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hard. I still didn’t know where to put my hands on her—those scars, the injuries, that hardness. Where do you put your hands on somebody who is broken all over?
    No protection: prophylactics were banned. She hissed in pain but there was no blood: afterwards she told me her hymen had burst during a fistfight with a Sikh who’d been resisting arrest. We rocked together slowly. Angela locked her legs around my back, grasped the bedrails, gyrated against me.
    I closed my eyes and saw Eve’s face turning to ash and watched it blow away in a superheated wind. I wondered who the hunters would be and guessed old mates: Henchel, Applewhite, Garvey. I saw the Star of Gilead twinkling above Hollis’s desk and thought about the face under that hood . . . the wrong colour. The wrong damn colour .

The Sack
    I sat in a folding metal chair facing my apartment door. I’d left Doe’s apartment hours ago. The hunters usually caught you in bed—figured I’d surprise them. Every light off, eyes closed: I wanted to hear them coming.
    It had been Angela’s decision: Let them come for us separately . They might be more lenient . So I’d left her.
    Steps outside in the hallway now. I felt them out there: the pressure of their bodies, the violence of their intent. A crumpling blast was followed by a superheated wind that raced low across the floor, blistering my ankles. Later on I’d catch my reflection in the interrogation room’s one-way mirror: face and neck acned with pinpricks of dried blood, shallow racing grooves on my skull where debris had scored a path.
    Shapes moved in a haze of cordite smoke. One of them said, “Over here—in the chair.” A few mordant chuckles and then a Scots brogue whispered, “Fancied we were coming, did you lad?” and I smiled or at least tried to, couldn’t feel my face, then someone slipped the Sack over my head and I got real scared.
    Every hunter was familiar with the Sack. Black burlap, the word HERETIC printed across the front in yellow block letters. I’d slipped it over a fair share of heads myself.
    The drawstring cinched tight, cutting across my windpipe. A fist drove into my gut and knocked the air out of me. Another punch tipped the chair back and spilled me onto the floor, where I puked a wretched stream of bile into the Sack.
    The blade of a box cutter slid between my collar and the skin of my throat. My shirt was slashed away, belt and trousers, my underwear. Hands gripped my armpits and dragged me into the hallway naked and shivering.
    “Heretic!” the hunters called for the benefit of my rubbernecking neighbours. “Traitor to the Republic!”
    They tossed me in the back of a meat wagon. My skull caromed off the floor plates; melting-hot constellations exploded in the stinking blackness.
    Someone was in the meat wagon with me. I heard his ragged breathing.
    “How could you let it happen?” someone said.
    “Garvey?” I croaked.
    “How could you let Eve die ?”
    The Sack was wet with blood and puke, glued to my face like cling wrap.
    “I didn’t . . . the guy wore a hood . . . thought he was part of the band . . .”
    “She was The Prophet’s daughter . Did you get a good look at the guy?”
    He was white, Garvey , I thought. He was us.
    “No,” I said. “The hood. Are they going to kill me?”
    “I think so,” Garvey said, rocking with my head in his lap. “I won’t be able to step in, either—you know the rules.”
    “Doe?”
    “We took her in first. Same rules apply.”
    Panic seized me: a thousand fiddleback spiders scurrying the walls of my gut. “Listen: she had nothing to do with it.”
    “Hey.” His voice that of a master shushing a yappy dog. “ Hey .”
    Angela mutilated. Exiled. Dead . I pictured her lying face-up in a shallow hole, quicklime eating into the cool green of her eyes. . . .
    The meat wagon wrenched to a stop. Hands grasped my ankles and dragged me out. I was hauled up a staircase—kneecaps bashing each step, pain singing along my