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scattered with rusted-out cars, past a housing project covered up in green mounds of kudzu, making it look like elves lived inside. Probably only rats and roaches. They finally had the place to themselves.
    The former residents had all gone into the Bin, except for the handful who’d squatted in the abandoned homes of surgeons or stockbrokers. But most of them didn’t last long when they figured out they couldn’t burn enough wood to heat those big barns, and that, if they wanted water, they’d have to dig a well with a pick and shovel, and if they wanted electricity, they’d have to rig up a generator—and then find or make fuel to run it. Sooner or later, most everybody went into the Bin. It was just too easy, too hard not to. Too hard to turn down paradise.
    The doors at the end of the car slid open and a fundie came down the aisle. She was fifteen or sixteen, her long hair braided and wound into a bun. She wore a camouflage print dress, a flaming cross stitched above her left breast. The tracts in her hand read
ONWARD CHRISTIAN SOLDIERS! SATAN IS WINNING THE WAR
! She half-heartedly offered Nemo a tract, and he shook his head. She slumped against a pole, looking toward the two remaining cars of the train, both empty, then sat down across the aisle. “There’s six people on this whole train,” she said to no one in particular. The train dove into a tunnel near Fredericksburg, making the fluorescent lights inside the car seem brighter. She turned toward the window, looking at her reflection, or at the tiled walls of the tunnel, scrawled with graffiti going by too fast to read.
    There wasn’t anyone left for her to save anymore. She absentmindedly riffled the tracts in her hands like a deck of cards, her pretty face reflected in the window, her eyes wet with tears. Nemo figured pretty soon she’d go into the Bin, defect to the winning side. Let the real world go down the tubes—leave it the wackos and creeps with their God or their scams or their paranoia. It’d never worked out anyway. About the only things still working were these trains. They were built by Constructs in the late thirties and early forties. They still kept them running for reasons known only to themselves, though the trains pretty much ran on their own, connecting every major city. They were operated by computers, powered by some geothermal plant somewhere, built before they figured out they didn’t have to make a bunch of machines, they could just climb inside one enormous one.
    The train stopped in Alexandria and a lone old man got on the car behind them. He was lugging two car batteries with a harness that went over his shoulders. He dropped the batteries down in the aisle and sat on them. The fundie girl glanced back at him but didn’t bother to get up and offer him a tract.
    When the train started slowing down for Pentagon Station, she got up and stood in front of the door, leaving her tracts on the seat. “You want these?” Nemo called after her and pointed at them. She shook her head and turned back to the door.
    Nemo nudged Lawrence awake. “We’re here,” he said.
    Lawrence blinked his eyes and rose to his feet, immediately awake. They stood behind the fundie girl as the doors slid open and followed her up the escalators. She smelled like chamomile. At the top, she turned right toward Receiving. Lawrence and Nemo turned left toward Visitors. She looked back over her shoulder and gave Nemo a small, sad smile.
    He wondered where she was from. You could visit the Bin from almost anywhere. There were at least a couple of VIMs at all the Metro stations. But if you wanted to go in for good, you had to go to one of a dozen Receiving Points throughout the globe, but most people came in here. Over the years, it’d become the thing to do to come in at D.C., make a pilgrimage to the Rogers Memorial to thank him for eternity.
    “Mighty pretty girl,” Lawrence said in his Texan voice.
    “She’s going into the Bin,” Nemo