Grey. Look. Look at me.

The body had landed face-up. One eye was pointed up at Grey, but really at nothing; Grey could tell that right off. The other eye was gone. So was that whole side of his face, like something had turned it inside out. Grey knew what dead was. He’d seen animals-possums and coons and sometimes cats or even dogs-broken to pieces on the side of the road, and this was like that. This was over and out. The gun was still in his daddy’s hand, the finger curling through the little hole the way he’d showed Grey that day on the porch. See now, see how heavy it is? You never ever point a gun at anyone. There was blood everywhere too, mixed in with other stuff, like bits of meat and white pieces of something smashed, all over his daddy’s face and jacket and the seat of the truck and the inside of the door, and Grey smelled it, so strong it seemed to coat the insides of his mouth like a melting pill.

Grey, Grey. I am here.

The scene started changing then. Grey felt movement all around him, like the earth was stretching; something was different about the snow, the snow had started moving, and when he lifted his face to look, it wasn’t snow he saw anymore but rabbits: thousands and thousands of fluffy white rabbits, all the rabbits in the world, bunched so closely together that a person could walk across the yard and never touch the ground; the yard was full of rabbits. And they turned their soft faces toward him, pointed their little black eyes at him, because they knew him, knew what he had done, not to Roy but to the other ones, the boys with their knapsacks walking home from school, the stragglers, the ones who were alone; and that was when Grey knew that it wasn’t his daddy anymore, lying in the blood. It was Zero, and Zero was everywhere, Zero was inside him, ripping and tearing, emptying him out like the rabbits, and he opened his mouth to scream but no sound came.

Grey Grey Grey Grey Grey Grey Grey.

In his office on L2, Richards was sitting at his terminal, his mind deep inside a game of free cell. Hand number 36,592, he had to admit, was squarely kicking his ass. He’d played it a dozen times already, coming close but never quite figuring out how to build his columns, how to clear out all the aces when he needed to, to free up the red eights. In that sense it reminded him a little of game 14,712, which was all about the red eights, too. It had taken him most of a day to crack that one.

But every game was winnable. That was the beauty of free cell. The cards were dealt, and if you looked at them right, if you made the right moves, one after the other, sooner or later the game was yours. One victorious click of the mouse and all the cards sailed up the columns. Richards never got tired of it, which was good, because he still had 91,048 games to go, counting this one. There was a twelve-year-old kid in Washington State who claimed to have won every hand, in order-including 64,523, the death’s head of free cell-in just under four years. That was eighty-eight games a day, every day, including Christmas, New Year’s, and the Fourth of July, so assuming the kid took a day off every now and again, to do kid things or even just come down with a good case of the flu, the real number was probably more like a hundred. Richards didn’t see how that was possible. Didn’t he ever go to school? Didn’t he have homework? When did the little bastard sleep?

Richards’s office, like all the underground spaces of the compound, was little more than a fluorescent box, everything pumped in and filtered. Even the light felt recycled. It was a little after two-thirty in the morning, but Richards got by on less than four hours of sleep a night, he had for years, so he paid this no mind. On the wall above his station, three dozen time-stamped monitors displayed every nook of the compound, from the guards freezing their asses off at the front gate to the vacant mess hall with its empty tables and dozing drink dispensers, to the subject containment areas, two floors below him, with their glowing, infectious cargo, and, farther down, through another fifty feet of rock, to the nuclear cells that powered it all and would keep the lights on, the juice flowing, for a hundred years, give or take a decade. He liked having everything where he could see it at a glance, where he could read it like the cards. Sometime between five and six A.M. they’d be taking a delivery, and he figured he might as well just stay up all night for that. Subject processing took a couple of hours at the most; he could grab a few winks at his desk afterward if he had to.

Then, on the computer screen, he saw the answer. It was right there, under the six: the black queen he needed to move the jack and free up the two and so on. A couple of clicks and it was over. The cards shot up the screen like a pianist’s fingers flying over the keys.

Do you want to play again?

You’re goddamn right he would.

Because the game was the world’s natural state. Because the game was war, it always was, and when wasn’t there a war on, somewhere, to keep a man like Richards in good employ? The last twenty years had been kind to him, a long run at the table with nothing but good news from the cards. Sarajevo, Albania, Chechnya. Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran. Syria, Pakistan, Sierra Leone, Chad. The Philippines and Indonesia and Nicaragua and Peru.

Richards remembered the day-that glorious and terrible day-watching the planes slam into the towers, the image repeated in endless loops. The fireballs, the bodies falling, the liquefaction of a billion tons of steel and concrete, the pillowing clouds of dust. The money shot of the new millennium, the ultimate reality show broadcast 24-7. Richards had been in Jakarta when it happened, he couldn’t even remember why. He’d thought it right then; no, he’d felt it, right down to his bones. A pure, unflinching rightness. You had to give the military something to do of course, or they’d all just fucking shoot each other. But from that day forward, the old way of doing things was over. The war-the real war, the one that had been going on for a thousand years and would go on for a thousand thousand more-the war between Us and Them, between the Haves and the Have-Nots, between my gods and your gods, whoever you are-would be fought by men like Richards: men with faces you didn’t notice and couldn’t remember, dressed as busboys or cab drivers or mailmen, with silencers tucked up their sleeves. It would be fought by young mothers pushing ten pounds of C-4 in baby strollers and schoolgirls boarding subways with vials of sarin hidden in their Hello Kitty backpacks. It would be fought out of the beds of pickup trucks and blandly anonymous hotel rooms near airports and mountain caves near nothing at all; it would be waged on train platforms and cruise ships, in malls and movie theaters and mosques, in country and in city, in darkness and by day. It would be fought in the name of Allah or Kurdish nationalism or Jews for Jesus or the New York Yankees-the subjects hadn’t changed, they never would, all coming down, after you’d boiled away the bullshit, to somebody’s quarterly earnings report and who got to sit where-but now the war was everywhere, metastasizing like a million maniac cells run amok across the planet, and everyone was in it.

Which was why NOAH had made a certain sense, back when it all started. Richard had been with the project since the beginning, since his first communiqué from Cole, rest in peace, you little shit. He’d known it was something important when Cole actually came to see him in Ankara, five years ago. Richards was waiting at a table by a window when Cole strolled in, swinging a briefcase that probably had nothing in it but a cell phone and a diplomatic passport. He was also wearing a Hawaiian shirt under his khaki suit, a nice touch, like something out of Graham Greene. Richards almost laughed. They ordered a pot of coffee and Cole got started, his smooth face animated with excitement. Cole was from a little town in Georgia, but all those years at Andover and Princeton had tightened up the muscles in his jaw, making him sound like Bobby Kennedy channeling Robert E. Lee. The boy had nice-looking teeth, too, Ivy League teeth, straight as a fence and so white you could read by them in a dark room. So, Cole began, think of the A-bomb, how it changed everything just to have it. Until the Russians set off their own in ’49, the world was ours to do as we liked; for four years it was Pax Americana, bay-by. Now of course everybody and his uncle was cooking one up in his basement, and at least a hundred rust-bucket Soviet-era warheads were floating around on the open market and those were just the ones we knew about, and of course Pakistan and India had burst the cherry with all their bullshit-thanks a bunch, fellas, you made incinerating a hundred thousand people over diddly-squat just another day at the office of the deputy undersecretary of the War on Terr-rah.