“Free Miranda. Free Miranda. Free Miranda…”

The holo pulsed for fifteen minutes, then changed:

The white light changed to an American flag, stars and bars su-perimposed over the double helix.

“Free Miranda. Free Miranda. Free Miranda…” Fifteen minutes later the holo words changed again:

“Free Miranda. Free Miranda. Free Miranda…” The American flag became a rattlesnake, poised to strike. It looked so real that a few children started to cry.

Another fifteen minutes and the snake was replaced by the original double helix and holy white light. This time we got three lines:

The double helix rotated slowly. I wondered how many of the chanters even knew what it was.

“Free Miranda…”

At the end of an hour, it was over. It took another hour for the huge crowd to quietly disperse, which it started to do the moment the holo vanished.

Back in my tent, I borrowed Lizzie’s terminal, with its library crystal. “Don’t tread on me” was first used on flags in the Colonial South, as relations with Great Britain deteriorated, and later adopted as Revolutionary slogan in much of New England. “Liberty or Death” appeared on flags in Virginia, following Patrick Henry’s exhortation to turn on the British masters. “Hope” was the legend on the flag of the Colonial armed schooner Lee, the first flag to also feature thirteen stars. I couldn’t find a record anywhere of “Will and Idea.”

These maniacs considered themselves colonists in their own country, fighting to overthrow a donkey establishment that was largely in passive hiding and, maybe, a syringed Liver population that was essentially defenseless. Unless you count chanting as a weapon.

The government existed, in part, to defend its citizens against this sort of demented civil insurrection. Did we have a government left? Did we have a country left?

The only official representative of that country in sight, Oak Mountain Maximum Security Federal Prison, sat silent and dark. Maybe it was even empty.

I walked back toward the prison walls. This time I went right up to them, borrowing a torch from some obliging camper who asked mildly, without insistence, that I return it when I was done. I walked along the prison walls, inspecting.

A few graffiti, not very many. Few Livers could write. What graffiti there was hadn’t been written on the walls themselves, which of course shimmered with a faint Y-energy shield. Instead river boulders had been rolled laboriously against the shield, the earth scraped raw from their passage. On the rocks was painted FREEE MARANDA. WE R PEEPLUL TO. TAK DOWN THEEZ WALLZ.

A pathetic scratching in one rock, a half-inch deep, where some group had begun, symbolically at least, to tak down theez wallz.

The prison door, facing the river, blank and impenetrable. Thirty feet up the security screens, which may or may not have been recording, were dark blank patches.

Above the walls the shimmer, hard to see unless you used your peripheral vision, extended outward a few feet, like eaves. I couldn’t imagine why.

Towers loomed at each of the four corners. They had no windows, or else windows holoed to look like they didn’t exist.

I walked back to my tent, returning the torch on the way. Annie, Billy, Lizzie, and Brad had already disappeared into their tents, two by two. Clouds were rolling in from the west. I sat outside for a long time, wrapped in a plasticloth tarp, cold even though it was at least seventy degrees out. The prison, too, sat massive and silent, not even flying a holographic flag. Dead.

“Lizzie, I need you to do something for me. Something tremendously important.”

She looked up at me. I’d found her deep in the woods, after hours of patiently asking total strangers if they’d seen a thin black girl with pink ribbons tying up her two braids. Lizzie sat on a fallen log, which the backs of her thighs were probably eating. She’d been crying. Brad, of course. I’d kill him. No, I wouldn’t. There was no other way for her to learn. Claude-Eugene-Rex-Paul-Anthony-Russell-David.

The timing was good for me. I could make use of these tears.

I said, “There’s a message I have to get to Charleston. I can’t go myself because the GSEA is monitoring me remotely; I told you that. They’d know. And there’s nobody else I can trust. Annie wouldn’t do it, and Billy won’t leave Annie…”

She went on looking at me, not changing expression, her eyes swollen and her nose red.

“It’s about Miranda Sharifi,” I said. “Lizzie, it’s unbelievably important. I need you to walk to Charleston, and I’ll time-encode in your terminal what you need to do after you arrive. In fact, I’ve already done that. I know this sounds mysterious, but it’s essential.” I put everything I had — or once had — into that last sentence. The donkey authority. The adult tone of command. The confidence that this girl loved me.

Lizzie went on gazing at me, expressionless.

I handed her the terminal. “You walk along the gravrail track until it branches at Ash Falls. Then you—”

“There’s no message about Miranda Sharifi,” Lizzie said.

“I just told you there was.” Donkey authority. Adult command.

“No. There’s nothing anybody can do about Miranda. You just want me out of here because you’re afraid that underground will attack tonight.”

“No. It’s not that. Why would you think—” you, who owe me so much, my tone said ” — that I don’t have resources you don’t understand? If I say there is a crucial message about Miranda, there is a crucial message about Miranda.”

Lizzie stared at me emptily, hopelessly.

“Lizzie—”

“He left me. Brad. For Maura Casey!”

It’s wrong to laugh at puppy love. For one thing, it’s not that different from what most adults do. I sat on the log next to her.

“He says … he says, him… that I’m too smart for my own good.”

“Livers always say that,” I said gently. “Brad just hasn’t caught on yet.”

“But I am smarter than he is, me.” She sounded like the child she still was. “Lots smarter. He’s so stupid about so many things!”

I didn’t say, Then why do you want him; I recognized a hopeless arena for logic when I saw one. Instead I said, “Most people are going to look stupid to you, Lizzie. Starting with your mother. That’s just the way you are, and the way the world is going to be now. For you.”

She blew her nose on a leaf. “I hate it, me! I want people to understand me!”

“Well. Better get used to it.”

“He says, him, I try to control him! I don’t, me!”

Who should control the technology? Paul’s voice said to me, lying in bed, pleased to be instructing the person he had just fucked.

Pleased to be on top. Lizzie probably did try to control Brad. Whoever can, Billy said.

“Lizzie … in Charleston…”

She jumped up. “I said I’m not going, me, and I’m not! I hope there is an attack tonight! I hope I die in it!” She ran off, crashing through the woods, crying.

I took after Lizzie at a dead run. At ten yards, I started gaining. She was fast, but I was more muscled, with longer legs. She was within a yard of my grasp. It was six hours before dark. I could tie her up and physically carry her as far from Oak Mountain, from danger, as I could get in six hours. If I had to, I’d knock her out to let me carry her.