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through the windows. Slumped over warm wine, eyes ringed and twitching. Someone had shredded the napkins.
    She said, “Oh my god, you have it.”
    Mrs. Ferrell said, “Have what?”
    “This insomnia thing.”
    “What insomnia thing?” Dr. Ferrell said. He was a therapist at the base—an expert on sleeplessness who worked with war-haunted Marines, trying to get them through the night. A bad liar too. Lila knew.
    DR. FERRELL once wrote: “In the dreams we have forgotten we have had many mothers. We have had many fathers, brothers, and sisters. Even as children we have parented many children of our own in our dreams—sons and daughters that gaveus forgotten lifetimes of joy and torment, leaving only a shadow of a memory.
    “Playing out of endless familial permutations is one of many tasks the mind tackles while we sleep, our bodies on hold.
    “We know everyone we’ve ever seen with great intimacy.”
    MOST of the students at the new school were military kids. The girls were pretty slutty, in Lila’s opinion. Seemed like everyone was a cheerleader. The boys were all what she liked to call soldier larvae, though her dad hated the term. Not soldiers anyway, he would say. Marines. Lila never saw the difference. They fight wars, don’t they, wearing uniforms all the different colors of dirt?
    Some of the girls on the soccer team were okay, but Lila came in halfway through the season and didn’t really get to know them before summer vacation hit.
    Lila decided she didn’t need them. These days, you could just keep your old friends by staying connected online. She went home after school and logged in and there were Arielle and Matthew, waiting for her as avatars in their virtual hangout. Arielle looked a lot like she looked in real life, but Matthew had a tiger’s head in that other world of theirs, where opting for an animal head was common.
    THIS is not Earth, Mrs. Ferrell thought when they first arrived in the desert. He has brought us to some desolate planet. She had abandoned the notion that she could continue her real estate career in this place. It’s a landscape without selling points, she told her husband that first night. The only view it offers is that of thesun going down, the dying of the light slowing traffic like a fresh wreck on the side of the road.
    “That’s putting a pretty morbid spin on things,” Dr. Ferrell had said.
    It’s not a place that you can carry off in your heart, she concluded. This is not what her daughter will picture, years from now, when she tries to remember home. At the very least, memories of an American home involve trees.
    ON the base, Dr. Ferrell was working with a Marine who had rolled a grenade into a tent where eight men were sleeping. The Marine had been an insomniac, though the media overlooked this at the time and focused on his Arab ethnicity.
    The doctor had his own struggles with getting to sleep. Lately, it had worsened as he considered possible causes of the epidemic. Many in the scientific community were focusing on a known disease—
fatal familial insomnia
—the idea being that this was some kind of mutated strain of the already mutated variation called
sporadic familial insomnia
. Whereas FFI was believed to be hereditary and limited to less than forty families in the world, and took up to two years to kill the afflicted, this new iteration seemed to be some kind of unstoppable upgrade. Accelerated, resistant, moving through the four stages of demise at three times the speed.
    But this was just the leading theory. No real connections had been made, and the medical community remained confronted by its greatest fear: a mystery.
    Could it be? Not with fire, not with ice, but because of a protein abnormality?
A change of amino acid at position 178?
His mind kept whirring into the morning hours, a pinwheel spun bythe current of his speculations: Maybe more like mad cow. He had seen a report. A chronic wasting disease superbug triggered by a weaponized mammalian