"You think it's going to keep going?" Alex said. He could see the gas station where they'd parked their car, waiting like a fever dream built out of nationalistic poetry. The neon had once been red, white, blue, chosen by some design team to evoke the most positive possible reaction, One if by air, by corporate approval. Not the first time one charts a course mascot by mascot.

Hawk shrugged.

"Because after that explosion...or...you know. Whatever it was. It felt..." He trailed off, searching the (mercifully living) grass beneath his feet for the words he needed.

"Safe," Hawk said. "You felt safe. You felt like it was over."

"Yeah...but...is it?" he said.

"I don't know. But...this has to be something that stops. Right?" her words shivered towards the ground like someone's discarded skin. "I know the logic doesn't pan, but...it has to stop."

Alex didn't need Hawk to tell him that was a horrible assumption to make. "Talk me into believing that, Hawk."

"I mean..." She trailed off. She could see the gas station up ahead. They were almost to the car. "It's happened in other places. If this stuff didn't stop, we'd be talking about the giant dead zones in California or Illinois or something. So it has to stop."

He felt the logical fallacy like a migraine. "Hawk..."

"Then we come back tomorrow. If they haven't moved miles away by then, it stops."

"So why are you still scared?" Alex said. "Why am I still scared?"

"Because the damage is done. The only question is, how long. How long before we can consider something safe for life?"

"Human life?"

"No. Life. You know. The springtails and ferns and moss and grass. The ground is dead, Alex. It's supposed to be hugely bioactive and now it's not. The bacteria and microscopic stuff is gone."

"According to what Willheim said. I didn't think that was anything big, anything worth lying about." He paused, feeling a bit like maybe he was spotting that proverbial cloud-like-a-hand on the horizon. Or maybe biblical metaphors didn't reach the kind of murky dark horror twisting in his subconscious analysis. His mind assembling a Kraken. "Is it a big deal, Hawk?"

"Right here? Right now? In this situation? No. Because I can just...pick up a couple tons of local soil and move it over. And if I can't...we can wall this off. We can afford to tell people that this part of the world might as well just be gone. But what about a dead zone the size of a county? Or a state? How do we fix that?"

"Go one state over. Get dirt. Bring dirt back to this state. Dirt goes in ground."

"If you say 'profit', I'm going to..." she stopped. “God. You’d make a mint if you did it right.”

"Yeah," Alex said. "Because I've been thinking exactly that for a while now."

"You think Willheim would do that?"

"I think that we have a real tendency to think a billion dollars comes with a science degree that isn't honorary. And I take it there's a problem with that response? Not the profiting off the moving of dirt, but moving the dirt."

"It's called 'this is how you get invasive species'."

"They don't seem to worry about that much with your ants. You're always mail ordering the damn things." Alex said. They'd reached the gas station and the car.

"They can only ship to states where the species is confirmed, and there's a lot of paperwork both ends have to have that the sellers usually take care of for me. We are incredibly careful about what insects get shipped across state lines, and we absolutely do not import or export bugs. It's not a perfect system, but we learned from RIFAs."

This last was pronounced REE-fahs.

"Fire ants, right?" He said.

"Red Imported Fire Ants. Also known as Solenopsis Invicta, also known as 'fuck you on six legs.' Every time you work in the garden and wind up having to ice your hands? It's because for two, three hundred years we were moving crates of vegetables around without washing off the boxes. There's a reason S. Invicta is on damn near every continent, and the ones that don't have Invicta have Geminata."

"These are both the ones that die if you pour boiling water on them, right?" Alex said, with enough of a southern-boy drawl to make Hawk roll her eyes. "I don't memorize the scientific names of fucking ants, baby."

"They're the ones wrecking the ecology everywhere they're found. Millions, maybe billions of dollars’ worth of damage, and I don't mean the kind of damage a scientist pays attention to, I mean the kind that men like Willheim actually see. The kind that usually means it's too late to stop anything. Like, I get it. Nobody sane is passionate about ants or bugs or algae or fucking corn. But most people see all these species as this isolated little thing, like it's a marble in a bag of marbles and if you get rid of that one you still have a hundred other marbles. But it, life, the ecology, all of it, it's more like a jigsaw puzzle. Every species is a piece. Duckweed in the water, that's a piece. Ants and springtails and mites in the dirt, that's another. Duckweed filters the water, it cleans it, and it feeds every herbivore in the water. Ants aerate the soil, different ways for different species, and they fill their tunnels with trash and poop, which fertilizes the plants, which grow and feed the animals that feed the rest of us. It's all this cooperative web, and you lose a piece, the web can fix itself, the same way you can still see the picture of a jigsaw puzzle if you lose a piece. One piece. Maybe two, three, four, it's okay. The picture is still there."

The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

"Lose too many pieces, it goes away," Alex said.

"Right." They had stopped walking. Locomotion felt almost like a sin, like it would draw the words into the ground and make them true. And Hawk kept talking, kept spilling out malignant theories in hemorrhage. Why wouldn't she stop? "But what can you do when you lose the entire puzzle? Like...if the whole of Arizona died, today, except for the people in it...do we understand the puzzle enough to rebuild the picture? Do we know how many pieces we need? Do we know where they are? And what if we miss something? What if we bring in every single species but one, a parasitic fly that, unbeknownst to us, was the main thing keeping...say...a species of desert wasp in check. Transplant that wasp without its primary predator...we'll have a plague of wasps. It'll make locusts look like a tea party. And it doesn't have to be wasps and flies. It could be a species of desert flower that, it turns out, really likes wet conditions, and we put it in the wrong place and now we have the next kudzu. Or here's a mouse that needed a fox and now it's going to eat the whole fucking breadbasket.

