dry grassy field, berating himself for his stubborn blindness. It was an impassioned performance. Kaye did not remember the movie being so compelling. She watched it with Jayce until she noticed that the girl was sound asleep. Then, turning down the volume, Kaye switched over to Fox News.

There was a smattering of show business stories, a brief political report on congressional elections, then an interview with Bill Cosby on his commercials for the CDC and the Taskforce. Kaye turned up the volume.

“I was a buddy of David Satcher, the former surgeon general, and they must have a kind of ol’ boy network,” Cosby told the interviewer, a blond woman with a large smile and intense blue eyes, “ ‘cause years ago they got me, this ol’ guy, in to talk about what was important, what they were doing. They thought I might be able to help again.”

“You’ve joined quite a select team,” said the interviewer.

“Dustin Hoffman and Michael Crichton. Let’s take a look at your spot.”

Kaye leaned forward. Cosby returned against a black background, face seamed with parental concern. “My friends at the Centers for Disease Control, and many other researchers around the world, are hard at work every day to solve this problem we’re all facing. Herod’s flu. SHEVA. Every day. Nobody’s gonna rest until it’s understood and we can cure it. You can take it from me, these people care, and when you hurt, they hurt, too. Nobody’s asking you to be patient. But to survive this, we all have to be smart”

The interviewer looked away from the big screen television on the set. “Let’s play an excerpt from Dustin Hoffman’s message…”

Hoffman stood on a bare motion picture sound stage with his hands thrust into the pockets of tailored beige pants. He smiled a friendly but solemn greeting. “My name is Dustin Hoffrnan. You might remember I played a scientist righting a deadly disease in a movie called Outbreak. I’ve been talking to the scientists at the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and they’re working as hard as they can, every day, to fight SHEVA and stop our children from dying.”

The interviewer interrupted the clip. “What are the scientists doing that they weren’t doing last year? What’s new in the effort?”

Cosby made a sour face. “I’m just a man who wants to help us get through this mess. Doctors and scientists are the only hope we’ve got, and we can’t just take to the streets and burn things down and make it all go away. We’re talking about thinking things through, working together, not engaging in riots and panic.”

Delia stood in the bathroom doorway, plump legs bare beneath the small motel towel, head wrapped in another towel. She stared fixedly at the television. “It’s not going to make any difference,” she said. “My babies are dead.”

Mitch returned from the Coke machine at the end of the line of rooms to find Morgan pacing in a U around the bed. The boy’s hands were knots of frustration. “I can’t stop thinking,” Morgan said. Mitch held out a Coke and Morgan stared at it, took it from his hand, popped the top, and chugged it back fiercely. “You know what they did, what Jayce did? When we needed money?”

“I don’t need to know, Morgan,” Mitch said.

“It’s how they treat me. Jayce went out and got a man to pay for it, and, you know, she and Delia blew him, and took some money. Jesus, I ate some of that dinner, too. And the next night. Then we were hitching and Delia started having her baby. They won’t let me touch them, even hug them, they won’t put their arms around me, but for money, they blow these guys, and they don’t care whether I see them or not!” He pounded his temple with the ball of his thumb. “They are so stupid, like farm animals.”

“It must have been tough out there,” Mitch said. “You were all hungry.”

“I went with them because my father’s nothing great, you know, but he doesn’t beat me. He works all day. They needed me more than he does. But I want to go back. I can’t do anything more for them.”

“I understand,” Mitch said. “But don’t be hasty. We’ll work this through.”

“I am so sick of this shit!” Morgan howled.

They heard the howl in the next room. Jayce sat up in bed and rubbed her eyes. “There he goes again,” she murmured.

Delia dried off her hair. “He really isn’t stable sometimes,” she said.

“Can you drop us off in Cincinnati?” Jayce asked. “I have an uncle there. Maybe you can send Morgan back home now.”

“Sometimes Morgan’s such a child,” Delia said.

Kaye watched them from her chair, her face pinking with an emotion she could not quite understand: solidarity compounded with visceral disgust.

Minutes later, she met Mitch outside, under the long motel walkway. They held hands.

Mitch pointed his thumb over his shoulder, through the room’s open door. The shower was running again. “His second. He says he feels dirty all the time. The girls have played a little loose with poor Morgan.”

“What was he expecting?”

“No idea.”

“To go to bed with them?”

“I don’t know,” Mitch said quietly. “Maybe he just wants to be treated with respect.”

“I don’t think they know how,” Kaye said. She pressed her hand on his chest, rubbed him there, her eyes focused on something distant and invisible. “The girls want to be dropped off in Cincinnati.”