No, it wasn’t something physical that made Zero stand out; it was how he made you feel. That was the best way Grey could explain it. The others seemed about as interested in the people behind the glass as a bunch of chimps at the zoo. But not Zero: Zero was paying attention. Whenever they dropped the bars, sealing Zero on the back side of the room, and Grey squeezed into his biohazard suit and went in through the air lock to clean up or bring in the rabbits-rabbits, for Christsakes; why did it have to be rabbits?-a kind of prickling climbed up his neck, like his skin was crawling with ants. He’d go about his work quickly, not even really looking up from the floor, and by the time he got out of there and into decon, he’d be glazed with sweat and breathing hard. Even now, a wall of glass two inches thick between them and Zero hanging so that all Grey could see was his big glowing backside and spreading, clawlike feet-Grey could still feel Zero’s mind roving around the dark room, trolling like an invisible net.

Still, Grey had to say it wasn’t a bad job on the whole. He’d certainly had worse in his life. Most of the time all he did was just sit there through an eight-hour shift, penning his way through a crossword and checking the monitor and logging in his reports, what Zero ate and didn’t eat and how much of his piss and shit went down the drain, and backing up the hard drives when they maxed out with a hundred hours of video footage of Zero doing nothing.

He wondered if the others weren’t eating, either. He thought he’d ask one of the techs about that. Maybe they’d all gone on some kind of hunger strike; maybe they were just tired of rabbits and wanted squirrel instead, or possum, or kangaroo. It was funny to think it, given the way the glow-sticks ate-Grey had let himself watch this only once, and that was one time too many; it had practically turned him into a vegetarian-but he had to say there was something fussy about them, like they had rules about eating, starting with the whole business with the tenth rabbit. Who knew what that was about? You gave them ten rabbits, they’d eat only nine, leave the tenth just where it was, like they were saving it for later. Grey had owned a dog once who was like that. He’d called him Brownbear, for no particular reason; he didn’t look especially bearish, and he wasn’t even really brown but kind of a mellow tan color, with flecks of white on his muzzle and chest. Brownbear would eat exactly half his bowl each morning, then finish it at night. Grey was usually asleep when this happened; he’d wake up at two or three A.M. to the sound of the dog in the kitchen, cracking the kibble on his molars, and in the morning, the dish would be sitting empty in its spot by the stove. Brownbear was a good dog, the best he’d ever had. But that was years ago; he’d had to give him up, and Brownbear would be long dead by now.

All the civilian workers, the sweeps and some of the technicals, were housed together in the barracks at the south end of the compound. The rooms weren’t bad, with cable and a hot shower, and no bills to pay. Nobody was going anywhere for a while, that was part of the deal, but Grey didn’t mind; everything he needed he had right here, and the pay was good, right up there with oil-rig money, all piling up in an offshore account with his name on it. They weren’t even taking out any taxes, some kind of special arrangement for civilians employed under the Federal Emergency Homeland Protection Act. A year or two of this, Grey figured, and as long as he didn’t piss away too much at the commissary on smokes and snacks, he’d have enough socked away to put some serious mileage between himself and Zero and all the rest of them. The other sweeps were an okay bunch, but he preferred to keep to himself. In his room at night, he liked to watch the Travel Channel or National Geographic, picking places he’d go when this was all over. For a while he’d been thinking Mexico; Grey figured there’d be plenty of room, since about half the country seemed to have emptied out and was now standing around the parking lot of the Home Depot. But then last week he’d seen a program on French Polynesia-the water blue like he’d never seen blue before, and little houses on stilts sitting right out over it-and now was giving that some serious consideration. Grey was forty-six years old and smoked like a fiend, so he figured he had only about ten good years left to enjoy himself. His old man, who’d smoked like he did, had spent the last five years of his life in a little cart sucking on a tank, until he’d done the big face-plant just a month before his sixtieth birthday.

Still, it would have been nice to get off the grounds every now and then, even just to have a look around. He knew they were in Colorado someplace, from the license plates on some of the cars, and every now and again somebody, probably one of the officers or else the scientific staff, who came and went as they chose, would leave a copy of The Denver Post lying around; so it was no big secret, really, where they were, no matter what Richards said. One day after a heavy snowfall, Grey and some of the other sweeps had gone up to the roof of the barracks to shovel it off, and Grey could see, rising above the line of snowy trees, what looked like some kind of ski resort, with a gondola inching up the hillside and a slope with tiny figures carving down it. It couldn’t have been more than five miles from where he stood. Funny, with a war on and the world the way it was, everything in such a mess, to see a thing like that. Grey had never skied in his life, but he knew there’d be bars and restaurants too, out there beyond the wall of trees, and things like hot tubs and saunas, and people sitting around talking and sipping glasses of wine in the steam. He’d seen that on the Travel Channel, too.

It was March, still winter, and there was plenty of snow on the ground, which meant that once the sun went down the temperature fell like a rock. Tonight a nasty wind was blowing too, and trudging back to the barracks with his hands stuffed in his pockets and his chin tucked into the neck of his parka, Grey felt like his face was getting slapped a hundred times over. All of which made him think some more about Bora-Bora, and those little houses on stilts. Never mind Zero, who apparently had lost his taste for fresh Easter Bunny; what Zero ate and did not eat was none of Grey’s business. If they told him to serve eggs Benedict on toast points from now on, he’d do it with a smile. He wondered what a house like that would cost. With a house like that, you wouldn’t even need plumbing; you could just step to the rail and do your business, any time of the day or night. When Grey had worked rigs in the Gulf, he’d liked to do that, in the early morning or late at night when no one was around; you had to mind the wind, of course, but with a breeze pushing at your back, few pleasures in life compared to taking a leak off a platform two hundred feet over the Gulf and watching it arc into the air before raining down twenty stories into the blue. It made you feel small and big at the same time.

Now the whole oil industry was under federal protection, and it seemed like practically everybody he knew from the old days had disappeared. After that Minneapolis thing, the bombing at the gas depot in Secaucus, the subway attack in L.A. and all the rest, and, of course, what happened in Iran or Iraq or whichever it was, the whole economy had locked up like a bad transmission. With his knees and the smoking and the thing on his record, no goddamn way they were taking Grey in Homeland, or anywhere else. He’d been out of work most of a year when he’d gotten the call. He’d thought for sure it was more rig work, maybe for some foreign supplier. They’d somehow made it sound that way without actually saying it, and he was surprised when he’d driven to the address and found it was just an empty storefront in an abandoned strip mall near the Dallas fairgrounds, with white soap smeared on the windows. The place had once housed a video store; Grey could still make out the name, Movie World West, in a ghostly formation of missing letters on the grimy stucco over the door. The place next to it had been a Chinese restaurant; another, a dry cleaner’s; the rest, you couldn’t say. He’d driven up and down in front a couple of times, thinking he must have had the address wrong and reluctant to climb from the air-conditioned cab of his truck for some pointless goose chase, before he’d stopped. It was about a hundred degrees out, typical for August in north Texas but still nothing you could ever get used to, the air thick and dirty-smelling, the sun gleaming like the head of a hammer coming down. The door was locked but there was a buzzer; he rang and waited a minute as the sweat started to pool under his shirt, then heard a big ring of keys jangling on the other side and the clunk of the unlocking door.