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compound: one-third free-loaders professing beliefs they wouldn’t act on, one-third committed to the same soft ‘education’ of voters that had accomplished squat in the last fifteen years, and one-third fiery enough but incapable of planning, of detail, of an after-life spent underground. They wanted to blow things up, all right, but not to live with the consequences. Useless to me.
    “The tunnels are the weak point,” I say to Wayne. “I studied everything in the prison library.”
    “They let you have access to articles on dome construction?”
    “No, of course not. But there were ways.” In prison, there are always ways.
    Wayne fiddles with his beer. We sit at a homemade wooden table, lovingly carved by someone who could better have used his or her time in subverting the domes, not creating tiny local beauty outside them. The TV is on, as it has been all evening, to the state-sponsored news channel. I need to keep up.
    “Catie, I’m not going to engage in anything illegal. Not with the baby coming. I have family responsibilities now.”
    “You mean that you’ve caved to the system.”
    “I mean that your arrest and imprisonment should have taught you that your tactics won’t work.”
    “‘Your’ tactics? They were yours, too, Wayne! We made that plan together!”
    “I know.” He raises his eyes to mine. “Do you blame me for not getting caught along with you? For staying outside these fifteen years?”
    I am astonished. “No, of course not. What good would it have done for both of us to go to prison?”
    He laughs, reluctantly. “You always had courage.”
    “So did you. But I was the one stuck with the Jaworski name.”
    “Yes.” For just a second the old feeling sparks between us, but it’s only an ember, a pathetic flicker of what once was. I don’t bother to fan the ember. Wayne had courage, all right, but never vision. Not really. He could kindle small fires to attract attention to injustice, but he would never start a conflagration that would burn the old order to the ground. I would have to do that.
    I had tried to do that. This time, I would succeed.
    Wayne says, “The domes are impregnable.”
    “Nothing is impregnable.”
    “Okay, that’s the wrong word. But I think that if the tunnels –”
    “Wayne, don’t you –”
    “Catie, give it up. We can succeed best with the slow drip of water on stone. Law makers are starting to come around. The Goodman-DiBenetti Act –”
    “Is a sop to environmentalists! A pathetic old dog with no teeth!”
    “No, it –”
    “You’re a coward, Wayne. Admit it.”
    He slammed down his beer glass on the table. “I’m a realist!”
    “You’ve been seduced by the same thing the people living under the domes have sold their lives to: more . More security, more comfort, more soft living. More more more, and the rest of the world be damned!”
    “And you think you’re any different? You want ‘more’ as well! No incremental victory is ever enough for you. They have to be bigger, gaudier, more spectacular, because what you really love isn’t winning battles to help the poor, it’s the excitement of the battles themselves!”
    Silence. There isn’t any more to say. Except maybe one thing.
    “Wayne, was it you who made that call fifteen years ago?”
    “No.” He’s telling the truth. But the way his gaze shifts to the left, the slight droop of his head –
    I say, “You know who did.”
    “You weren’t doing what everyone agreed on! You made that substitution of –”
    But abruptly, shockingly, I’m no longer listening to him. For fifteen years I’ve wondered who betrayed me that night, and now I’m no longer listening. The TV screen suddenly shows my father, wearing his solemn-exalted look. The news guy beside him looks not just exalted but positively beatified. I turn up the sound.
    “– such a major breakthrough! Now no family need choose between living near a job or living near loved ones! Can you tell us, Dr. Jaworski,