“Maybe it’s unbeatable, maybe there are ways to fight back. What it may require is a dedicated cadre of warriors willing to sacrifice time, income, personal safety, a brother/sisterhood consecrated to an uncertain struggle that may extend over generations and, despite all, end in total defeat.”

She’s going crazy, Maxine thinks, this is Jedi talk. Or maybe that graduation speech last summer at Kugelblitz really was prophecy, and now it’s coming true. For all Maxine knows, March is sleeping in the park by now, her possessions in Zabar’s bags, hair growing out wild and gray, no hot baths anymore, depending for showers on the winter rains. How guilty is Maxine supposed to feel about passing her Reg’s video?

•   •   •

VYRVA COMES OVER ONE MORNING after leaving the kids off at school. It isn’t that a coolness has grown between her and Maxine, exactly. Among the underlying rules of the fraud-investigation universe is that on any given Saturday night anybody may be playing canasta with anybody, who in particular seldom being as important as what’s on the score sheet.

Nose in her coffee cup, Vyrva announces, “It finally happened. He dumped me.”

“Why, the li’l rat.”

“Well . . . I sort of provoked it?”

“And he didn’t . . .”

“Take revenge because DeepArcher went open source? Hell no, he’s delighted, means he’s got it for free, saves him a purchase price that could have put Fiona, Justin, and me in any twelve-room penthouse in town.”

“Oh?” Real estate, now there’s a return to mental health. “You guys’ve been looking?”

“I have. Still got to talk Justin into it, ’course, he’s homesick for California.”

“You’re not.”

“Remember a movie called Lawrence of Arabia (1962), guy from England goes out in the desert, suddenly realizes he’s home?”

“You remember a movie called The Wizard of Oz (1939), where—”

“All right, all right. But this is the version where Dorothy gets heavily into Emerald City residential property?”

“After an inappropriate relationship with the Wiz.”

“Who’s done with me in any case, tossed me aside, a fallen woman but I live with my guilt, yes I’m free, free I tell you.”

“So why the face?” Maxine allows herself once a year to do her Howard Cosell impression, and today’s the day. “Vyrva, you are wallowing in lachrymosity.”

“Oh, Maxi, I feel so totally, like, used?”

“What, you’re a decent-looking enough broad, at least when you’re not blubbering, what if it wasn’t only business intrigue, what if it really was lust he felt,” is she really saying this? “true and simple lust, all along.”

Which turns the spigot on full blast. “That sweet little guy! I told him to just fuck off, I hurt him, I’m such a bitch . . .”

“Here, a tip.” Sliding over a roll of paper towels. “From one who has been there. Absorbs better than tissues, you don’t use as many cubic feet, less to clean up later.”

•   •   •

DAYTONA, AS IF HAVING MADE some year-end resolution, suspends her comical-Negro shtick for a minute. “Mrs. Loeffler?”

“Uh-oh.” Checking the area for vengeance seekers, bill collectors, cops.

“No, it’s only about that Ehbler-Cohen ticket? With the weird-ass defined-benefit plan? They were hiding it in the spreadsheets. Look.”

Maxine looks. “How did you—”

“It was luck, really, I happened to take my reading glasses off, and suddenly, blurry but there it was, the pattern. Just way too many them damn empty cells.”

“Walk me through this idiot style, please, I’m hopeless at spreadsheets, people say Excel, I think they’re talking about a T-shirt size.”

“Look, you pull down Tools, click on Auditing, and that lets you see everything that’s going into the formula cells, and . . . dig it.”

“Oh. Wow.” Following along, “Sweet.” Nodding appreciatively, like it’s a cooking show. “Nice going, I would never have caught that.”

“Well, you were out working on some other thing, so I took the liberty . . .”

“Where’d you pick this stuff up, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“Night school. All this time you thought I was at rehab? Ha, ha. I’ve been taking CPA classes. Going for my license next month.”

“Daytona! This is wonderful, so why keep it such a secret?”

“Didn’t want you be thinkin All About Eve and shit.”

•   •   •

CHRISTMAS COMES AND GOES, and maybe it isn’t Maxine’s holiday but it is Horst’s and the kids’, and this year it seems less of an effort for her to be a sport, though she does predictably find herself the night before Christmas screaming desperate in Macy’s at midnight, her brain the usual Sno-Kone with convolutions, up on the mezzanine rejecting one gift idea after another, suddenly here’s a warm and friendly tap on her shoulder—aaahh! Dr. Itzling! Her dentist! This is what it’s come to!

But somewhere in the tinsel dazzle, there are also fragrances from weeklong oven exercises, Horst and his possibly toxic Old-Time Eggnog recipe, the coming and going of friends and relatives including the distant in-law who always ends up telling mohel jokes, A Beast Wars Family Christmas at Radio City Music Hall, with Optimus Primal, Rhinox, Cheetor, and the gang helping a middle school with its Christmas pageant by doing singing cameos as manger animals, the boys, overindulged, sitting among an early-morning mountain of unreusable wrapping paper and packaging, out of which have emerged game platforms, action figures, DVDs, sporting equipment, clothes they may or may not ever wear.

During this occur odd moments of slack, reserved for visits more spectral, from those who cannot or would not ever be here—among them, at a typically uneasy distance from the jollification, Nick Windust, from whom there’s been not a word, though why should there be. Out somewhere in that nomad’s field of indifference, riding the Chinese bus into a futurity of imprecise schedules and reduced options. How long does that go on?

“Nick.”

He’s silent, wherever he is. By now one more American sheep the shepherds have temporarily lost track of, somewhere in the high country above this ruinous hour, cragfast in the storm.

•   •   •

MONDAY AFTER THE HOLIDAYS, Kugelblitz has resumed, Horst and Jake Pimento are over in New Jersey looking for office space, Maxine should either try to cop another hour of z’s or go in to work, but she knows where she ought to be, and as soon as everybody’s out of the house, she brews twelve cups of coffee, gets in front of her screen, logs in, and heads for DeepArcher.

Open source has certainly brought some changes. Core is teeming these days with smartasses, yups, tourists, and twits writing code for whatever they think they want and installing it, till some other headcase finds it and deinstalls it. Maxine goes in with no clear idea of what she’ll find.

Onto the screen, accordingly, leaps a desert, correction, the desert. Empty as the train stations and spaceport terminals of a more innocent time were overpopulated. No middle-class amenities here, beyond arrows to let you scan around the horizon. This is survivalist country. Movements are blurless, every pixel doing its job, the radiation from above triggering colors too unsafe for hex code, a sound track of ground-level desert wind. This is what she’s supposed to pick her way across, dowsing a desert which is not only a desert, for links invisible and undefined.

Not yet in despair, off she goes, zooming and swiveling, up and down dunes and wadis of deep purity finely touched with mineral tints, beneath rocks and ridgelines, empty stretches in which Omar Sharif continues not to come riding in out of a mirage. It should be just one more teen-sociopath video game, except it’s not a shooter, so far anyway, there’s no story line, no details about the destination, no manual to read, no cheat list. Does anybody get extra lives? Does anybody even get this one?