"Or else...we miss something else. Something that we don't know about. Some element of nature that we've never noticed or thought to register because it's always there. We just never knew. And without that thing, we can't do it. We can't transplant nature from where it is to where it is not. And we try, because that's what we do. We try until we've blasted ourselves open and raw...and the dead spot stays dead. Not because we aren't trying hard enough, but because we're missing that one thing that we never knew was there."

"You're talking about the chance that...what, an amoeba has the secret of life? A microbe?"

"We haven't catalogued them all, have we? We know what some of the populations are. We know what some of the microbes are, some of the bacteria, some of the bugs, all are. We've catalogued, oh, ninety percent, maybe? And I'm being real generous. I think it's less than that. Much less. I think we could fill multiple Arks just with what we haven't discovered yet. But the point is...we do not know what we don't know about our world. And you know what I think would happen, if we just picked up the topsoil from Nevada and Texas and New Mexico and tried to rebuild Arizona with it? I think it would die. The dirt would die. Over and over. I think it would collapse like all my honeypots. The way our attempts at contained biodomes never work, and our models for extraterrestrial ecosystems keep going down in flames. Because we might know enough to fix an imbalanced system, but we do not know enough about our world to fix sterility. I don't think we can bring dirt back from the dead."

"Yeah, you do. Just...go get..." he stopped.

"Go get more dirt, right? Different dirt? If this works the way Willheim seems to think it does...we're going to run out of dirt."

He thought for a minute. "What about chemistry? We can do all the things the bugs do."

"Can we?" She said, softly. "Do we know every process yet? Do we have enough time left to do that? I mean...that's the barrel of the gun we were looking down with climate change, only this...we've taken it from a handgun to a howitzer. Do we really want to gamble that we aren't going to miss the one process or species that makes it all possible? We're human beings, Alex. Do we really want to gamble that we can't be wrong?"

Her words echoed in the silence of an abandoned gas station. Abandoned, not because of the marching line of death approaching, but because of something else. Some concatenation of financial weakness, or a miscalculation of traffic, or the overwhelm of an owner, all had lead here: to a building that had failed its builders.

Or been failed by them. Whichever came first.

"So...what do we do?" Alex said.

"Stop it before it gets that far," Hawk said.

"And you don't think Wilheim can do that?" He said, and then held up his hands. "I know, Hawk. But I'm asking the dumbass question for a reason." He arched a brow.

"Sometimes we need to hear it?" She was already nodding. This was not a question, unless it was about her sanity. "I think he's probably more concerned about patents and monetization than he is about bugs. But he's thinking wrong, you know. Because we can't do what the bugs do. We don't understand what they do well enough to replace them. We just...supplement it. The way we take pills between meals. That's why we call those pills 'supplements' and not 'meals'. They're supposed to make up for deficiency."

"Not be the entire meal." This was a conversation the two of them had had multiple times. "Alright. But there's a huge difference between..." he scanned his brain and was caught by a dearth of knowledge. "...I can't think of anything other than artificial pesticides and fertilizers."

"And a non-zero amount of those fertilizers are needed because we kill all the bugs. And we don't pollinate our own crops. We need the bugs for that. Otherwise we're going down a greenhouse aisle with a paintbrush. Did you know that figs are exclusively pollinated by wasps? Why just wasps? What does a wasp do that a bee doesn't do? If we can't answer that question, and we can't keep those wasps around, we might have to say goodbye to figs."

"No aphids," Alex said, desperately reaching for the bottom of a barrel he didn't know existed.

"Which would mean a hit to the ant colonies that support them. Multiple species use them as a sugar source. Those species are, again, aerating the soil with their tunnels, filling those tunnels full of fertilizing trash, cleaning up the waste from other, larger animals. Ants don't invade picnics. They're just the janitors trying to start their shift early." She paused for a long time, and then said, very quietly. "And we're firing the janitors. And the maintenance crew. And the half of IT that doesn't go 'yes, you are the dominant species on this planet. We will do whatever you say.' We're getting rid of every single creature that keeps us alive, because we decided that they aren't important, because we don't understand the jobs they do. You and I, right now, are two CEOs of the planet saying, 'do we really need someone to empty trash cans? Can't we just do it ourselves?' Fiddling with our organization charts while the whole world burns."

And that, Alex realized, was why she was so afraid of Kaiser Wilheim, and lead him to the reason why he didn't trust the man. Alex knew a fellow con-artist when he spotted one launching the tale at him. But he still had one problem.

"Hawk, love...we sometimes have to seriously stack things to pay the bills. We can't save the world. We can't afford to."

"Well...when someone wants to keep a secret, what's the con artist's move to leverage that?" she said.

Coming from someone else, that might have been a low blow. Hawk couldn't low blow if you taped her to the floor. His history was no open, festering sore between them. They'd lanced it, treated it, cleaned it, and now stood upon scar tissue with glacial thickness. When you know where the love sits, the barbs lose their sting. "You threaten to tell. But with somebody like Kaiser, Hawk...you gotta follow through. It's not a threat. You put a gun to anything with him, you're ready to pull the trigger. You don't con powerful men. You play chicken. And Hawk?"

She'd been about to get in the car, and now she was poised as if caught in states of flight. Stolen goods sat in her ant bag. He, too, had his hand on the door. And yet the words still came.

"If Wilheim wanted everyone to get out of this alive, this place would have been a story on the evening news."