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any more about the science behind this development? Of course we all know that HomeWalls Incorporated possesses all its tech on a proprietary basis and –”
    I watch the entire program, and then the next one. My father has discovered a way to extend the force fields of the domes. The new tech will allow them to cover not just a maximum of thirty acres but entire cities. The rich and middle-class will never have to see, hear, or even be aware of the domeless poor again.
    All my plans will need to change. Attacking the tunnels will not work now. My father has ensured there will be no more tunnels.
    Wayne has slipped off to join Tara. I don’t see him again before I leave the compound in the morning.
     
     
    T HE FIRST H OME W ALLS went up when I was fourteen. They went up around our house.
    The house sat on the shores of Lake Michigan, on Chicago’s Gold Coast. Twenty thousand square feet, plus guest cottage and pool house and boathouse by the dock. The force field ‘circle of protection’ extended six feet below ground, into ditches dug for the purpose, and out onto the lake, where it had to stop at the surface of the water. Those early walls were opaque and, of course, open at the top; the tech to create domes came later. We had weather. We had seagulls and winter snow and seismic detectors to warn of tunneling beneath the walls and complete safety from kidnapping. The dome had to be turned off briefly to let yachts sail to and from docks, but this was considered a minor inconvenience.
    The thieves swam in from the lake, at dusk, when they were least expected because my father had a house full of guests. I had had some teenage argument with my father, gone into sulks, and refused to attend the party. So I was loitering by the curved eastern wall, finishing off a bottle of wine I was not supposed to have, when the intruders in their wet suits reached the control room and shot the guard. One of them – inadvertently, it later came out at his trial – deactivated the walls. Not a good step if you plan on stealing valuables and then slipping silently away. Most thieves are stupid.
    So was I. Until then I hadn’t known anything, not anything at all. When the wall collapsed, dissolving like dark rain, I lurched into squatters that the police had not yet removed, huddled around a small fire.
    “No!” I screamed, smashed the bottle on the ground, and held out the jagged neck as a weapon. Who the hell did I think I was, some video fighter?
    “No!” screamed a ragged woman, clutching two kids to her.
    No men. After a moment the older kid, a girl maybe nine years old, snatched up a rock and threw it at me. It hit me in the arm and, drunk, I started to cry.
    “Annie, you stop that!” the woman said. “Don’t you be throwing no rocks!”
    She was protecting me.
    I dropped the bottle. The stupid tears came faster. Alarms sounded from the house, police sirens from the street, shouts from all sides. The woman came up to me, her face creased with fear, with resentment, with hope. “Miss, Annie didn’t mean nothing. Please don’t tell the cops that she –”
    “I won’t,” I had time to gasp, before I vomited up a bottle of wine on both of us.
    Later, I looked for the woman and her kids. I didn’t find them, of course. They’d vanished into the growing horde of the homeless and the desperate. As well look for a single pebble on the shores of Lake Michigan. No, not on the lake – under it. The country was sinking into economic collapse, into despair, into violence. The demand for my father’s walls was immediate and enormous.
    But I did look for the woman. And looking, I saw.
    By sixteen, I had found Wayne’s group. By seventeen, I was gone. I didn’t see my father again for four years, at the Cook County jail, where we shouted accusations at each other and he did not even try to make my bail or find me a lawyer.
     
     
    “S UNNY J AY, ” I SAY. “You haven’t changed.”
    This is a blatant lie. Unlike Wayne,