Miguel relaxed in the saddle and released a pent-up breath he hadn't even noticed he was holding. The morning sun started to peek through the chilly fog, ready to burn the thin sheath of frost off the land. With every minute that passed he felt better about leaving, about adding so many miles and weeks to their trip.

"Penny for your thoughts?" Miss Jessup asked.

"I am sorry to be so quiet," Miguel said. "Tell me, what did you do, Miss Jessup? This last year, I mean, that you should find yourself in Texas, captured by road agents?"

As soon as he asked the question, he regretted it, thinking himself too forward and rude for inquiring about another's personal business. But Trudi Jessup seemed not at all put out.

He saw her shoulders lift in silhouette.

"First up, my name is Trudi. Remember. Second, I was working for Seattle, like everyone else," she said. "Or so I thought. Before I wrote for magazines, I used to work in restaurants and catering. A lot of it is just logistics. Knowing how much food to have in store, predicting demand spikes and troughs, organizing transport. But you'd know some of that if you worked for the Golden Arches."

In fact, he had merely bossed their herds in one particular part of Mexico and knew very little about the hamburger clown's wider business. Once the cattle were out of his care, they were no longer his concern. And where all the potatoes for fries and apples for pies came from and went to he had no idea. Although he had heard dark rumors that the globby, glutinous filling of Ronald McDonald's apple pies were not apple at all but some sort of reconstituted root vegetable in sugar syrup. A rumor he dismissed as foolishness but one that never seemed to go away. Even down in Australia, they still talked about the apple pies as though they were made of mystery vegetables and secret chemistry tricks. When the family-again, a knife twisted in his chest as he thought of them-had passed through Sydney on their way back to America to join the resettlement program, he had taken them to spend the last of their local currency at a McDonald's down near the port from which they were to leave. Miguel Pieraro would swear on his life that the apple pie contained only apples and maybe some sugar.

"Well," Miss Jessup continued, unaware of his private musing, "I put all that down on my forms when I got back from Sardinia. I would have stayed; it is absolutely gorgeous there with so much history and culture. And the food…"

Miss Jessup… Trudi… sighed.

"But with the Arab-Israeli thing and my funds turning into so much pixelated static, it just wasn't tenable to hang out in that part of the world. So the feds paid for my passage, and I signed away five years of my life, figuring I wouldn't be doing much more than digging ditches or clearing roads. God or the cosmic dice must love me because I got sent down here to organize the logistics train from settler farms like yours back to Seattle and up to KC. That's how I got caught by the agents. I was out inspecting homesteads not far from where Aronson's congregation got themselves bushwhacked."

Miguel whistled at Red Dog and sent her forward to chivvy a couple of head that looked like they might have been splitting off from the herd. The little cattle dog, a streak of fur in the dark, flashed off at his command, barking and leaping. Without being asked, Sofia urged her mount forward to support her.

"So, before you were captured, did you have other problems with Fort Hood, in your work, I mean?" Miguel asked. He was forever searching for information about Blackstone that might help when he arrived in Kansas City.

Trudi laughed. "Oh, you have no idea.

"I learned pretty quickly not to route any requests through there," she said. "Blackstone's all but replicated the federal bureaucracy back in the Northwest, you know, and at first I thought that was a good thing. It can take a long time to hear back from Seattle, and I figured, naively, I suppose, that we were all in this together. So early on I tried cutting a few corners, sent out a few feelers to Fort Hood, to see if maybe we could get a few back-channel contacts going, you know, help each other out with stuff. All the usual informal give-and-take you get when people are making do in pretty rough circumstances."

"And they were no help?"

She laughed again, but not happily.

"They tried to shitcan me! Said I lacked the requisite 'credentials.' Said I'd have to sit a course and exam in Fort Hood before they could even deal with me. Do you believe that shit? Academic credentials in this environment?"

She waved her hand around.

"That's when I knew they were just dicking me around. I've been doing this sort of work for longer than most of those assholes had been in uniform. But that wasn't enough, of course. When I pushed back, they complained all the way back to my head office about me trying to subvert their duly constituted authorities and systems and structures and all sorts of petty Weberian bullshit?"

Miguel did not understand exactly what she meant by "Vayberian," but he had a pretty good idea.

"It is as I thought," he said. "It is even possible, Miss Jessup-"

"Goddamn, Miguel. I'm Trudi! My name is Trudi."

"Sorry, I forget. The nuns beat me for bad manners when I was a boy. It is even possible… Trudi, that you were targeted by the agents because you were sent by Seattle."

She was silent at that, riding along for nearly half a minute under the cold fire of the stars.

"Possible," she conceded at last. "It wasn't but a few hours before meeting them that I had a nasty brush with the TDF. Some bald clown with a goatee and a really filthy chaw tobacco habit."

Miguel could see that the riders ahead of them had turned the herd to the northeast, as agreed. They had traced out the next week's trek on a new road map taken from the study of the holiday home. For much of the journey they would follow the road network, avoiding some difficult geography between here and the grasslands, although the final approach to the first reserve would see them traverse a long forested valley north of the town of Commerce. Of that part of the state they had no knowledge, although it was so far from the cluster of federal settlements in the south that Miguel did not expect to encounter any problems there. In his experience, one was more likely to rub up hard against the Texas Defense Force and the agents near areas resettled by the federales.

He looked east and found the skyline there discernible at last, just a faint difference in shading between earth and heaven at that point but enough to let him know that dawn was not far off. He found himself wishing that Miss Julianne and Miss Fifi and all his friends from the dead golfer's boat were with him. By the Sacred Mother, they would make short work of any agents who attempted to interfere with them. Those mountain men from Nepal, if he remembered, the soldiers she had hired… Gurkhas! He could never remember their unusual names, but he well remembered how fiercely they had fought to protect the boat and his family from pirates down at the bottom of the world.

Miguel shook his head.

Pirates. At the bottom of the world.

What strange paths his life had taken. Midafternoon and storm clouds building up in the west confirmed what Miguel's nose had told him earlier. The road agents were unlikely to get them now even if they had helicopters or planes to help them. The purple thunderheads, livid and bruised at the heart and tinged with green at the edge, already were flashing with a malicious promise of violence. Thunder, distant but ominous, rolled over gentle hills toward them. The weather front advanced rapidly, blotting out the clear sky as it came. At its current speed, Miguel could see it would overtake them long before they left the valley.

The herd stirred with agitation, calling to one another. Flossie snorted, shaking out her mane, struggling against the reins. She started to back-step and fight the bridle.