My fingers brushed her back. She spurted forward and leaped over a pile of brush. I leaped, too, and my ankle twisted under me as I fell.

Pain lanced through my leg. I cried out. Lizzie didn’t even falter. Maybe she thought I was faking. I tried to call out to her, but a sudden wave of nausea — biological shock — took me. I turned my head just in time to vomit. Lizzie kept running, and disappeared among the trees. I heard her even after I couldn’t see her anymore. Then I couldn’t hear her either.

Slowly I sat up. My ankle throbbed, already swollen. I couldn’t tell if it was sprained or even fractured. If it was, Miranda’s nan-otech would fix it. But not instantly.

I felt cold, then sweaty. Don’t pass out, I told myself sternly. Not now, not here. Lizzie…

Even if I could find her again, I couldn’t carry her anywhere.

When the biologic shock passed, I limped back to camp. Every step was painful, and not just to my ankle. When I reached the outskirts of the camp, some Livers helped me get to my tent. By the time I got there, the pain was already muted. It was also dark. Lizzie wasn’t there, and neither was Annie nor Billy. Lizzie’s terminal and library crystal were gone from her tent.

I sat huddled in front of my tent, watching the sky. Tonight was cloudy, without stars or moon. The air smelled of rain. I shivered, and hoped I was wrong. Completely, spectacularly, om-nisciently wrong. About the underground nobody admitted actually existed, about their targets, about everything.

After all, what did I know?

# # *

“Free Miranda. Free Miranda. Free Miranda…”

The red-and-blue helix pulsed, overlaid by the red, white, and blue flag. WILL AND IDEA, no other legend. Whose will? What idea? Oak Mountain Prison sat dark and still under the rhythmical light.

“Free Miranda. Free Miranda. Free Miranda…”

I still sat in front of my tent, nursing my ankle. Annie had wrapped it tightly in a strip of woven cloth, which my skin was probably consuming. I sat perhaps a quarter mile from the ten thousand chanters. Their chant carried to me clearly.

The sky’was dark, overcast. The summer air smelled of rain, of pine, of wildflowers. I realized for the first time that these scents were as strong as ever, whereas the stink of human bodies was muted in my altered olfactory nerves. Miranda Company knew their business.

The torches held by the chanters mixed with Y-energy cones: wavering primitive light and steady high tech. And above it, the red-and-blue glare. Broad stripes and bright stars.

The first plane came from Brad’s nameless mountain, flying without lights, a metallic glint visible only if you were looking for it. They didn’t need planes; they could have used long-distance artillery. Somebody wanted to record the action close up. I staggered to my feet, already crying. The plane came in over the top of the prison and swept low, buzzing the chanters. People screamed. It dropped a single impact bomb, which went off in the middle of the crowd. Barely enough to cause fifty deaths, even in that mass of bodies. They were playing.

People started to shove and push, screaming. Those fortunates on the edge of the crowd ran free, toward the distant wooded slopes. I could see figures behind them, distant but separate, stumble over each other. Miranda had left me with 20/20 vision.

A second plane, that I hadn’t seen in advance, flew over me from the opposite direction and disappeared over the prison walls. I didn’t hear the second bomb, which must have fallen on the other side of the walls. The explosion was drowned out by the screaming.

People started to trample each other.

Billy. Annie. Lizzie…

The first plane had wheeled and was returning from behind me. This time, I knew, it wouldn’t be to play. Too many people from the edges of the crowd were scrambling to safety. Would the bomb take out Oak Mountain itself? Of course. That’s where the chief abomination was. I didn’t know what kinds of shields the prison had, but if the attack was nuclear…

The holo above the prison changed for the last time:

I thought I saw Lizzie. Insane — it wasn’t possible to distinguish individuals at this distance. My mind merely wanted me to die in as much dramatic anguish as possible. And so I thought I saw Lizzie run forward, and be trampled by people panicked to escape what had been inevitable since the creation of the first genemod.

I squeezed my eyes shut to die. And then opened them again.

In time to see the nanosecond in which it happened.

The shield around Oak Mountain glowed brighter than the holo in the sky. One moment the prison was wrapped in silvery light. The next the same silvery light shot out from the prison walls over the crowd below, in grotesquely elongated eaves of pure energy. The bomb, or whatever it was, hit the top of the energy shield and detonated, or ricocheted, or was thrown back. The plane exploded in a light that blinded me, but wasn’t quite nuclear. An instant later a second explosion: the other plane. Then dead silence.

People had stopped running, most of them. They looked up at the opaque silver roof protecting them, the roof of manmade high-tech radiation.

I cried out and staggered forward. Immediately my ankle gave way and I fell. I raised myself chest-high off the ground and stared up. The “roof extended all the way to the lowest slopes of the mountain. I couldn’t see through it. But I heard the subsequent explosions, artillery or radiation or something that must have been directed from the top of the distant mountain.

People were screaming again. But the shoving and trampling had stopped. Huddled under this high-energy umbrella was the safest place to be.

I thought: Huevos Verdes protects their own.

I lay back down on the ground, my cheek pressed against the hard-packed dirt. It felt as if I had no bones; I literally couldn’t move. Small children could have trampled on me. Huevos Verdes had protected their own, incidentally saving the lives of nine or ten thousand Livers while wiping out some other unknown number of Livers. That was who made the laws now: Huevos Verdes. Twenty-seven Sleepless plus their eventual offspring, who did not consider themselves part of my country. Or any other. Not donkeys, not Livers, not the Constitution, which even to donkeys had always been silent in the background but fundamental, like bedrock. No longer.

Who was the statesman whose last, dying words concerned the fate of the United States? Adams? Webster? I’d always thought it was a stupid story. Shouldn’t his last words have concerned his wife or his will or the height of his pillow — something concrete and personal? How grandiose to think oneself large enough to match the fate of a whole country — and at such a moment! Pretentious, inflated. Also silly — the man wasn’t going to pass any more laws or influence any more policy, he was dying. Silly.

Now I understood. And it was still silly. But I understood.

I think I have never felt such desolation.

There was a final explosion that left my ear, the one not pressed to the ground, completely deaf. I struggled to turn my head and look up. The shield had disappeared, and so had the holo and the entire top of the distant mountain. I had never even learned its name.

More screaming. Now, when it was all over. The Livers probably didn’t realize that, might never even realize what had been lost. Small bands of roaming, self-sufficient tribes, not needing that quaint entity, “the United States,” any more than Huevos Verdes did. Livers.

The first fleeing people ran past me, toward the dark hills. I stumbled to my feet, or rather foot. If I didn’t put my full weight on the self-healing ankle, I could hop forward. After a few yards I actually found a dropped torch. I extinguished it and leaned on it like a cane. It wasn’t quite long enough, but it would do.