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from an old drama movie. A shorthand term for situations like yours.”
    He was annoyed. He considered himself cultured, but if she was going to start spiking the dialogue with crumblie fictional allusion—”I don’t rate them. Why watch actors working up a storm of pretend emotions, when you can plug into subscriber soap? If you like that kind of exhibitionism. The point is, I know I’m clean. I have to persuade my boss to get the case reopened. Even in the middle of this revolution, I believe she can do it. I plan to offer her the aliens, see if we can trade.”
    Seimwa would like that, he thought. She delighted in barefaced insolence.
    “What about the way you feel? Have you had any symptoms?”
    Her timing was vicious.
    “I feel terrible, wouldn’t you? In a year or so I’ll start going senile and then they can bury me and feel justified. Braemar, I didn’t ask you to join me on this trip. I don’t expect you to drink out of the same cup. But just take your risk and keep quiet about it, okay?”
    “One more question.”
    “One. And harmless, or I’m going to get mad.”
    “Why the construction work?”
    “Oh.”
    He flicked the tower with his thumbnail, scattering it.
    “Just a nervous twitch. Mama wanted me to be a regular engineer.”
    Johnny entered the fort alone. The floor was earth, the air dank. He was in a tomb. He touched off his flashlight and the silver-ribbed sky appeared in a circle overhead. There were two ways in, the one he’d just used and a black hole with broken steps that led to the underground storage space. He stood where he could watch them both.
    He was naked without a cam, without even a wire. But it would be crazy to break the rules of US quarantine, in the very act of trying to win back his good name. He was actually frightened, too. He’d forgotten how this felt: the real/unreal danger of an eejay’s life. The artificial stunts, the occasional genuine firefight. He had known both. It was dangerously difficult, once embarked, to remember which was which. This must be fake, however, or Braemar Wilson surely wouldn’t be here. Spiking the dialogue, what a kid’s trick. Sneering at his country too. It was nothing internal that had brought the USA down. It was the ’04 and its complex reverberations. And the rise of the European mega-slave-state, gross industrial malpractice and economic warfare. Not that Braemar would care. She probably had a whole family of illiterate Romanians with rotten teeth cleaning her toilets. Plug into a horrorfeelie. How he despised that kind of retro-slang.
    Even if he did use it himself, all the time.
    If it hadn’t been for her he’d have found some reason to ignore the note. The game was to seek, not to find. To stretch out the interest over slow pedantic days, like an old convict building something pointless out of matchsticks. Was Braemar so naive that she thought this could be real? The “alien” was a birth-defected rich kid in hiding, recovering from disastrous gene-therapy. Rich enough so the locals knew better than to answer questions…
    He heard a scrabbling sound, thrust the light at it and saw a dark shape wriggling in one of the crumbled slit windows. She dropped to the ground. Dim light welled like blood between her fingers, from a short, red, glowing dumbbell. She came towards him, then stood and gazed for a long time. The strangeness of her face began to melt. The split lip and concave nose became as invisible as the features, the beauty even, of a face loved and familiar. Maybe, he thought, she was trying to see him as human too.
    “Hi. I’m John Francis Guglioli, late of New York city. Who are you?”
    “I am you.”
    She didn’t have a cleft palate, then. She didn’t make sense but her speech was normal, only slightly nasal. She was very young. Translate the measure any way you like she was fifteen at the outside, this alien. The way she looked at him, shy and daring and doubtful, made her seem irresistibly like a high